Exclusive Interview with:
Hale Dwoskin

"Love is not the answer or the question.

It's just who you are."

Hi, Hale, how you doing?

HALE DWOSKIN: I’m great. How are you both?

We’re fantastic. We’ve got Lester here in spirit, right?

Absolutely.

Our first question is how did you get involved in a spiritual path? What was your “ah-ha” moment? And then, tell us how you met Lester.

Sure. You know, I don’t remember the “ah ha” that made me go in a spiritual direction. I’ve been on the path for so long, it’s hard to remember. I started actively seeking in my early teens and I was attracted to both Eastern and Western disciplines. I did yoga, tai chi, various forms of meditation and then from the West I did rebirthing and many other seminars.

I met Lester Levinson, the co-author of the book, back in 1976 at a seminar I had organized for a man named Leonard Orr. He was the man who founded rebirthing.

I didn’t really notice Lester in the seminar, but I was fortunate enough to go out to lunch with him and a few other organizers of the seminar. Something about Lester just deeply moved me, because I had met many teachers, from the East and West, from different traditions. Many of them had some incredible things to say. I gained tremendous benefit, but the one thing that was universal about all the teachers I had met up until that point is that they were still seeking themselves. They were a little bit ahead of me, maybe, in certain areas, but they obviously were still seeking. They weren’t complete.

When I met Lester, the first thing that struck me is I could tell that seeking had ended many, many years ago. The second thing was that he was in a state of profound peace that I could tell was unshakable. There was also this incredible wealth radiating off of him. One thing that was very unique compared to every other teacher I’d met (although I’d met loving teachers and peaceful teachers before), is there was no ego. He treated everyone, including me, a total stranger – and for the next 18 years when I worked with him, I never saw this waver – totally as his equal. He never either talked up or down to anyone. When I met Lester, I felt his presence, I noticed how he responded to other people and I could tell that he was a living embodiment of that which I had been seeking. I decided to take the Sedona Method Course that was being held that following weekend, even though I had no idea what it was all about. What Lester always said about his teachings was that you go to this classroom, you sit around the table and everybody releases. I had no idea what that was. This was back in the 70s.

It wasn’t as popular as it is now. Now there are hundreds of disciplines that focus on getting you to let go. None of them as simple and as direct as what we do and some of them are even offshoots of what we do, but at the time I had no idea of what he was even talking about. What is releasing? But I didn’t really care. I figured if it helped me to even get some of what he was the living embodiment of, I had to investigate. I knew I had to at least explore this particular option and since then I’ve never wavered.

I’ve been involved in this work since 1976 and it’s been a progression of feeling happier, calmer, more alive, more at ease and more capable of really sharing this work with others and helping others achieve the same degree of happiness and calmness and peace. So I live most of the time in a very profound state of happiness no matter what’s going on around me, my mind is almost completely quiet. I still have a tiny bit of seeking left. It’s here some of the time and not here other times.

This work, part of which is in Happiness is Free, is based on the direct inspiration that I receive from Lester and my own personal experience. The chapters in the book are comprised of a combination of Lester’s teachings to small groups and me giving exercises and interpretations of how it all fits together.

Excellent. We liked Lester’s story in the beginning, about how he was very ill, not on this path. Can you relate a little of his life story?

Actually I don’t think he shared his story when I first met him. I learned about it on the weekend, which he didn’t, by the way, teach. Even back then, his organization was relatively new but he still wasn’t leading the seminars. He let other people do that because one of the things unique about Lester is, most people who achieve a state of consciousness that he lived in continuously for 42 years, end up being, whether they want to or not, turned into a guru by their devotees or disciples or followers. But Lester was so anti that, not in a negative way or a resistant way. He felt that people really needed to help themselves. So he always tried to distill his teachings into systems and tools that people could use on their own, without needing any exterior assistance.

Back in 1952, Lester was sent home from a second coronary thrombosis which was one of many illness that he was suffering. He was your typical Type A, hard driving personality. He had studied all the fields of man, including psychology. In fact, he had four years of psychoanalysis with a associate of Freud and after four years he got discharged. And the man said “Lester, I’m sorry. Some people just can’t be helped.”

That’s how far gone he was. He had many other physical problems, but when the doctor sent him home to die, it was like a wake up call. After he rummaged through his library for a couple of days and only felt worse, he realized that “Lester, for a smart boy, you are stupid, stupid, stupid. If it had been in anything studied before, the answer you’re looking for, you wouldn’t be in this state.” So he decided to drop everything he had experienced from before. And fortunately for us, he had no metaphysical or spiritual background. He didn’t have a lot of baggage to drop there, so he could get his own direct experience. He went back to the lamp within and he started asking himself questions, like, “Who am I? What’s this world? What is happiness? What’s this all about?” He started getting some very profound answers but the thing that he found the most useful is what came upon him, that we are all unlimited beings, limited only by the concepts of limitation that we hold in mind. These concepts of limitation manifest consciously as our unwanted thoughts and feelings. We all have a natural ability to release these unconscious and conscious thoughts and feelings.

He used it intensely on himself over a three-month period and he went from this physical and emotional basket case to a state of peacefulness that he lived another 42 years in. He has been called sahaja samadhi, although he didn’t have the term at that time. It’s the peace that surpasses all understanding where there is complete worldly awareness and ability to function, yet at the same time, there’s complete, profound, unshakable peace. He lived in that state 24 hours a day.

Did Lester meditate?

No. Lester never did a meditative practice. Meditation wasn’t part of this. Just using this tool to examine his past and let go of the obstructions that he had put in the flow of life, in his particular life stream, was the only work that he did on himself, combined with very active self-inquiry. But he didn’t even know what self-inquiry was… because this all happened so quickly to him without a teacher. The only desire he was left with after this unfoldment was to help the rest of us discover what he had discovered.

So he started to read other spiritual teachers to see if he could find a language to describe what he had experienced. He tried the Bible but he felt it was a little too codified and he studied a few of the other teachers from the East and the West. One of the ones that he liked the very best, because he thought that it was the clearest and closest to his teachings, was a teacher from the East called Ramana Maharshi. Ramana is the one who popularized the technique of self-inquiry and Lester, without realizing what he had been doing, was actually doing a form of self-inquiry. In a way, our teachings are basically Westernized self-inquiry. It’s a tool for inquiry that helps dissolve the mind.

That’s basically what’s taught in our seminars, books and tapes, including Happiness is Free.

Ramana Maharshi is really considered one of the strongest avatars that’s ever lived. We visited his ashram. Devotees come from all over the planet to touch into that energy, to understand the teachings and just be in that essence.

Coming back to Lester, when he’s telling his story, he was finding out about happiness. Here’s a man who’s got all these degrees, he was a physicist for many years. Obviously he had a very inquiring mind and inquiring minds always want to know. When he went on his search and he was first discovering about the essence of loving, “I concluded that my happiness equated to my loving. If I could increase my loving, then I could increase my happiness... I’ve got to go a step further. It’s not about what I get from anybody else, it’s what I give to them.” Then he said, “I can do this with everybody.” Every single person. We can imagine someone in your face about something and being the most obstinate person on the planet. How can you maintain that happiness quotient inside of yourself? How can you maintain that loving stance? He indicated that that was such a revelation for him.

The key of loving is a very profound key and it’s something that a lot of people do talk about. Every church says love thy brother as thyself. The problem is we don’t know how to do that and that’s where Lester’s teachings come in. It‘s that every feeling that we have, except love itself, is a non-love feeling and is therefore varying degrees of hatefulness, and as you dissolve your non-love feelings you discover that love is your basic nature. Love is not the answer or the question. It’s just who you are. When you let go of your hatefulness, no matter what form it’s coming in, the more you do that, the more you feel love, the more you rest as love, the more you experience love in every circumstance, even when you are receiving external opposition or things don’t go your way.

The core in everyone is goodness, there is love. It’s just covered up. The light isn’t as bright in some people, but it’s there.

Absolutely. Love is both the universal solvent of our limitations but it’s also the enlivening power that flows directly from the self. Love is the energy that flows through every phenomena in order for it to exist, and when the love disappears completely, we call that death. But the love is always there, even in a mass murderer. It may be pretty covered over, but it’s still there.

What I’d love to do is give a technique that would help people experience this directly for themselves.

OK. That would be great.

One of the things I discovered as I worked with people with letting go, is there’s a very interesting thing, a phenomenon or a way the mind functions, that can be used to dissolve our sense of limitation. Most people, especially people on the path like us, have heard it’s not good to judge. You shouldn’t judge others. They talk about it in churches, in temples and in mosques. They talk about it in most self-improvement techniques. But the problem is the mind is an instrument of separation and the way it does that is through judging and it can’t turn that off. And if you try to judge your judging, what happens basically is you have judgments about your judgments. Then you judge your judgments about the judgments and it spirals out of control.

What you can do is allow the mind to do what it’s already doing, but expand it just enough so it collapses in on itself or dissolves. And, because everything that we judge as good or bad arises together, everything in life arises in duality or pairs. If you have in, you have out, if you have right, you have wrong, if you have happiness, you have sadness. If you have love you have hate. But we live life as though that isn’t true. We try to cling to what we judge as good and of course that slips away. We resist that which we judge as bad and that persists. But what happens if you embrace both sides is, like bringing matter and anti-matter together or positive and negative charge. There’s either an instantaneous or gradual dissolving that happens where you’re just left with your loving presence. And so, the way to do this is to simply, gently shift your consciousness back and forth between the two sides of any one of these polarities that we find ourselves locked into. Since we’ve been talking about love, why don’t we do a technique specifically on that.

The polarity that I’d like us to work on is worded strongly and I think it will help people get more out of doing this particular release. So I’ll talk us through it. What I’ll do is invite us to experience both sides, one after the other, several times and just notice what happens inside. If you’re like most people, what you’ll notice is that the hatefulness that we all experience to varying degrees, especially towards those who are closest to us and the love, the love will actually soften but expand and the hate will dissolve. Now, you can do this on a specific person if you’d like or you can just simply welcome your sense of lovingness and hatefulness directly. It’s however you prefer.

So, allow yourself to focus inside. This can be done with eyes open or eyes closed. And could you just allow yourself and welcome whatever hatefulness you’re feeling in this moment? Could you just let it be here? You don’t have to make it stronger, just whatever you’re experiencing in this moment. And then as best you can, could you also welcome the love that you are?

Now in the beginning, if this is a charged situation, this may be a little more difficult, but just do this as best you can.

Could you simply welcome the love that you are? And then could you also welcome whatever hatefulness you’re aware of in this moment. You don’t have to make it stronger, just whatever’s there. And then could you also welcome your loving presence, the love that you are, as best you can. And then again, could you allow yourself to welcome whatever hatefulness there is in this moment? And again as best you can, could you also welcome the love that you are? Could you just allow love to be as best you can? And then could you allow yourself to welcome whatever remaining hatefulness there is in this moment? And then could you also welcome the love that you are? And as best you can, just rest as that.

OK, so if you were doing this on your own, you would keep going until you felt the degree of love that you chose to in this moment. And you would go at your own rate. I pick kind of a medium speed when I’m working with others so that they can stay along with me, but you may find as you do it that you can go faster or you may need to go slower, but you do it at your own rate.

Just do it until the loving presence feels more than the hateful presence.

Right.

Something very interesting happened when you were doing that, I don’t even use the word hate. Well, I hate that my body is aching right now. My back’s been out for the last couple of days and I’ve got to go out of town. I really don’t like that. That’s very uncomfortable. Then I’m back into a loving presence, then I’m out of it, then I’m into it. And the more I got into the loving presence, the more the dull ache in the back had left. It’s gone.

I’m not surprised. What this is, is just a very powerful, practical easy-to-use tool that can really shift anything in awareness that you’ve felt stuck in. In fact, let’s do a very specific release based on any kind of physical discomfort.

Now, there’s a couple of things about health. I need to do my medical disclaimer. I’m not going to try and treat, diagnose, cure or even advise about medical conditions. Now it’s universally accepted but when we first started talking about this in the 70s, people thought we were out of our minds. But now doctors agree that somewhere between 70 and 90 percent have at least a relationship to, if not directly caused, by dis-ease in our emotional nature. In other words, if we’re suppressing emotions, if we have unresolved issues, they very often manifest physically. And two things happens when you do this kind of releasing work and you resolve the inner emotional issues. One is the body may get support in its healing process but the one thing that’s guaranteed is that the dis-ease in the ease goes away. Part of what makes disease so unpleasant for most of us is not just the sensations that come with the disease and the consequences, but also our reactions to them. In fact, our reactions cause them. Very often diseases get totally blown out of proportion or persist because we’re so uneasy with having the symptoms. At any rate, there’s a very simple holistic tool you can use for any kind of uncomfortable symptom. And it’s also something you can do to simply feel more relaxed and at ease in your body.

You don’t have to wait to do this until you’re feeling pain or discomfort or contraction or tension or whatever uncomfortable physical sensation you’re experiencing. What you do is, as before, go back and forth between both sides. Now this is not quite the same as that, but it will have the same kind of effect. What we’ll do is we’ll welcome whatever sensation is arising in consciousness in this moment and then as best we can, we’ll allow ourselves to welcome or embrace or be open to, the emptiness, the beingness, the space, the is-ness, that surrounds and interpenetrates every sensation.

Most of us experience our bodies as very solid. But our bodies aren’t quite as solid as we believe they are. In fact, they’re merely sensations arising in consciousness that we’ve labeled “our body.” So when you get back in touch with the underlying consciousness, the underlying is-ness, the beingness, you also welcome the sensation. If you go back and forth doing both of those, what happens is the sensation dissolves into the background and you’re left with just feeling more present and at ease. It has a very profound physical effect as well. But you don’t have to wait until you’re feeling distressed. You can do it with whatever sensations you’re experiencing in the moment. That’s how I’ll take us through it.

Again, allow yourself to focus inside. And please feel free to do this with eyes opened or eyes closed, however you prefer.

Could you just welcome whatever sensations are arising in this moment? Whether you label them positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. Could you just simply welcome the sensations? Let them be here as best you can. And then could you also welcome the emptiness, the is-ness, the space, the beingness that surrounds and interpenetrates every sensation?

If you’re lost in an intense sensation, this may be a little difficult at first, but if you stay with it, you’ll be able to experience this and you’ll notice things starting to shift right away.

And again, could you allow yourself to welcome whatever sensations you’re experiencing in this moment? Could you simply let them be here? And could you also welcome that which surrounds and interpenetrates every sensation? And could you welcome whatever remaining sensations are arising in consciousness in the moment?

And then could you also welcome that which surrounds and interpenetrates every sensation, yet is totally unaffected by them?

Now again, if you were doing this on your own, you would go as long as you like, until, if there was any unpleasant sensation, it had fully dissolved. And you would go at your own rate, either faster or slower, however you choose.

That was great. We feel calm, ready to go to sleep. Relaxed. Thank you, Hale.

You’re welcome. Actually, the interesting thing is that most of us would consider this degree of happiness or calmness or peace unusual. We might even call it a peak experience. One of the expressions that Lester coined when he developed his teachings into a system is that this is the bottoms up method. What he meant by that, ordinarily in life, there are lots of ups and downs. And if the ups are rare and they’re extreme, we call them peak experiences. But what happens over time as you use the techniques is that you get to this place where you bottom out where you used to peak. Because it’s not unusual to be in this open, expanded, relaxed state, you can allow yourself to be completely functional and at ease in life, doing whatever it is you need to do and still be relaxed, calm, happy and centered.

That make sense. It felt like it was a gentle releasing process. It’s gentle because you’re easy on yourself. You don’t have to blast it out of yourself or primal scream or anything to let go. It’s just a gentle back and forth until it’s just a little bit less, a little bit less, a little bit less. Then at some point, most of the time you’re living in bliss or happiness.

Yes. That’s been my experience and the experience of thousands of others who do this work, you can live a life of peace, joy and happiness no matter what is going on around you.

Yes, regardless of the outside circumstances. Referring to all the tension that was going on in the world – it’s lessened a bit and we like to think it’s because of all the prayers we’ve been sending out – but even in times like that, when we have great upheaval, you can find that happiness. That seems like a word that doesn’t fit when there’s great upheaval.

Don’t I know. But yes, you can actually feel relaxed, at ease, at peace and still be effectively making your voice heard for change or for the good. A lot of times we feel that we need to join the person that we’re opposing in their negativity in order to get them to change and that’s really not required. In fact, when we’re anti anything, we’re actually giving it support because we’re sending energy toward it.

What I recommend to all people is that, instead of being anti a particular political point of view, to be pro the solution or pro the opposite, because then you’re sending your energy toward exactly what you want.

Like pro peace, not anti war.

Right, exactly. I was at a peace conference with leaders from all over the world and that’s what we were focusing on, rather than being anti war, we want to be pro peace.

How long does it take before we start noticing a difference in our lives when we’re doing these self talks?

The wonderful thing about it is that you see results immediately. Now the results are cumulative, they’re long lasting and they improve over time. But you’ll see a result just from the two releases that we just did.

That is great. It’s a really good technique and it’s so simple, but the essence of life really is simple. We try to make it too complex.

Absolutely. That reminds me of a quote. I wish I knew who I’m quoting. I heard it second hand and I love it: “Truth is simple. If it was complicated, everybody would understand it.”

When you start releasing, is this a continual process, like layers of an onion? Do you keep dredging up stuff that you’ve got to keep releasing?

Yes and no. Actually this is something I want to share that will help people no matter what technique or practice they’re doing. Most of us, we live in the West. We want instantaneous results. And it can be very quick. When you do any kind of practice, including this method, you go through a progression. At first, you’ll do the exact same things and then you’ll only remember you had something you could do about it after the fact. So, what happens over time is you’ll be in the middle of doing the inappropriate behavior or having the inappropriate experience or whatever it is and you’ll be able to catch yourself right in the middle of it and you’ll be able to let go and you’ll break the pattern. Then over time, you’ll be about to do it and you’ll let go and you won’t do it. And eventually, on that particular issue, it will no longer arise in consciousness. It won’t even be an issue any more.

It takes care of itself automatically.

Right, exactly. The other thing is, when you go through this progression, it’s important to keep two things in mind. One, be open to the fact that any time you do the practice or any time you release if you’re using one of our methods, could be the very last time you ever need to address that issue. You could let it all go right now. But at the same time, you’re willing for it to take as long as it does.

So if you’re open to immediate change but at the same time willing for it to take as long as it does, then the change comes much more rapidly and at a level that’s integrated and lasting.

When you’re ready for it, it will happen to you.

Exactly.

What last pearl of wisdom would you like to share with us?

I would say, very simply, that happiness, peace, joy and love are your basic nature and there’s absolutely nothing you need to do in order to be what you already are. The only reason you don’t experience that from moment to moment is you’ve covered it over by your sense of limitation which is completely made up and artificial. As you let go, as you just open to this possibility, you’ll discover this more and more from your direct experience.

This has been great. We thank you so much for the work that you’re doing on the planet to help us clear and release and raise our consciousness so we can live a happy life.

Dwoskin’s websites are www.happinessisfree.com and www.sedona.com