Mystical Awakening & Divine Love –
Aedamar Kirrane – Transcript

Aedamar Kirrane Interview

Summary:

Full interview, edited for readability

Aedamar: Suddenly that voice spoke again and the voice said, I would walk into that mountainside  and reenter the womb of Christ.  And I was gob smacked.  And then the feeling, I didn’t hear any, any more voice.  I didn’t hear anything else beyond that.  That was the end.  And then I just came more and more and more back into my body and into this realm and  into this world.  And I was, I was dumbstruck.  What had happened?  How did it happen?  Why did it happen?  What did it mean?  How could I have it again?

Suddenly that voice spoke again and the voice said, I would walk into that mountainside and reenter the womb of Christ. And I was gob smacked.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.  My name is Rick Archer.  Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.  I’ve done over 730 of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P and look under the past interviews’ menu.  This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers.  There’s no advertising really, or paywalls, or whatever. We don’t set up barriers to listening to this stuff. So, if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and a page which explains alternatives to PayPal.  My guest today is someone whom I’ve gotten to know through her books, and also through a conversation or two that we’ve had before today, and I think you’re really going to  like her.  Her name is Aedamar Kirrane.  She’s in Dublin, Ireland.  She used to be a lawyer, or a barrister as they call them, but then turned to philosophy and writing. She experienced a spontaneous mystical awakening that began in 2015 and continues to unfold. And she didn’t find the support she might have hoped to within her own Christian tradition, and so she embarked on a very deep inquiry to understand the inner dynamics of  awakening, and came to believe in life as an original blessing rather than the doctrine of original sin that she thinks has destroyed our sense of ourselves as sacred beings, at  least through that particular tradition.  She wrote a lovely book called Light on Fire, Waking Up to Divine Love, which I listened to  as an audible book, which I recommend, because she reads it very nicely, with her lovely Irish accent,  was published in 2021. And we’re going to get into all the details. I’m just summarizing a little bit here. She has developed a threefold mystical cosmology that understands creation in the pattern of exodus and return, and it recognizes all of life as sacred, described through the concept of panentheism, which we’ll be discussing and explaining, and that  the purpose of human life is deification, or the return to our divine state, while still  in human form.  And all of this is set within the context of a great awakening that she, and many other people feel that we’re now living through.  Okay.  She’s done a lot of mystical writing, and you’ll find that on her website, which I’ll  be linking to.  Okay, so for starters, Aedamar, before the extraordinary events you describe in your book, “Light on  Fire”, you were a lawyer, a wife and a mother.  Can you paint a picture of your life then, and the unconventional soul you felt you were hiding  all along?

Aedamar: Yeah.  Well, first of all, thank you so much, Rick, for having me.  It’s a real pleasure to be in conversation with you.

Rick: Thank you.

Aedamar: You’re welcome.

Rick: It’s a joy.  It’s a pleasure for me.

From Ordinary Life to Extraordinary Awakening

Aedamar: Thank you.  So, I was living a really ordinary life.  It didn’t cross my mind to explore spirituality in my life, so I wasn’t in any way a seeker.  I wasn’t on a spiritual path.  I was just living a really ordinary life.

Rick: You were a good little Catholic girl going to church, right?

Aedamar: Yeah.  I had grown up certainly with very strict Catholicism. My parents were very traditional, both from  rural west of Ireland, very traditional Catholic upbringing. But by the time I was in my own  Adulthood, I was doing it my own way. I was still very much, I’m  now going to say, I was like in love with God, but I only know that now. I had a healthy kind of relationship with the divine realm, but it wasn’t something that was significant or important to me on a day-to-day basis.  But yeah, you’re touching on by saying I had lived quite an unusual life from a very young stage, like from my earliest memories in life I absolutely  felt that I did not belong in this realm. I did not belong with my family, I did not belong to humanity, I felt really lost at a very deep and profound level and I  felt had the sense that I was just in the wrong place. And I as a child I used to  kind of have this idea that at some point pretty soon somebody was going to figure out that Aedamar was in the wrong place, and they were going to take me out of here and I was going to be brought to where I would find that I fitted in and I  belonged. So, it was just this inner sense now I know that I was just very naturally spiritual. Now I know that I had sort of a mystical temperament. Now  I know that I was living between worlds really in every way, but I had no  understanding of that as a child. I had no understanding of that until the last  ten years of my life. So, I had kind of grown up with this sense, this very kind of a disappointed sense, that I was stuck here in this realm in a human body with  the human community, and that I just had to kind of make the best of it. And then  my life did begin to dramatically change around 2007 and then significantly in 2015.

Rick: Okay, before we get to all that, you write in your book that becoming a mother was a  catalyst that reoriented your life towards its true North Star, as you put it. In what  ways did motherhood prepare you for the spiritual awakening that was to come?

Motherhood as Spiritual Catalyst

Aedamar: So the main thing around becoming a mother, was that I fell into postnatal  depression during the birth of my first child, my daughter. And this…

Rick: That’s uncommon, usually it’s postnatal, that’s why it’s called postnatal.

Aedamar: Do you know what,  there’s actually prenatal depression as well. There’s  depression during pregnancy, there can be like traumatic experiences during the birth and I certainly had, I was psychologically sort of thrown during the birth of my daughter and then afterwards the problem was that nobody  diagnosed it. I was surrounded by supposedly the best medical care in  the country, beautiful midwives, lovely doctors, lovely consultants, but  like they sent me home with what I now absolutely know was a textbook case of  postnatal depression. And it took me, like I was going to my GP saying I  can’t stop crying. I’m really sad even though I’m also really happy. It was a  very confusing time for me. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me.  I didn’t know why I can’t just be blissfully happy with the  fact that I am now a mother which had been the absolute highlight of my life?  It was that it was just really that the central thing that I wanted in my life was to be a mother, and now I was a mother and things just weren’t working out in the fairy tale way that I had kind of anticipated. So, one day- I  was now pregnant with my second child, which is my son Coen and I was in our  sitting in my kitchen crying just really upset just kind of despairing and just saying “what is wrong, what is wrong, what is wrong with me?” and suddenly I heard an  inner voice in my head and it said “I have postnatal depression”, and the most  enormous weight just lifted off my shoulders because now I had a name for  what was wrong and now I could get help. Now I knew okay there’s a path I can follow to fix this and get myself out of this mess.

Rick: It must be, is there any kind of more esoteric explanation of postnatal  depression other than it’s a hormonal thing that happens naturally or what?

Aedamar: Oh yeah, I know there’s a number of different ways of looking at depression, but  for me it was very psychological. I think it was touching on the aspect of my life that is the most sensitive, birth and death, or the most sensitive parts of all of our lives.  And for me they have been quite profound. So, in my background- I’ll just give a like a sense of  how I see the postnatal depression arose in me and then why it became a portal for healing and  awakening. In my mother’s lineage, my mother’s mother, so that’s my grandmother, when her mother,  my great-grandmother was giving birth to my grandmother, she died in childbirth.  And so, my grandmother, who was called Bridget, was brought up by her grandmother in turn.  And then my grandmother was an only child. And when my mother was pregnant with me,  I was her fourth pregnancy, there were seven children in our family. When my mother was  pregnant with me, her mother died and so I was carried in my mother’s womb with my mother in mourning, and when I first began therapy several decades later, I  kept intuitively coming back to my mother’s womb. I didn’t know that that had happened until years later, but I kept,  coming back to the idea that something went wrong in my mother’s womb. All of these problems that I’ve been living with all my life,  something happened in her womb.  And so, when I later discovered that my grandmother had died,  I realized, okay, that’s a big part of this jigsaw.  So, giving birth myself, I think, brought me back to all of that energetic maelstrom of the womb and birth.

Rick: Very good.  Okay, so jumping ahead, what led you to leave your career as a lawyer?  Did you enjoy being a lawyer?  But you left it to pursue philosophy and creative writing.  What were you searching for in that transition?

Aedamar: It was the postnatal depression that prompted me to leave my career as a lawyer.  When I went back to work after my daughter was born, I was in a bad way.  And it was just incredibly challenging.  So, when I was pregnant with my second child, and coming up to the time to give birth to him, I said I realized that I really needed to serve myself better this time and I thought I’ll take an extended maternity leave, and I’ll get myself back on my up on my feet again as a mother and begin enjoying this experience and  bonding with my children. And once I gave up work, I had turned to writing-  journaling, furiously during my time of postnatal depression, which  probably lasted for about three years in total I’d say, two definitely, and I fell in love with writing and I loved journaling and then I started taking  creative writing courses and I was writing anything and everything. I  fell in love with writing and I thought “wow I wonder if I could make a career as  a writer” and I just decided I was going to make a change. So, I never went back to  law, and instead I went back to college, and I studied English and philosophy and then a master’s in creative writing all with a view to becoming a writer of fiction.

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

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: Alright so your spiritual awakening began in 2015, but you described a powerful precursor  to this in 2007. And an experience of profound peace and a vision of reentering the womb of Christ.  Can you take us back to that moment and the impact it had on you?

Aedamar: Yeah, huge impact. So, 2007, my children were still very young. They were born in 2001 and three,  So, they were just sort of 4,5,6,7 that kind of age. And I was on summer, our little family was on  summer holidays in the west of Ireland, a very, very, very beautiful part of the coast near the  Skellig Rocks. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them. Have you Rick?

Rick: Only from your book, I think.

The 2007 Vision: Entering the Womb of Christ

Aedamar: Okay, they’re worth looking at online just to get a picture of them. They’re really,  really majestic. They’re quite small. And they are, they’re just huge, big, gray, stony peaks that are kind of triangular in shape and it was the place for, it was a monastic settlement back in the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries. Augustinian monks used to live out there,  and they lived incredibly ascetic lives in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,  living in little stone beehive huts. So, it’s very majestic in the west of Ireland,  there’s a real spirituality to the land and to the setting and the energy is very liminal,  and it’s very magical and it’s the part of the world where I always feel when I’m there,  it feels like my soul just opens and expands and spreads and kind of comes home to itself.  So, one evening I was walking along this coastline that I’m describing. I love to walk in nature and  I love to walk in the evening around sunset. It just really is very special for me. So, I was walking along, and I had often had an experience of what I now know is called altered states of consciousness, where I would just become quite detached from this world and sort of fall into- not quite a reverie like I  was able to keep living my ordinary life, but my mind was somewhere else but I  I didn’t know where it was, it was just elsewhere.  And this evening, as I was walking along by the coast of the Atlantic,  I fell into a really, really, really deep and exponentially accelerating altered state of consciousness.  So that on the beach, I actually just had to stop walking,  because I did not know what was happening to me. And I fell into this sense of complete disconnect from my body, the beach, the world, the cosmos.  And I felt myself traveling or being brought into a state of profound peace,  like beyond anything that could possibly exist in this realm.  And it was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me.  And I often think that it was essentially like a near-death experience without actually dying.  Every aspect of this life had just ceased, as if I had left existence entirely, and it was really incredibly beautiful, and it lasted for, I don’t know.  It’s impossible to know, but maybe 20 minutes, maybe half an hour in or about that kind of time.  And when it began to fade, when I began to feel myself coming back to this world’s consciousness and realizing that I was back on the beach, and I was back in my body, and I was back in this world,  I was really devastated because I thought “I want to stay there. I want that to continue forever.  I don’t ever want that to end. I wondered is there a way back?”  And I was thinking to myself, what could I do to try and get back into that state?  I had no words to kind of describe it to myself.  But I like a way I describe it in the book is that it’s like when you wake up from a really good dream and you try to kind of sneak back into the dream. It was kind of like that.  I was saying, can I get back somehow or another and as I was standing on the beach, just really absolutely in awe and also just, kind of shocked as well for what had happened,  suddenly a voice started talking in my head and the voice said,  “What would you do if you could stay in this place of peace forever or with this feeling of peace forever?”  And I was really gob smacked. I thought, “Who just said that?”  It was speaking inside my head.  And so, I began to think, “Well, gosh, well, what would I do?”  Like my sense is I would do absolutely anything because it was the most beautiful experience I’d ever had in my life.  So, before I could even formulate an answer in my mind,  suddenly that voice spoke again, and the voice said “I would walk into that mountainside and re-enter the womb of Christ” and I was gob smacked and then the  feeling, I didn’t hear any more voice, I didn’t hear anything else beyond that,  that was the end and then I just came more and more and more back into my body,  and into this realm and into this world and I was I was I was dumbstruck what  it happened, how did it happen, why did it happen, what did it mean, how could I have it again.  So that was 2007 and that did set me on a bit of a quest to figure out what was that all about.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve seen that happen a lot where people get zapped with some really nice experience  as kind of a teaser, a taste of what’s possible. And then they’ve got to figure out how  to, stabilize it and, make it more abiding. But it’s like we’re given a glimpse,  and sometimes people actually get it from psychedelics or something like that. But  other times it comes spontaneously as you did.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah.  I often think that the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and the  the grail stories. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, but

Rick: I’ve probably seen some movies.

Aedamar: Yeah, I only have a small familiarity with it. But what I  do know what I think happens is that somebody gets a glimpse of  the grail, sort of as a shimmering image somewhere, and  they spend the rest of their life trying to find that grail again. And I think that’s sort of an analogy. I think that’s a  version of this. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. And in fact, they’ve been poets. I think I’ve heard this with reference to Blake, that they have some beautiful transcendent experience, and then they write about it for the rest of their lives, without ever really being able to recapture it.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Jim Finley has this really beautiful sentence that just keeps me company all the time.  He says, “Sometimes in life, something is given, and you spend the rest of your life trying to be true to that thing even though you don’t know what it was.  Yeah, and I think that just describes perfectly,  this path.

Rick: Yeah but I think what you’ve been experiencing and what  what I would certainly advocate is to you know not have it be a one  a one-shot deal, but to you know have it recur and  and integrate and stabilize and become more of a  a normal state of functioning.

Aedamar: Yeah, I think you’re precisely speaking to the awakening  process, aren’t you? Yeah. I mean, I think this is what we what we want. We want our consciousness to transform. But the way in which it happened for me is that my awakening that that was just the beginning of it, then it became a daily like from 2015. Really until now, it has  become an almost daily experience for me to have mystical experiences. But if you  have a spiritual awakening or you’re beginning to have a spiritual awakening,  but you’re not on a particular path, how do you explain it to yourself,  how do you understand it so when it’s spontaneous you then have to work  Backwards. I’ve been working backwards since 2015 how does this happen, what are the frames, what’s the context but how do I understand this, who might help me understand it, how do I process it, how do I integrate it?  So, I’ve been working backwards ever since.

Rick: Yeah, you explain in your book that you had a  lifelong feeling of being lost at a primordial level and a cosmic desire for something you couldn’t name. So, it’s like here you’re given this taste. And so, what methods have you used? I mean, was your study of  philosophy  part of the working backwards process?  You mentioned the works of Schelling and  Heidegger having provided some contexts for your experiences.  Did their ideas about nature being an  authenticity help you understand what was happening to you?

Aedamar: Yeah, hugely.  Yeah, they really did.  And so, I was studying these philosophers before 2015. It was just my final year of my philosophy in English degree that the mystical  experiences began. So, the way in which philosophy first began to help me, and it still helps me,  the way in which it first helped me, was that it began to explain that lifelong feeling of being lost and this cosmic desire that I used to feel for something vast and huge that I didn’t know what it was. And so those, the couple of philosophers that really helped were, first of all Schelling,  I remember preparing for a tutor, so he is an Enlightenment philosopher around these,  the late 1600s, early 1700s I think would be his era, and he was part of the counter-Enlightenment,  so, he was a philosopher of the sublime, so he would be like in Blake’s lineage, so he wasn’t really committed to the enlightenment project and  rationality and explaining everything just with pure reason like  they can. So, he was looking at nature. I think they called him a  nature philosopher, but not in the way we would understand nature now.  But anyway, I was preparing for a tutorial one evening,  and I was reading in one of his whatever pieces of writing I had to read and he said that “nature is God giving birth to itself” and I was just transfixed.  I can still see myself at the kitchen table, and I just read the sentence again and again and again and I thought” nature is God giving birth to itself” and it just I mean it landed as a truth thought “yeah okay, now we’re on to something. Okay now somebody has said something that really resonates with my heart and with my whole being.”  And that really opened a door for me to begin looking at nature in a different way and to  begin looking at God in a different way. Up to that point, I think God had still been quite remote, quite external, the external God managing things from without. But if nature is God giving  and birth to itself, then God is in absolutely everything.

“Nature is God giving birth to itself” and I was just transfixed. I can still see myself at the kitchen table, and I just read the sentence again and again.

Rick: Yeah.  We’ll get into this as we discuss panentheism,  but, and Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism  would have something to say about this too,  because, they would say that,  well, there’s nothing but that,  but Brahman or God.  And so, this, so it must be a self-interacting dynamics that’s taking place in which the apparent creation is actually just essentially the same as that which gives rise to it.  It’s all one thing, kind of playing a self-referral game.

Aedamar: Yes, yeah, yeah.  I think that’s exactly what it is, yeah.  I think God goes out from itself, herself, himself,  with the intention of coming back.  We were having a conversation last week,  and I was saying, does God really–  Is God going to make it home, to god’s own self. We were chatting about that.  And after subsequently I was reflecting, and I think this is what I’m thinking now, is that god knows god will get back  But maybe isn’t sure exactly how you know that TS Elliott quote “Coming back to the place from which you’ve started and knowing it for the first time?”

Aedamar: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that I love that. I have that experience so often. Yeah. Yeah

Rick: Yeah  Okay, anything more you want to say about this little bit?

Aedamar: So then Heidegger, he was incredibly helpful as well. He spoke about these moods,  he called the moods of detachment. And so, he was describing these kinds of altered states of  consciousness I’ve been having all of my life without understanding what they were. And he said,  that it is essentially a call to authenticity. He said, when you’re in that kind of detached state of mind, what’s happening is that you’re entering pure being.  You’re becoming your authentic self. And he said when you go back into regular ordinary consciousness, he said you’re left with a longing to  return permanently to that other way of being.  And he said it’s a call to authenticity because you no longer want to engage at what he called the level of idle chat in ordinary consciousness,  in the way you’ve been living your life up to that point. So that again gave me language for  understanding that okay yeah this is a call to authenticity, I do want to be authentic, I do want to be my true self. Yeah so, they set me on the road and then Levinas explained what the cosmic  desire was. He said that that’s metaphysical desire for the great other which can be God,  being, life, consciousness. So, I began to have a bit of a vocabulary for my way of being.

Rick: Yeah, I had a spiritual teacher who gave a talk which was later entitled “The Path of  the Seeker,” but he talked about how, he actually used an analogy too which I’ll give you in a second, but you leave the comfort of ordinary life and discover  there’s something more, and so you can no longer really feel satisfied with  ordinary life, but then you haven’t reached that something more, so you’re kind of in  no man’s land, you know?

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah.  You’re in a limbo.

Rick: Yeah, it’s kind of uncomfortable.  The analogy he used was like, let’s say a guy is living in this little shabby hut, and  that’s all he knows; he’s attached to it.  And then someone says, “Well, you see that palace over there?  That’s actually your true home.”  And so, he starts out towards the palace and then he thinks, “Wait a minute, what about  my hut?  I don’t know.  I don’t, where am I now?  I’m not in either place.”

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah.  True.  Limbo.

Rick: Yeah.

Aedamar: True. Limbo.

Rick: Yeah.  But a central image in your book is that of sacred fire.  You haven’t really talked about this much yet in this interview,  but Jesus comes to you, and that’s the main theme of your book.  Jesus comes to you in a blaze of fire,  and you feel your own, head and soul set on fire.  So, what does this fire represent?  and as much as you possibly can,  what is it like to experience it?

Aedamar: Amazing.  I’ll read that piece, actually, Rick.  I have that page in my book open of that experience.

Rick: Okay, go for it, yeah.

Aedamar: That’s okay, just to give people a flavor  of that experience.  And then what I’d love to talk with you about,  is the fact that I now know from listening to your show,  that what I was experiencing  was also a spontaneous Kundalini awakening,  I didn’t understand it at all until very recently. So, I’ll read this. This was my first  full-on mystical experience that happened almost exactly 10 years ago, July 2015.  So, I’m reading from my book Light on Fire. So let me just get to the, oh yeah, I’ll give a  a little background to this, Rick. When I began to meditate in early 20… what year did I begin  to meditate? 2015. Yeah, so this happened six months after I began to meditate. When I say  I began to meditate, like that’s a real overstatement. I hadn’t…

Rick: You just kind of  did it somehow. You didn’t get instruction or anything, right?

Sacred Fire: The Jesus Encounter

Aedamar: I just sat at my kitchen table,  and closed my eyes. I didn’t have the first clue how to meditate. I barely knew that there was like  formal teaching for meditation, but somebody had recommended to me. I was really sad. My dad had  just died a couple of months ago and I was very heartbroken. And somebody  said, “why don’t you meditate?” And I thought, okay, I’ll try that. And so, I sat at my kitchen table and just closed my eyes, and just kind of followed my intuition, so I was doing no formal meditation but I was really loving the feeling in my body when I did meditate.  Like I had a real sense of profound peace, calm, stillness and I really liked that.  In early July somebody had recommended a book to me called Spirit Babies by Walter McKitchen,  and I read it, and it was really interesting and at the end of each chapter he had some guided meditations and I said, “oh bingo this is what I’ve been looking for some advice.”  So, I did one of his meditations which is called a rainbow meditation and it’s a  really simple meditation. I mean there’s nothing esoteric or difficult about it.  So, what he asked that what the instructions on the page were to -now I  didn’t know what chakras were, I didn’t know what colors were, I didn’t know anything about working with the chakras in the body, but this is what the  meditation simply asked you to do -was visualize colors traveling up from the  earth one at a time the colors of the rainbow you’re traveling up your left foot going to a particular part of your body, say the base chakra the red ,and then you see the color traveling down your right foot out in back out into the  earth and so on up your body until you get up to the top. He didn’t say base chakra, sacral chakra, crown chakra. He just said red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white,  and I just followed the color. So, it was like full of like really naive approach to it all.  And then this is what happened. So, I’m reading from my book now. So,  that paragraph just gives that description. Then I visualized colored energy traveling up and  down my body for each different chakra color. And as I did this, I felt powerful energy building inside me. I was quite taken aback. I faced a split-second decision. I knew I could stop this strange experience from developing any further if I wanted to. I could just stand up, walk away,  break the spell, so to speak. But as that thought flashed across my mind, I heard my inner voice saying, “I am held up by the white light and I can stay for this.” I have no idea how I came to say such a thing, the meaning of which I barely understood, except that I sensed it was completely safe to let the experience continue. I also knew that I would miss something absolutely amazing if I walked away. I could sense something really incredible about to happen.  So, I went with it, once more surrendering to an experience that lay far beyond my intellectual  understanding. When I got to the seventh chakra on top of my head, suddenly, without the slightest warning without any preliminary sign, with nothing to prepare me for it, I felt Jesus come to me in a blaze of fire. My head exploded with that same holy fire I  had experienced on the pier and in the park on the summer solstice. We’re on the  solstice today.

I felt Jesus come to me in a blaze of fire. My head exploded with that same holy fire I had experienced on the pier and in the park on the summer solstice.

Rick: It is, yeah.

Aedamar: Only this time it was staggering in its intensity and  its holiness. I felt Jesus’s presence as a blaze of energy, as a sacred fire all  around my head. As soon as he came, he said to me, “I am the I Am.” I heard the words silently in my head with my inner hearing, but they were spoken with majesty, as a  king speaking to the whole world. And as I heard them, I was filled with a  staggering and sublime holiness. I knew with certainty, as part and parcel of the  experience, that this holy fire I felt blazing in me and all around me, was Jesus. I do not know how I knew it; I just did. I felt Jesus. I didn’t see anything. It  It wasn’t a physical seeing in any way.  It was a feeling knowing.  I could feel the incredible holiness of his presence,  and his intimate closeness to me.  His light surrounded me,  and I was utterly absorbed into the experience.  Nothing I could ever see with my physical eyes could come close to the beauty, the power,  the profundity of this inner experience  and this inner knowing.  Then I heard myself spontaneously begin to chant.  I won’t go into that.  Then the energy of Jesus’s fire,  his spirit flowed into me, and my fire flowed into his fire.  I explained this with the image of two fountains of water.  So, we began to sort of flow in and out of each other.  I was seeing his fire and my fire above my head.  And we were like dancing with each other,  just in a blaze of ecstasy.  We were taking turns cascading our flow of fire in and out of each other, like a vertical,  like a figure of eight, like a vertical infinity symbol.  We flowed in and out of each other several times,  in a beautiful dance of flowing fire.  It was blissful.  I was ecstatic.  It was holy rapture.  So, the fire is just this–  it’s an ecstasy.  And it feels as if my body is on fire, but it’s not burning.  Some days, I feel I wouldn’t be surprised if I spontaneously combusted.  There’s just so much energy in my body.

Rick: That supposedly has happened to people.  I wonder if you stuck a thermometer in your mouth,  if you’d notice your actual physical temperature was hotter  or it’s just a subtler phenomenon.  –

Aedamar: I think it’s a subtler phenomenon, yeah.  –

Rick: Yeah. – Yeah.  –

Aedamar: Yeah.

Aedamar: That fire.

Rick: I’m sorry, go ahead.

Aedamar: That fire is the mark of all of my spiritual experiences.  Then my body blazes and burns.  Just when I sit to meditate in the morning,  or if I’m out walking in nature,  that’s kind of, for me,  that’s the sign of the sacred in me is the fire.

Rick: You know that the word tapas in Sanskrit means heat or fire.  And tapas is a word of spiritual practice.  You do tapas, meaning you’re doing sort of intense spiritual practice  and it’s burning off the dross.  It’s burning off the impurities.  And so, this notion of fire is,

Aedamar: Oh, I like that.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a universal thing.

Aedamar: I must have an awful lot of impurities to burn off.  r

Rick: Oh, I don’t know about that.  I’ve heard some people comment that Christ was not Jesus’s last name.  Jesus is a name for a man, Yeshua, but then Christ is like Christ consciousness,  right?  And so, your association or interpretation of this as Jesus, you think a Hindu having the  the same experience might think, “Oh, Krishna’s coming to me,” or most of them might think,  “Oh, Muhammad is coming to me,” or whatever.  But you just have this cultural conditioning.

Aedamar: Yeah.  Yeah.  I did read in one book that a mystic, or when you begin to have spiritual experiences, they’re  always in the tradition that you’re familiar with, because it would be meaningless to somebody to be visited by somebody that they just don’t know.

Rick: Yeah, some blue guy with four arms or something.

Aedamar: Yeah, that wouldn’t have meant anything to me, really.  Yeah, so I think it’s, Christ, I love the way Richard Rohr speaks about Christ,  the universe of Christ, another name for everything, just another name for the sacred,  for life, for consciousness, for love, for the greatest thing that you could envisage,  you know.

Rick: Yeah, I, I bring that up because, yeah, I’ve had my fair number of share of encounters  with fundamentalists, and it’s just not the way I’m wired that so and so is the only way and in a universe where there are probably trillions of inhabited planets, I  just feel like God is not a one-trick pony. I mean he basically  makes himself accessible to people or beings of all sorts throughout the universe through various means.

Aedamar: Yeah, I completely agree with you.

Rick: Yeah, some saviors might look like  some weird octopus or something, but on some other planet. Y

Aedamar: eah, yeah, if that’s  the way it’s coming through. Yeah, I think, we’re entering the era of inter-spirituality.  So, it’s really important for all of us to realize that there should be no walls between anything.  All of these boundaries and identities, I think, just really need to dissolve, so that we can open to the sacred flowing between all the different wisdom systems, traditions, religions, mystical  lineages.

Rick: Yeah, and not to hammer on this point too much, but I think there’s a certain  egotism inherent in the emphasis on “my way is the best” and “you’re going to hell.”  That church down the street, those guys are going to hell, my church is the only right one,  that kind of stuff.

Aedamar: Oh, it’s horrendous.  I mean it undermines in every way the whole essence of the  religious instinct and the spiritual impulse,  which is unit of consciousness, which is we are all one.  If that’s where we’re truly aimed, to reach that state of consciousness where we recognize everything as our brother, our sister, our mother, our father, our daughter,  our child, like the birds, the bees, the planets, the stars,  the moon, everything.  It’s all one.  And we won’t get there if people just cling to individual identities of their particular path.

Rick: Yeah. And if we contemplate what God really means, or really is, then, absolutely unlimited.  Just, dwarfing the universe by comparison, if the universe has limits.  and all-pervading and you know just so broad and universal and  all-encompassing that any sort of narrowness, narrow  interpretation or exclusivity is kind of an insult to that grandeur of God.

Aedamar: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think God is like,  I used to love kaleidoscopes when I was a child. You look in the  little thing and you twist it around and see all the different patterns. I think that’s closer to  what God is, than what you’re describing.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so there was a recurring experience that you report in your book about leaving your body and merging with the Devine. Can you talk about what is, I guess maybe that thing in 2007 was like that, when you’re walking on the shoreline near  the rocks, you kind of like, sounds like you totally left and an observer, I don’t know what someone would have observed when you were doing that, would you just have been standing  in a trance or sat, did you sit down or whatever?

Aedamar: No, I stayed standing, yeah, in a trance probably, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, so what is it like to lose your sense of small self and become one with this blazing  light of love?

Aedamar: Oh, it’s the best!  It’s the best!  [Laughter]  It’s just wondrous, Rick, the joy.  I don’t know, have you ever experienced this, Rick, in your journey?

Rick: Yeah, I suppose I experience it to some degree  every day, but it’s not like on steroids like your experiences are.  I mean, you’re just really pulling out all the stops.

Aedamar: Yeah, so yeah, so you are familiar with it and I think anybody who’s on a spiritual path  has had a taste of this,  and so, what it’s like, is like,  if I sit in in meditation and I still don’t have a technique.  I just sit and close my eyes and fall into a sacred space.

Rick: Seems like you’re doing something, right?  Getting your money’s worth out of it.

Aedamar: You know the other side of it though Rick, is that  like the other side of it is that I have to tell people about my mystical life.  I mean, I would never have chosen this path to go publicly telling people about what was happening in my daily meditation.  But Christ and Mother Magdalene and Mother Mary say to me repeatedly,  “Share our love with the world, share our love with the world.”  And I know that they want me to share what I write in my journals.  It’s just the records of my mystical experiences.  So, if I had my own way, I would tell nobody.  Nobody would know about this, and my life would,  I’d be trying to live my life on twin tracks again,  which obviously isn’t allowed,  when you’re trying to walk the authentic path.  So, I think, yes, I am incredibly grateful to  have all of the wondrous experiences that I have on an ongoing basis but kind of the cost of it is that I’ve got to tell everybody else what’s happening and then run the gamut of the consequences of that,  because there’s no way that that my cultural familial sort of  community setting in Dublin in Ireland, is ready for this kind of thing. So it’s it can  be quite alienating, it can be quite isolating, it can be, it’s a lonely path.

Rick: What was it, Jesus said something like, about no man is without honor except in his own village  or some such thing.

Aedamar: Yeah, well, I wouldn’t put myself in that category.  But yeah, I know what you mean.

Rick: Yeah.

Aedamar: Yeah.

Rick: But he also said, don’t hide your light under a bushel.  And I think in my travels around the world, I found–  and my online travels these days–  I found that there are bright lights everywhere.  I mean, I spent three months in Iran.  I spent nine months in the Philippines.  I’ve been in India, various places.  And there’s a whole spectrum of people everywhere.  And there’s some very, very spiritual people,  who are receptive to this kind of thing.

Aedamar: Yeah, and I think it’s our natural state.  I think it’s what’s meant to be happening to everybody Rick, and  we have become so broken as a culture and as a species,  and we’re so dysfunctional and our brokenness has become normative so we  don’t even realize how broken we are even though we can see on the news every day of the week how horrendous things have become.  But nonetheless I think our natural state is actually to undergo this spiritual awakening and rise towards unit of consciousness as much as we can.  So yeah, I really hear you that there are lights lighting up everywhere.  And that’s part of the great awakening that it happens spontaneously all over the planet.

Rick: Yeah, we’re going to talk more about this great awakening as we go along.  And I’m not saying that some people are special and everybody else is…

Aedamar: Yeah, not at all.

Rick: riffraff. I mean, because everybody has the same potential within them, no matter how dark and confused their life may seem to be.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, so a couple of people that I would share this with,  some of them might say wow I’d love that, I’d love that, I’d love to love it and I  think like are you prepared to really give up your  entire life for this? Like it cost nothing less than  everything. Jim Finley says that,” it costs nothing less  than everything” but now I’ve added on to the end of that for myself  it also promises nothing less than everything.  So, there is a glorious kind of flip side to it.  Can I tell you something that’s on my mind about leaving my body?

Rick: Yes, please.

Aedamar: Now, that’s a feeling that I have.  I feel my energy rise up out of the top of my head,  and various things can happen.  But I had one experience, and it’s on Kundalini,  so, I wanted to come back because I’m really intrigued.  I’d like to kind of hear from you more about the Kundalini awakening,  because a lot of us are having spontaneous awakenings  and we don’t know what it is.  it is. We don’t know that it’s a Kundalini awakening. So back in around 2007, when  was it? It was shortly after these mystical experiences began, and they were incredibly intense and they were happening every day, and I went on this retreat with a so-called spiritual teacher. She was either English or  American, I can’t remember which, and I went down the country to the south of  Ireland to County Cork for a weekend retreat. And very quickly I kind of got a  bad feeling. There were about ten women, and we were all in a small, maybe a small  hotel or something, can’t really remember the setup. It was a private house.  One of the participants had given over her home and it was a  very big home, it was lovely. And I didn’t really like the woman’s energy. And I was, so I was kind of, I was a bit on red alert, like this isn’t really great. I don’t really like this. But anyway, we did our first meditation and  we lay down on the ground and she guided us through a visualization, and there was really like, there was music playing which I subsequently discovered was intentionally trying to work on our energy field. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard anything about that kind of…

Rick: Oh, music certainly does that in various ways.

Aedamar: Yeah I kind of felt I felt manipulated by it, put it like that. I didn’t  know what was going on, but anyway, the meditation ended, and we all stood up from our mats and the woman came over to me and she said like in quite an  accusing tone of voice, she said you shouldn’t leave your body when you meditate. And I was quite taken aback. First of all, that she obviously has  psychic clairvoyance that she can see this, but also, I didn’t understand fully what she meant that I was leaving my body, but I felt kind of affronted. So that afternoon anyway she said that she was going to do a meditation to awaken the Kundalini, and I thought “over my dead body you’re not touching my Kundalini,” and I said I’m not going to participate in that meditation and  I said,” if you don’t mind, I’m not going to be here after lunch.”  I went out in the garden, and I waited until that was done.  Somebody came out to tell me it was over about two hours later.  And I went back into the room, and it was pandemonium, Rick.  There were women in hysteria, bawling, crying, like deeply, deeply,  deeply troubled and upset.  And the woman who was running the thing was kind of running from one woman to  another, trying to calm everybody down.  And I was so grateful that I had followed my intuition,  and just said, no, no, no, this isn’t right.  But as I was driving home from the retreat,  it was a Sunday evening, and the roads were quiet,  and it was, sorry, I just need to take a drink of water.  –

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Aedamar: I’m talking too much.

Rick: No, you’re not.

Aedamar: Just a sec.  I think even just talking about that experience actually It’s not nice.  Thank you.  So, I was driving home, and there was a remarkable number of  rainbows in the sky, the entire journey home for about two  hours.  There was rainbows everywhere.  I looked double rainbows full of rainbows and one rainbow lasted for an entire hour.  And I felt there was something very supernatural about it.  I thought this this is telling me something and I  was listening to the radio.  On Sunday evening, there’s a lovely music show that I used to love listening to. And there was a beautiful piece of music was played. And the presenter came on afterwards. And he said, and that was a piece of music from Tom Dahl’s vision, the 11th century Irish knight who had an out of body experience and went on a journey.

Rick: Very cool.

Aedamar: That’s so affirming. So, I looked up Tom Dahl and I found out all about him. He was a precursor to  Dante’s travels through hell, purgatory and heaven. And I thought, I’m okay. I look after my own spiritual life and I won’t let kind of like rogue, reckless people, sort of in  to interfere. It’s dangerous.

Rick: Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve seen my most recent interview with  Jurgen Thiewa. Talk about out-of-body experiences.  Just for the sake of the audience, this is, the interview prior to this one with Jurgen,  his name is J-U-R-G-E-N, who’s been having out-of-body experiences for decades, and is also a talented artist and has managed to depict them, especially now using AI. So, we just  took a tour of the universe from deepest hells to highest heavens. Quite interesting.

Aedamar: I skipped the hell parts actually.

Rick: Okay, understandable. I actually told people they could do that if they didn’t.

Aedamar: Yeah, I didn’t want to say that.

Rick: Yeah, but a couple of just a couple of quick comments on this Kundalini thing. Firstly,  incidentally, I’ll be interviewing a guy named Michael Bradford, I think in August,  maybe July, who worked closely with Gopi Krishna for years. Gopi Krishna was a guy who wrote,  who went through rather hellacious kundalini awakening experiences, but wrote numerous books about it. But it’s often advised in, by responsible teachers, to be very careful and not to do anything to awaken kundalini prematurely. It’ll awaken itself,  It’ll awaken naturally when the conditions are right, but if you force it in some way,  you can get yourself into trouble.  And it can be natural for people to have what they call “Kriyas” where they’re yelling or making strange noises or moving in strange ways.  And that’s not necessarily a sign of insanity or anything.  But again, it’s a powerful thing.  And it has to be treated with respect and care.  And this is not a sprint or a race where you want to get my kundalini to the highest chakra right away.  You want to proceed in a safety first is a good motto.

Aedamar: Yeah, oh for sure.  When you don’t know what it is though,  I only found out like a couple of months ago that what I was experiencing is known as a kundalini awakening in a different tradition.

Rick: And I’m sure that there- Kundalini is a Sanskrit word, but I’m sure that in various  traditions around the world, people have gone through stuff like this and had their own terminology for it.

Aedamar: Yeah, there’s no terminology for it in the West that I’ve ever come upon.  I mean the closest would-be Holy Spirit.

Rick: Christian mystics, you don’t come up with any depictions?

Aedamar: Nobody, I’ve never read anybody who systematizes the energetic component the way  Kundalini is systematized in your tradition or in other traditions.

Rick: Right.  Yeah, it’s true.  I think in certain Eastern traditions, Kashmir Shaivism and so on, it has been systematized very in great detail.  In fact, I interviewed somebody who could be the most authoritative or knowledgeable living exponent of Kundalini, Vidya, as it’s called.  Vidya means knowledge.  Her name is Joan Shiva Pitha Harrigan.  I mentioned her to you.  I think you were going to get her book.  But–

Aedamar: I am definitely going to.

Rick: Yeah.  I mean, it’s a big, fat book with all kinds of illustrations,  and detailed information about Kundalini.

Aedamar: Yeah.  That would be a wonderful marriage of inter-spirituality,  for people to learn what these energies are,  because people are experiencing them.  And they are.  And then you might often then miss the boat,  because you don’t realize, I should be engaging with this.  This is really significant.  I can learn about it.  Instead, it’s just missing it.

Rick: Yeah, I interviewed this woman years ago  when I was first starting Batgap, who started having spontaneous kundalini awakenings.  She didn’t know what was happening to her.  She was just his housewife in Arizona.  And she started doing research on the internet,  and she came across the word kundalini.  She thought it was some kind of disease.  And she eventually found a teacher,  and kind of got some guidance.  But I think this,  I bet you there have been people thrown into mental hospitals,  throughout the ages.  Because they were starting to have this kind of thing,  and neither they nor the authorities  knew what was happening to them.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Rick: Yeah.  In fact–  [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Aedamar: Yeah.

Rick: No, go ahead.  I’m sorry.

Aedamar: I only learned that terminology in the last three months or so.  And I’ve been having Kundalini experiences for 10 years.

Rick: Yeah, there you go.  That’s insane.  Yeah.

Rick: Well, speaking of insane and Kundalini,  you did struggle with the question of whether you were going mad through some of this.  And how did you navigate that?  And how did you come to trust that you weren’t going mad and these were legitimate mystical experiences?

Aedamar: Well, I ultimately trusted that I wasn’t going mad  because everything is so beautiful.

Rick: Right, good point.

Navigating Questions of Sanity

Aedamar: It’s just an exquisite experience,  which each time is intensely meaningful and very beautiful and very positive  and just so full of life, exploding with life.  So ultimately that was what sort of confirmed to me,  that there’s something in this.  And I definitely had to ask myself, am I going mad?  I mean, is this, is this insanity?  And yet I was living my life  like I was functioning perfectly fine  in every other aspect of my life.  So, I was kind of like, I mean,  there were days when I really did wonder,  I would fall into despair and say,  well, I’ll tell you one thing I was never going to do,  which was going to go to a psychiatrist,  because I thought the risks of a psychiatrist  not understanding this and throwing me into  like the local psychiatric hospital,  the risks of that were too severe in my mind.  So, I thought I’m not going to go down that road.  And then the beauty won out in the end.  And I have conversations with Christ.  So, I was able to ask, “what’s going on?”  and Christ would say that “I want you to share my love with the world.  I have anointed you, I have appointed you,  I have filled your heart with my love.  I want you to bring my love to the world.  I want you to write books of love,  and share my love with people.”  And even though that’s unusual,  It is in and of itself, like just full of meaning and beauty.  And it fills my heart, and it fills my mind, my soul, my life.  The path of my life, I find just incredibly beautiful.  So, committing to the path really sort of showed me that I was on the right path.

Rick: – Yeah.  And there is a thing where people on a spiritual path can get mentally unstable, because there’s a whole kind of restructuring that takes place in your neuropsychology, neurophysiology.  And it can, and so again, there’s a need for a certain reasonable pace, not pushing it too hard and integration at every step, stabilization.  So, I’ve seen it happen.  I’ve actually had tasted it myself to varying degrees where you can just get kind of kooky,  when you’re doing a lot of spiritual practice.  And some people have had to be hospitalized or drugged or have jumped off buildings and things like that.  So, I’m just putting that out as a caution.

Aedamar: Yeah, when I’ve been reflecting on it, I’ve seen, I think that there are sort of, there  three possibilities when visions begin. Actually, I’m now, I’ve been in therapy for years, which you’d need to be to keep stable to manage. And you have a therapist who understands you?  I have recently in the last six months started with a Jungian psychotherapist. Now, the therapist  before that did also understand, but now I adore Carl Jung. So, I’ve with a Jungian therapist.  And she is completely at ease. I remember saying to her, how come you just take all of this in your stride and you say well like I’m a Jungian therapist, I  wouldn’t be much good if I wasn’t able to be comfortable with visions. And just  in discussing it all with her, I’ve identified that there are  three possibilities when the visions begin psychosis, as you’re  talking about, then the other extreme. A negative response would be inflation,  which people call identified -you’re identifying with your visions and  you suddenly begin to think that you are divine or you’re God or you’re some holy being walking the planet. So, they’re the two extremes but then there’s a  middle road and the middle road is the path of  transformation. So, if we can engage just steady as you go, one foot after the  other trying to make sense of what’s happening, and trying to let the visions work on us. I mean this is another big thing that I’ve really realized only in  the last couple of months. The visions themselves are fully intelligent, they’re  fully purposeful, they’re fully intentional, they know what they’re  trying to achieve in each individual different person. So, I now -the  easiest way I understand myself is that I’m just like I’m a channel, I’m a  messenger, I’m delivering messages of love out into the world for anybody who might like to read them. I’m not proselytizing, I’m not teaching, I’m not trying to convert anybody to anything. I’m passing on experiences of love from  from the realm of the Christ.

Rick: Nice. It’s interesting you should mention inflation,  because in recent weeks I’ve been encountered a couple of different  situations and I’ve been aware of this for years, where somebody has a profound  and undoubtedly genuine spiritual awakening, but perhaps they’re not quite ready for it or something because it goes to their heads. It results in a kind of an ego aggrandizement in which the next thing you know, they’re, they’re proclaiming themselves to be the avatar of the age and, the greatest spiritual teacher on earth. And sometimes they’re not public about it. Other times they are other,  but other times they’ll say to their students in, in private, “listen,  if you leave me, you’ll be a worm for the next 10 incarnations,  you’ll be off the track for so long. And I’m the only one who can bring you to enlightenment.” Yada yada, it goes on and on.  What do you see as, I think a great deal of humility if one can achieve it and self-scrutiny,  might be an antidote to that. But what would you recommend if you can think of anything to prevent a person from falling into that kind of delusion?

Aedamar: Well, humility first of all. If we’re really on a spiritual path and we’re  awakening to the higher ideals of life as Plato referred to them, if we’re  awakening to the truths, justice, peace, equality, love, service, all of those  beautiful higher truths of life, if we’re really awakening to them, certainly the  Christian path, it’s all about service. I mean that’s what Jesus was modeling in his life -that you must love one another as I have loved you. You must serve each other as a servant. So, one of my favorite stories from the Bible is when Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. He got down on the ground and washed their feet. Now, if that’s not telling you  what to do with spiritual experience like nothing is, and then he died on the cross.  He didn’t hang around Palestine saying, “Hey, I’m the one,” he let them kill him.  So, I think if you truly are following some spiritual teachers,  you’re going to learn from people who did it in a very modest, quiet way of service. So…

Rick: I think that’s the best answer you could have given because I think, service is  definitely a spiritual path in many traditions.  And it does culture humility.  It sort of becomes about the other rather than about me.

Aedamar: Yeah, fully.

Rick: And the washing of the feet and all that, it’s symbolic in a way, but I think even literally  doing such a thing or just doing something very basic and fundamental can help to  counteract the tendency for you know surging energies to  Inflate the ego.

Aedamar: Yeah. Yeah, and I think it is part and parcel of the spiritual of the path of spiritual awakening is that you realize you want to serve everybody else you want to put your life in service  So, my service is sharing my spiritual writing. That’s how I am called upon to serve. It might  not seem like a big deal to other people, but it has been unbelievably difficult for me to go public about my spiritual life. It’s the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I used to bargain with  Jesus or Christ, and I’d say, I will do anything except tell people about my spiritual  life. I remember saying like I’ll do a PhD in mystical theology, I’ll write about  mystical theology but I won’t tell anybody what I’m doing or what my experiences are, but that wasn’t what was wanted. But just on  that question of inflation as well the other thing, is people falling into the  dark side. That’s something that’s really scary and a huge risk as well, and I  once encountered a woman who was clearly had fallen on the wrong side of the  middle line and I was very frightened by the experience. It was really  horrendous to be in her presence and as soon as I left her presence I  immediately lit a candle and sat to meditate, and I was just pulling like powerful Christ light down into my body. I just felt I needed to be cleansed of  of all of the ugly energies that she was carrying.  And as I was meditating, an inner image appeared in my inner seeing.  And later, I recognized the image, but at the time I didn’t know that it was called the Eye of Horus,  which is the Egyptian symbol, which protects against evil.

Rick: Yeah.

Aedamar: And that just spontaneously arose in my inner seeing.  And that shows me then, well, first of all, I was very grateful,  because I felt that I was now safe and protected and cleansed. But it also shows again, the weaving of the different traditions that that came in to show me that I was now safe, I was protected.

Rick: Yeah, a couple of thoughts on that. I think that in a way, like in a war,  if the soldiers are in the foxhole, they’re kind of safe. But if they pop their heads up,  up, then they can be shot.  I think in a way, stepping forward as a spiritual teacher can make you vulnerable.  It’s like you almost have a bullseye on your chest or something.  Negative entities or forces which don’t want you to do that could try to knock you back.

Aedamar: Right.  Right.  Yeah.  Wow.  Yeah.  That makes a lot of sense.  Yeah.

Rick: Just yesterday, I was listening to a podcast and this guy was saying he visited India and he discovered  there was this temple where they explicitly worship demons.  He’s like a Christian dude and he thought, “Well, I’ll go there and see if I can kind of purify it or something.”  He went there and he talked to the priest, and he said, “Why do you do this?”  He said, “Well, they can give us a lot of trouble.  So, if we worship them, we hope it will placate them and then they’ll just kind of leave us alone.”  He thought he was going to do some purificatory thing, and he walked toward this icon or statue,  or something in the middle of the temple and he started feeling this really cold, and also this ominous feeling, and then he got this voice which said get back off -you have no idea what you’re  dealing with.

Aedamar: Wow wasn’t he lucky, that was really, that was reckless in the extreme.

Rick: Yeah.

Aedamar: Oh, wow

Rick: Anyway, you’re making good points. I mean all of this might seem like  mythical woo woo, but I think there’s a legitimate reality to all these kinds of things.

Aedamar: Maybe I’ll read a vision.

Rick: Yes please.

Aedamar: Great, well, l’ll do that.

Rick: Time for a vision.

Aedamar: That’ll be nice, yeah.  I chose a couple. It was kind of…

Rick: Purify us after all this darkness.

Aedamar: Yeah, after that ugly  ugliness. Let me see, I will,  okay so I have on my website, I’ll read a couple from my two or three, I’ll start with one and then maybe another one. So  this is allocution, so allocution is sacred speaking, so as much as I have visions, I also hear and sometimes can be in  conversation with Christ or Mother Magdalene or  what divine being presents. So, my visions come in so many different circumstances,  like whenever I fall into a state of real stillness or peace, clearly like the veil thins and I begin to have visionary experiences. So that happens quite a lot when I’m getting body work,  whether it’s craniosacral therapy or accupuncture, or when I used to do yoga it would happen as well.  So anytime that I’m really stilled. So, one day in craniosacral therapy, I heard Christ saying,  “I am the I am, I am the enunciation of love, announce my love.”

Rick: Announce, A-N-N-O-U-N-C-E.

Aedamar: Yeah. Yeah. So then, so here’s just a short piece then. So, this is from  April in 2020. And this is what I heard Christ saying to me, “Tell them I am love, tell them I  am love. Tell them I am nothing but love. I have appointed you to speak my holy  name of love back into the world. I’ve anointed you to speak as a messenger of  my love. You are a channel of my love, chosen to deliver my message of love to  the world. Do not worry about those who will not listen, but share my love with  those who are hungry for my love. My love is the food of life. I have filled you with my love, that you may share it with the world. Speak my holy name of love back into the world that I created in love. This is a book of love that I have asked you to write in my holy name. My name is love. I am love.”  Oh, so beautiful, Rick. I got goosebumps just reading it. Wow.

Rick: When you have that kind of vision, try to describe it. Like if I were to have that  kind of vision, would I be actually hearing an audible voice as if there was a person in the room speaking to me or is it a thought in my mind?

Aedamar: It’s a completely inner hearing. Yeah, completely inner hearing. I guess the closest analogy would be if you were having an imaginary conversation in your mind, which we all do all the time.

Rick: Right.

Aedamar: Except this isn’t an imaginary conversation. I’m in a meditation and I’ve fallen into stillness, and that would be preceded by the experience of the sacred. I would be aware that the Christ was present, I would be aware that the energies had become really incredibly sacred, maybe there’s fire burning in my body. So, it is couched, for want of a better word,  in an already existing mystical experience. And then I hear these words. Does that explain it at all?

Rick: Yeah, I think it helps. I’ve interviewed other people like Gina Lake, for instance, who channels Jesus and writes whole books as if Jesus wrote them, but she’s just serving as a scribe.

Aedamar: Okay, I must look her up.

Rick: Yeah, you should check her out. You’d like her.  She and others too, Mary Magdalene and people  kind of -it gives you the feeling that these higher  Beings or whatever you want to call them are just looking for opportunities to communicate with humanity through whomever is capable of serving as a conduit.

Aedamar: Christ said to me once he said “Wherever I find an open heart, there I enter.”

Rick: Yeah, there you go.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, they really are looking for us to cooperate in our own unfolding, in our own  awakening. Like we’re so kind of bloody minded as humans, that we’re, we’re so  closed to the one true path of life, which is the path of deification and awakening and the return to love.

Rick: Yeah, well, they can’t do it all for us. If a surgeon wants to operate on you,  if you’re going to just be kicking and moving around the table and he can’t do it,  he has to wait until you’re ready to settle down.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.  My psychotherapist said to me, she said, “Aedamar, you weren’t,” this is the terminology she has,  she said, “you weren’t defended against the visions happening.” That’s just the terminology from Jung.

Rick: In other words, you weren’t blocking them? Is that what that means?

Aedamar: I didn’t block it.  Yeah, and they when they came, I let them in. I 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.

Rick: Yeah. Or maybe Jesus would have come back and said, “Oh, come on.”

Aedamar: I think he would have, he loves me so much.

Rick: The second part of your book is more about society. You argue that Western civilization is built on a narrative of separation, that has ruptured the connection between reason and spirit and God and humanity. How do you see this playing out in the world today?

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, the horrors, the genocides and the wars and the brokenness and the individualism,  materialism, consumerism, secularism. We’re living in a very broken world. So, I think we, yeah,  I’m sure you completely agree that we do live as if we are cut off from the divine realm. We live as if we’re just kind of random happenings on a random universe, rather than there being some really beautiful, glorious, meaningful, purposeful design to our lives. So, we live as if we are kind of like the masters of our own destiny, rather than being part of a beautiful whole.

Rick: Well, some people actually articulate that paradigm. They say we’re biological robots in  a meaningless universe. And everything is random. And there are certain laws of nature that the whole thing is mechanistic, but there’s no intelligence behind it, no kind of  intelligent design in any, by any definition.

Aedamar: Yeah, to me that just has to be hubris.  I remember listening to a podcast a couple of years ago, and I think it was a scientist,  and he was saying that we still don’t know where the laws of nature come from,  You have to go be like just the kind of story, the picture that you’re painting there, there’s just these laws of nature. Well, where did that come from?

Rick: Actually, I was having a friendly debate with this guy. I think he was from Australia, but he  was saying, “Okay, if you just grant us one miracle, then we can explain everything else.”  I said, Oh, what’s that? He said that there are these laws of nature.  and I said, “Sorry, I’m not going to grant you that.”

Aedamar: Yeah, oh-brilliant!

Rick: There’s a reason why there are these laws of nature. There’s an underlying intelligence that, those are expressions of.

Aedamar: Yes, yes, yeah. I remember I was  very lucky several years ago to attend a fabulous conference in Dublin. There was a  eight Nobel Prize winner speaking. It was to honor Erwin Schrodinger, who was an Austrian physicist who was the precursor to Watson and Crick and DNA and so there was a huge  gathering in Dublin. It was co-chaired by or co-presented by Trinity College  Dublin which is one of the great universities in Dublin and so they were  talking all about the Big Bang, they were talking about consciousness, it was really exhilarating like it was mind-blowing listening to these brilliant people but one of them, so a lot of the talk was the Big Bang  and consciousness and do we create it or are we or are we like an antennae  that consciousness

Rick: yeah a transmitter or receiver kind of thing.

Aedamar: Yeah and one of them said,  they were talking about the Big Bang and where did the particle come from  which banged during the Big Bang, and he just said now I don’t know if he was being like actually joking in retrospect, but at the time I took it in all serious  and he said “well science doesn’t know where that particle came from, we think it just spontaneously appeared”. Are you telling me with all your science that were to buy that the particle just appeared?

Rick: Yeah, it didn’t have anything better to do, it just kind of came along. The way  I look at it is, you don’t have to go back to the Big Bang, you can just look at a blade of grass or a mosquito or anything and imagine, just think about what you’re looking at. Think  about if you have a microscope, look at a single cell and watch how it functions and you think this could not possibly be random and accidental. It’s not little billiard balls running into  each other. There’s this intelligent orchestration of everything. And then the whole universe  is like that, no matter how far out you expand, even if you go to intergalactic space where there’s nothing there, there’s photons whizzing through and all kinds of laws of nature in  play. So, the whole thing is just one ocean of intelligence.

Aedamar: Oh yeah, oh completely, I completely  agree. You’ve mentioned before about even seeing God like the genius of the  divine mind in a pile of dog poop.

Rick: Sure.

Aedamar: I was out walking with…

Rick: By before, you mean like the previous  conversation you and I had in case people are wondering, “Hey I missed that.”

Aedamar: I was out  walking with a friend last weekend in some beautiful woods in Anaskari and there was a big pile of dog poo in front of us and it was covered in flies and my friend said dinner for the  flies. I told her what you had said. Yeah, it’s true. Yeah yeah.

Rick: Reminds me of a movie called The Bug’s Life. So, there’s this cafe and this waiter comes out with a  little platter of poop, and it said “who ordered the poo poo platter?” and all these  flies go down.

The Great Awakening and Second Axial Age

Aedamar: Yeah, there you go. So, the brokenness, just to come back to that question, Rick,  this separate, that we do live as if we’re separated from the divine and we live as if we’re  just random particles spontaneously big banging in our individual little lives. But the essence  of, so one of the big things from philosophy that has helped me to kind of begin to find frames for understanding the path of spiritual awakening and the path of life, is the axial age,  to talk about the first axial age and the second axial age. So, what I learned in philosophy,  and I find this like really, really, really helpful, so hopefully it might be helpful to  people listening who mightn’t have heard the idea before, in the 1960s a German philosopher called Karl Jaspers, he looked back over history, and he recognized that over a 600 year period  between 800 and 200 BCE, he said during those 600 years, there was, he said that consciousness itself transformed from the mythic animistic state of consciousness, to rational intellectual scientific consciousness. And he said that happened spontaneously in a number of  different geographical locations around the world.  And he said it was profound and it changed everything and he called it an axial shift like as if the  the earth had tilted on its axis, it was so profound.  And that was the beginning of the rational intellectual way of understanding ourselves, the scientific model,  the rational intellectual way that we live now. That came to dominate the way in which we live our lives. And my sense is that, so, and we’re now in a second, the second axial shift that’s just been recently recognized over the last couple of decades, that it’s as  profound again. We’re going through another profound shift. So, in as much as consciousness  changed profoundly from myth and animism to the scientific way, we’ll call it. We’re now shifting from the scientific way to the spiritual way. That’s the shift that’s underway and  the path through that shift is spiritual awakening. So individually, we have to awaken if we want to kind of stay on track with evolution itself and collectively, we need to awaken as a species.  We need to grow up as a human species like  the Wilbur Combs lattice,  like the two sides, like we start off at kind of a primitive tribal and  then you go up the left-hand side to  rational intellectual and the highest  point is unit of consciousness. And so  humanity itself has to grow up as much as an individual human has to grow up  from being a child to an adolescent to  an adult and then hopefully ongoing adult development at a psycho-spiritual level.  So, this is what’s playing out at the moment that life itself is, consciousness itself, is trying to shift into a new gear. It’s trying to shift from rational to spiritual, from logic to love. And a whole new way of understanding ourselves and being is what’s being offered by evolution. It’s like being offered on a  a planet, particularly through spontaneous spiritual awakenings that are happening all over the  planet as you said at the outset. This is the invitation of life at this time that we’re  alive. Do you want to get on board with evolution? Do you want to stay the distance and continue to live on this planet and be a flourishing species or do you all just want to kill yourselves and kill each other?

We’re now shifting from the scientific way to the spiritual way. That’s the shift that’s underway and the path through that shift is spiritual awakening.

Rick: Well put. Now, obviously, throughout history, there have been difficult times.  Life used to be very short. People would be considered ancient if they lived to 40. And there have been plagues and wars and, famines and all kinds of difficult things throughout history. And so, sometimes you say, “Oh, the  world is such a mess these days.” Well, if you study history, it seems like it’s always been a mess. But perhaps we’ve reached a point at which, it’s become more critical.  Some say that we’re in the sixth great mass extinction. And this is the first one that’s human caused. Others were due to asteroids and things like that. Yeah. So, what would  you say? And as you just said, there seemed to be spontaneous spiritual awakenings taking place all over the world, and facilitated in part by our modern technologies such as the  internet.

Aedamar: Yeah, for sure.

Rick: And I don’t know if that had been the case 500, 600 years ago.  Probably not.  I’m sure there were some.  So, what would you say is, what in current affairs, current events, is characteristic of a spiritual awakening taking place?  And it wouldn’t necessarily be good news stuff.  It could be upheavals that are actually symptomatic of a major shift taking place.  And how do you, do you have any conjecture as to how it might play out?

Chaos as Birth Pangs of New Era

Aedamar: Well first off, the first part of it is, I completely agree that the horrors that are  unfolding across the planet are the other side of the Great Awakening.  So, one era is dying and that is always like Kali in that tradition, that’s destruction  and chaos and darkness and everything falling apart.  And that is how an era ends.  It all disintegrates.  It all falls apart because that system is not working anymore.  And a new era is trying to be born.  And then you’ve got the labor pain, you’ve got the nightmare of labor and the difficulty to birth something new.  Any birthing mother will know,  like it’s a really, really, really difficult thing to do,  but it’s worth it to go through the pain of labor to get the new birth, to get the new thing,  to get the new era in terms of the whole of humanity.  So, I think that we are seeing the,  hopefully it couldn’t get much worse,  like led by humanity,  the horrors in the world, the genocide,  the appalling wars, the famines that are being inflicted on whole peoples. My heart just breaks day after day. And, and yet I’m hopeful. Yet  I just think there is so much beauty being offered to humanity that it doesn’t matter really that the leaders of some of the biggest powers in the world are to me agents of evil.  It doesn’t actually matter because on the ground, the majority of human beings want a  a more beautiful world. Ordinary people like you and like me, and what each of us individually  does matters, and it counts and it contributes. We’re all trying to weave a new cloth for  humanity. We’re trying to weave a new consciousness. And it can’t come any other way, Rick, except through individual human beings doing their, playing their part, doing their thing. So even though, I don’t know, I don’t know why I’m still hopeful, I just am because  I know what’s offered. I know the bliss and the ecstasy and the love of  unit of consciousness. I know what it’s like to be in a place of love, temporarily, unfortunately,  and then I have to come back to this realm. I know what it’s like, I know what’s being offered,  and I just can’t believe that we will continue to turn our back on it and not accept the gift.

Rick: Yeah, I’m also optimistic. My concern just has always been like how much chaos do we have to  go through to get to the other side, and what can we do to make it smoother and to  minimize the chaos. And it kind of seems like we’re taking one step forward, two steps back sometimes,  and we’re pulling out of climate agreements and things like that. There could soon  be large swaths of the earth that are uninhabitable during the summer, major cities that have to be evacuated or something. Anyway,

Aedamar: Yeah, it could get, it can be very depressing,  but I think the thing is not to give in to the despair, because then we’re not helping.  The other thing that I might just as a comment say, is that it’s really important for all of us to remember that we carry our karma with us through lives, and that each of us has lived horrendously in previous lives, inflicting pain on other people. Do you know Brian Weiss’s book,  Many Lives, Many Masters?

Rick: I know the title. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the author,  but I remember that.

Aedamar: It’s really brilliant. I really loved reading it. And so, he had a gift of when he had one patient and under hypnosis, I think it was hypnosis, he’s a psychiatrist in  America and she recounted multiple, multiple, multiple past lives and he was in lots of her past lives as a teacher and but one of the things that, sorry he probably had other people other stories in his books as well, but the point was that say for example like the Nazi German in one  lifetime is the Jewish victim in another and a Palestinian victim in another and a perpetrator in another, just to use that one line, it’s one that comes to mind from it.  So, there’s like, I think it was Richard Roar talks about spiritual narcissism and righteous activism and I think there’s risks for that. I think there’s a lot of room for humility around all that’s wrong. I don’t know what I’m really fully circling there, but I think it’s important to know that we’re all capable of all of the same horrors, and how do we work together to  bring us all on.

Rick: Yeah, I think you kind of got the point across there. Who knows what we’ve  done in past lives.

Aedamar: And yeah, more succinct.

Rick: There but for the grace of God go I.

Aedamar: This time, yeah.

Rick: Yeah. And I mean, to throw in another cliche, make hay while the sun shines, because we have an opportunity now, regardless of what we may have done, or regardless of what’s going on in the world,  to make some serious spiritual progress and radiate a positive influence.

Aedamar: And I think  It all operates collectively.  Like Jesus dying on the cross did it for the entire of humanity.  Meister Eckhart said that Jesus divinized humanity. So, each of us small players,  I think what we do I think we do for everybody. I think we do it for the collective

Rick: Yes  Yeah, that’s an interesting point in itself that inevitably  everything is completely interconnected and every thought you think, every action you perform,  sends out a ripple of influence to the whole universe really, but especially this planet.  And so, when I heard a great quote from, who was it, Aldous Huxley recently, he said all these problems, wars and famines and diseases and all this stuff, those aren’t problems,  those are symptoms. They’re symptoms of our underlying failure to be self-realized or  whatever actual terminology he used there. But if we could achieve that, these other things would stop manifesting as they do.

Aedamar: Yeah, 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. It’s nothing new.  I mean, you can trace it right back.

Rick: Yeah, and imagine if,  like we were talking earlier about how maybe Jesus  and some of these higher spiritual beings  are looking for opportunities to tune into receptive individuals here and there.  But imagine if all 8 billion of us,  or maybe at least 7 billion,  were receptive in that way,  and they could tune into all of us in that way.  Imagine the world we would manifest.

Aedamar: That’s the plan. I mean that’s what’s being offered Rick. I mean I have absolutely no doubt. I’m sure you agree like that’s exactly That’s what the hope is that we will all like, but you know, let’s start living beautiful lives in love.  I do think that it’s meant to be heaven on earth.  I mean I think that that awakening is meant to happen here and now in this realm, and I think if we don’t do the work of  It here, there’s not a magic button that happens when you die, that your spirit suddenly gets upgraded like oh, yeah you can go into the white light. You got to do the work here and now.

Rick: Yeah, but heaven on earth I think is entirely possible. It’s just, if we don’t like the way the world looks, it’s just the reflection of eight billion people in a rather undeveloped state of consciousness. And if more of them could develop, then we would have a different world automatically.

Aedamar: My garden, and I have a little garden out here, and my flowers and a few little  trees and the joy that they give me is just incredible and just in in terms of like the collective, like what every morning I sit outside and I have a  coffee like no matter what,for the whole year and I just talked to the flowers  and the roses are in bloom now I have four different rose bushes and each of  them bloomed in the exact same week just about ten days ago it’s just so  remarkable and they’re not even like the same species of rose. So, when I go out into the garden like I greet everybody, I greet the Sun, the stars, the  sky, the trees, the planets, the earth, Mother Earth and I just offer thanks and  I actually learned a beautiful practice from the Native American woman Pat McCabe, do you know her? She has a beautiful native name called Woman Stands Shining and I’ve seen her, she was doing, she did something with Richard Roar’s Place, I think she did the opening ceremony for some summer school or some event, I saw it online and she says, “Greet the Sun every morning and make an  offering and ask the Sun to strengthen and bless everything that you are going to do today.” And I started doing that. I offer water and oats in the morning. Oats  are a native Irish offering to the divine realm, and it’s just such a  beautiful way to start. Before I even meditate, I sit outside and I just commune with nature and I just feel myself just to be so it’s so enriching.  It’s so lovely and I feel part of them you know I feel like a little flower sitting there with them, except that I can walk.

Rick: sounds lovely. Here’s a  question from a fellow Ireland, what do you call Ireland people? Irishmen.  Michael Moran. Have you considered your channeling and healing ancestral karma?

Aedamar: my spiritual lineage I do, not particularly in my personal lineage. So, if  I can answer it in that way, I discovered that, so that I have a number of  different types of visionary and mystical experiences and after my book Light and  Fire came out, a whole new kind of wave and style and type of  experiences began. One of which is, I now know called the exchange of the sacred  heart. So, I began to have experiences of, I’ll read one of them for you in a  little while, I began to have experiences of Christ giving me his heart and asking me to give mine to him, and it was just the most sublime, exquisite, beautiful experience. It’s happened a number of times. Then by chance I was reading Wendy Wright, an American academic actually, and she mentioned exchange of the  Sacred Heart as a mystical lineage and I nearly jumped off my chair and I said, “Oh my god, that’s what happens me!” And so, I read deeper and further into it and I  discovered that there was a 13th century line of women mystics in Germany who were the first to have this experience of the exchange of the sacred heart. So, when I  was doing my Master’s in Spirituality two years ago, I wrote my thesis on these  ancestral lines, these women were just astonishingly beautiful mystics and they  wrote books at a time when it was very rare for women to be writing books and  and the church did not like the female women mystics,  and the type of mystical experiences they were having.  So, these three women that I particularly love,  Mechtild of Magdeburg, Gertrude of Helfde and Mechtild of Hackborn,  they ended up all living in the same monastery in Helfde, in what’s now Germany.  They all died within a short number of years of each other.  The third one of them died in 1301.  In 1310, the first woman was burned at the stake for her mystical writing in Europe, Marguerite Perrette.  Now, I feel that in me really, really,  really deeply and strongly.  I feel deeply connected to the women of Helfter and MacTilda of Magdeburg.  And to see that the close timeline connection  of this blaze of spiritual writing amongst women  in the late middle ages,  and then the horrendous silencing  and burning alive of women mystics,  some men, but primarily women,  and then the continuing burning of women  for centuries in Europe.  So, I do feel,  where I feel a healing is happening  through what I’m being asked to do with my life  is that my mystical voice is an echo of their mystical voice.  I’m being given to speak what they were being given to speak,  and which went underground for centuries and was lost.  Many of their books were just lost and kind of random chance they’re found,  and are being brought back by incredible work being done by academics all over the world.  So that is an example,  of where I do think there is healing being offered down through the ancestral lineage.  I always say that I relate much more to my spiritual lineage than to my human lineage,  even though I like my human lineage too.

Rick: It’s hard to imagine how for centuries, men who considered themselves to be the leaders  and representatives of a religion of love, Jesus’s teaching, could have been such sadistic monsters.

Aedamar: Well, I think it’s the same karma, Rick, I think in each different life, we get  a chance to do it better.  Maybe I was one of the men burning the women at the stake, rather than actually being one of the women in the monastery.  I don’t know.  But yeah, so the sacred female voice, it’s  very new in the world, and it takes an awful lot of personal healing and collective healing for the sacred female voice to be heard again in the world as something valuable with spiritual gifts to contribute.

Rick: Yeah, I talked about this quite a bit with your fellow Dubliner, Diyamudu Murku, a month  or so ago, and he was talking about how prominent women were in the very, very early church before  it really became a church. And then I guess when Constantine came along and made Christianity the  official religion of the Roman Empire, the women all got shoved aside and the macho men took over.  (laughs)

Aedamar: Yeah, Jesus was an iconoclast. I mean, he broke down the barriers,  between all of the othering that was that was common at the time, and women were a huge part of his work, bringing them right into the center. think  that there were 12 female disciples. I’m absolutely certain of that.

Rick: In addition to the 12 men, you mean?

Aedamar: Yes, I absolutely. Yeah. And I’m certain, I mean, we know that Mary Magdalene wrote a  Gospel that has been recovered and verified. And all of the experiences that we  read about that the men experienced in the Bible. I’m certain sure the women had all of the same kind of beautiful, exquisite mystical experiences with Jesus, but they just weren’t recorded.  But the thing, one of the things that absolutely like stopped me in my tracks was when I began to  get interested in the spirituality and this mystical path and what does it all mean. And  I began reading the Bible in a very serious way. “Okay, what’s in here?” I really liked the prophets,  Ezekiel spoke to me in a really powerful way, really like him. But then I was reading the gospel,  the Easter story and Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus. And the first witness of the resurrected  body was Mary Magdalene. The first witness. What else was Jesus, and now the resurrected  Christ trying to do except to say I am appointing a woman to speak for me. A  woman, my beloved Mary Magdalene, will tell the world that I have risen from the  dead. And she was just brushed to the side, thank you very much. First of all they didn’t believe her, they went to see with their own eyes, the man, but she was the first evangelist. And these women that I’m talking about, the mystics in  in Helfte in the 13th century. Jesus spoke to them as disciples, as  apostles, as evangelists.

Rick: Yeah, we were talking about the second axial age. I  think that the resurgence or re-establishment of women in their proper role will be very much a part of it. And the fact that the world has  been so troubled as it has been, is attributable in part to their repression.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. It has to be. I mean, we  can’t have a balanced world, and we can’t have equality and we can’t have justice until everybody is equal, every single person.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s been a hard-fought battle. I listen to Heather Cox Richardson, who’s an  Historian, and she often talks about just the difficulties that women went through throughout our history in terms of actually being considered citizens and worthy of voting, and all kinds of things.

Aedamar: It’s hard to fathom.  It’s hard to fathom.  I mean that the vote is only like less than 100 years old for women.  It’s hard to fathom.  In ancient Greece, women were lower down the pecking order than slaves.

Rick: Yeah, almost like that, to a certain extent in the U.S. as well.  Okay, another question here from Michael.  I don’t know what you’re going to be able to do with this one, but let’s see.  Did you consider contact with avatars to help with your kundalini?

Aedamar: No, because I didn’t know it was a kundalini.  No, no, I have never sought anything in a mystical experience.  It happens to me.  I sit in reverence, in prayer, in sacredness,  and then I am opened to the mystical realm.  I would never go and look to try and make contact with somebody other than somebody who’s visited me,  being Jesus, Mother Magdalene, Mary.  And then there’s sacred animals,  like I’m looking at my beautiful Theobald,  a beautiful sacred deer came to me as well,  and is a guardian that minds me on my spiritual path,  amongst other beautiful symbols that look after me.  But I would never seek to make contact with anybody, Michael.  No.  That would be–  I mean, yeah, it’s not my path.  It’s not what it’s meant to do.

Rick: Very good.  All righty.  So, the final segment of your book  focuses on practical advice for listeners who are inspired by your story and might be seeking their own spiritual connection. So, you have what you’ve created what you call a path of gold,  a guide to the seven stages of awakening. You want to say a little bit about that?

The Path of Gold: Seven Stages of Awakening

Aedamar: I will try. Yeah. The title Path of Gold came from Christ. He said to me one day,  “I have laid before you a path of gold. Take my hand and let me guide you on the way.  I know the way because I am the way.”  Last, just a little segue, last night I was walking in the woods near where I live,  just towards sunset to honor the eve of the solstice which is today.  And you know at sunset when the sun is coming in at an angle and there’s little pockets of light,  and I was walking through a woodland and there was a little path of golden light, and I was remembering, oh my goodness, it’s the path of gold and it just felt so meaningful and so beautiful.  So what do I have in the path of gold? So, I’ll just pull out my book here now and just see what I said.

Rick: Sure, and while you’re looking that up, let me ask you a related question.  For someone listening to this who feels a deep longing for more,  who feels disconnected and off track in their life, what is the first step you would recommend they take?

Aedamar: Can you say that again Rick? Sorry, I wasn’t concentrating properly.

Rick: Oh, sorry. Yeah, for someone who’s sort of feeling a deep longing and feels disconnected,  what is the first step you would recommend that they take?  And you can weave this into the path of gold if you like.

Aedamar: The first thing I would do is sit with the longing.  I’d bring the longing into my prayer life, I’d bring the longing into my meditation  and I would let the longing reveal itself to me, because the longing is a path. I  mean it’s actually part of what’s in the path of gold. The longing as much as the visions are intelligent and meaningful and intentional, the longing itself is love calling us home.  So, if somebody has this longing in their heart,  talk to the longing, bring it into meditation,  and just be curious and say, show me, guide me,  help me, reveal, tell me, teach me.

The first thing I would do is sit with the longing. I’d bring the longing into my prayer life, I’d bring the longing into my meditation and I would let the longing reveal itself to me.

Rick: I remember interviewing a woman named Mary,  I’m not remembering her last name, this was years ago,  but her theme was, what’s in the way is the way.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, yeah,  Rumi, who was writing at the same time as those women mystics I was just talking about,  and we all know his exquisite, beautiful,  mystical poetry and love poetry.  He has a beautiful poetic expression for saying that the longing that we feel,  is the longing that’s longing for us,  that it’s reciprocal and it’s mutual.  So, if somebody is already feeling that longing in their heart,  It is the very presence of love expressing its own longing in us.  So, it’s very beautiful.  It’s a very beautiful part of the journey to feel that longing.

Rick: Would you say, for instance, that if the longing is uncomfortable,  rather than trying to distract ourselves by going to a movie or something,  tune into it.  And even if it becomes more uncomfortable, feel it even more acutely.

Aedamar: Yeah.

Rick: And that will help you kind of like break through.

Aedamar: Yeah.  Yeah.  You know, Carl Jung, who’s been a great teacher to me,  he talks about adopting the symbolic attitude to everything that meaningful that happens in our life.  So, to engage with us in an intelligent, open, curious way.  So, for example, to take it into your morning sit in your meditation and to set the intention,  “I would like to engage with this longing.  I’d like to learn more about it.”  And also, the bigger question of,  “I would like to engage with my spiritual path my spiritual awakening “and let the longing speak to us or it can speak in  words, can speak in images, can speak in feelings, can speak energetically in our bodies and say for example if somebody was going, like I do, for body  work, for acupuncture or craniosacral therapy or whatever, bring that longing to all of these moments when we’re seeking integration and healing in our life because they’re the times that were opened up, they’re the times of stillness, that’s when the  veil pins, that’s when we’re in a healing space and I think that’s the time to ask the big questions.  So okay let me just have a quick look to see what’s on the path of gold. So okay yes seven  stages. I’m just, oh yeah, so seven stages, yeah, of awakening and the following this is the path of gold. So, I’ll just read out the seven and then see if I have any comments on any of them. So, the first one is the call to awaken and to interpret the signs of spiritual dis-ease. So that longing that can be uncomfortable is  what I would call spiritual dis-ease, not disease. And so, there is a call going out in every second of every day from the divine realm to every human being trying  to invite us into the awakening. So, it’s to hear the call to awaken and engage and engage meaningfully, with the signs of spiritual disease or a spiritual  invitation. To take the journey within, just to commit to the inner life, to let go of the external, inauthentic, vacuous, empty world that is out there and commit to  the inner journey.  Just go inside.  Dante’s poem, like that was a real, that was a big milestone on my journey reading his  book with a great English academic from Cambridge, I think, did an annotated translation and I  just, it was a very beautiful experience.  So that’s the journey within, going into the dark wood, surrendering to being lost, surrendering to not knowing the way but waiting for the way to reveal itself.  Because it will reveal itself if we make ourselves available.  So, the journey within.

Rick: And I would say letting go of this dark, dark world and going within, doesn’t mean abandoning  the world because having gone within, you come back, and you infuse the world with the  inner light. It becomes much more beautiful and rich, kind of like,  going to the bank to get some money out so you can go to the market and enjoy the market more.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, lovely.  Yeah, yeah.  What did you say earlier about somebody who becomes inflated rather than offering service?  I think, yeah, exactly that.  Like you get gifts from doing the inner journey.  The whole point of the inner journey is that you find your true gifts and come back out,  and you share them with other people. Yeah.

Rick: It’s replenishing, it’s refreshing, it’s enriching.

Aedamar: Yeah. Yeah, it’s all.

Rick: Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else should be added  unto thee.

Aedamar: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, beautiful.

Rick: Famous biblical scholar, Rick Archer, quoting.

Aedamar: So, then the third stage that I have here is what I call the liminal space and the consciousness of  of longing, there you go, for our friend to ask this question. So, to begin to be  comfortable being between worlds, allowing that to be a felt lived experience, being comfortable and the thing is that because we’re now entering into a new axial age, we quite simply are already in a liminal space, we are between worlds. So, the best way to fall in with that, is to let it happen in our own individual selves as well. To be comfortable with the not  knowing, with the confusion, with the breakdown of the ending of one era,  the birth of the new. We’re in that dark time of labor, death and labor and we’re  waiting for the rebirth. So, to let it happen, accept it, recognize, for more of  us to learn that it’s a natural state and it’s a natural phase of the awakening.  Then the next I have is transmission from an awakened mind and reading the mystics.  So, I think that’s huge.  I think in the Buddhist and the Hindu cultures, that’s really central.  Isn’t it Rick?  Transmission from a teacher.

Rick: Yeah.  And it happened with Jesus too.  I remember the woman who touched his cloak and he said he felt like there had been some kind of transmission.  I felt the energy go out of me or some such thing.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I mean I never knew anything about that in my religious practice you know or in any teaching that I ever received. I didn’t  know anything about that, but I think you can meet, I mean if you met Jesus yeah, you’d get it full on fireworks,  but also, when you’re not exposed to  spiritual teachers, I think then reading,  reading the mystics and reading spiritual books and reading from the great  teachers like for me Jim Finley and Richard Rohr  reading their work. But much more for me it’s the mystics, I think that’s where my primary teaching comes from and then Richard and Jim and Cynthia Bourgeau as  well and lots of other wonderful teachers they then kind of  flesh out for me how to integrate the mystical experiences and how to walk the spiritual path. And so that’s all to say that we’re moving in the direction of  unity consciousness. So, moving from the dualistic mind of the rational era of  the last axial age to unit of consciousness which is the type of consciousness of the spiritually awakened mind. All is one, there is no  division, there is no separation, we are all one, we are all parts of one very beautiful majestic being which is the being of love which is life itself. So  we’re so on this spiritual path that’s where we’re headed. We’re headed to unit of consciousness where we’re walking towards the recognition of the divinity  of all of creation, everything is sacred that’s panentheism and then we are moving towards spiritual mystical consciousness or divine union. And  hopefully we’ll all get to the stage where we permanently live in the bliss and the ecstasy of divine union with the sacred, in whatever way the sacred presents to us.  So, for me, it’s the Christ and for you, it’s somebody else.

Rick: I think we all will.  I don’t think it’ll necessarily happen to each of us in this lifetime, but  this lifetime is just a chapter in a very big book.

Aedamar: Yeah, yeah, ongoing.  Yeah, yeah.  I hope I meet you in the next lifetime as well, Rick.  We’ll see where we are.

Rick: Yeah, well, it’d be nice to meet you in person in this lifetime.  We’ll see if that ever happens.

Aedamar: That’d be nice, yeah.

Rick: The final instruction you received from Jesus in your book  was, “Invite them to become kindling in the fire of my love so that all may burn together as one in love.”  What does that invitation mean to you,  and how do you extend it to our audience today?

Aedamar: First of all, my body is burning.  just to hear you say it.  So, fire is the metaphor and the image that and the symbol that Christ has used with me,  and given me to experience all along.  So, kindling in the fire of my love,  is that I would offer myself to Christ  as a piece of wood for him to throw into the fire  and let me burn in your love and enjoy the bliss.  So, the invitation there is for each person to recognize themselves as contributing  to the fire of love that is a universal fire  in which we are all invited to burn in love.  So, the kindling, to become kindling,  join in, wake up.  –

Rick: Yeah.  One nice thing about the kindling metaphor  is that when a piece of, let’s say,  unlit wood gets near to a piece of lit wood,  then the fire spreads to the unlit piece.  And then it can, one to the next, it can spread around.

Aedamar: Beautiful.  Yeah.

Rick: And yeah, so I think that there’s a kind of  a contagious quality to this work.

Aedamar: Oh, that’s a lovely way to say, yeah.  –

Rick: In a good sense.

Aedamar: Yeah, I actually feel as if I’ve kind of come,  I feel as if it’s been contagious for me,  just having this conversation.  I feel really inspired and I feel as if I’m on fire.

Rick: Great.  Well, thank you.  And me too.  It’s this, I’m like the prime beneficiary of doing these interviews.

Aedamar: You’re so kind.

Rick: It’s just such a delight meeting such wonderful people  and having conversations with them.  It really has become one of my most powerful  spiritual practices.

Aedamar: Well, it’s incredible service that you do, Rick.  I guess this is your incredible path of service.  You put wisdom out into the world,  for all of us to listen to,  as we go through our lives.  I’ve been really benefiting from listening to an awful lot of the conversations.  Thank you for what you do.

Rick: Well, I think people benefit from this one.  And so, thank you for offering it to us.  And I’ll have a page on Batgap,  like I always do, about this interview,  and it’ll have a link to your website and to your book.  And I’m happy to upgrade that from time to time,  like if you write a new book or announce some event  or something like that.

Aedamar: Thank you very much, Rick.  I would say for people to go to my,  for now, to go to my website,  because I have put a huge number of my visions  directly onto the website,  just in chronological order, transcribe my journals.  I’m trying to give it all away for free.  I’m trying to make it accessible to people,  so that people can use them on their own spiritual journey  and see if anything touches them.  It’s a gift that I’m giving away.  It’s my service.  So, it’d be good if you could–  I’ll give you the– you could just link to the vision pages on the website.  And that’s my gift to the audience.  Thank you to whoever is here listening and watching and in the future.

Rick: Yes, thanks, Aedamar.  And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching.  And as I always say, we’ll see you for the next one.

Aedamar: Thank you so much, Rick.  r;You’re welcome.  (upbeat music)  [MUSIC PLAYING]  Thank you.