by Blayne Bardo, May 1998

Blayne: What is the essence of the teaching which happens through you?

Wayne: The essence of the teaching is the same as that of my guru, Ramesh Balsekar, and the many true sages before him, which is that all there is, is Consciousness. Consciousness is all there is. If that is understood intuitively and deeply then there's nothing else to say. Anything else that is said after that is superfluous because the ultimate understanding is a non-intellectual state.

The ultimate understanding?

Yes, the ultimate understanding. First, there is a deepening of intellectual understanding that is part of the process. Intellectual understanding may result in a phenomenal experience of Oneness. That phenomenal experience of Oneness is what is normally thought of as a mystical experience, and the mystics for centuries have written about that experience using a variety of terms that reflect their spiritual culture. The ultimate understanding can be said to be the result of an impersonal event that happens in phenomenality, but the ultimate understanding is not phenomenal in nature. It is that which transcends and yet encompasses phenomenality.

What do you have to say to the seeker seeking something, whether it be peace, or freedom, or enlightenment?

The seeking happens. There is no denying that the seeking arises in certain body-mind organisms. The process through which it arises is that a normal, everyday, average person gets the notion that there must be something more to life than the pursuit of money, sex, relationships, success. She or he begins to wonder who or what she or he truly is. This is the point at which Ramana Maharshi says that your head goes into the tiger's mouth, the jaws close, and there is no escape. That is the point at which the seeking starts. You are a seeker, and as long as there is a sense of personal doership associated with the body-mind mechanism of the seeker, he or she will believe that it is he or she who is seeking. With the final or ultimate understanding what is revealed is the seeker is that which is sought.

Blayne: What role, if any, does the guru play in the seeking process?

Wayne: The common question is, "Is the guru necessary?" My answer is that there are no requirements set forth by Consciousness. Consciousness can do anything It wants within the manifestation. Seeking is a phenomenal process, and that's what's crucial to understand-seeking is a phenomenal process. It happens within phenomenality; the various progressions that occur are in phenomenality; the impulse is in phenomenality; and the final event which is the dissolution of the seeking, actually the dissolution of personal doership, is in phenomenality. All that happens is in phenomenality. The result of the process of seeking is only notionally a result, because what it reveals is what is there all the time anyway. So there is really no progress in the absolute sense. Yet within the phenomenal structure of seeking and the seeker, the guru may play a role. In fact, in the lives of many seekers the guru is a figure central to the seeking. For those who have found a guru, who have found their true guru, there is no greater phenomenal experience.

When I first met Ramesh I fell more in love than I have ever been in my life. To that point I had been fortunate enough to have experienced deep and profound love with several people-my children and wife and parents-but this kind of love pales in comparison to the love between the disciple and the guru. That is because the guru-disciple relationship has an additional quality that is of an entirely different dimension. When there is what I call resonance between the body-mind mechanism of the disciple and the body-mind mechanism of the guru, when that resonance is there, there is for the disciple an experience of the Oneness, which is the abiding non-phenomenal state of the guru. And that Oneness is one of inexpressible Love.

This Love you're referring to is not the love that is commonly used in everyday speech.

No. It is not that love. That kind of love is essentially a social contract: as long as you continue to give me that which fulfills me, then I will continue to love you. The love which one experiences with the guru is what might be called love without condition, unconditional love, because there is no social contract implied or in any way associated with the interaction. It is one in which there is unbridled love, a desire to freely give with no thought of getting. From the disciple's side the pure love is often mixed with the phenomenal quality that is the counterpoint of hate and that we might call romantic love. There is often an element of that on the disciple's side of the relationship. And thus, the disciple may find himself jealous of other disciples.

I can speak for myself. When I first met Ramesh I was always scheming to get into his presence, to be with him as much as possible, and I hated the guy who was taking him out for meals and drives and who had the kind of relationship with him that I wanted. I mean I hated that guy with a jealous passion since he had the object of my love and devotion in his car. There was a 'me' that wanted Ramesh for its own purposes. Now, from the guru's side there is no desire in the relationship. There is no 'me' wanting anything from the disciple. Yet, there is an experience in phenomenality from the standpoint of the body-mind mechanism of the guru of pleasure in the love that exists in that resonance between the disciple and the guru. But there is no involvement in any of this by the guru. So from the guru's side it is an absolutely pure love. From the disciple's side it is that pure love mixed with a more romantic, personal kind of love.

How is it possible for the guru to have these feelings of 'pleasure' since there is no 'me' left to experience them?

Well, that is a common misconception. When we say that the 'me' is absent in the guru, the 'me' is not absent to the extent that there is no reaction on the part of the guru. The guru is not some slab of human tofu, not some bland colorless blob without any characteristics of its own. He has a body, which has certain demands attendant to it. He has a mind that has been conditioned in certain ways and reacts in certain ways. You can say that there is a personality there-a person-ality. That personality has to exist or the body-mind mechanism of the guru could not function. What is absent, utterly and completely absent in the guru, is any sense of personal doership. The body-mind mechanism of the sage is like any other body-mind mechanism-an instrument through which God, or Consciousness or Totality, functions. But in the sage there is no sense of personal doership. In the personally identified individual there is a sense of "I am the doer" even where there is absolute intellectual conviction that that is not the case. The subjective experience of the ordinary individual is that of personal doership. This is what Ramesh calls 'divine hypnosis'. The sense of personal doership persists despite all evidence to the contrary. If you look at any of your actions in a bigger context, if you examine your own life, then the sense that "I'm doing it" falls apart immediately. Yet there is that sense within the body-mind mechanism of the identified individual that he is the doer, and until that is removed, it's there! For the sage there is only pure action or pure emotion-without any sense of personal doership.

How does one find a guru?

You do not find a guru. The understanding is that the guru appears as part of the functioning of God, or Totality. The same Power that turns an otherwise happy and well-adjusted body-mind mechanism into a seeker either delivers onto that seeker a guru or does not. It may deliver onto that seeker a false guru, one with whom the interaction leads into the exact opposite direction of realization of one's true nature. The practices suggested by such a guru may strengthen the sense of personal doership rather than diminish it. For example, such a seeker may become a very accomplished meditator. He may then consider himself to be a better meditator than any of the others. You would see him strutting around with the attitude, "I can out meditate anyone on the block." Even were he "spiritual" enough not to say it, it would be clear he believed it.

Speaking of meditation, are there practices which are required for the seeking to come to fulfillment?

There is nothing that is required for the seeking to be fulfilled. Consciousness can fulfill Itself through a body-mind mechanism any way at any time. In the case of this body-mind mechanism, I was one who, for most of my life, was not a spiritual seeker. At around sixteen years old I discovered drugs and alcohol and found that these things supplied me with that which I needed. They made it possible to live, live with the painful belief that I was the doer. See, when you have the sense of personal doership, and you are constantly being presented with evidence of the fact that you don't have sufficient control, it's misery to sustain that sense that "I have to do this. I have to get out there and manipulate the world to my ends." The world keeps slithering out of your grasp, and the best laid plans keep falling apart, and the most earnest efforts fail in coming to fruition. It can be quite devastating.

I found that alcohol and drugs were a way to cope with that way of living, with that belief system. The use of these substances led to addiction, and I became physically compelled to use drugs and drink a lot of alcohol every day just to survive. And yet I was dying. It was killing me. My ankles and wrists were swollen with alcoholic edema, I was losing control of my most basic body functions...I was in a horrific state.

Then there came at the end of a four day binge a moment of absolute certainty that that phase of my life was over. It was like a switch had been thrown. The obsession was gone. It wasn't a matter of having to resist or do anything. It was gone. And what was staggeringly clear is that I hadn't done it. If I hadn't done it, the question then became, "What has done this to me? If I am not the master of my destiny, what is?" This was the point at which my head went into the tiger's mouth, the jaws closed, and there was no escape. I became a seeker.

Within fifteen months the seeking lead me to Ramesh. I had been a drunk much of my life, and now I was with all of these veteran seekers around Ramesh. While I had been on a barstool, they had been in ashrams in India or attending spiritual retreats. They knew all the buzzwords Ramesh was using: noumenon, phenomenon, Consciousness-at-rest; they even knew how to spell Nisargadatta. They knew what siddhis were and what all this other Hindu stuff was. I hadn't heard of any of it. I said to Ramesh, "I really feel like a child being with these people. All these people have this knowledge that I don't have. He said, "Do you know what sadhana is?" I said, "No." And he said, "Sadhana is the path, the notional path that a seeker goes along, which has various practices associated with it that are said to break down identification with the ego. Your sadhana, the sadhana of the body-mind organism of Wayne, was to drink and use drugs for nineteen years. That's what was required for that body-mind organism to get to a point where the ego-identification could be broken sufficiently, that is its hold on the sense of personal doership could be broken sufficiently to begin this seeking."

So you asked, "Is meditation or some other practice required?" Through the body-mind mechanism of Wayne Liquorman this understanding happened. You say, "Well, what caused it? He was an alcoholic and drug addict for nineteen years. That must have caused the subsequent awakening. So if I want to follow his way I better start drinking, I have to hurry up and become a drug addict and an alcoholic." Of course, that's ridiculous. Most people who follow that path die, and die horrible alcoholic deaths. They don't one day wake up and start reading the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and all that stuff. I can assure you that not many of my old cohorts from Chasers Bar and Grill are out roaming around giving Advaita talks. It all just happened as part of the functioning of Totality.

Were there any specific sadhanas or activities you did between the time your head went into the tigers mouth and you met Ramesh?

There were some more traditional types of sadhanas which happened in that period between the sudden disappearance of the obsession to do alcohol and drugs and the time I met Ramesh. In fact it was a period akin to wandering through a spiritual bazaar. It was a grand experience because the spiritual bazaar has got all this colorful wonderful stuff in it. I was attracted particularly to Eastern things because I had such a profound prejudice against the Western stuff. I hadn't yet had the opportunity to develop any good prejudices against the Eastern stuff. That came later.

So I was able to investigate a lot of different things. I started to do Tai Chi. I read Thich Nhat Hanh, Rajneesh, Chuang Tzu., Huang Po, and those kinds of characters. It struck a resonant chord in me, and I delighted in it. I figured they really were onto something. I went to hear Ram Dass speak. He was such a wonderful spirit. It was so entertaining, and it was such a joy to be in the kind of community that surrounded his talks. I really enjoyed all of that. It was a period of about fifteen months before meeting Ramesh.

After meeting Ramesh, how long was the period of time before awakening occurred in this body-mind?

I met him September 16, 1987, and the so-called awakening happened in April 1989. So it was roughly a year and a half.

In this year and a half period after meeting Ramesh were there any specific sadhanas?

No. I was completely focused on Ramesh. I had the opportunity to be with him quite a bit when I took on the role of co-organizing his second tour here in the States and publishing and editing his books.

Would you consider yourself continuing a lineage?

Well, perhaps because of my Western orientation, the notion of lineage has never been particularly significant for me. But the fact that Ramesh was Nisargadatta Maharaj's disciple was sufficient to have me look at I Am That. My interactions with Maharaj through the written works left me cold. I've skimmed I Am That and read a few pages, but it never moved me like it has so many others.

So rather than continuing a lineage, one could say continuing a tradition?

Wayne: Well, the way the teaching is expressing through me is, of course, quite different than the way it expressed through Maharaj and the way it expresses through Ramesh. The backgrounds and the natures of the three body-mind mechanisms are entirely different. When the teaching is live and spontaneous rather than a rote process, then it expresses according to the nature of the mechanism through which it is coming. Though I respect the Indian origins of Advaita I have never been tempted to take an Indian name or dress up in Indian clothes for my talks. It is usually when a teaching is expressed through a disciple in whom realization has not happened that the culture, dress and words of the prior guru are parroted and the prior concepts held to be the embodiment of the truth. But the true teaching of any guru is not in appearances or the concepts he uses. The concepts, as Ramana Maharshi said, are tools. They are like thorns that are to be utilized to remove another thorn...and once the embedded thorn is removed then all the thorns are to be thrown away.

If the guru has not been brought to one yet, what is your feeling about books and the role they play while the seeking continues?

Wayne: Well, perhaps the best way to approach the question is to look at the fact that the books exist. The books exist; the seekers exist; the books come into the seekers' hands. Now what the effect of that coming together of the book and the seeker is, is variable. One seeker will pick up a particular book, and it will move him in very profoundly "spiritual" ways. There is tremendous opening, a "seeing" that comes about as a result of the contact with what is expressed in the book. Another seeker may read the same book and completely misinterpret the teaching in such a way that he is "set back." He becomes further enmeshed and mired in identification. Such are the destinies of these two body-mind mechanisms.

What role, if any, does prayer play since everything is destined?

The role it plays can be seen if you look at What Is; prayer happens. Prayer is an event that occurs as part of the phenomenal manifestation. For example, you pray for the recovery of a loved one from an illness. The prayer offered up is very sincere. The person recovers. By drawing a small frame around the two events and excluding everything else you can say that the prayer caused the recovery of the loved one. You say that prayer is causative in nature. And that is what we are really looking at, the cause and effect relationship amongst things. What is more accurate to say is that in order for the loved one to recover, a prayer was necessary, therefore a thought arose to pray for the loved one. So the prayer took place; the prayer had its effect; and the person recovered. If the person was to die, then the prayer would not have happened or the prayer would not have had an effect. What we are dealing with is that all events in phenomenality are quanta. They are individual in nature. The connections between them are notional. Cause and effect is an idea, is a notion. As Ram Tzu said, "Ram Tzu believes in cause and effect....he just doesn't know which is which."

For the awakened being Consciousness is all there is, but for the unawakened there is separation?

This whole question of an "awakened" being is an interesting one. There are no "awakened" beings. There are only body-mind mechanisms in phenomenality through which Totality functions. As part of this functioning of Totality through these various body-mind mechanisms, certain ones become seekers. They question at some level whether they truly are the doers. As that questioning becomes more profound and goes deeper, then the true nature of things may be revealed as part of that process. That revelation does not happen to an individual. It happens through an individual. As an identified doer it is not possible to conceive of that state anymore than it is possible to describe it. And yet, this entire discussion on the part of a sage is an attempt to intellectually point towards that which cannot be intellectually known.

The body-mind mechanism of a sage is only a sage in relation to a disciple. Without the disciple there is no sage. There is no need for the sage. You can even go so far as to say, notionally speaking, the presence of the disciple brings the sage into being. And that's what the Buddhists point to when they say that the Buddha appears as a compassionate act to release those seekers who are in bondage. It is the presence of the seeker who considers himself to be in bondage which calls forth the sage, the Buddha.

You use the words "notion" or "notionally." Are you employing these as Ramesh and others have used the words "concept" or "conceptually?"

Precisely the same way.

Consciousness Itself is beyond concept, although we use a concept to refer or point to it?

Correct.

It can never be thought. It can never be felt. Only aspects of It can be.

That's correct. It cannot be known in Its Totality. It can only be known in Its aspect.

And it cannot be felt or known in Its Totality because each aspect of the manifestation is merely a part of that Totality?

That's correct.

In both the Eastern and Western traditions there are stories of someone who goes to look for God and comes back being God. What does that mean?

They are pointers to the true state of affairs which is that all there is, is God. They are a way of saying that everything, including the one who considers himself other than God, is God.

When you use the word or concept of "God" you are obviously not using it in a personal sense. There is a great deal of confusion surrounding this word.

That's why it's better to use a word that has fewer associations with it. As a teaching matures, like Ramesh's teaching has matured, the terms such as "Consciousness" become tinged with a lot of associations. The long-time disciples begin to believe that they now know something. They have heard all the descriptions and pointers that the sage has used in referring to this, have absorbed all of these descriptions and pointers, and thus believe that they have some handle on what this thing is, what this Consciousness, or God, is. It then becomes useful to shift the terminology to a new one. Call it Source, call it Maurice, call it something else. It makes no difference what you call It. But the notion that you know what It is is a major impediment. The sage is not attempting to pile up a collection of concepts for the disciple. The sage knows that there is no special Truth in the concepts.

Consciousness is all there is. There is no doer, no doership; consequently, that means there is no free will and hence everything is destined for individuals and groups of individuals?

Yes. Though, destiny is only from the standpoint of the individual. For the sage there is no destiny either. For the sage all is seen as it is in the eternal Present Moment. Destiny is a function of time and space. Time and space exist as aspects of the phenomenal manifestation. The sage sees the entire phenomenal manifestation as an expression of the one Source. As the Zen folks say when you start Zen, rivers and mountains are seen as rivers and mountains. Then as you progress in the process of seeking in Zen, rivers and mountains cease to be rivers and mountains because now you are seeing the illusory nature of these things. They are not real. They are not true. They have no independent existence. There's no inherent validity in them. Therefore they don't really exist. And this is the point that most of the seekers find themselves in to varying degrees. This can be a very liberating sense or it can be a very depressing, dislocating kind of awareness. The mind comes in with a nihilistic negative association to all that and says, "Well, if it's not real then it doesn't have any value; it's all meaningless." But when there is awakening, when there is this seeing, when there is this knowing, then the rivers and mountains become rivers and mountains again. This phenomenal manifestation is seen as part of the Total, and although it has no independent existence it is a part of the One, an aspect of the One. As such it has reality. It has substance.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding or non-understanding about reincarnation. What is your explanation?

From the standpoint of the ultimate understanding that all there is, is Consciousness, then all of the mechanisms, all of the appearances in Consciousness in the manifestation, all of the so called individuals are simply arisings in Consciousness. They are expressions of Consciousness. So in visual terms, imagine Consciousness as a big ball of clay out of which are pulled these various organisms so that they are never separate, they never come apart from this ball of clay, because the ball of clay is all there is. It is a oneness. Yet arising out of this are all of these body-mind mechanisms that are given names such as Bill or Karen or Abdul. When they arise we say they are born. The reason this image is useful is that the connection between that which is born and the Consciousness from which it arises is visually in tact. In the world there is the appearance of all of these separate entities walking around. Their connection to the Source is not readily seen. When it is understood that there is this underlying connection to everything-that everything springs forth from this Oneness and is only an aspect of the Oneness- then it is seen that each of these forms is a temporary arising through which various events happen, experiences happen, emotions arise, thoughts arise, and memories are contained. At the end of its span death happens, what we call death, which is the returning of all of these elements back into the Source. It is the falling of the arising so that all of the component elements "return" to the Source from which they have never left in the first place. They are no longer differentiated in any way. All of these thoughts, experiences, memories, all of these characteristics go back into this pool of undifferentiated Consciousness.

What happens to Bill or Karen or Abdul after they return to the Source?

Wayne: The important thing to realize is that the clay figures that are extruded out of the whole are never separate. They may appear to be separate, but that is only because you can't always see the tendril of connection back to the Oneness. Nothing can be separate from the Oneness, then it would be twoness. Matter, as the physicists say, is neither created nor destroyed. There is this Oneness and there is a continual arising of new body-mind mechanisms. If in one of these body-minds there is a sense of personal doership, then it will think that any thought that arises in it is its own. It may be a "new" thought or one that was thought by another body-mind mechanism five hundred years ago. It may be the memory of an experience experienced in a previous body-mind mechanism. But if there is a sense of personal doership there, the organism will consider that thought, or that experience, or that memory to be its own and will say "I" experienced that, that was "my" previous birth, that was "my" previous experience. But there is no separate mechanism in the first place. Bill or Karen or Abdul are merely names given to particular temporary arisings in Consciousness.

The whole notion of reincarnation is based on the notion of separateness. Once it is seen that all there is is Consciousness then what incarnates and reincarnates is also seen as Consciousness. From the standpoint of the sage all is One, and all of the expressions are an expression of the One.

What is your advice to the apparent seeker in this rather painful process of seeking? What would your closing words be to someone who leaves your presence with their shoulders rather drooping because they have a good intellectual grasp but at the same time they are caught up in personal identification?

Wayne: I give no general advice. Who would I offer it to? This speaking that happens through me happens only as a result of some need on the part of the questioner. I have no agenda. When Ramesh suggested that I speak he said, "If they come, talk to them." And that is all I do. There is nothing that I have the slightest interest in teaching because the understanding is that this is all a process. In the moment I might tell one person just to breathe. To someone else I might echo Ramesh's frequent comment to someone in this situation: forget everything that you've heard here. That would be advice to someone who is clearly a retentive intellectual kind of being, one who's going to carry these concepts as more bricks in their backpack. They would walk off with a heavier load than they came with if they held on to these notions as some kind of truth. So what might be said would depend upon the moment.

Hence the student's dilemma or apparent conflict when reading a quantity of a teacher's or sage's teachings.

Wayne: Absolutely. They are conflicting. Any teacher worth his salt will be highly inconsistent. Consistency doesn't exist in nature except from the megastandpoint in which all is One. That's the only consistency. Everything else is in flux, is in duality, is changing so each moment carries with it its own imperative. The mechanism responds to the moment according to its nature. So the imperative of the moment brings forth out of the mechanism a response. The only difference between the sage and the seeker is that that response is known by the sage not to be his response. It is simply a response of the mechanism which is an expression of the One Source.

Thank you.

Wayne: It was Nothing.

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