Ingrid Honkala Interview

Summary:

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done well over 500 of them now, and if this is new to you, if you haven’t seen one before, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll find all the previous ones archived in various ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of batgap.com. My guest today is Ingrid Honkala, PhD. Welcome Ingrid.

Ingrid: Thanks so much, Rick. Thanks for having me here, it’s just such an honor.

Rick: Well, it’s a delight to have you. I read your whole book this past week entitled “A Brightly Guided Life, How a Scientist Learned to Hear Her Inner Wisdom,” and it’s quite a book. We’ll be talking about a lot of the stuff that you wrote about in that book during this interview and a few things you didn’t write about because I had a few questions as I read it, which I still have. But let me just say a few things about you quickly. Ingrid was born in Bogota, Colombia, and she had a near-death experience when she was nearly three years old from drowning in a tank of cold water. It’s a good thing it was cold, by the way, you know that, don’t you? You don’t want to drown in warm water because your brain doesn’t last very long, but cold water people have lasted up to half an hour and been revived and been okay. So anyway, it’s 8,600 feet in Bogota, so that’s why the water was cold. Ingrid, now during this experience, and she’ll be telling us in detail, she became aware of other dimensions of life and began to perceive beings of light, and they have, she’s been in touch with them on and off throughout her life ever since, and they have helped her in various ways, which we’ll also discuss. Ingrid had a whole lot of challenges. Colombia was a country at war as she was growing up there, and she went through all sorts of things which we’ll describe in some detail, but she ended up getting a PhD in, would you say oceanography or is it more specific?

Ingrid: Yeah, to be more specific, marine sciences with emphasis in biological oceanography.

Rick: Okay, marine sciences, yeah. And she’s worked at NASA, she’s traveled all over the world, she’s done all kinds of interesting things and her life has also had a profound spiritual track to it as she developed this professional track. Alrighty, so there’s a lot more to the bio, but let’s just get into our conversation and details will come out as we go.

Ingrid: Let’s do that.

Rick: Alright, so it seems like the best place to start is this near-death experience story which I’m sure you’ve told a thousand times, but people listening to this probably haven’t heard it, so let’s start with that.

Ingrid: Yes, Rick, thanks. Yeah, like you mentioned, I lived in Bogota at the time and I lived with my parents and two of my sisters at the time, and it was normal those days in Colombia to have a maid living in the house. So my parents would leave for work, they left us at the care of this lady and when they would go out she didn’t even pay attention to us. So early one morning my oldest sister, who was close to four, I was close to three, decided “Let’s go play.” And there was a patio at the back of the house, we went to the patio, it was very early around six in the morning, 6: 30, and then in this patio there was a tank and the purpose of this tank was for hand-washing clothes. Back in the day we didn’t have a washing machine, so this tank was for to collect water. It held about 900 gallons of water. And next to the tank there was a flat surface for scrubbing. So we grabbed a couple of stools, my sister climbed the tank and she sat on the flat surface, so she was a little bit safer compared with me. I went to the other side, it was a thin edge, and being a child, what is the danger? So I’m leaning very precariously in this tank. She grabbed the ball and she tossed, oh yeah, the idea was to play catch across the tank. So she grabbed a ball, she tossed, or she threw the ball at me, and at that moment she didn’t apply enough force and the ball fell in the water and, oh, I thought I could grab it. What is the problem? I leaned forward to try to grab the ball and it rolled on the surface of the water and then I fell into the tank. Like you mentioned, probably the temperature in this tank was about 30, 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The water was frigid cold, so that was the first thing, was the feeling of like, this water is cold. And then after that was that sense, Rick, of like, oh, why I cannot breathe. I have never been in a pool, we didn’t have a bathtub, so I did not have idea that if you fall in the water you drown, I didn’t know this. So I’m now in this state of absolute horror, why I cannot breathe. And then I just sunk into the tank and when I am in this desperate attempt to just try to get out of this water, didn’t know how to swim, I went in just like that, from this state of complete terror to just like, ah, one of absolute peace. I didn’t have to fight anymore, I didn’t need to breathe, I didn’t need to escape from this tank, it was like, wow. I didn’t have idea what was happening, but I was feeling incredibly well. And then I always like to put like, describe some little contrast that happened there, because one thing is this tank was entirely made of cement, it had a roof, so the area in the tank was very dark. So the last thing I saw, Rick, with my eyes open, was like the darkness of the space. And then in just like a flash, a light came from below. And this light was like the light of a candle, but it was able to illuminate the whole watery surrounding and now I’m like, wow, there’s light. The next thing, the next incredible contrast was that I live in a house that was very noisy. We have dogs, birds, cousins, my sister, so there was always noise. And the last thing I also heard before I went to the state of peace was my heart. Imagine the scare. My heart was pounding in my chest like the anxiety I could hear in my head. Boom, boom, boom. And it went silent. There was the state of I just experienced absolute silence. And it’s what I what I call the silence behind the silence, because never in my life after that I could experience that. And I wanted that silence, Rick. And later I will hide in closets, chapels, whatever it was to find that silence. So that was the other thing. And this moment I am mesmerized by, oh, this feels so good. And then I started to see bubbles suspended in the water. And these bubbles were surrounded by light. And it was by looking these bubbles, like wow, and chasing the bubbles that I turn around. And then I saw a body suspended in the water. And it’s when incredibly I just at that moment had the realization, the clarity, oh, that’s my body. I didn’t even feel afraid. And Rick, it was the sense like, oh, this already had happened. I was familiar with this situation like, oh, I already like I already had changed bodies many times. I already experienced like the eternity of who I was.

Rick: Now let me interrupt you right here, this is interesting. So you are not even three years old, and you’re describing this now with your adult mind, but you’re describing things that a two or three year old could hardly conceive of, particularly this last thing you said that you had the realization that you have changed bodies many times, so you’re alluding to reincarnation. So there’s two interesting things here. One is that you would be able to entertain such a concept as reincarnation, and the other is that what strikes me throughout this whole story is that you remember it so vividly, as if it happened yesterday, even though it happened maybe almost 40-something years ago. So what do you say to those things?

Ingrid: You know, Rick, that’s incredible because that’s the clarity I have about this experience, and to the point that even when I mention it and I wrote it on the book, even when we saw the balls in the patio, I can even have memory of the color of the ball, and it had like high relief letters on it.

Rick: Embossed, they call it embossed, yeah.

Ingrid: Oh, embossed, and I could even remember the drawings that were next to each letter. It’s like, how clear this is in my mind. And when I had that clarity of even seeing, like, “Wow, this already happened,” it was the sense of, “I am familiar with this, and I cannot explain how I knew this.”

Rick: Yeah, but you did.

Ingrid: And even when we talk about the after-effects, when I came back, I already came back with clarity. I didn’t come back like a child that had a near-death and forgot everything.

Rick: You came back like a wise person all of a sudden.

Ingrid: Yes. So, how I knew these things, I couldn’t explain, but even again, like, later in the experience, when I joined or when I was in this realm of the light, was again the sense of familiarity. I already have been here. I already have experience here. I’m just coming back home. So yeah, this whole experience, and again, that’s why I also like to bring all the points of contrast, because I think that’s what also made this experience so difficult, or I guess impossible to forget, because there were so many things that I experienced that brought that extreme contrast. And the other one that I am about to mention is when I saw the body, Rick, and I was born as a very sick child, and I spent almost the first three years of my life feeling unwell. So up to this point of my life, I didn’t even know how to feel well, I mean for Ingrid as a three-year-old. And now I am experiencing the sense of absolute well-being. Like I’m feeling so well that, wow, look at the decisions. Look at the clarity, how I could even make this decision with the knowing that I could make it. I just look at the body and I’m like, “I’m not going back there.” And I just look at the body and I’m like, “Why do I want to be in that body?” And I feel so well that this is the other part that I said sometimes we will ask why a child will be born sick, why these things could happen. And for me, in my own experience, I cannot talk for other people, but that brought me at that moment, or the memory of holding that point of contrast. What it was to feel unwell and what it was to feel so well.

Rick: It’s interesting that a person can feel well when they don’t even have a body. It makes you wonder, like, what is it that we feel? What are we feeling with if we don’t have a body?

Ingrid: Yeah, and you know what? I have thought about that, Rick. And even when I look at people that are very sick, with sickness, cancer, whatever it is, and you go to sleep, how is it possible that you can even rest if your body is in so much pain? But you go to sleep and you disconnect. And this is, I would just, to put that analogy, that’s how it feels. It’s like you, it’s like pretty much at that moment, your body or the concept or whatever it is, your body separates and you don’t feel, you don’t have… Later, actually, when I came back, Rick, I would have that question for years. I said, “How could I have seen my body lifeless if I was still alive?” More alive than ever, how is it possible?

Rick: Well, you not only saw your body in the tank, but as I’m sure you’re about to tell us, you went and traveled around a little bit and saw other people.

Ingrid: I did, which was what made this amazing because, and it’s what validates also the whole experience even more because at that moment, like I said, I just saw the body. I’m not going back there, turned around, and I started to see flowers that were blooming from nowhere. And this is amazing because now you think about this, something I think now, I didn’t think it back there, but I’m like, what happened with dimension? How big these flowers were that I was picked up by flowers? See, so these are things I think now, of course. But then I just was picked up by flowers and it was like, this is great!

Rick: The flowers were picking you up, you were sitting on them.

Ingrid: Yes, yes. So who was being picked up? I don’t know. See, if I think about it now, I can create the ideas, but at the time I just didn’t. I’m just like – now I am being carried by flowers. This is, wow, this feels so good. And I can apply the analogy like it’s going back to the womb because again, it was that sense of like, I don’t have to do anything. I’m just being carried. And then I am just there in the state of just feeling so happy, joyful, good. And then in just a flash like that, I appear in the maid’s room and I’m like floating about her bed and I’m looking at her. And this is again, look at how incredible these memories are, Rick, that I can even remember the soap opera she was listening to on the radio. And she was completely unaware that I was there. And I’m like, oh, that’s Maria. That’s me. So from there, again, just a flash, I appear in my mom’s way. My mom was walking at that time. She didn’t have a car and she had to walk to her bus stop. And it was a big neighborhood. And I appeared there. And again, I am floating like above her. And the moment, Rick, she was actually walking. She could… There’s more story behind that, but she had just got this new job. So imagine the decision she had to make at this moment. If she doesn’t want to be late for that job or anything, she would not have turned around. But at that moment, when I said, oh, that’s mom, she stopped. She did not hesitate. She just stopped. And she knew; she knew something was happening at home. She turned around and started to run back home.

Rick: How far was she from the home?

Ingrid: It was far, Rick. It was about 10 minutes walking.

Rick: Wow. So five minutes running, maybe.

Ingrid: Yeah, so we don’t know how long I was under the water, but yeah, maybe about five minutes. And she started to run. And I just looked at her and I’m like, oh. And at that moment, it’s like I raised my I say my head because I didn’t have the concept that I wasn’t. I raised my vision and I saw a dog, and I love animals. So it was like at the end of a street. I mean, just like that. I was with the dog. And the wall. So at that moment, I turned my head and I look at tree and now I am with the tree and I’m like, wow. So I just started to play this game of going places.

Rick: Did the dog sense your presence?

Ingrid: I don’t know.

Rick: Sometimes animals do see subtle things, you know.

Ingrid: They do, they do. But no, at that moment, I was just… it was so fast, Rick. It was like I turned my head, saw a tree, and now I’m with the tree. So I’m like, I just started to play this game of going places. Like this is super fun. Then from there, everything in these experiences will happen in like in a second, like in a flash. Now, just like that, I appear in a realm, and it was made of pure, intense, shiny light. And it was the first time, Rick, in those almost three years of my life that I have this sense, the feeling that I am home. I have to also tell you something. Why did I feel this feeling of being home? One, I was burning up. Like I mentioned to you, my body was always unwell. Two, my parents were forced to marry. So it’s not really a very good situation happening at home. They will leave us home with a maid, who was a very abusive person. So the situation at home was very hard. And now I am in this realm of light where everything felt, well, where I felt welcome, where I was home. And I apply the analogy that for me there was the sense of like, say, in the morning I went to school or I left home or I went somewhere and I am back. But it’s not like even three years have passed. It was the sense. Wow, I am back home. This just happened. So again, that sense of familiarity kept repeating. And you ask me, I don’t know how I knew all these things, but it was that clear. And then now …

Rick: Was there anything in that light that you could perceive or was it just sort of light?

Ingrid: It was only light, but that was a feeling, there was the sense that I was not alone. So it was the sense like, again, I work with analogies, the sense that you get home and you know your parents, your family, your wife is somewhere in the house. And so I felt welcome. That was the feeling, I am being welcomed. And then at that moment, although I saw the body in the water and I knew it was my body, I did not have that realization that I am not that. So look at how far this went, Rick, because I went to knowing at that moment that I am not that. So I look at myself and I realize myself as a being of light. I am a being of light. And then I started to have that sense of like, just this sense of well-being amplified like So it was the sense of like, wow, I’m part of all this. There was no sense of, again, I am that body. I am this, I am that. And I feel that sense even today, I could just say with all the learnings, all the teachings I experienced, and I experienced it many times throughout my life, the sense of nothingness. What I mean with this, there was no presence of sound, of color, of meaning, of concept, of nothing I knew; no body, nothing. There was nothing, Rick.

Rick: It’s like pure consciousness all by itself.

Ingrid: Yes.

Rick: Yeah.

Ingrid: Pure consciousness. And I am in this nothingness state. Some people get very scared when I say nothing, but I feel, or now I know with all the other experiences that at the same time it’s the state of wholeness. It’s just, phew! True expansion, you feel, is what we call bliss, I guess. And then at that moment my mom arrived home, and this is the other incredible thing, Rick, she knew exactly where to go. And we lived in a big house, and she directed herself to the back of the house. This is the other thing I said about my mom. She was a very, very intuitive woman. And I said to people, “But it’s not just the intuition, it’s that you learn to hear your own intuition.” And my mom was always like that.

Rick: And she told you later that she could see auras and things like that too.

Ingrid: Yes, and spirits and all that since she was very little. She was very sensitive. She always was, all her life. So she went to the patio, and this is a question that people ask me. My sister was still there, and people ask me, “Why didn’t your sister go talk to the maid?” What happened, Rick, was that this lady was very abusive. And we were afraid of her. So look at what kids do (due to) fear of reprisal? She didn’t go.

Rick: She was afraid she’d get into trouble or something.

Ingrid: Exactly, and she was just trying to get me out of the water. But she was too little, and the tank was deep. So my mom got there. My sister said, “Ingrid is there, and I cannot get her.” My mom worked with children. She had some training. My mom always wanted to be a doctor in reality. She read a lot. Any training that was out there available, she would take it. She had some training somehow to do some CPR. I don’t even know how that training was at the time, but she went into the water. She got me out, and she started to do anything she knew to revive me. And at that moment, Rick, I was so disconnected from this reality. I did not feel anything. There was nothing to do with this body, with this physical reality. But again, like everything in this experience, I felt like that in a blast that I had jumped from the tallest building in the world, and there was nothing I could do. I didn’t. Nobody asked me, “You want to go back?” Nothing like that happened for me. It was like, “You go.” And I felt like I was being vacuumed, like I was being pulled. And it was the sense, like if you jump from ground zero and you feel the vacuum, like (gasps) and now there’s nothing I could do. And I knew I was back in the body when all the feelings of the heaviness, that I’m not free, I felt the uncomfortable feelings of the body, the pain, the coldness. The coldness is something even up to today I can never take away, (or) like shake away, like, “Oh!” And then now is when the hard time came, right, because I didn’t want to be back.

Rick: Yeah, you know, I can’t think of a single near-death experience that I’ve read and (I’ve) talked to so many people (and no one) ever said, “Oh boy, let’s go back to my body.” It was all sort of, “Oh God, I’m out of there. I don’t want to go back.” And then somebody, in some cases there would actually be a conversation where some guide or being of light or something would say, “No, sorry, you have to go back.” Or sometimes they’d give them a choice, like, “Okay, well, you can stay, but how about your daughter? How about your kids?” And then they’d think, “Okay, I’ll go back.” But it was always reluctantly.

Ingrid: Yes, I guess at that point, because I didn’t have that strong attachment with my parents either, with this reality with my body, I would not ask anything. I was just like, “You’re back!”

Rick: Have you given any thought – I’m sure you have over the years – to what it is that actually separates from the physical body and enables us to have experiences once the physical body is incapacitated or even dead?

Ingrid: What is that thing? I think (it’s)our consciousness.

Rick: Yeah.

Ingrid: I think we are….. Rick, I have experienced things that are incredible. One day I woke up in my bedroom. I (have) meditated all my life. For me, meditation is.. I say it’s not a doing, it’s a way of being. To me, I am in that state. I wake up at three in the morning. One day I woke up and I sat on my bed and I was bigger than the room itself. I was huge, Rick. I was huge, so huge that I couldn’t even fit in the bathroom. And I even heard the words, “Grandioso.” I was like, “Whoa!” And I had another experience, Rick, which shows that we are multidimensional beings. And for me to explain this one (to you) is a little bit difficult, so I have to use analogies as an oceanographer. I use the ocean as an analogy. But one time I went to sleep, Rick, and I’m in this deep sleep and I heard a bell. Cling, cling, cling, cling, cling. So to give an example with the ocean as the analogy, say that at that moment I woke up and I was at the very, very deep part of the ocean. How did I know? Because I woke up. I woke up feeling completely like I am awake, because I heard this bell. And I’m like, “Whoa, what was that bell?” And then I heard the bell again. Cling, cling, cling, cling. And I woke up again. I’m like, “Whoa! What? How? Oh!” And then I heard the bell again. Cling, cling, cling, cling. And I woke up again. What the…? And in all these times I woke up, I did not have any concept, idea, thought, connection with what we call “Ingrid.” So if I (use the analogy of) the ocean, I didn’t have any connection with the waves on the surface. It was like the depth of who I am. And this bell had to sound around five times before I arrived to what I call the thermal climb, where you can feel that there’s okay, the disturbance, what is happening in the layers, the first layers of the ocean. And I just like, “Oh, oh, there’s something, something that is called Ingrid.” And I heard the bell again. Cling, cling, cling. And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, there’s an Ingrid thing. There’s an Ingrid thing.” And then I heard for the last time, it was six or seven times, Rick, when I am finally, “Wow, yes, I’m here. This is the bed my husband is at. Wow, yeah.” So it’s then I realized with that clarity that we are multidimensional beings and we’re living in all these states of being.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, very true. I’ve had some experiences like that too, but I won’t go into them. Just all kinds of interesting things, but yeah, a lot of people have. And you know, I think that we all know it on some level, even the most ardent atheist or materialist or skeptic, we have to have some kind of deep, innate sense that there’s so much more to life than we’re experiencing, such greater depth, such greater profundity. It can never be entirely blotted out, don’t you think?

Ingrid: It cannot. Even when you ask me, and look, this is what made me also see children and think about children with completely different eyes, because of course, at the moment we see the child and what the child comes with…; and now (the child) is going to be conditioned by what we know. But when I had my near-death experience, now that you ask me how I was aware of seeing myself in eternity and wearing different shells, like I call it, is because I came back, Rick, and now I had an awareness I did not have before. And when I looked at my body, that body, I was not that child.

Rick: So, you didn’t forget that, did you? I mean, there you are, a little three-year-old, four-year-old, five-year-old, and you just knew, you know, this is not me.

Ingrid: I knew, Rick, and I would look at my parents, so that was hard too, because you will think, how is this child with her parents? But I had some sort of disconnection at some level, as in “I know you’re not just my biological (parents), I know you’re not this.” I felt them as my equal. I couldn’t relate with other children, because I would look at the people, Rick, and I’d be like, what is happening with these people? They don’t know anything. To me, they’re like, what is going on? So I came already with that awareness, and not just with knowing I am more than this body, I am not this. I would look at myself in the mirror, Rick, and I said, that’s not who I am. That is not my name. But I would just say, I should not be here, because I just didn’t want to be here. And my mom, what can you do with a child like that? It’s like my mom just tried to say, you’re beautiful, don’t think this way, be grateful with God, whatever, but what do you do? And then I started to feel very angry. I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to even be touched by people. I didn’t want to be here, Rick, because I just, for me, it’s like, what is happening? Why am I here?

Rick: It’s not your home. You had gone home, and all of a sudden, you’re not home anymore, right?

Ingrid: Yes, Rick, and now this is the other incredible thing, all the validation that happened in this experience. Now I came back and I had the abilities of being able to read, write, resolve mathematical problems, put together complex puzzles.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve heard you say that. I mean, how much of a jump in your ability was there? And did you go from -like, usually people who are under three can’t read at all, or write- did you all of a sudden, right then, next few days, start reading and writing?

Ingrid: Yeah, but it wasn’t like a full-

Rick: Yeah, it wasn’t. Shakespeare, it was sort of, yeah, something.

Ingrid: It was sort of like, they will show, and you know what happened, Rick? You know how children don’t develop (and for my mom, that was great, because she was a Teacher) that abstract ability until later on? I already had it, once I came back. So for me, I was able to see (patterns in) numbers, and I retained that (ability) for the rest of my life. I could just see patterns, I could see how the words work, I could see how everything worked, and then I would just say to my mom, and later in school, when I joined school. It was a problem, because they didn’t have a culture of children like me. And for the teacher, it’s like, “If you know everything, just sit in that corner and let us be,” because to me, it’s like –

Rick: So you know the answers right away, right?

Ingrid: Yeah, so for me, school was stupid; my mom said she never met anybody more rebellious than me.

Rick: It’s funny, I used to have a girlfriend, like, 50 years ago, who was a school teacher, and there was a kid in her class who, she was always telling me about it, “Oh, this kid is such a problem, oh man, what am I going to do with him?” And they were thinking of holding him back a grade or something, and then somehow they figured out that the problem was that he was actually much too smart for that class, and so they skipped him ahead of a grade, and then all of a sudden, all the problems went away. So he was more challenged, he wasn’t bored, and he was able to fit right in.

Ingrid: Yeah, so that’s the problem when we see everybody else, that all of us have to do things the same way, and I experienced it myself, so I had problems at school because of that, and for me, Rick, it was the same thing that happened during my near-death Experience. It was the sense, “I am not learning these things, I’m just remembering. I’m just remembering. I’m just remembering.” So that was incredible. So imagine a little child talking to her parents about a subject, about which of course, I I had no language to express. This made it so hard, because how could I tell them, “I’m experiencing these things,” and there was not the understanding either. So if I would tell them, “I see things, I hear things, I…. whatever it is,” they just didn’t understand what was happening. And there’s the other thing, though, Rick, which is funny. I always say to people that after my near-death experience, it’s like the door never closed, because I kept having out-of-body experiences, communicating with beings of light. Then not long ago, the beings of light said to me, “Of course the door never closed, because there is no door.” So I was like, “Oh, yeah, what we call the kingdom of heaven, consciousness, whatever we want to call it, is what we are. We are that consciousness, we are that light. So we are the ones – due to conditionings, school, parents, ancestors – we are the ones that close that door. We can use the analogy of the sun, the sun is always shining, we’re the one who close the shutter.”

Rick: Now you’ve referred to beings of light several times, but you haven’t really told us yet how the beings of light experience began. Was it actually in the tank you began to see beings of light, or later on once you were resuscitated, or what?

Ingrid: No, it was later on, Rick. Like I said to you, after my near-death experience, I didn’t know anything about out-of-body experiences, of course, I didn’t have that concept, but that started to happen, that’s how we know it nowadays. I know now because I would close my eyes and I would just start experiencing movements, Rick, that I had never experienced. Changes in vibration, frequencies, colors, sounds, I had never seen, I started experiencing them. And it was kind of scary at the beginning, but I would go to the realm of the light again. So I was like, “Wow!” So it didn’t matter if all these things were kind of shocking and scary, I wanted to be in that realm of light.

Rick: And you could do that any time you wanted?

Ingrid: No, just when I went to sleep.

Rick: Oh, okay. But then later on you learned to meditate, maybe that became more voluntary, but in any case you’re saying that when you were a little kid, it would be when you started to go to sleep that this happened?

Ingrid: Yes, this would happen, and then of course after this, because it felt so good, I wanted to sleep more. Yes, and then what happened is in one of these journeys, one day, Rick, I just saw starlight figures that were shining everywhere. If I have to explain how it is, it is like if you’re outside looking at the stars, but instead of seeing a black universe, it is all light; the lights were shining in all different colors, all different colors, everywhere, like to the infinite. And I went, “Whoa!” So now imagine, I wanted to sleep forever! And then in one of these journeys, one of these lights shaped itself into a human form, and it was shining in gold, pure gold light.

Rick: Now let me ask you here, so you were going to sleep, but you weren’t asleep yet, this wasn’t a dream. You were somewhere in between, or just settling in, and then you started having this experience?

Ingrid: Yes, yes, so I would start closing my eyes and then I would start seeing these changes in color, speed, sound, and I would appear there.

Rick: And then when it had a human form, this first one, was it like kind of very dreamlike and indistinct, or was it very clear, like you could see eyes, nose, various features?

Ingrid: No, no, just the shape.

Rick: The shape, okay.

Ingrid: The shape, kind of to show me, “I am like you.” So, it was the shape of this being, and it touched me, Rick, and when it touched me, then I had the clear knowing in my head, and it came as, “You are a being of light.” So this was something that happened.

Rick: The knowing was that you were one, or that that was one.

Ingrid: That he is one.

Rick: He is one.

Ingrid: Because I saw myself as a being of light during that experience, it was the knowing that we are the same.

Rick: Okay, it takes one to know one, as they say.

Ingrid: Yes, exactly. And that day I snapped awake. But guess what happened, Rick? Of course my parents told the other lady to go, because she almost let me drown. They hired a new one, but this one also did it. I mean, if a kid is sleeping, you don’t have to take care of the child, so she was happy that I was sleeping. So what started to happen is I wanted to take naps. I wanted to sleep all the time. So I would just go to sleep because I wanted to be there. But it’s now that I understand, of course, balance is needed. At that moment I didn’t think about that, but I couldn’t sleep forever. So it’s then that I understood why I started to see them here. One day I was taking a shower, having this really, really good shower, when a being of light that was shining in bright blue, was there. It was this bright blue intense light, it shone in the bathroom. And I’m like, “Oh, now the beings of light are here.” And now after that, I started to see them everywhere. And this is one thing people ask me, like, “How do you see them? How do you hear them?” At the beginning, they really didn’t need to shape into anything. I just knew. So I just saw the lights shining, and when I would look at them, and later I started to hear voices. But if they would talk or they would communicate with me, it didn’t matter who it was, I knew who was talking. So I didn’t have to see a shape, I didn’t have to see the expression, I just knew. I knew who was talking.

Rick: Let me ask you a couple of mundane questions, just to make this more real for me and other people. So I got the impression from what you just said that it didn’t really matter whether your eyes were open or closed. It wasn’t really a matter of your physical eyes, if it were even pitch dark, you could have seen them, right?

Ingrid: Yes, yes, yes. And the thing is, I like to continue going deeper with what you just asked. I didn’t think about that there, but later in life, I understood. I know now, I understand this concept of home. Home is not a place, it’s a state of being. Because when the beings of light started to appear here, in the physical realm, I started to heal, Rick. I started to talk to my parents, I started to feel well, I started wanting to interact with others, I started to eat. My physical body, I was very ill. After the drowning, I was worse. But I just started to feel well. So, now later in life, I understand that I didn’t have to go anywhere. Now that the beings of light were here, and I felt that sense of well-being, I felt love, I felt care, I felt that I was not alone. And then this is the other thing, because I felt that I did not have attachment with my name, Rick, or with my persona, and I was throwing big tantrums. They would call me by my name and I would get aggravated. And there was an evening when they were calling me for dinner and the lady was like, “Ingrid, Ingrid, and I said, “don’t call me like that.” Then I would just ignore it. And then she came and said, “Ingrid, don’t you hear? We’re calling you for dinner.” And I turned to her and I said, “Do not call me like that. That is not my name.” And she looked at me and she’s like, “So what is your name?” to just aggravate it. And I said, “I do not need one.”

Rick: They must have thought you were a strange little kid.

Ingrid: Of course, everybody at school thought, “What is with that child?” And then that night, Rick, when they sent me to bed, I was so aggravated, so sad, and it was the first time I heard a voice.

Rick: Now, the voice, was it speaking in Spanish or was it more pre-verbal?

Ingrid: So, it was conveying ideas without any specific language being expressed.

Ingrid: You know, that’s incredible because I never even thought about it until people asked me, and then later on when I paid attention, it was like, yeah, I don’t think there was Really a sense of a language. I cannot tell you if it was a man or a woman. There was none of that (detail). But I have had experiences where I clearly heard a voice that was more female or male. But with the beings of light, depending who is talking, it will be different. And I didn’t have, again, the sense of a language, but there have been other occasions in my life, like when I wrote my book, everything came in English. So, the language was English. It was amazing. When I get many of the teachings, they come in English. So, you know, it’s like a download, but if you’re kind of paying attention deeply, there’s not really a language, but I guess we translate it that way.

Rick: I would imagine that in the realm where these beings of light dwell, it would be too gross to have a physical spoken language, you know, of which there are many thousands on the earth. They would just communicate telepathically, but it wouldn’t be in human language.

Ingrid: Yes, that’s why I think at the end, when we’re at that level of being, we can communicate with anybody. It doesn’t matter what the physical language is, we manage, we can hear, we can communicate. And once you start having that telepathic communication, like when I talk to people, even from other countries, even when people that write to me, I already have a sense, I know their thing, even if they can speak a different language, because it goes deeper than that. But another thing, separate also from the language, is the names. That’s the first time the beings of light said to me, they talked to me like in a whisper, and said, “This is our secret.” They said to me, “It’s going to take time for them to understand.” And I’m like, “Oh, imagine, I can hear.” And they said that in the realm of the light, names are not needed. You cannot imagine the sense of relief that that gave me, because it was the feeling that, “I am not crazy. I don’t need a name. I know now why I don’t need a name.” Because they said, “They’re not needed, and you already know that.” So people ask me, too, “What are the names of these guys, these beings of light, these angels?” And I say, “I never cared for a name, because I already know that names are not needed.” But of course, later I understood here in our physical realm, in our human experience, of course, we’re like a container, a basket. We need a name, profession. We have our uniqueness, our purpose, so that’s beautiful. But beyond this realm, it’s not needed.

Rick: Yeah. I have a friend who had a profound spiritual awakening and sees beings of light, and I didn’t know that at first, but we were at a conference in California and he told me that he sees beings of light. He actually sees them clustering around people out on the patio and things like that, doing something, he didn’t know what, attending to people somehow. And later on, we were going home and we were in an elevator in the San Francisco airport, and I was really curious about it, and I said, “Hey, are there any in this elevator?” And he just kind of smiled. And then we got out of the elevator and he said, “They said to me, ‘Don’t point us out to people. If they are meant to see us, they will see us.'”

Ingrid: Yeah, that’s my experience, too. They said, “Do not talk about us.”

Rick: Yeah, I mean, you can talk like we’re doing right now.

Ingrid: Yeah.

Ingrid: But if you were sitting in a restaurant and the waiter came over, you would say, “Hey, you know, there’s a being of light around you, they’d probably kick you out of the restaurant.”

Ingrid: No, I don’t do that. And also, Rick, one of the things the beings of light said to me through time (my book is full of teachings, but they said to me), “Ingrid, your path is the path of gentleness. You’re not here to convince anybody about anything, so do not interfere. Do not go saying things.” Now I do it because we do it for the general audience, and if someone wants to listen, somebody’s in tune with us, they will come and listen. And if they don’t, and if they don’t agree, it’s okay, too.

Rick: Yeah.

Ingrid: All of us are in our own path. But then the time also arrived in my life when I met a person, at my job, actually. I was working at that moment for the U.S. Navy. I met a friend, and that is when the beings of light told me, “You can tell her everything.”

Rick: Oh, cool.

Ingrid: But by then I was already 40, I think 41 years old, so all those years had passed. They said, “The time will come.” Rick, they knew, and this is another thing that I talk about, and it’s in my book. I started to have visions since I was four years old, and I already knew at the beginning. I didn’t know those were visions, but later in my life when I saw them and they manifested, it was like, “Whoa.” And sometimes it was little things, and later it was just other big things. But I remember my parents took me to see the ocean for the first time, and I was completely mesmerized. And I said to my mom, she had to actually have to kind of shake me because I would just get like, “Oh.” And I said, “Mom, someday I’m going to know.” It was that (I knew I would have) the knowing. I said, “Someday I’m going to know what is there under that blanket.” And when I was five years old, I approached my dad and I said, “Dad, when I grow up, I’m going to be a marine scientist.” And he was just like, “Okay.” And I was born in the mountains, far away from the ocean, but I already knew these things, Rick. When I was 12, I had a vision. Imagine, I was born in Colombia, when I thought I would ever work for NASA or nothing like that, middle-class girl, didn’t even think about my future, or about what I am going to do later. And then I had this vision where I was shown the exact building, the road, the place where I was going to work.

Rick: When you were 12.

Ingrid: When I was 12. And when I was in this place 20-something years later, I was almost floored. I told my husband, “I’m going to work there, and I’m going to work there.” And he’s like, “Uh.” He was lost.

Rick: It’s interesting. How do you think that works?

Ingrid: There’s a lot of things about time and how time works, but I think that what we do is that we set major milestones. I just say it’s like we have that knowing within ourselves. Even before we come, I know that (we have) what we call a pre-plan. But even so, people always ask me, “So we (our fates) are predestined?” And I say, “No, no. It actually is like this – I could just decide I’m going to go to college.” So I set a milestone. But what is going to happen before I have my degree? I don’t know which electives I’m going to take, how long I’m going to take doing this, two years, three years. So I said it’s the same thing.

Rick: Yeah.

Ingrid: It’s like we set major goals, and how we get there might vary.

Rick: Yeah.

Ingrid: And sometimes I also have experienced this. I say that time is like a ruler made of cheese. It’s (like there is) horizontal and vertical time. I think that when you have big awakenings, you cut the time. I think there’s things you don’t need to experience anymore. So there’s certain things that were going to bring you to certain challenges, to certain things to grow, to evolve. And somehow you have these big awakenings in your life. Now there are things you don’t need (to experience). So it’s like you jump and you just experience something else. I know that because of other experiences I have had, where I just thought why didn’t that happen or why was that change was so big, and the beings of light said to me, “Because you didn’t need it anymore.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. There’s a verse in the Yoga Sutras where it says, “Avert the danger which has not yet come,” and the idea is that you might have some load of karma coming down the pike, you know, but you can actually work it off before it gets here. And so, maybe you were destined to break your leg or something, but instead you stub your toe, and you don’t have to go through the big bad thing that was going to happen.

Ingrid: Yes, yes. There was a time when I went to ask for this job, and at the time I was an expert in mangroves and mangrove ecosystems in Colombia. I had done vast research (on this subject), and I didn’t get hired for the job. So the mind was like, “Oh my, I wasn’t good enough.” All the stuff that we create in the head, you know, all the drama. And then, okay, I didn’t get the job. Years later, well, five years later, after thinking for all those years how I could (have got the job, but) I did not, (and that) I was the one for that job. And then five years later, four years later, I learned that the person that actually got the job was killed by the rebels.

Rick: Interesting, yeah.

Ingrid: In one of the field trips, and I asked the beings of light (about this) later, and they said “You did not need that challenge. You might not have died, but you might have been really badly injured, but you did not need that challenge, so it was not for you.”

Rick: Well, this brings up an interesting question. Are the beings of light like passive observers who just have a broader perspective on the whole course of your life, or are they actually more like puppeteers who are influencing events, like preventing you from getting that job, for instance, because of the potential danger or because they happen to know that you no longer needed it? So, they’re actually messing with the mind of the employer and saying, “Don’t give her that job.”

Ingrid: You know, Rick, I think there’s a little bit of both.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Ingrid: Because there’s certain things in which I would have said, “Why did this happen this way,” or I would just say, “This didn’t come from me.” I feel I am a vehicle, to be honest. There are certain things – I’m just the vehicle for things to happen. So, I just open myself to that. And the other thing is that I think they were like guides. They never have told me, actually, in my life what to do or which decisions to make, but There are times in which they act just like guides. They suggest, and I’ve been really rebellious in my life. So, there were moments in which I would just say to them, “I’m not doing that.”

Rick: [Laughter]

Ingrid: Because they said, “How could you say that to the beings of light…” And even when they asked me, (when I was 19 years old they asked me) if I wanted to actually be a teacher, if I wanted to keep going in this path of a spirit and being a spiritual teacher, I said, “No, I’m not going to teach anything. I don’t want to teach anything to anyone. I want to be normal. I want to be like everyone else.” And that was the time when I pretty much asked the beings, “Can you just please leave me kind of alone?”

Rick: Uh-huh.

Ingrid: And people are like, “How could you do that?” And I said, “Because it’s like if you have parents, and at some point you go to college, and you want to do your own thing.” But this was beautiful, Rick, because I said, “Your parents are always one call away. It’s not that, ‘Hey, bye,’ and I never saw them again.” But it was the sense that I could have my experience. I could go on my path. So I think there’s a little bit of, well, like, (it is) with our parents. They cannot force you to do anything, but they can guide you and tell you, “Oh, Ingrid, don’t do that. Look, I have had that experience. Why did you…?” But it’s my decision at the end. So I don’t think we’re puppets. I just think that they’re guiding us, and at the end, I believe and I think there’s free will.

Rick: Yeah, I agree. And obviously, if they were controlling every bit of our life, even if we had free will, but they were exerting so much control, we’d get lazy, and we wouldn’t develop our autonomy, you know, our self-sufficiency. And self-sufficiency, obviously, is a critical stage of development.

Ingrid: Yeah, and challenges wouldn’t be necessary, because for what?

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Ingrid: So, yeah, all these experiences, at the end, life is here to challenge us so we can go back to remember, or we can go back to that place of realizing, “I am that consciousness. I am that light. I am that..” But if everything is being done, like you say, for us, then we will never need to.

Rick: Yeah, kind of like not developing muscles because you never get to lift a heavy weight or anything.

Ingrid: But there’s also things that they kind of know. Like, there was a moment when I told them I want to continue doing my thing, but they kept saying to me, “Okay, I don’t know, this is another story, but one day I was sitting in a bus, Rick, and I was looking through the window, and I felt like I was an observer. This is how I felt also all my life, Rick, that I was an observer.” And I asked, “What is it that I am observing?” And they say, “Life through your own personal experience.” So, I felt that with the beings of light, I was providing feedback. It’s the feedback. It’s amazing. So, I was just then in this bus, and then I always say, “Be careful with what you ask,” because at this moment, there were a lot of problems at home. My parents were close to divorce. My sisters, you know, we were all teenagers. And it was all chaos. And I’m in this bus, and I just said, “I wish none of this was real,” because in my heart, all these years I wanted to die, actually, Rick. I wanted to die. And then I said, “I wish none of this was real,” and the bus started to dissolve. And with my eyes open, there I am sitting, and I started to have the clarity of the organic and inorganic constituents that made this bus possible. And I’m starting to see these, and everything is just dissolving into trillions of particles. And I’m like, “Whoa, including me.” And at that moment, the same thing I experienced during my near-death, I experienced in that bus, it was the sense of nothingness, like pure consciousness, pure presence. I was like, “Oh.” It was really fast, though. And now everything was back. And I have the knowing, and later on, with time; the beings of light said to me, “Nothing is what it appears to be.” And then at that moment, Rick, I came up with two questions. How is it possible to forget who we truly are? And when did we stop being one with the whole? When did this whole separation happen? But at that moment, the beings of light knew that I wasn’t ready. They knew, so that’s another part. It is a part of, I guess, the parenting (aspect) of the beings of light. They looked at me and said, “In 20 years, you will understand.” I got mad at that moment. You say, “20 years? That’s like forever and a day.” And they said, that’s what (it is) they said. They would never argue. That’s one thing. There’s no argument. They just go. Then I didn’t even realize it. Nothing. My life just kept going. I had 20 years of a lot of challenges after that… But this is the other thing. I can cite an example – say that you are in a room, and for the first 19 years, I had the light on. I have the guidance of the beings of light right there. I have the light in the room on. And at the moment, I decided to just say to them, “Let me do my own thing.” It’s like I turn off the light in the room. It’s now you go walk your path. Then for 20 years, I had all these challenges. Of course, if you’re in a room with the lights on, you see where the furniture is. You don’t trip. But if you’re in a room with the lights off, oh, now you’re tripping with all the things in that room. So 20 years of challenges. And 20 years later, without me thinking, 20 years (have passed). Of course, I forgot the number. I forgot about it. And it was then that I had what I call the big awakening.

Rick: Yeah, which we’ll talk about in detail in a bit. Yeah. You know, that reminds me of a great story. It was somewhere in the Vedic literature. There’s this master and a disciple, and the disciple said to the master, “Teach me about Maya. I want to understand Maya.” You know what Maya means, right?

Ingrid: Yes, yes (inaudible words).

Rick: Yeah. And so, the master said, “Sure, I’ll teach you about Maya, but I’m thirsty. Would you go get me a glass of water first?” So, the disciple went off, and he went to a well in a nearby village, and he was getting some water up from the well, and then he saw this beautiful woman there, and he thought, “Wow, she’s really nice.” So, they started talking, and one thing led to the next, and they ended up getting married and having children; he started a farm and all this stuff, and a whole life in that village. And then one day, a big flood came. There was a great big storm, and this flood came, and one by one, his children got washed away, and his wife got washed away, and everything was getting – he was about to die, and he remembered the master, and he said, “Master, save me!” And boom, the flood was gone, and nothing was happening, and the master was standing there, and he said, “So, where’s my water?” So, that was like a big lesson on how blinding Maya can be, the whole illusion. But maybe we learn something that way that we can’t learn by just some intellectual explanation or anything we have. That leads to a question I was going to ask you, that why does everybody have to go through all this? You know, life can be so difficult, even more difficult than your life, and you haven’t told us everything that happened, but there were some pretty difficult parts. There are so many people who are having a really rough time. What is the evolutionary value of that? You know, if God is a loving God, and if enlightenment is the purpose of everything, ultimately, why do people have to go through such a hard time?

Ingrid: I think because, again, we ponder the question of love, but it’s because we’re trying to find that love and joy and that happiness outside ourselves. Life is not here, Rick, to give us happiness. Life is not here to give us joy. Life is here to challenge us, so we can find that joy, that happiness, that love within ourselves, and when we keep looking outside, life is going to shake us harder, saying, “Go look inside.” But I want to look outside. Then it will shake you harder. No, you look within, and there are moments in which people have to go through very bad sickness, even to prison, to finally stop. Life shakes you so hard that you stop, and it’s just when you go to that place where you pretty much stop the idea of thinking the world is giving, (it) has to give me this, and you start finding it within. There’s nothing (for which) I have to look outside because I am it. But if you don’t get shaken that hard, you don’t see it. You will always pursue it as something that is outside of you, and you will think you are in lack because incredibly, we always have been that. I always like this question – “If the core of who I am is joy, love, happiness, peace, silence, greatness, the real question is, what am I doing to disturb that?” So if we keep looking outside, life is going to come with these challenges to show us, “Stop looking. You’re not lacking this. You are this.” That’s why when people, and in all the teachings, say, “Don’t look for enlightenment ,” you’re already enlightened. Don’t look for what you already are. The more you seek, the less you find, and the more confused you are because you’re looking; it’s a labyrinth. You’re already that. You’re already that presence. You’re already that light. You’re already that silence. So the question is that, how do I remove the blocks. I love this analogy that came to me lately, Rick. It’s like you have a bulb, like that lamp back there, and the lamp has its own bulb, this beautiful bulb. That’s what we are, this light, but we put a shade on it. The conditioning, (whatever) they tell us, (whatever) they believe, so, we put a shade on it; you’re not this, you’re not that, or you’re this, or you’re that. And then after that, it’s what it is like to always have a cloth, I drop it on me, and you put another cloth, and another cloth, and another cloth, until that light that you are cannot shine. It is shining, but cannot be seen, cannot express itself. It’s under all these layers, layers of clothing or shades. And then what we have to do, and what life is going to (do is) challenge us to start removing these blocks, removing these shades. I say, a person is like an onion. What do you do to get to the core of the onion? You have to remove the layers. But what happens when you remove the layers? What happens when you chop an onion? You cry. You cry a lot. So that’s what happens, it hurts to remove all these layers and realize I am not any of this, until you get to that light of who you are. One time, we were talking about vibrational frequency with some people, “vibrational frequency, high, low, vibrational frequency,” blah, blah. And the beings of light that night told me Rick, “there is only one true frequency, God’s frequency, or source frequency, or consciousness frequency.” It’s the same idea with the bulb. It’s the bulb that’s always shining. This measure of frequency (reflects), how far or how many blocks you have put around yourself to stop being that light. The more you remove, the more connected you are, the higher the frequency, the higher the vibration. The more shades you put, the less you shine your light.

Rick: So how would you answer this question? Why can’t we all just come in as little children and have the kind of knowing that you had after the tank, but without having to drown? We grow up knowing that stuff naturally, and we don’t cover ourselves with a thousand covers that block our light, we just sort of enjoy growing into our full potential and live a beautiful life. How come we have to get all lost and confused and find our way back again? I could give an answer to this question, but I want to hear what you would say.

Ingrid: You know, Rick, I just say even with the experiences I had, like when I said I turned off the light, I realized how easy it was to get lost, how easy it was to forget. So, I think anyways, like in the experience I had in the tank and throughout my life, the realization (that) I am an eternal being is (lost) because a long time ago we turned that switch off. It’s not just in this life. The fact (is also) that we died… I have this experience, Rick, I started to see spirits when I was six years old. So the fact that we come to this life right now doesn’t mean we are awake, it doesn’t mean that baby is awake yet, it’s pure and innocent. Just to show you how I learned it, I started to see spirits when I was six, and the spirits caused me fear. So, I asked the beings, (and also) I told my mom at that moment – I already knew my mom could see spirits and all that.

Rick: So, when you say spirits, you mean spirits, not beings of light, but you started to see spirits.

Ingrid: Spirits, spirits. And again, like this question of vibration, I felt something different.

Rick: Like lower vibration.

Ingrid: Yes, lower vibration, and they caused me (to feel) terror. It was like, “Whoa! What is with this stuff?” And then I went to my mom when I saw the first spirit and I told her, “Mom, the beings of light and the spirits are not the same.” And then my mom started to, “Okay, explain clearly what it is that you see.” And I explained, and she’s like, “Whoa!” She almost started to cry and she’s like, “I think that you see angels.” And I just said to her, “No, mom, I don’t think they’re angels because they don’t have wings.” So, my mom was like, “Oh, but they have to be your guardian angels because of the light and stuff.” So, because I’ve been talking with them for a while, I went and asked them. I said to them, “What is with these spirits?” Because they caused me fear. And then I thought the answer was going to be Rick, like, “Oh, they are different, whatever.” But then at that moment, the answer was incredible because they said, “That thing that you call a spirit, you and us, we’re all the same. The only difference is the level of awareness you have about who you truly are.” And just with the example I gave, well, (you see) how easy it is to forget who we are, how easy it is to get tangled. The beings of light showed me a kaleidoscope and the light that comes, the source light, and they showed me, ow it forms all these beautiful images of light and color, and they said, “People think that that’s the real thing when that is an illusion.” So, we get trapped in the illusion and it’s so easy to get trapped there. So, I think we leave home because, like it happened with this analogy or story about this teaching, you leave and you get trapped in the illusion and it’s so sweet and it looks so good and it feels so great, then now it (now becomes) your trip to go back and realize this is not the truth.

Rick: Yeah. And I think by the time you get back to it, you appreciate it more. Having gone through the whole rigmarole, you appreciate it more.

Ingrid: You appreciate it more, exactly. And now, this is the other thing, at that moment I also asked the beings of light, “My mom said that you are angels. Is that what you are?” And the answer was incredible because they said, “You can call us whatever you want.” And the other thing was, they expressed to me, “We are to you whatever you want us to be.” So see, even that is a part of the illusion, because all of this is an expression of consciousness, the kaleidoscope showing us, “Look at all this,” but all this at the same time, again, like we’re talking now, is bringing us back to that place of “remember who you truly are and appreciate that, greatly, and deeply.”

Rick: This conversation reminds me of a poem by T.S. Eliot, he said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Ingrid: Oh, I love that, oh yes, it’s beautiful, yes. So, I even have a story in my book which is really, really cute. I was five years old and there was an aunt, I think I never told this story other than in the book, and she was so mean, and she came to me and she told me (Ah, this could be a good answer for this) that my mom didn’t love me, because she always wanted conflict with my mom, she was very envious of my mom, there were a lot of problems between them. So, this aunt was so mean, and me, at five years old; she said, “Your mom doesn’t love you because you don’t look like your sisters. Look at you with these dark eyes,” and she always kept my hair short because I have curly hair, and she didn’t know what to do with this curly hair. So, I felt, “Why doesn’t my mom love me?” and she said, “And by the way, you’re not your dad’s daughter.” because My dad was blonde with blue eyes and my sister looked more like him than I did. So imagine how this person is so bad, (put) these thoughts in a child, and (because of that) I was suffering so; and I believed what she said. I started to really be bad, I was throwing tantrums; they tried to talk to me and I didn’t want to listen. So yeah, I was rebellious, so she has to be right, because it’s true, my sisters are beautiful and I’m not. So an aunt came to visit and I went to live in her house for a while because my parents thought maybe this is the solution, maybe she should go somewhere for a while and she will learn to appreciate, and then they sent me away, then now I thought, “My aunt is right, they’re getting rid of me,” Then I had all this experience of being away from home, and I was understanding how it was to be away from home, and finally I got really depressed there. I wanted to come back home. So look at all the challenges I had to experience of going to this place, leaving home, to come back and realize that I want to be home, I really appreciate home. And this was the first time in those five years of my life that I finally felt that I had some place in my form as a human.

Rick: Yeah, and to sort of rehash the same cycle on a larger scale, if you think of everything you’ve been through in your life from drowning in the tank and then everything you went through for several decades and then finally having this awakening, – which we haven’t talked about yet, but we will – think how well you’re able to function now and explain things from the foundation of that awakening; (more so) than when you were three years old and you had just had this experience in the tank and you didn’t know what was going on. So you really had to go through all this stuff in order to be a much more capable representative of that deeper reality.

Ingrid: Yes, exactly, Rick, because that was like that. All these things were happening for me in a natural way. I think by 17, I was able to communicate with plants. I could hear plants.

Rick: What would the plants say?

Ingrid: Oh, no, sounds, but there was some knowledge.

Rick: Some knowledge, some transmission.

Ingrid: Yes, at the beginning, I started to be able to hear the grass, and I was like, “Oh!” It was almost like a symphony, like this was incredible, something I had never heard, and I asked the beings, “What is going on?” And they say, “It’s welcoming you.”

Rick: Interesting.

Ingrid: People don’t know that nature welcomes them, and like (there is) a symphony of sound, and we don’t even know.

Rick: I once met this Indian sage, he was really a sage, but he was a specialist in plants and herbs and things like that, and he said that the plants would talk to him and tell him what their purpose was in terms of some medicinal value. He could just wander down the path and the plants would actually communicate what they were for. So, there was that level of communication.

Ingrid: I had a similar experience I was studying the Bach remedies, healing using flowers, and I was in one of these retreats, and they put all these plants in front of us, and they said, “Write on this paper what you feel the plants are telling you.” It was part of the whole retreat, and it’s when I wrote all the answers right, so I got freaked out. I didn’t even realize I was having communication at that level with the plants, but again, Rick, at the time, I didn’t understand my uniqueness. I didn’t understand why I was different. I didn’t understand why these things were happening to me. I didn’t really want to share it with most people, apart from my grandmother. I was going to transcendental meditation, and doing all these spiritual things, but I was always very quiet; there was a moment where the heaviness of wanting to be like everyone else was really hard because I had now three sisters. They were beautiful, and (they had) the boys, and the parties, and life. And then I started college, and I was like, “I’m tired of being different.” So, I couldn’t really appreciate all these gifts, like the way I do now. I could not really understand what was happening, so yeah, I had to go through all those. I think it (took) maturing at all levels, psychologically, emotionally, mentally, to be able to be where I am today.

Rick: Yeah. A question actually came in from a fellow named William in Houston, and he has been following you, he said, since seeing you at the IANS Conference, International Association of Near-Death Studies Conference, and his question is, “Do you think that NDE teachers like Anita Mourjani, yourself, and others have profound messages to teach the world about spirituality and how to evolve?” It’s a two-part question, that’s the first part.

Ingrid: I think that not just near-death experiences, I think that anybody that has gone through profound spiritual experiences, profound experiences that bring us to realize who we truly are.

Rick: Yeah, you don’t need to drown to do that.

Ingrid: No, you don’t need to drown, no, and I say, “Yes, better if you don’t.”

Rick: Right.

INGRID: So, yeah, it’s not like anybody that also has to be special, No! Start doing the work, because people ask me, “How can I get there? How can I hear beings of light?” But they don’t want to do the work, and they say, “What is the work?.” At the beginning, it’s work, but like I said, meditation for me is not a doing. I started to meditate when I was eight years old, right? And for me, meditation, was like, “Wow,” it’s a state of being, but it started as a doing.

Rick: But even when you were eight, it was pleasant from the beginning, right? It wasn’t difficult.

Rick: Oh, yes. It was extremely pleasant. It was incredible. When I was 12, my grandmother brought me to the first Buddhist temple, and this was unheard of in Colombia. But that was the thing, the beings of light said, “People will come to your path to guide you and to help you,” and that just happened. So, like you said, there’s things that are being worked out anyways. At all levels of being, we work together. The beings of light, like here on Earth, And there’s also beings working with us at all levels. So, my grandma took me to this temple, and I did this. It was the first breathing meditation technique, Rick, and I felt that this feels so good. And at that moment, I started to remember past lives; eventhough I was very young, it was the sense that I already had experienced things like this. And then, when we were to leave, I told the monk, “We cannot come back. My grandma is a very busy woman.” And he said, “Oh, don’t worry. Don’t worry, child.” He said, “You will never have to come back because you already have a temple.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “You are the temple. So, you can practice this breathing meditation whenever, wherever.” And for me, that was key, Rick. From that day, it’s like, “Oh, I am a temple.” So, I kept just doing (this meditation). But nowadays I tell people that the work is to calm the mind. Look, Rick, when I had my near-death experience, as I mentioned to you, what I knew is that part of that essence that I am, is of course, absolute presence, but it was silence. It was that space of calmness, peace. And I don’t say silence of noise. It was calmness, silence of thoughts, silence of all the stuff that we accumulate inside ourselves. It was like a spaciousness. So, when people asked me, “How can I connect with beings of light?” I said, “You have to quiet your mind.” And the work of quieting your mind is, I said, “Go walk in meditation, do whatever, all these different practices for you to start learning quieting your mind.” And the more you quiet your mind, the more space you create, the more you remove those blocks and you take those sheets off and now you’re vibrating, now you’re connecting with everything!

Rick: Yeah, the second verse of the Yoga Sutra says, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” And then the next verse says, “And then you rest in the self.” You know? So, (it’s an) ancient teaching, and among the people who are listening to this, perhaps some people meditate and some never have, and maybe some have tried it and it’s been Difficult; but you know, if you go about it right, as I know you know, it’s not only enjoyable in and of itself, it’s also not a big chore and doesn’t take a great deal of self-discipline. But then the after effects are enjoyable, so it’s kind of a win-win situation. And one other thing I’ll just throw in there is that I think you and I would both agree that the goal of meditation or spiritual practice is not to see beings of light. That might be a side effect, it might happen to some people and not to others, but that’s not the essential purpose of it.

Ingrid: Completely, completely agree with you, so that’s what I say to people, if you have a goal, you’re going to be disappointed.

Rick: Right.

Ingrid: So, I say people (should) do it because you’re touching the essence of who you are, because it feels great, because you’re becoming in touch with your light, with the spaciousness of who you are. You know this analogy that is so beautiful, the beings of light, they just come up with these things. The other day they showed me a room, and it was just a room, and they said, “What is the thing that never ever changes in this room?” And I already had heard about teachings that are similar, and I said, “Of course, the space, the space.” And then they started to show me furniture, and then they said, “See, that’s the key. What are you identifying with, the furniture or the space? Always be vigilant. Are you being the furniture or are you being the space?” So that’s always something I carry; when I know that I’m being carried away by my emotions, my thoughts, I stop. I am not that. I am not the furniture in the room. I am the space. So, you become calm because you go to that place of resting in calmness. Many times, Rick, I have days where I go and experience again that state of non-self. I wake up in the morning and people say, “Oh, you cannot say that time (does not exist), time always exists no matter what.” And I say, “When I am in the state of absolute presence, calmness, when there’s no story, to me there’s no time because time is a measure of change. And if I am in my awareness, there’s no story, there’s no change.” And these are moments in which you are just in this state of absolute presence, ah, it’s incredible.

Rick: Time is a relative thing, even physics (physicists), totally understands that. I was just listening to a talk by a physicist named Roger Penrose and he was saying that for a photon there is no time. And what he means by that is that the photon, let’s say (is) coming from the Andromeda galaxy 2 million light years away; from our perspective, it takes 2 million years for it to get here. From its perspective, it’s traveling at the speed of light and so time and space have completely collapsed and it makes the trip instantaneously. So, time is a relative.

Ingrid: It’s very relative. I asked the beings of light, “What is the purpose of time?” And the answer was awesome. They said, “The purpose of time and experience is to help you remember who you truly are.” So, once you remember, it’s not needed anymore.

Rick: Interesting, yeah.

Ingrid: Yeah.

Rick: William from Houston had a second part to his question. He said, “OK, so you guys, you and Anita and people like that, have profound messages to teach the world about spirituality and how to evolve. If so, what does that look like in the realm of education, business, and the how-to of carrying the message forward?” So, what I think he’s saying is, you and Anita have written books and you give talks and many other NDE people have done those things, but wouldn’t it be nice if Education that millions of children get or businesses that millions of people who work in could enjoy this kind of insight, and how would that come about? How would you introduce it in those fields?

Ingrid: You know, Rick, it’s starting to actually happen. Recently, I was part of a study with I think 20 people, 20-something, we wrote these Incredible (articles); they were doing a study of near-death experiences, and there were like 22 articles or something we wrote for John Hopkins University, and it was for this incredible magazine, it’s called Nib. This study just gathered all these experiences, and the idea is to show to the medical community and the clerics that these experiences happen and that the patients that come back with a memory or with something like this cannot be disregarded, because that will harm the patient rather than help the patient. So, we’re trying to (do that), it is actually happening. We’re starting to introduce these concepts and are starting to help people. I do sessions with people online, and already this is beautiful. Rick, I have had few people that have children, because the article I wrote and a lot of the talks I give, of course, I was a child (when I had the) near-death experience, I was so little and life was so hard; so now people are coming to me and saying, “I understand what is happening to my child.” Somebody looking at my experience realized that her child had had a near-death experience. This child had been suffering so much and the mom could not understand, “but you’re back, God brought you back, you’re being ungrateful”, and she saw my talk and she realized, “Oh my God, I get it, my daughter is grieving. My daughter is grieving because she had to come back.” For the first time, this mom understood, and we had this incredible dialogue. I was able to talk to the girl, Rick, up to that point, the girl, she was completely distraught, quiet, she wouldn’t talk, and we got together. Oh my God, now the girl is another person.

Rick: That’s great.

Ingrid: Yes, and it happened with another girl who could see spirits, and she was put in an institute for mental illnesses. The moment that girl and I connected, I said, “I wish I would have met you when this had just happened.” So we are actually doing the work, little by little, we’re introducing this, and there’s more openness, and because I guess it’s happening at all levels – I think it’s so important to mention that – because it has also happened to doctors, neuroscientists, scientists, teachers, psychologists, and everybody’s open to it. It’s like, “Oh, so this is not just something to happen to…., I don’t know, it’s sad that it has to happen this way, but you know it gains credibility, sadly, when it’s experienced by a doctor.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, sure, they have the credentials.

Ingrid: Exactly, and now these people can come and say, “Wow, yes, this is real.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. I mean, science is the predominant influence of our age, and so if spirituality is really going to go mainstream, it seems to me science is going to have to understand it and explain it in its own language and kind of give it the stamp of approval, and then it can be accepted.

Ingrid: Yes, yes, exactly. So, that’s the other thing, people ask me always about that difference between science and spirituality because I am a scientist.

Rick: Yeah.

Ingrid: And, through all these years, Rick, I just came to the realization the separation is in the mind, because if the essence of who you are, again, going back to that, is that of love, compassion, kindness, (then) great, because it all depends on what you think spirituality is. If spirituality is to be your authentic self, to be the core of those principles, then you’re already spiritual in whatever you do. You’re a carpenter, doctor, I don’t know, driver, but if you’re already that embodiment of who you truly are, then you’re already spiritual. That’s what all this is about. Go back to the core of who you are. Go back to that essence of who you are and be that.

Rick: Yeah.

Ingrid: You know, Rick, after I had my big awakening that we haven’t talked about yet.

Rick: We should talk about that soon.

Ingrid: And I was still working with NASA and with the Navy, it’s then I was like, “How can I tell everybody? How can I tell everybody how this feels?” Because it was this state of clarity, of connection, of like, “I know who I am. I became aware that I am awareness.” So, I asked the beings of light, “How can I do, what can I do, or what can I say?” And look at the answer. This tells you a lot, Rick, because the answer was, “Do or say nothing.” And they said, “The light of your awareness is all they need.” So, they said at that moment, “Be that light.” And that’s the teaching of all the things ever, “Walk your talk.”

Rick: Just teach by example.

Ingrid: Exactly, “Be that.” And the saying and the doing will come from being, not from the head. So, that’s the big difference right there, Rick. So, it was that. I said, “People, it’s incredible because spirituality is a science.” Why is it a science? Because you have to become an observer of yourself. And you become an observer of yourself, and you catch yourself as awareness. You’re inviting awareness into your life, and it’s experiential. Because it’s not about believing things. “Oh, you hear this? Now go try it. Go try to be kind. If you don’t know you’re kind, go try and see what happens. Try to be loving, try to respect, try to do this. Oh, calm your mind and see what happens.” It’s experiential. So, I go do it, and I was in the corridors, and I would just be in a state of presence and emanating that light. Look, Rick, even the most grumpy guy in the corridor would stop and smile. And people would say to me, “You know everybody in the agency.” And I said, “No, I don’t. Not in person. But when we are connected at that level, when you are emanating that light, people will notice. You are the experiment. Life is a laboratory. Just use it. Do the experiment. You’ll see it works.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. I love what you said there. It’s too bad that spirituality or religion has spent thousands of years making a big fuss about belief and, “Oh, you’re a believer, you’re not a believe

Rick: burned at the stake because you’re not a believer.” Whereas really, the whole thing is about experience, and it doesn’t matter tremendously much whether you believe it or not. If you experience it, then it’s absurd to use the word “belief,” you know?

Ingrid: Yes.

Rick: I wouldn’t say, “I believe I’m looking at my hand.” You know, it’s not the right word because it’s an experience.

Ingrid: Exactly. Look, this is key. The Beings of Light said to me since I was very young, Rick, “Do not believe in anything we’re telling you. Do not believe in us. Do not believe in anything. But keep an open mind.” That’s the key. An open mind is what is going to just discover the potential of everything. So even the Beings of Light were saying that me, “Do not believe in anything, but keep an open mind.” So that’s what I did since I was very little, and people would tell me, “you believe” and I would say, “I don’t.” So nowadays, when people ask me, “Do you believe in this?” I’ve written in my book, my experiences, and I say, “I don’t believe in anything. I know what I know. And what I don’t know, I then go deeper, and I ask the questions, and I try to experience it, and I do it for myself.”

Rick: Yeah, I remember one time Oprah Winfrey was interviewing Eckhart Tolle, and she was doing this little thing where she would start a sentence and let him finish it. And so, she started a sentence that she said, “I believe,” and he said, “Nothing in particular.”

Ingrid: Yeah, so it’s like, yeah, I don’t believe in anything. But what I know, I know.

Rick: Yeah, and I would say that that extends to things like God and angels and all kinds of stuff that people in the past would say are matters of belief, but for you it’s come more into the realm of experience.

Ingrid: Exactly. So, for me, it’s annoying. I don’t have to believe in anything. And that’s what made me very rebellious since I was little, Rick, because even at school, I was in a Catholic school, and I would go to the priest, and say, “Why are you talking about fear in God? You’re actually walking away from God.” Oh, my God, this guy would get so mad at me. “You’re just a child. What do you know? Those are thoughts of the devil.” And I just would look at the guy and say, “But I had an experience. I didn’t have that concept of God.” So when people ask me, “Did you see Jesus? Did you see God?” I don’t know. I was two years old. I didn’t have a concept of a God. But I knew that there was just goodness, Rick. I knew goodness. I knew greatness. I knew peace. I didn’t even know the word “love.” That’s why I don’t mention it during my near-death experience (conversations), but it was, now that I know the word, it was love, pure greatness.

Rick: We’ve kind of talked about this, but you were saying earlier how the major events of one’s life are chosen or predestined or some such thing. I kind of get the sense in reading your book, that it was not an accident that you fell into the tank. It was like an initiation almost, where you had to be shifted into this other realm, and that was a way of doing it.

Ingrid: You know what? It was not an accident.

Rick: No.

Ingrid: Oh yeah, that’s for sure. And to also answer one of the questions from, I forgot his name.

Rick: From Houston? Andrew, I think?

Ingrid: What Andrew asked is if we come with a message. Actually, there’s a purpose behind our experiences. That’s the other thing with all of these. Once I started to have more clarity…. at the beginning of the book, I said, “Learn to ask the right questions, and you will receive the right answers.”

Rick: Good point, yeah.

Ingrid: So I started to ask the right questions that are actually simple. It’s not complicated. And I just started even asking questions, simple questions, Rick, like, “Why Did my near-death experience happen when I was so young?” And the answer was, “Because you were old enough to remember, but young enough not to be conditioned yet.”

Rick: Perfect, yeah, yeah.

Ingrid: So that was key. That was important. And the other thing, I said to the beings of life, “Why did my near- death experience happen?” How simple, but I never asked. So now I got the answer. They said, “To bring back the message of the purpose of—not the purpose, the power—of connection.”

Rick: Right.

Ingrid: And then I said, “How come?” Because (sometimes) there are things that happen to us that we don’t see. And they said, “Look.” They brought me to see the experience, and they said, “Look, when you saw your body, what was your first answer (reaction) to that? And look at how the egoic mind at that moment is not the one making the decision.” So what was my decision, Rick. I said, “I’m not going back to that body.” And what the beings of life said was, “That was still your egoic mind. Guess what? That was not what the universe wanted for you.” So that’s when we’re playing the game of what do we do and what the universe wants—see? What is it that we’re coming (here) to do? So this pre-plan was that, “No, you’re coming back.” So this thing that you’re leaving your body is not true. And they said, “(this is the )Reason why you went to look for the help of the lady and your mom,” which I didn’t even have awareness of – that I was looking for help. But that’s what the universe (wanted)—I was coming back. So I said, “Okay, so if I was going to come back and I was going to look for help, why did I stop in the maid’s room? Why did I waste time?” And they said to me, “That’s the point. That’s the point of contrast.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And they said, “Look, when you went to look for the maid, she did not have connection with you, so she could not hear you. What happened when you went to look for your mom? Look, complete connection.” And that’s what we call unconditional love. Love doesn’t have barriers, right, to the point that there was not a spiritual realm and a physical realm. It’s love, complete connection. So my mom sends her (unclear audio) wherever it was, and she came back. And then (the Light Beings) they said, “Look, the person that was so far away from home was the one that got you out of the tank. The person that was only a few feet away didn’t even know you were there.” Then they said to me, “Look, with this lady, (and) look what happened when there is connection. Your mom saved you. Look what happened when there was no connection.” It was beautiful. They said, “When there is no connection, they will let you drown. When there is no connection, there will be war.”

Rick: Yeah, so imagine if there were a deep connection between everybody in the world.

Ingrid: Exactly. We wouldn’t have to have all this craziness that is happening.

Rick: That reminds me of the story of when you were almost raped on that beach, and you suddenly kind of grabbed the guy by his chin, I think, and looked into his eyes, and you made a connection. And the connection shocked him, and so he left.

Ingrid: Yes, that story is incredible, incredible, because at that moment, Rick, I realized there is no enemy. There is the idea of an enemy, the illusion of an enemy. He thinks he’s an enemy. I think he’s an enemy, because there’s conditioning, all the layers of conditioning. But at that moment at the beach when all that fell off, With that man and I, I felt the sense we are one.

Rick: There’s a lady named Isira who I interviewed maybe six months ago, from Australia, and she was literally being beaten to death by this guy, and eventually she needed reconstructive surgery and all kinds of stuff. But in the midst of that, she suddenly had this shift where she just felt love, and she just saw everything as one, and she loved this guy that was beating her to death. And he had this look of total shock on his face, and he ran away. He just left.

Ingrid: Yes, it was the same thing here. So, look, your question again, why we go through hard stuff, (is) because those moments are cruel. However, – maybe not at the (same) moment (though) in my experience it happened at the moment – for some people will happen later. They will tie the knots (make the connections), and they will say, “Thanks to that, this happened, and thanks to this illness, now I am more compassionate. I have more empathy. I have more love. I opened this organization.” See, it’s like (this with) everything, I just know that behind every experience there’s a purpose. So I say to people, “Don’t stay in the experience. Go deeper. Go deeper. Don’t stay in the near-death. Go deeper. There’s always something Behind (it).” And with that guy on the beach, it was not just me having the experience that day. The Beings of Light said to me, “For all the experiences you’re going to have that are like that, there will be a witness, and this witness, it would transform the life of the witness.”

Rick: So your boyfriend was there,

Ingrid: yeah. Yes, and he was an atheist. He didn’t believe in anything. Imagine when he sees that these guys, three guys in a row, were going to rape me, kill us. Later, the police said, “This is a miracle, because we’re investigating a series of murders that have happened in this area.” And then he said, “How this is possible?” And I knew that the guys were going to come back, because I knew in that moment of…

Rick: Clarity.

Ingrid: –how would you say– clarity was going to go away, and I said to him, “They’re coming back.” So we were able to climb this mountain up high, and he said, “How did you know they were coming back? How is it possible that they let us go? What just happened?” And I said, “You don’t believe in guardian angels, in protective forces, in God, but this is the time (to believe).” And this changed the life of this person.

Rick: Tell the one about when you were walking along with your boyfriend and some homeless people came up and started robbing you, and what your boyfriend experienced then.

Ingrid: Oh, that was another incredible one. Again, this changed the life of this person for the rest of his life, because he was, at the time, very angry. He didn’t believe in anything. He thought that life was unfair because he had a genetic–

Rick: Birthmark sort of thing.

Ingrid: Birthmark, yeah. So he was very angry at that, and then we were walking on the street, and I was already kind of talking to him about his spirituality. I’d been showing him things that were happening, even light coming out of my hands, things like that, at that level, and he was like, “No, that has to be some explanation for that.” So that day we’re walking, Rick, and three homeless people started to come towards us, — and in Colombia, you see that, and you know you’re going to be robbed. He’s like, “Oh, there’s no other way.” So we just kind of held hands, thinking maybe they will let us go. No, they came, and they surrounded us, and they started to take everything from him, his wallet, and everything. He was in such shock, like he couldn’t take (off) his watch, and they were saying, “Give us your watch,” and I’m standing at the scene, Rick, and I cannot move. I have one person right here, and the other–and I am observing. I am an observer of this scene, and then they grabbed his watch since he couldn’t take if off himself, and they scratched his arm. He was bleeding, and then finally they left with everything, and at that moment I was able to now talk, and I said, “Santi, your arm is bleeding. They took your watch. They took everything,” and he’s like, “Ingrid, I don’t care about the watch. I don’t care about the bleeding. I don’t care about nothing. The only thing I care is that you were not here. They didn’t rob you. They didn’t take anything from you because you were not here.”

Rick: In other words, you became invisible.

Ingrid: I became invisible, and that’s what changed his life. I mean, Before (due to) an experience like that, he became spiritual. He had an awakening, and he started to use his own experience and his Birthmark and everything else to just grow in empathy and compassion. That was incredible, and I asked the Beings of Light later, “I didn’t know you could make people disappear,” and they said to me, “By now you should know that nothing is impossible.”

Rick: Probably then you were invisible to the robbers, too.

Ingrid: Yeah, I actually was, because they were standing here.

Rick: They didn’t take your stuff?

Ingrid: Nothing. I had a leather jacket. I had my wallet, my money, (they took) nothing. It’s like I was not in the scene.

Rick: You know that invisibility is one of the siddhis that Patanjali talks about as being something a yogi can do.

Ingrid: This was incredible. I learned about it later in life. Yeah, they talk about the three big things a yogi can do. I think it’s invisibility, invulnerability.

Rick: There’s a whole bunch of them, levitation, all kinds of things.

Ingrid: Yeah, and I’m like, wow, yeah, that’s incredible. But the answer of the Beings of Light was amazing. “By this point, you should know that nothing is impossible.”

Rick: Yeah. Well, we’ve kept everybody in suspense for quite a while. Let’s talk about your big awakening experience that you had, the big shift.

Ingrid: Yes, and that’s a little bit long, but we will shorten that. After all the suffering for all those years, finally, I reached the point, Rick, of big despair. But at this point in my life, I had a trip planned to the Middle East. I was going to have this trip. And I went actually to to Singapore, met this lady, we became friends. And she said, you have to come with me to meet the Dalai Lama. And finally, that happened. I went there, I spent like a week with him, receiving his teachings. At that moment, I was so busy doing Science; I had walked away from spirituality, and I hadn’t done anything like that for so long. I went to meet him. And at that moment I got a feeling that I had walked away from what had given me the greatest joy in my life. The silence, the Beings of Light, the spaciousness. I had seen so many challenges, suffering, and anger that I had forgotten. Incredibly, I had forgotten, just like we were talking before. And then it just came back. And I remember sitting next to the Dalai Lama holding his hand and thinking, in the library of my mind, 10,000 questions, like, what can I ask him? And at that moment, I realized I need to go back to silence. And then I came back home after that trip. And that is when I went into the biggest depression of my life. Because at that moment, I had realized, and questioned how I could forget who I am? How could I allow all the suffering and all the other silly stuff to get to me? And I felt disconnected. And then I (felt like I) had been disconnected forever from all this and from my own self. Then I fell into the deepest depression of my life, and I wanted to actually kill myself. (inaudible words) And one day I’m lying in the bed with my little baby next to me, who was the only thing that had been keeping me here. I mean, I would do anything for my little boy. And the this thought (came up). (You can) imagine how thoughts can be so the ego so cunning, so crazy. So I had this tiny thought, what if I leave? What if we live together? What if we die together pretty much? And at that very moment, I just opened my eyes and said, I lost it. How could I even think this way? I mean, this is sick. I really am losing my mind. And that was the first time for many years, I had to stop meditating, praying, everything, because I was angry at many things. And at that moment, Rick, I went into this profound state of prayer. I didn’t ask for things to change around me. When I went into that prayer, I asked to have clarity. I said, God, help me see because I cannot see. I am blind, I cannot see. And then I went into this deep prayer, help me, help me. And the next day I got up and it was (like this)… I always say that these things are so simple. It’s nothing too complicated. You think a thought, you need help – go see a psychologist. But it was not a thought like, “oh, I might go,” you know, it was not a thought of the ego. “I might do,” no, it was clear. And I just went to my computer, – I had never wanted help from anybody up to that point – Me, psychology? Come on, I am a scientist. I don’t need help. But no, it was clear. I went, I typed a name. I phoned this guy, I wrote the name on a paper. And the same day, Rick, two other People (told me about this psychologist), one was my daughter’s psychologist. And it was the exact same name (that was recommended to me). And he’s great. And another person (also recommended the same person). So when three things happened on the same day, and I had written his name on a paper, So three people told me about the same person. I said, oh, this is a synchronicity. This is a message. So I went to meet that guy. And incredibly, he was an amazing psychologist who was very spiritual. He was a person who was open to listening. So I started with really simple things. And then I would drop a nugget of something that may make him think that I had lost that thing. No, the guy always got it. And so there was a moment when he asked me to write a list of (things that made me) suffer. And then I wrote this list. But I thought first, I am a scientist, I don’t write about sufferings. But oh, well, then I saw the arrogance (of this). So then I wrote this list of all the sufferings. And when I show him the list, he looked at it, and he said, of course there were people who had suffered more things than me. But in his own experience, he said, this is the first time he had seen somebody who had suffered this much, and is mentally stable. (He said) I’ve never seen someone like this. I was shocked, Rick. I had never thought that I was the one that suffered the most (and did not understand) why he was saying this. And at that moment, I said to him, why me? Why this is happening to me? And the answer was amazing, again, so simple. He said, “why not?” The moment he said, why not? And he was incredible, because this is the power of listening. When I realized that he had been listening, that’s connection. When he started, he didn’t even have a notepad. And at that moment, he said, look, thanks to (these things that) you did, you’ve been here. Thanks to this that you did, this happened, and so on. And I’m like, wow, and all my neurons, and my everything started to connect. And I started to find purpose behind all my experiences, right? Like, ting, ting, ting. And at that moment, I stopped being a victim. I stopped being at the level of the effect. And I became the cause. I started to see, all this is not happening to me, it’s happening for me. And then, even the most crazy stuff, the things I hate the most, everything at that moment made sense. And I came into a state of absolute gratitude, Rick. It was (the understanding that), I don’t have to change anything. I don’t have to delete anything, because it is all perfect. This all happened for me to be where I am now, today, in this chair. And the other clarity came. And it was the knowing that none of that was here anymore. Everything was in my head. So it was the awareness of “I am not these thoughts. I am not these experiences. I am not this noise. And I can decide right now what to do with all of this.” So it was going back to that empty space. And then, this is the other thing I experienced, Rick. And I read it later, how they use the idea of forgiveness. But at that moment was when true forgiveness happened, which is this knowing that there’s nothing to forgive, because nothing ever happened. Nothing ever happened to me. So imagine that state of freedom, Rick, that state of liberation, calmness of the mind. And I love that office. Like, if I’m walking in the clouds, I went into my car and I started to drive. And then I had an experience similar to the one I had in the bus 19 years before. I’m driving the car. And it was like the presence of what we call Source, the Creator, God, was absolutely everything, Rick. There was nothing that was not it. The windshield, the car, everything was that emanation of the presence. Everything was love. There’s nothing that was not it. Wow, I had to stop the car, and I’m like, this is who I am. There’s nothing else. And then now, after that, of course, (came a) state of clarity. And I knew, at that moment, Rick, I knew that 20 years had passed from the time they told me, in 20 years, you will understand. Because the two questions I had asked 20 years before were answered. And at the moment (it felt) like 20 years had not passed. And the questions were, when did we stop being one with the whole, and how is it possible to forget? And the answer was, one never stopped being one. One never left the Source. And look at this, one just became distracted and seemingly forgot. We really never, truly, forget. That’s why we want to go back to it. That’s the sense of like, why do you want happiness? Because you want to go back to it. Why do you want love? Because you want to go back to it. So we never really forget, we just get distracted. And that’s what happened.

Rick: Yeah, and I imagine that now, having gone through that whole 20 years, your questions are answered in a living way, much better than any little communication could have taught you back then. You had to go through all this, and now it’s really profound. It’s in your bones.

Ingrid: Yes, and you know, Rick, because this is part also with spirituality where confusion can happen, because it’s not just to become a Self-realized being, but how you integrate that into your life.

Rick: Exactly, yeah.

Ingrid: It is to become a Self-actualized being. What do I do with this? And then you have different levels of awakening, you are at the awakening of realizing, “I am awareness, but now what do I do with this?” So it is what we would say the awakening of the heart, the awakening of the next level, how do I share, how do I give, how I am as that life or the world? And now how I ground this, how I bring it to fruition, how I share it with others, ike he’s asking in his question, how I put my feet in the ground and bring this to the rest. Then you have to go through all this process; I was arrogant when I was little. I would look at others, Rick and would say, “Those people are stupid, they don’t know anything,” because I didn’t understand. Then I had to go through all the suffering to understand compassion, to understand kindness, to have the empathy, to go to that place of connection (that) the Beings of Light we’re talking about. And then, oh, now I’m at that very profound level, and I understand all my levels of being.

Rick: Yeah, you know, that answers more thoroughly the question that I asked about an hour ago, which is, you know, “Why can’t we just be born like enlightened little kids and stay that way? Why do we have to go through all this stuff?” But you just explained it. You have to go through all this stuff because then you become an embodied, you know, fully embodied representative of higher consciousness. It’s not just that you can deal with all different levels of concerns, all different levels of reality. You don’t have to just sort of, like you said, when you were a child, try to sleep all the time so you can get inward and have that experience. You can do it totally in the waking state, totally engaged in raising a family and having a business and doing everything; and you can maintain, what you call Being or Higher Consciousness or whatever term you want to use in the midst of all that.

Ingrid: Yes, and actually, like you say, it’s cool. I said, “Why do I want to wake up?” People say, “Because it’s awesome. You become more intelligent, you know what to do.” Like, with the guy on the beach, I knew how to handle all levels of being, even if you’re just doing it at an energy level. You can shock somebody with your eyes. That person will run away. When I was working in all these projects, even though I didn’t have the connection I have now, I always was connected, Rick, and I created incredible projects. I was never at the level of the problem. I was always, “How do I solve this problem?” And this is the other thing. The more awake you become, the problems or the challenges don’t become problems. They become opportunities.

Rick: Yeah.

Ingrid: So, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have challenges, but when a challenge comes, now I’m like, “Bring it up.” Because I know that will–

Rick: “What do you have to teach me?”

Ingrid: Exactly, I know. And of course, sometimes I have my head under the water. I’m not going to say that I don’t cry, that I don’t scream, but it’s faster and easier. I even have a friend, she’s amazing. The Beings of Light said to me, “Learn to recognize the triggers, but also have reset buttons. Create your spiritual environment.” So, the spiritual environment is the book, the friend, the place that you can go back to for alignment. So, I have this friend and I just call her and I tell her whatever it is (I have to say), and she’s there. And she later confessed to me, “I just wait, we hang up the phone and you call me like an hour later, or a day later with the answer.” She said, “I wait because you’re going to bring new teaching, you’re going to bring a new awakening.” And that’s what happened. We see our challenges as opportunities, we keep evolving, we keep growing, we can help others, too, to see their problems or their challenges as an opportunity to grow.

Rick: I remember when I started meditating I was living with this family and they had seven kids and a dog and a pet raccoon and a rock band in the basement and all kinds of stuff. And so I used to go out in the back and climb up a tree and meditate in a tree house that they had built up there. And it was a nice, quiet place, I could get away from everything. So they made up this song about me based on “Hey Jude” by the Beatles, and it was like, “Hey dude, up in your tree, get out of you and into me.” But the point was that by getting into oneself, by sort of dipping into pure awareness, one’s true nature, one then has the resources to bring to bear on whatever you want to do in the outer world.

Ingrid: Yes, and you know, Rick, create the real change. I’m going to give you this really cool teaching. One day my husband had this back pain and I’m sitting in my studio there working and he comes, “Oh, I’m going to get a massage because my back hurts.” And he left. And at that moment the Beings of Light said to me, “He’s not going to heal.” And I’m like, “What?” And they said, “No, because that’s already a result. He’s not going to heal because that’s not the cause. That’s the result already.”

Rick: There’s a deeper cause.

Ingrid: Exactly, that he has to go to the level of the cause, to change within. So they showed me an equation and they said, “Look, one plus one is two. You cannot change the number two. You cannot change the result. It’s already a result. You have to go within.” So the analogy was to go within and create a new equation. When you go within, you’re able to see things from a deeper place. Now you can create a new result. Like now – one plus two is three. And they laughed, and said, “Look at how much energy people are wasting trying to change results when they have to go to the cause. They have to go within. They have to resolve it from within, and what happens is you create a new reality.

Rick: Yeah. I’ll give you two analogies. You probably have heard these, because you actually learned TM back in the old days, and we used to use this as TM teachers. But one thing is if you want to shoot an arrow, you can’t just put it on the bow and let go, because it’ll just fall to the ground. You have to pull it back first, and then that prepares the arrow to really shoot forwards. Or another analogy is, if you want to buy something in the marketplace, you need to go to the bank first and get some money, and then you’ll be able to spend. So we could think of many other examples, but going within is preparation. I mean, it has its own intrinsic value, but it’s preparation for whatever else you want to do. Krishna said to Arjuna, “Transcend,” and then he said, “Established in yoga, perform action,” and then he said, “Yoga is skill in action.”

Ingrid: Yes, yes, that’s right, Rick. That’s why when the Beings of Light talk about the doing, they say that it has to come from being, because that’s the place where true creation happens. When we are in tune, when we are connected to the depth of who we are, that’s when we’re acting (from awareness), and what we’re saying comes from the place of awareness, from the place of wisdom, from the place of clarity. The Beings of Light once said to me, “Ingrid, you think that you are actually thinking, and people are all the time thinking?” And I said, “Yeah, of course, all the time.” And they said to me, “No, most of the time, people are not truly thinking. They’re not using the true gift of thinking. They’re just remembering. We’re trapped most of the time, 98% of the time, in our own memories. The only way to be connected with the true creative thinking of the universe is by quieting the mind, by going within, by reconnecting with that center of beingness. And from there, the doing and the saying are very powerful.” Then we also start receiving clear messages, even about knowing what to do. Now I am whenever, wherever, and I could be in the bathroom, it doesn’t matter, I can hear a message. I hear the voice, the inner voice, actually saying to me, “A challenge is coming.” Imagine that, Rick. That gives me the time, that gives me the possibility to go back and center myself, go back to that place of balance, quieting my mind, and connecting with my inner wisdom. And then from there, I can be ready for what is to come. So just to give an example, that a car accident has to happen, I can buckle up and be ready for what is to come. That’s one of the great perks of waking up, is that you can use that awareness, that wisdom, that connection to be an awakened being in action.

Rick: And I would suggest that not everybody is going to hear Beings of Light giving them tips that things are coming, but we know life, things come, things are going to happen, there’s always going to be challenges, so (it is) time to prepare.

Ingrid: Yes, and in this case, that’s why I mentioned my inner voice, because there’s different ways to receive communication. We all try to leave it in the outside, but it’s not like that, Rick. We have what is called inner wisdom. We have our inner voice. If we are eternal beings, and have been experiencing so much, imagine the library of knowledge that we have within ourselves. And the connection, of course, now we have with Beings of Light, the universe, whatever we would they call it, Akashic records, everything else, everything is a library of knowledge. When we learn to quiet our mind, we connect with all that wisdom.

Rick: Home of all knowledge.

Ingrid: Exactly, and we know what to do, it’s amazing.

Rick: Yes, sometimes that field of being is referred to in the ancient traditions as the home of all knowledge, and what that means is that even though you as an individual couldn’t possibly know all the details about everything, there’s just no one individual possibly could, if you’re sort of dwelling and functioning from that level, then you get the benefit that would be had by knowing all the details, even without having to know all the details.

Ingrid: Yes, yes. And you know it’s a much profound knowing. You’re now actually becoming your own guide. You have your own GPS on, and you’re guiding yourself. So this is incredible, this is amazing.

Rick: Yeah, “Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

Ingrid: Absolutely beautiful.

Rick: Okay, well we better wrap it up. Thank you so much for this conversation. During this conversation we’ve been alluding to little points here and there in your book, but the whole book is very interesting, and I would recommend that people read it if they’re interested. I’m just showing your website on the screen right now, Ingrid Honkel, PhD, and I’ll have a page on batgap.com that has a link to your website and a link to your book and everything. Let me see what I can do here. I’ll just scroll down the page. There you are. There are a couple of videos, very nice professional videos that were made. I’m showing pictures of your book now. It’s been translated into Spanish also, and then some testimonials from people, and some videos from you. Very nice website.

Ingrid: Oh, thank you.

Rick: Yeah, anyway, thanks Ingrid. It’s been great getting to know you, and I already knew you pretty well before we even started talking today, because I’ve sort of been in your world for the past week, but it’s been a lot of fun.

Ingrid: Thanks so much, Rick. Yeah, that was a lot of fun, and if I can share one more thing before we leave, if that’s okay. I just say to people, and this is one of the last teachings I received, is that to remind people to go back to that place of gratitude. Gratitude is what we are. That’s why it’s the highest vibrational frequency there is. And the beings of light said to me, “Ingrid, if you don’t imagine how grateful every human being would be if they realize that for you to exist, trillions and trillions and trillions of subatomic particles have to be in agreement.” They said, “Ingrid, you are, you Rick, Irene, all of us, you are a divine intention.” Wow, Rick. So now when I see you, when I see anybody, when I see this pen, when I see a glass of water, I am like, “Wow, this is divine intention.” Imagine that gratitude. This water exists for me to drink, and trillions of particles agree for me to make this water and I (can) drink it? Wow! Yeah, it’s beautiful to see life as a divine play like that.

Rick: Here’s a quote from your book. You say, “When you think that you are too much, remember that you are but a speck of dust in the vast universe. And when you feel like you are nothing, remember that you are as whole as the universe.” And then you mentioned seeing entire communities of microorganisms in a single drop of seawater (and that) brought you to recognize the vastness of this universe. But it’s beautiful to consider that in every little drop of water or every little anything, there is just a vast display of intelligence, and that intelligence just pervades the entire vast universe, every cubic centimeter of it. It’s just full of that potential of intelligence and organizing power. We can merge with that.

Ingrid: Existence itself, life itself is like, “Wow!” So being in that state of gratitude, wow! Now you can communicate with everything, with all levels of being within yourself.

Rick: Yeah. So you mentioned during our talk that you do one-on-one conversations with people. What else do you do? How can people connect with you or get involved in any way?

Ingrid: Yeah, I do that, the one-on-ones, and I am also creating a community because people are asking me, especially older people I do sessions with, they’re like, “How can we keep in touch with you?” Because, of course, trying to answer emails from every person is impossible. So now I’m creating a community where I’m planning to do two meetings a month and answer questions and interact that way. So that is in the process of happening. And I also do speaking engagements and workshops. So for all of that, I’m available.

Rick: Oh, you used to do speaking engagements before we all had to go underground.

Ingrid: I know. Now they are all in Zoom.

Rick: Right, right. All right. Well, thanks so much, Ingrid. I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. Next week I’ll be totally shifting gears and speaking with three guys who run the Conspiratuality Podcast, which is about the strange infiltration of conspiracy theory thinking and QAnon and stuff like that into spiritual communities, which has been really quite widespread and deep. So we’re going to talk about that subject, which is one of my bizarre fascinations. Anyway, thanks a lot, Ingrid, and thanks to those who’ve been watching, and we’ll see you for the next one.

Ingrid: Thanks so much, Rick.

Rick: Talk to you later.

Ingrid: Talk to you later.