HT Radio w/ Dr. Miller feat. Arjuna Ardagh 7.11.09 part 1

Welcome to Healing Times Radio with Dr. Emmett Miller.

This is Dr. Emmett Miller. Arjuna Arda, our guest today, is an awakening coach. He's a writer, a teacher, and a public speaker, and the author of 7 books as well as a number of audio and video products. Best known perhaps is his 2005 book, The Translucent Revolution, and also He's written a new book called Leap Before You Look. He's the founder of the Living Essence Foundation in Nevada City, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the awakening of consciousness within the context of ordinary life. I'm sure you're going to enjoy your experience of Arjuna Ardagh. Welcome to Healing Times.

Hello, this is Dr. Emmett Miller, and this is Healing Times Radio. We're here today with Arjuna Arda, who is author and teacher and coach. And welcome to Healing Times Radio.

Thank you, thank you.

I'd like to begin with, um, by getting to know you a little bit better, just where you You seem to have a non-California accent. What's— tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I was born and raised in England, and I went to university there, to Cambridge University. And, you know, from a very early age, I had a sense which I think many people of our generation have had, as though I had walked into the wrong movie, you know. So, you know, that you had— they have those multiplex cinemas where you can go and you can buy your ticket for something romantic like Mamma Mia, some nice, you know, happy romantic thing. So you buy your ticket and you stumble around in the dark corridors of the, movie, movie, uh, Cineplex, and you stumble into the wrong movie theater. So you sit down with your ticket expecting, uh, to be entertained by Pierce Bronson and, uh, and, uh, who, who was this the, the main person in Mamma Mia? Um, it'll come back to me anyway. So, um, you're all ready to be entertained and you've actually walked into Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator 3. Yeah. You know. So everyone's getting blown up and bodies are flying everywhere, and you're sitting there waiting for this nice, you know, these nice ABBA songs and everything. And, um, after some time you realize, whoa, this isn't what I signed up for, this isn't what I paid my ticket for, something's gone wrong here. So I had that same feeling when I was really quite young, when I was a teenager, um, when I looked at the way that my parents were living their lives and looked at my teachers, I had the feeling, some intuition, some deep memory, that this was not what I'd signed up for. There was something deeper available than this, something more meaningful, something that gave life its aha, that's why we're here. And really, that was what has fueled my, my life, you know.

So what did you do to start finding the right theatre?

Right, the right movie. Well, I went to Cambridge University, which is, you know, a bit like going to Harvard in America, and I got a first-class degree, which is really, in England, that's your ticket to whatever you want, you know. So people, oh, do you want to— people were saying to me, do you want to go on the BBC? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? And really what I wanted was to find out what it was that was calling me, this deep longing to find out more about that. So everyone was shocked because I could have done anything, and what I did is I went to India to discover about meditation. And I had this— I'd had this intuition, but I also knew that there were people that had lived in different traditions and different cultures at different times in history who had really found a deeper sense of fulfillment, of meaning, and of connection. People like Buddha, Jesus, people like Lao Tzu, recently people like Gandhi, who had really found some deeper connection, a deeper peace that was not conditional upon external circumstances. So I went to find out more about that. And I spent time in India, and then I spent a great deal of time with different teachers, both in India and then in the United States. And this really led to meeting a particular man. After many, many years of being a seeker, I met a particular man in India in 1991. And his name was H.W.L. Punja. He was not a guru, he was actually a retired army officer. He had been in the British Army prior to 1947. He was an old man when I met him, old, old man, and he had a very military kind of style, you know, "Oh, what do you want? Who are you?" By no means a guru or anything at all, but he had this deep deep, deep sense of connection and almost like magic around him. So I met him in 1991, and he said, in this very gruff kind of army manner, he said, "Ah, what do you want?" I said, "Well, I feel like I've been seeking as long as I can remember." Seeking for I don't even know what, but I said to him, "What is in the way of finding?" He looked at me like it was the most stupid question anyone had ever asked him. "Huh? What's in the way of finding? Seeking, of course." So my whole world was turned upside down in meeting him, and later on that same morning, in the first day I met him, he said, "What do you want? What do you want? Why have you come here? What do you want?" He was really like impatient, you know, like, "Don't waste my time. What do you want?" I said, "Well, enlightenment, you know." And he said, "Okay, okay, we can give you that, but first," he said, "first find the one who is feeling bound. Before we can give you freedom, find the one who is feeling bound. Before we can give you enlightenment, find the one who is trapped in darkness." In other words, find yourself, find this entity you've called me, and then we can enlighten it. So that sounds like a simple task, you know, but I went back to my hotel room, and for about a week actually, it was as though— it was like the mind was a machine and somebody had pulled out the kingpin which held all of the pieces together. So now the mind kept working, but it was flying chaotically in all different directions, you know. And I can remember still, I would go back to my hotel room and just these thoughts, like, you know, a memory and then a desire and then a concept, and just went like that. But the mind was not held together by any coherent force anymore because my whole life had been about seeking, and he had pulled out the pin that held that seeking together. So now there was just this random machine going in all directions. Now I call that declutching. When you declutch the mind and it just flies in its own direction, it's not held together by any intention anymore. And on the 6th morning of being there visiting him, I woke up in the morning and in that innocence you have when you first wake up— people are very innocent, childlike when they first Anybody, you know, even somebody very powerful and sophisticated, when they first wake up in the morning with their hair tousled, you know, people are very innocent. So I woke up in the morning with this feeling, okay, something very important today. What is it? Oh yes, I have to find the ego. I have to find this thing I've called me. I have to find the ego and take it to Poonjaji so we can enlighten it, you see. And so in that early morning innocence, it was just like a reaching out, like really like just like reaching out, okay, where is this thing? And the reaching out just went on forever, forever, forever. It was like the hand just reached back and it was just infinite, infinite, infinite space, infinite space. And then in that moment came the realization, this is not something that's been attained. This is what was always the case. That's all that has ever been here. Hearing the sounds, feeling the sensations in the body. All that there has ever been is infinite space. There really isn't a thing called me. It's just this space, which is empty. And sitting there in the hotel room, 6 in the morning, I just, it was, the best way to say it is like my body, the body, just burst out laughing. There was like this huge wave of relief, incredible relief, like, "Ah, I've been looking in all the wrong places."