Mirabai Devi Transcript

Mirabai Devi Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. This show is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. For more information about the show or to see past episodes, go to batgap.com. B-A-T-G-A-P My guest today is Mirabai Devi. Mirabai Devi is an international spiritual teacher and mentor to thousands of people around the world. Her work is to help raise the collective consciousness of humanity. She does this by helping the individual awaken to their inner divine nature through giving darshan, satsangs, workshops, talks, and individual sessions. She travels throughout the US, South Africa, and worldwide. Welcome, Mirabai.

Mirabai Devi: Thank you, Rick. It’s wonderful to be here with you today, in Fairfield.

Rick: In Fairfield. What’s your impression of Fairfield?

Mirabai Devi: Oh, I love Fairfield.

Rick: You’ve been there twice now, right?

Mirabai Devi: More than twice. Yeah, I think this is my fourth time. Yeah, beautiful consciousness, beautiful energy.

Rick: Yeah. So you go to a lot, you live in Kauai.

Mirabai Devi: Yes.

Rick: And you’re always going to places like Asheville and, you know, spiritual places. Do you notice that different places have a sort of a different flavor or kind of a different fingerprint?

Mirabai Devi: Completely different, yeah. It’s literally from one island, Maui, to the next island, Kauai. It’s like a different planet.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai Devi: So imagine going from there to Iowa, or Iowa to Boston, or the different spiritual, both the big cities and the spiritual towns that are more like community-oriented, night and day difference. Yeah.

Rick: And what do you feel about Fairfield as a spiritual community, if you can be more specific, you know, in terms of its flavor, its spiritual fingerprint?

Mirabai Devi: Well, it feels incredibly uplifting and powerful. As we were driving here from Chicago, you could actually feel the border of Fairfield. You know, we came up in the car against a wall of consciousness, and then we bumped into this wall of consciousness and went through it, and then everything was just like, “Ah, peaceful, blissful, uplifting.” It’s just exquisite, and it really is a thing. I mean, you could cut it with a knife.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai Devi: The consciousness-raising effect has really worked here, and the community has done an amazing job over the years, following the teachings of their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Guru Dev. And you can really feel the work that’s been created here through the consciousness effect. There’s a real unified field. So I love that. I mean, it’s like coming into a town where everybody’s already transcending. You don’t have to work so hard to get people to transcend, and then take them into the direct healing effect. They’re already in the transcendent, and so it sinks in a lot quicker. So we need to create this, not only in spiritual communities around the world, but we need to get the consciousness of the world risen to be like Fairfield.

Rick: That would be nice.

Mirabai Devi: Wouldn’t it?

Rick: Some people find it’s a bit of a pressure cooker here, you know, because the spiritual energy is kind of intense, and they feel a sense of relief when they get out of town once in a while.

Mirabai Devi: Yeah. When people work with me and they receive Divine Light transmissions, the experience is that all their stuff comes up. Everything that the Light touches on is going to be pulled up and pulled out, kind of like weeding a garden. The intense frequency of the Light is going to push anything that is not of the Light, that is not serving us, upward and outward. And when it’s coming out, it can have a tendency to feel like a detoxing, or as they say here, an unstressing effect. And when that detoxing is happening, it can feel really, really intense, especially if you have a lot of suppressed stuff, like suppressed anger or suppressed fear, or karmic buildup, residue. It would feel like you want to run from the Light.

Rick: Right.

Mirabai Devi: Run from the Light and hide. And that’s what happens at my gatherings. Sometimes people run out of gatherings, and they just have to get away, because the negativity in them starts screaming as it’s coming out and being pulled, like a vacuum that’s sucking it out, or Ganesh’s trunk that’s removing all those obstacles. You’re in the fire, and the fire can feel hot.

Rick: Yeah. Maharishi used that same analogy. He said, “That noise of the Hoover, it makes such a commotion, and there’s dust flying, but once you’re done, it’s a cleaner room.”

Mirabai Devi: Yeah, it is a much cleaner room. I think Maharishi has used the word “dust” in the attic, the dust flying around in the attic. And so that’s the same effect when we do Light transmissions with individuals and groups, is all the stuff is flying around, and it can be confusing for people’s minds and egos if you identify with the stress that’s leaving, and you think, “Oh, I am that stress that’s leaving. I am that particle of dust.” So we always tell people, “Don’t focus on, don’t merge with the stuff that’s releasing. Stay focused on the Divine Light, which is who you are and which is what you are, and don’t get caught into the negativity that’s leaving. Just say, ‘Bye-bye!’ or blow the kiss, ‘Bye-bye!’ And just stay identified with the Truth, with the Light, with the consciousness, with what you’re gaining, this newfound state of consciousness and freedom that you’re gaining, and release the other.

Rick: So I’ve had the joy of listening to quite a few hours of your other interviews and talks and so on in the past few days, and I’ve really enjoyed listening to your personal story. I think it’s quite interesting and unique, and I know people can go on YouTube and hear other interviews in which you’ve told that story, but most of my interview, most of my listeners won’t have heard it, and I’d rather just have you tell it here, and maybe I’ll ask a few questions that weren’t brought up in other times that you’ve told it.

Mirabai Devi: Oh, sure. Okay, wonderful. Well, I was born with an overwhelming longing to return back to the Divine Light, to return home to God, and of course, like many other individuals, was very angry, mad to be back in a physical body. I was like, ‘I knew I was going for the Light, and I must have made a wrong turn and gone down some other corridor back into this dimension. I was done with the Earth,’ you know, I thought, and I’m sure many have had that experience, and I sort of found myself being shot down through a tube and into a body again.

Rick: You remember that?

Mirabai Devi: Yes, and I remember having a dream later on in my life that I was shot through a tube of Light, landed on the Earth, and watched all the civilizations of the Earth going through from the beginning of time right up until the current day, saw the city that I was born in all around me, and then came into the body, and I heard the words, ‘Now experience life in a body, in a city, and experience what it means to have enlightenment in this form.’

Rick: Do you remember the last time you were in a body prior to this life?

Mirabai Devi: I do, yes, but I won’t talk about that.

Rick: Okay.

Mirabai Devi: Yeah, that’s personal information.

Rick: Sure.

Mirabai Devi: And so, as I was coming into this whole experience again, it was this intense form of, ‘I’ve done this, I completed, why am I back? What’s left? What could possibly be left?’ And I came to understand over the course of my life, with perspective, that what that meant is I had been sent back, and obviously the Divine had asked me to come back to help raise the consciousness of humanity and to help humanity, and I’d agreed to it. But once I was in that narrow form of limitation, that excruciation of going from being infinite, cosmic, unified energy, where you are just the all-that-is in the bliss of being, and experiencing being all the elemental energy too, and then being stuffed into this little narrow shoe, which is what the body is, it was excruciating. And I was like, ‘Oh, not again. I can’t go through another period of this.’ And of course I had forgotten, and so different Divine Masters appeared around my bed from the age of three to the age of seven, and there were twelve Masters that came, always twelve.

Rick: As a group?

Mirabai Devi: As a group. And they stood around my bed at night, and they would look into my eyes, and of course I know who all the Divine Masters are, but I would look into their eyes and I would say, ‘How come you all have the same eyes? You all have one eyes.’ In other words, they had oneness in their eyes.

Rick: You looked the same in their eyes?

Mirabai Devi: Identical. Like I was looking at the same soul. And they said, ‘Because we are in a state of oneness, and you will come back and remember your state of oneness too, and that’s why we’re here. We’re here to bring you back into your remembrance of your state of oneness.’ So what I came to understand is that I, like every other human being, went through the birth tube and forgot. And they came at a very young age to shake me out of that state of forgetting, because I had a mission, and I’d signed up and said, ‘I’ll take on the contract, I’ll do the mission, and I’ll be here for this consciousness raising during this golden age of enlightenment, during this age of the new sun.’ But I obviously had forgotten. So they were there to wake me up. And so they did everything they could to help wake me up. They took me out of my body every night from the age of seven onwards, actually, I’m sorry, excuse me, from the age of three to the age of seven, and shortly onwards after seven, where I was taken to different planets every night by these Divine Masters. And they would show me, ‘These are the realms of the light, and these are the realms of darkness, and these are souls that have forgotten their light.’ And they would show me how to uncover the light within each soul in these different dimensions.

Rick: So they’d take you to heavenly planets and hellish planets?

Mirabai Devi: Celestial realms and hell realms.

Rick: Just to show you the whole range?

Mirabai Devi: To show me the whole range. And they taught me how to transmit light, and how to take the seed of light in the heart and magnify it, and take souls out of darkness and into light.

Rick: So did you actually practice doing that when you were on a particular planet? You would sort of work with someone, but you must have been in some ethereal body.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, in my etheric body, or in my astral body, but I’d say more likely etheric. And they would show me how it was done. And of course these Masters were doing it since time immemorial, and they were just reminding me of the work that I was to do here in this form, and beyond this world, of course. And I believe I was doing the work before, but it was some kind of restarting of the process again. And so, particularly it was shown that my work was on other dimensions, in other words, on many different realms, both hell realms and intermediary realms, beyond the earth, as well as the earth. And that was purely from taking people from darkness into light.

Rick: I wonder if everyone listening to this takes for granted that there are various realms. I wonder if it would be worth taking a minute or so just to explain how and why there are.

Mirabai Devi: So there are as many realms and dimensions as you can imagine grains of sand in every beach surrounding the entire earth. If you could take every grain of sand, that each grain is a dimension or a realm. That’s how many there are. And these beings, these Divine Masters, know their way between all of them.

Rick: And they’re not necessarily off someplace at a distance. They’re right here, right? Everywhere.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, there’s the Chinese doll, is the best symbolic image I’ve seen.

Rick: You mean the Russian doll?

Mirabai Devi: The Russian, I’m sorry. Thank you. The Russian doll has a large doll, and inside you take it apart, and inside’s a smaller doll. You take that apart, and there’s another doll inside that. And you keep going until you get to the tiniest little doll at the very core, and they’re all kind of inside of it, wrapped inside of each other. That’s how the dimensions are. Everything is here and now, within. Each dimension is within. So they all go like that Russian doll, within each other. So when you’re traveling through the dimensions, our brain and our ego computes time and space, but on the celestial levels, or even beyond, there is no time and space. To the soul, there’s no time and space. So when the soul is traveling, there’s no experience of time and space. There’s more just the experience of the forms and the images.

Rick: Do they correspond to one another? So if we could experience the celestial realm in this room, would it be the celestial version of this room, or does it have a completely different sort of topography, unlike what we’re seeing on the gross?

Mirabai Devi: Some are the same, and some would be completely different topographies, as what we would see on the gross. You’d be in a different planet. You wouldn’t even be experiencing this. This is just a movie image projected out by our collective consciousness, and they wouldn’t necessarily see this or experience this, but some can break through and see both, depending on their state of consciousness, or what their mission is.

Rick: And so what you’re saying is these Masters are kind of adept at traversing all the various levels.

Mirabai Devi: Like an elevator.

Rick: They’re not locked into one or another.

Mirabai Devi: Have you ever seen, in your dreams, when you’re in an elevator, and you’re going from floor to floor in the elevator, and sometimes the elevator breaks and it goes “whoosh,” and you rush all the way down to the bottom?

Rick: I can imagine that.

Mirabai Devi: Those are different dimensions that you’re traveling between. And that’s the experience in our astral bodies, transition, we’re stopping and starting as we go through the floors of the elevator. That’s our astral body translating, changing dimensions.

Rick: So I sometimes think that a good definition of enlightenment might be the ability or the capacity to encompass the full range simultaneously, and function in that state.

Mirabai Devi: Effortlessly.

Rick: Yeah, effortlessly and naturally. So you’re shopping, you’re driving, you’re doing normal stuff on this level, but your awareness traverses all the other levels simultaneously, as well as the ground state of all levels. Would that be a good definition?

Mirabai Devi: Yes, I’d just like to say that if you look at people like the Dalai Lama or any of the great saints and bodhisattvas and Buddha incarnations, they are grounded with their feet on the earth and very practical, and running an organization and running what they run, like a president of a state or a country, completely down to earth and practical, but at the same time trained to traverse the realms and dimensions. And that’s the art. So you’re absolutely entirely accurate there, yes. It’s a very practical, normal state, enlightenment. Very practical, normal consciousness, and at the same time you’re able to travel through the relative and through the absolute.

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s worth emphasizing because sometimes people have this sort of black and white version of enlightenment in their mind, and it’s like, you know, I just want the absolute, the world is an illusion, who cares about global warming or whatever, you know, it’s all illusory. Anyway, and sort of like, they’re not giving each level its due justice or its due regard.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, I believe it was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that said, “Knowledge is structured in consciousness, and reality is absolutely structured according to that level.” It has its own rules, it has its own game, it has its own operations, and then you move to the next level, completely different. Different rules, different game, different operating functions, and you can’t take one state of reality and apply it to the next state of reality because they’re not the same. So you can’t take the absolute and then try to apply it to the relative and say, “It doesn’t matter what happens in this world, or in this earthly functioning world, because it’s all an illusion.” So I think Maharishi also said, you know, if you take someone with a hammer and hit them over the head, they’re going to feel it, right? It’s going to be painful and you’ll cause damage. So just in the same way people say it’s okay to run around and murder people, I mean, no it’s not. On this level, that causes suffering and pain and karma and harm and breaks laws and creates heaps of negative karma and destroys oneself. So no, it’s not okay. And so we need to take care of global warming, we need to take care of the planet, we need to do everything we can on this level to help and make a difference and make a change, otherwise no one would bother if it didn’t matter.

Rick: Good, I think it’s important to emphasize that. And we could spend a whole interview talking about that, but we left you at the age of seven.

Mirabai Devi: Okay.

Rick: I heard you got initiated into TM when you were seven.

Mirabai Devi: I got initiated into TM when I was seven.

Rick: It must have been the children’s technique at that age.

Mirabai Devi: It was the children’s technique, yes. And I later went on to the TM Siddhis program in 1993, when I was 23. And so I did TM most of my life, and Siddhis as well.

Rick: I didn’t know that.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, and my whole family too.

Rick: Do you still practice it?

Mirabai Devi: I do, yes.

Rick: And the Siddhis and everything?

Mirabai Devi: Yes, I do.

Rick: Interesting.

Mirabai Devi: Yeah. And so anyhow, at around seven onwards, when I went to school, I was in South Africa, that would be junior school, and I shut down. And I shut down pretty much, I mean shortly after seven, I was still going through the astral traveling to different dimensions and my inner training, but I shut down on the outer level when I went to school, because I was in that experience.

Rick: You were a normal kid for a while?

Mirabai Devi: Actually it was the opposite. I didn’t feel like a normal kid, and I didn’t know how to relate, and I felt very alienated. And my family was going through, you know, my parents got divorced when I was three, and my family were going through that moment of dark night of the soul with the divorce, and my mom being a single mother, and so during that period at home, and the period of being around other people at school, I didn’t know how to relate. And so I went from kindergarten, where I was walking around saying, “I’m ancient, I can fly.” “What do you mean you can’t fly? Of course you can fly.” You know, I fly every night. And, you know, I’m trillions of years old. I’m ageless, I’m deathless, I’m immortal. So are you, don’t you know it? And at seven, through junior school, I realized I couldn’t keep talking that way, because people thought I was crazy. So I shut down and stopped talking about everything, and tried to learn how to fit into this world, this society, and now, you know, in retrospect, hindsight’s 20/20, I should have gone to a Waldorf school. But at that time, of course, you know, we didn’t know.

Rick: Well, did you manage to suppress your own experience, or did you just shut your mouth and didn’t say stuff that would freak people out?

Mirabai Devi: I pretty much went through shutting my mouth so that I didn’t freak people out, and then after maybe a couple of months, or even early years, after seven, I shut down the inner level also, because I didn’t know how to relate to both at the same time, because I was having such a vast inner experience that I couldn’t fit into this world. So I had to shut it down to a certain extent, and in some phases from seven till 16, 17, almost altogether, completely.

Rick: So you became a normal adolescent for a while.

Mirabai Devi: Yeah, because I was talking to Devas and talking to Celestials and talking to Divine Incarnations, and then nobody else knew what I was talking about. So I shut it down, and at 17 became vegetarian, and I spent some time when I was 17 around the Hare Krishna organization, you know, coming into the temples and just smelling the incense and hearing the bells and seeing the Indian clothing and eating a vegetarian diet and just woke back up again. And after that, I went into, from 21 and 22, I went into this insatiable desire for enlightenment. It was like an unquenchable thirst where nothing in this world could satisfy me. It was like nothing in this world can bring me any happiness. All I want is God union. And everything else seemed so insignificant and paled in comparison, and I really didn’t want to be here anymore on the planet, because obviously I’d shut down so much. I’d gone into a complete state of separation at that point, which was illusory, of course, because I could never really lose it, because we are it. But as everybody else goes through forgetting, I had gone through a period of forgetting.

Rick: Do you see that as having an evolutionary value? I mean, not only for you, but for everybody. If we acknowledge that the universe is one big evolution machine, it must be well and wisely put that we forget, and then eventually we discover.

Mirabai Devi: Correct, yes. It’s very intentional. It’s on purpose. And it has its perfection of reasons, and when you see the whole picture, it makes perfect sense.

Rick: Would you say that having forgotten, and then having realized once more, you end up with something more than if you never left the state of oneness?

Mirabai Devi: Yes. It adds a different value to it, because you appreciate it so much more. How they talk about Radha is the longing, and Krishna is the beloved, and the feminine is about longing for the beloved, and then the divine masculine, or Sri Krishna, represents that principle of merging with the beloved. And so in the same way, the soul, which you could look at in that aspect as feminine, in that it’s the embodiment of that aspect of longing, and when it comes back to itself, back to the self, the reuniting process is so glorious. It’s so ecstatic. It’s so triumphant that there’s nothing. It’s just an indescribable experience that the loss and then the reunion, only that experience can bring you into that, those facets of those emotions and feelings and qualities, those heights of ecstasy and those depths of darkness that you go through in the longing, the dark night of the soul, or even the desert. Many souls go through the desert. I see that even in spiritual communities, people that have been meditating sometimes 40, 50 years, and they’re still going through the desert. That happens.

Rick: A lot of people in this town.

Mirabai Devi: Yes. And so it’s really important to break through that phase, those phases, and to keep it moving to that place of finding. And that’s why it’s very easy for awakened teachers to say, “You are it. Just be it. You never lost it. There’s nothing to do. There’s nowhere to go. There’s only to be here now.” It’s easy to say that, but when you’re in separation, to find it within you is a whole art. It’s a science. You have to know where to go. And to me, that’s the role of a teacher. The role of the teacher is to lift the veils, to help you lift the veils, and to generate enough consciousness where you do it yourself, with their help and their grace, so that you find it. Because it’s within, it’s not without. And so that moment of reunion is so ecstatic that that’s the whole point. That’s the whole point, is the Shiva and the Shakti. They unite in the whole creation forms. So it’s the loss and the gain.

Rick: Yeah, the Upanishad says, “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.” And Maharishi used to say that, “Brahman doesn’t become a living reality until you’ve gone through the whole rigmarole, the whole cycle.” I think it was T.S. Eliot said, how did it go? “The end of all our seeking will be to come back to the place from whence we started and to know it for the first time.”

Mirabai Devi: Oh yes, I know that. That’s a beautiful saying. Beautiful, yeah, exactly. My mother used to read that to me when I was a child.

Rick: So you went to India, you had this burning desire for God, the Hare Krishna thing kind of stoked the fire a bit.

Mirabai Devi: It stoked the fire a bit and turned me vegetarian. And then of course, it was just a brief diving into the Hare Krishna path, just for a short period, just to get my appetite and give me a kick. And then I went off to India, believing in my consciousness, as many people do, that India would bring me that enlightenment, that answer. And I wanted to find a realized guru. And of course, what happened was that my path was very unique in the sense that I did spend some time in a couple of different ashrams, and I did have intensive inner journeys. And what was unique to my path is that I believe that my spiritual masters, my spiritual divine beings were guiding me beyond those particular forms of those avatars and masters that were in India, and led me to go solo.

Rick: Is it relevant to say which ashrams you went to?

Mirabai Devi: Yeah, I don’t really like to share those because those are personal. But I did go to a solo retreat in Goa after living in ashrams. And that was the point, that was the turning point, where I lay down on a rock in Goa one night under the full moon and prostrated on the rock to the moon, and I surrendered my life completely. And there was just this overwhelming sense of… My throat just chokes up talking about it. There was just this overwhelming sense of, “I’m done. I can’t go on. There’s nothing left. There’s nothing left.” I said, “God, if you don’t show your face to me, if you don’t appear and take me, then I want to die. I don’t want to stay here in this ignorance, in this separation, not one more second, not one more moment, not one more breath. I’ll never eat food again. I’ll never drink water again. I’ll never get up from this rock. I’m going to lay here and die.” And I went on some kind of a strike.

Rick: It’s interesting how God sometimes responds to ultimatums. There are stories like that. There was some guy who held an incense stick. He said, “If I’m not enlightened by the time this burns down, I’m killing myself.”

Mirabai Devi: Oh my God. I know, and it’s funny because I’m a bhakta, a bhakti yogini, so my path has been devotion. And so the longing was so excruciating, so intense. Paramahansa Yogananda said, “The way to God is to desire God more than anything else.”

Rick: A lot of them say that. They say, “Holding your breath underwater, the intensity of desire to breathe is equivalent to how strong your desire for God should be.”

Mirabai Devi: And I know it’s true because I’ve experienced it myself. In everything I teach, I say, “Wisdom is integrated experience.” Unless you’ve experienced it for yourself, how do you really know? And so I experienced that. I reached that end. And I lay down on the rock, and that’s what happened, is that I was told, “Get up and go back to your cabin.” And I got up and went back to my cabin, and I laughed and cried for eight hours and emerged through many different stages and phases. And it would be hard to describe them all in this interview because obviously it’s volumes of what, you know, it’s the timelessness of the infinite levels of experience you go through in that moment. And then I broke through into the absolute. And I did have an experience, although I do share this part, is one of the stages was an experience of moving into the Godhead and meeting what I describe as the celestial being, who then said, “You have to go back.”

Rick: Some particular celestial being?

Mirabai Devi: Yes, there was an experience of meeting the Godhead. And the celestial being said to me, “You need to go back and you need to help raise the consciousness of humanity and help the planet. And I also heard, “And help your family and help all to awaken. Now you have awakened, you need to experience others to awaken.” And I said, “Well, that’s impossible because I didn’t do anything. All I did was lay down on the rock and die. How can I possibly help them? I don’t even know what I did. How could I share with anybody what to do?”

Rick: I can imagine you teaching retreats, “Okay, lie down and die.” In fact, that’s a question actually, is that you came to this sort of crescendo or this junction point where you couldn’t go any further. But I don’t suppose, I shouldn’t think that that can be fabricated or faked in any way. You were kind of at a level of ripeness where the fruit was ready to fall off the tree, mixing metaphors, but most people may have some time to go before they reach that level of intensity.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, it’s a ripening, it’s a maturity. It can happen over thousands and thousands of lifetimes. And obviously I had come in already in unity, then gone into separation, and then had to find that unity again. And I was just done. I was absolutely done with playing the game. And one of the things I remember is I pulled off my jewelry and my clothes and I said, “I’m done with being the actress in this movie. I’m no longer going to participate in this movie.” And I had to let go of my identity. I had to burn my identity. And the identity was the ego identity. The identity of being a woman and being in separation and coming from South Africa and having this family and doing this particular journey. And whatever I had come from, believing I was separate, I had to release that identity and then this new self was born. And this new self was–all I can describe was that when I was sent back from that celestial realm to come in, I sort of remember this kicking and screaming feeling about the second time in my life.

Rick: The second time, yeah, I was going to say.

Mirabai Devi: But this time consciously. I came back in consciously kicking and screaming and having this sort of pit in my stomach of like, “I’m actually going to leave the celestial realm and be here and do this work even for a minute? Like how unbearable.” And then they kept saying to me, because I had the clairaudience intact from that moment forth, the Divine kept saying, “It’s okay. We’ll do it through you. It’s okay. You won’t be in that separation again. You won’t have to go through that separation again. And we will be with you and we will tell you what to do every step of the way.”

Rick: Yeah, I mean the whole idea is this time you’re not leaving it. You’re just sort of staying in it while doing this.

Mirabai Devi: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And so ten years everything was made out of vibrating light. I couldn’t see any solid form for ten years afterwards. And also I went through some very intense phases, which I’m sure could be described as like cosmic consciousness or God consciousness phases, where I was seeing the devas and the trees and I was seeing the auras of humans and animals and I was able to talk to the devas and plants. And then I went through phases of not knowing how to be human, didn’t know how to have normal conversations, didn’t know how to do normal things, couldn’t function in the relative for short periods of time when I would go into… The states would just bleed through. And then there would be moments of just not being practical. So it took ten to fifteen years to be able to function normally and practically. And then it just kicked in and turned the opposite.

Rick: So all of a sudden you were able to be normal and practical.

Mirabai Devi: Totally. Totally. It takes time though, because it’s kind of like learning to drive a car, learning to drive a bicycle. It’s like you’re staying connected to those realms and then you’re in this realm and you’re trying to function in this realm. When you’re in the full-blown experience, it’s hard to have a normal conversation. It’s hard to even understand where people are coming from, because you’re not in that perception. And so after a while it all filters back through and you’re able to hold it all and it starts to feel very normal. And I think to a certain extent you tune out as much as you need to tune out and then you turn on as soon as you need to turn on so that you can function as micro-detailed as you need to. And it’s sort of more like a radio station. You just dial in and out as you need it. And you learn to navigate with one foot in one world and one foot in the other world. And that takes practice. It takes a lot of practice.

Rick: I think the zoom lens of a camera is a good analogy. Sometimes you focus in here, sometimes you take a wide shot.

Mirabai Devi: Exactly. And I think really what I came to understand is that I was here to share I’m an ordinary person. I’ve had an ordinary life to a certain extent. I’ve been to school, I’ve been to high school, I’ve been to college.

Rick: Ever been married, boyfriends, all that stuff?

Mirabai Devi: Had a normal life, yeah, all that stuff, and had a normal life. And that my experience was to show people, you know, if I can desire God more than anything and have a breakthrough and into unity, you know, into God union, then anybody can. And everybody can. And everybody has that capacity because everybody is the divine light and is the light, is the self. It’s just that we’ve got so many veils in the way and so much karma in the way. And this leads me to the next thing. It took about 10 to 15 years to burn it off, that intensity of these two, living in the two worlds and the light.

Rick: Did you feel like a lot of burning and purging was taking place during that 10, 15 years?

Mirabai Devi: Yes, because of course your programs don’t go. You know, your personal karma is still there when you come back.

Rick: You’ve got some new wine and an old wine skin.

Mirabai Devi: Exactly. It’s kind of like people who have a near-death experience in the hospital and their body’s broken and, you know, completely cut up. And then they come back into this body and it’s excruciating. And they go, “Oh my God, I’m back from this celestial experience in a celestial realm and I have to deal with this body that’s dying and they’re in an emergency ward in the hospital.”

Rick: I have a quick question before you go on. And that is that some people have a radical awakening like that. And it can leave them not knowing how to brush their teeth, you know. It just takes years, as you say, to learn to function as a normal human being. Other people never seem to have something like that. It seems like it’s more incremental. They take a bite, they chew it, they swallow it. Take another bite, chew it, swallow it. And enlightenment kind of sneaks up as a thief in the night, you know, as it says in the Bible. And next thing they know, they’re in this sort of awakened state, but without ever having gone through anything. So do you think that both are legitimate things? Or do you think that even those people I just mentioned who are more incremental are at some point going to have an explosion that they’re going to have to somehow integrate?

Mirabai Devi: Well, first of all, I’d say both are legitimate things. I would imagine that the thief in the night way would be so much easier because you integrate it each mouthful, one bite at a time. And ultimately, are they going to have that kind of bleed through? It’s hard to say. Maybe some do and some don’t. But certainly my experience right after in India, when I had that full immersion in the absolute for eight weeks, when I came back in, when I ate food or went to the bathroom or brushed my teeth, I experienced that I was the water, I was the toothbrush, I was the soap washing the body, I was the cows in the field, I was the grass, I was the sky, I was the food itself that was being consumed. So I didn’t have any identity with being an individual self. So functioning was like I had to tell my leg, “Okay, step, step, walk, lift the foot.” Because at some point, even though it was all, of course, doing it itself, which it knows how to do it itself, there was some part of me that was like, “I am the grass and I am the foot and how do you get the foot to lift on the grass?” Well, it’s all automatically programmed, of course, but there was a phase immediately where I was submerged into everything. I didn’t know if it would operate unless I made it operate.

Rick: There must have been some remnant of identity, though.

Mirabai Devi: Until I realized that it’s all automatic. You can let it go. It’s all automatic. It’s going to do it itself and it’s going to feel weird in the beginning to be everything, and it will slowly calm down to the point where you are able to experience both simultaneously without being overly blown open. I was overly blown open. So it takes time to normalize and ground and get back to practical. It took me like 10 years, 15 years. And like I said, the karmic tapes are still going, so you still have all the karma to burn through when you come back in, and that’s a process to let that burning happen. That was the burning and the purification that was happening over the 15 years.

Rick: Yeah. And even then, when you were in that state where you could barely function, there must have been some remnant. I mean, when you would eat, you would put the food in your mouth, you wouldn’t put it in your shoe. There would be some sense of, “Okay, this goes here and the foot goes in the shoe.”

Mirabai Devi: Correct. There is.

Rick: But you were so blown open that…

Mirabai Devi: It’s bizarre. You feel really weird and silly, kind of goofy, like, “Wait, I am the food. Now I’m on the fork. Now I’m in the mouth, which is me. I’m all of it. How do I operate this?”

Rick: And the “I” you’re referring to there, it’s not like, “Okay, Mirabai is in the food.” You’re talking about the…

Mirabai Devi: The cosmic self.

Rick: The cosmic self and everything is that.

Mirabai Devi: And you are that. You are the “all that is.” You are the “that.”

Rick: Right. But the integration of that doesn’t imply the loss of it, right?

Mirabai Devi: No.

Rick: It’s just integration.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, it’s integration and then you learn to be within the skin at the same time and then it just… everything tones down, radically tones down.

Rick: Yeah, because a few minutes ago you were saying things in the past tense, “Well, I was seeing the devas and I was seeing auras and I was seeing all the celestial levels and all that.” But I mean, don’t you still see all that stuff?

Mirabai Devi: Yes.

Rick: But it’s just kind of like integrated.

Mirabai Devi: Well, you turn it on and off when you need it.

Rick: I see.

Mirabai Devi: It’s not all open all the time, simultaneously in every moment.

Rick: So you’re walking down the street, you’re not seeing everybody’s auras because there’s no need to or something.

Mirabai Devi: No, you can choose to turn the dial down and turn it up when you need it. So when I do a gathering or an individual session or a group or whatever, then I’ll turn it up.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai Devi: And if I’m just walking down the street, going to the shop, to the store, then I’ll turn it down so that I can have an easier time with it all.

Rick: Interesting how it’s tunable.

Mirabai Devi: It’s tunable.

Rick: Yeah. Did you ever see Amma, the Hugging Saint?

Mirabai Devi: I did, yeah, many times.

Rick: And you know this thing she does, Devi Bhava, at the end where she removes a bunch of veils and it’s like blast furnace time.

Mirabai Devi: Yeah, Kali comes through.

Rick: Yeah, it’s very interesting.

Mirabai Devi: Mahakali. Yeah, she’s wonderful, she’s great.

Rick: So you were going to start saying something and then I wanted to interject a question about the previous thing. Do you remember what you were going to start saying?

Mirabai Devi: I don’t.

Rick: Okay. Well, let’s see, where shall we go from here? So, if anything comes to mind, start speaking.

Mirabai Devi: Oh, I do remember.

Rick: Okay, good.

Mirabai Devi: It just came back. What happens is that then when you start the teaching phase, what happens with that is that there were different inner masters, then later mentors, masters and mentors, that then showed me how to burn the karma off again in humans and transmute it. So it went from, “I don’t know how to do any of this,” to them showing me from the inner planes and from the outer world also, how to burn karma off for people and take them out of darkness into light, learning how to heal the physical, emotional, mental bodies, and learning how to take people into higher states of consciousness through taking veils of negativity and darkness and karma and illusion from people. So, of course, there were inner teachers that were supreme beings, that were expanded on celestial realms, that took me through realms and dimensions, again, from that stage on, during that 10-year integration period. There was what I describe a rewiring and regridding process. Are you following me?

Rick: I am.

Mirabai Devi: And the rewiring or regridding process is the rewiring of the individual nervous system and the electrical system, so that you can handle high frequencies of light while still being in a human form. You have to upgrade and upgrade and upgrade without blowing all your circuits at the same time. So that’s what was taught to me over those 10 years and done on me. Make sense?

Rick: Yes, absolutely.

Mirabai Devi: Okay.

Rick: And I can think of casualty cases where some circuits were blown, you know. I mean, it’s a delicate process.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, exactly. And yeah, there are casualty cases where circuits get blown, and that’s what we try to avoid with people.

Rick: Safety first. Marci’s teacher always used to say, “Safety first.”

Mirabai Devi: Yes, I remember that. Yes. And so what happened is that I learned a certain amount from the inner realms and the inner planes on how to burn and transmit karma and how to transmit light and also how to work with individuals to take them into higher states of consciousness and how to heal the physiology. And then later on, I had the blessing of meeting two different male teachers that became colleagues of mine and great friends and mentors that then ended up changing the course of my work. One was Thomas Ashley-Ferrand, or Namadeva, who is one of the world experts on mantras. And he taught mantra to the planet, to the Western world, and I ended up traveling with him all over the U.S. where he would teach mantra and I would do light transmission and teach people about spiritual activation and healing. And then the second one was more in the last 10 years, was Howard Wills. And Howard Wills, of course, brought the forgiveness prayers from the divine light. He was given the forgiveness prayers from the divine light. He’s an awakened being, and he was shown how to instantaneously heal people’s physiologies. And I had been given the gift when I had my awakening in India. One of the little calling card blessings that the Divine left me with when I came back into normal waking state was the gift of instantaneous healing. And I prayed for it to be taken from me during those 10 years because it was too much to come back and integrate and then have that gift on top of everything else. It was like, I can’t deal with all this all at once. You know, I’m trying to maintain a separation. I’m wobbly. I’m like a toddler learning how to walk as a human again. And then I can’t have people coming to me and seeking me out for instantaneous healing on top of that. And I was trying to reform an identity, and I didn’t want my ego to take it. So meeting Howard Wills 10 years ago and his instantaneous healing and his forgiveness prayers was just the catalyst that opened that door back up for me again. And he helped me to get that instantaneous gift for healing back. And I spread the forgiveness prayers to millions of people around the world because they’re so potent in cleansing and transmuting karma and also the light transmissions that I had been giving in the form of the darshans. And the style that Howard Wills was working in became more integrated into my teachings through cleansing, through forgiveness, healing through forgiveness, and working with cleansing and peacemaking became a huge part of my teaching. And I’ve been teaching those both with Howard Wills and by myself around the world for the past 10 years as well as doing what I was doing before with the darshan and taking people into higher states of consciousness and transmuting karma. So I found this new form has very much been compatible with where I was coming from. And I found that it was a way for me on a personal level to be able to have less ego identification with it all because there’s a system involved and that system is really not just me. It’s a system of prayer and it’s working with the Divine Light where I can just be the conduit and then people can still have the results and then I can give them the prayers to do at home so they can continue the results on their own versus what was happening to me before which was just direct.

Rick: Yeah. Now you’ve had many years of experience of silent meditation, transcending and so on.

Mirabai Devi: Yes.

Rick: And Howard came to town about 10 years ago and I went and I got the prayers. But I’ve never been much of a prayerer. I mean I read them for a couple days but I’m so in the habit of just…

Mirabai Devi: Transcending.

Rick: Yeah, I felt like this is too much mental chatter. I don’t feel like doing this.

Mirabai Devi: Yes.

Rick: So what would you say to somebody like me about that?

Mirabai Devi: Oh, lots of people in Fairfield ask me that.

Rick: Yeah.

Mirabai Devi: And here’s the thing. You know I’ve had both sides. I’ve been merged in the absolute where you are merged in the Godhead and who are you praying to? Who is praying to who?

Rick: Yeah, right.

Mirabai Devi: So it’s really important to know that the ego and personality is not God. It’s a part of God but it’s not God. So the Godhead, the Supreme Self is who the ego, personality, mind, lower levels of the human are talking to the higher and I call it higher self. Because it’s easier for people that are used to transcending to understand when you’re transcending, you’re transcending into the Absolute. You’re transcending into the Self. But if you back out in your personality and your ego mind, which you may or may not be, depending, then that’s really all prayer is. It’s the lower self talking to the higher self. It’s the ego, mind, personality talking to the Divine Self, the Divine Nature. It’s all one. It’s just one’s ice and one’s steam. They’re at opposite ends of the spectrum. And so the ice is the human mind, ego, personality and the steam is the spirit, is the self. And they’re all one. But for cleansing the mind, the ego and the personality that are in separation, we do need techniques. And peacemaking or forgiveness is a technique. Prayer is a technique where we’re talking to the Divine Self to ask for the grace factor. And there’s other ways to access grace also. The light transmissions access grace. Meditation accesses grace. But prayer certainly accesses grace. So for somebody who is more deeply merged and needs less words, that can be the case. Although peacemaking cleanses the lower levels. We always need to cleanse the lower levels. We need to cleanse the ice and melt the ice. So depending on your state of consciousness, I would say, would be dependent on what techniques you need or whether you need a teacher or not. If somebody is functioning on the practical and merged into the absolute and their lower levels of mind, ego and personality are not causing chaos or disruption or negative karma or disease, then maybe you wouldn’t need them. But most people have physical disease or emotional disease or mental disease or they have karmic repercussions from negative actions, negative thoughts and negative words. And that’s what the prayers work on. They don’t work on the soul level because the soul is already the light. It’s complete in itself. Everybody’s got something. Self-referral. Everybody has some karma and of course that’s the way it’s meant to be. People think that they’re just supposed to be perfect. But it doesn’t work that way. You probably wouldn’t be here if you were. This is a finishing school. This is a completion training and to some people it’s a kindergarten. We have all levels of school here on the earth plane.

Rick: Yeah, we do, don’t we? Boy, what a range.

Mirabai Devi: I love to say, I just have to fit this in real quick here, Paramahansa Yogananda in one of his books, I believe it was “Autobiography of a Yogi,” he said, “The earth is the second most dense physical planet in the physical universe.” And in many ways, if you look at the higher dimensions, everybody asks that. He never said that, actually. But not to my knowledge, maybe he said it to his inner circles. But if you understand it that way, then it ranges all the way from kindergarten to PhD. So we’ve got people here in kindergarten level, and we’ve got people here learning PhD level. So different techniques, different teachers would apply to different folks.

Rick: Yeah, since we’re referring to Maharishi a fair amount, since we both have that background, I read something from him recently in which he was saying that the amplification, simultaneous amplification of both positive and negative, is very conducive to awakening, global awakening. That if it were just one or the other, there wouldn’t be so much of a need or an impetus or a move on nature’s part to awaken the planet. But the fact that there’s this polarity that has developed to a great degree is somehow a harbinger of dramatic transformation.

Mirabai Devi: Can I share from my own experience? I grew up in South Africa in the apartheid era, where there was a silent revolution. The outer revolution never happened, but the form of the revolution was very advanced crime. And Johannesburg, the city I grew up in, was the number one crime capital of the world. And so the suffering that I witnessed was so extreme that when I came and moved to the United States based on my spirit calling, made to be here, in 1998, what I saw here was comfort. And I didn’t see the growth, the levels of growth, the extreme amount of suffering that I’d seen in South Africa, or you would see in India, too, because I’d spent time, of course, in ’92 in India. I didn’t see that in the United States. And I saw a kind of lethargy. I arrived here in ’98, and it was like half the people I met were on coffee, sleeping tablets to sleep at night, numbing out watching television, living on junk food, antidepressants every second person. And I realized that it was because they didn’t have the level of suffering that keeps people on their toes in South Africa that makes people so desperate for God and for enlightenment and for change and for breakthrough and for solution. And what I noticed is when 9/11 happened here, and the whole country went into fear, and I remember because I was in South Carolina teaching a lightworker training at the time, and I remember seeing on the news what had happened on 9/11, and the whole environment went into fear. And the first thought I had is, “This feels like South Africa.” South Africa is in that amount of fear. And now the U.S. is in that amount of fear, and it feels like South Africa. And I noticed the awakening went like that. It skyrocketed after 9/11, although that was a traumatic tragedy, which we give a lot of credit to the suffering that the people went through, and everybody, the whole country went through, and the whole world went through. I certainly saw a rise in consciousness. It was a kickboard to wake people up, and it woke many people up. And that has continued to happen since then. So I have to say, I have personally experienced that suffering and even fear can turn people towards the light and towards a spiritual path and towards spiritual solutions. And many great saints have said, “Unless we have some form of pain or suffering, we don’t always turn towards God.” And it’s unfortunate, isn’t it, that as a species we tend to get lazy and lethargic unless we are hit against the wall. And that’s when usually people start praying, or start meditating, or start looking at, “How can I change my life?” Or, “Let me find a great spiritual teacher,” or, “Let me do something, a healer.” That’s an awakened agent for change.

Rick: Yeah, it’s funny, I have this dear friend, we used to call ourselves “disaster-arians” because whenever something would happen in the world, we’d think, “Change is happening!” The world is changing, and we’d have this positive reaction, and our wives would look at us like, “What the heck’s wrong with you guys?”

Mirabai Devi: Those are the fire elements in you. It’s not that we wanted people to suffer or anything, but obviously we all want the world to change, and we were interpreting events as being indicative of change, rather than as being just a bad thing happening. And people sometimes don’t like it at gatherings when I open up talking about what a critical condition the world is in, and the reality is, some people like to have their head in the sand and they don’t want to hear it. And it’s the reality, our world is in a critical state, and that is an agent for change. That’s when we all need to rally together in communities and make the changes that need to be made, find the solutions that need to be implemented, and do whatever we can to bring in the light in the new paradigms, in the new solutions. So it’s not a negative thing, it’s just that, again, it’s that kickboard, that agent for change, that we need to move quickly and do something about it. And fortunately some people are, but many people are still with their heads in the sand saying, “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know.”

Rick: And wouldn’t you say that people like yourself and other spiritual teachers, they’re doing their best to lubricate the process, you know? I mean, it doesn’t have to be too traumatic. The trauma can be minimized. The more the spiritual element can be infused into the world consciousness, the less traumatic the transformation has to be. But one way or the other, the transformation has to be.

Mirabai Devi: Exactly, it has to happen. That’s well said. Time has come. We’re in it, we’re in the time now. There is no more time.

Rick: Even on the news, I mean, I watch the news every night, and even Brian Williams on NBC News says things like, “People are starting to feel like the world is coming to an end.” There’s so many disasters and so many difficult situations. I mean, ISIS is beheading people on TV, and we’ve got Ebola in Africa breaking out, and Syria’s situation is crazy. And people are scratching their heads, and people are scratching their heads – and now there’s global warming, and people who are really into that say that could wipe out a good portion of humanity, and even all of us if the temperature rises by six degrees centigrade, it would be incompatible with human life. Some people are a little pessimistic, and even people with a spiritual bent who are focusing on that stuff can’t quite see how a spiritual transformation is going to manage to circumvent the huge momentum of negativity that seems to be building. So I imagine you have a different perspective.

Mirabai Devi: Well, I’ve been working very closely with this, as you can imagine, over the last ten or twenty years, and my experience is that this is critical, and this is the catalyst to get us to do something about it, and we are in that period of time right now, as we were just saying, where the changes need to be implemented and the new paradigms need to be brought about, and it’s not that we don’t have the solutions. We have the solutions, we’ve already seen all around the world so many great solutions being presented for all of our world’s problems, we just need to use them, we need to implement them, we need to apply them and make the changes. And slowly, slowly, it’s being realised. So if more political heads and more countries would really take action to refuse to continue the old ways we’ve been doing things, and really step into the ways that we can move from here on out, I’m trying to think of the exact word for that, we’ll just say apply new solutions. And this is what –

Rick: Innovation.

Mirabai Devi: Innovations, new technology –

Rick: There’s all kinds of cool possibilities.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, and many of them have been tested and proven to work.

Rick: Yeah. Energy things. And we could pave the roads with solar panels, there are people working on that, and they would provide free energy for everybody and they would charge your car as you drove along.

Mirabai Devi: There’s so many, we could spend hours talking about the amnount of solutions that have been found by people around the world, and now it’s time to implement them. And so I feel that we need to turn our back on the negativity and the past and what we’ve done, and really embrace these solutions and move quickly on them because the time, like you said, the environment, the global warming, the natural cataclysms that are speeding up, that’s the pressure cooker. It’s nature just putting us into the pressure cooker and saying “Do or die”, you know, get off the seat and take some action. It’s the way to kick us into action, nd it’s really a major wake up call, and it’s a furnace, not just in terms of global warming and the physical heat, but it’s a furnace on the spiritual level also, to get us to really wake up. And that seems to be a known factor around the world in spiritual communities and even in environmental communities, so now let’s see what happens.

Rick: Let’s see. I mean, it’s a David and Goliath kind of a story, because the powers that be seem so strong, and so dominant, and so much in control of everything, and the government is gridlocked, and the oil companies have billions of dollars, and all this stuff, and we’re these spiritual people, meditating, putting out good vibes, and a lot of people think you’re crazy to think you’re going to effect any kind of change. But you and I know, the subtle is more powerful than the gross.

Mirabai Devi: Consciousness is the factor for change. Nothing on the relative can change without consciousness, because consciousness is what creates it. So what we see on the planet today is a reflection of the low level of consciousness of the masses that we had. Now you have these spiritual pockets around the world that have raised their consciousness and are trying to impact the rest of the world to raise their consciousness, because as consciousness rises, we look at some of the things we’ve been doing and we see it’s barbaric. It’s barbarianism. It’s prehistoric barbarianism. And we’re still allowing things like this to occur on our planet, even though we know it’s destroying the environment, we know it’s destroying the earth, we know it’s destroying nature. And so how can we allow this to continue? And everybody at some level that looks into it knows that’s true. And so it’s just a matter of us, as I said, we have to trust that consciousness is changing and that the positive will prevail and that the old paradigm structures will fall away. In other words, these very dominant, aggressive, male, patriarchal structures that are keeping the planet and nature suppressed and in domination will have to fall away and give way to these new paradigm solutions that will save the planet and will be uplifting for nature and will be uplifting for all life forms on the earth. Otherwise the planet’s not going to make it. And that is, I know many spiritual teachers have been talking about this for the last 20 to 50 years, that we’re going to come to this critical time of change where we’re going to have to make the decision, we’re going to have to take actions that are going to bring about this global change. Otherwise they don’t know whether we’re going to make it or not. And to a large extent, I feel we are. I feel we are. Although it is hot and it is going to get hotter over the next year or two.

Rick: You’re talking about literally?

Mirabai Devi: I’m talking about energetically and climate-wise with the cataclysms. This is prophecy. This has been prophesied by the Mayans and other great prophets that this is going to happen to force humanity, so to speak, to choose positivity, to choose love, to choose unity, and to choose life-preserving technology instead of to move towards and continue the path of destruction which we need to move away from. It’s just obvious. So that’s what we’re magnifying, focusing our intentions on, praying for, energizing and supporting, is these new paths.

Rick: Yeah. One can get pessimistic because it seems like the powers that are in control are so intractable and how can we change things. But I really feel like you’re saying that there’s a momentum and it’s growing and it’s subtle but powerful. And somehow or other, look at how much the world has changed from one century to the next and no one could have foreseen the degree of the changes. They always think things are going to pretty much stay the way they are but then there’s huge changes.

Mirabai Devi: Yes.

Rick: So, let’s…

Mirabai Devi: I’d like to comment on that.

Rick: Please.

Mirabai Devi: I would say that the light will always prevail, the truth will always prevail, and that there will be a positive outcome. I don’t believe that it’s immediate. Some people felt that in 2012, you know, we were all going to wake up, the whole planet was going to wake up, everyone was going to start levitating and walking through walls and manifesting instantaneously and all of that was what we all talked about as being part of the golden age or the fifth dimension, whatever you want to call it. But the reality is change takes time and there is, you know, if we focus on all the pockets and areas where the change is coming, where positive things are being done, and where consciousness is rising, and we keep focusing on that little by little by little, things sometimes need to fall apart before they get better. And little by little they’re going to get better. And I think there’s going to be some more falling apart to come until things get better. But they will get better, they will improve, there’s no doubt about it.

Rick: Well think about it, I mean think about how many things there are on this earth that really have no business being here. I mean, just take some obvious examples, tobacco companies and GMOs and the whole oil industry, which served us for a while but is really antiquated now and obsolete. If we’re really going to undergo the kind of change you’re talking about, somehow or other those things are going to have to collapse.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, these are the old paradigms that I was referring to that are not life-preserving, that are destructive, and that are going to destroy the human race as well as the other life on the planet. But the reality is that these old paradigms must fall during this time, so that the new paradigms that are life-preserving can come into being. And so we’re going to see more and more of that crumbling of the old and the birthing of the new, and as the old’s crumbling, it’s not pretty. It gets a stronghold and gets more intense.

Rick: I was out on a boat ride on Lake Lucerne with Maharishi one time, and he was talking about this topic and things were going to get kind of wild, and people were saying, “Well how can we survive this, Maharishi?” And he said, “Just hold on to yourself.”

Mirabai Devi: Because the light is within you, and the light is peace, and if you hold on to that peace within you and that light within you, then everything that’s happening on the outside, you can bring light to that. You can bring peace to that, and just keep remembering we’re not this body, we’re not this form, we are here to help make a difference. We’re here on this planet, in this world, to make a difference, and to help bring in the new paradigms, to help the light prevail. We’re here to do the work. We are the hands and feet of God. And yes, things are falling apart, and they’re going to continue to fall apart, because things are not going to be pretty during this period. I mean, if you just look at what’s going on on the planet and how it’s intensifying, for some people that’s very scary. But when you understand that it’s a purification of the old crumbling and the new rising, it’s going to look ugly for a while.

Rick: Look what happens to the poor caterpillar. He goes into this cocoon and turns to mush. His whole body disintegrates. And then somehow or other, these imaginal cells begin to form and begin to take structure, and next thing you know you have a butterfly coming out.

Mirabai Devi: So beautiful. Butterflies are symbols of transformation, and we’re undergoing major transformation on the planet. And anyone knows when you’re undergoing transformation, it’s painful. You feel like you’re being ripped apart. Your life is being ripped apart. It’s upside down. It’s a mess. Even the planet is being ripped apart, upside down in a mess. But the orderliness inside of the soul, of the spirit, and the knowledge of the self, the orderliness of that inner, infinite impeccability, that organizing power of the universe, that universe functions according to absolute precision. Nothing happens by mistake. Nothing happens by chance. Everything is deliberately on purpose, whether it’s a cancer in your body, whether it’s global warming. It’s on purpose. Like you said, it’s all part of the evolutionary cycle to wake us up, and to get us to make different choices, different decisions, and to learn the lessons and do better. So I’d say love, serve, give, transform, bless, and stay focused on positive thoughts, words, and actions, and keep on the path of positivity, because it is ultimately only going to get better. And that’s not just hopeful thinking. That’s because there’s somebody in charge of this universe.

Rick: That’s beautiful. We have about five minutes left, and I hate to throw away five minutes, because I could talk to you all day, but that was such a beautiful statement. I almost attempted to make that the concluding statement. Is there anything else you’d like to say, or do you feel like we’ve done it for now?

Mirabai Devi: There’s so much more I could say. I mean, really just the main focus of my work is divine love, and is the path of self-love, and teaching people how to love themselves, and to receive love from the self, and that when we can really stop beating ourselves up in our lives, stop judging ourselves, stop criticizing ourselves, stop negating ourselves, and focus, like I was saying, on that deep inner state of love, and magnifying that, and making that the most important thing in our lives, that we’re a loving person, and that everything we’re doing, thinking, and speaking, is loving, is positive, is uplifting, is beneficial to the planet, is helping others. That’s what we take with us when we leave here. We don’t take with us the rest. We don’t take with us anything else material, anything else that we’ve created. Just what we’ve done on an inner level, wherever we complete ourselves to be in that state of love, when we leave this world is what we take with us, and where we go to when we leave. We go to places that reflect that, that held us, held us in more love, and that then we’re able to evolve. So even though we’re in the fire, in the washing machine here, stay focused on what’s real. Stay focused on transforming yourself, even though the world is tumbling around. Transform yourself with focusing inside on your inner state. Meditate on the light, meditate on the love that you are, and meditate on the divine within you, and fortify yourself, strengthen yourself, so that you have the resilience to be able to walk through this world, and not be thrown like a leaf on the wind here and there, just affected by all the suffering around you. But when you’re strong, and your cup is overflowing, and you’ve given to yourself, and you’ve received that love, and you’ve taken care of nurturing yourself, you have infinite amount to give to others. And you can help others, and you can help your community, and you can make a difference. And that’s where our focus needs to be, not on the negativity, because that drains our energy.

Rick: Beautiful. When are you coming back to Fairfield again?

Mirabai Devi: I’m not sure yet.

Rick: Maybe next year, or something like that?

Mirabai Devi: Yes, it would be 2015.

Rick: Good. I’d like to do this again when you come back.

Mirabai Devi: Wonderful, I’d love that. Thank you.

Rick: Because really, I could sit here all day. Questions keep coming in, “Let’s talk about this.” Our time is limited.

Mirabai Devi: Thank you.

Rick: So this is very sweet. And, you know, lest you don’t pick up on this through the video camera, and you might think that she’s just a very eloquent person, there’s a beautiful energy around you, and I just feel myself kind of bathing in it, and very uplifting, and clarifying, and sweet. So I really think that you embody that of which you speak.

Mirabai Devi: Thank you. There’s no separation, right?

Rick: Right.

Mirabai Devi: Only that which is in our minds.

Rick: Yeah. You know what it is? It’s like when I’m in the presence of someone who is highly evolved, or enlightened, or something, it’s almost like there’s a feeling like the air is thick with something that is by no means isolated to their immediate physical presence. It’s like a fullness or a wholeness kind of permeates the atmosphere.

Mirabai Devi: It feels good, doesn’t it?

Rick: Yeah, very good. Great. So let me make some concluding remarks.

Mirabai Devi: Thank you.

Rick: I’m speaking with Mirabai Devi, and this is one of an ongoing series of interviews. If you go to batgap.com, you will find them all archived, and indexed in various ways, alphabetical, chronological, categorical. And we’re going to be putting up a page also where you can search for events in your area. In other words, you could search London and see, of all the people I’ve interviewed, what might be coming up in London. Or you could sort it by teacher, and you could search on Mirabai and you’d see all of her events that are coming up, and so on. So there’s that, and various other things if you explore the menus on the site, batgap.com. And of course there will be a page about Mirabai dedicated to this interview, and from there you will find links to her website. Have you written any published books? Do you have any books on it?

Mirabai Devi: I do. I have a book called “Samadhi, the Essence of the Divine” right there. And I have four published CDs that are on my website on CD Baby. The book is actually on Amazon.com. You can order it through Amazon.

Rick: I’ll link to the Amazon thing directly from the site.

Mirabai Devi: Yes, you can get it on my website or on Amazon.com, as well as my four CDs on CD Baby or directly on my website. Great. So that just about covers it. Thank you very much for listening or watching. I’m going to take the weekend off next week. The following weekend will be Judith Blackstone. Very good.