Tami Simon: Today I speak with Rick Jarow. Rick is someone who has an interesting combination of credentials. He’s an alternative career counselor and an associate professor of religious studies at Vassar College in New York, and the author of several books, including the Alchemy of Abundance. He’s also published numerous audio learning programs with Sounds True, including The Advanced Manifestation Program and The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide. Rick is someone who’s very dear to me, someone I consider a kind of brother, and it was my honor to speak with Rick about how we can align our talents and desires with the hidden currents of the universe, what he calls “the art of manifestation.”
Rick, I think people in the Sounds True audience know you as the anti-career counselor. At a time when so many people have either lost their jobs or are interested in changing jobs, it’s a good time to explore what does it mean to have an anti-career? So what do you mean by that?
Rick Jarow: The anti-career started from my New York background because people don’t come to New York to raise a family. All these people come to the city, to create, manifest some career dream, and somewhere in the middle they would land in my office and want to figure out what went wrong. And so the basic polemic behind the anti-career was don’t crucify your life on the cross of the career. Don’t let the working situation hang you up so dramatically that you forget who your are and why you came here. So it’s a challenge to apply the intelligence of creativity and manifestation to the workplace so that one does not become a complete wage slave.
TS: Now you use this term manifestation. That’s a word that has a lot of different meanings for people. I want to manifest. What do you mean by it?
RJ: That’s tricky, and all these words–manifestation, abundance, alignment–are really tricky terms, and people use and mean them in different ways. But from the technical vocabulary that I work with, technically out of the Bhagavad Gita and Sanskrit language, manifestation was called viukta, which literally meant visible. The aspect of the universe that is visible to the human being is that which is manifest. The white cloud, the blue sky, the green grass, the workplace, the train running in front of you, the cars, the food on your table, this is all manifest. And what is not manifest is what is in dormancy or invisibility. And things keep circulating in and out of manifestation.
My sense, this idea that I want to manifest, this is not a complete misnomer, but it’s a very small portion of what manifestation actually is, and I think it’s been—I don’t want to go overboard and say it’s a tragedy, it’s kind of been a fitting tragedy, just as our economy is a fitting tragedy—that a lot of the rhetoric of manifestation has been hijacked by proponents of individual selfishness and greed. That’s not what it’s about at all, but neither is it about just giving up on the world and sealing yourself off. Manifestation as I understand it has to do with the intelligent and compassionate interaction with the visible world, and particularly, what visible world? The one that’s been put on your plate, the one that’s been given to you. This I think particularly in the United States is so crucial because so much of our spirit and force has been about moving ahead, and kind of erasing where we come from. But the process of manifestation really encompasses the timeless and time and past and future and the need to acknowledge where we came from, who was there. I think this is really crucial.
TS: What are you talking about, my biographical family, when you say where I’ve come from?
RJ: I’m talking about your biographical family. I’m talking about your cultural history. I’m talking about your dream texts—all of the above—and the most concrete example I can think if is a report I actually saw on the news in the airport. It said that the greatest fear of Americans is that they won’t have enough money to retire.
TS: That sounds right.
RJ: And I was thinking about this. And I was thinking, what is going on here? Still we’re one of the richest countries in the world, still we have huge resources. Why this huge anxiety? The one thing I could think of was if you are not rooted, reconciled, connected to the ground upon which you stand, you’re always going to be going someplace and anxious that you’re not going to be supported. And the way I see this in terms of our cultural history as a nation, there’s been some acknowledgement of slavery but there’s been almost no real public acknowledgment of the genocide of native people, the taking of the land, the broken promises. And to me this is sitting underneath the façade of stores and fast-food places. And until things like this are brought to light and reconciled in some form, there’s going to be no comfort around where we are. So that’s what I mean. That the cultural history, the shadows that are not expressed, as well as the results of what has happened.
TS: What you’re saying, though, is very unrelated to what most people think about when they think about manifesting.
RJ: Exactly, because we’re the fast-food nation, fast-enlightenment nation. We want results very quickly and we live by ratings. But the ratings are like the waves in the ocean. I’m sorry, but even the rhetoric of living in the present often misses the reality that the culture, the history, the land that we come from is very real, and that is part of the plate that we were given. We were born with this stuff on our table. And therefore, we might not be responsible for it but we need to be responsible to it. I can’t see any real deep, depth sense of peace and reconciled abiding for people who want to cut off from their family, their history, their land, as a lot of contemporary programs suggest you do: reinvent your life out of nothing.
TS: Just to take this a little further, I can certainly imagine someone listening who says, “Look, I’m here in the present and I’m envisioning the future that I want. I don’t want to go back and think about my terrible abusive father. Forget all that. I’ve cleared my past, let alone the crimes that have happened on this land to Native Americans by people that I have no connection with. I’m here in the present. I see the clouds. I got that part when Rick said it’s about what’s visible, and here’s what I want to make visible. I want to make this fabulous future career visible. What’s wrong with this guy Rick, Mr. Anti-Career now, anti-the-present-moment now. What’s wrong with him?”
RJ: Well, there’s so much wrong with me I can give you the list. But here’s the thing. You mentioned in that little diatribe, “I’ve cleared my past.” How have you cleared your past? Hypothetically, you’re talking. How have you cleared your past? Because why is it, with all these people who are imagining what they want, they never get it?
TS: Yeah! I’d actually like to know that.
RJ: Let’s talk turkey here. I was just in LA. Nine out of ten people I met in LA is either a yoga teacher, a life coach, or an aspiring actor. The interesting thing to me is all the yoga teachers are competing with one another over studio space and this and that, and I never saw business competition as part of the Yoga Sutras. It’s a new invention. And everyone who doesn’t know what to do becomes a life coach. So why is it that people imagine what they want and they don’t get it?
One of the reasons is that it’s not all about you. You are one little dot among 8 billion minds, and those 8 billion minds on the planet are connected with a gazillion minds in the past and future and you can only manifest from the center of gravity of the prevailing thought forms of where you are. And so if you’re living here, you have to contend with all the thought forms of the past and future of this land and work with it because you really can’t step out of history, even if you are out of history if you’re an enlightened Krishnamurti or someone like that, you still have to work within history and language. So that’s one reason.
Another reason why people aren’t getting what they want is because they don’t know what they want. Most of the things that people say that they want are reactions to cultural propaganda. How many of us have really done the work and dug deep into ourselves and talked to our contemporaries, our families, and our friends and really come out with, what do we want? Because what I want has to be in relationship to you. In LA and every place else, one of the first things people learn in manifestation is to manifest parking spaces. But what if someone else needed that parking space more than you? What if someone really needed that space? So without some kind of ethical underpinning, without some kind of community connection, without some kind of “we,” the “I” manifesting what I want is almost satanic. Sorry, but . . . I’m getting dramatic. [laughs].
TS: It’s okay, keep going, man, keep going.
RJ: My working definition of the devil is the private pursuit of happiness because it’s going to lead to amazing misery. You’ll be King Midas, you’ll have everything you want, everything will manifest in front of you like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky and there’s no other. It’s the ultimate loneliness. It’s the ultimate opposite of being one with everything and everyone.
TS: Okay, but here I want to manifest different qualities in my life. I don’t know what other people want. Can’t I just figure out what I want? How do I do this in relationship with others?
RJ: That’s a really important question, Tami. I think that’s one of the crucial questions. And I think that’s one of the crucial errors that people are making. Even if you are exiled onto a desert island forever, there will be thousands of people manifesting in your mind. The idea that I’m going to go into introspect and discover an answer and then come out and tell the world kind of flies in the face of reality. In fact, careers are created through relationship. Life paths are created through meeting people. Any career professional will tell you that you should put 20 percent of your energy into sending out resumes and 80 percent of your energy into making personal connections. So I would argue that manifestation is revealed in relationship and that is why when we do manifestation work and workshops and circles, it’s not enough for someone to say what you want. It’s much more powerful if you can say what you want and someone can listen to you and give you feedback. And then we have something that can grow.
TS: Okay, but still, I want to access an inner dream. How is it that I’m informing that with other people and they way other people are in my life?
RJ: First, I wasn’t being completely fair. There is definitely a part of accessing an inner dream, a part of our responsibility of getting clear about what’s important now. In things like the ultimate [anti-]career guide, I assign that to the third chakra–taking the responsibility of being clear about oneself. But then the next step, which I assign to the fourth chakra, is taking your dream or idea and offering it to your community and whether it’s your community of investors or supporters or people who are interested in your product or your service, there’s both a dream and a community action. And I have met hundreds–and I assume there are thousands—of disgruntled people living in basements and attics all over the world who complain that the world doesn’t understand their genius or vision. But the fact of the matter is they’ve done very little to help the world understand. So, yes you have a dream. The Greeks called it a dimand, an inner spirit that is pushing you toward a destiny. But that destiny is always collective. It’s always interwoven with others. You can’t get born alone. A vision can’t get born alone.
TS: I remember from The Anti-Career Guide, one of the things you said that really stuck with me [was] that a marketplace is your community. If you have products you want to sell to a marketplace, that marketplace is in a sense your field of connections.
RJ: Right, right. And I think the real innovative, evolutive potential in our time and the greatest challenge is the rethinking and regenerating of community. This is where evolution can happen. Aurobindo saw that. It’s not Rick Jarow’s idea. And this is my point about manifestation. The energy of manifestation, the energy of evolution, the energy of awakening is flowing through all of us like a tidal wave and we each refract a piece of it. And if we can share it in an evolutive and synergistic way we may find a way through these times, instead of everybody getting up on a soapbox and telling us their vision.
TS: Now when you think of the reinvention of community, and I know that means lots of different things to different people, what kinds of things does it mean to you?
RJ: Okay, here’s what it means to me, basically. Community has been a very scary word, because historically we have seen communities destroy individuals. And still now in my trips—I make frequent trips to Eastern Europe—and I see all the old houses where people were afraid to put anything bright on their door because they didn’t want to be noticed, because the police would come. We have on one hand the history of communal tyranny. Not only fascist and communist, but historically the community has put scarlet letters on people and not let them express themselves. On the other hand, the fallacy of individualism has revealed itself in people bopping around the freeway in California on the freeway in LA just wasting gas, that you can’t just create your own world. So on the one hand we have our historical, cultural commitment since, at least the Reformation, to the freedom of the individual. On the other hand we have the recognition that the individual needs others. So I see the challenge, the regenerative challenge, is creating communities that do not suppress individual freedom, because the two have been an anomaly. The two have never gone together.
TS: Have you ever participated in such a community that doesn’t suppress individual freedom?
RJ: I’ve participated in a lot of communities and most of them have been failures, and so I’ve learned from those failures. Okay, let’s lay it all out. The Hilda community that I was a part of in the ’80s—these people bought land, and before that community got formal, there was an amazing collection of people who used to come every Thursday to St. John the Divine’s Cathedral and jump up and down and share stories and meditate. And during those years, I remember living in New York, I moved about six times and I never had to call a mover because there was always someone who would help me. However, the minute things got organized and formalized and fear-based and people got on the land, the first thing was this community needs morality. Well, whose morality? What does that mean? It means no same-sex couples living together—all this kind of stuff—and the whole thing just blew up. The whole thing imploded and it imploded in the most unseemly but appropriate way possible. Hilda’s own children—not her biological children, but the people who she brought up–they kind of led the charge of rebellion. So I’ve seen things come and go and fall apart, and nevertheless, one of the things that keeps me going, for the last ten, fifteen years I have been doing these week-long workshops at places like Esalen, Omega, which are—I see them as transitional communities. Angeles Arrien calls them a community of strangers. People come together and listen to each other in a supportive, nonjudgmental way, help people manifest their visions. So the step beyond this—we have been working on a manifestation community, which is unorganized, but nevertheless people coming together to support each others’ creative process and path. This is the place where I think work has to be done. And one of the big pieces is the issue of leadership versus control. There are lots of communities that evolve easily when one charismatic person, kind of abusively tells everybody else what the story is, but to me those are the retrograde communities. And the real challenge—and I think it started with the formation of the United States of America through the Iraquois Nation—is coming into council and learning processes of decision making and living together that are not necessarily top down. And it’s very hard stuff.
TS: I can imagine somebody listening this and thinking, okay, I thought I was going to hear about manifestation and now I’m listening to sort of hippie talk about community.
RJ: Hippie. Hippies have not been able to organize anything.
TS: But you know what I’m saying. We’re talking about land and people living together and being themselves.
RJ: It’s not about living together. That’s one thing. That the communities of the future are happening on many—you know, you could argue that Facebook has become a futuristic community. People don’t have to live together to work together. I think that’s very important. But people need think tanks and places to incubate and manifest their higher visions.
TS: So for you, you see that to think about manifestation and take it seriously without considering this question of community and who’s my community, there’d be like a missing piece if you don’t put those two things together?
RJ: Yeah, that’s a nice way of saying it. And in a way, I’m giving it voice because I don’t think it’s been sufficiently recognized.
TS: Yeah, I agree with you.
RJ: If I just have my thing and I have my audience and you have your thing and your audience—you know, bonfire of vanities. Everybody’s playing to the audience. And they have to keep playing harder and harder because what everybody really wants, which is heart connection, is missing. And then because people aren’t getting it in many different ways, then they fixate on romantic relationships, like “this is my be all and end all, I have to have this.” So we need ways of working with each other. By the way, a business can be a community. I think one of the great engines of transformation in contemporary society will be and is small business, because the small business leader has the opportunity to create a culture. Like the dogs at Sounds True.
TS: It’s true. There is one sitting next to me as I’m sitting here in the studio, a small cocker spaniel.
RJ: There’s this really naïve sense of fantasy that if I just think about it and wish about it and think on it, it’s going to happen. And it’s much more complicated than that. Because you are having hundreds of thousands of thoughts run though you every day. And those thoughts are not necessarily your own. Most of them belong somewhere else.
TS: What do you mean by that, they belong somewhere else?
RJ: They belong to someone else. I had a guy from Australia who came to my workshop and said, “I was walking down the streets of New York and I started having all these strange thoughts about different ethnic groups. I don’t even know these ethnic groups.” It’s like they’re swirling in the air. They’re in the collective, they’re in the media, they’re in the mass mind, and we pick them up like antennas. So I think a much more accurate picture of manifestation is not what I want and how I get it, but what frequency I’m tuned into and what I’m broadcasting out.
TS: Okay, let’s talk about that a little bit–what frequency I’m tuned into.
RJ: This gets us to the bank account of manifestation. Where does the creative power come from? It is, as far as I can see, a question of attention. Your greatest asset is your attention and that’s why everybody wants it—your greatest capital asset, because your attention is the way you interact and develop your process of creation. So it’s not about, “I say an affirmation for twenty minutes a day and the red Rolls Royce is in the garage,” and the other twenty-[three] hours and forty minutes a day I’m concerned with who won the baseball game. That’s where my attention really is. So becoming aware and becoming cognizant of how our attention gets hooked and how our attention gets free and how our attention can become intention, that’s the work of the individual.
But even then, where do visions come from? How does one get from vibrating at 500 megahertz a minute to five thousand? Usually, it happens through meeting someone or hearing an idea. You tune into something that is beyond where you’ve been and it captures your heart and it captures your imagination and it marshals the resources to begin to focus there. But it’s not just you. You’ve tuned into something. And [for] most of us every day there are these angels floating down in the form of thoughts, just pricking our attention—how about this? How about this? But we’re too locked in or busy to receive them. So spaciousness is very helpful.
TS: I’d like to unpack a little bit this idea that you were saying about attention and intention, because a lot of people jump pretty quickly just to intention. “Here’s my intentions.”
RJ: Yeah, this is my whole point. Jumping on the train of intention without processing your attention, what generally happens is you wind up on a train to someplace else than you thought you’d be going. Because attention is a deep tapestry, it’s a deep fabric of thought, feeling, form, perception, multiplicity. It’s very rich. Think about it, just to jump out of it and say, “I want this.” This is what my little kids used to do. “I want to watch this program. I want my milk and I want it now.” And then you get your milk and then you want something else. Unprocessed intention does not solve the problem of desire and suffering. It just exacerbates it.
TS: So then in your view, what is the empowering relationship to intention? How [do] intention and attention connect?
RJ: I see two very clear portals of manifestation that connect these issues, and they’re often thought of as separate, but I see them as very much intertwined with each other. The first one is awareness, opening the field of awareness to becoming exquisitely aware of everything that is flirting with my attention, attracting my attention, or demanding my attention, so I can make more informed choices or guide my rudder to the area of the ocean or sea that really feels right for me. So the awareness is the open space, but the other part that is a compliment to awareness is the use of the imagination. So here’s the thing. If we just jump from intention to intention, that is just a more sophisticated way of jumping from desire to desire, which got us ensnarled in the mess that we’re in already. However, if we can open spaciously in awareness to what is really attracting our attention and what’s really demanding our attention, which is often painful, that’s step one, which is very much correlative with the first of the–in the Buddhist tradition of the Eight Fold Path, which is right views. Look at what’s happening, look at what’s on your plate, what’s really attracting your attention. Don’t go away from what’s attracting your attention, escaping into something that you want that’s not really going to deal with who you are. That’s step one.
Step two is once you have a sense of what’s attracting your attention, whether it’s your indebtedness, your sexual depravity, your business, whatever it is, can you open the closed clutching claws of judgment. Can we release the judgment around it. Here’s the alchemical metaphor, Tami. The human being is living suspended between opposites–north and south, east and west. Should I eat meat, should I be a vegetarian? Should I vaccinate, should I not vaccinate? Should I start a business? Should I go to China and meditate? We’re suspended between opposites. If you’re too shallow in the intention field you just jump on to one side and then the other side drags you back. If you can open the field of awareness, which I would define awareness as generous patience with what is. If we can open that field and allow ourselves to literally be torn, suspended, open, broken open by the tremendous attention dramas and oppositions and realities that are alive, then what can be born is a healed vision, and that’s what I’m looking for. Not just, “I’m having problems with money, let me envision myself having more money.” That’s not going to get to the root of what caused the problem in the first place. But if you can be deeply aware in all the ways that money is attracting your attention and release all the ways you think it should be. And the trust in the basic goodness of the universe allows the birth of a healed vision around money. Not only how would I be more rich, but what would it look like to be healed from my community—to be economically healed. That is a vision that can draw you into intention organically and not from a superficial ego platform.
TS: That’s good Rick, that’s really clear. One of the things in the beginning our conversation that you talked about was how you can’t just ignore your personal history or your cultural history and you even mentioned the land, what’s happened on the land where you are, and I’m curious how that plays in? Why even bring up this issue of the land?
RJ: That’s a really good question, and I wish I had a really good answer. I don’t know if his work applies as much for America as the rest of the world, the European world anyway, but I think Bert Helinger has a good pulse on the power of ancestry and things of this nature. You know Helinger, the Jesuit priest who does family consolation therapy?
TS: I’ve heard of his work, yeah.
RJ: He spent years as a missionary with the Zulus, and that’s how he understood the power of ancestry. He says you can move to a new country, you can change your name, you can build your own castle, but on some level deep within you’re always trying to heal something from the family of origin, from the culture. So the land that we live on, the history that we come from, I do not advocate drowning ourselves in it—making that our be all and end all unless that’s your particular calling–but I feel there is a richness in that that needs to imbue our own work so we have the blessings of our predecessors and don’t pretend they’re not there. To have the blessing of your predecessors doesn’t mean you have to follow or do what they did. But if you learn who lived on the land before you, if you learn what went on here, if you know the flowers as Gary Snyder puts it, you suddenly have a whole different level of support and you begin to notice—I spoke to a group that started a little community, and they propitiated the spirits of the land and I said how do you know the spirits listened to you? Well, when the foxes started coming back, when the water started running again, we knew we were doing something right.
The Greek vision of this was there are many different realms of divinity and you have the freedom and the right to go toward the one you’re aligned with. But it is a mistake to ignore the others—that everyone should have their due. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in India in front of my friends the cloth salesmen and before they eat or tea, they always through a little bit on the ground just to offer it to the earth, to the birds, to kind of move into a greater sense of community. I think the greatest offering that is not acknowledged is the offering of attention. If we just paid more attention to the land we live on and the people who came before us, we might start having a lot of good ideas.
I have a colleague who’s a writer and his father was a publisher. So when he was growing up he kept saying, “I’m not going to publish books, I’m going to be creative. I’m going to write them.” So he wrote a lot of books, but none of them sold. And at some point he said, “Maybe I should kind of listen to the ancestral knowledge about how to publish and market books. Maybe that could work with my writing and not against it.”
Now there are places where tragedy has occurred and where the land is marked by that tragedy, and my sense is that if we are part of that land, our job is to help release the spirits that are still trapped and to help transmute that into a peaceful situation. A friend of mine was walking on the beach in Malibu and came against the most unworldly stones I’ve ever seen. They looked like humans, they looked like heads, but they were rocks. When he tuned into them, he got a very clear sense that these stones were from the Shumash. People think that the Shumash, the tribes are extinct, but they’re not, they’re living in dreamtime and they have a lot to share. So basically, this is the same issue as finding ways of connecting with ancestors or with luminaries from the past. It’s not that we want to go backward, but we want to be at least translucent enough to allow these forces to imbue our work with their richness. That way it gets us out of the ego thing, that “this is my work, this is my vision.”
Think of someone like John Phee, the ecoactivist, who literally sees himself as a manifestation of the rainforest, and that has empowered amazing work.
TS: What do you mean by that, a manifestation of the rainforest?
RJ: He doesn’t see himself as a human being. He just says, “I’m part of the rainforest. I’ve taken the form of a human, but I’m here to represent the rainforest and its interests.” Strange?
And a lesser, more believable manifestation: a woman who told us a couple of weeks ago at a workshop said, “Look, I can create all the goal and action boards and lists that I want, however, when I feel that I’m responsible to someone or that I’ve made a promise to someone, all of a sudden I’m able to do what I wasn’t able to do before.”
TS: I’m curious, Rick, if you put some of these ideas together and answered a question that the title of one of your Sounds True programs proposes: The Beginners Guide to Finding Your Perfect Job. Now, granted you recorded this program with us awhile ago, and I’m sure that you’re thinking that it has, in some ways, changed. How could you put some of these ideas together to help someone who might be listening who says, “I want to find the perfect job”?
RJ: I have to just add a couple of things here. The one thing that we did not discuss, which again, it’s not necessarily the individual, but it’s very crucial to creating any type of viable work in any economic situation, and that is to come down to your own basic sense of well-being. Whether we call this abundance, whether we call this radical trust, whether we call this authenticity, I see four spokes on a wheel of manifestation and one of them is well-being. And by that well-being I mean developing the sense or uncovering the sense that it is completely all right and viable to be me. That I don’t have to become someone else to enter into the workplace. Now the way a lot of people discover this is by taking the time to connect with communities that really work for you instead of trying to fit into a community that is bending you out of shape. So that’s where the community issues comes in. Where are the communities? And by communities I do not mean hippie communes in the forest. A business is a community, an institution is a community, a mediation center is a community, and most of us will, I think, healthfully belong to many intercepting communities. But where are the communities that will recognize my talents and abilities and give me the space to explore, the communities that want my best and don’t want me to be a copy of whomever? So step one, well-being, really come from the sense of well-being. And step two, go into the communities of the past and future, the ancestors, the friends, the land that really support me and allow me to be who I am. If people are more sensitive to the land, you’ll see that there are places that you definitely feel you belong, and places where you’re always barking up the wrong tree.
So we move from well-being to social affinity and from the community and the social affinity that allows us to be ourselves, then we can begin to incubate intentions. And there are different levels of intention. In my own work I’ll speak of a vision which is an overarching of what I can be—what we can be, versus or in partnership with an incremental trajectory, which is having an intention that manifests within a period of time. But notice, that intention is not developed in a vacuum. It’s developed with others giving you feedback. It’s developed until it’s really solidified in yourself. And then the question of communities at large—and this is really important for any product or service, which is how can my talent, my dream, my vocation, how can my thing help the people around me? Where is it of value?
One example of this, and I don’t think this is just clever marketing, it’s a real example of the upiya of intention—the skillful means of intention and community of someone like John Kabat-Zinn. He could have been a Buddhist meditation teacher. He could have been a molecular biologist turned yoga instructor, but at some point he said, “Who’s my community? The medical people. They really don’t want to hear about Buddhism. But they really do want to hear about stress reduction.” And mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is his product, is nothing but basic Buddhist mediation and mindfulness practices put in a language that can serve a particular community. And that to me is how a vocation is born. It’s through the interaction: “What are my people asking of me? How can I serve?” Not just, “what’s my vision?” Does that make sense?
TS: Makes a lot of sense.
RJ: And the vision is also collective. For example, we had an amazing man who’s come to three of my workshops at the Esalen Institute. When he first came he was a captain in the US Army, and now he’s way up the ladder. And we always processed with him, what is the vision, the best vision you can imagine for the armed forces? But his vision is not going to manifest unless he can convince a few other people in the army to go in that direction. So the vision is there, but you have to understand if it is your dharma, if it is your job to give the vision of the future, to help language the vision to the community, or to do the nuts and bolts of it. So one way is to get the army together and say, “what’s the highest thing we can imagine for the work?” Disaster control, ecological healing, so many things could be done with that type of power. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be done if the center of gravity is still somewhere else. So vision is one thing and active reality is another, and how they relate in your life has a lot to do with what’s going to happen.
TS: Now, this series of interviews is called “Insights at the Edge,” and part of what I’m curious about is to find out in people’s personal lives, what they’re working on that is currently your edge, if you will?
RJ: I’m happy to talk about that. My edge is community. I think the edge of manifestation is community. And by the way, maybe community is not the exact word, because it has social connotations. But let me give you an example of what I’m talking about: In just about every major holistic center that I’ve worked with, the weekend workshop format is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, whereas the ongoing learning format is expanding. People want to learn something over a period of time with other people, as opposed to just getting a shot in the arm, because people want the learning community. So here’s my edge, Tami. I’ve been doing what we call the advanced manifestation program. I’ve been doing these groups for years now. We’ve done some experimenting and we have some formats that work, but the edge for me is to help birth, not live-in communities, I don’t think that necessarily helpful, but to help birth venues where people can come together and incubate their highest creative visions; bounce them off one another; actually accomplish something in a way that is holistic, synergistic, and fun. In order to get to that place, I have to—and here’s my edge—I have to relinquish some hierarchical and financial position. That’s what’s become very clear to me.
TS: You mean in order to be part of some ongoing group like this you’re not going to be able to swoop in and get paid the way you used to?
RJ: Right. And it’s not going to work if it’s coming from the top down, whether I’m at the top or anyone else is at the top. It’s going to work when enough people—which doesn’t mean that people don’t take their expertise and really work it—but it’s going to happen when there’s a sense of synergistic sharing that’s making everyone more creative, and where people really are encouraged to take that creative responsibility.
So this way it’s manifesting our group, and we’re having an ongoing discussion [about it]. Instead of just meeting once a month and Rick does a meditation and people talk and we incubate projects, what if we met more times, and what if at one point Rick could do a meditation, another meeting we could do open-space technology, where everybody would present things and working with them. Another time we work with storytelling and movement. In other words, have a lot more participation. Now, this is an edge for me, and an edge is a place where you can fall off very easily.
Let me give you another example about what I’m talking about. Maybe this will be helpful. When I look through the catalogs, go online, all the places where people are speaking, I rarely, rarely see a place where there’s dialogue. Even at conferences, X, Y, and Z get up and they say their things and then they’re asked questions and everybody goes home. Or Joe Hill gets up and talks about the environment and Mary Morningstar gets up and talks about healing. And then come to this workshop, come to that workshop. And to me that’s the old format of somebody telling the audience how it is. I would love to see a venue where some of these people would get together and publicly speak with one another and really work at generating and birthing what the new world is, because I think that’s how it’s going to happen. That’s how the Constitution happened. That’s where I think the edge is. I think the edge is for people to start dialoging in a more community-minded way and less in top-down, “I have the truth, follow my formula,” ten-easy-steps way. But it’s very tricky, because if you look at blogs, where the other side is if everyone comes in and give their two cents without even thinking about it, that kind of waters it down to the lowest common denominator. So it’s an edge, and that’s the edge I’m on, and maybe I’ll fall off it and maybe I won’t.
TS: I’m sure you’re thought about this as being a manifestation teacher, leading the groups, blah, blah, blah, even if you’re stepping into more of a collective type of process. You’re still the leader of the manifestation group and teaching these courses that you have to ask yourself, have I manifested in my life—I mean, how do you look at that? How do you evaluate your own level of manifestation?
RJ: That’s really good, and I think the beautiful thing about this question is that everyone has to answer for themselves.
TS: So how do you answer that for yourself, is my curiosity.
RJ: Peace, freedom, kindness, patience, and generosity are what I’m looking for. And it’s interesting, I used to see it as my freedom is the absence of anxiety. I don’t need money, I don’t want money, I don’t not want money. I want to be free with money. I don’t want to be anxious about money. That would be my freedom—not how much I have. Likewise with a relationship. Likewise with my house or my car. And so one barometer for me is the absence of anxiety, but the other one that I’ve really tuned into recently is the ongoing feeling of the manifestation of kindness. Because kindness to me is the overflow; It means that I’m full. And to me the fullness is being the witness of the divine grace happening at every moment. Being the ongoing present witness of the unfolding of miraculous reality, and to be so present in it that I can be there whether you’re in your penthouse in New York City or whether you’re dying of cancer in the hospital. That I want to be there with you with an open heart. That’s what I’m going for. So the process for me is every day to be really conscious of what triggers me and what closes my heart. To understand that, to breathe through that and to understand that I can let it go because walking around this world with a closed heart didn’t do me any good.
And what I mean a closed heart, I’m not just talking la-dee-dah, if I can give you an example in my life. I used to be very afraid of dying. I was obsessed with death. I read books. I wrote books. Reincarnation, nonreincarnation, and all of that vanished when I finally allowed my mind to sink into my heart. It turns out it wasn’t death I was afraid of, it was the split between the mind and the heart. So my job as I see it is ongoing sadana or spiritual practice. What connects that with manifestation is my fervent belief and conviction is that if this cannot happen in the walkaday world, where could it happen?
I’m very serious that if someone asks me, “what is your practice,” I’m totally serious that my practice is everyday. Is the water boiling over on the stove? Is my daughter falling and scraping her knee? Is the rent getting raised or is someone getting thrown out of their house? Everyday, that, to me, is it. Emerson had a beautiful line, which I carry with me. There are two lines that I carry with me that I’d like to share. Emerson said, “I’m am defeated everyday, but to victory I am born.” And another line that’s really touched me is from the movie Fierce Grace with Ram Dass: Larry Brilliant, the doctor and devotee of Neem Karoli Baba says, “The amazing thing about being with Neem Karoli Baba was not that he loved everybody, but when I was with him, I loved everybody.” That’s the abundance.
TS: You know, Rick, I could talk to you for a really long time, but I think I’ll close here. As a member of my community—and I really think of you that way, as a member of the Sounds True community–and one of my favorite authors to talk to, I hope we get to talk again, soon.
RJ: I hope so, too. And I’ll make it my business.
TS: Wonderful, thank you.
