The Guru Is Life: Stuart Perrin On Rudi & A Shakti Mission

Stuart Perrin describes his transformation beginning at age 16, triggered by witnessing his father's profound serenity just before death from illness. This led him to seek inner peace beyond ordinary life, exploring spiritual traditions while rejecting superficial answers. After years of searching across continents, he met Rudi in a Greenwich Village gallery in New York around age 25. Rudi, a powerful American-born teacher who adapted ancient Eastern practices (drawing from Hinduism, Buddhism, and his own experiences) for Western life, taught him a specific meditation technique focused on building foundational energy in the lower chakras (especially below the navel, akin to dan tian/hara), using breath (double breathing), focused mind, and opening the heart to handle life's chaos, karma, and higher energies like shakti without burnout.

Transcript

Holness,

Welcome.

This is Josh of Interskilled,

And today I have Stuart Perrin with me.

Stuart,

What's going on today?

Well,

I'm right here with you.

That's really what's going on today,

Right now.

And thank you for having me.

Here with me virtually.

Oh yes,

You're welcome.

So who is this human being known as Stuart,

And what kind of work does he do?

Well,

I can only go into my past a little bit to describe how I got involved with this.

And it's really a very interesting story.

Look,

I was a kid,

I was 16 years old when I first really seriously got interested in spiritual practice.

And I was on vacation with my mother and my sister in Florida.

We lived in New York at the time,

And we got a phone call that my father was very sick in the hospital.

So we got on a plane,

We flew back to New York,

We went to the hospital.

And my father was lying in bed with 106 fever,

He was shaking,

He didn't recognize me or my mother,

My sister.

You know,

And this went on for about a week to a week and a half.

At one point,

I walked into his hospital room.

He was lying in bed in a state of total serenity,

Total serenity.

And I could look into his eyes,

I could see a thousand miles,

I mean,

It was so clear.

Never saw my father like that before.

The room was full of light and had an energy that I had never experienced before.

I took his hand and I said,

Do you know me?

And he said,

Yes,

Shook his head,

Yes.

Anyway,

I walked out into the hospital corridor and I bumped into his nurse.

And this woman,

God bless her,

She changed my life.

She said to me,

She said to me,

To her experience,

Just before people die,

They go into this state of having let go of everything.

Total serenity,

This inner peace,

This quiet.

She said she's seen it in so many cases of people dying in the hospital.

And it really shook me up.

I had never seen my father that serene.

And I said to myself,

Why did he have to wait 49 years to get that serenity two hours before he died?

And it completely changed my life.

I mean,

I was a kid,

I was a pretty good basketball player.

I was,

You know,

Pretty good at school.

I was maybe getting scholarships to college and I was going to go on and become a professional and,

You know,

Something of that nature.

And I just completely transformed.

I started reading books on Buddhism,

Hinduism,

Zen,

All kinds of mystical books.

I started hanging out in Greenwich Village with hippies and beatniks and,

You know,

The whole thing.

I was raised literally in the Southeast Bronx and the tenements of the Southeast Bronx.

And I started living that way.

My whole life changed.

And I said,

Stuart,

You have to find somebody who can teach you how to get that inner peace and that inner sense of,

You know,

Samadhi almost.

You know,

It's an inner sense of having connected with spirit before,

You know,

You're lying in bed and gonna die in two hours.

And I spent nine years of my life looking for this person.

And I traveled to Europe.

I went Africa.

I went half around the world.

And I was always on my way to India,

Where I figured I would meet some swami or some,

You know,

High-level guru that would teach me how to do this.

And I kept meeting teachers and rabbis and priests and wise men.

After listening to their conversations and listening to what they taught,

I said to them,

How do I get my mind to shut up?

How do I get my emotions to quiet down?

How do I overcome this intense sexual energy that I feel all the time?

And this chaos that's inside my—and I never got an answer from anybody.

I mean,

Well,

You know,

Love,

Peace,

And eat vegetables.

I go,

You know?

And I said,

Well,

You know,

Yeah,

But my mind doesn't shut up.

I've tried to love.

I've tried to live and eat vegetables.

My mind is still going crazy.

And I remember,

I was living in Paris at the time.

I was about 25 years old.

And I was broke.

And a friend of mine—I called a friend of mine.

I said,

You know,

Look,

Can you send me a plane ticket back to America?

I have to go back,

Get a job,

And begin to work again and get my life together a little bit.

And he sent me a ticket,

God bless him.

Went back to New York.

I was living on the floor of his apartment.

I had no money.

I had no job.

I was literally down to ground zero.

And he said to me one evening,

He says,

Let's go out and have some dinner.

So I said,

Yeah,

You know,

There's a restaurant in Greenwich Village we used to like.

And so we're walking down Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village,

And we come to this Oriental Asian antique store.

And looking in the window,

And there's Buddhas,

And Thangkas,

And Krishnas,

And Shivas,

And all kinds of museum—literally museum-quality art—I'm looking at in the window.

And my friend said,

You know,

You love this stuff.

And I did.

I remember once I walked into an exhibition of Tibetan Thangkas at a museum on Riverside Drive.

And I felt like I found my family when I walked in there.

Couldn't believe all these gods,

And,

You know,

Rinpoches,

And gurus.

And,

You know,

It was like walking into a family.

So he said to me,

Let's go in.

I said,

Charlie,

I'm broke.

What am I going to do in there?

He said,

I have no money.

This stuff is really expensive.

He said,

It doesn't cost to look.

And I'll never forget that it doesn't cost to look.

And I walked in the door of this gallery,

And standing in the center of the gallery was a man.

And I felt an energy coming out of him that was really like the energy I felt in my father's room.

It was this powerful but serene energy coming out.

You could literally see light coming out of this man.

And I was attracted to him like a magnet.

And he started showing me pictures of him studying in India with a guru.

And he started talking about what he taught.

And he said to me,

If you want to come study with me,

Come back here at five o'clock tomorrow.

As I walked out of this gallery,

I turned around,

And I saw this man.

And I said,

You know,

It was that same serenity I saw coming out of my father.

And I said to this friend of mine,

I said,

Charlie,

I got to go see this guy.

I don't know what happened in there,

But I have to go back tomorrow and see this man.

So we went out and had dinner.

This is a great story.

It should be in a book.

We went out and had dinner and came back to this tenement where this friend of mine was living.

And when we were walking up the stairs,

We met a guy named Ed Borden in the stairwell.

And Ed said to us,

Why don't you come into my apartment and have some tea?

So we said to him,

Great.

You know,

We went into his apartment.

And as I'm sitting here,

This guy had like a half a million dollar Oriental art collection in his railroad flat with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet.

And I said,

Where the hell did you get all this stuff?

And he said to me,

There's a guy in Greenwich Village named Rudy.

And you see the picture over my shoulder?

And he said to me who I got this stuff from.

And I said to myself,

Stuart,

The gods are talking to you.

Listen,

Once in your life,

Listen.

So the next day I went down and I at five o'clock,

I met him in his gallery.

And he showed me a meditation exercise,

Which was exactly what I was looking for.

He showed me a meditation exercise that enabled me after doing it,

Not the first time,

But after doing it for a while to transform all the chaos in myself into an open heart,

Into being grounded inside,

Quiet mind,

Being capable of activating Kundalini without Kundalini burning me up,

Having the strength inside to deal with the forces of life and karma,

Having the strength inside to absorb the Shakti,

The energy of a higher nature,

Having the strength inside to activate Kundalini.

And I had never experienced anything like it.

It was extraordinary.

I said,

You know,

See,

Look,

I was kind of raised in the streets of the Bronx.

And,

You know,

I was never one to get involved in monasteries and ashrams and places of that nature.

I needed to find out as a kid,

I knew this.

I needed to find out how to make life sacred.

My karma was something that brought me to the earth to learn not how to hide out from life,

But how to embrace life,

How to find the sacred nature of whatever life has to teach me to grow inside myself and to connect with a higher energy in the universe.

And doing the meditation that this man taught me enabled me to begin to do that.

I was able to live in a place like New York City,

Which is a pretty intense place,

And have a spiritual life.

I was enabled to transform family difficulties,

Friendship difficulties,

Economic difficulties into a teacher that said,

Stuart,

It's not the fault of the outside world.

You have to get stronger inside.

You have to build within yourself the capacity to stay connected with Shakti,

With higher energy,

And allowing that energy to nurture you and develop a chakra system that was strong enough to be able to deal with all of these external forces.

I began to realize the external world was just a reflection of my own inner chaos.

If I change inside myself,

My ability to deal with the external world is going to change.

And learning this meditation that I learned from this gentleman whose picture is up there,

It enabled me to do this.

It didn't happen in a week or a month or even a year.

It took time,

And I began to realize time was my friend.

Time was giving me an opportunity to learn something that was extraordinary.

And I think anybody's meditation practice will teach them how to do that if they give it time and they have the patience to be able to say,

Okay,

I have problems,

But life will present me opportunities to resolve those problems.

I have to learn how to do it.

And that's what happened to me.

And then,

Look,

I studied with Rudy for six years,

And he sent me to Texas to run a meditation center for him.

And I was down there,

And he invited me back.

He says,

Stewart,

Why don't you come up to New York?

He said,

I'm having a gathering of a lot of people who are close to me.

I would like you to come back.

So I said,

Okay.

I went up there,

And this is probably one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.

We were going to a place in upstate New York where he was invited to teach,

And we were in an airplane flying up there.

I'm not supposed to mention books,

But I wrote a story about this.

And we got into this fog where I could barely see.

We could see 10 feet in front of us.

And we wound up hitting a mountain in an airplane crash.

And I was knocked unconscious.

I had all the front teeth of my mouth knocked out.

It was a mess.

And when I awoke,

The pilot told me that Rudy had passed on.

My spiritual teacher died.

I got out of the plane.

I started giving him artificial respiration.

I was trying anything I could to revive him.

And I realized he had passed.

And my first thought was,

You know,

The moment we hit that mountain,

I was holding his hand.

And the reason I survived that plane crash is his soul force went inside me and gave me my life and told me that I had a mission to do in the world.

I no longer had a life.

I had to be a servant of higher energy in the universe.

And the first thing I thought when I realized it,

This man who had saved my life a number of times,

Both when I met him and in that plane crash,

He saved my life.

I said to him,

I just thanked him for allowing me to be with him the moment he took his samadhi.

I said,

This was one of the highest blessings I could have ever gotten in my life.

And I said,

Stuart,

Now you'll learn out,

Truly learn what you learned,

What the last six years were all about.

Can you continue to do what this man taught you?

Can you continue to be a servant for higher energy in the universe?

Can you continue to use this incredible training you got to be able to transmit shakti and help other human beings find their path to God?

Now,

I wasn't a complete character at that time,

You know,

Six years into it,

But it took a long time of me consistently practicing what I learned from him and overcoming almost impossible circumstances to do it.

And realizing that my only reason to have met this person was to have learned this and to use it,

Become a servant for the higher force of energy in the universe.

And that's what's happened in my life.

You know,

It's what I do today.

I've been doing it now for,

I don't know,

50 years.

I've been doing this for a very long time.

It's an incredible story and plenty to say here.

I just,

You know,

Maybe I'll just encapsulate it here and then we can go maybe one by one.

I want go into what do you think it was that that turning point seeing your father and then having this kind of aha or this epiphany,

How come it touched you so deeply?

Because other people maybe wouldn't have been as affected by that,

You know?

And we all have,

I think most of us at least,

Have some kind of pivotal moment or something that really cuts to the bone where it won't for other people.

That I find very interesting because that is like a turning point in your life,

Right?

And so I'm going to ask you about that.

But then I want to go into this man,

Rudy,

And I don't know as much about him.

I read a little bit of your background and I actually did.

And I'm sorry for the,

I don't know about apologizing,

But yeah,

It does seem a very profound incident here.

And I actually researched this a little bit,

So you'll have to forgive me because I just did it cursory with ChatGPT,

Right?

And we know it gets it wrong a lot and it's kind of the lazy man's research,

Right?

Please correct me if I'm wrong or fill in the gaps here.

But the New York Times was the only one that reported on this plane crash.

And that's the big boys,

Right?

I mean,

They're like,

That's the big guns.

And from what I found out that pilot,

He had this,

I don't know if he had ever,

He barely just got his license or something and they let him fly in the fog,

Which is really bizarre.

But what was more bizarre,

I thought,

Was that there was no real report or incident filing,

I think.

I couldn't find a,

They said there was no accident report filed or anything like this.

So to me,

I mean,

No offense or anything.

I would just,

It seemed a little bit suspicious,

You know,

These two accounts,

Especially.

And of course we have the third factor that was it,

It was you,

Rudy,

The pilot,

And one other person.

I don't remember exactly who that was.

They all survived except Rudy.

So,

And then you,

You were holding his hand when it hit the mountain.

So,

I mean,

Yeah,

We don't have to,

I mean,

If there's something here that would protect whatever,

We don't have to go into it.

But is there anything else you want to say about the incidences surrounding this very interesting incident?

I mean,

That's not the right word to use.

I hope I'm not being kind of offensive or brash or anything like this.

It's just very,

A mysterious incident,

You know,

And I'm all into the different spiritual aspects of it too.

And I want you to talk more about your guru because,

You know,

I don't know exactly how things work in Indian stuff,

But this is maybe not the typical one that's,

That's having like,

Basically an art gallery,

Right?

Now,

I mean,

We have,

You know,

Rinpoches in the Tibetan tradition that are in the midst of life and they,

They marry,

You know,

In Vajrayana,

They,

They fully embrace life,

Right?

And so that's where kind of the rubber hits the road.

And like you said,

You know,

The streetwise spirituality that some people find it really easy in monasteries,

But as soon as they get outside,

Then you just kind of fall apart.

So,

But then,

Then,

But then we also hear other challenges with spirituality in the daily lives,

Not that has anything to do with you and your path,

But we hear all kinds of different corruptions and things like sexual scandals and,

And whatnot.

So,

You know,

There's challenges,

Pros and cons to each of these things,

But he seems a very enigmatic figure and I don't know much about him.

So please fill in the gaps of maybe his background and some other maybe mysteries around him too.

So we've got those three things,

Your turning point,

The airplane crash,

If there's anything else to say,

And then your guru.

And then I want to get into the main thing that we both agree on is the actual spiritual practice.

And maybe you can even lead us in kind of in a guided meditation,

Or if you want to explain the particular meditation that you learned too,

I would,

I would love that.

So got plenty on your plate to give you there.

Well,

The first thing is,

Look,

My mother heard about this airplane crash.

She was listening to the radio and she was listening to the radio and the announcer,

The person that was the news,

There was an airplane crash up in the Catskill Mountains and three people survived.

One of them was Stuart Perrin.

My mother heard this on the radio and she completely freaked out.

And who lived in Denton,

Texas.

And that's where I was living at the time,

But I was in New York.

And that's how my mother found out about the airplane crash.

The pilot,

I won't mention names and another,

And a woman who was in the plane with us,

The three of us,

We spent an entire night on top of a mountain on February 21st,

You know,

Huddled around a fire.

And then when the dawn came,

I said to them,

We got to walk down.

I said,

Nobody knows about us.

You know,

We'll just die up here.

I said,

We got to walk down.

We spent six hours walking down this mountain.

The pilot and the woman both had broken ribs,

Broken arm.

All I had was,

I was in a state of shock,

But my teeth were knocked out and I was bleeding profusely.

And we walked down the mountain and I remember knocking at a door of a house.

The woman opened the door and looked at me and she almost fainted.

She said,

What happened to you?

And we told her,

You know,

20 minutes later,

There were ambulances and police and fire people and a whole drama,

You know?

And I mean,

That's part of the story.

Look,

To get into Rudy,

Rudy was,

I mean,

Look,

He was born in the slums of Brooklyn.

I was born in the slums of the Bronx.

He was raised in East New York in Brooklyn,

I think near Stuyvesant town,

You know,

That area when it was really not an easy place to live.

His mother was a single parent with two children.

She raised them both.

She was a tough New York lady and I knew her very well.

She was a very good friend of mine,

His mother.

And she raised these two kids.

And when Rudy was very young,

He used to have these extraordinary spiritual experiences.

He would have like Tibetan lamas would come and sit on his hands and they would start pouring shock.

He was like six,

Eight years old when this started happening to him,

Much younger than me.

I was 16,

You know?

And then he started,

As he got older,

He started doing Gurdjieff work.

And he began,

You know,

And he also used to go to India,

Had teachers in India.

And he did something really remarkable.

He took the tradition,

Thousands of years old,

The form of meditation that I teach,

It's got to be one of the earliest forms of meditation in the world.

And he applied it to living in the Western world.

He said,

I'm not living in India.

I'm not living in an ashram.

I'm living in the West.

How can I?

And he found a way to do it.

He taught a remarkable thing.

He said,

You know,

Look,

Where is the foundation inside a human being?

And what is this chakra system,

Which is connected to spirit?

And he showed me,

He said,

There are seven basic chakras.

There's one here,

There's one in the throat,

In the heart,

Right below the navel,

The sex,

The base of the spine and the top of the head.

He said,

Nothing in the chakra system is going to work unless you are grounded inside.

You have to build foundation inside yourself.

Foundation is not in the heart chakra and it's not in the mind.

Foundation is this area right below the navel in the core of your being that the Chinese call the Tatien,

The Japanese call the Hara.

And you develop a thing in yourself called Qi.

In order to develop this Qi,

You have to learn to use the mind,

Not as a thinking instrument because that'll just drain you dry,

But as a surgical instrument by focusing it in the chakra below the navel.

It opens that chakra.

It becomes like a surgical instrument.

It's the most powerful thing we have inside us,

The mind.

The energy of the mind becomes like a surgical instrument that opens the core of your being.

The next element,

He told me,

Is breath.

Breath is life.

Try not to breathe for five minutes and see what happens.

You don't have to eat for a month and you can live.

Try not to breathe for five minutes.

And as you inhale,

The capacity to use the breath,

You learn a particular breathing technique that he called the double breathing technique to develop the core of your being,

To develop the heart chakra,

To quiet the mind,

And to enable oneself to be connected to this higher force of unit.

You're not damming up the works inside yourself because there's all this emotional tension,

Mental tension,

Et cetera,

Et cetera.

And he was an amazing being.

And he used everything he learned about Hinduism and Buddhism to develop this form of meditation.

And as a kid,

I was 25 at the time,

I was looking for something like that.

There has to be a way to build a system inside without me having to run away and live in a monastery.

And he taught it to me.

And I'll tell you a great story about I had once with the Tibetan Rinpoche.

This is really an amazing story.

I was in India.

It was about 1977,

78.

And I was in Darjeeling.

And I met a bunch of Tibetan lamas,

A couple of them.

One of them was a very good tanka painter.

And I actually brought him to America because he painted tankas for me and stuff.

And I said to him,

Take me to every Rinpoche in town.

I want to get teachings.

So we went from monastery to monastery to monastery.

There were a lot of them.

There were a lot of Tibetan refugees living at that time in Darjeeling.

And I never connected with any of the Rinpoches.

I couldn't feel like I was getting real teachings from them until he took me to one monastery called Sanada.

And we went up to the monastery,

And there were about 300 monks sitting in the courtyard there with their,

You know,

Prayer wheels and yapa beads and Om Mani Padme Huming it and the whole thing.

One of them came up to us,

And he spoke English.

He said to me,

How can I help you?

I said,

We would like to see the Rinpoche.

Is it possible?

No,

It's not possible.

Rinpoche is very sick.

He's very sick.

He's not seeing anybody.

So I said to him,

Look,

Do me a favor.

We've come 9,

000 miles.

Go in and ask him.

Maybe he'll see us for 10 minutes.

Came back with a surprised look on his face,

And Rinpoche said he will see you.

So we went in,

And Rinpoche was lying in bed with a blanket up to his throat.

He was a very ascetic-looking guy,

But very pale,

And he looked like,

You know,

He's ready to die,

You know?

And gave him a silk scarf,

Which is,

You know,

The kind of greeting you do,

And we sat down.

I said,

Rinpoche,

Through a translator,

He didn't speak English.

Can you talk just a little bit to us about Tibetan Buddhism?

We've come a long way.

We want to learn something about it.

He spoke for about an hour about Tibetan Buddhism.

When he finished,

I said to him,

Rinpoche,

Can we come back tomorrow?

He said,

Yes,

Please.

Came back the next day,

Gave him the silk scarves and,

You know,

The whole term of greeting,

And Rinpoche was sitting on his bed in his robes,

And I asked him again,

Can you talk about Tibetan Buddhism?

Then he again went on for about an hour.

When he finished,

I said,

Rinpoche,

Can we come back again tomorrow?

He said,

Yes.

As we were leaving the monastery,

This student of mine who was with me said,

You know,

The kind of meditation we practice is very similar to a thing the Tibetans do called tummo,

Vase belly breathing,

And it's their form of yoga,

You know,

It's Tibetan yoga,

And it's part of the six disciplines of Naropa,

You know,

One of the disciplines.

I didn't know anything about any of this,

And he happened to read a book about it,

And he told me this.

I said,

Okay,

Now I have some ammunition.

Went back the next day.

As I'm sitting and breathing,

Rinpoche was dressed in full teaching ritalia and sitting on a throne chair.

This is a true story.

We sat down,

And I said,

Rinpoche,

Can you please talk about the six disciplines of Naropa,

Specifically the discipline of tummo?

Went on for three hours.

The translator turned to me in the middle of all this.

I've been in this monastery 13 years.

I have never heard these teachings.

Went on for three hours,

And it was extraordinary.

I got my entire Tibetan Buddhist education in three hours sitting at the foot of this Rinpoche.

Isn't that amazing?

I don't know much about Vajrayana and Tibetan Buddhism,

But I think tummo,

The inner fire,

That's more of a,

At least at the time,

Was more of a secret teaching,

Right?

I'm just guessing that because a foreigner came so far and was so interested,

And maybe he saw,

Again speculating,

Guessing that you would have more reach in the world.

No,

Please,

Yeah.

And then what happened?

Would you take it,

How do you explain his health recovery too?

Well,

I don't,

Let me,

I,

Look,

I asked him,

I was living in Texas at the time,

And I wanted to move back to New York.

And I said to him,

Rinpoche,

Do you think I should move back to New York?

What do you think?

And he told me,

You have to move back to New York.

If you move back to New York,

Your teachings,

And he didn't even know what I taught,

But he saw the level of meditation we were doing around him.

And this is what my teacher taught me.

The depth of this kundalini meditation we were doing around him drew this amazing teachings out of him.

And he said,

If you go back to New York,

Your teachings are going to be known all around the world.

And he didn't even know what I taught.

Anyway,

The topper for this story,

Okay,

I was in San Francisco,

You know,

I don't know,

Maybe five years later,

I was in San Francisco.

And I was already living in New York at the time.

And one of my students comes up to me and said,

You're not going to believe this.

You got to hear this.

So,

We went over,

And this guy was telling us a story how Kala Rinpoche,

I don't know if you know about Kala Rinpoche.

He was one of the— The name sounds familiar,

Yes.

He was like,

You know,

The Kamapa.

He was like,

On the level of the Dalai Lama,

The Kamapa.

He was dying.

And these two seekers came from the West,

And their need for a spiritual life was so strong that it brought him back to life again.

And he told me something,

Kala Rinpoche,

That I found extraordinary.

He said,

When he was a young tulku in Tibet,

He said,

When he needed an answer to his questions,

He would get on—there'd be a line,

You know,

A hundred monks would be lined up waiting to see the master.

He said,

Today,

I can't find anyone to teach.

There are 300 lamas sitting in the courtyard,

Om Mani Padme Hum,

With the prayer.

And nobody tapped.

And my teacher Rudy said,

A teacher is like a cow.

You know,

You got to milk the cow,

Or the cow is going to dry up and die.

And this is the story of what happened.

This is how he came back to life again.

This is how what happened.

And do I understand it?

No.

But it was the karma of the situation that allowed this to work.

And I learned from my teacher,

You got to milk the cow.

You got to go and say,

I am here for a spiritual life,

And I need teachings.

And then you have to know how to milk the cow.

You can't just demand.

You got to know how through your inner work,

How to embrace the shakti,

The energy,

What that teacher has to give.

And that's what happened with Kala Rinpoche.

Incredible.

Rightly placed questions,

Too,

Are very important.

And if you don't mind,

I'd like to milk a cow here a little bit.

I'll just give a little bit of a synchronicity,

Or maybe it's just a coincidence,

I like to say.

So then,

Because some people have ideas about synchronicity,

The other end of the spectrum is,

Oh,

That's just coincidence.

It's like coincidence.

So the guest I had before this,

She has been to Bhutan and is involved with the Bhutanese government there,

And the Global Peace Prayer Festival that happened,

Which was a huge gathering,

Vajrayana gathering from all over the world.

And then the other guest I had this morning was an Indian guru,

Too,

That does Kundalini stuff as well.

So there we go.

So but I want to ask,

Because my girlfriend,

I would say she's highly clairvoyant into very unique teachings.

So and I want to stay diplomatic here and not pick a horse in the race,

So to speak.

But I'm wondering about chakras,

Okay?

So I know they have an association with the gland.

But to me,

It seems like the chakra system is an overlay to those physical glands.

And now we're going to get far out here a little bit.

It's okay if you don't want to go there.

These interfaces,

These energetic,

Whatever we want to call them,

Overlays,

That while they can be of benefit to us to work with them,

And I don't directly work with them.

Sometimes I'll work directly with the glands.

But what about if they go the other way,

Where there's beings in the unseen that are using that to,

Using this interface to do different things,

Like some people say,

Insert certain types of syphon,

Certain types of energies.

And so I wonder how you feel about that.

Also,

The Kundalini snake,

I'm wondering why it's a snake,

Why it's at the bottom of the spine,

And why we want to have interface and awaken a snake.

And also could what's known as the higher self actually be some other type of being masquerading as,

I'm going weird here,

Right?

Masquerading actually as something it's not,

You know,

Pretending to be something it's not,

Appearing,

Pretending to appear and give something that,

But it's actually something other than it is in order to have power or either manipulate or get some kind of benefit through maybe some kind of deception.

Is that a possibility?

Have you heard anything like this before?

Have you investigated anything like this before?

I'll tell you what my take on it is.

Spiritual energy is not polarity.

It's not energy of contrast.

It's not energy of good and evil.

It's an energy of purity that emanates from the source of creative energy in the universe.

When it comes into people,

You understand a person with training,

A person who has rootedness inside,

Foundation inside,

Has developed that chakra,

A person who can live with their heart open where there's love,

There's joy.

I always say happy people are enlightened people,

But find a happy person.

You know,

It's like the Holy Grail.

I'm looking for the Holy Grail.

You know,

That the person whose mind is quiet,

That energy comes through in a pure state and it guides their life and they do positive things in the world.

If that energy comes into you and the mind is in this chaotic state where it's analyzing and figuring out and trying to pick and choose what's real and what's not,

The energy becomes that.

And our covenant with higher energy is to use inner work to build a system that allows it to flow through us and to guide us so that our actions,

Our karma becomes a reflection of that higher energy working in the world.

If you're full of thoughts of evil,

That's how the energy is going to manifest.

If you're full of thoughts of,

You know,

Relationships and jealousy and all that nonsense,

You know,

That kind of emotional craziness,

That's how the energy is going to manifest.

Our responsibility is to do the inner work that allows this energy to flow through us and comes out as compassion,

Comes out as love,

Comes out as happiness.

It comes out of joy at the center of a human being's heart.

It comes out of patience and forgiveness,

All these words that were taught from the earliest age and nobody listens to.

They don't listen to it because they're so full of conflicting and chaotic energy.

So the purity gets transformed,

Not by some higher force,

But by human beings.

We create hell because we don't work on ourselves to fix the problems inside and allow that energy to flow in a deep and real way.

And then that nurtures other people.

We have patience with people that have problems.

We have patience with people that do strange things to us.

And it comes back to me,

What are they teaching me about me?

Why did I attract these people?

They are teaching me something important about myself.

So when the world becomes,

When life itself becomes your teacher,

It's a whole different way of approach.

And you got to be really strong inside because emotions and mental energy and intellect,

It's all such powerful energy that it controls and consumes the lives of people.

And when the spirit comes in,

You know,

It's pure.

And we transform it into insanity.

We turn it into wars.

We turn it into genocide.

We turn it into all this madness that goes on.

Because that's what exists inside people.

And I always say,

All this madness is never going to stop until people fix themselves.

Everybody's fixing the world.

They're fixing the objective world.

They're trying to fix illusion.

It's all an illusion.

If they would fix themselves,

Then the external world would get fixed.

So I think I hope that answers your question,

You know?

Well,

It just,

Yeah,

We're not going to be able to address it on the level that I put it to.

But on the level that you presented it,

Yeah,

I absolutely agree.

You know,

The Buddha,

He taught with generosity,

Right?

That was the first thing he would teach anyone.

Because we have,

We get happiness when we're considering giving,

While we're giving,

And then after we're giving,

You know?

So it's a three-way.

And it goes against the stream of the world.

Like,

What can I get for me?

How can I get this?

You know,

How can I take advantage of someone else to get?

So it flips that around,

And it conditions the heart and mind for kind of more spiritual work.

And then the next stage usually is ethics,

You know,

Non-harming,

And the five precepts and Buddhism.

And these are not like a commandment,

Right?

These are for our own well-being and those around us.

And it took me meditation to be able to see how foundationally important just this ethical training is.

And it's a training,

Too,

Because it's not perfect.

And we learn,

Like you're saying,

Everything in life is teaching us,

Right?

We can learn from it.

So everything that happens is an opportunity for practicing these basic precepts and rolling it into our spiritual practice.

And then,

You know,

Meditation and wisdom are kind of the other aspects.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

Yeah,

I couldn't agree more with that.

And that's why I kind of gave up on any kind of political things or external solutions.

It's great.

We do what we can.

But at the end of the day,

How am I going to be able to meet the external with the same kind of level of consciousness and mind and heart?

I have to go within and transform and kind of rise above and go deeper and expand and have different perspective and training internally.

And then that will meet everything.

So you understand all of this.

I'm kind of preaching to the choir.

I was curious,

Though,

But usually I don't know much about Kundalini.

That's what I'm trying to learn a little bit.

I don't practice this.

But I was always told that it arises from the base of the spine.

It comes up.

And you mentioned earlier this,

You know,

What they call a if it's not ready,

If it prematurely awakens,

And it's like a Kundalini syndrome.

I think some people have called it when they're not ready and it happens to prematurely or some people do certain practices to get it artificially to come up.

So how do you I understand the kind of the descending higher energies coming down.

But what about the lower energies?

What we're told about Kundalini coming up?

What is there to say about that?

Well,

It comes back to a simple answer,

A simple answer.

You need to be grounded inside.

Look,

People raise Kundalini with LSD.

They raise it with marijuana,

With hallucinogens,

And they burn out their system.

Then everybody says Kundalini is dangerous.

It's not dangerous.

It's the people that are using it in an unconscious way.

They're awakening it.

They're not ready.

They haven't spent the time developing the strength inside that can truly activate Kundalini in a healthy way.

They're activating it in a dangerous way.

Look,

I have only one rule in what I teach.

No drugs.

No drugs.

It's the only rule I have.

Somebody wants to do LSD,

I wish them the best and go live your life.

I'm not interested in having you as a student.

I can't compete because LSD works in the same areas as Kundalini meditation,

Except you don't have grounding inside.

You don't have that chi,

That power in the third chakra.

I once wrote somewhere,

If a tree has healthy roots,

A hurricane can't blow it down.

If a human being has healthy roots and a strong inner foundation,

Karma is not gonna blow them down,

Not gonna knock them over.

They will have the capacity to activate Kundalini and allow Kundalini to be,

It's really the pathway to enlightenment.

The energy rises up the spine to the crown chakra.

They call this the sahasra.

Then there's like a thousand-petal lotus that opens up,

And the soul of a human being connects with the soul of the universe.

It's the pathway to enlightenment.

But that pathway is very powerful.

And if we don't get rooted and grounded and build the chakra system,

If we don't have an open heart and living in the world and truly working out our karma,

How do you work out your karma?

You become a happy person.

That's how you work out your karma.

It's not very complicated,

You know,

By the heart being open and being able to interact with the world that way.

And the mind is quiet and you're grounded.

And Kundalini,

The naga,

The serpent at the base of the spine,

Awakens.

And it is a voyage to the crown where it germinates.

Then the crown chakra opens.

And,

You know,

Look,

I used to teach in Kathmandu.

I used to have an ashram in Kathmandu,

Actually,

Many years ago in the early 90s.

And one of the places we used to go and have meditation was at Pashuparinath,

Which is a really incredibly powerful,

You know,

Temple there.

And one of the things that used to strike me is that they had,

I don't know,

30,

25 statues there of Anandi,

The bull,

With a lingam and a yoni,

And naga,

A serpent.

And these were done in the 6th century,

For God's sake.

They understood the power of sexual energy when they made those sculptures.

They understood that when energy moves from the third chakra through the sex,

They understood that there's a marriage of masculine and feminine,

The marriage of the yin and the yang,

Shiva-Shakti,

You know,

The gods and their consorts,

You know,

You see in paintings,

Sculptures.

There's a marriage that marriage gives birth to kundalini.

So,

You need to have a healthy flow of sexual energy moving through that chakra where the unification of male-female takes place.

That marriage will give birth to kundalini,

Kundalini rises,

And a person,

You know,

It's the pathway to spiritual enlightenment.

And in the 6th century,

They understood this when they made these sculptures,

You know,

It's extraordinary.

And today,

It's all terribly complicated,

You know?

Well,

You know,

It's,

And I don't know enough about the history,

But help me out here if I'm right,

That recent,

I mean,

It wasn't until recently that a lot of these things become more public.

I mean,

Weren't a lot of these,

Because they were considered potentially abusable or potentially very powerful and maybe dangerous,

That they were kind of kept for initiation,

And you had to either had to be initiated or be under a guru or a system or order or something like this.

And I don't know why,

If I'm right,

Why it comes out more publicly.

And I'm not against that because we,

You know,

It could potentially benefit.

And I think maybe we are ready.

And I couldn't agree more with you with the drugs.

And unfortunately,

I know that from personal experience,

How really unhelpful and in Buddhism,

It's no intoxicants,

Right?

Especially ones that dull the mind.

And I won't even have a lot of,

I have to really vet guests that are into,

You know,

Into psychedelics,

Because to me,

It's not needed.

The states that can be entered,

Just the states,

And we want to go beyond states anyway,

But just the states that are available in sober types of meditation go well beyond anything that's possible with drugs anyway,

You know?

And you would,

I mean,

You could probably even kind of recreate a type of,

In meditation,

But you really wouldn't want too much because so much more and so much better and cleaner and higher is available.

So,

You know,

It's just common sense to us.

It gives you strength.

It gives you energy.

It gives you vast creative capacity to live your life.

It enables you to deal with all of the kinds of tensions and negativities in the world without allowing them to throw you off balance.

But I want to get back to something.

I 100% agree with this whole thing.

You need a teacher.

If you mess around with kundalini,

You're going to wind up in a sanitarium.

You need somebody to train you in how to develop a system inside that is strong enough to activate kundalini.

But if you start messing around with it,

Playing around with it,

Using drugs or whatever,

And you don't have somebody to guide you and help you build a really strong chakra system inside,

Forget about it.

You're going to wind up in a sanitarium.

And I think it's very dangerous.

I agree.

It's very dangerous.

I agree too.

I did kundalini yoga one time and I just felt how powerful it was.

And I didn't want to commit to that path because I knew that's just something I couldn't do on my own.

You know,

And it would have to be a serious commitment with a teacher and a whole system like that.

So yeah,

I can echo that as well.

Yeah.

I learned from Rudy.

He trained me in how to develop a system.

So it not only gave me the capacity to activate kundalini,

It gave me the capacity to live in the world,

Be successful in the world,

Deal with all of the problems that the world has to offer.

And at the same time,

Not be,

You know,

Trapped by it,

Not be imprisoned by it,

How to be free of it,

How to use it as a teacher,

Not only activates kundalini,

It really teaches one why we are born here,

What we have to learn,

What we've come to the earth to learn and how to embrace life instead of turning life into an enemy.

And I think to me,

This was equally as valuable as activating the kundalini because I wasn't born in the cosmos.

I wasn't born on some cosmic range with the Akashic record and all that stuff that goes on up there.

I was born on the earth.

Why the hell did I come here?

With all the suffering,

The pain,

The difficulty,

The wars,

All the stuff that goes on here,

Having to make money.

When I was a kid,

I couldn't stand the idea of making money.

I used to like to write and,

You know,

I wrote poetry and I wanted to be a writer,

You know,

And I'll never forget,

This is a great story,

Okay?

I was in Texas running an ashram for my teacher,

Rudy,

And I was working probably 19 hours a day.

I was teaching two classes.

I was teaching in universities and prisons and hospitals.

I had 25 people living in this house that I had to deal with.

I was running a business on top of it.

And one day,

You know,

One of the things I always had problems with as a young man was money and success in business.

I never wanted to be in business.

I always thought it was a nightmare.

I didn't have to do that.

So one day Rudy was there and,

You know,

We went to the prisons and all the places and the ashrams I had started for him down there and all that stuff.

And we're standing on the porch of my house and he tells me,

Stuart,

You're not working hard enough.

So I looked at him and I started to laugh.

I said,

Rudy,

What should I do?

He said,

Buy that building.

I said,

Buy that building?

He said,

Rudy,

I have $600 in the bank.

Anybody can do it with money,

He told me,

Anybody.

And the building was a shopping center,

Like a strip mall that was right next to where the house was for the ashram.

You know,

And that one little thing he did,

He taught me how to stop being afraid of money,

Success,

Life,

How to do it,

Transform it into energy that gives life.

A month later,

I bought that building.

Ask me how I did it,

I don't even know.

It just worked.

I went up to a higher source,

I got the energy,

Came down,

It manifested.

And a month later,

I was signing a contract to buy this shopping center.

And you know what it did for me?

It overcame my fear of success,

Of money.

And he looked at me and he said,

You need to overcome this.

But he didn't just say it in words,

Buy that building.

You know?

And it was amazing.

So there's not just Kundalini,

There's karma,

There's living in the world.

I mean,

I used to have a student who did meditation,

I don't know,

Some form of meditation,

And she would do it three,

Four hours a day.

And she said,

But why is it when I walk out on the street,

I just freak out?

This is what she,

I have to go running back to the meditation.

And I said to her,

Look,

You know,

Life is sacred.

You have to get,

You're working,

You're meditating on the brain and the mind and heart,

You got to learn how to get grounded inside so you can recognize the sacred nature of what life is teaching you.

And life is teaching you that you got to get stronger to be able to recognize you were born here.

And you can't be afraid of the place where you were born.

And you got to be able to deal with it and learn how to do it quietly and consciously with love,

With,

You know,

Caring,

With,

You know,

That by that building,

I'll never forget.

Tanner Iskra That's great.

Yeah.

It was right.

You have $100 million in the bank.

What's the big deal?

You know,

All it is,

Is greed.

You said you have to learn how to get free of something you've been afraid of all your life.

And I did,

I got free of it.

It's a great story,

Stuart.

And I think maybe some of the younger generations,

And especially a lot of people on the spiritual path,

You know,

These are big topics.

Fear,

You know,

Integrating meditation practice into daily life.

A lot of people that are meditators and spiritual things have a very kind of,

Maybe an inferiority,

Not complex,

But conceit,

Right?

We usually think of conceit as superiority,

But that's another one.

Timidness,

Resilience,

You know,

That you talk about this inner strength and fortitude is so important.

Courage,

Courage to face challenges.

So these are all really great classical spiritual topics,

Especially for some of us that are drawn to paths like this.

And these younger generations,

I guess,

It seems like there's plenty still up against these classic lessons as well.

And yeah,

It needs to be practical as well,

Right?

I mean,

The Buddha was a pragmatist,

You know,

He was also an idealist,

But it had to be realistic and it worked.

And he taught to everybody exactly where they were,

You know,

And he addressed them where they were.

And he taught all people from farmers to just regular folks,

All the way to kings and even devas.

So yeah,

It's really the full spectrum human is like the term I like to use.

I agree.

Life is sacred,

All dimensions of it.

And I mean,

Look,

Just before I left for Texas to run this ashram for Rudy,

He took me aside and he said to me,

Stuart,

If anyone ever asks you who the guru is,

You tell them the guru is life.

And I realized,

Stuart,

You are not the guru.

Your job is to help people get strong enough to where they can sit in front of the real guru is life,

Which is life.

And I found that such an amazing,

It took me 20 years to truly learn this.

I didn't learn this when he said it to me,

But 20 years,

It lingered inside me and I had to build a system strong enough to learn this very simple thing.

And then he said another thing to me,

I'll never forget,

That got etched in my consciousness.

We were sitting at a satsang,

Rudy was sitting right behind me in a satsang with an Indian Swami,

And I won't mention any names,

And he was talking about guru is God,

The guru is God.

If you worship the guru,

You will get your spiritual enlightenment.

Rudy was sitting right behind me.

He whispered in my ear,

God is God.

The best the guru can be is the servant of God and the servant of his students.

The humility went so deep inside me,

The profundity of him saying,

This is a powerful man.

He was really a powerful man,

Probably one of the most powerful people I ever met.

And the humility was so profound that it changed something.

It made me realize,

Stuart,

You know,

You know,

Not the guru.

You're just here as a servant.

That's the best you can do in this world.

And you help people build systems in themselves where they can have their own independent connection with God.

They're not going to become a bunch of Stuarts or a bunch of Rudys running around.

They have their own independent and unique connection,

And the energy will flow through them differently than it will flow through me,

Because they are a unique human being.

So,

You know,

I learned all this from—it took years to learn all these things.

But,

You know,

To what you were talking about before,

You have to be ready to hear them.

If you're not ready to hear them,

It's like water flowing past a rock.

You've got to be ready.

And if you're open inside,

Then you hear things.

It's like the day I met Rudy,

I had walked past his shop,

His gallery,

At least 500 times.

At least.

You know,

On my trips to Greenwich Village from where I was living,

I would always walk past that shop.

I looked in the window.

You know,

I had a friend of mine,

A close friend of mine,

A young kid when I was younger.

He also had a very deep and profound need for a spiritual life.

And he told me there's a guy in Greenwich Village named Rudy.

You know,

And he told me where his shop was.

You know,

He said he's supposed to be an extraordinary teacher.

I mean,

I heard this.

And this friend of mine—I won't get into it.

He wound up dying in a fire.

He used to do drugs.

You know,

He used to do like DMT and really powerful drugs.

Then he died.

He was 20 years old or something.

He died in a fire.

Anyway,

He told me about Rudy.

I knew about Rudy,

But I wasn't ready.

And when Charlie said to me,

There was something in me that was ready to meet this person.

You have to be smart enough to say,

Stewart,

This is not an accident.

There are no accidents in the world.

It's just a guidepost that will help you to evolve and grow in your life.

And that's why I went back to meet him again.

I said,

It's not an accident,

Having met this person.

Absolutely.

It reminds me of the old saying that when the student is ready,

The master appears.

But then when the student is really ready,

The master leaves or disappears,

You know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway,

It's been a great interview.

I appreciate that,

Stewart.

Yeah,

And this matter of life and death,

You know,

That's faced with life.

And I would just—reminds me also of that famous Ram Dass quote,

If you think you have any kind of spiritual advancement,

Just go spend time with your family.

Life,

If you've been thinking—let's just say,

If I think I've been gliding through life and,

You know,

Got this mastered,

Have some degree of wisdom,

I just spent,

You know,

A couple months living with my folks again.

And wow,

Let me tell you,

It's nothing more humbling than that and putting me in my place.

Let's just say that for sure.

So,

Yeah,

Life smacked me upside the head again there.

And grateful for it now.

Yeah.

Family is grateful.

And they really told me once that I couldn't pay a therapist $200 an hour to point out what's wrong with me that my mother can do in five seconds.

Exactly.

Oh,

My God.

That's so,

So great and so true.

You know,

It is really incredible,

Isn't it?

His mother,

He loved her.

He did so much.

He went out to do so much for her,

That woman,

You know.

But he told me that in five seconds she'll tell me exactly what's wrong.

It's so true.

Okay.

All right,

Stewart,

This has been really fun.

And I just implore the world that we need more wise elders like yourself,

You know.

It's really a treat and a joy to meet wise elders on the path.

And I consider myself fortunate to be able to meet folks like you and teachers and,

I guess,

Lineage holders,

Too,

Like you.

With that,

May all beings everywhere realize awakening and be free.

Bye now.

Bye.

Thank you.

God bless you.