An Interview with Bob Fickes on Fulfillment Meditation
by Gayla Y. Pinkosky


Bob, I understand that you were one of the forerunners of this age of Enlightenment. I also understand that you were one of Maharishi's students and you actually worked closely with him.
Bob Fickes:
Yes, you can say that. I have been teaching meditation since 1970. I worked very closely with Maharishi and was one among the 16 leaders of the TM movement in the United States that started the whole thing. It had been going on a small scale with Marharishi before that, but it started big around 1968-1970.

Being one of the first ones in on the action so to speak, I could go in to see Maharishi more freely than the people that arrived later. I received a lot of personal instruction from Maharishi. We talked about things that I did not talk about in open public, because I got weird looks when I did. These were the early days when a lot of people didn't have those experiences.

You currently teach what is called Fulfillment Meditation. Can you tell us about that?
Fickes:
Fulfillment Meditation has really synthesized a lot of what I learned from Maharishi and to be honest I wasn't intending on teaching Fulfillment Meditation. At the time that I was given those techniques (a whole story within itself) I was very active as a channel for the Ascended Masters. At that time I had been doing a lot of channeling for a little more than 10 years.

When I was in Japan, my promoter there asked if I had something that did not require a translator as much. It made me think about meditation. I told my promoter that I did not want to step on Maharishi's toes, nor did I want to create any problems for the TM movement but to let me think about it. The next time I was sitting in meditation, all of a sudden a door opened up and as that opened up, I understood the secret key and the secret code to unlock the Science of Mantra and the different techniques of meditation. I wanted to sit on it for a while and keep a low key. I did not even tell my promoter in Japan about it.

Then what happened was there was a man in Hawaii who was dying of cancer and he came to me for channeling. Merlin came in towards the end of his session and said, "If this channel would ever get off his butt and teach the techniques of meditation that he was given, people like you could be helped." So, I took the hint, and although I was hesitant, he was my first student. After that, I taught a few TM teachers whom I knew and they all said that there was something different about these techniques than what they had learned. I was using more than just a mantra in the sense that TM uses one. I was using different mantras in combination with a specific color. I also placed the mantra in different areas of the body and often made the mantra move. Later I added yantras to it.

The techniques that we are teaching now as Fulfillment Meditation are an expanded and more advanced version of what has been taught as the TM technique. We use a mantra and combined with the color and the yantra to take the mind from its normal level of functioning down into a more what we could call extrasensory perception, deeper more refined levels of perception. The color and yantra enhance this extrasensory perception.

The end result is expanding sensory perception until we completely let go of any objective perception to be just consciousness itself. That is found to be an infinite reservoir of potential. It is completely silent and unbounded and quite different than just sitting there and closing your eyes.

So, when I talk of meditation, I am not talking about visualization, I am not talking about concentration and I am not talking about holding the breath or quieting the mind. I am talking about an actual procedure to refine the way the mind perceives and the way the whole brain functions. It might even be better to call it Metabolic Meditation, because the metabolism drops 16-20 percent within the first two minutes. It is a very deep and unique experience. Between TM and this, I have been teaching deep meditation for 32 years. Tens of thousands of students have never seen it fail. How many things can you talk about that have 100 percent track record? This is for all people, ages 5 to 95 years old. Anyone can do this.

I see also that through your Awakened University of Meditation (AUM), you offer a degree-granting curriculum that sounds quite unique.
Fickes:
Yes, well this is an interesting story, too, because for almost 30 years I didn't like organizational structures. I believe in empowering the person and not doing something to set up a dogmatic teaching or control. But over the last five years, there has become more and more of a need for some kind of structure. And as the structure had been emerging with different techniques, and different books were starting to emerge, I realized that I could create a curriculum out of them. This curriculum would involve all the steps necessary to get to enlightenment.

When I was in the TM organization, one of the things I noticed was that people were not grounded. When I was doing a lot of the work with what we call emotional processing, like with Dr. John Gray, I saw that most of the people were almost fanatically involved with healing themselves around the clock and they never had time to have fun. With all of their processing, they didn't have peace of mind. They could clear their emotions, but they didn't find that inner joy, that inner peace of mind.

So, my own personal journey in the spiritual path has shown me that it takes more than one discipline. To have a completely fulfilled life inside and outside, both spiritual and material, we have to have a variety of disciplines to be able to achieve it. It is like spokes on a wheel and is important for balance.

The curriculum of AUM integrated many different tools that I have known over the years: emotional processing, regression, meditation, physical healing, spiritual healing and channeling. We have a very complete program: There is about two years of work for the Rishi Degree, another two years of work for the Maharishi Degree and about another two years of work for the Brahmarishi Degree. We have a three-degree program, which is similar to what we would find in a university as bachelor, masters and Ph.D. In this case, it is unique as we have set it up on the basis of personal experience of development of consciousness rather than book learning, memorization and passing tests. The spiritual universities that are presently out there base themselves on learning, rather than the direct experience of consciousness.

Maharishi had set up the Maharishi International University. That was a wondrous step in the right direction. He took all the disciplines of academics and showed their basis in consciousness. Still, the degree was based on bachelors, masters and Ph.D. curriculums. Our courses don't have to do with mathematics, literature or art. They have to do with experiences of perception. Such as, this experience means this, this experience indicates this...I show the roadmap basically from ignorance into all the states of enlightenment. This is a much more interesting way of learning and the path is Infinite.

Maharishi talked in public about seven states of consciousness. In the book that we use in Course 2 of the Rishi Degree program, we talk about 12 states of consciousness. There are five more states of consciousness beyond the seven states that Maharishi discussed in public.

This is interesting to the general public, because they are familiar with three primary states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and deep sleep. These states can be physiologically identified. There are other states of consciousness that people would refer to, such as drug-induced states, altered states, hypnotic states, but they are all sub-states of either waking, dreaming or sleeping or a combination of these three states of consciousness.

Beyond the three is what is called the fourth state or the state of meditation. The scientific name doctors apply to it is wakeful hypo-metabolic state. This is a state of mind that is 100 percent alert or awake and the body is in a hypo-metabolic state, meaning a lowered metabolism by 16-20 percent. For those of you that are worried about low metabolism for weight problems or whatever, this is a lowered metabolism that is a result of increasing the efficiency of the way the body functions. This is a very important distinction, because a lot of people have problems with their body due to inefficient metabolism. During meditation, the metabolism becomes super-efficient.

What happens when we meditate? The mind functions better, therefore the nervous system functions better and the physiology functions better. If we took a car and we refined the way the engine functioned, it would use less gasoline and become more fuel-efficient. When the body becomes more efficient, it becomes more fuel-efficient. Oxygen consumption drops 16-20 percent and we go into a super-efficient, lowered metabolic state. This gives better rest, better release of tension, more peace of mind. The research on brainwaves indicates a very high degree of synchronization not found in any other circumstance. IQ tests show that the IQ actually increases, grade point averages in students increase within three months by at lease one grade point.

We have been hearing a lot about cellular memory lately. It seems to be the buzzword. You have a book titled Clearing Cellular Memory. Can you fill us in on this topic?
Fickes:
Yes, this is a topic that I have been talking about for years. Actually, it was something that I started picking up on around Maharishi when we were learning that during meditation we "release stress" as he put it. I have now chosen the more ancient term for stress that is karma. We have deposits of karma. We have deposits of memory that are stored in the soul and stored in the body. During meditation, those deposits are lifted out and released.

So, that was my beginning, and when I took the journey with Dr. John Gray and did a lot of emotional processing, I went into deeper understandings of this and realized that many of the deposits that are in our body were not just our own, but came by way of our parents. As I took a theory based around that, I started doing regression work. Instead of doing soul regressions as most people do, I decided to do cellular memory regressions.

This is the way I looked at it: I realized at one point that the DNA is like a microchip and it remembers more than just biological information. It remembers every thought and every experience that happens to us. The DNA is a microchip of information that has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years, for thousands of generations. All of that information, all of those thoughts and experiences are stored inside that DNA. To say that the DNA is just biological information is like saying that a computer is just wires.

These DNA codes possess information that is accessible to our conscious mind under certain circumstances. In a regression scenario, we can go back through the parents, back through the grandparents, we can go 10 generations back and recover memories from our DNA that have been unresolved. One of the primary reasons that they are unresolved is that parents don't tell their children what they are thinking and feeling, the things that are kept behind closed doors. As children grow up, they are always thinking that it is their fault, but in reality daddy was just upset about something that was happening at the office or something was going on when mommy and daddy went into the bedroom and they would fight and the children would hear the screams but did not know what the content was.

We grow up with these feelings inside of us but not knowing that they belong to someone else. We start thinking that we are crazy or misunderstood. No one has ever explained these feelings to us. We start thinking that we are the only one having those feelings. This is the major handicap that I see in the world today, that people run around thinking that "no one can understand me." Once we get that this is something that has been passed on to us from many generations, then it also occurs to us, well, if it has been in my family for generations, it is probably something that is universal and inside of everybody.

We are not alone. Every human being is the same. The feelings, the strange reactions, the habits of behavior, have all been passed down to us from our ancestors as part of our genetic makeup. There are some steps that I have learned in Thailand from a teacher whom I work with called Jaupu or Bhu. This is from a Buddhist tradition in Thailand.

They first of all point out that we are just human. Being raised in the Western world, we have this handicap that on one hand we believe that we are supposed to be perfect, but on the other hand, I remembered my dad always saying to me, "There was only one perfect person." So we have this dual conflict inside of us, wanting to be perfect, but no, there was only one person that was ever perfect. The truth is that we are always human. We are just human. If we are to achieve a greater degree of perfection, or if human life was supposed to be perfect, we would not have been born human beings. We would have been born as a god, goddess or an angel.

We come here as Maharishi once put it, to experience life as 60-40: 60 percent good and 40 percent bad. I once had a girlfriend who was looking for the perfect mate, looking for the perfect place to live and the perfect job. She would call me every once in a while and say she found the perfect place that is to be her home or that she has found the perfect boyfriend. Six months later she would say, "Well, it is not really working out now and I have to move on." To understand that we have 60 percent good, hey that is as good as it gets in human life!

Another perspective along these lines is that this charge or these memories, this imperfection as it were, is contained within the body. When I was channeling, I noticed this. A Master would step into my body, start to speak through this mouth and use this mind, using my senses as its vehicle of perception. And it occurred to me that say, when Lord Michael would come through this body and channel through me and then channel through another channel, that there was a difference in Lord Michael: in the vocabulary, in the information and even in the understanding. What I began to realize is that even when the soul that occupies the body has perfection or spiritual realization, they still must function through the filter of the body and that filter is relying upon the degree of clarity that the body has achieved and also the degree of freedom from cellular memory that it has achieved.

That makes sense, because I think that all of us who have been to channels have noticed that same difference, so that answers that question about channeling.
Fickes:
As far as channeling is concerned, I am the first to admit, where not many channels would, that channeling is an imperfect science. Whenever I would get any information as channeled information, I made sure that I would verify it within three to four days. One of the other things I liked to do was to see what other channels had to say about the same topic. I put four or five different channels information together and then I had a broader perspective of what was trying to be said. Check and double check.

Even when we think it is coming from God or one of God's personal representatives or emissaries, let's remember that it came through an imperfect vehicle here. Even if that vehicle was our own, there is no way to get from the infinite knowledge into a finite medium like our body and not have some filtering out of the wisdom. There is a loss when we move infinity into a finite vehicle!

With techniques of clearing karma through the cellular memory, does it seem to take a long time to see a shift? Once you have a realization about something that is a karmic tendency, does that mean it is cleared for good?
Fickes:
It depends what kind of realization it is.

What if you had the realization that you have a record of having something happen in your relationship every six months?
Fickes:
It won't stop it. Just understanding something doesn't make the charge go away. Intellectual understanding is something different from the energetics of the memory.

Now, here we start to get into the fact that we are carrying two sets of memories. Most people in spiritual circles do not understand this, and particularly not in psychological circles. We have the cellular memories, which are specific identifiable memories stored in the DNA that are accessed from time to time when something similar occurs to us. Something will happen in our environment. A person walks into the room and it triggers our memory of someone who felt the same way. It could have been a memory of a great-grandfather or great-grandmother, but we no longer have that reference as to who that was or what happened. But the memory will be triggered inside of us, and we will irrationally respond to the person either with fear, attraction or whatever. Those memories are stored physically as concrete circumstances and there will be specific things about the person that will get triggered depending upon what that memory is composed of and the images of what that memory is composed of.

This is our cellular memory. The memories then will have physical dimension to them. They will have a concrete imagery associated with them and ideas and philosophies attached to them. Codes of morality, do's and don'ts, feelings of guilt or whatnot. But deeper than our physical memory is the soul that inhabits this body. The soul is not physical. It is energetic. The soul is a vast body of energetic responses that we call feelings. The memories of the soul are energetic deposits stored in what we might call our unconscious mind.

When the soul leaves the physical body, it leaves the physical memories behind with the body, but carries the textures and feelings of its lifetime forward into its next lifetime. After millions of lives that the soul has gone through, there are many textures and feelings that come along with the soul and move into this body, and they too will be triggered by different feelings and textures in our environment.

The person who walks into the room will trigger not just our cellular memory, but things from our own soul. These textures and feelings from the soul rise up through the physical vehicle and trigger the specific imagery of the cellular memory. The two deposits of memories combine to produce an experience in our mind.

What is interesting here and what we have to note here is that those experiences that we are having of reality have nothing to do with the reality outside. It has everything to do with the way the memories are being triggered inside of us. They will color and cover the texture over the imagery that is coming through our senses. We cannot have clear accurate perception of the world around us until we clear these memories.

How are they cleared? An idea is not sufficient. Just thinking about it doesn't clear the energy of it. They have to be cleared by expanding the energy and releasing it -- activating it, expanding it and releasing it through meditation. Regression can also help, because regression done the way I do it is to connect with the energy inside the person and not just the physical memory. I actually find its location in the body and release it through breathing, as well as realization.

All of us who do healing found that when a client walks into the room, the client will say, "This is what is wrong with me." The truth is that if they knew what was wrong, then they would not have to come to us. So what does this tell us? Well, it tells us that whatever they are using to describe their problem is not identified to be the problem yet. When I do regressions and healing work, I am always looking for where the charge is, and then I do research into that charge, where the energy is and try to locate the hidden side of it.

I have learned that the reason that we carry these things is that they have been hidden from our view. As John Gray put it in one of his first books, "What you feel, you can heal." What you cannot feel, you cannot heal yet. No matter how much you understand about it, if you cannot feel it, then you cannot heal it. The hidden memories are the hardest to find.

I have noticed that with people that have very debilitating illness such as AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis and these kinds of things, the first thing I need to do with them is to get them down inside their body where they are willing to feel their pain. If they are not able to feel their pain or they are out of their body someplace and numb, then there is very little we can do for them. The healing has to begin where they are comfortable with experiencing the degree of pain that is being carried inside the body. When we can locate where that pain is coming from, what kind of images and memories are associated with that pain, then it helps it to be released. This is the first stage of healing disease.

That is going to take a great amount of surrendering of the mind and the ego.
Fickes:
Yes it is. The mind and the ego definitely have to get out of the way. The ego is attached to things that it knows, and the mind will be always wanting to put labels on it and say, "This is what it is, now I am comfortable, now I understand, I don't want to go any deeper, I don't want to feel any more pain." It takes a lot of courage. Just when you want to say "I'm done" is when you need to keep going.

You have a new book coming out soon titled Shakti, The Gift of Spiritual Power. We have heard the word shakti many times, but what is it?
Fickes:
After 30 years of research, and that includes well over 80,000 hours with my eyes closed in deep meditation, and after working with tens of thousands of students around the world, I have come to understand what shakti is. To me, this is a very fundamental understanding. It marks a major transition in my own work and in the way that I teach.

First of all, shakti can be defined as spiritual power. Most of us think of spiritual power as anything other than our normal power. A lot of us are doing healing work and spiritual work on the basis of the understanding that it is something different than the normal reality. Well, yes, that is true, but to really understand spiritual power, we must understand it not from its relationship with present day objective life.

We have to find the origin of spiritual power. Where does it come from? What is it made of? How can we increase it? How can we develop it? For this, we have to go to God/Source. We have to take the mind deep into meditation and unite with our Source that is a deep reservoir of potential in the unlimited infinite silence within the mind. That silence is Source, the Source of all life. When it first moves, this means that it is the first movement of life. The Masters once phrased it this way: "Life is God in motion."

When we try to stop life, when we try to stop our feelings, we are creating death. Putting on the brakes every time is telling the body, "Don't do that." It is also telling the life, "Stop." It tells our body and it tells our soul to stop living. The underlying intent is, "I don't like what I am feeling, let me stop it." We are stopping the flow of life because we don't trust where it is going. We don't understand what is happening.

So, let us look at the origin of spiritual power as moving God/Source. Life in motion, God is Life in motion, or Life is God in motion. This movement of Life Force starts as a wave of Silence. The wave of Silence rises up through our being to become textures and feelings and then to become physical experience. We must learn the roadmap between the physical and the Silence. Physicists have already done that in terms of science, and now we have to do that in terms of Consciousness. As we do that, we can start to experience that flow of Consciousness more and more and give techniques to develop it further. That is what I am doing with Shakti. That is it in a nutshell, I took about five minutes here to describe what I have done in over 150 pages in the book.

You have a center being built in Thailand that sounds like a paradise, dream come true. I understand that it is a center where people can go for meditation, healing and spa treatments too. Can you tell us more?
Fickes:
Yes, it is a retreat center. This is a place where we can do intensive spiritual work that will be away from the normal routine of life, free from the distractions of noisy streets, noisy children, busy minds and responsibilities. When we want to get away from it all, we go to Thailand.

I live in Chiang Mai that is in the north of Thailand. We have six acres in the middle of rice fields, surrounded by mountains 360 degrees: Quite a beautiful setting! Northern Thailand has a spiritual heritage that is thousands of years old. It is at the foothills of the Himalayas, so there have been many monks and yogis that have wandered from India and over the Himalayas from Burma, Tibet and China. They have come into that area of northern Thailand and resided in caves there. Some of the caves have been documented to have as many as 50 different monks over the last several thousand years that have stayed there and got their enlightenment.

The land is infused with spiritual power, very sacred ground. It was interesting, when I first went to Thailand for a holiday, for some reason I had a guide book that said this was formerly the land of Krishna. I didn't know that until I read it and said, "Now let me think." When I read the Bhagavad Gita, and other Indian literature that referred to Krishna, they always referred to Krishna as coming from a land to the northeast of India. Of course, that is Thailand.

As I did my research there, I found two things that appeared to me. The first was that the Buddhist history in the temples goes back to the time when Krishna lived in that land. It also refers to a time when the tradition of the Tibetan Buddhism moved through Thailand. Actually, Tibetan Buddhism originated in Sri Lanka, moved up through Cambodia, through Thailand, through Burma and then to Tibet. It didn't go from India up into Tibet. In particular the tradition of Lady Tara, the Tara tradition, the feminine tradition of Buddhism moved through Thailand and found its way to Tibet. If you trace the lineage of teachers in the Tibetan tradition, you will find certain teachers that resided in Thailand and Cambodia. There is a very powerful spiritual tradition from that lineage residing just a half an hour south of Chiang Mai.

We bought six acres of land. We will have a spa there, actually it is from the chain of Hideaway Spas in Thailand. We will have a meditation center that is called salaa in Thai, and we have been working with a salaa there with our teacher Jaupu. Jaupu's salaa has been in existence for 20 years. We go there most every night and we heal anywhere between 50-200 people for free every night. These are mostly village people who have been in the hospital. The hospitals can't help them, because they are either too poor or the technology is not there to help them. They have been sent home to die. These people come to us by the truckloads carried in on stretchers. If ever there is a challenge for the healer, this is it -- and it is every night. Lots of spirit possession and all kinds of things. It is amazing to see people come in a catatonic state or a coma and two months later be normal. It is awesome.

So, this is a specific kind of healing?
Fickes:
This is a specific kind of healing. When I have done research on it, I have traced it back to the time of Buddha. Buddha used these healing techniques during his lifetime. They have been maintained through a secret tradition by the monks in various temples. Not all the temples, but a handful of them. It is found a lot in China and parts of Southeast Asia. It is extremely effective. It still works on the basis of the cellular memory and the soul memory. Thinking of the karma as an actual energetic deposit of memory that can be extracted from the body and from the soul.

We will be offering this ancient form of healing in our salaa. We will also be offering meditation for those that want it. The spa will be for those who just want to have spa treatments. We have a steam sauna with five different organic herbs that are boiled, and the steam is piped into the sauna. It is like having a sauna in Tam Yum Kung. These are all herbs that are good for the skin, good for the hair, etc. Now, what I am doing is working with the Thai tradition of herbal healing and developing different spa treatments that are more than cosmetic. They are actual therapeutic techniques to heal dysfunction in the muscles, help to realign the bones, help to clear cellular memory, help to cure aches and pains out of the body, bad backs and the whole works.

This means a regular person on holiday that doesn't know anything about meditation can come to your spa and get the works done.
Fickes:
Yes, well not today, but certainly tomorrow. We are looking to have the spa and the healing salaa to be completed this month.

Well, it certainly looks like you have done all the homework to find the best techniques available on the planet.
Fickes:
I think so. I am certainly humble enough not to draw the conclusion that I have the best, but I've got the best that I have found. I am constantly looking and traveling around the world particularly through Asia, which is my forte. I've been gifted with a lot of the understanding of Asian tradition, the Sanskrit tradition, the Buddhist tradition and I have been doing my research both in the scriptures and in terms of talking to the monks, the yogis and the Philippine psychic surgeons, and I have come up with tools that I have found to be the best. If there is something else out there that is better, I will embrace it and make it part of our program.

I have noticed that a lot of the newer books that have come out now and over the past centuries are revised versions of sacred texts. How do you know what is real?
Fickes:
I have always felt that it would be best to go back to the original first recordings or teachings, but they are of course in Sanskrit or Hebrew and not many people can study them for that reason. Along those lines, I was reading in a book called the Shiva Sutras that comes from Kashmir, the Kashmir Shiva tradition. In there, they have the instructions for finding a teacher. The very first thing they say is that when you are looking for a teacher, find a teacher who for one, has enlightenment for themselves and the experiences that you are looking for -- and two, has the tools to be able to pass them on to you.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of teachers in the world who are very good at what they do, but they are not enlightened yet, and they don't have the rest of the picture. The picture that they do have is very accurate and very helpful, but is not complete. I feel very fortunate that I have received a wondrous gift to be able to have had an enlightened teacher, several of them, and to have been able to have had those tools passed on to me or shown to me in a way that I can pass them on to others.

That is a very humble approach which makes your work feel much more real. I attended your lecture and that is what led to this interview.
Fickes:
Thank you. This is one note that I have found to be fascinating. When I travel, I end up meeting people from all sorts of traditions. Special people find themselves coming into my life and I have met people from many different traditions, many different meditation paths, Guru Maharaji, Osho, Muktananda, Guru Mai, Sai Baba to mention a few, and there are many more. Many of them have learned the techniques of meditation that we teach and they have all declared, "This is what my Master always talked about. This is what I have been waiting for."

To me, this is the best credentials I could ever find for the techniques that we are offering. Sometimes, there is so much in the market place and we cannot distinguish between the better tools and the mediocre ones -- or even the ones that don't work.

In the fact that you are willing to teach others to find the enlightenment that you have found, tells me that you are a true teacher.
Fickes:
Well, there is no choice. How is the world going to be a better place? Even if we get our enlightenment and we are walking through the world and the world is full of pain, we are still going to feel that pain. An enlightened person is not numb. They are more sensitive than normal people. An enlightened person is going to feel the pain even more than normal people do. You cannot grow in enlightenment and not want to help the world.

Compassion is a natural outgrowth of consciousness. We all feel each other. So, this is what we are offering. We have a whole curriculum and many teachers now that have been trained in each area. The teachers are not perfect yet. They are not superstars, but just normal people who embrace the path. They have enough knowledge and experience in meditation that I can pass on the tools to them so they can use them. We have a wonderful program that works, it works because of the tools. The tools carry Shakti.

For further information on Bob Fickes contact: Fulfillment Foundation International, 436 Por La Mar Dr. #1, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93103. Call (805) 966-3972, e-mail
coordinator@fulfillmentfoundation.com or go to www.fulfillmentfoundation.com

Gayla Pinkosky is a freelance writer and author living in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Copyright (c) 2002 Gayla Pinkosky


FEB 2003


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