Summary:

Background & Life Journey

- Left the U.S. in the mid-1960s in protest against the Vietnam War.

- Settled in Scandinavia, living in Sweden and later Denmark.

- Explored various paths to well-being: food, metaphysics, psychology, and spirituality.

Spiritual Awakening & Exploration

- Experienced a deep awakening that led to a lifelong quest to understand suffering.

- Traveled extensively, including hitchhiking to Afghanistan.

- Transitioned from physical health focus (macrobiotics) to mental and spiritual well-being.

Core Teachings & Insights

- Power of Mind: Emphasizes how thoughts shape reality and happiness.

- Sane Self-Talk: Advocates for conscious, constructive inner dialogue.

- Observing the Mind: Encourages detachment from mental stories and identification.

- Psychological Maturity: Focuses on emotional intelligence and wise decision-making.

- Vibrational Influence: Believes our energy affects outcomes and relationships.

Books & Contributions

Written 15 self-empowerment books, including:

- The Road to Power / Fast Food for the Soul / Book 1 & 2

- Are You Happy Now? 10 Ways to Live a Happy Life

- The Awakening Human Being / A Guide to the Power of Mind

- Sane Self Talk / Cultivating the Voice of Sanity Within

Spiritual Themes Discussed

- Nature of Consciousness: Explores impersonal mechanisms of the mind.

- Awakening Journey: Describes the possibility of 24/7 realization.

- Spirituality & God: Offers a non-dogmatic view of divinity and presence.

- Witnessing Awareness: Encourages observing thoughts without attachment.

Full interview, edited for readability

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today, my second guest today, since I did another interview earlier, is Barbara Berger. Barbara lives in Denmark, although she was originally in the US. She left the US in the mid-60s because of the Vietnam War. Hooray, Barbara! And settled in… Yeah, right on. Settled in Scandinavia.

Barbara: Like you are one of those people from that generation?

Rick: Oh yeah, I had a high draft number, so I didn’t…

Barbara: Okay, so you know what we are up against here.

Rick: Yeah, and it is funny because in those days I had this very kind of spiritual attitude toward those things. It is like I thought, “All right, well, really it is the raising of consciousness and meditation and all that is going to solve these problems.” But the older I have gotten, the more political I have gotten, actually. I find myself getting more and more infuriated by various issues in the world.

Barbara: Okay, okay, I hear you loud and clear. Well, we can talk about all of these things.

Rick: Yeah, and so here are some little things on your website, kind of little vignettes of your life. Child of middle class America, father Pentagon military man, that must have been interesting, rebel, runaway – I did that – Sarah Lawrence College, child bride, hippie, world traveler, crusader, writer, expatriate, new age teacher, three children, three marriages, sick and miserable, poor single mother, successful career woman, best-selling writer and lecturer, dedicated spiritual seeker. I now realize that it was the same urge for personal and planetary transformation that fueled all these phases of my life and the evolution of my consciousness. The same urge led me to write all my books. I think that is a very astute insight.

Barbara: Thank you, thank you, for the fantastic introduction.

Rick: Yeah, well you wrote it.

Barbara: Thank you.

Rick: You lived it.

Barbara: Definitely.

Rick: Yeah. So Barbara, what did you …

Barbara: So I am truly an awakening human being. When you think about what you just said, I mean, my life story has been breakdown, breakthrough, breakdown, breakthrough.

Rick: Yeah. So Barbara, I read a good portion of The Awakening Human Being, I will continue with it later, and what I didn’t get from reading it is much about … I mean, you speak with some authority about a lot of points and offer a lot of practical advice, but we didn’t hear much about you and how you came to a point where you could be qualified to give such advice.

Barbara: Well that is not really what that book is about. I have written really a lot of books. And of course, the background to that is I am a rather well-known teacher here in Scandinavia, so this book is sort of the summary of what I have been teaching here for many years. But I would be happy to share some background stuff with you. That would be great fun.

Rick: Yeah, whatever you feel is germane to the story. I mean, we all have our interesting stories, and some of it probably all has to do with our spiritual development, but some of it more obviously than others.

Barbara: Well, I would say that being born as a child of middle-class America and growing up in the 50s in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., because my father worked in the Pentagon, just being born into that environment, which is very, very limiting, very middle-class, and having an awareness actually from the very beginning that, “What am I doing here?” I mean, I always knew that I was like, “It didn’t fit, and I didn’t belong, and I had a different vision.” I don’t know where I had it from because there was nothing in my environment that gave me any input. And so I would say that it was really the trauma of the Vietnam War, which we were talking about before, that sort of really pushed me into choosing a different pathway. I had a boyfriend who got drafted, and I was 17, 18, and my father worked in the Pentagon. He was a high military person. He was Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, so it didn’t go down very well that he had a daughter who had a boyfriend and he didn’t want to go to Vietnam. So that was like the whole deal, and that was in the early 60s, before it was sort of the big protest. We were sort of on the beginning edge of it, and so I ran away from home, and we went to the War Resistance League in New York. At that time, if you were a conscientious objector, that was the only possibility of not going. You had to be religious, and Steve, who the guy was, he wasn’t. So I ran away from home. We got married. It was the only way for me to get away from home because my parents had the police after me. It was really a big drama, and then we went underground. We were underground actually for two years. I had been to Europe and got deported, and had been to Canada, but that was way before anybody went to Canada. We finally ended up in Mexico City. We had hitchhiked actually all the way from New York City to Mexico City. It took us about three weeks. We ended up in Mexico City, and on the very first day that we arrived, we were sitting in a park in the middle of Mexico City. We only had $100 left; that was all we had. We didn’t know anyone. We didn’t speak Spanish. We had no idea what we were going to do, where we were going, and we were scared. We were sitting on this bench, and we were sort of gazing at nothing. There was a guy in the distance, a very, very special-looking man. He sort of looked like he had stepped out of a Dostoevsky novel, a very tall, blonde guy with a beard. He was going around sketching people in this park where we were sitting. Then he came over to us, and we were sitting on this bench. Then he looked at us and said, “You guys are really beautiful. Can I sketch your faces?” We said, “Go ahead,” right? And Steve, the guy I was with, we both had really long hair

Rick: that was the look in those days, right? And so this guy, he sits down on the grass before us and he starts to sketch us, and then suddenly he has this big sketch pad, and then suddenly he puts it down and he looks at us and he says, “What are you doing here?” We had been underground for two years. We had never, ever told anyone that we were running away from the military police, that Steve had been drafted. We always had some story about we were students, or what. But for some reason we blurted it all out to this guy, you know, that we were running away from the army, and that we were against the Vietnam War, and we were scared shitless, and we didn’t know what to do. And then when we got done he said, “I am a pacifist, and I am from Sweden, and I think you are doing the right thing, and you can go home with me. I’ll take you to Sweden and you’ll be safe with me.” And it was like, “Okay!” You know, it was like, “Oh, oh, oh!” And he did, and it turned out that this guy was one of the most famous artists in Sweden, and his brother was a very famous journalist on the biggest newspaper in Sweden.

Rick: Did he buy you a plane ticket, by the way?

Barbara: Yes, everything. He paid for everything. We became a member of his family. He took us to Sweden. And also the other thing was that he was sort of like the first person in my life that sort of saw the light in me. And he said to me immediately, “Well, all this is happening. What do you want to do, Barbara?” And I said to him, “Well, I want to be a writer, because I always was writing stuff.” And then, so immediately he bought me a little typewriter. So first of all, when we came to Sweden we were like …

Rick: Hang on a second, I have a practical, mundane question. If you’re underground, how is it that you have a passport and you can go from US to Mexico, and Mexico to Sweden, and all that, or was that just in the days when they didn’t have their act together?

Barbara: They didn’t. Well, actually it’s really interesting that you say that, because when we got deported, when we were underground, one of the first places we went to was England, and we got deported from England back to New York. And we were so sure that when we landed in New York that the police were going to be waiting for us. And when we went through Kennedy, we never ever figured that out. And somebody later told me that they believed it had something to do with my father.

Rick: They actually possibly knew who you were and decided to let you slide.

Barbara: Yeah, because it comes later on in the story, too, things with my … because my father was very high up in government. So anyway, we never quite figured out … this is a question that I can’t really answer, and my father and mother are dead, but the thought has arisen this. But anyway, we did have passports still. And so, this guy, he took us to Sweden, and we became celebrities when we got off the plane there, and Sweden was very anti-American at that time, and they were not a member of NATO. And we became like these celebrities, the “other America.” And we were on TV, and then I decided … because I was so traumatized by these two years of being underground, and having run away from home, and suddenly being out there and taking all these drugs, that was the other bit. But, so I wrote a book called The Journey, which was actually about the other America, about the youth movement, and so on. And so I suddenly became this famous person in Scandinavia because of that. And we got political asylum in Sweden. So, there we were in Sweden. And it was also like, “What are we doing here?” It was very cold and very blonde, and it was like … So that was the beginning of this sort of getting thrown into this cauldron of life at a very young age, and being totally bowled over by it. But then I suddenly became famous, and then I came to Denmark, because at that time there was something called the Bertram Russell War Crimes Tribunal. And my book, which was about the other America, the young America who were saying no … I mean, I got involved in all this stuff. The book was published here in Denmark, and I became also a celebrity here. And I had my own column in the newspaper. And it was like all this stuff. They wanted to know what I thought, because I was sort of this representative of another face of America here in Scandinavia. But for me, it was like, I wasn’t interested in that. I wasn’t interested in being famous, and I got offered all these columns and jobs, and I could be … I mean, people thought I was really crazy for saying no to all this stuff. But that was in … let’s see, that was in the late … so we’re …

Rick: Late 60s.

Barbara: Yeah, and when we came to Sweden, that was in ’66. And when I came to Copenhagen, that was in ’68, when all this happened, the war crimes tribunal, and this sort of sudden fame, and this offering of you can make money by talking about all this. It was like, I was also so young. I was only like 22. I had written this book when I was like 20. And it was like, you know … and so the whole deal then was you had to go to the East. You had to go to India. You had to … I mean, the scene here in Europe was … you know, like in America we smoke pot, but in Europe they were into hashish, that was the thing. And it was like … it was a much more psychedelic, dark scene in a way. But it was also, you know, the influence of going to … going to the East was part of the thing here. You had to go to India, so we decided to go. Oh, now I was no longer with the American guy. We broke up and I met a Dane. And so we hitchhiked again. I mean, when I think about it, over land to Afghanistan, that took about … that also took about three weeks, four weeks, just in the wintertime. When I think about the things I’ve done, and coming to Afghanistan, by the time we got there I was so ill. And it totally freaked me out to be … I mean, you know, when you see the pictures of Afghanistan, the war in Afghanistan today, I mean, I really wonder what they could possibly be bombing, because when I was there in 1960, the end of ’68, the beginning of ’69, there was nothing there. I mean, and it was like completely going back to the dark ages. In those days, the hippies from Europe, the hippies, they went over land, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan. That was the route to get to India.

Rick: Yeah, I interviewed a guy who did that, named Radhanath Swami now, and he had a fascinating book. He practically … he almost died every other page in this book. He finally got to the border of India and they wouldn’t let him in. They said, “Go back where you came from,” but he had no money or anything else, so he finally got in the country. But anyway, this is your story, continue please.

Barbara: Well anyway, so being undernourished, sick, the middle of winter, having no money, and ending up in an Afghan hospital, which was more or less just in Kandahar of all places, which is more or less just a mud hut, and then in the middle of the winter you had this long queue of people standing outside. And everybody rolled up their sleeve and then this one doctor went by with a sort of a needle, a hypodermic thing that size, and just … in everybody’s arm, and then you could go home and die, right? So I realized at that point that I had to get help from a real doctor, and so we decided we had to get to Kabul. And we finally got to Kabul, and then I went to the American Embassy, and I knocked on the door. And at that time, and it was probably the same today, but it was like this fortress with these huge doors. And I remember standing there, you know, banging away, and finally somebody came and opened, and I said, “I’m sick, please help me.” And they took one look at me and they said, “We don’t help hippies,” and they slammed the door. And so I decided, “I’ve got to call my father.” And I couldn’t think of anything else to do because I was really afraid that I would die. So I called my father, who I hadn’t spoken to in a really long time, my parents, and I said, “I’m in Afghanistan and I think I’m going to die. Can you help me?” And then he said, “Wait 24 hours and go back to the embassy,” because I told him I had been to the embassy and what had happened. And so he said, “Well, wait 24 hours and go back to the embassy,” and I did. So I waited 24 hours and I went back to the embassy and I did the thing again. I knocked on the door and then they opened the door and then I said, “My name is Barbara Berger,” and they said, “Oh, yes, please come in.” And I sort of walked in and then they said to me, “We don’t know who your father is, but we got a top priority telegram from the State Department saying to help you.” And it was like … and so then I got into this … it was like getting into America out there in the middle of nowhere. It was like this compound in behind this wall, and everything was American and it was modern, and they had real doctors and they had cornflakes, and they put me in a bed. And I had pneumonia and I was undernourished and all this stuff, and they took care of me for quite a few days and fed me for quite a few days. And then the doctor said, “If you want to live, you’ve got to go back to Europe as soon as immediately when we let you out of here. You can’t go on to India because you’ll die.” So I did. It took another three weeks.

Rick: Did you hitchhike back?

Barbara: Yeah, because there was no … I mean, again …

Rick: I was hoping you were going to get some money from your father and fly back, so you hitch hiked back. Okay. Wow.

Barbara: So I think I weighed about 100 pounds when I got back to Denmark. It was really, really not much of me left. But anyway, that was sort of like the end of that period of total freaking out, drugs, chaos, that whole scene. And then the next thing that happened after that was I discovered macrobiotics; we discovered macrobiotics. It was like somehow I had to get well, first of all, but also there had to be some way of creating safety and order. After all these years where I had been on the road, underground, taking drugs, freaking out, and doing all the things that we did. But it got to the point, and also I had seen so many of my friends who had died, people who had taken too many drugs, people who were too freaked out. It got to the point where it was also too scary in the end. There had to be some way of making sense of this life experience, and there had to be a more productive way of being a rebel also, and of achieving higher consciousness. The next chapter for me was this … Macrobiotics is like this sudden miracle. I ate brown rice for 10 days and I started getting better. So the next book that I wrote a couple of years after this was called, “Eat Brown Rice and Make Revolution.” That was my next book, which became another sort cult. That’s why I say I don’t tell so much about my story in the book that you have, but people here know me a bit more. So that was a call to arms to the whole hippie movement, that you couldn’t just smoke hashish all the time and be angry at society. There had to be some more productive way to live, to take better care of your consciousness, to take better care of your body. If we really wanted to change the world, how are we going to do this practically? That was the start of this whole organic, simple living, back to the land. I’m sure it was the same in the States, right? That was the next thing. Then I would say that … Okay, then we founded the East-West Center in Copenhagen and we were the leaders of the whole macrobiotic. We had a shop and the teaching and all that stuff for many years here in Copenhagen. What started to happen for me anyway, was that I started to see in all this teaching about healthy living, a better diet, taking control of your life in that way, I started to notice that the hundreds and hundreds of people who were coming to us for advice, and some of them very, very ill, I started to notice that there was something else going on. Why was it that two people could come and have cancer and you gave them both the same dietary advice? The brown rice, the miso soup, the whole thing that we were doing, and the one person would get better and the other person would actually die. So then I started to become aware of the fact that I called it at that time, “What’s the X factor here?” That led me to the next big stage and the next development stage for me was this about the awareness of the mental, psychological, spiritual aspects of all of what we are experiencing. I myself also became very disillusioned with macrobiotics and left it. That’s a whole other story. That whole movement with its hierarchy, its guru, and its whole thing, it was very based on the body identification, food, and that whole very materialistic, actually, when I look back at it now. The fact that I left that, I was also considered a traitor to that movement. So that led me to the work that I’ve been doing the last many years, the last 25 years, the mind consciousness, and ever-expanding understanding of the human condition, I would say. So the book that you have, this one, The Awakening Human Being, is really an outlining of what I’ve been teaching with my son Tim Ray here in Scandinavia. I think the other thing I’d like to say about this approach that we’ve been using is that Scandinavia is probably the most non-religious societies in the world. I mean, the people here are definitely not religious. You cannot talk about God, spirituality, that kind of stuff, and get away with anything here. So I’ve learned, and that’s why this book is sort of very rational, how to explain the nature of consciousness and the way the mind works without using any sort of spiritual, God-related terminology. And so that has sort of forced me to try to boil it all down to the bare bones, you could say. What is the universal truth in all the different teachings, and how can I explain this in a way that children can get, or anybody can get, just by hearing? And can you test it yourself? So that’s sort of the … you’ve read the beginning of the book. I have these, the mental laws. It’s actually very popular here in Scandinavia, this whole idea of mental laws. It’s sort of a way of presenting the nature of consciousness and the nature of mind in a way that most people can actually relate to. So that’s really what that’s about.

Rick: Cool. So, my life has a lot of similarities to yours, but yours is even more out there, it seems to me.

Barbara: What did you do about the army?

Rick: I had a high draft number. There was a lottery in those days, and they chose, according to your birthday, you got a particular number. Mine was 284, something which was high enough that they never got to it in drafting people.

Barbara: So God was really on your side, right?

Rick: Yeah, so I just plunged into being a meditation teacher and didn’t have to worry about the draft; that was nice.

Barbara: Well actually, the guy that I was married to, that I ran away with, Steve, after we broke up, and then there was this amnesty. Remember President Ford? I stayed here, but he went back, so he went back after the amnesty. He was fine, so nothing ever happened to him either.

Rick: Well you weren’t going to get drafted, so you were just hanging around with him. You could have come and gone any time you wanted, right?

Barbara: Exactly, exactly. But just to say what happened to him, he did go back.

Rick: So when you began to realize that it wasn’t all about the body, and just eating pure food, that that wasn’t going to do it for you ultimately, what spiritual things did you begin to explore?

Barbara: Well I would say that the first thing that really spoke to me after macrobiotics, I also must say that I’ve always done things to extremes, you can hear that. So I was so fanatic macrobiotic, and I had three children, and the whole deal there. And then I finally collapsed from malnutrition also from that. And after that, I think the thing that really caught my attention was the signs of the mind. You know, the old, the new thought movement in America, Ernest Holmes, this kind of sort of trying to map out the way our thinking influences our experience. I would say that for me that was like taking back responsibility for my experience instead of putting it out there, food, whatever it is, the Vietnam War, all of these things. For me that was sort of a cataclysmic shift, you could say, that the way I view my experiences, the thoughts that I have about it, that I actually have some choice here. I mean that I can see also with all the people that I teach, I also work as a therapist, the whole understanding that we actually have a choice, that we are not our thinking, that we don’t have to be run by it. So I think that was the next, really the next step for me before I really became aware of the really great spiritual teachings and the whole thing about context, content, the nature of consciousness, all of these things were where I am now.

Rick: So what were these really great spiritual teachings that you became aware of?

Barbara: Yeah, eventually all of the great teachers, I mean, Sri Nisargadatta, the Bhagavad Gita, all of the traditional teachings, I have more, I don’t know everything about everything, but I have studied all of these things. And I have never had one specific guru, or you could say that the inner guru has been there all the time, but I haven’t had one specific teacher.

Rick: But you have had, obviously, done a lot of study, and did you eventually devise a practice for yourself, which you adhered to?

Barbara: Yeah, definitely, I mean daily meditation. I would say again, you haven’t read, I can understand, the whole of the Awakening Human Being, but the second half is a lot of different practices, and I tried to sort of …

Rick: You have done a bunch of them, yeah, I noticed that, because I read the whole table of contents and skimmed through, but yeah.

Barbara: I sort of tried to pick and divide it up into, I have these two different approaches to spiritual practice. One I call focus tools, and the other I call investigation tools. And so I’ve tried to pick and choose from the different practices, and obviously I won’t write about something that I haven’t found effective for myself. So I have tried to pick and choose from the various practices that I’ve used, which I feel have helped me a lot in this book. So I would say in the focus tool bag, that is learning that what you focus your attention on grows, and how can you use that to improve your experience of life. When we understand that what we identify with, that’s what we experience. I mean, just that understanding and the realization that we … When we know this, we actually have a choice. As long as we’re unconscious about the nature of this mechanism of mind, we’re victims actually of forces that we don’t really understand. So when we get this awareness that thought is cause, again I’m talking about our experience, thought is cause, and our experience of reality is based on our interpretation. You could say, “Reality is what it is, and every event that happens, people have different experiences or different interpretations of this event, and that’s what they get to experience.” And once we see that, it’s so liberating. I mean, we’re talking about, now we have a choice. And so, all of the focus tools in this book that I recommend are different ways of using our ability to choose. What are we going to focus our attention on? What do we want to see in this experience? So that’s the one thing, and the other kind of tools in the book are what I call investigation tools. And I have discovered now that because we are so identified with our thinking and so attached to our stories, people who come to me who are in crisis, that’s the kind of therapy I do, it’s always that their identification with their story is so solid that they don’t see that they have any options. That’s really, you could say, in a way, the definition of crisis, right? And so, investigation tools, that’s really reality testing, you could say. Questioning the stories we have about what’s going on in our life is also an extremely powerful spiritual practice, to find out, “Is it true? Is our interpretation true?” And often people, especially people who are unhappy or who are in crisis, they have these catastrophic interpretations of whatever it is, right? And so, this kind of exercise of sitting with your thinking and saying, “Reality and my thinking, how do they match in any way?” So, those are the kind of tools and those are the kind of practices. You asked me what kind of practices I do. I myself go from the one to the other.

Rick: Yeah, I noticed you mentioned Byron Katie in your book, and she has a very useful way of prying one’s loose from the rigid adherence to one’s story as being absolutely true.

Barbara: Absolutely, she’s brilliant. I’m a really big fan of her work and I’ve used it a lot for myself, and I use it very successfully with clients also. People who are willing to go there.

Rick: If you think about it, I’d say the vast majority of people in the world, probably more than 99%, really assume that the world is as they see it, and that their story of who they are and what they are and what’s actually going on is real. There’s no other possible interpretation. So I guess, would you say that the awakening human being, I guess you would probably agree that an awakening human being is one who is beginning to rouse themselves from that slumber of …

Barbara: Well that’s my definition of awakening actually, to realize, to become awake to the nature of consciousness. And as you become awake to the nature of consciousness, you see that there is this field of consciousness and within it thoughts arise and disappear, and they are not who you are. This understanding alone of being able to witness, that’s what we do when we meditate, we witness the thoughts arise and they disappear, and we’re still here. So we obviously can’t be that. I mean that is so profound when you get that.

Rick: Can’t be the thoughts you mean?

Barbara: You can’t be the thoughts. The thoughts come and go, right? I mean you know you sit there, I know you practice a lot of meditation, you sit there and you watch the mind go crazy, right? And you think about, you know, I forgot to buy milk in the supermarket, my boyfriend said this, or whatever, but they come and go, and who’s watching? Who’s witnessing? And so when you really get that, then you also have the ability to question these stories then.

Rick: Yeah, another helpful way … I’m sorry, go ahead.

Barbara: I noticed for example, a lot of people come because they have relationship problems. So I like to use this one sort of as a good example about what happens to us when we’re so identified with our stories, what you just said before. If you take a divorce, the reality of a divorce is like you have two people who were living together and now they part. That’s the fact of what happened, right? And then you have this woman who comes in the door and it’s like, “Ahh!” You know, it’s like the end of the world, I lost the love of my life, I’ll be alone for the rest of my life, I’ll never be happy again. That’s her interpretation of this event. I know for a fact, because I’ve been divorced three times now, especially the first time when I got divorced, it was like, “Hallelujah!” You know, now I’m free. I had a completely different story about what divorce meant. So, just that simple example is like …

Rick: It all depends on the circumstances of the relationship, I suppose, and how you’re going to react to it.

Barbara: But your reaction, what I’m trying to say is that your reaction is what you get to experience. Divorce in both cases, if you think it’s great, the reality is two people who were together, they parted. That’s sort of like the reality. And then you have all your interpretations of what it means for your life, but that’s what your experience is, but it’s not inherent in the event. It’s entirely subjective, right?

Rick: Yeah, I mean, look at the weather. I’ve seen people during a rainy season say, “Oh, this is so depressing and I’m miserable, I hate this weather,” and yada, yada. And other people say, “Oh, isn’t this nice? We can light a fire and we can play cards, and it’s kind of cozy.” So, it’s the very same weather.

Barbara: Exactly, and I know all about that, living here in Scandinavia where it’s dark a lot and rainy a lot. I mean, people really can get depressed by that too, and it’s like, “Hello?”

Rick: You know, another interesting trick for recognizing that you are not your story, you are not your thoughts, is … I mean, you and I are both in our 60s and if we kind of introspect even a little bit, we realize we’re the same person that we were in our teens, very same person, just circumstances have changed, the body has changed, but the “me,” that’s the same old thing. And I was just reading Tim Freke’s book, whom I just interviewed, he was saying he was at some seminar and some 83-year-old woman came to him and she said, “You know, the older I get, the easier it is for me to see that that which I really am is eternal, it’s not subject to the fluctuations of time.”

Barbara: And that’s the good news, isn’t it? But also, I mean, I’ve just written another book that you don’t have yet called “Sane Self-Talk,” and actually what you’re sort of pointing towards is what I’ve also found out that with this experience comes actually what I now am calling psychological maturity. In other words, as we become more aware of these mechanisms and as we become more aware of the fact that there’s no inherent value in outer things, it’s our interpretation and that we can do something about this, we can also learn to have what I call more “sane self-talk.” That’s actually what you’re talking about now, to have a more realistic assessment of the human condition and a more realistic assessment of what it means to be a human being. And yeah, we have difficulties and we have this and that, and we muddle through it, and we get better at taking care of ourselves when we have a more realistic assessment of what it means to be a human being. And that we don’t have to be so dragged around by our own catastrophic interpretation of events, actually. So that’s like growing up in a way, it’s like a huge relief, I would say. Don’t you feel also more, sort of, you know yourself better and you are more able to deal with the ups and downs? You don’t get quite so freaked out as you used to do, or what?

Rick: Oh yeah, I mean very much so. And I don’t think there’s any end to the degree of flowering of that, the depth of that. I mean there is something which is absolutely non-changing and pure equanimity in its nature, but one’s orientation to that, the degree to which one embodies that and the clarity with which one realizes that, in my experience so far, there is no end to the development of that.

Barbara: Very well said, very well said.

Rick: And the more it develops, the more it provides a kind of a buffer or a lubricant to the changes and ups and downs of life. What once might have been difficult or tragic becomes kind of interesting or intriguing, you know, an adventure.

Barbara: Well said, well said. So congratulations, I mean that’s what we all, sort of, I mean anyway, partly are striving for, to have this more, what should we say, realistic, easy going, laid back, I mean, relationship to the experience of life in these bodies, right? I mean, chugging around and we’re doing the best we can. And not, I mean, there’s so many people, the level of catastrophic thinking that so many people have, and because we are, because they’re so identified with the stories, they don’t have that ability to pull back. I mean, you just have to turn on CNN, it’s like, you know, crank it up, crank it up, the fear machine, right? It’s like, hello? You know, so, and it seems to me in a way that the media is feeding on that kind of stuff, you know. So we need to say what we’re saying loud and clear, so there’s some balance here, I hope.

Rick: Yeah, I mean the kind of stuff we’re talking, Oprah’s trying to do something with it, but it doesn’t equate to big bucks in the prime time media, you know. She has to throw her own money behind it to get it started. But, and you know, what I just said is not to say that you don’t have a preference in terms of the way things go. It’s not like, “Oh boy, I hope I get the flu because it will be an interesting adventure.”

Barbara: No, no, no, we need to say that. I mean, we do have our preferences, and I’m definitely not saying that we shouldn’t live as healthy, you know, with as much clarity as possible, and that we shouldn’t be as proactive as possible. I’m not saying any of that, I mean, but that life does what it does, and we don’t have a choice when it’s happening in that sense. I mean that reality, this moment, I mean it’s already done, right? So it’s more a question about how are we going to relate to that. And the less freaked out we are, the better I find that we can deal with stuff, because the more freaked out you are, the less of a chance you have of making sane, wise decisions, right? So it’s more that.

Rick: There’s a verse in the Gita which I’ve probably quoted far too many times, but it’s, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits.” And that’s very power of now-ish, because control over action alone means you really have control over what’s happening now in this moment, but you leave the fruits of action to God, or however you want to see it.

Barbara: Or I would say, I probably would say it like this, that your intention, you have control over your intention, but beyond that it’s not in your hands at all. It’s very important to, I mean again, if peace of mind is one of our preferences, it’s very important to understand that, because if we’re attached to the fruit of our actions, it’s …

Rick: it’s a sorry situation, because then you’re at the mercy of something which is out of your hands, and you’re going to get tossed around.

Barbara: And I think the other thing that’s really important about this whole sort of spiritual awakening that people like you and I are going through, is that we come to realize that we actually have what I call “inherent worth” to begin with. And inherent worth is like, you could say in a way, it’s the nature of reality itself. The fact that we are here, the fact that for whatever reason, consciousness is the way it is, and we have arisen in this field of consciousness. So I think that the whole identification that’s going on in our society now, so much with the media and the expectations that people have for what it takes to live a happy life, and you’ve got to be this thin and this beautiful and have this much money in the bank, and all that stuff. It’s all based actually on not understanding the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality, which is that you have inherent worth to begin with. Because why would we be so enamored of being thin, being beautiful, being rich, all that stuff that’s so in your face today, if we understood who we really are, if we had a realistic assessment of this thing called life. So I think that this spiritual information that people like you and I are working with, and we’re trying to propagate and spread as much as possible, it’s really so important to end the enormous amount of human suffering that’s going on. I mean, what other solution is there? You say you’re getting more political, and I certainly had a very political background, as you can hear too. But again, until we understand the nature of mind and consciousness, and our true nature, the nature of reality, how are we going to solve any of these problems?

Rick: Good point. I mean, when I say I’m getting more political, it’s not to the exclusion of spirituality, but actually with that as its foundation. I really feel that unless consciousness rises, then there’s no nutrient for all the various relative solutions to succeed, no fuel. So absolutely, we need to do something about global warming and feeding the starving, and all that stuff. And you don’t go to the starving kid and say, “Here, meditate.” You bring him food, but there’s no end to problems in the world. And if we merely deal with problems on the level of problems, I think it was Einstein who said that as long as you try to solve a problem on the level at which it was created, you’re not going to succeed. You need to go to a deeper level. And ultimately, spirituality is that deeper level. But I’ve seen people do the opposite and get so preoccupied with spirituality that they become selfish and they don’t feel like they need to do anything on a relative level, and it doesn’t matter, and so on and so forth.

Barbara: That’s what I call “spiritual bypass.” Actually, at the very end of the awakening human being, now that we’re talking about this, I have what I call the “ripple effect,” this very question that we’re talking about now. How can we change the world? I mean, that’s always been, you know, like, I want to be enlightened and I want to change the world. Nothing less will satisfy me, right? So, I mean, the ripple effect is that our thoughts, our words, our actions, they ripple out to the people in our family and to our community, and I mean, on that level. But you can also say that people who are higher in consciousness, the thought about the way our vibrational quality influences the field of consciousness, that the influence … so we have an influence, you could say, with our thoughts, words, and actions that you can probably see, but how much influence do we have on the vibrational level also? So there are many ways of looking at this, but you still come back to that, “If we don’t get clear, it’s really not going to help that much.”

Rick: Yeah, and as we know from physics, subtler levels are more powerful, so …

Barbara: Exactly.

Rick: … if you can radiate an influence from a subtler level, it’s going to have a big impact. There might be people in caves in the Himalayas who are having a much bigger impact on the world than political activists and so on.

Barbara: Yeah, because sometimes I like to say, sitting quietly, doing nothing, it could be the best service you could do for the world, again, from this point of view. I don’t know if you’re … are you familiar with David Hawkins, the work of David Hawkins?

Rick: Yeah, see the guy who has this numeric scale?

Barbara: Exactly, exactly. And he has this calibration about the different … the higher, from unconditional love, when you enter the non-dual paradigm, that the influence, the vibrational influence of the beings who are on that level of consciousness is so much vaster than people who are in fear, anger, desire. I mean, it’s fascinating, his work. I highly recommend it.

Rick: Yeah.

Barbara: I’m very, very … his comprehensive mapping out of the human condition is just mind-boggling.

Rick: Yeah, like everything else that should probably be taken with a grain of salt is an interesting theory. I think he uses muscle testing to figure out all this stuff.

Barbara: Exactly, exactly.

Rick: Which I’m a little bit skeptical of, but at least it’s skeptical in terms of it having any absolute …

Barbara: Yeah, but for example, he has a book called “Transcending the Levels of Consciousness,” where he maps out the different levels. It’s fascinating reading. I’m sure you will find it very interesting.

Rick: Maybe I could interview the guy one of these days.

Barbara: He’s very old, I don’t know if he does anymore.

Rick: Maybe not.

Barbara: I’m not sure he does public appearances anymore, but try, definitely try.

Rick: Yeah, I wanted to get back to something you said about intention. We have control over our intentions, and that kind of made me think. And I thought, well, people have all kinds of crazy intentions. I mean, they think, “Okay, well maybe I should spend all my money on lottery tickets, and I’ll get rich.” Or, “Maybe if I …”

Barbara: “According to your faith, it shall be done unto you.”

Rick: “If I go with this gun and rob this liquor store, it will be to my advantage.” So, how do we get a leverage on our intentions so as to elevate them, make them more wise and more conducive to everyone’s well-being, including our own?

Barbara: Again, I think that until we wake up, we don’t realize that we have a choice about our intention. And because we have projected value out there, and we don’t understand the nature of consciousness, we are not really choosing. I don’t believe that people are … I mean, you say, “Okay, everybody’s choosing,” but making conscious choices that are for the highest good, you have to be aware that you can do this before you can actually … I mean, this is high spiritual practice that you’re talking about. I mean, actually, we’re choosing in every now moment, aren’t we? I mean, what are you going to do now? Are you going to go left? Are you going to go right? Are you going to focus on God? Are you going to indulge in catastrophic thinking? Are you going to see the divinity in this person? Or are you going to think that … and each one of these … this is our karma, you could say. Each one of these choices is engendering another activity, a certain response. So it’s a fascinating thing to become aware of how much choice you have. I mean, this is free will we’re talking about, and this is what makes us human, and which also makes this human experience so interesting, because we get to experience the results of our choices.

Rick: Yeah, and you say, “When we wake up,” that makes it sound like a static watershed moment.

Barbara: No, no.

Rick: To me, there’s degrees of …

Barbara: I mean, my whole life story, I mean, I’m 67 years old now, I mean, it’s like … I would say that the transforming moment, you could say, yes, it’s incremental, but when you start to realize about the nature of consciousness, that’s a watershed moment.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a big breakthrough, sure.

Barbara: Before that, you’re sort of a victim of all these forces that you don’t understand. So there you’re starting to wake up, but then the awakening process is, as you say … I’m definitely not one of those people that you hear about that just, you know, and then, “Om Satyananda,” that’s it. I mean, I’ve had my moments, definitely, and I have more clarity, less clarity. I would say I’m definitely more and more awake. I definitely agree with you that it’s a process.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what to say to such people. Somebody recently said to me, “I am totally awake,” and I didn’t know what to say. It’s like, “All right, well, let’s wait and see, okay?”

Barbara: I would think that was probably a wise choice. I would have also said, “Good for you, right? I mean, what are you going to say?” I totally agree, I totally agree.

Rick: I mean, you know, I always give people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t say, “Absolutely, that’s not possible,” because who knows? But I’m just very skeptical.

Barbara: It’s definitely not my experience.

Rick: Not mine, and if someone says it’s theirs, I can’t emphatically deny it, but I’d be interested to talk to them in five years and see whether they still feel that that was the case.

Barbara: Yeah, absolutely right. But I think that also, even when I look back at my past, I can see, I mean, I can even find moments like when I was 10 or 12 years old, where I had moments of that divine bliss consciousness, “Om Sat Chit Ananda.” It was, I mean, I didn’t have the words for it, I didn’t have the context for it, I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I can see now with the knowledge I have today and with the experiences I have today, that I’ve had them along the way at different points in time, very powerfully, and I have them also now. But again, as you say, it’s definitely not a constant, and I mean, it’s a really bumpy road. And I think also what’s happening to me now is that the more awake I become, the more of the dark side, or the old stuff, is actually coming up too, in my experience. I don’t know if you have that, but I feel that, I don’t know for sure, but I think it may have something to do with becoming more conscious, that it allows, I don’t know, the old stuff to come up.

Rick: Exactly, I think, well, there’s several interesting things from what you just said. One is, there’s a phone message coming in, it’s kind of distracting. I think there’s a bigger container in which things can be resolved. Like if you take a glass of water and throw some mud in it, it’s going to muddy up the whole glass. But if you take an ocean and throw some mud in it, the mud just dissolves. So the more ocean-like you become, the more stuff can be dissolved or resolved. And many people report actually that they’ll have some significant awakening, and then the shit will really hit the fan.

Barbara: Yeah, I think that’s really quite exciting.

Rick: Because it was all bottled up before, but then there’s this openness and it can begin to be released.

Barbara: I’m glad to hear you agree with that, because that seems to me to be really my experience, that the more clear I get, or as you say, the more spacious, the more there is room for … I mean, also, I come from a really dysfunctional family, and I had a really traumatic start, and all of those crazy experiences I’ve had, it’s true, they’ve all been sort of bottled up, in a way, spiritual bypass. And now that I’ve become more spacious and more understanding of all these things, they are really coming up again, to be clear, I think. I hope so.

Rick: Yeah, you’re probably right. And you know the whole idea of … you said a minute ago that, you know, I don’t know, you’re not in some kind of perpetual enlightened state or something, and there’s still fluctuation and variation going on.

Barbara: A lot.

Rick: I kind of discussed this with Tim Freke a little while ago too, and he also was saying he didn’t think anybody is in some kind of absolutely stable enlightened state. I tend to disagree. I think there are people who are 24/7 in a very clear state of realization, which just doesn’t get overshadowed by anything, no matter what. But such people are probably rare, but probably becoming more common, and we don’t need to compare ourselves with them or anything else, you know, it will happen if it happens when it happens. But I think it should be concluded within the realm of possibility for human development.

Barbara: I love the thought. Actually, I was just watching on YouTube Sri Nisargadatta. I didn’t realize there were any films of him, and it was really interesting to see how agitated he was, and how, you know, when you read his book “I Am That,” it’s like, “Wow!” And to actually see him, and to know the clarity of mind that this guy had, and the level of consciousness that he had, but he also had his human personality. If you haven’t seen it, go in on YouTube and watch it. He’s like, “Duh-duh-duh-duh!” He seems very agitated and very excited. He’s not, you know, this … we sometimes have that picture of when you’re enlightened, but you’re so calm. So I just … “Oh, for me!”

Rick: And in his case, he’s puffing away at the cigarettes to which his body was addicted. But you know, you can’t judge a book by its cover. And you need to approach such a person with kind of the attempt to visualize their internal state, as best you can, and to realize that it may be a far cry from what you infer from the outer appearance.

Barbara: Apparently, apparently. That’s why it was so fascinating to watch, because if you read his books and you meditate on what he says, you know, “Ask yourself,” over and over again. It only took him 3 years, he says, to ask yourself the “I am.” Neti, Neti, Neti, right?

Rick: So I have quite a few people in Scandinavia watching this show, and even sending in donations and all, so it can’t entirely be a bunch of agnostics. There seems to be a fair amount of spiritual zeal over there.

Barbara: Yes, absolutely, but I just meant that the way it’s presented here, it’s definitely not the God thing. There’s a lot of serious spiritual practice here, definitely, definitely. Buddhism and so on.

Rick: Yeah, in my opinion, the God thing, you know, when I think of God, talk of God, it’s definitely not the traditional religious image of God.

Barbara: No, me neither.

Rick: But, you know, I think God, this may not be a good word because there’s so much baggage with it, but that reality is staring us in the face.

Barbara: Absolutely.

Rick: Anything you look at closely enough, you notice that there’s incredible ordinance and intelligence and structure and amazing, intricate thing going on there, that’s not just little billiard balls running into each other haphazardly.

Barbara: I don’t think so. It’s true though, the word “God” is so fraught with … it’s probably better not to use it if you don’t have to anyway, that’s my experience.

Rick: Yeah.

Barbara: But it’s the same.

Rick: Because we use words to actually try to communicate something, and if we use a word like that, we’re likely to miscommunicate. So take us through the book a little bit more. I know you have a principles and a practice section, and mainly I was reading the principles section because it’s towards the beginning.

Barbara: Well actually, I think I could say also that if people are interested in the way I’ve formulated the mental laws, we have them on our website. You can download them for free. So the website is www.beamteam.com, that’s our website. And if you click on the mental laws, that’s the first section of this book, you can download them. And again, that has been my take on trying to present the nature of consciousness and mind in a very scientific way.

Rick: I like your treatment of that in the book. You were saying you don’t get mangoes from an apple seed or whatever. There are obviously laws of nature that govern things in a particular way.

Barbara: Exactly. I try to start off by comparing the fact that we are all familiar with the fact that there are physical laws. And then I use the example of the law of gravity. The law of gravity is if you stand up on a building and you jump off, you’re going to fall down. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re President Obama or you’re the cleaning lady or you’re Chinese. So this is an impersonal mechanism that is automatic, impersonal for everyone. It’s happening at all times. And it’s also important to know that it’s happening even if you don’t know about it, even if you’re not conscious about it. So in other words, the law of gravity, you can’t stand up there and say, “Oh, I didn’t know about the law of gravity. I shouldn’t have hit the ground.” It doesn’t care if you know about it. So I use that as sort of my launching pad to say that the mental mechanisms of mind are in the same way. They are impersonal, automatic mechanisms that are in operation for all of us, whether or not we are aware of them.

Rick: And whether or not we believe in them.

Barbara: Exactly.

Rick: You know, we might say, you know, we can think of a million examples, but a person might insist they don’t believe in a particular thing. They don’t believe that the world is more than 6,000 years old and people used to ride around on dinosaurs. But if you believe that, then it has no bearing whatsoever on whether the world really is 6,000 years old.

Barbara: Exactly, reality doesn’t really care.

Rick: Yeah, and it doesn’t matter if it’s said in some book, or you think some book said it.

Barbara: So that’s also why, and then I say to the reader in the book, I say, “Well, I tried to set it up like this, don’t believe me. I tried to set it up so …” I’m trying to make a presentation and you test these sort of mechanisms that I point out and see if they are right. And so I start off with this thought, that the first mental law I call the law of thoughts arising, that thoughts arise and disappear. And then I say to the reader, “Okay, sit down on a chair in front of a white wall, a white wall with no pictures, preferably, just a white wall, and look at this white wall and then tell yourself that you’re not going to think.”

Rick: I can see how you came up with that example.


Barbara: Okay, what are you referring to?

Rick: Yeah, you’ve got these white walls there.

Barbara: Okay, so anyway, so when you do that, I mean, you’re a meditation practitioner, so you can maybe not think for, I don’t know, how long can you go before a thought arises?

Rick: Oh, not very long at all.

Barbara: Exactly.

Rick: Although sometimes you get into a real deep state and you slip into something and there’s a hiatus from thoughts for a while, but ordinarily the mind just does its thing.

Barbara: Exactly, so that’s the first observation, that thoughts arise and disappear. And you can test that for yourself. Anybody can sit down and test it for themselves and they will see that this is an impersonal mechanism that we’re not doing it, that thoughts are just, you know, “I forgot to buy milk in the supermarket,” and then it’s gone again. So I think that that’s a very important observation to make for yourself. I always, when we lecture and do workshops, we always sit with people and get them to do that so they find out that that’s the nature of what’s going on. And then the second law I call the law of witnessing. And then I say, “Okay, go back to the chair on the white wall and do it again.” So you sit there and you look at the white wall and you say, “I’m not going to think,” and then the thought comes up, you know, “I forgot to buy milk in the supermarket,” and it goes away. And then the next thought comes up, “Oh, I’m really not sitting very well. I have a pain in my butt,” or whatever, “Oh, my boyfriend.” So you watch the thoughts arise and disappear, and then I say, “Okay, so who or what is noticing this?” >>

Rick: You know what’s interesting there though is that you get gripped by the thought, you get caught into the thought, and to the point where you don’t realize you’re thinking it until after a while the thought maybe begins to dissipate and grip you a bit less, and you realize, “Oh, I’ve gone off on this thought.” You’re sort of like so absorbed in it that you didn’t really even know you were absorbed in it.

Barbara: You notice that that’s also when we identify with our thoughts and we’re off. But anyway, if you just go back to the fact that at some point in time, even if you do that, especially if you’re trying to meditate, then you realize, “I’d better focus on my breathing again,” or whatever your technique is, so you come back to … But then I say, “Okay, so this witnessing, that’s who you really are, right?” Because anything that arises and disappears can’t be real. So as far as I can see, that’s a major breakthrough in consciousness, to just have that awareness, right?

Rick: Yeah, even that recognition can be a major breakthrough. And you know, I like the fact that you present a scientific, systematic approach to all this, because spirituality may have a connotation for some people of being kind of airy-fairy, or ooga-booga, or involving beliefs or metaphysical leaps of fancy, but it really should be experiential, and that’s really what it should, in my opinion, what we should be referring to when we talk of practical contemporary spirituality. It’s all about actually having an experience of some sort, and not necessarily a transitory one either, but just it’s experiential, not metaphysical or religious. >>

Barbara: Yeah, that you can test it for yourself.

Rick: Yeah, it’s testable by scientific procedures.

Barbara: Well, I’ve noticed that the feedback I get here in Scandinavia for these mental laws, because I’ve been teaching it for a while, people are saying to me, “We should be teaching this to our kids in school.” This is a very simple presentation that I have, that kids can understand, as you say, that it’s easy to test, you can listen to it, you can explain it, and you can say, “Okay, yeah, this makes sense. I can see from my own experience that this is actually what’s happening.” And so then, I don’t know if you want to go through the whole thing, but the mental laws are …

Rick: Go through some of the highlights, whatever you think.

Barbara: Well, I think that then the next thing I try to do is I say that, “Okay, the nature of the human experience,” I call that the law number three, is the law of naming. Where in other words, so the quantum field, or the field that is like life itself, the non-dual reality, which is beyond languaging, the way we sort of deal with it in our human experience is that we have thoughts which name this field. You know, this is a chair, this is a lamp, this is a computer. So, it’s our … I mean, and again, this is for convenience. How are we going to manage to make coffee in the morning? So we have all this naming, and then the world arises, you could say, also. I mean, I’m sure you’ve had this experience of waking up in the morning sometimes, and it’s a complete blank, and you don’t know who you are, or where you are, or, or, or. And then you look, “Oh, and there’s his partner. Oh yeah, that’s my partner,” and the alarm clock rings, and then all these names arise, and the world arises. So thoughts arise, world arises. So this naming process is actually what we do automatically. It happens so quickly. Again, I try to get … What I’m trying to do in this book is to slow down the mechanism of mind enough so that we start to understand what’s happening. So I also try to slow this down a bit to notice the naming process. And then I also say that, “Okay, naming is innocent enough, you know, telephone, lamp, computer, tree.” But then we go into more and more generations of naming, and then we get to the storytelling, which is where we start to get in trouble.

Rick: You’re saying that naming is sort of important and useful up to a point, but it can be taken to an extreme which makes it a trap of some sort.

Barbara: Well, in other words, as soon as you start to tell stories about, you know, you could say, “Tree outside my window,” that’s sort of a statement of fact. And then you say, “Okay, tree shading the neighbor’s yard,” and then the neighbor is, you know, getting angry at you for not being a good neighbor, and the tree should be cut down. When we get to our interpretations of the naming, then we start to get into storytelling. And if the story makes you happy, fine, you can say, but a lot of people have stories that are very stressful and that are making them unhappy, and that’s where that investigation model comes in at the end of the book, that when our stories are stressful or making us unhappy, maybe we should question them. But to stick to the mental laws, then I go on to explain in law #4, which I call the law of cause and effect, which is really the heart of the mechanism, that thought is cause and our experience of life on this plane is the effect of our thoughts, that whatever story we tell, that’s what we get to live. And that’s fine. Again, it’s fine enough, it’s innocent enough, except if you’re miserable or unhappy. By understanding this mechanism, you can step back from it and you might want to question your story. You might want to see. When you understand that the thoughts are arising, you’re the witness, you’re naming, you’re telling stories, then you have a choice suddenly. >>

Rick: What if you’re the victim of circumstances beyond your control, like you’re in Nazi Germany and you’re thrown into a concentration camp, and it’s a miserable, horrible situation. Is it miserable and horrible because you’re just telling yourself a story about it, or is it intrinsically miserable and horrible? >>

Barbara: Good question, good question. I’ve been very challenged the last many years, I’ve had a serious ear problem, which has totally changed my life. I get very dizzy. So this question you’re asking, I have thought about it a lot. When something happens, when the so-called shit hits the fan, right? How are you going to, how do you react to it? And again, what I have found out from my own suffering and my own physical ailment that has really changed my life a lot, is that I still do have options, that I still do have, you know, what am I going to focus on? First of all, making peace with where you are. Reality is what it is. And so how am I going to relate to this? I can say, “Why is my life better because I have this?” What is the hidden gifts in this experience? I know for me, who has been such an outward person, an outgoing person, a super active person, it’s like sometimes I think to myself, “I’ve got this ear trouble because God said to me. “Now you have to sit quiet, Barbara”. But that took me quite a while to get to that. But again, in answer to your question, I suppose that people who, even in terrible catastrophic situations, it still has to do with how do we relate to it. But there is no, you know, as long as we are identified with the physical body, and that’s who we are, stuff happens. >>

Rick: Yeah, it does. And actually you can bring up extreme situations as cases in point, but even there, as you say, you can think of even different well-known people who dealt with the same situation in entirely different ways.

Barbara: Completely different ways, yes.

Rick: Some were completely crushed and embittered and depressed, others came out of it with greater wisdom and compassion.

Barbara: Think about Nelson Mandela, 27 years, man!

Rick: Yeah, look at that!

Barbara: I mean, just look at that man, right? He is a living example of that.

Rick: Great example. Or the Dalai Lama, you know, after what he went through with China. He refers to the Chinese as “my friends, the enemy.”

Barbara: Such an inspiration!

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. So, you know, it’s not absolute, it’s not all or nothing. Regardless of the circumstances, there is always some wiggle room.

Barbara: So I mean, how do we hold it? That’s what we are really talking about. The event is what it is. Do we hold it in fear? Do we hold it in anger? Do we hold it in acceptance? Do we hold it in understanding? Can we hold it in unconditional love? I mean, we have these choices.

Rick: And how do we cultivate our ability to choose, you know, to really have the freedom and the wisdom and the strength to make the more constructive choices, rather than be victimized by it?

Barbara: Well, first of all, I would say, again, to understand the mechanism of mind. Again, that’s the reason why I’ve spent so much of my life and time and energy trying to explain this, because again, I don’t believe that we can do this if we don’t understand that we do have a choice. So that’s number one.

Rick: Yeah, that’s the first step, right.

Barbara: But then, once you do understand that, that’s really what all spiritual practice is about, trying to make better choices. I mean, our daily practice, you know, “Surrender all judgment to God,” that’s a great spiritual practice, right? I mean, just that! We are judging all the time, we think we know best, but we’re not running the show, obviously, right? So just the spiritual practice of surrendering all judgment to God, it’s like, “Wow!” So any of these sort of basic, you know, seeing the divinity in everyone, any of these, you could say, focal points, if you really take it as a spiritual practice, very powerful.

Rick: And I suppose that any of them could be seen either as a description or a prescription. In other words, there might be people that describe the way they are spontaneously.

Barbara: That would be great!

Rick: Yeah, well, many people do. You know, for instance, like Mandela, I don’t know, I’m not an expert on Mandela, but it seems that his forgiving, wise nature is so ingrained in him that it’s not like something he has to wrestle with in order to do it.

Barbara: No, every day, right.

Rick: But perhaps that was developed over all those 27 years, and there could have been some dark, bitter times, and he kind of made the choices, and here’s where it becomes a prescription rather than a description. He made the choices to cultivate that kind of personality.

Barbara: Well, you could say also that in spiritual practice, yes, in the beginning it’s a conscious choice and it becomes more a habit.

Rick: Second nature.

Barbara: Yeah, exactly. It becomes integrated and it becomes a part of your being, right?

Rick: Yeah, like tennis or playing the piano or anything else. You do it enough and it gets incorporated and ingrained.

Barbara: Isn’t that a wonderful thing, that we can change our habits? Again, it’s practice, that’s why it’s called spiritual practice, right? That we can make a choice, surrender all judgment to God, for example, and that if you continue to practice that, it will become the default position, right? “I don’t know what’s good or bad, I cannot see the end of all things. Is it true that this is so terrible?”

Rick: And I should think people would find that encouraging, because if people are told that this stuff is supposed to just instantly be able to be this way, and then they find that they are not, they could feel like there is something wrong with them, or they are a failure, or they will never get it. But if they understand it to be a progressive development, then they can be inspired to keep on keeping on. >>

Barbara: Well, I think that’s a very important point. The very last section of that book I have, I call the daily practice, where I actually discuss just what you are saying, that it’s important to understand that it’s a process, it takes a long time, the more you practice, the better you get at it, that you have your ups and downs. And then I also have these different daily programs that I recommend to people, you know, if you only want to use this much time, I have some suggestions. If you want to use more time, I have some more suggestions. So in other words, and then I say, also be aware of the fact that you get better and you get worse at the same time. Sometimes you think, “I am doing all this spiritual practice, why am I feeling so lousy?” And that all of this is a way of embracing your humanity, but also understanding, as you say, that it’s not an instant fix, it’s not magic, it’s hard work.

Rick: Yeah, it seems like it’s good that you ended up in Denmark rather than Berkeley or something. It made you kind of formulate a more practical approach.

Barbara: Thank you, thank you. Well, maybe you’ll come to Copenhagen one day and we’ll get to meet face to face.

Rick: I’d love to, I’ve never been to Scandinavia.

Barbara: Okay, I’d love to have you there.

Rick: I’ve been around most of Europe, but not up there. So, is there anything else you’d like to bring out? I mean, there’s no rush here. We can sort of do the P.T. Barnum approach and leave him wanting more, or else if you feel like there’s anything else that you’d really like to play with a bit, we can take a bit more time.

Barbara: Okay, I think maybe I’d like to end with, I think that another good spiritual practice is to ask yourself, “What is preventing me from being, I don’t know if I should say happy right now, or what is preventing me from experiencing the true radiance of my nature right now?” Because as far as I can see, “Om Satyananda,” the divinity or the radiance or our true nature, whatever we want to call it, that’s what we already are. And then this whole mind thing, and today we’re all so mental, it’s like, as far as I can see, it’s the clouds that are actually covering the sun. If you would say, our true radiance is like the sun, it’s already there. So, as far as I can see, spirituality, the spiritual pathway, is about deprogramming, unlearning all the stuff that prevents us from experiencing the divinity that we are. And so therefore I think that understanding the way the mind works, and beginning to have the ability to question our underlying beliefs, our stories, and to see how our interpretations are making us unhappy, that this de-learning process is so exciting. And therefore I would like to say that if you at any now moment ask yourself, “What is preventing me from experiencing this radiance right now?” Whatever comes to mind, that’s the story that you need to question, as far as I can see. You know, “I should be thinner, I should have a better relationship, I should have more money in the bank, I should have better health, I should be younger.” We have all these expectations, stories, requirements, that as far as I can see, block the experience that we are the happiness, we are the divinity, we are the love that we are seeking, it’s already us. So I like that as a spiritual practice, to ask myself that. “What is it right now, Barbara, that’s preventing you from being present, and from having that experience of this, the suchness of this?”

Rick: Yeah, nice. Okay, well that might be a good thought to leave them with.

Barbara: Yeah.

Rick: So, alright, well let me just conclude then. I’ve been speaking with Barbara Berger, who has written a lot of books, but the most recent was “Sane Self-Talk – Remember What’s Important and Live a Happy Life,” and the one prior to that which I’ve been reading is “The Awakening Human Being.” I’ll link to Barbara’s website and to some of these books from batgap.com. Barbara, as she mentioned, lives in Denmark, but gets around, does things over there. I don’t suppose you ever do things in the States, right? You’re mainly …

Barbara: I have actually, but actually because I’ve had this ear problem, I haven’t been able to fly for the last two years, so I haven’t been to the States for a while, but I usually go wherever I’m invited, that’s sort of the deal.

Rick: Okay, so anyone listening to this who wants to invite Barbara someplace, where she can heavily sedate herself and get on an airplane? Good, and there’s also some, I guess, some audio material on your site, or videos people can watch, or anything?

Barbara: Yeah, there’s a lot of interviews on the site with me, radio interviews. I’ve been really on a lot of shows in the US lately, since the book came out. But as I said, there’s the mental laws you can download for free, and there’s some of this material we’ve been talking about, if you’re interested in that. >>

Rick: Yeah, I’m sure a bunch of people will do that. And so as far as my site is concerned, it’s www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and there you can find all the interviews I’ve ever done, archived, and new ones showing up each week, although next week I’m going to my nephew’s wedding, so I won’t be doing one next weekend. The following weekend is Isaac Shapiro, who’s also over in Europe at the moment. And in addition to the videos of these interviews, there’s an audio podcast, and you’ll see a link to that with every video, so that you can subscribe in iTunes and get them on your iPod, if you like. And there is a… you can subscribe also on the YouTube channel. There’s a link on the site for signing up to be notified by email every time a new interview is posted. There’s a donation button, which you’re free to click if you like. And there is a … my wife is waving her hand over there, like, “Yay!” Oh yeah, she’s teasing me about this little thing I do at the end of every interview, where I go like this at the end of every point. I don’t know why I’m doing that, but some kind of a strange little habit. And one more thing is that there’s a discussion group there at www.BATGAP.com, which sometimes gets very lively. People like to get in and chit-chat about the things we’ve been discussing, and sometimes the person I’ve interviewed gets in there and answers questions, and interacts with people. So keep an eye on that, Barbara. If anybody wants to pose a question to you or something, maybe you can answer it in there.

Barbara: Okay, on your site now, after the show. Okay, I’ll go and look.

Rick: Not immediately, but in a few days when this is up.

Barbara: Okay, okay, super, great, thank you.

Rick: Okay, great. So thanks to all those who have been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next time. [Music]