Mari Perron Interview

Summary

Mari Perron discusses how her relationship with Jesus and her reception of A Course of Love shaped a shift from mind-centered spiritual learning toward heart-centered knowing. The discussion examines whether the world is an illusion, how human and divine identity can be integrated, and how spirituality can avoid exclusivist religious claims.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can someone recognize whether a spiritual text or inner guidance is genuinely divine?
• Who is Jesus, and how does his role relate to the divinity within all people?
• Is the world an illusion, or can it be experienced as sacred and real?
• How can spiritual ideas become a lived experience rather than remain intellectual concepts?

Key takeaways

• A spiritual teaching can feel authentic when it creates a deep sense of being known.
• Jesus can be seen as an example of divine-human unity rather than an exclusive path.
• The ego's fearful perception is the illusion; love reveals the sacredness of the world.
• Spiritual growth involves unifying mind and heart within oneself.
• Divinity becomes transformative when it is embodied in ordinary human life.
• Reading can become a contemplative experience rather than an intellectual exercise.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. Today’s guest, I believe, is going to be number 385. And if you want to see more, go to batgap.com and look under the “Past Interviews” menu, and you’ll find all the previous ones archived in various ways.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a “Donate” button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Mari Perron. Mari, I’m just going to read her bio here and then perhaps stop reading it and speak extemporaneously. Mari tells us she’s delighted that A Course of Love has granted her a voice in the new dialogue that has opened about who we are as human and divine beings. She feels that the wisdom of the heart, a major focus of A Course of Love, has at times been missing from the conversation and loves being able to speak for both the heart and the human.

A question asked within A Course of Love is this: “Doesn’t it make sense that the only error possible is that of not being who you are?”

Mari is called the “first receiver” of this course that has been given as an extension of what was begun in A Course in Miracles. A Course in Miracles was recorded by Helen Schucman in the late ’60s and early ’70s as the words of Jesus, which since that time have gone out to millions of people all over the world. A Course in Miracles was stated to be a course in thought reversal and mind training.

Within A Course of Love, which Mari received between 1998 and 2001, Jesus calls Mari its “first receiver” and says that each person who lets it enter their heart is a receiver as well. Its stated purpose is a return to a true identity prior to the time of learning, and it calls for learning to end.

Mari feels that in a world that has told us that everything we need to know can be known with our minds and/or learned from teachers, experts, and gurus, we’ve often felt discouraged from listening to our hearts or trusting our inner knowing. A Course of Love offers a new way of knowing and invites us to enter dialogue and become creators of the new.

Mari lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is a writer and contemplative, as well as an engaged mother and grandmother. So welcome, Mari.

Mari: Thank you so much for having me, Rick.

Rick: Yeah, glad to meet you. It’s been nice getting to know you over the past week, listening to your recordings and reading your books.

Mari: And getting my phone calls about, “Am I doing this right?”

Rick: Yeah, right, working out some technical snafus.

Mari: Yeah.

Who is Jesus?

Rick: So what we just revealed in my reading of that little thing is that you kind of channeled this book from Jesus. I know that you yourself said that when you were first exposed to A Course in Miracles, you were a little skeptical as to whether it was really from Jesus. I don’t know what you might have thought it might have been, but that’s a little bit of a tall order, perhaps.

So let’s help out those who might also be skeptical and give a little explanation as to how you became convinced that A Course in Miracles was really from Jesus. What would you say to those who might be skeptical that either that book or yours are really from Jesus?

Mari: Really good question. I think what convinced me when I was reading A Course in Miracles was a feeling of being known. I was absolutely astounded that what I was reading explained absolutely—“The thinking that’s insane”—was my thinking. It was talking about how you torture yourself with these thoughts and how insane that is.

It was like he just knew me, and I thought that had to be a divine knowing for someone to talk to people all over the world and have them feel the same way, to have them feel that known.

There was also something about the words themselves. I felt it much more with my own course, that entering, you know? But there was a rhythm, and I just fell into that. I never studied A Course in Miracles. I never joined a group. I think the only associated book I read was Marianne Williamson’s book.

I just read it over and over because when I was reading it, I felt like I was with Jesus. It was incredible. So that’s how I felt I knew. I think people will feel that or they won’t.

Rick: Yeah. I’m going to ask you a few short, simple questions that might be the kind of questions a child would ask, okay?

Mari: Okay.

Rick: So first of all, who’s Jesus?

Mari:(Laughs.) Well, I was raised a Catholic, and I was born in 1955. So when I was young, all the moms were stay-at-home moms and people only had one car. The only time we really went in the car to go anywhere was to church, almost. So every week, we’d go to church.

In those early days, it was still Latin and it was mysterious. I felt like that mystery was something that moved into me, intrigued me, and it was like—from my very early age, I liked going to church.

Then I went to Catholic school, where they told me that Jesus was my brother and my friend. I began to talk to Jesus and just always felt that I had someone accompanying me who cared about me and loved me.

So I think part of the way I see Jesus is based on that. Other people will see it differently, but it’s the idea of Jesus as God’s son, who incarnated and lived here as a man. I think that symbology is very true to what’s going on now: that we are being called now to realize that we have that God’s spark in us and to live that way.

To have one example of a life that said, “I am both man and God,” that feels very important to me.

Rick: Okay. Second childlike question: Where does Jesus live?

Mari:(Laughs.) Well, where do any of our deceased loved ones go? You feel that presence sometimes of a grandmother—

Rick: Or somebody who—especially those who just recently died. I know after my dad died, I kept hearing this Beatles song in my head, and I don’t know if I can remember it now.

Give me a hint and I’ll know it. (Laughing.)

Mari: “If there’s anything that you want, if there’s anything that you need, just call on me…”

Rick: “From Me to You.”

Mari: Yeah, “From Me to You.” It was in my head, in my head, in my head, until suddenly you just want it to go away and you’re not even listening to it. Then all of a sudden I thought, “Oh my God, that’s got to be Dad,” because he just wouldn’t be singing Beatles to me, but that would be his message to me.

I’ve had so many experiences of feeling connected, and I’ve talked to people who’ve been connected with people who have passed on. So I do believe that there’s a field of consciousness. And it’s not a blob field, you know. There are individual consciousnesses even within the wholeness of consciousness.

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: And that’s where Jesus, the man, abides. There’s another part of Jesus that in my course is called Christ Consciousness, and so…

Beyond religious exclusivity

Rick: Okay, third question, a little bit less childlike: You’re kind of implying that there’s a realm where Jesus resides, and presumably other beings reside there also. We’re told when we’re kids that Jesus lives in heaven and so on. So maybe we could call that realm “heaven,” and Jesus isn’t just sort of hanging out and playing a harp; he’s actively engaged in the concerns of humanity through people like you and many, many others who invoke him in one way or another, or connect with him in one way or another. Would you agree with what I just said?

Mari: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. Now, a totally unchildlike question: NASA tells us that there are probably around 20 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy and now over two trillion galaxies in the known universe. So if you do the math, that’s a lot of places where life potentially exists.

Do you feel that Jesus has a local jurisdiction, that he’s assigned to this planet and takes care of it? Or do you feel that he is some kind of universal spirit who is engaged in the welfare of uncountable trillions and quadrillions of planets?

Mari: Well, I believe that the idea of Jesus being the Son of God is that he’s the same as God. I see God as the creator of everything, and I don’t have any problem with anybody else’s way of seeing, but that’s my way of seeing it. So yes, I would certainly see that the whole universe is part of this loving act of a loving creator.

Rick: Okay. And that Jesus, the being, the entity, the emissary of God, is actually overseeing and interceding in some way with beings throughout the whole universe? Is that what you’re saying?

I know this is kind of speculative, but I’m not giving you a hard time here. I find that astronomy is one of the greatest defenses against religious fundamentalists. I know you’re not one of them; you’re not a fundamentalist. But when they start telling me that Jesus is the only way and that kind of thing, I start giving them a hint as to how big the universe might actually be.

If we start getting into the world being 6,000 years old, I start talking about the speed of light and how the Andromeda galaxy is two million light-years away and things like that. So I put this in a kind of cosmic context of what we’re actually talking about here.

Mari: Yeah. I believe most spiritual beings—people who are spiritual or religious, but particularly spiritual—really feel that there is that God’s spark in them, that they are of the divine and they have a divine self as well as a human self.

So I don’t know—how does that go with your question? (Laughs.) I just don’t see any problem with attaching that godliness that created the universe to… I mean, people attach that to different things as they’re growing up, as they’re raised, as they are thoughtful, and as they explore other things, and I have no problem with that.

It’s just that for me, that is… I believe in Jesus as that one—and I’m not a scholar at all—but as far as I know, no other spiritual person was called the “Son of God.” I think there’s kind of that. And I say, even if you don’t believe it, that symbology—that we can be of God here in form—I feel is really important, especially right now.

Rick: Sure. But I don’t know—does it say in the Bible, and if not the Bible, does it say in the Gnostic Gospels or something, that we’re all sons and daughters of God?

Mari: Mm-hmm.

Rick: And so that’s not a kind of an exclusive title. It’s something that could be said of anyone. Yes?

Mari: Yes, but until that time I don’t think we understood that. A lot of people still don’t understand that, but I think he was the example of that…

Rick: Right.

Mari: …in history. That’s all I’m saying.

Rick: That’s good. And how about—I don’t know to what extent—I think initially you hadn’t, but now you’ve studied other traditions and so on around the world. There are many beautiful examples of people who are God-conscious saints, God-realized, one with God, and who spoke very beautifully and wrote beautiful poetry and scriptures and all that stuff.

It seems like we all have the potential to be that, and we all are that, essentially, and have the potential to realize that consciously. There’s nothing exclusive about Jesus. He was just a profound example of what’s possible. Do you agree?

Mari: Absolutely. If I didn’t make it sound that way, yes. I think that the thing about Jesus that’s so universal is that we are all that.

We are not limited to who we are in human form; we can see our humanity and our godliness, our divinity, combined.

Rick: Yeah, and I think he said, “All these great things that I do, you’ll do even greater things.” He wasn’t setting himself up as “the one guy” who had access to this sort of realization. He was, as I understand it, trying to convey that everyone has that potential.

Mari: And still is, you know.

Rick: And still is, yeah.

Mari: Yeah. Instead of seeing ourselves as limited to who we are in our human form, we can see our humanity and our godliness, our divinity, combined.

Rick: Right.

Mari: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, good. So I don’t mean to give you a grilling here. I just want to lay that foundation, because a lot of people—and a lot of spiritual people who are into Eastern spirituality now—have a bad taste in their mouth from their religious upbringing, where they were harangued about, “This is the only way.” There have been so many wars and so much carnage behind that idea that I just want to establish the broad-mindedness of this conversation here.

Mari: Yes, “the one right way” has wreaked a lot of havoc.

Rick: Good. As I gather, A Course of Love—I think this is a beautiful thing that you lay out, and I didn’t know it. In a sense, I’m not a very good person to be interviewing you about A Course in Miracles or A Course of Love, because I haven’t really studied either. But you laid out something really interesting about A Course in Miracles that I didn’t know, which is that it seems to be largely about the mind and tends to dismiss the world as illusion, whereas A Course of Love is heart-oriented and doesn’t emphasize that the world is merely an illusion. It wouldn’t just brush it off so glibly.

Mari: Mm-hmm.

Rick: Yeah. Do you want to elaborate a bit on that?

Mari: Yes. (Laughing.) It feels so important, because I really believe that what is happening now—we’re in a new time, and astrology and all kinds of people are telling us that we’re in this time—is a time of embodying. It’s a time of embodying this, and that is what is going to create a new world.

So, to imagine that the world is anything but holy and anything but real is something that I hope people begin to shake a little bit as we embrace and embody our divinity here on Earth. I have met so many people—almost all of A Course of Love readers come to it from A Course in Miracles—who have told me stories of just shutting down because of that idea of the illusion.

A woman told me she hadn’t cried over a sunset in years because she believed that it was an illusion. And one man even told me he didn’t name his child because the child in form was just an illusion. I don’t know if that’s true, but he told me that. (Laughter.)

Rick: Just name him “Illusion.” (Laughter.)

Mari: Maybe. So there were certain extremes that that idea led people to. And what A Course of Love does, which I think is particularly important for those coming from A Course in Miracles, is bring that back.

Actually, in my readings of A Course in Miracles—and, like I say, I’m no scholar; I just read it, I didn’t study it—but I read it many times, and I never got that. I never got that sense. I think a lot of interpretations and popularizations have done that more than the actual book.

If I had a good memory, I could tell you many passages, but I don’t. There are many passages in A Course in Miracles where creation is spoken of, and this world is spoken of, as beautiful.

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: And so… (Laughs.)

Rick: The way I have come to terms with that whole “world is illusion” point is that it’s illusion in the sense that we’re not seeing it rightly. We’re not seeing it as it really is, in its full glory.

Even science will tell you that when you look at anything, you’re not really seeing what’s actually there. Science has given us tools to see more deeply into what we’re actually looking at, and there’s a whole other world that we’re not aware of when we’re just glancing superficially.

By the same token, there’s so much more to be appreciated in the world that is all around us. If we’re just perceiving it superficially, “through a glass darkly,” as the Bible says, then, in a sense, that’s illusion, because we’re not really seeing the full reality of it.

Mari: Yes. This isn’t exactly said in this language anywhere, but what I take from A Course of Love, and the way it talks about A Course in Miracles in A Course of Love, is that the ego’s world was the illusion.

Rick: The ego’s world…

Mari: So it’s exactly what you’re saying. The perception that we had of the world and ourselves—that we perceived ourselves as separate from everyone else, as alone, as having all these reasons to be fearful—created our perception of a fearful, scary world.

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: So when you see the world with love—and you see yourself with love, which is a really huge part of it—everything changes.

Rick: Yeah.

When you see the world with love—and you see yourself with love—everything changes.

Mari: Yeah.

Rick: There’s that saying, “Life sucks, then you die.” There are other perspectives that are a lot more encouraging. (Laughter.)

Mari: Yeah. I have a sense of this being—I mean, I think humanity is, in a certain sense, like the last frontier. We are a consciousness that grew out of creation, and we can have such joy. We are creators ourselves.

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: As we begin to really experience the fullness of who we are, what A Course of Love says is that we can create the new, and I am very much looking forward to being part of creating the new.

Rick: Yeah. Well, you don’t have to look forward to it, because you’re already doing it.

Mari: Thank you.

Rick: The other thought that occurred to me a minute ago, when we were talking about illusion, is that if God is really omnipresent, as we’re told, and as there’s evidence for it if you actually look closely at the marvelous intelligence in every little iota of creation, then you know the world is divine because it’s God. We’re looking at it, and God is hiding in plain sight, so to speak.

Mari: Exactly. How can God be in the smallest flea and not in human beings?

Rick: Yeah, and he is in the smallest flea. Look at a flea under a microscope, and look what a miracle of creative intelligence that is.

🎵 Wholeheartedness and direct knowing

One thing I found really cool about your whole thing—and you may not know this—is that there are a number of spiritual teachers and traditions that actually delineate a progression from head to heart to gut in terms of awakening. Adyashanti uses those three terms.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi talked that way, too. He talked about a sort of realization of the Self on the level of the mind, where you realize the true nature of the Self but the world is regarded as illusion. Then the heart doesn’t like that, because the heart doesn’t like separation, and so the heart begins to bridge the gulf and eventually creates a sort of unification between self and world, in which one appreciates the divine or celestial quality of the world.

Then he said that there’s another stage, which might correspond to Adyashanti’s gut stage, where true union takes place. So, if A Course in Miracles is mind and A Course of Love is heart, maybe you’re actually tracking that same progression that these other teachers and traditions have discussed.

Mari: It’s certainly possible, yeah. One of the main themes of A Course of Love is that it starts with really changing the focus from head to heart, because it basically says the ego made off with everything you learned. So we come to the heart so that that doesn’t happen.

But then, as we go on, it talks about wholeheartedness. That’s one of the main themes, so that we unify ourselves from within first—we unify mind and heart. So it’s not a separation.

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: We do it. We become in union within, and that’s the key that gets us to being able to be more and more in union outside of ourselves—in relationship with nature, with our fellow human beings, and with God.

Rick: In your own experience, in your own life, did you see this kind of progression when you were studying A Course in Love—A Course in Miracles, I mean? Did you realize its potential to a significant degree experientially, and perhaps even walk around regarding the world as illusion and all, and then have a kind of dissatisfaction, feeling that there must be more?

Mari: No. (Laughs.) I just loved it. I just fell into it, and I loved it. This happened to me with A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love, which has made it hard for me sometimes to talk about—or I think it’s going to be hard to talk about—and I usually seem to do okay, but I could never really remember it.

I have heard this now from many people about A Course of Love. I don’t know so much about A Course in Miracles, but people say that it comes into you and you have this sense of it—you got it—and then it’s gone. So, no, I didn’t feel… Now I forgot your question. (Laughs.) But I don’t think I felt the way you’re talking about.

Rick: Okay. Well, on this “you got it, it’s gone” point, when you’re studying A Course in Miracles, you’re reading a book, right? Or maybe you’re in a study group with other people and you’re discussing it, and that’s somewhat on the level of intellect, it would seem to me. You’re taking in concepts and pondering them and so on.

Spiritual realization is usually regarded as being something more visceral, more fundamental, more experiential. If you taste and bite into an apple, you’re not conceptualizing the experience. You don’t even have to know it’s an apple. You could give it to somebody in Africa who had never seen an apple, and they would have that experience of the taste.

So there are scriptures and books and all kinds of things that offer us things in concepts and words, and then there’s the experience that those things are pointing to. As Zen says, “Don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. It’s just a pointer.”

How does A Course in Miracles or A Course of Love enable one to move from taking in words and concepts to actually having a living experience that you’re going to be having whether or not you’re entertaining those concepts?

Mari: Well, I think I didn’t feel that way with A Course in Miracles because I didn’t study it, per se. I just kept reading it cover to cover…

Rick: Seven times.

Mari: …seven times, and I didn’t go to groups or read the other teachers, so it was an experience for me. I don’t know how you feel about reading, but for me, reading is an experience. I mean, I am in love. I fall in love with Thomas Merton or Rollo May. I just fall in love with these people I read, and the books are like my best friends.

They’re working in me; that’s the way I see it. They’re working in me. I reread books that I really like because of that. I’ll just go over them again, and there’s something there. But I don’t necessarily study them. I don’t stop to figure them out; I just know what’s speaking to me.

Then, maybe at some point, it informs an insight that I have or growth within me, but it’s not necessarily linked. I think that’s one of the things—my favorite thing—about A Course of Love: It’s talking about the end of learning.

What I have found is that anything you are trying to learn keeps you from this absolute engagement that it is when you are in an inner place, when you are accepting these things into an inner place. That’s an experience. So how do you share without the teaching-and-learning model?

What Jesus says at the end of A Course of Love is that you share through dialogue. You share through being who you are.

You know. You can know. You can remember what you don’t know.

Mari: We were taught our whole lives—we’re taught our whole lives—that we don’t know enough. We don’t know enough to whatever it is, fill in the blank. So by the time we’re mature, we’re listening to people telling us how to pray, how to parent, and how to run our lives.

What a spirituality of the heart gives back is our sovereign right to know. It says, “You know. You can know. You can remember what you don’t know.” That’s precious to me.

Rick: Yeah, and I think that’s congruent with what a lot of spiritual teachers have said. Like you say, we live in a world that has taught us that everything we need to know can be known with our minds or learned from teachers, experts, and gurus. We’ve often felt discouraged from listening to our hearts or trusting our inner knowing.

But I think any teacher or guru worth his or her salt is saying, “Hey, I’m giving you some pointers here, but you’ve got to discover this within yourself to really experience it. I don’t want you to just hang on my words. I want you to explore within and see whether this is true in your own experience.”

Mari: Of course, I’m not saying the teachers are doing anything wrong, but it’s the approach, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: “I’m going to become awakened. I’m going to become enlightened.” There’s this sort of… I say that if you are trying to achieve something, you almost always, at the spirit level, fail.

People talk about awakening, and I think my most awake place is when I first open my eyes in the morning. I often have a really wonderful insight just waiting for me there. It’s wakeful, but not in our usual terms of wakefulness.

Rick: Well, that’s actually something that’s discussed in spiritual literature: There’s a sort of gap between major states of consciousness, and you can have intuitive or deep, insightful experiences as you go through that transitional gap.

They talk about expanding the gap until one’s whole life is lived in that gap, even though you’re going through the cycle of waking, dreaming, and sleeping. You can continually, consciously reside in what they call turiya, or the fourth state, which lies beneath—or is fundamental to—all the changing states.

Mari: Cool! (laughs) Like I say, I don’t know that much about these things, but I follow my instinct in a way. I had my husband build me this cabin out behind our yard, and I get up in the morning and spend my first hours there.

I don’t do well in busyness. Trying to take things in mentally now is just a distraction.

Rick: No, I don’t think you could have channeled this whole Course of Love if you had been all caught up in your mind. You wouldn’t have been a fit receptacle for it.

Mari: Yes. There was one story I can tell you about. When I first started, there weren’t chapters, and I had gone through what became the first nineteen chapters. By this time, I was doing it every day. Any time I could be alone, I would go and work on it. Then, on Sundays, I would share it. So it was being shared all along.

Anyway, one day I went to my computer, and I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t hear anything. Eventually, what I heard was, “You can’t go on with your thinking mind.” Those were the first words Jesus spoke to me personally. (laughs) “You can’t go on with your thinking mind.”

When A Course of Love began, it just began. Those were the words that began the Course. They were the first words I heard: “You can’t go on with your thinking mind.”

I was paused for several months, and those months were absolutely horrible for me. I felt very tortured during that time. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing. I thought, “How do I still have any mind left?” (laughs)

Anyway, what follows that is the most beautiful chapter of the Course, called “The Embrace.” Almost everyone finds that it’s the most beautiful chapter. When he came back to me, he said, “Now you are entering the embrace, the embrace of love.”

It’s a poetic chapter, and it’s the first time he speaks of the loss of the ego. He says, “There’s no longer any ‘I’ of the ego.” There’s this progression from that point on, moving more and more toward… He kind of begins talking to the ego, but by halfway through, he says outright, “The ego is gone, and you have to accept this, because if you don’t accept that the ego is gone, you’re going to have these two selves. You don’t want that. You don’t want to stay divided.”

Rick: So he says, “The ego is gone,” but what if the ego isn’t gone? What if a person’s ego is very much intact? We probably ought to define ego in the course of answering that question, because there are a lot of definitions.

Mari: My favorite definition is: It’s who you think you are. Or it’s the inner teacher who’s always telling you what’s right and wrong, judging, making you feel guilty, and all of that. It’s all the fictions that you tell yourself, the things that aren’t true. Those kinds of things are the way I describe it.

I’ve had people ask me that question, like, “How can it be said that you have left the ego behind just by reading a book?” And I said, “Well, if you’ve just read the book, you probably haven’t.”

What Jesus is saying is that something happens if you let this enter your heart, if you let it come into you. It’s probably the biggest difference I felt in receiving the words of Jesus: It was impossible to stand apart. It was impossible to stand apart from them.

As people read and feel that, I do believe that they lose that ego-self. The Course’s definition is more like “the self who believes it’s separate and alone.” So you really couldn’t have taken in A Course of Love and still believe that you’re separate and alone.

It was impossible to stand apart from the words of Jesus.

🕊️ From loss to a spiritual calling

Rick: There are more questions I could ask you here, but I think let’s take a step back. I’ve heard your history many times, having listened to a number of your interviews and so on, but people listening to this, unless they’re already a follower or reader of yours, don’t know much about you in that sense.

It’s interesting to trace back how you got started on this whole thing. You were an administrator at the university, and then you had these two friends. Both of them got pregnant, and why don’t you tell that story, just to bring us up to speed on how you ended up doing this?

Mari: Sure. As you said, I was working at the University of Minnesota, and these two women I worked with became pregnant within days of each other, so they were due at the same time.

One of them had a healthy boy, and one of them had a baby girl named Grace who died when she was five weeks old. It was that experience—we were already close, but in more of a normal friend way. When Mary lost her baby, we were just existing in this… We were three women working together. We had this room where we were together, and there was just this tenderness, a sort of palpable tenderness, that we were exuding just by being together in that time of loss for Mary.

We were trying to be—or not even trying to be. You just become gentle in a situation like that. I believe that began it.

Then, as Mary began to have these questions about her baby’s death—where did we go, and why would this happen to a baby?—we all began to explore spirituality in our different ways.

I was reading Joseph Campbell, and I can’t really remember exactly how it happened, but we would go to work in the morning and bring these things that we were reading or feeling, or the dreams that we were having, back to the table.

We would spend our first little bit of time in the morning talking, and we began to find out that we were having amazingly similar insights and, at times, even similar experiences.

That reading led me to pick up a book. I can remember it so clearly. I was at the University of Minnesota bookstore, and I bought several books. I got attracted to the cover of a book called Ask Your Angel. I normally wouldn’t go in for anything like that, but anyway, I bought the book, and I kind of regretted it.

But I started to read it, and it said that you could talk to your angel. That was my first experience of hearing beyond my senses—an angelic presence.

I was in the basement of my hundred-year-old home, and I wrote this little note to the angelic presence. I keep a journal; I always have kept journals. I was writing in my journal and said, “Will you speak to me?”

I heard the words, “Smell the sweetness,” and a smell like lilies wafted over me, which could have come from nowhere in my old basement, which smelled very musty and…

Rick: And it’s worth noting that you weren’t too far from the cat box.

Mari: Yes. (laughter)

Rick: The litter box.

Mari:(laughing) You heard that, then.

Rick:(laughing) Yes, I heard that.

Mari: I won’t say that again. Yes, I was close to the litter box. So that was the beginning for me, and I was kind of bowled over. I mean, I know people back then particularly thought this was just a great thing, but I was almost a little embarrassed by it. It’s like, I don’t know, if I had really given it thought, if I would have tried—or if I would have thought it was going to come through. I just don’t know. It was this very unexpected thing that happened to me.

And then there were many instances from then on where the knowing that I came to with this angel was pretty miraculous. It helped people and expanded my way of knowing. So that story was published, and just after it had been published, I had the dream that called me to A Course of Love. The dream was, “You can no longer sell your mind for money. Your mind belongs to God.”

I struggled with that for many months, just trying to dismiss it, and it wasn’t easily dismissed. Then I approached my husband about it. I didn’t tell him I wanted to work for God because I had just published these books, so I said, “You know, it would be a good time for me to expand, to do more writing.” He agreed that I could leave, so I gave my notice and left at the end of March.

Rick: I think you said you were getting to the point where you couldn’t work anyway, because your mind wouldn’t work anymore. In that job, it wouldn’t do what it was supposed to do.

Mari: Honestly, it felt like a biblical affliction. I’d always been a really good worker and really prided myself on my work, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I kind of got forced. You’re right—I got forced.

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: I was trying to make the story a little bit shorter.

Rick: Oh, that’s okay. I think that’s a significant point, actually.

Mari: You do?

Rick: Yeah, I do. And I’ve had things like that, too. But it’s sort of like, if we’re—there’s a saying, how is it? “For the wise, only an indication is necessary.” We’re not all that wise, some of us, and it’s kind of like, “All right, an indication doesn’t do it. Let’s give you a little bit of a nudge.” Then, “Okay, a nudge doesn’t do it. How about a good swift kick in the pants?”

Mari: I know. I tried going down in my hours. I tried bringing my work home. I mean, I tried so many different things because I had these great friends at work. And, of course, I was making money, and we’re a working-class family. But it turned out I really had to leave, you know.

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: And then I didn’t know what my work for God was. I never once in a million years dreamed it would be a new Course in Miracles, which is how it was put to me when it came. I had no thought like that. It had never even entered my mind.

Rick: Right. You said you were going around talking to priests, asking, “What am I supposed to do for God?” and that kind of thing.

Mari: Well, I didn’t tell them. To tell anybody that, except for your close spiritual friends—that God wants you to work for Him—it sounds so insane. And so I just went to my priest and kind of said—

Rick: What can you do?

Mari: I was ready for something, and I ended up teaching CCD religion for a year. But I was also introduced, from that visit, to Centering Prayer, which I practice. I know you had Thomas Keating on.

Rick: I did.

Mari: Which is wonderful. So when you look back, that’s such a fun thing. For me, it’s been almost 20 years now. It was 1998 when A Course of Love began to come, so 18 years at that point. And when I look back, you can really begin to see everything—how it all fit together, and how it made what happened happen, which you couldn’t see at the time. It feels like you’re doing the stupidest thing in the world, in a certain sense, and then, you know—

Rick: Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it? You gain trust in divine guidance because, in retrospect, you can see how it works.

Mari: Yes.

The beginning of the Course

Rick: So, okay, you quit your job and went through a kind of doldrums period where you weren’t quite sure what you were going to do for God and all that. The money was running out and this and that. So how did A Course of Love finally kick in? What was the final impetus to get that going?

Mari: It’s so funny because I’ve been trying to find some of my old journals from that time, to kind of put myself back there. I did find one typed journal entry, about 50 pages, from the month before A Course of Love came. The computers and everything have changed so much, but I found it.

I was so at the end of my rope. My husband had lost his job, and I was feeling like I was going to have to go get a job. I didn’t want to do that because I felt like that would be giving up on this idea. So I did a couple of things.

I returned to A Course in Miracles, which I had put away for a while. I opened it up, and my eyes fell on the words in the back, in “The Manual for Teachers,” which was always my favorite part: “Help is here.” That was very comforting to me.

I had also spent some of my time, during my days off, going to church. Again, it was sort of my idea of having something to do. I liked to get up early, and I would go to this 6:45 Mass, which was very short, with me and some old ladies. I wrote about that in this journal.

The two days before I heard about A Course of Love coming, there was a Gospel reading about the woman with two copper coins. The message was that she had to have total trust in God. It wasn’t just giving what she could afford; it was having this total trust.

Then, the next day—this one I hadn’t remembered, the actual day that I heard about it—the sermon was about endurance, and how you need to wait patiently. I mean, it was just like they were speaking to me.

So on that day, it was the 25th of November, and I got that message about endurance after getting trust the day before. I was thinking, “Okay, I can hang out a while longer.” It was my friend Mary Love’s birthday. Mary Love was the mom of the baby Grace, who had died, and she is still my soul-sister friend.

Rick: Yeah, I met her a little while ago.

Mari: Yes, you did. She’s helped me with technology, thank God. She’s good at that. So she came over for her birthday, and we were talking first about ordinary things. It was November 25th, so we were talking about Thanksgiving, Christmas, and things like that. Then we began to talk with more depth and eventually about our dreams.

She told me she had just had a dream in which she saw a new Course in Miracles. That was when I began to take in the idea that this was what had been trying to get through to me. It was because of her sharing that dream.

So that was November 25th. On December 1st, I was ready. I sat down, and the rest is history, as they say.

Rick: Did you sit down knowing that you were about to scribe A Course of Love? Or were you just sitting there, and all of a sudden you heard a voice?

Mari: Well, after Mary left that day, actually, in my journaling—I’d had this happen with the angel piece, where I would have a voice come in when I was journaling—I heard, “This was an announcement made to you this day that…” It was very short, just three sentences: “This was the announcement made to you this day: ‘A Course in Miracles,’ a new course”—something like that—“a new Course in Miracles.”

So then I knew it was coming, but I was very doubtful in a certain way because I thought to myself, “Who would want a new Course in Miracles?” It had meant so much to me, and I knew how incredibly devoted to it people all over the world were. I knew Helen took seven years. I’d read her story in A Journey Without Distance. So I thought, “What am I letting myself in for?” and “Who’s going to want it when I’m done?”

I went through those things that my humanity was considering, that my humanity was thinking about. But even as I was thinking about it, I knew I was going to do it if that’s what it was.

So on this day, December 1st, which was interestingly, in terms of the Church, the beginning of Advent—the time of the coming of Christ—I waited a very short time. We get the symbols that match us, you know, so I was getting these symbols that matched me.

There were those big old computers then, and the cursor seemed to blink so much more than it does now. It wasn’t long at all before I heard the words, “This is a Course in Miracles. It is a required course.” I knew it was Jesus, and I fell to my knees. It was very powerful.

The best way I’ve known to describe it is that I couldn’t stand apart from it. It was in me, and that is a powerful thing. When it’s direct, it’s more powerful than when something comes to you through reading. It was a powerful thing.

Then I got back in my chair, and it began. It was like hearing thoughts I wasn’t thinking. It wasn’t an audible voice; it wasn’t a male voice. It was just like these thoughts were coming, and I would type them.

It’s called “receiving” in A Course of Love. Jesus calls me “the first receiver.” Receiving isn’t passive. I bet a lot of people think that it’s a passive thing. It’s not passive. It’s a very intense, attentive sort of listening.

If I can kind of show you, it was almost like I would quiver between things with this coming on. It was almost there. It doesn’t sound like much of an experience, but it was a great experience. At times, I would find myself rocking.

I would suddenly realize that I had been typing for a while, and all of a sudden I was like this, rocking. My heart was beating really strongly, and I could feel it in my ear. There aren’t a whole lot of exciting things to say about typing A Course, but these are some of the things that alerted me, along with that complete cessation of time.

I would forget to eat. I actually became sick because I forgot to eat. So there were these different manifestations of being so absorbed.

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s a very genuine experience, and you’re obviously a very sincere person. It’s not without precedent. A good portion of the world’s revered books and scriptures were cognized in one way or another—almost, we could say, channeled.

And not only spiritual things. People like Mozart would just cognize a whole symphony in a flash, and then he would have to spend many hours writing it down. He had the whole thing in one nutshell; it would just come to him as an inspiration.

For what it’s worth—and it doesn’t matter what I believe—I very much believe that there are different strata of creation, with various intelligences residing on various levels. We may not be aware of them, but they may be aware of us, and they may actually be playing some kind of role in helping us not blow ourselves to bits. Certain people are receptive enough to be go-betweens, you know.

Mari: Yes, I think it’s—people call me a channeler or a scribe. I consider what I have done closer to mysticism, to that sort of state of being. Also, I always wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have ambitions that were other than writing, and I think—

Rick: You’re a good writer. I mean, I’ve read a lot of your stuff now, and it’s very well written. Obviously, if you couldn’t write to save your life, you wouldn’t have been a suitable person to do this.

Mari: Maybe not, but, you know, I think, like the works of the mystics, it’s like they got absorbed in this experience and then they tried to share it…

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: …and that trying to share it is usually, very often, done in writing.

Rick: All right, so we’ve talked for an hour about some philosophical points and about your history and everything leading up to A Course of Love. And we’ve alluded a little bit to what the emphasis of A Course of Love is, as opposed to A Course in Miracles. But it’s 700 pages long, and I’m sure we haven’t done justice to it.

So do you think it would be a good idea for us to spend a good portion of the remainder of our time laying out what A Course of Love has to offer, what it’s all about?

Mari: How about if I tell you what I love about it?

Rick: Yeah, great.

Mari: Yeah, yeah. There are certain things about it that I love more than others, you know, as is true for all of us. The wholeheartedness was a big one. I have a feeling with that—more down to earth than a lot of things. And, of course… (laughing) Back in 2001, when this first came out, nobody was talking about love. It was all more Eastern, and it was mindful, and it was… I don’t know, this was very unusual.

Now, I just—I think of people like Brené Brown, who talks about wholeheartedness and authenticity. So it’s got these certain things that have a flavor of bringing it back to the person. And that’s one I believe—wholeheartedness—is that combining of everything.

Be true to love and you can’t fail to be true to yourself.

Mari: One of my favorite quotes from A Course of Love is, “Be true to love and you can’t fail to be true to yourself.” And you could say it the other way around: “Be true to yourself and you can’t fail to be true to love.”

One thing that I didn’t mention yet is that, when A Course of Love was done, Jesus called me to be a companion. He said—I asked him, and I always sort of wished he would give me practical answers, especially when I was done with the book. I thought maybe he’d say what to do with it. But he said, “Be a companion to those willing to leave hell behind.”

And I had trouble with that for a long time, until I began to see hell as not being who you are. I think that’s the hellish part of life. So, “Be a companion to those willing to be who they are, who they truly are.”

Rick: Yeah. So who are we truly? Is it something that can be described?

Mari: Well, I’m really fascinated by our humanity. This doesn’t show up as the same thing in everyone. It’s the divine showing up as Mari and the divine showing up as Rick.

So, as we go on in the books, in the treatises, we begin to hear a little bit more about who we are in our humanity. Jesus says, “I love your hair, your eyes, the shape of your skull.” It’s this bringing back of the love and of our tender hearts. There’s a whole chapter on tenderness, on the time of tenderness.

So there’s a great range of acceptance of feelings, and most of them are the gentle and loving feelings. But as we progress and move into the dialogue, there’s a demarcation line between—I see it, partially because it was one of the other times I was given a directive while I was receiving.

So there is A Course of Love, and then there are the treatises, which are four treatises: a treatise on “The Art of Thought,” a treatise on “The Nature of Unity and Its Recognition,” a treatise on “The Personal Self,” and then a treatise on “The New.”

When we got to the point between the treatise on “The Personal Self” and the treatise on “The New,” Jesus said I had to quit everything that I was doing. I was working on editing what I’d already received, and I was meeting with an A Course of Love group already—it started right away. I had to leave that behind to be totally in “The New.”

There’s this whole—there’s this… What Jesus calls “The New” is very undefinable, and it’s sort of moving us from the concentration before, which is really about getting rid of the old. It’s like scraping paint to get rid of all the things that we’ve been conditioned to our whole lives.

Then, as you move to “The New,” it’s more like putting on the new paint and you’re getting fresher. So that is… I just fell in love. That was my favorite part of the book—most of the time it is.

But it talks about the beginning of creating a new world and how that future is yet to be predicted, that there’s no real plan for this as we’re going into a new time. It talked about people being born into Christ consciousness, a new sort of consciousness, and that they wanted to learn directly, because this was all about this movement of being in very direct contact with and knowing the divine in us as us.

So now, instead of telling you the parts I really loved about those, I’ve just given you a quick overview. And then—but the dialogues, I loved all of the dialogues. I know in some of my journal entries I found things saying, “Well, I didn’t really get it until the dialogues.” I was working too hard, you know.

But once it got to the dialogues, it was like everything opened up. It’s what happens with dialogue—the sense of being in communication, like you and I are in communication. There’s more of that sense with everything that comes in the dialogues.

And also, there becomes a greater acceptance of all of our humanity, even things—even feeling things that we don’t think we ought to feel. We’ve been so burdened by this thought that we are these thoughts and teachings.

For instance, here’s one I can give you. I still get nervous public speaking; that’s not my forte. So the old idea of ego is that if you’re nervous, you still have an ego. Okay, so I’ve been told these things over many years, and people—very tender-hearted people—have been told, “That’s your ego,” because they’re anxious. Any feeling almost that wasn’t bland and banal was the ego in those communities.

What I am very excited about when we’re in the dialogues is this acceptance of even feelings like anger. We don’t have to have an ego or a false self, or not know that we’re in union. Feeling anger doesn’t mean that we have fallen out of anything. It means that, usually for me, I have not been true to myself. That’s usually when I get angry: I haven’t been true to myself.

And so what I love about it is because I knew so many people who’d experienced so much pain with the old way of talking about it.

Rick: Yeah. I think what you’re alluding to here, and I think you address it in some of your writings, is that there’s a tendency—and I don’t know about it, maybe A Course in Miracles also—in the sort of neo-Advaita area to dismiss all this human stuff, like feelings, as illusory and not worthy of our attention or consideration.

It can end up in a rather cold-heartedness: “Oh, your baby died. Meh, just an illusion. The baby didn’t exist anyway,” or “The baby’s in a better place,” or whatever, without really engaging in the human feelings that would naturally accompany such an event.

There’s a lot of teachings which emphasize over and over and over again that there really is no—you’re not a person, there is no person—the sense that “there is a person” is part of the ignorance.

As a friend of mine, Francis Bennett, is fond of saying—I don’t know if you’ve watched any of his interviews—“Of course you’re a person. You’re not just only a person.”

Mari: Yes.

Rick: “There’s more to you than that.” It’s like saying to a wave, “Of course you’re a wave. There you are. You’re just not only a wave. You’re also this ocean.”

Mari: Yes.

Rick: There’s a deeper, broader dimension, but that broader dimension doesn’t negate the individual dimension. In fact, there’s a whole thing we could go into about the personal and impersonal aspects of God. Even God has a personal aspect as well as an impersonal aspect.

Mari: Yes, yes. So those, I just felt, were the things that were most in need of being said: the acceptance of feelings, acceptance of our personhood.

There are wonderful sections on creativity. He uses creativity to talk about some things, but it’s like inviting back our creativity and godliness, creativity and divinity, creativity and soulfulness. They all go together so much.

So there’s great credence given to our ability to be creative and to be creators. There’s a wonderful, very short section about the way of Mary—the feminine. I really think the whole of A Course of Love is leading into the feminine energies.

The idea of Mary comes in here, with Mary having birthed Jesus, and because we’re doing this birthing now, we’re doing this birthing of “The New,” we’re birthing ourselves anew. We’re birthing a new time. I’m excited to be part of this time.

Creating and embodying the new

It’s an incarnational side of things: what we’re here to do. We’re here to birth the divine into the world.

Also, the way of Mary addresses those who aren’t called “to do.” How people can feel, if they don’t have a calling, if they don’t have some particular thing to do, and they feel really bad about that. They’re always waiting for it.

“The Way of Mary” accepts those who are not called “to do.” There were the old anchoresses, and the women were anchoresses back in Christianity. It was sort of a mystical state, but we’re told that those are the way of Mary, anchoring this new reality.

I believe that what is happening as we begin to get this influx is more—it’s almost like, to me, a collaboration. We’re collaborating with the divine to create “The New” now.

And it’s different. My sister doesn’t understand this. There are—you are like you are. Jesus calls us forerunners of “The New.” We are forerunners of “The New,” and it can be a difficult position to be in.

But as we actually see that we’re creating new states of being—as I received A Course of Love, I created a new state of being in myself, and we do that. We create these new states of being and then we anchor them in the world.

What somebody said was, “Reality is no longer our reality.” We have that reality.

Rick: Yeah. I often feel in my own life that it’s like—I don’t know, this metaphor just came to mind. When you paint, you’re painting a wall. You have to dip the roller or the brush in the paint, and then you apply it to the wall. After a while, it runs out of paint, and so you dip it again and apply it again.

I kind of feel like that’s how my days go. I happen to have a meditation practice, but there are other ways people can do this. I always feel like I’m just getting infused with the divine energy, if you want to call it that, and then spending my day applying it in some way; then getting another infusion and applying it. I don’t know—do you like that metaphor?

Mari: Absolutely.

Rick: Does that sort of fit with what you experience?

Mari: Absolutely, yes, I do.

Rick: You spend your time in the cabin in the morning and then, I’m sure, you derive deep sustenance from that; and then you’re able to transmit that or convert that into something that others can benefit from.

Mari: Yes, and it’s also—I mean, this is kind of a newer idea to me—but it is also creating… It’s like just being there in meditation, just being there sitting, is creating this new state of being.

And it suddenly felt different to me in the last year or so that this is—we’re getting these pockets of this new state of being all over the place, and that’s really kind of what’s happening in the world. We do anchor something. We anchor something by allowing it and by being, however we nurture that in ourselves and others.

Hope, hardship, and social change

Rick: So do you feel that the world is headed for a much brighter time because there’s some new state of being or some age of enlightenment or something dawning? And is there anything in A Course in Miracles about that, that predicts it or describes it?

Mari: There is. There’s a wonderful line—again, I can’t remember.

Rick: I said A Course in Miracles; I meant A Course of Love, but either way.

Mari: There actually is one in A Course in Miracles about how—I wish I could remember—but anyway, it’s a beautiful quote about how heaven and earth will be as one, basically.

And I think people take that, or can take that, to mean the earth will pass away for this combining to happen. But with that, combined with A Course of Love, I take it that heaven and earth can come together.

I do think that these structures that the ego has created to protect and conceal and deceive and all of that, they’re going to have to come down, probably, before we get better.

Rick: And when you say “structures,” you don’t just mean in the individual; you mean in society—economic structures and political structures and stuff like that?

Mari: Yes. So there might—you know, there is certainly nothing that says we won’t have a harder time before it gets better.

Rick: The darkest hour is always before the dawn. So I was going to actually ask you if you had any commentary on the current political scene, but you’ve just sort of made one. You kind of feel like things are all as well and wisely put as they are; and the way things are going could very well result in the kind of crash and burn, or phoenix-like destruction and re-emergence, of a better world or something?

Mari: I think that deception has to come to light, and the way that we’ve been deceived and are deceiving ourselves and letting ourselves be deceived by the structures that are—I mean, I think that has to come to light, and I think it is.

This is a perfect opportunity for that to come to light—for what is not kind, not humane. And one of the things that I have seen—we really are just beginning, my husband and I, to recover from our financial decline that started when I left my job, and we were on the Obamacare plan. And that went up; it doubled this last year.

When we first went on that, no one seemed to understand what it felt like not to be able to afford health care. No one understood how difficult it was made by the program and this sort of thing.

I don’t mean this in any way like I’m glad this is happening to people. It’s just that I believe so many people are beginning to see the effects of this unkindness—this is the way I call it, the unkindness—to leave people without being able to be insured, or to have the cost so high they can’t be insured.

There are so many things that have gone on in the last, really, since the recession, even despite our Obama years, that have made the world harder and harder for people.

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: And more people are feeling it. So the only good I can see in that is that we all have a sense of what the poor have been going through for a long time, and a greater sense and a more personal… You know, if you’ve never been there, it’s really hard to have compassion for those who need to be seen and heard.

Rick: Yeah. And even some of the poorest people in our country are kind of wealthy by comparison with a couple billion people in the world.

They really—and we’ve all heard these statistics—how the top 100 wealthiest people in the world possess more wealth than the bottom 80 percent, or some such thing. So there’s this great inequity and tremendous suffering while others have so much more than they could possibly need.

I’m reminded of a quote from Martin Luther King at this point:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

Hopefully… When you start getting into political topics like this, it gets very controversial and people become very polarized. But I think what you’re saying here is really apt, which is important, and it connects with your whole theme about the heart and awakening of the heart: We really need to feel the suffering of others.

I mean, that’s a basic tenet of just about every religion. If we’re really feeling that, how could we possibly allow so much suffering to continue in the world? There’s something wrong with this picture that needs to be remedied.

Mari: Yes.

Rick: Okay, we’re going to continue talking about what’s in A Course of Love, but Marie from Boulder sent in a question, and I do want to ask people’s questions as they come in. This is related to something I was asking in the beginning. She said, “Is the Jesus that you channeled a being separate from yourself or simply an aspect of your own deep mind? How do you know?”

Mari: Hmm. Well, I would guess it’s a good way to put it, but it would be like having a conversation with each other, and there are two voices. Even if that voice comes into me, there is an awareness of the two voices.

So yes, I believe Jesus is a being, and that the Christ in A Course of Love language—the part of Jesus that is universal because of being that oneness with the Creator—is, like I said, called Christ consciousness.

It’s not that we’re walking around with Jesus in us, but we’re walking around with Christ consciousness in us. I often call it “a spark of God,” or “our divinity.”

But yes, I did feel Jesus as a… and not even… Of course, when I’m receiving A Course of Love, this is stuff I didn’t know.

Rick: Right.

Mari: There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t know. I always use the example of the word “treatises,” because I went and looked it up. I thought I knew what it meant, but I wasn’t sure. “What’s a treatise?” you know? So it was not me as I know myself, for sure.

But I’ve had conversations with Jesus. I had a lot of conversations with Jesus for the first five years after A Course of Love was published, and then he told me it was time to start relying on myself, and I didn’t have as many conversations with him. But he’ll pop in now and then when I’m journaling—a very distinct voice.

I know other people who hear from Jesus, and their Jesus is not my Jesus, because we’re always different in relationship. This is the thing. It’s like you talking to me is different than you talking to your wife.

Rick: Right.

Mari: So we’re all different in relationship, and that’s to be prized, not to be used as, “Well, it can’t be, because it’s different here and different there.” No. But union in relationship is a huge teaching of A Course of Love.

Rick: Yeah. One comment I just want to make is that you strike me as being very—and this is my personal editorial opinion here—you strike me as being very sincere and sweet and genuine.

I’ve spoken with some people who are into channeling, both on and off BatGap, who—I don’t know. I have a feeling there’s a lot of ego there, which is undoubtedly filtering or altering or coloring whatever it is they’re channeling.

In fact, I sometimes suspect that they’re not channeling anybody; they’re just kind of tapping into some level of creativity within themselves and coming out with a whole bunch of stuff.

So I think you’re an example of someone whose sweetness and innocence make her a reliable source for this kind of wisdom. It’s like I don’t get the feeling that you’re really in the way of what’s coming through.

Mari: Yes. I really had hoped Jesus was going to inspire me to write something on my own. (laughter) You know what I mean? It’s like that’s what I kind of thought, what I hoped it would be. I mean, I wouldn’t do anything, but it was like I was hoping.

And I was writing during this time, but it was awful—trying too hard, and I was writing this awful stuff. But that was really what I hoped. I had no aspirations to be a channel or a scribe or anything like that.

But I do like being called “the first receiver,” partially because it also includes everyone else in being… I, too, have met people—you know, I really didn’t like having my work lumped with people who would help you find your cat. There’s a reverential part to this.

Rick: Yeah. So, in other words, somebody who might help you find your cat or help the police solve a crime or something has its value, but they’re like psychics. They’re not necessarily picking up on anything profound. They’re just picking up on some information which you could get through your ordinary senses if you were in the right place.

Mari: Yeah. It’s like all those things are fine, but they’re not the same. They’re not the same as this. And to just lump it all—it’s sort of like anything that’s sort of extrasensory gets sometimes put in this one category.

Rick: Yeah. Well, that’s like saying—lumping all forms of music together and saying that the Sex Pistols are the same as Beethoven or something. (laughter)

Mari: Mm-hmm.

Rick: Does it sometimes amaze you, when you look at these 700 pages, and think, “Holy cow, how in the world did all this come out through me?”

Mari: Yes, it does amaze me. (laughing) It changed me so much. I was called to an orientation of solitude afterwards. I felt briefly sort of elated, and then… It’s actually about living in the world again after you’ve done something like this, you know—being able to.

I understand why people leave, and I always had this fantasy of a monk’s life or something. But I am married, and I love my family, and that love has informed my spirituality tremendously, too. So I got the next best thing with this cabin in the woods.

But it was very, very hard for me. My sensibilities changed. I can’t go shopping for an afternoon. I shop as quickly as I can. I can’t take noise for very long.

And so the effects on me are—I mean, I’m still normal. You know, I mean, I talk to myself as “ordinary.” I’ll go have a drink now and then or something, and I just can’t take too much.

It’s really sort of the feeling that it was so much, and it’s still so much, that I just need all this quiet time to hold it.

The end of learning and the beginning of knowing

Rick: Sure, yeah. You became more refined through the process, and therefore your taste became more refined and your interests became more refined, and, you know…

Mari: That’s a nice way to put it.

Rick: Yeah, that’s why—I don’t know, metaphors keep coming to mind—but if we have a hammer and chisel or something, we can break rock with it. But if the chisel is refined to the point where it becomes a scalpel, then it’s no longer really suited for breaking rocks, you know. It needs to do more delicate tasks.

Mari: Yes, that’s nice. Thank you. I like that.

Rick: Sure. So what more do you want to tell us about A Course of Love? You have an opportunity here to let people know a little bit more.

Mari: Well, I would just kind of… I started on the end of learning and then dropped it. But I think that’s… I remember one time somebody saying, “Well, do you mean you never read anymore? What do you mean, ‘the end of learning’?” And it’s the beginning of coming to know. The end of learning is the beginning of coming to know.

And it’s not about anything specific, and that’s the really hard thing. It’s sort of like, okay, I want… It’s about the knowing itself, and that’s a hard thing to talk about. But it’s about the knowing itself—to begin to trust in your own Knowing. This is a really huge thing.

I absolutely love that Jesus ends on dialogue, so that we go from teachers and learners to sharing in unity and to being in dialogue with each other. In fact, I watched some of your talks. I watched the one where you were talking at Berkeley, or wherever you were talking.

Rick: Out in Berkeley.

Mari: I loved you because you weren’t trying to teach me anything. You were sharing who you are, your curiosity, your ideas. And so this is sort of…

Rick: You should have seen me 30 years ago. (laughter)

Mari: What were you doing then?

Rick: Oh, I was teaching. I was talking about stuff that I hadn’t experienced (laughter) and being rather proselytizing, and probably a pain in the ass for many people.

Mari:(laughing) Okay, you get it then. Yeah, so that’s what I’m saying: I love this move. I love this move that’s being made. People, of course, will still try to teach and to do things the old way. But I think the more we move to dialogue—it’s kind of a time-honored thing to be in communication—but also with this understanding that this is happening to more people in the world, that we’re becoming these conduits, the more we share.

I just had this wonderful thing happen to me the other day. I was sharing with a guy from a group in Santa Fe. There are about 60 groups around the country now. I haven’t… With the ones I’ve visited, I don’t see teaching and learning going on. There’ll be somebody who facilitates, but then people are very lovely about sharing.

I was telling him that what I’ve been hearing lately is, “Only do what you want to do.” It’s like I’m telling this guy, “Only do what you want to do,” and it’s kind of contrary to the way that most of us love, (laughing) you know? “Only do what you want to do.”

I was still marveling over this, and I have actually been contemplating that, because then, of course, it calls you: What do you want to do? But he said to me, “Well, that sounds like A Course in Miracles. There’s this chapter in the Manual for Teachers that talks about trust, and I think that’s in there.” So I went to it, and I’d forgotten this: It kind of lays out this—like you were talking about some of the Eastern traditions. They lay things out, and when you get to this certain point, it says, “And now the teacher of God does what he wants to do.”

It’s as simple as that. I was like, “Oh my gosh!” (laughing) So these things are always combining. But that sharing—when I share with people, they almost always share with me something that will lead me to something else, something that I need to hear in that moment.

So I really am excited about dialogue, and always excited about things that remind me how much I loved A Course in Miracles, and that they are kind of one piece. I think when people—in fact, it’s really wonderful now—there are some groups that are combining them. They’ll take passages of A Course in Miracles and passages of A Course of Love and have that as their focus. It’s incredible how much differently people begin to hear A Course in Miracles when it’s combined with A Course of Love.

Sharing the Course with others

Rick: Is there a certain faction of A Course in Miracles people who see you as some kind of a renegade?

Mari: Yes (laughing), yes, there is. Usually it’s kind of fun. I usually get a warning. Somebody will say, “Don’t read this review on Amazon,” or some of these people who like to criticize will email a lot of people. And so somebody else will say, “Don’t read this from so-and-so because…”

Rick: It’ll hurt your feelings or something.

Mari: Yeah, I don’t know that it would hurt my feelings, but I’d rather not read them. So people are kind that way.

But I’m really, really excited that the A Course in Miracles community is beginning to accept A Course of Love, because this is clearly an audience that Jesus intended. He said, “I prepared them. I prepared them with A Course in Miracles, and now…”

Rick: I will do what I can on that end, and I am very excited.

Mari: I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if something further came. I think we’re always growing. We’re always evolving into further realizations.

Rick: Yeah, so I’m glad you said that, because I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this “end of learning” thing. I feel that I’m always growing and evolving into further realizations, as you just phrased it. So, in that sense, I feel like there’s no end to learning.

But I guess when you say “end of learning,” you’re sort of meaning “end” in the sense of taking stuff from authorities that we’re not necessarily experiencing ourselves, and that we really need to put it into that kind of dynamic and just really know things in our hearts directly and cognitively, or sort of viscerally, directly, experientially. Is that what you mean by that?

Mari: Yeah, that was very good phrasing.

Rick: Okay.

Mari: Thank you.

Rick: There’s somebody who sent in a question. Michael Kantos said—and this could perhaps be thought of in a broader way—he said, “Any advice for those of us looking forward to meeting with you in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, on February 25th?” Thank you, Michael, Center for Contemporary Mysticism.

We can broaden that out to say: For people all over the world who are listening to this, who may or may not end up meeting with you, any advice for them?

Mari: I have begun to… I really didn’t before, but I began to say to people, “Why don’t you just read it once? Just read it straight through without applying, without going to a group, without applying any thought or effort to anything. Just let it enter you. Just let it wash over you.”

And, of course, you can do that anytime. It doesn’t mean that you have to do that the first time. But if you’ve already read it, you might read it a second time. If you’ve read it in a group, you might read it a second time, just reading it through and letting it begin to have this flow that pulls you in.

That was one thing I was about to say when I said, “I’ll let you ask me.” I am very thrilled about this. This is my last presentation this year. It’s going to be in Philadelphia at the Center for Contemporary Mysticism.

One day I’ll be speaking with A Course of Love people, and I also get to do an hour on the broader topic of mysticism. It’s the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to do that, so I’m looking forward to both of those very much.

Rick: What kind of things are you going to say about mysticism?

Mari:(laughs) Well, I’m going to talk about all the things that drew me to mystery. You know, I always try to speak of things in a way that lets everybody else know that they have probably already felt these mystical tendencies in themselves.

It feels, to me, like it seems too hard. And I know, as a young person entering spirituality, I couldn’t afford to go to teachings and all of that, which is probably why I already said my books are my friends.

I think we’re all natural mystics, or born mystics, and we probably have memories of mystical experiences. If we can bring those forward in ourselves, we can begin to have that sense of “We’re not different,” you know? There isn’t necessarily a separate category of people called “mystics.”

Rick: It’s funny because when you were younger, you used to love to read mystery novels, and you wanted to be a writer of mystery novels. You ended up doing this, and in a way, you’re writing about mystery, but it just has this whole spiritual orientation now.

Mari: Very different. And you know why? The main reason I wanted to write mysteries (laughing) was because I knew, even then, I never wanted to promote myself. It’s like, I wanted to be this famous writer, but I didn’t want to have to be selling myself all the time.

So I thought—there were all these serious mysteries at the time—if I started a serious mystery, there’d just be people there waiting for my next book. I would just have to write. I wouldn’t have to do anything else. (laughing)

Final reflections

Rick: Yeah. So you said that this presentation you’re going to give in Philadelphia is your last one of the year, but it’s only February. You’re not going to give any more all year?

Mari: Yes, I was at the A Course in Miracles conference in Vegas in April this year, and I’ve been traveling.

Rick: This year meaning last year?

Mari: Yeah, last year, so 2016. I decided I would give it a year, trying a more public life, and so I visited with a lot of groups and that kind of thing.

So this will be my final one, and I’m going to take a pause. Whether it’ll end up being a whole year, I don’t know, but I am going to take a little pause.

You know, the whole message of A Course of Love is, “You have to be who you are.”

Rick: Yeah.

Mari: You have to be who you are. When I get too busy, I feel like I lose a part of myself. So I’m going to give myself some time and just kind of feel into what the next things will be.

Rick: Yeah. You know what you might enjoy is, rather than flying all over, giving a talk here and a talk there, you might enjoy doing a retreat every now and then, where you’re in a really beautiful retreat setting and people come there and you spend a whole weekend with them, where everybody can really settle in.

Mari: Yes, you know, I haven’t even really thought about these things, different ways that this could be done. So I’ll take some time and do that. I know a lot of people who I’m sure will give me some good ideas.

Rick: Yeah. You know, another thing is that some friends of mine do these kinds of webinars using Zoom, which is a certain kind of software. They have 20 or 30 participants who are scattered around the world, and they have a nice little thing for an hour or two with these people, in the comfort of their living room, just as you’re sitting now. So that kind of thing would also be a way of connecting with people without having to race around.

Mari: Well, that’s one of the things that I’ve done with this interview with you, which is arguably my greatest exposure. So I really appreciate that I could do that from the comfort of my home.

I bought about three microphones and all these different things to get it set up right, to get what worked for me, because I do realize this is one way I could share. It might be more comfortable.

Rick: Yeah, well, hopefully…

Mari: You can reach a larger audience too, you know. You can talk to people all over the world, which is amazing.

Rick: Yeah, I know. It’s neat, isn’t it?

Mari: We have many translations. The French translation is done now—the first complete translation of the whole book. We have a very active group beginning the Spanish translation. It’s actually almost done. The first round of it is done, so they’re refining it now and getting ready to publish. It’s being translated into Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, and Japanese.

Rick: Wow, that’s great. Here’s a question for you, just to jump back into the fray here for a second. Does Jesus, or does A Course of Love, discuss reincarnation at all?

Mari: It’s really not. It probably would be something I have never really been interested in. It’s not in A Course of Love, so I don’t really have much to say. You could probably answer it better than I, but in terms of A Course of Love, no, it doesn’t say anything specifically about reincarnation.

Rick: Okay. The reason I asked is that someone from France sent in a question about whether souls kind of evolve up through various species to higher and higher expressions and eventually become enlightened beings. But we don’t need to discuss that if it’s not really your bailiwick.

Mari: Okay.

Rick: Yeah. All righty. Well, I hope you’ve been enjoying this. I have. Any final thoughts you want to express?

Mari: You know, I don’t know what I’ve said. (Laughter.) That happens to me too, you know. It’s like, “I don’t know what I’ve talked about, so I’m probably better to quit while I’m ahead.”

Rick: Without resorting to memory, just intuitively, what do you feel moved to say by way of a wrap-up point?

Mari: Oh, just to encourage everyone to look at their lives with the eyes of their heart and to know that you have a greater knowing, probably, than you allow yourself to get in touch with. Let yourself begin to get in touch with that, and then let it expand into the world.

Look at your life with the eyes of your heart.

Rick: Beautiful. Okay, I’m glad I asked you to do that. That was nice.

Okay, so let me just make a couple of wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Mari Perron, and as always, I’ll create a page on batgap.com that will link to her website and her book and anything else she wants me to put there. You’ll be able to get in touch with her and so on.

This interview is part of an ongoing series, which has been going on for about seven years now, and which I hope will continue for many years to come. If you would like to stay in touch, go to batgap.com and you can sign up to be notified by email each time there’s a new one.

Also, you’ll see there’s an “At a Glance” menu. If you click on that, you’ll see a quick summary of everything that you’ll find on the site, including things such as signing up for the audio podcast and everything like that.

So go to batgap.com. Next week I’ll be speaking with someone named Nicola Amadora, and the week after that, Duane Elgin, and on and on. It’s really a joy getting to know these people each week and talking to them. I love it, and I hope all of you are enjoying it too. So, thanks, Mari.

Mari: Well, thank you. And can I please my publisher by telling people where they can find the book?

Rick: Yes, please.

Mari: Yes. It’s available, of course, on Amazon, but at bookstores too. If you can’t find it there, ask them.

Rick: You have a copy on hold up there? And I’ll be linking to the Amazon page where your book can be purchased also. I’ll be linking to that from your Batgap page. There it is.

Mari: There that is. Yes, and there is now—Rick benefited from this, and I didn’t even think of it because it’s so new; I’d kind of forgotten.

Rick: That was a great little thing.

Mari: It’s a resource.

Rick: Yeah. It’s an overview written by somebody else, but it’s a nice little synopsis.

Mari: It’s also for people who read it and would like to introduce it to a friend. This would be very nice.

Rick: Good place to start.

Mari: The website—can I tell them?

Rick: Yes, anything. Sure.

Mari: There are two websites: www.acourseoflove.org and also www.centerforacourseoflove.org. There are different things on each of them. I would hope you might visit both.

I do a blog. There’s also, on the Center site, a concordance that can help you find things—a search facility, which is what I use more than the concordance. I want to follow a theme like “the well of spirit.” I can go in there and type in “well of spirit” and find all the references to that. So I think that’s something people really love to hear about.

And then I am going to be in Philadelphia. You can find that out on the events page of A Course of Love’s website, and that will be February 25th and 26th.

Rick: Good. And I’ll link to these websites from your page on batgap.com, in case somebody’s listening to this while they’re driving or something and can’t really stop and write that down. Just go to batgap.com and you’ll see Mari’s page.

If you’re listening to this three years from now, the page will be buried under many other interviews, but you can always do a search in the search box. We also have an alphabetical index of all the guests, and you can easily find her page and go to her websites and link to her book and all that stuff.

All right, well, thanks, Mari. I really appreciated it, and it was great getting to know you.

Mari: Same here. I heard great things about you too. It’s like, “Oh, Rick and Irene Archer.” Great. Well, thanks, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. We’ll see you next week.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Rick: You’re welcome.

Mari: To everyone.

Rick: Sure.