638 episodes

The implication of the title - Buddha at the Gas Pump - is that ordinary people are experiencing higher states of consciousness once thought to be rare and difficult to attain.

People everywhere are undergoing a shift or awakening to their true nature. For some, this shift has been abrupt and dramatic. For others, it has been so gradual that they may not have realized it has occurred.



Such shifts, or awakenings, are not new: Christ spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven within, Buddhists speak of Nirvana, Zen masters of Satori, Hindus of Moksha, but these traditions generally regard these states as rare and difficult to attain.



Many people are therefore skeptical of claims of higher states of consciousness. They find it hard to believe that apparently ordinary friends and neighbors might be experiencing something extraordinary. Maybe they expect Enlightenment to look as remarkable on the outside as it is reputed to be on the inside.



This show will attempt to dispel skepticism and misconceptions by week after week, allowing otherwise ordinary people to relate their experience of spiritual awakening. The terminology is tricky, because there are no universally agreed upon definitions to describe this experience. So please forgive us if we use some unfamiliar terms. We will try to clarify our definitions as we go along.



Perhaps, after a while, those listening will become convinced that genuine and permanent spiritual awakenings are not just a pipe dream, but are real and are becoming relatively commonplace.



These podcasts are the audio track of a weekly interview show which may be seen as videos on our YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/buddhaatthegaspump). Also see the main site: https://batgap.com.



For search purposes, I will add the following to this description - batgap, Buddha at the Gaspump, Buddah at the Gas Pump.

Buddha at the Gas Pump Rick Archer

    • Religion & Spirituality
    • 4.7 • 565 Ratings

The implication of the title - Buddha at the Gas Pump - is that ordinary people are experiencing higher states of consciousness once thought to be rare and difficult to attain.

People everywhere are undergoing a shift or awakening to their true nature. For some, this shift has been abrupt and dramatic. For others, it has been so gradual that they may not have realized it has occurred.



Such shifts, or awakenings, are not new: Christ spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven within, Buddhists speak of Nirvana, Zen masters of Satori, Hindus of Moksha, but these traditions generally regard these states as rare and difficult to attain.



Many people are therefore skeptical of claims of higher states of consciousness. They find it hard to believe that apparently ordinary friends and neighbors might be experiencing something extraordinary. Maybe they expect Enlightenment to look as remarkable on the outside as it is reputed to be on the inside.



This show will attempt to dispel skepticism and misconceptions by week after week, allowing otherwise ordinary people to relate their experience of spiritual awakening. The terminology is tricky, because there are no universally agreed upon definitions to describe this experience. So please forgive us if we use some unfamiliar terms. We will try to clarify our definitions as we go along.



Perhaps, after a while, those listening will become convinced that genuine and permanent spiritual awakenings are not just a pipe dream, but are real and are becoming relatively commonplace.



These podcasts are the audio track of a weekly interview show which may be seen as videos on our YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/buddhaatthegaspump). Also see the main site: https://batgap.com.



For search purposes, I will add the following to this description - batgap, Buddha at the Gaspump, Buddah at the Gas Pump.

    701. Kimberly Lafferty

    701. Kimberly Lafferty

    Kimberley Theresa Lafferty is a seasoned teacher-practitioner specializing in constructive adult developmental psychology and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. She completed over 12 years of intensive Indo Tibetan study including the required retreats. She leads both open and advanced adult educational cohorts aligning developmental psychology and Buddhist theory. Kimberley co-leads, with Terri O’Fallon, the penultimate Minds I year-long developmental course of Stages International. She is an active Board member for the Association for Spiritual Integrity. Kimberley is also a householder as a wife and mother, living in a remote valley of the North Cascades of North America which deeply impacts her worldview and practice.

    Website: The Confluence Experience | Making sense of what doesn't make sense

    Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group.

    Summary and Transcript of this interview

    Interview recorded February 10, 2024

    Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

    • 1 hr 48 min
    700. Bob Davis

    700. Bob Davis

    After receiving his doctorate in the sensory neurosciences from The Ohio State University, Bob Davis, Ph.D., served as a professor for the State University of New York for over thirty years, where he conducted research in the behavioral and neurosensory sciences, taught, and held many high-level administrative roles. He published his research in over 60 articles in scholarly journals, and presented numerous lectures worldwide, which included invited lectures at Harvard, Cambridge, and Peking University. Bob was also awarded numerous grants by the National Science Foundation and The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health to conduct research in sensory neuroscience.

    Following retirement, Bob published several articles in the Journal of Scientific Exploration and Edge Science and presented lectures at national and international conferences on consciousness, spiritually transformative experiences, and unidentified aerial phenomena. Bob has also published three highly popular books:

    The UFO Phenomenon: Should I Believe?
    Life after Death: An Analysis of the Evidence, and,
    Unseen Forces: The Integration of Science, Reality and You.

    More recently, he has turned his recent book, Unseen Forces, into a planned documentary entitled - The Consciousness Connection - with Emmy Award winner Dave Beaty of Dreamtime Entertainment and Wilson Hawthorne of Eyeland Telemedia.

    Website: bobdavisspeaks.com
    Bob Davis is an administrator of the Facebook Site called: The Consciousness Connection Facebook group.
    Bob's email

    Summary and Transcript of this interview

    Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group

    Interview recorded February 3, 2024.

    Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

    • 1 hr 40 min
    699. Brad Laughlin & Anna Breytenbach

    699. Brad Laughlin & Anna Breytenbach

    Brad Laughlin is the author of Living with Enlightenment—A Journey of Love, which is about his 25-year life-partnership with Leslie Temple-Thurston, a teacher of enlightenment, and the profound spiritual transformation he experienced. With Leslie, he is co-author of two books, The Marriage of Spirit—Enlightened Living in Today’s World and Returning to Oneness—The Seven Keys of Ascension.

    Brad is dedicated to finding innovative ways of helping people to awaken spiritually and to find love, joy and inspiration during these times of great change. Using ancient Truth teachings, yogic practices and spiritual psychology, he offers simple yet powerful practices for dissolving old, limiting ego structures that keep us trapped in negativity, pain and fear. Brad’s transformative events are based on the principles of integration and unity consciousness, which help us to know our own inner Divinity—who we truly are.

    Brad and Leslie are co-founders of the nonprofits, CoreLight.org and Seeds of Light.org, CoreLight’s humanitarian arm, serving marginalized communities and AIDS orphans in South Africa. Brad has a bachelor’s degree from Duke University. He is an American by birth, considers himself a global citizen and lives in both South Africa and the United States.

    Anna Breytenbach is an internationally acclaimed professional interspecies communicator with over 20 years’ experience. Native to South Africa and currently based in Europe, she mentors and consults globally. Her focus is exclusively with wild places and beings, facilitating peaceful interventions and greater understanding. This includes predator research, wilderness protection, anti-poaching assistance, reforestation initiatives, wildlife management and rehabilitation. She is currently taking a sabbatical from her usual teaching and public appearances to write a book.

    Anna’s passion is raising awareness and advancing the relationships among human and nonhuman animals, on both the personal and spiritual levels. Her work is the subject of the documentary movie "The Animal Communicator”, watched by tens of millions of people (and a few of their pets), available on YouTube.

    Anna's website: The Animal Communicator | AnimalSpirit
    YouTube Channel
    Anna's first BatGap interview

    Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group

    Summary and transcript of this interview

    Interview recorded January 28, 2024

    Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

    • 1 hr 46 min
    698. Swami Medhananda

    698. Swami Medhananda

    Swami Medhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and an academic philosopher, currently serving as Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood. He is also the Hindu Chaplain at both UCLA and the University of Southern California. He is Section Editor for the International Journal of Hindu Studies (Springer), overseeing submissions in Hindu and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion. From 2010 to 2021, he was Associate Professor and Head of the Program in Philosophy at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute in Belur Math, West Bengal. He received his PhD in 2009 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized in German aesthetics. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2006–7) and a Visiting Student at Oxford University (2000–1). His current research focuses on global philosophy of religion, the epistemology of mystical experience, cosmopsychism, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and Vedāntic philosophical traditions, especially the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo.

    He is the author of three books: Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2022), Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018), and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta (2020) and co-editor, with Benedikt Paul Göcke, of Panentheism in Indian and Western Thought: Cosmopolitan Interventions (Routledge, 2023). He is also the editor of two special issues of the International Journal of Hindu Studies, one on “Swami Vivekananda as a Cosmopolitan Thinker” (2023) and one on “Vedāntic Theodicies” (2021). He has published over thirty articles in leading academic journals.

    He is currently working on two book projects: Karma and Rebirth in Hinduism (Cambridge University Press, under contract) and An All-Embracing Oneness: Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Advaita and the Legacy of Sri Ramakrishna (Oxford University Press, under contract).

    Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group

    Summary and transcript of this interview.

    Interview recorded January 22, 2024.

    Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

    • 1 hr 48 min
    697. David Doyle

    697. David Doyle

    David Doyle lives on the water in the island city of Alameda in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, their teenage son, and Merlin, a rambunctious Rat Terrier. At an early age he set upon a spiritual path and soon put down the books and turned inward. David’s path has been by most standards a very traditional inner practice, starting with Hatha Yoga and quickly moving to Raja Yoga. Meditation was his main practice, with asanas as an adjunct to meditation.

    Early on in his spiritual practice a teacher said that if you master the basics of yoga, and if you practice in earnest, all will unfold – everything you need will come to you. David took this to heart, beginning a life-long practice that for the most part was a solitary journey.

    At 20 years old his third eye opened in a dramatic unfolding, and from there came the never-ending gift of insight and abilities including: clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, precognition, telepathy and more.

    Some years later David joined the Berkeley Psychic Institute during its heyday and befriended the founder, Dr. Lewis S Bostwick, whom he considers to be his first great spiritual teacher, and friend. He spent over a decade with this group and at its many (at the time) institutes and thousands of students and teachers.

    In 2012, David came to an abiding awakening, and since that time, many changes have taken place in an ongoing process of daily and weekly energetic and auspicious unfoldings, many of which have left him nearly incapacitated.

    Since awakening, David has also become an adept Qi Gong Master under the guidance of Grand Master Shi Yong Yao, formerly an elite teacher-monk at the Northern Shaolin Temple in China. Additionally, many siddhis have developed as byproducts along The Way as well as a massive kundalini awakening and other extraordinary happenings.

    Now, with ten years having passed since awakening, David is ready to share experiences from his fifty+ year journey with a wider audience. He created Monk with Family, a 501c3 non-profit dedicated to the householder, but inclusive of anyone for whom The Way is their life’s focus. David leads a weekly Satsang open to all those interested, and is available for speaking engagements and other spiritual events.

    David A. Doyle: Inventor, entrepreneur, manufacturer, publisher, sailor, skier, burning man (burner), householder.

    Founder: Monk with Family Website

    Founding member of Shaolin Master Qi Gong, a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to sharing the teachings of Master Yao. David is registered in China as the: Deputy Director of the U.S. Regional Department of Shaolin Fohanmen.

    Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group

    Interview recorded December 30, 2023

    Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

    • 1 hr 46 min
    696. Mary Terhune

    696. Mary Terhune

    After dying of a heart attack on the doorstep of a hospital in 2006 and being brought back to life, Mary knew it was time to write about her lifetime of astonishing mystical experiences which began with a visitation from the mystic Jesus in 1984 during a defining life crisis. It was then that Jesus spoke seven revelations: on forgiveness, judgment, the bible, weight problems, disease, aging and the ego.

    A few years later in 1986 Mary met a monk who initiated her into deeper states of consciousness and in 1988 she experienced the highest state of awareness, self-realization, and received the message that divinity awaits all mankind. A few months following her transformative experience of self-realization, Mary was given a spontaneous experience of her own death while meditating on a bench inside a lobby where she worked at MIT. From that moment she no longer feared death.

    A number of years later during a health challenge Mary had a experience of nature’s healing law of “like cures like” after being introduced to the consciousness-based system of homeopathic medicine, resolving areas in her consciousness that held the root of disease brought on by traumatic events in her early years.

    She enjoys lecturing on these topics and sharing the truth of our divinity and letting go of the false notion of death by embracing our eternal nature. She shares how consciousness is all and why it is so important to embrace consciousness-based medicine to heal our physical, emotional and mental bodies by restoring our consciousness to harmony. As humanity awakens to itself through the upheavals of our times, this book will serve as a testimony to what is possible for humanity as the old paradigms fall away and new paradigms arise.

    This book will bring comfort to the seeker who wants to know their true Self and to answer the questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Does death truly exist? Is self-realization truly possible? If you want to connect with Mary personally, please consider booking a Conversation with Mary.

    Website: Mary Terhune | Awakening Now To Our Higher Consciousness

    Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group

    Summary and transcript of this interview

    Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.


    YouTube Video Chapters:


    00:00:00 - Introduction to Buddha at the Gas Pump interview with Mary Terhune
    00:04:14 - The Mystical Encounter at the Window
    00:08:23 - Inner Awakening and Forgiveness
    00:11:04 - Past Lives and Spiritual Path
    00:14:19 - The Misuse of Mystics' Words in the Bible
    00:18:37 - The Impact of Stuck Emotions on Health and Disease
    00:23:30 - The Experience of Love and Envy
    00:26:48 - Seeking a Context for Enlightenment
    00:30:05 - The Awakening and Reunion
    00:34:24 - Meeting the Monk and the Path of Love
    00:37:38 - Clearing Out Karmic Relationships
    00:42:02 - Being Nourished by the Light
    00:45:33 - Kundalini Awakening and Divine Realization
    00:47:34 - Reclaiming our divinity
    00:50:09 - The Natural State of Being
    00:54:41 - Agony of Separation and the State of Bliss
    00:59:25 - Out-of-body experience and return to the physical body
    01:04:10 - The Veil Between Here and There
    01:08:12 - The End of Experience after Realizing Brahman
    01:12:10 - The State of Divinity and the Space Between Thoughts
    01:14:30 - Living in the World, but Not of the World
    01:17:52 - The Death of the Egoic Structure
    01:20:51 - Near-Death Experience and Miraculous Recovery
    01:24:38 - Seeking a Spiritual Teacher
    01:27:34 - Interacting from a State of Oneness
    01:30:53 - Turia: A Continuum of Consciousness
    01:35:27 - Uncovering the Mother Loss
    01:40:03 - Healing with Homeopathic Medicine
    01:44:04 - The History and Suppression of Homeopathic Medicine
    01:47:57 - The Precipice of Something Huge
    01:51:06 - Farewell and Gratitude

    • 1 hr 41 min

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5
565 Ratings

565 Ratings

Bird lady22 ,

Hello

Every time a new episode downloads. It’s like a little Christmas present for my soul that I look forward to unwrapping!🎄💜

Sahja ,

For all spiritual seekers

I wish I knew about this podcast when it first started or even within the first couple of years, but I am so grateful I have found it now. I have been listening for several months and I am up to the 2013 episodes because I listen to them from the beginning. Rick is an amazing interviewer, he has beautiful respect for all of his interviewees. Some of them he knows, some of them are his friends. And some are well know spiritual leaders and teachers. He does do diligence with his research before he interviews someone so he gets an idea of their personality, and their beliefs, and their teachings. You always learn something. Even when I think this content is not for me this particular episode, I listen anyway, and it always turns out that I learn something useful. I'm not awake 24/7 yet but I definitely have a very strong intellectual understanding and I know that my life has improved greatly since coming across this continent, and starting to do meditation practices. I highly recommended for everyone. Especially those who think they don'thave anything left to learn, because we are always learning. It's never ending. 😉

guy in okc ,

Too much woo

Psychics, channelers, planetary healers, futurists, parapsycholgists, reiki practitioners, reincarnated people, friends of angels and other higher beings, etc. along with a few “mainstream” scientists, social activists and religious teachers and scholars. Even some fairly traditional Buddhists. Very fuzzy overlap of speculation, exploration, self promotion and maybe some delusion. A lot of shiny happy-looking folks who seem to have ego-driven ideas and projects. I thought Buddhism was about humility. Value? Depends on your own knowledge, biases and interests. A big haystack of perceptions, thoughts and claims.

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