This is Part Two of a two-part series. Read Part 1 here.
A brilliant outlier in the overlapping fields of depth psychology and spirituality, John J. Prendergast sheds much-needed light on what he calls our “deepest ground.” Bridging Western psychotherapy with the perennial teachings of nondual philosophy, his work as a teacher, writer, and therapist focuses on the powerful process of “waking down,” emphasizing embodied insight—the illumination of emotions, relationships, and ordinary life—as much as transcendental awareness. The author of several books, including Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality and The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence, he offers residential retreats in the U.S. and Europe, as well as online workshops and teaching. In this second half of our two-part interview, we talked about the insecurity that arises when we put our trust in the “false ground” of ego, and tools for touching into our spiritual core.
Mark Matousek: You’ve written that many are “deeply confused” about where their “essential safety” lies. This comes from putting their faith in the “false ground” of ego rather than “authentic ground”—if I understand you correctly?
John Prendergast: Yes. The ego is part of this false ground, the conventional way that we take ourselves to be a separate self. I’m in here, you’re out there. I’m this body, and there’s the world (which is not me). Believing ourselves to be the complete agents of our own actions. These positions are part of the common-sense experience of being a separate self.
This experience is accompanied by many levels of contraction that come from identifying with our beliefs, our reactive feelings, and negative somatic responses. All of that is part of what I mean by false ground. Yet when we pay attention, we discover that this is not who we really are, and that can be a very unsettling realization.
MM: How do we free ourselves of identification with this false ground?
JP: It’s helpful to have a practice and also a guide, someone who understands the territory. Having gone through this letting-go process themselves, they’re able to support us in letting go of what we’ve taken to be safe, which means letting go of control. We’re so oriented to trying to be in control in order to be safe. As we relax that tendency toward contraction, we discover that it is actually not safe to live in the manner we have been living. It is a false idea of safety that makes us vigilant, which takes a toll on psychological and physical health. Clinging to false ground makes us stupid, in a way, as well as unresponsive.
Alternatively, the more we live from openness, the deeper our intrinsic trust in life becomes. Such fundamental trust is not that things will work out as we hope and wish, but rather that they will unfold as they need to. That becomes our true ground, our true safety, as experience reveals itself.
This is nothing to do with naivete. We know that this body could become sick. We know we’ll lose our loved ones. We know we’ll die. There’s no denial in this. Instead, there’s a deep embrace of life as it is: the openings and closings, the appearances and disappearances, all of it. That is where true safety comes from.
MM: Many of us are capable of conditional trust, which is based on getting what we want. But the trust you’re describing sounds less personal than that.
JP: It is. And that’s the key distinction: it’s not personal. People associate the word impersonal with coolness or distance or being uncaring. But that’s not it at all. It’s just not egoic. This trust is not concerned with the separate self; in fact, what actually unfolds is freedom from that sense of separation.
MM: In your book, you write about three different kinds of authentic ground. What are they?
JP: The first kind of authentic ground is when we’re in touch with our body. For example, most of us enjoy being in nature. We experience a real appreciation for, and attunement with, physicality and nature. Very often, people who’ve been traumatized don’t have that experience because it was unsafe for them to be in the body. So, the first level of authenticity is actually to enter the body, to feel like it’s safe to be here. A lot of psychotherapy works with that, and with trauma and early attachment issues. That’s good work. I’m very supportive of effective psychotherapy in that regard.
The second level of authenticity is archetypal, and exists largely outside our awareness. There may be flashes of the archetypal realm here and there, during a psychedelic journey or through some other unexpected opening, such as powerful dreams. This is why Jung’s work is so interesting to me. The archetypal level is largely an underground kind of journey. For Jung, there was a descent into this deep underground space that was quite tumultuous in his own life (to the point where he was questioning his own sanity). The archetypal level is where the ancestors live—unredeemed—where ancestral conditioning comes into the psyche and is felt. I’ve sensed this in my own life as well as in my work with clients and mentees. There might be spontaneous memories of pogroms or great-grandparents, images arising from ancestral (or ethnic) streams, waiting to be welcomed into the light of awareness.
Then there’s the universal dimension, what you might call the “groundless ground.” No ancestors, no psychological conditioning, no forms, no categories of description. Instead, the universal dimension is characterized by a deep, dark silence here. There’s no one and nothing there. It’s empty of all form, empty of all thought, full of stillness, silence, and darkness. It’s the emptiness out of which all life comes, welling up from the depths.
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As we open to the universal dimension, we begin to feel an essential life emerging, luminosity coming out of the darkness, a song coming out of silence, a dynamic movement coming out of stillness. This is a very, very different quality of life, not dependent on circumstances. Of course, there are traditions that talk about this dimension as well, including Tibetan Buddhism and nondual philosophy, which counsel us to surrender the ego, to open to the life that is moving us all.
MM: It amazes me that waking down—as you describe it—turning to a more holistic approach to self-realization, is not more widely accepted in psycho-spiritual circles.
JP: You do find elements of this teaching in different traditions. My teacher and friend, Adyashanti, has spoken about it but not explicitly (deleted comma) incorporating specific psychological elements. It’s in some of the Tibetan teachings, as I mentioned, as well as in certain contemplative schools, but not with this weaving of depth psychology that I find really important.
MM: To hear a teacher of your stature admit that while you were a skilled meditator, you still needed to go deeper, to pay attention to parts of yourself that you’d missed, is humbling and inspiring. You could have continued in the “transcendent” direction, but chose to focus on waking down, instead.
JP: This is the importance of vulnerability and self-honesty. Those are the most important factors in terms of our spiritual discovery process, in my experience. How much do we really want to know? Are we willing to look at everything? Waking down is not about attaining or sustaining a state or an image. It really comes down to a love for truth. That is what has driven me.
