Suddenly that voice spoke again and the voice said I would walk into that mountainside and
re-enter the womb of Christ and I was gobsmacked and then the feeling I didn't hear any more
voice I didn't hear anything else beyond that that was the end and then I just came more
and more and more back into my body and into this realm and into this world and I was dumb
struck what had happened how did it happen why did it happen what did it mean how could
I have it again.
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.
My name is Rick Archer.
Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening
people.
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My guest today is someone whom I've gotten to know through her books and also through
a conversation or two that we've had before today, and I think you're really going to
like her.
Her name is Aedamar Kirrane.
She's in Dublin, Ireland.
She used to be a lawyer, or a barrister as they call them, but then turned to philosophy
and writing.
She experienced a spontaneous mystical awakening that began in 2015 and continues to unfold.
She didn't find the support she might have hoped to within her own Christian tradition,
and so she embarked on a very deep inquiry to understand the inner dynamics of awakening,
and came to believe in life as an original blessing rather than the doctrine of original
sin that she thinks has destroyed our sense of ourselves as sacred beings, at least through
particular tradition. She wrote a lovely book called Light on Fire, Waking Up to Divine Love,
which I listen to as an audible book, which I recommend because she reads it very nicely
with her lovely Irish accent. That was published in 2021. She has developed a three-fold mystical
cosmology that understands creation in the pattern of exodus and return, and it recognizes
all of life is sacred, described through the concept of panentheism, which we'll be discussing
and explaining, and that the purpose of human life is deification, or the return to our
divine state while still in human form.
And all of this is set within the context of a great awakening that she and many other
people feel that we're now living through.
She's done a lot of mystical writing, and you'll find that on her website, which I'll
be linking to. Okay, for starters, before the extraordinary events you describe in your
book Light on Fire, you were a lawyer, a wife, and a mother. Can you paint a picture of your
life then and the unconventional soul you felt you were hiding?
All along? Well, first of all, thank you so much, Rick, for having me. It's a real pleasure
to be in conversation with you. Thank you.
Oh, you're welcome. It's a joy. It's a pleasure for me.
Thank you. I was living a really ordinary life. It didn't cross my mind to explore
spirituality in my life. So I wasn't in any way a seeker. I wasn't on a spiritual path.
I was just living a really ordinary life.
You're a good little Catholic girl going to church, right?
Yeah, I had grown up, certainly, with very strict Catholicism. My parents were very traditional,
both from, you know, rural West of Ireland, very traditional Catholic upbringing.
But by the time I was in my own adulthood, I was doing it my own way. I was still very much,
I'm now going to say I was like in love with God, but I only know that now. I had a healthy
kind of relationship with the divine realm, but it wasn't something that was significant or
important to me on a day to day basis. But yeah, you're touching on by saying I had lived quite an
unusual life from a very young stage, like from my earliest memories in life, I
absolutely felt that I did not belong in this realm. I did not belong with my
family, I did not belong to humanity, I felt really lost at a very deep and
profound level and I felt, I had the sense that I was just in the wrong place. As a
child I used to kind of have this idea that at some point pretty soon somebody
was going to figure out that Adhemar was in the wrong place and they were going to take
me out of here and I was going to be brought to where I would find that I fitted in and
I belonged.
It was just this inner sense, now I know that I was just very naturally spiritual.
Now I know that I had sort of a mystical temperament.
Now I know that I was living between worlds really in every way.
But I had no understanding of that as a child.
had no understanding of that until the last 10 years of my life. So I had kind
of grown up with this sense this very kind of a disappointed sense that I was
stuck here in this realm in a human body with the human community and that I just
had to kind of make the best of it. And then my life did begin to dramatically
change around 2007 and then significantly in 2015.
Okay, before we get to all that, you write in your book that becoming a mother was a
catalyst that reoriented your life towards its true north star, as you put it.
In what ways did motherhood prepare you for the spiritual awakening that was to come?
Yeah, so the main thing around becoming a mother was that I fell into postnatal depression
during the birth of my first child, my daughter.
That's uncommon, usually it's postnatal.
That's why it's called postnatal.
Do you know what?
There's actually prenatal depression as well.
There's depression during pregnancy.
There can be like traumatic experiences during the birth.
And I certainly had, I was psychologically thrown during the birth of my
daughter.
And then afterwards, the problem was that nobody diagnosed it.
You know, I was surrounded by supposedly the best medical care in the country, you
know beautiful midwives, lovely doctors, lovely consultants but like they sent me
home with what I now absolutely know was a textbook case of postnatal depression
and it I was going to my GP saying I can't stop crying I'm really sad even
though I'm also really happy it was a very confusing time for me I did not I
didn't understand what was wrong with me I didn't know why can I not just be
blissfully happy with the fact that I am now a mother which had been the absolute
highlight of my life that it was just really the central thing that I wanted
in my life was to be a mother and now I was a mother and things just weren't
working out in the fairy tale way that I had kind of anticipated. So one day I was
now pregnant with my second child which is my son Coen and I was sitting in my
kitchen crying just really upset just kind of despairing and just saying what
is wrong what is wrong what is wrong with me and suddenly I heard an inner
voice in my head and it said I have postnatal depression and the most enormous weight just
lifted off my shoulders because now I had a name for what was wrong and now I could get help. Now
I knew okay there's a path I can follow to fix this and get myself out of this mess.
Is there any kind of more esoteric explanation of postnatal depression other than it's a hormonal
thing that happens naturally?
I mean I know there's a number of different ways of looking at depression but for me it
was very psychological.
I think it was touching on the aspect of my life that is the most sensitive, birth and
death are the most sensitive parts of all of our lives and for me they have been quite
profound.
In my background, I'll just give like a sense of how I see the postnatal depression arose
in me and then why it became a portal for healing and awakening. In my mother's lineage, my
mother's mother, so that's my grandmother, when her mother, my great grandmother, was
giving birth to my grandmother, she died in childbirth. And so my grandmother, who was
called Bridget, was brought up by her grandmother in turn. And then my grandmother was an only
child and when my mother was pregnant with me, I was her fourth pregnancy, there
were seven children in our family, when my mother was pregnant with me her mother
died. And so I was carried in my mother's room with my mother in mourning. And when
I first began therapy several decades later, I kept intuitively coming back to
my mother's womb and I didn't know that. I didn't know that that had happened
until years later, but I kept coming back to the idea that something went wrong in
my mother's womb. All of these problems that I've been living with all my life,
something happened in her womb. And so when I later discovered that my
grandmother had died, I realized, okay, that's a big part of this jigsaw. Giving
birth myself, I think, brought me back to all of that energetic maelstrom of the
womb and birth. Okay, so jumping ahead. What led you to leave your career as a lawyer?
Did you enjoy being a lawyer, but you left it to pursue philosophy and creative writing?
What were you searching for? Well, actually, it was a it was the postnatal depression that
prompted me to leave my career as a lawyer. When I went back to work after my daughter
was born, I was I was in a bad way. And it was just incredibly challenging. So when I
was pregnant with my second child and coming up to the time to give birth to him, I realised
that I really needed to serve myself better this time and I thought I'll take an extended
maternity leave and I'll get myself up on my feet again as a mother and begin enjoying
this experience and bonding with my children.
And once I gave up work, I had turned to writing, journaling, furiously during my time of postnatal
Depression, which probably lasted for about three years in total, I'd say, two
definitely, and I fell in love with writing. And I loved journaling and then
I started taking creative writing courses and I was writing anything and
everything and I fell in love with writing and I thought, "Wow, I wonder if I
could make a career as a writer." And I just decided I was gonna make a change,
so I never went back to law and instead I went back to college and I studied
English and philosophy and then a master's in creative writing, all with a
of you to becoming a writer of fiction.
Well the best laid plans of mice and men as they say.
Yeah.
All right so your spiritual awakening began in 2015 but you describe a powerful precursor
to this in 2007, an experience of profound peace and a vision of re-entering the womb
of Christ.
Can you take us back to that moment and the impact it had on you?
Yeah huge impact.
So 2007, my children were still very young.
They were born in 2001 and 2003, so they were just sort of four, five, six, seven, that kind
of age.
Our little family was on summer holidays in the west of Ireland, a very, very, very beautiful
part of the coast near the Skellig Rocks.
I don't know if you've ever heard of them.
Have you, Rick?
They're only from your book.
They're worth looking at online just to get a picture of them.
They're really, really majestic.
quite small and they're just huge big gray stony peaks that are kind of
triangular in shape and it was the place for, it was a monastic settlement back in
the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries. Augustinian monks used to live out there
and they lived incredibly ascetic lives, you know, the middle of the Atlantic
Ocean living in little stone beehive huts. It's very majestic and the west of
Ireland there's a real spirituality to the land and to the setting and the
energy is very liminal and it's very magical and it's the part of the world
where I always feel when I'm there it feels like my soul just opens and
expands and spreads and and kind of comes home to itself. So one evening I was
walking along this coastline that I'm describing. I love to walk in nature and
I love to walk in the evening around sunset it just really is very special
for me. So I was walking along and I had often had an experience of what I now
know is called altered states of consciousness where I would just become
quite detached from this world and sort of fall into not quite a reverie like I
was able to keep living my ordinary life but my mind was somewhere else but I
didn't know where where it was it was just elsewhere. And this evening as I was
walking along by the coast of the Atlantic, I fell into a really, really,
really deep and exponentially accelerating altered state of consciousness, so that on
the beach I actually just had to stop walking because I did not know what was
happening to me. And I fell into this sense of complete disconnect from my body,
the beach, the world, the cosmos, and I felt myself traveling or being brought
into a state of profound peace, like beyond anything that could possibly
exist in this realm. And it was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened
me. And I often think that it was essentially like a near-death experience
without actually dying. Every aspect of this life had just ceased, as if I had
left existence entirely. And it was really incredibly beautiful and it lasted
for, I don't know, it's impossible to know, but maybe 20 minutes, maybe half an hour,
you know, about that kind of time. And when it began to fade, when I began to feel
myself coming back to this world's consciousness and realizing that I was
back on the beach and I was back in my body and I was back in this world, I was
really devastated because I thought I want to stay there, I want that to
continue forever, I don't ever want that to end. I wonder, is there a way back?
And I was thinking to myself, you know, what could I do to try and get back into that state?
I had no words to kind of describe it to myself.
But a way I describe it in the book is that it's like when you wake up from a really good dream
and you try to kind of sneak back into the dream, you know, it was kind of like that.
I was saying, can I get back somehow or another?
And as I was standing on the beach, just really like absolutely in awe
and also just kind of shocked as well for what had happened.
Suddenly a voice started talking in my head and the voice said,
what would you do if you could stay in this place of peace forever or with this feeling of peace forever?
And I was really gobsmacked.
I thought, who just said that?
I was speaking inside my head.
So I began to think, gosh, well, what would I do?
I would do absolutely anything because it was the most beautiful experience I'd ever had in my life.
So before I could even formulate an answer in my mind, suddenly that voice spoke again.
again and the voice said I would walk into that mountainside and re-enter the
womb of Christ and I was gobsmacked and I didn't hear anything else beyond that
that was the end and then I just came more and more and more back into my body
and into this realm and into this world and I was dumbstruck what had happened
how did it happen why did it happen what did it mean how could I have it again so
So that was 2007 and that did set me on a bit of a quest to figure out what was that all
about.
I've seen that happen a lot where people get zapped with some really nice experience as
kind of a teaser, you know, a taste of what's possible.
And then they've got to figure out how to stabilize it and make it more abiding.
It's like we're given a glimpse and sometimes people actually get it from psychedelics or something like that
but other times it comes spontaneously as
as you did
I often think that you know where the stories of king arthur and the knights of the round table and the grail stories
I don't know if you're familiar with them, but yeah, i've probably seen some movies
Yeah, I only have a small familiarity with it
But what I do know what I think happens is that somebody gets a glimpse of the grail
sort of as a shimmering image somewhere. And they spend the rest of their life trying to find that
grail again. And I think that's sort of an analogy. I think that's a version of this.
Yeah. And in fact, they've been poets. I think I've heard this with reference to Blake,
they have some beautiful transcendent experience. And then they write about it for the rest of their
lives. Yeah, no, without ever really being able to recapture it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jim Finley has this really beautiful sentence that just keeps me company
all the time. He says, "Sometimes in life, something is given and you spend the rest of
your life trying to be true to that thing, even though you don't know what it was."
Yeah.
And I think that just describes perfectly this path.
But I think what you've been experiencing and what I would certainly advocate is to,
you know, not have it be a one-shot deal, but to have it recur and integrate and stabilize and
become more of a normal state of functioning. Yeah, I think you're precisely speaking to the
awakening process, aren't you? Yeah. I mean, I think this is what we want. We want our consciousness
to transform. But the way in which it happened for me is that my awakening, that was just the
the beginning of it, then it became a daily, like from 2015 really until now it has become
an almost daily experience for me to have mystical experiences. But if you have a spiritual
awakening or you're beginning to have a spiritual awakening, but you're not on a particular
path, how do you explain it to yourself? How do you understand it? So when it's spontaneous,
you then have to work backwards. I've been working backwards since 2015. What are the
frames, what's the context, you know, how do I understand this, who might help me
understand it, how do I process it, how do I integrate it? So I've been working
backwards ever since. You explain in your book that you had a lifelong feeling of
being lost at a primordial level and a cosmic desire for something you couldn't
name. So you know it's like here you're given this taste. What methods have you
used? I mean was your study of philosophy part of the working backwards process?
You mentioned the works of Schelling and Heidegger having provided some context for your experiences.
Did their ideas about nature being an authenticity help you understand what was happening to you?
Yeah, hugely.
Yeah, they really did.
Yeah.
So I was studying these philosophers before 2015.
It was just my final year of my philosophy in English degree that the mystical experiences
began.
So the way in which philosophy first began to help me and it still helps me, it began
to explain that lifelong feeling of being lost and this cosmic desire that I used to feel
for something vast and huge that I didn't know what it was.
The couple of philosophers that really helped were first of all Schelling.
He is an Enlightenment philosopher around the late 1600s, early 1700s I think would be his
era.
And he was part of the counter-enlightenment.
So he was a philosopher of the sublime.
So he would be like in Blake's lineage.
So he wasn't really committed to the enlightenment project and rationality and explaining everything
just with pure reason like they can't.
He was looking at nature.
I think they called him a nature philosopher, but not in the way we would understand nature
now.
But anyway I was preparing for a tutorial one evening and I was reading in one of his whatever
piece of writing I had to read and he said that nature is God giving birth to itself.
And I was just transfixed.
I can still see myself at the kitchen table and I just read the sentence again and again
and again and I thought nature is God giving birth to itself and I mean it landed as a
truth.
you know, I thought, yeah, okay, now we're onto something.
Okay, now somebody has said something
that really resonates with my heart and with my whole being.
And that really opened a door for me
to begin looking at nature in a different way
and to begin looking at God in a different way.
That, you know, up to that point,
I think God had still been quite remote,
you know, quite external.
The external God kind of managing things from without.
But if God is, if nature is God giving birth to itself,
then God is in absolutely everything.
- Yeah.
We'll get into this as we discuss panentheism,
but you know, and Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism
would have something to say about this too,
because, you know, they would say that,
well, there's nothing but that, you know,
but Brahman or God.
And so this, so it must be a self-interacting dynamics
that's taking place in which the apparent creation
is actually just an, essentially that,
same as that which gives rise to it. It's all one thing, kind of playing a self-referral game.
Yes, yeah, yeah. I think that's exactly what it is. Yeah, I think God goes out from itself,
herself, himself, with the intention of coming back. And we were having a conversation last
week and we were, I was saying, you know, does God really, you know, is God going to make it home,
you know, to God's own self? We were chatting about that. And after subsequently, I was
reflecting and I think this is what I'm thinking now is that God knows God will get back, but
maybe isn't sure exactly how. You know that T.S. Eliot quote,
coming back to the place from which you've started and knowing it for the first time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. I have that experience so often. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, anything more you want to say about this little bit?
So then Heidegger, yeah, he was incredibly helpful as well.
He spoke about these moods of, he called them moods of detachment.
Um, and so he was describing these kinds of altered states of consciousness.
I've been having all of my life without understanding what they were.
And he said that it is essentially a call to authenticity.
He said, when you're in that kind of detached state of mind, what's
happening is that you're entering pure being, you're becoming your authentic
self and he said when you go back into regular ordinary consciousness he said
you're left with a longing to return permanently to that other way of being
and he said it's a call to authenticity because you no longer want to engage at
what he called a level of idle chat in ordinary consciousness in in the way
you've been living your life up to that point. So that again gave me language for
understanding that okay yeah this is a call to authenticity I do want to be
authentic. I do want to be my true self.
Yeah, so they set me on the road and then Levinas explained what the
cosmic desire was. He said that that's metaphysical desire for the great other
which can be God, being, life, consciousness. So I began to have a bit of
a vocabulary for my way of being.
Yeah, I had a spiritual teacher who gave a talk which was later
entitled "The Path of the Seeker" but he talked about how
you know, you kind of, he actually used an analogy too, which I'll get, I'll give you in a second,
but you leave the comfort of ordinary life and discover there's something more,
but, and so you can no longer really feel comfortable, you know, satisfied with ordinary
life, but then you haven't reached that something more. So you're kind of in no man's land, you know.
Yeah, yeah. And you're in a limbo. Yeah, it's kind of uncomfortable. The analogy he used was
like let's say a guy is living in this little shabby hut and he's yeah that's all he knows
he's attached to it and then someone says well you see that palace over there that's actually
your true home and so he starts out towards the palace and then he thinks wait a minute
what about my hut you know i don't know i don't where am i now you know i'm not in either place
Yeah, yeah. True. Limbo.
Yeah. But a central image in your book is that of sacred fire. You haven't really
talked about this much yet in this interview, but Jesus comes to you,
and that's the main theme of your book. Jesus comes to you in a blaze of fire, and you feel
your own head and soul set on fire. So what does this fire represent? And as much as you
possibly can, what is it like to experience it? Amazing. I'll read that piece, actually,
Rick. I have that page in my book open of that experience. Okay, go for it. Yeah, that's okay,
just to give people a flavor of that experience. And then what I'd love to talk with you about
is the fact that I now know from listening to your show that what I was experiencing was also a
spontaneous Kundalini awakening, but I didn't understand it at all until very recently.
So I'll read this. So this was my first like full, full-on mystical experience that happened
almost exactly 10 years ago, July 2015. So I'm reading from my book, Light on Fire.
So let me just get to the, oh yeah, I'll give a little background to this.
Rick, when I began to meditate in early 20, what year did I begin to meditate?
2015. Yeah, so this happened six months after I began to meditate. When I say I began to meditate,
like that's a real overstatement. I hadn't. You just kind of did it somehow. You didn't
didn't get instruction or anything, right?
I just sat at my kitchen table and closed my eyes.
I didn't have the first clue how to meditate.
I barely knew that there was like formal teaching for meditation, but somebody had recommended
to me.
I was really sad.
My dad had just died a little, my dad had died a couple of months ago and I was very
heartbroken and somebody said, "Why don't you meditate?"
And I thought, "Okay, I'll try that."
And so I sat at my kitchen table and just closed my eyes and just kind of followed my
intuition, you know?
So I was doing no formal meditation, but I was really loving the feeling in my body when
I did meditate.
Like I had a real sense of profound peace, calm, stillness, and I really liked that.
So in early July, somebody had recommended a book to me called Spirit Babies by Walter
McKitchen.
And I read it and it was really interesting.
And at the end of each chapter, he had some guided meditations.
I said oh bingo this is what I've been looking for some advice so I did one of
his meditations which is called the rainbow meditation and it's a really
simple meditation I mean there's nothing esoteric or difficult about it so what he
asked that what the instructions on the page were to now I didn't know what
chakras were I didn't know what colors were I didn't know anything about working
with the chakras in the body but this is what the meditation simply asked you to
do was visualize colors traveling up from the earth one at a time the colors of the rainbow.
You're traveling up your left foot going to a particular part of your body say the base chakra
the red and then you see the color traveling down your right foot out in back out into the earth and
so on up your body until you get up to the the top. Now he didn't say base chakra, sacral chakra,
crown chakra. He just said red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white and I just followed the color.
So it was like full of like really naive approach to it all and then this is what happened.
So I'm reading from my book now. So that paragraph just gives that description. Then
I visualized colored energy traveling up and down my body for each different chakra color.
And as I did this, I felt powerful energy building inside me. I was quite taken aback. I faced a
split-second decision. I knew I could stop this strange experience from developing any further
if I wanted to. I could just stand up, walk away, break the spell, so to speak.
But as that thought flashed across my mind, I heard my inner voice saying,
"I am held up by the white light, and I can stay for this. I have no idea how I came to say such
a ping, the meaning of which I barely understood, except that I sensed it was completely safe to
let the experience continue. I also knew that I would miss something absolutely amazing if I
walked away. I could sense something really incredible about to happen. So I went with it,
once more surrendering to an experience that lay far beyond my intellectual understanding.
When I got to the seventh chakra on top of my head, suddenly, without the slightest warning,
without any preliminary sign, with nothing to prepare me for it, I felt Jesus come to me in a blaze of fire.
My head exploded with that same holy fire I had experienced on the pier and in the park
on the summer solstice. We're on the solstice today. It is, yeah. Only this time it was staggering in its
intensity and its holiness. I felt Jesus's presence as a blaze of energy, as a sacred fire all around
my head. As soon as he came, he said to me, "I am the I Am." I heard the words silently in my head,
with my inner hearing, but they were spoken with majesty, as a king speaking to the whole world.
And as I heard them, I was filled with a staggering and sublime holiness. I knew with
certainty, as part and parcel of the experience, that this holy fire I felt blazing in me and all
around me was Jesus. I do not know how I knew it, I just did. I felt Jesus. I didn't see anything.
It wasn't a physical seeing in any way. It was a feeling knowing. I could feel the incredible
holiness of his presence and his intimate closeness to me. His light surrounded me and I was utterly
absorbed into the experience. Nothing I could ever see with my physical eyes could come close to the
beauty, the power, the profundity of this inner experience and this inner knowing. Then I heard
myself spontaneously begin to chant. I won't go into that. Then, then the energy of Jesus's fire,
his spirit flowed into me and my fire flowed into his fire. I explained this with the image of two
fountains of water. So we began to sort of flow in and out of each other. I was seeing his fire
and my fire above my head and we were like dancing with each other in a just in a blaze of ecstasy.
And we were taking turns cascading our flow of fire in and out of each other like a vertical,
like a figure of eight, like a vertical infinity symbol.
We flowed in and out of each other several times
in a beautiful dance of flowing fire.
It was blissful, I was ecstatic.
It was holy rapture.
So the fire is just this,
it's an ecstasy and it feels as if my body is on fire
but it's not burning.
Some days I feel I wouldn't be surprised
if I spontaneously combusted.
There's just so much energy in my body.
That supposedly has happened to people.
I wonder if you stuck a thermometer in your mouth, if you'd notice your actual physical
temperature was hotter or not, or it's just a subtler phenomenon.
I think it's a subtler phenomenon.
Yeah.
You know, I'm sorry, go ahead.
That fire is the mark of all of my spiritual experiences.
My body blazes and burns just when I sit to meditate in the morning or if I'm out walking
in nature.
of for me that's the sign of the sacred in me is the fire. You know that the top the word tapas in
Sanskrit means heat or fire and tapas is a word of spiritual practice. You do tapas meaning you're
doing sort of intense spiritual practice and it's burning off the dross. It's burning off the
impurities and so this notion of fire is you know it's kind of yeah it's a universal.
I must have an awful lot of impurities to grow up. Oh, I don't know about that.
I get an awful lot of fire.
But, you know, I've heard some people comment that Christ was not Jesus's last name. You know,
Jesus name for a man, Yeshua, but then Christ is like Christ consciousness, right? And so,
your association or interpretation of this as Jesus, you think a Hindu having the same experience
might think, "Oh, Krishna's coming to me," or a Muslim might think, "Oh, Muhammad is coming to me,"
or whatever, but you just have this cultural conditioning. Yeah, yeah. I did read in one book
that a mystic, or when you begin to have spiritual experiences, they're always in the tradition that
that you're familiar with,
because it would be meaningless to somebody
to be visited by somebody that they're just--
- Yeah, some blue thing, blue guy with four arms or something.
- Yeah, that wouldn't have meant anything to me, really.
(both laughing)
Yeah, so I think it's, you know, Christ,
I love the way Richard Rohr speaks about Christ,
you know, the universe of Christ,
another name for everything,
just another name for the sacred, for life,
for consciousness, for love,
for the greatest thing that you could envisage, you know?
- Yeah, I bring that up because,
yeah, I've had my fair number of,
share of encounters with fundamentalists,
and it's just not the way I'm wired,
that so-and-so is the only way.
And in a universe where there are probably
trillions of inhabited planets,
I just feel like God is not a one-trick pony.
I mean, he basically, you know, makes himself accessible to people or beings of all sorts
throughout the universe through various means.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
Yeah, I mean, you know, some saviors might look like some weird octopus or something,
but on some other planet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the way it's coming through.
Yeah, I think, I mean, we're entering the era of inter-spirituality.
So it's really important for all of us to realize that there should be no walls between anything.
All of these boundaries and identities, I think, just really need to dissolve so that we can open to the sacred flowing between all the different wisdom systems, traditions, religions, mystical lineages.
lineages. Yeah and not to hammer on this point too much but I think there's a
certain egotism inherent in the the emphasis on my way is the best and you're
you're going to hell you know it's like you know so that church down the street
those guys are going to hell my church is the only right one and that kind of
stuff. Oh it's horrendous I mean it undermines in every way the whole essence
of the religious instinct and the spiritual impulse,
you know, which is unit of consciousness,
which is we are all one.
If that's where we're truly aimed,
you know, to reach that state of consciousness
where we recognize everything as our brother,
our sister, our mother, our father,
our daughter, our child, like the birds,
the bees, the planets, the stars,
the moon, everything.
It's all one.
And we won't get there if people just cling
to individual identities of their particular path. Yeah, and if we contemplate what God
really means or really is, then you know, absolutely unlimited, just, you know,
dwarfing the universe by comparison if the universe has limits and all pervading and,
you know just so broad and universal and all encompassing that any sort of
narrowness narrow interpretation or or or exclusivity is kind of a an insult
to that that grandeur of God. Yeah yeah yeah I completely agree with you. I mean
I think God is like I used to love um kaleidoscopes when I was a child you
know you look in the little thing and you twist it around and see all the
the different patterns, I think that's closer to what God is than what you're describing.
Yeah. Okay, so there was a recurring experience that you report in your book about leaving your
body and merging with the vine. Can you talk about what is, I guess maybe that thing in 2007 was like
that, when you're walking on the shoreline near the rocks, you kind of like, sounds like you totally
left and an observer, I don't know what someone would have observed when you were doing that,
would you just been standing in a trance or sat, did you sit down or whatever?
No, I stayed standing, yeah, in a trance probably, yeah.
Yeah, so what is it like to lose your sense of small self and become one with this blazing light
of love. It's the best. It's just wondrous, Rick, the joy. I don't know, have you ever
experienced this, Rick, in your journey? Yeah, I suppose I experience it to some degree every
day, but it's not like on steroids like your experiences are. You're just really pulling
all the stops. Yeah, so yeah, so you are familiar with it. And I think, you know, I think anybody
who's on a spiritual path, like, has had a taste of us, you know. And so what it's like, is like,
so if I sit in meditation, and you know, I still don't, I don't, I still don't have a technique,
you know, I just sit and close my eyes and fall into a sacred space.
Seems like you're doing something right.
Getting your money's worth out of it.
You know, the other the other side of it, though, Rick is that I'm like,
the other side of it is that I have to tell people about my mystical life. I mean,
I would really, you know, I would never have chosen this path to go publicly telling people
about what was happening in my daily meditation. But Christ and Mother Magdalene and Mother Mary
say to me repeatedly, share our love with the world,
share our love with the world. And I know that they want me to share
what I write in my journals, you know, it's just the records of my mystical
experiences. So if I had my own way I would tell
nobody. Nobody would know about this and my
life would, you know, I'd be trying to live my life on twin
tracks again, which obviously isn't allowed when
when you're trying to walk the authentic path.
So I think, yes, I am incredibly grateful
to have all of the wondrous experiences
that I have on an ongoing basis,
but kind of the cost of it is that
I've got to tell everybody else what's happening
and then run the gamut of the consequences of that,
because there's not this, I mean,
There's no way that my cultural, familial,
sort of community setting in Dublin, in Ireland,
is ready for this kind of thing.
So it can be quite alienating, it can be quite isolating,
it can be, it's a lonely path.
- Well, what was it, Jesus said something like,
no man is without honor except in his own village
or some such thing.
Yeah, well I wouldn't put myself in that category, but yeah, I know what you mean.
Yeah.
But he also said don't hide your light under a bushel.
And I think in my travels around the world, I found, and my online travels these days,
I found that there are bright lights everywhere.
I spent three months in Iran, I spent nine months in the Philippines, I've been in India,
various places.
And there's a whole spectrum of people everywhere.
And there's some very, very spiritual people
who are receptive to this kind of thing.
Yeah.
And I think it's our natural state.
I think it's what's meant to be happening, everybody, Rick.
And we have become so broken as a culture and as a species.
And we're so dysfunctional.
And our brokenness has become normative,
so we don't even realize how broken we are,
even though we can see on the news every day of the week how horrendous things have become.
But nonetheless, I think our natural state is actually to undergo this spiritual awakening
and rise towards unit of consciousness as much as we can. So yeah, I really hear you that there
are lights lighting up everywhere. And that's part of the Great Awakening and that it happens
spontaneously all over the planet. Yeah, we're going to talk more about this Great Awakening
as we go along. And I'm not saying that some people are special and everybody else is,
you know, yeah, not at all riffraff. I mean, because everybody has the same potential within
them, no matter how dark or confused their life may seem to be. Yeah, yeah. So you know,
a couple of people that I would share this with, you know, some of them might say, wow, I'd love
that. I'd love that. I'd love to love it. And I think like, are you prepared to really give up
your entire life for this? Like it, it costs nothing less than everything. Jim Finley says that
He says, you know, it costs nothing less than everything.
But now I've added on to the end of that for myself.
It also promises nothing less than everything.
So there is a glorious kind of flip side to it.
Can I tell you something that's on my mind about leaving my body?
Yes, please.
Now that's a feeling that I have, you know, I feel my energy,
you like rise up out of the top of my head and various things can happen.
but I had one experience and it's on Kundalini so I wanted to come back because I'm really
intrigued. I'd like to kind of hear from you more about the Kundalini awakening because a lot of us
are having spontaneous awakenings and we don't know what it is. We don't know that it's a Kundalini
awakening. So back in around 2007, when was it? It was shortly after these mystical experiences began
and they were incredibly intense and they were happening every day and I went on this retreat
with a so-called spiritual teacher.
She was either English or American, I can't remember which,
and I went down the country to the south of Ireland to County Cork
for a weekend retreat and very quickly I kind of got a bad feeling. There was
about 10 women and we were all in a small, maybe a small
hotel or something, can't really remember the setup.
It was a private house, one of the participants had given over her
home and it was a very big home. It was lovely. And I didn't really like the woman's energy.
And I was so I was kind of, I was a bit on red alert, like, this isn't really great.
I don't really like this. But anyway, we did our first meditation and we lay down on the
ground and she guided us through a visualization and there was really like, there was music
playing which I subsequently discovered was intentionally trying to work on our
energy field. I don't know if you've ever heard anything about that kind of...
Oh music certainly does that in various ways.
Yeah I kind of felt I felt manipulated but I put it like that I didn't know
what was going on but anyway the meditation ended and we all stood up
from our mats and the woman came over to me and she said like in quite an
accusing tone of voice she said, "You shouldn't leave your body when you meditate." And I was
quite taken aback. First of all that she obviously has psychic clairvoyance that she can see this,
but also I didn't have a, I didn't understand fully what she meant, you know, that I was leaving my
body, but I felt kind of affronted. So that afternoon anyway she said that she was going
to do a meditation to awaken the Kundalini and I thought, "No, my dead body, you're not touching my
Kundalini and I said I'm not gonna participate in that meditation and I
said if you don't mind I'm not gonna be here after lunch. I went out in the
garden and I waited until that was done. Somebody came out to tell me it was over
about say two hours later and I went back into the room and it was pandemonium
Rick. There was women in hysteria bawling crying like deeply deeply deeply troubled
and upset and the woman who was running the thing was kind of running from one
woman to another trying to calm everybody down and I was so grateful that I had
followed my intuition and just said no no no this this isn't right but as I was
driving home from the retreat it was a Sunday evening and the roads were quiet
and it was it was so I just need to take a drink of water. Yeah sure. I'm talking
too much. No you're not. Just a sec. I think even just talking about that
experience actually is not nice. Thank you. So I was driving home and there was a
remarkable number of rainbows in the sky. The entire journey home for about two
hours there was rainbows everywhere I looked, double rainbows, full of rainbows.
And one rainbow lasted for an entire hour and I felt there was something very
supernatural about it. You know I thought this this is telling me something and I
I was listening to the radio.
There's a lovely, on a Sunday evening,
there's a lovely music show
that I used to love listening to.
And there was a beautiful piece of music
had just been played, was played.
And the presenter came on afterwards and he said,
"And that was a piece of music from Tom Dahl's vision,
the 11th century Irish knight
who had an out of body experience and went on a journey."
(laughing)
- Very cool.
- I thought, oh, that's so affirming.
So I looked up Tom Dahl and I found out all about him.
He was a precursor to Dante's travels through hell, purgatory and heaven.
And I thought I said, you know, I'm OK, I'm I look after my own spiritual life
and I won't let kind of like rogue, reckless people, you know, sort of in to
to interfere, it's dangerous.
Yeah,
I don't know if you've seen my most recent interview with Juergen Thiel.
Yeah, talk about out-of-body experiences.
Just for the sake of the audience, this is, you know, the interview prior to this one
with Juergen, his name is J-U-E-R-G-E-N, who's been having out-of-body experiences for decades
and is also a talented artist and has managed to depict them, especially now using AI.
So we just kind of took a tour of the universe from deepest hells to highest heavens.
Yeah, quite interesting. I skipped the hell parts actually. Okay, understandable. I actually told
people they could do that if they didn't. Yeah, I didn't want to see that. Yeah, but a couple,
just a couple quick comments on this Kundalini thing. Firstly, incidentally, I'll be interviewing
a guy named Michael Bradford, I think in August, maybe July, who worked closely with Gopi Krishna
for years. Gopi Krishna was a guy who wrote, who went through rather hellacious kundalini
awakening experiences and wrote numerous books about it. But it's often advised by responsible
teachers to be very careful and not to do anything to awaken kundalini prematurely.
It'll awaken itself, it'll awaken naturally when the conditions are right, but if you
force it in some way, you can get yourself into trouble.
And it can be natural for people to have what they call "crias" where they're yelling or
making strange noises or moving in strange ways.
And that's not necessarily a sign of insanity or anything.
But again, it's a powerful thing.
And it has to be treated with respect and care.
And there's not some kind of, this is not a sprint or a race where you want to get my
kundalini to the highest chakra right away.
You want to proceed in a safety first is a good motto.
Yeah, oh for sure.
When you don't know what it is though, I mean I only found out like a couple of months ago
that what I was experiencing is known as a kundalini awakening in a different tradition.
Right.
And I'm sure that there, I mean, Kundalini is a Sanskrit word, but I'm sure that in various
traditions around the world, people have gone through stuff like this and had their own
terminology for it.
Yeah, there's no terminology for it in the West that I've ever come upon.
I mean, the closest would be the Holy Spirit.
Reading Christian mystics, you don't come up with any depictions?
>>Sarah: Nobody, I've never read anybody who systematizes the energetic component the way
Kundalini is systematized in your tradition or in other traditions.
>>Rick: Right.
Yeah, it's true.
I think in certain Eastern traditions, Kashmir Shaivism and so on, it has been systematized
very in great detail.
In fact, I interviewed somebody who
could be the most authoritative or knowledgeable living exponent
of Kundalini, Vidya, as it's called.
Vidya means knowledge.
Her name is Joan Shiva Pitha Harrigan.
I mentioned her to you.
I think you were going to get her book.
But--
I am definitely going to.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a big, fat book with all kinds of illustrations
and detailed information about Kundalini.
Yeah.
That would be a wonderful marriage of inter-spirituality,
you know, for people to learn what these energies are,
because people are experiencing them.
- They are. - And they are.
And then you might often then miss the boat
because you don't realize, I should be engaging with this.
This is really significant, I can learn about it.
Instead of just missing it.
- Yeah, I interviewed this woman years ago
when I was first starting Backgap,
who started having spontaneous kundalini awakenings.
She didn't know what was happening to her.
She was just his housewife in Arizona.
And she started doing research on the internet,
and she came across the word kundalini.
She thought it was some kind of disease.
And she eventually found a teacher
and kind of got some guidance.
But I think this is probably,
I bet you there have been people
thrown into mental hospitals throughout the ages.
Because they were starting to have this kind of thing,
and neither they nor the authorities
knew what was happening to them.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
In fact--
I mean, I--
Yeah.
No, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I only learned that terminology in the last three months or so.
Right.
And I've been having Kundalini experiences for 10 years.
Yeah, there you go.
That's insane.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of insane and Kundalini,
you did struggle with the question
of whether you were going mad through some of this.
And how did you navigate that?
And how did you come to trust that you weren't going mad
and these were legitimate mystical experiences?
- Well, I ultimately trusted that I wasn't going mad
because everything is so beautiful.
- Right, good point.
- It's just an exquisite experience,
which is each time is intensely meaningful
and very beautiful and very positive
and very, just so full of life, exploding with life.
So ultimately that was what sort of confirmed to me
that there's something in this.
And I definitely had to ask myself, am I going mad?
I mean, is this, is this insanity?
And yet I was living my life in a,
like I was functioning perfectly fine
in every other aspect of my life.
So I was kind of like, I mean,
there were days when I really did wonder,
you know, I would fall into despair and say,
you know, Adam, well, I'll tell you one thing
I was never gonna do,
which was gonna go to a psychiatrist
'cause I thought the risks of a psychiatrist
not understanding this and throwing me
into like the local psychiatric hospital,
you know, the risks of that were too severe in my mind.
So I thought I'm not gonna go down that road.
And then the beauty won out in the end.
And I mean, I have conversations with Christ.
So I was able to ask, you know, what's going on, you know,
and Christ would say that I want you to share my love
with the world.
I have anointed you, I have appointed you,
I have filled your heart with my love.
I want you to bring my love to the world.
I want you to write books of love
and share my love with people.
And even though that's unusual,
It is in and of itself, like just full of meaning and beauty.
And it fills my heart and it fills my mind, my soul, my life.
The path of my life, I find just incredibly beautiful.
So committing to the path really sort of showed me
that I was on the right path.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
And there is a thing where people on a spiritual path
can get mentally unstable because there's a whole kind of restructuring that takes place
in your neuro, neuropsychology, neurophysiology.
And it can and so again, there's a need for a certain reasonable pace, not pushing it too
hard and you know, integration at every step stabilization.
So I mean, I've seen it happen.
I've actually had tasted it myself to varying degrees where you can just get kind of kooky,
you know, when you're doing a lot of spiritual practice.
And some people have been, had to be hospitalized or drugged or, you know, have jumped off buildings
and things like that.
So I'm just putting that out as a caution.
Yeah, when I agree, when I've been reflecting on what I've seen, I think that there are sort
there are three possibilities when visions begin. Actually I'm now, I've been in therapy for years,
which you'd need to be to keep stable to manage. And you have a therapist who understands you?
I have recently in the last six months started with a Jungian psychotherapist. Now the therapist
before that did also understand, but now I adore Carl Jung, so I've with a Jungian therapist and
so she is completely at ease. I remember saying to her, you know, how come you just take all of
of this in your stride and you say well like I'm a Jungian therapist I wouldn't
be much good if I wasn't able to be comfortable with visions so and just in
in discussing it all with her I've identified that there are you know
there's three possibilities when the visions begin psychosis as you're
talking about then the other extreme negative response would be inflation
which people call identified you know you're identifying with your visions and
you suddenly begin to think that you are divine or your God or you're some
holy being walking the planet. So they're the two extremes but then there's a
middle road and the middle road is just, the middle road is the path of
transformation. So if we can engage just steady as you go one foot after the
other trying to make sense of what's happening and trying to let the visions
work on us. I mean this is another big thing that I've really realized only in
the last couple of months. The visions themselves are fully intelligent,
they're fully purposeful, they're fully intentional, they know what they're
trying to achieve in each individual different person. So I'm I now the
easiest way I understand myself is that I'm just like I'm a channel, I'm a
messenger, I'm delivering messages of love out into the world for anybody who
might like to read them. I'm not proselytizing, I'm not teaching, I'm not
trying to convert anybody to anything. I'm passing on experiences of love from
from the realm of the Christ. Nice. It's interesting you should mention inflation
because in recent weeks I've been encountered a couple of different
situations and I've been aware of this for years where somebody has a profound
and undoubtedly genuine spiritual awakening but perhaps they're not quite
ready for it or something because it goes to their heads. It results in a kind
of a an ego aggrandizement in which the next thing you know, they're they're proclaiming
proclaiming themselves to be the avatar of the age and, you know, the greatest spiritual
teacher on earth and sometimes they're not public about it. Other times they are other
but other times they'll say to their their students in in private, listen, I'm, I'm,
I'm the you know, if you if you leave me, you'll be a worm for the next 10 incarnations,
you know, you'll you'll be off the track for so long and I'm the only one who can bring
you to enlightenment. Yeah, it goes on and on. So what do you see as I think a great deal
of humility if one can achieve it and self scrutiny might be an antidote to that. But
what would you recommend if you can think of anything to prevent a person from falling into
that kind of delusion?
Well, humility, first of all, if we're really on a spiritual path and we're awakening to
the higher ideals of life as Plato referred to them, if we're awakening to the truths,
justice, peace, equality, love, service, all of those beautiful higher truths of life,
if we're really awakening to them, certainly the Christian path, it's all about service.
I mean, that's what Jesus was modeling in his life,
that you must love one another as I have loved you.
You must serve each other as a servant.
So one of my favorite stories from the Bible
is when Jesus washed the disciples' feet.
He got down on the ground and washed their feet.
Now, if that's not telling you what to do
with spiritual experience like nothing is,
and then he died on the cross.
I mean, he didn't hang around Palestine saying, hey,
I'm the one.
You know, he'd let them kill him.
So I think if you model your--
I mean, if you truly are following
some spiritual teachers, you're going
to learn from people who did it in a very modest, quiet way
of service.
So--
I think that's the best answer you could have given,
because I think service is definitely
a spiritual path in many traditions.
Yeah.
And it does culture humility.
It sort of, it becomes about the other rather than about me.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
Fully.
Yeah.
Fully.
And the washing of the feet and all that, it's symbolic in a way, but I think even literally
doing such a thing or just doing something very basic and fundamental can help to
Counteract the tendency for you know surging energies to
Inflate the ego. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that I am
I think it is part and parcel of the spiritual of the path of spiritual awakening
Is that you realize you want to serve everybody else you want to put your life in service?
So my service is sharing my spiritual writing.
That's how I am called upon to serve.
It mightn't seem like a big deal to other people,
but it has been unbelievably difficult for me to go public about my spiritual life.
It's the last thing in the world I wanted to do.
I used to bargain with Jesus or Christ, you know,
and I'd say, "I will do anything except tell people about my spiritual life."
I remember saying like, "I'll do a PhD in mystical theology.
I'll write about mystical theology but I won't tell anybody what I'm doing or you
know what my experiences are but like that wasn't that wasn't what was wanted.
But just on that question of inflation as well the other thing is people falling
into the dark side that's something that's really scary and and a huge risk
as well and I once encountered a woman who was clearly had fallen on the wrong
side of the middle line. And I was very
frightened by the experience. It was
really, it was horrendous to be in her
presence and as soon as I left her
presence I immediately lit a candle and
sat to meditate and I was just
pulling like powerful Christ light down
into my body. I just felt I needed to be
cleansed of all of the ugly energies that
she was carrying. And as I was meditating
an inner image appeared in my inner seeing. And I later, I recognized the image, but at the time,
I didn't know that it was called the Eye of Horus, which is the Egyptian symbol, which protects
against evil. And that just spontaneously arose in my inner seeing. And that shows me then, well,
first of all, I was very grateful because I felt that I was now safe and protected and cleansed.
But it also shows again, the weaving of the different traditions that that came in to show me that I was now safe, I was protected.
Yeah, a couple of thoughts on that. I think that, in a way, you know, like in a war, if the soldiers are in the foxhole, they're kind of safe. But if they pop their heads up, then they can be shot.
And I think in a way, like, stepping forward as a spiritual teacher can make you vulnerable.
It's like you almost have a bullseye on your chest or something.
And negative entities or forces which don't want you to do that could try to knock you
back.
Right, right.
Yeah, well, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
And then just yesterday, I was listening to a podcast and this guy was saying he visited
India and he discovered there was this temple where they explicitly worship demons.
And he's like a Christian dude and he thought, "Well, I'll go there and see if I can kind of
purify it or something." And he went there and he talked to the priest and he said, "Why do you do
this?" And he said, "Well, they can give us a lot of trouble. So if we worship them, we hope it will
placate them and then they'll just kind of leave us alone." And so he thought he was going to do
some purificatory thing and he walked toward this icon or statue or something in the middle of the
temple and he started feeling this really cold and also this ominous feeling and then he got
this voice which said, "Get back off, you have no idea what you're dealing with."
Wow, wasn't he lucky? Yeah. That was reckless in the extreme. Yeah. Oh, wow. Wow.
Anyway, you're making good points. I mean all of this it might seem like, you know, mythical woo, but I think there's
legitimate
reality to all these kinds of things
Maybe I'll read a vision. Yes, please
Yeah, I chose a couple it was purify us after all this dark
Let me see I
I will, okay so I have my on my website I'll read a couple from my
two or three I'll start with one and then maybe
maybe another one so this is a locution so a locution is sacred
speaking so as much as I have visions I also hear
and sometimes can be in conversation with
Christ or Mother Magdalene or what divine being presents.
So this, so one day, so my visions come in so many different circumstances, like
whenever I fall into a state of real stillness or peace, clearly like the veil thins and I begin to
have visionary experiences. So that happens quite a lot when I'm getting body work, whether it's
cranio-psychotherapy or acupuncture or when I used to do yoga, it would happen as well. So any time
that I'm really still. So one day in craniosacral therapy, I heard Christ saying, I am the enunciation
of love, announce my love. So announce, A-N-N-O-U-N-C-E? Yeah, announce my love.
So then, so here's just a short piece then. So this is from April in 2020. And this is what I
heard Christ saying to me, "Tell them I am love, tell them I am love, tell them I am
nothing but love. I have appointed you to speak my holy name of love back into the
world. I've anointed you to speak as a messenger of my love. You are a channel
of my love chosen to deliver my message of love to the world. Do not worry about
those who will not listen, but share my love with those who are hungry for my
love. My love is the food of life. I have filled you with my love that you may
share it with the world. Speak my holy name of love back into the world that I created in love.
This is a book of love that I have asked you to write in my holy name. My name is love. I am love.
Oh, so beautiful. I got goosebumps just reading it.
When you have that kind of vision, try to describe it. Like if I were to have that kind of vision,
Are you, would I be actually hearing an audible voice as if there were a person in the room
speaking to me or is it a thought in my mind? It's a completely inner hearing. Yeah, completely
inner hearing. I guess the closest analogy would be if you were having an imaginary conversation
in your mind, which we all do all the time. Except this isn't an imaginary conversation.
I'm in a meditation and I've fallen into stillness and that would be preceded by the experience of
the sacred. I would be aware that the Christ was present. I would be aware that the energies
had become really incredibly sacred. Maybe there's fire burning in my body. So it is couched, for want
of a better word in an already existing mystical experience. And then I hear these words.
Does that explain it at all?
Yeah, I think it helps. I've interviewed other people like Gina Lake, for instance, who channels
Jesus and writes whole books with, which genes, you know, as if Jesus wrote them, but she's just
serving as a scribe.
I must look her up.
Yeah, you should check her out. You'd like her. And others too, Mary Magdalene and people
kind of, it gives you the feeling that these higher beings, or whatever you want to call them,
are just looking for opportunities to communicate with humanity through whomever is capable of
serving as a conduit. Christ said to me once, he said, "Wherever I find an open heart,
there I enter. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, they really are looking for us to cooperate in our own
unfolding in our own awakening. Like we're so kind of bloody minded as humans.
That we're, we're kind of we're so closed to the one true path of life, which is the path
of deification and awakening and the return to love. Yeah, well, they can't do it all for us. I
I mean, like if a surgeon wants to operate on you,
if you're gonna just be kicking and moving around the table
and he can't do it, he has to wait
until you're ready to settle down.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.
My psychotherapist said to me, she said,
"Adamar, you weren't," this is the terminology she has,
she said, "You weren't defended
"against the visions happening."
That's just the terminology from Jung.
- In other words, you weren't blocking them?
Is that what that means? - I didn't block it, yeah.
And they when they came, I let them in. Yeah. I mean, in what I read there a little while ago, like there was a split second when I thought, should I stop this? And then I was kind of encouraged to keep going. And I guess that's what she's talking about. Maybe that day, if I had said no, maybe nothing ever would have happened again. Maybe that was it do or die.
Yeah. Or maybe they maybe Jesus would have come back and said, Oh, come on.
I think he would have he loves me so much.
The second part of your book is more about society.
You argue that Western civilization is built on a narrative of separation that has ruptured
the connection between reason and spirit and God and humanity.
How do you see this playing out in the world today?
Yeah, yeah.
The horrors, the genocides and the wars and the brokenness and the individualism, materialism,
consumerism, secularism, we're living in a very broken world.
So I think we, yeah, I mean, I'm sure you completely agree that we do live as if we
are cut off from the divine realm. We live as if we're just kind of random happenings on a random
universe, rather than there being some really beautiful, glorious, meaningful, purposeful
design to our lives. So we live as if we are kind of like the masters of our own destiny,
rather than being part of a beautiful whole. Well, some people actually articulate that paradigm,
they say we're biological robots in a meaningless universe. And everything is random. And you know,
there are certain laws of nature that the whole thing is mechanistic, but there's no
intelligence behind it, no kind of intelligent design by any definition.
I mean, to me that just has to be hubris. I remember listening to a podcast a couple of
years ago and I think it was a scientist and he was saying that we still don't know where the
laws of nature come from. I mean, yeah, just the kind of picture that you're painting there,
there's just these laws of nature. Well, where do they come from?
Actually, I was having a friendly debate with this guy. I think he was from Australia, but he was
he was saying, okay, if you just grant us one miracle, then we can explain everything else.
I said, Oh, what's that? He said, you know, that there are these laws of nature. You know,
and I said, Sorry, I'm not going to grant you that. I mean,
yeah, there's a reason why there are these laws of nature. There's there's an underlying
intelligence that you know those are expressions of. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. I remember I was at a,
I was very lucky several years ago to attend a fabulous conference in Dublin. There was a
eight Nobel Prize winner speaking. It was to honor Erwin Schrodinger who was an Austrian physicist
who was the precursor to Watson and Crick and DNA and so there was a huge gathering in Dublin. It
it was co-chaired by or co-presented by Trinity College Dublin, which is one of the great universities
in Dublin.
And so they were talking all about the Big Bang, they were talking about consciousness,
it was really exhilarating, like it was mind-blowing listening to these brilliant people.
But one of them, so a lot of the talk was the Big Bang and consciousness and do we create
it or are we like an antennae, you know, that consciousness can transmit to us.
Right, a transmitter-receiver kind of thing.
and one of them said, they were talking about the Big Bang and where did the
particle come from, you know, which banged during the Big Bang and he just said, now
I don't know if he was being like actually joking in retrospect but at the
time I took it in all serious and he said, well science doesn't know where
that particle came from, we think it just spontaneously appeared. Are you telling
me with all your science that were to buy that the particle just appeared?
have anything better to do. It just kind of came along. I mean, the way I look at it is
you don't have to go back to the Big Bang. You can just look at a blade of grass or a
mosquito or anything and imagine and just think about what you're looking at. Think
about if you have a microscope, look at a single cell and watch how it functions and
you think this could not possibly be random and accidental. It's not little billiard balls
running into each other. There's this intelligent orchestration of everything. And then the whole
universe is like that, no matter how far out you expand, even if you go to intergalactic space where
there's nothing there, there's photons whizzing through and, you know, all kinds of laws of nature
in play. So the whole thing is just one ocean of intelligence. Oh, yeah. Oh, completely. I
completely agree. You were talking, you've mentioned before about like, even seeing God,
Like the the genius of the divine mind and a pile of dog poop. Sure
I was out walking with before you mean like the previous conversation you and I had in case people are wondering. Hey, I missed that
Um, I was out walking with a friend last weekend in some beautiful woods in aniskari
And uh, there was a big pile of dog poo in front of us and it was covered in flies
And my friend said dinner for the flies
as I told her about you and said, Yeah, it's true. Yeah.
Yeah.
Reminds me of a movie called the bugs life. So there's this cafe and this waiter comes out
with a little platter of poop and it's a who ordered the poopoo platter and all these flies go
Yeah, there you go. Yeah.
So the brokenness just to come back to that question, Rick,
that this separate that we do live as if we're separated from the divine and we live as if we're
random particles spontaneously big banging in our individual little lives
but the essence of so one of the big things from philosophy that has helped
me to kind of begin to find frames for understanding the path of spiritual
awakening and the path of life is the the axial age you know to talk about the
first axial age and the second axial age so what I learned in philosophy and I
find this like really really really helpful so hopefully it might be helpful
to people listening who mightn't have heard the idea before. In the 1960s a
German philosopher called Karl Jaspers he looked back over history and he
recognized that over a 600 year period between 800 and 200 BCE
he said during those 600 years there was he said that consciousness itself
transformed from the mythic animistic state of consciousness to rational
intellectual scientific consciousness. And he said that happened spontaneously in a
number of different geographical locations around the world and he said
it was profound and it changed everything and he called it an axial shift like as
if the you know as if the the earth had tilted on its axis it was so profound.
and that was the beginning of the rational intellectual way of understanding
ourselves, the scientific model, the, you know, the rational intellectual way that
we live now. That came to, that came to dominate the way in which we live our
lives and my sense is that, so and we're now in a second, the second axial shift,
that's just been recently recognized over the last couple of decades that
it's as profound again. We're going through another profound shift. So in as much as
consciousness changed profoundly from myth and animism to the scientific way
we'll call it, we're now shifting from the scientific way to the spiritual way.
That's the shift that's underway and the path through that shift is spiritual
awakening. So individually we have to awaken if we want to kind of stay on
track with evolution itself and collectively we need to awaken as a
species, we need to grow up as a human species like the Wilbur Combs lattice,
you know, like the two sides, like we start off at kind of a primitive
tribal and then you go up the left-hand side to rational intellectual and
and the highest point is unit of consciousness.
And so humanity itself has to grow up as much as an individual
human has to grow up from being a child to an adolescent to an adult and then
hopefully ongoing adult development at a
psycho-spiritual level. So this is what's playing out at the
moment that life itself is, consciousness itself is
trying to shift into a new gear. It's trying to shift from rational to
spiritual from logic to love. And a whole new way of understanding ourselves and
being is what's being offered by evolution. It's like being offered on a
planet, particularly through spontaneous spiritual awakenings that are happening
all over the planet as you're saying, as you said at the outset. This is, this is
the invitation of life at this time that we're alive. Do you want to get on board
with evolution? Do you want to stay the distance and continue to live on this planet, you know,
and be a flourishing species, or do you all just want to kill yourselves and kill each other?
Well put. Now, obviously, throughout history, there have been difficult times, you know,
life used to be very short. I mean, people would be considered ancient if they lived to 40, you know.
And there have been plagues and wars and famines and all kinds of difficult things throughout history.
And so, you know, sometimes you say, "Oh, the world is such a mess these days." Well,
if you study history, it seems like it's always been a mess. But perhaps we've reached a point at
which, you know, it's become more critical. I mean, some say that we're in the sixth great mass
extinction and this is the first one that's human caused. Others were due to
asteroids and yeah things like that. Yeah so um what would you say and as you just
said there seemed to be spontaneous spiritual awakenings taking place all
over the world and facilitated in part by our modern technologies such as the
internet and I don't know if that had been the case 500 600 years ago.
probably not. I'm sure there were some, but so what would you say is, what in current affairs,
current events is characteristic of a spiritual awakening taking place? And it wouldn't
necessarily be good news stuff. It could be upheavals that are actually symptomatic of a
major shift taking place. And how do you, do you have any conjecture as to how it might play out?
Well, first off, the first part of it is, I completely agree that the horrors that are
unfolding across the planet are the other side of the Great Awakening. So one era is dying,
and that is always like Kali in that tradition, you know, that's destruction and chaos and darkness
and everything falling apart and that is how an era ends. It all disintegrates, it all falls apart
because that system is not working anymore and a new era is trying to be born and then you've got
the labor pain, you've got the nightmare of labor and the difficulty to birth something new. I mean
any birthing mother will know like it's a really, really, really difficult thing to do but it's
worth it to go through the pain of labor to get the new birth, to get the new thing,
to get the new era in terms of the whole of humanity. So I
think that we are seeing the, hopefully it couldn't get much worse, like led by
humanity, you know the horrors in the world, the genocide, the appalling
wars, the famines that are being inflicted on whole peoples. I mean my
heart just breaks day after day and and yet I'm hopeful. Yet I just think there
is so much beauty being offered to humanity that it doesn't matter really
that the leaders of some of the biggest powers in the world are to me agents of
evil. It doesn't actually matter because on the ground the majority of human
beings want a more beautiful world. Ordinary people like you and like me and
what each of us individually does matters and it counts and it contributes.
We're all trying to weave a new cloth for humanity. We're trying to weave a new
consciousness and I am, I mean it can't come any other way Rick except through
individual human beings doing their, playing their part, doing their
things. So even though I don't know, I don't know why I'm still hopeful, I just
am because I'm because I know what's I know what's offered. I know the
bliss and the ecstasy and the love of unit of consciousness. I know what it's
like to be in a place of love temporarily unfortunately and then I have
to come back to this realm. I know what it's like. I know what's being offered
and I just can't believe that we will continue to turn our back on it and not
accept the gift. Yeah, well I'm also optimistic. My concern just has always been like how much
chaos do we have to go through to get to the other side, you know, and what can we do to make it
smoother and to minimize the chaos. And it kind of seems like we're taking one step forward, two steps
back sometimes, and not, you know, we're pulling out of climate agreements and things like that.
there could soon be large swaths of the earth that are uninhabitable during the summer,
major cities that have to be evacuated or something. Anyway, you know.
Yeah, it could get, it can be very depressing, but I think the thing is not to give in to the despair,
because then we're not helping. The other thing that I might just, as a common say, is that it's
really important for all of us to remember that we carry our karma with us through lives
and that each of us has lived horrendously in previous lives, inflicting pain on other people.
I don't know, do you know Brian Weiss's book, "Many Lives, Many Masters"?
I know the title. I wouldn't have been able to tell you the author, but I remember that.
It's really brilliant. I really loved reading it. And so he had a gift of when he had one patient
and under hypnosis, I think it was hypnosis,
he's a psychiatrist in America,
and she recounted multiple, multiple, multiple past lives.
And he was in lots of her past lives as a teacher.
But one of the things that,
sorry, he probably had other stories in his books as well,
but the point was that, say, for example,
like the Nazi German in one lifetime
is the Jewish victim in another,
and a Palestinian victim in another
and a perpetrator in another,
you know, just to use that one line,
it's one that comes to mind from it.
So there's like, I think it was Richard Roar
talks about spiritual narcissism and righteous activism.
And I think there's risks for that.
I think there's a lot of room for humility
around all that's wrong.
I don't know what I'm really fully circling there,
but I think it's important to know that we're all capable of all of the same horrors, and
how do we work together to bring us all on.
Yeah, no, I think you kind of got the point across there.
Who knows what we've done in past lives?
And yeah, more succinct.
There but for the grace of God go I.
This time, yeah.
And I mean, to throw in another cliche, make hay while the sun shines, because we have
an opportunity now, regardless of what we may have done or regardless of what's going on
in the world, to make some serious spiritual progress and radiate a positive influence.
And I think it all operates collectively, you know, like Jesus dying on the cross did
it for the entire of humanity.
Meister Eckhart said that Jesus divinized humanity.
So each of us small, small players, I think what we do, I think we do for everybody.
I think we do it for the collective.
Yes.
Yeah, that's an interesting point in itself that inevitably everything is completely interconnected
and every thought you think, every action you perform sends out a ripple of influence
to the whole universe really, but especially this planet.
And so when I heard a great quote from, who was it, Aldous Huxley recently, he said, all
these problems, you know, wars and famines and diseases and all this stuff, those aren't
problems, those are symptoms.
They're symptoms of our underlying failure to, you know, be self-realized or whatever
actual terminology he used there.
But you know, if we could achieve that, these other things would stop manifesting as they
do.
Oh, that's so true. Yeah, the horrors that we're seeing now absolutely are symptoms of a very broken world for many, many centuries. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's nothing new. I mean, you can trace it right back, you know.
Yeah. And, you know, imagine if, like we were talking earlier about how maybe Jesus and some of these higher spiritual beings are looking for opportunities to tune into receptive individuals here and there.
But imagine if all 8 billion of us, or maybe at least 7 billion, were receptive in that
way and they could tune in to all of us in that way.
Imagine the world we would manifest.
Oh, well, that's the plan.
I mean, that's what's being offered, Rick.
I mean, I have absolutely no doubt.
I'm sure you agree.
Like, that's exactly what the hope is, that we will all, 8 billion of us, start living
beautiful lives in love.
I mean, I do think that it's meant to be heaven on earth.
I mean, I do think that awakening is meant to happen here and now in this realm.
And I think if we don't do the work of it here, there's not a magic button that happens
when you die that your spirit suddenly gets upgraded like, oh, yeah, you can go into the
white light.
You know, you got to do the work here and now.
Yeah.
But yeah, but heaven on earth, I think is entirely possible.
It's just if we don't like the way the world looks, it's just the reflection of 8 billion
people in a rather undeveloped state of consciousness.
And if more of them could develop, then we would have a different world automatically.
My garden, and I have a little garden out here, and my flowers and a few little trees,
and the joy that they give me is just incredible.
And just in terms of like the collective, like every morning I sit outside and I have
coffee like no matter like for the whole
year and I just talked to the flowers
and the roses are in bloom now. I have
four different rose bushes and each of
them bloomed in the exact same week just
about ten days ago. It's just so
remarkable and they're not even like the
same species of rose and so when I go
out into the garden like I greet
everybody. I greet the Sun, the stars, the
sky, the trees, the planets, the earth,
Mother Earth and I just offer thanks
and I actually learned a beautiful practice from the Native American woman
Pat McCabe, do you know her? She has a beautiful native name called Woman
Stands Shining and I've seen her, she was doing, she did something with Richard
Roar's Place, I think she did the opening ceremony for some summer school or some
event, I saw it online and she says, "Greet the Sun every morning and make an
offering and ask the Sun to in strengthen and bless everything that you are going
to do today and I started doing that I offer water and oats in the morning
oats are a native Irish offering to to the divine realm and it's just such a
beautiful way to start before I even meditate I said outside and I just
commune with nature and I just feel myself just to be so it's so enriching
It's so lovely and I feel part of them. You know, I feel like a little flower sitting there with them except that I can walk
That's lovely
Here's a question from a fellow Ireland, what do you call Ireland people Irish Irishman Michael Moran
Have you considered you are channeling and healing ancestral karma?
In my spiritual lineage I do not particularly in my personal lineage
so if I can answer it in that way. I discovered that, so that I have a number
of different types of visionary and mystical experiences and after my book
Light and Fire came out I began a whole new kind of wave and style and type of
experiences began. One of which is I now know called the exchange of the sacred
heart. So I began to have experiences of, I'll read one of them for you in a
little while I began to have experiences of Christ giving me his heart and asking
me to give mine to him and it was just the most sublime exquisite beautiful
experience. It's happened a number of times. Then by chance I was reading Wendy
Wright an American academic actually and she mentioned exchange of the
sacred heart as a mystical lineage and I nearly jumped off my chair and I said oh
my god that's what happens me and so I read deeper and further into it and I
discovered that there was a 13th century line of women mystics in Germany who
were the first to have this experience of the exchange of the sacred heart. So when
I was doing my master's in spirituality two years ago I wrote my thesis on these
13th century visionary women mystics. So why how this ties into healing
ancestral lines. These women were just astonishingly beautiful mystics and they
wrote books at a time when it was very rare for women to be writing books and
the church did not like the female women mystics and the type of mystical
experiences they were having. So these three women that I particularly
love, Mekhtild of Magdeburg, Gertrude of Helfde and Mekhtild of Hackborn, they
ended up all living in the same monastery in in Helfde in what's now Germany.
They they all died within a short number of years of each other the third one of
them died in 1301. In 1310 the first woman was burned at the stake for her
mystical writing in Europe, Marguerite Perret. Now I feel that in me really
really, really deeply and strongly. I feel deeply connected to the women of Halftime and
Mechtild of Magdeburg. And to see that the close timeline connection of this blaze of spiritual
writing amongst women in the late Middle Ages, and then the horrendous silencing and burning alive of
women mystics, some men, but primarily women, and then the continuing burning of women for centuries
in Europe. So I do feel, where I feel a healing is happening through what I'm being asked to do
with my life is that I'm, my mystical voice is an echo of their mystical voice. I'm being given to
speak what they were being given to speak and which went underground for centuries and was lost. Many
Many of their books were just lost and kind of random chance they're found and are being
brought back by incredible work being done by academics all over the world.
So that is an example, Michael, of where I do think there is healing being offered down
through the ancestral lineage.
I always say that I relate much more to my spiritual lineage than to my human lineage,
even though I like my human lineage too.
It's hard to imagine how for centuries, men who considered themselves to be the leaders
and representatives of a religion of love, you know, Jesus's teaching, could have been
such sadistic monsters.
Well, I think it's the same karma, Rick, you know, I think in each different life, we get
a chance to do it better.
Maybe I was one of the men burning the women at the stake rather than actually being one
of the women in the monastery.
I don't know. But yeah, so the sacred female voice, it's very new in the world, you know,
and it takes an awful lot of personal healing and collective healing for the sacred female voice
to be heard again in the world as something valuable with spiritual gifts to contribute.
Yeah, I talked about this quite a bit with your fellow Dubliner, Djamar Murko, a month
or so ago, and he was talking about how prominent women were in the very, very early church
before it really became a church.
And then, I guess, when Constantine came along and made Christianity the official religion
of the Roman Empire, the women all got shoved aside and the macho men took over.
Yeah, I mean, Jesus was an iconoclast. I mean, he broke down the barriers, you know, between
all of the othering that was common at the time. And women were a huge part of his work,
bringing them right into the center. I mean, I do not, I think that there was 12 female
disciples. I mean, I'm absolutely certain of that.
In addition to the 12 men, you mean?
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I'm certain, I mean, we know that Mary Magdalene wrote a gospel.
I mean, that has been recovered and verified.
And all of the experiences that we read about
that the men experienced in the Bible,
I'm certain sure the women had all of the same
kind of beautiful, exquisite, mystical experiences
with Jesus, but they just weren't recorded.
But one of the things that absolutely
stopped me in my tracks was when I began to get interested
in the spirituality and this mystical path
and what does it all mean.
And I began reading the Bible in a very serious way.
Okay, what's in here?
I really liked the prophets.
Ezekiel spoke to me in a really powerful way.
I really like him.
But then I was reading the gospel, the Easter story
and Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus.
And the first witness of the resurrected body
was Mary Magdalene.
The first witness.
I mean, what else was Jesus and now the resurrected Christ
trying to do except to say,
"I am appointing a woman to speak for me.
A woman, my beloved Mary Magdalene,
will tell the world that I have risen from the dead."
And she was just brushed to the side.
Thank you very much.
First of all, they didn't believe her.
They went to see with their own eyes, the men,
but she was the first evangelist.
And these women that I'm talking about,
mystics in in Helfter in the 13th century. I mean, Jesus spoke to them as disciples, as apostles,
as evangelists. Yeah, we were talking about the second axial age. I think that the resurgence or
re-establishment of women in their proper role will be very much a part of it. And the fact that the
world has been so
troubled as it has been is
attributable in part to
their repression. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think you're absolutely right. It has
to be. I mean, we can't have
a balanced world and we can't have
equality and we can't have justice
until everybody is equal, every single
person.
Yeah, and it's been a
hard-fought battle. I mean,
I listen to Heather Cox Richardson,
who's an historian and she often talks about just the difficulties that women went through
throughout our history in terms of actually being considered citizens and worthy of voting
and all kinds of things.
It's hard to fathom.
I mean, that the vote is only like less than 100 years old for women.
It's hard to fathom.
In ancient Greece, women were lower down the pecking order than slaves.
Yeah, almost like that to a certain extent in the U.S. as well.
Okay, another question here from Michael.
I don't know what you're going to be able to do with this one, but let's see.
Did you consider contact with avatars to help with your kundalini?
>> No, because I didn't know it was a kundalini.
No.
No, I have never sought anything in a mystical experience.
It happens to me.
I sit in reverence, in prayer, in sacredness,
and then I am opened to the mystical realm.
I would never go and look to try and make contact
with somebody other than somebody who's visited me,
being Jesus, Mother Magdalene, Mary.
And then there's sacred animals,
like I'm looking at my beautiful Theobald,
a beautiful sacred deer came to me as well
and is a guardian that minds me on my spiritual path,
amongst other beautiful symbols that look after me.
But I would never seek to make contact with anybody, Michael.
No.
That would be-- I mean, yeah, it's not my path.
It's not what it's meant to do.
Very good.
All righty.
So the final segment of your book
focuses on practical advice for listeners who are inspired by your story and might be seeking
their own spiritual connection.
So you have what you've created what you call a Path of Gold, a guide to the seven stages
of awakening.
You want to say a little bit about that?
I will try, yeah.
The title Path of Gold came from Christ.
said to me one day, "I have laid before you a path of gold. Take my hand and let me
guide you on the way. I know the way because I am the way." Last, just a little
segue, last night I was walking in the woods near where I live just towards
sunset to honor the eve of the solstice which is today and you know at sunset
when the Sun is coming in at an angle and there's little pockets of light and I
was walking through a woodland and there was a little path of gold and light and I was remembering,
oh my goodness, it's the path of gold and it just felt so meaningful and so beautiful.
So yeah, so what do I have in the path of gold?
So I'll just pull out my book here now and just see what I said.
Sure, and while you're looking that up, let me ask you a related question.
For someone listening to this who feels a deep longing for more, who feels disconnected and
off track in their life, what is the first step you would recommend they take?
Can you say that again, Rick?
Sorry, I wasn't concentrating properly.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, for someone who's sort of feeling a deep longing and feels disconnected, what is the
first step you would recommend that they take?
And you can weave this into the path of gold if you like.
The first thing I would do is sit with the longing.
bring the longing into my prayer life, I bring the longing into my meditation and
I would let the longing reveal itself to me. Because the longing is the longing is
a path I mean it's actually part of what's in the path of gold. The longing
as much as the visions are intelligent and meaningful and intentional, the
longing itself is love calling us home. So if somebody has this longing in their
heart, talk to the longing, bring it into meditation, and just be curious.
Show me, guide me, help me, reveal, tell me, teach me.
I remember interviewing a woman named Mary, I'm not remembering her last name,
this was years ago, but her theme was "What's in the way is the way."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean Rumi, who was writing at the same time as
those women mystics I was just talking about and we all know his exquisite beautiful mystical poetry
and love poetry. He speaks of, he has a beautiful poetic expression for saying that the longing
that we feel is the longing that's longing for us, that it's reciprocal and it's mutual. So if
somebody is already feeling that longing in their heart, it is the very presence of love expressing
its own longing in us. So it's very beautiful. It's a very beautiful part of the journey to feel that
longing. So would you say for instance that if the longing is uncomfortable rather than trying to
distract ourselves by going to a movie or something, tune into it and even if it becomes more uncomfortable
feel it even more acutely. Yeah. And that will help you kind of like break through. Yeah. Yeah.
You know Carl Jung, who's been a great teacher to me, he talks about adopting the symbolic attitude
to everything that meaningful that happens in our life. So to engage with it in an intelligent,
open, curious way. So for example, to take it into your morning sit in your meditation
and to set the intention, I would like to engage with this longing. I'd like to learn more about
it. And also the bigger question of, I would like to engage with my spiritual path and my
my spiritual awakening and let the longing speak to us or it can speak in
words, can speak in images, can speak in feelings, can speak energetically in our
bodies and say for example if somebody was going like I do say for for body
work, for acupuncture or craniosacral therapy or whatever, bring that longing
to all of these moments when we're seeking integration and healing in our
life because they're the times that were opened up. They're the times of stillness. That's when the
veil pins. That's when we're in a healing space. And I think that's the time to ask the big questions.
So, okay. Let me just have a quick look to see what's on the path of gold. So, okay. Yes. Seven
stages. I'm just, oh yeah, so seven stages, yeah, of awakening and the following this
is the path of gold. So I'll just read out the seven and then see if I've any
comments on any of them. So the first one is the call to awaken and to interpret
the signs of spiritual dis-ease. So that longing that can be uncomfortable is
what I would call spiritual dis-ease, not disease. And so there is a call going
out in every second of every day from the divine realm to every human being trying
to invite us into the awakening. So it's to hear the call to awaken and engage
and engage meaningfully with the signs of spiritual disease or a spiritual
invitation. To take the journey within, just to commit to the inner life, to let
Let go of the external, inauthentic, vacuous, empty world that is out there and commit to
the inner journey.
Just go inside.
Dante's poem, like that was a real, that was a big milestone on my journey reading his
book with a great English academic from Cambridge, I think, did an annotated translation and I
just, it was a very beautiful experience.
So that's the journey within, going into the dark wood, surrendering to being lost, surrendering
to not knowing the way, but waiting for the way to reveal itself, because it will reveal
itself if we make ourselves available.
So the journey within.
And I would say letting go of this dark, dark world and going within doesn't mean abandoning
the world, because having gone within, you come back and you infuse the world with the
inner light, you know, it becomes much more beautiful and rich, kind of like, you know,
going to the bank to get some money out so you can go to the market and be more,
enjoy the market more. Yeah, yeah, lovely. Yeah, yeah. What did you say earlier about somebody
who becomes inflated rather than offering service? I think, yeah, exactly that, like you get gifts
from doing the inner journey. The whole point of the inner journey is that you find your true gifts
and come back out and you share them with other people.
Yeah, replenishing, it's refreshing. It's enriching. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's
the first the kingdom of heaven and all else should be added on today.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful.
Famous biblical scholar, Rick Archer, quoting.
So then the third stage that I have here is what I call the liminal space and the consciousness of
of longing, there you go, for our friend to ask this question. So to begin to be
comfortable being between worlds, you know, allowing that to be a felt lived
experience, being comfortable and the thing is that because we're now
entering into a new axial age, we quite simply are already in a liminal space, we
are between worlds. So the best way to fall in with that is to let it happen in
our own individual selves as well.
You know, to be comfortable with the not knowing,
with the confusion, with the breakdown of the ending
of one era, the birth of the new.
We're in that dark time of labor, death and labor,
and we're waiting for the rebirth.
So to let it happen, accept it, recognize,
for more of us to learn that it's a natural state
and it's a natural phase of the awakening.
Then the next I have is transmission from an awakened mind and reading the mystics.
So I think that's huge.
I think in the Buddhist and the Hindu cultures, that's really central.
Isn't it Rick transmission from a teacher?
Yeah, and it happened with Jesus to a member of the woman who touched his cloak
and he said he felt like there had been some kind of transmission.
I felt I felt the energy go out of me or some such thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, we don't I mean, I never knew anything about that.
my religious practice, you know, or in any teaching that I ever received. I didn't
know anything about that. But I think you can meet, I mean if you met Jesus, yeah
you'd get it, full on fireworks. But also when you're not
exposed to spiritual teachers, I think then reading, reading the mystics and
reading spiritual books and reading from the great teachers, like for me Jim Finlay
and Richard Rohr reading their work, but much more for me it's the mystics. I think that's
where my primary teaching comes from and then Richard and Jim and Cynthia Bourgeau as well
and lots of other wonderful teachers. They then kind of flesh out for me how to integrate
the mystical experiences and how to walk the spiritual path. And so that's all to say that
we're moving in the direction of unity consciousness. So moving from the dualistic mind of the rational,
era of the last axial age to unit of
consciousness which is the, which is
the type of consciousness of the
spiritually awakened mind. All is one.
There is no division, there is no
separation. We are all one, we are all
parts of one very beautiful majestic
being which is the being of love, which
is life itself. So we're, so on this
spiritual path that's where we're
headed. We're headed to unit of
consciousness. We're walking towards the recognition of the divinity of all of
creation. Everything is sacred, that's panentheism, and then we are moving
towards spiritual mystical consciousness or divine union. And hopefully we'll all
get to the stage where we permanently live in the bliss and the ecstasy of
divine union with the sacred in whatever way the sacred presents to us. So for
me it's the Christ and for you it's somebody else. I think we all will. I
don't think it'll necessarily happen to each of us in this lifetime but this you
know this lifetime is just a chapter in a very big book. Yeah, yeah, ongoing. Yeah,
yeah. I hope I meet you in the next lifetime as well Rick. We'll see where we are.
Yeah, well be nice to meet you in person in this lifetime. We'll see if that ever
That'd be nice, yeah.
The final instruction you received from Jesus in your book was, "Invite them to become kindling
in the fire of my love, so that all may burn together as one in love."
What does that invitation mean to you, and how do you extend it to our audience today?
First of all, my body is burning, just to hear you say it.
The fire is the metaphor and the image and the symbol that Christ has used with me and
given me to experience all along.
So kindling in the fire of my love is that I would offer myself to Christ as a piece
of wood for him to throw into the fire and let me burn in your love and enjoy the bliss.
So the invitation there is for each person to recognize themselves as contributing to
the fire of love that is a universal fire in which we are all invited to burn in love.
So to become kindling, join in, wake up.
One nice thing about the kindling metaphor is that, you know, when a piece of, let's
say unlit wood gets near to a piece of lit wood, then the fire spreads to the unlit piece
and then it can one to the next, it can spread.
So I think that there's a kind of a contagious quality to this work.
Oh, that's a lovely way to say it.
Yeah, in a good sense.
Yeah, I actually feel as if I've kind of come, I feel as if it's been contagious for me just
having this conversation.
I feel really kind of, I feel really inspired.
And yeah, I feel as if I'm yeah, on fire.
Great.
Well, thank you.
And me too.
It's this.
I'm like the prime beneficiary of doing these interviews.
You're so kind.
It's just such a delight meeting such wonderful people and having conversations with them.
It really has become one of my most powerful spiritual practices.
Well it's incredible service that you do Rick.
I mean I guess this is your incredible path of service.
I mean you push wisdom out into the world for all of us to listen to as we go through
our lives.
really benefiting from listening to an awful lot of the conversations.
Thank you for what you do.
And thank you for having me.
I think people will benefit from this one.
And so thank you for offering it to us.
And I'll have a page on BatGap, like I always do, about this interview.
And it'll have a link to your website and to your book.
And I'm happy to upgrade that from time to time,
like if you write a new book or announce some event or something like that.
Thank you very much, Rick.
I would say for people to go to my,
for now to go to my website
because I have put a huge number of my visions
directly onto the website,
just in chronological order, transcribe my journals.
I'm trying to give it all away for free.
I'm trying to make it accessible to people
so that people can use them on their own spiritual journey
and see if anything touches them.
It's a gift that I'm giving away.
It's my service.
So you could just link to the vision pages on the website.
And that's my gift to the audience.
Thank you to whoever is here listening and watching
and in the future.
Yes, thanks, Aitamar.
And thanks to those who've been listening or watching.
And as I always say, we'll see you for the next one.
Thank you so much, Rick.
You're welcome.
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Thank you.
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