Episode 34 - Richard Moss – The Mandala of Being – Engaging the Evolutionary Conversation of our Soul

Transcript

Richard Moss: Living Dialogues means that conversations, a conversation gives birth to something that maybe Duncan nor myself nor any of us when we’re in conversation this way would have expected to happen. Living Dialogues is very much about giving birth to insight, to connection, to connectedness and to gratitude in the experience of those.

Duncan Campbell: It’s true. It becomes a dialogue that expands like a pebble in a pond.

Duncan Campbell: From time in memorial, beginning with indigenous counsels and ancient wisdom traditions, through the work of Western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo, and Quantum Physicist David Boehm, mutual participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning a dia-flow of Logos meaning, beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now, as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues.

Duncan Campbell: Welcome to Living Dialogues. I’m your host, Duncan Campbell and with me for this particular dialogue I’m truly delighted to have as my guest Richard Moss, M.D., internationally respected teacher, visionary thinker and author of five seminal books on transformation, self healing and the importance of living consciously, the most recent of which is The Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness, which has already won already wide praise from people such as Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love and The Gift of Change who said of the book, “Richard Moss is one of the most important teachers of transformational knowledge.” Deepak Chopra has said, “In this very elegant book, The Mandala of Being, Dr. Richard Moss offers practical suggestions and techniques to find that presence within you that allows you to know yourself as a limitless awareness. I have admired Dr. Moss’s work for many years and highly recommend The Mandala of Being.” This from other people that have been featured on Living Dialogues and we might go on to say that in his work Richard has for 30 years guided people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines in the use of the power of awareness to realize their intrinsic wholeness and to reclaim the calisdom of their true selves. He teaches a practical philosophy of consciousness that models how to integrate spiritual practice and psychological self-inquiry into a concrete and fundamental transformation of people’s lives. He lives in Ojai California with his wife Ariel. You can contact him at www.richardmoss.com. So Richard, what a real delight to have you here on Living Dialogues.

Dr. Richard Moss: Thank you Duncan.

Duncan Campbell: As I mentioned, we’ve had Marianne Williamson here as a frequent guest and the same with Deepak Chopra and it’s a real pleasure to have this opportunity to do dialogues together, in particular this wonderful new book of yours, The Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness, it really fits in the mission we might say, which has evolved here on Living Dialogues, to in a sense connect people to the various gifts that are being given by people around the world to the evolution of a new planetary consciousness, and in particular this gifting is characterized, I believe, at the highest levels by a transmission and sharing that does not make people dependent on a teacher or even on a particular community of inquiry where you are taught you might say and respect the teaching of how to be self-empowered, how to reach the state of we might say evolutionary awareness or to be in the now as Eckar Toll famously put it and as you put it, without being dependent as we say on a teacher or even a community of fellow practitioners, and from that point of view you can collaborate, either as a teacher or student or member of a community at I believe an even more amplified level, and so with that kind of hint of what is in The Mondola of Being, I thought we might begin before we talk about the book itself, with your own evolution and maybe start with a story that might come to your mind spontaneously from your early life or perhaps even childhood that foreshadowed your life work these last 40 years.

Dr. Richard Moss: Ooh. Well first, I’m honored to be in lovely company, the people that you mentioned and I’m sure many, many others. I don’t, you know, I don’t really think much about my past and it…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: I certainly did years of work, psychological work and self-inquiry work in my 20’s and 30’s and on and off when I’ve wanted to through the years. To examine my own, my own issues, the stuff I carry from my family and upbringing and, I don’t think it always comes from there but some of it, just to work on the stuff of life. In terms of anecdotes or stories, you know, I think my life isn’t very exceptional, I mean I, I went to, I went to school at a time when I think the country invested more in education than it does now. Right after World War 2, when the GI’s came home, it was a real baby boomer, I’m in the front end of that generation. I remember when I went to school, one of my, Candace Pert was one of my classmates and we were good friends…

Duncan Campbell: Oh yeah, she’s been…

Dr. Richard Moss: and her work on neurotransmitters and the biology of, not the biology, that’s, she’s written about…

Duncan Campbell: The molecules…

Dr. Richard Moss: Molecules of emotion, yeah.

Duncan Campbell: Exactly, she’s, she’s been a guest here with that book and a lovely woman, really a terrific person.

Dr. Richard Moss: Oh, she’s a character…

Duncan Campbell: And a character, yeah.

Dr. Richard Moss: very, very, one of these minds that beeps everywhere and is interested in everything…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: big heart.

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: Anyway, we, you know, I just think life was a, the 60’s was an interesting time, it was so-called counterculture time, it was a mixture of self-exploration and politics and, you know, social consciousness and all that, all those things influences me, but there’s nothing all that specific or special about my life I would say that wouldn’t be just sort of, I think I, I think I’d rather let the rest of the conversation stand for itself. Oh, I will say that about 20 something years ago I met my current wife, I was married once before, and she joined me with 3 step, 3 of her children, 3 step-children for me and that’s been quite a journey, to step from being a kind, kind of a contemplative for many years, I started doing the work I’m, consciousness work that I’ve been doing, which is very experiential based work with a lot of retreat with people, started doing that in the very late 70’s. My wife and I met in the mid, in ’86 and started to be together in ’87 and married in ’89, and I suddenly was with 3 children and that was very powerful for me, very important in my life because, because you’re not a teacher in your house, in your house you’re a husband, a father, a friend and an asshole at times, and it’s a wonderful, you know, when you put that side by side with where your ego isn’t being with how easily it is to get your ego stroked when you are a guide or a leader, and in that balance I think that’s been incredibly healthy for me, and I really do think that ultimately the work on the couple is the work, is the work of the future for our world, when, when we can start making a lot more, a better communication between male and female, masculine and feminine, man and woman, we will, we will understand ourselves better and in ways that are both lets say transcendent and landed right on the ground, and when we put those two together as a species, and they’re very far from together now, though we’re making great strides, then I think we’ll see some profound changes in the world and we are seeing them. So I would say for me, the dance of my individuality and my capacity to be in a relationship, of leadership and learning, of being a decipal and being a teacher, a disciple of life and my own foibles and flaws, has been really the cycle of my journey.

Duncan Campbell: And wonderful teaching material and sharing material as well. When you do manifest as a teacher or in this case as an author sharing your life experience, and I have to say, I’m so delighted to hear these brief stories and a sense of evolutionary history and progression there because it’s very similar to our work here on Living Dialogues, where I’ve talked for years now about the evolution of the human species all together as, we might say, in parallel to the kind of experience we all know in human development, from the infancy stage, as your most recent addition to your family, your new grandson, you know, and then moving from that through childhood and that childhood stage then giving birth by a necessity to an adolescent individuating stage, which moves away from that sense of being embedded in an alive universe, first the womb and then the protected space of hopefully a good childhood. But then, just as the embryo has to move from the womb into separation and individuation for the complexity to take place and evolution to transpire, we move into adolescence where the emphasis is very much on individuation and individual empowerment over and against, we might say, mother nature and the natural world, sort of pushing that away to give ourselves an empowered identity, but then we found ourselves on the horns of the dilemma where the identity of individuation becomes its own trap, as you have so excellently observed in many subtle ways in, in your book, and we do then have to, in a sense, integrate within us the unity principle and the individuation principle and bring those together so we can then be prepared to enter into a relationship of real sacred marriage, of Sheva Shockde, masculine principle, feminine principle, with all of creation including individuals that we might mate with and literally bring forth or nurture, you know, a new womb, a new family and so on, and so very much attuned to what you’ve just said and how that’s elaborated in your book, and so, I just realized by asking you to talk about your past it’s really in a sense ironic and amusing because it does illustrate how we can both honor our past and at the same time not get stuck in it, and at one point when you talk about the mandala, you say that basically if we stand in the center of a circle, like a mandala, and we’re considering that to be present in the now, the only way our mind can go away from the now is in one of four directions; we can go into the future, we can go into thoughts about the past, we can go into self-absorption thoughts or we can go into obsessing about the external world or the other and tell ourselves stories that manage to keep us out of the center of the circle, and I like very much how you say that when we go into the past, we often times find ourselves telling ourselves stories of regret or nostalgia, guilt, if we go into the future, our body itself experiences worry or hope and so on. So with that faint adimbration there, foreshadowing, why don’t we ask you to tell us how you came up with this very powerful archetypal application, I should say this timeless archetypal model of the mandala.

Dr. Richard Moss: Well, one of the pieces that I chose purposely not to talk about from my past was when I was 30 I had a deep profound experience, a mystical experience, which is very difficult to talk about and I’ve written about it, but it changed the reference for my life from knowing myself through my thoughts to knowing myself through consciousness or through being, through then being able to look at my identity as, or the, lets say, they call it the ‘primordial thought’, the thing that a baby doesn’t have which is a sense of me, which by the age of five or six becomes really consolidated as an identity, a basic identity of me. When we have the experience of transcending that for a while, of being able to look at that me, of seeing that me become just a point of awareness that’s observing an experience of, of an entirely different and profound consciousness, a kind of knowing that has a, we, that we never really knew until, until you have the experience of what’s at the root of all religions, it’s at the root of all deep wisdom I believe, it’s at the root of all great, great artists I think, this some degree of this kind of experience. And so for myself from that point on my, my worldview started from the present and I understood, I understood how people construct identity, how I, and I began to understand of course how I did that in myself, in ways that were more than psychological. And the, so for a long, long time I was able to speak about, I mean for 30 years of working with people in long retreats, the key to the retreats, the key to the healing I saw in my work, and as a physician, it fascinated me to see how many people would heal themselves of serious disease during these retreats, whereas you can go through a whole career as a doctor and never see one true spontaneous remission, I saw many and wrote about them in my other books, in The Ivent as We and The Black Butterfly and in How Shall I Live, which  are my, some of my previous books, I realized that the key to all the work was simply coming into the present moment, deeper and deeper into the now of ourselves, and that when we don’t do that, the reason we don’t do that is that the mind, the mind is not designed, the egoric mind, the mind that becomes me at the age of 5 or 6, the identity with ones body, with ones feelings, with ones thoughts, ones sensations, and that the idea of who we will become in the future, and the idea of who we were in the past and how we want to change or not change, how we want to repeat experiences that were good or avoid experience, repeating experiences that we call bad, how the psychology of time would weaken our ability to really come into the immediacy of ourselves. And the psychology of time, as you mentioned the past was beliefs that lead to a feeling of regret or nostalgia, blame or loss, and the psychology of the future, which causes us to oscillate back and forth between thoughts that are either hopeful or thoughts that are anxious making or anxiety provoking or fear creating. And for the longest time I understood that and at the same time parallel to it, I was talking about the nature of subject object consciousness because you can talk about subject object consciousness only to the degree that you’ve transcended subject object consciousness. Now any athlete, or people that are in an athletic state of flow, briefly to a certain extent transcend layers or levels of the sense of subject and object, so the surfer and the surf board and the wave become one, and the skier and the snow and the slope become one, and, and the poet and the moment that the words are flowing become one, and the artist simile, and sometimes dancers, I remember watching Torvo and Dean and the, this was a long time ago…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: I think ’72 or ’74, no maybe ’82, ’80 or ’82, ’84 Olympics, I guess it was ’84 Olympics…

Duncan Campbell: I think it would’ve been…

Dr. Richard Moss: Winning the gold and the…

Duncan Campbell: Yeah.

Dr. Richard Moss: the ice dance.

Duncan Campbell: ’82, yeah.

Dr. Richard Moss: And watching them and thinking, I mean it was palpable to me, I could see it…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: a level of connection between the two. They forgot themselves, they were just the perfection of that performance…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: and so. And watching Michael Jordan play basketball and seeing this happening in so many people’s lives, realizing that that’s why we like to go running and reach that point where it does us and that’s why we like to sing or play until somehow we’re being lived by something deeper. And in my work I just emphasize this experience of, of entering deeply into so many different things until it lives you deeply. And at the other side of these experiences we’re briefly, the inner and the outer are the same thing, and the notion of me disappears into this, the flow of being and on the other side of that there was new wisdom, deep profound insight, a whole kind of inner knowledge that would awaken inside of people that they could begin to tap, a whole spontaneous excitation of creativity, new vision, new purpose for their lives and physical healing. And so, I saw it, it was really coming into the present, but it wasn’t until about 7 or 8 years ago where suddenly I realized that the notion of the subject and object, the subject/object consciousness, and time really could be superimposed on each other, and that these things, this suddenly gave birth to this map, this map to profound insight that’s so archetypal, that it’s just going everywhere now, to people who are working with people, but the nature of mandala is it’s circle, it’s, so the people who are listening can visualize a circle, it’s strongly oriented toward the center.

Duncan Campbell: And let me just interject here, as I recall the way this teaching first emerged was you were saying, and we’ll come right back to the mondolay here, you were saying that in your own experience when you were teaching or when you were in your workshops, you had that, lets call it the Michael Jordan or the Torval and Dean experience, and as did people in the workshop, you know, we found ourselves, you found yourself in that sense in the experience of unity and you were in the zone we might call it.

Dr. Richard Moss: Well it’s a very easy thing to bring people to a profound…

Duncan Campbell: Yes.

Dr. Richard Moss: centeredness, an altered state temporarily…

Duncan Campbell: That’s the point…

Dr. Richard Moss: It is not an easy thing for people to go home and be able to know how to continue to find that place or build their lives around a practice which brings them back again and again into the present, and that’s why the mandala became so important, because people would change in the work with me profoundly and then they would be back to the same patterns later on very easily, very quickly, and the same thing was true for me, I would be in such an expansive and liberated state of consciousness when I was working, as I had been in the initial experience that had awakened or opened me, but when I went home, as a step-dad and as a husband, and found myself defensive or petty or resenting criticism or thinking that I was too important to be doing some of the things that needed to be done around the house and so forth, in the daily friction of life, I started asking myself, “What do I do different when I’m working? What do I do different when I’m really present in myself as a rock climber”, which was, and in mountaineering, which were things I did in my 20’s and 30’s and even into my 40’s and 50’s when I had time, what am I doing different there that I’m doing now when I’m being reactive, when I’m being angry, when I’m being defensive, when I’m being self-important, and it became really clear, my mind was going into these four different directions that you mentioned before, into the past, the future, into a belief in my own special ness as a grandiose kind of special ness…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: or a depressive kind of special ness, either I was superior or inferior…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: better than others or less than other, this oscillation of this, and the kinds of beliefs I was telling myself and that I see people doing all the time, that makes them special in an inflated way or special in a depressive deflated way, and then constantly all these stories about other people that create the most basic of feelings are anger and hurt. Either we’re angry at people and we’re attacking them or we’re hurt because they’re bigger than us and they’ve done something to us and we’re envious and we’re jealous with our thoughts and we’re…

Duncan Campbell: Or disappointed or…

Dr. Richard Moss: disappointed…

Duncan Campbell: feel betrayed.

Dr. Richard Moss: impatient, and so forth…

Duncan Campbell: Yup.

Dr. Richard Moss: And all these emotions depend up where the mind goes and how it leaves the now. And so the mandala's a picture of that.

Duncan Campbell: And one of the ways I thought was very graphic that you described it was in attempting to give a visual depiction of this to people that are visually oriented, you said, well now imagine, you know, I’m standing here in the center of a circle and I’m in the now, and what I’ve found from my own self inquiry is that if I leave that sense of unity and presence and aliveness, I go in one of four directions, and you said, I could walk this way and this could be the future and that way could symbolize the past and over here to the left could be, you know…

Dr. Richard Moss: That’s it, exactly how it happened…

Duncan Campbell: Yes, exactly.

Dr. Richard Moss: I was walking around a carpet…

Duncan Campbell: with a mandala, a carpet I brought back from Nepal in 1982 that had taken a family of four Tibetans a year to weave…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: And I had this in the center of my seminar space where I do my retreats or if I can travel with it, I’ve brought it to places, I’ve had it there, I love this carpet, I’ve stared at it for thousands and thousands…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

Dr. Richard Moss: of hours. And I was walking around and saying, “Look here, this twelve o’clock, that’s the future, over here it’s six o’clock if this was a clock, that’s the past…

Duncan Campbell: Mm hmm.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell