Emilio Diez Barroso - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

[Music] welcome to buddha at the gas pump my name is rick archer buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people we've done over 660 of them now if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones you can you know fish around on our youtube channel but you might want to go to batgap.com b-a-t-g-a-p because we have the past interviews organized much more systematically in about four different ways this program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers if you appreciate it would like to help support it there's a paypal button on every page of the website my guest today is emilio diaz barroso i'm getting fancy by rolling the r's in that um emilio perfected the art of appearing very successful this is the bio he sent me he manages two family offices a venture investment firm sits on the board of over a dozen companies and so on but until recently he was always trying to get somewhere other than where he was seeking recognition achievement love success and finally the ultimate carrot enlightenment in his pursuit of enlightenment he was forced to face what all the seeking had been trying to avoid his own sense of unworthiness defeated at the game of becoming and humbled by the realization of his true nature he is now dedicated to alleviating suffering in the world emilio is a father to three incredible teachers and resides in los angeles so welcome emilio good to meet you guys rick thank you for having me yeah um so we thought we would do this in a way that we often do these interviews which is kind of a mix of autobiography and uh going through some interesting discussion points that will naturally come up um as emilio kind of outlines the journey he's been through and he has done that also in a book he's written um called the mystery of you which i've been reading um okay so i got the impression from your book emilia that you grew up in a well-to-do family and you know you didn't really have to struggle in that regard correct yeah i did quite quite a while to do family actually it was i grew up in mexico city and we were really at the top of this sort of socio-economic scale if you're familiar with developing countries and the big gap between people that have resources and donors right um and zone is very prominent and we were in that circle of individuals so lots of money lots of power lots of influence lots of inner poverty yeah not necessarily inner poverty because you can have both but i guess you're saying that the outer fulfillment was a lot more plentiful than the inner fulfillment yeah i certainly was raised to believe that there was going to be a point when enough of the outer was going to suffice yeah that that that was the pathway and there was a light at the end of that road of that tunnel and that if i only ran fast and long enough then i would be able to rest and be at peace quicker yeah a lot of people seem to feel that um i i i read something the other day i don't know if it was in your book or some article i was reading where there's a whole batch of young people these days whose aspiration is to become billionaires you know because they see elon musk or mark zuckerberg and these people and they think i want to do that and um i guess they presume that these people are very fulfilled or something um but um yeah it's not always the case i grew up around those individuals in my family those specific individuals or people like that people like that right billionaires that we were and even back in my early years were billionaires weren't necessarily that common and and even though there were a lot of signs that would have pointed me should have been enough to make me realize that it wasn't going to be enough i still subscribed to that conditioning it's like okay i gotta actually because i was raised in this environment where there was a lot of power and money and my family had set this big precedent i thought that i had to outrun that and carve my own path but do it in a way that was so much more important and meaningful and special and obviously that was a that had its own implications to it yeah that's part of the reason why i wrote the book really because i a lot of the books that i had read when i started out on my inner growth before even it became spiritual in nature were written by people that didn't match my lifestyles and i still wanted to be the billionaire and yet i thought that i couldn't have those both the very much in the world and the inner peace and freedom that i was craving yeah so you mean books like power of now or you know iron cadence that kind of thing yeah very much so whether it's katie gangaji adi ashanti like non-dual teachers uh or eckhart that that are that profile right they are the teacher and they they live that archetype and and in my mind somehow i really believed that i wouldn't be able to arrive at a place where i felt that level of inner contentment until i was done with all these modern day requirements that i had i had three kids i was running businesses i was you know in within my own world incredibly successful and perceived as that way sort of the standard societal words and uh so i thought well when i finish this then i'll be able to commit time to that yeah so it's not that um you know obviously those people that you just mentioned didn't achieve great material success before becoming spiritually awakened to whatever extent they have uh but you felt that your particular calling uh necessitated that right given your background and family upbringing all that kind of stuff that was what you had to do well i felt at the time that i had to choose between really being in the world that i was born into and one way or another honoring that incarnation or having to go to a monastery if i really was chasing this sort of spiritual freedom that i was so interested in i just didn't think that it was possible and i didn't have a lot of models for it being possible that there were there was a way to have the yes end yeah that would suggest that you did have to do that i mean buddha was a prince he left the castle you know to become a wandering mendicant and saint francis of assisi grew up in a wealthy family his father was some kind of textile merchant and he just decided to leave that so you know obviously these people have given the impression that that might be necessary and i'm not arguing that it is but yeah there's obviously historical precedent yeah and i was raised catholic right so that right the the whole orientation that i was operating under was no material possession goes totally against sort of the the christ consciousness that i that and that was my my understanding of it i'm not suggesting that everyone that uh subscribes to the to the religion believes that but that's certainly what i was indoctrinated on yeah well christ himself said you know it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven right yeah yeah and i think what he ultimately i would imagine meant by that was not just rich in the terms of financial accumulation right but the degree of attachment to identity or otherwise that we're holding on to but uh you know that make us heavier on the journey so why were you reading those books in the first place how did you get to the point where you thought that you might find something in in those spiritual teachers you know it's a combination of an inner calling that i don't know that i can explain that was there from a very early age that actually was at one point because i was in this catholic environment i thought i was going to be a priest it's like oh this is but this will be very telling i was so type a in my orientation i was so driven and i wanted to be permanent right i'm going to be the pope i'm and ultimately that was that was that was really emanating from this sense of not being good enough i i really wanted to be special i wanted to be valuable to people i wanted to be perceived as valuable i wanted to really deep down have others validate my worth and when i really dig even deeper to not be abandoned and i thought well i think i pivoted towards self-growth and spirituality because i was i became so good at the financial accumulation game and at the rejecting those images but i realized there was always someone that had more than me and i said well if i can do all of that and also be conscious oh wow i'm going to be really special everybody's going to love me and so i think there's a combination of that and an inner colleague that was always nudging me on the inside did you go through therapy at some point is that how you got these insights about not having enough self-worth or wanting people like you or did you just cognose those things on your own i did a lot of therapy uh quite a lot and then i did a master's in spiritual psychology with a emphasis on consciousness health and healing so i was i was structured in my approach again this taipei knew how to be efficient and but it was always driven towards more right i think that that's the virus that i i took me a really long time to to snap out of yeah i think that there's a positive you can put a positive spin on this drive towards more i think every living being has a desire for greater happiness you know the the mind even from moment to moment has a desire for greater happiness if if you're sitting reading a book and it's not that interesting and then some beautiful music starts or something you your attention naturally shifts to the beautiful music you don't have to even use any effort and you know i think that that drive manifests in pretty much everything we do in life and sometimes it's successful sometimes it's thwarted but ultimately i think it might we could might we could say that it leads to what you've discovered which is that there's no amount of outer success which will satisfy the drive completely right yeah and no amount of inner transformation because i i i was convinced i was going to get to a place when i shifted from the outer pursuit to the inner pursuit that there was going to be a place where i eventually reached a state like the people that i admired that was going to be i was going to make me feel enough and and whole and what i've come to realize is that as long as the orientation is on the self that's a local identity it'll never be enough we'll never behold and the me that wants to be whole by definition is operating out of a partition of a limited sense so even my inner journey was driven by that me yeah yeah so well i'm good glad you clarified it that way because when you first said no amount of interest exploration can satisfy it and i thought wait a minute yeah because that can but obviously if it's just in terms of you know making a better individual me that's not going to cut it but yeah i think i think people that are psychologically oriented think that they're gonna this is my experience and a lot of the people that i mentors a lot of what i do is mentoring i think that they're gonna heal themselves enough in order to make themselves whole and the spiritually oriented people think that they're going to awaken enough to transcend their humanity and i pendulumed between the psychological and spiritual realm of trying to get somewhere other than where i was but there was still this me at the center of this running yeah i have a friend named craig holiday who's been on this show who wrote a book called fully human fully divine and uh this is a it's a theme that comes up often because some people seem to feel that you know like just two weeks ago i interviewed a woman who is very critical of the neo advisor scene in which you're it's emphasized over and over again that you know you are not a person there is no self and that you know there there's nothing that you can do to further yourself spiritually or anything else and it's she found it very damaging very nihilistic and um very dis resulted in a lot of disassociation and spiritual bypassing um i think that well the book my friend's book title is appropriate it's fully human fully divine you you can have it both it's just a matter of approaching it right and it doesn't involve blotting out your individuality or negating it or anything like that it just involves supplementing it with something that's universal so that you are ocean and wave not just one or the other yeah i love the there's a beautiful teacher luck kelly ever i'm not sure you had a chance to speak lemony sure yeah and and he's a dear friend and he speaks of waking up waking in and then waking up yeah nice and i think when i was i had heard the wave and notion analogy many times and i it's almost like there were two aspects of me that were in competition constantly and the way but in the ocean how do i do that it's so paradoxical to my mind i don't i don't get it and i was still trying to get it but there was this wave that wanted to be the ocean and there's a subtle distinction between a wave that recognizes itself as the ocean and the ocean living out as a wave can you elaborate on that yeah when i had a lot of i spent probably about eight years of my life going to ten thousand retreats a year really committed mostly with arya some of the gangaji and i was i really wanted to get in line and i had these big spiritual experiences where the veil of conditioned reality fell away and i think we many of your listeners probably have experienced some versions of this where where everything is one and it's just this bliss and joy and everything is so clear and then it would disappear and then it would come back up and and they would normally disappear the moment that i tried to grab on to it or there was this new intro the reintroduction of the sense of self and i was convinced that there was going to be the big experience when eventually everything changed the problem is that there was this wave that was still looking to say oh let me remember that i'm the ocean and i'm going to do whatever i can to remember that in the ocean and recognize that i emotion which makes so much sense and yet when you truly know that you are the ocean then you are the ocean embodying the wave and it's it's a different slightly different semantically but it's a huge difference in experience yeah because then whether the wave remembers that it's the ocean or not it's irrelevant in that moment whether the wave behaves in one way or another it's it's a byproduct of knowing that you're the ocean that this wave becomes just love and compassion service and all these qualities that are associated with this state of being but also the byproduct and i had it reversed for most of my life and i noticed most of the spiritual people spiritual seekers that i sort of have been along this journey with me still believe that there's going to be this one moment when everything becomes and i hear teachers speaking of this and and i think there's value to it but it can be very confusing at least to my mental framework and i i think to a lot of people's mental frame yeah there's a lot of good stuff in what you just said um one is i don't think that well just using our ocean analogy the ocean doesn't have to remember that it's an ocean or think about it's being an ocean or anything like that it just knows itself as the ocean and just carries on you know without giving it a second thought and i think one's experience can mature to that extent that you know it's this is not something you're looking for thinking about throughout the day you're just living your life if you actually want to check in oh yeah there it is but it it's not you just function that way ordinarily normally um what else i forget what else i was gonna say maybe you have a comment on that i do i think i think this ocean is gets to see the part of the i think that i'm going to say natural but that's just because that's my experience some of the people that i've witnessed but it's by no means the only there is that value to the transcendent experience of oh i am not this human entity individual body mind i am not this way i am all of this and there's a comfort in that transcendence because it becomes very distant and very quiet very still very non-active the way the way i've heard teachers talk about it is this stuck in emptiness and and i think most of the spiritual teachings are aimed at that awakening very few there's more recently which is very encouraging talk about sort of the waking out that lock speaks of and the reality is that there's a there's a lot of temptation for this new spiritual egoic identity to get lodged i remember when i when i first sort of was in that space i i there was nowhere to go there's nothing to do there's nothing to say there's like it's just it's all ocean you know everyone's silly and and and i was in the middle of parenting and having businesses and running lots of money and so that really more more that more the children because the money meant nothing and losing it or not losing it was not really something relevant but my children really grounded and they were this vehicle through which the ocean was able to fully re-embody the waveness and with all its humanity with us because in that spiritual egoic identity it's very safe to not get triggered it's very safe to sort of feel free from having a bad day and these enlightened masters never have a bad day but that humanity is that reclaiming almost redeeming all of these little nooks and crannies of this conditioning become the joy of life yeah that's great i mean from my perspective the whole point of spirituality is really not to escape out of life but it's to live life fully um you could might you could say maybe 200 percent of life 100 inner values hundred percent outer values uh even if those outer values are not opulent but they can certainly be enriched and then you know enhanced by that inner being uh inner awareness um seriously i'm reminded of a friend of mine who has undergone some very beautiful state of awakening i don't know exactly how to define it but there's tons of bliss and oneness and vastness and you know to the point where she's afraid to look at the sky as she's driving down the road because she'll become so vast she's a fish she won't be able to drive um but uh she has an eight-year-old adopted son who has autism issues that need to be dealt with and and she's and he kind of is her her teacher in a way keeps her down to earth but she's kind of passed through this phase of you know afraid to look at the sky and it's become integrated into this very beautiful state with vast awareness fully open heart and yet total practicality um you know in dealing with the vicissitudes of life and and and dealing with them so skillfully as a result of this awakening you know her fear was that she would lose the ability to do that but in fact her ability to do that has been enhanced many fold having undergone this transition it's incredible isn't it i yeah i would have never believed that i could live the life that i live from the place that i live it and still be so engaged in everything i'm doing yeah and it doesn't mean that i don't mess up particularly as a parent with three teenagers but mike it's it's wild but i love it and when i do mess up i it's so quick because it's not personal yeah so it's so quick to assume responsibility and say you know that re that was reactive i'm i'm sorry that's not how i want to show up and let's learn from this because there's no nothing that's sort of making it mean something about me and carrying all that extra baggage that just becomes unnecessary yeah and part of that extra baggage was trying to seem perfect again the trying word yeah and the seeming word yeah yeah there's a verse in the gita which basically says yoga is skill in action and by yoga it means not just physical postures but you know unified unit unit of awareness or the state of samadhi is actually not an escape again from the world but is a means of being more skillful in the world and that's what you're actually describing yeah because i i used to think that it was going to be kind of like a doormat oh if i'm all love and heart and i'm in this place where i truly know it's all a story and it's all just an expression of i of source i'm not going to want to do anything or how am i going to be efficient in the world that i operate in which is a world of high performance financial markets yeah and to your point earlier it becomes and your friends it becomes just so much more interesting and fun and joyful and actually efficient which is very surprising yeah yeah one way of looking at it is that you know nature itself is very efficient there's a deep intelligence i believe guiding nature if you if you throw a ball there's an infinite number of trajectories the ball could take but it actually takes the most efficient trajectory given the gravity and the velocity and the wind resistance and everything else it's just absolutely the most perfect trajectory it could take and i think that when we get established in this whatever we want to call it unbounded awareness or whatever um we're actually getting established in the field of intelligence from which nature itself functions and our individual life can take on the kind of efficiency that reflects the way nature itself functions because it really is nature's intelligence that's guiding it through our individuality yes oftentimes i use the metaphor of hiking for click i mentor a lot of entrepreneurs like but how do you how do you operate and how do you decide what's and i i don't find myself making choices it's strange to say and it's like and so i try to reference hikings like imagine you're hiking and you're have a general direction you want to go up but imagine if you were over analyzing every step and what we're thinking should i go that way should i go this way what if there's a cliff which is really how we have normalized operating in daily life this over protagonistic approach to to that intelligence right that you're speaking of and i think most people recognize the way i describe it often is we've learned to have a almost like a intermediary between ourselves and the rest of life and in this layer of intermediation is where all our commentary happens where we say i like this i don't like this more of that less of this and to the degree that this layer thins out and there's greater intimacy with the moment or absolute intimacy with the moment is to the degree that we would reference it that we're on the in the zone or we're in the flow or we're present and and all it really is is just a recognition of this natural intelligence leaving itself out and we we have all reference points for that i believe whether it's getting lost in a sunset or you know newborn or dancing whatever it may be yeah i think i think the body i didn't grow with an awareness of my body like the first time that somebody asked me well how does that feel at vehicle it feels good i feel it was a mental answer but the body is such a direct gateway into the moment and it allows me to directly experience whatever is here in that very intimate way without the experiencer and the experience itself are not separate does that tend to be your experience most of the time that the experience or in the experience are not separate even when it's not because it i i want to be careful of setting it up because when i would hear someone describe what their experience was like i would associate it with the permanent state and i think the idea of permanence yeah we let we love it as minds when there's a contraction or when that layer is on board and there's a narrative that comes online even that is seen as an expression of source as a wave in and of itself so then there's this unconditioned recognition not even conditioned to how this humanity shows up yeah it's good did you um through all of your courses with audia and all that did you adopt an actual daily practice of some sort that you have stuck to or did you mostly just live your life and then go on retreats whenever you could i was very dedicated to the practice for a while it was it was structured meditation a lot of reading and yeah it's interesting because for when i was in this spiritual more spiritual seeking mode i wouldn't resonate with katie's inquiry for example with the work it felt very and it just didn't resonate with it and then once some of the bigger changes happened the inquiry came back online because the inquiry that i was practicing was the deeper inquiry of who am i and you know sitting with that in silence for as long as it took not an active approach is it true and all that but when when some of the bigger shifts happened i gravitated towards katie uh she said she's a very dear friend as well i gravitated towards her because it assisted this light in looking for all those little places that were yeah that were just looking to me to be met and loved yeah that's a good tool and then right now i i don't i don't distinguish between sort of the sitting meditation the sitting practice and the just regular life so i don't have a structure per se but i find myself sometimes sitting up and spending time you know in the middle of the night just just in what i would have called meditation before and have you found that you know this kind of yearning and you know annoying feeling that used to drive you has pretty much dissipated and has been replaced by a sense of contentment yeah i don't remember the last time i came up yeah that's good um there's going to be a conference next week called the end of seeking an online conference and i'll be interested to see how the people in it define seeking and how they define the end of it um but my my knee-jerk reaction when i hear that phrase is there may be an end of seeking in the sense of you know this kind of feeling of emptiness and you just have a desperate need to to fill it or to you know be relieved of it there's an end to that and you know as contentment genuine contentment dawns but there's no end to the to spiritual development as as i understand it i mean saint teresa of avila even said that it appears that the lord himself is on the journey so it seems to me that all beings in the universe can still learn and grow um in every respect but uh that doesn't mean that you're always chasing the dangling carrot you know and feeling unfulfilled by any by no means at all does it mean that yeah yeah i like i like sort of the the way that it's often framed as it's not that the seeking goes away is that the seeker loses its place loses its grip yeah yeah because if in the absence of a seeker whether seeking arises or doesn't arise it's irrelevant because the seeker has an identity around getting somewhere or even the spiritual seeker is very invested in stopping seeking yeah good point it's like like a dog trying to catch its tail or something yeah yeah this and what was really valuable for me in all of this there's i don't know if there's someone once mentioned and i don't know if it's a zen cohen or where i just made it up not the image but that isn't gone it's it's a figure of an individual with a stick in their head and in front of it is that carrot but in the back is a is a bag of poop and i think we're all very familiar i certainly was very familiar with the idea of oh you're chasing the carrot and you know no matter how many times you get there it won't be enough and but i wasn't as familiar with with the fear behind me as and the framework that i already operate and the feel that arrived for me with the i must outrun that whatever that was and sometimes externally that was i must run failing i must run disappointment i must but internally it was i must outrun the feeling of not being good enough i must have outrun jealousy i must and no matter how much psychological work i was still imprisoned by this whatever current bag of poop was and what i really take from that image and i've had moments in the past where some of the things that were jealousy was one of those really gripping energies in my system i grew up in a situation where my parents were separated but they didn't really tell us they were separated because they thought it was better for us as kids so i i grew up associating this loyalty with intimacy and all these things that were very confusing so this jealousy would show up and at one point i had to fully let the experience of jealousy be met in my body and it was so liberating but it's become a that's why i speak of the body it's become this doorway into everything i noticed i've never experienced tiredness or hunger these things that are so familiar to me i had always experienced the desire for tiredness to stop or for hunger and system and to to discover this sensation that had been along for this journey with me for so long for the first time directly what is hunger actually like in my body when i'm not immediately trying to get rid of it and it feels like that's what the relationship is to every arising energy now that's interesting so the the body is like a barometer or a thermometer some kind of sensing instrument which enables you to navigate life more viscerally it sounds like more sensitively yeah no it's not true in your head but kind of in your gut yeah not as a tool to orient because also time doesn't hold the framework that it used to but more as a as a constant invitation to the moment it's a constant invitation to what's here because it's not it's not operating in the same way that the mind does in time the body is and these energies are so here that it becomes um a love affair with the instant through the organ of sensing because meister record we used to say it's a an intuitive regard with oneself that's interesting yeah not too many people talk about this i don't think have you heard many people talking about this not many no but i find it very interesting it is fascinating because then then it takes it away you know i'm very i operate in worlds that are very mental and so i became very proficient and very top-heavy in sort of this logical rational and and when i speak to people about these things it's very easy to fall in the category of woo and i've found it even for my own my mental orientation it's so helpful to to to very to ground and even with my children right because children they don't take concepts like come on what are you really talking about so this is very primary in elementary language and examples and and the body is so here it's like okay let's let's discover because a lot of entrepreneurs experience anxiety and stress and so with them i'm not talking about enlightenment or waking up or not being themselves but if i invite them to explore whatever is present or how how do they feel at stress which is usually sort of in solar plexus or in their in the core of their their belly and then gets so intimately close to it where the boundaries between them and this energy disappear then they're they're essentially they are bringing the light of consciousness to something that was previously held with resistance and i don't even need to say the word consciousness or spirituality or and ultimately that's that's where all this leads right because we don't need more beliefs we don't need more people telling us that all is one or because then our mind idealizes it and considers it a goal and that's where the premise of you what you were sharing of it's always unfolding is so challenging for the spiritual persona it's like no i need to know that i'm going to get somewhere where now i'll be okay i like to think of it as being like education in the in the ordinary sense which we've all been through then nobody ever reaches a point at which they say okay i'm educated that's it can't learn anything more um you know i've reached the pinnacle of human knowledge um it was always like a next horizon and um that doesn't shouldn't fr that doesn't frustrate uh that doesn't frustrate somebody like albert einstein or you know one of the geniuses of that we've that we've seen it it's more like it um exciting it's like an adventure oh boy what can i figure out next and um i don't know i i just see spirituality that way too there's there's no end to the deepening and the refinement and the i mean think of it this way we have all these faculties we have a heart we have a mind we have an intellect we have senses perceptual abilities um what is the full extent to which all those things can blossom um how how how loving can a heart be you know how compassionate can it be how subtle can sensory perception be i just think there are no end to these things and some people might say well all that stuff yeah that pertains to relative phenomenon and those are illusory so you don't have to worry about all that uh but i don't think so i think that the the whole package is involved in genuine spirituality absolute relative everything in between yeah it's it's very comfortable to assign no meaning to the form right yeah when you when you when you are in the formless form really is is perceived as so translucent and non-existent and impermanent and and yet it is through those stories that the mystery gets revealed so so these stories this form these appearances are what are where where that heart gets to to connect in the apparent separation that's why the book is the mystery of you is just an ongoing discovery not there's value to the accumulation of more knowledge more experience is more but it's it's more a journey of continued discovery like a like a big free fall where you at some point decide that you're gonna stop grasping and start smiling yeah you know what i thought of as you were saying that is that um and i've heard references to this in various you know spiritual literature but the relative life is actually grist for the mill so to speak it's it's a means in and of itself for further advancement and uh i think that applies not only to i mean even to even to recluses but certainly most of us are householders and as you say you refer to your children as your teachers um i think that it can be a handicap not to have um engagements in in the world for most people as a um as an aid in their spiritual growth kind of putting that in negative terms but um i didn't used to see it this way i mean i used to have a rather escapist attitude toward the world and just wanted to get out of it but i found that when i ditched that perspective finally my growth really accelerated and became much more significant anyway you're kind of saying that too in terms of your relationship with your family your children your businesses all these things are like spiritual techniques if you have the right orientation to them yeah yeah and absolutely life is intelligent and i think we we've got a perfect set of circumstances always presenting themselves to help us either i like this word redeem because all we really are is redeeming right we're we're taking these previously almost like stories that were lacking some of that dimensionality of of their beingness and were infusing them with this light through living them consciously even even if what we are increasing with light is our unconscious and even if we and that's why from this perspective where there's nowhere to go where there's really we use the word advancing but there's there's no one advancing it's all it's all just reclaiming re-infusing the parts of ourselves that are represented everywhere with this light of consciousness that's great and then it's yeah because then it's i think the where it where it gets tricky is where i still think that i'm a spiritual individual or an individual that will advance spiritually right and i need to make sure i'm using everything for my advancement which i think is incredibly helpful but then it becomes one more way in which this identity as the spiritually advanced or spiritually advanced advancing one gets gets engaged and invested and and that's not wrong but but then it's like can can the light of consciousness infuse even that that impulse towards towards getting somewhere that impulse towards the me that is that is interested in this advancement because that's just who we get to be well also i mean what you're implying or i think or at least i inferred is that spiritual people can be notoriously selfish self-indulgent you know about my my this and my that my you know my meditation and my diet and my you know kind of prima donnas fussy about it and um but the idea of spirituality is you know my cup runneth over one is a blessing to everything and you stated that very nicely too and i think that the impoverishment of the world whether it be financial or ecological or sociological or all the different problems that beset the world are is symptomatic of the lack of what you just described which is the infusing of the inner values into the world um by most people i mean not enough people are doing that and i think if more people were if then all these problems would just be found to vanish which is not to say that there wouldn't be actual concrete solutions such as better technologies and all but those two would come up if enough people were tapping into their inner wisdom yeah i love speaking of because i i i'm on a lot of boards of non-profit companies and i a lot of people are trying to change the world and my my experience with most of the activists is that they have some inner wound as we know the world is a projection from a psychological perspective but even more from a spiritual perspective inner wound that they're trying to resolve and it's almost like if they're able to change the world enough then it'll justify their inner hurt it'll make it worthwhile it'll it'll somehow make it okay if i can't fully heal here i'll heal out there i think it's an incredible motivator but there's very few people i can really think of one right now jane goodall oh yeah seem to operate from an inner cohesion she's also a dear friend and she is i've i once i don't think i asked her a friend asked her what what do you do with with the poachers you know how do we how do we what do we do with these poachers because they're killing the animals and not she's known for for caring for the animals she's like how can i judge the poachers why wouldn't i just focus on giving them better jobs yeah it's like ah just saying and i feel goosebumps it's like if we were able to operate from that inner cohesion then then every time i would look at the world and say oh it's a mess i look oh what is my inner mess it's clearly and that doesn't mean that i lose objectivity i'm very engaged in trying to make things better but but if i can operate from that coherence it's just so much more enjoyable more effective i attract individuals and parties to the mix that are able to create change yeah so i like to pay attention every time i'm looking out there and thinking that something needs to be different i like to start with oh what is what is that reflecting in me very good i was yeah remember the beatles song revolution you know a little bit before your time but you know that one of the lines was we all we all want to change the world but then another line was better free your mind instead yeah powerful lyrics yeah yeah yeah but again it's it's it's worth re-emphasizing that um i think the world such as it is including whatever problems we're having environmentally the war in ukraine everything else is just symptomatic of the inner wounding if you want to use your phrase of billions of people and billions of people are emanating that kind of inner quality to the outer world and creating that outer world in the image of that and so that's why i mean and like you said i mean we should we have to keep doing stuff to help in the outer world i mean people need to be fed and this and that but the the inner wounding has to be healed in significant numbers of people uh in order for real change to take place yeah and i i i think of it as my inner wounding yeah yeah i i i i sometimes when that when there's it's almost like it's it's almost like seeing this wave that that gets to play a particular role it's like oh what's what's my role as this individual entity in redeeming that part and reclaiming and bringing more love to that part within me because you're right it is symptomatic it is we we we witness everywhere just the the byproduct of of that incoherence yeah yeah without forgetfulness yeah in your bio you said you were now dedicated to alleviating suffering in the world and i don't think you meant by that that you're just going to sit and work on your inner wounding and and that'll be your contribution to the world i you know i think that you can you know walk and chew gum at the same time i mean you're you're working on that but you are also do seeing what you can do to help others do that or to help others in in various other ways right yeah very much like what you do yeah i i just i show up and i it sometimes the mind gets ideas of what that should look like but most of the time it's just right here it's it's driving it's walking it's answering an email it's yeah it's it's everywhere yeah and and to your earlier point things just happened this divine intelligence happens to to bring opportunities forward that just mirror that resonance i know isn't that this is the direction isn't that something i mean it's beautiful it happens and you have to i mean you have to have initiative in life but at the same time you have to sort of have counterbalance it with surrender so that you can be receptive to the direction that you know is being orchestrated for you by that divine intelligence yeah it's like that hike analogy right yeah you're gonna put on the right shoes you you you're you gotta start before a significant amount of time before sunset but then you know then you're on that you're on the walk and you're on you're on this exploration and it is it is that balance and i always struggled with the word surrender because i was always approaching surrender in the same way i approached everything else yeah like you'd be a pushover or something that and i thought i needed to surrender and and i i wrote this i don't write much but i read something that i wrote eight years ago and it said surrender is the last will to be surrendered and this will to surrender ultimately is just one more way in which i wasn't surrendering yeah i think one way of looking at surrender is just as a quality of humility which might also be described as the quality of not insisting that things happen any particular way it's like it's you know just sort of being willing to and again there's a balance between that and being a pushover um one can have determination and conviction and and so on but at the same time be like you were saying with your with the body sensitivity being sensitive to the hints the impulses of what happens and and being willing to shift direction if necessary if that's the the indication of the way things should go or are going yeah yeah that's what i hear when you say that is an agility and a good word a deep listening uh-huh and i think the the the things that burden that agility and that listening are for me the sort of the narrative that has a particular identity attached to it yeah because when there's there's an identity there's a there's an attachment a greater attachment to defending it or having a particular outcome and i love how you that sensibility that you speak of yeah when you use the word agility for some reason i thought of a pro basketball player who's really in the zone you know and he wants to get from here to the other end of the court and you know he can't just plow his way straight down the court he'll get blocked and have the ball taken but he has to sort of have the forward momentum and yet and he doesn't know exactly what he's going to have to do to get from one end to the other but as he goes there's you know according to circumstances he's able to just adjust instantaneously and get to the other end yeah i love that because if i was going to ask if i was studying because i thought this was sort of a basketball player that i was interested in becoming better at my game right i would try to break down his movement and i would ask him okay explain to me so how do you how what did you think the moment you were going to do this i didn't think anything i wasn't thinking but he was at that place that you're describing where he was just agile sensitive where and he'd done his part to be to be ready to not have that layer of protagonism get in the way that's a good point too he he had done his part obviously to be able to play like that he had put in a lot of practice and uh you know cultivated the ability to do that when the time came so there's something to be said for that too and it's so tricky right to talk about time and timelessness because then then if you break it down did he ever prepare or was this was every instant just a function of the same intelligence right and it's and obviously from one perspective we have we operate in a world of of time so we we need to speak of that language and and yet it can often be used like the fact that we operate in this world doesn't mean that it's the only reality and and i think it's important even as we speak of he did his work it's important to remember that every instant of that timeline was just that instant and and that we don't see because if if i set it up in my mind like i need to do something before something happened it's this constant oh but he did his work but that teacher did that and that's why they can do that and and how it was set up in me was that there was this process that would lead me somewhere and while that is true that can also get in the way because it becomes this always always then phenomenon and and that's where we're back to the body if in this instant i can access the moment right here in whatever is present in my system and then i'm in the same place that that basketball player was maybe i couldn't run and do that move but i am in that same place of inner hereness yeah but paradoxically um and you feel free to dispute this but paradoxically there are things one can do to be to eventually be more in that state of inner hereness i think that's the way you phrased it um you know like all of the retreats you went on the practice you did and all this and that you know you're a different person you function differently now than you would have if you hadn't done all that um so i mean because some people you know some especially the neo-invited people said you don't do anything if you do any kind of practice you're only reinforcing the sense of a practicer and uh so you're already enlightened just you know realize that and you're done that i think that's very unrealistic um and i don't know if there's really any very very many good examples of that having succeeded that that approach yeah i uh i totally it is so paradoxical and thank you for bringing up i think what i i part of me wants to tell people when i'm i'm of along this journey with them and just accompanying them as they do their own inquiry i get i i get that impulse to say you really just drop into right now you really don't need to go anywhere and i certainly did my running so then what i've come to realize is that i support people in getting to disillusionment as quick as possible because that's really where all this led me to not disillusionment but disillusionment you said dissolving is what you're the word you're using right no no dissolution disillusionment okay that's a that's a good word too in the sense that we want to come out of illusion yeah and i mean it more in the sense of um yeah i guess i guess it is like that i mean it in the sense also is of where all of the strategies fail that place of defeat and if we can sit in the defeat for a moment before the next energy kicks in of okay that's a new strategy that's stopping i think it was it was uh we started from gangaji and her teacher papaji said just stop and i never i never resonated with a stop i was like why don't i stop there's no way i'm gonna stop i'm going and and i only stopped i didn't stop because i trusted her i stopped because i got tired i stopped because i fell on my face well i found my face many times but at one point i felt in my face enough where it was harder to get up it wasn't that dramatic on my pace it was probably could have happened in half an hour of meditation but but that inner experience of defeat that i had previously overridden really quickly with something new was able to to have an impact of snuffing out a flame yeah you remember i just need to worry about that no there's nothing oh you pretty much i mean he was he was like you know professional bicycle racer and he brought that competitive spirit to spirituality and he was pushing himself really hard and going on retreat so i'm gonna be the best meditator on this retreat and he you know he got to a point where he felt like he was about to crack and he left in the middle of a retreat and went home and he went to his parents backyard or something where he had this little meditation hut and he he went into the hut and said that's it i give up and then boom he had his first big awakening yeah i hear him talk about failing at zen yeah yeah and that's really all we can do i think is i i have so much love and appreciation for audio because he holds such a clear light of uh not taking anything and not pretending that he has anything that is needed by a student and i think as a teacher he encouraged me to run faster also he encouraged me to um to use that type pace like okay you wanna you wanna really get somewhere okay go for it go as quick as you can want to really get in line go go chase he could have it's it's a very and i noticed the temptation it's very easy as someone that is guiding someone or just accompanying someone in the spiritual journey to provoke a spiritual experience you know you just need to there's this transmission that can happen if you just sort of really sit in that stillness and there's a it's an energetic that even just as i'm doing i can feel the energetic just flow through and and i can i can and the temptation to do that to provide a quick experience is there an area i seldom see him go down that path because he recognizes the transient nature of that experience and he doesn't dismiss the value of those experiences but he but he knows those were just experiences and he's like you know you gotta run your your run you gotta you gotta go and do your thing whatever that thing is and his was the zen tradition and that's certainly been my experience that i really had to exhaust all these mechanisms of control all these ways in which i thought that i was going to get enlightened yeah i remember he told me this thing one time about how he felt he he was a he he found that he could he could give a person an awakening experience he could awaken them in some way and he eventually realized that that wasn't what he should be doing um and so he kind of changed the way he taught i must i must have been more exposed to him after that conversation yeah i think maybe he was somehow eliciting a something prematurely in people maybe he felt that they needed to do more groundwork um and that the experience would dawn naturally when it was ready to there's a quote from the sargadatta that i saw the other day he said um the fruit falls suddenly but you know it it takes there's there's a long process of maturation before it's ready to fall there's a there's a quote about bankruptcy he's like how did you go bankrupt gradually and then all of a sudden i think that's kind of how it happens and it's you know i can i can point on i can speak of moments when really big shifts happen but it's very hard to very hard to narrow it down it was this moment when everything really because it is it is a chipping away at some degree yeah a lot of things yeah i heard a nice analogy um you could be walking and there could be a sudden downpour and you you get drenched or you could be walking along and like in great britain let's say and and this is heavy pea soup fog misty thing and after a while you get just as drenched as if you were in the sudden downfall but downpour but you can't really say exactly when you got drenched you know where was the demarcation between dry and wet that's a great image yeah so there's some uh i printed out the table of contents of your book would it be useful to go through some of these points then you know just discuss the the points that you discussed in various chapters oh of course whatever okay so i'll read them and you know maybe we maybe some of them we've already discussed but um if not we'll this will give us some food for thought so the first chapter is called the operating system why'd you call it that what was that about a lot of the people that i i work in the tech space a lot i invest in a lot of early stage venture and uh and a lot of these individuals understand the premise of technology evolving exponentially and they're very focused some of these very high performing individuals very focused on disrupting large industries and disrupting large companies and creating something that essentially changes the way that things are done so i started using this language with them where imagining that their conditioning was software and that their body was this hardware and how when was the last time their software went through an upgrade right as this operating system and how much of the old operating system which is just a language that they really understand from the days of survival was still running in their in their bodies and the reality that most of these individuals are not happy and that finding a way to disrupt themselves was a good investment of their time and and that's that's the languaging around this operating system and where it came from do you find a lot of them are i mean you know you've heard the story we all heard of burnout and people working 18-hour days and stuff like that um do i mean do do some of these people actually use performance-enhancing drugs or you know cocaine or stuff like that to just which would be very short-sighted because you're not going to get i heard that june cooper the drummer was using cocaine because he was competing with buddy rich who was a really great drummer but it eventually just ruined him so it's very short-sighted to use artificial stimuli like that i'm sure they there's lots of different ways in which people enhance and but i think what's more apparent to me is the ways that they cope more than the ways that they enhance because it's a lot of um they're really some of them are running on fumes yeah yeah and they're and i can relate in some ways and they're very concerned with stop or slowing down because they're centered [Music] feel so threatening to stop or slow down they feel that everything will fall apart and kind of like in your musician analogy there's this always someone running next to you right here or right here and it's such a highly competitive environment particularly sort of in the silicon valley world of technology things are evolving so quickly and you can be irrelevant so quickly in that framework that uh that people just run as fast as they can until they until they hurt yeah so they hurt deep enough to try something new and you know plant medicine has become a lot more popular in these circles because it provides a glimpse into a different reality and it snaps them out of this sort of very narrowly focused approach into like oh wow there's something completely and and it can be so disorienting for a lot of them yeah because there's no no no healthy process of reintegration when it's not done you know in a way that's intentionally unconscious that's an important lesson they have to go back to operating yeah and i hear stories about people you know thinking that oh since i had such a profound experience i'll do it every weekend and then next thing you know it's really thrown their lives out of kilter yeah it becomes it becomes as new because that's the way that they've approached things through i and i'm not i'm not i think there's incredible value in plant medicine yeah and conscious journeys as a way to well there's probably a lot of therapeutic and healing properties but just as a way to show something else as possibility but then when we when we get it's like going to watch a happy movie all the time that you're sad yeah i think it was alan watson said with regard to those drugs he said well once you get the message hang up the phone yeah yeah and yeah i mean i think we're so conditioned to pursue experiences and we're so conditioned to think that somehow we think that there's going to be some experience that's going to really stick forever like i'm going to do this and i'm going to see this and then when i do that then i'll i'll see everything like that forever and i'll be at peace forever and when i hear some of the spiritual teachers speak of their way of orienting around life and they speak of everything as one it can be very easy to misunderstand that as a constant state of experience yeah well in a sense it is a constant state of experience i'm i'll hit back at this just for a second i mean if you could let's say step inside of adja's head or ramuna maharishi for that matter you'd find that there is was a a constant state of experience that is really nice a nice state to be in but that doesn't mean that it's jaw-droppingly flashy or anything uh it's just you know we acclimate it becomes natural it's our natural style of functioning whereas you know psychedelics and things like that tend to be flashy and you know overpowering and if somebody thinks that a state like that is going to become the norm uh that really wouldn't be desirable i mean who would want to be in a state like that all the time yeah and i would even question i'm not obviously an audience or ramana's experience but i would question that it's a constant state of experience not ex i mean the experience let's let's find a better word because you know the the the orientation through which life is lived yeah maybe maybe a a non-localized and at times localized so even when it's localized it's non-local so the aperture is such where there can it can afford small apertures and what what becomes the loop of the spiritual seeker is the moment there's a small aperture it thinks that it lost it but the big aperture allows for the smaller apertures to exist so aria aria is not is likely not going around saying there's no tree it's all it's all one yeah correct so the small aperture of the individualized self that may even have agendas and preferences temporary and seen as illusory and just but i think when we believe that the enlightened master is always seeing everything as one and no separation it keeps the seeking in place it keeps the seeker in place yeah yeah i get you um and you use the word aperture it's a good word because uh i sometimes think of it as like a zoom lens like right now um my camera is focused on me and the background is a little blurry but the camera could focus on the background and i'd be a little blurry like that and you know cameras work that way and uh i think that a person functioning in a let's say higher state of conscience for lack of a better phrase um it's it's kind of like a zoom lens where they're not always just you know zoned out you know in some kind of blissful state they could be driving a car and a rainstorm and having to you know totally focus on what they're doing but there's a general frame of reference from which one functions that is different than it otherwise would be like in in your own case uh you know snap back to when you were 15 or 20 years old compare that with the general state in which you function now you did you probably did many of the same things you do now but it's from a different general orientation yeah it is and it's not a flashy experience you're operating from it's it's if anything it's an unflashy experience because you know there's sort of deeper grounding in in being inner silence yeah yeah so feel free to disagree with anything i'm saying i'm just sort of yeah no i think you're you're absolutely right i i it is it is very different and it includes everything yeah and i think when the spiritual seeking mind associates awakening or enlightenment whatever you want to call it with with one particular experience it's um i noticed a lot of people could just keep looping around that yeah like bliss or unboundedness or yeah you know some such thing um yeah i think arya calls it the um what is it the sales page for enlightenment sales pitch yeah [Laughter] i know ramana was big on talking about those things which come and go as not being the reality like when papaji first came to him and he said he had just been having visions of krishna and playing with krishna and ramana said is he here now papaji well [Laughter] yeah i love i love the the face of the spiritual teaching that is just caught here who is asking who is like okay so disarming and so helpful my wife hates it i was gonna ask you something your wife and kids i mean what do they think of you they think your dad's kind of a nut case or are they on board with some of this themselves they're i think they they're kids so they love it they really um but you know we we all have our our journeys and i think there's no such thing as a sort of a perfect childhood so they will they will often in the conversation we have very open conversations oftentimes what they're working on is not seeing me as seeing me more messy so i have to i have to be very attentive to showing all of my humanity to them and so they they really they've grown up with it so they're very comfortable with it my ex sometimes calls me the teenage whisperer uh but but my wife my wife actually introduced me to a lot of these teachings i was very much in the in the psychological realm of sort of healing myself and when she first gave me emptiness dancing audio's book and our lives kind of flipped a little bit because then i i went deep into spirituality and she had been raised with much more spirituality but then went deep into work so um we were just at different eight stages of our of our sort of life cycle and we we speak the same the same language and yet there's a very distinct and i notice it with arya and the there's almost like a texture to the feminine teachings that is so heart-oriented it's a big generalization but in this book they just feel so heart-centered and so engaging of the form like it brings all the little pieces into the fold it's very different than the manushri quality of who's who's feeling who's talking who's sensing and oftentimes when when i notice my wife going through something in the past she would be sharing something and i i'd go with a mandusky approach and then i noticed it that was not really what she was looking for and i would i would ask her you know do you how can i support you just listen like great i could do that yeah yeah that's a good point you make about um the feminine qualities we here on that gap we we have a rule that we're going to interview as many women as men and they're actually for some reason there are a lot more men in the database of potential people to interview but we really stick to that rule and i think a lot of people feel that the world needs a lot more you know feminine energy and wisdom from feminine sources we'd all be better off if that were more plentiful yeah i think i think that's spot on particularly because a lot of the masculine is about the stillness right it is about the formless and the mature masculine comes back into the form but but because so much of the teaching has been done by by masculine figures it is very much about getting to that nothing is real state and and the feminine is really i think that cycle could be a lot quicker in the feminine expression yeah another thing is that um all the various scandals that happen in in spiritual circles not all but the vast majority are men that are screwing up and you know the women are pretty impeccable by comparison so there's something that can be learned from that absolutely part of my journey has been as a man who grew up in mexico city where a lot of behaviors were pretty normalized has been reclaiming things that are uh that i noticed still operate in the masculine macho stereotype kind of stuff macho how we relate to women yeah which i guess is macho but for me i grew up in in a world in a culture where integrity was very different than how i define it now and and part of what happens or happened for me as this sort of deeper elements of truth started sort of breaking me from the inside was that there was a lot of discomfort with anything that wasn't entirely honest or true or in integrity so all those things that i grew up being able to get away with all of a sudden were impossible to ignore yeah that's good there's a association there's an organization called the association for spiritual integrity which i helped to found along with a few other people and um has over well over 400 members now but um it's an attempt to raise the bar a little bit or popularize the the notion that ethics and integrity are very important components of the spiritual path and shouldn't be ignored or rationalized away with some kind of it's all an illusion and i can do whatever i want because the world isn't real kind of nonsense which some people actually do they try to use things say things like that it's it's so tempting right for the for the remnants of that egoic structure because all of a sudden a lot more capacity comes online with these awakenings right you're able to have a lot more influence and exert a lot more energy and manipulative capacity on people from that place so if there's there's a part of you that's not in integrity and i think that's where you hear a lot of these scandals right because there's a lot of these spiritual teachers that are able to create that allure and that stigma and are able to coerce people into doing things in the name of something or just simply because they become more attractive beings in and of themselves because this light is attractive yeah yeah so i mean i think the more that that happens you know the more attractive one becomes the more charisma one has and so on it's really incumbent upon the teacher to be more careful more circumspect more impeccable in one's own behavior because it's a great responsibility being as being a spiritual teacher and it's i think a great crime to violate the trust that people place in you and use take advantage of your position to take advantage of of your students yeah yeah almost i i've always admired therapists and the process networks and marriage and family therapists and training but the the process of how much integrity is infused into those into the training of becoming a therapist yeah how the dual relationships and the transference and how much that is is really talked about it almost feels like as some of the people that are coming up on these realizations and getting ready to share them or teach there'd be there'd be value in just addressing that a little bit yeah that's the kind of thing we're trying to do with that organization to some extent but unlike like your wife and who's training as a therapist and and there's a formal part of her training which involves these issues there's nothing like that with all the spiritual teachers that are stepping forth i mean it's just a kind of a free-for-all and there's no overarching organization that grants or revokes licenses the way there is with psychologists or doctors or lawyers or other such professions and our our little organization the asi is certainly not going to take on that authority but um it is a bit more of a wild wild west you know comparison in comparison to these more established professions yeah that's why i really was lucky enough to gravitate towards teachers that always encouraged that inner discernment yeah it's like whatever i say here is you know just test it out for yourself and and check out what works and any teacher that essentially claims that they're the the one or the doorway or the means towards yeah that's probably a really good red flag that's really good i'm glad you're saying that and the buddha himself said something like that he said don't believe something just because i say it you know check it out check it out for yourself just the way you just said and uh you know so anyway i i i hope that spiritual teachers will grow and spiritual aspirants will grow more and more in that kind of discernment and the wisdom to not adulate someone just because he sits up on a pedestal and seems to be enlightened but you know use your common sense and walk away if the guy seems to be going off the rails yeah easier said than done right yeah really yeah somebody sent me that externally go ahead oh i'm sorry i just was going to say that i've had my sort of idolation for for people that i really look up to and and i said i've just been graced by their giving it back and saying this i'm not taking any of that good let's go yeah which not all of them do some of them they just it goes to their heads um okay a question came in from a gentleman named pawan kumar in chandragrath india chandigarh india will every seeker eventually surrender once he is exhausted of seeking if yes should they just run towards exhaustion with full force oh i wish i knew um that's a beautiful question what i do know is that all of my spiritual practices and my spiritual dedication to put a word to it prepared me for those moments of deep exhaustion i i understood the value of them and i was capable of holding enough inner stillness that when those moments happened i wasn't quick to replace them with something else so i think we all have our walk to walk i think if you've got energy to run run that's you know i want to say that you shouldn't pursue what you want but i do think there is a gift in in that disillusionment that is often overlooked yeah i also think it's good to keep the principle of safety first in mind because i've run into instances including one quite recently where people um they're peddled to the metal you know and they're just saying enlightenment are bust and i'm going to meditate 10 hours a day or something and then they end up having some kind of psychotic break or you know serious problem so you have to stay balanced absolutely get proper exercise and sleep and you know the food and all the all the normal things in life you're not going to storm the gates of enlightenment by force yeah i thought i could yeah right it was very silly and i thank you for sharing that because it is it is important to recognize that we our body this instrument is just as divine as the most magical spiritual experience you could ever have yeah and the body is the temple of the soul you know you have to take care of it and it's your vehicle really um so if you damage it in some way then you you're stuck with a damaged vehicle and i would just suggest that there is there is this element of grace that seems to respond to this inner commitment and that inner commitment doesn't mean necessarily the 10-hour meditation days it's just it's just that capacity inside to say this is this is what's really important to me yeah that's really good i mean there's a difference between sort of gritting your teeth and just being you know enlightenment or bust or just having this sincere ardent deep heartfelt desire for this and you know not necessarily struggling and straining and and you know doing all that but just uh you know it comes from a deep place i can think of examples of both um one of them actually seems rather egotistical you know where it's like damn it i'm going to get this and it's boom boom that it does so to fulfill the neoadvison's thing about reinforcing the sense of a practicer but i can think of other examples that it's much gentler and heartfelt and and effective in terms of the outcome i can really only directly speak of my experience and even that is probably already filtered through my memory and my terrible recollection of things but for whatever it's worth it was very helpful because i i met fear and fear that was unconscious and often didn't necessarily have a story sometimes as a story at the at the pit of my core often and my impulse was to get to that edge and move away from that edge because it was way too scary and i think this spiritual commitment to what truly is important supports us in staying at that edge where where everything in us is a big no because it does feel like like death to some part of us and to just go back to that inner inner commitment in those moments yeah like in a way that holds in context the larger picture of your your body and making sure you're taking care of yourself but being able to let that precipice approach inside of myself and stay with it was was incredibly valuable at one point that's good i like the way you speak i i can see your your kind of there's this self-reflective care in how you choose your words and uh although you're speaking spontaneously but there's a kind of a thoughtfulness that's it's good um a question came in from peter buckley in vancouver do you feel that the masculine approach to spirituality dismisses the need to heal the heart heal trauma on the spiritual path i wouldn't necessarily call it the masculine approach dismisses that i i would just suggest that oftentimes the feminine has it more front and center and that the in general the masculine directive is more single pointed and and in my experience it made very little room for anything else other than that single pointed direction like anything that wasn't i remember at one point i don't know if it was an audio talk or something but it was it was the invitation was what do i know for sure to such a degree that i would bet my loved ones life on it the teacher and that yeah okay i didn't didn't ask it to me it was it was part of a topic general question kind of thing yeah and it it really struck me because it all the answers that i could come up when i was in this sort of spiritual i went to i am it's all consciousness and but even even these answers when i was thinking of my children's life just weren't holding mustard and i got really really quiet i love those questions that get me really really quiet and to me that's that's both a what i would call masculine leveraging the feminine right because it's the it's the cutting through illusion but it's bringing in the heart and the love like oh i love this being so much that i'm holding that up against this illusion and i'm using that deep love as a way to see through all the things that are not real so i thought that was a very skillful way of merging these two did you come up with an actual answer that you could have expressed no i stayed quiet for a long time yeah it's an interesting question um because i i know that every answer is filtered one way or another through my sensing organ mechanisms and if i was unaware of somebody giving me a any kind of substance i know how my mind gets altered i know that i can't necessarily believe i know that it's operating in time and that time by definition involves either imagination or memory so like what what fades into that and i part of why i love that question is that it leads into this examining of time as the canvas of our reality because any answer would be would have to be placed on this canvas but if the canvas is seen as just this fabrication of past and future because every story needs a little dimensionality it's almost like painting in the air when the canvas is not there nice let's take another chapter of your book um we may have covered a lot of this stuff so we can always move on to the next one but um irrational discontent yeah that's the that's the discontent that doesn't make sense the one that that is i should be happy like you've got everything done for you i have all of this family friends i've got financial security it's the it happens i think many times through our life it's sort of exemplified by this midlife crisis phenomena but but it's this this moment when it's similar to what we were speaking of the strategies when when our strategies seem to have failed yeah when the promise of whatever it was that we were embarking on is seen through us impermanent and you were speaking of the buddha i i imagine siddhartha's experience of discontent was one where like well i'm living in this palace or suffragette of the seaside and there's something missing yeah well you know the story was his father it was predicted by some astrologer that he was either become going to become a great king or a great spiritual leader and his father wanted to be a king so he tried to sequester him in the palace and not allow him to see anything negative in the world outside but buddha got out one day and he was going around and he saw a sick person and an old person and a dead person and he was like what's wrong with these people and he was told well this is what happens to everybody including it's going to happen to you someday and so then he thought okay that's it i have to leave and find out the truth yeah yeah which to the rational mind makes absolutely no sense yeah so let's take another one unnecessary roughness i think that's all the stuff that we put ourselves through you know all the all the way i as i mentioned having grown up in this catholic landscape in a catholic school i associated learning with judgment it's almost like the premise of lashing yourself it's like oh if i do something wrong i must hold on to this strong judgment otherwise i won't learn and if someone else does something wrong i must really hold on to that grudge or otherwise it will happen again and it's all the ways in which we create this unnecessary hurt because we think it's going to help us out and we think we must keep our grievances top of mind and we truly believe that if we were to forgive bring compassion to those places that then we would not learn the other individual did not learn we would go through something like that again that's not my experience at all i think it's unnecessary reference yeah i i've heard philosophies of prison reform and they do this in scandinavia some scandinavian countries in which they try to give the prisoners as good a life as possible you know comfortable setting and nice food and you know nice fresh air in the country and just everything as good as possible and uh they even you know let them work in the kitchen with sharp knives and all kinds of things but um it's turns out to be much more healing and they have much better success rates than a kind of a real punishing kind of criminal justice system i love that it's it's hard for the again for the rational mind or for them for the mind that's justified in its righteousness to not think of punishing someone we we associate in ourselves on each other the behavior with the individual and we think that we think of themselves as criminals or wrongdoers whatever it may be promiscuous or liar or as opposed to individuals i think there's a tribe somewhere that i was i was reading that thinks of people as having caught a virus the virus of lying or the virus of stealing and then the individual is not necessarily a liar or a thief the individual is someone that caught this thing that needs to be cured and that is an approach that feels a lot more makes a lot more sense certainly our current system isn't working in the way that it's punishing and i see with children also i in this identity of a parent i think oh if if i don't punish them then they'll never learn not my experience at all i don't think i've ever punished my children so what do you do if one of your kids misbehaves in some way what if you catch them stealing something or lying to you or you know being mean to their little sister or whatever yeah there's a part of your book about that actually being mean to the little sister yeah yeah yeah first i check my energy because most of the time i'm bringing my own baggage to the mix so if i'm bringing my own baggage it's really difficult to create any value out of the exchange because i'm just projecting my stuff and i'm holding my own my own issues into it but if i'm if i'm not triggered in that way if it truly is just hey this is something that wasn't supposed to happen according to sort of our understanding i found them to be incredibly capable of having full-on conversations from very early ages where i sit down and i say you know what this is how i felt when you did this this is why it doesn't work this is why it works let's come up with a strategy together so that doesn't happen again and it becomes such of an incredible and sometimes they'll do it again and if they do it again then i'll come up with them with a strategy with how what consequence seems to be and it's incredible they're a lot more difficult on themselves than i would be right their consequence maybe oh the next time i do this i should and we write it down on a piece of paper it's like okay if i'd ever do this again then this is what i'm gonna and it's like oh i would have never i would have suggested one day not a whole week but okay and and it's it's incredible to to to be able to treat them in a way where i really honor their humanity and i think along the way i've healed so much of my upbringing which was more much more authoritarian and i know that every time i'm triggered it's because there's a younger part of myself that wish he had received something that you know needs needs to be brought forward oftentimes some version of feeling disempowered yeah as you were saying that i was thinking about how um this works well for you but i wonder if it would work as well as a parenting method for somebody who hasn't done as much work on themselves as you have you know who hasn't undergone as much transformation because you know another person who is full of all kinds of tension and wounding and whatnot could say the very same words that you were to that you were saying to your kids in these circumstances and it might really not have the same effect yeah i think that that's likely and yet i think our children are not looking our children our relationships are not looking for us to be perfect and not be messing up but if we can model how to be when we mess up if if if we can if we can show up in ways that are less than optimal but then say hey you know what i kind of really didn't show up right there i think that's more powerful than not messing up so it doesn't matter where if if there's the slightest capacity even significantly after the fact to take responsibility for how we showed up in any relationship truly letting go of the other side like taking a hundred percent for how we showed up not conditioning in a yes but you did this so i did this but truly just say you know what that way that i did this i could see how i could have done it differently and i'm sorry that's so powerful and children understand that language very well yeah it's great it's it's a really humility kind of thing where it's not like i'm your father and what whatever i say that's what is going to happen i mean there are people who function that way but it's like you know hey we're all bozos on this bus and i'm doing my best and let's let's you know yeah better yeah and i was so invested in appearing as a really good dad yeah that oftentimes i didn't i didn't i purposely didn't mess up or if i was having a difficult experience i would hide it from them right and i noticed what uh how i was handicapping yeah they could probably see right through it okay um so we've talked a bit about surrender you have a couple chapters here what is possible dynamic surrender uh have we covered those points or is there anything more we want to say about those things no i think we i mean i'm sure there's things that we can talk about okay but then there are a bunch of different freedom chapters mental emotional physical spiritual um and uh have we covered those i think we've covered aspects of them certainly we've covered a little bit of the physical when speaking of and there's i just tell stories about people that i've mentored and how i've seen them sort of evolve and i share some of these tools that are really helpful in liberating different aspects of ourselves at these various levels right at the mental there's a bunch of things we've talked a little bit about katie's uh inner work and inquiry right but there's there's a lot of other things that we can do to deal with sort of our mental chatter and the emotional level you know there's this a lot of sort of that resides in the psychological realm of um you know of doing even healing of memory so being able to observe misunderstandings that we subscribe to and the meanings that we made so that's a lot of that work on the on the spiritual because we've spoken quite quite a bit of it but i i frame it as the spiritual part that is still looking for a outside figure for comfort it's this spiritual freedom is really ultimately a freedom from these ideals from this enlightened self or more conscious self i think there can be a distinction between um a dependency on an outside figure to try to fill some vacuum within oneself and then just the enjoyment of associating with you know highly spiritual people so you know there might be some people who go to a spiritual teacher and there's like oh my god i have to get as close to this person as possible and and i feel so miserable when i have to leave and and that and but then there's another orientation which is you know it's it's nice to enjoy the company of such people when the opportunity rises but my my world doesn't crash and burn when i'm not around them and you know i don't have to sort of strong-arm my my way to their immediate proximity you know things like that i've seen i've been that through both of those myself i mean i've been that i've been both of those types of person in my life me too me too and then at first it was i think we use so many different things to create ideals and you know there's one version of it which is ramana and the aranachala you know and that was sort of an externalized reference when you say well how contradictory is that that you say that there is no no self no separation and yet here you are sort of having a love affair with this mountain and and i think it's it's it's paradoxical in so many ways and i think you're right it gets tricky it's like the idea of god right i think relationship with this figure that we could call god or this symbol that we call goddess is incredibly beautiful and i think it's so valuable at different stages and at some point in my own journey i had to be willing to give up the concept of god to claim my own autonomy that doesn't mean that i wouldn't recreate an idea of god and pray to that god but it would be a very different relationship than the one that i grew up with yeah and perhaps a very different even if you had a concept it would be very different than the concept that you learned when you were a kid you know some big scary guy in the sky with a thunderbolt or something yeah i remember when when i first was having these bigger revelations when i was more in that emptiness formless space my um my father who was also a catholic would always sort of do the cross right another what i don't know i don't know why you call it english but he would he would say goodbye genuflect isn't it i think that's the word anyway go ahead i didn't never heard that one but but he would he would do the the anatomy in spanish and and i wouldn't do it back because i'd be like no he wouldn't he'd understand but it'd be it'd be like sure father son holy spirit amen whatever but i wouldn't do it and and then at one point i just started doing it again and i found so much love and joy in it nice and and there was this beautiful exchange and i think that's that's the possibility of religion right yeah uh i think some of us have to have those teenage years where kind of like in that transcending our humanity we move away we judge it we think it's the worst thing ever and if appropriate we understand it at a later point and we're to enjoy it in a different way yeah and you know speaking of devotion and god and all that most of the well-known indian spiritual teachers anyway had no problem enjoying both non-duality and devotion um and i can you know every single one of them ramana you've already mentioned the shankara ra ram i don't know i said wrong um sri ramakrishna he in fact he said i'd rather taste honey than bee honey papaji uh nisargadatta they all have these devotional things going on in addition to their intellectual teachings which were more likely to end up in books yeah i often wonder how how much of that was not for them but for people around them completing the circle of um love coming back for itself and and how much of that outward display of that reverence and devotion was a way to model the mature expression of that non-dual experience of being yeah okay it could be both you know in other words they enjoyed it the shankara or one of his disciples said something like the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion and shankar wrote all this beautiful devotional poetry and stuff and yet he was the founder of advaita vedanta so there's like i said earlier we have different faculties and one of them happens to be the heart and the heart enjoys love and bliss and you know stuff like that which devotional qualities or activities can stir up what do you find yourself currently in devotion to that's a good question um well i you know i've had a couple of different spiritual teachers in my life um amma whose picture is behind us there and marshy mashyogi earlier on and went through a very devotional phase with both of them these days you know if anything i would have to say it's just a kind of a sense of quiet awe at the intelligence that i see functioning in everything as i walk down the street you know looking at the sidewalk or the grass or the telephone pole i just i'm constantly reminded that you know the all of this is infused with the divine and it's it's functioning on every level uh from the subatomic to the galaxies i love looking at pictures of galaxies and just contemplating the the vastness of creation and the vastness of the intelligence which dwarfs the size of creation by virtue of its um the presence and so i don't know that's kind of mental the way i'm describing it but there's a feeling associated with that yeah it's fun to think about it's fun to feel yeah how about you my humanity humanity that's a good one yeah i should have said that too yeah go ahead you want to say more about that no it's just as you see images um i just i keep seeing images of my children and the love that i have for them and and i think what you're describing the aw even even when there's like a pattern i took my kids inner tubing the other day so i rented a boat and it was labor day weekend and i'm in this bay that is so crowded with jet skiers and everyone and i'm i'm pulling them behind my uh behind the boat on one of these little inflatables and i found myself so stressed because i'm pulling them and there's jet skis losing by and i'm barely able to keep up and they're are they okay and then i just caught myself actually i didn't catch myself my daughter caught said that if we're gonna be stressed we don't need to win or two that's like brilliant [Laughter] but it's this ah at how how this humanity operates and how it finds its ways and when there's like a an attachment to a particular outcome and a nice spiritual dimension or i'd be like well there shouldn't be attachments like that i'm very attached to my kid right now being saved and the fact that that is part of it um i find so much awe in that yeah that's beautiful i'm really glad you're saying that um because i mean i interviewed a woman two or three weeks ago named jessica nathanson or she calls herself jessica eve and she she's kind of on this campaign to point out the shortcomings of neo advaita but she said she deals with people all the time like there was one guy who said he's be he had become so emotionally numb and detached as a result of his indulgence in in that approach that he felt he didn't have any feeling for his kids anymore and he was even because they hit their their illusory you know and he was even becoming you know suicidal over it and you know but what you're saying is um i think one can feel you know the most intense ardent love for one's kids and that that's not a symptom of spiritual ignorance it's i mean i've seen you know amma for instance i mentioned amma just with tears rolling down her cheeks when presented when someone presents their sufferings to her or you know their child someone says their child died or their husband beat them or some such thing and she just feels it intensely and yet i've never met someone who at the same time is so free um within herself you know you know i love the distinction that i once heard alia gave around freedom because he said one thing is to be free from and the other is to be free too that sounds what you're describing in amma is she's free to experience deeply yeah it's like an ocean can rise up in much bigger waves than a shallow pond can you know it's free to do that because it has the the the capacity yeah the ocean recognizes the attachment of the wave like oh survive kid must be safe i must not crash all these and and and the spiritual way says no no no well then they're you're confused and then you're believing in separation and you're in and and it's so understandable as part of the journey and i relate to this individual that you're sharing that sort of just is so in this transcendence nothing matters mode and it can be so tempting to to linger there and i want to encourage anyone listening that is lingering there or is to not make that wrong but to recognize just maybe a little opening in the heart and see what the heart in the body feels like at any given moment yeah because there's a there's a dropping from this transcendent experience of being which tends to be sort of over here it's just like a settling into the body into the heart that's a little more texture yeah it's like oh as you know audrey likes to talk about awakenings in head heart and gut and i presume he means sequentially but i think a lot of people have achieved some degree of awakening on the head level but so far the heart for some people has been neglected or just hasn't hasn't blossomed yet but i think when it does it can be you know far more sumptuous and then a mere head awakening and it's so confusing for the one that was so invested in escaping it's like what do you mean we're going back into storyland yeah we put so much effort moving away from that and it's not real what do you mean we're going to start indulging stories and it is kind of like the the dreamer analogy right recognizing the dream that's just the dream and then it's like i'm going to go back into that character and yeah this whole not real business you know i think it's not even really a valid thing to dwell on for a householder if a person wants to sit in a cave in the himalayas and just go you know really heavy into the world as an illusion then find that if that's what they're cut out for but i really don't think it's compatible with householder life and and that's part of the problem with neoadvita is that this kind of teaching is being propagated willy-nilly to audiences for whom for most of whom it is not really appropriate or ideal yeah and any sort of uh it's very easy for the egoic structure to hijack that okay well that's not necessarily the most inspiring note to end on um maybe we can throw out something else but um you know like for instance um you know you're running businesses you're raising your family uh what are you doing anything else ex specifically in the spiritual realm in terms of like well you still go to retreats once in a while but then also i'm you're not setting yourself up as a spiritual teacher as far as i know but um you do say that you want to alleviate suffering in the world as much as possible so what are you doing what's your what's your aspiration what are your activities you know it's so moment to moment i am i i'm not a spiritual teacher and i um wherever i'm finding myself i'm just in almost like being this reclaimer of all those parts of our humanity and i like this book is is the version of that all the all the proceeds go to a foundation called contentment contentment.org and that develops curriculum for school children i co-founded that and uh i'm on a lot of education boards and a lot of different non-profits that try to address homelessness and poverty but i notice a lot of that it's just like it's great but where i find that phrase of alleviating suffering most relevant is isn't just my immediate circle it's in any time i'm i'm creating separation in my own experience of the world or those around me and then by definition the bipartisan that is just a lot of love and compassion and responsibility yeah i mean charity begins at home i guess they say and think globally act locally um you know want to make sure that one's own life is in in integrity is that carlos castaneda's teacher has saying he said a warrior has time only for his impeccability and by a warrior he meant sort of a spiritual dude um but you know i think you've got your your priorities straight sounds to me yeah it's it's it's i got my contest straight i think compass yeah i think the compass and a lot of people you know in the circles that i move on people speak a lot about purpose and and i encourage them i can be so tricky but i encourage them to get clear with their how or than their what because if you're clear with your how then wherever you find yourself you're living that purposefulness that's good you do consult with people i've heard you say in your book you're consulting with various business people and i don't know if that's a formal thing you do or maybe it's just with the people whose companies you invest in but it sounds to me like you've had fairly good success helping um you know type a business executive push the reset button and you know chill out a little bit yeah yeah that's that's not a business that's just something i do something you do yeah yeah and i write a blog every now and then which is on your website yeah okay good well i'll be linking to that from that yeah already well this has been fun um is there anything else you want to say in conclusion before we wrap it up with gratitude well thank you yeah gratitude for what you do and what you've been doing for so long yeah well it's the only game in town at least for me yeah this is where you know it's fun it's enjoyable thank you and i'm honored to be here with you yeah well thank you so much um and thanks to those who've been listening or watching um and i'll be linking to emilio's website and to his book if you'd like to read it and i guess can they contact you through your website if they want to um i don't know i'll find out all right if you want people maybe you've got enough going on you don't want everybody emailing you but then let's create a i'll create something on my website so there's a way to capture an email okay great if i ever get out to los angeles i'll get in touch please do at least and uh next week everybody i'll be interviewing brian swim who's a cosmologist and i i love that field i love the kind of stuff he talks about and i've been wanting to interview him for years and finally i think irene emailed him a few months ago and said all right one last time did you want to do an interview and he said yeah okay i'll do it um so i i'm reading his book at the moment which is called cosmogenesis and it's about as the name implies it's about the genesis or the you know the origin of the cosmos and as far as i know his his theme is that the the universe is suffused with intelligence and that you know there's an evolutionary trajectory to it um brian famous quote from brian is that you you leave hydrogen alone for 13.7 billion years and you end up with giraffes rose bushes and opera um so i'm looking forward to that conversation all right well thanks emilio and thanks to everyone who's been listening or watching see you for the next one [Music] you

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Published: Fri Sep 16 2022