Mary Reed Interview

Summary

Mary Reed describes the collision between an ordinary professional life and a series of overwhelming, unbidden mystical experiences. The discussion also examines suicidal despair, spiritual emergencies, and the need for compassionate support that respects both mental health and spiritual dimensions.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can someone understand sudden mystical or metaphysical experiences?
• What should a person do when spiritual experiences become overwhelming or isolating?
• How can suicidal despair be met with compassion while encouraging help and continued living?
• Why is it important for mental-health professionals to understand spiritual emergencies?

Key takeaways

• Unexplained spiritual experiences can be deeply destabilizing without language, context, or support.
• People facing suicidal despair need compassionate connection and practical professional help.
• Mystical experiences should not automatically be dismissed as mental illness.
• Mental-health professionals need training in spiritual emergencies and unusual states of consciousness.
• Accessible conversations about mysticism can help people feel less isolated and confused.

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. There have been nearly 340 of them now over the past six years. So if this is new to you and you want to check out others, go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu.

I will say this in the beginning also: there’s a donate button on the site, and we rely on the support of appreciative listeners and viewers to enable us to do this.

❤️ Meeting Mary at the nunnery

Rick: My guest today is Mary Reed. Mary is an “Accidental Mystic,” which is the title of her book, who, following 11 years of profound involuntary visions and insights into divine realms, surrendered her executive life in Washington, D.C., to explore her spiritual gifts in a remote Buddhist nunnery in India.

She grew up without any interest in religion, but with an innate knowing that humans had more ability to access greater wisdom than most seem to realize. She’s originally from the U.S. Southwest, but spent most of her career directing global health care programs and creating nonprofit partnerships throughout America and Africa.

Today she divides her time between Thosamling Nunnery in India, where she is often immersed in silence; Cambodia, where she works with Wide Open Wings, a small charity she co-founded; and traveling to speak with a variety of audiences to share her story as a way to illuminate the common ground of love and precious divinity in all of us, and to inspire joyful collective resurrection and remembrance with her unique view of our beautifully awakening world.

And as you can tell, Mary is a good writer because she wrote what I just read. Her book was very well written, and it’s kind of a page-turner. When it starts, you’re telling the story of how you very methodically and carefully were in the process of committing suicide by taking a whole lot of pills. In the book, you don’t talk too much about what led up to that decision, although you do allude to financial difficulties and relationship difficulties and stuff like that. But perhaps you could start by telling us your story, wherever you’d like to start, and we’ll see where we go with it.

Mary: Okay. Well, first of all, thank you very much for the invitation. I’m really delighted to be here. I love your work, as I was telling you before. I really love what you do, and I’m so appreciative of all that you offer all of us. So thank you.

Rick: Oh, thank you. I want you to start by telling us actually where you are right now, what time it is there, and what it actually takes to get to that place, because it’s an amazing thing that we’re even able to do this.

Mary: It is. It’s totally an amazing thing. So I’m at Thosamling Nunnery, which is a really tiny, remote nunnery. It’s located in the rice fields. You have to walk ten minutes after you’re let off at a little bridge by a taxi. And I’m in the main—

Rick: In northern India, right?

Mary: In northern India. It’s about—by bus, it would be 12 hours from Delhi. And then I’m in the—Actually, I’m in the abbess’s office, and everybody here at the nunnery was very excited about this interview, so they fixed it all up for us. It’s really a very, very simple little nunnery. So that’s where I am. And actually, to make this happen, they increased the Internet services just for this interview because it’s really very remote here.

Rick: That’s great. Those little guys outside are running at double speed on the treadmills, getting it to—

Mary: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so that’s where you are, and that in itself is interesting, and we’ll talk about why you ended up there. But let’s go back a bit and start at the beginning.

👁️ The voice and the first visions

Mary: Yeah. So, the reason—You asked first about, or you commented first about, the suicide. That suicide came about because me being here in this nunnery is really, really, really far from the life that I was living for many years.

I was an executive in Washington. I had a life that I really enjoyed, and I didn’t have any religious background ever at all, nor did I have any interest in any kind of religious topics. I was never a seeker, never had a lot of questions. I never read the Bible, and I didn’t know anything about other religions.

In the summer of 2000, I began hearing a voice, and that voice said that I was supposed to be doing something very important. I tried to ignore the voice, but it just kept getting more persistent and more pronounced. After six months of that, there was a series of events—

Rick: Let me just interrupt. So, “voice”—I presume you mean just sort of an intuitive prompting, or was it sort of like a Charlton Heston movie booming voice? Was it actually audibly inside your head, or just kind of more like an impulse?

Mary: You know, I think the way that I phrase it in my book was that it is more like—you know when a bass singer hits a bass note, like a really hard note, and you feel a little after-sound vibration? That’s what it felt like. It was more like a packet of information that’s interpreted as a vibration, and it was very, very, very clear.

It kept coming to me again and again and again, and every single time it would say the exact same thing. That voice said, “You’re supposed to be doing something very important.” After six months of that, there was a series of events that I’m sure we’ll talk about, which led to my first metaphysical event. Then the gates just flung open to all of these metaphysical abilities.

When that happened, it was incredibly confusing to me because everything was related to God and Jesus and Buddha and angels and the divine realms, and I had no context for any of that because I had no religious background. So I was really very, very confused. And—

Rick: So, specifically, you had a metaphysical event and everything was related to God and Jesus and Buddha. What were you actually experiencing that caused you to realize that everything was related to Jesus and Buddha, and what was that metaphysical event?

Mary: Well, the first metaphysical event was—I went to find out what this voice was. I went to see a friend of mine who’s a psychotherapist, and she specializes in near-death experiences and that sort of stuff, in Arkansas.

I went to see her to get help with figuring this voice out, but at the same time, I had already, just a few days before I went to see her, had this sudden realization—this really profound realization—that I had forgotten something really important. I knew that those two things were connected.

So I went to her to get help with this. I don’t mention this in the book, but I’ll tell you: when I was on the plane flying from Washington, D.C., to Arkansas to see her, I was trying to figure out what could be so important that something kept prompting me to do something very important—or this thing that I’d forgotten.

On the plane, I had this notion somehow that I must have forgotten something like, “I know the secret to purifying water.” Like some very simple little—I know, it’s silly—some simple little thing that, if I imagined it, I could help so many people if I knew something really, really simple like that. That is exactly what was in my head when I went to see her, and that’s the sort of scale that I was thinking on. It was probably something like water. And—

Rick: Because you were kind of doing that sort of thing, trying to help with AIDS in Africa and things like that.

Mary: Yeah. At this time, I was actually doing clinical research in respiratory medicine and AIDS.

Rick: Oh, that’s right. Yeah.

Mary: But, you know, I’ve always done work to help people, so I thought it had to be something to help people. When I actually saw her, she put me under—she had just started putting me under hypnosis, and I went into this event which ultimately involved going into the body of Jesus at his moment of crucifixion.

In that event, I learned everything. Suddenly, I just knew everything about the evolution of man up to that point. Then I knew everything that was happening in the world at that moment of the crucifixion—not just around the crucifixion scene itself, but everything that was happening. Then I could watch as everything unfolded from that point forward to the present day. So it was essentially—

Rick: So you say you knew everything in the world that was happening. Do you mean in minute detail? Like you knew what some guy in China was doing and what was happening at the southern tip of Africa? Or more like a broad-strokes kind of sense of where the world was and the trends of time and all that?

Mary: Yeah, the latter. But it’s—the scale of it is just not fathomable. It was knowing everything, but also embodying all of the nuances of everything that was happening at that time and everything that had led up to that moment.

It was knowing everything, but also embodying all of the nuances of everything that was happening.

Rick: Okay. And this is sort of a silly question. I’m not going to ordinarily interrupt you as much as I am right now, but I’ll let you get rolling. For some reason, this silly question has been kicking around my head since I read your book: do you think that Jesus was aware that some chick from the future was kind of crashing his experience there and tuning into it, or is this something that you just tuned into and it had nothing to do with his subjective experience?

Mary: Well, in that moment, I did not have the identity as Mary. I was aware of myself, but I didn’t have the identity of Mary. I had the identity of Jesus on the cross and Christ in the spirit form then. So there was no separation between his knowledge of his own being and me within him. So, does that answer your question?

Rick: Kind of. I mean, yeah. So it’s not like Jesus—the man 2,000 years ago, being crucified—was aware that people from the future, namely you, were tuning into what he was experiencing. It was just—That’s probably too rational and linear an explanation of what was actually going on?

Mary: No, it was very much me being present in that moment. Essentially, I wouldn’t have been from the future in that moment, if that makes sense.

Rick: Yeah. And so in that scene, that was very much me understanding the world before Christianity, with the birth of Christianity, and then the evolution of Christianity from the perspective of Christ.

So this is the kind of—That scene was three and a half hours. Then the next day, she took me back in a regressive hypnosis. We went back in a different way, and it was a completely different scene, but again in the ethereal realms, meeting angels and a godlike being and other things, in another three, almost three and a half hours.

So that weekend began a series of these really profound events, but almost all of them were related to the origins of something that we think of as divine truth. For example, the origins of what we would consider the universe, the origins of Buddhism, the origins of thought and of fear and other things. You were going to ask something?

Rick: Well, just why do you suppose you were being shown all this? There must be a reason, right? I would say.

Mary: Yeah. Well, it would just be conjecture on my part at this point. I have not been shown specifically, “You need to know this.” I mean, in the big picture, related to my life’s work, about coming here to be able to bridge the ethereal realms and the physical realm, that is my purpose. That’s why I came.

One would think that, as part of my course in this destiny, this would be how it’s going to play out.

Rick: Yeah, because my sense is that if you had this sort of nagging prompting that you were supposed to be doing something, then there was some sort of higher intelligence—and given what you subsequently experienced—some sort of higher intelligences prompting you. So when you had these hypnotic sessions and began experiencing all this stuff, I would assume that you were being shown the things they wanted you to be shown, so that you could have the kind of education you needed to do whatever you were subsequently doing or were going to do.

Mary: Yeah, I think that’s a fair statement. And it feels to me like they just sort of threw me off the deepest end, and said, “We’re going to start there.”

Rick: Yeah.

Mary: And so this is how the whole thing has progressed. Every single time that these things have happened—and the only time that it happened under hypnosis was those first two times—I began to spontaneously have these things start happening. And every time that they’ve happened, it’s been all the way to the fundamental origin of something. In this case, for example, the origins of Christianity.

When two worlds became impossible to hold

And so the challenge that I had—going back to the original comment about the suicide—was that I had a very big life in Washington, D.C. I was very busy. I had a lot of projects and programs around the country and around the world. I lived very much a normal executive life without any kind of spiritual context to anything.

Having all of this stuff come into my life that I couldn’t talk about—it’s not something that you can just tell people at the water cooler over the weekend—I didn’t know how to talk about it. I also didn’t know how to hold it, and I didn’t know what to do with it. So it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

There was a large piece of me that was feeling quite insane with the profound, unspeakable nature of all of these things. Trying to hold my two worlds in balance was really very, very difficult. So I kept trying to seek help. I saw allopathic doctors and acupuncturists and shamans and various kinds of healers all over the world, and no one could help me understand what was happening. They couldn’t help me talk about it, and they couldn’t help me know what to do with it.

The further and further along I got in trying to seek help, the more failures I kept having over and over again. Then, around 2008 or 2009, all of the normalcy in my life and everything that I had been very successful in just began to crash. Everything—my relationship, my home, my work, my family, my finances—every single aspect of the normalcy of my life came crashing down in very certain, point-of-no-return ways.

At the same time, the spiritual piece was just pushing higher and higher and higher. So when the balance tipped upside down, I made a decision that what must be happening in my life was that this was all a sign that the work I was supposed to do came from the divine realms. That was nothing at all that I had been shown. It was just a decision that I made in my massive state of despair.

That’s when I made the decision to end my life with a drug overdose. Ultimately, it was March 23, 2011.

Suicide, despair, and the need for compassionate help

Rick: I want to dwell on this a little bit because I have pretty strong opinions about suicide, and I’m sure you do too at this point. My mother tried to commit suicide three times, taking massive overdoses of phenobarbital, which my father needed to take for his epilepsy.

I have had three very good friends who were ardent spiritual seekers and who committed suicide—two by gun and one by self-immolation. A couple of those guys had been living on a monastic program that I had once been on and had been really applying themselves, going at it intensely, seeking enlightenment and God-realization, and so on.

If our little conversation here can save one person from making that decision, I think the whole thing will have been worth it just for that.

In my opinion, which I stated is rather strong, I don’t feel—I mean, I wouldn’t be opposed to euthanasia for somebody who is on their deathbed, suffering terribly or something. But for a relatively young, relatively healthy person who thinks that they should check out for some reason, that things will be better, and that they have the right to just make that decision—that they’re needed elsewhere and that they should kill themselves—I just feel like it’s wrong, and they need to work through something.

It’s very sad when that sort of thing happens, and they probably need professional help, because in all three of those cases—all four of those cases, including my mother—there was definitely a psychological disturbance going on, depression and whatnot, that proper intervention could perhaps have balanced out and prevented that turn of events.

So I just want to throw that in there as sort of an editorial, and then I’ll let you continue. Maybe you want to play off what I just said.

Mary: You know, I can’t imagine that there’s anybody who comes to that point who hasn’t felt like they’ve tried everything. It’s a last-ditch effort to end the suffering. Everybody has their own idea of what they would consider the depths of the bottom—that there’s nowhere else to go.

In my case, I tried to seek help again and again and again and again and again. For me, there was no answer. I couldn’t get any answers anywhere in my life. I’m sure that other people in this state of such despair as to seek suicide feel the same way—that there is no other place.

I don’t know. I do think that having someone to talk to is probably one of the most important things to be able to prevent it. For example, in my case, I couldn’t talk about what was happening. If I felt like I could trust other people and open up, it probably would have prevented me from going there.

By that, I mean a friend or a family member or something, not somebody professional who’s paid to listen to you. But beyond that, I can’t place a judgment of right or wrong, personally, on someone else, because the pain is—if someone wants to end their life because they’re terminally ill and in really intense physical pain, we would have a lot of compassion for their desire to stop that kind of pain.

So is mental or emotional pain any less than physical pain? Is it less significant or important to get to the point of wanting to end one’s life? I don’t know. I think that’s a very—I don’t feel in a place to judge that as right or wrong. I certainly can—

Rick: Well, I don’t know if—

Mary: —sympathize with people who get there.

Rick: Yeah, we don’t need to lay right or wrong on it, but obviously, if you’re dying of some kind of cancer and you have weeks to live—I mean, there are spontaneous remissions, but chances are you’re going to die, and maybe you’re just going to suffer for the next few weeks, and it’s compassionate to let yourself go.

But if you’re in your 20s and you happen to be very depressed or something, it seems to me it’s a different situation. Various spiritual traditions talk about the karmic implications of all this. You said there was no place to go, no one to ask, and no one who knew what to tell you. But now we’re actually having a conversation, which thousands of people will watch, in which we can say, “Hey, keep your chin up. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

Mary: Well, actually, this points to a very important issue, and that is that when I would see psychotherapists or physicians—remember, this was 15 years ago—and when I would talk about having metaphysical events and there being this thing that I could not figure out, people dismissed me pretty quickly. People were very suspicious and didn’t really feel that what I was saying was true or that I needed this kind of help.

So I think there’s real value in having spiritual dialogue—and mysticism in particular, metaphysical events, and unexplained things—come into common conversations and health care, and mental health in particular. The therapists that I worked with didn’t have any kind of training to work with somebody who was so seriously depressed.

You mentioned that a couple of your friends who committed suicide were people on the spiritual path.

Rick: All of them were.

Mary: And I think that—yeah, so having health care professionals, in particular mental health professionals, trained to handle and manage these situations, and having their own resources to support their work with these people, is really valuable.

The therapist who finally helped me significantly is part of a network of people who are trying to introduce that into their circle of professionals in the Maryland and Washington, D.C., area. It’s incredibly valuable, and I think that’s something that really needs to be talked about more in the public sphere.

Rick: Yeah, and there was something—maybe there still is—called the Spiritual Emergency Network. Stanislav Grof has talked about spiritual emergencies, as have many other people. There are therapists who are actually beginning to specialize in this, or at least are very familiar with it, because it keeps coming up so often. They don’t just dismiss such people as crazy, but realize that something is going on.

One of the reasons I have people on BatGap who are having far-out mystical experiences is that some people say, for instance, “You shouldn’t keep having these people on who are seeing angels and all that stuff. Just talk about nonduality. That’s the ultimate reality.”

But it’s becoming more or less epidemic that people are having all kinds of amazing experiences, and we get feedback all the time from people who don’t quite know what’s going on, why this is happening to them, or what to do about it.

I think it’s necessary to bring it into the culture—to develop a wider, deeper understanding of this kind of phenomenon—so that when it does happen to people, they aren’t freaked out and feel like they can turn to somebody for information.

Mary: Yeah, because I didn’t know a single person. I couldn’t—and the other important thing about programs like yours, and the idea of introducing more spiritual conversation into common culture, is that there’s a unique language to this awakening world right now.

You just mentioned nonduality. I would have had no clue what that meant. I didn’t even know the word “consciousness.” When I was referred to Dr. Rudy Bauer, who runs the Washington Center for Consciousness Studies—and I highly recommend him, by the way; he’s in Washington, D.C.—I couldn’t figure out why the word “consciousness” was in the title of his business. I thought, “What does that have to do with anything?” To me, that’s just being awake.

I didn’t have any idea about the use of these kinds of words in spiritual work. So introducing newcomers—and there are lots of newcomers—is important. I’ve watched a few clips from your show, and I know that you have people who had no spiritual background but who had these profound events start happening.

It’s important for us to have resources to understand how people are talking about it, where they’re getting their information, how I can reach them, and how I can connect. Who is their community? None of this was available to me—or I didn’t know how to find it, certainly, 15 years ago.

Rick: Yeah, and incidentally, on BatGap, under the “Past Interviews” menu, one of the choices is “Categorical Index,” and in the Categorical Index, there’s actually a whole category of therapists whom I’ve interviewed who are very familiar with this sort of thing. And obviously, there are probably many more such people out there, but help is available.

So, we can move on to other topics, but I just want to say that if anybody is feeling suicidal or depressed or anything else, help is available. It’s not a shortcut to anything to end your life. And your existence, your evolution, is going to continue, but it’s probably going to be a major speed bump to make that choice, and there are better choices.

Mary: So, let me just add: obviously, my suicide attempt didn’t work. I took 97 prescription pain and sleeping pills with three glasses of wine, and then I just miraculously woke up on my own two days later.

When I woke up very sick—and my physical state was really very bad—I was in excruciating pain, and I had no ability to control my motor skills. When I was conscious enough to realize what I had done to myself, and the reality finally hit of what the implications of that act would have been for my family and my friends and my former colleagues and all of this, it was really profound remorse.

And I still struggle to this day with— Sorry. With the idea of what I did to me— Sorry.

Rick: No, it’s good.

Mary: This happens in my talks, too. It’s really extraordinary. I mean, I obviously don’t know what I would have thought had I succeeded. Maybe I would have been in a blissful state thinking, “Boy, I’m happy to be free,” but I’ll never know that.

In my physical form, now in a body that is really— You know, it’s forever. I have a liver that will never be the same. It’s really something I have to live with for the rest of my life.

Rick: Yeah. And what would your insights be on the notion that the body is a vehicle? You don’t want to damage the vehicle that you depend upon to make this journey.

Mary: I would say that’s 100 percent correct. And for me, I consider my painful right side—which still pains me today, five years later—as a chronic reminder. Not chronic, but a constant—

Rick: Persistent.

Mary: Persistent and quite loving. Like, this is not a continual punishment. It’s not a— This is just a reminder that this body is important, and there’s no other system for me in this world to bring in Source and allow all that I am and all that comes through me to express itself except through my body. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. And I would say that’s kind of a universal truth.

Mary: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. So obviously, your whole story is not just about your suicide attempt. There’s much more to it. So unless there’s more you want to say about that, let’s move on to what happened after that and how things have been progressing over the years.

Mary: Well, actually, when I woke up from that suicide attempt, I had, at that time, two worlds that I couldn’t live in. I couldn’t figure out how to be successful in my normal physical life, and I couldn’t figure out what to do with a spiritual life. So, I couldn’t do either one.

And I had been trying forcefully, aggressively, eagerly, to figure it out, to be in control of my life as I always had been. After I woke up from the suicide attempt, I realized that there was nothing I could do. I needed to stop. I just needed to stop.

And so, I stopped trying to figure things out. I stopped trying to plan. I stopped trying to fix. I literally sat on the edge of my couch, numb, and I just surrendered in the most supreme way.

God, you can see I have no idea what I’m doing. So, if there are going to be doors that open, you’re going to have to open them.

Every day, many times a day, I would just say, “God, you can see I have no idea what I’m doing. So, if there are going to be doors that open, you’re going to have to open them. I cannot be the project manager for my life anymore.”

And when I got into that really extreme state of surrender, literally within just days, all these doors just started opening, one by one by one by one. I didn’t even really have to push the door. I mean, it was just like an invitation to come this direction and come this direction and come this direction.

And one of the first doors to open was leading me to a therapist. By this time, I had seen more than 40 practitioners of various kinds, and nobody came even close to helping me.

Right after the suicide attempt, the door was open to this absolutely perfect therapist who worked with me to get me back on my feet. And then she happened to have trained with Dr. Rudy Bauer at the Consciousness Institute. So, it was just the right resources, one right after the other. But it was after I stopped trying to be the one in charge and let my life unfold in the way that it was meant to.

Rick: It’s interesting—Irene was just saying the other day how it seems that surrender so often precedes a significant spiritual awakening or shift, and how hard knocks can often bring one to the point of surrender—or various other kinds of difficulties.

But it does seem to be a common theme that this sort of—you know, the old bumper sticker, “Let go and let God,” seems relevant.

Mary: Yeah. I’m often asked that question in my talks: “Do I feel like that’s really necessary for people to get to that stage?”

I don’t think it’s necessary for everybody. And I recently saw your interview with Della, I think, and she seemed like a woman— She was very happy, and she had this awakening without any kind of crisis that led up to it.

But I think for many people—I have a very strong mind. I couldn’t have otherwise, living in Washington, D.C., for 17 years. But in order for me to get to a path, particularly because I had no religious background, in order for me to get on that path, something really serious had to take me out of where I was going to go, or where I was and where I wanted to go.

And there was no other way for me to do it. I would not have gone gently in that direction. It just wouldn’t have happened.

So, I think for people who are really entrenched in their ideas of what their life should be, and they’re really not headed in the direction that, at a deeper level, they want to be, or they’re here to be, I think that state of surrender has to be pretty— They have to be sort of pushed there.

Rick: Yeah. I would say one way of putting it would be that as long as you feel like you’re in charge and that you can handle things and so on and so forth, there’s a natural tendency to want to do that and to run the show.

And maybe some people are flexible enough or humble enough or something that they can just recognize that without being knocked over the head by something. They can just recognize that maybe there’s a better way to do it and they should just relax.

But I think a lot of people, myself included, really needed to sort of hit bottom before shifting gears like that and allowing something else to take care— And wouldn’t you also say that it’s not just a sort of a black-and-white, first you’re here, then you’re there kind of situation, but there are certainly deeply ingrained tendencies and remnants of styles of functioning that are just going to keep cropping up again? Or for you, was it a complete watershed moment, and ever thereafter have you been in the back seat?

Mary: Yes. Yes to the latter. It was a watershed moment, and I have not known how to— In part, I haven’t been able to feel like I’m in control.

I tried to do it after nine months living here in the nunnery, getting sort of, “Okay, now I can put my life back together again,” and that was just a complete disaster.

But also, let me go back to something that you said. So, people like—and I’ll bring up Della again—what I thought when I was watching her—which was a lovely interview, by the way—is that I think that, for me in my situation, there were enormous lessons that came out of it.

Because on the other side—after the suicide attempt and after coming into the spiritual journey with really an immense focus—what I could then see was all of the conditioning of my own life, my old life. And all of these lessons that were just beautiful in what I had been doing—which was not a bad thing. I lived a very nice life. I enjoyed what I did, and I helped a lot of people.

But I saw it through a completely different lens. And I know that I came into this life intending to have that kind of rich continuum of experiences. I intended to do that.

And so, people like Della and other folks who—perhaps they come in already having done a lot of that work and they have those sort of connectives innately with those experiences to get those different understandings and lessons—they’re already more a part of who they are. That’s sort of how I thought when I was watching that interview.

Rick: So, your voice broke up slightly when you were saying that, but to summarize, then, to make sure we got it all, you’re saying that in retrospect, you can see how all the events of your life were various lessons, different types of lessons. And that it was all sort of well and wisely put in terms of teaching you the things you needed to learn, right? You were saying— That’s what you were saying, right?

Mary: Yeah, that’s a fair summary.

Rick: Okay. And you said somebody like Della, or maybe other people, come in having already learned a lot, but I don’t know—I would conjecture that if you come in at all, there’s more to learn, or you wouldn’t be here.

Mary: Oh yeah, yeah, but I’m saying maybe hers were different lessons.

Rick: Oh, different, sure.

Mary: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and maybe they don’t need to be learned so sharply.

Rick: Right.

Mary: You know, there’s a different kind of embodiment of an experience: to learn it gently or to learn it more sharply or severely. And for me, mine was definitely the hard route.

Rick: Yeah. Are you comfortable universalizing that to say that Syrian refugees are learning lessons, and kids who are enslaved in Bombay and stuff like that are learning lessons? Or is that— Does that seem too harsh?

Mary: Well, everybody is learning lessons. It doesn’t matter whether we are a prince with no problems—which I doubt—or Syrian refugees or children sold into slavery or whatever. There are lessons on every side of those issues.

But bigger than that—and this is part of what my sight is. My sight is very much with the details and also more cosmically. But the lessons that those people are teaching are not specifically just for them. Their teaching is actually on a much larger level. It’s more to the consciousness—sorry, to the conscience of the collective.

And so, there’s a lot of dialogue. Syrian refugees are a great example. We have a lot of global conversations about compassion, about responsibility, about fairness, about fear, about judgment.

We have so many conversations because we have millions of people teaching us that there’s a problem, that there’s a global cry. There’s a loud cry for love. And how are we going to answer it?

And so, people like that—people who have the more severe, publicly noticeable issues—they’re a different kind of teacher, and they’re learning different lessons. As we are—we’re learning lessons with them.

Evolution, wholeness, and the end of conflict

Rick: Well, as you know, spiritual traditions—Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on—address this point of learning lessons, and they all sort of indicate that we’re all progressing toward something through these lessons.

And you’ve given this some thought and had mystical insights regarding the progress of the culture over the past couple of thousand years. So, what would you say, without just parroting what Buddhism says? What would you say about that? About what we’re progressing toward individually and collectively?

Mary: Well, a couple of things. First, I don’t know what Buddhism says. I’m in a Buddhist nunnery, but I don’t know about Buddhist doctrine. I get the support of the nuns here, but I don’t actually know the philosophies. I know them from the experiences of being in the mind of Buddha, but that’s very different from the teachings that came out of it.

And I have much deeper than just a 2,000-year look at this, literally from the origins of the first—I know my first thought as conscious awareness. Literally my first thought. And I have seen in a very global way—not global, cosmic way—how evolution is happening.

Evolution is kind of a funny word because that implies a linear point A to point B to point C. And that’s not really my experience of it. However, I know that individually and collectively, the whole point is that we are seeking to be all that we are. And all that we are is love and goodness.

And so the exploration of what all is possible in that state is exactly what we’re doing. And so there’s not really an end goal, but our purpose is to feel the wholeness of what we are—of all that we are. And that’s infinite. It’s infinite possibilities. And so what we’re doing is exploring that.

But what we’re progressing toward now is ways of exploring that in a way that’s not a dualistic, conflict-based exploration. And that’s where we’re coming out of. We’re not coming into, “We’re going to be whole suddenly.” It’s that we’re going to continue experiencing the possibilities of that in a way that is much gentler. And it’s not suffering-based.

Rick: Okay.

So, a couple of questions. When you say you know your first thought, does this mean when you, as an entity, first came into existence—like a thousand lifetimes ago or whatever? Is that what you meant by that? Do you know your first emergent impulse as an individuality?

Mary: So, in the scene that I was talking about with Christ, it is the moment of the crucifixion, and understanding all of the world in that moment. And in another instance, not under hypnosis, I went into the mind of Buddha at his first moment of enlightenment. I saw what he saw and understood things in the way that he saw them—understood them—before any words were ascribed to that situation or any teachings came out of it.

So it was the moment of the foundation of Buddhism. And in that same kind of origins way, in the field—the ultimate field of nothing, the exquisite void of nothingness, which is also the field of pure potential—what was described to me as the primordial ground, the being before there’s being, or the potential for life before there’s the living of life—I entered into that field, first seeing it and then becoming it. There’s no separation.

Then I experienced the way that it came into the manifestation of life—the existence. And that is the infusion of that God source or that love source, the Source, into its vessel for expression. And in that moment—in that first pivotal moment, the waking up to conscious life and understanding—the first thought was, “I am goodness. And I want to be all that I am.”

And when that happened—in my own individual awareness, which I’m also in oneness with everything—everything was set in motion. Everything—all of evolution—started from that point.

I am goodness. And I want to be all that I am.

Rick: For your particular jiva, your particular soul or entity? Is that what you’re saying? Or for the whole universe? Which one are you saying?

Mary: My experience—well, there was no separation between those two. There was no this and that. It was all the same.

Rick: I mean, what I’m getting at is that we have this notion of a Big Bang—the universe emerging from nothingness or from pure potentiality. But we also have the notion of some people being old souls, for instance. Some people are young souls, and some people are old souls.

So the notion seems to be that souls kind of emerge from the primordial soup at a certain point, like little bubbles coming out of ginger ale or something. And then, according to whatever tradition you ascribe to, they progress through a series of many, many incarnations. They evolve up the scale and eventually become human and keep evolving, and so on and so forth.

So when you talk about your initial emergence, your first thought, that’s the kind of framework that I put it into. I’m not sure whether that’s what you’re saying or not.

Mary: Well, if you have an old soul, that soul has to have an origin somewhere, presumably, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Mary: And so it would be the origins of where that initial—before there were many—came.

Rick: Yeah.

Mary: Or, because we think of things in a time sort of way—but it’s not really that way—it would be when one was the individual and the many at the same time.

Rick: Right. But there are 7 billion people on the planet and many more billions of other types of species. Are you saying that each of these souls—each of these beings—has an origin as a soul, and that if we could have the omniscience to see it, we could see where that particular soul emerged and that each of them has its evolutionary trajectory?

Mary: Well, I can’t—I don’t know the answer to whether everyone has an individual soul. And the reason I can’t answer that is because soul is a word. When we get into this problem of trying to identify or contain something with a definition, then we necessarily exclude possibilities of something else.

And so I can’t really say definitively this or that. In my experience, it wasn’t that kind of clear delineation. It’s more complex than that. And we don’t have a word for it. We don’t have a concept for it.

The definition of soul is wrapped around a concept of this happening and then these things happening from there—and it’s beyond that. It’s not really something that I can put into words.

Integrating mystical experience with ordinary life

Rick: When you have mystical insights or visions or experiences, do you come out of them with a sense of frustration, in a way, because it’s almost impossible to translate what you experience into words or even into rational thought?

Mary: Yeah. In the beginning, I really struggled with that. I have to write really fast, and then it’s like, “What do I write?” I can’t even—what do I—“Then this happened—” But how do I say that? It’s really impossible to capture all of the nuances of everything that happens. It’s not possible.

What I can capture is just a speck of the scale of these things. And anybody who has these experiences, I’m sure, has said the same thing. But the other thing that I experienced in sort of coming back—it’s not so bad now, but in the beginning it was so sharp—the difference from that world to this world—I would experience great frustration in coming back to this world.

I once wrote a creative piece called “The Mystic in the Coke Bottle,” and that’s what it felt like. Coming back from these events is sort of being squeezed back into this life, having been so expansive, and then I have to come back in and everything feels very rigid.

I really struggled enormously with that in the beginning, especially because I was having these things while I was working or while I was in my neighborhood or whatever, so it was just too messed up.

Rick: Yeah, interesting. Do you feel like you’re in much better shape now in terms of integrating the boundaries with the boundless?

Mary: Yes, much better. And I have the foundations. The foundations were sort of the first pieces to come. And so I needed a long time to integrate those understandings and those perspectives into my normal day-to-day life.

Most people who approach the spiritual path from more of an intellectual curiosity—like they do a lot of reading or studying or whatever—their part is hearing the theories or the philosophies and then taking the time to figure out how that fits into their life or to apply it to their life. And I’m on the other side of that.

So I have the knowledge, and then I have to figure out how to fit that into my life from the other side. Either way, it takes a long time, but for me this part is much, much easier now. It’s much gentler.

Rick: Yeah, I would have to say that the name of the game of spiritual evolution and enlightenment and all that stuff is learning how to integrate unboundedness with boundaries, to use a couple of simple terms. There could be other terms, but for some people it becomes very lopsided.

There are some people in this world, of course, who are very good at boundaries, very good at precise performance of various kinds—flying a jet plane or doing neurosurgery or something—but who may not have any sense of unboundedness.

And there are other people—more rare—who end up having some kind of blowout awakening and have to relearn how to brush their teeth and stuff, because they totally lost any sense of how to function within boundaries. But ideally, one could fly the jet plane or do the neurosurgery while firmly established in a very unbounded condition.

Mary: Yes, I can totally relate to the “You can’t figure out how to do things” experience. Particularly, there’s a part of this sight that is kind of quantum in nature—not a mystical vision as much as more energy. So I can also have these experiences—and I should mention that all of these are uncontrolled—of seeing, transcending the mechanisms of interpretation of reality and coming straight to just the field of energy.

And in those moments, I can’t figure out at all how to be normal. I can’t figure out where I stop and something else begins, and forget brushing my teeth. I mean, it’s not—I couldn’t even—like, “What’s the toothbrush?” It’s a really difficult thing.

But I also want to say something about the—I don’t—I’m not sure how you said it, but the spiritual journey is all about this or that.

Rick: Yeah, it’s integration—having it be a living reality. I mean, there are these vast cosmic regions and unbounded awareness and all kinds of subtle realms and all this stuff. And ordinarily, we’ve kind of got it together in terms of being able to function as an individual, at least to some extent.

We’re good at functioning within boundaries, but then when we start dipping into the spiritual realm, we discover that there’s this vast other thing that, in many people’s experiences, is very hard to integrate with having a job and raising a family—

Mary: Yeah.

Rick: —and functioning efficiently within boundaries. And that’s why we have monks, because they don’t have to do anything. They can just kind of wallow in the wonderfulness of—

I’m going to tell the nuns here that’s what their life is about.

Mary: You know, I sort of see it a little bit differently. I agree with you that I understand how you would frame it that way, and I appreciate that. My experience is there’s sort of two ways to the beauty of it. And I really consider it so exquisitely beautiful, this spiritual journey.

One is, as we come into awareness of something, then in a more mystical way, or a greater divine understanding, our conditioned life is suddenly illuminated. We understand how we have been fearing or how we have been judging, or how we have lived our life in this way because of this conditioned belief, pattern, habit, or whatever.

Understanding those pieces of ourselves and how we came to be, how we are, and engaging with other people, and then being able to recognize that in other people is so beautiful. It really is. How we’ve done this is just magnificent. I mean, we sort of took the hard road to do it, but it’s really beautiful. So there’s an understanding of where we’ve been and who we are and how we are that’s really valuable.

At the same time, beyond that—or beneath that, or however you want to call it—is the other side of the coin: the greater divine understandings of unconditionality, the equality state, the lack of fear, the total trust, and how we’re completely loved in a way that we have no idea about, regardless of what we’ve conditioned ourselves in this other life.

For me, I see those two things really coming together more and more and more on this spiritual journey: really appreciating both sides and how one is supporting the other, and how one has been supporting our other life all this time, and we’ve had no idea about all of the intricacies of it that are really beautiful.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s kind of what I was saying too, just in entirely different words. Just a different way of putting it. But sometimes the word Brahman means totality, and Brahman is kind of a synonym for enlightenment in a way—the Brahman consciousness and so on.

But it would mean having subsumed within the greater totality of one’s experience all the diversities and complexities and everything else, and coming to appreciate and know that experientially as the one thing: the essential constituent of everything, the ultimate reality. And that takes a great degree of integration and assimilation and so on.

I just heard the term the other day—I think Swami Sivananda or something used it—of “weak yogis,” people who have had this yogic awakening but are still very deficient in certain areas of their personality, their behavior, and things like that. There hasn’t yet been a complete infusion of that deeper reality into all the channels of their relative life.

Mary: Yep, I can understand that.

Sharing the message of hope

Rick: So, getting back to what you were originally told when you started hearing this voice: “You’ve got important work to do in the world.” There you are in a monastery in the Himalayas, not working too much. Maybe—

Mary: Well, actually I’ve been working for the nunnery.

Rick: Yeah, but I mean, do you feel like the best is yet to come in terms of what you may end up doing? And would you say, in a nutshell, that involves somehow serving as a conduit through which the deeper realizations you have had can be transmitted or infused into world consciousness?

Mary: Yeah, without a doubt. And I literally—I can feel it so strongly. In fact, I’ve been working at the nunnery part-time in exchange for my room and board here, and to have a place where I can stay in this sort of peaceful environment. But I do come out to talk about my story and share and that sort of stuff in the last two years.

Part of that has been me sort of tiptoeing out into the world to see how it feels to use my voice on a public stage, and to see how people hear that. What do people hear me say? How do people respond to my presence or my words? And then what is it that they’re responding with? This has been great learning for me.

I had no clue. Because I don’t attend church, I had no idea about the level of people’s hunger. I really had no idea. And that has been very poignant, seeing how people react to me and to my story and to my message of hope.

People—you can just see it in their eyes—want that permission to have hope. It’s phenomenal. And so, yes, I do feel like the best is yet to come. And I feel myself right now, literally, within the last few weeks, just starting that, like, “Yeah, here it comes.” I can just feel it.

So it’s no coincidence—no accident—that we’re having this interview at this time. And I’m feeling more inspired to write, and things are starting to sort of formulate and whatever. So I can definitely see ways that I want to share my knowledge and work with people. Most assuredly. And I’m very excited about it, I have to say.

Rick: Yeah. And so how do they react? You mentioned you’ve been out doing some speaking, and it’s very inspiring how people react and so on and so forth. I’m wondering what kind of impact it has on people—not only inspiring them in the moment when they’re sitting there in a lecture, but perhaps are there any anecdotes of shifts or changes that have taken place in people’s lives of a more permanent nature?

Mary: Yeah, I didn’t—when I set out to just tell my story, and I really had no expectation, I just needed to—I knew I needed to tell my story. I needed to start talking. I had no expectation about what was going to happen.

I certainly didn’t anticipate really changing people’s lives. I just thought they might find it an interesting story. They might find permission to feel okay if they have these events start happening in their life. I wanted to let people know that they may have friends or family who maybe start having this, or if these stories start coming out in the public, that this is reason to have hope. Those are the sorts of things I wanted to talk about.

What happened was, from the very first talk—and my first talk was in a Roman Catholic church in Stamford, Connecticut—I was invited to several churches there. It was mostly little old ladies; the average age was probably 80. And I had no idea how they were going to react to a mystic coming to tell their story.

They were 100 percent, across the board, blown away. I could feel it as I was talking, and I was like, “I don’t exactly know what’s happening here.” When I finished my talk, I said, “So, I’m happy to answer any questions that you have.” There was dead silence throughout the room, and it was a packed room. I just thought, “I have no idea what this means.”

Finally, this woman in the front row raised her hand and said, “I’m sure that I have questions, but I am so spectacularly startled. I have no idea where to start.” And then everybody said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s how I feel.”

They weren’t used to hearing such direct, profound information from somebody standing right in front of them, talking about the same things that Christ came to talk about, the same teachings that they’re trying to incorporate into their life.

I’m standing before them saying, “I’ve never read the Bible, but I can tell you that what you know about the teachings of love from Jesus are absolutely spot-on, and that there is this resurrection that’s happening, and I understand the Christ within. I know what this is.”

I just didn’t expect that. And every single place that I went, that was the reaction. Every single time. It doesn’t matter if it was in Connecticut or Michigan or North Carolina or wherever. Across the board, the reactions were really profound.

Then, after the talks, people lined up to meet me and get me to sign their book or whatever. People started to tell me their stories. People have lots of things that they don’t tell, which are the same kinds of mystical secrets that they’ve been keeping. So they have a little insight into themselves that opens those doors.

But the other thing I really didn’t know, and I certainly didn’t anticipate, was the level of people’s personal struggle as they try to find answers to their deep questions or their deep sorrow.

When people started to come up afterward and sort of whisper to me about these really, really intense problems—a terminal diagnosis, or a child who has died, or these other things—they were looking to me, this person who simply has a story at this point, to give them some level of guidance.

I didn’t anticipate that because I’ve never been a spiritual teacher or in a spiritual counseling role. And what happened to me in those moments, when people are coming to me and they’re eye to eye with me telling me these things, is a little bit like an out-of-body experience. I have no idea what’s going to come out of my mouth.

Then there’s this thing that just transpires between us, and whatever’s happening, whatever’s coming through me and out of my mouth, is so perfect. And I don’t mean that arrogantly, but there’s just this thing that’s coming through to say, “I hear you, and here is this love that we can offer in this moment.”

So, in that way, it’s been stunning. It’s been really, really beautiful. I’m very much looking forward to more of that.

Rick: That’s really sweet. Yeah, we’ve talked both before this interview and during it about serving as an instrument of God, or as an instrument of the Divine. And it’s very interesting having that experience because of the surprises one experiences as things come out of your mouth that you wouldn’t have anticipated, or that you didn’t know you knew, and things like that—things that you couldn’t possibly have calculated would be just the right thing for that person to hear. Yeah, it’s cool.

Mary: Yeah, and I’ll mention what we talked about last night. I was saying that you, in particular, are like the lab partner. You’re like the spiritual lab partner that people should seek out because you do all of the work, and we can just peek over your shoulder and look at your notes and all of the work that you’re doing.

We don’t have to do the work ourselves. You’ve got the people that you’re interviewing and the stories that they tell. What you do is really phenomenal. We’re really very, very blessed to have you.

Rick: Well, thanks. I’m just doing my little part, and I couldn’t do it without people like you and people like Irene, without whom this whole thing would be an organizational shambles. So we’re all kind of like one big team playing different positions.

Mary: Yeah. Go team!

🕊️ Spirituality and the suffering of the world

Rick: Okay, so where should we go from here? Rather than just sort of dreaming up a question, is there any impulse within you about what we haven’t covered and what we want to be sure to cover as we go along today?

Mary: Nothing comes to mind right off the bat.

Rick: Okay, so let me just ask you, then. I took a whole lot of notes from your book, and I could start glancing at them and asking you questions based on those. But one thing that sort of comes up based upon what you were saying is that—and I was thinking as you were speaking of shifts in cultural and scientific understanding that were so difficult for pioneers like Galileo or Louis Pasteur, or others like that, who had a new understanding of the way things worked and were ridiculed and threatened with all kinds of dire consequences if they kept saying what they knew.

But eventually, there’s a saying in Sanskrit, Satyameva Jayate, which is that truth alone is victorious. And eventually, when it’s time for something to be understood by the culture, there’s no stopping it. It can be very challenging for the avant-garde, who have to deal with the prevailing ignorance—which is an appropriate word.

But what I was thinking as you were speaking about the little old ladies in Stanford was that there may be a much greater groundswell of awakening and mystical experiences than we realize. There may be a lot more people than we realize out there who are having these experiences and don’t know quite what to make of them, or are afraid to tell anybody—that kind of thing.

In fact, George Gallup, whom I actually met in 1976, did polls of this sort of thing. I don’t know if he’s still alive anymore, but his organization has done polls, and large percentages of the population say they’ve had mystical experiences and so on.

We still live in a society in which a materialistic mindset is predominant and kind of governs the economies and the sciences. But if we really are heading for a more enlightened age, then that has got to shift. People like yourself and many others are playing an important role in helping it do so.

Mary: Yeah, so there are several things I want to say about that. One is that I think as more and more of us wake up, and more and more of us mobilize to infuse our communities and our day-to-day lives with our understandings—on a really basic, fundamental level—about choices in life, about what we’re listening to, about what we believe, and all of these things, they will ripple out into the systems that support the problems we see in our world: economically, religiously, politically, et cetera.

I think there’s a lot to come in that regard, with everyday people making different decisions and different choices about their lives based on these understandings that they come into.

But bigger than that, in addition to these understandings, I think that old language—and, in some ways, new language too—I think we’re going to rethink the value of the one-line teachings that people really rely on and see the benefit of a more inclusive way of talking about spirituality, religion, et cetera.

By that I mean, there’s a lot in the spiritual teachings that I’ve watched in my very short time here. For example, the idea of karma, the idea that our world is an illusion, the law of attraction, this idea that suffering is intended to be here to make us stronger, or that we’re intentionally conflict-based—all of these sorts of things.

There are ways in which we recognize, from a more enlightened perspective, that these kinds of ideas hold us back and are a little bit of a cop-out in some places.

For example, I live in India, and karma is often talked about. Somebody’s in a difficult situation—for example, most notably, the Untouchables, the caste that nobody has anything to do with. There is a dismissal of the need for compassion for that group because it’s just their karma.

There’s also this idea that people can play now and pay later with karma: “I’ll do what I know I shouldn’t do now, and I’ll just pay the consequences in the next life.” I hear these things here, and so there’s a watering down of the initial intention.

With the law of attraction as well, we look at a lot of people and think, “Well, if they would just think more positive thoughts, this wouldn’t be happening.”

I’m especially troubled by the idea that the world is just an illusion. That really dismisses our call for compassion toward people who are truly suffering.

I often think about my own spirituality and my check on things. I’ve worked in very hardship-stricken places. I worked in really, really destitute townships in Africa, in many places. I see it all around here. I also work in Southeast Asia.

I think about seeing a room in which there is a nine-year-old girl who has been sold into sex slavery. She lives in a room with a padlock on it. Her mother has sold her into slavery because she needed the money, and her clients are soldiers.

I think about the application of spirituality. If you’re standing in the doorway of that nine-year-old girl, with the mother and the soldier lined up on the other side, what is a spiritual practice or a spiritual philosophy that honors all that’s happening in this moment?

I can’t turn to a nine-year-old and say, “You just think more positively,” or “This is a karmic thing,” or “This is all an illusion,” or “This is just awareness.” There’s a real cop-out, in my opinion, with that kind of stuff. It’s a dismissal of real, true suffering that goes on, that I’ve seen and that I know is around.

I personally can’t let go of that deep desire to end suffering for all beings in favor of such single-minded—not single-minded, narrow-minded—philosophies. I know that the intention of those philosophies is not narrow-minded, but we in normal societies tend to take them and kind of cop out with them.

So I hope that what evolves—and what I see more and more—is a more inclusive way of talking about the application of spirituality and its principles.

That’s not to say that those teachings don’t have value. I think they have enormous value, and I think they have enormous validity. But I think we’re going to get out of this idea of using them as excuses for not digging deeper.

I can’t let go of that deep desire to end suffering for all beings.

Rick: Yeah, that was beautiful and brilliant. I was listening just this morning, as I was riding my bike, to Matthew Wright, whom I’m going to interview next week. He’s a young Episcopal priest, and he was talking about the second axial age. We’ll be talking about this next week.

He was talking about how certain traditions used concepts such as karma or the world as an illusion, and so on and so forth. They went very deep in a certain dimension, but were really not all-inclusive.

He quoted Father Wayne Teasdale, who is a Catholic theologian, I believe, as talking about how—and many others have said this—it’s really not nonduality to say a thing like that. It’s a kind of lack of recognition of the omnipresence of God. In that nine-year-old girl and those soldiers, there is—you know, I’m not saying this anywhere near as well as I’d like to, but there is—

Mary: I hear you. I understand what you’re saying.

Rick: You know what I’m trying to say? If God is really omniscient and omnipotent, and if we think about it a little bit, we can convincingly see that divine intelligence permeates every speck of creation.

Then to say the world is an illusion—what we really probably are trying to say is that the world is not as we ordinarily perceive it to be. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about it. It means we actually fail to appreciate it. It’s actually much more divine, much more sublime, and much more wonderful than we recognize.

If we treat it as mere illusion or mere material stuff or anything else, we’re doing a disservice to the reality of what is.

Mary: Yeah, that’s well put. I would agree with that.

Rick: Yeah, and if we could actually—go ahead.

Mary: No, no. Go ahead.

Rick: Well, I was going to say that if we could actually appreciate what is, then compassion would be unavoidable. It would be inevitable. What’s the Golden Rule? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you actually see that you are them, then we can’t bear their suffering any more than we can bear our own. We’re forced to translate our divine cognition into action of some sort.

Mary: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I think my own response in that situation, standing in that doorway and looking both directions, would be, first of all, “I see you, and I see your suffering,” and second of all, “I hear this loud, profound cry for unconditional love, for that connection to God.”

My responsibility in this is: How will I answer that call? For me, it’s that simple. It’s looking into my own life and my own work, my abilities, my story, my skills, and my access, and determining what to do. How will I respond to this, and in what way? Where? Where in the thread?

What we’re seeing in these moments—I mentioned earlier that these people are our teachers. These are the really big teachers for us, teachers on a much greater consciousness level. But they’re the outcome of the problem; they are not the problem.

Taking the time and responsibility to look back into the mind streams, and all that’s included in those mind streams that have brought them and us to that moment—what’s in there? What part of me and my choices in my life are in those mind streams supporting it?

I think the work is really deeply nuanced. If each of us can come to that place of, first, honoring and seeing the suffering, and then questioning how we’ll answer that call—because we’ve all got a way to do it that’s really valuable. Every single one of us has a way to do it that’s incredibly valuable.

Unraveling the threads of conflict

Rick: Yeah, and as you were saying that, as you were laying out that situation in which the nine-year-old girl is a sex slave and there are soldiers outside the door, my thought was, “Gee, people listening to this might think, ‘Oh yeah, it’s terrible, but what can I, as a spiritual aspirant, do about something like that? I’m not there. If I were there, I’d probably get arrested or killed or raped or something.’”

How do you confront a situation like that and actually bring about change in the world? Christ said, “Resist not evil.” How do you confront a situation like that and actually bring about change in the world? I could give you my answer, but I’d rather hear yours.

Mary: But I want to hear yours as well. So there are people for whom it is a joy and a passion to respond to that directly. They will start a charity or work for a charity or volunteer for a charity that addresses that issue. And then there are all of the sort of causes that lead up to that, that they may join in those efforts: oppression, gender inequality, economics. So they’ll come into it from different places that ultimately are drivers of that kind of suffering. And for them, there are lots of ways that they can do that.

And then there are people whose most valuable thing that they can do is pray, and offer up some call for greater compassion and greater sight. And then they can extend that call into their own life: What are they doing to support, in any kind of way, the factors that influence that kind of suffering?

But I’m actually glad you brought this up because I did want to mention something. There is a way that our own internal work, especially on our fears and judgment, has a massive impact on the collective, and particularly now as we’re sort of in this really great stage of momentum in our world.

So let me give you an example. Let’s say that—and I’m going to speak now from an energy standpoint, an energy perspective—you and I have a conflict. And maybe you heard one of my talks on this.

Rick: I did.

Mary: Okay, so this is an important example because it really is a very profound thing that’s happening on our planet. And that is, it works on an individual basis. So let’s say that you and I have a conflict. And I’ve done something terrible to you, and I’m mad at you, and you’re mad at me. And we have these energies of anger and blame and frustration.

What that looks like on an energy level, it looks exactly kind of like a thread. It looks like a little beaded thread. And it’s a thread that gets really tangled up between us. It doesn’t matter that you’re there and I’m here. Energetically, in the field of awareness, this is what it looks like. It looks like a thread that we just wind up around us and get all tangled up.

And then, as I’m in my world and I’m telling people about how awful you’ve been in this situation—“I can’t believe you did this, and this, and this”—I’m winding that same thread around these other people. And you’re on your end talking about it with people, so you’re doing it too. You’re wrapping that thread around.

And so, as we move around and we move around in our lives and bask in the energies of blame and victimhood and all of these sorts of things, we’re all just tangled up in this massive tangle of conflict energy. And planetarily, this is what we have looked like. We are all just in this mass entanglement energetically, and we’re bound down. Literally, it looks like we’re bound down and held still, without being able to have a greater frequency or flow.

And so, in this situation of conflict, if I really earnestly take the time to go in and evaluate my own role in this—my own part, my own responsibilities, my own feelings—and I own everything that I feel, I finally get to the place of forgiveness.

And that is not forgiveness of you, because that would be a judgment right there that you’ve done something wrong. That forgiveness is always only for me, for the way that I’ve seen things or the thing I’ve done. When I get to that place of authentic forgiveness for me, what happens energetically is that thread that has completely been wound around me just opens up and begins to fall away. It begins to flow because I have transmuted my own fear and judgment to compassion and understanding and love.

And this is what’s happening on my end. That thread just begins to fall away. And as it begins to fall away from me, it necessarily begins to fall away from you. You no longer have that push and pull on my end. It’s the same thing that begins to happen with the people around me and with the people around you—all because I did my own work.

And planetarily, this is also now what’s happening with us. Now the flow is beginning to open up on a massive scale because more and more and more of us are interested in this introspection and getting into that place of really authentically transmuting our behaviors and reactions and these habitual things that we’ve manufactured long ago. And we’ve begun to let them go. We’ve begun to open it up.

And so now, all around the planet, we are having these threads open up, and now we begin to vibrate at a higher frequency. We begin to flow more readily and easily between us, and really sensitive people can actually feel that.

So in this situation where we look at the suffering of others that we don’t think we’re related to or whatever, they are impacted. The energies that are creating those scenarios are impacted ultimately by what we’re letting go of individually. Any of the energies that are in their entanglement—and I’m sorry for speaking in these solely energetic terms—but the things that entangle them—oppression, inequality, judgment, fear, et cetera—any of those common threads that we have, that we clear in our own field, we begin to open up in those fields as well.

And what that looks like in real life is that you begin to see these sudden, just miraculous kinds of policies that change. Or a new leader comes into existence in a place where it’s really key for this kind of issue in their country or something. These things—that’s the manifestation of the changes that we’ve made in the collective energy field.

When I get to that place of authentic forgiveness for me, the thread begins to fall away.

Rick: That’s great. I’m reminded of a simple analogy, which is that if you want the forest to be green, all the trees have to be green. And it’s interesting to think of specific examples—for instance, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, or the abolition of slavery, or the passage of the Civil Rights Act—major social milestones that have taken place in the world.

Mary: Just all recently. They all have happened just in the last hundred years. When you look at just the last hundred years, all of these enormous advances in equality, based on race, based on gender, and now based on sexual orientation.

And this is where we’re all—where it’s all going to come out, especially in equality. Because, and I talk about this in my book, in the field of potential, everything is equal. There’s no judgment. Everything is equal.

So when we come into a dualistic setting, we intend to come in like this. But eventually we start: “Right. Wrong. Less than. More than.” Whatever. And in there is suffering. And so, as we reduce that suffering, we become more and more and more back to the state of equality. And so this is why you see it more and more coming about in these issues.

✨ Collective awakening and social change

Rick: Yeah. So it does seem that there’s an acceleration of social change taking place. You can look on the dark side and think—certain political factions are always saying, “Oh, the country is going to hell in a handbasket. We’ve got to restore America back to its original greatness,” or “Make America Great Again” is the catchphrase, and so on and so forth.

But when you actually look at the sorts of changes that have been taking place, as you say, in terms of equality for LGBT people and civil rights issues and a number of other things, there seems to be an acceleration of progress taking place. And so, would you say that that is in some way a result of people unraveling their tangles, to use your metaphor?

Mary: Without a doubt.

Rick: On a mass scale?

Mary: Yep. It is no coincidence.

Rick: And what’s causing masses of people to unravel their tangles? What’s the cause of that, if we want to take it a step further back?

Mary: Yeah. It’s no coincidence that all of these changes have coincided with a greater spiritual awakening.

Rick: Yeah.

Mary: We look at the last hundred years, all of the things that have come out that have mobilized people’s curiosities and explorations, and access to books and lectures, all of these sorts of things, starting in the early 1900s. Eastern religion is starting to come into the United States, and our ability to travel and get exposed to more cultures and ideas and to collaborate more. Now look at the internet, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Mary: It’s absolutely beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And I especially love watching the youth rise up through the use of social media. It’s like right in time for a group of youth that are not thinking the same way that you and I thought when we were young. They’re thinking in a much more collaborative, loving, harmonious, unity-inspired kind of way. And they have social media to let them do that, to let them work together.

I was going to say something. Maybe it’ll come back to me.

Rick: Okay. Well, yeah. It is pretty—I don’t know what the cause is, but whether cosmic rays are being beamed to us from the center of the galaxy or what, it does seem to be—and there are various astrological explanations and so on, and cyclic patterns in the Vedic tradition, various cycles that take place and so on—but there does seem to be this upsurge taking place in collective consciousness.

And it has its manifestations in terms of the technologies you just mentioned, but then those technologies in turn enable it to happen. So there’s this kind of positive feedback loop that helps the acceleration.

Mary: Yeah, we’re all feeding each other now.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah.

Mary: Yeah. I do know what I wanted to mention.

Rick: I knew it would come to you.

Mary: I know you’re trying—it’s a—I’m reminded of Harry Potter, “He Who Shall Not Be Named,” but I know you’re talking about Donald Trump and the “Make America Great” thing. Even here in the nunnery, we know about him.

Rick: Yeah.

Mary: There are many, many, many things that look really dire in our world, really accelerated in their occurrence, and really crazy, just like—they’re at the level of, “What the hell?” And this is not to be unexpected. That is, again, that’s not the problem. That’s the outcome of the problem.

So the momentum began long, long, long ago. And particularly energies that look like Donald Trump and his ilk, they like things to push against. That’s something that likes the friction. And the more that we historically have pushed against it, the greater those energies have become.

The problem—or the opportunity that we have now—is not about the expression of that problem. It is our reaction to the expression of that problem. Because now, more and more and more and more of us are reacting. Rather than fighting back against the problem, we’re reacting much more compassionately. And we’re mobilizing in much more productive, compassionate, and collaborative ways that we haven’t done before.

And so I was talking about that in one of my talks in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was saying that—because somebody in the audience, I think, had mentioned something about these—there seems to be more war and all of these different things. And I said, “It is not that the war is the opportunity for us right now to change. It is our reaction to it that we’re changing.”

And there were two women—it happened to be two women—in the audience who were from the Sandy Hook community, which was the site of one of the massive school shootings that had just happened a couple of years before my talk. Both of those women raised their hands and said, “Well, actually, we can testify to that firsthand.”

Because when this shooting happened in their community, the day that it happened, their community immediately came together around the motto, “We choose love.” Everything around them—the media, all of the people coming into their communities, everyone—wanted to blame. They wanted to hate. They wanted—

And they just said, “We understood immediately that the last thing that we need is more hate. That’s what led to this. So our reaction from this point forward will only be love.” And they had literally T-shirts and bumper stickers and everything, and the whole community came together around it.

And we’re seeing more and more and more of that, not just in America, but all kinds of places around the world. We don’t hear these stories often on the headline news, but they’re most assuredly happening.

Rick: Oh, yeah. I just watched a documentary about Malala the other night, the little Pakistani girl. And when she was shot, instead of defeating what she was standing for—trying to defend education for girls in Pakistan—it rallied the nation around her and actually awakened the—

So, in a way, she kind of served as a sacrificial lamb for that, but fortunately lived and came out more articulate and brave than ever. But one thing she said in the documentary, when some questioner, some reporter, was saying, “Don’t you have any kind of blame or hatred or anything?” She said, “No, not even one molecule, not even one atom, not even one quark. I just absolutely am not reacting that way to what happened.”

Mary: Wow. And how poignant that it is a young girl from the Middle East who becomes that voice, who becomes that poster child for forgiveness and for mobilizing in a really productive, loving, compassionate, system-changing world.

I’m so excited about it. Literally, I just—I’m giddy about all these changes. It’s really so beautiful—so beautiful. And look how eloquent she is.

Rick: Yeah, she’s incredible.

Mary: I mean, it’s just stunning. What young girl knows the word “quark?”

Rick: Yeah. Right.

Mary: I didn’t know it until I was 45.

Rick: Smart girl. But in case anyone is thinking at this point, “Well, what does all this have to do with enlightenment?” and so on, it has to do with it because enlightenment is not just an individual thing. It’s not just you sort of marinate in this wonderful subjective experience and it’s good for you. It has social implications, and we’re all in this together.

And I don’t think that any significant number of people in the world can get enlightened unless, commensurately, there is a vast—well, I don’t know what the chicken and what the egg is, but there is—the more people awaken spiritually, the more society is going to change. And the more society changes, the more easily—the easier it will be to awaken spiritually.

So when we lapse into discussions like this, I think it’s very relevant, even to those who feel, “I really don’t care about all this social issue stuff. I just want to end my own personal suffering and experience awakening.” It’s all tied together.

Mary: It cannot be that one person becomes enlightened and nothing is impacted by that. So as more and more and more people come into these enlightened understandings, we become a more enlightened society, and that’s the goal. What’s the point of becoming enlightened and then suffering still continues all around you?

Rick: Yeah, exactly. Like the little girl in the brothel in Bombay that you alluded to—what’s the point of us being all sort of blissful and wise and spiritual if things like that are going to continue? It should be that our enlightenment impacts those kinds of things and helps to eliminate them.

Mary: Yeah. My enlightenment is forever incomplete if she’s not included.

My enlightenment is forever incomplete if she’s not included.

So, yeah, it’s to be expected. That’s the whole point: If we can wrap our heads around—this is no pun intended—the idea of this collective mind that we share, the mind of God, that we’re all in there, like this—we’re all a part of it. And it is that collective being that we aim to love unconditionally, fully, beautifully, romantically, to fall in love with it. And that means caring for every individual and every issue.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a very good point. Again, I was listening to Matthew Wright this morning, and I forget who he was quoting, but he was saying something like, the kidney can’t say, “I don’t care about the heart,” and the heart can’t say, “I don’t care about the brain.”

It’s like every one of these things within our own individual body depends upon every other component. Ultimately, nothing is less important than any of the— I mean, you can afford to lose an arm, but we kind of need to function as a holistic, healthy whole in order to be an optimally functioning human being.

And so, again, it’s incumbent upon spiritual seekers, I would say, to recognize that, as you just said, no man is an island. We’re all part of the main—and what good is my enlightenment if it doesn’t contribute to the alleviation of the suffering of others? I think it’s a very Buddhist concept, isn’t it?

Mary: Yeah, I suppose so.

👁️ Future work and a vision of wholeness

Rick: A lot of people I interview do have private consultations with people over Skype and whatnot, and they kind of—some of them make their living doing that. Are you into offering that sort of thing, or is it just too difficult living up at the monastery and so on?

Mary: Yeah, I’m actually just, as I said, in the last couple of weeks really starting to come out, and that’s definitely one of the things that I would like to do. I don’t have it set up in a way to do that right now, but that’s definitely on the horizon.

Rick: Yeah, well, if you do enough of it, maybe you can fund a fast Internet connection there at the nunnery. But you’ll have a lot of nights up at two in the morning trying to talk to people in other time zones.

Mary: That’s all right. What else am I going to do?

Rick: There’s a few passages from your book I’d like to read as we kind of move toward a conclusion. They’re kind of beautiful. I’ll just read them, and then you can elaborate on them if you like.

You say, “Today I know change is coming, and it is not the conflict-centered, fear-driven story of Armageddon. It is love like we have never dared to imagine. I see this love with absolute certainty. It is coming. In fact, it is arriving more and more every day.

“I watch now as a massive gathering of countless divine beings—Masters, Archangels, Angels, et cetera—come together throughout the cosmos. They all watch in jubilant celebration as individual bodies of light begin to illuminate one by one around the planet Earth.

“There is a great love coming, like a great tidal wave, like the force of a thousand winds. It is unstoppable. You should welcome it when it comes.”

Mary: Yeah, that was that— So, in my book I alternate between my narrative in my life—my stories—and metaphysical events. And what you just quoted is from a metaphysical event in which—I think that one was one in which I had been swept up into the greater Christ consciousness. And I am with both Jesus in that and the Christ consciousness as a whole. And those are the words coming out of that.

And that is—when that happened, the scale of what I could see—if you can imagine the cosmos rolling like this, this momentum, this— And you can assign sort of a joy to that momentum. This is what I could feel. This is what I could see. This is what was coming out as this was happening.

And these divine beings that are celebrating with us are just a testament to the fact that we’re not in this alone. And we’re not the only ones who are impacted by these remarkable changes going on. This is a universal momentum, and it’s a—there’s celebration on every level happening.

And I’m sure that if you’ve had other mystics on, they’ve probably told you the same thing: that it’s a jubilant time that we’re in on every level.

Rick: That’s great. Well, do you have any—do these insights ever translate into any kind of specific predictions or timelines or anything like that? Do you ever get any kind of concrete—

Mary: No.

Rick: —visions about what things might be like 10, 20, 30 years from now?

Mary: No. There’s never a timeline with it because there’s never any time in these—there’s no aspect of time ever in these things. Everything is happening at once with all of this.

However, I have seen where we’re going in terms of the state of more wholeness—the state of— And we’re already whole. It is us recognizing more of our wholeness. And that part I’ve definitely seen, and it is not describable, but it’s definitely beautiful.

Rick: So, even though it’s not describable, can you describe—do you have a sense of how society might function in 20 years with greater wholeness being the norm? What our political systems might look like, our economies, that kind of thing?

Mary: Yeah, and I can’t put years on it. It’s not—

Rick: Well, forget the years. I mean, don’t—

Mary: Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: Let’s not say 20 years. Let’s just say some time when it might—

Mary: Yeah, it’s definitely more—it’s more harmony-based and it’s much simpler. And it’s—people still have differences, but it’s different. I heard somebody talk about it in terms of different flavors of ice cream. It’s all ice cream. It’s just a different flavor of ice cream.

We still have differences, but we don’t experience them, nor do we deal with them, in sort of a combative, conflict-kind-of-suffering way. It’s definitely more unity-based and collaborative and much more creative. Much more creative.

And the reason it’s much more creative is because nobody is bound into these roles and expectations that are societally imposed. And so people have the freedom to express their full potential. And their full potential is far beyond what we do right now, because we are really, really restricted in our expressions of Divinity right now. And we’re heading into a place where we’re going to be masters of that.

Rick: That’s great. Well, one of the reasons my interviews are so long is that I always have this feeling that I want to just discover everything about the person and give them the opportunity to tell everything about themselves to the audience. But it’s by necessity always going to be sort of just a taste, just a glimpse. If people want to find out more, they can pursue it. You have a book one can read, and you’ll be doing more work as you go along.

Mary: Another book.

Rick: Another book, and you have a website where you’ve written a bunch of stuff, and so on and so forth. So, by necessity, each one of these interviews is just sort of a glimpse into the world of one or another awakening person in the world. And it’s a great joy for me to be able to research people such as yourself week after week and then have these conversations with them. It’s really a joy and a privilege. So, I’ve really enjoyed this, and I just wish you the best in terms of…

Mary: Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this as well. It’s been such a pleasure, and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I love your breadth of knowledge and your presence. I really am very, very grateful for you.

Rick: And I for you. So, let me just make a couple of concluding remarks. With regard to Mary, I’ll be putting up a page on batgap.com, like I always do with each interview, that will contain some biographical information about her, a link to her website, a link to her book, and a link to her next book. When you get it published, Mary, let me know. We’ll add that link and some things like that.

Then, in general, with regard to this show, it’s an ongoing thing. And if you go to the website and explore, you’ll find all kinds of interesting things, one of which is that just this week we finally got this system working: a geographical guest index. If you type in a particular location, like Chicago, you’ll see a list of all the teachers who are offering something within an outgoing radius from Chicago, sorted by distance. So, at 50 miles there’s this, and at 100 miles there’s that. And that’ll be growing as more and more teachers register for it. But there’s about, I don’t know, 50 people or so who’ve put in their information so far.

There’s also the email newsletter if you want to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. Or you can subscribe on YouTube, and YouTube will notify you. There’s the donate button, as I mentioned earlier. There’s an audio podcast for this. A lot of people don’t have the time or the bandwidth or whatever to sit and watch things for two hours in front of their computer. But you can subscribe to the podcast and listen while you’re commuting or something. So many people do that.

So, thank you for listening or watching. And thank you again, Mary.

Mary: My pleasure. Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Yeah. Have fun up there in the Himalayas. And we’ll see everybody next week with Matthew Wright, whom I mentioned earlier as being the next guest. Thanks.

Mary: Thanks. [Music]