David Spangler Interview

Summary

The discussion examines subtle realms as nonphysical aspects of Earth's living ecology and asks how they relate to spiritual growth. It also explores childhood spiritual perception, reincarnation, soul individuality, and the possibility that a soul can express itself through multiple incarnations or realms at once.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What are subtle realms, and how do they relate to spiritual development?
• Is subtle perception necessary for spiritual awakening or inner growth?
• How can reincarnation be understood if the personal self is not permanent?
• Do souls choose their parents and life circumstances before birth?
• Can one soul participate in multiple lives or levels of existence simultaneously?

Key takeaways

• Subtle realms are nonphysical parts of Earth's ecology, not automatically spiritual attainments.
• Subtle perception can be developed by anyone, but it is not required for spiritual growth.
• Seeing subtle beings or energies does not prove that someone is spiritually advanced.
• The soul is an individual field of consciousness, but it is more complex than a human personality.
• Incarnating souls may choose life circumstances, though some incarnations arise without deliberate choice.
• A soul may remain active in subtle realms while part of it is embodied.
• Spiritual reality may be more multidimensional than ordinary human categories suggest.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve been doing it for over six years now. If this is new to you, you can check out previous interviews by going to batgap.com and looking under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see them all organized in a variety of ways.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners. So, if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there’s a PayPal button on the site. And if you don’t like PayPal, there’s a page explaining other ways of supporting.

My guest today is David Spangler. I received an email three years ago—I was just looking at it—from a fellow named Jose. He said, “If I could cast a thousand votes for somebody”—because we have a voting system for helping to determine the priority of guests—“it would be David Spangler.” He said, “David has been awake since he was a child, and he’s had 60 years to mature in his experience and understanding, and I think he’d be a fascinating guest.”

Having just read a couple of David’s books and listened to some of his interviews, I think I agree with Jose. Let me just read a little bio here.

“David Spangler has been a teacher of spiritual potentials since 1964. From 1970 to 1973, he was co-director of the Findhorn Foundation community, which is in northern Scotland.” Is it in northern Scotland?

David: Yes.

Rick: He is a fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, co-founder of the Lorian Association, which is a spiritual educational foundation, and a director of the Lorian Center for Incarnational Spirituality. His work involves enabling individuals to embody the innate spirituality of their incarnations.

He is the author of over 30 books, including Journey into Fire, Apprentice to Spirit, Subtle Worlds and Explorer’s Field Notes, and Facing the Future. He writes a free monthly email essay called David’s Desk. He also writes a quarterly esoteric journal of his work and explorations with the subtle worlds, titled Views from the Borderland.

In recent years, this work has brought him into contact with the Sidhe. Is that pronounced correctly?

David: Say that again, Rick.

Rick: With the Sidhe, S-I-D-H-E.

David: With the S-H-E. Pronounced like “she.”

Rick: Oh, like “she.” Okay. The Elven Cousins of Humanity. He describes his experiences in a book, Conversations with the Sidhe, and through a special card deck, the Card Deck of the Sidhe, which he created with Jeremy Berg, with inspiration and guidance from their Sidhe context.

Information about his journal, David’s Desk, and online courses, books, and workshops can be found at lorian.org. David is happily married, and I’ve met his happy wife, Julie, and they have four adult children.

What are the subtle realms?

Rick: We’re going to start, David, I think, by getting to know who you are a little bit, by unfolding some of your personal story, which began—well, all of our personal stories began in childhood, but your personal spiritual story started in childhood. Before we get into that, since we’re going to be talking a lot about subtle realms and the beings that reside there, perhaps we could just define what subtle realms are.

The reason I ask is that there are a lot of people, some of whom are very ardently spiritual and sincere seekers, who think that all talk and discussion of subtle realms is just fantasy. I interviewed a guy named Jürgen Ziewe a while back, whom you may know, and some guy started debating me in the YouTube comments about subtle realms. He thought the whole thing was “makyo,” which is a Buddhist term for illusory and imaginary, and that people are just dreaming this stuff up and it has no reality.

Even if it does, he thought, it’s not worthy of our attention because we should really be going for self-realization, going for the absolute, unchanging truth. We don’t want to get waylaid or caught up in all sorts of subtle phenomena, which might not really be ultimately significant.

So, you’ve probably heard that objection before. Let’s just address that, but also, what are we talking about when we talk about subtle realms?

David: The subtle realms are simply the nonphysical side of the planet’s ecosystem. If I think of the Earth as a whole entity, then it has physical and nonphysical aspects, just as we do. The subtle realms are a way of talking about those nonphysical aspects.

The subtle realms are simply the nonphysical side of the planet’s ecosystem.

Actually, I agree with the proposition that the subtle realms by themselves won’t add to or detract from a person’s internal spiritual journey any more than things around me in the physical world will do that. They can be a distraction, or they can be an assistance. They’re just part of the environment in which my life is being lived.

For me, the subtle worlds are another side to the Earth’s ecology. I don’t think of them as spiritual worlds as such. They’re another area in which life is manifesting. It just happens to be manifesting on frequencies of existence that are normally outside our physical perception.

Rick: Do you feel that physics provides a useful metaphor in terms of its understanding that the deeper we go into the structure of matter, the less physical it becomes?

David: Well, yes, it can. Certainly, people use metaphors from physics to describe the subtle worlds. In fact, that’s been fairly common since the 19th century. But I prefer biological metaphors, which to me describe more accurately what my own experiences are like.

There’s something about physical metaphors—or metaphors from physics, I should say—that puts a more impersonal and nonliving side to it. Whereas biology, to me, emphasizes the fact that we’re dealing with a living realm.

Rick: Yeah, albeit one that you wouldn’t be able to see under a microscope or something, because an instrument like a microscope doesn’t operate in the subtle fields. Or does it? If someone with the ability to perceive the subtle were to look under a microscope, would they see subtle life forms on a microscopic level?

David: Well, if you had a subtle microscope, you might. I mean, there are beings of all sizes. I actually hesitate to use the term “size.” I would rather say they are patterned differently. And so, there are small beings and there are large beings.

Sometimes the small ones are, in fact, more potent and powerful than the larger ones. So, quantitative descriptions in that sense don’t always make sense or aren’t that accurate when trying to describe subtle phenomena.

Rick: Okay. Regarding the microscope example, you’re not really perceiving the subtle realms with your physical eyes anyway, or are you?

David: I’m not.

Rick: No. Or for one who does, is it more like a subtle sense that’s being used? And even a blind person could have that perception?

David: Yes.

Rick: Yeah.

David: That’s correct.

Rick: Okay.

David: Which is not to say that it would be impossible to see a subtle phenomenon with your physical eyes. I have known people who have done that, but that’s not that common.

Rick: Okay. Do you consider the ability to have subtle perception like this something that pretty much everyone may encounter at some point in their spiritual journey? Or do you feel that it’s just a special aptitude, such as athletic ability or perfect pitch, that doesn’t really have relevance or isn’t a necessary component of one’s spiritual unfoldment?

David: Everybody has subtle perception. They may not be aware of it or give much attention to it, but it’s there for all of us. The potential to use it and to develop it is there for all of us.

But again, as in all these things, people will have varying degrees of that potential and of their ability to develop it. In many cases, it’s just a matter of not doing the work or the practice necessary to develop it.

But I want to make clear that, for me, subtle awareness is not by itself a necessity for spiritual development. These are two different things to me. Subtle awareness helps one realize the ubiquity of life in the world around one. I think it expands your ability to engage with the world, particularly in positive and helpful ways.

But one’s spiritual development is another kettle of fish, and one can progress and deepen spiritually quite well without ever having any subtle awareness.

Rick: So, by that logic, then, someone could be much more advanced spiritually than someone else who has subtle perception. The subtle perception thing is just a particular aptitude that the other person happened to develop, but it’s not necessarily tightly correlated with the degree of spiritual evolution.

David: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s a mistake that people often make: If somebody is demonstrating subtle awareness, it must mean that they’re spiritually evolved. Those two do not necessarily go together at all.

David’s earliest subtle experiences

Rick: Okay, great. We’ll come back to this whole discussion about subtle perception and subtle realms and all kinds of things we can talk about there. But let’s loop back and talk about your own life, which has been a very interesting one.

You started having deep, subtle perceptions and insights and experiences when you were just a child, five or seven years old or something. What’s the first significant one you’d like to tell us about?

David: Well, actually, my very first memory is of the subtle world and subtle perception. That happened when I was still in the crib. I was basically a baby.

I have this distinct memory of my death in a previous life and waking up in what I thought was a prison and yelling for help. I wasn’t yelling for help for me; I was yelling for help because I died in a situation in which many people were dying. I was trying to get help for them and died in the process of trying to get help for them.

So, I was, in a way, still in that memory. This giant came over and picked me up, and I looked up and saw this woman’s face. I had this very clear thought that said, “Oh my gosh, I’m a baby.” And then that was the end of that experience.

In my earliest years—four, five, and six—I had experiences of the subtle energies around things, around people, around places and plants, and so on. Occasionally, very occasionally, I might see a nonphysical being. That was more the exception than the rule.

But the most significant experience for me came when I was seven. That was the time when, as you said in your introduction, I woke up to the larger side of myself and realized—well, actually, I experienced and recapitulated the incarnational process that brought me into this life as David Spangler.

From that point onward, I had a kind of dual consciousness: one as the personality of David, growing up as a kid, and the other as an awareness of this whole other level of being that was my deeper self.

Rick: Take a couple of minutes, if you would, just to describe that recapitulation of the incarnational process. I thought that was very beautiful and interesting.

David: So, this experience began when I was in Morocco. My dad worked for the US government, and he was stationed in Morocco. That’s essentially where I grew up. We lived on an airbase that was 20 minutes away by car from Casablanca.

We were driving into Casablanca to do some shopping. Dad and Mom were in the front seat of the car, and I was in the back seat. I was looking out the window, and suddenly I had this sensation like somebody was pumping air into me. I could feel myself swelling. Before I could say anything, I found myself floating outside the car.

I was looking down at the car, and I could see through the roof of the car and see myself, my body, sitting in the back seat. I could see Dad and Mom and so on. Then I started moving through what were like clouds of light. At times, they would part, and I would see individuals or places, landscapes. Then they would close in again.

There came a point where it was like I crossed a threshold, and memory came flooding back. At the time, I thought, “Wow, this must be what an amnesiac feels like when he remembers his identity.” I absolutely remembered at that point who I was as a soul and my decision to come into life.

The process began to reverse itself, and I felt myself moving back through these clouds of light. I found myself suddenly, as if I were an astronaut looking down at the Earth. I could see the Earth, and I had a sense of my body down there, or the potential for a body, actually.

What I felt was this intense joy at the privilege and the possibility of being incarnated. I heard my name. Someone said, “David Spangler.” The moment I heard that, the joy intensified, and then I was back in my body. I was looking out the window of the car and seeing the same scene that I had been seeing when this experience started.

The experience felt like it went on for a very long time. But, in fact, judging from how far the car had moved, it was probably only two or three seconds, or maybe 30 seconds at most, of physical time.

Rick: Do you have any opinion on—this is a little bit of a tangential question—but do you have any opinion on whether people actually choose their own parents? I’ve heard that said in esoteric circles: that we’re born into the circumstances that are going to be most conducive to our evolution, even though it may not seem like that, because a lot of circumstances are pretty horrific, but it’s actually our choice.

David: I think, like many of these esoteric statements, the answer is both yes and no. In many cases, perhaps in most cases, the incarnating soul chooses many of the parameters of that incarnation: where the birth will take place, when it will take place, who the parents will be, who siblings might be, and that kind of thing.

But there are certainly situations where that doesn’t happen. Either the soul is not skilled enough to make those kinds of choices, and so it’s arranged on his or her behalf—on its behalf, actually, because the soul is essentially androgynous.

Sometimes the soul hasn’t moved very far away from the circumstances of its previous life, and there’s a longing to be back in embodiment. That can pull a soul into embodiment without any real choice being involved. A person might find themselves in a situation that is essentially a throw of the dice, more or less. It’s not entirely random, but it wasn’t exactly chosen either.

So yes, that can happen. I think the general rule of thumb is that most people, in fact, do choose the circumstances of their life. If it’s a horrific one, then yes, there may well be qualities that that soul is seeking to learn from that situation.

But the fact is that this is a challenging world to be incarnated into. I think we could all understand why. Sometimes a soul will be born into this world and then think, “Wow, this was a lot more intense than what I bargained for.”

Or the soul may say, “Well, I had a friend who went into the military and wanted to become a Navy SEAL. He went through the training but didn’t make it. He flunked out of that training, and he said, ‘You know, it was much, much more intense than anything I had bargained for.’”

I think that happens for a soul, too. It may say, “Wow, I’m going to come to Earth, and I’m a powerful being and I can do anything.” Then it discovers all the limitations and challenges of incarnation and realizes that maybe this wasn’t all that I bargained for.

Rick: There was an old play, maybe it was a musical, called Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.

David: Yeah, I remember that.

Rick: Here’s another question that’s a little bit tangential to your personal story, and I want to come right back to that. But since we’re discussing reincarnation very matter-of-factly here, as if that’s the way things work, not all people agree with that, even spiritual people.

I’ve interviewed people who say, “Well, ultimately there is no personal self. There is no person. It seems like there is one, but that’s just ignorance. There isn’t one. Therefore, there couldn’t be reincarnation, because that would imply the existence of a person who reincarnates. So that whole thing is bunk.” What do you say about that?

David: Well, I can understand why somebody could see it that way. I don’t agree with it, obviously. The thing is that we—from my perspective, and all of this is only from my perspective; I’m just drawing on my own experience, so you have to take that with the caveat that this is one person’s experience—my experience of the soul is that it’s a very complex field of life.

It’s not at all like a personality. We think of the soul at times as just a larger and more spiritual aspect of ourselves. There is a part of us that traditionally has been called the higher self. I think of it as the incarnate soul, the soul that’s emerging out of the incarnate experience, which is like that. It carries the vision and the seed and the potential and the image of all that we could be.

But the actual state of consciousness that is the soul, from which the incarnation ultimately emerges, is not like a person. It is, however, an individuality. It has individual characteristics, but it’s such a complex being, and it’s multidimensional. That is, it extends in so many different directions and interconnections.

Boundaries at that level are not quite the same as they are for us. I know that I’m not Rick because my body tells me that. My body is sitting here, and your body is in Iowa, and there’s this difference between us. But at the soul level, there’s much more flow between us.

There are situations in which it might be challenging to say, “Well, which one is David and which one is Rick?” Yet, from my point of view, there is an individuality there. Everything that I’ve encountered in the subtle world has individuality, but it may not have personality in the sense that we understand it.

I could see a person having an experience and saying, “Well, my personhood, my personality—it disappears. It dissolves into something. Therefore, this must be an illusion.” There are ways in which we’re constantly creating a personality that may not last for very long. We have that as a personal experience. We know how much we change.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not this core individuality standing behind that whole process. So I’m up for the individuality, not necessarily for the permanence of the personality.

Rick: Yeah. I’ve also heard the notion—and this is along the lines of your use of the word “multidimensionality”—that we actually exist on various realms simultaneously, not just in terms of gross and subtle, but also in a temporal sense.

For instance, I might die, and my mother is there to greet me, and yet my mother has already been reincarnated. But in a very real sense, my mother still exists on that realm, even though, in some portion of her, or in a sense, she has been reincarnated. She’s still dwelling on some subtle realm to which one goes after one dies.

By the same token, you and I, even though we’re incarnate, at the same time we exist in some other realm and perhaps have a very different perspective there and a very different life there, simultaneous to this one. Does that concur with your understanding?

David: Yes, it does. Yes.

Rick: Want to elaborate, or just yes? Yes is good enough, I guess.

David: Oh my gosh, usually I’m accused of giving long, lengthy answers.

Rick: No, you’re doing good. This is a nice balance.

David: I give a one-word answer.

Rick: Larry King said his hardest interview was…

David: Sure, I can elaborate.

Rick: Okay, you go ahead. You go ahead.

David: So, like I said, the soul is a complex field of life and consciousness. From my point of view, the soul develops and matures. That development is marked by its capacity to do multiple things simultaneously. It’s able to multitask, to use a human expression.

So it’s quite possible for a soul to have part of itself in incarnation and part of itself active in the subtle worlds. In fact, that’s generally the case. From my understanding, it’s not possible for the entirety of a soul to enter incarnation. It’s just too complex and intense an energy field. There’s always something left behind.

But how much is left behind and how active it is depends on the development of that particular soul individuality and that field. This can get complex. It’s actually not a simple question to answer, at least it’s not a simple question for me to answer, because there are layers and levels to the soul, too.

Keeping it just to that relationship between the soul and its incarnate self, yes, the soul is carrying on its life, a set of relationships and activities that are more or less independent but still congruent with our life here.

There’s a part of the soul that is absolutely focused and dedicated to its incarnate aspects. That’s what I think most people touch into when they say, “I’m in touch with my soul.” But occasionally you realize that there’s more behind that, and then there’s more behind that, too. It keeps expanding out.

That’s one reason why a person could say that, at some point, what we understand as the individuality is hard to find, because it is operating in what, for us, with our mentality and our way of viewing things, is a very diffuse sphere of activity. But it’s not diffused from the soul’s point of view. That’s the thing.

Anyway, your friend’s mother could very well be an incarnation again, and yet her soul is able to resurrect that particular shape and form and persona to greet your friend when he passes over. Absolutely.

Rick: Actually, I was thinking of myself and my mother. I’d like her to be there when I go and say hi to her. By the same token—and I don’t want to spend too much time; hopefully you don’t consider this to be insignificant or too tangential—my impression from things that I’ve been told is that it’s not that common, but I’ve heard it said that, given this multitasking theme, one could actually be incarnate in several, or more than one, human life simultaneously.

Like maybe I’m Larry Kelly up in Canada while I’m also Rick Archer in Iowa. Does that make any sense?

David: Oh, absolutely. Yes, this can happen. Again, it’s … well, I don’t know how common it is, actually, and it depends, again, on the maturity and capacity of the soul to spread its energy out in that way. But there are souls that do that and are capable of doing it, or they think they’re capable of doing it, and then they do it and discover it’s more of a stress than they might have understood.

In fact, I knew a gentleman years ago who had knowledge. He knew that he, as the soul, was also living simultaneously in Russia as a totally different personality. At times, he was able to shift into the soul level and shift back down into the life of his Russian soul brother, so to speak.

Rick: It would be interesting for him to go find himself over there and shake hands.

David: That would have been interesting.

Exploring subtle reality

Rick: Incidentally, the place I’m coming from in answering these kinds of questions, and the way I conduct BatGap in general, is that I really have a desire—and I think it’s important—to really understand how things work. And I’m open to all possibilities, which is not to say I want to sort of indulge in any one of them, but I keep an open mind.

If we really want to be knowers of reality, then it’s important, I think, not to jump to conclusions and say, “Well, it’s just this,” but to be open to the possibility that it might be far more multifarious, rich, detailed, mystical, and magical than it first appears.

David: I quite agree with that, Rick. I think your questions are great. I don’t think of them as being tangential. Again, I want to reiterate that I see things from a certain perspective. I’m standing at a certain lookout point, and this is what the landscape looks like to me. But somebody else standing at a different lookout point might see a different landscape or see the same landscape from a different angle.

So, it’s really helpful to be able to cast a wide net, so to speak. But what isn’t so helpful is when it just leads you into confusion. Part of the challenge at this point in our cultural history, particularly here in the West, is that we’re fundamentally illiterate when it comes to the subtle realms. And so it’s hard to discern truth from fiction.

In that sense, it’s very much like dealing with all the stuff that’s there on the Internet. What’s true and what’s not? It’s not always clear. Part of that is just that we don’t have the same kind of insight into the subtle worlds that, say, science has into the natural world. So the principles escape us.

Part of that, I believe, from my point of view anyway, is that we have a tradition of viewing the subtle world through a religious lens and seeing it in some way as either a spiritual domain or an anti-spiritual domain. And it’s not. It is a domain of life, the same as this one that’s around me.

I think if we approach it like naturalists would approach the natural world around us, we have a better chance of coming to understand the nature of what’s out there.

Rick: Yeah. This leads to a point that I actually find personally very interesting, fascinating. I think about it a lot. You trained somewhat as a molecular biologist, and so you have a scientific background.

I regard anything that any religion has ever said, or anybody says, not as something to believe or disbelieve, but as a working hypothesis—as something that we could actually investigate, and that we could actually get peer agreement on if enough people investigated it in a systematic way and discovered it to be true experientially.

I think that sort of thinking would have a lot of value for religion, and religion or spirituality has a lot of value for science, because science doesn’t have the tools to investigate all these subtle phenomena. And yet, if science really wants to understand how the universe works, it’s going to have to investigate this. What better tool is there than the human nervous system, if properly utilized?

So there can be sort of a marriage of science and spirituality, which I think maybe our culture will move into over time, and it will be really valuable for a number of reasons that we can still talk about later in the interview.

David: Yeah, I agree, Rick. I absolutely agree with that. I think if we’re investigating the subtle world from a scientific point of view, we have to have a certain degree of tolerance for ambiguity and for the subjective element.

Science is so into quantitative measurement and control, and things being precise, that it’s actually hard for somebody trained in that methodology to shift over and develop the kind of mindset that works best in exploring the subtle realms.

But it’s not that it’s all idiosyncratic. For example, in science, it’s very important and useful to have a peer group, and our scientific discoveries go into peer review. I have my peer group. I have people who are sensitive in one way or another, whose inner perceptions I trust, and I’ll say, “This is what I’ve experienced. This is what I’m experiencing. Could you check on that for me? What do you think?”

If they say, “Well, I think you’re off the wall, David,” as they have on occasion, then that’s important information. I need to relook at what I’m experiencing. If they say, “Oh, no, I don’t see it in quite those terms, but I’m having actually the same experience,” and I’ve had that happen way too many times to count, that’s also important.

I’ve seen so much over the years—so much confirmation across multiple sensitives—that there’s no question at all in my mind that if we put our attention and our resources to it, we could come up with ways of validating subtle research that would be replicable.

Rick: That’s very interesting. Yeah, as you know, a physiologist could have somebody hooked up to the appropriate instruments, and from the next room he could tell whether that person was awake or asleep or dreaming. But he wouldn’t be able to tell what they were dreaming, or necessarily what they were experiencing if they were awake—whether they were looking at an apple or an orange. He couldn’t tell from brainwaves and such.

With regard to dreaming, maybe it’s more appropriate to talk about that. Dreams are very phantasmagorical and sort of imaginary and so on. There’s very little possibility of applying scientific rigor to understanding exactly what people dream.

But it seems to me that what we’re talking about here with subtle realms and subtle worlds is not just imaginary. We’re talking about actualities, realities that exist, yet beneath the normal threshold of our perception. And so those things should be explorable and confirmable by peer review, as you say.

David: Yes, I agree, Rick. It is an objective world, but it’s a world that operates with slightly different principles than this one. And so the tools that work well for us here don’t necessarily work as well when engaging with the subtle worlds. We just need to develop different sets of tools.

I actually have a number of friends who are practicing scientists. They’re all getting up in years now, as indeed I am, and so most of them, or many of them, are retiring. But we’ve talked about this, and something that’s been very interesting to me is that there’s a willingness now on the part of science to investigate spiritual states, but still a deep unwillingness to admit to the reality of the subtle realms.

I find that fascinating, and I think it’s because the spiritual states are not threatening and can be seen as adding to a person. But if you start admitting that the subtle worlds exist, then your worldview changes, and that’s always a scary proposition for anyone.

Rick: Yeah.

David: I think, to be fair, one of my scientist friends, who’s a practicing quantum physicist, said, “Well, it’s not that I’m reluctant to explore the subtle world,” especially because, in his case, he has his own experiences of that world. He says, “I just don’t know how to develop the experiments that would work.”

It’s not like going into a parapsychology lab and testing for telepathy or clairvoyance. It’s different from that. And actually, part of the problem is that anytime you put anything into a lab, the laboratory itself acts as a filter that only allows certain information in and keeps other information out.

That’s why, in biology, you have people who go out in the field. If you’re going to understand an organism, you can only understand it up to a point by bringing it into the lab and dissecting it or observing it in laboratory conditions. You actually need to go out into the ecology of which it’s a part, because every organism, including us, is defined in part by the environment in which it’s embedded.

Rick: Yeah. I’m thinking of examples here. Let’s say they discovered the Higgs boson in a large hadron collider. I think probably you and I have to just take their word for it that they discovered the Higgs boson. We could even look at the scientific papers they published about it, and it would probably be complete gibberish to us. But we trust those guys. Enough of them concur with one another. They say they found the Higgs boson, whatever that is. Okay, it looks like that’s part of our scientific knowledge now.

So, let’s say you had a whole group of people who had developed subtle perception, and they were all in a situation where they agreed upon what they were perceiving. Maybe there was an angel in the room, to take a simple example. “Yep, we all see it.” They could agree among themselves, and they could even write a paper about it, but they probably wouldn’t be able to take a photograph of it. They could tell us all about it, but we’d kind of have to take their word for it, and it wouldn’t necessarily be able to dispel skepticism.

But I would say, perhaps, that if there are systematic ways of developing that same sort of perception, then the hardest of the hardcore skeptics could pursue those ways and practice them long enough, and then he, too, may come into agreement with those people.

David: Well, you’re absolutely right. Those methodologies do exist. Anyone who wants to develop subtle perception has ways to go about doing that. There are a number of different methodologies for doing so, and some will be more successful with some people than with others.

Just like there are different ways of learning to play the guitar, different teachers have different approaches to the process. But yes, part of it is the work involved, the practice involved, and the willingness to accept the possibility.

But part of it is just that people believe what they want to believe. There are folks who still believe that no one ever landed on the moon. And there are people who believe that much of what passes for scientific knowledge is a grand hoax.

Donald Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax, and a lot of people agree with him. Maybe not about the China part, but they see it as a worldwide conspiracy of scientists who are perpetrating this hoax. Why? To destroy American business, or to pursue it because they’re all Democrats. All these scientists are presumably Democrats who are pursuing a political agenda.

Rick: To get funding for their studies.

David: That’s right. It gets pretty crazy. But the point is that people will believe what they want to believe because it becomes integrated into their sense of identity. To change their core beliefs, they have to change how they think about themselves. And that’s always a scary proposition.

Incarnation and the sacredness of ordinary life

Rick: Well, let’s come back to your story. There’s a nice little section in your book when you were about seven and you had had that awakening. You said, “I couldn’t act in a thoughtless way or with intent to hurt or destroy without feeling immediate consequences, as if I were the victim of my own actions.” You depicted an experience where you’d been walking through a field with a stick in your hand, whacking the ferns.

David: That’s exactly right. I suddenly felt this wave of distress and anguish, and it stopped me in my tracks. In that moment, I felt like weeping. It was just this sadness of, “Why are we being hurt this way?”

And it’s one thing if you’re a plant that grows for the purpose of giving food. Wheat is there to give food, and it recognizes this. But the ferns weren’t there to—well, you could pick a fern to eat it, and that might be okay. But this was just pure, mindless destruction because I was walking through all these ferns and whacking away with a stick because it felt fun to do.

Partly, it was the mindlessness of it that was an outrage. It’s the same thing if somebody walked up to you and killed you, and you said, “Why?” And they said, “Oh, I don’t know why. There’s no reason. I just felt like it in the moment.”

But experiences like that definitely made me rethink my relationship to the world around me. This happened with people too. I found that a careless word or something I might say without thinking, hurting someone’s feelings, brought an immediate blowback in my own emotional body. I could feel the impact of it energetically, and immediately I’d be filled with remorse. I was feeling the hurt that the other person felt because of my words.

Rick: How about vegetarianism? Are you a vegetarian?

David: No, I’m not. And I know that sounds paradoxical. It’s partly because I recognize that my body has a need for animal protein. I mainly eat fish and chicken. I eat very little beef. But I was in the hospital recently and came out absolutely craving steaks. I’d had a blood transfusion, my blood count was low, and I needed what that steak had to offer.

When I eat meat, I can feel the energy of the animal. I take it in with a sense of gratitude and say, “Thank you for this gift of your flesh for me.” That works for me. I have many friends who are vegans or vegetarians, and I’m fine with that. But that hasn’t been a path for me.

Rick: Can you feel a difference if you eat free-range, grass-fed, naturally cared-for beef versus factory-farm food?

David: Oh, yeah. I can.

🕊️ John and the new spirituality

Rick: You met a guide, or a guide came to you, whom you called John. Here’s a quote from something a being told you when you were quite young:

There is a new spirituality emerging, a spirituality of personhood and incarnation. It will represent a new way of being in the world.

And then:

Your work is to help this emergence.

So, what do you say?

David: I’m not sure that that was John. That happened when I was 17. The being that appeared then didn’t identify itself.

I was in that interregnum between high school and college. I was on my way to pursue a scientific career. I was really interested in biology, particularly cell biology, and wanted to be a molecular biologist. I was out walking in Phoenix, where I lived at the time, when I stopped to have tea with a friend of the family.

She asked the question that adults always ask: “So, David, what are you going to do? What’s your plan for the future?” I started to say, “Well, I’m going to study to be a molecular biologist.” Right at that moment, I had a vision. A figure appeared, like a mannequin from a department store, but glowing from within.

I looked at it and intuitively felt, “This is a representation of an incarnate person.” Light was coming out of the incarnate state. Then I felt a being standing behind me, whom I never actually saw, saying into my ears:

There’s a new spirituality that honors the sacredness of the incarnate state that is emerging. And you’re going to be part of that. That’s your task in life, to help that to happen and to contribute to it.

My friend knew what was happening. She said, “Oh, you just had an experience, didn’t you? And what happened?” I told her, and she said, “Well, I guess that answers my question.”

Rick: About what you’re going to do with your life.

David: But it didn’t answer it for me, because by God, I was going to be a molecular biologist. I thought, “Maybe that’s what I’ll do late in life. After I’ve had this other career and I’m retired, I’ll do these spiritual things.” Oh no, there were other plans afoot.

Rick: You mentioned in your autobiography that you kept getting prodded to step into your spiritual role, while you kept hanging in there as a molecular biology student. At a certain point, it was as if your capacity to remember was taken away.

David: It was in a 24-hour period. It felt as if somebody had thrown a switch and my mind turned off. Until then, I had a fairly good memory. I could read a textbook, and it would be there for me. But after this happened, I could read that same textbook and close it, and it was like I’d never read it at all.

After this went on for two or three months, I said, “Okay, I get the message. I need to make this change.”

Rick: Eventually you came to Findhorn, and even that had a special way that it came about. But incarnational spirituality is something you talk about a lot. Maybe it would be useful to say more about what that is. Is there such a thing as disincarnate spirituality that you would contrast it with?

David: Incarnational spirituality is the name that I have given to the teaching, principles, and practices that have evolved out of my engagement with the subtle worlds, particularly with a specific group of individualities in the subtle worlds.

When John first appeared to me in the summer of 1965, I was having breakfast in a friend’s house where I was staying. I felt something like a wave of energy that hit me, like standing in the surf and feeling a wave come in. Then this individual literally walked through the wall and appeared.

At the time, he looked just like a college professor: reassuring and normal in appearance. He said, “You can call me John. That’s not my name, but it’s a name that you like.” His actual name was the energy signature of his whole being and wasn’t translatable into English or any language, so John was like a nickname.

He said he was part of a school and group. I thought he meant an educational institution in the inner worlds, but I came to realize that he meant something more like a school of fish, or the Chicago School of Economics—a body of thought. He was part of a field of thought and its representative in connecting with me.

Much of what he taught me during those early years became foundational when I began developing incarnational spirituality. Around the year 2000, John having left ten years earlier, I realized that this being had appeared briefly and said, “The challenge with humanity is not that you’re too incarnated; it’s that you’re not incarnated enough.”

The challenge with humanity is not that you’re too incarnated; it’s that you’re not incarnated enough.

That statement got me exploring the process of incarnation itself, to see in what way we need to be more incarnated. I realized that I was working with this school of individuals, this group on the inner, that John had spoken about. They had their own project, which was to develop and deliver the ideas involved in incarnational spirituality so people could try them out and see if they worked in their lives.

The central theme is the sacredness of a person’s incarnation and the ability to stand in a sense of sovereignty and honor one’s unique being. It’s from that place that you engage with the subtle worlds, engaging with them as a partner.

Imagine being taken to dinner by a very wealthy friend. You feel you don’t have money to pay, and your friend says, “Not to worry, I’ll pay for it.” That’s wonderful, but you also feel beholden, and the relationship isn’t that of equals. But if you recognize that you have money in your wallet too, then you and your friend are on equal status and can both contribute.

That’s what the inner worlds, my subtle colleagues, were after. When you engage with the subtle worlds, you don’t have to feel, “They’ve got all the wisdom, all the love, all the insight, all the light, all the power, and I’m a poor, benighted human being.”

We’re both equally close to the sacred. We’re both sacred beings. We both have something to offer, and we can work together in a collaborative way and in a collaborative partnership.

Collaboration rather than hierarchy

Rick: Are these beings enlightened beings who have somehow finished their human incarnation and moved to something higher? Or are they in a particular phase of functioning and may end up back here? It seems like we’re each occupying different sections on the spectrum of reality. We happen to be on a gross and concrete section, while they function more readily on another part of the spectrum.

David: I work with a variety of different subtle beings. When I think about this group or school, there are individuals in it across a wide spectrum of development. There’s not a hierarchical relationship.

It’s as if you had a college graduate, someone still in college, and a very bright high school student, all coming together to work on a project. The college graduate has something to add that the other two don’t, but the high school student has something to add too. The relationship is collaborative.

Some of the beings I work with will reincarnate. Some are fairly close to the human incarnate experience; others are not. Some haven’t been in incarnation for hundreds of years, or perhaps have never been in incarnation. They have deep insights, but I have to translate them.

Some beings whom I think of as very evolved don’t have a clue what life is like for us in the incarnate state. They admit that. They say, “This is what we see. This is what we have to offer you, and you need to put it into the context that’s relevant to you.”

Rick: Perhaps some beings are so far removed from the human condition that we’re not even on their radar, while others are very much involved.

David: That is true. In some cases, they genuinely don’t know what a human being is.

Rick: One of your common themes is the non-hierarchical arrangement. You say, “A spiritual teacher has a responsibility to instill an independent and loving mind in each of his students.” You also talk about horizontal versus vertical spirituality.

David: I had a friend many years ago who organized a group for me to speak to. Everyone was very solemn. I’m whimsical and like to use humor, but she became uneasy when I joked with her. Finally, she told me she’d been told by a psychic that I was the second coming.

Rick: Oh, brother.

David: Suddenly, I’d gone from being David Spangler to being Christ. It showed me dramatically what happens when you get put on a pedestal.

John called this the problem of the transpersonal. He said, “You put us on a pedestal, and you want to worship us, and that creates a barrier between us because we can’t engage with you when you’re separating us in that way.”

There are always beings and people who might enjoy that and take advantage of it. But the truly higher beings, those genuinely working for the success, wholeness, and blessing of humanity, find this to be a real turn-off. It gets in the way and creates barriers.

Rick: How do you reconcile the fact that there are actually higher beings with the idea that we’re all in this together?

David: There’s a difference between different levels of development and achievement, and a hierarchy as an instrument of control or ranking. I might look at a concert pianist and have great respect and reverence for what that person has achieved. We might still be friends outside the piano realm.

The Buddha is not closer to the sacred than I am or than you are. Jesus is not closer to God than you are or I am. The sacred is equally present in all beings, from my point of view. But if we could talk about the skill of playing sacredness, the Buddha and Jesus have more skill at that than I do.

The sacred is equally present in all beings.

Certainly, I can and do reverence and honor these beings, but I don’t elevate them in a hierarchical way above me. I call them my friends, allies, and partners.

Rick: It kind of reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita, where Lord Krishna and Arjuna had a friendship. At one point, Arjuna glimpsed Krishna’s true nature and was blown away. Afterwards he apologized for having treated him casually, and Krishna put him at ease: “You’re my friend and you’re my devotee.”

David: That’s exactly right.

👁️ Over-lighting beings and collective life

Rick: You refer to planetary and cosmic beings, and say that many cities and villages, churches, schools, and businesses have over-lighting beings. Do planets, cities, and organizations have a kind of soul or spirit?

David: Let’s start with towns, cities, and organizations. In a way, it’s a chicken-and-egg question. There are spiritual beings whose function is cultivating the development of human spiritual energy and awareness. Many of these beings are opportunistic: if an opportunity for engaging with human energy arises, they try to take advantage of it.

Let’s say a group of musicians gives a concert for world hunger, and 10,000 people gather. There will be spiritual, angelic, or devic beings attracted to this as an opportunity. They may move currents of subtle energy, thought, feeling, compassion, love, and service through the crowd.

The person who’s just there to rock on may suddenly pick up some of this and feel more compassion than when he entered. It might be a little bit, but for these spiritual beings, that’s a success.

With a town, city, corporation, or human organization that has permanency, a being may over-light the collective energy field to bless and stimulate the spiritual development of the people involved. How successful that is depends on the people individually and on the nature of the field.

There are situations where human beings set something into motion and an angel responds. There are also situations where an angel might appear and say, “We want you to do this work, and out of that work a collective field will develop.” In a way, that’s what happened with Findhorn. The idea and energy behind that community existed before the community did—an egg that came before the chicken.

With planets, I honestly don’t know the complete answer. My best understanding is that planets are mainly brought into being by planetary devas or planetary angels, by what I call the world soul. At some point there is a planetary being that becomes the ensouling life of that world.

In our case, this is a world that hosts a multiplicity of life forms and their evolution. It’s like our planetary deva is hosting a giant life party in which consciousness can evolve, learn, and have experiences.

Good, evil, and subtle ecology

Rick: Here in the ordinary world there are good and bad, light and dark. We have corporations that don’t seem to have the best interests of the planet in mind. Traditionally, there are stories about gods and demons tussling. It would seem that some entities have the opposite of angels guiding them.

David: This is complex. Take the Ku Klux Klan as an example. It was formed for nefarious purposes, and it does not attract angelic over-lighting in the same way a church would. But you have to consider what human beings bring to the mix. What is created at the personality level of the collective is also important.

Angels can’t necessarily prevent negative structures from forming. They can try to move things in a positive direction, but human beings create mental, habitual, physical, and organizational structures that can solidify negative qualities.

There are negative beings in the subtle world, and organizations can attract forces that feed off fear, hatred, anger, and other negative energies. They may promote that behavior because it is like feeding time for them. But an angelic being might still hover nearby to mitigate the worst of what is happening, or to take advantage of the possibility that an individual could have a change of heart.

This is where it becomes complex. You can’t simply say, “This is totally evil” or “This is totally good.” There may be an angelic over-lighting that isn’t responsible for what a corporation is doing, but is trying to create an atmosphere in which human beings can rise to the better angels of their nature.

Rick: There must have been, in Auschwitz, some positive beings doing their best to ameliorate the suffering.

David: Absolutely. That’s exactly right.

When I say “angelic over-lighting,” I don’t mean the angel is telling a corporation what to do. The angel is trying to create an atmosphere in which change is possible.

Rick: I’ve often felt that when certain movies have come out by people like Spielberg, Lucas, or Ron Howard, there is more than the intelligence and creativity of the human beings involved being conveyed to mass consciousness. There may be divine inspiration using that instrument to infuse new ideas or higher consciousness into the collective.

David: I think so. Yes. And there are projects that inspire greater negativity.

We have this image of a battle of good versus evil, angels versus demons, God versus Satan. To me, that’s not really what’s happening. I look at the subtle world as an ecology.

Imagine sewage getting into a lake. The water turns toxic, and pathogens appear. The pathogens are looking for an environment in which they can survive and be fed. In a way, many negative beings are like that. They’re not necessarily demonic intelligences trying to corrupt humanity; they’re responding to hunger and seeking an environment where food is available.

What you want to do is change the environment. In most cases, it’s not a battle as much as asking, “What do I have to do to cleanse this environment?” It’s a hygienic process as much as a warrior process.

It’s a hygienic process as much as it is a warrior process.

Rick: Destructive things also have their role in the universe. Dung beetles and bacteria that break down a corpse have a role to play.

David: That’s exactly right. Some beings may look dark, but they aren’t evil. Their function is to break things down; they are decay-eaters. What becomes problematic is when a human being tries to harness those forces for power, as if weaponizing a virus.

Other entities have become broken and pathogenic, often because of human activity and our projection of negative thought and emotion. Some are our energetic children that emerge from us in a broken state. They are just looking for something to attach to. That’s the kind of negativity against which one has to protect and perform energy hygiene.

Rick: Many people say that when they’ve reached a certain stage of enlightenment, they become washing machines for collective consciousness. Maharishi was fond of setting up large groups of meditators because he felt they would have a profoundly cleansing effect on collective consciousness.

David: That can happen. It isn’t automatic as a person develops consciousness, but it could be a path of service.

One and many

Rick: You say, “The sacred cannot be adequately described as either a single source, a oneness, nor as multiple sources interacting together. It’s something else that embraces and holds both of these manifestations. But how can something be one and many at the same time? Whatever the sacred is, it may be neither the one nor the many, neither a oneness nor a diversity, but rather the capacity to be either as needed.” You also say, “Differences generate creativity, and differences arise from boundaries and thresholds, that is, things that separate.”

David: Here we are having this delightful conversation, and part of what makes it possible is that you’re not David and I’m not Rick. We have differences. You see things a certain way, and out of that come your questions and insights. I see things a certain way, and the same thing happens.

We may not agree, but insights may arise that neither of us would come to alone. The fact that you’re not me and I’m not you enhances the field of energy, the possibilities of knowledge, and the growth of spirit around us and between us.

When we talk about the sacred, we use words and concepts that evolved in a constrained universe—a three-dimensional world with time flowing in one direction. Anything we say about the sacred will be inaccurate because our words aren’t big enough to capture that reality. Poetry, metaphor, music, and dance may sometimes get closer.

So, in saying that the sacred may be both one and many, I’m trying to capture something that can’t be entirely defined as one or the other. In seeking to experience that paradox, we may come to a deeper insight.

I celebrate separation and difference. If you spill water on a table and put down an ordinary sheet of paper, it absorbs some water. Put down a paper towel, and it absorbs much more because it has more surface area. Each of us is a little bump on the paper towel of creation. Each of us absorbs something out of the universe and has a perspective no other being has.

Each of us is a little bump on the paper towel of creation.

If I keep my perceptions only to myself, separation has gone amok. But if I recognize that I’m separate so I can absorb something you can’t absorb, then it increases the surface area of divinity. We need to share and collaborate. Difference and separation can serve harmony and wholeness.

Rick: So, we’re villi in the cosmic small intestine.

David: I’m not sure I want to quite go there, but yes, you’re right.

🎵 Findhorn and ecological partnership

Rick: Findhorn was an amazing place in northern Scotland, with sandy soil and a cold climate. Yet the community grew beautiful, lush foliage and plants, even when skeptics brought plants they thought couldn’t grow there.

It would seem that everything you’re talking about, and what Findhorn represented, has important implications for ecology and the future of our planet.

David: The important lesson from Findhorn is collaboration between human beings and the subtle worlds, in this case the nature spirits and devas. Human beings gardening on their own could not have produced the results Findhorn got, but the devas and nature spirits could not have produced those results either. It was two species working together.

The devas always said through Dorothy Maclean, their primary contact, “If you work with us, we can transform the pollution that you’re dealing with. We can truly turn the planet itself into a Garden of Eden.”

That’s one reason why I went to Findhorn: to experience the concreteness of this collaboration in action. The project team I’m involved with says, “We want greater collaboration, because together we can enhance the health and wholeness of the world in ways neither species can achieve alone.”

For collaboration, human beings need to stand in a place where they honor their spiritual and sacred nature and meet the subtle beings as equals—not put them on pedestals, worship them, fear them, or dismiss them as fantasy. Then we can work together in partnership.

Part of incarnational spirituality has to do with how I learn to stand in this sovereign, attuned, sacred place. From there, I can engage with partners from the subtle worlds, and together we can do things we could not do separately.

✨ Cultivating subtle awareness

Rick: A question came in from Aurelian Carnoy: “What practices are there to cultivate subtle awareness? What can we do as individuals and as humanity at large to bring about a Findhorn-like world?”

David: The best way I can answer is to say, “Check out my book called Working with Subtle Energies,” or Journey into Fire, one of the Lorian classes, because that’s exactly what we deal with.

Each individual has a unique relationship with the subtle world. We experience the physical world in different ways, and that extends into the subtle worlds. There is no single technique that works for every person. It’s an exploration. My classes and books offer principles and ways to go about it, but I don’t prescribe one technique.

For that exploration, you need to come to a place where you can say, “This is possible. I can be aware of the subtle worlds.” In fact, all of us are aware all the time; we just don’t recognize the signs and symptoms.

We have privileged the mind. Coming out of the age of reason, we have exalted reason and mental capacities, so most people think connecting with subtle worlds is a mental activity. The mind is involved, but it’s a whole-body process. Every part of us is involved.

Many people receive clear messages from the subtle worlds through physical sensation. A close friend who had been at Findhorn always felt she was the person who couldn’t see or hear anything. Then she realized that she was receiving a great deal of information; it simply came through her body in ways she learned to recognize.

So the first thing is to say it’s possible and start paying attention. Then we ask, “Is it my imagination? Can I trust this?” The answer is yes. Some of it will always be imagination. Imagination is an integral part of perception on the physical level and in dealing with subtle worlds. But it’s not all imagination.

You need to go through the imaginal aspects to touch the reality behind them. You have to trust yourself and say, “This is a process. I’m not going to short-circuit it by saying, ‘It’s just my imagination.’ Maybe it is, but let me go more deeply into the experience and see what unfolds.”

I’m going to accept myself and see myself as a trustworthy instrument in making this connection.

Closing thoughts

Rick: I think this has been a really useful conversation. It’s important for us to have as clear and detailed an understanding as possible of the territory, both because it’s inspiring and motivating and because it helps us navigate. If we have an idea of what’s possible, we won’t be as disconcerted by unfamiliar experiences or mistake something unimportant for something significant.

David: What’s important for people to know is to listen to different voices, because none of us has the whole picture. I have part of it, and many other people are contributing their insights and awarenesses. Let a thousand roses bloom.

As long as we exercise discernment, I have a couple of principles. If a being says, “You are my children, and do what I say because I know more,” that’s a huge red flag. If a human being is put down in any way, or I find myself dealing with some celestial hierarchy, I get out of that too. Whoever comes through from the subtle worlds should empower and develop collaboration, not control or obedience.

Rick: That’s the nature of this show: every week, a different voice. These days I find that enriching. Every new ingredient added to the stew seems to make it more tasty.

David: You can think of me as a potato.

Rick: You look a little bit like a potato.

David: It’s when I take my eyes out, my ears off, and my mouth off.

Rick: Don’t do that.

David: Wow, he really is Mr. Potato Head.

Rick: Thanks so much, David. I could easily go on another couple of hours with you, but out of compassion for you and the audience, we won’t do that right now. Maybe another time.

David: Okay, Rick, thank you very much. Actually, I’m starting to lose my voice.

Rick: Ah. Time for a break. For those who’ve been listening or watching, this is an ongoing series. It exists both as a video program on YouTube and as an audio podcast, and there’s a link on the website where you can subscribe in various ways.

The Donate button is there, along with the schedule of upcoming interviews and the past interviews organized in different ways. Check out the site, batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—and we’ll see you soon. Thank you. Thanks, David.

David: Thank you. [Music]