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. And tonight – it’s night here in the US – my guest is Michael Rhodes, who is in Australia. I’ve really enjoyed preparing for this interview, listened as usual to quite a few hours of his recordings, and read quite a bit of, I think it 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 sort of 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 time and space, and enter into deep communication with nature. Since his spiritual enlightenment at age experiences and explorations of alternative realities and dimensions. His main focus and teachings are based on unconditional love and emotional balance. traveling over five continents, presenting inspirational and life-changing five-day intensives in a clear, compelling, humorous – I’ll attest to that, he’s a funny guy – and no-nonsense format, enabling many of us to experience amazing shifts in consciousness. Michael, an ordinary mystic, weaves his wealth of life experiences with the most extraordinary insights, insights that offer pathways to our deep spiritual relationship with nature and with self. He has the consciousness and ability to empower people to gain understanding of the true nature of reality and assist them in their spiritual awakening to their divine potential. His website is michaelroads.com, R-O-A-D-S, and we’ll be talking more about that a little bit later. And the statement I want to make is just that a couple weeks ago I did an interview with Penny Kelly, and she was a pretty far-out lady by most people’s definition – all sorts of amazing experiences, talking to elves, traveling around the universe and so on. And I was interested to see, a little dismayed to see, how much negativity, how much flak that evoked from some people calling her a liar, calling her crazy, things like that. And I just wanted to harken back to an interview I did a couple years ago with Darryl Anka, who channels a being named Bashar, and we started that interview by talking about the distinction between skepticism and cynicism. Skepticism we defined, or he defined actually, as kind of an open mindedness, but taking things with a grain of salt and asking skeptical questions, but just having a healthy attitude, not being cock-sure of yourself that everything, basically. Whereas cynicism would be the tendency to reject things that don’t fit into your paradigm, into your worldview. Personally, I feel that the universe is vastly more mysterious and marvelous than we can even imagine, and that all kinds of amazing things might be true, or at least we should be open to the possibility of their being true, that far exceed our personal experience. So I kind of like to keep an open mind about things, and I give pretty much everybody the benefit of the doubt, because if they say they’re experiencing something, who am I to say they’re not? I have no way of proving they’re not. But I also take everybody with a bit of a grain of salt, because I’m not just going to believe everything everybody says, neither should anyone in my opinion, and I try to ask questions that will help me better understand their perspective and see if it seems to hold water for me. I must say that reading Michael’s book over the last week or so was a fascinating experience for me, it just sort of expanded my horizons of what might be possible. But as I was reading it I kept thinking, “Man, people are going to slam him for this, some of this stuff is so far out”. But I think personally it would be beneficial to anyone listening to keep an open mind and see what Michael has to say, and it might just expand your horizons as to what is possible for a human being to experience and what it might be possible for all of us to experience over time. So as I said, that’s a much longer introduction than I ordinarily give, I just wanted to lay that foundation. And now let’s introduce Michael again. I already read his bio and here’s Michael. So thanks Michael, I appreciate you doing this.
Michael: It’s okay, that’s okay, and I’m really happy to be here.
Rick: What did you think about what I just said?
Michael: Well I think it’s very fair what you just said, there’s a difference. You’re talking about people being skeptical, and I couldn’t imagine anybody not being skeptical about people like me. But on the other hand, I very rarely talk about it, and all my intensives, I seldom ever talk of my experiences. And I talk of unconditional love and emotional healing etc etc. And so if you’re going to try to cajole me into talking about things I normally don’t, then you might have an uphill struggle with that, because I’m actually rather sensitive to the public. I don’t feel there’s any point in slamming doors by making outrageous statements. In other words, I long ago learned that truth is always truth, but it isn’t truth out of another person’s timing. So in the simplest form, one person could say, “See my fantastic garden, that’s all done by organic gardening”. And the neighbor says, “Oh rubbish, organic gardening doesn’t work”. And he could look over the fence, see the evidence, but he’s still not ready to believe it. And when I was a farmer, I experienced exactly that. I had exactly that experience. In fact, the Agriculture Department in Tasmania all those years ago, I was blacklisted. I was considered a dissident and an agitator.
Rick: For doing organics?
Michael: For going organic and talking about it in public.
Rick: Yeah, well let me ask you this, if… I haven’t read any of your books other than the one you sent me, and that was full of all kinds of amazing things which I thought were fascinating. I intend to finish the book as time allows. But if you don’t talk about that stuff in your seminars, in your retreats, why do you dedicate a whole book to it, and possibly other books to it?
Michael: Because my way, I’ve never done anybody else’s seminars. I’ve walked my own path all my life. And years ago when I was a kid in school, I would always line up the teacher with the window, and this took a while to develop, a year or two to develop, but I was a very right-brain, highly imaginative, heart first child, in a very left-brain intellectual-type school, and I just didn’t know what they were talking about, it just didn’t make sense to me. So I would line the teacher up, and then stare at the teacher, and begin to imagine them shrinking, and I got so I could shrink them down to about the size of a glass of water. But the nice thing was when I shrunk them down, and that took months, but when I shrunk them down, I was shocked to realize other people could still see the teacher. Nobody else seemed to realize this has happened, but their voice went with them, so I couldn’t hear them either, and then it occurred to me, this was peaceful, nice peaceful room, I couldn’t see the teacher hardly, or him, but then I thought, well maybe I could go out through the window with my imagination, and so I gradually began to work on things in the playground, and I’d go out and see certain things that I’d have seen there, and they were like that, but then I took it to a woods like 20 miles away from where I lived, that I’d never been in, the beech woods, and I began to travel in there, while my body is sitting in the classroom. And to me I was daydreaming, it was as simple as that, no problem, daydreaming. And I would go into the beech woods, and when I eventually went there on my bicycle, I had noted certain things that I wanted to see, and they were there. And it really hit me, “I thought, my God, I’m actually, my body’s in one place, but I’m in another place”. And then I got to be a teenager, that of course kept me at the bottom of the class, because I really didn’t have much clue what was going on in class.
Rick: Yeah, what would happen if you were off in the beech woods, and the teacher would ask you a question, would you snap back?
Michael: I could snap back, yes. I could keep an eye on them, but then they had to get big fast, and that really happened, so I got called out as well, many times I got called out, until I’d hear this voice, “Roads, Roads”, and then I’d come back, because that was my cue. But then when I discovered girls, and that was the end of that, and then I got married very young. I was only 21, and in England, working on my father’s farm. And then he proceeded to die, and the next thing is we’re emigrating. But the point is, when I emigrated to Tasmania, Australia, my whole background from 14 – I left school at 14 – was farming, but something happened in that moving away, something that happened was, and I could put it this way. When we’re born, a soul is born, and a personality is born, but we don’t see the soul, so we all call it one, a little baby. Well, generally soul is on its journey, and personality tends to go on the journey that the parents steer it on. And that is to be successful, you’ve got to make a living, you’ve got to make a lot of money, you’ve got to be successful. I don’t know when that ever got together, money and success, but it’s sort of, people still think that craziness, anyway, and that didn’t go well. But when I emigrated, actually what happened was, soul and personality did come together, and because I’m suddenly doing something, I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I’d been an arable farmer in England, in other words, we grew corn, and we grew wheat and barley. But here now, suddenly I’m a beef farmer and dairy farmer, and I didn’t know a thing about it. But these two parts of me came together, the soul and the personality, and that was, that created its own dynamic, it created a magic, which went on to change my life.
Rick: Yeah, and I’ve heard you tell your story about how the timing was terrible, you got this big drought, you know, a lot of your cattle were dying, and you’re just going through all this stuff, and we don’t have to go through that in great detail. But the first really significant spiritual experience that I recall you relating in that phase of your life was when you were taking a lunch break and lying on your back and looking up at an eagle. Would you like to talk about that one?
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 know, 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 laid 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 noise, no noise, it 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’s like 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, and I didn’t know that from the eagle 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, 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 my life is I need to cross 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, 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 eerie, I like getting off 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 you know really sort of like 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.
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, 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 3 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 that at the 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 the 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’s 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 have 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 tenses, 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% 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 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, the personality mortal 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, that I saw as the worst things could happen, were great fortune for me, 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 kind of experiences of other realms and other dimensions were so detailed and with such variety and richness and I’m still going to like 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.
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 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. So therefore a human being when they’re communicating with nature has got to move into the moment with them. 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 human is energy. As you probably know with your many interviews we’re 99.9% energy. If you take all the space away from all the protons, neutrons, electrons etc in our cells and so 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. So 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 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 species that we commonly know about, is 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 ourselves and alienated ourselves. And so even in humanity you see a hierarchy of ability, you see a hierarchy created by money, you see a hierarchy of spirituality. Now none of this implies for a moment superior or lesser. 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 no superior but they’ve learned more because of their focus and where we focus energy flows. And so I a long time ago did that. So in nature and I find with nature’s spirits and with the David Kingdom, yes there is a hierarchy but there isn’t a hierarchy of superiority. That’s not even a concept in a real world, that’s just a concept for us.
Rick: Yeah, so I mean these different nature spirits and David’s and so on they refer to, 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 which many of them are about the size of a pinhead, we don’t see those. You see and here’s an interesting question for some of the listeners who gets a bit sceptical. Let’s just say you’re walking into a park, you walk into the middle and there’s a bed of roses, made 20 meters across, a really serious bed of roses and you’re looking at them. And as you look at them you suddenly see like tiny semi-transparent things look like a bit like a bee. And you really get up close and it comes right up to you and looks like a fairy. And then you realize there’s tens of thousands of them all over these roses and you’re looking at and thinking “oh my god I can see nature spirits, oh my god this is incredible”. And then little wire wire coach stops about 30 people get out and stretch and come walking down to the rose bed and they just stand there looking at it. And you look at their faces and nobody’s saying “oh my god look at all these fairies”. Now… and you then ask somebody “can you see the fairies?” because you’re pretty straight and you then do that the question is, can you still believe your own reality which is now not going to be reinforced by 30 other people. Now for 30 years I found that difficult, incredibly difficult, so I was skeptical with myself to an astonishing degree, incredibly skeptical. So in all this mishmash one day I’m in… I’m walking over… I go 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 and this is in the subtropics and the water is crystal clear and the sun shines through it and all the rocks – beautiful river rocks – turn bright green because it’s winter and it’s 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 one, this egg- looking thing, is completely pure white almost or actually a pale cream. And I kept staring at it thinking “this doesn’t make sense, every other rock is green. Why is that one not green?” And so it called to me, it said “bring me out the river”. And I said “no no no no, we don’t want to do that, it’s deep there”. Anyway nobody – this was in that way out in the country in a river valley and I’m standing on a bridge looking into the river – and I thought “okay well, nobody’s been over here in ages, so I’ll go in”. So I strip off all my clothes. So I’m naked and go into the water which was freezing and pick this rock out. I had to dive down to the bottom and of course I’m walking back with it and the car comes over and five people stop the car and stare at me. The water was so cold they’re probably trying to work out if I was male or female. Anyway I took it home and it spoke to me, and it called me, it told me it was a guide stone. And I asked him what that was but anyway it didn’t tell me. And so every now and again I would bring it in put it in the sun and then soak it in out in a bucket of water, it seemed to want that. One day I’m 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. And so I took this stone and there’s about 25 people at the workshop, and this big stone – I sat it, kept it in a bag. Nobody saw it and after lunch I decided to try something clever. I put it out in the middle and invited everybody to go into it and I mean you know some of them said “how do you do that?” And I said imagine, because that’s another story – imagination that’s something I talk a lot about. Imagine, and so they started doing their thing and I’m sitting looking at it and I’m thinking to myself that’s very peculiar there’s a little hole in it. Now I’ve had this thing a year and 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 arm of my chair and lean forward to look closer because I wasn’t going to do this with everybody else. I wanted to be with it in case somebody gets a wobbly going and occasionally can happen. Anyway…
Rick: What does that expression mean somebody gets a wobbly going?
Michael: Wobbly – well, they get a little bit upset. Oh I get in there think they can’t get out.
Rick: I see right.
Michael: So I like to keep an eye on the people anyway so I lean forward and looking at it well what happened Rick and this was not nice this was in my earlier days. It’s as though the essence of me was sucked out like and I could see the smoke like mist coming out of my body, sucked across the space and went in through this hole. Now all my experience suddenly is going with this metaphysical me and being sucked into the hole, and it freaks me out but what really did this was bad but I couldn’t move. My body had turned off. Now that doesn’t happen, you don’t get things like that happen. I’ve been a very practical farmer all my life up until this, nobody turns your body off. And here I am sitting there holding on the arms of this chair I can’t even blink. Now I’m moving into a vast cavern – an incredible size cavern – and which is freaky to say the least and I cannot move my body and in this cavern there is a voice. This voice is running up and down the scale of madness as far as it felt like to me and it’s saying “run run run run run run run run run run run”. And all I wanted to do was run but I couldn’t move my physical body. I could not get it to move and so I couldn’t run. I swear I would have run out the room, there’s no way I wouldn’t have run. And so in this cavern this other me is shaped up now – there’s me standing in there me sitting on the chair. The me sitting in the chair is now 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 back in this… I’m in the cavern the whole time, and this little idiot me in the cavern starts walking into it further. Like no no no don’t do this let’s get out let’s come out. No it continues walking in and the voice is going “run run run” and it took seemed to me like for two months I’m walking further into this cavern, that’s what it felt like. And and all the time this voice is running up and down the scale and this probably lasted 10 or 15 minutes. And I am freaking out on this chair. Anyway as I walk into the cavern I see a pair of doors and they go from one side of the cavern to the other and meet in the middle. Enormous I mean this cavern’s as big as the inside of the world. And I look at them and I’m feeling tired and exhausted. And then this other me – this voice – changes what it says. It doesn’t say “run”, it says “if you open these doors, a full force of nature will pivot in your being”. I’ve never forgotten the word – well, jeepers – this wasn’t going to happen, I want to get out of here. Well, I still could not switch my physical body back on. It’s real in a mess now I’m telling you. And this other me so wants to put his hands on the door and open them and he’s exhausted, completely exhausted. I instantly knew there were six people in the room I could suck the energy out of them terrible, and I did, I took the energy out of them six people who nearly fell flat on the floor. They felt drained so fast and so hard, and in fact I didn’t 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. And so suddenly I’ve got energy and I push on the doors and they fly open. And I thought “oh god now what I’ve done”. And there’s this other world just floating in front of me, and I know that earth very well. That’s what I call a fifth dimensional earth. That’s the earth I call terror we’re on earth that’s terra T-E-R-R-A. And then there’s gear which is a bit further away. So this was an earth that didn’t have humanity on it. And then this being comes walking away from it, walking across space and in a moment is standing in front of me. And I knew this was Pan – 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 sort of the intelligence of nature.
Michael: I mean… I’ll explain that. I mean – and it took me years to sort of really come to this what I feel. Pan the god of nature but this God was dressed like a good-looking movie star, had a pair of jeans on, a t-shirt and had a face that was let’s semi-human but definitely not fully human. The forehead and the head was too big utterly totally beautiful an incredibly powerful being. Now this is where our relationship began. I refused it of course – skeptical, 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 look around. I’m ready. I’m 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. And I wanted to fall on the floor and cry for the next hour, so I get my handkerchief out and gradually mop myself up. Nobody else had noticed. 20 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 – emotional mess. And so when we… I gradually brought them out of it and then I got them to share and managed to gain another hour, and at the end of an hour I felt that I could stand up and so I got through it without them too badly knowing except 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.
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 and 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 had you awoken or got 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, and why I don’t talk about this sort of thing in my intensives. Intensives, people call me a spiritual teacher – I look at it differently. There are two ways to live. One way works, one way doesn’t work. Probably 95% 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 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. You know 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 them, keep poking each other in the face, stick fingers in their eyes, pull their hair and it’s a battleground and it keeps several kindergarten teachers very busy to keep the kids amused so they don’t tear each other to pieces. Because that part of that in that youth we do that sort of thing. Well this is a young planet and so enlightenment to me, one it happens in the moment. So if I look back and say yes I was 49 but that’s not me that was the body then. You know enlightenment never leaves the moment. So if you growing 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 and so when I became enlightened, I knew that I was. The one thing my body healed, I had 20 years of terrible back pain. I never had more than three months out of it and when the moment I was enlightened my body healed, cellulitis was gone like that. My insomnia finished and my all those years of pain came to an end. I don’t do back pain anymore and haven’t done since that time 30 years ago. And so there is a… 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, and 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. And 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, and high school is not in this time frame and not in this reality. But junior school is and 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, and 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. 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, your mental and emotional 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 they train their thinking, they train their mental body and they get so-called clever, taking more and more deeply a grip on stupidity with the other hand. But 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 have you, 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. And so we… you see many people in their 80s 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 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 spiritually, mentally and emotionally – all one together. And 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 nothing much to do with that. Now there’s a lot of enlightened people, so-called, have got their ticket back because they’re emotional children still.
Rick: So what you’re saying then is 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 of or the 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 sort 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, but unfortunately people on the spiritual path put it in an unreachable place and 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 and 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 that 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 get… 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 fall in love is not the end of love, because when you fall in, 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 written 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 on it, 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 on my Facebook “Choose Love” 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 and 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 and 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 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, we 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 to 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 is 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 say 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 sort of 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 his 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 the being tuned in as you put, the way you would define it. There’s fewer filters in 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… and 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, 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 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 all kinds of situations where it goes, I just felt like if I stick to this routinely it’ll 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 real, 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 sort of had an individual flavor of it to it. So in these scriptures, very often there’s a distinction between Self with a small “s” and Self with a capital “S”, you know, 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 sort of 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, and there was a very emotional time for me. I was, after 48 years married, 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, so 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 – and I wrote a book about this, Talking with my Late Wife – and 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”. I said, “What do you think I’m crying at? A picnic?” I said, “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 pain, terrible pain, and yet terrible joy at the same time. And then next day I brought out mucus and I began to recover. A month later, two weeks later, I’m on top of the world, feeling fantastic. Lost a lot of weight, looking great. And I went to America where my organizer was waiting for me. And this organizer I’d known, she’d been through a separation and I’d known her for 15, 20 years. And to my shock horror, I find I’m falling in love with her. And I thought, “This can’t happen”. And you know, “I just can’t do this. I’m 70, I don’t fall in love anymore. This is not right”. I am, I’m 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, I want this to… is it okay if I fall in love again? I need your permission”. Which she ignored. And I went through a metaphysical process. And in this metaphysical process, in front of me, and I’ll keep it short, there is a spring of water, which is about a meter high. And I know that this is love. And I keep throwing it on her. Then she’s not there. And I’m still throwing it on her. But she’s not there anymore. And then I’m realizing she’s covered in like a grey shroud. And this shroud is my emotional attachment to her. Now I’ve been through attachments are not love. And I’ve 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 – I’ve never got close to her. And I was enlightened. This was a shock. An enlightened person. How could this be? How could this possibly be happening? Because I certainly put into place all the spiritual aspects of enlightenment. Anyway, this process continued with her. And 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”. And I sat there with this in this metaphysical experience. And suddenly there came a moment when there’s something rising up. And 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 when I let go I would never see her again. Certainly in this lifetime. All the idea, we’ll carry on together. Our life will continue. This, 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. And they were separate journeys. They weren’t the same journey anymore. And so there came the moment, Rick, I let go. Now for me, I can’t describe it. It was an amazing experience. But this water, this lifted up. Suddenly it was three meters high and automatically I stepped into it. And I stayed there. And I experienced this unconditional love. And 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. That changed me more than anything. Up until then, I had one view of enlightenment. After that, there was, you know, 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 changed my whole relationship with enlightenment. It changed. It became more personal and more universal, simultaneous. Because I am the universe. I am the universe. So how could it be less? How could it… you know, people say, “I am the universe, but I’m not, but they have no personal”. You know, 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. And actually, there are some traditional scriptures. Sometimes it’s fun to refer to traditional scriptures and all, just because if people have been saying the same thing for thousands of years and some guy comes along and says it now, it sort of lends a little bit of extra credence to it, or credibility. You know, 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 to be added unto thee”.
Michael: And you know what? When this all began, that was my running. 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, and I realized that me 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, “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 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. The mother died, and suddenly my mother died. Suddenly money that had been tied up for 15 years, and suddenly there’s money available. Suddenly I’ve got a home. When I awakened first, 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, New York, to give a talk when I’m a hundred. Now 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. So mayflies, it doesn’t take long. Rats, it doesn’t take long. And so their life. 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. Not many around, is there? And let’s just say the physical body, 140, not 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 we criticize and we attack ourselves mentally, where 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 and every day. I don’t do that. I do, 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 intenses, 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 in about 90 by that time or something. Actually, no, I’ll be about 86.
Michael: Really?
Rick: Yeah, I’m 66 now.
Michael: I’m 79.
Rick: I know. So I wanted to ask you… so 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, 70, you’re up to about the fourth grade, how would you imagine that somebody who has graduated high school, graduated college, has a PhD, so to speak, using this metaphor, how are they functioning compared to somebody in the first or fourth grade?
Michael: Do you know what you’re saying is, 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. And 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 it, but it’s much more liberated, and then a seventh dimensional reality. By the sixth dimension, our spiritual, our emotional, and our 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 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, but it wasn’t so long ago I was that idiot. I was doing exactly what they’re doing. You know, if you criticize yourself, but most people doing it all day, you’re going to get sick. Then you turn around and try to get healthy, but all the time criticizing yourself, when you’ve decided that you are absolutely perfect, that God loves you, you love yourself, and you live from that point of view, with an enormous sense of humor, realizing that there was no point coming to this planet if you didn’t have a sense of humor, that 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 makes you creating your own reality. You know, that puts that in a whole other bracket. This has been going on, let’s just say conservatively, 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. And 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 sort of avoid kind of 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 take, 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 the most comfortable thing I could do always. 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 have 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. 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 of the vehicle. It’s the propellant that makes the words have energy that impact 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 my 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. Now probably Bruce Cathie or Bruce Lipton they could explain it far more than me because he’s got quantum physics to take him. I’d like to talk to that guy sometime, but because he’s got quantum physics I have experienced the Torus, you know the T-O-R-U-S. I was experiencing for ten years until one day I learned what it was on Pride, the movie, 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 is what 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 realized 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 a 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 it’s, you know, some people actually have a fairly limited appreciation of how marvelous the creation is, and it’s nice to have a glimpse into how the incredible intelligence and diversity and richness and proliferation of life on all dimensions and throughout all…
Michael: In fact Rick, that’s the most common thing that people e-book me, or Facebook me, and email me, “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 just focus exclusively on this stuff, but it’s really nice to have 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 in it and you’re 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 like 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. Now I’m being provocative and I’ve seen dragons of vastly greater intelligence than humans and you sort of think, “Okay, you know, four legs not so smart, two legs very smart”. And 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 and takes the energy of that body and recreates about a quarter size 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 and then to come out, like I came out of a clarity and a certainty of proportions that I didn’t know existed. Like 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 therefore I don’t look 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 I grow 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, hasn’t got much hair on his head, grass doesn’t grow on busy roads, so I can deal with that. And I love my body and I talk to it and I love life and 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 and be clever. We exist, she exists because she is God and God is not a static state, is growing in consciousness and 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 and if in your thoughts you do not think, the truth is – and I’m speaking to EE – the truth is you are a magnificent, metaphysical, multi-dimensional, 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 of 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, 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, they could at that moment 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, Mixael soul walked in. And 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. And 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 then develop with that personality. Sometimes a soul that is highly enlightened can bypass that. Generally they are very spiritually advanced. Now 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. And if I did find enlightenment I was going out of there straight. So in my soul family was another person, another soul, more enlightened, much more enlightened on the fifth dimensional reality, but 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, such a strong character, his personality was so strong. I’m in a body, every cell in this body is stamped with his personality and 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 I had to, 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 in about the last seven years, 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, which she came in from. 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 out. 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 have, 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 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 having thinking of spirituality. You would grow far more in the ten years. So generally speaking, soul maturity is 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 then 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’s 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 a what you 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 say I’m crazy. Happily that did happen but that’s beside the point. So life is of a vastness and multi-layered to a vastness that our brain just doesn’t comprehend. What we try, 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 see straight to well if you did this, it’s like what do they call it, parallel thinking or 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 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 is today about 85% 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 and 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 manifest 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, and 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…
Rick: There must be a reason.
Michael: …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, I spend showing people how to recreate their life, how to have a life that is joyful and uplifting. I get people 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 it 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. We 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 you had the word… you used the word doubtsville. Like I guess you went through a long period where you had a lot of doubt and 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 learn to create trust. Who do you trust? You. What do you trust? That I am, in fact, in truth, 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 you focus your energy flows. When your energy is focused flowing, that means you’re flowing toward what you’re focusing on. But so 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 in. 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. 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, there’s something different 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 a hundred 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. 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 towards 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 about genetically modified crops, and how these lower astral entities are somehow involved in genetically modified agriculture. So, maybe you could kind of 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 is 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. They have… 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 a 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 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.
Michael: So, and equally there are higher levels, and then your higher levels in the nature kingdom are like the nature spirits and the davers, and the over-lighting davers, 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, but do you ever get anybody writing about power drains? I found that there’s always a counterpart. Now, there are drains that are sucking energy out of the earth, so power points bringing it in. Luckily, most of the energy sucks are taking out negative energy, because if they didn’t, we would be overwhelmed with our own negativity, and so in a way the planet and the whole metaphysical structure of the planet is taking care of us, but I guess life changes remarkably when you stop being a physical person and you start being a spiritual being. And you do that consciously, and you keep that consciousness with you, life changes incredibly. Because you look at things, and instead of a reaction, you look at it, and you think, “Yeah”, and you do something 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? I mean, there are a lot of people, for instance, who feel like 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, and that if we actually are going to somehow transition to an enlightened world, that a lot of things are just going to have to completely collapse, and then something better be built from the ashes of that. Do you see some cataclysmic or catastrophic transition phase like that, or do you think it could maybe not be quite so dramatic?
Michael: I think the metaphysical always precedes the physical, and the metaphysical is already going through that, and 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 of our immediate future is only a probability pattern. You know, enough people like me, and many of the people you talk with who are traveling the world, are helping to change the consciousness. There are many wonderful people who send inspiring things on Facebook, and through the work people like you do, which more and more puts what we’re about among 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 where it’s difficult, it’s a higher frequency, but it occupies exactly the same space. You know, we can come at an x-ray machine to look at bones that we look at and can’t see, and we say, “Okay, well, they’re there”. So it can see them. Well, the same thing is going on in other ways. And so there is a… there are many many levels of reality, and we have a humanity that will stay, that will polarize 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, and they will select themselves. I would like to think it might be as high as 15 to people reckon three to five percent will do it, but I like to think 15 might be up there. But they will see a world of more love, of more compassion. They will see examples of people who care, flash mobs that are very uplifting. They will see those, and they’ll see the people who walk through it. Not looking at these idiots, who know what do they think they’re doing. And so these two people are emerging now, but we’ve created ourselves over the last hundred thousand lifetimes. But we have to go the direction we created. Now there’s going to be at least the next 20, 25 years at least where 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. But that is happening right now. I do see a beautiful world. Now is there a world of horror? Yes there is. But me 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 there’s 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. And when you live that life then you’re affecting the energy of every human being. And 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 that’s just another drop in the ocean but it’s another lifting of the frequency of all humanity. And this is why Andrew Harvey does what he does and I do what I do and all of us and you do what you 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. And so people will see the increasing breakdown, terrorism will grow, but so will lovism and careism.
Rick: And it actually is, I mean 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. I mean there’s some marvelous technologies emerging, there are certain cures for various diseases that are being found and all kinds of good stuff. I mean there’s solar powers proliferating in India and other places and so it’s like 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 it’s Shinto religion in Japan, they have temples and shrines everywhere. Every 20 years they pull them down and they rebuild it on the building land next to it 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 for human inertia. Humanity’s become inert, we’re not moving, we’re not growing in consciousness. And it’s very simple. If we’re a conscious species, we’re designed to grow in consciousness within 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 and so change and inertia have now collided. There’ll 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”. And they’ll hop onto a new one and they’ll 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 ourself 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. It means 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 and criticism and aggression?” See what happens.
Rick: That’s great Michael. That might be a good note to end on. I mean you couldn’t have said it better. Is there any little thought that, anything like throw in before we wrap it up that we haven’t covered?
Michael: One of the things I have said is it’s where you focus is where your energy is flowing. Your focus is all your thoughts and your emotions and most people’s thoughts or emotions are complete confusion going every which way all the same time. So their life is completely confused and directionless and a few fixate on money and that’s all they get in life, money, nothing else and a few have a broader view of it. So be aware where you focus energy flows. If you focus that you are a worthwhile and beautiful being and that becomes your focus you’ll find that life will honor that. If your honor life life will honor you. If you honor self 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 have really enjoyed talking to you. I just I would keep going but I sort of feel like for some reason I feel like two hours is probably about right for 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 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.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: 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 of the gas pump. And you’ll have your process to get into you. And then when suddenly just before Christmas we got an email – “Okay you’re on”. In January she… 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 you make it possible. And so 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: (Unclear), 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 and there’s so many more things we could talk about. But you know that’s all a two-hour interview can be and if people resonate with what you’ve been saying then 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 Rhodes and if you are new to this show then I should say that there have been well over 300 other interviews conducted and 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. And 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 and then you plug your phone in or your iPad and it copies them onto that and then you can just listen to them whenever you want – while you’re driving or whatever. So there’s a menu on batgap.com of sign up for the podcast. Check it out. And 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, which 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. And Michael mentioned 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 and 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 on that. 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.