„When I went to India, when we met in Maui there were no cell phones, no internet. We didn’t know about India. Now it’s all online, it’s a whole new world. How will that impact us, that you don’t have to go to India, that all the sacred teachings are online? Well, that’s both good news and bad news.“

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Transcript of this Episode

REINHARD: Hi and welcome to episode 29 of my podcast.

Today I’m opening a new source of wisdom for my listeners. It is a series in which I will be talking to spiritual teachers around the globe. Let’s remember, the ultimate goal of rhythm practice is finding emptiness –  a place where the abundance of life is emanating from –

And it is the place where you can discover who you really are, beyond the mind made little entity, the I. And that also means, this podcast, on the one hand hosts great musicians, composers but equally important, it hosts people who are able to inspire you on this quest for wisdom and inner evolution and I am excited to start this new series with a great spiritual teacher and friend of mine with whom I shared many significant moments.

He started as a rebel, during the 1971 May Day Protests and became a federal fugitive during the Vietnam war. He describes this time as „I was brought face-to-face with death. And through grace, I passed to the other side“. And that is where the spiritual quest began. Kalu Rinpoche appointed him the president of Kagyu Minjur Choling, the first Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist dharma center in Marin County.

In the 1980’s he ran a lot of programs in Esalen Institute. Clinical hypnosis certification programs and he was a keynote speaker at the first international enneagram convention in Stanford. But then in 1990, in India, he met his teacher Poonja, also known as Papaji, who was actually a direct disciple of the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi. After learning quite some time under his guidance, Papaji send him and his wife Gangashi out to give their own satsangs. Right now he is teaching through the Leela Foundation, welcome Eli Jaxon-Bear!

ELI: Oh, so good to see you REINHARD! Thank you for having me here, Bro!

REINHARD: Yes, and thank you for this great book. I really enjoy reading it. It is the rebel that found his home.

Lets right go to this. At the core of what you and I are doing with TaKeTiNa it’s emptiness and stillness. And I have a very very great recollection that I shared with you. This is a moment where we have been in Germany, in Zist – this is a center where we have both been teaching – and then I had a tour pause, I remember, and you came with green tea. Very delicious green tea you prepared. And as we started to drink – you was sitting right across the other side – a profound, incredible emptiness and stillness opened up. I will never forget this. So my first question to you… Is emptiness a state that can tear down the veil of illusion?

ELI: No. You can have an experience of emptiness which is a state, which doesn’t tear anything down but sees through. So, to tear down is to believe there’s actually something to tear down. But when you have a moment of truth, a moment of emptiness, in that clarity you see through the veils. So, there is nothing to tear down. But, as an experience it is limited. That’s why I answered no. That’s because the truth is that this realization of yourself is deeper than any stage. And when you realize yourself, timeless and formless, or what you call emptiness, that realization doesn’t come and go. But if you don’t realize yourself as that but you have the experience of that, that comes and goes. And that is very useful. It’s beautiful, it’s profound, it’s fantastic. We all have bliss states where everything disappears. Sometimes it happens in orgasm in sex or you can have them with psychedelics. It happened with me with psychedelics for sure.  And it has happened in so many other times, with high stress, bliss or moments in nature. But all oh those as useful as they are, and they are so useful, those are momentary experiences, those are highs. In Sanskrit its called Samadhi. Samadhi is a bliss state, but it is a state and what we are here for, to realize yourself is to realize what is before all states, what is conscious in all states. Hell realms and heaven realms. Empty and full. And it is so beautiful to see you again my brother. I remember that green tea, I remember your tour bus. Reinhard and I actually thought together somewhere in Hamburg maybe or where was it where we did the TaKeTiNa and trance kind of thing?

REINHARD:  Yes, exactly.

ELI: And Reinhard was at my wedding in a cave in holy Haleakalā in Maui.

REINHARD: That is quite another story. Yes we have been in Hawaii, in Maui, in Kihei actually where we did the workshop. And here I came across the enneagram that you were teaching there for the first time. For many of my listeners I don’t think they really know what’s an enneagram and what it is good for in the inner evolution.

ELI:  Beautiful. So let’s start with the enneagram as the earliest system of vibration that we have in the West. It starts with Pythagoras. Pythagoras was a pre-Greek philosopher who really set the groundwork for what is to come. So that Plato, Aristotle, Socrates all come from the groundwork that really starts with the questions raised by Pythagoras. So Pythagoras walks by a metal shop one day and he sees someone hammering a bar and he realizes: octave, that actually to go from one frequency to the next, to go from 1000 to 2000 in the sound frequency is a path through octaves. And he saw that the whole universe is vibrating. And that it vibrates according to mathematical laws. And these mathematical laws are the first expression we know as the Pythagorean theorem. It is the only one we know because he never wrote anything down. It was a mystery  school where it was passed on when you were ready to receive it. And so it was always a secret. But basically he saw that the whole universe is a mathematical construction of certain laws. Laws that are before Earth, before humans, before us. There is always a triangle and there is always a Pythagorean theorem. And that everything is vibrating and it has its own musical pitch. This is Pythagorean from 500 b.C., 600 b.C., sometime in there.

REINHARD:  So you are saying that Pythagoras invented or found the enneagram?

ELI: The first drawing of the enneagram is found in one of Pythagoras’s students. He didn’t write it down. But the first person who brings it to the West is Gurdjieff and he explains the harmonics of it. That is really how vibration changes octaves. So what you find in an octave when you go through a piano keyboard there are certain black keys missing. Those have notes that are missing. According to the pythagorean understanding, is where the energy of the original impulse starts to slow down

and it needs an outside shock to keep the energy vibrating continuously on to its next frequency.

So the enneagram describes that. And it then takes it into the form of human psyche. And the

beautiful thing is, it gives us the wisdom mirror to see the structure of ego, the structure of our

deep genetic character fixation.

REINHARD: So how do you get this transfer from the vibrational laws now to the psychological…

ELI: Well actually if you look at people we’re all vibrating of course and we vibrate at different frequencies and you know that there’s some people that you’re in tune with and some people giving off bad vibes and the enneagram gives you the vibrational frequency of each of our animal forms because we don’t have that many. There’s nine different basic animals you could say. We’re vibrating. So the hysterics the emotional fixations have a higher or flightier vibration and they’re up here a little more and they’re… You know whereas the fear ones are vibrating and they’re a little back here and they’re… And the anger ones like me, this form, you know come is out there and in your face and it’s just vibrationally it’s heavier. And so you can start to see that the psyche is actually showing vibrational frequencies of egoic fixation.

REINHARD: So there are nine characters or nine archetypes or nine… how would you describe it?

ELI: According to Aristotle we all have three bodies of manifestation. A physical, emotional and mental body. Each of those bodies is vibrating at its own frequency. Our emotional vibrations…We know when someone’s going on emotionally. Our mental vibrations, you know, it’s electric in our head and our physical vibrations it’s in the body and in the physicality and in the physical presence. So those three are the three basic fixations. So genetically when we’re born we’re either identified physically, emotionally or mentally, that becomes our center of gravity. It’s not that we don’t have all three of course everyone has all three but there’s one that is this the central focus that the others then support. So if your physical fixation, your emotions and your thoughts are really in service of your physicality whether your mental fixation, your emotions and your body are in service of your mind and so then there’s just a ying and the yang, an introverted and extroverted version of each of those and that’s how you get nine.

REINHARD: So are you born as an archetype one of the…

ELI: Yes.

REINHARD:  Okay, how does this happen?

ELI: How does genetics happen?

REINHARD: Yeah, how do you let’s say… You arrive on this planet as a nine or a seven or a three?

ELI: How do you arrive with red hair and blue eyes?

REINHARD: Yeah okay this is just one manifestation of that. And now there obviously is a path that you can go as a three or another path you can go as a seven or a nine or a five.

ELI: There’s no you know… We’re all animals with the same basic drives. That also is something that was taught in Pythagoras’s teaching is that there’s three basic drives. There’s an animal drive for survival. We all have that. There’s a social drive for being part of the group part of the family part of the herd, whatever it might be and there’s this sexual drive to reproduce. Those are the three every mammal has these three drives. So when these drives also genetic when they start to manifest they manifest through the structure of the fixation so that you know if you’re a mental fixation with a self-preservation drive you’re going to show up one way if your mental fixation with an angry drive you show up a different way.

REINHARD: That makes sense, yes. And how do you now work… Let’s say you have people in the workshop or people come to explore the enneagram… How do you work with them on the enneagram.

ELI: First you find out what you want. This is the first question. Most people don’t know what they want. They think they want more, better, less, different or better different, let’s say or less better different. Less pain, less suffering, less fear, less confusion, more success, more money, more sex more whatever. That’s what most people want and all of those are conditioned wants by society, by our culture. If you grew up in the Kalahari bush you would have very different wants. So our wants are mainly programmed by our environment and our particular fixations meeting that environment. But to find out what you really want is to go deeper than that. Is to ask the essential questions of life. What is the meaning of life when life has no meaning? What’s the point of your life? What are you willing to live for? What are you willing to die for? You start to examine yourself, you start to see what’s real, you start to see where you’ve betrayed yourself. And then you start to uncover the fixation, the pattern that continually betrays what you really want for money, sex and power.

REINHARD: Don’t you think that at the core of every human being there’s love but it’s just covered by the fixation or by all this…

ELI: At the core we’re all the same yeah. We are all silent immortal consciousness. But if you believe that it’s a trap. It’s a better trap than you know hanging out in the bar and getting drunk every day. Better to believe that we are all immortal silent consciousness but to realize it, to realize it is the possibility that we’re all here for. And to realize it you have to be willing to turn away from everything else because everything else is the obscuration to the shining of the truth.

And that’s why it’s valuable to know the fixation because then you know what it is exactly you’re turning away from.

REINHARD: You just sent me a very interesting little essay which is focused around the true friend that you describe of having emptiness, love… What was the third?

ELI: Awareness

REINHARD: Awareness

ELI: So it’s not that you have those. See that’s it. The trap is for all of us. We want to have these things. I want to have emptiness, awareness and love so I can be a true friend. And that’s the trap so then I develop the imitation of that which works because even if you’re imitating truth it’s better than imitating the lie and so it works and you get lots of perks from it. People see it and they recognize and they pop and they “wow” and it’s well. But to realize yourself as the truth of yourself which is empty intelligent love, that is itself awareness before being, then you can be a true friend for whatever shows up in your life. And where you are not a true friend where you’re some egoic identification of a somebody doing something to that degree you’re suffering and to that degree you’re not transmitting the truth and love and emptiness that you are. You’re transmitting me and my opinion or me and my agenda or me and the way I see it. What I want.

REINHARD: It’s also an interesting time right now because i see a big split between people diving really into suffering and fixation about the suffering and other people waking up big time and shedding all this.

ELI: Isn’t it mind-blowing?

So REINHARD: when you were on Maui with me before I met my teacher, I had never heard of satsang and I’m sure you hadn’t or anybody in that party in Kihei. We’d never heard of satsang. Now every yoga teacher is doing satsang, everybody’s got satsang. It’s like it’s become a worldwide phenomena. Which is good news and bad news of course because the good news of it is that it at least spreads the concept and perhaps the momentary experience of the truth of yourself and that it’s possible to wake up. When we were on Maui before I met my teacher nobody even had ever heard of a silent mind and now everybody’s talking about emptiness and silence. That change has just happened in…you know…well you and I were together, we’ve seen that.

REINHARD: This was a very remarkable meeting you know with so many people there that you invited. And first it was like whale watching… Like, what are we doing here? And then we really dove so deep into so many things, going into nature out and having these amazing ceremonies going on.

Have you ever been back to Maui? Or you’re now…

ELI: We lived there for seven years. We were living there when I met my teacher. We were living on a farm. You were at that farm. So we were on that farm for seven years.

REINHARD: I see.

ELI: You and I did acid on that farm.

REINHARD: Yeah! (Laughter) This is absolutely true. It was a mind-blowing experience, very high up you know, half the way up to Haleakalā. And this was another amazing thing like when you married in the crater of Haleakalā. It was pouring rain and so the people, many didn’t come because it was quite difficult to go up.

ELI: All the Americans didn’t come. All the Germans and the Austrians came.

REINHARD: Yeah this was a wonderful time. Are you now in Ashland right?

ELI: I’m in Ashland and you know, i’ve got pictures of you in your underwear in that cabin in the mountains because it was pouring rain. When we got there we all got undressed, we built a fire and we were in our long underwear with… And that’s when the german John showed up.

REINHARD: Yes exactly, the german John on the horse, yeah.

Now let’s go to that. You married Gangaji there and you both…

ELI: That was before she was born Gangaji, then she was Tony, right?

REINHARD: I knew her when she was Tony and I got the whole transition. Now let me actually go back to this time where you met Poonjaji. Tell us a little bit about it because there’s so many people I know that have been deeply deeply influenced by Poonjaji. What was your calling there, your experience there, how did you meet him?

ELI: I was already published. My enneagram book was doing really well, it sold out in its first printing in Germany, really fast. I was teaching as you said at Esalen and in Wien and at Zist and in Japan. I was married to my best frie… I was not married yet but for 13 years living with my best friend, my partner Tony. I had a great life. I had a life people dream about. But I knew I wasn’t finished. And I got called. And I didn’t know, there was no name Poonjaji. It’s like I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know what I would find but I knew I was being called. I was 43 years old, Tony my partner said you’re having a midlife crisis man, where are you going? You’re going off to… I had two criteria. I either wanted to meet someone who’s more awake than I was that could give me the final transmission or I wanted to meet sufis who knew the enneagram better than I did. So I was going to go off into Kafiristan and into the backcountry of Pakistan to find the people that I thought maybe knew the enneagram. Also I was going to go to find Jagman Gurung who was a tibetan buddhist i’d received the transmission from when we were on Maui and he was in Bhutan.

REINHARD: Now let me ask you one question. You said that the enneagram came from Pythagoras, right?

ELI: Yes

REINHARD: So how did that come then to the Sufi traditions?

ELI: Actually I think they learned it from Gurdjieff. Here’s where it really goes. From Pythagoras, he sets up his mystery schools. When he first sets his first one up in the town he’s kind of outspoken about what he’s about and it creates kind of a revolution in that town. And that becomes a threat to the property owners and they burn down his school and from there he goes from the Greek world he goes underground maybe into the Persian world and he sets up his mystery schools there. And his mystery schools are still going in the Druids, the Druids of Lebanon. Actually their secret religion is pythagorean. They have the whole cosmology, the vibration of the universe…I mean it’s just mind-blowing. And Pythagoras was one of the first people who believed in reincarnation. He said “I never learned anything, I’m just remembering what I knew from my past lives”. And so in the Druids tradition and in the secret traditions of this mystery school you stayed within your marriage and your children stayed within the community so that your soul would reincarnate lifetime after lifetime into the same teaching, in the same community for your own realization.

REINHARD: It’s very interesting. Now Gurdjieff comes in…

ELI: So Gurdjieff comes in. He must have learned it from the Druids. But he never says. He just says he learned it from a mystery school. A mystery school he said in central Asia maybe. He was very vague about it. He kept it a secret because basically he took a vow of silence. He was basically breaking his vow of silence and bringing the teaching out.

REINHARD: Have you seen this movie meeting with a remarkable man?

ELI: A long time ago.

REINHARD: It’s about Gurdjieff’s life. There’s a scene in which he talks about a Sarmoung brotherhood up in the Amatoria river.

ELI: Yeah that’s right. Actually I read his book way before the movie came out. It’s one of his books and so that’s why I was going to find the Sarmoung brotherhood which I thought would be in the back back hills of Pakistan.

REINHARD: But it took you further on to India right?

ELI: Well, I had a land in Delhi to get my visa. I was gonna fly from Delhi to Lahore and also I was gonna go to meet Jagman in Bhutan. So for both of those I had to get my visa in Delhi. And so that’s why I flew to India. I had no interest in going to India at all. I mean that was just my transit point.

REINHARD: Okay. And then how did you come to…?

ELI: Okay. I was staying at a small inn and I told the innkeeper in Delhi that I was looking for sufis and he said “oh there’s you know there’s a Sufi village right down the road here in Nizamuddin”. So I took the temple down to Nizamuddin. It was like driving back in time. Suddenly I’m in this 16th century dirk road, mudwall sufi village, built around the shrine for Nizamuddin, who’s a sufi saint. So I went there. I went to the mosque and I went to the shrine in the Zamudin, I prayed for liberation and then I went to eat at Kareem’s restaurant right off the bazaar, off behind the mosque. I sat at a table, I’m waiting to be waited on and another man sits down after I do and they wait on him first. And it’s like “hey I was here…what, what, what?” you know.  Because I’m a New Yorker, I know about lines, I know who was here first. No, you don’t wait on him first. I didn’t say anything but I felt it. And he felt it and he said to me “May I join you? And please let me sit at your table and whatever he’s having you know, I’d like to pay for“. And so he sat at my table, turns out he was a government minister, he was just in town for the day and his sister writes books about sufis. And so he could tell me who all the enlightened sufis were and he gave me this list and he drove me in his government chauffeured car back to my hotel. And so I started searching for sufis and I met sufis, I met the head of the Lakshman Di sufis in old Delhi and I went to the Gangetic plains. I met the sufis there, I met the sufis in the Zamuddin, and I never found what I was looking for. And so he said he was stationed in Lucknow and he said “well look if you don’t like…I have more names back home, you can always come visit me in Lucknow and i’ll give you more names”. And so I went to Lucknow to find him and get more names of sufis. But while I was there I had read a book by one of papaji’s students, Andrew Cohen, who mentioned his teacher was in Lucknow and his name was Poonja. I didn’t have the book with me, but since I’m going to Lucknow, I remember that, I called my partner Tony back in the States, which was like a huge ordeal to make a phone call from India to anywhere. It’s like a 12-hour thing and when you get on the phone you can’t hear, you’re underwater but she said his name is Poonja. And that’s all I knew. And so I then went down to the lobby of the hotel to get a phone book but the pieces had been torn out. I was staying in an old muslim palace of a minor Nawab of Lucknow. Lucknow was a major part of the muslim world. And so I went up onto the hotel where there’s turrets and towers and I smoked my holy herb, my marijuana which I brought with me wherever I went, and I was ready for a vision. I looked up in the sky and I saw this square black piece of paper, kind of just floating on the air, and then it would jerk. I said “oh”, am I tripping? Did it really jerk? Did it really move? And then a red piece of paper, also like floating up on the heat waves… And then they started dancing together and I knew that’s where he is. I’ve got to get to that spot. And it wasn’t that far from where my hotel was. So I finally got another phone book, I got directions, I found there was a Poonja and the Poonja was in the Narhi marketplace not far from my hotel. So I walked over, asking directions, I knocked on his door and this sweet open good-hearted man opens the door and says “oh come in he’s waiting for you”. “He’s waiting for me? Nobody knows I’m coming. But he’s waiting for me, okay”. So I go up and I go into his bedroom and I knock on his door, he’s sitting in his bed, his room is big enough for a single bed and a chair and some shells for his clothes. He invites me in and he has me sit on his bed with him and he says “what are you here for?” I said “well I’m really finally, I’m ready to wake up”. And he laughed and he kind of slapped me a little bit and it was over. I knew in that moment I was looking at my own self. There was no doubt. This was love looking at love. I didn’t know myself as love but I knew he was love. And I know he was seeing me and loving me. And my mind stopped. Everything stopped and I sat on the bed with him. At that point I had considered myself a buddhist, as you said Kalu Rinpoche had me run his dharma center and I’d been to Japan where I was given a zen teaching fan from the oldest living zen master, which was passing on the dharma to teach. So I was a buddhist and I’m sitting on this bed with a living buddha. An 80 year old living buddha sitting there, looking at me, laughing and loving me. And what does he do?, he picks up the Xinxin Ming which is a chan buddhist classic. Chan is the Chinese pronunciation of a sudden awakening which the Japanese pronounce zen. So I’m a zen student and he goes to the Chan master and reads to me from the non-dual teaching of this Chan master. And i’m sitting with a living buddha. I couldn’t believe my good luck.

REINHARD: It’s fascinating to see the first part of your life. You were very much engaged also “oh I am the head of this monastery and I have done this and i’ve done that” and then all of a sudden here you sit, and as you said, you just look into someone’s eyes and realize that you’re love and he is love and…

ELI: And it’s over. My search that started in Colorado when I was a federal fugitive from that time you were mentioning, I had an 18-year search to find my teacher. And so you and I were on Maui together just months before I left I think. No maybe a year before I left. That was maybe what, 88 when we were there and I left in January of 90.

REINHARD: This was the 1990s. Sounds so much like India but in this very unique to meet a spirit like that. Ramana Maharshi hasn’t talked much as I have heard. It’s just the being who was sitting and the rats have eaten his body partly and he was at samadhi. Did you feel some transmission from Ramana Maharshi to…

ELI: I felt it from Papaji. The only thing Papaji had on his wall, he had two things on his wall. He had a big poster of Ramana Maharshi in color that he gave to me that’s now in my bedroom. And he had a Sri yantra which was my logo from the time of the very when I started teaching in the early 80s. And so wow, a Sri yantra! Ramana Maharshi I didn’t really know. I knew vaguely but I didn’t know his story, I didn’t realize that Papaji was a student. I didn’t know any of that. I just knew I was sitting with the living truth.

REINHARD: Back then there were not many people from Europe yet with Poonjaji, right?

ELI: I was the only one. My god, i’d eat my meals with him and his family, we go on walks together, we do everything together and he would read his letters he would get from devotees around the world and I would sit with him in his room, he would sit in his chair and I would have my arms around his legs and sit with him and he said “oh this couple is in Varanasi now they want to come visit” and I said “oh no don’t let them, no, no”. So they were the first Europeans to show up while I was there and they were both from London. And she Chloe good child, maybe you know her, she does music little things.

REINHARD: When did Tony come?

ELI: Well as soon as I got there I started writing her letters telling her she’s got to come, she’s got to meet them and she said she would go into bliss from just reading my letter. That the transmission was in the letters. But still she didn’t know and so I had to fly back, I flew back to get her and before I did Papaji took me… Oh, before I left him he wanted to… He took me into his room and he said “you’ve been tested”, and he had some fantastic tests for me that I loved. They said “you’ve been tested, you stayed true, you’re ready”. And at that moment I felt the arising of pride. I knew… Wow… He’s gonna… Wow this is too much, right? And I felt it and at that moment I knew and I said to him “Papaji my wife is the sadhguru, you have to meet my wife”, and he said “okay, good, good”. So I said “but my wife is not a yogi she’s a goddess. I have to find the right accommodations for her”. And he said “okay well let’s go to Jarwal and you can find the accommodations. I’ll wait for you there and you can go and get her”. And so we took the overnight sleeper to hardware, where he rented rooms on the ganga, and I went and found the best place for her which was the tourist motel, which was like taking you into the inner city of Detroit. Didn’t have gunshots but you know… Anyway that was the best place in town I could find. So then he waited there. I was there in January to February of 1990, I went home and brought her back in April.

So in March I did my retreat on Maui where Sabrina and Christina, who became… What was Christina’s name with Papaji? She was a heart surgeon in Munich, who was one of my students who became Papaji’s devotee and stayed with him, lived with him and took care of him. Yamuna, Yamuna.

So they all met me on my return from meeting Papaji and I just brought them all back with me to India. So Sabrina and Yamuna and the whole crew came back to Jarwal with me.

REINHARD: Now we had really the luck to travel India at a time where it’s always possible and where it was still the old India where you can find saints like this. Nowadays, in this very situation, I see a lot of desperate people, angry people, depressed people, what can we give them from the abundance we have learned? You are my honored guest and I would be very happy if you had something for the listeners like if you are in a situation like get angry, you get depressed and you get fearful…

ELI: If you’re suffering in any way…

REINHARD: Yes, if you’re suffering. Exactly…

ELI: You know, people will say “well i’m not suffering, most of my life is really good”. But I’m not talking about the most of the part that’s really good. I’m talking about the other part. The part that’s not so good, the part where you’re suffering. If you’re suffering that is a disease of ego. The possibility is to wake up from your egoic identification. And the only way is not by listening to anybody else, not by reading anything else, not by going to India or going anywhere else. It’s your own direct self-investigation to find out who you are, what you are, where you are. Because right now, if you’re suffering, you’re living in a trance and that trance is a sleepwalking trance and you’re dreaming you’re awake. And in dreaming you’re awake you believe that who you are is your name and your body and your thoughts and your feelings, and where you are is your physical location and what you are is a human being. That’s the trans induction. None of those are true. They’re relatively true but relatively is where you’re suffering. If you want absolute truth, there’s no suffering in absolute truth. It’s bliss, there’s happiness, there’s fulfillment. If you can say “I am completely fulfilled”, your work is done. There’s nothing left to do. There’s always more to realize, there’s always more, there’s always depths. But to get to the level where you know you are already fulfilled there’s nothing left to do, there’s no tomorrow, there’s no yesterday, there’s nothing you need from the next moment. That’s fulfillment, that’s happiness.

REINHARD: Even knowing that you don’t have to get rid of this or that, or make this right or wrong, just dive down to the freedom.

ELI: Yes. Getting rid of this and that is still in the realm of the trance. You imagine there is a this and a  that.

REINHARD: Yes. I don’t know how this will continue because people that I see around here they’re kind of on the edge with their existence and the anger driving, and all of that, and it gets worse and worse because the politicians don’t listen to them.

ELI: It’s the end of the empire. Since world war 2, we have been living in the American empire. It’s a world culture. That’s why we’re speaking english right now, we’re not speaking Chinese. That’ll be the next generation. But for this cultural empire it’s english and everyone in the world, if they’re going to do business, which is the American way, you speak english. Rock and roll was the greatest import of American culture to the world. It showed up in Soviet Union, it showed up everywhere. That’s all part of the American empire, it’s the good part. So as this empire collapses, crumbles, it causes dislocations in the human psyche. It causes enormous issues of survival. It causes enormous fear and panic and depression and despair. And that is both the good news and the bad news. The bad news of it is that the tendency then is to follow the strong leader who will get you out of it, who will show that you’re a victim, it’s not your fault, and the strong leader will take care of you. That’s what Trump is. So that’s the one way it goes. The other way it goes is that if you are true a good human being and you’re still lost in the despair of what to do, that’s your own spiritual ripeness. That’s your own cataclysmic opening to discover the truth. Because to discover the truth you have to give up the illusion. And to give up the illusion is what we call to be disillusioned. So to be disillusioned is painful. If you see through the church, you’re disillusioned with the church. It’s both liberating and it’s painful.

REINHARD: Absolutely.

ELI: And that pain is the way in to being disillusioned with yourself. And when you’re disillusioned with yourself, when you’re willing to give up your own, just like you gave up the church, you give up your own personal identity. It’s both painful of what I’m gonna lose and what will I not get and it’s so liberating that it’s worth the pain, just like it was worth the pain to leave the church.

REINHARD: If it goes good, where can we go from where we are right now? You say it’s the end of the empire. So in what kind of form of life together, living together.

ELI: Who knows? Who knew that you and I would be able to talk like this live on television? That’s my god, you know. Who knew?…When I went to India, when we met in Maui there were no cell phones, no internet. We didn’t know about India. Now it’s all online, it’s a whole new world. How will that impact us, that you don’t have to go to India, that all the sacred teachings are online? Well, that’s both good news and bad news. It both cheapens it and it makes it available to everybody.

REINHARD: Absolutely. And I think the diving into the here and now is the only thing that really is real, just this moment. And you will see where it transports us to right.

ELI: So, may I on that?

REINHARD: Absolutely.

ELI: So the question is: who is diving into what? So, to dive into here and now is to assume that you’re somewhere else. Where are you before you dive into here and now? So then you start to examine, how do I imagine that I’m separate from here and now? It’s a blissful experience to suddenly just drop into emptiness. It feels good. Everything’s gone, it’s blissful. But it doesn’t last because then there’s the next moment where you come back out. That’s beautiful, diving into here and now. In truth, by the time you hear these words it’s already passed, where’s the here and now? By the time they hit your ear it’s already over. So, here and now can never be in the material. The material is always the past. By the time the sense organs receive the information from the material, the sound the color, whatever it is, it’s past. So to be here and now is to be without here and now, with no one here and there’s no now.

REINHARD: Yes, it’s time timelessness.

ELI: Yes, yes. Beautiful. I’m so glad, so good to see you.

REINHARD: Yes. Likewise. And I have to say, wow, I’ve seen your past for so long now and I have a very very deep respect for how you’re going. Tell us a little bit about your current life with Gangaji. You’re both in…

ELI: We live in Ashland, Oregon, which is a little hippie town on the California border.

REINHARD: I’ve been a lot of times… Like I’ve been teaching for 10 years in Portland, Oregon, so I know Ashland and all this. It’s a nice coast, beautiful coast.

ELI: Beautiful coast, yes. We were living in Marin County in California but it was too expensive for people and it got to be too much about money and Ashland is like what Marin County was back in the 70s. It’s much it’s loose, it’s laid back, it’s hip and for the first time since the 1980s, in April we’ve been in quarantine and we haven’t traveled. I mean 1980s, you know I was going to Esalen two months a year, I was going to Austria and Germany a month or two, a year. So I was on the road since the 1980s. Now for the first time Gangaji and I are living in our perfect environment without traveling. Wow it’s incredible. It’s a whole new world that has opened up for us, it’s fantastic.

REINHARD: That’s so true for me too. I have been traveling like three times around the globe. Finally it was insane and I felt something needed to change and then, I think it was April when I came back from Brazil, everything went to lockdown. And as i’m now married with my beautiful Anna, who is a flautist and we live here, and we have been so creative and so much meditation and creation has happened, and stillness has happened and everything has changed completely. I love it.

ELI: So beautiful. I’m so happy for you. I have a picture of your old girlfriend on the boat with us when we went out whale watching.

REINHARD: Yes, this was Heidrun.

ELI: Heidrun. I have a picture of Heidrun.

REINHARD: Yes. It was a very important time for me back then because it just blew the lid of so many things I didn’t know that existed, you know. And you’re really the guy who knows the drugs a lot. I did it at a very young age, then I stopped totally and we did some very nice journeys there that really opened up.

ELI: When you first landed on the beach right in Kahului, that was our pre-wedding, the pre-wedding gathering. We had you and Swen, who had been inviting me to Austria and Wolf… I don’t know if Wolf was there. Yeah, Wolf was there. He came from…

REINHARD: Wolf was there and a Hungarian…

ELI: Laslow, who is running the new age world in Hungary, in Budapest, and we all did, I think we did either acid or ecstasy depending on who you were. Swen, I gave a whole bunch of mescaline to and he was tripping all day in his chair on mescaline. I don’t know if you got ecstasy or acid, i’m not sure. But everybody got something and we just…. In a beach house, in this paradise… That was really fun.

REINHARD: It started really a lot of things. So after that you went to India, right?

ELI: Yes.

REINHARD: I hope when everything opens up that you come over again with Gangaji. Do you plan to travel or you don’t want to do this anymore?

ELI: It’s over you know. I’m an old man now.

REINHARD: You have a center where people come and have satsang or…

ELI: Yes. Well, right now everything’s online and it’s working really well. And then eventually when it opens up you know people will come here. I can’t go anymore. I mean I really have done it, you know. I mean I edited it up and it’s like I lived three years in Baden-Baden. If you count up all the months I was there it comes to three years I lived in Baden-Baden and it’s like “oh wow”.

That was hard on my body.

REINHARD: Yes, I imagine.

So thank you so much for coming…

ELI: Come here. Hey listen, come and visit.

REINHARD: I will, I will for sure.

ELI: Do your classes here, of course. Every day TaKeTiNa… Would be a big hit in Ashland.

REINHARD: I have a lot of students over there who want me to come back. I was actually planning to go last July but of course what happened. So we have postponed it but we will show up for sure.

ELI: Oh good, good.

REINHARD: So, actually I want to thank you very, very much for your time and showing up here. How do you get Eli Jaxon-Bear online…. It’s great. Please give my love to Gangaji.

ELI: I will, I will. So good to see you again.

REINHARD: Thank you for sharing your wisdom that I really deeply appreciate.

ELI: Thank you so much Reinhard for having me as a guest on your show. TaKeTiNa rules.

REINHARD: Yes. Also to our listeners, it’s a rare occasion to get someone like Jaxon-Bear here. Every path, from the advanced hypnosis to enneagram and finally, really, it’s visible for me that you found it, you are it. Thank you.

ELI:  Thank you so much.

REINHARD: So if you like the podcast visit us. It’s www.powerofrhythm.com/podcast and leave a comment. Where can they contact you?

ELI: Leela Foundation. If you google me or google Leela Foundation you’ll find also there’s a school now that is running in Sydney and in Amsterdam and here in Ashland for training therapists and training true friends and helpers.

REINHARD: So really check that out. You will find a source, a big source of wisdom and that can really help you a lot right now. So, with that, all the best. Thank you.

ELI: Thank you. May everyone wake up and be happy and free.

REINHARD: Atcha.

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