Donna Quesada: Hello, Gary. Gary Zukav: Hello.
DONNA: It’s so nice to meet you. I’m Donna.
GARY: Hello, I’m Gary.
Donna: I know. I first fell upon your book… I think it was ’89, right after The Seat of the Soul came out, and I think someone gave me your book, and I just loved it so much. I’m pretty sure I still have that same copy that I’ve had for all these years.
GARY: Which book is it?
DONNA: The Seat of the Soul.
GARY: Yes, that’s a good one.
DONNA: So on a personal level, I’m honored to have this time with you. I know that our readers on Awaken will enjoy this conversation. I don’t know if you know, but we have a special way that we like to start. So if you don’t mind, we’ll get right into it. I’d love to ask you what it means to awaken.
GARY: Can we start with a moment of quiet?
DONNA: I’d love that so much. Shall we sit quietly together?
Gary: Yes. Thank you.
DONNA: My pleasure. I appreciate it.
GARY: You’re welcome.
DONNA: What does it mean to awaken?
GARY A deeper question would be, awaken to what? There’s always something to awaken to. Evolution never stops. Never. We are experiencing one commonality of it that we in the Earth School… this environment of time and space and matter and duality share. But if we say, awaken, it gives the impression that I woke up now to the real reality and that’s my evolution. It’s come to an end.
Your evolution will never come to an end. The universe is evolving and everything in it. So let’s start here. Let’s say that awaken means awaken to the present moment. If you are awake to the present moment, you are awake because the present moment is now, and it always is. You might say that the present moment is the portal to every place that you want to go. From another perspective, you can say that you are every place you could ever want to go. All of that and more is in the present moment.
So if you are awakened to the present moment, that means you are an aware and an awake person in your life because whatever appears in the present moment, which is the totality of your life, you are awake to it. But what does that mean? It means that in the sense that I’ve been using it and that most people think about it when they are really awake, is you become more aware and responsible… aware of what you are saying, what you are doing, and even more importantly, why.
The why is the most important. That’s your intention. If the why for what you say or what you do in the present moment is love, that creates constructive, beneficial, good-feeling consequences. If it’s fear, that creates destructive, painful and experiences, physical sensations you don’t want more of. Will that help you?
DONNA: It helps very much. There’s one word that you said that wasn’t usual. You know, I remember once… it was in a Zen retreat and someone asked the teacher, what is the big whoop about being present? What’s so important about now? I always thought about that. Of course, it’s such a funny question because the answer is that’s all there is. But I love something you said. You said because you’re more responsible when you’re present. I just love that so much because, of course, the analytic mind wants to say, what does that mean to be responsible? But it means to me… and please elaborate if I’m on the wrong track… I can make choices that facilitate better-feeling consequences rather than painful consequences.
GARY: Yes. That’s it exactly. Responsible doesn’t mean you’re responsible to somebody else like you’re supposed to turn in your homework on Tuesday and you didn’t do it. It means you are responsible for what you experience. Most people are not aware of that. So they experience a great deal of pain in their lives, loneliness, disappointment, rejection, anger, frustration, resentfulness, competitiveness. You create all of those. All of those are created by parts of your personality that we’ll call the parts that originate in fear.
When you act on those parts of your personality, you create those consequences. All of those experiences that I mentioned are painful. When you act on them, you create painful consequences. Jealousy is painful. When you act in jealousy, you create painful consequences for yourself
We also have another basket, you might say, or set of experiences. We can say these originate in love. Those are experiences like gratitude, appreciation, caring, contentment, patience, all of the universe. When you act on those, on that energy, the energy of love, you create very different consequences for yourself.
Until you know that, you’ll continually create pain. Because you’re creating from a dynamic that perpetuates itself unconsciously. In other words, if you don’t know your intention when you speak or when you act, it’s coming from fear. To be clear, every intention that is unconscious is an intention of fear, and it produces painful consequences. When you run into them, you say, how did this happen to me? I didn’t intend this. Actually, you did, but you weren’t aware of your intention when you said it. So now, we’re coming back to awake. When you’re awake to these things, then you realize that you are responsible. You can’t blame the world anymore for the things that cause you painful experiences, because the world is not responsible.
The world activates dynamics in you, dynamics of love or dynamics of fear. If you’re not aware of those, it’ll be a dynamic of fear. You’ll act on it. You’ll create consequences. When you encounter them, you’ll do the same and the same again and the same again and the same again and the same again. The Buddhists call this the wheel of life orsamsara. When you wake up, you wake up to this process, not because you learned it in a sutra or because someone in church told you about whatever they tell you in church. But when you wake up to whatever it is that’s meaningful to you, you wake up to it in you. It’s not a teaching anymore. That doesn’t mean the teaching can’t be valuable, because if you recognize value in it, that already is a degree of awakeness.
But then, as you follow what is meaningful to you, that you’re learning, that will lead you to more meaning, into more meaning. Eventually you’ll realize that if you want to live a more joyful life, a more present life, a more healthy life, a more connected life, you have to choose to do it. When? Now. It’s when you’re not connected, when you’re not joyful. In other words, when you’re in the control of a frightened part of your personality.
So, as you become aware of these parts, frightened and loving, you can become aware of what it is that you want to challenge, which means not create with it anymore, and what you want to cultivate. Now you’re on the way to creating authentic power. Creating authentic power is the ability to distinguish between love and fear in yourself, and choose love no matter what’s happening inside of you, like hopelessness, despair, rage, anger, jealousy, despondency, or what’s happening outside of you, like a catastrophe, a tsunami, a hurricane, or another 9-11 type event. Now you’re becoming awake, you’re becoming aware in your life in meaningful ways, and the more you do, the more you see the world is not responsible for what you experience.
You are responsible for what you experience. There’s no one to blame. Fear is a realm of illusion. It’s not real. Love is real. Love is all that is real. The illusion is that the world causes your pain, and the illusion is to get out of your pain, you need to change the world. That won’t work. This is becoming clearer to hundreds of millions of us, because we are in the midst of an unprecedented transformation in human consciousness. That’s what all of us are experiencing now. Not all of us. There are still more people with the old consciousness than there are with the new, but this is very temporary. That will disappear within a generation or two, but in the meantime…
DONNA: Are you hopeful that despite the wars and the turbulence in our world right now, that the number of awakened people will continue to grow, and that we can create a conscious Earth?
GARY: That’s two questions. Yes, I’m hopeful. I’m more than hopeful. I know that the number of people with a new consciousness will increase. What each of those individuals choose to create is for them to choose. They will either create a world at peace or a world in conflict for themselves. When they had the old consciousness, they thought that the world outside was just that, outside of themselves. In the old consciousness, there was a barrier between in here and out there. That barrier does not exist in the new consciousness.
So, millennials and people in Gen Z are the first of the generations that were born with a new consciousness and experiencing it from youth. So for them, what I’m calling the new consciousness is simply consciousness. This is the way the world is. But they know that something big is happening. They can sense it. They don’t understand why they have inherited a world as it is, a world that is crumbling, a world that’s disintegrating, a world that’s not functional. It’s because they have inherited a world that was built by a five-sensory species, a species that was limited in its perceptions to the five senses, and that understood power as the ability to manipulate and control.
Donna: We see this happening still today, politically.
GARY: Not still today. It’s now becoming clearer and clearer today. The question is not… the question is, what will you do in YOU about YOU? Will you judge people who are on one side of this political divide and open yourself to people on the other, regardless of which side of the divide you are on? You, if you are on either side of any divide, are in a frightened part of your personality. If you’re in a loving part of your personality, you are not. Love accepts. Love includes. Love embraces. Love nurtures. Fear does the opposite of all of those things.
If you intend to move beyond the pain that is characterized and the violence that is characterized by the human experience, you can’t do it by trying to change the human experience. You cannot. Because if you’re trying to change the human experience, you are pursuing external power. You are attempting to manipulate and control. But you can’t change a world that’s built on manipulation and control by manipulating and controlling it. You’re adding more to what it’s already made of. To change the world, you need to change yourself. This is a big change in consciousness. Everything about the new consciousness is a big change.
DONNA: What do we say, if I were to ask you, how do we balance individual awakening and that consciousness to choose love over fear? How do I balance that? How do we balance that with the call to global awareness?
GARY: I think it was better said the first time, how do I engage that?
DONNA: It starts in me, is what you said. Go ahead.
GARY: There’s nothing to balance. There is what is. We are living it now. It’s not going to change in the future. There is no such thing. Don’t try to make your plans in the future. Whatever you do, whatever you decide, you will do it now. That will always be the case. Love now or fear now. As you choose now, that is what you will experience. There is no future. There is now.
If you want your future to become loving, become loving and do it now, because there’s no future. Now is the time. You are a powerful and creative, compassionate and loving spirit. There’s nothing to balance between inner awareness and outer transformation, because the two are not separate.
DONNA: Understood. What I also wanted to ask, though, for those watching, who might be in the middle or related to those who are dealing with what’s going on in Ukraine or the Middle East, what do we say to those people that you just have to choose love?
GARY: No. You say what’s appropriate as long as you say it with love or you choose not to speak when that’s appropriate. I suggest that you choose not to speak when it’s appropriate with the intention of love. Now, I don’t ask anyone who’s listening to us to accept anything that I say… is so simply because I say it.
In fact, I suggest that you not do that with anyone. Instead, if I say anything that you resonate with, then try it on in your life. Experiment with it. If it creates something that is constructive and healthy, experiment some more. That’s one of the things you have your life for. If you don’t resonate with anything at all that I say, let it all go. Don’t try to wear a shoe that pinches. It’s up to you. This is not a matter of right or wrong, more or less. It is a matter of your life and what you’re experiencing in it and what you choose. The two are the same.
Continued in Pt 2…
