Connie Huebner

Key Takeaways

• A direct experience of oneness can be the beginning of a much deeper spiritual search.
• The heart may long for a personal relationship with God beyond impersonal unity.
• Inner seeking requires persistence, honesty, and willingness to look within.
• Spiritual growth can move from abstract consciousness to intimate communion with the Divine.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can someone move from abstract spiritual experience to a personal relationship with God?
• What does it mean to seek the Kingdom of heaven within?
• How can persistent inner inquiry deepen spiritual realization?

Full transcript, edited for readability

🧒 Introduction and childhood

And I spent the next twenty years as a TM teacher and I learned a tremendous amount about consciousness, as you well know, all about the ancient Vedic tradition, the growth and development of consciousness that is available for human beings, it was just fascinating; fascinating for me, and I loved every minute of it.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. My guest today is Connie Huebner. Welcome, Connie.

Connie: Thank you! It’s nice to be here.

Rick: Yeah. Connie is one of those people who makes Fairfield, Iowa, an interesting place to live. She and I have both lived here for decades, and she is originally from Grand Rapids, is it?

Connie: Yes, born and raised in Grand Rapids.

Rick: Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has a very interesting story to tell. And I didn’t actually know much of the details of Connie’s story until just this last week when I read something she had written about it, and here I have been living in the same town and been friends with her for years and I thought, “Wow! This is really a treasure trove.” So we’re going to turn it into an interview.

So, Connie, as I recall in the thing you wrote, you started out in more or less … was it college or childhood in your account of things you went through?

Connie: Well, my first spiritual experience, my big spiritual experience, was college. My childhood was really quite wonderful, living in a small town and having a lot of freedom to explore and roam around and be in the country, but I had a social conscience at the time, even as a child, because I wanted to be the President of the United States when I grew up.

But the reason I wanted to be president was because I was aware that the world was an uncomfortable place for many people and I wanted to do something about it. So my first thought was, “I guess I’ll have to be president in order to do something.”

Rick: It’s not too late.

Connie: Yeah … it’s true. Well, I’m doing something differently about it now and I’m very pleased with what I’m doing. So anyway, it was in college when I first had a sort of hit-me-over-the-head spiritual experience. Do you want me to talk about that?

Rick: Yeah, yeah!

The first oneness experience

I mean I did have some very excellent, wonderful experiences in meditation, with the welling up of lots of what I would call “love,” lots of just incredible peace, but that …

Connie: All right. So I actually was an atheist at the time. I decided that God was going to have to prove Himself to me if God existed. And so I was just enjoying my college life at a big university and was happy and having fun and so on, and one day I was in a field with a friend, just lying on my back looking up at the sky. It was daytime. And as I looked up at the blue sky I knew there were stars out there that I couldn’t see. And so I thought, “I’m going to try and look between those stars.”

And as I was looking into this vast expanse of blue, it’s almost as if I was craning my neck to look between the stars, as far out into the universe as I could, something happened. And the simplest way to say it is: I just became everything. I was the stars, I was the sky, I was the grass that I was lying on in the field, I just became one with everything.

And I have no idea how long the experience lasted because when I finally got up and looked around and saw my friend next to me, all I could say to him was, “We are one.” And of course he kind of looked and said, “Oh yeah, that’s great,” you know, it didn’t impress him that much. But I was like, “No! We are one!” It was so striking to me. And still he didn’t really know what I was talking about.

“I just became everything.”

And keep in mind this was … I believe it was the fall of 1968, so there were lots of … spirituality was just kind of becoming an interest, in terms of “oneness” and “expansion” and so on. Traditional spirituality had a pretty strong hold back then.

So I realized, “Well, he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about,” and we went on with our day. I went back to my dorm and was going to go to sleep that night and I thought, “I can’t forget this! I don’t want to go to sleep and forget about this experience because it was so amazing.”

Rick: And you were still having it?

Connie: Yeah, yes, oh yeah.

Rick: Eight hours later.

Connie: I was still having it. I mean I was doing my usual things but I was still experiencing my union with everything, my oneness. But I thought I might forget it when I went to sleep, so I wrote a note on my mirror. Actually, I just put a big number “1” on my mirror so that in the morning when I woke up, I would look in the mirror and I would say, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, I’m one with everything.”

But the ridiculous thing is, there was no way I could forget that I was one with everything; it was like indelible, it was like falling into indelible ink. But it was invisible indelibility; nobody could see it except me. And it wasn’t that I was seeing it; I was experiencing it.

And it was actually a very enjoyable experience, I liked it.

Rick: So when you woke up the next morning, it was still going on.

Connie: I was still experiencing it, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and it has never stopped since.

Connie: It has never stopped, even though I have tried to get rid of it — not recently, I haven’t tried. I appreciate now the value of it, but back then I thought I would try because I wanted to test it. I was, you know, scientifically researching it after a while.

Rick: You know, a fun thing — a thing I thought kind of ironic and funny — is that the experience you started with is the state that many people on the spiritual path consider to be the goal, but for you it was just a beginning, and you went on from there. There was still plenty of territory to traverse, and still is.

Connie: Right, that’s right. That’s so true, so true. And one of the first things that I realized was absolutely ridiculous is to be an atheist, because now I’m God, I’m experiencing myself as the unity of all things.

And everything just flip-flopped in my life. I would try to explain the experience to people and they usually looked at me pretty strangely, and many of them suggested that I go see a psychiatrist, which believe it or not I did do. It didn’t do much for the experience and I realized that wasn’t the direction that I needed to go.

When I would look at people and say, “I’m one with you,” often they would become very uncomfortable. It was like I was just being much too intimate, and so I realized that didn’t work. And basically I just started a quest of trying to find somebody else who was having the experience, because nobody I knew was having the experience, nobody I knew could even know what I was talking about.

Although a lot of people, because, you know, this was academia, they said there were philosophers who talked about this. So they would send me to different philosophers, which I would read avidly and yes, they were talking about it, but they were dead, and I needed to find somebody who was alive that I could commune with in this way, consciously commune and share this experience with.

It took me a while, it actually took me a while. I did a lot of seeking, I talked to a lot of people about it. I think it was about a year and a half later that I finally found one person who was having the experience.

🛤️ Searching for someone alive who knew

They are all qualities of God, and I know this now. At the time I was uncovering them I didn’t really know what they are, now I realize the Divine light that I found, the Divine love, the Divine truth, and the Divine grace that I uncovered are all qualities of God, and that qualities of the Divine were being revealed to me.

Well, during that next year I started to avidly seek somebody who was having this experience of oneness, and because people didn’t really know what I was talking about as an experience, I changed my language and I said, “I came up with this ‘oneness theory,’ that everything is really one.” And as a theory, you know, in academia, they could definitely accept it and talk about it. And we had lots of great conversations but I kind of felt like I was hiding, because I couldn’t tell anyone: “Yeah, you know, that’s my experience, all the time! I live with that.” But that didn’t work; anytime I tried, it didn’t work.

So eventually I did graduate, because this happened in the fall of my senior year. I ended up graduating and going to Boston, Massachusetts to work. And the person that I found there that I thought might be having the experience was Baba Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert, and he was giving talks in the Boston area. He had just come back from meeting his guru in India and his talks were fascinating.

And one weekend, friends of mine were going up to Vermont, or maybe it was New Hampshire, I think it was New Hampshire. And I heard he had a family home where he was doing a weekend retreat up there with a group of his followers, and we happened to be in the vicinity so I convinced my friends to drive over.

And they were not into this the way I was, so I really had to do a lot of convincing. And I made the phone call to his house — I was just kind of bold. I was actually very bold in this search, I just was driven to find somebody else, because I was either crazy, you know … but I knew I wasn’t crazy, but I was very isolated, I felt I didn’t have anybody to share this with.

So anyway, I called him up, he said, “Come over,” I got my friends to drive me there. And when we got to the farm, which is his family farm in New Hampshire, nobody would get out of the car, so I said, “All right, I’m going to go meet this man.”

And I got out, walked across the lawn, knocked on the back door, and he came out. He answered the door, and all I wanted to do was look into his eyes, because I had developed this test. The test was: if somebody could hold my gaze — I mean now in retrospect, the test seems kind of silly, but at the time it was a very important test — if someone could hold my gaze and we could just meet eyes, hold the gaze, and connect in that oneness and not shift the gaze, that person must be experiencing the oneness. So I had never found anyone. I had been staring at people for a year and a half and nobody had been able to hold my gaze.

So anyway, all I did was look at him. And I had had some words that I had rehearsed like, “I hope you had a pleasant journey,” or something like that, but he was able to hold my gaze and we had this silent exchange, but a very powerful exchange, because it was the meeting of consciousness, it was the meeting of wholeness, the meeting of oneness, which is an incredible experience to have with anyone.

So he met my gaze and then we embraced. I remember hearing him breathe and I think he was practicing a breathing technique, but at the time I didn’t even know what that was. And then he said … well, I knew he was going back to India the next day to be with his master again. So anyway, I had met one person, and that one person that I had met, far from me being able to exchange more and be with him more and even talk about it, was leaving the next day, so that was a bit of a disappointment, but at least I had met him.

Rick: And you said, “Have a nice trip,” or something?

Connie: Yeah. I said, “Have a nice trip back to India.” And it was all this nonverbal experience that was so significant. And he said, “Thank you,” and was very polite, verbally, a very polite verbal exchange, but on the deep levels it was a very profound experience.

He recognized me as having the experience, I recognized him, and that was really what I was looking for because it gave me the confidence that, “Okay, I’m not alone in this.”

🧘 TM, Maharishi, and cosmic consciousness

At first I did it subtly and then I started telling them: “You’re in a bad mood, let me try this.” And then I would start to pour Divine love or Divine light. I actually developed a sequence that I would use, and so: first light, then love, then truth, then grace, and they did notice a change.

So anyway, I left, and it took me a while to find somebody else who I could experience that with on a regular basis. But in Boston at the time, I was still talking about my oneness theory to people, and someone said — a friend of mine said, “Go to the Transcendental Meditation Center. Sometimes when we are all practicing the meditation together,” she said, “I feel at one with everyone in the group.”

So I immediately went off to the Transcendental Meditation Center and learned TM. And it wasn’t until the last night of the checking — the third night, the follow-up meeting — when they talked about “Cosmic Consciousness,” that I suddenly tuned in and I thought, “That, that’s what I’m looking for!”

So I raised my hand because I could tell that the teacher wasn’t experiencing what he was talking about and I said, “Do you know anyone that experiences this?” And he said, “Well, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi experiences at least Cosmic Consciousness.” And then he went on to explain that was just the beginning of the growth of consciousness.

So immediately my next task was to find a way to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and it took me another year and a half, really about a year, to figure out how I was going to meet him, which was to go to a preliminary teacher training course. And I did do that, it was in Amherst, Massachusetts. I believe by then it was 1971.

Rick: I was there.

Connie: I might have met you! Anyway, it was great, there were thousands of people there, it was, as I said, a preliminary course for training teachers, which I was very interested in because having learned TM, I then had followed up on a lot of the advanced courses that were available and weekend courses, and really liked everything that I heard, and was planning to become a teacher of TM but the big thing was I had to test Maharishi. I had to make sure that he was experiencing the oneness, because he talked about it but I needed to look in his eyes.

So I finally got my chance. I had taken an advanced technique and he was checking the techniques, and so I got in line to go up and sit with him for a few minutes to get my technique checked. I don’t know if I should tell the little incident about …

Rick: Sure!

Connie: About my dress.

Rick: Oh yeah, well that’s kind of funny, go ahead.

Connie: Because here Maharishi was a monk from India and … anyway, I had this mini-dress on at the time. You know, it was the summer of ’71, I had this mini-dress and I didn’t have time to go back and change and put on something that I thought might be more appropriate to meet a monk in.

So I just had this little mini-dress and I went up and sat by him. And my biggest concern was that the dress was so short and I kept trying to pull the dress down, but then the neck would come down. So then I would try to pull the neck up but the dress would come up! So that was the first few minutes of my experience of sitting with him; I was trying to figure out … pulling the dress up and pulling the dress down, and what to do.

Finally I gave up and just looked at him, looked him in the eyes, and it was just powerful, is all I can say. I mean I just got lost in his gaze. I just fell into this unfathomable, infinite source of all of life. And in fact, I was the one that turned away.

And I remember turning away because it was like he showed me so much more than I was experiencing at the time, and I just like got pulled into it. So it was very, very profound and I definitely signed on to teach TM and help other people have that experience — that experience that I was having, the experience that Maharishi had really shown me he was having.

And I spent the next twenty years as a TM teacher and I learned a tremendous amount about consciousness, as you well know, all about the ancient Vedic tradition, the growth and development of consciousness that is available for human beings, it was just fascinating; fascinating for me, and I loved every minute of it.

Do you want me to go on?

Rick: Yeah, yeah. If I think of any questions I’ll let you know. You’re doing good. Usually I talk too much, so this is nice.

Yearning for God

And I have to tell people that I have really learned to, I guess I call it “read” energy, and I learned through this process of my own how to perceive energy and that energy has a lot to say, a lot to tell people. Light, love, truth, and grace are just four aspects of Divine energy that carries information, knowledge. And if you go into it you can get Divine knowledge.

Connie: Well, so after a while, anybody who has investigated TM knows that TM was presented in a very scientific vein, and there was lots of scientific research verifying the validity of the TM technique. And as teachers we talked in a scientific way, it was just the way the whole thing was languaged; it was about stress release.

Definitely we talked about consciousness, but we explained it in scientific terms, that it could be measured and validated, and all of these things which really helped it be accepted by the general population, as it was very well accepted.

But what happened to me is during that time I was continuing to grow in the depth of my experience of oneness, of unbounded consciousness, and I started to get this yearning to meet God. And Maharishi talked about this, he talked about “shaking hands with God,” and he frequently, as you know, would say, “The Kingdom of heaven is within you.” Well of course Jesus said that and I had heard it from Jesus, but somehow now that I was having an inward experience of something that certainly was very deep and I could even say “heaven-like,” I wanted more of it.

So what started to grow was this development of my heart, and in my private moments I would just be praying to God and saying, “How can I know You? How can I meet You?”

Rick: Which is almost verbatim what Maharishi said in that lecture, you know?

Connie: Right, the Shaking Hands With God lecture?

Rick: Yeah, the person sees the artist’s work and thinks, “Oh, this is so beautiful, I’ve got to meet the artist,” and the yearning to meet the Artist grows stronger and stronger and stronger until the Artist eventually says, “Here is this guy who really appreciates my work,” and He, from His side, comes to meet His admirer.

Connie: Right, right, that’s right. So I was in that process of yearning and it made it very difficult for me to talk about this objective, scientific experience of the Divine; I wanted to go in and talk about the devotional aspect. But of course I certainly respected the way TM was being taught, and just taught the way I was trained to teach as a TM teacher.

Rick: One question that occurs to me that people might ask is, if you were experiencing everything as one, then who is this “God” you wanted to meet and where was this God? It seems that if everything is one, then God is already included in that oneness, so what more is there to find?

Connie: Great question, yes. So I had met God, met the omnipresent …

Rick: Unmanifest.

Connie: The unmanifest omnipresence of God, and I was flowing and moving through that unmanifest, omnipresent, all-knowingness field, but what I was wanting was a personal God, a personal relationship with God. I wanted to talk to God, I wanted to ask questions to God, I wanted an internal, constant exchange with God.

Rick: And so still there’s the sense that God is “someone” that I could talk with and ask questions of, who is in some sense different from that unbounded field, which I know myself to be. Because otherwise one could ask questions and talk to that unbounded field, if that is God, and why not just do that? What is one seeking for that is in some sense different from that unbounded field?

Connie: I was seeking a relationship with God, and the relationship with the unbounded is very abstract, it is like a relationship with being. I wanted the personal relationship with God.

Rick: Reminds me of what Maharishi used to say, “Prayers to the Absolute are a waste of time. It’s like a rock. Who hears those prayers?” So there must be a personal aspect of God to whom one could appeal.

Connie: Yes, yes, and that’s where I was. I wanted this personal relationship, the personal. I wanted to find and talk to and engage with the personal aspect of God. And it wasn’t an intellectual choice, it was more of a yearning from my heart. Because intellectually I know like, I have God …

Rick: Yeah, like the things I was just saying.

Connie: Yeah, but my heart kept moving me saying, “There’s more, there’s a more sublime experience in the play with the Creator.” So anyway, so I was looking for that. And what happened is that … what happened?!

I couldn’t talk about it with my friends — my TM friends, and I again started to feel isolated and alone, like originally I had felt when I was the only one I knew having the oneness experience.

Rick: Had you told your TM friends that you had been having this oneness experience since college, or was that little bit … did that fall on deaf ears?

Connie: Oh yeah, no, I didn’t tell them.

Rick: They would think you were pretentious or something like that.

Connie: Right, yeah. No, I didn’t tell anyone. In the TM Organization we just didn’t talk about experiences that much, and if anyone did say that they were having some enlightened experience, it was kind of sometimes suspect, like, “How can you say that?” So I kept very, very quiet about my experience.

And even my need to find God, I just didn’t talk about it much, I don’t even think I talked about it at all. I was going to church, I started going to churches and I kind of didn’t really find much there. I investigated other religious areas and I was very — obviously the Eastern philosophies I was very comfortable with, but I didn’t come from that cultural tradition so the worship and the experience was somewhat foreign.

So anyway, I thought, “It must be in Christianity or Christianity wouldn’t have survived for so long,” even though I was unable to find it in talking to different ministers and religious people. So again I felt sort of on my own in my search for God; now I was searching for the personal God.

Looking within for the Kingdom

Yes, but what’s happening when you are saying it is you are actually telling light what to do. And I could say it for you, I could say, “You are being filled with Divine light. Divine light is pouring into you, it is filling your heart, it is bathing you in its wonder and its power and its strength. You are being inundated by Divine light.”

So here is what I did: by that time I had had a child and she was an infant at the time …

Rick: So what year are we talking about now, just for chronology’s sake?

Connie: We must be talking about 1986.

Rick: Okay. What year did you and David get married?

Connie: We got married in ’79.

Rick: Okay.

Connie: So anyway, now my daughter would take a nap every day, and during her nap I made this conscious decision that I was not going to — I had been in some ways been seeking outside of myself. I’d been talking to religious people, I’d been reading books on God, and I had been looking in the book or in the conversation or in the lecture that I went to for God, and for other people’s experience of God.

And I realized that I couldn’t look out there, that was an experience that belonged to someone else; I had to find it within myself if I were going to believe that the Kingdom of heaven was within me. So I decided to just go in, close my eyes, while my daughter was napping, and look for the Kingdom of heaven.

So first day that I decided to do this, she was taking her nap and I went into my room and closed my eyes and was sort of sitting there with, “Where’s the Kingdom?” Nothing happened. It was just blank.

Rick: And this is obviously a different approach than your regular TM meditation that you were doing?

Connie: Right, I didn’t go in there and meditate …

Rick: You were given a mantra and … but you were just sitting there with the eyes closed having this intention of finding the Kingdom of heaven.

Connie: Exactly.

Rick: Okay.

Connie: So I would just sit there and look, I would look from the inside.

Rick: Yeah, and I’m sure you had very blissful, sublime experiences during meditation, but somehow those were not quite “the Kingdom of heaven” as you were seeking it?

Connie: No, no.

Rick: You knew there was something more than those, yeah.

Connie: I mean I did have some very excellent, wonderful experiences in meditation, with the welling up of lots of what I would call “love,” lots of just incredible peace, but that …

Rick: You also had the 24/7 oneness as like a foundation.

Connie: Yeah, right.

Rick: But you knew there was something more.

Connie: Right, so that’s not what I was looking for, I mean, I don’t know exactly what I was looking for, but that wasn’t it. I mean, I knew the experience of the infinite wholeness, the abstract presence of Being very intimately. And now in retrospect, when I closed my eyes and went into the room, that’s really what I was sitting in, is that abstract Being.

And I would just sit there and it would get a little boring actually, but the next day I would go back and I would do it again. So finally I started asking some questions, I started saying, “Okay, Jesus, You said the Kingdom of heaven is within. Show me, where is it?” Again, nothing happened. I didn’t get any answer, nothing. So I started asking for it though, at least.

And I went on for a month or maybe six weeks, or maybe even two months like this. The one thing I do have to say is, I was persistent in this.

Rick: Yeah, I was going to say, you’re fairly stick-to-it-ive.

Connie: I felt that if Maharishi and Jesus said the Kingdom of heaven was within, I did believe them, and so I was going to have to find it for myself. So one day as I was sitting there looking for the Kingdom of heaven, I saw a little sparkle of light and it was the first thing that I had seen in my inner vision, that was at all, and so I immediately started to watch that light. And interestingly enough, when I watched the light, the light seemed to grow.

👁️ Inner light, love, truth, and grace

And now, there is so much consciousness available that now, these tools and techniques that I’m using, that I’m offering people to use and of course that I am using myself, are really … they work. People who are drawn to using them find them very effective.

Rick: Not to distract you or sidetrack you and we’ll get right back to this, but if it’s 1987 or 1986 or something, you had been practicing the Siddhi Program for a number of years, and had there not been — we don’t need to elaborate too much on what the TM Siddhi Program is, but it is an advanced program that TM people learn, and there are all these various siddhis described by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras, many of which involve inner visions of various kinds, things that you would know or experience inwardly that you wouldn’t ordinarily know or experience — so had you been successful with those?

Connie: I don’t know how to define “successful,” because I did have experiences with them, and I don’t think I really understood what they were, which is interesting because I understand them really well now, but at that time I didn’t really understand what was happening, or even what was supposed to happen, except that you did it and there was a response. Which I did do and I had a response, and sometimes they were great responses and sometimes not so much.

Rick: But none of them were the Kingdom of heaven.

Connie: Well no, I mean I would have experiences of the different siddhis on the subtle, but they weren’t … they were actually satisfying but they weren’t what I was seeking, or I guess I could even say “expecting.” It’s always a little dangerous to have expectations, but they weren’t what I was expecting either. And so I wanted something that I could own, that was more my own and more intimate to me.

Rick: And more God-related.

Connie: That’s right; definitely, definitely God-related.

Rick: Yeah, I mean the siddhis various things, you know: friendliness, happiness, compassion, knowledge of the cosmic regions, different things like that, but not a whole lot about God.

Connie: Yeah, that’s right. Okay, so then I saw this little light and I started to watch this little light, and it would move and flow and so on. And to make a long story short, once I saw the light for the first time, I started to look for it every day.

And so as I did it day after day, tremendous light started to be revealed to me. I still didn’t call that the “Kingdom of heaven”; it’s really as if someone had rolled me a flashlight in the darkness of my inner world, and now I had something to use to look for the Kingdom of heaven. I had a tool to use.

And what I noticed as I worked with the light is that I started to feel really good, and that actually my life started to change, that if I were unhappy, if I had a problem with my child — had one child at that time, or my husband, or anything in my life, if I poured light into it, if I increased the light in it, the problem would shift and I would find solutions.

Rick: So you were experiencing an inner light, but somehow by virtue of this experience of inner light you were able to pour light into another person or situation?

Connie: Well that happened kind of gradually. Because first of all I was just experiencing the light, then I got the idea that maybe I could pour the light into myself when I was outside this “looking for the Kingdom of heaven” — I could do it when I was just washing the dishes or driving my car, and I did and I found it had a tremendous effect on me.

Then I got the idea that, “Well maybe if my husband came home from work and he was complaining about something that had happened at the office, if I poured light into him it might change things.”

So I started to work with the power of light to change situations in myself and in my environment. So that was great, I mean I started to feel mastery … over the universe actually, that I could change things just by increasing light in a particular area. So this whole process, I mean I still do this, I still close my eyes and ask to be shown things within, and I’m shown a lot of things, but in the beginning I uncovered what I now call “vibrational tools,” and I actually teach them.

On my website I have many, many that people can download and use for themselves and I’ll teach them how to use them, because it’s a way — the Divine light being just the first one I uncovered — it’s a way that you don’t have to feel that you’re a victim of circumstances. That you actually, by changing things at the level of energy, which is light, change outcomes, which is really something that is quite fascinating to me right now.

But after working with light for a while I was welling up with Divine love, and I realized that love is the other side of light and that I could actually work with the energy of Divine love. The whole thing really just unfolded as I learned about all of these what I call “Divine tools and techniques.”

They are all qualities of God, and I know this now. At the time I was uncovering them I didn’t really know what they are, now I realize the Divine light that I found, the Divine love, the Divine truth, and the Divine grace that I uncovered are all qualities of God, and that qualities of the Divine were being revealed to me.

And as they were revealed to me I started to perceive God, through having these qualities displayed to me.

“I had a tool to use.”

Rick: So you set out to find the Kingdom of heaven, and you found love, light, grace …

Connie: Truth.

Rick: Different qualities. And so did you feel in finding those that you had or were finding, had found or were finding the Kingdom of heaven, that these were sort of the attributes of it?

Connie: Not at first, not at first. I was learning, I was definitely in learning mode. And so I would work with one of these tools, I would try it out, mostly on my friends and family, and I would find that transformations would occur.

Rick: Did they know you were trying anything on them or you were just doing this subtly?

Connie: At first I did it subtly and then I started telling them: “You’re in a bad mood, let me try this.” And then I would start to pour Divine love or Divine light. I actually developed a sequence that I would use, and so: first light, then love, then truth, then grace, and they did notice a change.

Rick: Yeah. You would both be sitting eyes closed while you were doing this process, pouring light in? I mean did you kind of formalize it like, “Let’s sit down and do this.”

Connie: Yeah, we would sit down and what would happen was very naturally our eyes would start to close. It doesn’t have to, but because these qualities are Divine qualities, they take you to the subtle level where the Divine resides, so that then we would want to go within and want to experience that subtle level.

So anyway, I need a drink of water.

Well I could go through all this; there were many steps.

Rick: Yeah, we have time.

Talking with Jesus

Because we are Divine beings in truth, when we say to a blockage, “Go!” it has to go, as long as we are commanding from our Divine authority. So I teach people how to clear the blockages in their system by just connecting with their Divine authority and saying to it, “Go! Go into the light.”

Connie: Okay. The best thing that started to happen was, as I told you, I started to say early on, “Jesus, if there’s a Kingdom of heaven, show it to me,” well I started to realize that Jesus was there, and this sort of came as a surprise to me. Because I would keep saying, “You talk about the Kingdom…” — you know, I kept talking to Jesus.

Rick: Yeah, you were petitioning Him in particular, so therefore …

Connie: Because He was the One who said it, you know? So I thought, “You said it, so You show it to me.”

Rick: Put your money where your mouth is.

Connie: Exactly. And so what I started to notice was that when I would say, “Jesus, show me this,” not only was there a light but there was a presence. I would feel a sense and energy, a vibration that I started to identify as Jesus. In fact, I started to like, “Is this Jesus?” And this was quite a few months after I had dealt with the light, and the love, and the truth, and the grace, and I would get like a positive response.

And I have to tell people that I have really learned to, I guess I call it “read” energy, and I learned through this process of my own how to perceive energy and that energy has a lot to say, a lot to tell people. Light, love, truth, and grace are just four aspects of Divine energy that carries information, knowledge. And if you go into it you can get Divine knowledge.

All this was being sort of revealed to me from within on a regular basis. But anyway, at one point I decided: I feel the presence of Jesus and every time I would say the name a stronger presence would come, so I started saying, “Jesus, are You there?” I’d get another big blast of energy. And so what happened is I got into a conversation with the energy of Jesus, and I started to learn how to interpret the energy into English words. It was like reading a foreign language and the language was energy.

So I got into a dialogue with Jesus, basically, and it was incredible, it was just amazing. I would ask a question and I would get an energy answer. Then I would settle into the energy, sort of literally transcend into the energy, and information would come to me, from Jesus!

And at first it was like, “I love you,” it was just very loving, wonderful communication. And then I would ask another question, a simple question: “Who are You?” And I would get a response from that. So now, things were really getting exciting, now the Kingdom of heaven was becoming much closer.

Rick: Yeah, you were really talking to somebody.

Connie: Right, right. So for a long time I would go into my … what I would do is I would prepare myself by bringing in all of the Divine tools: I would fill myself with light, fill myself with love, center myself in Divine truth, and allow the Divine grace. And by that time I had written these things out in verbal form so that I could even read it from a paper. And I would get into this place which I was beginning to now call “the Kingdom of heaven,” and then I would ask for Jesus to come forth.

And I want to tell you, I was not a religious person, I mean in the traditional sense. I was spiritual, I was very magnetized by spirituality, but even talking to Jesus seemed a little funny to me because of the way traditional religion talked about it that I could never relate to, but now I was experiencing it within me.

So I would have some conversation with Jesus and it was always very loving, and many times I would just need to know how to handle my life, you know? What do I do? How do I pay this bill? Is it wise for us to move into a new house? How do I handle this disagreement that I had with my friend? I mean just very ordinary, simple things that me in my personal life needed to know to feel comfortable and to move forward. I got answers! And when I acted on those answers, things smoothed out, my friends and I stopped … the arguments dissolved, and whatever discontent was there was resolved.

So it was very practical, it was extremely practical, but I didn’t tell anyone about this because I just felt too personal really, too personal. And also, I didn’t want to be challenged, it was like, “Are you sure?” And I didn’t want to go into my intellect about it; it was all on the level of the heart, and so I just kept it very silently. I did share it with my husband and he was completely respectful.

And I just kept going on like that. And then I kept getting, after a year or two, I kept getting this inner message: “You need to share this with other people.” And that was a huge step for me, because one — I didn’t think that my TM friends would take to it very well because it just was so out of the mold of what we had been doing, and I was nervous about doing it.

But anyway, so I did start sharing it with a few friends, just personal friends, and they loved it. I actually started … they could ask Jesus questions and then I would say, “Okay Jesus, what is Your answer?” And then I would tell them, “This is what I’m getting,” and they found it extremely illuminating and uplifting.

So I just did that for friends and family for a number of years and then again I got another boost from the inside saying, “You need to offer this to more people,” which I resisted for a couple of years. But finally, the push from the inside to share what I had uncovered and discovered with more people was so intense that to hold it back was almost painful.

So I just put a little blurb in the local newspaper: “Prayer assistance,” because I didn’t know what else to call it! And three people called me — you know, I had put my phone number, and from those three people it grew, word of mouth. And pretty soon my whole day was giving what I at the time called “prayer assistance,” and people were having really great experiences using the tools, the vibrational tools — the Divine light, Divine love, and Divine grace.

And I started to develop more vibrational tools as I worked with people, because I realized people had blocks in their energy, I realized I had blocks in my energy and I need to find ways and means to clear the discord, at deep levels of my system.

Vibrational tools and clearing blocks

You know Ramana Maharshi talked about “Atman began,” or self-inquiry as being probing or exploration in that area. And the Chāndogya Upanishad has this beautiful thing about how the stars, and the winds, and everything is there and … I don’t know, can’t do justice to it.

Rick: Are these tools something you can explain in the course of an interview like this, or do they really have to go to your website and study a more detailed thing? Would it be inappropriate to try to explain exactly how to do it here?

Connie: Well, no, I can explain it. I now call them, after all these years, I call them “Divine Mother’s vibrational tools,” and the first one is Divine light and it reads — and people can download a print version of it — reads something like this: “Divine light is pouring into me now, Divine light is flooding me now. Divine light is filling me. Again and again I am filled with Divine light.” It goes on like that.

Rick: It’s like a prayer or an affirmation.

Connie: Yes, but what’s happening when you are saying it is you are actually telling light what to do. And I could say it for you, I could say, “You are being filled with Divine light. Divine light is pouring into you, it is filling your heart, it is bathing you in its wonder and its power and its strength. You are being inundated by Divine light.”

But what people don’t realize is by saying that, light actually is coming into you; that’s what the energy aspect of it is.

Rick: Even if people don’t perceive it, on a subtle level it is, even if you don’t notice it.

Connie: Right, right.

Rick: Because I’m kind of a dullard.

Connie: Hahaha, I don’t believe that.

Now most people that do this with me, and I do many private sessions with people, I have a process that I got through that I set up. I first call in many, many Divine beings …

Rick: Are we getting ahead of ourselves? Divine beings and all this…?

Connie: Well, we don’t have to get into that …

Rick: I want to get into that.

Connie: Well, there’s only one, but it just has many names.

Rick: Okay.

Connie: But yeah, we will get into that. But just getting back to what you just said — so Divine light is one of the vibrational tools, Divine love, Divine grace. I have a vibrational tool that breaks the subtle structures of untruth that we’ve created with our thoughts. Every time we have a thought there is a vibration that goes along with it, and if it is a negative thought we create a negative vibration. And if we think those thoughts many times, we build up these negative vibrations and they actually constrict the way we express ourselves; they hold us to a small concept of who we are, even a negative concept of who we are.

So one of the tools I’ve developed is to break those structures, literally breaking us out of the energy cage we’ve built around us that inhibits the full expression of who we are, our Divine selves.

Rick: And just to reemphasize, people don’t need you for this; they can just learn these on their own and do them on their own, right?

Connie: Yes.

Rick: I mean you can be a facilitator if they happen to be able to sit with you or Skype with you or something, but ultimately they can learn these things and do them as a daily routine or something.

Connie: Yeah, in fact, I recommend that they do that. In fact, I’m actually in the process of finishing up a book with a list of all the vibrational tools that I’m hoping people can use and just read, just reading them, things change.

Rick: Now you know how it was with the TM Siddhi Program when we learned it, Maharishi said, “Well, you really need to establish consciousness pretty well before this will work for you,” and in fact when he first taught it, he had us go on a six-month meditation course and we were doing long meditations for three months before he even gave us any techniques or anything. So with this thing, is the efficacy of them really dependent upon how lively and how fertile a person’s consciousness is, how well developed it is? I mean here you have had some unity things (experiences) since college, but most people are a little more calcified and restricted than that.

Connie: I would say no. I would say that anyone could do this and notice a change immediately. And I want to say I feel that the reason that these methods, these vibrational tools that I’ve uncovered are working now, is because the world is different now than when you and I first started Transcendental Meditation back in the ’70s, early ’70s, and there’s been a tremendous preparation that’s taken place.

And now, there is so much consciousness available that now, these tools and techniques that I’m using, that I’m offering people to use and of course that I am using myself, are really … they work. People who are drawn to using them find them very effective.

Rick: So even if a person has PTSD or maybe drug problems, or something — they’re kind of a stressed out person, they will be able to use these tools and get benefits?

Connie: Yes, yes, yeah. Yeah, that’s one of the beauties of them.

Rick: Would you suggest or recommend that they supplement these tools with something like TM or some form of meditation? Does that add an extra engine to it or make the tools more effective?

Connie: It definitely does. If they are doing any kind of spiritual practice, it definitely augments the whole process. And of course the most powerful spiritual practice is this whole process of going into the Source, and of course TM takes people into the Source.

These tools take people into the Source, actually. And I have one of them, it is the “softening technique,” which is a series of having you … we’ll just do it right now: soften in the heart.

Rick: Want me to close my eyes?

Connie: Um, sure. Soften in the heart. Soften in your throat. Soften in the brow, the third eye. Soften at the crown, at the top of the head. Soften at the base of your spine. Soften in the pelvic area. Soften in the solar plexus. And again in your heart. And then again in your throat, soften. Soften in the brow. And the crown. And the base of the spine. And again in your pelvic area. Solar plexus. And the heart.

What I recommend is that people start with this softening exercise. In the softening exercise, obviously the attention is on the main energy centers of the body.

Rick: Yeah. So when you say “soften,” basically all I was able to do was just bring my attention to the different areas you mentioned, and there is an influence when you bring your attention to something.

Connie: Yeah, right. And the intention is to soften; the attention is on the part of the body.

Rick: As opposed to constriction or tension, or something; it is relaxation.

Connie: And the intention is to soften. Well that relaxation moves you through the rigid boundaries of these different energy centers, and what it does is it is moving you to the more boundlessness. So by repeating it you are helping a person get into that unboundedness. And I will do the softening for like ten minutes when I’m working with someone or working with a group.

I do a lot of free webcasts, and anybody seeing this can attend a free webcast and experience the process.

Rick: We will explain later how to tune into those.

Connie: Yeah, because really the experience is the most important thing, as far as I’m concerned. I’m talking about my story here but my story, every single step of my story was a footstep into deeper experience. And that is really what to me is real, if the experience is real, is there, then you know it, you don’t have to intellectualize it but you know it from your core.

So that is what I am trying to give people, is an experience from their core, of union with God, basically, of connection with the Divine. And it is beautiful, it is beautiful.

Rick: And so obviously what you are implying is that when enough softening has taken place and dissolving, and all that, then naturally the connection with the Divine begins to be more experiential, that it is clouded and occluded by all these sort of hidden tensions and crud.

Connie: Right, right. Because it is there already, it’s just that it has been covered up. And so these techniques that I’ve uncovered, that I offer people, are just ways to, one: enliven the Divine with the Divine qualities, and two: break the blockages with the — I have a whole bunch of clearing tools, for example clearing with the break-brick, if there is a block.

Because we are Divine beings in truth, when we say to a blockage, “Go!” it has to go, as long as we are commanding from our Divine authority. So I teach people how to clear the blockages in their system by just connecting with their Divine authority and saying to it, “Go! Go into the light.”

Rick: I was never a very good visualizer, you know? Like I never felt like I was getting any noticeable, predicted results when I did the TM Siddhi Program. And when I go through something like that or I imagine if I sit and do all your techniques with you, there would just be sort of a faint sense of moving my attention here or there, it would just be almost a subtle conceptual notion of breaking this or telling that to go, but it is all very vague to me, it’s not really vivid and clear.

Do you find that among the people you work with there is a range of people like me on one end of the scales, and others much more clearly cognizing or experiencing the things that are going on?

Connie: No. No, I find that actually vague is good, because vague means more subtle, and I’m trying to get people to experience more subtle. I’m not trying to get them to have a clear mental experience. So what you are falling “vague” just means a more fundamental feeling …

Rick: A faint-level of the thing, kind of.

Connie: And you see, people aren’t used to focusing on their vague, faint feeling level; in fact, we tend to dismiss it. And really, that vague, faint feeling level is what is more real than what we are cognizing with our intellect.

Rick: Well that’s reassuring because I’m kind of a pro at vague, faint feeling but I’m always hearing people talk about these vivid experiences and I think, “Nah, I’m not having that.”

Connie: No, no, no. See, what happens as you bring your attention within and start to notice at first that vague, faint, feeling level, as you fall into it or soften into it, to use that technique, it becomes more real, it becomes more concrete because you are softening into your subtle experience of life.

And we all, including me in the early days, we dismiss that subtle experience of life, and really, that subtle experience of life is the most significant; it is the most important. And so I actually am trying to get people to notice their subtle experiences, their vague, faint feeling level, and give it some credence and not just … the intellect can so easily dismiss it and say, “Oh, that wasn’t real.”

You know, it probably is real, and if you pay more attention to it is going to become more real than anything that your intellect can conjure up. So that is what I am actually training people to do, to pay attention to what is happening on the subtlest levels, even the subtlest level of creation where the unmanifest is manifesting into form.

That subtlest level of creation is incredibly important; that is where the Divine resides. And so if you start paying attention to that even as a faint feeling, or as a vague, abstract thing, it’s going to start to become more concrete and you’re going to start having Divine perception, really. And that’s one of the things that I’m actually trying to help people realize, that you just have to get more subtle, more quiet, more internally focused in order to have Divine perception, because it is all happening. It is all happening and we just aren’t noticing it, so a lot of the techniques that I do help you notice what is happening on subtle levels.

🧘 Heart-centered practice and subtle perception

And then the other thing is, this is where the Divine Mother resides, is in the heart. This is where your true Self is also, as united with the Divine. So we are enlivening and awakening our true Self, we are awakening the Divine relationship when you move into the heart and breathe into the heart.

Rick: Yeah. I feel like even after 45-plus years of regular spiritual practice, you know, hours a day without fail, there’s a real nice, profound, 24/7 thing established, but at the same time I am acutely aware that there are still blocks — blocks in the head, blocks in the heart, perhaps other centers in the body.

And sometimes I feel like, “God, just rip me open, pulverize me, dissolve this, whatever it is that is kind of still blocking after all this time, I would really like it to go.” And I talk to a lot of people who just conceptualize all this and who say, “Oh, it’s all oneness and all this stuff about levels and blocks and God and all this, this silly nonsense,” but they are in the head, they are just conceptualizing oneness. They haven’t even perhaps begun to fathom the experiential dimension of it.

And I kind of harp on that a bit in a lot of interviews, that there’s this lifetime experiential exploration that one really has to engage in, and maybe lifetimes experiential exploration. It is not just a matter of conceptualizing what Ramana Maharshi talked about and then feeling like you are on his level or something. Anyway, I’m rambling a little bit but what do you have to say to all that?

Connie: Well I have a lot to say. The biggest thing I want to say though, and the thing that my work emphasizes is, moving into the heart. Out of the mental concepts and into the heart, into the perception of the heart. And for one, the perception of the heart is clear, if you give it a chance. We are constantly being trained to override the heart perception with our mind, I mean that’s what the Western society and the way we are raised is all about.

But the heart really has … that’s where the true knowledge is! That’s really where the Divine is, that’s where the Divine Mother is. I haven’t gotten to how I discovered Divine Mother.

Rick: We’re going to talk about that.

Connie: Yeah, I definitely want to talk about Divine Mother, because that’s the main focus of my work now, is the Divine Mother. But the Divine Mother resides in the heart and the Divine Mother is the Creator, you can call It “Mother-Father God.” I explain that when I mean “Divine Mother” I’m not leaving out the Father of God; they are one. It is just that the Divine Mother is resurging at this time on this planet because of the tremendous need for the qualities of the mother — the love, the nurturing, the nourishment, the tremendous compassion. So now God is coming forth as “Mother God” to unite her children, to bring the people back together.

Rick: What about the heart? I mean, a lot of people have talked about that …

Connie: This is all about that.

Rick: You know Ramana Maharshi talked about “Atman began,” or self-inquiry as being probing or exploration in that area. And the Chāndogya Upanishad has this beautiful thing about how the stars, and the winds, and everything is there and … I don’t know, can’t do justice to it.

So are you talking about an energetic center where the attention should dwell or which should be awakened or enlivened a whole lot more, when you say “heart?”

Connie: Definitely should be awakened and enlivened a lot more. And one of the ways to awaken and enliven it, one of the techniques that I offer I call it “the heart exercise,” is simply breathing into the heart, putting your attention here (pointing to heart) as you breathe. Bringing the breath in from the outside directly into the heart as well as down the throat, and letting your awareness be in this heart energy center, not just the heart organ. And then training yourself really, from moving from here, from the heart, rather than from the head.

Now the mind and the heart need to integrate, but the way things have been is that the mind has dominated the heart, actually pushed it aside. And so a lot of the amazing knowledge that the heart is capable of giving us has been ignored and just pushed aside.

One of the things when we start breathing into it is we will notice we have blocks in that area, which the breath can open up. By breathing into the blockage, you can dissolve it.

Rick: So as an actual practice you would recommend people sit for 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes, or whatever, and just with eyes closed, have the attention on the heart and breathe in …

Connie: Yes, breathe into the heart and notice what you are noticing.

Rick: Whatever sensations you may feel.

Connie: Yeah, whatever. A sensation, you might notice a pain …

Rick: A burning.

Connie: You notice a burning?

Rick: A little bit. Right now I notice a little; last couple of days I noticed just some subtle burning sensation.

Connie: Oh, so then I would say, breathe into it, preferably with eyes closed so you can really focus the power of your attention, because where your attention is is where your consciousness goes.

Rick: Right. Now a lot of times I notice sensations more in my head. Like I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, focusing on minute details, and I’ll notice a tightness or a tension, or even a sort of feeling of tightness in my head and so I’ll think, “All right, I should have the attention here (pointing to heart) to soothe and heal that,” and so there’ll be a predominance of my time doing that, during meditation.

Connie: I would say, even if the pain is in your head, breathe into your heart. By breathing into your head you can get a little top-heavy, but if you breathe into your heart you will actually find that …

Rick: It will take care of the head.

Connie: It will take care of the head, yes. Because the heart is the main, it is the center chakra of the main physical chakras, so by breathing into that, and whatever has been compromised in the heart can cause pain in other parts of the body.

Rick: Sounds like a master switch.

Connie: That’s right.

Rick: A fuse box, you know?

Connie: It totally is. So breathe into the heart. In fact, when you are finished with the computer, if you can just sit there and breathe into your heart for ten minutes, a lot of that mental tension will dissipate. And notice.

What you are noticing when you noticed the burning that you were just talking about, that’s an imbalance. That’s an imbalance of the energy flow. So as you breathe into it, the breath carries the life force and that life force will balance out that burning sensation.

Rick: Now when you sit with eyes closed, the breath gets very subtle and almost like “shhh” — just a very faint thing like that. Are you saying that one should just let that be the breathing, or should one consciously exaggerate the breath somewhat?

Connie: No, I wouldn’t exaggerate it, I would just …

Rick: You know, take deeper breaths?

Connie: Take normal breaths; normal. The breath might soften just because you are used to when you close your eyes the breath softening, and that’s okay. But if nothing much is happening, just breathe more strongly, because the stronger the breath, the more power goes in there.

Rick: So you are just sitting there and mind starts to wander or whatever [Rick demonstrating taking a deep breath].

Connie: Just bring it back.

Rick: Breathe more strongly into the heart, yeah.

Connie: Bring it back. In fact, I have a digital download of me guiding someone into the heart, so people could just play that — I think it is 20 minutes — and that would help someone. Some people use this “heart exercise,” as I call it, as a meditative practice; they are just breathing into the heart for the 20 or 30 minutes, and it gets them very settled and very centered. But the heart is the number one most important place that I encourage people to move from, to heal — it is important to heal the heart. The heart has had so much wounding in this life on earth, that there is a lot of pain in the heart that needs to be dissolved, and breathe into it.

And then the other thing is, this is where the Divine Mother resides, is in the heart. This is where your true Self is also, as united with the Divine. So we are enlivening and awakening our true Self, we are awakening the Divine relationship when you move into the heart and breathe into the heart.

The heart is the treasure trove of our life, really. And another thing, the heart is your center. The mind can go anywhere, it can rationalize anything, but if you come to the heart, the heart will tell you the truth. And so again, another value of breathing into the heart is once you get through all the layers of pain and masking and so on, you are going to hear the truth. The heart will guide you in any important decision, and keep breathing in until you are certain that you got the Divine answer.

Rick: How many people do you know who got through all the layers of pain and masking? There must be lots of layers, you know?

Connie: There are a lot of layers but you know, they unwind quickly when you are focusing there. I mean, it may have taken years to build up the pain, but it can be unwound in a matter of months, with regular focus. I have seen miracles happen with people that I have worked with regularly and just tremendous clarity.

I believe, personally, that our last stresses reside in the heart.

Rick: By stresses you mean like vasanas or impressions which block from the Divine?

Connie: Yeah, yeah. And the deep core issues, even in the belief in separation from God. The belief in separation itself is held in the heart area. I’ll also enlarge the heart area to include the solar plexus, because a lot of our individual belief systems are in the solar plexus and connect to the heart, but it is very empowering to begin to develop the heart.

One of the other things I want to get to is how I connected with Divine Mother. Is this a good moment?

Rick: Yeah, this is fine, and any other details that you want to get to. I mean, at some point you were talking about chasing away bad, subtle beings that are hassling us and all kinds of things, so weave it all into the story in whatever sequence you wish.

👨‍👩‍👧 Jesus, other beings, and Divine Mother

Connie: Okay, all right, well. So I was talking to Jesus and just getting personal advice for my life. I was encouraged to …

Rick: And you never saw Him, like the guy with the beard and all that? It was more like this light which had a conscious persona, presence to it, and you got positive reinforcement whenever you tried to confirm that that was Jesus, the light would get brighter?

Connie: Yeah, yes, and the presence, the energy-presence of Jesus would get brighter. You know, some people are very visual and do see, other people — I have always been more tactile, so the developed sense that I have is the sense of touch, and so I feel I can touch Jesus — the Jesus energy — and to me that is just as real as to somebody whose visual sense is developed and they see a form, with beard and clothes and a face, and all that.

Rick: Yeah, different people have different senses more predominant.

Connie: Right, right. Other people have knowingness really strongly developed and they just know, without a doubt that “This is Jesus, I am in the presence of Jesus.”

So my first experiences of the Divine were always from this tactile sense of feeling a presence, sensing of energy. However, as I’ve developed, my visual now has started to grow, so I will have visual perception of God in different forms.

Rick: Yeah. Incidentally, if the emphasis on Jesus seems a little Christian to people who have acquired a childhood distaste of Christianity through various experiences, I have interviewed half a dozen people who had similar experiences with Ramana Maharshi — you know, if you want to have the Eastern route — who came to them before they even knew he existed, or they kind of get this inner messaging from some being who identifies himself or whom they feel is Ramana Maharshi.

So it seems like the Divine can communicate with us in different forms, according to which form we most resonate with.

Connie: Exactly. And I have to say, I didn’t particularly resonate with Jesus, it’s just that …

Rick: He said, “The Kingdom of heaven is within.”

Connie: He was the One that said, “The Kingdom of heaven is within!” So I’m like, “All right, You said it, You show it to me!” So anyway, that’s why I got to know Him. But anyway, so I was working with Jesus, I also started to investigate some other Divine beings, some Ascended Masters — Saint Germaine, Babaji the Yogi-Christ. You know, once you are at that subtlest level, you can talk to anyone, anyone; you can talk to any Divine being, let me put it that way.

Rick: And so you would say, based on this experience, that when these folks dropped the body, they don’t just merge into the Absolute like a drop in the ocean, never to be distinguished from the ocean again; they still are functional, on some subtle realm, and able to interact for the benefit of the world?

Connie: Yes, if that is their purpose. Some of them do just drop into the Unbounded because they have, for whatever reason, it is all individual at that level; it is an individual choice of Divine service.

Rick: Right, but many maintain some sort of functionality.

Connie: Yeah, many of them do, and I would love to tell people how to connect with them, which I will, in a minute. Not that you’ll be able to do it immediately, but with practice.

Rick: Yeah. I mean you sat there for months before anything happened, before you even saw a glimmer of light, yeah.

Connie: Yeah. Well now I teach people how to do it in an eight-week course and people still need to practice, but they get the initial flavor and they get Divine wisdom, which is what I call it. So this can be taught.

Where was I going? Oh yeah, how I met Divine Mother. I’m starting to feel a presence of Divine Mother really strongly right now, so She really wants us … Okay, so I was doing this with people and I started having a visual that I had ignored many times. Like you were saying, on this faint level feeling, something is happening but I didn’t look at it.

And what this image was, was of a huge wave of light coming out of the unmanifest wholeness. It was just this huge wave of light that would then break up and just move into the whole universe, and I had seen that before but I just didn’t pay attention to it.

So at a certain time I started to watch it and it was beautiful, and there was a tremendous feeling of love and joy and everything, everything wonderful, everything Divine, with it. And so I just started watching this wave of light come up and break, and all the different little particles of it would then combine and create something, and more particles over here were creating something.

Rick: You didn’t know what it was but it was just interesting?

Connie: Yeah, I didn’t know what it was, but it was fascinating and it was extremely joyful to watch. So another wave would come up and at one point, how this dawned on me is I thought, that’s the Creator, creating from the unmanifest, but not only is it the Creator, it is the Divine Mother birthing the creation; it is the birth of the creation that I was watching.

And it was certainly the Divine Mother because of all the qualities of such love and all the things I mentioned, just gently and wonderfully nourishing the growth of everything in the creation, the deep connection — because the Divine Mother was creating everything out of herself.

And when I realized, this is the Divine Mother, I was just overwhelmed with a sense of surrender and unity. I felt complete union with the Divine Mother and I started really focusing on the Divine Mother as the supreme Being; the supreme Being of the universe.

“I felt complete union with the Divine Mother.”

Rick: So is all that love there not necessarily because it’s “female,” but because it is an aspect of Divine intelligence, which has this sort of nurturing, healing, supportive quality?

Connie: And creative, birthing quality — that was what so amazing to me, is it was birthing the creation; it was actually creating.

Rick: Because a lot of times you hear people … well, we refer to God as “He,” usually, and we have pictures of this big guy with a beard and people say, “That’s ridiculous, God is not a ‘He’ or ‘She’; it is just pure intelligence.” But what you are saying is that this pure intelligence, if that’s a proper word to use, has these different qualities, and the one you have been cognizing here, really the word “Mother” fits very nicely because it is so creative, so supportive, so healing, and all that.

Connie: Yes, perfect.

Rick: And perhaps we can even think of some masculine qualities of God that we might say is the Divine Father, or some such thing, by comparison.

Connie: Yeah, yeah. My experience was definitely of the … it was because of the feeling level that I was experiencing It as the Mother, but that level, the Divine Father has all those qualities as well. It has the incredible tenderness and deep, deep love, love for the creation as yourself.

Rick: Yeah. And obviously in Vedic cosmology they personify these things, you know, you have Shiva and Shakti, Vishnu and Lakshmi, and these different father-mother figures. And I suppose these are perhaps literal on some level, but representatives of these different qualities.

Connie: Definitely. My experience of the Divine Mother is that the Divine Mother is the Divine Father, the Divine Mother is Shiva, is Vishnu. I use the term “Divine Mother” and I know it is because of the devotional aspect, that the power of the love was so overwhelming that I just associated it with maternal love. But that meant that the Divine Mother was also all of the Father expressions of God.

So that’s when I started focusing on Divine Mother and asking Her what She had to say, what knowledge was there from Divine Mother. And I always go to the knowledge because people have experiences; people have spiritual experiences and they don’t realize that every experience has knowledge that is trying to be communicated with it.

So they will tell you the experience of, “I saw this light and I saw this expression of God,” and then I’ll say to them, “Well what was that trying to say to you? What was that communicating to you?” And they are like, “Oh, I never thought about that,” because we are so overwhelmed with the display of the person of the Divine. But if the Divine is revealing Itself to you, It has something to say, It’s got a message for you.

Rick: Presumably a profound message, not just “invest in IBM” or something, but something deeper.

Connie: Right, right, a very profound message, and it may be, “I love you.” And that is a very profound message, especially to people who maybe didn’t know they were loved. A basic human problem is we all feel we are unworthy in some way, and particularly unworthy in the eyes of God, so when God comes forth to say, “I love you, you are so important to Me,” it is a life-changing experience.

So that is one of the things that I did when I saw this Divine Mother displaying and creating the universe, I started asking Her what She had to say. And because I had practiced this previously with Jesus, I was a little bit, you know, I had a little bit more skill and could start to communicate with the Divine Mother and essentially have been communicating with Her ever since.

I mean, She wants everyone to know Her. She wants to talk to everybody. And essentially what She wants people to know is how deeply She loves them, and how She is there for them, and how people feel so isolated and alone and you know, life can be very rough, and how She wants to help them. She wants to help people move through the forest that we can experience of life, where we are lost and don’t know where to turn and feel like we are backed up against the wall, and what do we do?

Her compassion for us is just immense and She wants to help us move through our life, in a very personal way. And that’s the message that I’m giving to people, that has become my message, which is just in service to my Mother, to tell people, She cares and She wants to talk to you and She wants to communicate with you. And these tools and techniques are methods that I found that have helped me connect with Her and they could very, very readily help you connect with Her.

But that’s really what She wants; She wants to bring all of Her children home. And by “bringing home,” that means bringing them back into Her heart and bringing them back into their self-knowledge, knowledge of themselves even as one with Her. So that is really what I do now, is help Divine Mother connect with people and communicate with people, and then always on my webcast, I always tell people how to connect with Her; that’s the first step.

There are further steps but the first step is the most important step, and essentially I can tell you that “how” now?

Rick: Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say something but you might as well just go ahead.

Connie: Okay, well, all you have to do is breathe into your heart, center in your heart. And you do have to get heart-centered. And one of the things I do in my webcast is go through about 20 minutes of settling people down with a softening technique, and breaking structures, and saying, “Go” to discordant energies, and bringing people into the heart so that the heart is very alive and awake, and then say the name.

All you really have to do to call forth any being is say their name. So we just say the name “Divine Mother,” but I don’t encourage … you don’t have to say it out loud. Usually people have their eyes closed and they are settled quietly and I just have them say “Divine Mother” as an impulse of the heart. And then notice what happens, because I’m having people notice the energy of Divine Mother. And it might be vague, it might be faint, but just notice what happens when you say “Divine Mother.”

Now we haven’t had much of the preparation here, but some people notice a ripple of energy, some people notice a warmth, some people notice expansion, some people notice depth. And if they don’t notice anything, then I would just say, continue to breathe into your heart, to get yourself more centered there.

If you feel a block, many people will notice a block, I have them say, “Go into the light, just go into the light, go into the light,” and then breathe into the heart again and just say, “Divine Mother.” What you are looking for is just the vibration of Her name, even saying “Divine Mother,” there is a vibration.

So first you can just notice Divine Mother as the energy wave of that name, and soften into it. And then say it again, “Divine Mother, is that you?” And notice the energy. You are noticing something very subtle, because I’m teaching the subtle senses to wake up. The subtle senses need to wake up to perceive the Divine.

So that’s all you say: “Divine Mother,” and then soften, “Are you there?” And a lot of people, we’ve been trained to ignore our subtle senses. So the mind might say, “Well, I noticed some expansion but why wouldn’t I notice that anyway? We’ve been talking about Divine Mother for the last 15 minutes, or 20?” Anyway, trust it. Trust that experience. If it’s not real, it will become obvious, but if it is real, it will increase. So that’s what you are looking for.

And then I have people say, “Divine Mother, come forth,” because She will. Her energy will come forth, if you say, “Divine Mother come forth,” but I’m emphasizing to you: it is an energy. It’s not that somebody is going to walk in the door and say, “Here I am”; it’s a vibration that will become stronger and stronger as you work with it.

In the same way … oh, okay, She is talking to me, telling me what to do now.

Rick: Okay, Mom!

Connie: I was actually going to say, maybe I should have Rick interview Divine Mother.

Rick: I can do some of that. So what is She saying now?

Connie: Well, She wants us to connect with Her and so She is saying [long pause] well, She is saying, “Tell people they need some healing, they need some healing. And especially at these subtle levels they need some healing.”

She says, “Don’t be discouraged. I am here to help you heal.” She is saying, “Use the techniques,” and She says, “And one of the other techniques is my name.”

Rick: Divine Mother.

Connie: “Divine Mother — saying my name.” And She says, “In other traditions, chanting the name of Divine Mother, be it in Sanskrit or in any other language, is a technique for healing and uniting with me.”

Rick: The Gayatri Mantra or whatever, things like that.

Connie: “Yeah, right, right. But even in English, the word ‘Divine Mother’ repeated over and over again is going to create My vibration, which will heal you and deepen your experience of Me.”

So that’s the first thing that I teach people, there is a lot more to it. For example, there is a discernment value in order to discern if what you are getting is really from Divine Mother or just your intellect, or from some other level of creation that you don’t want to have anything to do with, that could even be damaging to you. You want to be very alert to things like that and I teach that in this course that I teach. But that’s really the first step, is just saying “Divine Mother.”

And the other thing is, at that level of that subtle, quiet, relative, you can say “Buddha” and you can bring Lord Buddha forth, that vibration. You can say “Lord Krishna,” certainly you can say “Jesus Christ”; they are all vibrations, they are all frequencies. They are Divine frequencies coming right out of that unmanifest, and once you get used to it, communing with them there is very comfortable and it is quite a wonderful experience.

Your life becomes very much in relationship with the Divine, on a very, I want to say “concrete” level. Even though many people don’t think vibration is concrete, it really is. It is the first wave that comes out of the unmanifest, is a vibration, a wave of light, which has a personality.

And that is the Divine relationship that I was looking for, the personal relationship with the Divine, whereas I had the relationship with the Infinite, the Infinite Wholeness, but I wanted to experience the personal relationship and I have! It’s great! It’s sort of “I found the Kingdom of heaven.” I’ve opened the door, let me put it that way. I found the way in and the more I go in and experience it, the richer my life becomes and the more knowledge is available.

“I found the way in.”

👨‍👩‍👧 Divine Mother, the world, and transformation

Rick: When you were talking about Divine Mother earlier and you were going through the whole thing, the image that came to mind was that we’re not talking about something that is far off that will come to us; we are talking about something that is oceanic, that already contains us.

It’s like the analogy of fish in the ocean looking for water or being thirsty; it sounds absurd because they are completely engulfed in water. So that Divine is omnipresent and it is just a matter of clearing away, I guess, or you can explain what it’s a matter of, but it’s just a matter of establishing that connection with something which ultimately we are already connected with, which is obscured by some ignorance, some blocks, some whatever, and which, as you were saying, wants us to make that connection. It’s not like it’s going to be elusive or shy or try to avoid us if we attempt to make the connection; it’s just a matter of choosing to make that connection.

Connie: Right, because She is making the connection with us all the time, it’s just we don’t see it, we are ignoring it. And when we make the choice to make the connection, it is like the two circuits meet.

Rick: Connect.

Connie: Yeah.

Rick: Well, it’s like you were talking about, subtle senses and subtle perception and all that needing to be enlivened. And just the way the senses are structured, by habit they are outward directed, and the world appears to be gross, concrete. And so continual engagement with the outer world to the exclusion of the inner coarsens the faculties of perception, it’s sort of like a muscle that atrophies if you don’t use it. So all that subtle stuff not being used for decades, lifetimes, the potential is there but it needs rehab.

Connie: That’s right! That’s exactly right, yeah; we have to wake it up. And I really think that all of that time I was spending with my eyes closed, I was waking it up. I had to wake up my own subtle perceptions to be able to see the Divine that I was looking for. And then I got little techniques and tools on how to help me wake up my subtle perceptions, and how to clear these blocks and fears and things that we carry, and so the whole process was necessary.

Rick: So you are just … in a way you are pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I mean, obviously you are resorting to a power much higher than yourself. But it’s like, if you remember, the principle of the snow plough: it clears its own path. You didn’t readily find techniques and practices and teachers and what-not, although you found some great ones, you didn’t necessarily receive all the instructions and information you needed to do the exploration you’ve been doing, and so it was kind of a self-exploration process and a self-discovery process, and in the course of doing that, the invention of these techniques.

And I presume it is ongoing, I mean, certainly you do associate with great teachers still — you go to see Amma and probably do other things, but there is this sort of ongoing inner exploration, right?

Connie: Definitely, yes. In fact, I found the inner adventure far more exciting than the outer adventure, that once I started closing my eyes and looking to see what was inside, it was like worlds opening up.

Rick: And it’s not like you lost interest in your family or anything, right?

Connie: Oh no, no, no, we’re still.

Rick: Yeah, it’s not like, “You guys are boring, I’m going to go close my eyes!”

Connie: No, in fact the outer — my family has definitely kept me grounded and practical all through this, you know? Even with my daughter when she was an infant and then starts crying, you need to go in, change the diaper and feed them, then go off and do all the worldly things that you do with children, and all the way through, and we’re still doing all those things.

Rick: Yeah, well if you’re really going to be of any use to the world and be able to bring such things to the world, then you probably need to know how to function in the world, otherwise you would just be sitting in a room someplace.

Connie: Yeah! No, my life hasn’t allowed me to just sit in a room someplace, although just for a few hours at a time, yeah.

Rick: And so when an explorer is exploring, there is always the next horizon. Like I just watched the movie Kon-Tiki a couple of weeks ago, it was great, Thor Heyerdahl going across the Pacific Ocean. And they are always looking for land or looking to the horizon and figuring out where they are on the map and things like that, making sure they are catching the current.

So with you, what is your sense of the map of life, where you are on that map, and what there might yet be to discover in the course of your exploration?

Connie: Well, gosh, I’m sort of at a point where I’ve found that being innocent is the best position to take, because when you are innocent, then things can be revealed to you that you might have not looked at before; you might have missed.

So at the moment the biggest thing that I’m doing is just teaching people, using my website to reach more people. And personally, the journey just gets deeper and deeper, just goes into more and more depth.

Rick: Well in the case of Kon-Tiki, they were at the mercy of the currents and the wind. They couldn’t go back to Peru if they wanted to; they had to keep going west because that’s the way the currents were taking them. So where do you feel the currents are taking you? Innocently?

Connie: Ahh…

Rick: Where do they seem to be taking you?

Connie: I’m referencing in, inside now. Well, they are taking me to just continue to erase any semblance of fear or pain from my own life. And then as I do that, I find that my experience of myself becomes more expanded, so I take on other projects rather than by just working on clearing my own system, I start clearing the world system, you know, I do a lot of work in healing and clearing the world.

So that has been a big concern of mine, is to just do what I can to use the knowledge that I have to dispel the darkness and the ignorance in the world.

Rick: And you don’t just mean by doing webinars and teaching techniques, you also mean like eyes closed, within your consciousness you’re kind of serving as a washing machine of sorts.

Connie: Yeah, that’s primarily what I mean, yeah. Well, and then I also have a group that meets on Tuesdays and we always address world situations, whatever is up in the world.

Rick: Taking work on Syria and things like that?

Connie: Yep, working on Syria in these last few weeks. But just really, it’s a big job to uplift the whole world, huge. So that’s kind of where I personally sense myself, like you said, individually, when I’m doing my own internal meditative work, and also the groups that I’m with, we always do something for the world.

And then of course there is the whole universe. There is the solar system and the universe! But mostly we are here on the planet right now and this planet needs a lot of attention, and so that’s where most of my attention is going.

And you know, I would love to teach as many people as possible how to work with energy, how to be a master of energy, so that when there is something you don’t like, like the war in Syria, we’ve been pouring Divine light into it, just flooding the whole thing with Divine light. And you know, obviously, more and more people doing that.

And there are other groups doing that. I can say that my group is definitely not the only one; there are lots of groups doing that. So participating in the global awakening is really where I am going, I mean, until the globe awakes fully, there is a lot of work to do right here on Mother Earth.

Rick: You think it ever will? Is there ever such a thing or is it just an ongoing … there are always going to be people who are not quite so awake as others, and you know, new people being born?

Connie: Well I think there is something big happening. I think in the next 100 years, we can say, there is something big happening, and there is going to be a big change, a big shift. And everyone who knows about it — and that is certainly not everyone who is embodied on the planet that knows about it and is working for it.

Rick: It’s only a minority of it, a fraction.

Connie: Right, right, right. But we happen to be in that minority and so we have to do what we are here to do, which is help shift it. And minority can shift it, as you know.

Rick: Oh yeah. In recent interviews I quoted a lot of those statistics and principles of like, pacemaker cells in the heart — one percent, photons in lasers — square root of one percent. There are so many systems in nature where a tiny bit can shift the whole thing in a different direction.

Do you feel like — and when I address these questions I’m addressing either Connie or Divine Mother or whoever, you can take it from any level you want. Do you feel like it’s kind of a done deal in terms of the world shifting to a better place, or do you think that we can do ourselves in, with rogue nuclear weapons, and Fukushima, and global warming, and all that stuff?

Connie: Okay, so I’m going to let Divine Mother just say it. So here is how I connect with

Her: I focus my attention on that subtlest level and I say Her name, just like I say, “Divine Mother” — and I say it inside, not out loud — and She is saying, “I am Divine Mother, I come in the name of truth and I love you. The world is a beautiful place. We are going to change it. All of the things that you mentioned, the catastrophes that have occurred and the pain on the planet needs to be changed, it is crying out for change. And if we don’t address it, we aren’t doing our duty, so we have to address it. We’re not going to allow it to overcome us. Mother Nature won’t allow it to overcome us.”

She says, “Divine love won’t allow it to overcome us. This is the ebb and flow of life. And right now we are in a big flow. This is the focus now: healing Mother Earth, trusting yourself enough to heal the planet. Mother Nature wants the planet healed, and Mother Nature can overcome anything. You will be surprised at what Mother Nature is capable of. So don’t despair, work with me. I am the Mother of the universe. My love can transform anything. As you work with me, we generate the energy of Divine love. I will show you many miracles, and miracles will become normal. Just work with me.”

Rick: If we are going to arrive at an enlightened planet, there are so many things in our current planet which would be completely inappropriate and out of place in an enlightened planet — economic systems, agricultural systems, many, many things which just would not fit in, in a more enlightened world.

Will the transition from this to that necessarily be somewhat cataclysmic? Will there necessarily be economic collapse, billions of people dying, and so on, or is there a way for it to all transition more smoothly?

Connie: “Well, there are going to be changes. There are definitely going to be changes. Everything that isn’t working has to collapse. So I am not going to say it is a cataclysmic collapse, it is going to be a smooth collapse, for those who are open to transformation. It is all about transformation. And those who are open to transformation, it will flow, the transformation will flow as fluidly as the bud of a flower transforms into a full bloom, but for those who are not into transformation, who want to try to hold on to the old ways, it is going to be more difficult, because they are trying to hold on.”

Rick: Now there are lots of people who are currently in the midst of what appear to be transformative events, like Syria for instance, that we mentioned. Were all those people somehow shepherded in this lifetime into a difficult situation, or might there be some … were those all people who were holding on and are therefore having a hard time with it? Or all the people who were killed by the Japanese tsunami, do we consider that to be part of the changes that are taking place?

In other words, sometimes these transformational events seem to be societal and so large that regardless of one’s spiritual orientation, one is caught up in the midst of it. You know what I mean?

Connie: “Yes. Well, even though there are huge groups of people involved in particular dramas that are going on in the planet, each one of those individuals is an individual with individual karma and a unique Divine purpose to fulfill. So I am not looking at the groups as … I’m looking at the groups as individuals because I, Divine Mother, work with individuals. I work with each person’s heart. And so there are people in Japan and Syria who are extremely highly evolved beings, who are helping with the transition there, and they may look to you like part of the group that is suffering or resisting something or fighting for something. They are doing something for Me, to help Me introduce new light on this planet.”

“So I love them all and I don’t want to diminish them in any way by saying that they are part of a group that just has to experience this way; every member of that group has a special, unique experience of Me, of life, of love, of truth, and they are all growing in their own ways. And the grace of God is guiding this transformation. I don’t think I can quite explain to you how the Divine intelligence has a focus on every individual human being on this planet, it is quite remarkable, it is remarkable! So that is why I don’t want to say, ‘Yes, this group has to experience that, or another group has to experience something else,’ because each individual in that group is having their own experience of what is happening in that region of the world.”

Rick: And would it be safe to say that whatever happens or whatever is happening, if we zoom back far enough and see it in the big enough picture, it is all for the good, it is all an evolutionary process? Or is it more like there is a battle of good and evil and sometimes the evil gets the upper hand and it’s not so good? Or is it actually, in the biggest picture, good, even if evil sometimes seems to be getting the upper hand?

Connie: “Well what I want you to understand is that what is evil and those people who are representing evil, are also in the process of growth and evolution, and they have chosen to stand with that side of life because they are growing and learning, and they will actually grow out of the evil.”

Rick: And they are serving an evolutionary purpose even though they may seem to be evil. So for instance, Ravana in the Ramayana, who battled with Rama and kidnapped his wife and all that stuff, there wouldn’t have been a story without him. And actually, there was an evolutionary outcome to the whole conflict, which perhaps may not have been achieved had there not been a conflict.

Connie: “That’s right. That’s exactly the truth. So in the larger picture, the evolution is ongoing. There are choices being made and those choices are very significant, that’s the wild card with planet earth, is that human beings do have free will, and that they are making choices and the choices are sometimes unpredictable.”

“And so with earth there is this level of unpredictableness that makes it particularly fascinating. So you being here, participating in this, is a tremendous evolutionary burst for you.”

Rick: “You” meaning…?

Connie: “Meaning, whoever is listening to us. And that is why I want to help you. I want to help you make those choices that are going to expand your growth and evolution, that are going to enhance your heart, yes. Because overall, the whole universe is conducted in love, and that is something that most human beings haven’t quite understood. Love is not really appreciated here yet, for its power of evolutionary force. It has an incredible power to propel evolution forward, and I would love to help you with that.”

“Because it is inevitable that that power will take over, that power has to take over; it runs everything in the universe. So that is why I am encouraging people to move to their hearts, to start making the choices in alignment with truth and love. This is what has not been done on the planet, the choices have not been made in alignment with truth and love, and so the situation has gotten extreme, extreme.”

“The world is a beautiful place. We are going to change it.”

Closing and resources

Rick: Well, that’s a good segue into concluding, because you have a number of ways in which people can take you up on that offer to help. And obviously the best, the most simple way is to just go to your website and then they will find everything there.

Connie: Yep. www.divinemotheronline.net

Rick: And I’ll be linking to that as always, from www.batgap.com — from Connie’s page on www.batgap.com so you’ve mentioned things they can download, and there is this little email they can get every day with a message from Divine Mother; I subscribed to that.

Connie: And there is also the free webcast. We do those at least once a month.

Rick: Like on livestream or something that?

Connie: Yeah, free webcast. Well, you either go to our webpage or there is also a teleconference option or a Skype option.

Rick: Okay. Do you do individual sessions with people still?

Connie: I do, I do. I do individual private sessions for those who would like that.

Rick: Over Skype or in person if they are here?

Connie: Yeah, Skype or telephone, one of those. And I have lots of membership programs. I have something called “The Ascension Program,” which is a membership program that is very, very hands on. Ascension is discussed and explained as the highest goal of human life, to develop ascension, so we talk about that.

And I have the dialogue with Divine Mother, where I teach people how to talk to Divine Mother. There are many, many wonderful things available.

Rick: Good. Well I always admire people who systematize things, in a way, and that is maybe just because that’s the way Maharishi always did it and I kind of saw the value of that. Because a number of people, they will just get up and describe their experience and other people listen, and never the twain shall meet, but if people can come up with some practical means whereby one can rise to the same level of experience that the person is having, then it is kind of more useful, so I’m glad you’re doing that.

Great! Well let me make some wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Connie Huebner and I must say, I feel very uplifted, or settled, or whichever direction you want to take it. It’s really sublime sitting with you like this for a couple of hours and it has a really nice influence.

Connie: Thank you.

Rick: And you’ve just heard about her website, which I will be linking to and you’ve heard about all the things you can do, so I won’t elaborate on those. With regard to Buddha at the Gas Pump, this is an ongoing interview series. I think Connie will be number 194 or something like that, so there are plenty of back issues to listen to if you would like, and they are all archived at www.batgap.com, both alphabetically and chronologically.

And there’s an email newsletter thing you can sign up for to be notified of new ones, which happens about once a week. There is an audio podcast if you don’t have time to sit in front of your computer and watch things, I don’t blame you. You can sign up for the audio podcast, get it all on your iPod, and listen while you are commuting or something.

There’s a discussion group at www.batgap.com. There are general discussion areas and then there is an individual discussion group area set up for each interview, so you will see a link to that on Connie’s page.

There is a “Donate” button, which I don’t make a big fuss over but I really rely upon people clicking it occasionally and making a donation; enables this whole thing to keep rolling. And I think that just about covers it. If I’m leaving something out, I’ll remember it next week or you will find it when you go there.

So thanks a lot for listening or watching. Thank you very much, Connie [gives her a hug]. That’s the value of doing this in person — you can’t do that over Skype. And we will see you next week.

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