Dear, dear listener, hi, this is John Duque.

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God bless.

Thank you.

Welcome to part three of our conversation with Kimberly Lafferty.

As we correct the misconception of the Bodhisattva or Awakened One bow is not that the Bodhisattva no longer suffers along with the rest of us, but that through our changes, the world changes and there is less suffering.

Welcome to Deep Transformation.

Self, society, spirit, life enhancing, paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr.

Roger Walsh and John Dupuy join us in the evolutionary fast lane as we take a deep dive into transformational practice.

Peak experience, profound understanding, powerful contribution.

Kimberly, what actually changes as people mature?

I mean, I'm thinking of the various capacities seem to come online in sequential ways, and you emphasized one of them earlier.

That is the capacity for a larger perspective encompassing more and more people in one's scope of care and concern, and not only spatial, but also temporal.

That is the capacity to take more generations into account.

For example, the beautiful Native American tradition of think of the effects of what you're doing on the seventh generation.

So, but what are some of the other capacities that tend to come online as people mature?

Fun.

Oh, my favorite subject.

Okay, so when I'm speaking, I'm speaking from both what we've seen in developmental research and what we also have learned.

What I've learned learned in the traditions as well.

So one of the most exciting moments that happens in our developmental journey and our story of development as an individual and as a collective is when I mentioned it first.

First one wakes up to metacognition, which is just, oh, I can think about my thinking, I can think about my feeling and I can think about my behavior.

And that is something that's essential and very, very important in order for what then comes later.

Once that capacity is grown, we start to see, we get the capacity to be able to start to see ourselves as parts.

Parts is the most common word used.

Or sub personalities or archetypes.

It's like our thinking and our feeling and our behavior kind of devolves into.

Yeah, Persona.

Part I've got an inner family system, for example, is a common way to think about it.

I've got.

There's an inner child or I see my cognitive structure as something from afar.

I can start to actually look at my own system on the inside and see a system there.

Right.

See an internal family system of some form.

And this is beautiful.

And much of our therapy is focused on this.

Parts work, shadow work.

All of this is developmentally appropriate for that stage.

We are.

And then something amazing happens.

And this where we see.

So far from what we can tell, the numbers start to drop off.

Actually, after this, there's a capacity that seems to require or be supported strongly by the spiritual training that we're talking about.

And this is when we awaken to individual construction, we would say, or the understanding that in the moment I am projecting.

We'll say I am creating.

I am somehow, in a mysterious way, my karma, my past, my construct activation, my genetics, my whatever.

It's still.

So much of it is still a mystery.

Right?

But in this moment, what I'm looking at are thoughts, things are thoughts, and thoughts are things.

And somehow figuring out the confusion of that.

This is the first thing we see.

There's a huge shift when we go into what we call meta aware or fifth person perspective.

And it's marked by this ability of in the moment to start to catch your projections.

And when I'm saying projection, I mean like small p projection.

I mean, I'm looking at an idea in my mind, and my mind is more than here.

Right.

My mind is actually everywhere.

Right.

So this is the first marker that we see is that capacity.

First.

It happens over time, but in the start to in the moment, catch your projections, Catch that.

The movie that I'm watching a movie right from there.

And that's a big shift.

It's like moving from understanding social construction to understanding individual construction.

It's radical.

I mean, this is a big developmental confusion.

Sometimes that takes a lot of support.

And this is where I say we see numbers drop off.

Because if there isn't a spiritual community supporting that or a psychological community supporting that, or some sort of ideally, combination of the two supporting this awakening, shall we say, or this realization, shall we say, it can be very difficult or tentative.

It doesn't have somebody to reinforce that structure that's developing.

It's hard to hang on to.

Yes, indeed, John.

Thank you.

It's like to make it real, it's like waking up in a lucid dream and realize you're dreaming.

And if there is the support there and the structure there, when that happens, it can be very beautiful and very sweet, as it was for me.

And which is why I'm so grateful the community.

I had to say, yes, you're on track.

You're not crazy.

And it's not Kimberly, who's the one doing the projecting.

It's very easy to fall into narcissism and, you know, to have these fall off one side of the cliff or the other, to stay grounded in kindness and.

And your spouse and your relationships and.

Right.

So that's what we see as we move, as we stabilize that realization, as we stabilize that and figure out, okay, well, what does that imply?

If it's a dream, what does that mean?

What does that imply?

We start to get used to the dream and we start to get used to how it is that this functionality of thoughts or things is happening.

And we start to expand our capacities.

And it's interesting, we see next people tend to get very active.

It's like you get this realization and it's almost like poured into you.

Like you were saying, John.

It's like this lineage almost poured into you get this realization, get used to it for a while and then you get busy with it.

It's like, well, how can I then if I've deconstructed everything, how can I now reconstruct using my gifts and my passions to somehow put together a world that is ethically charged and you might not ever use that word, but it's going to bring goodness, truth and beauty, you know, that is going to somehow.

And it could be being a quiet, good neighbor.

It doesn't mean you're famous.

It doesn't mean any of that, you know, but you're driven by this.

This desire to act and to be, you know, to do more than be.

Actually.

What we notice here too, Roger, is the objects that one speaks about changes.

You mentioned the temporal aspect of it.

Our objects get really, really big.

So it's not just me and my family and me and my tribe and me and humans and me, even me and animals, but objects get to be time and space beyond time, you know, beyond this current moment, impacting the past, impacting the future and everything we do.

Objects start to.

Language changes dramatically where we start to understand that we are a wave in the ocean, right?

And.

And we are one in the many.

And this connection between form, relative reality, and let's say emptiness or ultimate reality is continuing to evolve.

And how did this Blank screen.

And how does the paint work together?

And this becomes something that is felt.

It's beyond concept.

It's beyond really thought.

It's something that's experienced on a day to day basis.

We do see an increase when things are healthy and the shadow work has been done and is continuing to be done on a daily basis.

We do see, I mentioned before, an increase of compassion, an increase of joy.

Not always right.

But these are words and languages that we begin to see much more of.

Ultimate love.

Yeah.

And there's a simplicity too that starts to come up when we see data coming in from these later stages.

It's not wordy, unlike what I'm doing right now.

Right.

There's a.

There's a real simplicity and poignancy that we also see start to come in.

Oh, that's beautiful.

It's not oversight at all really.

Beautifully still includes the family and going on to the holidays and all of that.

It's a balloon, it's not a ladder.

You know.

And ideally we get better at that.

I do need it better.

Yeah, yeah.

And the metaphor of the balloon is a very beautiful one.

And it is so easy to fall into latter metaphors and higher as opposed to lower as opposed to, you know, better.

You used a much better term later.

And you're also using the metaphor of a balloon.

Kimberly, I just want, I want to note that at all times you are this wonderful bubbling fountain of Shakti, the divine energy.

Energy coming lit up even more and transmitted even more of it as we got into development.

So I understand, I love this is incredibly important topic and it's.

I view it as one of the main contributions of psychology in the last 50 years and just feels oh so vital and adding a developmental understanding and even pointing to the possibility that there are developmental stages beyond what we take to be the ceiling of possibilities is an enormously important recognition and one which makes the greater individual and collective realization of those potentials more available.

See, feels like a crucial first step.

You just outlined some of the capacities that emerge and come online at subsequent stages.

And I want to ask you to go further with that.

Let me suggest a couple of other things that be great to have you talk about.

One it seems like is, and you've kind of implied this is the capacity for a more fluid and multi level perspective taking.

Yeah.

Seems crucial.

I'd love to hear you talk about that.

Well, it's interesting.

And one thing I want to say too as we get into development is there are some good critiques of development and they have their Point.

Right.

And I just want to mention the elephant in the room.

And I get you and I get it.

And any sort of smacking of, you know, hierarchy or better than or anything like that, we just want to acknowledge that that might come into the field.

And that's not what we're talking about here.

So always with developmental ethics, we're all of them.

We are all, each one of them, a cosmos inside of us.

And so knowing that, we also notice as cognitive humans that beings seem to theoretically fall into these patterns of becoming that go throughout humanity, throughout our history.

And so that's what we're talking about with development.

They're these patterns that very good researchers over time.

And Roger, thank you for saying that about developmental theory.

Coming from you, that means a lot.

And that was my experience of it too.

It's an incredibly important field that we want to understand is not hierarchical, it's a balloon.

And just like I think differently than my 13 year old son and the mistakes that I do in parenting, which I do do, always come back to for me, if it's outside of any trauma, I'm having a developmental mistake I'm making.

Like I am not matching and meeting where my son is coming from.

My reality is not attuned to his reality.

Right.

And so now I'm not any better than him, obviously.

Right.

So it's not a better than even being later.

So we'll say that there perspective taking we notice and you know, developmental research in its field is its own subcultures and it's prone to its own biases and who takes the assessments.

And we understand all that.

But what we tend to notice is that an interest in development and an interest in the fact that there are multiple perspectives out there, that it is a realization, it is an awakening.

Awakenings happen all throughout our lifespan, in my opinion, all throughout our lifespan these awakenings happen.

It comes at the end of fourth person perspective where we begin to see not outside of us, but inside of us.

There's this echo between inside and outside that starts to happen where we start to see that there's multiple perspectives out there.

And I probably got that earlier.

Okay, like there's my person who votes differently from me.

Isn't bad, isn't wrong.

It's different.

You know, different religions are okay, different ways of what happens in your bedroom.

All of that is different and multiple perspective and is good and okay and is fine.

But I start to see that that's happening inside of me.

And again it's an echo inside and out.

And when that Happens a whole opportunity opens up of creativity and creation of how what is going on inside with my own inner voices and the multiple perspectives that I can take from inside is echoing what's happening outside.

And it increases my ability to have compassion.

It increases my ability to understand where someone else is coming from.

And importantly this skill set increases my capacity for what we call skillful means to be able to zoom into a situation and see it from close in and zoom out of a situation and see it from some distance and zoom into a situation and see it from this perspective from right up close.

Like what's the issue right up close.

How are you feeling in this moment?

What's actually happening to zooming out even in time and space and seeing this came from the past and this is going to cause this in the future.

And let me get some perspective on that.

So this multiple perspective taking happens at a lot of levels with outside people, with my inside parts and voices and ideas and also in time and space as our capacities increase.

It's interesting, Roger, we're seeing in the developmental research too.

John, you'll be interested in this how what we call in the yoga philosophy siddhis, it's S I D D H I.

If you were to do a transliteration, it means powers.

How these something that was considered almost transpersonal or transhuman powers start to come on and I think, you know, I don't mean magical, but I do mean almost a precognitive capacity to see into the future.

It might come in dreams, it might come in meditation, it might come in just pattern making and insight.

We see a real capacity to empathy like the capacity for empathy.

True empathy increases a really almost in a mysterious way.

You, you know, when you're in the presence of somebody like that who really almost can see into your soul is something.

Sometimes we say that capacity increases.

Yeah, lots of ways.

That's beautiful.

John, I have umpteen questions, but you've been very, you've been very impatient in letting me ask most of them, so why don't you jump in?

Well, maybe just to comment on the last thing we're talking about that these higher levels of development but not only do the new capacities emerge and pretty amazing things, but also new challenges, new problems are created that we never had to deal with before.

Yes, yes.

I guess it creates the need for the next level of development or the further expansion of the balloon or the, the next circle that grows ever larger.

Yeah, that.

Thank you for saying that.

There's confusions all the way up and all the Way down.

You know, that happens, especially considering we tend to be talking about this particular moment in our developmental journey, which is often akin to kind of the big awakening or understanding things are coming from me and not the way I thought before, but not the me that I thought was there.

Understanding individual projection and how what I'm looking at is a particular construct, you know, this particular shift that happens.

One of the confusions that we often see there.

If there isn't a spiritual psychological community of support around this, it's often, well, what matters?

What does it matter?

Why should I.

Let me just sort of rest in the beingness of it all, and I don't actually need to do anything.

And I personally fall prey to that myself, sort of.

I've come to see, just personally, santosha in Sanskrit, or contentment can actually be an obstacle for me.

Yeah.

Easily becomes complacency.

Yeah, it does.

And I just admit that among friends here.

So, yes, there are confusions, or is sometimes what it's called, you know?

Yes, challenges.

But it never stops.

You know, we are never at a final enlightenment.

Let's just put it that way.

Yeah.

I just want to.

That feels so important to acknowledge, Kimberly, and I'm so glad you said it, because there is this myth, historically and contemporarily, that if you reach a certain realization, basically you coast thereafter.

Yeah, I wish.

Yeah.

I mean, we all.

Yeah.

And not to say things don't get.

I don't know.

What do you say, Roger?

John, you know, I.

It's not that things don't change for the better, if I can use that word.

I mean, I.

In all honesty, my life is amazing.

You know, I am so fortunate.

I.

It's extraordinary.

And I point to my dharma practice and the benefit I have of studying with the teachers that I did and getting the support that I needed when I needed it.

And I yelled at my son two days ago, and I.

You know, and I had a moment that I regretted that I needed to repair and I needed to clean up.

And this is just part of the zest of humanity, is we're embodying our own becoming in a system.

We're not alone.

We're in a system with other people and with cultures and society.

And the more we can.

And I can step into that out of my complacency and my little bliss bubble, the more challenged I might be in the moment, but also the more I grow and the happier I am.

Honestly, you know, and the enlightenment in this situation is manifested not by the fact that you yelled at your Son.

But the repair.

Yes.

Therein is the enlightened behavior.

I mean, we're all going to do that, yell at our kids or make those moments, you know, when we're just very, very human.

But it's the repair that's so essential.

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I wouldn't.

That's.

That's exactly it.

And because we want to be involved in the world and not locking ourselves away in a cave somewhere.

And so we're going to be challenged, and we need to build up resiliency and we need to apply developmental understanding to ourselves and others so that we can respond most skillfully and compassionately in the moment.

Beautifully said.

And.

And we've had the privilege of doing a series of dialogues, currently are doing a series of dialogues with Hamid Ali, founder of the Diamond Approach.

Just an extraordinary gifted practitioner and teacher.

And he has a beautiful perspective.

Whereas most traditions have the assumption that there is some final state which is the goal, and it is the final state.

But his perspective is a much more profound one, which is quite rare.

You see it a bit in Dogen, for example, maybe Ramakrishna, some.

But it's rare that each opening or awakening can be the portal for further openings and awakenings and realizations.

That's right.

Absolutely.

And even emptiness or ultimate reality itself comes in a series of evolving realizations and evolution.

And according to Hamid, you get to the mountaintop, you realize the clear light or emptiness or ultimate realization.

And a lot of people want to stay there, you know, why wouldn't you?

But the work really can.

Right.

Consists in come bringing it back down in the descent and bringing it back into the marketplace.

Right.

With open heart and open hands and bringing it home.

Yes.

It's really, really good.

Yes.

And I'm grateful.

I mean, believe me, I am far from perfect, as my spouse can tell you, but there's something about leaning into that and all of my messiness and all of our messiness and even the messiness of our.

We're in America right now.

I know we are listening to this all over the world.

Those of us who are here in America right now.

It can be a practice, you know, to see what's happening on our stage.

But even that itself, even that itself, if we can lean into the imperfection of it, if we can lean into the messiness of it, there's somehow this path through with delight and with joy and with humor and with kindness that we can find our way through this.

Because what connects us all is our luminous, aware consciousness.

The definition of mind in Tibetan Buddhism is simply Saunang.

It's translated as luminous and aware.

Or sometimes it's translated as clear and knowing.

Right.

And we're all this.

If we can connect to each other through this and see that in each other, I think that we'll be able to find our way through this messiness.

And the paradox is that finding our way through may not look like everything's wonderful.

Yeah.

Yes.

No, indeed not.

No.

It's admitting when we yell at her son or.

Yeah.

Getting into the.

The zesty messiness of it as well.

Yeah.

And in the bigger picture, it may be that we really do create a global catastrophe for ourselves, and it will still be important to do whatever we can as well as we can, with the understanding that these priceless traditions have given us.

And these catastrophes are happening as we speak.

You know, I don't have to mention all the places in the world, but.

But I deeply feel that stuff.

And that's.

That's.

That's a hard.

Thank you for feeling that.

And that is something we see too, is the individual's capacity to be able to feel the whole is something that we also see.

Come up.

I want to underline, too, something Roger, you said, because the value of the traditions, I mean, that's something that I stand on with wisdom.

And with the old baby with the bath water metaphor, we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but these traditions, I believe, are pointing us to where we're headed as humans.

So in a simple way, if we buy into the story of evolution, you know, on this planet, on this Earth, there were apes, right?

And at some point in our journey of evolution, human, the human species, the ape species.

I'm super simple about this, but the human species sort of branched off, right.

And became its own species.

So you had the.

Whatever the Latin is for the ape species.

And the human species became humans.

And at some point, the traditions point us to.

And also developmental research seems to be pointing us to this pattern that at some point of our human species will branch off again and become something maybe transhuman.

You know, if we follow the pattern, what are humans becoming?

And you're bringing a very crucial contemplative perspective to the idea of becoming transhuman.

This is because the idea that there's a possibility of us becoming transhuman is a big thing in this.

In the techno world and come through uploading ourselves to silicon chips.

Oh, yeah.

No, that's not what I.

Yeah.

Or, you know, any number of your robotic enhancements, etc.

Etc.

So there's a whole world.

But you're pointing to a very different innate kind of transhuman, which is the recognition of that which we always already are.

That's right.

And always have been and never could have find because we've never lost it.

Right.

Beautifully said.

Beautifully said.

Yeah, yeah.

And I want to ask you to.

To say more about the kind of.

You're pointing to the possible that as people go through these stages and balloons, to use your metaphor, that there's a kind of bigger picture, kind of the cognition, the thinking changes.

And it's what you're pointing to a kind of bigger picture perspective.

And I think pointing us towards a more systems way of thinking as opposed to linear logic.

Could you say something about that?

Sure.

Yeah.

Well, the individual who.

I mean, the biggest question of really spirituality, one might argue, is who am I?

Yeah.

Anybody ever wondered who am I?

What am I?

Right.

And so is this identity changes and how one answers the question of who am I?

One begins to think of oneself as a system.

I am involved in an interpenetrating system with others.

Right.

In a collective.

And so that's one thing that starts to come online very strongly, is that we are the opposite of alone.

And we are interdependent on each other for our meaning making for our physicality, for everything else.

Yeah.

One thing I wanted to mention too, that we see that happens as we evolve and in these later stages of development, what people report and show indications of is that the senses evolve.

So on the one hand, when we're talking about emptiness and ultimate reality and that which we can never lose and never find, you know, that which has existed beyond time, that's ultimate reality.

But we find that relative reality or form, you know, thought, the things that we can is tangible, that evolves.

And our senses, for example, our hearing evolves in these later stages to deep attunement.

Attunement is a word that we use and it's a sense.

It's like the sense powers actually evolve to.

Attunement is like a deep listening.

A deep listening that happens inside and happens outside too.

In terms of listening to the whole system.

That's amazing.

We notice that our eye powers, in a sense, our sense powers of I evolve to what we call witnessing, a kind of capital W.

Powerful witnessing, the ability to see.

In the mystical tradition, we do the third eye seeing, right.

To be able to see through time, through space, kind of suddenly have these flashes of insight, right.

About a variety of things, from something going on with me to something going on in the world to a creative insight.

So our vision, our capacity to vision expands and evolves to something else.

Right.

And then even our capacity of touch, our capacity of embodiment, we notice in the data that's coming in evolves where people start describing that as presence.

We could say capital P presence.

This embodied, this evolution of embodiment where my body is not just, you know, Kimberly, of a certain age and a certain.

Right.

My embodiment becomes something else entirely where almost the boundaries of my skin dissolve and my body becomes somehow even interpenetrating with yours, Roger and yours, John, and even the people who are listening to this.

Somehow we're connected to each other.

And so we're noticing that too, in terms of this sort of.

What I mean, just to further clarify by the transhuman is that even our senses evolve and.

And more so.

Yeah, yeah, beautiful.

And I love your emphasis on the question, who am I?

And it seems like we've been suffering from an individual and collective state of mistaken identity.

Mistaken identity indeed.

Yeah, yeah.

There's one novel idea and theme and way of working with issues that has emerged in recent decades which seems like it should have or must have a developmental perspective, and that is the emphasis on polarities.

Seeing things in terms of polarities rather than opposites.

I'd love to hear you, you know, enrich that for us.

Yes, there's beautiful work that is happening right now with polarities.

And, you know, various places we see this come up in the developmental story.

You know, most often we see polarities come up later in meta aware, you know, mature fifth person perspective.

And for your listeners, that means sort of you're in a place where stabilize the realization that we've been talking about of.

I'm in the dream.

Okay, I've woken up in the lucid dream.

I'm in the dream.

So then what dream am I going to make?

And how is this for the benefit of all, not just for myself?

Otherwise there's a warning across the bow.

Okay, for the benefit of all, what dream am I going to make for myself and others?

What dream am I going to make here?

And we start to see how constructs or labels or qualities, how it is that relative reality or form, how it's being built and polarities naturally comes up as a way to start describing how reality is being built in front of us and that you can't have one without the other somehow.

This good, even the most basic thing of this good, bad, or any other polarity you could think of, they can't exist without the other and there's this.

You don't have good without bad.

Right.

You don't have truth without non truth.

You don't have one without the other.

And we start to see, see apparently how these are the building blocks of how we're constructing our reality.

We're always making distinctions and choices.

In Buddhism, there's something called the five skandas and the five heaps.

And discrimination is an essential part of our world building process.

So there's something in, and I'm not a polarity expert, there's amazing ones out there that, that are doing incredible work on this.

But we see this in the developmental data that this does become a fascination, you know, in the later stages because it's how we're constructing literally our experiences of reality.

And it's.

Yeah, beautiful work is being done in that field right now.

And there's a Hegelian dynamic, that these two polarities actually go to a higher synthesis.

So it's not just good and bad, but there's something in between that takes us a little higher up and that becomes the new thing that creates a new polarity that keeps us growing.

There's a evolution there of polarities, which is.

You're right, there's a lot of great stuff out there right now.

Exactly.

So, yeah, and it's beautiful, beautiful work.

Yeah.

I want to just emphasize the point you made, Kimberly, that ideally these realizations, these capacities are used for the welfare and awakening of all.

And you've brought us back to the bodhisattva for aspiration.

As far as I can see, Bodhisattva aspiration is perhaps the greatest ideal the human mind has ever come up with.

It's basically what is the greatest good.

Deep reflection on that and a realization that it involves the relief of suffering, the enhancement of well being, the actualization of capacities and the awakening to our true nature, not just as you were pointing out for me, but for all conscious creatures.

And that is a completely encompassing and completely beneficent ideal.

And I can't see how one does better than that.

Agreed, agreed.

And it feels aligned too with both the transpersonal.

Right.

The transpersonal for, you know, the ultimate connection we have beyond the individual, where we all meet our clear light and also the personal for the benefit of just humanity and how we can, in this schoolhouse earth, if we want to think of it like this, how we can each individually raise each other up and raise the water, you know, for the benefit of all.

And I, one of the reasons that I love my spiritual tradition so much and I'M so grateful for it is we don't do it alone.

Like, bodhichitta taps us deeply into the invisible realms.

Right into.

It's impossible that an individual.

An individual person could make a difference.

But when I am papped into my ultimate nature, I'm tapped into how I'm connected, both at the concrete level to the earth and the trees and the animals and my children and my neighbors and people who think differently than me politically.

And I'm tapped into that.

And I'm also tapped into the time structure of this earth and what's.

Actually, I'm thinking about how what I'm doing is affecting the environment, and I'm thinking about what I'm doing is affecting my.

The future, children.

I'm thinking about what I'm doing might be causing harm or help, even in the books that I'm writing or the research that I'm doing.

So it's tapping us into something tangible every day.

Can I give you a cup of coffee?

And it's also tapping us into something much broader.

Right?

Yes.

Yeah.

The idea that nobody's enlightened until we're all enlightened.

Right.

Nobody's saved until we're all saved.

I used to say in the recovery work, nobody's sober until we're all sober.

You know, that's very moving and it's very personal, and that's very big at the same time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well said, John.

And it also brings us full circle, Kimberly, because you've emphasized the interaction between ethics and wisdom and.

And care, compassion.

And now the bodhisattva for aspiration seems to be, as you are implying, a natural expression of who and what we really are and of who and what everyone else really is.

And it's just.

It just makes.

Well, what.

How.

What else would you want to do with your life?

Recognize who we are and other people are like, this is the body side for aspiration is just what makes sense from that perspective.

That's just what makes sense.

And I would go so far, again, to say that it's an indication of true insight, true realization.

True is a true true.

But, you know, it's an indication.

It's a check.

It's an indicator that we're on track both as an individual and in a system we might be following as well.

And perhaps important to acknowledge that, as you've implied, everything in every developmental stage has its potentials and its traps.

And I think you and John have both emphasized that.

And even the Bodhisattva, aspiration has its traps and Even some of the ways, it's traditionally formulated as a vow.

I vow to awaken, liberate all beings.

So good luck.

Yeah.

It's like once you realize how much it takes to awaken one being oneself, liberating them all.

See, I remember when I had my early stages of Tibetan Buddhism.

I was retreat and Lama Surya Das and brought in this very traditional, traditional llama.

And every practice began with the Bodhisattva vow.

Yes.

Which I would just mouth quietly because there's no way I was going to commit to liberating all beings.

Finally, I stood up and said, well, you know, I just got married after nine years.

It took me nine years to commit to serving one being.

He was not impressed.

It's so true.

It's so true.

It's a beautiful thing, you know, I do wanted to take the opportunity to dispel a dharma rumor, the Buddhist rumor, which I see out there often, which is somehow that the Bodhisattva vow and vows are a big deal.

They're codes.

You know, codes are a big deal in the traditions, and there's a lot of value to them and there's a lot of trappings to them.

So it's again, one of those polarity things, but that somehow the Bodhisattva vows to stick around.

They're going to get enlightened, and they're going to get to a place of wisdom and bliss, let's say, say the good kind of bliss.

And they're just going to stick around while everyone else is suffering until everybody gets out of suffering.

And it doesn't.

That's a misunderstanding.

I would venture to say, as we transform, our world transforms.

And it doesn't mean that we don't see suffering out there.

It doesn't mean that we don't suffer ourselves.

But the way we experience that suffering changes radically.

And our capacities, you know, our capacities, both in terms of our spiritual development and evolution that we've put in and our developmental journey, how far we've come, our capacities get bigger and bigger.

We can reach more.

We can have more impact in the small things that we do.

And so the path of the Bodhisattva is to awaken as best we can.

Yes.

And to be in the world, not lock ourselves away in a cave, you know, to be in the world as best we can.

But it's not that, like, we're in bliss over here and everyone else is suffering.

It's that as we change the world, then in turn, our world then in turn changes, and there's less suffering.

So it's much more powerful than we think.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

It feels like you have beautifully brought us full circle here, Kimberly.

And I have one little thing.

I've been bugging me since the very first paragraph.

Basically, you mentioned at the very beginning how you just taught a retreat on the Heart Sutra.

Yeah.

And talked about how Tibetan Buddhists, or Buddhists in general have been arguing over that interpretation for 1500 years.

Yes.

And I've seen, I've heard about it in the Tibetan tradition and I've seen videos where these monks are just going after each other, you know, in these arguments.

I understand what they're saying, but I saw the videos and is that a tradition that upheld where you can get into these, not like Fox News arguments or CNN arguments where everybody yells their bullet points at each other, but really a sacred conversation that leads to a higher level of understanding.

Oh, and is that okay?

Yes, thank you for asking.

It was a problem for Socrates.

You know, in Christianity we didn't do too well with it.

So is that something you guys have been carrying out and being successfully able to do?

It's a huge thing.

Yes, it's a huge thing and thanks for mentioning it because anything just to honor, you know, my lineage and the teachers and the beauty of Tibetan Buddhism in particular, there's a beautiful debate tradition and in order to progress spiritually and to actually get degrees, because in the Galupa Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the tradition of the Dalai Lama, it's very scholastic, it's very academic, which is why really super heady people like myself are really interested in it and others aren't, and that's fine.

You know, it's.

We all have to find the spiritual path that we're most attracted to and suits our personality.

But there's this debate tradition.

Yeah.

Where you get in each other's faces and you slap your hands and people can Google Tibetan Buddhist debate in the monasteries and they'll see it.

It's extraordinary.

And it's a fantastic practice of good hearted, good nature, good humor and yet fierce in your face, challenging of logic and assumptions and beliefs, our belief structures.

And all of this gets questioned.

And the joy of it is it's passionate, it's dramatic, it's challenging, it's in your face.

But it's also good humored and joyful.

And it trains us not only to think clearly about these deep questions of who we are, why we're here, what's right, what's wrong, but also trains our own interior conversations.

Because isn't that where the Debates that happen inside of our system, our own cognition.

It also trains us to do that well, with good humor.

Yes.

And heart and cheer instead of beating ourselves up, which is often where the problem is.

I think just credit's due.

I think the Jewish tradition has been really good at that.

They've been arguing over Torah and Talmud for thousands of years.

And I heard one person say, jews don't pray to God.

They argue with God.

You know, there's that.

I think that's so healthy.

And that's something I was hoping that we'd be able to bring in here to.

To this podcast.

And I think we touched on it a bit today, and it's been really, really rich and transmutory, I would say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

And Kimberly, is there anything else you'd like to add before we bring this circle to completion?

Oh, just gratitude to the two of you for this incredible work.

I love your listeners.

To know you are not alone, to reach out, to find others that you feel seen and connected to at spiritual level, at a transpersonal level, that there is support for you to explore those arenas, and that this human life is really meant for awakening the heart and expanding our wisdom and then turning that into action in the way that we're each most called to do in our own creativity.

So just lots of appreciation and gratitude and love to you both.

Thank you so much.

And thank you for all you've communicated and transmitted and for the many, many years of deep, committed practice and study that have gone into your capacity for this kind of transmission.

And also just to let people know, I believe some of your teaching is done online and you are accessible in that way, and I have certainly learned from you, and I'm sure anyone who is interested will learn a lot, too.

So, Kimberly, thank you so much.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation.

We hope that you were moved, as we are moved, being part of it ourselves.

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It comes out of our pockets.

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Mainly to get this podcast out to more people because the bigger audience have, which is steadily growing, but the more people we can reach and the more marketing we can do, the more positive effect we can have on the world.

So we've done that a couple of ways, but we'd like you to buy us a cup of coffee.

Very simple.

And I do that with podcasts that I support, and I find it very satisfying.

So thank you for your help.

Thank you for your presence.

And thank you for all you are and all you do.

We love you.