Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Julie Chimes. Julie is the sort of person that you interact with her a few times and you feel like she is an old chum. She is such a kind of friendly, delightful person. So I have really been enjoying getting to know Julie a little bit over the last few weeks. I also read her book which is called A Stranger in Paradise. Julie had a spiritual awakening of sorts in a way that most of us would not choose to do. She was a victim of a murderer or someone who is attempting to murder her, who stabbed her repeatedly and nearly killed her. In the process of that, Julie had a rather remarkable experience which changed her life. She can tell that story better than I can, so I am going to turn it right over to Julie. Incidentally, apparently other people who have interviewed Julie really wanted to focus on the murder itself, or the attempted murder, and get into as much gory detail as possible. That won’t be our focus, although we will have our share of gory detail. But I think in the context of this show, the spiritual experience she had as a result of this and the inner transformation that occurred in her life are far more significant. So that is what we will primarily focus on. So thanks Julie, welcome, and thanks for bearing with me as we overcame all sorts of technical difficulties to get this thing going.
Julie: Hello Rick, it is a real pleasure to be here at last. I think you are going into the technology business. You have made me an expert.
Rick: Yeah, really. So where would you like to start? Do you want to give a little bit of background before the incident, just to give us a context of what your life was like, and where you came from, what you have been through, and all that stuff?
Julie: Okay, potted history of the life. I think the most interesting thing about all of this is that I wasn’t looking for spiritual experience. I wasn’t aware of being on any path or searching. I was simply a businesswoman in London, doing what in the 80s I believed were the things that were important. I had a career, I had a good relationship with my partner who was a doctor, and all the accoutrements of a successful life of that particular era. And yet there was something within me that wasn’t happy with all of that as well. Something was missing, but I didn’t know what, but I wasn’t searching for it. I was aware that having all of these things was not necessarily making me as content and as happy as I thought I should be. So, in that context, I had a place in London, which was sort of my business home, and then I shared a cottage in the countryside with my doctor partner, Tony, and I was there at weekends and in between times. I’d just taken a few days break from a really busy time working. I was in marketing and working a lot with the media, so up against big deadlines in the days before computers and mobile phones, would you believe? So it was probably quite a lot more stressful in some ways, and a lot more fun in others. I’d taken some time out, and I’d been in Spain with my mother and my stepfather, just to have a bit of a breathing space. And during that time, my mother and I, we had an extraordinary few days together. We were very, very close and very sweet, our relationship. We had a lot of fun and we were doing some reminiscing. When the time came for me to get on the plane to go back to the UK, my mother begged me not to go, and she insisted on coming to Malaga airport with me. And at the airport, again, she said, “Something’s wrong, and I don’t know what it is, but please, please don’t get on that plane.”
Rick: This is a totally irrelevant interjection, but your mother had been Miss Great Britain, hadn’t she?
Julie: Yes, she’d been Miss Great Britain. She was a great beauty in her day and had married a pretty infamous comedian, genius in his time, so she’d been quite a lady. And she’d always been very tuned in to something, very psychic, very aware, and lived a highly interesting life. And on this particular day, it wasn’t like her to get emotional, and I mean, usually she’d be glad to see the back of me, frankly. So, for her to be begging me not to go and to be tearful was unusual. And at the airport, she had a crucifix that she used to wear, a gold crucifix, and she took it off and she said, “Please wear it.” And I said, “Look, it’s not really my thing to wear something like that.” And she said, “No, I beg you, put it on.” And to make her feel better, I did. And I can remember standing there, and I was joking with her, saying, “You know, for goodness sake, if you think the plane is going to crash, this is the moment to tell me, and I won’t get on it.” And she said, “No, no, no, it’s not that, it’s something else, but look, I don’t know what it is, but just take great care.”
Rick: I remember hearing a story of Elizabeth Taylor actually being on an airplane ready to take off someplace, and having this very strong premonition of getting off the plane, and the plane did indeed crash after that.
Julie: I’m quite sure we can tune in to these things, and I’ve subsequently heard amazing stories of this. It takes great courage though, because even though someone you really love is telling you to actually step out of an airline queue and say, “I’m not going on that plane,” I think you have to be very brave. And I wasn’t brave enough not to go back. I wanted to stay, I was having a marvelous time in Spain, and to go back to wintertime England, you know, in the gloom and the rain, and a job that wasn’t fulfilling, and a relationship that maybe wasn’t it. You know, too many questions, I needed more time, but I didn’t allow myself that. So, first hurdle failed. I got on the plane, got back. The following day, I had a lot to do when I got back in England, and I’d got appointments and business things to sort out. And I was actually in the cottage with my boyfriend, and we were awoken very early in the morning, I think about half five or something in the morning, and he wasn’t on duty. He was a local doctor with a surgery for local people, and in those days they used to cover nights and weekends on a rota basis. And if there was any sort of emergency or anyone needing a doctor in that time, they could phone directly to your house. So the phone ringing was always in my mind. If the phone rang early, it meant there was some sort of emergency. And sure enough, it was the police calling to say that they’d taken a lady off a London-bound train, and the only number she would give was this number, which was his number. She’d given the number of his surgery, the answer phone had gone on to the duty doctor. The duty doctor, who wasn’t my partner, said, “Well, you know what? This lady, if she knows the senior partner, maybe it’s better you phone him, because he may have more information.” And so through a rather bizarre series of phone calls, we get woken up to say that a lady had been taken off a train for behaving in a rather odd manner, and not doing anything to break the law, but doing a sort of anti-social behavior.
Rick: Didn’t you say in your book that she was running through the train naked or some such thing, or am I thinking of something else?
Julie: No, you’re on the right track. I mean, I know some people might think that was very social.
Rick: I should think that would be against the law in Great Britain, maybe you’re more liberal than we are.
Julie: But actually she went and locked herself in the lavatory on the train, and then she threw her clothes out of the window. So by the time the train stopped at the next station, she’d been reported and the station police went and got her off. And I think they managed to go down the track and get some of her clothes back. And you know, I mean, had I been told any of this on the day, let me tell you, my destiny may have been very different, but nobody thought to tell me these little details. So this woman, taken off the train, phone call to my partner, Tony, and he said, “Well look, I’m not on duty. I don’t really know this woman. So can you bring her to my surgery and bring her down later this morning? If it’s okay, keep her in your custody, and then I can see what we can do with her, and I can maybe contact her.” If somebody is behaving in a way that indicates that they may have psychiatric problems, there’s quite a lot of procedures that have to be followed in the UK, and I’m sure in your country, to actually do something with that person. So he needed to follow procedures, and he needed time, because he’d already got, you know, his appointments were completely full that morning. So when he did eventually go off to work, I said to him, “Look, you take great care. I think this woman, I’ve just got a funny feeling about her. Take great care.” And he sort of laughed and disappeared off. And at this point I’ll give a little bit more background that he’d met this woman on a course, a self-awareness course, that he had gone on, because a lot of his patients had been asking him about it and saying that they’d heard some very interesting and good things about it. Did he know anything about it in terms of healing, and what did you do on it? And he had no idea. So he phoned up the organizers and asked them if he could go and watch. And they said, “Hello, I don’t think it’s that sort of course. You come along and you participate.” So he said, “Well, okay, I’ll do that, because I’m curious about this, I want to learn more, and patients are asking me, and then I will be able to give them my direct experience.” And he’d gone along to that course, which I think had about 70 people on it, and this woman had been one of the participants. She was on it, nothing to do with him, but she was there. And so that was the context in which he had met her at that time in our lives.
Rick: And she had sort of fixated on him, and I guess gotten a crush on him or something?
Julie: She definitely got a crush on him, because she used to keep phoning the house and then hanging up if I answered the phone. So, again, looking back, there were signs that her behavior was becoming a little bit strange towards him, and that’s why I had said, “Take care,” when he’d gone off. But there was nothing to indicate that she was a dangerous person. She was just a lonely woman. She was very educated, well-spoken, she’d been a model in her day, and she’d been a good-looking lady.
Rick: Yeah, she was behaving like a normal American politician.
Julie: I’ve never met any, but I’ve heard. My partner saw her. She was actually brought by the police at 9 o’clock in the morning, which is significant. They didn’t bring her late
Rick: they brought her as he started work. So, he didn’t have time to see her, other than just for a few moments. And he saw her, and she seemed a little bit…she’d calmed down. He hadn’t been told that she’d been running up and down a train naked, and she was very pleased to see him. And you have to remember, too, that there was a practice manager, the lady who was the manager. There were nurses, other doctors there, patients. Nobody sort of came out carrying a crucifix going, “Get back!” She just was behaving…by then she was a pretty ordinary person. She said, “Look, I’m really confused about many things.” So Tony said, “Well look, I want to give you more time, I need to talk to you, but you’re going to have to wait. The manager will make you some coffee, etc. We can put you in one of the rooms.” She said, “Well, what I’d really like to do is, could I go and be with Julie?” Because she was very understanding. I had met her once at a little gathering of these people on the course, where they met for a supper and I’d been invited along. And she remembered that and she said, “I’d really like Julie, could I be with her? And would that be alright? I’d rather be in a home than waiting here.” Now, that might seem absolutely horrifying by today’s standards, to think that a doctor would send a patient to his home. But in those days it was actually quite normal. Our front room was often used as a waiting room for private patients. I was used to that happening. So I received a phone call from Tony and he said, “Look, could this lady, could she be with you and wait with you? She’s a little bit disturbed and confused about her life and she just needs company and I won’t be long.” So this was my second hurdle, my second test. You know, God exists as much in the word “no” as the word “yes,” but I didn’t know that then. I canceled my appointments and I said, “Sure, she can come.” So the practice manager drove her just down the road to our house. I opened the door to welcome her and brought her in, sat her down, sat with her and asked her if she … We had a nice big kitchen/dining room, lovely open plan room. And I said, “Now, can I get you a drink? You look like you’re freezing cold,” because she was shivering. And she said, “Yeah, I’d like iced water.” I go, “Okay, okay.” And I was just making myself a coffee, so I said, “You know, I’ve got the kettle on here. Can I make you a hot drink?” And I put the fire on. And then she looked quite tearful and I just went up to her and put my arm around her and said, “You know, come on, what do you really need?” And she said, “I haven’t slept for two nights.” I said, “Well, look, I’ll tell you what, we have a spare room here. Why don’t you go there? I’ll put the electric blanket on. You can be warm, you can rest, and then when Tony comes back, he can take care of you and talk to you and, you know, don’t worry, you’ve got all the time in the world.” And she said that’s absolutely what she wanted and she was so grateful. So I went up the stairs to turn the electric blanket on, check the room was okay. I went up another flight of stairs into the attic where I had my office. I phoned Tony to see how long he would be, and I couldn’t get through. The lines were engaged, too, so I came back down the stairs. And the last thing I’d actually said to her was, “Look, if you change your mind about a hot drink, help yourself.” And I heard a kind of rattle and a noise in the kitchen, and I thought, “Ah, she’s making a coffee.” I heard the cutlery drawer and I figured she was getting a spoon, and I felt pleased. I was a lot younger then, so I went charging, running down the stairs to go into our kitchen. And I always used to jump down the last few stairs; it sort of turned into the kitchen. And as I ran down, I heard this most extraordinary scream, but a really guttural scream. And in a split second, I had no time to work out why the scream happened. I just remember the most excruciating pain, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to my solar plexus. When I looked, when I kind of opened my eyes after the shock of this pain, I saw that this woman had come up the stairs. She had actually taken my biggest carving knife and had plunged it straight into my middle, which is not what I was expecting, to say the least. So thus began my Tuesday morning.
Rick: Well, you might as well continue the story. I’m sure you’ve got everybody engaged at this point. This is interesting. You seem to be reacting quite emotionally to this right now. Are you feeling a strong emotion right now?
Julie: Well, whenever I say this, there’s still the body memory in the sense of the impact.
Rick: This happened like 20 years ago or something, right?
Julie: This is 20 years ago, and I’m not in any way, I’m not reacting in the sense of, “Oh my god, isn’t that terrible? How could that have happened to me?” It’s more just this shadow of memory in the body, and the sense that any human being could do that to another is quite shocking. And talking to you somehow, you’re very different to other interviewers, Rick, because there’s a depth in you that I don’t normally encounter. So I get a lot of empathy from you. I can feel that. So back to the staircase. Moving on. So there was an immense shock, and not only that, this woman was calling out that she had to save the world in the name of Jesus Christ, and that she had to kill me to save the world. So this was like an added dimension to the experience that not only was somebody trying to kill me, but they had deemed me so utterly evil that if I wasn’t going to die, the world would end. So all of that was racing through my brain and my being. But what also happened in that moment was some part of me exploded beyond this body awareness into a completely different place. Like I had an overview. I suddenly was watching the scene from on high, looking at myself, looking at the woman, looking at the knife, looking at the whole scenario from a place beyond. And I thought, “Wow, that’s it, I’m dead.”
Rick: And it wasn’t just like you were hovering near the ceiling from that perspective, seeing it. It was a different dimension of beyond you’re referring to, right?
Julie: A completely different dimension, as if I were almost in a theater, watching a movie, watching it from a distance, seeing a movie screen from quite far away, and being fully aware of what was happening on the screen and engaged with that, but in a place where there was no pain, no sound effects, because there was a lot of sound on the stairs of knife and flesh and screams, but beyond all of that, and in a place of incredible love and great humor, just a sense of laughter. Like, “Oh, you know, is this the way you’ve decided to end this lifetime? This is so corny, you know, this is just … what a way, couldn’t you have been …?”
Rick: Like a B-movie or something.
Julie: Yeah, it was like, I don’t know about in the States, but in the UK, back in the 60s, we used to have these really dreadful horror movies. They were so bad, you could see the ropes pulling the bats. It felt like that, it was just so ham. But anyway, watching it from this other dimension was very, very funny and also very poignant, because you hear, one hears about life flashing before one, and the near-death experience, which is now common parlance, but back then it was not a phrase I’d ever heard. I hadn’t heard of tunnels and light, and it’s not what happened to me. What happened to me was different. I was in another dimension, I was watching, and it was as if I had somebody with me who I intuitively knew really deeply loved me, and wanted me to survive, and wanted me to go through this whole process of being stabbed and to live through it, because they told me that I was not meant to die, and that I had to go back into the body. And I was arguing with them, “There is no way I am going back into that,” because I could see what was happening to it.
Rick: And it wasn’t just the one stab, meanwhile she was stabbing you repeatedly, right?
Julie: Yeah, it was just a frenzied knife attack.
Rick: Over and over again.
Julie: And I knew if I was going to survive I had to get off the staircase, and I didn’t see how that would be possible from this bigger perspective. But at the same time there was this incredible love, and then I was back on the stairs looking through my eyes at this woman, like I was in and out of this state. It was very hard to write about it, Rick, because so many things happened all at once, and I went beyond time, beyond space, beyond logic, and then to try and condense it into the language of making sense out of it so that I could explain what happened. This is really difficult, and it’s still difficult as you can hear. But I looked at this woman through my physical eyes, and I just found the words came out of my mouth that I said, “I love you, you can’t kill me because I love you.”
Rick: And you said that she would have actually heard you say that, this wasn’t just a mental thing, it was actual, you physically spoke those words.
Julie: I physically spoke those words, and I don’t know whether she heard or not, but what I know is that within me, the feeling was like an explosion inside me of wonder, that we were somehow locked in this dance of death, but it was actually a very beautiful dance, and that I could not in any way hate her for what she was doing to me, and I felt this immense compassion. I saw her life, I saw a great sadness, loneliness, bleakness in her. I saw her madness, her insanity, I saw her life, sort of through my eyes I could see it, and through my being I could feel it, and with that understanding I could only have compassion for her. I knew that I didn’t want to die on that staircase, and then I went kind of back into the bigger perspective again, I kind of went out again, and I found myself standing on a hillside looking at a monk in these wonderful shimmering robes, and he was giving a lesson, like a martial arts type of lesson to two young boys, like in the old kung fu movies, “Ah, grasshopper!” But he was teaching them how to deflect an attack, if someone was running at you with a knife, or a weapon, how to deflect the energy, and use the energy of the person attacking you against them. And he gave this demonstration, and then he looked at me, whatever I was, because I obviously wasn’t in my body, but he could clearly see something, and it was very simple, it’s very simple. And then I was back in the body again, looking at this woman lunging at me with the knife, and I just put my hand up and I just literally, very gently, knocked her to one side, knocked her arm, and she of course fell because she was coming at me with all her might up the stairs. And she fell forward and the knife embedded itself in the staircase, and I was able to then just kind of slide around her. I couldn’t stand up, I got this massive injury in my middle, but I kind of slid down into the kitchen. And then the next, what actually was about 15 minutes, I’m told, was this in and out of body state, where I was being given instructions. And someone was shouting in my ear, like I can hear you through my headphones, someone was shouting, “Don’t forget to breathe! Breathing helps, you know!” There’s some wise shot, and I go, “Oh, right!” And then step by step I was guided through my home. And then I have to tell another piece of the story here because it’s so significant, that a few weeks beforehand, before this happened, I had been in London at a business meeting. And I was in central London and it was absolutely pouring with rain. And I’d gone to this meeting and the person that I had an appointment with was delayed by about an hour. And his secretary told me, “Would I like to wait?” because it was an important meeting and I didn’t have time to go back to my office and then come out again. So I said, “Well, yeah, but I’ll find a cafe or something and then I’ll come back in an hour.” And it was in an area of London in the West End where there actually weren’t any cafes, and it was in a place called Belgrave Square. But I remembered that when I was a child, my mother had taken me to Belgrave Square because it was the headquarters of the British Spiritualist Association. And I remember she’d gone a couple of times. And I also remembered that this building, it was a very grand old London building, it had a library. And I don’t know why I remembered on that day, because I’d been to Belgrave Square many, many times subsequently in my life, but I thought, “I wonder if that library is still there. I’ll go and see and I can shelter from the rain and read for an hour.” So I found the building. It was still the headquarters of the British Spiritualist Association. And I went in and there was a reception area and a woman looked up and she said, “Ah, you must be the three o’clock appointment.” And I said, “No, no, I don’t have an appointment. I just wondered if the library is here. Could I have a look in the library?” And she said, “Yes, yes, the library is still here.” And she said, “Is it your first time, dear?” And I thought I was going into a brothel, you know. I said, “No, I really don’t have an appointment, but I didn’t want to stay. I just want to stay out of the rain and keep dry and read for an hour. I’m killing time.” And this woman, she was so persistent. She got in her bean that I was her three o’clock appointment with some medium. And I actually got so embarrassed by her insistence that I just said, “Look, I’ll take the appointment. Okay, I’ll take it.” So, completely not interested, not wanting to know anything, no focus or question in my mind. I went up some stairs and down a corridor and entered into a room. And there’s this very nice gentleman sitting there with amazing blue eyes, really intense blue eyes, who looked at me and asked me to sit down. And then he went straight into talking about my grandfather and describing people in such an accurate way that he got my attention, he really had my attention. And then he went very quiet and he said, “There’s only one thing that we want to say to you. Change your front door.” He said, “I beg you, change your front door.” And then he started to hammer his fist on the little table as if someone was telling him, shouting at him. And then he was shouting at me, “You must change your front door. You must, must, must change your front door.” And I was thinking, I’ve just spent however many pounds to be getting DIY instructions from spirit. You know, how profound is that, “Change your front door”?
Rick: It would be more helpful if he said, “Don’t let any strange women in your house.”
Julie: Well, exactly, but this is so significant because I had a front door sitting in the garage. I’d been sitting there for six months, to the cottage. Neither of us had actually bothered to get it done, we’d been too busy. And we had such a tiny entranceway into this cottage, this little porch area before you got into the main house, that the door opened inwards and it trapped you. You had to stand behind the door to let someone get in, and there was no room for two people in a hallway. So, back to the day of the attack, when I actually got to that hallway, I had changed the door so that it opened outwards. I’d followed the instruction from spirit, and that was a significant factor in saving my life.
Rick: Yeah, you never would have been able to open it inwards.
Julie: No way, because I was actually on my hands and knees and I was slumped in that hallway. I was a weight against the door, so I could never have opened it inwards and moved myself out of the way with somebody attacking me. It would have been impossible, it would have been impossible.
Rick: And she was still attacking you all the way to the door? I mean, had she managed to get the knife out of the stairs and keep coming?
Julie: Oh yeah, she just followed me all the way.
Rick: She yanked it out of the stairs or whatever and just kept following and stabbing as you crawled toward the door?
Julie: Yeah, just relentless. I actually had managed to get up to my feet at one point, and because that’s what I was told to do, get on your feet, and I had my hands above my head holding the knife in her hands. She was quite a lot taller than me, holding the knife above my head with all her, and I used her force to help me walk backwards.
Rick: I see, she was pushing you along.
Julie: So she was actually pushing me, so it was really quite helpful. She got me to the porch, but there I collapsed again. I’m laughing because it’s so bizarre in one way, and I’m here, you know, there’s a happy ending, so I can laugh now. In the hallway, the next thing that happened was when I was actually slumped, she grabbed hold of my sweater to bring me nearer to her with one hand so that she could put the knife in me with the other. And as she grabbed me, this crucifix that my mother had given me just flew out of my sweater. And because all this was being done in the name of Jesus, she stopped dead when she saw the crucifix. It like fixated her, and again, that was another significant thing because I managed to … by this point I have to say that the knife had actually gone through my right hand as I put it up to protect myself. But with my left hand I could kind of reach up behind me, and I actually reached up and managed to lift myself up and open the latch on the door so that it opened outwards, and I fell out. And the only time I had an opportunity in that moment that I could have turned the knife on her, you know, there was just that moment in self-defense where she was still fixated, and there was no way I could harm her.
Rick: You could have taken the knife away from her and stabbed her with it, you’re saying?
Julie: Yeah, I don’t know that I could have gotten it out of her hand, but I could have turned it around on her. In self-defense, you know, just to anything to stop her, and yet I couldn’t. I just somehow, even in my desperate situation, knew that I couldn’t harm her. But what I could do is, as she lunged with the knife out of the door, I used my body to just slam the door on her wrist, just to try and shut the door. And then I was calling for help. I had quite a long driveway down to the road, and the cars and people were going about their business at the end of this drive, and I was calling out to all and sundry for help. And I thought at this point it would be like the Hollywood movie, you know, that somebody would come and rescue me. But what I actually saw was that people were running away. And then, in all honesty, had I been one of those people, I would have run away, I’m pretty sure. Because by this time the woman with the knife was back, and she got it in my back, she stabbed me in my back as I was crawling down the drive. And it kind of got stuck in my back, which in a way was another good thing because it meant she couldn’t do any more damage. And she was trying to pull it out, and I was just trying to crawl down this drive, which I did. And all the time …
Rick: It must have gotten stuck between some ribs or something.
Julie: It got stuck in my muscles apparently, my muscles contracted around it in my shoulder blade. And it had gone down actually into my spine. So, and I was still having a conversation with this being who was telling me that I was going to live, that it was going to be all right, that I had to keep going. And I did, I’ve always been obedient, you know, just followed the instructions, carried on down the drive.
Rick: So you’re crawling on your hands and knees down the driveway?
Julie: Yes, yes. And then I figured that, okay, if no one was going to run up and help me, if I could get in the drive and actually get in the road, the cars would have to stop because then my body would be in the road. It was a good plan, but the cars just drove around me.
Rick: Holy mackerel! Wow.
Julie: I think it was such a hideous sight, and what do you do? How do you help? I’m sure people were going to get telephones. There were no mobile phones then. And then this mad creature decided that she was going to decapitate me, and then I lost consciousness for a while. For just a little while, everything did just go black, and the vast space, the light, the love, everything had gone. And that was the most desolate moment. I didn’t know whether I was alive, whether I was dead, whether the voice …
Rick: So you lost body consciousness, but you were still conscious in some way?
Julie: Well, I had to, because I was saying, “Well, who is aware that there is nothing?” Because if there is nothing, nothing would be aware. So this extraordinary question …
Rick: So the mental process was still going on.
Julie: So the processes were still going on. And then I opened my eyes and once again I was back in the body, and very aware of … and I could hear all these people arguing. So what had happened was a young man who had … he’s a builder, and he was on his way to have an early lunch. And he got to a bridge, the railway bridge, which was near to my home, and was very high-sided to stop people throwing themselves off it. And he got onto the bridge and he thought he heard a scream, and he turned around, and then it was silent and he heard nothing. Then he heard another scream, and in that moment he thought, “Ah, I’ve left my jacket with my money in, back at the building site.” So he needed to go back. He turned around, walked off the bridge, and as he came off the bridge he saw there I was, lying in the road with this woman trying to cut my head off. And with no fear at all, and I suppose this was the Hollywood movie, he just walked up to her. And this is when I regained my awareness. I heard him, I didn’t see him, but I heard him saying to me, “You’re going to be all right, love. You’re going to be all right.” Very softly spoken, and then he turned to this woman and he said, “Now just put that knife down. Just put it down and give it to me.” And everything stopped, and then I heard people and voices, and I heard people arguing, saying, “Has anyone called an ambulance?” And someone else said, “Well, there’s no point. They’re on strike.” And I’m thinking, “Well, this is helpful.” And then I remember just thinking about studying biology and how much blood can a human being lose before they die, and getting myself into the emergency position, because no one else was going to do that for me. And then I heard the sound of stiletto heels running across the road, and a very well-spoken voice, and this face came into focus, and it was a woman who lived over the road whose husband was a doctor. And I heard her say, “Is there anything I can do, dear?” So I phoned home, and I found it very difficult to speak, but I asked her if she could phone Tony, get Tony. A) because he was a doctor, B) because he was my partner, and I thought, “Well, he’ll know what to do,” but despite this shower of people, I really got the worst accident onlookers it was possible to get. Somebody said, “Well, do you think we ought to cover her?” And then I heard a man saying, “I’m not putting my jacket on her, I’ll get ruined with blood.” And I was so cold, I was just so cold and frightened, really, and the pain was starting to become unbearable.
Rick: Now meanwhile, had the woman been restrained? Her name was Helen, wasn’t it?
Julie: Yes, well, that was the name.
Rick: She had been taken away at that point?
Julie: No, the police hadn’t arrived.
Rick: But I mean, she wasn’t still stabbing you at this point.
Julie: No, she actually, I didn’t know at the time, but I subsequently found out she had gone back into the house. What she had actually done is gone and got another knife. She came out at this point when the woman had gone off to phone Tony and the accident onlookers were arguing. She got another knife from the kitchen, came back out and tried to have another go at me, but she was pulled off by this young man for a second time, then the police came. I then heard a “click, click, click” of the high heel shoes coming back across the road. This woman bent right down low and in my ear said, “The phone was engaged. It was busy. I couldn’t get through.” But fortunately somebody else had got onto Tony and I heard, I actually recognized the sound of the engine and the squeal of the brakes. A wonderful sequence of events, an amazing sequence of events got me to a hospital. The police are not allowed to take accident victims in their car, but this young man had just qualified on an advanced driving test. This young police driver, and he said, “You know, ambulance,” they were on strike, “we’re putting her in the back of the police car and I’ll take the consequences.” He drove apparently at very, very high speeds. He also had just come from the main and obvious hospital to take me from. He’d just been there and he knew that there was a massive traffic accident, there was queues, the roads were blocked, he couldn’t get there. So he went through the back lanes to another hospital which was near to his hometown, which was only five minutes further in distance, but the roads were clear. He got me there and at this point my partner Tony had also said, “I’ll take her in my car if no one else will do it. I don’t care, but we’ve just got to get her to the hospital.” And he heard very clearly that there were 15 minutes. He just knew that’s how long he’d got to save me. And he could hear it counting down in his head.
Rick: 15 minutes.
Julie: Yeah. Right. We arrived at the hospital. I remember the trip in the police car, but again I felt like I was at the end of a very long tunnel, just hearing voices. I could hear Tony shouting at me to stay there, stay with him, stay conscious. And the police driver was shouting at me as well, shouting at me, “Come on, we’re nearly there. You can do this, you’ve got this far.” They were really encouraging me to hang on to life. The hospital was about to be filmed on one of these reality TV shows, and so all the doctors were there, and the surgeons, all in their best kind of whites, and the nurses were there. And they were ready to be filmed, and so they were all on duty, which is a miracle, believe me, in the UK. Because the injuries I had, I needed different experts for different bits of me. So we got to the hospital as the last minute. We did it, we got there.
Rick: And they patched you up, gave you some blood.
Julie: Frankenstein’s pride, Rick, they did patch me up.
Rick: Of course, in reading your book, I read the whole thing about your recovery and all, and all the various dramas and humorous incidents you went through during all that. So that’s the basic story of the incident. Now let’s shift gears, if we may, and discuss this other dimension that came into it, this voice that was guiding you, and as much as you can possibly say about that.
Julie: I think that the most fascinating thing for me was that it didn’t stop. It wasn’t as if it came during the extreme need, which I know happens, and has happened to many thousands of people, but it stayed with me. So whilst I was in the hospital recovering, I was having these amazing dialogues with this being beyond form, and a discourse. And I was drifting in and out of dreams, very lucid, vivid dreaming, which I always had very vivid dreams, but these were very specific dreams that I was being taken to, like a classroom situation, as if I were in some sort of university of life, where I was listening to lectures about the meaning of life, the nature of life, the nature of forgiveness, compassion, why things happen the way they do, the purpose of human life, just listening, listening, listening. And then lying in my hospital bed and then back at home when I was recovering, going in and out of dialogues with this being. I called him Veritas, because it just seemed to encompass what it was.
Rick: That means truth, doesn’t it?
Julie: Yeah, just truth, just a higher truth. And I kept hearing this voice saying, “It’s time to follow your highest truth, it’s time to follow your highest truth.” And I didn’t know what that meant, you know, “What does this mean, ‘highest truth’?” So everything in me had woken up to the fact that there was another dimension to this thing called life. And I promised, lying in the hospital, I promised myself that if I made it through, if I really did live, and if I survived all of these injuries and all the complications, that I would dedicate my life to finding out what “highest truth” meant.
Rick: And so how has that gone?
Julie: Oh, has it been one heck of a ride?
Rick: You’ve had about 20 years or so to work on that?
Julie: 20 years, still working on it. Oh, my goodness me. Yes, it’s just been extraordinary. I knew I had to end the life I was living then, and I had to do it graciously and with integrity, but somehow it seemed utterly unimportant. The quest of the money-making 80s, you know, where a ruthless pursuit of more seemed obscene to me. The world was so vivid, Rick. When I came out of the hospital, everything was so bright, just so bright, and in some ways quite hideous. I saw an ugliness, and then behind the ugliness I saw this light. And that was the only thing I wanted to know about, the light behind, the light. I could sort of see through things for a while. It didn’t stay, but for a while I had this kind of extraordinary vision, and I could see through people, just sort of look in their eyes and somehow …
Rick: You don’t mean in a literal sense, so that if they were standing against a tree you’d see through them and you’d see the tree behind them, but you mean more, you’d see the subtler aspect of them or something?
Julie: I mean both, both. I was seeing a subtle aspect of people, but I could also look in a room and then the room would disappear. It would just sort of fade out and other things would start to emerge, other scenery would emerge.
Rick: Like what?
Julie: Like I’d be in suddenly, I would be in a room, and then in the next moment I’d be in countryside, on a hillside, on a mountain.
Rick: And what was the significance of that? I mean some people would say, “Well, she was just hallucinating,” but what do you feel that really signified?
Julie: Well, I could put it down, one would put it down to hallucinating in the hospital with pain-killing drugs being pumped into me. Sure, you could say that, but then why would it have happened and happened subsequently? And that was what I had to ask myself, “All right, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t take anything, so what is this? What is this happening to me and why? Yes, what is the significance of it?” So the first thing is that it showed me over and over in different circumstances that the fabric that I had considered so solid and so real of this earth is just a veil, which you can put your hand through sometimes, and you can walk through into other realities. So it taught me to never presume anything about anywhere or anybody. You can have no judgment or presumption because nothing is as it seems.
Rick: When you saw these scenes of mountaintops and fields and things, did you feel that those were real places that you were somehow tuning into, or were they more like metaphors or symbols of something?
Julie: I think they were more of a dream-like quality, much finer, and there was a very translucent feel about them as well. And yet, sometimes it would happen to me, and I would go into a scene, completely different. So I’d be sitting in a room and then I would be at a site where an aircraft had crashed, or a ferry had gone down and there were people in the water, and I would be telling people they were dead. And helping them, and it was very vivid. And the next day, I would tell my husband, I’m sort of jumping ahead of time here, and I’d remarried, but I’d left Tony and had a different relationship. So these events, I would tell my husband, Richard, and I’ve had this extraordinary experience, I’ve seen this, and then it would be on the news, either the next day or the day after. It would happen, that event would happen.
Rick: So you were actually visualizing it and interacting with it before it happened.
Julie: Before it happened, beyond. So this whole concept of time, you know, time is just a constraint we use, isn’t it really, and it’s very necessary, but there is a place that is absolutely beyond time. So I was experiencing that, but back after the accident in those early weeks and months, I didn’t know what the heck was going on really. At some point I thought maybe I was going mad, that I was going insane, because the person who had attacked me was hearing voices and had been instructed to kill me, and here are my hearing voices. But the things that I was hearing were so loving and so utterly … they made such sense, and there was no harm in them. It was for my learning, nothing else. It was for me to learn. And the more I was learning, and the more I do learn about the mysteries of this thing called life, the less I realize I know it. It’s just extraordinary. It gets bigger, and my awareness of it just seems so … it’s so exciting, because you just never know what’s going to be revealed next. You never know.
Rick: Did you feel that this Veritas entity was an entity, distinct from you in some way, like some higher being or some such thing, or did you feel like it was sort of your own inner essence speaking to you, or that you were tapping into?
Julie: Well I would say, “Who are you? Who are you?”
Rick: You would say that to Veritas.
Julie: To Veritas, and then he would say, “I know who I am. The important thing here is for you to know who you are.” So he would always turn it around on me, and it was elusive. I never saw a form, I only heard him, and I felt his presence.
Rick: Did you hear it sort of like an actual auditory voice, as if you had a speaker playing in your ear?
Julie: Yes, absolutely.
Rick: Okay, so it wasn’t just like a subtle intuition, it was more like, “Hey Julie, this,” you know, really clear.
Julie: And interestingly, when I was very, very small, I can remember … My first memory is of people speaking to me, and these voices chatting away to me, and feeling very comfortable, and not feeling like a child when I was speaking to them at all, but feeling that I was their friend. And so I had had the experience of the voices in the ear, and it was very, very much an external source of sound, it wasn’t sound within me.
Rick: Okay, so maybe we should go a little bit chronologically. You came out of the hospital, and your whole life had shifted, and this whole new dimension had opened up, and you were seeing through people, and seeing through things, and trying to make sense of it all. So, maybe chart the course of the last 20 years, how have things progressed for you, and what have been the significant realizations, or milestones, or methods that you’ve used to sort of accomplish this, making sense?
Julie: Well, I suppose the burning question I had was, “Why does something like that have to happen to me?” And, back to your very astute point, that if back in that spiritualist association, a stranger who could say to me, in his mediumistic state, “Change your front door,” why didn’t he say, “Don’t let any strangers in your house in the next few days”? So, my first thought was, when I really contemplated that, clearly it was meant to happen.
Rick: Yeah, and he was only given as much information as was needed to actually save your life, but it wasn’t part of the plan for you to avert that experience.
Julie: Exactly, Rick, exactly that. And that made me so curious, and for a while quite angry, because there is the human side, that as a young woman, and I’d been stabbed in my face, my neck, my hands, my body, it wasn’t pretty, and I felt very sad that that had happened to me. And then this other part of me thought, “Well, hey, you are not your body. You are so much more than that. You know that now.” So I decided that I …
Rick: You didn’t really know that until this happened.
Julie: No, no, I mean, I think we hoped, we as humanity hope there is something more, but how can you know?
Rick: Yeah, it was just a vague speculation, but then with this incident, it was an actual experience.
Julie: It was an actual experience, that’s it. And so I thought, I’ve got to find out what following your highest truth means. So I wound my business down and got rid of it. I finished my relationship in a very loving way, and Tony is still one of my greatest friends to this day. And it set him off, incidentally, on his spiritual quest, because he too was asking much bigger questions. And we parted amicably. I met Richard, who was a fellow adventurer, spiritually speaking, and wanted to know that there was more to life than his business life and the world that he was in. And we sold up everything that we had, and we said, “Well, let’s just follow the wind here. Let’s just go with the, let’s see what unfolds.” And Veritas was saying to me that I needed to just trust that everything I needed would come to me. And when the pupil is ready, the master will come. And I thought, I have to find a teacher, I have to find somebody who can explain to me what is happening here. So I went on a number of courses in the UK that I thought might give me some idea, these personal growth and development courses, which were good in that they gave me intellectual understanding and interesting books to read and contacts, but they didn’t touch on anything like the depth that I needed to know. And I was thinking, “Well, is there such a thing as an enlightened master? Is there somebody with this light of truth shining out of them, actually alive on this earth?” And I got really excited at the thought that I could find somebody who knew, who was in physical form. And Veritas seemed to be encouraging that, that I would find a teacher. The suggestion was that if I just followed the signs, I would be taken to the right places. So thus began a twenty-something year long adventure of saying, “Okay, show me, reveal to me, reveal to me what I need to do and where I need to be.” And a complete surrender of everything that I had up to that point believed in, and under wanting to understand, and under wanting to live a life where I could find that love again. A love for my Self, with a capital S, and a love for myself with a small s, in this little physical body here, this little Frankenstein’s bride body, and a love for humanity and compassion and an understanding. So that was my quest. And we decided, Richard and I, that we didn’t want to stay in the UK anymore. We felt that the business world was getting very greedy, very corrupt. We wanted no part of that, which was quite courageous at the time, but there weren’t many people thinking like that. We wanted to understand more about organic farming, living a very simple life, treading lightly upon this earth. So Richard had a, I can’t use chance meeting because I don’t think anything is by chance, but he bumped into someone from his past who asked him what he was doing, and he said, “Well, you know, we’re just about to head off on an adventure, I don’t know where we’re going to go.” And she said, “Well, you know what, my neighbor’s got a farmhouse in northern Spain, and they’re looking for someone to take care of it for a year, because they need to go off. Would you be interested?” And he said, “Yes, can we meet them?” And we did, and we agreed, and we began our life on a new level in Spain, on a hillside, in a beautiful stone farmhouse with no telephone, no computer, no neighbors, and I started to practice meditating there. Really, because I hadn’t…
Rick: Did you learn it formally or just kind of figured it out on your own and did something?
Julie: I figured it out, I figured it out because I just knew that the only way I could hear veritas ever is if I got very quiet and very still, if I could just still all the thoughts, you know, all the shopping list stuff that goes around in one’s head every day. And I found this hillside a marvelous place for that. So I’d just sit on this terrace overlooking the Mediterranean hillside with the ocean below, and I would get very still and very quiet.
Rick: But you were in northern Spain, you said, the Mediterranean is in southern Spain, isn’t it?
Julie: No, all the way, the whole coast goes up to the border of Catalonia, Barcelona, up in the northeastern region of Spain, which borders onto France and the wonderful French Pyrenees, mystical mountains. So I started to practice on a daily basis being quiet, which was quite hard for my little mind, to say the least. And the only company we had were books. It’s harder I think now for younger people to imagine a life without Internet, without just plugging in and looking up anything you want in the great library in the ethos. But then we had nothing, just a few books and a very, very simple home and life. And as the way these things happen, we had friends come to stay, and this friend, they brought an unexpected guest with them, and this person had some books with him, and he said, “I’m going to leave them with you.” And we started reading, and they were amazing books. They were just perfect. And they were written by a lady called Mary Margaret Moore, and they were called the Bartholomew Teachings. And this was channeled wisdom. So it was very much like Veritas speaking. It sounded like absolutely it was Veritas. It was my guide was speaking through these books. That’s what it felt like. It was so familiar, and the wisdom was absolutely what I had been experiencing in the dreams. And I just devoured the books, as did Richard. We just loved them. And then we thought, “We’ve got to meet this person. We’ve got to be able to be in the presence of this and hear this wisdom.” And so, you know, when you’re on the spiritual quest, you make big efforts to get places and to meet people. Like setting up technology can sometimes be a big effort. And we got in touch, we wrote, and we actually got a letter through, and we found out that Mary Margaret Moore gave conferences that you could go to, seminars, and you could hear Bartholomew speak. And so she was coming to England. And so we went to one of these seminars, and it was fantastic. This was the first time I really connected. I felt, “This is it.” All these other courses and books were quite superficial. Because I think, you know, for years now anyone can go and do a course for a weekend and kind of set themselves up as some sort of wisdom guru. And everyone’s got a piece of the picture for sure, but I wanted someone who had an overview, who had many pieces. One was not enough. And I found in the teachings of Bartholomew just so much.
Rick: Was it merely philosophical or did it somehow provide you with tools to experience whatever it was that it was talking about?
Julie: It was experiential, to be in the presence. There was a very definite awakening of one’s spiritual energies, a raising of one’s awareness.
Rick: When you’re with this woman.
Julie: Yes, and then Bartholomew, the energy that spoke through her, was so pragmatic and so humorous, and gave wonderful guidelines for life, living.
Rick: Stuff that you could use when you came back home.
Julie: Sure, and for being in the supermarket and being in the queue and the traffic jams, as well as being immersed in bliss.
Rick: So when you say that you were looking for a spiritual master, was that the fulfillment of that quest right there? Or are there more chapters to this?
Julie: There are more chapters to this. It was the beginning of an understanding of a master and a pupil relationship, and great respect. But the whole of the Bartholomew teachings were only to, it was called an experiment in consciousness, and they were only going to be for a limited amount of time, because Bartholomew expressed that he did not want people to be dependent upon him. He simply wanted us to know how to access it within ourselves, and therefore it was not going to be available for that long. And so we followed it through until its conclusion, and we went to New Mexico for a final gathering, which was a very emotional time actually, to be in the presence of something that you know was going to go, and not be so available. And of course, I realized that it’s so easy, isn’t it, even when we have these amazing experiences of one’s truth, of one’s highest truth, it’s easy to lose that state. Just like I was on the staircase, in and out, in and out. You know, the flashes of brilliance come and then they go, and we fall, and we get set back. And what is it? The other thing that intrigued me is, what is it? Why can’t you just go up to a human being and say, “Hey, you know what? You’ve got the light of God blazing in your heart. Get a life, let’s love each other.” But it doesn’t happen, does it? So why can’t we access it? And what is it that’s covering this light, and how significant is that? So I still had many questions that were not answered, and I needed to understand more of the whole philosophical structure of why life is the way that it is.
Rick: And so how did you accomplish that?
Julie: Well I knew that I was sort of, after Bartholomew, I kind of lost the plot for a while, I think. I seemed to lose my contact with Veritas as well, and got caught up back in the need to have some money, and family issues that were happening, and a lot of sad things happened. It knocked me from my state of knowing, big time. And so at this point, Tony, my ex-partner, came to stay with us in northern Spain, a couple of years down the line, and he’d been to India. He’d gone as a doctor to offer his services in an ashram, but to offer his medical expertise. A patient had recommended that it would be good for him to do that. He had no idea that it was a spiritual community with a Master. He simply had gone there, he laughs now, he’s like with blinkers on, he didn’t see that there were monks wandering around and chants going on, and great meditation sessions. But he was just doing his doctor thing, and then bumping into this rather amazing teacher, and having little chats, you know, thinking it was perfectly normal to do that. And I think about four weeks into his experience, it dawned on him that this was just no ordinary place he was in, and extraordinary things were happening around him. And he experienced a lot of healing around the guilt that he had felt for what had happened to me. And some of the pain got released. And he came from that ashram to us and stayed with us in northern Spain, and he brought with him a tape of a mantra and a photograph of this Indian saint. And we put the mantra on almost immediately, and I just had to go and lie down.
Rick: Is that the Mrityunjaya mantra by any chance?
Julie: It was Om Namah Shivaya.
Rick: And who was the saint by the way?
Julie: It was Gurumayi Chidvilasananda of Siddha Yoga. So we played this, which is considered a living saint in India. And we put this mantra on, and I just felt so strange, I had to go and lie down. I remember it was an afternoon and I lay in this room, and the mantra was still playing. And then it ran out and it stopped. And I just lay on the bed and I started to feel my whole body kind of vibrating and shaking. And then the room filled with the most intense light, and I heard Veritas again. And I hadn’t heard that voice for about a year, and I heard it again. And I just remember saying, “There you are! Where have you been?” And then it just went, “No, where have you been?” And I knew then that obviously there was some great reconnection going on, and the next phase of my journey began.
Rick: Is Veritas a man or a woman or kind of asexual?
Julie: Asexual.
Rick: Okay, just curious. Okay, the next phase of your journey, what was that?
Julie: Well, I then read the books that were offered.
Rick: The Gurumayi books?
Julie: Yeah, the Siddha Yoga, and I found that they were not just words on a page, they weren’t just an intellectual process. I found they took me back to this place beyond my body. I seemed to go into very deep states of meditation and contemplation, and they were a key that opened the door again. I loved it and devoured them, and just kept reading them and playing this mantra. And I felt sad that we had no picture of this beautiful Indian swami. I mean, her eyes were so extraordinary, and I wanted to paint her eyes, so I’d have something I could look at, and I wanted to paint her face. So I spent a day sort of creating her, and I’m no artist, but I captured something. And then I would just keep looking at these eyes, and they would draw me in, in the most beautiful, tender way. And I found that all of the dreams, the experiences, the meditations, everything started again. It’s like the energy in me had been reignited and was taking me even deeper into myself. So I knew then that it’s very difficult, isn’t it Rick, really? Because you’ve kind of got to be in this world, but not of it. You’ve got to live and relate to everybody, and many people can’t talk about this sort of stuff, and they don’t want to, and I would never impose it on anybody. So there’s a secret life, a secret inner life, and then an outer life.
Rick: Yeah, in a way it depends on the company you keep, and that sort of depends on where you are. The Vedic literature emphasizes very strongly that the company of the enlightened, so to speak, is a very powerful technique for evolution, for spiritual enlightenment in and of itself, just hanging around with the right people. The energy of that kind of entrains with your own energy and raises you up. And it’s a very dense world, you know, in most quarters it’s a very concrete, dense world, which tends to overshadow a person, especially if it’s a very fledgling sort of realization, I think, that the person has had, it’s easily overshadowed. It takes a long time in many cases to really stabilize it, so it can’t be shaken by anything.
Julie: You’re so right, so right. And I guess you’re just describing the process I was going through. I was being shaken and convinced, sometimes even convinced, as I’ve said, that I was really losing the plot and I was not like other people, and I needed to, you know, people were saying, “Get a grip, get real, and get a job.” But we were living a life with as much integrity as we could possibly have, and I needed to understand that company was very, very important, and I still hadn’t learned the lesson that no, you could say no to things. You know, I’d been born in that time where women were much about pleasing others, you know, you sort of be flexible around everybody else’s needs, and that was very much my personality. And so I was doing it to a very large extent, and even moving abroad hadn’t changed that because that was something in my, that I obviously had needed to work on. And so I began to write my story, I began to write of the experiences, and I wrote A Stranger in Paradise. Of course it was cathartic to do so, but it also helped me put it into some sort of context and perspective, and to have my sense of humor about what had happened, because I found that people talked to me about being stabbed with anything other than a great long face, and, “Oh, you poor thing, this whole thing, you poor, poor thing, it must have been so terrible.” And yeah, on one level it was, but on another level it was amazing, it was just so amazing. And I knew I had to get that down somehow and get it into a better balance, because I couldn’t ever talk about it very well, it was easier to write it down, and then I could put all the different strands together to build a fuller picture.
Rick: You’re talking about it pretty well now, maybe you’ve had a lot of practice.
Julie: I always feel I’m very clumsy when I speak about it.
Rick: No, you’re doing great, I think everyone will find this interesting. I thought the book was very nicely written too, very easy to read.
Julie: Well I tried my best to make it just keep moving and not wallow too much in any area. So this thing about keeping good company, by writing the book that took me then on a whole new level of experience of being a published author and being invited to speak. And I did quite a lot of work with victims of violence and got involved with some charities in the UK and spoke on their behalf. Years I traveled and spoke at length, and the book got published in other languages and got distributed in different English-speaking parts of the world. And it just led to an extraordinary journey, which hasn’t stopped actually, of being invited to speak about different aspects of the story.
Julie: Yeah, you are talking to me.
Julie: This is the first time, Rick, that I’m speaking to you, I would say, uncensored. I’m not here to speak on behalf of you, I don’t have to be aware of certain things that have to be raised in this conversation. That book is, what is it, 15 years old? It’s done its thing. I have no agenda, and you are the first person who has wanted to speak to me about my spiritual journey, which I’m finding interesting.
Rick: Yeah, that’s the thing that I’m mainly interested in. There are plenty of people who get stabbed and shot, but not that many have a spiritual experience out of it, at least that I know of, although many do, I suppose. There are some very interesting near-death experiences, but that’s the angle that really caught my eye. I guess you originally contacted me, didn’t you? You saw the show and you said, “Hey Rick,” or did I contact you somehow? I forget how this happened.
Julie: No, I didn’t know of you, and you contacted me and I think someone wrote to you about me.
Rick: Yeah, that happens. People recommend people that I should speak with, and so I got in touch with you, I guess. Okay, well, however it happened, I’m glad it did, and it’s not over. So, okay, you started listening to all the Gurumayi and Siddha Yoga tapes and reading the books and all that, and that kind of rekindled your awareness, and you were back in touch with Veritas, and then you were starting to serve by helping other victims of violence. So take it from there.
Julie: Okay, yes, so I appreciated that there was a huge need in me to give something back, and to give back something positive. I wanted to talk about violence and all of the associated things, and to see what could be done in a practical way to improve the way victims of violence were treated, to improve understanding, to look at things like compassion and forgiveness in light. So I’m a bit of a lady on a mission, really. I felt very much, I used to get so frustrated about the negativity that one reads in the media and on the news, etc., and I thought, “You never hear, you just never hear about positive things coming out of this,” because like all the sages say, you know, with any event you can ask yourself, “What have I lost? What have I gained? What have I learned?” There’s always a positive, but you have to be guided to find it. And so I found myself getting more and more involved in that, and at the same time in my own journey, realizing that it wasn’t about becoming an author, it wasn’t about numbers. If I could help one person, if I could just help one person come to a place of peace, then something good would have come out of it. And when I got published, I went through this phase of thinking that somehow unless the book is a best-seller, I was very fired up with the publisher as well. There’s a lot of expectation from a publisher, and you are asked, in your contract you have to do a lot of publicity and appearances, and I didn’t enjoy that at all, because I didn’t want to be flogging a book. I wanted to be helping people come to an understanding about what greatness lay within their hearts. So there was a big conflict during that period, and I found then, that’s again when I lost my, one of those times where I lost touch with my truth, and I found the teachings of Siddha Yoga. I realized that one has to have discipline. On the spiritual path, you need to do your practice, you need to tune in, you need to meditate, you need to make time for that inner space to speak to you, and that is the most important thing. There is nothing else. It is the greatest reason that we’re here. The only reason we’re here is to know what’s within us, and if we don’t make time, I found, if I didn’t make time to honor that, then life went back into what I call two-dimensional, yin-yang, back-forward, right-wrong, black-white, all the polarity, just swinging up and down on that pendulum of polarity, which is very boring and incredibly exhausting. So I had to keep climbing up the pendulum pole and getting onto the pivotal point of stillness and having my overview again, and I found that the teachings that were within Siddha Yoga, it is my path. I didn’t have to look anymore. I found what I was looking for, and to this day it is my spiritual nourishment, I think is how I would describe it. And it’s a very private thing, actually. I’ve never publicly said this before, but I feel that my hand is held, I have my hand held and very firmly established in that path, and then I can put the other hand out into the world and not get pulled in, if that makes sense. Then I’m anchored, I’m anchored in something so strong.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, I was around in the days when Muktananda was in the facility right next door to where I was staying. I was staying in the TM facility, and he was right next door in South Fallsburg, New York, staying there. He used to walk down the road with his little ski cap on. I read all of his books and everything, and some friends of mine got involved with that. It’s like with any organization, and I can hear people saying, “Oh yeah, Siddha Yoga, Muktananda was doing this, and there were these scandals and controversies and so on.” You can almost find that with anything, any organization, regardless of how good it may be on the whole. But with most of them, I mean, tomorrow I’m going to interview a guy who is a leader of the Hare Krishna organization, who is a fascinating guy, who has written a marvelous book. They’ve had their kind of scandals and controversies. But it seems to me that if, in every example I can think of, Osho is another example, in every example I can think of, if you go to the heart of it and discover the essential value that it has to offer, you can benefit from that thing. I mean, maybe there are some that are so extreme that you wouldn’t want to touch them with a foot pole no matter what. But most of the well-known spiritual organizations and traditions, you know, TM, Siddha Yoga, the Krishna people, all these things, when you get to meet some of the people in them, you realize that these are incredible people and really wonderful, and they’ve found a path that works for them and that has been very enlightening for them. There are some real shining examples of what these paths have to offer. And then, as with any organization, they attract all types, and you also have some oddballs and some characters and some troublemakers and so on and so forth. But it’s good to learn not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to sort of like …
Julie: Yeah,
Rick: go ahead.
Julie: Yeah, I mean, everything you say, one has to enter into any relationship with great care. And I think all teachers must be tested. You have to choose against your own heart. And I feel that for each one of us, ultimately it’s down to your own experience. You stand in the presence of a teacher, and it’s what you experience. I couldn’t and wouldn’t speak for anybody else, and I’m not advocating any path for anybody, really. There are as many ways as there are human beings, I think, and we’re totally free to choose, totally free. But for me, it was down to my own experience being in that presence. And if you go into the core of all of the teachings, the Maharishi, Osho, Ramana Maharshi, I just love them all, I think. They’ve each had their own interpretation of aspects of yoga, and they have different ways, and some of them are really fun and way out there. And I guess they were right for some people at that time. But when you find what you’re looking for, you know, you just know. Because there is no more searching. And I’ve been very curious for very many years. I was searching up mountain, down dale, different countries, different teachings, different types of things. And then suddenly, bang! I found what I needed. But I have no desire to shut myself away or live the ashramic life. That’s not my destiny at all. And I think there’s so much confusion in people, don’t you? That you’ve kind of got to shut yourself away from the world. I mean, I hear what you say about the very dense, dark corners, and it can be a bit like running through treacle at times. Someone once said, “A slug fencing with lightning,” you know, the little self trying to cope with the spiritual energy, and the shakti. But I sense that one can be in this world and really live a shining life.
Rick: Yeah, I think the monastic thing, the ashram life, definitely has its value, but it’s right for you at that particular time in your life. I mean, I’ve done years of that myself. And then at other times, or for other people, it’s not right. So there’s just no one universal prescription. You find the niche that works for you.
Julie: That’s right. And I think also there is a great tendency in this day and age to run around from one teaching to another, from one guru to the next, and this course to that course, and another franchise. And a very beautiful friend of mine who is a monk said, “It’s a bit like eating off a smoker’s board. You try everything, but you do end up, if you overdo it, and in a few hours you are hungry again.”
Rick: Yeah. And there is the analogy of, you know, better to dig one well that is 100 feet deep than 10 wells that are only 10 feet deep. You are more likely to strike water if you dig a deep one. So being a dilettante is not always a good thing. But then again, you can’t take an absolute position. For some people it may be appropriate to sort of shop around and taste a whole lot of different things. I mean, I am sort of doing that in a way these days, although I have my own practice. I really love kind of delving into all these different worlds of the people that I interview, and listening to them, reading their books, and just kind of exploring all the various ways of seeing and expressing this.
Julie: And you would have to be very open about what you do. And in the same way, although I found my path, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have great interest and love for other paths, because I do. And I mean, I absolutely … the first spiritual book I ever read after being stabbed, I heard the word, again, like the shouting in the ear. One morning I woke up and I heard like Veritas saying, “Avatar, Avatar.” And I thought, “What does this mean, Avatar?” I mean, I didn’t know what the word meant then. There were no movies called Avatar. And I spoke to a very lovely friend of mine, a man called Noel, who is a very wise, gorgeous man, and he said, “Read Yogananda, and read ‘Autobiography of a Yogi,'” which I think is many people’s first book, actually. Such a beautiful book. And I read it and I completely fell in love with Yogananda. I just felt so much love, but I never felt that that was going to be my path. I read every book written of his teachers. I’ve been in the States, I’ve visited, and I absolutely love it there, and I have a great soul connection. And yet, it didn’t call me in the sense of being somehow the teachings that were igniting me. But I have immense love for that particular path, and the Maharishi too. So my life and my quest has taken me into some incredible areas and extraordinary teachers. I had one here in Spain, there’s a young man who is a healer, and he’s not known on the world stage at all, but he’s known locally in Andalusia. And I asked if I could meet him, because I’d heard that hundreds of people go to him and that miracles happen around him, a bit like John of God. He’s one of these people that… And when I met him, I could feel, when I’m in the presence of somebody who has a lot of God’s light shining through them, I always feel the great heat when I stand near them. And I remember he was standing in a crowd of people talking to them, and he was actually in robes, as a priest. And I stood there and I felt good grief, I felt such inner heat. And he suddenly turned around and he said to me in Spanish, “If you stay there much longer, we’re going to start a forest fire.” So he clearly was aware of what I was experiencing behind his back. And to cut a long story very short, I actually, with my husband, we actually went and lived in the area, which is an area where people live in caves still. It was a troglodyte community in inland Andalusia, a very strange and ancient landscape. And we lived and spent nearly six months listening to the teachings, with the view of maybe writing for him, writing his story and his teachings. So you know, I was very drawn to do that, and to spend six months with a very intensely Catholic young man. Even though he was a helic, very, very Catholic, but so wise and so amazing, beautiful being, full of fun. So the adventure continues, and I have an idea, maybe one day in my dotage, I will write of my spiritual adventures.
Rick: Well it’s good you’re saying this, the adventure continues, because sometimes when you say, “Well, the seeking stopped,” sometimes that implies to people that the adventure stops, or that the finding stops, or that they just sort of sit on their laurels and contemplate their navel or something. But I think it can be quite the opposite. The mystery of life hasn’t gone away, and the depth and clarity to which one can experience things still has great potential, and there are all sorts of possibilities. It’s just that, I mean, it’s just a sort of yawning, yearning, craving, lost feeling that I associate with the word “seeking” has gone away, and on a foundation of knowing and contentment, one continues to explore.
Julie: Yeah, my seeking has now got a structure around it, and I understand more the process of being a seeker, and the structure has been created by the path that I’ve found my refreshment and my comfort and my guidance. So the adventure can continue in an even greater way, and it is a supreme adventure, it really is. And it’s taking what is within and being able to put it out there into the everyday situations. The thing is that that’s what I find so utterly fascinating. And of late I’ve been exploring forgiveness. That is the thing that really calls me. Because I feel that, in fact, in Yogananda he said that the physical world is held together by the mortar of forgiveness. So the implication of that is so huge.
Rick: Do you feel like you’ve completely forgiven the woman who stabbed you?
Julie: I feel that now there’s nothing to forgive, because it’s part of a design that was exquisite, for me, for her, probably, for everybody involved. It was a part of a soul’s design, it did have to happen, and I, you know, have a place of great understanding and peace within myself about that. And I really don’t have any… I don’t really think about this woman very much, but if I do think about her, or like today we’re talking about it, I don’t get anything other than a sense of, “I just wish her well in her life.”
Rick: Yeah. Do you feel you still have this connection with Veritas? Is that a big thing for you still, or is that something in the past?
Julie: I still have the connection with Veritas, but it has perhaps a slightly different form, in that I don’t hear it so much now, but just have this knowing arise within me. It’s not the external voice.
Rick: It’s more subtle.
Julie: Yeah, it’s gone on to a more subtle level. And I still have to be very focused and centered and still within myself to experience him, her, it. But you know, what I find is that, and I think this is happening for a lot of people now too, that the connection between the thought and the manifestation is so fast. I think something and it’s there, I think of a person, and I just find that that knowing, that literally now is much more subtle, in that understanding arises within me much more quickly, and stays for longer. And I’m far more careful about the company I keep.
Rick: Right. And you’re not so much in this syndrome of “I got it, I lost it.” In other words, you don’t get caught up so much or forget this. Is it more stable now?
Julie: Yes, it is much more stable. And I feel, it’s very difficult, it’s difficult now if I’m asked to give a talk. I just can’t actually do things to order anymore like that. I just have to stand there and whatever will come out of me will come out of me in the moment. It depends on the room, the people, you know, I just have to trust it. I just don’t need more, if I could speak, I speak from the heart. Only if I’m invited, I don’t try to order a speaker, you know, I don’t market anything, very testing no. But from time to time if I’m invited, like you invited me, I’ll speak, but I don’t do any preparation. Maybe I should.
Rick: No, there are a lot of very articulate teachers who don’t do any preparation, like Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti and so on. They just kind of get up there and start talking and it just comes.
Julie: And it’s perfect. I’ve listened to Eckhart, I’ve been in his presence too, fantastic, absolutely. You know, again, the truth is the truth, and there are all these fine instruments that express truth on our earth. Aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we lucky? Humanity has great people out there to help us.
Rick: Well it’s a good thing there’s an abundance of us because there’s 7 billion people on the planet and I don’t think one person could handle it all.
Julie: I don’t think so. It’s really good news.
Rick: Some people, when they speak of a spiritual awakening, they speak of a sort of a shift to a sense that there is no personal identity, there’s sort of an impersonal being and talking happens and eating happens and sleeping happens and doing happens, and there’s no person who is making them happen, and they insist that that really is the nature of realization. Have you had anything of that nature or any tastes or flavors of that?
Julie: Yes, I would call that being in the state of the witness, where the word I’ve been using is “overview,” it’s getting to that place where I sometimes say things, even during this interview, and I’m thinking, “Well, where did that come from?” And I find myself laughing. It just comes from inside, and there is this part of me that watches that with great humor. And then there’s this other part that sometimes worries that it’s not doing it right, or the human-ness. So, yeah, the place of no identity, when one just is, I suppose, a totally clear, clean, hollow flute, through which melody can be played. Yeah, something like that. And I know that state, and I love it, and more and more I can attune to that. And I’m finding less and less about day-to-day life troubles me, getting more equanimity in my old age.
Rick: You’re not so old. I think you’re younger than I am. I won’t ask you how old, though.
Julie: You can, I don’t mind. It’s only your body.
Rick: How old are you?
Julie: I’m 56, I’ll be 57.
Rick: Oh yeah, you’re just a kid.
Julie: Thank you. You just made my body’s day.
Rick: Do you have any sort of lingering handicaps from the trauma? I mean, physical, can you use your right hand properly now? You mentioned it took a long time to rehabilitate that.
Julie: It’s not as it was, and I had to give up all … I was a great sportswoman, and I love playing squash, golf, tennis. I can’t do any of that because the right hand isn’t as dexterous as it used to be, and its grip has gone. And I don’t find it fun to play those sports. I was at a pretty high level, and it’s not fun to … I don’t enjoy it. You know, because the golf club flies out of my hand after a bit, which is exceedingly dangerous, so I probably killed somebody. I used to play the piano, not that well, but I could play the piano and I can’t do that anymore. So, the thing is though, you have to lose some things, but then I figure, “Okay, well I can learn to do something else.”
Rick: Yeah, you should take up skiing or skydiving or something.
Julie: Sure, bungee jumping, I’ll be fine. I think as a human being, one has to keep that enthusiasm for life, and there’s always something else. I mean, if we get rigid in only doing it one way, we become real boring old what’s it, don’t we? So, I think through what happened to me, it taught me also that you can reinvent yourself, no harm done. It’s a good thing to do, it’s actually a great thing to do, and it’s so exciting because tomorrow I can be something different, I can try something new, and the creation is infinite, so the possibilities are endless for exploring and experiencing love and laughter and friendship.
Rick: I’d like to start it. Go ahead.
Julie: I was going to say, Rick, one of the things about almost losing life, really gets what’s important in life, it puts it back into perspective. In the end, it’s said over and over, but I really know it now that all I really care about is when I lay down my head to go in this lifetime, I do hope it’s a peaceful passing, I think I’ve done the violence bit, that’s the only time I left, so I probably won’t get that. Anyway, when I do go, I want to be able to say that I have no regrets, no unfinished business, and that I really loved to … possibly could.
Rick: Repeat that last sentence because there was a glitch in the audio, we missed most of that sentence where you said, “I really want to,” and then there was a big long gap in it and then you said, “possibly could.” So what did you just say?
Julie: That I would like to have no regrets, no unfinished business with anybody, and that I will know that I have loved to the fullest capacity that I possibly could.
Rick: Hmm, good. Well that’s beautiful. That might be a good note to end on, but if you have anything more that you’d like to say that I haven’t elicited from you, this would be the time. Is there anything that we haven’t really thought to talk about that you’d like to mention?
Julie: There is nothing that comes to my mind, not really, but what I’d say is that if you have any questions that come to you, or anybody asks a question that’s unanswered, I’ll always be available to answer that.
Rick: Yeah, I will, when I put your interview up on the website, batgap.com, there will be a link to your website and to your email address if you want it on there, and people can get in touch with you. Very often, almost every single one of these interviews, a discussion ensues afterwards on each person’s page, where there is a little place where you can post a comment and then people reply to that. And sometimes we go on page after page of people talking about what the interview inspired in them. So that may happen with yours, and if you feel like chiming in, no pun intended, or responding to any questions people may have, or getting involved in the discussion that might ensue, then you are more than welcome to.
Julie: Thank you Rick, that would be, well I’ll keep my eye on that.
Rick: Yeah, I’ll notify you if something comes up.
Julie: You can let me know, yeah, that would be great. It’s been really interesting to share this time with you.
Rick: Yes, it’s really been a delight getting to know you, we’ll stay in touch. So let me conclude by, you know, I want to thank our guest Julie Chimes, who lives in Spain, was originally from England obviously, and she has published a book called “Stranger in Paradise”, I’ll have a link to that on the website if people would like to purchase that and read it. And if you are, depending on how you are hearing this, you might not actually be on batgap.com, you might be listening to an audio file somebody sent you, you might be on YouTube, but if you go to batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump, B-A-T-G-A-P, you will see all of the interviews that I have done listed there, and you can sign up for an email if you wish to be notified each time a new one is posted. So thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next time.
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