>>Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.
My guest this week is Jack O'Keefe, who Jack is short for Jackie, which is short for Jacqueline,
but you seem to go by the name Jack mostly.
I'm speaking to her from the hinterlands of Ireland where the internet connection is spotty,
but we finally managed to work out an arrangement that apparently will work.
I just stumbled across Jack a couple of weeks ago, which I'm surprised I haven't heard of
you before, because since I found you other people have been mentioning you and stuff
like that. But I was just watching some YouTube video with some guy who had seen Amma and
Adyashanti in one weekend and he was going on about that. And then after I watched that,
another video came up of you being asked a question by this guy. And so I listened to
that and I thought, "Oh, she sounds interesting." And then I read your biography on your website
and I thought, "Whoa, this is a fascinating story. I'd love to talk to this person."
So we got in touch and here we are.
So I realize you've probably told your story many times in many satsangs and interviews
and all. You're probably tired of telling it, but my listeners haven't heard it, and
most of them probably. So if you wouldn't mind, I'd like you to tell it again in as
much detail as you'd like, because we have plenty of time. And I may interrupt you from
time to time to have you embellish on certain aspects of it.
And then once we've gone through your whole story we'll get to what you probably consider
to be the more juicy stuff.
Sure, well actually whatever we talk about is a load of crap anyway, to be honest.
So it's like one story, they're all stories, even if we're talking non-duality it's still
a story, I mean silence is anything that is in any way worthwhile I suppose, but it doesn't
make you listen if they say so.
It would be very, I think people would tune out pretty quick.
In fact I did that last week, I was interviewing this guy who has had a spiritual awakening
but his main interest is in Reiki healing and he actually did a little healing thing
on me during the interview where we just sat silently for a while.
Larry King wouldn't do something like that.
Did it work?
Sort of.
I noticed more later on than I noticed during the actual thing.
Yeah, yeah, some energy shifted somewhere.
Yeah, alrighty, so the story.
Well, okay, Catholic rural Ireland, raised on a farm, pretty rough and raw rearing as
many people have, and a convent all girl boarding school and like, oh my god, can I just grow
up, can I just get out of this?
a few scenarios when I was a kid of like, one I remember actually and I don't think I've
aired it too much because it just came to mind now, I remember hearing on the radio something
about a mortgage, I'd say I was about 8 and my next older sister who would have been 12
at the time, I said what's a mortgage, what are they talking about on the radio, what's
a mortgage and she just said, "You have to get one of those to buy a house."
I thought, "I don't want to buy a house."
She said, "You have to buy a house.
When you get married you have to buy a house and then that's where you have your children."
This was a nightmare.
I remember going, "I can't do that.
I don't want to live like that."
She said, "But that's what everybody does."
I was like, "I know.
No, no, no, no, but that's not what it's about.
That's not what it's about."
that? And she said, "But that's what everybody does." I was like, "I know, no, no, no, no,
but that's not what it's about, that's not what it's about." I actually remember that,
knowing that, no, that doesn't make sense, even though I got the mortgage and got married,
I didn't do the kids' bit, I wasn't that brave. But there was something of like, no, even
at that age, there was something, which there is always with kids, but we often forget it.
But I didn't forget it, I knew that there was something, it's not about that, whatever we
talk about it's not about that, I don't know what it's about but it's not about that.
And then a feeling of in my teenage years waiting to grow up, I just have to wait until I'm old
enough to find out what this is all about.
And I remember then actually in university talking to a friend of mine because she met
me recently and she said I remember, I actually remember smoking a joint with you she said,
in this house where we shared together and you were saying, "What's it all about?
What's it all about?"
I was saying, "What are you asking a question like that for?"
And I was like, "What's the point in any of it if you don't know what it's for and where
it's going and why?"
And she just told me this a few weeks ago, I didn't remember those conversations, I had
that language at that time, in 1920.
At that time I went to study theology because I thought, "Well, if I could find out about
God, then maybe the mystery side of it all could be demystified.
Theology in Ireland at the time was the study of Catholicism and I didn't know.
And so after a few months this monotheistic, dogmatic philosophy was clearly about control.
So I got into a bit of trouble with the priests who were lecturers and they said that, "Well,
you either leave or you have to go with what we're talking about because you're learning
how to teach this to other people.
So you were asking difficult questions and skeptical questions and so on.
Yes, yes, and the curriculum did not allow for this at all.
So I made a choice really, I asked my parents and I said, "Can I quit?"
And they said, "No, we want to retire, you're the last one, you're not on any subsidy, no,
this is your one shot at education."
And I'm like, "Okay."
So I stayed quiet and fulfilled the degree and got out as fast as I could, an atheist,
a very solid atheist because I was listening and reproducing this crap, actually.
What did you write your thesis on?
Confession!
The sacrament of confession!
And how it's supposed to work and everything you mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
God, I haven't thought about that since.
And the thing that pulled me to confession was that there was something, something could
change in the psyche, in the folding of story, that's really what I was talking about.
But of course I had to talk about the power of the sacrament and all of that stuff.
And all the while you were writing this thing you didn't believe what you were writing
but you just thought, I'm just going to get this over with.
Yeah.
That must have been hard.
It was, but Rick it taught me discipline.
And it taught me patience.
Yeah, good point.
It did, it actually equipped me very well for what was to come.
And at the time I was just having as much of a social life as I could to balance out this
awful stuff that was just making me contract.
So then I got involved in community development, I was very interested in social issues, social
equality, so I worked in that area for 5, 6, 7, 8 years.
Barack Obama did that when he was younger too, he was a community organizer in Chicago, he
gave up all kinds of lucrative things in order to do that.
Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, and I also at that time, I was always interested in the arts because
music was a thing that was just kind of cruising around, it followed me all the time, and so
I got interested in how the arts could access something else in people who lived in disadvantage.
So I jumped into that, not having the language again, that how artistic expression is an inaudible
voice from that which is beyond concept. Were you a musician or were you just studying
it academically or something? Yeah, both. I played the cello and I did music
just as a primary degree. So then at the age of 30 I was running my own
freelance consultancy business for community development organizations and working hard
No one playing hard.
And there was six of us having Sunday lunch, three couples, myself and my husband drinking
one of them.
And I was drinking a can of Heineken and I put it down on the table and lifted my head
and I saw dead people hanging from the ceiling all around.
And I said, "Okay, okay, I'm tripping, I'm tripping, who's giving me what?
This is not okay.
What's going on?"
And my friends just said, "What are you talking about?"
And somebody's given me something, I can see stuff, and of course they hadn't given me
anything and so what it was was some third eye capacity, some perception of the non-physical
appeared.
>>Rick: But of course you didn't know that at the time, you thought you were going crazy
or something.
>>Karen: When you're dead that's the end of the show and happy days when that comes, it
was as clean and clear as that. So then what to do with these dead people? So it was like,
so does this mean then that when your body dies you're not dead? Oh, I have to start
at the start here. So then is there a God? I mean the whole can of worms opened.
Let me just ask you about these dead people, because you also had this experience, you
were in the bank and someone appeared behind the teller and asked you to tell this woman
not to marry so and so, and it turned out to be the woman's mother and so on. Did they
They appear kind of wispy and ethereal or they weren't concrete like you might see in the
movies or something?
>>Kiran: Yeah, no they're not as concrete, to these eyes or whatever you can say, they're
not as concrete, there's kind of something, yeah you could, there's a translucency, so
you know who's a spook and who's not, there's never a question of like, you know.
>>Rick: But you can tell, ok this is an older woman or this is a young man or whatever.
Oh yeah, the features are quite clear.
And why were there so many of them hanging around a restaurant?
Did a lot of people die of food poisoning there?
Well we were in somebody's house, it was an old house, funnily enough, it was an old house,
it had been a rectory and it was this woman's mum, we were having a party basically for
the weekend and one of my friends, you know, it was her mother's house, and it had been
So it was steeped in lore and stories and history, it was an ancient house with a protection
order and everything on it.
So I ran out of the house and the boys, the three lads who were there said, "We're
going to the pub anyway, I don't know what's going on with you Jack, but get over it,
I'll stay and do the dishes, it's ok."
And the thing was, I was petrified.
I was petrified because I had no control, first of all, and that was something that I wasn't
familiar with.
No control meaning you had no choice but to see these things?
Exactly.
I couldn't turn them off, it was upsetting.
On my belief system I couldn't stop them from engaging with me in any way.
And there was certainly a...
Were they engaging with you?
Yes.
Or were they just hanging around?
Or were they saying, "Hey, we know you can see us and we want to tell you something."
Yes, they started to engage.
about an hour they started to engage and I suppose it's because I engaged with them,
looking now at how energy works, I definitely started to become visible to them because
I was sending an emotion there or looking at them and validating their existence and
they were validating my existence and lo and behold separation is there and now we've
got this other dimension in this dimension.
>>Rick: Did they seem malevolent or were they friendly?
>>Kiran: No, malevolent.
>>Rick: Oh really?
>>Kiran: Yeah.
Maybe the friendly ones had moved on or something.
Malevolent ones were stuck.
They were stuck, and that's usually what it is, you know, where there's a lot of unfinished
business, you know, if there's a lot of pain going on you tend to project that pain or
communicate with and through that pain, and these ones that came to me, yeah, there was
a lot of pain going on, there was a lot of pain, and maybe I would have taken no notice
of the other ones, these ones were just eager to get out of their pain, as is the position
of any sufferer. So were they asking you for help?
They started messing with me, physically pushing me around the place and that's how I knew,
I thought, ok I'm really not imagining this because I'm being kind of, not beaten up but
chucked against a wall. Really? So you'd like stumble into walls and
things? Yes, yes, so I ran out of the house and I
clung against a wall, you know, and I would try to run into the house and as I would leave
the wall I would get whacked back again. So even though they were ethereal they could
would actually have an impact on the physical level
that's exactly it, there was some tactile
the capacity that they had, yeah, and I think what enabled that was my own fear
and made you vulnerable or something, yeah it made me completely exposed
I was petrified, I can imagine
completely out of my realm of what was possible, not to mind
it being a real experience you know at the time
so there was no sense of having any handle on it at all
it at all for a couple of weeks. I'd say there was two or three weeks of the light was on
all night. I was just, "What can I do about this? What can I do?" It was, "Go away, go
away!" There they are again.
>>What would happen when you tried to go to sleep?
>>I would fall asleep from absolute exhaustion.
>>Would they mess with you in your sleep or anything?
>>Oh yeah. They would wake me up. There'd be pressure on my body. Yeah, your typical horror
movie stuff, you know? Really, it was just a horror movie. Those scripts are not so far
from what you...
human spooks or did you also see animals and things like that?
No, human. The animals were very benevolent. They were beautiful, they were just easy.
Oh, you mean you saw ghostly animals or you just saw, oh ok, but they were ok.
But they were always nice and at peace and just sitting there. I never saw a dinosaur,
was there anything but dogs, swans, elephants, but very nice, very gentle and just looking.
>>Rick: So you'd be in rural Ireland seeing an elephant.
>>Kiran: Yeah.
>>Rick: I imagine many Irish have seen elephants but not for this reason.
They saw pink ones mostly.
>>Kiran: Yeah, the odd dumbbell flying past the window.
It's funny, it's totally wacky, you know, and if I hadn't been so practical and down
to earth, it had to be that problem.
This is too crazy, this is too far removed from what is normal, real and ok, now I want
to see the world, so what am I going to do with it?
And I remember at that point thinking, ok, shut it down or move with it, what are you
going to do here?
I remember talking to my husband about this, and he said, well it's your choice, really
I can't, it's completely your story here, I have no perspective at all.
So I said, well if I shut it down, life continues as it is, but you know what, maybe I can learn
something.
It's kind of too interesting, even though I'm petrified.
And you didn't have a choice to shut it down anyway.
No, which I thought I did of course.
You thought you didn't have some little switch you could take, I suppose you could have taken
some drugs or something.
I guess, just like I just did, and you're told it's a psychotic, and then that path happens,
>>Rick: Yeah, they could have locked you up, probably people are locked up who had this
happen to them and it was just as legitimate as your experience, but they went and sought
help and were diagnosed as crazy and they're behind bars now.
>>Kiran: That's exactly it, that was the other option, even though I didn't ever have the
label of "oh this is a psychiatric thing", my brain didn't go there.
But if I had gotten help, of course that would have been where I would have gone from.
Yeah, or you'd be on Thorazine or something.
Yeah, no sweat, but it would have been psychiatric.
There's no other route out there for that kind of an experience.
And all it is, is just that, I don't know, it can be a few things I suppose, but it's
like the limits of mind start to break down, the limits of what you think is real starts
to break.
So the lack of reality in all of it starts to appear.
And so then everything is possible starts to appear.
Interesting, so that's a lesson.
Yeah, all of these things were coming in and I was like, oh, so then there are other dimensions
after all, that's not just all fairy tales.
Ok, so maybe then there are actually Irish leprechauns, maybe it's that far fetched,
that all of it is possible.
Did you see any leprechauns?
Oh God, I mean, or are we getting ahead of ourselves?
I should just have "flake" written across here.
R: That's ok, I think most people who would appreciate what you're going to be saying
in a little while will also appreciate this and I think they'll find the progression
fascinating.
J: Yeah, of course, because that's the story, that's how it works.
Yeah, sure, leprechauns, fairies, the whole lot, all kinds of creatures in woodlands,
man!
Woodlands that haven't been, that are indigenous, that haven't been created so much, ones that
are indigenous are teeming with the indigenous non-physical, can I say spiritual, realm?
>>Karen: Yeah, you know, wildly, wildly fascinating beings.
>>Rick: Just as common as the birds and the butterflies and the insects and everything
else.
>>Karen: Same, same, same, same, yeah.
>>Rick: And steer me clear if I'm distracting you from something you want to unfold, but
I'm trying to extract as much interesting detail out of this as possible.
So did that phase of seeing the woodland, the subtle beings in the woods, happen around
the same time as the ghosts or was that later on once you had come to terms with the fact
that you were having subtle perception?
Yes, it came later on, I'd say about two years later, before I could see woodland life
forms.
And by that time you were kind of adjusted to the whole thing, I suppose.
I was, it was like it was no big deal, then it was like, "Oh, hello!"
know?
It was just a new form of rabbit, you know?
>>Rick: And did they too communicate with you, the little leprechauns and stuff?
You were able to converse in some way?
Obviously not in English but telepathically or something?
>>Kiran: Yeah, telepathically.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's all there.
You know, the astral body moves into these dimensions and does this when you're asleep
anyway.
I mean, you know, it's just, if there are beliefs that the world is a certain way, well
this stuff is really hard to take.
And for me those beliefs were very rigid, they were really rigid, I kind of knew how the world
worked and I could sort it all out.
Jesus, it had to be attacked with a sledgehammer, so it was.
>>Rick: I think most people feel that way but most people don't have your experience.
>>Kiran: Yeah, for some reason this was just on the destiny of the woman called Jack.
>>Rick Most people get hard life lessons in the gross
level like foreclosuring on their home or a divorce or an illness or something and that
shakes them up but you sort of had it crack open in a vertical dimension.
>>Kiran That's right, that's right, it was huge because
I remember the thought that was running all through the first, I'd say two years of this,
while fear was in the beginning huge and then it was slipping a little bit, I was getting
some handle on being okay with what was happening.
During that time there was one thought running which was, because this realm that has invaded
my realm is beyond death, I can't kill myself to get out of this.
>>Rick: Interesting.
>>Kiran: So, or if I could kill myself, this physical body goes, but actually I'm not sure
if anything else is going to change.
>>Rick: You might become one of those spooks.
>>Kiran: Yeah, I'm just one of those.
So nothing can be gained by killing myself.
so I felt so trapped Rick, I mean it was like I have no option here, there is nothing to
do here but I have to go through with this.
There are plenty of books on this kind of stuff and you live not too far from Fyndhorn
and things like that, did you look into any of those things?
I didn't know what Fyndhorn was, I didn't know, I'd never heard the word new age, nothing,
I'd never heard the word freaky, you mentioned that earlier, I mean nothing.
You were just a Heineken girl that had her reality.
I'm going to give it my day and give it my night!
Yeah, and working hard and social stuff gave me a buzz, the arts gave me a buzz and it didn't
go any further, that was the world.
Was your business disrupted by all this?
Did you find it hard to function?
I had to shut it down.
Okay, here's a story. I wasn't too long into it, I think, oh yeah, it was exactly one week
since the first episode of Casper's Everywhere. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard
something in the living room and there was a woman hanging from the ceiling.
Hanging as with a noose or just hanging up there?
suspended suspended yeah floating with quite deftly quite deftly looking and I
was get out of my house get out of my house and and she said she said you can
help me I said I can't do anything for you get out of my house I can't you're
dead you know now let me ask you this when you when you had that conversation
with her were you speaking out loud such that your husband could have heard you
or was it all mental I I wasn't because he told me he would have heard it and he
didn't hear it so it must have been mental even though I thought I was being
I said, "You must have heard me!" and he said, "No, I really would have heard you."
The door was open and he's a light sleeper.
So I thought I was talking but obviously I wasn't.
It was in some non-verbal way, but I hadn't twigged at that time that you don't need to
use sound for your mental sentence to be given and another one received.
So what she said is, "You will do something to move me on, you know how to do it."
I said I don't know what to do, will you tell me?
And she said, look treat me as you would one of your friends and I said, ok but I don't
know you and she said, well you just imagine that you know me and I was putting up every
defense I was being a sloppy old cow you know and I just said, well if you were one of her
friends then I would feel compassion for you, I would send you love because you look like
you're in awful pain and she said I am and I'm stuck and I need energy from your world
to move to where I'm supposed to go next.
So I said, "Ok, well then I'm just going to imagine you're somebody I know and I'll send
you love."
And I put my two hands out to her and this beam of light came down from the ceiling and
my heart was beating, this thing came down and I intuitively caught it and I bent it
towards her and it actually felt like a hose pipe, it was tactile and I said, "Oh my God,
this is just love, it's just love, that's all you want actually is love."
And so she said, "You will do this to others like me."
And she left.
Interesting.
That beam of light thing is kind of interesting.
It almost sounds as though there wasn't just you and her in the equation, there was also
something sending that beam that wanted you to intermediate and kind of connect, be a
conduit so that beam could connect with her.
For why they couldn't connect the beam directly to her without you, I don't know.
>>Kiran Yes, it was for my benefit, I suppose in hindsight
the learning was for me, she came to teach me, you know, she was a working experiment,
you know, and volunteered I guess.
>>Rick Well it sounds like it was mutual too, because
she appears to have needed help.
>>Kiran She did, but was it enough or not I don't
know, but she said it was, so I did the trick.
Now the funny thing is, I went back to bed, immediately after this I went back to bed
and I was like dripping and like adrenals pumping and I thought, oh my god, oh my god,
And this other man appeared at the end of the bed and I said, "Get out of here, get out
of here, I've had too much to digest for one night, get out of here, enough!"
And he said, "I'm here to help you and I will tell you anything you need to know, anything."
And I said, "Okay, so tell me your name then if we're going to talk and if you're here
to tell me I need your name."
And he said, "I can't tell it to you yet," he said, "but you know, call me Liam because
Because it's an Irish name and I know you don't like that name and I thought, actually I don't,
okay, okay, alright, alright, look at this guy knows something and he's got a bit of
a sense of humor, alright.
So I said okay, let's start at the start then.
Is there a God?
And I sat up on the bed and I knew this part was telepathic because I wouldn't have the
sentence out and the sentence would be back, the answer would be back, the speed of his
transmission was phenomenal and he was full of light, I could see his eyes but it's like
there was this light, a dazzling light radiating from his chest to such an extent that it covered
most of his features.
So I couldn't make out too much of his features.
Then we spoke for a long time and he just said, "If you do follow this path," and it looked
like I had a choice because that's what he had to work with.
He had to work with where my brain and my understanding and my limitations were.
So he did yield to that.
And I suppose that's where Jack has the practice of that now also, seeking the value of that,
of where the belief stuck, and let's move from there.
And so he said, "Well, your life is going to change hugely if you go with this."
So I said, "Yeah, but what's in it for me if I do?"
Practical question.
Yeah, yeah, of course, all about me.
And he said, "This is what you will get."
And this sensation came up, which I don't know, a lot of Kundalini happened after that, can
you multiply Kundalini by a thousand?
You know, I mean phenomenal, arresting sensation, that was just like, Jesus, that's off the
Richter scale.
And he said, that is a teaspoon of love.
And love is what this is all about.
And you are looking at a teaspoon of a liquid that is greater than the largest ocean on the
planet.
And I went, "Ah, ok, this is just off the Richter scale."
And he said, "Yes, you can't comprehend what I'm talking about.
Do you want to pursue a path that is about this?"
I said, "Yes, do exactly what you like."
And then he said, "Well, ok, tomorrow morning you're going to imagine, you will now decide
that you imagined this sensation.
So I'm going to give it to you again, because you doubt a lot, which I did of course at
the time, and so he said, "Just prepare yourself."
So I laid down on the bed and I thought, "Okay, now," so that I could imagine, that I could
observe, but you would swallow the observer totally.
I went, "Okay, I'm going to go for this, take it away."
Now, I've got to jump in to follow up this story, Rick.
Eight years later I found out who this guy was.
Four, five, six, I'm just working out the year.
years after this, I connected with a spiritual master, who's called Master Jose, who's I
guess he must be late 50s now.
He's alive, he's a physical person?
Yeah, he's in a physical body, I've never physically met him, because of the clairvoyance
it was no big deal because I can see him, I can call him in.
He's actually in some place, Ecuador?
Yeah, he's got a wife and he lives in a house, and a son, and he lives in the north of Spain
still, and he runs meditation retreats, or a disciple of his runs meditation retreats,
and they do a type of chanting and a type of healing, and it's totally the devotional
path, totally. And I connected with this six years later, and went to several of these
retreats. Now, two years into this meditation, coming in and out, getting deeper and deeper
and beginning to follow this guy and thinking, "Gosh, this guy is very clear and any time
I go to these retreats I tune into him, the clarity is phenomenal and something tends
to drop out of all of the story of Jack."
So, God, this is the purest I can find, having looked at New Age, having tried everything
at that point that you can find.
And at this retreat we were chanting and it was the closing event and he appeared in front
of me and I went, "Oh, hello," and he said, and it was telepathically because everybody
was singing around me, and he said, "I'm Liam," Master Poseidon, and I went, "Who's Liam?"
Sure it was just like ...
>>Rick: You forgot that.
>>Kiran: Yeah, I completely had, like it was just a story six years before.
"Who's Liam?"
And he said, "You remember this?"
And he opened his hands and the image of him at the foot of my bed, I said, "Jesus Christ,
you're joking!"
And he went, "That was me, and I've waited for six years while you went to South America,
took loads of this, that and the next, thinking that you can find God through everything except
through your heart.
So my dear, are you ready to walk with me?
Now you're ready to work with a master."
I went, "Okay, if you have that kind of love that you sit watching me going around the
world doing stupid things in search of what you know I'm looking for, sure.
Okay, I trust you, I go for it."
I cried and cried and cried and some things said, "Okay, the search now gets easier.
Whatever it is you're looking for, he knows what you're looking for but you don't know
what you're looking for, you just know that you're looking."
I had that much.
And so all kinds of resistance to following a master was the next couple of weeks.
It should be a woman.
Hang on just one second.
So do you actually want to skip the last six years and pick it up from there or is there
anything worth talking about during those six years when you went to South America and
everything?
And you actually worked as a ghostbuster in Ireland?
Yeah, I did. I can give you a brief synopsis.
Hang on one second. Please continue.
So that's six years in a synopsized version.
Liam, or Master Jose, told me that to walk this path, do not take on any more contracts,
contracts, because I was working freelance at the time, within six months you will be
working as a ghostbuster. And I was like, "Oh no, not that kind of jitter!" But he said,
"If you go through this path, you will find out about fear."
I'm sure you've seen that movie, right? Ghostbusters?
Oh yeah, yeah, The Sixth Sense, The Sixth Sense was great.
That was great too, but you remember the old one with Dan Aykroyd and…
I do, I do. Who are you going to call?
I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to cross the beams!"
Great movie.
That one wasn't researched very well, but Sixth Sense was.
Oh yeah, that was a great movie.
So yeah, within six months then I started working as a Ghostbuster.
Within I don't know, I'd say maybe a year of working as a Ghostbuster, and he told me
to call it a Ghostbuster.
He said, "You're so concerned about your self-image, if you call yourself a Ghostbuster you're going
on a cringe and I'm like, "Oh God, this guy knows me too well, I was ready to admit that."
And so that name stopped.
So did you do for people what you did for that woman in your living room that night,
connect with a beam of light and send them on their way?
Is that what you were doing?
Yes.
That's right, pretty much that, just resolving what needed to be resolved.
And you know it's kind of therapy for the dead really, you know that's what it was really,
it was just moving on whatever the stock belief system was, usually forgiving oneself, that
was generally the one that would cause most movement.
But then you get a lot of malevolent spirits who would be throwing things across the room
or I remember one case of a child who had been to various psychologists, various psychiatric
ward, she was 12 years old and she would wake up in the morning black and blue and this was
the presenting symptom and the family somehow found out about me and I went and sure, sure
of course she was doing battle during the night, this is what was going on.
Could she see them the way you can see them?
Yeah, and everybody thought she was going psychotic, don't tell those stories to anybody, you know,
I was like, oh bless her, of course it was happening, you know, and so then move on,
the gang and sure she was fine and I stopped and that was the end of it, never record again.
Did you ever find any that were too strong to purge from the premises?
Yeah, what would happen is that they would just be laughing at me and they'd go for a
while and then two weeks later they'd come back and I'd say, "Hey sorry I'm going to
swing by and give you your money back because I can't, they won't take me for real."
Was there a big demand for that in your area?
Yeah, it was a full time job, yeah.
How do you charge for your services as a ghostbuster?
Yeah, it's funny, I don't know.
By the ghost or by the…
Little ghosts are $20 and big ghosts are $100?
I don't know, it's usually a donation or I don't know, my time for something, I'm
I'm not quite sure if there was any fixed rate, I've always been very looser on things like
that anyway.
It seems like the kind of thing that would have somehow caught the attention of the press
and you would have gotten skeptical articles written in the local papers about you.
Did that happen?
It never happened and my father gave me advice about that.
He said never, ever, ever let the media know about what you do.
He said that when I told him, "Listen, my life is changing, I'm going to do this."
You know, you have to tell your family at some point and then they all have a conference
among themselves thinking, "Ok, she's lost her marbles, what are we going to do?"
Well, it's not too far off, I mean the Catholic Church has exorcisms, it's sort of in the
same ballpark.
Yeah, it is, I don't know what they concluded out of it, I never bothered, that's their
business.
But yeah, he did give me that advice, don't go near the media at all, ever in your career,
you know, so of course, he was right, he was right, it would certainly have been a distraction
I think and it would have slowed things up I think.
So from that, a year later into the ghostbusting, a year into the ghostbusting rather, I heard
a voice when I was washing the dishes, and it's time to work on the living, stop working
on the dead.
like yeah, ok fine, not a clue what to do with this one, so show me what to do if that's
what I'm to do.
And so of course the same day, collecting my car from the local mechanic and he said
Jack if you ever do on living people, how you help the dead, I'd love to volunteer.
Oh no!
And I thought yeah ok, ok fine.
Two days later I came back and I said well were you serious?
So he came to my sitting room floor, I thought ok I'll pull out an old mattress and a sleeping
bag and throw him on top of that and he fell asleep.
Perfect.
Ok, he's asleep.
Now I'll just sit here and think, ok, I've set it up, now voice from wherever you are,
tell me what to do, and lo and behold his chakra system became visible and I went, oh
my god, look at these colors, look at these wheels, oh my god, look at this mess, and
my hand started to move and turn this and twist that and then explaining this to a friend
of mine, she said, these are chakras, you can buy books about these, there's charts
about these in my yoga class, and I went, "OK, tell me what to do."
So I went and I had a psychic reading with somebody and she just said, "You get this
book, you get this book, you do this course."
She was fantastic and put me on the track of the new age, because I needed that language,
I needed that world, because that's what was appearing in front of me, so I needed the
skill to manage there.
>>Rick: Let me just interject a question, was that Master Jose who came to you and changed
your marching orders to start weekend living, was it him again?
>>Kiran: Yeah, I think so.
There was nothing else that responded to any kind of authority except to his authority
I think.
There was a sense of all the other stuff, "Ah, go away, go away, go away."
There was something about his energy that was just unquestionable.
It would be like, "Sure."
Doubt would come in, there was a trust there.
So from there into the New Age thing I ended up at a sweat lodge and met somebody at a sweat
at large who told me about sanctidae me. So then I did sanctidae me intensively for a
couple of months. What's that?
Oh yeah, it's a plant from Brazil which is quite connected to a church. It's a medicine,
a plant medicine. It's hallucinogenic for sure it is.
Ok. Yeah. And there's quite a lot of that in Europe.
It's legal now in Holland, that the church is actually recognized as a church. And this
would be the sacrament, the sanctidae me would be a sacrament.
I don't think it needs to be really because now it's a recognised church at least in Europe.
And so from that somebody said, well if you're drawn to this, then what about Ayahuasca?
I was like, well what's that?
And so I got very interested in Ayahuasca, I got very interested in that and ended up
spending some time in Peru, I know, just a few weeks, but an intensive camp.
I went back to Bolivia several times and worked closely with a shaman there.
>>Rick: So what did all this do for you, the sanctidaim in the Ayahuasca, what were your
experiences with those?
>>Kiran: Oh, they were wild of course, because I was so open and so available.
>>Rick: And you were already seeing stuff, you must have started really seeing stuff.
>>Kiran: It was wild, it was crazy, it was nuts.
You know, in the feedback, like in the early morning, at dawn, when everybody's talking,
I'd be like, "I'm going to have to taper down what I'm going to say here," and I was looking
around because I just picked out one bit of a story because they ain't seen nothing, you
know?
>>Rick: Is it worth telling us some details or do you feel like now that would be just
sort of a distraction?
>>Kiran: Yeah, I think so because it's all simply just different aspects of mind.
Any concept that can be thought manifests in some shape or form, that's the deal with the
concept.
It has the capacity to manifest in form or formless or in some dimension or some place
and I suppose I was able to access those dimensions very easily on plant medicine.
One thing, one story I'll tell, because it might be somebody's experience, I was taking
San Pedro, and there's a specific way that you take this medicine, in that you're walking
around a fire within a corralled area until about 4am in one direction, which is the unwind.
And then the shaman stops the whole thing, a little ceremony happens and you walk the
opposite way.
I can't remember when it's clockwise and when it's anticlockwise, I don't remember.
So in the winding in of it, the shedding of stuff as I was going out, and at 4am you start
to pull back in until dawn comes.
Since I was coming back in there was like a shudder and my vibration energetically would
drop and it made me understand how energy works in some way and I would feel like you get
the shake of somebody walking on your grave, you know that kind of a shudder and something
would feel more dense and in that density it would be, and so you think this and so
this is real and so this person is in your life because you're holding this belief and
this isn't cleared and so there's this belief going on and so then this person is in your
life and this is the scenario and that's why you're in the job you're in and that's why
you're married to this person and I was like shit!
So as each little belief system that Jack was holding at the time of how she thought the
world worked, as each one was coming back in I could feel a density, a thickness, a yucky,
shitty, crappy feeling kind of coming in at a cellular level and it's like something or
or I don't know actually really what it was, was there some astral body coming in or some
density which had blown out but the parts that hadn't been dissolved were coming back in because
I wasn't ready or I couldn't integrate the shifts, maybe something like this.
And so I could actually see, oh my god, this is just total density, the world as I see it
is the world because I see it like this.
And only because I see it, I've totally created everything that I believe, everything how
it is, is not how it is at all.
It's only how it is because I believe it's how it is.
Oh my God, that's what I have to do.
So it gave me a fantastic reorientation to see that this is totally my belief system,
there's nothing else, this isn't about faith or going someplace, this isn't about anything
except the belief system of believing that I'm Jack who thinks the world is like this.
There's something inherently unstable about this, because it can be thrown off and it
can come back in, so it's just a ball of conditioning.
So somehow it became clear of the years of therapy that I did when I started at 19 to
25, just going to a psychotherapist, that part clicked in, that's what the pull was
to get rid of conditioning.
That's why it feels so awful to believe your own story and why there's freedom when you
shed something because energetically there's the loosening, there's a contraction which
ceases.
So that was a great seeing, that was probably the best one actually, it's the one that comes
to mind now.
>>Rick: That's very interesting, I wish everyone could have that experience.
>>Kiran: Yeah, it was a great one.
The other big whammy then was on sancto daime where everything was stripped and this serious
vacuum sucked any concept that I was clinging to, excluding the idea of myself.
And that awful void continued for hours and hours and hours, even after the ceremony, but
the organizers of the ceremony were trying to bring me back and my body was, I mean totally
I could look and of course the mental faculties were going on and I could talk but I had no
power at all from the neck down, none.
You mean you couldn't walk or anything?
Nothing, nothing, I was lying on the floor, I was just limp.
Was it really awful to be stripped of concepts or did you actually kind of like it in some
way?
No, it was horrific.
There was nothing to stand on, no ground, there was just nothing and then even nothing was
taken away, there wasn't even a comfort in nothing.
You should know this one as a Catholic, "For the foxes have their holes and the birds have
their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."
That's exactly it.
I think that's what he was talking about, but he had adjusted to it obviously.
Yes, yes.
You're dead right Rick, that's exactly what that was, that there's nothing stable in any
of this.
And I try, you know, even in the middle of that I was saying, "But Jesus Christ, you
know, if you're a Christian you're like, Jesus let me grab something, somewhere that
was valid for a while, maybe."
And I clung to that and it was like, no, a concept, a belief system, another relative
story, it was like, shit, shit, there was nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
So from that what was deduced was that existence, existence itself is a myth.
It's not that which exists, it's not real.
>>Rick: You mean manifest existence or concrete existence?
>>Kiran: Yes, yes, and that something can exist.
It was prior to the something, this was about existence going.
It wasn't that the things, in the beginning the things went, you know, Jesus or my life
or whatever, the physical world, the cosmos, all the dimensions, I was jumping from anywhere
for some rest.
So when the things went, existence itself went and that's what the horror was.
You will cling to survive in any capacity you will, you can, the basic instinct of any
human individual is to cling to life, that instinct will kick in no matter how clear
the understanding is that it's not real or that this is an illusion or only an appearance,
some basic instinct will kick in to keep the form alive until it's done.
And then it's done and that's fine.
>>Rick: Were you still married at this point?
Were you going through all this stuff and going to South America?
But your husband was cool with it?
>>Kiran: He said, "If I didn't know you for so long beforehand," because I met him when
I was 17, he said, "If I didn't know you for so long I would be gone, girl, gone."
because this is just too much, but actually I'm finding it interesting because it's you.
So actually he was just, she worked in the post office, real stable, solid guy, played
his golf, so he was very grounded which enables me to go off and do wacky stuff and come back
to base and be okay.
So he allowed the integration.
Yeah, it must have been good for you to have an anchor.
That was wonderful.
Definitely, if there's no anchor there, gosh, it's tough.
It's tough, yeah.
It can be very tough for people who don't have any reference point for that integration
while the human life is in transition, you know, until that phase finishes.
I got pretty darn crazy myself before I got married, I mean just being on this totally
dedicated to a spiritual path and boy, when I think back, I think, God, was I nuts, you
It took many years to get more and more integrated and get rid of a lot of my idiosyncrasies,
but I wasn't having any kind of experiences like you were having, but still meditating
hours a day and so on.
>>Karen: Yeah, yeah.
And when you look back at that now Rick, what was that at play?
I sort of feel like all is well and wisely put. I take the long view of things, the big
time eyes, as I think somebody put it, and I just sort of feel like everything is unfolding
just as it should. I started out really nuts, heavily into drugs as a teenager and dropped
out of school and just a real mess. I don't want to turn this into a whole thing about
me, but I learned to meditate when I was 18 and it really turned me around profoundly
and dramatically, but there was many years of healing and restructuring and all that
needed to take place, because I'd really gone at it as a younger person and had a rough
family life and all that stuff.
But anyway, let's get back to you.
And here you are now, domestic again, touching into it from within a domestic scenario, you
know.
It's amazing, they're not in opposition to each other at all are they?
No.
Isn't it funny?
Yeah.
It's funny because I have a sister who seems to have this skill to kind of see where Jack
is at, where the character is at, and she often says, "Jack, you know, someday, someday
you will go into a relationship again."
I'm like, I'm so far from that, the Jack character is so far from that.
It's funny, you know, and she just says, "No, you will, you will, it'll just go around like
that."
So it's funny, you know, I wonder will that integration happen for Jack again, I don't
know.
Never say never.
Yeah, never say never.
I mean, your master Jose, he was married and had a kid, right?
Yeah, he's still married.
Yeah, he's still with her.
He seems to be doing okay.
You bet.
>>Rick: It's fascinating that he was able to scope you out from Spain and find this woman
in Ireland who's having this experience and appear at your bedside and have all this interaction,
where must someone be at to be functioning in that way?
>>Kiran: That's right, that's right.
>>Rick: Does he speak English?
Maybe I should interview him.
>>Kiran: No, he doesn't speak English at all.
And he's completely in retreat, he never physically appears.
So where am I at?
Where were we at?
R: Ok, well you had jumped ahead six years to your visit with Master Jose in Spain and
then I kind of backtracked you back to the Amazon and Peru and everything, we went through
some of those hallucinogenic experiences, so we can take it up from wherever you like now.
>>Karen Yeah, so okay, so from the connection with Master Jose, there was a few big wobblers
I think really, with Ama, as in the hugging mother, and from those retreats from the Master
Jose school.
>>Rick Yeah, I want to hear about that because I'm
very fond of Ama and my wife and I have been seeing her since about 11 years and we go
2, 3, 4 times a year and spend time with her.
And you also spent some time when you were camping in Spain, but maybe that's the Master
Jose thing.
Yes, that was the Master Jose thing.
So maybe we should go on to Amrita Puri, I don't know.
The first time with Emma, she was in Ireland, it was her very first trip in Ireland, and
after the, just before the hug, when I was coming up to the hug I thought, I'm going
to puke, I'm going to puke, what am I going to do, I'm queuing up here and I'm going to
vomit on this lady, you know.
And of course I didn't, because I felt like, oh this is an energetic, then I twigged, this
isn't food, I didn't eat, it's been hours I've been sitting here, ok fine, this is energetic,
calm down Jack, calm down.
And the shift that happened after the hug, it's like the energetic movement happened
and I spent an hour and a half in some kind of trance, whereby I felt I was communicating
with her, I was sitting down, my body was shaking because there was a friend of mine holding
my jacket as I went up, so she was just sitting there watching me doing this shaking thing
for an hour and a half, and at that time she told me, "You will have to leave your husband,
your marriage is going to end, you will" and I was like, "You get a grip, you're just playing
with me here."
>>Rick: Self-admittedly she said that.
>>Kiran: Yeah, sure.
So she told me some home truths like this, which came to pass.
I shut everything down at one point, now let me think, maybe a year after Amma.
What do you mean you shut everything down?
Yeah, I knew, ok, I was working as a healer at this point, so as a healer, maybe I was
about 36, ok so the Kainikin and Kaspar was when I was 30, ok?
So then there was about six years until I hit the Master Jose thing, where I had done the
energy work, the New Age, the Ayahuasca, all the shamanic stuff.
I hit the Master Jose thing, started cleaning up everything because it was more meditation,
more chanting, more contemplative.
And so from those two years with Master Jose, I felt that whatever I'm doing, giving workshops
on chakra healing, on chanting, running weekend residentials, on healing the family tree,
I got involved in all that stuff.
And so, it has its place like everything, it just came clear that this is going nowhere,
this is a service, fine, and everything in my life at that point was a service, because
that was all that made sense, and that really all I'm doing is gathering information and
sharing information and this is just engaging my mind all the time, I'm trying to balance
it out with meditation and with observation and there's something amiss here, I keep accumulating
more information and engaging my mind in a way that I know is not helping, I've got to
in some way leave all of this.
And so I started doing my work but without the third eye capacity, so I thought ok, shut
down this extra information and just be normal, just be normal and see if that churns up more
crap.
And so I did and I was able to like, no, only the physical realm, only the physical realm
and that's possible to do.
And so that was too much also, it was like, "Ok Jack, but I want more silence, I need
to go away, where am I going to go, what am I going to do?"
And I thought, ok, I go to where there's more light.
Now what's light?
I thought, ok, the sun is light, after that, the rest of it is just ideas.
The sun is light, ok, I'll trust that, we're down to the physical realm again.
So I put my tent on my back and I went to a campsite in the south of Spain for 3 months
and my husband came out once for a week and I would phone him every now and then or something
and when I came back to Ireland in the airport and he collected me I was like, it's gone,
it's gone, something is finished here, I can't be his wife anymore, something is broken.
So then I knew that this is very drastic here, I'm actually going to have to lose everything,
I can't play with this one at all.
So we talked about it and he said, "Ok, it will finish when it will finish."
That was June and by September it was, "I actually can't be engaged with you sexually
anymore."
And he said, "Well now it's finished, now it's done."
And that was the end of it, you know.
So I went to Spain.
R: Although you've got to give him credit for having been very patient for a long time.
J: I should have found him a sweetheart.
And we're great mates, you know, his girlfriend is lending me her car next week.
It's lovely, it's lovely, we've just always been great mates, it's just that we couldn't
do the marriage thing anymore.
He now says, "Jack, the best thing you ever did for me was leave me, the best thing you
ever did, because it threw me upside down."
And so of course everything works out fine, you just have to ride through the uncertainties,
you know.
From that, yes, I moved to Tenerife and I met somebody who said, "I want to go to India
to study yoga and will you come with me?"
like okay, okay, let's see what yoga is about, went to this yoga center which was at the back
of Arunachala and after three days this crack about saluting the sun and my hands up and
my legs down and crabs and dogs and cats and forget it, I am not a yogic, I'm quitting,
and so it's like okay I'm going around to the other side of the mountain and I'll wait
in the local village and see you in three weeks time when the course is over and over
at the other side of the village, it was Thiruvanamalai, and I was like, Jesus, where was I, what was
I messing around with for so long, they're putting words on what I know, they're putting
words on that which I thought had no words, we can point towards that which is beyond
mind, the relief Rick, it was wild, just to like, Jesus, people talk about it, oh my God,
the word non-dual for the first time.
I suppose this probably couldn't have happened now because nowadays there's non-dual people
on every street corner talking about it.
And YouTube wasn't there, it just wasn't available.
So from there I spent a lot of time on my own, I spent a lot of time just doing self inquiry,
a few years really, until Richard Miller knocked on my door and that was the end of Jack's
solitude.
Good old Richard Miller, he gets around.
He sure does.
And then at what point did you go to Amritapuri?
>>K: Yeah, to just get a break from Tiruvannamalai, when the season would be there in January,
February and Amma is doing her Indian tour, she's hanging out in the ashram, it's like
"Okay, too many Westerners here, it's too busy, it's too much of a party scene" and
I was going in too much at that point, I couldn't engage.
So yeah, get a train across to Amrita Puri and stay for a week or two weeks or something.
>>Rick: You said something on your biography about really being incapacitated there and
having to be fed or just sort of being completely out of it for six days, what was that all about?
>>Kiran: Yeah, there was a mantra which appeared, as they often do, you know, just a sentence
comes which obviously you've heard somewhere or something, and it was "I am the supreme
consciousness, I am the supreme consciousness" and it was running, running, running, running,
as things were at that point because my mind was very much going to a single point.
And I remember looking out the window of the little rooms in Amrita Puri, looking out the
window way down to the queue, right out from the temple of hundreds and hundreds of people,
and seeing so clearly that, oh my gosh, look, that really requires a lot of imagination
to imagine that we are all people and that they are individuals doing separate things
and that they have lives and that she is the mother of that child.
What a load of make-believe ideas placed on top of just balls of energy which we call bodies
which are moving completely just as the cosmos is moving, it's just particles moving and
somehow we believe we are separate from this?
What a crazy idea, but that idea is just part of the movement too.
And so some seeing of there is no individuality at all, concepts are never the truth, they're
not real, they can be taken as real but they don't represent capital and reality.
And so in the seeing of that I seemed to not be there and functioning was happening because
I was thankfully with somebody who could say, "Come on Jack, I need to eat" and pull me off
the floor and I would just eat and go back to the room and lie down again and then it
was six days later and it was like, okay, what's appearing now and how come this is sort of
solid again and what's going on?
But the thought that brought me back was sex, the idea of sex, because the partner I was
with was having a shower and I was just lying there and I could see him having a shower
and thinking, "Why does this body imagine it connects with that body in a pleasurable
way?
What on earth could imagine that there is a subject of pleasure in this?"
And somehow it's like, "Oh my God, yeah!
Oh now I can see how that works, oh that's amazing and boom!"
There was Jack again!
much less, it was just seeing that, oh what was left then was that the sense of I am an
individual is only alive when there is desire running, it only kicked in and it wasn't that,
it was clear that there isn't an I here all the time that tunes in with self image or
tunes in with desire, not at all, the I is part of that thought, it's like it's a quality
attached to a particular thought at any time.
Some thoughts have an "I" sense about them and the wonderful magic of that is that it
has the capacity to make you believe you're real and you're separate from the thought
that you're having.
It's like, what a joke!
>>Rick: So would it be fair to say that it has its function when it's needed but that
it gets sort of overindulged in ordinarily and becomes something which really should just
be sort of an occasional functional useful thing becomes the predominant permanent situation.
>>Kiran: It does, it does, in order to make having a human life possible.
So it's totally wonderful the fact that it concretizes in some way.
It's amazing that it actually is believable and it's 100% believable, especially when
they're suffering.
It's more believable when they're suffering, because that density is there.
>>Rick: Very dense, yeah.
I mean if we held our hand over a candle flame or something like that, it would concretize
very quickly.
Or if I held mine over a candle flame and you didn't, the pain would be located here,
not there.
I'd be the one who, there'd be a sense of, get that arm away and you wouldn't have that
sense so much, because this is my kind of concrete manifestation.
>>K: That's right, that's right.
And there are layers to it, because the instinct for the body to protect itself, that's always
there of course, and for some it's overlaid with a fear of, I'm going to die, or I'm vulnerable,
or don't remind me that I'm mortal, and even with those gone, there is a basic instinct
that moves to protect itself.
>>Rick: Yeah, which anyone, Ramana Maharshi had, anybody.
>>Kiran: Sure, sure.
>>Rick: I heard you talking about this in one of your satsangs, how you were saying that
there's always going to be some remnant of I or ego or sense of self as long as you're
alive.
I'm not a Sanskrit scholar by any stretch, but I happen to know of one phrase which is
called "leisha vidya" in Sanskrit, and what it means is "faint remains of ignorance."
And the idea is that as long as you're a functioning human being, there has got to be some leisha
vidya in order for you to function, otherwise you couldn't distinguish the wall from the
door or know to put food in your mouth.
>>Kiran That's right, that's right, yeah.
And I guess it's the working mind, because the thinking mind is the part that achieves
liberation, it's a mental phenomenon, liberation anyway.
So that seeing of the illusion as the illusion is just for the thinking capacity of mind.
So the working mind is there but yet something enables a movie to appear as a movie.
The appearance still appears.
It's an appearance, but it appears to appear, still.
R: Yeah, and there's some kind of mutuality in it too, because if you and I were sitting
in the same room, we'd both see the same table and the same chair and the same wall
and everything else, and if one of us were to die, that table, chair and wall, the other
one would still see those things.
So it's not like we totally create our own individual reality afresh and uniquely, each
one of us, there's some kind of a universal thing and we all just sort of tune into it
to whatever extent we do, or however we perceive it.
>>Karen: Yes, and then at satsang you find somebody an hour into it saying, "Every question
that was asked could have been mine."
So at the subtle layer also there's such a commonality because it's just one ball of
energy, it just keeps moving around and so there isn't a whole lot that's subjective
actually, it depends on how wide a lens you want to look through.
>>Rick: So as far as the Jack story is concerned, we left you kind of lying on the floor in
Amrita Puri, did you ever reach a point where you felt like, "Okay, this is the final stroke
and is that farther along in your telling here?"
I don't know because I have no plan.
Okay I remember walking around, I used to have a practice of walking meditation, of walking
around the Samadhi Shrine of Ramana Maharshi and I remember walking around that, I think
it was like in August or something, there was nobody there, and the sentence, the show
The show is over, the show is over, and I often use that now actually, the show is over, the
show is over, the show is over, and something just went, what makes an I appear?
What is it?
Desire, ok, ok, ok, I think it was desire, let's see, let's see if desire, where's desire,
what's desire?
And after that sentence, that repeated sentence, because it was running for ages before it
was heard and it was like, "Oh gosh, I seem to have lost something."
Within a few days later, in the shower, again in Teru, I'm doing this because you throw
jugs of water over yourself, in the shower, and it was like, "Oh, my mind is breaking,
my mind is breaking," and there was this sense of an iceberg breaking into particles and
particles flowing away.
I was like, I'm losing my marbles here, ok, ok, fine, psychiatric hospital in India, so
be it, so be it.
>>Rick: Oh, you must have been used to losing your marbles by that time.
>>Kiran: Yeah, totally, it was like, ok, what's next?
Yeah, totally, well off the Richter scale at this point.
So those two experiences were, in hindsight now, they felt like that some wiring, some
essential wiring that's necessary to make the I be believed.
That wiring was burning out, that the I never, ah God, it's just not authentic, there's a
gap between an I story and what is believed.
How can anything be believed?
idea of believing anything, it's just nuts, nothing can be believed, who could it be believed
by? Believing is just part of a ball of energy that moves through consciousness, why would
it be owned or believed? Some link broke in what gives an authenticity to the manifested
world.
So in hindsight I would have to say it was those two incidences that happened quite close
to each other in linear time.
R: It's interesting how most spiritual seekers, there's definitely a personal motivation
it seems that they start out with where they kind of have some realizations that there's
something more and they think, "I've got to get that."
And so they start doing practices and reading books and going to seminars and there's this
a very purposeful thing. In your case, you were just going along, living your life, and
it's like a big hook came in and grabbed you by the neck and said, "Here's what we've
got planned for you." Obviously, you've gone and pursued all sorts of things over
the years, but it's more like you just stumbled onto a fast-moving train and had not much
choice in the matter. You were destined for this thing and you were almost chosen. I'm
I mean, like in the Master Jose incident, he just kind of came along and boom.
So it's fascinating, it does happen to some people that way.
Not everyone.
>>Kiran: No, not everyone, and both must exist, you know, that you go after it or that it
comes after you.
I was playing catch up, I was just constantly trying to make sense of something because
the next thing was already on top of me.
>>Rick: Some people might speculate that…
I often remember thinking, maybe I'll ask to slow it down, maybe I'll ask to slow it down,
and I did once, because I thought about it so much I can remember, I asked once, it has
to slow down, and about three days later I thought, no, no, actually I'm ok now again,
I'm ok now again, off it goes.
Who do you think you're asking?
Ah, sure, good question, my mind I suppose, what else?
Either that or some bigger intelligence, you know, some higher, I mean…
>>Karen: Yeah, maybe so, who knows?
I don't know, it just went out there.
>>Rick: Obviously, you look at the universe, it's vast and fascinating and complex and
you and I couldn't create a housefly if we needed to, there's just so much intelligence
inherent in everything.
So to me it always seems like there's…
I mean I start my day every day by looking at some astronomy pictures of galaxies and
stuff like that.
Rick - It seems like there's some much bigger intelligence running the show and we fathom
that to whatever extent we can and essentially we are that but as human beings, individual
human beings, we don't have that kind of power.
But it seems like there is a bigger power and perhaps deputies and sub-deputies and
so on, who were all involved in running this thing and you got tagged.
Some people might speculate that you had done a lot of spiritual work in previous lives
or something and therefore you were ready for this, who knows?
>>Karen: Who knows, who knows?
But I suppose the deputies and the sub-deputies and the magnificence of galaxies, we are all
of it.
We are all of it, mind just says we are this body so therefore there are these other things
that can be labeled, but we are all of it, we cannot not be all of it.
We are all of it.
Somebody posted a question on my blog the other day and I wrote a little answer, and this
is going to shift gears for us here.
I want to read it to you, it'll just take a minute, and then see what your response is
to it.
He said, "Although I am impressed with the abilities of the many non-duality teachers
and more every day, but where are they coming from, to describe and point to nonduality
in all the ways that they do, I have not seen anyone wake up as a result of experiencing
their teachings.
Have you?
And I wrote, "I have, and I believe it happens, but I think it only happens when one is ready
to awaken.
It doesn't help people climbing a mountain to hear a man standing on the mountaintop
describe his surroundings.
If such a description is offered, it should be to inspire people to continue climbing.
Or it may be that some people have reached the summit, but climbing has become such a
habit that they think they need to keep doing it.
For them, the assurance that this is it can legitimately end the search.
But most people are still well down the mountain, and they need instructions relevant to where
they are.
The man at the top may forget his own climb and say, "There is no climb, only this view
from the top."
The climbers may believe him and give up the climb, believing they have already reached
the summit.
They may even start advising fellow climbers that they too have arrived.
A real teacher recognizes that different people need instructions and practices relevant to
their level of experience.
One size does not fit all.
Traditionally, Advaita was intended to provide the final stroke of knowledge to complete
the enlightenment of people who had traversed many developmental stages.
It was not intended as a general instruction for spiritual seekers.
In the hands of beginners and intermediates it can become a channel for fundamentalist
mentality.
I also believe, and often mention during these interviews, that there are many stages of
awakening.
Some of these can be very profound and are easily misinterpreted as final.
So, what do you think about all that?
>>Kiran: Yeah, yeah, I go with, I think, pretty much all of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
All the styles are out there.
There are non-Jewish speakers who sit at the top and say, "There's only the view from the
top of the mountain and nothing else is real."
And then there's, I don't know, I suppose Jack's style is like putting a torch to see
if I can shine a bit of light at the rock in front of somebody's toe and say, "Listen,
would you just watch this one coming up or go to the right of it or go to the left of
or time on top of it, because that's what was done for Jack, you know, there was always
that sense of, ok if I just know the next step and something was always showing me the
next step, no matter how wacky it was, I always took it and then from there the next step
would come and of course I fell on my ass loads of times, of course, I'm sure it still
happens, which is a lot, that's just life.
So yes, there is a lot of speaking from the top of the mountain which is completely a waste
of time for those who are at the bottom of the mountain.
There has to be a maturity to be able to hear words which come from that which is beyond,
without story, if those words are story.
Intellectually I think a person can be still fairly low on the mountain and sort of grok
what somebody means when they speak from the top of their head.
They say, "Yeah, intuitively I understand what you're saying.
Nothing ever happened.
There's only one of us."
There's this and so on and so forth.
I think what seems to happen too often is that people mistake that intellectual insight
as the actual experience of being on top of the mountain.
Then they think, "I'm done."
All this talk of progress and all these gurus and all this stuff is a lot of bunk because
I've got this idea, I'm finished.
I think it's just a concept.
Yeah, they did, it's just a concept.
And the word fundamentalist that I used here, not only in Neo-Advaita but in Christianity
or Islam or whatever, there's a certain kind of mentality that loves to latch on to a concept
of an absolute reality and try to make it absolute but it's really only a concept.
Because it's really only a relative perspective, which is all it can be from that level of
experience, it ends up clashing with every other relative perspective.
Then we fight wars over our concepts and we kill each other, we fly airplanes into buildings
and so on.
Yes, apparently we do.
Yes, I mean look what happened to you in Catholic Girls School, they were feeding you a load
of concepts and presenting them as absolute and saying this is what you have to believe
and we're training you so you can get others to believe this, but what does it matter what
anybody believes, they're just concepts.
Yes, they are just concepts, they are just concepts, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I don't know, there is such a supermarket now of Advaita out there, I suppose for listeners,
take whatever is useful, but to be so honest with yourself, is it real or do I want to
believe this?
Is this actually going to, is this the next step or does this make sense?
Now if you wake up, that's fine, that's magic, wonderful, delighted for anybody who wakes
up on the park bench, they don't have to do all the madness, the jacket.
So but you can't sit around and wait for that to happen, and it might or might not happen,
if it's going to happen it's going to happen anyway, but in the meantime, gosh, yeah, of
course, let the maturing happen, let the eye finish out what it needs to do, find out if
there's something that still wants to experience something and have those experiences and go
go and live and go and travel and go and do whatever it is the I wants to do, so that
there are no regrets, that experiences are seen through, that desires are seen through,
and maturity needs to kick in, so that it's seen that none of these things are real enough,
the juice is gone from what the phenomenal world can offer, from even what my mind and
my concepts can offer, the juice is gone.
that maturity needs to happen and for many that won't happen at all in a meditation hall.
For some you can see an immature eye sitting in a meditation hall and it's like, "Jesus,
if you went out and lived in the world, you know what, there'd be a different energy
form sitting here two years later."
You know, it's totally, totally individual.
Thankfully there are no two paths the same.
So really feeling where you're at and not grabbing, because the spiritual supermarket
like any supermarket, you know, give me the color red first, regardless of what's in the
packet.
You know, it's like, hold on, hold on, what do you need?
What makes sense?
Where are you stuck?
Where is there a contraction?
Where is there a tightness?
Where are you holding on to a belief system?
Because the belief system is making you think you're an individual.
So and then there's an I who hangs on to it.
It's like, okay, have a look at self-image, have a look at these sticky ones, you know,
have a look at when you defend yourself, have a look at these things that make you feel
that you are an individual.
That's the work, that's what it is.
>>Rick: Speaking of the work, I'm sure you've heard of Byron Katie, right?
She's very good at it, she has a nice little technique for helping to do that.
>>Katie: She has a nice technique, she does, she does.
That helps a lot of people.
It does, yeah, it does.
Whatever tool it is, and this intellectual snobbery that's part of this non-dual movement
now, it's like, "Oh, Jesus!"
no maturity at all and so many people are just grabbing the intellectual aspect of it and
it's like, what good is that to you?
You know when you're trying to pay a mortgage, now balance it up, balance it up.
When you're in the horrors because you're in physical pain and you're attached to your
physical pain and you believe that you are doing your body, what good is it now?
I'll send you a link to a very funny cartoon, it's an animated cartoon, it lasts about ten
minutes but it's about a conversation with a neo-advaitist and someone who just says,
"Hey look at the beautiful tree" and he goes into this whole thing about there is no tree,
there is no beauty, there is no self.
They go back and forth, I'll send you the link.
Good, good, good, thank you.
I'm sorry, I interrupted you.
No, not at all, sure, whatever.
Good.
Yeah, so I don't know, it goes the way it goes, you know, and is there a path, is there
not a path?
There's a path for an eye and there's no point in dropping a spiritual path until it is totally
known and seen and understood that it's useless.
You know, you have to mature to the point to see that the spiritual search is actually
the obstacle.
But to grab that, because like for Jack, I never heard that sentence, that the search
is blocking me.
It popped, it was like, "Jesus Christ, here I am doing japa, this is the problem, this
is the problem, because there's me and there's some participants, holy shit, what am I going
to do now?
You can't do anything, whatever you do is going to be a block.
So in one way it was a blessing that there was no, even though I was like, God, will
somebody tell me what I'm going through, somebody tell me what this thing is about, and I could
get answers nowhere, because it was pre this internet availability of this information.
So now people have that, so arriving at these points isn't happening, the natural maturing
isn't happening.
And I would suggest that your Joppa and various other things you did were not blocks at a certain stage until they were.
It's like training wheels on a bicycle. At a certain stage you need the training wheels and then at a certain stage the training wheels just get in your way.
They just get in your way. You got it. And make flow as it does and enjoy the flow because it's organic and it's not you anyway.
But you think it's you and even enjoy that it's you while you think it's you because that too spins out.
out.
>>Rick: Yeah, I mean all things must pass as George Harrison is saying.
>>Kiran: Yeah, exactly, with whatever is presenting as real, it's just presenting as real, so be
honest about it, let it be where it is, and it will pass, it all passes, of course, the
whole thing goes up in smoke anyway.
>>Rick: That's good, I think this point needs to be brought out more because there are so
so many voices saying, "Give up the search, there is no search, all paths and techniques."
There's a Zen saying which is something like, "Enlightenment happens accidentally but spiritual
practices make you accident prone."
>>Karen: Wonderful, I love it, I love it.
That's a beaut, I haven't heard that before.
That's a beaut, that says it in one.
Yeah, that's how it is.
>>Rick: Well, this has been a lovely talk.
I'm so happy that I stumbled across you on YouTube and I'll put this up on my site and
help more people stumble across you.
I'll link to your site.
I've already put a thing up on the site but I haven't added this interview obviously because
I haven't done it yet.
I will link to your website and people who want to go there to find out more.
There are tons of talks that you've given on the site.
I have this little tool in Firefox called Download Them All and I applied it to your page and
it downloaded over 7 gigabytes of audio, just audio.
God, is there that much up there?
And then there's tons of videos.
People are going to have a feast if they want to listen to you.
Yeah, if it works for them and if it drives them nuts, there's other people out there,
know, whatever works. And you travel around and I'm sure you have
some kind of mailing list people can get on if they want to be notified of where you're
going to be. It's just on my website really, I don't have
a mailing list. It's just on my website, people check in where they want to check in,
but a retreat center is being built in Costa Rica so I'm going to live there.
Oh nice, will it be yours exclusively or sort of for other teachers to help?
No, it's just myself, somebody's building it and I'm going to live there.
It's just a small intimate, whoever wants to come.
Something here is moving away from giving isolated satsang events, it just feels like a spiritual
opener or something, it's kind of like too much of a supermarket, "Oh who's in town this
weekend?"
"Ah, give me somebody who's a mature seeker, who's done a lot of work" and in some way
way then.
I don't know, I'm not drawn to working with a mind that's suspicious and just checking
out, testing out to see what something is like.
It's like, "Oh come on, come on, come on."
>>Rick: Well you know I see that too as a stage in your progress, because you went through
the phase of doing the satsangs and come one, come all, and now you're entering a new phase,
which probably won't be your final phase, it's another phase.
I'm sure, it's just another phase, so now it's residentials, it's just all residentials,
you know, that's where it's moving to now.
So yeah, that will fade too and that will seem like a bad idea at some point and then we'll
do something else.
R: Yeah, but each phase serves its purpose.
K: Yeah, it does of course, it keeps moving and changing, thank heaven.
R: And Costa Rica is not such a bad place to hang out?
K: I believe so, yeah, it's got a nice vibe, you know, something slow, something gentle,
and the weather is a hell of a lot nicer than in Ireland.
Rick>> Thanks so much Jack.
Janna>> Thanks so much Rick.
It was fun.
Rick>> Yeah, don't hang up on me quite yet.
I just want to wrap it up here and then we'll talk for just a second after we wrap it up.
So this has been Buddha at the Gas Pump, episode number 41 I believe.
My name again is Rick Archer, I've been speaking with Jack O'Keefe in Ireland and not sure
who's going to be next week, but we'll see you then.
Thank you for listening.
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