Jac O’Keeffe Interview

Jac O’Keeffe Transcript: Ghosts, Ayahuasca & the Myth of Existence

Key Takeaways

• Rigid beliefs can collapse when direct experience reveals more than the physical world.
• Fear can make subtle experiences overwhelming, but they can also become a path of learning.
• Love and compassion are presented as the way to help suffering beings move on.
• The limits of mind and reality can break open, making more dimensions seem possible.

Questions Explored in this Conversation

• What happens after death?
• Can spirits or subtle beings be perceived directly?
• How can fear and rigid beliefs break open into a wider reality?
• Can love help beings who seem stuck or suffering?

Full transcript, edited for readability

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My guest this week is Jac O’Keeffe. Jac is short for Jackie, which is short for Jacqueline, but you seem to go by the name Jac mostly.

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, good. And I’m speaking to her from the hinterlands of Ireland where the internet connection is spotty, but we finally managed to work out an arrangement that apparently will work. I just stumbled across Jac a couple of weeks ago. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of you before, because since I found you other people have been mentioning you and stuff like that. But I was just watching some YouTube video with some guy who had seen Amma and Adyashanti in one weekend and he was going on about that. And then after I watched that, another video came up of you being asked a question by this guy.

And so I listened to that and I thought, “Oh, she sounds interesting.” And then I read your biography on your website and I thought, “Whoa, this is a fascinating story. I’d love to talk to this person.” So we got in touch and here we are. So I realize you’ve probably told your story many times in many satsangs and interviews and all, you’re probably tired of telling it, but my listeners haven’t heard it, most of them probably. So if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to tell it again in as much detail as you’d like because we have plenty of time. I may interrupt you from time to time to have you embellish on certain aspects of it.

And then, once we’ve gone through your whole story, we’ll get to what you probably consider to be the more juicy stuff.

Jac: Sure. Well, actually, whatever we talk about is a load of crap anyway, to be honest. So it’s like one story, they’re all stories, even if we’re talking non-duality, it’s still a story. I mean, silence is the only thing that is in any way worthwhile I suppose, but it doesn’t make good listening, they say, so…

Silence is the only thing that is in any way worthwhile I suppose, but it doesn’t make good listening, they say.

Rick: No it doesn’t. I think people would tune out pretty quick. In fact I did that last week. I was interviewing this guy who has had a spiritual awakening but his main interest is in Reiki healing and he actually did a little healing thing on me during the interview where we just sat silently for a while. Larry King wouldn’t do something like that.

Jac: No. Did it work?

Rick: Sort of. I noticed more later on than I noticed during the actual thing.

Jac: Yeah, yeah, some energy shifted somewhere. Yeah, alrighty, so the story.

Rick: Yeah.

Jac: Well, okay, Catholic, rural Ireland, raised on a farm, pretty rough and raw rearing as many people have, and a convent all-girl boarding school and like, oh my God, can I just grow up, can I just get out of this? A few scenarios when I was a kid of like, one I remember actually and I don’t think I’ve aired it too much because it just came to mind now.

I remember hearing on the radio something about a mortgage, I’d say I was about 8, and to my next older sister, who would have been 12 at the time, I said, “What’s a mortgage, what are they talking about on the radio, what’s a mortgage?” And she just said, “You have to get one of those to buy a house.” I thought, “I don’t want to buy a house.” She said, “You have to buy a house. When you get married you have to buy a house and then that’s where you have your children.” This was a nightmare. I remember going, “I can’t do that. I don’t want to live like that.” She said, “But that’s what everybody does.” I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, that’s not what it’s about.

That’s not what it’s about.” I actually remember that, knowing that, no, that doesn’t make sense. Even though I got the mortgage and got married, I didn’t do the kids bit, I wasn’t that brave. But there was something of like, no, even at that age there was something, which there is always with kids, but we often forget it. But I didn’t forget it, you know. I knew that there’s something… it’s not about that. Whatever we talk about, it’s not about that. I don’t know what it’s about, but it’s not about that. And then a feeling of, in my teenage years, waiting to grow up. I just have to wait until I’m old enough to find out what this is all about.

And I remember in university, talking to a friend of mine. She met me recently and she said, “I remember, I actually remember smoking a joint with you,” she said, “in this house where we shared together, and you were saying, what’s it all about, what’s it all about?” She was saying, “What are you asking a question like that for?” And I was like, “What’s the point in any of it if you don’t know what it’s for, where it’s going and why?” And she just told me this a few weeks ago, you know. I didn’t remember those conversations, that I had that language at that time, at 19 or 20.

But at that time I went to study theology because I thought, “Well, if I could find out about God then maybe the mystery side of it all could be demystified.” And theology in Ireland at the time was the study of Catholicism and I didn’t know. And so after a few months this monotheistic, dogmatic philosophy was clearly about control. So I got into a bit of trouble with the priests who were lecturers and they said, “Well, you either leave or you have to go with what we’re talking about because you’re learning how to teach this to other people.”

Whatever we talk about, it’s not about that.

🛤️ Questioning the Catholic Story

Rick: So you were asking difficult questions and skeptical questions and so on.

Jac: Yes, yes, and the curriculum did not allow for this at all. So I made a choice really. I asked my parents and I said, “Can I quit?” And they said, “No, we want to retire, you’re the last one, you’re not on any subsidy, no, this is your one shot at education.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So I stayed quiet and fulfilled the degree and got out as fast as I could, an atheist, a very solid atheist, because I was listening and reproducing this, you know, crap actually.

Rick: What did you write your thesis on?

Jac: Confession! (laughter) The sacrament of confession!

Rick: And how it’s supposed to work and everything you mean?

Jac: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. God, I haven’t thought about that since. And the thing that pulled me to confession was that there was something, something could change in the psyche, in the folding of story. That’s really what I was talking about. But of course I had to talk about the power of the sacrament and all of that stuff.

Rick: And all the while you were writing this thing you didn’t believe what you were writing but you just thought, “I’m just going to get this over with.”

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: That must have been hard.

Jac: It was, but Rick, it taught me discipline. And it taught me patience.

It taught me discipline. And it taught me patience.

Rick: Yeah, good point.

Jac: It did. It actually equipped me very well for what was to come. But at the time I was just, you know, obviously just having as much of a social life as I could to balance out this awful stuff that was just making me contract. So then I got involved in community development, I was very interested in social issues, social equality, so I worked in that area for whatever, 5, 6, 7, 8 years.

Rick: Barack Obama did that when he was younger too, he was a community organizer in Chicago, he gave up all kinds of lucrative things in order to do that.

Jac: Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. And I also at that time, I was always interested in the arts because music was a thing that was just kind of cruising around, it followed me all the time. And so I got interested in how the arts could access something else in people who lived in disadvantage. So I jumped into that, not having the language again, about how artistic expression is an inaudible voice from that which is beyond concept.

Rick: Were you a musician or were you just studying it academically or something?

Jac: Yeah, both. I played the cello and I did music for my primary degree. So then at the age of 30 I was running my own freelance consultancy business for community development organizations and working hard, you know, and playing hard. And there was six of us having Sunday lunch, three couples, myself and my husband being one of them. I was drinking a can of Heineken and I put it down on the table and lifted my head and I saw dead people hanging from the ceiling all around.

And I said, “Okay, okay, I’m tripping, I’m tripping, who’s giving me what, this is not okay, what’s going on?” And my friends just said, “What are you talking about?” I went, “Somebody’s given me something, I can see stuff, you know?” And of course they hadn’t given me anything, and so what it was, was some third-eye capacity, some perception of the non-physical appeared.

Some third-eye capacity, some perception of the non-physical appeared.

Dead People and the Opening of Perception

Rick: Of course you didn’t know that at the time, you thought you were going crazy or something.

Jac: When you’re dead that’s the end of the show and happy days when that comes. It was as clean and clear as that. So then what to do with these dead people? So it was like, so does this mean then that when your body dies you’re not dead? Oh, I have to start at the start here. So then is there a God? I mean the whole can of worms opened.

Rick: Let me just ask you about these dead people, because you also had this experience, you were in the bank and someone appeared behind the teller and asked you to tell this woman not to marry so and so, and it turned out to be the woman’s mother. Do they appear kind of wispy and ethereal or they weren’t concrete like you might see in the movies or something?

Jac: Yeah, no they’re not as concrete, well to these eyes or whatever you can say, they’re not as concrete. There’s kind of something…

Rick: You could almost see through them?

Jac: You could, yeah, there’s a translucency, so you know who’s a spook and who’s not, there’s never a question.

Rick: But you can tell, okay this is an older woman or this is a young man or whatever, you know?

Jac: Oh yeah, the features are quite clear.

Rick: And why were there so many of them hanging around a restaurant? I mean, did a lot of people die of food poisoning there?

Jac: Well, we were in somebody’s house. It was an old house, funnily enough, it was an old house. It had been a rectory and it was this woman’s mum’s. We were having a party basically for the weekend and one of my friends, you know, it was her mother’s house. It had been a rectory so it was steeped in lore and stories and history. It was an ancient house with a protection order and everything on it. So I ran out of the house and the boys, the three lads who were there, said, “We’re going to the pub anyway. I don’t know what’s going on with you, Jac, but get over it.” “I’ll stay and do the dishes, it’s okay.” And the thing was, I was petrified.

I was petrified because I had no control, first of all, and that was something that I wasn’t familiar with.

Rick: No control meaning you had no choice but to see these things.

Jac: Exactly, I couldn’t turn them off. It was upsetting all my belief systems. I couldn’t stop them from engaging with me in any way and there was certainly a…

Rick: Were they engaging with you?

Jac: Yes.

Rick: Or were they just hanging around? Or were they saying, “Hey, we know you can see us and we want to tell you something?”

Jac: After about an hour they started to engage and I suppose it’s because I engaged with them. Looking now at how energy works, I definitely started to become visible to them because I was sending an emotion there, or looking at them, and validating their existence. And they were validating my existence. And lo and behold, separation is there and now we’ve got this other dimension in this dimension.

Rick: Did they seem malevolent or were they friendly?

Jac: No, malevolent.

Rick: Oh really?

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: Maybe the friendly ones had moved on or something.

Jac: For sure.

Rick: Malevolent ones were stuck.

Jac: They were stuck and that’s usually what it is, you know, where there’s a lot of unfinished business. You know, if there’s a lot of pain going on, you tend to project that pain or communicate with and through that pain. And these ones that came to me, yeah, there was a lot of pain going on, there was a lot of pain. And maybe I would have taken no notice of the other ones, these ones were just eager to get out of their pain, as is the position of any sufferer.

Rick: So were they asking you for help?

Jac: They started messing with me, physically pushing me around the place. That’s how I knew. I thought, okay, I’m really not imagining this because I’m being kind of, not beaten up but chucked against a wall.

Rick: Really? So you were like stumbling against walls and things?

Jac: Yes, yes. So I ran out of the house and I clung against a wall, you know, and I would try to run into the house and as I would leave the wall I would get whacked back again.

Rick: So even though they were ethereal they could actually have an impact on the physical level?

Jac: That’s exactly it. There was some tactile capacity that they had. And I think what enabled that was my own fear.

Rick: It made you vulnerable or something?

Jac: Yeah, it made me completely exposed. I was petrified.

Rick: I can imagine.

Jac: Completely out of my realm of what was possible, not to mind it being a real experience at the time. So there was no sense of having any handle on it at all for a couple of weeks. I’d say there was two or three weeks of the light was on all night. I was just, “What can I do about this? What can I do?” It was, “Go away! Go away!” There they are again.

Rick: What would happen when you tried to go to sleep?

Jac: I would fall asleep from absolute exhaustion.

Rick: Would they mess with you in your sleep or anything?

Jac: Oh yeah. They would wake me up. There’d be pressure on my body, yeah, your typical horror movie stuff, you know. Really it was just a horror movie, like those scripts are not so far from what you’re…

Rick: Wow, did you just see human spooks or did you also see like animals and things like that?

Jac: No, human, the animals were very benevolent.

Rick: Yeah.

Jac: They were beautiful, they were just easy, you know, so…

Rick: Oh you mean you saw ghostly animals or you just saw…

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: Oh okay, but they were okay.

Jac: Yeah, but they were always nice and at peace and just sitting there and, you know, I never saw dinosaurs or anything, but dogs, swans, elephants, but very nice, very gentle, and just looking.

Rick: So you’d be in rural Ireland seeing an elephant?

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: I imagine many Irish have seen elephants but not for this reason. They saw pink ones mostly.

Jac: Yeah, the odd Dumbo flying past the window. It’s funny, it’s totally wacky, you know. And if I hadn’t been so practical and down to earth…

Rick: You might have taken it in stride more easily.

Jac: Yeah, yeah I think so, but it’s just like, this is too crazy. This is too far removed from what is normal, real, and okay. Now I want to see the world, so what am I going to do with it? And I remember at that point thinking, okay, shut it down or move with it, what are you going to do here? I remember talking to my husband about this and he said, “Well, it’s your choice. It’s completely your story here, I have no perspective at all.” So I said, well if I shut it down, life continues as it is, but you know what, maybe I can learn something. It’s kind of too interesting, even though I’m petrified.

It’s kind of too interesting, even though I’m petrified.

Rick: And you didn’t have a choice to shut it down anyway.

Jac: No, but I thought I did, of course.

Rick: You didn’t have some little switch you could take, I suppose you could have taken some drugs or something.

Jac: I guess, go to a psychiatrist, you’re a total psychotic, and then that path happens, you know?

Rick: Yeah, I mean they could have locked you up, probably people are locked up who had this happen to them and it was just as legitimate as your experience, but they went and sought help and were diagnosed as crazy and they’re behind bars now, you know?

Jac: That’s exactly it, that was the other option, even though I didn’t ever have the label of “Oh, this is a psychiatric thing.” My brain didn’t go there. But if I had gotten help, of course, that would have been where I’d have gone for.

Rick: Yeah, or you’d be on Thorazine or something.

Jac: Yeah, no sweat, but it would have been psychiatric. There’s no other route out there for that kind of an experience. And all it is, is just that, I don’t know, it can be a few things I suppose, but it’s like the limits of mind start to break down, the limits of what you think is real starts to break. So the lack of reality in all of it starts to appear. And so then “everything is possible” starts to appear.

The limits of mind start to break down, the limits of what you think is real starts to break.

Rick: Interesting, so that’s a lesson.

Jac: Yeah, yeah, yeah, all of these things were kind of coming in and I was like, oh, so then there are other dimensions after all, that’s not just all fairy tales. Okay, so maybe then there are actually Irish leprechauns, maybe it’s that farfetched. That all of it is possible.

Rick: Did you see any leprechauns?

Jac: Oh God, I mean.

Rick: Or are we getting ahead of ourselves? (Laughter.)

Jac: I should just have “flake” written across here.

Rick: That’s ok, I think most people who would appreciate what you’re going to be saying in a little while will also appreciate this. I think they’ll find the progression fascinating.

Jac: Yeah, of course, because that’s the story, that’s how it worked. Yeah, sure, leprechauns, fairies, the whole lot, all kinds of creatures in woodlands, man! Woodlands that haven’t been, that are indigenous, that haven’t been created so much, ones that are indigenous are teeming with the indigenous non-physical, can I say spiritual, realm? Yeah, you know, wildly, wildly fascinating beings.

Rick: Just as common as the birds and the butterflies and the insects and everything else.

Jac: Same, same. Same, same. Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And steer me clear if I’m distracting you from something you want to unfold, but I’m trying to extract as much interesting detail out of this as possible. So did that phase of seeing the woodland, the subtle beings in the woods, happen around the same time as the ghosts or was that later on once you had come to terms with the fact that you were having subtle perception?

Jac: Yes, it came later on, I’d say about two years later, before I could see woodland life forms.

Rick: And by that time you were kind of adjusted to the whole thing, I suppose.

Jac: I was, it was like it was no big deal then, it was like, “Oh, hello!” It was just a new form of rabbit, you know.

Rick: And did they too communicate with you, the little leprechauns and stuff? You were able to converse in some way? Obviously not in English but telepathically or something?

Jac: Yeah, telepathically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s all there. You know, the astral body moves into these dimensions and does this when you’re asleep anyway. If there are beliefs that the world is a certain way, well this stuff was really hard to take. And for me those beliefs were very rigid, they were really rigid. I kind of knew how the world worked and I could sort it all out. Jesus, it had to be attacked with a sledgehammer, you know? So it was.

Rick: I think most people feel that way but most people don’t have your experience.

Jac: Yeah, yeah, for some reason this was just on the destiny of the woman called Jac.

Rick: Most people get hard life lessons in the gross level, like foreclosure on their home or a divorce or an illness or something and that shakes them up, but you sort of had it crack open in a vertical dimension.

Jac: That’s right, that’s right, it was huge because I remember the thought that was running all through the first, I’d say, two years of this, while fear was in the beginning huge and then it was slipping a little bit, I was getting some handle on being okay with what was happening. During that time there was one thought running which was, because this realm that has invaded my realm is beyond death, I can’t kill myself to get out of this.

Because this realm that has invaded my realm is beyond death, I can’t kill myself to get out of this.

Rick: Interesting.

Jac: So, if I could kill myself, this physical body goes, but actually I’m not sure if anything else is going to change.

Rick: You might become one of those spooks.

Jac: Yeah, I’m just one of those. So nothing can be gained by killing myself. So I felt so trapped, Rick. I mean it was like, I have no option here. There is nothing to do here but I have to go through with this.

Rick: There are plenty of books on this kind of stuff and you live not too far from Findhorn and things like that. Did you look into any of those things?

Jac: I didn’t know what Findhorn was. I didn’t know. I’d never heard the word New Age. Nothing. I’d never heard the word Reiki. You mentioned that earlier. I mean nothing.

Rick: You were just a Heineken girl who had her reality changed. (Laughter.)

Jac: Heineken by day and Guinness by night. Yeah, and working hard and social stuff would me a buzz, you know, the arts gave me a buzz and it didn’t go any further, you know, and that was the world.

Ghostbusting and the Living

Rick: Was your business disrupted by all this? Did you find it hard to function?

Jac: I had to shut it down. Okay, here’s the story. I wasn’t too long into it. I think, oh yeah, it was exactly one week since the first episode of Caspers everywhere. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard something in the living room and there was a woman hanging from the ceiling.

Rick: Hanging as with a noose or just hanging up there?

Jac: No, suspended.

Rick: Suspended, floating up there.

Jac: Yes, quite deathly looking. And I was, “Get out of my house! Get out of my house!” And she said, “You can help me.” I said, “I can’t do anything for you! Get out of my house! I can’t! You’re dead!”

Rick: Now let me ask you this, when you had that conversation with her, were you speaking out loud such that your husband could have heard you or was it all mental?

Jac: I wasn’t because he told me he would have heard it and he didn’t hear it, so it must have been mental even though I thought I was being audible. I was sure and I said, “You must have heard me!” and he said, “No, I really would have heard you.” The door was open and he would have, he’s a light sleeper. So I thought I was talking but obviously I wasn’t. It was in some non-verbal way but I hadn’t tweaked at that time that you don’t need to use sound for your mental sentence to be given and another one received.

So what she said is, she said, “You will do something to move me on, you know how to do it.” I said, “I don’t know what to do, will you tell me?” And she said, “Look, treat me as you would one of your friends.” And I said, “Okay, but I don’t know you.” And she said, “Well, you just imagine that you know me.” I was putting up every defense, I was being a sloppy old cow, you know, and I just said, “Well, if you were one of my friends, then I would feel compassion for you. I would send you love because you look like you’re in awful pain.” And she said, “I am and I’m stuck.

And I need energy from your world to move to where I’m supposed to go next.” So I said, “Okay, well, then I’m just going to imagine you’re somebody I know, and I’ll send you love.” And I put my two hands out to her. And this beam of light came down from the ceiling and my heart was thud thud thud! This thing came down. And I intuitively caught it and I bent it towards her and it actually felt like a hose pipe. It was tactile. And I said, “Oh my God, this is just love. It’s just love. That’s all you want actually is love.” And she went, “Yes, that’s all.” And so she said, “You will do this to others like me.” And she left.

Oh my God, this is just love. It’s just love. That’s all you want actually is love.

Rick: Interesting. That beam of light thing is kind of interesting. It almost sounds as though there wasn’t just you and her in the equation, there was also something sending that beam that wanted you to intermediate and kind of connect, be a conduit so that beam could connect with her. Why they couldn’t connect the beam directly to her without you, I don’t know.

Jac: Yes, it was for my benefit. I suppose in hindsight the learning was for me, she came to teach me. She was a working experiment, she volunteered, I guess.

Rick: Well it sounds like it was mutual, too, because she appears to have needed help.

Jac: And it was enough for now, I don’t know, but she said it was, so it did the trick. Now the funny thing is, I went back to bed, immediately after this.

I went back to bed, and I was dripping and adrenals pumping and I go, “Oh my God, oh my God, alright, okay, lie down.” And this other man appeared at the end of the bed and I said, “Get out of here, get out of here, I’ve had too much to digest for one night, get out of here, enough.” And he said, “I’m here to help you and I will tell you anything you need to know, anything.” And I said, “Okay, so tell me your name then if we’re going to talk and if you’re here to tell me I need your name.” And he said, “I can’t tell it to you yet,” he said, “but you know, call me Liam because it’s an Irish name and I know you don’t like that name.” And I went, “Oh, actually, actually I don’t. Okay, okay.

All right, all right.” Okay, this guy knows something and he’s got a bit of a sense of humor. All right. So I said, “Okay, let’s start at the start then. Is there a God?” And I sat up on the bed and I knew this part was telepathic because I wouldn’t have the sentence out and the sentence would be back, the answer would be back. The speed of his transmission was phenomenal. And he was full of light, I could see his eyes but it’s like there was this light, a dazzling light radiating from his chest to such an extent that it covered most of his features. So I couldn’t make out too much of his features.

Then we spoke for a long time and he just said, “If you do follow this path” and it looked like I had a choice because that’s what he had to work with. He had to work with where my brain and my understanding and my limitations were. So he did yield to that. And I suppose that’s where Jac has the practice of that now also, seeking the value of that, of like where the belief stuck, you know, and let’s move from there. So he said, “Well, your life is going to change hugely if you go with this.” So I said, “Yeah, but what’s in it for me if I do?”

Rick: Practical question.

Jac: Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, all about me. And he said, “This is what you will get.” And this sensation came up, which I don’t know, a lot of Kundalini happened after that. Can you multiply Kundalini by a thousand? I mean phenomenal, arresting sensation, that was just like, Jesus, that’s off the Richter scale. He said, “That is a teaspoon of love and love is what this is all about. And you are looking at a teaspoon of a liquid that is greater than the largest ocean on the planet.” And I went, “Ah, ok, this is just off the Richter scale.” And he said, “Yeah, you can’t comprehend what I’m talking about.

Do you want to pursue a path that is about this?” I said, “Yeah, do exactly what you like.” And then he said, “Well, okay, tomorrow morning you’re going to imagine, you will now decide that you imagined this sensation. So I’m going to give it to you again, because you doubt a lot,” which I did of course at the time. And so he said, “Just prepare yourself.” So I laid down on the bed and I said, “Okay, now.” So that I could imagine that I could observe, but you had swallowed the observer totally, and I went, “Okay, I’m going to go for this, take it away.” I’ve got to jump in to follow up this story, Rick. Eight years later I found out who this guy was.

Four, five, six, I’m just working out the year. Six years after this I connected with a spiritual master, who’s called Master Jose, who’s I guess he must be late 50s now.

That is a teaspoon of love and love is what this is all about.

📚 Meeting Master Jose

Rick: He’s alive, he’s a physical person.

Jac: Yeah, he’s in a physical body. I never physically met him, because of the clairvoyance it was no big deal because I could see him, I could call him in.

Rick: But he’s actually in some place, Ecuador?

Jac: Oh yeah, he’s got a wife and he lives in a house, and a son. He lives in the north of Spain still, and he runs meditation retreats. Or a disciple of his runs meditation retreats, and they do a type of chanting and a type of healing, and it’s totally the devotional path. Totally. And I connected with this six years later and went to several of these retreats. Now, two years into this meditation, kind of coming in and out and getting deeper and deeper and beginning to follow this guy and thinking, gosh this guy is very clear and any time I go to these retreats I tune into him, the clarity is phenomenal and something tends to drop out of all of the story of Jac.

So God, this is the purest I can find, having looked at New Age, having tried everything at that point that you can find. And at this retreat we were chanting and it was the closing event and he appeared in front of me and I went, “Oh, hello.” And he said, and it was telepathically because everybody was singing around me, and he said, “I’m Liam.” Master Jose did. And I went, “Who’s Liam?” Sure it was just like…

Rick: You forgot that.

Jac: Yeah, I completely had, like it was just a story six years before. “Who’s Liam?” And he said, “You remember this?” and he opened his hands and the image of him at the foot of my bed, I said, “Jesus Christ, you’re joking!” And he went, “That was me, and I’ve waited for six years while you went to South America, took loads of this, that, and the next, thinking that you can find God through everything except through your heart. So my dear, are you ready to walk with me? Now you’re ready to work with a Master.” I went, “Okay, if you have that kind of love that you’ve been watching me going around the world doing stupid things in search of what you know I’m looking for. Sure. Okay, I trust you.

I go for it.” So I cried and cried and cried and something said, “Okay, the search now gets easier. Whatever it is you’re looking for, he knows what you’re looking for, but you don’t know what you’re looking for. You just know that you’re looking.” I had that much. And so all kinds of resistance to following a master was the next couple of weeks. It should be a woman.

Rick: Hang on just one second. So do you actually want to skip the last six years and pick it up from there or is there anything worth talking about during those six years when you went to South America and everything? And you actually worked as a ghostbuster in Ireland?

Jac: Yeah, I did. I can give you a brief synopsis.

Rick: Okay, hang on one second. Please continue.

Jac: So, that six years in a synopsized version. Liam, or Master Jose, told me that, “To walk this path, do not take on any more contracts,” because I was working freelance at the time, “Within six months you will be working as a ghostbuster.” And I was like, “Oh no, not that kind of job!” But he said, “If you go through this path, you will find out about fear.”

Rick: I’m sure you’ve seen that movie, right?

Jac: Oh yeah, “The Sixth Sense” was great.

Rick: That was great, too, but you remember the old one with Dan Aykroyd?

Jac: I do, I do.

Rick: Don’t cross the beams.

Jac: That one wasn’t researched very well, but “The Sixth Sense” was.

Rick: Oh yeah, that was a great movie.

Jac: Within six months then I started working as a ghostbuster. Within, I don’t know, I’d say maybe a year of working as a ghostbuster and he told me to call it a ghostbuster. He said, “You’re so concerned about your self-image, if you call yourself a ghostbuster you’re going to cringe.” And I’m like, “Oh God, this guy knows me too well!” And so that name stuck.

Rick: So did you do for people what you did for that woman in your living room that night, connect with a beam of light and send them on their way? Is that what you were doing as a ghostbuster?

Jac: That’s right, pretty much that, just resolving what needed to be resolved. And you know it’s kind of therapy for the dead really, you know, that’s what it was really, it was just moving on whatever the stuck belief system was, usually forgiving oneself, that was generally the one that would cause most movement. But then you’d get a lot of malevolent spirits who would be throwing things across the room. I remember one case of a child who had been to various psychologists, various psychiatric wards, she was 12 years old and she would wake up in the morning black and blue. This was the presenting symptom.

The family somehow found out about me and I went and sure enough, sure, of course, she was doing battle during the night, this is what was going on.

Rick: Could she see them the way you can see them?

Jac: Yeah, and everybody thought she was going psychotic. “Don’t tell those stories to anybody,” you know? I was like, “Oh bless her, sure of course it was happening.” And so then they move on, the malevolent, the gang, and sure, she was fine. It stopped and that was the end of it, never occurred again.

Rick: Did you ever find any that were too strong to purge from the premises?

Jac: Yeah. What would happen is that they would just be laughing at me and they’d go for a while and then two weeks later they’d come back and I’d be like, “Hey sorry, I’m going to swing by and give you your money back because I can’t, they won’t take me for real.”

Rick: Was there a big demand for that in your area?

Jac: Yeah, it was a full-time job, yeah.

Rick: How do you charge for your services as a ghostbuster?

Jac: Yeah, it’s funny, I don’t know.

Rick: By the ghost or by the…

Jac: Yeah!

Rick: Little ghosts are $20 and big ghosts are $100.

Jac: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know, it’s usually a donation. I’m not quite sure if there was any fixed rate, I’ve always been very looser on things like that anyway.

Rick: It seems like the kind of thing that would have somehow caught the attention of the press and you would have gotten skeptical articles written in the local papers about you and stuff like that. Did that happen?

Jac: Yeah. It never happened and my father gave me advice about that. He said never, ever, ever let the media know about what you do. He said that when I told him, “Listen, my life is changing, I’m going to do this.” You know, you have to tell your family at some point and then they all have a conference among themselves thinking, “Okay, she’s lost her marbles, what are we going to do?”

Rick: It’s not too far off, I mean the Catholic Church has exorcisms, you know, it’s sort of in the same ballpark.

Jac: Yeah, it is, I don’t know what they concluded out of it, I never bothered, that’s their business. But yeah, he did give me that advice, don’t go near the media at all, ever in your career, you know. So of course, he was right, he was right, you know. It would certainly have been a distraction I think and it would have slowed things up, I think.

So from that, a year later into the ghostbusting, a year into the ghostbusting rather, I heard a voice when I was washing the dishes, “It’s time to work on the living, stop working on the dead.” “Yeah, okay fine, not a clue what to do with this one, so show me what to do, if that’s what I’m to do.” And so of course the same day, collecting my car from the local mechanic and he said, “Jac, if you ever do on living people, how you help the dead, I’d love to volunteer.” “Oh no!” And I thought, “Yeah, okay, fine.” Two days later I came back and I said, “Well, were you serious?” So he came to my sitting room floor, I thought, “Okay, I’ll pull out an old mattress and a sleeping bag and throw him on top of that,” and he fell asleep.

Perfect. Okay, he’s asleep. Now I’ll just sit here and think, “Okay, I’ve set it up, now, voice from wherever you are, tell me what to do,” and lo and behold his chakra system became visible, and I went, “Oh my God, look at these colors, look at these wheels! Oh my god, look at this mess!” And my hand started to move, and turn this, and twist that. Then, explaining this to a friend of mine, she said, “These are chakras, you can buy books about these, there’s charts about these in my yoga class.” And I went, “Okay, okay, tell me what to do.” So I went and I had a psychic reading with somebody and she just said, you get this book, you get this book, you do this course.

She was fantastic and put me on the track of the New Age because I needed that language, I needed that world because that’s what was appearing in front of me, so I needed the skill to manage there.

It’s time to work on the living, stop working on the dead.

🩺 New Age, Chakras, and Plant Medicine

Rick: Let me just interject a question. Do you think, was that Master Jose who came to you and changed your marching orders to start working on the living, was it him again?

Jac: Yeah, I think so. There was nothing else that responded to any kind of authority except to his authority, I think.

Rick: Right.

Jac: It was a sense of all other stuff, “Ah, go away, go away, go away.” You know?

Rick: Yeah.

Jac: But when that, there was something about his energy that was just unquestionable. It would be like, “Sure.” Doubt wouldn’t come in. There was a trust there. So from there into the New Age thing I ended up at a sweat lodge and met somebody at a sweat lodge who told me about Santo Daime. So then I did Santo Daime intensively for a couple of months.

Rick: What’s that?

Jac: Oh yeah, it’s a plant from Brazil which is quite connected to a church. It’s a medicine.

Rick: It’s like a hallucinogen?

Jac: It’s a hallucinogenic, for sure, it is. And there’s quite a lot of that in Europe. It’s legal now in Holland, the church is actually recognized as a church and this would be the sacrament, the Santo Daime would be a sacrament.

Rick: Everything is legal in Holland.

Jac: Yeah, yeah. And so, wings of that church practice in Ireland. So it’s a little bit underground of course, but I don’t think it needs to be really, because now it’s a recognized church, at least in Europe. And so from that somebody said, “Well if you’re drawn to this, then what about ayahuasca?” I was like, “Well, what’s that?” And so I got very interested in ayahuasca. I got very interested in that and ended up spending some time in Peru, I know, just a few weeks, but an intensive camp. I went back to Bolivia several times and worked closely with a shaman there.

Rick: So what did all this do for you, the Santo Daime and the ayahuasca? What were your experiences with those?

Jac: Oh, they were wild, of course, because I was so open and so available.

Rick: You were already seeing stuff. You must have started really seeing stuff.

Jac: It was wild, it was crazy, it was nuts, you know. In the feedback, like in the early morning at dawn when everybody’s talking, I’d be like, “I’m going to have to taper down what I’m going to say here,” when I was looking around because I’d just pick out one bit of a story because they ain’t seen nothing, you know!

Rick: Is it worth telling us some details or do you feel like now that that would be just sort of a distraction?

Jac: Yeah I think so, because it’s all simply just different aspects of mind. Any concept that can be thought manifests in some shape or form. That’s the deal with the concept, it has the capacity to manifest in form, or formless, or etherically, or in some dimension or some place. I suppose I was able to access those dimensions very easily on plant medicine. One thing, alright, one story I’ll tell, because it might be somebody’s experience. I was taking San Pedro. There’s a specific way that you take this medicine, in that you’re walking around a fire within a corralled area until about 4 a.m. in one direction, which is the unwind.

And then the shaman stops the whole thing, a little ceremony happens and you walk the opposite way. I can’t remember when it’s clockwise and when it’s anti-clockwise, I don’t remember. So in the winding in of it, okay, then the shedding of stuff as I was going out. At 4 a.m. you start to pull back in until dawn comes. As I was coming back in there was like a shudder and my vibration energetically would drop and it made me understand how energy works in some way. And I would feel this vibration, like you get the shakes, somebody walking on your grave, you know, that kind of a shudder, and something would feel more dense.

And in that density it would be, and so you think this, and so this is real, and so this person is in your life because you’re holding this belief. This isn’t cleared and so there’s this belief going on, and so then this person is in your life, and this is the scenario. And that’s why you’re in the job you’re in, and that’s why you’re married to this person. And I was like, “Shit!” So as each little belief system that Jac was holding at the time, of how she thought the world worked, as each one was coming back in I could feel a density, a thickness, a yucky, shitty crappy feeling kind of coming in at a cellular level. It’s like something… I don’t know actually really what it was.

Was there some astral body coming in? Or some density which had blown out, but the parts that hadn’t been dissolved were coming back in because I wasn’t ready or I couldn’t integrate the shifts? Maybe something like this. And so I could actually see, oh my God, this is just total density. The world as I see it is the world because I see it like this. It’s only because I see it. I’ve totally created everything that I believe. Everything how it is, is not how it is at all. It’s only how it is because I believe it’s how it is. Oh my God, that’s what I have to do. So it gave me a fantastic reorientation to see that this is totally my belief system, there’s nothing else.

This isn’t about faith, or going some place, this isn’t about anything except the belief system of believing that I’m Jac who thinks the world is like this. There’s something inherently unstable about this because it can be thrown off and it came back in, so it’s just a ball of conditioning. So somehow it became clear of the years of therapy that I did when I started at 19 to 25, just going to a psychotherapist, that part clicked in, that’s what the pull was, to get rid of conditioning. That’s why it feels so awful to believe your own story and why there’s freedom when you shed something, because energetically there’s the loosening, there’s a contraction which ceases.

So that was a great seeing, that was probably the best one actually, it’s the one that comes to mind now.

The world as I see it is the world because I see it like this.

Rick: That’s very interesting. I wish everyone could have that experience.

Jac: Yeah, it was a great one, it was a great one. And the other big whammy then was on Santo Daime where everything was stripped and this serious vacuum stopped any concept that I was clinging to, including the idea of myself. And that awful void continued for hours and hours and hours, even after the ceremony, but the organizers of the ceremony were trying to bring me back and my body was, I mean totally… I could look, and of course the mental faculties were going on, and I could talk, but I had no power at all from the neck down, none.

Rick: You mean you couldn’t walk or anything?

Jac: Nothing, nothing. I was lying on the floor, I was just limp.

Rick: Was it really awful to be stripped of concepts or did you actually kind of like it in some way?

Jac: No, it was horrific. There was nothing to stand on, no ground, there was just nothing and then even nothing was taken away. There wasn’t even a comfort in nothing.

Rick: You should know this one as a Catholic, “For the foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests but the son of man has no place to lay his head.”

Jac: That’s exactly it.

Rick: I think that’s what he was talking about but he had adjusted to it obviously.

Jac: Yes, yes. You’re dead right, Rick, that’s exactly what that was, yeah, that there’s nothing stable in any of this. And I try, you know, even in the middle of that I was saying, but Jesus Christ. You know, I mean, if you’re a Christian you’re like, Jesus let me grab something, somewhere, that was valid for a while, maybe, and I clung to that and it was like, no… a concept, a belief system, another relative story. It was like, “Shit, shit!” There was nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing. And so from that what was deduced was that existence, existence itself, is a myth. It’s not that which exists is not real.

There was nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing.

Rick: You mean manifest existence or concrete existence?

Jac: Yes, and that something can exist. It was prior to the something, this was about existence going, it wasn’t that the things, in the beginning the things went, you know, Jesus or my life or whatever, the physical world, the cosmos, all the dimensions, I was jumping from anywhere for some rest. So when the things went, existence itself went and that’s what the horror was. You will cling to survive in any capacity you will, you can. The basic instinct of any human individual is to cling to life.

No matter, that instinct will kick in, no matter how clear the understanding is that it’s not real or that this is an illusion or only an appearance, some basic instinct will kick in to keep the form alive until it’s done. And then it’s done and that’s fine.

Rick: Were you still married at this point? Were you going through all this stuff and going to South America and your husband was cool with it?

Jac: He said, “If I didn’t know you for so long beforehand,” because I met him when I was 17, he said, “If I didn’t know you for so long, I would be gone, girl, gone, because this is just too much, but actually I’m finding it interesting because it’s you.” So actually he was just, he worked in the post office, real stable, solid guy, played his golf, so he was very grounded, which enables me to go off and do wacky stuff and come back to base, I’d be okay. So he allowed the integration.

Rick: Yeah, it must have been good for you to have an anchor.

Jac: That was wonderful. Definitely, if there’s no anchor there, gosh, it’s tough, it’s tough. Yeah, it can be very tough for people who don’t have any reference point for that integration while the human life is in transition, you know, until that phase finishes.

Rick: I got pretty darn crazy myself before I got married, I mean just, you know, being on this totally dedicated to a spiritual path and boy, you know, when I think back I think, God was I nuts, you know, and it took many years to sort of get more and more integrated and you know get rid of a lot of my idiosyncrasies. But I wasn’t having any kind of experiences like you were having but, you know, still meditating hours a day and so on.

Jac: And when you look back at that now, Rick, what was that at play?

Rick: I sort of feel like, “All is well and wisely put.” I take the long view of things, the big time “I” as I think somebody put it. I just sort of feel like everything is unfolding just as it should. I started out really nuts, heavily into drugs as a teenager and dropped out of school and you know just a real mess and when I learned… I don’t want to turn this into a whole thing about me, but you know I learned to meditate when I was 18 and it really turned me around profoundly and dramatically. But there was a lot, many years of healing and restructuring and all that needed to take place. Because you know I’d really gone at it as a younger person and had a rough family life and all that stuff.

Jac: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: But anyway let’s get back to you.

Jac: And here you are now, doing this again.

Rick: Yeah, here I am.

Jac: Here you are now, touching into it from within a domestic scenario. It’s amazing, they’re not in opposition to each other at all, are they?

Rick: No, no.

Jac: Isn’t it funny? It’s funny because I have a sister who seems to have this skill to kind of see where Jac is at, where the character is at, and she often says, “Jac, you know, someday, someday you will go into a relationship again.” And I’m like, “I’m so far from that, the Jac character is so far from that.” It’s funny, you know, and she just says, “No, you will, you will, it will just go around like that.” So it’s funny, you know, I wonder will that integration happen for Jac again, I don’t know.

Rick: Never say never.

Jac: Yeah, never say never.

Rick: I mean your Master Jose was married and had a kid, right?

Jac: Yeah, he’s still married.

Rick: Yeah, he seems to be doing okay.

Jac: You bet, what a life.

Rick: It’s fascinating that he was able to scope you out from Spain and find this woman in Ireland who is having this experience and appear at your bedside and have all this interaction. Where must someone be at to be functioning in that way?

Jac: That’s right, that’s right.

Rick: Does he speak English? Maybe I should interview him.

Jac: No, he doesn’t speak English at all. And he’s completely in retreat, he never physically appears. So where am I at? Where were we at?

Rick: Okay, well you had jumped ahead six years to your visit with Master Jose in Spain and then I kind of backtracked you back to the Amazon and Peru and everything, we went through some of those hallucinogenic experiences. So we can take it up from wherever you like now.

Jac: Yeah, so okay, so from the connection with Master Jose, there was a few big wobblers I think really with Amma as in the hugging mother and from those retreats from the Master Jose school.

👨‍👩‍👧 Amma, Marriage, and the Move Toward Satsang

Rick: Yeah, I want to hear about that because I’m very fond of Amma. My wife and I have been seeing her since about 11 years and we go 2, 3, 4 times a year and spend time with her. You also spent some time when you were camping in Spain, but maybe that’s the Master Jose thing.

Jac: Yes, that was the Master Jose thing.

Rick: So maybe we should go on to Amritapuri, I don’t know.

Jac: The first time with Amma, she was in Ireland, it was her very first trip in Ireland. And just before the hug, when I was coming up to the hug, I thought, “I’m going to puke, I’m going to puke, I’m going to… What am I going to do? I’m queuing up here and I’m going to vomit on this lady,” you know! And of course I didn’t and because I felt like this is an energetic, then I twigged, you know this isn’t food, I didn’t eat here, it’s been hours I’ve been sitting here, okay fine, this is energetic, calm down Jac, calm down.

And the shift that happened after the hug, it’s like the energetic movement happened and I spent an hour and a half in some kind of trance, whereby I felt I was communicating with her. I was sitting down, my body was shaking because there was a friend of mine holding my jacket as I went up, so she was just sitting there watching me doing this shaking thing for an hour and a half. And at that time she told me, “You will have to leave your husband, your marriage is going to end, you will.” And I was like, “You get a grip, you’re just playing with me here.”

Rick: Telepathically she said that.

Jac: Yeah, sure. So she told me some home truths like this, which came to pass. I shut everything down at one point, now let me think, maybe a year after Amma.

Rick: What do you mean you shut everything down?

Jac: Yeah, I knew, okay, I was working as a healer at this point.

Rick: As a healer.

Jac: As a healer, maybe I was about 36. Okay, so the can of Heinekin and Casper was when I was 30. So then there was about six years until I hit the Master Jose thing, where I had done the energy work, the New Age, the ayahuasca, all the shamanic stuff. I hit the Master Jose thing, started cleaning up everything because it was more meditation, more chanting, more contemplative. And so from those two years with Master Jose, I felt that whatever I’m doing, giving workshops on chakra healing, on chanting, running weekend residentials, on healing the family tree, I got involved in all that stuff. And so, it has its place like everything.

It just came clear that this is going nowhere, this is a service, fine, and everything in my life at that point was a service, because that was all that made sense. And that really all I’m doing is gathering information and sharing information, and this is just engaging my mind all the time. I’m trying to balance it out with meditation and with observation and there’s something amiss here. I keep accumulating more information and engaging my mind in a way that I know is not helping. I’ve got to in some way leave all of this.

And so I started doing my work but without the third-eye capacity, so I thought okay, shut down this extra information and just be normal, just be normal and see if that turns up more crap. And so I did and I was able to like, no, only the physical realm, only the physical realm, and that’s possible to do. And so that was too much also, it was like, okay Jac, but I want more silence. I need to go away. Where am I going to go, what am I going to do? And I thought, okay, I’ll go to where there’s more light. Now what’s light? I thought, okay, the sun is light, after that, the rest of it is just ideas. The sun is light, okay, I’ll trust that, we’re down to the physical realm again.

And so I put my tent on my back and I went to a campsite in the south of Spain for three months. And my husband came out once for a week and I would phone him, whatever, every now and then or something. And when I came back to Ireland in the airport and he collected me, I was like, it’s gone, it’s gone, something is finished here, I can’t be his wife anymore, something is broken. And so then I knew that this is very drastic here, I’m actually going to have to lose everything. I can’t play with this one at all.

So we talked about it and he said, “Okay, it’ll finish when it’ll finish.” That was June and by September it was, “I actually can’t be engaged with you sexually anymore.” And he said, “Well now it’s finished.” And then, you know, that was the end of it. So I went to Spain.

Rick: Well you’ve got to give him credit for having been very patient for a long time.

Jac: I’m a great mate, you know. His girlfriend is lending me her car next week, it’s lovely. We’ve just always been great mates, it’s just that we couldn’t do the marriage thing anymore. And he now says, “Jac, the best thing you ever did for me was leave me, the best thing you ever did!” Because it threw me upside down and so of course everything works out fine, you just have to ride through the uncertainties, you know. From that, yes, I moved to Tenerife and I met somebody who said, “I want to go to India to study yoga and will you come with me?” I was like, okay, okay, let’s see what yoga is about.

Went to this yoga center which was at the back of Arunachala and after three days, this crack about saluting the sun and my hands up and my legs down and crabs and dogs and cats and forget it, I am not a yogic, it’s not my pattern, I’m quitting. And so it’s like okay I’m going around the other side of the mountain and I’ll wait in the local village and see you in three weeks time when the course is over. And over at the other side of the village, it was, you know, it was Thiruvannamalai and I was like Jesus, where was I? What was I messing around with for so long? They’re putting words on what I know, they’re putting words on that which I thought had no words.

We can point towards that which is beyond mind. The relief, Rick, it was wild, just to like, Jesus, people talk about it. Oh my God, the word non-dual for the first time.

They’re putting words on what I know, they’re putting words on that which I thought had no words.

Rick: I suppose this probably couldn’t have happened now because nowadays there’s non-dual people on every street corner talking about it.

Jac: Yeah, and YouTube wasn’t there, I wasn’t woken up to it. It just wasn’t available. So from there I spent a lot of time on my own there, I spent a lot of time just doing self-inquiry, a few years really, until Richard Miller knocked on my door and that was the end of Jac’s solitude.

Rick: Good old Richard Miller, he gets around.

Jac: He sure does.

Rick: And then at what point did you go to Amritapuri?

Jac: Yeah, to just get a break from Thiruvannamalai, when the season would be there in January, February and Amma is doing her Indian tour or she’s hanging out in the ashram, it’s like, “Okay, too many Westerners here, it’s too busy, it’s too much of a party scene.” I was going in too much at that point, I couldn’t engage. So yeah, I get a train across to Amritapuri and stay for a week or two weeks or something. Yeah, yeah.

Rick: You said something on your biography about having, really being sort of incapacitated there and having to be fed or just sort of being completely out of it for six days, what was that all about?

Jac: Yeah. There was a mantra which appeared, as they often do, you know, just a sentence comes, which obviously you’ve heard somewhere or something, and it was “I am the supreme consciousness, I am the supreme consciousness,” and it was running, running, running, running obsessively, as things were at that point because my mind was very much going to a single point.

I remember looking out the window of the little rooms in Amritapuri, looking out the window way down to the queue right out from the temple of hundreds and hundreds of people to get into the temple and seeing so clearly that, oh my gosh, look, that really requires a lot of imagination to imagine that we are all people and that they are individuals doing separate things and that they have lives and that she is the mother of that child. What a load of make-believe ideas placed on top of just balls of energy which we call bodies which are moving completely, just as the cosmos is moving. It’s just particles moving. And somehow we believe we are separate from this? What a crazy idea!

But that idea is just part of the movement, too. Okay. And so some seeing of there is no individuality at all, concepts are never the truth. They are not real. They can be taken as real but they don’t represent capital R reality. And so, in the seeing of that, I seemed to not be there. Functioning was happening because I was thankfully with somebody who could say, “Come on Jac, you need to eat,” and pull me off the floor.

I would just eat and go back to the room and lie down again and, you know, then it was six days later and it was like, “Okay, what’s appearing now and how come this is sort of solid again and what’s going on?” But the thought that brought me back was sex, the idea of sex, because the partner I was with was having a shower and I was just lying there and I could see him having a shower and thinking, “Why does this body imagine it connects with that body in a pleasurable way?” What on earth could imagine that there is a subject of pleasure in this and somehow it’s like, “Oh my God, yeah, now I can see how that works, that’s amazing and boom!

There was Jac again!” But much less, much less, it was just seeing that, oh, what was left then was that the sense of “I am an individual” is only alive when there is desire running. It only kicked in and it wasn’t that, it was clear that there isn’t an I here all the time that tunes in with self-image or tunes in with desire, tunes in. Not at all. The I is part of that thought, it’s like it’s a quality attached to a particular thought at any time. Some thoughts have an I sense about them and the wonderful magic of that is that it has the capacity to make you believe you’re real and you’re separate and that you’re having the thought. It’s like, what a joke!

The I is part of that thought, it’s like it’s a quality attached to a particular thought at any time.

Rick: So would it be fair to say that it has its function when it’s needed but that it gets sort of overindulged ordinarily and becomes something which really should just be sort of an occasional functional useful thing becomes the predominant permanent situation?

Jac: It does, it does. In order to make having a human life possible. So it’s totally wonderful the fact that it concretizes in some way. It’s amazing that it actually is believable and it’s 100% believable, especially when there’s suffering. It’s more believable when there’s suffering, because that density is there.

Rick: Very dense, yeah. I mean if we held our hand over a candle flame or something like that, it would concretize very quickly. Or if I held mine over a candle flame and you didn’t, there would definitely be the pain would be located here, not there, you know, and I’d be the one who, you know, there’d be a sense of, get that arm away, and you wouldn’t have that sense so much, you know, because this is my kind of concrete manifestation.

Jac: That’s right, that’s right, yeah. And there are layers to it, because the instinct for the body to protect itself, that’s always there, of course, you know. For some it’s overlaid with a fear of “I’m going to die,” or “I’m vulnerable,” or “Don’t remind me that I’m mortal,” and even with those gone, there is a basic instinct that moves to protect itself.

Rick: Which anyone, Ramana Maharshi had, anybody. I heard you talking about this in one of your satsangs, how you were saying that there’s always going to be some remnant of I or ego or sense of self as long as you’re alive. I’m not a Sanskrit scholar by any stretch but I happen to know one phrase which is called “lesha vidya” in Sanskrit and what it means is “faint remains of ignorance.” And the idea is that, as long as you’re a functioning human being, there has got to be some “lesha vidya” in order for you to function, otherwise you couldn’t distinguish the wall from the door or know to put food in your mouth or anything.

Jac: That’s right, that’s right, yeah. And I guess it’s the working mind, you know, because the thinking mind is the part that achieves liberation, you know. It’s a mental phenomenon, liberation anyway. So that seeing of the illusion as the illusion is just for the thinking capacity of mind. So the working mind is there, but yet something enables a movie to appear as a movie. The appearance still appears. It’s an appearance, but it appears to appear, still.

Rick: And there’s some kind of mutuality in it, too, because if you and I were sitting in the same room we’d both see the same table and the same chair and the same wall and everything else. And if one of us were to die, that table, chair and wall, the other one would still see those things. So it’s not like we totally create our own individual reality afresh and uniquely, each one of us. There’s some kind of a universal thing and we all just sort of tune into it to whatever extent we do.

Jac: That’s right.

Rick: Or however we perceive it.

Jac: And then at satsang you find somebody an hour into it saying, “Every question that was asked could have been mine.” So at the subtle layer also there’s such a commonality because it’s just one ball of energy, it just keeps moving around and so there isn’t a whole lot that’s subjective actually, it depends on how wide a lens you want to look through.

Rick: So as far as the Jac story is concerned, we left you kind of lying on the floor in Amritapuri, did you sort of ever reach a point where you felt like, “Okay, this is the final stroke,” and is that farther along in your telling here or what?

Jac: I don’t know because I have no plan. Okay, I remember walking around, I used to have a practice of walking meditation, of walking around the Samadhi Shrine of Ramana Maharshi and I remember walking around that, I think it was like in August or something, there was nobody there. And the sentence, “The show is over, the show is over,” and I often use that now actually, “The show is over, the show is over,” and something just went, “What makes an I appear? What is it? Desire, okay, I think it was desire.

Let’s see, let’s see if desire, where’s desire, what’s desire?” And after that sentence, that repeated sentence, because it was running for ages before it was heard and it was like, “Oh gosh, I seem to have lost something.” Within a few days later, in the shower, again in Tiru, I’m doing this because you throw jugs of water over yourself, in the shower, and it was like, “Oh, my mind is breaking, mind is breaking.” There was this sense of an iceberg breaking into particles and particles flowing away. It was like, “I’m losing my marbles here. Okay, okay, fine.” Psychiatric hospital in India? So be it, so be it.

The show is over, the show is over.

Rick: Oh you must have been used to losing your marbles by that time.

Jac: Yeah, totally, it was like, okay, well what’s next?

Rick: You’d have been losing them for years by that time.

Jac: Yeah, totally, well off the Richter scale at this point. Those two experiences were, in hindsight now, they felt like that some wiring, some essential wiring that’s necessary to make the I be believed, that wiring was burning out, that the I never… ah God, it’s just not authentic. There’s a gap between an I story and what is believed. How can anything be believed? The idea of believing anything, it’s just nuts. Nothing can be believed. Who could it be believed by? Believing is just part of a ball of energy that moves through consciousness, why would it be owned or believed? Some link broke in what gives an authenticity to the manifested world.

So in hindsight I would have to say it was those two incidences that happened quite close to each other in linear time.

Rick: It’s interesting how most spiritual seekers, there’s definitely a personal motivation, it seems, that they start out with where they kind of have some realizations that there’s something more and they think, “Well I’ve got to get that.” And so they start doing practices and reading books and going to seminars and there’s this sort of a very purposeful thing.

In your case, you were just going along, living your life, and it’s like a big hook came in and grabbed you by the neck and said, “Here’s what we’ve got planned for you.” Obviously you’ve gone and pursued all sorts of things over the years, but it’s more like you just stumbled onto a fast-moving train and had not much choice in the matter.

Jac: I was hanging onto the train.

Rick: You were destined for this thing.

Jac: Yeah, for sure.

Rick: And you were almost chosen, like in the Master Jose incident, he just kind of came along and boom. So it’s fascinating, it does happen to some people that way. Not everyone.

Jac: No, not everyone, and both must exist, you know, that you go after it or that it comes after you. I was playing catch up, I was just constantly trying to make sense of something because the next thing was already on top of me.

Rick: Some people might speculate that… I’m sorry, go ahead.

Jac: I often remember thinking, maybe I’ll ask to slow it down, maybe I’ll ask to slow it down. And I did once, because I thought about it so much, I can remember, I asked once, “It has to slow down.”

Rick: Did it slow down?

Jac: And about three days later I thought, “No, no, actually I’m okay now again, I’m okay now again, off it goes.”

Rick: Who do you think you’re asking?

Jac: Ah, sure, good question. My mind I suppose, what else?

Rick: Either that or some bigger intelligence, some higher…

Jac: Yeah, maybe so, who knows, I don’t know, it just went out there.

Rick: Obviously, you know, if you look at the universe, it’s vast and fascinating and complex and you and I couldn’t create a housefly if we needed to, you know, there’s just so much intelligence inherent in everything. So to me it always seems like there’s… I mean, I start my day every day by looking at some astronomy pictures of galaxies and stuff like that. It seems like there’s some much bigger intelligence running the show. We fathom that to whatever extent we can, and essentially we are that, but as human beings, individual human beings, we don’t have that kind of power.

It seems like there is a bigger power, and perhaps deputies and sub-deputies and so on, who were all involved in running this thing and you got tagged. Some people might speculate that you had done a lot of spiritual work in previous lives or something and therefore you were ready for this, who knows?

Jac: Who knows, who knows? But I suppose the deputies and the sub-deputies and the magnificence of galaxies, we are all of it.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Jac: We are all of it. Mind just says we are this body so therefore there are these other things that can be labeled, but we are all of it, we cannot not be all of it. We are all of it.

Rick: Somebody posted a question on my blog the other day and I wrote a little answer and this is going to shift gears for us here. I want to read it to you, it’ll just take a minute, and then see what your response is to it. He said, “Although I am impressed with the abilities of the many non-duality teachers, and more every day, but where are they coming from, to describe and point to non-duality in all the ways that they do? I have not seen anyone wake up as a result of experiencing their teachings. Have you?” And I wrote, “I have and I believe it happens, but I think it only happens when one is ready to awaken.

It doesn’t help people climbing a mountain to hear a man standing on the mountaintop describe his surroundings. If such a description is offered, it should be to inspire people to continue climbing. Or it may be that some people have reached the summit, but climbing has become such a habit that they think they need to keep doing it. For them, the assurance that ‘this is it’ can legitimately end the search. But most people are still well down the mountain and they need instructions relevant to where they are.

The man at the top may forget his own climb and say, ‘There is no climb, only this view from the top.’ The climbers may believe him and give up the climb, believing they have already reached the summit. They may even start advising fellow climbers that they, too, have arrived. A real teacher recognizes that different people need instructions and practices relevant to their level of experience. One size does not fit all. Traditionally, Advaita was intended to provide the final stroke of knowledge to complete the enlightenment of people who had traversed many developmental stages. It was not intended as a general instruction for spiritual seekers.

In the hands of beginners and intermediates, it can become a channel for fundamentalist mentality. I also believe, and often mention during these interviews, that there are many stages of awakening. Some of these can be very profound and are easily misinterpreted as final.” So, what do you think about all that?

Jac: Yeah, yeah. I go with, I think, pretty much all of it. Yeah, absolutely. (Long pause) (Long pause) (Long pause) All the styles are out there. There are non-dual speakers who sit at the top and say, “There’s only the view from the top of the mountain and nothing else is real.” And then there’s, I don’t know.. I suppose Jac’s style is like putting a torch to see if I can shine a bit of light at the rock in front of somebody’s toe and say, “Listen, would you just watch this one coming up,” or “Go to the right of it,” or “Go to the left of it,” or “Climb on top of it,” because that’s what was done for Jac, you know.

There was always that sense of, okay, if I just know the next step, and something was always showing me the next step. No matter how wacky it was, I always took it. And then from there the next step would come and, of course, I fell on my ass loads of times, of course, I’m sure it still happens, but so what. That’s just life. So I guess there is a lot of speaking from the top of the mountain which is completely a waste of time for those who are at the bottom of the mountain. There has to be a maturity to be able to hear words which come from that which is beyond, without story. If those words are story.

There has to be a maturity to be able to hear words which come from that which is beyond, without story.

Rick: But intellectually I think a person can be still fairly low on the mountain and sort of grok what somebody means when they speak from the top. They say, “Yeah, intuitively I understand what you’re saying. Nothing ever happened, there’s only one of us,” and so on and so forth. But I think what seems to happen too often is that people mistake that intellectual insight as the actual experience of being on top of the mountain. And then they think, “I’m done!” And all this talk of progress and all these gurus and all this stuff is a lot of bunk because I’ve got this idea, I’m finished. But I think it’s…

Jac: Yes, they just grabbed the concept.

Rick: Yeah, they did, it’s just a concept. And the word “fundamentalist” that I used here, I mean, not only in Neo-Advaita but in Christianity, or Islam, or whatever, there’s a certain kind of mentality that kind of loves to latch on to a concept of an absolute reality and try to make it absolute, but it’s really only a concept. And so that ends up, because it’s really only a relative perspective, which is all it can be from that level of experience, it ends up clashing with every other relative perspective. And then we fight wars over our concepts and we kill each other, we fly airplanes into buildings and so on.

Jac: Apparently we do.

Rick: Yeah, I mean look what happened to you in Catholic Girls School, they were feeding you a load of concepts and presenting them as absolute and saying this is what you have to believe and we’re training you so you can get others to believe this. But what does it matter what anybody believes, they’re just concepts.

Jac: Yes, they’re just concepts, they’re just concepts. I don’t know, it’s like there’s such a supermarket now of advice out there. I suppose, for listeners, take whatever is useful, but to be so honest with yourself, is it real or do I want to believe this? Is this actually going to… is this the next step? Or, does this make sense? Now if you wake up, that’s fine, that’s magic, wonderful, delighted for anybody who wakes up on the park bench, they don’t have to do all the madness that Jac did. But you can’t sit around and wait for that to happen. And it might or might not happen. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen anyway.

But in the meantime, gosh, yeah, of course, let the maturing happen. Let the I finish out what it needs to do. Find out if there’s something that still wants to experience something and have those experiences and go live and go and travel and go and do whatever it is the I wants to do so that there no regrets, that experiences are seen through, that desires are seen through, and maturity needs to kick in, so that it’s seen that none of these things are real enough, the juice is gone from what the phenomenal world can offer, from even what my mind and my concepts can offer, the juice is gone. And that maturity needs to happen, and for many that won’t happen at all in a meditation hall.

For some you can see an immature I sitting in a meditation hall and it’s like, “Jesus, if you went out and lived in the world, you know what, there’d be a different energy form sitting here two years later.” And you know, it’s totally, totally individual. Thankfully there are no two paths the same. So really feeling where you’re at and not grabbing, because the spiritual supermarket is like any supermarket, you know, give me the color red first, regardless of what’s in the packet. You know, it’s like, hold on, hold on, what do you need? What makes sense? Where are you stuck? Where is there a contraction? Where is there a tightness? Where are you holding on to a belief system?

Because the belief system is making you think you’re an individual. And then there’s an I who hangs on to it. It’s like, “Okay, have a look at self-image. Have a look at these sticky ones. Have a look at when you defend yourself. Have a look at these things that make you feel that you are an individual.” That’s the work. That’s what it is.

Rick: Speaking of the work, I’m sure you’ve heard of Byron Katie, right?

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: She’s very good at it. She has a nice little technique for helping to do that. That’s a nice technique.

Jac: She does, she does. That helps a lot of people.

Rick: It does.

Jac: It does. Yeah, it does. Whatever tool it is, you know, and this intellectual snobbery that’s part of this non-dual movement now it’s like, oh Jesus, no maturity at all and so many people who are just grabbing the intellectual aspect of it and it’s like, what good is that to you? You know, when you’re trying to pay a mortgage. Now balance it up, balance it up. When you’re in the horrors because you’re physically pained and you’re attached to your physical pain and you believe that you are your body. How good is it now, huh?

Rick: I’ll send you a link to a very funny cartoon, it’s an animated cartoon, it lasts about 10 minutes, but it’s about a conversation with a neo-Advaitist and someone who just says, “Hey, look at the beautiful tree,” and he goes into this whole thing about there is no tree, there is no beauty, there is no self. I’ll send you the link. I’m sorry I interrupted you.

Jac: No, not at all, sure, whatever. So, I don’t know, it goes the way it goes, you know, and is there a path, is there not a path? There’s a path for an I and there’s no point in dropping a spiritual path until it is totally known and seen and understood that it’s useless. You know, you have to mature to the point to see that the spiritual search is actually the obstacle. But to grab that, because like, for Jac, I never heard that sentence, that the search is blocking me. It popped, it was like, “Jesus Christ, here I am doing Japa, this is the problem, this is the problem, because there’s me and there’s something else to get. Holy shit, what am I going to do now?

You can’t do anything, whatever you do is going to be a block.” So in one way it was a blessing, even though I was like, “God, will somebody tell me what I’m going through, somebody tell me what this thing is about,” and I could get answers nowhere, because it was pre this internet availability of this information. So now people have that, so arriving at these points isn’t happening, the natural maturing isn’t happening.

Rick: Right, and I would suggest that your Japa and various other things you did were not blocks at a certain stage, until they were. It’s like training wheels on a bicycle, at a certain stage you need the training wheels and then at a certain stage the training wheels just get in your way.

Jac: They just get in your way, you got it, you got it. And make flow as it does and enjoy the flow because it’s organic and it’s not you anyway. But you think it’s you and even enjoy that it’s you while you think it’s you because that’s who spins out.

Rick: Yeah, I mean all things must pass as George Harrison is saying.

Jac: Yeah, yeah exactly, with whatever is presenting as real, it’s just presenting as real, so be honest about it, let it be where it is, and then it will pass. It all passes, of course, the whole thing goes up in smoke anyway.

Rick: That’s good, I think this point needs to be brought out more because there are so many voices saying, “Give up the search, there is no search, all paths and techniques.” There’s a Zen saying which is something like, “Enlightenment happens accidentally but spiritual practices make you accident prone.”

Jac: Wonderful. I love it. I love it. That’s a beaut. I haven’t heard that before. That’s a beaut. That says it in one.

Enlightenment happens accidentally but spiritual practices make you accident prone.

Rick: Yeah.

Jac: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how it is. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Good.

Closing Thoughts and What Comes Next

Well, this has been a lovely talk. I’ve really enjoyed. I’m so happy that I stumbled across you on YouTube and I’ll put this up on my site and help more people stumble across you. And I’ll link to your site. I’ve already put a thing up on the site but I haven’t added this interview obviously because we hadn’t done it yet. I will link to your website and people who want to go there to find out more, there are tons of talks that you’ve given on the site. I have this little tool in Firefox called Download Them All and I applied it to your page and it downloaded over 7 gigabytes of audio, just audio.

And then there’s tons of videos, so people are going to have a feast if they want to listen to you.

Jac: Yeah, if it works for them, and if it drives them nuts, just… there’s other people out there, you know, whatever works.

Rick: And you travel around and I’m sure you have some kind of mailing list people can get on if they want to be notified of where you’re going to be and things like that.

Jac: Yeah, it’s just on my website really, I don’t have a mailing list. It’s just on my website, people check in where they want to check in, but a retreat center is being built in Costa Rica, so I’m going to live there.

Rick: Oh nice, will it be yours exclusively or sort of for other teachers to help?

Jac: No, it’s just myself, somebody’s building it and I’m going to live there. Yeah, it’s just a small, intimate, whoever wants to come. Something here is moving away from giving isolated satsang events, it just feels like a spiritual opener or something, it’s kind of like too much of a supermarket, “Oh who’s in town this weekend?” You know, give me somebody who’s a mature seeker, who’s done a lot of work and in some way then, I don’t know, I’m not drawn to working with a mind that’s suspicious and just checking out, testing out to see what something is like, it’s like, “Oh, come on, come on, come on.”

Rick: Well, you know, I see that too as a stage in your progress. It’s because you went through the phase of doing the satsangs and “Come one, come all” and now you’re entering a new phase, which probably won’t be your final phase, it’s just another phase.

Jac: I’m sure. It’s just another phase, yeah. So now it’s residentials, it’s just all residentials, you know? That’s where it’s moving to now. So, yeah, that will fade too and that will seem like a bad idea at some point and then we’ll do something else.

Rick: Yeah, but each phase serves its purpose.

Jac: Yeah, it does of course. It keeps moving and changing, thank heaven.

Rick: And Costa Rica is not such a bad place to hang out.

Jac: I believe so, yeah. It’s kind of got a nice vibe, you know, something slow, something gentle, and the weather is a hell of a lot nicer than in Ireland.

Rick: Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks, Jac.

Jac: Thanks so much, Rick.

Rick: Yeah, no don’t hang up on me quite yet. I just want to wrap it up here and then we’ll talk for just a second after we wrap it up. So this has been Buddha at the Gas Pump, episode number 41, I believe. And my name again is Rick Archer and I’ve been speaking with Jac O’Keefe in Ireland. And not sure who’s going to be next week but we’ll see you then. Thank you for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING]