Leslie Temple Thurston Transcript

Leslie Temple Thurston Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Leslie Temple Thurston. And actually I’m her guest this week because I’m at her beautiful home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my wife and I came to visit her sister. And so I decided to do a couple of interviews while I was in the area. I’ve been aware of Leslie for quite a few years now. I’m on your email list, actually. And so I’ve been aware of what she has been up to. And I also listened to an interview recently that you did with Tammy Simon on Insights at the Edge. And so when I heard your story, in fact I remember this interview very well. I was doing yoga asanas in my driveway in the sunlight, listening to an interview of you with Tammy Simon. And I thought, “What an inspiring and fascinating story. I’d love to interview Leslie.” So I put you on the list, and then when I discovered I was coming down this way, I thought, “Let’s do it.” So here we are. Leslie divides her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Limpopo Province, South Africa. And I’m sure she’ll be telling us about that during the interview. So thank you very much for this opportunity.

Leslie: It’s wonderful to be here with you. I’m honored that you wanted to come to Santa Fe and interview me. I don’t do a lot of interviews. Actually, I’m quite reclusive. In fact, except for the work that we do, we haven’t become activists or anything like that. Just in a certain way, when we work. I suppose working with the black people of Africa is kind of an activism.

Rick: And you work with animals also, elephants and lions.

Leslie: Well, yes. We are supporters of an organization called the Global White Lion Protection Trust, because white lions are being used for canned hunting in South Africa. And a very good friend of ours named Linda Tucker has been drafted by Spirit to take care of these lions. And she has her own farm with her own lions where they roam free. But all around that area are farmers who are shooting. They’re using white lions. They’re breeding them and using them for canned hunting. Do you know what canned hunting is?

Rick: No. Is it like the lions can’t really get very far and the hunters just come in there and they’re like sitting ducks?

Leslie: Yes, the lions are released into a fenced area. And the hunters, I guess, either walk if they want to or safely drive in jeeps until they find them and they shoot them. And the farmers are making probably upwards of $40,000 a trophy.

Rick: Oh, I see. So it’s hard for them to resist.

Leslie: It’s people from Europe and America that are coming and doing it. And they need the money in that area, so they’ve succumbed. And it feels just grossly cruel and awful. And as far as the elephants go, the elephants of Africa are under siege. They’re in trouble. They’re wanting to cull them in South Africa. They say there are too many. But we’re suspicious of that motive because it really doesn’t seem as though there are too many. And in the rest of Africa, the great open spaces that they migrate through are being closed off and taken away. So everywhere in Africa, these magnificent creatures are under threat. And they’re so intelligent. And so they’re like whales. They’re the whales of the land. They’re extraordinary. And so we’re involved in doing what we can about that.

Rick: Well, that’s one thing that kind of inspired me about you, is that you have this very profound spiritual dimension, which we’ll be talking about. But you’ve kind of channeled that into compassionate activism for people and animals. And a lot of times you don’t see that. A lot of times it’s kind of one way or the other. I mean, I know people who are most probably spiritually awake when you hear a description of their experience. But they like listening to Rush Limbaugh, and they’re very, very conservative. I know some people. There’s one guy I interviewed. You can listen to his interview on Batgap.com.

Leslie: But that’s a total illusion. How can you be awake and listen, other than just to get the drift of it?

Rick: Well, it’s a good question. I mean, it’s a whole interesting conundrum of spiritual people who… I mean, it’s a whole chapter, I think, that we could get into, is the dichotomy, if there is one, between inner awareness and having that percolate into the personality in such a way as to make a person compassionate and generous and morally upstanding and so on. And very often, even great, famous spiritual teachers fall down in some of those respects. They may have tremendous darshan and radiance and so on, but then you hear stories of them sleeping with their disciples and doing weird things with money and so on. So I find it inspiring and a nice example to set if someone walks their talk.

Leslie: I don’t see much point in being awake if you don’t use it for the betterment of humanity. That’s just my perception. I think my position, I was going to say my problem, but my position was that I grew up under apartheid in South Africa, and I just saw too much of the upper class dominating the lower classes, and the black people, the lower classes. It was horrifying to me. Even as a child, I couldn’t bear it. The 30 odd years that I lived there were torture. It was so refreshing to come to the U.S. I breathed freedom. You know, we had censorship, and you couldn’t say anything about the government, and people were put under house arrest and investigated. It was awful, and I went to a liberal university in Johannesburg, and so the campus was always being invaded and infiltrated, and we were always walking on the streets by the secret police.

Rick: By government people?

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: I remember watching that movie about Stephen Biko.

Leslie: That was later. The whole thing erupted just before I left, and the reason we left was obviously Spirit’s guidance, but my ex-husband got an appointment at UCLA. He was a doctor. So we had already agreed to go when the whole thing erupted, but I realize now that my destiny was to not be there for when the actual revolution hit the skids, in a way. I was on my spiritual journey, and it wasn’t that I was escaping, because I had been on my knees to my guides who were communicating with me at that time, and saying, “What can one person do? What can I do? I have to do something.” And so they sent me to the U.S., and it didn’t make sense at first, but what happened was that I met a spiritual teacher, several spiritual teachers, and I began my journey. Because they said, “We’ll show you what one person can do”, and they took me through the whole journey very fast over the course of a few years. I had a cave experience where I was completely secluded for about two years, and during that time I did a lot of process work to help South Africa, because the revolution in 1986 and ’87 was at its height, and that’s round about the time when people like Biko and others were being executed.

Rick: Now that’s a good little synopsis, but now let’s go back to the beginning and unpack that whole thing and go into the details of every stage. So maybe let’s go way back. As a little girl, what was your first inkling of any sort of spiritual dimension or interest in that sort of thing?

Leslie: Well, my grandparents had a farm way out in the bush that was really far away from everywhere, actually sort of near the border of Botswana. It was very wild. I used to get sent off there regularly during the school holidays, or offloaded by my parents to spend the three-week vacation with my grandparents. My grandmother was a strangely reticent person who didn’t really like me very much, I don’t think, so she left me completely to my own devices. And so I would wander through the fields and through the bush, hours and hours on my own, or else I’d go to the compound where the black people were and I would hang out with them. And there was no electricity there, and no paved roads, and I was in the middle of Africa, and that’s an energy field all of its own. And many years later I realized that I was going into Samadhi as a child, just wandering around on this farm with nobody to talk to and being left alone. I didn’t understand, but I liked it. I was in this sort of wildly expanded trans-Africa state of consciousness, and then it was balanced out by my education and my life in the city. That’s where it started, because when I did finally break into Samadhi when I was older, my mind immediately, my whole awareness, went back to Africa and I was right there again. So I understood that I’d been doing it as a child. And then, of course, during my teenage years, I just did what other teenagers did.

Rick: You became a wild and crazy teenager.

Leslie: But I always carried the banner for the black people of Africa.

Rick: Did you get flak for doing that from your peers?

Leslie: No, my parents were quite liberal. They didn’t mind at all.

Rick: How about friends at school? Did you befriend black kids? I guess you weren’t in the same school as black kids.

Leslie: You know, South Africa is the home of apartheid, so it was major segregation. We lived in neighborhoods where everyone spoke English, and the Afrikaners lived in a different part. They mostly didn’t live in Johannesburg, they had their own city, or cities. So only more recently has there been a real intertwining of the different races and nationalities. But everyone was separate. The English-speaking people were much more liberal, and the Afrikaners were the architects of apartheid. I’m not pointing fingers. It really was a complicated mess, and now they’re trying to fix it. It’s a sort of a noble attempt.

Rick: Well, it seems like it turned out a lot better than it might have. When Mandela came in, he was very forgiving.

Leslie: Oh yes, it was a miracle that it wasn’t a black bar.

Rick: He could have been a very bitter man.

Leslie: Absolutely, absolutely. He’s a profound, unique being, and he gave his whole life for that. And he and people like Bishop Tutu and so on really did save the country.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, the two of them seemed like these bright spiritual lights.

Leslie: That Truth and Reconciliation Commission was profound. I wish they’d kept it going a bit longer. But I suppose there was a dharma to that. The people… Mandela, when he stepped aside a few years ago, said, “Okay, now it’s up to you. You the people, I can’t do any more for you. You have to do this on your own.” And they are making a pretty valiant attempt to get to know each other and live peacefully side by side. After decades of hatred, that’s really quite something.

Rick: This is a tangent, and perhaps we shouldn’t go too far down it, but I often get the feeling that really great leaders who come to the fore in trying times had a sort of a destiny to do that. It’s almost as if they were sent or assigned by some higher power to be born at a certain time and go through certain experiences in order to arise on the world stage when they’re most needed.

Leslie: It’s very, very clear.

Rick: People like Abraham Lincoln, or different people like that.

Leslie: Mandela, I’m sure, is an ascended master who took an incarnation into it.

Rick: Very well could be.

Leslie: Because what we’ve come to understand in the aftermath of the ending of apartheid is that South Africa is holding something very important for the world, an attempt at reconciliation, and mixing, racial mixing, and homogenizing themselves.

Rick: If they can do it, then anybody can do it.

Leslie: Yes, absolutely. There are 11 different languages just amongst the black people, and then the whites speak two different languages. So they have a lot of official languages, and the people who’ve been kept separated for so long don’t just naturally gravitate towards one another. So it’s taking effort. Unfortunately, the World Bank has stepped in, and that just sounded an alarm bell for me when I heard about that.

Rick: So, let’s get back to you. So you survived your teenage years.

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: And then, coming out of that, which for me was a wild scene, but coming out of that, when did you first revisit your spiritual nature?

Leslie: I remember two years. When I turned 13, I started getting downloads, and I began to realize that I saw things differently from the way other people did. And then again, when I was 18, I got a whole surge of downloads as well, about transcendent experiences. And doorways opened, and I started being capable of having transcendent experiences.

Rick: Please elaborate on downloads, what you mean by that, and what some of these downloads were, and how you saw things differently.

Leslie: When I was 13, I felt mystical alignments beginning to open in my awareness, and I was uncomfortable.

Rick: You kind of knew them as such?

Leslie: Yes, I did. I knew that I could see things that other people couldn’t see.

Rick: Like what? Like auras and things like that?

Leslie: Yes, and I could see into them. I could see what they were thinking, and what they were feeling, and I could read them very easily. I had one girlfriend that I could share a little bit about that with. She was compassionate, but couldn’t join me there. So I kept quiet about it.

Rick: Did she kind of speak to people if you said something?

Leslie: Yes, I became quiet and serious. And then again, when I was 18, when I started university, I had a whole period… It was probably astrological, but there was a whole period where everything opened up again. It had closed up a little bit between 13 and 18, then it opened up again. And I went to the university in Johannesburg and studied Fine Arts. That’s what I was drawn to do. And it was the one thing I was good at. I couldn’t do anything else very well, but I could paint and draw and so on. So I felt like that was my destiny, and I really got into it. Even after I graduated, I started painting a lot. And I had, I think, three exhibitions before we left South Africa. And when we left South Africa, I didn’t realize it, but that was the end of my painting career. We arrived in Santa Monica, California, and I had to take care of two small kids. I didn’t have a nanny to do that anymore, so my painting time was gone.

Rick: Was your painting a kind of a spiritual practice for you?

Leslie: Yes. I used to paint without copying things. I would just put a white canvas on the easel and stand there and then intuit to take a certain color and just start doing this, and it would become something.

Rick: Were they abstract paintings or more literal?

Leslie: They were a mixture, sort of semi-abstract and semi-literal.

Rick: Like a landscape or something that would be kind of abstract?

Leslie: A mystical-looking landscape, yes.

Rick: You didn’t do that, did you?

Leslie: I did, yes.

Rick: Oh, very nice. It’s beautiful. It looks like an angel or something.

Leslie: Well, it’s actually the etheric body and some of the other bodies, mine.

Rick: Of yours?

Leslie: Spirit made me paint it when I was going through the awakening process so that I would remember that that was what I looked like on another level. That was what they wanted me to do.

Rick: And so as you were painting that, were you experiencing your etheric body?

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: With that degree of clarity?

Leslie: I was. Well, they said to me… It took me six months to paint this because I was out of practice, but my guides said to me, “We don’t want you to touch the painting unless you’re in Samadhi.” And so I was starting to go into Samadhi, and sometimes there would be long, several-week interludes between each Samadhi episode, and so I would add a little more. And I was going inside myself and then transferring what I saw inside myself onto the canvas. And the feeling level of that was accurately what I was experiencing.

Rick: Now, I have an understanding of what Samadhi means, and probably most of our guests do, but what do you mean by the word in terms of your experience?

Leslie: Well, it’s been different. It’s evolved over time. But back in those days, it looked very much like the painting in that there was this light pouring out of my body, white gold light.

Rick: With your eyes open, closed, didn’t matter?

Leslie: Exactly. In fact, when they said I should paint the painting, I’d been sitting on the couch doing the Samadhi for quite some time.

Rick: Just sitting there experiencing the light pouring?

Leslie: Yes, hours. I mean, I spent two years sitting on the couch in meditation. That’s what the cave experience was. And at some point they said, “Okay, now we want you to make a painting.” I hadn’t done one for years, so I went and got a canvas. And they said, “Now, you’re not to touch the painting unless you’re in Samadhi.” So it took six months because there were intermittent Samadhis. But the reason I had to do that, one of the reasons, was because they wanted me to be able to hold the Samadhi while I was in motion and focusing. So I wasn’t sitting anymore. I was standing up in Samadhi and moving my arms and thinking a little bit, although it’s a very intuitive process. There’s not much thought happening when I paint. When I used to paint. I don’t paint anymore.

Rick: Now, you’ve alluded many times already to “they” referring to guides. So let’s talk about that a little bit. Who they were. How you experienced them.

Leslie: It was absolutely everyone.

Rick: And when that started also.

Leslie: Yes. During the course of that two years, I was taught by everybody.

Rick: Okay, now wait a minute. So the two years of cave experience, was that before you got married?

Leslie: That was the culmination.

Rick: Oh, later on.

Leslie: That was long after my divorce and after all the many years of spiritual practice. It was between ’86 and ’88. And I guess I sort of reached the climax. So I was drafted into a small apartment in West L.A., which is an area I’d never lived before, where I knew absolutely nobody. And gradually, the beings that were tutoring me telepathically led me into going out of the house less and less and less until I was really housebound. And then they started working with me. And I went through the dissolution of my entire ego, including all the negative stuff at the bottom. So I would lie in bed or on the floor, weeping. It doesn’t sound very…

Rick: Just experiencing all this.

Leslie: Just letting it all pass through.

Rick: Yeah, catharsis stuff going on.

Leslie: And this was the latter end of it, because as the human imprint of the ego dissolved, so the Samadhi started to come through, and so the training then shifted. But I was going at one point, seesawing between high, high, luminous Samadhis and then diving down into the muck again. And this would be like a week-long cycle.

Rick: I wonder if someone more mundanely oriented would have just said you had manic depression or something.

Leslie: Oh, absolutely. I was completely isolated. Nobody came near me. Nobody knew where I was. Well, actually my family. But they had moved to Phoenix, so nobody was knocking on my door. All my friends had somehow vanished, and nobody knew where I was. I was completely incognito, locked up in this apartment.

Rick: So when you say these guides were communicating with you telepathically, was that like a voice in your head or more subtle? Was there a visual component where you could actually see what they looked like, or was it more like just a voice coming, saying something?

Leslie: It was telepathic, at least claireaudience. I was hearing it in my head.

Rick: Would they sound like a human voice, with a particular accent, for instance?

Leslie: Sometimes.

Rick: Different voices, man’s voice, woman’s voice?

Leslie: No accents.

Rick: Different genders?

Leslie: Mostly masculine guides, but occasionally. I had a many-month experience of the Divine Mother working with me, but that came right at the end. They were ascended masters. Sometimes they told me their names. Sometimes they didn’t.

Rick: And you would know they were an ascended master because they would say, “I’m an ascended master, and my name is Soa.”

Leslie: “I’m Babaji. I’m Ramana Maharshi.” Ramana Maharshi showed up one day and he said, “I’ve come to teach you for about six months, and you need to do what I ask you to do,” which I did.

Rick: Interesting.

Leslie: He was one of the last. I started going to Samadhi at the end of that. But Babaji was one of them, Yogananda at one time, a whole slew of ascended masters, from Archangel Michael, several archangels, but Archangel Michael was a very prevalent guide. And gosh, I’m spacing on the names of some of the others.

Rick: Were they all people?

Leslie: Sometimes they didn’t have names, and I would ask them. They said, “You don’t know who we are, and we don’t feel that you need to know. We don’t feel the need to speak about it.”

Rick: That kind of answers the question I was going to ask, which was, were they just masters that we all may have read about in books, or were they just somehow out of the blue something no one’s ever heard of?

Leslie: It was both. It was almost everybody that you’ve read about in books, and more beings that nobody’s… ascended masters with no names. At least they didn’t tell me. They were so compassionate and so loving and so always there. It was 24 hours a day that I was in this transmission that came through. And so I didn’t mind being alone. I wasn’t really alone.

Rick: You weren’t alone. Plenty of company. Sometimes when I hear people talk about these things, I’m skeptical. But for some reason with you, I don’t feel skeptical. Some people use it as a sort of ego boost thing. “Oh yes, I am speaking with Archangel Michael, and he’s telling me to tell you this.” It seems a little hokey, but in your case…

Leslie: Archangel Michael put me on a three-week fast and wouldn’t let me sleep. I had to sit cross-legged in front of my altar for three weeks. Well, during the day I was actually in computer programming school, but every night for three weeks I didn’t sleep a wink, and he coached me. And that’s when my heart opened up at the end of those three weeks. I didn’t eat or sleep for those three weeks.

Rick: So you actually came out of the apartment, went to a computer programming school?

Leslie: Yes, and then sat up when I came back.

Rick: And then came back and meditated all night?

Leslie: With him.

Rick: Huh, with literally no sleep for three weeks?

Leslie: No sleep. No food and no sleep.

Rick: How did you feel during the day when you were back at your…

Leslie: Just fine.

Rick: You didn’t feel hungry or tired or anything?

Leslie: No, because I was being fed this energy.

Rick: Amazing. I feel like I’m missing a lot here, because there must have been so many interesting, particular things like that. I mean, if you were communicating with all these different people, perhaps don’t let us miss the highlights of all the…

Leslie: Well, I can share something with you at the end of those three. I was sitting in a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, eating lunch, and Archangel Michael, the voice came and it said, “I am the Archangel Michael and I’ve come to teach you. Do you want me to?” Something like that. And I said, “Yes, I do.” And he said, “Well, stop eating.” And I had this delicious bowl of shrimp right in front of me that the waitress had just put in front of me. So I pushed it aside and that was the beginning. I had no idea that it would last three weeks and I had no idea what was going to happen, but I just trusted him. So I went to school every day and I came home…

Rick: You were living in Boulder then?

Leslie: In Boulder, yes. I came home and… I was living alone. I came home and was guided to sit down in front of my altar and meditate. And the first night was a bit shocking because it was the whole night, no sleep.

Rick: Did your legs get tired sitting in the…?

Leslie: Oh, that was part of the whole thing. My legs ached and my back ached and it was agony. And it went on for hours and I just sat there and cried.

Rick: But you really felt like you shouldn’t get up?

Leslie: No. He had said he was going to teach me and so I stuck it out and I didn’t get up. But what happened was I just cried a lot because the pain was unbearable. And as I cried, my shadow started peeling off. He was peeling the shadow off. And it went on for three weeks. I didn’t know that it would go on for three weeks.

Rick: So it’s pain all night for three weeks.

Leslie: But then after a few days of that, there was a night where I was just in Samadhi bliss and there was no pain and the whole night felt like five minutes. Whereas the painful nights just seemed like hours and hours of misery that dragged on. And I didn’t know it would end at the three-week mark, but I hung in with it. I used to jog, so I stopped jogging and he said, “No, go. Go and jog. You’ll see. You’ll be able to do it.” And I did. I was able to jog my three miles.

Rick: It must have been good for your legs after all that sitting.

Leslie: The pain would go away instantly and it would arrive instantly. It was like the pain was being done to me. And just the crying was a healing. At the end of the three weeks, my heart opened to a much deeper level than it was. I mean, I was still very third-dimensional at that point. But my heart opened into a higher dimensional state to the point where it never closed again. And he said to me at the end, he said, “This is heaven’s gate.” And I can vouch for that being true. I had a whole different viewpoint, a whole different perspective on life at that point. I saw people differently. I felt different in myself.

Rick: How did you see people differently? What are some of the characteristics of this heart opening?

Leslie: I could see their whole ego configuration and who they were beyond that. I mean, it was like everything became transparent.

Rick: Would you have to really zoom in on a person to see that or could you just like at the cash register you see the whole picture?

Leslie: No, I didn’t use it that way. These are people I knew. We were all in computer programming school together. They were acquaintances, not really close friends, but because I had lunch with them at times and I spent time with them, I could see where they were wounded and where they were blocking the light and where they were in pain.

Rick: Did you find yourself beginning to help them at that point?

Leslie: In whatever small way I could without seeming to be.

Rick: Without imposing.

Leslie: It was really just showing compassion when people seemed to be suffering. There were times when I said, “I see that you’re in trouble. Can I help you?” or something like that. And then if they were really ripe, they would let me. But it was just a way of being there for people and I didn’t want to create the wrong impression, let’s say that, and I just felt I need to be humble rather than anything else.

Rick: I have a friend whom I interviewed earlier in this series who, I don’t know if this is still going on, but she went through a phase where if she was on the phone with a help desk at some company or something like that, she’d just hear a few words from the person’s voice and she’d start getting all this information, “Oh, they went through a divorce and they have three kids,” and all these details of their lives just from the sound of their voice.

Leslie: I sometimes get that kind of information, but really only if it’s pertinent to what the person’s trying to clear in themselves, or where their main hitch is that’s hanging up their lives. So, yeah, it gets quite transparent.

Rick: So it sounds like your cave period happened in both LA and Boulder. Is that so?

Leslie: The cave experience in LA came after the Boulder experience. The heart opened and then I was sent off to the cave experience. I was literally sent from Boulder to LA as soon as I finished my computer programming course.

Rick: Which you probably never did anything with.

Leslie: Yeah, but I saw why I was doing it at some point, and that’s why the Samadhi started. It was because as an artist I’d been very right-brained, and the computer programming balanced out the left brain and the right brain. And as soon as I started to get some mastery in the computer programming, that’s when Archangel Michael showed up, and that’s when I went through those three weeks, and that’s when the Samadhi would begin at night. Even after he left, I continued to sit in meditation all weekend and during my spare time, and often at night as well, and the Samadhi started to come in at that time. So it developed over the course of quite a while, and then they sent me to LA at the end of the programming course.

Rick: Your guides?

Leslie: Yes, they. They’re my telepathic teachers.

Rick: Had they sent you to do the computer programming in the first place?

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: Right.

Leslie: Oh, I struggled not to do it. I mean, they asked a few times and I would just go, “No, I’m not going to do that. I don’t have a mind for that. I’m not that kind of person.” But finally, somehow they cornered me. I can’t quite remember how they did that, but they got me there.

Rick: Sign here.

Leslie: Yeah.

Rick: I wonder if a lot of people have guides sort of whispering in their ear like this.

Leslie: They do.

Rick: And they don’t know it.

Leslie: Absolutely.

Rick: Right. Or they just think it’s some thought that’s, you know, some random thing going through.

Leslie: They do. Everybody does.

Rick: Is it always the big guys talking to them?

Leslie: No, there are different levels of guides. I graduated from various beings to other various beings.

Rick: When you started out having guides talking to you, it was more sort of smaller, lower level, so to speak, in the hierarchy?

Leslie: Well, there was a variety, because sometimes a really profound being would show up and I would get a real boost and move forward. And then there would be a team that would come in to try and hold me at that level. They would keep working with me to hold me at that level. And then when that level became established, and I had a little, maybe a bit of a respite in between where nobody showed up at all. But I was very committed to my meditation. I did that every day. But then someone else would show up and… It was a series of jumps that I was given.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting because I’ve been meditating for 42 years and I’ve never thought of it so much in terms of some other entity of some kind intermediating or helping me. Although I imagine that must be going on in some way. I’ve always just thought of it as this process I go through where my mind settles down, I get into this nice deep state and come out again.

Leslie: I had asked for enlightenment. I don’t know that everybody does that. I had asked for that. And I said I had stated, “I’ll do anything to have that state.” And I gave up many things that were deeply important to me and became a very solitary being, living completely at the whim of these guides. You know, get in your car and drive to such and such. I would do it.

Rick: Wow. I was just listening to a Sufi teacher, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, as I was driving up here in the car. And he was talking about how these higher beings, they don’t have the dense bodies that we have. And so they kind of need us in a way to be intermediaries here on earth in order to help to bring light into the world. So it’s kind of this collaborative effort. And I imagine that when someone shows a willingness to cooperate…

Leslie: Oh, that makes them so happy.

Rick: Yeah, then they say, “Okay, here we go. Here’s somebody we can work with.”

Leslie: Exactly. You get a lot of attention when you are available like that.

Rick: Yeah. But I mean, a lot of people would probably listen to what you’re saying and think, “I’d love to have that going on in my life, but I seem to be kind of a lunkhead.” “I’m not in tune with guides. I’m doing my yoga and I’m doing my meditation, but I seem stuck and I’m not making very much progress.” “And how could I have what Leslie is talking about?”

Leslie: Well, I suppose I had a destiny, but I’m not sure of that. I was very gung-ho. I’ve always had this activist heart. I wanted to see the world benefit, to see people benefit, and I was willing to make sacrifices, to sacrifice all kinds of things to do that. So I’m not sure that I was special. I had seen so much suffering that I just wasn’t complacent, and I was willing to say, “Okay, I’m going to do what I can do to mitigate the suffering, not wait for somebody else to do it.” I’d seen the need, you know, that’s a big piece of it. I’d really seen the need for compassion in the world. I’d seen such horrific things.

Rick: So to a great extent, your motivation for enlightenment was not, “What’s in it for me? I want to just experience all this bliss.” It was, “Enlightenment will enable me to be a more useful servant of God.”

Leslie: I had no idea that it was bliss, to be quite honest. I wanted to serve.

Rick: Yeah, and you felt like your understanding was that enlightenment would be the tool or the attainment that would enable you to serve.

Leslie: It wasn’t my understanding. Remember I’d said, “I’ll do whatever it takes,” and my guides had sent me to the U.S.?

Rick: I see.

Leslie: And I’d been meditating before, for a year or two in South Africa.

Rick: Just kind of on your own, just doing it?

Leslie: I learned TM, and I did it on my own. It was the only meditation that was available in South Africa. So that was my beginning. TM was the beginning.

Rick: Did you have a good experience with that?

Leslie: Oh yes, I had lovely meditations. In fact, it changed my life. My whole perspective on everything changed.

Rick: Peter Swan, remember? South Africa, TM teacher.

Leslie: Oh no, not really. The one that I used to be with was different. I’m spacing on his name right now.

Rick: It doesn’t matter.

Leslie: It was very important for me. I started experiencing transcendence very quickly.

Rick: With TM?

Leslie: Yeah. And so I knew this was the only thing I wanted to do at a certain point, and I didn’t want the rest of my life. It took a while, because I had two children at that point. It took a while for my husband and I to sort out what was brewing between us. And finally we separated. And after about a year, I was asked by my guides to let my children go with him. And that was when I moved towards the cave experience, which I couldn’t have done without him.

Rick: That must have been quite a sacrifice.

Leslie: That was a big one. And the art. I sacrificed the art. They stopped me from painting at a certain point. And they mitigated the separation from my children in amazing ways. I had a strong energetic connection to them.

Rick: To the children?

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: So you didn’t feel so separated?

Leslie: No. And we talked on the phone. They were the only ones who ever got through on the telephone during the cave experience. For everybody else, the phone was kind of broken. It didn’t always work.

Rick: How are they doing now?

Leslie: They’re doing fine.

Rick: Good. This could be tangential, but have they gotten bitten by the spiritual bug themselves?

Leslie: My daughter is, to a certain extent, but in a different kind of way. She’s going the academic route. She’s doing a PhD right now. Not my son, no. He’s more like his father. But no, they have lives.

Rick: Sure. So you did TM for a couple of years in South Africa, and then you were called to move to the U.S. You moved to the U.S. with your husband, did you not?

Leslie: Yes, and my children, all four of us.

Rick: So did you feel like the guides were instrumental in getting the whole family over?

Leslie: Oh, absolutely.

Rick: But the husband didn’t. Did you talk to him in those terms? Did you say, “Hey, honey, the guides say we’re moving to L.A.”?

Leslie: They arranged it. What happened was that he had just trained as an orthopedic surgeon, and lo and behold, his professor at the university was contacted by the professor of orthopedics at UCLA, looking for a research fellow to come and do a two-year stint. And the professor at the university in Johannesburg just went straight to my husband and said, “This is for you.” So he took it.

Rick: But from your perspective, that was orchestrated.

Leslie: Well, I didn’t realize at the time. I wasn’t that connected to guides that much during those days, not until I actually began a serious spiritual journey. Did they start really running my life, which I let them do. But they asked me to let my children go with my husband when we got to that point.

Rick: So, two years in South Africa meditating, then moved to UCLA, family still together. And then at some stage of the game there, the serious spiritual journey began to kick in. Was that simultaneous with or subsequent to your marriage beginning to break up?

Leslie: It was simultaneous.

Rick: So, it’s like the spiritual engines were revving up, and that was making it more and more difficult to maintain the status quo that you had been living.

Leslie: There’s another way that I look at it now, because it’s happened many times, that I was evolving at a much faster rate than he was. His life is very much the same as it always was now, and I was on a very different trajectory. So, it was inevitable that we would move apart because he wanted stability and to stay the same, and I was already in motion. And there was no way I was going to stop that.

Rick: At times, did you try to sublimate your spiritual motivations to keep the marriage together, or did you have a hard time compromising like that?

Leslie: I did a little bit, but really not with any gusto or seriousness.

Rick: So, there’s such a force to your evolutionary drive that you really couldn’t?

Leslie: Well, at first I thought I could be married and a mother and do a spiritual path, and then it became clearer that I couldn’t.

Rick: It works for some people.

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: It does, yeah.

Leslie: Well, you know, I was waiting for him to move with me, and he didn’t come, and he didn’t come, and I finally thought, “I’m going on my own now. I have to go on my own.”

Rick: There’s a Bengali saying, “If no one comes on your call, then go ahead alone.”

Leslie: Yes, that’s what happened. It was painful. It was heartbreaking, actually.

Rick: But you felt confident that you were doing the right thing.

Leslie: It was all intuitive. I was never that confident, but I just…

Rick: Trusted your intuition.

Leslie: I did. I guess I could feel that I had to, that I had no choice. I had no idea where I was going. But I was… you know, by the time you’ve let go of your career, your husband, and your children, you don’t have a lot holding you, and I was just ready for takeoff at that point.

Rick: How old were you at that stage, if you don’t mind my asking?

Leslie: He and I separated when I was about 35, I guess, and I woke up when I was 42, so it was that period in there.

Rick: You reached this stage, in which you were reaching escape velocity because of the spiritual urge that was welling up within you, or that you were also receiving from your guides. Then you said something about a six-year period before the cave period started? Is that right?

Leslie: That was when I studied with two spiritual teachers for about four years.

Rick: Is that worth talking about? I’m sure it is. What did you go through?

Leslie: Oh, the one was a woman, a Jungian, and she introduced me to the notion of shadow. So it is important to talk about that. She made it very clear to me, and I knew she was speaking the truth, that if you don’t deal with your negative ego, which is your shadow stuff, you can’t wake up. You can’t really go into, you can’t dissolve the ego unless you deal with the stuff that’s down there. And that made perfect sense to me. I knew she was speaking the truth. So she was very clear, you can’t just go into the light all the time. That’s just the upper reaches of the ego when you do that.

Rick: If a person tries to do that, what happens to them?

Leslie: They just get stuck.

Rick: Does the negative stuff sort of keep jumping out at inconvenient times?

Leslie: It does, yes. There are people who can use their wills and stay above it.

Rick: Right, keep it bottled up.

Leslie: Keep it bottled up, yeah. So, for whatever reason, I chose to believe her, and for four years she worked one-on-one with me, dissolving all of my programming.

Rick: In a sort of therapeutic setting?

Leslie: Yes, a one-on-one talking. She was a seer though. She could see, “Okay, you’ve got this program, and it’s now up at the top of the list for you to dissolve.” So we would dialogue about this particular behavior or ego program, and then I would surrender it, and then it would go away. And we did a lot of that.

Rick: And it probably was not totally smooth as silk, surrendering all this stuff?

Leslie: No.

Rick: I mean, you must have been going through a lot of purging of…

Leslie: This was right as my marriage was breaking up, when I met her. And so I was really ripe and ready. At this point I had let go. We just hadn’t quite separated, but we were living very separate lives at that point. And so I was fairly distraught. It wasn’t a very cool experience, having your marriage break up. It was hard. And I was distraught and a bit confused and so on. But it was as though I was being carried along by the current in a river, actually. Anyway, she was there, and I started to see all the places where I was locked in and stuck and so on, and it became quite consuming. And then it was shortly after, maybe six months after I’d been working with her, that I met Rama and started sitting at his weekly meditation sessions, which I did for, give or take, four years, I think. Although the fourth year, I still considered myself to be students of both of them.

Rick: Were you still seeing the woman?

Leslie: Well, periodically. She lived in LA, and Rama at that point lived in Boston, and I lived in Boulder. So I still believed that I was affiliated to them, but in actuality, my inner guides were weaning me away from them and moving me into this sort of full-time telepathic tutoring that they were giving me.

Rick: How could you do weekly meditations with Rama if you were in Boulder and he was in Boston? Were you flying to Boston?

Leslie: Well, that was before we all left LA.

Rick: Oh, okay. So in other words, Rama was in LA at that point.

Leslie: At that time. And then he went to Boston and I was in Boulder. So it was just in my mind that I studied with him for four years. The actual experience was probably more like three.

Rick: I have a friend who was really into Rama, and he said that he actually saw him levitate and stuff like that. Did you see that?

Leslie: Yes, we used to go out into the desert and he would do stuff. I watched him disappear. He was sitting on a rock in front of me and I watched him just dematerialize.

Rick: And you could see stuff behind him that had been there?

Leslie: Yes, the rock that was behind him.

Rick: And levitating?

Leslie: I didn’t see him levitating, no.

Rick: Interesting. And everybody in the audience saw it?

Leslie: Not everybody, many people.

Rick: So it sort of depended upon your receptivity to see that?

Leslie: I think so. I think the mind gets in the way and just disbelieves.

Rick: Interesting story, that whole guy. But that’s a whole other story, and he’s not around to interview.

Leslie: No, he’s an interesting person. But as I said, I didn’t study there with him for another three years.

Rick: So you were shifting kind of into not having a human teacher, but just having this telepathic thing.

Leslie: That was the direction that it went. Eventually I had no human teacher.

Rick: And so that’s when you began to enter your cave period in Boulder?

Leslie: Yes. That three-week period in Boulder was obviously a preparation, because my heart was open at that point and I was very, very receptive. And that’s when I was put into seclusion in that apartment that I called my cave. It was very much like a cave, actually, the apartment itself, sort of dark and cave-like. And at the end of that, I had a number of breakthrough experiences.

Rick: In the three weeks?

Leslie: No.

Rick: In the two years?

Leslie: The two years.

Rick: Let’s hear about those.

Leslie: Well, there were stages. Once again, like the period with Archangel Michael, when I sat on the floor and meditated all night. That was a stage, that was a significant stage. It had a beginning, a middle, and an ending, with an outcome where a significant change had taken place.

Rick: And once the change had taken place, it was sort of like a permanent shift up to that point.

Leslie: Yes. I was a different person after that.

Rick: You saw the world with new eyes.

Leslie: Yeah. My whole reality had changed.

Rick: And then it would change again, and then again.

Leslie: Exactly. So the whole cave experience was a series of those shifts that ignited or initiated a different perception and consciousness. And I finally figured out that I was actually shifting dimensions. Maybe not all of them were dimensions.

Rick: Dimensions of consciousness?

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: Right. I’m glad you’re saying this, because a lot of people have a shift, and it’ll be very profound, and they’ll think, “That’s it, I’m done, I’m enlightened.” And my notion, my sense of things, is that there are many, many such shifts to go through, and there may be no end to it, as far as I know. There are significant milestones.

Leslie: I don’t think there’s an end to it.

Rick: No.

Leslie: Because I’m still working and shifting, working on myself and shifting.

Rick: Yeah. But I don’t know anybody who isn’t.

Leslie: Especially now. And it’s possible that a couple of hundred years ago, when the world was moving more slowly, the vibration was slower, that there was a sense of reaching a goal. But this whole planet is in accelerated evolution right now. And so people who are actually doing a spiritual evolutionary journey by choice are moving by leaps and bounds, and this is the great opportunity to do that. So, no, I would never try to put a ceiling on anything.

Rick: So, I kind of distracted you a little bit, but you were saying during those two years there were a number of significant milestones.

Leslie: There were significant doorways that led to a whole new level of consciousness.

Rick: Perhaps you could just sort of sketch out one of the more significant ones briefly, or not briefly if you want to elaborate.

Leslie: The one where we discussed the making of this painting was a very significant one, because I started going into Samadhi, and I had been having Samadhi sitting on the couch, but I had to keep very still, stop my mind, and hold the meditation in order for that to come through. So the painting was significant because I got up, they wanted me to be able to walk around and move and be functional, and hold the Samadhi at the same time. And their rationale was, “Well, painting is something you know how to do, so we think that you’ll be able to do this.”

Rick: As opposed to fixing an engine or something.

Leslie: Yes, where I had to engage my mind. The painting was very intuitively spontaneous.

Rick: And so by Samadhi in this instance, do you mean settling into a state of unbounded awareness with very little or no thought?

Leslie: Yes, with no thought, but heightened perception.

Rick: Heightened perception, and being able to maintain that while painting.

Leslie: Yes. So that was a tutoring that had an outcome. And, gosh, there were others I can’t quite remember, I can’t bring them back right now, so maybe we should move on.

Rick: Sure. So, shall we move on to the end of the two years?

Leslie: Oh yes, at the end of the two years, that was the most significant one of all. At the end of the two years, I didn’t know it was the end of the two years.

Rick: I figured there must be something special at the end of the two years, otherwise it might have been three years or four years.

Leslie: Obviously. I had gone through a period of shadow that was fairly regular, but one day I was sitting on the couch, which I did most of the time, and I was feeling sort of strange, I couldn’t really define it. But I suddenly, I had a vision, and this was very clear even with my eyes open, that a lot of arms materialized. It sounds so bizarre, but these arms with hands came down in front of me and grabbed me, and I felt myself being lifted up. And then I don’t remember anything. I only found out what happened later, under hypnosis, but I was gone for three days.

Rick: Really? Your body was on the couch?

Leslie: I don’t know where my body was. I came to on the couch in the same lotus position, and was very disoriented.

Rick: And you looked at a watch or something to figure out that it had been three days?

Leslie: No, fortunately I had a subscription to the LA Times, and when I opened my front door… I mean I was sort of bumbling around in this sort of dazed state when I got off the couch. I opened my front door and there was a little pile of newspapers there.

Rick: So you could see how many days had elapsed?

Leslie: Yes, so I knew how many days had elapsed, but I was gone. And the thing that was most noticeable of all at the end of that was my state of consciousness, that I knew I was in an Nirvikalpa Samadhi at that point.

Rick: Better define that.

Leslie: I don’t know if I can. I mean it’s a vast transcendental state that didn’t ever go away. I’d had those high Samadhis before, but then they would subside and I would plunge into the shadow again. But this stayed. I didn’t go down into the shadow anymore. I just stayed in the state.

Rick: Of course, initially you probably didn’t know that you were going to stay in that state. You might have figured that you were going to drop down, but then…

Leslie: That’s why I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t go out and say, “Yay, I’m finished.”

Rick: But then days passed and you were dropping down.

Leslie: The days went months. Actually, I didn’t tell anybody for two years because I wanted to be absolutely certain.

Rick: Did you have friends that you could talk to this stuff about? I mean, did people know what you were going through all this time?

Leslie: No.

Rick: You were just on your own.

Leslie: I waited two years, then I wrote my ex-husband a letter and told him, because he knew what I was trying to do. He didn’t really approve of it, but he actually paid my rent, so he was supporting me.

Rick: Did he think that – again, I feel like I’m getting tangential here, but I’m curious – did he think that there was any legitimacy to what you were striving for, or did he just think you were nutty?

Leslie: No, I think over the course of all the years that I’d been meditating and sort of asserting my independence around this, that he kind of half-believed it. He was clear it wasn’t for him, but he was willing to…

Rick: And you weren’t doing anything crazy?

Leslie: No, I wasn’t doing anything crazy. He saw that I was serious. I think he may have thought I was a bit barking up the wrong tree or something, but he was willing to humor me, I guess.

Rick: That’s very nice.

Leslie: I waited two years before I ever told anybody anything, but the whole seclusion started breaking up at that point. People started coming into my life. There were several people who lived in the building, the block of apartments that I lived in, who came and knocked on my door and said, “We’ve heard that you teach meditation. Will you teach us meditation?” And so that was sort of a coming-out thing. And then I met a couple of other people at some kind of festival, some kind of whole-earth festival, and they wanted to come and meditate with me. And so my seclusion was over, and one thing led to another, and I started teaching them what I knew, aside from the meditation. But I want to share with you about when I went to the woman to be hypnotized. I got this inner guidance that…

Rick: I’m surprised you could be hypnotized once you were in a state of Nirvikalpa Samadhi that I just think you wouldn’t be.

Leslie: You’re so, I guess, open that it’s very easy to surrender into it.

Rick: All right, well, tell the story.

Leslie: I don’t know if this part was just made up. I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be telling you if I really thought that. But I went to this woman on the guidance to do it, and I relived under hypnosis the whole experience that I had had during those three days.

Rick: I see.

Leslie: So I knew what had happened.

Rick: So it was revealed to you what was going on during those three days?

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: Can we get those?

Leslie: It’s kind of bizarre and amazing. After being lifted up, which I guess was sort of an etheric thing. Nobody really lifted my body, and I don’t think my body left that couch.

Rick: People would have seen it on the couch if they had peeked through your window or something, probably.

Leslie: You know, I don’t know.

Rick: You really don’t know, but probably.

Leslie: I have no idea. I never went to the bathroom. I never regained consciousness for those three days. So the first thing that came up in hypnosis was that I found myself in what was like an operating room, you know, the big light above my head. And I got the sense that I was on a craft, a spacecraft.

Rick: Right. I was going to ask you that question.

Leslie: There were beings around me that were very compassionate and loving, but they were doing a kind of a surgery on me. And I remember the one said to me, “Don’t be worried. Don’t be afraid. But we want you to know that you will never be the same again after this.” Okay. And I just remember this huge light above my head, and that it was, it felt… I’ve been in operating rooms before, so I could feel… It had that kind of feeling. And there were a lot of tubes and pipes and things hanging from some kind of mechanism on the ceiling, and they were hanging kind of above me and around me. And it had this sort of a cold metallic kind of white light in the room that resembled an operating room. And then the scene changed, and I was being held. A group of seven gigantic beings were all held their hands together. They were in a circle, held their hands together, and I was like a tiny little Thumbelina sitting in the palm of their hands. And they said to me, “We are the Elohim, and each one of us, each one of the seven of us contains a universe, seven universes, seven Elohim.” And they held me like this, like a little Thumbelina, and they spoke to me. I don’t really quite recall all of what they said to me. But after a while, they all lifted their hands, oh, and they invited me to look inside each one of them and see the seven universes that they contained. And I remember doing that and finding the seven universes being totally different.

Rick: Were they like universes at different levels, or were they more like each one a universe full of galaxies like we see in NASA photos?

Leslie: Because they were in a circle around me, and I looked from one to the other around the circle, they were all on the same level. There was not a hierarchy there at all.

Rick: But you said each one was totally different.

Leslie: Each one was totally different, and I’m afraid that I cannot recall the details. It was as though I was looking at the structure of consciousness as it manifested its particular form of life inside each of those universes. And because I was doing that with my human orientation, I couldn’t retain, because they were so different, different forms of life.

Rick: So in other words, it was so alien to human intelligence that it’s impossible to recall it and express it in English language.

Leslie: Yes, precisely. And that took a certain length of time. And the Elohim said to me, “You are one of us.”

Rick: And Elohim is just a celestial being or something, right?

Leslie: I didn’t really know. I didn’t really know.

Rick: But that’s what they call themselves.

Leslie: Well, they are creator beings, angelic creator beings, I’ve since learned. But they seem to each, I don’t know how many of them, I only saw the seven, and each one contained a universe.

Rick: Now you kind of segued from being apparently in a spacecraft of some kind to this Elohim thing.

Leslie: It was just like a dissolution, suddenly the scene faded and then this one started. And then the next thing that happened was, they said some words to me which I can’t recall, but then they had me look up. And what I saw was something very much like that scene from the movie Contact, where she goes through the time warp and she sees that golden galaxy with sort of golden light all around it. And she looks at it. Well, that was before the movie Contact was made even, but that’s what I saw. They all held their hands up like that and pointed me towards this. And actually held their hands so that their hands went right into the golden energy around this spherical golden form. And I felt the energy of it. And whenever I watch that movie Contact… Somebody else has been there because that was exactly how I felt. She goes, “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful!”

Rick: Either that or the intelligence of these beings channeled that into the movie makers and gave them the vision to do it.

Leslie: It was a saturation of love that I had never, ever experienced before. And it was sort of “Oh my God” kind of feeling. And I saw there was a slight pull in my body to just go right into that light. And something held me back and I realized that it wasn’t my time to do that.

Rick: In other words, you might have died if you’d gone into it.

Leslie: I think I probably would have. I came back because I still had to do things and live a life. And then I think that was the end.

Rick: And then you woke up on the couch.

Leslie: Yes, I woke up on the couch. If it hadn’t been for the newspapers, I would have had no sense of the passing of time at all.

Rick: And so then you began to get drawn out by people, “Teach me meditation.”

Leslie: Yes, yes. There was this knocking on the door saying, “Come.” I guess I was luminous at that point.

Rick: Just to look at you, I mean, people would think, “Whoa.”

Leslie: Yes, and there was a force field around my body. Now, I don’t have that quite to the same extent. At least I don’t think so.

Rick: You look pretty good, that’s what I mean.

Leslie: It may have just seemed that way then because it was so unusual. I’d never quite felt that way before. And now I’ve become accustomed to it, but I don’t think so. I’m a spirit walker. I don’t have a huge golden aura around my body anymore. And I think that that’s also evolutionary. I’ve integrated it into what’s more like clear light state of consciousness than that kind of radiant celestial. My understanding of that is that it’s still somewhat egoic. It’s sort of a fourth dimensional heavens and hells. You’re in the heavens when you’re in that state.

Rick: But it has a polar opposite.

Leslie: It’s still some of the hell worlds polarities to it, yeah.

Rick: I meant to ask, as a result of this whole experience you had, do you have any comments or insights into the role that sort of extraterrestrial intelligences might be playing in this whole thing? I mean, a lot of people feel that they have a spiritual orientation and that they’re assisting the planet in its spiritual evolution.

Leslie: Well, what is an extraterrestrial? We think they’re like little space people, but you know, the ascended masters are extraterrestrials.

Rick: But some of them at least seem to have physical craft that people see and come around. And there’s crop circles and there’s all this stuff going on. And you wonder about, you’d like to think that they are benign and have our best interests in mind.

Leslie: I’ve never really been into spacecraft, I mean, other than going into one in that experience where I went through that sort of psychic surgery. That was definitely a spacecraft. And I’d never had an experience like that before.

Rick: I had another friend who had an experience like that. He was drawn up in a spacecraft and he was shown these sort of instruments and everything, and he was shown how they were able to kind of monitor the levels of consciousness of countries and cities and individuals, and sort of do things to kind of help everybody along.

Leslie: I’m quite certain that they do. You know, I’ve come into a perception that I would describe now as that we are like test tube babies, the human race, and that the higher beings are just like training, cultivating, teaching, developing us. It was a vision I had at one point. So, right here, we are not alone. Because we have a programming to feel separate, that we perceive ourselves to be alone. After the Fall, humanity became locked into the egoic veils of separation.

Rick: Yeah. Now, do you feel that these beneficent beings that you’ve been guided by most of your life have a negative counterpart that are trying to hurt people or lead people astray, and that are in kind of competition with the good guys?

Leslie: Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I’ve never run into any of them. But, you know, my whole perception of reality was based on polarity, on the duality. One of the ways that I came into non-duality was by working with dualities. So, I would imagine it’s a question of whether there’s still duality out there in space, or if it’s confined to planet Earth. Or if that sort of outer space thing is just an extension of our reality.

Rick: Well, I’m not just talking about UFO-type beings, but I’m talking about, you know, just as you have the archangels and so on, the Elohim, and beautiful beings, and whether a lot of the suffering and difficulties we see in the world are perhaps the handiwork of those more negative beings, and that these positive beings are in competition with them in a sense, trying to, through people like you and spiritual people in general, trying to kind of create enough spiritual energy to change the balance. I’m speculating, but I’m wondering whether from your experience you have more insight into that.

Leslie: I think it’s all part of our process in a way. The whole thing is like stage sets for our growth and development. I mean, it may sound a bit sort of egocentric to think that we’re so important, but I do think we are.

Rick: Yeah. I think it can be given an egotistical slant. I mean, people have said, “Oh, human beings are so important, we can just rape the planet, you know, take all the resources we want because we’re the top of the heap.” But that’s not the sense in which you mean it.

Leslie: We aren’t the top of the heap at all. The thing that I’m getting on this is that we’re the babies, and so we’re being nurtured. And the process itself is about undoing the Fall, undoing the state of separation that humans believe they’re living in right now, that there is no separation. But we do have these veils around us, illusory veils of separation, that are there as part of our evolution in this patriarchal age. I don’t think we’ve always had those veils. In the previous age, there weren’t those veils of separation. This is a cultivating of a whole race of beings in an evolutionary cycle. It’s very carefully orchestrated, that’s what I’m trying to say. There’s nothing random about anything that happens. And it’s just the human state of separation that perceives the randomness, because our sense of separation allows us to feel cut off from things and disconnected from things, and it’s an illusion. There’s nothing random and there’s no such thing as separation. And so that’s what we wake up to. We wake up to the unity of everything, and that’s what we’re being taught. My experience with my guides was that they gave everything, all their time and energy and absolute meticulous attention to detail, in the way they worked with me. There was nothing shoddy or slipshod or part-time about it.

Rick: Very serious work.

Leslie: Very serious work, yes. The evolution of the human race we’re talking about.

Rick: And as you were saying that, I was kind of picturing a leaf falling from a tree and thinking, every little tiny thing like that is perfectly integrated into the whole divine plan, or the whole divine play.

Leslie: Absolutely.

Rick: There’s nothing that’s… I mean, if you think about it, everybody says, “Oh, God is omniscient.” Well, if God is omniscient…

Leslie: Nobody really knows what that means.

Rick: But if you think about what it means, it means that every little housefly and every little particle of everything is permeated by divine intelligence. So how can anything be random or arbitrary?

Leslie: And of course we don’t see it that way. So that’s our learning curve, it is to come to that. And time is not an issue. We’ve got all the time in the cosmos to be able to make the journey, and some people are further along. It’s like a one-room schoolroom where some people are just beginning and others are very developed. But we learn through our experience of being cut off from that divine life, from the separation that we live in. And so, as I said, I think we’re like test tube babies.

Rick: There’s a T.S. Eliot line about somehow… I forget how it goes exactly, but somehow coming back home to where we started from and discovering the place for the first time. Somehow it seems like the whole cycle of going out into diversity is necessary to forge a greater wholeness.

Leslie: Well, when we’re in that state of separation and we’re trying different diversities, each one is calibrated to teach us a set of lessons. So each soul comes in with a slightly different configuration each life. They choose a little different configuration. They’re not into wholeness yet. They have to have that specialized configuration in order to have a certain set of experiences. And when they’ve had those experiences and they’re done, the next life they’ll come in with another configuration.

Rick: Another lesson, set of lessons.

Leslie: And you can’t really learn lessons except by separating things out, because eventually when there’s no separation, the wholeness is there and there’s nothing further to learn. So we are learning through our state of separation, and that’s very, very profound actually.

Rick: And you referred to it as a fall, and that sort of has a negative connotation, but really without having…

Leslie: It’s an illusion that there was a fall. And it wasn’t an accident. We treat it like a disaster. That’s why I called it the Fall. People’s egos feel very ashamed and broken by that separation. If they ever dig deep enough to see that’s the cause of their pain, that’s what they’ll see. The loss of that divine connection is the most painful thing we can experience. So when that’s healed, we’re whole again, and that’s the whole journey through this earthly system.

Rick: And if the loss is the most painful thing we can experience, then the restoration must be the most sublime thing we can experience.

Leslie: Absolutely. But most souls, they start looking for that reconnection in personal relationships, or having a lot of money to assuage the pain of the emptiness inside, and of course…

Rick: It doesn’t do it for them.

Leslie: So how many lives do you have to have before you realize it’s not going to do it for you? You want the real thing. But you have to realize that that’s the missing piece first.

Rick: Funny how Coca-Cola picked up on that slogan, “The real thing”. Somebody intuitive in the Coke company. Did you feel that the beings that have been guiding you are multitasking? In other words, Archangel Michael and so on, he’s not just focusing on Leslie, he must have a lot of clients, so to speak, that he’s working with.

Leslie: Well, they’re not singular beings. But I’ve experienced my own multiple bodies in the work that I seem to do at night with people. I can’t remember all of them, the memory cannot…

Rick: In other words, while you’re sleeping, you’re out doing something.

Leslie: I’ve got many bodies that are out doing things simultaneously. And Archangel Michael is everywhere at once being…

Rick: Right, omniscient to a degree or whatever. So in other words, he might be working with everyone on the planet, or a certain set of people on the planet simultaneously, with the same care and attention that he gave you.

Leslie: Yes, yes. And this sort of singularity that we live in, in our little bodies, is what we think to be reality. It’s not at all.

Rick: Before we started taping, you and I were talking about the political scene, and what we each thought of that, and whether we were optimistic or pessimistic or whatever. You said earlier that you feel like there’s a kind of a divine plan, I’m not sure if that’s the word you used, but that there’s a kind of a destiny, or whatever words you were saying, that we’re being shepherded along by this loving intelligence. Doesn’t that kind of make you optimistic, despite all the apparent tragedies and difficulties in the world, that somehow we’re going to prevail?

Leslie: Well, I have moments when I think it… And I think the moments that I was about to describe are based on my perception that suddenly we’re gaining ground, and then something comes along, and suddenly we’re not gaining ground anymore. So I fluctuate. I wouldn’t even call it pessimism and optimism. I think it’s a clear perception day to day of the actual fluctuations of whether we are approaching a critical mass. And I think that there are people that are so deluded about everything, that they’re sort of messing up, you know. They’re messing up for themselves and other people.

Rick: I mean, the environment, and the way animals are treated, and the way people are treated, and just all this.

Leslie: Well, if you look at what’s happening in this country, and I think it’s happening in other Western countries too… Einstein said that if you keep doing the same thing in the hope of getting a different result, that’s a kind of insanity. Well, I think that’s what’s happening. There are people who are trying to do the same old, same old, at a much stronger, more vigorous level, in the hopes of getting a different outcome. And to me, what that looks like is that they’re verging on insanity. They are deluding themselves, and that could crash the whole thing. So, people have to change. And you know that’s the hardest thing for the average person to do, because you have to go through a process of reorganizing the egoic structure of the personality in order to change. We can use our wills to change a little bit, but often we just slide back again, because the will is just a human will, which is a polarized, dualistic will, and so it doesn’t have complete control over everything. And only when we come into a state of oneness can our wills really create real change. And you have to be willing to change to get to the oneness. It’s kind of a double bind.

Rick: So let’s say somebody’s listening to this and they think, “Well, that sounds great. I want to do it. What do I do?”

Leslie: The first thing you do is make a statement to the universe, because everybody’s listening anyway. You ignore the fact that you feel alone and separate, and you make a big, bold statement to the universe, more or less the way you just said, “I really want to do this. I’m signing up.” And you really have to mean it, because when the guides do show up and say, “Okay, well, we want you to change your life in this and this and this direction,” you can’t suddenly say, “Well, no, I don’t think I can do that.” Then the agreement is off at that point. You have to be able to let them guide you.

Rick: So would you recommend that people go out to a mountainside or sit in their meditation room or something and actually make an audible statement of intention, “This is what I want”?

Leslie: Yes, but you have to really want it. If you really, really want it and you make a sincere statement and you say something like, “I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything that’s necessary to end my state of separation, to transcend my ego, to come into unity consciousness,” whatever you think you need to do.

Rick: Do you think it would be wise to put in the proviso that, “I will do this in a way that doesn’t hurt other people, that doesn’t break someone’s heart or leave someone abandoned”?

Leslie: Well, I suppose you could.

Rick: Because some people get kind of selfish about spiritual advancement. They’ll trample over in order to get ahead or something.

Leslie: Well, that’s just the ego doing its usual ambition thing. It’s not really quite surrender. We’re talking about a real surrender to the unknown. It’s not, “Okay, now my ego is going to start running the spiritual journey the way it’s orchestrated my business or my life or my marriage or whatever.” It’s, “I’m here with absolutely no plan at all, except I know that I need to offer myself to this work because it’s the only thing that’s going to shift the global consciousness,” or whatever. Not, “I wish to be a high and mighty enlightened person.” I think there has to be an altruistic genuineness to that surrender, where you’re really saying, “I don’t know how to solve the world’s problems, but I would like to try, and I’m asking higher intelligence to show me the way.” I think one has to have altruistic intentions to become enlightened. I don’t think you can say, “Well, I’d like to be enlightened”, because I think what will happen is that the ego will short-circuit the process at some point.

Rick: Yeah, and if we think about what enlightenment means, by definition, it’s not a self-aggrandizement. It’s not like, “Me, me, me, I’m going to be great.” It’s more of a merging with something much vaster than our individuality.

Leslie: But that’s what people don’t get. They think it’s going to make them more powerful, perhaps.

Rick: Super guru.

Leslie: Yeah, something like that. Because I know the projections that I get from people, students, people who sit with me, is that I’m something special, and that I know it. And their projection of the superior makes themselves inferior, and so then we have a hierarchical projection that’s really uncomfortable for me.

Rick: And then they’re thinking, “Maybe I could become something special too, and then I’ll have people sitting at my feet.”

Leslie: Yes, exactly, exactly. I see things with very equal eyes, because I just see God in everything, and there’s only oneness there. So these egoic perceptions of being special are really uncomfortable to me. I just wish I could somehow… I mean, I can talk about it, and I do, I try to explain it, but until the ego is dissolved to a huge extent, there’s still that whole superior-inferior perception in the ego. And they think I’m putting myself on a pedestal, and I’m just trying to help them see there are no pedestals. What people don’t realize is that it’s coming from inside. It’s a programmed or conditioned perception of superior and inferior, and we do that with all of society. It’s a human perception that comes from inside. And then we tend to think that, “Oh, that person thinks they’re superior,” but actually we’re making them superior with our projection. Only when you come into the oneness and you transcend the duality, can you see that it’s all God and there are no separations and there’s no high-low.

Rick: Somebody sent me an email about this the other day. After listening to one of the interviews, they said, “Why are you always quoting Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta or all these people? Aren’t you sort of putting them on a pedestal, and can’t you just quote yourself or whatever?” And my attitude is that it’s one of these paradox things where, on the one hand, I feel like there are people who are vastly more advanced than I am, and I look up to them and I respect them and I admire them and I’ll quote them. I’m not taking what they say as some kind of gospel truth cut in stone that I need to believe in or else I’m going to hell or something, but a lot of people have the ability to express it much better than I do. They’re much more eloquent and they can sit for an hour and give a beautiful lecture that I wouldn’t be capable of giving, and I love listening to them and so on. So there’s no harm in it. On the other hand, I realize that essentially we’re all the same and we’re all one. So somehow these two things seem to fit together okay for me. I can have respect and admiration and even devotion for someone, and at the same time feel a kind of camaraderie.

Leslie: You know, it’s probably because you don’t feel very broken inside yourself. People who are more broken by their upbringing, their childhood, are more polarized in that way.

Rick: I’ve been there. I mean, I had an alcoholic father and a mother in a mental institution.

Leslie: Years of meditation have evened you out.

Rick: I’ve gone through all sorts of fanatical phases.

Leslie: I wish that everyone in the world was willing to look at their ego constructs from a witnessing place where they can say, “This is just my garment for this lifetime. It’s not who I am. I’m not the ego. I’m Divine Presence taking in a human life and living in a polarized ego in order to learn lessons, but I’m not the ego and I’m not the dualistic nature that I’m expressing here.”

Rick: Yeah, it takes a while to see that. I mean, someone hearing these words isn’t necessarily going to be able to snap their fingers and just see it that way. There’s a maturation process, I think. I mean, getting back to our person who has gone into their meditation room and proclaimed their intention to be enlightened for the good of the world, then they might think, “Well, what next? Now what do I do? I’ve had this intention.” Do you sort of feel confident that something’s going to show up for them pretty quick after expressing that intention, or do some people fumble around for a while?

Leslie: I really do think something does show up, but they might be too scattered to catch it when it comes, and they miss the opportunity to grab hold of it. They’re preoccupied. They’re too into being in control. That’s a big one. “This is my life, and I’m in control of it, and I’m going to do it the way I want. Enlightenment’s a nice idea, but really I have to learn lessons about life through being in control.”

Rick: So it can take a while to dismantle all that stuff.

Leslie: Yes. I was gung-ho already, but the four years that I spent with the Jungian therapist were so profound in that I really saw the games that the ego plays about power and so on. Power, fulfillment, need and desire, and all that sort of thing. I really began to see that I had them all, and that they weren’t really who I was. That came through so clearly, and that was a quantum leap forward. So incredibly freeing, really, to have that experience. I would recommend everyone get a really good Jungian therapist.

Rick: Is this woman still practicing?

Leslie: No, I think she’s in her 80s at this point. But getting to know your ego. Everyone goes, “Oh, I want the light! I want the transcendence! It’s so beautiful!” They have a taste of it maybe, and the real change takes place when you grapple with your ego. It makes all the difference, because you then see, “This is a whole fabricated personality. It’s not who I am.” Plus, you can catch yourself when you start doing behaviors that are part of the ego. You go, “Oh, whoops! There’s another power-hungry side diving in here and wreaking havoc.” And you stop doing it. You drop it. You drop it. And you have to drop both sides of the polarity. You have to drop the negative and the positive, and that’s where people get trapped. They want to keep the positive side and drop the negative side. But because you’re moving from duality into non-duality, you have to be willing to drop the positive side as well, the positive side of the particular program behavior that you’re doing. And then liberation comes so fast, it’s truly amazing.

Rick: And dropping positive and negative doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be a lukewarm blob that has no emotions.

Leslie: No, you’re becoming a transcendent being. You’re becoming your real self. You’re actually completing your whole ego journey for the life.

Rick: Because some people have this notion of dropping the ego or losing the ego or dissolving the ego as being a sort of a loss of something beautiful and unique and individual, and that the ego is some divine expression of God which is meant to exist, and that by destroying it you become kind of zombie-like or feelingless, or a lukewarm, neutral, personality-less entity. Perhaps you could elaborate on that notion.

Leslie: It certainly has been my experience. I find I have a range of emotions and thoughts and capacities that are quadrupled from what I had when I was in the ego. The ego is a limitation. You still have human qualities, but you have a much wider vocabulary of potentials available to you. It’s not like your humanness goes away. As long as I have a human body, I’m going to live a human life.

Rick: If someone says, “Leslie,” you turn your head. You don’t answer the phone and say, “This is nobody.”

Leslie: I know the truth of who I am is nobody in particular, and that “in particular” is kind of the key piece there because I can access a very wide range of human thoughts, feelings, emotions, capacities, very empathetic, very aware. I can feel where people are at. I’m very sensitive to their suffering and so on. So I feel like I’m sort of a superhuman, really. I hesitate to use the term because it has connotations of Superman, and it’s not that at all.

Rick: Well, the connotation might be, “Hey, I’m special, superhuman,” but what you’re saying is by virtue of having dissolved that kind of thinking…

Leslie: I just have access. There’s a whole lot more available to me. It’s like Christmas time.

Rick: I mean, you feel like there’s sort of strata to your life, and on one level you’re still Leslie Temple Thurston with your own personality and likes and dislikes and tastes and whatnot, and then as we go through the strata, we’re moving toward the universal. There’s this broad level, vast, infinite level at which you’re not Leslie Temple Thurston. You’re a universal spirit. But all these levels sort of fit. They live together compatibly in order to function as a human being.

Leslie: They do, yes.

Rick: And maybe our attention sort of moves up and down the strata according to the circumstances and the needs. Does that sound right?

Leslie: I think so, yes. I mean, I identify, I never changed my name. That was very clear from my guides that I wasn’t to do that. I was to present the awakened state as a very human, ordinary kind of thing. I was never guided to change my name or to try to live in an isolated ashram or anything like that. I mean, live here in the middle of suburban, middle-class Santa Fe.

Rick: I wouldn’t exactly call it middle-class, but maybe it is for Santa Fe.

Leslie: Yeah, it is.

Rick: Shirley McLean or whatever, up in the hills living in the…

Leslie: No, that’s definitely different status. I think Spirithood gifted us with this house, which is sort of what happened, so that I could have space around my body because I’m hypersensitive. And so going into the marketplace, like airports and that, really makes me contract a bit. But I’m living a fully human life. I’m enjoying it to the hill. It’s very creative. I’ve always been creative, and I just love… I use my creativity in ways of helping people and writing and developing new theories and so on, rather than making paintings nowadays.

Rick: People are your canvas.

Leslie: In a way, yes, if they let me be.

Rick: Sure.

Leslie: And some do. And life and the world seems very beautiful. I’m very concerned about the mentality of a certain group of people in this country. I think that they are doing that Einsteinian thing of choosing to do the wrong thing, in the wrong way at the wrong time. It seems like they’re going to hit a dead end. And my concern is that they’re going to hurt a lot of people along the way.

Rick: A lot of people are being hurt now, and animals and the environment and all kinds of things.

Leslie: Oh, they’re so, yes. It’s hard. I’m very sensitive. I mean, I can weep for the suffering. I try not to be too gushy about it, but it does hurt me a lot. So, I don’t know. I’ve had a very wonderful… it’s been 20 years, or actually it’s 22 years.

Rick: Since the Nirvikalpa shift?

Leslie: Yes, yes.

Rick: So it’s really “Nirvi” now, meaning non-break. There has been no overshadowing or interruption or anything?

Leslie: No.

Rick: During sleep also? Is pure awareness there during your sleep?

Leslie: For part of the sleep, yes.

Rick: Part of the sleep, yeah.

Leslie: I go into a deep sleep where there seems to be no sense of anything at the beginning of the night, and then I’m conscious for the rest of the night. And we’ve been working so hard at that. We’ve been trying to get more restful sleep.

Rick: Working hard with students and retreats and things like that.

Leslie: Yes, and projects galore.

Rick: In terms of this humanitarian stuff we mentioned in the beginning.

Leslie: It’s all activism kind of projects.

Rick: Are you able to do it remotely from here, or do you have to go to Africa to do it?

Leslie: Oh, we have projects here as well, so we’re doing both. My role is more energetic, although when we’re in Africa it’s more hands-on than it is here. But I am definitely doing an energetic piece of work for the world. I’m very conscious of it.

Rick: Elaborate on what you mean by that just a little bit.

Leslie: Well, it’s really hard to talk about it.

Rick: I think I know what you mean, but I’d like you to try to.

Leslie: I have a method of processing. So if I see a group of citizens or a country, they’re all acting out egoic stuff. So whether it’s a group of people doing egoic stuff or an individual or a whole country, it doesn’t make any difference. I can process that internally because everything is part of me.

Rick: As if you sort of digest it or something.

Leslie: Yes, recalibrate it.

Rick: And help to kind of neutralize it or align it.

Leslie: But I get quite toxic, physically toxic when I do that. And so there’s a limit to how much I can do.

Rick: And then you have to regenerate yourself to detox.

Leslie: Well, it takes a few days for the toxicity to move through the body. And sometimes I’m quite down with it and try to keep going because I don’t have time to rest.

Rick: Well, perhaps that’s the main role you’ve been cultured for. Because it’s a big world out there, 7 billion plus people. And there’s only so many people you can interact with. But perhaps by working on this more subtle energetic level, you’re able to have a much bigger impact than if you tried to just do it all on a one-to-one.

Leslie: That is what’s happening. And that’s increasing, especially at night. I do most of it at night.

Rick: During sleep?

Leslie: Mm-hmm.

Rick: Right.

Leslie: Semi-sleep, whatever you want to call it. But if I’m in the middle of something, it’ll stretch out over a few days.

Rick: Do you mean if you’re going through a process of realigning something, it might take several days to do?

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: And are you usually aware specifically of what it is you’re realigning? Like, “Oh, okay, I’m working on this situation in Czech Republic,” or something like that?

Leslie: Not always, interestingly enough. I would have to… It comes in at a very impersonal level, and I do it as though it was part of myself. So unless I happen to open the newspaper, my guidance actually says, “This is what’s happening.” Like the thing that I shared with you earlier. That is, a little bit of a danger signal. So they’re alerting me to that.

Rick: So in other words, it’s almost like you get assigned little projects. They say, “Hey Leslie, we’ve got one for you. We need somebody to work on this. Would you please take it on?” And then you do it.

Leslie: Yes. And I don’t know if that’s true for all people who are teachers or whatever. You remember that was my premise at the very beginning, “I’ll do whatever it takes to help the world.” And so that’s what I’ve been given. I think it’s different for other teachers.

Rick: I think so.

Leslie: If they’re making different choices.

Rick: And if they’re constituted differently. I mean, we all have different nervous systems and different dharmas and different set of functions. An orchestra is composed of a lot of different instruments and the flute can’t play all the parts.

Leslie: Absolutely. So not every teacher is there to do the same job.

Rick: Yeah. And some of them have big mass followings like Amma, and she sits there hugging people for 24 hours. And others, you might not even know about them. I mean, there might be people that don’t have any students or anything.

Leslie: No, they are definitely.

Rick: They’re just up in the mountains someplace or something and doing this processing thing that you do.

Leslie: Yes, I’m sure that’s true.

Rick: But on a mundane practical level, if somebody wants to actually get involved with you and be taught by you or work with you or help you with your humanitarian things and all, you have ways for them to do that, obviously.

Leslie: Yes.

Rick: And there’s a website, corelight.org, which we’ll be linking to. And you have an email newsletter, and I’m sure that you can use donations for these humanitarian projects and helping.

Leslie: Oh, yes. We’re always raising funds and seeking donations for the projects because the work that we do with the students doesn’t cover that kind of stuff.

Rick: Right.

Leslie: So that’s why we’re a non-profit.

Rick: Yeah.

Leslie: And really, the teaching work just covers our staff, office, and household expenses because we’ve always kept our prices really low. I didn’t want to exclude anybody. So the work with the elephants and the lions and the AIDS orphans and so on is all funded by funders.

Rick: Does it say on your website what you’re actually doing for the lions and so on, so that if somebody wanted to make a donation, they could understand how their money was going to be applied?

Leslie: Pretty much, yes. We’ve just been building a new website. I think that’s what you’re referring to.

Rick: Oh, okay.

Leslie: So some of those pieces aren’t complete. The AIDS orphans website, which is linked to ours, is under construction for a new one. We all needed a new website.

Rick: Yeah.

Leslie: A bit overdue, actually.

Rick: Okay.

Leslie: So that’s under construction. I think the old one is still there, but…

Rick: CoreLight.org?

Leslie: No, Seeds of Light.

Rick: Oh, Seeds of Light. Okay. Is CoreLight the new one?

Leslie: No, CoreLight is the parent organization that does the spiritual teaching. We are a 501(c)(3) organization. Seeds of Light is the name we gave to our African adventure, our African activism.

Rick: Well, we’ll link to all these things on the site.

Leslie: That would be wonderful.

Rick: People can come. And so if somebody wants to study with you as a spiritual student, they don’t have to come to Santa Fe, or do they?

Leslie: No, we’re doing everything on the Internet, on phone bridges.

Rick: So you give conference calls?

Leslie: Yes. We’ve recently restructured everything, because it was definitely called for. So we run a teacher training program, and the teacher training students formed into small circles, where they get together on conference call, and they process with each other once or twice a week. So that’s something that happens without me having to be too involved.

Rick: And then they teach others how to meditate, or whatever they teach them?

Leslie: The teacher training course is a four-year course, and each of the classes has their own teacher. These are students from long ago that graduated, and I trust them, and I know they’re capable. So they work as the teachers. So I will work with very advanced students. We have an annual teacher training conference, and I run that. And we’ve just changed our MO over and over again over the years as people became more advanced, and we felt that the format needed to recognize the advancement and recognize people’s skills and so on. And now we’ve arranged everything so that we get the most amount of talk out of the time available, so that people are moving forward. And there are public… We do public phone conferences where Brad and I just ran one. It’s actually still underway. It was, I think, six classes every two weeks on a Sunday afternoon on a conference call. And we’ve been looking at the… Each week it’s a different subject, like the environment, the situation with water, the financial potential, what’s wrong with the financial world right now, and the ecology.

Rick: And you sort of tie it all back to a spiritual dimension, as opposed to the fragmented approaches that you can read in college, if you want to.

Leslie: We’re in the business of shifting consciousness, so we’re connecting people’s shifts to the global changes.

Rick: So you’re kind of identifying how the financial situation or environmental situation all ties back to consciousness, and by how changing consciousness we can infuse more life into those things.

Leslie: Changing consciousness, that’s what we’re doing. But often what we saw happening is that people who change consciousness will isolate themselves into a bubble.

Rick: And become disinterested in all that stuff.

Leslie: Exactly. And now, more than ever, we have to see the mirror that the world is presenting us of our own limitations.

Rick: Very good. Well, speaking of limitations, there’s only so much capacity on this little thing that we’re recording this with, and we’ve just about reached our three-minute limit. So is there anything you’d like to say in conclusion in our remaining few minutes?

Leslie: Oh gosh, all I can say is that discovering your heart and becoming empathetic and living in love, and showering that love in every direction, every opportunity you can possibly get, is really what’s called for right now. And learning how to be unselfish and caring about others. Because in this patriarchal era and in the Western world, we live so in our individuality. We’ve forgotten how to be a community. We don’t know how to relate to each other. And that’s going to be our downfall. The isolation of that individualistic state is where it’s just me, me, mine, and I’m living for my own whatever, maybe including my small nuclear family in the equation. But that’s not how we’re supposed to live. That’s not how we’re going to survive. You build a fort by accumulating a fortune, and something will happen where your fort is going to be your jail. And we need each other. We need to love each other. We need to respect each other. That’s really my message.

Rick: Well, this has been really delightful, even more so than I thought it would be, and I thought it was going to be pretty delightful.

Leslie: It’s wonderful to have spent this time with you.

Rick: Oh, I really enjoyed it. And I’ll conclude, because we’ve reached about the end of our memory capacity here, but you’ve been listening to an interview with Leslie Temple Thurston, Buddha at the Gas Pump, one of an ongoing series of interviews with people who have had a spiritual awakening. And I hope you have enjoyed it. If you go to www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump, you’ll see all the interviews that we’ve been doing and will continue to do. And then there’s a little thing you can sign up for to be notified of new ones. So thank you very much, and we’ll see you next week.