012. Michael Baxter

Buddha at the Gas Pump

Rick Archer

Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy, Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.7 • 695 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2010

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

bax (or baxishta if he’s feeling uppity) does not consider himself fully awakened, but knows for sure that he’s recognized glimpses of the self. He says this puts him in an awkward position and insists on starting off with this apology, if what i’ve seen is true then i’m a hypocrite every time i speak about it no better than the man who having awoken briefly from his dream rushes back to tell his friends what he saw “you’re all in my mind” he informs them and they laugh at him twice once for being obviously wrong and once for being right and therefore talking to himself my only defense is that even hypochondriacs do get sick and even hypocrites do awaken briefly bax’s motto is “self is solid”, and he considers himself a student of Ramana Maharshi, whose favorite description of the self was “a dense mass of self-knowledge”. He considers himself a post-new age thinker, and feels that most of what is discussed today goes only halfway to Shankara’s great ‘three laws of self-knowledge’. Specifically, much is said about consciousness but not very much about the self itSelf. Summary and transcript of this interview Interview recorded 2/17/2010. YouTube Video Chapters: 00:00:00 - Introduction and Background 00:04:03 - Self-Discovery, Music, and Health Issues 00:07:13 - Fact and Fiction 00:10:43 - Different Dialects for Different Schematic Regions 00:14:01 - A Near-death Experience 00:16:53 - Affective Flatlining 00:19:10 - Coming out of Nothing 00:22:24 - The World Lacks Existence 00:25:02 - The Experience of Solid Existence 00:28:23 - Recognizing the Glimpse of the Real 00:31:19 - Solidness as the Measure of Reality 00:34:34 - Mini-cycles of Seeking and Depressions 00:37:33 - The Evolution of Personal Development 00:41:11 - The Deep Dark Density 00:44:26 - Unpacking Points: Solidness and Intelligence 00:47:50 - The Paradox of Existence 00:51:01 - The Illusion of Consistent Laws 00:54:25 - Brahman as the World 00:57:54 - The Phases of Seeking 00:58:58 - Uncertainty 00:59:45 - The Marvel of Creation and Divine Intelligence 01:04:08 - Embracing Contrarianism 01:07:02 - Being a Trouble-maker 01:10:18 - The Cycle of Thought 01:13:25 - The Scale of a Thought 01:16:53 - The Presence of Self in Contrasting Situations 01:20:10 - The Clarity of Perception 01:23:22 - The Importance of Defining Words with Care 01:26:13 - The Importance of Truth and Half-Truths 01:28:53 - The Beauty of Existence and Non-Existence 01:31:13 - The Urban Guru Café

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Welcome to Buddha at the gas pump, the weekly show in which we talk with people who have had a spiritual awakening.
0:34.6	My name is Rick Archer and my guest this time is Michael Baxter, whom we will also refer
0:41.7	to as Bax or Michael, but not Mike.
0:45.4	Michael is unique among my guests so far for several reasons, one of which is that he doesn't
0:50.0	really claim to have had a spiritual awakening.
0:52.1	He says he's had some glimpses, and I think he's
0:55.4	going to be able to talk about them very eloquently, but maybe they're not stabilized. But that's
1:01.0	okay, because the reason I want him to have Mike on, Michael, is that I consider him to be something
1:07.8	of an Advaita scholar, if you know what Advaita means, it means non-duality.
1:13.6	And there's a whole school of thought which deals with that topic.
1:18.1	And Michael is very eloquent on that point, writing things, prose, poetry, composing songs,
1:27.1	one of which he might sing for us tonight, all sorts of things.
1:30.3	So I felt that this might be a very interesting discussion. It might be a little bit more
1:35.3	systematic than some of the interviews we've done so far, which have been just kind of free-flowing,
1:41.3	spontaneous, extemporaneous, because Michael has developed some fairly detailed points,
1:47.5	and he's so accustomed to talking about this stuff that he has a fairly clear structure in mind of how he'd like to lay it out.
1:54.2	At the same time, it won't be a lecture. We'll have plenty of give and take and questions and answers and so on to make it lively for you.
2:01.6	What we often do on this show is have people start by just sort of giving a little bit of a
2:06.1	biographical sketch of themselves, you know, what their background is, just personal
2:11.8	details of their life that they consider relevant, how that pertains to spirituality or, you know, consciousness, awakening, and so on.
2:20.9	So, go for it.
	...

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