Brad Laughlin & Anna Breytenbach Interview
Summary:
- Guests: Brad Laughlin, a spiritual teacher and co-founder of CoreLight.org, and Anna Breytenbach, an interspecies communicator known for her work with animals.
- Main Topics: They discuss their backgrounds, the importance of sacred activism, and their mutual passion for helping animals and the Earth.
- Upcoming Course: Brad and Anna are collaborating on an online course titled “For the Love of Animals,” focusing on deepening the connection with the natural world and living in love and joy.
The conversation also touches on the collective consciousness of species, the role of animals in maintaining Earth’s energetic grid, and the transformative power of love and connection in facing global challenges.
Full transcript:
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. We’ve done, this is number 699, we’re almost at 700 of them. And if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P and look under the past interviews menu. And of course, you can also subscribe to the YouTube channel and explore the YouTube channel, except on batgap.com we have them organized in a number of ways that are not possible to do on YouTube itself. So, you might find that useful. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. 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 explaining alternatives to PayPal. Also, another way to support it, is we have a number of volunteers who do different things, one of which is proofreading transcripts of the interviews. And it’s a work in progress. We’ve done about half of them, I think, maybe more, but there’s still more to do. So, if you’d like to help with that, just get in touch. My guests today are Brad Laughlin and Anna Breytenbach. And I interviewed Anna about four years ago, and it became one of my most popular interviews. It’s gotten over 200,000 views. And Brad, I have not interviewed, but I did interview his wife, Leslie Temple Thurston, in I think 2010, the fall of 2010. So, I hadn’t even been doing Bat Gap for a year yet at that point. And I listened to both interviews in the past week, and as usual, I’ve forgotten everything we had talked about, but I really enjoyed them and enjoyed listening to them again. And I also read a couple of books that Brad has written, and listened to also a video that Brad and Anna just made recently about something they’re going to be doing, which they’re going to talk about in today’s interview. And that’s why I have the both of them on together, because they’re going to be doing something together. I’ll keep you in suspense for a few minutes until they explain what it is. So, sometimes I just wing these interviews and whatever comes up. I have all kinds of notes, and in this case, I just felt like asking Brad and Anna to write out some notes, to make sure that we cover everything they want to cover, which is something I always want to do. I want to make sure that we get to talk about everything the guest wants to talk about. And so, their first intention for the interview that they expressed in their notes was to create an inviting space of love and joy. Love and joy. So that sounds good. And also, since we’re going to be talking about interspecies communication, to inspire people to know that they too can develop that skill, and develop conscious connection with the natural world and the self, capital S, and live more in love, joy, and the eternal present moment. And we’ll also be talking about their course. And they promise that they’re going to share plenty of inspiring, uplifting, and often humorous stories of interactions with animals in the natural world. So first of all, we want to talk about their backgrounds and maybe we should start with- Do you want to start, Brad, with yours?
Brad: Sure. Yeah, the brief, you’re talking about the brief little intro, right?
Rick: Yeah, like your bio.
Brad: Yeah, sure.
Rick: I mean, who are you?
Brad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve been a spiritual teacher for the past 25 years or so, and my spouse, as you said, is Leslie Temple Thurston, and she’s a teacher of enlightenment. And I wrote a book about our 25-year relationship. It’s called Living with Enlightenment, A Journey of Love. I think I’m not going to really tell you about that book because we’re going to talk about that later when we talk further. But together, Leslie and I co-founded a nonprofit to support the spiritual teachings and that’s called CoreLight.org. Core Light means the core of enlightenment within each one of us. And our tagline is “Change the world by changing yourself.” So, we teach, it’s a synthesis of a few different disciplines. One is the yoga of the mind, one is spiritual psychology, and it’s really about the egoic clearing work. It’s about learning to live in the heart and embody the soul, and we offer quick and simple but very powerful practices to do that. Those are outlined in our books and our courses. We also started a humanitarian arm about 20-some years ago called seedsoflight.org, Seeds of Light, and that organization serves marginalized communities here in South Africa where I live, in rural South Africa where I live part of the year, including AIDS orphans. We started by serving AIDS orphans. So, yeah, I think that’s it, except to say maybe that I’ve been through a very profound transformation the last few years, and I think we’ll probably talk about that today.
Rick: Okay, good. Okay, Anna, how about you? –
Anna: Well, I jumped ship off a more usual sort of course that had been set in my life. Had a very ordinary suburban upbringing in South Africa, my native country. And I mentioned that specifically to prove that, I’m not born with some unusual talent, or I didn’t spend my life gadding around in the African bush field with lions, cuddling up to leopards or elephants. I wish, perhaps in my childhood dreams. But no, I had a very ordinary suburban upbringing, straight into university for a bachelor’s degree, all very mental and academic. And all along the way, I was satisfying my feeling for the non-human world by volunteering at animal shelters or doing a holiday job at the vet and trying to learn these ways to be of assistance to animals. In retrospect, I realized those were also all very sort of human career orientated and usually rooted in the sciences. And I went down the corporate career path, moved to the West Coast of the US, where I was even more disconnected from nature and wildlife, living in Silicon Valley, as you might imagine. And after two years in the Bay Area, I moved up to the Pacific Northwest, very specifically choosing an island to live on because of a wolf sanctuary there and feeling some deep inner calling to follow that urge to get back into predator conservation, education, and these things I had been busying myself with along the way. So, it was as if I had a shadow career with the very little time that I had left in your average week. I became a cheetah handler in the late ’90s, and would do talks at schools around, conserving big animals and write newsletters, and do all these sorts of things. When I got to the Pacific Northwest though, I decided to learn tracking as in the good old-fashioned art of following footprints and sign to learn about what the non-humans had been up to when humans weren’t around. And this is where things turned on for me intuitively, because I didn’t know anything about North American animals, much less what their feet looked like. It didn’t help even if I were looking at the most perfectly sharp track in dried mud, I didn’t know what animal might have made that track. And the Wilderness Awareness School, which was founded in the mid-1980s by my Nature Connection mentor, John Young, they have a bevy of fantastic mentors and facilitators. Their whole ethos is not about teaching you book knowledge to then go out into the field and identify, but rather to sink into what they call seeing with native eyes and to sink into a feeling and a direct five-sensory relationship with the landscape and with the tracks that might be there. So instead of telling me what track I was gazing at without getting any answers, they suggested that I hold my hand over the track and see what happens, close my eyes, hold my hand over the track and see what happens, which I dearly did. And I began to get mental images of a certain dog-like face, bigger than a jackal from my native South Africa, not as red as a fox, more gray-brown and a certain backdrop in my mental vision. My eyes flew open. I described what I’d seen in quotation marks to the tracking mentor when he said, “Yes, well done. That is a coyote’s tracks.” And I said, “What’s a coyote?” So, a few things like this happened, a smattering of these intuitive, sudden knowings, let’s say, which would then play out to be true or to be verified. And I thought, “Well, I’m either losing my mind or there’s something really witchcrafty going on, or there’s some foundation to this. So, I did my research and discovered the whole field of interspecies telepathic communication, which was brought back into modern awareness by Penelope Smith. She’s nowadays considered the grandmother of interspecies communication. I chose to study with a mentee of hers, Dr. Jerry Ryan at the CC International Animal Institute and used all of my sacred vacation days from my corporate job over the next two years to do the 60 case studies required for certification. And the rest is history. Gleefully skipped back to Africa, kicked the corporate career out the window, and sunk myself into what had been calling me all along, which was a way to be a bridge between our species and the others who are so available to us, and so at the effect of our actions and decisions. I wanted to bring voice forward for the voiceless. And that’s what I’ve been up to the last 20 years. For the last 10 years or so, I don’t do pet consultations at all. Very much focused on my first love, which is the wildlife and ecological restoration projects that I consult to.
Rick: Nice. And you’re working on a book right now. You’re on a book writing retreat, so to speak.
Anna: Yes, indeed. I’m stepping off the radar for the rest of this year, writing a book I’ve wanted to for a long time, but haven’t been able to afford the time off yet. And it’s going to simply be stories from my consultation career. There are plenty of very good how-to books out there already, and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. But the stories themselves, as the famous story of Spirit the Black Leopard indicates, the stories themselves show what’s possible and also bring forward the animals richness and intelligence and personalities to any readers who are interested. I must just say that when the book is finally finished, the e-book and the audiobook will be completely freely available to everyone to download them. And that’s thanks to the UK based charity Lighten, who is supporting that publishing process.
Rick: Wow, that’s great. It’s interesting when people follow callings and you did, Brad and Leslie both did, and there’s so many stories and movies and fables and folklore and all kinds of things about people following callings that don’t make any sense to the people around them or to the ordinary world. And yet, they have this inner knowing that they have to do it. And it’s not necessarily a slam dunk because there’s so many influences tugging at them not to do it, and probably a lot of people don’t follow their callings, and yet when they do, in so many cases, marvelous things happen. People like Gandhi followed a calling that didn’t make any sense and many other stories. I mean, Frodo and…I’ve kind of been that way myself. Very unconventional path I’ve taken in life, but it’s nice when we can hear that inner voice and it actually turns out to be some kind of higher guidance or something, and it results in beautiful results that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
Anna: I must agree, they say that life begins outside of your comfort zone, and it’s so, so, true. One of the very helpful books along my path to developing the courage to step into what was calling, was a book by Greg Leroy called Callings. So eloquently written, and that gave me the courage to see that something could be created.
Rick: Yeah. Did one of you say that Laurens van der Post wrote a forward to one of your books or some such thing? No? Was that, where did I hear that? Maybe, I don’t know. Anyway, he was one of my favorite authors from South Africa. Ok, so what next? So, where should we go from here, you guys? We wanted to spend about 45 minutes talking about your backgrounds, but this is obviously not 45 minutes. So, do you want to loop back now and start to embellish and elaborate? Maybe starting with Brad?
Anna: Yeah, we could talk about how we came together.
Rick: Oh, yeah. Yeah. How did you guys meet?
Anna: Brad?
Brad: So, my spouse, Leslie, is also, she’s an animal communicator, interspecies communicator. And there were some students of hers, a couple, man and woman, who also studied with Anna. And they said, “You guys need to get together. This lady, Anna Breytenbach, is amazing.” And this was long ago. I can’t remember how many years ago, but it was before Anna’s work went viral and became very well-known. So, we invited Anna up to our house here in South Africa, rural South Africa, up in the northeastern part of the country and we spent an amazing, I don’t know, week or however how long it was, a few days together. And the intention was not just to get to know each other, but it was also that we share a mutual passion for what we call sacred activism. That’s a term that Andrew Harvey started with his book, The Hope, back in 2010. And we use it because it’s so apropos to our work and Anna’s as well, and it’s really sacred activism is about putting love in action, essentially. He’s written a whole book on it. So, we have this mutual passion for serving the earth and especially animals and the natural world, and especially elephants. So, the intention of our getting together initially, was to see what we could do to help the elephants. We were going to talk to them and see what their message was, and how we were ready to take down a to-do list of what we can do to help the elephants and Anna, would you like to finish the story from there since you did a lot of the talking to the elephants that week?
Anna: Yeah, we all sat together in a non-concentration form of meditation, just aligning our intention to be open to receive messages from elephants. We didn’t have to have a representative elephant in the room or outside. And our intention to be in contact with or to communicate with another being, our intention is sort of like the signal that gets us there. And one can connect with either an individual or a group, a collective. So, in this case, we were connecting with elephant consciousness to ask what we could do, pens poised at the ready, waiting to go and create petitions online or whatever. And to our initial dismay and then understanding, the elephants essentially, or elephant consciousness said, “Look, we’re facing extinction. Man has pretty much made sure that they’re leaving no space left for us, the largest land mammals. And it’s such a worldwide problem, and we can’t live our original ways and lifestyles. So, we don’t really see things that can be done to change things on a material level. However, we do ask for those humans who care to hold space for us, to literally sit in compassion for us, and to engender the feelings of us being well, to hold the energies of wellness and freedom of movement and safety, to hold that for us. And that’s essentially what they were asking for, was our energetic systems. Because whatever was going to play out, was going to play out. But even if, and it has continued to be pretty dramatic, what is playing out for elephants and the destruction of their habitats and poaching and all sorts of things, even in the face of those 3D circumstances, when they have the support of and feel that there is compassion and care, it does help improve their emotional experience of the difficult things they are going through. And so, what we did after consulting back amongst ourselves as the humans, is we created the Elephant Prayer Circle or Intention Circle, which resides on callite.org on the website there still to this day, and this is now 15 years later. And it’s a simple expression of the prayer or the intention of certain energies to be held for elephants. There’s no deep or complicated technology behind it. Myself, I printed it out and stuck it to my fridge door with the magnets and would see it several times a day as a little reminder and I didn’t have to read it every time. It was just a cue for me to come back into those heart-centered states of being. And whether we perform an action that has a butterfly effect on the other side of the world, or whether we think a thought or express a feeling, everything, everything that emanates from us, is a stone that drops into the pond of life, and the ripple effects continue outwards in concentric rings far beyond any distance or effects we can know. And this calls us into being responsible for what we are thinking and feeling, seeing as we have some choice in the matter, it seems, let’s put our minds and our hearts to helpful things.
Rick: Say a little bit more about how there could be a collective consciousness of the elephants or of bees or of giraffes or of humans or whatever. It seems like each -I’ve heard this mentioned many times and it makes sense to me that each species could have its own kind of morphic field and that’s what you were communicating with. You weren’t communicating with a specific elephant, but elaborate, if you would, like on how there’s an intelligence in the morphic field, which is kind of greater than the sum of the parts, perhaps, of that field, the animals representing that field, and how one could actually commune or converse with that intelligence.
Anna: That’s a very good question, and there’s a few things to say about that. Firstly, we shouldn’t paint all members of a certain species with the same brush in terms of behavior or personality. So, I am fatally bored of being asked, “Why do dogs bark at the gate?” (laughing) Or “Why do whales beach themselves?” Or “Why do horses snort?” One can’t say, you know, it’s ask the horse, ask the whale, ask the dog. They are an individual having an experience and all behavior arises out of a motivation or a need, a motivation to resolve a need or have some desire fulfilled. So, one can’t say that at a collective level, all horses perform a certain action for the same reason. However, my experience of all the non-humans is that they can communicate, and have very full self-awareness of their individual lived lives and actions and desires and fears and needs and wants, and relationships and everything. And they are also deeply connected, and have this very innate sense of the collective consciousness of all the others of their kind. And collective is still a matter of how we humans in our minds want to slice and dice all life. So, I’ll give you an example. One can communicate with the collective of elephant consciousness like we did those days. One could also communicate with a collective that comprises several different species. And when I work with permaculture or biodynamic farmers, this is the kind of thing. One walks into the garden, which is a collection of untold number of species, including the microbials that exist in the soil, and to ask caring questions like, what do you need for your health? Or what needs to be resolved here? Or who wants to move to a different position in the garden, for example? These are questions into the collective of the garden, that is made up of multiple species, because we are putting that container around it. So that said, a collective consciousness, whether it be multi-species in its nature, like a location-based thing, a particular forest in the Pacific Northwest, for example, or if it’s at a species level, the collective consciousness seems to hold the blueprint, or the original design for that place or for that species inherent purpose to be expressed without interference. And including their gifts, their talents, and what they are here to embody or contribute towards. In other communications with elephants, it has been conveyed that part of their role, is to keep the energetic grid of the earth stable. And their migratory paths are actually a match for the major ley lines and magnetic lines that run under the Earth’s surface. So not only are they using those to navigate and find their way when they need to, to resources, their walking and their rumbling and their sounding is helping to maintain the wellness of this grid structure. So, while an elephant is going about their daily business, they’re doing it in the context of that greater good as well. In some other sacred texts, this collective consciousness might be referred to as the sort of like the Devic level or the overarching consciousness of a certain species, and it appears to hold the blueprint and a very present understanding of the status of the health of all of their kind. And it’s less about the individual expression.
Rick: I think it’s a really useful and interesting concept. I mean, a lot of times, spiritual people who’ve been reading Advaita and so on, they get the idea of kind of a universal consciousness or, Brahman or the self and that is foundational and that we all sort of share in common, but it’s not as commonly talked about that there are individual expressions of consciousness as you’ve just been describing for various species, for a city, for a country, different collections of beings and there’s a lot that can be considered when we have that concept lively and our understanding. I wanted to ask that – would perhaps lead into an interesting topic -that you mentioned that the elephants walk along the ley lines and that helps to sort of stabilize or harmonize or something the functioning of the planet. I’m sure that they have been prevented from walking along where they would like to walk, and where they’re naturally inclined to walk, and so it’s interesting to consider what sort of disruptive influence that must have on the entire globe.
Anna: Yes. And the elephants, what the elephants are up to collectively is what the whale species are up to in the sea, same thing.
Rick: Swimming along ley lines?
Anna: Swimming, exactly, exactly. And look at how many places and regions the whales no longer from those pathways for all sorts of human created reasons. So yes, the destabilization that results, is significant. And what you were saying about the Brahman or the universal consciousness and then expressing in these different forms, I do think that is not different and non-dual. It’s acknowledging that all of life, any expression from a sort of a blob, to a fern leaf unfolding, to an ant, to an elephant, to human. If really in their center and in the core of their being, then they’re going to be responding to life in a way that is unknown to them, in service to the greater collective. Everything is an aspect of the divine, everything without any layering or differential value. And as everything is dancing, No job that they’re doing is self-determined, and no job that they’re doing is more or less important than another. So, it is in this wonderful, wonderful dance, including the chaotic things that are happening. It seems to me that all of life is in a very dynamic state, continually moving towards harmony, but harmony is not a fixed, static point of some ideal formula.
Rick: Brad, do you want to comment on any of that?
Brad: I don’t think I can add anything to what Anna has said. I guess there was one thing that crossed my mind, and that is, I wrote a book about ley lines and I didn’t include this work that we’re talking about with the animals, but the ley lines of the earth are like the meridians in the human body, like Chinese acupuncture is aware, and the ancient indigenous people were very, very aware of this. You look at the aboriginal Australians and they talk about the rainbow lines, the song lines, and the book I wrote is about the ley lines of Europe and the ancient culture that lived there marked those ley lines. They knew about earth energies. And we’ve had experiences, without going into great detail, just the experiences we’ve had, is really like -this time that we’re living in now, we’ve all, all of us who are on this path of consciousness and who work with energy and who love the earth, part of our role, is to wake up those ley lines. That’s partly what we’re here to do and maybe we’ll talk about that a little bit later in the call. It’s a bigger subject, but the elephants, the whales, all the animals are part of it, and yet we’ve fenced them. We’ve fenced them off from being able to do their job and I really don’t want to get ahead of ourselves because this is a topic we wanted to cover about hope for the future and looking at the day that fences will come down on the planet. That’s something we’ve seen, so it’s a potential.
Rick: Yesterday… I’m sorry, go ahead, Anna.
Anna: I just want to add that while the animals are doing their very important, following their very important divine instructions, they don’t have what might be a sort of a human sense of seriousness about it. They don’t have frowny faces and having meetings about it or imagining some need for a personal promotional path through to some heightened state of enlightenment. While the whales are attempting to swim through toxic seas with noise pollution and magnetic alterations to those lines that they’re used to following, they’re still interacting and singing and breeding and breaching. And scientists still don’t know why whales breach. And they’ve measured it and seen that,
Rick: Breach means they jump in the air?
Anna: Jump in the air, that’s right. And that’s, seven times in an hour is considered, sort of a very exuberant whale. And the amount of mass, I mean, these one ton or heavier whales, to fathom the life force energy, the physical kinetic energy required to propel a body of that mass out of water into the air, It uses a lot of calories. (laughs) It’s quite a workout. And yeah, scientists wonder, are they trying to scratch the barnacles off them? Are they trying to see better because they can’t hear what’s going on? So of course, I’ve asked whale after whale after whale. And without exception, the consistent answer is a version of, “Oh, because we can, it’s just such fun.” (laughing) “It’s just so good, just to be exuberant, it’s just to burst forth and simply be fully alive all of your physical capacity.”
Rick: Yeah, a lot of people like to ski jump and stuff like that. Yesterday I sent you both an article I had just come across about slime molds and I’d heard about this before, but slime molds are this amazing thing which don’t have a brain of course, or they would be considered very low on the evolutionary scale by biologists, but they’re actually being used to design subway systems and things like that, and NASA’s using them to figure stuff out. Because like, to take an example, they like oat flakes. So, if you arrange, let’s say, oat flakes on a petri dish or whatever the slime molds live in that are in the same pattern as the stops on the Tokyo subway system, within, I think it was an hour or so, the slime molds had actually interconnected all the oat flakes in a way which humans with their computers had taken years to do. The slime molds actually, if they figured out the best routes between all these stops, all these oat flakes, and so, wow, there’s just some intelligence that functions in things, even things that we consider to be very lowly evolved, which is beyond our appreciation, if not our comprehension.
Brad: Well, it speaks to… I recently re-watched your interview with Anna from a few years ago, and this is very apropos to your conversation then, which is, what is intelligence? What is life? And slime mold is right up there, but it doesn’t even have a brain, right? So how does that work?
Anna: Exactly. Everything is an intelligent expression of life. And just the magic that we humans are missing, because we insist on evaluating and assessing and judging others by empirical measurement, which is of course intrinsically has the design flaw of being our systems, we’re projecting onto them. And we as humans are the only ones who create this imagined hierarchy of intelligence and put ourselves at the top. And then we run around with notebooks or measuring devices to see how the others sort of live up to that. There’s so much intelligence, for example, in a beehive, again, individually, where every bee is doing exactly what their job is and will continue to do it, even upon risk of dying in the execution of their duties. And collectively, same in termite mounds. I mean, the ambient temperature of a termite mound underground, where they have large colonies, has to be 27.5 degrees. And they open and close vents and do all sorts of tunnel modifications to keep the temperature consistent throughout the year. They grow their own gardens of fungus to provide food for their brood. Incredible intelligence. And even the very laudable sort of aspect of science is known as biomimicry. Even that of course, acknowledges the intelligence intrinsic in nature and tries to learn from it and imitate it to mimic the biological world. Even so, there’s a slight tinge of extractive attitude in that, right? Or let’s see how we can copy it for our benefit, or for cleaning our water systems better for our homes. So that’s not a bad thing, but it’s still sort of copying some of the things in nature, for the sake of human good. It’s still one step away from direct communication. And imagine if each of us were exactly where we’re living. Could be an apartment in a city. You could have a pot of plant in your apartment or not. You could see a tree or a seagull or not. Imagine if each of us, where we’re living, started to have conversations and a lived connection with all of our surroundings. With the wood of our furniture and the tree or trees from which it came. With the spider hanging out by the windowsill. With the drop of rain or condensation that comes onto the window. Imagine being in that uninduced, no psychedelics required, constant state of open-heartedness and a lived communion with the fabric of life. That’s a very full and lived experience, plus sends a much greater chance of us knowing what we need to know, to be a helpful part of the equation in this magical complexity that is any environment.
Rick: I think if all of us did function that way, we would have world peace. We wouldn’t have hunger, all of our farming practices, and we wouldn’t have the climate change emergency that’s happening. Everything would be so different. But of course, we can’t just snap our fingers and all function that way overnight. It’s necessarily going to be that there’s some avant-garde who do function that way, and then hopefully society will move in a direction where it becomes more and more the norm.
Anna: I’ve got a great candidate, though. I’ve just moved to a new rental house and my cat is holding herself hostage inside because of two feral strays outside. Yesterday when I got home, one of them was very hungry at my door making a plan that he wanted attention. I myself was very hungry having skipped breakfast. I apologized to him telepathically. I was just quietly, I’m like, “I’m so sorry. I’m so hungry. I’ve got to go inside and just put something in my stomach and then I’ll come see to you.” I went outside about half an hour later, there was a freshly dead baby mouse that he had brought to the front door for me. Because I was hungry.
Rick: Yeah. Did you fry it up?
Anna: I did not, but I did reposition it, where some raptors might make good use of it. Pay for it up the food chain. But at least if we’re fortunate enough to still be alive in the apocalypse and near-term extinction, We might have to rely on the other non-humans more than we think if they care to help us out.
Rick: Yeah So, Brad you just pipe up anytime you want because Leslie, I mean Anna and I were kind of going at it here, but I want to make sure that you
Brad: I’m happy that you and Anna are having a great conversation and I’m happy to chime in when it seems right.
Rick: Okay. I do have one thing. I’m not going to like harp on this, but there was a sort of a sticking point in our last interview on a which I don’t think we resolved then, and I don’t know if we can resolve now, but I want to just take a quick crack at it. And you were just alluding to it. You were talking about; we both acknowledge the profound intelligence that is functioning in all aspects of nature, not only biological life, but even in a stone or out in somewhere in intergalactic space where there are laws of nature, functioning there, electing fields and forces and so on. Everything, the whole universe is just chock-a-block, as I think the British say, packed to the gills with intelligence. It’s all God, we could say. So, on that level, it’s all divine, it’s all perfect, it’s all fully kind of scintillating with intelligence. But in its expressed values, this is where we couldn’t quite agree, in its expressed values, it seems to me that there are levels of evolution. I mean, a mouse is more evolved than a stone in terms of, and we might need to define evolution, I would say in terms of its ability to kind of make that innate primordial intelligence a living reality, as opposed to just a sort of a transcendental one. And, you know, a horse is more evolved than a mouse and so on. And so, we obviously want to have reverence and respect for all of life and not lord it over other species or abuse them or mistreat them. But on the other hand, you and I got into this thing about whether the life of a child is equivalent to the life of a mosquito. And I couldn’t quite get you to agree that we would want to save the… if we had a choice, we would save the child, even if it meant killing the mosquito. So, do you still stand where you stood on that point?
Anna: Absolutely. I still do. I don’t think a mouse is more involved than a stone, or a horse is more involved than a mouse, if we’re going to keep it just within the animal realms. I hear you about stone not seeming to be able to express its divine purpose, or basically do much, it would seem. And I hear you that you are acknowledging it’s in essence as being an expression of the divine, for sure. But I think where we might be seeing things from slightly different points of view is that, again, we humans tend to need something to happen in 3D for us to acknowledge that that is an expression of intelligence. And I’ve worked a lot with stones. I’m a firekeeper for sweat lodges for the last 20 years or so. I work a lot with stones and rocks and they have a lot to say, and where they are placed and the places from which they can’t move, yes, means that they cannot overtly do things that we humans would be able to apprehend or notice. But they are emanating energies. They are adjusting and contributing to the microclimate or to the health of the waters that are running underneath them, to the ley lines they are vibrating with and helping attune. They are also absorbing, as does water. The work of Masaru Emoto, proves that water absorbs energies, and frequencies and intentions, as do the bacteria that live in our body. We are mostly bacteria. So, I have not in any of my communications with many different species from the sort of single-celled amoeba all the way up to the octopus who went missing when Craig Foster was trying to find her, the way through to elephants and trees and corn that’s growing in fields. I’ve not expressed any difference in the fullness, and the complexity of the intelligence, but for sure they are expressed in very different ways. And for those who don’t have legs and can’t move around like us, often, they don’t get an opportunity to express their intelligence. And their part in the whole, yes, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but each part, each seemingly tiny cog is as important as the next would be my vantage point.
Rick: Yeah, I agree with that. They’re all important. But again, like for instance, in the last interview, you said, you weren’t a vegan anymore, because for health reasons, you needed to eat meat. And we talked about that for a while. But obviously you probably eat, chicken meat or maybe even pork and beef, But you don’t eat people. Because we can, and the reason that that is generally considered not a good idea is that we tend to regard, maybe it’s just a cultural thing, but we tend to regard people as somehow being more highly evolved. In fact, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi once said, if you have to eat somebody, eat lesser evolved life. So, it’s somehow, I don’t want to belabor this because…
Anna: Yeah, we’re not going to agree on it. I’m familiar with various of the Buddhist schools of thinking that have this hierarchy or this promotional path for certain species. It’s just not my experience in communicating with, the whole gamut. No, I don’t eat people, no, I don’t eat factory farmed meat at all.
Rick: Right.
Anna: Again, it comes down to about what lives have the animals lived and how are they letting go of their lives. And I’m also not a vegetable hater. A lot of vegetarians consider they’re quite speciesist, speciest, speciesist, I don’t know the right word there, but whatever the equivalent of racist is. And to make vegetables, to make plants less important than animals just isn’t in my realm of experience. And so, if one is being vegetarian, because you consider animals more important than plants, well, that’s perhaps a version of cruelty to vegetables, to really have a slightly off-piste sense of humor about it. So, I have equal respect and communication with the tomato, the lettuce leaf, the husk of corn, the fennel bulb, as with the chicken and so on. But yeah, it does come down to, comes down to really who we are being, including our choices. I don’t think there’s intrinsically a right or a wrong. I think it comes down to operating from our center, which is where Brad’s body of work resides. It’s how can we be deeply in tune with our center, and move from there outside of our ideas even, or our personal preferences or belief systems. And so, this matter of what I eat might change over time as the constellation of circumstances or what this animal body needs may change. How can I be enough in my center, that I can live beyond my belief systems even?
Rick: I think that was your cue, Brad. (laughing)
Brad: So I guess maybe what’s important to say right now is that Anna and I, the place that our work meets, is the experience and the understanding that we’re all connected by love. That we are one with the web of life, it’s a web of love, and this is the out picturing, this is what we discover as a result of a path of self-inquiry, which is essentially what we offer at Core Light.. It’s the path of self-inquiry, and on that path, we discover that that’s an ultimate truth. That we’re all made of love, humans, the rest of the natural world, this is the unity consciousness that we talk about. So, it’s really, this segues into why Anna and I came together to offer a course. So, would this be a good time to share about that?
Rick: Yeah, go for it.
Brad: Okay, yeah. Well, as I said before, the place we connect is that we have a mutual passion and a purpose for serving the earth, for raising consciousness, specifically consciousness about our connection with the natural world. And that’s the sacred activism that I referred to before, putting our love into action. But especially when we want to, help the elephants, for example, or any other species, or any other particular animal or ecosystem. So, Anna and I got together a few years ago, when things really ramped up in terms of our world facing so many challenges., that’s been escalating for so many years now. But it really is reaching what feels like a threshold. And there’s so much angst about the state of the world, and we’re constantly being encouraged and invited into fear and separation. And when we started talking about this, we thought, “Well, what can we do? What can we do about that?” At the same time, there’s also this extraordinary opportunity for everybody, for all of us on the planet. And the opportunity is to learn to choose love and connection instead of the fear and the separation. So, we wanted to offer this course which supports people in learning how to open the heart more, learn how to love more, learn how to connect more, really to experience, to know our communion with each other, with the rest of the natural world, and so on. Anna, is there anything else that you want to say about that?
Anna: I think just what has beckoned us into this co-creation is inherent in the title of the upcoming course, For the Love of Animals.
Brad: Oh, right, I failed to mention the title of the course.
Anna: Yeah, but For the Love of Animals is what motivates us and you could exchange animals with plants, or the natural world or stones, but for the love of animals, we named it that because it’s often the love of animals that is our first from childhood even, or certainly even as adults, it’s one of our most pure experiences of this kind of unadulterated love. There’s a certain purity to it. And so, our love for animals, our natural leaning into them and towards them, is what can maybe beckon us into exploring how to be better beings, ourselves. Plus, the other way to interpret the English of that “for the love of animals,” is also that once we have sorted ourselves out a bit on the inside, we can then be in greater service to life, for the benefit of the animals, for the better love of them. I’ll let Brad explain a bit more before I talk about how this has been fundamental, in fact the most important aspect of my journey as an interspecies communicator. Nothing to do with the outside expression of my work, but how much I can pipe clean myself at my own issues so that I can be as clear as possible.
Rick: When is this course going to be?
Brad: Soon. It’s an online course that will be evergreen. So as soon as we launch it, people can take it anytime. And from the time you sign up, you’ll have six months to complete it.
Rick: There’s going to be a live audience initially, or just you and Anna doing your thing and then people just watch it whenever they can?
Brad: They watch it whenever they can. It’s based in video, and it’s got guided meditations, audio, PDFs of home practices people can do. So, that’s all there for people whenever they can do it at their own pace. Initially in 2021, we offered it live and we did live Zoom calls, but that’s complete, and so now this new offering is going to be just there for people so they can do it at their own pace whenever they want.
Rick: Okay.
Anna: There are six modules and each one has a 20-minute video for people to watch and to wrap their head and hearts around some concepts. And each of those six modules then has home practices or an audio meditation that people can use ongoingly and in many iterations to put into practice these techniques. We do encourage people to leave it at least a week or two between the modules. Don’t just go and sort of scarf them all up at once, because the point is that what we’re offering is the take-home stuff to really build muscle around. That’s why we’ve allowed a very generous six months for people to have access to the video materials, and the audio and downloadable documents are there to download and keep forever.
Rick: And is there a way they could sign up now if they wanted to or is that not yet accessible?
Brad: It’s not in place yet but soon. We’re thinking early this year it will be ready. But people, if you, the way to learn about the course, you can see a little promo video if you want, and that’s on the corelight.org site. If you go to corelite.org and you go to the, the tab is “Sacred Activism” and there are sub-tabs there. There’s one called “Interspecies Communication.” You can’t miss it, and it’s right there. And there’s a button to sign up for an announcement that will be coming out about it.
Rick: Okay, good. And like three years from now, if somebody’s watching this, will that course still be there, do you think? They could do it then?
Brad: Yes. That’s the plan.
Anna: Yes, and also because it brings forward so much of Brad and Leslie’s lifetime of work, it truly is timeless. It’s eternal. It’s not like there’s some spiritual technology to this that people would have to upgrade. There’s no mystery school, there’s no graduation processes. It’s actually all designed to help bring us back into that deep center of the heart, which is where we best connect with the essence of all life.
Rick: Okay. So, Brad, Anna just mentioned Brad and Leslie. Would this be a good time to talk a little bit about the book you wrote about your whole life with Leslie, which I just recently read and found fascinating?
Brad: Yeah, absolutely. I’d be delighted to. I’ve never spoken about the book in public. It was published a few years ago, but this would be a first time, Rick.
Rick: Okay. Yeah, drumroll.
Brad: You want me to just start talking?
Rick: Yeah, just start talking about it. No, I’ll have questions, but you get going.
Brad: Alright. Okay, so before I talk about my relationship with Leslie, it’s unique because, Leslie as an enlightened teacher, as a woman, to be a male in that position was a very unique experience. So that’s the bulk of what the book is about, is our relationship. But the book starts, it’s an unusual relationship, and I’d like to just share a little bit about It, because I know on your show, Rick, you always talk with people about their paths, and so, I think I should share a little bit about my path and how that came about.
Rick: Yeah, and the reason I’d like to do that is that it kind of illustrates the fact that there are as many paths as there are people, and that no one’s path is kind of lesser or anything like that, and that, we should just be broad-minded in terms of respecting what people go through and choose to do.
Brad: Well, and I think my story challenges people for that, because it’s an unusual story. So, let’s see, I want to give you the reader’s digest version because I know we want to spend quite a bit of time talking about interspecies communication. So, I won’t tell all the stories that are in the book, but in essence, what happened was, I was an engineer, I went to university and got a degree in engineering. I was miserable working as an engineer. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and my passion was acting. I had always acted in theater in high school and college. And when I was acting, I had this experience where I went to give blood. This was 1985, and I went to give blood at the blood bank in Los Angeles, and there was a brochure that said, “Don’t give blood if you’ve used intravenous drugs, or if you’re a man and have had sex with a man.” And I thought, “Because you could have a very dangerous disease and we don’t want it in the blood supply.” And I went into shock because I was a closeted gay man, and it really was like an opportunity to face my death, basically. And you know, when we face our death, that is when we make pacts with God. So, I prayed a lot, and I said, “Alright God, you get me through this, and I’m yours. I’ll do whatever you want.” And sure enough, I got through it. I got tested and I was HIV negative, but I realized also as an actor, to really to be a good actor, you have to understand what motivates you, because how can you understand what motivates your character you’re playing if you don’t understand what motivates you? And I realized it was a lot about getting real. It was just about getting real with myself. Like it was a very, very shameful secret to hold on to my entire life. And I grew up in suburban America in the, I was in high school in the 70s. I graduated in 1980. in the 80s, so you remember that climate if you’re old enough, it was super repressive in that way. It was just so shameful to think that you might be gay, so I kind of pushed it aside and pushed it aside. Anyway, the long story short is that I think of that William Shakespeare quote from Hamlet, and I’m probably getting it slightly wrong, but it’s, “This above all, to thine own self be true. Then as followest the day, the night, thou canst be false to anyone.” And so, it’s really such a profound statement about knowing yourself, and getting real and really looking at yourself in the mirror, which is one of the hardest things we can do in life. So, I started getting real, and it was beginning of my conscious spiritual path was to really look at myself and face shame, face the fear of shame, facing the desire for approval, the fear of disapproval, all these egoic constructs that we grew up with. And I got real, and I realized, like, well, I was enjoying the acting career but it kind of had lost its shine at that point. After the pact I made with God, I really realized I wanted to focus more on getting real with myself and discover who am I? What is this all about? And I was asking, starting to ask the bigger questions. What is life? What is this life about? And I was raised in the church, and I thought, ah, I need to go study theology. I’ll find out there. So, I applied to Yale Divinity School and I was accepted, so I left Los Angeles to go to Yale Divinity School to study theology. And quickly discovered that was not where I was going to find the answers I was looking for. It was a very mental exercise. It was a lot about, mental gyrations of theology. And I couldn’t have explained then what I know now, but what I was really looking for was something experiential. And so, again, to make a long story short, there’s a lot of twists and turns here, but I essentially, what happened was I learned to meditate. I left Divinity School after one semester. I went, I was living in Connecticut at the time, and I went to the Insight Meditation Society, the Pasana Center, the Buddhist Center in Barrie, Massachusetts. It was started by Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. And I attended a 10-day meditation retreat. And I had, it was my 28th birthday and I had blowout experiences. I took to it like a duck to water. It was so natural to me. And I had one of the most profound mystical experiences of my life when I was at that retreat. I went into, I was so deep in meditation midway through the retreat that I entered what’s called the breathless state. And it’s where your lungs and your heart slow down so much that they actually stop. And when I went into this breathless state it became an ecstatic experience, and I started seeing a film playing in my head but my eyes were closed, and it was like the inside of my forehead was the movie screen and on that movie screen played this little film and I was shown a Buddhist monk and I was shown a Native American shaman, like a high priest. And no information was given with it, but again, to make a long story short, I knew that something about that was very important and that I needed to spend time discovering why was I shown those two men, what was that about? And so, I knew after that retreat, I had many experiences during that retreat, but I knew after that retreat beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had found what I was looking for that meditation would be my companion for life and I needed to follow that. I needed to figure out like what is that? What is going on here? What is this all about? So, I started reading books. One of my favorite books, first books was Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, classic spiritual book. And I thought, I need to meet somebody like this guy, but that’s alive. I’ve got a million questions for this guy, but he’s not alive. So, every day, all day long, I was praying for somebody like him in the body. And within a year, I was on vacation in Los Angeles, visiting friends, and a friend said, I also just learned to meditate. I heard you did too, and would you like to come to my meditation class with me?” And I said, “Sure, I’d love to.” And he said, “My teacher’s name is Leslie Temple Thurston, and you might like her.” And I was sort of like, “Okay, whatever.” And went to this meditation class. It was in this nondescript little building with about 12 people sitting in a circle. It was called the East West Center. It was dedicated to Sri Aurobindo and the Sweet Mother, if you know them. If your listeners know them, I know you know them. And so, I sat there in the circle, and went into my meditation that I had learned how to do focusing on the breath, the Vipassana style, and I was aware Leslie was opposite the circle from me. And again, to make a long story short, with my eyes closed, I could feel her, she didn’t leave the chair physically, but I could feel her energy moving around the room working with each person. And I had never experienced anything quite like that before. I was thinking, “How can this woman do this? What is this?” And when it came my turn, she sent, this is difficult to describe, but she sent a ball of light, this beautiful golden ball of light from her heart into mine. It was like this high speed, and it siphoned the air out of my lungs and I was in this ecstatic orgasmic state. It wasn’t sexual at all, but I literally couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move.
Rick: Sounds like that scene in the swimming pool in Cocoon.
Brad: That’s exactly, I think I wrote that in the book.
Rick: Oh, you might have. Yeah.
Brad: It was exactly, if you’ve seen the movie Cocoon, it was exactly like that scene in the pool where the young man, the young woman that he falls in love with, is actually an alien, but she looks like a human. And
Rick: It happens to be Raquel Welch’s daughter by the way.
Brad: Tawny Welch. Good, yeah, if you’ve seen the movie, you know it well. Steve Guttenberg played the young man and Ron Howard is the director. It’s a great movie. So, what happened in that movie was she wants to show him what it’s like to make love on her planet. And they’re on opposite sides of the pool and she builds this ball of light in her heart, and then she sends it out ricocheting all over the pool house and then it goes BAM right into his heart and the same thing happened to him that happened to me. Just air siphoned out of the lungs in this ecstatic, orgasmic state and he, in the movie, he looks at her and he says, “Oh, if this is foreplay, I’m a dead man.” (Laughter) So again, with Leslie it was different, it wasn’t sexual at all, and it didn’t ricochet all over the building, it just went from her heart into mine, but it changed my life. And I remember at the end of the meditation, people got up, she gave a talk, I have no idea what she said, I was scared that I can’t remember a thing. And people got up and went and had tea and cookies, and they were talking, and I thought, “Who are these people? How can they move? How can they talk?” And I opened my eyes, and the circle was empty except for Leslie, and she patted the seat next to her and she said, “Come, come sit next to me and tell me about your experience.” So, I could barely move but I got over there and I said, “I could feel you.” And she said, “Yeah, that’s how it works.” She said, “I work with energy. It’s called Shakti ,and in the East that’s a healing energy that an enlightened master can transmit. It has profound effects on people, healing effects.” And anyway, we had a chat about it and the end of that story is basically that I, my friend Tom drove me back to where I was staying and I resolved to go back to Connecticut, pack everything up and move to LA as soon as possible. So, I was back there in three weeks because I thought that lady is the answer to my prayers. She’s got everything I need. I need to know what is this? Like what’s going on here? So, that was the beginning and within, I was there for like a year, not quite a year and a half, and we bonded, I was at every class she taught, I was knocking on her door on weekends saying, “Can I help you with anything?” I just wanted to be around her all the time, and we bonded so deeply. We bonded mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and then it became clear that we were to start a physical relationship. And that’s another whole story. We actually thought it was meant to last a few days, and we decided, alright, every morning when we wake up, let’s ask if we’re meant to be together, and to take a step back. What we decided was, we were very conscious of this. And we said, we will stay, we’re not going to make a commitment to each other in relationship, because our commitment is to spirit. Our commitment is to our highest spiritual path. Our commitment is to serving the earth and awakening and helping people and helping the earth. If the relationship serves our highest spiritual path, then we’ll stay in relationship. So, every morning, we would check in and we get a yes. But we said, as soon as somebody gets a no, we’ll stop. So, we checked in every morning, we got a yes every morning. After a while, it got a little monotonous. So, every week, we checked in and we always got a yes. And you can see where this is going. After weeks, it got boring and we said every month we’ll check in, we always got a yes. And eventually, several decades passed and some years we forgot to check in. And so, it was, it has been, it was the most extraordinary experience I can imagine to live, to be her partner, to live, to have lived with her for 25 years. There’s so much more I could share, but I’m aware of the time.
Rick: Let me just ask you a couple of quick things. So, in recent years, Leslie has been undergoing memory loss, and I presume it’s quite far advanced now, I don’t know. Yeah. And I was wondering, as I was listening to your book, why that might have happened to her, and of course, there are physiological reasons why it could probably happen to anybody, but in her case, she had done this thing for many years where, if there was a conflict in the world or something, as there are now in several places, she would kind of filter it through her own physiology in a way. We were talking about collective consciousness earlier, she would sort of serve as a washing machine or a filter for what was going on in the collective consciousness and it would take a toll on her. I mean, she’d be wiped out for a while after that. So, I was wondering if that might have contributed to it, but then there was an interesting part in your book where you were, she was ready to shift into a much higher state or something and her guides, which is a whole other topic, but she had her guides said, “Well, I don’t know if we can, if you can do this and yet stay in the body. And so, it’s going to be kind of an experiment.” And so then, then the memory loss, I guess, started to happen if I’m getting things in the right order. And I was just thinking, and then I’ll finish up and let you respond, that it could very well be, that while on the outside Leslie appears fairly uncommunicative now perhaps, there’s definitely still something going on, on the inside, and she is actually still functioning, serving, doing something very profound on some level that is not necessarily evident. Do you think that’s a viable hypothesis?
Brad: Absolutely. And I have to say, I know that I’m supposed to write a book about this. There’s just so much to talk about. So, there’s no way we can do it justice in a call like this. But there are a few things I could share with you. My understanding is that it’s sort of like, and forgive the crude metaphor, but it’s sort of like on this planet, we have three arenas. There’s the one arena that most people are in, the vast humanity is in. We’ve all got agreements, we’re all working in this system, what we call the system of separation, the system, the 3D, the third dimension. And then there’s this milestone that many people reach, and it’s, and again, it’s a crude metaphor, this is, forgive me, but it’s meant to be a simple metaphor. So, there’s like a second arena that when somebody becomes so-called enlightened, they move into that other arena and it’s a different set of rules, it’s a different set of agreements, it’s a different way of life, different way of seeing the world. And very few people make it into that arena. And then there’s yet a third arena, and my understanding is that very, very, very few people make it from the second arena into the third arena without dropping the body. Because going into the second arena is challenging enough, because when we’re that connected to spirit, when we have that much light moving through the body, we tend not to do the things that a human being needs to do to care for the body. and so, it’s harder to stay in a body when you’re in that second arena. When you go into the third arena, it’s very rare that anybody can keep the body, because literally there’s just so much light it’s hard to have a body and then also again, it’s like you don’t do the kinds of things that you should do to have a healthy body and so the combination of those two things means it’s really probably almost impossible to make it into that third arena, and if somebody does make it into that arena, that’s when a lot of siddhis start manifesting, by location and walking on water and what have you. So, my understanding of Leslie is that she was trying to make that leap into the next, the third arena. And I remember she was telling me things that were happening while the memory loss was sort of just beginning and she was making these huge commitments to spirit to help, to help transform the earth and to serve the earth in a significant way. And I kept saying, “Sweetheart, are you sure you want to be praying like that? That just, I’m not sure you want to set that intention for yourself. That just sounds difficult, to put it mildly. And she said, “No, I know, I need this.” So, I think it was her attempt, and she has kept the body, I think the body’s still alive even though the journey of Alzheimer’s, dementia, whatever you want to call it, the journey of memory loss is where the soul leaves the body very slowly and degrees over a long period of time. And my experience is that she’s kept the body because it’s still being used for essentially uploads and downloads. She receives light and energy and sends it out into the world, and she also transmutes shadow and that helps heal.
Rick: Yeah, and I’m sure everybody listening has heard stories about near-death experiences and how a person could be comatose, and yet they’re having a profound subjective experience. So, it shouldn’t be too hard to believe that on the inside something really profound is happening that Leslie is fully cognizant of, even though she can’t really communicate it.
Brad: Yes, exactly. And as I said, there’s so much more I could share with you, but I know we wanted to talk a lot about interspecies communication.
Rick: Yeah, and people can get your book and read the whole story and all that.
Brad: So, the truth is…
Anna: Well, that’s something that is relevant in my experience of Leslie now, is that in her bodily and spoken, like vocalized expressions and so on, and in her movements, there’s just this pure joy and presence, not in the meditation sitting posture, and not because she’s with her cognitive mind consciously holding space for a group of people who are physically in the room with her, but there’s this absolutely clean, shining, almost boundaryless expression of just this amazing core state. She is a particle in the ocean, and she literally dances. She literally dances with joy and expresses that with no directing on her brain’s part, but what she is currently contributing to the collective while she still has a body is joy and love personified and completely unfettered by mind, strategy, or even the job title of being a spiritual teacher. It’s just so beautiful to behold and a very high sort of role model for me.
Rick: Nice.
Brad: Thank you. Could I add one more thing please to that?
Rick: Of course.
Brad: Because I think you bring up a really important point and it’s not really fair to talk about this without sharing something about what you just said, Anna. Part of this is really just a personal theory of mine, but I feel like it’s true in many instances and it might help people if you have somebody who’s experiencing dementia. My experience of it is that when one of the gifts of dementia is it allows the person to express that which they didn’t allow themselves in life. So, for example, if somebody suppress a lot of anger, they get to become an angry dementia patient and then they get to let it all out of their system before they drop the body, so they don’t have to come back and do it again and carry all that anger with them. It’s a gift and an opportunity. And so, with Leslie, what I can tell you is I remember, and I think your audience will appreciate this, Rick, I remember when we first started our relationship back in the early 90s, if you remember that time, if you’re old enough to remember that time, there weren’t many female spiritual teachers at that time, you know? There might have been some, but they weren’t very well-known, and most of the teachers at the time were men. And they were men who could point to a lineage. They were either Buddhist or Hindu or yogic or something, they’d say this is my lineage, it goes back to this guru, or it goes back to Buddhist, whatever. And Leslie said to me, she’d had her enlightenment experience, and she said to me, I have to hold a certain poise and dignity to command a certain level of respect as a spiritual teacher because I’m just some woman. I’m just some random woman without a lineage. Why should anybody listen to me? And so, I supported her in that and I understood that. It made total sense and that was her life was – with the enlightenment came a certain amount of joy, there was always this internal joy always present, but she could never really let her hair down. She could never really just abandon herself to this sort of childlike, exuberant, playful, silly kind of joy. And it’s exactly what she has now. When we’re together, like when we were, quote unquote, “stuck at home” during COVID here, we laughed and played like children all day long. We would splash in the pool, we would tell silly jokes, we just had a ball. I mean, it was one of the happiest times of my life. And so, for me to see her, get to have this expression finally, it’s sort of like this is a great gift for her. So, as I said at the beginning, Rick, it’s like there are many, many layers to this and that’s just one, but it felt like I couldn’t really complete the story without sharing that.
Rick: Thank you for doing so. Okay, so we have a lot of questions that are coming in and a little bit later we’ll get to those in kind of machine gun style, I think, because we can’t talk 10-15 minutes on each question, but we’ll just try to go through as many as we can. But in the meanwhile, we have some major points here we want to talk about, like the relationship between ego and interspecies communication skills? Launch into that.
Anna: Yeah, that’s been my journey, I guess, is to discover the seeming magic of interspecies communication and getting information and appreciating the sentience and the beauty of the intelligent life forms expressing themselves, and then noticing that as these data bites, the truth of the other lands in me, that’s where the work begins. Because being connected intuitively or unconsciously or telepathically is happening anyway, whether we know it or not. As we move around life, we are in a constant quantum entanglement, quite literally, with everything, with all beings, particularly those close to us, around us. And when we become consciously aware of that through communication or behavioral expression, that’s when we then, with our minds, engage. But receiving information in these subtle ways is very subtle. It comes in seemingly at our own sort of unconscious level, intuitively in a quantum way, the universal language of life, just pure energy. And only when that incoming data stream runs against our mental database of vocabulary words, stored life experiences, memories, do we then get a hit, a flag goes up in our brain saying, “Oh, green tennis ball. That’s what the dog wants.” So, the problem was me getting the internal first hit of green tennis ball is that, me first aware in green tennis ball could be direct and pure and unfiltered and unclogged. It could be the dog wants a green tennis ball, or it could be because I used to play tennis. And so, I’m used to seeing more balls that are green tennis ball, then soccer balls or baseballs, for example. And it could be that green is my favorite color. Can you tell?
Rick: Oh, yeah. (laughing)
Anna: Could be that green is my favorite color. Or it could be that that’s my expectation because I’ve seen one too many, dog training class. And all of those are possible for reasons why I might misinterpret the truth of the animal. Because in that parcel of what they are showing is the desire for a ball, then there’s perhaps a specific color or shape and somewhere along the line, I might unwittingly filter out their truth and overlay it with my projections, even the unconscious ones. And so, the journey of becoming clear is really what this has been about. And clarity isn’t an external thing either. It’s not like there are complicated scientific techniques to learn to become more clear. It’s not like taking a photography course and learning how to better focus the lens to see things more crisply. What this actually is about and the majority of my efforts in interspecies communication over these 20 years has been the work on the self to unbecome, to get out of the way, to unbecome a somebody who’s doing it even. And to try to get out of the way enough beyond what I know, beyond what I wish to hear from the animal. Now, this is tricky because one can’t just unknow what one already knows in terms of life experiences and so-called knowledge. I can’t unknow that horses have four legs. But if I’m communicating with a three-legged horse. I need to be able to be open to that possibility around a movement impairment, for example. That’s a silly example, but the point is that what we know can be useful as a possible set of data from which to draw that hit or that correlation, but it can also work against us when we are communicating, particularly with individuals or with species that we don’t know anything about, and we can miss hearing their truth if we don’t have experience of what their truth is already. Now, normally for all of us walking around, we think that what we are perceiving is real, like is an actual fact real. We think that things happened, we can describe an event, and we think it really happened like that. Back in my psychology studies, this was quite a point of research because eyewitness testimony is actually extremely unreliable in law, because eyewitnesses are going to have their own bend or filter on the experience based on racial prejudices, gender prejudices, their own internal trauma, what unconscious memories might be being triggered. And so, I realized that I was and still am just this kind of walking, talking collection of ideas. And how am I truly going to know another beyond my ideas of them, particularly the ideas I don’t know about? And the best way that I have found is to do the egoic clearing work, to keep on clearing and clearing stuff out, which doesn’t mean forever expelling it to the great void in the vacuum of space. I wish, it’s not that simple, but it does mean identifying it, identifying what my, polarities are, the yeses, the no’s, the preferences, and just identifying it means I’ve separated from it and I’ve come into a state of witness and then I’m free. I’m free from being at the effect of those things unconsciously. I’m free when I witness them to listen beyond them and that’s why this this course that we’re going to be offering in a couple of months’ time, is not a training in how to do animal communication because it’s so not about what we’re doing, it’s about who we are being. It’s not a practitioner training course. Yes, one of the six modules does have a technique for connecting telepathically, but by the time you get to that module halfway through the course, you’ve already done some of the work on developing your witness and being clear on what is yours versus what is not yours and what is not yours would be then reliably from the other. So interstage right Brad who can talk about how some of that egoic clearing works.
Brad: Well, I think one of the first things to talk about is what is the ego? Many people speak about it in different terms but it’s our thoughts, our feelings, our habits, our memories, the physical body, it’s the lens through which we interpret the world and interact with the world. And it also acts as a mirror that reflects the world back to us. So, what happens is the lens of the ego gets clouded and distorted by all of our childhood patterning and wounding and so forth. And really, the clearer the ego, the clearer the lens through which we see the world. And the clearer and shinier the mirror through which the world is reflected back to us. So, the clearer the ego, the better our ability to communicate, whether that’s telepathic, verbal, with people, whatever kind of communication we’re doing. So, it’s because we can see the truth. We can see and feel the truth of any situation and it’s not clouded by a distorted lens. There’s more I could share, but I think maybe that’s enough for now. That sort of says, what we’re doing.
Rick: Yeah, and just some quick points that you sent in your notes, the importance of heart and interspecies communication, the difference between love as we’re taught in 3D world and unconditional love, and it is possible to live with a permanently, open heart no matter the outer circumstances. So, those are some nice points to contemplate. You want to add anything to that?
Brad: Yeah, sure.
Rick: Leave those as main points. Okay.
Brad: Anna, would you like to talk or you want me to talk?
Anna: I’ll just briefly start the conversation by talking about this matter of love and how we love animals. Because even the most well-intentioned, truly animal-loving people are often dumping a whole lot of human forms of love and projections onto different species. And as a friend put it in a voice note recently, she’s realized that cats’ love language is not physical touch. It’s not that a cat’s primary way of engaging or expressing love is through physical touch, unlike perhaps some species that are more pack-orientated, more about physical reassurance and connection and socialize, trooper baboons or dogs, for example. So, when we humans love animals, there’s some common things that happen. We treat them like our children. We even refer to them as our children or we talk about being our pet’s mom or dad, which is a bit creepy because we have adult sentient beings sharing space with us and yet we relegate them to a lifetime of being called a child. And unwittingly what we bring when we care for them in that way, unwittingly what we bring is dominance, deciding everything for them, and making them less than fully adult beings with their own soul purposes and expressions and roles that they play. And very often our version of love is actually wanting something in return. It’s got that subconscious condition of, “I love you, you love me back. I want your approval.” And then other forms of love we do with our pets are just plain harmful to them, giving them treats that are unhealthy, messing with their own rhythms and their own natural needs. So, we are privileged to have had some species and biologically alter their course to be able to tolerate living around us, and for sure choosing it as well. They are beautiful, soulful reasons for us sharing journeys with others as we intersect for a period of time in our Earthwalk. And interspecies communication is a lovely way to find out what all of those are. But if we want to be clear and fully available to the highest possible relationship with another, we do need to be clear and in a state of love that doesn’t need anything in return.
Rick: Nice. Okay, so we have some other points here, and we also have a bunch of questions. How should we proceed at this point? You want to go into like part three and four here, or do you want to take some questions or what?
Anna: Well, I know I saw one question earlier. Perhaps I could just address that.
Rick: Yeah, go for it.
Anna: I’ll speak to it and that is about feeling angry with humans, loving animals and really being so sad with the way that they are treated generally on the planet. And I’ve travelled this journey myself as well. I’d fallen into being an angry activist, and despairing and just really fed up with humans and wanted nothing more to do with humans because of the animal abuse. And it is through this work of Leslie and Brad’s that I’ve discovered that me being angry with humans is just a pendulum swing. And I’m actually holding feelings of anger and lower energetic states that I’m just contributing to life and bringing to any communication. And it’s the animals also, those who do suffer abuse at the hands of humans, it’s the animals who showed me their ongoing compassion for humans, even their torturers and abusers. So, I’ve learned a lot about compassion for humans from the animals and have traveled a somewhat awkward journey back into being able to love humans again as well, collectively speaking. It’s a bit like, “forgive them, they know not what they do.” And who knows what is playing out. Sometimes the most difficult of circumstances will be what a soul needs to shine or to grow. So, you’re not wanting to make spiritual excuses for anything, But yeah, we’re all kind of in this mess together. But being angry or despairing or downhearted is one of the common things we come up against when we do care. Brad, could you speak to that a bit?
Brad: Absolutely. Well, I think one of the first things to mention, is that it’s perfectly natural. It is perfectly normal to feel anger, to feel even hatred. I mean, if you look at what’s happening in the world, there’s probably something wrong with you if you don’t feel anger sometimes about things that are happening in the world. So, it’s just to say that we’re, this work that we’re talking about is not about killing the ego or getting rid of the ego, or “if I’m feeling anger, something’s wrong.” That’s not what this is about. What we’re talking about is much, much deeper. We’re talking about practices that allow us to name what we’re feeling, to develop an emotional literacy, so to speak. And then there are essentially what we call processing methods. There are ways of processing those energies and witnessing them as they pass through us. In essence, we are pure awareness. We are not the emotions. You look at the way some of the romance languages talk about emotion, they say, they don’t say, “I am angry.” They say, “I have anger.” So, it’s sort of like, “I have anger passing through me in great quantities in this moment.” It’s really, it’s like a reframing of how we look at these things and without going into great detail, you get the sense of it from what I just said. It’s sort of like practices, techniques, simple but powerful that allow us to witness and allow us to transmute energies that are not helpful. It’s not that you’re suppressing them, it’s not that you’re not feeling them, but you allow them to pass through and then you can find that place of clarity within yourself which Anna said, it’s really the place of compassion. It’s a place of love, unconditional love, compassion, tolerance, forgiveness, all these higher qualities that we can embody, it is entirely possible to live in those states. And I know for a fact that that’s the state that Anna goes into when she gets very clear information. You won’t get clear information if you’re not in that place of unconditional love and forgiveness and compassion. You have to have that or else your lens is clouded. So, we look at ways of doing that and practicing that so it becomes a way of life. Does that help?
Anna: I love your term emotional literacy, exactly. And with the practice, very quickly that muscle gets developed, much like the interspecies connection technique itself. With practice, it’s like going to the gym, but for your spirits strengthening, let’s say. And by the way, the course is called For the Love of Animals, but of course everything applies to a love for plants as well. it’s applicable across the board. I’ve had many fantastic communications with plants also, which I know one question was asking about. And Rick, just to come back to your earlier point about believing that certain species are perhaps more intelligent than others. I was once asked by a lady in Scotland, a lady as in she has the title of a lady, to come to her primeval forest because the oak trees had been dying from, gosh, for unknown reasons, they called in all the, what you can imagine, the horticulturalists and the botanists and shamans and singers and druids and still the trees were dying, not all of them, but some, and no disease could be found. And she wanted me to ask the tree. So, she dropped me off at one end of the forest, and said she’d pick me up two hours later at the other end and just left me to it. And so, I went to some healthy oak trees to aware and know what it felt like to be a healthy oak in that forest. And then I went to some unhealthy ones who were sick or already dead to get that feeling, so I could compare and also to ask them to feel what could be missing or needed. But when I specifically asked the oak tree consciousness and said, what’s causing this tragedy? I was very quickly put in my place and I was told two things. One is this is not a tragedy. some of us have to die from this parasitic infection, so that the rest of us learn how to live with it and to evolve and adapt so that we can survive it, and our future generations can survive it. So, this is not a problem. And the mood of that was a bit like, “OH, silly human,” just thinking that we would care just about our lives. And the second thing they said was, can we basically, we’re not interested in saying any more about it, It doesn’t matter, leave us to evolve, please. But we are so sad at the absence of our rabbit friends. The rabbits were our friends and they’re all gone and they died horrible, slow deaths. We saw them stumbling around as if they couldn’t see, and we miss our rabbit friends so much. Are the other rabbits okay? And when I gave the lady this feedback afterwards, she told me about this disease amongst rabbits. I knew nothing about myxomatosis, which indeed does make them die in that fashion. And the oak trees’ compassion for their rabbit friends, they had had active, alive, thriving friendships with these particular rabbits, and they were sad. They were sad, to have lost that.
Rick: That’s interesting.
Anna: And yeah, and then of course I’m feeling those things on behalf of the trees at the time that I’m experiencing them. For me to know it, I have to feel it, and then not let it stick, and not go into my story about how I feel about that, and something should be done and blah, blah, blah, to just let all of those thoughts be there, monkey mind, and just stick with the feelings.
Rick: Good, okay, so I’m going to fire some questions at you guys. So that took care of Shelly in Australia about the plant. Tineke in the Netherlands is wondering if it’s true that animals have no ego, that distorts their perception of reality and are therefore, so to speak, enlightened beings, and if that is true, then why do they go through so much fear and suffering?
Anna: To me, it’s also, it’s this and, it’s not either or. It’s not that when you are enlightened, you don’t have physical troubles, or understandable responses to the circumstances and your environment. I don’t know how to answer that from a spiritual technology point of view, such a thing exists. But what I can say that when I’m communicating with a being, the communication is happening essence to essence. It’s their purest God self, all aware aspect that is communicating with my unconscious intuitive, bigger than my personality aspect. And certainly, with the non-humans, from that place, from their essence, they can describe how they are going through things and difficulties, even though they wish they weren’t. Parrots who are distressed and plucking their own feathers until they’re raw. There’s this feeling of, “oh, I wish I weren’t doing that, but I can’t help it. I’m on some sort of autopilot, or I need this healing remedy or this flower essence or a trip to the vet.” It seems that when we come into 3D form, we are naturally going to be in this kind of tug of war with circumstance and cellular life.
Brad: I can add something to that. Leslie and I would talk about this very thing from time to time, because we watched so many people misunderstand what enlightenment is. enlightenment is, they would somehow think that it meant you’d never had emotion anymore, or you didn’t have reactions anymore. And that’s just not the case, you know? You still feel, in fact, you feel more, you feel you’re more sensitive than ever before. So, anyway, I hope that helps shed a little bit of light on what you’re just talking about.
Rick: It does, and that’s a big topic and I think that enlightenment needs to be more clearly understood in the culture, both for what it is and for what it isn’t. Like because there are people that say, “Oh, you can be enlightened and yet be an alcoholic or be sleeping with all the women in your sangha or whatever.” And I kind of feel like that cheapens the term, but on the other hand, like you said, you can obviously have a – you’re a human being, you have a heart, you’re going to have emotions, things like that. Now whether one of those emotions is going to be hate, if you’re enlightened, that’s an interesting thing to discuss.
Brad: No.
Rick: No, right.
Brad: No, no. But you do feel. It’s sort of like, I think what I witnessed, just personally speaking, as I watch lots of people project all kinds, like an enlightened being can be like a blank screen. Like a perfect- like if we talked before about how the ego is the lens through which we interpret the world, and it’s also a mirror. It acts as a mirror. And when you’re with an enlightened person, very often, they will be a perfect mirror for you, for whatever you need. And they simply turn to the next person and they’re a completely different person to that person because it’s a different mirror. There’s such a clear reflection. So, what people would do is they’d get upset. They would project all kinds of garbage onto her, and some people would actually, get angry with her. And it hurt her. She got hurt and we would talk about it later and she was sometimes in tears saying, “I don’t, this is like, she’s learning about the enlightenment, like, it hurts when I still, if you prick me, I bleed.” It’s like that when you project anger and other things at me, I still feel. So, it’s not that, she would get angry back or hate, anything like that, but it’s the sensitivity is what I’m saying.
Rick: Yeah, okay, I think we answered Deborah from Massachusetts in terms of if you have her question in front of you, do you feel there’s anything we need to add to that? Oh, let me look.
Anna: Email program closed.
Rick: She said that the animals have asked her to love all beings, including humans, but sometimes she hates people.
Anna: Oh, yeah, we’ve addressed that earlier.
Brad: Yeah, I guess the only other thing I would add to Deborah’s question is, like, if you find yourself getting angry and hating people, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you find some form of egoic clearing work to do. Because that’s what it’s about. It’s really about looking at yourself, looking at yourself in the mirror and working with whatever you’re experiencing and finding a way that you can move more into compassion, that you can find more unconditional love and forgiveness. Ultimately, it’s about forgiveness. That’s the ultimate goal, well not a goal, but it’s the purpose. When you’re far along in the path, you live in a state of forgiveness.
Rick: Yeah, okay. And then there was a question from Birgit in India about whether the course could be taken, if she’s traveling and all that, and you guys answered that. It’s flexible. And then here’s one from Matthew in Ontario, Canada. Rudolph Steiner describes a path of overcoming the modern intellect by the conscious development of intuitive senses. He states that humanity is more fully incarnated into the physical world than most other beings and that this severs us from the intuitive spiritual sources of knowing that other species enjoy. He claims that this is to develop our capacity for freedom and love. What do you think about that?
Anna: I don’t. There’s many different cosmological theories as to why we’ve become severed. I do agree we have become somewhat severed, not terminally, thank goodness. In the Southern Africa where I grew up, a lot of the different tribes, folklore tells of this time where we were tempted by the idea of superiority over the other species. And when we bit at that fruit, there’s another allusion to the biblical metaphor, when we bit at that fruit and took that superiority offer, we then lost our kinship, our ability to communicate with all the others. So different cosmologies will have different reasons to explain it. I’m less and less interested these days and these years in explaining why something is so, and just being with it as it is and in the present moment and with the present beings re-establishing connection.
Rick: Yeah, okay. Here’s one from Barb in Maine, US. Have you ever had the opportunity to speak with an animal involved in factory farming? Are animals like humans able to disassociate from their bodies and not have to experience the trauma such as people sometimes do with NDEs?
Anna: Yes, and yes. Yes, animals in a lot of distress or physical pain or close to death or in those horrid batteries of egg-laying chickens and so on, they do, not to make it okay that those practices are happening, but they do disassociate because the experience, like Brad was just saying, the experience that we continue to have, if you prick, you bleed, if you prick, you bleed, that experience is just too much to hold. And so, they do disassociate. You see this in zookosis, which is the phenomenon of zoo animals pacing and walking, with that empty look in their eye. And it’s like the lights are on and no one’s home. It’s a very disembodied, unwhole state for a being to reside in, but it does alleviate them. It does alleviate some of the emotional distress of their situation.
Rick: Yeah. I once heard a spiritual teacher say that prisons, human prisons, are kind of like these beacons of stress or negativity, these dark knots in the collective consciousness and that, those needed to be healed in order for that influence not to radiate. I can imagine this is the case also with factory confinement, animal confinement things and stuff. There’s just these little hidden torture chambers really that we prefer not to be aware of but are nonetheless all around us.
Anna: Exactly. And if you have the misfortune of driving behind one of those trucks filled with animals on their way to the slaughterhouse, you could go into anger, you could go into despair
Rick: you could burst into tears with the kinds of things we talk about in in our course, it’s about how to manage your own energy so that you acknowledge the feelings, including the feelings of the animals, and your own, and nonetheless choose to be enough in witnessing that you can then choose what to contribute to the energetic field, and to choose to send love, or apology, I can’t tell you how many times I’m apologizing on behalf of humans or humankind. Very interesting word that, talk about a misnomer, humankind. And just apologize and say, I see you, I acknowledge you as the sentient beings and the souls that you are, and I’m sorry this is happening to you and bless you and thank you for your life. And they feel that, they get that, and that does improve their experience of their really, really distressing situation.
Rick: Yeah. Here’s one from Debbie in Spokane, Washington. I’ve had experiences that leave me no doubt that I have the ability to communicate with animals, but I find myself doubting the message I believe I’m receiving when I try to speak to the animal. Do you have any advice about putting aside the doubt?
Anna: Brad to you.
Brad: No, you go. You’re the expert here.
Anna: When I’m doing consultations, which are exclusively with wildlife for the last 10 years or so, I still have doubt myself. I haven’t reached some beautiful blank canvas in my mind, but I just now know the quality of doubt. I know that character inside myself, and I basically let them be there, because otherwise, as Carl Jung says, “What you resist persists.” So, I just let doubt be there. I’m like, “Oh, hello, old friend,” and whatever. Let that voice be there. And using my intention on myself, which is the only one we should be using it on in this scenario, using my intention on myself, to just come back to the center, to the emptiness, and let self-doubt or possible alternative answers from the animals be comments from the peanut gallery happening in the background somewhere over there, and turning my attention to the silence and the emptiness, because where our attention goes is where energy flows.
Rick: Doubt the doubts.
Anna: Mm-hmm, yeah, nice one.
Rick: Here’s one from Virginia in Covington, Georgia. This is the last question. I believe rocks, plants, bugs all have life with a unique consciousness. I have communicated with a large boulder in a stream nearby and with a mountain on a recent trip to Peru. I’m very interested in your course. Humans seem to evolve slowly. Do the species you communicate with see hope, without a deep reduction of humans on the earth?
Anna: Yeah, I wonder about that myself. The species I communicate with don’t project into the future. They don’t wish humans gone, but they’re very aware of the accelerated destruction that we are causing to the environment primarily, right down to the microplastics. They would wish that not to be the case, but they’re not vengeful. They’re not going to make efforts to have us leave sooner. But they don’t project into the future. They don’t, yeah, they don’t have anything to say about it. Future isn’t really on the radar. Myself, I have wondered if humans just exited the scene, perhaps AI might do a better job of making even just practically intelligent decisions about how to continue to support your planetary life. Cause we humans do seem rather daft to be wiping out our own resources upon which we depend at the moment. Of course, we always tend to think that there’s a planet B, and that’s just where we’ll head to and repeat the same patterns. And so, yeah, things like hope for the future and so on are not in the realm of the animals, individually or collectively that I have communicated with. They’re very busy with what’s happening right now.
Rick: I know a lot of people I talked to and have interviewed, such as Jem Bandel and Duane Elgin and others, feel like we’re headed for some kind of possibly catastrophic societal collapse. And I don’t know if the animals have communicated with you about this, but, Brad, in one of the books I was listening to mentioned some guy that has written a beautiful book, I think his name started with an H, some beautiful book about all the good stuff that’s happening that don’t, around the world that doesn’t make the news. But do either of you have any kind of a sense of what were, whether there’s rapids ahead that we may or may not manage to navigate.
Brad: I have a lot to say about that, but Anna, do you want to start or shall I?
Anna: No, no, you go ahead.
Brad: I’m aware we’re almost out of time, so I kind of feel like one of the closing things…
Rick: We can go a few minutes over, yeah.
Brad: Okay, well, one of the closing things I wanted to share was, I mean, yes, the answer is yes, Definitely, my seeing, my intuition, the research I’ve done, yeah, of course, we’re heading for some kind of threshold, whether you want to call it a collapse or whatever it’s going to be. I don’t think anybody knows. I think, there’s so many different timelines and it’s all probabilities. So, who really knows what’s coming, but we can all feel that something has to give. It can’t continue the way it’s going. So, what I know to be true, I have a lot of hope for the future, and I could talk for a long time about that, but what I know to be true is something when we first moved to South Africa here and we started getting involved with sacred activism and helping certain wildlife projects and other things, Leslie’s guides, Leslie’s clairaudience, her spiritual guides speak to her telepathically, and they told us, they said, your job is to plant seeds in consciousness and to raise awareness about our connection with the natural world. And they said that one day, the fences would all be coming down. They said that one day humans and animals would live together like we used to long ago and there would be this new kind of harmony amongst all life. And they said, you probably won’t see it in your lifetimes, but maybe the younger generations might live to see the beginning of it. But what I know to be true is that the outer world is really only a reflection of our own unconscious self, of what’s inside us. And so, when we look at fences coming down in the world, it’s a metaphor for what’s inside of us. And so, essentially, the fences in the world coming down is a mirror of the veils of separation coming down within us. And that’s what allows us when we do that, when we dissolve those veils of separation within us through the egoic clearing work, it allows us to connect more deeply with the rest of the natural world and to open our communication channels with other species. And so, I guess I share that because to me, that’s what it’s all about. It keeps coming back to working on ourselves. We feel so hopeless. So many people in the world feel so hopeless right now. And the truth is, there’s a lot that one person can do. The greatest gift that we can give the world is our own spiritual awakening. It’s our own clarity. It’s our own love. Even one simple act of kindness is something. And the more we can clear ourselves so that we can live more from the heart and more in love and more in compassion, that’s what’s going to make the difference. Those are the seeds that we’re planting in consciousness. Every time we clear a layer, every time we peel away some egoic layer, that’s what’s going to make the difference here.
Rick: Somebody said…
Anna: That’s a match for what the animals are pertaining to your other question, because the animals aren’t projecting to future scenarios or hope for a world without humans. It’s just who and how are we being now, and let’s make the best of what we have now. What if today is the last day? What if the asteroid hits tomorrow? Who are we being right now? What is the quality of our relationships and our presence and our authenticity? And it would be an added sort of bonus if we can live in those states, in an open-hearted state. It would be an added bonus, if that means that when things get really tough, we can live well in community or be resourceful or share with others or find creative ways to find solutions instead of picking up arms or hiding out in underground bunkers. But that’s the bonus. It can’t be for that reason. It has to be because right now we want to be fully alive in this moment with the best possible quality and integrity.
Rick: Good.
Brad: Can I just add one little thing to that? I come back full circle to what we started this call by talking about with Anna’s and my intention with this course is that we’re being invited into these states of fear and separation. And the more we as humans buy into any of that stuff, the less chance we have to have this breakthrough before, we’re talking about breakdown and then breakthrough. So, the more that we can choose love and choose connection over the fear and separation, the more chance we have to make it through this breakdown into a breakthrough.
Rick: Yeah. What you were saying, I think, Anna was saying about consciousness is, maybe we’ve both been saying this, but I’ve always felt that that’s where you have the greatest leverage, you know? The greatest, it’s like the fulcrum that enables you to move the big giant rock or something because it’s so fundamental. And it almost seems like a David and Goliath situation because the powers that be are so powerful and huge and financially, endowed and what can little old us do? But and they also seem so stubborn, like people don’t want to change. Climate change? Ah, let’s worry about the next quarterly profit, you know? And -go ahead.
Brad: I always remember when I think- I know what you’re talking about, we all think that way from time to time, like, oh my god, it’s just hopeless. This is overwhelming. so powerful, how can I make a difference, what are we ever going to do to make a difference? And I keep coming back to the book Power vs. Force by Dr. David Hawkins who successfully measured the power of a thought form. And what he found was that it’s not a linear progression. As we move more into states of heart consciousness, the forgiveness, the compassion, the unconditional love, the gratitude, all those wonderful states, the more we are there, exponentially more powerful our thoughts. And you measure the power of a thought form of someone who’s vibrating at those low rates of anger, hatred, fear, dominance, all that garbage. Tyrant victim consciousness, essentially, is what we’re talking about. That’s the overall process that the whole Earth is moving through right now, is this transcending tyrant victim consciousness. And so, the more we each move into the heart, the more we live from love, exponentially doesn’t take 51% of the planet, you know? It takes a small percentage to actually, tip the scales. That’s been proven.
Rick: Yeah.
Brad: And I know through TM, you talk, I know you’ve been into TM for a very, very long time and those experiments that you and Anna talked about in your previous interview, it’s very well proven that it just takes a small percentage of the population, the square root of 1%, to make a difference.
Rick: Yeah, and they’re examples from nature. I mean, 1% of the cells in the heart are called pacemaker cells, and they coordinate the beating of the other cells in the heart, or the square root of 1% of the photons in a laser, if they align coherently, then all the other photons fall into sync with them, and it becomes a coherent beam of light. So, hopefully that sort of thing will manifest in the human world.
Brad: I think it’s inevitable. I think it’s coming. It’s just a matter of how ugly it has to get before it comes.
Rick: Yeah, good point.
Brad: But who knows? Yeah. Okay, on that lovely note, so let’s wrap it up. So, you got your chorus coming, and you’ve mentioned that people can go to corelight.org to get on an email list to be notified of it. And you might want to make it more prominent on the, so they don’t have to go to some menu and then get down to something else, just something so they can just see it.
Brad: It is right on the home page.
Rick: Oh, okay, good.
Brad: Go to the home page and just scroll down a little bit. It says Featured Course and it’s right there. Just click on it.
Rick: Okay, great. Good.
Brad: Yeah.
Rick: And so, I’ll be linking to all your websites. has an email newsletter, do you Anna, at animalspirit.org and that’ll be, offer updates on your book development project that you’re working on?
Anna: Yes, I’m wholly unavailable for any teaching engagements or further interviews. This will be my last this whole year, as I go into a book writing retreat, and I’ll be sending out the occasional newsletter with updates on how that’s going. Meantime, I have a YouTube channel, Animal Spirit, all one word, Animal Spirit, where there are some inspiring videos on how to live kindly with our non-human friends as well as interview recordings for events such as this.
Rick: And I’ve already set that link up on the page that I’ll be publishing when I publish this interview, link to your YouTube channel. And okay, Brad, you have a free monthly call, Spirit Weather Report, Spiritual Weather Report?
Brad: Yes, yes, that’s right. Just sign up for our email list and you get the monthly notice when it’s happening and you can attend live. There’s guided meditations and a talk and Q&A and if you want to just listen to the recording later, that’s also available either on YouTube or on our free resources page on our website.
Rick: Okay, and then I’ll be linking to your books and you’re creating a non-profit organization to make the clearing work more accessible including for younger generations and it’s supported by that lighten.org organization you mentioned in London. Anything you want to say about that?
Brad: Yes, I’d love to. It’s my passion. I was telling you at the beginning of the call, my life is going through a major change. And a lot of it is because this wonderful, wonderful, amazing group, this foundation in London called Lighten. It’s L-I-G-H-T-E-N.org, Lighten.org. They have offered to support the work that I’m doing, that Leslie and I, Leslie birthed the material and it’s my job to help make it more accessible. And it’s these techniques that Anna’s been describing, the very simple but powerful egoic clearing techniques. And because a lot of people don’t read anymore, I thought, well, Let’s turn them into very high production value, engaging, fun social media videos. Short and to the point. And so, we’re on this big project now. It’s going to take some time, but we’re developing this. I’m super excited about that. And if that interests you, you can just sign up on our email list and you’ll learn more about it as time goes on.
Rick: Great. All righty. And also, as time goes on, if you develop some new thing or something that you don’t even know about yet, let me know and I’ll put it up on your Bat Gap page so that somebody listening to this a few years from now can go there and they’ll get the latest stuff.
Brad: Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that. Yeah. All right, thank you both. Anything you’re going to regret not having said after we hang up? (laughing)
Anna: Yeah, I would like to say, I would like to say thank you to all my teachers, the two-legged, the ones who aren’t in human form, just all the guidance and tutelage and mentoring that I’ve had along the way to be able to be happily knowing that I’m living and doing what I’m called to do. So, I just want to acknowledge that, that I can feel them standing behind me and at my side And yeah, just to bow, bow to all the teachers.
Rick: Nice, that’s a good attitude to have. I mean, it’s a good sign actually if a teacher is teaching and they have a picture of their teacher behind them or something like that. It kind of says, “Hey, this is not about me. I didn’t originate this. I’m just passing it on.” Okay, well on that note, thank you very much, both of you, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. Thanks for all the great questions that everybody sent in. And go to batgap.com and explore the menus there. And they’re pretty self-explanatory. And we’ll see you for the next one.
Brad: Thank you, Rick. Thank you both.