Donna Quesada: May I step back once again to your days in San Francisco,
which is a time that fascinates me so much because I feel like there was such a collective awakening going on. How did you stumble onto your own spiritual path and journey?
Gary Zukav: I was invited, when I was in San Francisco and I was macho. “Macho” is the street name for being so frightened that you don’t even know you’re frightened. I was riding motorcycles, experimenting with drugs, addicted to sex, and thinking that I was living a very admirable life. I can see now, it was a very painful life and there wasn’t anything admirable about it, but that’s what I felt at the time.
And I was invited to a meeting of physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the hills just above the Berkeley campus. And I went because I wanted to see what a scientist looked like and what it was like to be with one. And they were asking the question, are we creating the reality that we’re experimenting with? And that was exactly the question that my group in the Trieste Coffee Shop in North Beach in San Francisco was discussing, except we were a small, arrogant group of young, unaware men. These 10 or 12 physicists in the fundamental physics group were seriously discussing the nature of reality and the possible nature of reality. I was so excited by that conversation. I felt as though I’d had four cups of cappuccino, sparks coming off my fingers. But I didn’t understand what was exciting me and I couldn’t share it. I couldn’t explain it.
So I started buying physics books in the used bookstores to find out what was exciting me. I asked if I could return and Elizabeth Rauscher, the founder of the Fundamental Fysics Group, said yes. I really liked Elizabeth. She was herself, a physicist, and she was jolly, rotund. She called her group the Fundamental Fysics Group and she spelled physics F-Y-S-I-C-S. It caused everybody to chuckle. As I went back, I began to learn a little more and a little more. And then I was invited to a gathering. At that gathering, it was at a New Age retreat, Esalen, in Sanford, in Big Sur in Northern California. And there were several people at a round table. One of them was Al Wong. And he said, “I studied physics in National Taiwan University. It’s called Patterns of Organic Energy.” And I thought, “What does organic have to do with physics?” And Al is an elegant and patient man.
He took his napkin and a pen and he said, “Chinese is a tonal language. For each Chinese character, there are four pronunciations and each of them means something different. If you put two of those characters together, that’s so for each of them. So you can see what the permutations are.” But these two characters, and he wrote them down in his beautiful calligraphy, are Wu-Li. And this Wu-Li means Patterns of Organic Energy. Then he said, now these two, he took my napkin, he wrote two more characters. He said, “They’re also pronounced Wu-Li. In English, that Wu-Li is the same because we’re in a tonal language. But in Chinese, they mean I clutch my ideas.”
And then he took someone else’s napkin, he wrote two more characters, did the same thing, and gave us six examples of a combination of two characters, each pronounced the same way in English, Wu-Li. I suddenly became very excited and I knew I’m going to write a book about what I’m learning at Elizabeth’s group. And I’m going to share it with others, others who are liberal arts majors like me, who don’t understand science or mathematics or have an aptitude for mathematics. And I did, and I asked the physicists in the group if they would help me. And all of them but one said yes.
They only asked me one thing, they said, “Get it right. Get it historically, factually, conceptually correct.” I agreed…that was my intention, anyway, so I started writing. I started writing and I would make an outline for each of the chapters. But as soon as I started to write, I would start to write about something that was more interesting than the outline. So I’d throw away the outline I wrote. And the chapter concluded itself, which was a new experience. I didn’t know that a chapter finishes… it concludes itself. I thought that the writer concludes the chapter.
As I was writing this for six months, which means I had about six chapters, I realized what I had begun to suspect, the chapters all fit together, like they were written to be together. But I threw all the outlines away. What caused this to happen? And that’s when I realized that I’m not writing this alone. It is not possible to be alone. That’s when I discovered non-physical reality. So I love the irony that my first experience of non-physical reality came when I was writing a book about quantum physics.
DONNA: Are you saying that it was channeled?
GARY: No.
DONNA: No?
GARY: No, I’m definitely not.
DONNA: Are you speaking of God?
Gary: Well, I don’t usually use that word because it’s been preempted by so many people. But if by God you’re speaking about divine intelligence
DONNA: It flowed through you?
GARY: Not exactly. I had to work at it. I had to work to make it right. I had to work to put energy with words. It was a co-creation.
DONNA: I love that. Yeah
GARY: The Greeks called this experience an experience of the muses.
DONNA: Yes. I love that.
GARY: And the feeling of co-creation is a good one. It’s a feeling of… Yes, in the flow. Jazz musicians call it “being in the groove,” where it’s all coming out right. And no matter what you play, it’s just right with what she plays, with what he plays. Athletes call it being in the zone. They run faster. They’re quicker. They’re smarter. They throw better. They catch better. They’re in the zone. They love being in the zone.
DONNA: Well, I think physics and spirituality ask the same questions. What are we and what is our purpose?
GARY: I don’t think so, in a respectful way.
DONNA: Yes, please.
GARY: From what I have seen of physicists and physics, I’m talking about the discipline, not every individual physics practitioner.
DONNA: What have you seen or experienced in that regard?
GARY: That physicists are studying the external world. Physicists called it a discipline of science, and science is called empirical. That means five sensory. From our perspective now, that means the old consciousness. People who are interested in awareness are interested in the relationship between their experiences and their internal dynamics.
DONNA: And how we shape it, how we shape our experience…
GARY: How we shape our experience, how I shape my experience, how you shape yours. Physicists are not concerned with this. But can you see how fascinating it is that Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and all the people that were involved in the solidification of this discipline called quantum physics, came to the conclusion that our choices shape our experience.
They called it of nature. And they’re talking about the outside world. Even Einstein, who is a remarkably insightful, very special person, as the world knows, said he never liked quantum theory. He said God doesn’t throw dice. Quantum theory can’t produce events. It predicts only probabilities. But he also gave an analogy of watching the face of an analog clock. He said, “You can see the hands moving. You can theorize why they’re moving, but you can never open the clock.”
DONNA: It is so fascinating.
GARY: Isn’t it really?
DONNA: When I ask people about awakening, sometimes we get into the discussion of different portals into that spiritual path. For you, it was something fascinating, a fascinating conversation about physics that you fell into. You came from your world in San Francisco and people were taking LSD, and that was a portal into a world of awakening. And so sometimes when I talk about awakening with people, that comes up… the experience of drugs as a portal to awakening, or the experience of nature as a portal to awakening, and so forth. Meditation as a portal to awakening. I would love to get your take on that. Can LSD be a legitimate portal?
GARY: You’ve assumed.
DONNA: That was long-winded. I apologize.
GARY: Well, no, it was complex and flowing, and it had several assumptions in it. So I’d like to look at the assumptions because without doing that, I can’t really answer the question. First, just how you’re using the word portal. Is meditation like LSD? Yes, in a way… it’s a deliberate attempt to look at consciousness and to watch it change. Although for me, it was never that. It was just escapism. Can LSD produce insights of value or any hallucinogenic? Yes. Look at Ram Dass and Timothy Leary. Is this a meditation, a portal? What is a portal?
DONNA: An entryway.
GARY: Your life is the portal. The present moment is the portal. What you fill it up with is not the portal. You are the portal. The present moment is the portal. And if you’re not there, you’re not going outside the earth school.
DONNA: So the drug… I’m sorry to interrupt.
GARY: Well, even so, there is no outside the earth school. So language is something that’s inadequate as the new consciousness begins to emerge and takes us where we’re going. Now, the first experiences of the new consciousness are simply that, the sense… I know that I’m more than a body and a mind. That’s a multisensory perception. As we begin to experience it, we begin to use it. And you can use it to create authentic power, which means to become emotionally aware and make responsible choices. These are choices that create consequences for which you’re willing to assume responsibility.
There’s only three tools to creating authentic power. In addition to emotional awareness and responsible choice, there’s consulting intuition. The rest of it is actually doing it. Experiencing the frightened and loving parts of your personality, challenging the frightened parts, and cultivating the loving parts with your volition, with your choice of love or fear.
So I started, about a third or fourth of the way in, suggested that no one who’s listening to me take any of the things that I’m saying as true without seeing if you resonate with something. And if you resonate with it, experiment some more and see if it continues to be true for you. At a certain point, you will not have to say, “I learned this from Gary. I read it in a book.” It’s yours. You are it. Well, that is a miniature description of where our consciousness is taking us.
DONNA: So if I have explained the way I was using portal, whether it’s by way of hallucinogenics or meditation or whatever it may be, it’s of no consequence. The point is, be here.
GARY: Well, and in the sense that you’re using that word, becoming a parent is a portal, recognizing for the first time that you can give to life instead of taking from life is a portal. Or the reverse, if you were born to think you’ve always got to think about someone else and you’re neglecting yourself, the first insight that you can care for yourself and nurture yourself too… that’s a portal. But these are different portals to different experiences, a portal into the deeper nature, which means the realer nature, but that’s false also because everything is real. In other words, you are not separate from the universe. That goes back to what I was saying initially. In the new consciousness, there is not this distinction between in here and out there. That’s a rumor. It’s an experientialist assumption and it’s incorrect. You are not separate from the universe and the universe is not separate from anything. What could it be separate from? As you begin to move toward that consciousness, it becomes more than thoughts, it becomes more than concepts, it becomes more than theories. At a certain point, it becomes experience.
You can’t just think yourself into a real experience. A real experience is one that is based in love, is love. And once you see that, you see that everything is love. Love is all there is. The earth school, with all of its pain and opportunity, is a gracious gift of love. Frightened parts of your personality are gifts of love. They’re given to you so that you can recognize and identify and move beyond the control within yourself… those parts of your personality that prevent you from giving the gifts you were born to give. And it’s in giving the gifts you were born to give that you experience meaning, fulfillment, joy, creativity, and vitality. Your curriculum, mine, yours, and everyone that’s in the earth school, the curriculum is love, to learn love. Your experiences are each your lessons in that curriculum.
DONNA: Do you recommend a practice such as meditation to get into that space where we can better choose love?
GARY: A meditation I recommend, if you want to call it a meditation, which is a good name, is the one I’ve just described. You can call it a heartfulness meditation.
DONNA: I like that.
GARY: Emotions are at the heart of creating authentic power. The heart is the heart of creating authentic power. So as you develop the ability, moment by moment, to distinguish within yourself between love and fear and choose love no matter what’s happening inside of you or outside of you, that’s my meditation. That’s the one I suggest to you. And I suggest it to you not because it’s my favorite, but because it is the evolutionary requirement of our species now.
DONNA: What could be used as a practice though, Gary, for someone who wants to incorporate a meaningful practice into their day? Is it something that you sit down to do, or is it just remembering, remembering, remembering?
GARY: You sit down and do it. You stand up and do it. You go to the bathroom and do it. You take showers and do it. You go fishing and do it. You always do it so that you see, eventually, when you are experiencing a frightened part and when you’re experiencing a loving part. And after a while, at first, it’s a discipline. Developing emotional awareness is a discipline. Linda Francis and I co-authored a book called The Heart of the Soul about emotional awareness. And it will take you through that process. It’s something that life will take you through, but you can begin to observe life taking you through it more quickly if you know what it’s taking you through. And you can verify that for yourself.
Continued in Pt 4…
Read and Watch Pt 1 Here: Awaken Interviews Gary Zukav Pt 1 – To Change the World, You Need to Change Yourself
Read and Watch Pt 2 Here: Awaken Interviews Gary Zukav Pt 2 – Wherever There Is Love, There Is Not Fear
