Meet Matthew Lowes
In anticipation of Matt’s appearance at the CSS Community Night on Wednesday 19 March 2025, I met with him for a friendly and freewheeling chat which spanned more than three hours. This took place in mid-February at the home of Matt and his partner Emily: a lovely place with inviting workspaces and two cats. We sat comfortably with coffee and recorders running, and the time went by quickly! Although by this time Matt has already given three Sunday guest talks at CSS, this interview provides an opportunity for members to get to know his personal side a bit better. ~ Vip Short
Vip: So where did you come into this world— starting with geography?
Matt LowesMatt: I was born in Tacoma, Washington, moved around a lot, then finally ended up back in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up mostly in Wisconsin and Connecticut — covered all the country, with some time in Texas. My parents are both from Michigan. I moved around a lot because my dad was in the military — a Vietnam veteran — and when he got out of the military, which would’ve been somewhere around the time I was born — 1972 — he got into business, and that kept us moving around as well. My parents eventually split, and they now live on opposite coasts.
Vip: Do you have memories of areas where you grew up — and I’m talking, for instance, about your interactions with the natural world?
Matt: I’ll be coming up to the Center to talk about my awakening story again (Wednesday, March 19, 7 PM), so I’ve been trying to think how I can add to this story, how I tell it in different ways, since many people at CSS heard that story already. Anyway, I was thinking about this, and my earliest memory of having a kind of Gnostic flash would go back to being in elementary school. I remember a big field outside during recess, and there was a hill that went down to a community farm. I remember lying on this hill, looking at the trees overhead one day and seeing the light coming down through the trees: it was just stunning. It’s my earliest memory where that feels like an experience of merging. It was all just extraordinarily beautiful.
I also lived in Connecticut for a time, outside of Danbury, down a kind of roller coaster of a road that went to the woods — Forty-Acre Mountain Road. It was in the woods, but there were some big houses out there. And so, I used to run around the neighborhood, and there were all these trails that went back in the woods; my friends and I would run around and explore it all. There were these old abandoned hunting shacks back in there. We would explore all these different places. I used to climb vines and trees. There was a lake across the road from our house, called Candlewood Lake. We’d spend the summer swimming there, and fishing, and in the winter, ice-skating on that lake. There were all these kinds of places around the neighborhood that were landmarks: like “The Burnt-down House,” “The Pumphouse,” and “The Chain” at the end of our gravel road. They were kind of mythical landmarks. There was a huge hill behind our house that went up to another road. I had a good friend who lived up there. A narrow path went down the hill through the woods that was simply called “The Path.” It was a big deal to be able to ride your bike down the path. One year, my brother and I sledded down, and that’s how I got this scar on my face. We veered off into a patch of pricker bushes.
Vip: I’m getting images from that good old movie filmed on the Oregon coast in the 1980s, The Goonies.
Matt: (Smiling) Yeah, it was very much like that! Occasionally I would walk two miles to a drugstore to buy comic books; a quest for a nine-year-old. There were a lot of movies like that, that were aimed at kids of my age: The Goonies, ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back. It was like a golden era, when we grew up. Of course, all children have their version of this golden age. But yeah, we were like kids in The Goonies! That was was like a renaissance, from my point of view.
V: So let’s go forward in time a bit.
M: As I said, I moved around a lot when I was younger. I went to two different high schools. I lived in Wisconsin from seventh grade to my sophomore year in high school. Then we moved back to Connecticut, to Westport, which is a coastal town that’s sort of a New York suburb. When I graduated from high school, I was kind of tired of moving around. I had friends in Wisconsin, so I decided to go to university there. Madison, Wisconsin: six years as an undergrad, and just enjoying the ride. I loved being a student at the university. I studied English literature and a bit of philosophy of language. After I graduated from university, I moved to New York City and I worked at an advertising agency for six months or so. After that I went on an extended road trip and ended up back in Wisconsin. I lived there for a number of years. I met my ex-wife there. She was a linguist, and we moved to Mexico for six months. She was doing field work there, and we got married, then moved to Austin, Texas. She was starting her PhD program in linguistics and we were there for a year. What she wanted to study didn’t really fit their program though, and there was somebody here at the UO who was doing what she wanted to do, so she changed programs in 2005.
V: Do we get to places by design or is it all just random?
M: The difference between random and design dissolves when you see things clearly. So yeah, I’ll say, when I was on that extended road trip after I left New York, I traveled down through the southwest out to California, and then drove up the coast from California to Oregon, and I came across from the coast into Eugene. I spent a day here walking around the university, because I like universities and I was still kind of playing with the idea of doing more school. I looked around Eugene, and it seemed a nice place to live. I had a taste of this nice place to live in 1997 or so. Then I got married in 2003.
I had gone on this long road trip and then I ended up in Wisconsin. I worked a variety of jobs there. I worked for a computer consulting firm for a while, but I really wanted to write fiction books, so I ended that job and I got a night job at a hotel; a small hotel near the hospital in Wisconsin where a lot of people stay who are coming for procedures and treatment at the hospital. I was the only person working there starting at 11 PM until morning. I would finish my work by 1 AM or so, and then have a solid five hours to write before I had to bring in the donuts and set up for morning. That’s where I met my ex-wife. She was a bartender there. We eventually quit our jobs and ran off to Mexico together.
THE GIFT OF SOLITUDE
V: You mention valuing the uninterrupted alone time, to write. We raised the topic of solitude as opposed to loneliness, and maybe it’s a useful distinction?
M: It’s a distinction that people make: “solitude” when they’re feeling well, and I think you said it right, when you said “loneliness” is a kind of affliction. Obviously, when people feel loneliness, they are compelled to try and fix it, and they look around for various places to fill that void. And I would say that in one form or another so much of human activity is trying to fill a void that can be experienced in various different ways. And seeking love is one of those afflicted ways to try to find a solution.
V: Peter Gabriel sings about people looking for “the filling of their holes” in his haunting song “The Blood of Eden.” He evokes the specter of loneliness. Solitude on the other hand is more a state where nothing is wrong. Nothing is missing and there’s a wide-open feeling to it. That was the feeling and the drive for me as a kid, when I would go out on these long walks with my dog. It would be like anything is possible, everything is here, and nothing is urgent. When you experience solitude, there’s a sense of self-exploration; exploration both inside oneself, and of the manifest world. And there can be a sense of immanence. Isn’t that kind of a Catholic word? Actually, in some of my notes you mentioned a background of Catholicism?
M: My mom’s family was Catholic, and when I was really young, we went to church and Sunday School. But somewhere in elementary school that fell away, and we stopped going to church. I remember it as a decision being made, when we were allowed to not go to Sunday School. And later, through life, I always had this spiritual impulse, all my childhood and through my years at university and so forth. I always had that and didn’t have anywhere to express it. So, when when I met my ex-wife and we were going to get married, there was this funny thing: we were at a Barnes & Noble’s, at the magazine section looking at some kind of bridal magazine, and we were just talking about the wedding and she said, “I don’t want a Catholic wedding!” I said, “Me neither!” Then she said, “I’m Catholic.” And I said, “Yeah, me too.” We had a good laugh about that. We hadn’t compared notes on religion until then. She also had the same kind of spiritual longing and nowhere to express it. After we got married (by a Unitarian minister), we moved to Texas and eventually started going to church. We went into a catechism class and got confirmed in the Catholic Church. We went through all the process, so that’s how I became a practicing Catholic for a while as an adult.
V: I saw the Christian contemplative Thomas Keating listed in the bibliography of your book That Which Is Before You. But this departure from formal church-going is a very common story; I have a notion about this phenomenon of families moving out of established religion. It seems evolutionary to me. It seems it’s a good sign. It’s like moving out of childhood. My family did the exact same thing 20 years earlier, and our last stop was a multi-denominational Protestant church because we lived in the Philippines at the time. That country is heavily Catholic, in terms of its westernization, because it was a Spanish colony for so long. But a lot of the Americans living over there were Protestant, so there was this blended church called the Union Church and it catered to a spectrum: Lutheran, Baptist and everything in between. That was a great place to hop off the bus because we were able to just get the whole ball of wax, the reformation versions of Christianity, and then “Cool, we’re good.” We got our fill, backed away from the table, and I’ve always thought it was a really positive development.
M: Whether it’s good for somebody — that’s a matter of that person, so I wouldn’t say it’s one way or another. It’s there for people who are on a spiritual path, and how their path guides them into or away from traditions is unique to their path. So, if they’re following their path, then it’s good, you know. People tend to think about religions or traditions as if they are monolithic. What’s important is really whether they’re helpful or not helpful. At a certain place it could be very helpful and another place it could be an obstacle, and this is true of everything that we know. The same is true of books, ideas, concepts about the path: to a certain extent, trying to understand them can be an immense help, and at some point, they’re a complete obstacle. It’s very useful to have a map, and it can tell you how to orient yourself, how to get from point A to point B when you need to, or how to avoid the bad neighborhoods or whatever. But you’re confined to the map.
V: And it’s not reality!
M: That’s very true — so you just have to take what’s good. Follow your own route, you know, even if it’s a religion. Another way to think about it is from a more open perspective: a religion is just a spiritual practice. It’s a very comprehensive spiritual practice, but that’s what it is, a spiritual practice. And so, to become Catholic is in a way no different than to take up a mantra, or any other spiritual practice. At a certain phase that practice could be very helpful to you.
Ramana Maharshi talked to a lot of people, and many people came to ask him questions or to get advice. He would ask them, “Well, what are you doing now?” and they would say, “I’m doing this. I’m doing this practice, I’m doing this, I’m doing that…” A thousand different things. If they were happy with what they were doing or felt it was working for them, often he would just say, “Good, carry on.” Only if it wasn’t working for them, or if they said “I can’t do it anymore,” would he gently steer them toward direct self-inquiry.
V: And each person’s small mind is absolutely unique. When I contemplate that fact, it’s like a koan: I marvel that no two things in the entire creation are exactly alike. If I use the word “things” for the vastness of experiences, thoughts, objects, grains of sand… there’s no two ever have been exactly the same, ever. There’s this biblical quote: “Behold, I am making all things new,” spoken in the voice of the Creator. It’s a mind stopper!
M: In a way the function of all spiritual teachings is to be “mind-stoppers.” When I’m talking to somebody and you get to this place where there’s no other direction to go, and the person maybe can’t think of anything else to say or another question to ask, that’s a wonderful place!
V: I was thinking about the French mystic Simone Weil, who was originally a hard-core Marxist, and later an anarchist — I don’t know her story well, but my takeaway is that she was a complete agnostic, and later in life she had her opening, and became a devoted Catholic, which probably confounded her former comrades-in-arms, like: “What the hell happened to you?” So maybe there’s an example of a form, not even returning to it, but discovering a form that her former self would’ve said was oppressive and the opiate of the people and all that… but then discovering it as her way of liberation?
M: So that shows, as they say, that anything can be an aid to realization — and likewise can be an obstacle, as long as you don’t want to let go of it. You know, everybody’s got their unique way of turning away from reality or turning away from the truth — and I don’t mean that in a negative sense either. It’s just we all form our own world, our own delusion. By the teenage years, typically these constructs are becoming solid; they’re becoming “real,” in a deep way. Many people will live in those conceptual worlds their whole lives, and never question any of it.
V: Maybe that is at least part of what’s meant in one of the Ten Commandments, about idolatry?
M: The major obstacles of any spiritual path are different forms of the same obstacle, which is taking something particular to be Reality. In the path of devotion for example, it’s one’s idea of God; in the path of knowledge, the form that it takes is conceptualism, taking concepts or ideas to be Reality; in the path of action it comes in the form of hypocrisy; and for the path of skill, it comes in the form of egotism — in other words, believing that the ego is the doer of your actions. In a way, it’s all idolatry.
V: I like your development of the path of skill. I really enjoyed your talk about that at CSS, and the graphic that was part of it, the circle diagram.
M: Yes, it’s in my second book, When You Are Silent It Speaks. It appears when I describe these four different paths. And then there is a more extended treatment of all those paths in my fourth book, which is about practice, called Lighting the Sacred Fire — that one goes into more detail about the main obstacles in each path.
V: I was just admiring how your mind functions and I was wondering: Is this ability to present these schemas of spirituality something you’ve always known about yourself? Or — speaking of skill — is it an acquired skill? Do you surprise yourself with what you come up with?
M: Since university, I’ve had a bit of an intellectual streak, I guess. I got very interested in literary theory and philosophy and things like that. And also I also got interested in spirituality: reading a lot about Buddhism and Hinduism, and I got very interested in Eastern spirituality and their schemas — their ways of explaining the world. And for the greater part of my adult life, I’ve spent a lot of time working on writing fiction, and that involves keeping a lot of different details in your head, and things like that. And I’ve always liked logic. What surprises me now sometimes is that it makes sense, you know; for years and years and years, I struggled to make sense of my experience, or I was driven by this desire to find ground truth, and at every turn in my life that quest was foiled over and over and over again. No matter how deeply I thought, no matter how well I could track the logic of a particular line of thinking, I would always get to a place — I would always come to the edge of the mind. I would think, I can’t take this any further. There’s not another logical step after this.
V: There’s no where to go after you get to that point.
M: Exactly. You end up looking into a desert and you think “well there’s nothing out there,” and so you would turn around and go back into the mind. “I must’ve taken a wrong turn.” So you would go back and try again with some other line of thinking. What surprised me is that, after my awakening, I would read spiritual literature, and it was just transparent. What before would have been perplexing to me as I tried to pin down those lines of thinking, now was just clear, without any thinking. And of course, everything is like that.
V: What is your approach to teaching?
M: Primarily I see teaching as a skill of pointing, redirecting people to where you’re pointing, and not allowing them to grasp onto particular views. So, any time the person grasps onto a particular view, the task of the teacher is to undermine and destroy that view, to pull the rug out from under them, and to redirect their attention toward the unspeakable truth.
* * *
V: Thinking of college years, in 1969 I was in a Philosophy 101 class, and the professor assigned us to write a meditation on the following quote from William Blake: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would grow wise.” At the time I was getting into astrology and other divinatory stuff; one of my sisters was giving people tarot card readings, and I remembered that card, The Fool. So I got some books out of the library, looking at the different representations of the Fool, and he’s literally walking on the edge of a cliff with this little dog nipping at his heel. And he’s oblivious. So the paper I wrote was about, how you can say this is his fault because it looks like his imminent destruction, but he’s about to find out something really huge.
M: The Fool is a person, a spiritual person just starting out on a spiritual path. You know, I have a connection to the tarot, because around the time of my awakening, I got interested in the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
V: Let me clarify here, because I saw this in your book. Is this the guy, the filmmaker who blew my mind starting in my college years with his surrealistic movies? The first one I saw was called El Topo.
M: Yes. The same person. Jodorowsky was a practitioner of Tarot, also a Zen Buddhist, film maker, actor, writer, et cetera. Probably his most famous film is The Holy Mountain. He also made Santo Sangre. And he’s also famous for having not made the first Dune movie. He was lined up to do it, and he assembled a kind of magnificent seven of artists and writers to work on it, including Chris Foss, H.R. Giger, Jean Giraud, and Dan O’Bannon. He called them his “spiritual warriors.” He had Pink Floyd for the soundtrack. He wanted Mick Jagger to play Feyd-Rautha, Orson Wells to play the Baron Harkonnen, Salvador Dali to play the Emperor Shaddam IV, David Carradine to play Duke Leto, and he had his twelve-year-old son Brontis training six hours a day, seven days a week, with a French martial arts master in order to “awaken his creativity” and “open his mind” in order to play Paul Atreides. The film was going to be twelve-hours long!
There’s a wonderful documentary about Jodorowsky’s Dune, and I just fell in love with him as a character — his uncompromising passion, spontaneity, and creativity. His Dune movie never got made, but many of the people who worked on it went on to work on other highly influential films.
V: So it was a mystery school, basically, that he created?
M: Yes! I looked him up, he had authored a lot of books, and he was interested in tarot — he has a whole book, his own methodology for tarot cards. I was interested in that; I was reading his various books, mainly his book on psychomagic and his tarot book. He looked at the tarot as a map of the spiritual path. I found that very interesting, and you know I was writing this game, Labyrinth of Souls which is a tarot card game. I was working on that when I woke up, so if anybody reads it, it has a spiritual subtext.
V: I know you’ve created a number of games. I’m not a gamer, but for those interested, would you like to expand on that part of your creativity?
M: The main one is Dungeon Solitaire: Labyrinth of Souls. I wrote a follow-up game called Devil’s Playground. I grew up playing solitaire, poker, and Dungeons & Dragons. And an interesting thing happened near the end of my path: it was like my life came full circle. I started going back to things that I’d done when I was a child. Games like Dragons, and things like that. And likewise, when I was younger, more in my twenties, I traveled a lot. I went to Australia, did a lot of traveling. You know, the quintessential looking-for-yourself kind of thing. And I got to this point where I started thinking about going on a trip again. I thought about going to India, because I’d never been there, but all these things — meditation too, I came back to meditation — I went back to doing these things or thinking about doing them for a completely different reason — and that was no reason at all, as opposed to when I was young… when I was really looking for something.
* * *
V: Here’s a totally unrelated question — it’s very mundane — but what attracts you? Like, your favorite foods? You have preferences, right?
M: Sure.
V: It’s just that they don’t have you anymore.
M: We have each other. (laughs)
V: Have you told Emily? (more laughter)
M: We also have each other. We all have each other.
V: How about aversions? In my job I always ask people about their natural aversions. You got any?
M: No, they’re all unnatural aversions.
V: But organisms have them, right? I mean, you're still an organism. There's still an organism here in front of me. I mean, I'm just picturing you're gonna take a bath. You draw the shower curtain back, and there's a big-ass hairy spider in the bathtub. For many people, they don't think about it, they just recoil. It's an instant aversion. So is there anything like that in your life?
M: I think that the answer to all these questions is the same answer. A simple answer one way or the other will give people the wrong idea. If I say yes, I have these things, this will give people the wrong idea, because who has them? If I say no, this will also give people the wrong idea. The only real question with regard to you or anyone is, “What are you?” If you find that out, then this whole question… like the question we discussed earlier, is it predestined or is it all by chance; the premise of the question is rooted in delusion, that there is separation, that there is a difference between predestined and chance. But if you find there are no distinctions whatsoever, then this question dissolves. And this is true about preferences and it’s true about aversions, and it’s true about fear and it’s true about all these things. I’ll give you an example to illustrate this point and hopefully anyone can take this example and apply it to all these things, the preferences and aversions. Sometime after my awakening, I was at a writers conference where I was asked to give a talk about martial arts fiction. I had one of my martial arts students there to help out with some demonstrations. We were out in the lobby area of some university building downtown, waiting to give my twenty-minute talk. I remember, I said to him “You know, I feel all the telltale signs of being nervous, but I myself am completely unaffected.” So that’s what it’s like: I can feel all those things, preferences, aversions, fear, et cetera, but I am completely unaffected.
V: So tell me if I’m on track with this. It’s like the character Matt in the book about Matt is experiencing it, but I’m not really affected by it.
M: That’s one way of looking at it. But I’m not that character, see, so I’m not really affected by it. To be honest, it probably just sounds like nonsense, but it’s clear as day. You know, a lot of people have these kinds of questions, and I often say, look, the body itself is conditioning. If you wake up in the morning and find yourself with a body, that’s conditioned. If you expect realization to remove all conditioning, don’t expect to wake up with a body. You know, there’s a misunderstanding that liberation means you won’t have any conditioning. If that were so, your realization would be dependent upon a particular state — upon certain things happening or not happening, but the word “liberation” refers to being free! In other words, it doesn’t matter whether it happens or not, because you’re free. So you wake up in the morning with a body, it’s no problem. If you wanna eat pizza, no problem — no problem whatsoever. And if you condition realization on anything in particular, then you’re not free.
V: So the underlying formula here is that these things only make sense in duality.
M: Yeah. When people try to explain these things accurately… like I said before, if I say yes, I’ll mislead you, and if I say no, it’s a lie. Which is why silence is so great. Because it comes closest to the truth. So if people want to know: is it like this or is it like that? Well, that’s a difficult place to start.
V: I had two book titles in my head when you were just giving that little teaching, both Adyashanti. One is The End of Your World. The other one is My Secret Is Silence.
M: I’ll add to that, since he brought up secrets. Another teaching I like is this: One day this crowd of people came to see Krishnamurti and he said, “Do you want to know my secret?”— and of course everyone wants to know! And he says simply, “I don’t mind what happens.”
V: I remember going to see Ram Dass. I was in college at UC Santa Cruz in the early ‘70s, and he came. It was a big deal. He was already a pretty famous spiritual guide. And he came on stage and sat. He was totally silent for a long, long time and eventually somebody broke the silence, sounding frustrated as hell; somebody from the back yelled out and said “So why are we here?” Ram Dass slowly looked up and leaned into the microphone and said, “That’s a fair question,” and he began his discourse. And the funniest part was that afterwards I realized I had heard it wrong, and I would’ve bet anybody a million bucks that how Ram Dass responded was that he said, “That’s a fear question” — and this made every bit as much sense to me.
* * *
Vip: All right, are you into music?? Who’s the cellist? (I had noticed a cello parked in their living room.)
Matt: That’s Emily; she’s teaching herself cello. She’s also an aspiring clarinet player. I’m into electronic music, ‘cause I’m comfortable at keyboards (grins).
V: I’m not surprised to hear that. Are you recruitable, to be in a band?
M: No. I don’t know. I don’t play well with others. It’s strictly a solitary pursuit.
V: You do it the way you do your writing?
M: Yeah. If I like it, I’ll post it on YouTube. I’ve got some spiritual talks on there, as well. I’ve been meaning to put more on there, when I find the time to go through material and extract it.
V: Your body of work is getting ahead of you!
M: Always. I’m just doing the work, which is good. I go wherever it leads.
V: What kind of music do you like? If you could name three artists, who would they be?
M: Hmm. I’m not good at this game. I like all kinds of music, if the mood strikes me. But let’s see, since I make electronic music… let’s go with Tangerine Dream, Suzanne Ciani, and Eliane Radigue — she actually became interested in Tibetan Buddhism. She had a long hiatus in her music career in which she was studying Buddhism. Some of her later pieces have names that reference stories from Tibetan Buddhism.
* * *
V: About your voice: I don’t have a lot of exposure to your writing. Your book That Which Is Before You is the only book written by you that I have, but I couldn’t help but notice that your voice is very personable. Very easy. It’s just like us here talking, and that’s good! As a reader — you know, last May I had a brain injury that affected my vision, and for quite a while it was a lot more challenging to just sit and read anything; but I found your book quite accessible. I would make the comparison to Joel’s writing style: The Way of Selflessness, and also his autobiography Naked Through the Gate, I feel like he’s just sitting talking to me. So just one question about that: does this carry over into your fiction? Do you think that quality is also found there?
M: It’s a little different in fiction, but yes, it’s plain language. I think just as you said, my approach to writing is as if you’re telling somebody something. If it’s fiction, then you’re telling them a story; if it’s nonfiction, you’re telling them your experience, but either way you should be natural about it.
V: Okay, quick question— I thought I was so clever coming up with this, but it might be silly: Give me your best cosmology in less than a minute.
[Matt checks the clock, then remains silent, giving me only a slight smile.]
V: Okay, got it! That’s the best answer!
Just a couple more questions. What exactly do you think was the drive toward martial arts?
M: You know, it’s interesting, when I was really young, my brother and I would watch kung fu movies and stuff like that, so there was that fantasy appeal, for sure. But I actually got into martial arts directly by chance. Again, we can ask, is it determined or by chance? I was a freshman in college and a friend of mine came by and said “We’re going to this Aikido class. Do you want to come?” I think my friend lasted a week or two, and I lasted 30 years. So that’s how I got into martial arts. But I will say, having been in martial arts a long time, people get into it for a variety of reasons related to their deluded mind. Many of the reasons have to do with fantasies of power or as a response to unrecognized fear or undealt-with fear. And I would say for me that was also the case. Now if you persist in training, martial arts practice will evolve into something else. If you cling to this fantasy aspect then you will leave or else find a way to cater to that fantasy. But if you persist in being willing to face your fear for real…
V: And it’s a body-mind discipline.
M: Yeah, look, this is true of all spiritual disciplines. Most people get into it because of a fantasy they have. If they persist, it’s because they’re willing to move toward reality itself, and in order to do that, there are certain fears they're going to have to face. And in this way, the path, whether it be martial arts or meditation or whatever, in a certain way, it's like a bait and switch. All teaching is a bait and switch, because think about it, if you go to a teacher, you don't know what you're going to learn. Otherwise, why would you go to the teacher, right? But you think you know, you have an idea of what you're going to learn. Otherwise, again, why would you go, right? Unless you thought, if I do this thing, I will get this. Or if I train in this way, I will become, you know, strong or skilled. So there’s a kind of bait that draws you into the path or practice, and to be clear, it’s nothing nefarious. The teacher isn’t dangling bait. You yourself are providing the bait with your own fantasy of what you think you're gonna get out of it.
V: You're the carnie, your own barker.
M: Yeah, you provide the bait, and then the path is to become disillusioned of it.
V: So demand your money. This isn't what I thought.
M: No, if that’s your attitude, you will stop practice at some point. If you think, “Oh, this isn't what I thought, I want the fantasy,” you will stop going. But if you're like, this isn't what I thought, this is way more amazing than I thought, or way more interesting than I thought, then you will keep training.
V: I’m a high-school karate dropout, myself. It didn’t click for me.
M: That’s fine. You know, frankly, I wouldn’t say you’re a dropout. Whatever it was that you were looking for when you went there, you went on looking for it in other ways. See, that's how the path works. You know, we look for it in one place, and we think either this isn't for me or this isn't working. And then we'll go look somewhere else. And we just keep doing that until we get to the end or find a practice that is working for us, and we delve into that practice deeply. And so that's not really, in my way of thinking, turning away; that's following the path. You know, your path just led you away from there.
V: Well, thank you.
M: Yeah, because remember how we talked earlier how each mind is a unique puzzle that can only be unlocked in a particular way. And so sometimes in order to follow the path, you have to leave a practice. And sometimes, in order to follow the path, you have to engage in a practice. And that’s just how it is. It’s the will to the truth that matters, not the particular route that one takes.
V: That thing you touched on earlier is really key for anybody who hasn’t awakened — that you had no questions. You had no questions. By the time you sat with Joel, you weren’t having any questions, and I’ve heard that time and again. I mean, it’s just a common thing with people who woke up. There’s an old spiritual book that I had on my shelf for years. I don’t know if I still do. It’s from the 1930s or something, so it’s kind of during the rising of early 20th century mysticism, which was pretty funky because there were lots of occult arts people, and they were bringing swamis over from India and so forth. The book was The Dweller on the Threshold by Robert Hichens, and for some reason that stuck with me because it feels autobiographical and I’ve been on the freaking threshold a real long time. With Joel, I don’t have any questions for him anymore. I probably went to Joel and said, "My problem is, I don't have any questions for you."
M: What did he say?
V: He said “Good.” It’s good, but you know, I do not feel satisfied. I wanted him to push me off that cliff. I thought that’s what might happen, and I’ve just been dwelling.
M: Only you can push yourself off that cliff.
V: I guess the leaping part is, yeah, what’s hung me up there.
M: It's a puzzle, you know? And you know, you’re not alone. There are a lot of people who have engaged in practices for many, many years, and maybe they still have questions, but they know deep down they don't like the answers, the answers won't satisfy them. That’s classic disillusionment, right? That you know no particular answer is going to satisfy you.
V: You gave me some of the classic hints today. You weren’t giving them to me, per se, but you were giving them to this session and I’m taking them to heart.
M: The thing is, that for people, there’s still a desire for something, and that's the obstacle, right there.
V: You know, it could be, the whole thing is the desire. It could be the desire to wake up.
M: That’s what I mean. That’s the desire for something. Like I said, the obstacle is always the same obstacle, which is taking something particular to be the reality. And in this case, you’re imagining that awakening is something particular you might grasp.
V: And what about the idea that I fell in love with the yearning itself?
M: Yes, that could be an obstacle also.
V: Or that I fell in love with the union itself? Because when you were talking about your childhood stuff, being out in the woods and mucking around, you know that was my entire childhood. I just had to go off by myself, and you know, I think it’s possible that people fall in love with forms, which is almost all we ever do.
M. Yeah, people can fall in love with the form of practice, or a state of being, a state of mind, a feeling like yearning, and so on. Longing has a certain appeal to it, and also, there's an appeal to the adventure of searching. So yeah. Just because I've been reading about Ramana Maharshi lately, I'll say this: Ramana would say there are really only two ways to the truth. One is complete surrender to God. So people would sometimes say, “So you mean, if I surrender, then I'll realize?” And he would say, “That’s not surrender.”
V: That's bargaining, right?
M: Yeah. And then other way is self-enquiry, to look inward. And, of course, these two are ultimately the same.
V: I made a commitment for this interview to cover the superficial stuff with you, because I wanted to approach you on the basic personal level, and reveal the “ordinary” Matt to the reader. When they come to the Center they can get the other stuff, but let’s find out, just who is this guy who has started to be a CSS regular? But now we have inevitably wandered into the less mundane.
Andrea, when she popped awake in the Fall of 1997 during a retreat at Cloud Mountain — almost now a CSS tradition, because a fair number of people have awakened in the province of a Center retreat — she went to the teacher’s cottage, which is located right near the meditation hall, during a break. And Joel starts doing his “dharma combat” with her, of course — it’s part of the job, weed out the pretenders. It can turn out, “Nice try, but you’re not quite there; you’re only halfway up the mountain.” But at this particular point he’s never yet had a student wake up, so he asks her something like, “What’s the quality of what you know?” And she said, “You can’t get away from it!”
M: You know that’s an interesting way to put it. You can’t get away from it. This poem I wrote — it might’ve been the same day of my awakening, I don’t quite remember — but it was really right almost immediately afterwards, reads:
There it is ...
Grasp its tail and it will sprout ten thousand tails.
Grab its arm and it will grow ten thousand arms.
Fix its gaze and it will open ten thousand eyes.
Charge at it and it will recede from you.
Run away and it will follow.
You cannot escape it.
You cannot master it.
What more can you do?
V: I had an hours-long direct experience of this at age 19. I was at University of Washington and my girlfriend and I had moved in together. She was kind of a wild one, more than a match for me. We lived near a beautiful park, and on weekends we often tripped together. (This was the late ‘60s.) Back then the acid doses were quite hefty. So this one time we’re lying on a grassy lawn with all these trees around us, and there’s birds in the trees and it’s just the perfect spring day, and we are just completely flying. It went on for many hours. You’re in for the ride back in those days, you eat this one little piece of gelatin and it’s a good 12 hours. We were lying inversely, head-to-head, like the top and bottom of a playing card. Which was disorienting in itself, because every time she would move her mouth it would be like her own language, mysterious. Things became very archetypal: her upside-down face displayed a series of all the goddesses and gods. I was not familiar with the Hindu or Tibetan pantheons at that point, but I saw them all. I could hear what she was saying when she was speaking to me, and I knew on one level what it meant… but on these other levels, vibrational levels, I was perceiving the Truth, the fundamental Truth. And I would try with my mind so hard to grasp it, to grab and keep it. And every time, it was just a complete frustration, a slippery failure, every time. I spent hours trying to somehow keep and hold onto it. Her eyes were infinity, a bottomless Mystery, and every time the Grail slipped out of my attempted grasp, she would laugh uproariously, as if she knew exactly what the game was.
M: There’s another chapter in my book about this. You should reread it. It’s called “There is Nothing to Hold Onto.”
V: As soon as you chased after it, it slips away, it was the most frustrating thing! Then I went into a continuous déjà vu, which seemed to last hours. I remember being afraid that I would never come out of it; I just thought, if this is like a permanent neurological condition I’ll get used to it, but there was a sense of great frustration. People stuck in a déjà vu always try to tell, if there’s somebody with them. Because it’s a sense of attempting to catch up to a moment that you’re already in, and explain it to yourself too.
M: The feeling of déjà vu: I remember some really strong ones, and the feeling was like a message telling me I was on the right path, that things were happening exactly the way they’re supposed to happen. You know, we talked a little earlier about Stranger Things. All strange occurrences are like that. They’re like messages. They’re saying “Hey, things maybe aren’t the way you think they are.” And “Hey, maybe there’s more to reality than you think.” Whatever we experience that seems unusual is prompting us to set out on the spiritual path.
V: It’s great that there are these little signposts.
M: Oh, absolutely. They are aids on the path. Even, even when, I will add, when they’re terrifying.
V: Do they ever occur once the path is finished?
M: It’s all strange things. You make no distinction between the stranger things and the more regular things. But yeah, the same kinds of things can happen. I can’t say I’ve had a lot of déjà vu, but I’ve had weird encounters and things like that, out-of-body experiences in dreams, and so on. Exploring these experiences is a whole other topic. Let’s just say you can explore these things, but the purpose, or maybe the effect, is different, because you’re not trapped in a particular view.
V: Like why you still love to play games, or create games?
M: Yeah, the reason is different. Same with meditation. The practice may go on, like meditation or playing games or doing martial arts, whatever, but the purpose for doing so is completely changed. And in the same way, strange things may happen to you, but the effect is different. You know, I used to have these terrifying nightmares. I had these experiences that were like demonic encounters, and they were terrifying. I would wake up and have this palpable feeling of a presence, an evil presence, and not be able to sleep. And also, I had existential concern about what was happening. What is this? And that happened to me periodically throughout my whole life. And it still happens occasionally, but now I will wake up from these experiences and I’ll just roll over and go right back to sleep.
In the same way you look around and see all the same things you would have seen before — I see the door, I see the clock — I see it, but at the same time, your relationship to those things, so to speak, is completely different, because you do not see yourself as separate from anything that you see or experience. So yeah, those things can still happen, but their effect is different.
V: Have you ever used virtual reality goggles?
M: Yes, it was pretty amazing.
V: We got one of those, like, three years ago for Christmas. And for the first month or so we were just amazed. This is going to be a game changer, you know, right? But this thing is now just gathering dust on your shelf. It lost its charm or something. Never touched it after that first month.
M: Well, look, you’re in the most amazing reality already. But yeah, I can see how it could get old. Even in awakening, you can get used to anything. You know you’re in heaven, but you can get acclimated to it. You can get used to being in heaven, and that’s fine. (Big smile.)
V: Well, that’s a good note to end on!