Mercedes Kirkel Interview

Summary:

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Mercedes Kirkel. Mercedes is a spiritual growth facilitator who brings forth messages from Mary Magdalene and other beings of light. And she was recommended to me by my friend Sandra Glickman, whom I interviewed near the very beginning of this whole show about three years ago. I often run into Sandra in the grocery store and places like that. So, at one point she recommended Mercedes and here we are. Now, it’s funny because on this show I often refer to the fact that there are subtler levels of creation, and even that there are beings dwelling on those subtle levels, and that one with sufficient development or whatever, could communicate with those beings and that there might be some value in doing that. Although that’s not the main focus of this show, that topic does sometimes come up. And yet when I actually encountered somebody who was doing that, my skepticism started kicking in, as it did for you when you first started having those experiences. So, what I was thinking was, let’s lay a foundation because I think it’s probably natural and healthy to be skeptical, especially since not all the people who claim to be doing the sort of thing you’re doing are actually doing it. Some might just have vivid imaginations. Not everybody was Joan of Arc in a past life or whatever. So, let’s lay a foundation and in the context of this conversation we’ll discuss why what you’re doing is relevant to somebody who would be interested in enlightenment or self-realization and might feel that channeling or subtle beings, or any of that stuff is only a distraction, that it might throw them off the path or just get them caught up in new age woo-woo, without having any ultimate value. So, we’ll talk about those things and many others. Let’s start from the beginning, Mercedes. What would you like to just say about your own life and journey and so on, starting as early as you feel there’s anything significant to recount?

Mercedes: Well, my journey actually started at a very young age. My earliest memory of having spiritual experiences was when I was eight years old. The one that most connects with this story I think, is when I was 12, which is that I started to have visions come to me, of having walked with Jesus in the desert. And to put this in context, my family was Jewish. I was living in a small Midwestern American town and my family was not particularly religiously oriented. It was more of their background was Jewish, but we weren’t actively involved in much of anything spiritual or religious. And I started having these visions. And in the visions, there were about 100 people who were following Jesus in the desert, and I was part of that group. There was an inner circle, and I wasn’t part of the inner circle, but I was part of the larger gathering. And I never told anyone about these visions because I didn’t think anyone would understand. I didn’t think my family would understand and I didn’t really know anyone outside my family to talk to.

Rick: Would they come in dreams or when you were just riding your bicycle or sitting quietly or what?

Mercedes: Actually, my strongest memory of this vision is one time when I was doing a family chore. I was cleaning one of the bathrooms and this vision came to me. So, I was awake, and it was sort of when I was in quiet time by myself, and I remember they came to me a number of times the same vision.

Rick: And it was pretty vivid? It wasn’t just a vague imagination; it was something quite vivid?

Mercedes: Oh yes, and it was something I knew was different. All children have imagination and that kind of thing. And this was different, and it stood out very strongly for me. But eventually it receded back into the background, and I more or less forgot about it. But I did go on from there to be very interested in religion. And in my early life, starting when I was 12 years old, I was very drawn to Hinduism and Eastern spirituality. I remember going to the public library in a small midwestern town and taking up books on Hinduism. And at that time the only books available were very scholarly texts. I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. But it didn’t stop me. I still tried. There was something so strong in me wanting to connect with this. And it wasn’t until I went to college, and I actually was still fairly young. I was 16 when I went to college. And I started to meet people who were practicing Eastern Indian religions or paths of different sorts. And I was very drawn, experimented with lots of things and I was a dismal failure at all of it. I tried meditating, I tried chanting, I tried Zen Buddhism, I tried everything that I could get access to. And I just seemed like I wasn’t cut out for it. Nothing worked. Yoga, I didn’t have the discipline, couldn’t get myself up in the morning. Nothing seemed to work. But I stayed with it. I was so persistent. Finally, I did connect with an American spiritual teacher. That teacher went by many different names, but the name that he finally ended up with, that he’s known by today, is Adi Da.

Rick: And that’s where you met Sandra. She was with Adi Da and Saniel Bonder.

Mercedes: Right. That was my second spiritual teacher, and she was connected to both of them. And I was with Adi Da for 17 years. I was very, very involved at the most central level. And this was what I consider a very serious spiritual path that I was on at that point. It involved lots of meditation and all sorts of disciplines and my whole life being very, very devoted. And eventually I moved into the second spiritual group that I was with, which was Saniel Bonder and the Waking Down Community.

Rick: Why did you leave Adi Da?

Mercedes: I had no intention of leaving. There were things that were going on that I wasn’t quite aligned to, and I was aware of that. But I was still feeling that there was so much blessing, and I was growing so strongly that I was very at peace with what was happening. But I was in a relationship with someone who felt like their practice had plateaued and that they weren’t growing. This had been going on for a number of years and he was very frustrated. He decided that he wanted to look for something to supplement his practice. Both of us had a number of friends who had formerly been in the Adi Da community and had left and gone with Saniel, and were working with Saniel Bonder and were very excited about what was happening. Because we heard about Saniel through our friends, my partner decided he would check out Saniel. He started going to Saniel’s groups and really felt very supported and really liked what was happening. He kept saying to me, “Would you like to come? Would you like to come?” I said, “No, I’m fine with what’s happening with me, but I’m glad this is working for you.” After about six months, it started to become apparent to me that he was really getting more and more committed to what was happening with Saniel. I thought, just for the sake of our relationship, I should go and check out and make a connection with the people there. We started with a dinner. We had a dinner with Saniel and his partner, Linda, and one other woman that I had known who was working with Saniel, but I had known her previously from the Adi Da community. I was very impressed. First of all, I was very impressed with this woman I had known from the previous community because she had changed so much. We had been very good friends, and I knew her well. I could see how much she had changed; how strong she had become. She had a lot of power and clarity, and I was really impressed. That was the first thing that really spoke to me.

Rick: Do I know her?

Mercedes: Her name is Renee Hanson.

Rick: I don’t know her. I don’t know her. I haven’t interviewed her, no.

Mercedes: That was very powerful for me. At a certain point, Saniel said, “Would you like to talk about your spiritual practice and what’s happening?” I thought, “Wonderful, I’d love to.” So, we started talking and I told him what was going on at that point in my life. He said, “Would you like to hear my point of view on this?” I was so impressed that he even asked. He was so respectful and that really moved me. I said, “Yes, I’d love to hear your point of view.” He talked to me and said things I had never heard before. I was very impressed, and I thought, “This is interesting. I think this could be valuable. There is something here.” Then at the end as we were leaving, it had been a very lovely dinner, he asked if I would like a hug. I said, “Sure, I’d like to have a hug.” So, I got a hug from him, and I recognized that there was spiritual transmission that happened. That impressed me too. I was very familiar with spiritual transmission from Adi Da, who has- had, he’s not alive anymore, but when I was with him, I experienced very powerful spiritual transmission. So, I knew what that was like. This was not as strong as that, but it was clear, and I felt it. So, I went home. The next morning, I woke up and things started coming out of my mouth that were different. I knew it was because of that hug. I knew it had affected me. All that really got my attention and I thought, “I better check this out more.” I went to the next sitting that he was having, Saniel, and he did a meditation with the group. In the meditation I experienced the witness consciousness for the first time that I was aware of. I knew very well what that was from my study that I had engaged, but I was not aware of ever having experienced that before. I thought, “There is something happening here. I need to check this out.” A week later I went to two more gatherings and a weekend event, and I said, “This is my new home. I need to be here.” So, it was a very graceful, organic transition that happened.

Rick: Is it of interest to you or has it been something that you’ve been trying to process, since leaving Adi Da’s community, the paradox between the fact that someone can have a great deal of spiritual power and radiance and influence, and yet have other aspects of his life that seems to not jibe with that? I met a guy who had been with Adi Da for 17 years and he left because Adi Da was screwing his wife, to put it a little bit indelicately. He gave me a whole laundry list of stuff that the guy was into, which was quite disturbing. It would have been if I had been involved with him. But at the same time, I heard so many wonderful things about him from people. People say his books are so brilliant. Over the years this has been an issue with me, not only with him, but other teachers, why there’s so often a dichotomy between some aspects of who they appear to be and then other aspects of their behavior. I’ve come to the conclusion, to put it in a nutshell, that to use Ken Wilber’s analogy, there can be lines of development and a person can be very developed along certain lines, and stunted in others. They’re not completely blossomed to the full extent of possibilities, in terms of spiritual development, even though they may think they are. Do you have any reflections on that? I think it would be good to touch upon it in passing, or maybe it’s of no interest to you.

Mercedes: It’s definitely of interest to me. It didn’t disturb me the way that it had disturbed some people. I think partly people who were involved in receiving the tremendous gifts that so many of us receive from Adi Da, were able to, in a maybe subconscious way or something, to accept that there were different things going on. For me it was always a balance point of, am I fundamentally in integrity with myself, and is the good outweighing what’s not working for me? I was able to be at peace with that. I think most people did that on some level or other. Some people got to the place where that wasn’t the case, where there were things going on that were too disturbing for them, too unsettling and non-supportive, and that’s when they decided to leave. A lot of people left with anger or hurt. There were many people who had a lot of hurt when they left and went through a difficult process. Also, a lot of people went through a difficult process. It was like a divorce because there was such a deep love that the people who were there, especially people who stayed for a long time, had for him. It’s very much like a divorce; what people went through. So, I was very, very blessed because I didn’t exit out of anger. I didn’t have a difficult experience that caused me to leave. I just left because I was guided somewhere new. In some ways, I feel like my whole life has been like that. I’ve been so blessed. Also, I went to another community. A lot of people who left didn’t have another community to go to, and that was a very hard thing, too. So, I didn’t go through that. But I think Ken Wilber’s description is a very good way of looking at it, and more or less in my own explanation how I understand it. Also, one of the things that I came away with after leaving the Adi Da community, and then even after that, is that I don’t any longer relate to awakening or enlightenment as one event. Definitely when I was in the Adi Da community, there was a structure that Adi Da was teaching, and it had to do with he’s awakened or enlightened and he’s helping other people to attain this. It was like an end point, a goal. I don’t see it that way anymore. As a matter of fact, I view this whole progression as this progression into return and reunion with absolute divinity. What I see it in terms of dimensions, and in the book, I talk about this, 12 dimensions, with us being for the most part, and most of us, operating in the third dimension primarily right now. What I think that most people in a more traditional sense are talking about when they talk about enlightenment or awakening is some degree of the fifth dimension, and that there’s quite a bit beyond that. If you don’t see it as just one event where it’s all or nothing, you’re either there or not, then it’s very possible that there can be different levels, different parts of yourself, that are further along in this progression and other parts that are needing more help. That makes more sense.

Rick: That’s excellent. I want to talk more about those dimensions with you a little bit later in the interview. What you just said pretty much describes the way I see it these days. I also used to think of enlightenment as this static terminus. Even now, just the other day I was reading a quote from some teacher that said, “Either you’re awake or you’re not. It’s like being pregnant or dead. You’re either dead or you’re not. You’re pregnant or you’re not. The same with enlightenment or awakening.” But in my experience, which admittedly is still a work in progress, but also, in my experience of interacting with other people, I’ve gotten the impression that it’s an ongoing process, and that there are many, many degrees of awakening, never-ending degrees of unfoldment, refinement, embodiment, whatever you want to call it. Obviously, there’s some component there that once realized, doesn’t change in and of itself. There is a non-changing aspect to life, but the infusion of that component, if you will, or the reflection of that, there’s no end to the degree of progress in that realm.

Mercedes: The way that I look at it is that there are these, and in the book this is a lot of what Mary’s talking about too, these two aspects or faces of God. And the name, the label that she gives to them and the way she looks at them is the masculine and the feminine. There are other ways of looking at it too.

Rick: Shiva and Shakti.

Mercedes: Exactly. And that the masculine ultimately is this eternal, unchanging aspect of the divine, the transcendental, what’s prior to all of manifestation. And the feminine is the incarnate, the manifest, the in-form, if you will, aspect of God. And the feminine is always changing. It’s the nature of change, birth, life, death, rebirth, the cycle of …

Rick: It’s funny that we assign genders to them, because why would we think that the pure, absolute, unchanging, silent consciousness is masculine? What is there that’s masculine about it? And obviously human beings have both components within them. You’re not all one or the other. But it is a little funny that we assign genders to them. And maybe a related question is, do women embody more of what you just said, and men embody more of the transcendent quality and maybe that’s why women are women and men are men.

Mercedes: Yes, I think that’s in general true. And for each individual there’s varying degrees and all of that. But yes, I was on a panel discussion this week with a man who is specializing in the masculine, and supporting men in particular in incarnating the masculine. And he had an image I really, really liked. His name is Dwayne Klassen, and his image was taking the yin-yang sign and cutting it down the middle. And if you look at each side, each side of that symbol has about 70% of one of the elements, yin or yang, and 30% of the other. And he says in general for men and women that’s about the right percent where you are functioning within yourself and in relationship to the other pole pretty optimally. And I like that. I thought that was really good.

Rick: Do you think gay people have more of a balance in the other direction or something? And that’s why we have gay people?

Mercedes: They may, but in most gay relationships you’ll usually see that one person is more in the masculine role, and one person is more in the feminine role.

Rick: Interesting. All right, so we’ve taken a tangent, but I want to get you back to your story. You left Adi Da and you were getting involved with the Waking Down community, and let’s take it from there.

Mercedes: Yes. So, what happened is that within four months of coming into the Waking Down community, I went through a very profound awakening- what they call in that community the second birth. And for me it was really the fulfillment of my spiritual seeking for all those years. And it was knowing who I was at the fundamental core of my being in union with God, and it was a fundamental shift. Something within me absolutely changed. And I don’t think about it so much anymore, except once in a while when I’m having a conversation with someone and we’ll be talking about our mind and our consciousness, and they’ll describe kind of the way their mind is working, and I’ll go, “Oh, yeah, I remember. I used to be like that.” And then I can see that something has changed. But it’s the way it is so often with human growth, where you’re striving and striving for something and then you achieve it, and it becomes just sort of ordinary and oh well, and you go on.

Rick: Yes, I think that’s the way we’re wired, even in material realms. You get a new car and it’s, “Oh boy, it smells so good, and it feels so good.” And a few weeks later it’s like, “Yeah, it’s my car.”

Mercedes: It’s the car. So, I went through that, and in some ways, it was a bit of a crisis for me, because my whole life had been about this awakening and knowing who I was in relationship to God and the world and all of that. And suddenly that quest wasn’t there anymore. I was at peace. I felt like I had completed that.

Rick: Can you elaborate on that experience a little bit more? I’m just thinking some people might want to say, “Okay, well who was she?” or “What was this experience exactly?”

Mercedes: Okay. Well, there were two stages to it. And the first stage, I’m trying to remember the name that they gave, and I can’t even remember, but it was something about awakening to the witness consciousness. And this was what I experienced that first time in that meditation with Saniel. And I continued to experience this every single time that I meditated with Saniel, or any of the other teachers who were teaching at that time in the Waking Down process. And then the first step is to start to realize that outside of meditation, where you are continuously connected to that, in contact with that. And that happened after about two months, where suddenly I realized it was always with me. It reminded me of a computer screen, where if you’re running a program, and then you can hit a button and it minimizes the program, and it just goes down to this little icon. I felt like this consciousness was always with me, but it was minimized. It was right here over at my left side, and whenever I wanted, I could click on it and be with it fully. But I never lost my connection to it. It was always there.

Rick: And just like the computer analogy, it was running in the background, so to speak, doing a certain function and serving its purpose. But it didn’t need to be in the foreground all the time in order to serve that purpose.

Mercedes: Right. And in my cosmology, my understanding now, the way that I relate to things, I would say that that was the masculine, that was the transcendental, pure, transcendent nature of God, that didn’t really directly have anything to do at that time in my awareness with everything else. It was just the way that when you go into meditation, you go away from the world, away from everything that’s happening. It was always there, but it was its own thing. It was not integrated.

Rick: Not integrated, but it must have impacted the rest of your life, right? Having awakened that as opposed to previously not having awakened that, it must have somehow had an influence, or did that influence just grow gradually over time?

Mercedes: It was subtle, but there was a sense of a kind of peace and a sense of having something very special in your life, sort of like a special secret that you just know and you’re carrying with you. And the sense of, I had this, and it was just this blessed gift that was always with me.

Rick: Yeah. And it must have… Did that peace kind of begin to influence the way your mind functioned, for instance, or the way your behavior flowed? Like you referred to that woman, someone, Hanson, I think her last name was, who seemed so strong and different than the previous time you had seen her. So, did something similar to that happen to you as a result of this awakening?

Mercedes: I would say not immediately. What it did was it laid the groundwork, the foundation for the second stage of the awakening, and that’s when things really started to change. So, it was sort of like a germination period in some ways. The seed was planted. And the second stage I went through about two months later, and one of the things that precipitated it was that I was editing Saniel’s book. He was working on what was his second book, but his really first public book, called Waking Down. And I had done some work before in the Adi Da community. I’d been in the editorial staff and had been writing and editing work. So, he, at one point, had passed out a sample chapter, and I said that I loved it, and I would be really honored if he wanted to work with me and have me edit it. And I did a sample edit, and he said, “This is great. Let’s do it.” So, I ended up editing the book. And as it was getting very close to coming out, I was really immersed in the teaching. So, I would say for the two weeks before I went through this full awakening, I was almost full-time, all day long, working on this material. I was very focused on all of the teaching that Saniel had given. And then I went to this retreat, and at the retreat, actually, Sandra was one of the leaders of the retreat. It was Sandra and Van at that time. And I was in a group with three other people, and we were particularly put in this group, because Saniel felt all of us were very close to awakening, and he thought it would be supportive of us to be together.

Rick: So, he didn’t regard that thing that had happened a few weeks before as awakening. That was just like the initial…

Mercedes: That was part of his teaching, was that there were these two stages that he would go through. And he saw that as the initial stage, but no, that was not the full awakening. And so I was in this group, and it felt… It did have this feeling of being pregnant, like we were very, very close. And it was intense, and there was this intensity between all of us. And on Saturday night of the retreat, we went out to dinner with Saniel and Linda, and at one point, Saniel looked at me and he said, “Well, Mercedes, what’s keeping you back? What do you have to do before you’re ready to fully awaken?” And I just felt fear, such fear when he said that. It was like the core of my being said, “No! I’m not ready!” And I said something like that to him. And he just said, “Okay, well, when you’re ready, you’ll know.” And I went home that night, and I remember I had vivid dreams all night. I was so disturbed, and I woke up in the morning, and I had this feeling like a truck had run over me or something. It was just so intense. And I had the feeling I was just very, very close, and my ego was just holding on for everything it was worth. Like, “No, no, no, you don’t want this.” And I went to the retreat that morning, and we started out with a meditation. The two leaders, Sandra and Van, were both leading the meditation, and we were doing an eye-gazing meditation. And first I meditated with Sandra, and it was very wonderful, and then I meditated with Van, all in the large group. When I say “meditated,” it was like we connected with our eyes gazing. And Van, at that point, because it was still new in the days of the Waking Down teaching, Van was the only person, other than Saniel at that point, who had brought someone through who was working with him into full awakening. And so, as I was meditating with Van, I silently said to him, “Van, please help me. I don’t know what I need, but please help me.” And almost instantly I had a response, and it was what I consider the moment when I awakened. And what happened was it was a very simple experience. I connected with my awareness, my sense of awareness, and I saw it go out to a certain level and stop. And it was like, “That’s my sense of who I am, and that’s the limit of it as much as it goes.” And then all of a sudden, something–I want to say “reversed,” but that’s not really the word–but something fundamental just changed. And it’s like, “Whoosh!” It just went out to infinity. And at the same time, there was a simultaneous awareness of myself as this one single point that was not in space or time, but you could say it was at the very center of everything, and that I was both. I was this absolute, infinite everything, connected to everything, non-separate from everything, and I was absolutely nothing but a point. And that was the moment for me when everything shifted. And it took about a day to really kind of start to get a sense of what had happened. And what I realized, was that I understood what had happened by contrast to how I had been before and how I was now. And comparing the two is what made sense of it for me. And I realized that before, I had always had this sense of me being separate from everything else. Whatever I was, which I didn’t really know what I was, but I knew that it was somehow cut off, separate from everything. So, there was me, there was everything else, and there was separation. There were these three elements that were constants in my life. And that my life really had all of… Everything I did in my life up to that time had been trying to come into union, to get out of separation. And no matter what it had been, everything that I had done had been motivated by that. And all of a sudden, I did not feel separate, and I did not feel separate from God, ultimately. And I had none of this drive anymore. It was like there was this motor that was always running previously, and suddenly the motor had turned off, and there was just absolute peace. And that was the change.

Rick: Nice. And that persisted?

Mercedes: To this day, it’s never changed.

Rick: Right.

Mercedes: And I did not become perfect. I did not become the Buddha. I still had problems in my life. I’m very normal in so many ways, but it’s this internal shift that has made a huge difference.

Rick: And you mentioned the term “full awakening” several times, and yet earlier we were talking about it’s an ongoing unfoldment. So how do you use the adjective “full” to characterize that, if there’s going to be more?

Mercedes: Yes. That was my big question. My big question wasn’t about Adi Da. It was about, “What does this mean, what I went through?” And “Why am I not a perfect person?” Was this really an awakening? But yet, there was no question that I went through this profound change that has really affected me. And the other thing I want to say about it is, relative to the difference between that first stage and the second stage, the way that I see it, is this second stage took that initial witness consciousness awakening, and integrated it with every aspect of my being. So suddenly they weren’t separate anymore. It wasn’t this little program running at the side. Suddenly that was what was not separate from everything else. And so, I think Saniel’s term is a really good term, because he calls it “second birth,” and it’s like a birth. It’s a beginning of a whole new way of relating to life, and a whole new way of being. So that, to me, is why there’s still this development and why there’s this on-going-ness. It’s because you’ve come into a new level of integration that, to me, is as natural to us as all the stages we go through. It’s as natural as a one-year-old learning how to walk. And then they go on, and there’s so much beyond that. But there’s no question they’ve learned how to walk, and they never forget.

Rick: So, in terms of this 12-stage thing you mentioned earlier, would this “full awakening” have been a certain stage, like stage 5 or something? Or doesn’t it fit into that model?

Mercedes: I don’t really see it as fitting into that model, because I consider myself definitely still seated in the third dimension. But there are parts of me that are moving and already strong in what I would characterize as the fourth dimension, and to some extent beginning in the fifth dimension. I think there’s that, it’s like streamers going forth, the parts of ourself, until all of us is ready and we move all together into that next level.

Rick: Usually when scientists talk about dimensions, they mean depth, height, and width are the first three dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. But when you use the term “third dimension”, I presume you mean the whole material world that we customarily live in, and the fourth would be what? What the Hindus say is “turya”, which means “fourth”, which is “transcendent”, or what, something else?

Mercedes: I can’t compare it to the Hindu, because I’m not that familiar with what that means in that terminology.

Rick: It just means like the transcendent state, fourth state, turya. But I think you’re saying something different.

Mercedes: I think I’m saying something different too. I look at it as realms of manifestation, as what we would call our reality, all together. So, it’s much, much bigger than the scientific kind of analysis of these elements. And it’s based on the idea that our consciousness creates our reality. So, for those of us who are manifesting at third dimension right now, our consciousness primarily is operating at this certain frequency, that’s calling in what we know. And the third dimension is characterized by duality, by separation, and by fundamentally our anchor, our base is in the physical, in the third dimension.

Rick: Yeah. So, you’re saying that even now, after those awakenings, you are primarily operating in the third dimension, because you have a physical body and a physical life and all that stuff. But somehow other dimensionality has been brought into it that kind of coexists with your third dimensional life. Is that what you’re saying?

Mercedes: Yes, and I think that awakening was a great support in that, in opening my consciousness and starting to open me to other things other than only the third dimension. And the third dimension primarily is characterized by what Mary referred to as our lower mind. And that’s a combination of our rational mind and our subconscious mind. And the fourth dimension is the beginning of starting to move into the higher realms, from this point of view. And the fourth dimension, many of us, the most common experience we have of the fourth dimension is in our dream world. It’s what we experience, in our dreams, where we still have a physical body, but it’s very light. And that’s not the primary characteristic. The primary characteristic is this more energy aspect of ourselves. And the fourth dimension is much more energetically based, and emotionally based. And there are… It’s a spectrum also in the fourth dimension. So, there’s lower aspects of the fourth dimension or higher aspects. And the lower aspects are more like what our nightmares are like. It’s the heavy dreams we have of fear or terror, or extreme sorrow, anger, very strong, kind of dark emotions. And the higher aspects are the more blissful aspects of the emotions of joy, love, ecstasy, peace, serenity, those kinds of things. And in some ways, it’s kind of like the classic view that has been held in Christianity of what heaven and hell are like. And I think there’s a basis in that in these realms in the fourth dimension.

Rick: Okay. So, I want to make sure that I’m not throwing you off on detours, because this is all very interesting. And I would like to talk about all these dimensions, and the whole realm of possibilities, but we still have a story that we’re unfolding here. [Laughter] So, we can kind of loop out a little bit and then loop back again.

Mercedes: Okay. So, I went through this awakening. I stayed in that community for about two years altogether. I was stabilizing and coming into this awakening, and integrating it with my life. And the second year, I became a teacher in the waking down process. And it became apparent to me over the course of that time of teaching, that that wasn’t quite a fit for me. That it wasn’t my real path, although there were very many wonderful things about it. And at the end of that time, I was still wondering, “Well, what is my path now? What am I going to do with my life?” And I started having visions again. And I had visions…

Rick: Like you had when you were 12, like visions. You had visions for a long time.

Mercedes: I had visions again, right, since I was 12, and they were very different visions. At the time, it was a vision of being on the side of a volcano, and being at a very beautiful lake where I was leading a group of women in ceremony. And shortly after those visions started, which again, I had a number of times, I met a man, fell in love, and he was headed back to Hawaii, where he had lived before. And he invited me to come visit him in Hawaii. And we got there, and there was the volcano and the lake, just like I had seen in my visions.

Rick: Nice.

Mercedes: Yes. So, I ended up moving to Hawaii. And I was on the big island, and my spirituality definitely turned at that point, to be connecting with the Earth very strongly, and with Earth as the Divine Feminine, our Mother, because I didn’t really have that at all in my background. And while I was in Hawaii, in addition to making this very strong connection with the Earth, I started to receive messages from Spirit, very simple messages. Most of them were directives to me about things to do in my life, do this, do that, that kind of thing.

Rick: And these messages came in the form of actual words, as if they were a loudspeaker, or more like a subtle impulse kind of thing?

Mercedes: Most of the time, the messages came what I would call telepathically, which means they were delivered directly to my brain, and I suddenly knew them. But I knew I could tell the difference between my own thoughts and these messages. It was very clearly two different kinds of things. But that’s how I would experience them. But one actually did happen, where it was a voice that I heard, a very loud voice. I was asleep, and it was so loud it woke me up. And it was a directive to me. It was rather humorous, I thought. It was telling me the message was, “Buy gold.”

Rick: Ha! Wow.

Mercedes: And I knew nothing about… I was like, “Buy gold? What does that mean?” I didn’t even know that people could buy gold. So, I took a month, and I researched it on the Internet and found out that gold was at an all-time low, and it was a great time to buy gold.

Rick: Ha! Cool. So, you bought some.

Mercedes: So, I did.

Rick: Great. Sounds like it was a smart move. Ha!

Mercedes: So, lots of funny stories about that. But then what happened was I was leading a workshop at one point. It was actually a sacred sexuality workshop, and that’s a story unto itself that I won’t go into. But one of my friends said, “Oh, have you ever heard of this book by Mary Magdalene?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “Oh, if you’re teaching sacred sexuality, you should read this book.” And I said, “Okay, great.” So, she loaned it to me. It was a channeled book, channeled by Tom Kenyon, from Mary Magdalene. And in it, Mary Magdalene was telling her story, saying that, in very summary form, that she was a priestess of Isis. She was prepared for her meeting with Yeshua, the Aramaic name of Jesus, specifically, by being trained in the sex magic of Isis, a very high practice within the priestess lineage, and that he was similarly trained. And they were prepared to come together and practice this sacred sexuality, which he called the sex magic of Isis, as part of both of their spiritual paths, but specifically empowering Yeshua to do his final miracle, which was to die, go into the underworld, and lay a path of light for all beings to follow, and that their work was a key element in transforming his energy body into pure light and empowering his spiritual body to do this final miracle. And then she went on from there to explain the practices, in very simple form, that they were doing of sacred sexuality. And as I read this, this was new material, I hadn’t heard of these practices before, and they instantly became activated in me as I was reading the book. And by the end of the book, I was feeling quite amazed at what was going on, and had an integration that happened, and I realized I was remembering, that at the cellular memory level, my body knew these practices all before because I had done this practice. I had been in this temple culture in Egypt as a priestess, and I had done these practices. And moreover, I had memories start to come to me, of having known Mary Magdalene, having known Mother Mary, who was also a priestess of Isis, and that that was why I was following Jesus in these visions that I had when I was 12 years old, because we had all been connected through the temple, and it was a reconnection for me. So, when I went through that, it was a big surprise. Big surprise. And first of all, I was one of those people who had a definite attitude about channeling, that channeling was fluff, it was maybe delusional, not real, and definitely not the real spiritual path. And suddenly I’m reading this channeled book, and saying, “This is resonating with me.” So that was very confusing to me. Also, because I still didn’t associate myself with the Christian path, I was like, “Mary Magdalene? Mother Mary? I don’t relate to these people. What is Isis?” I had no idea who Isis was or what the temple of Isis was. That was just like foreign to me. So, I did what I always did. I got on the Internet, started researching, “Who’s Isis? What’s the temple of Isis?” And I couldn’t find anything. I found one book, and I ordered it, and it was very unsatisfying, didn’t really answer my questions. And I tried to find someone who could give me information, and I only found two people on the Internet. One was Tom Kenyon, who had written the book. And I wrote to him, and he never wrote back. Then I found a woman who was a psychic, and she felt like she was connected to Isis. And I did some work with her, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for. I wanted really very grounded details, information, and I wasn’t getting that. And so finally I said, “As best I knew how.” I didn’t know how to do this, but I just did what I could figure out to do. I had a conversation with Isis, and I said, “Isis, if you’re real, if this is real what’s happening to me, “I need help. You’re going to have to guide me. “I can’t find this on my own. “I don’t know what to do with this. “I don’t know where to go. “You’re going to have to guide me.” And what happened is she started coming to me, and giving me these telepathic messages. Only a couple of times, very simple, and the main one was that I was to lead a priestess training for women. And she told me that. I’m like, “What? You’ve got to be kidding.” I said, “I’m only awakening to my background as a priestess. “How am I going to lead a training for other people?” And she said, “Don’t worry. “I’ll give you everything you need.” That was… In some ways I look back and I see it as a test, but it was a huge leap of faith for me, to advertise and put out that I was going to lead this training that I knew absolutely nothing about.

Rick: Yeah, really.

Mercedes: But I did it. And what happened was the morning before the first gathering, she came to me, and she gave me the full download of everything I was to do, the full activities down to the music I was to play, everything.

Rick: Interesting.

Mercedes: And she continued to do this every time we met. And the group lasted for a year, and was an absolutely amazing group. So, I had that experience and that brought me up to the end of 2009. And then that group ended at a year and right at that time, I got a message from spirit, not from any particular being, just what I consider spirit, that I was to leave the Big Island. And in some ways, this was another test. I was very happy at that time living on the Big Island. I’d been there for ten years, thought I was going to live there the rest of my life.

Rick: Presumably you weren’t still in a relationship with that guy whom you had…

Mercedes: Right. Right. So, I asked three times, to check out and see if I was really getting this right. The message was very consistent, so I said “okay.” Because I had seen every time, I had ever followed a message from spirit, my life had worked out for the best. So, I took off. Took a few months, closed all my affairs and left. The only thing was the message did not tell me where I was supposed to go. It just said leave the Big Island. So, I didn’t know where to go, so I went to visit my family on the mainland. And it turned out that my family was needing some help. My parents were both having some changes with advancing age, and I was so happy to be there, and be able to help them with some things that they were really needing support with. And so, I did that for about four months. And all the while I kept asking, “Okay, spirit, where am I supposed to go? Where is my home now?” And I didn’t hear a thing, nothing. But almost to the day that I finished helping my parents, did everything that I could see that I was able to do, I started getting messages again. And I got a few messages that guided me to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And so, I came here, and it was like the red carpet rolled out for me. Everything I needed was provided immediately, and there were signs everywhere that this was exactly where I was supposed to be. Within a couple of days of arriving I was meditating one morning and all of a sudden, I felt a very strong presence around me, a very beautiful, wonderful presence. And I especially felt it in my throat area, and I had the sense that I was blocking it somehow in my throat, from completely coming through and I really wanted to experience this presence. So, I just put all my intention on whatever needed to happen, for me to release this block in my throat for that to occur. And all of a sudden, a voice started speaking through me. And simultaneous with the voice beginning, there was this internal message that this was the voice of Mary Magdalene.

Rick: And when you say speaking through you, it was just on your mental level, right? If someone had been in the room, they would have heard you?

Mercedes: Yes, I was talking out loud.

Rick: Even though you were alone you were talking out loud?

Mercedes: I was talking out loud and it was not my usual voice at all. And I was just amazed. And she proceeded to give a full spiritual discourse, which now is the first chapter in the book, the first message. This was a first for me. I had never had that kind of message come through from any being or from spirit, where it was a full talk, a discourse. And I was just amazed and in awe and by the time she ended, I was like melted in a pool of bliss. Until I had a thought.

Rick: How am I going to remember this?

Mercedes: Exactly. And I was like horrified. I was like, I can’t just forget this. This is too amazing what happened. And also, I was very sure that this was not just for me. This was a very universal message that came through. And I felt like this was my responsibility to record it and share it. And so, without a moment’s hesitation or another thought I asked her, would she give me the message again so I could get my computer, and type it into my computer? And she said yes. I went and got my computer. I’m a very fast typist. She gave me the entire message verbatim, word for word, exactly identical to the first.

Rick: And this time it was just coming to your mind and you were typing.

Mercedes: Exactly. And I could not have done that. I could not have recreated that message again verbatim. And so, what that did beyond allowing me to record the message, which I really wanted to do, but it really confirmed for me that this was Mary Magdalene and I knew that I didn’t have that ability to do what had just happened. It was like a little miracle.

Rick: Interesting. One doubt that came up when I first started reading your book and thinking about this, is there’s a very creative level of the mind. And if you can tap into that sufficiently you can become a Mozart or a Shakespeare or an Edison and so on, tremendous creativity. And sometimes I wonder whether people who are channeling, are just somehow tapping into an incredibly deep, creative level of the mind, and just expressing something from who knows where, but it doesn’t necessarily involve other beings or on subtle levels or anything. Like for instance, I had a friend who used to do channeling, and he claimed he was channeling Merlin, and he would come out with a Scottish brogue. I don’t even know if Merlin ever existed, but he would go into this big, long thing that Merlin was giving him. And so, I’m saying this in a gentle way, because obviously for the most part I totally believe you, but there’s these kind of doubts that come up, and I wonder if there could be some other explanation, and I’m hopefully giving voice to doubts that listeners may have, and offering you the opportunity to address those doubts before we proceed.

Mercedes: I had those doubts too. I even asked one of my very close friends from Hawaii at one point, who I shared some of Mary’s messages with her and I said, “Do you think this is just me?” And she read it and she said, “No, I don’t think this is you. I’ve never heard you express anything like this.” She said, “There’s an aspect to it that is definitely related to you, but this is different.” And that really helped me.

Rick: Well, that’s another thing. Could it be that there is some genuine message coming from Mary Magdalene, or whoever is being channeled, in this case Mary Magdalene, and yet it’s being colored to a great extent by the individuality of the person? Like there’s Ramtha and that whole thing and who knows to what extent that’s being colored by the personality of J.Z. Knight. However, having said that, I answered that doubt in my own mind by saying, “Well, but Mercedes actually prepared herself to a great extent as a vessel, or a conduit before this started happening.” There was a genuine awakening to a non-dual state or whatever we want to call it, and so, the likelihood of coloration is probably much diminished, compared to somebody who hadn’t gone through such a transformation.

Mercedes: I think everyone who channels other beings, influences it to some extent or other. Is this what you’re calling coloring? Yes, I believe. And I think with different channels, it’s to a different degree. And so that’s one of the things that I think people look for, or should look for when they’re involved with someone who’s channeling, is how clear is the channel? How much is this person influencing what’s coming through, and how much does it seem like it’s a pretty clear communication?

Rick: Yeah. For one thing, it had to be, unless Mary Magdalene has learned English. Maybe on that level you know all languages, but you don’t speak Aramaic, and so, it was coming through in English.

Mercedes: And also, one of the things that was a real question for me was, one of the things that happened, backtracking a little bit, when I was in Hawaii, is I got exposed to the nonviolent communication teaching, and I was very involved with that. I taught nonviolent communication for most of the time that I was in Hawaii, and was very dedicated to it, thought it was a very valuable tool of raising consciousness, really. And when Mary started coming through, she incorporated a lot of these concepts into her messages. So, if you’re familiar with the nonviolent communication, you’ll see a lot of bleed-through in her messages.

Rick: Were you thinking that that was your nonviolent communication?

Mercedes: That’s what I was worried about, very worried about. But later, because I was so new, I was such a tabula rasa, a blank slate to this whole world, I didn’t know very much about channeling. Now, having done it for three years and being much more familiar and understanding of what happens, the way that I see what happens with channeling, is that the person who’s channeling, if they’re able to do this, they open themselves to the higher being, and the higher being kind of reads their mind in a certain way. It’s like you’re giving them access to your mind, to the concepts in your mind, the language in your mind, everything, and then they can use that to communicate with us. So, it’s like my mind is the software in some ways, and all my ideas are the software, too. And whatever they find valuable in my mind, they select from that to make their communication. And that’s why there is this bleed-through, I think, and this integration. And relative to my preparation, I think there was a lot of guidance going on for me, in all the preparation during this life.

Rick: Yeah, preparing you for it. That rings true to me. So, what you’re saying is that you wouldn’t be a very good channel for Albert Einstein, because you don’t have that kind of…

Mercedes: The software would be sadly lacking.

Rick: Yeah, you don’t have that kind of training, but for Mary Magdalene you were a good fit, because you had gone through so many relevant things.

Mercedes: Right, and even the non-violent communication, because so much of her teaching is about the feminine, and especially she’s focusing on the emotional realm. And the non-violent communication gave so many tools, and understandings for working with that, that I think she found that is very helpful for what she wanted to communicate.

Rick: Yeah, that sounds good. Okay, so what next? This is your first… you had your first session, and there were 28 of them as I recall.

Mercedes: 25.

Rick: 25 of them over almost a month, and the whole thing just kept unfolding, and then I guess it stopped. I haven’t finished your book, but I got through a bunch of them. So lay it out for us. What among all those readings… You can take as much time as you like, to explain as much detail of everything that was conveyed, if you wish, or just give us teasers so people will buy the book, whatever you prefer.

Mercedes: Well, I love to share about this information. I have so much passion about it. And I didn’t realize it at the time that she gave me the first message, but it was really her thesis statement for the whole book, and she is absolutely brilliant. I am so impressed with her mind and what I consider her brilliance. And she continued to every day come to me and give me a message a day, which became the structure of the book. Each message was a chapter, and it was perfectly laid out where, like I said, the first message had her whole thesis statement for the book, and then chapter by chapter, she was developing that with such depth, wisdom, brilliance, all the way through to the ending. And I felt as I was around the 21st, 22nd message, that it was winding to a close. I could feel a sense that she had said what she wanted to say. It was complete. And at that point I was feeling incredibly sad. I had so much treasured this amazing communion with this high being, virtually every day and was really sad about it. However, it had become clear to me fairly early on in her giving me these messages, that she was giving me a book, and it was like I had my marching orders. I knew what I had to do, and I had a lot of work ahead of me, I knew. And so, there was a mixture of, like, it’s time for me to get out and do my part, and time to let go of having this kind of connection with her that I had so much treasured. So around the 22nd message I thought, “This is it. This is the end.” And then I went the next morning to meditate and thought, “Am I going to be able to connect with her? Is she going to be here?” And she came through, and her quality was so different. For those first 22 messages it was like she was fiery, she was intense, she had a mission, and the mission was about us, helping us in service to us. And now it was like she knew that it was done. She had done what she had come to do through this interchange, and it was almost like there was a sigh of relief, like, “Phew, okay, now we can relax.” And I felt a very different quality of, kind of like two women together, just woman to woman, so sweet. And she gave me that 23rd message, was the most special message of all, where she talked about her love of Yeshua. And it was so exquisite. It was the shortest message of all, and just spoke to my heart with such purity and beauty. So that was very, very special. And then the next day she came again, and again I was wondering, “Is she going to come? Are we done?” She came again, it was that same quality of sweetness, intimacy, and she said, “Today I’ll tell you more about sexuality.” Which she had definitely gone into in the book, but I had a sense that she wasn’t going too far, that she was reserving that for what I thought was going to be a second book. But she knew that all of us had great interest in sexuality, and she was aware of that, and so, she said, “I’ll tell you more.” And so, in a very sweet, again, kind of woman-to- woman exchange, she gave me that message that was revealing a little bit more about the sacred sexuality practice that she was trained in, and her lineage in that. Then she came one more time, and that was the 25th message. And this one was like, to me, it’s funny that you mentioned Joan of Arc earlier, because I always think of this message as being like Joan of Arc. It was like the call to action, gathering the troops, the rally to let’s go forth and do this now. And one of my friends called it her manifesto. And it’s very passionate, and she’s really, I feel like, passing the torch to us, and saying, “I’ve given you all you need. Go do this. This is important, and this will serve you.” And that was the completion.

Rick: Were all 25 of these messages the same, in terms of speaking them out loud, and then going and sitting down and getting them again? Or how did you– if you got them while you were meditating, how did you go later and type them in?

Mercedes: Now, knowing that I was going to be engaged in this process, I brought my computer with me into meditation.

Rick: Oh, so you would just start typing.

Mercedes: I would just start typing.

Rick: I see. So, looking at all 25 messages, what is the general teaching or message that has come through? What was conveyed? What is it that we need to know?

Mercedes: Okay. Well, she starts out right from the start saying, “This is a very special time, and that we’re moving into a new age, and that it has everything to do with the balance of the masculine and the feminine, and that for most of us that is going to require strengthening of the feminine, because most of us have for a very long time been suppressed in the feminine, and the masculine has dominated, not just culturally, but within each of us, in terms of our internal development of our own masculine and feminine, and that this is the time for the feminine to come forth as both becoming strengthened so that it comes into balance, and also that the feminine is leading in this transition into the new age. And it’s a new age not of dominance of the feminine, but of union and unity and equality between the masculine and feminine, and that’s why she’s coming forth.” And she said that she, both she and Yeshua, knew it was going to be 2,000 years, before the world was ready to receive the feminine in all of her forms, and to receive Mary Magdalene in her form as leader and teacher, and that in her relationship with Yeshua she was equal. They were both teachers, but the world wasn’t ready for her, and that they knew it wouldn’t be for 2,000 years, so this is the time now.

Rick: Now Yeshua, or Jesus, obviously made an impact by being on the earth in a physical form and performing miracles and all that stuff. In her case, she hasn’t been on the earth for 2,000 years, so, I guess there’s two questions here. What’s she been doing all this time, and how did they pass the time up there? And the second thing is, how could she possibly make as big an impact as he made, if she’s only going to remain in a non-physical form? Your book is only reaching a tiny, tiny fraction of humanity. Can we expect hundreds of years from now to have Mary Magdalene proliferated throughout the cultures of the world to the extent that Jesus did early on? Or the feminine? This gives you plenty to chew on here.

Mercedes: Ultimately, I guess my answer would be yes, but there’s different aspects to it, different questions you are asking. I think we are moving into a time that’s going to be about the balance of the masculine and feminine, and I think it’s inevitable that–I guess I believe in God, I believe in this spiritual process that seems so real to me, that I think there’s a choice about how we’re going to get there, how long it’s going to take, but in my mind, there’s no question that this is going to happen. And so, with that, there’s going to be this change where there is going to be this balance of relating to the feminine leaders, the feminine spiritual teachers, figures, and to Mother God as much as Father God.

Rick: Hillary in 2016.

Mercedes: Maybe.

Rick: So would you see environmental degradation and the whole 99%, 1% economic imbalance, and various warfare and all that kind of stuff, are these all manifestations of imbalance between masculine and feminine?

Mercedes: Absolutely. For example, take the environment. One of the things that she’s talking about is that there are three foundations of the feminine within human beings, and that’s our body, our sexuality, and our emotions, and that those have to be strong, infused with the divine feminine and purified. There’s a maturing and a fullness in each of us for those foundations to be in their full state. And when I look at the environment, it’s first of all, to me, it’s a manifestation of the way we relate to our own bodies, because that’s the body of the earth. And so, if we can treat it with such abuse, it’s a reflection of how we treat the feminine, absolutely, and how we relate to our own feminine, how suppressed it is for some of us, not all of us.

Rick: I pick up a lot of garbage as I ride my bike around town, and I recycle it or throw it away. And I wrote a letter to the editor of the paper a few years ago, and I said, “Well, you can’t expect the people who are throwing this stuff by the roadside to stop doing it, because considering what most of these containers contain, they don’t even care about their own bodies, so how are they going to care about the environment?” But at least maybe the rest of us could pick up the stuff and give ourselves a clean town. But that said, if people don’t even care about their own bodies, the ruination of the environment is a logical extension of that.

Mercedes: Right, absolutely. And relative to war, there’s so much that could be said about that, but I think in some fundamental ways it’s seated in our conflict within ourselves and our pain within ourselves. And that has everything to do with our emotional body and the way that we’ve learned to relate to pain. And that is more than anything else what Mary Magdalene is talking about in the book, because she says more than anything else that’s what’s holding us back in our spiritual growth and our movement into this new age.

Rick: What is it that’s holding us back?

Mercedes: Emotions altogether, but including pain, were given to us as humans as a pathway to connect with God, and most of us never learned that. And instead, we learned how to relate to painful emotions especially in a way that’s blocking our union with God. We learned how to try to get out of pain as quickly as possible, to not feel it, and to avoid it as much as we’re able. And all of those things are obstructing us. And her biggest work that she’s bringing forth in the book is very specific and clear instruction, about a different way to relate to pain that will liberate us and bring us into union with God.

Rick: And what is that?

Mercedes: Okay. Well, it has steps. And the first step is, and this applies to joyful emotions as well as painful emotions, but for the most part, most of us aren’t hung up on our joyful emotions. It’s our painful emotions that we have a hard time with. So, the first step is when you’re experiencing some kind of pain is to notice and become aware that you’re in pain. Now, this step is only necessary because most of us have developed strategies of avoiding pain. And these strategies are so deep-seated and so immediate that for most of us when we’re in pain, we immediately go into something else, and then we think what’s happening is the something else instead of the pain. And for most of us, we don’t even notice what’s really going on, what our pain is.

Rick: So you mean we might indulge in food or TV or other diversions or something in order to blot it out?

Mercedes: Become very busy. Blame is a big one. We go into blame. And that is projecting the pain outward onto something else with our thinking. It’s your fault, it’s because of this, blah, blah, blah, instead of I’m in pain right now. So, there’s all different levels, and most of us have our favorites. The ones that we’ve developed is our personal style, but most of us have them. So, we need this first step of coming into awareness that we’re actually having a feeling and in some kind of pain. The second step is to make a conscious choice to open to the pain. Even a step beyond that is to embrace it, to fully allow it to the point that you merge with the feeling. Then the next step after that is again a consciousness step, and this is to identify the source of the pain. And most of us mistakenly think that the pain has been caused by something external to us, some event that triggered this pain. But Mary is suggesting no, that’s not the case. That the source of the pain is something within ourselves, that’s not being fulfilled. And she calls these our inner divine qualities. And so, she says the actual function of emotions, and in this case painful emotions, is it’s a communication device that lets us know that something’s going on with these deeper inner divine qualities, and somehow, we’ve gotten disconnected from them, and we need to reconnect. So, at this point what I’d like to do is give a practical example, because this is very abstract, and I think it really helps to ground it and understand. The example that I like to use is a simple one, and sadly I think a very common one for a lot of us, which is that we’re driving out on the road somewhere, and suddenly someone cuts us off. And for most people the typical response is some form of anger, ranging anything from mild annoyance to complete rage. And if you’re a spiritually oriented person, and you’re really dedicated to bringing your spirituality into your everyday life, perhaps you might have a more spiritual kind of response, such as blessing the other person, or staying detached, not getting affected by what the other person has just done, something like that.

Rick: Or you might spontaneously do those things, it might not be manipulative, you might just not react as much as somebody else might react, without doing all kinds of…

Mercedes: Right, but it’s a response, some kind of a response that you’re making. Mary’s suggesting something different from any of these. She’s saying rather than doing something in response to what just happened, that’s in relationship to the other driver, or in terms of taking care of yourself, or something like that, that actually the first thing is to bring this awareness to notice what you’re feeling. And so, in this case the feeling might be, let’s say, anger about what just happened. And the next step would be to open to that feeling, and fully embrace it. Allow yourself to really have the experience of anger, not having to do anything in response to it, just be with. And this is one of the key characteristics of the feminine, is it has to do with being, rather than doing.

Rick: So, it might be handy to pull your car over to the side of the road, so you can really delve into it, otherwise, you’ve got to keep putting your attention on other things if you’re driving down the road, and you can’t give it your full attention.

Mercedes: Especially if you’re new to this process. As you start to get familiar with this process, it becomes very quick and very easy to go through these steps, even while you’re engaged in some other form of functioning. But in the beginning, yeah, you might need to give it more attention than that. That might be really valuable. So, you allow yourself to really open and have this experience of being with the feeling, in this case the anger. Then the next step is to bring your consciousness to inquire, what is the source within me of this anger? And again, this is something that if you engage this process, you’ll start to become more familiar with, how do I identify that? In the book there’s actually a chart given that comes from the Center for Nonviolent Communication, and it’s a chart of what they call human needs, and she says these are basically the same as what she’s referring to as inner divine qualities. And so, it can be helpful to look at all these, and they list about 80 different of these qualities. In this example that we’re giving, the quality, well first let me say that the qualities are always something beautiful. All of our painful emotions, all of our joyful, wonderful emotions are always sourcing out of something beautiful within us. And so, in this case, what I would identify as what may likely be the source would be safety.

Rick: Your safety has been jeopardized.

Mercedes: Right, you were needing safety, and you got disconnected from your internal sense of safety, the way safety lives within you. And ultimately, our true safety is in God. These qualities ultimately are always leading us to the divine. But in this practical sense, this practical circumstance, we got disconnected from our sense of safety. Oftentimes there’s more than one that’s involved. So, there may be others that maybe were secondary, not as important. In this case it could have been something having to do with consideration or cooperation amongst drivers. That the qualities of consideration and cooperation weren’t fulfilled for you in this event that just happened. It’s some kind of mixture of safety along with consideration and cooperation. What happens next, is to allow yourself to- well when you identify the inner divine qualities that are the right ones that got disconnected in this outer event, what happens is a very natural process of reconnection. You’ve identified them and suddenly you go back into, oh yes, these are those beautiful qualities within me, and a natural process happens of reconnecting, in this case with safety, with consideration, cooperation. When that happens, the feelings tend to either go away altogether or at least recede. Because they’ve done their job. Their job was actually to bring you to this inner connection within yourself. And if you don’t make that inner connection, the feelings remain because they’re still trying to do their job. So that’s how feelings get stuck in us and how they don’t get healed because we haven’t made this connection with our wholeness. Once we make it, the feelings recede, we drop into this state of wholeness, and we’ll know we’re there because we generally experience peace. That is the number one quality that most people will report. You feel peace now and you also feel like I’m back, I’m whole within myself. So, then there’s one more step from there. And the final step is to consider from this place now, which Mary says what you’ve really reconnected with is your inner divinity. You’ve reconnected with God ultimately and this is your bridge that takes you back to God. Now that I’m coming back from my union, now that I am in union with God, from that place of union, what action, if any, do I need to take? In this driving situation, the primary action you probably needed to take was that reconnection. And there’s probably nothing else to be done at this point. But in many circumstances, there will be things that you need to do. But now you’ll do them from a different place than that initial point of being disconnected, when you were still disconnected from yourself and God. Now it’s going to come from your wholeness and your peace and most likely that will be very different.

Rick: So, it sounds all a little bit analytical but I’m sure that with practice it becomes more second nature. It almost also sounds like you need to memorize all those non-dual communication points, or non-violent communication points, in order to identify which thing has been violated.

Mercedes: Yes.

Rick: Because otherwise you might not realize safety and consideration, those two.

Mercedes: Yes. It’s like a new map and it does help to have that chart and all that. As a matter of fact, when I was first learning this, I made a sheet that I laminated, and it really helped me to have that. But eventually you get to know it because it’s like you’re learning your inner landscape. And this is actually something that’s very natural to us, but we’ve been cut off from it. According to Mary, we were very intentionally trained to deny our feelings, starting from very young children, because it supported the third dimensional authority structure. When people are cut off from their feelings and then cut off from the source in the inner divine qualities, they lose their power. And it’s very easy then for them to be controlled and give their power over to outside authority. And she says that’s part of this transition that we’re going through into the new age, is where we’re not going to be giving away our power anymore. We’re keeping our power and it’s going to be a very different kind of structure that we’re going to work in. It’s not an authoritarian structure.

Rick: What do you do if the situation is more ongoing? Let’s say, I’ll give you two examples. Let’s say that in the traffic example you actually have an accident, and the other guy gets out and starts yelling at you, and yelling and yelling and yelling. So, it’s not just a brief thing, it’s something that continues. Or a more perhaps serious situation is, some relationship in which there’s emotional abuse that’s going on month after month, year after year. Easy to numb down in that kind of a situation. And I suppose, are you saying that this kind of practice could be helpful for a person in that circumstance, and could enable them to gain the inner strength necessary to take appropriate action?

Mercedes: Absolutely. This is not about being passive and not taking action. Or separating yourself from a somehow spiritually separate place. This is about empowering yourself and then you’re ready to move into action. And the actions are really limitless, what you might choose. You might be able to speak in a way that calms the other person down. You might choose to separate from the situation. You might do some of those things you initially thought of doing, such as blessing or whatever. But you’re doing it now not as a distraction from your own disconnection. You’re doing it from your wholeness. And based on the principle that our consciousness is constantly creating our reality, this will actually create a different reality. And in my experience, it really does. It’s really true. So, we’re talking about a different way of approaching manifestation. In the New Age spiritual community, a lot of people are very interested in manifestation. And they’re doing it from the point of view of our thinking, changing our beliefs and changing our mind. And that is one way of approach, which I think depends on your qualities, how accessible and easy that is for you or not. But this is another way of approach, which is through our feelings and our inner divine qualities. That’s also very powerful for manifestation. And ultimately, I think the most powerful is the union of the two, to have access to both.

Rick: Well, those things go much deeper than thinking. If we think of an ocean analogy, just thinking could be like the waves on the surface. And having intentions or desires or resolves or whatever just on that level might not have much impact, much strength. But if you can access the depth, then… Well, to stretch the ocean analogy, a shallow pond can only rise up in ripples, nothing much more. But a deep ocean could rise up in tidal waves, and the tidal waves are much more powerful than the ripples.

Mercedes: Yes, yes.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so you said that if you had to summarize Mary Magdalene’s message, this whole thing about feeling pain and using it as a technique for going deeper and merging with the divine, that, as I gathered, was kind of the core message. But what else? Or if I’m a little bit mistaken as to what the core message was, you can reiterate and clarify, and it’ll help everyone.

Mercedes: I think that’s her greatest gift that she’s given, is this practice relative to our emotions and relating to them in a whole different way. But it’s a part of this bigger piece of strengthening our whole feminine for each of us, men and women alike. And it has these three aspects relative to our relationship to our body, our relationship to our sexuality, and our relationship to our emotions. And so those are the three areas that she says, when they’re strong, then the divine feminine can take her seat in our heart. And which so many of us are aware that that’s what’s so needed, is to be in our hearts. And she says at that point, there’s two aspects to the mind. The mind is really more the masculine pole within each one of us. And she says our lower mind is made up of our rational thinking mind and our subconscious. When we’re strong and seated in our heart, she says that becomes in service to our heart. For most of us right now, our lower mind is taken over because we haven’t been seated in our heart, because of these three other areas not being strong. And so, it’s like someone needs to man the ship here. So, the lower mind is taken over. And that’s why so many of us are plagued by this kind of constant thinking and all the complications of that. But that comes into balance when we’re seated in the heart. The lower mind relaxes, says, “Okay, I can just be in service to do what I need to do.” The mind and thinking, is still important. And then the higher mind can open up. And that is the seat of the divine masculine. And she says when that–so it’s kind of a progressive process, these three areas of body, sexuality, and emotion becoming strong, going into the heart. The lower mind taking its place in service to the heart. The higher mind then opening. And this marriage happening between the heart and higher mind. And that’s the gateway that leads us into this next stage, what I refer to as the fourth dimension, the new age we’re moving into.

Rick: I presume, correct me if I’m wrong, that the book doesn’t contain everything one might need to know in order to attend to these three things. That there might be other practices or procedures or therapies or whatever that a person might need to get into. But this is just–the book is sort of an introduction and a starting point maybe?

Mercedes: It’s an overview and an understanding. Relative to the body, she’s saying–she is very clear that there’s tremendous wisdom out there.

Rick: Like pure food, yoga, all kinds of things.

Mercedes: Exercise.

Rick: Exercise.

Mercedes: All sorts of things, right.

Rick: Fresh air.

Mercedes: She touched on a couple points relative to the body, the main one being shame. And how important it is for many of us to heal shame and to love our bodies. And she talked a little bit about that as being like maybe the one area that could use some more attention for a lot of us. And then relative to sexuality, she talked more about that and about relating to sexuality as a sacred function, and if we’re choosing to be sexually active, engaging it in a sacred way.

Rick: And if we’re not, what about all the monks and nuns of this world?

Mercedes: Well, then we need to engage our sexual energy in a sacred way.

Rick: But it’s not that we necessarily need to be practicing and engaging sexuality per se.

Mercedes: Right.

Rick: So in other words, the energy is sublimated and transmuted in some way if we’re going about it right and we’re living that particular lifestyle. Yes? No?

Mercedes: I think she would recommend sublimation.

Rick: Well, but what if you’re a priest or a monk or something? I mean, obviously some of them couldn’t keep their hands off the choir boys, but the others that are–

Mercedes: For good reasons. Because they’re not making right use of that energy. Sublimation fundamentally doesn’t work. It’s like whatever you resist, persists.

Rick: Well, sublimation implies conversion, though. It’s not the same as repression.

Mercedes: Okay, exactly. Then I can agree with you. And the pathways in sacred sexuality, we’re basically using the sexual energy to activate sacred spiritual pathways. And that can be done whether we have a partner or not, whether we’re engaging sexuality or not. But the practice is fundamentally–it’s very similar to kundalini yoga. And so, in that sense, it doesn’t require what we consider sexuality-being with a partner, overt sexuality. It’s working with the sexual energy. So that can be done by anyone and actually needs to be done, in my point of view, by everyone. It can happen organically. It can happen without having intentional focus on it. But if you learn the practices and choose to engage them, you’re more likely to have this development and this strength happen more quickly, and be of help to you, be of service to you. So, she’s highly recommending that. But she didn’t go into, specific details about how to do that. And my sense was always that would be a second book. And in fact, there is a second book coming that will be specifically giving the practices of sacred sexuality.

Rick: Not from Mary Magdalene but based upon your own knowledge and experience.

Mercedes: No, no.

Rick: From her.

Mercedes: Through Mary. She’s already given me this book.

Rick: She’s back.

Mercedes: I’m underway with it. She’s Back. That’s right. So, and then the third arena being working with emotions. And that’s the one that she gave lots of detailed instruction about in this book, because she felt that was the one area that could make the most difference for most people and the one area that’s blocking us the most in general right now.

Rick: Nice. I have a question that might take us off in a different direction, but is there anything more you want to say about that whole package of knowledge that we’ve just been discussing?

Mercedes: The other thing that she goes into in some of the later chapters is she does go into things that involve our thinking and the way we tend to use our mind. And mostly it’s in relationship to those patterns of avoidance that we’ve developed. And one of them that she talks about a lot is judgment, blame, the idea of seeing the world through the lens of right and wrong and judging certain things as right and certain things as wrong and how that is holding us back. And that the source of that, again, is being divorced from our heart and our feeling. And that the solution to that is not to try to be judgmental, because again, that’s a resistive action. Instead, to get to what that’s blocking, which is our feeling, and the judgment will naturally dissolve.

Rick: Yeah, there was a nice quote from somebody. Let’s see if I still have it on my iPad here. I think I deleted it. Anyway, oh, here we go. She said, “You know,” this is from the woman I interviewed last week, Amodha Majeevan, “I know you are operating from the personal when things appear black and white. You judge right and wrong, label good and bad.”

Mercedes: That is a hallmark of the third dimension. And going beyond that, we are starting to move into the fourth dimensional consciousness. And that, to me, is what Mary is supporting us in doing.

Rick: Yeah, which doesn’t mean that you don’t… I mean, let’s play with this a bit. I just listened to a talk by a man that I had interviewed a while back, who wrote a book about child prostitution in Nepal and India, and how as many as 200,000 young girls have been kidnapped from Nepal, and they’re living in brothels in various Indian cities. Now, I have a pretty strong judgment about that. That’s wrong. So, I don’t think you’re saying, “Oh, just be… everything is cool, whatever happens.”

Mercedes: No.

Rick: It’s all an illusion.

Mercedes: No.

Rick: You’re not saying anything like that.

Mercedes: I’m not saying that because that would be disempowering to say that. That’s sort of like, to me, a spiritual bypass. No. I’m saying that you take it to your feeling. In this case, you’re probably feeling horrified.

Rick: Yeah.

Mercedes: That this is so horrifying to you. And the inner divine quality would be, that you absolutely have this profound need for protection, for human life and well-being. Yeah, and in his case, this is Stuart Perrin I’m referring to. He’s set up a whole foundation and they’re raising money, and doing all kinds of stuff to try to combat the problem. He’s a very spiritual guy. So, this whole thing about judgment and right and wrong does not mean you don’t take a stand. Jesus himself, if the story were true, he went into the temples and turned the money changers and all that.

Mercedes: Absolutely.

Rick: He was a pretty fiery dude at times.

Mercedes: Absolutely. But if you take a moment to feel the difference between the stance, “That’s wrong.”

Rick: Right.

Mercedes: Where I feel that, I feel that right here in my head. I’m located in my head, and it puts me into a combative kind of disposition as opposed to, “I feel horrified. I so much need protection for life and everyone’s well-being.” And protection especially for young people who are more vulnerable. That puts me in my heart, and it also puts me in my solar plexus, my power center. I have power to engage, to act from that place, but it’s a different place. It’s not a confrontational place. It’s an empowered place of protection of life and protection of vulnerable beings.

Rick: It has interesting implications for a lot of these issues that are so polarizing in today’s society. Gay marriage, gun control, abortion, all these things that people are on diametrically opposed poles, and no compromise, no middle ground. Probably because they’re on the level of the mind and trying to consider these things. If there could be a sinking into the heart, then there might be some resolutions to some of these things.

Mercedes: That’s right, because when you connect with your own inner divine qualities, this is the source of compassion, because ultimately everyone has the same inner divine qualities. They might manifest in different ways in their life. They might have different strategies of trying to fulfill these inner divine qualities, but it’s kind of like genes. We all have these same qualities. We all have the same connection to God. When we connect with those, we feel our connection to all other beings. We start to feel our care for other beings. When we’re connected, one of our natural human qualities is care for others. That is one of our inner divine qualities. This gets activated when we’re whole within ourselves. Oftentimes, in situations where people are diametrically opposed around an issue, oftentimes the underlying inner divine quality is the same one. They just have different strategies that they have in their minds for how they have to get this fulfilled. But when they connect, when even one person connects with their inner divine qualities, it can help everyone to connect. All of a sudden, they realize their sameness, their connection, their non-separation at the core level. It can do amazing things in terms of opening our creativity to find new strategies that aren’t in opposition, that are what Mary calls inclusive, inclusive of everyone. Rather than me versus you, we go into me and you.

Rick: That’s a nice point. Take gay rights, for example. One person might say, “I love God, but I also love this person who happens to be the same gender as I, and I want that person to be my partner.” On the other pole, you have some guy saying, “I love God, but God says this is bad.” It’s like the old “God is on our side” alibi for wars. Both sides are saying it. But obviously, if you sink down to a deeper level, there’s perhaps not that polarity.

Mercedes: Right. They’re both wanting respect for their choices, support for their beliefs and values. Both sides are. What other strategies can we look at that would support this for everyone? Respect for everyone’s choices, support for everyone’s beliefs and values.

Rick: You said something a minute ago that triggered a new question, which I,s what if one person is really operating from the heart but everyone else isn’t? Like in taking Jesus as a prime example, he was operating from a very deep, profound, cosmic level. Guess who got crucified? The powers that be in his society were not operating from that level, so, he was completely misunderstood and feared and killed. Does it make one vulnerable, susceptible to evil forces? Does one become innocent and lamb-like and then get slaughtered?

Mercedes: From a third-dimensional position, it appears this way. I think this is one of the fears that people have had at the third dimension. This is a very interesting question to me, a very wonderful question that I think about because I believe that there is more that was going on in the crucifixion than we have yet understood, including me. I have this very strong belief, but I don’t know what it will be yet. It’s not clear to me. But I absolutely believe that there was a very clear purpose for what occurred that’s beyond what we understand. And part of this is my own experience. My experience of coming from any time that I come from a higher consciousness, I see that my life is different, that I have a different experience in life. Sometimes I wonder, I hear from people who are living in Santa Fe, and I hear people express, “Santa Fe is…” By the way, I live in Santa Fe. Other people will express, “Oh, Santa Fe is so hard, and there are so many people who are suffering, and I’ve had this happen, I’ve had that happen.” I go, “Wow, are you living in the same place I’m living in?” I have such a different experience.

Rick: If you think Santa Fe is hard, try Newark.

Mercedes: Yeah, really. But I believe that that’s what happens, is that people have an experience that reflects their consciousness. It’s not a judgment, but it’s actually like a physics. It’s a law of how reality works and how manifestation works. And so, I believe that, taking the example of Jesus, there was more going on than we realized about why that manifested in his case. There’s this concept of being a bodhisattva and service to the world that is in Buddhism, and perhaps there’s an element of that. I don’t know altogether, but I just have a very clear sense that it’s not because he was vulnerable, and he lost and the third dimensional powers won.

Rick: No, I don’t either. I’m just kind of playing devil’s advocate. Some people say what happened was he took on a huge amount of karma, and that if you align yourself with him, then you become one of the beneficiaries of his having done that.

Mercedes: Yes, that’s a whole other explanation that’s very possible to me. I don’t have clarity about what it is, but I have a very strong sense that it’s definitely for a higher purpose, and it was a conscious choice.

Rick: Yeah. Interesting phrase, “conscious choice.” I doubt that he thought, “Hmm, I think it would be a good idea for me to get crucified.” It was more like, “He’s in tune with the divine will, and the course of events were unfolding, and this is what came to pass.” For a moment, if the scriptural account is correct, he said, “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me,” and then it was, “Okay, let thy will be done.” It’s because he was accustomed to going with the flow in the highest sense of that phrase.

Mercedes: That’s right, and I can say from my own experience of receiving guidance from Spirit, it doesn’t happen in advance. It’s not like Spirit says, “Okay, here’s the future, so you don’t have to worry about it. This is what’s going to happen.” I usually get my guidance right when I’m on the fly.

Rick: On the fly, yeah.

Mercedes: That’s right. I say I’m on a need-to-know basis, and evidently, I don’t need to know very far in advance.

Rick: Yeah.

Mercedes: And I’ve heard this from other people who channel, who get guidance from Spirit, that they have the exact same experience.

Rick: Interesting. Let’s talk a little bit more about Mary Magdalene’s role in the world. You mentioned some other guy whose name I think started with K, also, who had written a book about her. Is it just you two, or is she appearing to many people all over the place? And not only she, but are there a whole bunch of these higher beings that are appearing to a whole bunch of people, and this is just one way in which divine guidance is being brought into the world?

Mercedes: Yes, I very strongly feel that’s the case. There are many, many people who are getting messages from Mary Magdalene, many people who’ve written books. Some of them are books about what happened, and some of them are written as fiction or historical fiction about what happened. Some of them aren’t. Some of them are studies of her life with Jesus back 2,000 years ago, and some of them are more like, in my case, she was very clear she did not want to focus on her life with Jesus or what happened 2,000 years ago, and therefore, this piece that she was bringing through for me, it was about helping us and focusing on us and our spiritual growth, very much the way I understand that Jesus was working with people back when he taught. And I think she is appearing to many, many people, and in different ways. My way was a teaching way, an instruction way. In others, it’s more in terms of a story, because some people, that will really speak to their heart and move them. In other people, it’s more historical. And when I started sharing with people about what was happening with me, in the beginning I was very afraid to share. I thought people were going to say, “You are crazy,” or else be angry at me, like, “That’s not what happened.” That’s not the story or whatever, because she does say some things that are challenging to the traditional church.

Rick: Like her relationship with Jesus and everything.

Mercedes: That she was a priestess of Isis, that they were practicing sacred sexuality.

Rick: Those things, for many people, are blasphemous.

Mercedes: So, I was very worried about telling people, and at the same time I was so excited about what was happening. So, I started initially, little by little, to share the story. I was absolutely amazed that almost again and again I would have the experience of telling people, that I was receiving messages from Mary Magdalene. I had gotten the words out of my mouth, and people started telling me about their experiences with Mary.

Rick: Wow.

Mercedes: And I had no idea that she was coming to so many people, that so many people felt connected to her. It’s like an underground movement that I was totally oblivious to. I didn’t even know that so many people had written books about Mary Magdalene when I first started getting this.

Rick: No, I didn’t know.

Mercedes: And again, I think that was in some ways by intention. She didn’t want me to be influenced by all the other stuff out there, so that I would be a queer channel in that sense. But I’ve come to see that there’s immense information and huge numbers of people who feel a connection to Mary. And actually at this point, I see Mary as what I would consider a group entity at a higher dimension. I think she did incarnate more than one time, but I think particularly in that lifetime, she has a particular individual that she’s operating in a higher dimension. And in the higher dimensions, people more and more are functioning as group entities. And oftentimes when I channel beings, they’ll give the channeled message and say, “We this, we that,” because they’re speaking as a group. Their level of non-separation has progressed to a whole different degree than we’re familiar with at this level.

Rick: Interesting. Committees.

Mercedes: Soul groups.

Rick: Yeah. That’s interesting. We are groups too, even on the human level, but we don’t quite see it as clearly because the duality is so dominant. But there are collective clusters of like-minded people, and even a city has its own collective consciousness, and a country, and a continent, and there are all sorts of degrees of organization. And going microscopically, we’re a committee. We’re all trillion cells and all these other little things going on, which in and of themselves are autonomous, but collectively and cooperatively form a human being.

Mercedes: And then there are interactions you have, people that you meet where you feel this instant connection with, like they’re family, you know them, or you resonate with them. I believe that’s a sign that this is someone that at a deeper level you have this soul connection, and you’re coming from a higher-level grouping.

Rick: Interesting. Michael Newton, who wrote Destiny of Souls, even said that some souls might actually incarnate in multiple places at the same time, the same soul, like I might be living in Canada and here also. But who knows? Interesting to speculate. Now you mentioned that you’re channeling others as well as Mary. I’m not very tuned into this whole channeling world, but it would be interesting to take a survey, and see how many different entities are coming through and whether there’s a predominance of the feminine now, or you hear people channeling Saint Germain and all. Again, I take it all with a slight grain of salt and half of the people could be just making it up. Who else are you channeling? Do you have a more global view now as to what’s happening in this whole realm worldwide?

Mercedes: Right. What happened was after this month-long period where I got these messages from Mary, it changed me. Suddenly I was able to channel other beings and have other beings come through, which I never had before. Again, I was like a baby. This was so new to me. I tested it first with just friends or whatever to see if this was real. Then I started having groups and inviting people to come and started channeling. Now I do that regularly. I have what I call my holy family. There are five beings that I feel personally most connected to. Those are Archangel Michael, Mother Mary, the Goddess Isis, Yeshua, and Mary Magdalene. Those are my personal ones that I feel I’m closest to.

Rick: You’re certain that that’s who they are and there’s not a doubt in your mind that this one is this and this one is that?

Mercedes: Absolutely. When they come through, their energies are so different. It’s very clear. Then also I sometimes have other beings come through. I’ve had all kinds of beings come through. In my case, they’re always ascended beings. Some people who channel will contact your deceased relatives or something like that. I don’t do that. I’ve never done that. I channel these ascended high beings that come through. They’re quite different ones. Most of them I’ve heard of, but lots of times I know nothing about them. I’ve just heard the name or something. Sometimes a being will come through. Usually, it’s some angel or other and they’ll say their name and I’ve never heard of that being.

Rick: When they do come through, are you saying the stuff out loud so that people in your gathering can hear? Or is it sometimes subjective?

Mercedes: No, I say it out loud and record it and then I transcribe it later.

Rick: Oh, so there’s recordings. You’ve got a lot of book material.

Mercedes: DO I ever. Most of the time they get published. I have an online journal that publishes them. I put them in my blog. I get published in Sedona Journal of Awakening. They’re out there to read. I was going to say one other thing. The other thing that opened up for me, was that I started being able to do Akashic Record readings. The Akashic Record is what’s considered at the energy level of the earth. It’s the record of all the souls and all the beings who have ever incarnated. It’s often likened to a big library and that every soul has their own volume in the library. To read the Akashic Record, it’s like opening up that volume for that person, which you can only do with their permission. It’s also a form of channeling because you’re channeling with their guides of their Akashic Record and bringing through information, which includes past life information and things like that, to help people to understand their soul’s journey and to support them in healing, anything that needs healing and moving forward, what are their next steps in moving forward on their soul path.

Rick: Does anybody ever try to come through that doesn’t seem so nice?

Mercedes: I have never had that experience. I know other people have, and I do certain things that I think are protective. I think some of it is all the background I’ve done and the work, the spiritual work, that I’m only inviting in certain energies that are for the highest good of all. I’m very clear about that, and I’ve never had any problems at all.

Rick: Do you ever feel overshadowed or taken over to a greater extent than you would want to be? Are you grounded in your integrity and just this process is taking place, but without pushing you off into a corner?

Mercedes: First of all, it’s always by choice. It never happens like suddenly I’m taken over and I was surprised. I always have to accept and allow it. So, I’m always a choice, and I can always end it at any time. And when I’m channeling, it’s like I’m in a light trance. I am aware of what’s happening around, but I’m not focusing on it. And afterwards, after I channel, I very quickly forget what happened. Especially for personal readings, I’m very glad about that. I don’t want to remember other people’s stuff at all.

Rick: So, you’re not totally gone the way, I guess, maybe Edgar Cayce was. He went into these deep trances.

Mercedes: Right, that’s deep trance, and I’m in a light trance state. And even the channeled readings of higher beings coming through, I pretty quickly forget what happened because I’m really in an altered state. But when I go back and hear the tape later, the recording, I’m like, “Oh yeah, now I remember that. Oh yeah.” But if you asked me what was in there, I wouldn’t know, without listening to it with my third-dimensional conscious mind.

Rick: And then some channelers, it would appear, undergo some deleterious influence. I believe, what’s that woman’s name? Jane Roberts? Or something that channeled the Seth material? I think that really took a toll on her health and everything. So, you’re not noticing any kind of…

Mercedes: Not at all. As a matter of fact, I feel like it’s a gift. I get this infusion of light and higher frequency. It’s wonderful, so I don’t feel anything negative about that.

Rick: I think a point that bears repeating with regard to what we’ve just been talking about, and this is an analogy that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi always used to use. He said, “Life is like a big territory, and in this territory, there are all kinds of things you could explore.” Diamond mines and gold mines and silver mines and whatnot, you could go explore those. But if you don’t capture the fort first that commands the territory, then you’re going to be in a dicey situation exploring all this stuff. First of all, you won’t even own the whole territory, but secondly, you’ll always be in jeopardy of something if you’re exploring into something that doesn’t really belong to you. So, he advocated capturing the fort, by which he meant self-realization or enlightenment or…

Mercedes: Consciousness.

Rick: Consciousness, awakening. So, you’ve explained to us in the whole unfolding of your story that that was the course of events for you. You weren’t even interested in this stuff, and you didn’t seek it out. It kind of came to you once the foundation had been established.

Mercedes: Right, exactly.

Rick: You also spoke earlier of these twelve dimensions, and could you touch upon those a little bit? When you have, say, new age coming in and all, presumably that means the kind of unfoldment of these higher dimensions on earth, or not, let me know what you say, but what do you envision the new age being? What kind of time scale are we talking about? What are these dimensions?

Mercedes: Yeah. First of all, I want to start by saying that this is my map that I use, and other people have different maps. I have twelve dimensions in mine, some people have twenty-four dimensions in theirs. So, when you hear somebody say the fourth dimension or the fifth dimension, they’re not always talking about the same thing. But I think fundamentally the progression that most people are seeing is the same course that we’re talking about, but different people see different divisions within that, different steps that we’re making. So that being said, I do see that this spiritual evolution into a new age, is a transition into what I call the fourth dimension. I talked a little bit about that earlier, about it being like the dream state. Some of the qualities of it are that it is very emotionally based and less physically based, and because of that this emotional mastery becomes more important. It’s one of the reasons why I think Mary Magdalene is focusing on it, in addition to the fact that it’s holding us back. Once you get in the fourth dimension, your emotional frequency is going to determine the kind of experience you have. If you’re not strong enough to hold a high enough frequency, you’re probably going to take yourself out of the fourth dimension, just the way we try to wake ourselves up from a nightmare, because we don’t want to be there. We’ll probably come back into the third dimension to do more work, to gain that emotional mastery. So that’s one of the aspects of the fourth dimension. Things manifest instantly in the fourth dimension, and this is one of the hallmarks. Some people say, “Oh, we’re already in the fourth dimension, we’re already in the fifth dimension.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, are you manifesting everything immediately in your world?” By my definition, that’s part of the fourth dimension.

Rick: Obviously, the Larry King question here would be, “Are you manifesting everything in your world, Mercedes?” So, you’re saying you’re not fully in the fourth dimension yourself yet.

Mercedes: Right. I’m moving into that, and I’m definitely manifesting more and more. I see that as I’m strengthening in that fourth dimensional aspect, but no, I’m not instantly manifesting every thought I have and every feeling that I have.

Rick: Nor would you want to, probably.

Mercedes: No, I don’t think I’m ready for that. This is one of the great graces of spirit, that I think it protects us from being in a situation before we’re ready for it.

Rick: Right, right.

Mercedes: So that is another quality that I think we’ll learn how to work with. At that point, so much of what we’re familiar with at the third dimension, including one of the hallmarks of the third dimension that Mary talks about, is the sense of lack, that there’s not enough here. Based on that, we have to struggle for our survival, for getting the things we want. It takes a lot of hard work. This isn’t going to be the case at the fourth dimension, because we’ll be able to manifest whatever we need. One of the things that people will manifest is perfect health. They’ll manifest beautiful bodies, whatever you want in terms of your body to be. You manifest longevity. I don’t think we choose to be there forever, but we will live much, much longer until at some point we’re ready to release our physical body and move on. As a part of that, because we will have abundance at that point, we’ll have whatever we need. I think there’s a progression that happens with this, a maturity. We start out by really wanting to have the things the way we want, our bodies to be the way we want, the possessions we want, or whatever. But we more and more mature into, or outgrow that to where we want qualities more. The qualities will become more and more this manifestation of these inner divine qualities, of having all these beautiful things that are part of our humanity, of peace, of purpose, of love, of consciousness, of play, joy, inspiration. All of those things will become more and more important to us. Another shift that Mary talks about, going from the third dimension to the fourth dimension, is that in the third dimension where we’re based in this sense of lack, not enough-ness, and needing to survive, we tend to get into competition, me versus you. In the fourth dimension, we’ll be starting to shift into this consciousness that she calls the consciousness of inclusion, where we’re more and more acting out of caring for everyone rather than just me, or just mine, whatever that is. So those are some of the hallmarks, the features of the fourth dimension that are coming to me right now. The fourth dimension is generally considered a transitional dimension into the fifth dimension. In relative times, I think our time at the fourth dimension will be much shorter, than the time that I believe many of us have been involved for lifetime after lifetime at the third dimension.

Rick: Are you talking about the whole planet, or just we as individual souls who move on, go through two other planets, if necessary, to find one that resonates with our dimension?

Mercedes: I think the Earth is also moving at least into the fourth dimension. That’s what I believe, and that the Earth is alive, is a living being, and has her consciousness, and that she also is ascending. This is one of the things that is supporting us at this time, is that because the Earth is ascending, that is very much affecting us as humanity and helping us in our transition. Also, I think it’s even a much bigger process than just the Earth. I actually believe that it’s a universal process that’s happening- that’s very much centered around what’s happening at the Earth right now. But because of this, I think many, many beings from other places, other planets, other star systems, are first of all very interested in what’s happening at the Earth right now, are supporting us from other places, and are actually also supporting us by incarnating here, and becoming part of this transition. I think many beings outside the Earth have more of a conscious awareness of what’s happening than we do, and they’re very excited about it and curious about it, but on a global, not a global scale, a universal scale, or even beyond universal scale, we as human beings represent a pretty low level of manifestation and consciousness, and we are changing at an incredibly fast rate. I think this is something that has almost never been done on other places. So, because of that, I think many, many beings are fascinated by what’s happening right now, and that we are transforming so quickly.

Rick: Do you feel like it’s something that may or may not actually pan out, that we could blow ourselves up or melt the ice caps and drown or whatever? Or do you feel like, as insurmountable as some of these problems appear, we’re going to surmount them?

Mercedes: I absolutely believe we’re going to surmount them, and I don’t think we would even be allowed to self-destruct at this point. This is, again, one of those things, this is a belief on my part, and I’ll just state it right out, that’s the case. But I strongly believe that what’s happening on Earth is important beyond the Earth, and that there’s universal help for us right now, and there’s actually universal laws that we’re not going to be allowed to destroy ourselves, even if we end up wanting to go that far. But I think we’ve played it out long enough, and we’re at the tipping point now. We might be at this tipping point for a while. I had great hopes that I would wake up on December 22, 2012, and we would have transitioned into the fourth dimension.

Rick: I was more cynical about that.

Mercedes: I had serious reservations as to whether that would really happen, but I diminished my hope that that would happen. But no, I think this could easily be a couple hundred years we’re talking about. Again, I hope not. I hope it doesn’t take that long, but I think it could. But in the ultimate time, that’s like a blink of a dot.

Rick: A snap of the fingers.

Mercedes: A snap of the fingers. Nothing, exactly. We’re all relative, but I think we are definitely in this process, and we are going to go through it. It’s a birth process, and we’re coming out the other end, I strongly believe.

Rick: Yeah, it’s funny. On the one hand, I watched Eckhart Tolle be interviewed by Oprah recently, and she had him give him a bunch of sentences that she wanted him to finish. One was, “I believe,” and his answer was, “In nothing in particular.” The reason I thought of that, is that we use the word “belief” a lot in the last few minutes. On the one hand, I believe everything you’re saying. I don’t believe it adamantly, because who knows? These are theories. But it resonates. I think it might resonate with a lot of people who are listening. But on the other hand, the word “belief” is often used to refer to things that can’t be experienced, and is sometimes taken as, “That’s all you’re going to get is a belief. You’re not going to get the experience to substantiate it.” I feel that anything that is worth believing in, can be verified through experience, either immediately if one has the capacity to do that, or over time. We’ll see these things pan out, and you don’t really have to believe in them in any kind of clinging way. If they happen, they happen, and your belief will be vindicated.

Mercedes: Yes. This sense of having to verify it through experience is a very third-dimensional point of view. Not that it’s bad or wrong, but it can be a limit if you’re saying that’s the only way to accept information.

Rick: Well, you’ve said a whole lot of stuff today that is pretty far out there by most people’s standards, but it’s your experience, and so that’s what I mean. I would suggest that anyone listening actually has the capacity to have the experiences that you’ve had. It may not be their role or their calling, it may not happen in this lifetime or whatever, but if one person can experience something, then at least theoretically, potentially, anyone can experience it if it’s a real phenomenon.

Mercedes: Going back to this idea of these two parts of ourself, which I feel comfortable referring to as the masculine and the feminine, the masculine being the transcendent doesn’t have belief. That is that absolute space of emptiness, no need for belief in that realm. The feminine being the imminent manifestation in form, and belief is, I think, natural to us as one of our abilities, our qualities that we bring into this realm. And so, I think we all have both sides of those within us. We have the part of us that doesn’t need belief, doesn’t hold on to belief, and belief just isn’t a part of it. And then we have that other part where belief can be very active and play a part, and depending on how we relate to it, can be very supportive.

Rick: Yeah. When I say belief, I’m always just sort of… It’s like, who was it, Thoreau or somebody said, “Go ahead and build your castles in the air, that’s where they belong, now just put foundations under them.” So, there’s nothing wrong with belief, but one should always aspire to… I say experiential verification, but I don’t mean to sound kind of like overly third-dimensional when I say that. I just mean that living in a conceptual world isn’t going to do it for you ultimately. There should be an experiential, visceral kind of grounding.

Mercedes: Right. Is this true in your life? Is this showing up in alignment with whatever you experience in your life?

Rick: Right. Because there are people who spend their whole lifetime clinging to beliefs that they haven’t really substantiated through deeper experience.

Mercedes: Most of us do.

Rick: And such people can become very radical or fundamentalist and so on, when that’s their orientation.

Mercedes: But even there can be all sorts of beliefs that we took on oftentimes when we were very young. There can be beliefs like, “This world isn’t going to support me.”

Rick: Right.

Mercedes: Or beliefs like, “I can’t trust men,” or whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be that I end up being an international terrorist. I just end up being a normal, messed up person.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I don’t think we’re going to take the time to talk about all 12 dimensions. That would probably take us a couple more hours. But I guess, needless to say, you see life, you see the universe as having, in my father’s house there are many mansions. You see it as having a great sort of depth and profundity that doesn’t ordinarily meet the eye. And there’s a huge realm of possibilities that we have just begun to explore.

Mercedes: Right. And one of the reasons that I laid out my map and explained about the dimensions in the book, was because it seemed to me that some of what Mary was bringing forth wouldn’t make sense, if people didn’t have that contextualization. So, it seemed necessary as a foundation and a container for what she was bringing forth, where she was talking about everything from Mother, Father, God, and what that meant, and how that came to be, down into talking about the higher dimensions, and especially referencing the fourth and fifth dimension.

Rick: Cool. Well, I’ll have to finish the book. Time gets away with me, doing one of these every week and having some book to read. I usually don’t get to finish them, but I’m intrigued. And hopefully listeners will be intrigued as well.

Mercedes: Well, thank you so much. This has been just wonderful talking with you. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Rick: Yeah, me too. A lot of fun. So, we’ve already pretty much covered in the course of the interview some of the things you have to offer and the things you do with people and so on. We have a website, obviously, mercedeskirkel.com, K-I-R-K-E-L, and I’ll be linking to that from batgap.com. For those listening to one of these interviews for the first time, batgap.com is kind of the mothership of this interview show. There are over 160 interviews archived there now, available both in video and in audio. You can either download the MP3 or you can link to a podcast where you can subscribe, and download them all in iTunes. There’s a discussion group there, which gets very lively at times. The week before last, the interview had about 500 posts in the discussion group, and they were quite substantive. People were really writing thoughtful things. So, if that kind of thing appeals to you, feel free to participate. There’s a donation button, which I rely on to enable me to continue doing this, and to take care of various expenses, which are explained on a page on the site there. There’s also an e-mail subscription tab. If you click that, you can sign up to be notified by e-mail each time a new interview is posted. So, thank you, Mercedes. It’s really been delightful.

Mercedes: Thank you. I’ve greatly enjoyed it.

Rick: Thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next time. [Music]