 Did you know that there are over 2,200 known religions in the world? We are all born into one belief, religion, or faith which influences how we see the world and everything and everyone in it, including ourselves. Do our beliefs divide and separate us, or do they bring us together in greater harmony? When you look up with awe on a star-filled night, do you ask who or what created all of this? Have you ever had a profound or deeply challenging experience in your life that changed your beliefs at the core of your being? Enlightened Pathways takes us on a journey of discovery to understand just how spiritual transformational experiences impact our lives and the world around us. Join us now as we deeply explore all that nourishes, heals, and inspires us. Welcome to Enlightened Pathways. My name is Robert Kabeca and I am your host for today's show. And my special guest today is Tobias English. Welcome Tobias. Hello. Hello. Hey, brother. Good to see you. Thank you for being on the show. Yeah. It's good to see you too. I appreciate your being here. I've known Tobias for about four years when I first moved to Portland, Maine, and he was one of the first few people that I met here, and it's been a wonderful journey getting to know him. We're going to have lots of opportunity to talk about that during the show. Certain that the universe had a specific intention for us to meet because Tobias has significantly enhanced my spiritual journey over the past few years. Likewise. Like what? We're going to get into that. Likewise. It's mutual. Oh, likewise. Likewise. Yes. I thought you said like what? So it's awesome. So let me tell you a little bit about Tobias. He just moved from Portland down to Asheville, North Carolina, which he absolutely loves. He is a autodidact, like me, which means we're pretty much self-taught in a lot of ways. However, he is an accomplished musician and certified in many healing methodologies. He's a licensed massage therapist. He does body talk, health kinesiology, holographic repatterning, and is about to get certified in core transformation as a certified core transformation coach, which is really, really cool. I got certified in core transformation a year ago. It has transformed my life, and I know it's had a positive impact in his life as well. And so, oh, also, yes, I am reading from cards because there's a lot to talk about with Tobias here. And he also has a renewed passion for Advata, which he is going to talk about as well. So welcome, Tobias. Thank you for being on the show. It's so good to see you, Roberto. Yeah. Again, through technology, we're lucky enough to see each other occasionally, even though I've moved away. Yes, indeed. So yeah, we're going to have a great conversation here, and why don't we just get started with just me asking you what kind of religious belief we brought up into, or belief system faith we brought up into as a kid, and what kind of impact that might have in your early life, whatever you're comfortable talking about? Sure. My folks were Protestant, but not particularly observant. We went to church four or five times a year. And I wouldn't say that it was religious, I would say, and there was certainly no real spirituality. Or at least I liked the singing, and I think the rest of my family did, too, the singing in church. But it was like Christmas Eve, Easter, and Thanksgiving or something. Is that kind of what got you or inspired to music at an early age, too? Well, I founded a musician, and I was encouraged slash forced to play an instrument pretty young. I played the trumpet piano for years, and eventually got into guitar, which I would say was thoroughly therapeutic, relaxing to me, even though playing rock and stuff, very healing to play an instrument, I believe. Yeah. Why do you think that was? Well, you know, they say that the people who are improvising on a musical instrument have their brain lit up, whatever that means. That means that it's just a way to relax and experience hearing and creativity and tactile and visual experience all at once, and it becomes a challenge like, oh, how can I perform or what's the best ratio of practicing to performing, getting done in any given practice session? Some people say it should be half and half or something, but. Well, that sounds like something you've explored a lot. We'll circle back around to that, but so after your early years, was there anything that occurred in your life that caused you to either look for a different religion or question the religion that you were being brought up in, even though it wasn't a constant practice? Well, this will be, yeah, when I was 14, I was a bit of a juvenile delinquent. Won't shock you to hear that because you know some of my story, but I took LSD and was like, oh my goodness, my sense of doership, my sense of owning my thoughts or being an entity within this experience was removed. And as I came down, I realized, wow, I'm going to be spending on some level the rest of my life figuring out how to do this organically rather than taking an object into my body around it. I mean, I too remember the experience that I had the first time I experienced the results of a substance at a very young age as well. I was about 14 as well. And it changed my life, unfortunately not in a great way, but I can say that I chased I spent many, many years of my life chasing that experience again, right? And it's like I want to recapture that experience. And that created a lot of drive and energy for me to pursue some very unhelpful pursuits as it were and allowing my emotions to control my decisions as a result of that. At the same time, after myself getting into recovery many years ago, I started to discover other methods through spirituality, through spiritual practices that have brought me, didn't never brought me back to that experience, but it brought me to places that I would never been able to experience if I were under some influence. Like the path to ascend or transform was getting clear. Like I think that spirituality is motivated by suffering, like it's only people who really sabotage their own lives repeatedly really want to know what the underlying fabric of reality is made of. Like it seems, I mean some people don't have to get as self-disrecorded as we were, maybe, but yeah, there are a lot of somewhat of the purpose of suffering, I think. Well and I think that that just leads us right back into, it's like during the process of your recovery and maybe before that you started to explore some other traditions, religious or spiritual traditions that took you to different places. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, well I went through a period in high school where I read the Bible and it's like, okay yeah, like I want to be moved by the spirit, I want to believe that something other than, you know, my ego is hanging out here. And I did actually, not long after high school, I was exposed to an invited teacher, Romesh Balsakar and Wayne Likerman, and I resonated immediately. I was like, okay, non-duality, that's provocative, controversial, what's going on? But then, you know, I wasn't ready to kind of really experience that. And did a bunch of non-religious experiencing in the, as self, you know, in the 12th step, the self is small as little self and it's related to, you know, self absorption, self obsession, self centeredness. And just did a bunch of that, trying to, you know, be a clever human, you know, getting approval and stuff. And, but it wasn't until a little bit into recovery, eight and a half years ago, that I, which, and I had gotten several, a bunch of times, you know, but eight and a half years ago, I started getting into Buddhism as well, which was another, it's kind of leaning towards it, but it gets, it alludes to the emptiness, which is possible, which is, yeah. And so when you say emptiness, what do you mean by emptiness? Emptiness is, you know, it's a tricky word, because it's a word, but it's referring to the kind of, what's, I'll mention the headless way, which is something that was developed in the 70s by, I'll remember in a minute, but Richard Lange has been making it popular again, and it's a way of like experiencing the first person in that I've never seen my head. And when I point to my, where I'm looking out of, I point to essentially an empty space where the world is, where the world appears in an empty space, but also the emptiness refers to the fact that we, where the belief in a separate self exists or seemed to exist when that disappears, it feels like an emptiness, but not in a sad, griefy way at all. Right, yeah. And that's why I asked the question, and thank you for clarifying that so clearly, being redundant there, but it's a distinction, you know, because people think, oh, emptiness, that means, you know, kind of like, you know, hopeless and emptiness and no purpose and things like that, but that's not what it means in the spiritual tradition, in the spiritual practice, you know, and where you talk about Advaita, you know, where it's a singularity, right? It's that non-separation, right? Talk about how you really got into that. I may have misspoke that, so why don't you clarify that for me too? Advaita means not too, as opposed to oneness, because oneness is a concept that an ego, a self, can like say, yeah, I'm involved in this oneness. So Advaita means not too, meaning it's a negation of the subject-object relationship. For instance, it's possible to, as you look out into the room to notice that seeing is happening, and typically there's a sense of it, there's me seeing, there's an I looking out, seeing objects, and in our actual experience, really, all there is is seeing, and there doesn't need to be a subject or an object. There is only the seeing or the hearing or feeling, and so what is the perception made of? It's made of experience, experiencing, and what is experiencing made of? Knowing, and knowing is essentially seamless, and it's happening whether or not there's objects, or whether or not I'm asleep, or I'm just knowing of experience is really the one ingredient, the awareness, knowing more awareness, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so if you take that a little bit further, how does that unfold in your daily practice? Well, it's an option to consider at any time, really. For instance, I can have memories a long ago or yesterday, or I can imagine tomorrow or a year from now, but those memories or fantasies or projections are happening now, and they can also be experienced as perception, and so the perceiving is happening, and I get to remember like, oh, there's actually not a self here, like Tobias is not really here, like what I thought was here as an individual, the part that gets worried about death, that's, it's not necessary in order to function in day-to-day life, like everything I would be doing could be doing, can be doing, can be done without that idea that there's an I over here, a separate self. So it's not, it's actually quite available to anybody at all times, it's not like a a lofty position, it's just a realization that there doesn't need to be a me in order to be experiencing, because culture tells us that we are observing objects all the time, there's a subject and an object, and that's actually, there's some physicists who are, the one Bernardo Castro physicist who basically is saying that basically all there is is consciousness, and that what we see as the world, what we experience as the world is actually mental, transpersonal representations of something that is, but we're seeing it kind of like through our own brain through a filter, which has got a ton of blind spots, and also matter doesn't exist, from the physicist's point of view, there's no located stationary dead inert matter anyway. So anyway, that's kind of a deep end answer to, and I will give credit, I've been listening to a lot of Rupert Spira, who's a non-dual teacher, and invited a man who is quite articulate regarding the, that which can't be really spoken about. Yeah, and you've turned me on to him a bit too, and I've listened to some of his material as well. Having difficulty just, you know, comprehending some of the concepts he is discussing is not as easily as, you know, Joe Dispenza or, you know, some other folks like that, you know, that I, you know, can easily relate to in terms of, you know, I talk singularity or oneness, but I like this concept of, you know, non-duality because that tends to remove, you know, again, like we said, that object-subject, you know, relationship there, and, you know, I like using the word wholeness, you know, and I know you've been doing a lot of work in wholeness, I'd love for you to, we've got just about 10 minutes left, but, you know, it's like, I'd love for you to talk about how wholeness has, you know, worked to not just transform your life, but help you align your life to where you want it to be. Well, I would say that it's not me that's aligning it. Well, okay, correct me. Yes, I stand corrected there. Yes, absolutely. But yeah, you turned me on to core transformation, and that was, you know, a spiritual experience, a very new, like, wow, different access to core states, which as we know are states that the various parts leave back up a bit and say that there, Bernardo Castro, the physicist, basically has his model of the universe is that it's mental in the same sense that DID people, people with dissociative identity disorder, can have like distinct separate personality used to be schizoid personality disorder. He's making an argument for the fact that we, the people on earth are essentially a, we are all dissociated alters of the one month, basically in a dream. And that can sound very far out and not very grounded to some people who whatever are not, it's a different concept for sure. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's all made up. But yeah, Connie Ray, Andrea, came up with an amazing way to relate to parts of, you know, personality and, you know, be curious and investigate what parts want, as you know, and parts, you know, no matter what they are acting like, if the one of them has a bad habit of overeating or swearing too much or whatever, we can, we can say what, where is this part? And, okay, let's thank it for being here. And I might be, you know, one part of the body or could be outside the body and basically set a dialogue to start a dialogue like what do you want? And it might say wants protection or wants nourishment or something. And then we will ask, okay, so step into that part, kind of talking to ourselves in a way, step into that, experience it fully nourishment. And what do you want through having nourishment that's even deeper? You can go into this and come to a core state, which would be something like oneness or okayness or being. And kind of give parts of us what they really want, which is to integrate with, you know, our whole system. And oneness is a variation on that that can be, it's actually slightly different because it's not dealing with states, but locations can be seen from different points of view, maybe in mind's eye and felt from different points of view in the kinesthetic sense. And then at some point a part will welcome the invitation to relax and open as awareness, which of course does not need objects to be. So, yeah, yes, to answer your question, it's been amazing to just lose tons of psychic weight. Like tons of, you know, it's quieter, there's less thinking, less ruminating, because there's fewer parts that don't know that are confused. Right. And as a result of that, if there's less thinking, that means there's more experiencing. Right. You know, and, you know, one thing that I want to point out too, you know, as you were describing, you know, the core transformation process a bit, you know, it's a way of acknowledging my entire self. You know, there's a part of me that wants this and there's a part of me that doesn't want that, you know, and we argue and we debate and that creates thoughts and it creates distractions, it creates disagreement, it creates discomfort within self. Right. And so I recognize for myself, through using the core transformation methodologies, that I no longer have to tell part of me that it doesn't have a right to exist or be here. You know, it's like I can bring it in. It's like I am one whole being included, you know, and it's like once I've learned how to include all of myself as part of my greater self, there's unconditional love that shows up, there's patience, there's compassion, there's trust, there's security, you know, etc. And so many different levels that I'd look for in all my life through so many different things, including drugs and alcohol and what have you, but I've looked for these things in so many ways and, you know, one of my previous guests said, you know, it's like everything that I've always wanted to find out and want for myself is already here. You know, it's already here, you know. Yeah, it's very hard for themselves, the small sense of self to experience, like even the idea that happiness and fulfillment are actually our true nature. That seems like a beautiful nonsense statement to the part. But yeah, it's yeah, you know, we'll talk a bit later also about at some point about that. I just want to mention this guy, Paul Beddington. He's a he's a 12-second guy that is also invited. He's talking about how like the bondage of self is the underlying, the cause and condition of our need to escape the self is essentially solved by the experience of our treatment, realizing that there is no subject object. There is only experience and knowing experience. So what I was going to say, so somehow we've only got a couple of minutes left here. Our time has just like flown by. So being myself, yeah. Being myself, it's one of many Rupert books I have and I just want to, you asked about spirituality. Please yeah, go for it. The apparent existence of things is borrowed from that which truly is God's infinite being. Just as the apparent reality of objects in a movie is borrowed from the reality relatively speaking of the screen. Things don't have their own existence. Being has thing. Selfs don't have awareness. Awareness has self. We do not think of things because they exist. They seem to exist because we think of them. Thought abstracts discrete objects and cells from the reality of God's infinite and indivisible being. The fearless reality in the midst of experience is to know beauty and love. It is God's presence shining in and as existence. Yeah, what a relief. I actually wrote a haiku earlier, a bird chirps. There's only, there's only hearing. Wow. Few are really, I knew of the haiku. That was awesome. But that is all the time we have my friend. Thank you so much for making time for us today. Thank you to my guests Tobias English. Appreciate you and we will again be talking very soon. Love you Roberto. Blessings brother. And just a few closing remarks and a shout out to today's executive producer and sponsor, Bridge to Heaven Healing and Lepin Lizards, which is the premier source for healing crystals and readings with four locations, including 120 Center Street, Auburn Main. You can visit www.lepinlizards.biz for more information. Also a big thanks to our co-executive producer, Dr. Anna Cabeca, the creator of Mighty Maka Plus, the daily nourishing supplement that improves metabolism and reinvigorates the body. Visit DrAnnaCabeca.com for more information. Also, if you would like to get more information about this show to reach out to us or to sponsor us, please visit www.deepbeing.org. We would love to hear from you. And a quick shout out to the crew, Director Packard and Carton, Audio and Sound, Warrant and Cameras, Travis Nadeau, as well as to the Portland Media Center and their team, Tom, Dino and Warrant. We wouldn't be here without them. Thank you for watching Enlightened Pathways and spending your valuable time with us today. Until next time, play, have fun, be happy.