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In this episode we talk with Ross Hostetter, award-winning author of The Keepers of the Field. An Invitation to the Unitive life. This book is a jewels for all of us who are seekers of adventure and spiritual insights. Based on the author's own experiences in the deep Canadian wilderness, it explores human life when stripped bare of the conveniences, comforts and conventions, all the beliefs and habits of every-day life. When one has nothing left, everything suddenly reveals itself...
Visit his websites at
rosshostetter.com and www.keepersofthefield.com
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Episode Two with Ross Hostetter
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Viktória: Hello and welcome back! This is Viktória Duda from Zenith Lifestyle bringing you the new podcast, in which we are talking to people who like many of us have visited, have taken glimpses of worlds beyond the physical and who have also found a way to live in both worlds simultaneously, creatively, successfully and those are our multi-dimensional people.
Today I'm here with author Ross Hostetter, who has written a wonderful book called "The Keepers of the Field. An Invitation to the Unitive Life." Welcome, Ross!
Ross Hostetter: Thank you, Viktória. It's a pleasure to be here.
Viktória: Yes, and it's such a pleasure to have you! I might actually tell our audience how I found your book, because it is such a wonderful story of synchronicity itself. I was actually in bed with a broken leg, completely depressed about it, as I love the outdoors and a life full of adventures. I wanted to find something to read that takes away from that prison of my own room, and takes me on an adventure. I love the adventures that are of the spiritual kind, when you go on a hero's journey, as we put it these days, and you come back with a message that is telling us something about the inner world, something about the nature of reality. It is actually a type of book that is really hard to find; there are not many books which are really good in this genre. I came randomly across yours, and it was such a wonderful experience, because it did just that: it took me out of my little misery and took me to a wonderful journey into the wilderness, and also into the nature of our own lives and realities. Then I think it was the first time in my life that I felt compelled to write an email to an author that I just found, because it was just such a magic adventure! And I learned that this adventure was actually quite real, wasn't it, Ross, something that you based upon your own experiences in the wilderness - in Canada, was it?
Ross Hostetter: That's exactly right, Viktória, yes and you were one of my very first readers and your email and our subsequent friendship that's developed has been just a wonderful jewel, just so encouraging. You know when you write these things you never really know who is going to read them and writing a spiritual adventure story, or a piece of visionary fiction as this is called, is an own walk of faith, a walk of risk and trust and transformation - for me and I think any author who undertakes this sort of thing.
Viktória: Absolutely ... and what made you write that book? What was that experience?
Ross Hostetter: Well, there was really a compulsion to write the book based upon some experiences that I had as a very young man. I was at that time a professional wilderness guide in the North Woods of Canada. Earth that we were walking that time, Gaia, was a Northern belt of wilderness that surrounds the world. It's a very rugged landscape carved out by glaciers. It's full of beautiful lakes, clear running streams, water that you can simply dip your cup into and drink, but it's also a very harsh climate, a very sparse climate. It is one that requires a great deal of attention to be able to live in successfully. In many ways it is the Northern journey, as you can think of in terms of different spiritual paths, in different directions. A guy named Bill Plotkin did that in some of his soul work (his book is called "Nature and the Human Soul"): South, East and West. The South is usually associated with all that warmth and sensuality. The East is the land of the gurus and of deep-deep state experiences. The West: philosophy and the mind and the North is its own cardinal direction, which is the direction of the cold, the clarity, the austere and also things are quite simple and beautiful. It is a country that strips everything away which is not necessary, so that you might find "the One" or something of great value. That is what the Northern Journey is all about, also what the Hero's Journey is all about. The Hero's Journey begins with the fool. The fool is full of the unbridled optimism and trust that if we allow ourselves to follow our best impulses, sometimes impulses that seems to be coming from beyond ourselves, sometimes we go through a process, where we meet friends and guides and have experiences that helps us grow and it always leads to a form of deconstruction, where the old self is dropped away and a new possibilities emerges.
Viktória: I found it very powerful, symbolic in your book: you're writing about ... it's a lawyer who gets on this adventure and he carries so much stuff with him at the beginning, doesn't he?
Ross Hostetter: That's right.
Viktória: He buys all this high-tech equipment, because he believes he will need this and he will need that, and at end of the day he cannot carry it and gets rid of more and more of the stuff. At the end it's just him and he trusts his environment more and more. At the beginning he needs disinfectant tablets to make the water clean and these kind of things, but at the end he is just drinking like every other animal from nature and he is fine. This is so powerful I think because we live in a society, don't we, in which we all believe we need so much that we become slaves of needing a lot of money, needing a lot of machines and material things. Probably the more we rely on those things, the more we forget how to trust the universe to give us everything that we need.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, I don't think there is any question, Viktória. As you are stating so eloquently, we do live in a hyper-world, in a world of overstimulation and that is not necessarily a bad thing, because that world is immensely creative. We have immensely creative possibilities: more and more people are creating more and more things all the time. I think one of the dangers of the hyper-world is that we become very distracted and thinking we are doing something different every day, while we are actually repeating the same consumption cycles: watching the same websites, watching same movies, getting on the same Facebook loop, where our attention becomes very distracted and diffused. We don't have the power to concentrate it to really create something, whether that will be an artefact or a life or love itself or a state that we could begin to generate a coherent waveform that actually has that condensed power to work in the world as love ... which is something that I want to talk to you about, you know what love is, and how we can begin to put out a coherent waveform. But before we get to that, I do want to talk a little bit about the Hero's Journey and the boon that this character Charlie - the protagonist in my book - discovered, which was the same boon or gift that I discovered when I was out in the wilderness. The notion of the Hero's Journey is simply this: you did begin this process ... it looks like you don't know where you're going, it looks like you are wandering, but you are actually following what you might call a red thread - the thread of something you can only see when you look back at where you come and see that this very crooked road you actually walked is straight and narrow. The way you can walk the straight and narrow path in the Hero's Quest is the open-hearted path, the path where you are moving into more and more connectivity, more and more in love with your environment ... more and more connection, losing all of that hyper-disconnection, that seems to be like a lot of connection, but it really is very superficial ... getting much-much deeper into it.
So, with this particular character what happens in the Northern Way ... the you begin ... typically on a journey like this, one begin alone. That isn't always the case, but usually on the spiritual path there is a point in time where it is useful to separate from all of the relational elements of the world to begin to "find yourself". All meditative traditions do that, whether you're sitting in an ashram or in a zen-do, you are essentially in a process where you are you are removing the inner active world and beginning to proceed by yourself. That is a little bit oxymoronic because you are never really alone - you're going deeper into a form of interconnectedness - but without all the relational complexity that we have in our marriages, friendships, families and business life. So, it's a time apart from all of that. That really is the first element. The second element is that you are in an environment (or one puts oneself into an environment) where your attention needs to become focused. The beautiful thing about the trip to the wilderness is that, that is automatic: if you don't go and focus your attention you die! Especially if you are alone in the wilderness: if you are not looking at every step, you die. It is really about every step, especially if you are there without telecommunication equipment, when you are there without anybody else, you are risking your life with every step.
Viktória: Exactly! I was thinking that while reading your book that I would be already dead, because you remember I was reading it with a broken leg. With that broken leg I was only allowed to survive because I was supported by society, But in the wilderness, exactly in that situation, that is it. So the focus that I lacked, for that minute, when I overlooked a root in the forest nearby, that would have been it in the real wilderness. That was a huge eye opener.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, attention becomes very important and in a meditative or Eastern path in this direction the first thing that meditation does, it forces you to focus your attention: on your breath, on an object, on a mantra, where the mind begins to quiet down. It begins to build a concentration in - as we now know from neuroscience - in your frontal cortex, the attention and will creating aspect of your mind. Then other parts of your mind begin to have not a lot of activation. So this attention is an exceptionally important thing.
The third thing, I think, which happens is that you do embrace pain. On a wilderness trip and also in lots of types of meditation, pain is a factor which becomes a teacher. You certainly don't want to put yourself in any kind of deliberate pain, but there is a type of pain ... there is also a distinction in yoga practice, where there is a pain that is really stretching you, and something that is hurting you. Things that you might have avoided in the past, because they were painful, things that you avoided, because they were painful to look at, become quite clear. So, the avoidance of what one might call a negative emotion, a pain, is just really a resistance - a resistance to what is. To begin to work through that resistance and embrace that resistance, I think, is a very important third step - and to welcome it! Welcome it as your friend along the path. In this particular place there was, of course, nature - this is something you and I hold deeply in common - nature is a fabulous teacher. There is a certain vibratory field when one gets deep out into nature. Nature is very coherent. [laughter] It had 13.7 billion years to get into balance. It's much more coherent than the human psyche is, at this particular point in time. So, it's coherent in an older way, but it's very much alive - and very coherent. It's just fabulous to be in there. There are scientific studies now that just walking 90 minutes in nature calms the nervous system down. One begins to vibrate on a different frequency, on an older frequency, that natural frequency that allows other things to happen. Oftentimes the spiritual journey is likened to climbing a mountain, like going to a mountain top and there is that aspect of the journey that you are thriving towards something higher, but I think a better metaphor is that it's more like you are descending into the ocean. It is one ocean that has many-many shores, billions of shores of the human experience, and that one begins to strip off the first layer of the ocean hall, of the distracting mind, getting into the next layer, which is the subtle nature of reality, that you and I have talked about many times: subtle nature, where archetypal forces, ways to experience deeper forces and powers ... that then descends into a quietness.
And then, there is a final, fourth stage, which was the boon in this book, and - I don't use this term, but the yogis call it turiya, which is simply a word which means the fourth. So, there're these four levels of consciousness: one is the waking state (that becomes calmer), there is the subtle stage (which is naturally associated with our dreaming environment, where we are open to many different forces), there is the causal level (the deep, quiet, dreamless sleep), and then below the causal level is this fourth level, what the yogis call turiya, which I called in this book the field. I think both are good names for it, but the experience of the field, which is the boon Charlie ultimately has on his journey is this sense of completely stepping out of one's previous identity, and coming into what is experienced as being inside of God. Elizabeth Gilbert in a very popular book "Eat, Pray, Love" talks about that experience that she had in an ashram in the middle portion of her journey. Suddenly you step outside yourself and "it's like hello," you are the drop that contains the ocean - you see yourself as something unique and beautiful, but intimately interconnected with everything. Western mystics call this extasis or extasy, which literally means to step outside oneself. And for this moment, that all the mystics fall silent in front of: indescribable, ineffable, cannot be contained in words, can only be pointed to, that experience is considered the parole of great prize. The thing that is sitting there all the time, and if then we can strip off all the "layers of the ocean" that we can be inside of it and know fundamentally who we are. And that is a great thing to know and then to start the re-creation of a life that is in the world and that is in balance and that is in harmony. So, that's really kind of the story, and the story is how Charlie is getting there, and how he gets all these layers stripped off, which includes his near-death experiences, reliance on nature, the body being very strong and it always comes, you know, as a surprise, when all that happens.
Viktória: It is also interesting that you are talking about the indescribable nature of that experience, which is also what people say who have had near-death experiences, or out-of-body experiences. They all say the same thing: that it is not describable in human words, and one reason is precisely because it is no longer part of the Hero's Journey, it is no longer a story we can tell, which has a beginning, a middle and an end, and can be followed with human logic, it is something beyond that. I think that is very important, because I think that is also the reason why we shy away from studying it academically, studying it scientifically, which in my opinion is a shame, because then we will always have to rely on religion, and we cannot go into it with a more curious scrutiny, if you want to put it like that, but we can still describe the way which leads us there, in more objective, more academic, more scientific terms, to help more people to understand it. Then we will also probably have to draw the limits of science to what is humanly perceivable and understandable and just acknowledge that there is something beyond that - which in my opinion is really beautiful. It's scary for some people, but I find that fantastic and comforting that there is something beyond what we know.
Ross Hostetter: That's something you and I have in common, and probably most listeners on this show have in common that we still believe there are things that are discoverable. Things that are not impossible, like I don't know, some sort of Godhead, and not the basic sort of things, like religious instructions and learning the books of the Bible, some revealed truth or something like that, but something that is difficult, but nor impossible. Something that is actually quite real, and isn't created out of one's imagination, but actually discovering something that is real: a real discovery. Talking about the scientific method and its usefulness: it is so immensely useful. Science right now is our main truth system. If we can see, however, all truth systems as limiting truths, whether it is some revealed truth from some sort of sacred text or religion, or science, but it is a limiting truth in a sense that it always sees things from a third person perspective: it's the "I-it" perspective. As we gaze deeply into the "it," something interesting is beginning to happen. It's the third person perspective, if we gaze deeply into it, the third person becomes a "we." We realise that the "it" and the "I" are very intimately connected. We're very intimately connected and we are in a relationship. Beyond that "we" state of relationship, that dynamic and polaric balance that happens in relationships, in the mystical experience it become the "I," a first person experience, where there is no separation, not an "it," not a "we," but an "I." We become or we experience ourselves, like the mystics say, as the drop which contains the sea. The whole sea is in the drop, the whole drop is in the sea. It's what the Buddhist call a non-dual experience.
Viktória: And from that perspective you can see the absurdity of that one drop trying to see the ocean from an "objective, outside perspective."
Ross Hostetter: Yes, that's right.
Viktória: We can't do that! And I think it's nice that science itself is discovering that. Modern physics is discovering that maybe, yes, the experiment depends on the experimenter. It's giving up that illusion that we are "outside" the universe and we can study it like we can study a little, artificial eco-system on my desk.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, yes, exactly right, and oftentimes we talk about the world appearing as an illusion, and I think that there's a little bit of a danger in that, because the physical world is of course quite real, but it is really a matter of one's perspective. So, when we are in the "I-it" perspective, that world is completely real. It's not an illusion, it's a reality that we are able to experience from that particular perspective.
Viktória: ... and we are part of it.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, and it is real. The states of consciousness really allow us to discover worlds that have different layers of reality in them. I think, as you do, Viktória, that this notion that the world must be seen from some sort of fixed perspective, and it's the only world that exists, is a big mistake. It's too small for the human being.
Viktória: It's a limiting perspective, isn't it?
Ross Hostetter: That's right.
Viktória: And it leaves the most interesting thing out of the equation, which is consciousness itself. It is our consciousness that I believes does play a great role in the universe.
Ross Hostetter: The interesting thing about that is that it's more accurately discovered than created. I believe these rounds or planes of consciousness are real, that they are actually things that are pre-existing, that can be discovered, not just something we are making up in our heads.
Viktória: There is actually quite a number of ... I once went through the trouble of looking it up ... there's quite a big number of physicists on the highest level, you know, scientists that got the Nobel Prize, that also sign that consciousness is fundamental in the universe. So you could study the entire universe on the assumption that consciousness plays a fundamental, creative part in it. It is interesting, because you said you wanted to talk about love, and I just came across a quote from Helen Wambach: she was the psychologist, maybe you heard of her, who did a lot to study the birth experience. She regressed people into the experience of how they were actually born, which is in itself a fascinating topic, you know ... they could sense the feeling of the mother, people in the room and all sorts of things like that. But she was the one, and that's why I remember her how who said that the first thing a client or patient who goes to a therapist is whether that therapist "loves me." I found that such a fascinating thing to write down, because it has been such a taboo to even say that word. You know, "love" was ... if you said that as a therapist, you were no longer objective, and you violated one of the sacred rules of being objective and not engaging in any kind of emotional relationship with the patient. But I think that is changing.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, I think that it is changing.
Viktória: People are discovering that love is a force. What would you say it is?
Ross Hostetter: We are moving into a new topic now. We are talking about love, which is of course, fundamentally interconnected with the previous one. The previous one is, in my experience, the most complete experience of love, in my life-time, because the field itself is experienced as love. That's its carrier frequency. That's how it is, the experience, this feeling of complete inter-connectedness with all things just as they are. In that experience we love as "God loves," which is you just love every hair on their head. That is ... you just love them. It is not that it's unconditional, because in a relationship, there are all kinds of conditions, if they're going to create something together, but that basic experience of simple witnessing of someone and you're just loving, you know [laughter] every hair on their head. It creates them a grounder of field, in which new things can happen, and new aspects of the self can be brought forward, which is of course what psychotherapy is all about. It is about getting rid of a bunch of old stuff that we don't need, witnessing it, letting it go, allowing something new to happen. So, you asked me what I think love is. What we were just talking about, is an aspect of it, but I think love, as I understand it at least today, is a complex. It's a complex that moves in a direction, towards a target, towards something, which then changes that target and sets up this reciprocal link in which we are being loved in return. That circle or cycle of love is another definition of the field, as it is experienced in the relational space.
Viktória: It almost sounds like you are saying that is the moving force or the moving energy within the field.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, moving energy within the field, so the therapist would be a great example, and the patients who want to know that they are loved. So, how do you know that someone is loved? First of all, there are aspects of it, there are character aspects: to be trustworthy, helpful, friendly, caring ... those character attributes are going to be in an internal check-box, that everyone has, to when they are evaluating a spouse or a business partner, whether they want to open themselves to someone and trust. To be trusted, you must be trustworthy. [laughter] So, there are aspects of character, not just like a language game or a trick: people know when you are trustworthy. So, character is part of the love complex. Then there's also capacity, as part of the love complex. Somebody ... using now this psychotherapist metaphor or model: they have capacities, they are trained. One of the things they are trained at is that they have the ability to train their attention, and they have the ability to put their attention to things that are unpleasant. Unpleasant people can come to that office and be loved - which is a hard thing for unpleasant people to have in the outer world, because they are creating all sorts of fields, which are throwing people off all the time for really good reasons. They are not that fun to be around, and they got a lot of crap that people don't want to deal with. So, there is a professional capacity which takes a will-force to love someone or certainly pay attention to. You know I was a mediator for many years in my life, I did over 3000 mediations in my legal context and that was a decision every day to be a witness to someone else's suffering. To be present with them, no matter what they were doing, even when they were biting you [laughter]...
Viktória: ... like an abused dog.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, exactly right. To do that, and then there are levels of consciousness, that come into that. There is a certain level of consciousness which just says: "ok, I'm listening to you, but then I will tell you everything that you need to do," you know, "I already know all the answers, so now I'm just gonna let you know." Then there is another level of consciousness, a kind of post-modern consciousness, that just says: "oh well, everything is ok, and I'm gonna listen to you, and everything, but it really doesn't move anywhere." Then there're other values and levels of consciousness that say: "hey look, we're gonna get through this stuff, but we're going to do this for something, not just to be free from something, or just free to do this circular relationship experience all the time, but to become free for something" [laughter]. You are free for something, that's the whole goal of what we are trying to create here. Love is a complex of different things and to the extent that the loving person is developed and coherent, in their character and in their capacity and their values and their level of consciousness that they are bringing into the situation, the chances of getting something really good are greatly expanded. I think that the next feature of love is that it moves towards a target which is set at an objective distance. In this metaphor it is the patient that is going to be changed, and it is interesting also in this complex that the "I" of the loving person (the therapist in this example) drops away and you become then completely attentive to what's happening. There was a beautiful book on stage fright, written by a guy called Declan Donnellan, and he teaches people how to get out of stage fright and it turns out that the whole thing about stage fright is this "I" business: "I don't know my lines, I'm not sure about who the character is, I'm not sure whether the lightening is right, I don't feel comfortable," and that's very dangerous. To drop all of that away, walk on stage, with all of your preparation, knowing your lines and being an actor and everything like that ... and look at Julia's lips. [Laughter.] Julia's lips want to be kissed! And if I want to kiss them, how do I have to change, in order to, you know, reach that target. To be open. And then that target is worked from a discernible distance, and you can see it changing, and the power of your love and attention begins to change that target and the reciprocal thing starts to happen. Julia opens up to you as Romeo [laughter].
Viktória: This's really beautiful, because if you look at all that you are saying: an old paradigm is moving into a knew. Once we had an old paradigm, where love was considered mainly as a feeling: someone makes me feel good and I love them. That paradigm now moves into a new paradigm, and I talk to many people lately like that. This is coming up. This is becoming global and universal hopefully that love is an attitude that is moving towards evolution. Together - that we share this commitment to something better and higher. It seems that everybody is saying this aspect more and more, that we commit, that we have that attitude: to move towards something higher and form a kind of coalition for that.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, isn't that a beautiful idea!
Viktória: I think it is a beautiful idea.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, and it is actually coming up. You're exactly right that there is a coalition of forces that are becoming free for something.
Viktória: Ross, let me ask you one more question, before we have to come to the end. Because when I started this podcast with multidimensional people, I was very interested in one aspect, which I believe so many people must be interested in, as well, because there're so many of us who discover the multidimensional world, non-physical realities and they discover that there is something more to life than we can see through our eyes. And I think that is because we are evolving: it is not just a religious thing anymore, but as you said, we are truly discovering that, we are truly a reality behind this all. Regarding evolution, I feel we are a bit like the first fish that tries to come out of the water to turn into a reptile, or something like that. So, we are in that phase, where we have to live in two worlds at the same time, sometimes having to use lungs, sometimes going back into water. A lot of people say they are still in an "old job" for example, that is very old paradigm, to support themselves and their families, but then they have that spiritual interest. There seem to be a bit of a contradiction, something hard to put into a harmonic system, you know, to experience those higher states, walking a spiritual path, but at the same time still live in the world, find a creative contribution ... if that makes sense.
Ross Hostetter: Well, you know, what you are talking about is, what is now emerging as the new type of occupation. There was an article about the post work world: what's actually happening is that most people in developed countries, all of the base-line jobs, factory work, milking cows, stuff like that, are all replaced by machines, and they are going to do that at a much quicker rate. Driving, which is an occupation for 20% of the male population, if you think of all the truck drivers, taxi drivers and everything like that, they think that is going to disappear in the next 20 years. Computerised cars will be much safer, so those sorts of jobs, will tend to disappear. But the way I would like for our listeners to think about this, that I oftentimes think there is a split-off between the roles we are being given in society and our spiritual longings and aspirations. So, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is familiar to very many people, is I think a good model. We do have base needs for security. What often happens, when you read books like mine, is that people give up their entire security structure. They give up their entire security structure and then they go off to the guru, or they go away on this quest, but that's ultimately not sustainable. People really can't live like that, we must have our basic bodily needs met. For more and more that's becoming less of a problem, not so worried about food so much, but we are very much worried about money, especially if we have children. They need resources, we need to bring them into the world, so you're right, people are then often trapped into these old ways. There are these stable ways to make money that don't really create anything new. They create copies of what's already been created, and sometimes much better copies, but if you are selling real estate, you are still selling real estate, whether it's a two-storey old house, or a five-storey modern house. It still is the reiteration of the same thing, and many jobs, like our jobs as lawyers, is really just about reshuffling the deck. We are really not creating anything new, keeping people's assets safe or doing litigation that is reshuffling the deck or doing contracts and all that. Just reshuffling the system, academia is like that, reshuffling ideas without doing anything new.
Viktória: [Laughter] I'm just hearing Raymond Moody, you know, who is doing all the near-death experience research, he said that very sobering statement which is so true: that all this discussion whether the near-death experience is really about the soul leaving the body or just a hallucination of the dying brain ... is the same discussion as they had in antique Greece. He was originally a philosopher, teaching Plato vs Aristotle and he said the discussion ever since is moving in circles. There's nothing new...
Ross Rostetter: Exactly! The one thing I want to tell our listeners is that there is no shame in that. We have to do what is necessary to meet our needs. If that is necessary for a certain time, because you are a mother, because you are a father, that needs to be done. But our soul, just as you said, wants - especially once you get glimpses of these higher states of consciousness that by the way really loosen up the psyche and see that there are other things that are possible - the soul then wants to move into a different level where we want to innovate and we want to create. The main desire, just as the main desire at one point was survival, getting physical food, getting relational food ... all these desires need to be met, but then there is a point in time when those desires are adequately met, and the main desire of the psyche/soul becomes to make a contribution, to have a creative novelty. And really, what evolution is, you just spoke about a few minutes ago, is basically the devotion of one's life's energy to an emergent novelty. So, how we can support ourselves in light of these this emergent novelties is our big crises. That's a big crises. That has not been fully worked out.
Viktória: I think it's also a goal-oriented thinking. Once we build up all those resources ... say, someone is in their 30s, 40s, they have a stable life, they have a house in which they can live and they have some form of income, maybe a family and it's all set ... then the question arises: what am I going to use these resources for? That's where new thinking could be useful: of course, we all need the resources, but then why do we have the resources?
Ross Hostetter: Yes, and the studies are now showing, certainly here in America: guess how most people are using their resources? They sit in front of flat screens and sleep. They look at a screen for 50 hours a week, and they sleep the rest of the time, they eat the rest of the time, and that is not enough for a sufficient life. This is a kind of sleepiness, which comes from having everything that we need, and then just wanting to have this next form of amusement, the next soccer (what you call the football) game, the next amusement, or getting into a drug state or drinking, or something like that. And that creates a life which is not sufficient.
Viktória: Exactly. People have the illusion that if they have enough to eat and a place to stay that's comfortable enough, than they done it. But that's just the beginning, isn't it?
Ross Hostetter: Yes, there's than the pain again of doing what you are attempting to do with this radio show, with your life and with your work, what I'm attempting to do with my book, with my field dynamics teaching, to bring some sort of a gift out into the world, and find a way that the world says "yes" to it, and begins then to support in a reciprocal cycle of getting and receiving. One of the things that I'm dedicated to helping people with is that process, because it is an entirely new skill-set. And it's a big deal to do it! It will not just happen...
Viktória: Yes, it is a big deal, and it is also something that people have to begin to share. You know this truth, I know this truth, and probably a lot of people who are listening right now to what we are saying also know this truth. That is the first step, but it is still private. When this becomes shared, put together, then we will reach what they call the tipping point. In order for that to occur, it's about sharing, putting all those little drops of water (who we are) together into an ocean.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, that is what sometimes some people call the insight-economy. The main thing, when all the other needs are met, is our personal evolution. It sounds narcissistic, and I think it is at the beginning, but then the main interest becomes the evolution of other people, and then of course, making a decision about this planet as a whole - because we are the keepers of the field. That's our role.
Viktória: I'm so thankful that you shared all these insights with us! It's been absolutely fascinating listening to you.
Ross Hostetter: It's been fantastic listening to you, Viktória. I think, we've gone a little bit beyond our time...
Viktória: ... we did, but we shared what we were here to share, and I really hope to talk to you another time in the future! In the meantime, I wish you well with all your projects, they will be on the website, so please send us your links to share, and I thank you for coming, everybody for listening and good-bye for today! Thank you.
Ross Hostetter: Thank you, Viktória.
Today I'm here with author Ross Hostetter, who has written a wonderful book called "The Keepers of the Field. An Invitation to the Unitive Life." Welcome, Ross!
Ross Hostetter: Thank you, Viktória. It's a pleasure to be here.
Viktória: Yes, and it's such a pleasure to have you! I might actually tell our audience how I found your book, because it is such a wonderful story of synchronicity itself. I was actually in bed with a broken leg, completely depressed about it, as I love the outdoors and a life full of adventures. I wanted to find something to read that takes away from that prison of my own room, and takes me on an adventure. I love the adventures that are of the spiritual kind, when you go on a hero's journey, as we put it these days, and you come back with a message that is telling us something about the inner world, something about the nature of reality. It is actually a type of book that is really hard to find; there are not many books which are really good in this genre. I came randomly across yours, and it was such a wonderful experience, because it did just that: it took me out of my little misery and took me to a wonderful journey into the wilderness, and also into the nature of our own lives and realities. Then I think it was the first time in my life that I felt compelled to write an email to an author that I just found, because it was just such a magic adventure! And I learned that this adventure was actually quite real, wasn't it, Ross, something that you based upon your own experiences in the wilderness - in Canada, was it?
Ross Hostetter: That's exactly right, Viktória, yes and you were one of my very first readers and your email and our subsequent friendship that's developed has been just a wonderful jewel, just so encouraging. You know when you write these things you never really know who is going to read them and writing a spiritual adventure story, or a piece of visionary fiction as this is called, is an own walk of faith, a walk of risk and trust and transformation - for me and I think any author who undertakes this sort of thing.
Viktória: Absolutely ... and what made you write that book? What was that experience?
Ross Hostetter: Well, there was really a compulsion to write the book based upon some experiences that I had as a very young man. I was at that time a professional wilderness guide in the North Woods of Canada. Earth that we were walking that time, Gaia, was a Northern belt of wilderness that surrounds the world. It's a very rugged landscape carved out by glaciers. It's full of beautiful lakes, clear running streams, water that you can simply dip your cup into and drink, but it's also a very harsh climate, a very sparse climate. It is one that requires a great deal of attention to be able to live in successfully. In many ways it is the Northern journey, as you can think of in terms of different spiritual paths, in different directions. A guy named Bill Plotkin did that in some of his soul work (his book is called "Nature and the Human Soul"): South, East and West. The South is usually associated with all that warmth and sensuality. The East is the land of the gurus and of deep-deep state experiences. The West: philosophy and the mind and the North is its own cardinal direction, which is the direction of the cold, the clarity, the austere and also things are quite simple and beautiful. It is a country that strips everything away which is not necessary, so that you might find "the One" or something of great value. That is what the Northern Journey is all about, also what the Hero's Journey is all about. The Hero's Journey begins with the fool. The fool is full of the unbridled optimism and trust that if we allow ourselves to follow our best impulses, sometimes impulses that seems to be coming from beyond ourselves, sometimes we go through a process, where we meet friends and guides and have experiences that helps us grow and it always leads to a form of deconstruction, where the old self is dropped away and a new possibilities emerges.
Viktória: I found it very powerful, symbolic in your book: you're writing about ... it's a lawyer who gets on this adventure and he carries so much stuff with him at the beginning, doesn't he?
Ross Hostetter: That's right.
Viktória: He buys all this high-tech equipment, because he believes he will need this and he will need that, and at end of the day he cannot carry it and gets rid of more and more of the stuff. At the end it's just him and he trusts his environment more and more. At the beginning he needs disinfectant tablets to make the water clean and these kind of things, but at the end he is just drinking like every other animal from nature and he is fine. This is so powerful I think because we live in a society, don't we, in which we all believe we need so much that we become slaves of needing a lot of money, needing a lot of machines and material things. Probably the more we rely on those things, the more we forget how to trust the universe to give us everything that we need.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, I don't think there is any question, Viktória. As you are stating so eloquently, we do live in a hyper-world, in a world of overstimulation and that is not necessarily a bad thing, because that world is immensely creative. We have immensely creative possibilities: more and more people are creating more and more things all the time. I think one of the dangers of the hyper-world is that we become very distracted and thinking we are doing something different every day, while we are actually repeating the same consumption cycles: watching the same websites, watching same movies, getting on the same Facebook loop, where our attention becomes very distracted and diffused. We don't have the power to concentrate it to really create something, whether that will be an artefact or a life or love itself or a state that we could begin to generate a coherent waveform that actually has that condensed power to work in the world as love ... which is something that I want to talk to you about, you know what love is, and how we can begin to put out a coherent waveform. But before we get to that, I do want to talk a little bit about the Hero's Journey and the boon that this character Charlie - the protagonist in my book - discovered, which was the same boon or gift that I discovered when I was out in the wilderness. The notion of the Hero's Journey is simply this: you did begin this process ... it looks like you don't know where you're going, it looks like you are wandering, but you are actually following what you might call a red thread - the thread of something you can only see when you look back at where you come and see that this very crooked road you actually walked is straight and narrow. The way you can walk the straight and narrow path in the Hero's Quest is the open-hearted path, the path where you are moving into more and more connectivity, more and more in love with your environment ... more and more connection, losing all of that hyper-disconnection, that seems to be like a lot of connection, but it really is very superficial ... getting much-much deeper into it.
So, with this particular character what happens in the Northern Way ... the you begin ... typically on a journey like this, one begin alone. That isn't always the case, but usually on the spiritual path there is a point in time where it is useful to separate from all of the relational elements of the world to begin to "find yourself". All meditative traditions do that, whether you're sitting in an ashram or in a zen-do, you are essentially in a process where you are you are removing the inner active world and beginning to proceed by yourself. That is a little bit oxymoronic because you are never really alone - you're going deeper into a form of interconnectedness - but without all the relational complexity that we have in our marriages, friendships, families and business life. So, it's a time apart from all of that. That really is the first element. The second element is that you are in an environment (or one puts oneself into an environment) where your attention needs to become focused. The beautiful thing about the trip to the wilderness is that, that is automatic: if you don't go and focus your attention you die! Especially if you are alone in the wilderness: if you are not looking at every step, you die. It is really about every step, especially if you are there without telecommunication equipment, when you are there without anybody else, you are risking your life with every step.
Viktória: Exactly! I was thinking that while reading your book that I would be already dead, because you remember I was reading it with a broken leg. With that broken leg I was only allowed to survive because I was supported by society, But in the wilderness, exactly in that situation, that is it. So the focus that I lacked, for that minute, when I overlooked a root in the forest nearby, that would have been it in the real wilderness. That was a huge eye opener.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, attention becomes very important and in a meditative or Eastern path in this direction the first thing that meditation does, it forces you to focus your attention: on your breath, on an object, on a mantra, where the mind begins to quiet down. It begins to build a concentration in - as we now know from neuroscience - in your frontal cortex, the attention and will creating aspect of your mind. Then other parts of your mind begin to have not a lot of activation. So this attention is an exceptionally important thing.
The third thing, I think, which happens is that you do embrace pain. On a wilderness trip and also in lots of types of meditation, pain is a factor which becomes a teacher. You certainly don't want to put yourself in any kind of deliberate pain, but there is a type of pain ... there is also a distinction in yoga practice, where there is a pain that is really stretching you, and something that is hurting you. Things that you might have avoided in the past, because they were painful, things that you avoided, because they were painful to look at, become quite clear. So, the avoidance of what one might call a negative emotion, a pain, is just really a resistance - a resistance to what is. To begin to work through that resistance and embrace that resistance, I think, is a very important third step - and to welcome it! Welcome it as your friend along the path. In this particular place there was, of course, nature - this is something you and I hold deeply in common - nature is a fabulous teacher. There is a certain vibratory field when one gets deep out into nature. Nature is very coherent. [laughter] It had 13.7 billion years to get into balance. It's much more coherent than the human psyche is, at this particular point in time. So, it's coherent in an older way, but it's very much alive - and very coherent. It's just fabulous to be in there. There are scientific studies now that just walking 90 minutes in nature calms the nervous system down. One begins to vibrate on a different frequency, on an older frequency, that natural frequency that allows other things to happen. Oftentimes the spiritual journey is likened to climbing a mountain, like going to a mountain top and there is that aspect of the journey that you are thriving towards something higher, but I think a better metaphor is that it's more like you are descending into the ocean. It is one ocean that has many-many shores, billions of shores of the human experience, and that one begins to strip off the first layer of the ocean hall, of the distracting mind, getting into the next layer, which is the subtle nature of reality, that you and I have talked about many times: subtle nature, where archetypal forces, ways to experience deeper forces and powers ... that then descends into a quietness.
And then, there is a final, fourth stage, which was the boon in this book, and - I don't use this term, but the yogis call it turiya, which is simply a word which means the fourth. So, there're these four levels of consciousness: one is the waking state (that becomes calmer), there is the subtle stage (which is naturally associated with our dreaming environment, where we are open to many different forces), there is the causal level (the deep, quiet, dreamless sleep), and then below the causal level is this fourth level, what the yogis call turiya, which I called in this book the field. I think both are good names for it, but the experience of the field, which is the boon Charlie ultimately has on his journey is this sense of completely stepping out of one's previous identity, and coming into what is experienced as being inside of God. Elizabeth Gilbert in a very popular book "Eat, Pray, Love" talks about that experience that she had in an ashram in the middle portion of her journey. Suddenly you step outside yourself and "it's like hello," you are the drop that contains the ocean - you see yourself as something unique and beautiful, but intimately interconnected with everything. Western mystics call this extasis or extasy, which literally means to step outside oneself. And for this moment, that all the mystics fall silent in front of: indescribable, ineffable, cannot be contained in words, can only be pointed to, that experience is considered the parole of great prize. The thing that is sitting there all the time, and if then we can strip off all the "layers of the ocean" that we can be inside of it and know fundamentally who we are. And that is a great thing to know and then to start the re-creation of a life that is in the world and that is in balance and that is in harmony. So, that's really kind of the story, and the story is how Charlie is getting there, and how he gets all these layers stripped off, which includes his near-death experiences, reliance on nature, the body being very strong and it always comes, you know, as a surprise, when all that happens.
Viktória: It is also interesting that you are talking about the indescribable nature of that experience, which is also what people say who have had near-death experiences, or out-of-body experiences. They all say the same thing: that it is not describable in human words, and one reason is precisely because it is no longer part of the Hero's Journey, it is no longer a story we can tell, which has a beginning, a middle and an end, and can be followed with human logic, it is something beyond that. I think that is very important, because I think that is also the reason why we shy away from studying it academically, studying it scientifically, which in my opinion is a shame, because then we will always have to rely on religion, and we cannot go into it with a more curious scrutiny, if you want to put it like that, but we can still describe the way which leads us there, in more objective, more academic, more scientific terms, to help more people to understand it. Then we will also probably have to draw the limits of science to what is humanly perceivable and understandable and just acknowledge that there is something beyond that - which in my opinion is really beautiful. It's scary for some people, but I find that fantastic and comforting that there is something beyond what we know.
Ross Hostetter: That's something you and I have in common, and probably most listeners on this show have in common that we still believe there are things that are discoverable. Things that are not impossible, like I don't know, some sort of Godhead, and not the basic sort of things, like religious instructions and learning the books of the Bible, some revealed truth or something like that, but something that is difficult, but nor impossible. Something that is actually quite real, and isn't created out of one's imagination, but actually discovering something that is real: a real discovery. Talking about the scientific method and its usefulness: it is so immensely useful. Science right now is our main truth system. If we can see, however, all truth systems as limiting truths, whether it is some revealed truth from some sort of sacred text or religion, or science, but it is a limiting truth in a sense that it always sees things from a third person perspective: it's the "I-it" perspective. As we gaze deeply into the "it," something interesting is beginning to happen. It's the third person perspective, if we gaze deeply into it, the third person becomes a "we." We realise that the "it" and the "I" are very intimately connected. We're very intimately connected and we are in a relationship. Beyond that "we" state of relationship, that dynamic and polaric balance that happens in relationships, in the mystical experience it become the "I," a first person experience, where there is no separation, not an "it," not a "we," but an "I." We become or we experience ourselves, like the mystics say, as the drop which contains the sea. The whole sea is in the drop, the whole drop is in the sea. It's what the Buddhist call a non-dual experience.
Viktória: And from that perspective you can see the absurdity of that one drop trying to see the ocean from an "objective, outside perspective."
Ross Hostetter: Yes, that's right.
Viktória: We can't do that! And I think it's nice that science itself is discovering that. Modern physics is discovering that maybe, yes, the experiment depends on the experimenter. It's giving up that illusion that we are "outside" the universe and we can study it like we can study a little, artificial eco-system on my desk.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, yes, exactly right, and oftentimes we talk about the world appearing as an illusion, and I think that there's a little bit of a danger in that, because the physical world is of course quite real, but it is really a matter of one's perspective. So, when we are in the "I-it" perspective, that world is completely real. It's not an illusion, it's a reality that we are able to experience from that particular perspective.
Viktória: ... and we are part of it.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, and it is real. The states of consciousness really allow us to discover worlds that have different layers of reality in them. I think, as you do, Viktória, that this notion that the world must be seen from some sort of fixed perspective, and it's the only world that exists, is a big mistake. It's too small for the human being.
Viktória: It's a limiting perspective, isn't it?
Ross Hostetter: That's right.
Viktória: And it leaves the most interesting thing out of the equation, which is consciousness itself. It is our consciousness that I believes does play a great role in the universe.
Ross Hostetter: The interesting thing about that is that it's more accurately discovered than created. I believe these rounds or planes of consciousness are real, that they are actually things that are pre-existing, that can be discovered, not just something we are making up in our heads.
Viktória: There is actually quite a number of ... I once went through the trouble of looking it up ... there's quite a big number of physicists on the highest level, you know, scientists that got the Nobel Prize, that also sign that consciousness is fundamental in the universe. So you could study the entire universe on the assumption that consciousness plays a fundamental, creative part in it. It is interesting, because you said you wanted to talk about love, and I just came across a quote from Helen Wambach: she was the psychologist, maybe you heard of her, who did a lot to study the birth experience. She regressed people into the experience of how they were actually born, which is in itself a fascinating topic, you know ... they could sense the feeling of the mother, people in the room and all sorts of things like that. But she was the one, and that's why I remember her how who said that the first thing a client or patient who goes to a therapist is whether that therapist "loves me." I found that such a fascinating thing to write down, because it has been such a taboo to even say that word. You know, "love" was ... if you said that as a therapist, you were no longer objective, and you violated one of the sacred rules of being objective and not engaging in any kind of emotional relationship with the patient. But I think that is changing.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, I think that it is changing.
Viktória: People are discovering that love is a force. What would you say it is?
Ross Hostetter: We are moving into a new topic now. We are talking about love, which is of course, fundamentally interconnected with the previous one. The previous one is, in my experience, the most complete experience of love, in my life-time, because the field itself is experienced as love. That's its carrier frequency. That's how it is, the experience, this feeling of complete inter-connectedness with all things just as they are. In that experience we love as "God loves," which is you just love every hair on their head. That is ... you just love them. It is not that it's unconditional, because in a relationship, there are all kinds of conditions, if they're going to create something together, but that basic experience of simple witnessing of someone and you're just loving, you know [laughter] every hair on their head. It creates them a grounder of field, in which new things can happen, and new aspects of the self can be brought forward, which is of course what psychotherapy is all about. It is about getting rid of a bunch of old stuff that we don't need, witnessing it, letting it go, allowing something new to happen. So, you asked me what I think love is. What we were just talking about, is an aspect of it, but I think love, as I understand it at least today, is a complex. It's a complex that moves in a direction, towards a target, towards something, which then changes that target and sets up this reciprocal link in which we are being loved in return. That circle or cycle of love is another definition of the field, as it is experienced in the relational space.
Viktória: It almost sounds like you are saying that is the moving force or the moving energy within the field.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, moving energy within the field, so the therapist would be a great example, and the patients who want to know that they are loved. So, how do you know that someone is loved? First of all, there are aspects of it, there are character aspects: to be trustworthy, helpful, friendly, caring ... those character attributes are going to be in an internal check-box, that everyone has, to when they are evaluating a spouse or a business partner, whether they want to open themselves to someone and trust. To be trusted, you must be trustworthy. [laughter] So, there are aspects of character, not just like a language game or a trick: people know when you are trustworthy. So, character is part of the love complex. Then there's also capacity, as part of the love complex. Somebody ... using now this psychotherapist metaphor or model: they have capacities, they are trained. One of the things they are trained at is that they have the ability to train their attention, and they have the ability to put their attention to things that are unpleasant. Unpleasant people can come to that office and be loved - which is a hard thing for unpleasant people to have in the outer world, because they are creating all sorts of fields, which are throwing people off all the time for really good reasons. They are not that fun to be around, and they got a lot of crap that people don't want to deal with. So, there is a professional capacity which takes a will-force to love someone or certainly pay attention to. You know I was a mediator for many years in my life, I did over 3000 mediations in my legal context and that was a decision every day to be a witness to someone else's suffering. To be present with them, no matter what they were doing, even when they were biting you [laughter]...
Viktória: ... like an abused dog.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, exactly right. To do that, and then there are levels of consciousness, that come into that. There is a certain level of consciousness which just says: "ok, I'm listening to you, but then I will tell you everything that you need to do," you know, "I already know all the answers, so now I'm just gonna let you know." Then there is another level of consciousness, a kind of post-modern consciousness, that just says: "oh well, everything is ok, and I'm gonna listen to you, and everything, but it really doesn't move anywhere." Then there're other values and levels of consciousness that say: "hey look, we're gonna get through this stuff, but we're going to do this for something, not just to be free from something, or just free to do this circular relationship experience all the time, but to become free for something" [laughter]. You are free for something, that's the whole goal of what we are trying to create here. Love is a complex of different things and to the extent that the loving person is developed and coherent, in their character and in their capacity and their values and their level of consciousness that they are bringing into the situation, the chances of getting something really good are greatly expanded. I think that the next feature of love is that it moves towards a target which is set at an objective distance. In this metaphor it is the patient that is going to be changed, and it is interesting also in this complex that the "I" of the loving person (the therapist in this example) drops away and you become then completely attentive to what's happening. There was a beautiful book on stage fright, written by a guy called Declan Donnellan, and he teaches people how to get out of stage fright and it turns out that the whole thing about stage fright is this "I" business: "I don't know my lines, I'm not sure about who the character is, I'm not sure whether the lightening is right, I don't feel comfortable," and that's very dangerous. To drop all of that away, walk on stage, with all of your preparation, knowing your lines and being an actor and everything like that ... and look at Julia's lips. [Laughter.] Julia's lips want to be kissed! And if I want to kiss them, how do I have to change, in order to, you know, reach that target. To be open. And then that target is worked from a discernible distance, and you can see it changing, and the power of your love and attention begins to change that target and the reciprocal thing starts to happen. Julia opens up to you as Romeo [laughter].
Viktória: This's really beautiful, because if you look at all that you are saying: an old paradigm is moving into a knew. Once we had an old paradigm, where love was considered mainly as a feeling: someone makes me feel good and I love them. That paradigm now moves into a new paradigm, and I talk to many people lately like that. This is coming up. This is becoming global and universal hopefully that love is an attitude that is moving towards evolution. Together - that we share this commitment to something better and higher. It seems that everybody is saying this aspect more and more, that we commit, that we have that attitude: to move towards something higher and form a kind of coalition for that.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, isn't that a beautiful idea!
Viktória: I think it is a beautiful idea.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, and it is actually coming up. You're exactly right that there is a coalition of forces that are becoming free for something.
Viktória: Ross, let me ask you one more question, before we have to come to the end. Because when I started this podcast with multidimensional people, I was very interested in one aspect, which I believe so many people must be interested in, as well, because there're so many of us who discover the multidimensional world, non-physical realities and they discover that there is something more to life than we can see through our eyes. And I think that is because we are evolving: it is not just a religious thing anymore, but as you said, we are truly discovering that, we are truly a reality behind this all. Regarding evolution, I feel we are a bit like the first fish that tries to come out of the water to turn into a reptile, or something like that. So, we are in that phase, where we have to live in two worlds at the same time, sometimes having to use lungs, sometimes going back into water. A lot of people say they are still in an "old job" for example, that is very old paradigm, to support themselves and their families, but then they have that spiritual interest. There seem to be a bit of a contradiction, something hard to put into a harmonic system, you know, to experience those higher states, walking a spiritual path, but at the same time still live in the world, find a creative contribution ... if that makes sense.
Ross Hostetter: Well, you know, what you are talking about is, what is now emerging as the new type of occupation. There was an article about the post work world: what's actually happening is that most people in developed countries, all of the base-line jobs, factory work, milking cows, stuff like that, are all replaced by machines, and they are going to do that at a much quicker rate. Driving, which is an occupation for 20% of the male population, if you think of all the truck drivers, taxi drivers and everything like that, they think that is going to disappear in the next 20 years. Computerised cars will be much safer, so those sorts of jobs, will tend to disappear. But the way I would like for our listeners to think about this, that I oftentimes think there is a split-off between the roles we are being given in society and our spiritual longings and aspirations. So, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is familiar to very many people, is I think a good model. We do have base needs for security. What often happens, when you read books like mine, is that people give up their entire security structure. They give up their entire security structure and then they go off to the guru, or they go away on this quest, but that's ultimately not sustainable. People really can't live like that, we must have our basic bodily needs met. For more and more that's becoming less of a problem, not so worried about food so much, but we are very much worried about money, especially if we have children. They need resources, we need to bring them into the world, so you're right, people are then often trapped into these old ways. There are these stable ways to make money that don't really create anything new. They create copies of what's already been created, and sometimes much better copies, but if you are selling real estate, you are still selling real estate, whether it's a two-storey old house, or a five-storey modern house. It still is the reiteration of the same thing, and many jobs, like our jobs as lawyers, is really just about reshuffling the deck. We are really not creating anything new, keeping people's assets safe or doing litigation that is reshuffling the deck or doing contracts and all that. Just reshuffling the system, academia is like that, reshuffling ideas without doing anything new.
Viktória: [Laughter] I'm just hearing Raymond Moody, you know, who is doing all the near-death experience research, he said that very sobering statement which is so true: that all this discussion whether the near-death experience is really about the soul leaving the body or just a hallucination of the dying brain ... is the same discussion as they had in antique Greece. He was originally a philosopher, teaching Plato vs Aristotle and he said the discussion ever since is moving in circles. There's nothing new...
Ross Rostetter: Exactly! The one thing I want to tell our listeners is that there is no shame in that. We have to do what is necessary to meet our needs. If that is necessary for a certain time, because you are a mother, because you are a father, that needs to be done. But our soul, just as you said, wants - especially once you get glimpses of these higher states of consciousness that by the way really loosen up the psyche and see that there are other things that are possible - the soul then wants to move into a different level where we want to innovate and we want to create. The main desire, just as the main desire at one point was survival, getting physical food, getting relational food ... all these desires need to be met, but then there is a point in time when those desires are adequately met, and the main desire of the psyche/soul becomes to make a contribution, to have a creative novelty. And really, what evolution is, you just spoke about a few minutes ago, is basically the devotion of one's life's energy to an emergent novelty. So, how we can support ourselves in light of these this emergent novelties is our big crises. That's a big crises. That has not been fully worked out.
Viktória: I think it's also a goal-oriented thinking. Once we build up all those resources ... say, someone is in their 30s, 40s, they have a stable life, they have a house in which they can live and they have some form of income, maybe a family and it's all set ... then the question arises: what am I going to use these resources for? That's where new thinking could be useful: of course, we all need the resources, but then why do we have the resources?
Ross Hostetter: Yes, and the studies are now showing, certainly here in America: guess how most people are using their resources? They sit in front of flat screens and sleep. They look at a screen for 50 hours a week, and they sleep the rest of the time, they eat the rest of the time, and that is not enough for a sufficient life. This is a kind of sleepiness, which comes from having everything that we need, and then just wanting to have this next form of amusement, the next soccer (what you call the football) game, the next amusement, or getting into a drug state or drinking, or something like that. And that creates a life which is not sufficient.
Viktória: Exactly. People have the illusion that if they have enough to eat and a place to stay that's comfortable enough, than they done it. But that's just the beginning, isn't it?
Ross Hostetter: Yes, there's than the pain again of doing what you are attempting to do with this radio show, with your life and with your work, what I'm attempting to do with my book, with my field dynamics teaching, to bring some sort of a gift out into the world, and find a way that the world says "yes" to it, and begins then to support in a reciprocal cycle of getting and receiving. One of the things that I'm dedicated to helping people with is that process, because it is an entirely new skill-set. And it's a big deal to do it! It will not just happen...
Viktória: Yes, it is a big deal, and it is also something that people have to begin to share. You know this truth, I know this truth, and probably a lot of people who are listening right now to what we are saying also know this truth. That is the first step, but it is still private. When this becomes shared, put together, then we will reach what they call the tipping point. In order for that to occur, it's about sharing, putting all those little drops of water (who we are) together into an ocean.
Ross Hostetter: Yes, that is what sometimes some people call the insight-economy. The main thing, when all the other needs are met, is our personal evolution. It sounds narcissistic, and I think it is at the beginning, but then the main interest becomes the evolution of other people, and then of course, making a decision about this planet as a whole - because we are the keepers of the field. That's our role.
Viktória: I'm so thankful that you shared all these insights with us! It's been absolutely fascinating listening to you.
Ross Hostetter: It's been fantastic listening to you, Viktória. I think, we've gone a little bit beyond our time...
Viktória: ... we did, but we shared what we were here to share, and I really hope to talk to you another time in the future! In the meantime, I wish you well with all your projects, they will be on the website, so please send us your links to share, and I thank you for coming, everybody for listening and good-bye for today! Thank you.
Ross Hostetter: Thank you, Viktória.