Keith Parker 0:00

I'm Keith Parker and this is Radical Reality Conversations on Consciousness, a cross-disciplinary inquiry into who and what we really are. What is consciousness? Where does mind meet matter? How do we reconcile the mystical with the measurable? In this special series inspired by my book, Radical Reality, I connect with leading voices from across disciplines to explore the nature of consciousness, reality, and existence itself. These are not debates, they are open-ended conversations rooted in curiosity, shaped and informed by lived experience and enriched through the cross-pollination of ideas. This is a journey through the inner and outer cosmos, an invitation to inquire into what it truly means to be. Tom's work sits at a rare intersection neuroscience and sound, psychotherapy and mysticism, rigorous inquiry and direct experience. Over several decades, he's explored how sound, frequency, and vibration interact with the human nervous system and brain, and how altered states of consciousness can be accessed, stabilized, and integrated. He's also one of the greatest sound healers alive. What makes this conversation especially relevant to radical reality is that it touches one of the central questions of the series. Is consciousness something the brain produces? Tom approaches this not only through theory, but through lived experience. His work invites us to consider whether sound is merely sensory input or whether it can function as a bridge between different states of awareness and perhaps even different levels of reality. This conversation is an entry point, a tuning fork of sorts for the series ahead. Let's begin. I'm here with uh Tom Kenyon, uh well-known sound healer, and uh we are going to enter into this conversation about consciousness or wherever else that word brings us. What have you been up to lately to start small? What's been going on with you?

Tom Kenyon 2:11

Uh period of uh moving inward and outward. After COVID, the COVID fiasco, everything got messed up. So I was really internal and not teaching at all, not working. I was working, but not teaching. So I'm starting to do some of that online, uh, but the main rhythm is paying attention to me because the island, Orcas Island, is turning into winter. So there's an element of when the when the the light disappears from the sky and there's mist. And when the sun does show its head, it's through the mist. And so you're in another world. And so it's a very much of the island is like moving all energies inward. So that's what I'm about, which is interesting. I'm having this conversation with you about something very deep as I'm simultaneously moving further and further inside in prepare preparation for winter.

Keith Parker 3:04

How important have you found uh following the natural flow of rhythms in terms of how the environment informs your external and internal environments, given, for example, you're living where you are uh in the Pacific Northwest on the islands outside of Seattle, right? That that region. Um, yeah, how how how has that played a factor in your life uh, you know, as time has gone on as well, in terms of following the and being in harmony with the rhythms of nature?

Tom Kenyon 3:35

Well, it's interesting in that I've just recently started really going into some research uh in the fields of uh light synthesis, fractal energy. Um, and I found it very interesting. Our house is on a long lane uh through trees, and you really don't see people that much. And um I noticed as I was walking, the light patterns were changing, of course, because there's less sunlight, but when the light shines through the trees, it creates this fractal pattern that's very clear. And I started paying attention to it. In the past, I would just walk by it. But because I've been reading about this in this fascinating research about the effects of light, I'm paying more attention. And it really is something to look at sunlight from different perspectives and move through a natural environment like trees and feel just present. And reminder of Ram Das's thing, just be here now. Yeah, just be here now. When I go for a walk, I have to turn off my brain sometimes because I'm running these things I need to do, and I just say, Good, we're just walking and be present. And it's it's restorative.

Keith Parker 4:42

Yeah, I've I've noticed um just looking at, you know, when you see a big body of water, whether it be uh, you know, a lake or even the ocean or a sound, and you have lights on the other side, like a city is on the other side of a bay, and the amount of complexity of just the reflection in the water, the way the light hits the water and the water keeps moving, and that the reflection keeps undulating, the complexity and the beauty of something like that is awe-inspiring. And it begs the question of asking when I look at that, just what kind of experience are we having right now when we think on the surface that things seem simple and something just like a reflection of light on the water is both so beautiful and so complex at the same time. You know, what about the complexity of the deeper aspects of you know, the the kind of the architecture of life all the way down to the the the bedrock of consciousness, for example?

Tom Kenyon 5:45

The complexity that we see in some reflections is also an aspect of the creation, this universe we're in, the physical universe. If we pay attention to it in a way that we are relating to something that is ourselves, even though we perceive it as separate from ourselves, it is at the deepest fundamental level. We're all interconnected, whether we like it or not. We may not like other people, have issues with them, but guess what? We're all interconnected, the entire cosmos is interconnected, and we're finding now that planetary movements are affecting things that are happening here on Earth. Um, this has been known for, of course, centuries and centuries, but modern science is beginning to look at wow, there's something really going on when the solar flares go off. What's happening for people, what's happening for plants and animals. So it's it's a very complex tapestry. And since this conversation you wanted to go into consciousness, it just poses to me immediately the paradigm and the difficulty of being a modern human being, because we are carrying with us the cultural history that we built up to this point as a civilization, and we tend to see ourselves as separate from creation, separate from everything that we're surrounded by. And that's true to some extent, but at a deeper level, we are so deeply connected into what's actually happening around us. And so that, you know, I think that it was an error when Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. And that started the uh European Enlightenment, of course, and we have technology and the wonderful creations of science. And it's of course a mixed bag at this point. However, at that central vector, when he said, I think, therefore I am, he moved the entire compass of our civilization into the mental realm. And the mental realm can be disconnected from reality in very profound ways. So our culture is rolling along with this premise that is actually, in my opinion, an error. And other researchers and philosophers far more advanced than I have also have quandaries about this. So when we're looking at the trees, and I'm walking, or you're out looking at a reflection in the water, when we're we hold ourselves as separate from that experience. That's the certain set of vibratory experiences we have. But if we are looking at it from the standpoint of this is an example, I'm part of this expression, whatever it is, it opens a different vibrational field and you can access different, a whole different terrain of thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Keith Parker 8:23

Yeah, it makes me think of uh John Archibald Wheeler's. There's no out there, out there. Um, and you know, even something like pop cultural, like uh like Neo from The Matrix, how there's really this continual thread of connectivity that is the architecture behind what we see as physical. And the yogis called this the difference between um Maya, the the illusory level of reality versus like an absolute. And interestingly, Einstein came forward and then called time and space the relativity, right? And so in some ways, I make that link to seeing that that is the maya, that is the relative, that is the the form, so to speak, but there's like something that is formless or continuous or unified behind everything else. And there's this gap of architecture that I'm particularly interested in, which is the the energetic, which is the the mental, the things that we know that we have that we don't actually understand where they are, you know. Like this is fundamentally consciousness is a very deep, deep, you know, profound can you get further kind of question. I'm I'm interested in the the bus stop of mind and just saying, hey, to the average person, you you know you have a body, right? And the person says, yes, yes, and say, Do you do you know you also have a mind? And they go, Yeah, I'm pretty sure about that one. They say, okay, where is your mind? You know, where where is it? And a person knows where their body is, they're pretty comfortable with that idea, but the idea of knowing where the mind is or what the mind is is entirely an unknown question and is the beginning, in a certain sense to me, of the rabbit hole of consciousness as a question altogether.

Tom Kenyon 10:10

Yeah, and I'm reminded of a statement Karl Prieber made, the uh the researcher, that there's no such thing as a mind. A mind is a process running parallel to processes in the brain. So I think that if you look at modern the way I look at things is through the lens of spirituality, but neuropsychology, and I was a psychological counselor for decades. So I look at that through that lens. And so Carl Program's uh Pilgrim's statement is uh accurate to some point, but in another way it's not. In that there is more and more research coming out in the fields of neuropsychology and neuroscience that the brain is non-localized, that the brain has aspects, connections to other things that are far outside the physical domain. Um, and it's becoming very clear that the brain can access information that it doesn't usually have access to through certain mental states and emotional states. So I would refer anyone who's interested in this area to the work of uh Dr. Wynne Wenger, W-I-N-W-E-N-G-E-R, PhD, created a program called Um Project Renaissance. And his whole thing is moving people into genius states very rapidly. So he teaches people to play classical piano in an unbelievable short period of time. And he develops something called image streaming, which is a way to use the verbal part of the mind to connect to the other part of the mind that is nonverbal and increases our uh effectiveness in the world. And it's been shown to increase measurable IQ up to one point for every 60 minutes of usage. So there's something that we hold in our heads, but it is both local and non-local. That's how I view it. It's that yes, you and I have a conversation because the neurotransmitters in our brain are operating at a certain level that allows us to communicate. And that is brain function. But there's another aspect, the field effects of you and me having this conversation is bringing different types of information into our brains that allows us to go in new directions, perhaps.

Keith Parker 12:18

Yeah, and there, and like you're saying, this this brain-mind question. Um, what has happened in our culture is that people just actually ascribe mind to brain as though they are a one-to-one thing, that that my mind is my brain. My brain is my mind. Now, I have a real problem, I could say, or I I feel like this is just so obviously error-ridden. It seems that there's this real issue with ascribing mind to brain, that being the same thing. And a a really obvious error or gap that to me is completely unexplained, and I I'm you know interested from a scientific standpoint, anybody who who does hold this perspective that mind is brain, it's it's a simple kind of suggestion, which is if you think of a red balloon, right? If you imagine a red balloon and you can record a bunch of neurosynaptic firings that correlate with the thinking of the red balloon, how do you bridge the gap of where is that red balloon? What is the what is the jump, what's the gap that explains what the actual experience, the imagination, what have you, of the red balloon is versus neurosynaptic firings, because they're not the same thing. If you were to say mind is brain is brain or brain is mind, and they're exactly the same, neurosynaptic firings are not the red balloon. They're just neurosynaptic firings that correlate to a red balloon. What do you think of this kind of a gap, or how do we deal with this kind of mysterious space?

Tom Kenyon 13:52

Well, I like the metaphor that uh someone I read many, many years ago, and I can't attribute give credit, but uh he said that uh the new the neurosynaptic firings we're talking about are like the footprints in snow left by snow leopards. The animal is not the print in the snow. The animal is a mystery that we don't actually see with our eyes. It's very hard, very rare to see a snow lion. So it's a perfect metaphor. So, yes, synaptic firings correspond to something that's going on, but that's not necessarily the source of the information. So modern neuroscience is tilted towards total physical explanation of consciousness. There are some breaking through. Some researchers are saying, wait, over here, take a look at this. I send people to Dr. Bruce Lipton and his work with the pineal gland and how that is the antenna for other levels of consciousness to communicate with the biology of our nervous system. So it's a very, very good source to look at. But what my experience is exactly what you said. It is not a physical. The nexus that's creating the phenomena is not coming from the brain, it's coming from somewhere else, and the brain's responding. That's the best way I can put it, to something that is more ephemeral than we currently understand. I think our instrumentation is getting finer and finer. There's a new science called photobiophotonics, which is looking at how every cell of the body emits light, measurable, quantifiable light. We're not talking about new age light. We're talking about measurable light in the lab. So when you have that in science, you really have something. So biophotonics is opening up the entire universe of these light pulsing energies in our body and how they communicate in the complex webs of interconnectedness between our organs, but also the context, complex webs between you and me and every other human being and perhaps every other sentient being on this planet.

Keith Parker 15:55

There are tests that show that if you and I were to focus in a particular object, like if I held up a pencil, for example, and we were to then focus on the pencil, and we took a voltage meter before and after we did that to measure the voltage around the space or the field around the pencil, it's the voltage would measurably go up once we put intense, concentrated focus on the space of the pencil. And so there's uh evidence to show and confirm essentially that attention actually goes where you place it in space, so to speak. And it's not like you were saying, it's non-local to the physical body, but actually can be displaced or can move anywhere your attention, i.e., like the flashlight of your awareness or consciousness in a way, goes. So this is starting to talk about where is the mind and that it isn't local, and that your brain isn't the thing that necessarily anchors what the mind is, but is rather something like a lower-dimensional um footprint in the snow. It seems that the movements in science, although they keep improving uh instrumentation and resolution, um, it seems that the model itself might be fundamentally flawed. Uh what do you think about the trappings of working within the paradigm or like kind of what what kind of might help us get over the hump? You know, is is AI the harbinger or the the the beginning of showing us what actually is going to push the envelope to realizing that we're in a much more interconnected world?

Tom Kenyon 17:34

AI is the beginning of something, that's for sure. I think it's gonna have an effect far beyond what the Gutenberg Bible had an effect on in our civilization. Uh, I think it's a mixed bag, a very, very mixed bag. But uh, in answer to the question, what could allow us to jump out of the box that we're in, perhaps having a little less hubris as a as a civilization and as a scientist, uh, I find it very funny that we now know because the instruments have changed and got more sophisticated, that the brain goes up in way above 100 cycles per second hertz or even beyond that. But at the beginning, neuroscience said the brain goes up to 30 uh hertz and that's it. The brain simply does not go above 30 hertz. Well, the reason they came up with that was because they had ink pens on graph paper that would go up and down. And if it went above 30 hertz, it would go off the paper. So did nobody think, let's make the paper larger? No. They just said the brain does not go above 30 hertz. Of course, that's now we know that's not true, much more complex. But science is the creation of the human psyche. And so in the human psyche, you have so many things pulling at you as a researcher. You have your finances you have to handle, you have to get funding, you have to do it in a way that you won't be discredited. So you may have to fit yourself into the paradigm that science is operating under that moment. And the paradigm in science is weighted towards physicality, is the reason for whatever happens. And I think that's a narrow view. I think it's more complex than that. And you can include both, they don't, it's like Newtonian physics and quantum physics don't negate each other. They're totally compatible, but they're describing different realms of reality, different realms where the physics are operating. But they are compatible, even though they look antithetical. So the same thing with science and spirituality. Because when for me, when we talk about consciousness, that's what we're talking about fundamentally, is what is consciousness and what is this thing called spirit, and how have people looked at it from millennia, and how does science now look at it? It's a very exciting time, it's a confusing time for sure, but it's also an exciting time from the advances that are taking place in the sciences in especially the subtle realms, what are called subtle energies, subtle energy research.

Keith Parker 20:00

Wouldn't it be fascinating to be able to measure subtle energy a lot better as you're describing certain things about uh biophotonics, um, you know, the body emitting light and things like that. My my particular intrigue is with higher dimensions, um, you know, like uh that we that we are in a kind of multidimensional or higher dimensional system. And the physical, the way I look at it, the physical is a lower-dimensional representation of a multidimensional system. And what we call the energy field is is in general the classical sense of the aura, are those higher dimensions, and it's where that body-mind connection is happening, where the the non-local aspects of this experience right here and right now actually do have objective structure and existence that are measurable, that are detectable, but we don't have the instrumentation to do it because we don't even have a model to understand. How would you measure the fifth dimension? How would you measure the sixth dimension, even though cutting edge physics suggests those are existing, and even more so, cutting-edge neuroscience is showing that the brain is functioning primarily in these higher dimensions as well, if if you know about the Blue Brain project.

Tom Kenyon 21:09

And you know, something we said earlier about attention is what where the mind goes to. And so if you look at the technologies that have been developed in the history of humanity for people to access other states of consciousness, you can call it spirit, whatever you want to call it, those methods have been developed over centuries. And if you look at the at the collectively, each without getting into the philosophical conflicts between them, because there are fundamentally deep schisms between these three systems, but most of them are saying pay attention to this. They're pointing you in a direction to pay attention to. And the Buddha even said essentially the same thing you pay what you pay attention to expands and grows. So the Dharma is about a path of paying attention to what really matters underneath the play of sensory disorder. display and make contact with that and pay attention to that. Pay attention to that. So it brings me back to the statement you said earlier, which I think is very true. It's about attention. What we pay attention to has a profound effect and we don't our culture is so oriented toward money. And um so research is biased. So the research, you know, it's been shown in the field of psychoimmunology that a person can affect their health just by how they think, how they feel, is having a profound effect on their health. And this is self-empowering. And then we have the culture that says well take this pill. We've created this pill, take this pill, and that's all you have to do. And there are all these side effects that we're finding are just horrible. So as a culture and science is just a product of the human psyche and a cultural path to knowledge. And so it is affected science is affected and constrained by the monetary underlying underpinnings of research. Because if you look I mean I remember a good friend of mine who died during COVID was a wonderful doctor and he was the head of an emergency department in Texas at a huge hospital. And he was asked by the directors of the hospital to come and meet with them because they wanted to find out what he was doing. And he said, well what do you mean? And so you'll we'll tell you when you get here. So he got there and there are all these people at a board table and he said so tell us how it is that your patients get out of the hospital several days earlier than anyone else's. There are fewer complications. We're saving money at this end. What are you doing that we can incorporate he said well first of all they don't give them pharmaceuticals I give them natural medicines. And they said that's it we don't need to know we don't need we don't need to know anymore. So they were just closed because it was not a monetary factor in that and it plays a huge role in how science is conducted.

Keith Parker 24:06

And that's going to create a major limiting factor to the openness of actually moving towards truth and and you know models that are congruent with what's real.

Tom Kenyon 24:18

Yeah.

Keith Parker 24:19

It's a big big problem. Yep it is but as you're saying it would seem that the entire culture would have to change in order to have that fundamental value object called money, you know, some a monetary currency based system be the thing that's the guiding force. Like I've I've not spent a lot of time thinking about this specifically um you know what is a replacement or an advancement in our society? What's what's what is it to move forward, to evolve to a different level of function and and peace and harmony amongst ourselves and the thing that always stands out to me is our the fundamental values and presumptions about who we are is the thing that moves the buck forward more than anything. And as you were saying earlier separateness you know this idea of maintaining a sense of I'm just this physical body and you are just that physical body and how I think, how I feel is my private life and you have your private life over there and bec and in that sense I'm separate and the consequences are separate. Well in reality they're not and as you're saying there's there are things like showing how how you think affects how you heal. And we might say well that's interesting that science proves that but it's also self-evident to every single person that that's also the case in terms of their direct experience uh you know the the idea that um what can you know directly versus what do you need measured externally? And and science is wonderful for measuring things and having studies and controls and you know having peer-reviewed papers and doing things that we have this kind of consensus of saying look over here, here's enough data to agree upon that. But at the same time I fear the disempowerment that comes to the individual the average individual who feels that they can't actually know the truth themselves you know basic things like how I think affects my health right because that's something again that it seems self-evident you know when I'm having positive thoughts and I'm having a good day when I feel good when I'm balanced I know that my health is improved versus a day that I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety or turbulence or conflicts with somebody or things like that. You know, the the it seems self-evident.

Tom Kenyon 26:31

What do you think about this empowerment disempowerment in relation to people in a certain sense knowing for themselves what what is true what's not well I think there's a lot of truth to that and it's on multiple levels um and medicine is very clear. I was in a store like a few months ago and there was something on the shelf that and it was the last one they had and I said could I get the whatever it was and she looked at the computer said we don't have it. And I said well it's up there I said but I it doesn't exist for me. If it's not here it doesn't exist for me. Okay. So um and I think that society has a bias and historically there's no point in going to that because it'd be so long and difficult a difficult conversation how we got shaped to the point where we don't trust ourselves we don't trust ourselves and we get these messages all from all these directions but in terms of the science affecting how people view themselves um we're we're on a stage in this moment in time as a culture as a planet going through tremendous difficulties uh old things dying away new things coming forward instability all types of things are happening at once and so the person can be dwarfed by all this that's going on so paying attention to what is your feeling and what you're thinking will have a tremendous impact upon your health and how you think about yourselves which affects your behavior and affects your social interactions and there's a feeling that in from the standpoint of looking at the limitations of human consciousness it's good to acknowledge the limitations but I think it's also good to look at the other things that are more open-ended so that empowering the individual to take a look at himself herself at a deep deep level and finding things realizing that you can change something that's a very powerful thing to possess in yourself. And the culture doesn't generally provide that it provides obstacles to that realization.

Keith Parker 28:57

And I'm I'm I'm still also with what you talked about with the medicine that the store the box on the store I found that really fascinating because it almost sounded like a parable versus an actual experience but there is that strange thing that has happened where there's such a strong disconnect between individual agency versus an interface with a kind of a system you know like it it it made me think of just how I don't know customer service okay customer service the idea of working with companies and businesses airlines you know uh phone companies used to be somehow you'd have a human interaction and people would talk and you could figure something out and now there's this thing where you go into this maze of automated messaging tiers of management and if something happens it's like it's gone from the idea that I was the customer I'm trying to solve something and somebody's trying to help me solve it to I have a problem and it will become a such a greater problem to try and fix something like that it's so complicated to fix simple things because everybody is disempowered within the chain that works within the corporate structure. And it's it's kind of wild and that thing that you talked about reflects that in a weird way in a very obvious way but it's also somehow eerily symbolic to me of this disconnect like you're saying about just how can a person just be with the moment and know what's real and what's not real and this kind of corporatization, this commercialization, this extreme you know managerial function uh the way that things are structured has continued to reinforce this disconnect.

Tom Kenyon 30:39

Oh for sure. The uh had a technical problem I won't name the company but uh some archives are lost and so I went to them and they said well here's the links that you can figure out how to find it yourself. In the old days that would not have happened the old days meaning just like a decade ago you would have a human being and you would engage them and they would say oh yeah let's solve this problem. A robot doesn't care. Robot is just following that was laid out by its overlord to produce profits and blah blah blah whatever else but there's the human interaction is disappearing from customer service. I agree with you. It's a very strange thing to watch happening and it's it's detrimental we're being disconnected from each other from human to mut there's a lot of research in the field of psychology that shows that social interactions are actually very crucial for optimal brain function immune system health and good behavior. So when you disconnect people from others it's it's not good. It's not a good thing but that's what's happening right before our eyes.

Keith Parker 31:41

Yes and and you know you started I think our conversation you mentioned about um about COVID um and the ramifications in way of COVID and COVID seems like this thing that we're just we're just starting to get far enough away from it to actually have some space some more grounded and comfortable reflective space especially for the general public but it was a it was a mass trauma of sorts, right? Like an in an individual trauma somebody might have a really bad accident or what have you and it might take them some months or years to be able to reflect on that in a more therapeutic way that has a bit more objectivity. And it seems like the same thing is happening now with with COVID where this really significant event happened and the specific thing that you're talking about which is distancing ourselves from one another was one of the core features of the experience itself. Not only did we all experience that meaning we were kept separate from other people for a prolonged period of time but we also had again this external kind of loudspeaker that the the government and institutions were saying you know social distance there are consequences and it's not good to be near people and that kind of compressed traumatic experience that reinforced that particular quality seems to only be adding to the the digital and technological version of it as we're describing as well. Yeah that was a very unfortunate choice of words social distancing they could have come up with something different uh but you add social distancing emotional distancing isolation loneliness confusion it was a mess just an absolute mess and it is a cultural trauma and the research shows that when a certain generation experiences trauma for instance this was found true with uh generations the children of those parents who were in Arstwich and other concentration camps it was such a horrible trauma for them but it showed up in the genetics of their kids and their grandkids so a trauma like that is not just localized in time it affects the entire genome system the genetic system uh downline and so yeah COVID was a huge trauma a planetary trauma that we'll be sorting out for a long time it really it really is something I'm very curious to know what happens in the next 10 years or so especially with the studies on um studies on health you know the long-term effects of people's health who um had the various versions of of uh experiencing it and which I I presume is the major the large majority of the world population. I would think more than I this is totally guessing, but I I have always been under the assumption now for some years that more than 90% of the entire world's population had has had COVID in one form or another which is quite a mass um a mass uh exposure to something that could have quite deleterious effects long term. When we um bring up these fundamental questions of consciousness you said that there's like a long history of the idea of kind of maybe maybe a more unified perspective versus a fragmented one what comes to mind you know like uh if uh as a general sense a starting point when we open up that big question of what is consciousness is there a starting point that arises for you when you try and put language to something as broad as that or even abstract or ineffable as that can you see that another way could just say what is consciousness well the way I view it is that we have our conscious mind you and I are having this conscious conversation the words are coming out we are hearing them reflecting on them but it's coming from a deeper place it's coming from a subconscious place a place where our brains are processing however you and I are going to respond to each other we're not aware of that processing but it's still there that's the subconscious then there's the superconscious which is totally non-localized and involves other dimensions and other realities and they're all connected in unique and profound ways.

Tom Kenyon 36:00

So as a human being I believe we have the access to what we are consciously doing in the moment. If we pay attention and go deep in ourselves we can find what our motivations are, what is underneath the the veneer of our life, what is actually driving us, what are the issues that we're carrying subconsciously that we might not even be aware of consciously. And then that nests perfectly in what I call the superconscious which is a much more global and much more complex system because it's pulling in information from other realms of existence other realms of experience.

Keith Parker 36:36

Tell me more about the superconscious curious about this how it fits into your map.

Tom Kenyon 36:42

I had a many many like in them in my 20s I really got into the uh writings of Meher Baba which is one of the world avatars and by avatar I mean a true world servant he didn't take a workshop and get a certificate he actually had the markings of a yogi or yogini who was an avatar which means a being who has come to move the collective in a more positive direction through spiritual abilities and so forth and he was a very powerful powerful being and I was uh at that time I was a musician I'm still a musician but I was really identified as a musician I was the young suffering musician suffering for his art and you know the my guitar and my songs were the most important thing to me I had a vivid dream after a deep meditation with Mehir Baba and we're by a swimming pool. And so you know in Jungian terms water is a is a symbol of emotion. So we're by a pool that's holding all these emotions and Mehir Baba looks at me and I know in that moment that if I look at him in his eyes at that moment, something terrible will happen and my guitar starts to turn into dust right before me in the dream because I'm connecting to something that's more robust and extensive than my own self-identity and is changing something in me. And that old part of me is going to turn into dust and I said no no no and I woke up and the guitar reconfigured itself in the dream and I was done. Thank you Mehir Baba so that's an example of a humorous and also interesting way of how the superconscious the what I call spirit but this this global unbelievable complex system we call consciousness interacts with my personal psychology and my personal subpersonalities and all together it's all rolled together as a human being but they are actually different fields of energy.

Keith Parker 38:38

So that's just one example of the superconscious coming in and giving me a message which I did not listen to for several decades by the way well you you create these um dare I say otherworldly soundscapes uh sonic soundscapes uh that uh are extremely evocative and and healing and really inspiring when you uh are kind of bringing forth these sonic tapestries or performing live stream because some of your work is pre-recorded multi-track some is you know just uh uh real time um are you tapping in to this superconscious or is that your intention um and what has been that process for you of kind of learning to lean in and to trust that that space and connection more well a lot of the sounds you're talking about come from the Hathors which is a you know interdimensional group of beings um we could spend all day talking about them but essentially they are in another dimension of consciousness and they can communicate with me and they would tell me when they would want a sound meditation and they would say they usually gave me advanced notice but sometimes they would just wake me up at three in the morning.

Tom Kenyon 39:57

They like three in the morning for some reason may have to do with the hour Brahma you know where the sun first hits the the earth that area starts to enliven um anyway what I noticed is that some of these they would point out we want you to do this at this day it has to be this day and I didn't even know what they were talking about. After the fact I would look at it and it was a major astrological configuration or major sunspot activity. Something was going on in the cosmos that was somehow connected linearly through time by their request for me to do the sound meditation at that particular time. So the energies come into me and I feel them and I get out of the way I don't calculate what the sound if you're talking about my music that's different. I'm making those nights notes happen. When I'm channeling the sound it's coming from a different aspect and it's not personal it's transpersonal. And so I have to get out of the way have no agendas no manipulation of the energy at all just let it come through and it has when I'm able to do that it has a power to it that's uh very clear. And this is an example of this coming from this other field this amorphous field we're calling consciousness channeling into me to make notes it's coming from some other aspect it's coming through me but it's not coming from me. However there's no way that a person can communicate something without affecting it somehow. So there's no such thing as a pure communication. All I can say is in my work I try to be as pure as possible. But there's always going to be some type of uh because we're the interface we're the antenna but the information's coming through an antenna and the antenna is going to affect what we get somehow if that makes sense.

Keith Parker 41:45

Absolutely there's a there's an inbuilt bias because of the the nature of that the body itself at this formation is biased. It has its own history and conditioning and there is no such thing as being uh pure in the utmost sense but you can as you're saying strive to and achieve higher and higher levels of reducing the the distorted filter and allowing the the signal to come through in the cleanest way that the instrument can possibly provide a resonator for. Very nice I wonder if these you know astrological points of reference and these timings that you're describing sometimes I think of uh these these nodules in in time and these organizations at celestial levels as being like threads in the cosmic Ethernet where there are certain nodal points or certain resonant moments where the information passes back and forth much more easily into and out from local to uh you know further abroad kinds of communication systems and things like that. So uh I'm fascinated by that kind of rhythm, you know, which is more of a temporal rhythm when we talk about a more of a cosmic astrological scale. As much as there is a physical signifier I think it's more about the structure of time and how information relates to time versus space.

Tom Kenyon 43:09

Yeah I mean if you think about it if you take um one of the stars say 1200 light years away and I or somebody's doing something in their internal world that they feel is significant, oh yeah that alignment happened. Well that alignment happened 12000 years ago. Hello dude the entire cosmos rearrange itself that you can receive this information at this point in time from something that happened so far in the past it's a fascinating universe we live in and who knows. Right.

Keith Parker 43:42

Right and this and this is just like knocking on the door of the absolute you know going back to the reflections in the water right this uh the or the fractal reflections through the trees the sheer level of complexity of the informational environment that we're in is so Astounding to think that the light information that my body is receiving right now, if I step outside, is a composite of not only the sun, but of stars sending information through their light that that are littered with 12,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. And that that light carries information and it's only reaching now, right? And that that information isn't a one-way street that that presumably we're doing things that sends information back out to those very same origin points. And it's just we know so little. And maybe we're not supposed to know that much. Maybe that's that's a human thing, is to only be able to compute or function or interact with oh so much information. But uh at a more humble level, to just really soak in the the absolute, you know, vastness of things. Uh, I don't know, you know, but the work you do definitely evokes that in me.

Tom Kenyon 44:58

Well, that's good. That's good to hear. Other people say the same thing. I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone. But if you're tuned into this non-ordinary aspect of consciousness, sound in music is a very powerful ally to explore those worlds, which is why chanting and mantras have been used for millennia. Uh singing, it's the architecture of music can mimic certain architectural features in human consciousness and open doorways. It's just an extraordinary vehicle, the use of sound.

Keith Parker 45:30

Yeah, speaking about sound, um, more and more, um, I'm really intrigued by sound's relationship to emotion because I find that when I reflect on how music, I used to relate to music, I was um I was an active musician for a long time. And um I didn't know or think of it at the time, but when I reflect now, I see that the way that I listened to and participated in both consuming and producing music was so b so related to almost like an emotional regulation, you know, that and so I'm curious what you think about their sound in the maybe the utmost sense of vibration and consciousness and things, and then downstream some kind of very, very direct communication to what we call emotions. What what are your thoughts on that?

Tom Kenyon 46:23

Well, I referenced Manfred Klein's and his work in Centic Theory. Uh, he was a brilliant, brilliant uh pianist, and he discovered he could make people cry by how he played the piano. And it turned out it was how he was approaching the piano, the pressure waves, which is interesting because pianos are not as pressure sensitive as some other instruments, but he was able to communicate that through the piano, and it led him into looking at syntics and sound creates these waveforms, and some of them match emotions. He did, I don't know how they these researchers did this, but they did all the many, many measurements on the Pieta, where Mother Mary is grieving the loss of her son, and it was a signature of grief. Literally, the visual architecture of the sculpture had the emotion of grief. So sound can also elicit emotions, and it's a very powerful thing when that happens, when sound creates an emotional response for a person.

Keith Parker 47:23

What do you think of emotions in relation to this word consciousness? What how do you contextualize emotions in our experience? Like what purpose they have? Oi. That's a really big question.

Tom Kenyon 47:37

Um well, there's a couple things. Um part of it is for me, if I look at my life, my day-to-day life, is a cascade of different emotions in response to different things. And so there is the emotion of uh, let's say, irritation. And what I found is that if I'm in a certain mental state, the irritation doesn't have a big effect on me. Um, for instance, I was in the uh kitchen the other day and knocked over a glass pitcher by accident, and I looked down at it and I yelled at it, but not like I used to. I used to really yell at inanimate objects, being I'd get really angry and start yelling at them and breaking them. In fact, one of my favorite incidents of my own neurosis was in my 20s when I was working on a sabotage part of myself I called Liz. It was a giant lizard that I would every night in my dreams, I would see this lizard. So I'm in my early 20s. This is when you individuate in coming to the world. So in my dream world, some part of me was trying to kill me to keep me from stepping into the world as Tom. So I had this long, it's went months and months, and I was doing uh non-dominant journaling where you you write, if you're right-handed, you write with your the question with your right hand and you answer it with the left hand and is scrawly. It's not as well developed as your right hand, but it's a way to communicate with that part of yourself that's unconscious. So I was using this method to communicate with the lizard. Finally, I said, What is your name? And it's to just call me Liz, Lizard. And so this went on for months. And then there was a night, it was like three in the morning. This is way before cell phones. This is when you had old phone lines. And if you had a long distance call, you would hear on the background that you'd have to listen through. So it was definitely a long-distance call, three o'clock in the morning, and the voice says, Is Liz there? And I said yes, and I wish he'd fucking leave. That was, of course, a synchronicity from the standpoint of Carl Jung. I mean, out of the blue, why would somebody call that number at three o'clock in the morning? Does it mean anything? I don't know. It's just a significator, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's important. It was just something, a conglomeration, all these different forces at the same time. So we've gone off in a tangent, but I was addressing essentially the paradox of human consciousness and neurosis.

Keith Parker 50:08

Which in one way or another, everybody has some version of we all have something, some. Yeah. I am really intrigued by the paradox of unity versus separation, and you brought that up earlier. I think it's such a critical point because we can talk about these things. You know, we can cognitively intellectually talk about it. Somebody could read the great spiritual texts of the world and see how there's this idea of the unity of consciousness, the drop becomes the ocean, that separation is an illusion. But how do we know that? The value of like of knowing it, the mystical direct experience, the awakening to non-separateness, you know, the role of that in the process of understanding what consciousness is. Because we're talking about consciousness, and fundamentally there are two big differing perspectives. One is that consciousness is an emergent property that is materially bound, right? The paradigm of today, which is like your body, your physical body, creates consciousness. Consciousness isn't fundamental, it's not first. Mind isn't fundamental, it's not before the body. The body creates a mind and this property of consciousness, or its inverse, right? And the inverse being consciousness is what's most fundamental: beingness, existence, awareness, pure consciousness, whatever words. And then from that springs forth mind and form, and then ultimately what's, you know, you could call the language of descension or the fall into matter, into this lower dimensional subspace of causation that we call physical, the physical realm. Um, you know, how do we how do we approach this scientific component which wants to measure everything and people are so reliant on versus trying to actually get to it from a, hey, I I know that. Like I it's not a question for me, it's not a cognitive philosophical measured thing. It's a no, I know that directly. I've experienced things that show me that my mind and what's being called spirit or consciousness or the vastness of connectivity is not just physically bound.

Tom Kenyon 52:18

Right. And so your question is what specifically?

Keith Parker 52:21

I guess your thoughts on kind of navigating this paradox that you're describing in the sense that at at one at the on the one hand, we can talk about uh if I were to call the paradox, um, or how I'm hearing the paradoxes, on the one hand, there's the intellectual component where we can talk about it, and then the other hand, there's the direct experience in that they don't necessarily um they both can be uh existent and yet they require different domains of inquiry. It's probably not the paradox you were describing, but it's how I'm hearing it.

Tom Kenyon 52:56

Well, let me talk about that from two different uh experiences I had that are very different, but they overlap. And so there's first of all, I'd like to look at this consciousness as a the mystery that it is, separate from the religious and spiritual traditions that have been built up that tell you how you should approach that mystery. So I want to put that in, I want to come back to that because it's a very important point, I think. But the two experiences I had, well, I think will elucidate what I'm talking about in the confusion of how do you approach consciousness. So um, when I was 18, I had a very powerful mystical experience. So I went into samadhi spontaneously. I tried to sort that out, and the first place I went to was my own spiritual religious training, which was Christianity. So I went into exploring the Christian mystics, and it took me back to the medieval mystics, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Francis of Assisi and Teresa Avignon and all those people and how they viewed things. And so that what came, what would come out of that tradition for me was the agape, divine love. So the divine love, agape is a force that is experienced when you're in the Christos ethos, the mystery of not the church. I don't want to separate this from the church because there's a lot of different things going on there that, but in its essence, when you're in the conduit, so we speak, of it of an expectation and belief about divine love that will influence your experience. So I was out, uh, it was at night, I was at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. I had been practicing uh the contemplative prayer for many hours, so I was deeply altered. So my consciousness was altered. I was on the golf course by myself. It was twilight, it's turning to pitch dark. I was standing there and I saw all these cars. It was rush hour. People were coming home from work, and suddenly I felt this unbelievable sense of love for everything. All the people that were coming. Now, this is a very odd state, but what my experience in that moment was I could feel the people, all their hopes and dreams. I could feel the power of life, I could feel I could sense the internal combustion in the engines, the fire that was driving the cars that allowed them to go home to have what they wanted next in that moment of their life. All of that was somehow the same mystery expressing it itself in so many different forms to the point where I heard crickets in the grass, and I was not on drugs, by the way. I heard crickets and I looked down at them and I felt the love for them, the same love I felt for the people out in the car. So this was through the lens of the Christian ethos. I many years later uh went into uh dokchin, which is a particular form of uh of Buddhism for direct encounter with consciousness itself. And when I entered through that gateway, I had a similar experience in that it was all pervasive love. Everything is connected. I may see things as totally distinct and separate, but there's also another part where it's all interconnected, so it's both separate and connected at the same time. So as human beings, we have we have matter, and matter expresses itself as a particle or wave. So the literally the particles that make up our body can transmort transmore into something that's a waveform function, more fluid. So all this is all together, the complexity and the simplicity all exist simultaneously. But what I wanted to point out, these two methods, one was the Christian path and one was the Buddhist path, led to a place where they agreed, if I were to articulate what the statement was, yes, love is the is the force that moves through the universe constantly. Everything is connected through this sense of love. But the Christian part had an aspect of guilt, which was not part when I went through the dukchen. And very interesting, I've talked to friends who are Buddhists, and they also feel guilt when they grew up as a Buddhist because there's all like everything, all religions twist things around. But the central feature of the direct access through dukchen to pure consciousness was similar, but also a little different than what I experienced through the Christian mythos. Some I've experienced through Taoism and shamanism and uh and other methods, and there's a place where they all converge and they would all agree on certain aspects of what consciousness is and what it means for a human being.

Keith Parker 57:54

It's interesting that you're you're echoing what I'm hearing from the uh way in which you're creating music in those superconsciousness connected states and acknowledging the limitations of the bias of the filter that there's some filter regardless. And the same now is being applied in this interesting way that even when we're talking about opening up to the most unified, pure um ground state of being, right? Spoken of in all different religions, the religion itself becomes a filter, the religion itself becomes a container.

Tom Kenyon 58:34

Yes.

Keith Parker 58:34

And it will define what is possible and what is not possible unless you transcend it. Right. And so we have the the saying in Buddhism: if you if you are on the road to enlightenment and you see the Buddha, you have to kill the Buddha, right? So this idea that there's this thing that the psyche grocs onto a representation or a system as a as a as a crutch, as a um, as a pivot. Because there's almost uh for many psyches, this required strength or structure to help guide through that process out of the Maya. And at a certain point, you kind of get to the edge of where that system can take you based on its own internal representations of symbology and and you know, master archetypes like a Buddha, like a Christ, what have you. And when you get there in Buddhism, they're already telling you, like, just slay the Buddha, you know, you got to get past that representation. I've heard this in many mystical experiences that people often have this kind of meeting or passageway at the towards the end of that passage, in which they do encounter the the master representation from their particular spiritual tradition that they need to transcend that as well.

Tom Kenyon 59:48

Yeah, yeah, right. Because the path of the Buddha was the path he took, Botama, Buddha. There have been thousands, hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of Buddhas, many of them female. But the Buddha of our era is Gotama, and that was his path. But another being who would reach enlightenment will have his or her path separate from the Buddha's path because it has to follow your intrinsic, deep, authentic nature. That's where the goal, that's where you'll find it, not through mimicking somebody else. Up to a point you can make progress, but there's a point where you have to deal with yourself.

Keith Parker 1:00:22

Did you find or have you found that you have particular resonance with a certain tradition? Like that, you know, has that just changed over time, or do certain things, certain traditions really resonate with you more? Or I don't want to really say like offer a more pure vessel. That's probably an unfair question.

Tom Kenyon 1:00:42

I've found uh extremely elevated states in every tradition I've worked in, to be honest. Uh what speaks deep the deepest to me, probably because I've had so many incarnations as a as a Buddhist, a yogi, is though are those methods. So um But it's an interesting, I meant it. You asked that question at an interesting point. And so I should probably have started this entire conversation by saying to you, I'm speaking to you from my current level of misunderstanding. Meaning that no matter how much we understand, there's so much more that's it's vaster than we can ever imagine. So that's where that's coming from. But when you ask that moment, since it's we're striving to have an authentic conversation, nothing has been prescripted. It's just in the moment, what you say, how I respond. So when you ask that question to me, it's like some part of me is like, well, I'm not sure we could talk about that right now because we don't really have absolute clarity on this, and we are disagreeing with the Dharma. We are disagreeing with the fundamental statement in many Buddhist traditions. So I'm not sure we want to talk about that. But in the interest of authenticity and see where it will take us, let's talk about it. I at this point feel that there's an era in Buddhism, as it has worked in the United States in Western cultures. I became a student of Carl Jung's very early, and I remember in my mid-20s was when I really started to immerse myself in his writings. And he said it's not possible for a Western psyche to become Buddhist, because the psyche has been rooted in something that is so fundamentally different, you'd have to spend so much time excavating through the bullshit to get to what is actually authentic, that then you could grow on. So I was very uh angry with him for that, because I'm going to prove him wrong. So he's right in my experience, he's right. So for me, what the error is, and I think that if we could have Gotama sit in this room with us, and you and me, he could clarify this because I think it's a very fine, fine point. But the point that makes me go, eh, not, I don't think that's quite right. There's the dichotomy between enlightenment and non-enlightenment, between a being who is spiritual and not spiritual, between thoughts and no thought. There's this whole thing that goes on in the, I would say the more the deeper, more refined questioning that arises out of Buddhism as you begin to look at, as I begin to look at myself and what I see in myself are where I'm attached to things. I want something to happen. So I will leverage my energy to make it happen. So that is how our psyches work in the Western culture. In the eastern culture, it's more aware, just floating in the awareness of things. So there is, see, it's hard to even articulate, but the fundamental point in as this juncture in Buddhism is that some of our experience is rooted in our enlightened mind, a bodhisita. Another part of our experience is rooted in our delusions and our hubris and our attachment to things happening a certain way. So there is this place where some people get into some type of anui, and when they go into Buddhism, it's like uh and there's this place where some people do not engage their life at all. They do not engage it, they're floating off. That is a big temptation. I don't think that's going to lead us any place we want to really go. It's just perpetuating of self-delusion. There's a part of us that wants to make things happen. There's a part of us that can relax into the luminous aspect of our own consciousness. But there are certain aspects where in Buddhism where it said that's wrong. You engaging the world is wrong, engaging your body is wrong, engaging your senses is wrong. You need to pay attention to this. I think it's paying attention to both. The individual aspects of being a human being and the amorphous vastness of consciousness itself. I think it's both simultaneously. It's not one or the other. That's my quandary. That's the point I'm in when you ask that question. I'm actually wrestling with that myself in the minutiae of my day-to-day life and how I think and respond to situations. Why am I doing this? How am I doing it? What's influencing me? I wonder if I articulated that very well, but that's close to it.

Keith Parker 1:05:42

I love where you're going with all of that and continuing to kind of reflect um humbly on the limitations of any particular system, that the system will have its own intrinsic filters and Buddhism, especially the you know um. Theravada, original, closest to original, um, what the Buddha actually said, apparently, you know, which is its own game of um telephone, you know, hundreds of years after he lived, before the Pali Canon was ever even written. Um, you know, of course there's going to be bias in that because it's something from 2200 years ago, 2003, 400 years ago, through that culture, through that system, through that language, through those disciples, and um so inherently there is a lot of potential distortion and that division, uh, I think it's really interesting you bring up the division in Eastern and the Western traditions, uh, Jung's participation. I remember uh my my small forays into Jung in comparison to being immersed, um, just him saying that he really felt that in the long run, that the balancing of the deficiencies of the Western psyche would be would be met by an integration of the Eastern psyche and the Eastern traditions, that the combination of the two would come together and strike the balance and kind of heal and and upright both of them. Because there's there's such a different emphasis on the two. And when I reflect on those two, I tend to think of individualist versus collective ways that the ego gets tilted and that the Western ego is very individualized, and there's this emphasis in the personal striving, the personal ego versus the collectivist version. Um, and it's very, very hard for the Western mind, you know, and in uh a Western conditioned mind to truly be able to sit in a clean relationship with a Buddhism or a yoga or a Taoism or what have you, um, because we're already so conditioned coming in. Um, and yet, interestingly, I do feel that that's the big appeal to many people as well, that so many Westerners who are seeking a spiritual tradition that resonates with them, of course, it's going to be often leaving the one that's familiar. So leaving some Judaica tradition version and going to something else on offer. Well, what is on offer? Well, all that stuff from the East. And it doesn't have a lot of the same dressings and trappings that the Western stuff does, and that the ego is deeply, deeply minimized in those Eastern traditions, you know, the very thing that's so out of balance to the Westerner in the first place. Um, and there's also a much cleaner presentation of what spirit might be. Like it's not dressed up in usually in figures as God themselves, so to speak, or as some divine being, so to speak, but rather individuals who can just discover things within themselves in this a little more approachable way than the ego reification of some of the Western kinds of ways of presumably misreading Western traditions, but nonetheless the mainstream reading of Western traditions, you know, um, if that if that makes sense. Oh yeah. Definitely. I had a similar I I have had a similar path in that um I have found most resonance with the Eastern traditions, and it's really the first time when I was exposed to both Buddhism and yogic traditions that it was the first time that I truly had a connection to any spiritual tradition. My um, you know, growing up, I didn't have any connections to my Christian or Jewish um um, you know, household traditions. They just didn't didn't resonate with me. I wasn't interested, wasn't attracted. Um, but something really jumped off the page when it came to uh Buddhism in particular. And here I was reading sutras for the first time in my life, reading religious texts and stuff. And um I've always been fascinated by that and uh why that occurred or why that occurs to so many um Westerners, you know, seeing myself in those communities and stuff.

Tom Kenyon 1:10:05

Well, you said something at the very beginning of our conversation about me being a sound healer, and I think it would be uh a good thing to flesh that out a little bit, in that um there's a mysterious transfer of energies that takes place that allows you and me to hear each other speak and uh hear music and sound in general. Are you we locked in? You're not moving. Oh, you're still there? Okay. It looked like we were frozen. Um sound is this uh defined as a uh vibration moving through a medium, such as air or water. If you have something that's vibrating, say in a vacuum, there won't be any sound because there's no medium to carry it. So that it has to have a medium to carry the vibration. So when you're getting the literally the process of hearing is what I'd like to take a look at. Your ears have these little ear canals, and what happens is the air is vibrating. The air is the medium, so the air molecules are vibrating and hit inside the inner ear a little like a little drum. And literally it's creating a vibration, and it's a bone. Little bones are hitting the drum that the sound is creating the movement. So we have air becoming earth. That's bones are the earth element from a Taoist perspective, and also from the Bompo tradition. So we have air moving, creating earth, and then earth hits water. There's a water inside this little drum, and there's little hair filaments that pick up the vibrations that are traveling through the water. So we actually are having air affecting earth, affecting water, and then that goes into the occipital areas of the brain and creates electrical charges in the in between all the synapses that are involved. So you have electricity. So we have this very important esoteric point that just the act of hearing is a miracle from the standpoint of the transformation of the fundamental archetypes of the elements, the fundamental classical elements, not the elements out of the periodic table, but the elements out of classical Greek philosophy, Chinese Taoism, et cetera, et cetera. And the elements are earth, air, fire, and water. And so just the acts, the we do not recognize the miracle that we live in because it's so commonplace. But just the act of hearing a TV commercial or a dog bark or you speaking or any sound at all is a transformational miracle of air into earth, bones hitting water, hitting electrical transmitters in the brain. I mean, it's extraordinary. And if somehow we could rest in that awareness of what how miraculous our life actually is, when you put all the problems and bullshit aside, you just look at what's actually happening at the level of the atoms and the construction of our organs and our body and how we experience the universe. It's a miracle. So when you started saying, Yes, I was a sound healer, I wanted to mention that because I think it's a significant underpinning to our conversation, because we are having conversations with, we are drawing from the structures of the atomic structures in our bodies and our brains are actually creating this phenomenon that we are calling a conversation. And we're having this conversation because it's being facilitated by the transformation of the fundamental elements of classic uh Taoism and Greek philosophy.

Keith Parker 1:13:36

I love that. And it makes me just go, and that may very well be kind of framed by saying this is all fractal. Uh, and by that I simply mean it's a repetition of every moment, of everything is a repetition of the very same thing that began everything, which is this movement through something from nothing to something, and then that something being an expression of all the things in perfect interrelationship to create some kind of next formation, next moment, next movement. And regardless of how mundane a moment might seem, all of those elements that began are still present, and all of those transformations and interrelationships are continually active if we're receptive to just listening to it.

Tom Kenyon 1:14:24

Yeah, right. And I'm, you know, at this point in my life, I'm listening more and more, talking less and less. Just watching the mystery, finding the best mental state for me for the greatest uh progression of my own consciousness is being present and watching, resting into the miracles that are actually happening. Instead of trying to make something happen, I still make things happen. You have to. You have to wash the dishes when we're done. But um, paying attention to the mystery, trying to rest in that mystery of the miracle that is our experience as a human being is very, very poignant and profound and helpful.

Keith Parker 1:15:04

You said just a few moments ago about the enui that can enter into people who may take on like a Buddhist orientation because there's this introduction of a kind of a detachment from things, you know, like learn to witness, learn to be receptive, learn to just be present with things, but keep, in a certain sense, keep chiseling it away at all of the kind of you know, tendrils of attachment that we have built up. And that's that's usually like the deconstructive phase of developing in being able to be more present. Is usually there's a lot of deconstruction rather than reconstruction that needs to start. Um and then you come to a certain point where maybe there's enough deconstruction or enough stillness and presence where you say, So how do I participate in the world? And you talked about simultaneity, you know, not to deny any part, but to appreciate all of these things happening together in an integrated way. How do you take forward that sense of where does my sense of doing come from? Where where where do you where do you like to take your cue from amongst the different inner voices or drives that you can have? And and how important do you feel is that external uh externalization of your existence versus how you're tending to the internal?

Tom Kenyon 1:16:30

I think for me it's a it's both simultaneously. Uh actually, one takes precedence, but the other one comes in on the heels of the other one. Um when I am in what's called rippa, which is the state of non-it's just pure awareness. There's no uh wanting to make anything happen, there's no pressure to make anything, there's no neurotic drives, there's nothing happening, it's just awareness, and it can happen in a gap of a few seconds between thoughts or between actions. When I'm resting in rikpah, I just feel that everything is okay. I don't need to do anything. Cool, dude. Don't need to do anything, it's all happening. Then there's the part of life that requires some action, and so that's the tightrope of human existence. And there's that phrase that says before enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water.

Keith Parker 1:17:24

And there's another paradox again. The the doing and the non-doing, as the Taoists doing non-doing rather, as Taoists might say. Are you compelled by the idea that there is a uh an external manifestation that is relevant and important to do, to carry out, versus actually tending the internal state and having more, in a sense, or rather cultivating higher levels of peaceability, of ease, flow, love internally? Is there the temptation, or what do you how do you reflect on that? Does it really matter what the outside looks like at all? If you if you take things to the extreme, does it matter what the outside looks like at all?

Tom Kenyon 1:18:20

In the extreme, no. When I'm when I'm an extreme Rigpa, nothing matters. I mean, everything matters, but nothing matters. I mean, that's a strange comment, but it's like the minutia of existence is all happening, but there's something more profound taking place, and all I have to do is rest in it and be aware and not have to do anything. But then life has its necessities, and then I have to do something. So I kind of walk a tight rope between these two, and I'm experimenting with being in that space of Rikpa-like. There's no little rikpa. You're either in it or you're not. Rikpa is simply meaning your cognitive thinking process has stopped. It's not dissociation, it's not dullness, it's being very aware and alert, but there's no thought. That's rikpa. So when that happens, it's usually small windows. And so I can do something, but I'm not engaged in trying to make it happen and have neurotic anxiety. Oh, will this work out? That doesn't take place in that when I can hold that space where both can take place. The particle and the wave can take place simultaneously in me, and making doing something happening, making something happen in my life and just being resting in awareness, they are compatible in unusual ways. And for me, that's the that's the most richly rewarding part of my journey at this moment, is bringing these two polarities together for me. That's my path.

Keith Parker 1:19:47

It does seem to be of unavoidable to have to face deep levels of of paradox, um, to be able to consider these things, experience these things, and act upon these things in some level of succession. If one goes through this chopping wood to chopping wood experience, right? Because there there is a reckoning with what does that mean to know or to realize some of these foundational things we're talking about, and then to continue being a human being, continue being a an interactive and participatory member of the world whilst also being informed by the context of the world, um, which the Buddha very eloquently, I think, described.

Tom Kenyon 1:20:37

Yeah, it's a very uh interesting state to be, have those two operating simultaneously.

Keith Parker 1:20:43

Do you have a biggest project or desire that compels you? Is there a thing that is number one on your list when you think of that inner voice that says, hey, get that one done or make sure to do that? Is there is there a thing?

Tom Kenyon 1:21:03

There's some things, yeah. Uh, but there's nothing concrete to point to and say this is it. Um, mostly what I'm doing is resting in nature more because we're moving into winter here in the in the northwest, so everything's more your whole environment wants to, your body wants to go in. So it's the time of introspection. So I'm experimenting with some uh dogchen methods. But as far as my sense is that after the first of the year, whatever this thing that's inside of me that wants to express itself, it's going to come forward. Right now, it's too embryonic for me to say what it is or to give it form in terms of a teaching or anything like that.

Keith Parker 1:21:49

So you're you're picking up on uh something new has been seeded and is is like, as you're saying, is gestating and will in a certain sense be both revealed and born in its own course.

Tom Kenyon 1:22:02

Right in its own course, with no uh I cannot affect it in any neurotic way. It has its own organic way to develop, and I'd best not contaminate it, just watch it and enjoy it.

Keith Parker 1:22:17

To return to the word simultaneity, and you were talking about Rigpa and it being a state of no thought, do you think that there's a uh like a disjoint or a separation there where Rigpa disappears and the active mind is what is exclusive, or that Rigpa is uh uh ever present and it's just a matter of being more, let's say, uh present dominant um uh in a Rigpa state, so to speak, versus a more busy mind state with the Rigpa moving to the background.

Tom Kenyon 1:22:59

Well, I would reference my primary uh teacher in in Dogchin, which would be Long Chin Pa. He's uh what's the he's called the Dharma King of the Great Expanse. He's one of the most consummate masters of uh Tibetan Buddhist Tantra and Dogchin. And he says that Rigpa is ever constant. We are imposing something onto Rigpa. If we can just relax into Rigpa, it would be a very different experience. So I think he's right. I'm at that, I'm still at that point, you know, between make things happen, allow things to happen. But I think he's right. I think that the non-localized aspect of the brain does not think, it receives information from so many different levels, different types of energies, textures, information, meaning, all of that is coming multidimensionally into the brain. So the brain is actually not the mind is not thinking per se, the mind is receiving. But because we have been conditioned to be a certain way in this civilization of this time, we do certain things that we do because it makes us human, because we fit into society, we make a contribution, all those things are true. But Rippa is a state, I guess it's the pre-cognitive state of consciousness, before consciousness moves into cognition and start to break things down into the minuscule levels that it can. Rippa was the mother that births all of this, but she herself is not affected by it in any way.

Keith Parker 1:24:38

Is Rippa often ascribed as the feminine? I just noticed you said the she there. That's my current exploration.

Tom Kenyon 1:24:44

I think that's uh, yes, I think it is. They don't talk about it. And and and ultimately they talk about it in Dukchin through the metaphors of something called Samantha Bhadra and Samantha Bhadre. And Samantha Bhadra is the masculine aspect of existence, of the entire all that is the edifice of the entire field of consciousness and existence is Samantha Bhadra and this consort is Samantha Bhadre, feminine. When they come together, it is a very powerful tantric practice to bring their energies into your body. And that's what's happening at that deep fundamental level, is those pure energies are coming in and affecting and changing your nervous system. But it's interesting when you look at uh Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhism in general, and also this is true in India, in the in the yogas and Hinduism, the male aspect is emphasized and the female is not emphasized as much, even though if you look at the mechanics of creation, like behind me, I don't know if you can see that, that's the uh Kalachakra Tantra, um Yantra of Kalachakra, which is the union of male and female at a very high elevated state. So, but so when you read in the writings about Samachabhra, Samach Bhadra isn't hardly ever mentioned, but she's his consort. In the mythology of uh Tibetan Buddhism, it was Padma Sambhava, in order to complete his final work. He could not do it himself. He was, he was the most, he was called the second Buddha of our era by Gotama. He was predicted, this is the second Buddha of our era. He could not accomplish this without the benefit of feminine presence. He had to go. In the mythology, he went into the Hindu lands and went to um Brahma and asked if his wife, Sarasvati, could send an emanation to earth so that he could have a relationship with her to complete the Maha, the great Maha work. So she incarnated and they had a relationship with her, and he had a wife who took care of his daily needs, but with her, she was his consort, his equal, and they flew up into all over the place in Bhutan and Nepal. So even he could not do what he needed to do without a feminine energy. So I think if you look at the yogas of shit that come out of Hinduism, some aspects of Taoism is also has this, and definitely some of the Buddhist aspects, the male is emphasized and the female is de-emphasized. I think that's an error, a deep fundamental error. And I think it will be reconciled over God knows how many thousands of years.

Keith Parker 1:27:25

There's some reckoning that's been taking place uh now, you know, and recently for sure. Um but yes, that that does seem that masculine-feminine polarity uh needs to continue to rebalance and it will will probably take quite a long time. The feminine principle is the operative principle of negation and emptiness and foundation and and birth, you know, like that that the bottom of the at the bottom of the barrel is the feminine because all all is born from the feminine.

Tom Kenyon 1:27:56

So females are about relationship, also, they're much more tuned into. To relationship than men are. You look at them in terms of hormonal profiles. So the goddess is intending, aware of relationships. So I mean, it's so amazing when you look at the feminine, masculine archetype as human beings, and then you go deeper into the subconscious, and we have the myths and the heroes, the gods, and the goddesses, and we get down into the deep spiritual or pure consciousness, you still see the polarity operating, but in a more subtle level between what the Taoists would call yin and yang, feminine and the masculine. It's all interconnected in vast, mysterious ways. And enjoy the ride.

Keith Parker 1:28:39

Yes, very much. Enjoy the ride. I love peeling back the layers of going from the agreed-upon forms of male-female, and then seeing these teachings and the layers and depths of mythology and archetypes, uh, and how that all winds up connecting the dots from the most superficial to the absolute deepest that you can go before you get to where you have to cross that bridge of transcendence, uh, in which there no longer can be any division. And the the two uh yin and yang uh representations are contained within the infinite circle.

Tom Kenyon 1:29:23

Beautiful metaphor, the circle, the Davis circle.

Keith Parker 1:29:26

One of the best. I really feel like that one. For me, that's my favorite of all the the big uh Eastern tradition symbols, only because I feel like it contains in such a clean way so many levels of wisdom that it's just it just, I don't know, perfectly represents so much and just stays away from a lot of the uh the trappings of of kind of more culturally specific ornamentation. Going to neuroscience, because you uh have done so much work there. Is there a study? Is there a thing if you had unlimited funds you would do to either further your work andor like just a dream project you've always wanted to do? Because brain work is so compelling in this realm of researching consciousness.

Tom Kenyon 1:30:11

Well, I would be fascinated. I think the the instrumentation will get subtle enough in the next several years to look at biophotonics at a deeper level, because there are biophotonic pathways in the body that constellate as organs and systems. So it'd be very interesting to see how biophotonics, the light particles that are comprised a part of these tissues, how are they responding? What are their the flows? And then how does emotion affect that? And how does music and sound affect the biophotonic flows in the body? Because I know they do from an experiential standpoint, not from an uh evidence-based at this point, other than peripheral. But I think that we will find that we are creating and recreating our bodies and our minds and our emotions 24 hours a day, whether we are awake or asleep. And the biotonic, biophotonic fields of light that are in our body are a key to this.

Keith Parker 1:31:09

Sounds like a very interesting field of study that I am completely in the dark about right now. Um I will have to check out some things about this. You said there are certain strings or connective pathways in which are highlighted, meaning more light are coming through certain kind of channels, dare I say, than others.

Tom Kenyon 1:31:27

Repolation of what I'm read about biophotonics, what I've observed in uh healing when it takes place in psychotherapy in my office, how music and sound can facilitate that. I think music and sound and emotional rapport creates a flow of biophotonics that can be conducive to healing. So I didn't want to imply that the biophotonics, the field of biophotonics is not talking about it this way. I'm saying I think how they're going to start talking about it in the next several years. I could be wrong.

Keith Parker 1:31:57

Also, just looking at kind of, let's say, futuristic kind of things, we touched into AI for a moment. Um, I'm just curious your general thoughts about that in relation to this big word consciousness. And obviously, many people in the mainstream sense are looking at AI as something like any any an emergent consciousness, some people might might call that. How do you view it in the context in the way you think of consciousness and you know what AI is andor could be?

Tom Kenyon 1:32:27

Well, there's consciousness that is experienced by a biological entity, like a human being. There's consciousness that can be experienced by a robot, but they're very different categories of information because at this point the robots do not have emotional rapport. They can mimic it, but they don't really have it. And so the experience that comes out of being a biological entity and consciousness is different than AI. And what I have many concerns about AI. I think that it's going to be a very good tool, but people are not paying attention. For instance, people are walking around with their phones. I see them all the time, and they're not paying attention to their environment at all. They're just literally looking at their phones, walking down the sidewalk peripherally glancing so they don't bump in anybody. And people are driving off bridges because Siri's telling them to go left or right, and they do that instead of paying attention. And people are actually having accidents. When my wife and I were in in Iceland many years ago, Siri told us to go straight. And if we had gone straight, we would have been into the ocean. It was like 150-foot drop or something. It's like, well, I'm glad we paid attention to the external reality and didn't just interface with the interface. So if people are going to interface totally with something that is non-biological, I think there would be prices to pay. I don't know what they're going to be, but it doesn't seem like a good thing. I think that AI, if it's used as a tool and uh is used in the higher interest of the higher human qualities, I think it'd be wonderful. But I'm afraid it's going to deteriorate into a mix of whatever good and bad. But um I think it's uh I look at it optimistically and with skepticism.

Keith Parker 1:34:24

Yeah. It it it does seem like this kind of very significant and mysterious tidal wave coming our way because the force, the sheer force, will be so massive and it's so hard to predict the amount of change that results. Um, but yet knowing that the change will be very significant, you likened it earlier to the Gutenberg press, which is a very significant comparison to put it alongside something of that level of influence.

Tom Kenyon 1:34:55

I think it will definitely be as extensive as Gutenberg's. Uh change the entire face of Europe. And um so many things happen as a result of that. So the same thing will happen if they're gonna have you know, whole classes of uh occupations are gonna disappear. Whole jobs, whole sectors of jobs for centuries just be gone. And you can say goodbye to customer service.

Keith Parker 1:35:18

Oh my god, at least as far as well, pray that it gets a little better in those in those categories, you know. Uh my my concern is really more than anything is the the lessening of people's higher order thinking. Um the that that people will be very, very lured by not really learning to write very much anymore, not learning to think through problem solving very much anymore. Now I know that a potential um opportunity is that what we can do is our very creative ideas can be executed potentially with great with great facility, with greater ease, so that we can, if we have, if we envision greater realities, we can actually manifest those greater realities with greater ease. But at the same time, that kind of ground up ability to think creatively, to understand all of the steps, to generate ideas and use language to reflect those ideas back in a trial and error kind of way. If you just fast forward a generation or two, how much are those people, those children growing up going to actually go through the process of being schooled and being educated in a way where they do kind of go through the rudiments of using the body and the mind in a somewhat grounded and organic way versus this very artificially puffed up kind of way?

Tom Kenyon 1:36:46

Yeah. Very big ramifications for education, how children are educated or not. We're on the cusp of something that we can't ever imagine, how consequential it's going to be.

Keith Parker 1:38:07

And it's like it's right there, right? But it's I'm really fascinated that this has kind of risen as a kind of a theme, because in the context of consciousness, that seems a very appropriate way of talking about where we're at, which is consciousness is the most direct, the most obvious, the most simple and yet the most profound thing that that it is in our experience, and yet we don't understand it. And we don't know how to um kind of make sense of it, particularly at a social scientific level. It seems that it seems that based on what I'm hearing from you, your your opinion and perspective, and my opinion and perspective tends to be that science doesn't really get it at this point, and yet science is the thing that people rely on for telling us the truth about these kinds of deep matters. So um I find that there's this reflection, this thing that's come forward in us talking that reflects that very same element. Is there anything else that comes to mind for you regarding this topic of con of consciousness, something that we haven't touched into or something that you want to share that maybe hasn't had enough space to look at today?

Tom Kenyon 1:39:27

Well, I think that all of us uh involved in this human experience on planet Earth at this time, uh it's a difficult, challenging time for so many reasons. I think that uh it's helpful to remember that the reins of your life are in your hands and don't give them away to other people uh unless you're really sure. And even then think twice about it.

Keith Parker 1:39:56

I simply thank you, Tom, for your time today. Really appreciate uh connecting with me and sharing uh your thoughts on such a deep topic and just all the different places that we went. It was a really great pleasure to connect with you as as always.

Tom Kenyon 1:40:08

Nice talking with you. And if people are interested in uh free resources, they go to wwwtomkinyon.com. There's a lot of free uh sound meditations, articles, scientific uh studies, etc.

Keith Parker 1:40:20

We'll definitely direct them to that.

Tom Kenyon 1:40:22

Okay, take care.