Thomas Beck & Janet Colli Interview

Summary

The discussion explores how trauma, illness, and psychological distress can disrupt ordinary identity and become openings for spiritual transformation. It also considers the roles of support, meditation, surrender, and embodied integration in turning difficult experiences toward healing and expanded awareness.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can trauma or serious illness lead to spiritual awakening?
• How can difficult psychological states such as OCD become gateways to transformation?
• What support helps people integrate spiritually transformative experiences safely?
• Can meditation and therapeutic work prepare a person for profound changes in consciousness?

Key takeaways

• Trauma alone is not enlightening; support can help transform it into growth.
• Illness can challenge rigid beliefs and open a person to surrender and change.
• Meditation may gradually reshape the nervous system and expand awareness.
• Difficult mental states can become portals when approached with awareness and support.
• Healing spiritual transformation requires grounding, integration, and respect for individual needs.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been about 370 of them now. If this is new to you, go to the Past Interviews menu on batgap.com and you’ll see all the previous ones archived and categorized in various ways.

Today’s guests are Thomas Beck and Janet Colli. I’ll just read their bios for the sake of those who may not have read them online.

Thomas Beck, PhD, has helped people for 25 years to integrate transformational experience—a radical restructuring of the psyche on a higher level of functioning. As a result of his own neurophysiological restructuring, his meditation practice, and interactions with an otherworldly being whom he calls Cosmic Mother, Thomas is now helping people heal from a wide range of physical illnesses. He believes we all have the ability to heal and to spiritually awaken through the unconditional love of the Almighty Spirit.

Janet Elizabeth Colli, PhD, is a psychotherapist in the Pacific Northwest specializing in integrating trauma with spiritual awakening. With expertise in both clinical and transpersonal psychology, she bridges psychology with the extraordinary and the mystical. She presents at the professional conferences of the American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences.

Catalyzed by a spiritually transformative experience herself—an STE—during cancer treatment, she now provides psycho-spiritual support for a full range of processes, including for those who have been psychiatrically hospitalized during STEs. She facilitates Spiritual Emergence Seattle, a consultation service integrating psycho-spiritual, physiological, and community support. Janet lives on Whidbey Island and swims with wild dolphins in Hawaii.

✨ Trauma as a doorway to awakening

Rick: There are three things I think that we’re going to be talking about in this interview. One is trauma as an impetus to spiritual unfolding. Another is subtle beings, which I’ve covered in quite a few other interviews. And a third is ETs, or extraterrestrials, and the role they may play in an individual’s or collective spiritual awakening.

Obviously, on both of those points—the subtle beings and the ETs—I’d say people fall into several categories. There are people who don’t believe in them whatsoever. There are people who feel that they’re just imaginary. There are people who feel that they’re real but irrelevant to true spiritual aspirants, and there are those who feel that they are real and relevant.

Whatever category you may happen to fall into, we’re not going to spend a lot of time trying to dispel the most obvious and common skeptical questions, because we could spend the whole interview doing that. There will be a certain presumption of the legitimacy of these things, and we’ll explore from there.

So, thank you, Thomas and Janet. It’s great to be with you. I really enjoyed reading quite a lot of all three of your books.

Janet: Oh, wonderful.

Thomas: Thanks for having us. We appreciate it.

Rick: Among these three categories, which thing would you like to talk about first? Is there a logical sequence that we can unfold?

Janet: Yeah, I think there is. I’m just loath to begin, that’s all. But trauma is the most grounded thing, and so I think before we take off into the nether realms, we might as well begin with something very embodied: trauma.

That’s pretty much the way we both came in. It’s happening a lot in this collective, in this culture, and it happens to be one of the primary ways that people’s egoic consciousness gets split open, dissociated, and fractured. Therefore, it’s got to be a primary way that we can evolve and transcend and enter into these higher states of consciousness.

Rick: I’m sure you’ll give us examples, but I do have friends who have gone through fairly traumatic experiences, like the death of a sibling or a serious health crisis. It sort of kick-started them and shifted them into a different and higher state of consciousness.

Janet: Yeah, and that’s exactly what we work with. I think it can’t be overstated. I’ve got a wonderful quote from Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religious studies at Rice University.

Rick: I’ve interviewed him on this show.

Janet: Oh, wonderful.

Extreme illness, car wreck, and sexual abuse are particularly effective inducers of the mystical.

So, that about says it all. I generally begin with that. Sometimes I tell my own story and how that catapulted me into the work we do today.

Rick: Why don’t you do that? So, your own story was cancer.

Janet: Yes, and I must say, putting it all together has taken all of my life, even though it seems like the first part was another life. I was diagnosed at 30 with cancer, but it came right out of my childhood. My father was bipolar, and my mother was fairly fractured.

I had a traumatic hospitalization for food poisoning at around three. That catapulted me into Western medicine. My father was an MD as well, so I grew up with a healthy dose of trying to work with an extreme state—bipolar—and he was trying to manage that himself. Growing up with that was both wonderful and awful.

When I was hospitalized, I developed a very difficult time absorbing food. I ended up with my growth stunted, and I was not very healthy for the first part of my life. Western medicine had basically failed me.

During an episode later, when I was in my late 20s, my father was having an episode and was fairly manic. We decided that he would, for the first time in his life, be hospitalized psychiatrically. This is a psychiatrist, and doctors don’t, in this culture, make very good patients.

He was hospitalized, and that ended in a tragedy. He died in the hospital. Having been helpful in making that decision, I took that on and felt very guilty about it, which led directly to my own cancer.

So, here I am at 30 with cancer, which was treatable with Western medicine, but there was no way I could trust it. If you consider that my ego had been formed very early on out of fear of the medical system during that hospitalization, here I was expected to do chemotherapy and radiation. I also had an eating disorder as a result, because I couldn’t absorb food, and it just did not feel good to eat.

In the process of healing that, now I had a diagnosis of cancer, and I was supposed to do chemotherapy and radiation, which I absolutely could not do. I said, “That’s going to kill me,” and I refused to do it.

So, I spent three years trying to initiate a mystical experience and a spontaneous remission. That, of course, can’t work if you’re not in a place of surrender. I had a big no, and it wouldn’t happen. After three years, I was dying.

When I was dying, I had a dream, and the dream was of dolphins. The dream pretty much saved my life. It initiated my ability, my trust, and my faith to move forward and do the thing that I absolutely could not do. The thing I was most afraid to do was chemotherapy and radiation.

I was forced, pretty much by creation, to confront who I thought I was and how my conceptual reality had been put together up to that point.

Rick: Yeah.

Janet: So, I did the chemotherapy and radiation. I spiritualized Western medicine. I had to bring East and West together in my body and transmute what I had firmly believed was poison.

I entered into a whole other level of life. For me, it was a mystical, spiritually transformative experience that lasted for a number of months, integrated, and then I was basically remade and reformulated. So, I knew that trauma was a doorway, a transformational doorway, and I wanted to help other people.

Thomas: I would just add that Janet’s illness was a very curable form of cancer, and she went for a long period of time without undergoing the traditional therapy for it, which was scary in its way. All you have to do is undergo the chemotherapy, which is, relatively speaking, not the worst of that type of medication treatment. So, I’m in the background watching all this and thinking, “Holy smokes, let’s move forward with this.”

But she was powerless, of course, and had I been forced to do it in a negative way, it never would have worked. When I said yes to it, it was a transformation.

Rick: I had friends who died messing around with natural cures and things like that when chemotherapy probably would have saved them. Sometimes you really have to just do it. Maybe in some advanced civilization there will be some Star Trek-like thing where they just zap you with a little light beam and you’re all healed, but we aren’t there yet.

I’m just saying this because sometimes the topic of suicide comes up, and I make statements about it because we have a large audience. People have actually said that this show has brought them back from that brink, and maybe it’ll bring them back from the cancer brink, too.

Janet: Every case is individual, but for me chemotherapy and radiation happened to be my transformational door. For somebody else, it can be something entirely different. But that dream of dolphins was the impetus that enabled me to trust, and so I have that connection with them very deeply inside of me.

Rick: An obvious question would be: You guys are both scientists. Have there been any studies showing that large, traumatized populations—the survivors of those situations—have large percentages of spiritual awakenings? For example, the Holocaust, Rwanda, genocide, or what’s going on now in Syria? Are we going to see, a few years from now, a blossoming of spiritual awakening in that traumatized population?

Janet: I can say two things. First of all, it’s with assistance or with some kind of support, generally, that these things can blossom or turn that corner into transformation, and that’s why we want to support people. Trauma in and of itself is not enlightening, no, but with support, I think we all have built into our DNA the transformational process or potential. As Stanislav Grof says, “Every human being has the potential for mystical experience.”

As far as research, Ken Ring’s research was really interesting. Years ago he did a study called the Omega Project. One of the things he looked at was people who had either a near-death experience or some kind of UFO encounter, which could be a close encounter or just a UFO sighting.

What he found was a statistically significant increase in the trauma they had experienced in early childhood. So, what we can say is that it can definitely set you up for experiences that can be seen as subtle-realm or spiritual. It can definitely set you up through the capacity to dissociate.

Rick: Leonard Cohen had some line about the cracks being how the light gets in. Do you remember that line?

Janet: Yes. I’ve got that on my website. It’s perfect. “Forget your perfect offering,” right? Except the cracks—the cracks are how the light gets in.

The cracks are how the light gets in.

Rick: I know people who I would consider highly enlightened who had really nice childhoods, real smooth, like Adyashanti. He had great parents; everything went nicely. Although he did have some major physical breakdowns in his 20s, where he was stuck in bed for six months. Eventually, he got the message. It was like something was trying to shift him into a different mode of life.

Janet: Perfect, case in point. We get remade, we get undone, we become undone. Our egoic nature gets fractured by any number of things, and the more we realize that and can work with it, the more we can see the doorway. The training I did was like, “Oh, you have a problem? Congratulations!” Because that could just be the biggest doorway to enlightenment.

Thomas: My own experience as a child was that I experienced sexual trauma. As a teenager, directly related to that, I went through a period of about three years where I experienced extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder. In those days, not much was known about it, there were no medications for it, and there really was no understanding of what actually happens in the brain.

More recently in my life, I have used the remnants of the OCD as the doorway into some really quite extraordinary experiences. So, the trauma-to-transformation route has been my path, and I’m still on that path.

Janet: I would like to say something about OCD in particular. When I hear Stanislav Grof speak, the thing that seems to fascinate him the most is OCD and his experiences with people with OCD during LSD psychotherapy. That’s why it has been such a profound doorway for Tom.

When you go into these states, and if you’re focused on the states of obsession or revulsion, then, because you have a higher order—Tom, at this point, is a long-term meditator, and his brain functioning has expanded beyond that—you can go from that place in the brain where that experience functions and have that expansion take place again and again. It has been profoundly transformative.

Rick: I sometimes joke that OCD is my friend because it’s made me meditate regularly for 48 years.

Janet: It can work in some positive ways, too.

Rick: I remember walking to school when I was a kid and not stepping on the cracks because it was going to break my mother’s back.

Janet: The brain’s way of compensating can be enormous. Tesla had OCD, as you might know.

Rick: Everything had to be in multiples of three. If he stayed in a hotel room, it had to be divisible by three, and he would walk around a building three times before going into it.

Thomas: He would use about 12 napkins—embroidered napkins, piles of them. He was pretty deep into his OCD.

Janet: When you work with the brain and these states, it can be a portal to expansion. That contraction and expansion, which is at the heart of the universe, actually happens within our brain when you pass through that transformational door, whether it’s cancer, OCD, or sexual trauma.

Rick: I would like to think that we possibly have the option, if we believe that we have free will, of getting the message without having to be whacked over the head. We don’t necessarily have to go through extreme trauma in order to have a spiritual awakening.

Janet: Not necessarily. But how else are you going to crack that ego structure? I mean this lightly, because it’s not in our business to go around cracking the ego structure. But that is essentially what needs to be done. That is the crack that lets the light in.

That egoic structure, whether it’s through long-term meditation, the help of a guru, or otherworldly beings, something has to happen. There has to be some intrusion.

Rick: The more we can take the initiative ourselves to thin our shell, the less God or nature or whatever is going to have to clobber us.

Thomas: Years ago I was really a beginner about meditation. I began meditating, and I really, really liked it. So, I would get up at 3 a.m. and meditate for three hours, day after day after day, and I could feel my nervous system shifting from week to week. It actually became too much at one point, and I had to back off.

In the long term, though, this led to a number of very expansive, incredible experiences that just happened spontaneously, like the ones I write about in my book. I began to think, “Gee, is there some way that I can actually facilitate these things happening?”

That led me to a Jungian psychotherapist. At one point, I said, “I need to bite the bullet and look at the trauma that I experienced as a kid much more deeply, and I’m ready to do that now.”

For a period of about 18 months, every single time we met, I would have a very expansive, incredibly intense experience that lasted for 60 to 90 minutes. Eventually, the energetics of those sessions focused more and more on my arms and hands, as opposed to being a whole-body experience. Then, probably in the last year and a half or so, I became aware that I can actually help people reduce their symptoms from some pretty serious illnesses.

I meditate six to ten hours a week right now. Trust me, I have clients who have never meditated in their lives. They start out with five minutes a day, and I’m going, “Fantastic. Go for it. Do it, do it, do it.” And it changes them.

🩺 Healing and neuroplasticity

Rick: Are there any examples among your clients that you want to bring up?

Thomas: The one that comes up right away is a man in his early 50s who, as a child, experienced some of the most severe sexual trauma that I’ve ever been aware of in my career. As a result, it’s very difficult for him to look at what happened to him because he goes right back into that state, and he dissociates—extremely dissociated.

He made a decision that he wanted to confront his trauma head-on. He began to talk about some things that had happened to him, and only in a very general sense. I could watch him dissociate, and he actually became nauseous, could barely hear my voice, and he was sitting four feet across from me.

He doubled over, and I went through the normal routine. I patted him on the backs of his hands and patted his legs to bring him back. It began to help a little bit, and I got his awareness back after about 10 minutes. At some point, he sat quietly, and I could watch this shift happen.

He made a fundamental shift from being extremely distressed by even touching the surface of his trauma to going clear to the other end of the continuum in a matter of about 10 to 15 minutes. I call it the Buddha smile. It came over his face, and he sat back relaxed and went into an actual state of complete bliss.

I said, “How are you doing?” Let’s call him Ralph. He just smiled and looked at me. I said, “Just hang with that for the next half hour,” which he did. Then he said, “Okay, it’s time to go. I’m good.”

I made sure he was grounded and could drive. He told me the following week that he had experienced that for the rest of the entire day. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of his entire life.

Rick: Would you concur that trauma, and all mental states for that matter, will have a physiological correlate? Every thought we think, every emotion we feel—everything has some kind of neurophysiological counterpart. If there’s been a lot of trauma and it has residual effects, it must be stored physiologically as well as mentally. Overcoming it necessitates and involves a physiological transformation as much as a mental one.

Thomas: When a child is traumatized, no matter what the trauma is, we have to shut down emotionally, oftentimes, to survive what’s going on around us and what’s being done to us. So, certain brain structures are altered during that process.

As a form of compensation, our brains are incredibly neuroplastic. One part of the brain can take over the functions of another part to compensate. This has been shown to happen with people who begin mindfulness meditation. Within about eight weeks, fMRI studies show actual physical structural changes in their brains, as well as functional changes.

One part of the brain shuts down, and another part opens up as a form of compensation. This is what I believe allows a lot of people who’ve been severely traumatized to become much more intuitive. It makes it easier for them to open up to these other states of consciousness and to the beings that inhabit these other realms.

Janet: If you come into a childhood setting where there’s going to be abuse and trauma, I also have to look at this in terms of the soul. Such settings teach a person how to leave their bodies or become vast dissociators.

But what happens with that doesn’t necessarily cause just pathology. It’s teaching you, training you, how to focus your awareness into other realms and realities that are going to affect us spiritually. That dissociative quality can become functional.

When you give a long-term view of that, it’s hard—you don’t want to bring that in too early when somebody’s coming in with trauma and say, “Well, this is part of your karma or part of your soul’s journey.” But having been through that myself, I can’t ignore the bigger picture, as well as what it does to us in terms of our psychology and our physiology.

Rick: Some say we sign up for what we end up getting; we choose our parents. I read an article about a guy who hit his head on the bottom of a swimming pool and got a severe concussion. Shortly thereafter, he began to play beautiful classical music, composing it on the fly.

There was also that woman who wrote Stroke of Genius, and a little kid who got hit in the head with a baseball and thereafter was able to solve complicated mathematical equations just in his head. But one would like to think that you don’t have to actually damage the brain in order to open up its full potential.

Thomas: This is what I wrote about in my book: the being that I encountered when I was four years old, whom I call Angie in my book, but whose actual name is Cosmic Mother. There are beings that are very corporeal, very real, like we’re real. I call them people, and they have the capacity to download enormous amounts of knowledge and energetics into the human body that can take months, days, or years to integrate.

So it isn’t necessarily a traumatic experience that can lead to different kinds of awakening processes in a human.

Janet: But it’s going to be an intrusion of some nature. That’s the common denominator: an intrusion. It seems like an intrusion to our egoic self.

Rick: It might depend on how intact and defensive the ego is. If one fully trusts in what’s going on, one might not feel it as an intrusion, but as a gift.

Janet: That’s the trick, that’s the key: our perception of it. The perception initially may be one where you just look at what’s happening in the collective. How can you see that for the gift that it is? Ideally, one would want to say, “Congratulations, you have a problem,” or, “Congratulations, this is the energy of life.”

Rick: You said, “The current paradigm on our planet is one of polarization and isolation. A deep fear-based mass unconsciousness that sees control and will not stop until everything it touches is destroyed.” I’ve felt this very strongly most of my life. You wonder whether the darkness that may seem insurmountable is actually a trauma that’s catalyzing a worldwide awakening.

Janet: Part of the plan. That’s an incredible way to see it. We can see this polarity. The polarity gets bigger; it’s very unified, but out of that, the third transcendent state of consciousness will come. So if we’re in this contraction now, it’s just part of the plan.

Thomas: The underlying why brings us into what they call chaos theory in mathematics. When you feed a certain kind of energy into any natural system—global weather, individual consciousness, or collective consciousness—you keep feeding energy in over and over. At some point, the underlying attractor, the underlying form of the system, will go through an abrupt shift.

People meditate for years and years, and then one day, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, whoosh, something happens and this huge energy comes through the body. You see the world suddenly in a very different way.

If we understood this really well, it is something that could be applied to a lot of people collectively—a very different sort of planet.

Rick: There’s a phrase in physics called “phase transition.” When you boil water, nothing much seems to be happening even at 211 degrees Fahrenheit, but at 212, boom, it starts to boil. It could be that we’re a lot closer to a significant shift in the world than it would seem.

Janet: The words “species shift” come to mind. That was exactly what the beings told Marcy Clevans. They basically told her, “We’re undergoing a species shift.”

What’s happening individually will, in their wording, “move like a wave through the species,” so that the individuals who are experiencing this transformational shift make it possible for everybody else to participate by virtue of our connection.

Encounters with subtle beings

Rick: Let’s talk about beings. What are we talking about when we talk about subtle beings, and what is their relevance to individual and collective awakening?

Thomas: In my case, I knew all my life that something profound had happened to me when I was four years old, and I couldn’t quite pin it down. It was some sort of intervention from outside the normal state of affairs.

A couple of hypnotherapy sessions brought some imagery up. Eventually I worked with a woman who’s a natural remote perceiver. She was able to tap into the timeframe during which this happened and the emotional experience that my sister had had at the time. She mimicked that, and when I saw her mimic it, it sent me into an altered state.

Janet: It was sheer terror.

Thomas: My sister’s terror, not my own. At that moment, I began to recover some of the actual memories of what had happened. I was able to access the feeling, and spontaneously, the memories began to come forth.

Janet: The memories were reexperienced, so it wasn’t just a mental process. Tom was in this state himself.

Thomas: It was very physiological and very intense. They’re not just thoughts.

Janet: These memories are deeply associated with the age involved, so they’re state-dependent memories. You literally have to be in that state of consciousness in order to recover them fully. He went into the reexperiencing of his contact with this otherworldly being, and what we had merely surmised for all of our lives became manifest.

Rick: So, Thomas, what was that experience exactly with the subtle being? Why was it so impactful?

Thomas: The setting was central Ohio, a small house that my family and I lived in. The memories that came through were of an overwhelming love—unconditional love that was pulling on me, really hard. I had the memory of actually being moved through the air toward what I consider a light being: a female being who was making a very powerful contact with my subconscious and conscious mind.

There were three houses, and ours was the center house. I remember brilliant white light in the sky. Eventually, we moved toward that white light, and I was in the presence of this being.

At first, I was trying to ground myself. We had this huge mulberry tree in the backyard, and I was trying to grab that. At some point, I felt an enormous wave go through my body and had this feeling: “Ah, I can let go. I don’t have to struggle. I can just go with this energy.”

I found myself in the presence of a diminutive little being, very definitely female, probably four feet tall or smaller. I was four years old, trying to form my ego and figure out how the world worked, and all of a sudden everything I knew went out the window.

I remembered lying on a table, propping myself up on one arm, and looking into the eyes of this being. At that point, everything went sort of black. What I understand now is that it was like a mind merge with this being, and she was downloading a massive amount of knowledge and energy into me physically.

I came to understand later that it was not her first choice to do that at that moment, because I was too young. But she felt compelled to do so because of where the species is right now and because this whole thing was set up long before I was born.

I found out only a few years ago that my mother, as a child, had had an experience, and she didn’t know how to recognize it. There are actually what you call MIB experiences that have happened in our family over the years.

So, I was blessed to experience unconditional love on a level that I couldn’t have imagined. That has been the primary nature of my experience with this being: she exudes unconditional love.

Some people talk about negative experiences with beings, and I haven’t had that kind of experience. Mine has been very positive. Then she went away for many years, until about six years ago, when I started consciously asking her in my meditations to return to my life.

One day, I felt this overwhelming presence that lasted for a whole day and continued into my meditation that night. I asked, “Cosmic Mother, what’s happening here?” What I got was, “I’m not here for you right now, but somebody else is.” There is a male figure now. I call him Henry.

Henry is a being. I feel his presence all the time. In the last couple of years, Cosmic Mother has come back into my life, especially when I’ve been in these intensive states. She helps initiate these intensive states in a therapeutic setting.

So, I’m aware that she is around and that I’m in a very intensive phase of my awakening right now, and that includes the healing process I described earlier.

Rick: Wasn’t Henry the name of Jimmy Stewart’s rabbit in that movie?

Janet: No, that was Harvey.

Rick: Harvey! I knew it started with an H.

Janet: Henry is very personable, although he says, “I am not a soothsayer,” if we ask too many questions. He’s been known to give us very grounded information and has been helpful as the emissary, or go-between, between Tom and Cosmic Mother. The universe is efficient.

Many dimensions of reality

Rick: Was your first experience with Cosmic Mother a physical experience? Was it your physical body, or was that an out-of-body experience?

Thomas: It was my physical body. I tend to shy away from certain terminology anymore, but it was definitely an encounter experience with an otherworldly being.

People think, “You’re talking about subtle beings and not-so-subtle beings.” NASA released a report estimating that there are some 20 billion Earth-type planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone, based on Kepler telescope studies. Within the known universe, there are some quintillion possible Earth-type planets.

Rick: There are now estimated to be two trillion galaxies instead of a couple hundred billion in the known universe.

Thomas: It’s like, folks, we’re not alone in the universe.

Janet: Physical or nonphysical, we are right now in what we think of as a physical, material reality, but is that the only dimensional reality? Of course not.

I don’t get hung up on whether they manifest materially in our material reality or not. I look at it as phase transitions. Some things happen out of body, and some things happen very materially, but you have to become more fluent.

Think of it as water turning into ice. We happen to have the ability to pass through material objects at times, facilitated by these beings. They themselves are not bound by our temporal and linear reality.

Thomas: They have technologies.

Janet: We call them spiritual technologies.

Thomas: Spiritual and scientific technologies that are far more advanced than those of humans.

Rick: A quote from your book says, “A vast consciousness organizes the universe, subsuming everything. It is the glue that holds the universe together, everywhere and nowhere.” Science helps us realize this. If you look at anything closely, you see that vast intelligence at work.

The whole thing to me is one big mass of intelligence, which we could call God if we want.

Thomas: Space is not just big; it’s infinite. Time is infinite. There was no beginning and there is no end. Consciousness is also infinite. It’s virtually impossible to understand these ideas in our normal waking state, but in an expansive state, you get them as a direct experience of reality.

Janet: Or being in the presence of one of these beings. These are experiences that people have had, and that we have had, with much skepticism and ridicule. It’s very important to provide a place so that we can talk about this in as grounded a way as we can.

Rick: A few years ago, I organized a panel discussion with people who have subtle perception. One of them said that he constantly and routinely, as you and I experience birds and trees, experiences all the subtle realms of creation and all the beings who reside therein.

And you mentioned something about being in the presence of one of these beings. Well, we always are. They’re always there. We’re just not fully conscious of it. It’s about becoming more acclimated to that.

The subtle is fundamental to and gives rise to the gross. Gross material reality is said by mystics and visionaries alike to arise out of this subtle realm.

The reason we don’t see it ordinarily is that gross perception overshadows the subtle. The senses become habituated to a relatively crude level of functioning and lose the ability, or never even gain the ability, to pick up on these more refined values. But eventually, in the course of spiritual evolution, they do.

Thomas: That’s why meditation has been such an important part of my life. The more you meditate—if you’re doing it right—the more open you become. I got to the point where my sensory input was overwhelming because I had been doing such a great deal of meditation, so I had to back off for a while. But my nervous system has adjusted to that now.

Janet: His weekly sessions with the Jungian therapist were the container through which this being could enter and enhance his nervous system. Every week, it would be like literally darshan.

A new species and a collective shift

Rick: Your book is entitled The End of Homo Sapiens and the Birth of a New Species. Do you feel that this is literally true?

Thomas: I think so. It is a phase transition that I believe is already well underway. It’s like popcorn. One person becomes awakened, and then another, and then it reaches some critical mass, and then boom—a lot of people.

Maybe it only takes one person in every 10,000 or every million to become fully awakened in order to affect the collective.

Rick: One percent of the cells in the heart are pacemaker cells, and they regulate the beating of the entire heart. The square root of one percent of the photons in a beam of light, if they become coherent with one another, creates a phase transition in which the entire thing becomes a laser.

Janet: Our function right now happens to be to elucidate the role that these otherworldly beings are playing in this. We are not alone. We are certainly connected with them energetically and genetically, and there is a vast intervention happening.

For those people who are having similar experiences, we are here to normalize it and to validate it, just as Joy Gilbert did for us 20 years ago.

Extraterrestrials and human evolution

Rick: Could we say that there’s the whole extraterrestrial thing and the whole subtle-being thing, and then there’s some kind of overlap? There may be subtle beings who inhabit subtler realms, and extraterrestrials who have mastered travel not only over distance but over dimensions.

Thomas: Human beings are in the playpen right now in terms of these technologies. Given that another species would have the ability to travel vast distances, they would first have to have the technology to communicate across those distances in a relatively short period of time.

If you travel even at the speed of light, when you shine a flashlight at one end of our galaxy, it takes 50,000 years for the beam to hit the other side. So there has to be some level of technology that goes far beyond what we’re utilizing right now.

There are also the technologies of the spirit, which we are in the process of learning. What comes out of a great deal of meditation? These are remarkable technologies that cumulatively will become, or are becoming, the phase shift that we’re talking about.

Janet: We happen to think it’s encoded in our DNA. I have absolutely no proof of that, but that is one thing the beings have said. They said directly to Joy Gilbert, “Your DNA is coded to awaken at this time.”

What I see is that Tom is going through in slow motion what Joy went through, and that is important because I can document, write, and describe the experience to make it more normal for others.

Thomas: My resident state of consciousness is going through regular, periodic upgrades, and I don’t know what the endpoint is. It’s phenomenal to have these physical sensations in my body and also the expansion of my awareness of what’s around me.

Rick: I wonder how many people have actually been influenced by extraterrestrials directly.

Janet: I spoke at the American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences. Marcy Clevens, who is in my book, is now integrating her experiences and speaking publicly about them.

When she spoke at this conference, it was a tremendous success. As people sat around the table, some began to share experiences that they had not known how to think about or integrate. We had a profound sharing.

We are right there. The timing is now. If we impact certain individuals right now with this, the work will fall on whatever fertile ground it needs to.

Rick: If you could put yourself in the perspective of these beings and completely understood their agenda and their role in the evolution of our planet and species, how would you describe their role?

Thomas: The word that I use is a midwifing process. They are overseeing the transition that the human species is in the process of going through right now. They are making adjustments as we go along. The way to make adjustments is to impact individual people, as opposed to landing on the White House lawn.

People may be experiencing existential fear, and that becomes the resistance. It’s easy to ridicule this stuff because it isn’t scientific. But we use labels and words, and words can show us what possibilities there are.

Janet: We don’t say “alien abduction.” We stopped using that.

Thomas: I say “close encounters.” And the being—I scarcely even use the word being with regard to Cosmic Mother. She’s a person. It humanizes her. She isn’t human; she isn’t our species, but she has the human phenotype.

Janet: At the same time, I can say she’s a gray. I’m working with someone who has experienced mantis-type beings. We have to use some labels, and then we transform the labels.

We don’t see these beings through a good-versus-evil perspective. That may be true on some levels, but it’s not how we see them.

Rick: What about cattle mutilations?

Thomas: I don’t know a whole lot about it, but the little bit I’ve read suggests that some agent or agency may be doing tissue testing to see how contaminated we are.

Janet: We teach from personal experience and from the experience of those we know best, and that’s not our experience. What you choose to put your attention on grows stronger in your life.

Rick: Even with subtle beings, there are darker ones, and you don’t want to go there.

Janet: There are people who have been in hell realms—what the Tibetans would call hell realms. There are also forms of attachments or beings that you don’t want in your physical body or physical space, and there are ways to work with that.

The most profound way I know involves prayer—actually reaching out to the light. That was the solution, the remedy. His transformative leap was that.

Love is the answer.

📚 Spiritual masters and otherworldly beings

Rick: Some people might find it a stretch to think of extraterrestrial beings as spiritual shepherds or guides trying to uplift mankind. And yet there are stories in your book of spiritual masters actually being in contact with these extraterrestrials.

Janet: That seems to be the picture. Joy Gilbert’s book, It’s Time to Remember, is a jewel. Her life embodies the connection with these beings, going from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Tibetan Buddhist Sogyal Rinpoche.

Now we are in her tradition and lineage as well, coming out with our own experiences because it’s time. We’re not trying to convince anybody who doesn’t want to be convinced. We’re sharing our own experience, hopefully in a grounded enough way, beginning with cancer and trauma.

Thomas: In the last couple of years, I’ve made a connection with His Eminence Garshen Rinpoche. I think it’s important to ground what Janet and I have been experiencing in science and historical traditions.

This is a universe teeming with intelligent life. They are around us right now, and they love us very deeply. I understand that there are people who feel they’ve had negative experiences, and I have compassion for them. I’m just telling you that hasn’t been my experience.

Janet: The first case in my book Sacred Encounters is a woman who had post-traumatic stress from her encounter. So, not to disavow the traumatic aspects of it. You can work through whatever shock that caused to your nervous system and consciousness. It can be worked through. That’s why we trained in trauma therapy: not to disavow that, but to shelter it and usher it into the next stage of expansion.

I asked a Bengali saint’s Swami, “What do you know about these so-called aliens? What do you know about vimanas, the UFOs in the Vedic literature?” The answer was very clear: “No one is alien to Sri Ma. No one is alien to Sri Ma.”

Rick: If we think of ourselves as one global family, then no one is an alien. You just have to expand it beyond the Earth.

Thomas: There’s a continuum with trauma, with dissociation at one end and super-connectedness at the other end. There is some midpoint that can be used as a doorway to transition from one to the other, and this can be done on a collective level as well as an individual level.

Janet: This is the integration process. Beyond the actual experiences, the reliving and recovery of them, and making the connections—what it all meant—and then having to live in this higher energetic, that’s the integration process.

🕊️ Science and spirituality

Rick: I’m fascinated with the potentially mutually enriching relationship between science and spirituality. Science can bring a more systematic approach to spirituality, so it’s not all just faith and conjecture. Spirituality can bring a whole new set of tools to science—tools that it doesn’t have—to enable it to explore the vast majority of creation.

The ultimate tool would be the human nervous system itself, which is far more sophisticated and subtle in its functioning than any material tool we’ve been able to build to extend our senses.

Thomas: These beings come from different genetic lines than humans do, at least as far as we know. Their perception of the world around them is probably vastly different from how we perceive the world.

It’s incumbent upon those of us who have been in contact with these beings to teach about it at some point in our lives. We need to bring it out in a grounded way and connect it with science.

How can a being communicate with a human and not speak verbally? Is there some primal language that we all can understand? I think there is. A great deal of knowing or knowledge can be conveyed in a very short period of time. We grossly underestimate the capability of our human brains to take in, download, linearize, and integrate information.

Rick: I think there are levels of the mind that precede meaning. If you’re able to function on those levels, they precede verbal language. But meanings can be conveyed without the use of different languages.

Science helped us realize that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe or solar system. I would like to think that through a much more mature science—one that incorporated the exploration and knowledge of subtle realms—we could eventually make knowledge of that as common as many other things we agree upon as a culture.

Thomas: I’ve looked into technologies based upon my work with individuals. What if these crafts are real, and if so, how do they do the things people report? They’re far outside the envelope of any technology we currently have.

We are moving rapidly toward these hyper-technologies. I think there are ways to access solar energy that are very different from anything being done right now.

Janet: Tom has an energy project designed to bring some of these technologies to manifestation.

Thomas: It can be accessed safely and limitlessly, and we don’t have to burn anything to do it.

Janet: We try to be grounded. When I say Tom has an energy project, I mean an actual practical device. We are trying to normalize and manifest what has impacted us and others, and bring it home.

Rick: There’s a whole thing about implants in the body and genetic manipulation. It seems like there’s some kind of genetic engineering going on, perhaps on an interspecies level.

Thomas: Humans are sure trying to do it. We’re trying to genetically engineer everything.

Janet: I would say that we have had enough intervention in our genetics at this point that there’s no question in my mind that we have been impacted and even engineered by these beings. I have no proof, but I know stories that got my attention.

One person, during his near-death experience, was going through the tunnel of light, and flanking him were two beings we would call grays. Then he had a sense of his own body and realized he was a gray. He was himself that kind of being.

Rick: In human form for this lifetime?

Janet: For this human lifetime, but on the other side he reverted to his more resident state of consciousness and being as a gray. Joy said they are basically manufacturing bodies so that enlightened beings can have a human experience.

Who are we? Some of us come from different places. Some of us come from the stars.

Rick: It’s an interesting thought that there are genetically engineered bodies that could be adequate vehicles for some more highly evolved souls to occupy.

Janet: Exactly. It’s hard to disavow that if you read Joy’s book, or even mine, which is partly about her.

Rick: You mention the ancient Vedic society of India, which apparently had regular diplomatic links with extraterrestrial and higher-dimensional beings. The Puranas refer to 400,000 human-like races living on various planets, among which interbreeding regularly occurs, the human species allegedly descending from the Devas.

The Devas are usually translated as gods, but that could mean more highly evolved beings from elsewhere. In Sanskrit, the Devas are referred to as Vaimanikon, meaning travelers in Vimanas. Vimanas were aerial cars that the Vedas describe in some detail.

It’s like there was an ancient culture that was in regular communion with these other cultures.

Janet: I think we are headed in that direction now.

Rick: I think we are too, which is why I wanted to do this show. Even though people might think I’m a weirdo, I’ve never really restrained myself for fear of being labeled one.

Janet: The timing is now. There will be those who thank you.

Rick: History is rife with examples of people who have taken a fixed position and then been proven wrong over time. It’s just a mindset, and I really think we have to remain open-minded.

Thomas: It’s clear to me now. We live in a self-organizing, self-sustaining universe, and the fundamental glue that holds it all together is unconditional love.

If I had to say I have a goal in my life, it’s to help people heal emotionally and physically, and for myself to experience that unconditional love as much as I possibly can and help other people experience it as well. That’s my bottom line.

The fundamental glue that holds it all together is unconditional love.

Rick: What the world needs now is love, sweet love.

Janet: The beings told Betty Andreas, “Those who do not have love have nothing.” They basically said, “Love is the answer.”

Rick: A genuinely enlightened human being may be aware of the multitude of layers of creation, including those from which so-called aliens emerge. That pushes the envelope on what enlightenment or awakening really means.

Some people say that awareness has nothing to do with enlightenment and could be a distraction. Perhaps it could, if one places undue emphasis on it without getting down to the essence of things. But I think a full-blown spiritual development is going to include a lot more than mere self-realization.

Janet: At this point, we’re absolutely fine with our own experience, and we’re teaching out of that.

🩺 Healing abilities and kundalini

Rick: Is there anything more you’d like to say that you haven’t had a chance to get in?

Thomas: I feel like I’m on an accelerated asymptotic curve. I got my early experience with Cosmic Mother, and that gave me what I jokingly call a “curl brain boost.” Now I’m at a whole different phase in my process.

The ability to impact people physically with these hands is totally unexpected to me. The healing is like a miracle. It convinces me that there is hope for the human species. We have the ability to do things that are life-affirming. All we have to do is set our minds to it and not live in a place of fear.

I’ve experienced absolute, full-on, unconditional love, and it’s a mind-blower. It’s phenomenal to be in that space. There are times when I crave it and want to share it with people, however I can do that.

Rick: In contemporary spiritual circles, siddhis of any kind are often dismissed as irrelevant or distracting. And yet, these extraterrestrials have all kinds of siddhis: being able to levitate, go through walls, and do amazing things with people.

What does full human potential look like, and what does full spiritual potential look like? Is it merely a realization of oneness, or will it include a blossoming of capabilities that we have latent within us?

Janet: I don’t view it as a distraction, but as a necessary step in the process. Everything’s on a case-by-case basis. As we integrate these experiences, there’s a time for the work that Tom is doing now. Who knows what it will evolve into, but I know it’s important for him now.

With the proper degree of spiritual, emotional, and personal maturity, these things can be appropriate. Judgment itself can shut things down more quickly than anything.

Rick: What’s been the nature of your kundalini process, Thomas?

Thomas: I began to experience it about 20 years ago. I was doing three-hour meditations every night, from about 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. My first experience was that I got into a state where I could sit completely motionless, except for breathing, for two or three hours at a time.

Then it began to express itself as intense shaking—whole-body tremors. It would be like a hurricane came through. The front half was all the tremors, and then there’d be absolute calmness for 15 or 30 minutes, a beautiful, blissful state.

Then the other side of the hurricane would come through, and I would experience kriyas, spontaneous body postures and motions. My body would do a Balinese dancer kind of thing. Everyone’s like, “What is this? It isn’t me; it’s just this energy flowing through me.”

It’s actually become very intense in the last two or three months. But I’m so used to it now, it’s like, “Okay, what’s happening tonight?”

Rick: Some people get into much more dire situations, where they are bedridden and frozen in various postures for hours at a time, with volcanic energy that they can’t allow to go all the way up. If world consciousness is rising and this becomes more common, it’s something that will have to be dealt with systematically by knowledgeable people.

Janet: Spiritual emergency is rife with kundalini processes.

Thomas: Mine just seems to keep on going. I’m like, “Okay, that’s great.”

Closing thoughts

Rick: It’s really fun talking to you guys.

Janet: Thank you for such a broad-minded, heart-based communication with us. It’s very rare. We have not been able to do this publicly in this way, so I really thank you.

Rick: I’ve been around the block. I talk to a different person every week. If I couldn’t accommodate a wide diversity of perspectives and experiences and give people the benefit of the doubt, I wouldn’t be able to do this.

I feel like there’s much more to life than meets the eye. In my father’s house there are many mansions, as Jesus said. There are so many different mysteries and marvelous things in the universe that we generally don’t know anything about.

It’s important to keep an open mind and not to be gullible. I don’t say that because somebody said it, it must be true, but I’m open to the possibility that it is true.

Thomas: It’s important to keep this work grounded. That’s why I keep it grounded in science and meditation. People have been meditating for thousands of years to help awaken, so why can’t introducing another element from outside this planet be an option?

Janet: Why not?

Rick: Thank you so much for this, and thanks to those who have been listening or watching. I’ll put up a page on BatGap about this interview, with links to Thomas and Janet’s websites and books and any other relevant information.

Janet: Sri M, whom you interviewed, is a wonderful corollary to this show. We watched it, and we knew we were heading in the right direction. If anybody wants to see his interview in conjunction with ours, it would be lovely.

Rick: He was a good man. I recommend his autobiography, and I’d recommend your books. I’ve really enjoyed reading them.

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Janet: Thanks, Rick.

Rick: Thanks, Thomas and Janet.

Janet and

Thomas: Thank you. Bye.