Karyn O’Beirne Interview

Karyn: Grace has no yardstick to measure us by. Grace is everywhere once we shift our perspective of what it is to be alive, to be human, with this brain we have, with our ability to be aware of being aware.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done well over 700 of them now, and if this is new to you and you haven’t seen any and would like to check them out, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, where you’ll find them all organized in various ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website, and there’s a page suggesting alternatives to PayPal, such as good old‑fashioned checks and things like that. You know the way YouTube works with their algorithm and all that; if you like this video, if you actually do like it, click the “Like” button, because that tweaks the algorithm and brings it to the attention of more people. And if you would like to be notified of other ones, click the “Subscribe” button. That helps also.

Okay, thanks. My guest today is Karyn O’Beirne. I read her book, Findings from the Hunting Party’s Scout. Hopefully you can see this book. I have some notes, but the book was finished 20 years ago, so we’re going to get into stuff that wasn’t in her book.

Just in brief, Karyn’s spiritual journey, which was documented in the book, starts out with her being an atheist. She goes through a number of rather intense years of spiritual growth, with a foot in both camps: an ordinary working soccer mom, pursuing spiritual opportunities, traveling around the world, going to different holy spots and power spots and so on. She eventually became an embodied, awakened faith leader. After a life‑changing spontaneous awakening, which we’ll be discussing, she shared her Toltec teacher Don Miguel Ruiz’s teachings and her own experiences as an interfaith minister, ordained by One Spirit Seminary in New York City.

In 2019, she was certified as a mindfulness meditation teacher, taught by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. She incorporates methods of mindfulness, The Four Agreements (the Toltec teaching), and mystical teachings of the world’s religions into her talks, workshops, and writings. She shares wisdom in a non‑denominational, dogma‑free style that is accessible to people who are searching for an open spiritual path that they can call their own.

On her Substack, “Karyn’s Findings,” she released Inviting Grace In, a curated full year of quotes to guide readers through four seasons of spiritual growth: Spring (uplifting spirit), Summer (shifting perspectives), Autumn (recognizing wisdom), and Winter (expanding the understanding of our being). I’ve read a bunch of those, and it’s a wonderful collection of quotes. I need to add them to my quotes collection.

As a lifelong social activist, Karyn’s posts highlight ways we can mindfully and compassionately co‑create a world where all life is uplifted with a new understanding of ourselves and the source of existence we often call God.

So, that’s the intro.

Karyn, a minute ago before we started recording, we were talking about something, and you were talking about grace. Repeat what you were telling me about grace. That might be a good starting point.

Karyn: After a lot of what had happened to me, sometimes people would question me: “Why did that happen to you?” Or I’d ask, “Why did that happen to me?” or “Can I make it happen again?” What I want people to understand is, I didn’t do anything or change the kind of person I was. When I had my spontaneous awakening, it happened in my living room with a group of people. I wasn’t very far on the spiritual path. I didn’t know anything about non‑duality, I wasn’t interested in enlightenment. I just wanted to feel happy.

I was at a time in my life where I thought, “I have what the culture tells me I should have, and I can’t feel happy.” So I didn’t even have this great reason to “get spiritual.” But grace stepped in. That’s what I call it, when I tell the story. I wasn’t working on myself or trying to achieve something, but I did feel a lack. I felt the lack when I started meeting people who were spiritual teachers or had been doing this for a long time. You meet some people who have been doing it for 15–20 years. I felt a lack, like there was something that they had that I didn’t. I had this feeling of not being enough.

When I look back, none of that matters when it comes to receiving grace, recognizing grace, opening to grace. Grace has no yardstick to measure us by. Grace is everywhere once we shift our perspective of what it is to be alive, to be human, with this brain we have, with our ability to be aware of being aware. None of this has to do with doing certain practices over and over or becoming a PhD in this. That is all great and wonderful, but I want people to understand we are enough, exactly as we are in this moment, to receive grace. We’re enough.

Being enough is great because it allows us to be open. We’re not chasing some sort of idea of what a spiritual person is, or what someone who is worthy of grace is, or that grace only happens to “good people.” That’s not it at all. That’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. I wanted people to say, “Hey, I’m just an ordinary person,” but I went for it. And throughout it, you can too. I didn’t do anything extraordinary. I have learned and grown; it’s been 20 years now. But during those intense four years, I was on a ride. I was just opening to it.

I think that’s the important part: we have to let go of what we think we know. That’s the biggest letting go.

Rick: You may have noticed the subtitle of this show is “Conversations with Ordinary Spiritually Awakening People,” and those words were carefully chosen. One of my motivations for starting this is that I live in a town where several thousand people have been meditating for many decades, out of a total of 10,000 population. A lot of people were having profound spiritual awakenings and shifting into higher states of consciousness, as described in the ancient texts.

Sometimes they would tell friends, and the friends would dismiss them as delusional: “You’re just an ordinary guy. I’ve known you for years. You don’t look different. It couldn’t have happened to somebody like you.” People imagine you have to be floating on a cloud or wearing white robes to have a genuine spiritual awakening. So I thought, I’ll start interviewing some of these people and let others know that peers—ordinary people just like them—are having spiritual awakenings, and it can happen to them as well.

If you don’t think it can happen to you, it can be a self‑fulfilling prophecy that delays or postpones the possibility of receiving grace, as you put it.

Karyn: That was one of the things. If someone asks, it really helps to be open to the idea of grace. It does help. I agree with you. But it took me a little while to get there.

My father was an atheist; he said he was an atheist. My mother brought us up Methodist, Protestant Christianity. At a certain point, I saw religion as a power play, because of all the conflict: the Middle East, still going on, Ireland, Protestants/Catholics. If you look at history, it’s crazy. What really made me lean toward my father’s perspective was my brother Brian.

He was a very sensitive, intelligent young man. He was so shy, and he had a lot of little difficulties, but he was diagnosed schizophrenic in his twenties. He suffered so much. I could not conceive of a loving God that would let someone suffer like that for no reason. So it was personal. I personalized God and said, “Forget it, I just don’t believe in this.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever read anything by Caroline Myss?

Rick: A little bit. I know who she is.

Karyn: She wrote Anatomy of the Spirit. I don’t know why I picked up that book. I was starting to read Buddhist stuff because they don’t have a deity, pretty much, so I was very interested in that, and humanism. But I picked up Caroline Myss’s book.

I worked in New York City for many years, so I would take the train from Long Island, the Long Island Railroad. It’s quite a long trip from where I lived, so I would read on the train. I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit in one of those train cars where you’re sitting facing other people at the end of the car. We’re all New Yorkers, commuters; we don’t even look at each other. After 10 years of commuting, either you sleep or you read.

I read something she said, something like, “You do all this, get your books, you… and then you have to let it all go because you just don’t know,” or something to that effect. Whatever it was, it really hit me. I started crying. I don’t know why, but whatever she said really hit me.

That’s another thing I’d advise anybody: if you start weeping when you’re reading a book or listening to a speaker, that’s a good sign to follow if you’re interested in finding your own spiritual path. There’s something inside you. All the things that have made up your psyche to this point respond, often with tears.

So I’m there, crying on the Long Island Railroad. It was so embarrassing. I’m embarrassed, and at the same time I’m thinking, “Why? Why is this happening?” She opened the door. It didn’t have to be “don’t believe in God” versus the God I grew up with as a Protestant, because I couldn’t relate to any of that. She opened up the space of a different idea—not even God, but grace. I think she uses the word grace a lot. That gave me an opening to explore. I’m always grateful for that.

Then of course I bought multiple copies of the book because that’s what I do. I find a book I really love and start sending it to people. I did that with The Four Agreements, and I did that with Inner Bonding. That’s usually the start of any new spiritual adventure for me: a book or a podcast. So that’s another recommendation: turn off the TV and read a good book.

Rick: Oprah Winfrey was interviewing Eckhart Tolle one time, and toward the end of the interview she would start sentences and have him finish them. One of the sentences was, “I believe…” and he said, “…in nothing in particular.” Here’s a guy who has pretty profound experience, and you’d think he has deep beliefs in profound things. I like that because belief is not all it’s cracked up to be.

If you study the world’s religions and philosophies, people get so invested in elaborate beliefs about the afterlife and God and what you should do and how you should dress. Thousands, if not millions, have been killed for having beliefs that differ from somebody else’s. It’s absurd.

I’m often reminded of a video by Carl Sagan called “Pale Blue Dot.” You can find it on YouTube. You see a picture of the Earth taken from somewhere out near Saturn by the Voyager spacecraft. It’s this little pale blue dot, with an arrow pointing at it so you can see what it is. Sagan gives an eloquent commentary about all the bloodshed and strife and war that have taken place throughout human history over little tiny fractions of this pale blue dot, people thinking they’re going to gain something by acquiring this little fraction and that little fraction. It seems absurd from that perspective.

So belief is not that important. What’s important is what you actually experience, and if you’re not experiencing anything that can conclusively confirm this, that, or the other belief or philosophy, then hold them all lightly and don’t get so invested in them.

Karyn: I think people stop questioning when they’re brought up in a certain tradition. It’s just surface, but they’ll defend it, because it’s like your sports team.

Rick: I remember when I was in about second grade, walking home from school with a girl who lived on my street, and she told me that under the ground, deep down, is hell and people are down there. I knew a little bit about geology and said, “Well, actually, there are strata of rock and then molten lava deep down. You see it coming out of volcanoes. There’s no place down there where people are being tortured.” She was adamant: “No, there is such a place. There really is.” So there you go.

Karyn: When I went to One Spirit, the first year is learning about the world’s major religions, and they all sound crazy.

Rick: One Spirit is an organization, or…?

Karyn: One Spirit Seminary is an actual seminary created by Diane Berke and a few other people in New York City. It’s a two‑year program, but they have other programs too. I went to the seminary because I was getting involved in the Unitarian Universalist congregation near my home. What I love about them is they have a set of seven principles, and three of them were fabulous from my standpoint; it was so great I fell in with them.

The first is the inherent worth and dignity of every person. The fourth is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning—meaning they’re not going to tell you what to believe. I never knew there was a religion that let you do that. And the seventh principle is respect for the interdependent web of which we are all a part. I found that so liberating.

I was heavily involved in the church, and I met someone who had gone to One Spirit. I said, “Let me do that. The kids are in college. I’ll go to seminary.” It’s funny, because we learn about the religions and they all sound crazy if you take them literally.

Rick: I know. Weird stuff.

Karyn: Then I looked back at Christianity and thought, “That’s crazy!” Reverend Diane Berke, one of the founders, said, “The problem isn’t this or that, it’s when people start taking the texts literally.” They’re meant to spread their wisdom stories, but if you take them literally, you end up with fundamentalism and killing each other.

Rick: Yep.

Karyn: I was really blessed to follow that route. It was great. Now I can respect different traditions because, when you learn about the mystical core, you see that Jesus didn’t go around trying to start Christianity. You look at his core teachings, his core experience. The same with Muhammad, with…

Rick: Krishna, Buddha, the founders of all these different…

Karyn: Yes. When you learn about their experience and how they turned it into sharing, they wanted to share it. When that happens, you want to share it. Then it gets further and further away from the original things. That’s where forgiveness comes in for people who unfortunately can’t get past, or don’t question, until something happens.

I think it’s used—was it Marx who said, “Religion is the opium of the masses”?

Rick: Yes, that was Karl Marx.

Karyn: When you look at history, you can see how he could say that because it was crazy. Still a little crazy.

Rick: Mystics don’t make good administrators. They’re not interested in it. They’re deep in their mystical experience. Administrators come along and say, “Hey…” There’s a joke: God and the devil are walking down the road and God sees something interesting on the ground, picks it up, puts it in his pocket, and they keep walking. The devil says, “What did you pick up?” God says, “Oh, it’s the truth.” The devil says, “Oh, give it to me. I’ll organize it for you.”

That happens every time. Administrators come in who aren’t having the mystical experience and don’t get what the founder of the religion was experiencing and talking about. They bring their baggage and rigidity and cruelty and fundamentalism. The whole thing—knowledge—crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance, as one of my teachers used to say.

Karyn: That’s what it is. But we can transcend that and be respectful. I have people who are devout Christians, so I have to be respectful. They listen to me here and there.

Rick: I want you to talk more about the awakening you had. We never really defined grace; we just threw it out there as if people know what we mean. So let’s hear about this awakening you had and weave in a definition of grace.

Karyn: Okay. I eventually found my way to Don Miguel Ruiz. I read his book, and it made sense to me; it just made a lot of sense. I went to see him talk, and then I went to Omega for a five‑day retreat. My husband went with me, and it was incredible.

Part of what he did was rituals. He had two helpers, apprentices Rita Rivera and another woman whose name is escaping me now. They had us envision our own funeral. Rita was very good at setting the container and the atmosphere. You’re envisioning your funeral as she guides you: you go down, you see your casket, you see all your loved ones, they’re all sad.

You can hear the people around you—people had been sharing about abusive fathers or different difficulties—and now they’re sobbing. You go up there, you look and think, “Wow, I’m dead.” I see my husband Joe and how sad he is, and I think, “Oh my God, I love them so much, and I’m gone. I just want them to go on and be happy.”

Then you hear Don Miguel’s very soft voice with his Mexican accent: “Why do you wait so long to tell them you love them?” Everybody breaks open. We realize it’s about loving; that’s what it’s about. But we don’t realize it because we take it for granted after a while. That was one way of doing it.

He had other rituals that took us out of our normal environment. I had never been on retreat. We were a suburban couple commuting into New York City; this was so different. That’s another thing I’d advise people: if you really want to get engaged in a spiritual journey, you have to do something that’s not in your wheelhouse. You have to do something that takes you out of your routine, that challenges you and exposes you, so you can’t manage every moment.

I realized I was always managing the next moment because I wanted to be what I wanted to be. I was never present. I was always in the future, manipulating things. There’s nothing better than not managing the moment. That’s Eckhart Tolle too.

Six weeks after that retreat, where I had an opening—an opening about what God might be, what is real—9/11 happened, and I was there. I worked in Manhattan, 53rd and 6th. It was horrific. I saw people walking out of Manhattan because they weren’t allowing any more buses, trains, or cabs in. People had to walk over the bridges out into the Bronx or Queens to get out of Manhattan.

I realized I don’t know what time I have. I had just done that whole funeral thing; it could be a reality. Don’t wait. And I didn’t.

We would meet with Rita Rivera, who came from the West Coast to the East three or four times a year and held a weekend workshop where we all slept at whatever kind of retreat house we could get and did deep work. I got to know about 30 people. We’d see the same people again and again.

When you have a community where you can be vulnerable while you’re seeing all the things you believe that are contrary to each other—this bundle of beliefs and reactions and conditions that define how you live your life—you don’t really see them until you have time to process with someone who knows how to do that.

It was the summer of 2003, so I’d only been doing this two years. 2001 was when I met Don Miguel. I invited a bunch of those people to our house on Long Island for a weekend, just because. No teacher, just to be with them. We could be ourselves, take off the masks—that’s a Toltec thing; we all have many masks—and be together in community.

It was Sunday morning and I asked Joe, “Let’s have everybody meditate before they leave, so we can do that together.” We were in my living room in a circle, some people on the couch, a few chairs. We said a prayer and thanked Rita, expressing how grateful we were that we had this ability to be together.

I noticed that when we were holding hands during the prayer, my heart was beating very erratically. It was like when you put popcorn in a microwave: pop, pop, pop. Not a regular beat, very fast. I thought, “That’s really strange.”

I let go of everyone’s hands and rang the Tibetan bell to start the meditation. I noticed I wasn’t really thinking anything, which is odd because I think a lot, even when I’m meditating. I decided to just feel the connection with these people I’m here with. I was so grateful. My life had changed so much in two years. I felt things. I was understanding better. I was feeling happiness, closeness.

I had a vision of white lines in a soft, velvety darkness, which I had felt one other time before, and these white lines intersecting, but where they intersected there was just space. I thought, “That’s interesting.” I felt myself opening up. I reached out to the people, feeling them, and I kind of felt myself slipping into them.

Then something unhooked, and I was out there. I knew I was me; I knew I was still Karyn, but I was boundless. I was aware of everything, and I knew everything. I was intimate with everything—with molecules, with atoms. I was experiencing it, but I knew it was an experience being given to me.

The overall thing that held it together was this incredible love, this incredible, unconditional love of its own creation. It was intimate and new. I was out of my body, obviously. I thought, “Whoa.”

Then a question popped up: “What is this?” My dog barked. But it didn’t matter, because it was the realest thing that had ever happened to me. I thought, “That’s reality. That’s the underlying nature of everything.”

I explained it to myself as: God let me know what his heart and mind were. It was that boundless and intimate at the same time. Love was like the glue that made it all happen. I didn’t say anything to anybody because you can’t talk about something like that right after it happens.

I was so grateful, so full. I thought, I don’t care if anything else ever happens to me the rest of my life; I know this is reality and we’re just on the surface, with all our ideas and theories and philosophies. The essence is: there’s one source of this, and for whatever reason, I was able to experience it.

After everybody left, I was tired, so I lay down on the couch. As I was waking up, the first thing I experienced was terror—absolute terror. Then I felt a grasping for some sort of identity: Where am I? What is going on? I didn’t know who I was. Then it seeped in and I calmed down. I thought, “What is that all about?” I didn’t know. I went back to sleep.

Same thing: terror as soon as awareness came, then grasping for an anchor, some sort of identity, then coming into it. Luckily, I have a sense of humor; I think I inherited it from my mother. I heard Robin Williams’ voice as the genie in Aladdin: “Phenomenal cosmic power, itty‑bitty living space!” I don’t know why that popped into my head, but I thought, yes, I don’t know what happened today, I don’t know why, but it’s real. It happened to me, and I don’t know what to do with it, but I’m going to keep going, because I want this again.

I’ll be honest: it never happened again. It never happened again. But it didn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter. That’s why I call it grace. Grace stepped in. Grace steps in in many ways; for me it was this. I use it in my writings, in my poetry, in my sermons. It’s very hard to articulate because the feeling of love is there. How do you have a feeling of love when you’re not a body? I don’t know.

Rick: That’s beautiful. A few thoughts on that. There was a Zen teacher who often said to his students, “Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident‑prone.” You had been doing some stuff. If you hadn’t been doing your Don Miguel practices and whatever else you’d been doing for a couple of years, that might not have happened. You set the stage. “God helps those who help themselves.” You had cultured some readiness.

There have been great poets who had an experience like that, and the rest of their lives it inspired their poetry. But these things don’t have to be a one‑shot deal; they can become more frequent and eventually stabilize. There are people walking the earth who are in a state like that all the time, integrated.

That doesn’t mean you’d be in a state of fear. That’s just the initial shock of the ego being dissolved. There’s a great book called Collision with the Infinite by Suzanne Segal. She had been doing deep meditation practices for some years but had drifted away. She was in Paris, married and pregnant, coming from a swimming pool and getting on a bus one day, when suddenly—poof—big shift, just like you described.

She was immediately terrified because she couldn’t locate a personal self anymore. She was out there, yet still able to get on the bus and know where to get off. For ten years she went on like this, raising a daughter, getting a master’s degree, doing various things, but always searching for a personal self and in fear because she couldn’t find it.

Finally she met Jean Klein, Francis Lucille’s teacher (Francis was Rupert Spira’s teacher). Jean realized what had happened to her and said, “Stop looking for a personal self.” Then she relaxed into it and went into an abiding state of unity consciousness.

These things can be cultured. That’s what spiritual practice is ultimately about: not just giving us a momentary experience, but culturing a state in which that sort of thing is our living reality all the time, well integrated, so we can do normal things and not be distracted or hampered by the experience. In fact, a state like that can enhance your functionality and your capability of doing things.

Karyn: When I say it didn’t happen again, I have had other experiences.

Rick: Maybe just not quite so dramatic?

Karyn: Yes. I think the terror, if anything, was that it was so glorious that coming back to the limited persona or the limited, not‑so‑connected state was such a contrast.

Rick: So getting squeezed back into the bottle was the terrifying part.

Karyn: Yes, getting squeezed back in the bottle.

Rick: Okay.

Karyn: But it didn’t matter. For a couple of years I tried to recreate the conditions so that might happen again, and it didn’t. But it left me so sure—so sure—of that love, that source, and that knowing, that it didn’t need to. Eventually it came to me: it doesn’t need to happen again. It makes you want to be in service of that love.

Rick: Yes.

Karyn: Between the Toltec dreaming, which is very powerful, meditation, and different practices, the spirit or grace of that experience informs me in my writings, when I put together services for the congregation, when I do workshops, or when I’m picking the quotes for Inviting Grace In. That experience is always in the background, or always referred to as truth.

Rick: Yes.

Karyn: It keeps me on a through‑line. That knowing of our ultimate source and unity—and that it’s love—I couldn’t have made that up. I didn’t know anything about non‑duality or enlightenment at that point. I was looking at how to use The Four Agreements to shred my conditioning, what Don Miguel calls our domestication into the “dream of the planet,” how we go along and accept the way things are without understanding how we’re just reacting to everything. We’re not choosing; we’re reacting because we’re conditioned a certain way.

That’s what I was working on. I wouldn’t say I was a mess, but I had to go to a therapist for a while.

Rick: You mean after that big opening?

Karyn: No.

Rick: Before.

Karyn: That was my condition when that happened. I wasn’t chasing an experience. It happened. It was nothing I could have made up or even thought of.

Rick: You weren’t trying to make it happen; it just happened.

Karyn: I wouldn’t even have known there was such a thing. That wasn’t what I was reading about. That wasn’t how Don Miguel or Rita were presenting anything.

Rick: That’s why you use the word grace—because…

Karyn: Grace, yes. Grace is something that happens that is not asked for. The source is not only unbounded; it’s connected and intimate. Everything is conditioned by everything that’s happened before; nothing is separate on its own.

Once we start paying attention—Buddhism emphasizes awareness and attention; Don Miguel and The Four Agreements emphasize awareness, awareness, awareness, directing your own attention; mindfulness is directing where your mind goes—you start seeing grace. Because I had that experience, I can recognize it more easily. But it’s happening all the time.

There are opportunities to enhance our lives, to be kind, to cultivate love, to have access to joy, to have better relationships. Grace is always there. We don’t see or turn to it because we’re still in our conditioning. We’re still believing certain things.

That’s why we almost have to put ourselves in a setting where we don’t have control, where all our assumptions and beliefs don’t do us any good because it’s too new. Grace—our heart is grace. Our feeling heart is like grace living inside of us. Where would you be without love? Without being able to love? Even if it’s loving your car.

I remember loving my minivan. One day I was driving, feeling so good. I put on the gas to pass somebody, and that minivan just took off; it had eight cylinders. I said, “I love my van!” I realized, when the love’s coming out, that’s aliveness. That’s what brings us to that higher state. It’s natural. Babies love; they come out loving. They come out screaming too.

People make things so complicated. It’s dynamic and intricate, but it’s not really complicated. It’s very simple. We are created to receive this and then share it.

Rick: Sometimes we’re blessed with something like that by God or by a guardian angel, as a means of giving us a glimpse of what’s possible and creating an implant that we can’t forget. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, who had been persecuting Christians, got zapped and had this profound experience and eventually became the Apostle Paul; it totally transformed him. Or Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where he got zapped by the spaceship and it left an impression he couldn’t forget that drove him to find what he had to find.

That happens along the spiritual path. We have a beautiful experience like that, and it leaves a lasting impression. It involves a subtle reconfiguration of the nervous system and mind‑body system that is perhaps irreversible. We’re not going to forget it. It becomes an inspiration or motivator to carry on and deepen it.

Karyn: Yes. When I was learning about this—because it happened well before I went to One Spirit or got certified in mindfulness—I saw how religions touch on that. Their originators—the original person who had the experience, Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha—there’s a commonality there. Respect, and then discernment.

I just want to say what happened a year after that. We went to Ireland, to a mountain called Croagh Patrick. We were with Rita Rivera and another woman, Gloria, from a power journey to France. Remember how during the awakening experience I had that thought, “What is this?” and my dog barked? I never got an answer because it was gone.

At Croagh Patrick, we were not too far up the mountain, in this little side place with a spring, wildflowers, and a big rock. We meditated—Rita had us sit and dream, meditate. I’m feeling the sun on me, the coolness of the rock, smelling the flowers, hearing the water, feeling the breeze.

I hear these words in my mind, so clear: “I am the awareness that allows the sun to be aware of the moon. I am the awareness that allows the air to kiss the water and merge as one. I am the awareness that is God, being aware of being God.” I thought, that’s the answer.

We exist—through evolution, because you can believe in God and evolution, why not?—we, as a species (and there might be others), have the capacity to be aware of being aware. What happened the year before was God wanting, “Hey, I like being aware of all this,” and we’re a conduit for that. We’re a conduit for that awareness, which means we’re not separate. God is always seeing through our eyes and hearts, but the concept of God gets all mucked up.

So I left it as grace, because the more I tried to have a concept of God, the further away I got from the experience. It had to stay open. There’s no reason to put a label or a box on it because when we do, we limit it. We limit the possibilities for it and for ourselves as this evolved species that can reflect on ourselves.

Years later—this isn’t in the book; it was after 2004—I had another experience, kind of like a purification, in Teotihuacan. We were going there. I was asked to speak later that evening, and I didn’t know what I was going to say; I was wiped out. But I relaxed about it: “I’m among friends.”

What came out of my mouth was, “Until we realize that everything is God…” I didn’t think I would have that thought until it came out of my mouth. Again, I feel I’m being informed always by that experience. I don’t have to be disconnected from this body, this mind, this ordinary self to benefit from that awareness coming through me.

When my teacher heard me say that, she was like, “You got it, you got it, you got it.” Why limit? You don’t have to define God. It’s just a word I use because I don’t have a better word. But you can feel it. You can have it live through you. You can align with that. But you can’t rationalize your way to God, in my opinion.

Rick: “Everything is God.” Of course, God is a word, and words are concepts, but there’s a reality to which that word refers. You can’t rationalize your way into God, I suppose, although there is an intellectual path to God‑realization in the Vedic tradition called jnana yoga.

If you think about it, those plants behind you, for instance: if you got a powerful microscope and looked at an individual cell in one of those leaves, you’d see something more complex than the city of New York in terms of what’s going on. That couldn’t possibly be happening through random chance or little billiard balls knocking into each other arbitrarily. There’s an intelligence permeating every cell and every iota of the entire creation.

There’s nowhere you could look where you wouldn’t find it, if you knew what to look for and looked closely enough. That’s what comes to mind when I think about sayings such as “God being omnipresent.” It’s staring us in the face that this intelligence is omnipresent.

What was the last of those three phrases you came up with?

Karyn: “I am the awareness that is God, being aware of being God.”

Rick: It reminds me of Muktananda’s catchphrase, “God dwells within you as you.” The whole thing is God, and we’re just—“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” We’re instruments of the divine, sense organs of the infinite.

Karyn: For me, what came to me one time at One Spirit was, “We are God’s love made manifest.”

Rick: Yes.

Karyn: Another phrase I really like for myself: I feel like I’ve been invited to the mystery. The beauty of that is we are the mystery and we get to live it too. How can I not be grateful? Yes, I’m a mystery to myself, but that’s okay. I get to live this mystery.

When I talk about making a spiritual journey that is of your own making, that’s the gift: to use this wonderful mind and heart and hormones and senses. It’s a feast. Sometimes it really hurts, with my brother, for example. I have to come to terms with the mystery, and sometimes it’s horrible what happens to other people. There’s that.

But we have a choice in any given moment where to put our attention. Sometimes I put my attention on where I can help: what can I do to shed light, or send money, or be a good friend? I can also put my attention on feeling the gift of existence and not having to make it be anything other than what it is.

Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now was huge for me because he was so clear. After doing a lot with Don Miguel and The Four Agreements and with Rita, I eventually needed something else. Adyashanti put out a series of talks on spontaneous awakening, and I started crying listening. I thought, “This guy knows what happened to me,” because some of the things he described—about the heart and boundlessness—were similar.

My teacher, which I think was smart, didn’t want to define any of it for me. She just said, “Remember how grateful you were before that happened,” so gratitude has something to do with it. She wasn’t going to layer on conditions. After listening to Adyashanti, I felt he contextualized it for me. I could say, “This is happening to a lot of people.”

Adyashanti told a story from maybe the 1400s, after Buddha. There was a big meeting of Buddhist monks or teachers. They all gathered, waiting for the big kahuna, the sage. It was time for him to speak, and everyone was waiting. He goes up there with a walking stick, takes his stick, hits the earth a couple of times, and walks away.

I wasn’t sure exactly what Adya said about that, but it stuck with me. I think, for me, it meant: be present. Not “just” be present—simply be present and don’t create a virtual reality in your mind about what is happening. That’s how we live when we’re not connected to the body. The mind creates scenarios that have nothing to do with reality. We think somebody’s thinking this, or they think we’re thinking that; it’s all virtual, creating angst and suffering.

If we can simply be present to what is here and let our senses take it in, but not create a virtual model of what’s here…

Rick: What do you think prevents people from doing that, and what can facilitate it?

Karyn: Habit. It’s habit, and we’re not taught anything like that.

Rick: There are lots of distractions. You’ve got your phone in your face and all the things on TV and everything coming at us.

Karyn: The mind is not a good barometer of reality. It really isn’t. We think things and assume that’s what it is. Our thoughts are coming all the time. That’s why mindfulness is so good. Mindfulness training—becoming aware of your thoughts. Thoughts are real, but not true. Many of them aren’t true. Most of them are repeats; 98% are repeats. We’re constantly telling ourselves a story. We don’t even check in anymore.

Now it’s so easy not to. Nature is a good place to be. But I would say mindfulness training, like Jon Kabat‑Zinn’s work and the training I had, is about being more and more aware of being aware, resting in the awareness instead of manufacturing scenarios. The mind becomes the boss if we don’t do some sort of mind training.

Rick: One thing I say to people is: if this sounds appealing to you and it’s not your experience yet, but you’d like it to be, then do something. Find something, learn something. Start; one step leads to the next. “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened.” Get together with a teacher, go to a class, do something online or in person. Once you have that initiative, you’ll be given the next opportunity when you need it at each step.

If you’re super busy and can’t imagine taking anything like this on—raising young kids, for example—if you have time to watch a TV show, there’s time to do some kind of meditation practice. Learn something that’s easy and enjoyable, that you look forward to doing every day, not something unpleasant. Try to stick to it and it’ll immediately start yielding results. As the Gita says, “No effort is lost and no obstacle exists.”

Karyn: I went back and looked at some of my notes. Have you ever heard of The Artist’s Way and morning pages?

Rick: No.

Karyn: Julia Cameron wrote The Artist’s Way. She has a thing called morning pages: first thing when you wake up, you write stream‑of‑consciousness. It’s not for everybody, but doing that—writing out your thoughts—helps you see the repetitiveness of what’s going on in your head. It also helps because it’s usually junk, so it’s like taking out the trash before you start the rest of your day. You don’t monitor yourself; you just write.

There are ways to bring certain things to the surface. If we don’t express or pay attention to them, we don’t have awareness of them. That’s one way.

I found this in one of my more recent notebooks: keys to happiness. Acceptance of the moment. If you’re always resisting, you’re not going anywhere because you’re in… as Adyashanti would say, “Resistance is futile.”

Rick: I think that actually came from Star Trek, but anyway.

Karyn: Maybe! He had it at the back of the big room he taught in: “Resistance is futile.” I thought, what does that mean?

So: enthusiasm for the opportunity inherent in life. Just thinking to yourself, “I’m here.” You don’t even have to ask, “Why am I here?” Just contemplate, “I’m here. I’m alive. There’s opportunity. I’m not a rock.” Something simple to get out of the habit of constriction. We’re looking out of a very small window; we’ve put ourselves in that box. It’s like that Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall.” If we don’t have some other way of perceiving ourselves or the moment, we get smaller and smaller; our bandwidth for grace shrinks. Try to find some enthusiasm for the fact that you exist.

Rick: These things help, like acceptance of the moment. That’s very Byron Katie-ish—“loving what is” was her catchphrase. There’s something to that. If you have an attitude like, “Oh, this sucks. I wish I weren’t here. This shouldn’t be happening,” that sabotages your experience of what’s happening right now.

If, on the other hand, you appreciate that there is some kind of intelligence orchestrating the universe and that whatever is happening right now is “all is well and wisely put,” to use that biblical phrase, there is some significance or value or opportunity in what you’re experiencing right now, even if you’re working at McDonald’s. It can change your whole perspective. Rather than despising your situation, you think, “Okay, this is what I’m doing now. Let’s take full advantage of it. I won’t be doing this all my life, and one thing will lead to the next.”

Every day is life, and you don’t want to pass over the present moment for some glorious possibility in the future.

Karyn: Right. When I went to that first retreat and had to visualize my own funeral, I thought, yeah, I am alive and that’s me dead, and that’s going to happen someday. Let me not waste. In our culture we pretend nobody’s going to die.

Then: discerning and choosing one’s own response and perspective. What you just said. We do have control over that. That’s probably the only thing we have control over: our response in the moment, our perspective, our engagement. We can’t control anything else. Everything is interconnected; it’s so dynamic.

Another thing I got was a kind of download of how it works. I can’t describe it, but it’s so dynamic. You can’t keep track. There’s no way. So anybody who thinks they can control everything—like people in office now who think they can control the country and foreign affairs—it’s an illusion. Anything could happen, because everything’s connected. Something could happen who knows where that changes everything.

So the only thing we really have control over is how we respond to life, to what is happening, and our attitude or perspective. We do have control over that, but we have to be aware of being aware. We can’t just go around reacting through our senses, because then we feel powerless. Not having control doesn’t mean powerless. It means you have to accept, in the moment, this is what it is.

Rick: You can take apart the word responsibility: it’s the ability to respond. We can culture that ability. The time to prepare for a dance recital is not the moment of the recital; it’s the time leading up to it.

There’s another Gita verse: “You have control over action, never over its fruits. Live not for the fruits of action, nor attach yourself to inaction.” Every moment is an opportunity to improve our ability to respond to whatever else is going to be happening. There’s another verse from the Yoga Sutras: “Avert the danger which has not yet come.” When the danger comes, you can’t do much about it, but you can do something now to avert future dangers. Maybe you have some karma coming that would cause you to break your leg, but perhaps you can do something so that when that moment arrives, you’ll just stub your toe instead. You can lessen the impact of future repercussions or karma.

Karyn: I’m not sure I see all of that… Karma is another word with many connotations. I accept cause and effect, but taking responsibility for what happens even though we don’t cause it…

Rick: Give me an example.

Karyn: I had a friend and we were very close, but certain things happened and we had to dissolve the friendship. It was a loss. I’d tell my story to somebody and they’d say, “Oh, yes, she was…” And she’d tell her side. But I had to take responsibility. I chose to let that relationship go rather than keep trying to make it work.

Rick: That might have been the right thing, to let it go.

Karyn: Yes. But I stopped blaming her and took responsibility for my own unskillful responses or reactions to certain things. That helps, maybe, in the way you’re saying: as you learn from something you take responsibility for, you can avert other things in the future because you’re learning to be aware of your own reactions and learn from them.

Instead of just being reactionary and saying, “How come I always meet the same kind of people?”—maybe you’re not always meeting the same kind of people; maybe your responses continue to cause the same issues. If you take responsibility, take agency in the situation you’re not recognizing—though it’s uncomfortable because it’s not flattering (“I was mean, I was petty”)—you recognize those things not to beat yourself up but to learn, to grow.

I can see how that helps avoid similar things. But I’m still not sure. I was there for 9/11 and people just went to work one day.

Rick: Are you saying that makes it hard to understand how there could be such a thing as karma?

Karyn: No, I’m saying karma is not personal. I don’t know how personal it is. I guess certain traditions say each person has their own particular karma, but I wonder. A tsunami happens because the earth opens up.

Rick: A tectonic plate shift.

Karyn: Yes. How is that personal to me? Is it saying I was particularly put there at that time so I could be washed out by a wave? It’s a paradox. It’s very personal, but it’s also not personal.

Rick: Some would argue—this is an example of what we were talking about earlier—that you can take everything as a hypothesis. There are so many beliefs. Some religions and traditions would say, “If there’s a plane crash, everybody on that plane had the karma to be in that crash and it was all arranged by cosmic intelligence.” Others would say, “It was an accident, arbitrary; you can’t read that much into it. There is no cosmic intelligence orchestrating everything; stuff happens.”

I lean more toward cosmic intelligence orchestrating everything, but I don’t hold that as an adamant certainty. I don’t hold anything as an adamant certainty. It just makes sense to me that nothing is accidental or arbitrary and everything is orchestrated. The Gita says, “Karma is unfathomable.” Human intellect cannot possibly fathom the mechanics that would be involved in the way it works, if we accept that it works.

But it’s just one way of looking at things. There’s no compulsion to believe in it. If it works for you, great. If it’s just interesting to think about, or if you don’t believe in it and want to argue against it, great. Life is for learning, as Joni Mitchell sang.

Karyn: I can see that. There’s always cause and effect; things happen because of something else. How you interpret that is up to each person.

Rick: Another element we could add is: is there an evolutionary trajectory in the universe? Do things happen for an evolutionary purpose, to foster the growth of souls? Or does that just happen sometimes and other times things are accidents with no evolutionary significance or meaning? Something to consider. What do you think?

Karyn: I think evolution is intentional. It’s intentional for us as aware beings to be more participatory in this. We do that by aligning with higher principles—love, interdependence, kindness. The Dalai Lama said, “My religion is kindness.” That alone could change the whole world. There are many things that could change the world.

So I feel that is evolutionary. It’s like the trifecta for me: the awakening (expansion of awareness into everything), then the message “I am the awareness of God being God,” and then a dream I had at least ten years after the book. I was studying with another teacher, a Gnostic Christian, exploring Christianity from a different perspective. We were going on retreat and she told us, over the phone the night before, “When you go to sleep tonight, look for a guide, look for your guide, and see what they have to say.”

I know there are probably angels that kept me alive in my reckless twenties, but I don’t know. I kept an open mind. I had this dream. There are dreams, and then there are dreams.

In the dream, I’m in a stone cylinder, an ancient tower. You can see the big chunks of granite. It’s circular, and there’s nothing else in there. Then I notice a narrow window. I go over and look out, and it’s absolutely stunning. The colors, it’s alive with life. It’s choreographed, it has a path.

In The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy lands in Oz and opens the door, she goes from black and white to color. The inside of the turret was like black and white; looking out was like that color. I say, “Who created this?” A voice says, “Humans did.” I say, “No, we don’t create like that.” I’m envisioning cities, ghettos, concrete jungles. “No, we don’t do that.” The voice says, “They will.”

It was a message. It’s taken me a while, but for me, that turret—that concrete—is something we build. We have created this inability to see, but we have that window of opportunity. The message is: we have to participate. We created the bricks and the walls, but we have an opportunity to be creative, and we want to create with awareness and alignment, with a different motivation than we have now.

Rick: Interesting.

Karyn: It was a hopeful dream, even though I thought, “How do I get out of this turret? I don’t want to just look at the window.” How do you do that? You have to take down the turret and create differently from a different place than what we do now. That’s one of the opportunities.

Rick: Perhaps a vision of possibilities. I’m listening to a podcast called The Last Invention, about AI. It’s interviews with the most knowledgeable people in the world about it. About half think it’s going to kill us all, and about the other half think it’s going to save us all. They all agree it’s more impactful than the printing press or just about any other human invention.

One woman in the podcast felt that, when you look at it, the problems confronting humanity are insurmountable. There are so many things we’re not showing any sign of solving, which are getting worse, which we don’t seem to have the wisdom or intelligence to solve. Perhaps this will do it for us. If we achieve AGI—artificial general intelligence—it would be like a country full of Einsteins, geniuses, to bring to bear on our problems. It may come up with things we’re not going to get otherwise.

It could be nature’s response to a dire situation we’ve created or that trends have created. Then there’s something beyond that called artificial superintelligence, where AI recursively self‑improves, takes off far beyond our comprehension or ability to control. That’s where it gets scary. But this is where humanity is, on the verge of this happening, and very few people are aware.

I don’t know why I went on this rant, but it’s significant. People might watch this 20 years from now and think, “Wow, he was right.” Not that I came up with it; I’m just listening to a podcast. We didn’t see this coming and it has totally rocked our world. I’m hoping it rocks it for the better.

Karyn: That’s going to depend on how it’s used.

Rick: Yes, how it’s used. As with every other technology—nuclear technology, dynamite, anything we’ve invented—the power of the technology tends to vastly outstrip our wisdom and maturity. That comes back to what you and I have been motivated by: doing something to help advance the spiritual maturity of humanity, each in our own way.

That alone is the ultimate fulcrum from which everything else is steered. Some people think, “If we could just get a great leader to take over, he’ll set everything right.” But how can he or she if hundreds of millions are in a relatively low state of consciousness, emanating the influence one emanates from a low state? We’re going to have problems.

Karyn: The only thing that’s going to save us is a change in consciousness.

Rick: Exactly. Remember New Dimensions Radio? Michael Toms and his wife Justine. It started in the ’80s on NPR. He would start the show by saying, “It is only through a change in consciousness that the world will be changed.” I used to say “Yeah!” every time. That’s what we need to do.

The more people who realize it—that’s what motivates this show, that’s what motivated me to become a meditation teacher when I was 21—that’s what we need to do to assure the kind of vision you had from that power comes about, rather than a dire dystopian scenario.

Karyn: Yes. It is possible. I was listening to a podcast—can’t remember which—and a woman said most religions think we have to suffer to grow. She said the evolution is not to have to suffer first to grow, but to grow from a different experience, like the experience I had, but collectively.

With suffering, we keep creating it. Yes, we grow from suffering. I love Joseph Goldstein’s phrase, “Don’t waste your suffering. Learn something from it.” But I would love to see us create not out of learning from suffering—like NATO came out of World War II—but to create from something positive we cherish, like joy.

We do that sometimes; for example, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy. So we do, but he was exceptional. Can it be more universal, where we’re at a place of awareness and consciousness that we create out of sharing joy more often than out of crises like “we can’t afford to feed everybody”? We can; we just have to change the budget. Stop putting billions into warfare.

Everything is possible, but we choose the wrong thing because we’re crazy—not personally, but the constant arms race and killings over what? Borders that change anyway. It’s such a waste. That’s my argument with the powers that be, God. But we have agency over that.

Rick: That illustrates what I was just saying: a certain ambient collective consciousness percolates into certain policies. You can’t hope for better policies if you haven’t raised the ambient state of collective consciousness. We’re going to be bellicose and greedy and let people starve if we’re coming from a low level of consciousness. The world could be a heaven, like you glimpsed in that vision, and the resources could easily be there.

There’s no reason for starvation in Sudan right now; it’s just warring factions depriving people of food. Or Gaza, or whatever. You don’t solve the problem on the level of the problem. The problems are inevitable if we function from a low level of consciousness. If we could raise our collective consciousness sufficiently, everything on the surface would change dramatically.

If we can’t raise our collective level of consciousness, no amount of political or economic tinkering is going to improve the situation; it never has. That’s not to say it’s not good to have the United Nations, Doctors Without Borders, and all these efforts, but that alone won’t cut it if we don’t take care of the foundation. Thoreau said, “Go ahead and build your castles in the air. That’s where they belong. But now put foundations under them.”

Karyn: That’s beautiful. That’s why I ended up doing mindfulness training, becoming a teacher, because that’s the only way.

Rick: Yes.

Karyn: Now when I see people who are in that lower state of consciousness, that unawareness consciousness, I have sympathy for them because I was there myself. It’s true: usually we don’t seek out spirituality or raising consciousness unless something hits us over the head—an illness or a loss.

I don’t know. Maybe AI can figure out how to make it popular. It would be nice if one of these video games actually elevated people’s consciousness. Can you imagine?

Rick: There would have to be a market for them. If kids are not spiritually motivated…

Karyn: No, you have to hide it in there. You have to sneak it in there.

Rick: Easter eggs, they call them. Hide it in there.

Karyn: AI has to be sneaky. That’s part of the game. That’s when I could get on board with AI. I’m at an age where I learned DOS, then other platforms; now I think, I can’t handle one more new technology.

Rick: It’s getting easier. I use it all day long, intermittently.

Karyn: Just give me somebody to talk to.

Rick: This software we’re using to record this interview, when I’m done, will have used AI to automatically transcribe the whole interview, to suggest excerpt highlights for YouTube. It uses AI to correct the sound and make it more balanced and rich, as if recorded in a studio.

But like every other technology, if we don’t raise collective consciousness, the dystopian scenarios may play out. It could end up killing us all. It’s not necessarily going to have a mind of its own, although some speculate that it will have a maternal instinct and take care of us, disarm us. But more likely, if we’re operating from a low level of consciousness, then the technology we’ve created will be very dangerous.

Karyn: The good news from my perspective is, having experienced these different experiences and guidance, it’s okay if we’re all dead. We’re everything anyway. We can’t go anywhere; there’s nowhere to go. It’s not going to be “Karyn O’Beirne,” but I am part of the source, so there’s no place to go.

I just want to be awake. I say I want to be awake when I die. I want to be aware when I die. I’m very curious. Knowing that I can’t be separate from that which is my essence—that created me—I’m not the body. We know that. It takes the edge off.

What’s horrible is the way we might end up doing that; that’s horrible. But being extinct—even the human race being extinct—there’s life everywhere.

Rick: Eventually it will be. In five billion years the sun’s going to expand and the earth will become a molten blob, and long before that there won’t be any life here. But you and I will still exist on some level, in some way.

Karyn: In what form, I don’t know. I’m very curious. Having been formless—that’s not bad either. I feel that I’m in love with life. That’s another dimension of the spiritual journey: falling in love with life. I have that joy and the sorrow that it is often taken so lightly by people who inflict suffering for no reason.

There’s holding both. I have a fondness for this form. I have a fondness for the way we—our senses, thinking, speaking, growing, reading, creating beautiful music. But love is at its core. Love is at its core.

I have several poems. If you don’t mind, I’ll read one short one.

Rick: Sure. While you’re looking that up, I’ll make a comment. You had fondness for your old minivan. It was a great minivan, but you probably don’t have it anymore. You have something new. At some point we won’t have these bodies, and at a certain point we’ll probably feel, “It’s time to trade this one in; it’s getting rickety.” Then there will be a new beginning.

Karyn: Right, that’s like nature. Everything is recycled.

This is a poem I wrote. I didn’t write poetry at all. I went to a new moon meditation at Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. You know Alex Grey?

Rick: I know his art, that amazing psychedelic art.

Karyn: He had a place in New York City, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. My friend and I went; we didn’t realize it was the night before Halloween. Everybody was dressed up in costume, waiting to get into the building because on the floor above they were doing a fright‑night haunted‑house thing.

So while we were meditating we kept hearing, “Ahh!” and all this, while we’re meditating. It was funny because before that they had nice music playing, and then all this hell broke loose upstairs.

He invited everybody to be creative because he’s a creative guy. “Take a piece of paper and write a song or a poem or make a drawing.” This is what I came up with. This is what I mean by grace appearing. I never wrote a poem, but this is Poem for Celebrating the Wholeness of Life:

“What great fun, this heaven, this hell.
Creation made of my shadow, creation made of my soul.
Creation both of light and form, reflections of the whole.
Seductive illusion, love is at its core,
I cannot stay sad or be sorry,
when it is life that I adore.”

Rick: Very nice. That’s nice.

Karyn: It’s fun to create. This is what we’re offered—this existence. I encourage, like you said, if you’re feeling the call or you want some of these experiences, get clear about what it is you want—just right now. My motive for doing what I did 20 years ago is different from my motive now. But whatever it is, be clear with yourself and then take the next step.

It’s so much easier now. The internet has so much free stuff. With Zoom, if you live in a place without many teachers, you can do it online. Then I’d still recommend doing something in person when you get a chance because there’s nothing like being with a group of people. There’s nothing quite as wonderful.

Rick: That was a nice poem.

Karyn: I couldn’t believe it. I read it to the whole group. I couldn’t believe that either because I was, believe it or not, pretty shy. I thought, “No, I created it; I’m going to read it.” And I did. So, risk putting yourself out there. Be vulnerable.

Rick: If we’re a microcosm of God, if “made in God’s image” means we’re like little mini‑gods in our own lives, reflecting certain qualities that God the totality has, then all the dramas of our life are reflective of the dramas of the universe itself. We honor great dramatists like Shakespeare not just for comedies but also tragedies. We find them all entertaining.

Karyn: I like to say—this is in one of my pieces—“God loves a good story.”

Rick: Very good. Yes. Nice.

Karyn: I can talk a bit about what is, at least in my life and I think universally, very important: self‑compassion. Even though I’d gone through these wonderful experiences and studied with Don Miguel and Adyashanti and became a minister, there came a time in 2003 when all these things happened. My brother died, I lost my job, I had a problem with something in the congregation that didn’t work out, and I fell into a funk.

I couldn’t understand it, because I don’t usually get depressed, but I was feeling so caught, in a malaise, doing self‑destructive things I thought I’d given up. One morning, waking up, as I was waking I heard my own voice. I know my voice. It was awful. It said, “You should have known better. Look at you now,” something like that—just nasty.

I thought, I can’t believe I’m still doing this, that this is still here. I guess everything had to be that bad for it to come back. I didn’t know how to get out; everything was bad. I didn’t know how to turn it around. It was so strong.

I happened to hear a podcast by Margaret Paul; she wrote a book called Inner Bonding. If you type “inner bonding” into Google, she has a whole website. It’s basically re‑parenting yourself. That voice comes from a source set up when we’re children. I thought I had dealt with that, but apparently not, because it came back in force when I felt I had failed.

That’s what I like about mindfulness training: the two wings of mindfulness are awareness and compassion. Tara Brach teaches very well about self‑compassion. That’s why, when I lead a Metta meditation, when it comes to “may all beings…”—because you’re supposed to start “may I be,” then “may you be,” then “may all beings”—what I found is that people like me have a lot of trouble saying, “May I be happy. May I be safe.”

Somehow growing up, I felt not really worthy of happiness or safety. There was something deep that I was undeserving, no matter what I did. So now when I do Metta I say, “As I am one of all beings.” Because I never had problems saying, “May all beings be happy, may all beings…”—I want that, because what a wonderful place it would be. Happy people don’t go around doing what some people do.

But when it came to me, I hit resistance. There was a belief: “You don’t do that. You don’t wish that for yourself.” So I say, “as I am one of all beings.” We have to include ourselves in our compassion for others, and often we don’t. We close our heart to ourselves. We abandon ourselves when certain conditions are there.

I want people to know that there are ways out of that knot, that “trance of unworthiness,” as Tara Brach calls it. It’s prevalent in the Western world. I don’t know if it’s religion or how we raise children or competitiveness. But it can be a real hindrance. It’s painful.

So I learned through suffering. But I had been exposed through other spiritual traditions to seek help. I recognized what it was. I knew it wasn’t truth, but it still affected me. It was still in there. I just want to say how important self‑compassion is on the journey. It’s so much better when we have true self‑compassion.

Rick: Good. A question came in related to what you’re saying. This is from Kenny Haughan in Scotland. He asks: “It seems that grace sometimes can give people a nudge, sometimes cause physical or personal disturbance to stop them in their tracks, forcing them to refocus their attention away from their conditioned state of being. Should we be fearful of grace or simply accept that grace is redirecting our life from a higher perspective?” Nice question.

Karyn: Yes, thank you. I would firmly say we don’t need to fear grace. We are always held in grace, even though it doesn’t seem like it. It relates to our earlier conversation.

We’re in this form now, but we have an internal beingness. We don’t know how long this beingness will go on or what form it will take. Grace is here to guide or nudge because grace maybe has a vision of something better for us. But we often don’t pay attention until it’s in our face and kind of scary.

I get comfortable. I was very comfortable in my life before I went on this journey. Sometimes we need to get kicked—maybe not kicked around, but we need an interruption. It’s hard for us to interrupt ourselves. So grace steps in.

Rick: One way of understanding grace is that we’re not alone. I’ve interviewed people who perceive celestial beings or guardian angels, entities they say are more numerous than we are and constantly interacting with us in ways we don’t perceive but which influence us.

I think there is an evolutionary trajectory to the universe. As all the sayings go, God loves us, and sometimes your mother loves you but needs to scrub behind your ear with a washcloth because you’ve got dirt there, and you scream and cry and resist. I think there’s definitely some kind of higher intelligence that helps guide our growth and evolution and steer the course of our life toward certain things and away from others.

We can ignore it, but the more we ignore it, the more likely we are to get scrubbed with that raspy washcloth.

Karyn: Yes. What I found is the more I paid attention and was clear in my yearnings, the more I noticed grace. That’s how I found The Four Agreements: somebody handed me a flyer on my way to lunch in New York City in 2000. Back then the internet wasn’t what it is now. That’s how you found out about something.

If you worked in New York, you never took a flyer, otherwise you’d have ten flyers by the time you got back from lunch. But I happened to take that flyer and actually look at it. The book intrigued me. In my mind, that was grace too, because what were the chances?

Then, when I went to see him talk in the city, on the pew there was a flyer for Omega, which I had never heard of, announcing that he was going to be doing something there that July. If I hadn’t gone, who knows—my whole life could have ended up different. So even when grace doesn’t look loving, I think you’re very right that it nudges us in a direction.

Rick: Yes, I really think so.

Karyn: Pay attention. That’s the thing about mindfulness. When you start paying attention instead of just paying attention to thoughts that go around and around, when you really start paying attention, the opportunities are there.

Rick: Very good point. We should start wrapping it up. Is there anything you do that people can interact with? Like, do you do Zoom meetings or anything like that?

Karyn: What I’m going to be doing—since I’ve done Inviting Grace In—is, you can always subscribe on Substack.

Rick: I’ll put a link to your Substack on your BatGap page.

Karyn: You’ll get that free every Sunday—those quotes. It’s going to be more interactive come probably January, once I get the chat going.

The one thing I really would have liked when I was going through this was to be able to talk to somebody, to articulate what was happening to me with someone who had been there, and have them listen and maybe nudge me in a direction. Even though I had a teacher, she had a lot of students; they don’t have a lot of time.

So I’m offering one‑on‑one conversations and perhaps mentoring. You can go to karynobeirne.com and put in your name, email, and what you’re interested in talking about. I can contact you and we can have a brief Zoom meeting and see if there’s anything in the conversation that can be helpful or provide clarity. Or maybe you just need to articulate what’s happening. Even if you write it down and don’t talk to somebody, that accelerates everything. When you articulate it, because if we just keep it in our head going like this…

So there’s that. Also, if somebody already has a group and they’d like me to come and speak or speak over Zoom, I have many different talks and mindfulness workshops, mindfulness and relationships, and things like that.

Rick: Okay. I’ll put a link to karynobeirne.com on your BatGap page and people can click that.

Karyn: If they want to contact me. I’m keeping it loose. I don’t want to put it in a box. I’ve recreated what I do many times, and I want to be in the flow. I want to help people who are at the point where they’re not playing around.

Rick: They’re serious.

Karyn: Yes.

Rick: Personally, what are you most curious or passionate about exploring next, spiritually or socially? Anything on your horizon?

Karyn: Kind of what we talked about. I want to explore how we can create from being in alignment with Source—to be open to not having to suffer to grow, finding ways of shifting perception enough.

I’m also very interested in the end of life. I’ve done a lot of funerals.

Rick: Spoken at them.

Karyn: Yes, presided. There’s a sacredness to that. I’m interested in exploring what life after death means—not so much that, but maybe helping people transition and giving them comfort. I have a firm belief that nothing will be lost when we die. The body, yes, but nothing that is held precious by Source.

So maybe that’s a calling; they call them death doulas, but I’m not sure—that’s more physical.

Rick: That’s good. We have a whole category on BatGap. We have a categorical index, and there’s a category for near‑death experiences, the other side, that kind of stuff. I think it’s really useful.

The reason I do those interviews, and I’ve been reading books about that for a long time, is that it helps a person to understand that there is… just to watch interviews with people who have had near‑death experiences expands your perspective and can totally change your attitude about dying and can prevent suicide.

There are people who think, “Okay, I’ll just kill myself and that’ll be the end of me and my problems will be solved.” Then they do that and think, “Uh‑oh, it didn’t work out that way. Here I am still, and my problems are going to be worse because I did that.” It can really impact your life to understand this.

Karyn: I have listened to different ones. Sounds True had a whole thing too.

Rick: Yes.

Karyn: Maybe if we had a more expansive view of existence, we wouldn’t be wasting our time destroying each other.

Rick: That too.

Karyn: I just wanted to say one other thing: who or what we identify as makes all the difference. You were just saying that. If somebody believes, “This is it. I’m here, this body is me, and when I die that’s that,” we’re going to act differently than if we identify as part of Source where there’s something afterwards. We can’t be separated from it.

How is it going to be, to be not separate without form? That’s the next stage of consciousness I’m interested in: how not to identify the way we do now, because there is such a pull of gravity for identity. How we identify—because we create that—makes all the difference. That fascinates me: the difference it can make on how we identify.

Rick: It really can.

Karyn: That’s who we are.

Rick: I appreciate this more and more: how even understanding has a profound impact on your whole perspective and orientation to life. That’s why it’s good to keep culturing understanding—reading things, listening to things, and so on. Keep exploring, keep learning. It makes life more interesting and can really enhance it.

Karyn: Thank you very much.

Rick: Is there any final quote or nugget you want to leave people with? It could be something you already said, but any closing statement?

Karyn: When I had that vision of the white lines and space in between—they don’t actually touch—that’s because everything is relationship. In the no‑self, there’s nothing really there; it’s all about relationships. When I was thinking that, I thought, love—which, God is love, the essence of creation is love—love wanted to love, and that’s why there was the Big Bang and us. Because it wanted to have a relationship.

Rick: I think that’s beautiful.

Karyn: Duality is within non‑duality. I love that so much better than a purely mechanical Big Bang. It’s also kind of risqué… but what came out of it—the universe, us, the stars, everything—because there’s relationship.

It also matches the words I was given at Croagh Patrick: “I am the awareness that allows the sun to be aware of the moon.” We think we’re the only things that have consciousness. We don’t know.

Rick: I don’t like the phrase “have consciousness.” I think everything is consciousness, and things reflect consciousness to varying degrees. They don’t possess it, but they reflect it. You and I ultimately have the same consciousness but reflect it differently. The plant behind you reflects it differently, and so on.

Consciousness is not just plain vanilla consciousness; it’s imbued with intelligence. It’s that intelligence that is orchestrating every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies and in those plants. Anyway, I’m getting off on a rant, but I like to comment like this.

Karyn: I understand what you’re saying, but I’m saying we don’t know whether there’s intelligent consciousness within the sun. The sun is a servant to the galaxy. We don’t know whether there’s consciousness there or not.

Rick: I think there’s consciousness everywhere—every rock, everything. Most fundamentally, it’s there.

Karyn: That was kind of what I experienced, but I’m talking about the sun being conscious of itself.

Rick: Some people—well, you mentioned you watched my interview with Richard Lawrence a few weeks ago—he was talking about how, in his organization, they believe there’s life on every planet. It’s just not gross biological life, which obviously couldn’t live on Venus, but at subtler levels there’s life—beings who live on Mars, Venus, the sun, every place.

This mirrors what ancient traditions talked about when they regarded the… It seems primitive; we think, “Oh, they thought the sun was a god.” But there’s something more profound they may have been realizing, which is that this fusion reaction we call the sun, on a subtle level, embodies an intelligence.

Karyn: Thank you for saying that, because that’s what I was getting at but couldn’t articulate. I don’t know why those words came to me. I never would have put that, but when I heard it, I thought, “That’s beautiful.”

Rick: That was one of the things that jumped out most at me in your book—that phrase. I thought, “I love that.”

All right, well, let’s wrap it up. Thanks a lot, Karyn. Good to meet you, and stay in touch. Thanks to those who have been listening or watching. Some interesting interviews are coming up, including Swami Sarvapriyananda in December, one of my favorite dudes. I always love talking to him and listening to him. I’ve been taking classes from him for years.

If you’d like to be notified when new interviews are posted, you can sign up for our email list. There’s a link at the bottom of every page on batgap.com.

All right, thanks everybody.

Thank you.