Summary
Christina Donnell describes expanded states of awareness arising through dreams, meditation, and deep stillness. The discussion explores consciousness beyond ordinary time, perception, and the sense of being a separate doer.
Questions This Interview Explores
- How can dreams become a source of spiritual insight?
- What happens when meditation quiets the mind?
- Can awareness remain present during sleep?
- How might consciousness experience reality beyond linear time and space?
Key takeaways
- Stillness can reveal deeper and more powerful layers of mind.
- Transcendent dreaming involves merging with the energy behind dream forms.
- Sleep may relax perceptual filters and open access to expanded awareness.
- Quiet awareness can release energy, creativity, and vitality.
- Awareness can become embodied and express itself naturally in daily life.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 410 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look at the Past Interviews menu. You’ll see all the previous ones arranged in several different ways.
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My guest today is Christina Donnell, and I actually didn’t know too much about Christina when I first began preparing for this interview. Irene had set up the interview, and I looked at Christina’s webpage and said, “It looks good to me.” But when I actually started preparing for it and reading her little book, which is called Transcendent Dreaming, I was delighted. I thought, “Wow, this is wonderful, so interesting, and such a profound, deep person.” So I’m really glad that we invited her, and I think those of you watching will really enjoy this discussion.
I’ll just read a little bit of her bio here. Christina is a spiritual teacher, mystic, and author. She’s the director of The Winds of Change Association, an educational organization dedicated to offering programs that tend to our evolving human consciousness. In her book, Transcendent Dreaming: Stepping into Our Human Potential, she chronicles quantum states of awareness in which the participatory nature of perception impacts our visible world.
It is a deep foray into truths about our human potential, a new distribution of our resources, and a way to know unity consciousness and be its agent in the world. Christina conveys a simple yet profound message: through deepening receptive awareness, a participatory nature of perception unfolds and the transfiguration of our consciousness occurs.
Christina was initiated as a medicine woman by the Karo Indians of the high Andes and has worked closely with them for 25 years. Inspired by the cultural shifts and changing human values on a planetary scale, she is dedicated to cultivating and awakening the potency of the human spirit. So, thanks, Christina. Welcome!
Christina: Good morning, Rick—or good afternoon at this point. Thank you for having me on your show.
Rick: Oh, you’re welcome. It’s great to have you. So, you and I were both joking before we started this interview. You read this book yesterday for the first time in nine years, and I read it at the beginning of the week. We both tend to be the type where things go in one ear and out the other. All I know is that, without remembering a lot of specifics about your book, I really enjoyed it. Every chapter was fascinating.
But one thing I’d like to ask to begin with is, are you one of these people who started having mystical experiences at a young age, like as a child or something?
Christina: Mm-hmm. I’ve often thought that I came into the world as a dreamer. It’s really deep in my essence and in my soul. My earliest recollection, although at the time I thought it was normal, was around the age of four or five. Many years later, I realized it wasn’t normal.
I was living in Detroit. My father was a cop. It was during the riots and the civil rights riots in the ’60s. I remember all the police officers putting on riot gear, holding my mother’s hands, and wives kissing their husbands goodbye. I remember feeling all the anxiety in that situation.
In order to quell that anxiety, at night I would escape off into the lap of this really large African American woman who had sung these spirituals. I could just feel the essence and the soulfulness of it. It was deeply comforting to me, and I thought that was normal.
Christina’s First Awareness of Spiritual Gifts
That was until I wrote my first book in first grade, my six-page book on African American spirituals. Both my parents and teachers wondered how I was able to recite them so easily, and that was my first real awareness that maybe what was coming through me was different from what came through others.
Rick: This woman was not somebody whom others would have seen. You were kind of shifting into an alternate reality where she existed, yeah?
Christina: Absolutely, and I don’t believe I’ve ever met this woman to this day.
Rick: Were the spirituals you were singing and that you knew ones that actually exist? Or were they somehow not even known to our culture?
Christina: They did exist. They did exist.
Rick: Yeah, like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” or whatever, different ones. That’s interesting. What do you attribute that to? Some past-life thing or some alternate reality? Or what?
Christina: You know, it’s always tricky for me to talk about past lives because you kind of have to live in a linear reality to believe in a past life. But I certainly do believe that there are simultaneous realities continuously, and I think my essence just had enough flexibility to move with fluidity in between those worlds—and still does today. Meaning, it didn’t have to be educated.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. I’ve had people tell me that the whole notion of past lives is really not linear, that all whatever lives we may lead are simultaneous, and that we just sort of attribute linearity to them to interpret our ordinary reality. But really, everything is happening simultaneously.
Christina: Right. It’s very, very difficult for our brain to understand that everything is happening simultaneously, so our little linear model is helpful for a reason.
Rick: Yeah. Well, there seems to be physical evidence. I mean, we look at the Andromeda Galaxy and we know that the light coming from it originated two million years ago, and yet they say that from the perspective of the photon, if you’re traveling at the speed of light, it is simultaneous. It’s instantaneous. The photon gets here immediately. There’s no sense of time or space, you know, between the galaxies.
Christina: Yeah, yes, yes. I just read recently in the literature—I think this came out in 2014, but somebody passed it on to me—that we’ve now identified the quantum states in the microtubules of the neurons of the brain. As soon as you shift into that quantum state, space and time collapse, and there’s a lot of simultaneity occurring.
So, I think it actually exists in the body, you know, and can be anchored in the body.
As soon as you shift into that quantum state, space and time collapse.
Rick: So, in other words, the body has this innate capacity to tune into quantum levels of reality. Is that what you’re saying?
Christina: Yes, yes. Really, in those places where awareness is present, you can be present in a quantum state. It’s not that it’s just always going on and we’re unaware of it, but that you actually begin to anchor reality from there, as maybe a second language.
Rick: Yeah, interesting. So, take us along, then. You had this kind of experience when you were a little child, and then what was—sometimes it’s funny that we’re talking about linearity and time and all that in chronologies. But it is really handy when doing an interview to kind of walk people through the stages of their life in a way, because things do tend to appear to unfold in a linear way.
So then, obviously, you got a little older and went into your teenage years. Did you go, like many people did, through a period where you lost that depth of cognition, felt it slipping away, and longed for it and so on? Or did you actually manage to retain it through your adolescence?
Christina: I think periodically it was retained. I have a very long history of flying in my dreams and flying to both familiar and unfamiliar places.
At the same time, through adolescence and young adulthood, I was very intellectual and also an elite athlete. In retrospect, I think, “Boy, it was a good thing,” because I was learning how to wield the body. So, my awareness was really more present in those places.
It wasn’t until my late twenties, which I wrote about in the book, when I was director at an anxiety-disorders clinic at a major medical center here. I came home from work and went to bed. I had a dream that ended up being a prophetic dream of my father dying in an automobile accident.
In that dream, every detail of the moment before his death unfolded—from the place where he removed his grandchildren’s toys from the back seat, to going over and kissing my mother’s side of the bed, kissing a family picture, telling the family dog to take care of the farm—that was a 40-acre farm—and driving down a country road and hitting a single tree in the middle of winter.
At the time of that dream, as soon as he hit that tree, I was propelled into a state of pure, expanded awareness and merged with his awareness, both of us looking down into his body. It was actually a kind of ecstatic, exquisite experience.
As I came out of the dream, I just assumed I was preparing for his death because he had Lou Gehrig’s disease. But the next day, somebody came to the medical center and let me know that my father had died at 8:25 in the morning in a single-car automobile crash.
That was really when, in my late twenties, I realized, “Okay, I’m beginning to have states of awareness that are just beyond what we consider linear or ordinary.” I started paying more attention to them.
Rick: Did you begin to cultivate them in various ways and explore means of shifting your awareness and all? Or was it just sort of coming on spontaneously?
Christina: At the time, I was a martial artist at the world level, so I was doing a lot of Zen meditation. I think that quieting of the mind and really becoming very, very still expanded the states of awareness, which then began to occur spontaneously. They continued to occur through the dreaming.
Rick: So, did they occur both in your wakeful Zen practice and in your dream states?
Christina: Yes, yes, yes.
Rick: It’s kind of interesting when you describe the onset of these expanded states of awareness. What was it like? A syrupy, heavy kind of thing you would feel coming over you, and the next thing you knew you would go into this transcendence or unboundedness?
Christina: Yes, yes, it was. Of course, now in retrospect I can see what the heavy, syrupy feeling was probably about. But why I called it Transcendent Dreaming is that it really is a form of lucid dreaming where you awaken within the dream.
Transcendent Dreaming Versus Lucid Dreaming
How it differs from lucid dreaming is that in lucid dreaming you’re waking within a dream and you have some control over the dream. There’s an expanded state of awareness and more luminosity, but you’re always really separated from it.
Why I call this transcendent dreaming is that it’s a form of lucid dreaming, but what happens as you awaken into the dream is that there’s this merging of the awareness into the energy behind the dream. There’s a loss of the “I” or the “me,” a reality centric to itself.
It’s an expanded awareness where perception and feeling are almost fused, and you simply are the dream unfolding. There’s no you. There’s no dream. There’s a communion, or a state of unity consciousness. In that state, many things can occur, including that these dreams materialize in our everyday reality.
So, it’s a very different shift of our awareness, I think, certainly from a normal dream, but also even from lucid dreaming, in which there’s still a separation.
There’s no you. There’s no dream. There’s a communion, or a state of unity consciousness.
Rick: As most people who watch this program know, I’ve been meditating for a long time, but I would have to say that the most profound experiences I’ve ever had were actually in sleep or during dreams. My wife says the same thing—that she has had some really profound experiences. I guess that maybe the reason for that is that you’re so innocent, all your defenses are down, and you’re completely open or something. Do you think that’s why?
Christina: I do believe that there’s something in sleep that allows the way our perceptual filter looks at reality to relax, and our awareness has more fluidity to it. For myself, in the transcendent dream state, it gets less heavy, less syrupy-feeling. That’s the place in dreaming for me where awareness is actually merging into the energy behind the forms in the dream. So now there’s a nonlocality; it’s simultaneously in multiple forms.
I’ve always said that dreaming at this level is not just in the mind or an awareness, but it’s also a bodily process. The heavier that syrupy feeling would become, the more you could really feel energy coursing as though you had actually merged into a larger energy.
Rick: Have you ever—or do you even now—maintain awareness, not through any sort of effort but spontaneously, throughout the night during sleep? Or is it mainly just in these occasional dream experiences?
Christina: I don’t sleep very much, and when I do sleep, I’m aware that I’m sleeping, so I’m awake all night long watching. But what’s changed over the last ten years for me is that it isn’t that I’m not having transcendent dreams—I am—but they’re now here in my waking reality.
I think the difference is that it was an organic development and a remaking of consciousness, and I think it required sleep—essentially just to knock my awareness out and quiet my mind so that it could have these experiences.
But with more meditation, as you well know, as you move into the quieting of the mind, this stillness in the body and in every cell of the body—eternity is stamped at the deepest level of the cellular nature. Once awareness is attuned there, without all of the surface noise, once again planes of realization open up and avail themselves. I see them now in the waking state as much as I do in a dreaming state.
👁️ Silence, sleep, and the nature of dreaming
Rick: Yeah, the reason I ask that question about maintaining awareness during sleep is that, in a lot of different traditions, there have been sages and realized beings who have described how the waking, dreaming, and sleeping states may cycle through, but pure awareness remains awake to itself throughout that cycle.
They even describe—I mean, there’s one description—that there’s a sort of gap between each state of consciousness. As one transitions from sleeping to waking or from waking to sleeping, and so on, there’s a little gap, and that gap eventually becomes clearer and widens. Eventually, it sort of persists. The gap becomes the predominant thing, and then the waking, dreaming, and sleeping continue to cycle on.
Christina: That’s very interesting, because I know for myself, even in the morning, if I’m simply resting, there’s a place in that resting where I’m interconnected to many things at the same time. It’s a feeling state, and it’s really exquisite. It’s very, very nourishing.
I’ve come to not even want to awaken and go down a path of any thought, because as soon as I do, it takes me out of that state. I think that might be what you’re calling the gap.
And then the rest of the day just never really can compare to that moment of true interconnectedness on many, many different levels.
Rick: Yeah, it can be a very intuitive time for people. As a matter of fact, if I get the story right, Thomas Edison used to take these little naps throughout the day and have his assistants wake him up. Part of the reason he would do that is that he would enter into that gap and then get creative ideas and breakthroughs in what he was trying to figure out as he dipped in and out of that gap state.
Christina: Yes, yes.
Rick: So, when you say “dreaming” in your book, you say that dreaming really equates with consciousness. Usually, when people think of dreaming, they think of all sorts of imaginative adventures that we have when we sleep, and that’s a true, valid use of the word. But you’re really equating it with pure consciousness, I think. Is that right?
Christina: I am. Sometimes I use “dreaming” synonymously with the God force or Allah, meaning it’s the implicit order moving into manifestation, or that which is moving from silence into manifesting in the world and then receding back out of the world. I call that “the dreaming.”
I also call it “the substance of all that is,” and when our awareness is attuned there and every cell of the body is being nourished from it, from there you suddenly find that consciousness is creating, and consciousness is creating through you in that moment in which you’re in touch with the substance of all that is. So I call that “the dreaming.”
It’s a movement. Sometimes I call it “the silence,” but silence is not a closed silence. Silence is a substance; it’s an intelligence. It’s coming out of the void to manifest and receding back into the void.
Rick: Yeah. Here’s a nice quote I lifted from your book. I think you may have attributed this to a Zen teacher: “The mind is structured in layers, as is the universe, from the superficial to the profound. Deeper layers are more powerful. Quiet the mind and know them.”
Deeper layers are more powerful. Quiet the mind and know them.
Christina: Hmm, hmm. Yes, yes. That’s from my sensei. I was abysmal at Zen meditation because, like many people, I had a very active mind.
Rick: Yeah, Adyashanti failed too.
Christina: And I still have an active mind. So it’s a beautiful quote, and I find that to be absolutely true. I find that as we quiet the surface consciousness and the mind reaches a place of stillness, we reach another level of the mind that doesn’t think at all and has the ability to have nonlocal experience, to be in multiple places at once, and to be fused with that experience. So it’s not a place the mind can readily go.
Rick: Yeah, let’s dwell on this a bit. The second and third verses of the Yoga Sutras: The second verse is, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind,” and then the third verse is, “And then the seer rests in himself,” or in itself. So this notion of settling down the activity of the mind—
Christina: Beautiful.
Rick: I’ve always been taught, and have understood and experienced, that the mind actually has a natural tendency to want to do that, because more settled levels of mental activity are more charming. They’re more fulfilling. So if we can find the means of allowing the mind to begin to settle down, and yet not just fall asleep but settle down and remain alert, then we encounter greater and greater charm as we go. The mind just sort of moves on to it without effort or the need for control or concentration.
Christina: Yeah, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. I like that “greater charm.” That’s absolutely right, right down to that equanimity and joy that one can experience when it all quiets.
I think, too, once someone has found a certain level of quietude, it’s almost aversive to have an active mind because it requires so much bandwidth. It takes a tremendous amount of your energy, and what you get from it is really a surface consciousness. So I think there are greater rewards as the mind quiets. It’s self-rewarding.
Rick: Yeah, but that is not to say that a person wouldn’t be able to write books and give lectures, travel, and do this and that. It’s just that the average mind thinks about maybe a hundred thoughts in a minute, ninety-nine of which are unnecessary or irrelevant, using so much energy. Whereas the quiet mind could have maybe one thought in a minute, just to make a simple example, but it’s actually the useful one among those hundred.
I was just talking yesterday to a ninety-something-year-old gentleman whom I’ll be interviewing in December. He came onto my radar when he got in touch with us, and he said, “Well, I’m in my nineties, and I have some sort of physical problem where they had to amputate my feet and this and that.” But he said, “I’ve never been happier in my life, and everything’s wonderful.”
It turns out he was a designer of cars in the fifties. He designed the original Thunderbird and other things. As I was talking to him yesterday, he was saying, “You wouldn’t believe how much energy I have.” He’s thinking of selling his home, buying an RV, and driving from South Carolina to California—and he’s in his nineties. So he’s in this sort of awakened state where there’s just this tremendous energy all the time.
Christina: Absolutely. Once the bandwidth isn’t taken up by our surface consciousness, there’s a tremendous amount of vitality in that stillness. To me, that’s really where different states of awareness and different planes of realization become available, because you’re in the instant moment with all this quietude, with eternity on both sides, and the expanded presence of attention has nowhere to go but, in that instant moment, to that which has been invisible before—with a tremendous amount of energy available to move there.
Rick: This phrase again is worth repeating: deeper levels being more powerful—quiet the mind to know them. I guess we could say, “Do less and accomplish more,” or something, if deeper levels are more powerful.
I’m preparing for an interview with Mooji tomorrow, who’s a well-known teacher, and he said in one of his talks that someone who is really at peace with themselves—which would equate with being in tune with these deeper, quieter levels—has a much bigger impact on the world than any politician or treaty or anything else.
Obviously, if we could populate the world with more such people, then we would have a peaceful world. But we’re not going to do it on the level of politics and so on if everybody’s operating from an agitated level of mind.
Christina: Yeah, I’m in complete agreement with that. I believe that when we’re in what I sometimes call “the pocket of silence,” where the mind is very, very still, it’s where we access the substance of all that is, giving life everywhere. To touch that current has tremendous vitality to it, which increases one’s bandwidth and capacity, I think.
When one is in communion or union with it, one really becomes its agent, its expression in the world, and it’s all invisible. You know, it doesn’t require doing anything, because it’s actually manifesting through you.
Rick: Yeah, that’s beautifully put. In fact, there are all sorts of verses in ancient scriptures and modern people who talk this way, about how they really have the sense that they’re not doing anything. Everything is sort of being done automatically, and they’re just residing in this relaxed state of oneness or witnessing or whatever, and nature is doing all the work.
Christina: Yes, there’s no doer.
The Q’ero and the unity of experience
Rick: Nice. Okay, there’s a lot to talk to you about. The whole thing with the Q’ero Indians—there are so many interesting stories in your book of various dreams that you had and various experiences. Where shall we go next? When we were doing the chronological thing a few minutes ago, you mentioned that visionary dream about your father’s death.
Christina: Prophetic.
Rick: Prophetic. That’s the word I’m looking for. You were practicing Zen, you said. So what’s the next significant milestone for you?
Christina: Probably my work with the Q’ero.
Rick: Okay, what attracted you to go down there? Or how did you even—I’d never heard of the Q’ero Indians until I read your book.
Christina: Yeah, and I hadn’t heard of them either, and it’s funny that you would ask that question. In retrospect, you can think that, on the one hand, you’re getting involved with something from a linear perspective, but for myself, it’s really clear that the dreaming brought my relationship with the Quero to me.
Shortly after my father’s death, I had a dream where I was in an English pub, getting ready to come back to the United States. There were three men and a woman sitting at a high-top table with me, and underneath was a large wooden box, two feet by five feet. One of the men asked if I was willing to bring it to the United States. I thought, obviously, I need to see what’s in it before I’m willing to bring it to the United States.
Two of the men wandered off to the restroom. He opened up the wooden box, and at the time I didn’t realize it was an Incan mummy. As he opened it up, it was a full mummy adorned in gold.
Rick: Try getting that through customs.
Christina: Try getting that through customs, yeah. And I knew, as he closed the wooden latch in the dream, there was something inside of me—an incredible resistance saying, “There’s no way I am bringing that to the United States.”
I woke from the dream, and then within six months I was in the Andes. I was traveling there because of my interest in shamanic cultures, and I met the Quero Indians for the very first time. They happened to be descendants of the Inca.
So, it wasn’t serendipitous. The dreaming clearly brought this resonance, or something that we shared in common together. I’ve worked with them now for decades. But what’s even more interesting about that dream was that, when I met my editor for Transcendent Dreaming, it was 14 years after that dream. When I saw her picture, she was the woman in the dream. She’s the one who edited this book on dreaming.
The lovely part about these expanded states of awareness and nonlocal states of awareness is that you start to see the connectivity, the interconnection, that we simply cannot understand from a place of the rational mind.
Rick: Yeah. Even though we can’t understand it, have you ever made an attempt to explain the mechanics of it, or do you just throw up your hands and say it can’t be explained?
Christina: I do both. I do both because I’m quite fascinated by it, of course, and at the same time, it’s never better to believe in anything, because that just limits me and gives me a perceptual filter through which to see the world, which is very confining.
So, I say I like to play in ideas. I like to ground these experiences with quantum physics, even though I don’t know a lot about quantum physics, because it seems to be the model that best holds the experiences.
Rick: Yeah, some physicists get a little annoyed with “New Agey” types trying to use physics to explain their experiences. At the same time, there are a lot of physicists who are very progressive and are devoting most of their time to trying to draw the connection between physics and consciousness, mystical states, and so on.
A Phenomenological Approach to Transcendent Experience
You know, I’d like to stay with more of a phenomenological approach, which is: this is simply my experience. This is what it feels like in the cellular nature of my body. This is what my mind feels like when I’m in this state, and it’s all I know to be true.
Christina: You know, I’d like to stay with more of a phenomenological approach, which is: this is simply my experience. This is what it feels like in the cellular nature of my body. This is what my mind feels like when I’m in this state, and it’s all I know to be true.
Rick: So, these days, going down to South America and working with native cultures is all the rage, and it mostly involves ayahuasca. Did you work with the Quero involving plant medicines like that, or was it of a different nature?
Christina: The Quero don’t use any plant medicines. They are of the high Andes. Most of the plant medicines—the ayahuasca and San Pedro—come down from the Amazonian traditions, and I certainly don’t need to use plant medicine. I might be afraid to use a plant, given the fluidity of my own consciousness.
Rick: Things are working for you pretty well without them.
Christina: Yeah, yeah. I feel like I don’t need that in this lifetime, for sure.
Rick: So, what does it mean, then, to have been initiated as a medicine woman?
Christina: You know, the Quero have a set of transmissions that, interestingly, some say are the keys and processes of who we are becoming a hundred thousand years from now, and they’re all energetic transmissions.
The Quero are very interesting people because they don’t live in linear time. If you are with them, they never talk about the past. They don’t talk about what just happened two minutes ago, and they don’t talk about the future.
Rick: Do they have past and future tenses in their language?
Christina: They don’t. Their language is more like Sanskrit, and it has a sensuality and a vibrational quality to it that mirrors the land.
The other fascinating thing about the Quero is that they don’t have a sense of self, of “I” or a “me.” They are a community, and they’re very, very inclusive. So, they live in varying degrees of unity consciousness, depending on whether it’s the tribal people or the medicine people.
This is very different from our own experience. They are considered, or have been considered by many, to be essential masters of the energy realm, and indeed, it is their primary reality. Material reality is secondary to them.
Twenty years ago, a Ziploc baggie was a phenomenon to them. They live between 18,000 and 22,000 feet, which is above the tree line. There’s nothing up there. It’s three days by horseback to get there, so there’s a monastic quality to it.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, like many Indigenous cultures, they are now a dying culture. They’re coming down off that mountain. The traditions are changing, and most of my time spent with them has really been about how to simply walk with them as they are a dying culture.
Rick: Why would you say fortunately?
Christina: Because I think that there are larger rhythms coming out of the void where everything has to die.
Rick: Yeah.
Christina: You know, our species will die, our planet will die; everything has to have its full fruition, blossom, and die. I absolutely honor those rhythms, even though I may not understand them.
Rick: Yeah. Do they see themselves as representative of what humanity may be a hundred thousand years from now, or do they just have a vision of that which isn’t necessarily the way they live?
Christina: It’s not necessarily the way they live, although all the master medicine people are now dead. Even ten years ago, they were in their 80s and 90s, and there were about five remaining. They had that level of consciousness.
Their job—one job—was to sit in prayer for the planet. That was their vocation. In the transmissions, which are energetic transmissions involving increasing levels of communion and stewardship, whether it be with the Earth, with the stars, and eventually with the energy behind creation, those energetic transmissions are taken very seriously.
Rick: So, describe a little bit more the nature of your work with them. What sorts of disciplines were you going through? What sorts of experiences were you having? Just the whole experience of being down there all that time. Did you learn their language, or were you using a translator, or was language not so necessary?
Christina: A little bit of all of that, yeah. You know, I think one of the most interesting pieces, early on, of simply being with them was the inability to speak the language.
So much of how they work and move is from an energetic perspective. If you ever have the opportunity to simply be with the people for an extended period of time, you’re held in that field or that resonance, and it kind of starts to rub off on you. I think it’s maybe the best way to learn, just like the best way to learn a foreign language.
Early on, I would use a translator, but very quickly—and because so much of the initiating and the medicine is really energetic transmission, working with the forces of nature—language wasn’t the way that it was going to unfold.
Also, I think they recognized my innate dreaming essence. They are not dreamers per se in that way, and yet we had a way of moving in the world. We got there from different places. They got there from nature, and I got there from dreaming. But there was a simultaneity and appreciation in that.
So, even though I’ve been through the initiations, and even though I taught Indigenous shamanism for 25 years, I never really saw myself as working with them. I saw myself watching a culture die and simply being very present to that at a really concrete level.
Rick: But working with them for 25 years, there must have been something that really engaged your interest. I presume you weren’t there nonstop for 25 years; you must have gone back and forth. Something kept bringing you back. What were you actually experiencing that you found so intriguing, so worth several decades of your life?
This concept of something they call munay . Probably at its lowest frequency it means “love,” but at the highest frequency, it means “dissolving the I into the one.” So, it’s not unlike namaste .
Christina: This concept of something they call munay. Probably at its lowest frequency it means “love,” but at the highest frequency, it means “dissolving the I into the one.” So, it’s not unlike namaste.
There are people who live in unity consciousness. They live and breathe it, and their hearts are some of the purest hearts I’ve ever experienced on the planet. They’re such a humble agricultural people.
At 18,000 to 22,000 feet, infant mortality is very high, and they live on 70 varieties of potato. There’s nothing that grows up there, right? So, every day is a communion in silence. It’s a meditation in silence and in simple living, and yet in the unity of experience, because there is no “I” in that culture.
You can’t bring medicine for an alpaca for one of the villages. They have five small villages, and they’re all about a day and a half apart. You can’t bring something for just one village; they don’t recognize or accept a gift unless it’s for everyone.
Even the small children will bring a piece of candy back to the entire family. They live differently on the planet.
Rick: So, the attraction to you is that you were kind of imbibing the unity state of consciousness by osmosis, by proximity to them or something, right?
Christina: I think so. It was very reminiscent of transcendent dreaming and the states that occur in transcendent dreaming, and that purity of heart was, very early on, a soul moment for me.
I knew the first time I had to come back from there that we needed that in North America, that this essence needed to be brought back to North America.
It makes me think that’s probably what that dream was about, where I was like, “Hell, no, I’m not taking that mummy.” I wept the first time I left there, knowing how daunting it felt to have experienced what I experienced there, and what it would mean to bring that to the United States—to bring it to communities, to bring it forward.
It’s been three decades of my life serving there.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, that’s the first thought that came to my mind: How in the world do you—there’s a phrase Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to use, “Knowledge crumbles on the hard rock of ignorance”—how in the world do you take something from that culture that is so removed from our modern world and introduce it into the modern world without having it completely fall flat?
Christina: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, yeah.
Rick: So how did you?
Christina: You know, expanded states of awareness that they naturally live in in the West—you have to find experiential ways to train that, to provide that experience for someone. My first 20 years of teaching were about finding the experiential exercises along with the energetic transmission, along with bringing the students and voyagers in consciousness back into relationship and interconnection with the Earth.
But after 20 years of that, and after really coming to a place where I felt like I couldn’t offer one more experiential, it simply felt as though somebody was becoming intoxicated off of the experience. I turned my teaching to, “Let’s move to silence.” No experientials. Let’s move to quietude. Let’s move to what it means to have an ever-increasing presence of attention and the stilling of the mind in the body, because it brings the same state. And that’s actually closer to the Q’ero Indians and their transmissions and prophecies.
Rick: Well, when you say that people were becoming intoxicated with the experiential—I mean, if you read your book and all the dreams you had, there are some pretty far-out experiences. Were you saying that people you were teaching were becoming intoxicated by flashy experiences and looking for those and trying for those, and so on? Whereas they were missing the point because the silence is the really important thing? Is that what you just said?
Christina: What I said is that early on, in order to give people experiences and expanded states of awareness, I would use an experiential. Within an experiential exercise, whether it was journeying—I mean, there are various ways to offer an experiential where you’re participatory and you’re actually allowing someone, teaching someone, how to expand awareness—but over the years, it felt as though, one, they couldn’t hold that state, and two, they were just looking for the intoxication.
Rick: Right.
Christina: So more recently, meaning the last five years, I’ve really come to this place of, “I’m done with experiential and people seeking intoxication.” If you’re interested in the remaking of consciousness, of moving from separation to unity, we’re going to do it through understanding silence and the power of silence. And it feels more organic to the teachings of the Q’ero, who sit in silence and prayer all the time.
Rick: Yeah, I think probably everybody gets that point. Flashy experiences are transitory; they can’t last. Enlightenment is not a flashy experience. It’s not like one big, perpetual flashy experience.
Christina: I also think that there’s a place with that quietness of the silence that comes with long years of meditation, which allows you to hold the tremendous new amount of energy that becomes available and the new planes of realization that open up. If you’re offering an experiential and you get that opening, but you still have all this surface consciousness and noisiness, it creates a lot of tumult in an individual. So I think that silence is really fundamental.
Preparing the Nervous System for Expanded Awareness
Rick: Yeah, it’s an important point, I think. Silence is definitely fundamental. Something you just alluded to, I think, is the necessity of culturing the nervous system, or the container, in order to really sustain that silence and that experience. I often hear from people who have had some sort of Kundalini awakening, or some sudden influx of energy, or something for which they weren’t prepared, and they have to quit their jobs. They become incapacitated in various ways. It’s just too much for them to handle.
There’s wisdom in understanding that the nervous system is the vehicle through which anything is lived, and something as radical as enlightenment really necessitates a radical transformation of the nervous system. This whole idea of instantly popping into it and sustaining it is rather unrealistic.
Christina: Yes, yes. I absolutely agree, and I do think there is an organic development that arises naturally if you don’t push the system.
Rick: Yeah, it’s important: safety first. Since we’re talking about the South American traditions and so on, and we’ve alluded—not in your case, but we’ve alluded—to the use of ayahuasca and so on, I was preparing for the Mooji thing the other day and someone asked him about ayahuasca. He said, “Well, does it last?” It’s just this sort of temporary thing, and you really should be looking for that which lasts.
That is not to say that you might have a beautiful meditation and feel great. Even then, there’s some culturing of the nervous system that takes place, and to a degree the physiology has changed and is more capable of sustaining that state. But if one does things that are sudden, abrupt, or premature—perhaps chemically induced—it gets a little bit more risky.
Christina: I think so, too. I also think for some there’s a place for it, because it’s the beginning of an opening for them that they might not have had otherwise.
Rick: Well, it was for me. I mean, I first did that stuff in the ’60s and thought, “Oh, wow! There’s a lot more to life than I realized.”
Christina: I think it’s a nice preview of possibility. I also think that we’re all here as a shard of light from the Godhead, or God force, and each essence is here for a different reason and to hang out at different planes of realization.
I always say to my students, “If you’re drawn to unity consciousness, it’s like the moth to the flame.” Apparently, in this lifetime, that development is organically unfolding because of the longing or the desire. Of course, there are many paths up the mountain.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a great point, and I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s path, including ayahuasca and stuff like that. Some people have benefited from it a lot, and there are all sorts of paths. Some people say, “Well, there are actually seven and a half billion paths to God—as many of them as there are people on Earth.” So, yeah, I’m glad you made that clarification.
Christina: But like you, Rick, I do think—and I get pushback from some of my really long-time students who are faculty, MDs, and attorneys, and who have been [unclear] consciousness for 30 years—that in moving to this notion that you can find these planes of realization, expanded states, and unity consciousness through the organic emergence of silence, there is a stage in the layering, the folds of quieting the mind.
You’ve heard many mystics and artists speak of it: because the mind becomes quiet, there’s an emptiness. We call it “emptiness” or “nothingness,” where there’s no desire, no longing, and no passion necessarily out here in the everyday world. It’s a true, quiet desert of “nothingness.”
I don’t think plant medicine allows you to organically feel that, stay in that state while being in our everyday world, and recognize its true value and where it’s going to lead you next. It doesn’t lead you back into surface consciousness. You still live that as your primary language, but it leads you to really being in connection with the substance of “all that is” that is manifested every day in the world, emerging and bringing things back into the void.
So it’s that moment of both creation and destruction simultaneously happening, of which your awareness is witnessing in the state of nothingness, because there’s none of all this noise here. It’s also the place where the “I,” the reality centered on itself, begins to dissolve. There’s no center in that space, and you start to move participatorily in the space. I think plant medicines don’t train that piece of the organic development, and it’s the part that allows you to be sane in the world.
Rick: So, in other words, they don’t train—or they don’t enable you to tap into—the most fundamental level of silence. There’s still something going on in a rather dramatic way. Is that what you’re saying?
Christina: I think, unfortunately, here in the West, for most people, they decide to have the experience. They work 60 or 70 hours a week, plan for Friday afternoon, do their purification for the way, have the experience, and go right back into our everyday world, moving at the speed of light. Their surface consciousness and that state of emptiness and nothingness are never really developed.
Rick: Yeah, good point. There’s a little story in the Upanishads, or someplace, where a master tells the disciple to go and get him a banyan seed. So he gets the banyan seed, and the master says, “Okay, now break it open.” He breaks it open, and the master asks, “What do you see inside?” He says, “It’s hollow. I see nothing.” The master says, “Well, it’s out of that hollowness that this whole big banyan tree arises.”
The teaching is that all of this comes out of silence, and that if you really want to get to the foundation of it, that foundation is going to be silent and empty in its nature.
Christina: Yes, yes, yes. Beautiful. That doesn’t mean that I think people don’t go through phases. What you just said about dispassion and maybe flatness—I don’t know if you used that word—but people do go through a phase where they may feel kind of emotionless, flat, disinterested, or dispassionate. It’s just a phase.
It is. I often liken it, or think of it, as if your true heart center is based on the everyday surface consciousness—the news feeds, Facebook, and that’s what you’re passionate about. When you suddenly find a larger reality underneath that, you don’t immediately know how to fall in love with it or be passionate about it. Yet, at the same time, you’re realizing it offers a little bit—maybe more—than where your passion was before.
So, like you said, I think that there’s this amount of time where the old passion is dying off in order for a new passion to avail itself. Students are very uncomfortable there.
Rick: Yeah, which always happens. The caterpillar must think, “Oh, my God! I’m turning to mush. What’s happening to me?” But that’s the necessary phase to go through to become the butterfly.
Christina: Right, and their imagined selves are developing and rotting—the caterpillar’s nervous system. So it’s uncomfortable.
I think another thing that fits in here is that if you think of that as a phase, it’s important to realize that pretty much everything is a phase. There’s going to be ongoing development for the vast majority of people. Never freak out and think, “Oh, my God, I’m becoming like this, and I’m always going to be like this, and I don’t want to be like this.” Just realize it’s a stage. You want to comment on that? I could say more, but I shouldn’t talk too much.
Rick: I think another thing that fits in here is that if you think of that as a phase, it’s important to realize that pretty much everything is a phase. There’s going to be ongoing development for the vast majority of people. Never freak out and think, “Oh, my God, I’m becoming like this, and I’m always going to be like this, and I don’t want to be like this.” Just realize it’s a stage. You want to comment on that? I could say more, but I shouldn’t talk too much.
Christina: I would be in agreement. I might also add that when people want to define enlightenment or define awakening, to me there’s never really an end to awakening. I think that if Buddha had lived longer, he’d have been able to awaken to even greater levels of reality, or Christ. This beautiful mind that we have has the capacity to move from the finite into the infinite, and that infinite is very, very large. I think we can forever be exploring that in the cellular nature of the body.
Rick: I think the one thing that happens is that—I was just discussing this with somebody the other day—there is a dimension of life which doesn’t change or evolve, and we could call it “the absolute,” if we wish. So it’s not going to get shinier or be improved or something like that. But our interface with that, our ability to live that and express that, and our capacity as sentient beings to embody that reality—how could there be an end to that?
Christina: Absolutely.
Rick: So, when people say that there are no levels or stages, that’s true of the absolute, but is it really true of our human experience? Can you show me an example of anyone you know who doesn’t continue to go through greater refinement and so on? Feel free, if anything pops into your head, and I’m not asking you to—feel free to just say it, and I’ll get into it.
Well, one thing—okay, maybe we’ll come back to this. The point I was about to make towards the end of the interview was about how you actually work with people and how you help them get into that silence and so on. But before we do that, let’s continue on. There were some very interesting—well, this is going to connect with what we were just saying about the silence and not dwelling on flashy experiences—but there were some very interesting experiences you recount in your book, various dreams.
For instance, there was one in Chapter Two, which you entitled “Crossing the Threshold to Ordinary Reality,” in which you say, “I became a midwife for those who were crossing over into the spirit realm—people and animals, and people in comas.” What was that all about exactly? Do you remember that?
Christina: I do remember that, yes. I had a period in transcendent dreaming where, repeatedly, I would enter the dreaming, awaken within the dreaming, and my consciousness would expand into a place where it felt as though it were limitless—where it was really pure awareness. I would be taken to this place where, in the cellular nature of my body, it felt as though the cellular nature was dissolving, or eternity was unfolding in the cells of my body.
I felt like I was going to die to the body. In these repetitive dreams, I was held in abeyance in that space of pure awareness, but I was also aware of the body. The cellular nature felt as though it were dissolving, and I had this—like many people speak about being at that threshold. It was very, very exquisite because I was held in abeyance. It was very fatiguing.
Rick: Define the word “abeyance” for those whose first language isn’t English.
Christina: It felt like I was straddling the threshold, so I wasn’t going over the threshold, but I couldn’t pull myself back. It was exhausting to be there because, in the physical body, that dissolving at what felt like eternity—it was a feeling experience—was this vastness happening in the cells of the body. I was enduring it, essentially, and I saw it as a tremendous time in my dreaming of expansion of consciousness.
It was teaching me to hold greater, expanded states of awareness. It was also at that time that I naturally had clients who were beginning to pass away—pets, you know. It’s always funny how you end up being somewhere consciously, and then resonance has an affinity and people start to seek you out.
Because I had been in the community and had been in a major medical center, many primary care physicians and family practice physicians referred people to me. Some of them were my friends who knew I was having these expanded states of awareness. One of my friends, a family doctor here, asked me one time to come in. I’ve done it more than once now for major traumas, usually involving a young adolescent or young adult, male or female, almost always in an automobile accident. They’re on life support, and the family is often long-distance.
My role really is to provide comfort for the family and to be able to enter that place of quieting down and commune with the consciousness of the young adult, for a better understanding of where it is at. That actually gives the families some relief as they’re trying to make very difficult decisions.
Rick: Does the person’s soul kind of tell you whether it’s ready to move on and wants to come back, or that kind of thing?
Christina: Yes, it runs the gamut. Often, it’s a state of confusion, and it’s just hanging in that “bardo,” hanging there. There are other times when it absolutely does not want to return. My role has never been to assist it. My role has really been to come in, meet it, and be in communion with it.
Rick: Do they know you’re there? Does that soul realize that someone in the Earth plane is tuning into it?
Christina: Sometimes, not all the time. I would say most of the time, not. There’s a fair amount of distress in that place.
Rick: Are you able to help soothe them in some way or clear up their confusion?
Christina: If I stay there long enough, it can help settle the energy so that action takes place. I really see my consciousness as lending itself as a catalyst or a generator for that other consciousness to move between the manifest world and the unmanifest.
Rick: Interesting. Do you still know this stuff, or was that back in the day, before you had gone through other changes?
Christina: I do it on occasion.
Rick: You have not lost your ability?
Christina: I have not lost the ability.
Rick: Now, there was another chapter entitled “Piercing the Illusion of Time and Space,” and there was a story about a dream you had about a boy who had polio. You know where I’m getting at. Do you want to relate that story quickly rather than have me tell it?
Christina: Yes. This story—even when I was reading it last night, I thought, “Wow, I still don’t understand.” Once you collapse linear time, I don’t understand how things unfold.
In this dream, I had another transcendent dream. I awakened within the dream, and I was actually merging into a young boy who was walking home from school. He had polio, and he had one brace on and the other one off. He was whipping it like this as he walked home from school. I stayed with him in the dream through the dinner hour, and then he was getting ready for bed.
His father took him into the bathroom to get him ready for bed, and they went through all the normal routines of brushing his teeth. But eventually, his father took his pants off, and he took his own pants off and had his son touch his penis.
As I was in that dream, my awareness was simply in communion with the boy. But in that moment, as often happens in transcendent dreaming, everything slowed way down. You merge again into the consciousness of both in that experience. At the same time, I absolutely knew that there was a catalyst in my awareness being with the boy, spiritually guiding him.
I also recall feeling in that dream that, if I were to leave this—and this was right after the death dreams, when I think I mentioned that I had lost a lot of affection for life because that other place was so enticing, and I hadn’t returned to my affection for life—I was always trying to figure out where I belonged in the dream. Should I stay?
It sounds funny intellectually, but as a spiritual guide to this child, that felt more propelling than my everyday life. Or should I spin out of the dream? I didn’t have a lot of control over that, because I was dissolved into it. I finally did come back out of the dream.
I thought that was odd, but I understood it as my consciousness now being in multiple places, and as the experience of the feelings of different places.
Then we segue to many years later. A male friend of mine who had lost his father asked me to go out to dinner. We sat in a booth, had dinner, and he said, “I have some unresolved business with my father. I’m wondering if you could recommend a male therapist.”
I said, “Well, tell me a little bit more.” It ended up that it was about sexual abuse, so I referred him to a therapist. When we went to leave the restaurant, he kind of hinged as he got out, sat his hand on the table, and said, “You know, I had polio as a child, so it’s sometimes hard for me to move.”
In that moment, I absolutely knew.
Rick: That was the guy.
Christina: Yes. My brain still, to this day, doesn’t make sense of the linearity of that. And yet I’ve known this guy now for thirty years. I’ve moved back to Minneapolis three times, and I’ve “deathed” everyone in his family.
Rick: Using “death” there as a verb, you mean you’ve been there when people in the family have died in order to help with the transition? Is that what you mean to say?
Christina: Yes, yes. Thank you.
Rick: Interesting. Then there’s another one about a motorcycle accident, where you had this dream in which you were cradling someone’s head in your hands because she didn’t have a helmet on and she was on the back of a motorcycle. It was going through an accident, and then you take the story from there.
Christina: Yes, this dream reminds me of the levels of connection that we’re unaware of. In this dream, again, a transcendent dream, I actually reconfigured into only a pair of hands. My awareness was simply a set of hands as a woman was catapulting off a motorcycle.
I saw her boyfriend or husband, very seriously injured, and I was just these hands that caught her head before it hit the pavement. I was there until the emergency responders came, and then all of a sudden I dissolved out of the dream.
I have hundreds of dreams like this. It’s not uncommon. Several years later, a colleague of mine said to me, “I want to refer someone to one of your shamanic workshops, but she’s become a fundamental Christian.” I’m always very curious about what makes anyone become fundamental, so I inquired about why this woman had become fundamental.
She relayed to me that the woman had had an experience with what she thought was a guiding angel. Then she recounted the motorcycle accident. The woman said that she felt a pair of hands behind her head, and they were there until the emergency responders came. Then they dissolved.
I never met the woman. She never came to see me. Had she come, I probably would not have said anything about it.
Rick: Only if she reads your book.
Christina: Oh, I know, I know. But experiences like that, as I was writing Transcendent Dreaming, made me think that we may all be having these experiences every day but not have conscious awareness of them.
This is simply the quantum realm and what comes out of the silence, manifesting through us. Our awareness doesn’t touch it. If that’s the case, what that really means—it’s one thing to suddenly be given awareness, but I suspect this might be going on all the time.
We may all be having these experiences every day but not have conscious awareness of them.
Rick: Yes, I’m glad you made that point, because I’m getting these stories out of you not just to provide entertainment for people to think, “Oh, here’s another flashy experience for you to listen to.”
There are two reasons. One is to bring awareness to the notion that there’s a deeper mechanics to creation going on all the time, as you just said, and that what we ordinarily experience is just the tip of the iceberg.
I think there’s value in appreciating that and realizing that there’s a deeper mechanics, that there’s a sort of more fundamental intelligence that interconnects everything and orchestrates and coordinates the universe.
It’s not that we’re all going to have those kinds of experiences, but somehow, if it’s part of your fundamental understanding of life, it really does change life and change the way you live.
Christina: I will often say to my students, “The tragedy of awareness is that if we refuse to look at something, it can’t reach us.” Until our awareness—the bandwidth of our awareness—finds a place to hang out besides just the surface, it’s going to be very, very difficult for it to understand these other perceptual states that actually may be going on all the time in the deeper mind of everyone.
Rick: Another way of thinking about it is that if we are just on the surface, and yet there’s this deeper sort of organization taking place all the time, chances are we’re going to be out of tune with it most of the time because we’re oblivious to it. But if we could expand our awareness so as to incorporate those deeper levels of intelligence that are functioning and coordinating the universe, then perhaps we could be so in tune with them as to elicit their support and cooperation spontaneously.
Some people say that they get up on the wrong side of the bed and nothing goes right. Well, maybe that’s just because you’re not in tune with what nature is trying to do. If you could be so attuned, then coincidences would happen: you would meet that person at just the right time, the telephone would ring, and there would be a sort of synchronicity characterizing your life.
Christina: Well, I also like the image you’re giving of the iceberg, where you just have this surface, but underneath there’s something fundamental, something far greater in the deeper mind that doesn’t really even think at all. It actually participates and experiences directly. It’s a larger reality, and probably—I don’t know this to be true—of a higher order.
When one consciousness is there, there’s much more patience and equanimity for all the surface chop and chatter and waves, because there’s a higher order underneath it.
Rick: That’s a good point, yes. Patience and equanimity, and a kind of tolerance also, I’d say. Allowing things to play out—not being passive, but allowing and recognizing the wisdom of the unfoldment of things as they’re unfolding, and being patient and cooperative with that, rather than trying to jerk things this way or that prematurely or abruptly.
Christina: I also wonder about that larger reality. I know for myself—I can’t speak for others—that when you’re in the experience of a higher order, not through the mind but through participation, there’s no personal will wanting to influence anything. It’s “non-doing.” It’s not an action, although there’s action actually unfolding, but there’s no will or desire for an outcome. That in and of itself is a different way to live in the world.
Rick: And for those in the Advaita mode of thinking about things, this may seem a little bit full of details that they don’t usually consider. But the point is that we are essentially that deeper reality; that is our true nature. There’s a verse in the Rigveda someplace—I forget the exact reference or something—where it says…
Christina: You sound like me. It’s somewhere over here.
Rick: It says that all the impulses of intelligence that structure and govern creation reside in the transcendent field. And it says, “Those who don’t know that field, what can those impulses do for them?”
The implication is that those who do know that field can receive the cooperation and support of all those impulses of intelligence, which are ultimately within you, within the larger reality of what you are. But if you’re divorced from that larger reality, then you’re divorced from their assistance and support.
Christina: Yes, yes, that’s well stated. I sometimes think about the cellular nature and the atom, at the microscopic level, where those little vortices go into a vacuum of silence, right? That energy in every atom of the body—a hundred trillion times that energy inside every one of us—is the same energy that’s simultaneously organizing galaxies and fields of sunflowers. If one can bring their awareness to touch that, it changes how you move in the world.
Rick: Beautiful. It reminds me of that thing in the Bible where Christ says, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they toil not,” and they don’t worry about tomorrow and all that. “But even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” And if God is going to take care of the lilies, he will take care of you.
Christina: All right, all right. All at the same time.
Rick: That’s a beautiful point. We are the intelligence that is orchestrating and permeating every iota of creation, from the subatomic to the galactic. And we’re part and parcel of that.
Christina: Yes, and we can anchor our awareness there, which is a radical thought to many.
🛤️ Seeking, longing, and exploration
Rick: Yes, it’s an inspiring thought. A fellow named Ron Williams from Seattle—incidentally, anybody in Seattle, Susanna Murray is offering a retreat this weekend. You could still come to part of it; look at her website—asks a question: Was there ever a point in your life when you considered yourself a seeker, or is this awareness in which you now live a natural occurrence? You know what he means by that?
Christina: Yes. Beautiful question, beautiful question. It’s not an either/or, or even a both/and. I’ve never thought of myself as a seeker. I feel as though, because I was spontaneously having expanded states of awareness that I couldn’t go find a teacher or read about in a book, early on I surrendered into the dreaming as my teacher.
Was I the seeker? Was the seeking? I don’t know, because mostly I was hanging on by my fingernails, trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy without being able to find it in a book or a teacher. Would I have traded the experience? No, I would not have. I knew this was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Rick: Well, I think that many people would trade their situation for yours, in the sense that many people come at it from a place where life is drab, humdrum, routine, and not that fulfilling. They would sure like to dip into all this spiritual glory that everybody talks about and reads about in books, but they say, “I’m not having experiences. When is that ever going to happen for me?” They go through this phase for a long time, striving and yearning for that.
“Seek, and you shall find.” Eventually, people do move out of those phases if they are sincere about it. But you came at it the other way around, where you started having these profound experiences from the outset and then tried to begin to make sense of them, I think.
Christina: Yes, I think I probably came in the door backwards. But Ron’s question also brings up this: Is there a difference between seeking and longing? I think the seeker often has longing, but I think there are also a number of people who don’t necessarily seek, but they have longing.
What is longing? It is something in a greater will, or in the essence, that is wanting to move toward something. Whether we do that consciously or unconsciously, I think it runs the gamut.
Rick: Yes, and is there a distinction between—I draw a distinction between seeking and longing—and exploration? There does seem to be a point at which the unfulfilled quality of longing drops off, and so you’re no longer a seeker in that sense, like, “I’ve got to have this or I’m going to die.” But the thrill and fascination of exploration continues—the adventure of learning and discovering more about life.
Here’s a question that came from Mark Peters in Santa Clara: Do you have any sense of what it is that binds local consciousness to a particular body? That is, after your point of view has temporarily shifted to another person’s perspective, what is it that ultimately draws it back to your body?
Christina: These are wonderful questions.
Rick: Yes, better than the ones I can think of.
Christina: So, thanks for saving me, folks!
You know, I do wonder, since I wrote Transcendent Dreaming almost a decade ago, how I might have answered it then. I can only answer it now from a place where—I think in the book I use the language of entering someone else’s body, another form, another being, another plant. But over time, with these states happening more in a waking state, it comes out of the silence and is actually inside my own being. It’s not outside of my being.
To me, it’s a vastness that opens up. Again, it’s a feeling state where there’s a kind of dissolution of the cellular nature, and there’s a vastness. Suddenly, I am the experience. There’s a loss of an “I” in the space; there’s no egocentric piece of the space. You’re just there. It’s the difference between putting your nose in a flower and being the fragrance. The fragrance can be in multiple places at once, and you’re simply aware there.
To me, it’s a vastness that opens up. Again, it’s a feeling state where there’s a kind of dissolution of the cellular nature, and there’s a vastness. Suddenly, I am the experience. There’s a loss of an “I” in the space; there’s no egocentric piece of the space. You’re just there. It’s the difference between putting your nose in a flower and being the fragrance. The fragrance can be in multiple places at once, and you’re simply aware there.
So I don’t think of my body as separate there. It’s simply an experience. But that vastness starts to contract, and then eventually I’m back with my own personal experience.
Rick: It kind of reminds me—I’ll tell a story quickly. There’s a story of Shankara. Shankara would go around the country and have debates with all these different people. The tradition was that if you debated and won, that person would become your disciple, and his students would become your disciples also. So he was pretty good at that.
Shankara was the founder of Advaita, and there was a woman who was a renowned sage who challenged him to a debate. Somehow, the topic had to do with relationships and romantic love and so on, which Shankara knew nothing about, being a monk. So he had to learn about that in order to win the debate. But he was a monk and had his vows and all.
There was a king who was just dropping the body, and Shankara, using a certain technique, occupied the body of the king. Shankara’s body stayed in a cave guarded by his disciples. The king wakes up and gets back into his activity, and the king’s wife is impressed because this man is now so bright. He hadn’t used to be so bright.
So Shankara spends a month or so living this life and having this whole experience. But somehow the queen got the notion that this was actually not her original husband. This was the sage who was doing this. She thought, “I’ll just get rid of his body so I can keep my king, who will retain this newfound brightness.” So she sent out people to destroy Shankara’s body.
As this was about to happen, some of Shankara’s disciples came to the palace and began to chant to the king, who had begun to forget who he really was, verses that Shankara himself had written about the true nature of the Self and all. Somehow, Shankara realized what was happening, dropped the king’s body, which dropped dead, and went back into his own body, which was about to be burned by some emissaries of the queen. He popped back to life again and lived happily ever after.
I love your kitty cat there.
Christina: Yes, this is Sweet Pea right here. And I actually have Bodhi, named after the Buddha, but he must be elsewhere.
Non-action and the unseen world
Rick: Okay, Dream Seven. There was a dream entitled “Reconfiguring Energy,” and you began to have this phase of your life where you mentioned “the increased luminosity of internal and external objects.” There was actually a dialogue with Jesus that took place. There’s more that I want to say from this chapter, but maybe you could start by elaborating on that bit a little, if you remember.
Christina: Help me remember.
Rick: Okay, I’ll just continue on, and you kick in as soon as you remember what you were talking about.
Christina: I recall what happened before Jesus appeared?
Rick: I don’t remember. But one thing that I found intriguing—I think it was in this chapter—you said you were able to influence the subtle forces of nature: “I could alter circumstances, change destinies, and modify the effects of other people’s actions.” I wondered about that because it seems like you’re messing with people’s karma or something. Then you mentioned the Q’ero tradition of exercising dominion with nature rather than dominance over it. So, I wondered if you kind of dabbled a little bit in modifying the effects of other people’s actions, but then realized that you shouldn’t really intervene in that way.
Christina: I don’t know if I ever saw myself as dabbling, in part because with transcendent dreaming, there’s a loss of separation. So, there is no “you,” and in the moment you have a will or a desire for an outcome, you spin out of the dream.
Rick: Oh, good point.
Christina: So, it wasn’t dabbling per se. It was the awareness that you are a generator and a catalyst in the moment because there’s more energy available.
Rick: So, it was not your individuality that was messing with their individuality. It was more your universal nature—which is all of our universal nature—that you were tuned into.
Christina: Yes. And how do you witness and be in relationship to that? As it’s developing, how do you feel about it?
I did go through a period of wondering where this was going to take me, what it meant in terms of impacting the manifest world from an unseen place. I didn’t have much control over it. I still don’t to this day. But I did go through this period of wondering and, very early on, decided absolutely just to stay with non-action.
You know, I never talked about my prophetic experiences. I never alert anyone. I’ve chosen to simply allow that piece of my awareness to be an intermediary between the visible and invisible realms, without needing to influence it by putting it into language or telling someone.
Rick: So, these things are happening to you not because you’re being alerted to some situation that you’re supposed to influence, but they’re happening to you just because you’re cognizant of a deeper mechanics of—
Christina: Yeah, I think it’s touching the substance of “all that is” that’s everywhere at once—hugely abundant and endlessly abundant. It’s everywhere at once, and in some ways you become its agent so that the unseen can manifest onto the planet. It really doesn’t have anything to do with myself.
For instance, in the last five years, I’ve had ninety-two transcendent-language dreams where I’m actually inside a foreign language, and I’m like a new meme coming out of the planet. You know, it’s not something I would choose to do. My personal will doesn’t hang out there, necessarily, and yet there’s something—when I touch the substance of “all that is”—that begins to emerge. There must be some sort of resonant affinity, and my energy becomes available there.
Rick: Yeah, you must be keeping a journal, because otherwise you couldn’t possibly have remembered that there were ninety-two of them.
Christina: I made a habit, really early on, of writing them down and just sending them off to my editor without editing. With most of them, I don’t have a clue what’s inside them. They’re really coming from somewhere else.
Rick: Yeah, you said something a minute ago that was interesting, which is that perhaps you’re serving as a conduit or a channel through which something is being infused into the world by virtue of your experience.
You didn’t use those nice words, but I mean, we’ve all heard the stories of yogis in the Himalayas. You actually mentioned a Q’ero Indian guy who just sat and prayed for the world. This is the idea of yogis in the Himalayas who are helping to keep the world together by virtue of their consciousness, even though they’re out of the sight of humanity.
Perhaps you, although you’re more involved in the world, are—well, we’re all having an influence. Everything we think, say, and do—all seven-point-whatever billion of us—is radiating an influence, and the sum total of that influence is what we see as the quality of our world—
Christina: That’s right.
Rick: —with all its troubles.
Christina: And you know, Rick, in keeping with this notion that we’re all intermediaries for the unseen to come into the manifest world, essentially we’re pure awareness, and that is how it makes its way into the world.
I think, because I’ve been a dreamer, I have a number of people who want to tell me their dreams. They’re almost inevitably interpreting the dreams personally, as symbolic in this way, or related to their purpose or their destiny. But I get to sit in the place where people are telling me their dreams often enough that I can see collective energy trying to come onto the planet.
One of the ways in which it comes onto the planet is through individuals’ dreams. If people didn’t move to a perceptual filter of the individual, but understood that the collective is actually birthing itself through them, they would have a different experience of their dreams.
Rick: That’s a good point. So, it’s not all about them. They’re just like a radio that’s picking up a certain frequency that’s getting more clear.
Christina: Yes, it’s trying to find its way out of the planet.
Rick: Yeah, and I think that’s true of the sort of epidemic of awakenings in itself. We just put up a new quote from Eckhart Tolle on BatGap. Let me read it here. Irene found it the other day. She’s been wanting to put something up that sort of indicates that there are many people at varying stages of awakening, because sometimes we get criticized: “Do you claim that all these people you’re interviewing are enlightened?”
But the subtitle of BatGap is “spiritually awakening people.” The quote from Eckhart was:
A huge number of people are going through the process of awakening—some in the early stages, some in later stages—and it’s wonderful to see.
That definitely does seem, from my perspective, to be something going on. Everybody in the world is experiencing it, whether they know it or not. It’s percolating up and having an influence, which some people might really enjoy and others might find very uncomfortable, according to how prepared they are for that energy.
Christina: I would absolutely agree. And, of course, there are multiple ways to view what’s going on. You know, whether the frequency is increasing on the planet and every cell of the body is in resonance with the planet, so it changes consciousness—it’s an evolution in consciousness occurring.
There are mutations on the planet now. I’ve given thought recently to what I call our new prototypes of consciousness, meaning the young children who we call “on the spectrum”—autism. I’ve been interested in how most of them have delayed language acquisition. So, there’s a quietness already that is almost resistant, in a developmental place, to learning language. Then also, most of them cannot learn individuation, as though they’ve come from that unity but can’t be in the world and adapt within individuation. Then, of course, there’s that increased sensory sensitivity.
And I say, are we seeing an evolution that’s really preparing the vessel for a different kind of consciousness? When I look at our millennials and the way the millennials’ brains work—how quick they are to multitask and to be in multiple forms of media—although people are quick to say the millennials are going to have a really difficult time with their heart space because they’re all about connection through social media, possibly—but maybe not.
Maybe what’s to come will open more easily, given how the brain allows them to move with such dimensionality and spontaneity. So, I think we’re just watching over—if you look at the generations. Now, I think for those of us who are baby boomers, we’re really holding a hand across the bridge to how to be adaptive in our world to what’s to come.
Rick: You mentioned something about the Q’ero Indians envisioning what humanity might be like a hundred thousand years from now. With reference to that, and also in all of your dreaming experiences, have you gotten any visions or insights into what humanity might be like in a much more near future?
Christina: No. And you know, it’s interesting: with the number of prophetic waking states I have, they never moved in what I would call a future direction. But I don’t know—maybe the language dreams are that. It’s just not that easy to identify.
But I’m also someone who, because I can be in this ever-expanding present moment with eternity on each side—and eternity doesn’t mean a long time; it means no time. There’s no time. So, it’s this multidimensional moment.
What’s really exquisitely beautiful about it is that you can watch something coming into manifestation, and all of a sudden, on another plane of realization, it eclipses it and something else starts to move. There’s no cause and effect. It’s more like effect, effect, effect, in surround sound. I wouldn’t want to even blend my consciousness with what’s possible, because I think it would limit it.
I think we’re at an interesting time, with all the chaos, the tumult, and the noise in the culture. And we know that a higher order often comes from those places. In time—how long will that be? I don’t know.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, look how chaotic the sixties were, and it was a time of such change. I think there’s some Chinese symbol for chaos or something in Chinese that includes the symbol for opportunity—something like that.
Christina: Yeah, we’re there with that symbol.
Rick: So, in the conclusion of your book, you talk about “the unity of experience with accompanying nonlocal awareness is now a regular visitor in the waking state for me.” By “regular visitor,” do you mean it comes and goes, as visitors tend to? Or do you mean it’s characteristic of your regular waking state?
Christina: It comes and goes.
Rick: Okay. And you’ve spent the last several years teaching your students interested in nondual awareness about an organic development and remaking of consciousness, using the silence stamped in every atom of our body—the same silence from which all arises and returns. And you found that most people are not dreamers in the sense that you have been. Most don’t have that aptitude, but everyone, perhaps you would say, has access to silence. How do you help them access it?
Christina: You know, Rick, the most common question I’ve been asked since writing Transcendent Dreaming, nationwide and even worldwide, has been, “How do you experience these expanded states of awareness if you’re not a dreamer?” I’ve really been living into that question in a profound way.
At the same time, over those ten years, these states had become waking states for me. In living into the question, I’ve been witnessing that organic unfolding in myself, and my teaching has reflected that. I’m fortunate enough that most of my students have been with me for those ten years, plus the years preceding the writing of Transcendent Dreaming. So they’ve been able, all along the way, to work with the pieces in the teaching that I think are organically unfolding.
It’s only recently that I’ve come up with the idea that you can have a remaking of consciousness, especially if there’s a longing inside and there’s a natural maturing going on in consciousness—meaning that it’s meant to move here in this lifetime. That remaking is organic, and there are phases to that development. I like to use the word “phases” rather than “stages” because phases denote an interior change of energy without the outside state looking any different. Phases can overlap with one another, and yet something emerges where the perceptual filter of reality is now different.
If you take all the bells and whistles away from expanded states of awareness, including plant medicines, we can come right back down to silence and ask what it really means simply to become silent for twenty minutes, to have the longing and desire to enter the folds and layers of that silence while quieting the surface consciousness.
There are three phases, with unity consciousness being an art. The medium of the art is silence, just as sound is for the musician and color is for the painter. Silence is the medium for unity consciousness, and the craft—the instrument—is silence and the body. The cellular nature has that quietness stamped into it, and when awareness touches it, “union” emerges from there. Nonlocal awareness is simply a byproduct of it.
The first phase I call “the gathering” of that surface consciousness. It’s probably the most difficult phase. My students who’ve been voyaging for forty years were frustrated with that stage because people soon realize they’re absolutely addicted to everything that’s going on at the surface, and they can’t quiet it.
So it begins this whole inquiry into why one would want to do it. Do you really want to? What do you think you’re going to gain by it? Then there’s the everyday discipline of just sitting in silence—not guided and not with a goal. You simply bring all your awareness while things quiet. That’s the first phase.
The second phase is when that quietness enters the stillness, and that stillness brings you to that place of emptiness or nothingness. Again, that’s its own phase of organic development, meaning you would never want to force someone into emptiness. You pretty much have to feel complete with our everyday reality to move to this deeper place, where one looks at it differently.
In that emptiness, you reach those currents of silence that are coming out of the invisible world, and your body and awareness are touched by that. The third phase is learning how to surrender into that and be in the participatory experience of it. We’ve been doing a year-long training with nine audios, which is really the pilot for teaching this in terms of stages or phases.
Rick: I think people probably realize that when you talk about silence, it doesn’t mean just sitting and doing and saying nothing. Although that might be a phase of it, it’s something that integrates and stabilizes into your awareness.
You and I have been talking for two hours, but there’s been silence throughout. It’s not as if we’ve sacrificed silence in order to have this conversation. I found it fascinating what you just said about the impulses or currents within silence, because usually silence is thought of as being featureless, flat, empty, and nothingness.
But there’s a whole explanation of the dynamism within silence, which we could get into from the perspective of science and also from the mystical or Vedic perspective, where it’s understood that silence and dynamism coexist as characteristics of that underlying fundamental reality. Infinite silence and infinite dynamism are both present together.
Christina: Yes, that’s beautiful, and I call it dynamic perception in the body. The mind might feel it as a stasis. My awareness will feel it as a stasis, and yet there’s an undulatory movement that carries the entire universe within the stasis. That’s very hard to language. It’s hard for someone to have that experience.
But when you bring it all the way down into the cellular nature of the body and you’re touched by that stasis and that undulatory movement, then there’s a physical experience associated with it. The body is changing, so this is a very embodied way of remaking consciousness.
Rick: I don’t know how I get into this, but I’m looking at a picture of a galaxy on my computer screen right now. I always use a galaxy as an example of existence having both silence and dynamism, both of those qualities to an infinite degree. The infinite interplay between them results in the apparent emergence of the diversity of the universe, all the phenomena, and the glory of the whole thing. In any case, it can be an experiential reality.
Christina: Yes. Sounds like someone is doing some Saturday-afternoon trimming.
Rick: Yes, as a matter of fact, there’s a tree service whose people are big fans of Batgap. They’re cutting down a tree, and I said, “Can you just take a break from twelve to two because I’m doing an interview?” But now it’s two o’clock on the nose, and they’re starting again. So we probably should wrap it up, because otherwise you’re going to hear a chainsaw.
Closing conversation
I’ll be linking to your website from Batgap.com. People can go there and find out what you’re up to. I guess you have some kind of monthly online thing that people can tune into. Or is that for your existing students?
Christina: It’s open to anyone. On the website, it’s called The Unity of Life Audio Series. One has to purchase the series, and then they’re in our virtual web, in our community, where they actually get to listen to all the audios.
Rick: And then you actually have follow-up meetings online and so on?
Christina: They can contact me and shoot me emails.
Rick: You’ve been referring to your students, and I presume those are in the Minneapolis area. But now that you’re doing this interview, is there something that somebody in London can do?
Christina: This is a global community. We have a community in San Francisco and a community in Seattle, so eventually we may do something in Europe. The beauty is that we also have a virtual classroom. Many people are participating nationwide, just virtually.
Rick: Good. Okay. Well, I’m very glad to have this opportunity to speak with you and to bring you to the attention of my audience. I think many people will find this fascinating, and I really recommend your book. It’s not a big book; you can read it in an hour.
Christina: Thank goodness.
Rick: Yeah, sometimes I get the six-hundred-page books, so I felt relieved when I saw this one.
Christina: I want to thank you, too, for all the connections that you’re making in our everyday world. We loved putting all of our students and community in touch with your whole library and archive of interviews. Thank you so much.
Rick: Well, it’s a joy to do it. It brings a lot of meaning and purpose to my life, and a sense of gratitude. I should also always express gratitude to the many people who help with this. It’s not just me.
Irene does a huge amount, and then we have a team of people. There are people who monitor the questions during interviews, a guy who does all the video post-production, people who do all the audio-work production, and a translation and transcription team. There’s a fellow who’s been heading that up in a beautiful way.
In fact, there’s a volunteers page on Batgap, and you can look there and see pictures of all the people who help and what they do. Maybe people would like to join in and help in some way.
Christina: Oh, that’s beautiful.
Rick: Okay. Well, let me just make some general wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Christina Donnell—and yes, I said it right! I’ll be linking to her website, and you can just follow that link. Your website is ChristinaDonnell.com?
Christina: Yes, yes.
Rick: And there’s another one, TranscendentDreaming.com. You can get to everything through ChristinaDonnell.com.
This is an ongoing series, as I always say. Tomorrow—I usually do one per weekend—but I’ll be interviewing Mooji for the first time in six years. No, for the second time. We have interviews scheduled all the way through November now.
If you go to Batgap.com and look under the Upcoming Interviews page, you’ll see what’s on the docket. There’s a little reminder feature where you can set a reminder on Outlook, Facebook, or whatever, to notify you when the interview comes up, in case you’d like to watch the live one.
Otherwise, if you’d like to be notified once the permanent interviews are put online, you can sign up for the mailing list, and you’ll get an email when I put up a new one. There’s also an audio podcast, which had been having technical problems, but those are fixed. If you tried to sign up for that before and couldn’t find it, try again. It’s working now.
There’s a bunch of other stuff, too. Search through the various menus on Batgap, and you’ll see what we have to offer. Thanks for listening or watching. Thanks again, Christina.
Christina: Thank you, Rick. Much appreciation and abundant blessings back to you. I’m the prime beneficiary of this. It’s not as if I’m doing this out of a sense of selflessness. I just love it. So thanks a lot, and thanks to those who were listening or watching. We’ll see you next time.
Sounds wonderful. Thank you.
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