Welcome to Bud at the Gas pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Gary Weber. Welcome, Gary. Good to be here. Yeah. I first met you at the Science and Non-Duality Conference last year, and then you kind of disappeared and I think you told me later you had a flu or something, so Yeah, , it's good to get together finally.

Um, and, uh, you had an unusual kind of awakening a number of years ago. You were in the middle of a yoga posture and, and all of a sudden everything changed and never, never went back to the way it was. Um, so that was a kind of an interesting watershed moment, but, um, just so people can get to know you a little bit, let's backtrack and, and just give us a sketchy overview of, you know, what led you up to that moment.

Why were you doing a yoga posture? What had interested you to you in spirituality? What had, what, what sorts of things did you do up until that point? Yeah. I was, uh, raised a very, uh, conservative Methodist, uh, Western Penn.  person and, um, deeply schooled Christianity. And that kind of, at some level, I knew or felt that there was a thing called awakening and that I could get it.

I don't know how I knew that because nobody around me talked about it, knew anything about it. It wasn't part of the liturgy in the Christian teachings. And then that went away and I went off, did my thing through graduate, through undergraduate, went off to the nuclear submarine navy and almost, uh, died in nuclear submarine.

Wow. And some kind of accident or something. Yeah. We actually ran into the mountain, um, underwater. Underwater, yeah. Coming back very fast and very deep and ran to a mountain, almost, almost killed ourselves. . So that, that, that kind of was a wake up call. I'd been looking kind of, uh, hard and fast and that was kind of a, okay, now this is for real.

And came back to graduate school and I was walking down the hill into graduate school, working my PhD. I had one of these epiphanous moments where I had a step back and look back at my consciousness and saw this, uh, tremendous rush, ongoing rush of self-referential narrative that, uh, was doing nothing except causing me unhappiness and suffering.

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