and that shun that is like a golden elixir, which becomes a golden elixir of immortality that just flows on the whole body. And then there is a kind of meditation or kind of practice that goes with each level, and that a certain diet that just naturally is attuned to each of those, and they're extremely open and flexible, and it's based on the kind of practice you're involved in, there's the kind of diet in place, and the intellectual activity that you would have. but it's all tied into the breath. It's as if they are creating a kind of rhythmic flow with nature, and the breath is the means by which you start the very first level of a physical movement, and it is tied into the meridians of the body to this whole incredibly aesthetic and scientific System, but it's all if there is no breath that it is just physically possible. There's just no way that no way that can be done Yeah, so they said if you can if you can take one breath you can crunch your fist and open it then you can do anything So it's ultimately the most Democratic expression that if you can breathe You don't need a PhD.

[01:08]

You don't get you if you can breathe and you can do any of it. I mean Well, I think in Qigong and Taoism, too, in general, the breath energy practices are definitely more emphasized, more explicit, and more developed than in Buddhism. By far, yes. But if I start talking about breath practices, we could spend the next three days just on breath practices. And I... There's no point in going into it at that level, but I mean, you mean just a simple thing, for instance, of the word prana means first breath. It's like the unit of dharma, unit, first breath. So it means, first of all, treating each breath like it was your first breath. Then there's practices of attitude on your breath, like you die on your exhales and you come back to life or reborn in your inhales. And then there's ways of changing the frequency by how you pay attention to your breath until your breath pays attention to you. But basically, to simplify it, it's seeing breath as bringing your attention to your breath, following your breath, using it as a thread,

[02:20]

beginning to touch yourself through breath and touch the world through breath, feeling the world breathing, and residing in your breath. And so mindfulness practices, I mean, for lay people, the mindfulness of bringing yourself to your breath, like pretending every staircase is a monastic staircase. We're usually left alone when we walk upstairs or downstairs. So you can just pretend the staircase is in a monastery and feel your breath in the stairs. Or every time you look out the window and see the sky as your mind, you stop and let your breath settle as sky-mind. You take certain things, again, in a homeopathic way, and just present themself to you and get a habit of doing them. And that transforms you. At some point, you start just residing in your breath, and you're not residing in your thoughts anymore, and that's a very big step. And you can practice in more detail. For instance, you are always breathing with an emphasis on either the left or right nostril. And the left or right nostril will affect the reverse side of the brain.

[03:21]

So when you start doing creative work, you can actually intentionally shift the breath and the more creative side of your brain comes into practice. And you can watch it. It's an hour to two hours. There's a shift, but there can be finer shifts. But just the practice of beginning to notice whether you're breathing through the left or right nostril creates an incredible mindfulness. It's quite difficult to do. And also it's related to how your cranium works, because if you want to be in awareness, which is also a physiological event, not just a mental yoga event, if you shift your sense of attention to the back of your eyes and quit seeing on the surface of your eyes, which is a more comparative way, you feel like you're seeing from the back of your eye, you can feel your cranium change and your breathing changes. and your nostrils change, and you feel about the world. I mean, you can begin to feel the shift at a physiological level, so you can begin to change the way you perceive things just by changing the feeling in the back of your head or in your ears. And that all arises in breath practices, where you begin to get contact with these things through breath practices.

[04:29]

I think it's sunrise and sunset at this time of the day when your left and right nocturnal will just rapidly change. And I think also to digest, your foot, if you're breathing, I'm convinced it has sort of a seder. After you lean to the left side, which could change the... And a lot of this body stuff that's involved now in rituals, People don't realize how it's tied to a kind of psychic body. They just tell you to do this, but it's actually to do something to your body, not just with your body. I also say that in a lot of Qigong that when I then took that into Jewish practice of davening and prayer, that suddenly to daven is another breathing practice. Then when you do the Shimon Esrei, it's like when you're just moving your spine forward, the shoulder, you're loosening each vertebrae in your spine, and you're saying each blessing, which has a certain kind of length to it, a certain breath that is associated with each one, that it really has the Jewish liturgical practice a great deal. Yeah, I think a lot of people practice Zen or meditation, and then they go back to being Episcopalians or something, and it opens up for them.

[05:38]

or Jews or whatever. Richard, you were saying that a limitation of Buddhism is the focus of the body. I find that difficult, if I understood it properly, difficult to understand. Well, if there are dimensions in our existence and in this mystery that we live within, I like Wittgenstein said something like, the phenomena... There's nothing special or mysterious about each phenomenon or something like that. But each phenomenon can become mysterious to you. And when it does, that's the arising of spiritual life. What did you say? Body. Body, yeah. If in this mystery, which I take as a mystery, I only know Zen practice, and it works for me.

[06:40]

I don't say it in any way covers the mystery. It's just a particular language for approaching the mystery. That's how I understand it. If there are other worlds or other dimensions, then I am, as a Zen teacher, committed to only teach what I experience. So I can't teach a lot of things in the sutras that I have no experience of. I understand them in certain ways or intimate them, but I don't teach them. If there are other worlds, etc., or other dimensions that don't relate to the body, then Zen doesn't have much to do with it. Buddhism doesn't have much access to that and has no cosmology really about it. in my opinion. At least certainly from the Zen point of view. So if you're going to look for a limitation in Zen, it's the emphasis always on the body. That everything is through the body, through awakening the body, through spiritualizing the body, through turning the body into consciousness and so forth. But still, it's always in this yogic culture, based on the body. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, right.

[07:42]

When you first introduced this idea that Buddhism always has to do with the body, I was stunned because it seemed to be so much at variance with my own understanding of I'll just say Buddhism. Maybe because I spent so many years teaching introductions to everything. Teaching introductions to Buddhism, and I would always try to be sure that everybody understood we begin with the Four Noble Truths. So if you say Buddhism has to do with the body, I say, hmm, let me think, how does that relate to the Four Noble Truths? Then I get stumped. So could you say a little bit about this emphasis on the body relative to the Buddha's insight on desire and the curing of desire. Maybe I'll just leave it like that. Well, the...

[08:58]

Four noble truths are that we could say everything is suffering, but everything's changing. And because we want it not to change, we suffer. And there's a cause to that. And because there's also the undivided world, there's an end to suffering or an end to the cause. Because an end to suffering means in some way you're outside of causation, which means you're in a stopped world, or an undivided world, or an interrelated world, and there's a path to that. And that path, through the Eight Noble Path, it immediately brings in the body your intentions, conduct, views. But when you go through the Eight Noble Path, you start out with your views, and that means you take an inventory of the way you look at things. But then you go through it and then you see how those views are expressed in your conduct.

[10:02]

So your first study, in a way, as a Buddhist, if you use the Eightfold Path, which is very basic, is that you begin as the person you are and you begin to see that you have views and then you begin to see those views in your conduct and in your speech and in your livelihood. And then you see it in your energy, and then in meditation, and then in consciousness. Now, at this point, you've changed, when you've changed to energy and consciousness and so forth, you're now, in Buddhist practice, in the body. And then you take those views back, consciousness that arises with the... You know, it's all out of the body. Anyway, then you go through the Eightfold Path again, and then it really becomes Buddhist. Because then you have the views that have arisen through mindfulness and consciousness and meditation.

[11:03]

Then you break in those views and begin to see the dissonance between those views, which you don't leak, say, and those views which you do leak. And then you try to bring non-leaking into your conduct, non-leaking into your speech, and so forth. So you actually go through the Eightfold Path several times... and each time you're more and more based in the body and that's the path now this is from the point of view of practice just feels to me as I think about all the various Buddhist schools and Buddhist texts and Buddhist practices, it wouldn't lead me to say all of that is in the body, or all of that is the body, or all of that has to do with one body or another. I could imagine saying all of that has to do with relations, the way Bob was talking about emptiness, But really, it has always seemed to me that it's a matter of consciousness.

[12:08]

And perfectly fine to say, well, the body is a kind of consciousness, or the body is many kinds of consciousness. But I don't understand why you put this emphasis on the body and not on the consciousness which leads to liberation or not. It's not the body that does it. It's the consciousness. That's why we meditate. That's why we walk in a certain way. That's why we work on right livelihood and right speech. Change of consciousness. Yeah, that's true. And Zen is a mind-to-mind transmission. Right. But again, as Nagarjuna says, putting the mind in bamboo means putting it in your body. Because the body has a pace that you can act on. It's the best way to get... Buddhism would say to just work with the mind is impossible. It's so confusing. And the ego is so tricky.

[13:10]

I mean, it's so slippery. Ground yourself in the body first. And if you look at the sutras now, the Four Noble Truths are the kind of public, popular teaching for people. They still are the basis of all of Buddhism, too. But if you look at the sutras and so forth and the koans, they all arise out of yogic experience. To practice them, you don't have to be a yogi. You don't have to be an adept. But they arise out of and only can be recreated and reproduced through yogic experience. That's my understanding and experience. And so even if you practice, so it starts out, practice, and understanding the mind and consciousness starts out through locating yourself in your body, getting your mind out of your thoughts. And then, when you develop certain consciousnesses, all those consciousnesses in the list are all called bodies. They're consciousness, but they're called bodies. Space is called a body, the Dharmakaya is a body, Nirmanakaya is a body, Sambhogakaya, the bliss body.

[14:11]

You don't say it's bliss, it's a body because you don't have shifts in mood, you have shifts not only in personality or in person, you have shifts in body. In the sense that if there's a dead person on the floor here, there's his body, or her body. There's no life in it. What is the life in it? Well, the life in it, what the life in it is what Buddhism means by a body. It's what makes the dead body a live body is what Buddhism means by body. So in a way that's consciousness. But Buddhism always calls it a body. It's fascinating. I mean, this is a wonderful pair of lectures which Steiner gave to a group of scientists. And he contrasts the Eastern and Western path in that pair of lectures. And it sounds very much the way you're talking about it. He says that those practices were developed. He connects them to what he would call inspiration, which doesn't mean anything without a lot of explanation, but basically a particular kind of practice which works in this way, at all sorts of different levels. And he just gives a little thumbnail sketch, nothing as detailed as you've done, but just gives it a... And then he makes a case for the fact that to this audience, at least, at this point in time, that there's another practice which starts first, which he calls imagination, and which actually I think which comes and connects to some of the later things you talked about, and that one works with those first now, and then comes to this

[15:36]

other level, which was actually being evoked first back then. In other words, he says the order which was appropriate 3,000, 2,000, even 1,000 years ago, now that we're dealing with natural science, Western civilization, all the rest, he would suggest that the practice, in some sense, be inverted. And one starts, rather, with images, one starts with this attention to perceptual field, where you said, you know, you allow this state with the image effortlessly. You know, to explore that, that's the kind of motif that's done or developed. Those sorts of practices come first in this characteristic imaginative consciousness, which tends then to pop up all kinds of psychic powers, iddhis, you know, which I think in most Buddhist practices you're just basically trying to put to the side, right? These are just distractions that avoid emptiness. he actually tends to, and then gives meaning to through this higher practice. So it's interesting that your response to hear this conversation between you and Robert. Well, my feeling is, since we're all genetically compatible beings, human beings, at least are, and we live in more or less the same world, that all these practices are going to be in a lot of the same territory.

[16:51]

But the entry point at which you come into them and then develop them And the premises, even slight difference in premises, create actually rather different teachings and probably access to this mystery in a different way. So I think the different teachings are... I mean, I would look at them from two ways. How do they help people? How do they hurt people? And how do they validly create... I mean, for instance, you can't say, and I believe in... in the quantum theory exactly what happens, but you can say something happened. And I had a wonderful talk for three or four days with Hans-Peter Dürer and David Finkelstein in a castle in Austria. We just talked all night and we had a fantastic time talking about these things. And so, from my point of view, Buddhism's like that. I don't know if Buddhism really explains the world, but it's quite, it works quite well. Now, Christianity may work quite well. Steiner's way may work.

[17:53]

Mohammedanism may work well. We're not sure about that. But my first religious experience was, I'm pretty sure, with a soup in Bandishapur, Iran. where I would say, I'll say something kind of curious. But, 19 or 20? 21, 20, 20? Anyway, so my feeling is that the different languages, and see, I see it as language, not truth. The different languages open up various other dimensions of the truth. So to me, in this world, they're all valid. I mean, not all, but most of them are valid. A lot of them are valid. And I think all of them, including Buddhism, may create a language that we don't yet know and that when we speak to the mystery in that language, there may be something we don't know yet. That's what's exciting to me.

[18:56]

It's a kind of adventure. Anyway, I was in... left Harvard and went in the Merchant Marine for a while. And, uh, I went to Bandishapur, Iran. And I thought of it because you were... So, I'd had various kinds of experiences, sort of Samadhi-type experiences and, uh, bliss experiences as a teenager that, uh, really were fantastic. I tell you, really, I was sort of, really, this is so much better than school. And I didn't know quite what to do with them until I met Suki or she, but I had them, and I thought of it as art because, you know, schooled in James Joyce and Proust and so forth like that at that age, and I was reading a tremendous amount. For me, it's those experiences which led Joyce to reject the church and become an artist. So for me, this was art. But when I met this man, a friend of mine named Earl McGrath, and I went by chance to see together for two years.

[19:56]

And in this little town of Bandishapur, there was one guy named Shukra Ali. And he sat on these little tables, tables about two-thirds as big as this, and he'd sit with people, and there were various tables around. And he had a son named something, I can't remember. But there was something about this guy that was so clear and so pure and so... I mean, there's this big field around him, and everybody kind of related to him. He was just one of the workers. They were all people who came down from the mountains into Banish Report to make some money and support their family back. And this guy was just a dock worker type. But every time he came, and he singled Earl and I out from all the other merchant seamen who were around... And he'd always, and they were really poor, but they'd always buy us a Pepsi-Cola, get us to sit. And there was something going on that I think now he must have been a Sufi. And there was such a pure relationship with him and such clarity that for me this was not art anymore.

[21:00]

It was a kind of religious experience. And it opened me up to Sufi worship. And so when I was 25 and met Siddiqui Rishi, I felt that same clarity. And that, for me, an incredible openness to people is what was shattered when what happened to me in 83 in Zen Center, which I'm still trying to reform how I... this experience I had from this Shukla Ali and then Siddiqui Rishi, and reform it into a new way of being with people. I was thinking about my own experience with Vipassana meditation, where it's the body and the breath that finally gives you a place to stand, to begin to observe the mind and separate the process of thinking and the process of feeling with me. In other words, be aware of the field as opposed to the contents.

[22:00]

And I think that does give you, as you mentioned, After that work, you can go back and recycle your notions of the Eightfold Path because you've plunged in a way, or you've got some distance from the contents of the thinking process and your earlier thoughts that were not necessarily contaminated with your history. Yeah. I'm not sure I wish Bob Thurman was here, because his Shabala teachings, it sounds like in Zen you'd be limited from that as a speculation, because it's not coming from your direct experience. That's right. So in that sense, Zen is quite different, actually. It's always tied to craft and what you actually experience. We focus so heavily on the breathing practice. I find it curious.

[23:02]

I think it's curious. For example, I haven't read all the pages in Buddha Gosha's classic text on meditation. But I'd say the majority of them have nothing to do with the breathing practice. there are ten casino devices. He talks about the breathing, but there are also cautions about the breathing practice, as I remember. No, no, I agree. And somehow in America, in the West, we have landed with both feet in the breathing practices. So, for example, the practice in that text, which I really warm up to, is not the breathing practice, but these ten casino devices. And to me, they speak so eloquently of a particular path which... You know, it's quite different than the breathing practice. And it gives the whole, what is it, 40 subjects of meditation. And is there a reason why we've narrowed it down? Well, I don't know if we have, but I would say that it's take the unity of mind and body and the unity of breath and mind is taken for granted in all the practices.

[24:07]

And you first have to achieve that. I mean, let me give you a simple vipassana shamatha thing. Because I think the field contents shift is more important than breathing practice, but the technology of all the early stages of threading together, in the word inspiration, of course, spirit and all that stuff, the threading together of mind and body and self and the world, and also how you mature the self in Buddhism. And I think this is a very, very important thing that is not developed in Buddhism. As I say, Buddhism is a mindology, not a psychology. We have no psyche in Buddhism. And the Dalai Lama even says there's no unconscious in Buddhism. And in any case, but we do, we see the world as a story. It's a Christ event and a particular event. And the way we individuate ourselves and the way we see archetypes as clothes not yet worn, floating in our consciousness are all these archetypes like suits of clothes waiting to get into, you know.

[25:14]

And the way archetypes function in the West is, I think, different than in the cultures that Buddhism developed. And I think we can't ignore that. So I think that we have to find with Buddhism in a way that we don't use practice to repress the self or to destroy the story. I mean, I know in my own practice, I completely put the narrative of my story aside for years because the skills in meditation practice gave me the ability to do it. And I think it was actually damaging because I needed to mature my story and have my story interact with people, and I had the skills to not have to interact. And so, I mean, I think this is, in a way, I damaged myself through meditation practice, not seeing how to let the narrative of my own story, as a Westerner, which I do, I have to function this way, and how to mature that narrative. Now, I now understand what I'm working with, They took love with a group of psychologists, psychotherapists, and in Vienna, now it's going to be a once or twice a year thing, we're trying to come, because I don't think any real work has been done in the relationship between Buddhism and psychology, Western psychology, is to develop a language where we actually know in some detail what we're talking about.

[26:32]

and we can sort of see. And all these people, almost all of them, are people who the use of psychology in their own lives ceased to work, and they even got wondering whether psychology worked for anyone until they started practicing meditation. And once they started practicing meditation, their own views, psychological views, began to work for them, and they began to hold a place with their clients, which worked better. So we're trying to work on that, but I think that the role of the psyche is unique to the West, and the sense of life as historic is quite unique. It's part of our Western genius. And that has to be incorporated in Buddhist practice if Buddhist practice is actually going to thrive in this culture in any good way. Now, the practice I was going to say is very simple. If you concentrate on this... There's a card trick that I need to do. Concentrate on the king.

[27:36]

Concentrate on this. Now, when you're really concentrated on it, say, king, come down and dance. You have a king up, right? And so they finally say, okay, king, come down and dance. Then you go... Anyway. Concentrate on this. And you concentrate on this, and then after you've... become fairly concentrated... I can take this away. Now, as David asked me this question the other day, because in early Buddhism it says a consciousness arises on an object of concentration, right? But Mahayana Buddhism and Zen, that's not where it's at. Where it's at is you can concentrate on this Do you concentrate? Then I can remove this, and you can still have the field of concentration without an object of concentration.

[28:39]

And in effect, the field has become the object of concentration. That's shamatha practice. Then, when you bring this back up into the field and no longer look at it as an object of concentration, but look at it from the field of concentration, which you learn to establish through your breath, then you get vipassana. Because you're examining the world with insight through a field of concentration. Sure. Right? At the beginning of some time is… Really. …exercise. So that sense of the fieldship is so essential to Buddhism, and the breath is the technology of that. We should probably use space for 2.30. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, no. I was just thinking, we have lunch, and we're still going to follow up on this with you at 2.30. I have no idea the time. Well, now it's 10 to 1, and there's lunch.

[29:40]

I know I'm trying to send the time back, except I have to go to the toilet. Probably not as effective. So, well, welcome. How long has it been since you've been here? Oh, golly, probably 83, 83. Yeah, it's almost. For that big fellows conference? Yeah. Yeah, so that's a good 10 years. No, we went in 81. We went in there. Ooh. Christopher. Yeah. The last time. Wow, so it's a good 10 years. Barfield wasn't here when I was, so 81. It's 82. Yeah, I think it was Barfield, 82. The big meeting was 82. We met in 81. That's right. The fellows meeting was in the fall of 82, and then we had a couple of conferences in the summer of 82, and it was over in Barfield. and you, Christopher, that summer.

[30:44]

I remember coming on. Fritz and Vivian were down in your house down in the valley. Yeah, that was 81. That was for Christianity in a New Age. That's good. Long time. Well, long overdue, but welcome back, and it's all yours. Anything you like. Thank you. I did have an opportunity on the drive here from Colorado Springs to hear your tape, Bill, and Andy's tape. Arthur? Arthur, you're right here. So I'm, and Margaret and John, and John filled me in a bit on what's been happening. Margaret, John, and John? No, well, John Klotzen and John. Oh, John Klotzen was with you, too. Oh, great. No, I have no privy knowledge.

[31:48]

I'm sorry not to have been here earlier. And it was one of those crazy things. But it was important that I stay home so Julie's got to be used to doing things with one arm. for the moment. What I would like to have been here, and my heart has been with you, and I've been thinking all the way driving up, what would I have to say coming in three quarters of the way? My impression from listening to Bill and Arthur, I know that Steiner has been an underlying theme here for the conference.

[33:06]

I'm not a particularly great student of Steiner, I must admit. There are many people who are far more knowledgeable about him than I am. But I've always felt a connection with him. It hasn't necessarily translated into reading all his material. Perhaps a contribution I can make at this point is to direct our attention again to what he calls the super-sensible world and our relationship to them, particularly as that relates to this time. And I come fresh from hearing Arthur in the discussion you had with folk about the next wave. What is the next wave? And I think that may be something we're all interested in.

[34:11]

But whether I have any more illumination on it than anybody else here remains to be seen. One of the things that attracted me to Steiner initially was his emphasis on thought, and on thought as the means for entering into the contact or experience of the supersensible world. The reason that had impact for me comes out of my own personal experience. When I was very young, about the age of seven, I had an ongoing series of psychic experiences which ultimately had the effect of being frightening for me because there really wasn't anyone in my environment

[35:29]

talk too easily about them, assuming that I knew quite how to describe what I was experiencing. And a few times I tried to discuss it with my parents. They were certainly supportive. They did not tell me, don't make up those things or don't be involved in those things. They were very supportive, but it was also outside of their realm of experience. So there wasn't a great deal they could do to help me, so I ended up not talking about it very much. When I was seven, though, I had a mystical experience, what I would call a mystical experience, because it ultimately ended up in total dissolution of my personality into a state of oneness. And then it's reformation, the reformation of the being that I know as David Spangler.

[36:34]

And I experience the creation of David Spangler in that experience, and my movement to the earth into birth. And after that experience, all the psychic experiences I've been having went away. or were subsumed into it, but they ceased to be frightening for me. I didn't necessarily understand them any better, but I had access at that point to another presence inside of me that stood both unified with but separate from my personality, that I could take those, when those experiences would come up, I could relate them to that present. And it wouldn't always explain what was happening, but it would certainly give me a context of peace about it.

[37:39]

It wasn't frightened. And then there was a long period in my childhood when all of this was like a background hum, but it was not in the foreground of my life. I was just involved in the ordinary pursuits of childhood. Until I became, I was around the age of 14 or so, and then my parents discovered the new age, you might say, or they discovered a whole metaphysical psychic field. Oh, come on in. Come on, thanks. Yes, go on. Is there another one in the back? Okay, I'll head to the back. I'm skipping over quite a bit here, I must admit.

[38:46]

But what I'm skipping over, I don't know if it's germane to our topic. When I was 14, my parents, exploring some experiences that they had had while we lived in Morocco, I should say that I grew up in North Africa, born in this country. Both my mother and father worked for the U.S. service, and they were stationed in Morocco for six years. While they were in Morocco, they, along with several other people on the air base, several hundreds of people, had a UFO experience. It's a cigar-shaped object flew over the base. But this thing had been trapped. My dad was in a military intelligence who got access to intelligence reports and discovered it had been tracked by radar, appearing somewhere over Viman and disappearing somewhere deep in Africa, somewhere over the Congo.

[39:56]

It crashed. It just disappeared off the radar screen, but there was no evidence of it ever having crashed. So my parents, wondering what this was, my dad got very interested in the whole phenomenon of UFO and began studying it. And in the course of that, they went the path that a lot of people followed in the New Age movement. I start with, as Bill said, you start out with the crazies and you work your way inward. Sometimes the crazies are the place where there's enough freedom and enough flexibility begin encountering what the structures of the society otherwise don't let you encounter. My folks met some people in Phoenix, Arizona, where we had ultimately ended up, who were into channeling and new age and metaphysics and about everything that you would read about today.

[41:00]

And for a while were very taken with it. When they shared it with me, it was more than being taken with it. It was like I encountered something that had been buried in my being, that my life is bound up with this. And there was a lot about the metaphysical movement of that milieu in Arizona in the late 50s and early 60s that left something to be desired. But for the most part, it was made up of individuals who were really pushing the envelope of their reality, their view of reality. And weaving in and through that was this whole idea of

[42:05]

of the New Age, but also one of the themes for many of these people were themes like channeling and psychic abilities. And one of the groups that my folks became part of for a short time was a group that was headed by an excommunicated spiritualist minister. He'd been excommunicated from the spiritualist church because he taught reincarnation. And reincarnation is not one of the accepted doctrines of the official spiritualist church of the United States, though it is an accepted doctrine of the spiritualist church of Great Britain. The spiritualists have their doctrinal schisms. In this group, part of the instruction that he would offer was unchanneling and developing his psychic ability.

[43:09]

And this was, I suddenly found myself with groups of people who understood or at least accepted or experienced experiences that I'd had as a kid and had had on and off through my childhood. This was very exciting to me. So I began studying with this man for probably about a couple months And then had a very clear inner voice that said, that's far enough. Don't go any further. This isn't your path. So I dropped it. But what had been awakened in me was the sense of the contact within the world that had been background for me for many years, coming right back to this experience when I was seven. But now I'd come into the foreground, and I knew that I needed to do something with it.

[44:16]

But the methodologies that I experimented with then, meditation, primarily meditation, weren't quite doing the trick for me. What did the trick for me was studying calculus. Because at this point, as I was in high school, I was in my freshman year of college, and I was working for a bachelor of science in biochemistry. And for some reason, I had a very heavy math, a very heavy math course. And working with abstract thought, Just the effort working abstractly with mathematics was what broke through for me into a very clear connection with the super-sensible world, what Steiner called the super-sensible world.

[45:20]

I never became a good enough mathematician that I could say to people, well, If you want to make contact with angels, go study calculus. But it had worked for me. And the whole domain of science worked for me. Everything about science and the discipline that science imposes as a way of thinking worked for me, not only in terms of understanding and the particular subject I was studying, but also as being my meditative path into the inner world. It was actually some years after that that I came across Steiner. Somebody introduced me to his work. Actually, I think the first book I was given on Steiner was an old biography about him called Scientists of the Invisible. And that led on to other things by him.

[46:29]

And I recognized that Steiner was talking about experiences that were equivalent to what I was experiencing. And this was very encouraging. But what was most encouraging was his methodology. Now for me, what became evident, important, as a core discipline from the very beginning was was working with spirit, not with spiritual entities, not with other worlds, not with phenomena, but with core spirit, pure spirit.

[47:34]

And in the experiences that I had, again for me, became evident that the heart of this domain in which I was being led was This was the other thing that I felt in common with Steiner, was the Christ event. And for me, the Christ event transcends historical Christianity, but obviously embraces it. But it's more than an institutional event. It's a profound planetary event. And this was an experience for me that was very deep in my being. And it colored, still colors, my approach into the inner world. I found myself in dialogue with what at that point I simply accepted as a part of my own being, a higher part, that was not as involved in my everyday incarnation as I was.

[48:49]

that its discipline was essentially a mystical one. It was a discipline of daily taking time just to go beyond form, to go beyond identity, to go beyond definitions, and just try to get into this abstract place, the place of pure spirit, what I call pure spirit. And out of that, other things would come. But the primary discipline for me has always been a spiritual discipline, not a psychic one or not a... Actually, it's very little to do with super-sensible world. But after I've been doing that for a couple of years, and by this time I was now a junior in college, Again, very clear suggestion came that it was time to leave college, that I needed to go on a different path.

[50:06]

And that, in fact, the training of the mind that I was involved in was about to become detrimental to the awakening of the intuition. And I basically said,

[50:21]

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