Mary Foster Transcript

Mary Foster Interview

Summary:

Rick:  Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump, the weekly show in which we have a discussion with someone who has had a spiritual awakening. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Mary Foster. You’ll recognize Mary if you’ve been watching this series because she and her husband George were my first guests on the first show that I taped back in October. And that show has really sustained this whole concept for months now because by the time you see this, shows will be getting aired regularly. But at this taping in early April, we have still been plagued with technical problems with regard to the software. I won’t go into the details. But we haven’t been able to upload the shows as readily as we would like. Nonetheless, Mary and George’s interview has been on the internet since last October or so and has got well over 600 views and all sorts of discussion. They had come the night before they were to embark on a trip from Iowa to Seattle and they weren’t even packed and ready to go yet, but nonetheless they came down. And I really appreciate your having done that back in October because it’s really been the foundation for this whole enterprise. So, in the first show with Mary and George, I took a chronological approach, in which we went back to their adolescence and moved up through to the present, recounting or tracing the stages of their spiritual development. And since we’ve already covered that ground, I thought we would take a different tack tonight and just focus in on what Mary considers significant now. And knowing Mary as I do and having spent a lot of time talking with her and various friends about her experiences, there’s always something new. There’s always something going on, some breakthrough, some development. So I’m sure that a lot has happened since last October, but I thought we’d start with what’s happening right now and we’ll go into that and expand from that and just see where it takes us. So, you’ve undoubtedly given this some thought over the last few days since we’ve been talking about doing this interview.

Mary:  No, I haven’t.

Rick:  Okay. So, where would you like to start?

Mary:  I guess this latest, I just call them openings, because it seems that more and more is revealed as we live in the physical body. And it’s been very interesting these last years, almost eight years, that the experiences that I’ve had, they all come with knowledge, obviously. You have an experience of something and something goes along with it, something that you know, something that you see, something that you understand. And for me, it’s been a lot of crazy experiences. I’ll say crazy because here I am in Amsterdam having fish and chips, and my first bite of fish was not only really tasty, but I’m experiencing the whole life of the fish in my awareness by tasting it. And I’d had other experiences also with hearing and with sight that there’s a holistic experience of knowing a full range of something.

Rick:  To make that concrete, are you referring to the experience of talking to a sales lady or something on the phone and getting a whole panorama of her life?

Mary:  Yes, that was the first actual experience that I had with the senses. I was on the phone with a sales lady. It might have been calling about a bill, something to do with a cell phone or something. But it was somebody who was in customer service, and as I’m talking to her, all of a sudden her whole life flooded in. I knew all the details of her life in one composite sound.

Rick:  Like spanning years?

Mary:  Her whole life from the moment she was born up until right now. I was speaking with her and I’m like, “Oh boy, she’s having some trouble with her marriage.” I’m hearing this in her voice, and for me, because I’d had other experiences opening to me with consciousness, I wasn’t shocked. But it was like, “This is something very interesting.” So I took that and then started having more experiences of that, where I could talk to a person and I could basically hear their whole life in their voice. Eventually, what happened is it came down to they could speak a sentence, then it could be just one word, and then it was just hearing their breath and I could hear the quality of their life, basically. And I don’t mean like picking out every single instance of your whole life.

Rick:  It would take a whole life just to talk about that.

Mary:  Yes, yes. But the basic quality. And then a few things would pop up. A friend of mine said, “Oh, what do you hear?” And hearing an experience is really an interesting thing. So I’m hearing in the voice that when this person was young, they were somehow involved with water and a log and it was maybe life-threatening in some way. I said, “Something happened when you were younger. I’m just picking that up. I can hear it.” And then, of course, she said, “Oh, yeah. I had a log roll on top of me down a riverbank and I fell in the water.” So it was just different things like that. I can hear the qualities of joy, the qualities of sorrow, the qualities of intellect. All of those things are all present in the voice.

Rick:  Has this merely been entertaining or has it had a practical significance for you?

Mary:  Well, I think what it has done for me is it has validated pretty much what I already would feel from someone. So, you’ve had the experience as well, there are people that you don’t necessarily care to be around because they’re not pleasant. And so just by merit of having these feelings, this is like an extra validation. Now, this isn’t something that’s just developed. This has been an ongoing thing about two years. So that was my first experience of hearing this. And then I had seeing, the tasting, the touching. Not knowing the life of something by touching it, but there’s this new experience in that this is how it all ties in. So my senses of the physiology, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, all these different things, have come together in a new experience for me that’s really been quite interesting. I would say it’s still in the infant stages of development, which is what happens. That’s why we want to take care of our physiology so that we can keep having more and more experiences of consciousness. Once you have that initial opening, a lot of people don’t care about their body. They eat junk. They stay up all night long. And I think there comes a point in a lot of people’s lives, whether or not they’re having any experience of opening of consciousness, that they realize that it’s important to take care of the physiology. So you do. Then you start resting more regularly, eating more healthily and so forth. Just because you want to live longer so that you can have more experiences. You care about your physiology. You care about your life.

Rick:  Yeah. I had a guy in here a couple months ago who said that when he had his awakening, back in the mid-90s, he started taking drugs afterwards. And I was thinking to myself, “Is that a genuine awakening? Why would he do that?” And it seemed to be genuine from everything he said in the course of the evening, but it was like it didn’t matter to him somehow. He felt sort of invincible or detached from it or whatever. He could do whatever he wanted. And it kind of contradicts a realization I had, which got me on the path of meditation in the first place. I was 18 years old and I was taking drugs at the time, as many 18-year-olds did in the 60s. But I was sitting there and several ideas dawned on me. I won’t elaborate. But one of the key ones was, “I am stuck in this body. And if I abuse it, I’m going to be stuck in a damaged body for the next many decades.” And so I thought, “I’d better take care of it, because I don’t want to be stuck in a damaged body. I’d better start moving it in the other direction.” And that’s been kind of a guiding principle.

Mary:  Yeah, it is. So by virtue of telling you of this experience of the hearing, the sound, what’s happened is, if you saw my first interview with Rick, I did speak about probably one of the biggest openings that I’d had in the beginning, which was standing on a porch, and everything disappears. I’m there with my senses. My physiology is still there, even though I don’t see it. I don’t see any of the physical world at all, all relative life.

Rick:  Or hear, or touch, or smell.

Mary:  Yes, everything’s gone. But I’m still experiencing. There’s still something there. And I know that what I’m seeing, what I’m hearing, what I’m touching, the whole experience, there was something in that. And it’s taken all this time for me to come around full circle to that experience again in another regard. And it’s that, in a sense, all of that has filled back in. And what has filled in for me is knowing the connectedness that all of my senses have with wholeness, with that ultimate reality of what really is, what connects everything to itself. And we experience it through our senses because we have a physiology. So there is an experience of the infinite, eternal essence of reality through the sense of sight, through the sense of hearing, through the sense of taste, through the sense of touch. And what I’ve been in the infant stages of experiencing is how all of my senses connect to the eternal nature of what is. So how I describe it is, there’s many different ways, but it’s kind of like all the pieces of this puzzle are starting to fit together, but there really aren’t any pieces to the puzzle. It’s just that everything is starting to fit. And I know that there’s what’s called levels of consciousness, but really they’re just descriptions of along the way to full awakening. You have an initial awakening where you realize that you’re not just this body. Something happens that’s a permanent awareness, a permanent shift, like you’ve said. And what happens throughout time and experience with the physiology is that you have a broader experience of this ultimate truth. So you’ll experience, say, your physiology will fill the whole universe. That’s an experience that I’ve had that’s common with other people. You realize that your body doesn’t stop here. It goes all the way out, goes all the way out, 360, you know. And so you’re experiencing this with your senses. The senses are your ultimate connection to the reality of experiencing consciousness as full, as whole and complete, without any disconnection between anything that exists on all the realms of consciousness, all the levels of consciousness and your experience. But it’s unique in that for me, what I’d experienced before were just pieces of this complete connection with all. And this would include the celestial realm, the relative, the absolute, meaning where the quantum field, for instance, where all springs from. And the connection that I experience now is different than it was two months ago, a year ago, two years ago. So it’s filling in.

Rick:  Probably different than it will be two months from now.

Mary:  Yes. Because even that, the clarity is what’s going on now. The clarity of my connection through the eternal nature of existence.

Rick:  So you’ve said that in some respect your experience now is still in its infancy. Do you feel then that you are somewhere between your initial awakening and a complete awakening that will probably happen at some point in the future?

Mary:  Well, from what I’ve gleaned from reading, gleaned from speaking with others, this is the beginnings of the clarity that brings you to a final state of enlightenment. Meaning you can now say, “Yes, I’m fully enlightened,” and then you go from there. There is more. There’s always more. There’s always, always more.

Rick:  Like the TV commercials say, “But wait, there’s more!”

Mary:  Yeah. I mean, there have been experiences where I thought, “Oh, well, this is it. This is it. I’m fully engaged. I don’t know everything, but it feels like I do.” And then the whole thing turns inside out into a whole new experience. And that’s happened to me several times. This new experience that I’m having is totally different than anything, again, that I’ve ever experienced, but there is a connectedness between my physiology, all of my senses, with the whole of creation. And I know it, I feel it, I experience it. It doesn’t go away. It’s always there. Now before, that awareness was always there. There’s an awareness. There’s an awareness of the Self, you could say. There’s awareness of one sense or another.

Rick:  Let’s probe that for a second. Because most people, when they say, “I experienced this,” or “I experienced that,” “I experienced a great restaurant,” “I experienced this great baseball game,” “I experienced great sex,” or whatever, they’re referring to a very localized sense of individuality that experiences things. “Oh, I was at this cool party and I was doing this, and I said this to him.” They’re referring, really, to a very specific, space-time-bound physical entity that they regard themselves to be. When you say, “I experienced this unfolding,” or “I experienced that,” or whatever, what is your sense of “I” that you’re referring to in these experiences?

Mary: “I” doesn’t stop here. It’s not the physical body.

Rick:  So who or what is experiencing the things that you are describing?

Mary:  All of the physical senses.

Rick:  Which we all have.

Mary:  Which we all have. So I experience you with a complete sense of all of my senses. It’s different than just a feeling or a knowing. There’s a connection between my sight, my hearing, my sound, taste, touch. All the senses of this physiology experience you. They experience what’s behind you, what’s in between you, and what’s behind you. So between what’s the physical body that is called Mary, it’s quite abstract. But how I can describe it is that there’s what I could say is an embracing of all that is, that is all of you. And every particle of you, and every particle of this table, of your watch, of the space in between us, our physical bodies, all contains in it the knowledge of the whole universe. So if you could extract any one little particle of consciousness, you could look into it, and in it you would find all that was, all that is, and ever will be.

Rick:  Like a hologram.

Mary:  Yes, it’s of the whole existence of creation.

Rick:  And is this your sort of everyday run-of-the-mill experience of everything? As you’re shopping, and driving your car, and taking a shower, and all that stuff, is it always kind of in this context?

Mary:  Yeah, there’s a totality there that wasn’t ever there before. There was a unification before, where I could feel that I was one with. The “with” is gone.

Rick:  So let’s dwell on this again for a second. I mean you probably have a fairly good conception of what the average person experiences life like, or how you experienced it when you were 10 years old, or 15 years old, or whatever. Let’s contrast what you would consider to be the ordinary way that people experience with what you just said. Let’s run by it again and try to make some contrast and comparison between the two.

Mary:  Okay, well I’m thinking of my grandson right now.

Rick:  Okay.

Mary:  And he’s just approaching a year old. And it’s all “I, me, mine,” like that Beatles song.

Rick:  Yeah, George Harrison.

Mary:  Yep, it’s “I, Me, Mine.”

Rick:  All the Beatles actually wrote that. I think George wrote it, but they all played it.

Mary:  ”My, me, mine.” So you have that experience where you own everything, as a child, but carrying that into adulthood could typify antisocial behavior where the world is my oyster, it’s all mine anyway. Well, there’s a sense of that, but then of course you have the psychological boundaries where you know that this building is not mine, and the streets aren’t, but I’m experiencing it. So there’s a kind of a separation, I think.

Rick:  For the average person.

Mary:  For the average person, it’s just me and everything else. And I am this living, breathing thing. And some people are so unconscious that they’re not even really aware of their body. They’re barely in their body. You hear even doctors say that.

Rick:  It reminds me of a line from “Good Morning, Vietnam,” where Robin Williams was woken up early in the morning to go on that radio show, and he’s dragging himself into the studio, and he says, “I’m not even in my body.”

Mary:  Yeah, you’re just barely conscious, just functioning. And I think I can see that in people. I can see somebody driving in a car, and they just look like–

Rick:  Checked out.

Mary:  Yeah, they’re checked out.

Rick:  Forgive them, Father, they know not what they’re doing.

Mary:  Yeah, and for them, that’s their normal homeostasis. This is me, my name is this, and I live here, and all those things.

Rick:  At one point in your life, that was probably your experience, right?

Mary:  Yeah.

Rick:  More or less. It was mine, more or less, I would say.

Mary:  And then you get this tickle that there’s a little more. There’s got to be more than this. There’s just got to be. So you experience whatever it is that you think can get you to open up or to get more. You want more. That’s the natural state, I think, of a human being in regard to evolution, is you just want more. Once you get a taste of it, then that’s when the seeking really begins, I believe. You have this hunger for more, because the natural state of man is to be fully conscious.

Rick:  And evolving.

Mary:  And evolving, yes.  And I believe that just by merit of being alive in a physical body, some evolution does take place throughout your lifespan, whether it be two weeks or a hundred years.

Rick:  Some would say that’s why we’re here, and therefore, whether we know it or not, that’s what’s happening. And ultimately the sum total of what we take out of this life is whatever evolution we have achieved.

Mary:  So we stay healthy and we do what we can. Now I think for me, it seems that there came a point when, through my attention and through my intention, just by being aware of those two things, that there’s just a spontaneous unfoldment that just occurs. And I know one of the things that we’ve said in other groups of friends that we’ve been in, in speaking about consciousness, is “Check in on it.” Is it there? Because I remember from those days when I first realized that I was awake, that it kind of comes and goes. It vacillates, it’s in the foreground, it’s in the background, where is it?

Rick:  And this “it” you’re referring to is this silent field of awareness.

Mary:  That awareness. It’s big.

Rick:  It’s big, and it’s silent, and it’s subtle, at least initially. And so it’s easily overlooked. If there’s a lot of other stuff impinging, and it’s kind of in the background, you don’t even notice, you forget about it.

Mary:  Right. So one of the important things is, “Check in, check in on it, and see if it’s still there.” And of course, in the beginning it’s so much fun, because you keep checking in.

Rick:  There it is.

Mary:  Yeah, there it is. How about that? It didn’t go away. And then there comes a point when you don’t need to check in anymore, it’s just there all the time. It’s right here.

Rick:  Try making it go away.

Mary:  Yeah, try to make it go away. Look through it. Maybe that’s why this fellow was doing drugs, trying to make it go away.

Rick:  I’ve heard people say that. “I’m going to see if I can obliterate this.” Nope, it won’t go away.

Mary:  Yeah. Funnily enough, I think that even through the death of the physical body, it doesn’t go away.

Rick:  No.

Mary:  There’s just a shift from this level of awareness to another.

Rick:  In fact, if the near-death experiences people have are to be believed, it comes to the forefront with the death of the body. It’s like, “Whoa, okay, that’s what I am.”

Mary:  ”I’m much bigger than I thought I was.” Yeah, a lot of people that have had no prior spiritual experiences of any sort have this huge opening.

Rick:  Because they’re forced through that trauma to disassociate from the body, to break that conviction that they are the body. “Wait a minute, my body died and I didn’t, so I must not be the body.”

Mary:  Yeah, that’s great. I’m not the body. And there comes a point when you realize that you’re not the body, but when you realize that the body is what allows you to experience consciousness, then there’s that appreciation, and of course that intention, that, “Here I am, and also there I am.” And then there’s more of a connection that happens where the senses flood out and fill all levels of creation.

Rick:  Elaborate on that.

Mary:  Well, I remember when I first experienced this. It might be helpful for people if I talk about the experiences, even though it’s the knowledge that comes with it that is the most valuable.

Rick:  Sure.

Mary:  So, about four or five years ago, I felt something happening in my physiology. And as you may recall, usually when there’s another shift happening for me, I can feel it coming. It’s kind of like feeling a sneeze coming on. Only it can take days, weeks, a couple of months sometimes, maybe even longer. This one I’m currently going through, it’s been coming in like the tide. It’s coming a little, coming a little, and finally it’s coming. But I felt something going on in my awareness, and I’m trying to feel around somewhere, see what’s going on. And it was a stirring. There’s stirring going on in my spiritual self. I can feel something’s changing.

Rick:  The baby’s kicking.

Mary:  Oh, boy. So, here I am, pregnant with this experience. It’s been a while, with lots in between, so I’m trying to recall. I think I woke up in the middle of the night, and everything, all the senses of my physiology were as though they were stuffed with cotton, all muted. Everything was muted. So I lay awake for the rest of the night. Probably two or three hours before it became daylight, I got up, and I was walking around. I was in this vacuous, quiet, very quiet place, and I didn’t quite know what was going on. A new experience. And for three days this went on, all day long, all through the night. I didn’t sleep. I also didn’t eat. I didn’t drink any water. Two of my girls were still living at home at the time, so I cooked dinner, fed everybody, and sat at the table with an empty plate.

Rick:  Were you talking to people?

Mary:  If I needed to, but really not. I was so internal. It was just amazing. I mean, I was still conscious, but something is going on and I’m not quite sure what it is. And they all understood that something was happening, And I was trying to figure it out. I was trying to grab hold of it, trying to find it, trying to understand it. And then there came a point when I started having an experience of something other than this muted, quiet, silent three days of “what the heck is going on?” And I had a kind of visual thing going on with this. I felt as if I was standing in the middle of one of those big fissures in the middle of a glacier, because it was kind of white, it was kind of blue. And I was having this quality of stillness and total silence. It must be quiet in there, I don’t think I’ve ever been in one. I haven’t in this lifetime, but I’ve seen photographs,. And that’s what I could relate this to, that I was standing in the middle of this. And then as I was realizing that, I started lifting out of it. My awareness was coming up out of that. And when it did, all of my senses became alive again. And they were enlivened with something new, something different. This was a whole new experience for me. And  as I was coming out of this, coming through, however it was, all of my senses reached throughout the whole universe. My sight, my hearing, my touch, everything. It was it all filled in with my senses. All of what I could possibly be aware of.

Rick:  Does that mean you were seeing a lot of galaxies?

Mary:  Oh, yeah.

Rick:  Floating around?

Mary:  Yeah, total connection with all of the planets, all of the stars, all the way out. And I always say “all the way out” because in a sense it’s an experience of infinity. That there’s a lot more than what we can see. We know that from Hubble. They can zoom in on a black spot.

Rick:  The Hubble Deep Space Field, it’s this little tiny point at arm’s length. And you’re seeing billions of galaxies in that little point?

Mary:  Yeah, it’s that. And it’s still that, if you could stand at the furthest edge of one of those galaxies. Physicists are examining this now, thinking there’s more levels to creation than what we can see. And sure enough, they’ll figure it out. They need instruments fine enough or refined enough thinking, so that they can figure out how to quantify it.

Rick:  It’s interesting, because I’ve always thought of spiritual development as a scientific experiment in which our scientific instrument is this nervous system, which is a far more sophisticated instrument than any telescope that has ever been built, if we knew how to use it properly. You’re an example of someone who’s using that instrument to do some interesting exploration.

Mary:  Yeah, because as far out as you can see, you can also see far in.

Rick:  In, meaning small, teeny tiny atoms and molecules, or in a different sense?

Mary:  You can go that way , where you can introspect into the physiology. And the further in you go, the bigger it gets, which is kind of funny to say. But the space in between the atoms and the molecules is vast.

Rick:  Oh yeah, I’ve seen films and documentaries depicting that.

Mary:  Just as you look out into the stars at night, you can look into the body. You can divide any of those spaces in half, and those in half, and those in half, and keep on going that way.

Rick:  That’s interesting. I don’t want to get you off on a tangent if you haven’t wrapped up. There’s a number of beautiful thoughts that keep coming, we could spend a half an hour on each one, but feel free to steer the course as we go on here. I don’t want to take you off on tangents if you haven’t developed something, but I do have another question. Should I ask it or do you want to say more?

Mary:  No, go ahead.

Rick:  It’s interesting because I know you’ve done a lot of meditation over the years, a lot of spiritual practices, but these days you don’t do much of any formal spiritual practice, to my knowledge. And yet this thing has a life of its own, there’s this momentum going, which is kind of automatic and very powerful,. And very significant progress and unfoldment is taking place. But it’s like on autopilot now.

Mary:  Yeah, I’m constantly in meditation. It’s no different if I close my eyes and do the techniques that I was taught initially. It’s the same whether my eyes are open or if they’re closed. There was a fellow who came up to me backstage at one of the shows at the Civic Center, and said, “I saw your interview, it was great.” And he said, “I’ve got all these questions, but I don’t know what to ask you.”. And I said, “Let me ask you a question. When you practice meditation and you have the experience of what’s called transcending, which is becoming aware of awareness, do you transcend anymore?” And his eyes got big and filled up with an openness. They just filled with openness. And he said, “Why no, I don’t.” And I said, “There you go.” And he couldn’t say anything. He just stood there, and it was a Mahavakya for him. It was like “Oh, I get it. I don’t transcend anymore because I am. I’m transcending out. I’m aware of awareness here and when my eyes are closed.” It’s that experience.

Rick:  I could say that. Now I don’t want to get off on a whole tangent about whether people should meditate or not, but in my experience, meditation is still relevant because it’s this focused healing time. You’ve talked about the physiology, how we want to take care of it because it’s the vehicle which allows us to unfold all this. So when I meditate I feel I’m really fine-tuning the physiology and devoting some time exclusively to that. And then by the end of it, everything is a lot more fine-tuned. It’s like an analog radio where you need to keep turning the dial.

Mary:  Fine-tune it.

Rick:  Get it right on the station so there’s no static.

Mary:  Yeah. But there are obviously many people who have woken up without doing any techniques.

Rick:  Yeah, absolutely.

Mary:  Babies in the crib, which I mentioned in the first interview. It happens. You don’t necessarily need a technique. I’ve thought on and off that it’s just a blessing. You get this opening, and then it just rolls and rolls and rolls.

Rick:  Yeah. Well, Amma is a case in point. In her girlhood, she was meditating all the time and doing real intensive practices. And then at a certain point, it just wasn’t necessary anymore for her. But nonetheless, I am sure her experiences continue to evolve and unfold. I mean, she’s alive, therefore they must.

Mary:  Yeah. That connectedness that one experiences in a higher state of consciousness is really fulfilling. That’s why they call it fulfillment. There’s something there that is so beautiful. And as gentle as it is, it’s also very powerful.

Rick:  Yeah.

Mary:  I mean, if you’re connected with all that is throughout creation, with all of your senses, that means that you’re also connected with God.

Rick:  Let’s talk about God a little bit. And you also mentioned the word “celestial.” Let’s talk about those things for a few minutes, and what your experience is. Describe what you mean by celestial perception, and also what your feeling or perception of God is at this stage of the game.

Mary:  I guess I’ll start with another experience that I had, which allowed me to understand the celestial realms. I’ve seen different things throughout my life, spirits kind of coming and going, and I don’t really talk to people about it, because sometimes it was frightening. Sometimes it was like, “Wow, look at this.” And then, if you’ve never talked to anyone about those experiences, you’re afraid to, because you haven’t heard anybody else talk about them.

Rick:  Yeah, they think you’re nuts or something.

Mary:  Well, yeah, like, “Hi there.” So, I was in bed one night, and…

Rick:  Long time ago, or recently?

Mary:  About five years ago, maybe. And it felt like something just grabbed me by my whole heart, and pulled me up. It was like, “You need to see this. Sit up.”

Rick:  And did you literally sit up?

Mary:  I sat up. It felt like something pulled me up, and it was wonderful. It wasn’t scary at all. And I’m sitting up, and I open my eyes, and the whole room is filled with all these beings. And I’m like, “What in the world is going on?” This sounds pretty far out, but it’s my experience.

Rick:  People have these experiences. We should talk about it.

Mary:  Yeah. So, I know that I’m seeing something here that I’m supposed to know, I’m supposed to understand, for a reason.

Rick:  You’re going to tell us what kind of beings these were?

Mary:  Absolutely benevolent, wonderful, beautiful, human-like spirits, not in real fine detail.

Rick:  Male, female?

Mary:  Both.

Rick:  A mixture?

Mary:  Yeah, and almost no delineation between male and female, but the overall feeling was of this one, or this one, or this one, more male, more female, whatever. But all very, very present. And something interesting that connected me, in a sense, with understanding the celestial realm, is that the knowledge that I got from the experience, and there’s more to the experience than just that, but through looking at this room just absolutely packed full, and knowing that didn’t stop in this bedroom. It went all the way out. Packed full from here all the way. And my understanding was that I couldn’t exist without their existence, and also, they could not exist without my existence. They’re part of what upholds and maintains all of creation. You hear of the woodland elves that take care of the babbling brooks, and the trees, and the flowers, and yeah, they do. But they also take care of us. But by virtue of us just appreciating what is, we take care of them. Without them, we wouldn’t exist.

Rick:  And vice versa.

Mary:  Yes, it goes both ways. So that was that big tidbit of knowledge that I got from that.

Rick:  Were they there specifically to communicate something to you, or have some influence on you? Or would it be true to say that everybody, all six billion people in the world, if they could see it, would see a crowd in their bedroom every night?

Mary:  Yeah.

Rick:  Seems like there’s more of them than there are of us then, you know? A whole gang in your bedroom!

Mary:  Yeah, yeah.

Rick:  Overpopulation.

Mary:  Well, what it showed me, through that knowledge, is the connectedness that we have with all that is. It’s a ripple effect, you could say. If you’re laughing, the whole universe is laughing. If you’re crying, the universe is crying. You don’t cry alone, as that popular saying goes, “Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone”, it’s not true.

Rick:  But it must be that there was something special going on there. They must have been aware that you were aware of them, which ordinarily is not the case with people.

Mary:  Yeah, there was an exchange going on, a definite exchange that I was very aware of. And something interesting about it, earlier I was talking about how I could take one point out of you, or the air, or the table, or anything, and that contains the whole knowledge of everything that ever was, is, and will be. It’s all there. All the information is in every point of creation.

Rick:  If you can unpack it.

Mary:  Yeah, and that’s part of that cohesive quality of creation that keeps the planets from crashing into each other, even though they sometimes do. But it’s the thing that orchestrates it all. So what I understood from this experience was that connectedness. Say you’re one, and there’s one next to you, and there’s one next to you, and there’s one next to you.

Rick:  One what, person?

Mary:  One celestial being.

Rick:  Oh, I see.

Mary:  They’re all fully aware of everything that you are thinking, feeling, tasting, touching, all of that. They’re all aware of each other. They’re all saying something different, they all have a different job, but they are all. by that same token, like that one little particle, all aware of each other, all the way out, again.

Rick:  Unlike people who tend to get more insular, huh? You’re saying that they’re kind of aware of the connectedness all the time.

Mary:  Yeah, they’re aware of each other. So a celestial being that is standing next to you is also aware of everyone, all the way throughout the whole celestial realm. They’re all aware of each other.

Rick:  Continuously and simultaneously.

Mary:  Yes.

Rick:  That’s interesting because I remember people asking Maharishi about omniscience, and he said, “No, you have to have a celestial nervous system to have omniscience. Human nervous systems can know any one thing at a time, but if you want to know everything at once, you’ve got to have a celestial nervous system.”

Mary:  Yeah. Now, even though I consider that experience a celestial experience, I don’t believe I have a celestial nervous system.

Rick:  No, because you weren’t saying you did know everything.

Mary:  Right, I have the perception to be able to see that and to understand it. And it’s the understanding that is really the strong point of all of it. Knowing that any part of my physiology, which also goes all the way out in my consciousness, my body doesn’t stop here, it just keeps going, that that connectedness with wholeness is fully present always, eternally. So that’s why I believe that when the physical body stops functioning, the awareness that we have is still fully present and just keeps functioning in that regard. The individual might be gone, but the consciousness, the awareness is always there. Nothing can destroy it, like Einstein’s theory.

Rick:  Well, is the individual really gone, or is it just that the grosser vehicle of the individual is gone, but there’s still some subtle vehicle that defines this individual as opposed to that individual?

Mary:  Yes, the quality.

Rick:  And that subtle vehicle maybe gets reincarnated in another gross body later on.

Mary:  The quality of Rickiness will still be Rick after, because there’s thought forms that you have, there’s energy that you have, and that’s all part of that whole thing that makes you an individual.

Rick:  And also, if you think of this whole endeavor of living as an evolutionary journey, where we’re just acquiring or rising to higher and higher levels of knowledge, understanding, and so on, it would be a shame if the whole thing just ended with death. What do we do, start all over again, or is that the end of it? I once saw a cartoon where a guy was standing on the street looking at a sign on a bank. It said, “First reincarnation bank. You can’t take it with you, so leave it with us until you return.” So we take our chips, we cash them in, we pick them up again next time and keep playing.

Mary:  Yeah, it’s interesting.

Rick:  So back to these celestial beings, if it doesn’t seem too tangential. What do they actually do? You mentioned they helped to run the universe, but you made it sound like they just stand around in people’s bedrooms. What are they doing on a day-to-day basis to earn their keep, so to speak?

Mary:  I think that whole thing was that they all have a job. They all have something going on, someone to watch over, something to do. I think that it was just that brief moment where I was allowed to understand through my vision what actually is going on. Now, that’s not the only level of the celestial realms. There’s more levels as well. There’s also the really big guys and the really little guys.

Rick:  Have you had glimpses of those?

Mary:  Well, the biggest I’ve seen has probably been about 40 feet tall, maybe 50.

Rick:  What’s the significance of big in this regard? Bigger responsibility?

Mary:  Bigger jobs, yeah. Because somebody’s got to be watching over the galaxy.

Rick:  Right. And I imagine that wouldn’t be a 40-foot guy, that would be a real big guy.

Mary:  Probably even bigger.

Rick:  I can imagine.

Mary:  Yeah, and when I saw those big ones, I was driving, and I could see something. It was twilight, and I’m looking up, and I looked under, and I looked again, and there are four of them, they’re standing there, and I’m like, what are they doing? It’s like they’re doing their job.

Rick:  Well, I imagine that a lot of these experiences that people report of aliens showing up in their bedrooms at night could be this. It’s not necessarily guys that came in spaceships, it could be that they’re tuning into some celestial thing.

Mary:  Yeah, well these weren’t guys from spaceships, for sure. And I’ve had more of that, where I’ve seen the whole room filled, other rooms that I’ve been in.

Rick:  How about nasty ones? I mean, if you’re in some negative place or something like that, do you ever see the blue meanies?

Mary:  I have, but I don’t put my attention there, because what you put your attention on can grow. So my general guideline is if I see anything like that, it’s like a person that you don’t want to be around, you just ignore them. I mean, everybody’s beautiful in some way, so even these guys must be.

Rick:  Ones only a mother could love.

Mary:  I guess. But they have their jobs too, and it’s not something that I care to dwell on. I can acknowledge their presence just enough to acknowledge it, and then put my attention elsewhere. I never thought I’d be talking about this!

Rick:  That’s right, you never know where these things are going to go. Now I’m kind of thinking of “Ghost”, with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze.

Mary:  Oh, that was a beautiful story.

Rick:  How about the big guy himself? I mean, how about God, or whatever that may be? What has been your experience so far of that level of creation?

Mary:  I’m looking, and I think that there’s a little recognition, but not enough that I can say I’ve looked into the face of God. But I think that’s where this heads. It’s not God-consciousness, that’s different. This is totally different.

Rick:  I was going to ask that, because, especially in the TM world, you have cosmic consciousness, God-consciousness, and unity-consciousness. And I used to understand God-consciousness as meaning you really actually experience God, whatever God is. If that’s not what God-consciousness is, what is God-consciousness, and what would it have to be to really experience God?

Mary:  I think God-consciousness, according to our little…

Rick:  TM cosmology.

Mary:  Yeah, it’s more being aware that God exists in all things, that he can help to create, maintain, everything.

Rick:  Not just conceptually, but some kind of perceptually?

Mary:  Maybe not even perception, it’s just more of an appreciation of that, I think.

Rick:  Maharishi always talked of it in terms of celestial perception, seeing the subtle value of the relative world, which I suppose is what you’re discussing here, having these subtle perceptions.

Mary:  Yeah, but I think I’ve been through that stage.

Rick:  Golden glasses, the whole deal.

Mary:  Yeah, I’ve been through that stage, so this is more complex, more complete. It’s just totally different. Same with what we call unity, that, like I said, you’re one with everything, and then the “with” drops off, and there’s just one. There’s just a oneness. The experience for me, even though it’s still new, the easiest way I can describe it is that all of those points of creation are full of themselves, of creation. They’re all packed full. It’s being aware of all of those, all of that, in terms of wholeness, in terms of the whole picture. The whole picture is here, the whole picture is here, the whole picture is here. I had an experience of this probably about seven years ago. A  lot of my experiences are visual, so I meditated, got up out of meditation, and I’m sitting there, and I see, in my mind’s eye, this huge golden egg, and I’m like, “Pfft!” And it’s floating out in space somewhere, where I don’t know. And in just part of a second, the whole thing collapsed into one point. And as soon as it got to that one point, it exploded into billions of points of light, filling the whole universe. And I’m looking at this, and I’m understanding what I’m seeing. I didn’t know what, but this is how visually I’m seeing this. And every single point, no matter where I looked at any of these points of light, was the center of the universe. So I’m seeing this, and I’m understanding what I’m looking at. So then comes along another realization, thinking of the scientific discovery of the Big Bang, that was how it happened, in just a fraction of a second. And I’m like, “Huh, I think that’s what I might have witnessed, a birth of a universe, maybe.”

Rick:  Not necessarily the one that happened to our universe 14 billion years ago, but…

Mary:  Don’t know. There wasn’t a calendar along with it.

Rick:  Huh. Interesting. So it’s hard to say. I suppose a lot of things happen that are hard to categorize or clearly define. They’re just like these fascinating, interesting things that are developing.

Mary:  Yeah, I’m just shown this, and I’m fascinated with it. I’ve got a strong sense of science. I love science. So I read some of the journals, and there’s one fellow, Max Tegmark, who I’ve had a dialogue back and forth with. He talks about the universes being like bubbles. Here’s a universe, and then there’s one right next to it, and then another one. So I wrote to him, and I said…

Rick:  Kind of like frog eggs.

Mary:  Yeah. So I said, “How about if all the universes intersect like a Venn diagram would?” Venn diagrams are used in logic, but they’re also used in science, where here’s a whole universe, say, and you represent it by a circle. And here’s another universe represented by another circle. Well, they intersect somehow, somewhere. They all intersect with each other, all the universes that are possible, however many that could be. So when I wrote back to him, I proposed that to him. I said, “How about if they all intersect? That’s my experience. I’m walking through many universes all at once, including my own that I’m aware of on this level.” And he just didn’t know what to make of it. So he’s thinking about it. I’m wondering if he’ll come up with some hypothesis of multiple universes that actually intersect with each other, instead of just ones that don’t interact with each other. I believe that they totally interact. That’s my experience anyway.

Rick:  Whenever you have a new experience, do you feel an imperative to try to figure out what its significance is for you? Do you feel like, “There must be a reason I’m having this, and it’s my obligation to figure out, come up with that reason, to understand why I’m having this.” Or do you feel like it’s sufficient to just say, “Well, that’s cool,” and move on to the next one?

Mary:  Well, when I have an experience, I know there’s something that will become clear to me, either during the experience, after the experience, or at some point down the road. I’ll go, “Oh yeah, I understand that now because of another experience that I have, or an understanding that I’ll have.” And I think these days, pretty much what happens is, I have an experience, and at the same time I understand it, and I have knowledge with it. It’s all together in one.

Rick:  It all happens at once.

Mary:  Yeah, it all happens at once. So I’m not wondering, you know…

Rick:  And that just happens spontaneously. You don’t have to work at it.

Mary:  Because I just understand it. It’s interesting for me, because I can write better than I can speak. It’s always easier for me to write. So I write a lot of things down, and through that I get a clearer understanding. But the clarity that I have pretty much is there along with the experience. I have this huge experience going on, and to try to vocalize it for me sometimes is very difficult.

Rick:  You’re doing okay here. It’s a good practice to try, I think.

Mary:  Oh yeah. What’s been going on now for the last several weeks, it’s probably been maybe a month and a half, that’s the thing, the time is just kind of erased. I did write it down briefly, and with writing it, my understanding gets more clear. I mean, the experience is fully there. I’ve got this awareness. I know what it is. But then I’m trying to describe it to you in words. Maybe if I read all sorts of Vedic texts or something, I could say, “Oh, well, it’s this and this and this.” And you would understand that intellectually, or you experience it, and I don’t have that.

Rick:  I was thinking about it a few minutes ago, when you were talking about different stages and levels, and I was thinking there is a natural tendency, at least in me, to want to categorize things.

Mary:  To want to know where you are.

Rick:  Yeah, exactly. What’s going on? What’s the whole realm of possibilities? And where am I? What stage am I on that progression? And personally, I couldn’t say. For thousands of years, there have been people who have dedicated their lives to trying to create that road map. But it’s funny because different cultures have created different road maps, and people have made attempts to try to intersect the road maps, to figure out to what extent they correlate, or correspond. And then there are people who say, “It’s a whole new ball game,” and that the enlightenment of 2,000 years ago is not totally adequate to explain what’s happening now in this post-modern culture.

Mary:  Oh, I don’t know about that.

Rick:  I don’t know.

Mary:  I think they’re talking about the same thing. If you read Rumi, if you read Nisargadatta, some of them are even older. Even Socrates, Plato, they would allude to consciousness in a way in their writings. And if you have that consciousness, you can see it right away. You can go, “Holy cow, look at that, look at that.” They’re alluding to that, but maybe their experience wasn’t clear enough to be able to really vocalize it.

Rick:  Or the translator’s experience wasn’t very clear.

Mary:  That’s true, too.

Rick:  Because all this stuff is filtered through translators who may not have a clue of what the guy was actually talking about.

Mary:  But you can get a taste of it. And it’s funny, because I can read passages in books or pick up a book and leaf through it, and it’s about being awake, and I’ll read it, and I’m like, “Whoever wrote this wasn’t awake.” You can just tell, you can feel it. And it’s like, this is not truth, this is speculation, this is intellectualization. And there’s plenty of that out there. But there’s also plenty of truth out there as well.

Rick:  Seek and ye shall find.

Mary:  Yeah. And I’ve been raising kids for the last 20-some odd years, so my time to read has been very brief. So even though that goal was always there, when I finally started awakening, my children were very excited about it. Because I was telling them all about it. It’s like, “Okay, I’m going to tell you, because you need to know this, because you might be experiencing it” and sure enough…

Rick:  Cool. So you have three daughters, right? And they’re all pretty appreciative of what you have to say to them?

Mary:  Yeah, it’s kind of neat, because it looks like two of them are awake, and we talk about it, and one of them is having really wonderful experiences. She says, “Mom, it just keeps getting bigger and more.” And she’s all excited about it. But she’s in college right now, so she doesn’t have time to really think about it, doesn’t have time to talk about it much. She’s just focused on her studies, which is what I want her to be. But when she comes home, we’ll take some time to ourselves, and we do talk, and it’s really wonderful.

Rick:  We should have the two of you on, or the three of you, sometime.

Mary:  Oh, that would be fun. They’re pretty shy about it, though.

Rick:  Yeah, I know.

Mary:  And they’re in their own lives and experiencing it, and for them, it’s a natural state. So what’s there to talk about? This is who I am, I know who I am, blah blah blah, you know?

Rick:  Yeah, but there is a lot to talk about if you unfold it. There’s a whole group of people in the spiritual scene these days who talk endlessly, but they always say the one thing, which is just basically you wake up, and after that there’s nothing more to say. And all this talk about progress and strata and further development and all that is a crock, because all there is to it is you know who you are, and that’s the end of it. And, personally I think, how can they say that? Are they stuck? Because I know so many people for whom there’s this continual unfoldment, even though they’ve clearly experienced what these folks are talking about. But that’s just the foundation.

Mary:  Yeah, a lot of people wake up and they get so excited, and they get so engrossed in that, that that’s where they plateau out.

Rick:  Yeah, and there’s almost this arrogance that is dismissive of people who do talk of further development and strata.

Mary:  Yeah, it can happen.

Rick:  And higher and lower and this and that, because there’s this sort of fundamentalism or this sort of attitude that “we’ve got the answer here and this is all there is to it, and anything else is just complication. People are just indulging”.

Mary:  And then maybe, or maybe not, they’ll have further openings, further development. But I understand where you are. I’ve heard and seen videos of others and it’s just like I wish for them that they will have more fulfillment. They think that’s fulfillment, but oh boy, there’s a lot more. And the really cool thing about that, to mention again, is that people have a different physiology than me. I mean, obviously you’re male, I’m female. So that’s the beginning of the differences in our physiology. Then there’s also the subtler levels of your physiology that can maintain a certain level of consciousness. And based on that physiology, your experience of consciousness can be totally different than mine. Then there’s those common little threads. I mean, I’ve had some experiences that people say, “God, I wish I had that.” But then I’ll see other people or talk to other people that are having certain experiences that I would love to have as well. And it doesn’t mean that I have to have that in order to be fulfilled. But I’m looking at it like, “That’s really cool. That would be pretty neat.” But I’m satisfied with what I have and what I know. And if it stops here, that’s fine. I’ve said that all along. If it stops here, I’m fine. But I know that it doesn’t. And for me at least, that progression just continues. And I think the important thing is, again, that intention and the attention to your experience. Because if you take your eye off the ball, it doesn’t keep rolling.

Rick:  Yeah. If you get totally caught up in other stuff, then it sort of atrophies.

Mary:  Yeah. I just went through, I wouldn’t call it a health problem, but my physiology was doing something that wasn’t allowing me to have a full experience of what I knew that I was having. So I took care of it. It took a few months to straighten things out and get everything cleared up and fine. Now my experience is deepening and broadening continually. And I think that with my awareness now of the attention and intention,I’d be surprised if I didn’t continue to experience more, more knowledge, more connection with wholeness.

Rick:  On the other hand, we’re all going to get old and we may have strokes or we may get senile or whatever, and eventually we’re going to die. And I don’t find that discouraging in light of what you were just saying about needing to have a finely tuned physiology. Because maybe it’s just a belief, maybe I’m just optimistic, but it’s like I was saying earlier, it’s like you’re putting money in the bank as you grow in consciousness or in spiritual development. And even if this vehicle is no longer up to the task, at a certain point, 80, 90 years old or whatever, it’s an ongoing journey. I really feel that. There are many cultures which have said just that. Others would dispute it and say, “Oh, you’re just fantasizing, it’s just wishful thinking because you want to have a sense of immortality.” But for me there’s a kind of a certainty about it that actually, in a way, it eliminates fear of death and fear of aging and so on.

Mary:  I think no matter how developed you are spiritually, because you’re human, because you have a physiology, you do have a fear of death. It’s the self-preservation that would kick in.

Rick:  Yeah, if somebody came into the room with a gun, our adrenaline would start to go and so on and so forth. But in terms of our calmer moments, the bigger picture thing, some people have a dread in their calmer moments because they think, “This is all I am, and this is going to end, oh my God”. I remember reading once that Raymond Burr, who played Perry Mason, was so afraid of death that on his deathbed he forced himself to sit up for several days and not allow himself to…

Mary:  Because he didn’t want to die.

Rick:  Well, he probably hastened it, but he was fighting it because he was terrified of letting go.

Mary:  I’ve been through that.

Rick:  You personally?

Mary:  When I was probably in high school, I’d get these fear rushes like, “Oh my God, one day I’m not going to breathe anymore.” And that was the localized self, just saying, “Ahh.”

Rick:  But I’ve heard it said by various spiritual teachers that if you’ve dealt with this whole thing in the right way, impending death can actually be a joyous occasion rather than a fearful one because you’re actually moving on in the adventure to a whole new phase.

Mary:  Oh yeah, to be relieved of the mortal coil. I’ve read one person’s experience quite recently. It was at my father-in-law’s house celebrating his 91st birthday, and there was a book on the bookcase about near-death experiences. It’s funny, I read exactly what someone had told me about. Someone was in Europe, got food poisoning, was just so sick they couldn’t even raise their hand up to reach the telephone to call somebody. They knew they were dying, and they couldn’t do a thing about it. So they died. Left the body, went zooming off, and did the whole thing out there with going to the light, and seeing relatives that had passed before, and all that. But then there was a point when you’re kind of told, “No, you’re not done. You have to go back.” Well, this person’s experience and the person’s experience that I read about was that coming back into the physical body was like crawling back into a cold lump of clay. So the freedom that we have without the physical body is very uplifting. So often I’ve heard when people are at that moment when they’re leaving their physical body, they smile. They’re happy, they’re free, and it shows. It shows in the face. If you’re in a lot of pain, I don’t know if that’s the case. Maybe. I haven’t attended.

Rick:  Anyway, we could go on for another hour trying to understand what you mean by your body fills the universe. Because people are going to say, “What does that mean? Her liver’s on the moon or something?”

Mary:  It’s an awareness. It’s all tied into awareness, what you’re aware of. So when I say my body fills the universe, it’s because I’m aware that my body fills the universe in the sense of, “No, my liver’s not on the moon. My liver is actually everywhere.” I recall hearing that other people could see inside their bodies. And I thought, “That’s really interesting. I’d like to see inside my body.” I’ve seen inside other people’s bodies, but not ever my own. Then several weeks ago, I was out walking the neighborhood, and I was looking inside my own body for the first time. And I was like, “This is really amazing.” And what I’m seeing, this will help explain this connectedness. What I’m looking at is one of my bones, and I’m realizing, “Oh, that’s my bone”. It was my femur. So I’m looking at it, and I’m seeing it just as though I’m looking at a movie of it. I’m seeing how it functions and so forth. And then I’m realizing that it’s bathed in this golden light. It’s almost like syrup on top of the bone. But then it’s also strands, if you look closer, strands of light, and there they are. And if you look closer, it’s little particles of light. And this energy, this connectedness, is what I’m talking about that allows everything to exist. It holds it together. It makes it cohesive. It makes it understandable. It makes it knowable. And an analogy I was just thinking of that might help explain it a little bit is, here’s a string of beads, and they’re all part of a necklace. But imagine if this string of beads could expand into an infinite number of beads but still all part of the same necklace. Every bead is part of this necklace. Without one bead, it wouldn’t be a necklace anymore. So that bead’s always there. It has a placeholder in the strand, and without it, it’s not a necklace. So how I experience consciousness is that everything fits perfectly. Like I was saying, it’s a puzzle with no pieces in a sense. It all fits together perfectly, perfectly orchestrated, but the bead that’s at the end of this necklace knows about the bead that’s the third one up on this necklace, and so on and so forth. All the beads are aware of each other.

Rick:  Are we the beads? Is that what you’re saying?

Mary:  Particles of us.

Rick:  Particles of us. But then there’s 6 billion of us on this planet, and so on and so forth outwards, are you saying that the whole thing is like one huge, giant, interconnected arrangement of beads?

Mary:  Yes, and each one of those beads could be one particle. So on the tip of a pin, there’s 6 billion particles or whatever, and each one of those particles is aware, each one specific particle is aware of every single other particle that exists, and they are in total communication with each other as well, because each one contains all of the knowledge of creation.

Rick:  And so you’re saying that that is in reality the way the universe works, is that every little particle of it contains the whole, and that if we can be attuned to that, then we can have the whole knowledge of creation in everything that we perceive?

Mary:  Through our senses, yes. So that’s part of my experience, that’s what’s going on is that understanding and that knowledge of how my senses relate to all that is.

Rick:  Cool. [laughter]

Mary:  Yeah, it’s a mouthful.

Rick:  That’s great. Well, I think that might be a good place to stop. They don’t like us to make these interviews too long.

Mary:  No, it’s been 5 minutes, hasn’t it?

Rick:  Yeah, I think so.

Rick:  And we’ll do it again, because in the nature of the way you’re going on, it’ll be appropriate every 6 months or whatever to do another one and see what’s happening.

Mary:  Yeah, I’m fully expecting that, again, everything will turn around inside out or broaden out or something. There’s always something going on. And you know, sometimes there’s periods of time where it’s like something will happen and then you just have a homeostasis. And I think what happens is, based on what you’re aware of, based on your physiology, the physiology of the senses, there’s a fine-tuning that’s going on. And as that tuning goes on, then you’re able to maintain and sustain more awareness. I think that initially, when I had this huge opening standing out on the porch and everything disappeared, if my physiology would have been able to sustain that, it would have been integrated at that time into my awareness.

Rick:  Right, but it wasn’t.

Mary:  And knowing, no. And you know my physiology has these vibrations that go on.

Rick:  Yeah.

Mary:  And I’ll feel them, I’ll be aware of them, and that’s one of my personal signals, when I know that something’s happening. It’s like I’m getting tuned up, like a tuning fork. Something will bang against me and then the vibration of my body changes.

Rick:  Yeah. I think it works that way on all levels of the body. I’m doing this program, there’s a website called 100 Push-ups, and it’s this training program where you work your way up to being able to do 100 push-ups. And you don’t just do as many as you can. You do a certain number, and then you rest, and you do another number, and then you rest, and then you skip a day, and then you print. When you complete everything for week one, you print out week two, and you go through that. But there’s this rest and activity cycle that enables your muscles to acquire the ability to do that. And I think the same is true of our spiritual muscles, or the nervous system and its ability to reflect the kind of things and stabilize the kind of things you’ve been talking about. It naturally goes in stages of progression and surges, and then integration, and then another surge. But most people seem to experience it that way.

Mary:  Yeah, and that’s why we don’t meditate continually.

Rick:  24/7.

Mary:  I mean, some places they do, because that’s their choice. But I think you need the activity to stabilize what’s already going on in your body, so that you can just keep that equilibrium going on. It’s important, actually.

Rick:  Yogastah Karu Karmani, established in yoga, perform action.

Mary:  Yeah.  Well, this has been interesting. Way in the back of my mind, since you said, “I’d like to do another interview,” I guess I’ve kind of been thinking about it, but I really haven’t. I just thought whatever comes up, it’ll just come up. And I know that it might be a little far out for some people to hear.

Rick:  It makes it interesting.

Mary:  But that’s just the tip of my iceberg. I’ve got so much stuff that’s happened, and as it becomes more clear, I’ll share it with you.

Rick:  Yeah. And one person’s far out, is another person’s mundane. So I feel like people should just say as much as they’re comfortable saying. And for some people it might be a stretch, and for other people it might be elementary. But it’s just like it makes it interesting to have a whole different story told every week.

Mary:  Well, I figure if I can help just one person understand what they’re experiencing, done.

Rick:  Oh, yeah. Well, there’s a whole gang that are really into these interviews, and I suspect it’ll grow. There’s also a chat group where there’s all sorts of conversation going on all the time. And there’s a blog called batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the gas pump. And if anyone listening to this or watching this has a question for Mary, you can post it. Each guest, when they do an interview, has their own little section on batgap.com, and Mary will have a section. And you can go into that section, and there’s a place to post a question or have a discussion about what she was talking about. So if anybody posts a question, I’ll alert you, and you can go in there and respond.

Mary:  Yeah, you’ll have to.

Rick:  I’ll let you know. And you can go in there and respond to it. This is the case for all the 16 or so interviews that we’ve done so far. So feel free to go to batgap.com, and you’ll also see there links to other shows that you might find interesting, other spiritual-type interview shows, and links to various other things. There’s a number of different tentacles to this octopus.

Mary:  Well, I’m glad you’re doing this, because I think by interviewing different people, who obviously have different experiences — I was going to go through and look at all the interviews, you know? And I started looking at one, and I went, “No, that’s their experience, and they can have their experience.” And so I didn’t want it to flavor mine at all, as far as what I would bring up or say.

Rick:  Yeah, I mean, everyone should just tell their own story. And we’re all sense organs of the infinite, and it wouldn’t be God’s style to want every single sense organ to be perceiving things exactly the same way.

Mary:  Yeah, let’s all talk about the same thing.

Rick:  Oh, um…

Mary:  Yeah, where you have all the same questions for everybody. What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite food?

Rick:  I tried using a standard list of questions for a while and asking the same questions to every guest.

Mary:  It’s difficult.

Rick:  It got boring after a while. I had to stop it. But anyway, this has been great, and we’ll do it again. And thank you to those who are watching or have been listening, and stay tuned. We’ll keep doing them. And get involved if you feel like you have questions. There’s various ways of watching this, podcasts and so on. You’ll find all that on batgap.com. It’s too much to say every week. And you’ll see some information about that and the titles as they roll. Or if you’re just listening to this as an audio, all you need to do is go to batgap.com and you can use that as a springboard. So thanks a lot, and we’ll see you next week. This has been Rick Archer on Buddha at the Gas Pump, speaking with Mary Foster.