Buddha at the Gas Pump

762. Dave Markowitz

Empaths, Empathic Overwhelm, Source Intuition, and the Sacred Work of Healing Dave Markowitz explores empaths, empathic overwhelm, and the sacred work of healing ourselves and our world. He shares how trauma, sensitivity, intuition, and our connection with Source can shape the way we experience ourselves and other people. A Source intuitive, bestselling author, healing facilitator, and longtime student of human transformation, Dave draws on decades of experience working with highly sensitive people. He describes his own discovery that he was an empath, how he learned to distinguish his own feelings from what he was absorbing from others, and why he believes many of us are naturally empathic. The conversation explores the deeper roots of empathic overwhelm, including four original wounds and the movement from an early experience of oneness into separation and individuation. Dave explains why simply protecting or shielding ourselves from other people’s energy may address symptoms without addressing the deeper source of the problem. Rick and Dave also discuss trauma, fear, anger and grief; relationships and community; forgiveness; meditation and nonduality; connecting with Source; intuitive guidance; and the importance of allowing difficult experiences to become part of our growth rather than trying to escape them. Dave offers a practical perspective on becoming more resilient without becoming closed off—and on how our own healing can ripple outward, affecting the people and communities around us.

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761. Monica Khosla

Spiritual Liberation, Memory Reconsolidation, and the End of the Separate Self Monica Khosla explores spiritual awakening, nonduality, and liberation through the surprising lens of neuroscience and memory reconsolidation. A somatic psychotherapist, she describes a sudden shift during a yoga class in 2009 in which the sense of being a separate self simply fell away. Monica is the author of The First and Last Belief: A Theory of Liberation in the Age of Neuroscience. In this conversation with Rick Archer, she considers whether the apparent end of separation may be understood as the release of a fundamental embodied assumption—an update in the brain’s model of reality rather than the attainment of a special spiritual status. They discuss her early spiritual experiences, her long search through psychology, yoga, meditation, acupuncture, astrology, and nondual teachings, and the quiet, unremarkable character of the shift she calls liberation. Monica distinguishes enduring liberation from transitory spiritual states, challenges common assumptions about enlightenment, and emphasizes that liberation does not make someone perfect, omniscient, or free of ordinary human habits and difficulties. The conversation also explores memory reconsolidation, trauma therapy, predictive processing, consciousness, the nature of perception, the relationship between ancient contemplative traditions and modern neuroscience, free will and responsibility, personal identity, and how spiritual understanding may—or may not—translate into ordinary life. Book: The First and Last Belief: A theory of Liberation in the age of neuroscience Website: nondualitynow.com Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group

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265. Bart Marshall

Hello everyone, who knew and loved Bart, This is Renata Gregori, his wife. My beloved husband left this earth plane on July 27, 2026, due to pneumonia and infection - complications from conditions he was dealing with since the end of last year. He was the best man I’ve ever known. He was my teacher, my confidant, my best friend, the love of my life and my touchstone for all that is good and righteous. I could always count on him to put things in perspective for me and check me, when I was off base. We had a celebration of life at our house in Mexico yesterday and it was so beautiful. Music, laughter, tears and beautiful people. Bart has been laid out at our house for two days. As per his wishes, he will be cremated today. Please continue to contemplate his teachings, read his books and watch his videos. I send my Love to all who knew and loved him and all whose lives he touched. Bart Marshall described his spiritual path as “self-guided eclectic.” It began with a death experience in Vietnam in 1968 and ended in 2004 on an airplane at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic as he returned from a workshop with Douglas Harding. In those intervening years he “turned over every rock” in his quest for a final answer, but counts three teachers as the most influential: Richard Rose, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Douglas Harding. He founded Self Inquiry Group (SIG) in Raleigh, North Carolina and for many years held weekly meetings before stepping back in 2013. Sometimes called “the reluctant guru” by those who know him, Bart nevertheless traveled widely to speak when asked, and teaches retreats and intensives with Deborah Westmoreland (Conscious TV interview) events that proved to be highly transformative for participants. Bart was the author of The Perennial Way: New English Versions of Yoga Sutras, Dhammapada, Heart Sutra, Ashtavakra Gita, Faith Mind Sutra, and Tao Te Ching, and Christ Sutras (Fall 2014), which contains the complete sayings of Jesus from all sources arranged as topical sermons. Interview recorded 11/8/2014

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541. Houman Emami

Houman Z. Emami, a native of Iran (ancient Persia), has a bright academic career in Philosophy and Religion, Holism and Consciousness, with earlier careers in Computer Science, Telecommunications, and a number of educational-institute startups. He has completed undergraduate studies in the above fields, within and without standard academic training, and he continues in his graduate and Ph.D. thesis, “On Intuition, the Heart Faculty, and Theophanies”. Before reaching his eleventh year, Houman had lived through the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Iran and Iraq war of 1981, and the inner-city bombings and atrocities of war. “And that was just the beginning,” he tells us. Miraculous events began as a direct result of these earlier years of awakening and grew in proportion to his yearning. In this way, the dark side of war, and the lesser-known light side of war were made manifest from age five onwards. After several relocations and maturing in both eastern and western cultures before his thirtieth year, Houman had taken part in a relatively successful lifestyle, returned to academia and various spiritual practices thrice, finally taking early retirement in his late twenties, leaving all behind and spending a decade as an independent world-traveler, contemporary monk and spiritual pilgrim. These later awakenings in solitude and on the pilgrim’s walk integrated those of his early childhood. At last, returning to worldly life in his late thirties, he continues to impact the world he left behind. Loved ones and relations lovingly refer to him as “scribe,” “pilgrim,” and “scholar.” A “scribe” is one who decodes and deciphers the teachings of the ancient scrolls, which are symbolic representations of transcendent realms made immanent within a simple framework of understanding. A “pilgrim” is one who leaves the mind behind (is a passerby), leads from the heart, “connects the dots,” is a bridge-builder, and a peacemaker. And a “scholar,” from scolere, is one who lives at ease as a student of life, truth, and wisdom. In this respect, he has written: Let the truth of love be & become the love of truth, and the love of truth be & become the truth of love. That means, the soul genuinely desires love and truth, embraced by and swaying this way and that throughout life, in order to teach us that we must love unconditionally but when finding ourselves in the snares of selfish love, we must pursue truth; and we must pursue truth unconditionally but when we find truth become empty tradition and superstition, we must pursue love. In practice, Houman’s spiritual invocation consciously began in his early teens, as a result of a near-death experience (NDE)—taking him back to his early childhood visions, and to his native ancestral teachings of the East, Near East, and the Orient. After his near-death experience and remembering his life’s calling more fully from age five, Houman recalled all that proceeded from that age in the divine plan, walking them out and remembering them step by step. Years later, these remembrances and awakenings culminated into visionary experiences and embodiments—involving “theophanies,” meaning divine interventions or encounters. Twelve years of practice and integration turned him into an independent spiritual pilgrim in 2003, and he has been traveling the world since. His journey has been one of the most overwhelming stories one might hear. All there is, IS Love for Love IS…

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130. Andrew Cohen

Andrew Cohen (1955–2025) was a spiritual teacher and the founder of EnlightenNext, an organization associated with his teaching of “Evolutionary Enlightenment.” He was a student of H. W. L. Poonja and wrote several books, including My Master Is My Self and Evolutionary Enlightenment. I interviewed Andrew in July 2012. Soon afterward, serious accounts emerged from former students describing a harmful and coercive culture within EnlightenNext. In light of those accounts, I removed this interview from the BatGap site. I have decided to restore it following Andrew’s death, not as an endorsement or a minimization of the harm experienced by former members, but because he appeared to make sincere efforts in later years to confront his behavior and change. These included therapy, ayahuasca work, a willingness to take ordinary jobs when necessary, and participation in the candid documentary How I Created a Cult, which includes difficult testimony from former members and is far from flattering to him. This interview is being made available as a historical record. As always, viewers are encouraged to exercise discernment and form their own conclusions. Books by Andrew Cohen: My Master Is My Self Enlightenment Is a Secret An Unconditional Relationship to Life Freedom Has No History Embracing Heaven & Earth Living Enlightenment Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path for Spiritual Awakening Interview conducted 7/14/2012

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760. Mark Vicente & Bonnie Piesse

Narcissism, Cult Recovery, Spiritual Awakening, and Discernment Mark Vicente is an author, speaker, and award-winning Writer/Director/Producer from Johannesburg, South Africa. Taking his first photograph at age four, he worked his way up through the ranks of the camera department, shooting a number of anti-apartheid films in the 1980s before relocating to Hollywood. Because of the atrocities in his native South Africa, he found himself propelled to question fundamental assumptions at a young age: beliefs about human behavior, morality, cosmology, existentialism and mysticism. Unifying his love of science, philosophy and filmmaking, his dream of creating cinema to inspire and provoke thought emerged with the creation of “What the BLEEP Do We Know?!” Later, deeply moved by the violence consuming Mexico, Mark released “Encender el Corazon,” a film about the kidnapping epidemic there and one community’s courage in standing up to the cartels. It was a bittersweet victory. While the film touched many people deeply, it was by association supporting the criminal enterprise NXIVM. Mark made the difficult decision to pull the film from distribution and, with a small band of whistleblowers, exposed NXIVM’s criminal behavior, resulting in multiple arrests and prosecutions. This journey is captured in the HBO Documentary Series “The Vow.” He has since developed a passionate interest in exposing the coercive, duplicitous environments of high-control groups. His feature documentary “Narcissists’ Playbook,” examining malignant narcissism through self-confessed, self-aware narcissists, juxtaposed with testimony from victims, survivors, scientists, and mental health professionals, has now been released. He is also developing “Inst@Guru,” a series examining the rise of predatory self-help culture in the social media age, centered on Dutch social media guru Bentinho Massaro. Websites: markvicente.com Narcissist’s Playbook Bonnie Piesse is an Australian/American actress, singer-songwriter and soul alignment and manifestation coach. She’s best known for her roles in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and was recently seen in My Favorite Girlfriend alongside Tyler Johnson and Michael Nouri. As a singer-songwriter, her music has been featured in film and TV including Miss Arizona, HBO’s The Vow (in which she was also a subject), and CW’s Life Unexpected. Through her business, Your Quantum Life, Bonnie helps soul-led leaders remember who they really are and step into authentic expression and embodiment. Website: bonniepiesse.com

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12. Michael Baxter

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.

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759. Leela Muse

Leela Muse is a nonduality guide whose YouTube work explores the life‑affirming process of spiritual awakening and profoundly unowned, ordinary life. Through contemplative dialogues, she emphasizes the art of noticing, radical honesty, and open curiosity, validating the lived experience of seekers while gently challenging assumptions about what awakening is supposed to look like. Leela joins Buddha at the Gas Pump to talk about spiritual awakening, the myths that surround it, and what integration actually looks like in ordinary life. Leela shares her journey from a fundamentalist Christian childhood and years of psychological suffering to an initial awakening experience inspired by Eckhart Tolle, and how that opened into an ongoing, ever-deepening exploration of non-duality. Rick and Leela cover why duality isn't a mistake but simply how non-duality shows up, why emotions and fear don't disappear after awakening, the danger of spiritual bypassing, and why "no self" is a beginning rather than an end point. They also dig into several common myths about enlightenment, including the idea that awakening is a permanent special state, that a person can "become" enlightened, and that understanding concepts is the same as realization.

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758. Keith Parker

Seeing the Aura - A New Understanding of the Human Energy Field Keith is a teacher, author and healing practitioner with expertise in the human energy field, contemplative science and the healing arts. Initially, Keith used meditation as a vehicle to understand and refine subtle states of consciousness. Over the following decade he studied movement, breathwork, bodywork, energy work and other disparate disciplines. During this intensive period, Keith had a series of breakthrough experiences enabling him to see the aura with remarkable clarity. He founded Field Dynamics in 2018 to help individuals with their personal growth and as a platform to exemplify the potential of energy healing. His first book, Radical Reality: How Seeing the Aura Reveals Who & What We Are, is an exploration of how the human energy field informs our understanding of the mind-body connection, consciousness and reality itself.

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757. Ruben Laukkonen

Ruben is the director of the Flourishing Intelligence Program (FLIP) at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Ruben is also co-director of the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, a Senior Researcher within Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, and fellow at Linacre College. Ruben has made significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, meditation, and insight. His work also reveals a pathway towards better and safer artificial intelligence based on the science of consciousness and contemplative wisdom. Ruben has an eclectic contemplative background, including Zen, Advaita, and Theravada, and his first-person inquiry into the nature of reality continues to deeply inform his scientific research, and vice versa.

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756. Karen Shanley

I didn’t set out to become a spiritual teacher. I was the kid with questions that wouldn’t let go — why are we here, what happens when we die, is this really all there is? At eleven, I had my first spiritual awakening, which introduced me to what I call my Inner Teacher, a wise guiding presence that’s been with me ever since. Those early experiences set me on a long journey across traditions and continents, including several years on a mountaintop in India with a 120-year-old enlightened master. He used laughter, provocation, and paradox to dismantle every spiritual assumption I had — and showed me that real spirituality isn’t about rising above life, but stepping fully into it. What came out of all that is how I teach now: Eastern depth, Western practicality. Spirituality that holds up just as well on a Tuesday afternoon as it does on a meditation cushion. I’m not interested in quick fixes or spiritual highs. Over decades of teaching, I keep coming back to this: you already have an Inner Knowing, an intuitive wisdom that’s been there all along. Most of us have just been talked out of trusting it. My work is about helping you clear what’s in the way — the limiting beliefs, the mental clutter — so you can remember who you are at the deepest level.

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755. Jonathan Ashford

Jonathan lived the definition of material excess, twenty-five years climbing the corporate ladder in marketing and technology as a C-level executive, accumulating possessions, and actively avoiding anything spiritual. That was until May 22, 2023. On that day, Jonathan died. His skin turned yellow, his organs failed, and he was gone for three hours. What happened during those three hours wasn’t just a glimpse of white light. He experienced complete immersion in divine consciousness, received profound spiritual teachings and revelations, and was given a choice: stay on the other side or return to share with those ready to awaken. He chose to return. But the being who returned bears no resemblance to the executive who died. Jonathan now helps individuals across the world through speaking engagements, group calls, and private sessions.

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754. Julia Mossbridge

Teaching AI to love, the physics of unconditional love, and telepathy with non-speaking autistic people all come together in this lively Buddha at the Gas Pump conversation with neuroscientist and futurist Julia Mossbridge. In this wide-ranging dialogue, we explore unconditional love as a real, foundational force in the universe and what it means for consciousness, time, technology, trauma, and disclosure. Julia describes her working model of universal love as “that which connects,” a fundamental force more basic than space, time, matter, and energy. She explains how unconditional love is the human emotional and motivational state that arises when we become directly aware of this ever-present universal love, and why that experience paradoxically makes us more motivated to improve the world even though “nothing needs to change.” Along the way, she and Rick unpack the difference between unconditional and conditional love, the pitfalls of spiritual bypassing, and the limits of “purification” models in spirituality and healing. They then turn to the ethics and possibilities of “loving AI”: can we create AI systems and robots that genuinely support human well-being and help people access unconditional love, instead of amplifying our polarization and fear? Julia shares the origins of the Loving AI project, her work on Socratic GPT tools for critical thinking, and her leadership in efforts to bring more feminine and marginalized voices into AI, robotics, cognitive science, and consciousness research, including The Synapse women’s conference. Another major theme is time and precognition. Drawing on her neuroscience background, Julia discusses empirical work on precognition and self-transcendence, including how difficult life circumstances can sometimes push people into profound, love-filled states in which they recognize themselves as “the flame, not the candle.” The conversation also dives into “The Telepathy Tapes” and Julia’s research with non-speaking autistic people who communicate via letterboards and keyboards. She outlines why equating speech with intelligence is scientifically and ethically untenable, and how spontaneous telepathy, “the Hill,” and rich inner lives in non-speaking autistic individuals challenge mainstream assumptions about mind, communication, and consciousness. In the later part of the interview, Julia talks about her book “Have a Nice Disclosure,” which reframes disclosure not just as governments revealing secrets about advanced programs or possible non-human intelligences, but as an inner process of truth-telling, healing, and reconciliation. She and Rick explore how collective and personal shadow material is surfacing globally, why genuine disclosure must happen in the heart as well as in institutions, and how unconditional love can hold even the darkest aspects of our history. Julia Mossbridge focuses ruthlessly on developing a deep understanding of love, time, technology, and how these human experiences relate to corresponding physical forces. Her most recent relevant projects include: Creating a Socratic GPT to guide intelligence analysts through the critical thinking process, leading a diverse team of technologists and designers to create a scalable, self-guided digital tool that increases overall wellbeing and is now being developed further within Native American communities, and leading an international group of AI developers and roboticists toward creating an unconditionally loving robot that reduced anger and cognitive load in humans.

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753. Tammy Lee Anderson

Tammy Lee Anderson shares how three profound near-death experiences opened her to unconditional love, spiritual awakening, and a life of service as a psychotherapist, healer, and spiritual medium. In this deep conversation, she describes what near-death really felt like, how it dissolved the fear of death, and how love and awakening can be embodied in daily life through grief, trauma, and ordinary relationships. We explore Tammy’s early near-death experiences in infancy, her memories of being “in between” worlds, and how these experiences invited her into a lifelong journey of surrender into love. She explains why we are not victims of our reality but co‑creators of it, and how even our deepest challenges can expand compassion, forgiveness, and embodied love. Tammy also talks about her unusual background as an Olympic‑level kayaker, 5th degree black belt Aikido teacher, former monastic, and long‑time psychotherapist. She shares powerful stories of working with grief, homelessness, abuse, and trauma, and how her mediumship and healing work now help people reconnect with loved ones in spirit, release fear, and rediscover meaning. If you’re curious about near‑death experiences, life after death, spiritual mediumship, or how to live awake in a dense and sometimes painful world, this conversation offers both inspiration and very grounded wisdom.

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752. Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a public intellectual; he is the creator, writer, host of Closer To Truth, the long-running PBS/public television series and leading digital resource on Cosmos (cosmology/physics, philosophy of science), Life (philosophy of biology), Mind (consciousness, brain/mind, philosophy of mind), and Meaning (theism/atheism/agnosticism, global philosophy of religion, critical thinking). Peter Getzels is Closer To Truth co-creator and producer/director. Kuhn is the author of the comprehensive review article on theories of consciousness – “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications” – and editor-in-chief of the expanded, continuously updated Landscape of Consciousness website (with more than 400 theories of consciousness in ten categories), Kuhn has written or edited over 30 books, including The Mystery of Existence: Why is there Anything At All? (with John Leslie); Closer To Truth: Challenging Current Belief; Closer To Truth: Science, Meaning and the Future; The Library of Investment Banking; How China’s Leaders Think (featuring President Xi Jinping); The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin (China’s best-selling book in 2005 and in December 2022); and “The Origin and Significance of Zero: An Interdisciplinary Perspective” (with Peter Gobets). Dr. Kuhn is chairman of The Kuhn Foundation. He has a BA in Human Biology (Johns Hopkins), PhD in Anatomy/Brain Research (UCLA), and SM (MBA) in Management (MIT).

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751. Kogen Czarnik

From my teenage years I had an unquenchable thirst to see beyond the veils that growing up had created in my mind. I tried different avenues of exploration, and soon found my spiritual home in the Zen tradition. After graduating from college, I went straight to Japan and became a Zen monk at the Bukkoku-ji monastery. For over a dozen years I practiced in the monastic context, mostly in Japan and Korea, living a life dedicated fully to this investigation, going through an awakening process, and deepening my realization and embodiment. Later I also explored approaches of other traditions and followed several secular non-traditional teachers. I have spent about 4 years total in silent meditation retreats, and have worked directly in the retreat setting and one-on-one with teachers such as my root monastic teacher, Tangen Harada Roshi, as well as with Jakusho Kwong Roshi, Shodo Harada Roshi, Wu Bong Sunim, Adyashanti and Angelo Dilullo. Even though the years of meditation and the simplicity of monastic life had a powerful effect, most important on my path were three breakthroughs at age 23, 30 and 37, each stripping down a different layer of illusion and revealing bare truth, without any sense of separation, or any sense of personal nor universal “self.” I have also explored and continue to explore various approaches of somatic work to aid embodiment and the uprooting of habitual tendencies, as I consider myself, and all human beings, a work in progress. Following my monastic Dharma grandfather (Daiun Harada Roshi)’s example, I vowed to spend all of my twenties and thirties only on my own practice, deepening and embodiment. Now in my forties, I make myself available as a resource to those who seek support in their own process of finding freedom from self-created suffering. Despite my love of the monastic life and the Zen tradition, I have decided to share outside of the confines of those systems. I stay true, however, to the essence and marrow of Zen as defined by Bodhidharma, the Indian monk considered the founder of what we now know as Zen: “Transmission outside of scriptures Not dependent upon words and phrases Directly pointing to each person’s mind See your nature – become a buddha” Feel free to reach out if you feel so inclined. May all beings find liberation!

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750. Purnima Sinha

Purnima Sinha is a spiritual director and coach whose life has been shaped by meditation, near‑death experiences, and a deep commitment to seva (selfless service). Raised in a highly spiritual Indian family steeped in the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, she began meditating in her teens and was trained in Ultra Transcendental Meditation and Surat Shabd Yoga in India. She has now practiced meditation for over 50 years. After an intense emotional crisis around the year 2000, Purnima had a near‑death‑type experience in which she found herself in a tunnel, received a powerful life review and “downloads” about her future, and understood that her life’s purpose was far from complete. This, along with subsequent experiences—including warnings before a later collapse, shared‑death experiences with family members, and long‑term after‑death communication with her mother—reoriented her life around service, self‑love, and trust in inner guidance. Professionally, Purnima worked for many years as a graphic designer before feeling an inner compulsion to serve in a hospital setting. Guided “voices” and a series of striking coincidences led her into over 3,500 hours of volunteer work and a formal role as a patient advocate in a major hospital, where she visited patients one‑on‑one, listened to their concerns, and supported them and their families through serious illness, cancer treatments, and end‑of‑life transitions. Repeatedly, nurses and staff invited her to sit with patients who were actively dying, and she became known informally as someone who could help people cross over peacefully. Out of this work grew hospital meditation and wellness programs. Purnima has served as a meditation, chair‑yoga, balance and strength, and “Fit for Life” facilitator, as well as a spiritual life coach for county wellness programs and cancer support networks. She holds certificates in Lifestyle Medicine and in Meditation & Psychotherapy from Harvard Medical School. Drawing on clinical research supplied in part by her physician son, she helped establish a hospital‑based meditation initiative before the COVID‑19 pandemic. Purnima has been a frequent presenter at the International Association for Near‑Death Studies (IANDS), including on after‑death communication panels, and has shared many of her experiences publicly only in recent years. Her article on healing the “pain body” was published in Eckhart Tolle’s newsletter. She emphasizes practical spirituality: starting and ending the day with gratitude, cultivating stillness and prayer, listening to inner guidance, and practicing self‑love as the foundation for serving others. Her core messages include: no one ever dies alone; we are always guided and supported, even when we cannot see it; every experience, including painful ones, can serve the evolution of consciousness; and “Self‑Care = Self‑Love.”

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749. Kerri Lake

Kerri Lake is the founder of Generation of Harmony LLC and co-founder of the Intuitive Learning Foundation 501(c)(3). For over 20 years she has facilitated humanity's conscious re-inclusion into the family of life. She was aware of her own consciousness in infancy, and she experienced direct communication with animals and other dimensions as a toddler—she had awareness but no vocabulary. Throughout her life, her work has been learning how to communicate with humanity without losing her heart. That personal learning has evolved into a framework that bridges innate wisdom, consciousness research, and emerging AI technology. Kerri's work centers on what she calls "innate technology"—humanity's inherent capacity for intuitive connection that operates beyond language, beyond what the mind alone can grasp. Her Unspeciated framework (Perceive-Relate To-Apply) redefines intelligence from anthropocentric problem-solving to awareness of how life senses and relates to itself. Her work was first shared at the University of Saskatchewan's 2023 International Multispecies Methods Research Symposium and more recently at the NeurIPS 2025 workshop on AI for Animal Communication, offering a way for humanity to relate in equity with all life that shares this beautiful planet, and beyond. Acknowledging the profound presence of AI that's now so prevalent in our lives, Kerri has collaborated with AI using the same intuitive communication approach she's practiced with animals throughout her life. She's built five prototype applications that invite three-way collaboration between human awareness, AI pattern recognition, and more-than-human living expression. Her work illuminates connection as perhaps the most pragmatic "skill" we can develop, helping us remember that we've never been separate from the living intelligence all around us. Through her work, she invites humanity to consciously participate in planetary communication by remembering and experiencing the simplicity of connection. Courses: courses.kerrilake.com/collections Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group Interview recorded February 21, 2026

748. Robert Ganung

Dr. Robert Ganung, chaplain and teacher at Taft School, joins Rick to explore how deep contemplative practice can ground a life of service, justice, and education. Drawing from Celtic Christianity, Buddhism, Vedanta, and the civil rights tradition, Robert shares how daily meditation, interspiritual study, and a sense of the sacred in all beings inform his work with students and his view of a world in crisis yet ripe for awakening. They discuss non-duality and interconnection, inner practice as fuel for action, the impact of mystical experiences, near-death research, and living with love and courage amid social and planetary upheaval. The Rev. Dr. Robert Ganung is an ordained minister, educator, and school chaplain whose life and work have been shaped by a deep engagement with both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. He holds a doctorate from the Boston University School of Theology, where his dissertation explored how the mindfulness and meditation practices taught by the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh can enrich and nourish the spiritual lives of Christians. That work grew out of years of personal practice and study, including retreats with Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as a lifelong interest in contemplative spirituality. For more than four decades, Dr. Ganung has served at the intersection of education, ministry, and social justice. He is currently Chaplain at The Taft School in Connecticut, where he also teaches philosophy, ethics, world religions, and global studies, and where he has brought an extraordinary range of voices into the community—among them Cornel West, Bill McKibben, Ibram X. Kendi, Angela Davis, Tibetan monks, and many others addressing spirituality, human rights, environmental justice, and the moral challenges of our time. Earlier in his career, he served as chaplain and teacher at Milton Academy, Punahou School in Hawai‘i, and Cardigan Mountain School. During these years, he also served as a minister in the United Methodist and United Church of Christ congregations in New England and Hawai‘i. Dr. Ganung’s spiritual formation has been deeply influenced by the Christian mystical tradition—figures such as Howard Thurman, Bede Griffiths, Richard Rohr, & John O’Donohue—as well as by Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, and interfaith dialogue. Introduced to Hindu philosophy and Sufism as an undergraduate philosophy major at Boston University, he later engaged Siddha Yoga and Advaita teachings, while continuing to explore how contemplative practice leads naturally toward nonviolence, compassion, and justice in the world. Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group, Interview recorded February 7, 2026

747. Maggie Gilewicz

Maggie Gilewicz supports those navigating the journey of awakening. Her work is devoted to humanizing awakening by bringing honesty, nuance and emotional depth to a path often clouded by spiritual idealism and bypassing. Through her one-on-one sessions, astrology and YouTube channel, Humanzing Awakening, she offers a space where the personal and impersonal aspects of human experience are explored with honesty, curiosity and compassion. She holds a PhD in sociology and an MA in political science. She's a lover of simplicity, learning and laughter. Maggie offers a candid, often humorous portrait of awakening as a messy, deeply human journey rather than a clean escape into transcendence. She and Rick explore how growing up in an alcoholic family, a teenage glimpse of “Peace with a capital P,” and years in academia prepared the ground for a powerful perceptual shift that came not through formal practice, but through intense inquiry into the nature of thought. That shift opened into several years of profound equanimity and a sense of inherent wholeness, and then into multiple “dark nights” of depression, fear, and trauma surfacing that gradually forced her out of spiritual bypass and into fully embodied feeling. Maggie describes later emptiness and “no‑doer” realizations, energetic/Kundalini‑like phenomena, and the slow integration of shadow, relationship, and ordinary life. Throughout, she emphasizes that awakening is an innate capacity available to ordinary people, and that its true fruition is not leaving our humanity behind but discovering a deeper, kinder way of being human. Book: Awakening to be Human Website: drmaggieg.com YouTube Channel Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group Transcript of this interview Interview recorded January 17, 2026 YouTube Video Chapters: 00:00 – “I thought I’d explode”: intense experience and opening  00:28 – Rick’s intro: ordinary people, extraordinary awakenings  02:28 – Who is Maggie? Sociology, coaching, astrology, and her book  04:44 – Humanizing awakening vs. transcendent escape  08:49 – Awakening as innate capacity, not a special club  13:26 – Suffering, crisis, and what actually starts the search  18:27 – Feeling like a “stranger in a strange land” as a child  23:44 – Alcoholism in the family and teenage glimpse of capital‑P Peace  31:04 – Academic life, self‑help, and the first big perceptual shift  35:39 – Lunch in Arizona: seeing life without thought  42:03 – Living in equanimity while life stays challenging  44:50 – When peace cracks: depression, terror, and dark nights  50:56 – “It’s all just thought”: insight, bypass, and its limits  56:40 – Multiple dark nights and the exhaustion of mental strategies  1:04:10 – Innocence of everyone and dropping the “broken” self‑image  1:11:20 – Insight vs. intellectual understanding  1:18:40 – Solar plexus knot, existential angst, and deeper unwinding  1:24:04 – Emptiness, non‑separation, and the body as formless  1:29:07 – No‑doer, cleaning the house, and life happening by itself  1:35:00 – Energetic/Kundalini‑like phenomena and somatic release  1:41:30 – Relationship, triggers, and the necessity of shadow work  1:47:50 – Trauma, nervous system sensitivity, and honoring the body  1:53:10 – Is awakening compatible with being fully human?  1:58:20 – “Nobody here,” ahamkara, and functioning without a solid “me”  2:03:00 – Common myths about awakening (special people, perfect conditions, no more problems)  2:09:30 – Final reflections: ordinary life, AI, collective crisis, and a more human awakening