Western Baul Podcast Series

As long as we have a body, ordinary life will present things that ego considers problems. Waking to ordinary life implies that we’re not awake. When we are stagnant and fearful, interested in a safe comfort zone, we do not notice the beauty of ordinary life. But we can broaden our view. Waking to ordinary life is about cultivating a vulnerability to beauty. This occurs when we have the necessity t...

Mantra is likely older than language, sounds that were received by the rishis, poet mystics of the Vedas. It can be silent and internal, a form of thought that reveals more as one goes deeper into it. One meaning of mantra is “crossing over the mind.” How can a sacred sound take us beyond the incessant machinery of mind? Japa is defined as speaking mantra, a simple practice of devotional repetitio...

We can’t separate our nervous system from the nervous systems of others we are in relationship to since we affect one another. In a practical sense, we are not separate. Nervous systems do not develop in isolation. If we are not regulated and have children, there is an immediate effect on them. Co-regulation is the regulation of emotions and behaviors in relationships or groups. We don’t have the...

The book, The Only Grace Is Loving God, written in twilight language or ecstatic speech by Lee Lozowick in 1982, was inspired by Answer to Job, CG Jung’s discussion of the human struggle with an image we have of God and the suffering we experience. The Divine image has to include the feminine aspect of existence in order for Christ consciousness, a God of love and mercy, to be born in us. Consciou...

French audio version, original talk released July 14, 2022. Rumi termine l’un de ses poèmes en disant : « Il y a mille façons de s'agenouiller et d'embrasser le sol ». Quand on regarde le monde tel qu'il est aujourd’hui, il est normal d’avoir peur, d’être anxieux, de ressentir du chagrin. Notre monde est à la fois bourré de toxines et débordant de nectar. Il y a trois façons de traiter ces toxines...

There is a rightness to how we feel because of how we act when we provide what is wanted and needed in any given moment. This may be considered as the trademark of a revolutionist. Fresh insights and revelations come from use of a different language. Jan Cox was a teacher, in the mystical and philosophical sense, whose language was unique. Maxims from his “Revolutionist Code of Conduct” are discus...

There are two sides to the metaphor of a razor’s edge. On one side is duality and on the other side is non-duality. When we’re born, we’re in a state of relaxed well-being and can see clearly for a period of time. Then we discover that we can fall off the razor’s edge. This occurs when our attention is taken from us through identification, attachment, comparison, and our stories. Prior to losing o...

This talk emphasizes what we can use from Dune for our own personal evolution or transformation. Science fiction explores archetypes and mythic structures and can help us consider what it means to be human. Twilight language, which permeates Dune, is the way that mystics and shamans speak, which requires a different state of consciousness to understand. Frank Herbert creates a world that leaves ou...

Zazen is a practice that involves the body in ways such as working with the breath. Joshu Sasaki Roshi came up with the phrase, “Buddha is the center of gravity.” Rooting ourselves to the earth through the hara, the abdominal area, is an aspect of Chan or Chinese Buddhism that came to be known as Zen in Japan. We unconsciously absorb negativity that denigrates the body in our culture. There is a s...

Identification is the great law that governs all human life. We are enslaved and quickly swept away by it as it captures and consumes our attention, which is what we are in essence. Yet, we are blind to it and believe we are free. All human problems are caused by identification. Imagination and identification are identical twins that work together. We are powerless to hold attention for long befor...

Rick Lewis talks about the mystery of the Guru through telling stories of his experience with his Guru, Lee Lozowick. He discusses circumstances that brought him to his first Guru, Bhagwan Rajneesh (Osho), to meet Lee after Osho’s death, and to search to escape from the anxiety of human separation through spiritual attainment. Altered states that feel incredibly profound can be used to maintain a...

It's interesting to consider that there are larger forces at play in creation than we know. Angels are part of the Abrahamic cultures (Moslem, Christian, Hebrew). There are similar entities—dakinis, demigods, spirits—in Buddhist, Hindu, and Native traditions. Einstein’s great question was, “Is this a friendly universe or not?” We can look at the qualities of angels in history, art, and theology an...

The aphorisms of G. I. Gurdjieff are an accessible concentration of many of his ideas and basic teaching. Nine of the 38 aphorisms are considered in this presentation on the life of Gurdjieff, who appeared in Moscow in 1912 after a 20 year search for knowledge. His quest produced a system that became known as The Work. Gurdjieff used the tumult of life that presented itself to teach, including wor...

An ethical will is about what we wish to pass on to future generations. Native American tribes think seven generations ahead in terms of what to leave behind. An ethical will has been part of the Jewish tradition. Ethics is about acting according to conscience, while morality is more about following widely shared norms, sometimes unthinkingly. When we consider who our ancestors were, we learn abou...

The Gospel of Thomas was found in 1945 in a jar buried in the ground in a small Egyptian town, Nag Hammadi, in a region where monks had meditated in solitude. Its origin dates back to the first few centuries and possibly to the time of Christ. In the accepted Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Jesus is presented as an utterly unique being or as the only begotten son of God. Thomas means twi...

Love is a stable state of being that can be seen as the culmination of the path. What is required of us for this state to come about? Love is about more than one relationship. We can consider love in coupled relationship, with others that we associate with, and in relationship to life. What is usually meant when we say we love someone is that we want to be loved by them. We can have expectations o...

We are living in wild times, in a shifting world in which we don’t know what’s going to happen. How can we find and live with reality in a world that is so predominantly unreal? Our karmas have to ripen all the way for us to become more fluid, open up, and let go. An essential tenet of tantra is non-rejection, taking whatever is arising as our path. Pratyahara, a teaching in the Yoga Sutras, is ab...

Enlightenment may or may not be a goal for people, but why would we get on the path unless we wanted something? With age, there seems to be less talk about pursuing enlightenment, which takes attention and energy to sustain. Is it natural for the pursuit to continue with less intensity? Or have we been distracted by all the problems of life so that the focus of attention that some of us had in our...

The metaphorical aspect of darkness can refer to the dark night of the soul, to a deep descent within ourselves, our individual or collective shadow, a time of transition, grief, or depression—whenever we’re suffering. We have a bias towards light. The sacred nutrients of wisdom, creation, and transformation dwell in darkness. Darkness has a fertile, receptive, feminine quality because something w...

The direct path is a refined articulation of the principles of nondualism, and the backward step is the actual practice of it. The mind feasts on complication. One of the features of the direct path is its simplicity. It does not involve lineage, guru, or ritual. We are always looking at things, but what are we looking out of? When we look at what we are looking out of, we are taking a step back i...

We need help to continue to grow. The name of a God-realized being invokes the Divine. We can make efforts to return to the present, to ground the attention. Attention is crucial in learning to use suffering so that suffering does not use us up and can become food for growth. Two kinds of attention are possible for a human being: mechanical attention which is an unconscious survival mechanism, and...

The expressions of certain faces in spiritual paintings or sculpture and of genuine spiritual teachers in photographs or in-person can communicate our own basic goodness or organic innocence when we are in an open state. Something in us responds to a face that dances to the rhythm of creation, that exudes the peace of surrender. We are hard-wired for connection, which gets made through the face—fo...

All failure to live life richly and fully is based on the feeling that love is scarce. We may sense at times that love is the ground of all being. What if we lived on the basis of this truth? There is so much music and poetry that reflects on our inner longing. Those in attendance at the live talk were asked to write down sayings, mantras, or mahavakyas (short sentences of wisdom teachings) that c...

We could say that all we know about ourselves cognitively are stories we tell ourselves. These are not necessarily obvious to us because they play so constantly. We respond to the universe through the stories that filter our experience. How do we work with this since we can’t think ourselves out of this box? Transparency hints at a different way of relating to stories. Many stories we identify wit...

We are always already living in groundlessness. This can be scary since we tend to approach life in a fear-based way, but we can be groundless and focused on our delight. Groundlessness is not linear; it has no direction as we are always moving and changing. Children trust that their needs will be met until we give them a different message. We get into the habit of identifying, and holding onto an...