Interview # 7 Transcript - Jerry Katz on Nonduality
Jerry Katz: Hello everybody. This is CKDU 88.1 in Halifax, Nova Scotia or CKDU online. This is the community radio station of Dalhousie University and your listening to the Nonduality talk on September 23, 2015. I’m Jerry Katz.
We are live today. Live is always scary - guys I don't about you guys. Joining me in the studio are two local gentleman from Dartmouth Nova Scotia Lloyd Dickey. Hi Lloyd.
Lloyd Dickie: Hi.
Jerry: Nice to have you here. And Paul Boudreau. Welcome back Paul.
Paul Boudreau: Thank you. It is great to be back.
Jerry: We did an interview together in June.
Lloyd and Paul are co-authors of great book “Awakening Higher Consciousness Guidance From Ancient Egypt and Sumer”. And their website is awhico.com.
The topics I think we're going getting today are mythology, ancient cultures, ecology, the Gurdjieff Work, self-realization, world travel, archaeology. Can we possibly cover all of that? I don't know. There is a lot going on in.
Lloyd Dickey is a retired ecologist former professor of oceanography here at Dalhousie and Lloyd studied ancient Egypt for more than 40 years explored many active sites contributing significantly to their understanding and also Professor Dickey has a doctorate from University of Toronto and a Masters degree from Yale University. Paul Boudreau has a Masters from Dalhousie and explored fisheries ecology as a career in ancient myths and ancient sites have captured Paul's imagination since childhood. Even before the show we were talking about – don’t let me forget about that – Gobekli Tepe. We want to get into some of that.
Paul: Yes, Gobekli Tepe - some of the very recent finds archaeologically.
Jerry: And we want to talk about spirituality compared to - well you’ll explain it later. So don’t anyone let me forget.
So welcome to you both. Welcome Lloyd great to have you and welcome Paul.
Now somehow have to start this. Thinking what we can do today is just an attempt at a connection. Maybe connect ancient civilizations with regard to the experience of higher consciousness like the sense of higher consciousness, urge toward knowing it, the experience of higher consciousness. The sharing of it, the expression of it. We can look at how this higher consciousness has been expressed in myths and even what's being uncovered archaeological like Paul what you were alluding to and maybe talk about a practice that opens us to higher consciousness namely the Gurdjieff Work that Lloyd is involved. And somehow we are going to weave all this together. So are you guys ready to give this a try?
Paul: Yes I think so.
Lloyd: I’ll do my best.
Paul: We were talking yesterday, Lloyd and I, about our desire to get back to – I think you used the word origin Lloyd – that is at the bottom of our book in terms of where this concept of higher consciousness arose originally.
Jerry: It brings up a question. How does your book differ from other books on mythology? Where do you think it mainly differs?
Lloyd: I don’t think it is really about mythology. It is really about us. If I can say that? It is really an exploration of what are the finer perceptions that we can have. Well I don’t know. Paul you can probably fill in something there.
Jerry: I like that right there. Its about when I ask you about how your book differs from other books about mythology, you say that it is not about mythology. It is about us. What a powerful statement!
Lloyd: It is not really about mythology.
Jerry: In the course of your life, your scholarly life, when did you - its a turnaround perspective – when did you realize that mythology is about you?
Lloyd: Well I wonder? Because I was trying to figure out what other people must be getting from this because I couldn't understand why it seemed so strange to everybody else. I grew up trying to say ‘How did I think of that?’ And I didn't know. I didn’t have an answer to that. It took quite some time before I before actually discovered, that I really felt this much more when I went to Egypt, more than anywhere else I have ever been. I've traveled a fair amount in both North and South America and parts of Asia. But a turning point came when I visited in Nepal. I went up to some of those strange places there and I realize that this is a whole experience that I've never had before. I don't know what I'm expecting but I did learn a little bit about just sort of living it and seeing what's going on.
Jerry: Living it - what do you mean? You say you learned about living it. Do you mean the immersion in the environment?
Lloyd: I really mean to try to feel emotionally what was going on in me. And to relate that to whatever I was seeing. Did it come from that or does it come from my imagination.
Jerry: This time in Nepal – what time of your life was that? How old were you?
Lloyd: It was in 1985 or something like that. So whatever I was. I was over 40 by that time.
Jerry: 30 years ago doesn’t seem like a long time in a long time. 1985 doesn’t seem like a long time. When you say its 30 years it sounds like a long time.
Paul: Well truth be told, you've told me about that same emotion when you're in Machu Picchu, when we were at Stonehenge, when we were in Egypt. Its something that you’ve explored in many places around the world not just in Nepal.
Lloyd: Well it always comes up the same thing.
Paul: Yeah.
Jerry: It always comes up to an experience of emotion. The investigation of it. The curiosity of it.
Lloyd: How do I experience an emotion? Well we know that it is different than thought. And we know that it is different than sensation. And yet we somehow or other feel something in us. And I think it was a question about ‘what is this?’ ‘what's going on?’
Jerry: What did you feel? What emotion were you experiencing? And Paul said that you felt everywhere you guys travel together. I don’t know. Pick one and about it. Or they ultimately the same? Talk about that please if you will Lloyd.
Lloyd: Yeah, I can't really describe it better that I don't think. I say its something that I never recognize before except when as a kid in dreams or something like that. So it has that ephemeral quality about it as though there was something there to be discovered and yet I couldn't really put a finger on something.
And I suppose that same kind of feeling probably got me into the Gurdjieff Work because what he said is that you’ve got to know your self always and everywhere and what on earth does that mean?
Jerry: I don’t know but it sounds like it applies to your life. You travelled here and there and everywhere. You have to know yourself. There is certainly a connection there that is apparent.
Lloyd: I think that is why I did travel a lot. I was really searching for an object – well myself is.
Paul: Searching for myself. That captures it.
Lloyd: Well what else can we say?
Jerry: That’s a relief to me. You have to book a mythology. I've been schooled, educated and all that stuff and I’ve never honestly been drawn to myths. But I respect the literary aspect and their power. I understand the power, the importance and the significance. But I’ve never had a natural drawing to it. So I’m glad you get me off the hook a little bit by saying that the book is about you, it isn’t about mythology. Whew!
Lloyd: It's not really it's really not but anything else but us.
Jerry: Is that true for everything else that we come in contact with?
Is that when you say it's about us? The myths and the mythologies are about us?
Lloyd: That's what I was trying to say.
Jerry: Is that true for just about anything that we encounter, any stimulus that we encounter.
Lloyd: Probably. I would say that we put our stamp on almost anything. The real search is to find what's real for me and what’s not. And I don't know where to go from there for describing it.
Jerry: You said it started even as a kid when you were curious about something, curious about the emotions.
Lloyd: I guess I was curious about everything. My father and my mother finally in desperation bought me a set of the Books of Knowledge.
Jerry: Great! Did you read the whole thing?
Lloyd: Well I don’t know how much I read. I started by thumbing through it looking at pictures. They had a lot of lovely Egyptian pictures in there. And that is probably what woke up my interest in going to Egypt. And well it didn’t just stop there. And sometimes I would have been experience of myself and the person who was with me wouldn't feel anything. But once in a while someone did feel what I said I was feeling. And then we tried to trace this in various places and it turned out that the Hypostyle Hall in the Temple of Karnak in Egypt had something special to teach us. So it was a place, it wasn't just imagination.
Paul: And we had the same feeling in the Kings Chamber of the Great Pyramid as well - a connection – exactly the same thing. The reproducibility of the shared emotion is . . .
Jerry: Certainly somebody, in poetry, in myth – someone must have been written to express that emotion somewhere. Have you found anything? Or maybe art or maybe you just have to go to the Hall you mention. Maybe that's the poetry that describes it. Mabye you’ve got to go there?
Lloyd: Well I always wondered what one could discover about the Sphinx because in those days they didn't have geophysical explorations or anything at all. So you go and you can feel yourself there and feel what it was that seemed to be turning you on but it seemed to be related to a wider universe than just ourselves.
Jerry: How wide universe?
Lloyd: How wide the universe - that's right.
Jerry: Maybe that's the answer?
Paul: The universe is us? One goes in circles?
Jerry: I really appreciate you're telling us that.
Paul: I think in our personal experience and we've worked together for 40 years we’ve sort of took a while to build the confidence to share some of these experiences. ‘Hey you felt that?’ “Yeah, you felt that?’ And we’ve built on that shared experience so that we could work to find a language in the myth. And a lot of what we put in the book has to do with finding a language to describe these indescribable moments. Find that language in the myths.
Lloyd: Exactly.
Jerry: Do you have an example you can read or something? Or is it too big to just kind of tease apart.
Paul: I couldn’t pull something up. Could you Lloyd?
Lloyd: Well I don't know. We keep on exploring and keep on finding things as Paul says the current thing these days is Gobekli Tepe. It turns out that Gobekli Tepe is several thousand years before the oldest part of Egypt that we ever discuss, describe and seen. So does this mean that man's nature has been of this same type for a very long time.
Paul: For 10,000 years we have been creating images of the sky and of animals.
Jerry: Just tell us what Gobekli Tepe is. Some people may say what’s that. Some people may be wondering what it is. Just tells with that is. I have a note here, maybe I should just read it.
Lloyd: Gobkeli Tepe is a fairly high altitude place in western Turkey. And someone, Paul you probably remember better than I, discovered that there were here some intentional building had been done. So who on earth were people 6000 years before,10,000 years actually before the present era had actually some suggestion that they were looking for things that were the same as we're looking for. Something like that.
Paul: The temples are built of huge megalithic stone, aligned to certain stars in the sky. There was a very strong suggestion that they were actually temples. But they were more than one would need to eat sleep, reproduce, have sex those types of things. This is definitely more than our common view of man. And they were doing a 10,000 years ago. So to even imagine that 10,000 years ago humans we're having these higher thoughts long before, pick something, vaccination all things that we see as necessary for modern day life, these guys were moving big rocks around for what reason? For something higher.
Jerry: In preparation for this I read that Gobekli Tepe is only 5% of it has been excavated and probably even much less is understood. What are the implications where you just said Paul?
Paul: There are a couple things. The first thing is that man at that point was investing huge amounts of energy. They would have to marshal people and food. They would have to marshal society to create something to stargaze - to look beyond themselves. So this whole fiction that ancient man was measly and starving and beating each other over the head with bones comes into question.
Lloyd: It has got to be wrong.
Jerry: It has got to be wrong.
Paul: And so our interest in higher consciousness has a much longer lineage than we’ve ever imagined. This sort of builds on what we experienced in Egypt which is 5000 years old.
Lloyd: 5000 BCE. Well actually the oldest written stuff there is about 3000 BC.
Paul: So five thousand years. This is significant to us that we weren’t primitive in the sense of just grunting and groaning. We were looking at the stars and viewing stuff.
Jerry: Lloyd, then what are you referring to is that your search, your emotional experiences that you want to explore, like you said it was it was known by the people that Paul is describing. It must have been known.
Lloyd: It must have been known.
Jerry: There is an ancient connector right now. Anyone listening right now who has the sense of a mystery in the universe, mystery of their existence. You look up at the stars and see the infinity. Its real. Its a question. Its absolutely no different than guys hanging around 10,000 years ago. No know different. Not at all.
Lloyd: Yet somehow or other someone began to make sense of it.
Paul: In our book we particularly tackle the literature. We go back to the origins of literature - the very first writings of man. Because we can approach that in a way that is different than stones and stars which are equally important. We found as we look at Samarian and ancient Egyptian, the initial literature of man that we have access to is talking about these very highest aspirations of man. Much like stone work at Gobekli Tepe. We think it is talking to the highest aspirations of man. The literature we find in the Pyramid Texts is talking about spiritual development. It is not talking about how many ears of corn I grow, it talks about the highest aspirations and how was it that man that long ago with what could be seen as having limited capacity, are struggling to build these huge pyramids with fantastic stories with fantastic carvings inside the pyramid. So all along our history we re-encounter this desire, this striving for the higher whether it is in stone or in text.
Lloyd: Exactly – yeah.
Paul: So you have been in some of the pyramids, such as the Pyramid of Unas and seen the skill at that time.
Lloyd: Oh yeah! And to feel the scale of this is what you do. I mean there is nothing you do you just open yourself to it. Suddenly you have a sense of some great mystery that I'm not understanding.
Paul: But you can sense and feel it. You don’t have to understand it.
Lloyd: You can certainly sense and feel. So it's more than just ordinary thinking, feeling and acting. Its something that we put together and that's what we call higher consciousness. There is a level of consciousness which we all think we have anyway but what is higher consciousness? It's something that poses a big question. I think it's trying to get closer to what that question is all about that. Well as I say, for me it began to be put into form by running into the Gurdjieff Work.
Jerry: I want to talk about I just want to talk again about the big question. Do you think there has been any progress in 10,000 years as far as the society coming from higher consciousness coming from what we're seeking. You know that vastness because it seems our entire society has been set up to keep us from exploring higher consciousness.
Lloyd: Almost that.
Jerry: Its like we’ve gone backwards in 10,000 years. As what you're describing Paul that was in the forefront - was developing spiritual awareness. In our world today it aint there. Its there, but its hidden.
What's gone on in 10,000 years?
Lloyd: Yes, what's been going on for all that length of time. We don’t seem to have changed anything.
Jerry: We still have that urge for higher consciousness and to understand the mystery of existence.
Lloyd: Well we’ve got the word but the consciousness itself is something that each of us has to sell for himself.
Jerry: And so we talk about your experience, are you connect with a deep emotional experience, that you do not feel a need to describe in words, I think that some people can resonate with it. Now someone else may not have that emotional experience, but might have some other type of visceral, mental or spiritual or whatever experience. So each person has to find out for themselves.
Lloyd: That's right.
Jerry: What their kind of touch point is. What their interface is.
Lloyd: Yeah that's exactly right.
Jerry: And no one should imitate you. It is certainly fascinating to hear about you. To here you speak about it. The way you speak you can make a person say ‘Yeah I know what you're saying. You know I don't have the same exact experience but I know what he’s saying in my own way.’ And that's important. That's important communication.
Lloyd: So how do we go beyond that? I suppose that is the burden of our whole exploration. As Paul says, we went into the pyramids of Egypt. And the greatest mystery is how on earth those could ever have been built. Stones are so big you couldn't lift them and they perhaps had levers, but the best estimates people have made of what they could lift required levers that we're longer than they could make with just ordinary things around. So someone had to - we had to explain something that seems to be totally inexplicable.
Jerry: I’m not forgetting the Gurdjieff Work, but I want to stay on the pyramids again for a second. You guys spend a night like in the Great Pyramid or something. What was that like? Was it like being in a motel room? Was there maid service? Was there a telephone with the Yellow Pages. What was that like? What was all that about?
Lloyd: Yeah I can hardly remember when I try to put it back into words. There is a feeling of there being more room in any here than I'm used to feeling. If I had stretched out my finger and touch something, but if I stretch out my finger and can’t touch anything - what's happening? Am I just going crazy or is there some other quality that I wasn't thinking about looking for.
Jerry: There was a quality of the space?
Lloyd: Yeah I think it is a quality of the space. Anybody else's put terms on? I don’t know.
Jerry: I don’t know. Paul what was your . . .?
Paul: Again, it's the recurrence of that feeling in many places in the world. But the Kings Chamber had a musical quality that was exceptional. You talk about how you express it with somebody else. Well one thing that we have found in our travels is it generally requires a state of quiet, a state of calm, a breathing. Whether the Sistine Chapel or Stonehenge if you're with a group of tourists doing what tourists do, chat and take pictures, that often interrupts this flow. But in the King’s Chamber in particular, we happened to be there with no one else. Actually it was just two or three of us and we got sitting one side and then just sensed the space. With the right conditions and the right preparation it was incredibly magical and if you add music to it - how could you not sense that moment. It is a teaching tool, a teaching space in the world. The pyramids are phenomenal.
Were you able to remember the sound that we were able to generate?
Lloyd: Yeah I wish I could remember. There was a kind of resonance that was setup just because the room has particular dimensions. But of course that means only that if you sound a particular note you can usually hear the octave. And so it was a feeling of opening up that was actually associated with that that made quite a big difference.
Paul: An opening up and connectedness. I guess it seemed like everything was just one.
Lloyd: Yeah it doesn't answer anything. What it does is just open more questions.
Jerry: Sure why not.
Lloyd: Which is what it's all about it isn't?
Jerry: I'm asking if there's any expression for what you guys have been experiencing and the inability to express it is its own kind of expression really.
Like Paul was saying you kind off have to be in the silence. Silence maybe the proper response.
Paul: You need some preparation I guess and condition I guess. I don't know if I lived next to the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid and I went there every afternoon would it happen. I don't know, but I have been fortunate to have experienced it a couple of times. In some ways we draw allusions to that feeling though our use of the word creation and creation myths. That arising of something out of chaos that in the Christian world we’re all familiar - you know that originally there was chaos. I think that that chaos is in us. These moments these situations this preparation . . .
Lloyd: You know something that there is not just chaos. And know that there's some kind of arrangement that you aren’t responsible for.
Jerry: Well the fact that you can know there is chaos. That knowing can be chaotic.
Lloyd: That's right.
Jerry: There is some hold to it.
Paul: Some basis for it. So one can see these things better as you go in and out. I don’t think in and out is the right term. We can experience these different states. Maybe that's why it requires travel. One has to get away from our regular routine chaos to see something.
Lloyd: I think that was the base of everything we tried. Trying to find something that was sort of material compared with this ephemeral feeling that one has. What is it? Where does it come from? Why is it so difficult to understand in our ordinary terms.
We appeal to looking up at the stars saying what is up there? Why this tremendous distance? There's no answer to why. There just is. There is something that one needs to appreciate and I guess we were lead by travel to contact it and try to explore something more about it. And we still come back and say, ‘Well what about me?’
Jerry: I love where this conversation is going. Last time with Paul it was about the myths the Greek and Sumerian myths. We really haven’t gotten there yet – and that is OK. That is so cool.
Paul: That’s Lloyd’s fault:-)
Jerry: I like it! Now as part of your investigation you came across the Gurdjieff Work - Can you tell us about? Tell us as our listeners might not know George Gurdjieff was. And How did you stumbled into his teaching?
Lloyd: Yeah, well I can't honestly remember how I actually got there originally. I think it was through a friend of mine who contacted somebody else. In those days we were in Toronto and this woman had come from New York. It seemed like a long ways away. Somehow or other she was making some kind of sense about at what kind of questions we were able to ask. And that woke up chord in me that made me say, “I need to follow up questions like this.” This is really interesting to me.
Jerry: What kind of questions? Like on your true nature and stuff – or your true self?
Lloyd: Yeah, what is my true nature? I mean it may not be answerable but the question is terribly important. How do I even ask the question intelligently? I don't know where to go from there - Paul?
Paul: Well for me one of the concepts in the Gurdjieff Work is the multiple “I’s”. It’s the first time that I encountered the many I’s in me. You know, just some of those insights allow you to see yourself in a different way. There is no going back once you encounter the multiple I’s. And you see that your appetites aren’t in line with the mind/brain thing that we're taught to trust. So the body, emotions and sensations dichotomy really contributed to this life-long striving to understand who I am or maybe it's more what I'm what I'm not.
Jerry: Paul are you involved in the Gurdjieff Work too?
Paul: I have been over time. I’ve certainly the read books and its still a main topic of discussion. So we all have to find our own way and those ways are different but I think they all have to contribute to our own development.
Lloyd: Well you do know that certain personalities fit with you and certain others don't. And that's really a consideration when you get into things like The Work. What about particular people’s points of view can contribute to your understanding and what seems to block it. How do you know that this guy knows anything? How do you get to agree with this someone about what is happening? I mean in you. There's seems to be no proof for anything.
Paul: Just direct experience.
Lloyd: Yes - direct experience.
Jerry: So how do you discern the real from the truth from the false? Is it completely intuitive? I'm trying to draw words out of people but yeah it's fair game to say “well you don't have to express it - a just do it.”
Lloyd: Well you do have to try to express and then you rerun up against something that you can’t express somehow. So what does this do? What does it raise for you? And it seems to me that it all comes back to saying “Well I guess it's up to me.” Where does it all arise in me? This must have happened because of my experiences. Is it beyond myself? What is spirituality? We use that word occasionally when we dare, but do we have any what it means?
Jerry: I don’t know. We can go back to the guys 10,000 years – they probably knew. We lost it.
I think we lost it when we started growing wheat and grains and stuff.
Paul: You have to be careful to not answer questions that you don’t know the answer to.
Jerry: I know the answer buddy:-)
Lloyd: Well as I started to say at one time in the interview earlier, the business of being beyond anything I could describe was what came to me in these adventures in the high mountains in Nepal. Where in the heck did that come from? Where does it lead me? And I don't have any answers for that.
Jerry: So to this day you don't have an answer. There is no concrete answer that you can put in a textbook.
Lloyd: No concrete answer.
Jerry: So is the not knowing - is that sufficient?
Lloyd: Sometimes it has to be – doesn’t it? The not knowing – it can’t end there. You can keep on questioning and I suppose this is why you keep on doing it your whole life.
Jerry: So Lloyd, it sounds like there has not really been a resolution as far as what that is what that mysteries feeling is within you?
Lloyd: No I don't think so.
Jerry: Or should there be a resolution, could there be a resolution?
Not an answer – a resolution? In same way that an emotional feeling comes about. An internal resolution of some sort.
What's the situation with something like that?
Lloyd: Well I don't know where to go from here. In a way I have to say what would be a resolution? I don't know. I mean there's no concrete answer to this. So there has to be something that's sort of out about in the far distance. I am remembering being told about a man that I admired who was dying - quite obviously. And he of course had been used to these kinds of questions and at one point he opened his eyes and he looked at the people around him and said “So that’s it” – and then he died.
Jerry: That was a resolution.
Lloyd: That is a resolution.
Jerry: That's it that's it.
Lloyd: So there's a resolution that is no resolution. There is only continued study to somehow or other one can find an enlarged view of everything you’ve known before. And that has to create a new kind of understanding. I don't know what else - I don’t know how else you handle it. Anybody any answers?
Jerry: So we what we're doing here and talking here is really what was being done again 10,000 years ago among three guys sitting together. Really no different I don't think.
I don't the different it would be any different.
Paul: I believe that I've encountered moments of more clarity I guess my life. And I know that that happens rarely and happens under certain conditions. But most my life honestly, such as now, you know yeah I know that I am talking with you – but those glimpses of something higher motivates me to keep working. Now whether the builders of Gobekli Tepe or the pyramids what that meant to them? They were highly motivated individuals not interested in food or the common interest in life but something must have motivated them to build a fantastic structure - if I can tap into that striving? I don't think there is an any answer for the where, the why, the ultimate but right now I can try to be just a little bit more conscious here as I sit talking to you. And tomorrow I can try just a little bit more conscious. And it is not additive unfortunately - or we would all be saints. I just come back to that memory of something higher - come back to the fact that I have to keep working on it and maybe on our deathbed we will have that glorious moment that can't be harmed.
Jerry: Lloyd are you pretty active in the Gurdjieff Work?
Lloyd: Well I am. It is a hierarchical system and one is always looking for a leader. And so in the early days I ran into a man who is said to be a son of Gurdjieff and I thought “Well this is as high as I can go surely.” And I said to him “I think that I am able to understand what you're saying. Is it but because we are the same type?” So it’s a matter of type. I don't know how we go any further than that. We're trying to explain but by explanation we are trying to put it in terms that we ordinarily use. And that's not in it.
So how can one say “Well I don't know - there's something I don't.” And be sure of that. It is not so easy, but it is possible to ask – to continue to ask questions and I support that's the nature of life.
Paul: The Gurdjieff Work is called The Fourth Way because it balances three other ways: the way of the yogi, the monk and the fakir.
Lloyd: That's a good expression all right. I mean there is an intellectual way and there is an emotional way and there is a sensation way but there's something else and that is at the base of this stuff that we ask questions about. There is no final answer to that surely, but there is a need for keeping on asking the questions that opens up something in you.
Paul: Right.
Jerry: And you found through the Gurdjieff Work some way of organizing your perceptions of this mystery, this unknown - some discipline in regard to it.
Lloyd: It gives you a chance to ask yourself questions The big question really is “Who am I?” That allows you to ask questions “Well I can appeal to the stars. I can appeal it to ancient times I can appeal to something faraway.” But it is something that I have to come to myself because it has to be in me if there this is an answer to be found. I don't know where and when anyone can go beyond that.
Jerry: Beyond their own experience.
Paul: “Who am I?”
Jerry: Yeah and again just to repeat what you did then is to take that personal experience and then find a discipline for investigating it within the Gurdjieff Work.
Lloyd: Yeah it appears.
Jerry: And everyone can do that. Nor everyone has to go to the Gurdjieff Work. There are all kinds of paths and teacher and organizations.
Lloyd: Yeah that's right.
Jerry: Yeah, but a person has to find out is right for them by seeing or finding something or someone that resonates with your temperament – like you found.
Lloyd: This is the point. What else can one do?
Jerry: Like you two guys found together.
Paul: Yes you can say that.
Jerry: Yes, I guess you can say that - 40 years of working together.
Lloyd: We seemed to have found something that keeps us from being at each other's throats all the time.
It doesn't replace these other needs but it does contribute to our resolve to write and think about these things and keep on exploring.
Paul: And sense our bodies and try to observe our emotions.
Jerry: And that's something anyone can do right here right now.
Lloyd: Absolutely.
Jerry: You’re just yourself. You don’t have to run out to a meeting or run out somewhere. You can just sit on your couch or your car seat.
Lloyd: You don’t have to go anywhere. But sometimes you have to go all lot of places to discover that.
Jerry: Yeah you might have to but who knows. I think if you just follow maybe what's choiceless within you. Its like what do you have to do? Not what it would be nice to do. Not like take a vacation, but what is it that you have to do?
Lloyd: No it doesn’t have anything to do with a vacation.
Jerry: But not so with you guys And I don't even have to ask, but your work is kind of choiceless. This is you have to do. You might think that there are some aspects that would be nice to do. Take a trip here or there. But by and large, on the whole, it's like this is your investigation - you're way.
Paul: And we could've done it individually. I could've done it individually. So much is based on knowing you.
Lloyd: No you actually need someone to two bounce ideas off and get something back because we get so deeply into ourselves that we think we understand something. It doesn't take much for somebody else to come along and point out “Oh yes, forgot about that.”
Jerry: It is the problem again. I think trying to talk about whatever you put yourself out on a limb. You put your head out there. When you say anything it's always limited so someone will come along and chop your head up.
Paul: Or sometimes they’ll say “Yes, you are seeing something.” You are.
Jerry: You are. There are going to be people who when you're saying something are going to say that you're seeing something but you could've said this too.
And that’s the Spiritual game. I wonder if they played that there in Gobekli Tepe – or whatever they called it. They probably called it New Jersey. What do we know? We don’t know that they called it.
Lloyd: But it has been fooling around for a long time.
Jerry: Is it fascinating that only 5% of that archaeological site has been discovered? What does that imply? What’s going on in regards to size and stuff.
Paul: It took a long time the original explorer to even get any funding. It wasn't seen as of interest to the mainstream archaeology. So it took a long time just to make the case for the 5%. We are scientists and we were talking about this just yesterday in Shubie park as we walked. Scientist rarely look at where those hypothesis come up. I mean once you have an hypothesis, things roll very nicely with the testing. But where the hypothesis comes from is magical. I think the same thing with Gobekli Tepe. Who had the original ideas that this was even worth looking at? And how many more sites around the world require that advocacy to say that this is important. Some will work out and some wont. You asked about the 5%, thank god that they discovered the 5% before I died. So I now know than I did.
Jerry: And we’ve brought it into this conversation
We’ve got to get going. We’ve got to wrap it up in a minute or so. So do you think we did what we set out to do? We didn’t talk about mythology but we talked about higher consciousness and we brought in some of the archaeology, ancient civilizations, the Gurdjieff Work. Lloyd you really kept it right on target. I liked personal experience, your own investigation to find your own way to do that and you offered tremendous teaching on that I think. I don't know if I have time but when I prepared for the show I highlighted a section of your book to read.
Lloyd: Okay
Jerry: It is kind of longish. I don’t know if I have time. I think we said everything.
I'm doing some editing as I go here. This is what you guys write in your book
“We cannot help but comment on the great good fortune that seems to be ours in this age, the beginning of the twenty-first century, when such new discoveries, both external and internal, seem to be more and more frequent. We wish here to draw additional attention to the importance of maintaining the internal quiet patience that is necessary if we are to find ourselves in the sudden presence of new perceptions.”
I think that's especially Lloyd what you were referring to. You can’t express things but you can value that internal quiet patient.
Lloyd: Yeah that’s right. I’m glad we wrote that.
Jerry: I am glad that you wrote the book. Any final words from you guys?
Lloyd: I don't think so do. Do you have any?
No, I all I can say is that the search is never-ending. So one has to make up one's own self and work for what it is.
Jerry: Thank you Lloyd Dickie and Paul Boudreau.
Paul: Thank you Jerry.
Jerry: Their book is “Awakening Higher Consciousness, Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer.” Which you can buy through the website awhico.com.
This has been non-duality talk our website is nonduality.org and you can hear a copy of the show on nonduality.org.
I’m Jerry Katz, thank you for listening.