WEBVTT

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Suddenly that voice spoke again and the voice said I would walk into that mountainside and

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re-enter the womb of Christ and I was gobsmacked and then the feeling I didn't hear any more

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voice I didn't hear anything else beyond that that was the end and then I just came more

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and more and more back into my body and into this realm and into this world and I was dumb

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struck what had happened how did it happen why did it happen what did it mean how could

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I have it again.

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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

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My name is Rick Archer.

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Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening

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people.

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I've done over 730 of them now and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out

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previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu.

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My guest today is someone whom I've gotten to know through her books and also through

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a conversation or two that we've had before today, and I think you're really going to

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like her.

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Her name is Aedamar Kirrane.

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She's in Dublin, Ireland.

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She used to be a lawyer, or a barrister as they call them, but then turned to philosophy

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and writing.

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She experienced a spontaneous mystical awakening that began in 2015 and continues to unfold.

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She didn't find the support she might have hoped to within her own Christian tradition,

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and so she embarked on a very deep inquiry to understand the inner dynamics of awakening,

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and came to believe in life as an original blessing rather than the doctrine of original

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sin that she thinks has destroyed our sense of ourselves as sacred beings, at least through

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particular tradition. She wrote a lovely book called Light on Fire, Waking Up to Divine Love,

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which I listen to as an audible book, which I recommend because she reads it very nicely

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with her lovely Irish accent. That was published in 2021. She has developed a three-fold mystical

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cosmology that understands creation in the pattern of exodus and return, and it recognizes

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all of life is sacred, described through the concept of panentheism, which we'll be discussing

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and explaining, and that the purpose of human life is deification, or the return to our

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divine state while still in human form.

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And all of this is set within the context of a great awakening that she and many other

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people feel that we're now living through.

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She's done a lot of mystical writing, and you'll find that on her website, which I'll

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be linking to. Okay, for starters, before the extraordinary events you describe in your

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book Light on Fire, you were a lawyer, a wife, and a mother. Can you paint a picture of your

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life then and the unconventional soul you felt you were hiding?

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All along? Well, first of all, thank you so much, Rick, for having me. It's a real pleasure

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to be in conversation with you. Thank you.

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Oh, you're welcome. It's a joy. It's a pleasure for me.

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Thank you. I was living a really ordinary life. It didn't cross my mind to explore

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spirituality in my life. So I wasn't in any way a seeker. I wasn't on a spiritual path.

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I was just living a really ordinary life.

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You're a good little Catholic girl going to church, right?

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Yeah, I had grown up, certainly, with very strict Catholicism. My parents were very traditional,

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both from, you know, rural West of Ireland, very traditional Catholic upbringing.

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But by the time I was in my own adulthood, I was doing it my own way. I was still very much,

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I'm now going to say I was like in love with God, but I only know that now. I had a healthy

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kind of relationship with the divine realm, but it wasn't something that was significant or

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important to me on a day to day basis. But yeah, you're touching on by saying I had lived quite an

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unusual life from a very young stage, like from my earliest memories in life, I

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absolutely felt that I did not belong in this realm. I did not belong with my

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family, I did not belong to humanity, I felt really lost at a very deep and

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profound level and I felt, I had the sense that I was just in the wrong place. As a

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child I used to kind of have this idea that at some point pretty soon somebody

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was going to figure out that Adhemar was in the wrong place and they were going to take

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me out of here and I was going to be brought to where I would find that I fitted in and

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I belonged.

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It was just this inner sense, now I know that I was just very naturally spiritual.

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Now I know that I had sort of a mystical temperament.

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Now I know that I was living between worlds really in every way.

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But I had no understanding of that as a child.

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had no understanding of that until the last 10 years of my life. So I had kind

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of grown up with this sense this very kind of a disappointed sense that I was

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stuck here in this realm in a human body with the human community and that I just

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had to kind of make the best of it. And then my life did begin to dramatically

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change around 2007 and then significantly in 2015.

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Okay, before we get to all that, you write in your book that becoming a mother was a

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catalyst that reoriented your life towards its true north star, as you put it.

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In what ways did motherhood prepare you for the spiritual awakening that was to come?

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Yeah, so the main thing around becoming a mother was that I fell into postnatal depression

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during the birth of my first child, my daughter.

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That's uncommon, usually it's postnatal.

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That's why it's called postnatal.

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Do you know what?

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There's actually prenatal depression as well.

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There's depression during pregnancy.

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There can be like traumatic experiences during the birth.

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And I certainly had, I was psychologically thrown during the birth of my

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daughter.

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And then afterwards, the problem was that nobody diagnosed it.

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You know, I was surrounded by supposedly the best medical care in the country, you

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know beautiful midwives, lovely doctors, lovely consultants but like they sent me

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home with what I now absolutely know was a textbook case of postnatal depression

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and it I was going to my GP saying I can't stop crying I'm really sad even

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though I'm also really happy it was a very confusing time for me I did not I

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didn't understand what was wrong with me I didn't know why can I not just be

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blissfully happy with the fact that I am now a mother which had been the absolute

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highlight of my life that it was just really the central thing that I wanted

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in my life was to be a mother and now I was a mother and things just weren't

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working out in the fairy tale way that I had kind of anticipated. So one day I was

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now pregnant with my second child which is my son Coen and I was sitting in my

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kitchen crying just really upset just kind of despairing and just saying what

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is wrong what is wrong what is wrong with me and suddenly I heard an inner

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voice in my head and it said I have postnatal depression and the most enormous weight just

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lifted off my shoulders because now I had a name for what was wrong and now I could get help. Now

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I knew okay there's a path I can follow to fix this and get myself out of this mess.

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Is there any kind of more esoteric explanation of postnatal depression other than it's a hormonal

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thing that happens naturally?

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I mean I know there's a number of different ways of looking at depression but for me it

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was very psychological.

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I think it was touching on the aspect of my life that is the most sensitive, birth and

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death are the most sensitive parts of all of our lives and for me they have been quite

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profound.

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In my background, I'll just give like a sense of how I see the postnatal depression arose

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in me and then why it became a portal for healing and awakening. In my mother's lineage, my

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mother's mother, so that's my grandmother, when her mother, my great grandmother, was

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giving birth to my grandmother, she died in childbirth. And so my grandmother, who was

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called Bridget, was brought up by her grandmother in turn. And then my grandmother was an only

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child and when my mother was pregnant with me, I was her fourth pregnancy, there

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were seven children in our family, when my mother was pregnant with me her mother

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died. And so I was carried in my mother's room with my mother in mourning. And when

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I first began therapy several decades later, I kept intuitively coming back to

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my mother's womb and I didn't know that. I didn't know that that had happened

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until years later, but I kept coming back to the idea that something went wrong in

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my mother's womb. All of these problems that I've been living with all my life,

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something happened in her womb. And so when I later discovered that my

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grandmother had died, I realized, okay, that's a big part of this jigsaw. Giving

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birth myself, I think, brought me back to all of that energetic maelstrom of the

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womb and birth. Okay, so jumping ahead. What led you to leave your career as a lawyer?

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Did you enjoy being a lawyer, but you left it to pursue philosophy and creative writing?

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What were you searching for? Well, actually, it was a it was the postnatal depression that

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prompted me to leave my career as a lawyer. When I went back to work after my daughter

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was born, I was I was in a bad way. And it was just incredibly challenging. So when I

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was pregnant with my second child and coming up to the time to give birth to him, I realised

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that I really needed to serve myself better this time and I thought I'll take an extended

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maternity leave and I'll get myself up on my feet again as a mother and begin enjoying

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this experience and bonding with my children.

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And once I gave up work, I had turned to writing, journaling, furiously during my time of postnatal

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Depression, which probably lasted for about three years in total, I'd say, two

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definitely, and I fell in love with writing. And I loved journaling and then

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I started taking creative writing courses and I was writing anything and

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everything and I fell in love with writing and I thought, "Wow, I wonder if I

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could make a career as a writer." And I just decided I was gonna make a change,

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so I never went back to law and instead I went back to college and I studied

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English and philosophy and then a master's in creative writing, all with a

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of you to becoming a writer of fiction.

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Well the best laid plans of mice and men as they say.

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Yeah.

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All right so your spiritual awakening began in 2015 but you describe a powerful precursor

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to this in 2007, an experience of profound peace and a vision of re-entering the womb

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of Christ.

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Can you take us back to that moment and the impact it had on you?

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Yeah huge impact.

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So 2007, my children were still very young.

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They were born in 2001 and 2003, so they were just sort of four, five, six, seven, that kind

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of age.

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Our little family was on summer holidays in the west of Ireland, a very, very, very beautiful

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part of the coast near the Skellig Rocks.

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I don't know if you've ever heard of them.

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Have you, Rick?

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They're only from your book.

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They're worth looking at online just to get a picture of them.

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They're really, really majestic.

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quite small and they're just huge big gray stony peaks that are kind of

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triangular in shape and it was the place for, it was a monastic settlement back in

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the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries. Augustinian monks used to live out there

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and they lived incredibly ascetic lives, you know, the middle of the Atlantic

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Ocean living in little stone beehive huts. It's very majestic and the west of

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Ireland there's a real spirituality to the land and to the setting and the

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energy is very liminal and it's very magical and it's the part of the world

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where I always feel when I'm there it feels like my soul just opens and

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expands and spreads and and kind of comes home to itself. So one evening I was

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walking along this coastline that I'm describing. I love to walk in nature and

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I love to walk in the evening around sunset it just really is very special

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for me. So I was walking along and I had often had an experience of what I now

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know is called altered states of consciousness where I would just become

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quite detached from this world and sort of fall into not quite a reverie like I

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was able to keep living my ordinary life but my mind was somewhere else but I

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didn't know where where it was it was just elsewhere. And this evening as I was

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walking along by the coast of the Atlantic, I fell into a really, really,

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really deep and exponentially accelerating altered state of consciousness, so that on

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the beach I actually just had to stop walking because I did not know what was

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happening to me. And I fell into this sense of complete disconnect from my body,

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the beach, the world, the cosmos, and I felt myself traveling or being brought

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into a state of profound peace, like beyond anything that could possibly

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exist in this realm. And it was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened

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me. And I often think that it was essentially like a near-death experience

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without actually dying. Every aspect of this life had just ceased, as if I had

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left existence entirely. And it was really incredibly beautiful and it lasted

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for, I don't know, it's impossible to know, but maybe 20 minutes, maybe half an hour,

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you know, about that kind of time. And when it began to fade, when I began to feel

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myself coming back to this world's consciousness and realizing that I was

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back on the beach and I was back in my body and I was back in this world, I was

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really devastated because I thought I want to stay there, I want that to

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continue forever, I don't ever want that to end. I wonder, is there a way back?

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And I was thinking to myself, you know, what could I do to try and get back into that state?

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I had no words to kind of describe it to myself.

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But a way I describe it in the book is that it's like when you wake up from a really good dream

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and you try to kind of sneak back into the dream, you know, it was kind of like that.

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I was saying, can I get back somehow or another?

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And as I was standing on the beach, just really like absolutely in awe

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and also just kind of shocked as well for what had happened.

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Suddenly a voice started talking in my head and the voice said,

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what would you do if you could stay in this place of peace forever or with this feeling of peace forever?

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And I was really gobsmacked.

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I thought, who just said that?

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I was speaking inside my head.

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So I began to think, gosh, well, what would I do?

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I would do absolutely anything because it was the most beautiful experience I'd ever had in my life.

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So before I could even formulate an answer in my mind, suddenly that voice spoke again.

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again and the voice said I would walk into that mountainside and re-enter the

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womb of Christ and I was gobsmacked and I didn't hear anything else beyond that

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that was the end and then I just came more and more and more back into my body

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and into this realm and into this world and I was dumbstruck what had happened

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how did it happen why did it happen what did it mean how could I have it again so

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So that was 2007 and that did set me on a bit of a quest to figure out what was that all

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about.

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I've seen that happen a lot where people get zapped with some really nice experience as

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kind of a teaser, you know, a taste of what's possible.

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And then they've got to figure out how to stabilize it and make it more abiding.

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It's like we're given a glimpse and sometimes people actually get it from psychedelics or something like that

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but other times it comes spontaneously as

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as you did

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I often think that you know where the stories of king arthur and the knights of the round table and the grail stories

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I don't know if you're familiar with them, but yeah, i've probably seen some movies

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Yeah, I only have a small familiarity with it

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But what I do know what I think happens is that somebody gets a glimpse of the grail

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sort of as a shimmering image somewhere. And they spend the rest of their life trying to find that

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grail again. And I think that's sort of an analogy. I think that's a version of this.

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Yeah. And in fact, they've been poets. I think I've heard this with reference to Blake,

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they have some beautiful transcendent experience. And then they write about it for the rest of their

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lives. Yeah, no, without ever really being able to recapture it.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jim Finley has this really beautiful sentence that just keeps me company

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all the time. He says, "Sometimes in life, something is given and you spend the rest of

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your life trying to be true to that thing, even though you don't know what it was."

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Yeah.

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And I think that just describes perfectly this path.

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But I think what you've been experiencing and what I would certainly advocate is to,

00:18:22.380 --> 00:18:29.580
you know, not have it be a one-shot deal, but to have it recur and integrate and stabilize and

00:18:29.580 --> 00:18:36.620
become more of a normal state of functioning. Yeah, I think you're precisely speaking to the

00:18:36.620 --> 00:18:42.780
awakening process, aren't you? Yeah. I mean, I think this is what we want. We want our consciousness

00:18:42.780 --> 00:18:48.780
to transform. But the way in which it happened for me is that my awakening, that was just the

00:18:48.780 --> 00:18:55.220
the beginning of it, then it became a daily, like from 2015 really until now it has become

00:18:55.220 --> 00:19:01.100
an almost daily experience for me to have mystical experiences. But if you have a spiritual

00:19:01.100 --> 00:19:05.340
awakening or you're beginning to have a spiritual awakening, but you're not on a particular

00:19:05.340 --> 00:19:11.540
path, how do you explain it to yourself? How do you understand it? So when it's spontaneous,

00:19:11.540 --> 00:19:17.860
you then have to work backwards. I've been working backwards since 2015. What are the

00:19:17.860 --> 00:19:21.940
frames, what's the context, you know, how do I understand this, who might help me

00:19:21.940 --> 00:19:26.180
understand it, how do I process it, how do I integrate it? So I've been working

00:19:26.180 --> 00:19:32.020
backwards ever since. You explain in your book that you had a lifelong feeling of

00:19:32.020 --> 00:19:36.340
being lost at a primordial level and a cosmic desire for something you couldn't

00:19:36.340 --> 00:19:42.660
name. So you know it's like here you're given this taste. What methods have you

00:19:42.660 --> 00:19:47.780
used? I mean was your study of philosophy part of the working backwards process?

00:19:47.780 --> 00:19:55.020
You mentioned the works of Schelling and Heidegger having provided some context for your experiences.

00:19:55.020 --> 00:20:00.500
Did their ideas about nature being an authenticity help you understand what was happening to you?

00:20:00.500 --> 00:20:01.500
Yeah, hugely.

00:20:01.500 --> 00:20:03.100
Yeah, they really did.

00:20:03.100 --> 00:20:04.100
Yeah.

00:20:04.100 --> 00:20:08.500
So I was studying these philosophers before 2015.

00:20:08.500 --> 00:20:13.220
It was just my final year of my philosophy in English degree that the mystical experiences

00:20:13.220 --> 00:20:14.260
began.

00:20:14.260 --> 00:20:19.980
So the way in which philosophy first began to help me and it still helps me, it began

00:20:19.980 --> 00:20:26.040
to explain that lifelong feeling of being lost and this cosmic desire that I used to feel

00:20:26.040 --> 00:20:30.140
for something vast and huge that I didn't know what it was.

00:20:30.140 --> 00:20:33.460
The couple of philosophers that really helped were first of all Schelling.

00:20:33.460 --> 00:20:38.660
He is an Enlightenment philosopher around the late 1600s, early 1700s I think would be his

00:20:38.660 --> 00:20:40.260
era.

00:20:40.260 --> 00:20:43.780
And he was part of the counter-enlightenment.

00:20:43.780 --> 00:20:45.900
So he was a philosopher of the sublime.

00:20:45.900 --> 00:20:48.780
So he would be like in Blake's lineage.

00:20:48.780 --> 00:20:55.500
So he wasn't really committed to the enlightenment project and rationality and explaining everything

00:20:55.500 --> 00:20:59.100
just with pure reason like they can't.

00:20:59.100 --> 00:21:01.740
He was looking at nature.

00:21:01.740 --> 00:21:05.380
I think they called him a nature philosopher, but not in the way we would understand nature

00:21:05.380 --> 00:21:06.380
now.

00:21:06.380 --> 00:21:11.680
But anyway I was preparing for a tutorial one evening and I was reading in one of his whatever

00:21:11.680 --> 00:21:18.380
piece of writing I had to read and he said that nature is God giving birth to itself.

00:21:18.380 --> 00:21:21.440
And I was just transfixed.

00:21:21.440 --> 00:21:26.880
I can still see myself at the kitchen table and I just read the sentence again and again

00:21:26.880 --> 00:21:34.640
and again and I thought nature is God giving birth to itself and I mean it landed as a

00:21:34.640 --> 00:21:35.640
truth.

00:21:35.640 --> 00:21:38.520
you know, I thought, yeah, okay, now we're onto something.

00:21:38.520 --> 00:21:40.520
Okay, now somebody has said something

00:21:40.520 --> 00:21:44.200
that really resonates with my heart and with my whole being.

00:21:44.200 --> 00:21:47.380
And that really opened a door for me

00:21:47.380 --> 00:21:49.720
to begin looking at nature in a different way

00:21:49.720 --> 00:21:52.300
and to begin looking at God in a different way.

00:21:52.300 --> 00:21:53.760
That, you know, up to that point,

00:21:53.760 --> 00:21:55.760
I think God had still been quite remote,

00:21:55.760 --> 00:21:57.440
you know, quite external.

00:21:57.440 --> 00:22:02.400
The external God kind of managing things from without.

00:22:02.400 --> 00:22:05.600
But if God is, if nature is God giving birth to itself,

00:22:05.600 --> 00:22:07.800
then God is in absolutely everything.

00:22:07.800 --> 00:22:09.000
- Yeah.

00:22:09.000 --> 00:22:11.920
We'll get into this as we discuss panentheism,

00:22:11.920 --> 00:22:14.620
but you know, and Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism

00:22:14.620 --> 00:22:16.120
would have something to say about this too,

00:22:16.120 --> 00:22:18.160
because, you know, they would say that,

00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:20.080
well, there's nothing but that, you know,

00:22:20.080 --> 00:22:21.600
but Brahman or God.

00:22:21.600 --> 00:22:26.600
And so this, so it must be a self-interacting dynamics

00:22:26.600 --> 00:22:30.400
that's taking place in which the apparent creation

00:22:30.400 --> 00:22:35.400
is actually just an, essentially that,

00:22:35.560 --> 00:22:42.520
same as that which gives rise to it. It's all one thing, kind of playing a self-referral game.

00:22:42.520 --> 00:22:48.760
Yes, yeah, yeah. I think that's exactly what it is. Yeah, I think God goes out from itself,

00:22:48.760 --> 00:22:54.440
herself, himself, with the intention of coming back. And we were having a conversation last

00:22:54.440 --> 00:22:59.480
week and we were, I was saying, you know, does God really, you know, is God going to make it home,

00:22:59.480 --> 00:23:04.280
you know, to God's own self? We were chatting about that. And after subsequently, I was

00:23:04.280 --> 00:23:10.280
reflecting and I think this is what I'm thinking now is that God knows God will get back, but

00:23:10.280 --> 00:23:13.880
maybe isn't sure exactly how. You know that T.S. Eliot quote,

00:23:13.880 --> 00:23:18.840
coming back to the place from which you've started and knowing it for the first time.

00:23:18.840 --> 00:23:24.840
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. I have that experience so often. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:23:24.840 --> 00:23:27.880
Okay, anything more you want to say about this little bit?

00:23:28.520 --> 00:23:32.200
So then Heidegger, yeah, he was incredibly helpful as well.

00:23:32.200 --> 00:23:36.940
He spoke about these moods of, he called them moods of detachment.

00:23:36.940 --> 00:23:41.260
Um, and so he was describing these kinds of altered states of consciousness.

00:23:41.260 --> 00:23:43.900
I've been having all of my life without understanding what they were.

00:23:43.900 --> 00:23:47.320
And he said that it is essentially a call to authenticity.

00:23:47.320 --> 00:23:52.080
He said, when you're in that kind of detached state of mind, what's

00:23:52.080 --> 00:23:57.580
happening is that you're entering pure being, you're becoming your authentic

00:23:57.580 --> 00:24:03.520
self and he said when you go back into regular ordinary consciousness he said

00:24:03.520 --> 00:24:08.240
you're left with a longing to return permanently to that other way of being

00:24:08.240 --> 00:24:13.480
and he said it's a call to authenticity because you no longer want to engage at

00:24:13.480 --> 00:24:18.920
what he called a level of idle chat in ordinary consciousness in in the way

00:24:18.920 --> 00:24:23.140
you've been living your life up to that point. So that again gave me language for

00:24:23.140 --> 00:24:26.860
understanding that okay yeah this is a call to authenticity I do want to be

00:24:26.860 --> 00:24:29.900
authentic. I do want to be my true self.

00:24:29.900 --> 00:24:34.380
Yeah, so they set me on the road and then Levinas explained what the

00:24:34.380 --> 00:24:38.620
cosmic desire was. He said that that's metaphysical desire for the great other

00:24:38.620 --> 00:24:43.500
which can be God, being, life, consciousness. So I began to have a bit of

00:24:43.500 --> 00:24:47.500
a vocabulary for my way of being.

00:24:47.500 --> 00:24:51.260
Yeah, I had a spiritual teacher who gave a talk which was later

00:24:51.260 --> 00:24:54.620
entitled "The Path of the Seeker" but he talked about how

00:24:54.620 --> 00:24:59.660
you know, you kind of, he actually used an analogy too, which I'll get, I'll give you in a second,

00:24:59.660 --> 00:25:04.460
but you leave the comfort of ordinary life and discover there's something more,

00:25:04.460 --> 00:25:09.580
but, and so you can no longer really feel comfortable, you know, satisfied with ordinary

00:25:09.580 --> 00:25:14.540
life, but then you haven't reached that something more. So you're kind of in no man's land, you know.

00:25:14.540 --> 00:25:21.100
Yeah, yeah. And you're in a limbo. Yeah, it's kind of uncomfortable. The analogy he used was

00:25:21.100 --> 00:25:26.460
like let's say a guy is living in this little shabby hut and he's yeah that's all he knows

00:25:26.460 --> 00:25:30.620
he's attached to it and then someone says well you see that palace over there that's actually

00:25:30.620 --> 00:25:35.020
your true home and so he starts out towards the palace and then he thinks wait a minute

00:25:35.020 --> 00:25:39.980
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

00:25:41.820 --> 00:25:45.340
Yeah, yeah. True. Limbo.

00:25:45.340 --> 00:25:52.700
Yeah. But a central image in your book is that of sacred fire. You haven't really

00:25:52.700 --> 00:25:56.140
talked about this much yet in this interview, but Jesus comes to you,

00:25:56.140 --> 00:26:03.100
and that's the main theme of your book. Jesus comes to you in a blaze of fire, and you feel

00:26:04.060 --> 00:26:12.700
your own head and soul set on fire. So what does this fire represent? And as much as you

00:26:12.700 --> 00:26:21.260
possibly can, what is it like to experience it? Amazing. I'll read that piece, actually,

00:26:21.260 --> 00:26:26.380
Rick. I have that page in my book open of that experience. Okay, go for it. Yeah, that's okay,

00:26:26.380 --> 00:26:30.700
just to give people a flavor of that experience. And then what I'd love to talk with you about

00:26:31.260 --> 00:26:37.180
is the fact that I now know from listening to your show that what I was experiencing was also a

00:26:37.180 --> 00:26:43.740
spontaneous Kundalini awakening, but I didn't understand it at all until very recently.

00:26:43.740 --> 00:26:49.500
So I'll read this. So this was my first like full, full-on mystical experience that happened

00:26:49.500 --> 00:26:56.940
almost exactly 10 years ago, July 2015. So I'm reading from my book, Light on Fire.

00:26:58.380 --> 00:27:02.780
So let me just get to the, oh yeah, I'll give a little background to this.

00:27:02.780 --> 00:27:12.620
Rick, when I began to meditate in early 20, what year did I begin to meditate?

00:27:12.620 --> 00:27:20.780
2015. Yeah, so this happened six months after I began to meditate. When I say I began to meditate,

00:27:20.780 --> 00:27:26.780
like that's a real overstatement. I hadn't. You just kind of did it somehow. You didn't

00:27:26.780 --> 00:27:27.780
didn't get instruction or anything, right?

00:27:27.780 --> 00:27:30.380
I just sat at my kitchen table and closed my eyes.

00:27:30.380 --> 00:27:32.580
I didn't have the first clue how to meditate.

00:27:32.580 --> 00:27:38.380
I barely knew that there was like formal teaching for meditation, but somebody had recommended

00:27:38.380 --> 00:27:39.380
to me.

00:27:39.380 --> 00:27:40.380
I was really sad.

00:27:40.380 --> 00:27:43.220
My dad had just died a little, my dad had died a couple of months ago and I was very

00:27:43.220 --> 00:27:46.460
heartbroken and somebody said, "Why don't you meditate?"

00:27:46.460 --> 00:27:48.540
And I thought, "Okay, I'll try that."

00:27:48.540 --> 00:27:52.100
And so I sat at my kitchen table and just closed my eyes and just kind of followed my

00:27:52.100 --> 00:27:53.300
intuition, you know?

00:27:53.300 --> 00:27:59.940
So I was doing no formal meditation, but I was really loving the feeling in my body when

00:27:59.940 --> 00:28:00.940
I did meditate.

00:28:00.940 --> 00:28:07.100
Like I had a real sense of profound peace, calm, stillness, and I really liked that.

00:28:07.100 --> 00:28:13.940
So in early July, somebody had recommended a book to me called Spirit Babies by Walter

00:28:13.940 --> 00:28:15.100
McKitchen.

00:28:15.100 --> 00:28:18.260
And I read it and it was really interesting.

00:28:18.260 --> 00:28:21.460
And at the end of each chapter, he had some guided meditations.

00:28:21.460 --> 00:28:26.460
I said oh bingo this is what I've been looking for some advice so I did one of

00:28:26.460 --> 00:28:30.780
his meditations which is called the rainbow meditation and it's a really

00:28:30.780 --> 00:28:36.420
simple meditation I mean there's nothing esoteric or difficult about it so what he

00:28:36.420 --> 00:28:40.900
asked that what the instructions on the page were to now I didn't know what

00:28:40.900 --> 00:28:45.540
chakras were I didn't know what colors were I didn't know anything about working

00:28:45.540 --> 00:28:49.460
with the chakras in the body but this is what the meditation simply asked you to

00:28:49.460 --> 00:28:55.540
do was visualize colors traveling up from the earth one at a time the colors of the rainbow.

00:28:55.540 --> 00:29:01.620
You're traveling up your left foot going to a particular part of your body say the base chakra

00:29:01.620 --> 00:29:08.340
the red and then you see the color traveling down your right foot out in back out into the earth and

00:29:08.340 --> 00:29:14.500
so on up your body until you get up to the the top. Now he didn't say base chakra, sacral chakra,

00:29:14.500 --> 00:29:19.940
crown chakra. He just said red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white and I just followed the color.

00:29:19.940 --> 00:29:26.820
So it was like full of like really naive approach to it all and then this is what happened.

00:29:26.820 --> 00:29:34.180
So I'm reading from my book now. So that paragraph just gives that description. Then

00:29:34.180 --> 00:29:40.180
I visualized colored energy traveling up and down my body for each different chakra color.

00:29:40.180 --> 00:29:46.260
And as I did this, I felt powerful energy building inside me. I was quite taken aback. I faced a

00:29:46.260 --> 00:29:51.460
split-second decision. I knew I could stop this strange experience from developing any further

00:29:51.460 --> 00:29:55.780
if I wanted to. I could just stand up, walk away, break the spell, so to speak.

00:29:55.780 --> 00:30:00.660
But as that thought flashed across my mind, I heard my inner voice saying,

00:30:00.660 --> 00:30:07.300
"I am held up by the white light, and I can stay for this. I have no idea how I came to say such

00:30:07.300 --> 00:30:12.740
a ping, the meaning of which I barely understood, except that I sensed it was completely safe to

00:30:12.740 --> 00:30:17.700
let the experience continue. I also knew that I would miss something absolutely amazing if I

00:30:17.700 --> 00:30:25.220
walked away. I could sense something really incredible about to happen. So I went with it,

00:30:25.220 --> 00:30:29.620
once more surrendering to an experience that lay far beyond my intellectual understanding.

00:30:29.620 --> 00:30:36.020
When I got to the seventh chakra on top of my head, suddenly, without the slightest warning,

00:30:36.020 --> 00:30:42.740
without any preliminary sign, with nothing to prepare me for it, I felt Jesus come to me in a blaze of fire.

00:30:42.740 --> 00:30:47.940
My head exploded with that same holy fire I had experienced on the pier and in the park

00:30:47.940 --> 00:30:55.380
on the summer solstice. We're on the solstice today. It is, yeah. Only this time it was staggering in its

00:30:55.380 --> 00:31:01.620
intensity and its holiness. I felt Jesus's presence as a blaze of energy, as a sacred fire all around

00:31:01.620 --> 00:31:09.300
my head. As soon as he came, he said to me, "I am the I Am." I heard the words silently in my head,

00:31:09.300 --> 00:31:14.500
with my inner hearing, but they were spoken with majesty, as a king speaking to the whole world.

00:31:14.500 --> 00:31:19.300
And as I heard them, I was filled with a staggering and sublime holiness. I knew with

00:31:19.300 --> 00:31:24.740
certainty, as part and parcel of the experience, that this holy fire I felt blazing in me and all

00:31:24.740 --> 00:31:30.660
around me was Jesus. I do not know how I knew it, I just did. I felt Jesus. I didn't see anything.

00:31:30.660 --> 00:31:36.420
It wasn't a physical seeing in any way. It was a feeling knowing. I could feel the incredible

00:31:36.420 --> 00:31:41.620
holiness of his presence and his intimate closeness to me. His light surrounded me and I was utterly

00:31:41.620 --> 00:31:46.980
absorbed into the experience. Nothing I could ever see with my physical eyes could come close to the

00:31:46.980 --> 00:31:52.900
beauty, the power, the profundity of this inner experience and this inner knowing. Then I heard

00:31:52.900 --> 00:32:00.260
myself spontaneously begin to chant. I won't go into that. Then, then the energy of Jesus's fire,

00:32:00.260 --> 00:32:06.500
his spirit flowed into me and my fire flowed into his fire. I explained this with the image of two

00:32:06.500 --> 00:32:11.220
fountains of water. So we began to sort of flow in and out of each other. I was seeing his fire

00:32:11.220 --> 00:32:19.700
and my fire above my head and we were like dancing with each other in a just in a blaze of ecstasy.

00:32:19.700 --> 00:32:25.860
And we were taking turns cascading our flow of fire in and out of each other like a vertical,

00:32:25.860 --> 00:32:28.940
like a figure of eight, like a vertical infinity symbol.

00:32:28.940 --> 00:32:31.140
We flowed in and out of each other several times

00:32:31.140 --> 00:32:33.100
in a beautiful dance of flowing fire.

00:32:33.100 --> 00:32:35.220
It was blissful, I was ecstatic.

00:32:35.220 --> 00:32:38.380
It was holy rapture.

00:32:38.380 --> 00:32:42.100
So the fire is just this,

00:32:42.100 --> 00:32:47.940
it's an ecstasy and it feels as if my body is on fire

00:32:47.940 --> 00:32:49.260
but it's not burning.

00:32:49.260 --> 00:32:51.380
Some days I feel I wouldn't be surprised

00:32:51.380 --> 00:32:53.180
if I spontaneously combusted.

00:32:53.180 --> 00:32:55.460
There's just so much energy in my body.

00:32:55.460 --> 00:32:57.780
That supposedly has happened to people.

00:32:57.780 --> 00:33:01.820
I wonder if you stuck a thermometer in your mouth, if you'd notice your actual physical

00:33:01.820 --> 00:33:06.160
temperature was hotter or not, or it's just a subtler phenomenon.

00:33:06.160 --> 00:33:08.160
I think it's a subtler phenomenon.

00:33:08.160 --> 00:33:09.160
Yeah.

00:33:09.160 --> 00:33:10.160
Yeah.

00:33:10.160 --> 00:33:11.160
Yeah.

00:33:11.160 --> 00:33:12.620
You know, I'm sorry, go ahead.

00:33:12.620 --> 00:33:15.900
That fire is the mark of all of my spiritual experiences.

00:33:15.900 --> 00:33:20.700
My body blazes and burns just when I sit to meditate in the morning or if I'm out walking

00:33:20.700 --> 00:33:21.700
in nature.

00:33:21.700 --> 00:33:28.740
of for me that's the sign of the sacred in me is the fire. You know that the top the word tapas in

00:33:28.740 --> 00:33:37.140
Sanskrit means heat or fire and tapas is a word of spiritual practice. You do tapas meaning you're

00:33:37.140 --> 00:33:41.940
doing sort of intense spiritual practice and it's burning off the dross. It's burning off the

00:33:41.940 --> 00:33:50.020
impurities and so this notion of fire is you know it's kind of yeah it's a universal.

00:33:50.820 --> 00:33:54.580
I must have an awful lot of impurities to grow up. Oh, I don't know about that.

00:33:54.580 --> 00:33:57.060
I get an awful lot of fire.

00:33:57.060 --> 00:34:05.540
But, you know, I've heard some people comment that Christ was not Jesus's last name. You know,

00:34:05.540 --> 00:34:14.580
Jesus name for a man, Yeshua, but then Christ is like Christ consciousness, right? And so,

00:34:15.300 --> 00:34:24.100
your association or interpretation of this as Jesus, you think a Hindu having the same experience

00:34:24.100 --> 00:34:29.060
might think, "Oh, Krishna's coming to me," or a Muslim might think, "Oh, Muhammad is coming to me,"

00:34:29.060 --> 00:34:35.700
or whatever, but you just have this cultural conditioning. Yeah, yeah. I did read in one book

00:34:35.700 --> 00:34:41.540
that a mystic, or when you begin to have spiritual experiences, they're always in the tradition that

00:34:41.540 --> 00:34:42.460
that you're familiar with,

00:34:42.460 --> 00:34:44.220
because it would be meaningless to somebody

00:34:44.220 --> 00:34:47.020
to be visited by somebody that they're just--

00:34:47.020 --> 00:34:50.700
- Yeah, some blue thing, blue guy with four arms or something.

00:34:50.700 --> 00:34:52.980
- Yeah, that wouldn't have meant anything to me, really.

00:34:52.980 --> 00:34:55.860
(both laughing)

00:34:55.860 --> 00:34:59.140
Yeah, so I think it's, you know, Christ,

00:34:59.140 --> 00:35:01.680
I love the way Richard Rohr speaks about Christ,

00:35:01.680 --> 00:35:02.900
you know, the universe of Christ,

00:35:02.900 --> 00:35:04.620
another name for everything,

00:35:04.620 --> 00:35:06.900
just another name for the sacred, for life,

00:35:06.900 --> 00:35:08.380
for consciousness, for love,

00:35:08.380 --> 00:35:12.380
for the greatest thing that you could envisage, you know?

00:35:12.380 --> 00:35:16.380
- Yeah, I bring that up because,

00:35:16.380 --> 00:35:19.180
yeah, I've had my fair number of,

00:35:19.180 --> 00:35:21.460
share of encounters with fundamentalists,

00:35:21.460 --> 00:35:23.540
and it's just not the way I'm wired,

00:35:23.540 --> 00:35:26.180
that so-and-so is the only way.

00:35:26.180 --> 00:35:28.940
And in a universe where there are probably

00:35:28.940 --> 00:35:31.020
trillions of inhabited planets,

00:35:31.020 --> 00:35:35.740
I just feel like God is not a one-trick pony.

00:35:35.740 --> 00:35:45.740
I mean, he basically, you know, makes himself accessible to people or beings of all sorts

00:35:45.740 --> 00:35:48.420
throughout the universe through various means.

00:35:48.420 --> 00:35:50.740
Yeah, I completely agree with you.

00:35:50.740 --> 00:35:54.500
Yeah, I mean, you know, some saviors might look like some weird octopus or something,

00:35:54.500 --> 00:35:56.140
but on some other planet.

00:35:56.140 --> 00:35:58.260
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:35:58.260 --> 00:35:59.620
That's the way it's coming through.

00:35:59.620 --> 00:36:03.500
Yeah, I think, I mean, we're entering the era of inter-spirituality.

00:36:03.500 --> 00:36:09.500
So it's really important for all of us to realize that there should be no walls between anything.

00:36:09.500 --> 00:36:23.500
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.

00:36:23.500 --> 00:36:28.260
lineages. Yeah and not to hammer on this point too much but I think there's a

00:36:28.260 --> 00:36:35.660
certain egotism inherent in the the emphasis on my way is the best and you're

00:36:35.660 --> 00:36:40.380
you're going to hell you know it's like you know so that church down the street

00:36:40.380 --> 00:36:43.940
those guys are going to hell my church is the only right one and that kind of

00:36:43.940 --> 00:36:48.940
stuff. Oh it's horrendous I mean it undermines in every way the whole essence

00:36:48.940 --> 00:36:51.940
of the religious instinct and the spiritual impulse,

00:36:51.940 --> 00:36:54.540
you know, which is unit of consciousness,

00:36:54.540 --> 00:36:56.340
which is we are all one.

00:36:56.340 --> 00:36:59.140
If that's where we're truly aimed,

00:36:59.140 --> 00:37:01.340
you know, to reach that state of consciousness

00:37:01.340 --> 00:37:03.740
where we recognize everything as our brother,

00:37:03.740 --> 00:37:05.440
our sister, our mother, our father,

00:37:05.440 --> 00:37:07.640
our daughter, our child, like the birds,

00:37:07.640 --> 00:37:09.740
the bees, the planets, the stars,

00:37:09.740 --> 00:37:11.040
the moon, everything.

00:37:11.040 --> 00:37:11.840
It's all one.

00:37:11.840 --> 00:37:15.640
And we won't get there if people just cling

00:37:15.640 --> 00:37:23.400
to individual identities of their particular path. Yeah, and if we contemplate what God

00:37:23.400 --> 00:37:30.520
really means or really is, then you know, absolutely unlimited, just, you know,

00:37:30.520 --> 00:37:36.920
dwarfing the universe by comparison if the universe has limits and all pervading and,

00:37:38.200 --> 00:37:44.760
you know just so broad and universal and all encompassing that any sort of

00:37:44.760 --> 00:37:52.600
narrowness narrow interpretation or or or exclusivity is kind of a an insult

00:37:52.600 --> 00:37:59.880
to that that grandeur of God. Yeah yeah yeah I completely agree with you. I mean

00:37:59.880 --> 00:38:03.960
I think God is like I used to love um kaleidoscopes when I was a child you

00:38:03.960 --> 00:38:07.080
know you look in the little thing and you twist it around and see all the

00:38:07.080 --> 00:38:12.840
the different patterns, I think that's closer to what God is than what you're describing.

00:38:12.840 --> 00:38:22.640
Yeah. Okay, so there was a recurring experience that you report in your book about leaving your

00:38:22.640 --> 00:38:29.520
body and merging with the vine. Can you talk about what is, I guess maybe that thing in 2007 was like

00:38:29.520 --> 00:38:35.120
that, when you're walking on the shoreline near the rocks, you kind of like, sounds like you totally

00:38:35.120 --> 00:38:39.840
left and an observer, I don't know what someone would have observed when you were doing that,

00:38:39.840 --> 00:38:44.000
would you just been standing in a trance or sat, did you sit down or whatever?

00:38:44.000 --> 00:38:47.120
No, I stayed standing, yeah, in a trance probably, yeah.

00:38:47.120 --> 00:38:55.520
Yeah, so what is it like to lose your sense of small self and become one with this blazing light

00:38:55.520 --> 00:39:06.480
of love. It's the best. It's just wondrous, Rick, the joy. I don't know, have you ever

00:39:06.480 --> 00:39:13.920
experienced this, Rick, in your journey? Yeah, I suppose I experience it to some degree every

00:39:13.920 --> 00:39:21.000
day, but it's not like on steroids like your experiences are. You're just really pulling

00:39:21.000 --> 00:39:28.440
all the stops. Yeah, so yeah, so you are familiar with it. And I think, you know, I think anybody

00:39:28.440 --> 00:39:36.040
who's on a spiritual path, like, has had a taste of us, you know. And so what it's like, is like,

00:39:36.040 --> 00:39:42.680
so if I sit in meditation, and you know, I still don't, I don't, I still don't have a technique,

00:39:42.680 --> 00:39:47.160
you know, I just sit and close my eyes and fall into a sacred space.

00:39:47.800 --> 00:39:49.160
Seems like you're doing something right.

00:39:49.160 --> 00:39:53.560
Getting your money's worth out of it.

00:39:53.560 --> 00:39:57.800
You know, the other the other side of it, though, Rick is that I'm like,

00:39:57.800 --> 00:40:03.240
the other side of it is that I have to tell people about my mystical life. I mean,

00:40:03.240 --> 00:40:08.360
I would really, you know, I would never have chosen this path to go publicly telling people

00:40:08.360 --> 00:40:13.880
about what was happening in my daily meditation. But Christ and Mother Magdalene and Mother Mary

00:40:13.880 --> 00:40:17.400
say to me repeatedly, share our love with the world,

00:40:17.400 --> 00:40:21.560
share our love with the world. And I know that they want me to share

00:40:21.560 --> 00:40:25.080
what I write in my journals, you know, it's just the records of my mystical

00:40:25.080 --> 00:40:28.520
experiences. So if I had my own way I would tell

00:40:28.520 --> 00:40:31.240
nobody. Nobody would know about this and my

00:40:31.240 --> 00:40:34.440
life would, you know, I'd be trying to live my life on twin

00:40:34.440 --> 00:40:37.240
tracks again, which obviously isn't allowed when

00:40:37.240 --> 00:40:39.580
when you're trying to walk the authentic path.

00:40:39.580 --> 00:40:46.260
So I think, yes, I am incredibly grateful

00:40:46.260 --> 00:40:49.360
to have all of the wondrous experiences

00:40:49.360 --> 00:40:51.760
that I have on an ongoing basis,

00:40:51.760 --> 00:40:53.880
but kind of the cost of it is that

00:40:53.880 --> 00:40:56.080
I've got to tell everybody else what's happening

00:40:56.080 --> 00:41:00.440
and then run the gamut of the consequences of that,

00:41:00.440 --> 00:41:02.720
because there's not this, I mean,

00:41:02.720 --> 00:41:07.720
There's no way that my cultural, familial,

00:41:07.720 --> 00:41:10.800
sort of community setting in Dublin, in Ireland,

00:41:10.800 --> 00:41:12.680
is ready for this kind of thing.

00:41:12.680 --> 00:41:18.760
So it can be quite alienating, it can be quite isolating,

00:41:18.760 --> 00:41:22.180
it can be, it's a lonely path.

00:41:22.180 --> 00:41:25.480
- Well, what was it, Jesus said something like,

00:41:25.480 --> 00:41:30.220
no man is without honor except in his own village

00:41:30.220 --> 00:41:31.060
or some such thing.

00:41:31.060 --> 00:41:36.220
Yeah, well I wouldn't put myself in that category, but yeah, I know what you mean.

00:41:36.220 --> 00:41:37.220
Yeah.

00:41:37.220 --> 00:41:39.660
But he also said don't hide your light under a bushel.

00:41:39.660 --> 00:41:47.220
And I think in my travels around the world, I found, and my online travels these days,

00:41:47.220 --> 00:41:50.780
I found that there are bright lights everywhere.

00:41:50.780 --> 00:41:55.940
I spent three months in Iran, I spent nine months in the Philippines, I've been in India,

00:41:55.940 --> 00:41:57.100
various places.

00:41:57.100 --> 00:42:00.940
And there's a whole spectrum of people everywhere.

00:42:00.940 --> 00:42:05.020
And there's some very, very spiritual people

00:42:05.020 --> 00:42:08.500
who are receptive to this kind of thing.

00:42:08.500 --> 00:42:09.660
Yeah.

00:42:09.660 --> 00:42:12.420
And I think it's our natural state.

00:42:12.420 --> 00:42:14.980
I think it's what's meant to be happening, everybody, Rick.

00:42:14.980 --> 00:42:19.540
And we have become so broken as a culture and as a species.

00:42:19.540 --> 00:42:20.860
And we're so dysfunctional.

00:42:20.860 --> 00:42:22.620
And our brokenness has become normative,

00:42:22.620 --> 00:42:24.740
so we don't even realize how broken we are,

00:42:24.740 --> 00:42:28.820
even though we can see on the news every day of the week how horrendous things have become.

00:42:28.820 --> 00:42:35.780
But nonetheless, I think our natural state is actually to undergo this spiritual awakening

00:42:35.780 --> 00:42:41.140
and rise towards unit of consciousness as much as we can. So yeah, I really hear you that there

00:42:41.140 --> 00:42:45.700
are lights lighting up everywhere. And that's part of the Great Awakening and that it happens

00:42:45.700 --> 00:42:50.340
spontaneously all over the planet. Yeah, we're going to talk more about this Great Awakening

00:42:50.340 --> 00:42:54.980
as we go along. And I'm not saying that some people are special and everybody else is,

00:42:54.980 --> 00:42:59.860
you know, yeah, not at all riffraff. I mean, because everybody has the same potential within

00:42:59.860 --> 00:43:05.300
them, no matter how dark or confused their life may seem to be. Yeah, yeah. So you know,

00:43:05.300 --> 00:43:09.460
a couple of people that I would share this with, you know, some of them might say, wow, I'd love

00:43:09.460 --> 00:43:13.700
that. I'd love that. I'd love to love it. And I think like, are you prepared to really give up

00:43:13.700 --> 00:43:20.180
your entire life for this? Like it, it costs nothing less than everything. Jim Finley says that

00:43:20.180 --> 00:43:22.580
He says, you know, it costs nothing less than everything.

00:43:22.580 --> 00:43:25.140
But now I've added on to the end of that for myself.

00:43:25.140 --> 00:43:27.980
It also promises nothing less than everything.

00:43:27.980 --> 00:43:31.540
So there is a glorious kind of flip side to it.

00:43:31.540 --> 00:43:35.620
Can I tell you something that's on my mind about leaving my body?

00:43:35.620 --> 00:43:36.740
Yes, please.

00:43:36.740 --> 00:43:42.020
Now that's a feeling that I have, you know, I feel my energy,

00:43:42.020 --> 00:43:47.100
you like rise up out of the top of my head and various things can happen.

00:43:47.340 --> 00:43:51.740
but I had one experience and it's on Kundalini so I wanted to come back because I'm really

00:43:51.740 --> 00:43:57.500
intrigued. I'd like to kind of hear from you more about the Kundalini awakening because a lot of us

00:43:57.500 --> 00:44:01.660
are having spontaneous awakenings and we don't know what it is. We don't know that it's a Kundalini

00:44:01.660 --> 00:44:11.420
awakening. So back in around 2007, when was it? It was shortly after these mystical experiences began

00:44:11.420 --> 00:44:16.140
and they were incredibly intense and they were happening every day and I went on this retreat

00:44:16.140 --> 00:44:20.940
with a so-called spiritual teacher.

00:44:20.940 --> 00:44:23.980
She was either English or American, I can't remember which,

00:44:23.980 --> 00:44:27.340
and I went down the country to the south of Ireland to County Cork

00:44:27.340 --> 00:44:32.460
for a weekend retreat and very quickly I kind of got a bad feeling. There was

00:44:32.460 --> 00:44:37.500
about 10 women and we were all in a small, maybe a small

00:44:37.500 --> 00:44:40.220
hotel or something, can't really remember the setup.

00:44:40.220 --> 00:44:43.900
It was a private house, one of the participants had given over her

00:44:43.900 --> 00:44:53.660
home and it was a very big home. It was lovely. And I didn't really like the woman's energy.

00:44:53.660 --> 00:44:59.580
And I was so I was kind of, I was a bit on red alert, like, this isn't really great.

00:44:59.580 --> 00:45:03.460
I don't really like this. But anyway, we did our first meditation and we lay down on the

00:45:03.460 --> 00:45:12.500
ground and she guided us through a visualization and there was really like, there was music

00:45:12.500 --> 00:45:17.740
playing which I subsequently discovered was intentionally trying to work on our

00:45:17.740 --> 00:45:21.380
energy field. I don't know if you've ever heard anything about that kind of...

00:45:21.380 --> 00:45:26.100
Oh music certainly does that in various ways.

00:45:26.100 --> 00:45:32.300
Yeah I kind of felt I felt manipulated but I put it like that I didn't know

00:45:32.300 --> 00:45:36.980
what was going on but anyway the meditation ended and we all stood up

00:45:36.980 --> 00:45:40.540
from our mats and the woman came over to me and she said like in quite an

00:45:40.540 --> 00:45:45.980
accusing tone of voice she said, "You shouldn't leave your body when you meditate." And I was

00:45:45.980 --> 00:45:52.140
quite taken aback. First of all that she obviously has psychic clairvoyance that she can see this,

00:45:52.140 --> 00:45:58.940
but also I didn't have a, I didn't understand fully what she meant, you know, that I was leaving my

00:45:58.940 --> 00:46:03.500
body, but I felt kind of affronted. So that afternoon anyway she said that she was going

00:46:03.500 --> 00:46:09.500
to do a meditation to awaken the Kundalini and I thought, "No, my dead body, you're not touching my

00:46:09.500 --> 00:46:13.740
Kundalini and I said I'm not gonna participate in that meditation and I

00:46:13.740 --> 00:46:17.000
said if you don't mind I'm not gonna be here after lunch. I went out in the

00:46:17.000 --> 00:46:22.700
garden and I waited until that was done. Somebody came out to tell me it was over

00:46:22.700 --> 00:46:27.860
about say two hours later and I went back into the room and it was pandemonium

00:46:27.860 --> 00:46:34.020
Rick. There was women in hysteria bawling crying like deeply deeply deeply troubled

00:46:34.020 --> 00:46:38.060
and upset and the woman who was running the thing was kind of running from one

00:46:38.060 --> 00:46:44.260
woman to another trying to calm everybody down and I was so grateful that I had

00:46:44.260 --> 00:46:51.200
followed my intuition and just said no no no this this isn't right but as I was

00:46:51.200 --> 00:46:56.380
driving home from the retreat it was a Sunday evening and the roads were quiet

00:46:56.380 --> 00:47:01.300
and it was it was so I just need to take a drink of water. Yeah sure. I'm talking

00:47:01.300 --> 00:47:07.240
too much. No you're not. Just a sec. I think even just talking about that

00:47:07.240 --> 00:47:15.460
experience actually is not nice. Thank you. So I was driving home and there was a

00:47:15.460 --> 00:47:20.900
remarkable number of rainbows in the sky. The entire journey home for about two

00:47:20.900 --> 00:47:25.380
hours there was rainbows everywhere I looked, double rainbows, full of rainbows.

00:47:25.380 --> 00:47:30.820
And one rainbow lasted for an entire hour and I felt there was something very

00:47:30.820 --> 00:47:34.840
supernatural about it. You know I thought this this is telling me something and I

00:47:34.840 --> 00:47:37.100
I was listening to the radio.

00:47:37.100 --> 00:47:39.060
There's a lovely, on a Sunday evening,

00:47:39.060 --> 00:47:41.240
there's a lovely music show

00:47:41.240 --> 00:47:42.480
that I used to love listening to.

00:47:42.480 --> 00:47:44.000
And there was a beautiful piece of music

00:47:44.000 --> 00:47:46.720
had just been played, was played.

00:47:46.720 --> 00:47:49.600
And the presenter came on afterwards and he said,

00:47:49.600 --> 00:47:52.760
"And that was a piece of music from Tom Dahl's vision,

00:47:52.760 --> 00:47:54.720
the 11th century Irish knight

00:47:54.720 --> 00:47:58.200
who had an out of body experience and went on a journey."

00:47:58.200 --> 00:47:59.200
(laughing)

00:47:59.200 --> 00:48:00.040
- Very cool.

00:48:00.040 --> 00:48:03.480
- I thought, oh, that's so affirming.

00:48:03.480 --> 00:48:06.360
So I looked up Tom Dahl and I found out all about him.

00:48:06.360 --> 00:48:12.240
He was a precursor to Dante's travels through hell, purgatory and heaven.

00:48:12.240 --> 00:48:17.720
And I thought I said, you know, I'm OK, I'm I look after my own spiritual life

00:48:17.720 --> 00:48:23.680
and I won't let kind of like rogue, reckless people, you know, sort of in to

00:48:23.680 --> 00:48:26.320
to interfere, it's dangerous.

00:48:26.320 --> 00:48:27.840
Yeah,

00:48:27.840 --> 00:48:32.120
I don't know if you've seen my most recent interview with Juergen Thiel.

00:48:32.320 --> 00:48:37.960
Yeah, talk about out-of-body experiences.

00:48:37.960 --> 00:48:42.000
Just for the sake of the audience, this is, you know, the interview prior to this one

00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:48.520
with Juergen, his name is J-U-E-R-G-E-N, who's been having out-of-body experiences for decades

00:48:48.520 --> 00:48:54.760
and is also a talented artist and has managed to depict them, especially now using AI.

00:48:54.760 --> 00:49:00.320
So we just kind of took a tour of the universe from deepest hells to highest heavens.

00:49:00.320 --> 00:49:06.400
Yeah, quite interesting. I skipped the hell parts actually. Okay, understandable. I actually told

00:49:06.400 --> 00:49:11.120
people they could do that if they didn't. Yeah, I didn't want to see that. Yeah, but a couple,

00:49:11.120 --> 00:49:17.520
just a couple quick comments on this Kundalini thing. Firstly, incidentally, I'll be interviewing

00:49:17.520 --> 00:49:25.760
a guy named Michael Bradford, I think in August, maybe July, who worked closely with Gopi Krishna

00:49:25.760 --> 00:49:30.520
for years. Gopi Krishna was a guy who wrote, who went through rather hellacious kundalini

00:49:30.520 --> 00:49:39.940
awakening experiences and wrote numerous books about it. But it's often advised by responsible

00:49:39.940 --> 00:49:47.800
teachers to be very careful and not to do anything to awaken kundalini prematurely.

00:49:47.800 --> 00:49:52.400
It'll awaken itself, it'll awaken naturally when the conditions are right, but if you

00:49:52.400 --> 00:49:56.240
force it in some way, you can get yourself into trouble.

00:49:56.240 --> 00:50:02.580
And it can be natural for people to have what they call "crias" where they're yelling or

00:50:02.580 --> 00:50:07.360
making strange noises or moving in strange ways.

00:50:07.360 --> 00:50:12.280
And that's not necessarily a sign of insanity or anything.

00:50:12.280 --> 00:50:15.320
But again, it's a powerful thing.

00:50:15.320 --> 00:50:20.000
And it has to be treated with respect and care.

00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:24.980
And there's not some kind of, this is not a sprint or a race where you want to get my

00:50:24.980 --> 00:50:27.760
kundalini to the highest chakra right away.

00:50:27.760 --> 00:50:32.560
You want to proceed in a safety first is a good motto.

00:50:32.560 --> 00:50:34.940
Yeah, oh for sure.

00:50:34.940 --> 00:50:39.440
When you don't know what it is though, I mean I only found out like a couple of months ago

00:50:39.440 --> 00:50:44.640
that what I was experiencing is known as a kundalini awakening in a different tradition.

00:50:44.640 --> 00:50:45.680
Right.

00:50:45.680 --> 00:50:50.920
And I'm sure that there, I mean, Kundalini is a Sanskrit word, but I'm sure that in various

00:50:50.920 --> 00:50:55.080
traditions around the world, people have gone through stuff like this and had their own

00:50:55.080 --> 00:50:56.720
terminology for it.

00:50:56.720 --> 00:51:01.960
Yeah, there's no terminology for it in the West that I've ever come upon.

00:51:01.960 --> 00:51:02.960
I mean, the closest would be the Holy Spirit.

00:51:02.960 --> 00:51:06.880
Reading Christian mystics, you don't come up with any depictions?

00:51:06.880 --> 00:51:15.040
>>Sarah: Nobody, I've never read anybody who systematizes the energetic component the way

00:51:15.040 --> 00:51:20.000
Kundalini is systematized in your tradition or in other traditions.

00:51:20.000 --> 00:51:21.000
>>Rick: Right.

00:51:21.000 --> 00:51:22.160
Yeah, it's true.

00:51:22.160 --> 00:51:28.720
I think in certain Eastern traditions, Kashmir Shaivism and so on, it has been systematized

00:51:28.720 --> 00:51:29.960
very in great detail.

00:51:29.960 --> 00:51:33.000
In fact, I interviewed somebody who

00:51:33.000 --> 00:51:38.720
could be the most authoritative or knowledgeable living exponent

00:51:38.720 --> 00:51:40.520
of Kundalini, Vidya, as it's called.

00:51:40.520 --> 00:51:42.080
Vidya means knowledge.

00:51:42.080 --> 00:51:44.720
Her name is Joan Shiva Pitha Harrigan.

00:51:44.720 --> 00:51:46.040
I mentioned her to you.

00:51:46.040 --> 00:51:47.660
I think you were going to get her book.

00:51:47.660 --> 00:51:48.160
But--

00:51:48.160 --> 00:51:49.680
I am definitely going to.

00:51:49.680 --> 00:51:50.520
Yeah.

00:51:50.520 --> 00:51:53.360
I mean, it's a big, fat book with all kinds of illustrations

00:51:53.360 --> 00:51:56.680
and detailed information about Kundalini.

00:51:56.680 --> 00:51:57.800
Yeah.

00:51:57.800 --> 00:52:01.320
That would be a wonderful marriage of inter-spirituality,

00:52:01.320 --> 00:52:03.960
you know, for people to learn what these energies are,

00:52:03.960 --> 00:52:05.960
because people are experiencing them.

00:52:05.960 --> 00:52:07.120
- They are. - And they are.

00:52:07.120 --> 00:52:09.120
And then you might often then miss the boat

00:52:09.120 --> 00:52:12.040
because you don't realize, I should be engaging with this.

00:52:12.040 --> 00:52:14.840
This is really significant, I can learn about it.

00:52:14.840 --> 00:52:16.920
Instead of just missing it.

00:52:16.920 --> 00:52:19.080
- Yeah, I interviewed this woman years ago

00:52:19.080 --> 00:52:21.400
when I was first starting Backgap,

00:52:21.400 --> 00:52:24.120
who started having spontaneous kundalini awakenings.

00:52:24.120 --> 00:52:25.440
She didn't know what was happening to her.

00:52:25.440 --> 00:52:27.560
She was just his housewife in Arizona.

00:52:27.560 --> 00:52:30.720
And she started doing research on the internet,

00:52:30.720 --> 00:52:33.560
and she came across the word kundalini.

00:52:33.560 --> 00:52:36.120
She thought it was some kind of disease.

00:52:36.120 --> 00:52:38.720
And she eventually found a teacher

00:52:38.720 --> 00:52:40.460
and kind of got some guidance.

00:52:40.460 --> 00:52:42.320
But I think this is probably,

00:52:42.320 --> 00:52:43.640
I bet you there have been people

00:52:43.640 --> 00:52:48.320
thrown into mental hospitals throughout the ages.

00:52:48.320 --> 00:52:50.360
Because they were starting to have this kind of thing,

00:52:50.360 --> 00:52:53.980
and neither they nor the authorities

00:52:53.980 --> 00:52:55.440
knew what was happening to them.

00:52:55.440 --> 00:52:57.240
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

00:52:57.240 --> 00:52:57.740
Yeah.

00:52:57.740 --> 00:52:58.240
In fact--

00:52:58.240 --> 00:52:59.080
I mean, I--

00:52:59.080 --> 00:52:59.680
Yeah.

00:52:59.680 --> 00:53:00.240
No, go ahead.

00:53:00.240 --> 00:53:00.740
I'm sorry.

00:53:00.740 --> 00:53:05.960
I only learned that terminology in the last three months or so.

00:53:05.960 --> 00:53:06.460
Right.

00:53:06.460 --> 00:53:09.960
And I've been having Kundalini experiences for 10 years.

00:53:09.960 --> 00:53:11.720
Yeah, there you go.

00:53:11.720 --> 00:53:12.960
That's insane.

00:53:12.960 --> 00:53:13.460
Yeah.

00:53:13.460 --> 00:53:15.920
Well, speaking of insane and Kundalini,

00:53:15.920 --> 00:53:18.680
you did struggle with the question

00:53:18.680 --> 00:53:21.640
of whether you were going mad through some of this.

00:53:21.640 --> 00:53:25.160
And how did you navigate that?

00:53:25.160 --> 00:53:29.080
And how did you come to trust that you weren't going mad

00:53:29.080 --> 00:53:32.640
and these were legitimate mystical experiences?

00:53:32.640 --> 00:53:37.440
- Well, I ultimately trusted that I wasn't going mad

00:53:37.440 --> 00:53:40.560
because everything is so beautiful.

00:53:40.560 --> 00:53:41.400
- Right, good point.

00:53:41.400 --> 00:53:43.600
- It's just an exquisite experience,

00:53:43.600 --> 00:53:48.440
which is each time is intensely meaningful

00:53:48.440 --> 00:53:51.640
and very beautiful and very positive

00:53:51.640 --> 00:53:56.360
and very, just so full of life, exploding with life.

00:53:56.360 --> 00:54:01.700
So ultimately that was what sort of confirmed to me

00:54:01.700 --> 00:54:04.540
that there's something in this.

00:54:04.540 --> 00:54:09.540
And I definitely had to ask myself, am I going mad?

00:54:09.540 --> 00:54:13.260
I mean, is this, is this insanity?

00:54:13.260 --> 00:54:17.060
And yet I was living my life in a,

00:54:17.060 --> 00:54:20.100
like I was functioning perfectly fine

00:54:20.100 --> 00:54:22.260
in every other aspect of my life.

00:54:22.260 --> 00:54:24.660
So I was kind of like, I mean,

00:54:24.660 --> 00:54:26.780
there were days when I really did wonder,

00:54:26.780 --> 00:54:28.900
you know, I would fall into despair and say,

00:54:28.900 --> 00:54:31.300
you know, Adam, well, I'll tell you one thing

00:54:31.300 --> 00:54:32.500
I was never gonna do,

00:54:32.500 --> 00:54:34.380
which was gonna go to a psychiatrist

00:54:34.380 --> 00:54:36.980
'cause I thought the risks of a psychiatrist

00:54:36.980 --> 00:54:39.100
not understanding this and throwing me

00:54:39.100 --> 00:54:42.300
into like the local psychiatric hospital,

00:54:42.300 --> 00:54:46.020
you know, the risks of that were too severe in my mind.

00:54:46.020 --> 00:54:48.540
So I thought I'm not gonna go down that road.

00:54:48.540 --> 00:54:51.740
And then the beauty won out in the end.

00:54:51.740 --> 00:54:54.540
And I mean, I have conversations with Christ.

00:54:54.540 --> 00:54:59.540
So I was able to ask, you know, what's going on, you know,

00:54:59.540 --> 00:55:02.860
and Christ would say that I want you to share my love

00:55:02.860 --> 00:55:03.940
with the world.

00:55:03.940 --> 00:55:06.420
I have anointed you, I have appointed you,

00:55:06.420 --> 00:55:08.540
I have filled your heart with my love.

00:55:08.540 --> 00:55:10.900
I want you to bring my love to the world.

00:55:10.900 --> 00:55:12.620
I want you to write books of love

00:55:12.620 --> 00:55:14.680
and share my love with people.

00:55:14.680 --> 00:55:17.660
And even though that's unusual,

00:55:17.660 --> 00:55:22.420
It is in and of itself, like just full of meaning and beauty.

00:55:22.420 --> 00:55:26.900
And it fills my heart and it fills my mind, my soul, my life.

00:55:26.900 --> 00:55:31.500
The path of my life, I find just incredibly beautiful.

00:55:31.500 --> 00:55:37.620
So committing to the path really sort of showed me

00:55:37.620 --> 00:55:39.980
that I was on the right path.

00:55:39.980 --> 00:55:41.620
- Yeah. - Yeah.

00:55:41.620 --> 00:55:46.100
And there is a thing where people on a spiritual path

00:55:46.100 --> 00:55:52.540
can get mentally unstable because there's a whole kind of restructuring that takes place

00:55:52.540 --> 00:55:58.140
in your neuro, neuropsychology, neurophysiology.

00:55:58.140 --> 00:56:06.780
And it can and so again, there's a need for a certain reasonable pace, not pushing it too

00:56:06.780 --> 00:56:12.900
hard and you know, integration at every step stabilization.

00:56:12.900 --> 00:56:14.780
So I mean, I've seen it happen.

00:56:14.780 --> 00:56:20.860
I've actually had tasted it myself to varying degrees where you can just get kind of kooky,

00:56:20.860 --> 00:56:24.260
you know, when you're doing a lot of spiritual practice.

00:56:24.260 --> 00:56:30.720
And some people have been, had to be hospitalized or drugged or, you know, have jumped off buildings

00:56:30.720 --> 00:56:31.940
and things like that.

00:56:31.940 --> 00:56:34.980
So I'm just putting that out as a caution.

00:56:34.980 --> 00:56:41.220
Yeah, when I agree, when I've been reflecting on what I've seen, I think that there are sort

00:56:41.220 --> 00:56:48.580
there are three possibilities when visions begin. Actually I'm now, I've been in therapy for years,

00:56:48.580 --> 00:56:53.860
which you'd need to be to keep stable to manage. And you have a therapist who understands you?

00:56:53.860 --> 00:56:58.900
I have recently in the last six months started with a Jungian psychotherapist. Now the therapist

00:56:58.900 --> 00:57:04.740
before that did also understand, but now I adore Carl Jung, so I've with a Jungian therapist and

00:57:04.740 --> 00:57:09.700
so she is completely at ease. I remember saying to her, you know, how come you just take all of

00:57:09.700 --> 00:57:12.820
of this in your stride and you say well like I'm a Jungian therapist I wouldn't

00:57:12.820 --> 00:57:17.500
be much good if I wasn't able to be comfortable with visions so and just in

00:57:17.500 --> 00:57:21.620
in discussing it all with her I've identified that there are you know

00:57:21.620 --> 00:57:26.180
there's three possibilities when the visions begin psychosis as you're

00:57:26.180 --> 00:57:33.100
talking about then the other extreme negative response would be inflation

00:57:33.100 --> 00:57:37.820
which people call identified you know you're identifying with your visions and

00:57:37.820 --> 00:57:42.020
you suddenly begin to think that you are divine or your God or you're some

00:57:42.020 --> 00:57:46.180
holy being walking the planet. So they're the two extremes but then there's a

00:57:46.180 --> 00:57:51.660
middle road and the middle road is just, the middle road is the path of

00:57:51.660 --> 00:57:57.580
transformation. So if we can engage just steady as you go one foot after the

00:57:57.580 --> 00:58:01.760
other trying to make sense of what's happening and trying to let the visions

00:58:01.760 --> 00:58:05.900
work on us. I mean this is another big thing that I've really realized only in

00:58:05.900 --> 00:58:10.620
the last couple of months. The visions themselves are fully intelligent,

00:58:10.620 --> 00:58:15.500
they're fully purposeful, they're fully intentional, they know what they're

00:58:15.500 --> 00:58:21.380
trying to achieve in each individual different person. So I'm I now the

00:58:21.380 --> 00:58:25.620
easiest way I understand myself is that I'm just like I'm a channel, I'm a

00:58:25.620 --> 00:58:29.660
messenger, I'm delivering messages of love out into the world for anybody who

00:58:29.660 --> 00:58:34.100
might like to read them. I'm not proselytizing, I'm not teaching, I'm not

00:58:34.100 --> 00:58:40.460
trying to convert anybody to anything. I'm passing on experiences of love from

00:58:40.460 --> 00:58:45.780
from the realm of the Christ. Nice. It's interesting you should mention inflation

00:58:45.780 --> 00:58:50.140
because in recent weeks I've been encountered a couple of different

00:58:50.140 --> 00:58:54.940
situations and I've been aware of this for years where somebody has a profound

00:58:54.940 --> 00:58:59.780
and undoubtedly genuine spiritual awakening but perhaps they're not quite

00:58:59.780 --> 00:59:03.220
ready for it or something because it goes to their heads. It results in a kind

00:59:03.220 --> 00:59:08.420
of a an ego aggrandizement in which the next thing you know, they're they're proclaiming

00:59:08.420 --> 00:59:13.500
proclaiming themselves to be the avatar of the age and, you know, the greatest spiritual

00:59:13.500 --> 00:59:17.500
teacher on earth and sometimes they're not public about it. Other times they are other

00:59:17.500 --> 00:59:23.180
but other times they'll say to their their students in in private, listen, I'm, I'm,

00:59:23.180 --> 00:59:28.300
I'm the you know, if you if you leave me, you'll be a worm for the next 10 incarnations,

00:59:28.300 --> 00:59:32.140
you know, you'll you'll be off the track for so long and I'm the only one who can bring

00:59:32.140 --> 00:59:42.520
you to enlightenment. Yeah, it goes on and on. So what do you see as I think a great deal

00:59:42.520 --> 00:59:50.340
of humility if one can achieve it and self scrutiny might be an antidote to that. But

00:59:50.340 --> 00:59:56.280
what would you recommend if you can think of anything to prevent a person from falling into

00:59:56.280 --> 00:59:58.600
that kind of delusion?

00:59:58.600 --> 01:00:06.440
Well, humility, first of all, if we're really on a spiritual path and we're awakening to

01:00:06.440 --> 01:00:12.840
the higher ideals of life as Plato referred to them, if we're awakening to the truths,

01:00:12.840 --> 01:00:19.760
justice, peace, equality, love, service, all of those beautiful higher truths of life,

01:00:19.760 --> 01:00:24.440
if we're really awakening to them, certainly the Christian path, it's all about service.

01:00:24.440 --> 01:00:27.180
I mean, that's what Jesus was modeling in his life,

01:00:27.180 --> 01:00:30.300
that you must love one another as I have loved you.

01:00:30.300 --> 01:00:33.140
You must serve each other as a servant.

01:00:33.140 --> 01:00:36.620
So one of my favorite stories from the Bible

01:00:36.620 --> 01:00:40.380
is when Jesus washed the disciples' feet.

01:00:40.380 --> 01:00:44.100
He got down on the ground and washed their feet.

01:00:44.100 --> 01:00:46.980
Now, if that's not telling you what to do

01:00:46.980 --> 01:00:50.220
with spiritual experience like nothing is,

01:00:50.220 --> 01:00:52.240
and then he died on the cross.

01:00:53.140 --> 01:00:57.940
I mean, he didn't hang around Palestine saying, hey,

01:00:57.940 --> 01:00:58.860
I'm the one.

01:00:58.860 --> 01:01:01.020
You know, he'd let them kill him.

01:01:01.020 --> 01:01:03.460
So I think if you model your--

01:01:03.460 --> 01:01:05.460
I mean, if you truly are following

01:01:05.460 --> 01:01:07.860
some spiritual teachers, you're going

01:01:07.860 --> 01:01:12.860
to learn from people who did it in a very modest, quiet way

01:01:12.860 --> 01:01:14.020
of service.

01:01:14.020 --> 01:01:15.260
So--

01:01:15.260 --> 01:01:17.340
I think that's the best answer you could have given,

01:01:17.340 --> 01:01:19.820
because I think service is definitely

01:01:19.820 --> 01:01:23.020
a spiritual path in many traditions.

01:01:23.020 --> 01:01:24.020
Yeah.

01:01:24.020 --> 01:01:30.060
And it does culture humility.

01:01:30.060 --> 01:01:34.900
It sort of, it becomes about the other rather than about me.

01:01:34.900 --> 01:01:35.900
Yeah.

01:01:35.900 --> 01:01:36.900
You know?

01:01:36.900 --> 01:01:37.900
Yeah.

01:01:37.900 --> 01:01:38.900
Fully.

01:01:38.900 --> 01:01:39.900
Yeah.

01:01:39.900 --> 01:01:40.900
Fully.

01:01:40.900 --> 01:01:44.820
And the washing of the feet and all that, it's symbolic in a way, but I think even literally

01:01:44.820 --> 01:01:50.380
doing such a thing or just doing something very basic and fundamental can help to

01:01:50.380 --> 01:01:56.740
Counteract the tendency for you know surging energies to

01:01:56.740 --> 01:02:01.700
Inflate the ego. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that I am

01:02:01.700 --> 01:02:07.180
I think it is part and parcel of the spiritual of the path of spiritual awakening

01:02:07.180 --> 01:02:12.860
Is that you realize you want to serve everybody else you want to put your life in service?

01:02:12.860 --> 01:02:15.860
So my service is sharing my spiritual writing.

01:02:15.860 --> 01:02:18.560
That's how I am called upon to serve.

01:02:18.560 --> 01:02:20.760
It mightn't seem like a big deal to other people,

01:02:20.760 --> 01:02:26.760
but it has been unbelievably difficult for me to go public about my spiritual life.

01:02:26.760 --> 01:02:30.460
It's the last thing in the world I wanted to do.

01:02:30.460 --> 01:02:33.260
I used to bargain with Jesus or Christ, you know,

01:02:33.260 --> 01:02:38.960
and I'd say, "I will do anything except tell people about my spiritual life."

01:02:38.960 --> 01:02:42.060
I remember saying like, "I'll do a PhD in mystical theology.

01:02:42.060 --> 01:02:47.580
I'll write about mystical theology but I won't tell anybody what I'm doing or you

01:02:47.580 --> 01:02:51.460
know what my experiences are but like that wasn't that wasn't what was wanted.

01:02:51.460 --> 01:02:56.180
But just on that question of inflation as well the other thing is people falling

01:02:56.180 --> 01:03:03.220
into the dark side that's something that's really scary and and a huge risk

01:03:03.220 --> 01:03:09.020
as well and I once encountered a woman who was clearly had fallen on the wrong

01:03:09.020 --> 01:03:12.500
side of the middle line. And I was very

01:03:12.500 --> 01:03:14.180
frightened by the experience. It was

01:03:14.180 --> 01:03:16.060
really, it was horrendous to be in her

01:03:16.060 --> 01:03:19.020
presence and as soon as I left her

01:03:19.020 --> 01:03:22.380
presence I immediately lit a candle and

01:03:22.380 --> 01:03:25.300
sat to meditate and I was just

01:03:25.300 --> 01:03:28.540
pulling like powerful Christ light down

01:03:28.540 --> 01:03:30.540
into my body. I just felt I needed to be

01:03:30.540 --> 01:03:33.380
cleansed of all of the ugly energies that

01:03:33.380 --> 01:03:35.980
she was carrying. And as I was meditating

01:03:35.980 --> 01:03:44.540
an inner image appeared in my inner seeing. And I later, I recognized the image, but at the time,

01:03:44.540 --> 01:03:50.380
I didn't know that it was called the Eye of Horus, which is the Egyptian symbol, which protects

01:03:50.380 --> 01:03:57.820
against evil. And that just spontaneously arose in my inner seeing. And that shows me then, well,

01:03:57.820 --> 01:04:02.860
first of all, I was very grateful because I felt that I was now safe and protected and cleansed.

01:04:03.900 --> 01:04:12.580
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.

01:04:12.580 --> 01:04:24.420
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.

01:04:24.420 --> 01:04:30.740
And I think in a way, like, stepping forward as a spiritual teacher can make you vulnerable.

01:04:30.740 --> 01:04:33.780
It's like you almost have a bullseye on your chest or something.

01:04:33.780 --> 01:04:40.700
And negative entities or forces which don't want you to do that could try to knock you

01:04:40.700 --> 01:04:41.700
back.

01:04:41.700 --> 01:04:42.700
Right, right.

01:04:42.700 --> 01:04:46.380
Yeah, well, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

01:04:46.380 --> 01:04:47.380
Yeah.

01:04:47.380 --> 01:04:48.380
Yeah.

01:04:48.380 --> 01:04:52.420
And then just yesterday, I was listening to a podcast and this guy was saying he visited

01:04:52.420 --> 01:05:00.420
India and he discovered there was this temple where they explicitly worship demons.

01:05:00.420 --> 01:05:05.220
And he's like a Christian dude and he thought, "Well, I'll go there and see if I can kind of

01:05:05.220 --> 01:05:09.060
purify it or something." And he went there and he talked to the priest and he said, "Why do you do

01:05:09.060 --> 01:05:15.220
this?" And he said, "Well, they can give us a lot of trouble. So if we worship them, we hope it will

01:05:15.220 --> 01:05:19.300
placate them and then they'll just kind of leave us alone." And so he thought he was going to do

01:05:19.300 --> 01:05:24.420
some purificatory thing and he walked toward this icon or statue or something in the middle of the

01:05:24.420 --> 01:05:32.180
temple and he started feeling this really cold and also this ominous feeling and then he got

01:05:32.180 --> 01:05:37.060
this voice which said, "Get back off, you have no idea what you're dealing with."

01:05:37.060 --> 01:05:47.220
Wow, wasn't he lucky? Yeah. That was reckless in the extreme. Yeah. Oh, wow. Wow.

01:05:47.220 --> 01:05:54.020
Anyway, you're making good points. I mean all of this it might seem like, you know, mythical woo, but I think there's

01:05:54.020 --> 01:05:56.220
legitimate

01:05:56.220 --> 01:05:58.220
reality to all these kinds of things

01:05:58.220 --> 01:06:01.640
Maybe I'll read a vision. Yes, please

01:06:01.640 --> 01:06:08.420
Yeah, I chose a couple it was purify us after all this dark

01:06:08.420 --> 01:06:15.020
Let me see I

01:06:15.820 --> 01:06:22.060
I will, okay so I have my on my website I'll read a couple from my

01:06:22.060 --> 01:06:25.100
two or three I'll start with one and then maybe

01:06:25.100 --> 01:06:29.420
maybe another one so this is a locution so a locution is sacred

01:06:29.420 --> 01:06:32.700
speaking so as much as I have visions I also hear

01:06:32.700 --> 01:06:35.660
and sometimes can be in conversation with

01:06:35.660 --> 01:06:41.660
Christ or Mother Magdalene or what divine being presents.

01:06:41.660 --> 01:06:47.580
So this, so one day, so my visions come in so many different circumstances, like

01:06:47.580 --> 01:06:54.940
whenever I fall into a state of real stillness or peace, clearly like the veil thins and I begin to

01:06:54.940 --> 01:07:01.100
have visionary experiences. So that happens quite a lot when I'm getting body work, whether it's

01:07:01.100 --> 01:07:08.460
cranio-psychotherapy or acupuncture or when I used to do yoga, it would happen as well. So any time

01:07:08.460 --> 01:07:17.260
that I'm really still. So one day in craniosacral therapy, I heard Christ saying, I am the enunciation

01:07:17.260 --> 01:07:25.100
of love, announce my love. So announce, A-N-N-O-U-N-C-E? Yeah, announce my love.

01:07:25.100 --> 01:07:32.700
So then, so here's just a short piece then. So this is from April in 2020. And this is what I

01:07:32.700 --> 01:07:38.220
heard Christ saying to me, "Tell them I am love, tell them I am love, tell them I am

01:07:38.220 --> 01:07:43.140
nothing but love. I have appointed you to speak my holy name of love back into the

01:07:43.140 --> 01:07:48.460
world. I've anointed you to speak as a messenger of my love. You are a channel

01:07:48.460 --> 01:07:52.940
of my love chosen to deliver my message of love to the world. Do not worry about

01:07:52.940 --> 01:07:56.620
those who will not listen, but share my love with those who are hungry for my

01:07:56.620 --> 01:08:01.020
love. My love is the food of life. I have filled you with my love that you may

01:08:01.020 --> 01:08:06.700
share it with the world. Speak my holy name of love back into the world that I created in love.

01:08:06.700 --> 01:08:13.900
This is a book of love that I have asked you to write in my holy name. My name is love. I am love.

01:08:13.900 --> 01:08:21.260
Oh, so beautiful. I got goosebumps just reading it.

01:08:21.260 --> 01:08:29.100
When you have that kind of vision, try to describe it. Like if I were to have that kind of vision,

01:08:29.740 --> 01:08:36.060
Are you, would I be actually hearing an audible voice as if there were a person in the room

01:08:36.060 --> 01:08:42.140
speaking to me or is it a thought in my mind? It's a completely inner hearing. Yeah, completely

01:08:42.140 --> 01:08:49.980
inner hearing. I guess the closest analogy would be if you were having an imaginary conversation

01:08:49.980 --> 01:08:56.860
in your mind, which we all do all the time. Except this isn't an imaginary conversation.

01:08:56.860 --> 01:09:08.140
I'm in a meditation and I've fallen into stillness and that would be preceded by the experience of

01:09:08.140 --> 01:09:13.740
the sacred. I would be aware that the Christ was present. I would be aware that the energies

01:09:13.740 --> 01:09:23.260
had become really incredibly sacred. Maybe there's fire burning in my body. So it is couched, for want

01:09:23.260 --> 01:09:30.300
of a better word in an already existing mystical experience. And then I hear these words.

01:09:30.300 --> 01:09:32.860
Does that explain it at all?

01:09:32.860 --> 01:09:40.700
Yeah, I think it helps. I've interviewed other people like Gina Lake, for instance, who channels

01:09:40.700 --> 01:09:47.020
Jesus and writes whole books with, which genes, you know, as if Jesus wrote them, but she's just

01:09:47.020 --> 01:09:48.060
serving as a scribe.

01:09:48.060 --> 01:09:49.980
I must look her up.

01:09:49.980 --> 01:09:55.900
Yeah, you should check her out. You'd like her. And others too, Mary Magdalene and people

01:09:55.900 --> 01:10:03.020
kind of, it gives you the feeling that these higher beings, or whatever you want to call them,

01:10:03.020 --> 01:10:09.420
are just looking for opportunities to communicate with humanity through whomever is capable of

01:10:09.420 --> 01:10:15.260
serving as a conduit. Christ said to me once, he said, "Wherever I find an open heart,

01:10:15.260 --> 01:10:22.860
there I enter. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, they really are looking for us to cooperate in our own

01:10:22.860 --> 01:10:28.140
unfolding in our own awakening. Like we're so kind of bloody minded as humans.

01:10:28.140 --> 01:10:35.340
That we're, we're kind of we're so closed to the one true path of life, which is the path

01:10:35.340 --> 01:10:41.900
of deification and awakening and the return to love. Yeah, well, they can't do it all for us. I

01:10:41.900 --> 01:10:45.540
I mean, like if a surgeon wants to operate on you,

01:10:45.540 --> 01:10:48.140
if you're gonna just be kicking and moving around the table

01:10:48.140 --> 01:10:50.420
and he can't do it, he has to wait

01:10:50.420 --> 01:10:51.900
until you're ready to settle down.

01:10:51.900 --> 01:10:55.260
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.

01:10:55.260 --> 01:10:57.580
My psychotherapist said to me, she said,

01:10:57.580 --> 01:11:01.060
"Adamar, you weren't," this is the terminology she has,

01:11:01.060 --> 01:11:02.380
she said, "You weren't defended

01:11:02.380 --> 01:11:04.640
"against the visions happening."

01:11:04.640 --> 01:11:06.460
That's just the terminology from Jung.

01:11:06.460 --> 01:11:08.380
- In other words, you weren't blocking them?

01:11:08.380 --> 01:11:10.420
Is that what that means? - I didn't block it, yeah.

01:11:10.420 --> 01:11:31.060
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.

01:11:31.060 --> 01:11:35.820
Yeah. Or maybe they maybe Jesus would have come back and said, Oh, come on.

01:11:35.820 --> 01:11:39.860
I think he would have he loves me so much.

01:11:39.860 --> 01:11:45.780
The second part of your book is more about society.

01:11:45.780 --> 01:11:51.260
You argue that Western civilization is built on a narrative of separation that has ruptured

01:11:51.260 --> 01:11:55.380
the connection between reason and spirit and God and humanity.

01:11:55.380 --> 01:11:57.980
How do you see this playing out in the world today?

01:11:57.980 --> 01:11:59.620
Yeah, yeah.

01:11:59.620 --> 01:12:06.820
The horrors, the genocides and the wars and the brokenness and the individualism, materialism,

01:12:06.820 --> 01:12:11.620
consumerism, secularism, we're living in a very broken world.

01:12:11.620 --> 01:12:17.540
So I think we, yeah, I mean, I'm sure you completely agree that we do live as if we

01:12:17.540 --> 01:12:25.380
are cut off from the divine realm. We live as if we're just kind of random happenings on a random

01:12:25.380 --> 01:12:31.620
universe, rather than there being some really beautiful, glorious, meaningful, purposeful

01:12:32.820 --> 01:12:40.980
design to our lives. So we live as if we are kind of like the masters of our own destiny,

01:12:40.980 --> 01:12:48.580
rather than being part of a beautiful whole. Well, some people actually articulate that paradigm,

01:12:48.580 --> 01:12:55.300
they say we're biological robots in a meaningless universe. And everything is random. And you know,

01:12:55.300 --> 01:12:59.860
there are certain laws of nature that the whole thing is mechanistic, but there's no

01:13:01.220 --> 01:13:07.620
intelligence behind it, no kind of intelligent design by any definition.

01:13:07.620 --> 01:13:14.820
I mean, to me that just has to be hubris. I remember listening to a podcast a couple of

01:13:14.820 --> 01:13:19.540
years ago and I think it was a scientist and he was saying that we still don't know where the

01:13:19.540 --> 01:13:29.060
laws of nature come from. I mean, yeah, just the kind of picture that you're painting there,

01:13:29.060 --> 01:13:32.260
there's just these laws of nature. Well, where do they come from?

01:13:32.260 --> 01:13:37.780
Actually, I was having a friendly debate with this guy. I think he was from Australia, but he was

01:13:37.780 --> 01:13:41.940
he was saying, okay, if you just grant us one miracle, then we can explain everything else.

01:13:41.940 --> 01:13:46.500
I said, Oh, what's that? He said, you know, that there are these laws of nature. You know,

01:13:46.500 --> 01:13:48.260
and I said, Sorry, I'm not going to grant you that. I mean,

01:13:48.260 --> 01:13:55.780
yeah, there's a reason why there are these laws of nature. There's there's an underlying

01:13:55.780 --> 01:14:02.500
intelligence that you know those are expressions of. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. I remember I was at a,

01:14:02.500 --> 01:14:08.980
I was very lucky several years ago to attend a fabulous conference in Dublin. There was a

01:14:08.980 --> 01:14:16.340
eight Nobel Prize winner speaking. It was to honor Erwin Schrodinger who was an Austrian physicist

01:14:16.340 --> 01:14:23.220
who was the precursor to Watson and Crick and DNA and so there was a huge gathering in Dublin. It

01:14:23.220 --> 01:14:30.460
it was co-chaired by or co-presented by Trinity College Dublin, which is one of the great universities

01:14:30.460 --> 01:14:31.460
in Dublin.

01:14:31.460 --> 01:14:35.500
And so they were talking all about the Big Bang, they were talking about consciousness,

01:14:35.500 --> 01:14:40.540
it was really exhilarating, like it was mind-blowing listening to these brilliant people.

01:14:40.540 --> 01:14:45.700
But one of them, so a lot of the talk was the Big Bang and consciousness and do we create

01:14:45.700 --> 01:14:50.300
it or are we like an antennae, you know, that consciousness can transmit to us.

01:14:50.300 --> 01:14:52.300
Right, a transmitter-receiver kind of thing.

01:14:52.300 --> 01:14:56.820
and one of them said, they were talking about the Big Bang and where did the

01:14:56.820 --> 01:15:01.980
particle come from, you know, which banged during the Big Bang and he just said, now

01:15:01.980 --> 01:15:05.940
I don't know if he was being like actually joking in retrospect but at the

01:15:05.940 --> 01:15:09.780
time I took it in all serious and he said, well science doesn't know where

01:15:09.780 --> 01:15:15.900
that particle came from, we think it just spontaneously appeared. Are you telling

01:15:15.900 --> 01:15:22.020
me with all your science that were to buy that the particle just appeared?

01:15:22.020 --> 01:15:27.780
have anything better to do. It just kind of came along. I mean, the way I look at it is

01:15:27.780 --> 01:15:31.980
you don't have to go back to the Big Bang. You can just look at a blade of grass or a

01:15:31.980 --> 01:15:38.260
mosquito or anything and imagine and just think about what you're looking at. Think

01:15:38.260 --> 01:15:44.460
about if you have a microscope, look at a single cell and watch how it functions and

01:15:44.460 --> 01:15:48.900
you think this could not possibly be random and accidental. It's not little billiard balls

01:15:48.900 --> 01:15:54.260
running into each other. There's this intelligent orchestration of everything. And then the whole

01:15:54.260 --> 01:15:59.940
universe is like that, no matter how far out you expand, even if you go to intergalactic space where

01:15:59.940 --> 01:16:04.820
there's nothing there, there's photons whizzing through and, you know, all kinds of laws of nature

01:16:04.820 --> 01:16:10.420
in play. So the whole thing is just one ocean of intelligence. Oh, yeah. Oh, completely. I

01:16:10.420 --> 01:16:15.620
completely agree. You were talking, you've mentioned before about like, even seeing God,

01:16:15.620 --> 01:16:20.020
Like the the genius of the divine mind and a pile of dog poop. Sure

01:16:20.020 --> 01:16:26.580
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

01:16:26.580 --> 01:16:32.760
Um, I was out walking with a friend last weekend in some beautiful woods in aniskari

01:16:32.760 --> 01:16:37.220
And uh, there was a big pile of dog poo in front of us and it was covered in flies

01:16:37.220 --> 01:16:39.300
And my friend said dinner for the flies

01:16:41.940 --> 01:16:44.980
as I told her about you and said, Yeah, it's true. Yeah.

01:16:44.980 --> 01:16:45.460
Yeah.

01:16:45.460 --> 01:16:51.940
Reminds me of a movie called the bugs life. So there's this cafe and this waiter comes out

01:16:51.940 --> 01:16:56.180
with a little platter of poop and it's a who ordered the poopoo platter and all these flies go

01:16:56.180 --> 01:17:00.500
Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

01:17:00.500 --> 01:17:05.780
So the brokenness just to come back to that question, Rick,

01:17:05.780 --> 01:17:11.380
that this separate that we do live as if we're separated from the divine and we live as if we're

01:17:11.380 --> 01:17:17.260
random particles spontaneously big banging in our individual little lives

01:17:17.260 --> 01:17:23.100
but the essence of so one of the big things from philosophy that has helped

01:17:23.100 --> 01:17:28.380
me to kind of begin to find frames for understanding the path of spiritual

01:17:28.380 --> 01:17:34.660
awakening and the path of life is the the axial age you know to talk about the

01:17:34.660 --> 01:17:38.140
first axial age and the second axial age so what I learned in philosophy and I

01:17:38.140 --> 01:17:41.500
find this like really really really helpful so hopefully it might be helpful

01:17:41.500 --> 01:17:48.420
to people listening who mightn't have heard the idea before. In the 1960s a

01:17:48.420 --> 01:17:52.860
German philosopher called Karl Jaspers he looked back over history and he

01:17:52.860 --> 01:18:00.540
recognized that over a 600 year period between 800 and 200 BCE

01:18:00.540 --> 01:18:07.060
he said during those 600 years there was he said that consciousness itself

01:18:07.060 --> 01:18:13.940
transformed from the mythic animistic state of consciousness to rational

01:18:13.940 --> 01:18:19.120
intellectual scientific consciousness. And he said that happened spontaneously in a

01:18:19.120 --> 01:18:22.900
number of different geographical locations around the world and he said

01:18:22.900 --> 01:18:28.420
it was profound and it changed everything and he called it an axial shift like as

01:18:28.420 --> 01:18:33.540
if the you know as if the the earth had tilted on its axis it was so profound.

01:18:33.540 --> 01:18:39.020
and that was the beginning of the rational intellectual way of understanding

01:18:39.020 --> 01:18:44.440
ourselves, the scientific model, the, you know, the rational intellectual way that

01:18:44.440 --> 01:18:50.100
we live now. That came to, that came to dominate the way in which we live our

01:18:50.100 --> 01:18:54.740
lives and my sense is that, so and we're now in a second, the second axial shift,

01:18:54.740 --> 01:18:58.700
that's just been recently recognized over the last couple of decades that

01:18:58.700 --> 01:19:05.540
it's as profound again. We're going through another profound shift. So in as much as

01:19:05.540 --> 01:19:12.620
consciousness changed profoundly from myth and animism to the scientific way

01:19:12.620 --> 01:19:17.060
we'll call it, we're now shifting from the scientific way to the spiritual way.

01:19:17.060 --> 01:19:23.360
That's the shift that's underway and the path through that shift is spiritual

01:19:23.360 --> 01:19:29.360
awakening. So individually we have to awaken if we want to kind of stay on

01:19:29.360 --> 01:19:33.800
track with evolution itself and collectively we need to awaken as a

01:19:33.800 --> 01:19:39.020
species, we need to grow up as a human species like the Wilbur Combs lattice,

01:19:39.020 --> 01:19:45.240
you know, like the two sides, like we start off at kind of a primitive

01:19:45.240 --> 01:19:52.200
tribal and then you go up the left-hand side to rational intellectual and

01:19:52.200 --> 01:19:55.400
and the highest point is unit of consciousness.

01:19:55.400 --> 01:20:00.360
And so humanity itself has to grow up as much as an individual

01:20:00.360 --> 01:20:04.680
human has to grow up from being a child to an adolescent to an adult and then

01:20:04.680 --> 01:20:07.160
hopefully ongoing adult development at a

01:20:07.160 --> 01:20:11.240
psycho-spiritual level. So this is what's playing out at the

01:20:11.240 --> 01:20:15.400
moment that life itself is, consciousness itself is

01:20:15.400 --> 01:20:19.800
trying to shift into a new gear. It's trying to shift from rational to

01:20:19.800 --> 01:20:26.600
spiritual from logic to love. And a whole new way of understanding ourselves and

01:20:26.600 --> 01:20:30.360
being is what's being offered by evolution. It's like being offered on a

01:20:30.360 --> 01:20:35.320
planet, particularly through spontaneous spiritual awakenings that are happening

01:20:35.320 --> 01:20:40.280
all over the planet as you're saying, as you said at the outset. This is, this is

01:20:40.280 --> 01:20:45.440
the invitation of life at this time that we're alive. Do you want to get on board

01:20:45.440 --> 01:20:52.080
with evolution? Do you want to stay the distance and continue to live on this planet, you know,

01:20:52.080 --> 01:20:57.760
and be a flourishing species, or do you all just want to kill yourselves and kill each other?

01:20:57.760 --> 01:21:05.200
Well put. Now, obviously, throughout history, there have been difficult times, you know,

01:21:05.200 --> 01:21:10.560
life used to be very short. I mean, people would be considered ancient if they lived to 40, you know.

01:21:11.840 --> 01:21:21.040
And there have been plagues and wars and famines and all kinds of difficult things throughout history.

01:21:21.040 --> 01:21:26.720
And so, you know, sometimes you say, "Oh, the world is such a mess these days." Well,

01:21:26.720 --> 01:21:34.880
if you study history, it seems like it's always been a mess. But perhaps we've reached a point at

01:21:34.880 --> 01:21:40.480
which, you know, it's become more critical. I mean, some say that we're in the sixth great mass

01:21:40.480 --> 01:21:45.160
extinction and this is the first one that's human caused. Others were due to

01:21:45.160 --> 01:21:53.760
asteroids and yeah things like that. Yeah so um what would you say and as you just

01:21:53.760 --> 01:21:58.240
said there seemed to be spontaneous spiritual awakenings taking place all

01:21:58.240 --> 01:22:03.560
over the world and facilitated in part by our modern technologies such as the

01:22:03.560 --> 01:22:09.760
internet and I don't know if that had been the case 500 600 years ago.

01:22:09.760 --> 01:22:18.240
probably not. I'm sure there were some, but so what would you say is, what in current affairs,

01:22:18.240 --> 01:22:23.840
current events is characteristic of a spiritual awakening taking place? And it wouldn't

01:22:23.840 --> 01:22:30.560
necessarily be good news stuff. It could be upheavals that are actually symptomatic of a

01:22:30.560 --> 01:22:36.880
major shift taking place. And how do you, do you have any conjecture as to how it might play out?

01:22:37.920 --> 01:22:46.640
Well, first off, the first part of it is, I completely agree that the horrors that are

01:22:46.640 --> 01:22:53.040
unfolding across the planet are the other side of the Great Awakening. So one era is dying,

01:22:53.040 --> 01:23:00.640
and that is always like Kali in that tradition, you know, that's destruction and chaos and darkness

01:23:00.640 --> 01:23:07.920
and everything falling apart and that is how an era ends. It all disintegrates, it all falls apart

01:23:07.920 --> 01:23:14.400
because that system is not working anymore and a new era is trying to be born and then you've got

01:23:14.400 --> 01:23:20.800
the labor pain, you've got the nightmare of labor and the difficulty to birth something new. I mean

01:23:20.800 --> 01:23:26.080
any birthing mother will know like it's a really, really, really difficult thing to do but it's

01:23:26.080 --> 01:23:30.360
worth it to go through the pain of labor to get the new birth, to get the new thing,

01:23:30.360 --> 01:23:36.600
to get the new era in terms of the whole of humanity. So I

01:23:36.600 --> 01:23:43.160
think that we are seeing the, hopefully it couldn't get much worse, like led by

01:23:43.160 --> 01:23:47.680
humanity, you know the horrors in the world, the genocide, the appalling

01:23:47.680 --> 01:23:51.560
wars, the famines that are being inflicted on whole peoples. I mean my

01:23:51.560 --> 01:23:59.760
heart just breaks day after day and and yet I'm hopeful. Yet I just think there

01:23:59.760 --> 01:24:06.040
is so much beauty being offered to humanity that it doesn't matter really

01:24:06.040 --> 01:24:11.880
that the leaders of some of the biggest powers in the world are to me agents of

01:24:11.880 --> 01:24:17.480
evil. It doesn't actually matter because on the ground the majority of human

01:24:17.480 --> 01:24:23.180
beings want a more beautiful world. Ordinary people like you and like me and

01:24:23.180 --> 01:24:27.260
what each of us individually does matters and it counts and it contributes.

01:24:27.260 --> 01:24:32.440
We're all trying to weave a new cloth for humanity. We're trying to weave a new

01:24:32.440 --> 01:24:38.900
consciousness and I am, I mean it can't come any other way Rick except through

01:24:38.900 --> 01:24:43.300
individual human beings doing their, playing their part, doing their

01:24:43.300 --> 01:24:47.620
things. So even though I don't know, I don't know why I'm still hopeful, I just

01:24:47.620 --> 01:24:53.340
am because I'm because I know what's I know what's offered. I know the

01:24:53.340 --> 01:24:57.660
bliss and the ecstasy and the love of unit of consciousness. I know what it's

01:24:57.660 --> 01:25:02.020
like to be in a place of love temporarily unfortunately and then I have

01:25:02.020 --> 01:25:05.980
to come back to this realm. I know what it's like. I know what's being offered

01:25:05.980 --> 01:25:10.180
and I just can't believe that we will continue to turn our back on it and not

01:25:10.180 --> 01:25:18.100
accept the gift. Yeah, well I'm also optimistic. My concern just has always been like how much

01:25:18.100 --> 01:25:23.860
chaos do we have to go through to get to the other side, you know, and what can we do to make it

01:25:23.860 --> 01:25:32.900
smoother and to minimize the chaos. And it kind of seems like we're taking one step forward, two steps

01:25:32.900 --> 01:25:38.100
back sometimes, and not, you know, we're pulling out of climate agreements and things like that.

01:25:38.100 --> 01:25:43.460
there could soon be large swaths of the earth that are uninhabitable during the summer,

01:25:43.460 --> 01:25:50.420
major cities that have to be evacuated or something. Anyway, you know.

01:25:50.420 --> 01:25:57.060
Yeah, it could get, it can be very depressing, but I think the thing is not to give in to the despair,

01:25:57.060 --> 01:26:03.220
because then we're not helping. The other thing that I might just, as a common say, is that it's

01:26:03.220 --> 01:26:08.580
really important for all of us to remember that we carry our karma with us through lives

01:26:08.580 --> 01:26:16.180
and that each of us has lived horrendously in previous lives, inflicting pain on other people.

01:26:16.180 --> 01:26:20.180
I don't know, do you know Brian Weiss's book, "Many Lives, Many Masters"?

01:26:20.180 --> 01:26:24.820
I know the title. I wouldn't have been able to tell you the author, but I remember that.

01:26:24.820 --> 01:26:32.020
It's really brilliant. I really loved reading it. And so he had a gift of when he had one patient

01:26:32.020 --> 01:26:35.140
and under hypnosis, I think it was hypnosis,

01:26:35.140 --> 01:26:37.180
he's a psychiatrist in America,

01:26:37.180 --> 01:26:42.140
and she recounted multiple, multiple, multiple past lives.

01:26:42.140 --> 01:26:45.700
And he was in lots of her past lives as a teacher.

01:26:45.700 --> 01:26:47.020
But one of the things that,

01:26:47.020 --> 01:26:50.140
sorry, he probably had other stories in his books as well,

01:26:50.140 --> 01:26:52.700
but the point was that, say, for example,

01:26:52.700 --> 01:26:55.820
like the Nazi German in one lifetime

01:26:55.820 --> 01:27:00.540
is the Jewish victim in another,

01:27:00.540 --> 01:27:03.140
and a Palestinian victim in another

01:27:03.140 --> 01:27:05.140
and a perpetrator in another,

01:27:05.140 --> 01:27:06.780
you know, just to use that one line,

01:27:06.780 --> 01:27:09.180
it's one that comes to mind from it.

01:27:09.180 --> 01:27:13.580
So there's like, I think it was Richard Roar

01:27:13.580 --> 01:27:17.420
talks about spiritual narcissism and righteous activism.

01:27:17.420 --> 01:27:19.740
And I think there's risks for that.

01:27:19.740 --> 01:27:23.180
I think there's a lot of room for humility

01:27:23.180 --> 01:27:26.980
around all that's wrong.

01:27:26.980 --> 01:27:28.900
I don't know what I'm really fully circling there,

01:27:28.900 --> 01:27:35.620
but I think it's important to know that we're all capable of all of the same horrors, and

01:27:35.620 --> 01:27:39.220
how do we work together to bring us all on.

01:27:39.220 --> 01:27:44.180
Yeah, no, I think you kind of got the point across there.

01:27:44.180 --> 01:27:46.420
Who knows what we've done in past lives?

01:27:46.420 --> 01:27:49.900
And yeah, more succinct.

01:27:49.900 --> 01:27:52.900
There but for the grace of God go I.

01:27:52.900 --> 01:27:56.300
This time, yeah.

01:27:56.300 --> 01:28:00.260
And I mean, to throw in another cliche, make hay while the sun shines, because we have

01:28:00.260 --> 01:28:04.260
an opportunity now, regardless of what we may have done or regardless of what's going on

01:28:04.260 --> 01:28:12.740
in the world, to make some serious spiritual progress and radiate a positive influence.

01:28:12.740 --> 01:28:19.640
And I think it all operates collectively, you know, like Jesus dying on the cross did

01:28:19.640 --> 01:28:22.180
it for the entire of humanity.

01:28:22.180 --> 01:28:25.020
Meister Eckhart said that Jesus divinized humanity.

01:28:25.020 --> 01:28:31.380
So each of us small, small players, I think what we do, I think we do for everybody.

01:28:31.380 --> 01:28:33.460
I think we do it for the collective.

01:28:33.460 --> 01:28:34.460
Yes.

01:28:34.460 --> 01:28:42.920
Yeah, that's an interesting point in itself that inevitably everything is completely interconnected

01:28:42.920 --> 01:28:47.360
and every thought you think, every action you perform sends out a ripple of influence

01:28:47.360 --> 01:28:52.340
to the whole universe really, but especially this planet.

01:28:52.340 --> 01:28:59.300
And so when I heard a great quote from, who was it, Aldous Huxley recently, he said, all

01:28:59.300 --> 01:29:04.100
these problems, you know, wars and famines and diseases and all this stuff, those aren't

01:29:04.100 --> 01:29:06.020
problems, those are symptoms.

01:29:06.020 --> 01:29:12.820
They're symptoms of our underlying failure to, you know, be self-realized or whatever

01:29:12.820 --> 01:29:14.620
actual terminology he used there.

01:29:14.620 --> 01:29:20.660
But you know, if we could achieve that, these other things would stop manifesting as they

01:29:20.660 --> 01:29:21.660
do.

01:29:21.660 --> 01:29:29.360
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.

01:29:29.360 --> 01:29:29.860
Yeah.

01:29:29.860 --> 01:29:34.460
It's nothing new. I mean, you can trace it right back, you know.

01:29:34.460 --> 01:29:48.460
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.

01:29:48.560 --> 01:29:54.860
But imagine if all 8 billion of us, or maybe at least 7 billion, were receptive in that

01:29:54.860 --> 01:29:58.280
way and they could tune in to all of us in that way.

01:29:58.280 --> 01:29:59.800
Imagine the world we would manifest.

01:29:59.800 --> 01:30:01.740
Oh, well, that's the plan.

01:30:01.740 --> 01:30:03.420
I mean, that's what's being offered, Rick.

01:30:03.420 --> 01:30:05.260
I mean, I have absolutely no doubt.

01:30:05.260 --> 01:30:06.260
I'm sure you agree.

01:30:06.260 --> 01:30:11.900
Like, that's exactly what the hope is, that we will all, 8 billion of us, start living

01:30:11.900 --> 01:30:14.160
beautiful lives in love.

01:30:14.160 --> 01:30:16.720
I mean, I do think that it's meant to be heaven on earth.

01:30:16.720 --> 01:30:21.400
I mean, I do think that awakening is meant to happen here and now in this realm.

01:30:21.400 --> 01:30:25.320
And I think if we don't do the work of it here, there's not a magic button that happens

01:30:25.320 --> 01:30:30.160
when you die that your spirit suddenly gets upgraded like, oh, yeah, you can go into the

01:30:30.160 --> 01:30:31.160
white light.

01:30:31.160 --> 01:30:34.120
You know, you got to do the work here and now.

01:30:34.120 --> 01:30:35.120
Yeah.

01:30:35.120 --> 01:30:38.120
But yeah, but heaven on earth, I think is entirely possible.

01:30:38.120 --> 01:30:43.220
It's just if we don't like the way the world looks, it's just the reflection of 8 billion

01:30:43.220 --> 01:30:48.740
people in a rather undeveloped state of consciousness.

01:30:48.740 --> 01:30:54.080
And if more of them could develop, then we would have a different world automatically.

01:30:54.080 --> 01:30:59.300
My garden, and I have a little garden out here, and my flowers and a few little trees,

01:30:59.300 --> 01:31:04.440
and the joy that they give me is just incredible.

01:31:04.440 --> 01:31:09.140
And just in terms of like the collective, like every morning I sit outside and I have

01:31:09.140 --> 01:31:11.640
coffee like no matter like for the whole

01:31:11.640 --> 01:31:15.100
year and I just talked to the flowers

01:31:15.100 --> 01:31:17.260
and the roses are in bloom now. I have

01:31:17.260 --> 01:31:19.340
four different rose bushes and each of

01:31:19.340 --> 01:31:21.500
them bloomed in the exact same week just

01:31:21.500 --> 01:31:23.340
about ten days ago. It's just so

01:31:23.340 --> 01:31:25.740
remarkable and they're not even like the

01:31:25.740 --> 01:31:29.260
same species of rose and so when I go

01:31:29.260 --> 01:31:31.180
out into the garden like I greet

01:31:31.180 --> 01:31:33.700
everybody. I greet the Sun, the stars, the

01:31:33.700 --> 01:31:36.340
sky, the trees, the planets, the earth,

01:31:36.340 --> 01:31:39.020
Mother Earth and I just offer thanks

01:31:39.020 --> 01:31:43.900
and I actually learned a beautiful practice from the Native American woman

01:31:43.900 --> 01:31:49.100
Pat McCabe, do you know her? She has a beautiful native name called Woman

01:31:49.100 --> 01:31:54.520
Stands Shining and I've seen her, she was doing, she did something with Richard

01:31:54.520 --> 01:31:59.180
Roar's Place, I think she did the opening ceremony for some summer school or some

01:31:59.180 --> 01:32:04.700
event, I saw it online and she says, "Greet the Sun every morning and make an

01:32:04.700 --> 01:32:10.660
offering and ask the Sun to in strengthen and bless everything that you are going

01:32:10.660 --> 01:32:16.420
to do today and I started doing that I offer water and oats in the morning

01:32:16.420 --> 01:32:23.020
oats are a native Irish offering to to the divine realm and it's just such a

01:32:23.020 --> 01:32:26.820
beautiful way to start before I even meditate I said outside and I just

01:32:26.820 --> 01:32:32.260
commune with nature and I just feel myself just to be so it's so enriching

01:32:32.260 --> 01:32:38.000
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

01:32:38.000 --> 01:32:40.780
That's lovely

01:32:40.780 --> 01:32:48.340
Here's a question from a fellow Ireland, what do you call Ireland people Irish Irishman Michael Moran

01:32:48.340 --> 01:32:53.580
Have you considered you are channeling and healing ancestral karma?

01:32:53.580 --> 01:32:59.180
In my spiritual lineage I do not particularly in my personal lineage

01:32:59.220 --> 01:33:08.820
so if I can answer it in that way. I discovered that, so that I have a number

01:33:08.820 --> 01:33:12.460
of different types of visionary and mystical experiences and after my book

01:33:12.460 --> 01:33:18.260
Light and Fire came out I began a whole new kind of wave and style and type of

01:33:18.260 --> 01:33:24.300
experiences began. One of which is I now know called the exchange of the sacred

01:33:24.300 --> 01:33:28.540
heart. So I began to have experiences of, I'll read one of them for you in a

01:33:28.540 --> 01:33:32.500
little while I began to have experiences of Christ giving me his heart and asking

01:33:32.500 --> 01:33:38.860
me to give mine to him and it was just the most sublime exquisite beautiful

01:33:38.860 --> 01:33:45.380
experience. It's happened a number of times. Then by chance I was reading Wendy

01:33:45.380 --> 01:33:50.140
Wright an American academic actually and she mentioned exchange of the

01:33:50.140 --> 01:33:54.020
sacred heart as a mystical lineage and I nearly jumped off my chair and I said oh

01:33:54.020 --> 01:33:58.580
my god that's what happens me and so I read deeper and further into it and I

01:33:58.580 --> 01:34:04.540
discovered that there was a 13th century line of women mystics in Germany who

01:34:04.540 --> 01:34:10.420
were the first to have this experience of the exchange of the sacred heart. So when

01:34:10.420 --> 01:34:15.220
I was doing my master's in spirituality two years ago I wrote my thesis on these

01:34:15.220 --> 01:34:21.340
13th century visionary women mystics. So why how this ties into healing

01:34:21.340 --> 01:34:28.300
ancestral lines. These women were just astonishingly beautiful mystics and they

01:34:28.300 --> 01:34:32.220
wrote books at a time when it was very rare for women to be writing books and

01:34:32.220 --> 01:34:36.780
the church did not like the female women mystics and the type of mystical

01:34:36.780 --> 01:34:42.100
experiences they were having. So these three women that I particularly

01:34:42.100 --> 01:34:46.780
love, Mekhtild of Magdeburg, Gertrude of Helfde and Mekhtild of Hackborn, they

01:34:46.780 --> 01:34:53.460
ended up all living in the same monastery in in Helfde in what's now Germany.

01:34:53.460 --> 01:34:58.740
They they all died within a short number of years of each other the third one of

01:34:58.740 --> 01:35:06.040
them died in 1301. In 1310 the first woman was burned at the stake for her

01:35:06.040 --> 01:35:12.680
mystical writing in Europe, Marguerite Perret. Now I feel that in me really

01:35:12.680 --> 01:35:19.640
really, really deeply and strongly. I feel deeply connected to the women of Halftime and

01:35:19.640 --> 01:35:29.000
Mechtild of Magdeburg. And to see that the close timeline connection of this blaze of spiritual

01:35:29.000 --> 01:35:36.360
writing amongst women in the late Middle Ages, and then the horrendous silencing and burning alive of

01:35:36.360 --> 01:35:42.440
women mystics, some men, but primarily women, and then the continuing burning of women for centuries

01:35:42.440 --> 01:35:52.760
in Europe. So I do feel, where I feel a healing is happening through what I'm being asked to do

01:35:52.760 --> 01:36:03.000
with my life is that I'm, my mystical voice is an echo of their mystical voice. I'm being given to

01:36:03.000 --> 01:36:10.440
speak what they were being given to speak and which went underground for centuries and was lost. Many

01:36:10.440 --> 01:36:15.320
Many of their books were just lost and kind of random chance they're found and are being

01:36:15.320 --> 01:36:21.200
brought back by incredible work being done by academics all over the world.

01:36:21.200 --> 01:36:29.320
So that is an example, Michael, of where I do think there is healing being offered down

01:36:29.320 --> 01:36:31.120
through the ancestral lineage.

01:36:31.120 --> 01:36:35.640
I always say that I relate much more to my spiritual lineage than to my human lineage,

01:36:35.640 --> 01:36:39.440
even though I like my human lineage too.

01:36:39.440 --> 01:36:46.600
It's hard to imagine how for centuries, men who considered themselves to be the leaders

01:36:46.600 --> 01:36:53.080
and representatives of a religion of love, you know, Jesus's teaching, could have been

01:36:53.080 --> 01:36:55.480
such sadistic monsters.

01:36:55.480 --> 01:37:00.720
Well, I think it's the same karma, Rick, you know, I think in each different life, we get

01:37:00.720 --> 01:37:02.740
a chance to do it better.

01:37:02.740 --> 01:37:06.760
Maybe I was one of the men burning the women at the stake rather than actually being one

01:37:06.760 --> 01:37:08.000
of the women in the monastery.

01:37:08.000 --> 01:37:16.880
I don't know. But yeah, so the sacred female voice, it's very new in the world, you know,

01:37:16.880 --> 01:37:26.400
and it takes an awful lot of personal healing and collective healing for the sacred female voice

01:37:26.400 --> 01:37:32.960
to be heard again in the world as something valuable with spiritual gifts to contribute.

01:37:32.960 --> 01:37:40.060
Yeah, I talked about this quite a bit with your fellow Dubliner, Djamar Murko, a month

01:37:40.060 --> 01:37:46.540
or so ago, and he was talking about how prominent women were in the very, very early church

01:37:46.540 --> 01:37:49.140
before it really became a church.

01:37:49.140 --> 01:37:54.280
And then, I guess, when Constantine came along and made Christianity the official religion

01:37:54.280 --> 01:38:01.360
of the Roman Empire, the women all got shoved aside and the macho men took over.

01:38:01.360 --> 01:38:08.260
Yeah, I mean, Jesus was an iconoclast. I mean, he broke down the barriers, you know, between

01:38:08.260 --> 01:38:15.200
all of the othering that was common at the time. And women were a huge part of his work,

01:38:15.200 --> 01:38:20.040
bringing them right into the center. I mean, I do not, I think that there was 12 female

01:38:20.040 --> 01:38:22.760
disciples. I mean, I'm absolutely certain of that.

01:38:22.760 --> 01:38:25.360
In addition to the 12 men, you mean?

01:38:25.360 --> 01:38:31.120
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I'm certain, I mean, we know that Mary Magdalene wrote a gospel.

01:38:31.120 --> 01:38:33.920
I mean, that has been recovered and verified.

01:38:33.920 --> 01:38:37.880
And all of the experiences that we read about

01:38:37.880 --> 01:38:40.400
that the men experienced in the Bible,

01:38:40.400 --> 01:38:43.780
I'm certain sure the women had all of the same

01:38:43.780 --> 01:38:46.500
kind of beautiful, exquisite, mystical experiences

01:38:46.500 --> 01:38:49.280
with Jesus, but they just weren't recorded.

01:38:49.280 --> 01:38:53.320
But one of the things that absolutely

01:38:53.320 --> 01:38:56.600
stopped me in my tracks was when I began to get interested

01:38:56.600 --> 01:38:59.000
in the spirituality and this mystical path

01:38:59.000 --> 01:39:00.180
and what does it all mean.

01:39:00.180 --> 01:39:03.220
And I began reading the Bible in a very serious way.

01:39:03.220 --> 01:39:04.860
Okay, what's in here?

01:39:04.860 --> 01:39:06.660
I really liked the prophets.

01:39:06.660 --> 01:39:09.540
Ezekiel spoke to me in a really powerful way.

01:39:09.540 --> 01:39:11.300
I really like him.

01:39:11.300 --> 01:39:15.460
But then I was reading the gospel, the Easter story

01:39:15.460 --> 01:39:18.420
and Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus.

01:39:18.420 --> 01:39:22.740
And the first witness of the resurrected body

01:39:22.740 --> 01:39:24.900
was Mary Magdalene.

01:39:24.900 --> 01:39:27.260
The first witness.

01:39:27.260 --> 01:39:31.580
I mean, what else was Jesus and now the resurrected Christ

01:39:31.580 --> 01:39:33.580
trying to do except to say,

01:39:33.580 --> 01:39:36.220
"I am appointing a woman to speak for me.

01:39:36.220 --> 01:39:38.700
A woman, my beloved Mary Magdalene,

01:39:38.700 --> 01:39:41.980
will tell the world that I have risen from the dead."

01:39:41.980 --> 01:39:43.940
And she was just brushed to the side.

01:39:43.940 --> 01:39:44.780
Thank you very much.

01:39:44.780 --> 01:39:45.980
First of all, they didn't believe her.

01:39:45.980 --> 01:39:48.380
They went to see with their own eyes, the men,

01:39:48.380 --> 01:39:52.780
but she was the first evangelist.

01:39:52.780 --> 01:39:54.300
And these women that I'm talking about,

01:39:54.300 --> 01:40:03.020
mystics in in Helfter in the 13th century. I mean, Jesus spoke to them as disciples, as apostles,

01:40:03.020 --> 01:40:11.260
as evangelists. Yeah, we were talking about the second axial age. I think that the resurgence or

01:40:11.260 --> 01:40:20.220
re-establishment of women in their proper role will be very much a part of it. And the fact that the

01:40:20.220 --> 01:40:23.900
world has been so

01:40:23.900 --> 01:40:25.580
troubled as it has been is

01:40:25.580 --> 01:40:28.780
attributable in part to

01:40:28.780 --> 01:40:30.380
their repression. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:40:30.380 --> 01:40:32.220
I think you're absolutely right. It has

01:40:32.220 --> 01:40:34.540
to be. I mean, we can't have

01:40:34.540 --> 01:40:36.380
a balanced world and we can't have

01:40:36.380 --> 01:40:39.500
equality and we can't have justice

01:40:39.500 --> 01:40:40.380
until everybody is equal, every single

01:40:40.380 --> 01:40:43.420
person.

01:40:43.420 --> 01:40:44.860
Yeah, and it's been a

01:40:44.860 --> 01:40:47.340
hard-fought battle. I mean,

01:40:47.340 --> 01:40:49.180
I listen to Heather Cox Richardson,

01:40:47.340 --> 01:40:54.420
who's an historian and she often talks about just the difficulties that women went through

01:40:54.420 --> 01:41:00.700
throughout our history in terms of actually being considered citizens and worthy of voting

01:41:00.700 --> 01:41:03.060
and all kinds of things.

01:41:03.060 --> 01:41:04.060
It's hard to fathom.

01:41:04.060 --> 01:41:05.060
It's hard to fathom.

01:41:05.060 --> 01:41:09.500
I mean, that the vote is only like less than 100 years old for women.

01:41:09.500 --> 01:41:11.460
It's hard to fathom.

01:41:11.460 --> 01:41:15.940
In ancient Greece, women were lower down the pecking order than slaves.

01:41:15.940 --> 01:41:20.940
Yeah, almost like that to a certain extent in the U.S. as well.

01:41:20.940 --> 01:41:23.540
Okay, another question here from Michael.

01:41:23.540 --> 01:41:26.820
I don't know what you're going to be able to do with this one, but let's see.

01:41:26.820 --> 01:41:31.940
Did you consider contact with avatars to help with your kundalini?

01:41:31.940 --> 01:41:35.940
>> No, because I didn't know it was a kundalini.

01:41:35.940 --> 01:41:36.940
No.

01:41:36.940 --> 01:41:44.040
No, I have never sought anything in a mystical experience.

01:41:44.040 --> 01:41:45.620
It happens to me.

01:41:45.620 --> 01:41:50.620
I sit in reverence, in prayer, in sacredness,

01:41:50.620 --> 01:41:56.340
and then I am opened to the mystical realm.

01:41:56.340 --> 01:42:00.420
I would never go and look to try and make contact

01:42:00.420 --> 01:42:03.260
with somebody other than somebody who's visited me,

01:42:03.260 --> 01:42:06.700
being Jesus, Mother Magdalene, Mary.

01:42:06.700 --> 01:42:08.900
And then there's sacred animals,

01:42:08.900 --> 01:42:11.220
like I'm looking at my beautiful Theobald,

01:42:11.220 --> 01:42:14.580
a beautiful sacred deer came to me as well

01:42:14.580 --> 01:42:20.180
and is a guardian that minds me on my spiritual path,

01:42:20.180 --> 01:42:23.420
amongst other beautiful symbols that look after me.

01:42:23.420 --> 01:42:28.980
But I would never seek to make contact with anybody, Michael.

01:42:28.980 --> 01:42:31.620
No.

01:42:31.620 --> 01:42:36.540
That would be-- I mean, yeah, it's not my path.

01:42:36.540 --> 01:42:38.300
It's not what it's meant to do.

01:42:38.300 --> 01:42:39.420
Very good.

01:42:39.420 --> 01:42:39.940
All righty.

01:42:39.940 --> 01:42:42.740
So the final segment of your book

01:42:42.740 --> 01:42:50.260
focuses on practical advice for listeners who are inspired by your story and might be seeking

01:42:50.260 --> 01:42:52.000
their own spiritual connection.

01:42:52.000 --> 01:42:57.680
So you have what you've created what you call a Path of Gold, a guide to the seven stages

01:42:57.680 --> 01:42:58.680
of awakening.

01:42:58.680 --> 01:43:01.820
You want to say a little bit about that?

01:43:01.820 --> 01:43:04.760
I will try, yeah.

01:43:04.760 --> 01:43:07.520
The title Path of Gold came from Christ.

01:43:07.520 --> 01:43:12.760
said to me one day, "I have laid before you a path of gold. Take my hand and let me

01:43:12.760 --> 01:43:20.000
guide you on the way. I know the way because I am the way." Last, just a little

01:43:20.000 --> 01:43:24.080
segue, last night I was walking in the woods near where I live just towards

01:43:24.080 --> 01:43:29.680
sunset to honor the eve of the solstice which is today and you know at sunset

01:43:29.680 --> 01:43:33.920
when the Sun is coming in at an angle and there's little pockets of light and I

01:43:33.920 --> 01:43:39.680
was walking through a woodland and there was a little path of gold and light and I was remembering,

01:43:39.680 --> 01:43:46.560
oh my goodness, it's the path of gold and it just felt so meaningful and so beautiful.

01:43:46.560 --> 01:43:52.520
So yeah, so what do I have in the path of gold?

01:43:52.520 --> 01:43:56.600
So I'll just pull out my book here now and just see what I said.

01:43:56.600 --> 01:44:01.520
Sure, and while you're looking that up, let me ask you a related question.

01:44:01.520 --> 01:44:06.120
For someone listening to this who feels a deep longing for more, who feels disconnected and

01:44:06.120 --> 01:44:10.480
off track in their life, what is the first step you would recommend they take?

01:44:10.480 --> 01:44:11.480
Can you say that again, Rick?

01:44:11.480 --> 01:44:12.880
Sorry, I wasn't concentrating properly.

01:44:12.880 --> 01:44:13.880
Oh, sorry.

01:44:13.880 --> 01:44:17.780
Yeah, for someone who's sort of feeling a deep longing and feels disconnected, what is the

01:44:17.780 --> 01:44:21.660
first step you would recommend that they take?

01:44:21.660 --> 01:44:25.080
And you can weave this into the path of gold if you like.

01:44:25.080 --> 01:44:29.160
The first thing I would do is sit with the longing.

01:44:29.160 --> 01:44:33.880
bring the longing into my prayer life, I bring the longing into my meditation and

01:44:33.880 --> 01:44:40.080
I would let the longing reveal itself to me. Because the longing is the longing is

01:44:40.080 --> 01:44:45.280
a path I mean it's actually part of what's in the path of gold. The longing

01:44:45.280 --> 01:44:50.720
as much as the visions are intelligent and meaningful and intentional, the

01:44:50.720 --> 01:44:58.000
longing itself is love calling us home. So if somebody has this longing in their

01:44:58.000 --> 01:45:04.560
heart, talk to the longing, bring it into meditation, and just be curious.

01:45:04.560 --> 01:45:11.600
Show me, guide me, help me, reveal, tell me, teach me.

01:45:11.600 --> 01:45:15.920
I remember interviewing a woman named Mary, I'm not remembering her last name,

01:45:15.920 --> 01:45:20.640
this was years ago, but her theme was "What's in the way is the way."

01:45:20.640 --> 01:45:25.680
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean Rumi, who was writing at the same time as

01:45:25.680 --> 01:45:31.840
those women mystics I was just talking about and we all know his exquisite beautiful mystical poetry

01:45:31.840 --> 01:45:40.400
and love poetry. He speaks of, he has a beautiful poetic expression for saying that the longing

01:45:40.400 --> 01:45:47.600
that we feel is the longing that's longing for us, that it's reciprocal and it's mutual. So if

01:45:47.600 --> 01:45:54.080
somebody is already feeling that longing in their heart, it is the very presence of love expressing

01:45:54.080 --> 01:45:59.840
its own longing in us. So it's very beautiful. It's a very beautiful part of the journey to feel that

01:45:59.840 --> 01:46:06.640
longing. So would you say for instance that if the longing is uncomfortable rather than trying to

01:46:06.640 --> 01:46:13.120
distract ourselves by going to a movie or something, tune into it and even if it becomes more uncomfortable

01:46:13.120 --> 01:46:19.440
feel it even more acutely. Yeah. And that will help you kind of like break through. Yeah. Yeah.

01:46:20.000 --> 01:46:25.040
You know Carl Jung, who's been a great teacher to me, he talks about adopting the symbolic attitude

01:46:25.040 --> 01:46:31.920
to everything that meaningful that happens in our life. So to engage with it in an intelligent,

01:46:31.920 --> 01:46:38.080
open, curious way. So for example, to take it into your morning sit in your meditation

01:46:38.080 --> 01:46:44.560
and to set the intention, I would like to engage with this longing. I'd like to learn more about

01:46:44.560 --> 01:46:49.600
it. And also the bigger question of, I would like to engage with my spiritual path and my

01:46:49.600 --> 01:46:56.720
my spiritual awakening and let the longing speak to us or it can speak in

01:46:56.720 --> 01:47:01.160
words, can speak in images, can speak in feelings, can speak energetically in our

01:47:01.160 --> 01:47:06.600
bodies and say for example if somebody was going like I do say for for body

01:47:06.600 --> 01:47:11.280
work, for acupuncture or craniosacral therapy or whatever, bring that longing

01:47:11.280 --> 01:47:15.480
to all of these moments when we're seeking integration and healing in our

01:47:15.480 --> 01:47:21.000
life because they're the times that were opened up. They're the times of stillness. That's when the

01:47:21.000 --> 01:47:27.560
veil pins. That's when we're in a healing space. And I think that's the time to ask the big questions.

01:47:27.560 --> 01:47:39.480
So, okay. Let me just have a quick look to see what's on the path of gold. So, okay. Yes. Seven

01:47:39.480 --> 01:47:44.960
stages. I'm just, oh yeah, so seven stages, yeah, of awakening and the following this

01:47:44.960 --> 01:47:49.000
is the path of gold. So I'll just read out the seven and then see if I've any

01:47:49.000 --> 01:47:54.520
comments on any of them. So the first one is the call to awaken and to interpret

01:47:54.520 --> 01:47:58.840
the signs of spiritual dis-ease. So that longing that can be uncomfortable is

01:47:58.840 --> 01:48:04.680
what I would call spiritual dis-ease, not disease. And so there is a call going

01:48:04.680 --> 01:48:09.960
out in every second of every day from the divine realm to every human being trying

01:48:09.960 --> 01:48:14.880
to invite us into the awakening. So it's to hear the call to awaken and engage

01:48:14.880 --> 01:48:21.180
and engage meaningfully with the signs of spiritual disease or a spiritual

01:48:21.180 --> 01:48:27.760
invitation. To take the journey within, just to commit to the inner life, to let

01:48:27.760 --> 01:48:35.600
Let go of the external, inauthentic, vacuous, empty world that is out there and commit to

01:48:35.600 --> 01:48:37.020
the inner journey.

01:48:37.020 --> 01:48:38.020
Just go inside.

01:48:38.020 --> 01:48:44.580
Dante's poem, like that was a real, that was a big milestone on my journey reading his

01:48:44.580 --> 01:48:52.940
book with a great English academic from Cambridge, I think, did an annotated translation and I

01:48:52.940 --> 01:48:55.620
just, it was a very beautiful experience.

01:48:55.620 --> 01:49:02.420
So that's the journey within, going into the dark wood, surrendering to being lost, surrendering

01:49:02.420 --> 01:49:07.140
to not knowing the way, but waiting for the way to reveal itself, because it will reveal

01:49:07.140 --> 01:49:10.060
itself if we make ourselves available.

01:49:10.060 --> 01:49:12.300
So the journey within.

01:49:12.300 --> 01:49:18.060
And I would say letting go of this dark, dark world and going within doesn't mean abandoning

01:49:18.060 --> 01:49:24.700
the world, because having gone within, you come back and you infuse the world with the

01:49:24.700 --> 01:49:29.740
inner light, you know, it becomes much more beautiful and rich, kind of like, you know,

01:49:29.740 --> 01:49:34.300
going to the bank to get some money out so you can go to the market and be more,

01:49:34.300 --> 01:49:41.340
enjoy the market more. Yeah, yeah, lovely. Yeah, yeah. What did you say earlier about somebody

01:49:41.340 --> 01:49:47.340
who becomes inflated rather than offering service? I think, yeah, exactly that, like you get gifts

01:49:47.340 --> 01:49:51.900
from doing the inner journey. The whole point of the inner journey is that you find your true gifts

01:49:51.900 --> 01:49:54.620
and come back out and you share them with other people.

01:49:54.620 --> 01:50:00.380
Yeah, replenishing, it's refreshing. It's enriching. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's

01:50:00.380 --> 01:50:03.820
the first the kingdom of heaven and all else should be added on today.

01:50:03.820 --> 01:50:06.540
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful.

01:50:06.540 --> 01:50:08.940
Famous biblical scholar, Rick Archer, quoting.

01:50:08.940 --> 01:50:19.100
So then the third stage that I have here is what I call the liminal space and the consciousness of

01:50:19.100 --> 01:50:24.480
of longing, there you go, for our friend to ask this question. So to begin to be

01:50:24.480 --> 01:50:30.060
comfortable being between worlds, you know, allowing that to be a felt lived

01:50:30.060 --> 01:50:35.360
experience, being comfortable and the thing is that because we're now

01:50:35.360 --> 01:50:41.520
entering into a new axial age, we quite simply are already in a liminal space, we

01:50:41.520 --> 01:50:46.720
are between worlds. So the best way to fall in with that is to let it happen in

01:50:46.720 --> 01:50:49.520
our own individual selves as well.

01:50:49.520 --> 01:50:51.920
You know, to be comfortable with the not knowing,

01:50:51.920 --> 01:50:55.620
with the confusion, with the breakdown of the ending

01:50:55.620 --> 01:50:57.720
of one era, the birth of the new.

01:50:57.720 --> 01:51:03.320
We're in that dark time of labor, death and labor,

01:51:03.320 --> 01:51:05.320
and we're waiting for the rebirth.

01:51:05.320 --> 01:51:09.120
So to let it happen, accept it, recognize,

01:51:09.120 --> 01:51:12.220
for more of us to learn that it's a natural state

01:51:12.220 --> 01:51:16.620
and it's a natural phase of the awakening.

01:51:16.620 --> 01:51:21.420
Then the next I have is transmission from an awakened mind and reading the mystics.

01:51:21.420 --> 01:51:22.920
So I think that's huge.

01:51:22.920 --> 01:51:26.720
I think in the Buddhist and the Hindu cultures, that's really central.

01:51:26.720 --> 01:51:28.820
Isn't it Rick transmission from a teacher?

01:51:28.820 --> 01:51:34.420
Yeah, and it happened with Jesus to a member of the woman who touched his cloak

01:51:34.420 --> 01:51:37.720
and he said he felt like there had been some kind of transmission.

01:51:37.720 --> 01:51:40.320
I felt I felt the energy go out of me or some such thing.

01:51:40.320 --> 01:51:40.620
Yeah.

01:51:40.620 --> 01:51:40.820
Yeah.

01:51:40.820 --> 01:51:41.020
Yeah.

01:51:41.020 --> 01:51:41.320
Yeah.

01:51:41.320 --> 01:51:41.620
Yeah.

01:51:41.620 --> 01:51:42.420
Yeah, exactly.

01:51:42.420 --> 01:51:42.720
Yeah.

01:51:42.720 --> 01:51:43.120
Yeah.

01:51:43.120 --> 01:51:46.520
Yeah, we don't I mean, I never knew anything about that.

01:51:46.520 --> 01:51:51.160
my religious practice, you know, or in any teaching that I ever received. I didn't

01:51:51.160 --> 01:51:56.160
know anything about that. But I think you can meet, I mean if you met Jesus, yeah

01:51:56.160 --> 01:52:03.520
you'd get it, full on fireworks. But also when you're not

01:52:03.520 --> 01:52:11.080
exposed to spiritual teachers, I think then reading, reading the mystics and

01:52:11.080 --> 01:52:15.760
reading spiritual books and reading from the great teachers, like for me Jim Finlay

01:52:15.760 --> 01:52:22.080
and Richard Rohr reading their work, but much more for me it's the mystics. I think that's

01:52:22.080 --> 01:52:27.280
where my primary teaching comes from and then Richard and Jim and Cynthia Bourgeau as well

01:52:27.280 --> 01:52:33.640
and lots of other wonderful teachers. They then kind of flesh out for me how to integrate

01:52:33.640 --> 01:52:40.520
the mystical experiences and how to walk the spiritual path. And so that's all to say that

01:52:40.520 --> 01:52:45.720
we're moving in the direction of unity consciousness. So moving from the dualistic mind of the rational,

01:52:45.720 --> 01:52:50.760
era of the last axial age to unit of

01:52:50.760 --> 01:52:53.120
consciousness which is the, which is

01:52:53.120 --> 01:52:56.160
the type of consciousness of the

01:52:56.160 --> 01:52:58.120
spiritually awakened mind. All is one.

01:52:58.120 --> 01:53:00.760
There is no division, there is no

01:53:00.760 --> 01:53:03.240
separation. We are all one, we are all

01:53:03.240 --> 01:53:05.760
parts of one very beautiful majestic

01:53:05.760 --> 01:53:09.120
being which is the being of love, which

01:53:09.120 --> 01:53:10.680
is life itself. So we're, so on this

01:53:10.680 --> 01:53:12.040
spiritual path that's where we're

01:53:12.040 --> 01:53:14.440
headed. We're headed to unit of

01:53:12.040 --> 01:53:16.760
consciousness. We're walking towards the recognition of the divinity of all of

01:53:16.760 --> 01:53:22.600
creation. Everything is sacred, that's panentheism, and then we are moving

01:53:22.600 --> 01:53:28.240
towards spiritual mystical consciousness or divine union. And hopefully we'll all

01:53:28.240 --> 01:53:32.800
get to the stage where we permanently live in the bliss and the ecstasy of

01:53:32.800 --> 01:53:39.720
divine union with the sacred in whatever way the sacred presents to us. So for

01:53:39.720 --> 01:53:44.840
me it's the Christ and for you it's somebody else. I think we all will. I

01:53:44.840 --> 01:53:50.320
don't think it'll necessarily happen to each of us in this lifetime but this you

01:53:50.320 --> 01:53:55.360
know this lifetime is just a chapter in a very big book. Yeah, yeah, ongoing. Yeah,

01:53:55.360 --> 01:53:59.880
yeah. I hope I meet you in the next lifetime as well Rick. We'll see where we are.

01:53:59.880 --> 01:54:04.720
Yeah, well be nice to meet you in person in this lifetime. We'll see if that ever

01:54:04.720 --> 01:54:08.160
That'd be nice, yeah.

01:54:08.160 --> 01:54:13.920
The final instruction you received from Jesus in your book was, "Invite them to become kindling

01:54:13.920 --> 01:54:19.240
in the fire of my love, so that all may burn together as one in love."

01:54:19.240 --> 01:54:27.000
What does that invitation mean to you, and how do you extend it to our audience today?

01:54:27.000 --> 01:54:33.280
First of all, my body is burning, just to hear you say it.

01:54:33.280 --> 01:54:40.200
The fire is the metaphor and the image and the symbol that Christ has used with me and

01:54:40.200 --> 01:54:42.680
given me to experience all along.

01:54:42.680 --> 01:54:47.340
So kindling in the fire of my love is that I would offer myself to Christ as a piece

01:54:47.340 --> 01:54:52.680
of wood for him to throw into the fire and let me burn in your love and enjoy the bliss.

01:54:52.680 --> 01:55:00.140
So the invitation there is for each person to recognize themselves as contributing to

01:55:00.140 --> 01:55:07.200
the fire of love that is a universal fire in which we are all invited to burn in love.

01:55:07.200 --> 01:55:12.500
So to become kindling, join in, wake up.

01:55:12.500 --> 01:55:17.900
One nice thing about the kindling metaphor is that, you know, when a piece of, let's

01:55:17.900 --> 01:55:23.860
say unlit wood gets near to a piece of lit wood, then the fire spreads to the unlit piece

01:55:23.860 --> 01:55:28.820
and then it can one to the next, it can spread.

01:55:28.820 --> 01:55:32.940
So I think that there's a kind of a contagious quality to this work.

01:55:32.940 --> 01:55:35.460
Oh, that's a lovely way to say it.

01:55:35.460 --> 01:55:36.940
Yeah, in a good sense.

01:55:36.940 --> 01:55:42.060
Yeah, I actually feel as if I've kind of come, I feel as if it's been contagious for me just

01:55:42.060 --> 01:55:43.500
having this conversation.

01:55:43.500 --> 01:55:46.460
I feel really kind of, I feel really inspired.

01:55:46.460 --> 01:55:50.380
And yeah, I feel as if I'm yeah, on fire.

01:55:50.380 --> 01:55:51.380
Great.

01:55:51.380 --> 01:55:53.380
Well, thank you.

01:55:53.380 --> 01:55:54.380
And me too.

01:55:54.380 --> 01:55:55.580
It's this.

01:55:55.580 --> 01:55:58.380
I'm like the prime beneficiary of doing these interviews.

01:55:58.380 --> 01:56:02.220
You're so kind.

01:56:02.220 --> 01:56:06.060
It's just such a delight meeting such wonderful people and having conversations with them.

01:56:06.060 --> 01:56:11.100
It really has become one of my most powerful spiritual practices.

01:56:11.100 --> 01:56:13.340
Well it's incredible service that you do Rick.

01:56:13.340 --> 01:56:17.100
I mean I guess this is your incredible path of service.

01:56:17.100 --> 01:56:24.060
I mean you push wisdom out into the world for all of us to listen to as we go through

01:56:24.060 --> 01:56:25.060
our lives.

01:56:25.060 --> 01:56:28.500
really benefiting from listening to an awful lot of the conversations.

01:56:28.500 --> 01:56:30.500
Thank you for what you do.

01:56:30.500 --> 01:56:31.500
And thank you for having me.

01:56:31.500 --> 01:56:33.860
I think people will benefit from this one.

01:56:33.860 --> 01:56:36.780
And so thank you for offering it to us.

01:56:36.780 --> 01:56:42.060
And I'll have a page on BatGap, like I always do, about this interview.

01:56:42.060 --> 01:56:44.540
And it'll have a link to your website and to your book.

01:56:44.540 --> 01:56:49.900
And I'm happy to upgrade that from time to time,

01:56:49.900 --> 01:56:53.940
like if you write a new book or announce some event or something like that.

01:56:53.940 --> 01:56:55.220
Thank you very much, Rick.

01:56:55.220 --> 01:56:57.940
I would say for people to go to my,

01:56:57.940 --> 01:56:59.660
for now to go to my website

01:56:59.660 --> 01:57:02.940
because I have put a huge number of my visions

01:57:02.940 --> 01:57:04.660
directly onto the website,

01:57:04.660 --> 01:57:07.940
just in chronological order, transcribe my journals.

01:57:07.940 --> 01:57:09.700
I'm trying to give it all away for free.

01:57:09.700 --> 01:57:11.600
I'm trying to make it accessible to people

01:57:11.600 --> 01:57:14.780
so that people can use them on their own spiritual journey

01:57:14.780 --> 01:57:17.820
and see if anything touches them.

01:57:17.820 --> 01:57:19.380
It's a gift that I'm giving away.

01:57:19.380 --> 01:57:20.340
It's my service.

01:57:20.340 --> 01:57:23.860
So you could just link to the vision pages on the website.

01:57:23.860 --> 01:57:26.940
And that's my gift to the audience.

01:57:26.940 --> 01:57:29.660
Thank you to whoever is here listening and watching

01:57:29.660 --> 01:57:31.220
and in the future.

01:57:31.220 --> 01:57:32.820
Yes, thanks, Aitamar.

01:57:32.820 --> 01:57:35.100
And thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

01:57:35.100 --> 01:57:38.220
And as I always say, we'll see you for the next one.

01:57:38.220 --> 01:57:40.420
Thank you so much, Rick.

01:57:40.420 --> 01:57:41.020
You're welcome.

01:57:41.020 --> 01:57:44.380
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01:57:44.380 --> 01:58:05.300
Thank you.

01:58:05.300 --> 01:58:08.660
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