Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to The Choice to Grow. I'm Scott Schwenk. Through these dialogues, we'll explore fresh perspectives and discover practical tools for navigating a thriving life that adds value wherever we are.
Speaker: I'll introduce you to innovators and creators from across our world who embody what it means to cultivate growing as a way of life. Let's prepare together.
Speaker: Take a deep breath in.
Speaker: Hold the breath briefly as you soften your shoulders and soften the soles of your feet and palms of your hands. Then exhale like you're releasing tension and setting down a heavy burden from every cell.
Speaker: Now let's dive in.
Speaker: Welcome back everybody to The Choice to Grow. I've got a special guest. And this guest was introduced to me by my mentor and friend, Venita Ramirez. Perhaps you've heard that episode. If you haven't, I highly, highly recommend checking it out.
Speaker: So today I've got with me Eugene Potoshkin, and he's an integral psychologist and therapist in private practice in Moscow, as well as online. And we're going to get into what integral is and integral theory. We've been touching on it here and there.
Speaker: Some of my guests are very steeped in it. Some of my future guests are very steeped in it. So it's important. And it's really an underpinning of the work that I do, helping people to wake up more deeply, grow up more fully, clean up the unconscious storehouse, and show up as our best selves.
Speaker: Eugene is the co-founder and teacher of the of Integral Awareness Meditation, the I AM process. He's a very experienced group work facilitator who led and co-led 100 plus weekend workshops.
Speaker: Together with his life partner, Tatiana, he co-teaches advanced integral awareness courses. And these weave together awareness meditations, adult development models, and Ken Wilber's integral framework.
Speaker: Really to to boil it down, I think that Ken Wilber himself will speak well for Eugene. Ken writes about Eugene. Eugene Potoshkin is a major representative and promoter of integral meta theory in Russia.
Speaker: He has a superb understanding of this radically new approach and he has worked endlessly to get it accepted and spread in Russia and elsewhere. He's particularly helped by translating many of my works into Russian and has done a brilliant job with this task.
Speaker: I'm deeply grateful to the work he has done to help promote and spread integral meta theory And I can certainly recommend highly any projects he's associated with. So without further ado, I'm really happy to welcome you, Eugene, to The Choice to Grow.
Speaker: Thanks for being here. Well, thank you for inviting me. And I'm really happy to speak to you and share presence and meanings of what it means to have a holistic, integral life.
Speaker: When you hear the title of the show, The Choice to Grow, what does that evoke for you? Well, ah being a psychotherapist, I've been thinking a lot about the things that make us stop growing, for instance, and that at certain stages in life, we might make, for instance, a decision, like a defensive decision to, you know,
Speaker: ah stop growing and but in a particular line of life or something like to freeze our growth and in order to continue we have to return and make the choice again like make a new choice choice to grow and this is one particular way to see it through you know shadow work working with our um childhood traumas and stuff like that, that sometimes you make choices.
Speaker: But also for me, when I hear it, it is about the importance of our intentionality, that growth and development is not just something that happens to us, There is some kind of help from the environment and ah from some kind of deeper forces probably which are evolutionary forces.
Speaker: But also it is dependent on our intentionality, on our choice, on our intentions and will and everyday activities that we we do.
Speaker: And o we live all our lives, we make small choices, big choices, and all of them may lead to growth. So this is what ah which associations I have when I hear the title of your show.
Speaker: And when you look at your own life, where you've come up against challenges,
Speaker: what do you see about where you've almost quit or back down and something shifted, something opened in you or somebody showed up with the right resource and you grew past where you thought you could.
Speaker: I think like many many situations like that, I can remember when I was just starting working with integral psychology and integral framework, I became very curious because I found those Ken Wilber's books at a Russian bookstore in Russian.
Speaker: And I tried to read integral psychology and I thought myself to be ah smart guy, but I was reading and I was not understanding I was ah feeling challenged and I thought, hey, that's something strange. I really want to understand this because the whole idea, i like it.
Speaker: And I started to try to read him in in English, and and they in the original language. And I realized that the language was so um clean and pure.
Speaker: That's what actually motivated me to start to try to translate um what I saw as very pure and clean to Russian. So as I was starting to translate the work, I was translating it first some essays like the paper, ah integral An Integral Theory of Consciousness, which was published in a journal of consciousness studies, very, you know,
Speaker: important paper, that the article that Ken Wilber wrote. And I was doing that as I was studying at university um ah for clinical psychology.
Speaker: And It was like, what am I doing? Because i need to do something pragmatic with my life, you know find ways to earn a living, to do something you know practical.
Speaker: And here I am, I'm translating all these articles. And what do I do with them? And I just decided to give ah away my translations for free. I just started to post them online you know to share with people. This is how all it started.
Speaker: And I found this myself in this particular spot. ah ah When I was not translating, I had to encounter you know daily mundane circumstances of my life, which at that time were not very happy for me. like Well, it was not ah um ah not the life I ad dreamt of. like There were some things that I was frustrated about, and i was feeling a bit depressed.
Speaker: And then I realized when every time I started to translate, some kind of blissful ah state of awareness started to arise in me. i I was feeling happy and i realized that maybe I should follow my bliss and I made this choice to no continue translating Ken's work and lo and behold, almost 20 years later,
Speaker: I'm a professional translator of Ken Wilber's books. I translated about a dozen to Russian and also edited a few Russian translations. and then But not only that, i my whole life and professional life is interpenetrated with the integral vision ah that Ken Wilber and other authors, other thinkers and visionaries described.
Speaker: Tell what that because before we go too because before we go too far for the average person listening, which is, I wouldn't call an average person listening to this show, they've got you've got some interest listeners in choosing to grow and you've explored different things most likely, but you may not have encountered integral theory or like many people who've encountered integral theory, but not really read much about it.
Speaker: You may have gone, oh my God, this man's vocabulary is so big and it just sounds so heady. But those of us who've actually gotten into the ocean of integral theory and gotten into the experience of it have realized something priceless.
Speaker: Tell us a bit about it in a way that people who don't have exposure can really begin to understand and see how they map it into their own life, their own way of moving through moments.
Speaker: Sure. At first, people think it's kind of a conceptual framework, some kind of mental heady stuff, which is not true. As you hear from my story, I encountered what I later learned that it happens in in some other instances.
Speaker: It is called transmission, like a direct transmission of some state of consciousness or state of awareness or even experience, experience of heightened, elevated being in my case.
Speaker: which I gained through texts. And actually, integral is a um space of how to live life. It is not about you know simply kind of meta-theoretical conceptualizations, models of reality which we think about.
Speaker: It can be helpful, it is a map. But it is a map of paths that we can traverse. And i know when I started, ah just finish I'll finish my thought, I thought that these activities are purely you know like purely as creative flow and maybe service to humanity, but they're not practical. And now im all my professional life is built around this um integral um ah framework because it is very practical.
Speaker: And I'm translating currently Ken Wilber's recent book, Finding Radical Wholeness, where he actually provides a very nice way to introduce integral vision to everybody in a very simple way.
Speaker: Usually it is introduced in a different way, but he kind of found a way to really pack it in a very easy um ah several elements.
Speaker: So he speaks that there is this universe of wholeness. The whole a universe is a holistic entity which is very interconnected, and we can gain access to this ah big wholeness of the universe.
Speaker: But there are various paths that we need to go through to gain access to this big wholeness. And those are various kinds of wholenesses and various kinds of activities which open up for us ah this wholeness. And wholeness is a sense of... like It can be understood as um singular versus systemic.
Speaker: or one event versus understanding the context of the event and the series of events. This is kind of wholeness, for instance, that we can encounter. Like, am i just a hand or am i the full body?
Speaker: Am I just a full body here or am also a mind and stuff like that? So the more elements we bring in, the more wholeness we get to and it feels vibrant. The more are whole, the more we are vibrant in our lives and the more we are able to navigate through challenges of life.
Speaker: And Wilbur says that we have a few kinds of wholenesses. The first one, he says, is one of the most important. And this is the wholeness called the wholeness of waking up.
Speaker: And it is the wholeness of waking up to our states of presence. at towards what in some traditions is called like Buddhahood or in others salvation, and generally like a transformation of our um state of being from a more fragmented to a state of presence where we are, in ah in a simplified for terms if I speak in very simple terms, we feel an experience directly unity with everything that is ah arising moment to moment.
Speaker: And it is not just unity, and it is a unity which is followed by the feelings of sublime bliss. So this is the waking up wholeness.
Speaker: And then there is the wholeness of growing up. It is growing up to our maturity. As children, we might experience you know peak states of waking up, but we don't know how to pay for our bills, for instance, or how to navigate relationships.
Speaker: or how to you know go to work and do our professional activities. We basically have to grow up, go through school, and in integral vision um based on and adult development psychology and also child child development so psychology, um we speak about stages of growth.
Speaker: It's not just about growing up through school into workplace or any other kind of activity. It is also... maturity of our psyche. you know We all meet and somebody who is an adult in the body but acts and behaves in some situations like a child. And all of us are doing that in some instances.
Speaker: Some are in relationships, others you know when it comes to earn a living, you know to make money. others i when it comes to creativity and artist artistic self-expression, all kinds of ah lines of development can be participating. So ah this is the path of ah growing up towards greater maturity.
Speaker: which doesn't end when we graduate from school. it's like It is a continuous lifelong journey towards increasing capacity to take perspectives on life.
Speaker: The more and more complex perspective of taking into account more and more various aspects and sides of life. And the the better if we do it, the more holistic and whole our life becomes.
Speaker: And another way towards wholeness that we need to combine with the previous two is the way of cleaning up. Cleaning up is actually the traumas and subpersonalities, shadows, hidden voices, undigested experiences from childhood or even adolescence or even a adult life that we might have in our system, which we don't recognize as our own.
Speaker: And we often project it onto situations and other people and we say like, I'm not angry, but the whole world around is so angry and I'm not angry at all. Anger is not my property. But all human beings can be angry.
Speaker: And if I don't feel my anger, which occasionally could arise, oh I'm deluded and I need to reintegrate this anger. doesn't mean I become an angry person.
Speaker: but That means I get back this energy of anger. Anger is the easiest example, but there could be other examples like intelligence, brilliance, oh, he's so brilliant or she is so brilliant Or she's so beautiful and I don't understand my own in inside internal beauty.
Speaker: And this is like kind of energy which I can return to myself in the process of psychotherapy or self-work. Many ways for this ah wholeness of cleaning up.
Speaker: Another ah way to get to wholeness is to, and which needs to be combined with the previous ways, is the um wholeness of opening up.
Speaker: if We grow up, but we grow up not in a singular way. We actually have multiple streams of development or multiple lines of development. We can have intellectual capacities, we can have emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, moral intelligence, social intelligence, even financial intelligence.
Speaker: all sorts of intelligences that could be like body, kinesthetic intelligence, musical intelligence. And if we are well developed in one kind of intelligence or line of development, it doesn't mean we are well developed in another. So for instance, we can be very smart, but emotionally mature, or we can be emotionally mature, but financially very not smart.
Speaker: So we need to find out which lines of development or intelligences are important for us in our life, which we need to develop further to some degree so we adapt to life in a better way so we'll be more whole again, maybe be successful, maybe more, you know, heartful, maybe more maybe even if we need to you know upgrade our and cognitive intelligence or intellect.
Speaker: so for For everyone, it is like a specific thing. So everyone is different. So every one of us has their own unique set of intelligences that we need to use more.
Speaker: ah Some we don't need to use that much. Like for some people, musical intelligence is very important. But for others, it's more about logical and mathematical intelligence, about doing equations because they are professional mathematicians.
Speaker: So everyone is different. And the last ah kind of wholeness that Ken Wilber speaks about is the wholeness of showing up. And it it means to just that, to show up to different um areas of life and in integral meta theory, there are four basic areas of life that we need to show up to, to embody, so ah to activate, to use, and to you know be present and co-present with.
Speaker: One of them is consciousness, is developing our ability to be present with our experiences. Another is ah our embodiment, not just how we feel our body from our consciousness, but also the nutrients, the behaviors,
Speaker: Like, do we make those, you know, 10,000 steps every day? Do we um look go go out and um spend time in nature and stuff like that?
Speaker: So specific behaviors or are we effective behaviors? and doing phone calls if your work our work requires us, doing phone calls or conference calls, like specific behaviors. We need to embody them and we need to take care of them. We need to take care of the health of our organism.
Speaker: And another area is relationships. We need to take care of our relationships. We need to find healthy boundaries. And we also need to find unhealthy boundaries and dissolve them.
Speaker: So we need to find ways to ah how to be attuned to each other and to build holistic relationships with our families, with our close ones and with people at work, for instance.
Speaker: And ah the final area where we need to show up is society. It is a social system. It doesn't mean we need to become famous, but what it means is that we need to find our evolutionary place in the social system dynamic where we do most goodness to the world and to ourselves.
Speaker: like It is like some place which is sustainable for us to i know ah sustain our family, sustain ourselves, and also bring the ah beauty, goodness, and truth to the world.
Speaker: So we need to equilibrate, we need to balance all these four areas. And this is what it means by showing up. So basically, integral is ah way of living where we take care of waking up,
Speaker: to our ah deepest nature, growing up to the most optimal maturity in our life. It doesn't mean we have to be supermen with superegos, but ah if we are not mature enough, we need to work, make a choice to grow so towards greater complexity of life, which actually tries to dance with us.
Speaker: The third um thing is to clean up because we have some potentials, energies, qualities, anything which we forgot sometime in the past, which ah we dissociated, repressed.
Speaker: And we need some basic psychotherapy or shadow work to return those aspects of ourselves. And we would feel immediately more energy, more wholeness, more joy in life.
Speaker: after we do this work. Of course, for some people, it requires more work. For others, and a little bit less work in some as instances. And some people like me, I think it is a lifelong journey to recover your shadow because shadow is actually something that always might happen.
Speaker: And ah we always, you know, like through feedback loops, try to reintegrate it. And opening up is to see which lines of development intelligences I really need to you know bring to greater maturity.
Speaker: And it is ah very important in psychotherapy because there are smart people who always wonder why they have some trouble in a relationship. And they try to become even smarter. But they need to become smarter in relationship.
Speaker: So maybe trying to do some relational training, to do some empathy training, it could ah really help them in improving their relationship, not thinking through, but feeling through the relationship. And there is a dozen or more of lines of development or intelligences that we can improve given our ah life circumstances.
Speaker: And then showing up. And showing up, of course, there's these four big areas, but for me it is also to show up to life flow. to life flow of dialogue with the universe and our people and our own selves.
Speaker: Sometimes we might feel that we are not living up to our life, are not showing up to some essential aspects to of our life. And we need to ah consider this and take care of ourselves and then maybe make a choice to actually show up even though at the in the beginning it could be scary we could be afraid always by when we we have to do something new like show up in some area where we really feel we need to show up but it's something like we've never done it before it's alright to feel nervous and the worry and stuff like that but this imperative that we need to really to show up because the
Speaker: um the commonwealth of human beings and other beings, all sentient beings, all they all need our presence, our proactive, intentional presence, bringing good and beauty and truth to life.
Speaker: oh All our input matters. So this is where showing up is not just a simple thing. It is actually very crucial. It integrates, it kind of integrates all other kinds of wholenesses.
Speaker: So this is what integral is about in the most, you know, down-to-earth way. it's It's about reaching this big wholeness in our life practically, not just by thinking about it or by just doing one kind of wholeness.
Speaker: We really need establish connection with all these kinds of wholenesses. And there could be some other additional wholenesses, like some additional ways of and connecting with this way of integral life.
Speaker: For instance, Ken Wilber doesn't speak about it in his ah risk book, but types, the types lens, like Enneagram types or MBTI types or other typologies, they bring a sort of wholeness which is very necessary.
Speaker: It is the wholeness of understanding your character, your type, and your destiny. ah If it is about the type which doesn't change in life, but which is like more kind of a diamond type of your life purpose because at least I personally believe that we are not randomly put into life into specific conditions.
Speaker: There is some deeper underlying pattern of why we are like ourselves, why we have these troubles that we have currently. and why we have these gifts and what sorts of lessons we learn in our current lifetime I think there's a pattern that connects all that it is not random it has a deeper meaning with which which we could uncover and studying our own typology would be one of the ways to uncover it and also understanding types of other people because like for instance I could be an introvert somebody else could be an extrovert and it's like in the in different ways
Speaker: ways and it could be you know we need to understand each other and help each other and see our strengths and weaknesses and form cohesive teams to ah do something good and in life.
Speaker: So that would be another type of wholeness and that would be like a brief overview of kinds of wholenesses that Kinnebier speaks about so brilliantly and he has more dense works more technical language, if you're more like and into philosophy or psychology or psychotherapy, you'll find a rich treasure in his books.
Speaker: And also one advice is to read them you know carefully, sentence by sentence, because um they really give you ah kind of and transmission of presence, of integral presence, which is so motivating. Maybe it is even even more important than all these specific details because there's a kind of inspiration in life that we can gain through integral books and through other you know achievements of life like paintings or music or anything else.
Speaker: Here it's about philosophy and very holistic way of living and doing things.
Speaker: Thank you. That is such a rich tapestry. And I encourage you listeners to consider re-listening to it if something is catching you. And you know if you're at all like my experience as a listener, even though I'm very familiar with these terms over the many years, where I'm really hanging out and listening to you, Gene, is there is a transmission.
Speaker: You're so steeped and cooked in this material That there's the words happening, but where I'm locating myself is in this kind of vibrational experience that's behind the words, which I almost want to call mysticism. And in fact, over your shoulder, I'm seeing a book with the rainbow body, what the Buddhists call the rainbow body that Daniel B. Brown translated.
Speaker: what What is your relationship to mysticism and how does mysticism weave through everything you've just told us in terms of practical applications for whether it's waking up, growing up, cleaning up, or showing up? Or does it only fit into one of those areas?
Speaker: Well, yeah, the mysticism and basically points out towards and what is ah some people call a spiritual or transpersonal dimension of life.
Speaker: And this is the strongest, and for me, it's the strongest allure and strongest part of integral vision, which is, you know, Ken Wilbur is one of the participants of this sal um collective integral vision,
Speaker: but there has been many other visionaries, not just contemporaries, but also you know in ancient times, who have been seeing this unity of reality.
Speaker: And this unity of reality, it opens up in experience which is beyond words and beyond even emotional feelings.
Speaker: a kind of space of awareness and this space of awareness is a kind of space of spiritual awareness that we realize that there is this unity in our consciousnesses like Ken Luber likes to quote Schrodinger who said that consciousness is a term, is a word which in singular a plural form of which is unknown. You don't have like consciousness.
Speaker: You have just one consciousness which is shared among all of us. So this is basically what mysticism speaks about. Mysticism is a practical way to, you know, how is they say in Orthodox Christian tradition, like Orthodox mysticism, it's like a way of recollecting Holy Spirit.
Speaker: And Holy Spirit is a kind of energy which brings forth spiritual presence. a presence of something that is ah greater than us, something which is greater than our life stories, something which is greater than the whole human history combined.
Speaker: It doesn't mean it is not important but It is put into a context of which we are not thinking about, but which we feel inside. Like Mahatma Gandhi said that there is an indefinable, mysterious power.
Speaker: I feel it, though I do not see it. And this force or power, it was driving him as a mystic in some way. and But it is not about those legendary heroes.
Speaker: and you know leaders of the humanity and we are simple people who have no access to it because by virtue of our own consciousness and awareness if we train in some kind of discipline of contemplation or meditation or prayer we can ah get access to the layer of our own conscious experience which is beyond concepts and emotions and stories and limiting beliefs and it is eternally present and is they call it ever-present ground of being.
Speaker: And we are always feeling that we are returning home when we recognize that we are in this nest of being in this ground of being which is never away.
Speaker: It is like we're a child sitting on mother's lap and looking around, where is mother? But she's behind us. And then we turn back and we instantly recognize here is my mom and my motherland, my home, my homeland. So mysticism is a very practical and simple way to always, always already feel at home.
Speaker: at home with the deeper reality of our awareness, of our energy. And also it brings, it is not just no passive contemplation, it brings it is a source of meaningfulness in our daily activities in very simple activities like drinking tea in the morning or in very complex activities like social activism or academic career or being a psychotherapist or being a taxi driver or anybody else so this is what mysticism is about and integral ah like integral framework can be sometimes understood as some kind of rational thing which is you know about how to structure like your life and think about life but actually beneath it at the explicit foundation of Integral Vision is this mystical relationship to life.
Speaker: Mystical relationship to life means being very intimate with everything, everyone arising moment to moment in our perception. We go beyond any, you know,
Speaker: and Narrow judgments about reality. What is important, what is not important, what is inside, what is outside. For some people, what is outside is more important than what is inside.
Speaker: For others, what's inside is more important than what is outside. And for a mystic, everything is inside and everything is outside. It is a kind of unitive experience which actually creates one of the biggest wholenesses that you can can have. It is the wholeness of pulsating creativity and unity with the source of everything, at least subjectively. You know you don't you can have different interpretations of what it means objectively, ontologically, but subjectively in terms of your well-being.
Speaker: You are living as if you're living the most meaningful and rich life ever. And this is what mysticism means. ah
Speaker: Wholeness. It sounds like it's another doorway for recognizing that everything is already whole. And as I dissolve the the illusionary boundaries of separation, ah get to taste more and more and more of this.
Speaker: And then notice in my life experiences moving around through my life story, where does that wholeness seem to slip away? And that seems like those are the the key opportunities that life is pointing out to grow and open up into greater wholeness.
Speaker: Indeed, and it is a you can say it's a wholeness of waking up and also staying awake. Staying awake not in terms of not sleeping, but staying awake even mean while you're sleeping or dreaming. There are kind of specific yogas or methods of cultivating awareness even in a dreaming state or in a deep sleep state.
Speaker: But for most of us, like for me, ah staying awake when I'm awake, like when I'm in my waking life, would be very great discipline, a yoga, you could say, like a yoga of staying awake where we are awake.
Speaker: And in this awakeness, what integral shows that this awakeness per se, it shows the walls of the container. shows the walls of the container But it doesn't make doesn't necessarily make um the kind the the things that are contained in this container disappear.
Speaker: It highlights their importance. And that's why you become fallen in love with all the i know events in life. and So ah true mysticism is not a separation from reality.
Speaker: It is like you start to see the wholeness of the container And through that, you become very caring about the contents.
Speaker: and What do mean by container? What do you mean by container? Can you unpack that for us? Like container is like some kind of room. room or space which has walls.
Speaker: Let's say it's the room of our life with walls. And we as if we are living without understanding there are these walls, which brings some context. And then we start to understand and see the walls of this room.
Speaker: And through that, we see um the things in the room, like different you know things like a cup or a person, and all of them start to shine when we see the room. Like Tatiana, my life partner, is ah is she's a psychologist, psychotherapist, but she is also in her first education, interior designer.
Speaker: So if you are aware of interior design, you understand how interior design of a room makes different. difference So basically, mysticism is becoming you know aware of the transcendental interior design of life room, of the room of life. transcendental interior design of life. That is just an incredible phrase. The transcendental interior design of life.
Speaker: Oh my God, I love that. the All metaphors have their limitation. In this case, this room has no walls. This room has no floor and this room has no you know ceiling.
Speaker: It is boundless. And this is this boundless the room, boundless container in which all our life events arise. Life events and things and everything that we deem important or non-important, they all arise there And they become very you know beautiful when we see them through the lens of seeing the eternity and this um boundless space of eternal being, actually.
Speaker: Eternal, never-ending, unceasing, uninterrupted, ah constant choice to be. This is what, for me, in the universe is about.
Speaker: The universe is the constant moment-by-moment choice to be. You cannot even imagine a choice not to be because this is already happening.
Speaker: Being is already there. It is a constant creative choice to be and bring forth new ways of manifestation. And this is also a kind of way of how some mystics would make relationship with their reality and with other people and with all events. They can be very simple-minded in some ways, people working very simple work, very simple jobs, but they see it all in the context of eternity and even beyond that.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah as you say, eternal being, I sit here and, and you know, curious about timeless, boundless being.
Speaker: You know, I know that at later stages, one can have to work out that confusion of the difference between ah timelessness and boundlessness and ah eternality and infinity.
Speaker: And a step away you no completely from the flow of time and from the any limitation of space,
Speaker: Yet those ah continue to arise as beautiful, magnificent, how do you call them?
Speaker: like these beautiful palaces, like palace of reality, and like these beautiful mandalas in which oh ah everything is contained within, but your true identity even beyond that.
Speaker: but There is, of course, many layers. But you know, it is also a thing about and the mystical path, at least in non-dual traditions, is that ah the path is ah always the ground and is always the fruit.
Speaker: So there cannot be any, you know, trying to speed up your process because the very thought of speeding up the process means that there something incomplete in the noun.
Speaker: that I am concerned with eternity, not with boundless, not this spaceless thing, so I need to move on. i really need to do quick and go quicker. It creates a thought that this is not perfect, but this is all can be seen as a perfect manifestation of actually this is what integral um ah vision brings.
Speaker: ah to us It is the kind of evolutionary mysticism that the whole universe, ah its purpose not to undo itself, not to you know for us not to leave this planet or leave this universe into some formless realm, but we are actually co-participating in the cosmic creation in the vibration vibration, pulsation of creativity and the whole evolution in some models it is like almost 14 billion years of e evolution evolution all that is a creative process in which we co-participate and all of it is ah it it is a self-contained purity self-manifesting realization of
Speaker: creativity You cannot say that you know the artist's creation is something we need to get rid of. No, we continue co-create. So for some of us, this co-creation can be about getting into this timeless, boundless, and non-conceptually unspoken
Speaker: We cannot even name it, but ah it know it is not necessarily so. and It does not require for our consummate wholeness of this moment, there is no necessity to go anywhere but here and now.
Speaker: Because this is what and what's so interesting about this whole thing is that the whole fullness of this ultimate presence It is right now.
Speaker: If I'm looking at somewhere else, I'm making a mistake. A mistake of looking somewhere else. Which is also okay. I can then enjoy this process of seeking, but then I could just sit down and feel as if all business that I had, everything that I was aspiring to, all tasks that I had on my to-do list,
Speaker: All done. All things are done. All things are complete. Everything is accomplished in this moment. And feel this immediate fullness of freedom.
Speaker: That is a delicious pointing out instruction to actually imagine everything that we could ever want to accomplish is already done. and to just rest there, aware, present, and see what's noticed.
Speaker: I've never recalled having it pointed out quite that way. And it's an immediate experience for me of this
Speaker: overflowing fullness. And by full, like I don't mean full of you know tea or full of food, like full of
Speaker: Well, wholeness, yeah, I come back to the the recycling the words we've been using, full of wholeness, like nowhere to go, nothing to get, nothing to avoid, everything already here and full and delicious, absolutely delicious.
Speaker: Eugene, what is your particular orientation at this point in terms of the path of growing up, or sorry, waking up for yourself, the mysticism that
Speaker: that you're called to that seduces you into deeper wholeness
Speaker: yeah uh there is kind of um it's a tricky question because i have definitely affinity with uh like certain indo-tibetan traditions like dsokchin first and foremost and sumaha mudra you mentioned daniel p brown whom i I respect a lot and I respect a lot Dustin Di Perna for instance and so many your others.
Speaker: I translated one small book by Tralya Kyabgon Rinpoche about Yogachara and Mahamudra. It is a very small one but I tried to give it as a gift because I really liked the book to the practitioners.
Speaker: So I definitely have a lot of fondness to the tradition. Yet I also have fondness to general current of non-duality.
Speaker: Sometimes it is called tantric traditions, but and nowadays tantra is associated with some kind of you know relational, emotional trainings and ah sexual activities, which is ah not necessarily and in any way related to this deepest tantric current.
Speaker: But I'm very interested in ah studying the visions of, for instance, this great tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, like I really feel there it looks at the same non-duality from a different angle, aesthetic angle, while Buddhism often looks at it from wisdom and compassion angle.
Speaker: Shaivistic tradition looks at all that is arising as a sign of beauty. And also it is a um something which can be called theistic non-geo-mysticism that doesn't have to postulate that there is no self.
Speaker: for instance, which can be understood in a different way, but it actually is very free about that our personhood, our self, in its deepest ground, is the same self with capital S. It is not that our small self is like no self, like we have to let go or dissipate it in order to you know become this big self.
Speaker: There is this nuanced, sophisticated, and continuity between our current mundane self and this big self called the divine being, for instance. Ocean and waves maybe?
Speaker: Ocean and waves? Yes, or vibration of... It's not even like ocean and waves because it is kind of it is it's difficult. I'm not like i'm I'm just studying it, but it's difficult to convey.
Speaker: It is like oh there is this fullness of completeness in all aspects of reality, like a hologram.
Speaker: There is no need for a person who is limited to try and be unlimited because he or she is already unlimited. And the only way, the only thing you need to do is to just recognize it in the moment and recognize it through you know dissolving dissolving attachment, not destroying it, dissolving exclusive identification the time his smaller cell with everything.
Speaker: Smaller self itself is ah not an obstacle. It is actually medium through which a spirit is shining. So I really like that and I cannot limit myself to just one specific tradition. But I'm also very interested in Christian mysticism in in various traditions from Orthodox Christianity to Meister Eckhart's profound, brilliant, non-jualistic instructions.
Speaker: So I'm very curious about that. So I come to a conclusion that i'm interested in the awareness base If you write Awareness with capital A, then all of that is a treasure trove of awareness. Like this is the biggest teacher.
Speaker: Of course, you need traditions to help with pointing out instructions, but the biggest and the innermost teacher, the sublime spiritual teacher is awareness, which we cannot say my awareness or your awareness.
Speaker: It's just, you know, shared awareness of cosmic being. So I'm really curious about that because it has very practical implications to life. I look at all simple things in life differently when I'm in contact with this even prospect, even inspiration of being um of being in the state of recognizing ever-present awareness.
Speaker: and which cannot be you know described in any way. Some people try to just describe describe it as a boundless space, for instance. It is like a space, but it is not like a physical space, but it is a living space which is a vibrant and full of energy, full of light, and yet even that doesn't capture it because, oh Divine, you are beyond any qualifications.
Speaker: and I am just a very small particle in this ocean of awareness. Yet in this mystery, this particle-ness of mine is with the larger whole.
Speaker: Oh Divine, how sublime this paradox of reality that I don't have to be anything but this moment, anything other than what is right now.
Speaker: And yet, I'm in full recognition of the mystery of being and I try to relate to you, O Divine Being.
Speaker: I try to ah get to know you better. So this is probably an essence of many spiritual traditions, not even non-Jualistic ones, but or all the rich ah spiritual legacy which we have to preserve because the current day's conditions they make conditions for preserving them because the internet and global globalized society we can actually travel and meet somebody and meet some group and study and books, electronic books and but also because we have so many a distractions like which are not bad in in themselves but they engulf our lives like smartphones, social media
Speaker: movies, all that is great in itself, but we if we pay full attention to them, we forget about the legacy of the spiritual traditions, and then we lose them because they have to be given from heart to heart, from mind to mind, from soul to soul in this direct lineage because this is no and the tricky thing about this play of the universe that it is very personal in a sense.
Speaker: Even in personalistic traditions, they're continuated through personal contact. So we really have to be, you know, I think about it as say a red book, the red book of rare, you know, flora and fauna and rare spiritual insights, which are not just insights, there's whole systems which we need to learn how to cultivate in our life.
Speaker: So that just caught my attention. It sounds like you're pointing out there are different types of red books. I thought you were going to specifically talk about Carl Jung. So red book sounds like it's a conventional or a convention or a term that points at a certain style of ah sharing something. Is that, am I following you?
Speaker: Well, Red Book is like a red book of ah very rare species. It's like the book in which there are animals and plants are written down, which you cannot hunt or collect, because they are very rare. You have to preserve them in your natural reserves.
Speaker: and Got I meant it in sense. and OK. And then the other thing that really just jumps out at me, partially because of the where I sit as a teacher and as a facilitator,
Speaker: In two lineage streams of Kashmir Shaivism and Sri Vidya Tantra, which are very co-informed and interpenetrative, it's been said that Sri Vidya is the practices, by some, not all, that is the practices and in Kashmir Shaivism is the underpinning philosophy that explains or contextualizes what we're doing and why we're doing it.
Speaker: For example, for those of you who these terms are new, Kashmir Shaivism ah In fact, I've got a course coming out from Unity that's in launch right now where the spine of it is the Pratyabhnyadhyam, which is a big, beautiful Sanskrit word that means that the heart or the essence of the teachings of waking up to reality.
Speaker: And so these 20 sutras show us how consciousness got lost and distracted and how it can find its way back to recognizing wholeness again. And it is not just a waking up to reality, it is ah but in particular the self-recognition doctrine, which means that this like every moment is fully complete, like if you use this more like great completion or perfection metaphor, everything is done and what we do is recognize it moment by moment effortlessly.
Speaker: So this effortlessness of recognition of the true nature of this moment of our of our experience is this kind of self-recognition doctrine which can be assisted with other kinds of methods which can be more like some take effort, some other less effort, but this is the the highest path of spontaneous recognition of but that everything is good. It's it's all good, actually. it is Everything is ah goodness and everything is beauty and everything is truth.
Speaker: Of course, within this container of ultimate goodness, truth and beauty, there are some things which are ugly. There are some things which are not that good, some things which are untrue.
Speaker: which is important for our i know daily activities. And it is also important to simultaneously to be connected with this ever-present moment of fullness and truthfulness and beauty and goodness and full presence of spirit.
Speaker: Let's come back to the importance because there's such a conversation in certain circles about ah the time of the guru is is gone or dead. um And the way I hear that from for myself is like, there's no way it's possible as somebody who's been authorized to give certain empowerments and initiations in what's called the ear whispered tradition, as you pointed out, like from heart to heart, mind to mind,
Speaker: whispered from teacher to student and passed along in an unbroken lineage, not written down. I don't see that the need for the teacher who can transmit things ever goes away.
Speaker: But there's this conversation afoot and there's somebody i I believe I'm recording with this weekend who's a a llama, a Western llama. And in our email exchange, she was she was unpacking this experience she's having of her own community, the Sangha, as the next guru.
Speaker: And my response was like, okay, The guru, the one who can transmit wider states of awareness by embodying them and using skillful tools is not separate from the gathering of seekers, the sangha.
Speaker: Like what what do you see about the enduring value and importance of having a teacher who's further down the road than oneself is to be able to even non-verbally s sense or suss out or um calibrate to the wisdom stream that they're actually drinking and teaching from.
Speaker: I want to highlight first the importance of the other point that you mentioned by your colleague, Lama, who said this importance that the next guru is a Sanca or the collective.
Speaker: and um I have extensive experience of facilitating and co-facilitating group work. And it is based not just on some kind of and linear activity, but also on field awareness.
Speaker: And there is a great deal of truth that there could be a greater wisdom that would come through the field of a community or group which is facilitated skillfully and which has this evolutionary dynamic, there will always be shadow dynamics.
Speaker: There will always be group dynamics. There will be regressive tendencies because groups are the it's the mechanism of their work. But if it is all facilitated skillfully, you can really have a teaching arising through presence of everyone in a group.
Speaker: In this sense, I definitely agree that Sankha or a community of practitioners or a group of practitioners, it could function as the teacher. Guru means teacher, you know, and in a sense. It means a teacher or the medium through which a teaching arises. And a teaching, in this case, is a psychoactive teaching of transforming one's own consciousness or mind or soul or heart.
Speaker: however you put it. So in this sense, I totally agree with this. And at the same time, it doesn't happen just like that. If you put just, you know, people without skillful facilitation or some people who have been doing it for years,
Speaker: who can help ah you know spirit or ah will not spirit, even monday and some more mundane professional psychological skills shine through a or self-expression shine through a person, ah often groups start to become and for instance toxic or regressive or hijacked by lesser activities so you really have to have guides in groups so a guru or a teacher in this sense in this modern 21st century sense
Speaker: and could be seen as a guide, a guide for best practices, of know-how, and also not just explicit conceptual knowledge of how to facilitate things, how to teach, how to give instructions, but also the tacit knowledge of having gone through thousands of episodes, thousands of situations in group setting and working with people.
Speaker: So in this sense, I think that the role of a guide or a teacher or a guru, it will be increased, actually. We need more skillful, more integral ah teachers who can take care of the all the five or more elements or paths towards wholeness that we discussed in the beginning of this conversation.
Speaker: they need to do definitely a lot of cleaning up because many problems with gurus why we want to get rid of ah teachers is because all their human beings and their soul a you know um fall prey to human folly and to shadow and they can do do nasty things as all people, as we constantly do to each other, you know, we we constantly do some, you know, thing, some people do worse things, I don't want to be very relativistic about that and some teachers really betray trust of their students.
Speaker: which is very important to ah for us to collectively reflect. But I think that the future is in recognizing the potentialities of the all of all areas of showing up, of collective group presence, and you can really be very skillful in working with the field, with relationship with group, with taking care of group dynamics, of collective shadows that arise, of facilitating collective reflection, and of highlighting the best potentials, the guru potential in each of the participants, in each of the students.
Speaker: But also, we need to highlight the importance of the people who are holders of awareness, holders of expert knowledge, who have spent often decades or many years in you know learning how to shape this ah space of teaching.
Speaker: how to internalize the teaching how to look at it from thousands different perspectives this is what best teachers do like at at least in authentic traditions they are not just in enough oh I have a peak experience I'm enlightened now I'll go teach intuitively no intuition is always combined with a rigorous effort towards perfecting your ah capacities and your understanding of the tradition and its different perspectives and and different types of people, different ways to approach them.
Speaker: And so it is not that teachers themselves would disappear, it's that they would become more post post-modern, more integral in a sense, more up-to-date with current reality. This is what integral vision is speaking about.
Speaker: It's not that we lose gurus in favor of just you know some collective thing. It doesn't work like that. What works is the combination of both. like Integral is not either or, it is both and.
Speaker: So we need more whole holistic ah teachers and we need more holistic methods of cultivating group presence and also other areas and then we have this synergy of effect which bring really you know integrative experience to people with ah where these errors and mistakes are diminished and good outcomes are increased.
Speaker: But I agree with this criticism of the guru era that if we rely on strictly authoritarian model where there is this patriarchal or matriarchal figure which is the absolute subject and everybody is an object of this subject and this subject, ah him or herself, that does not allow any reflection, any you know objectification.
Speaker: It is basically and a place where narcissism actually hides because a nature of narcissism is that I use spiritual spirituality in order to hide my so I don't want to be objectified because objectification of myself that I am seen by somebody, not like that I am seen everybody else, but everybody sees only no guru in me, but not my personality.
Speaker: This is very painful for our narcissistic tendencies. that see is not you know of course it can have moral defects. Of course, we need to take care of moral defects, but that also it is a trauma ah trauma of feeling so ah feeling so much shame about being seen.
Speaker: So we can actually, you know, this Adlerian model of will to power and will to hypercompensation. So we hypercompensate, we reach really high altitudes of our spiritual awareness ah Actually, we do that. you know but So many great ah painters were narcissists, ah politicians, you know becoming even you know presidents of certain countries can can be considered by some narcissists.
Speaker: you know Surgeons can be very good surgeons and narcissists. There are many narcissists among psychotherapists because they you know they can be ah even good psychotherapists in some sense, but they're narcissists.
Speaker: And among spiritual teachers, it is proven that there could be narcissism hidden in some ways in which needs to be you know excavated and we will need to find ways how to collectively and individually heal this narcissistic trauma and to feel it is in the situations when I'm being seen as vulnerable, as limited, as a smaller self.
Speaker: It doesn't cancel out, it doesn't undo all my spiritual capacities, but we really need to look into it and to be very tender about this narcissistic core.
Speaker: And this is where this criticism of the Guru Institute, it's spot on. Most of the problems are related to this character pathologist. And people, you know, it is a stigma and we have to avoid ah stigmatizing.
Speaker: But we also have to be aware that, for instance, narcissistic personality disorder can have a dark triad of traits, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, like sociopathy, and narcissism, which is has like it is kind of a schism of personality, like segregation of a good part of personality, which contains all good projections and all good qualities.
Speaker: and all bad parts and it is like ah like a split personality almost in a sense and in this split personality you have this bed as bad you know like quote unquote part which has this narcissistic tendency to actually hurt people because this is the thing if I'm a narcissist I'm not even aware that actually I'm killing people's people's hearts, I'm breaking their hearts, I'm not aware of it because in order to be aware of it, I need to be vulnerable towards being seen and towards and to become we know the same with others.
Speaker: And being a spiritual guru, a psychotherapist, an artist, an actor or ah or an actress, anybody, it brings you know you it elevates you and it helps for some time to defend yourself or myself from you know this plain, simple feeling of being human.
Speaker: So this is where 21st century teachers can actually become even greater teachers by reconnecting to our humanity. This is what I adore, respect in John Wellwood's work about spiritual bypassing and how he spoke about that.
Speaker: We are not just human beings trying to become awakened beings. We are also beings of awakening trying to become human beings. trying to embody human vulnerabilities.
Speaker: So in this sense, of course, there are these dialectics of gurus. I agree that we need to reflect upon it and we need to do thesis, anti-thesis, and then try to find synthesis out of these polarities.
Speaker: ah
Speaker: There's so many things to that could just continue to dialogue with you about endlessly for days on end. I think we're going to have to find a way to meet in person and do just that, Renna. a cool house somewhere on the sea and just go for it.
Speaker: There's a question I like to ask every guest, and it's based on one of my favorite quotes from Shunryo Suzuki Roshi, who opened the Zen Center of San Francisco in the 1960s. And he would say, death is certain, the time is not.
Speaker: What is the most important thing? Well, I think there can be different responses to that. And one is, I'm always, you know, by confronting a question like that when I'm facing this question, the there is this temptation to just be silent.
Speaker: Yet, I think now, evolutionary-wise, what is the most important thing? is to find ways for this silence to be present while we are trying to convey it in communication and sharing it in our words and in our deeds, in our artworks, in our different activities. Every one of us have their own ways of contributing to society.
Speaker: So i I would say this is the most important is to be connected with this um non-conceptual stillness and silence and obviousness of what's most important and conveying it through all the different multiple simple and complex means.
Speaker: like I'm not like simpleton and i'm not this complexity guy, I'm both. i I think that all different gradations of reality of our human being are very important.
Speaker: And I would also say that if I would think about the direct way towards anything that would resemble this big word of enlightenment or awakening,
Speaker: Before you get to know any mystical tradition or contemplative school or a school of praying or a faith, before all of that, the direct route towards this or out of this is creativity.
Speaker: Because I believe that our creative way of living is this direct manifestation of divine will through us, that we are actually manifesting our energy in creativity which is also the energy of the whole universe.
Speaker: This is what what drives it. And this creative energy is not a some kind of mistaken avenue of some being out of which we need to get away.
Speaker: This actually is actually the path. It is actually the perfect manifestation of the whole purpose. We don't have to you know be boundless or any you know be mystics or whatever.
Speaker: We only need to find contact with our innate creativity, which all human beings ah have. I have this solid belief that we are all not just homo sapiens, but we are creative beings. yeah How would you say it in Latin?
Speaker: Homo creativity or whatever. We are beings who co-create. So this creativity is what is you know inspires artists, but it also inspires every one of us. Creativity is the foundation of all human activities, and I believe of all universal activities. But I don't know, I haven't been a mouse or a bat. I don't know what it is like to be a bat, you know what it is like to be a mouse, but I know what it is like to be a human being of my particular qualities and I would say ah think that what is universal across all cultures or all religions all ways of being is this creative impulse which we we all can connect and draw inspiration and be inspired and be inspired to be connected with the spirit which tries to create through us and with us
Speaker: How would you define being creative? People hear that in so many ways. And many students I've encountered over the years have a story from being criticized as children or compared to a sibling and say, oh, you're not creative. Your sister is. And I say, well, can you appreciate beauty?
Speaker: Yes, I can. Well, then I say you're creative. What's your how do you unpack that for people and help them recognize what it is to be creative? Yeah, it's not a commandment, thou shalt be ah creative. like If it it is like that, it is already you know stiffening this creativity. creativity i like how Taoists speak about you know unity with Tao and letting Tao or Tao move you and instead of you know trying to point it into a specific direction. You are you're responsive and perceptive towards life's energies.
Speaker: and you're co-dancing with the life energies in this transparency of being so creativity in this sense it's not like this commandment there's more like this playful ah relationship to life it doesn't mean playfulness but not seriousness it could be both playful and serious it could be playful and not serious but this particular way of playfulness and feeling the energy through the medium in which you apply your creativity.
Speaker: I learned creativity when I was writing poems at high school, as many people did in their adolescent years. And when learned how to write very quickly on keyboard and write texts, and now I was writing them as if something was going through me and I was feeling this tingling sensation of energy, of creativity in my fingertips.
Speaker: And for somebody, it could be like in a dance when they they move, they feel this kind of almost subtle energy of creativity through their embodiment. And for others, it is ah in thinking. And for me, for instance, too, sometimes I get so elevated by you know, trying to contemplate the intricate realities of life, philosophy of meaning of life, that I feel very creative and alive. So ah creativity is kind of aliveness of energy, which is ah we allow to move through us.
Speaker: And there is no, this is the thing, there is no specific way or algorithm to be creative. it is or you know it's ah it's not even about Be creative because be creative, it's like, it's a demand.
Speaker: It's just about allowing to, you know, to feel into creativity. yeah You know, it is unqualifiable. It is a mystery. But when even when I see, when I do it, when I let it move through me, I know it is creativity, you know?
Speaker: So explore, experiment, be playful. This is what in playful, not just, you know, I have to be playful by be becoming an actor to go to the drama circle. Of course, if it is your cup of tea, go for it.
Speaker: But it could be, you know, being writing a poem, or paint in the painting a painting, or just speaking at a business meeting in some kind of way which you haven't spoken before. or no One way to find connectedness with creativity is to try and practice some form of mindfulness or meditation, and five ways to go to stillness.
Speaker: And ah David Lynch recently passed. yeah He wrote a really great book, Catching the Big Fish, or Catching a Big Fish. it It has also nice audio book. I recommend it.
Speaker: And his metaphor is like you yeah are doing meditation. ah You are trying to you know go for fishing for ideas. And for for this meditation, go into this silent space of rest.
Speaker: You are becoming an at ease. And out of that, some impulse might arise. And this impulse would be this creative impulse. It could be a vision. It could be a hearing.
Speaker: It could be a movement. And you could explore. Everyone, we are all very different. So all of us have very own unique ways of creative life.
Speaker: And also I believe everyone has their own kind of way of meditation. It cannot be know one meditation method for everyone. Meditation is something that arises creatively from within.
Speaker: And there is this wonderful... scholar and practitioner, David Germano, who speaks about ah generative contemplation. He's a Dzogchen practitioner, he's a scholar, but he speaks about this generative universal, generative contemplative tradition, which is universal across cultures, across different systems, that actually contemplation, it's like language.
Speaker: you learn it generatively. And this generative way is also a creative way, finding your own ways how to be connected with it. So this is, well we could speak for hours about it and become you know like just like improvisation into that.
Speaker: But I think if you I don't know if I'm creative right now. I feel like like it like when I'm trying to convey it. I feel like this creativity. And if you ah listen to it, that just don't listen just to words.
Speaker: Try to i know ah feel into this ah sort of, you can call it different names, like energy of it. And try to see what is your own way to resonate with this.
Speaker: It is not belonging to me or to you or to anyone. It belongs to all of us, the source of creativity. But ah David Lynch wrote a great book. So if you need more instructions, like he's like ah the guy about this creative flow.
Speaker: I've got to check that out. that's That's a book I remember when it came out. And I've always got so many books, probably like you, that I didn't yet engage with it. So I'll look out for that. And also this David Germano.
Speaker: Well, I think we're going to have to have a part two at some point in time. And I thank you so much for being here. Your passion is contagious. Your joy is contagious. Your stillness is contagious.
Speaker: um And we're going to complete in a few moments by all of us listeners and you and I going into shared silence of just being together in quiet for about 10, 20 seconds at the end of this. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us to close out for today's dialogue?
Speaker: Yes, I would like to share the goodness and if there is any goodness and if there is what Buddhists, for instance, call merit, we did something good and there is kind of very good energy vibe about it.
Speaker: To share this vibe with all beings in all times and all worlds that it would multiply and be shared across the universe. So this would be my desire my sincere wish.
Speaker: So that everything that if there is something good, do multiply and be shared with everyone everywhere. May it be so. May it be so. so everybody, if you're able to elongate your spine, soften the soles of your feet and the palms of your hands, like you're opening imaginary fists with your imagination,
Speaker: Let the exhale become long. And as you inhale, just choose to explore the possibility that you're sipping in truth, beauty, and goodness through every cell.
Speaker: Loving the episode? Click to follow, like, and share it as widely as possible. Want to go deeper with the choice to grow? Explore the show notes. You'll find links there for going deeper with our guests, as well as how to work with me in the work of waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.
Speaker: Thanks for listening. Can't wait to join you in the next episode.
