688. Bob Harwood

Buddha at the Gas Pump

Rick Archer

Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy, Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.7 • 695 Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2023

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Between the age of 20 and 40 I was consumed with a wide range of existential questions, but despite endless thinking and reading, I never found a single answer. Due to some business-related stress at the age of 40, I started a simple meditative exercise as a way to acquire some peace of mind, and within two weeks a major insight occurred that led to more meditative activities. Five months later a huge cosmic-consciousness event answered seven of my questions and catapulted me into a different reality. I then concluded that all answers were "within," and for the next 15 years I went on silent meditation retreats with Christians, Buddhists, and Advaita groups during which all of my other questions got answered. Nevertheless, I still did not feel free. Then, a new question arose, "How is it possible to stay in a unity-conscious state of mind permanently rather than oscillating between a sense of selfhood and no-self?" In 1999, after a deep experience of gratitude on a solo hiking retreat, "the little guy in the head" (the sense of a personal "me") totally vanished, and the result was freedom, contentment, and understanding. Book: Pouring Concrete: A Zen Path to the Kingdom of God – Expanded Edition Bob's email Transcript and summary of this interview Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group Interview recorded August 19, 2023 YouTube Video Chapters: 00:00:00 - Introduction to Buddha at the Gas Pump00:04:43 - Questioning Beliefs and Exploring Existential Questions00:08:25 - The Journey of Seeking Answers in Zen Philosophy00:12:17 - The Shift in Perception00:16:07 - A Reality Shift00:19:54 - The End of the Construction Company00:24:03 - Realization of the Incomprehensible00:28:16 - Simple answers to Zen riddles00:32:17 - Finding Freedom in the Middle of Responsibilities00:35:50 - Questioning Selfhood and Freedom in the Mountains00:38:59 - The Dissolution of the Sense of Self00:42:30 - The True Self and Identity00:46:00 - The Silence of the Mind00:49:19 - Non-Abidance in the Mind00:52:39 - The Kingdom of God Inside and Outside of You00:55:59 - Shifting Attention Beyond the Mind01:02:47 - The Benefits of Practice and Reconfiguration01:06:16 - The Natural Inclination to Help Others01:09:50 - The Depth of Awakening01:13:12 - Falling Asleep During Meditation01:16:26 - Realizing the Irrelevance of a Silent Mind01:20:00 - Seeking Benefit in the Present Moment01:23:32 - Intuition and the Home of All Knowledge01:27:00 - Knowing and achieving specific things in life01:30:50 - The Blissful State on the Deathbed01:34:07 - Embracing the Unknowable Future01:37:31 - The Universal Sound01:40:44 - The Challenges of Maintaining Friendships01:48:00 - Wrapping Up with Bob

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Welcome to Buddha at the gas pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing
0:31.6	series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We've done nearly 700 of them now.
0:38.2	If this is new to you, and you'd like to check out some of the previous ones,
0:43.3	go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu.
0:49.6	This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate
0:56.4	it, we'd like to help support it. There are PayPal buttons on the site, and there is a page,
1:01.1	which explains alternatives to PayPal. Also, as I mentioned in some recent interviews, we have
1:08.0	an ongoing transcription project going on, and I have a team of over 50 volunteers
1:15.1	who have been helping to proofread the transcripts. And there are a number of reasons why that is
1:20.2	important. I won't go into them all right now. But just this last week, Nipun Meta, who was on
1:27.0	Batgap, offered to create a BackGap chat bot based on ChatGP4, which if you're familiar with that, is a very powerful technology.
1:37.5	And the core of it will be all these proofread transcripts.
1:41.3	So we're in the process of getting it.
1:43.7	It's actually already working, but we won't make it public until we've uploaded more of the transcripts. So we're in the process of getting, it's actually already working, but we won't
1:45.5	make it public until we've uploaded more of the transcripts. But if you'd like to help
1:49.8	proofread them, that's one thing that'll contribute to. Okay. My guest today is Bob Harwood.
1:57.5	Bob lives down in Tennessee and has written a book called pouring concrete, a Zen path to the kingdom of God, which is sort of a paradoxical title in that the Zen people don't talk about God, but I guess Bob does.
2:12.8	I read the whole book.
2:14.5	The reason it's called pouring concrete is his profession for most of his life was that of
2:18.5	a construction contractor and he poured a lot of concrete. And the book is rather concrete in the sense that
2:25.1	it's very down to earth, which I found refreshing. Sometimes when I listen or read spiritual books,
2:32.0	I space out a bit, you know, because they get kind of abstract and
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