EP 150: A Direct Approach to Spiritual Awakening | Craig Hamilton

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is Fleet Moll, your host. And today I'm having a conversation with spiritual teacher, meditation teacher Craig Hamilton, who created the Academy of Evolutionaries and and is well known for his approach to direct awakening. So we had a deep conversation about evolutionary psychology, about meditation, about direct awakening, and really how to accelerate our path to liberating ourselves from the kind of human conditioning that can perpetuate suffering for all of us. So give it a listen. Craig Hamilton's an amazing teacher. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Welcome, Craig.

Thank you, Fleet. It's great to be here. We're exploring my favorite topics, so, yeah, great diving in.

It's really great to have you. Thank you for making the time and great to connect with you. We kind of realized as we talked previously that we had connected before years ago. So I'm going to share a bit of your background for audience and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Okay, sounds good.

All right, so Craig Hamilton is a pioneer in the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality and a leading voice in in the movement for conscious evolution. As the guiding force behind integral enlightenment, Craig offers spiritual guidance and teachings to an international community spanning 85 countries. Craig created the Academy for Evolutionaries, which offers practical spiritual tools and training informed by an up to date understanding of the human condition. Based on his on the ground research at the leading edge of spiritual practice and inquiry.

His courses have more than 16,000 graduates to date. He's considered to be a teacher of teachers and counts several of today's leading spiritual luminaries among his students. Craig is a founding member of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute, a member of Deepak Chopra's Evolutionary Leaders Forum, and was a participant in the Synthesis Dialogues and interdisciplinary think tank presided over by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.

Okay, thanks. Sleep.

I think people can get the sense of why we're having a conversation with you today about spirituality and consciousness. So, you know, I'm not going to ask you to. I want to start a little bit with your background, but I don't want to try to have you kind of encapsulate what I'm sure is a really rich life story into a minute or two. So maybe instead we could focus on maybe. Was there a pivotal moment that kind of set you on the trajectory that you Ended up being a teacher of meditation and a kind of explorer of evolutionary consciousness and spirituality. So if there was such a moment and then how you kind of ended up in, you know, this particular. It's pretty broad spectrum of meditation and the whole secular mindfulness movement and spirituality in general, what kind of directed you into this evolutionary approach? So, two part question there.

Okay, I'll do my best. All right. Well, I don't know that I can say there was one. One precise moment. I mean, I could probably point to a dozen precise moments that were the moment that catalyzed the next thing and the next thing. But. But what I can say to your first question is that, you know, well, let me. Let me sit back, give you it in a nutshell. So I didn't start out as a spiritual person. My family wasn't spiritually oriented. But I started to have a spiritual longing in my teens that grew and grew and intensified and quickly got me doing a lot of Eastern practices and exploring Western mysticism and just really kind of starting to feel that my life was going to be mystical life, that I was going to be pursuing enlightenment.

For my life path in one way or another. And it took different forms at different times. Like I said, I dove deep into the Eastern approach. Initially, that was a little more resonant. Trying to become a Christian when you're kind of raised an atheist, that's a tough sell. I tried to go to church with some of my friends, but the narrative never made sense. So like many of us, I turned East. And.

I think the moment I would point to was, is just that.

I was diving into all these Eastern practices, like many of us, doing different meditation practices, learning from Buddhism, learning from Hinduism, Vedanta, a lot of these different approaches. And there seemed to be a kind of.

Kind of global meta narrative in those traditions that said that spiritual. It said something that was kind of paradoxical to me and somewhat seemed. Seemed like a contradiction or it seemed like an oxymoron. And it was that. That on the one hand, spiritual awakening, our true nature, our enlightened essence, is right here, right now. It's closer than close. When you awaken, what you realize is that this is the moment. This moment right now is it. And there's never been a better, more perfect moment to be awakened than right now. And I'm only awakening to who I already am. I'm not awakening to something I wasn't before. You know, we're all. It's all the story in Eastern wisdom is that there's an enlightened Self and that it's who and what we already are. And that if we just remove the veils that are obscuring it, we will know ourselves to be none other than the source of all the good, the true and the beautiful, and all glorious things. And the expression of the creative force of the cosmos. And all of it is who and what we are. So there's this profound affirmation of our essence and of our. Of really what it is to be a human being and the glory for what it is to be a human being on the one hand. And then on the other hand, throughout those traditions. And of course, there are exceptions here and there, but broadly speaking, there's this assertion that, okay, that might be true, but enlightenment, realizing that takes lifetimes or at least a lot of work. In this lifetime. It's going to take you this whole lifetime and maybe a thousand more. You know that it's this. And, you know, it's gonna. It's gonna take you forever, and very few will ever discover it. And so there was something to me, always about that kind of the tension between those two, that on the one hand, it's right here, and on the other hand, it's a million miles away. And so I think that kind of paradox really drove me into the kind of approach I ultimately ended up in, which is a very. Let's call it experimental approach, a very modernist approach, let's say it's a kind of scientific approach to spiritual awakening. Because. Because I. And just to add to that, I mean, I'm. I'm sharing my sort of inquiry. But along with my inquiry was my own spiritual practice and my own spiritual awakening. I started having profound spiritual experiences at a pretty young age, just spontaneously, just pro. Perhaps catalyzed by the practices I was dabbling in. But sometimes just out of the blue, riding my bike along a river and suddenly just flooded with this feeling of grace and that. That the cosmos was already perfect and that the moment was already perfect and that I was already whole and nothing was missing. And just, you know, being brought to tears by these kind of revelatory moments that would just happen to me. And so I was having this experience of awakening and that. That affirmed everything I was reading in the. In the Eastern books. Right? It was. It was. Yes, right. It's right here. It's right now. Oh, I. I get what they're talking about, and I'm experiencing it. And then. But, you know, go back into your practice for 100 lifetimes and maybe. Maybe you'll really get it. And so. So all of that drove me into this kind of laboratory approach or this experimental approach, working with other Westerners, let's say, you know, other Americans and Europeans who were interested in these things, but also found that the traditional approaches seemed maybe, you know, mired in ancient myths or dogmas or superstitions or just didn't have that, the appetite to go and, and swap, you know, as, as, as your teach. One of your teachers, Roshi Glassman, used to say, you have to swallow the whole fish. You know, if you're going to give yourself to a tradition, you have to take it, bones and all. You can't just pick and choose the, the little practices you want to take out of it and make that your path. So I think people who felt that they couldn't swallow the whole fish, you know, joined with me and, and I, I joined with them. And I was involved in a number of different kind of experimental environments where we were really trying to push the edge and say, well, what is spiritual awakening? How do we do it? What is it devoid of traditional stories and narratives and myths and dogmas? What is it in psychological terms for us human beings right now? And is it really, you know, does it have to remain mystified and does it have to remain far away? Or is it, is it is. Is the truth that it's here right now really the, the more important truth? And is there a way we can practice that can reveal it to us right now? And so that maybe set the stage for really how I ended up teaching these things and you know, down this path?

Well, that can set the stage for a fascinating conversation because that tension between the kind of gradual and sudden enlightenment approaches and linear versus non linear nature of awakenings and all that is a long standing conversation.

That's right.

But so maybe you could, could you describe a little bit what you mean by, you know, you're working with others in kind of these, you know, evolutionary laboratories of sorts, you know, so. Pushing the edge. So what was pushing the edge about? Was it intensive practice, experiences of fasting or solitude or, or what was pushing the edge? And then, and was it solitary? Was it dialogic? Was it community based? And then, and then how did it begin to take on this, this quality of what you describe as kind of evolutionary consciousness or evolutionary spirituality?

Yeah, so like I said, I participated in a number of different environments. They were collective in nature. I mean, I'll just say my work has always had a kind of collective focus to it, both in my own, like, seeking what I, what I was attracted to and and ultimately what I ended up, have ended up leading and guiding. There's, it's my, you know, again, speaking back to the, to the traditions versus what would a more experimental approach be? You know, I noticed, you know, I, as, I think, you know, I was editor of a magazine called what is Enlightenment? That for, for about a decade and this magazine was kind of trying to explore this very question. This, like, what is enlightenment now in our age and time? And how, what, what can we learn from the traditions, but what can we learn from a scientific approach to all this? And you know, doing a lot of comp, comparative study and analysis of these things. And.

You know, one thing I noticed in a lot of my encounters with traditions, and I know you can't, you can never say the traditions all believe this because there's probably a tradition that believes in any version of anything that any of us come up with now. It was, someone thought of it before too. So it's not like the old and the new is a kind of a false, false dichotomy. But I've noticed a tendency in the traditions often to.

Sort of, even if people practice together, meaning like we might meditate together, but we kind of keep our practice to ourselves. And I found this when I talk to Christian monastics that the only person they're supposed to talk with their, talk about their practice with was their elder. And I, I've talked to, and again, I'm sure this is evolving in the Buddhist community now, but you talk to traditional Buddhists and you might be having the most incredible experiences on that meditation cushion, but you're not going to talk to them about, about them with your fellow, with the people in your sangha, you might talk about them with your sensei or your roshi and get, you know, direction. But there's always been this kind of idea we have to kind of keep our, our spiritual experience, our spiritual development kind of private or pretty private. And something I, I, one of the things I found in my own experience was that being in a collective context with other people and actually really actively sharing all those things and saying, well, what's really happening for you in your practice? And this is what's happening for me and, and comparing nodes and what happens when you do this and here's a response to that. And you know, when the grasping begins, what if you resist the grasping and you, you didn't make a problem out of the grasping and would you notice that it wasn't actually in the way and anyway, but being in a very dialogical process right in the heart of our spiritual practice. Ultimately even doing spiritual practice out loud in the sense that we would come together in groups and practice meditating out loud, talk, talking, describing the meditation process while we were in it and compare kind of helping each other while we were in it and all. And not just meditation, but also other aspects of our spiritual development. You know, how do we take on the, the wily ego and its ever shape shifting forms and really giving each other very honest reflection about that and lifting each other up when we're struggling and challenging each other, when we're indulging and you know, really having a tight crucible of kind of awakened conversation with going those are the kinds of environments I'm talking about that why I said pushing the edge, because there's something edgy about it. When, when I say to you, hey Fleet, I want, I want to give my whole life to the path of awakening. And I don't want to hold anything back. And I want, and you say to me you want to do the same? And we say, well, I say, okay, well I'm going to challenge you anytime I feel you're not giving your whole life to that and you're going to challenge me anytime I'm not. And we're going to really create a kind of structure of mutual accountability for our highest aspirations and then live into that every moment of our lives and really practice into that and then share what's happening, our practices and, and challenges each other on that. You know, not without guidance. You know, of course hierarchies emerge. People with more experience, less experience are, you know, the wiser, are helping the less accomplished. You know, all of these things happen. It's not like just a kind of a free for all without structure but, but the spirit of it, I guess I'm trying to convey there. So that's kind of the, what I mean by the laboratory environment and then in the kind of edge pushing environment that I've, I've been involved in and tried to catalyze. And then to your second question about how did this, how did, how did the focus on spirituality as an evolutionary process come to be? Because you mentioned, I think the term conscious evolution and the term evolutionary spirituality. And these are so, so this is a whole emergent way of approaching spiritual awakening and way and also way of understanding the human spiritual thrust, you know, our higher spiritual potential.

Again, we could say that broadly speaking, in what we might just call the pre modern traditional times.

There was not, you know, nobody really thought things were progressing towards something better. Just. And I don't mean this in just spiritual. I just mean how humanity looked at what. What it was to be alive and what the universe was. The belief in almost all traditions was that things started really good and degenerated from there, whether they started in the Garden of Eden or, you know, we started in the Golden Age in Hinduism and deteriorated through many ages down to the Iron Age, where things are very, not very good. You know, in other words, a lot of traditional, kind of the mythic structures were that we're kind of things are getting bad, but there's still a possibility for individual salvation. But, you know, then all of, you know, the world started to turn on its head around the time of the Enlightenment, the Western Enlightenment.

And we started. You know, people started to, you know, the German idealist philosophers all came out with their visions that were very evolutionary. And they said, no, it's not deteriorating. We're actually evolving toward God. We're evolving toward a higher possibility. Our human potential is rising. It's not. It's not degrading. And then, you know, Darwin got caught on to the idea of evolution. We had biological evolution as an idea come out. And now evolution has sort of become the grand. At least one of the grand narratives of the human race at this point is that, hey, you know, let's evolve. I'm evolving. Are you evolving? Culture is evolving, conscious evolving, technology is evolving. And, you know, of course, at the same time, some things are devolving in parallel with that, that we're all familiar with and trying to counter. We could, you know, think of those as market corrections on the cosmic upward trajectory, maybe, I hope. But anyway, so I feel like this whole evolutionary framework for spirituality really is something I got into, was very influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo in the east, in the West. Andrew Cohen, who was a big pioneer of that, was someone I studied with and got very on fire with evolution. Ken Wilber has been a big proprietor, proponent of this and many, many others. Brian Swim, Thomas Berry. You know, there's a whole lineage now of kind of the evolutionary spiritual elders out there who. Who I think inspired a lot of us with this vision. But for me, what it came down to was just. It gave it. It helped me put my own spiritual longing and my own spiritual awakenings that were happening in. In what to me felt like the. The highest, most meaningful context, which is that this isn't just about me and my liberation from suffering or my realization of my fullest potential to have an amazing, inspired life. This is about our evolution as A species. And it's ultimately about the continued evolution of the cosmos itself. I would even say maybe we could say God's even evolving and that the highest, you know, spirit is evolving, that what this is is moving forward. And we, through our participation in things like meditation and other spiritual practices like I was describing, we're participating in that forward movement. We. That's what it means. It doesn't just mean you can have a good life and get this. It means you're participating in this movement that transcends you and that will be. Has been going on for at least 13.7 billion years and will continue going on for, you know, perhaps forever in some form. So, you know, we're. Our lives can take. Can become very meaningful. And I think that's important because a lot of people, if you. I don't know what you've noticed about this, this particular moment in history, and I really mean this moment like this last few years, let's say, you know, the more people I talk to more I've heard a lot of kind of despair or kind of like hopelessness or kind of, well, what can I really do that's going to mean anything anyway? And so many things seem to be going backward and we're really destroying our planet and we're really. Humanity doesn't seem to care. And, you know, so many things that we can feel are degenerating or stuck. And it can feel kind of like, well, okay, I can do my spiritual practice and learn how to be more calm or more mindful or. Or whatever I aspire to be. But in the grand scheme of things, so what? Maybe I'm happier, but it's not. So what? When we start to realize that we are evolution in motion and that everything we do is either adding momentum to evolution or it's adding momentum to the inertia. And so let me make my life part of the evolutionary thrust as whole, fully as I can.

Yeah.

This conversation about are we in an evolutionary trends or devolutionary trends? And many spiritual traditions talk about that devolution into a dark age. I always appreciated Gurdjieff's view that it's kind of spiral. So you have times of great awakening, it spreads into the culture. You have a kind of golden age. Eventually things kind of dispersed, become too diminished and starts to deteriorate into a devolutionary spiral into kind of a dark rage. But that. But what was attained there is an evolution of like, awakened energy, if you want to call it that, or consciousness. And so that hasn't diminished. But now it's in the hands of a few and they're actually able to concentrate it and expand it further. And when they do, they then they. At some point they can no longer hold onto it. It has to go back into the culture. It disperses and withdraws again and then gets concentrated, increased again. So it's these spirals kind of going up and up. So it is a long term evolutionary view of consciousness and reality that includes the possibilities of.

Falling backward and contracting, expansion and contraction. Sure.

And that whole view of are we in an entropic universe or not? These are really big questions. And I think, you know, for myself, I've always been an optimist, so I never, you know, was much about the Dark Age things, even though it's talked about in some of my own spiritual traditions and so forth, and this being the Kali Yuga age and all that. But the last couple years have.

Maybe reconsider, taken my optimism just a little bit. Not completely, but it has given me pause.

I get it.

So, you know, I. I like to, you know, this idea of direct awakening, non dual approach, you know, that. And some teachers go so far as to say the only thing obscuring us from realizing our true nature or being awake is the thought that we're not awake to begin with. And some will just lead people to these kind of cognitive dialogues, you know, that kind of can give you a moment.

I'm not sure what they do ultimately, but. And then there's that there's the hard work, long term, you know, approach. And that maybe the nonlinear event of an awakening is a nonlinear event, but it's not likely to happen unless there's the, you know, the work, the gradual work. So that, that kind of whole milieu that you referenced to begin with. And I'm just wondering, you know, another proponent of evolutionary spirituality, obviously Ken Wilber, our mutual colleague and friend Ken Wilber. And he has this model that talks about a lot of.

I believe if I have the order correctly, I think it's waking up, growing up, cleaning up and showing up. And so, you know, there is the growing up and the cleaning up, the cleaning up references, doing the shadow work and the growing up, you know, is just the process of human maturation, becoming more emotionally intelligent and so forth. And of course there are, you know, many, many people who've had profound awakening experiences, but then manifested in ways that it was fairly clear that their work was not completed.

Right, right. And nicely, to put it nicely.

And you know, and I think we've all experienced that to a degree, I mean, we maybe had very profound experiences related to meditation. For some people, psychedelics or for some people, it's just a spontaneous moment in nature. But how much did it fundamentally change how I was showing up in the world or able to show up in the world? And you know, sometimes we talk about, you know, in the Buddhism, they sometimes talk about the only difference, and I think it's spoken in other traditions as well, the only difference between the Buddha or an Awakened Being is that they realize their Buddha nature and have confidence in it. Whereas the rest of us who are also essentially have Buddha nature and are essentially awakened Beings, we lack confidence in that. And therefore, I guess we fall into, you know, kind of all the neurotic kind of human coping, fear based, kind of survival based coping, psychological strategies for living our life, because we don't have that confidence. So what is it that earns that confidence? So I just kind of trying to set the stage here for talking more, a little more about this in terms of this day. The focus of our summit, the Best Year of youf Life is really to try to provide ourselves and our audience and with the inspiration, the clarity on, on how to move forward in our lives, some of the science. We have a whole day focused on the science of habit change. We have a day on mindset and performance. The very first day is about clarifying who we are and what we want, clarifying our vision and life purpose. And so, you know, this day on spirituality and consciousness, you know, maybe if we could talk about it from, you know, a little bit of a path quality without turning it into a thousand lifetimes. Right. But you know, people who would like to, you know, maybe they are involved in a spiritual path of some kind and they feel like it's plateaued or they're not realizing the experiences they've read about in the books, or maybe that hasn't been a big focus of their life and they would like to deepen the spiritual aspect of their life and get started with something like that. So I'm wondering if you could, you know, talk about that from a bit of a path quality at the expense of not, you know, not turning it into just a linear thing that would be an optical to the possibilities of awakening.

Wow. Well, you said a lot there a lot of interesting places to jump in.

So somewhere I want to jump in. And I think it will hopefully have a path quality to it that you're looking for is you were.

Well, you.

Were speaking a little bit about, okay, we, you know, this, this, you know, the paradox that I raised at the beginning, I guess that on the one hand we have the diff. As you said, the difference between an awakened being and unawakened being is the awakened person has confidence in their true nature, and the unawakened doesn't have that confidence. I, like, I've never heard that quote, and I think that's beautiful. I was. I was touched by the simplicity of that and kind of the human. The human truth of it, just from my own path and from my own work with people, that this idea that it's kind of about confidence or, you know, we could. In another era, we might have called that faith. Right? And it could also have kind of. It could trust could kind of come into that. That a little bit too, and constellate around it.

And so you're kind of saying, so let's take that as a truth and then say, well, how. Where would that come. How would we develop that conf. Because clearly, you know, in the. The purely direct path, as you're saying, the. The idea would be, it's. The confidence is gained all at once. It's gained through the radical realization. You see it, you know it, and you never. But see what would. So let's just take one. One angle on this. One slice. So two people both have the same awakening. What they both. One day, they're in the same meditation retreat, opposite ends of the. Of the room, and it just happens that they both just. Wow, the whole thing all at once. Just. This is it. It never. Wasn't it. Oh, this is who I've. This is how it's always been. How did I not see the truth of this? They're both, you know, shaken to their core and just released into this happiness. And they're just. Whoa. I. I see now that what's. What. What a. That I've just been. I've just been denying something this whole time. I've just been rejecting who I am and I've been rejecting what the sacredness that this life is and that every moment is. I've just been holding it at bay. And I. For a moment through my practice and the way it was guided, I dropped it. And I'm seeing it all and knowing it all right now. And they both have this. And the. The teacher says, yes, that's it. You. You're. I can tell you're seeing it and so are you. And it's all happening now. One of them. And this would be the. The very rare student, right? The one in a million, probably student.

Never doubts it. Or they. They just. They. From that moment forward, they're just, like, free as a butterfly. And they just, like, continue to exude this and they start telling everyone else about it. And pretty soon people are gathering around them for. Because of what they're transmitting from through their being. Because this has become so. The truth of this has become so obvious to them, and their confidence in it, to use our term, is just unshaken and their life's changed forever. And that doesn't mean maybe that they still might have some work to do, like on their. Their shadow or this or that maybe. Right. Because those might be some different lines of development, but we can save that for another time or for later this time. But. But. So that's that person. That's their experience. The other student is pretty lit up for a few days, very, whoa, something happened to me. Whoa. You know, and very trying. And then they're. And then. But like a week later, it's gone. And it's like they remember something really incredible happened on that retreat. They don't even quite remember what it was. They know how it felt. And maybe that's all they can remember now is how it felt. It felt really free and amazing and expansive. And so now when they sit down to meditate, they try to get back to that feeling they felt because it's the only part the gross mind can remember is the feeling. So they're like, okay, oh, yeah, I'm trying to. And now they're meditating. They're just trying to feel a certain way, which is not meditation and will never bear any fruit anyway. What is the difference between these two? Now, some people would say, well, this one was more ripe. Their karmas, their Samskaras, were more matured. They had done more preparation. They had prepared the vessel, you know, all kinds of ways we could look at it, but we could also just look at it and kind of really get interested in what, you know. This person just didn't doubt what they realized. And the other person, because of, you know, the momentum of their personality and their tendencies to doubt and to be insecure and fall into fear and the strength of their ego's, you know, you know, structure and whatever else, they couldn't help but doubt it. And they just started almost immediately going, well, was that real? And I don't know. And. And, you know, and they trying to hold on desperately to the feeling and whatever they. And pretty soon it's just. They. They've strangled it and it's gone or smothered it.

So anyway, I'm Just, I'm just kind of ruminating on what you're. On this idea and kind of saying, well, we don't know, you know, exactly why one might be able to not doubt it and be confident and why the other might not. But how might we all proceed with the path if we could see that what's really needed is that we just need to accept some things about reality and have confidence in them. If we want to talk about spiritual awakening as that, we need to really have confidence that there's, that's in some deep and fundamental things that our mind can't really know. And we have to have confidence that we can let go so deeply that a kind of spontaneous way of being will emerge and come forth from a place, an unpremeditated place, where we never see it beforehand and live in, kind of live in the unknown. And we're going to now start to live in the unknown all the time, live in not knowing, live in innocence and, and, and live in this trust, this faith, this confidence in something our mind can't see but that we increasingly find to be the ground of our own being and this, this mystery. So, so from a path point of view, I, we can talk about a lot of parts of the path, but I want to talk a little bit about what I call the practice of direct awakening, because this is where I've tried to make a path out of the pathless, you could say. And, and so, so what I mean by that is, is when, when we're sitting in meditation doing the practice of direct awakening, what we're trying to do is we're, we're simply practicing.

We're practicing being the way our awakened, our true nature, our Buddha nature, our awakened essence, naturally already is. So we're trying to kind of practice being awake is maybe what I would say. So we're not practicing something in order to cause an awakening. We're practicing how does the mind function when we're awake, how does the heart function when we're, how do we relate to each moment when we're awake? And how could we turn that into a practice in our meditation and sit down and say, I'm going to meditate for 30 minutes now, and for this 30 minutes I'm going to practice this way of being that is none other than an enlightened way of being. It's the way.

And it's exactly, I'm practicing being exactly the way.

I am when I'm my awakened self. And the way anyone is when they're their awakened self, because just, just like the unawakened self is very predictable. And, you know, the way we relate to opportunities, the way the ego relates to opportunity, the way the ego relates to challenge, the way we relate to fear, the way we relate to desire, that's pretty much the same for all of us. Just, it's the same with awakened consciousness to awaken human beings. Very much the same mind, it's the same consciousness. And so let's take one example of a distinction between that we can see in someone who's awakened. You know, I know you've got a lot of Buddhist training, Buddhist background. The whole concept of grasping and the grasping mind. And the unenlightened mind tries to. It tries to hold on to everything. It's trying to find security. It's trying to find control in the world. And so we grasp and we grasp. And that means, you know, you sit in meditation and you're grasping onto thoughts, you have a strong feeling, you're grasping onto the feeling you keep attaching. Let's say another would be attaching to everything. Kind of attached to the feeling. We attach to the thought, we react. Then because we're attached to it, we react to it. That ultimately triggers our behavior. Our unenlightened life flows from all that. So what if we sit in meditation and our practice for the half hour is to not hold on to anything, to not grasp onto anything, to not attach to anything that arises. So we're just letting all experience occur and we're not exerting any preference for one experience over another. We have an uncomfortable feeling. We let it be. We have a wonderful feeling. We don't grab onto it. We don't. We don't push it away. We don't grab on. We're just being. Now, that way of being is natural to an awakened human, awakened person. That's how they are, because they're awakened and they've realized that there's nothing to hold on to anyway. And that holding on just blocks this natural, easeful flow from happening. And. And, you know, part of awakening is we start to become. We fall in love with the unknown, and we fall in love with a way of being that's mysterious to us and that that kind of is leading us instead of us controlling it and leading it. So we can practice that in our meditation immediately. Right now, anyone can. And there's not a preparation for that. There's a, hey, sit down and try this way of relating to your thoughts, this way of relating to your feelings. Do this for half an hour, see what happens. And the. The Miracle of it is that if we just do that and we really do it, we really will know our true nature in that moment. Because your ego can't let go. Your ego can't, you know, let things be. You know, and so we're kind of short. We're creating an environment where the ego. And by the ego, I mean it in the kind of traditional Eastern sense, I guess, as the kind of the primary obstacle to awakening, the little grasping self, you know, hungry to feed itself always.

Yeah. So we're creating an environment where awakened consciousness can naturally thrive and be. Because we're. We're kind of just practicing, aligning with it, you could say. And so that's one. What I just described very simply is one of the practices of direct awakening. But we can see that awakened consciousness functions in a whole bunch of predictable ways that any of us who have had experience of awakening will go, yeah, right, that's true. And then we can practice that. And so these are. That's why I say it's direct awakening, because I don't mean that you only have to do it once for one second, and now you're enlightened for the rest of your life. I mean that it's direct in the sense that we are directly practicing being awake when we're in meditation. There's no time in this and that. And then. So to bring it back to our point about confidence and. And so what happens is, as we do these practices day after day, where we're kind of just choosing to set aside a time to rest in and as awakened consciousness or our true nature, and we're making that space, and we are genuinely experiencing it more and more because we're really. We're really making. Making room for it, and it's really showing it's really happening. We develop more confidence in it. You know, we start to feel, wow, this is really a way I can be. And what's it like to be this way off the meditation cushion? And how do I let go in life? And this, you know, how do I make room for this beautiful mystery that's emerging out of the depths of my being and starting to show up? How do I make room for it to live my life and not how to. And then we start to see all the ways so to come to the path. So as now awakened consciousness is starting to lead us on the path because it's coming forth in our practice, then what we find is we start to see everything we do all day long that gets in the way, but we're not doing that because somebody told us it's in our experience, we see, oh, there I go again. I'm just. I'm reacting out of fear, or I'm trying to control the situation, or I'm, you know, there's my doubt coming in. And, you know. But it's all. We're seeing it because we're seeing it from somewhere else. We're now seeing it from the eyes of enlightenment, of awakening. And now the motivation to let go of those old habits and tendencies and all of the obstacles which are many and profound. I'm not in any. I know some of the direct awakening people are kind of more like, there are no obstacles. Just realize it and it's done. And I'm not in that camp at all. I'm like, no, there are a million obstacles. And you'll see them all as you allow yourself to have more faith in your own awakened self. And then all of the obstacles you see, but then you have the motivation to relinquish them because you want to make more and more room for the dharma to reveal itself in your being. And, you know, so that's the kind of path that I guess I am very excited about and have found to be very potent for people who are. Now, here's the only thing I want to say, because you were asking, like, well, if someone's maybe not really checked out spirituality. I mean, I guess I would say, I hope that everything I've said about it might inspire you to want to check out spirituality and give more time to it. But, you know, it's.

Everything I'm talking about here. Takes a lot of maturity.

To relate to our life in this way. To have the discipline, to practice in the way I'm describing. To take these radical positions of letting go completely or of not knowing anything, you know, that's another direct awakening practice. Don't know anything for a while. Sit there for 30 minutes and don't try to know anything. Don't try to understand anything. Don't try to interpret your experience. Don't evaluate your experience. Don't label it. Don't judge it. Just.

Don'T know. You know, that's a very. It requires a lot of austerity, you know, so these are. These are very simple things. They're very. They're the most natural things. They're also, you know, they take a lot of heart from us.

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, you brought up a lot there. And a couple things I'd like to explore without. Want to try to avoid getting. Getting too.

Far down the rabbit hole. Or too esoteric for our. For our discussion here. But so, you know, yes, we really can't know where any individual is in terms of their karmic ripening or conditions or people. If people do are open to the notion that we go through many lifetimes, you know, where. Where are we, What's. What's behind us, What. What trail are we bringing into the. Into the present moment experience and how that would affect things. But it was really interesting. You talked about those two students in the same retreat having the same experience. And one kind of just really trusts that experience and develops immediate confidence in it and starts to live from that place and. And maybe even begin to teach from that place. Uh, and of course, with the caveat that we don't. We know many people who have done that and later on it.

It.

It was proven that rightful. May have benefited a lot of people, but clearly they still had work to do and. And ended up in some problems. So.

But then the other person who just, you know, wow, I had an amazing experience, but, you know, immediately kind of begins to doubt it and. And so forth. So what's so maybe. Well, I think what you're talking about is how, regardless of where. How we come into the situation, how might we practice that experience and even gradually develop more confidence in it by just practicing that experience? And the way you describe, you know, the.

Was it direct awakening practice or direct. What was the word? Direct. Yeah.

Practice of direct awakening.

Yeah, practice of direct awakening. You know, I mean, it sound to me like basically good, solid meditation instruction, even within Shamatha Vipassana tradition, certainly within the formless traditions of Mahamuda, Dzogchen or Chikantaz and Zen. And many people have been doing practice with that good instruction in that way for. For a long time. And their life still goes through a tremendous amount of ups and downs. And, you know, there's a lot of work to be done. But I'm wondering about. In terms of, you know, maybe developing competence in that. And I want to.

Let me ask you something fleet, though. I just. Because I want to. I just want us both to like all. I'll pretend I don't know anything about this. You do the same. Let's just for a moment though, like, so is it that.

Is it that they've real, like this person, you said, who's been doing that instruction for a long time rigorously, and their life is still kind of a mess in all these ways? Like.

No, I didn't mean their life was.

A mess or, you know, the ups. Oh, okay. But when you were saying ups and downs, I thought you meant that they're still.

No, what I really, what I, what I really meant was a, you know, they haven't.

They haven't developed some confidence that this is it, I'm there, and stabilize it in their life in such a way that they would start teaching it or, you know, they're still, they're in the midst of their life. They have many problems here and they can, they can sit down to meditate and their mind can stabilize very quickly and they can practice in that way of, of, you know, with tremendous equanimity and letting things just be as they are and so forth. And, and yet, you know, that there's, you know, and this is described in great detail and you know, in the meditation manuals of Zochen and Mahamuda, the layers and layers and layers of this and also the possibilities of self deception within that. And when you're in that very refined state of just not knowing, just letting things be as they are, one of the things that instruction is to look for is to look for the very subtle layers of fabrication, the very subtle layers of, of grasping, the very subtle layers of reification and so forth, or even the away experiences of. So that, you know, maybe being able to accelerate this path of developing confidence in one's own experience such that it does begin to permeate one's life more. Because I can certainly feel and see that one can have those experiences. And part of the way, one of the reasons that they even on a regular basis in one practice and one of the reasons they don't permeate one's life more may be that one kind of doesn't have enough confidence that this is actually what we're all talking about, that this is actually what they're talking about in the books, right? That what I'm experiencing is actually that. And so in terms of accelerating the development of that context, I'm wondering about the, your, your position on, or experience really on the importance of teachers. Because traditionally in many traditions, in the student teacher relationship and especially in the, you know, the more realization traditions, the teacher is able to sometimes facilitate an experience with a student. What's often called pointing out instructions where they have experience and teacher goes, that's it. And of course, then a teacher, the student again, some students will walk away and that's really stabilizes something, accelerates their path and they're able to practice with more confidence. And others will walk away going.

I'm not sure he said, I was there, but you Know what I mean? So, but my basic question here is what about teachers and what about the importance of getting a glimpse of that in some form of transmission, whether it's group or it's a particular teacher or the presence of a teacher. So that accelerates one's confidence and one's faith that actually, yes, that is by nature I'm on the path to experiencing it and my practice is actually developing these qualities.

Yeah, I mean.

The whole question of spiritual teachers has become so fraught and complex in our time. Right. It used to be straightforward back in, back in the way old days, you.

Know, and it's getting deconstructed left and right to the point where I'm afraid we may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Yeah, I'm with you. I mean.

I kind of picked up from what you were saying. It sounds like you're, you're a little, you. Your answer to that would be somewhere more on the side of. Teachers are incredibly important. And it's certainly been my experience that the deepest, you know, my deepest realizations and insights, it was in some way the affirmation of that by a teacher or the pointing the way to it and then creating the context for it to flourish and you know, the encouraging me to have the trust and the faith in it, you know, all of those things were very, very important. And if I look at, say, what's happening in my own relationship with people who take my courses and are in my ongoing community, you know, I hear back from them and I, and so often I'm, you know, I give a lot of instruction and people do a lot of practice on their own. And then I so often hear from people, well, but it's when I'm meditating with you and you're describing and you're pointing, because I do, I do a lot of pointing out style teaching. I don't, you know, teachers teach differently. I don't tend to sort of say, here is the meditation instruction, go sit. I, I like when I lead retreats, I'm, I'm in the meditation with the students and I'm speaking and I'm just, I'm pointing it out. I'm saying, now notice this and now notice that and do this and do that. And you know, it's a kind of active pointing out thing. And I get so much feedback from students about the power of precisely that. And you know, some people come on my retreats and say, oh my God, I've done 50, you know, retreats in my life. But I, but because you were there holding, guiding me through it the whole time. I went so much deeper than in my other 50 retreats because in those I was just given instructions and left to sit on my own. And, and so I do think that the, you know, I'm very again, I don't know how many people could really find their way to any kind of meaningful spiritual awakening without having a teacher and teachers, a teacher, but having that interaction. I don't know how many. I don't know. It seems to me a very, you know, a very rare seeker who had just so much drive for it and so much, you know, aptitude and ability to hear it that maybe they could just read the books and kind of receive the Dharma. Then the transmission that's in the written words because it's there. The transmissions in the written words. If they were written by an awakened teacher or you know, spoken by an awakened teacher, it's there. You know, maybe they could receive it and just be self guided and have enough discernment and discipline and structured enough way of relating to things that they could really find their way. Maybe a very rare, but like again, maybe that's one in one in ten thousand, you know, practitioners, I don't know, one in a hundred thousand. It's a very rare thing.

Who knows what lays behind there that moment. So yeah, so I like to broaden out for a moment. I mean, suffice it to say, you know, because we're talking here on in the summer spiritual incontinence and this really we need to, I mean, you and I come from contemplative traditions. We have a lot of shared experience and we're talking about meditation and we're talking about, you know, direct awakening practices and non dual practices and so forth. And yet really this subject includes all the faith based and devotional practices and all the ways in which people approach spirituality and shamanic paths and all the rest of it. And so suffice it to say.

I personally feel, and I think you would agree that if one really gets interested in deepening this part of our lives, it's really helpful to get good clear guidance and good clear instruction. And we know more about that than we ever have in life, both with the availability of all the ancient teachings which have all been published, and also the modern scientific interaction with that. And it's not hard to find people like yourself and others who, who brought a modern Western scientific perspective to really getting to the essence of these ancient traditions, teachings across many traditions. And so you know, it the pathway, if we're willing to Do a little research, do our homework. I think the pathway is more accessible than ever into really good quality instruction and teaching that could help us deepen our practice, whatever the means of that practice is, rather than kind of floundering around for a long time. But it does require doing our homework because there's also a lot of, you know, just stuff out there.

So there is a lot of stuff out there now.

There's a lot of. There's a lot of stuff out there, but I want to broaden it, you know, into. Okay, what are we talking about with awakening? Well, in the early Chan teachings, there was a wonderful book. I don't think I'll be remembering the name right now. It's been a long time. But it's a Western scholar that really studied the early Chan teachings in China, which is the precursor to Zen Buddhism, and made the case that what those teachings were saying and really demonstrating was that the only place we can really identify something called awakening or enlightenment is in the relational field. Like, that's the only place we can point to that is really showing up. Right. You know, this is terms of Mahayana view, that kind of myth of personal realization. Now, somebody can say they're personally awakened, and maybe that's their subjective experience, but how does it actually show up in the relational field? And I think we're all deeply concerned about the overall global. Global relational field at this time on the planet. You know, are things evolving in a positive way? Are we devolving what's going on? And even in our personal lives, I think when most of us think about deepening ourselves spiritually, you know, some of us may long to have powerful, transcendent experiences. But I also think we're just talking about deepening our lives and wanting to have better relationships and a more fulfilling life and, you know, maybe feel more connected to nature, more connected to others and these kind of things. So I wonder if you could talk about that aspect of it, of. Of the. How, you know, this connection to the idea of awakening being a phenomena of the relational field and a phenomena of the collective.

It's wonderful to hear that. That it was an early child idea. I didn't know that. And it's definitely been my experience. I mean, when. When people ask me, how do you know if you're awake? I say, other people will tell you.

You know, half jokingly, but have not, because the, you know, we. Again, we can only find it in our relationships with others and how we live. That's where all of. That's where all of our triggers will come out and reveal the ways that we're not yet aligned with that. And it's, it's also where, it's where the beauty of all this starts to manifest and show up is, is in, you know, the. So what are the. I guess maybe we could say what are the relational measures of awakening that you can start to notice? And you would say things like radical vulnerability, like a willingness and vulnerability. See, when you think of vulnerability as maybe a willingness or you know, you can be harmed or something, so you're vulnerable to harm, but vulnerable to be moved, vulnerable to be influenced by others. You know, one of the, one of the ways I always am really, I always notice that awakening shows up in people. And where you really start to see it is when say somebody really is so is more interested in what they can learn from the relational field, meaning others and how it can influence them than they are in what they already know and their, their trajectory. When you meet someone who's like meeting people and they're kind of like, wow, what you know, what do you know and what, how do you relate to life? And how I might, you know, model off that. Someone who's really willing to flow and be moved and be influenced, that's a lot of vulnerability. And also someone who's willing to be very transparent and not have anything to hide and not have anything to. That they're ashamed of or don't. Wouldn't want to be seen. So that's again a relational measure of awakening, a kind of transparency of self, a vulnerability.

I think, you know, the obvious things like care and compassion that show up in, in relationship and you know, a genuine love loving orientation to people that's not related to, it's not more so for the people that you know better. It might express itself more in those relationships because they're closer, but that, that kind of fundamental care and concern that shows up equally kind of for any human being because we are knowing so deeply that we are all this one self and, and we just can't help but feel so, so much tenderness for everyone around us. So I mean those are all very relational measures and they're again, when you start seeing those things happening again, you're, you're more conscious. Friends will definitely tell you, they'll say, well, what's happening for you? You know, you're like shining and you're present and you're available and your care is here and you're totally, you're. Oh, here's another one. A lack of self preoccupation. You're you're here in this conversation and you're completely here. There's your. I can tell your attention is not somewhere. You're not thinking about the other thing. You're not worrying about yourself. You're not concerned about how you look or what you just said or whether people like to eat it. There's no self consciousness that makes you this incredibly open relational being. And, you know, so all of these things, I, I just, I'm loving your, your chan, you know, quote. And just. I think it's so deeply true because otherwise, you know, like you said, maybe there's such a thing as subjective awakening. I mean, certainly there is. You know, we have experiences of being more awake and then we have experiences of being less awake. And those can be very internal. Like, can be on a meditation retreat where you go through heaven and you go through hell and then hopefully it ends in heaven. But, you know, maybe not. But, you know, there is a subjective world of awakening, but it doesn't matter much. The one that matters is the one that's, you know, impacting the world through, through our, Our engagement and interaction. So that's a absolutely. A really lovely. Yeah, lovely way to look at it. And it brings us together, it brings us out. Because, you know, I will say a lot of people on the spiritual path, I, you know, do kind of somewhat keep it a bit to themselves, I think, maybe because they have family members who aren't that, you know, a lot of us have family members who don't really get our spirituality and why we're so passionate about it. They don't share it. You know, they're not as interested in it. So we kind of take it off and we have our little solitary practice and hopefully we have some kind of sangha, some spiritual friendships where we get to share that. But, you know, ideally this just lives fully in the world and it just inspires everyone else who's not spiritual to kind of go, you know, maybe you're onto something. Maybe I should check this out after all. Because you sure seem, you know, you seem to be radiating something that. I want some of that. Yeah.

Well, Craig, thank you very much for this really rich conversation. You know, there's an idea maybe I want to close on that from that. I've read in your work that you talk about sort of re engineering, you know, and using the modern approach of re engineering the awakened state or awakenment. Right. You know, re engineering. Like companies do that with other.

Reverse engineering.

Reverse engineering. I'm sorry.

A company will go get some other company's product and they'll take it apart, they'll get engineers take it apart and they'll figure out how they made it and they'll, they'll, they'll make it themselves. Right? Reverse engineering, so reverse engineering, you know, awakening. And you know, I think that's something that could be really broadly applicable. You know, we're all, we've all been inspired by various spiritual and religious, religious figures in our life or even people that maybe wouldn't put in those boxes, but human beings who've really inspired us because of their lives and, and you know, so rather than just being inspired by them, we could actually begin to really emulate that in some way. And look, okay, who were they really and what were they saying and, and how that, and you know, I, there, there was a religious movement at one point. I'm not sure if it's still around anymore, but it basically was based on a simple principle of continually asking oneself this question in the midst of one's life as one faced decisions and challenges in life. What would Jesus do?

Oh yeah, right.

And the idea was actually really trying to not just emulate, you know, and be devoted to Jesus as this way off, distant, enlightened or God person, but really try to live that way, the example that he gave in his life, and really begin to live that way. So I think whoever we're inspired by and the books we've read and whether it's, you know, on the similar meditation paths like Craig and I have been referencing or more faith based or devotional paths, we could actually think about reverse engineering that and trusting that as human beings we all have the same capacity. We all have this innate goodness, we all have this unconditional innate wisdom, goodness and wholeness. And you know, if we're willing to kind of take the leap, we can actually start practicing that in the way you're talking about. And I think that could be really broadly applicable to whatever anyone's particular.

You know, context or focus or interest is in, in spirituality and consciousness.

So I'm with you. I love that. I mean any, I love it as a contemplation. Just anyone who you inspires, you realize that you can. What is it about? How do, how would I do that? How would I be that way? What would have to change? How would I have to relate to this moment to show up that way? And we can find it because we're all the same, we're all the same person really fundamentally. So we can find our way.

For me was, I was always very inspired as many people have been by Nelson Mandela. And before many people know my Backstory, I spent 14 years in prison and as a practitioner, which is kind of how I ended up in prison. It's a long story, but at any rate, it was my monastery time. And so shortly before getting out, I read his book again. I said, I got to read that book again. And which he, you know, covers his whole journey of, I think, 26 years in prison and then getting out of prison. And, you know, I really took that view of how can I. You know, it's amazing. How did he come out of 26 years in prison and onto the world stage as this incredible statesperson that brought healing and unity to his country and overcame apartheid? And, you know, how did he do that? People don't come out of prison that way. Right. How did he do that? And so I really focused on, you know, wanting to emulate and be that and crack the code of what he was doing. Right. In order to try to bring my best out into the world as I came out of prison. Right. So I think we can really look at that in almost any area of life and certainly in the realm of spirituality and consciousness and. And just I think one of the things can. Can really spark us is having that basic faith that we all are unconditionally good, enlightened, wise, and. And the work is really just uncovering the obstacles to that. So I think. I really appreciate that you've been pointing us in that direction so directly today and. And really appreciate this conversation.

Me too. Fleet. Thanks so much for having me. And really, it's been a delight. Feel like we could. Feel like we could go on for another three hours.

We could not get bored.

So thanks so much. I hope it's. Yeah, I hope that some of this sticks or provides a pointer and helps some of you who are tuning in on your own path. I know you invited me to share a link, so if any of you want to.

Explore this a little bit more, I've got a free ebook that you can go download called Unlocking the Power of Meditation. It kind of similar to some of what we've been doing here, but it sort of looks at some of the most common kind of mistakes we make in our meditation that take us away from the simplicity that I was talking about here. And I have a link. Craighamiltonglobal.com forward slash best year. So, Craig. Hamiltonglobal.com forward Slash best year. Wonderful. So thanks again. Thank you.

Christ.

Take care.

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