Laurie Moore 2nd Interview Transcript

Laurie Moore 2nd Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Laurie Moore in person. We’re out at the Science and Nonduality Conference in California, outdoors obviously. You’re going to hear a jet or two going over maybe. I interviewed Laurie about a year ago and we exchanged a few emails before I came out to the conference and she indicated that her thinking had evolved over the course of a year and that we might want to have a conversation while we’re out here. I probably will be doing two or three other interviews while we’re out here also so you’ll be seeing those. So Laurie, welcome. Thanks for driving over. So what’s changed in the past year?

Laurie: Well when I spoke to you last my main message and my main invitation to people was simply to return to this depth of love, this depth of peace, this depth in which there can be a resonance and experience of the connectedness of all and everything, and fundamentally I still feel that’s what we’re called back to, what we yearn for and to be so focused on that that it overlooks the reality of the many other aspects of consciousness that we have to operate in, to live in at this time is a bit of an oversight or a bit of an escape or a bit of denial, and so now when people are coming to dialogue with me and they want assistance or they want help and they’re really pointing to some aspect of consciousness in which they’re revolving, in which they’re living. I tend to just value whatever aspect of consciousness they’re experiencing and go from that point.

Rick: So you’re saying that earlier on you were focusing on the unmanifest quality to the exclusion of the manifest and now you’ve broadened your territory so to speak to incorporate the whole gamut, the whole range more fully.

Laurie: Yeah.

Rick: This is actually a traditional hang-up I’ve been discovering because it’s one of the themes that comes up frequently in interviews and so I’ve looked at it from different angles there. Even back in the Upanishads there’s some verse in the Chandogya Upanishad I think where some sage says to someone, “This Brahman of yours is only one-footed.” In other words, you only like grok the absolute value of it and you haven’t really incorporated the full range, and I think it’s something that’s endemic in the non-dual community these days, and it’s also something that many non-dual teachers such as Jeff Foster and Bentinho Massaro and others have kind of progressed through and then out of.

Laurie: Well we obviously live in many states of consciousness both as individuals and ourselves and how we participate and cooperate with each other and right now probably a lot of us are rethinking about our overall government system of how we participate with each other. What have we bred from our choice to be a capitalistic society? I’m not here really to comment on capitalism or socialism, I have my own views, but we have to look at what have we bred from, what we’ve chosen, and if spirituality becomes something that we need to separate ourselves in a community or separate ourselves solo or deny a lot of what’s going on around us, what good does it do? if it doesn’t bring us back to kindness and an intelligence that evolves us into a system that’s serving everybody, what’s the point?

Rick: Yeah so you’re saying spirituality is not a sort of a pie in the sky sort of thing, it has a pragmatic application or it should.

Laurie: Yeah. And I found with myself that when I was in a lot of states of oneness when that grace had taken me there, it consumed me and I felt that’s all that mattered but it didn’t fully meet challenges that came to me in my personal life that I had to attend to, and so I said, “Hey, wait a minute.” There’s kind of a humbling about that. People are in all kinds of situations and need to focus on, as I was saying, the consciousness in which they are needing to operate. In any moment in a whole day you might have to be in different states of consciousness, so when we start to idealize spirituality and talk about oneness or unconditional there’s many moments during the day when that’s not where we are and when we’re challenged by certain interactions or situations whether they’re personal or societal or family, and then what is so important is how do we work with the oneness state that deep oneness state and the reality of duality that’s included.

Rick: Would you say that it’s not an either-or situation that it’s not like you have to be either in oneness or dealing with practical matters but you can, and this is sort of a leading question, because obviously this is what I believe that you can integrate and stabilize oneness and enjoy that state. Well, there’s a verse in the Gita that says “yoga-sthaḥ kuru karmāṇi,” which means established in yoga, which means oneness, perform action. So established in it not like enjoy it for a while lose it and get into action but living in oneness do what needs to be done.

Laurie: Yes and that’s always for me that’s always been the goal to deepen to deepen and then to bring that out into the world into the service and to the interaction in which I live.

Rick: I’m going to be interviewing Luen Van Lee later this next month I guess and he’s written a book about spiritual ecology and at the last SAND conference there was this sort of interesting dialogue that took place between two other teachers I guess I won’t name names at this point but one of them was saying “the world is an illusion, ecological issues don’t really interest me” and the other guy was saying “you’ve got to interest, I mean it’s important and we shouldn’t use non-duality as a way of de-emphasizing critical problems” and in fact I think this is going to be Luen’s point in that interview, in fact spiritual awakening maybe will be the critical component that can bring solutions to these problems ultimately.

Laurie: For me I always was interested in the world I was interested in ecology I was interested in cross-cultural relations and world peace and I was always based in a deeper place that felt like the foundation and certainly there’s a perspective and a seeing that I see a lot of the time, where I see everything’s just floating by we’re all imagining we’re giving value to things that have no value or we’re passing through all that’s happening is some sensations some motions and sounds, and in the depth of my heart I experience that is true and I participate in a world where everyone’s affected and if everyone’s not eating something’s wrong with the whole group if everyone’s not getting good health care something’s wrong with the whole group if it’s destroying the plants and the animals so that the earth no longer is in a harmonious existence we have problems and so I would say like you that as more and more people return to this deeper state in the heart, to this place of unconditional, we have solutions that can come that we don’t even know yet that to live more in a question of not knowing is a really great thing. I’ve been in so many spiritual communities where this deep peace is valued and then I observe horrible behaviors like cutthroat behavior so I’m thinking what’s the point of this if it’s not kindness, if it’s not learning to respect one another.

Rick: Yeah. John Donne wrote that poem, the famous lines “no man is an island and” then a little bit later “ask not for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee”, meaning if like you just said somebody’s starving somebody’s being forced into prostitution as a child or you know all these horrible things that happen in the world it’s like it or not ultimately we can’t isolate ourselves from these things even if you think you’re isolating yourself it’s actually you that that is happening to on some deep level

Laurie: Yes, and how we deal with all these challenges is really overwhelming and perplexing and I know for myself many times I would wake up in the morning and say “I don’t know what to do about it” and so of course we each have a role that we’re drawn to we don’t know why it’s a mystery we end up doing actions and participating in a way unique to each of our personalities but we’re part of this big system and for me I personally feel very challenged right now, I am part of a big system yes I would like to wake up every day and just meditate and share with people and I was doing that for a while and I said hey I can’t pay my bills and so then I did some I went back to doing some like promotion quote-unquote and I didn’t feel good about it I felt something inside me got a little more jaded because my mind was in a different place but then I thought well I’m being really blatantly honest here on the internet because I’m assuming a lot of people go through this kind of thing and then I thought okay well then I’ll just go back I’ll keep praying and meditating that I just stay in this state and so many teachers say “that will just guide you and it will all be done” well that’s not my experience or many I need to take care of myself in the world of duality and my wish would be for everyone to have that opportunity.

Rick: So sounds kind of like this is still a work in progress for you or have you resolved this to a certain to a great extent

Laurie: The resolution is a work in process, the resolution is a lot of humbling and forgiveness for the great imperfection of participating as a human

Rick: So you mentioned that your perspective shifted a lot in the past year. Was there some event or something which precipitated that or was it just a kind of a natural gradual incremental maturation that just began to dawn on you?

Laurie: It’s shifted because originally I wanted to take as much of the 12 months in silence I had planned.

Rick: Yeah

Laurie: I planned it like a gift to myself and then so many things occurred that that wasn’t it would have been kind of foolish to do that I had to tend to practical matters but in that time the beginning where I had some time in a lot of silence I started to note different states of consciousness that I was cycling through and one state was the first one that we’ve addressed there’s just all there’s no word for it there’s no difference between me and that book and you and my thought. then there is another state where there’s creation and there’s an impetus and there’s an intention and then there’s another state where words get added to that as a mode of an expression and then there’s another state where you’re a little lost because you’ve gone more into the words than the state and then there’s actions that come from the words and then you can just be really lost in all that which can be fine they’re good people doing wonderful things in that illusion and then I noticed the unconditional states like the unconditional peace state and unconditional joy state like flavors there were different qualities within that but then I said what societies had really done well with each other people who just went into the oneness state or people who were also perfecting very practical states and so really valuing and thinking about Ken Wilber’s work and how he pointed out how so all this is necessary and affects how evolution occurs.

Rick: Yeah the thought that I kept coming back to as you’re talking is that it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation, that the name of the game really is to grow in the ability to simultaneously function in all these states or stage or levels if you want to call them levels because each has its significance and its importance and dealing with certain specific practical matters or worldly problems or whatever is not a cop-out. It’s not like if you’re gonna do that then you’re not serious about non-duality or something and in fact I think the road said go ahead and build castles in the air that’s where they belong, just put foundations. So this non-dual state that we’re all talking about this conference is about is really the foundation and I totally … go ahead and respond that.

Laurie: One of my favorite mentors, Gangaji’s invitation has always rung very true with me because no matter what I’m doing or how I’m serving or participating, when I when I fully open myself to the sensational experience within that it seems to just melt, it’s back in the oneness but I’m not removing myself from the participation. So I would say that as we delve deeper into this foundational piece that is the basis of us and remain in the participation if that’s our calling. Some people’s calling is to remove themselves, and I support that a hundred percent. We have to go with whatever we’re called to. We find that the fabric the quality the way in which we relate carries a deeper resonance of peace but what I began to question for the first time this last year was does it carry a deeper resonance of kindness and cooperation, and what’s needed in duality because in duality which does exist we each have a separate ego and we each have the opportunity to keep noting what our own personality is stuck on or assuming for our own narcissistic needs, that’s true of everyone there’s so many need after need out of subtle need that can affect what we believe is right or true, that’s the invitation on earth to keep letting more and more of that go, to keep noting more and more of that and to stay in a deepening place of the peace is a great opportunity that we have.

Rick: Well there’s a couple questions in there. One is how do we stay there, because people find that they get caught up in worldly concerns and they lose it, and we’re talking here about simultaneously being in that state while dealing with the worldly concerns. So what ways have you found to integrate and stabilize the simultaneity of the depth and the surface values of life?

Laurie: I started using prayer a lot more. I was a natural meditator from childhood I would just go into these deep states where I had to be in silence. I had no choice I loved it and I’ve always been like that and meditation wasn’t a practice it’s just what I love.

Rick: It just came naturally to you.

Laurie: But prayer was what I felt was for me what I started using more and more this last year as the meeting point between any contradiction I could find. Basically just asking for help oh now I’m really frustrated I’m not at all what I’m preaching! help!

Rick: So by prayer you sort of mean not just having that deep non-dual awareness but introducing specific intentions into that or specific desires or requests?

Laurie: Yeah

Rick: And have you found that fruitful?

Laurie: I have. I have not found it to be as quiet and silent as just the simple meditation silent state that’s so lovingly wonderfully there. But I have found it to be raising me to more honest level of what I’m not what in me is not at all that.

Rick: Yeah

Laurie: It’s brought like just great joy and compassion for just about everyone because a lot of judgments I had on myself and when you have judgments on yourself they get extended to others even if quietly expectations kind of started to wilt and I just saw wow I don’t know who anyone is I’m just here with each person in the moment see what we are in this moment.

Rick: Yeah interesting thing, if we pray let’s say from surface level of the mind then it’s gonna have a certain effect like maybe to use an example from physics like if you take a pebble and throw it it’s gonna have a certain effect but if you can pray from the deeper levels of the mind or deeper levels of being or whatever and those are intrinsically far more powerful and so it’s like taking all of the sense of destructive implication which is not what I intend but yes, if you could unleash them the sort of atomic or nuclear level of energy of that pebble it can probably fuel an entire city for a year or something if you can really extract all the energy from it. So I think what you’re suggesting is that you’ve since childhood had recourse to the deep oneness level of awareness, whatever we call it but now you’ve been more intentionally entertaining desires or intentions on that deeper level and thereby perhaps having those be much more impactful than if you were just sort of entertaining at some surface level. Don’t mean to put words in your mouth.

Laurie: Yeah I would say you’re talking about the level of creation and I feel that what the adjustment for me was using my creation more for kind of just more of an acceptance. Okay I had this idea, I was born in the sixties, and I thought we were creating world peace. I don’t even know what world peace is now. I thought in seems really simplistic but somehow that’s what I thought. And then I thought when Obama was elected that was gonna solve it like everyone was gonna come forward with all these new solutions. So things didn’t turn out as I planned, I thought, so it took me back to ‘okay well the only universe I can contribute to is the one I’m standing in right now and I have no idea what this, this earth, this enactment, this time in history, and all the planets, solar systems, how it’s gonna turn out’, but that I had to operate more from rather than this expectation that we are going to have this happen and create it, and we’ll all love each other, and everyone will be full of respect and goodness. And I have no idea, except now all I can do is turn to what feels to be the most important intention for this moment now, with no idea of what’s going to happen.

Rick: Yeah, and what I get from that is that you’ve kind of realized that you’re not running the universe, and so don’t usurp a role which is not yours, which even having such expectations is doing in a way, but kind of like fully surrender to the role which is yours which will be shown to you in each stage of the game.

Laurie: Yeah, and I did think we were a giant web so it wasn’t so much that my desire would play out but I thought so many people were here to bring about a new shift a new ecology a new a new pilot political way new ways of course there are new ways but there’s so much destruction going on right now, it’s just my ideal was just naive.

Rick: Yeah well it’s happening I think but it’s got its own time schedule. I was talking to Menas Kafatos this morning at breakfast – he’s a physicist and he was talking about scientists such as Stephen Hawking who are kind of atheistic and there are certain things which bug the hell out of them about what physics understands about the universe because it shakes their atheism. I’ll interview him and we’ll get into it in detail and I can’t do justice to what he was saying, but basically one of the principles was a sort of multiverse principle. There’s some things about this universe that we live in which are just so miraculously right, and if things are off by just one little iota one to so many zeros difference though the universe wouldn’t work, and so it implies that there’s an intelligence governing the universe and this really scares people for whom that paradigm doesn’t fit, and so they’ve come up with this multiverse theory that there must be like a practically infinite number of universes and just by chance. like monkeys typing and enough monkeys typing to produce one of them producing Shakespeare, just by chance we happen to live in the universe which is kind of worked out but so there is no intelligence involved it’s just kind of lucky we lucked out that this one sort of works out of all the duds but what Minos and I were agreeing upon is that intelligence is everywhere and if there are multiple universes those are working out too, and are governed by the same intelligence governing this one, and what I’m getting at in a roundabout way – bear with me, I had coffee for the first time in a year this morning because I didn’t sleep much last night because I got in – the way is he said that corporations are actually surreptitiously funding some of these atheists who are espousing this kind of insentient non-intelligent view of the universe and we were thinking, why would they do that? They don’t do anything except for profit and so why would they feel that the propagation of the notion that we’re swimming in a sea of intelligence would jeopardize their profit in some way? and the thought was perhaps that if enough people wake up to that understanding based upon their experience, not just philosophically, it’s going to produce a sea change in collective consciousness and if collective consciousness shifts sufficiently there are all kinds of very entrenched things which you and I would agree don’t deserve to exist, which are going to have the rug pulled out from under them and which will have a very difficult time existing. So I mean so many aspects of our economy really have no purpose of any kind in any benign sense. They’re just destructive of life and the Keystone pipeline the cigarette industry the alcohol industry I mean just the gun industry so many things we could mention, they’re just destructive of life and if consciousness were raised enough they would have no reason to exist and consciously or unconsciously the perpetrators of those things perhaps realize that they’re being threatened by a change in society which will. I’ve gone on long enough

Laurie: But thank you for going on about hope and faith in a way because you’re saying that as people as more and more people recognize the immense intelligence. Tt’s mind-boggling how everything works, how a plant grows, how you and I are talking, how you even got and I even got here. I mean a hundred years ago you and I would not know we exist and here we are in San Jose, you live in Iowa, talking about this. We’re so fortunate, and as more and more people are in touch with the bounty and grace and just what can be created when we tune in to this the gift of life and intelligence running everything and it is benevolent and I mean I’ve seen so many unexplainable synchronicities and goodness and that yes we can create human participation at large in a much different way.

Rick: Yeah so what you were saying a few minutes ago about being kind of naively optimistic and maybe Obama’s gonna do it maybe this is gonna do it everything’s gonna change by such as 2012 or something like that don’t be. I’m not saying just that to you but to people in general. I don’t think just because those hopes and dreams don’t pan out in our time, don’t get pessimistic. I’m thinking in our lifetime there’s still gonna be a massive change and we’re already we’re seeing symptoms of it and the pace of it seems to be accelerating exponentially.

Laurie: Yeah there’s a lot of good being grown. I’m feeling a little cynical lately but I’m bouncing back right as we speak.

Rick: Good.

Laurie: Yeah

Rick: Yeah I mean the evidence is there it’s just this thing I said about the corporations even they’re aware of it people who you wouldn’t expect to be aware of such things are feeling beginning to feel threatened that’s a good sign.

Laurie: Yeah and I mean it’s gonna jump out of the woodwork and change their mind I mean somebody who’s put themself in a position to influence many or have power in a way that is destructive can suddenly that same degree of energy they’re using sometimes people switch, they flip yeah I think changes them and all that energy they’ve grown is suddenly used in the opposite direction for good.

Rick: Yeah and social changes sometimes happen quite abruptly. I mean look at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union if , those were beneficial. well they seem to have been beneficial, at least the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and it’s like people sort of take for granted that the world they live in is the way it’s always been and always will be, but as you were just alluding to it if we’re to go back a hundred years and look at what we’re doing now today and that jet flying over with it where am I this is like a whole futuristic thing but we take it for granted so what might it be like 50 years from now hundred years from now.

Laurie: I would love to imagine that it’s a world where everyone has food and everyone has shelter and everyone has health care in every country and everyone has freedom of expression and everyone has an ability and everyone is consciously considering kindness and care and thoughtfulness and respect among all species, an important value. That’s so simple. If every single person, speaking of prayer and intention, if for the next 10 minutes every single person on the globe decided that was more important than anything. that could happen within 24 hours, I’m convinced.

Rick: Yeah but now you’re getting pie in the sky again because everybody in the world isn’t going to do that for the next 10 minutes it’s kind of going to grow in a more organic natural way and there will still be people doing creepy things but there’s kind of a groundswell that’s growing.

Laurie: Yeah, and sometimes when lots and lots of people build something together the change comes later. My father and I were talking – he’s in his 80s so I’ve been making a point to talk to him more and more about his life because he won’t be around forever, and he worked for the Kennedy administration and he was reminiscing about Martin Luther King’s march and how it might not have happened and how it did happen and just the tremendous energy that came of that and the waves and repercussions later and so as you speak I’m thinking about how when we really join together lots of us with a particular intention how it can abruptly shift something and that the goodness of that can come about wave after wave for years to come.

Rick: Yeah, what was that thing Margaret Mead said about small group of committed individuals, that kind of thing it’s like that’s what actually does bring about change it’s usually not a top-down kind of thing probably never where somehow everybody wants to does such and such like sits for the next 10 minutes and but it’s more like a small percentage starts doing something and then 100 monkey thing it propagates and that gets us back to where we were half an hour ago which is that if that small percentage is working from a more fundamental level, then they have leverage whereas on the political level, on the macroeconomic level those seem powerful to us but that’s not actually where the leverage is.

Laurie: Well isn’t it true where you live in Fairfield Iowa, with all the meditators, that the crime rate has went down drastically when all the meditation started?

Rick: Yeah not just in Fairfield but they’ve done all these experiments where they – I was part of it, where we went to places like Iran just before the Shah left and Nicaragua and certain trouble spots of Israel and there was a war going on with Lebanon at that time and that and they did all sorts of statistical analysis and I mean maybe they were using the research as a PR thing but it got it actually got published in some peer reviewed journals and the skeptics couldn’t debunk it but apparently you know there was a clear correlation between these large groups of people meditating in these places and reduction in war deaths and crimes and in all kinds of other social indicators, and we’re just sitting in a hotel or whatever with our eyes closed so it’s not like we were intermingling with the population and smiling at them or something. It was more like we were affecting a change in an underlying field which propagated throughout the environment and resulted in a very organic deep way changes in behavioral patterns of the people who shared that field.

Laurie: When I work with people I now work in my home. I worked in offices for years so I can be in a certain energy field and if a lot of people report a similar kind of challenge at the same time I look to any place in myself where I can make a shift and I make the shift and I find that people come in and they make the shift it’s not and I don’t want this . to be understood, I didn’t make their shift there’s something about energy when we go to the deepest source of our intention when we go back to that place of peace rather than talking about it or how are you going to fix it that’s secondary and that’s needed but fundamentally changing an energetic intention and you have a group of people going to this deep peace others didn’t know but then the research showed that many situations changed around that.

Rick: Yeah so I guess the one question might be what will be the tipping point for the world if we really want to see will there be a tipping point or will just be sort of a gradual continuous continual change or could there come a time when we have a global equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling or Soviet Union collapsing where there’s just this massive shift on a global level at a certain point when enough momentum has been built up.

Laurie: And maybe there’ll be a lot of maybe by necessity a lot more community will start to happen. I know in the seventies and necessity physically that will start to happen that people will have to rely on each other more in those ways I mean I see that sprouting up I’ve seen a lot of countries where people have started to create more community type living now and maybe from those power sources, of that kind of power peaceful power all over more and more of those will give rise to something more global.

Rick: Yeah, and we’re speaking a little bit hypothetically here but I think there are examples of this stuff happening, yeah so , maybe it’s like it’s building up.

Laurie: Yeah, if you google ‘intentional community’, there’s a kind of new intentional community growing all over. Maybe a resurgence of what was happening in the else shall we touch upon in the time remaining now? We’ve been kind of going around the same point from various angles but so anything we haven’t, any kind of angle we haven’t really dealt with yet?

Laurie: If you’d like to emphasize that if we want world peace, if we want new structures, if we want a different way of harmonizing with one another, it really does come down to how we interact within ourselves and thus towards others, because there is somewhat of a war in each human I think inherently that we’re born with. There are aspects of each of ourself that will not be preferable to others and there are aspects to ourself that will cause pain for ourself, and so really looking to honestly face embrace heal be present with those aspects of ourself maybe just quietly we don’t need to tell everyone what they are we can have forums and that can be healing too either way is vital is to me very very important.

Rick: Yeah I mean to me it seems self-evident, I take it for granted, that individual pieces is the unit of world peace and we kind of look to political reasons why there isn’t peace here and there, and economic reasons, and those things have their relevancy as we said in the beginning, and perhaps things need to be done on those levels, but if things are merely done on those levels without individual peace somehow being established it’s probably a fool’s errand.

Laurie: Yeah, it becomes philosophy. And back to when I thought about Obama getting in, it wasn’t that I thought Obama would do it, I thought who I thought Obama was, that this is a reflection of where we are in consciousness. Yeah so many people and he will represent so many people and I’m not commenting anything on Obama, yeah everyone’s very complicated, he’s a human being, but I thought, he’s the reflection

Rick: Of so many things happening with if he’s getting

Laurie: Yeah, that each of us is doing such deep work.

Rick: Yeah well I don’t know. I was saying to Francis – Francis is sitting here – that I mean it wasn’t you but you could put Jesus Christ in the presidency and it would still be a flop in many respects just because that the leader of any nation is to such a great degree governed by the collective consciousness of that nation. L ; Yeah that’s what I’m saying yeah, so what has happened since has to do with everyone

Rick: Yeah no leader can do the whole thing. I live in Iowa and all the politicians come through Iowa and we see them on a real nitty-gritty level because it’s the first caucus in the country and the first all that, so I’ve had the opportunity to run into Obama three times now and ask him a couple of questions and the last time I said to him I said, ‘we love you don’t let the turkeys get you down’. He laughed he said, ‘there’s a lot of them out there they just keep on gobbling’. I say the presidency is like trying to drink from a fire hose there’s so much coming at you yeah but the point for this interview is that the government a leader like that can only do so much given the collective consciousness of the nation he’s trying to go

Laurie: And so that brings us back to ourself because of course we like to think about the globe and society in the country, I do, but I’m responsible for what I’m thinking what I’m feeling and how I’m artistically interacting with that and what we are thinking and feeling a lot of people say we can’t control what we’re thinking and feeling we can’t control it but what our basis is I’ve noticed in my body and mind the basis of my interaction with the with the universe with the light with whatever you want to call my source with the source is affecting greatly the thoughts feelings and physical sensations that then go through me as a being all along and I consider them to be barometers and thermometers of what where am I embedding my deepest intention my deepest intention is world peace which has to be personal peace my thoughts and feelings and the physical sensations inside me greatly reflect that, and this is not a popular thing to say because it can be misinterpreted as I’m blaming people for their illnesses which I’m not at all, because I did go through a few years where I was severely ill and I didn’t know if I would live and it was very unexpected because I had a very healthy lifestyle but what I learned from it, because I had to intricately interact with my own thoughts and feelings quietly in in states that had contained very uncomfortable feelings was my thoughts and feelings were very much affected by where I was embedding my deepest intentions and little things I didn’t notice throughout the day little conversations I might be having in my mind that were not peaceful where I brought in other people into my imagination would actually take place in my body as a sensation that could be very uplifting and healing or could be very painful, and a lot of the work I’ve done with people where they’ve experienced these deep emotional healings and said there’s been physical results has come from that understanding, that we’re operating a machine our soul is placed in the machine and all day long we’re putting effects on it that’s going to cause physical or emotional or mental turmoil or peace and once again I’m not blaming anyone for their illnesses we’re all going to have emotional and physical disharmony that we can re-shift by where we’re embedding our basic consciousness and our intention.

Rick: Yeah and you can be the most enlightened guy in the world and still get cancer. Ramana Maharishi got cancer and so have some of these other ones so it doesn’t mean that he did something bad anything else I mean the body is the body it’s vulnerable to all kinds of things

Laurie: Yes and the body has genetic imprints and but there’s an opportunity regardless of the outcome what I had to do is I had to interact with myself at deeper and deeper levels of what I would what I experienced as peace and my conversations had to be more and more positive and with everything, my private inner conversations, and I just kept measuring and noticing the differences and how I was experiencing life as a result of that that thoughts I might say oh these thoughts just passed through my mind but what I was focused on most of my time in my life, effects the thoughts that are passing through my mind that’s my responsibility then if I have a great life or I have a challenging life or I get cancer I’m the healthiest person in the world that’s secondary I wish for everyone to be healthy and I wish for a great life for everyone but just going back repeatedly to what I am valuing beyond what I say I’m valuing proved important showed me with that this is an instrument a biofeedback instrument

Rick: Forget what I was gonna say but um okay

Laurie: And as everybody’s shifting these biofeedback instruments then we see a shift and more around us and what we perceive who we attract what’s going on what we think is happening

Rick: Yeah I remember what I was going to say which is that if God if you wish to use that word or intelligence really is sort of omnipresent then it permeates every cell every particle of our being and nothing is happening arbitrarily or capriciously and another thought to throw in, if there really is a sort of an evolutionary purpose to creation then ultimately everything is in service of that evolutionary purpose and if it doesn’t appear to be so then you’re just not zoomed back far out enough to see the perspective of that intelligence which is orchestrating all this. so I think this relates to your point where if various things that you go through and difficulties or illnesses or stuff that you find within yourself all that is sort of an instrumental ultimately and the evolution of this instrument I think you use the word instrument to serve that greater purpose

Laurie: Yeah basically instrumental is the word yeah

Rick: Now let’s talk about animals for a minute because in our last interview that’s mostly what we talked about and you and I kept going back and forth we couldn’t agree and I thought about this over the past year and you mentioned Ken Wilbur earlier from what I have read of Ken Wilbur I like listening to him I like his work and one of his things that he talks about is what he calls the pre-trans fallacy and pre rational trans rational and the way he describes it as I understand it is that animals and children have characteristics of innocence and spontaneity and even wisdom that seem very much like enlightenment but they’re actually in a pre-rational stage of development and that on the other side of the development of rationality we have the transrational phase where you might find saints to take it to the greatest extreme who also have that innocence and wisdom and spontaneity but they’ve traversed a whole range of development which the animals and the children and whatnot have not yet traversed and yet the two can often be mistaken or interposed. Christ said something about being like little children or you won’t enter the kingdom of heaven but he didn’t mean going back to a pre rational phase of development he meant like the in a trans rational way developing the kind of innocence and spontaneity that children and animals display. so that was my conclusion about your whole thing with animals is that I kind of felt like it perhaps you were succumbing to the pre-trans fallacy and assuming that animals have this sort of enlightened status and I can think of rebuttals to what I’m saying right now that even I would agree with so I’m not saying this is some kind of a put-down or an absolute

Laurie: I understand what you’re saying that it could be sensibly concluded that animals are spontaneous and animal and children are spontaneous just because of an innocence because they haven’t developed through all the developmental stages that at the quote-unquote highest stage maybe a saint or a master would now exhibit this innocence of spontaneity but from a very different conscious place but I would just ask people to stay in the question of do you really know who anyone is and is it possible that a very evolved soul might show up in a giraffe a person an ant and someone that looks quite evolved to you because they talk the talk and you’ll find that around all the kind of spiritual new age seminars satsangs communities some people talk the talk and if you really watch what they’re doing and what their intentions are if they’re not so great. So my experience having talked to many animals and people is that there’s different souls and different states of evolution in all kinds of bodies okay plants animals people.

Rick: So you say that all animals every squirrel every whatever is some kind of enlightened being in an animal body or would you say that it’s just something that can happen and occasionally you run into them

Laurie: I would say no not every animal is in that state but all animals are in a more they’re in a more aware state of their connectedness to all life they’re working at different levels of service or ego or something else but all animals are in aware state of their connectedness to all life no animals that fantasizing or imagining that they are separate that their personality is all that matters that their small world is all that matters.

Rick: Okay I saw an article in the paper the other day about chickens being much more intelligent than we have realized yeah did you see that?

Laurie: Not the chickens but it’s coming out about more and more species the ravens

Rick: Yeah and it was I guess it was sort of the implication was we shouldn’t be putting them in these horrible little confinement coops you know raising them as just sort of products they should be treated with compassion because they’re more intelligent than we realize

Laurie: Yeah well there’s an anthropological question that if you go to another country and they have very different customs and you assume you understand and you’re not understanding at all the depth behind those customs and meaning behind those customs so what we’re finding out more and more about animals is we don’t speak their language they’re observing ours domestic animals we’re not speaking all the intricacies their languages are just as complicated their intelligence just as I mean whales IQs are way off our charts right and I believe they’re gonna find that out about cats and chickens and rabbits and everyone in time we’re just not observant enough if you observe any animal they might a cat will meow in so many different ways they have a language they have body language say we just missed it we think we’re smarter I think we’re probably at the lowest level of intelligence of most of the animals

Rick: And that’s because when you pass through the rational phase going from pre rational to trans rational it’s a minefield because you’re given free will and you are able to separate yourself from nature and you begin to make choices and you can really screw up and we do as a species but it’s just it’s kind of like teenagers which they’re doing okay when they’re little kids and then they get in the teenage phase they start taking drugs and doing all these crazy things and to self-destructive and then hopefully they make it through that phase and get a little bit more responsible again so human beings are kind of like that they’re in the teenage phase but that is not to say that animals are in the adult phase they’re still in the innocent children phase having not gone through their teenage years of evolution metaphorically speaking

Laurie: Well two things I’m not sure that animals aren’t faced with ethical choices animals contemplate animals face choices it is different than humans and another I want to bring up is that I’ve been in a state sometimes where it is clear to me that we’re actually not making as many choices as we think and I know I’m contradicting something I said before because I don’t live in that state and maybe Ramana lived in that state and I’m very rarely in that state but there’s sometimes I’m in a state where it’s pretty clear that I have not chosen anything nothing. however in duality I have to live as a responsible person I don’t that’s a mystery to me how these different states exist at once but they do

Rick: Yeah in duality you do make choices in a certain realm of creation where we do have egos no matter how cosmic we are and we make choices with them and face consequences of those choices and so on

Laurie: It appears that way from one perspective and then from another state in consciousness it appears something very different is going on that there’s a source that’s floating through everything and has designed each being very differently and the being doesn’t have so much say and what they are as we tend to think I don’t know that I could argue it I can only observe the mystery and stay into what comes into my consciousness

Rick: What you’re saying earlier about this being an instrument and refining the instrument and serving more fully with this instrument and so on as an instrument it’s a very sophisticated compared to that of a chicken I mean your prefrontal cortex and the whole the whole nervous system and everything is far more sophisticated and complex and evolved instrument then I’m a chicken who just has a little garbanzo brain and much more primitive nervous system by comparison so but that is not to say that the consciousness of the chicken fundamentally is any different than the consciousness of Laurie and all the rest all the human beings we’re all one consciousness but that consciousness. A phrase I’ve said a million times we’re all sense organs of the infinite and there’s a chicken sense organ and there’s the human sense organ and there’s the cow sense organ and all these sense organs have different functions and in a sense the eyes are no more important than the nose no more important than the ears they all just serve different purposes so on some level all these things have their importance

Laurie: Yeah and the Mayans thought that the highest stage of evolution before you were not in a body anymore and you were in a star was that you would be a tree or a plant where you didn’t make choices of will, you couldn’t be distracted in any way you had reached such a state of awakenedness that you were just placed in a body that’s completely supported that

Rick: Hmm I guess maybe I have a Hindu bias having grown up and spiritually speaking in a from a Hindu thing TM I remember Maharishi once saying people were asking about vegetarianism years he’s saying if you have to eat someone then eat lesser evolved life and so his perspective was that the cabbage is less evolved than a cow for instance and so because I guess it would be considered a greater sentence I mean and the more evolved the life form that the more of an affront to nature it is to kill it for purposes of nutrition

Laurie: I do know that in India there are some religions where when you die you can have your body placed on the tower

Rick: For the animals to eat

Laurie: Yeah and I wish I could do that

Rick: I don’t know

Laurie: It’s wonderful how there’s so many viewpoints and perspectives and we all have different beliefs

Rick: Oh yeah and I’m aware that I’m not saying that I’ve got the truth here and you don’t or something I’m just say the differences in our perspectives make for some interesting conversation but who knows what’s really happening. Okay I think we’ve exhausted the animal conversation and I just wanted to touch on that since we’ve talked about so much in the previous interview so anything you’d like to conclude with?

Laurie: Just gratitude, just really appreciate being here being able to share this with the people who are listening appreciate thank you for letting me go through my cynical wave I came up this morning I thought why am I having an interview and I’m thinking these things but I think it was a good thing because I think that we all or it can be used as a good thing because we all go through this and now’s the time that we can go deeper into our love deeper into our gratitude deeper into the question what do we really wish to contribute to this planet that we all share.

Rick: So great, thanks Laurie. Let me make my usual concluding remarks. You’ve been watching an interview with Dr Laurie Moore and this interview is one in a continuing series. there have been nearly to say about it so you can find them all archived on batgap.com BATGAP. there also you’ll find well there’s two ways of finding them their alphabetical listing and chronological listing. I have about a thousand people literally on the waiting list to have either been recommended to me or have contacted me themselves and I apologize to anyone who I have not yet been able to schedule I usually my standard response to people is ‘oh great sounds wonderful I’d really like to do it and I’ll put you on the list and don’t hold your breath because it may take a while before I can schedule you but it’s by no means meant to be a sort of a judgment on your worthiness to be interviewed or the worthiness of the person you may have recommended to me to interview’. All right that was a bit of a diversion but I just want to say it the also you’ll find on batgap.com a place to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted there’s a tab there a donate button which by virtue of which I am able to be at this conference today so I really appreciate people donating if and when they can and a discussion group each interview has its own discussion group in this forum that we’ve set up and the discussion has become quite lively one thing is to see the discussions that are in there you may need to register on the site as a way of registering. somebody just brought it to my attention the other day that they went into the discussion for David Godman and didn’t see any discussion and then they registered and saw pages and pages of discussion so we’re gonna try to fix that so you can see the discussion even without registering but in the meanwhile if you go there you’ve got to register to see the discussion. there’s also an audio podcast people don’t have time to sit in there in front of their computers and watch long interviews but if you’d like to just listen to the audio you’ll find a link in every interview for the audio podcast you can subscribe on iTunes and also I’ll have more about Laurie on her page when I put up this interview a little bio of her links to her website books and so on if you’d like to get in touch with Laurie you do sort of little sessions with people over Skype as well as in person and phone and you’re kind of an animal communicator and we had a little session with you with talking about our animals and the first one especially that you did was kind of uncanny and you came out with some stuff that would have been hard to guess it was impressive. so thanks for listening and watching and we’ll see you next time next time is going to be soon because I have two or three of these planned for my during my visit here at the conference. Thanks.