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[00:00:00] Corey: Here we go. Liftoff. Ryan Oelke, it’s good to see you, man.

[00:00:03] Ryan: Good to see you, buddy. It has been a while since we’ve done one of these.

[00:00:08] Corey: It has been seriously a long time. I think we took like the entirety of last year off, actually.

[00:00:12] Ryan: I was looking, yeah, and I think the last one that was in my calendar was October of 2022.

[00:00:17] Corey: Wow.

[00:00:18] Ryan: Yeah. So we were overdue for this.

[00:00:22] Corey: We’re way overdue. Well, I missed you, man. I mean, I only miss you so much because we talk, you know…

[00:00:25] Ryan: Yeah.

[00:00:26] Corey: …all the time, every other day or so.

[00:00:28] Ryan:

Yeah that’s true, and our conversations are similar to what we have here on the actual show, but it is nice to be doing this again and reconnecting with the audience and starting the conversations up again.

[00:00:41] Corey: Yeah, it’s totally true, when people watch this show, awhenthey watch Inhabit, you know, the funny thing about it is like, this is just us. I mean, this is, this is sort of like how we hang out. Like when we’re playing Halo, we have, we have the same conversations.

[00:00:56] Ryan: Yeah. And I like that a lot. I mean, it’s kind of funny, obviously it’s informal and this is how you and I roll, but I feel like hopefully it’s an embodiment of what we’re trying to share in terms of our exploration of integral and all these different facets of like, yeah, this is life. Right? So how do we talk about it in this just really open, down to earth way?

[00:01:16] Corey: Yep. Yeah, I totally agree, it’s well put. And you know, I like that too, that we’re not… you know, we’ll bring in some theoretical, you know, sort of components of what we’re talking about.

[00:01:25] Ryan: Yes.

[00:01:26] Corey: We’re capable of doing that, but the point of the show is, as you say, to really sort of step into integral from the inside out, and really express sort of,

[00:01:37] Ryan: In a personal way, yeah.

[00:01:39] Corey: In a personal way, exactly, our own sort of unique, inhabiting of these ideas. And to the extent that that can be useful for our audience, either for, you know, people who are sort of coming in for the first time and really tasting these waters for the first time, or for the people who’ve been here for a while. And, you know, that’s one of the most extraordinary things that I found, Ryan, is that every individual sort of in this larger integral project has this sort of very unique enactment of these ideas. Simply because the ideas themselves are so big and there’s so many different ways of relating to them, and relating them to our lives and to the world, that you just get all of these different sort of flavors, personal flavors of integral. And I love that. I love sort of that field effect and seeing sort the diversity of how people step into this material.

[00:02:27] Ryan: Yeah. I love that. It’s well put.

[00:02:29] Corey: So

what are we inhabiting today, man? I think we started off with a juicy but very open topic for us.

[00:02:35] Ryan: Yeah.

[00:02:36] Corey: What are we inhabiting?

[00:02:37] Ryan: We’re inhabiting your awakening. Our awakening. I, we, it, wakin’ it up.

[00:02:43] Corey: Yeah. We should let our audience know that you actually just released a major new Integral Awakening, Integral Dharma web course on integrallife.com, and we’ve gotten such awesome feedback for that, Ryan. Really, really well done.

[00:02:57] Ryan: Thank you. Yeah. And I want to say to folks listening that, I think that course and how I approached it really did come out of my experience with you, Corey, here in this Inhabit show, and the conversations and the comments and everybody participating here. I wanted to create a course that was a practical support for what we discuss here. So it was very in the spirit of the show. So I’m just super happy to finally put it out there. And also to have, you know, the live practice group was something that I kind of emerged later that I didn’t originally think about, but we’ve been doing a live practice group and yeah, I have another one coming up here. So that’s… it’s all in this spirit of inhabiting, just as you put earlier.

[00:03:36] Corey: Yeah.

[00:03:36] Ryan: So I’m happy that we’re going to explore what it means to awaken integrally. That is the big question. What is that?

[00:03:44] Corey: Because awakening is obviously a capacity that human beings have had ever since we, you know, walked upright for the first time. I mean, I would argue that many animals, I think, probably have something like awakening experience, or at least some of the, you know, the more complex nervous systems. You know, I think that, that this thing that we’re calling awakening is truly a universal quality. And that actually is what makes it so sort of difficult to talk about.

[00:04:12] Ryan: Mm.

[00:04:12] Corey: Because, you know, it’s another one of these where the actual experience of awakening, in my experience anyway, has been one of seamlessness, where the seams literally kind of disappear. And by seams, I mean, sort of the divisions, all of these various polarities that we find ourselves in, in this world. You know, it’s a collapse of the interior and the exterior. It’s the collapse of the relative and the absolute, of form and of emptiness. It’s the collapse of parts and wholes, and individuals and collectives. And you know, there’s this sort of realization that, you know, can be sudden, but can also sort of be, you know, cumulative, to a certain degree, where we begin to see through, I think, a lot of the notions of separation.

[00:05:04] Ryan: Yeah.

[00:05:05] Corey: Where we begin to understand that, you know, this universe is very much composed of individuals, but not of independent individuals. That sense of independence, I think, begins to sort of shift, you know, fade away. And this is a classic Awakening experience that I think can be experienced by anyone, you know, no matter where they are in their own sort of developmental journeys. And there’s some unique qualities that come online at particular stages of development, which we’ll talk about a bit today.

[00:05:35] Ryan: Yeah. That’s a great way of putting this. And there’s two words that come up for me and everything you just shared about this, you know, dissolving of the feeling of separation, you know, of inner and outer. And classically I might think of the word interconnection, you know, interdependent co-arising, things like that. But funny enough for me, this is just me, the word that comes up in integral to express that often is "simultaneity". And I think it came up from Ken talking about the four quadrants being tetra-arising. And so this simultaneous arising captures a little bit of the spirit of what integral awakening is. So it’s not just like, ah, now I can rest in this direct experience of being, of oneness, and of interconnectedness with all things and all beings, but it’s the feeling of the simultaneity of the complexity of who we are, of what reality is. And then it’s like, okay, well, how do I awaken through this, and as this, and respond, you know, in the classic bodhisattva sense, an integral bodhisattva. What does that mean? Yeah.

[00:06:42] Corey: Yep. 100%. Yeah, no. And it’s interesting when we sort of reconcile this notion of simultaneity with… you know, one of my sort of background hobbies, I love watching videos about physics, right? I love physics. So I go to like, the PBS Spacetime channel on YouTube, and I just kind of geek out with physics for a while. I think there’s just something about, I spend so much time with these very, very abstract ideas, sometimes I like to just kind of push, you know, these sort of dense little objects around. Sort of, you know what I mean? Which isn’t to say that, you know, it’s any less confusing down in the basement of reality than it is sort of, you know…

[00:07:19] Ryan: That’s a different flavor, yeah.

[00:07:21] Corey: It’s a different flavor of samsara for sure. But you know, one of the points that physicists make is that, you know, ultimately really, there’s no such thing as simultaneity. That every experience in the universe is separated to some degree by space and time, even if we’re talking like the tiniest possible fractions of space and time, right? Like, right now, me and you are having a simultaneous experience, because our field of awareness is large enough to include everything I’m saying, everything you’re saying, we have a memory of everything that we’ve previously said. So it feels like we’re sharing a moment. And yet if you really, really zoom in and look at the details, the moment of simultaneity that you’re experiencing is actually a little bit different than the moment of simultaneity that I’m experiencing. And so again, you see it right there. There is an implicit sort of separation between entities, between holons, between, you know, manifestations in the universe, but there’s no independence between those. Right? So even though we don’t share a physically simultaneous moment, because time changes, you know, as space changes, it’s one of the wackiest things that we learn in physics, even though it’s impossible to for us to share that simultaneous moment on a one to one kind of basis, there is something about consciousness itself that transcends mere location.

[00:08:45] Ryan: Right. So, this is working, right, with, you know, nondual teachings and the contemplative side. What does it mean to work with the four quadrants, from the perspective of awakening, and polarities, right? All this comes up of like, well, what’s our understanding of what you just said in real time, as practitioners?

[00:09:06] Corey: Yeah.

[00:09:07] Ryan: How do we realize that directly?

[00:09:09] Corey: Yep, yep. And it’s a fascinating thing because when I take the physicists seriously, in terms of when they say, you know, no two subjects actually occupy a simultaneous moment in time, there’s always that, you know, speed limit to the universe, and that’s the speed of light. When they say that though, I ask myself a secondary question, which is, if that’s true, right, if that’s true, then how can we take literally the idea that consciousness is a singular to which the plural is unknown? And I love taking that quote, like, absolutely literally, because that is itself what transcends space and time and separation and, you know, sort of the illusions around simultaneity. You know, we might all occupy our own sort of territory in space and time, but that which is occupying is the same universal witness from one subject to the next subject.

[00:10:03] Ryan: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.

[00:10:04] Corey: And I just find that such a fascinating idea.

[00:10:06] Ryan: Absolutely. I love it. And fascination, you know, wonder, is an important quality. Well, important realization and something we can cultivate that I think is absolutely, for me, key in the path of integral awakening. It’s like if I can keep coming back over and over to that wonder and curiosity, which is not to say lacking teeth or lacking willpower and response, no, no, no, no. But it’s just a key ingredient of awakening. It’s just being, wow, this is fascinating. We’ll talk all day about it, get very specific, get very nuanced, get very discerning, which is really helpful, you know, using an integral map. And still, what is this? Right? Being alive in reality is weird.

[00:10:48] Corey: Yeah, it is weird. Well, and that’s, I think that’s one of the things that we get turned on to as we begin to take more seriously this sort of, you know, awakening process, is the perception that we have of the world is in so many ways flawed. Right? It’s in so many… like, we’re born into this human body, which has a very narrow window of sensory perceptions that are available to us. You know, we see like this little fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, for example, and we take that as being real. We have a hard time seeing sort of realities at a smaller scale until way late in the human story when we began to invent things like microscopes and, you know, and so forth, where we were able to really look at how this reality is fundamentally composed in terms of, you know, in terms of the lower holons. None of which is obvious to us, right? There are so many aspects of this thing that we call reality that are just completely not obvious.

[00:11:49] Ryan: Hmm.

[00:11:50] Corey: And I think the awakening process, part of that, is sort of this disillusionment with the various modes of perception that we’ve been conditioned to think is real.

[00:12:03] Ryan: Yeah, yeah.

[00:12:04] Corey: Whereas, go back in time 5, 000 years ago, people 5, 000 years ago, they had a very, very different experience of the world. There were some, you know, universals in there for sure, but they had a very, very different perception, just an actual perception of the world. We have the advantage of, you know, a few millennia of accumulated knowledge and wisdom to help sort of reorient us. But, you know, why wouldn’t we also believe that our perception is fundamentally flawed?

[00:12:34] Ryan: Yeah, yeah. So in the context of integral, right, so classically speaking, as you were saying, we might point to basic things like our senses, right, so our limited senses, and just say, like, everything we’re experiencing, we’re processing unconsciously through all these senses, and there’s a whole bunch of things that we’re taking as real in that process without ever wondering and questioning, right? And uh, Lama Lena will describe this as like, you know, you’re clumps of these thoughts and experiences and sensations that you take as like this solid entity, and there’s problems in that in terms of like the problems and suffering stacked upon suffering when we do this. And so first we like, let’s unpack like, what is a basic experience, right? So, you know, first we’re like, oh there’s an object, there’s the sense organ, there’s the sense consciousness, there’s the mental reflections, things like this, there’s a reaction. We start breaking it all down to see how this is all functioning, and then there can be some liberation in that.

I think one of the things that integral awakening adds to it, you know, and kudos to Ken for this, is similarly to recognizing the unconscious operating of senses, meaning making, which you were pointing to here, is that, oh, this is another thing that has gone on unconsciously that colors our experience, too much in a certain way, because we can then become aware that, oh, we do make meaning continually through structures of consciousness. And once we can recognize that there is some freedom, we’re not free from structure, structures of consciousness or meaning making, but there is freedom around it. And that, oh my gosh, guess what? We interpret our awakening from wherever we’re at developmentally. That’s a huge shift, huge evolution of what awakening is.

[00:14:24] Corey: Yeah.

[00:14:24] Ryan: And we can include that and work with that consciously.

[00:14:27] Corey: Yeah. No, it’s well said. One of my favorite examples that Ken offers of that is, you know, anyone can come along and say something like, I am one with everything. Right? But the definition of the word "I", of the word "one", and the word "everything" changes pretty dramatically from one stage to the next.

[00:14:46] Ryan: Yes, yes, yes.

[00:14:48] Corey: So if we are at an early stage of development and we have an experience of "I am one with everything", well, you are one with everything that you are currently aware of.

[00:14:57] Ryan: Yeah.

[00:14:58] Corey: And it just so happens that there are realities that you are not yet aware of, because you do not yet have the developmental capacity…

[00:15:05] Ryan: We cannot yet include.

[00:15:07] Corey: …to see different kinds of complexity. So therefore you cannot yet include them. That’s right. You are one with everything. And yet there’s a huge, massive, you know, sort of upside down iceberg that remains over your head, that you can’t be one with.

[00:15:19] Ryan: Yeah.

[00:15:21] Corey: that is one of the things that the growing up process brings with it, is an increasing capacity to perceive sort of the nuances and the subtleties of reality. Any subject of our awareness can become an object of awareness. And then we can then become one with, we can collapse that subject and object together. But if you can’t, if you’re not able to perceive it in the first place, you can’t be one with it.

[00:15:43] Ryan: Yeah. And so it limits our own awakening, our development, and our ability to respond. You know, and taking it on the compassion side, in terms of meeting people where they’re at, which is a big gift of recognizing development, truly, and I think that still takes work. We’re all probably working with that in some way of like, okay, how can I use my integral awareness to truly meet people where they are? And in context, it makes sense. We’re not going to be best friends with everybody in the world, but it’s like, we are going to run into people who are at different developmental vantage points, you know, so to speak. So how do I meet them? And we look at it from awakening, and using a map like Ken’s states of consciousness, state-stages, that can help where, again, we can’t escape interpreting awakening. But if we can simplify things to a certain degree and say like, Oh, okay, yeah, everybody has access to the subtle state. I can meet somebody if I can recognize, but I have to first see through, likely, their meaning making to be able to sense and taste that, Oh, you know what this person who’s very traditional, fundamental, religious kind of person, actually, maybe they’re having a state experience of the subtle or the causal, which then they interpret and they act upon, and then their behaviors might be in a way where we say, well, that is very strange or it’s harmful or whatever. But how does that change how I relate to them, if this is now in my awareness that both their developmental level and their state of consciousness, now what do I do with that? And there’s not… I’m not saying there’s an answer in that situation, but I have more possibility, you know, in terms of how or what I do.

[00:17:16] Corey: Yeah, no, and you can also get that kind of mismatch when we’re looking at the various sort of perspectives that people tend to favor. So, like, you know, an average Buddhist walks into a room, who really emphasizes a first person, you know, perspective on awakening, and starts talking to a Christian friend, for example, who is really emphasizing a second person. Both of them might actually sort of have an implicit mistrust of the emphasis of the other. Right? So someone who’s, practice goes deep into that first person realization process, they might be a little bit doubtful about the kinds of data that would be made available by a second person practice with a deity or, you know, it doesn’t even necessarily need to be deity, you know, sort of out there somewhere, but can be an emphasis on selfless service, an emphasis on bringing compassion, an emphasis on helping others, being kind. Right? These are simple second person practices that don’t necessarily come naturally with a first person realization. And vice versa. And vice versa. You know, the person who’s really into prayer or you know, the second person practices might be a little bit, you know, skeptical of what they perceive as a bit of hubris maybe when it comes to first person practice. "Oh, so you’re saying you are God? You know, what does that mean?"

[00:18:36] Ryan: Right. Right. Yes. Yes. So for me, the importance of what you’re saying and like practically speaking means that we become more experientially comprehensive in our awakening and how we practice. So it’s like, okay, yeah, it’s going to be natural that I have my certain dispositions. And I mentioned this like in the lesson on awakened typology, I spell out this like long descriptor of who I am, it’s like, "I’m a nondual embodied Buddhist, blah, blah, blah, and type four…" Like, this is me. Like, generally speaking I gravitate to these 12 descriptors, but I try to include more and become aware of at least, in an essential way, of like the areas in which I don’t engage.

So silly example is like, you know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, I started trying to read up more on economics and legal situations, you know, so the court case comes out in Supreme Court. I want to actually look at the legal opinions written. Because I’m like, I don’t spend a lot of time down there, and so I leave it out of my awareness of sorts. It’s not really included experientially. So anyways, but you gave a perfect example of that, right? Of like how this plays out in real time between like a Buddhist and a Christian, or, you know, you can say somebody who lives in a cave, practicing all the time versus somebody who’s talking about inflation. It’s like, how do those two things relate? Right. But as practitioners, if we can include practices and experiences that span the map, that’s better. But we need a good map to help us hone in, you know, so we don’t get utterly overwhelmed by everything happening, you know, all at once.

[00:20:12] Corey: That’s right. All this is important. So all this, I think, is looking at, you know, again, sort of this meaning making or sense making aspect of spirituality. But there’s so much more to awakening than just that, right? I mean, awakening is, we were talking about it in pre-show, there’s a few different factors that seem to come with this. There’s the sense making piece, the meaning making piece. There’s the perceptual piece, right? Like when I think back to some of my major awakening experiences, the first one of which happened when I was about 19 years old or so, I perceived the world in a radically different way after that experience than I did before that experience. So there’s something about having these, you know, temporary state experiences that somehow rewires your hardware in a certain kind of way, rewires your nervous system, so that of all of the things that you pay attention to, certain things are coming to the foreground a little bit more easily.

[00:21:07] Ryan: Mm hmm.

[00:21:08] Corey: So there’s that perceptual piece as well.

[00:21:10] Ryan: Yeah. And the perceptual shift then ripples out, right, in our life. And I know we can talk about meaning making, sense-making, but not from, I think when I go beyond that, so it’s not, we often talk about that in terms of developmental stages. It was not exclusively that, but being able to look in all directions and feel out how these transformations, these awakenings, ripple out and impact our life. And I, you know, one of my mentors had said that, hey, after a particular powerful experience like what you described, it can take us a year, years to fully integrate and understand what that was, which kind of sometimes doesn’t make sense because it’s like, well, it was so immediately clear, like, beyond words, but in terms of understanding, well, like, how’s this impacting the work I do and how I experience friendship and love and politics and all, you know, the four quadrants, right, the whole integral map? Having that, for me, it’s a both/and right. So it’s like being able to look in those directions, having a map that helps me know where to look, it’s just really useful just for the perceptual shift, just like what a relief, because without that, sometimes those awakenings, even though a lot of times they feel amazing, not always, it could be difficult, it can be a real challenge to, to integrate those into our life.

[00:22:30] Corey: That was the case for me. I mean, you know, I think a lot of times, Ryan, this stuff can actually be a little bit dangerous. Awakening can be dangerous to a self system that is not itself stable enough to support that realization, or maybe exists in a, you know, cultural context that is not suitable for that kind of experience.

You know, for me, my first awakening experience, my first satori experience, it was, you know, as you say, some of them can be, you know, wonderful, big, beautiful, love and light kind of experiences. My first one was not. I had a very sort of, you know, it felt like an apocalyptic sort of spiritual experience, where it was a total collapse of perception. Everything that I thought was true about myself, who I was, what the world was, how it worked, it all got sort of suddenly flipped inside out. And I experienced that as, you know, basically a violent experience. It was kind of

ironic because… I mean which isn’t to say that there wasn’t the beauty behind it, there absolutely was, you know, I definitely had this sensation that like, okay I am having an experience right now that somehow makes me more aware of the universal qualities that are shared between me and all other human beings. I could feel that. It was like, I could feel that in my skin.

At the same time, after the experience, I didn’t feel closer to people, I felt more alienated from people, because I had this experience that I was trying to find words for, that my closest friends had not had. And so they didn’t have the words for it. So anytime I tried to share my experience, I just felt a little bit sort of crazy. Right? And that actually created a greater gap between me. So

[00:24:14] Ryan: That’s the cultural the personal, yeah.

[00:24:16] Corey: Totally. Totally. My context, my own development, was not stable enough to support that experience. And so it did, it took me a good eight or nine years, I think, probably to really authentically grow into that experience.

[00:24:32] Ryan: What helped you to do that? I’m just curious, like over those eight or nine years, what are some standout, I don’t know, fill in the blank here, but like, what do you think helped to… I mean, obviously the passage of time, but…

[00:24:43] Corey: Yeah, I mean, there’s sort of the natural accumulation of experiences and, you know, wisdoms and all that, for sure. Really though, honestly, I mean, after I had that experience, you know, again, I had no sort of template for this. I had no role model. I didn’t know that experiences like this were possible.

[00:25:01] Ryan: And that didn’t arise like in a spiritual context just for that.

[00:25:04] Corey: No exactly, it’s not like I was seeking it out. It just sort of happened it crashed on my head…

[00:25:10] Ryan: Spontaneous, yeah.

[00:25:12] Corey: And it began to open me up to… you know, I was like, "well, I need to learn more about this. There’s surely there are other human beings to whom happened, I need to start, you know, learning. And that began really my sort of intellectual spiritual journey. And, you know, the first six months were really tender, and I noticed myself going down sort of all sorts of different blind alleys and getting more interested… you know, I was visiting the New Age section in the Barnes and Noble or the Borders near me more often.

[00:25:36] Ryan: Yeah, sure. We’ve all been there.

[00:25:39] Corey: And because of that, I feel very lucky that it only took me about six months after that experience to discover Ken’s work.

[00:25:45] Ryan: Ah ha.

[00:25:46] Corey: Right? It felt like this sort of, like, illuminated path that led me to Ken’s work. And I feel like that, that itself saved me so much time, right? And not only that, it saved me time that I didn’t have to spend in sort of some of these narcissistic spiritual, you know, new age circles that are out there, which, you know, again, are very, ironically, can take you further away from these awakening experiences, because it really reinforces the self and how amazing and unique and important myself must have been to have that experience.

[00:26:20] Ryan: Right, and what happens, sidebar, of like with things we might talk about cleaning up, right, so like this has an impact of like wherever we’re at in our own healing journey, and then the impact of awakening experiences like that can create new trauma or exacerbate trauma we already have. And then if you go down these really kind of unhelpful, let’s say, but at least spiritual solutions, pathways, it can double down all that and make, you know, make it even worse, right? Exacerbate the problem.

[00:26:47] Corey: Dude, you just, you nailed something totally true in my experience. So much of my spiritual journey has been almost like PTSD from that initial awakening experience.

[00:26:58] Ryan: Interesting. Yeah. That’s not as common.

[00:27:01] Corey: I can really feel that and I can feel how I compensated for that, particularly in my twenties, right? Where like, suddenly, I was very invested in having a spiritual identity, right? So I loved to talk about this stuff. I would, you know, I was obnoxious about it. Like I, anyone who was willing to listen, I wanted know, like I had this experience and totally reformatted my entire life and, you know, I was just going on these sort of narcissistic sort of trips and, you know, really wearing this stuff on my sleeve, as a way to compensate for the sort of alienation and the isolation felt sort of after the experience.

And it wasn’t, Ryan, until… and you and I have talked about this before, it wasn’t actually until, you know, almost a decade ago now, when my daughter, you know, had her liver transplant when that flipped for me again. Right? And I noticed that in that experience, which was one of total emergency, right, in total emergency, all of the accumulated, you know, thoughts and ideas and symbols and ornaments and all the things I would wear on my sleeve… in that moment, none of those served me anymore. None of them served me anymore.

And so I felt like suddenly stripped of this spiritual identity that I had sort of fashioned for myself over, you know, the preceding 20 years or so. And it was painful, it was simultaneously very much like a dark night, right? Because it’s like, here’s all these pieces of myself, these objects that made me feel like I was connected with the universe, and suddenly that is all going away. Suddenly that’s gone, and all I’m left with is, you know, I described it as just three steps repeated over and over again, just a cycle of three: presence, compassion, put one step in front of the other. Presence, compassion, put one step in front of the other. So, while everything was being stripped away, everything that was no longer necessary, or no longer serving me was being stripped away, I was left with this, what felt to me anyway, retroactively looking at it because I didn’t have time to think about it when it was actually happening, but you know, looking back at it, it felt like a grace in a certain kind of way. It felt like it was a quieting of my sort of separate spiritual self, and I was, I was sort of coming to rest in what is really real in that awakening experience. Which is simply presence, compassion, put one step in front of the other. Action. Right?

And you know, ever since that experience, I’d say for the last 10 years, I’m less comfortable talking about, my, you know, my spirituality or, you know. Which is funny, being sort of a host of shows like this where it’s just, it’s just, I’m not too interested in talking about that because that life has become simultaneously more quiet, but more profound me.

[00:29:53] Ryan: Mm. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, Corey thanks for sharing that. I feel like, I mean, your journey, in a lot of ways, really embodies and expresses what an integral awakening is and can be. So we have talked a lot about awakening in these formal senses because they emerge out of classical awakening, right? So we’ll talk about practices and paths and stages and all this stuff. And sometimes though, even when context that in being integral practitioners, sometimes in a weird way, like the rest of life seems something different. That like perpetuates a little bit, you know, that’s a stage thing too, I think. But your first experience that rocked your world and left you shaken in a kind of difficult way happened spontaneous. Yeah? And your kind of like deeper liberation from that and just dropping in was also you being in the midst of your life, you know, with your girl and partner. And it’s like, that’s awakening. You know? And I know you’ve done a lot of different formal practice, things like that, and you’ve been an integral geek for a long time, but yeah, the path can be exactly like that.

[00:31:03] Corey: Mm hmm. So I’m curious about your experience, Ryan. So when did you have your original initial awakening experience or series of experiences? And it seems like you, you know, you went sort of a different direction on that path. So you’ve been, you know, really in, you know, specifically the Buddhist lineage…

[00:31:22] Ryan: I did that a lot. Yep.

[00:31:23] Corey: …for a while now. So , how did that connect for you?

[00:31:27] Ryan: So, yeah, I was just thinking about this the other day a little bit, and hearing you talk. Obviously, I have a ton of formal practice and study and yeah, I’ve been doing it for a long time. Honestly, though, it’s just… I had to do it, you know, kind of thing. I never had a plan of it going anywhere except for I was drawn to it. But also I feel like my path, I relate to your story more than I do when I hear people talk about being on retreats. And I’ve done like, you know, the longest one I did was like a month solitary, and that was fucking crazy. And like, that rocked me hard. It was a tough one. Came out okay on the other end, but that was tough. That rocked me. But when people talk about, oh, I’ve been this formal practice, and these experiences happen in the formal practice, yeah, that’s happened for me tons. I feel like it’s more life, though. I feel like, you know, kind of like a cartoonish falling down a mountain, and then you just roll, hitting trees and stuff, and then stand up, you’re like, ah, I made it! It’s a little like that. And less so these days. I feel like too, kind of like in relating to your story about like things quieted down, like there’s a shift where like after a while, it’s it’s it’s not as big of a deal. Like, it’s just, here we are. Okay, cool. And life is what it is. And there’s still practice and there’s still difficulty, challenges, but a big bulk of the bigger gusto part of my path, I’ve just felt like it was life, like suffering and just like the doorway of suffering. And coming upon it, honestly, being in a small town in Missouri in undergrad, and even smaller town in grad school, 25 years ago when none of this shit was like cool. And we were definitely weird at that time, right? Whenever we found Ken, cool amongst other integral people, but weird outside of it. And I’ve practiced in the midst of a bunch of, you know, more rural like folks and Bible belts and things like that. So me with my buddhist statues, it’s like, you know, I was coming upon it, honestly, that’s why I would say it’s like I wasn’t trying to have an identity, but I was just like, hey, maybe this will help. Right? I just intuitively found my way to it, and integral. So a lot of my life experience is getting beat down and heartbroke, you know, failing just life over and over, that’s been a bigger driver.

Now, so many beautiful experiences sticking with it that are also deeply the love, the opening, the relief that can come over and over with practicing and waking up. Definitely motivators. It can’t just be all bad stuff. But the initial doorway is just like, you got to do something different. This ain’t working. Right?

[00:33:58] Corey: Right.

[00:33:59] Ryan: But once I got on the path, then yeah, I did a lot of formal practice. I was all about it. And I don’t know what I thought would happen when I first got on it. I just felt like, hey, this sounds better than what I’ve been doing. Acknowledging the deep suffering and in a lot of ways, being way more honest with it. It’s like, we all suffer and we all are going to die. Like that’s the Buddhist first turning message. So point blank, not beating around the bush, but then like, Hey, it’s workable. It’s doable. There is liberation in a certain way from this continual, especially unconscious hooking into patterns of suffering. There’s freedom and possibility, goodness, wholeness. It’s like, okay, I like that. That was some good, good news for me at that time in my life. And so, yeah, then, yeah, going down the path and there was certain moments of different sorts of awakenings that can be mapped on stages, you know, I know I did a, a little week long retreat with Vince Fakhoury Horn, our good buddy, my co-founder of Buddhist Geeks, we did something out in Crestone that was one little retreat where I would call it a stream entry from the progress of insight, you know, official unleashing into reality, but then it keeps going, you know, then there was like another disillusionment there. And I talk about this a lot in the course of unpacking it because it’s a bigger conversation, but, you know, there’s these cycles of, like, seeking, efforting and breakthrough and disillusionment and equanimity and relief and maturing, you know, and that’s from the phase of insight that Vince Horn and his partner Emily Horn created. So I relate to that in a very, I like that model because it feels like, you know, you sharing your story, the organic nature of our lives, the humble unfolding of it, I relate to that. It’s like, oh, yeah, these waves, but it’s deepening, but there are waves and it’s not all of one flavor.

So I’ve had that over time, you know, and of course, like really something that you just said about, like, not talking about spiritual things, maybe as formally or as in the same way you did in the past, there was a phase after that one breakthrough awakening experience where, just naturally, again, just over time, an "always already" sort of recognition where I’m like, yeah, practice is good, but I don’t need to do practice. Or I don’t, like, I can’t seek something out of practice and feel like it’s going to change something. That illusion dissolved where I’m like, no, I know, like in one sense, there’s this deep okayness of just being, so that’s relieving, and you figure "that’s it!" And sometimes we can hold onto that, and that’s where things go bad. It goes to the dark side where it’s like, we just try to maintain this ego identity with always already. But what happened after that is like, yeah, but I’m a fucking mess. So there’s this simultaneous… and integral helps with this. It’s like, yeah, we are all always already awake. What a fucking relief. Oh, it’s such a relief. At the same time, it’s like, yeah, I’m a mess. Things are fucked up. You know, all you do, I did this, the Ram Dass quote, "so you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family." But we can find a million different ways to say, oh yeah, I’ll go watch the news or go do this, go do that and the other, and quickly you’ll be like, things aren’t as perfectly cheer as we thought. Right? So yeah, it’s like, well, then there was a period of disillusionment where I’m like, what do I do? You know, cause I can’t just practice incessantly, because that’s dissolved and evaporated. But yeah, I feel like a new practice, and it took a while then to coming back around to embodiment practice, which is really an integrating practice. It’s like, how do I embody this awakening? How do I continue integrating waking up and cleaning up, waking up and growing up, integrating these different kinds of "ups" that felt different in the past. The simultaneity is what I refer to here. It’s like, well, I’m all these things that this points to. So like, it’s all happening at once. So how do I work with all that? Then there was a little bit more purpose, right?

And so, you know, path keeps on going of like this where I don’t worry about as much anymore, I have a little more trust in saying like, yeah, there’s gonna be awakenings, there’s gonna be shifts, gonna get beat down, gonna get back up again, you know? But having a suite of tools, a great community of close friends like you and Vince, and larger communities like Buddhist Geeks and Integral Life, the map, lots of practices… I feel pretty good, as much as I can, you know, in one life.

[00:38:12] Corey: Beautiful. No, it’s beautiful. And you know, as I’m listening to you, Ryan, you know, a few things come to mind. You know, the first thought I have is that awakening will show up for different people in different ways, according to their needs, their conditions, their experiences, their Kosmic address,

[00:38:31] Ryan: Uh huh, yeah.

[00:38:32] Corey: For me, it was, you know, I can very much feel how, you know, and it might be one of the things that actually made that original sort of awakening experience possible in the first place, I can see now in retrospect I was in the middle of a major stage transition. I was, you know, it was my 1st year in college, I could feel, you know, my thinking about my own thinking in a different way. And I would later learn through Ken’s material that I was really making a big transition from an orange stage into a green stage.

[00:39:01] Ryan: Yeah. The same for me. Uh,

[00:39:02] Corey: And you know, I, again, I feel very grateful that as I was entering that green stage, I also found Ken’s work that could help sort of shepherd me through that green stage.

[00:39:11] Ryan: That’s great. Yeah.

[00:39:13] Corey: I could, you know. But I could also feel how so much of that experience in my own path of awakening was colored and tempered by just sort of the body mind I was born into. And I think this is something that becomes increasingly clear to us at later stages of development, you know, particularly like the construct aware stages, where you begin to realize just how much of yourself is an accident of birth. Right? It really is an accident of birth. Like I have the political and economic views that I have because I happen to be born at a particular region in a particular culture at a particular time, and I make sense of the world because I was born into that. And there’s so much of this, you know, there’s so much of our own identity that we cannot actually take sort of responsibility for. I didn’t create this. It was sort of, I was born into this, right?

And so one of the things I think this body mind was born into was an experience of insecure attachment. And that insecure attachment, I can really see how that flavored my spiritual path, particularly in the early phases, where I really sort of overcompensated for that insecure attachment by like, you know, a lot of my spiritual identity was coming from a place of lack. I had an experience of devastating wholeness, right, and I want to be more like that, because I feel broken down here, I can remember a feeling of wholeness being possible, I’m lacking that. I want to, I want to do everything I can to get to that. Right? A lot of that was animated by my own insecure attachment.

And then, funny enough, that same insecure attachment became sort of a wisdom for me later in life when, you know, you and me and Vince talked about this during one of our episodes a year and a half ago, talking about the illusion of ground, the illusion that we actually have a solid place to rest. You never really do. You never really do. That rug is always being pulled out from under you, and then you think you find another ground, and then that gets pulled out from under you, and you think you find another ground, and oh, you know, eventually you have to accept, this is groundless. Right? This Ground of Being does not exist in the manifest world. And there’s a part of that, that my insecure attachment’s like, "I knew it!" You know what I mean? I knew it. Oh, i, i, I had this feeling the whole time.

[00:41:43] Ryan: Well, that’s why I like we can have the cycling of… I feel like for all of us and I relate to that too, of maturing, where like the recognition of groundlessness is, you know, scary, or like makes it cynical, or feeds into it, or at other times it’s relieving and liberating. Like, "ah, good, thank goodness that I’m not fundamentally hooked into every experience that’s going on. Like, things rise and pass. But it depends where we’re at and what’s going on, I mean, phase wise, but day to day, you know. But I think that’s part of the gift of a path of awakening, is that disentangling, the ability to disentangle, and the insights that emerge by recognizing, "Oh yeah, it is groundless." And that means I can disentangle from thoughts, patterns, experiences, but it doesn’t eliminate them. Patterns keep on going. And, again, sidebar here is like, well, why would we want to eliminate all that? That’s all the dynamic arising of life that makes it interesting. Right?

[00:42:42] Corey: Right. I don’t want to sit in a cave and stare at a wall.

[00:42:45] Ryan: Yeah, we’re not going to pure void. We can unhook from everything happening, and there’s a process of that, like we just talked about. But I think that kind of lubricates up our ability to practice in an integral way, because it’s like I can unhook from where I tend to bias, if we look through the integral lens. That means, okay, well, I can have more flexibility to open up and practice and engage with others in life in ways that I might not have because I have this.

And, you know, I loved how you phrased this, of like, you’re like, "this body-mind is like this", and you described your disposition. You know, and so like me growing up, I was super socially anxious, you know, I didn’t realize it until grad school after finishing my master’s in counseling psych and then reading through a social anxiety disorder, I’m like, "I have that." That is good. I was relieved. I was excited. I was like, "yes!" The whole life, right? And one of the things I appreciate, I know I reference Lama Lena, a lot. She’s, she’s just so entertaining and so blunt. But she will refer to herself, especially in kind of like the Buddhist metaphysics, cosmology thing, you know, with rebirth, and she’s like, she’s a deep person. She is very awake. But she has her disposition, and she’ll say like, you know, like "this incarnation, this body is like more fidgety and I’m startled more easily" and all these kinds of things. All of her quirks are still here. There’s some relief and humor about it, like taking this larger perspective that regardless of the cosmology… but she’s like, "okay, well, what does it mean if this is groundless, and if we just take for a moment, extend the metaphysics to rebirth, it’s like, this is just this life. You know, I’m taking more relief and entertainment with it now. It’s like, yeah, these are my quirks in this life. That’s what I got. But we can work with it

all.

But then again, how to work with it all? An integral map where we make more discernments, even if we want to include more than what we have in our typical Ken Wilber map, it’s a damn good start. So I keep coming back around to that, like, okay, how do we deeply unhook and disentangle and wake up and continue evolving in this life?

[00:44:51] Corey: Same. Beautifully said. You know, one of the reasons why you and I get along so well, Ryan, is that we have a lot of similarities, you know, we have a lot of similar deep structure dysfunctions.

[00:44:59] Ryan: Yeah. We’re Enneagram fours. Yes. Right.

[00:45:02] Corey: Totally. Which is automatically going to make us like total, you know, drama queens

[00:45:07] Ryan: Yeah we’re drama twinsies.

[00:45:09] Corey: Totally. Totally. No, and Ken’s work, that’s exactly what it represented to me, because again, I felt like… well, I’m not sure if I felt like the thunderbolt of sudden, you know, awakening experience, I’m not sure if that’s what made me fall apart, or if that’s just simply what made me aware that I was already sort of broken and fragmented, right? It brought about that feeling. And to me, Ken’s work in particular became sort of this hole in the wall. And if I could just get through that hole, that crack in the wall, and make it to the other side, then I would be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Right? I would be able to take all these broken pieces of myself that I see on the floor, and start reassembling, reconstructing them into something like a real, you know, an actual human being. Sort of a Humpty Dumpty Pinocchio story, I’m kind of mashing up my fables here. But that’s really what it represented to me. You know, and I remember having that actual visual in my head, of that crack in the wall.

And what I’ve begun to realize afterward is, you know, It comes down to these phases of awakening. And there was nothing wrong with that, you know, I kind of make fun of myself for it, sort of the imaginal, vivid phase of my spiritual life, of my spiritual identity. But there was nothing inherently wrong with that phase, because it brought me… you know, I like to say it brought me to a door, and I’m grateful that it brought me to that door, to this gate. I just couldn’t walk through the gate with all of those sort of attachments that I, was creating for myself. It was the same thing, this feeling of lack, that brought me into Integral in the first place. You know, I’ve talked about it many times. I very much had one of those golden shadow projections onto Ken Wilber, right? So when I first met him and I began to realize how human he is, right? And he doesn’t live up to these projections of, you know, godliness that I put on him my imaginal space. I had no choice but to reclaim some of those golden shadows. But I followed the golden shadow all the way to my integral career, right?

[00:47:22] Ryan: This

[00:47:22] Corey: your golden shadows Your golden shadows are sort of pulling you in a particular direction. And the important thing, I think, is to pay enough attention to start heading in that direction. Eventually you’ll catch that golden projection, that golden shadow. It’s, you know, it’s like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, right? This was my rabbit that brought me down my particular rabbit hole.

down my particular rabbit hole And I’m so glad that… you know, at the time, it felt like it required a lot of courage to follow that because I was going against the grain of what the rest of the conventional world was telling me was important and true and real. And suddenly I’m like, I kind of feel like this is more important right now, and I went in that direction and, you know, thank God I did.

[00:48:04] Ryan: Yeah, I love that. There’s a lot of, I think, compassion taking that view, and then some wisdom with it too. Like, if we have some ideal that things will happen in some perfect manner if we just align ourselves correctly and practice in the right way… which is like, that’s not going to pan out. And yet at the same time, kind of like a tantric perspective of like, hey, rather than feel like we need to avoid negative emotions, we actually embrace them, because there’s an essential energy in them that can manifest as wisdom. It’s the same thing, you’re like, "Hey, this is how life is." it’s like, it’s all of it happening at once, and it’s like, yeah, I had to deal with some projections and stuff, but it also brought me here to this deeper way of being and engaging in the world. So yeah, take it all at once kind of approach. Yeah.

Yeah. And I was thinking totoom, you know, something that it makes an integral awakening, an Integral Dharma, and you know we’ve been talking about this, obviously, of course, with this multiplayer group of practicing as integral we’s. And that even in our journeys, we’ve already talked about this, it wasn’t… yeah, sometimes we can feel we have an isolated individual experience, like a spontaneous experience like you had, right? And you had no context for it and nobody to talk to at the time, which was painful, right? Because you felt isolated, you felt disconnected. So that’s an indication of how important that quadrant is as part of an integral. And I always feel like I have to put some caveats here to see, like, we’re not dipping down into only pluralism, we’re including things that come up with like that pluralistic we space, because it’s important. But like we had Integral Naked back then. Right? How amazing was that? Like, we weren’t waking up by ourselves, we were waking up together, even if we weren’t in the same places. That all of these ideas about awakening were simultaneously informing us and how we practice. Like it’s, that is an interconnection, an integral awakening.

So we had our integral communities, in person and online, which was a godsend for me at that time. I’m in Kearney, Nebraska with, you know, early two thousands and being like, Oh my God, on my laptop, my giant laptop, I can tune into Integral Naked and these conversations. And now Integral Life here, you know, of being able to… we’re not alone in the practice, and we really have to wake up together. And especially when we look at, this is a big year here in the United States and election year, things like that. And then everything going on in the world definitely feels like integral is needed, integral awakening is actually needed. Not as an ideal, which maybe felt for me more like this big idea. Ken, I think was way ahead of his time in SES, but at the time it was more like, this is fascinating and interesting. Look at these models and maps. And now it’s like, we need these, like, if we’re going to make it through it.

And so how do we wake up? You know, and our unique paths, as you mentioned, like our unique kosmic addresses, but also kind of like unique, "we" kosmic addresses, right? Of like the people we’re connected to, the work we’re doing in the world, the communities we’re part of, and how does that connect with the even bigger picture, that it feels unavoidable. I think that’s the terrifying thing, and the big opportunity is that like, everything feels unavoidable now. And so what are we going to do with that?

[00:51:09] Corey: This brings me back to a previous episode we did, Ryan, Inhabit: Your Purpose, where we were talking about the Integral Ikigai, where, the challenge I think is to take these, you know, often divine feeling inspirations that we’re being flooded with that are just sort of, you know, overflowing in a certain sense, because I do think this is an important quality of integral spirituality is it’s not sort of a silo that’s sitting over here separate from all the other aspects of your life. Like, it floods in, right? It begins to permeate all of your relationships and all of your work and all of your hobbies and all of your, you know, the kinds of entertainment and joy that you get from the world. And it really spills into all this, and you begin to realize that it’s not a separate kind of category of our lives. It’s actually sort of this bottomless source that is always replenishing itself and spilling into the rest of our reality. So the idea here is that, is that awakening is not inert, right? Like awakening is this active dynamic process, and it’s asking you to participate with it. And when it comes to participating with something like the awakening experience, this calls into not just meaning making, but purpose making, right? What is mine to do?

[00:52:26] Ryan: Yeah.

[00:52:27] Corey: Why is this human consciousness, right, becoming self aware, and what the hell is it supposed to do now? Right? What is its contribution? And that brings us to the sense of purpose. And for me, you know, the way I’ve metabolized my own experience and sort of the path of, you know, that’s unfolded ever since is, is as you were saying, I remember those sort of dark ages of, you know, before the internet, before Integral Naked, where I was a lonely integral island, where literally I could not talk about this stuff which had become the most important thing in my life, I could not talk about this stuff without, like, teaching the entire model. So I wasn’t very popular at the time because no one wanted to hear this shit, right? And it’s not like you can just drop a 900 pound, you know, 900 page, felt like 900 pounds sometimes, a 900 page Ken Wilber book on their heads and, you know, they’re going to thank you for it. So it was very, again, that was part of the isolating kind of, you know, feeling I had. And thank God for it. Thank God that I went through that period of loneliness and isolation, because it made me clear on my purpose, right? My purpose was, I don’t want anyone to feel lonely or isolated. Right? So that’s why in 2000, I decided to pick up and move to Boulder, Colorado to get involved with, you know, these new projects that Ken was getting off the ground. Because I was like, I need to be a part of this. This is the only thing that is giving me meaning, and it’s the only thing that is satisfying this emerging sense of purpose. Right? Here’s, here’s my calling. It’s increasingly feeling like a calling. I just want to make sure no one has to feel the pain and the violence of being unable to sustain and support such a beautiful awakening experience. And I see a lot of people who get clobbered by these experiences.

[00:54:20] Ryan: Yeah. Well, I’m super grateful that you stuck to your path, man. And I, I’m sure I’m speaking for a lot of people in the Integral Life community that I think you’ve succeeded immensely in creating space and a community for people to, to never have to feel that way. truly.

[00:54:35] Corey: that, man. I appreciate that. Well, and the most rewarding thing for me, Ryan, is the fact that, you know, all of my best friends I’ve made in this space. Yourself, right? I mean, you and I would not know each other if it wasn’t for this sort of confluence, that Integral, I think, brought about. And this, mutual sort of respect and admiration for each other’s, you know, awakening paths, I think is so, it’s so gratifying.

[00:55:04] Ryan: Yeah. And it could be, I’m glad you brought this up, because I know you and I both feel that a ton because of, again, of like where our path started, where it was hard to find people to connect with. And even going through the internet, it was still, you know, it took you some effort. But I can imagine now a lot of people may take it for granted, especially maybe if you’re younger, if you’ve been more immersed in what feels like constant social connection, even if it is superficial surface level at times. We didn’t even have that. There was no social media. There wasn’t even Google, okay peeps? So imagine those times back in the day.

[00:55:36] Corey: Yeah, dark ages. I’m telling ya.

[00:55:39] Ryan: Yeah. So it is like sometimes maybe you don’t know how good it is until it’s not there. Right? But golly, it’s so important to have these spaces like this. And I know the formal study and practice is a huge part of our paths, you know, that’s why we have consumed and practiced the integral path and in our, you know, respective contemplative waking up practices. But gosh, some of the most useful experiences being able to talk like we’ve done today, being able to talk with fellow practitioners in a really, a real, humble, open way, you know? Dropping pretenses. And the integral map just gives us a lot of the ability to cross gaps, whereas like you may have had totally different experiences and formal practices, but we can still talk about them because we have a map that taps into that universality of life and gives us ways to connect.

[00:56:33] Corey: It’s like a Rosetta Stone, you know? Everyone is coming to this with their own awakening language, in a sense, and a lot of those languages can feel incompatible until you find this Rosetta Stone, where you see, like, Oh, okay, this is beginning to unlock.

[00:56:46] Ryan: Exactly. Yeah. I love it.

[00:56:48] Corey: Yep. Beautiful. Well, I’ve got a nice little… I thought Ryan, maybe we would end with a, with a passage from Ken. this has always been, you know, talk about a thunderbolt. This passage has always been a thunderbolt of realization for me. I love this passage so much because, you know, Ken’s… Ken is such a tremendously gifted writer, but one of his greatest gifts is his ability to, you know, both explore a great deal of complexity, a great deal of complexity. I mean, some of the ideas and the constructs that he is creating are so intricate and elegant, right? And after he does all that, he’ll just wrap it all up into this beautiful little poem, you know, which feels holistic. It’s like, if he’s showing us the beams and the struts and like all the individual parts of an idea, you know, in his prose, he then integrates it in the form of this poetry, and the poetry is sort of showing you the wholeness. It’s it’s actually giving you a feeling of wholeness, you know, not just an intellectual understanding of it.

[00:57:54] Ryan: That’s so huge that he does that. Yep.

[00:57:56] Corey: Totally. And this is one of the pieces where that wholeness just runs through it So this is from one of my favorite books of Ken’s, One Taste.

Sunday, August 3rd

People typically feel trapped by life, trapped by the universe, because they imagine that they are actually in the universe, and therefore the universe can squish them like a bug. This is not true. You are not in the universe. The universe is in you.

The typical orientation is this. My consciousness is in my body, mostly in my head. My body is in this room. This room is in the surrounding space, the universe itself. That is true from the viewpoint of the ego. But utterly false from the viewpoint of the self. If I rest as witness, the formless I-I, it becomes obvious that right now, I am not in my body, my body is in my awareness. I am aware of my body, therefore I am not my body. I am the pure witness in which my body is now arising. I am not in my body, my body is in my consciousness. Therefore, be consciousness.

If I rest as the witness, the formless I-I, it becomes obvious that right now, I am not in this house. This house is in my awareness. I am the pure witness in which this house is now arising. I am not in this house, this house is in my consciousness. Therefore, be consciousness.

If I look outside this house to the surrounding area, perhaps a large stretch of earth, a big patch of sky, other houses, roads, and cars, if I look, in short, at the universe in front of me, and if I rest as the witness, the formless I-I., it becomes obvious that right now, I am not in the universe. The universe is in my awareness. I am the pure witness in which this universe is now arising. I am not in the universe. The universe is in my consciousness. Therefore, be consciousness.

It is true that the physical matter of your body is inside the matter of the house, and the matter of the house is inside the matter of the universe. But you are not merely matter or physicality. You are also consciousness as such, of which matter is merely the outer skin. The ego adopts the viewpoint of matter, and therefore is constantly trapped by matter, trapped and tortured by the physics of pain. But pain, too, arises in your consciousness, and you can either be in pain, or find pain in you, so that you surround pain, are bigger than pain, transcend pain, as you rest in the vast expanse of pure emptiness that you deeply and truly are.

So what do I see? If I contract as ego, it appears that I am confined in the body, which is confined in the house, which is confined in the large universe around it. But if I rest as the witness, the vast, open, empty consciousness, it becomes obvious that I am not in the body, the body is in me. I am not in this house, the house is in me. I am not in the universe, the universe is in me. All of them are arising in the vast, open, empty, pure, luminous space of primordial consciousness, right now, and right now, and forever right now. Therefore, be consciousness.

[01:01:34] Ryan: I love it.

[01:01:37] Corey: I love that.

[01:01:38] Ryan: Thank you, Corey.

[01:01:40] Corey: Thank you, Ryan. This has been fun, man.

[01:01:41] Ryan: I love it. Yeah, it’s been great, happy to be doing this again, and looking forward to hearing from folks.

[01:01:49] Corey: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we want to do a whole new year’s season of Inhabit. So if there’s anything you guys in the Integral audience want us to talk about or want to talk about with us, please let us know, and we will prepare some future episodes. In the meantime, dude, it’s good to be back in the saddle, man!

[01:02:06] Ryan: Great to be back with you, buddy!

[01:02:08] Corey: Yeah, brother. And just to remind people one more time, Integral Dharma, you can get the standalone course right now. We’re getting amazing feedback for it.

[01:02:16] Ryan: Yeah, I would love to see you all and practice with you. Yeah.

[01:02:20] Corey: Awesome. Ryan, I love you so much, man.

[01:02:22] Ryan: Love ya buddy.