Welcome to part one of our conversation with John Prendergast, depth psychologist, author and spiritual teacher, where we discuss what is our deepest ground and what keeps us from knowing this and our true nature and how we can embody the ground of our own being and the deep transformation that this embodiment brings. 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.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuis. And our guest today is John Prendergast who is a psychologist, formerly a professor of psychology. He's also a spiritual teacher. Was invited to teach by a couple of people including Adyashanti, and he's an author. And the most recent book which we'll be discussing today is your Deepest Ground, A guide to embodied spirituality. John is also the author of several other books, though a beautiful one, the Deep, Our Portal to Presence. Really a beautiful, gentle book and also of the book In Touch, how to tune in to the inner guidance of your body and trust yourself. And a series, Sacred Mirror, Non Dual Wisdom and Psychotherapy. But today we'll zero in on the topic of John's latest book, your Deepest Ground. And so John, welcome. And perhaps we can start with the obvious question, what is deepest ground?

What is our deepest ground? When I write about and talk about the ground, I use it in two ways. One, as a metaphor for a felt sense of aliveness and stability, spacious, alive stability that we feel in the lower part of our body, in the belly, in the hips and the legs. So where this really comes online and we feel ourselves really fully inhabiting the body. So that's the subjective sense of ground. And it's palpable, it's visceral. We feel as that ground in the body opens, we feel like we're really landing here in a very expansive and open way. So that's the subjective sense. And then I also use it as a metaphor for being in touch with reality. And there are different levels to that. There's a physical level, just being in touch with our body. There's a mental level of just having a clear capacity for clear thought, an emotional clarity or groundedness, being in touch with our feelings, subtle energies, being in touch with those within our body and interpersonally as well. And then the deepest ground, which is ungraspable, unfathomable, and which is referred to with many names, you know, as the radiant void, as Buddha nature, as Christ consciousness. Something that is without quality and yet we know it, can know it intimately as a ground of awareness. It has a quality of open, unbounded openness to it.

But touching into this nothingness, it's like changes everything.

It does, it absolutely does. Because we generally take ourselves as a fragment, you know, as a contracted separate being. And when the bottom falls out and the walls come off and the roof comes off, and we know ourselves as this empty openness, as no thingness. It provides a completely different context for how we experience ourself and how we experience the world and how we move from a very different place. A place of love, a place of deep peace, groundedness. So yeah, when I talk about your deepest ground, this is what I'm referring to.

John, could I ask you, getting on the subject of ground, you also talk a lot about in your book about presence.

I do.

And can you distinguish presence from ground?

Yes and no. So the yes is the ground is, I would say, an aspect of presence. In my experience working with myself and people that I've worked with for four decades now, there are three major portals to presence. One is through the mind, one is through the heart, one is through the ground. It's all opening to the same non thingness, open, radiant presence. But they have different flavors. So the opening of the mind brings a sense of tremendous spaciousness and clarity. The openness of the heart, tremendous love, compassion, a sense of wholeness and non separation. Openness of the ground gives a sense of tremendous solidity. And so these are all we could say essential aspects of presence. And what's interesting is when we open to the ground, initially it feels like a descent, like the bottom opens up. But as it continues to open, it becomes global. And the same is true for the heart. You know, at first it feels like it's centered here, mid chest and back, and then also global and similarly with the mind. So it's like they're different doors, they have different qualities or essential qualities of being, and yet they all are aspects of awake awareness. And so when I speak of presence, I'm speaking of awake awareness and these different portals to it.

And John, you make a really very strong statement which struck me so much that I copied it out. You said that in over 40 years of work with students and clients, and you've been both a spiritual teacher and a psychotherapist, you say in over 40 years of work with students and clients, the presence or absence of ground has been the most Important theme. That's quite a statement.

It is. And reason being, I should back up a little bit just to say, for unknown reasons, I am particularly sensitive to subtle somatic dimensions of the body. And so sitting with people and sitting with people who are interested in really a deep transformational process of healing. What I've discovered is very often in that process of awakening and opening, people encounter a deep fear of letting go.

Yes.

A fear of losing control and that annihilation. It's a fear of annihilation. It's like if we lose control, if I lose control, I'll die, I'll be annihilated. I'll lose who I am. And that whole system, that part of the system tends to localize in the guts, in the solar plexus, the lower belly and the base of the spine. In the chakra system, three lower chakras. And so again and again in my work with people as they're in the process of healing and awakening, they encounter this fear of losing control and of annihilation. And very often this is not fully conscious. Often it's subconscious. And there are many dimensions to that. And so this is what I'm referring to. In my work over four decades, people this in depth work. And often people are not initially aware of it. So when we sit with it and people begin to open and then they find their process becoming in some way inhibited. And as we explore more deeply, they come into these contractions, areas of contraction in the lower body that are associated with this fear of letting go, of losing control and of annihilation.

But ultimately on the spiritual journey, this life or next, or whenever that's something that happens.

It is, yeah. If we're really interested in embodying our essential nature, we have to move and move through these layers of resistance, unconscious resistance, because it's not enough. This up and out transcendence is a beautiful first step, I would say. But really there's a very important process of embodying awareness more and more deeply in the physical body, in the subtle body. And this is, I think, very important as an integral approach to spirituality.

Nicely said. And you seems like there have been two quite different perspectives on spiritual life. One is a kind of up and out, let's get the hell out of here. This place sucks. Oh well, there's no intelligent life here, Scotty. Beat me up or whatever it is.

Beat me up, that's right.

And the other is, yes, a moving through psychological and spiritual limitations to a transcendent opening, but then a phase of full embodiment or. And you use the story of the myth of underground descent, and. Which is very closely related to the hero's journey as defined by Joseph Campbell and the phase of. Or of Arnold Toynbee, the great historian, who said that the distinguishing feature of the lives of those people who'd contributed most to humankind was that they went through a cycle of withdrawal and return, withdrew from society and conventional life to some deeper inner exploration, had some kind of realization, and then returned to offer the benefits. It sounds like that's what you're describing.

It is. I mean, there are. I think what I'm describing has some of those elements of a necessary descent into the unconscious, which corresponds with these kind of lower energetic centers. But maybe unlike the hero's myth or story, it's not like we come back with the chalice or the Golden Fleece. We don't emerge as a recognizable hero to society. I think much truer is that we emerge much more simple, much more humbly, much more kind of stripped and open and available to life. And so it's, in a way, the hero gets lost, you know, the heroic will, you know, the egoic will gets lost in the process in this deep descent. And, you know, Carl Jung was also articulating descent as well, and something that he experienced in a very tumultuous way over a century ago on the eve of World War I. So that was interesting to kind of revisit Jung as I was exploring this question of the multidimensionality of the ground, because there is this archetypal dimension. And of course, this is what Joseph Campbell was pointing to.

John, you also mentioned. And I really. I'm a Tolkien fan and I like stories. And you mentioned Gandalf going into the underworld and wrestling with Balrog. I think that's exactly creature. And he falls descent, you know, down into the abyss. And then he comes out later and he's transformed. It's like he doesn't even quite know himself as Gandalf, and the people don't quite recognize him. And in the story of Jesus, which I think Tolkien was riffing off because he was about Catholic, I mean, he knew that story. Jesus dies and descends into the lower parts of the world, wherever that is, and then he comes back in the beginning, his disciples don't even recognize him.

That's right.

Thomas says, I want to stick hands in the wound to make sure it's really you. Who are you? So there's this transformation to a kind of a new, new self that in the beginning, we have to. We don't know ourselves, and those around us don't quite know how to explain it either. So have you found that in your work with your students and yourself?

Yeah, it's true. I mean, what happens is our ordinary sense of identity is deeply, deeply, deeply questioned and seen and seen through. So it's beautiful to bring up that particular teaching, like Christ or Jesus descended into hell, you know, and then rose from that. And that's right. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and so he was developing that theme. And we see it in Dante's Inferno with that descent to the core encounter with, you know, the king, devil, and the descent into another realm, passing through that to Purgatorio and then an ascent as well. So it's a very, very deep mythological process that we hear about. And I think those images that we see, whether it's Gandalf not quite knowing himself and not quite recognized or Jesus, is referring to a kind of translucency of the body, mind that emerges and that we can also refer to as a kind of core illumination. So in the very core of the body, there is this luminosity, generally unconscious. And as people begin to awaken, particularly in this descent of awareness and emergence of the sense of the spirit in everything, the immanence of spirit, there is a sense of the interior of the body lighting up. And so what we took to be dense and solid actually just reveals itself as much more translucent, much more luminous. And these are the themes that we see articulated in these different traditions, this kind of inherent, dormant luminosity that emerges as there's growing intimacy with essential nature, an embodied sense of essential nature. And I have felt that in myself. I mean, this whole description of the opening of the ground was really unfamiliar territory until probably. I mean, there were hints of it, but it really wasn't until maybe 20, 25 years ago that it started to come online, maybe. No, as I say that that's not quite right. I can see earlier evidence of that, but it really gained force in the last 20 years, both in terms of my own experience and as I could sense my. This kind of interior luminosity as there was a process of healing and awakening. I could also sense it in others, often before they did. But when I would point to it, they could recognize it as well.

You also mentioned in what I've read about your life story that you spend a lot of time in wilderness, both backpacking into wilderness with others and by yourself. And has that been a part of this process that you've been going through?

Not so much. I mean, I think it's. I love the high country. I'm just, you know, I love the high Sierra. And mostly I go with others, you know, with friends and just occasionally solo. But when I do, you know, when I do go to the high country, in that silence, in that stillness, in that remarkable beauty, luminosity. This is really called, you know, into the foreground of experience. But no, it hasn't been so much time in nature that's been facilitative as it has been a long standing meditation practice and practice of self inquiry and time with authentic teachers. I really needed the help of attuned guides to help me see through the obscurations and places of fixation. So both practice my own meditative practice and self inquiry practice, but also my time spent with authentic teachers. That's been the primary on a retreat. It's been, I would say, the primary facilitative factor.

Yeah. And you mentioned that Ajat Shanti was one of your primary teachers. What a remarkable man. I think he's retired from teaching now.

Yeah, he did, but I've had a.

Couple of experiences with him and I don't trust spiritual teachers for a lot of personal reasons. And I used to say when somebody says they're a spiritual teacher, I grab my pants and grab my wallet and get out of the room. Right. But I certainly felt that this is a good guy. This man knows where if he speaks. And I immediately felt openness and trust to him. Really remarkable.

Yeah, very high integrity, very authentic. And I felt the same thing. I went to hear, I worked with Jean Klein for probably over 15 years and then he passed away. And a friend invited me to come to a talk of Adyashanti. And I immediately felt the same presence and resonance. I had to go through a letting go of my loyalty in a way to working with Jean Klein in order to be open to Adya. That was an interesting process, but it seemed like he just took over, you know, where Jean had left off and was. I mean, it's a mysterious thing, the connection with a teacher. It's very individual, it's very a matter of resonance and intuition. But I felt that immediate connection and recognition of Adyan as my next teacher. And he was extremely helpful in this process of opening for me. And we've, we've stayed in touch and been friends. So. Yeah, that's beautiful.

Thank you.

Yeah. John, I want to go back and just touch into something you said before which I had not heard before. And that was I was. I had brought in the Joseph Campbell's hero's journey and the return of the hero. And you spoke of the hero in a way I hadn't heard of before, which I thought was very striking, important. But, you know, maybe in some of the deeper inner journeys the heroic will is released and one comes back not as a. In quotation marks hero in any way, perhaps not even recognizable, as with the 10ox herding picture where the sage is unrecognized, but perhaps in a very simple way, stripped of a lot of the baggage or even psychological dynamisms that brought us onto the path.

Yeah, I think so. And the Oxfording pictures, I think is an interesting and important metaphor because there is a returning to the world, so to speak, but in a very simplified way. And it's difficult to actually grasp, I would say that is to say, to define who one is. And there's not interest in doing that. I think that's the most important thing. It's like I don't need to know who I am as a story or as an image. And one is. It's more of a sense of just opening to life and listening and following moment to moment. So it doesn't have a heroic accomplishment in a certain way. It's not an accomplishment or an achievement or an attainment, which is how we normally think about achieving a goal. Because all of that just like dissolves and there's a recognition. What I have been looking for, I am and as is everyone else. And so there's no hierarchy, there's no sense of I'm better than that, I've accomplished anything. But that whole kind of seeking mechanism falls away. And there's a simplicity and an openness. So in that sense, it's a bit different than our normal understanding of the hero or a heroine's journey.

Yes. And I have to say I love this book, John. Your Deepest Ground is really a very beautiful, heartful, truly authentic work. And I have a copied out various quotes to read at various places or to pose to you. But since you're bringing in this idea of the person who returns from the quest as a simpler, as in some ways very unpretentious, shall we say. You point out that it's very easy to have idealized view of saints and sages and your caution seem you give some wise caution about idealizing them and assuming that we can become those ideals.

Yeah, well, I think there's a tyranny of idealization that many people on the spiritual path, myself included, got caught in. You know, you read the books about, you know, I came through the Indian tradition So when I first read. I was an undergraduate at the University of California and someone gave me Yogananda's autobiography. I read that and it's like, wow, you know, how remarkable, all these special qualities and higher states of consciousness. So that was kind of my model. You know, it's like higher states and, you know, these saints. And I have to confess, I had an early ambition to be a saint.

That's not all bad. But one of the things I took away from that book, I was very moved by it also, was the deep humility of this man. It's like, again, somebody's been touched by grace or been gifted something. So not taking a lot of personal credit for it.

Well, that's what it is. It's like you can't hold on to any of it because it actually doesn't belong or refer to you. And who we are, what we discover in this process of opening of inquiry is we're not who we think we are and with our mind define who or what we are. But there is an intuitive recognition. There's a sense of being at ease at home, of discovering a deep sense of peace and also knowing this is true for everyone, right? That this doesn't make one special. It releases us from the desire to be special or the need to be special. It's a real homecoming. There's a naturalness to it, as, you know, we're using the word unpretentious. It's like, I don't have to pretend to be someone or something. I can simply be as I am. And being as I am means I'm also a conditioned being. I have flaws, I have limitations. I am learning. I am growing as an individual. And to recognize our true nature, which is unconditioned and open and boundless, actually gives space for us to be simple and natural and human releases us from the ideal of who we think we should be and allows us to just simply be as we are. And that actually gives space not only for our kind of ordinary humanity and our conditioning, but for deeper elements that are essential, like our gifts, let's say, to come out and be shared in a way that feels appropriate and natural.

As a. No, I think a Protestant poem or was a hymn, but the line stuck with me. It says, ready to go, Ready to stay Ready my place to fill. Ready for service. Smaller. Great. Ready to do God's will.

Beautiful.

So whatever you're called to do, true humility, in that sense of this is not about me, has to be.

That's it. What we follow, that's It. And it's very quiet. There's no, like, one of the interesting things, and this is something I've been, you know, in my first book in Touch, I was looking at is, you know, getting in touch with a sense of inner guidance. And guidance is very quiet. It's non assertive, it's non insistent, it's non judgmental. It's not, you need to do God's work in this way, you know, or I'm on a mission. It doesn't have that kind of missionary zeal or a sense of inflation at all. And it's really very quiet. And it requires a quietude, a silence willingness to let go of who we think we are and what this world is. And then it's interesting, the willfulness kind of gradually transforms into a willingness that this.

That's nice. Yeah, thank you.

A very beautiful. This hymn, John, that you recited points to. It's like, I think we see this. It's, you know, there's a sense of surrender. Thy will be done. And Meister Eckhart pointed to this as well. We have one prayer, Let it be. Thy will be done.

John. Your description of this quiet guidance reminded me of the Quaker statement about the still, small voice within does that.

Very much so.

So, so part of this presence, part of this grounding also includes a sense of a personal guidance and direction. How we as an individual, something that's connected to everything, moves through this time that we are given. And I think great comfort in that, you know, but sometimes I really struggle and I've had periods of time when I've.

It's been very clear, yeah, we could speak of it as personal guidance or maybe I prefer the word individual guidance just because it doesn't have a personal feeling so much to it. It can initially. And then you realize, oh, it's not. It's not really personal. There's something greater moving through that I'm listening to. And as to the small still voice, that's one channel that it can come through in terms of the audio channel, but also. And occasionally it comes that way through me, but fairly rarely, much more. It's kinesthetic or proprioceptive as a felt sense, as a subtle kind of inclination or movement for the next obvious step. And what I found is I don't need to know more than that. You know, I don't need to know the final destination because I can't. I don't know. I can't know. I don't need to know. It's really like, what is the next step? And in that quietude of that listening, very often there's a kind of inclination in a particular direction. And so that, for me is a form that it takes in terms of guidance.

And, John, the thrust of your book, your deepest ground, is this opening to. Well, to our deepest ground.

Our groundless ground.

Our groundless ground, yes. Well, we'll get to that. And you provide some beautiful inquiries for that process. Are there specific practices for this? Is this more an opening that occurs as a function of inner work? In general.

It can be both. I think it can be facilitated by practice, by attending in a particular way. And it also unfolds spontaneously. So in that sense, it can be both. I think there is that tendency. There is a natural tendency of awareness to open and then descend. Although it can open in very different ways for people. Different portals can open in different orders, but generally speaking, it will include descending. Descending aspect. What was your question again, Roger?

Well, I was. I was wondering.

Practice, right?

Yeah, practice, yeah. In general, I tend to think, as we talk about cultivating particular qualities or aspects of being, that there are often any inner work, anything which thins the barriers and blocks and which opens us in various ways is facilitating for the cultivation of any capacity or virtue. But then sometimes there are very specific practices. For example, loving kindness, to cultivate love. I'm wondering, does that also apply for opening to our ground?

It can. And two things that come to me is in the way that I work with people, because people who are really spiritual explorers, people who are really interested in discovering their essential nature, and always will encounter blocks and obstacles and fixations. And the question is to recognize them and how to be with them. And if you try to work with them from the level of the mind or the conditioned mind, often progress is very slow and partial. And so what I have found in my work with people is it's really helpful to evoke presence to whatever degree it's accessible. And so let's say I'm working with someone and they start getting in touch with this fear of losing control and the fear of annihilation. Rather than saying, let's go into that, I'll say, just notice that, Notice the effect, and let's take a step back first and resource yourself. Take a few deep breaths, let your attention drop down and in, and feel a sense of spacious awareness behind you, an open, boundless sense of awake awareness, and just relax back. We're not trying to grasp it, we're not trying to create it. It's already here. It's just a matter of attuning and resting back and just take a minute and rest back in. And as this open awareness. And so we'll sit just quietly for a minute or two and then someone will say, okay, I have a sense of that, some sense. Then from this more open awareness, we invite the contraction, invite the constriction, we invite the fear. Whatever our experience is, we invite that in to this welcoming, open awareness without an agenda to fix or change. Not to make it different, but actually to be intimate with it. This is a fundamental practice that I share with people and just notice what happens as you welcome this conditioned response of fear and whatever beliefs that may go with it into awareness. And very often just in that process of welcoming, there's a natural unfolding that begins to happen. Because I think these areas of constriction are also portals to our true nature. And given the chance, they will open and reveal essential qualities of being and true nature. It's a fascinating process to support and bear witness to. So that's one basic practice, is like welcoming our experience. And in this case, fear of annihilation or fear of losing control.

And I just want to emphasize some of the points you made there, John, because they're really striking and they're counter to common ways of doing psychotherapy, working with people. First off, you don't go straight into the issue or the block or the barrier. You just take time to settle into presence, awareness, to resource the person you say. Second, you invite or welcome the block or barrier in and without an agenda. And what you're making me realize is first number of times I've worked with people and failed to do that, that it's been more. Okay, let's go in. What exactly is this? To explore, investigate. And of course, that has its value.

It does.

But there's added value from the taking time to settle and rest in presence and then to welcome. Because what I noticed as you said, that it just feels like it removes the even very subtle tendency to. This is wrong. We got to get rid of it.

Exactly. Which always engenders resistance.

Yes.

Also, John, and money taken directly from your book. You say maybe there's a paraphrase. But ultimately we find when we do this work, when we open to that, we go to the constrictions, we go into the darkness. We accept the possibility of annihilation. See that we find that the fear is unfounded, that we are the love we seek. Yeah, that's a heaven of a statement. That's a very, very powerful idea.

It's based on direct experience that as we welcome that which we have avoided and pushed away as an inhibition or as a block, we actually discover what it's made up out of is the same thing. It's really innocent confusion. It's contraction and what's in the very center of a contraction, Openness, space and luminosity. So it is a different approach and it's one I actually had to correct within myself in terms of my training as a therapist. Okay, let's find out what the problem is and go into it to actually, let's identify what that is and then step back, open up and welcome into that. And it makes a huge difference because as you're suggesting, Roger, we're not trying to get rid of it. That creates a very different atmosphere. It's really pure exploration and just a desire to get to know it better. An ordinary mind can't do that.

That's so important. And I think in my experience anyway, so underemphasized in conventional psychotherapy. And I know have a little sadness in myself, you know, I spent a lot of years teaching psychotherapy and I may feel maybe I didn't emphasize that enough and probably wasn't aware of it enough, so.

Well, that's why.

Yeah, yeah, but. And I'm also struck by the correspondence, an alignment between what you're saying and the central practice of the diamond approach that Amid Ali offers of inquiry. And we have the privilege of doing a year long series with Amid, otherwise known as H Almerson. It's been really striking in his approach how much he emphasizes opening to whatever arises out of a curiosity, welcoming, just as you do, and no attachment or intention to change things, but rather to.

Trust the unfolding Same principle, isn't it? And I came to this approach from a different angle than Hamid. It's not because I had studied Hamid. I appreciate Hamid's work very much and have followed it for years. But it was actually through my work with Jean Klein and his approach of welcoming experience that my time with him that really facilitated this approach. So, yeah, it's really remarkable to approach our experience with this kind of innocence and curiosity and affectionate attention. Because that's exactly what it's wanting. Right? That's exactly what it's wanting. Because we much prefer, if we're in a conversation with someone, we much prefer that quality of just being received and listened to without an agenda to change us. And same thing applies to our inner experience. So there's another. I just want to mark here, there is another practice of meditative inquiry which does relate to what we're talking about here, like there's a welcoming experience as it is a sensing, a breathing and innocent curiosity. And I also. There's a specific form of meditative inquiry that has emerged in my work with people that specifically is focused towards beliefs. Because I have found that with these contractions and fixations of attention, very often, not always, it depends developmentally, when they were created, there is a core limiting belief. It could be psychological, it could be existential. Like as the psychological can be. Often something's really wrong with me. I'm flawed, I'm not enough, something's lacking, I'm screwed up, I'm deficient in some way or more existentially, I'm separate, I'm alienated, the universe is hostile. And these are very deep, very profound effects in terms of our sense of self. And so being able to recognize those first. And they can be usually identified in very simple words because they're often formed in childhood. Noticing what the somatic contraction is and the emotional, you know, the affective reaction is important. And then I find again, kind of step back, let that go, and just evoke the question, what's my deepest knowing about this now? Or alternatively, what's true? And let it go. It's very interesting what happens because this kind of. There's this infusion of the light of awareness into these areas of contraction. It feels like there's like new information, new energy entering into a closed system and a very interesting transformative process. So I find, I think, like Hamid, I have found meditative inquiry, even more than sitting practice, to be the most powerful transformative practice in my work.

And Hamid says, going along with what you're saying, one of the essential parts of that is a deep and profound love of the truth.

Absolutely. This is the core of it. It's like it's not so much the practice itself, but where the practice comes from. And if we're engaged in self inquiry, it's like the first question to ask is, do I really want to know what's true? And to be honest about that, not as a judgment, but just kind of notice what comes up. Do I really want to know? And usually there'll be an ambivalent response. There'll be a yes and a no. And that no is very interesting, right? No is very, very interesting. To be honest about and to welcome that, that can be a starting point. No, I don't want to know. Oh, okay. Welcome in. What's that about?

John, you're pointing to something which I hadn't heard articulated before, at least that I can recall. Which is that the implication that at deep levels of work limiting beliefs. And I also want to just take a moment to acknowledge and emphasize what you're saying about the importance of recognizing limiting beliefs that and that they do tend to underlie, it seems so many of our blocks and barriers and limitations and act as self fulfilling prophecies. But you're suggesting that it's important to do what we call. Let's see, I'm trying to come up with a term transpersonal cognitive therapy to work on existent. Not just personal limiting beliefs, but existential limiting beliefs. It's almost like one. There's great value in correcting one's metaphysical assumptions about oneself in life.

Can you give us an example of an existential limiting belief that you're talking about?

I am a separate self.

Wow.

Yeah.

I am disconnected from the whole of life. This goes very, very deep and it's developmentally inevitable. It's just part of the human experience to take oneself as separate to a certain point and then we begin to question it. And when we start questioning that one, things really open up.

The only other place I can think of this where this has been spoken of explicitly and of course I'm sure there are other examples and people and teachers, but is in the work of Stanislav Grof, who was the great psychedelic pioneer and transpersonal psychology founder and so forth. And he said, you know, his work with. And he's probably, interestingly, he's probably seen a wider array of profound human experiences than anyone else in history. You know, he guide personally guided over a thousand LSD sessions plus thousands of holotropic breathwork sessions. And he said, you know, for the deepest levels of work, it's really important to. Where he stayed, I think was to have a skillful metaphysical framework which I would understand as saying, a framework that is released. The kind of limiting existential beliefs to which you're pointing.

Exactly. The more comfortable we are with not knowing, not in terms of being ignorant, of course, but not in any way devaluing rational thought, but just seeing the limitation of thought. Seeing that thought beautiful, powerful tool, cannot grasp its source. The more that we recognize that there's a kind of a space around ordinary mind that emerges of just openness of curiosity, of not knowing and not needing to grasp some kind of final conclusion about what reality is. And that quality of openness is so precious and so inherently transformative.

Yes. And it seems that there's even a place there for recognizing limiting beliefs such as it's not okay not to know.

Exactly. That's Right. That's right. And in that openness, a different kind of knowing starts moving. Right. Transrational knowing or true gnosis emerges.

And how would you. What's the experience of that kind of knowing, John?

For me, because I'm wired more kinesthetically, it comes as a felt sense, almost vibratory, of openness, aliveness, of luminosity, of some sense of. Yeah, those would be the qualities, I would say. Aliveness, luminosity, sense of internal clarity about whatever, life, myself.

When you say not knowing, it sounds like you're pointing to a couple of things. You're pointing to the importance of recognizing bottomless mystery. And you're also pointing to the importance of a kind of knowing which is not a conceptual understanding.

Exactly. And this is. I didn't know this clearly for many, many years. I couldn't have made that differentiation. I could have done it intellectually quite easily. And did you read about it? You talk about it. But when there was a real shift that happened and there was this recognition of inherent wholeness and awake awareness that's always been here in the background, and when it suddenly came into the foreground, the distinction between ordinary thought and this knowing as awake awareness was very, very clear and eventually became the ordinary experience as well, within which the mind is operating. So often it's spoken of as being skylike in this expanse and its clarity.

John, I'd love to move into another topic here. And that is one of your chapters in your book, your Deepest Ground, where you take as exemplars of two kinds of approaches to the psyche and our depths. And you take the exemplars of Carl Jung and Ramana Maharshi, two giants of. What should we call them? Explorations of the most profound aspects of the psyche. So maybe you could say. And you juxtapose them in a very beautiful and skillful way. So maybe you could say what these two giants represent for you or symbolize.

Stay tuned for part two of our conversation with spiritual teacher and depth psychologist John Prendergast. Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation. Conversation. We hope that you were moved, as we are moved, being part of it ourselves. We'd also like to say that this is being funded by Roger and myself. It comes out of our pockets. So if you would like to help us to. 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's very satisfying. So thank you for your help. Thank you for your presence and thanking for all you are and all you do. We love you.

Sa.