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Shai: Hello everyone. I am so delighted and honored to have David Whyte as our guest at 1000 reasons for feeling awe. David Whyte stands as a remarkable figure in the world of poetry and prose, drawing deeply from his rich heritage and diverse experiences. Raised amidst the picturesque landscapes of Yorkshire and influenced by his Irish roots, White now resides in the Pacific Northwest, finding inspiration in its natural beauty. His works, including esteemed titles like The Heart Aroused, The Bell, and The Blackboard, reflect a profound exploration of humanity’s relationship with the world, creation, and the essence of life. With a background in marine zoology and experiences like guiding in the Galapagos Islands, Whyte brings a unique perspective to his writing. His poetry resonates beyond the literary sphere, touching lives in corporate boardrooms, educational institutions, and theological conferences, highlighting its universal relevance. Founder of many rivers and invitas, the Institute for Conversational Leadership, White’s influence extends into leadership and personal development, showcasing his multifaceted talents and deep commitment to understanding life’s complexities. So, David, thank you so much for your willingness to participate in this project.

David: Yes, I am very happy to be here. Talk about the theme of awe, which is a necessary thread in every human.

Shai: Thank you. Yes, I certainly share that feeling. I would like to start by reading a short passage that appears on your website titled The Power of Poetry. Wouldn’t that be okay?

David: Yes, please do.

Shai: Thank you. So, the poet leaves and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back. Once this frontier has been reached, a new territory is visible, and what has been said cannot be unsaid. Poetry is a break from freedom. In a sense, all poems are good. All poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable. But only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unattainable realms in the passage of a few short lines. So these are extraordinary lines. And I would like to start by asking you: Is poetry in itself an expression of awe?

David: In a sense, it is because poetry is trying to establish your place in all of the contexts at once, including the contexts that are hidden from you. So the contexts that are hidden below the horizon of your understanding inside you and then beyond the horizon of what you can see with your eyes, hear with your ears, or number with your intellect. So quite often, we all understand the way that we can live our lives and not even be aware of contexts that are right before our eyes, actually that are surrounding us, but which we’re choosing to ignore.

And quite often, when we close off our senses and our understandings from everything that’s knocking on our door because of the general trauma of existence, of being wounded just by meeting other people or other things in life, human beings necessarily draw themselves in and create defenses at times in order to pass through a difficult time in their lives. But in doing that, they almost always never emerge again in a full way unless they’re really conscious of it. So we tend to close down our experience of awe as we close down our sharper, finer, and more far-seeing abilities to understand what’s going on around us. So the act of writing poetry is to try and attempt to bring all of the contexts, both seen and unseen, into a live conversation again.

And the poet is trying to overhear themselves say things they didn’t know they knew, to surprise themselves into their lives again. And that’s one of the reasons for awe: how surprising it is. And one of the diagnostics of having shut awe out of our lives is that we start to become cynical. And one of the chief diagnostics of cynicism is my saying that you can’t surprise me. I know how the game is played, and I refuse to be surprised by anything. I will have an explanation for anything, and I will have a box to put our experience into. Yes, poetry is an unboxing experience, you could say.

Shai: Yes, that, of course, would imply that the good poet has to remove his or her fences in order to be somehow vulnerable, susceptible, or exposed to life.

David: Yes, we tend to think, when we use the metaphor of dismantling or taking down barriers, that it’s hard work. It is a kind of hard work, but it’s the hard work of undoing, actually, of radical not doing, and of dropping down into a more rested, centered, attentive part of the psyche that, just by looking from that place, things start to actually disappear in the way you’ve been seeing them or the way you’ve been arranging your relationship with identity. I think a lot of good art, good speech, and good conversation have to do with the ability to arrange for our own disappearance. The way you see yourself, the way you see the world, the way you think—you have to hold a conversation—all are just let go of so that things can start in the innocence of a real meeting.

Poetry as a form, but any real conversation really as a form of radical undoing. And that’s when the awe starts to open up. I have a piece, actually, that represents that experience. Shall I recite it?

Shai: Oh, yes, please. I had in mind, while you were speaking the poem, something just beyond yourself that somehow seemed to touch on this very experience. Of course, this doesn’t mean that this is what I ask you to recite, but I’m just reminded of it.

David: Well, I was thinking of another poem, but I’m very suggestible, obviously, so I’ll work with that one just beyond yourself, because it does work with it perfectly. And we can return to the one I was thinking.

So just beyond yourself. That’s an experience I had walking up a boreen, which is an Irish name for a small lane in County Clare in the west of Ireland. And I stood at the bottom of this lane, this narrow road, and it had two beautiful limestone walls on either side of it. And the two limestone walls met almost in perfect Italian Renaissance perspective, right at the top of the hill, except they didn’t quite meet. There was a little door of light where the western sun was going down. The light was shining through that little doorway of light, and I felt this incredible invitation to walk to that horizon. And I felt as if I could walk through that door and off into the thin air of my new existence.

And it was a very poignant time because I’d just gone through a separation and divorce from a marriage, and I was attending a marriage in County Clare, actually. And there’s nothing more poignant in your life than attending a wedding when you’re leaving your marriage. And yet it’s still just as moving that two people are speaking of awe. There’s a tremendous amount of awe at a wedding ceremony when you’re witnessing two people make a promise in the teeth, in the gale-force wind. Of all the evidence that this is extremely difficult to do, that’s an awe-inspiring experience, but it makes you very thoughtful. And this was a typical Irish three-day wedding, or at least an old-fashioned Irish three-day wedding. So I’d gone up this road to take a little space for myself.

I was in a very thoughtful place, and there was this new life waiting for me outside, beyond the grief and difficulty of the separation. So this is the piece I wrote, and it’s called Just Beyond Yourself. Just beyond yourself. It’s where you need to be. Just beyond yourself. It’s where you need to be half a step into self-forgetting and restored by what you’ll meet. Just beyond yourself. Just beyond yourself, it’s where you need to be half a step into self-forgetting and restored by what you’ll meet. There’s a road always beckoning when you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time. That’s how you know it’s the road you have to follow.

That’s how you know where you have to go. That’s how you know you have to go. That’s how you know it’s just beyond yourself; it’s where you need to be. Just beyond yourself, it’s where you need to be. Half a step into self-forgetting and being restored by what you’ll meet. There’s a road; there’s a road always beckoning when you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon. And deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time. That’s how you know it’s where you have to go. That’s how you know it’s the road you have to follow. That’s how you know you have to go. It’s just beyond yourself. Just beyond yourself. It’s where you need to be.

So I think one of the awe-inspiring dynamics of existence is the constant way we’re being invited out of ourselves by our own aging and maturation as our desires change and our horizons change in life, by the people who surround us, who are inviting us out, but in all of our great contemplative and religious traditions, by creation itself, by the natural world. And if you’re a traditionally religious person, it’s also by what’s been called the voice of God. It’s the voice that’s beyond the horizon of what you can imagine for yourself, calling you out from where you are. And it’s interesting to think that many of the pernicious, unhealthy states of human psychology come from refusing that invitation, actually. Why? Because it takes enormous amounts of energy to close yourself down away from what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, and who you’re with.

And you pay an enormous price for the lack of that intimacy. We think of intimacy between ourselves and another person as physical intimacy. But there’s a physical, joyous intimacy with creation, with the world itself, with our lives, and with our work that’s also possible. And it takes the same kind of invitational vulnerability that’s needed in a physically intimate relationship—a marriage with a lover,a relationship with a partner. It takes that same kind of physical intimacy, although we don’t quite believe it, to establish a proper relationship with our work and with ourselves and our lives. So we can think of a horizon out in the world beyond which we’re being invited. And that’s one of the beautiful things about horizons. That’s what’s awe-inspiring about a beautiful view when you’re on a cliff and you’re looking out over the ocean.

I know you’re in Sintra, in Portugal. I’ve been there. Yeah. And there’s the ocean, the western ocean, that invited the Portuguese out all over the world. And they probably did go out of the world because that invitation was there on a daily basis. So that’s a deep part of your conversational history. But it takes immense energy to turn your eyes away from the sea, if you live next to the sea, to turn off your sense of delight at the arrival of the waves and the tide and all the different changes of light in that sea. So it’s interesting to think that we’re surrounded by an astonishing sea of experience around us that we’re constantly turning our faces away from.

Shai: Yes.

David: And I’ll just take that metaphor of the horizon in another, also very parallel, useful direction. We tend to think of horizons outside of ourselves, but it’s really interesting to think that you have a horizon inside yourself, too. You have a line outside of yourself beyond which you haven’t gone yet that’s calling you, but actually you have one beneath you, too. You have a deeper, darker, more hidden, more centered, and more understanding self that lies beneath the line of your present personality. So the ability to put not only those two horizons in conversation with each other but also what lies below that horizon, that unknown, into conversation with the unknown beyond the horizon outside you. This is the deepest form of awe.

This is what we call mysticism, or religious experience: one unknown inside you meeting one invitational unknown inside you as a human being meeting the invitational unknown that lies beyond the understanding of your world outside you.

Shai: So that’s the principle of conversation about which you write and speak a lot—the conversation between this kind of inner horizon and outer horizon?

David: Yes. I mean, conversation from Latin, and I’m sure it means the same thing in Portuguese, too: inside out, actually converse, and the opposite with the inside and the outside. To bring those two together and create something quite remarkable in the meeting. So in the Zen tradition, which I’ve set for decades, I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, but that’s been my way of paying, getting into deeper states of attention, you could say, as an aid to all the other forms of attention. But the Zen tradition is all about that. Your identity is not this thing you think is you, nor is it. The world that you’re meeting is the place where you meet. And there’s that very ancient Cohen, the very ancient Zen question: what is the sound of one hand clapping?

Which is really just what it’s like to travel through space and time meeting nothing other than yourself? This is a tragedy. Yeah. The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of your isolation, of your exile.

Shai: I see, yeah. I’ve never considered this in this context or this interpretation.

David: Yes. Not meeting anything. Yes. So you’re not this. You’re not. That’s you for this moment. Is that meeting, this conversation you and I are having here, that other people are listening to? This is our identity at the moment. And the vitality of the conversation depends on our mutual attentiveness. How present are you? And there’s this incredible, awe-inspiring. Speaking of awe, So I keep returning to that word because it’s part of your theme.

The awe in absolute presence is absolute disappearance.

Shai: So would you say that, mystically speaking, there is a point in which this conversation is transcended to such a degree that inner and outer merge into one another or no longer exist?

David: No, I think they all exist at the same time. It’s just that you don’t choose between them. You’ve got what you think is you. You’ve got what you think is other than you, and you’ve got the meeting between them both. And all those contexts exist at the same time. And that’s where a good sense of humor comes from, because you have to understand that one of the ways you disappear is through humiliation, through being humiliated. Whatever fancy ideas you have about yourself—this self that’s meeting the world—those fancy ideas and those strange ideas will be tested and often blown apart by the meeting itself. It’s a bit like marriage or a relationship. Before you go into a relationship, you have all of these wonderful ideas about how you’re going to be, how the other person is going to be, and the life you’re going to make together.

And marriage is always something that neither people imagined nor wanted. But that’s it. That’s where you’re meeting. That’s the essence of the conversation. So many of us are in a bad marriage with ourselves at times because we’re just refusing to meet what’s down below that horizon inside ourselves. So it’s like one person just going off and doing whatever they want to do without taking any heed or paying attention to the other person who’s trying to call you back. So I often think many of the dynamics in life have to do with the untethered mind being invited back into the body.

And part of the dynamic, in all of our great meditational traditions, is to clear and open a hallway of silence in the body that the mind can be invited back into so that you can think in a wise way. But if you start from the point of view of thinking, you’re going to end up in trouble. You’re going to be giving the wrong name to your partner, to your work, and to yourself. So the first step in deepening the conversation, as I always say in conversational leadership, is stopping the conversation you’re having now. That’s the first step in deepening the conversation.

Shai: Yes.

David: And then that silence opens up, and in that silence, an invitation also opens up at the same time into the unknown.

Shai: Yes. Perhaps that would be a good moment to ask you to recite enough.

David: Actually. I’ll turn the tables on you now. And you asked me to recite one, and I’ll recite a different one. And it’s a poem called The Bell and the Blackbird, which I wrote right at this desk here and right in front of me. I’ve got two French doors with windows in them. And it’s actually a gorgeous, beautiful late winter, early spring day here, and the sun’s out, and it’s just about now, actually, or maybe in the next couple of weeks, that the red-winged blackbird comes back to the Pacific Northwest. And the red-winged blackbird has the most beautiful song. And when you hear that song for the first time, it’s the sound of springtime. You’ve made it through another winter with this beautiful enunciation. And I was here with the door open, and I heard the sound of the blackbird.

And at the same time, my wife came through that door behind her with two tibetan bells in her hand, and she hit them together just perfectly. You know, half the time you hit tibetan bells together and they make this awful sound, and you didn’t get it right. And then you have to try again until you get it right. No, she hit it the first time, and the note went right through me as I heard this black bullet, a blackbird outside of me. So I said, I can’t talk to you now. I need to write. And she was very good. She went up, and this is the piece that I wrote. It’s called the bell and the blackbird. And here’s the red-winged blackbird; actually, on the book, you can see it there. And the bell is behind. The sound of a bell is still reverberating.

The sound of a bell is still reverberating. Or a blackbird. A blackbird is calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life. Or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. The sound of a bell is still reverberating. Or a blackbird. A blackbird calls from a corner of the field, asking you to wake up to this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage. Either way, you want to become nothing but that self, which is no self at all. Wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all. He wants you to walk to the place where you already know you will have to give every last thing away. The approach is also the meeting itself. Without any meetings at all. That radiance you have always carried with you.

That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk, both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation, is crying hallelujah. Either way takes courage. The sound of a bell is still reverberating. Or a blackbird. A blackbird is calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life. Or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage. Either way, you want to become nothing but that self, which is no self at all. He wants you to walk to the place where you already know you will have to give every last thing away. The approach is also the meeting itself. Without any meetings at all. That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk, both alone and completely accompanied in friendship. every corner of creation. Praying hallelujah.

Shai: This really encapsulates our entire discussion.

David: Thank you. Yeah, it’s probably the piece that most carries that seamless experience of awe—the inside and the outside being present—that I’ve ever written. Probably. It’s got a kind of clarity, purity, and presence that I’m very glad to have captured.

Shai: Yes, it must be a precious moment in which you experience that you have succeeded in somehow transporting the unsayable to the realm of the sayable, thus inspiring awe in yourself and your readers. But in a tangible way, it’s no longer elusive.

David: Yeah, there’s a marvellous piece by Pablo Neruda. Where he says that, he’s talking about the first lines of poetry ever written and where that occurred. And something ignited in my soul. Fever or unremembered wings. And I went my own way, deciphering that burning fire. And I wrote the first bare line: pure foolishness. Pure wisdom of one who knows nothing. And suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open. Yeah, he captures that. Not knowing.

That’s a deep form of attention when you don’t know who your intimate partner is. When you talk to them as if you don’t know who they are, you have a much deeper conversation than if you think you’re with the person who you’ve given a name to, or even quite often, an affectionate nickname to. You find that many of the names you’ve given to someone you love are actually stopping a deeper form of love from occurring. So the willingness to look at your. I mean, I have a funny little experience every morning when I feed my dogs. I put their bowls down, and they’re trained to sit until I give them the signal to go. But that’s the moment when they look at me with the most intent. They’re looking directly at every fiber of their being.

They’re just completely alert. And I look at them, too, and suddenly it’s not a dog; it’s not a human; it’s just pure. And that’s when I reestablish the foundation of my love for them on a daily basis, because they do try my patience for the rest of the day. But how do we do that with the people we know? And I think one of the awe-inspiring things we learn about another person, for instance, is that they’re always looking for an invitation, just like the world’s always inviting us, but it’s also looking for an invitation for us as individuals to make to it. Come and find me. Come, world. Come and find me just as I am. That’s a really powerful invitation, actually. And it’s a terrible moment in human life when you stop asking that.

You say, Life, stay away from me; it’s too painful. Love, stay away from me; it’s too painful. Relationship, stay away from me; it’s too painful. Work, everything; just leave me alone. So the ability to make an invitation from a foundationally vulnerable place, which is the place where you’re actually open to the world—I mean, vulnerability just comes from the Latin word vul, which means wound. You always make the invitation from the part of you that’s open to the world, whether you want to be open in that way or not. You’re just made that way. You’re made with that particular form of—you can call it woundedness—but it’s also a form of permeability, of openness, where if you close down part of your essential nature.

Shai: I think there is something interesting that I’ve noticed throughout this dialogue: that awe can also be found in the painful and the way you’re describing it, that if we remove the defenses, we are also vulnerable to the pain. Because I think that what struck me was when you recited just beyond yourself prior to this discussion, I wasn’t  aware of the context in which this poem had been written. And then I started realizing that somehow the poem had a sort of alchemical power, transforming grief or a breakup into something beautiful, into something that is awe-inspiring, because that poem is so elevating.

David: Well, I would say that almost all poets begin with grief and distance. Well, I think probably all self-knowledge begins with realizing how much you’re in exile and how many barriers and defenses you’ve put up because of the wounds and traumas you’ve experienced. And no one gets through childhood without wounds and traumas. And so that’s the doorway. That’s the opening. And so it’s very hard to write good poetry without going through, to begin with, the doorway of grief, distance, and exile. But there’s a point at which the most difficult poetry to write is the poetry of awe, contentment, happiness, and most especially, joy. So it’s just a stage where it seems as if you have to be miserable in order to write, to write well, or to be a good artist. It’s just the first doorway.

And as you deepen that apprenticeship and that road into your art, then you’re asked to speak about the privilege of life, the awe that’s in your existence, the invitations, the astonishing life you’ve already lived, actually, and the giftedness of everything. So the hardest art to actually create might be the art of pure presence.

Shai: So I’m very grateful for this conversation. It has been absolutely wonderful. And profoundly inspiring. Thank you so much. Every word you’ve shared with us.

David: You’re very kind and lovely. And I hope I get to see you in Portugal sometime. I hope for that.

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Shai Tubali: Hello everyone.  In this episode of 1000 Reasons for Feeling Awe, I am extremely honored to have the opportunity to focus on one aspect, one dimension of awe, with author and teacher Stephen Jenkinson. Among Stephen’s many works, we can find “Die Wise” and “Come of Age”. And there is also a significant documentary titled Grief Walker about him, focusing on what he terms our culture’s death phobia. He’s also the developer of the method of orphan wisdom, which, among other things, pushes against death phobia to promote acceptance of death and to participate emotionally in one’s death as we do in other big life events. His work partly draws on his extensive experience with dying people and their families. 

As a former program director in a major Canadian hospital and a former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school, I am wondering, of course, if our theme today will be the awe of death. But I will not assume. I will ask directly. Of course.  I personally cannot think of anything that is a greater source of awe than death, both in a terrifying sense and as an unfathomable mystery. So welcome, Stephen. 

Stephen Jenkinson: Thank you very much, and thank you for the kind introduction. 

Shai Tubali: Thank you so much. So, would you please share with us what your chosen reason for feeling awe this is? And of course, we will need to understand what all this means to you and why you’ve selected this particular reason. But what would be the starting point of our conversation? 

Stephen Jenkinson: Well, maybe the history of the word I don’t know if this has come up with your other guests, but it seems to be a fairly important detail. So I’ll elaborate a little bit on the etymology. So, you could say that the etymology of a word generally carries four fifths of what’s there in the etymology that is not there in common use. And you could think of it as a kelp, a piece of kelp. And the top 3 feet of the piece of kelp are lying on the surface of the sea. And that’s the part that you see. That’s the part of the word that’s in common use and that people imagine that they’re aware of. And then there’s 70 feet going down to the bottom. That’s the history of the word over time. 

And then the roots in the sand, of course, are the distant origins of the word. So with that in mind, if we look at the top 3 feet of the word awe, how it’s typically used today, and how I imagined it was intended to be used in the material you sent me in preparation for this, for example, the notion that it’s a feeling, like, what else could it be, apparently? So in the last, I don’t know, some hundreds of years, the word awe has become a synonym for something more or less positive, more or less uplifting, more or less compelling, and more or less enabling this kind of thing. But if you investigate the word with any depth at all, You realize that’s a very recent incarnation of the word, and it’s not clear that it’s anything more than a reaction against awe. 

That’s what the contemporary meaning of awe seems to me to be: an attempt to domesticate what awe actually is. Yeah.  So from my understanding, awe is not how you feel about things. Awe is the indwelling power, consequence, and character of the thing that you’re talking about, not you. It’s awe-inspiring. It’s awesome. And of course, it’s amazing. And all of these words suggest that there’s consequences for the beholder, and there’s consequences for the recipient. The much older meaning of awe by far and away is something in the order of desperate, overwhelming, unnerving, fraught with frailty and fearfulness. All of this kind of stuff This is mostly winnowed away from the word today. 

But its old origins are something that we should, I think, pay a lot of attention to because it’s whispering to us that we have no obligation to turn awful things in this world into another occasion for single-note celebration. It doesn’t seem to be what it’s for. Awe seems to be there in the world to give the world a chance to survive our regard for it or our lack of regard for it. In other words, you could imagine that awe, as it exists in the world, as a deified power, if you will, seems to be there to push back against the overwhelming success of humans in the world. 

And it’s a very interesting thing to note that the more successful humans have become in the world in the last three or so hundred years, this very word has lost its detonation power and turned into a kind of high five, a kind of emotional and spiritual generic and not very consequential affirmation. So when younger people tend to say, they tend to use the words awesome as a synonym for great, fantastic, loved it, this kind of thing. And you can hear the inclination to turn the word into something that behaves well, when in actual fact, awe doesn’t behave well at all. And it’s not a very good house guest. 

Shai Tubali: Your introduction has definitely aroused many questions in me, so I will start. First of all, in what sense do you distinguish the one who feels from that, from the source of awe, from the object of awe? Okay.  Because awe seems to be a sort of meeting point between a subject and an object, Or am I wrong to assume that? 

Stephen Jenkinson: No, I think that’s fair. The word I would use to characterize it is the emanation of awe, the incarnation of awe. Yeah.  I think that’s what you’re alluding to. That’s certainly what I would mean by it as well. You could say that the consequence of being on the receiving end of an awful encounter is a sense of being overwhelmed and standing in the crosshairs. I’ll give you a very simple example. I think I was driving some time ago, maybe 10-12 years ago. My son was a teenager at the time, or maybe younger; maybe he was eight or nine years old and, apropos, nothing at all. He suddenly said to me, “I love storms.” I said, really? Why do you love storms? He said, “Because finally there’s something that’s bigger than us.” So a powerful storm, and we’re seeing more and more of them. Clearly, with every seasonal change, it’s increasing. It would appear to be the case. So, I mean, get ready for awesome, obviously. But there is something in the nature of storm patterns and storm consequences that, beyond their destructiveness, is their unmitigated power, their sense that even at a standstill, they are overwhelming to the human mind. Think, for example, of that recent I mean, I don’t know if it was pathos or if it was tragedy, but that descent, that privately owned little submarine, or whatever it was, was a submersible thing going down to see the Titanic and literally imploding. I mean, I can’t even imagine, from a physics point of view, the consequences of that implosion, but it’s a contraction of such unimaginable intensity. This is awesome. Clearly, it’s awesome. It’s a force of nature. It’s naturally occurring. It means no harm. 

But probably on occasion at least, it serves as a fair warning that there are places in this world where we don’t belong, but awe does. 

Shai Tubali: I see.  So places we don’t belong, but all do. So that indicates that all is well. What is it? That which is, as you said, bigger than us, that which evades our comprehension, that which we cannot contain. 

Stephen Jenkinson: Yeah, certainly it has those qualities. I think it’s important to say that none of these observations are meant to suggest that it’s hostile to humanity. I don’t think it is. I think it’s indifferent to humanity, which humans experience as exceedingly hostile. The indifference of a storm, the willingness of the storm to proceed regardless of the consequences, makes the storm monstrous to us. But I would say that inside the storm, there’s nothing monstrous about it at all. It is on its way. It’s moving towards exhaustion. That is the nature of awesome. It seems to me that things are, in some remarkable way, kind of time-limited. They have a kind of expiration that they seem to be moving towards all the time. And our disassembly—maybe that’s a better word for it from a physics point of view. 

disintegration and dispersal, and then a subsequent reconstitution in some other form, which may not be as powerful the second time out. I don’t track, for example, things like tropical storms and storms coming off the ocean and things like this, but these are some examples. But maybe scale is something we could address for a moment. So far, it would seem that I’m suggesting that all of these things have to be enormous in their length and breadth. I don’t think that’s actually the case. I think certainly the most easily awe-inspiring things tend to have those qualities. But you could imagine, I don’t know, the organization of a beehive. We have bees here on the farm. The internal organization of a beehive is a phenomenon called swarming. This is awe-inspiring too. 

You don’t want to get in the middle of it and have others participate behind you. You want to be awe-inspired from a distance. You understand what I’m saying? It’s unwise to draw too close to that which inspires awe in you, it seems to me. So maybe there’s a synonym here. Maybe wild would be a good synonym for some of these things. If you don’t mind, I’m going to tell you a little vignette that I think illustrates these things very well. This comes from my days working in the death trade. So I was asked to come to somebody’s house. There was a woman in her 40s. She was an English teacher at a university, and she just spoke generically. The form said she wasn’t doing very well. I got out of my car in front of her house. 

I could hear her screaming from the second floor. Screaming.  It was overwhelming before I even got in the house. And I felt immediately like it was a scene from The Exorcist, though I wasn’t in the place yet. So I knocked on the door. They let me in. Clearly, the family was unnerved and had no idea how to respond to the dying woman upstairs. And I said to them, “Listen, I’m going to go up there now.” No matter what you hear, don’t come up. Give me a chance to do the things that I know how to do, and we’ll see how it goes. It may last only a few minutes, or you may hear nothing, or we’ll see. And they agreed. And up the stairs I went, and I let myself in the door. And she was in mid-flight. Her torment was beyond description. 

It was almost a force of nature unto itself. She was cut loose there. That’s a good word to describe it. So I sat down, maybe 6 feet away from her bed, and I just waited. And occasionally I would nod, as I’m nodding to you now, which is just a generic indication that I’m affirming her presence without requiring her to be a different kind of person than she is right now. She herself was bordering on a wild thing. All the old lessons, all the old rules, all the things that she’d learned in school that she taught as a university professor—all of them had basically abandoned her by now. So eventually the storm abated, you could say, and she was kind of gasping for breath and so on. 

And I don’t remember which one of us started to speak first, and I honestly don’t remember what we said, but it was kind of inconsequential. It was almost conversational—strangely conversational, given the storm that we’d both just lived through. And then, about 20 minutes into this almost meaningless conversation, I said to her for the first time, “So how are you doing?” And with no hesitation whatsoever, she said, “Pretty good.” And then we just looked at each other, and I looked at her to say, Do you see? And she looked at me very accusingly. And then she said, “How did you do that?” And I said, Do what? How did you make me say that I’m okay? I said, Obviously, I didn’t make you say anything. I just asked you a question at the right time. You see?  So she learned an enormously important lesson that all people on the receiving end of awe should learn, which is that it’s possible to be okay and to be dying at the same time. It’s not required that you be completely undone in order to slowly soften your attachment and your connection to this world. And what has this got to do with awe? In the way that we were talking about it earlier, to me, I characterized her as a storm cut loose. That’s true.  She was experiencing herself as a force of nature. She was clearly undone by this strength and the magnitude that was raging inside her. It was a combination of fear and terror, dismay and a little bit of sorrow and perplexity, mysterious tremendous, and probably many of the things that your other guests have spoken about apropos of awe. 

But none of these things gave her a sense of well-being. You see, it was completely beyond her until we spoke as normal human beings, not particularly overwhelmed by the storm that had come and now gone. And in that quiet, she observed herself in a different sort of fashion. I think this is what awe gives us a chance to do as human beings: experience our place in this world and our habits, our feeling habits in particular, and our habits of perception and the eye. We can experience them in ways that we’re unaccustomed to because those extreme moments and those extreme experiences ask something of us that regularly scheduled programming doesn’t seem to ask. 

Shai Tubali: This story has left me somewhat speechless. Yes, because it’s been very engaging. So when you’re talking about this differentiation between a hostile or indifferent source of all, this reminds me a little, if I may bring this to the conversation of Albert Camu’s description of the universe, because he wrote that the universe is not hostile to humans but actually simply indifferent. He spoke of the silent universe. So I’m wondering if this is what you mean to a certain degree—this kind of silence of something that is incomprehensible or inconceivable—and that we somehow need to come to terms with this kind of silence or be silent ourselves. 

Stephen Jenkinson: Right.  I’m certainly not characterizing what I’m describing here as silent. I would say that people who do translate what we’ve been talking about have a kind of eerie silence, a kind of vaguely indifferently hostile or hostilely indifferent silence. These are people who want to hear their name come back from the world. They want the world to echo them. Probably that’s where the notion of silence comes from. In actual fact, there’s a lot of sound; it seems to me there’s a lot of presence, which has a lot of, and I don’t mean literally sound that you can hear in your ear, but there’s impact in the sense of sound waves. There’s an impact on the body that’s a consequence of, I mean, I was just in Cleveland, Ohio, it seems, four or five days ago, and an immense storm was blowing in just as we landed. 

And the sky was that kind of combination of gray and green, which means something really severe is very close by. And it lingered and flashed at a distance, but you could clearly see everything happening. And it kept a distance, and it changed the ozone in the air, the relative humidity, all of these things. And they manifested themselves around you in the swirls in the trees. And it wasn’t a prevailing wind. It was a wind that you could call either chaotic or ecstatic, depending on how you felt about it. I suppose it was a wonder to see it blow in, and it tore the roof off a church very close by. And it had real consequences. It set off those sirens at the edge of town that warn of heavy incoming missiles and all that kind of stuff. So it was the real thing. That’s the kind of notion that I’m describing here. It’s not always catastrophic, but it seems to be, almost without exception, consequential. And some of the consequences register with us, but maybe not most of them. 

Shai Tubali: Yes, I think I’m now starting to comprehend the depth of your transmission here. Essentially, it all lies in where you are not, or that which is not your domain in this sense. 

Stephen Jenkinson: Yeah.  We are guests in an awful house. Correct. 

Shai Tubali: Now, is there any chance—any possibility—that one could enter a sort of communion with this kind of awe? Is there any access to this in our human experience? 

Stephen Jenkinson: I think so. And this warrants another story. Now, this is as awful a story as I can manage. at least as awful as the one I just told you. So the preamble to the first story would be that these dying people were routinely trying to feel better, right? As you’d expect, And they routinely expected that anybody who came to them had to work toward the goal of making them feel better. But they’re dying anyway. The only way they can feel better is to forget about dying for a while. Which is not really feeling better, is it? It’s feeling less. 

And so I realized my responsibility to them was to oblige them to feel more, not better, but simply to expand the repertoire of possibilities so that things weren’t narrowly either good or bad or right or wrong or left or right or dull or bright. You understand what I mean? So this story is from my own childhood and carries very much the same kind of numinous, eye-widening power. It took place on Christmas Eve. If Christmas was not part of your childhood, the story is not going to mean much, but for those who did, they’ll recognize something. So, of course, you don’t know this, but your parents are down below. In my case, we had a two-story house that we lived in. 

So they were on the ground floor, and they were obviously putting together some kind of Christmas-related paraphernalia, gifts, or whatever they were doing. But on pain of severe consequence, they were never allowed to come downstairs until they were beckoned to do so in the full glow of Christmas morning. See.  So it could happen, and it did happen to me. And I’m going to guess I was about five; I couldn’t sleep, and I was completely attuned to the marvel and the wonder that was unfolding down below, silently but without question, magically. But I was also aware that I had this biblical injunction not to go downstairs, you see. So I was sitting at the top of the stairs, and I experienced a sense of excitement, or, I don’t know what else to call it, awe. As a five-year-old, that was so intense, so indwelling, and so consequential that I thought that my rib cage was going to break apart because of the sheer marvel of the whole thing. I could barely contain it. So you see, it’s very similar, even though it seems much less consequential than the storm that tears the roof off a building. But I think you understand what I mean when we’re talking about the human-scale encounter with awe. I think it’s very recognizable to a five-year-old in the presence of something that’s so big, so vast, and so portentious. And his job is to not intrude until the appointed hour. Absolutely.  It remains a marvelous memory, and I’m very lucky to have had it and proud to be able to remember it. 

Shai Tubali: So would you say that your life work takes place on the threshold of all? From what I’m gathering in this conversation, death is one component, one ingredient, of this ungraspable, uncapturable presence. 

Stephen Jenkinson: Indeed.  I mean, you’ve said it very well. I didn’t know there was such a thing as the death trade when I was in my twentys and thirtys, as naive as that might sound. But genuinely, I wasn’t aware of it, and I had no desire to get into it either. So it happened completely by accident, and I kind of backed in. And when I was there, I began to have these encounters, which were almost routine. They were so frequent of people who were beyond speech, not because of some physical or pathological development, but because nothing in their ordinary lives enabled them to encounter or engage with the realities of dying at the ordinary level. Everything was hypersonic, if you will. Everything was extreme. And they couldn’t find a language where they could engage with the realities of dying. 

 

So I began to realize that was my job. My job was to find a language where the undomesticated, unhoused, broken awe of death was available to them in my manner of speaking to them. I didn’t always speak about what I just said to you, but I always spoke to them as if that were so. And I’ll give you an example of why this became so important. So I’m driving to meet the next patient, and I’m talking to his wife on the telephone. I’m just making sure they’re still there, they know we have an appointment, and so on. 

She says, “My son, they only had one child.” He was about 15 or 14. I said I’d kept him home from school so he could meet you. He’s really looking forward to meeting you. Well, that was the first. How should I call this? I don’t want to call it a lie because she meant well, but it wasn’t true. I knew it wasn’t true at the time. No 14-year-old who’s got his father dying upstairs is looking forward to meeting a strange man, period. Right?  It’s not an object of curiosity. Okay?  So I said, Okay, I understand. She said, Oh, and by the way, she said, When you’re here, don’t use the D word. Quote.  That’s what she said. And I actually looked at the telephone. I couldn’t believe someone had actually explicitly said such a thing, though it was always there in most houses in most people’s lives. Not using the D word constituted compassion for most people. I considered it malpractice myself. And so I said, Don’t use the D word just to make sure I’d heard right. And she thought I was agreeing with her. She said, Yeah, that’s right. very casually like that. And I said to her, Didn’t you just tell me that your son, when he comes home from school, comes into his dying father and tells his dying father about his day? Yes.  She said he does that. And didn’t you tell me that before he goes to school in the morning, he comes into his room and lays down in the bed beside him and talks to him or doesn’t talk to him, whatever they do? You told me that too. She said yes. I said, Well, if I don’t use the D word, then what secret am I helping you keep? And I’m asking that question to see if the people are listening. Now, if we withhold these radioactive words, if we draw back from the edge of awe in the name of being compassionate or in the name of being obscuring, which to me is virtually the same thing, then I wonder if we’re leaving the important job of truth-telling to the symptoms instead of to each other. No.  So I think finding a language that does justice to awe is something you hear me trying to do here since you and I first said hello. I’m not using one word, one synonym, and saying that’s what it is. I’m trying to find a way of speaking where the consequences of awe become available but not manageable, somehow detectable, or somehow touchable. Yeah. 

Shai Tubali: Yes.  I have this growing feeling that we are on the brink of awe. It is here, palpable, not nameable, but still more present than anything else, actually. And I think that what’s so unusual and so welcome in this type of conversation is that you’re speaking about awe as a direct outcome of encountering reality as it is with all its overwhelming difficulty and with these parts of life that we are trying to negate, which are the parts of life of which we have absolutely no. 

Stephen Jenkinson: Indeed.  You know, I’m speaking to you from my farm here in the Ottawa Valley in eastern Ontario, and if I were to take a pinch of dirt from outside and hold it in the palm of my hand and hold it up to you, I wouldn’t tell you what it was. I just asked you, What is this in my hand? And I don’t know you, of course, so I’m just guessing. The possibilities are that you may answer from a scientific point of view, decayed vegetable matter, or something of this kind. You may answer from a New Age point of view: Oh, it’s potential, it’s life force, you know, this kind of stuff or other things in between. But of course, almost nobody says what it actually is when I ask this question. And what it is is death. It doesn’t represent death; it doesn’t symbolize death. It is death. I’m not saying it’s dead; I’m saying it’s death. It’s a different order of understanding. No.  And everything that’s alive that’s outside this window has its roots in what? Life, which is what we would be prompted to say in a moment like this, The answer is no. No.  Life is rooted in life; that’s cannibalism; life is rooted in death. No death, no sustenance, period. That is amazing, isn’t it? in the sense that we’re talking about it now. It’s so enormous, and it’s so ordinary at the same time. It’s not a spectacle, but it is a covenant, if you will, between those conscious of being alive and life. A kind of covenant that says, You get to do this for now; don’t wait. Soon enough, you won’t, period. Any questions?  That’s it.  It’s kind of that simple. And I started by talking about storms, but maybe I put too much emphasis on the kind of thunder and lightning. What we’re really talking about here, I think, is something that overwhelms our capacity for indignation, boredom, and self-importance. That’s not a bad combination. If those three things can be overwhelmed once a week, that’s a pretty good combination. And you’d be awestruck if that happened. 

Shai Tubali: So if one removes this type of death phobia you’re speaking about, is that then a source of new life or new consciousness that enables us to experience the other side of awe, which is marvel, which is astonishment, or which is appreciation of life’s beauty? 

Stephen Jenkinson: Yes, absolutely.  The question answers itself very well, but I’ll add something to it and say that, without endings, there’s no living. There’s a strange irony to the arrangement. without frailties, endings, and limits. are a kind of boundless, ungathered something, a kind of strange vapor of potential that the world doesn’t seem to benefit from. So here’s a word that hasn’t come up between us yet that maybe belongs in this conversation, maybe right about now, and it’s the word amen. How does it work? I mean, it’s not clear that you can even translate Amen. What does it mean? The answer is that it doesn’t really mean anything. It does something. Amen is a kind of event that is not all affirmation, as it turns out. I think it’s made of two parts: the word amen, and it’s an awful thing. And it goes like this: The first part of amen means something like, I have no idea, or I did, but I don’t anymore. Or I’m trying to reestablish my understanding of things. It’s not working. Or this thing is so vast and so uncharted, and despite Google Maps and everything else, I just don’t get it. It’s bigger than my capacity to be big, et cetera. And all the things we’ve said—that’s the first half of amen, and without that, the second half doesn’t mean anything. The second half would be something like, “I’m in.” That’s the affirmation I’m in. I remain a citizen of such a place and such a time. I more or less willingly stumble towards something that I don’t really know. That’s what Amen means to me. And that’s a one-word symphony of an awestruck person, I think. Amen. 

Shai Tubali: Thank you for this. I think we’ll leave our viewers and listeners with this kind of silent and realistic prayer, a recognition of reality as it is. Stephen, this has been one of the most eye-opening conversations I’ve ever had. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this. 

Stephen Jenkinson: Thank you.  Amen, brother.

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Shai Tubali: Hello, everyone.  I am honored and overjoyed to engage in discussion with Richard Gregor as a part of 1000 Reasons for Feeling Awe. Richard Gregor is a professor of philosophy and cultural history at Florida State College in Jacksonville. as a founding philosopher and researcher. is particularly interested in cross-cultural themes in the philosophy of religion and science, including comparative theories of mind and consciousness, the metaphysical implications of theoretical physics and scientific cosmology, and comparative world religions, philosophies, and civilizations. I’m so happy to have you here, Richard. 

Richard Grego: Thanks.  It’s an honor to be here, sir. 

Shai Tubali: And I’m so curious to hear what your chosen reason for being in awe is. I’m sure that your work as a philosopher is steeped in awe, but you are also, I think, a spiritually engaged human being, and probably both fields intersect somehow. So perhaps we could start by just hearing what your selected reason for feeling awe might be. 

Richard Grego: You know, I guess to some extent, to begin with, I hesitate even, and I think you’d understand this as a fellow Krishnamurti scholar in some sense, to even try to describe personal experiences of awe, although I can do that, and I will, if you wish, just for the very reason that I think not just Krishnamurti but the whole philosophical tradition that you are also familiar with, right? From Nagarjuna and the Tao, Taoism. The Tao that can be named is not the Tao, and Nagarjuna’s notion of emptiness. And St. Augustine in the Christian tradition talking about how he knows what God and time are, but if you try to ask him what they are, that’s when he loses it. 

 And even Alfred North Whitehead, the famous philosopher of science in the 20th century, talked about things like what he called reification and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where the minute you try to summarize something in quantifiable, measurable, or even verbally descriptive terms, you kind of lose it as well. I guess I’d say any personal experience I describe would come with the qualification that probably any terms I use to describe it really don’t do it justice. I think you get what I’m talking about, right? 

Shai Tubali: Yes, I do. Yes.  Nevertheless. 

Richard Grego: Okay.  Having said that, one of the ways that I think personally I connect with awe, and really, God knows, I’m sure everybody does. If they don’t, God help them in life, right? I think awe is essentially the Summum Bonum of a worthwhile existence. But for me, I can’t point to a particular epiphany I’ve had or anything like that. But I think my moments approaching awe, at least, have a lot to do with experiences in nature and engaging with nature in the natural world. Just standing on a beach with the blue sea and sky and an infinite expanse around you and the thunderclouds towering dreamily into the heavens over this horizon that seems to stretch away into the boundless reaches of eternity I think that’s certainly something about living in Florida that is an experience that generates awe within me. 

And I think even if this is what you want me to address, I assume that is the question you want. Am I answering the right question? 

Shai Tubali: Well, you are describing experiences of awe. I’m wondering, by the way, as a philosopher, do your self-reflective philosophical tendencies enter into such moments? 

Richard Grego: That’s a great point. I think largely, as that monologue I went on about Taoism and Krishnamurti and everything and Alfred North Whitehead would suggest, I think sometimes they enter into those instances in a negative way, in the sense that, as Krishnamurti reminds us, as soon as you start thinking about it, there’s a sense in which you lose it, right?  The experience.  And what did he say you would remember? Didn’t he tell a kid one time during one of his talks that if you watch a bird and you teach the kid to name the bird, he’ll never see it again? I don’t know. Do you recall that? 

Shai Tubali: I’m aware of the quote, yes. 

Richard Grego: Yeah.  So, in some sense, I think intellectualizing experiences via philosophy can be an impediment. But I do think that after the fact, upon reflection, when I’m trying to integrate those experiences into my life and into my sense of purpose in life. And then I think, the philosophers that I’m interested in, the philosophies, the schools of philosophy, and the themes they explore resonate really profoundly with what I’ve experienced. Is that sort of what you’re asking about? 

Shai Tubali: Yes.  So here is what interests me because you’re describing this kind of disconnect, or the moment in which there is a separation between the awe experience or the direct experience and the philosophical musing, right?

Richard Grego: Right.

Shai Tubali: What I’m interested in isn’t the philosophical act itself; doesn’t it start with awe? This means, isn’t that a continuation or an extension of this awe experience and, is in itself, an expression of awe? Because when I’m beginning to introspect, when I’m beginning to contemplate, for instance, my own consciousness, doesn’t that start with a question that originally started in a state of awe? 

Richard Grego: Yeah. And again, I wonder if this is a persistent theme when you speak to people about that subject. I was just thinking of a cosmologist. I wonder if that’s what Einstein and some of the great cosmologists of history used to say. And the philosopher Aristotle, I believe, said that philosophy begins in wonder, which is a great quote. I don’t really care for Aristotle that much, but that’s a great quote, and I think it’s very true. So yes, I guess ultimately my own philosophical quest began certainly,  I mean, I would have become a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist, or something, if the experience of something deep and wondrous about existence didn’t fill me with a sense of awe. Is that what you mean?

Shai Tubali: Yes, that’s wonderful. Could we delve into that? Could you try to bring us closer to your own experience that propels you to philosophize because of awe?

Richard Grego: Yeah, gosh again. I think, to some extent, when I’m working as a professional philosopher, I tend to be so immersed in arguments. And again, this may be one of the limitations of that analytic philosophical tradition. I tend to be so immersed in arguments and addressing arguments that I’ve heard, working within a very particular intellectual tradition, and writing for an audience that’s going to be scrutinizing my arguments that sometimes, when I’m doing philosophy again, I lose touch with the awe that inspired my interest to begin with. But again, I think some of these experiences in nature don’t necessarily have to be that way. I remember one time just sitting in my backyard and hearing the whisper of wind chimes on a summer breeze on a calm day. 

That brought to mind a poem by Rumi and a poem by William Blake, or at least verses from them, that then made me think about what it is that thinkers like, say, Lao Tzu are talking about when he’s just trying to describe the ineffable. Because for me, those moments of hearing wind chimes on a summer breeze and their significance are probably best described through poetry rather than philosophy. I think, like Heidegger, I’m ultimately all for the poets over the philosophers. But I think those are times in which my experience leads me to philosophical reflection, if that helps. How about you? I’m curious, Shai. You’re on a completely different level spiritually than I am. But you don’t seem to have any trouble. 

You seem to have completely overcome that disconnect I’m talking about between philosophical reflection and deep spiritual revelation, if that’s the right word for it. I think you certainly seem to, listening to you, listening to your talks, and speaking with you, I get that impression. I don’t know if it’s wrong for me to ask you questions, but I just wonder: was that always the case with you? That you just had this sort of nondual experience of mind versus experience? 

Shai Tubali: Yes, exactly.  This is exactly my experience. Because if there is a certain experience that takes place, then naturally the mind that begins to reflect on it, that begins to observe it, and that begins to name it, and to theorize about it, and so on, they are not really different from one another. It’s a continuity. It’s something that flows from this experience. 

Richard Grego: So there’s a difference, then, between, a constructive difference between a purely analytic or reflective kind of philosophizing and a kind of living philosophy, which is a living revelation that you’re experiencing even as you’re engaging in it. Does that make sense? 

Shai Tubali: Yes, exactly.  I think, for instance, if we experience an expansion of our consciousness, then understanding the nature of the expansion of consciousness and what is consciousness, these questions arise from the very same place that awe arises from, or that the direct experience arises from. Because I think that it all boils down to the very essence of a question. Right?  Because when I ask, “Who am I?” And when I ask it philosophically or spiritually.

So, this is what I’m interested in. Because you seem to be able to embody and synthesize these two interests, right? The mystical, the spiritual, and the philosophical. So I’m really interested in where this question mark starts in you? 

Richard Grego: Yeah, where it starts in me. That’s interesting.  I guess it depends on what you mean. Do you mean where the experience of awe begins or where the experience of awe, translated into philosophical terms, begins? Is that what you mean? 

Shai Tubali: Yes.  How do mysticism and philosophy, for instance, meet for you? In you?

Richard Grego: Yeah.  Gosh, it’s such a profound question. It’s hard to address, in a sense, I guess, to some extent now I think it’s evolved as I’ve matured, I guess, hopefully through life. And I suppose that’s the same for everyone. I think my big philosophical questions very often stem from the dawning realization of mortality, which, again, was an abstract sort of proposition when I was younger. But now, as I’ve gotten older and I’ve really lost people that I deeply and profoundly know and love, it’s become more of an existential reality to me, although I suppose it always was, or I wouldn’t have been so interested in these philosophies. But I think it’s become a more visceral and pressing concern for me. So that when I hear a philosopher like Socrates say that the purpose of philosophy is to prepare everybody for death, or when I read the Katha Upanishad, right, when there’s this dialogue literally with death. And about mortality and about the limitations and meaning of life. Or when I read Heidegger talking about nothingness and being, and that ultimately, what all of our struggle for purpose in life is, even if we’re unaware of it, involves our confrontation, all of us that we know about, even if it’s only in the back of our minds. And we hide from it all our lives until we are confronted with the vastness of non-being in some sense, or nothingness, which may be something subtly different from non-being. So I guess that for me now is the notion of mortality, which is not just, I guess, the end of biological life but the end of all the things you’ve lived throughout your life. That, I think, is largely where my philosophical interests and my deep, visceral experience of awe meet. Is that kind of what we’re getting at? 

Shai Tubali: Yes. 

Richard Grego: This is a lot like therapy. 

Shai Tubali: And do you think that philosophy has therapeutic value in this kind of self-interrogation or questioning of the nature of immortality? 

Richard Grego: Yeah, I think so. I think it can. I think it gives you, like poetry, a way of working through and expressing the ineffable in human experience. Well, something like that, yeah, expressing the ineffable and making it somehow a problem, if that’s the right word, a phenomenon that you can articulate and develop a framework or guideposts to help you understand it better in some ways. Or, if not better, at least help make it more authentic in your actual life. If that helps. Do you find that that’s the case?

Shai Tubali: Mostly not. Not when it comes to philosophy that, let’s say, separates itself from actual engagement in the questions and ponders in a way objectively or abstractly these questions. But when it comes, for instance, to Socrates or to the Katha Upanishad, when it comes to these types of philosophies that have really made it their purpose to resolve actual problems in life.

Richard Grego: Definitely.   Yeah.   And I can see that in your writing and in your scholarship, you really seem to want to work with thinkers like Krishnamurti, for instance, and Socrates, certainly, Lao Tzu, I guess, and the authors of the Upanishads, for whom the philosophical reflection and the experience of awe were interconnected and interdependent in such a way that you were experiencing and engaging awe in the very act of reflecting on it, I guess, right? You were working through the living experience of it while you were reflecting on it. Boy, that’s difficult, I think. And maybe it’s me. It doesn’t seem difficult for you, obviously, because that’s what you do in your work. I mean, in your teaching. So you tell me, since this is such a great therapy session, what’s the reason for that disconnect? 

What do you think the reason is for that disconnect among so many thinkers? Is it a Western problem? Is it the kind of thing that Western philosophers are particularly hung up on? Is that my problem? Was I conditioned to think that way more? Or is it something deeper than that? 

Shai Tubali: Well, I think perhaps we tend to forget when we begin to philosophize that our questioning arises from an existential crisis. This is where the disconnect begins. Because I think, for instance, when you’re talking about seeking answers to the problem of immortality or to the dread of immortality, this is an existential terror or an existential confusion. But then, when we enter the world of philosophy, we begin to conceptualize it to a degree that eventually we don’t speak about death. We speak about ideas about death. 

Richard Grego: Yeah, yeah. 

Shai Tubali: And this is definitely a Western tendency, yes.

Richard Grego: Yeah. 

Shai Tubali: An objectifying tendency.

Richard Grego: Yeah. 

Shai Tubali: Yes.  That separates subject from object. 

Richard Grego: Right.   And I guess now you’ve mentioned it’s endemic to the human condition, as, you know, Freud would probably describe that as sort of an ego defense. Right? And certainly other people did. Abraham Maslow and his famous philosophy of science, a psychologist Abraham Maslow and his famous book “The Psychology of Science” talked about intellectualizing or rationalizing as literally an ego defence by which we can really escape the profound experience of entering into these questions and the places where that can take us by turning it into an abstract problem. And then you can remove yourself from it, like you said, from a safe subject, object, or distance, and just sort of think about it with critical analysis as opposed to experiencing it with your whole being. 

Shai Tubali: Right.   So would you say that, usually, philosophers tend to be troubled by philosophical problems that originate in their own existential crises? 

Richard Grego: Sure, yeah, I do hear them talking about that very often. You hear psychologists doing this very often. I’ve heard people give that kind of testimony that, gosh, I went into this field because of all these existential questions in my heart that I was passionate about because I was living them. And then I got processed through an academic system that trains you—literally trains you—and you know this as well as I do. You’ve just been through it. It trains you to turn living experience into abstractions so that you can say very safe things about it, put it down in books, and have other people who are involved in the same game that you are reflect on it and say clever things and get recognition for it without ever really suffering. And maybe is that what it is? 

Is that why I’m afraid, or are other philosophers afraid to encounter awe in its depth? Is the suffering not melodramatic but inevitably, right? The pain or the suffering that it entails despite the great things I’m sure that it entails. Do you think that’s the problem? Is that why people do that? 

Shai Tubali: These are really provocative questions. 

Richard Grego: Sorry.   I know you’re supposed to be interviewing me. I come to you for wisdom. So, I thought this would be a great opportunity. 

Shai Tubali: Yeah.   But I will insist on my role as an interviewer now. 

Richard Grego: Fair enough. 

Shai Tubali: And I will ask you: let’s take the position of one who observes those who have managed to have reflection as a continuation of awe-experience, or a reflection that really involves existential crises, and existential insistence on resolutions, and so on. How would you describe this awe of reflection? How could reflection be an act of awe? When you look at figures like Socrates or Yama in the Katha Upanishad and so on? 

Richard Grego: Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s a kind of mode of inquiry that involves your whole being. And I think that’s something that they all have in common from Socrates to Krishnamurti. Right.  I think something that they all have in common is that they’re inquiring, or they’re at least inviting you to inquire into something with your whole being. I think with your, just reading this fascinating book by a neuroscientist named Iain McGilchrist, I’d recommend it to you. He wrote two great books. One is called “the emperor and his messenger”. Another one is called “The Matter with Things.” Absolutely fascinating.   He’s a true Renaissance thinker. He was both a literary scholar and a neuroscientist; he literally had degrees in both. He taught at Oxford, and he talks extensively about the connection between all these fields. 

And he was talking about the difference between, you know people always talk about the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain division. And he does very much what we’re talking about here. He connects to awe. He thinks that the purpose of not only intellectual thought but also human life is to connect with awe. And he thinks that the separation between many people’s lives and awe, which is particularly reinforced in contemporary society, has to do with employing different hemispheres of the brain. I guess that was one of his specialties as a neuroscientist. And of course, the right hemisphere is all about intuition, imagination, art, aesthetics, and emotion, which allow you to essentially enter into experience in a visceral, primal kind of primordial way. 

And then you’ve got the left hemisphere of the brain, which tends to abstract, to rationalize, and to turn experiences, rather than being mysteries to be lived, into problems to be solved. And his theory is that our society has generally reinforced the development of these left-hemisphere powers to their exclusion. And it has sort of marginalized these right hemisphere capabilities such that left hemisphere capabilities, literally in our neurology and our neural pathways in the mind, have become so trained to rationalize, and abstract, and solve problems that we have started to notice that the other dimension of our intellect has begun to atrophy, literally not only in our intellectual experience but literally in our brain. We don’t develop those neural pathways. 

And I think philosophers who managed to turn philosophy into a true existentially awakening experience, you could see it in those terms, right? They’ve learned to activate those centers of the brain and make them primordial. And the dimension of the intellect of the brain that turns those experiences into problems. They have learned to be subservient to the more important right hemisphere.

I don’t know if that’s a good illustration of what I’m trying to say or not, but I think that’s what enlightened philosophers like yourself seem to be very adroid at doing. Here’s the point where I want to start asking you questions, but I’ll refrain. I wonder if you would think that’s one of the problems, not just in the west, although I think this society is particularly adroid at getting people to be more left-brained than right-brained. 

But I wonder if that’s one of the problems with human experience generally. I don’t know. But in answer to your question, I do think you need to be able to do that to experience awe. And you certainly need to be able to do that to incorporate and manifest the experience of awe in any practical experience or practical task. And I think the philosophers and thinkers who’ve been able to do that are the ones who are really the truly profound ones. And maybe that’s why I like poetry so much, because I think maybe poets do exactly that, don’t they? They experience the ineffable through the depths of their imagination and intuition. They are able to manifest that in the immediacy of beautiful words, somehow describing what’s indescribable. Does that make sense? I don’t know. 

Shai Tubali: Yes, I think they all originate from the same source. Again, this kind of question mark or being in awe in the face of existence, and then the question begins. So the poet captures this kind of pure experience of awe or the purity of the moment, and then the philosophical mind begins to ask questions about it. What is it? What is the nature of it? So in a way, I think the philosophical mind can be at the service of this kind of pure moment. 

Richard Grego: Yeah. And I guess it’s difficult when you’re a professional scholar because you’re constantly stepping out of the deeper dimensions of that. You’re sort of working in that more narrowly confined, objective, analytic space. So that’s, I think, one of the challenges of doing that. And maybe that’s why the truly seminal philosophical figures were people like Socrates, like Lao Tzu, like Confucius, who maybe were not as much Confucius but in general were not primarily men of letters or professional scholars. They were people who were working through the existential problems and crises that they were addressing, even as they were philosophizing. Krishnamurti’s and Socrates’ dialogues may be great examples of that, and I think you’d agree. As a matter of fact, this is one of your themes as well in your own scholarship, isn’t that so?

Shai Tubali: Yes, so you’re saying something quite radical, that actual philosophy takes place outside the academic quarrels.

Richard Grego: Really.   Right. I mean, you have these seminal figures like Socrates and Confucius and the Neo-Confucians and the Upanishads and all these traditions that were founded and established by people who were able to do “living philosophy,” if that’s a good word for it. And now, you have generation after generation in the 20th century, 21st century, and 18th century of people developing ideas about what these people said. And talking about making abstractions out of what they said and talking exclusively in terms of those. Right. I think Nietzsche once said, the existentialist philosopher, of course, somebody asked him about or maybe his writing about Jesus, the significance of Jesus, another living philosopher, and then about Christianity. And maybe you’re familiar with the quote he said: “Well, the last Christian died on the cross.” And you knew you had Jesus, and then after him everything else is just footnotes. Right?

They’re people arguing over abstractions they created about his deep insights. I think that’s a genuine problem. I mean in terms of an awe-deprived life that I think most people and in our culture have, and this isn’t just intellectual; I think people who are staring at their phone screens all day and thinking about work, doing their 60-hour-a-week jobs, are all about, again, just this left-hemisphere kind of mind and mode of consciousness, have a really hard time connecting with awe, with the experience of awe, and maybe don’t understand it anymore as much as perhaps people who have a lot of that way of life turned off. I don’t know. What do you think? 

Shai Tubali: I will still insist on asking you one last question, because that’s really tempting. But I will still ask you the question. Does reading or studying philosophy sometimes leave you in awe? Are there certain philosophical texts that leave you in awe, just as you would feel when you are on the beach? 

Richard Grego: Wow. Yeah, that’s a great question. I think some come close; some great poems, like the Romantic poems by poets speaking of nature, really do. I mean, some of those are poetic verses. There’s nothing more beautiful. Music, right? A beautiful piece of music comes close. And there are great philosophical concepts there. I think some of the greatest philosophers in the world are poets, musicians, and artists. But there is, to be specific, Krishnamurti’s “Freedom from the Known”, chapter ten. I could quote you paragraphs. As a matter of fact, I was just working on something. I’ve got them in front of me. That’s what’s bringing them to mind. Heidegger’s essay  “What is metaphysics?” and his other essay, “The Essence of Truth.”

And interestingly, those are two very different, you could juxtapose those two explorers very creatively because, on the one hand, Krishnamurti is all about the immediacy of what you’re feeling and thinking through things in their immediacy. Whereas Heidegger at least sounds, when you read him, so abstract. But there is something about his abstraction that sort of forces your mind to be quiet. And in that stillness, what he would call the “soundless voice of being” is capable of emerging. And you feel this profound immediacy of existence and presence of the world that sort of reveals the magnitude of its beauty, and wonder, and meaning in a way that you wouldn’t normally. And maybe it’s because they force you to a place where your mind does become still, and maybe that’s the key. Does that answer your question? I’m not sure. 

Shai Tubali: Oh yes, oh yes.

Richard Grego: Those are two examples for me. I mean, you’ve written about the other existentialists, like Camus, certainly his thing, and even Jean-Paul Sartre, you know, a colleague of his who talked about concepts like being and nothingness, and the absurd, and existential freedom, and things like that. But he pushed them to the extent where he had you enter into those experiences if you give him a chance, right? If you give his writing a chance, you enter into that kind of mode of consciousness. And those can bring about, I think, a sense of awe, maybe just as much as standing on the beach. And you know in some of the great stories, too. In contrast to the existentialists, for whom life is absurd and meaningless. 

You have the other side of that same coin with philosophies like Vedanta, in which everything is sacred, right? Because it recognizes the absurdity at the same time. Or Taoism, right? Where you have this ying-yang confluence of meaninglessness and ultimate meaning. And some of the stories, I think, from the Upanishads or from religious traditions. I remember there’s a great story from the Sikh tradition about Guru Nanak when he traveled through the Middle East. He was traveling through the Middle East, and he was sleeping one night with his feet pointed eastward. I guess that for him, it would be west. Anyway, some imam, a local imam, was around, and he started screaming at Guru Nanak because he said, “You’re dishonoring God.” And Nanak said, “Why?”

And he said, “Because your feet are pointed toward Mecca. And you’re dishonouring God by doing that sign of disrespect.” And Nanak said, “Well, fine, I’ll sleep however you want me to, but just show me a place where God isn’t residing, and I’ll point my feet in that direction.”

I think that’s a great juxtaposition, right? As Sartre said, it doesn’t matter because everything is absurd. Nothing matters.   Doesn’t matter.   I think one great quote was “It doesn’t matter if you spent your whole life drinking in a bar or you became a saint.” Either way, it’s all the same. Right?   Because everything’s meaningless. Whereas you have some of these great traditions that remind us everything, in a sense is meaningless, because it’s meaningless as an abstraction, but it’s also God-imbued, right? It’s filled with God in that sense. 

And in a deeper sense, you find that everything is sacred if you’re willing to face the sort of nihilism that some of the great existentialists would like us to experience. So that, to me, is also I think an invitation to awe.

Shai Tubali: That’s absolutely wonderful. And I’m so grateful for this lively, engaging, and thought-provoking, and heart-provoking discussion. So, thank you so much, Richard. 

Richard Grego: Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it.

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Shai Tubali: Hello, everyone. I am so thrilled to initiate a dialogue for 1000 Reasons for Feeling Awe with the delightful Amrit Sandu. As a globally recognized speaker, Amrit is not only the host of a successful podcast but also the founder of Inspired Evolution. His credentials include certification from Eckhart Tolle’s esteemed School of Awakening, as well as being a Master Certified Trainer for Mindvalley, in both Australia and India. As an ambassador for both Inspired Evolution and Mindvalley, Amrit frequently conducts enlightening keynotes, seminars, and workshops across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. And for me, it is a great source of delight to have this opportunity to speak with you today, Amrit. 

Amrit Sandhu:   Shai, if I’m honest, I’m melting hearing you read out something even about me. I love your work so dearly. It is an absolute honor and pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me here, brother. It is an absolute pleasure.

Shai Tubali: Brother, I love it. Yes. So, as brothers who share the awe at the beauty and mystery of life and this existence, I would like to start by asking you – as you know, this project is based on me inviting dear interviewees to choose their own specific reason for feeling awe, for being in awe in the face of life, the universe, and so on, based on their experience of life and their expertise. Now, I know that for awe-inspired individuals, there are usually millions of reasons for feeling awe. But what would be our gateway today? What would be your chosen reason? 

Amrit Sandhu:   Yeah, there was a particular moment. Is that what you’re asking about? The particular moment that I felt the most awe at sort of brought us into something that I’ve wanted to bring to the table today. There are, as you mentioned, so many aspects of an inspired life that one would want to bring, but I think the one that probably rings with the richest vibrancy, I’m a bit nervous to share it because it’s very dear to my heart, but vulnerability is always a good place to go in these things, especially because it’s you. There was a very, yeah, just I remember when I proposed to my wife on that particular day, how it all happened, the series of events that led to me asking her to marry me. There’s a lot in our story—how we first met, etc.—but I’m conscious that I have to pick one moment—so the one reason for feeling awe was just the signs and the synchronicities and the trust and all the unfoldings of me marrying my wife and me asking her to marry me. 

Shai Tubali: First of all, she is very fortunate that this is your one reason for feeling awe. 

Amrit Sandhu: I’m very lucky, that’s what I would say. I joke that I put the ring on her finger before she realized what was going on. I am very lucky to have such a beautiful partner.

Shai Tubali: So, let me start by asking you because, of course, we are using this reason as something that could inspire our listeners and viewers. So my question is, could you bring us closer to this kind of occasion? What was the source of awe in these special circumstances? 

Amrit Sandhu: If it’s okay, I’d like to share the story. So, thank you so much. I had known my wife for about nine years before we got married. So I really made sure (laughs). But we never really saw the point of, well, marriage, really, because we are a bit new age, I guess, if you look at it that way. Yeah. I was always ready to make a commitment, but for my partner herself, she was just like, “Hey, I make the choice every morning to wake up next to you.” I don’t need the sort of old system of bondage that comes with a signed certificate of marriage or whatever. So, it was interesting that we never really felt compelled to get married in the first place. I was hoping that one day we’d make a commitment, and then one of the things that started coming closer to us was this idea that we were going to have kids. And my son is now two, touch wood. And the Inspired Evolution is all about breaking social taboos. But one of the big social taboos was that being Indian and having kids outside of wedlock in our culture is a bit of a disgrace on the parents. Now, I know that this is old-school thinking, but that’s kind of how the Indian culture sees it, even to this day, a little bit. Quite traditional in that sense.

And so, for our parents’ sake at the very least, we are of the opinion that we are looking to potentially start a family, and that maybe we should at some point get married. I don’t think we agreed that we couldn’t have kids outside of wedlock. So, there was this event that had to happen before we potentially had kids. And for the longest time, I knew exactly how I was going to propose to my wife. Now I’ve had you on the show, so please don’t take this the wrong way, but one of my ideal guests to have on the Inspired Evolution podcast was an artist named Nahko. He’s this incredible musician, and his songs are actually my favorite songs. And there are many stories as to the synchronicities and the aura I feel through his music. But, long story short, I was hoping that one day, when I was ready to propose to my wife, he would be part of the proposal. I’ll just run you through my dream proposal and what my dream proposal was. Full caveat: this is not exactly what happened. 

So my dream proposal was: my wife’s favorite place in the world was in Amsterdam. There’s this big park, right? I’m pretty sure it’s called Vondelpark, in the middle of Amsterdam. And it’s like, if you’re going from one side of Amsterdam to the other, everybody goes through the park. There are people juggling. There are people doing things like getting married; this is kind of like Eden a little bit. Right? So Vondelpark has this really beautiful vibe in the heart of Amsterdam. Amsterdam is obviously very liberal and forward-thinking. It’s a really nice culture in this space. And so we’re in Vondelpark. This is my dream, and my wife and I have been having a great time traveling in Europe. It’s one of our favorite European summers. As you know, being from that part of the world, there’s something special about them. And we walk past this tree, and next to this tree is Nahko, who is playing a song. And the song is called “Tus Pies,” “your feet.” I’m probably butchering the French version of it, but the song’s called Your Feet, and he’s playing this song, and it’s about how your feet found me, and I’m so grateful for your feet and the path that they walk in this life. Right? That’s the theme of the song. And she has this moment where she turns around and goes, “Oh, my God, that’s Nahko just playing in Vondelpark.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s our favorite song.” And she’s like, yeah. And then I point to the sky, and then it just says, “Will you marry me?” This was my dream proposal. So the sky says, “Will you marry me?” My favorite artist is sort of playing in our favorite place in the park. And, yeah, this was my dream. And my ambition with the Inspired Evolution podcast for quite a while was to get Nahko onto the show so that I could eventually ask him to see if there was some way I could reimburse him for his time or if he was ever going to be in Amsterdam to do a gig. Can I synchronize this? Can I make it happen? And it just never really eventuated; you know, a year had passed, two years passed, three years passed. And I started getting a little bit anxious, I would say. We’re planning a family. I haven’t proposed. I don’t really know; I’ve got this dream proposal, and I don’t really want a second-rate proposal. You only get to propose to the love of your life, touch wood, once. And so I was like, “Okay, what are we going to do?” So one of the things I realized early is that, like, whenever it happens, I should have a ring. So I purchased the ring, and I had the ring burning a hole in my pocket for, I think, at least two years, if I’m honest with you. I just had this ring sitting in my pocket, waiting for the Nahko synchronicity to eventually come through, and the universe, I believe, will deliver. And it didn’t end up happening. 

And we were actually traveling. There is a whole story on how we ended up in Brazil. But we’ve been to Brazil a few times, and there’s a beautiful music teacher there. His name is Carioca. And Carioca means “Brazilian guy,” loosely, a man from Brazil. But this guy is a musician, and he makes Brazilian music and he’s phenomenal. And he’s a very dear brother, and he makes incredible, incredible music. So he was Kay’s first music teacher, like a proper guitar teacher. And he was actually what inspired me to pick up the guitar. And so we were going to music retreats on his land in Brazil every year. And then I had the ring in my pocket, and I kind of knew that we are getting to a point where, with women and their bodies, there’s this, I don’t know if this is real, but science says so, let’s see, but before the age of 35, you kind of want to have your kids because it becomes much harder to conceive for women after the age of 35, right? So we’re conscious that there’s this bit of a biological deadline within which I’ve got to propose to my wife before we can have some kids. And there’s like this real universal pressure starting to build, and Nahko isn’t appearing. So I’ve got the ring in my pocket, and we’re going away for, I think, the third time to see Carioca in Brazil. And he’s got this beautiful retreat, which is called Ciranda. It means “circle of children.” You know there’s an acre of land, and they only inhabit 1% of it. There’s a beautiful music maloca outdoors. I love these guys. They’ve got, like, a $100,000 sound system in the middle of the forest. So when they press record, you can hear the monkeys and the forest, like the Atlantic rainforest, birds, and everything else. It’s just a really beautiful, lush space to be in, touch wood, and I feel very privileged. It’s even more Eden than Vondelpark, really. It’s a really incredible place. And I remember on the musical retreats, there were these overnights where we’d sit and make music. And there are people from all over the world who come together. And the concept of the music retreat is basically that Amrit will bring a song, my wife will bring a song, and everyone will bring a song that they want to learn and share. And we each form the band, like a 20–25-piece band to each person’s song. And we learn the different instruments, different musicalities. It’s a really great experience. It’s probably one of the best experiences of my life. So much so that we kept going back. And so, I had this idea: there’s always a sort of closing retreat that happens. There’s a sort of closing ceremony to end everything. It’s like, “Okay, this is the end of the two weeks you’ve been here learning all these songs.” And then, one after another, we perform the songs to each other. It’s got an incredible energy to it because you really bond through music. And I just said, “You know what?” We’re here. I’ve got a ring, and I can just feel it. I think this is going to be the time I propose. And I remember there’s a guy with a photography film guy there with this incredible set up. And I was like, “Perfect. Can you please film the proposal, etc.?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool.” So we’ll propose here. And at the end of this big retreat, everyone’s sitting in a circle. Someone’s got a gem bay, someone’s got a guitar shaker, music, and a big drum, and everybody’s in a circle. And I asked Carioca, “Dear brother, can the last song at the retreat be a song that I sing that we sing together, me and my wife? And at the end of the song, can I propose to her?” And he was like, “Oh, Yes,” He’s like, “Yes, absolutely, we would totally do this.” And I’m like, sure. Perfect. So he’s on board. Everybody’s on board. The night comes. I’m super anxious. I’ve got the ring in my pocket. Literally, I’ve reminded Carioca. Hey, I’m about to propose to my wife. Let’s not forget that I’m going to do this. And he’s like, “Yes, absolutely. You go, son.” I was like, “Thanks, brother.” And so the last song comes on. I go to sing, and just as I go to sing, and the song is going to be Love is My Religion by Ziggy Marley. I don’t know if your audience knows it. Hopefully, they do. If you haven’t, please go check it out. And it goes “Love is my religion, love is my religion.” And my line was going to be “my love and my religion, will you marry me?” Right. Touch wood. I’m very cheesy, if you haven’t already been told. So that was going to be my line. And at the moment when the time came, I picked up the mic to sing the song, and Carioca was facilitating the retreat. And he looked at me, and he goes, “No,” and I could feel the ring burning a hole in my leg. And I’m looking at Carioca, and everybody in the audience is looking at me. Everybody who is part of the retreat is looking at me. And I’m looking at Carioca, and I’m like, “No, this is my moment,” and he’s like, “No.” And I’m like, “Aeh?” And because it was his retreat, I sort of curled into my own little shell. And I was just like, “Okay, I guess this isn’t the moment.”

And after the retreat, my wife came up to me. She’s like, “Is everything okay? You seem really perplexed, like things are kind of off; are you okay?” And I was like, “Okay, let’s go to the waterfall. Let’s go talk at the waterfall.” And then I was trying to get her to go to the waterfall so I could propose there. And then she was like, “But I’m really hungry. You know, we’ve been up playing music all night.” And then she got to the kitchen, and then everyone started talking to her, and all the energy started to dissipate. And I was just like, “Oh, my God. What is going on? This is just not happening.” This is just not flowing. and I’m just questioning everything. I’m just like, “How is this really happening right now?” I’m internally devastated. There is a big part of me that trusts the universe, but in these moments, it’s really, really, really challenged.

 

And afterwards, I went up to Carioca, and I’m talking to him, and I’m like, “I was meant to propose.” And he goes, “Oh, I forgot. I thought you were asking to sing one more song. That was it. I could feel the energy was good.” I was just like, “I was meant to sing one more song, and I was meant to propose.” And he was like, “Ahhhh, are you still staying for another four days?” And I was like, “Yeah, we are staying for another four days.” He’s like, “Okay, we’re going to do another musical performance, and at the end of that…”. I was just like, “Carioca, man, come on.” Anyway, I left licking my wounds, but I was like, “Okay, cool. Perfect. There’s another opportunity.”

 

And as it turns out, four days later, it comes around. And I tried to learn the song that I actually wanted, because I’d already sung the song that I wanted to propose to, but I couldn’t propose, so that moment was gone. So I had to come up with another song, and I was like, “What song am I going to learn to sing at this retreat?” And I was like, “I can’t play the guitar that well.” But there’s a song called “At Your Feet” that I wanted Nahko to sing in Vondelpark. That’s been my dream this whole time. And I was like, “Maybe I’ll learn how to sing that song and play it on the guitar.” Anyway, so I’m learning how to play it on the guitar, and because it’s a musical workshop, everybody’s looking at me, and they’re like, “Dude, you are really not playing this very well.” What are you doing? And I was like, “Look.” And I told a couple of the brothers, “Look, come here.” This is what’s going to happen. At the end of the next retreat, I have to propose to Kay. I was meant to propose to Kay a couple of, like, a couple of days ago, and now I have to learn this whole new song in, like, two days, which I can’t play. And they’re like, “Bro, we’ll play with you.” You just sing. So long story short, we practiced together for, like, day and night, hiding from my wife at this retreat, which is a very intimate retreat. There are only, like, 20 of us from all over the world, right? We’ve been together for, like, three weeks already, hiding from my wife and learning this song. And we get to the retreat, and at the end of this retreat, I sing the song, which is the Nahko song, which is to aspire to your feet and how they found me. And as I’m singing this song, the brothers are playing the guitar, and it is just the most magical moment of how everything has just come together. And I get down on one knee, and I propose. And she said yes, thankfully. And Carioca is there, facilitating a retreat. There’s a lot of love in the air. and we’re obviously very smitten. We’re now engaged. This is all happening. And the piece about awe—thank you all for listening in. I know it’s a long story, and I really appreciate your patience. You’ll remember that the piece about awe was always meant to be that song. I was forced by nature to miss the song, to miss the moment, and to be forced into the song. and it wasn’t meant to be Nahko. It was meant to be Carioca, who’s a massive mentor to us and who means even more to us than Nahko could ever possibly know. Even though we love Nahko’s music, Carioca gifted us music and continues to open that gift for us.

And we walk out of the massive outdoor maloca, and you look up in the sky, and there are two massive rainbows in the sky. And it was like, “She definitely said yes to marrying me.” And I was meant to say, in the sky, “Will you marry me?” And so in that particular moment, especially when you asked me about awe, it was just all the bits that came up about me trusting the process when things were going wrong. Oh, no. What’s going to happen? When is this going to happen? And then in that affirmation, we said, “We’ve never seen a double rainbow there in our time there.” We’ve been there for many years. Everybody was remarking, “We’ve got this beautiful photo of the entire retreat under the two rainbows as our memory on our wall.” And yeah, it’s in those moments where you’re just completely floored at what the universe is doing. 

Shai Tubali:   So you’re talking here about this ability to allow the universe to show us the right moment. 

Amrit Sandhu: The synchronicities really blow me away. When there are signs from the universe that really affirm your path. Like the two rainbows in the sky all cinching into me singing the right song, I have to get out of my own way. And also just the lessons that we learned along the way, which was like, every time I thought something was perfect, I was forcing it with my mind. Right. But then it’s like there’s a better way, but you need to trust, let go, and surrender. So there are a lot of lessons that I got from that awe, but the big part that invoked the awe was the synchronicities and the signs from the universe. And I find if I slow down things like rainbows, things like when you’re thinking about peace and you see a bird flying over with a twig in its mouth, you’re like, “It’s not a dove, but it looks like peace.” And these signs that come your way, I find really awe-inspiring.

Shai Tubali: I see. So you say that there is a certain discrepancy or a gap between our thinking minds that think that the right moment has come. And then there is a certain cosmic dimension or a certain timing that we are unaware of; is that so?

Amrit Sandhu: “Perfectly.” Yeah, I really think so. I’m not sure if it’s all destined to be a certain way or not. I think that’s a really big question that everyone has always asked, and we haven’t really gotten very close to the answer. But I think there is a lot of opportunity for us to surrender the mind, trust the signs, and flow more in life, and I think more awe begets that flow than sort of pushing with the mind does. This is just my humble perspective.

Shai Tubali: So what would you say about this moment that you were experiencing there after years of trying to get married and doing your best to reach that precious moment? What does this moment reveal to you about the nature of the mysteries of life? Could you talk a little about it?

 

Amrit Sandhu: Yeah, it’s really interesting because I had to have some vision of what my ideal proposal looked like. Like I had to have some vision, and whether that vision was part heart, part brain, like it was my dream, right? And when we say “dream,” sometimes we dream with our heads, but really, I feel like when it’s a pure dream, we kind of dream with our hearts. So the dream proposal was like it came from the heart, really. And there was no way that it was really ever going to happen in some ways, but part of me was like continuing to dream, like maybe it could happen, and then going on my way to architect it a little bit with my head. So then, allowing the head to sort of apply itself as a tool to facilitate the dream in some way. And that looked like me making sure I got a ring, and then me making sure that the team was trying to reach out to Nahko to try and podcast him. And then I kept getting a no, which was interesting. I still, to this day, don’t believe it should have been a no, but it was a no. And so yeah, there’s like allowing the head to sort of follow the heart a little bit and then going, “Okay, I’ve had this vision of the heart, and then I’ve tried to integrate it with my mind.” And then the mind has this propensity to try and want to do the best that it can do, and it really has this propensity. And then you start to go along, and it’s like, “Oh, it’s not working.” And then you start to question yourself to the point where the mind has the ability even to question the heart and its dreams. and going, that dream was never possible. Why’d you make me dream that? And so now you’re in this loop of self-criticism and self-analysis, which is not fueling the purity that was initially there in the first place. Right. And then learning that, actually, it was really useful to have my mind sort of pull me forward, but then also learning where to let go and then allow more than the heart. There’s the fabric of everything to sort of guide and just trust that actually when the moment’s meant to be and you’ll be there, and the vision that you had, your heart, your mind, it’s all sort of stacking on top of each other, and the universe and its blessings will all come together to support you time and time again when you need it, where you are every single time. And it’s a reminder for me that, as I’m sharing this with you, that’s probably happening every moment. Right. like we are the pinnacle of our ancestors. Like our ancestors, if they are an arrow, they’ve all left behind the legacy that is us. Every single moment begets the next moment. And here we are, the biggest miracle that ever existed, and somehow the universe is supporting us in our existence and everything. It’s just like I’m just me; what’s the big deal? And at the same time, you are everything and connected to it all.

Shai Tubali: Yes. That’s wonderful. I would say that at that moment, you didn’t only propose to your wife but also to your future wife and also to the universe. Right. Because it’s a sort of marriage with the universe, with its universal timing and intelligence, and being able to surrender to this kind of union.

Amrit Sandhu: Yeah, it’s a profound way that you’ve articulated that, because in the Sikh faith, which is how we got married, I’m Sikh by faith. And in the faith, we have four rounds around our holy text, where we walk around the text, and each round represents its own symbology. And as you get through the rounds, you’re actually marrying yourself to God more than you are to the other person. Obviously, you’re marrying the other person. But the first few rounds are about you and family, and then as you go through the rounds, the last rounds are dedicated to this, which is an opportunity for me to recognize what union feels like. But then there is also what divine union feels like. And this is a vehicle for us to grow and learn how to actually be unified as one.

Shai Tubali: So how do you recommend that we follow this kind of path of awe? Is that even something one can prepare for? because it’s something that eludes or transcends our own expectations. Right. It’s not that we can prepare ourselves for this moment of awe. It was just exactly when you were refused over and over again by the universal timing.

Amrit Sandhu: Yeah, and when I look into the story, and maybe this is just the way I look at things, but I think there are at least five ingredients that it’s taught me, and potentially people can take away if you’re listening to this episode, the first one is don’t be afraid to dream. Right? I think absolutely You should dream. It’s an absolute gift that you’re alive as a human, and we have the ability to imagine. The fact that we can imagine something is quite remarkable when you just pause to reflect. Like imagination. And Einstein said, “At some point, you’ve got to quote Einstein.” I think you said that in our podcast at some point. sooner or later. And it’s just the fact that he knows imagination is one of the most important, and he was comparing it to something I’ve forgotten what he was comparing it to, but imagination is just so incredible. It’s absolutely incredible that we have the gift to imagine. So to dream and envision is quite mystical. And I think a lot of times, as a coach, what I find is that people are afraid to actually do that, which a lot of the time is to put a vision out there. Because then, if they speak their vision, a lot of people actually have a vision. But if they speak their vision, write it down, or communicate it to someone, there’s almost this borderline anxiety that comes in on the other side. It’s like, “Oh, now I can only fall short,” and it’s kind of true. Like, my vision with how I wanted to propose to my wife with Nahko there and having that idea of, like, there was a dream and giving it, and I didn’t really share it with anybody; I just shared it with myself, but I kept reaffirming it, and it definitely did pull me forward to the point where even today, when I can speak to you, me having written in the sky, like, me forcing to write in the sky, will you marry me? versus the universe and God, however you want to describe it, putting up two rainbows, which is complete nature. Doing its thing is so much better. And so, a vision is incredible. And one of the things I find myself saying in my coaching sessions is that if you shoot for the stars, you might just land on the moon. Yeah. And in this story, I feel like I was shooting for the moon, but I actually landed on the stars. So shoot and have a vision. So I think that’s number one: give yourself a vision. Don’t be afraid to have a vision. You don’t have to share it with the world. And in fact, sometimes as a coach, I say, “Don’t share it with too many people,” because you actually get dopamine hits when you say you’re doing something but you’re not actually taking any action. So your brain and mouth think they’ve taken action by saying they’re doing something, but they’ve actually done nothing. So it’s a total hack. So if you can actually keep your vision close to yourself but affirm it, it’s actually really useful.

The second thing that I took away was to pat myself on the back, and I invite you guys to do the same: be prepared. If I didn’t have the ring, it would have been the most beautiful moment, and it would have just swept right past me. So preparedness is a total thing, not forensic anxiety. It doesn’t have to be like that, but be prepared. It’s the reason we slow down and take the time to do things. If there’s something that’s coming your way, even if it’s in the future, like even planning for your retirement, I know that sounds much more clunky than what we’ve been discussing, but financially, set yourself up and be prepared. These things matter. You can prepare to the best of your abilities. So I think there’s a lesson in there for me to be prepared so that I can make the most of a moment when it appears to me. Can you imagine if we were coming to Australia and then I was like, “Okay, now I’ve got to design a ring and get it made up?” And it’s like, “I’ve got to do this within three weeks.” And it’s like, “The jeweler says it takes three months.” And it’s like, “I can’t do this now.” and be prepared. You know you’re going to propose at some point, and this person is right for you. Get a ring. All my friends are like, “Is this the one?” And they’re like, “Yeah, this is the one.” And I’m like, “When are you going to propose?” I don’t know. I haven’t thought about the proposal. I was like, “Get a ring.” And they’re like, what? And I was like, “Mate, the moment might just appear.” Just get a ring. And a couple of friends got a ring, and they were like, “Oh, now I started.” And the ring has its own energy right now. They’re starting to think and prepare. And moments are starting to appear, and they’re starting to notice the moment because of your preparedness. Yeah. It’s like a warrior. You’d much rather be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war, right? So an opportunity to be the warrior Take the time to be prepared. 

The other big piece for me was surrender. Yeah, it’s the most painful piece, I know when I’m saying it. I’ve still got a lot of work to do when it comes to surrender, but the third point would be surrender. It’s like, because there was so much self-aberration, even like, “Oh, I couldn’t do the Nahko way.” And then I got to Carioca, and then I couldn’t propose. And that was my moment; he told me not to. And it’s okay, people; try again. And I was like, “That was the song.” And then it was not meant to be that song. Right? It was meant to be the song I had always envisioned, because that song had carried the frequency of my proposal for so long. Just learning to surrender. And I think if I called that point three, I think we would call that three A. Three B’s would be to get back up, to get back up again and again. Within surrender, there’s got to be trust. They’re two sides of the same coin. And this is what a lot of these synchronistic, awe-inspiring moments keep teaching me. because when they came, they were never planned. Like you said, you can’t plan for them in some way, but when they come perfectly architected, they are even better than you could have even imagined. And you’re like, what? And one of the things that it does is, without you even trying, crack you open to trusting more. It’s like, “Can you trust?” that even when things are going wrong, they’re cracking open in just the right way for you to get the yoke of the egg out of it? That’s exactly how it’s meant to be. Trust and surrender are two sides of the same coin. What I’ve had to learn is that if I can’t surrender, it’s because I’m holding on and not trusting. And if I can’t trust, there’s definitely not going to be any surrender. So my inability to surrender is directly linked to my inability to trust, right? So if I can trust more, I’ll be able to surrender more. Right? Now, I know that is a big call, and my heart goes out to people who are facing some of my coaching clients. They’re facing terminal illness. And it’s really hard to trust in some instances, but ultimately, we’re all going to learn to surrender. That’s the final test, I believe, in many ways. So the ability to cultivate trust and surrender, I think, is fundamental. And in that time, while you can and you’ve got the blessing of life, get back up.

 

And the fifth point, I would say, even though I went three A, three B, is to slow down. Is to slow down. Really? I know when I say that, it’s a fast-paced world in the 21st century. It’s almost like 20% of anxiety is baked into everything. I totally acknowledge that. But there are moments where even when I sit on a park bench and I look down at the ground and I’m just looking at grass, it’s like, “Okay, I’m looking at grass.” And it takes me a good 30 to 60 seconds for my whole system to relax. And now I can see individual ants. I can see the life that’s happening at that level in the grass. I can actually notice things. Before, it was just grass, but when I slow down, I can actually see things a little bit better. You increase the fidelity of the moment when you slow down. And so the synchronicities are always there. The signs are always there. But oftentimes, when I find that I’m guilty of this even now, I’ll put my hand up and say, “Yes, I’m a culprit.” I’m rushing past the signs. And I see this a lot in my coaching as well. Stress is a sign in your life that you need to recalibrate, and people are just blowing past it again and again. One more coffee, and we push a little bit more. Just another six months of this, and I’ll be all right. Six months turns into, like, six years, and it’s like, I’m still doing the same thing. I never got off the hamster wheel. And it’s like stress. Listen, it’s a sign. Slow down. What is your stress actually saying to you? What are the signs around you saying? You keep seeing the same numbers appear. What does that mean? What are the signs? You’ve been thinking of a particular thing, and it keeps showing up in your field. How does that, obviously, work with the Internet and the algorithms? They know you really well, so it’s getting a bit treacherous in that space, but even in the world, it’s like something as random as I’ve been contemplating animal totems, and I keep seeing the fox. What does that mean? Does it mean anything? Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but you’re slowing down. You’re pondering, you’re contemplating, and I believe it doesn’t have to be where you believe it, but because you are the universe looking in on itself. Curiosity is a fundamental tenet of the human experience, right? Which I guess is the seed of awe, right? Because you get curious, and then you’re trying to look in on yourself, and then you see the majesty of what you are, and you’re like, “Oh, my God, I’m the universe.” As if that’s not the most awe-inspiring thing in the world, right? And in there, taking a moment to slow down and connect to those moments gives you the ability to connect to the curiosity of who you are, why you’re here, and what’s going on in the world. But if you don’t slow down out of curiosity, you might miss the moment. You might miss the opportunity for awe. Like when I walk out of the temple, if I didn’t look up to the sky, it’s pretty hard to miss a double rainbow, but I could have just rushed off and picked up a phone. Obviously, it was a phoneless retreat. Again, an invitation to slow down, but I could have just jumped onto my phone and just started doing a bunch of things, sending emails, blah, blah. I totally missed the moment. And that memory will stay with me forever. And I’ve had the blessing of hopefully inspiring a few people into awe with the memory now here, thanks to Shai and all of you listening in. So, yeah, take the time to slow down.

Shai Tubali: Wow, that was absolutely inspiring. These five pieces of advice are so precious. So if I may summarize in one sentence, what I’m gathering from everything that you’ve been saying is that awe in this context is like a meeting point between human dreaming, human vision, and cosmic timing.

Amrit Sandhu: Yeah. That leaves me in awe every single time.

Shai Tubali: And everything in between. Of course. Yes. I’m so grateful for this meeting.

Amrit Sandhu: The pleasure is totally mine.

Shai Tubali: It’s been really intimate and engaging. Thank you so much, Amrit.

Amrit Sandhu: Thank you so much, Shai. I absolutely love your work. And like I said, it’s an absolute honor to be here. Thank you so much for having me share a little bit about me and my life with everybody. Thank you. Hopefully, everybody leaves a little bit in awe and inspired to cultivate more awe in their lives. I absolutely love what you’re doing, and we’ll continue to share in every way. Thank you.

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Shai Tubali: Hello, everyone. I am truly honored to have Brian Thomas Swimme with us today. Brian Swimme is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches evolutionary cosmology to graduate students in the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program. His published works include The Universe Is a Green Dragon, The Universe Story, written with Thomas Berry, and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. His recent book is Cosmogenesis, an exciting hybrid of autobiography and cosmology. On a personal note, I have actually known Brian Swimme for decades as an avid reader of his fascinating books on evolutionary cosmology.

Hello, Brian. I’m overjoyed that we have this opportunity.

Brian Swimme: Wow. Thanks, Shai. Makes me feel right at home. It’s great to be here.

Shai Tubali: Thank you so much. So, it is clear that your work is permeated with a sense of awe. Even reading these lines on the first page of your recent book is sufficient as a basis for a full discussion on awe. So perhaps I can read these few lines.

Brian Swimme: Great.

Shai Tubali: “Our cosmic genesis can be summarized in a single complex sentence: The universe began 14 billion years ago with the emergence of elementary particles in the form of primordial plasma, which quickly morphed into atoms of hydrogen, helium, and lithium; a hundred million years later, galaxies began to appear, and in one of these, the Milky Way, minerals arranged themselves into living cells that constructed advanced life, including evergreen trees, coral reefs, and a vertebrate nervous systems that humans used to discover this entire sequence of universe development. That sentence required four and a half centuries of scientific investigation of matter.” What opening lines!

So, what is your chosen reason for feeling awe, at least in the limited context of our discussion?

Brian Swimme: Yeah, it’s a great question, I think. It’s also a tremendous mystery, awe. For me, it has to do with being stunned by the nature of reality and the structure of our existence. Even as you’re reading that sentence, wow! Right? Who would have guessed this? It’s just so amazing to me that we have this long, long process, and then it leads to this power to understand the long, long process. So I think the way in which the universe folds back on itself is what stuns me. I didn’t know that growing up. Maybe in 100,000 years, we won’t be as stunned as we are now by this discovery. It’ll be something else. But learning about the time-developmental nature of the universe has just blown my mind for fifty years now. I first got a glimmer of it when I was studying physics and mathematics. I got a glimmer of it, and then, over all that time, the insight has deepened, but it has never lost its ability to move me into awe. It’s still there.

Shai Tubali: So it stays this way to this day. 

Brian Swimme: Sometimes my mind can relax into the facts of cosmology, or I’ll be thinking about something and trying to get some detail straight in my mind, so my consciousness is sort of ordinary in every day life, and then all of a sudden, I’ll shift or I’ll see things from a slightly different angle, and the awe comes rushing in again. I think maybe it’s even a synonym for me: the experience of awe and the experience of being stunned. There are many different ways of being stunned, and I think they might all relate to a feeling of awe. But I guess for me, it’s an experience of magnificence. That’s how I would put it.

Shai Tubali: Wonderful. Can you bring us closer to this experience of being stunned in the face of the discovery of the development of the cosmos? Can you bring us closer to this actual experience?

Brian Swimme: Definitely. I think this is something that, after learning all of that mathematics, which I love, what we’ve discovered doesn’t require knowledge of mathematics. It’s actually very available to anyone. So the first step is the amazing discovery of where the atoms—the complex atoms—come from. When I’m speaking of complex, I mean carbon, oxygen, phosphorus—these atoms, we didn’t know where they came from. I mean, science has been exploring ideas like this for centuries, and throughout that time, we didn’t know where they came from. It was in the 1950s that scientists began to realize that carbon, phosphorus, and these larger atoms came out of stars. So this whole process of “stellar nucleosynthesis,” as the phrase goes, was an amazing discovery. So that’s right there, just to begin with that: every carbon atom of our body—you just feel your flesh, and it’s just all these carbon atoms—every one of them was constructed by a star that then exploded and spread it out in the Milky Way so that these atoms could come back together in the form of planets like Earth. So that’s the first step: just to take in that, at the level of atoms and molecules, we are the construction of a star.

But then here’s the second and final step: knowing that, knowing now that we come out of supernova explosions, when we look out at the stars, it’s a very amazing event because we’re looking out of the stars so that we are assembled by the stars, and now we’re looking at them.

So, we have to take that in. As opposed to thinking of the stars as “out there” and “other,” we have to think of them as something like mothers, because they are our source. But all of this is at an intellectual level, and that’s fine. People can stay there with that. But to really take this in, you have to realize that the consciousness that we have of the stars is not just knowledge. I’m looking at the night sky. I’m looking at stars. I have consciousness—I have this awareness of these bright points of light out there, and I have awareness that they built my body. Well, now look at the whole process of the star creating the molecules, coming together in the form of Earth, Earth developing life, life developing a nervous system and our human consciousness. So our awareness of the stars was also created by a process that began with the stars. The stellar process led to an organism with a mind that could reflect upon the stellar process. So it’s the circularity of the universe. The other word is—I’m blanking on the word I want, but here it is—we’ve discovered the recursive nature of the universe, how it turns back on itself. So then, here’s just a direct experience: Go out and look up at the stars and take in the fact that your consciousness is aware of the stars, so you are aware of the process that began with the stars and led to your awareness. Another way to say it: the inner is aware of the outer, which created the inner.

So instead of being just an organism that happens to be in the universe, we suddenly discover that we are a mode of the universe, of the whole thing. We’re woven by the universe. Some people would say we are woven by the universe so that we can enable the universe to know itself. It just blows my mind.

Maybe one last way of saying it. It’s something that anyone can do by just going through the step-by-step sequence of what we’ve learned. But it leads to this: When we look out at the stars, we are looking at the process that is looking. That process developed into us. We are looking at the process that is looking. So it leads to a kind of intimacy with the vast universe, and suddenly we see that, even though we’re individuals, we are this entire universe in the particular form of a human. I just can’t get over it.

Now, this insight was actually available to earlier civilizations, but it was arrived at in a different way, maybe in a spiritual manner. It’s a different mode, and that’s great. I don’t want to say that this is something that was not known. I think this was known in an intuitive way by certain individuals and certain cultures. And what science has done now is provide an understanding of this process using empirical data. That doesn’t mean science is superior to other ways of knowing, but perhaps it is a wonderful way that science complements other ways of knowing. And that too is a cause for amazement.

But just to focus on the science, that would be how, Shai? There’s my whole life right there. I’ve just given you the whole thing.

Shai Tubali: Yes, that’s astonishing to meditate on. So you are basically describing the beginning of a cosmic consciousness, but one that is not mystical in any sense; it is actual, it is substantial, and it is what it is. So, it is basically looking at the scientific fact and going all the way with it?

Brian Swimme: Yeah, that’s a nice way of saying it. So that science devoted itself—I mean, millions of humans devoted themselves—to this hard work of tracking things in terms of empirical knowledge, and so we have amazing data now about the universe. But what I’m providing, and others as well—it’s not unique to me at all—is an understanding that goes beyond just the data. It puts it all together into what can be called a story. That’s why we used the word “universe story” when Thomas Berry and I wrote that book—it’s an account; it’s a story that has these amazing features, but one that is grounded in science, as you say.

The good thing about that is that it’s available to people from all cultures. It’s not taking one spiritual orientation and imposing it. It’s rather allowing the scientific facts to speak for themselves, in a way.

Shai Tubali: Yes. That’s wonderful. How does one break the thin glass that separates the subject from the object? Because obviously, I’m going to look at the night sky, and as I’m gazing at the night sky, I’m aware of the fact that I’m observing an object. I think this is something that is shared by scientists and common observers, right? It has this sense of a subject looking at an object. So there is a sort of thin glass that separates me from this kind of revelation.

Brian Swimme: Absolutely, yeah. And finding a way through, right? Finding a way through that dualism that separates us is so crucial. And I just have to say, there are many different pathways through the glass, to break the glass, and to realize we’re not separate. I think all of these different pathways are important.

Here’s mine, which I think comes out of science. This happened when I was very young. I was at this park near our home, and I came across some dead fish that had been thrown. The carcasses had been thrown onto the beach by the fishermen who were cleaning the fish up above. So anyway, I came upon this fish head, and just being a little kid, I was curious about its brain because the eye was still there, and I sort of looked underneath, sort of looking for a connection between the eye and the brain. I didn’t get very far, but later on, when I was an adult and studying science and so forth, it came back. The memory came back. And now I could put it in a larger story.

I’m going to talk about myself over a period of time. I was fascinated by the fish and wondered about fish consciousness. But now just examine that situation. Those are the facts. How do we understand that from the point of view of science, especially the science of evolution? I was curious. I was curious because that was in the nature of my nervous system and my mind. And so I was using this brain, and it gave me the power to examine the fish. And I come out—all of us do—of a long lineage of humans thinking about fish. And the recent discovery, by which I mean over the last couple of centuries, is recent compared to the 100,000 years of human existence. The recent discovery of evolution has to be brought into this story because the fish invented a number of brains. One of their inventions led to the brains of amphibians, then reptiles, then mammals. So I was using a brain that was constructed out of the fish brain. And in that moment, I was no longer looking at an object that was separate from me. I was looking at something that had given birth to me. Dualism crumbled away for me forever.

Anyway, that would be the way in which the discovery of cosmogenesis is a powerful way out of the dualism that is causing us so much sorrow and anguish, when we look at the way we are behaving on planet Earth in the year 2023.

Shai Tubali: So you’re saying that this kind of revelation is also key to a different relationship with the Earth, with the cosmos, because we’re no longer dual, we’re no longer separate from it?

Brian Swimme: Yeah, I think that sort of the overriding image of the Earth in modern industrial consciousness is that the Earth is kind of like a hardware store. It has stuff that we can go and get, or it’s like a gravel pit. That’s how we view Earth, and we call it “there are resources.” And so it’s looking at all of this stuff out there, and it’s there for our use.

But now that’s the industrial consciousness that served us for a while but is breaking down. And what is replacing it is this awareness that we live inside an Earth community that gave birth to us. These aren’t resources. They’re all relatives. They’re all cousins. If we can learn to act with that awareness, things will be very different on this planet. Instead of tearing it apart, we will enter into its amazing existence. We’ll be part of a larger community as opposed to reducing it and using it for whatever purpose we might have.

Shai Tubali: And the beautiful thing is that our scientific discoveries can lead us to that.

Brian Swimme: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s what’s happening at this time. I mean, the scientists like these ichthyologists who were studying fish went about it by looking at something out there, examining it, dissecting it, and so forth. They, for the most part, hadn’t yet integrated what evolution was saying, and they came up with amazing stuff using that kind of dualistic orientation.

But we live at a time when that is all breaking down. It’s no longer a viable way of understanding things. So I think science is undergoing a profound change from its mechanistic form to its wisdom form. Science is another path to wisdom, one that is related to other forms of wisdom but brings something new as well.

Shai Tubali: Yes, that’s a complete paradigm shift.

Brian Swimme: Yes, exactly.

Shai Tubali: So can we return for a moment to the “star stuff” realization?

Brian Swimme: Yeah.

Shai Tubali: So basically, as we are sitting right now and discussing, we are a consolidation of star stuff, sitting and discussing the reality of our relationship with the universe.

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Shai Tubali: Now, I’m just trying to understand, scientifically, what does that mean that we are made of stars? Does that mean that these materials come from the far edges of the universe or from a particular spot? I’m just trying to understand, essentially, this kind of realization.

Brian Swimme: Sure. So here are some of the things we know: If we go back 5 billion years and just stay right here, we go back 5 billion years, and there’s no sun and no Earth. They haven’t come forth. We have to say, “Wow, all right, where were we?” There’s no sun. No Earth. There’s no Shai, no Brian. But scientists are piecing together the data and now speak of three stars that went supernova. This is an explosion of not just one star but three different stars, not all together but spread out. And in each one of these supernova explosions, they dispersed the atoms that they had built in their core so that the star exists by transforming hydrogen into helium, so that we can use some of the mass of hydrogen and convert it into energy, into light. That’s in the core of the star. Without that, the star would continue to collapse under gravity.

So you have to picture this star as having this tension. Gravity is trying to squeeze it down to a dot, and the fusion interactions of hydrogen transforming to helium are releasing energy and pushing the star part. We live inside that balance. After most of the hydrogen has been converted, the helium is converted into carbon. And so we step through the elements until the supernova, and there’s an explosion, and then all of the elements are scattered, and then they come together under the gravitational attraction and give birth to the sun, the earth, Mars, Jupiter, and all the rest.

We don’t even have a name yet for the supernova explosion, or maybe three of them, that gave birth to our solar system. You see, this is just entering human consciousness. Think of how important our ancestors were: Thomas Jefferson, Jesus, and Buddha. I mean, all of them are so important. Well, we have another one: this star that exploded and gave birth to a new solar system. That is something we need to wonder over and feel reverence for.

So here we are. We’ve come out of that process and, through ever-deepening complexity, have arrived at the ability to actually understand how it all took place. The universe, in the form of humans, is now understanding its infancy, its adolescence, and its mature, later stages. All of that is entering.

I mean, just think: if you go back 6 million years, when the first humans separated from the chimpanzees, they were almost identical to the chimpanzees. They didn’t know any of this, right? These humans were completely content living that life in Africa. And the chimpanzees stayed the same. I mean, we share 99% of our identification with chimpanzees. They stayed the same. We kept asking questions, and we moved out of Africa and went to the moon. The human species is amazing, and among other things, we are that place where the whole sequence has become aware of itself.

That’s something we do really well. We don’t do warfare very well. We don’t do consumerism very well. We’re great at learning things and entering into awe at what we’ve learned. That has to be one of the deepest meanings for humanity.

Shai Tubali: And that’s why we experience meaning when we are doing this.

Brian Swimme: Yeah, we feel down to our bones that it’s meaningful. Even if we don’t know the ultimate end, we just know it’s so important.

Shai Tubali: I have one last question, and this is perhaps the subtlest one. You are speaking about the stars, which produce us, in a way to be aware of them. Now, my question is whether you ascribe a certain intentionality to the stars or to the cosmos. Is it an intention? Or what is this kind of binding force that connects these two processes—first of all, let’s say, apparently unconscious or inanimate matter and conscious extensions of the universe. Is there a certain intentionality?

Brian Swimme: I mean, yeah, here we are, you know, billions of years after the birth of the universe, and we’re just captivated by that question of intentionality. It’s just so interesting.

Here’s how I view that: At one time, we couldn’t count to ten. Humans hadn’t invented numbers yet. We finally got to one, two, and then many. But, I mean, just think of early humans not being able to count yet, and yet they’re fascinated with the ability to mark time. But some people think that it was really this realization of the heartbeat and the seasons that led to our discovery of numbers. But now you look at something like calculus or differential equations. There’s no way the early humans could handle it. They couldn’t! If someone showed up and said, “Hey, let’s do some derivatives,” that’s not possible. I think that’s where we are with respect to some questions. I really believe that we have not yet complexified our minds to a level where we can really understand this mystery of intentionality.

But I do want to say something, and that’s this, and this, to me, is amazing: We go back to the early universe, which consisted of elementary particles, so there are electrons, there are protons, and there are neutrons, and they are in this form we call plasma, and it’s expanding. Now, did it know how to create stars? Now, when I say “know,” I put that in quotation marks because, in my guess, it certainly didn’t know consciously. There was no human consciousness around to know. But at the same time, it did know, on some fundamental level, how to create stars and galaxies.

As a matter of fact, if you ask any scientist, even the most reductionist scientists, if the early universe was heading towards the construction of galaxies, all scientists agree it was: the universe was heading towards galaxies, because if you altered the nature of the early universe even slightly, there would be no galaxies. So, you see, there’s something intrinsic to the early universe about the construction of galaxies. And so, I would say that’s a kind of cosmic knowing. It’s not conscious, but the primordial fireball knew how to create galaxies, and it got right down to it and did it. I think that’s as far as I can go talking about this deep mystery of intentionality.

Shai Tubali: Thank you. Well, I could definitely listen to you for hours. Your students are most fortunate.

Brian Swimme: Thank you.

Shai Tubali: It’s been an enormous delight to discuss with you, to listen to you, and to meditate with you on what is, in a sense, our true nature, who we are.

Brian Swimme: It’s been a delight, Shai. It really has been. I wish you all the best for your great work. That’s exciting. Our world really needs some reflection on awe.

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Shai Tubali: I’m so delighted to have you in this project, Dawson Church. Thank you for being here with us and for being willing to share your insight—your particular insight into awe.

Dawson Church: I’ve so enjoyed our previous conversations, Shai, and I am honored to be here. I’m so delighted to be sharing together on this awesome theme. So, thank you for having me.

Shai Tubali: Thank you so much. That’s lovely.  So, as you already understand, in this project, what we do is guide readers, listeners, and viewers on different journeys into the best reasons for feeling awe. And I would like to invite you now to introduce us to one good reason for feeling awe. I know that, in your tremendously rich and fascinating field of study and exploration, you have probably found many good reasons for feeling awe. So perhaps it would be a little challenging for you to select one, but just for the sake of this interview.

Dawson Church: Yeah.  o you’re right, there are thousands of reasons that we can look at and consider for feeling awe, but I’m going to start with one, Shai, that I think is fundamental. And that is the fact that you and I and everyone with us right now are breathing. We have breath; we have the gift of breath. And I was so struck that I was writing an essay recently on the commonalities of the world’s spiritual traditions and the ways we can bring ourselves into elevated states of consciousness and connect with “all it is” and with the transcendent state of being. And I realized that the commonality of so many of these spiritual traditions is the breath. And so just the fact that we’re breathing is a cause for awe. One of the pieces of data I looked up on the World Health Organization website recently had to do with breathing.

One day I was sitting in meditation and just enjoying the privilege of taking a deep, slow, and fulfilling breath. And I suddenly thought, “I wonder how many people in the world can’t take a deep breath like that.” I looked up the data, and the number was around 400 million people in the world who have some kind of respiratory distress and have some kind of reason why just taking a breath is a challenge for them. And so you’re breathing, I am breathing, roll breathing, that one thing. We can sit here and just take a breath. and this is the ground for all. Now, breath is far more than breath. If you read Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian saint of the early 20th century, or read Ramahansi of Hernandez’s famous bestseller, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” many of these spiritual traditions, from the Jewish scriptures to the Christian scriptures to Lao Tse in China or the Eastern traditions, we find that they are all reminding us that the breath is fundamental to life, and that the breath is the collection point with the infinite.

And so it sounds so simple. We take 26,000 breaths a day, unconsciously; that’s about 8 million breaths a year. We take it unconsciously; we aren’t even thinking about it. Our body is keeping us breathing; our body is keeping us alive. without me having to think: “Okay, now breathe in, now breathe out.” It’s all happening spontaneously. And so it’s easy to take those 26,000 breaths a day for granted. And yet these traditions tell us that the breath is the connection point with the divine. The breath is the connection point with the transcendent. So I want to start with the most basic possible way of feeling awe, which is just to sit here and feel your in-breath and your out-breath. Now, if you slow it down a little bit, if you get more conscious of it, if you bring your breathing down slowly to about six seconds per in-breath and about six seconds per out-breath, then you go into this phenomenon called heart coherence.

Now, my heart rate is coherent. My heart function is coherent. What that does is trigger brain coherence. Now my brain literally entrains my heart, and now my brain is coherent. My brain is emitting coherent brainwaves. So my brainwaves go from delta, then theta, alpha, beta, and gamma, all the way up the brain. Those brainwaves become coherent, and they become in sync with each other and with the rest of my physiology. So it’s producing profound shifts and profound effects on our health and wellbeing. And as all of those virtual authorities tell us, it’s the connection with the infinite. So if you had to pick one thing out of a million reasons to be filled with awe every day, start with your breath.

Shai Tubali: That’s wonderful because I really appreciate that you are guiding us toward attention to something that is literally under our nose, because awe tends to hide behind and beneath the most ordinary phenomena. Isn’t that so? So, perhaps we can take a moment in which you are guiding us to become more conscious of our breath?

Dawson Church: And one way to become more conscious of it is to simply focus on an experience that left you feeling in awe. In Sufism, in the Sufi tradition, this is called the glimpse, the glimpse of heaven. And you’ve all had that glimpse of heaven when you’ve held a newborn baby in your arms, when you have met with a friend after a long absence and you feel that sense of connection with them when you walk on the beach and you look down and see the waves that are splashing on the beach near your feet and you feel your toes sinking down into the beach sand, or when you look at a beautiful sunset. Any of those things are what the Sufis call a glimpse of heaven and bring you into that state of awe. When you listen to music by your favorite composer or your favorite band, you feel yourself swept up in that state of flow, which is again a very specific set of brainwaves that we measure with MRIs or EEGs. So when you get into that state of flow, that’ll do it. When you look at art, when you do art, or when you’re doing any kind of performance that really inspires you, you can have those glimpses. So the simplest exercise to get in touch with awe is to just close your eyes. And let’s just all do that now together.

Shai Tubali: Yes, please.

Dawson Church: So close your eyes and reflect on one of your glimpses. What glimpse did you have that left you feeling filled with awe and put you in flow—that sense of perfection? So reflect on this event now. Now that you’ve had your event, I want you to tune in to the quality of all five senses you experienced at that time. So reflect on what you saw. So you saw something, whether it was the sunset, the waves of the ocean, the image of the saint, or the work of art. So, reflect on the visual component of your experience of awe. And notice all the details of what you saw. What was the smallest thing, the biggest thing, and the most vivid color? and really tune into the visual component of that awe-inspiring experience. Feel your breath as you breathe in and out. And now tune into what you heard. What were you hearing during that moment? What was the loudest sound? The softest sound, the most unusual sound? and become aware of your breath flowing in and out. And imagine your breath flowing in and out through the center of your chest. So you’re breathing in through the center of your chest, and you’re breathing out through the center of your chest. And now notice any scent or smell that you noticed during that moment of awe; maybe if it was at the ocean, it was the salty scent of the wave, and if it was in a garden, it may have been the scent of the flowers. So tune into any scent that might have been present during that experience of awe. Feel your breath again, flowing in and out of your body through your heart and the center of your chest. And now reflect on any taste that you might have experienced at that moment. So you might have tasted that salty air. You might have salivated at that very rich, sensual experience. So reflect on your taste and slowly breathe in and out through your heart. And now notice what you were touching. Perhaps you picked up that sand from the beach and felt the grains of sand flow through your fingers. Maybe you touched a rose; maybe you touched a baby’s cheek. And you had that physical experience, that tactile experience of touch, to go along with this moment of awe. and tune into your breath again. Breathe slowly in and out through your heart and open your eyes.

And you’ve now had a rich multisensory experience of that glimpse. And some of those great philosophers and sages, like Dr. Paul Brunton in the 1920s and thirties, who was a student of Ramana and Maharshi, would have us dwell on the glimpse. The Sufis recommend we make remembering the glimpse part of our spiritual practice. You have the glimpse of heaven now remembering it.  And then neuroscience tells us that when we sensualize it, when we bring in all five senses into our memory, it then lights up and activates different parts of the brain. and we begin to have a whole-brain experience of that glimpse. Now it becomes extremely real to the brain, and it’s more likely that we’ll be able to evoke those feelings of awe in the future. So all we’ve done here is simply remember one of our many glimpses of heaven. We dwell on it. We’re firing those neurons. When you fire neurons, you wire them. In my book “Bliss Brain,” I have an image of two neurons that are firing together, and in the scanning electron microscope image of these two neurons, you see them shaking and vibrating as they fire together. Slowly, they move closer and closer together, and eventually they literally shake hands and wire together. And the whole process, from firing to wiring, takes 12 seconds. So all you need to do is savor that experience of awe for 12 seconds, and you’re already potentially creating a neo-neural pathway. Do that repeatedly, and you’re creating many new neural pathways. Over time, that’s literally changing the anatomical structure of your brain and sensitizing you to awe. And you then become a person who has an appreciation, a delight, and an affinity for those kinds of experiences.

Shai Tubali: Well, that was an incredible meditation. Thank you so much. I hope I I’ll be able to ask further questions.

Dawson Church: Yeah. Don’t put your brain to sleep.

Shai Tubali: I am also so happy that you weaved the element of awe into our breathing and our breathing awareness. Well, I think that many people are aware of meditation, mindfulness, and breathing. But only a few are aware of the fact that, when the Buddha first designed this meditation, he actually did it because he believed that mindfulness of breathing could actually connect us with reality. So this could actually constitute a complete path to reality, from liberation to transcendence. So my next question is, “Why would you say our breath can connect us with the infinite?” How are the two related? What is this link?

Dawson Church: We’re alive, and being alive is by itself a miracle. If you think for a moment about a corpse in the morgue, So imagine you’re visiting a hospital. There’s a dead body on the slab in the morgue. And this person has already been pronounced dead by a doctor. The doctor has said this person is dead. So that dead body, if you think about it, has all the cells required to move, love, laugh, and do all the activities of life; it has all the enzymes, all the proteins, all the genes, everything required for life, all the molecules; everything is there. It is missing one thing. and that’s actual life force. So five minutes before, this person was alive; now this person is dead. And so there’s just a dead body there. And so that’s the miracle of life. And so we want to connect ourselves with gratitude for that miracle of life in every moment.

And awe is one of the reasons for doing that. When you feel awe, a part of the brain called the insula lights up. And so we have our four familiar lobes of the neocortex, the new part of the brain, the most recently evolved part of the brain. Right below that, we have the insula. The insula is quite a big lobe of the brain. And the insula is what lights up when people are experiencing awe. They also have this part of the brain light up when they’re experiencing positive emotions generally. So gratitude, happiness, thankfulness, altruism, and compassion—all of these things light up the insula. So this positive emotional capacity of human beings is linked to that part of the brain. And when you cultivate that ability to move into these positive states, that part of the brain wires and fires, becomes better at signaling, and gradually develops connections with other parts of the brain.

So now you’re much more inclined to be in those states because you’ve developed your neural capacity to experience them. So just something as simple as breathing, something as simple as moving into awe, is able to move you there. And you want to use simple practices, especially when you’re stressed. When we’re stressed, we can’t remember elaborate things we’re supposed to do. Like, if you’ve ever learned non-violent communication, which I really like and admire, I would use it myself, but I know that when I’m stressed, I can’t remember to differentiate between needs and feelings, like many of the cognitive therapy techniques that I also teach. When I’m stressed, though, I can’t think because my brain, my reasoning brain, shuts down. I mean, my emotional brain is in fight or flight mode. And in those states, you can’t function; you can’t recall all of those really elaborate ideas that cognitive techniques have us use. But you can breathe. Remember to breathe and to feel. And so that’s able to reconnect you with that sense of something transcendent. So that’s when you’re stressed. When you’re not stressed, say you get up in the morning, you put on a meditation track, and you meditate early in the morning. I really recommend you meditate first thing in the morning. Like this morning, I meditated before I brushed my teeth, just like, “Get outta bed.” The first priority of the day is to plug in to that transcendent state. So what’s more important than that? I mean, is any email more important than any news story? Is any pain in my body more important than plugging into the infinite? Do I want to face the day without being plugged into the infinite? So the first thing you do is just get out of bed.

You breathe; you plug in to that which is greater than your local self. And we are that thing whose consciousness is greater than our local self. Rumi said that we are not a drop in the ocean of consciousness. We are the ocean of consciousness in a drop. And so we’re able to plug into the whole of consciousness when we deliberately induce those states early in the morning. and then that frames your day. I go into my day not as a confused, disturbed, or distracted human being. I go into my day with passion, purpose, and power. I plugged into the infinite. So sure, the day will bring challenges, difficulties, stresses, and problems. And I am facing them as that person who, first thing in the morning, prioritizes framing the day in positivity and plugging into all it is.

and that just radically changes your day. We interview people sometimes. I do a lot of research. We do get a lot of quantitative data from people through our research studies. I’ve been involved in over a hundred studies, but we also interview people, and they tell us that the days they don’t meditate, the days they skip meditation, just don’t go as well because they don’t have that resource. So that’s why I’m such a passionate advocate of meditation first thing in the morning. So plug in, frame your day that way, move forward that day, and then your whole day is transformed. It’s also an extension of your spiritual life. You live your day, your business, your money, your house, your marriage, your children, your grandchildren, your parents, and your friends. Everything is an extension of that spiritual connection that we create. first thing in the day.

We connect our local minds with non-local minds and with great minds. We lived then from that transcendent perspective. So first thing in the morning, breath meditation is going to take you there. It then has a dramatic effect throughout your whole day. And I’ll just finish by saying that in one study that I did, which we’re now publishing the results of in a peer-reviewed medical journal, we looked at what happens to people later in the day. So we were measuring all the usual phenomena of transcendence. And we know that they enter transcendent states, but for the very first time, we’re asking the question, “How do they perform at work after they’re in the transcendent states?” So what happens when the meditator goes to work and then has all the stresses of a job, children, money, and all of the ups and downs of life?

And we found that within 30 days of practicing the meditation tracks on my website, within 30 days of using those tracks on the website, they were 20% more productive. In one month, their productivity goes up by 20%. That is like accomplishing in four days what used to take you five days. And that’s just in the first 30 days of using those practices; if you keep on doing it for 3, 6, 9, 12, and longer, you become even more productive. So it’s not just affecting your own disposition, your mind, or your emotions at the beginning of the day. It’s literally making you a more effective human being as you move through your day.

Shai Tubali: This has been irresistibly convincing, and I think that all of these should be considered. And when you are speaking of all these levels or dimensions of life that become aroused or awakened as a result of breathing, this kind of flagging ourselves into the cosmic socket, as it were,

Dawson Church: I love that phrase.

Shai Tubali: This is what you’re actually describing. You are indicating that breath is the life force. Is that right? So how is that connected? You mentioned traditions and ancient schools of thought that refer to breath. And they also refer to another aspect, the subtler aspect of the life force, which is sometimes termed prana, sometimes chi. How do you see these two dimensions of the life force?

Dawson Church: Yeah.  And in all the ancient traditions, they use different terms for it. Like you mentioned, chi is called prana in India. And so they all have some notion of the life force. They all notice that the dead corpse on the morgue table doesn’t have it. And the living person has this mysterious thing. And even though that dead corpse has everything else required for great life—cells, enzymes, and genes—it doesn’t have this mysterious thing called life energy. Also, one other dimension of that is the amount of water you have flowing. So in acupuncture, for example, the acupuncturist, if you go in for treatment, will read your acupuncture meridians and then say, “Oh, okay, we noticed there is a blockage in this theme.” Meridian, let’s insert a needle and release that blockage, and then that life force will flow. So you want to have that life force flow. You want the life force flowing evenly on both sides of your body, both left and right, both right and back. And so there are 12 primary acupuncture meridians. And when you balance those, then the life force flows evenly. And then you also have energy. You have plenty of energy. And I hear so many people, Shai, even young people, that I’m teaching workshops sometimes, and I’m either teaching them in person or I’m teaching them remotely online. And often young people, like those in their twenties, tell me I have no energy. I’m dragging myself to work every day. I’m dragging myself to play with my kids and take care of my family, and I just have low energy. You want to have vibrant energy. You want to have lots and lots of energy flowing through you. There’s an amazing YouTube video I watched about 10 years ago of a tai chi master doing tai chi at 114 years old.

This guy laughs Chinese guy, 114 years old And here he is, with full range of motion in every joint. He is moving fluidly and easily as he does those Tai Chi moves. He died a couple of years after that video. But imagine having that much life force at 100 or 90. You know, one of the things we find about people who practice these practices is that they live longer. And if you look at studies—and again, there are some marvelous long-term studies, which I described in my books—about people who practice awe, gratitude, and all these other positive emotions daily, they live longer. Optimists, for example, are shown in giant population studies to live about 10 years longer than pessimists. A positive emotional attitude toward your circumstances confers around 10 years more longevity on average than pessimism. So you want to trigger these states. Not only does it feel much better every day, every moment filled with awe, joy, gratitude, and optimism, but it’s also having an effect on your gene expression. In one study I did with veterans with PTSD, we showed that in six treatments with acupressure and working on their cognitive issues, all their fears and terrible memories of trauma around combat went away. And we found that when we looked at their gene expression before and after that, the genes that regulate inflammation were dialed up. So now that their bodies are regulating the excess inflammatory response, their genes for immunity are dialed way up. Another study done by a colleague of mine found that genes to do with memory and learning are dialed up after these treatments, which I describe in my books.

So there are all of these physiological benefits to us for plugging in and doing this. We feel better, but the long-term effect is greater longevity and health. There are so many reasons to do this. One reason, of course, is feeling wonderful every day, plugging into that divine light socket, as you put it, and downloading all power, imagination, creativity, joy, and love. I mean, there’s so much love out there, Shai. Sometimes when I finish meditation and I’m starting to walk around my house for the morning, the love I feel pouring through from that dimension is so great. I don’t even know what to do with it all. I’m sometimes singing, sometimes dancing, and sometimes running outside to smell the roses in the garden. And you just have all this life flowing through you, and that life energy, that chi, is flowing abundantly. So you find that these people are chi-full; they have chi. And you also find then that, like a tai chi master with that chi, with that life force flowing through them, they have much longer, not just lifespans but health spans. They don’t have all the degenerative diseases that people who don’t allow energy to flow through them are subject to. They have much lower rates of those diseases, and often they are very, very healthy until just a few days before their physical bodies die. So chi energy is powerful, and it’s just a tragedy. If you’re 25 years old or 45 years old and you aren’t feeling full of life, cultivate awe, cultivate gratitude, cultivate joy, and cultivate inner peace. These things are super easy to cultivate. Just spend half an hour in the morning listening to a guided meditation track. You just have to listen passively, and you start to produce all these epigenetic changes in your body.

And you’ll start to feel better. usually within a month. We did one randomized controlled trial of people doing one of my meditation tracks compared to a control group. And we found that in just one month, the insula, that lobe of the brain that is responsible for all of these positive emotions—all gratitude and joy—had literally rewired itself to make the insula more active. So compared to the control group, which saw no change, the group doing meditation just for a month had this shift in function and anatomical structure in their brains. The lobe that actually governs all of these other positive emotions became more active in only 30 days. So do that; do yourself the favor of using meditation for only a month. and you’ll start to feel energy changing in your body. Do it for a year, and the whole landscape of your life will start to shift. So we have all of these things available to us. They’re free, they’re available online, and they’re easy to do. Yes.  And so there’s no reason not to cultivate what Daoism called “chi,” that life energy.

Shai Tubali: Yes.  That’s wonderful. So my last question is: I think that it follows from everything that you’ve said so far. How would you recommend that we begin to associate breath with awe? How could we make this connection in our daily lives, in our daily awareness?

Dawson Church: Virtually every meditation tradition is going to recommend that you focus on the breath in some way. Even those who use mantra repetition, singing, or chanting are using that cycle of the breath. So start by just being awed by the fact that you can breathe every day. Just be filled with gratitude for the fact that you aren’t that corpse on the slab. You are a living, breathing being, and you have this gift called life. What will you do with it just this one day? for this one day? What will you do with this gift called life? If we saw life as precious, if we saw every single thought in our consciousness, every single emotion in our hearts as a precious opportunity to fill ourselves with life, with joy, with chi, with awe, then if we have that frame for our lives, every single day is a miracle, why not make every single day a miracle? You know, every single day I’m alive, I feel so happy and excited. I just jump every day with enormous enthusiasm because I get plugged into that divine light sock in the morning. I breathe; I have amplified my cheek. I’ve felt life’s energy flowing through me. I then go do things with that life energy.

That’s the productivity I mentioned earlier. and get a 20% increase in productivity in only 30 days. So again, I’m more productive, I’m accomplishing more, and I’m having a much more satisfying life. And then the results start to show around you. So it’s a very simple practice. If you just meditate in the morning and then enter that space, you will find that gratitude and compassion are natural. You can’t stop them. You don’t have to try to create them in your life. They’re just there. They’re just flowing out all around you. So you walk out of your house, you are so happy, and you start smiling at people. You know, I walk around smiling most of the day, and what I found is that I’m smiling. I’m just looking at strangers in the street, and I’m smiling. I walk by somebody in the park, and I smile at that person. I say hello, and they smile, and they say hello. So suddenly, my whole life is full of friendly people who are smiling back at me because I’m smiling. I’m sharing that joy with all around me. And so I now perceive the world as a place of love, safety, support, and connection because I am generating those emotions myself. As I express them, they then reciprocate back to me as well. So it’s so powerful to do this. And again, we have that choice every day to connect with breath and then connect with awe, externalize that, and live our lives that way. And as we live our lives that way, it reflects back on us. One of the things people don’t realize is that our minds and our brains are creating reality every day. You have 10 times the number of neurons flowing from your visual cortex in the back of your head. The part of the brain that processes vision and visual information has 10 times the number of neurons flowing to the eyes as flow from the eyes. Now you have a lot of neurons going from the eyes to the visual cortex. You have 10 times as many going from the visual cortex into the central connecting point of the optic nerve. So you, by your perception and your beliefs about the world, are literally telling your eyes what to see. and you will start to see beauty. If your mind is full of beauty, you’ll start to see joy. If your mind is full of joy, you’ll start to see generosity; if your mind is full of generosity, you’ll start to see courage and compassion; if your mind is full of all of these things, we literally create the world. I wrote a whole book called “Mind to Matter” about how our brains are literally creating what we think of as the world outside of ourselves and external reality. So create my mind is my vision for everyone here: that we are creating the most gorgeous, satisfying, and awesome external reality possible by filling our mind and our brain with those energies and those virtues.

Shai Tubali: Wow. That’s why they did this; this whole discussion has been a source of awe for me. Thank you.  I can’t thank you enough for this absolutely exhilarating talk.

Dawson Church: It’s a joy. I love to share. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Shai Tubali: Thank you, Dawson. Thank you.

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Shai Tubali: Hello Stephen Fulder.

Stephen Fulder: Hi.

Shai Tubali: I’m so happy to have you as a part of this project of 1000 reasons for feeling awe.

Stephen Fulder:  It’s great, and I’m delighted, and I appreciate what you’re doing, and I appreciate your devotion and the fire that you need, that we all need, and that we receive from our inner lives. And clearly, your fire has brought you to this project. So many, many blessings and I’m delighted to be here.

Shai Tubali:  Thank you for these beautiful terms. Fire, yes, that’s right. So let’s increase the fire by having this kind of discussion. And you’ve been deeply engaged in various fields throughout your wonderful lifetime, as an academic researcher, as an expert in the field of herbs, as a mindfulness expert functioning as the founder and senior teacher of the biggest Buddhist and meditation organization in Israel, Tovana, and also as a peace activist, among other things. So what would be your chosen reason for feeling awe? The phenomenon that fills your heart with a sense of awe and wonder and leaves you humbled and amazed by the world around you or within you

Stephen Fulder: I think a primary place would be to leave behind the ordinary. That in the ordinary includes the framework called this person, Stephen Fulder, and all the ordinary mind, the ordinary history, and the usual habits of mind. And when that is broken, and sometimes it’s broken into pieces, and instead of that ordinary mind, there is a whisper, there is a hint, there is a blessing, there is a kind of touch of something way beyond the ordinary, then the response inside this consciousness is awe and amazement. So, I’m putting awe and amazement together because they are, in a way, the meeting with the unknown. The known is what we learned, the conditioned mind. It says, “This is Steven; these are my usual thoughts; this is what I have to do; and make a cup of tea.”

This is the ordinary mind. I’ll say more about that because, in a way, there isn’t such a thing as ordinary, but let’s say there is an ordinary. I will go back to that. The extraordinary is anything that shakes the ordinary, and it is no longer tenable to hold the ordinary, to hold the conditioned mind, to hold the habits of mind, and then arrive by itself. I never look for awe. I never chased it. I chase infinity in a way. Well, you can’t chase infinity. So, you know, it’s a paradox of language. But shall we say my heart goes to the beyond? And when as much as the heart touches the beyond or beauty and the heart being filled is a natural result of that, it’s not something that I look for.

Shai Tubali:  I understand, and that’s extraordinarily beautiful. and I would really like to delve deeply into that. So you just mentioned that there is no such thing as the ordinary. I guess this is what is revealed when you remove your ordinary perception. Is that right?

Stephen Fulder:  That’s correct.  So, ordinary perception is just what we learn, and it’s very, very simple. We learn where to go (location), we learn time, and we learn where the body is, and all of that learning is really needed otherwise; you know, I can’t cross the road if I don’t know where my body is and where a car is. So if you like, the operating system of the self and the world is needed, but it’s needed functionally and minimally, and you can begin to see, well, the consciousness is so vast that it can just keep going with the operating system and make sure the operating system is doing fine. “Thank you very much, healthy and well.” Now let’s see what really exists in this reality. And there you go way beyond, if you like, the operating system, the functional existence, or the conditioned mind.

Conditioned mind is what you learn on the way, but what is not in the structure of the brain, what is not in the brain networks, is a vast sense of being that is way beyond this person that you recognize, and there isn’t such a thing as ordinary anymore. And when you look back on what was ordinary, like Stephen as a person, you begin to see that it’s also a dream, that the functional life itself is a dream. And it’s no different from the dream at night when you have an amazing dream at night and you think, “Wow, what a dream!” But this day, when you wake up, that’s the same. Wow.  What a dream. Now, right now, when I’m talking to you, you know, I’m talking to the dream of Shai. It’s the dream of Stephen talking to the dream of Shai. The whole thing is quite amazing when looked at with fresh, open, and endless consciousness. This moment is utterly amazing. It’s never happened before. It’s unknown.  It’s uncontrolled.  It’s not contracted. This moment while we are talking, there’s something about it that is endless.

Shai Tubali:  So when we are talking about awe seen from this perspective, you are talking about the very beingness, right? that that is awe-striking or that that is breathtakingly inconsivable?

Stephen Fulder:  Yes.  I think that here we need to be a little bit clearer. Or, the way I see it, it is still an experience. It’s not itself beyond experience. So, the unconditioned, a consciousness that is beyond boundaries, is actually beyond conditioning. So I see awe as in the boundary place; awe is the experience, still an experience where the consciousness meets the unlimited, when the limited meets the unlimited, or is an experience and it’s a big experience. It’s not a small one. It is like compassion. It’s like ecstasy, but it is on that boundary. And when you are not on that boundary place, you are either totally inside the ordinary mind, you lose awe, there isn’t awe, or when you are totally beyond that boundary place and you are living totally in the unlimited, then there’s no awe there. There’s no need for it. So the boundary is where we experience awe, and it’s a beautiful experience by itself.

And it tells you that you are a limited being, if you like, born as a surviving body, you know, as a body born in life, and meeting the unlimited and the awe is a sign of that. There are other signs, by the way, not only awe. Another sign would be deep silence, where you feel deep quietness and a kind of sense of no disturbance—equally equanimity, you could call it—where there’s nothing that can be disturbed because there’s nothing wrong anywhere and there’s nothing missing anywhere. So that is another: a sense of non-disturbance, a sense of silence and stillness. And one more: I think quality, along with awe, would be love. So again, the heart is engaged and will feel this love when it meets the unlimited. And it is no longer a question of a mind, a thought, or a concept. Love would, in a way, fill that space. So there are some of the places that alongside awe indicate the touch, the kiss, if you like, of the beyond.

Shai Tubali:  I see.  So, you are talking about awe as this kind of experiential encounter between our limited consciousness, the consciousness that is right now, and the unlimited, right? that it glimpses into the unlimited. Could you talk a little about this encounter?

Stephen Fulder: Yes, I’ll give a small example. My first year in India was 1975 or 1976, which is a long time ago, and I had a flat or a room by the Ganges. It was in Varanasi, and it was right on the Ganges. And every morning I would run out of my front door and jump straight in the Ganges and swim, and don’t tell me the Ganges in Varanasi is dirty and dangerous, because I just did it anyway; I had no interest if there was a body or two passing by. But one day I remember it was in the monsoon, and I swam out to a rock, which was in the middle of the Ganges there, and I sat there and I just asked the universe to give me a sign, to give me a blessing. And after a few minutes, all of a sudden there was something that broke the water, and I realized it was a dolphin.

And the dolphin came up out of the Ganges River and came back. And then there was another dolphin, and another dolphin, and another dolphin. And after a while, I counted about 20 or 30 dolphins that were going around the rock that I was sitting on for about an hour. They kept going around and around the rock that I was just sitting alone on—this rock in the middle of the Ganges. And these dolphins were just circling around and circling around and circling around. And for me, that was like, “Whoa, unbelievable experience.” And in that sort of experience, which is propelling you into a place of beyond, which is really pushing you into a place of beyond, there is awe, which is so clear. So that place has happened in my life hundreds and hundreds of times. when I touch the kind of sense of beyond, the sense of a bigger space, or a movement from a contracted place to a more expanded place.

And it can be, you know, big or little; it can be just a small moment of, never mind dolphins, just to see a spider making its web. And there’s one in front of me right now as we’re talking; it’s making its web, and there’s such magic in it and such extraordinary beauty and specialness, but the eyes need to be a little open for that; you need to see it. You need to kind of feel that come out of yourself and feel like you belong to the universe in which these amazing things are happening. So, at that place, for me, awe, joy, bliss, and amazement happen. When I’m in deep meditation and I sense the universal, if you like, presence of everything in a universal sense, there is no awe for me. The universe is there; there’s nothing to be. There’s no reason for awe; if you like, instead of awe, there’s totality. And it is subtle; you can say maybe there is a deep appreciation, love, and so on in the stillness. I wouldn’t be too defining what is awe at those moments when there is actually a sense of the totality, of the limitless, of the beyond, of the absolute, of the totality. When you touch it, then yes, there’s awe, and you can cry. And I’ve cried when I kind of touched that place. But then, when you are inside it, that’s it. Then it’s the universal, and there’s no one to feel it, or there’s no person that is feeling awe.

Shai Tubali:  That’s wonderful.  So, are you saying that awe is this feeling that leads you or guides you to that being?

Stephen Fulder:  Yes.  It’s a helpful guide, and it’s a result of the movement of meeting and dropping into a more universal place, which is the sign of that movement. And in a way, it’s also an indication that you’re on the right track, and sometimes it can be an illusion in the spiritual journey. And what happens, and I’m guiding really hundreds of people, thousands of people, and I’ve noticed sometimes that there is an illusion that people feel like they’ve really expanded consciousness, but it’s still, in a sense, locked into a self. And one of the signs is that there’s a lack of silence, a lack of stillness, and a lack of beauty and awe. And because there’s some sort of illusion, the illusion creates limited energy somewhere. So, I think awe is an authentic meeting with the beyond, and one of the places that is really interesting is that knowing can stop it, can stop the awe. And in some of your writing, you were asking questions about the source of awe, and you mentioned science. And indeed, I mean, science is amazing, and I’ve been a scientist for years, but it’s also a real disaster at the same time. I think it’s a real catastrophe as well as amazing. But something about awe is beyond the known and the knowing, the knowledge, and knowledge can create a form in which you find yourself locked in to knowledge. I must know about this. How does this work? Even if you have too much knowledge about awe, for example, tell me how awe works, the rules, how to make it, how to get awe, and how I can grab awe.

Shai Tubali: Which is what they do nowadays, they try to, and you’ll capture it.

Stephen Fulder:  Exactly, and you’ll lose it if you try and chase the rainbow; you will lose, and you will never catch the rainbow. But if you are the rainbow, then the rainbow is what you are; you are the rainbow. You don’t try to catch the rainbow, and you’ll feel like you’ll be a rainbow. and there is awe there. And it needs, in a way, the unknown or the not knowing. And here I’ve been really inspired, really going back to the original text of the Buddha, two and a half thousand years ago, kind of jumping over a great deal of interpretation and books and forms and methods of meditation, but really going back to the source, like the original source, because there are some beautiful insights there about this place. and I’ll just give one small example. There is a text where someone came to the Buddha and said, “How do you recognize an awakened person?” And the Buddha answered, “You recognize them because you can’t find them.”

And the questioner said, “What does that mean you can’t find them?” They don’t exist. or are they gone in some way? He said, “No, they exist, but you can’t find them because you can’t describe them.” When you’ve gone beyond the ordinary mind, then all description, all labeling, and all the knowledge of the distinction—this is this, this is that, and this is how—go as well. So an awakened person is unfindable; basically, he is a mystery. So I think that’s a beautiful place where we are touched by awe when we are beyond the knowing and the distinctions and the descriptions and the labels, and then we let go, we surrender into a place beyond, and we can feel awe there. And Krishnamurti once said, looking at a mountain, “Beauty is where the self is not.” And by “self,” it includes knowledge, thinking, and descriptions. And where there’s no, where we drop that, awe takes the place of knowledge.

Shai Tubali: So, the self, the personal self, the known, is the obstruction, that which hinders our ability to reveal this kind of natural state of awe.

Stephen Fulder:  Yes, if it’s taken too seriously. We need, we have a self, or no, we don’t have a self, but we have a self-process. Like I said, the operating system is working; it’s fine for me to call you Shai and for Shai to call me Stephen. It’s fine.  It’s not that interesting, though. It’s just a kind of basic language so that we can get on and survive in this body. So, you know, we don’t need time until we have to catch a train. We catch a train, we need time, and then we drop it. And the same with the descriptions and the self. So we can have a kind of limited world where we need these things as a kind of convenient fiction. They’re convenient, but they’re fiction. As soon as we begin to question our belief in these forms, it opens the door to the unknown and to a bigger sense—an unlimited awareness that’s unlimited and beyond that self and its labels. And there, as I said, the sign of meeting in that place is awe. It’s like wonder and amazement. That’s the sign. That’s the sign that you are jumping in a way out of your snake, the old skin of the snake. You kind of pushed them and wriggled them out. And you have rigged out your old skin, and you have a new skin for the snake. And the snake goes, “Wow.” It’s all fresh, new, and amazing, and that’s the awe.

Shai Tubali:  I see, so I have one last question. And I know that you have pretty much rejected the idea of creating the perfect conditions for awe, and this is understandably so. But what could prepare the mind for this moment of being able to leave behind the known and the ordinary?

Stephen Fulder:  Yes, I was a bit extreme on purpose; it was a sort of reminder that, like awe and the rainbow, we have to be aware that we can’t really run after it in order to get something. However, there’s a lot; there’s so much. I mean, I’ve been teaching for 25 years, and I’m not teaching people just to sort of do nothing and wait for it to arrive. I’m teaching people to be active, and I’m active myself. I’ve been to hundreds and thousands of retreats, courses, teachers, and so on. So, of course, there is a lot that we can do to open these doors. And I think meditation is clearly a primary practice. And I would say meditation that is not too constructed, meaning allowing the unknown, seeing the way things are without too many phrases, mantras, control, methods of concentration, and so on, which are all helpful in their own time, but be light with meditation that’s too constructed. There needs to be a lightness there and a surrender, but surrender into some deeper place within us that actually already knows. And you can call it the Buddha’s nature. You can call it the “big, unlimited consciousness.” You can call it the Buddhist language of pure awareness. But having a sense that there is a refuge, there is a ground, there is a home within us, which already knows And so it’s both. There is something to do, and there’s nothing to do. and the paradox of spirituality is there.

So I really recommend having spiritual practice and being light with it and exploring with it. Yes.  Getting guidance and then knowing to let go Getting more guidance and then knowing to let go of that one Having different teachers that give different methods and then not being really stuck or attached to any of them So in this life of exploration, keep exploring the deeper voices within us, which are already there. And tell us if you think you are a limited person. It’s not true. Here, I’m telling you, say these deep voices. I’m telling you, these are voices of the ultimate. We can’t possibly be just completely locked in ourselves. It’s impossible.  Life isn’t like that. So you can say the voice of the universal, the voice of life, is there in us, and we just need to keep unpeeling the layers that have covered it. And each time we peel off a layer, we will, in your language and in your interest, experience awe. Each time we peel off another layer, we will experience another way of saying this in an English short word: wow. You can rewrite your whole awe word as “wow.” It’s the same, so when we peel off layer after layer, wow, wow, wow. And each time something already in us is released, it is given space to open and to show us the unlimited.

Shai Tubali:  Well, I could have continued to listen to you for hours, and thank you so much for this fascinating talk, which really gives us this vivid sense of the wonder of being.

Stephen Fulder: Exactly. And I just want to finish with a blessing to all your readers and listeners. It’s not so far away; it’s actually nearer than we think. It’s actually closer than our own thoughts. It’s what gives rise to our thoughts. And that place is, in a way, calling us. It’s calling us. And my blessing is to just allow ourselves—all of us that are listening right now—to open and to listen to the call and the invitation. And when we listen to that invitation, we can be entirely available. The deeper voice that is calling us is saying, “I’m here; pay attention.” I’m here, and I’m ready. Are you ready?

Shai Tubali: Yes, so consciousness is actually the source of awe itself.

Stephen Fulder: “Yes, it is.” And I would say just the endlessness of things is there constantly. And as much as we touch it, it blesses us. And one of the places where we experience this blessing is in awe.

Shai Tubali: “Thank you.”

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Shai Tubali: So, hello, Amy.

Amy Fox: It is wonderful to be here with you, Shai.

Shai Tubali: Yes.  Yes.  It’s sheer joy to be together and to begin to explore the theme of awe meditatively and experientially together, and this is actually the very first interview and the very first reason for feeling awe that we’re going to introduce to our readers, listeners, and viewers, so that’s a tremendous source of delight.

Amy Fox: I’m honored to be the first and to join you in this gorgeous effort.

Shai Tubali: So you told me before that for you, it’s almost difficult to discern a particular phenomenon that would be a source of awe for you because, for you, this is a kind of continuous state. Right?  But still, I would start by asking you: if you had to choose for the sake of this interview, for the sake of this exploration, what would be one good reason for feeling awe? The one phenomenon that fills your heart with a sense of wonderment and that leaves you humbled by the world around you or the world within you? 

Amy Fox: Oh, yeah.  I mean, and maybe I’ll speak to the first and then to the specifics of your question. So, I was reflecting on awe and anticipating our interview, and I was thinking that, in some ways, awe is a choice one makes about how to relate to the dimensions of grace in their life. So if you, if you have a kind of orientation to recognize that everything you’ve been gifted is full of awe, is full of an expression of the divine presence, whether it’s music or the beauty of nature, or the intimacy of a moment with a friend in, you know, sharing the deep interiority of your life, or an opportunity to create something with someone, or, you know, just the simplest acts of travel, of dining, of cooking, of every day acts can be awe-filled, if that’s the stance you choose to meet them in.

So in some ways, I think it’s true that there’s awe available to us in many, many moments, and that the threshold for awe, meaning that I recognize this as a grace, I recognize this as an expression of beauty, I recognize this as an expression of love. That’s what I think one means by “awe,” to have that reverence. And I do feel like you can cultivate that reverence and mature it inside your heart. And as you know, I had cancer very young, and I think that early connection to the ephemeral nature of life, or the impermanence of life, seeded in me a kind of cultivation of gratitude—just the opportunity to engage with life, be met by life, be fed by life, and offer something to life—that has sort of an element of awe in it. But since you’re asking me to pick one, I think I’ll pick the awe I feel when I get to know another person’s story and see the unique beauty of somebody’s specific journey in life. I am over and over and over again touched by the qualities of the human soul, and I think that’s probably the thing that I find the most awe in. 

Shai Tubali: Yeah.  I see; that’s a very intriguing choice. Could you please guide us through some kind of journey because not all of us are able to be touched so deeply by another’s story, especially the meaning you ascribe to it as glimpsing into someone’s depth of soul? So, could you elaborate on that and make it clear why this is a source of awe? 

Amy Fox: Yeah.  Let me think for a second. Well, implicit in what you said is something maybe worth being explicit about, which is that in order to receive another story, I have to have done a certain amount of my own inner work to be capable of listening to anything, to be an invitation to share whatever they’ve walked. And since most people’s lives include a lot of pain or struggle, and that’s the journey most of us have been on, you have to have done enough of your own inner healing work to be able to encounter that pain with an open heart. So I think it’s true that the fact that I’ve walked my own inner development path for a long time makes it possible for people to share more of the truth of their lives than they would otherwise. I think there’s a second quality of receptivity that’s worth naming, which is being able to see that any encounter could be a fertile exchange.

So I have the privilege of having profound conversations in what would be seemingly ordinary and casual encounters because I don’t have the expectation that they will remain superficial. I really believe, because I bring a quality of awe and interest to those conversations, that if you just create a little more room and a little wider invitation, people are eager to share something of who they really are, what they value, what matters to them, what inspires them, what threatens them, and, you know, what they custodian inside themselves. So I guess part of the reason I find the process awesome is that I know that it’s a dance between me and the other person. How big is my on-ramp to the conversation and how, you know, wide is my embrace has something to do with what is then granted me by the other person. It’s not neutral how people meet me or how I meet them. It’s a co-creative act, so part of the awe is sort of making the implicit tacit consent to me to meet, to really encounter, and to emerge something together so that moment when there’s a spark of recognition, soul to soul, we can choose to step in here and really find each other. That’s a moment of awe, I think. And when somebody grants you that license, that’s a very blessed moment, so that’s the first thing I would say. I think the second is that I really believe that the purpose of the evolutionary journey of life is for each of us to learn. So what that would suggest is that listening to anyone’s story and the meaning they make of it is an education in getting wiser. It’s a chance to, through osmosis, absorption, fascination, and a willingness to be moved, the life they have journeyed can become a source for your own evolutionary consciousness, so there’s something very beautiful about the learning opportunity to meet someone.

I also think it’s a healing opportunity because we know that much of the difficulty in life comes from feeling alone in whatever your struggle is—feeling too isolated—sort of a separate sense of self that is identified with its own aloneness. So the alchemy out of that is relation. The alchemy that comes out of that is intimacy. The alchemy that comes out of that is to be cradled in your life experience. So when two people pause and take the time to really listen to each other, I think there’s something intrinsically powerfully healing in that. And that’s also awesome, you know, to just watch somebody’s fear start to melt, to watch somebody’s shield start to drop, to just watch somebody, you know, it’s almost like an hand reaching out to meet another hand and that point of connection, something both hands change. 

Shai Tubali: That’s absolutely wonderful. Thank you.  So I would perhaps suggest that you are finding awe in the experience of true dialogue. Is that right? 

Amy Fox: You Absolutely. 

Shai Tubali: Could you speak a little about what listening means to you and what dialogue means to you? 

Amy Fox: Sure, one of my teachers, Thomas Hübl, says that listening is listening as if you have eyes all over your body. And I really, really love that, and I think that’s, you know, a skill one has to learn and commit oneself to, but in fact, what it means is opening your entire energetic field to receive the other person. Because people transmit who they are and what they’ve done, not just verbally but paraverbally, energetically, esoterically, and psychically, when you can take somebody in, that’s the beginning of the dialogue. And I think the other part of that is being willing to share with people the things that in society we’re told are not welcome, to really say, “Here’s where my brokenness lives.” Here are the things that scare me: Here are the things that have really shattered me: Here are the things I long for: Here are the things I doubt about myself or about life. I’d like to share the terrain that has historically, in our society anyway, been privatized. To share that in more of the commons will, I think, rewire community in life. And I think, you know, the notion that it takes a village is true. We can’t heal alone; we have to start rewiring the ways that we create the social fabric of our connections, and that kind of dialogue where you tell me who you really are and what’s your cutting edge, and you take me into your inner life, and I offer that same vulnerability and willingness to be raw and truthful, I think it does create a kind of mutual space that is pregnant with life, pregnant with awe, and pregnant with the possibility of something new emerging between us, that is more than the just synergy of our lives. It’s the alchemy of that moment, connected to everything we bring to that moment. And, you know, I have the privilege of being a friend of yours, and I can say every moment I get to spend with you is quite like that moment. 

Shai Tubali: Thank you.  That is a completely shared experience. So because I indeed can appreciate the way you are listening and being so completely engaged, in an unfamiliar type of depth, in a state of conversation, in what sense does that open someone else’s doors? Because you’re talking about this therapeutic dimension of the dialogue, right? And how do people respond in a way that actually becomes a source of awe to you? 

Amy Fox: So, I have the privilege of running a lot of workshops for leaders. And in the workshops, it’s not unusual, Shai, that they come in on the opening night, very guarded, very exhausted, and very self-contained in a way you might describe it. And the invitation in these programs is really to help people stop the superficiality of their lives, stop referencing their meaning and goodness by their accomplishments, by the prestige of their roles, by the quality of their lifestyle, and start understanding their intrinsic worthiness from a much deeper place inside themselves. And as people turn from a life that’s really shaped by cultural assumptions, norms, and goals to much more of an inner-driven set of values, motivations, and, you know, increasing their self-contact, there are just some qualities of who they really are that are invisible on opening night that start to unfold in front of your eyes over the course of the week. Qualities of compassion, qualities of playfulness, qualities of creativity and whimsy, qualities of depth of emotion—you know, many, many facets of what’s gorgeous about the human being—that are literally covered over, like, they have like a grey veil over them by the way that we operate so much of the time. And when you put them in a contact field that says, “No, you know, you don’t have to be so buttoned up,” you could actually just unleash who you are and speak from a soulful place and dance from a soulful place and, you know, engage each other from a really, really gravity of what we’re here to discover, it’s literally awesome to watch people come alive. It’s like, “I don’t know.” That’s like they’re absorbing the liquid gold of love, and that love has potential. And, and I also would say that in that field of love, they start to be very articulate about things that are important, and in that heightened sense of coherence and trust and ease with each other, the whole quality of conversation and the quality of the sort of invisible points of connection that you can feel but you can’t quite see, the field becomes very different. It’s very, quite beautiful. It moved me to tears almost every time, actually.

And I know that they will go home and lead differently. They will lead their organizations with all of those qualities of kindness, presence, and accessibility. And perhaps much more importantly, they will be more responsible to their families, to their children, to their communities, and to the context in which they operate on a day-to-day basis. That aliveness is a permeated force field in the rest of their lives, in every context that they will walk into. So part of the awe is anticipatory awe, because I know that it’s setting in motion a river that will run for a long time. have many different tributaries of beauty. So it’s the awe of watching somebody come home. 

Shai Tubali: So would you say that you are simply allowing something to be revealed—something that is already there, that pre-exists, and you are just there? Would you say that, or is it something that is actually developed as a result of the interaction? 

Amy Fox: No, I think it’s more the former. I think, in fact, that we normally live in a state of grace, love, and wonder, but that it’s constrained by trauma, pain, and hurt that has been unattended to. And because we aren’t tending to that hurt, we do many things to numb ourselves or disconnect ourselves from our pain. And the reason that we don’t see a world that’s exploding with awe and wonder isn’t because we’re not hardwired for awe and wonder. It’s because there’s so much untreated pain and so many sorts of micro-behavioral hacks that keep us outside ourselves that that distance is the gap between me in a moment of awe and me in a moment of dullness. But no, I don’t think we’re adding anything. I think we’re creating a kind of permission for people to dwell in the depths of who they are naturally. 

Shai Tubali: And this is not obviously done through a technique or something intentional, or is it just some kind of result of pure interest? 

Amy Fox: I think I would answer that as an and, I do think the quality of imminence in the room, like just the level of attention we want to pay to each person, the level of intention we’re holding for how profound something is that could happen, All of that is part of the context in which the unfolding happens. And of course, there are practices—you teach many of them—that are doorways to that kind of aliveness or feeling of heartfeltness and awe. You could do a meditation on loving kindness. You could do a journaling of your life story and look for key moments and the sort of meaning that they had for you. You could talk to each other about your life journeys; you could dance; you could do martial arts; you could do mindfulness practice; you could listen to poetry; you could play music. We do all of those programs in beautiful settings, and nature does a great deal of the awe work, we could argue, so yeah, I mean, I think there are ways to devote yourself to practices that are alivening, illuminating, and useful. But at the end of the day, it’s really love. I mean, if we had to be simple about it, 

Shai Tubali: So it’s love that’s behind this type of listening. 

Amy Fox: Yes.  But it’s not love in a soft sense. It’s love in a quite precise sense. Meaning, it’s not just that I’m willing to theoretically have an open heart; it’s that, as a practitioner, I’ve done enough of my own work to be able to take that heart and extend it to you in a way that is not diluted by my natural judgments of myself or you, is not clouded by my own terror and my own fear in the moment that you bring me your story, and doesn’t need to make something happen or pressure you to move any faster than your heart is safe to open. That’s a very important one. I don’t take my success as whether or not you open, so I’m not invested in pushing past your defenses. I really honor people’s defenses, and I think that anything they’re doing to guard themselves is a really intelligent survival strategy that they learned earlier in life.

It’s just that this moment is an invitation to test: is that still needed? Is that still necessary, or is something else possible? but it’s very different to approach that defense with an understanding of how significantly lifesaving it was once upon a time to have that approach and not as something to be dismantled or something to be discarded. So there’s lots of nuance to what it means to be in a state of love and receptivity, and I think some of the problems in the craft of transformational changes are that too often people sort of simplify it. Love is actually an art form, or this kind of love is, anyway. 

Shai Tubali: And creating conditions. 

Amy Fox: Yeah.  Creating the right conditions Yes, there’s also something about helping people move from every-day time to eternal time. So a program like this really lives in a state of grace itself. You know, you invite people to pull out of their daily lives, to pull out of their to-do lists, to pull out of their day-to-day interactions, so you’re creating, as you said, the preconditions for something elevated to happen. 

Shai Tubali: That’s wonderful.  Now, could you lead us to a moment or moments that you have experienced in your processes of guidance or in your everyday life, to some moments, certain moments in which you, in which someone opened up in a way that filled you with this kind of awe and wonderment? 

Amy Fox: Sure. I’d be so happy to. Two came to mind immediately when you were speaking. So I had a gentleman come into my program about six months ago who was very cynical and for whom self-exploration was not a natural mode of hanging out, and the programs are often done on the floor, you know, sort of very casually comfortable to make people feel more at ease and less formal. And he walked in and saw us on the floor, and I saw the thought flash through his brain: “I’m out of here.” I thought, “Oh, it’s not obvious he’s going to stay,” and he didn’t sit on the floor for the opening night. He sat in the back, and he had his arms sort of crossed. You can see he was just sort of assessing: is this, you know, too weird for me? And then, overnight, I attribute some part of his deep yearning for truth and freedom to his making the choice to really give himself to the program. And Monday morning, he was deeply willing and activated to start the process of self-discovery. And on the third day, he raised his hand and asked me a question that I’ll never forget. It still gives me chills.

He said, “Amy, can I ask you something?” And I said, “Yes, yes, of course.” And he said, really from the center of his heart, “I’m a ruthless man.” I’m ruthless with my teams. I’m ruthless to my partner, and I’m ruthless to my children, and I’d like to know how to stop that. For me, a question like that is a moment of awe because that man, it came to be revealed, came from generations of clinical depression, alcoholism, or trauma after trauma after trauma and his lineage. And unless he ever asks that question, it will simply pass along to his children and their descendants and listen to time. But when he asks that question and gives me goosebumps to talk about, how do I stop? How do I make sure it ends in my generation? You rewrite the book of life. So that’s one such moment, and I’ve truly been honored to have many, many, many such moments in these programs. Like, you just literally see before your eyes somebody making a choice in that one generation to change the future for their entire family and also all the people they lead for sure.

A much more personal one: I was in Israel last week, and I was in a car from the taxi to the hotel, having a very casual-seeming encounter with the driver. And a few minutes into the conversation, he started talking to me about his teenage daughter, who’s very dangerously depressed, and I’m sure many of your listeners know there’s a pandemic now of adolescent self-harming, depression, and suicidality coming out of COVID. It’s something I’m very worried about, very alert to, and happen to have a lot of resources for. And so we spent the whole ride, you know, once he opened the door of that conversation, me getting a chance to better understand what she was struggling with, what was going on for her and for him in the family, and what resources they needed, and, you know, I was pretty swiftly able to put some things in place that I hope will be meaningful to her.

But the story is not awe-inspiring because I helped, I mean, there’s many, many chances all of us have all day to help. It’s awe-inspiring to me to see how little of an invitation he needed to talk about what really mattered to him, and that what could otherwise be seen as a transactional exchange. He drives me to the airport, I pay him some shekels, I get out from the airport. Right. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be that, it doesn’t have to be that any encounter, any encounter can be a soul encounter. And I find that awesome, really, you can taste life’s richness so much more fully than we give ourselves permission to or believe is even possible. So those would be two examples. 

Shai Tubali: I’m so touched by your profound faith in the inherent goodness of humans, right? Because I think that’s really a profound experience for you. Yes. A profound knowing. 

Amy Fox: Yes. And I think in part, it’s very beautiful that you named that Shai, because I want to unpack why that’s true.

When you’ve had the chances I have to do a lot of trauma healing work with people, you start to, the close connection between what looks like not goodness, right? The behaviors that we would traditionally call mean or a curt or disrespectful or, you know, patronizing, literally come from a childhood in which that was the inevitable byproduct. And once you see it in its full life cycle, it’s very hard to be in a judgement mode of those behaviors or to attribute to the behaviors that you’re seeing as dysfunctional and destructive as they are. I’m not saying they’re acceptable or that we shouldn’t challenge them or that we don’t need to address them. I’m saying quite the opposite. You can’t address them by judging them and scolding them and punishing them. You have to address them by going to the source. And you have to address them by saying, I really want to know why this is happening. I really care and know there’s something much brighter and much freer inside you that is not going to act this way when we access it.

So that deep faith is part of the medicine what you’re pointing to. It’s very important to name that. It’s a confidence in the intrinsic goodness and also a very strong firsthand knowledge of the extreme pervasive aftermath of trauma in people’s behavioral repertoires. If you connect the dots, then you have to, you equally have to be in awe of the beauty of the human spirit and also the strength, like what people live through and keep their moral compass or their desire to be connected and held intact in some part, in some place in their heart. They keep that intact and if you can just pour a little water to that place, a flower comes, it just inevitably comes. 

Shai Tubali: Thank you. Thank you for these words. Now for my last question, how can the rest of us, because this is so extremely natural for you. I know that it’s hard won, right? I know that is the result of a great deal of experience and also some traumas. But this is still, I think it is interestingly natural for you. So how can the rest of us tap into this type of profound sense of wonder? Could we take certain steps to become more deeply capable of listening to others and helping them to reveal this awesome dimension of their being? 

Amy Fox: Oh, I love that question. I’m going to give you a counterintuitive starting place. Find someone to listen to you. So many of us have untold stories and uncharted territory in our own hearts. And if we’ve never had the good fortune of being well received and well held, it’s very hard to offer that. You need to, you know, sort of offer that from a full cup of having been well heard. So I think the first step is actually to go look for someone who will accompany you in your own exploration of your life and your journey. And when that feels well fulfilled, it’s much more natural than to make the outstretched hand that you’re describing. I think the second thing is something you do very naturally – listen to be moved. You know, don’t listen from your mind. Don’t listen from behind a shield. Listen from an open heart, open body, open soul and you’ll notice that you hear much more, not just because you literally have more facets of listening turned on, but because that openness transmits to the other person as a wider invitation. That’s the second thing. I think the third thing is to be willing to say things that are unexpected and that you’ve never said before, because when you enter novel terrain, there’s a kind of electricity that brings fresh conversation. So even, you know, these wonderful questions that you’re asking me are producing answers in me that I’ve never explored before, that makes the conversation, I think have a certain kind of vitality or joy. So let it be unexpected. Let it, you know, enter the mystery together would be another practise. I would say, something super concrete would be make a list of five questions that intrigue you, so that you bring your own curiosity to the questions and your own cutting edge to the questions or questions that you’re grappling with in your own life that you’d like counsel and advice on. And ask those so that there’s, you know, you have some investment in having the conversation deepen and have texture. And I think the last one is, let there be silence. It’s very hard to have a conversation permeate you and the other person if the space is cluttered with words, it’s much more likely that it will soften into something luminous if you give it a little more space.

Shai Tubali: I find it’s so meaningful that the first reason for feeling awe that we are presenting in this project is dialogue itself, is this kind of encounter between two awe-struck people right?

Amy Fox: Absolutely.