Dr. Shelley Thomas: Let me ask if anybody feels like they’re able to pose a question.
David: I appreciate I can go a little out there. When I first started my blog, I called it “in 2 deep.” Because I do have that tendency to go…
Shelley: Yeah, David has experienced a lot of things that may be out of our experience. So, but this is an opportunity to interact with somebody who’s had that experience. So what do you guys want to ask?
D: Yeah I get emails all the time through my blog because I talk about a huge range of different kinds of things. Everything from deceased relatives showing up at someone’s bedside and to how the world comes to be. It’s kind of from a… oh someone’s saying they can’t unmute themselves
S: oh thank you for for telling me that okay let me do that
D: uh yeah that’s my fascination, was how the world comes out of consciousness so i go into that a lot.
S: okay see if you guys can unmute now.
Q: I have a question, David. So the experience of witnessing, of sort of the separation of the, I guess, I’m probably not describing this as well as you could, but sort of the separation of the self from the consciousness, how would you, on the spectrum of like a purely intellectual event, of like just theorizing something in your head to an event that is as real and as physical as us sitting here talking to each other right now. Where on that continuum would you place that experience of like that expansion of consciousness?
D: It’s as real as right on that other edge of being as real as we’re talking right now. Now it’s more abstract than a physical thing, but consciousness is when we first experience it can be this distant kind of thing we can sort of like seeing it through the fog, but as it gets clear it becomes very real, but also it becomes very intimate because it’s who we are, you know, is it an intimate or is the most intimate thing.
So yeah a real solid sense of of reality to it, but of course there’s degrees because we can have you know a vague sense of, of not being this but not really clear on what we are instead or we can have a taste of of being a witness and then we fall back in the mind and then my kind of like i don’t know about that and um you know doubting and so on and, and it’s just flavors of quality.
Witnessing deep sleep is when it’s really obvious because there’s that wakefulness when the body is asleep and if we actually are clear enough we try to move the body it won’t move because it’s asleep. You occasionally see stories of people who start to witness sleep and they can’t move their body and they kind of freak out about it because I can’t move my body but the body is asleep and they woke up during sleep and they didn’t watch their body fall asleep. So it kind of makes them nervous. So there’s kind of like variations of spiritual things that are essentially a spiritual experience where people don’t recognize them as such. So there’s a lot of nuances and flavors of this can show up.
Lucid dreaming is somewhat related to witnessing dreams. Witnessing is kind of a stage deeper in a sense, but it’s very similar to that kind of description where people are more conscious during their dreams and remember them. Although, personally I kind of see dreams as kind of taking out the trash, it’s kind of processing the day’s experience and it’s kind of random noise a lot of it, so I just kind of let it go by and don’t pay a lot of attention to it. But some people, that’s one of the ways they tune into their intuition and that, so it varies.
Q: And one more that’s sort of semi-related. Obviously, sort of the yogic sciences and you are a, you have a master’s degree, so you’re very learned in this field. Have you found that the clarity of these experiences have increased in proportion to the depth that you’ve studied them? Or?
D: No. Studying them is valid, so there’s some context for the experience. But the challenge is that when we, if we’ve built concepts about them with things we haven’t experienced. So for example, when I first woke up, I had these concepts about what it was supposed to be like. Like there was some sense it was going to be something special. And I was really surprised when it was just completely normal and ordinary.
That’s actually really typical. People are surprised by it. But it’s a natural state for people. It hasn’t been as normal or typical, rather, in recent years, but it’s becoming much more common more recently, and especially in the last 10 years. But I had these concepts about what it’s supposed to be like, and I basically had to throw all those concepts out, and then settle into it, and then bring them back again in the new context. And then I realized, well, what my teacher said was accurate but how I had interpreted that was wrong. But still there’s this kind of thing, like in one of the old texts a very famous sage says that it’s important to desire Unity. Unity is a further stage after awakening but you know as I point out in my writing you’re not going to desire Unity if you don’t know what’s there. And so there’s a there’s some importance to
being aware of this.
Now some teachers view that the concepts about these stages is going to be a barrier to living them, in the sense that I talked about already. And so they avoid talking about stages, but what that’s done is created a scenario where some teachers teach that there are no further stages, because their teacher didn’t talk about them. And you know, a lot of what’s happened in the non-dual community, for example, as they take in Vedanta, which is about oneness and totality, where everything is all one and inclusive, and they’ve applied that to the initial awakening.
And they kind of say, well, there’s this inner oneness, and I experienced the world as illusory, so I can skip that, ignore that part, so it’s oneness, and this is oneness, and this is Vedanta. But it’s not actually, actual Vedanta, it’s inclusive of the world, it brings it all back in again but now in the context of consciousness. So each stage brings its own basic sense of reality and sense of the world as I mentioned and sense of self.
So there’s kind of two old sayings from the teachers from the tradition is “knowledge is different in different states of consciousness” and “knowledge is structured in consciousness.”
And so when you’re reading spiritual works it’s having a sense of the stages gives you an idea of where they’re speaking from or to because if we think that it’s all the same then when somebody’s speaking about one stage and we’re trying to interpret it through this other stage or understand, then they kind of get mushed together.
And that’s somewhat happened in Buddhism, for example, where Buddha did speak to further stages, but because they avoided talking about stages, they now, most Buddhist teachers that I’ve talked to have this assumption that there’s just one. Where you have people like Adyashanti, on the other hand, a Westerner who’s in the Zen Buddhist tradition, who has gone through over four stages now. So he does talk about stages.
Q: That was a very thorough answer, thank you for that.
D: Sorry.
Q: No, no, no, that went further in depth than I was expecting you to go. Thank you very much.
D: You’re welcome.
Q: I have a question. Is this practice just about living more, like being more aware of your surroundings and then being deeper into life than just what we see like as a physical aspect?
D: Yes, you could frame it that way. When you look at it as I spoke about in part of it there, seeing yoga as renunciate practice, when you try and discount and avoid the world, then the balance is wrong. Whereas if you see it as part of a growth, a personal process, it’s not about some ultimate goal of enlightenment per se, it’s about the process, the path itself, and a progressive development of quality of life, so that you’re not living in suffering.
Most people aren’t going to think of themselves as living in suffering, but when you’re identified with being an individual person and are experiencing life as happening to you and so forth, then basically it’s a rough way to experience life. Whereas if you can step back into that broader context of consciousness itself and you can heal the various traumas and challenges in your body, mind, and emotions. Then your quality of life goes up dramatically over time.
Yeah, it’s great.
Q: Thank you.
Q: I had a question. I was wondering, so whenever you reach Samadhi, it’s like, or I was wondering, once you reach Samadhi, you also reach like some understanding about how you are not your body nor your mind. So I was wondering if this was completely departed from the mind, then what processes this information? Like what, through what medium?
D: Yeah, it’s a good point. Yeah, so Samadhi is kind of like this thing where at first we just kind of it’s like dipping our toe in the water, you know, we’re just kind of touch in and out and touch in and out and then over time we’re able to go in more deeply and fully and then we’re able to go in. But oftentimes at first we don’t even notice we were until afterwards when we come out because when we go in, the mind goes silent, there’s nothing thinking about it or experiencing, it’s just a quiet space. And then we come out and we start thinking, “Oh, I wasn’t thinking there for a minute.” But gradually consciousness itself becomes more awake to itself, so to speak, through that purification and so on. And then it becomes more and more obvious in our experience.
And then it becomes more and more obvious that that’s who we are in our essential nature. So it’s kind of like a gradual process of repeated experience and getting to know this deeper part.
At first, we don’t experience it ourselves. It’s just some blank space, essentially, in our meditation. And then just gradually it’s more integrated into our experience.
Does that answer your question?
Q: Yeah, sort of. Also, I was wondering, basically, the way I’ve thought of it for a long time is I always had mind almost synonymous with brain. And I was wondering, could samadhi also have activity in the brain, or would that be considered also having the mind active?
D: Well, the mind has a certain pattern it displays during samadhi in the EEG. Like it becomes more coherent, like I mentioned before, the brain starts working simultaneously, the brainwaves become much finer. But, yeah, and then it’s just that repeated experience integrates it into our daily life, so it’s not a… it stops being a separate experience, it becomes part of just our regular, you know, and we get to know it better and better.
But it really varies. I mean, some people start meditation and it’s like a light bulb goes off, and it’s like, oh yeah. And so what happens is, when it becomes clearer and clearer, and then the mind adjusts the experience afterwards, and then it kind of can give it words and so on like that. But it’s after the, after samadhi that we start to recognize it, and can give it language and relate to it. It’s actually one of the challenges at first too is because the experience is very quiet and there’s no content to it, it doesn’t make a memory impression and so it’s hard to refer back to and so the mind doubts it. It’s like, did I really have that experience? Did that ever happen?
And then we have it again, it’s like, oh yeah, yeah, I had that before and even, you know there are times when you know we can listen to beautiful music or you know see a beautiful sunset or something like that where we can fall back and have an experience of samadhi.
It’s not a rare thing and in fact consciousness is essentially the neutral gear of our functioning and each time we shift from waking to sleeping to dreaming to sleep and then waking up in the morning, we actually drop into consciousness for a moment. So we actually transcend every, multiple times every day. But what meditation practice does is help culture that so it becomes part of our daily life.
Mind is actually a field. It, we experience it, we think of mind as being here in the head, because that’s where there’s concentration of senses. Most of our senses except for touch basically are concentrated there. But actually the mind is a field that surrounds our whole body.
There’s kind of like these layers. We have an emotional or energy body that surrounds the physical body. Then we have a mental body that surrounds that. And then there’s another one beyond that, essentially is the intellect or intuition and so on. They call those the koshas in the Vedic tradition, basically means sheath. And that matches the way consciousness becomes the physiology as well.
Q: Yeah, that’s starting to make more sense to me.
Q: I had a question regarding reincarnation. So you mentioned something about that and like, obviously that goes against like Christian beliefs and you said that you used to like be in church and stuff like that, so what’s kind of like your basis for believing in reincarnation and just kind of like what’s that like about to you?
D: Well one of the things I don’t suggest particularly is belief in the sense of believing anything I’m saying or whatever like that. This is more about direct experience, discovering it for yourself.
For me, I’d read about past lives and reincarnation and stuff when I was younger, but didn’t really have much. I didn’t know, I didn’t believe one way or the other. To me, it was a possibility. And then this situation developed in my life where I was under a lot of stress with work and it didn’t really make a lot of sense. Like for me, what was I doing working for the police department? It was kind of like a joke when I told people who didn’t know me, or introduced me, or whatever like that, that I worked for the police and people wouldn’t believe it because I’m not the typical guy who’s out there wanting to uphold the law and keep the peace and so on like that. And so it was a quandary in my life for a while.
But what it did for me is it kind of broke through… when we come into this lifetime, there’s kind of a veil that’s put over our past memory, so that we can experience this life as it is. But there is that potential to break through that veil and start to remember our prior lifetimes. And so that’s how it started to happen here.
And once I’d opened the door, I basically gradually started to remember bits and pieces from my last life. And then it kind of filled out a little bit more as I remembered. I didn’t recognize it as a past life at first, but as it filled out, it became more obvious. It wasn’t just some weird imagination thing. And it turned out, eventually what I was remembering was the circumstances in that life that led to me experiencing my life within the police department.
It made sense of this lifetime and the circumstances I was in. And so it just kind of gradually unfolded and then over, you know, this was in the 80s and very gradually over a long period of time I’ve gotten to know other lives, other things have opened up. I’ve met people who I had a past life connection with, a strong connection. And so it was just really obvious, not necessarily what the connection was, but just that you meet someone and it’s just like an immediate, sort of like, “I know you. Where do I know you from?” But there’s no connection in this life, but there’s a strong, heartfelt sense of connection with that person. And then that sometimes would trigger memories that oh that’s where it was from and so on.
So it’s not, there’s lots of people who are on spiritual practices that have never explored past lives and don’t consider it important. In my process it has had a role because it’s I have this strong intellect that wants to understand and so it’s, look back at that from my… I’ve studied world religions as well academically and I’ve also gone on and gotten a seminary Ph.D. and I have studied the tradition, the Christian tradition as well on that level and the original Christians did, from my interpretation, the original Christians did believe in past lives but from my understanding they removed that interpretation because they didn’t want people thinking they can get away with doing bad things because they can just, you know, because they’d have another chance or whatever. They wanted to encourage people to follow this. Basically some bad ideas got into the culture and so they wanted to move away from that. That’s kind of my understanding.
Q: I was going to say something about that too, like if there is reincarnation and we’re aware of that, like what’s, is there even a point to trying to do good in this life and trying to live.
D: Oh yes, very much. Yeah, see the thing is that, well fundamentally it’s about what they call karma. Karma means action and essentially, you know, from the physical law for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction and if we’re, so everything we do has a consequence and so we have to deal with that at some point and if we don’t deal with it, you know, short term, then we deal with long term, we don’t deal with long term, then we deal with it in our next life.
And in fact, that was part of the thing about the whole police business in my prior life, was I had this experience that it was basically a difficult, a very difficult decision in that prior life. And, but I continued to doubt that decision. And what that did was it created the momentum for that to need to resolve itself. And so in this lifetime, I experienced the opposite… the opposite choice. Excuse me. And it would take a little bit of background to explain that. But, basically, it, I went through about a 10 year period of my life where I was resolving the quandary I found myself in from that part of life. And it wasn’t actually about what happened, it was about how I responded to that, that created this backlog.
And so the the idea is that you have control over your action but you don’t have control over how the results show up. And so the ideal is to focus on doing the best you can. I mean, we all make mistakes and mess up, but doing the best we can and to be working on working things out and healing and supporting others, our loved ones and so on. And through that we work through our debts you could say and yeah, the Christian idea of sin is kind of, is related but it’s kind of it makes a little bit black and white whereas to me it’s a little there’s a little more nuance there’s kind of gray areas where there’s there’s an influence but it’s not as bad and it’s easy to resolve and as you become more skilled with consciousness itself, you know, like I mentioned the Samyama from the Yoga Sutra, you become able with some things to heal them on that level, resolve them energetically, so that they don’t have to show up as events in your life. So it kind of, life gets simpler and smoother and less eventful. So there’s definitely advantages to doing the right thing and doing our best and that kind of stuff because it has consequences. And it’s again the quality of life.
You know, what kind of life do you want to lead as you get into your later years in retirement? Do you want to live a life of regret or boy I shouldn’t have done that or do you want to live a life where you can be satisfied with what you managed to accomplish?
Q: Thank you for that, that was really interesting. I actually have another question but I feel bad because I keep asking questions. Is that okay?
D: Oh no, quite alright, quite alright. That’s why I’m here.
Q: I was just going to ask if like the idea of like heaven and hell if that tied into your beliefs at all like where does that fit in or like relate with what you believe?
D: Well, from my perspective, the world is built up in layers and as we get towards the physical level, it’s more, they get more and more dense.
And in the Vedic tradition, they talk about there being seven heavens and seven patalas, which are basically progressively worse places, and earth kind of sits about the middle.
Whereas to me, it’s about, it’s more about quality of experience. And it doesn’t matter where you are, and, you know, on the on different layers, it’s your quality of experience that determines whether you’re in heaven or hell, essentially. Because I’ve met people who are, in my police days, who were in a pretty bad way and you know they’re, they were basically living a personal hell and you know, here in the physical world and I’ve also met people who are just living embodiments of divine qualities and who have a powerful level of existence. They just live in happiness. So they’re living heaven here in a human body. And the same is true, although the higher you get in terms of the levels, the more refined levels, they get more heaven-like. And so you get to what’s sometimes called the causal level in the Western traditions. In the Kosha, as I mentioned earlier, the sheathes, this is known as the bliss body, and it’s also where some of the heavens are considered to reside, where people go between lifetimes and so on.
There are places that one can consider a heaven and hell but there are also things that we can personally live in our human life. And so culturing quality of life and right action and so on like that are worthwhile. It’s important. I mean even if the world kind of seems to be going a little crazy at the moment, that’s a phase.
And that actually it’s useful to comment on that. It’s important to understand. I mentioned at the beginning that we’re in a rising age and that, you know, in the last is rising, but just as we have things to purify on a personal level, there’s stuff in the collective that needs to be healed. And what’s happening in the current time as consciousness rises is it’s pushing the stuff that’s the things have been hidden in the shadows and the things that need to be healed, it’s pushing them to the surface to be healed but most people don’t recognize that that’s what’s taking place and they’re fighting it and making a drama and so on like that and but if you understand that it’s something that’s coming up to be resolved and to be completed and you understand some of the basics of how to do that, then and the experience becomes quite different and it’s actually a very profoundly spiritual period where a lot of progress is taking place for a lot of people.
People are having stage shifts and so on like that. I’ve seen several just in the last few weeks. So we’re actually living in quite an amazing time.
Yeah, and again, it’s useful to have some understanding, but adopting beliefs that aren’t your experience isn’t entirely helpful either. So in some ways it’s useful just to be open-minded and think about it in terms of possibility.
There’s one thing that’s useful to understand, also in the terms of the cycles of time also. Another thing that happens is that there’s awakened teachers that arise, who have the knowledge of how to wake up others. Because there are certainly lots of spiritual teachers around who have had a clear awakening, or maybe have progressed further, but they don’t necessarily know how to help other people wake up. Like Eckhart Tolle famously, in one of his books, has a bunch of techniques in the back of his book, but they’re techniques that culture an awakening that’s already happened. They’re not, if the awakening is a bit soft, they’re not techniques that create an awakening. And so there are occasionally these people come along who know how to actually help people wake up and they bring out techniques and stuff like that.
But what tends to happen historically is that they create this wave of people who are spiritually awake and then after about three or four hundred years, that core understanding of like I talked about earlier about effortlessness and the right approach, to the techniques, it gets lost. And so then people stop waking up and the quality goes down and it shifts from being what I, you know, stuff we’re talking about shifts in being, you know, guidelines for living or guidelines for a full experience become concepts and then they kind of become dogma and the core understanding is lost.
And yet that teaching is still in there, that core is still in there but it’s lost and you know from my perspective I think Jesus was one of those that he came forward and with with an understanding of how to help other people awaken, open their heart and and awaken to the to the deeper nature of divinity and their their own, within themselves but over time that was lost and became codified as a belief system and so on like that. So there’s beautiful value in there, but with the right technique you can actually learn to live this stuff rather than just taking on a level of belief. Well that’s my take.
And it’s beautiful too that people your age are interested in this stuff. It’s, I mean I certainly was as well, but if all the people in my age group, you know, go on and they die off, then maybe understanding will go with us too. So it’s beautiful, that you have to pass the torch.
Q: I had a question. So you mentioned that at the beginning, like, for example, when you said about Jesus, you said how maybe if we had continued like living that way, it wouldn’t necessarily have become more like codified and turned into what it is now. So I’m assuming like, really, like the strict like concept of what a religion is. So do you think if that hadn’t been done, perhaps more people would be in that awakened state now?
D: Well, yes, in a theoretical way, but there is that broader cycle of consciousness. And Jesus came at a time when we were approaching the trough of the cycles, the darkest time. Essentially the trough of the Dark Age, in about 500 AD was the trough of the Dark Age, when consciousness was at its lowest.
And so he apparently came to help people through that process, and with that more difficult time. So it would have been very, very difficult for that to have been sustained, for his teaching, have been sustained clearly through the dark. But it’s true of everything. I mean, I have this degree in Vedic science, but here I am, you know, telling you what’s wrong with the standard interpretation of one of the core texts, you know, because it’s true of just about everything.
I mentioned about Buddhism earlier and, you know, how that’s lost its understanding of stages. It happens the world over. That’s just part of the process of being human and those very, very simple… it’s just funny because the way into source, into the Divine, is very, very… it’s the ultimate in simplicity and awakening too. It’s like one of the things that happens when people wake up sometimes, especially people like me who’ve been studying for a long time, like you know, How didn’t I get that much sooner, it’s so simple but it’s something that has to be recognized directly… and it’s so easy for that simplicity to be lost when when there’s strong minds who are thinking they can make it better or or uh you know uh improve on it or you know and that just messes it up and and I’ve seen that myself you know just as a meditation teacher and some other people who come along and they learn and then they decide that oh if I just add this other thing it’ll make it work better and, and then it just kind of falls apart.
so yeah there’s there’s a beautiful simplicity in there but it’s so easy for that to get lost. And it happens over and over but you know there is that potential we’re in now for his teachings to be revived in a holistic way where you can come to know what he spoke of directly.
Now I hope I’m not offending anybody. I think Jesus has a beautiful teaching. Can’t see it from here but I have a picture. One of the classic pictures of, with the robes.
Andrew: Can I say something very quickly?
D: Yes.
A: Yes. I just wanted to say that, just kind of piggybacking off what you were pointing out, is that oftentimes when these teachings which are really all of the same nature as far as the basic direction which was the recognition of our deeper nature when they were coming through these great teachers oftentimes the teachers would even make a disclaimer that at a certain point the essential understanding would be lost like in this many hundred years you know the truth of this teaching will decline.
Like, El, my wife, she was reading a book on the life of Shakyamuni Buddha. And in this book, which was taken from a direct account of someone that was with him during his preaching years, he makes a statement like that. He says, “In this many years, the dharma which I have taught will decline or will be lost in its essence. And I suspect that other teachers also made similar statements.
D: Yes, I would agree. And yeah, and it’s interesting too because one of the things Buddhism was, was a simplification of the Vedic tradition because the Vedic tradition lost its source and so it got really caught up in ritual and gazillions of gods and all this kind of stuff. I mean, it basically at its core has a one God perspective, but expressed in many many forms. And you know, it just got to be a bunch of ritual and people praying to graven images and you know that kind of thing.
And so Buddha came along and brought it back to its core and took away all that, all the gods and all that kind of stuff, all the ritual and brought it back to its core what would actually help you wake up, um but now a lot of modern Buddhism has brought a whole bunch of that stuff back again and they’ve given some of the gods different names and that kind of stuff but it’s the same thing again it’s just the nature of human minds to, to want to to express and certainly there are Buddhists that came along and experienced these forms and so they wanted to celebrate them and that but then again people come along without that and then it just becomes a belief or ritual or whatever like that but it is possible to live this stuff and not just not just uh keep it on the level of the belief because that’s just mind and mind you know there’s there’s beautiful value in, in having uh healthy beliefs but, but why not why not live that to, take that further.
Q: Thank you for answering my question.
D: You’re welcome.
Q: In the era that we’re in now where, you know, internet media has allowed pretty much anybody who wants to have a voice to be able to have a voice, whereas in the past seeking out an illumined teacher might be more of a axiomatically discerning experience because in order to find someone they would have to already be pretty well established. Do you have
any sort of tips or tricks? Sorry?
D: Just to let you know on that point, my teacher’s teacher spent 14 years searching for his teacher.
Q: Do you have any like tips, tricks, and helpful hints that might help someone who is searching that out, find someone who is, separate the wheat from the chaff, find someone who is actually a fundamentally good teacher of this kind of stuff rather than someone who is just spewing potentially harmful nonsense.
D: Yeah well there’s not usually too much, well there are occasionally teachers that are a bit harmful but usually it’s just you know concepts is the issue and um um well one of the one of the things that i find useful to point out is are there awake people around the teacher or is it just the teacher who’s awake, because that means that they have some ability to help them actually make the shift um,
also is this a teacher that you resonate with, you know, because there’s some, you know, there’s some, I know teachers that I really value, but do I resonate with them on that level? You know, I really enjoyed talks and a couple of books by a few teachers that, but, you know, there are no shifts happen with them, and there’s no resonance on that level. But with other ones it did happen.
And sometimes people have things where they have kind of chapters in their life where there’ll be a time where they’re really into a certain thing and then they’ll outgrow it or their needs will shift and they’ll need a somewhat different thing. So they’ll spend a little bit of time searching again and finding a teacher or their friend will tell them about something they’ll go check them out and it’s like whoa you know this is cool, or whatever or sick i guess that’s what i should say,
dating myself…
Yeah so it’s a, it’s kind of a process and we all have our own processes some people find what will carry them right, all the way through. And some people will go through a more chapter-based thing. I had more of a chapter-based life.
Q: Thank you for that. Thank you.
D: Yeah, what I find really amazing is I know a few people who have had or several, they’re several stages awake now in their late 20s. And you know for me it sort of unfolded in my late 50s and so there’s a much smaller life in which to live this out and it’s really beautiful to see, to see that unfolding going on. Of course they’re in the middle, they have all the busyness of life and family and all that kind of stuff yet to happen that so they’re going to have a lots of ups and downs still but…
Q: so you mentioned that when finding a teacher um whenever like you wouldn’t necessarily like resonate with them like it would like there also be um you you would know like because you know shifts would occur with them right? So it’s like…
D: Do you relate to how they how they talk about it? You know, I’m pretty intellectual and visual. I experience a lot of stuff visually and so I frame things in a certain way. Andrew has a much, also has a strong intellect but also has a more devotional emphasis. So someone who’s really heart-based and heart-driven is really not going to find reading my articles very satisfying. Too intellectual. But other people who are into consciousness and all the details, they really enjoy that and that can be valuable.
Nobody’s waking up through reading my stuff though, it’s more helping support them. So you know, I don’t, I see myself as a writer, not as a teacher in that kind of spirit, in that kind of spiritual sense, but I do know a couple people that are doing well and helping people shift. Yeah, it’s kind of an exploration thing, you know, there’s an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, and that can be really frustrating sometimes when you’re looking and not finding, but there is that tendency for, you know, like I looked at a few teachers and so on like that and wasn’t finding the right thing. And then when my teacher came along, actually I had known him in the 70s before I was awake, a bit, but when he showed up, I think I woke up just a few months later. Of course, I’d been witnessing for decades before that too, but the ground was ripe. But yeah, he showed up when the time came, basically, when we connected.
Q: Thank you for the elaboration.
D: And there’s much to be learned just from the broader spiritual community. I sometimes go to the Science and Non-Duality Conference in California, they have around this time of year, but not this year of course because of COVID.
but that… because of science and non-duality they basically have scientists with a spiritual orientation and primarily non-dualists and then sort of some of the more famous people like Deepak Chopra and stuff as speakers and they kind of have the main hall and then downstairs in the basement they have you know but number of other rooms with speaking going on so they’ll have about eight tracks of people speaking at the same time and what I found was the better speakers were all in the basement and you kind of found out by word of mouth who the good ones were. Whereas the famous guys like Deepak Chopra were up on the main stage and you know being live-streamed and all that but, but he’s not awake yet and it’s still concepts so it’s not gonna help you wake up that way.
But yeah it varies, you know there’s some quite remarkable people out there but not always easy come by. You know, I know a woman who, she lives in Hawaii these days. When she looks at you, she can see not only your energy, but she can see your chakras, your DNA, and your birth chart. What the position of the plants were when you were born, and what that’s doing with you right now and uh just you know it’s amazing, way beyond what I can do.
So she’s, she’s an energy healer but she mostly does uh group sessions, she’s she found it’s way more effective that she can uh heal the, because everybody, it’s not just we have our own energy field, but when we sit together in a group like this, there’s a group field as well, created by the group in consciousness. And she can work on that and heal that, and that spills over and helps everybody. Yeah, it’s kind of a very different worldview.
Shelley: David, I’m just so grateful for your time with us and I know the students are too. Guys, lots of great questions. Thank you for being so open-hearted and I know it’s a reflection of David’s attitude which is really low-key and open and matter of fact and thanks for being so down to earth. You’ve obviously had very deep experiences that have come a long way, but we still feel like, wow, you’re very approachable, just like we felt with Andrew. So thank you, and I’ll continue to tell the students about your whereabouts, you and Andrew’s whereabouts, and how they can keep in contact with you, if they have any questions or anything like that.