JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is "Conscious Relationships." This is Part 1 of a two-part program with Patricia Sun, a spiritual teacher, a teacher of awareness and communication, and a radiant human being. Patricia, what a pleasure to be with you again.
PATRICIA SUN: My pleasure too, Jeffrey. Thank you.
MISHLOVE: When we think of conscious relationships, I'm struck first of all -- by way of introducing you, frankly, I could have said many different things about you; you're a Phi Beta Kappa from Berkeley, for example. But what you teach is not academic. What you teach comes from a deep level, from the heart, from the intuitive mind, and I think that's a good place to start -- with the depths.
SUN: Exactly. I think twenty-some years ago, when I was going to Berkeley and I was also doing family counseling, I really discovered that there were two hemispheres to the brain. I could feel them. And when I was doing counseling with people, I realized that the normal goal in academia and most of our culture is to be right, and that that didn't really help. And as I tuned in to people, I moved to what I called my soft mind, and as I felt that, and I asked the question, not "What's wrong here?" but "What do I need to know, to empower the people I'm speaking to? What do I need to know that will be healing?" whole new avenues opened up, and the kind of consulting or counseling that I did was gentle, it was soft, it was quick. We would get through in three or four sessions. People would have big, cathartic, awareness reactions and healing very quickly, and I realized, "Oh, there's a whole lot going on." And so basically my philosophy is that we're in the midst of an evolutionary leap, and it's one of consciousness, capacity to perceive.
MISHLOVE: And what you're suggesting is that at this time, when you were doing this counseling, you yourself were going through an awakening.
SUN: Oh definitely, definitely. It was quite something, because I was raised in a very scientific family, and I'm sort of a natural-born mystic, I think, in a certain sense, but I have a very good logical mind. And my family was very biased to the logic, and being right was very important. And so one of the things that I learned was that we are all a little too defended in that way, and what I called my opening was another way of saying -- and I use this expression a lot, and I always like to qualify it -- is that we're maturing, we're growing up, that as a species we're very, very young, and we don't communicate too well, and our brains actually aren't, I don't believe, fully developed yet. And part of the development is maturing the logical mind, but also maturing the intuitive mind. Our whole culture at large has a kind of misunderstanding about how the intuitive mind is and how it works. And by understanding it we create intimacy; we create authenticity and freedom to be whole, and we heal our wounds from the past, which is what's really plaguing us everywhere.
MISHLOVE: Knowing you, it would seem to me that the intuitive mind that you speak of has something to do with something that is direct and immediate and appropriate to the wisdom or the healing of the moment, not something that comes from a theory or a should or a have to.
SUN: Exactly. It has to do with really working on yourself by observing where you're frightened, where you don't necessarily feel comfortable, and finding a way, through really insights and working on yourself, to recreate your communication so you feel safe, so you're not lying, so you're not hiding, so you're not afraid. It takes a lot of work, actually, but it's totally worth it, because then you become comfortable in your own skin; you become more present. Intuition is soft, it's gentle, it's kind, it's feeling. It's emotion, it's feeling. And if you hold it in a state of respect for the other person and yourself equally, if you equally respect your own feelings and the other person's feelings, then when you communicate it's almost magical. We begin to bond. And that is really what a conscious relationship is.
MISHLOVE: You mentioned a few moments ago that conscious relationships are part of what you see as an evolutionary leap that's taking place right now.
SUN: Exactly, exactly. I think all of the chaos and problems that we have in the world, all the different forms of suffering that are very common -- the drug abuse, the sexual and physical abuse of children and men and women to each other, the confusion in our political sphere, even the media, some of the crassness and the violence and the sort of scandalousness of things, the lack of earnestness, the lack of respect -- that is all part of this crisis. And certainly the crisis in the family is very related to men and women connecting to one another and being afraid of connecting, having ancient fears that are thousands of generations old, that need to be incorporated in our consciousness and respected and understood that this exists. And also learning very practically right in the present time, what can we do? One of the most basic things we can do that causes a shift in consciousness is being more respectful -- both to yourself in the way you think about yourself, the way you self-talk, the way you talk to yourself. Give yourself a break; you're a human being. Everybody's been programmed with stuff; it's part of your ticket in, as I say. We all have things we've inherited that are painful, and that is part of our growth, to learn how to handle that. And setting up ways, through respect, to allow that to happen is a large part of the evolutionary leap, and letting your intuition function, instead of being fearful of it. I mean, people did get burned at the stake for being intuitive, and our logical mind needs to be right; so it will be cynical, it will be -- you know: "There will always be war. Men and women will always have the battle of the sexes." We say things like that, to be right, because it's easy. But what good is it? It doesn't help us.
MISHLOVE: You're saying that there is a resource within us that as it unfolds will enable us to move beyond problems that we have faced as a species for thousands of years.
SUN: Absolutely. And it has to do with us maturing and trusting our own integrity -- finding our own integrity, being more integrated. It's called trusting your gut, trusting your heart. It's written in your cells; I believe it's written in our DNA. I think we've been distorted through mistakes, through accidents of culture and problems and suffering -- wars, and people being violated in their person, babies and children. And this causes traumas that really do have to be acknowledged -- but not so much to just dwell on that but stop doing it, is the key, and to forgive it, and move on.
MISHLOVE: It sounds almost like alchemy, in the sense that everybody alive today is the inheritor of human history, and human history is full of trauma and tragedy and despotisms of every sort, and you're suggesting, if I hear you right, that we are living in the time when these things will be transformed and healed.
SUN: Exactly. And they do have to come to a head. They do have to reach conscious experience, which is part of the chaos that's across our country and across the world right now. And simultaneous to this psychological sort of awakening, although it's very messy at the moment, is the technological leap, where we can be connected. It's part of this evolutionary leap, where if any group of people really had true insight it would spread, it would be catching, because we have satellite hookups, we have the information highway. It's going to make a huge explosion, so that a premonition I had when I was 17, many years ago, is if someone tells the truth on television, 200 million people will hear it at the same time -- and truth being something that is profound and feeling and giving and good and wholesome and healthy-making. When we learn to encounter and speak and produce that, and share that and promote it, we're on our way to becoming our full potential, and healing those wounds and assaults from the past that indeed we really do all carry as defenses. Our linear mind is immature; the immature linear mind is needing to be right, judgmental; it thinks only in duality. It's responsible for racism, for men and women polarizing against one another, people polarizing against other people and other countries. It's being right or being wrong and nothing in between -- no growth, no movement, no give and take, no evolution.
MISHLOVE: You have a gift for speaking the deeper truths, and if I'm hearing you right you're saying that to speak the truth and to be right are two very different things.
SUN: Very different. Being right is what we are culturally trained to do, and which our development is sort of immaturely stuck at, a little bit. It's automatic. We try to be right.
MISHLOVE: If I'm right, it usually means that you're wrong, and she's to blame.
SUN: That's right. And we're bad and you're good. One of the things I say in workshops is it's much more powerful to be good than to be right. And goodness involves that extra ingredient of wisdom and intuition. Right is the facts. Linearly, you may have the facts, but you can't have all the facts. It's not possible to contain all the facts, so there will always be something missing, and that will distort it and make it inaccurate. But from goodness, from wisdom, from intuition -- the intuitive mind, the right brain thinks in pictures and feelings and spatial wholes, and it is the part of our intelligence that is the spiritual mind, or the genius mind. I used to call it all the time in workshops the mind of genius, because it can think thoughts never thought before, it can see things never seen before, because it's the part of our intelligence, when it is mature, that grasps the overview or sees the missing pieces. It's much like that analogy of a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, the thousand words are the linear mind, all the facts. But a picture tells you more than all the words in the universe can tell you. It tells you about relationship and position and shape and color and form and feeling and emotion and history, and many, many things in one glance of a picture. So there's so much in the intuitive mind that we are censoring out and beating down out of fear, and the immature right brain is the mind that believes in demons and goblins and ghosts, and is always trying to make a sort of magical reason.
MISHLOVE: The immature right brain, the part that forms pictures of our fears.
SUN: Exactly, and our insights, and our solutions, and our talents, and what's going on. When I first did family counseling, that was the thing. I would be listening to someone talk, and then suddenly I'd start to, with that intent, be open. I wouldn't be trying to figure them out so much, but just really receive them, and then some image would pop in my mind, and it would be very persistent, and I'd say, "Excuse me, I just keep getting this thought." And I'd say it, and they'd burst into tears. What the image would have been was some memory that I didn't know about, but that they had, that had been suppressed, that was the reason, the source, of the trauma, for the problems we were discussing. So I was getting things in this very profound way, very simply. It seemed magical, but wasn't. I was just sitting there, loving them, caring, asking, "What do I need to know?" And bingo! Something would pop in my mind. Well, that was the first stage, and I have learned many, many, many things more about the intuitive mind. Much of the crisis in our culture is that there is an upsurge of intuitive thinking, but it's all immature. We try to nail it down literally as true. The intuitive mind thinks in metaphor; it gives you the essential truth inside the metaphor, but an immature, linear mind says, "Oh, is it right or is it wrong?" And it's literal. So it tries to turn metaphors into literal truths, and that's why people are channeling 35,000-year-old men, and the ancient Chinese, and Chief Running Cloud, and not knowing that this is a part of their own intelligence. They are giving it a form, some form they believe would contain some wisdom, and then they gain access to certain intuitive parts of their mind. But it is still fraught with the same liabilities as all conclusions that it's their mind; it could have some off stuff as well as some really powerful intuitive insights.
MISHLOVE: When you say that we are in the process of taking an evolutionary leap forward, are you suggesting that this part of our mind is going to be actualized in a more mature way?
SUN: Yes, definitely; and more consciously readily available, more integrated. I really believe what the evolutionary leap is -- and again, even talking left brain and right brain is something of a metaphor too; it's not exactly, literally that, though there are literal components.
MISHLOVE: The brain is more complex than just left and right.
SUN: Exactly. And obviously we know they cross over anyway, and so on. But the metaphor of the two styles of thinking which are dominant in each hemisphere, that are different, are maturing and learning how to interface. And it's really going to change, I believe, the way men and women relate to one another, the way we relate to babies and children and birth, and our physical bodies -- being able to use our physical body, which is a large part of our intuition. One of the stages that I went through in my intuition development was I could read people in their body, in the sense that I could feel something hurting, or I could see a dark spot, and it was all these funny little visuals. They changed; they didn't stay the same. But they always told me something. Or often I would feel it in my own body. I could feel a grief, or I could feel a fear. It would just flit through for a second, and then I'd ask a question: "Do you feel afraid?" And then the person would say, "Yes. How did you know?" Because they were masking it. This is how we're so much more connected than we know, and it shouldn't be made so what I call "Woo-woo." It shouldn't be made so extraordinary. I believe it's a natural part of our intelligence. It's the thing a mother does know, or a father, when they're very connected to their child, and something's hurting them. They know that, but they don't know what, and they try burping them or turning them over, and they discover what it is, because they're caring. It's that deep, authentic, intimate opening of self to another person -- not needing to be guarded with defenses, letting your mind be open to people -- that lets you be a good sender. Being a good receiver is being open to receive what's actually going on, not what you think should be, not what will make you look good, not what will make you be right, but what is there. Because if we don't deal with what is there we can't move on. We can't heal it and move on.
MISHLOVE: What are the signs for you that this kind of awakening is taking place?
SUN: Well, as you know, I've been doing this for so many years, and I've seen a huge change in the world. I've made many trips all over the world; I've been on every continent except Antarctica, and made about 14 trips to the Soviet Union before it was quite so popular.
MISHLOVE: When it still was the Soviet Union.
SUN: When it was the Soviet Union for sure, and before Gorbachev and so on, and perestroika. I remember talking to them about my version of perestroika, which was the evolutionary leap, and talking to people fairly high up in the government, and then really listening and taking it in. And I can see, I really believe that those shifts in the Soviet Union are part of this change. I remember in 1983 and '84 telling people in my workshops, "You know, be ready. The Soviet Union's going to make a 180-degree turnaround. The Berlin Wall is going to come down and the Eastern Bloc countries are going to change. It's not going to be over then, but they're going to change, and so are we. We need to be ready to face what's really going on."
MISHLOVE: Do you see the pace of change continuing at this rate, or accelerating?
SUN: Oh, accelerating; unbelievably accelerating. Because there will be a kind of quantum leap, I believe, in consciousness. And what is accelerating now is the shadow is coming out, the truth is coming out -- and I've been predicting that for the last 10 to 15 years, that all of the secrets are going to have to come out. You know, Watergate, and the kinds of things -- we have to pay attention, not to catch somebody out, but to see how we work as human beings -- that we do have shadow, that we do do things that long-term are not necessarily good because short-time it looks like we'll survive or we'll be right. We need to have a little bigger picture and let ourselves go through the process of growth. And the truth coming out is very important for that.
MISHLOVE: I've often felt that the resistance that people have had to the psychic-intuitive realm is the fear that someone else might read their mind.
SUN: Oh, you got it. In fact that's something I say in every workshop that I do -- I try to remember, and you just reminded me. I like to say there's a very powerful thing you can do to create this evolutionary leap, and what it is, is to begin to imagine, consider, from this moment forward, that everyone you meet can read your mind. Because if you consider that everyone can read your mind, one, it's true at some level, so we might as well start practicing now while the fog is in, to sort of realign ourselves consciously. But the way that I believe it helps change your brain, is your linear mind up to now has only had to keep track of what you say. But if it begins to consider as part of the data that someone else can actually really read your mind, then it says, "Oh my goodness, we've got to keep track of what we think too." And much of what we think is not only not logical, which is linear-minded, it's acausal, it's intuitive, it's sensing, it's the whole; it contradicts, it's paradoxical. That's where great information is, and learning to be on more gentle terms with that is part of our maturing.
MISHLOVE: Freud said that we create an unconscious, a Freudian unconscious, because we don't even want to look at the contents of our own mind. We don't want to acknowledge our aggressive impulses, our sexual impulses, things that are not socially sanctioned.
SUN: Exactly right on the money. That is what we are wasting huge psychic and intellectual and human feeling and time -- wasting it defending ourselves against this supercritical internal parent that is judging us all the time, which is the immature linear mind. The linear mind is a magnificent thing; it's a wonderful tool for keeping track of stuff, but judgmentally thinking black-white, right-wrong is not helpful. We are in process, we are growing, we do make mistakes. I think it was Thomas Edison who said, "I think the man who's made a hundred mistakes is a hundred times ahead of the man who's made none." Because he knows a hundred things that don't work. It is the essence of creativity to try to juxtaposition in a new way. We kill and stifle that capacity which is the maturity of the intuitive mind, is creativity, if the linear mind is too harsh. So if we are too judgmental, too black-and-white, if our compassion is dampened -- and compassion literally means "with someone in their passion -- if we do not allow ourselves to empathize, to intuitively feel someone else's predicament, if we do not give them the grace and the dignity to move beyond a place where they were, then we cannot heal. That is such an essential issue, which is why I believe Jesus said, "Love your enemy." Because if you love your enemy, you help them not be your enemy. You help them grow up. You allow them to develop. I use that word grow up often, meaning that in a respectful way.
MISHLOVE: It seems that that's essential, because we all have within ourselves not only the aggressive and the sexual impulses, but the hurt and wounded parts of ourselves that in normal social discourse there's a tendency to hide.
SUN: Exactly.
MISHLOVE: I guess the fear is that if somebody else sees that part of us, these various parts of us, they won't be compassionate. They will be judgmental.
SUN: Well, really, if we could only know that mostly we're talking about ourselves when we feel that; it's our own judgment of ourselves that we telegraph and we defend against. And that's why learning to have compassion and forgive yourself is the first step to really rectifying what you do -- that if you keep it a shadow, you will project it on other people. That's what racism is all about. You will deny your own defensiveness, which is causing cruelty to others. And that's what the evolutionary leap is about, is facing your own shadow.
MISHLOVE: You seem to be saying that as the globe is reconciling the major conflict of the last 50 years, it's symbolic or representative or indicative of an inner psychic reconciliation that's taking place.
SUN: Exactly. For instance, when I was in the Soviet Union and I would come back, and they were so different than everything we'd been programmed with about what people in the Soviet Union were like. We were so abysmally ignorant that there were 15 republics and six time zones, and so much we didn't know. They were just our shadow, our demon; we could fear them, they were Commies. There was all this irrational fear and hatred, which was our shadow projected on them. I remember thinking -- well, two things. I remember once being there. A rather high official in the government said to the group that I brought, "We're going to do a terrible thing to you Americans" -- and everybody went like this -- "We're going to deprive you of an enemy." Because they were going to refuse to be our enemy. It did make me worry, what will we do then? Who will we project our shadow onto? And it isn't to say that the Soviets didn't have lots of problems and Stalin wasn't something that was a terrible horror, and a great grief that those people lived through, among many great griefs. It isn't that they haven't done anything wrong and don't have problems. It is just that they are people like us, and they have emotions, feelings, and confusions as we do. And our job is to face ours -- to clean up our home, our land, our family life, our television, our schools, our medical profession. Our job is to help heal us, and the first cornerstone of that is to heal the piece of the planet you sit in. That's where the greatest power lies, and each of us would face that shadow within with some kindness, and not with rage, not with fear, not with disdain and despising feelings, but with a healing compassion, that there's no way any single one of us hasn't inherited stuff from the past.
MISHLOVE: Right. We're all the inheritors of the tragedies of the past and the tyrannies of the past. You seem to be saying, if I understand you right, Patricia, that the evolutionary leap forward comes when we can treat ourselves with compassion.
SUN: Yes, because then you become whole. You face your own shadow. It's all energy that becomes available. You know your faults. You compensate for them in a healthy way. You try to rectify them, you work on them, you accentuate your talents, and you give other people the same benefit.
MISHLOVE: Ah. Well, Patricia Sun, what wisdom, and what a wonderful day it will be when this kind of deep telling of wisdom is everywhere.
SUN: It's coming.
MISHLOVE: It is coming. Well, it's such a pleasure to share this vision with you. Thank you so much for being with me.
SUN: You too, Jeffrey.
- END -