Michael Roads Interview

Summary

Michael Roads discusses unusual spiritual experiences, communication with nature, and the relationship between physical life and metaphysical awareness. He emphasizes presence, emotional balance, unconditional love, and an open but discerning approach to extraordinary claims.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can people develop a deeper conscious relationship with nature?
• What does it mean to live fully in the present moment?
• Can humans communicate with animals, plants, and nature spirits?
• How can spiritual growth unite the human personality with the deeper self?
• How can seekers stay open to unusual experiences without becoming gullible?

Key takeaways

• Nature is conscious and communicates through the energy and information shared by all living forms.
• Thinking pulls attention away from the present, while silence makes direct awareness possible.
• The apparent separation between people, nature, and the deeper self is ultimately an illusion.
• Extraordinary experiences should be met with openness, discernment, and respect for others' readiness.
• Spiritual growth brings the mortal personality and immortal soul into a more unified whole.
• Every part of nature has a role without being superior or inferior to another.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. Tonight—it’s night here in the US—my guest is Michael Roads, who is in Australia.

I’ve really enjoyed preparing for this interview. I listened, as usual, to quite a few hours of his recordings and read quite a bit of what I think is his most recent book. Let me give you a little bit of biographical information, and then I’m going to make a bit of a statement, more than I usually make at the beginning of interviews, just to put this in context.

Michael was born a farmer’s son in Cambridgeshire, England, in 1937. From an early age, he discovered that he had a natural ability to travel beyond linear

Michael: Yeah, you’ve done your homework. Yeah, I was lying; it was lunchtime, and I’d been on the tractor all morning. And this is, you’re right, this was absolutely one of the turning points in my life. I switched the tractor off and had my sandwich, and I was just about to get back on the tractor—five minutes. But I suddenly realized how silent it was, incredibly silent, and I thought, wow, you can always hear birds, you can always hear wind in the trees, and I’m surrounded by thousands of acres of forest, and couldn’t hear a sound. And I thought, this is weird, so I lay down and stared up at the sky. And going above me, going in a spiral above me, was an eagle, one of our wedge-tailed eagles. And I lay there for a few minutes looking at it, and this quiet, this no noise, deepened. And I looked at the eagle, and of course, what would you think? Wow, I wish I could fly with an eagle.

And suddenly there was a movement, and I’m looking from the eagle’s point of view down to me looking up. And I almost lost it, but this energy held me. And then I looked at the farm, and then I looked at where my cows went in the forest. I didn’t know that from the eagle’s viewpoint, but then I realized that the eagle was looking through the eyes of immediacy. It was looking through the eyes of the immediate moment. And I realized I didn’t do that. In fact, I realized humanity doesn’t do that. We look through the eyes of the intellect, through the eyes of our knowledge, through the eyes of yesterday, through the eyes of our beliefs, our religions, our expectations, our wants, and on and on and on. But not nature. It looks through the eyes of immediacy with absolute clarity. And then the eagle, as it was looking down, everything changed, and the vision went metaphysical.

It was like an enormous gulf. I moved right through the land, opened it up—of course, it wasn’t there physically—and I’m on one side and nature’s on the other. And I suddenly knew this was the gulf of separation, and I decided that my life was about crossing this gulf to nature on the other side. And when I realized that, then the eagle sort of swooped down, and suddenly I’m back in my body, moving towards Doubtsville, that place where everybody doubts everything and you don’t even believe your own experience. I spent a lot of time in that place, but the point is, yes, that changed my life, because it took me 15 years—15 years—to cross that gulf. And then when I crossed it, I realized one thing: a) it doesn’t exist. There is no gulf of separation, but I had to cross it to know it wasn’t there.

And b) it wasn’t just between me and nature; it was between me and myself, between that being I am and the personality I always had thought that I was. So it was a 15-year journey, which was a little bit slow for me. I’m Aries; I like getting on with things.

Rick: So, 15 years. When I read that introduction, it said you had your spiritual enlightenment when you were 49 or so. Was that the—

Michael: No, that was much later. I left the farm and traveled around Australia. I sold the farm eventually, traveled around Australia—four kids and my wife. And I’m all the time looking for me and on a journey of fear, and it was not much fun at all. We can pass over that.

Rick: Well, you had a hell of a time with health problems. I mean, really horrendous health problems. And there’s a real interesting thing where, before you started having all those health problems, you sort of made an ultimatum, like, “I want enlightenment by the time I’m 50,” right? And so then all hell started breaking loose in your body.

👁️ Questions about being enlightened

Michael: Well, when I was 40, I made that ridiculous statement. I was hurting; I was in really bad trouble. I had—yeah, I hurt my body very badly. I ruptured the disc in my back, the whole disc had degenerated. I was a mess. And when I was 40, I said—one day I was with a spiritual being, a much greater being than me—and I said, “I’m not enjoying this. I’ve had enough. Can we have an agreement?” And the being looked at me cautiously. I said, “If we can have an agreement, I want to be awake and self-realized, or spiritually enlightened, whatever you want to call it, by 50 or dead, and let’s come back and do it again. I just don’t want to keep doing this.” Well, the being looked at me for about half a minute and then nodded.

When I came out of that experience, that metaphysical experience, I thought, “Oh God, what have I done?” But on the other hand, it fitted in with my nature: Aries with Scorpio rising. I’m always head down, charging, and if I stop, down comes a sting and away I go again. And so at 50 I was in big trouble—sorry, at 49 and three months I was in serious, serious trouble, because that decade, as you said, was horrendous. It was really bad. I was in big trouble.

Rick: There’s a saying with regard to karma, which is that if the postman knows you’re going to move, he tries to deliver all your mail. So it sounds like you’re getting some heavy mail deliveries for about a decade.

Michael: It sounds like some bit of dogma in that karma.

Rick: So we’ll get back to this, but your allusion to that being implies an age of metaphysical travels and communion with other dimensions and all that kind of thing. You mentioned it quite matter-of-factly.

Michael: As I say, when you realize I began as a child, when I was on the farm in Tasmania, I began to go out on the fields with questions, sit down and meditate, and come back with answers. So gradually my life changed as a farmer, and I became one of Australia’s leading organic farmers. But that change was changing me; it was completely changing me. And so gradually I reached the point where I would look back on my youth and think, “What did I do?” So I began to revisit that and see if I could still do it, and found that I could. And over the next quite a lot of years, I’ve honed that down to quite a skill. I could now walk along a beach and let my body keep walking, and I could move away and be elsewhere. But I tried it in a park once and walked into a tree—slam dunk into a tree. So beaches are okay as long as there are no people around.

Rick: Yeah, and you don’t step into the water, and don’t try it while you’re driving, please.

Michael: No, no, no, no. Not a good idea.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: Most people are stopped from doing it by fear because you’re really moving into the unknown. So let’s just look at this: What are we? We have an English word, “individuality,” which, if you slow it down a little bit—and I often use this in terms—is “in-divided duality,” individuality, in-divided duality. Of that duality, there is the physical, there is the mind, the brain, the physical and the mental and emotional person, and there’s the metaphysical person. Now, the metaphysical being is immortal, connected to the soul; the physical is mortal, connected to personality. And so, for most people, 90 percent of their life—probably 99, but I’ll be kind—is based in the physical and mortal. When I started what I did as a kid, without realizing it, I was setting myself also on the direction of the metaphysical, immortal.

And today I like to feel that, pretty well, I’ve brought them into a seamless whole. So I live with the physical, mortal personality and the metaphysical and the immortal. I merge them and move them around. Everybody can do it. It’s not a Michael Roads exclusive, but I was very fortunate. My father died when I was young with no will. That changed my whole future, and things like that, which I saw as the worst things that could happen, were great fortune for me. They put me in places where I really had to grow.

Rick: Yeah, and you say everybody can do it, and I believe you, but I’ve never really encountered anyone whose experiences of other realms and other dimensions were so detailed and with such variety and richness. And I’m still going to trick you into talking about some of these things.

Michael: Oh, go ahead. You don’t have to trick me; I’ll be discriminating.

Rick: Okay, yeah, we have ways of making you talk.

Michael: Yeah.

Communication with plants and animals

Rick: But actually, a question just came in from one of the online listeners. Joan in California asks, “In his books and in his description of the eagle just now, Michael seemed to indicate that animals and even plants within their own species are connected energetically and with some sort of awareness. How much awareness does the animal kingdom experience? Is there awareness beyond the mere instinctual behavior?”

Michael: Oh gosh, yes. I mean, all nature lives consciously. As you probably know, most of humanity lives subconsciously, and we live subconsciously pretty well all our day. One of the things I teach is to be conscious, because subconscious isn’t okay; it doesn’t cut it. And so nature, if you want to—let’s say you want to communicate with a tree—the tree is in that moment. Now, the person who wants to communicate with it thinks. We think around about 60,000 thoughts a day. Every thought takes you out of the moment. You cannot think your way into the moment. The whole idea of meditation is to be silent and to come into the moment. So you can think your way out of the moment, but you can’t think your way into it. So think about that, Rick, sometime when you’re not thinking. You can only think your way out of the moment.

Now, a tree can’t do that, and so it’s always in the moment and always conscious in the moment. A human being is very rarely in the moment, and so they’re in a place that is subconscious, because to be in the moment you’ve got to be fully conscious. You can’t be subconsciously in the moment, because “sub” is less than fully conscious, and the only place full consciousness can be is in the moment. So you can’t be subconsciously in the moment. Therefore, a human being, when they’re communicating with nature, has got to move into the moment with it. And I could tell you a lot of stories about that. You’ve got to be in the moment with nature, with the animal, with the plant. Now, all species, everything in nature and everything in the human world, is energy. As you probably know, with your many interviews, we’re 99.9 percent energy.

If you take all the space away from all the protons, neutrons, electrons, et cetera, in our cells, we’re basically space. I think all humanity would occupy the space of a sugar cube. Okay, now therefore we’re space. All nature is space. That space is energy. That energy is consciousness, and all energy and all consciousness carries information. It’s full of information. So we have the ability, if we use it, to connect with that information, which is energy, which is consciousness. Nature is doing this within its own realm the whole time, and there’s a flow of information flowing through all species all the time. The only species outside of this is humanity. We use something dumb called the internet and pay to do it, and then don’t believe what we say to each other.

Rick: Well, let me ask you this. The Sufis have a saying—which you may not like, based on what you just said—but let’s see what you think. The Sufis have a saying that God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in the human being. And various spiritual traditions hold that there’s this sort of hierarchy of evolution in terms of spiritual evolution, and that, for the most part, only the human species is—of the species that we commonly know about—capable of spiritual enlightenment. We’re going to have to define what we mean by spiritual enlightenment here. But do you buy that at all, or do you feel like there could be enlightened cabbages and rocks and trees and whatnot?

Michael: I buy it to a degree. Everything has consciousness. Every rock has consciousness, and therefore it’s growing. It’s a slow process, and we don’t hang around to watch a rock grow. But everything is a movement in the moment of consciousness—everything. Enlightenment, well, yes, we could define that later. But in nature, because everything lives in the moment, everything moves with consciousness in a very natural and organic way. It doesn’t have to choose to grow; it grows because that is the process of nature. We’re part of the process of nature, but we’ve separated and alienated ourselves. And so, even in humanity, you see a hierarchy of ability, a hierarchy created by money, and a hierarchy of spirituality. Now, none of this implies for a moment superiority or inferiority. It doesn’t imply that at all.

But if a person spends all their life sitting by a gas pump and becomes the Buddha, then they have put energy into something, and then they get something from it. So, in a spiritual hierarchy, they’ve just risen a little bit. They’re not superior, but they’ve learned more because of their focus. Where we focus, energy flows. And so I did that a long time ago. In nature, and with nature spirits and the Deva Kingdom, yes, there is a hierarchy, but there isn’t a hierarchy of superiority. That’s not even a concept in the real world; that’s just a concept for us.

Rick: Yeah. So, I mean, these different nature spirits and devas, and so on, they just serve different roles, wouldn’t you say? Like players on a baseball team: the catcher isn’t better than the first baseman. They both are essential to the whole team.

Michael: That says it well. That says it very well. Now let’s jump in. In that hierarchy, there is something—there are nature spirits, many of which are about the size of a pinhead. We don’t see those. Here’s an interesting question for some of the listeners who get a bit skeptical. Let’s just say you’re walking into a park. You walk into the middle, and there’s a bed of roses, maybe 20 meters across—a really serious bed of roses—and you’re looking at them. As you look at them, you suddenly see tiny, semitransparent things that look a bit like bees. You get really close, and one comes right up to you and looks like a fairy. Then you realize there are tens of thousands of them all over these roses, and you’re looking at them thinking, “Oh my God, I can see nature spirits.

Oh my God, this is incredible.” Then a little tour coach stops, about 30 people get out and stretch, and come walking down to the rose bed. They just stand there looking at it. You look at their faces, and nobody’s saying, “Oh my God, look at all these fairies.” Now, you then ask somebody, “Can you see the fairies?” because you’re pretty straight. The question is, can you still believe your own reality, which is now not going to be reinforced by 30 other people? For 30 years, I found that difficult—incredibly difficult. So I was skeptical of myself to an astonishing degree, incredibly skeptical. In all this mishmash, one day I’m walking over a river bridge and I look into the water. Now you’ll get the real honky-tonk story. I look into the river, and it’s winter. This is in the subtropics, and the water is crystal clear.

The sun shines through it, and all the rocks—beautiful river rocks—turn bright green because it’s winter and the water is very clear. But one of these rocks is completely like this size.

Rick: And winter for you guys means it’s warm, right? That’s what you call it.

Michael: Our winter is warm, but the water is not warm.

Rick: No, okay.

Michael: The water is cold anyway. So this egg-looking thing is completely pure white, or actually a pale cream. I kept staring at it, thinking, “This doesn’t make sense. Every other rock is green. Why is that one not green?” It called to me. It said, “Bring me out of the river.” And I said, “No, no, no, no. We don’t want to do that. It’s deep there.” Anyway, nobody was around. This was way out in the country, in a river valley, and I’m standing on a bridge looking into the river. I thought, “Okay, well, nobody’s been over here in ages, so I’ll go in.” So I stripped off all my clothes. I was naked, and I went into the water, which was freezing, and picked this rock out. I had to dive down to the bottom. Of course, I’m walking back with it when a car comes over, and five people stop the car and stare at me. The water was so cold, they were probably trying to work out if I was male or female.

Anyway, I took it home, and it spoke to me. It called me. It told me it was a guide stone. I asked it what that was, but it didn’t tell me. Every now and again, I would bring it in, put it in the sun, and then soak it in a bucket of water. It seemed to want that. One day, I was going to do a workshop, and it said it wanted to go with me. So, if anybody ever tells you they’re going to take a big rock to a workshop, don’t go. I took this stone, and there were about 25 people at the workshop. I kept the big stone in a bag. Nobody saw it. After lunch, I decided to try something clever. I put it out in the middle and invited everybody to go into it. Some of them said, “How do you do that?” I said, “Imagine,” because that’s another story. Imagination is something I talk a lot about. So they started doing their thing, and I’m sitting there looking at it.

I’m thinking to myself, “That’s very peculiar. There’s a little hole in it.” I’d had this thing for a year and had looked at it minutely, and there was no hole in it. But I’m sitting there seeing a hole, and I thought, “This can’t be possible.” So I put my hands on the arms of my chair and leaned forward to look closer, because I wasn’t going to do this with everybody else. I wanted to be with it in case somebody got a wobbly, which can occasionally happen.

Rick: What does that expression mean, “somebody gets a wobbly”?

Michael: Wobbly? Well, they get a little bit upset. I get in there thinking they can’t get out.

Rick: I see, right.

Michael: So I like to keep an eye on the people anyway. I leaned forward and looked at it. Well, what happened, Rick, was not nice. This was in my earlier days. It’s as though the essence of me was sucked out. I could see the smoke, like a mist, coming out of my body, being sucked across the space, and going in through this hole. All my experience suddenly went with this metaphysical me and was sucked into the hole. It freaked me out, but what really made this bad was that I couldn’t move. My body had turned off. Now, that doesn’t happen. You don’t get things like that happening. I’ve been a practical farmer all my life up until this point. Nobody turns your body off. Here I am, sitting there, holding on to the arms of this chair, and I can’t even blink. Now I’m moving into a vast cavern—an incredible-sized cavern, which is freaky, to say the least. I cannot move my body.

In this cavern, there is a voice. This voice is running up and down the scale of madness, as far as it felt to me, and it’s saying, “Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.” All I wanted to do was run, but I couldn’t move my physical body. I could not get it to move, so I couldn’t run. I swear I would have run out of the room. There’s no way I wouldn’t have run. In this cavern, this other me is shaped up now. There’s me standing in there and me sitting on the chair. The me sitting in the chair is beginning to sweat. I’ve got tears running down my eyes, and my nose is beginning to run, and I still can’t move. That is not nice. I’m being brutally honest here, but I’m in the cavern the whole time. This little idiot me in the cavern starts walking further into it. I’m thinking, “No, no, no, don’t do this. Let’s get out of here.

Let’s come out.” No, it continues walking in, and the voice is going, “Run, run, run.” It seemed to me like for two months I was walking further into this cavern. That’s what it felt like. All the time, this voice was running up and down the scale. This probably lasted 10 or 15 minutes, and I was freaking out on this chair. Anyway, as I walked into the cavern, I saw a pair of doors. They went from one side of the cavern to the other and met in the middle. They were enormous. I mean, this cavern was as big as the inside of the world. I looked at them, and I was feeling tired and exhausted. Then this other me—the voice—changed what it said. It didn’t say “run.” It said, “If you open these doors, a full force of nature will pivot in your being.” I’ve never forgotten those words. Well, jeepers, this wasn’t going to happen. I wanted to get out of there.

But I still could not switch my physical body back on. It was really a mess, I’m telling you. This other me so wanted to put his hands on the door and open it, and he was exhausted—completely exhausted. I instantly knew there were six people in the room, and I could suck the energy out of them. Terrible. And I did. I took the energy out of six people, who nearly fell flat on the floor. They felt drained so fast and so hard. In fact, two of them refused to be my friends after that. They felt I shouldn’t have done it, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Suddenly I’ve got energy, and I push on the doors, and they fly open. I thought, “Oh God, now what have I done?” There’s this other world just floating in front of me. I know the Earth very well. That’s what I call a fifth-dimensional Earth. That’s the Earth I call Terra—we’re on Earth, that’s Terra, T-E-R-R-A.

And then there’s Gaia, which is a bit further away. So this was an Earth that didn’t have humanity on it. Then this being comes walking away from it, walking across space, and in a moment is standing in front of me. I knew this was Pan. It didn’t look anything like Pan, but I knew this was Pan.

Rick: And by Pan, you don’t just mean the guy with a little flute. You mean the intelligence of nature.

Michael: I mean… I’ll explain that. And it took me years to really come to this understanding of what I feel. Pan, the god of nature—but this god was dressed like a good-looking movie star. He had a pair of jeans on, a T-shirt, and a face that was semi-human but definitely not fully human. The forehead and the head were too big. He was utterly, totally beautiful, an incredibly powerful being. Now, this is where our relationship began. I refused it, of course. I was skeptical and didn’t get close, but this is how it all began. I’ll leave the story there. So, within an hour, I put that away. Well, when I came out of this egg thing, I looked around. I was ready. Suddenly, I could move, because I’ll end it properly. Pan talked to me a bit and then said, “You’re exhausted.” I said, “Yeah, I am.” So he put his hand on my shoulder, and suddenly I could move.

I wanted to fall on the floor and cry for the next hour, so I got my handkerchief out and gradually mopped myself up. Nobody else had noticed. Twenty minutes had gone by instead of three months, and I didn’t have a beard dragging on the ground, but I was a hell of a mess—an emotional mess. So, when we… I gradually brought them out of it, and then I got them to share and managed to gain another hour. At the end of an hour, I felt that I could stand up, so I got through it without them knowing too badly, except for the six who all demanded to know what had happened to them. That was my first introduction. Through the years, that relationship changed. Pan withdrew from anything, even metaphysical. So today, Pan, for me, is simply the spirit of nature. Pan is the intelligence that expresses all of nature. It’s not a being, it’s not a person, it’s not a thing, it’s not a god. It’s not…

it’s just an expression of intelligence that is so far beyond ours. I don’t try to think about it too much because it hurts my brain. But this beloved Pan takes me in his care, and I don’t know what I… Well, I do know what I did to deserve it, because I wrote that in the book too, Through the Eyes of Love . There was a connection made before this human experience, but that’s another story.

🩺 Dimensions and healing work

Rick: Well, let me ask you some questions that segue out of what you just said and hopefully put it in context. I can put myself in the mind of some people who will be watching this, and they’ll be saying, “Well, this all sounds very interesting and far out.” If you and I start talking about some of the other things that you’ve been experiencing and describing in your books, they’ll think, “Yeah, yeah, very entertaining, far out. He’s playing around in the astral. He’s going through all these subtle dimensions, all these subtle realms. But what does that have to do with enlightenment? I want enlightenment,” the person might think. “I want self-realization. I want to know what the ultimate reality is.

I don’t want to get hung up in some subtle strata where you could just play around for all eternity with any number of far-out possibilities, but never get down to the real nitty-gritty of your true, ultimate nature.” So, you say you awakened or became enlightened when you were 49. Let’s delve into what you actually mean by that, and then address that hypothetical objection that I just brought up.

Michael: Okay. Well, actually, I would agree with those people, which is why I don’t talk about this sort of thing in my intensives. In intensives, people call me a spiritual teacher. I look at it differently. There are two ways to live. One way works, and one way doesn’t work. Probably 95 percent of humanity lives in a way that doesn’t work for our well-being, so we die far younger than our potential. I’d like to teach a way that works, as simple as that, so I’m absolutely in favor of that. I don’t teach stuff that… You know what? I travel metaphysically. I travel and I write it, I journalize it, and then I turn it into a flow, and then it goes to the public. They choose whether they read it or not, but that isn’t so much what I teach. So, when you say, “What is enlightenment?” Now, this is good. This is getting to what I like. So, what is enlightenment?

Enlightenment—and I’m serious—is no more than leaving kindergarten. This is a kindergarten planet. Most souls on this planet are young souls. Now, that becomes a paradox, because souls are ageless, so how can you get young and ageless? I could tackle that one later if you want, but we’ll just say this is for young souls. Now, enlightenment is when you… If you go into a kindergarten, kids beat each other, keep poking each other in the face, stick fingers in each other’s eyes, pull each other’s hair, and it’s a battleground. It keeps several kindergarten teachers very busy trying to keep the kids amused so they don’t tear each other to pieces. Because in that youth, we do that sort of thing. Well, this is a young planet. So, enlightenment, to me, happens in the moment. If I look back and say, “Yes, I was 49,” that’s not me; that was the body then. Enlightenment never leaves the moment.

So, if you’re growing in consciousness with enlightenment, enlightenment grows. Now, this is a lovely subject. I like this. The things we think are enlightenment generally aren’t. People look on enlightenment as a goal. When I became enlightened, I knew that I was. The one thing was that my body healed. I had 20 years of terrible back pain. I never had more than three months without it, and the moment I was enlightened, my body healed. Cellulitis was gone like that. My insomnia finished, and all those years of pain came to an end. I don’t have back pain anymore and haven’t since that time, 30 years ago. And so there is… In your consciousness, you know who you are. I was very aware of who I am. Now, I certainly thought this was it. You know, “This is it. You go sit on the mountaintop now.” Whoever did that cartoon was not enlightened. So then I went on to the plateau.

This is my term: the plateau of enlightened complacency. In other words, you jumped up on the mountain, and here’s this plateau of enlightened complacency, and there are several other enlightened people sitting around, equally complacent. I sat there for a couple of years and thought, “Well, this isn’t much fun. What am I supposed to do now?” Then I decided to come off the mountain. So I came down, and what I found was that there is a junior school. High school is not in this time frame and not in this reality, but junior school is. I thought, “Well, what I probably ought to do is go and get into first grade.” So I then joined a junior school and went into the first grade. I think I’m somewhere around fourth or fifth grade now, and I don’t expect to outlast junior school. I think it’ll still be here when I’ve gone. So, enlightenment is a process of growth, of being conscious.

If you become enlightened—now this gets fascinating—enlightenment is holistic. We are… The only thing that is physical about you is your body. Nothing else is physical. Your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your imagination, your intuition, your insight—all that is metaphysical. None of that is physical. And so, when you become enlightened, you connect with all that in a very much deeper way. You realize that you are all that. You’re not that body; you’re this metaphysical aspect. And so, when you’re in the moment, all that is with you and continues to grow. Now, your emotions and your mental body are incredibly powerful. People say, “We think and therefore we are.” Wrong! We think, and that creates emotions, and therefore we are, because emotions are our powerhouse. Now, people go to university and train their thinking.

They train their mental body and get so-called clever, taking more and more deeply a grip on stupidity with the other hand. As they get more and more clever, they don’t realize, “Okay, we can grow our intellect this way, and we’ve done a great job with it. But did you go to an emotional university where you could grow emotionally?” Nobody does. And so, as we get older, we think our emotions are growing. No, the physical body grows. You see many people in their 80s who are like children. In fact, they call it the second childhood. It isn’t the second childhood; they never left the first one emotionally. They simply lived in a way that was acceptable. And when you get to 80, you don’t give a stuff about what’s acceptable or not anymore. I’m only one year away from that place, and they really don’t care. So they go back to being their own emotions.

They live them, and sometimes, on a good day, they can be as good as a six-year-old. And I’m not making fun of this. This is a very, very common situation. And so, to me, holistic enlightenment is spiritual, mental, and emotional—all one together. You are emotionally complete. And do you know, the mental is no problem? If you’ve got spiritual enlightenment and emotional completeness, your mental body just shapes itself up easily. There’s not much to do with that. Now, a lot of so-called enlightened people have got their ticket back because they’re still emotional children.

Rick: So what you’re saying, then, is that enlightenment, by your definition, is a holistic development. It’s not just the awakening of consciousness, but it’s also emotional unfoldment, mental unfoldment—just sort of all the facets or aspects that make us up have all been developed to a very high degree. And I would even throw in there the physiology. I mean, you said that when you had this awakening, or this enlightenment, your physiology healed. Of course, there are people who undergo radical healings and remission from cancer and all that who wouldn’t consider themselves enlightened, but in your case, at least, that was part of the package. So, is that a fair synopsis of what you just said? It’s a holistic development of all aspects of mind, body, spirit, personality, emotions—whatever components there may be that make us up?

Michael: Every component is involved, yes. As I read the books when I was younger, and I read Joel Goldsmith and people like him, Paul Brunton, Vera Stanley Alder—probably nobody today can remember them, but I read those sorts of people—I always got the impression that enlightenment was completely out of reach, just too high up on the shelf. But I tell people today it’s on the kitchen table. If you look between the butter and the marmalade, there it is. You can reach it that easily. But if you can’t see it, then you need to turn 365 degrees, because we have the ability for this. Everybody has the ability for this. Unfortunately, people on the spiritual path put it in an unreachable place. “It’s my potential,” and while their potential is there to reach it, they create the space between them and their potential.

And so their potential is going to have to spend a long time trying to reach it, because they’ve created the space between themselves and enlightenment and their potential. We do this stuff all the time.

Rick: And yet you said it…

Michael: We’re called clever.

Rick: And yet you said a few minutes ago that you could be enlightened, by your definition, and yet still be in first grade relative to what might be possible. So it would seem that you’re just sort of using the word enlightenment to signify a certain important milestone, but that there must be much more beyond that. At least, that’s what I would…

Michael: I would define enlightenment as, as we move into it, it’s rather like, as you spend more time consciously with it, it grows; you grow, enlightenment grows. And I’ve realized long ago enlightenment has no ceiling. There’s no— we say, “I am enlightened,” and that’s fine, we can say that, but the personality isn’t. The only thing that’s enlightened is the part that’s making that statement. It’s not a statement I would make in normal life. That’s waving the red flag. And what is it? I mean, if you’ve got big feet and swim faster than anybody else and win the Olympics, you’ll get a ticker-tape parade through the city. But if you went there and said, “I’m an enlightened being. This has taken me five lifetimes to achieve,” no ticker-tape parade—just a little room for a silly little person to go and sit in until they realize that they’re mad and then they can be dealt with.

Rick: So aside from your physical healing, which was quite dramatic, really, especially considering how much you’d been suffering for years before that, how would you say your life changed at 49 when you reached this stage, what you call enlightenment?

Michael: Okay, well, I do not experience fear, I do not experience fatigue, I don’t get tired, I don’t stress, I don’t get angry. Now, I did about seven years ago. That was the first time in 20 years, and it didn’t work then, so I don’t think I’ll do that anymore. So I don’t get angry. Once in 20 years it didn’t work, so I don’t get angry anymore. I don’t criticize myself, I’m not self-critical, I don’t judge myself, I sleep well—you know, all those little things. My relationship—in other words, what is enlightenment? Your relationship with yourself is your relationship with life; it’s life’s relationship with you. Enlightenment is you fall in love with you. But that falling in love is not the end of love, because as you fall in love with self and you become more conscious, then love has a relationship with you. So I have a relationship with what I call love.

Now, let’s get this clear: love is not an emotion. Somebody just wrote a New Age book about love, and the first chapter says, “Love, the most powerful of emotions.” They’re still writing this rubbish; they don’t even know what love is. Love is the power of creation. God did not have emotions and out of it came Earth. Love is the power of creation. So when you’re loving yourself, you’re enlightened. You’re loving yourself; you can be a complete idiot, and I manage it quite often. It doesn’t stop my relationship of loving myself. I could look at myself and say, “Okay, well, that wasn’t too clever. We won’t do that again,” and finish—gone. That’s it. Whereas once I would have sat and berated myself for a day over something stupid, beating myself up. Now I don’t beat myself up; I leave that to other people. They can beat themselves up trying to beat me up. That doesn’t work either.

And so I have a relationship with myself based in love. Now, when you’re loving yourself, you are loving yourself. It’s like in your life—and this is why I write “Choose Love” on my Facebook every time—in your life, love becomes a constant. Now, you don’t have to define it. “What is this?” You don’t have to define it. There is an energy, and that energy is supportive, and that energy is a constant. The more you focus on that energy, the more of a constant it is, and you feel good with it. And gradually, though, as you do this, life becomes a dance. You’re not in a ballroom, but you’re dancing in life, and life is becoming beautiful. It’s a beautiful, beautiful experience, and you’re loving it. And you realize one day that your dancing partner is love. You’re dancing with love, and love is beginning to change.

Because as you dance with love and you connect more and more deeply with love—and we’ll never connect fully, because we’re still in the process of growing as human beings—and when you connect more and more fully with love, gradually love begins to change you and recreate you in its own image, which is the image of creation. But equally, in this exchange, you begin to recreate love in the image of self—not the personality, but the image of self, of who you are. And this creation is utterly unique to every human being. And in this creation, God expands, God grows, consciousness grows. So every human being is on this process. Some of us on this planet decide we’re human beings; we’re not, actually. We’re souls having a human experience. We’re not always human. And so we tend, in that hierarchy, to put humans at the top of it. I don’t do that.

I put humans as a very worthwhile part of that hierarchy, but we haven’t reached yet what we will one day become. And so this thing of enlightenment really deepens your relationship with yourself, and that is the most vital relationship you ever have. When you’re loving yourself fully and completely, sickness doesn’t—I don’t get sick. I don’t do sickness because I—why would I get sick? I love me; I look after me. Why would I get sick?

Rick: Okay, now I have three or four questions.

Michael: This doesn’t make me a freak, and if anybody’s listening and says, “I don’t believe it,” that’s fine. That’s okay.

Rick: No, that’s okay. I have several questions based on what you just said. I want to make sure I get them all in here, but before I do, let me just—I want to honor people’s questions, because for weeks we haven’t had our question thing working properly. We finally got it fixed, and I think it’s going to work every week from now on. And so a question just came in. We’ll wrap this one, we’ll handle this one, and then I’m going to get back to some questions of my own based on what you just said. So Bruce from Minneapolis asks, “I find that sometimes I feel very tuned in, and then 20 minutes later it’s gone. Two days later it comes back. How do you stay attuned, or tuned in?”

Michael: Then, when you’re tuned in, be aware of what you’re feeling; be aware of where your thoughts are. When you’re tuned in, you’re not thinking out; you’re quieter. You’ll find that your inner space is much, much quieter. That literally is tuning in. So that’s what you do. You do less from the head and more from the heart. If you want to sit down, if you want to talk with a tree, wanting is a space between you. If you decide, “I will talk with that tree,” you haven’t created the space, and you can communicate with the tree. But if you want to, you’ve created a want, and want and desire do not communicate with trees. Do you see how subtle it is?

Rick: So it sounds like there’s more of an immediacy to being tuned in, as you put it—the way you would define it. There are fewer filters between you and whatever you’re experiencing.

Michael: The more you’re in your heart, the more you’re in your whole brain, and the more you’re in the moment, and the more you’re tuned in, and the more—your world gets bigger in that moment.

Rick: Bruce—

Michael: I have a friend, a very close relative, who’s brilliant, way up on the IQ, brilliant. He’s brilliantly clever, but his world is so small, it scares me how small his world is, and yet he’s brilliant. You know, he’s well over 140 on the IQ, but his world is so small.

Rick: I think Bruce and others might ask, “Well, it’s easy to say, but boy, I have this hectic job, and I have three kids, and there’s so much going on in my life, and whatever degree of being tuned in I occasionally achieve gets disrupted by all the chaos that I have to deal with on a daily basis.” How would you answer that?

Michael: My answer to that is, in every moment of your life, you are creating the direction and the content of every moment of your life. So if your life is full of chaos and you have no time, then you’ve created that situation. If you’re deciding that you want to move on to your spiritual path, then you have to. There’s certainly a discipline required, and you certainly have to make a decision: “Okay, I’m going to put aside some time every day, and that time is for me as an immortal soul, so that I can get in touch with that aspect of myself.” If you make that decision, you’ll do it. For many people, television—and I’m not suggesting this with Bruce, but for many people, television, newspapers, CNN, continuous negative news, all those are more important.

Rick: That’s a good answer. I mean, in my own life, I learned to meditate when I was a teenager, and I thought, “Whoa, this is really effective, and it’s really important, and I’m just going to do it no matter what.” And I’ve done it in bus stations, and on airplanes, and in all kinds of situations. I just felt like if I stuck to this routinely, it would pay off for me.

Michael: Let me take you to the peak of arrogance: I don’t meditate. I wake up in the morning, I know I’m wonderful, that I’m going to have a wonderful day, and that’s what I focus on, and that’s basically what always happens.

Rick: That’s great. So let’s get back to the line of questioning I wanted to follow after the previous thing you said before Bruce. A lot of times enlightenment is defined—and if you read traditional scriptures, you’ll find it defined—as sort of an experiential realization of the essential wholeness or unity of life. One realizes—well, there’s these sayings in the Upanishads, such as, “I am that, thou art that, all of this is that, that alone is.” One sort of realizes that sort of oneness of life wakes up to itself in and through the instrumentality of a human entity. But when you defined enlightenment a few minutes ago, you’re saying, “Well, I love myself, and I’m free of fear,” and this and that, and it all sounded like it had an individual flavor to it.

So in these scriptures, very often there’s a distinction between Self with a small “s” and Self with a capital “S”—capital “S,” Self; small “s,” meaning everything that makes us up as an individual; capital “S” meaning the sort of universal consciousness, like the waves in the ocean. So do you concur with those traditional descriptions, and did you just put it differently when you were talking a few minutes ago, or what?

Michael: I would need to add to my story. I absolutely concur with those, and one of my subjects I enjoy is oneness, and that is one of the amazing things you get with oneness. What I’m trying to get across is enlightenment is not an ending; it’s a beginning.

Rick: Right.

Michael: It’s not a ceiling; it’s that you can see a ceiling. But the point is, okay, I was—when I was in 2006, my wife died, my late wife, and in 2007 I traveled the world on my own. It was a very emotional time for me. After 48 years of marriage, 52 years with a person from when you’re 19 or 18, it was pretty devastating for me, but I applied what I teach. Anyway, at the end of the 2007 intensive tour, I had recovered. I’d gone through a process, and I’ll mention this because it might be of interest. I was in France and I was having Reiki, and she was suddenly there. I knew her energy signature, and she said, “You’re pretty…” I was full of congestion. She said, “You’re full of congestion because grief attacks your lungs.” And I said, “I am.

I know I am.” She said, “Why don’t you stop crying with emotion and deal with it?” I said, “So what does that mean?” She said, “Well, why don’t you take it straight to your soul and feel it, and then you can get on with things again?” I said, “What do you think I’ve been doing for the last 18 months? Feeling it. What do you think I’m crying at, a picnic? I’ve been feeling it.” She said, “No, you’ve been playing with emotions, the emotional game. Let it touch the soul you are.” I said, “Well, how do I do that?” She said, “I don’t know, but you’ll know in a moment. I can’t tell you, but you’ll know.” And so, would you believe, five minutes later I knew how to do that. Don’t ask me, because I can’t tell you either. Anyway, I brought this pain of loss to the soul, and it was like the most exquisite pain. It was a terrible pain and yet terrible joy at the same time.

Then, the next day, I brought out mucus and began to recover. Two weeks later, I was on top of the world, feeling fantastic. I’d lost a lot of weight and was looking great. I went to America, where my organizer was waiting for me. This organizer I’d known had been through a separation, and I’d known her for 15 or 20 years. To my shock and horror, I found I was falling in love with her. I thought, “This can’t happen. I just can’t do this. I’m 70. I don’t fall in love anymore. This is not right. I am married.” Then I thought, “Don’t be an idiot. You’re not married. You’re a widower.” And I’m in that whole struggle world that I’ve never been in. Anyway, in the process of this, one particular night, I decided to tune into Trini, and I said, “I want to… Is it okay if I fall in love again? I need your permission.” Which she ignored. I went through a metaphysical process.

In this metaphysical process, in front of me—and I’ll keep it short—there was a spring of water, which was about a meter high. I knew that this was love, and I kept throwing it on her. Then she wasn’t there, and I was still throwing it on her. But she wasn’t there anymore. Then I realized she was covered in a kind of gray shroud, and this shroud was my emotional attachment to her. Now, I’d been through the teaching that attachments are not love. I’d been through the shock of learning that all my life, what I thought was love was never more than an emotional attachment. Yes, of course, it was human love, but unconditional love—I had never got close to it. And I was enlightened. This was a shock. An enlightened person—how could this be? How could this possibly be happening? Because I had certainly put into place all the spiritual aspects of enlightenment.

Anyway, this process continued with her. Then she said, “I need you to let me go. This is not love. I need you to let me go.” And I knew. I said, “No, this isn’t love. I want to let go.” I sat there with this metaphysical experience, and suddenly there came a moment when something was rising up. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to be able to let go, to be able to just let her go.” And I knew that when I let go, I would never see her again, certainly in this lifetime. All the ideas that we’d carry on together, that our life would continue—I knew all that had ended. All my story was coming to an end. She was going on her journey; I was going on mine. They were separate journeys. They weren’t the same journey anymore. And so there came the moment, Rick, when I let go. For me, I can’t describe it. It was an amazing experience. This water lifted up.

Suddenly it was three meters high, and automatically I stepped into it. I stayed there and experienced this unconditional love. That changed my life more powerfully than spiritual enlightenment. I felt love for me. I knew—I had the knowing of who I am. If you read my other books, you’ll realize there’s a lot more to this story that I’m not saying. I went through an incredible process. That changed me more than anything. Up until then, I had one view of enlightenment. After that, there was spiritual enlightenment with unconditional love. It was a much, much bigger picture, an enormously bigger picture. Now, I’m not making any statements about how many other people have found that. I’m simply saying that it changed my whole relationship with enlightenment. It changed. It became more personal and more universal, simultaneously, because I am the universe. I am the universe.

So how could it be less? People say, “I am the universe,” but they have no personal experience of it. It’s one without the other. If you’re the universe, then you’re something. Anyway.

Rick: Yeah, no, that’s good. I like that. Actually, there are some traditional scriptures. Sometimes it’s fun to refer to traditional scriptures, just because if people have been saying the same thing for thousands of years and some guy comes along and says it now, it lends a little bit of extra credence or credibility to it. It’s like there’s been this map, and others have followed the map and found the same things in the territory as we’re now finding.

Michael: “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven.”

Rick: “And all else will be added unto thee.”

Michael: And you know what? When this all began, that was my running buddy: “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven.” I looked at everybody, including our local vicar, and I talked with them. I realized that I and every one of these people were seeking first all that could be added unto me.

Rick: Without having to seek first. Yeah, right.

Michael: And what he said, if it was translated right, was, “Seek ye first thee, the kingdom of heaven,” which to me was a state of consciousness. So I was crazy. I decided to do that, and I did it. I was broke. I had no money. I lived on the verge of—forget fear, I was way past that. I had used all my fear up by the time I was 49. My whole quota was gone. I did that. I lived that, and it’s true. If you seek that first, to the exclusion of everything else, you find the kingdom of heaven, because the kingdom of heaven is within. It’s a state of consciousness. There’s nothing out there. There’s nothing up in the sky. There’s no heaven out there. It’s a state of consciousness. But I never met anybody else who didn’t think I was mad. They all said, “You’re crazy. You’ve got to make an income.” I said, “Yeah, I should do it,” but I never did until, you know.

But then when this thing happened, strange things happened. My mother died, and suddenly money that had been tied up for 15 years became available. Suddenly I’ve got a home. When I awakened first, when I became enlightened, it changed my life. The second one, unconditional love, was an even bigger change. And now I sort of look back. You see, Rick, I’ve got a plan. I’m planning to maybe book out Carnegie Hall in New York to give a talk when I’m 100. Let me just say this for the interest of it. All mammals, according to science, live seven times longer than it takes to develop their physical body. Mayflies don’t take long. Rats don’t take long, and so their lives are short. But us? It takes us 20 years to develop our physical body, and then 26 years to have our brain fully developed, if it ever is. So that’s 184 years—seven times 26. There aren’t many around, are there?

And let’s just say the physical body should last 140 years. There aren’t many around. Well, I happen to believe that we should, in fact, live that long, that biologically we’re geared for it. But what we do is criticize and attack ourselves mentally. Most people are attacking themselves all day, which is a mental and emotional attack. That’s become subconscious. So this subconscious thing is happening to most people all day, every day. I don’t do that. I plan each day to focus and be conscious, and I have little ways to help me be conscious. I teach how to do this in my intensives: to be conscious. You cannot help but grow just by being conscious. You grow. Simple as that. I’d like you to take on what I said so you can live to be 140, so I can play with big boys instead of little kids in their 90s.

Rick: I’ll come to your Carnegie Hall thing. I should be about 90 by that time or something. Actually, no, I’ll be about 86. I’m 66 now.

Michael: Really? I’m 79.

Rick: I know. So I wanted to ask you: if you define enlightenment as being first grade, in a sense—you referred to it using the school metaphor—and you thought maybe by now, after another 50, 60, or 70 years, you’re up to about the fourth grade, how would you imagine that somebody who has graduated high school, graduated college, or has a PhD, so to speak, using this metaphor, would be functioning compared to somebody in the first or fourth grade?

Michael: Do you know what you’re saying? Oh, I see. Yeah, I don’t make comparisons.

Rick: Where do you see this going? What is the potential for development of consciousness?

Michael: The potential of a human being is stunning. You see, in my metaphysical wanderings, I meet beings of intelligence very far beyond myself. And I see—I mean, we’re not the only humans around on this planet. We were out in the galaxy on other planets before this Earth was created, before this Earth was formed. So I mix with a lot of what I would call intelligence. I mix with a lot of higher consciousness. If you read my books, you’ll read that I write a hell of a lot more than just what I’m doing in this moment, looking at an Eraatanash, for instance. You probably got up to the Eraatanash.

Rick: I read that, yeah. It was a great big, huge, giant being with a huge eye, and it was full of all these little, tiny beings.

Michael: They’re Eraata, they’re Eraata. Now, you know, people can say bullshit, but when you get out into the vastness of space, when you realize that there is no space, there is no time, and there is no distance, when you realize that we’re in the prison of physicality, and you come out of that prison, and you move into a fifth-dimensional reality—which you’re still in, but it’s much more liberated—and then a seventh-dimensional reality, by the sixth dimension, our spiritual, emotional, and mental bodies have become one. There’s no longer any separation between them. Language as we speak it is gone. The emotions we have have a language that is so far beyond our intellectual language, it’s ridiculous. I know that language, and I can use it to communicate when I’m with other beings, but when I come back to this, I’ve been reduced to being a physical person, and it feels like a reduction.

I’m used to it today, but, you know, when I travel on an airplane, from my point of view, I look at people doing things that are going to bring them grief, or in airports, and it brings them grief, and I look at them and think, “So why did you do it?” I mean, an idiot could see that through, but then I realize it wasn’t so long ago that I was that idiot. I was doing exactly what they’re doing. You know, if you criticize yourself—and most people do it all day—you’re going to get sick. Then you turn around and try to get healthy, but all the time you’re criticizing yourself.

When you’ve decided that you are absolutely perfect, that God loves you, that you love yourself, and you live from that point of view, with an enormous sense of humor, realizing that there was no point in coming to this planet if you didn’t have a sense of humor, when you do that, then—I don’t know—I just see life as beautiful. I see it as perfect. Let me give you my viewpoint. Seven-plus billion people, most of them, think it’s a shitty world. I don’t see that. The world is perfect. In every moment of your life, you are creating the direction and the content of every moment of your life. Think about that sometimes. That means you’re creating your own reality. You know, that puts that in a whole other bracket. This has been going on, let’s just say conservatively, for a thousand lifetimes.

So what’s happening in this lifetime is what we’ve been creating in a thousand lifetimes, which has got a tremendous momentum behind it. So it doesn’t just stop when we stop. It doesn’t just stop. And so when I look at it, every human being is in the classroom they’ve created. Now, some of us have created grim classrooms, terrible classrooms, but we created that. We’re immortal beings. We live for eternity. We have forever, which is a very long time. And in this classroom, everybody’s in their perfect position. Now, if they don’t like that position, they think, “We’ve got to have money to get me out.” That’s part of the illusion. If you don’t like the position, then all you’ve got to do is change your relationship with yourself, and your whole life changes. All you’ve got to do is decide, “Hey, I’m okay. I’m not the person my thoughts keep describing.

I am okay.” Begin with that, and you can climb out of it.

Rick: Yeah, easier said than done for some people. I mean, if you’re in Syria getting gassed by Assad and…

Michael: I’ve been there. I’ve been there. I’ve done all that. I mean, I created all my back injury, all my pain, all my suffering. I did it very well.

Rick: That’s true, you’ve been through a lot. And there are people who have it even worse in this life. I mean, there are kids sold into prostitution and slavery in Bombay, and all kinds of really horrendous situations. And I just want to avoid the attitude—which I don’t think you have—that, “Oh, well, they created their own karma, their own situation.” And that may or may not be true on some level, but some people follow from that to think that they should just live it out. Whereas, you know, the guy I’m going to interview Monday night, Andrew Harvey, is just passionate about spiritual activism—that we shouldn’t use the philosophical understanding that people create their own situation to absolve us from doing our darndest to help them out of it. If it’s, you know…

Michael: This is why I travel every year. I spend five months traveling the world, and that’s not always the most comfortable thing I could do. That’s why I do it, because, yes, people get themselves in this situation, but then I got myself in that situation. And it took me a long time to get out of it. If I can help people out in five days, nothing gives me greater pleasure. So I absolutely agree with spiritual activism, although I’d never heard that. I bet he’s American.

Rick: He’s British. He’s British.

Michael: Oh, well, it’s a good word anyway. I’m on his side. I agree with that.

Rick: So do you see, I mean, considering where you have traveled, so to speak—not on this earth, but all the various realms and dimensions and whatnot that you are familiar with and have traveled to—do you kind of regard the Earth as a… I think you might have actually said this earlier, that it’s sort of a kindergarten planet, that there’s only so much, you can only progress so far on this Earth, and then there might be other places where it might be more appropriate for you to be?

Michael: Do we want to make this more complicated?

Rick: I don’t know. Do we? Go ahead.

Michael: Okay, we’re on a three-dimensional reality. If you get a book with 300 pages, each page is three-dimensional. There are over 300 three-dimensional realities in our three-dimensional reality. We’re on one page. There’s a lot of other pages, but the good news is you don’t have to do all those pages. So what I’m trying to say here is that life is so much more vast, I realize, than anything I can comprehend. Now, I’m in a peculiar position. We all have our intellect, and an intellect can take so much. One of the things I did years ago when I was on my spiritual path—and that probably is why I am who I am today—I began to realize, I’m trying to take, let’s say, to create a metaphor, the contents of a thousand-gallon water tank, and I’m a one-pint—no, let’s say one-gallon—container. How do I put a thousand gallons into one? I realized I couldn’t do that, and I tried really hard.

Rick: You have to expand the container, I guess.

Michael: No. Then I realized, supposing I put the one gallon in the thousand, what would happen? That’s what I did, and it really took my whole world apart, but that’s, in essence, what I did. And so, when I travel the multiverse—when I travel a multiverse—intellectually, there’s not much I can bring back, but in consciousness I am aware of growing. I’m aware of things that I can’t even have a concept of, because we’re not an intellectual being. We are beings of conscious intelligence. We’ve become beings of subconscious intellect, but that’s not what we are. We’re beings of conscious intelligence. There is no limit to intelligence. You know, forget the IQ test; intelligence just keeps rising. Einstein was right: you can use intelligence. I didn’t even find the barrel with it in until I was in my forties.

Then I found this barrel, and it said on it “intelligence,” so I ripped the top off, but it was full of intelligence. I’ve been taking it out and using it ever since, but it takes me where my intellect cannot go, and there I’m stopped, but I’m still growing in consciousness. When I do an intensive, that consciousness moves through me. Now, my words are usually very simple, but they tell me the power behind them is pretty amazing. That’s the consciousness. People say, “Why don’t you teach us, and we’ll teach what you do?” And my answer to that is very simple: if you have my consciousness, you don’t need my words, and if you have my words and you don’t have my consciousness, then those words are just empty words. It’s the consciousness that speaks the words. The words are the vehicle. It’s the propellant that makes the words have energy that impacts the people.

And so I find enormous growth in growing, but I can’t just take it and write it down and say, “Here you are, I can pass it all on.” In fact, in the book I’m writing right now, I put this dilemma: is there going to be a time when I can actually do this? Pan says yes, there is. There will come a time when I can actually share to a deeper level, but as yet, my intellect doesn’t touch it. Now, probably Bruce Cathie or Bruce Lipton could explain it far better than me because he’s got quantum physics to take him there. I’d like to talk to that guy sometime, but because he’s got quantum physics, I have experienced the torus—you know, T-O-R-U-S. I was experiencing it for ten years until one day I learned what it was in the movie Pi , and I nearly fell over and cried. I mean, it was such an impact on me. I thought, “Oh my God, I’ve been with these. I see them in the thousands.

I mean, they’re in every cell as well as every body.” And so what these quantum physicists describe, I often see and connect with, but I can’t bring that back and write about it or even talk about it. So I write as much as I can, but I talk about what is life, what are you? This is what, to me, it’s about. What’s the point of talking about the outer limits of the garden if the person’s having trouble making a cup of tea in the kitchen? That’s where I focus now. Let’s get the kettle boiling.

Rick: Yeah, and you said that very early in the interview too. Essentially, you said, speak to the level of consciousness of the listener. You want to present something that’s actually useful and relevant to the person where they’re at, and not just sort of entertain them with stuff that’s far beyond the realm of their…

Michael: Now, in the earlier days, I did do a bit of that. I did do a bit of the cosmic entertaining, and then I realized this isn’t what it’s about. This isn’t what it’s about. But ever since the experience of unconditional love—which I still experience for myself, I experience it for you, I experience it for everybody—I don’t have to know them, because we’re all one energy. I can’t experience it for me without experiencing it for you. Even if you got insulting, I would still love you unconditionally, even if I wasn’t so enchanted with your personality.

Rick: Well, in defense of the kind of—however you just described it—the sort of cosmic entertainment or something, I realize that you wouldn’t want to make that the predominant focus of your teaching, because it would just get people all caught up in eye candy, imaginary stuff. But I think it is useful in that it gives people a kind of broader vision of how grand and vast and marvelous the universe actually is. I mean, you have to bring it back down to what’s practical for you, but some people actually have a fairly limited appreciation of how marvelous the creation is, and it’s nice to have a glimpse into the incredible intelligence, diversity, richness, and proliferation of life in all dimensions and throughout all…

Michael: In fact, Rick, that’s the most common thing that people email me, Facebook me, and write to me about: “Your books just stretch my world out.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say.

Michael: Exactly. They love having their world stretched out, and I love doing it.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s the main thing I got from your book. As I was reading it, I was thinking, “God, this is just so… I wouldn’t want to focus exclusively on this stuff, but it’s really nice to dive into it every now and then, and just get a feeling for how many…” Well, what does it say in the Bible? “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” How many different realities and dimensions and worlds and beings and all that stuff there are out there?

Michael: When you go into something like the black hole, and everything that you’ve learned says this is not possible, and yet you’re going into it and finding a staggering intelligence that defines how it works, it tells you what it does. It takes stagnation from one galaxy or solar system and relocates it into another one where it’s no longer stagnant. It does swallow, literally, solar systems that have become stagnant. But when you begin to… what it did for me and what it showed me is that you can’t go into an experience like that and come out the same. You just can’t come out the same. There’s just no way. You can’t go back to the person you were. Now I’ve been to a realm of dragons. I’m being provocative, and I’ve seen dragons of vastly greater intelligence than humans. You sort of think, “Okay, four legs, not so smart; two legs, very smart.” I had to really struggle with that.

These dragon things and their way of reproducing—I mean, it’s like our way. Okay, we enjoy our way of reproducing, but it’s archaic. They do it energetically. They have a purely energetic reproduction where one body just breaks down and another soul comes in, takes the energy of that body, recreates about a quarter-sized one for itself, and then starts a whole growing process. The way they live—I came out of that. I was aware that to go into the experience I had to grow to get in, and I was aware of a process. Then, to come out, I came out with a clarity and a certainty of proportions that I didn’t know existed. We would say today, “Oh, well, if you’re like that, that’s arrogant.” To me, I’ve become very careful with words like that. To have great clarity is wonderful, but that doesn’t mean I look around and realize everybody should have this.

Now, when I was 35, I put myself on a spiritual path. At that age, I wasn’t sure whether spirituality was in a bottle or outside of a bottle. From that point, I never looked back. Everything, first and foremost, was, “I’m here to grow.” My belief was that I grew through pain and suffering. So, like you said, I put myself… Read my book, Getting There . I’ve done pain and suffering, but today I don’t do pain and suffering. Today I talk to my body. I love my body. God, it’s a beautiful body. It hasn’t got much hair on its head—grass doesn’t grow on busy roads—so I can deal with that. I love my body, and I talk to it, and I love life. I’m just full of appreciation for things. Those are things anybody can learn.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. A question just came in from someone who calls him or herself EE, and the question is very simple: “What is the purpose of our existence, and why does suffering exist?”

Michael: That’s probably an unanswerable question, and I’m not going to just try to be clever. We exist—she exists—because she is God, and God is not a static state. God is growing in consciousness. So if you were to say that God created creation in which God could grow, as every living organism that there ever was, then that’s the purpose. Why is there suffering? We created that. I’ve done it, been there, and I no longer do it. So I can tell you on very good authority: we create suffering. If, in your thoughts, you do not think the truth is—and I’m speaking to EE—the truth is that you are a magnificent, metaphysical, multidimensional, immortal being of love and light. Not many people focus on that in a day. If you were to focus on being who you are in a day, suffering comes to an end. But we don’t live consciously; we live subconsciously.

Subconscious means you’re living a whole program of a thousand lifetimes of pain and suffering. It’s all there in your subconscious: every type of mental and emotional aberration and trauma you can have. It’s all in the subconscious. This is where your pain and suffering is. It is never in the moment. There has absolutely never been a moment filled with pain and suffering. We can take it in and hold on to it, but in that moment we could let go of it. The person on the cusp of choosing suicide is also on the cusp of choosing life. At that moment, they could choose life. They choose death, they come back, and do it again, of course.

Rick: There’s something you said about your own enlightenment that I found puzzling, and maybe you can explain it a little bit. You said that it almost sounded like you became a walk-in. You said that the Michael soul walked out and Mixael—however you pronounce it—the Mixael soul walked in. I’ve never really thought of enlightenment that way, that you’re actually replacing souls or something.

Michael: Enlightenment is not that way.

Rick: Oh.

Michael: Now, I’m telling my story there. This is not other people’s story. Okay, I wasn’t going to go into this.

Rick: I keep dragging you into all kinds of things.

Michael: You’ve opened up a can of worms now. Okay, you’re a soul; I’m a soul. The normal way for a soul to come in is to come into a developing fetus around three to five months, and then come in and develop with that personality. Sometimes a soul that is highly enlightened can bypass that. Generally, they are very spiritually advanced. Michael spent his last incarnation in a monastery. Before he died of consumption, or TB, he would spend weeks in meditation and contemplation. In fact, he spent half a lifetime in it. But he saw that he had the potential or the probability to become enlightened in this incarnation. Now, he didn’t want to incarnate. He incarnated because my late wife came first, so I decided I would come then. And so I did that lifetime. If I did find enlightenment, I was going out of there straight away.

So, in my soul family was another person, another soul, more enlightened—much more enlightened—on the fifth-dimensional reality, but that soul couldn’t stay there because the fifth-dimensional reality has balanced emotions, and I hadn’t balanced my emotions. So I had the spirituality to be there, but not the emotionality. Believe me, this is the powerhouse. And so I knew that I had to incarnate here again to get my emotions sorted out. Well, when Michael showed me his probability—and he showed it to me before we came onto this planet—the probability was there quite strongly. He said, “I’m off.” I said, “Well, can I have your body?” And so we made an agreement that he would leave. If he left his body, I could have it. We should have written a bit more small print, like how the body would be—like, in a good position, healthy.

Anyway, he became enlightened, and he did become enlightened, and he did heal his own body, and he left straight away. There’s another story in that. Then I walked in. But Michael was such a strong character. His personality was so strong. I’m in a body, and every cell in this body is stamped with his personality. I came in with an emotional issue, so emotionally I wasn’t strong enough to deal with it instantly. And so I went into denial. In and out, I only came out of denial about twice in 20 years. Now, I’ll be honest: when I stepped into unconditional love and let go of Trini, in that moment I was aware of who I am, Mixael, and I decided I would own it from that moment on. I would never pretend. So then, in my book, I had to be honest and write that, which I never really wanted to share with anybody.

But today, when people say “you,” I mean, do they mean Michael or do they mean Mixael? Now I’ve been Mixael for over—since I was 50, nearly 30 years—but I haven’t owned it. I’ve only owned it for about the last seven or eight years. Strange story, but I’ve met other people. I’m a walk-in, and I know they were. One woman said, “Do you think I’m a walk-in?” God, she was so freaky. She was not only a walk-in, she didn’t even come from a carbon-based life form. She came from a silicon-based life form, and although she was in a carbon-based body, she was struggling. She was struggling, and it helped her to meet somebody to say, “Okay, you can. It took me 20 years.” I’ve met people who’ve done this in, like, a few hours. I’m not proud of that.

Rick: Everything happens in its own time. So, picking up on a few notes—incidentally, as I said to you the other day when we spoke, you cover a vast amount of material in all your books, and probably your seminars and everything, and there’s a lot about you I don’t know. So if there’s something you feel like talking about that I’m not thinking to bring up, just throw it in there and we’ll talk about it. But here’s one thing that… I took some notes as I was reading your book of things that just sort of jumped out at me as being kind of interesting. Here’s one where you said, “Aspects of us live in different realities and dimensions simultaneously.” So you and I might be in this dimension, carrying on as Rick in Iowa and Michael in Australia, and yet there could be other aspects of us in other dimensions doing something entirely different, if I understood what you were saying correctly.

Michael: Okay, everything is energy. A soul is energy. When a soul has… The thing that ages or keeps a soul young is experience. In other words, if you did ten lifetimes fully spiritually aware and focused in consciousness, you would grow far more than if you did a thousand without ever thinking of spirituality. You would grow far more in the ten lifetimes. So, generally speaking, soul maturity has to do with experience. Now, we are souls. A soul is energy. At a certain point in its development, a soul can split itself into a hundred or more. So that means a soul can put aspects of itself in many parallel realities at the same time.

Rick: Almost like seeds or something. You get a pine tree, and it creates a pine cone, and there are a lot of seeds in that, and they go all over and create more pine trees.

Michael: But you can have many of you through many of the three dimensions. But you see, I have a body waiting for me in a fifth-dimensional reality. Now, this body is in what you might call a reality box, if you like. In other words, it’s held between heartbeats.

Rick: Suspended animation kind of thing?

Michael: Suspended animation. It could be there a million years and it still ages the time between heartbeats. And so a human being is—we look on ourselves in terms of the personality we are and other personalities. That is like an ant regarding us and trying to understand us, as for us to use our personality to try to understand us. And so, in my metaphysical travels, I experience us in futures. I experience humans one day—what we will be. I experience, if I was to say that those future humans came back so that we could experience our future and came back in a time before archaeology says we exist, people would say I’m crazy. Happily, that did happen, but that’s beside the point. So life is of a vastness and multilayered to a vastness that our brain just doesn’t comprehend. What we tend to do is make the simplicity of vastness—we tend to complicate it and make it small. That doesn’t work.

And so when I say that I teach what works, I have a way of looking at life. I do a lot of counseling. People phone me up and they’ve got problems. I have a way of looking at it and just seeing straight to, well, if you did this. It’s like—what do they call it? Parallel thinking? I mean, all thinking should be in the moment. But people, if they’ve got a problem—I mean, Einstein says it beautifully: humanity today has a problem. The consciousness that creates a problem is not the consciousness that can fix it. Today humanity is sick. Like, every three and a half seconds, a new cancer; every seven seconds, new dementia; every one and a half seconds, a new heart attack. I mean, God, how do we stay alive? But the point is that sickness is a state of consciousness that believes it has all the answers.

It looks at life and says, “I know what it is.” I look at life and I realize I have no idea what it is. To me, life is a mystery, and I never want to solve it, but I want to dive into it forever. I want to keep going into the mystery forever and ever and ever and ever. Answers don’t mean anything to me. I like to inquire and to keep going. The left brain always wants answers. Of course, I get so many left-brained people because the world today is about 85 percent left-brain dominant. And that’s not bad, but the future is going to have to be whole-brain. Left-brain dominance has its own future, but that’s not my future. And so we’re in a position today that we’ve never been in before. We have two futures in front of us. One that you could say is ever-changing newness, and one is more of the same oldness. One is more fear-based, one is more love-based. Now, there’s no right or wrong.

There’s no punishment—should or shouldn’t. There is: We create in every moment of our life. We create the direction and the content of every moment of our life. The last hundred thousand years of choosing are now at the point where they’re beginning to manifest where we go. Now, choosing has manifested a very disturbed and sick humanity. We’ve created that. We’ve created all of it.

Rick: I think I got the sense from your book that you feel that—and it seems obvious to me—that there’s a greater and greater polarity taking place on the Earth between people who are choosing one direction or choosing the other direction. Where do you see that leading, or how do you see that resolving, if it will?

Michael: Well, the choice is not mental; it’s in living. And again, I bring you back: it’s your relationship with yourself. You don’t need to spiritually know anything. I know way too much. I sometimes wish I knew a fraction of what I know. What I know is growing. You know, one day I think, “What am I going to do with all this?” Because I can’t—anyway… Consciousness is about growth, not what we know spiritually. And so we can have any person—atheist or whatever. What’s in our heart, our heart, our relationship with ourselves, the quiet moments of our thoughts—they’re the ones that determine where we’re going. I find in my thinking now, I’m never criticizing other people. I’ve got a son who doesn’t speak to me. I love him, and every time I think of him, I think of him with love. He doesn’t have to have me in his life.

If he wants me out of it, if that works for him, he’s got a perfect right to that. But that doesn’t mean I have to have any reaction. It means that I can love him completely. That is a whole different relationship with life. I meet people who do unpleasant things to us and try to cheat us, but then I look at me and I think, so what’s that showing me and myself? And I just smile. And if they cheated me, okay, they needed that more than I did, and I just continue loving and moving on.

Rick: Turn the other cheek, so to speak.

Michael: My life is no longer “react, jump, react, jump,” a series of reactions that moves it along. My life is like a gentle moving. God, life is so beautiful. We create it, everybody. This is what I love to do. Give me five days, nine in the morning till six at night, and I spend that time showing people how to recreate their life, how to have a life that is joyful and uplifting. I get people to go into remission with sicknesses simply because they go for a shift in consciousness. I shouldn’t have said that.

Rick: No, that’s great. That’s a good thing to have said. Here’s a question. Somebody—go ahead, I’m sorry. A question came in from Lynn, someone named Lynn in Idaho. She said—you remember earlier you used the word “Doubtsville.” She said, how did you get out of Doubtsville and find your direction after enlightenment?

Michael: There is a time—one of the things I talk a lot about, again, is trust. We do not trust. Humanity has no trust. We have insurance; we don’t have trust. We traded them a long time ago. I’ve learned to trust. So what is trust? Is there anybody who doesn’t know what it is? Of course there isn’t. Everybody intellectually knows what trust is. Rick, this is one of the dangers that we live in. If we intellectually know something, then we automatically—the intellect says, “So I know what that is.” So if we understand, it never occurs to us we could be wrong. “I understand. I always say, therefore I’m right.” That’s breathtaking arrogance. We never say, “I understand. Of course I could be wrong.” That doesn’t go with understanding. Okay, so when you—what was—sorry, what was your question?

Rick: Lynn’s question was, you mentioned the word “Doubtsville.” I guess you went through a long period where you had a lot of doubt. How did you get out of that?

Michael: Okay, so trust is something you’ll find that you have to create. Nobody has trust unless they create it. There’s a real paradox to this I won’t follow. But we have to create our lives. We’ve got to create everything. And we did a lot before we even got here, but we’re still learning creation. Every day is a lesson in creation. That’s all we’re doing—learning creation. So one of those things is learning to create trust. Who do you trust? You. What do you trust? That I am, in fact, a magnificent, metaphysical, multidimensional, immortal being of love and light. If you trust that and you live that trust, your life changes. It just changes. There’s no mystery to it. It changes. This is why—this is how you get out of doubt. You’ve got to begin where your focus is. Your energy flows. When your energy is focused and flowing, that means you’re flowing toward what you’re focusing on.

But also, now, if you’re focusing on aggression, you’re attracting aggression to you, and aggression is going out from you. Like attracts like. Now, I’m only just touching the edges of this. We could really get into it. If you give me another four hours, we could really get into it. At the moment, I’m still trying to put a lot into a little space, skipping over things. So creating trust is a very difficult thing to do, because you’ve got to trust you, and it has to be unconditional. There could be no such thing as conditional trust. So when you start to trust yourself, immediately you’ll find, well, ten times a day I’ve betrayed my trust in myself. It’s okay. That’s okay, as long as you keep on trusting yourself. Gradually, consciousness will realize, “Okay, something different has happened. This guy is trusting himself, and he’s not stopping.

No matter how many times he fails, he or she is continuing.” Then consciousness is really attracted by that, and very gradually trust grows. I trust myself totally. If I trust myself, can I have fear? Can I have anxiety? Can I have worry? How can I have them and trust? If you’re trusting yourself 100 percent, you don’t have those, or doubt. But you’ve got to create it, and it’s not—everybody today wants an overnight fix. It doesn’t happen. It’s something that grows. One day the world will discover me and they’ll say, “Oh, look, the spiritual teacher—he’s just appeared.” Yeah, only for the last 30 years they’ve been walking toward appearing.

Rick: Okay, I’m going to shift gears and ask you a completely different kind of question. You were a farmer for many years, and you still are, and you have a beautiful garden that you love to tend. There was a whole section in your book where you’re talking about cooperation with nature and devas, and you described this situation in which there was a healthy forest on the astral level, even though the physical forest on the earthly level was totally devastated. You ended this whole thing talking about genetically modified crops, and how these lower astral entities are somehow involved in genetically modified agriculture. So maybe you could riff a little bit on that whole thing about being in tune with nature and the subtler dimensions of being in tune with nature, both in terms of agriculture and forests and all of that stuff.

Michael: Okay, so in a way you could tie this also in with a hierarchy, because there’s a higher and there’s lower. And the same with everything is energy. There are higher energies and lower energies, and lower energies in the astral world are pretty grim. An alcoholic does see monsters. They do see pink elephants. They actually see them. They’re in that; they are in their reality. Now, we would say, “Rubbish, you’re just having a DT,” but no, it’s not. In their reality, they’ve now moved from the reality of somebody talking to them into a completely lower astral level of reality, where those things exist. Now, in the fifth dimension, there are a lot of genetically modified crops, but that’s all done with the cooperation of nature. And when you see a tree that is illuminated at night by fluorescence that originally came from the ocean, it’s an incredible sight.

And when you realize that the tree and the fluorescence are both grown in consciousness to go through this process—but we don’t do that. We force it on, and we do it for more money. And so the crops are of a lower energy, much, much lower energy. Therefore, they attract—and they attract very powerfully—low-energy astral creatures. And when you see these slug-like things feeding on the astral level, because everything has a metaphysical—the metaphysical always precedes the physical. You and I are looking at each other, the physical image, but we’re also two metaphysical beings looking at each other, but we don’t see the metaphysical. And so these slug-like creatures and other things—some of them just scream—and they feed off this lower energy of the physical plants that have been genetically altered.

So now that energy is in the plant, and we’re heading in a really dangerous direction with GM, and it’s spreading rapidly in America.

Rick: Oh, it is, yeah.

Michael: It’s very, very dangerous, and it’ll come to a collapse, and when it comes to collapse, agricultural collapse with it. And I can foresee that we’ve got some very nasty times ahead of us. Nobody’s going to like it at all, but we’re creating it because we just buy it. We just buy the stuff.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a big battle here in the United States about it.

✨ Consciousness and the resting point of awareness

Michael: So, equally, there are higher levels. The higher levels in the nature kingdom are the nature spirits and the devas, and the over-lighting devas, shall we say, of a forest. You’re getting into some much higher levels, but it’s like we know of power points on the Earth. Do you ever get anybody writing about power drains? I found that there’s always a counterpart. There are drains that are sucking energy out of the Earth, as power points are bringing it in. Luckily, most of the energy sinks are taking out negative energy, because if they didn’t, we would be overwhelmed with our own negativity. In a way, the planet and the whole metaphysical structure of the planet are taking care of us. I guess life changes remarkably when you stop being a physical person and start being a spiritual being. You do that consciously, and you keep that consciousness with you, and life changes incredibly.

You look at things and, instead of reacting, you look at them and think, “Yeah,” and you do and say something entirely different. You just change your future in that moment.

Rick: You just alluded to where humanity might end up as a result of genetically modified crops. Do you have any general, overall sense? There are a lot of people, for instance, who feel that there are so many structures in society, in the economy, and in so many other things, in various industries, that have no place in an enlightened world. If we’re actually going to somehow transition to an enlightened world, a lot of things are just going to have to completely collapse, and then something better will have to be built from the ashes of that. Do you see some cataclysmic or catastrophic transition phase like that, or do you think it might not be quite so dramatic?

Michael: I think the metaphysical always precedes the physical, and the metaphysical is already going through that. I suspect the physical will catch up. We won’t like that at all, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s all still a probability. Everything in our immediate future is only a probability pattern. Enough people like me, and many of the people you talk with who are traveling the world, are helping to change consciousness. There are many wonderful people who send inspiring things on Facebook, and through the work people like you do, which increasingly puts what we’re about in front of more and more people. That changes the whole probability pattern. But to go back to what I said, the world we’re on is an old world. A new world is already here, but what’s difficult is that it’s a higher frequency and occupies exactly the same space.

We can come to an X-ray machine to look at bones that we look at and can’t see, and say, “Okay, well, they’re there.” The machine can see them. The same thing is going on in other ways. There are many, many levels of reality, and we have a humanity that will stay polarized toward the old. They will never see anything of the new world. They will see a rapidly deteriorating world, and they’ll go with it. But other people will select themselves. I would like to think it might be as high as 15 percent. People reckon three to five percent will do it, but I like to think 15 percent might be up there. They will see a world of more love and more compassion. They will see examples of people who care, and flash mobs that are very uplifting. They’ll see those, and they’ll see the people who walk through it, not looking at them and saying, “These idiots.

What do they think they’re doing?” These two groups are emerging now, but we’ve created ourselves over the last hundred thousand lifetimes. We have to go in the direction we created. Now there are going to be at least the next 20 or 25 years when people can jump off the wall and move toward the polarity that will lift them. But I still think they will be the minority of people. That is happening right now. I do see a beautiful world. Now, is there a world of horror? Yes, there is. But my looking at it and focusing on it doesn’t help it at all. There are plenty of people who do that and maybe have the skills to help it. I have the skills to show people that there is life and there is an illusion, and they both occupy the same space. Illusion overwhelms you because we’re saturated in it. But I’ll show you how to get through that and see life in a way that you can live it.

When you live that life, you’re affecting the energy of every human being. I’m aware that every time I have a group of people whose whole frequency is lifted—we’ve measured that, so we know it does—whose whole frequency is lifted, I know that’s just another drop in the ocean, but it’s another lifting of the frequency of all humanity. This is why Andrew Harvey does what he does, and I do what I do, and all of us—and you—do what we do, because in our own way we’re all putting in our little, tiny bit to lift that consciousness. But that’s not going to happen for all people. People will see the increasing breakdown, terrorism will grow, but so will lovism and careism.

Rick: And it actually is. I often get emails and see articles about some really good stuff that’s happening in the world that doesn’t make the nightly news. There are some marvelous technologies emerging, certain cures for various diseases being found, and all kinds of good stuff. Solar power is proliferating in India and other places, so a lot of this stuff just doesn’t make the headlines because it’s not as flashy as the latest bombing or the latest mass murder.

Michael: We’re caught up in the position where change—like in the Shinto religion in Japan—is everywhere. They have temples and shrines everywhere. Every 20 years, they pull them down, rebuild them on the building land next to them, and rebuild the whole thing with new materials. Why? Because in the Shinto religion, nothing in nature is permanent. So change is part of life, and that’s their religion.

Rick: Kind of like the Tibetan sand paintings.

Michael: Exactly. And so it is with us. Everything is changing right now. Change is breaking down human inertia. Humanity has become inert; we’re not moving, we’re not growing in consciousness. It’s very simple. If we’re a conscious species, we’re designed to grow in consciousness by using intelligent consciousness. Do you know you cannot even use intelligence subconsciously? How about that? How many people realize that? Think about it sometime. You can’t do that. Intelligence operates in the moment. I always call it conscious intelligence. Change and inertia have now collided. There will be people who are terrified and will cling to inertia, and there are people who say, “Okay, I’ve ridden that one, man. I’m on this new one.” They’ll hop onto a new one and go for a new ride. They don’t spiritually need to know a thing.

All they need to have inside themselves is love and a good relationship with themselves. That’s all they need. It’s nothing to do with spiritual truth. It’s about our relationship with ourselves, and that means everybody can be in it. It means you don’t have to go out there and start reading Michael Roads and everybody else because you’ve got to learn this. All you’ve got to do in this moment is think, “Hey, I can choose trust, I can choose love, I can choose appreciation. How about I give them a day instead of judgment, criticism, and aggression?” See what happens.

Rick: That’s great, Michael. That might be a good note to end on. You couldn’t have said it better. Is there any little thought, anything you want to throw in before we wrap it up that we haven’t covered?

Michael: One of the things I have said is that where you focus is where your energy is flowing. Your focus is all your thoughts and your emotions, and most people’s thoughts and emotions are in complete confusion, going every which way all at the same time. So their life is completely confused and directionless. A few fixate on money, and that’s all they get in life: money, nothing else. A few have a broader view of it. So be aware: where you focus, energy flows. If you focus on the fact that you are a worthwhile and beautiful being, and that becomes your focus, you’ll find that life will honor that. If you honor life, life will honor you. If you honor yourself, you honor life. If you honor life, life will honor you. So honor yourself in all ways, whatever that means to you. Honor yourself, and life will honor you.

Rick: Beautiful. Nice point. Well, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. I would keep going, but I sort of feel like, for some reason, two hours is probably about right for one of these interviews. Otherwise, people say, “These are too long, Archer.” Pardon?

Michael: We can always do it again another year.

Rick: Yeah. Besides, you’re going to live to be 140, and I guess I might as well, too.

Michael: And you might as well, too.

Rick: Yeah, what the heck, as long as we’re having fun.

Michael: I don’t have an attachment to that. That’s my direction, because it’s possible. Now, whether I get there or not is completely immaterial. I don’t have an attachment, but we create our content in the direction. That’s the direction I’m looking at.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: To you, I would like to say thank you very much for having me on this. For two years, my lovely wife has wanted me to be the Buddha at the Gas Pump. You’ll have your process to get into you. Then, suddenly, just before Christmas, we got an email: “Okay, you’re on.” In January, you made her day, I’ll tell you.

Rick: That’s great.

Michael: She skipped and ran around the house, and I took it a bit more casually. But she was over the moon. I think people like you and Lilou Macé and people like that do an incredible service to other people because you attract a lot of people together and make it possible. I think that’s an amazing thing.

Rick: Well, I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s really fun.

Michael: That’s what I do.

Rick: Yeah. And I hope your wife is happy with the way this turned out. I have been, and I always feel like we’re just scratching the surface with somebody like you. There are so many more things we could talk about. But that’s all a two-hour interview can be, and if people resonate with what you’ve been saying, they can check out your books and check out your…

Michael: Go to my website.

Rick: Yeah, go to your intensives and all that sort of thing.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: Good. So let me make a few just general wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Michael Roads, and if you are new to this show, then I should say that there have been well over 300 other interviews conducted. You can find them all at batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—or if you just search for “Buddha at the Gas Pump,” it comes up number one in Google. If you go to the Past Interviews menu there, you’ll see them all categorized in four or five different ways. This also exists as an audio podcast. I was just talking to a friend today, and she said, “Well, I only watch about one in ten because I really don’t have time, and I don’t have good bandwidth on my phone, so I can’t just get them to download on the fly.” But that’s not the way a podcast works. You sign up for the podcast, and then it copies the things onto your computer. Then you plug your phone in or your iPad, and it copies them onto that.

You can just listen to them whenever you want—while you’re driving or whatever. So there’s a menu on batgap.com to sign up for the podcast. Check it out. There’s also a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, so you’ll see that link. There’s a donate button, which I didn’t mention in the beginning. This whole thing is offered freely to anybody who wants to watch it, but it’s supported by those who feel like supporting it, so we appreciate that. Michael mentioned that it took him two years to get on the show. We have hundreds of people inquiring, and it’s really hard to sort it out, but we’ve got a system going now. You’ll see a menu on the site under Future Interviews, I believe, where it says, “Suggest a Guest.” So if you have someone in mind you’d like to see on the show, you can fill out the form there.

So thanks for listening or watching, and thank you again, Michael. It’s really been fun. I feel like you’re an old friend, even though we’ve really just met.

Michael: I felt that the moment I first saw you.

Rick: Good. Yeah, well, probably we are. Probably we’ve both been kicking around for a long time.

Michael: Probably in another reality we’re cracking a beer right now.

Rick: Exactly, right. Who knows what they drink in those other realities? We’re cracking one of those.

Michael: I don’t drink much beer, I’ll tell you, so that wouldn’t work.

Rick: Yeah. So thanks a lot, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one.

Michael: Thank you, Rick, very much indeed. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you, everybody. I thought I was worth watching.

Rick: Good. Alrighty, bye-bye.