Stephen Levine: Conscious Living/Conscious Dying

This transcript represents the first, half-hour portion of the ninety-minute InnerWork video Conscious Living, Conscious Dying. It is one of the 38 programs included in the Thinking Allowed book. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we're going to explore the nature of the healing process. With me is Stephen Levine, a poet, an author, a spiritual teacher. Stephen has written numerous books, including Who Dies?, Meetings on the Edge, Healing into Life and Death, and Grist for the Mill. Welcome, Stephen. STEPHEN LEVINE: Thanks, Jeffrey. MISHLOVE: You've done an enormous amount of work over the years with people who are sick, people who are dying. You've witnessed the healing process in operation, undoubtedly thousands and thousands of times. We're going to look at some of the many stages of the process. When I refer to healing, I think in this context really I'm not talking about medicines so much as spiritual healing. I guess a good place to start is to look at the obvious kinds of healing, that is, healing in which some kind of a physical recovery occurs -- where a person experiences, for example, a spontaneous remission of a terminal disease. Let's talk a little bit about that process to begin with. LEVINE: Sure. You know, when you ask me, "What is healing?" I still don't know. My wife and I, when we were directing the Hanuman Foundation Dying Project, worked for a long time predominantly with people who had come to us to ask us to help them die. A lot of the people we worked with, as they came to a certain point in their process, usually including opening to the reality that death might well be in the near future, began to finish business. Our relationships are usually run like business: "I'll give you two; you give me two. If you only give me one, I'm going to take my bat and ball and go home; I won't play anymore." So this is kind of totaling of accounts that's always going on with people. It's real easy to think that finishing business is, "You forgive me, I forgive you; but I'm not going to forgive you until you forgive me" -- this always waiting for someone else to give

you something. We started to see that many people started to see that the end of business was no longer relationships as business. When I take you into my heart, our business is done. If you don't take me into your heart, that's your pain and I feel that, but it really doesn't affect my business. We started to see people heal their relationships towards the end of their lives, where they were really meeting other people with such mercy and such care for their well being, that even those who were angry -- an example, a really extreme example: A woman we had worked with, her mother had been very ill. She'd never really gotten along with her mother. Her mother had been very judgmental, quite unkind, abusive. And her mother then became very ill, very ill, and she was the only one of the sisters who would even go and sit bedside. They all had such contention, felt so judged, they really put their mother out of their heart. She was a Zen student. She decided that her work on herself was to be there for her mom. She sat next to her mom, and her mom would go into a light sleep and come out, in and out, as people do when they're real ill. She would just sit next to her mother and wish her well -- not, "Why haven't you given me this? Why didn't you do that for me?" -- not trying to total the accounts, but trying to let her mother, as is, into her heart. That's the basis of relationship -- as is. Because if I want you to be the least different, then you become an object in my mind instead a subject of my heart. Where's the healing there? It's just separation. Her mother had been very nasty in her lifetime, and it wasn't ending just because she was dying. This woman, day after day, sending loving-kindness to her mother. On the day that her mother died, her mother looked up at her and said, "I hope you roast in hell. I hope that you have the worst possible life." Her mother died cursing her, and she died with her daughter sitting next to her, looking at her with soft eyes, and with an open heart saying, "Ma, I hope everything's OK for you." Now for her mom it was terrible, but for her it was wonderful. She had really finished her business. She was just with another human being who was having a hard time. I mean, that's really an extreme story, and hopefully we can all get some glimpse of what that one would be. But that's enormous healing. The woman who was dying died; the woman who was sitting next to her was healing. MISHLOVE: Who was she healing? LEVINE: Herself.

MISHLOVE: Herself, yes. LEVINE: That's all we can heal. If we're not working on our own healing, we certainly can't be contributing to anyone else's healing. MISHLOVE: You use the phrase, "take somebody into our heart." That's an interesting phrase. I think it seems to have a lot to do with your sense of the healing process. LEVINE: Yes. A woman's dying in the hospital. She's lived her life in a great deal of separation. She has a cancer that has infiltrated her bones. Interestingly, it's a lot like this other woman who was dying. Six weeks into the hospital she has been so unpleasant to the doctors and the nurses that they don't even want to come in her room. One night she's in a real quandary, her pain is so great. She's been a person who has always been able to control. In fact her controlling quality has been so extreme that she hasn't seen her children in years, and has never met her grandchildren. She's dying alone in the hospital. The nurses and doctors, that's not where they want to be; they walk in the room and she's blaming them for her pain, them for her illness, them for not being able to cure her. Very little is she able to take within herself her own experience. She's pushing it away, pushing it away. One night the pain is just so great there's nothing she can do about it. And she comes to a point -- it's almost like a drowning person when they just say, "I'm going down. This is it; I'm just too exhausted to fight anymore." And maybe for the first time in her life she surrendered. It might have been the first time in her life she'd ever let go of her separation, of her idea of herself as opposed to the whole world. And in that moment something happened, where all of a sudden -her bone cancer was mainly in her back and in her hip and in her legs. She was lying on her side, in kind of an embryonic state, and all of a sudden she was no longer herself lying in the hospital. She was an Eskimo woman lying on her side, dying in childbirth, with enormous pain in her back and her legs and her hips. An instant later she was a woman lying on her side beside a river in some tropical environment, whose back had been crushed by a rockfall, dying alone, with enormous pain in her back and her hips and her legs. A moment later after that she said she thought she was somewhere in Biafra. Her skin was black. She had a slackened, empty breast, at which was suckling a starving child. They were both starving, perhaps dying of cholera she later thought, with enormous pain in her

back and her hips and her legs. She experienced, the next hour or two -- she said she couldn't really gauge time -- she experienced ten thousand women in pain at that moment, dying, at that moment. She said as that happened it went from being my pain to being the pain. She said, "I had no room in myself. My pain is in the mind; but the pain is the pain we all share, and it can be touched, it can be experienced in the heart, the heart we all share, the heart of common experience, the heart of common concern for the well being of all sentient beings." In the next six weeks, up until the time when she died, her room became the center of love in the hospital. The nurses would hang out there sometimes on their break. A few weeks after this experience, there were her grandchildren sitting on the bed, who she'd never met before, playing with grandma, and there were her children, her son standing next to her. Right before she died, the day or two before she died, one of the nurses brought in a picture of Jesus in the form of the Good Shepherd with the children and the animals, and this woman, whose heart had been like a stone, whose mind had been blocked to all but self concern, looked at this picture and the children and she said, "Oh Jesus, forgive them, they're only children." Hers is one of the most amazing healings I've ever seen. And that's why I really can't say I know what healing is, because I've seen people's bodies get well whose hearts were not as healed. There's a healing we took birth for. When we look around this plane, around this world, and we say, "How can there be so much greed, so much cold indifference, so much suffering?" it's because this is the place we come to heal, and everybody doesn't take the responsibility for the healing they took birth for. And it may be that some people don't even consider it until they find that they may be dying soon. MISHLOVE: You seem to be saying that healing of the body is really unimportant. LEVINE: Healing is not limited to the body. In fact, I've seen parallel situations, with two people with similar diagnoses, where one fought the illness. It was them against the illness, and contention filled the room. When they were in pain, they didn't think they were OK. Just when they most needed mercy, it was least available to them. MISHLOVE: From themselves. LEVINE: From themselves. And they pushed everybody away, and whether they

lived or died, what they did is create schism in the family, judgment in the family, guilt in the family, feelings of unworthiness in those who loved them most, because nobody could help. And I've seen other people in the same situation -same pain in their body, same pain in their mind -- say, "I don't have a moment to lose. I can't stand to live a moment longer with my heart closed. Too much pain for me, too much pain. The world doesn't need another closed heart." I see them where their priority is to communicate the care they have for others, and the healing in that room -- maybe the sign of real healing is, what are the people bedside left with when someone dies? Are they left with their hearts full and a sense of connectedness to that person, or are they left frightened of death, scared of that person, with much rumination in the mind about how things didn't work out, how could I have helped more? Did they leave a legacy of mental suffering behind? So I see people heal into death. Now, I've seen people where the person died with their heart open leaving more healing behind than someone who lived and just continued that judgment and that aggression in the family, and the family was unhealed, though the body was healed. MISHLOVE: Is there a sense -- I've heard this reported by some doctors -- that the kind of people who do experience a physical recovery from a serious disease are ornery kinds of people, who are kind of fighting for their lives? LEVINE: Aggression can be a very strong part. People can fight their illness, and then it becomes me against my illness. It becomes separation and anxiety. Our sense is that when you touch that which is in pain with mercy and awareness, there's healing. Where there's awareness there's healing. I think the word healing is used in an odd way. To heal is to become whole, right? To come back to some balance. And yet where's the balance in that process where -- one doctor, for instance, who helps people heal through modern methods, says that those who heal are their superstars. And then another doctor I know says that patients who heal are the exceptional patients. Well, what does that make everybody else -- a second-stringer, a loser? I mean, the very idea, that very conceptual framework where you are a good person if you heal, makes you a bad person if you die. Who needs to die with a sense of failure? It's very dangerous, those ideas. They're very well intended, because I know those fellows, and they're good fellows, and they want to help, they sincerely want to help, and they've helped many. But many have been injured by the idea that, for instance, you're responsible for your

illness. You're not responsible for your illness; you're not responsible for your cancer; you're responsible to your cancer. Because if you're responsible for your cancer, then how are you ever going to heal? If my conditioning caused it, do I have to get rid of all of my conditioning to be well? I know people who have meditated for fifty years and are not done with their conditioning, and when their time is short, energy is low, it just strains them, and maybe causes schisms within. When we see that we are responsible to our illness, then when pain arises we can send mercy, we can send kindness. You and I, we're conditioned. We walk across a room, we stub our toe. What do we do with the pain in our toe? We're conditioned to send hatred into it. We're conditioned to try to exorcise it. MISHLOVE: Like, "How stupid I was to do that." LEVINE: Yes, and we cut the pain off. In fact, even many meditative techniques for working with pain are to take your awareness, your attention, and put it elsewhere. Just when that throbbing toe is most calling out for mercy, for kindness, for embrace, for softness, it's least available. In some ways it's amazing that anybody heals, considering our conditioning to send hatred into our pain, which is the antithesis of healing. MISHLOVE: You've developed a number of guided meditations for dealing with healing, and part of that process is to really try and feel the pain. LEVINE: Explore the pain. MISHLOVE: Explore the pain, and then to know just how we protect ourselves from getting at it -- that there's sort of a wall of deadening around the pain, to keep us away from our own pain. It's as if by denying ourselves our own pain, we deny ourselves life. LEVINE: It's interesting. You're bringing up a really interesting point. The way we respond to pain is the way we respond to life. When things aren't the way we want them to be, what do we do? Do we close down, or do we open up to get more of a sense of what's needed in the moment? Our conditioning is to close down -aversion, rejection, put it away, denial. Nothing heals. That is the very basis on which unfinished business accumulates, putting it away -- I'm right, they're wrong;

no quality of forgiveness. We know many people who are working on sending forgiveness into their tumors, into their AIDS, into their degenerative heart disease. It sounds so bizarre, because our conditioning is to send anger into it, fear into it. Where can there be healing in that? MISHLOVE: That's true. The Simontons, a well-known medical couple, have developed visualization exercises where you imagine the white blood cells being like cowboys chasing the red Indians, and it's sort of these little battlefields in the body, and the white blood cells are out win and to heal, so that the immune system overcomes. You're suggesting that that's not appropriate. LEVINE: Well, that system does work for people, and I certainly wouldn't want anyone who's finding that to be a feasible means of working with illness to not do it. But I think we need to watch what it means to add aggression to this mind that already is so aggressive in moments of fear, in moments of aversion. How can we work to have that happen, without cultivating aggression? Imagine those people who have cultivated all that aggression, and the cancer doesn't go away; what happens? Well, my experience is that that aggression turns inward, and they often die in self hatred and a feeling of aversion for themselves, of failure: "I really am a rotten person. I really am dying and abandoning my wife and children. I really am a terrible person. I really am abandoning my lover and my friends." The mind takes so quickly to self negation. Anything that reinforces that has to be watched really closely, because all self negation seems to slow and limit healing. I think that it's very important in such methods as Carl and Stephanie's method, that one finds the imagery that's just right for them. A story: A fellow was going to do the technique, Simonton's technique, and he was a pacifist minister. He said, "I have really spent most of my life trying to make peace instead of war. I can't have white sharks eating black gerbils, or however it is." He said, "This is not appropriate for me; it's not going to work for me." So he was told, "Why don't you take some time, and find the imagery that's right for you?" And what did he come up with in a week? The Seven Dwarfs, going in, singing "Whistle while you work," digging it up in buckets and carrying the cancer away. And he healed. The wrong imagery, the imagery that's not appropriate to you. Also, how are you using it? For the people we're working with -- I wouldn't say with anybody else's method -- if it works for you, wonderful, but is it making your belly hard? Is there more armoring in you? That's really the diagnostic device. Are you tightening your belly? Is there

more holding? Is there more separation? Because if your belly's tight, you heart's probably going to be closed, and your mind's going to be painting you into a corner. MISHLOVE: You seem to suggest in your meditative work that if one can soften the belly and soften the heart and soften the breathing, that that creates a state of surrendering to some kind of essential healing that's there available for all of us. LEVINE: The word surrender is so funny, because most people, particularly in the case of illness, equate surrender with defeat. But surrender is letting go of resistance. Most of what we call pain is the resistance that clenches down on the unpleasant. In fact, a really dynamic, practical sense of that is that a lot of the people we work with, if they're going to take medicine, they'll look at it. They won't just swallow it automatically. They're not trying to take healing from outside. They're not giving up control to healing. They're participating in it, they're taking responsibility for it -- responsibility being the ability to respond, instead of the necessity to react. They look at the pills, and as they take them in, they guide them with loving-kindness into the area, because they've put so much attention into the area they know the inside, the multiple molecular variation of sensation within, the moment-to-momentness of that area. They direct it into that area, and they find, for instance with pain medication, that once the resistance has been gone through, that they can decrease the medication. Because I think a lot of medications get used up by the resistance before they ever get to the place that they're being taken to. MISHLOVE: Our medical system doesn't really encourage people to take responsibility at that level. It's as if we're passive, not only at the hands of doctors, but even at the hands of spiritual and psychic healers. LEVINE: It can be. We're not saying, "Throw away your other practice." We're saying, "Whatever you're doing to heal yourself, why don't you try to see for your own self what it might mean if you put mercy into that area?" It's so outside of our conditioning. We suggest that people treat their illness as though it were their only child, with that same mercy and loving-kindness. If that was in your child's body, you'd caress it, you'd hold it, you'd do all you could to make it well. But

somehow when it's in our body we wall it off, we send hatred into it and anger into it. We treat ourselves with so little kindness, so little softness. And there are physical correlations to the difference between softening around an illness -blood flow, availability of the immune system, etcetera -- and hardness. You know, if you've got a hard belly and your jaw is tight, and that hardness is around your eyes, it's very difficult for anything to get through. MISHLOVE: You seem to really be suggesting not just healing for the sick, but as a way of life in general. It's as if moment by moment we make the choice whether to harden or to soften. LEVINE: Well, the hardening has become involuntary, and the softening, it takes remembering priorities, that this is the only moment there is, and this is the moment to open. I mean, if we're not doing it now, how will we do it at any other time? That's why we suggest, don't wait until you get a terminal diagnosis to start to give yourself permission to be alive, to get on with your life. Now is a good time. MISHLOVE: Do you have an opinion about people who are healing practitioners who attempt to do healing not for themselves necessarily, but for other people -say, spiritual healers? LEVINE: If we are all doing it as work on ourselves, that's wonderful. But if we're healing someone else, and we're not trying to heal ourselves at the same time, that person is in trouble that you're trying to heal, because then you've set up the separation of I and other, and I and other is the basis of all fear, all doubt, and all the cruelty and confusion in the world. If you come to me and say, "I'm depressed," and I touch your pain, your depression, with fear, that's pity, and it's a very self-oriented state, pity. I want you out of that state, because I don't want to be in that state. But if I can touch your pain with love, that's compassion. And then even if you're in pain and I've done everything I can to get you out of your pain, if I'm not so hung up on some model of myself as a healer, but just here we are, then you can be in pain and I don't close my heart to you. A lot of healers, if they can't "heal" you, they have no business with you anymore. But when our work is on ourself, then even the teaching of helplessness is honored. Sometimes you can't help everybody, but that doesn't mean anything has to come out of you

that limits their access to who you are, to your heart, to your connection with them. If it's work on yourself, they're in the presence of good healing. But all the healers I know who are really phenomenal, who are some of the phenomenal healers, they all say God does it. I'll tell you a story. A woman had a very advanced cancer. Her doctor told me this story. The cancer really fulminated; it was really metastasized in many parts of her body. MISHLOVE: Stephen, we're going to have to end quickly. We've got only a minute to go. LEVINE: OK. Her doctor said, "Well, it doesn't look like you have long to go." She went to the West Coast. She thought she'd have a couple of days on the beach, a couple of weeks, before she died. She met a healer. The healer lay his hands on her. She was well. A week later she committed suicide. She said, "Well, if it was that easy to heal me, I don't deserve to live." Because that healer forgot to say to her, "I didn't heal you. You healed you; God healed you. You've done so much work, look how easy it was for you to heal." When the healer takes possession of healing, he actually injures that person instead of helps them. MISHLOVE: You seem to be suggesting that ultimately the basis of healing is self acceptance and acceptance of others, and that they're linked ultimately. LEVINE: When the mind sinks into the heart, and vice versa, there's healing. When we become one with ourselves, there's healing. MISHLOVE: Stephen Levine, thank you very much for being with me.

Huston Smith: The Psychology of Religious Experience

DVDs of this and other Huston Smith programs are available. The same program is also part of the VideoQuartet The Roots of Consciousness. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic this evening is the psychology of religious experience, and my guest tonight is one of America's great scholars of religious traditions, Dr. Huston Smith. Dr. Smith is a former professor

of religion and psychology at MIT. He's the author of the great classic, Religions of Man, which has sold over two million copies, as well as six other books on psychology, religion, and philosophy, most recently one called Beyond the PostModern Mind. Welcome, Dr. Smith. HUSTON SMITH, Ph.D.: Thank you. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. Your background in religious studies and philosophy and psychology is very extensive, and the topic that we're going to discuss is so very broad in some ways; there are so many religions and they're so diverse. And yet ultimately they all seem to reflect the mind of man. Would you say that as a scholar of religion you've become a more religious person yourself? SMITH: I certainly don't feel that I've become less religious, and I also feel that these studies have deepened and broadened my -- what? -- my beliefs. In that sense I guess one might say more religious. I think I might prefer to say perhaps a little more maturely religious, because I didn't have a strong religious bent from my adolescence on. MISHLOVE: It's, I suppose, always a little delicate for a scholar, who is supposed to be objective, to study something as intense and passionate as religion can be. SMITH: Well, some see it as a problem, but I've been fortunate that it's never been a conflict for me, because it seems to me that the opposite would be very difficult -- that if you were studying something you were not really in love with, or you felt that it could not bear the light of careful analysis and added information, now that would be a real tension, a real conflict. But it's been one of my blessings, I think, that I've been able to spend my professional life working on precisely what concerns me most. MISHLOVE: My first encounter in a personal or a deep way with the psychology of religious experience came from, of course, reading William James's classic -SMITH: A wonderful book. MISHLOVE: -- in which he described his experiments with nitrous oxide and other

drugs at the time. SMITH: That's right, yes. Very courageous, adventuresome mind. MISHLOVE: And also in the mid-sixties, reading a book by Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner called The Psychedelic Experience, in which they attempted to create the analogy between the pantheon of gods in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions with the dynamic forces working in the subconscious mind. SMITH: Yes, yes. Well, that was a very interesting and indeed important -- what shall I say? -- happening of our time, because this correlation and connection, it's a very delicate one, as we all know. But between artificially induced paranormal experiences and ones that come naturally, they can have, and do at times have, a great deal in common. MISHLOVE: An overlap, at least. SMITH: A huge overlap. And the discovery of these substances -- actually a rediscovery, because knowledge of them goes back at least three thousand years, and perhaps much further than that -- but the fact that we now know how they work on the brain has opened this up as a field of study which it had not been before. MISHLOVE: You were involved in some of the early work at that time. SMITH: Well, actually I was right at the eye of the cyclone. That was 1960, and I was teaching at MIT, and I had arranged to have Aldous Huxley come on an endowed program which enabled luminaries in the humanities to come to MIT. So I was his host for the fall of 1960 at MIT, and of course he had written the book The Doors of Perception, which was one of the opening books in this area. MISHLOVE: Describing his experiences with -- mescaline? SMITH: Mescaline. Well, it just happened that that September, when Aldous Huxley arrived at MIT, was the exact month that Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard from Berkeley. And on the way -- you know the story; it's part of history now -- on

his way, he took a vacation swing down into Mexico, and on the edge of a swimming pool one afternoon ingested -- what? -- seven mushrooms which opened up his mind in ways that totally startled, took him by surprise. MISHLOVE: Psilocybin mushrooms, I presume. SMITH: That's right, that's right. He had arrived at Harvard with a blank check. He was a research professor, had accepted an appointment as research professor in the Center for Personality Study, and he could pick his subject, whatever he wanted to work on. And the moment he had that experience, he was of course absolutely fascinated and mystified by how mushrooms could cause that kind of impact upon his mind, but he didn't know what to do with it. But he had read Huxley's book. So I actually had a part in getting the two of them together, and it's true, for that fall the three of us were very much in the ring in this matter. MISHLOVE: This was at a time, of course, when these drugs were perfectly legal. SMITH: Not only legal, but this was respectable. It was research at Harvard University. One of the first things that Leary did was to mount an open study in which people would simply report their experiences, but he found so many of those experiences had a mystical cast to them that he began reaching out for someone who might know something about mysticism. And that's where he tapped me and involved me in the project. MISHLOVE: You had been studying mysticism long before this, I presume. SMITH: That's true, right. MISHLOVE: Had you thought about the relationship between mysticism and drugs prior to your encounters with Leary and Huxley? SMITH: Well, only academically, in that I had read descriptions, also Huxley's in The Doors of Perception, and as he points out there, phenomenologically, which is to say descriptively, if you match descriptions of the experience, they are indistinguishable. I actually conducted an experiment on that in which I took snippets or paragraphs from classic mystical experiences, and then descriptions of

experiences under the psychedelics which were mystical. Of course not all experiences under those have that character, but those that did. And then I shuffled them up and gave them to people who were knowledgeable about mysticism, and asked them to sort them in what they thought -MISHLOVE: Which came from the real mystics and which came from the drug users. SMITH: Exactly. And there was no reliability in their predictions. MISHLOVE: That sounds similar to a more recent piece of work I know Lawrence LeShan did, where he took statements of mystics and statements of physicists and compared them, and they seemed almost indistinguishable as well. SMITH: That's right. I'd like to add one other thing. So phenomenologically, which again means simply descriptively, one cannot tell the difference. But I think I would want to say that that's not the only dimension, because religion is not simply an experience; religion is a way of life. And experiences come and go, but quality of life is what religion is concerned with. So one has to ask also, not only do they feel the same, but is their impact on the life the same? MISHLOVE: Well, I think especially now that we can look back after twenty years from the original psychedelic experiments of that type, you can see distinct differences between psychedelic cults and real deep religious traditions. SMITH: That's right. So I think it's important that, having touched on this subject, we not leave the impression that the two are identical in every respect. Simply descriptively they are indistinguishable. MISHLOVE: What about the original insight that Leary seemed to have in The Psychedelic Experience that the gods really do exist within us? I think what he was saying in effect is that the pantheons of gods from the ancient pantheistic religions are real active forces, even of a paranormal variety, within our own minds, even if we're Jews or Christians. SMITH: Yes. Well, that's another very interesting development in our time -- that

in the religions of the West, up to this point divine forces have been imaged externally from the self. But when one comes to think of it, when one talks about things of the spirit geography falls away, because the spirit is not bound by space and time, and therefore the distinction between out there and in here, which in our everyday life is very important -- once one modulates to matters of the spirit this whole framework of space and time and matter sort of drops away. What we are now coming to see is that this talk about out there has a certain naturalness, but also certain limitation. One can just as easily turn the tables and talk about the divine within. If I can put it one other way: when one looks out upon the world, value terms -- that is, what is good, are imaged as up there. The gods -MISHLOVE: Heaven. SMITH: Heaven; and the gods are on the mountaintops, and angels always sing on high. They don't sing out of the depths, the bowels of the earth. But when we introspect -- and by the way that imagery is natural, because sun and rain come from on high too -- but when we turn our attention inward and introspect, then we reach for the other kind of imagery, of depth. You know, we talk about profound and deep thought. All this is leading up to the fact that in point of fact this distinction between out there and in here is artificial and only metaphorical when we're talking about things of the spirit. And now I think in our time -- this is one of the changes -- having worked in imagery of the divine being out there, now there is a move towards realizing or exploring ways in which the same reality can be discovered within oneself. MISHLOVE: Another related notion, I think, is the one originally developed by Durkheim, the French sociologist, in which he suggests that religions are really representations of the group mind of a society, and that the god of each culture is an embodiment of what he called the group mind. He almost described that in ways that seemed quite paranormal to me, when you begin talking about group mind -- something like a Jungian collective unconscious. SMITH: Well, again, I think it's very useful. For one thing, we are too much given to the notion that the mind is simply attached to the brain, and therefore because the brain has a given geographical locus, then the mind must too. But I remember in a weekend conference down in Tucson a few years ago with Gregory Bateson,

he posed to the psychologists Rollo May, Carl Rogers -- all those people were there -- he said, "Where is your mind?" And it sort of took everybody aback. But what he was leading up to is it's quite wrong to think of the mind as lodged inside this skin-encapsulated ego, as Alan Watts used to call it -- that the mind reaches out as far as one's environment extends, in Bateson's notion. MISHLOVE: And of course we can always go back to the argument of Bishop Berkeley that the entire physical universe, that everything we experience -- your TV sets, for example -- exist only in your mind. SMITH: Right. MISHLOVE: There's no other way to identify them. SMITH: And we talk about ecology of nature now, but the ecology of mind, we're just beginning to get used to that idea. And yet it's an experience. One can walk into the room, and in current terminology, feel vibrations. You can sometimes feel like a wall of anger or hostility, but one can also sense an ambiance of peace, and now the physicists are realizing that physical phenomena really float on networks and webs of relationship. So we're only now coming to see that our minds too derive, they sort of factor out and congeal out of a psychic medium that Durkheim, I think, was quite right in identifying. MISHLOVE: You know, I notice though in contemporary religions, particularly amongst the evangelistic Christians who are experiencing such a revival, they're very concerned about certain errors that people fall into -- you know, the notion that one might identify oneself with God in an egotistical way. How do you feel about that? SMITH: Well, I think they've got a point. I mean, if someone comes along and says, "I am God," it's perfectly reasonable to ask, "Well, your behavior doesn't exactly exemplify that fact." God by definition is perfect, and what human being can make that claim? So I think the ministers that you refer to have a good point, but it doesn't annul the concept of the divine within, which remains valid. The distinction can come, even if we think of the divine within, as Hinduism puts it, and they have been perhaps the most explicit of all the great traditions in saying

that ultimately, in the final analysis, in their terminology, Atman is Brahman. Atman is the God within, and Brahman is the God without. But then they deal with the point you're raising by saying, well, a lantern may have a functioning light within it, but it may be coated not only with dust and soot, but in egregious cases with mud, to the point where that light does not shine through at all. So both things are true, but both need to be said in the same breath. Namely, I believe that it is true that in the final analysis we are divine and are God, but we should immediately acknowledge how caked and coated we are with dross that conceals that divinity, and it's, one's tempted to say, an endless quest to clean the surface, to let the light shine through. MISHLOVE: We were discussing earlier in the program some of your experiences with some of the very primitive peoples, such as the aborigines in Australia, in their I suppose naive native religions, their having a real sense of contact with this level of reality. SMITH: Well, they do, in two ways, Australian aborigines. One is that they distinguish between our everyday experience and what they call the dreaming. The dreaming is another level of experience, in which they participate in the life of their ancestors, and indeed the creation of the world, in I suppose we might call it a trancelike state, but that doesn't quite do it, because even in the midst of their ordinary life, half of their mind, you might say, is still on or in this dreaming state. But then there's another way in which they're in touch with it, and this has to do with parapsychology as we know the word -- telepathy, specifically. I was in Australia, basically giving a series of lectures at all the universities there, but using my spare time to come in touch with the aborigines, and so I sought out at every university the anthropologists who introduced me and put me in touch with them. And I did not in that entire swing meet an anthropologist who was not convinced that the aborigines had telepathic powers. They simply told me story after story, when they would be with them, and suddenly one of the persons would say, "I must go back to the tribe; so and so has died." MISHLOVE: That's a strong statement coming from anthropologists, who tend to be quite skeptical. SMITH: That's right. Their theory was, insofar as they had a theory, the

presumption was that these are normal human powers, but like any power it can atrophy if unused, and also can be short-circuited if our conceptual mind doubts that it is real. MISHLOVE: So would you say there are some religious traditions that encourage the development and the cultivation of the psychic side of human beings more than others? SMITH: Well, it's interesting. I'll put it the other way, slightly differently. That is to say that most of them believe that these powers are there and that they do increase as spiritual advancement occurs. However, they also warn against it, and say if you make this the goal, why, you're settling for too little. And also there are some dangers; for one thing, this is treacherous water where one is not totally benign, but also there's a strong temptation, as these siddhis, as the Indians call them -MISHLOVE: Powers. SMITH: Powers, yes. As powers become available to you, people's heads get turned, and they become egotistic in their abilities. And so in that way it can be counter-productive to the spiritual quest. So the greatest teachers are quite unanimous in saying they come, but pay no attention to them. MISHLOVE: But aren't there traditions -- the shamanistic tradition, the Tantric tradition -- which really do emphasize these powers? SMITH: That is certainly so. Now, I guess I tipped my hand a little bit in excluding them from the most profound spiritual masters. MISHLOVE: Perhaps you do have some preferences. SMITH: Well, shamanism is immensely fascinating, and extremely important in the history of religion. But sanctity one does not associate with shamans. They have immense power, and it can be misused as well as used. I think on balance it's been used. So I value them, but they're neither -- what shall I say? -- saints nor philosophers.

MISHLOVE: Well, perhaps we might liken the psychic abilities in this sense to musical ability, or any other natural talent that could be used in different ways. And some religions cultivate music, I suppose, more than others. SMITH: That's right, that's right. Most shamans are very much linked with the people, in helping them with practical problems of life. But the aspect of religion that has to do with virtues and compassion and loving-kindness, now, this kind of thing is when I speak of profundity, getting into those waters. The shamans, that's not their forte. They have a different role. MISHLOVE: Well, as our program is beginning to wind up, I wonder if you could comment on two things. One is a little bit more on how your exploration of religions has affected you personally, and perhaps we can tie it to our viewing audience a little bit. Is there some message that you would have for those people who would be viewing us right now, in terms of what your studies might convey to them? SMITH: Yes. Well, like any term religion can be defined as one wishes, and if one links it to institutions, I think religious institutions are indispensable, but they're clearly a mixed bag, and we've had the wars of religions; but I tend to think this is the nature of institutions and people in the aggregate. What government has a clean or perfect record, you know? MISHLOVE: We're running out of time. SMITH: In one sentence. But I think if one takes a basic religious world view, this is not only important but it's true, and we need to keep our ears open to those truths. MISHLOVE: In spite of those problems. Dr. Smith, it's been a real pleasure having you with me today. Thank you very much.

Kathleen Speeth: The Psychodynamics of Liberation

This transcript represents the first, half-hour portion of the ninety-minute InnerWork video The Psychodynamics of Liberation. It is one of the 38 programs included in the Thinking Allowed book.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "The Psychodynamics of Liberation." We're going to explore how it is that we get locked into particular limited views of ourselves, and how we can hope to ever transcend, to move beyond those small perspectives that we develop. With me today is Dr. Kathleen Speeth. Dr. Speeth is a member of the faculty of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California. She is a clinical psychologist in private practice and author of several books, many articles on human development, and co-editor of a book called The Essential Psychotherapies, which she worked on with Dr. Daniel Goleman. Welcome, Kathy. KATHLEEN SPEETH, Ph.D.:I'm glad to be here. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here again. We get stuck, we get limited. Every form of psychotherapy has its own diagnosis of what is the problem -- how do we become neurotic, how do we become stuck, how is it that we see ourselves in our smallness and can't get beyond it? And then they all offer a way to get around it. What I'd like to begin to explore with you are some of the commonalities, some of the larger things that we can say about the whole issue of liberation. Maybe a good way to lead into that is just to ask you, what is your definition of liberation? SPEETH: Well, I don't know if we can hope to find complete liberation from whatever traps we're in in this lifetime, but I'd say we could move toward liberation, if we find ourselves freer rather than less free, by whatever we understand about ourselves, or whatever techniques we use from psychotherapy or from any other religious tradition, any other technological helps we can find in the culture -- political even.

MISHLOVE: It seems as if in a sense we're caught in so many veils of illusion, that as soon as we break through one -- say, racism -- then we run into another, sexism. Or we run into another, religious prejudice. Or we run into another, age prejudice. There's no end to the ways in which our perspectives are limited by our particular situations. And I suppose at some level maybe that's healthy. Maybe it would not be good for a human being to be fully liberated. How would one function? SPEETH: Well, I suppose the most liberated person from your point of view, what you just described, is a neonate -- a tiny baby, just born, who experiences the world as a booming, buzzing confusion, doesn't have any concepts to clot the world into observable things and repeatable experiences. But perhaps a free human being, a free and developed human being, isn't like that. Perhaps they can be free without giving up conceptualization. MISHLOVE: Well, we certainly have ideal models of what this might be, especially from the Oriental traditions when they really do talk about spiritual liberation, spiritual enlightenment, completely unfettered by the bonds of karma or samsara or illusions of various sorts. And yet every time a so-called enlightened, liberated guru comes over to the West, it's like the emperor wearing no clothes. It's easy to see their foibles. SPEETH: So you're disappointed. You feel betrayed. MISHLOVE: I wonder, personally, if there is such a thing as enlightenment, really, or if it's one of these --you know, "Hitch your wagon to the stars." It's a goal we all ought to strive for, but which is not really attainable. There's something about the human condition itself which is fundamental. You know, existential reality -- we're born alone; we have to deal with death and alienataion, and no matter how much we practice yoga or meditation or build communities or begin to see through our foibles, we'll always be in these bodies, at least while we're alive. SPEETH: Well, that's undoubtedly true. There's a Sufi story about that. Basically, the story is about Bahaudin Naqshband, who is the great Naqshbandi -MISHLOVE: The founder of one of the major Sufi orders.

SPEETH: Right. And he materialized an apple, I don't know why, as some demonstration of competence. And the apple had a worm in it. And they said, "Well, Bahaudin, you're so powerful that you can materialize an apple. How is it that you can't materialize a perfect apple?" He said, "In this context, nothing can be perfect." But it isn't just the Eastern meditative traditions that give us some help with liberation. I think that Western psychotherapeutic approaches are even more appropriate for us, although I certainly have participated in both rather a lot. MISHLOVE: My sense is that the Western approach is to say, well, look, the world isn't perfect; we've got to live with it, with its problems. And psychotherapy is often oriented towards adjusting, coping, dealing with how bad life really is. SPEETH: Well, that's one form of psychotherapy. But you practice psychotherapy, as I do too. MISHLOVE: I do too, and I have another view. SPEETH: You have another view. What's your other view? MISHLOVE: Well, I tend to think that underlying the basic alienation, the separateness, the otherness, the fundamental ground of reality is one of connection -- that we're connected with everything. And for me, liberation is really becoming more and more in touch with that dimension of being part of everything, interconnected with everything. That way, as we move towards that, we get closer, I suppose, to what we might think of as our divine reality, and ultimately the highest model of liberation must be divinity itself. SPEETH: It must be. So the way you're talking now, you sound like Freud talking about eros, as opposed to thanatos -- the idea of a life instinct, something that moves toward life, and away from dying, away from entropy. Something that makes form out of chaos. And you feel that is development, and of course so do I. So then, what keeps us from that? What holds us back? What do we need to be liberated from, so that we could make connections instead of break connections, and get hot rather than cool?

MISHLOVE: I would say it's our attachments. SPEETH: Uh huh. And what attachments? MISHLOVE: It could be an attachment to a habit pattern that we have, or to a belief system. My sense is that the unattached mind just gravitates naturally to that state. And when I'm with a group of people, I can watch, some of them go right there, and you have a sense they're connected and they're with it. And then somebody else, their mind just won't let them float to that level, and they've got to talk about -- it could be anything; it could be their clothing, it could be art work. We have a million excuses that we use for not always resonating, I guess is a word I might use, at that level of connectedness. SPEETH: Or living enthusiastically. And what do you think holds people back from that? You know, Wilhelm Reich would call it an anti-pleasure bias in a character. Where does it come from? MISHLOVE: That is a good question. SPEETH: I mean, we're talking about being liberated from some kind of a net we throw around ourselves. MISHLOVE: Well, in many people it's clear to me it's trauma. They've been traumatized in one way or another, and they're kind of stuck. They haven't worked through their trauma. SPEETH: And how does that trauma stick people? What really happens? I mean, let's talk about it as deeply as we can. What do we need to be liberated from? MISHLOVE: Probably -- I'm glad you're asking me all these questions. It's a delight to be interviewed, on my own show. To me, I would say the basic thing is self hatred. It's places where we feel that we can't love ourselves. If we've been traumatized, we incorporate that, and we think, "I deserved that. The universe is telling me I'm that kind of person, who should be punished." SPEETH: You're saying two things; in this way I believe we've got a lot of wisdom

in the Western psychotherapeutic tradition. One thing you're saying -- and I of course agree with you -- is that it's something about going away from entropy and toward life. And the second thing you're saying is that it has something to do with having been hurt, right? We have to somehow work through some nonmetabolized experiences. We need to liberate ourselves from something that has gripped us and grabbed us and is holding us back -- something that happened very early. And the wish we have to dissolve and to die hangs on. MISHLOVE: And the irony is, that "something" is us. It's something we're doing to ourselves. SPEETH: It's something we're doing to ourselves. So one extraordinary thing about liberation, it seems to me, is that the very things that hold us back are the things that hold us in our families, in the family structure. MISHLOVE: Interesting. SPEETH: So, for example, Mother doesn't want you to sit and play in your own way. She wants to have interaction with you, so she can feel like a good mother. That's one example. I just worked with someone today in a therapy session for whom that was true. He didn't dare, when he was with his girlfriend, be quiet and just look at the fire. He felt he had to keep entertaining his girlfriend. And so he was ready to clear the decks of all girlfriends, because he didn't allow himself to be himself while in the company of a person who reminded him of his mother. So he is not a free man. MISHLOVE: Right, right. Because of some conditioning he had had with her. SPEETH: Right. Or another example, somebody I worked with whose mother was a Holocaust survivor. She was a happy woman, this patient of mine -- a happy woman, and well adjusted, with four or five brothers and sisters who weren't, and a mother who was a widow and a Holocaust survivor. And she couldn't give up her guilt, because, it turned out, her guilt was the only link she had with her mother. MISHLOVE: Uh huh. That's where they could communicate, they could resonate. Her mother felt guilty because she was a survivor, I imagine, and therefore in

order to kind of enter into resonance with her mother, she had to be guilty too. Then they could be guilty together and have a good time. SPEETH: Exactly. And they could be connected. Even if they had a rotten time, they would be together. MISHLOVE: The irony to me is, from my perspective guilt is totally unnecessary. It serves no function whatsoever. SPEETH: Except the function of connecting one with a guilty subculture. So in order to be free, we have to be willing to be solitary, emotionally solitary. MISHLOVE: Solitary. What does solitary mean? SPEETH: It means that we have to dare to be objective, and not to share, in order to become a "we" with other people, not to share their beliefs. MISHLOVE: To be able to sort of remove ourselves from the herd instincts. SPEETH: Yes. Perhaps to be really free, one can't be a healthy animal in a happy herd. Or perhaps one can; but one has to take the chance to find out. And that's a courageous step. MISHLOVE: You know, one of the things that you've delved into quite extensively and written about is the Gurdjieff work. I recall a point that you made about Gurdjieff, is that he claimed, as opposed to Western psychotherapies, that all of the negative emotions -- anger, hatred, and so on -- were unnecessary. That it was possible to live a healthy, harmonious, happy life without any of those. And yet in our culture, we have so much reinforcement that says you should be getting angry, you should be feeling guilty, you should be negative a certain amount of the day. Otherwise you're not owning your emotions. SPEETH: Right. And of course that's what I think of as one of the mistakes that many therapists make. They render their patients unhappy. That is, people come out of therapy feeling entitled to a lot of negative emotions. The fact is that they have to come to consciousness, and to be worked through, and to be put aside.

Because they're really not necessary. MISHLOVE: That's interesting. So for you, part of the definition of liberation would be to be liberated from negative emotions. SPEETH: One could still have them, but probaby the perverse sustaining of them would be gone. I mean, as we sit here, there are probably bombers going overhead with nuclear warheads on them, and so forth. We live in a very dangerous world, an explosive world. It would be difficult to simply accept that without a certain amount of what you might call negativity -- but not to dwell on that. MISHLOVE: When one looks at warfare in the world, and certain people, such as the Middle East, where they're just at each other, at each other, at each other, and they have been for thousands of years, one would think the only hope for peace in these situations is to somehow be able to communicate to these people to let go, to calm down, not to be so negative about it. SPEETH: And of course psychotherapy deals with an individual person, rather than a whole political scene. And within an individual that same thing is true. There are many I's and many subpersonalities. MISHLOVE: We're often at war with ourselves. SPEETH: And that war has to be ended. MISHLOVE: You know, the Muslims have a term, the holy war. And it often does refer to an internal war between the personality and the spirit, or various parts of ourselves. It's treated as something that we have to engage in; we can't avoid these things. The psychologies say the same thing -- you can't just ignore your anger. SPEETH: It's certainly not an invitation to repression or suppression at all, to think that it might be possible to live in a very deeply content way without that. MISHLOVE: What you're saying is that if one were to see the light at the end of

the tunnel, work through the anger, then there would be a time in one's life, when one had achieved a state you could call liberated or enlightened, where it would be possible to let go of that. SPEETH: And negative emotions are a little analogous to other substances that are misused, like cocaine, marijuana, alcohol. It's an addiction to feel negative. And the holy war inside, one meaning of it might be to feel no need to have the rush that a negative emotion produces. The rush -- I'm entitled, the feeling of being vindicated, etcetera. So that would be one movement toward liberation. MISHLOVE: My sense is that part of the dynamics here occurs when we become polarized to such an extent that we think that good and evil are at odds with each other inside of us, and that one must totally vanquish the other. SPEETH: Right. MISHLOVE: There is no vanquishing of that kind. They really have to come together. And one discovers usually that evil isn't really evil. SPEETH: So there's that feeling of wanting to be a whole person, a dappled person, a 3-D person -- not a person split into black and white. That's part of moving toward liberation -- to be free of the sense of being split inside, into a part of me that I love, and a part of me that I despise. So that's another aspect of what's necessary to do. And another thing you were saying that seems to me very important, is that we need to be free of the necessity to take and defend one position. Why should I see everything from a narcissistic point of view? Why couldn't I be objective and see myself as the same as other people? That would be a big liberation -- if I didn't polarize myself and aggrandize this little one that I am. MISHLOVE: You know, I recall a modern writer has a very popular book out right now -- The Closing of the American Mind. His point is that we aren't teaching people more about good and evil. We're forgetting what he calls traditional, basic values. People are becoming too relativistic; we should be attacking evil more. You seem to be saying -- and I would agree -- that no, it's just the opposite; we should be transcending this good-and-evil polarity.

SPEETH: And of course that is goodness, that is freedom. The Sufis have a nice way of saying it. They say, "Let go of your preconceptions, and accept your destiny." What is the reason to be liberated? What are we being liberated from? We're being liberated, basically, from conditioning that we received in early childhood, and also from anti-life aspects of probably our biology. I suppose that's in the DNA, I don't know. For what reason? It seems to me, so that we can live out some kind of personal destiny. And how will we ever know about that if we're going through the motions in order to continue some family tradition, or some cultural tradition? MISHLOVE: You mentioned earlier that Freud had described these two forces -eros, the force of life, and thanatos, the force of death. And we both agreed we were very sympathetic to the eros force. But what about thanatos? How does liberation become a factor in our lives as we face death? SPEETH: It must be a very important question for many people now, because at this time in history the gay community is being terribly, terribly ravaged by AIDS. I have a friend who's gay and he's a therapist, and he said he knows forty people -patients and friends -- who have died in the last year. He had to face death with them, and it's a very good teacher. So it certainly does help a person get their priorities straight. What could be more cleansing of stupidity, than to face one's death? But as you and I sit here, how different are we from those people who have been given a diagnosis of AIDS? I mean, right now, we're also finite. MISHLOVE: Right. We also have to die. SPEETH: We do. I mean, we are Ivan Ilyich. MISHLOVE: But I'm not looking forward to my death just yet. SPEETH: Well, why look forward to it at all? The question is to use it to give definition to your values right now. Does it help you at all to think that you're mortal? MISHLOVE: It does. In my own work I pay a lot of attention to issues of life and death. Often in hypnosis I take people beyond the realm of death -- to explore, to

get in touch with some sense of eternity, which I think is with us all the time. You know, it seems to me that it's possible that when people live from a place within them that echoes of eternity, death isn't so much of an issue, really. SPEETH: So a free man or woman would be impeccable, would be courageous, would be able to face his own finitude or his own eternity. MISHLOVE: You know, it reminds me of a Zen story of a time when there was much warfare in Japan. The monastery was ransacked. A general came in and he saw the Zen monk praying, and he came up to him with his sword, and he said, "Don't you know I'm a man who can run you through with this sword without blinking an eye?" The monk looked up at him and said, "Don't you know I'm a man who can be run through without blinking an eye?" The general put his sword down. SPEETH: Right. That is a free man. So when we talk about liberation, we're talking about liberation from the perspective of ego, my own personal ego, so that I can see from all points of view. And that is divinity. What is divinity? MISHLOVE: So it's the ego that separates us from that. SPEETH: It's a kind of paranoid clot of attention inside, a trembling, paranoid clot inside. Trungpa Rinpoche called it the basic contraction of ego. MISHLOVE: The basic contraction of ego. I like it. And I suppose that's also what's responsible for selfishness and greed and clinging of every sort. SPEETH: Uh huh, right. And of course to the degree that one is getting free of that, then it's possible to have empathy with others. If I'm not in a fortress protecting myself, maybe I can have a sense of how you're living, what your situation is. MISHLOVE: I should think there must be a difference, though, between this kind of egotistical, or egoistic, clinging, and a sense of when a person is on a real mission -- when they're following their destiny, when they're attached to something, but it's something greater than themselves -- a life purpose, a creative

work of some sort. SPEETH: Right. A heroic life. A life like Theseus, who was able to go through the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. Or a life like the life of Einstein, who was able to lock himself in a room for two weeks and come out with E = mc2 and so forth. That's a heroic life. MISHLOVE: Now, how does this relate to the dynamics of liberation? How do we free ourselves from the petty clinging, and enter into the heroic life? SPEETH: How do we work through enough so that our actions come not from deficiency, and not from fear, and not from conditioning, but from what Longhenpa called lucid awareness and consummate perspicacity? MISHLOVE: That's a mouthful. Consummate perspicacity. SPEETH: The sense of doing just the right thing at the right time. How do we get there? I think as Westerners we get there on the psychotherapeutic path. There's a person named Jack Engel, who's a psychiatrist in Boston. He did a study in Burma -- I don't know if he did the study, or who took the data, but the results were that Westerners and Burmese sat with a teacher, a Theravadin Buddhist teacher, and after six weeks the Burmese had the first level of enlightenment, and the Westerners had developed a transference neurosis on the teacher. So for us, we're different from the people for whom those meditative traditions were developed. MISHLOVE: A transference neurosis, for the benefit of our viewers, is where they're projecting their own emotions, about their parents probably, onto the teacher, and they're working that out. SPEETH: Right. And they're acting toward the teacher as if he were a loved, feared, or whatever, parent. So for us, we could do the two-person meditation called psychoanalysis, in which the therapist sits with evenly hovering awareness, and the patient sits or lies with free association of thought. What could be more likely to produce self awareness than that kind of working through?

MISHLOVE: I love to do therapeutic work with people myself, but I haven't necessarily heard of great geniuses, real heroes, coming out that way. Did Einstein need a therapist? SPEETH: No. And I have to say that Rilke refused psychoanalysis. He was afraid that it would interfere with his gift. MISHLOVE: This is not to demean therapy. SPEETH: No, but I hear what you're saying, and I can only say that in my experience, the people that I know, and also my own self, have profited by understanding their minds in the therapeutic manner. And that just means to conduct your own analysis of your life, with the companionship of a therapist. MISHLOVE: My sense is that maybe therapy does get one through certain stages, but there are certainly stages on the heroic journey that go beyond what Western psychology is equipped to deal with. SPEETH: Right. And in fact a hero wants to face his destiny without a cane. So at some point he'll have to stand alone and make it, and meet whatever is coming toward him. MISHLOVE: And I guess ultimately that's everybody's destiny. SPEETH: I guess it is. MISHLOVE: Well, Kathleen Speeth, it's been a pleasure sharing this half hour with you. I think this is for me personally, I'd like to say, one of the most exciting interviews I've ever done. SPEETH: I'm very glad to be here. MISHLOVE: And I hope to have you back again, as well. Thank you so much for being with me. SPEETH: Thank you, Jeff.

Fred Alan Wolf: Physics and Consciousness

DVDs of this and other Fred Alan Wolf programs are available. The same program is also part of the VideoQuartet New Physics and Beyond. EFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "Quantum Physics and Consciousness," and my guest, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, is certainly an authority in this area. He's the author of several books, including Taking the Quantum Leap, which is a winner of the National Book Award; Star Wave, a book describing Fred's own theories about quantum physics and consciousness; and also The Body Quantum. Fred, welcome to the program. FRED ALAN WOLF, Ph.D.: Thank you, Jeffrey. It's really a pleasure to be here and see you again. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here, Fred. Let's talk about consciousness for a moment, because before we can talk about quantum physics and consciousness we need to start with a definition. What is consciousness to you, as a quantum physicist? WOLF: Well, first let's talk about it in general -- not just as quantum physics, but what does it mean to be conscious? Just in coming to the studio, I happened to be going through a big library, and I was looking at all the books and all the titles on consciousness. I pulled one out and looked to see what he had to say; he didn't get it. I pull another one out; this doesn't get it. There are a thousand people writing books about consciousness, and not one of them really knows exactly what consciousness is. To tell you the truth, I don't know what it is either. So even though I've written several books about it and have been studying it for many, many years, to tell you exactly what consciousness is, is something that's beyond my grasp. MISHLOVE: It's Goedel's theorem. A system can never understand or explain

itself in any case. WOLF: It's kind of like a mathematical theorem, or if you like, it's so much a part of ourselves that we can't recognize it. We can laugh about it, we can joke about it, but to really find out exactly what it is, is very difficult to do. However, we shouldn't be so discouraged by such a remark as this, because in reality we don't know what anything is. If we ask, "What is this? What is that?" all you really do is try to describe how it behaves, or what it does, or what it looks like, or what it smells like, or what your sensation of it is. You really don't know what something intrinsically is. So it's really a philosophical question as to what consciousness could be, because that's the ultimate mystery. What I'm trying to describe, and what I've learned to describe, is what consciousness does. That may be a different issue, and may be something we could address and talk about. MISHLOVE: All right. What does consciousness do, Fred? WOLF: What does consciousness do? MISHLOVE: It sounds like you were describing it in a way, when you said we try to discriminate, we try to understand what things are. That is what consciousness is about. WOLF: The best way I can describe it is to speak of it in terms of some kind of huge metaphor, like an ocean of consciousness; or that consciousness is everything, it fills the universe. What it does I think is very interesting. Before quantum physics, people knew that human beings were conscious. We knew that animals were conscious. Some of the ancient traditions, particularly some of the Hindu traditions, or the Vedic traditions of ancient Indian religion, speak in terms of everything being conscious. Rocks are conscious; your thumbnail is conscious; the television cameras that are recording this show are conscious. So they speak about consciousness pervading everything. But with the twentieth century and with quantum physics, we began to see what might be called a new role for consciousness -- something that we know happens, but remained inexplicable until we began to realize that what we were talking about was the action of consciousness. So what I've been doing in my work is talking about something I call fundamental acts of consciousness. I call them FACS -- please forgive the pun.

What is a fundamental act of consciousness? It's an action in which something is perceived. Now, in ordinary physics, or in ordinary physiology, or in most of the classical realms of science, perception is something which is taken to be outside the realm of physicality. In other words, if you perceive something, you know that you see something. Light will strike your retina; you'll get an idea, or something will pop off in your brain, or something of that sort. But we never got the notion that somehow the act of seeing something was affecting what you were seeing or what you were looking at. But in quantum physics we've learned that when you're looking at very small objects, subatomic particles for example, the very action of looking at them disturbs them to such an extent that we never really get a complete picture as to what they actually are. Now, this has led me to think that consciousness may be at the core of this problem as to how perception can affect and change reality, and that maybe what we're doing when we're thinking or feeling or sensing or even listening to a conversation is using this action of consciousness, this fundamental act, which sort of what I call pops the qwiff -- that suddenly alters the physical reality of, say, the human body. MISHLOVE: In other words, in subatomic physics, if I want to look at a particle, I literally have to touch it. I have to bounce a photon or something off of it in order to do that. What you're suggesting is that consciousness acts in this way; it touches the things that it perceives. WOLF: That's right. MISHLOVE: It almost becomes one with them, merges with them a little bit, in the process of perceiving. WOLF: Right. The way I kind of look at it is that consciousness is a huge oceanic wave that washes through everything, and it has ripples and vibrations in it. When there are acts of consciousness, the wave turns into bubbles at that moment, it just turns into froth. MISHLOVE: It kind of reminds me of those Japanese woodcuts where you see the waves reaching out like fingers. WOLF: Exactly, exactly. That's a good metaphor. It reaches out like fingers, and

it's the action of those fingers that disrupts and alters the patterns of physicality that were previously arranged by the earlier acts of consciousness. In other words, there's a continuation of this movement. Each one is disruptive; each one is a little bit chaotic, so that things are never quite exactly the same as they were. There's like an ever-changing light show going on, a bubbly light show going on. I think this action takes place not only in our minds and our brains, but even at the level of the subatomic particles that make us up. In fact, that may be how the universe got created in the first place. MISHLOVE: And this is your whole point, that we're composed of this stuff. We're composed of this frothy little ocean. If we could see ourselves under an electronic microscope, it's about all we'd look like, I suppose. WOLF: Yes, it would be a rather bizarre looking light show, of things popping on and off, vanishing and reappearing, matter created out of nothing and then vanishing. And in that vanishing and creation, an electromagnetic signal is piped from one point to another point. That's really kind of an amazing description. MISHLOVE: It's almost remarkable, when you talk about it that way, that I'm here looking at you and you look like a humanoid. WOLF: Right, exactly. In fact there was one guy who tried to make a metaphor of that. He said, "Suppose I were to put you in a room, and put a wall between us, and all I could listen to was your voice, or better yet, no voice. All I could really do was read a computer readout coming through the wall, and I could ask you questions by typing them in to you, and then you'd feed them back to me. Could I ask you enough questions so that I could discern that what was behind the wall was a real human being and not a machine feeding you back data?" MISHLOVE: Interesting. WOLF: Interesting question. So the question is, you look at me, I look at you, and we say, "Ah, that must be a human being." But if we really wanted to get very Cartesian, like Descartes did, about everything, we might begin to say, "Well, how can I really know that that's a human being behind there? What kind of questions can I type out, or can I ask it, in order for it to feed me back and say, 'Ah, yes, I'm

a human being just like you, Fred.'" But then the question is, "Is Fred a human being who's asking?" Maybe this is the robot talking to you, and you have to ask yourself the same kind of question. MISHLOVE: You're getting at the nature of paradox here a little bit, aren't you? WOLF: Yes, we're getting at the very nature of what consciousness is, really, in raising these humorous ways of looking at it. If we try to address it, I think, totally scientifically and totally objectively, I think we run into a real brick wall. Literally; it's that brick wall that's erected that keeps the person behind and you in front. In fact, if you start to address your own body as that kind of a thing, you say, "Ah, this is not a hand; this is a machine. Look, it does this, it does that." MISHLOVE: A hundred and twenty-four joints. WOLF: Exactly. We look at the articulation, we watch how the blood flows, we know the pressures in the heart, we know the atrium does this and that does this, and we know how -- mechanically, we can see it perfectly. But yet, something is missing in it all. Even if I try to make it as mechanically clear as possible, we know something's missing, and that thing that's missing is something we call consciousness. MISHLOVE: Norman Cousins once talked about the body as being made of spiritual tissue. He was kind of getting at that angle. WOLF: What I'm getting at, is that possibly we can't really address the question of what consciousness is, if we purely look at it in its objective, causal framework. MISHLOVE: You're a physicist, and a theoretical quantum physicist. And when we get to that level of quantum physics, it seems as though the mechanical notions of the universe break down completely. Everything's fuzzy, it's frothy, it's foamy, it's probability waves. Doesn't that sort of seem to be like consciousness? WOLF: Well, let me quote from Newton about this, even though we're talking quantum physics. Literally, I feel like a child at a seashore, when it comes to seeing where quantum physics is pointing. I feel like we're on the verge of a

gigantic discovery -- maybe the nature of God, maybe the nature of the human spirit. Something of that sort is going to emerge from this, because our normal notions -- in fact the notions upon which we think science makes any sense at all, the notions of space and time and matter -- they just are breaking down, they're just falling apart, like tissue paper before our eyes. Wet tissue paper; it isn't even good tissue paper. It doesn't hold anything up anymore. So we're beginning to see that -- for example, in classical physics the idea that the past influences the presence is pretty normal. Everybody says, "Oh, of course." MISHLOVE: One-way causality. WOLF: One-way causality. Everybody says, "Oh yeah, naturally." I mean, that's what Newton said, that's what they all say. OK, but there's another notion. What about the future influencing the present? Is such an idea just an idea that comes about through parapsychology, or through mystical insight? Quantum physics says no, it says that definitely there is a real mathematical basis for saying actions in the future can have an effect on the probability patterns that exist in the present. In other words, what takes places now, what choices are being made right now, may not be as free to you as you think they are. To you it may seem uncertain -- well, I'll do this or I'll do that. But if you realized that what you did in the future is having an effect now, then it wouldn't be as obvious. So it's hard to talk about it because the future's yet to come, right? MISHLOVE: Well, I was thinking about this today. I just saw a movie, one of these Back to the Future kind of things, Peggy Sue Got Married -- these visions of people traveling through time. And I thought to myself, if I were in touch with who I will be twenty, thirty years from now, if I had the insights today that I will have then, how would I do it? What would I do different today? WOLF: Well, suppose you found out that you do have those insights, and you actually have them right now, but the problem is that we haven't developed our acuity for believing those insights as strongly as we have our acuity for believing the past. Most of us have made mistakes in the past, right? We're all schlemiels when it comes to the past: "Oh God, if I'd only done that differently in the past." OK, well, this is your opportunity to do it now in the future. And though it's in the future, you can envision something about yourself that's better than it is right

now. In fact, I guess that's what positive thinking is really all about, isn't it? And if we can tune to that picture and visualize it, sort of get a clear picture as to what it is, it will propagate back to the present right now, and will affect the choices that you're going to make now, so that a lot of the struggle you have, having to deal with the past, will sort of vanish away. MISHLOVE: In other words, if I hear you right, you're suggesting that we should kind of be talking and thinking to ourselves who we were twenty years ago, to make sure that we made the right decisions then, so we can be who our best self is right now. WOLF: That's right, that's right. MISHLOVE: Isn't that interesting? WOLF: We need to recreate the past. I mentioned this in an article I wrote about time, saying that the past is not fixed, that there's no absolute past. I'm sure there are events that we would all agree on. For example, we could agree on the Nazi Holocaust. OK, fine, but can we agree on what was going on in the German mind during the Nazi Holocaust? Can we agree on what was going on in our minds when we were ten years old? I mean, can we really come to grips and say, "OK, when I was ten years old I was really this bubbling kid, or I was just --" MISHLOVE: Do we know what goes on in Reagan's and Gorbachev's minds when they meet? WOLF: Exactly. It's not so much what's going on in their minds, but do we really have a fix on saying that the events we write down now about what happened in the past were really those events? Obviously we're creating the past; obviously we're making choices now. And there are feelings involved. MISHLOVE: But now there's a difference between interpreting the past and creating it, and I think as a physicist you're talking about creation here, aren't you? WOLF: I'm talking about that interpretation is equivalent to creation -- that there

really is no fixed, solid past, and that when you go back and look at the past, what you're doing is making an interpretation which will best rationalize the present position you're now holding. MISHLOVE: When you say there is no fixed, solid past -- talk about that a little more, Fred. I mean, most of us have this notion that the past is -- you know, we woke up, we went to bed, we got in our car, we did distinct things. WOLF: OK. I'm sure that one of our viewers probably had Chinese food on Tuesday evening, whatever month or day this happens to be. One viewer out there has had Chinese food, and that viewer, I'll talk to him for just a moment. So you had a little egg foo yung. All right. We have both agreed that you had egg foo yung on Tuesday evening. I can understand that. And maybe it wasn't the best egg foo yung for you; maybe it gave you a little heartburn. All right, so what? The fact is you had the egg foo yung, and you say you had the egg foo yung, and I say you had the egg foo yung, and you go to the restaurant, you ask the Chinese waiter, "Did I have egg foo yung?" and he says, "Oh, of course you had egg foo yung. You always order egg foo yung, Mr. Fu." All right, so that can be definitely pinned down and made clear, OK? Now, the question is not so much did I have egg foo yung or not; the question is, what was going on with that egg foo yung? In other words, what processes were taking place? What was I thinking about? How did that food integrate into my system? There are many, many millions of different processes that are going on. Can you actually go down and pinpoint every single one of those processes and say that happened, this happened, that happened? No, of course not. You can't even do that now. MISHLOVE: Maybe I got a rash; maybe I got indigestion. Maybe I got a great insight while I was -WOLF: Yes. You can't really do that. So what you can do, is you can create that past so that it serves your purposes now. In other words, that past is not fixed. It's not an absolute past. In physics we have the principle called the principle of uncertainty, or the principle of indeterminism. And that principle says that you can't specify the movement of an object through space and its position in space simultaneously. You can't say both. Now, if you were to try to say -- let's assume that the past exists, absolutely solid. The egg foo yung particles, Mr. Fu in the

restaurant, Tuesday at eight o'clock precisely -- let's assume that that's all there. And let's go further. Let's go into Mr. Fu's stomach, and we're watching all the particles as they're jiggling along. Presumably they're all moving and doing weird little things. Electrons are jumping back and forth; particles of egg foo yung are getting down in the digestive system; the stomach is -- all that's going on. The brain is going: oh, I'm enjoying this, or not enjoying it. We have in our mind that somehow everything that's happening to Mr. Fu and his egg foo yung is totally determined, that there's nothing he can do about it. He's just sitting there eating his egg foo yung. It's like every particle has been decided; they're all following the various paths. It's all like some kind of great big machine. But it isn't that way, because according to quantum physics you can't say where every little particle is, at exactly the same time. MISHLOVE: The billiard-ball vision of the universe breaks down completely. WOLF: Totally breaks down. Therefore, how can we say exactly what is going on with Mr. Fu? Maybe he didn't have egg foo yung after all. Maybe he only remembers he had egg foo yung. Maybe what he really had was a shrimp pancake. What I'm trying to say is that his vision of what he ate, or what he did that moment ago, is actually a creation of his own mind now. MISHLOVE: And that's all we have in the now. WOLF: And that's all we have in the now, is that constant creation of whatever happened in the past. You know, George Orwell realized this was true when he wrote 1984. He was trying to wake us up to the fact that yes, we are controlling the past. Like for example, in 1945, 1944, the Japanese were the bad guys. If you were to ask a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American, a WASPA, what is a Japanese person, he would say he was a monkey; he would say he had long fingernails; he would say he doesn't speak very well; he would say he was a subhuman. And in that person's mind, that Japanese person was subhuman. Subhuman means not human -- I mean really a despicable character. It's now 1986, 1987, whatever year this is going to be on television, and now the Japanese are surpassing us in the production of automobiles, televisions, everything, right? And they're not subhuman at all.

MISHLOVE: So we would say that we were deluded back then. WOLF: Exactly. We would wipe out that past: "Oh, we were totally wrong back there," right? That's what I'm trying to say -- that we are creating the past all the time. We're not going to go back now and make the Japanese the bad guys anymore. Who are the bad guys now? Ah, the Russians. Ten years ago the Chinese were the bad guys. MISHLOVE: Well, are you suggesting at a deeper level that reality changes, or are we just looking at the changes of the mind? WOLF: Yes. I'm saying that the reality changes. I'm saying that what was real in that past has actually been created by the minds of today, and what's being written down is modifying and changing that. It is 1984. It's very subtle, and it's not so blatantly obvious as the example I gave of Mr. Fu and the egg foo yung. MISHLOVE: Or George Orwell. WOLF: Or George Orwell. It isn't as blatant as that. But it's still a reality we have to live with. MISHLOVE: How does this affect us, Fred? WOLF: Well, we're in a kind of nuclear stalemate, holocaustic kind of reasoning right now. It's affecting us right now. We are creating a kind of glorified beauty-ofdeath vision about the nature of reality right now. There's some kind of feeling going on that it's going to be OK to blow ourselves up. It must be OK to blow ourselves up, because why are we heading in that direction so clearly, so absolutely clearly? MISHLOVE: I'm not sure we are. WOLF: You don't think we are? MISHLOVE: No, I don't know. I'm not sure we are. So maybe my reality's a little -we'll have a contest of wills here, to see who's going to make it happen.

WOLF: Well, it certainly is a major concern of our societies today. MISHLOVE: It's in everybody's mind. WOLF: It's in everybody's mind that that's the direction we're heading in. Now, why is that so? MISHLOVE: Or it's a probable direction, let's put it that way. It's a probable direction. WOLF: But it's probable because we believe; the people that think along these lines believe it's inevitable. They believe that it's because we did this in the past, and because we did that in the past, we can't trust them to do this, and we can't trust them to do that. We have a whole picture which goes back, and I said the past is unreal. MISHLOVE: Well, I'm not sure I agree with what you're saying, sociologically. I don't know what people believe. But perhaps you're right here. I think the deeper issue that you're getting at is that by our thoughts, by our minds, we are creating these realities. WOLF: That's right, exactly. There's absolutely no reason in the world, not one, not one iota, that we need to blow this place up. Not one. There's not one existing logical, sound reason. There is enough to go around for everybody. MISHLOVE: And I doubt if we'd ever get anybody on TV who would say that there is. WOLF: OK. But there is a reason that we're using to blow ourselves up, and that is the basic isolation, the basic mechanism of "I'm alone; you're alone. Don't bother me, bud, because I've got my life to lead. You're Russian; that's fine. You do your thing, I'll do my thing, and man, we're just going to go our own ways." It doesn't work in the world anymore. We have an ecology not only of the material universe, there's an ecology of consciousness. And because of these ideas that I'm talking about in quantum physics, we have in a sense a moral obligation here

to create the past to bring out the vision which can see the world in an entirely different light than it's presently being seen. And that I think is a hot issue today. If people could really understand the ideas I'm talking about now -- I'm doing the best I can to present them, but if people could really understand them in a deepseated sense, they'd realize we don't have to mistrust each other, and we don't have to go through that process, that all is forgiven. There is no past that -MISHLOVE: Would you say that they'd realize that we are each other? WOLF: Ultimately that is the great vision -- to recognize that everything is one. There's just one basic being, one basic consciousness, of which we're all parts in some mysterious way -- but not in the simplified way of "You go your way, I go my way, and I don't care what you do, you don't care what I do, as long as we go our separate ways, everything's hunky-dory." It doesn't work that way. If we go our separate ways on a round planet, we're bound to clash as we come around the other side, right? No matter what direction you go off in, you're going to come back together. MISHLOVE: I think you're talking about something more than a round planet. You're talking about quantum interconnectedness here. WOLF: I'm talking about global consciousness. I'm talking about the fact that what one being does in some way affects everybody on the whole planet. It's not just separate beings all going their own ways. We are interconnected in ways that are very subtle and not easy to appreciate. It's all a great big ocean of consciousness; it's a living surface of a planet. MISHLOVE: That's your basic sense of consciousness. WOLF: That's my basic sense of it, yes. And it goes beyond that, by the way. It goes off into space too. I mean, everything is basically consciousness. MISHLOVE: I gather from what you're saying that you would therefore see your world view as very compatible with what parapsychologists are researching. WOLF: I have no problem with what parapsychologists are researching at all,

because what is parapsychology? Parapsychology is the workings of science in areas which are very difficult to test. It's called fringe areas. I work in fringe areas myself, so I understand the nature of the problem. It's difficult to test it, and it's difficult to objectify it because we're working on things which break the paradigms of normal mechanistic thinking. So we have to go beyond those paradigms if we're going to have any success at all. So I'm very much a supporter of anything which gives people a new vision of how the universe works. MISHLOVE: And how about our own understanding of our bodies, in terms of this quantum vision of life? WOLF: Well, your body is probably the best laboratory for -- you might call it parapsychological experimentation, or quantum physical experimentation. Right now there are consciousness experiments that you can do. With just a turn of your mind, you can begin to experience, for example, your left toe. Suddenly your consciousness is in your left toe. You don't even have to move your left toe to experience it. I can just suggest something to you, and suddenly your mind will go right to that point. I say, "OK, I want to go right beneath, in the crease of your right knee." Suddenly you're there, right? You can feel it. If you want to, you can feel the stocking pressing on the heel of your left foot. MISHLOVE: Got it, got it. WOLF: This is what I mean. How can you do that? I mean, how is it -- is this mind doing it? Well, more than just the mind is involved, because obviously there's something very alive going on down where that crease of the foot is, or where the heel is. In my vision of the body -- and I write about this in my latest book called The Body Quantum -- I talk about that the ultimate game would be to become conscious of every living cell, in the same sense that you just became conscious of your toe, or the crease of your right knee, whatever. And if you can do that, I believe that you could find out exactly where the rough spots are, what needs healing. I have a model for healing which is based upon quantum physics. The whole notion here is similar to my world picture. What is illness? Illness is this concept that we can each go our separate ways. Can you imagine one of my cells saying, "Hey, Fred, I want to go my own way, buddy. I don't need you for nothin'. Just keep feedin' me food and I'll just do my own thing." That's called cancer. Got

it? That's all it is. MISHLOVE: Similar to what may be happening on the planet. WOLF: Similar to what's happening on the planet, exactly. You know, a cancer cell gets it in its mind. In its mind it says, "I'm the only thing around. I'm going to use this sucker to get everything I can from it." So it feeds itself. A cancer cell is a cry for immortality. It has no idea that it's a finite cell. It has no sense of commitment. There was a theory of committed cells that came out in recent physiology, in 1961. MISHLOVE: We're going to have to cover it quickly, though, because we're just about out of time. We have about thirty seconds, Fred. Can you handle that? WOLF: Thirty seconds? OK. Very briefly, the idea in this new vision I have is that it is possible to cure yourself of illness by simply becoming aware of where the tight spots are. And I think that's going to be the wave of the future. MISHLOVE: Great, Fred. We're going to have to do more of this. It's been so exciting. Thank you very much for being with me. WOLF: You're very welcome. It was fun for me too, Jeffrey.

Arthur M. Young: Self and Universe

DVDs of this and other Arthur M. Young programs are available. The same program is also part of the VideoQuartet Living Philosophically. EFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove, and today we're going to be discussing a small topic -- the nature of the self and the universe. We all have a common-sense notion of ourselves being separate from the world around us, yet the mystics, and now many scientists, are saying that the universe is one, that we're all interconnected. How is it possible that we have this sense of separateness, and yet interconnection at the same time? With me today

is Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter, the first commercially licensed helicopter; founder of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, California; and developer of a theory of process which relates all of the known sciences with mythology, spirituality, and psychic experience. Arthur is also the author of many books, including The Reflexive Universe, The Geometry of Meaning, and Which Way Out? Welcome, Arthur. It's a pleasure to be with you again. ARTHUR YOUNG: Hello, Jeff. MISHLOVE: You know, many spiritual teachers suggest that it's the ego that limits us -- that we get locked into the small, separate self, and if we could only get rid of our egos and experience the great oneness of the universe, that we would be enlightened. Yet this seems to go against the whole grain of Western thought. I wonder what you think about it. YOUNG: Well, I think the ego is essential, and it ultimately can flower into what you could call, what Jung calls, the personality -- you have these terrific personalities like movie stars and so on, after you've evolved sufficiently. But you first have to have a thing before you can give it up. So as I read nature, ego is our little ship or vehicle for experiencing the universe, and there's no point in giving it up until we've had the experiences it affords, and which only it affords. MISHLOVE: When does that point occur? YOUNG: I think it's way beyond most people today. So rather than give up their ego, they would do better to get the benefits of what the ego provides. Without the ego, all this connectedness is a confused mass. It's like having a flashlight in a cave. If you want to throw away the flashlight, you can experience the cave much better, but you won't really learn anything. Rather than get along in total darkness, you use the flashlight to examine as much as you can. Now this expands and expands if you use it; but it won't expand if you throw it away. MISHLOVE: It's as if the universe created us humans as separate entities for a purpose.

YOUNG: That's precisely correct. And what I call the third level is the level where separation begins. This is true also in the scientific world of physics. It's only when you get atoms that you get identity. The fundamental particles don't have any identity; there's no way to tell one from another. They're really forces, so you can see how ridiculous the notion of identity is if you're dealing with forces. Is the force of gravity, when it affects you, the same as the one that affects me? MISHLOVE: Well, we're all swimming in this sea of forces, and yet we do have our identities. YOUNG: How do we get it, is a very interesting subject. I used to say, how can you have separation in a universe made by God? Well, that's where I like to have my little torus -- sorry I haven't got it here. MISHLOVE: It looks like a donut, for people who may not know. YOUNG: A donut, right. Now, suppose you had a sphere, and there was a cow on the sphere and you put a fence around him. He can't escape. It's the same as a field. If you put a fence around the cow, he couldn't escape. But if you did this on the donut, provided the fence included the hole in the donut, the cow could escape through the hole. In other words, he wouldn't have to climb over the fence, he just goes into the middle and through -MISHLOVE: And comes around out the other side. Because the inside and the outside are the same. YOUNG: Right. This is an image for our separation from the universe. I'm separated from you and you're separated from me, but if we were to go into our inner life, we would join up in the divine spark. That's the center of this whole thing. MISHLOVE: That's very profound. YOUNG: Well, it explains intuition, for instance, which is one of those centered things that comes from deep within us. The outer world is out here; everything is separate. But the inner world, in the first place, is not objective. See, you have to

have objectivity to have separateness. MISHLOVE: And the inner world is where we can experience, in other words, the wholeness, the unity of the universe -- the unity of ourselves with all other -YOUNG: You can experience anything -- pleasure, suffering, and so on. There's a whole gamut of things. But those experiences are subjective or internal. I prefer to call them projective. But they are our memories, and they're very important, but they're not separate. What does the word telepathy mean to you? MISHLOVE: Well, it comes from the word pathos, I suppose, which has to do with emotion. YOUNG: That's correct. Most people think of it as communication at a distance, you see. But it isn't communication; it's feeling at a distance. Because these feelings are internal and general to everyone, you can feel other people's feelings. And that's the basis of telepathy -- it isn't communication, like a typewriter traveling through space. MISHLOVE: It's intriguing, though, how if one looks at the research in telepathy, the feelings often seem to be specific enough so that ideas come along with them. Information somehow is attached to them. YOUNG: Well, the information is highly colored, and that's probably the way it should be, because we have to take the information out. To put it in textbooks, it becomes all dried out, and it loses some of the nourishment it had when it was associated with experience. Nevertheless, that's the task of the ego -- to have this stop-and-think point, this cool observation which will enable it to get the benefit of knowing all these things. MISHLOVE: In other words, the ego sort of wanders about the fence which separates it from the rest of the universe, on the outside, through the realm of the senses, and attempts to manipulate, to grasp, to understand the universe that way. YOUNG: If you're going to use the fence in that metaphor, then I'd prefer this

one: suppose you had a million cows or something, and you wanted to count them. You'd very soon get mixed up. In fact, that's one of the reasons animals go in herds, because the pursuing animal, the lion, will get mixed up as to which one he's chasing. But in any case, you couldn't keep track of these million cows. So you put a fence around the whole thing and let them out one at a time and count them. That's in a way the function of the ego; it can't deal with the whole mass of reality at once, so it does it by this trickle method, and it takes many lifetimes to do it, but eventually it gets what it needs. And that's the time to give up the ego, not before. MISHLOVE: So what you're saying is that the ego seems to function in time. When you talk about the trickle method, it's like a counter, time. YOUNG: Well, you might not have the same sex or the same ego in different lifetimes, but you have an ego, just the way you get a new automobile, etcetera. MISHLOVE: You sometimes use the term monad, Arthur, to refer not to the ego, but to the deeper self. YOUNG: That's the classic word for the deeper self. But then we have to go into the question of the distinction between soul and spirit. I always remember the philosophy class that I was allowed to address in Colorado. They all sat there like bumps on a log, couldn't be less interested. So I asked them, "What's the difference between soul and spirit?" They all perked up right away; they'd never heard that one. I won't ask you; but it's very important to distinguish soul and spirit. They may actually interchange meanings. We talk of Hamlet; his father's spirit was the ghost. But that's more in the sense of soul. In any case, the distinction between the monad, which is not in time or space -- it's sort of the higher self -MISHLOVE: That would be the spirit. YOUNG: I would prefer to call that the spirit. Whereas the soul is the vehicle of experience -- that which goes into matter and suffers. MISHLOVE: In other words, when we think of someone being soulful, we're

referring to their emotions -- their longings, their ambitions, their desires, their suffering, and so on. And yet the spirit at some level may be detached from all of that. YOUNG: Yes, right. People use the words interchangeably, as they do with all words; but as long as you make the basic distinction. Of course, to go on with the philosophy class, as soon as I made it clear that the soul was the vehicle for going into different lifetimes, then they wanted to know, how did I demonstrate or prove the survival of the soul after death? I did what I hadn't done before, except once. The only thing I had available was a piece of chalk, and I showed how nice and round the chalk was, and it was so long, and it had such and such a shape. And I said, "I'm going to destroy this piece of chalk." I put it in my mouth and ate it. Of course, then the chalk kept coming out of my mouth. "Now, the form is gone," I said, "but the substance lingers on." And this is true in physics itself. You can destroy the form of things, but you can't destroy the matter-energy-substance content. And it's that matter-energy-substance content that is the soul. When I say matter, I'm saying it in the sense that it's without form. The ancients used the term water, because water takes on whatever shape you pour it into. You pour the wine into the glass, and it's glass shaped. The intellect can focus on the shape, but it can't deal with the substance. You have to drink the wine and experience it to get the substance. MISHLOVE: Well, is there a sense to you that at death, as the body decays -- and I suppose even the soul and all its longings dissipate -YOUNG: No, because that longing persists. It's like an energy, and it makes you find another body in order to satisfy that longing. MISHLOVE: And yet that soul, that energy, that longing, it is somehow distinct. I mean, my longing is different than your longing. YOUNG: Right. Well, I'm not saying that there's a loss of one's monad, one's individuality. But you lose the ego, like you might lose your identity card. MISHLOVE: Well, the ego being separate, the body being separate, that's something that's easy to understand. But when we talk about the spirit, in many

traditions there's a sense that we don't have many spirits; there is only one spirit. YOUNG: You mean one spirit for all persons? MISHLOVE: Yes. The collective unconscious would be the Jungian reflection of that. YOUNG: No, that isn't spirit, that's the collective soul. Excuse me for differing with you. But if you want to insist on a collective spirit, it's the unity from which all things came. It's your spark of God. We're all sparks of God, but we have our own journeys. These sparks are separated in the sense that they're making their own journey, but they're not separate substance or separate essence. There's no word for spirit, you see. MISHLOVE: So you would disagree with those who would maintain that even at death we return back to God, or back to spirit totally. We have a longer path, and the separation even transcends death itself. YOUNG: I don't think I have an opinion there. I think you might go to God. But what is God? We're in difficulties right away. To me God is the highest state of evolution. You can only go to it by evolving yourself. If you rush back, like to Mummy's lap or something, you're retreating. MISHLOVE: Sort of the Freudian notion of regression to the universal ocean of consciousness being an infantile stage. YOUNG: Well, all right; I don't like to talk about Freud. It is conceivable to regress; I don't think we actually do. But to make a plea for giving up your ego, you could easily forfeit the gains that you get the ego to acquire. MISHLOVE: The various spiritual traditions, particularly of the Orient, suggest that the notion of separation is an illusion. YOUNG: The whole thing is an illusion in that sense, including the pleasure and pain. But you have to choose which illusion you like better than the other. Let me try to help on that. Suppose you went into a movie in the middle, and it didn't

mean anything to you; they would just be Hollywood actors throwing things at each other. That's because you haven't got the illusion of the story. You see, the illusion is a necessary factor for anything -- you have to look at it as though it was real. Now, that itself is a veil, but it takes a lot of doing to transcend that veil. MISHLOVE: That's very interesting. It reminds me of the phrase that people in literature often talk about -- the willing suspension of disbelief. It's as if maybe it is an illusion; we really aren't separate at all, but we have agreed to suspend our disbelief in that so we can experience this movie, have this process. YOUNG: We have to have the exercise. I remember that Magritte painting which shows a window with a painted image on it, and the window is shattered. The pieces are lying on the floor. But the same image is in reality on the other side of the window. We have to keep shattering these illusions; but there's a greater one beyond, and this exercise carries us on our path. Now take perfect beauty; the artist is trying to make the perfect painting, and he may burn up his paintings and throw them away because they're not good enough. Where is that ideal painting that he's trying to make? It's not so much that it's real, because it could be a figment of his imagination; it's that it induces great effort on his part, to capture this elusive thing. MISHLOVE: And it seems as if, I suppose, here we are thrust in these bodies. One thing we certainly seem to be capable of is effort. And to what end are we to make these efforts, I guess is ultimately the question you pose. YOUNG: Well, the image of the soul is the beautiful woman. We're always looking for that perfect, beautiful woman. Even women, I think, image the soul in terms of a feminine figure, because the woman is the epitome of beauty. Again, division -God created Adam, remember, and that didn't work, so he split him in two, making Eve. He needed that thing to long for, and Eve became the mother of all living, it says in the Bible. Well, it means that -- I would say figuratively, as well as literally -- the mother of all living is this same illusion that you spoke of. The philosophers in the East say it's all illusion. Well, that illusion is our mother -- the mother of our experience. MISHLOVE: To what end do you think all of this is for? Obviously you take some

issue with the notion that we're going to return to the great mother. You don't think we should just sort of allow ourselves to be embraced by this ocean of oneness. YOUNG: Well, I think it's the omega point. Whatever you think of that's good, it's beyond that. Because -- well, it's just even better than what's perfect. MISHLOVE: And I suppose in your view of things, then, perhaps we can look at the great teachers of humanity -- the Buddhas, the Christs, and so on -- and suggest that ultimately we're all evolving in that direction. YOUNG: Someone said of Christ's teachings, when he said, "Follow me," he meant follow the inner me that is your own godlike potential. I think that's what being reborn in Christ means. You see, the teaching of Christ, if I can venture my own interpretation of it, was the son-ness -- the son of the virgin, or the son of God -- looking toward the future. Whereas the God with the great beard and so on is looking toward the past. But the present moment is the third one -- Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the Holy Ghost is the third one. That's the present moment. It's the potential of the present to become new, become transformed, become the son of God. That is our great task and our great challenge, because in doing so we shall eventually ascend, sit on the right hand, and so on. But we have to go through that birth process first, that virgin birth. MISHLOVE: There's a sense in which, when we talk about growth and we talk about unity and Christ, the term love comes up very often as a force that impels us -- love different than longing. YOUNG: Well, that's a long, very interesting subject. But the trouble is that love makes everything. See, longing has its dislike -- like and dislike. But you can love anything, or love is behind all forms of attachment. I mean, cupidity is stinginess, but it comes from the same root, Cupid, who was the god of love. MISHLOVE: That's very interesting. YOUNG: And he was the father of all the gods, the other gods being other principles besides love -- like Venus is beauty.

MISHLOVE: These gods of the ancient traditions -- we've talked about Zeus and Christ and Venus -- represent some deep structure in our own mind, perhaps some mediating factor between our own ego, our own monad -YOUNG: Well, if there were any way to differentiate the divine essence, it would fall under these separate gods. Like Cupid, the father of the gods, is love, of course. But the one that comes immediately after Cupid -- there are varying accounts, and some have her as the sister -- is Gaia, Mother Earth, which is not the physical matter only, but the whole motherhood thing, like Eve is the mother of all living. MISHLOVE: The Gaia image is now being used so much to refer to the biosphere, the environment in which we live. YOUNG: Right. But then there were other gods. Uranus was the god of separateness. He was the god that circled around. You think of yourself in the center of this circle, you see; otherwise there wouldn't be any sky, because if it had no center there would be no sky. So Uranus is centeredness, and becomes the principle of the ego. But he's also the one that's castrated. He has no potency, and that's because he is an intellectual. He's the one that gives things an identity. MISHLOVE: Do you feel that these gods of mythology represent real forces within us? YOUNG: They're real forces in everything, not just people. For instance, take the determinism in physics; they use to be very fond of determinism in classical physics, everything exactly according to law. Well, Cronos, or Saturn, is the god of law. He also does things like boundaries and legal disputes and anything to do with possession. Because if you didn't have any possession, a lot of laws wouldn't be necessary. MISHLOVE: How do these forces, represented by the deities or gods of ancient traditions, affect us at the level we described earlier -- the monad, or the soul? YOUNG: Well, I think they write the script, if you really want to know, but that's a long story. Our interactions with our fellow man don't depend solely on chance.

There's a definite script involved, and that's covered by these forces. MISHLOVE: I suppose part of the illusion, part of the movie that we were talking about earlier. YOUNG: Right. But I never would use the word illusion in a negative sense. If I had to use it in a negative sense, I would say delusion. Most of our illusions are delusions, and we have to separate them. And this process goes on and on. That's how we refine our sensitivity, is distinguishing the true from the false. Suppose you said a painting was an illusion. Let's say you have a Monet painting. You say, well, all paintings are illusions. There's a difference between a real Monet and one that's been faked. MISHLOVE: That would be the delusion. YOUNG: That would be the delusion, you see. So we have to judge our illusions and find the right ones. MISHLOVE: So in a way this wonderful illusion in which we find ourselves, this conversation -- and for those who are with us, this viewing of a video or a television program -- is all part of the grander scheme of the universe itself as it unfolds. YOUNG: Yes, yes. MISHLOVE: Well, Arthur M. Young, we're out of time. It's been a real pleasure sharing this half hour with you. YOUNG: Thank you very much, Jeff. I enjoyed it very much. MISHLOVE: Thank you for being with me.