Philip Weber on the Conscious Fertility Podcast

Welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast. I’m joined today by Philip Weber, author of Grace Happens and Reflections of Consciousness. Now, Philip experienced a spontaneous awakening he calls “The Kiss,” which dismantled his sense of a separate self and opened him up to a life guided by Grace. His journey rooted in both mystical insight and real-world service, including hospice work, reminds us that true awakening often requires an inner death. The letting go of who we think we are. His voice is both raw and refined, offering a grounded path to remembering what we already are. Philip, thank you for joining me here on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Well, thank you for inviting me. I really look forward to our chat today.

Alright, I’ve got to set up why we’re chatting today and the intention behind this. My listeners know, and we talked off camera… I’m curious. And today we’re kind of talking about a topic, and the words are used interchangeably – Self-Realization, Awakening, Consciousness, Enlightenment. And in the world today, so many people are struggling and suffering, and we’ve had so many conversations on our podcast that life seems to be inner work. You’re not going to find that peace, that sustainable peace or joy, outside of you. There are not enough cars, not enough relationships, not enough money to fill that void. And I know the title of the podcast is called Conscious Fertility Podcast. And if there’s a group of people that I see in my practice that are suffering, struggling, they often say that an infertility diagnosis is similar to a terminal illness diagnosis, the amount of stress. So I wanted to have you on here because I think there’s a paradigm shift. I think individuals have been having their awakenings and I think collectively there’s awakening. And I wanted to talk to what I would call an ordinary guy. And I don’t want to insult you, but you don’t seem to have a big temple named after you. You don’t have a big following where people are coming and bowing at your feet.

Let’s hope not!

 And so that’s why I want to have this conversation with you. So thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

I would love for you to define and discuss these terms that we’re discussing here – Enlightenment, Self-Realization. And I’d love for you to share your story and how has it changed, before Phil and after Phil with this Kiss of Grace.

There are a lot of misconceptions and a lot of baggage that comes with the “Enlightenment” word, so I usually don’t use that one. “Awakening,” I think, is more descriptive. In the books that I wrote and in all the spiritual literature throughout time, there’s a ton of detail out there, but I try to keep it pretty simple. What I would tell people is that Self-Realization is simply a shift in perception. And that shift in perception is from separation consciousness to unity consciousness. So what does that mean? Well, in classical Hindu texts, there are only two ways of seeing things: vidya and avidya. So, either it’s the Clear Seeing of Direct Perception or it is the illusory subject-object awareness that most of us have lived in and still do. It’s a turning within. And when there’s a sufficient ripeness, the subject-object dissolves.

Or another way to put it maybe is the subject-object perception collapses. And for me personally, I wrote about how the outside suddenly became my inside. When that happens, to borrow from Christian mysticism, there’s a “cloud of unknowing.” In the unknowing, the universe presents itself in every moment and then knowing happens. So, it’s almost a non-experience, because we’re going from “I am experiencing something” to there is no “I” or “thing.” There’s just one Happening.

It’s a very different thing and you can’t miss it when it’s happened, at least the way it happened for me, because it was a very sudden shift. That said, I think everybody has these moments throughout their lives, particularly people who are on a spiritual path, but they may miss them or they may say, “Well, that was…” and then the mind rationalizes it away and they miss the moment.

But there are moments of… you hear people call them “timeless moments” where thought is suspended and you’re just there. Ram Dass said it the best: awakening is simply Being Here Now. It sounds really simple and it is very simple, but it turns out, at least in my case, it wasn’t that easy to do. But it is our True Nature. It is always there. And so I really stress this, and a couple of things: 1. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. In my high school yearbook, I would’ve been the least likely person there to have been Awakened. It was not something that ever crossed my mind. And 2. It’s not something that we attain. It’s impossible to achieve Awakening because we already are it. So it’s a remembrance, it’s a capital R remembrance, or it’s a realization, a capital R realization.

That’s the cosmic joke. There are a lot of tales of Awakening where people have their satori, and they break into laughing. And I did too, crying as well as it turned out for me. But due to our ignorance, what we already are is what we’re trying to attain, and what was never there to begin with we think is holding us back. And when the curtain comes down and you see through that dissociative boundary, would be one way to put it, then you see that you always were what you were seeking. I would say it’s an experience, but it’s not even really an experience, it’s just, again, a shift in perception between separation and unity consciousness.

So let’s talk about both of those points that you made. The first one being you never thought you’d be in your yearbook as most likely to be Self-Realized. So who were you before? How did you perceive the world? How did you live in this world? How did you experience the world? How did you work in this world before your realization? Just so we can let people know that you didn’t have to be born like the next Dalai Lama. You weren’t chosen, you had this Awakening, what you call The Kiss.

Early on, I think the best way of describing myself was a fun-loving idiot. But eventually I got lucky. Not that there’s really anything called luck, but it’s just a term that’s convenient. I got lucky and I ended up working in a hotel and I was 23 and I just loved it and I was good at it. And within a very short amount of time, I rose into management. And then it became a career. During those years, I was very focused on what most people were focused on, which is making more money, trying to get a house, trying to get a decent car, trying to find Miss Right, a certain level of status and respect and all these things. I latched onto all these things and suddenly it’s who I am.

And around my mid-thirties, I wasn’t aware of it and I couldn’t have articulated it, but there was a growing inner dissatisfaction with everything. Suddenly I had a beautiful place to live and a great convertible Beemer, and everything was going pretty well. But inwardly, there was something that was just gnawing at me that kept getting worse and worse. And it was just at that point an unconscious feeling that all these outward things were never going to bring me the happiness that I wanted. And I kind of bottomed out. I didn’t have any serious issues like addiction, and things were going pretty well outwardly, but inwardly, I kind of hit rock bottom.

One day I was sitting at home on the couch watching TV, but I really wasn’t watching it. I was just channel surfing and everything was pretty inane. And it lasted about 30 seconds and I’d hit the remote and the next channel would come up. I was world weary, I think is one term that you hear sometimes. And suddenly this guy is on the screen, a bald guy in a sweater. But he mentioned somebody that in my early years… even though I was a fun-loving idiot, I had an interest in philosophy and metaphysics to some degree, and I really liked a guy named Alan Watts, who was a great disseminator of Buddhism and Zen in particular. And he was kind of an irreverent guy and he kind of fit my personality a little bit. So all of a sudden, this bald guy says, “the wake of the boat doesn’t determine its course.” And he said, “I’m quoting Alan Watts on that.” And as soon as he said that, it was like a light bulb went on and I was just transfixed. And I watched the rest of his lecture and the bald guy turned out to be somebody, of course, everybody knows now, but I didn’t know then: Wayne Dyer.

Okay. Yeah.

 And so the next day I went out and I bought a couple books from Wayne, one of them was Wisdom of the Ages. He wrote a bunch of essays in this book and I bought that and everything shifted. And that was really the first Shift. So I went from a materialistic direction to a spiritual one. I guess I had to go through all this stuff to realize that this wasn’t going to do it. And then I was ripe and I was ready for the shift to happen. And within a couple months I knew there was something else, something deeper that I needed. I didn’t know what it was. I went to the Barnes and Noble near where I lived, and I walked down the metaphysical book aisle, which of course was huge, and I didn’t know what I was looking for, but there was kind of a magnetic pull and I just kept walking down and looking around and picked up a couple things, and that’s not it.

And suddenly on the spine of one book, there was an Indian man who looked like a yogi. And Lorne, if I hadn’t picked that book up, I think it might’ve just flown off the shelf and hit me between the eyes because there was a real, all I can say was just a strong magnetic pull. And I pulled it down and it was the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. And that was it. And I knew it was it. I bought the book, and I think halfway through the book, I signed up for the SRF Lessons, the Self-Realization Fellowship Lessons. And that was my path. And it found me miraculously just when I needed it and it was perfect for me.

And then from there followed an 18-year path of meditation and spiritual practices and studying. I’m very ecumenical by heart, so I studied all types of teachings and I still do. I love them. And about 18 years in, I ended up in a job that was like the worst job I’d ever had. And that’s saying something. And suddenly my health started to go, everything started falling apart. I was on disability, I was maybe having to look at heart surgery or whatever. There was blocked stuff in there. And I was sliding into depression. I wasn’t clinically diagnosed, but looking back on it, I was in pretty bad shape. Fortunately, I had the help of a couple good friends, and one of them said, “You better get off your pity party butt or you’re going to have some problems.” And I really thought that this might be my last year. I felt an impending death coming, and I took it to be physical. So I thought, if this is going to be my last year, I’m going to go down swinging.

And so I got my act together and I had been talking about downsizing for years. And now that I wasn’t working, when the lease ran out on my house, I gave away pretty much everything I owned. I was working with the homeless shelter, so they had facilities that people could stay in. And so my furniture went to that, and I just kept a very little bit in storage. And I went out to the Hidden Valley Ashram, which was an SRF facility that I had actually been the Operations Manager of a couple years prior. I knew the Abbott of the monastery, but it’s also a place where guys could go for extended work visits and they could have an ashram life and a meditation in the morning and at night. And you work on the farm during the day. And I ran the thing for a couple of years. And so I went back there feeling the best that I’d ever felt in my life. I felt free. I felt ready to face the unknown. And of course, that’s when it happened.

Two weeks later, I had lunch, went back to my room, I was listening to a James Finley talk, a guy I really, really love. He’s just a dear man. I was listening to a talk on Meister Eckhart and I had my computer open. I was playing a little spider solitaire, and all of a sudden, the beauty of Eckhart’s words through James’ voice hit me in a way that nothing ever had. And I started tearing up and I just kind of sat back and said, “It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful.” And within about 20 minutes, there was this Descent of Grace, which is why the book is called Grace Happens: An Awakening of Consciousness. And that descent, I was ripe enough, it was nothing I did, but I was ripe enough. And the curtain came down. It was a pretty wild ride for the next nine months because there was a lot to assimilate and acclimate to. But that was what I called it, “The Kiss,” because it really felt like a kiss from the Divine.

And so in that moment you shared, people have all had these moments, they’ve had glimpses of this and they dismiss it or whatever way they excuse it away. But it just continued for you, it was intense. It was one of those glimpses, but it wasn’t just a glimpse for you.

Yes, the glimpses I think give us little openings. During my spiritual 18 years of sadhana, I remember I had a crown chakra opening that lasted for a few hours and I was in that state, even though it’s not a state, I was in that thoughtless, timeless being-here-now kind of thing. And it lasted a couple hours. And then maybe a year later I was at the Meher Baba Center, and I was meditating in his bedroom there where people do on Sunday mornings. I felt some raps right here at the top of my head, three of them. And I was just gone for most of the day. Gone meaning out of separation consciousness and in unity. And then about a year later I was meditating with some SRF friends up in the North Carolina mountains.

Can we define SRF? It’s Self-Realization Fellowship? Just because people aren’t going to be as familiar with that.

Yep. It’s a Los Angeles based international religious order.

That had a big impact on your preparing for this awakening, to remember the truth of who you are.

It did. Yogananda was my Guru and still is. The relationship’s changed now that the Awakening has happened. But yes, Yogananda I’d had connections with. And so the next big shift came and lasted all weekend. And then it was a very gradual thing over time, but I noticed that the amount of thought was being reduced in my head. I know Ramana Maharshi said that one of the great benchmarks of spiritual evolvement is the reduction of thought. It’s not the only one certainly, but it is one of them. For me it was. So these momentary lapses of lucidity I think were preparing me for the ultimate shift when it happened with The Kiss.

That’s a metaphor. You weren’t kissed because you did talk about you being that fun-loving idiot. So the Kiss of Grace, we’re talking about.

The Kiss of Grace. It’s not anything that I would take credit for. It happens when you’re ready, but it always happens eventually. We can’t screw it up. We’re always playing with the house’s money.

Can I unpack that a bit with you?

Sure.

And just like you don’t take credit for it as well, it’s going to happen, meaning you’re going to die and leave this body? Is that what you mean? It’s going to happen regardless if you don’t figure it out or it doesn’t happen to you in this physical body when this body retires, you experience that remembrance, is that what you mean? It’s going to happen anyhow?

Well, I do think a greater remembrance happens when we drop our bodies. It’s been said, and I think it’s true, that awakening happens through form, not in spite of it. So that’s actually why we incarnate, it’s to develop. This is a perfect contextual field for our evolution. And we’re always in the perfect contextual field even though it may not seem like it at the time. So, we actually Awaken in the body. That’s why people keep taking bodies. So the theory goes that we are working out our stuff, we’re shedding karma and we’re evolving as a soul. And in doing that, since we are an inseparable part of the divine, the Divine is Knowing Itself through us eventually. So when I say we eventually awaken, what I’m saying is we’re already awake, but we just haven’t realized it yet. And that’s the key.

Yeah. So let me put it that way then. The remembering will happen either while you have a body, now you get to play in this virtual reality we call life on earth. Or if you didn’t, you were the old Phil and you were still miserable on the inside, you get a second BMW, you get another relationship, but you’re suffering on the inside. Eventually that heart kicks out on you. Then you would be like, oh, you remember the truth of who you are. Is that what you mean by eventually it will happen because when you die, if it hasn’t happened by then, that’s when it will happen?

No. Again, I think after death there is a greater understanding of our nature. But actual Realization, Self-Realization, only happens as far as I know – and I don’t believe in absolutes, so there are probably exceptions to everything – when we are in physical form.

I’m just curious. You’re not suggesting, oh, go ahead and continue abusing your children and drink alcohol, and Grace is going to happen. It seems like there has to be some preparation.

 Yes, that’s a great point. It’s a paradox. Adyashanti has a great term. He says it’s becoming “Grace prone.” All this work that we’re doing makes us more prone to the opening of Grace. But ultimately, if Grace is Grace, then we can’t control it. So we do our best. And I think the more we do, the more likely it is for Grace to appear. But it’s still going to happen when it happens, and it’s always going to happen. In Buddhism, in particular, there’s a term called “Enlightened Intent.” And the Enlightened Intent in the universe is that it discovers its true nature. So that’s what I mean by we can’t mess it up because that’s what the universe is doing, it’s Awakening to Itself.
So we do our best with whatever practice or technology or method that seems appropriate to us at the time. But what many longtime spiritual practitioners find is they come to a kind of wall where they keep doing all this stuff and they’ll say, “Phil, I’ve been on the path for 40 years and I don’t feel any different.” What happened to me when I let everything go and went out to the ashram and felt like I was facing a physical death within a few months was a total surrender to life. And this is anathema to an ego, but there was an absolute letting go and trusting the process and saying, you know what? I can’t do this anymore. I’m not going to be able to make it happen. I’m just going to let go. And for me, the letting go wasn’t even a conscious thing. It was such a deep level that I wasn’t even really aware of it. That letting go – like opening a camera aperture – allows the Grace to come in.

Alright, I feel like I’m on the right path because what you shared there is my conscious work for myself, which I think is a big practice of witness consciousness, and I teach in my practice. It’s called the practice of “Notice, Accept, Choose Again.” And acceptance is a letting go or surrender. It’s not that you resign to, it’s not that you like it, you just don’t suppress it, deny it, repress it, project it out. There’s a surrendering. And the way I understand it for myself through my experience is when you’re fighting with it, you’re creating resistance. And that resistance, we call it chi stagnation in Chinese medicine, it prevents you from experiencing that perception you’re talking about. But when you fully let go and surrender, then the resistance drops and outflow and receptivity comes through you. And that’s what I will interpret as consciousness comes through you.

Yeah, that’s beautifully put. Witnessing consciousness is a fantastic tool to pull yourself out of identification as the content of consciousness. So now you say “I’m the witness and there’s consciousness.” It’s still dualistic, but it’s about halfway there. And then eventually the dualism just collapses. And you never know when that’s going to happen. And that’s the fun thing about it. You don’t know when it’s going to happen or how it’s going to happen, but I would say regardless for everyone, eventually it will happen.

When it happened to you… a couple of questions around that. And again, thank you for that part about the witness consciousness. I’ve had other, what I’d call, non-ordinary states. And what I want to ask you, because what you’re experiencing, the way you’re describing it, it sounds like that’s still duality. So I’d love to know what’s it like and why are you still alive in this world? If yourself realizes, what’s the purpose?

The purpose is easy. That always comes down to service. I had a difficult nine months after the Kiss, I had a lot of bliss, bouts of bliss, which I would define as kind of a fluid mix of peace and joy with a dash or three of euphoria. And then with that, my sleep patterns were whacked. I had difficulty focusing, couldn’t read really that well. Just even practical things like driving a car at times became problematic. So I was fortunately in a very safe space, the ashram, and the minister in charge I’d known him for 20 years. He was keenly aware of what was going on and he was, in my view, already Awake at that point. So he was a big help. He was the single most wonderful aspect of Grace in the body that I could point to. I mean, he really was a lifeline for me. But in terms of what’s the point, I struggled with that for months. I lost personal will and I couldn’t figure out a reason to get up out of bed. It’s just like, what’s the point? There’s no me. And this is a very common thing that happens to people when they’ve had a big ego-mind collapse. Ultimately though, it dawns on you that the purpose of existence is to be of service. So you’re coming from a place of love. What would love do? And then there is no one particular type of service that’s better than another. If you’re coming from a place of love, service is service. So some people go out and teach, like Eli my editor and best friend is doing, as you know.

Now, he’s on the Conscious Fertility Podcast as well. Everybody, that’s Eli Recht and he was the editor of Grace Happens and Reflections of Consciousness, Phil’s books.

And other people, they write a couple of books and they talk occasionally to people on a podcast. I enjoy a more behind-the scenes-kind of role. So if Eli is Batman, then I guess I’m Alfred, okay, and bat caves need dusting, so that’s what happens. But other people, occasionally people don’t keep their body, and throughout history, people have apparently awakened and then just dropped the physical form. But the idea in my mind of Self-Realization then becomes, first you’ve got to work through the bliss because it’s really difficult to work in that state. I know in the Sufic tradition, Ibn ‘Arabi made it very clear in his writings, he pretty much looked down his nose at the Sufis who were wandering around in ecstatic bliss because they really weren’t much help to anybody. And so his idea was, and I agree with this, that even the bliss has to be surrendered. And then it’s back to the old Zen saying, “…After Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”

Moving along here, I have so many curiosity questions for you. In 2022, I did psychedelics. I don’t do drugs, so my body probably wasn’t adapted to it, and I did 5-MAO-DMT, and I thought I was in hell or I am hell or whatever it was. And it was pretty clear to me afterwards, based on my training, what I do in my practice, that I totally broke my nervous system and dysregulated it. Now things are great, but it maybe took nine months. After the fact, it almost felt like, oh, I think I accelerated some karmic burn off there if that’s what I experienced. It really felt like things moved through.

The spiritual practice for me isn’t about addition, it’s about subtraction. We’re letting all the false beliefs go and we’re letting all these things go ultimately because all we are is a modulation of the one consciousness. You can’t add or subtract anything to that, but it seems that way. I would encourage people to not look at it as an additive process, but as a subtractive one, and you’re just getting rid of all this stuff. And the kundalini can really accelerate that. I know psychedelics can definitely – you use the metaphor of the sun and the clouds – psychedelics can definitely punch through the clouds and provide a glimpse into Reality that one has not had before. So I don’t recommend them, but I don’t not recommend them either, because I’ve done them and they can be helpful. But ultimately, I think meditation and self-inquiry and witnessing consciousness and these types of things are better methods than trying to do psychedelics over and over and over. Because if anyone’s read Ram Dass’s journey, he proved that that really wasn’t the way to go.

I’m glad you’ve said that and I kind of want to share that I don’t have a strong opinion or bias either. I know from my experience, I wouldn’t want anybody to go through it. And every guest I’ve had on so far where we’ve brought up psychedelics – we’re well over a hundred episodes, but not every episode we talk about psychedelics – but these are neuroscientists that have come on with their Ph.D. in Psychology, a lot of clinicians and physicists, and they all said the same thing you said, so I just want to repeat it. They said it’s a great tool. It’s a great way to give you an opening, a glimpse of that Oneness. But in the end, you have to have a practice. You have to be able to access that through natural means. And people do it. It’s a one, two, maybe three times, and you’re done for a lifetime. What people are doing now is it’s becoming a weekly event. I’ve only done it once, so I don’t have an opinion, but their opinion is that’s probably not the way to do it. They basically said that’s not going to do it. It’s just letting you know bought into an illusion. That’s all. It’s there to let you know.

Yeah, those things wouldn’t be in existence if they didn’t have some value. And in fact, the way I perceive things now is that everything without exception, everything and everyone has value by the very fact that it exists and it is a reflection, a unique once-in-eternity reflection of the Divine, and that we all express it in our own unique way. The trick sometimes is finding the right thing at the right time.

Right. I have some non-ordinary questions for you. Some of the questions I’ve been asked to ask you as well. I’m in a program and I’ll give a shout out to Randy Lewis’s program called the Taoist Death Medicine Mentorship, where we’re talking about death from a Taoist perspective, literally death, preparing the body for death and the death of the ego. So the whole idea is that to be alive, the ego has to die. There’s a rebirth like you described. I mentioned your books that I’m reading and that I was going to interview you, and somebody wanted to know: when you did hospice, were you awake during your working in hospice? Because they wanted to know, were you able to sense or have any astral or out-of-body discussions with these souls that left the body? Because people have shared that when a relative dies, for example, they get visits from them, they know it’s them or they see them, but when they open their eyes, they’re not there. So they wanted to know the non-ordinary stuff that you may not want to share often that sounds crazy weird, if there’s any crazy weird stuff that’s kind of outside the materialistic worldview that you’ve experienced in hospice, working with people who are dying or died.

I took a break from my hotel career for a couple of years after I had my shift back in my thirties because I didn’t feel any inner satisfaction in the corporate world anymore. So I was looking for something else. And originally, I started volunteering and I thought at some point maybe I could switch careers into the administrative side of things. And so I spent a year as a volunteer coordinator and at the same time sitting with people. I specialized in sitting with people at their bedside when they were actively transitioning. Then I was a bereavement coordinator for about a year following hospice. Typically, I think most of them are the same. They provide postmortem support for family members for 13 months. And so I did that and I think I had a total off and on of about 12 years of volunteering that included this. So I’ve been around a lot of death. Death is the word we all use, but I really think “transitioning” is a better term.

And to answer your question, I wasn’t awake at this point, this was quite a while ago, but the only thing that might fall under the category that you’re asking about is that I went to see an elderly woman who was a client on our hospice rolls. Well, actually before I got there, the nurse, it was in a nursing home, had told me that she had just passed within 15, 20 minutes. So I went in there just to pay my respects I guess, and I instantly felt her in the room. I couldn’t see her, but I knew that her astral form was just kind of over the bed and she was looking down on it, and sometimes I think it takes people a while to let go of the body.

I was with my mom when she passed. I mean she died looking right into my eyes, but she didn’t linger at all. She was just, I’m out of here, and there was no sense of her at all, but this woman was there. So, I pranamed and I sat down and I just meditated and I tried to, as best I could, impart that she was safe, that she was okay, that it was all right to let go of the body that wasn’t ever her to begin with. And within maybe 15 minutes or so, I could feel her depart. I just didn’t feel her presence anymore. But that would be the only time I remember anything like that.

I’m going back to something you said… when the Realization happens and you understand this illusion, there’s a lot of talk about laughter, right? When they can see how it is. I remember, I don’t know if you’ve heard or read the book, Awake by Angelo Dilullo. He’s an anesthesiologist that shares that he’s awake and he wrote a book on it and I was listening to a podcast and he was talking about it and he couldn’t stop cracking up and laughing because he’s talking about the world and the state it’s in. But yet he couldn’t stop laughing. He just wasn’t buying into it. You could see it was genuine. He wasn’t trying to be unconscious, but to reach his audience, he was trying to have that compassion, but he could not stop laughing. He just could not believe what was, it was such a “joke” to him, and that’s my word. It was just that he couldn’t believe in it. It was so bad. It was a contagious laughter. Do you sometimes just sit there and give your head a shake as in laughter, like people have really bought into this, or do you have a different experience or perception?

 Well, I shake my head at it every day. But it’s rarely with laughter because of the enormity of suffering. I’ll tell you one thing, Lorne, that Self-Realization for me has brought with it a much deeper level of feeling than I ever thought possible. It’s difficult to see it and know that on one level, at a high-altitude view, it’s perfect, but for someone who’s suffering and they don’t know that, that’s not very helpful. So wisdom tells me that it is just the way it should be. But love tells me that I need to do everything I can to help people if they come within my field of influence or they read a book or they hear this podcast. Wisdom without love is a cold place and I wouldn’t want to reside there. So I see the suffering every day. I see it for what it is. And the beautiful part about the wisdom is that it allows me not to become – generally speaking, sometimes it doesn’t, but generally speaking – wisdom allows me to not become overwhelmed by the heartache and the suffering and the war and the famine, and you name it, the child abuse and the animal abuse. Those two really hit me hard for whatever reason. And so, I can still function at a high level from the wisdom place in me, but from the place of love it breaks my heart to see what we do to each other. As a species we haven’t even figured out how to stop killing each other.

If everything is One, then how is there suffering in this? If this is what consciousness is, I’m asking you, somebody who is Self-Realized, when you’re Self-Realized or when you’re in that Oneness, do you suffer?

I do not suffer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain, and that doesn’t mean that I don’t have feelings that break my heart. I think the most concise definition of suffering that I could offer is that suffering is the resistance to What Is. What’s odd if you look at it is our society rewards it because the jury will say, here’s $10,000 for the broken leg, but here’s $100,000 for the suffering. They reward pain and suffering, and the fact is you just had a broken leg. The resistance to What Is really is at the core of what we’re trying to release in our spiritual path, because you’re trying to see that everything is a contextual field that is perfectly coming together for everyone to evolve in. And so why would you want to resist that? Now, having said that, there are things that are happening in the world that I don’t like. Who would want to see war and disease and starvation and all the things that we see on the news every day? And so, part of the perfection then is doing what we can to alleviate it for those who are still mired in separation consciousness. That is the illusion.

You’re not saying there is no action. You’re not saying, oh, loving what is, just that’s it.

Absolutely. I’m not saying we turn a blind eye to suffering because, well, I’m enlightened, so screw it. Again, it gets back to the fact that we’re always here to serve, and we do it in whatever ways, however we’re called to do so. To take a stance of well, it’s all perfect, so I’m not going to worry about the guy next door who doesn’t have enough to eat, or the dog that’s being abused, that’s not the message. We do all we can, but we do it from a place of compassion. That even though I see – to use that example of somebody abusing the dog – I see that person’s ignorance, that they just don’t know any better. Everybody’s doing the best they can from where they are. So while I’m going to do what I can to stop that action, there’s no judgment or there’s no malice. I don’t hate the guy.

I mean, it is like when you see little kids doing things that they don’t know any better, you take that into account. And so, what I take into account every day is that the actions that are being perpetrated around the world are by people who are deeply ignorant of their unity with the people that they’re doing these things to. And so I treat both compassionately and with love, but I still would probably, well, not probably, but if I saw somebody abusing a dog or a child, I would do whatever I could in that moment to make sure it didn’t continue.

Couple more questions for you. If you have some time.

Let ‘em rip. I’ve got all day.

 Alright, there’s some suffering in the world. Do you believe that we’re having or undergoing a collective awakening? And do you have hope?

Yes and no. So we are always undergoing a collective awakening because that’s all the universe does. But I think what I’m intuiting from your question more is: is it accelerating or is it more rapid now than it has been 1000 or 2000 years prior than now, I would say yes, it does seem to be accelerating. Why? I am not sure, other than maybe we’re coming to a point where our technologies are getting so powerful. You talk about AI and autonomous weaponry and bio-weapons, it may be getting to the point where if we don’t evolve a bit quicker, we may not make it as a species. And so I do think there’s an acceleration of things. And then of course with the internet and things like we’re doing, we’re finding out how many people are actually awakening and it doesn’t have to be 80% of the planet. There’s a tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point kind of thing where there’s just enough and it’ll shift things. So I do see that. I think we’re in an ascending arc right now and that’s going to continue for a long time. I used to be a turnaround specialist, so I’d go into underperforming operations and make them the way the ownership wanted them. And sometimes to do that, you’ve got to tear things down before you can rebuild them. So I think a lot of the structures of our civilization are going to be radically transformed over the next hundred years. And if they’re not, I’m not so sure how we’re going to do.

Hope? I don’t have hope. And that may sound paradoxical, but I also don’t have fear. So hope, I know the Dalai Lama said, “Be optimistic, it feels better.” And I agree with him, but hope is also an overlay onto things. It’s subtle. A hopeless person sounds awful, but actually that’s where the peace lies, because I’m not fearing how things are going to go, and I’m also not wishing that they were any better either. I’m doing what I can. But if you’re truly Here-Now, then the projection of hope onto things just doesn’t exist. I don’t know if that makes sense or not.

Thank you. Again, the more I dive into this, the more everything sounds paradoxical.

Yeah, you have to be able to embrace paradox at some point because they’re there!

When you do this work, my experiences intellectually, and then I’ve had experiences which I like to share with the people I work with is, when you no longer desire the healing, that’s when the opportunity for the spontaneous healing happens. When you no longer need the relationship, you’re no longer looking for the relationship to fulfill you, that’s when all the suitors come. And so I always say, when you do this work, one of two things happen: 1. Your perception of the present situation changes, and two, which doesn’t always happen, but you don’t care because number one happened, your perception of the situation changes. And/or 2. The external environment changes. The miracle happens where it reflects what you want, but once you have the first, you don’t need the second. You’re good. And then that’s when it can happen when you don’t really need it.

I agree. I do encourage people to be optimistic in general. I think it helps. And I do think that I am optimistic for our future as a civilization, even though we have some severe challenges ahead. Overall, I’m optimistic. I’m not sure if that’s the same as hope, but I trust basically, I just have implicit trust in What Is. And so from that point, you just do what you do to help in the way that you can. And again, it’s not like I don’t feel pain in watching things that are happening, but I do trust the process. And that’s an important point.

Trust the process. That’s the key. Michael Singer, when I read his The Surrender Experiment, he had to trust the process, right?

 He did!

 “You sure? Should I really surrender to this?” But he kept on and it worked out. So trust the process.

I think he’s a great voice and his books are really beautiful, especially I think The Untethered Soul and I really like Mickey’s work. It’s great stuff.

And on that note, you’ve shared, I see there’s some books that we’ve read. I’ve read the Autobiography of a Yogi, Wayne Dyer, Rupert Spira, Michael Singer, and I’m curious what books or teachers continue to inspire you?

I’m like a kid in a candy store. The bookshelf behind me here is about a quarter of the books in the house. So in recent years, I’ve really done deep dives into the Dzogchen of Longchenpa, the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, the Kashmir Shaivism of Abhinavagupta… And the beauty of these things, I guess for me, is just seeing the esoteric commonality of them all. Exoterically, they may look very different, but esoterically, I think all the world’s religions share the same common goal, even though they look very different. So broadly speaking, those. Currently, I don’t know, I don’t read to get anything out of it. I just read it for enjoyment and to see the beauty of how they express what ultimately you can’t express. Occasionally I’ll find something and go, oh man, I’m going to keep that one because that’s really good. One of the teachers and collections of work that most impacted me early on, and that vocabulary remains to this day, is the Conversations with God material by Neale Donald Walsch.

How old is that? I have imagination of reading that in the nineties. Is it that old?

It came out in the nineties. I got turned onto it in ‘99. I think it’d been out a few years. I’d met Neale a couple of times back in Atlanta when I lived there. A gentle, beautiful man. I love Neale. And so his work was super important to me. Meher Baba’s work, God Speaks, is one of my desert island books. And he said something you mentioned earlier. He said: you probably won’t understand much of this if any of it, but just read it anyway because there’s a transmission that happens and that stuff gets embedded in our consciousness and then it flowers when the time is right. So I think Meher Baba, his work was great, but there have been so many.

I tell you, the guy I just love right now, even though he tells everyone he’s not Awake and I believe him, but his articulation of the Awakened experience is right there with Rupert Spira’s – that’s Bernardo Kastrup. He’s a double Ph.D., and he got his first Ph.D. in Computer Science. Right out of university, I think, he went to work at CERN, but he started looking deeply into these things and he had a shift of some sort, and he really started looking at the nature of reality in a profoundly deep, and I would say an analytically rigorous way. And he realized to do it the way he wanted, he needed, he felt anyway, that he needed a Ph.D. in Philosophy. So, he went and got that. I think Schopenhauer really reflected his inner sensibilities. For anybody that wants to get the pith or a taste of Bernardo, he just published a book a few months ago called Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell. And Analytic Idealism is his way of rigorously, methodically, and scientifically explaining the mystical state.

And for someone to do that without actually being in it is remarkable. He’s a very good friend of Rupert Spira’s. They’ve done some beautiful talks together, and his website is the Essentia Foundation, which, I kid you not, is cutting edge science, not just the woo-woo stuff, but hardcore science as it relates to spirituality. And so guys like Rupert, Donald Hoffman is another one that I really like, his Conscious Realism. These guys just are so articulate and so aligned with my awareness-experience that I really think anyone interested in this kind of stuff should check it out.

Perfect. I just looked it up, I’m buying his book as we were talking, by the way, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell. He has Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, The Idea of the World. It goes on and on, Why Materialism is Baloney. Great. Seems like a prolific writer. The last question for you is: if you could whisper one thing to your pre-Awakened self, your pre-Realized self, what would it be?

I wouldn’t wish for anything to be different because it all worked.

That’s my litmus test, actually. When I see people, if they can’t accept their past, that victim mentality or hating what’s happened to them, then I know they don’t love the now no matter what they say. But when people love the now, although they may not like what has happened, they wouldn’t change it for the world because they’re very clear that if it did not happen the way it did, they wouldn’t be where they are in the present moment, and they love who they are in the present moment. So to say that again is, if you hate your past, you can’t love yourself now, because if you love yourself now, you realize your past is what brought you to where you are now.

Absolutely. When I look back at my life, there have been countless things that I’ve done that were hurtful to people or to myself. To anyone listening to this that can think of those things that knew me, I’m sorry for that. But we’re all doing the best we can from where we are. And that was me then. But I certainly wouldn’t try to change anything because it worked out the way it did. If I could somehow manage to magically still end up where I did today and not have hurt anyone, then of course I would change that. But you can’t. And regrets are self-destructive and they’re not useful. What we need to do is identify, okay, this was an action that I don’t remember fondly. Then learn from that action, and then you’ll never repeat it. And then that action actually becomes Grace in its own way because everything ultimately, from my perspective now – the good, the bad, and the ugly – it is all Grace because it all helped me evolve in the way that I needed to evolve.

And now you experience peace. You like where you are now for, I’ll put it this way, the Self-Realization is more fulfilling than the BMWs, the dates, the titles, the money, and the nice materialism. Would you trade that for all the tea in China, as they say?

No, of course not. And I think actually that’s what all of this stuff in the world is teaching us, is that those things are never going to be fulfilling. That’s what they’re there for, they are Grace in their own way because they’re teaching us. They taught me that anyway, material possessions and relationships.

I just had a memory. I want to ask you something. Like Bernardo, I’m aware that I’m not Awake, but I’m aware I’m in a process, as in, I know what I was like and I know what I’m like now, and it’s different and I experience life differently. And I work with people and thank God you can become enlightened from an unenlightened master because the tools I have to work with, and they’ve been working for me, but I’ve had experiences… So I’m just curious. This is way back when in my twenties, in the early nineties, I lived in Montreal and I started getting into spiritual practices, going to retreats and meditating, and I used to get quite excited watching sports, and I remember this experience watching the Montreal Expo’s play, and I remember thinking, how come I don’t care anymore that they don’t win? I totally remember I had nothing vested in the game. I was able to enjoy the hot dogs and being with friends, I loved the community. I thought the game was interesting, but whereas before I identified with it and if they lost, it was personal. And part of me was like, do I want to continue this? I really enjoyed my sports. And I was like, is this what life’s going to be like? I don’t care anymore.

I can remember those years where the wrong loss to the wrong team would send me spiraling for a week or two, or at least until the next game when they had a chance to win. It’s a terrible way to live! Now I can enjoy the games without having any vested interest. Now, I’m always going to want to see the Red Sox beat the snot out of the Yankees, but it’s not important, and you just take it for enjoyment, it’s not the life and death thing that we make it out to be here, at least I used to make it out to be when I was younger.

I love how we’re ending the podcast because we said “chop wood, carry water.” It’s not like you’re sitting there in a white robe and talking a certain way and everything’s beautiful and perfect. You’re still having a human experience, you’re still that – what’d you call yourself – the fun-loving idiot on some level, right? There’s still a bit of that. And thank you for writing your books, Grace Happens and Reflections of Consciousness, and making the time for us to talk today as well.

Well, I appreciate it, Lorne. The books are helping others. We’ve had some amazing reviews, and I get some incredible emails from people that have been touched, and so that makes the blessings that I’ve been Graced with all the more beautiful, because now those experiences are helping others. So it’s a privilege, and I take it seriously… but not too seriously.

Great, there’s a paradox again. And if somebody’s interested in your books or wants to reach out to you, because at the time of our recording, you don’t have a social media presence, you don’t even have a website. And that’s another thing which is nice, you’re interested in sharing, but you really don’t have – or it doesn’t seem like you have – an obvious agenda to try and really sell books or get people into a program. You’re just out there to share. But that also makes it difficult for people to find you and your books. So why don’t we let them know how, if they want to connect with you or get your books, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Sure. One thing really quickly about the books: I don’t promote – even though SRF and Yogananda and the Kriya Yoga technique were very important in my unfoldment – I don’t promote any ideology or methodology. I think that people have to find that for themselves, and I offer some tips on how to do that. You want to use your discrimination, or discernment, if you’re picking a spiritual teacher and you want to look at their lineage and you want to look at the followers that they have and try to get a sense of, does this feel right or not? So use your intuition as well as your discrimination. But I praise all the teachers that have helped me, and there’s a list of resources at the end of Grace Happens of all the best books and audios and movies and things that have touched me. So there’s a lot there for people to dip their toes into. But if you find something that’s calling to you, then I would say hang on to that and see where it goes.

As far as my books go, both of them are on Amazon, both in paperback and Kindle. We also sell ’em here. If somebody wants an autographed copy or whatever with a bookmark and stuff, then we can do that. And my window to the world, since I don’t do social media or websites, is my editor, Eli Recht at elirecht.com. I guess there will probably be a link or something in the notes.

Yeah, we’ll put a link in the show notes, and a shout out to Eli, he’s also on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, so check that out. And I’m having an interview series with Eli starting in August of 2025. We’re going to do a series on Self-Realization.

Eli is someone that I came in contact with because he was going through his own Awakening and didn’t know what was going on. And so one of the former monks from SRF knew me and told him “you ought to get in touch with Phil.” And so I helped him through his process, which helped me as well. And one last thing I would like to say about both Eli and I is we’re not doing this for money. So all of the proceeds that Eli gets from his Teaching services go to the local humane society, Rancho Coastal Humane Society.

And I can confirm that because I’ve done work with Eli and I went and donated to one of the animal shelters.

And if people want to donate to an animal shelter near them, he says, by all means. They all need help. So he does it strictly as a vocation and not – there’s nothing wrong with making money in this kind of thing – but that’s just not what he’s doing. And the same with me, all the profits from both books… and I’m almost at a breakeven point now, which is pretty exciting. When I first published these things, there’s so many of these books out there, and I’m a nobody, figuratively and literally! So I thought, I don’t even know if I’m going to sell 50 books, but as it turned out, we sold a lot of them, and all the profits are going to go to the homeless shelter that I worked at when I was working through my Awakening. And one of the beautiful things I learned from the Conversations with God material is if you’re struggling, find someone who’s struggling worse than you and help them, and you’ll receive much more than you can possibly imagine.

Alright, everybody, this is Phil Weber. Check out his books, Grace Happens and Reflections of Consciousness. I’ve used an app, so I’ve been listening to them. I have the PDF versions, the Kindle versions. However, I have a collection of books signed by people I’ve interviewed. So now I’m going to purchase some books because I collect signed books. And so I’ll talk to you and Eli off camera so I can get those sent out here to me in Vancouver and add to my collection. Phil, thank you very much for spending time with me today. I appreciate it.

Well, I appreciate the invitation, Lorne. It’s been a great chat and I admire your work, and I think it’s a valuable contribution to us all evolving in the way that we are. So thank you.