¶ Introduction to Buddha at the Gas Pump interview with Mary Terhune
[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We've done nearly 700 of them now over the past 14 years. If this is new to you and you'd like to watch previous ones, we've got your work cut out for you because there's nearly 700 of them. They're about two hours each, but you can check out all the previous ones by going to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and looking under the past interviews menu.
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Yesterday is Mary Terhune. I'm not going to read her bio because she's a very smooth, not, I don't know, get the right adjective here, she speaks very well, and she's written a very interesting book called Out of the Blue. I'm just going to let her introduce herself in a minute, but it's basically an account of her spiritual experiences of awakening, revelation and transformation over the years.
And it has a forward by Raymond Moody, MD, PhD. And also there's a really nice reading of one of the chapters by Wayne Dyer, who most of you are probably aware of. Anyway, Mary got in touch a while back, and I really enjoyed listening to her whole book, and I'm going to enjoy talking to her, and I think you will enjoy it, too. So hi, Mary, welcome. Thank you Rick for having me on your program and you wanted me to introduce
myself. So a little bit about my background, I trained as an RN, worked in the field for about 15 years, went back to college. I thought I was going to become a clinical psychologist. Instead I entered the field of massage therapy because when I needed healing for myself I found it so effective that I entered a school and did that for three years. After that I became a Reiki master and after
that in the 90s I became a homeopath. So I've been on this path of healing for many many years but it all began my path really switched when in 1984 I had a crisis, a life crisis, and I lost everything that I had earned. I lost all my retirement money and found myself a single woman with an 11-year-old daughter.
I was in debt and I was beside myself with anxieties and I felt that I had failed because I didn't get a lawyer to protect myself and I was standing in the living room, my daughter was visiting her father at the time, and I was standing in the living room so bereft and feeling like such a failure that I began to sob and I couldn't think one more horrible thought about myself. It's just my mind could not take any more anxiety and it just stopped.
And when it stopped, this space opened up and through the window poured this light and this
¶ The Mystical Encounter at the Window
light began speaking to me. The literal window of your house? Window of my house in the living room. Meanwhile, I have no context for any of this, as I didn't know anything about spiritual paths, I didn't know anything about spiritual teachers, nothing about yoga, I knew nothing. I was stuck in sort of the ego mind, just living life and feeling pretty miserable. And when this light entered, it began speaking to me.
And when this light began speaking to me, I recognized the voice, and the voice was that of the mystic Jesus. Now some people say, "How did you know it was him?" And all I can say is, "You know when you know." And he began speaking to me, the seven revelations and the first revelation. My attitude is, I give everybody the benefit of the doubt, and I also take everything with a grain of salt, you know, and proportions vary.
Sometimes it's all salt, sometimes it's very little salt, and I really believe the thing. And I've spoken to a number of people who've had interactions with what they feel to be Jesus and as far as I know, it very well may be Jesus. Who am I to say? He's a busy guy, actually. He gets around. Like Gina Lake, a friend of mine, she's written a whole bunch of books where Jesus has basically dictated stuff to her and the books are really profound. So why not?
But is there anything else you can say that might just assuage the doubts of someone who is a little bit more skeptical than me? No, there's nothing more I can say because... If you were a Hindu, do you think you might have interpreted it as Krishna or something different? I don't know. In the end, I feel all these mystics belong to the world and they don't belong to any particular religion. That was my experience with him.
I had been brought up a Catholic, but I had long left the dogma of it and was just living life in the egoic structure. And I wasn't happy, that's for sure. All I can say is when it happens to you, that's when you know, because no one can tell you. Nobody can tell anybody anything. You have to experience these things for yourself. The first thing he spoke about was forgiveness.
And he said, "Now do you see that true forgiveness is self-forgiveness?" And when he spoke those words, he gave me the experience of self-forgiveness. And I understood that we have to be compassionate with ourselves on this earth plane because we all go through these tests, this life. We have karmas we have to live out and blaming somebody else for it isn't going to work because it's going to make you miserable in the end. And so self-forgiveness, he said, was the true forgiveness.
It isn't up to us to forgive someone else or someone to forgive me. I have to forgive myself for everything. And it takes that burden off of people than just to forgive yourself for anything that you have to go through in life because it's not an easy task on this earth to come back to your true self. I mean, you go through a lot. So he spoke about that, self-forgiveness, and he worked his way... So let's take an example of that.
So there's this guy on the news today who had killed four kids in Michigan with a gun, and he was expressing contrition and remorse for his behavior. So let's say you're him and you're going to be in jail for the rest of your life now. How would that work in terms of his inner psychology, forgiving himself? Would it be like, "All right, I was a stupid kid, I shouldn't have done it, and I'm forgiven"?
Or do you think it's really a kind of an ongoing thing that might take a lifetime of introspection and deep self-exploration to really get to the root of why he behaved that way and resolve it once and for all.
You have to have some sort of an inner awakening to your divine nature and by doing so, the divine nature of everyone as one and that takes a lot. Who knows that may happen for that person in this lifetime or, you know, a hundred lifetimes
¶ Inner Awakening and Forgiveness
from now. you think that true, thorough, deep self-forgiveness can't really happen without some kind of inner awakening? Yeah, you have to have some sort of inner understanding of yourself and the divine nature of things. It takes a lot of inner contemplation. So, it's not just like an affirmation of some kind of... It's not a mental, it's just not an idea, a construct. It's an inner experience that's very, very deep and profound.
And how do you evoke that experience? Let's say this kid in jail now, how could he do that? Would he need a spiritual teacher? Could he get it from reading books? Is it voluntary to have one of these things? Who knows how it comes? Grace is part of the construct of our divine nature. Who knows how that happens and how it comes? How did it happen in my life? I don't know. maybe it's just time for me to wake up. It's a mystery. It is a very deep mystery. Pete That's an interesting point,
which we can discuss more later after you've gone through these seven points and everything. But, you know, the question of can one do something to bring about the kinds of experiences that you're going to describe today? Or is it just like divine grace and you're lucky if you have them, you know, too bad if you don't. Mary Everybody has divine grace. Okay, it's part of our constructs. When it is time to happen for us, that's a mystery. I don't know.
How did I wake up? I don't know. Well, you were doing spiritual practice. I wasn't doing any spiritual practice. Not in 84. No, not in 84. I knew nothing about anything. And when someone told me I entered a spiritual path, I had to ask them what a spiritual path was. I didn't even know what it was. So, the mystery of when it's time for you to wake up to your inner divinity is itself a mystery. I don't know. I just don't know.
Do you think that past life spiritual work tends to predispose one to have this sort of thing?
I would say over the years that that's true. And especially when I met my spiritual teacher, and she said we're coming together again to complete something, and showed me that I had been a monk of hers in a past life. And then when you go through these deep, deep spiritual experiences, you do have recurrences or memories of having your past lives. And clearly, I had a lot of past lives, not only as a monk, but as a nun. And that comes to you as
you walk your spiritual path, whatever it is. And some people, it happens to and they remember,
¶ Past Lives and Spiritual Path
and some people don't, but that's, you know, it's all a divine mystery. So much is a divine mystery. Pete Yeah, I've never had any, well, a couple of things, but not much in terms of vivid recollections of past lives. But I have this deep conviction that I have had them and that I've probably been a spiritual seeker in many of them. Mary Certainly. And then he when he told me everything that I needed to know in that moment
about forgiveness, he moved on to judgment. And he said, "Now do you understand what judgment is all about?" And then he gave me the experience that when you judge someone else in a critical way, because we are all one, you are judging yourself. Now that's a very esoteric, deep contemplation. It doesn't mean you don't have discernment and don't hang around with people who bring you down.
but when it comes to judgment and wasting your precious energy on criticizing others, just for the sake of criticizing them, for the egoic joy of blaming other people, that is not going to help you and it comes back at you. So you mean you shouldn't hang out on Facebook and call people idiots for voting for the other candidate? Well, it's probably not. It's kind of a waste of your time. It doesn't do anything for you, you know. It makes you feel better in an instant, but then what
does that do, really? You're putting that out in the universe, it doesn't help. It doesn't mean you don't have discernment and make good decisions for yourself that leads you to your true inner state. I think some people get addicted to the hormones that they're associated with, anger and negativity and so on. Just like some people like to watch a lot of horror movies or they like to go on scary roller coasters because of the adrenaline or whatever, but there's a certain biochemistry,
I think, to being argumentative with people. And there's so much of that online these days, people get addicted to it. Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek Yeah, well, it keeps the egoic construct in place. And in the end, does that really satisfy your life? Not for me. You know, I can't speak for others, but he made that clear. And then when I understood that, then he moved on to the Bible and he said, "Now do you understand how they misuse my words in the
Bible?" And when he said that, I could feel his sorrow in my heart. I felt it. And I felt so sad that his message was understood and used against people to make them feel less than, even speaking about this now, so many years later, it brings tears. Yeah, and I could feel that, and that's really all that he said about that. That was enough for me to understand never to use words like that of mystics and masters to
hurt somebody else, to put somebody else down. That was very powerful in that moment. - Before you go on to the next one, let me ask you a quick question. So you mentioned that this light came in through the window and this voice started speaking to you and you knew it to be the voice of Jesus. Was there any visual thing associated with it or was it just a voice?
¶ The Misuse of Mystics' Words in the Bible
Aside from the light, did you see a figure of Jesus?
Well, it was the feeling that happened inside of me as well because he initiated, after he spoke these seven revelations, he initiated an awakening of the Kundalini in my body and all the centers. I could feel all the centers spinning. Wow. And I knew I had heard a little bit about Reiki prior to that, but I didn't really know what it was. And I'm like, oh my God, there are these centers that are awakening and they started spinning. So he was my first Kundalini experience.
He was my first Kundalini master. And of course, I had no context for this, except that I knew that this felt true, that this was the most important thing that could ever happen to anyone because my soul knew the truth even if I was not very connected with it prior to that. But when it happens to you and you get plugged into it, you come to know yourself or you come to know that truth.
So as I began to speak, these centers started to awaken inside of me and I felt this tremendous love that started to pour through me. He went on to speak on weight and emotions. Now you can imagine like, why is Jesus talking about weight and emotions of all the things in the world that he would talk about? But I think it was because I was in the healing arts and he wanted me to understand this from that point of view.
And he explained that the energies that are stuck here, I didn't know a word for it then, consciousness, but I didn't know the word consciousness then, that these emotions stuck and consciousness have an impact on your physical body and that you have to deal with your emotions and your mind, your feelings, because that impacts you and it impacts how your systems work. So basically, I think that's why he told me this. And of course, now all the chakras are spinning
in my body. All of them are spinning. Not this one yet. That came later. You're pointing to the crown chakra. The crown chakra. Not yet. But that all started spinning and I started feeling this immense presence and love. By the way, I should add that when the light came into the room, I had to lay down because it was so powerful. I couldn't stand up in its presence. So I was laying down on the couch as all of this was happening to me and unfolding in me. After that, he then spoke about disease.
And again, why disease? Because I was part of the healing path and I would 14 years later come to understand this on a deeper level. And he spoke about disease and that the reason that disease happens is that we have stuck emotions. And when we have stuck emotions and traumas that aren't resolved completely, they have an impact on the physical body. I'll talk about this later, specifically about what happened to me and my thyroid years later
how I came to really understand this better. So he said, the disease occurred because of stuck traumas. He didn't use the word trauma, then he said stuck emotions later, I would come to understand traumas. And that has a tremendous impact on your whole being, your glandular system, your cardiovascular system, all your systems, and that disease had to be resolved
on that level. First, the issues had to be resolved on that level first so you didn't end up having to experience what we call disease, which later I came to understand as disharmony. Now, this is as much as I could understand. When he finished with that, he spoke about, and I have notes because this is a lot for me to remember, he spoke about aging.
And again, it's because I was in the healing arts, and this is why he spoke about aging. So, I could understand that aging was really because the mind and emotions and body, there was so much friction in your mind that negative thoughts wears you out. It wears your system out. It wears out how everything functions properly. Your energy can't flow completely. We call it stress, but it's
¶ The Impact of Stuck Emotions on Health and Disease
really the mind and emotions and the thoughts, the discursive mind that's constantly berating you, putting you down, putting others down, you know, just this negativity that is this background that seems to have a life of its own that wears you out. And when I understood that, then he moved on to the ego. He didn't say, "Now do you understand the ego?" He didn't come at it from that point of view. He impressed me with this understanding that the ego is a mental construct. Later, I would call
it a case of mistaken identity. That's what I would call it later, but I didn't have those words for it at that time. He just said that you're not your thoughts, you're not the job you do, you're not a man or a woman, you're not a gender, you're beyond that. But of course, to understand all of this was a lot for me to take in and try to assimilate. Later, I would understand that the ego
it's just a case of mistaken identity. You identify as a body, you identify with your thoughts, like they're so important, and you identify with your mental constructs, your ideas of how you view the world, how you view yourself, how you view other people, and that's the ego. I understood that and I understood that not only did I suffer from this, but everybody suffered in the egoic construct. And it gave me not only compassion for myself, but compassion for
others. And basically, when that ended, that was the ending of his instructions to me. But now he was fully enlivening my Kundalini so that the chakras were spinning. And I'm feeling this incredible bliss, this incredible love. And I'm like, "Why didn't anybody ever tell me about this? Nobody's talking about this. This is the most important thing in the world. How come I wasn't told? Nobody's told me this. How did I know?" And at that point, then he
took his energy and removed a veil from my third eye. And when he removed that veil, I felt this immense love just pour from me. At that point, there was also a saying that came into my mind, and the saying was, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." And when I heard that, it's like it was
impressed on me. I understood by rich man, it didn't mean riches necessarily, but it meant your thoughts, you know, holding on to constructs, weighted down with all these thoughts and ideas. And of course, taking all of this in was very difficult. But the overwhelming feeling was there was so much love pouring out of me and envy. I was just an absolute bliss, which was a reprieve
from the anxiety that I was feeling. Oh, there was another song that played. And it was like, Sweet little Jesus child, they had you born in a manger. And that was going through me too. Sweet little holy child, they didn't know who you were. And I understood that we don't know who each other is. That child is in our heart. And when you hurt another, that's what you're hurting. That we really are one. And all of this just, you know, stirred me.
And even just talking about it now really stirs me, kind of makes me tear up. At some point, when he was finished, all these instructions, finished awakening my Kundalini, which I had no idea what would happen to me afterwards, of course, he withdrew his energy out through the window. And here I was in this state of bliss and wonder and awe, and I felt like I needed to go to the backyard, open the door and get some fresh air.
And so I went to the back door, opened the door, and what I saw, because he had removed something from my hair, right, remember? What I saw was packets of light everywhere. I looked at the tree, and there were packets of light glimmering over it, almost like a Christmas tree. And I didn't understand then that it was photonic packets of light. And that light was alive with love and omniscience. And I understood that everything that we see is created from those packets of light.
And there was so much love emanating that I burst into tears and I said out loud, "Oh my God, this is paradise, but we have made it into something else."
¶ The Experience of Love and Envy
And I felt we had made it into a hell for each other, when really this is paradise if we awaken to that inside ourselves. And something else got awakened within me and it was poetry. I started writing poetry and I wrote a poem about this particular moment and to the Kalilini. It's very short. I'll recite it now. Chakra one, chakra two, chakra three and four, up the ladder, down the ladder. Can you tell me more?
Chakra five, six and seven, when your consciousness is pure, you will find that earth's a heaven waiting at your door. And so I was in so much love and so much joy and bliss. So then what happened, right? Afterwards, I was working at that time in research administration at a very big Boston hospital. I had to go to work. I didn't want to go to work. I wanted to sit like Eckhart Tolle on a park bench and watch the phantasmagoria of life.
Just watch it and feel that love and let, just let me be in, you know, swim in this love, this amazing bliss. But I couldn't, I had to go to work. And it was very difficult because I was supposed to be working with numbers, statistics, with work. And when I sat down to look at the papers and do the work, I couldn't do it. I couldn't make numbers work. I couldn't function. I was in bliss. What can I say, you know?
And I didn't have anybody to talk to. I had never heard of any of this. I didn't know what consciousness was. And I had no context for it. But what I was left with was I wanted to meet somebody on earth, not just the mystic Jesus visiting me, which was fine, but I needed a teacher on earth. I need someone who could give me a context for this. I had no context for any of this.
Sounds like you knew some because you knew what chakras were in order to write that poem.
Well, that's because he awakened it in me. I mean, I had heard something about chakras, you know, I heard it and I'm like, what's that anyway? You know, is that true that there's light?
what light? What are you talking about? So he gave me the full experience of it, but I had no context to understand why this light was pouring through me and out of me and everywhere I looked all I saw was love and when I looked at people all I saw was love and I was in love with everybody and everything and everywhere and I remember having to go to work standing in an elevator going up the elevator to my office and there were doctors standing in there and one of them was making fun
I remember, oh, you know, that's a bunch of nonsense, all this energy and stuff, that's a bunch of crap, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he was going on, and I'm thinking, if you only understood what I understood, you wouldn't say that. And so I remember, you know, getting off the elevator and just watching people, the way they treated each other in an unkind way and not even really noticing each other. It kind of broke my heart. It's like, don't you know who you are?
¶ Seeking a Context for Enlightenment
And of course I had no understanding how to integrate all of this and I didn't understand why we didn't know about it, why no one spoke of it and I had no one to talk to. So I was thinking in my mind, well maybe if I met someone who understood Einstein's theory of relativity, energy equals mass times light, then they could help me understand this. You know, what happened to this energy and all this light and my physical body
and all of this, you know. So I had this in my mind and I also had in my mind, I need to meet someone who has a clear pair of eyes. That's what I need to meet. And so I would go to different talks by different teachers and I would be like, "No, that's not it. No, that's not. Nope, that's not right." And they would say things like, "No, that's not right. That's not right." Until one day, two years later, 1986, I went to a talk at a place called Interface at the time in Watertown, Mass.
it was a panel of speakers, they were going to be talking about energy medicine. I go, "Yes, energy medicine, that's up my alley, you know, energy, they're going to talk about that." So one after another stood up and, "No, that's not right. No, that's not right." Until one person stood up and he said, first thing he said was, "E equals mc squared, Einstein's theory of relativity. That's right. I have to talk to him." And so he turned out to be an energy healer,
he called himself, and I ran up to him afterwards and I said, "I have to see you. I have to make an appointment. Let's make an appointment right now." So I did make an appointment. I went to his office. When I walked into his office, he said, "I'll be right back. I have to go get something." So I said, "Fine." And I noticed this picture on the wall, and it was a picture of this person, a woman. And I looked into her eyes. Those are the eyes. That's the one. And he walks into the room,
And I said, "Who is that anyway?" She told me her name. Because prior to him walking into the room, when I looked into her eyes, the picture came alive and began to speak to me. And this sounds strange, but when it happens to you, it's not so strange. And she said, "We're coming together again to complete something." And she showed me this little movie clip that I had been among of hers in the past life and that for political reasons or whatever we got separated so I couldn't complete
my journey. And I had no idea who this person was when he walked back, the healer walked back into the room. I said, "Who is that? Is she a monk?" And he goes, "Yes, she's going to be in Boston in a few weeks. You want to meet her?" Heck yes, I do. And the hour-long session, little did I know at that time when I looked into her eyes, I had also received another Kundalini awakening, like I did from Jesus. And it was supposed to be an hour-long session of
his energy and using his breath and moving energy and all of that. It turned into a six-hour event where the most amazing experiences happened. All my meridians opened with light pouring through, light coming out of my hands, out of my feet. And I thought, "God's here. I wonder why. Wonder what this is all about." And then I thought, "Ah, I remember pictures of Jesus and pictures of Mary, they all have light coming out of them. Oh, this is what this light is. That's
¶ The Awakening and Reunion
what they heal with. And there was so much that happened at that time. He told me that this child that I gave up for adoption when I was 19 and unmarried in the 60s, and that's what was expected of you. I was in my third year as a nurse. You know, there was no such thing as single mothers back then. And you were expected to give your child up. This is the cultural norm. And you didn't dare
stray from that because there was no support for you. So he said, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but your daughter has contacted me and told me she's not mad at you, that she loves you. And so I started sobbing, he started sobbing, and it was just the most amazing healing. And years later, I would be reunited with my daughter. Do you mean esoterically your daughter contacted him? Yes. Psychically or something? Psychically.
Right. He goes, you know, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but I'm going to tell you this. And he told me that and at the end, I mean, I was sobbing, just sobbing. He was sobbing, I was sobbing. It was like this immense healing and I didn't understand that that's what happens when the Kundalini is awakened powerfully. The Kundalini, this spiritual energy in you that clears out all of your life issues and karmas when it gets awakened.
awakened because that's all connected with your ego structure and all of that that you're held on to gets evaporated so that you can have this experience of your divine nature. Yeah. So I finally did meet the monk and the monk started talking about the ego and I thought that's just what Jesus said about the ego. Wait a minute, what's going on here? You know, I thought this This is the teacher that I want to be with, because whatever she has, I want it for me. So I didn't look at her as an icon.
I looked at her as a teacher who could help me discover something in me that I wanted so much. >> Had her teacher died by this time and she was kind of the main teacher? >> Yes. >> So you never met her teacher? >> No, I never did. So in the meantime, between 1984 and meeting this monk, so that was two years of waiting to meet somebody, I was having such a difficult time. And meanwhile, I graduated from my third year in massage school.
I had strange interactions with people because I had so much light just pouring out of me that in massage school with my peers, I had one woman yell at me. And she said, "You have so much light coming out of you, I can't stand it." And I didn't know what to do with that. It was so difficult and so hard to live in this world, in this state. And I had no one to speak to about it. That was just not available. Consciousness was not a word.
And certainly if you ever mentioned these things, you'd probably put you in a mental hospital and drug you with some drug because you're crazy. meantime, here I am at work, I'm trying to function, I still can't function. I have all this life pouring out of me, all this love, and I can't function. Eventually, the director realized something's happening here, I don't quite understand it, but one day she said to me, "Oh, Mary's found the path of love." And I go, "Oh, she feels something from me."
Although she never directly mentioned it. So she reorganized the office, I was reorganized out in a nice way, so I got a little bit of money, you know, in leaving. And meanwhile, all this time, in my personal life, I was going through relationships like potato chips. The Kundalini was so alive in me, clearing out all the karmas, all the relationships that I had to go through in this life, to meet the beginning, clear it out. It was like this tornado that went through my life
for about eight years. This tornado clearing out my mental emotional state, relationships that I would get into and then I would leave because I knew that wasn't right, but yet I had to be in it because I now I'm understanding this is karma, but there are no shortcuts.
¶ Meeting the Monk and the Path of Love
So what I'm trying to say. So let me ask a question here. So all these relationships are with various men that you had been with in a previous life, I think you're implying some men and women, both. Okay. And weren't you kind of creating new karma by having these relationships? What it really felt like was, I was having to complete lifetimes from a past life, because when I would leave, it wasn't done with malice. It was done with understanding. And I
would complete that. So I wouldn't leave it so that it was bad, leftover stuff. But it just felt like I was cleaning out. Many years later, I would be told that my basic karma in this lifetime was with relationships and that I had a lot to clear out with them. So I would just go through them,
clear it out and not leave a bad feeling, just complete it. And it just happened like a tornado, like my emotions were being cleared out, my issues were being cleared out, and every time I would feel better, but then again there'll be another storm. So when the next one was coming, would you actually think, "All right, well this will probably last two weeks, but I'm going to clear out stuff."? No, no, I wasn't that aware. Let's
put it this way. I was sort of a codependent person, really feeling I needed to be in a relationship because I didn't feel strong enough inside myself to not be in a relationship, because I enjoy relationships, even though for the past 18 years I haven't. I've been in a relationship with just myself. Because at some point that ended and I realized if you're not in a serious relationship with yourself, this is just going to continue. And so that just stopped.
It just stopped. And then I started the real more serious inner journey. Mind you, you know, karmas play out in all kinds of ways. Usually it's in relationships and in family systems, also in physical diseases that you have weaknesses. And so that played out for me as well. But at any rate, to get back to after Jesus and those two-year waiting period, and I left, I finally was separated from the hospital, and I left, I had nothing left in my bank account at all.
Your actual, literal bank account. You're not talking about your karmic bank account here. No, my, well, that's probably less, a little less, but not complete, right? And I could go visit my teacher now and there was an initiation that I wanted to initiate deeper levels of the Kundalini. And in order to go to this, it was going to cost me some money and I would have to travel. And I had such faith that I used up the last bit of money in my bank account.
I didn't have a job yet, but I went and did this. I went and did it and I spent everything. When I got back from that meeting at a meditation center, I opened up the Boston Globe at the time and in it there was an advertisement looking for a manager for the new office at the Space Center at MIT. And because I had helped the director of research open up our new office where I was in the hospital
¶ Clearing Out Karmic Relationships
and it became very successful, I thought I could do this, I know how to do this, I know how to open it. It was the Center for Theoretical Geocosmoplasmic Physics. And so I know how to do this, I could do that, and I could get my former boss to give me a recommendation which she did. And I went in, had the interview and got hired. So immediately, my bank account went from zero to something.
And it was just this leap of faith that I had so much faith in this inner journey that I took the leap to do this. So it was 1986 that happened and of course, you know, I was going through my different life experiences and trying to integrate all of this in my being. By now I started reading spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Viveka Chudamani, which is all about Brahman. So I was reading these things and feeling nourished by them.
Oh, by the way, one of the side effects when Jesus awakened me is when I had so much light pouring through me, I didn't need much in food because the light was feeding me on some level. So I lost about 10 pounds. I went from like 119 to 109 or even, but I felt so full in my spirit that I didn't need very much food. So that was an interesting experience as well.
- I was gonna ask because Jesus had talked to you about weight, whether you had been overweight or something, but you said you're only 119, which is not bad. on it. But that happened and I really understood how this energy in us when it gets awakened, you don't crave food as much, physical food, because your soul is being fed this amrita that pours from you and it's quite delicious, as I can describe it, absolutely delicious amrita.
So now it's 1986, met my teacher, took this initiation, now working at MIT. My teacher
leaves for a couple of years. In the meantime, I'm doing practices, I'm meditating, chanting, you know, doing selfless service, reading books, and living my life, trying to integrate all of this every day and when she returns in 1988 it was now the summer it was actually July 4th which we recognize as our liberation day right here in the United States and I was taking a course at that time at the meditation center on basically the ego and releasing the ego and on the third day
of the course, I was sitting outside on the meditation ground, sitting in an Adirondack chair under this huge pine tree by myself. I was eating my lunch, being in silence, and that night before the instruction was, "If you want to get rid of negativities, then repeat these words 24 hours a day, even in your sleep. So I repeated these words 24 hours a day. - Some chant. - Some chant, yeah, very small. - Sounds good thing or something.
- Yeah, and I thought, well, how am I going to do this in my sleep? And I thought, oh, I know, I'll repeat it as I'm going to sleep and then it'll just repeat itself. So I worked that out. So here I am the next day, same thing. I'm repeating these words, repeating these words.
people are all around, hundreds of people all around, but I'm sitting by myself and I'm trying to read this book called the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Alice Bailey and this one sentence captivated me and it said, "At some point, at some point, the ego will have to take the back seat and let the soul lead the way." And I thought, "Yes! I want that to happen to me!" That was a defining moment. In that moment, this powerful energy came over my head. It was the most powerful
energy and I recognized it. I'll give it the word God, but not as a persona or as a person, but as an energy. I gave it a different name after that. And this energy was so powerful, I knew what it was and it opened up my crown chakra, this crown chakra here and it went down
¶ Being Nourished by the Light
to the kundalini and boom awakened that kundalini to its fullest extent and as the awakening of the kundalini happened it started to roll up inside me up the shishumna, the central channel you have the ida and pangala which is duality male-female but when those two come together in union and and go up to Shishumna, a divine alchemy of light happens, and you turn into a divine being instead. And it entered up through the Shishumna, through here.
As it did, I could feel it rolling up the script of life as Mary. That was my experience. Oh, it's rolling up the script of life as Mary. Rolling it up, all the issues. And I understood at some point from here down, your script of your individual life is written on your chakras. All the things you're gonna go through, all written there, right there.
And when you've cleared out all of that, and it's your time, Kundalini awakens, rolls up, when it reached here, picture of my teacher showed up, I got divine permission to enter the higher. And as soon as that happened, this light of a thousand suns awakened within my crown, and the words that came out, or the words that I heard, felt, was, Aham Brahmasmi, I am Brahman and all this is my creation. And as I looked out, I saw like a gossamer, it was like a gossamer covering everything.
I will call it maybe Maya or gossamer over everything. And I thought, ah, the world is created from that. And I knew that Brahman was my natural state and the natural state of all humanity, that this is why we've come to reclaim our inheritance as Brahman, the ultimate field of omniscience, divine reality. I looked up over this building and there was Jesus rising in a cloud with his hands up. He looked at me and he rose up into the clouds and disappeared. And I thought, am I ascending too?
And then I thought, yes, I'm ascending here in this physical body. And I understood we're here to reclaim our divinity and to anchor it in this physical body and then to create the world that we live in here from that state of mind. When I looked out, I could see also what happened as this energy opened. It was like a fire hose of light. That's all I can describe. It was like a fire hose. You know, fire hose which shoots out water?
that's what it was, a fire hose and it just came down and it kept pouring. And then when it got to my heart, it burst it open so that it was pouring this divine energy and the feeling of it was bliss and compassion. Not compassion out of pity, but compassion because it was a natural state of being. And all of that was happening all at once. And as I looked out and people walked by, saw people walking by from this state and I could see their souls that hovered over their head.
It was like right here and I could see the soul. It was like filtering down like a Christmas tree over them and I wanted to shout at them, "Hey, look up! Your soul is right there! Look, look!" But I could see that they were caught in mind. They were caught in mind stuff because I saw that too and I thought, "Don't you know you're God? Don't you know? Look, look, look!" But I couldn't
¶ Kundalini Awakening and Divine Realization
shout it. I couldn't shout it out, but I felt it. And the tremendous, I was so elated, so blissful, fear fled. Fear cannot go past here. Fear is part of the egoic structure. For those who are just listening in audio, you're pointing to your third eye area, the macular point it's called, and you're saying fear cannot go past that spot to any higher state. No, because fear is part of the dualistic state. And that is the first feeling people feel when
they're separated is fear. How do I know that? I'll explain that in a bit. Pete There's actually a line from the Upanishads about that very thing. It just says, "Certainly all fear is born of duality." Susan Yes, absolutely the truth. And so, here I am reclaiming my statement, like, yes, this is our natural state. Now, it's omniscient and it's
divine and it's blissful, but it's our natural state. And I remember the egoic state and how unnatural and hellish it was to live in it because now I had something to compare it to. And it seemed to me that we've bought into this egoic structure as our natural state, which is so convincing and has held you like a prisoner with no escape. Save my teacher's grace,
who else can I turn to? And so this state I recognize as our natural state and that everybody, that it's in everybody, everyone, in the beggar, in a rich person, in the terrorist, in the saint, it's all there inside us and it's that you access it and why it's so important to wake up to it. Because if you don't wake up to it and you turn to fear and hate, you will do horrible things to other people because you will see them as other and able then to easily kill them, either with words,
either with actions or literally physically. And this is why it's so important to reclaim
¶ Reclaiming our divinity
this state and I understood this is why we came to Earth. This is why Earth is such an important place to be and to reclaim it here, that's the great purpose. And later I would come to know a word called Jivan Mukta. It's a Sanskrit word which means Jivan is body and Mukta is liberation. so being liberated while here in a physical body. When I looked down at my arm as I was having this experience, I could see light pouring all around my flesh, and I understood that it was the light
that was alive. The flesh had no life of its own other than this light that innervated it and gave it life and the words that I was given for humanity or the message was, "Here is your divinity, the divinity that awaits all mankind. Your soul wants full expression now. This is the presence. This is the living presence. This is living. This is real." And that's the message that I want everyone to know, and that is the truth. No matter what others say, this is the living truth.
And when it happens to you, you know it. You're a changed person. As I was going through that state, I was also given an understanding of the different kingdoms, the mineral kingdom, the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the human kingdom, and then the divine kingdom. And that humans were unique because only humans ask the question, "Who am I? Why am I here?" A tree doesn't ask it. A dog doesn't ask it. A flower doesn't ask it. Only humans can ask it.
And when you ask that question sincerely, you begin the journey to your divine nature. And when you come into your divine nature, it affects the consciousness of the universe because you're one. It's all one universe, one consciousness, one consciousness as divinity. And that's why it's important. So when we rise up as humanity, rising up from human state to divine, all the other kingdoms rise up with it. And that's what makes us so unique. And that's what makes it
so important. And that's what makes everyone important. Every single person on this planet
¶ The Natural State of Being
important because this is what they have within them and the possibilities of that. Now at the end of all of this for 20 minutes I had signed up to do dishes in the dishroom, huge dishroom, many people, soap suds, machine going, crashing around, lights, you know, from the water, all the smoke and everything, you know, coming up from this is the last I went, entered the dishroom and I was still in this state. I had my gloves on and the water and the dirty dishes and washing
the dishes and I am in bliss. And I happened to look up and the woman across from me happened to look at the same time and she looked into my eyes and she burst into tears because the state that I was feeling ignited and reminded her of the state within her and she burst into tears. I finished my dishwashing and I left the dishroom. As I left the dishroom, someone stopped me to ask me a question. In that moment, I could feel the energy pulling me down, back, down, down, down, into separation.
I was so distraught because now I was experiencing the fall from grace and very consciously. The agony of it was so severe I wanted to sob completely, but I restrained myself from doing that. And the first feeling that I had was fear, fear, just like that. And I entered back into this egoic state. It was a magnet like pulling, it was like maya just pulling you down. You can't fight it. You can't argue with it. This is your karma. You've got stuff to handle. You've got stuff to
clean out. You got stuff to go through and you will see the wisdom of it at some point and I'm like, no, no, absolutely not. I was absolutely in agony and later on, maybe three years later, I was reading this book called the Shiva Stotravali and in it, Upaladeva, one of the, I think, a ninth century saint said, when you experience it, he gave a word for it,
It's called Vipralambha, the agony of separation. Then I understood that all the separations you go through in this life from your loves of your life were all a mirror to that greater separation that you were really suffering from and trying to seek in each other, trying to find each other, trying to find a relationships. And believe me, I tried myself to find that. And the days that followed, it was so difficult for me to have to deal with this and to integrate it and accept it.
This took a lot of surrender on my part and I wrote to my teacher about it. What in the what? And she wrote back that the reason that I experienced this because my great face in the Shakti, that's why I experienced it. In other words, I had no doubt that this could happen. I didn't have enough training to tell me it couldn't happen. I wasn't a scholar to read that it's very difficult and hardly anyone ever enters this state. I had none of that in my way because I didn't have
any doubt that this could happen to me, none whatsoever, and it did happen. And then after I wrote to my teacher, I got phone calls once a week for three weeks to tell me that this was a great experience. Now this is 1988, July, July 4th, my liberation day and yet I had to go back. So time went on and I had to integrate this, live my life, go to work, do the practices, find some acceptance, live my life with the knowledge that one day I'd return to my natural
state which is Brahman, our natural state and everyone's natural state. You can call it whatever you want, but divine being. It was now October. I was working at MIT and I would be during the winter time, I would meditate in a lobby in the engineering building, electrical engineering building at MIT. Because I had a nice big lobby and in the middle there was a door that swung around and basically students would come through and cut through to go to the other parts of the campus.
So I would meditate on a bench. I would take my lunch, meditate on the bench for a little while and then go back to work. Now it's October 1988. I'm still reeling from self-realization and having
¶ Agony of Separation and the State of Bliss
to go back and live my life, not really finding anybody even on the path who I would speak to about this, who could not understand what the heck was I talking about. So it was a rather lonely time, a rather lonely thing, and a lot of people on a path find that is a rather lonely event in walking the path and now I'm reading about a monk, a realized monk, who had passed and I knew that I would never meet him because now he was on the other side. So I was feeling kind of sad about it.
So I closed my eyes to meditate, put the book down, I thought I had to meditate. So I closed my eyes to meditate. It's a few moments later, my eyes still closed. I hear, "Are you ready?" And I'm like, "Oh, that's just a student. He's bothering me. He sees I'm meditating. He's... pay no attention to him." I hear again, "Are you ready? Wait a minute." And so I kind of look to my left and there's the monk. And now I'm like, "Wait a minute. People have talked about these experiences in meditation,
that they're really life. You can see this person coming towards you. Oh my God, it's true." And so he turned and he walked towards me and as he walked towards me, he turned into the Milky Way. His energy turned into the Milky Way and entered my solar plexus. When he entered my solar plexus,
mind you, I still had my eyes closed, it made such a racket inside me. This whirling, this tornado, lights and energy and you know, conscious blowing and I could hear a locomotive of a train and I I heard bells ringing and this energy was moving up and some of it went down, but it was all moving up and it was so loud and so powerful and so strong that I thought my ears were going to burst. Of course, I had the thought my tympanic membranes were going to burst. This energy just kept coming
up and up and up and when it reached here I thought, "I'm leaving my body. Is that okay? Is that all right?" And he said, "Yes." I just went with it. At some point, like a split second, there I was, my energy body, standing next to the energy body of this monk. Now, looking at a window of light, two windows of light, one above the other, the light that was pouring from those windows was so powerful, it was such a magnetic pull that I couldn't resist. I've got to go. I'm going.
Wait a minute, you have a daughter. No, I'm going. I'm going. I'm going. As I went to move towards the light, he stopped me and he said, not yet. Oh no, I have to go back. I don't want to go back. I have to go back, but I have to go back. It's like, well, how am I going to get back? I didn't have a physical body, it was just in my light body. And I looked down and there was this filament of light, this silver cord that somehow was attached to me around the umbilical area.
And I was told that I had to follow the cord back to wherever the heck I was going. And so
I followed the cord and it took all of my energy to concentrate to get back. And as I'm following this chord it was dark and all of a sudden the vista opens up and now I see the solar system and I go wow I've been far away from wherever I was so now I started flying past the different planets very quickly and just amazed you know at the beauty of them and coming back and then I was like a zoom you know like google zoom's like and so I was like and finally I reach earth like oh
I'm going to earth. I was like, Oh, I'm going to North America. And I was like, Oh, I'm going to Massachusetts. Oh, I'm going to MIT. And now I find myself looking down at a body. This meditating on a bench. That's the body you have to go back to. Really? I was quite happy where I was. No, you got to go back into the body. I had no connection with that body. I had no feeling about it. I didn't know if it was a man or a woman. I just had to go back into a body and I had to enter through the head.
That's how I came out. And so I entered through the head and when I did the physical body jumped like boom. It was like, oh like your foot going into a very tight shoe and then all of a sudden all the mental emotional stuff connected with this being and body all flooded back and I went, oh, no, I have to deal with this mind.
¶ Out-of-body experience and return to the physical body
I have to deal with these thoughts. Oh no, this is terrible. And all of a sudden, the picture of the monk showed up again. He showed up and he goes to me, "You see, the veil is very thin between here and there. Very thin." And he disappears.
Now I'm sitting, I'm in this physical body, sitting on the bench at MIT in the electrical engineering building, looking out on Mass Ave and wondering if people were standing around me 'cause it was such a racket When I opened my eyes, there was nobody there, nobody around. Then I had the thought, wait a minute, I didn't have a physical body, but I could move, I could see, I could be. Wait a minute, you don't die. Your physical body drops, but you're eternal. You move on to whatever.
Then I thought, wait a minute, if there's no death, then how can you have birth? The dualistic version of it. Oh my God, the whole thing, it's not real. Oh my God, the whole thing's an illusion. You were never born, you never die, you're an eternal being. And from that moment on, there was no such concept of death to me anymore. Death died on that day. And I no longer feared that.
The thing that I wasn't happy about was being back in a body, having to deal with the egoic construct and living life in an environment of egoic construct. That bothered me a heck of a lot more. Do you feel that just being itself is eternal, impersonal being, or do you feel that even with some kind of personality of some sort, some type of individuality, I mean we don't get into the fine points, is eternal?
Like there's that Gita verse, "Never a time when I was not, nor you, nor all these rulers of men, and never shall there be a time when all of us shall cease to be." And that implies some kind of individuality being immortal, not just being itself. No, no individuality. You think he's referring to being itself there? Yes, being itself. Individuality belongs with the egoic construct. That's all egoic construct. I can tell you that for sure.
But then that monk showed up, having died, with some kind of individuality to interact with you. Well, you interpret it as an individuality, but it's just an energy. An energy that you recognize as that particular person. But I can tell you, it's so difficult to describe all of this and even it is a very much a mystery. But I can tell you when I experienced Aham Brahmasmi, I am Brahman and all this is my creation.
It's a oneness that cannot be described, understood from a mental construct or having a physical body. It's impossible. I can try to describe it. It's impossible. And no one can, I know, because I was on the other side of that, no one can tell you, no one can describe it in words that will make you get it. It's an experience you have in yourself. And when you're one, it's one. We may have a physical body, but we're not physical bodies.
We may have a personality that expresses, but we're not a personality. We may have thoughts, but we're not thoughts. We are that which comes through and expresses in this world. And there's no way I could convince anybody of anything, but I can tell you for sure, you don't die. There is no such thing. And for sure, you are Brahman. We all are, all one, and you can call it whatever you want, whatever you want.
And there's no way, no words or ideas that I can describe that can give anybody that experience. So, do you think that once that realization of Brahman is stabilized, not just something that disappears after you wash dishes, and then eventually the body dies, do you think that's the end of any kind of experience? It's like the drop merges in the ocean and that's the end of the drop once and for all? Like Jesus came to you, right? And interacted with you.
So, somehow Jesus, as Jesus, was still functioning on some level, apparently, to have that interaction with you, and yet, you know, presuming he had attained Brahman, how do you reconcile that? You know, when things filter down into this physical world, they do get filtered down. That's the only way I can describe it.
I don't know for sure, but that's the only way my mind can kind of conjure up an explanation of it to say, "Just like we have physical bodies on this earth, you, me, physical body, you're not that. You're not that." It's just an expression on a plane called earth that has these physical
¶ The Veil Between Here and There
constructs for whatever reason, but we're not the constructs. You may have a construct, but you're not the construct. And Jesus might come down as light as a construct, but it's just a way of relating in that moment. But once you're anchored in Brahman, like very few masters on this planet right now are anchored in that 24/7, but if you ever are around one, you feel it. And that state is yours. Just because you're not accessing it, doesn't mean it's not the same.
it is the same. There is only one. And you can call it whatever you want. You can call it Christ Consciousness. You can call it Brahman. You can call it whatever you want to call it. Once you experience it, you're like, "What?" The jig is up. And you have to be... I understand all that. And, you know, I understand I, my father, one that Jesus said.
But I'm just wondering, as a case in point, you had this interaction with a being that seemed to to be Jesus or with an energy that you identified as Jesus. So it's just a personal curiosity of mine as to whether once enlightenment has been attained, there's still some functionality that can interact with people as Jesus was interacting with you. So in some respect, one's life goes on even though it's not bound by individuality.
But there's still an individual expression as if an instrument of the divine which can play a certain role apparently. Yeah, and I wasn't privy to be allowed to go past those windows of light. So I can't speak to how all of that operates. I don't know how all that operates. It is a divine mystery of all mysteries. And I don't know, but I know for sure, for sure, we are one. And I know for sure, we are eternal beings. How all of that hellskiss works out, I guess I don't need to know that right
now. Find out when you find out. Yeah, you find out when you find out. I mean, if you need to know, it is a need to know basis. It's just a curiosity. It's a theme that comes up from time to time. Yeah, I mean, the mind wants to make sense of it. The mind wants to make sense of something that is beyond the mind. The mind is an instrument and it's a beautiful instrument, but it's limited in terms of all of that. And then when you're in beingness, you can use the mind as a instrument,
as a tool. You can use it for that. And thoughts, you can use thoughts as a tool. But you know, when my mind stopped and Jesus entered, it's because I was in between thoughts. And so that space in between thoughts, that's the state of divinity. The space in between breaths is the state of divinity, your divine nature. So, that's that space that's not empty, it's filled with the no thing. This is as much as I've been given to know, which is quite a bit,
but the rest is trying to understand it from the mind. It's interesting, the questions are interesting, but I don't think their answers can be very satisfactory in the end. Pete It's like a hypothetical speculation.
Yeah, which is kind of fun to banter around. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean a lot of traditions say well the drop merges into the ocean That's the end of any individuation or personal experience once enlightenment has been attained and the body does but then you have all these people Having Jesus come to them and Ramana Maharishi's coming to visit and all this stuff. Yes How do you reconcile those two ideas?
Because there are other states of being in consciousness that are in other places in this Cosmic universe there are other places that I haven't been invited to In my father's house there are many mansions yes, so I haven't been invited there Check that out, but not yet, but not yet. I mean eventually you know yeah find out
¶ The End of Experience after Realizing Brahman
Okay, that's just a little curiosity of mine. It comes up from time to time in these interviews It's one of those little things that you on over the years. I I think it's a great contemplation because the more you focus in contemplating it, in asking the questions, the more the answer is in the question and gets revealed. So I think that's very worthwhile. That's called contemplation. When I was reading that line from the Yoga Sutras, you have to let
the ego take the back seat and let the soul drive the vehicle. And I thought, "I want that to happen to me. I wonder what that would be like? That was a question and it was my time to get an answer. And I got a big time answer. David Yeah, you know, there's something you mentioned a little while back about when you had that Brahman experience
and the world seemed to be like this sheen or this thin veneer on Brahman. There's actually a term for that in the Yoga Sutras, which is Leysa Vidya, which means faint remains of ignorance. It's said that you have to have that faint remains of ignorance in order to function in the world, otherwise you wouldn't recognize the world and wouldn't be able to feed yourself or do anything.
But presumably there's the possibility of living in that state permanently, but still having enough of a cognition of a world, howsoever ephemeral it may seem, to be able to function normally and drive cars and all the stuff you have to do. Mary>> Or do the dishes. I mean, I could still do the dishes and appreciate the construct of this beautiful world. I could still do that, but I was be in the world but not of the world.
That's it right there. Be in the world but not of the world. So it's all here and it's astonishing and amazing and I'm just not the same from having known all this, you know, having experienced it,
having been given the understanding and the experiences. When they happen to you, then you And you know, I would say that you and some people are wired to have these kinds of experiences, but people shouldn't feel envious if they're not having them, because you can mature into a very nice, highly enlightened state without having all these flashy experiences, if we want to call it flashy. Yeah, I mean, this happened all spontaneous for me. I was just an ignorant kid born in New Jersey.
That's pretty bland. That's pretty normal. And why it came to me, I don't know. One can only conjure up maybe from a past life, I've done all this work and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but who knows in reality, I don't know.
Well, you know, you get what you need. And some people need experiences like this, it's important for them to have experiences like this. And certainly everyone would like to have experiences like this, but I'm just trying to emphasize that if you're not having experiences like this, those who are listening, don't feel bad about it. Get on to a good spiritual practice and path and just keep on truckin'. And know that it's true. Just know that it's true and be curious. Just be curious.
Seek and you shall find. Yeah, and knock on the door will be open. But you know, for me, it came from that moment of crisis with Jesus. The words that I said out loud, I didn't share this, but the words that I said out loud in that moment before Jesus entered was, "Please, God, just let me die. I can't take this anymore."
Because you're so broke and miserable.
I was so broke and miserable. I didn't realize "let me die" was the beginning of the death of the egoic structure. That's the real death that occurs. And it's painful and difficult, and anybody who's on this earth at this time, it's amazing that you're here and you should feel, you know, whatever you're doing in the world, know that it's important. I don't care what you're doing. I don't care if you're washing dishes. It's all very important because you are carrying
¶ The State of Divinity and the Space Between Thoughts
with you the Holy Grail. You carry the Holy Grail in you. I don't care if you're depressed, if you're anxious, if you're happy, if you're sad, if you're lonely, if you've got a great relationship, you carry the Holy Grail within you. Everyone does. David Everybody's got it on their minds these days,
you know, with the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza and so on. You know, it's interesting to contemplate those in light of experiences like yours and think, you know, for God's sake, I mean, these people are fighting and killing each other and here they are, these divine beings, not recognizing their divinity and beating the hell out of each other. This is why it's important to wake up. And anybody who hears this, you've already begun the process. If you're hearing this, you're already in it.
It is significant. It's already happening. If you're even aware that such a thing is possible, that's a big step. Well, yes, that's your consciousness saying, "I want to know itself." So if you even hear this, you're already on the path, because I didn't know any of this. I never heard these words, you know, before my spontaneous awakening. And the reason I wrote the book, Out of the Blue, was because, you know, I went through a lot of karma, including physical karma.
And in 2006, I died of a major heart attack. In fact, it was the widow maker, where the main artery shut down. And I happened to be with my grandson at the time. We were at a lake, very close to the house that I lived in with my daughter at the time. And I felt really sick. I didn't realize what was happening to me. And I felt this vice in my back and I thought maybe I have food poisoning. I started to feel nauseous 'cause I had my grandson with me.
I called my daughter and I said, "Look, I think I have to go to the hospital. "I think I have food poisoning." She calls our neighbor. Our neighbor is an EMT. Our neighbor, our good friends, is in charge of all the ambulances in the area. She calls him and says, "I think my mother's sick with food poisoning." And he intuitively somehow knew it was a heart attack. He called up the ambulances in the area to come to me because he was in charge of them. And she got to me along with the police.
The ambulance got there like two seconds later.
¶ Living in the World, but Not of the World
I get into the ambulance and I'm slipping away. I'm slipping away from this life and the window of light shows up as I'm dying. I don't realize I'm dying of a heart attack, by the way. The window of light shows up and I thought, "Oh, it's God again, I guess everything's okay." And I could hear them say, "We're losing her." And I completely went into the void. I had no consciousness then.
That ambulance met up with another ambulance on the way that had critical care equipment in it, transferred me into that. It was my friend, my neighbor, Ben, who drove that ambulance to the hospital on the way, calling the cardiologist because he had all these contacts, right?
saying this was the situation, be ready to receive her, get to the ambulance, the emergency room door, opens the back, I go into cardiac arrest, he grabs the paddles, shocks me back, which I have no memory of, although he said I did try to punch him, and wheels me in and says to the cardiologist, "You better not let her die because she's a good friend of mine." And I said, "Well, what did he saying he goes he didn't say anything he just smiled. They saved my life and I
lived through all of that miraculously. I was in the intensive care unit for three days completely unconscious and I woke up to my daughter and I think her husband repeating the mantra to me to wake me up and the mantra she was repeating is a very common mantra called Om Namah Shivaya. Most people know this mantra and I woke up to her saying that saying those words those the first words I heard. And then I had a two bit and everything and I'm trying to get free from the being tied down.
I was saying the word Nicholas, my grandson, I was worried about my grandson. And she goes, don't worry, he's fine. He's fine. And I slipped back in. You know, finally, I did wake up on the third day. So this was 2006. And the reason that I decided to write this book, because it took me a year to recover was because in 2000 when my grandson was born, when he was one month old in a dream, I walked over to the crib, he was lying on his back and he was emanating all this light
and he said, "God is consciousness. I am consciousness. Everything is consciousness. The people need to know. I'm glad you're here with me, Mary. I like the name Mary." - Nice. - And so-- - Well, I better write a book 'cause I might die again. - Well, exactly. And I thought, oh my God, I don't know if I'm going to live much longer. I have to write down these experiences. And I did write the book and self-published it. Six years later, it made its way to Wayne Dyer.
He read the chapter on self-realization, said it was the best explanation of self-realization he's ever heard. He invited me to his Divine Love Seminar. And then he had Hay House publish the book. Unfortunately, Wayne died three months before the book came out. He died in August, it came out in November. And because he was the one promoting the book, there was no one at Hay House to promote it, so it just kind of died on the shelves. And I finally got the publishing rights back about six
years later, so I've been looking for a publisher to republish it in a way. That's what happened with the book, but it did get published. And so anyway, the thing I also want to talk about is what happened to me about 14 years after my Jesus experience. A few questions came in from listeners. You want to do those or you want to...
¶ The Death of the Egoic Structure
Let's do that. Okay, we'll do that and then we'll come back to this. The first question is from Rin Eser from Turkey. Is initiation necessary for experiencing deeper states of consciousness? I read and I joined satsangs for many years now and I don't see any change in me. Great question. I don't know how to answer that. I know I needed a teacher. I don't know what other souls need, but that's what I needed. And I wasn't aware of what I was seeking other than I wanted to find a pair of eyes.
I'm not even sure that I called it a spiritual teacher, but it just came to me. It just happened. So I would say just keep doing your practices. And if you're seeking a teacher, ask. I want to find someone who can help me and maybe that will work. I don't know. that's how it happened to me, but I have no formula, but you're already on a path and whatever comes will come to you, that is supposed to come to you. And to know that you carry the grail within you and it's there.
And I would add, find yourself a spiritual practice, some form of meditation. This is my own recommendation. It seems to work for you and work means it actually should be enjoyable. It shouldn't be a chore. You should actually look forward to doing it twice a day or whatever. And if you don't find it enjoyable and you don't want to do it, then look around a little bit more because there are things out there that you will enjoy and that you will be easily do regularly.
I mean, I've been meditating regularly for 55 years and that you'll benefit from. Don't just read books and listen to YouTube videos. You got to do some practice. Yeah, that's a great, great. Okay, another question. This is from Satvik S. Is it just an experience for you or are you in that state all the time now? (laughing) I wish I were in the state of Brahman all the time. - You must be in some, I mean, obviously you're a different person than you were 50 years ago.
- I'm aware that I'm not in the state of Brahman. I'm aware that I am in the state of egoic structure. However, that's not what I focus on. I focus on my thoughts every day, from moment to moment, remembering the true state, just remembering that within me. just remembering it and that practice of remembering. And I'm not in that state of union, but I know that that is my natural state for sure.
And that I do my best to do practices and to function in this state of egoic issues without being too reactive to the world. - Do you feel a fair degree of contentment all the time? - Yes, yes I do. - So you're not like thinking, "Oh my God, I'm not in this state of union." - No, no, no. Yes, life goes up and down and we all have challenges, But I don't stray far from that state. I don't stray far from it, but I'm very aware that I'm not in that state.
- Okay, well that's good to be-- - But maybe I'm here just to talk about it. - Yeah, it's good to be real and humble about it.
¶ Near-Death Experience and Miraculous Recovery
Question three. - Thank you, thank you for that question. - Yeah, this is from the same guy. If there is not individuality, then how did you differentiate between you and the monk? I think it's kind of like what I was asking you before. You know, he's saying, well, if there is no individuality, how did you know that I am this monk who is someone, some being is talking to me who is some other being. - Yeah, this is so hard to understand. - It's kind of what we were going around about
a little while ago. - Yeah, it was kind of what we were going around about if you listen to that again, but you're not identifying as a separate individual and you realize that other people aren't separate individuals but on this earth, on this plane, we have these constructs called bodies. But when you realize your oneness, You're interacting with people from a state of oneness, rather than just looking at their body and interacting that way with them. Yes, this is a creation and we have it.
You're in the world, but not of the world. That's the best way I can explain it. I think the wave and ocean analogy would be handy here, because the wave can say, "Okay, I'm this wave and I see that wave over there, but hey, we're the same ocean." The same, yeah. So we're fundamentally just one, and yet we have a wavy nature, and I seem to be functioning
as this way when you're functioning is that way but we're really the same. But when you interact with people you're interacting if the other person is interacting on that level where you know you're Brahman, interacting with Brahman, you feel that state very much, very much so, you do feel that. And it's delightful, it's joyful and you try to be helpful then in the world. There's another verse in the Gita which says contact with Brahman is infinite joy. It is, it is, it's why I can tell
you that much. It's infinite and it's ever new. It's just unfolding. It's like this it's like that. It's wonderful. Okay, one more question from the same fellow, Satvik S. You know you were referring earlier to a gap between thoughts and gap between breaths. Yes. And he's asking well how can you be in that gap between breaths or thoughts? How to get there? Well it's a state. State. It's a state. It's a state of uh Brahman is what it is. It's a state
of full realization, a state of the now. So, there is no past or future. This is just... I guess he's saying, "Sounds good to me. How do I do it?" Focus on the space between your breaths. Focus on the space between your thoughts and let that space broaden a little bit.
You know that word "turiya", I'm sure you're familiar with, means "fourth". And it's kind of said that "turiya" is like glimpsed in the gaps between waking, dreaming, and sleeping, between thoughts, between breaths, but eventually it becomes a continuum that is there as you go through the cycles of waking, dreaming, sleeping, or breathing, or thinking, or whatever. It just
underlies. You can almost think of it like a tone where maybe initially the tone just comes as a beep and then here it is beep, but eventually it becomes a continual tone, but it's not really a tone. I'm using that as an analogy. And you don't actually have to pay attention. You don't even have to remind yourself that the tone is going all the time. In fact, it's in the background and you're going about your activities, but if you care to, you could always check it. Oh yeah,
tone's still there. I'm using the tone as an analogy or metaphor for consciousness or Brahman, if you will. It becomes an abiding continuum, but it's not like blam in your face all the time where you can't function. It's just a sort of a foundation or a background in the midst of whatever else you're doing. So you were going to tell us something earlier and then I did the questions. Next crisis in my life that changed me. For a dull moment, huh?
Never a dull moment in this life or in anybody's life really. 14 years later, I found myself with a
¶ Seeking a Spiritual Teacher
diagnosis of Hashimoto's thyroid and my thyroid was failing and it was diagnosed as an autoimmune disease and I was given a drug to take. What does it do to you? Does it make you sleep all the time. You start gaining weight, you don't feel energetic, you feel really weak, your mind is not clear, you just feel tired, you're going up the stairs and you can hardly breathe,
you know, it's just wipes you out, that kind of experience. And I was also losing my eyebrows, and I thought I needed to go to a dermatologist because I was losing my eyebrows, like why am I losing my eyebrows? That's another symptom. So I go to the dermatologist and she said, "Have you ever been tested for your thyroid?" "That's a thyroid issue." "You might have Hashimoto's." So I got tested for Hashimoto's and sure enough, I didn't. Then they gave me the typical drug that went Synthroid.
And when I took the drug, it made me so sick and I felt even worse. So I thought, "I need to find a different way." "I have to find something else that's going to work for me because this isn't working." So I said a prayer, a deep prayer. "Look, Brahmin, teacher, whatever."
I know you know the answer to what I need and I know by now that this lack of function has an emotional component to it because Jesus told me about disease a long time ago and that if things get stuck in your mind emotions they'll show up in your physical body as a disease we'll call it that. So I knew by then and I said I want to understand what's going on behind this and I want a cure. So the very next day I go to work and I tell this to my colleague and she turns around and hands me a
flyer and she goes, "Ah, then you're going to need homeopathic medicine." I'm like, "Homeopathic? What the heck is that?" And I knew with the energy that was shown to me that this is the answer. I asked the question, this is the answer. Okay, follow the answer. Pick up the phone. We then had still had rotary dials and I called a practitioner and I said, "I have to see you. I want to see you." She said, "I'm going to send you some forms. You fill them out and meet me in such
at such a time. So I fill out the forms and part of the forms was, she's a registered nurse by the way and a homeopath, and the forms included that I had to write a timeline of all the never well since events in my life from in utero when my mother was pregnant with me throughout my life. The significant events, the traumas, like you lost your dog, you had to move, I had this and whatever, I got a divorce, I got married and there was worse, you know, whatever the never well since events in
your life were, car accident, whatever. So I did that and I called my mother up because my mother was still alive at that time and I said, "I have a question for you. Did anything significant happen to you when you were pregnant with me?" And she said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, when I was eight
¶ Interacting from a State of Oneness
months pregnant with you, my mother, who was my very best friend and support in this world, died. And I never got over it. And I thought, "Okay, thanks." I showed this whole timeline, I did this interview with a homeopath. It was the most enlightening experience as I looked at all the never well since events in my life. They all involved relationships, failed relationships, I could never find the right partner. It always ended up in a mess. You know, it was just a mess.
And so she said to me, "What is the worst thing that ever happened to you?" And I said, "My mother left when I was 11 years old." There's that mother loss again, right? And then she said, "Do you have any recurrent dreams?" I said, "Yes, I've always had this dream of the ocean coming over me." And just as I was about to hit anxiety, and I was like, "Oh my God!" And it was always a recurrent and dream. And then she gave me a remedy to take. And I took this
remedy. I remember standing at the kitchen looking out the window, and I put that was in water and I took a teaspoon of the remedy in my mouth. As soon as I took a teaspoon of that in my mouth, my consciousness went out into the void. And in the void, I saw this twinkling little light like a star. And I go, Oh, that's where my energy stuck. And then I saw another twinkling light. Oh, that's the remedy. And it looks like the same thing is this. This looks like this. And it went like
this and it exploded. And I went flying back into my body. And I went, Oh my god, that's like yours. Like, that's how homeopathy works. It works on the level of consciousness, where you're stuck mentally, emotionally. And that's how it works. Oh my god, it was like this download of understanding I
have to study this because I see how important it is to myself and for my family. When I asked her about the remedy, and I read about the remedy in the book written by Catherine Coulter called Portraits of Homeopathic Medicines, the Psychophysical Analysis of Selected Constitutional
Types. And I read about this remedy and the remedy was Nat Muir, Nat Muir's table salt, homeopathic remedies and it's not herbal medicine, when that salt is so highly diluted, as you can think of it on a continuum of material, into the essence of consciousness, non-material, so it's this continuum. So you highly dilute it and highly dilute it so there's no more molecules that you can see from it, but it still exists on a data level and an informational level.
Nat Muir was the remedy and it is the law of which is innate within us which is like yours like. I asked her about the remedy, I read about the remedy. The remedy has a stuck emotional mind to it. They call it a delusion or a fixed idea and the fixed idea or delusion of Nat Muir is the mother is dead. I went, oh my god, that's what happened. It's a grief remedy about relationships. so that when my mother was pregnant with me, her grief was imprinted upon me that the mother is dead.
And that has to do with relationships, whether it's the mother is dead physically,
¶ Turia: A Continuum of Consciousness
or the nurturing is dead. I was imprinted with that. So when I came out of the womb, I kept repeating the lack of relationship, personal relationship throughout that was not nurturing. so I could never get free from it, and we can call it karma, until I took the remedy and it started to unwind this samskara of this thought and emotions that was layered upon me, this deep grief
that I held for 56 years, because that's when I found homeopathy. And when I took the remedy that night, I had a dream, and in the dream I met someone who was sort of like a representative of all my failed relationships and we kind of sorted it out with what, "Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, it was just a misunderstanding. Oh, yeah, I understand. It's okay. We're friends." And I had the dream. So I'd be beginning my healing and from that time on, I never had that
recurrent dream of the ocean, ocean is emotions, being overwhelmed by these emotions. So I never had that happen again. And I began my healing path, whereas I took the remedy over time, these emotions of past grief of relationship would come up, I would sob and then sob it out. I would cry it out and I'd feel so much better and so much lighter. So you could say that homeopathic medicine almost on a consciousness level helps to remove the some scars in the sense that the
Kundalini does to remove. And so I didn't take Synthroid anymore, I did find a natural pig substitute, Armour Thyroid is called. I started taking that and over the years I need less and and less and less and less of it. So now I may take one in a week and I don't even know if I need that. And it just cleared out this whole grief and the way I held grief and all of this. So it was the
clearance of all this karma. So you could say on a higher level and the most esoteric level of homeopathic medicine, it helps to remove some scars so that you can freely flow this and restores inner harmony on a mental emotional level so that you can experience your divine
nature in an unimpended way, in an easier way. And so I went on to study it and it cured me of, I had recurring bronchitis, it cleared that out which has to do with the lungs and the lungs have to do with grief and so I cleared out all the bronchitis, I cleared out my constant problem with colds and all of that. And so, so began my journey into homeopathic medicine, which I later found out was, and I went back to school with the doctor, an MD, who I trained with for three years, and along
with 88 other people. Homeopathic medicine was once part of our medical system in the United States. I had no idea. It was taught in our hospitals. It was taught in our medical schools. What happened?
What could have happened? There was even a monument dedicated to Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathic medicine, and the only doctor who has a monument to him to this day in Washington, D.C., at Scott Circle, a mile and a half from the White House, dedicated June 21, 1900, by President McKinley and Houses of Congress, dedicated to him as the great medical reformer of the 19th century. It was so popular then because it was so well used in the prevention and cure of all communicable
disease. This is how it became so popular, and it was in our institutions, and it was used, and we had doctors and hospitals across the United States at that time, and I'm thinking, "How in the world did this knowledge get lost? How did we lose this knowledge? How is it possible we could lose this knowledge. And I came to understand that Rockefeller Sr. loved homeopathy, actually, and he used it. He had two homeopathic physicians for himself and his family.
He liked it, but he also owned Standard Oil. And at this point, they learned that they could create synthetic petrochemical drugs using this synthetic oil, right? And so you could create synthetic
petrochemical drugs that would mimic what comes from nature. And so he was a philanthropist, so he told his son, "I want you to give equal amounts to homeopathic medicine, but I also want it for our drugs, because now if we could create synthetic drugs, we could patent them and charge a lot of money and nobody could take the information,
¶ Uncovering the Mother Loss
but homeopathic drugs, you can't patent it because it's from nature. There's no particular patent on them. And so he wanted both, but the son decided no, we're just going to get rid of that because then we will just be able to have our synthetic petrochemical drugs and we won't have any competition. And so they got it out of the hospitals and they told doctors if you try to use homeopathic medicine anymore we're going to take away your license. So that's how we removed
it. And then they basically said well there's nothing scientific about it, you can't prove it. Well, this is a hundred years ago, this is a hundred years ago. And of course, the science then was just in the material realm. And so we're on the precipice now of a renaissance, not only in the system of medicine, but in all the systems, we're in big, huge paradigm shifts.
The only difference with homeopathy is that instead of using, if you take homeopathic medicine and material and you start breaking it down and you dilute it and dilute it and dilute it, It goes into data level, you can call it consciousness level, but we cut it off here, so that we're only in the physical body pushing around chemicals and stuff. And we forgot this part. Now we're waking up to this part to reclaim it because we have to have both.
We need trauma medicine. I've used it. I still use it. And we need homeopathic medicine. Homeopathic medicine is prevention and cure. Trauma medicine is to save your life and to fix you up if you have needed surgeries. I've used it, it saved my life. We need both. And if you look at it as a duality, that this is the masculine principle with trauma medicine and that homeopathy is the feminine principle. If you bring them
together, you have an amazing system of medicine and I've used it for 25 years now. And we're on the precipice of this, this because we want more, because we are consciousness. And the more you wake up to realize your consciousness, and as Jesus said, it all starts here. It has to be resolved here, otherwise it's going to show up here. As I say, you need both. So I live in both, I use both. So there comes our balance. Just like it's time to wake up from egoic structure to our divinity,
right? So we're in this incredible renaissance. This is an amazing renaissance now. I actually have a quote from Joseph Campbell that I want to sort of end with. Let me ask you before you read that, did your eyebrows grow back? A little bit. Those are penciled most of the time. Yeah, I still have some. I still have a very similar thing. I hardly have any eyebrows. I read pencils eyebrows on me before interviews, but I don't have any other symptoms. I have tons of energy.
That's just aging then, you know, that's the natural aging process. I was wondering if maybe I had Hashimoto's or something. Well, you don't have any symptoms. I feel just fine, you know. Yeah, you don't have any symptoms. So just, you know, we're in the renaissance of the souls. That's what we're in. Yeah. Good stuff. And as we come into our divine nature and understanding consciousness as the underpinning of everything, we will create systems that reflect that
while we also have a physical world. You have to have discernment when to use both. So, Joseph Campbell, I just came across this today. He said, "The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation, when everything is lost and all seems darkness. Then comes the new life and all that is needed." And this is the precipice we are on now. So, this is the good news. We're in the midst of it. Pete I think about that all the time. We could have a whole
interview about that because I feel we're on the precipice of something huge. It's not necessarily going to be a real smooth ride as we transition into it. A lot of people aren't going to make it, but hang on to your, I was going to say hang on to your hat or your seat or something, but actually more useful information or advice would be hold on to yourself. Know thyself and that'll be the best prophylactic for making it through smoothly. Mary>> Yes, this is true. This is true, Rick.
Okay, Mary, well this has been a fascinating discussion. You're a great conversationalist. Your book again is out of the blue and it is in print, right? I mean, you found a publisher? I haven't found a publisher yet. Can people get it on Amazon? Some people can get some copies on Amazon. They're probably charging you more for it now, but I would love another publisher to come along and maybe scoop it up. Have you done some of the standards like Sounds True or New Harbinger?
I have tried, but it's so difficult unless you have somebody. Wayne Dyer was the one who found how important it was to him. You kind of had to find someone who's already in it and can help
¶ Healing with Homeopathic Medicine
you along. I have contacts at a few publishers. We can talk about that. Maybe something will happen. It's a pleasure talking with you, Rick. It really is so much fun to talk about these things and it's joyful, actually. It is, isn't it? Nothing I'd rather do. Me too. Pretty much. Yeah. Thank you so much. Oh, you're welcome. And thanks to those who've been listening or watching. Yeah, Yeah, thank you.
There are a couple hundred of them on our live call today and there will be thousands in the coming weeks. Go ahead, what are you going to say? If people want to contact me and learn more about homeopathy, you can book a session with me from my website. So it's Conversations with Mary on my website, which is maryterhune.com. You can book either a homeopathic session with me and I can explain it and maybe give you some remedies you might be interested for prevention of colds and flus.
And also, if you want to talk about spiritual matters, so you can do that too. Or all of it. Or all of it. Yeah. And I'll have links to all that on your Batcat page, so people can just click on that link. My next interview was with a friend named David Doyle. I've never met him in person, but we've been in touch for a few years. And his primary path seems to have been Qigong, and he has some pretty profound realizations too, not unlike some of the things Mary has been describing.
seems like a really interesting guy. I think it'll be a fascinating conversation as was this one. Well, thanks Mary and thanks to those who've been listening or watching and we'll see you for the next one. Bye. Bye.
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