Transciption of Ed and Patricia's 2/22/09 Interview of Ted in San Rafael

Eduardo:        This is Eduardo, along with my friend Patricia Gagne, we’re sitting here with Ted Strauss in his office in San Rafael, California. It’s February 22, 2009. Ted, as you may know, is a Senior Teacher in Waking Down in Mutuality (WDM) and is one of the founding members of the group.  We have a unique chance to look at some of the original ideas that brought about Waking Down in Mutuality and some of what is evolved into today.  But first, how’d you get here?
Ted:                Oh, you know, in the usual way! (laughter!)
Eduardo:        Where did you go to school, how far did you go with that?
Ted:                I got a bachelor in Science of Creative Intelligence from Maharishi International University.  Even that was sort of pieced together with some stuff I got from a Bloomfield College in New Jersey.  So, that and some courses with Maharishi and the whole school and somehow we cobbled together something I don’t know what to do with.
Eduardo:        I can relate.  My psych degree proved to be pretty useless after I graduated. You mentioned Maharishi University, what happened there?
Ted:                Yeah, I think I was about seventeen years old and a friend of mine came to me and said “Ted I’ve learned transcendental meditation (TM), you got to try this thing it’s really amazin.,” So, I’m like “okay, what is this?” and went to a lecture and it sounded interesting, so I begged for money from my parents and went and got initiated and I was impressed.
Eduardo:        What impressed you?
Ted:                ...I immediately had experiences of transcendence, the kind of experiences I would only have if I was on LSD or something.  I had already figured out that LSD wasn’t going to be the sustainable path of enlightenment that I was hoping.  I had to find something else and it came around just at that moment and I was immediately impressed that here was a way I could get some immediate personal access to something beyond my usual sense of self.  I assumed it was going to bring me to enlightenment by doing that twice a day.
Eduardo:        And how long did you do that?
Ted:                Twenty four years.
Eduardo:        And did it?
Ted:                No.  Too bad; that would have been a really cheap solution, but I actually went on and did all kinds of advanced stuff.  I did the siddhi program, became a teacher,  I initiated lots of people...basically I did everything Maharshi said we should do and then some, for twenty-four years.  I had lots of great experiences, but eventually I got tired of just having great experiences. It’s; “okay, ho-hum, another spiritual washday miracle.”
Eduardo:        Well between that time and the time you ran into Saniel, could you just summarize real quickly what you transitioned through to get there?
Ted:                Yeah, the TM organization started getting less about what I cared for and more about doing the right thing: herbs, supplements Aruvedic architecture, astrology, etc. Okay it’s good to be healthy and all that, but that’s not what I was in this thing for.  I was in it to become awake. And the thing I wanted never happened.
Eduardo:        And even though you may have had a little taste of it, there wasn’t an enduring one of those then?
Ted:                Right, no enduring one of those.  I had lots of amazing experiences, but like I said, that was no longer interesting after a while.
Eduardo:        Did you find yourself at that point when you were realizing “this isn’t doing it for me” a feeling like, “Wow, twenty four years, what have I done? Have I wasted…?  Were you in some kind of depression about it?”
Ted:                I was in some kind of depression about it. I don’t really quite remember it anymore, because that was quiet a long time ago, but I do remember walking into Open Secret Bookstore, which is like around the corner from where we’re doing this and I was looking around at all the books all over the store. I mean this is the biggest spiritual book store in the area and I’m looking at this whole place and thinking, “Oh my God, do I have to like read every book in this place, what is it going to take, do I have to practice every technique that anybody ever came up with?”  I was really feeling depressed about that.
Eduardo:        Would you say you were still in a search mode?
Ted:                I think I actually glazed out of search mode and into cruise mode. I was in the space where for years I was assuming all you have to do is meditate. Just keep meditating, it’s all going to work out okay, and then one day I sort of woke up and thought “what if that’s not true.”
I am starting to let myself think that maybe it’s not true, maybe all this automaticity of just meditating, just doing the techniques, the Yoga, the breathing exercises, the diets, … I started rotting out of that whole idea.  So, in a way, I just sort of re-awoke to my search. It’s like my search had gone to sleep – and I was really an automatic weapon – I woke up to the search again and then realized, “it can’t be the way it was for me. It can’t be where I’m just reading a book, or I’m going to some sittings where there is somebody sitting on the stage”… And I figured that out after I went and sat with some teachers who were sitting on the stage proclaiming absolute truth. At first, it was “oh wow, this is interesting,” and then it was like “No, this is nauseating, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t like how this feels. This is not really what I’m wanting. What I’m wanting is somebody who will sit with me and give personal guidance, you know, who I trust and who is really helping me.”
Eduardo:        Okay, let’s just move from that thought… meanwhile, somewhere around that time Saniel Bonder has left his guru and his community. He’s gone off on his own and come into his own self-realization and begun to offer that transmission of awakened mind.
Ted:                More than just awakened mind.
Eduardo:        Heart-mind?
Ted:                Yeah, heart, mind and body.
Participant:    Alright, so, how is that you ended up with Saniel then?
Ted:                I met my future wife Hillary is what happened. I met her when she was actually massaging at Shabui Gardens. One day I just needed a massage, walked in, and got her. She gave me a fantastic massage, so I kept her card and then a year later my usual person wasn’t there, so I pulled out the card and called her.  When I walked into her place and I saw that she had a picture of Ramana on her wall.
Eduardo:        Ramana Maharshi?
Ted:                Yeah. So, we started chatting about spiritual things and it was clear that she was on some sort of simpatico path.
Eduardo:        So she had already met Saniel?
Ted:                She had met Saniel a year or so before and done some work with him.  She actually introduced me to his work. She gave me his White-Hot Yoga of the Heart and I looked at that and thought, “okay, this is interesting. I don’t really quite understand it, but sure, I will go see the guy,” so she took me to a sitting.
I remember pieces of that first sitting. It was at Saniel’s little apartment in Greenbrae and I was sitting in a room with him,  I was just observing that first time. I was just sitting off to the side being very quiet and toward the end he said, “This is a finishing school for the realization of consciousness.”
Eduardo:        Oh, nice.
Ted:                And I thought to myself, “Wow, I’m ready for that. This is really what I want, lets bring it on, lets see what’s going on here.” So I went back again. It took me a while to get oriented to what he was doing because his style was nothing like I had ever seen before.
I had never seen a teacher sitting on the floor. This is what he was doing, surrounded by other people just talking about ordinary stuff. Some of it was spiritual stuff, some of it was relationship stuff, and some of it was just life stuff: money, sex, issues with the boss, whatever. It was different. It was more like “Wow, we’re just having a talk here about whatever is real.” That’s not what usually passes for spirituality.  It’s people talking about high faluting stuff.
Eduardo:        And here it was talking about any old thing, including material plain stuff.
Ted:                High and low faluting! Every kind of faluting there is.  That’s what he is into talking about. It’s just about where people are at.  There’s a way that he always had, a way of loving and supporting people. He was always there, loving and supporting, giving them whatever they seemed to need. Sometimes people even go in and have all kinds of crises and he would be almost too generous, giving up his time, his money and all kinds of support in ways that were way far beyond what I had ever seen before.
Eduardo:        Now, you’ve been long in the spiritual scene in one shape, form or another. You have spiritual antenna, developed a sense for the vibes around an alleged holy person, what was your first vibratory impression of Saniel?
Ted:                Well, he’s certainly not what I was used to in the form of a holy man.
Eduardo:        Yeah.
Ted:                He’s an ordinary guy who seemed to be extraordinarily present and compassionate.  Beyond that, I’m not sure that I felt anything more than that.  I felt a clear mind, an open heart… he seems to be claiming something beyond the ordinary spiritual stuff, I don’t know, is that an arrogant claim?  I thought maybe that was arrogant, but I didn’t feel the arrogance from him. If I listened to the words, I would say these are big claims this guy is making.
Eduardo:        What was an example of one of those claims?
Ted:                Well, for instance that there’s some sort of awakening beyond realizing consciousness. There’s an awakening that is somehow more significant than what has been generally, classically spoken of as spiritual awakening.
Eduardo:        Interesting!
Ted:                And I don’t remember what words he was using back then. He was definitely indicating that this whole notion of becoming identified with the transcendent, of realizing your own infinite nature, was not the end of the road. It was barely the beginning of the road. Like “What road are you talking about?”  He was talking about embodiment and mutuality. These are not terms I would have used to talk about enlightenment.  Usually enlightenment is, you detach enough from your ego, your mind, your story, your dramas and your life; it somehow becomes unimportant, at least relative to the true self, the universal self, the god self.
Eduardo:        This is what they usually referred to when they’re talking about self realization, for example?
Ted:                Exactly, that seems what most people are talking about.
Eduardo:        So, in the course of your relating with Saniel, it seem like something happened along that path, what happened? You were differentiating between the consciousness and the embodiment, was that it?
Ted:                Yeah.  Here is where it gets a little fuzzy, but for some people there is a distinctly different set of awakenings that can happen. For Saniel, and yes definitely for me, I had a it half year later after I first started working with Saniel.  I had a significant consciousness awakening, an awakening whereby, after this massive shift, I found myself fundamentally identified with the mysterious consciousness that was witnessing everything. 
I no longer identified with the mind, so in other words, it’s as if I went out of my mind. That’s exactly it, I went out of my mind. I went into the part of me that was witnessing my mind. My mind actually fell on to the screen and I was witnessing it from that point. It was very cathartic for me. It was just this momentary huge shift that took me over. I thought it was my Second Birth, because it felt like a Second Birth, but then I found out from talking to Saniel that it wasn’t, it was just a witness awakening.
Eduardo:        Which still leaves there being a witness and what’s being witnessed, there’s still some duality and so it’s not…
Ted:                Exactly, there still a buffer. I was not yet ready to actually let myself completely be the body-mind. I was still trying to play it safe.
Eduardo:        Go ahead with your story that led to your full awakening.
Ted:                Yeah, the Second Birth awakening took place one evening when I realized that I had actually spent my whole life trying not to be affected by my bodily discomforts, that I’d spent my life trying to avoid pain.  So for me, spirituality was a way of trying to escape.  It was a way for me to feel superior, removed, somehow fundamentally not affected by the things I didn’t want to be affected by. Of course the problem is, as long as you’re not letting yourself be affected by the stuff you don’t like, you wind up not being affected by the stuff you do like.
Eduardo:         That’s the price you pay for disaffection.

Ted:                 And that’s a heavy price, that’s right. I finally got to the place that I felt, “I don’t want this disaffection. I actually want to be here. I want to have the full experience of being alive.” I didn’t want to be in the bleachers anymore, I wanted to be down on the playing field. For me, there was that momentary recognition, followed by a falling into this reality at a whole new level. I felt like there was nowhere else for me to go. I just have to let myself fall there.

                        But I quickly sorted out this was not the Second Birth that Saniel was talking about. This was a partial awakening, an awakening of the consciousness aspect of my being. After a while, I really started to get it, that there was still this gap between me and my essential selfness and my body, my mind, my feelings and the world. There was this separation.

                        The Second Birth was the fundamental end to that separation. There was a kind of a smack into my body! A collision with the finite, if you will. (both laugh.)  For me it was a difficult encounter I’d been avoiding my whole life. But actually, it wasn’t as bad as I’d been afraid of.

Eduardo:         So, before we go ahead with the term, ‘Second Birth,’ can you define it? I liked your noting that awakening is a process, not a static event; it’s ongoing.  What’s the Second Birth, and where does it fit in that ongoing awakening continuum?

Ted:                 My view on that keeps changing. It was that there was this basic process whereby people are first awakened to consciousness and then that consciousness allows itself to fall into the body-mind in the world.  That would be The Second Birth. Then, there’s a deeper awakening into a dimension we call ‘mutuality,’ which is inter-subjective.

Eduardo:         Some schools of spirituality hold that we’re actually already awake, that we’re divesting ourselves of things that keep us from that realization rather than attaining it.  With that idea in mind, I’m wondering what role Saniel’s transmission played in triggering your awakening process?  

Ted:                 Well there’s really two ideas there: The role of transmission and the whole notion of awakening as a process of divesting yourself of illusions. I think we’re already divinely human creatures but it’s got to be a direct experience. And one of the surest paths to that experience is to allow yourself to let go of myths and illusions. 

                        I think transmission short-circuits the mind, just goes right around it. It makes a communication beyond the mind.  It says, “Hi, I see you, we’re here together, and you‘re loveable.  Everything‘s cool.”  There’s an element that goes straight through all the defense systems, all the ways that we’re saying, “God, no one’s gonna get through to me, otherwise something’s gonna go wrong.”  In that sense, it’s sort of like a trap door right under your feet, just open it. The mind catches up later. It plays second fiddle to the direct recognition of what IS, for which gazing is a catalyst.

                        So as I started gazing with Saniel, things in me started waking up quite directly. 

Eduardo:         Hmmm, a different story.  So now, how does that understanding differ from the teacher’s side, if I may ask?

Ted:                 To me, it doesn’t look like transmitting. It looks like just being present with the student and loving them. There’s a sort of encountering the mystery of ‘the other’ with a loving, open regard.

Patricia:           Is this an original transmission of Saniel’s, do you think?

Ted:                 Well, yeah, I’d read about stuff like that in the past, but I’d never experienced it.  When you have that direct experience and it deconstructs you, it’s a different thing.  I could never do this with students if I hadn’t had that experience from Saniel.  I think, as mammals, we don’t know how to be without looking at our parents and elders. We template off them. 

                        That’s one of the huge differences. Another difference is, for the few people who knew who they were, they didn’t know who anyone else was.  They didn’t know how to relate to people as if they were an equally valid mystery.

Eduardo:         Does that mean they’re sort of hung up in a detached, witness consciousness?

Ted:                 Or, they’re somewhat embodied but they’re still not openly disposed to mutuality.  There’s still a fundamental defense system in place.

Eduardo:         And that then foregoes the relationality you were talking about.

Ted:                 Right, we all have defenses.  Most people aren’t aware of how thick they are, and how they’re up all the time. Because when you’re looking at it from your own perspective, you can put whatever ‘smiley face’ stickers on from your side.  But if people are coming from the other side saying, “Ted, you’ve got some issues!” you have to consider it.  The difference is, who are you listening to. Are you listening to your own reflections? Or are you actually listening to other people?  If you actually listen to other people, you are forced to reconcile the difference.

                        What drew me out into real mutuality was the realizing how alone I really was in my separate, bubbled universe.  I was relating to people in a way that seemed to work for me and that made me feel safe, but in truth, people didn’t really feel connected to me.  The more I realized that was my relational reality, the more I realized I had actually been alone in here my whole life and I hadn’t really let anybody touch me.  Almost never.

Patricia:           Even as a child?  It almost seems you’re describing the way we felt as children, and what we need to get back to as adults.  To face the world without all the defenses, like you’re not a separate being?

Ted:                 OK, to me there’s a couple of different themes that I’d want to tease apart.  One is that I generally don’t look at the awakening process as going back to being childlike. I look at awakening as meaning that we are progressing to awaken to more and more of who we are.

Eduardo:         But there’s that old saying, “Ye must be as little children.”

Ted:                 Right, but not childlike innocence.  I think that we’re innocent in the sense that we’ve always been doing our best, and in general we don’t mean any harm.  Fundamentally on the inside of this whole thing, it feels like, “I’m just trying to survive and find a way to get my needs met, and find a way to relate with other people.”  And all the messes we get into with each other mostly turn out to be misinterpretations, projections of intentions.  It’s like, “you hurt me, therefore you must have been trying to hurt me.”  Well, because I hurt and I felt hurt by something you said doesn’t mean you were trying to hurt me. So, what does it mean to be innocent?  I think as children it feels to us like our survival is threatened when we’re not getting our needs met, by our parents especially.  And so we find a way to adapt how we’re being in order to get what we want.

Patricia:           So we create ‘the bubble?”

Ted:                  On a certain level, yes.  But on another level, I think the bubble of separation is an advance over the merger with mom.  We need to become a separate person.

Patricia:           So it’s a necessary element we need to later go beyond?

Ted:                 Exactly!  For me, it’s not a problem, the build-up of the whole egoic process was a necessary learning about how to be able to protect ourselves in this world. But then, most of us never got a template for how to go beyond that because our parents never went beyond that. We didn’t really have any living examples of that.

Eduardo:         It was very poignant to me how you spoke of your separate self identity.  And when that boundary or separateness dissolved, what did you find, what did that Second Birth feel like?

Ted:                 There are two distinct levels of this breakdown in the hard boundaries of separateness.  The Second Birth was a breakdown in the boundary of what appeared to be human and what appeared to be divine and what appeared to be the rest of the world excluding other people.  In other words, I felt I was being the whole world and it was all being me, but other people’s realities still seemed to be weirdly separate.

                        But the exploration of mutuality, especially and mostly between me and Hillary, opened me to the possibility of getting the other person’s reality more deeply than before.  It’s like, I could  open myself to you, you can ask me questions, I can say the truth of what’s going on in me, and you can feel me. And I can open myself to you as much as you’re willing to be open, and I can feel you to the point where a sense of self just expands and includes you.

Patricia:           Once that trust is there…

Ted:                 Exactly!  And the more trust there is, the deeper and more expansive that seeing can be. So that whole dimension of mutuality opens up at a another depth.

Eduardo:         Hmmm. Nice.  I’m about to switch gears here Ted, but first, any further thoughts?

Ted:                 I want to say, originally it looked like there was this predictable sequence of awakenings that would go from a disassociate awakening to a sort of disembodied witness awakening and then into the Second Birth and then into deepening mutuality. That has been my experience, but as I helped people in the process, I observed they often have what appears to us to be Second Birth type awakening and not even necessarily even get the consciousness dimension. It changes from person to person.

                        This Second Birth seems to be a coagulation of fundamentally whole and present sense of self. It is continuous with everything here and everything out there: inner and outer oneness and a fundamental sense of whole being selfness.  There is almost, for everybody, the great potential for an increasing depth and growth in all three dimensions: Waking, Down and Mutuality.

                        Some people can have the Second Birth and then a few years later have a big consciousness awakening.  Which to us in the first group, we’d go, “Huh? Wait a minute! That was supposed to come first!”  But now we’re seeing that, no, there’s really just this coagulation.  And actually, Saniel writes about that in The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart, and he decided, no, let’s just call it coagulation. And the more I go on with my own process, I think yeah, that describes it really well.

Eduardo:        Well, you have recently reformulated some of your thinking.  For example, on the benefits of doing the Waking Down in Mutuality work, I wondered if you would elaborate on those?
Ted:                Yeah, well especially when I was conceiving this as a fundamentally linear thing with exceptions and fuzziness.  It looks to me like, from conception up to about three years old, we are in this mushy state with little discrimination.  Basically, at the beginning, there is no recognition of self as any different from mom.
Patricia:          Is it symbiotic?
Ted:                Yes, totally symbiotic.  Their view is an awareness of me and mommy.  Then at around three years old, there is a massive awakening.  It’s a huge shift in consciousness from being just me and mommy into having a separate self, needing to saying “no, no, no” which is a way to saying “me, me, me.”
Patricia:          Yeah the threes are wonderful with children because they are past that rebelliousness, (of the “terrible twos”)  but they’re still babies and angels but yeah, they’re starting to get up to a separate self.
Ted:                Yes, most people in the world stay at a childlike stage where there’s still this fundamental sense of being a separate self in a world of separate others.  Most people live their lives that way.  Some people have this experience of awakening to consciousness which a lot of people conceive of as a higher self, or truer self, or more authentic self.  In this map I was putting together, I was calling that stage three, a fundamental recognition of consciousness and divinity and selfhood beyond body and mind and feelings and energy.  Then stage four is this fundamental non-separateness especially in the realm of the human and divine.  It’s all one thing!  You realize, “oh, I’m not just consciousness, I’m not just the body-mind, I’m being this one self that is two ends of its own spectrum.”  Then I started having this experience with Hillary of an awakening into mutuality.  Eventually this struck me as being another whole awakening.  Like I said before, it was like this another equally infinite dimension of Being opening up this way.
Eduardo:        So this particular kind of awakening couldn’t happen solo?
Ted:                Exactly, it’s not something that you can do by yourself, it’s something that requires the recognition of the divinity and the humanity simultaneously.  There’s got to be a big move in this direction in order for that to be recognized.  It can’t even happen if you don’t have two people who both are fundamentally awake and open to feel the awkward discomforts of the difference between self and other, (which can only happen if you’ve done that within yourself).  If you think, “why would I want to be both of those, how do I resolve that?”  Then you get to the Second Birth and say: “why do I have to resolve that?  I don’t have to resolve that, that’s who I am.”  Right, so who I am has some discomfort to it.  Just being my whole being self,  even if it’s not the way I wanted it to be; this is not the self I wanted to realize.  Okay.  Beyond that wholeness now it’s okay, I’m being here as a human being with limits and limitlessness at the same time. 
Eduardo:        So here we have an “I”, a “you” and an “us.”  It seems to me you’re talking about a sort of awakening in the context of the “us.”
Ted:                Exactly.
Eduardo:        Can you just elaborate on that?
Ted:                A third entity can awaken to its own existence, this entity of us-ness.  That’s sort of how I described the Second Birth of the relationship between me and Hilary.  It’s not that we didn’t already feel an us-ness it’s that we got to such utter trust and depth that there was a full me, a full her, and a full us.  It needed to happen before we could individually be who we are and allow each other to be who we are while being different, uncomfortably so at times.  If you can hang with this discomfort, then you can awaken to “us.”
Patricia:          It mushrooms out.
Ted:                It mushrooms out, exactly.
Eduardo:        You speak in a recent piece that I read about the profound benefits of the work in Waking Down in Mutuality.  I was rather taken with the evolution of your view of awakening and that continuum we were referring to.  I wonder if you can talk about them for a bit.
Ted:                When I was writing the script for a new Waking Down video.
Eduardo:        That’s a course that’s being offered at the IAM website right?        
Ted:                The video is really there to encourage people to learn about what we’re offering and to take a ten lesson course.  When I was writing the script I realized I wanted to get the benefits of this whole thing down into some bite-sized bits.  It took quite an evolution for me, and I think for our whole work to get the to the point where we could say, “we’ve got benefits to offer.”  At the beginning we had so rotted out of other spiritual processes that had sold us on them based on the benefits they were promising.
Eduardo:        Ah, so just avoid that whole benefit thing?
Ted:                Right.  We were all like, “we’re here because we’re rotting out of our ways of running away from who we are and what is.”  The benefits of coming here were more about getting real.  It wasn’t,  “Oh we’re going to have a great experience, or we’re going to have relationships.”  It was more like we were sick of being an unreality.
Patricia:          The rotting out you’re referring to, does it happen after the Second Birth?
Ted:                No, it’s really before the Second Birth.  The Rot is really this whole process of decaying out of our old beliefs that running our lives the way we have been will actually get us what we want.  It’s like all the things we do to keep ourselves protected and safe and secure.
                        Most of us have gotten into this place where it’s so un-hip to talk about benefits.  Then starting about a year or two ago I started feeling, “well, wait a second, look what’s happened to us, look what we’ve been through, this massive sequence of awakenings, we’ve healed so much of our childhood and early life conditioning, we are free to love each other and awaken to each other and we’re free to find out what our purpose is and to do it with gusto.” 
Eduardo:        Right on!
Patricia:          Do you mean you and Hillary?
Ted:                Yeah, not just me and Hillary, but a lot of the senior people too.  I’m just looking around thinking, “man, you’re talking about benefits.  We’ve got benefits!”  We’ve got amazing benefits, but we’re not used to talking about them as benefits. and just talking about how you find yourself helplessly attracted here, okay, what can you do, we’re here to help you.
Eduardo:        So, let’s look at the benefits of Waking Down in Mutuality. What are some of them?
Ted:                Right, there are many benefits or blessings, for example, one is having an “embodied witness awakening.”  I’ve gone into the development of benefits as qualities that emerge when we awaken more deeply. A lot of people who are coming from a spiritual perspective want that awakening of conscious-ness thinking we’re not going to be whole unless we have it.
Eduardo:        Before or after, either way.
Ted:                Exactly.  Sooner or later you’ve got to get that leg of the stool of Being or you’re missing one third of yourself.  So, I made that one benefit I was very careful to talk about that as embodied witness awakening not just transcendent witness awakening.  I wanted it to be clear that something really different does happen here; it’s not that we’re trying to escape; it’s not that we just want to be removed.  We want to get what consciousness is everyday with the eyes open, out of meditation and get what that is through our whole lives.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to show up like a light turning on in your head, as a lot of people think, but it does mean that you recognize it sufficiently so that you’re aware it is an aspect of your whole being.  You can therefore own it, stand in it,  stand with the power that is brings you.  It’s not really the dark side or the light side; it’s the force.
Eduardo:        The force, oh yeah.
Ted:                It’s definitely a force and if you’re not operating from that element of the force then you’re missing a lot of the feeling of grace and blessed and connectedness that is inherent in that aspect of Being.
Eduardo:        So, you’re calling that “embodied witness awakening?”
Ted:                Or “embodied consciousness awakening.”
Eduardo:        Okay, what’s another benefit?
Ted:                The Second Birth Awakening.  It is a benefit and a blessing that is so remarkable that it’s really hard to describe. 
Eduardo:        I hear that.
Ted:                The Second Birth is such a fundamental change in the way we are being and in how we are in ourselves and how we are in the world.  Prior to awakening I read all kinds of stuff, I thought Saniel was trying in his own way to talk about the same old perennial philosophy of life expressions I’d heard.  After a while, it didn’t sound exactly like the same thing; it sounded like he’s talking about something different, but I still didn’t get it.  The whole first year of studying with Saniel, I kept listening to him and reading his material wondering what is he talking about?  I don’t get “becoming your stuff,” what do you mean?  Isn’t that what you’re trying not to become?
Eduardo:        Right.
Ted:                So when the Second Birth happened for me, within 24 hours, this sequence of realizations went off and completely shifted my entire life.  There was about two weeks worth of nested realizations where every day I would wake up and say, “oh my God, yesterday I thought I was awake, what’s this?”
Patricia:          Nested realizations.  That’s a great term.
Ted:                So for at least two weeks, everyday there was feeling that made the previous day’s realization nest inside of today’s realization.  That actually kept happening, and eventually I got used to it.  For a while, “I felt “I’m falling and when am I going to hit bottom?”  After a while, I realized, “oh, falling is the new reality!”
Patricia:          You got your falling wings and then you were okay.
Ted:                Exactly, it’s like okay I’m not going to go splat on the bottom.  This is what it feels like to be in this place.  So, yeah it took me a while to get used to it.
Eduardo:        So that was the Second Birth?
Ted:                Yeah, but let me say more about the blessing of the Second Birth because...
Patricia:          It’s a big one.
Ted:                It’s a huge one.  I think for me one of the things I can say about it is that I began to realize that I had a right to be here.  I didn’t have to justify my life.  I didn’t have to accomplish anything, I didn’t have to be smarter than anybody, I didn’t have to become likable, and I could just be here.  Being here, for the first time in my life, was actually sufficient.
Patricia:          Yet you are all those things.
Ted:                Yes, I’m being everything I like and everything I don’t like.  Somehow being all of that was sufficient.  It doesn’t mean other people would agree that it was sufficient.  From the inside I feel like I feel fundamentally well.  I felt fundamentally whole, and I could start admitting to my faults.  I could start saying, “yeah you’re right I did say that, I’m really sorry.”  I mean it wasn’t an instant, it took a process for me, but I was well enough that I didn’t have to be constantly seeking to make myself feel well enough.  I was suddenly well enough.  Actually, the way one of my students put it was, “I’m sufficient!”  For her it was like, “Oh my God, I am sufficient.”
Eduardo:        Well there goes seeking, there goes self improvement, there goes all the outward searching that takes you away from finding.
Patricia:          Or the release of that contraction that we’re always feeling.  That, to me, would seem to be the best part of the whole thing where you don’t have that inward type of contraction we all have. 
Ted:                And I can’t say that it totally stops for everybody.  Even for me it went from like being 90% contracted to being like 30% contracted in one second.  But for other people they kind of ooze across that over a long period of time and then it take them a while to clarify their Second Birth.  Still that’s the basic direction, relaxing and becoming okay, not being self-defended all the time.
Patricia:          Do you think that all of those are of modern day or have people done this through the centuries?
Ted:                I think people have necessarily done this through the centuries, in general, only because of the stage of humanity’s development. It has mostly been about survival.  We really didn’t lift ourselves sufficiently out of survival until the post World War II era.  That’s when we got sufficient affluence in society where you don’t have to spend most of your time working or tilling the soil.
Patricia:          Well didn’t that take away the immediacy of life though, which isn’t necessarily a good thing either?
Ted:                That’s true, but what it did do is open us to develop other parts of our being that we weren’t able to develop when we had to stay in tune just for survival.  In other words yeah...
Eduardo:        It’s like you can’t talk philosophy to a man that’s hungry.
Ted:                Exactly.  If you’re hungry then you have to attend to getting your body that food.
Eduardo:        When we’re in survival mode there’s no such thing as art and philosophy…
Ted:                Exactly.  Imagine that Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” really does apply.  We have to take care of basic survival first, we’ve got to take care of our family, our needs for belongingness, for basic love.  Most people never even get there.  Most people are in survival and keeping busy to try to meet some needs and they don’t even know exactly what they are.
Eduardo:        You made an interesting point:  You talked about the role of relaxing, you talked about being okay with yourself and not too self-defended.  Can you relate that to the Second Birth?  How relaxing and Second Birth work together?  One time I asked you, long after your Second Birth, how it looks to you now, what does it boil down to now, and you came out with just one word.
Ted:                Relaxing.        
Eduardo:        Yeah.  So can you elaborate a little?
Ted:                Well, let’s look at what is it that we’re not relaxed about?  We tend to not be relaxed because we’re trying to defend ourselves from being uncomfortable or attacked.  But the habits that we learn about how to be, how to live in the world and how to relate to other human beings, tend to put us in a state of continual hyper-vigilance.  The society we live in, driving around in traffic, you can get killed at any moment, especially if people are honking their horns and screaming at you and trying to run you over at any possible moment.  Then we’re always exposed to our televisions which are barraging us with all kinds of crap.  Everybody is walking around in their bubbles, not seeing us, so we’re like protecting ourselves from not being hurt by people that can’t see us in the first place.  It’s all these different ways of being alive in this time and place which tends to make us feel under attack. Then, even if we’re not under attack, we are so used to being under attack, that the adrenals are constantly running.
Eduardo:        Then there’s the question of perceived threat even when it isn’t there and we react the same.
Ted:                Exactly, and we’re so conditioned when we’re in this earlier part of our process, because we were raised under these circumstances, so it’s the only way we know to be.  We look at our whole life that is this way of being that’s all about subtle hyper-vigilance, trying to get to a better place.  Even if we’re in a spiritual process trying to find out who we are, there is this achievement-oriented spiritual materialism thing, trying to get at it by doing the “right thing.”
Eduardo:        So this could all be in one word categorized as struggling and then relaxing is relaxing from the struggle.
Ted:                Right, but in order to be able to relax from the struggle you have to be uncomfortable; this is a big key.  If you start relaxing out of the struggle and you realize this isn’t comfortable and if you’re thinking therefore that’s not enlightenment, then you’re going in the wrong direction.  So, relaxing is the wrong direction.  If you’re in that school of thought then you really are in a bind, it’s a really horrible bad bind because then there’s no place to relax.  If you relax and you’re starting to feel the natural discomforts of being a divine human creature, if you think there’s something wrong with that, oh man.
Eduardo:        Then it’s a long haul.
Ted:                Yeah, relaxing very much starts with getting that this whole way we’ve been doing life, isn’t working.  It’s painful.  In fact, it’s incredibly painful, it’s excruciatingly painful and it wears us down and it causes a premature death in every case.  This is one of the things that Waking Down in Mutuality brings in.  It’s okay to be uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable is actually part of the condition of being divinely human.  I didn’t get this until my Second Birth.  At the moment of my Second Birth that’s the first time in my life I ever understood Christianity.  It’s like, oh, it’s a crucifixion.
Eduardo:        Oh, and this is where you come up with that concept of God in hell and all that?
Ted:                Exactly.
Patricia:          I was going to ask you that.  Do you think there’s any correlation between the Second Birth and the time during the 60’s and 70’s when there was the born again Christian movement?  Are there any similarities at all?
Ted:                Well, I’m not an expert on that whole thing at all.  I barely encountered it, but what I did encounter I would say no, they were not relaxing into the divinely human crucifixion of being here.
Patricia:          They were lit up somehow?
Ted:                They were lit up with an energetic connection with divinity that doesn’t still allow them to be all of who they are as human.  Basically the whole Christian thing is: you’re a sinner and you need to make yourself better, so you need to make yourself become more God-like, more divine.
Patricia:          “What would Jesus do?” ... I asked that question about the born again Christian                 movement because they thought they had It.
Ted:                They thought they had it and it’s not that they had nothing.  There is an energetic connectedness to divine energy that gets channeled through many of those Christian types.
Eduardo:        But yet it doesn’t include the recognition that ...
Ted:                That we are God.  So as long as you are convinced that there’s no way that you’re God, then you’re holding yourself separate.  If you’re holding yourself separate that actually takes up energy.
Eduardo:        That creates suffering.
Ted:                That creates suffering because, in truth, we are both God and human.
Patricia:          It takes the responsibility away from you.  That’s why some of them like it.
Eduardo:        That’s why he refers to this whole continuum of awakening as really a lot like growing up.   
Patricia:          Yeah, I can see why.
Ted:                Growing up into a more divine human creature requires us to take responsibility for being consciously crucified.  To me, this is one huge piece of the awakening process.  The way I perceive it, almost everyone is walking around the world in what I call “the tantrum.”
Patricia:          I love this part.
Ted:                The tantrum is, “I don’t like it, I don’t want it and I don’t have to put up with it.  I didn’t ask to be here.  Who consulted me?  I find myself here, life sucks and I am just going to stay on my feet until its better.”
Patricia:          That’s the baby-boomer thing in a nutshell!
Ted:                Exactly.  Baby-boomers are all like babies...
                        They’re rebelling about the fact that the world isn’t the way they want it to be.  Sooner or later, you’re doing this and finally it isn’t doing anything.  I’m still here, it still isn’t comfortable and all my complaints and consternations about the fact that reality isn’t the way I want it to be, isn’t changing it.  Maybe reality is bigger than me.
Eduardo:        It’s a mind expansion.
Ted:                Maybe I need to actually adapt to the reality. I think it takes people awhile and that’s one of the things I help them do, I help them get.  What is the tantrum they’re in and is it working?  When you get it yourself, “well, here’s my tantrum and no, actually it’s not working, thanks for pointing that out, where do we go from here?”  I’m like okay let’s lead into the feeling of it and begin to practice embracing it.  Self blessing, that’s what I call it.  That’s what brings you into the truth of life as it is instead of it being the endless attempt to make life be the way we want it.
Eduardo:        Talk about a huge chore you can never complete.
Ted:                Yeah right, exactly.  The way I put it once is it’s as if you were trying to abolish all the negative particles in the universe in favor of converting them into positive particles.  Let me know how that goes.
Eduardo:        And how the universe survived.  Alright listen: Let’s get us back on the track to the blessings and benefits of the work of Waking Down in Mutuality.  You spoke of the first one relating to consciousness and the second one being the Second Birth awakening.  You proceed from there.
Ted:                Alright, well, another benefit is a deep healing, not only of childhood wounds, even though that is a big piece of it.  It’s also healing in our view of the world.  It’s a shifting between our view of the world as a place where there were good things and bad things and right things and wrong things, into a view that this is how Being is.  It’s dark and its light, and it’s positive in the sense that we like it and it’s negative in the sense that we dislike it; and it’s always got all these qualities.  That’s what the whole Ying-Yang symbol is all about.  This is about Being and its all one thing yet it’s got all these aspects. 
Even absolute is both full and empty.  Even relative is both happy and sad.  It’s all relative in a sense.  The fact that it’s all relative is an absolute truth.  So it’s absolute and relative.  When we heal our awareness of the truth, heal out of our tantrum and into our fundamental surrender, acceptance and embrace, a full embrace.  This is what Being is, what I am.  Then, I can actually be okay with the parts of life that are uncomfortable at a whole new level.  Then you can bring that awareness into the exploration of my childhood issues, what triggers me, where does it save me and what is the impact of relationships on my life when I stay inside that loop.  So the more deeply you can hold your own discomfort and encounter all of the unresolved material in our whole lives, it’s actually not just a blessing, it’s a miracle.  We can actually take on awakened consciousness and go into places many of us have worked on in therapeutic settings for decades.  And take a whole new look at it, feel the pain of it and untie the knot.  Then come out and say, “wow now it’s over, I’m a different person.”  It’s not just me saying it, its other people saying it, and when you’re friends are saying “wow, you really are different now, congratulations.”  I think that’s a huge benefit.
Eduardo:        We all seem to be raised where we’re a little deficient in that mothering nurturing love and sometimes our healing requires an amount of what Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.”  This healing would seem to allow us to become more whole, to fill out more of our total Being, yes?
Ted:                Exactly.  If you look at it in terms of a hand going into a glove it’s as if – it’s more like a hand going into a glove that’s got a thousand different fingers in it and half of those fingers were cut off because when we were young something traumatic happened there and essentially we couldn’t handle it.  We just sort of cut that part off and put a little bow around it saying lets remember to come back to that one later.  That’s what all this stuff is in our system.  The knots in our system are little reminder knots.
Eduardo:        To come back later and heal so you can be back whole again.
Ted:                Exactly.
Eduardo:        That’s pretty cool.
Ted:                And it takes a depth of awakened consciousness with the willingness to be uncomfortable and to penetrate the mysteries of all of the stuff that was going on.  You’ve got to be able to feel it and see it and live it and let yourself become it.  This is Saniel and Linda’s six step recognition yoga.  I would call it embodiment yoga.  These are the steps of embodiment.
Eduardo:        Okay, moving right along.  What’s next?
Ted:                Another benefit of this work is awakening to mutuality and intimacy.  As I said before, awakening is another whole dimension.  As you awaken more and more deeply in that dimension, you actually gain skill at relating to other people.  You gain the kind of skill that you can’t have unless you spend a lot of time in that dimension with awakened consciousness and willingness to be uncomfortable.  By the way, I also need to say, you’ve got to have an equal willingness to be ecstatic and happy.  If you’re pushing away that whole piece you’re missing it, if you’re pushing happiness away then you also can’t fully feel pain.  You’ve got to let yourself into both.  The more you get into the mutuality, the more you get skill in relating, which isn’t a skill about manipulating it’s a skill that actually lets you interact with human beings in ways that are natural and allow all of us to get our needs met, to nourish each other and enjoy life and to cooperate without stepping on each other in unnecessary ways.
Eduardo:        It seems that would be so fulfilling in relation to that loneliness feeling that our usual self identity embodies, and suddenly you’re working through it by this relationally?
Ted:                Exactly, because then you can actually be touched.  If you’re being Shiva who’s being removed from the Shakti of the world, you can never be touched.
Eduardo:        And Shiva without Shakti is said to be without power.
Ted:                For sure.  There’s no power because there’s no connectiveness with the world.  The power is in the world.  Some people would say, “oh no, power is all in consciousness and the absolute.”  But I don’t think so.  If the consciousness is disassociated from the world you can’t do anything.  If the consciousness is in the body then you can do something here, you can love your friends, you can love your family, you can help other people to get disentangled from their mistaken misidentifications.  We can all help each other get into the Age of Aquarius.
Eduardo:        Oh yeah!
Ted:                Also, mutuality opens up this whole thing mentally...  There is this thing called intimacy, which is really a mutual opening, a mutual openness, and an ability to be touched and to touch and to feel this whole connectiveness that comes from your heart to my heart, and from your being to my being.  You can feel that sexually, you can feel it emotionally, you can feel it intellectually, and you can feel it in all ways that human beings can relate to each other.  You’re out there shopping (Saniel wrote about this in one of his books), and you encounter the clerk and for a moment you get, “wow, this is the goddess checking me out.”  Eventually you might notice she really was just checking me out, she wasn’t really interested in me, so you can’t do this intimacy with everybody. You still get a much deeper look and feel to your relationship to other people when you’re really open in that dimension.  Then when you get someone on the other end who is really open to the same level, wow.
Patricia:          So, are there some people who just reach a point of mutuality naturally, who are able to open up and be like that.  You run into those people once in a while?
Ted:                Yeah, it’s very nice and I find it quite unusual.
Patricia:          But for most of us it’s not quite that easy to see.
Ted:                For most of us it’s not easy because we grew up in this soup of anti-mutuality.
Eduardo:        Sometimes people refer to those as “espontáneos” they didn’t have a teacher...
Patricia:          I’m in Customer Service, so I see people every day.  Some of them, there is that connection as human being and they make that eye contact and that’s really wonderful when that happens.  The other people are just a closed shop.
Ted:                Yeah, that’s right.
Eduardo:        This whole mutuality thing fits in. I’ve studied and practiced Buddhism a lot of this life and they refer to the “Three Jewels” and the third one is Sangha, which means the community of fellow travelers that are helping each other along the way.  Of course included in that is relationally, so I see mutuality as being like a third jewel in this awakening.  Coming into embodied consciousness and then relating out in the world is like a seed unplanted until then.  Now it’s got soil and now it’s rooting out and touching others.  I see a parallel there and some groups didn’t get to that point.  They get the consciousness part, but not the relationally part.  Most people require great mothering, nurturing and love to get over their childhood, heal up and get whole again, and that takes a lot of support and I found with the Waking Down support is part of the package deal.  It seems to provide all the needed elements to cook the goose.
Ted:                It looks like it.  I’m sure we’ll find more elements.
Eduardo:        Alright then what’s another benefit that comes of the Waking Down in Mutuality work?
Ted:                Yes and  I’m calling it “fulfilling your purpose.”  This is a huge thing for a lot of people.  Not everybody is sort of wired up to be particularly caring about what their purpose is here because maybe more of their purpose is just in Being.  In other words, not everybody conceives there’s a purpose of being an accountant for life, or whatever your thing is.  So maybe a better way to put it is living your wiring diagram.
Eduardo:        The old phrase for it was “your calling.”
Ted:                You’re calling, right.  That came to mean your job or your vocation.  I conceive this more about finding out about what your unique wiring is and surrendering yourself into living it.  Again, this is, for many people, the part of the self that they didn’t want to realize.  Some people are here with wiring that says they’re not the kind of person that has a lot of the great ideas, but they’re great at carrying out somebody else’s ideas.  But then if they got this idea that they have to have their own independent ideas, well what is it then you have to go through, trying to live your life as if you were that kind of person and finding out that that doesn’t work for you.  The ideals were just part of the American Dream.  It’s like everybody is supposed to come up with their own ideas and make then happen; that’s the American Dream.  That’s just a dream.  That’s not how most people are actually wired.  Most people are like the worker bee’s, they’ve got energy and they’ve got the drive and they’ve got the intelligence to go do something if somebody just says go do this thing.  If they feel the right energy about doing that project, great, but if everybody thinks they’re the queen bee, there’s going to be a problem.  You look at the animal kingdom and there are alpha males and females; it’s a natural hierarchy.
Eduardo:        Some would say that everybody is here to awaken; that everybody has that Buddha nature in them.  What’s the diff?  The people who don’t seem to have an interest enlightenment are worker bee’s, they’re too busy.
Patricia:          I thought he was saying even people who are awakened can still just be the worker bees.  Just because you’re awakened doesn’t mean you have to be the one running the show.  So he was talking about people who are awakened and still not choosing to step up to the plate.
Ted:                We need them all.  That’s why it’s great that we’re all so different, as long as we’re not trying to become something other than who we actually are; that just don’t work.  It doesn’t matter how great your ideals or how much you yearn to be whoever your hero is. In the end, you’re going to have to be yourself.
Eduardo:        Maybe that’s why Shakespeare said: “to thy own self be true?”
Ted:                Exactly, for a lot of people it’s, “I thought I was going to be a doer and in fact I’m a socialite.”  I’m just a socialite, I’m just enjoying stuff.  If there isn’t somebody actually in the audience enjoying this play then the play doesn’t really work.  There are people on all ends of this thing, and just discovering what your natural position is, and becoming it, well, it doesn’t get much better than that.  If you awaken in all these areas and you’ve discovered true intimacy, real love, your own purpose and you’re out there doing what you love doing, I think that’s about as good as it gets.
Eduardo:        I’ll sign in.
Ted:                I’m not saying life is 100% blessed, I’m just saying that at least we’ve gotten rid of most of the unnecessary pain and we can really enjoy this as best we can.
Eduardo:        I’ve observed Waking Down in Mutuality, its teachers, its students for about three years now.  As a student of spiritual evolution through most of my adult life, I’ve been comparing it to other paths.  Jesus says, “By the fruits ye shall know them.”  I’ve not seen any work that has had the fruit so quickly apparent, that is to say, Second Birth awakenings in abundance.  If people will apply themselves, do these things, take in this unconditional love and flower it into a realization of who they are, they will have that self liberation or realization.
My final question is in relation to the success that Waking Down has had in spreading its benefits, it’s blessings, to let people come into recognition of who they really are.  To what do you attribute that?  Some places you’re supposed to practice your ass off and maybe some later lifetime you’re going to get it.  This one says maybe even within a few years you can get who you really are and get on about your gifts.  How is this working?  How can this work so well?
Ted:                Well, in the IAM video, I’m trying to answer this very question and reduce it to the minimum number of elements.  There are a whole lot of reasons why this works really well.  It’s very hard to tease them all apart because they’re the very same transmission that started from Saniel.  In a way I can say the reason this is working is because Saniel actually awakened at a certain depth and in a certain way that allowed this to just become easy to share.  From the very beginning he wanted this thing to be communicable, so instead of  “I am the one true God” that’s not communicable because if there is one true god then where is he?  I guess I’m chopped liver. 
Basically the communication is: I am the god man and you are the god man and you are the god women and we’re all being what Being is and I am giving you every way to empower you and awaken to this and fulfill your needs so you can come to this recognition yourself.  If you want to, go on and give this to your friends and other people you meet.  That’s a very different transmission.  We could say that it was all about that angle that Saniel took as he came on his awakening...  He could see what was going to make this thing work was to be really communicable.  The way I put it in the video is there is a master key and when you have waking, down and mutuality, they’re the three teeth on this key.
If you get all three going at the same time, you’re not avoiding any of the big pieces of what Being is.  There is a skeleton key effect.  I also added the three things that empower you to turn that key which are love, trust and confidence in Being.  Saniel was able to give us this remarkable love for who we are, not just love for who he wanted us to be, which is what most of us got from our parents.  Some of us got more than that, I certainly got more than that, but the kind of love that gives you full permission to be truly you.  There’s that kind of love.
Eduardo:        That sounds like an unconditional love, an all accepting love. There is conditional love and unconditional love at the same time.  That was a way Saniel was modeling that was quite amazing.
Ted:                Then there’s confidence.  Saniel had this incredible confidence in my ability to go through this process.  Instead of the teacher basically saying, “You’re not doing it right, you’re never getting it, you’re not meditating long enough, you complain too much, you’re too dramatic, relax, and don’t be so sensitive.”  Instead of that the teacher is going, “yeah, you’ve got this, you’re getting this, you’re doing great.”  It’s a completely different reality.  Under the influence of that kind of sunshine flowers can blossom.
Then there’s trust.  It’s not like a trust that is demanded of the student, by the teacher, it’s a trust that the teacher has in his or her own Being, in Being at large in his or her own life experience and awakened life experience.  This trust basically says, “How you’re showing up is exactly right.  You’re process is exactly the way your process should be going.”
Eduardo:        So it’s perfect how it is, don’t be trying to change it and fix it?
Ted:                Exactly.  In other words if I can trust your process as unique and unequally different from my process instead of trying to impose my process on your process, like “this is how it happened for me, I had three glasses of carrot juice and I ran around the block and I sat down and did some pranayam and I awakened so that’s how everybody should do it.”  Which – by the way there is a really beautiful embodiment in that Pinball Wizard song.  Its like “see me, feel me,” that whole song, it’s like he has his awakening through Pinball, so he was going to get everyone else to play pinball too.  It’s the same thing.  That’s the model we grew up in.  The teacher has an awakening and he gives that to the students.
Saniel brought a completely different model.  He said, “Well, here’s what happened for me, but let’s see what works for you.”
Eduardo:        No cookie cutter formula.
Ted:                Nope.  That’s a completely different kind of transmission about how awakening can happen.  It’s actually a truth way more real to what happens for those “realizers”.  By and large the people who’ve had their own awakenings were like “screw you guys, I’m going to do this my way.”  There was always some part of them going – at least in the West it happened more that way.  In the East it was follow the leader, but it does happen.  It’s not that it doesn’t work, but for us westerners we’re more like, “hey, what about me?”  And here comes Saniel with this whole approach, “right, it’s about you.”  That was a very different thing.  When you combine love, trust, confidence and Being, with Waking Down and Mutuality, you’ve got a master key.
Patricia:          A Universal Key.
Ted:                A Universal Key.  I can’t say universal because I don’t know that it works on everybody, but it works on people who come here and hang around, who are attracted to it, people who are consistently attracted.
Patricia:          Is there a certain segment of society that’s attracted to the Waking Down movement?
Ted:                I actually find myself using the word movement now more than ever because it really is a movement.  It a whole movement in a new kind of a direction and it’s a movement because it isn’t just about Saniel, it’s because we now have a whole bunch of different entities that comprise the stakeholders of this work, which really even the students have become stakeholders in this work.  It’s become a whole movement by a whole lot of people that are moving in the same direction.
Patricia:          I was asking about the demographics?
Eduardo:        Well, one thing I can point out is a lot of the people who benefit greatly from Waking Down Mutuality’s skillful means are people who have tried one or another thing until they feel like they’ve batted their head against the wall. They’re frustrated and unfulfilled, not awake and wondering what the hell happened.  A person in that position can benefit greatly from this work.
Ted:                Right, so there you go.  That has been the biggest demographic: grizzled, spiritual veterans of other paths.  These are the people who have really been at it for quite a while.  I think that’s the bulk of the demographics.  Then you’ve got the newer, younger people who just hear about it and they’re kind of fresh.  That’s refreshing because then we don’t have to detox them from all of their idealistic pictures of enlightenment before we can get down to the real work.
Patricia:          On one hand had it pays to have some kind of knowledge and background of a spiritual nature, on the other hand too much of it gets in the way.
Ted:                So that has been kind of a demographic, but we keep hoping that the demographic will expand. We keep evoking for it to expand.
Eduardo:        There seems to be a time as Arjuna Ardagh said in his book Translucent Revolution, where he’s citing how it’s across the board, in all walks of life, economic stations, that there seems to be a proliferation of awakening.  Have you noticed anything like that? 
Ted:                I don’t know.  I’m not out there in the public the same as Arjuna is.  I have tended to spend most of my attention facing into those who are already attracted to this.  So it’s a different kind of a specialty.  I used to have all kinds of idealistic notions about how what we’re doing here is going to change the world, that it was going to be the hundredth monkey effect and the whole world is going to wake up and won’t it be great and then we’ll really have peace and prosperity.  I think there is a certain element that is happening, but the impact isn’t being the way we want it to be.  The world is still being what being is, dark and light, good and bad, war and peace, happiness and unhappiness, life and death and as good as things get, there is still always going to be both. 
We’re never going to end up in the idealistic pictures of the lion laying down with the lamb; no the lion is going to eat that lamb every time.  A lot of my ideas have gone out about that, but I think at the same time my whole release of the desire to go out and proselytize and fix the world; forget it man!  The world is what it is.  I’m fine with it, and I’m just here helping people who are ready for this thing.  Meanwhile, the world is changing. 
Eduardo:        This has been a wonderful, very enjoyable interview, I’m really glad we got to meet together today and look into all these things.  I hope the people who hear this can continue their curiosity because there are other teachers in this world of Waking Down in Mutuality yet to be explored.  I’m really glad that we’re starting off with this one.
Ted:                Thank you man, I appreciate it very much.