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We're not connecting to something outside of us. We're connecting
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to something that is this built of the same source
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as us, which is light, which is love, which is divinity,
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which is ultimate goodness to come back to, hearken back
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to your beautiful Buddhic tradition. We are ultimately good, original
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innocence in Christianity. And so it's really connecting to our own,
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not only angelic, but archangelic nature.
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What if some of the moments you've called intuition, coincidence,
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or feeling that you weren't alone were actually invitations into
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a much deeper relationship with the unseen? Today I sit
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down with spiritual teacher and angel expert Alicia Doss for
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a fascinating conversation about angels, divine guidance, and the delicate
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balance between spiritual surrender and personal responsibility. We explore why
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spiritual experiences can sometimes be hijacked by the ego and
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how healing our trauma can help us discern a deeper
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voice from our conditioning, and why becoming more spiritual should
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actually make us more grounded, not less. Alicia also shares
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a remarkable story of surrender inside Folsom Prison and explains
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why connecting with what she calls our angelic nature is
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ultimately less about finding supernatural beings outside ourselves and more
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about remembering the love, goodness, and divinity already within us.
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Alicia Das, welcome to Radical Responsibility.
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Thank you so much, Fleet. I am really happy to
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be here.
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Well, it's a joy to have you. I've been looking
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forward to this conversation. So I'm going to share a
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little bit of your background and then we'll jump right in.
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Sound good?
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Sounds great.
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Okay. So Alicia Das is an angel expert and communicator,
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ordained minister, speaker, and spiritual teacher with more than 30
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years of experience helping people reconnect with their divine lineage
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and higher purpose. She holds a degree in spiritual psychology,
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has led more than 500 seminars worldwide, and hosts the
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Live Your Love podcast, featuring conversations with leading spiritual voices,
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including Marianne Williamson, Jack Canfield, Neil Donald Walsh, and Lorna Byrne.
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Prior to her work in the spiritual arena, Doss worked
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as an actress and a DJ, experiences that continue to
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influence her dynamic teaching and communication style. So, we like
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to get our conversation started on a little bit of
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a personal note. So I'm going to ask you kind
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of what took your life in this direction. You know,
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you have a degree in spiritual psychology, so kind of
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when did that happen, before or after? But even before that,
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there's just a question, you know, when you introduce yourself
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as an angel expert, does that, you know, take some...
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uh work to get people around the considering that because
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i mean i know there's many people who are tuned
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into angels and angelic visions and a whole angelic energy
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but for a lot of people there might be a
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little eye rolling so i'm just curious how you work
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with that.
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Well absolutely and i'm from a very scientific family everybody's
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an md and i was pre-med um a biology major
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and um So I really understand that. And I actually
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welcome the skepticism because we want to be discerning and
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we don't want to do a spiritual bypass. And I'm
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sure my type AAA Indian physician father would have loved
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the term angel expert and not. And so, but really,
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you know, Fleet, angels are ubiquitous. And the recent study,
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I did warn you that I'm a nerd, a recent
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study by the NORC, the University of Chicago and the
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Associated Press, demonstrated that 69% of U.S. adults believe in angels.
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That is more people than believe in God or a
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higher power. So, and it goes, they go through all religions,
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even Buddhism, even, of course, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, et cetera,
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even indigenous culture. So a belief that transcends so many
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different diversities as well as religions, there's probably something to it.
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Do you know, so... It's not so much of a
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leap for people to believe in angels. But when you
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say you're an angel expert, yes, that that can get
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some eye rolling. And so for me, it's funny because,
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you know, I've talked to people like, why don't you
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lead with the fact that you have a doctorate? And
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I mean, that it definitely informs my work. But really
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the heart and soul is learning that we can go
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only so far with beautiful psychological techniques and mental techniques
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and et cetera. And then we have to surrender to
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something greater. And that's where the angels come in. So
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for me, it wasn't a leap. I think it can
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be for others. And I welcome that because I want
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people to go in their own experience.
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And so how with your background... your father being an
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MD and so forth, your family being very science oriented.
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At some point, you made a left turn or a
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right turn one way or the other. So what brought
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that about?
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Really, again, experience. I mean, I had spoken to angels
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in their own language at age four, had lots of
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experiences growing up. And we just we spoke about Indiana
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before we started. And Do you know in rural Indiana,
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when you start telling people things about themselves you can't
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know and things about the universe you can't know, according
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to them as a child, you learn to keep quiet
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about these things. So it was really always the heart
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and soul of who I was. And once I left home,
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I was again pre-med for about a year and then
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I went, wait, this is not who I am. So
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I kept the scientific predilection and then really pursued. First
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I was an actress and then, but once I kept
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having spiritual experiences, moved to an ashram, got ordained, etc.
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That was where my heart and soul was. So I
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don't have any argument between science and spirit. Many do,
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but I don't.
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And so it sounds like you had some kind of
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intuitive capacity or you were in some ways in touch
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with the subtler dimensions of life from an early age.
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I really was, yes. When I was very young, I
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started having visions and they really had some extreme trauma
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as a child. And these visions, angels, if you will,
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really kept me whole and kept me very functional until
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I could work much later to heal the trauma altogether.
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And so for me at some point... you know, it
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really does go with a scientific mind to go, well,
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I'm going to trust my experience and then keep checking
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it out and see if it holds and see if
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it's consistent and see if it changes my life. And
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once that was the case, I surrendered.
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So, um, and your work, as I understand it, um,
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it's about helping people reconnect with their own, uh, well,
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with the divine in whatever way, but also with their
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own kind of divine lineage, that people have their own,
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I guess, everybody has their own innate connection or might
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be karmic connection or lineage connection with some sense or
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some manifestation of the divine or the sacred. So tell
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us more about that.
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I'm really passionate about people really connecting to their own
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divine heritage, to their divine self. We're all God, we're
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all the divine, the universe, whatever we want to call it.
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I'm I did my ancestry.com and it was very boring.
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I'm exactly half Eastern and half Western. I'm half English
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and half Indian. There's like a little bit of Chinese
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in there. I don't know how that snuck in, but
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that's like 1%. So for me, I'm very passionate about
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bridging the religions, the cultures, about bringing us together and
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So I really love to help people. I don't know
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if it's the best business model, but I love to
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make myself obsolete and really empower people to connect to
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the divine on their own. I hold a container. I
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help them. I do clear past lives and karma, et cetera,
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so that they can then connect on their own. And
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we do have to address the psychology and trauma and
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emotions and mind so that they can have that clear
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shot at really connecting to that which is beyond us all.
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So my work, one of the frames for my work
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is the name of my book, Radical Responsibility. And it's
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about a very high degree of personal ownership and responsibility.
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It has nothing to do with blaming others, obviously, but
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it has nothing to do with blaming oneself either. It's
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just about taking ownership for one's choices and creating one's
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own destiny. And also I work at my company, HeartMind.
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All my work really is grounded in the values from
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my own Buddhist tradition of what my first Tibetan teacher said,
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simply called basic goodness. Now, there's a more technical term
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in the Buddhist tradition called Buddha nature. And he used
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basic goodness as just that kind of very simple, accessible term.
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But it's pointing to the fact that underneath all the
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challenges we have, underneath all this stuff, at the core
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of our being, we are innately whole, innately wise, innately good.
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One could say innately sacred, innately divine, right? as opposed
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to ideas of the fallen nature or any of those
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kind of ideas that are out there. But mixing that,
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so I think it's very helpful. Actually, for me, a
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lot of my work is helping people get in touch
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with that so that they can embrace higher degrees of
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radical ownership and responsibility in their life without that triggering
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them into self-blame or self-doubt or self-loathing of some kind, right?
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So you first need a foundation. Now you can cultivate
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self-compassion on a kinder relationship with oneself and work with
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deconstructing limiting core beliefs and all that but actually have
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an experience where you experience in a depth of your
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own being that you're not broken that you don't need
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fixing that you're whole and innately good is profoundly transformative
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and then gives us the courage and resilience to embrace
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greater ownership in our life Having said all that, how
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do you distinguish between the idea of surrendering to divine
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grace and personal agency?
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I absolutely love everything you said, and I do want
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to celebrate your book title. That really says everything. It's
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not responsibility. It's radical. Everything. And I think that goes
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to really accepting who we are as human beings as
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well as divine beings. It's so important. Having... So to
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answer your question, to me, the two are not mutually
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exclusive at all. I want to tell you about my
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friend Robert, and it is literally the favorite story in
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my book, Your Angelic Ancestry. So I was sitting on
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a kitchen floor at a retreat in the desert, in
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the high desert. So we're away from everybody, away from civilization.
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And a very enormous gentleman was saying to me, I.
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I could get my guys to kill for me, but
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I liked it to be up close. And I would
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kill the child molesters and the drug dealers and, you know,
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the bad guys. This is an actual conversation I had.
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This was from a man named Shadow. And it was
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at a retreat in the desert with Byron Katie, who
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you probably know, a spiritual thought leader.
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And so....
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Former lifers were joining us with civilians in the desert
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to show us their work with the Inside Circle Foundation.
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And in an amazing ceremony to pick our dog, which is,
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you know, one's protector in prison, I picked Robert, who
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is this enormous, I mean, I've got to say he's
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probably 250 pounds of solid muscle, bald, a behemoth of
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a gentleman. And we went and sat in the desert,
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far away from everybody. Robert had just been in Folsom
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prison for 24 years, six years in solitary. He'd been
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out less than six months. And I'm a small woman.
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And I realized as I was listening to him tell
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me about acts of violence I'd never even heard of,
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and he'd murdered someone and his own story of alcoholism
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at age 11, etc. I realized that I was not
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afraid for a moment. I was sitting in the calm
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of a storm that had long passed and here's Robert's story.
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And it is about surrender and agency, both. So Robert
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had started doing work with the inside circle foundations, a
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blend of Christianity and Buddhism and, um, radical responsibility, trauma work,
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et cetera. And so he'd been doing this work in prison.
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He had become a Christian. And he had learned of
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a fellow inmate that was going to murder him. And
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this happens so much more in prison than I had
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any idea. And I mean, Shadow, who was another former inmate,
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just laughed at me when I'm like, well, how do
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you kill in prison without weapons? And Robert looked at
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me and he said, I said, how did you get parole?
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And he said, so this inmate was going to kill him.
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And Robert went to his inner inside circle mentor and
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they said, meditate on it first, meditate on it first.
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And so Robert really did. And in his meditation, an
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angel came to him, an archangel came to him, giant,
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much bigger than the prison, bigger than the mountain he
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was on, came to him and said, surrender and showed
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him a vision of himself, arms out like Christ on
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the cross and said, surrender. Robert came in out of
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his vision and he had this moment of radical responsibility
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where he took responsibility for everything he had done that
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got him into prison, in prison. And rather than take
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a life again, he was going to surrender. So the
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inmate came to his cell or wherever it is that
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they go. I guess it wouldn't have been his cell
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when they were out on the yard, came to him
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with all this violence. and Robert looked at him and surrendered.
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Knowing that that would cost his life, he surrendered rather
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than take a life again. The inmate saw this and
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it affected him and they ended up working out their differences.
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No violence and Grace, as if watching, entered in and
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Robert was paroled. He was released. And I saw him
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six months later in the desert, completely alone, pitch black.
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And I said, what is it like to be out
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after 24 years? And Robert said something fleet to me
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that I had never forgotten. He said, well, it's great,
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but really what's the difference? It's all an inside job.
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And so to me, Robert fully took responsibility and he surrendered.
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Full agency and surrender.
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That's a beautiful story. And there's so much within that.
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And I really deeply resonate with it. I think you
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may know that about my background, I spent 14 years
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in a federal prison on drug charges. So I'm very
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familiar with the world of prisons and what you were
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referencing there. And I can well imagine Robert and I
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knew many men like Robert. And, um, my philosophy of
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radical responsibility was actually born in my own prison experience
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that I saw the only, the only way through and
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the only way out for me was to embrace that
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kind of radical ownership, radical responsibility. So I really resonate
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with that story. and, um, interesting. My own spiritual path
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is very much about the integration of surrender and, uh,
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personal agency. So people often think of them as being, um,
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you know, oppositional or something, or at least confusing. Right. And, um, but, uh,
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they're very much, uh, very much integrated. And so, um,
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you know, I haven't had any angelic, uh, visitations or
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visions that I'm aware of in my life. Uh, given
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that I've survived three quarters of a century now, and
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given the nature of my life, I often feel like
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maybe I've got an angel or two, uh, riding on
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my shoulder, you know, um, very, very possibly I've survived
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a lot of near scrapes in life. Um, and, uh,
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In my own spiritual tradition, Buddhism, and I've practiced deeply
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in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism for over 50 years, Zen
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tends to be pretty austere, mostly about the practice and
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about insight. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition really includes the full
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breadth of the Buddhist tradition, including the Buddhist Vajrayana and
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the tantric tradition. And from that view, kind of the
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way reality is conceived of or experienced, is that there's
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the unmanifest realm, and then there's this realm that we
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live in. And in between the two, there's kind of
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a realm of form, has different names. What I'm referencing,
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if there are any Buddhists in the audience, would be
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the dharmakaya, the unmanifest, the unformed, the pure potentiality. And
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then this realm, the nirmanakaya, the realm of physical form,
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relative reality. And in between the two is something called
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the samogakaya, which is sometimes called the enjoyment body, literally.
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But the Samogitai realm is populated with all the Buddhas
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and Bodhisattvas and Dakinis and Dakas and a whole realm
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and pantheon of all kinds of beings who would be
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considered enlightened to one degree or another. There's also the
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notion of, you know, within realms there can be dark
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energies and different kind of things, although it doesn't get
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into quite the same way that's depicted in the Christian tradition.
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But there's very much, we're not alone in the world
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from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. And a lot of Tibetan
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Buddhist practices involve offerings and connection with that and so forth.
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And at the same time, though, very importantly in the
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Buddhist realm, because Buddhism is not a theistic tradition. It's
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a non-theistic tradition, which means it's kind of, it's not
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saying there is a God, it's not saying there isn't
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a God, it just doesn't use God language to describe reality,
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and also feels that ultimately reality is empty of anything
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that could define it, and certainly empty of anything like
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a self. And so it's ultimately a non-dual tradition. So
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even though we, in Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana practices, we work
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with this whole realm of having a rising of deities,
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whether receiving blessings or oneself arises. There's all this whole
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realm of practices where you're working with that energy, but
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it all arises out of emptiness and dissolves back into emptiness.
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So the notion of emptiness or shunyata is very important
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in Buddhism, and it's a little different than your more
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God-centered and theistic traditions, which don't point to that so often,
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except some of the mystics do in the Christianity. tradition,
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certainly St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila
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and other mystics point to this realm that's kind of
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beyond the notion of God and me or that kind
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of dualism, right? But anyway, just a background to that.
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So you often speak about communicating with angels. And so
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For someone who's both curious and skeptical about that, what
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does that exactly mean and what does that look like? Because,
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you know, I mean, for me in my practice, you know,
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sometimes I feel, I have a session where I'll feel
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particularly connected to that realm, right? It's not like I'm
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necessarily having a direct vision or hearing communications, but I'm
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able to tune my mind and emotionality. So I'm feeling
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more really connected and And you come out of it
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in the meditation and it's always profoundly enriched and so forth.
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So it has a profound impact. Um, and others in
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terms of receiving communications beyond our normal discursive thinking or
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beyond our normal interactions, a lot of people, you know,
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might categorize some things as kind of an intuitive feeling. Some, uh,
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some things as, as an idea that arose in their
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own mind with great clarity, almost like a vision or, um,
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And then, of course, you have the whole realm of
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psychopathology where people are hearing voices, right? But so when
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you talk about communication with angels from the one you
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mentioned before, it sounds like this feels like a very
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real experience where you're literally communicating with another being. So
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I wonder if you could describe it and see, are
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there different forms of this or ways it shows up
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for you and for others and so forth? I'm trying
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to describe the spectrum of this kind of communication with
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a subtler realm, with the divine you know, in broad
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terms to see how accessible we can make it and
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then talk about the particulars. I don't know if that
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makes sense, but.
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Yeah, absolutely. Well, and as mentioned, my heritage is half
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Eastern and half Western. My practice is as well. I
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have been an ordained minister since very, very young, but
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equally committed, also very young. At 23, I moved into
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an ashram dedicated to Eastern practices. So, and I'm half Indian,
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half English. And so for me, I absolutely concur with
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what you're saying. And I love the way you've described
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the Buddhist philosophy and practice really much more than philosophy,
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but practice reality. So ultimately, the soul, we are souls,
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we have a spark of light that is eternal. But
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even ultimately, as we continue our practice, we give up
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even that and we are in the selfless self, we
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are in The undifferentiated consciousness, what you're calling the void,
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the emptiness, no self. That is who we ultimately are.
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And that's a little bit of double talk. No, but
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ultimately we are. We are not. You know, we are
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and we are not. And we are this endless stream
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of I call it love because that's how I relate
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to it. But it is well beyond religion, is well
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beyond identity. Got it. and so where angels fit in
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that um they tangibilize that invisible realm and i do
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suggest i do believe that everyone has a guardian angel
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they're with us before our first breath and will be
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with us after our last so those are so the
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angelic realm predated the human realm by trillions of years
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this very ancient realm parallel to ours not higher lower
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but very ancient realm so But angels are essence. They
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are the space between our hands. So connecting with these
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angels are in a collective. They don't have individuation. When
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they evolve to an archangel, they have individual souls like
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we do. But then these great archangels, these monolithic, very, very,
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very highest angels are really much more beingness than beings.
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More in that beautiful void. More in that selfless self. Right?
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That uh overarching presence and so i do recommend we
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work with those and connect with those and what they
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do is they bring more present in a way we
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can perceive it they're a living bridge to higher consciousness
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to god to the divine to the void whatever we
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want to call it because they are essence and yet
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they have sentience so they are are a a a
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divinely ordained shortcut, a legal shortcut, if you will, to
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higher consciousness, because they help us experience the invisible and
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bring it very tangible.
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You know, seeing aside, I go to Auschwitz every year
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with the Zen peacemakers. I've been going for Almost 25
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years now, I'm one of the leaders of a bearing
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witness retreat where we bring people from all over the world,
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many of whom have a family background in history with
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the Holocaust or with Auschwitz in particular, but also many
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people who don't, Germans and Poles, people from the Middle East.
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We've had Native Americans from the U.S. with us. People
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have all come there and bear witness to the horror
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of what happened there, and people find it very transformative.
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It's very difficult, but very transformative. And we always have
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clergy with us and have some religious services in the camps,
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and we always have a rabbi with us. And we
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had a rabbi for a number of years. And when
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the retreat finishes on Friday night, there's a Shabbat service
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and then a meal and so forth. And so he
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also was a singer and played music and so forth.
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So there was a song he did that I always
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felt a strong connection to. Again, I haven't had any
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direct connection with angels or any angelic visions. But I
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grew up Roman Catholic, so it's, you know, that's there.
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And it's not super emphasized, at least not the way
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I grew up, but it's there, right? There's, you know, depictions, iconography,
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and so forth. But anyway, this one song, it was
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a calling in the archangels. And it had to do
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with Gabriel and Mikael and Gabriel. And what are the four? Raphael,
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missing one.
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Well, there's many, many more than four.
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But aren't there like four principal archangels?
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Is this in Judaism or Christianity?
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This was in Judaism, yeah.
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In Judaism, it would be Gabriel, Raphael, Mikael, and probably Uriel.
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Or Raphael. Yeah, okay, so the four. So anyway, it
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was a beautiful, beautiful, you know, he was kind of,
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I saw him kind of calling their energies into the
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space and I found it always stuck with me. I found,
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always found it very, very, very, very beautiful. So, um, um,
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and I, and I love what you said about, um,
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about balancing that East West background you have of we are,
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and we're, and we aren't to do the relative sense
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of self and then the selflessness of beyond. Um, and, um, um,
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I'm wondering how this, getting more of a connection, well,
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it sounds like that this connecting to those energies, if
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one actually begins to have some intuitive or visionary connection
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to these energies, that that can also be reaffirming of
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one's own divine nature or sacred nature and innate goodness,
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which could then also, in terms of, healing trauma and resilience,
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you know, overcome a lot of the self-doubt, the self-hatred,
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the self-loathing, all the limiting core beliefs, all the, you know,
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internal poverty and negativity that most of us arrive in
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adulthood with as a result of conditioning in the human condition, right?
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So it sounds like there could be a lot of
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healing in that and developing more confidence in one's own
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innate goodness and divinity by connecting with this representational energy
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of the, of the ultimate divine.
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Oh, absolutely. And that's really how my book is different
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than most angel or any other angel book that I've
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seen is yes, we want to connect to these beauties.
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I mean, for Robert, you know, he, he took radical responsibility,
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he surrendered, but it was a messenger of grace that
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really directed him, you know, so he, he found his
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way through that. It was divine intervention. So, um, The
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way that this book is different is really about connecting
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to our own angelic nature and all the things we
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associate with angels. Divine remembrance, connection to God, grace, beauty.
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You know, when you say to somebody, you're an angel,
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you're compassionate, you're giving, you're service oriented.
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So.
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It's really to say we're not connecting to something outside
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of us. We're connecting to something that is built of
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the same source as us, which is light, which is love,
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which is divinity, which is ultimate goodness to come back to,
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hearken back to your beautiful Buddhic tradition. We are ultimately good,
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original innocence in Christianity. And so it's really connecting to
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our own, not only angelic, but archangelic nature.
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Mm-hmm. So, in the years after I got out of prison,
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in the early 2000s, there was a training program I
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led for quite a few years. We had a lot
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of things involved in it, but I had a primary
474
00:29:32.329 --> 00:29:35.519
co-teacher that we led a lot of the core trainings with,
475
00:29:35.519 --> 00:29:37.880
and it was it was uh it was really a
476
00:29:38.140 --> 00:29:42.640
a training in contemplative peacemaking but it involved all kinds
477
00:29:42.700 --> 00:29:44.880
of inner work to do our own healing work and
478
00:29:44.980 --> 00:29:49.460
you know um but she was big into into getting
479
00:29:49.500 --> 00:29:53.789
people in touch with their inner guidance and discernment and
480
00:29:53.809 --> 00:29:55.869
we had a big conflict for a while around that
481
00:29:55.930 --> 00:29:58.630
and arguments around because you know in my view um
482
00:30:01.460 --> 00:30:03.440
I felt like more often than not, what she was
483
00:30:03.460 --> 00:30:09.559
getting people in touch with was their own egoic voice, right? And,
484
00:30:09.700 --> 00:30:12.299
you know, until we do a lot of inner work,
485
00:30:13.480 --> 00:30:16.619
I mean, maybe people have spontaneous experiences where it's just
486
00:30:16.720 --> 00:30:19.690
absolutely clear one thing. But I think for a lot
487
00:30:19.710 --> 00:30:21.450
of us, until we do some inner work to really
488
00:30:21.470 --> 00:30:24.410
get clear that we do have all this conditioning and
489
00:30:24.569 --> 00:30:27.630
we do have a fear and survival programming, we actually
490
00:30:27.670 --> 00:30:30.150
do have something called the ego, which is there's nothing
491
00:30:30.190 --> 00:30:31.630
wrong with that, but it tends to be fear and
492
00:30:31.670 --> 00:30:35.759
survival based and pretty self-centered until it's not. Right. So, um,
493
00:30:36.440 --> 00:30:39.259
until you know that almost your entire experience is being
494
00:30:39.339 --> 00:30:42.960
filtered through that, then, uh, and you start to get
495
00:30:43.019 --> 00:30:44.640
in touch with the inner discernment. Well, how do you
496
00:30:44.680 --> 00:30:48.529
know whether that's actually something inner and deeper or angelic
497
00:30:48.609 --> 00:30:52.089
or just deep versus, you know, just the latest survival
498
00:30:52.130 --> 00:30:54.609
strategy from your ego. Right. So we had a lot
499
00:30:54.630 --> 00:30:59.160
of arguments about that. And, um, And it's not that
500
00:30:59.220 --> 00:31:01.440
I doubt that there's such a thing as inner guidance,
501
00:31:02.140 --> 00:31:05.279
but I do think we need to be well aware
502
00:31:05.299 --> 00:31:11.630
that until we don't, most of us, the psychology we
503
00:31:11.670 --> 00:31:14.170
arrive in adulthood with, there's a lot of hope and
504
00:31:14.210 --> 00:31:18.230
fear involved in it. We're very hopeful that we'll be loved,
505
00:31:18.250 --> 00:31:20.769
that we'll be wanted, that we'll belong, that we'll fit in,
506
00:31:20.829 --> 00:31:23.450
that nothing terrible will happen to us. We're very fearful
507
00:31:23.490 --> 00:31:25.589
that we'll be rejected, that we won't be loved, that
508
00:31:25.609 --> 00:31:28.289
terrible things will happen to us. And a lot of
509
00:31:28.369 --> 00:31:30.730
our personality, which began as soon as we had to
510
00:31:30.750 --> 00:31:34.410
start individuating around six months or so, is about, you know,
511
00:31:34.509 --> 00:31:36.910
I'll be whatever you want. Don't leave me, love me,
512
00:31:36.930 --> 00:31:38.579
don't leave me, or love me, don't hit me, right?
513
00:31:38.599 --> 00:31:43.000
So we develop our whole personality around, you know, trying
514
00:31:43.019 --> 00:31:46.039
to get the world to accept us and have us belong, right?
515
00:31:46.079 --> 00:31:49.900
So all that conditioning runs very, very deep. And our
516
00:31:49.940 --> 00:31:54.829
experience is continually getting filtered through that. So how does
517
00:31:54.940 --> 00:32:01.490
one discern one's maybe a wishful thinking about divine guidance
518
00:32:01.549 --> 00:32:05.509
versus genuine divine guidance. And then how does one assume,
519
00:32:05.630 --> 00:32:07.670
even if one is kind of in some way or
520
00:32:07.710 --> 00:32:11.289
another getting in touch with something kind of an extraordinary
521
00:32:11.329 --> 00:32:15.430
intuitive perception or visionary perception, that one isn't further filtering
522
00:32:15.490 --> 00:32:19.930
it based on one's own kind of more egoic needs
523
00:32:20.029 --> 00:32:23.319
and desires versus really, you know, hearing the truth.
524
00:32:24.930 --> 00:32:28.390
Yes, it's an excellent question. And it's an incredibly important question.
525
00:32:28.450 --> 00:32:31.660
And it's one I wish more spiritual seekers would ask
526
00:32:31.799 --> 00:32:34.619
more often of themselves. It's a question I ask of
527
00:32:34.680 --> 00:32:39.319
myself still after 37 years at this, most of my
528
00:32:39.359 --> 00:32:43.670
adult life. Because we, you know, and going back to
529
00:32:43.890 --> 00:32:47.289
having a scientific background, we don't want to leave our
530
00:32:47.309 --> 00:32:49.710
mind at the door. But the challenge is our mind
531
00:32:50.049 --> 00:32:54.539
is a great servant, a terrible master. So we don't
532
00:32:54.579 --> 00:32:57.440
want to do, in my opinion, we don't want to
533
00:32:57.480 --> 00:33:00.059
do a spiritual bypass, which is what it would be
534
00:33:00.119 --> 00:33:02.279
if we go, oh, yes, that was God told me,
535
00:33:02.299 --> 00:33:05.720
you know, an angel told me. And it's like, well,
536
00:33:06.069 --> 00:33:10.809
that is through your perceptual filters. Now, sometimes people are
537
00:33:10.869 --> 00:33:12.950
very clear. And of course, that is my work of
538
00:33:13.029 --> 00:33:17.750
helping people to connect to that higher voice. But that's
539
00:33:17.809 --> 00:33:20.789
also why I started getting degrees in psychology and practice
540
00:33:20.829 --> 00:33:23.730
in psychology and life coaching certification so that I could
541
00:33:23.769 --> 00:33:27.349
address the whole being first. Because often, because if our
542
00:33:27.390 --> 00:33:29.210
windshield is very dirty, we're not going to be able
543
00:33:29.230 --> 00:33:30.970
to see down the road to drive and we shouldn't
544
00:33:30.990 --> 00:33:33.619
be starting the car and going, yes, I'm enlightened now,
545
00:33:33.740 --> 00:33:37.470
you know, and meanwhile, we're driving off the road. So
546
00:33:38.029 --> 00:33:41.970
for me, I'm really passionate about let's address trauma. Let's
547
00:33:42.029 --> 00:33:46.619
address emotionality. Let's address, in my parlance, let's clear past life,
548
00:33:46.670 --> 00:33:49.890
not to go back to them, but to clear what's
549
00:33:49.950 --> 00:33:53.900
incomplete so that we come present. Let's clear your auric field.
550
00:33:54.500 --> 00:33:58.880
Let's work with your psychology, your emotions, your repeating thoughts that,
551
00:33:59.160 --> 00:34:04.089
you know, sabotage you. Let's work with all that. But
552
00:34:04.130 --> 00:34:06.509
the thing is, is there's also something. So we want
553
00:34:06.529 --> 00:34:07.950
to work, address all that.
554
00:34:08.030 --> 00:34:08.210
Right.
555
00:34:08.469 --> 00:34:10.210
But then people go, oh, my God, I'm going to
556
00:34:10.230 --> 00:34:11.849
have to be doing that for 20 years before I
557
00:34:11.889 --> 00:34:15.260
can connect. And that is not true either. It's a both.
558
00:34:15.460 --> 00:34:19.000
And as you know, with Buddhism, you know, we don't
559
00:34:19.019 --> 00:34:23.179
want to do duality. It's it's a both. And so
560
00:34:23.219 --> 00:34:27.840
we address the psychology. And in the Hindu tradition, there's
561
00:34:27.860 --> 00:34:32.019
something called the Royal Road. And that means, like Einstein said,
562
00:34:32.059 --> 00:34:34.619
you don't address a problem at the level which is created.
563
00:34:34.659 --> 00:34:38.019
You get above it. And so that's where the spirituality
564
00:34:38.079 --> 00:34:42.820
comes in. And we work the psychology. We clear our
565
00:34:42.960 --> 00:34:46.949
mental fog, et cetera. And we continue to work with
566
00:34:47.170 --> 00:34:50.550
and to heal our trauma. And then we go, and
567
00:34:50.630 --> 00:34:54.289
I surrender. And I am open. And I don't, at
568
00:34:54.329 --> 00:34:55.949
some point we go, I don't need to keep fixing
569
00:34:55.989 --> 00:35:00.130
myself because God is divine universal life force, whatever we
570
00:35:00.150 --> 00:35:05.469
want to call it, intuition, is not limited by my limitations,
571
00:35:05.789 --> 00:35:09.550
by my humanity. God, the divine, the universe is not
572
00:35:09.590 --> 00:35:12.969
limited by my humanity. So the royal road is where
573
00:35:12.989 --> 00:35:18.630
you go from the top down and you truly surrender.
574
00:35:19.510 --> 00:35:22.949
You choose, that's your agency, you choose to surrender your
575
00:35:23.030 --> 00:35:27.000
free will, which humans, somehow God, spirit, the creator had
576
00:35:27.059 --> 00:35:29.860
some pretty amazing faith in us humans to give us
577
00:35:29.920 --> 00:35:32.949
free will, to endow us with free will. Sometimes I'm like,
578
00:35:32.989 --> 00:35:36.650
what were you thinking? So, but don't we learn so
579
00:35:36.710 --> 00:35:40.730
much through our free will and through that challenge with
580
00:35:40.789 --> 00:35:44.110
how do I discern the highest voice amidst all the
581
00:35:44.150 --> 00:35:49.239
distractions of this level, amidst my ego, amidst all the illusion.
582
00:35:49.260 --> 00:35:53.920
And that's where we surrender and we take that divine
583
00:35:54.000 --> 00:35:58.280
pause and we allow ourselves something higher, we go, well,
584
00:35:58.570 --> 00:36:01.360
is it my higher self? Is it God? Is it
585
00:36:01.409 --> 00:36:05.210
an angel? Who cares? Is it positive? Is it loving?
586
00:36:05.610 --> 00:36:10.269
Is it wise? Is it beyond this? You know, is
587
00:36:10.309 --> 00:36:13.869
it beyond your mind and emotions? Is it that living stream?
588
00:36:14.929 --> 00:36:18.349
Then trust that and speak from that. And I, that's
589
00:36:18.369 --> 00:36:20.489
the thing where I've seen people who think they can't
590
00:36:20.570 --> 00:36:22.710
do it. And I just hold the vision and the
591
00:36:22.769 --> 00:36:26.719
container for them. And they will start speaking these messages
592
00:36:26.760 --> 00:36:28.179
that will heal a whole room.
593
00:36:31.800 --> 00:36:36.119
What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently, but feeling differently?
594
00:36:36.619 --> 00:36:39.389
Science shows us that true change happens when we align
595
00:36:39.449 --> 00:36:42.809
not just our minds, but also the neural networks in
596
00:36:42.889 --> 00:36:46.570
our hearts and guts. This heart-mind connection is the key
597
00:36:46.610 --> 00:36:50.500
to deeper healing, resilience, and expanded awareness. That's why I
598
00:36:50.579 --> 00:36:54.440
created the HeartMind All Access Membership and Community, a space
599
00:36:54.500 --> 00:36:58.539
designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence,
600
00:36:58.920 --> 00:37:02.789
and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1,000
601
00:37:02.789 --> 00:37:07.550
hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs,
602
00:37:08.050 --> 00:37:14.159
you'll learn from world-renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists, and experts in neuroplasticity,
603
00:37:14.599 --> 00:37:18.079
all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset
604
00:37:18.500 --> 00:37:22.800
and heart set regulate your emotions, and unlock your full potential.
605
00:37:23.619 --> 00:37:26.969
You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course
606
00:37:26.989 --> 00:37:32.269
we've ever produced, a treasure trove of wisdom worth over $ 10, 000
607
00:37:30.750 --> 00:37:34.969
and growing, plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community
608
00:37:35.250 --> 00:37:38.110
to support your journey. If you're ready to step into
609
00:37:38.170 --> 00:37:41.429
a more heart-centered, connected, and conscious life, I invite you
610
00:37:41.469 --> 00:37:44.070
to join us. Click the link to learn more and
611
00:37:44.130 --> 00:37:49.750
start your journey today. So I want to unpack this
612
00:37:50.289 --> 00:37:51.989
even a little further. And I want you to know
613
00:37:52.010 --> 00:37:54.130
that I'm doing so, I'm not wanting to challenge you
614
00:37:54.530 --> 00:37:56.369
at all. I just really wanted to unpack this to
615
00:37:56.409 --> 00:37:59.050
make it accessible to our audience on so many levels.
616
00:37:59.110 --> 00:38:00.969
And if there are any people in our audience who
617
00:38:01.050 --> 00:38:04.269
are just sort of angel devotees that feel I'm like
618
00:38:04.309 --> 00:38:11.079
being too challenging, I apologize for this. So I mentioned before,
619
00:38:11.139 --> 00:38:15.300
my first and principal Buddhist teacher, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher
620
00:38:15.340 --> 00:38:17.829
that I started studying with back in the early 70s,
621
00:38:18.929 --> 00:38:23.909
his name was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and widely regarded as
622
00:38:24.050 --> 00:38:27.360
one of the great masters of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition
623
00:38:27.380 --> 00:38:31.539
by his peers, by the other teachers of the 20th century,
624
00:38:32.000 --> 00:38:35.199
and a deeply spiritual human being and a very visionary
625
00:38:35.400 --> 00:38:41.400
human being, received whole bodies of teaching in a visionary way,
626
00:38:42.780 --> 00:38:45.239
which is part of that tradition, and not all Tibetan
627
00:38:45.780 --> 00:38:48.780
Buddhist teachers and masters receive teachings that way, but some do.
628
00:38:48.800 --> 00:38:52.780
They're called tertans or treasure discoverers. And that's a whole
629
00:38:53.119 --> 00:38:55.500
other subject. But anyway, so he was a deeply spiritual
630
00:38:55.539 --> 00:38:58.380
visionary being. But at the same time, so he came
631
00:38:58.420 --> 00:39:00.389
here to the West in the 70s, and he saw
632
00:39:00.429 --> 00:39:02.909
what was going on in the 1970s and in the 80s,
633
00:39:02.909 --> 00:39:05.510
you know, which was quite a spiritual circle. You could
634
00:39:05.530 --> 00:39:07.510
call it a spiritual awakening in the U.S., but it
635
00:39:07.550 --> 00:39:10.329
was a bit of a spiritual circus as well. And
636
00:39:10.389 --> 00:39:15.690
he actually coined the term spiritual materialism. And that kind
637
00:39:15.710 --> 00:39:18.389
of goes along with what you could call physical materialism,
638
00:39:18.510 --> 00:39:23.480
psychological materialism, and spiritual materialism. And that view was, the
639
00:39:23.539 --> 00:39:27.659
idea the materialism part of it was uh the way
640
00:39:27.719 --> 00:39:31.280
in which our our egoic self are that part driven
641
00:39:31.320 --> 00:39:33.300
by fear and hope and fear and you know wanting
642
00:39:33.340 --> 00:39:38.030
to survive that survival psychology uh co-opting things right so
643
00:39:38.050 --> 00:39:40.250
on a physical level we could try to achieve physical
644
00:39:40.289 --> 00:39:42.670
perfection and now then i'll be survived and i'll be
645
00:39:42.710 --> 00:39:45.789
loved and right so Or maybe I, you know, develop
646
00:39:45.849 --> 00:39:50.199
psychological perfection, become really brilliant psychologically and master that, you know,
647
00:39:50.920 --> 00:39:56.599
or spirituality. So there's a tendency, and it really isn't
648
00:39:56.639 --> 00:39:58.480
picking those certain bad people to do it. It's just
649
00:39:58.559 --> 00:40:02.760
a natural human tendency when we have spiritual experiences for
650
00:40:02.800 --> 00:40:05.659
the egoic part of our nature to go, oh, wow,
651
00:40:06.059 --> 00:40:10.070
I had that experience. Now I'm a spiritual person. Now
652
00:40:10.269 --> 00:40:12.860
I'm somebody. Now I'm this. And, you know, that can
653
00:40:12.880 --> 00:40:16.690
be completely unconscious, conscious, unconscious, by degree, varying degree. But
654
00:40:16.730 --> 00:40:18.630
he felt like he saw a lot of that in
655
00:40:18.650 --> 00:40:22.289
the culture. In fact, one of his most popular early
656
00:40:22.329 --> 00:40:26.829
books was called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. And I used
657
00:40:26.849 --> 00:40:29.769
to tell, I've been teaching for almost 50 years, and
658
00:40:29.809 --> 00:40:31.610
I used to tell people, you know, who've read that book,
659
00:40:32.050 --> 00:40:34.710
you know, he wasn't talking about those other people. He
660
00:40:34.750 --> 00:40:39.010
wasn't talking about, you know, some charlatans out there, or
661
00:40:39.050 --> 00:40:41.150
the worst example we can think of it. He's talking
662
00:40:41.170 --> 00:40:43.550
about all of us because we're all doing that until
663
00:40:43.570 --> 00:40:44.010
we're not.
664
00:40:44.530 --> 00:40:44.929
Absolutely.
665
00:40:45.309 --> 00:40:49.630
And so I've often encouraged people rather than, you know,
666
00:40:49.690 --> 00:40:51.780
living with ritual thinking, well, I hope I'm not involved
667
00:40:51.800 --> 00:40:55.039
in spiritual materialism to rather consider, well, of course I
668
00:40:55.099 --> 00:40:57.360
am on whatever degree. Let me look at that. And
669
00:40:57.400 --> 00:40:59.599
when I can recognize a layer of that, oh, I
670
00:40:59.639 --> 00:41:02.559
can peel back that layer. And there's one less layer
671
00:41:02.619 --> 00:41:05.130
and another layer and layer to have that. it's not
672
00:41:05.190 --> 00:41:08.699
quite an internal skepticism, but it's slight. It's not a
673
00:41:08.800 --> 00:41:12.480
negative view of oneself, but it's being savvy about the
674
00:41:12.519 --> 00:41:15.380
way our psychology works, right? And having a little bit
675
00:41:15.400 --> 00:41:17.760
of skepticism so that we can get, we can peel
676
00:41:17.800 --> 00:41:22.170
away those layers of the self-delusion around it and then
677
00:41:22.190 --> 00:41:25.389
get in touch with something more direct, something, right? So,
678
00:41:25.690 --> 00:41:28.909
and I would say, you know, maybe this is just
679
00:41:28.929 --> 00:41:33.349
my bias, but the notion of angels and angelic communication is,
680
00:41:34.710 --> 00:41:38.210
is probably a pretty ripe fruit for the idea of
681
00:41:38.250 --> 00:41:42.489
spiritual materialism for people. If I had an angel vision
682
00:41:42.570 --> 00:41:46.730
and now, but anyway, so I'm just putting it out there.
683
00:41:46.769 --> 00:41:49.929
And so again, I guess this comes back to the
684
00:41:50.010 --> 00:41:54.099
discernment of how people work with being savvy enough about
685
00:41:54.119 --> 00:41:58.019
their own psychology and being able to separate that and
686
00:41:58.059 --> 00:42:02.030
the way that might make use of spiritual experiences so
687
00:42:02.070 --> 00:42:04.260
they can really hone in on the truth of the
688
00:42:04.300 --> 00:42:09.460
spiritual experiences and their spiritual path and stay in that
689
00:42:09.500 --> 00:42:12.920
kind of self-honest relationship to their own spiritual path.
690
00:42:13.860 --> 00:42:16.460
Absolutely. I actually, and I don't mind the challenge at all.
691
00:42:16.559 --> 00:42:19.980
I actually welcome it because I want to keep discerning
692
00:42:20.099 --> 00:42:23.460
and going, well, I think we need to keep questioning
693
00:42:23.500 --> 00:42:26.739
and be open and curious and ever-growing. So I just
694
00:42:26.760 --> 00:42:31.010
think this is remarkable because Literally, I had a lunch
695
00:42:31.230 --> 00:42:36.369
with a CEO of the Los Angeles Tribune, and he
696
00:42:36.409 --> 00:42:40.730
sent me this text yesterday. And that is spiritual. That is,
697
00:42:41.070 --> 00:42:45.260
I'm not going to say this right, Shogun Trungpa on
698
00:42:45.360 --> 00:42:48.500
spiritual materialism. Because we were talking about it. We were
699
00:42:48.519 --> 00:42:49.920
talking about it. Yeah, literally right here.
700
00:42:49.980 --> 00:42:50.900
A little serendipity there.
701
00:42:51.739 --> 00:42:52.579
Well, absolutely.
702
00:42:52.679 --> 00:42:55.929
Or what Trungpa Rinpoche called it, he called it auspicious coincidence.
703
00:42:56.329 --> 00:42:56.829
Exactly.
704
00:42:56.869 --> 00:42:59.070
Things coming together that you can't quite explain, but there
705
00:42:59.110 --> 00:43:01.670
seems to be something auspicious about them coming together.
706
00:43:01.989 --> 00:43:04.300
And see, we're all talking about the same thing. And
707
00:43:04.320 --> 00:43:05.800
it drives me nuts when people go, oh, well, it's
708
00:43:05.840 --> 00:43:08.739
this or it's that. Like we're talking about whether we go,
709
00:43:08.820 --> 00:43:11.460
I would call it divine intervention. That's what I would
710
00:43:11.480 --> 00:43:15.179
call it. But it's absolutely, you know, auspicious coincidence. I
711
00:43:15.489 --> 00:43:19.300
was privileged to be able to spend some time with
712
00:43:19.500 --> 00:43:23.679
Andrew Young, who was on the balcony when MLK was shot.
713
00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:26.219
And he said to me, we had a beautiful conversation.
714
00:43:26.280 --> 00:43:29.030
And he said to me, coincidences are God's way of
715
00:43:29.289 --> 00:43:32.909
remaining anonymous. You know, so I mean, I think it's
716
00:43:32.949 --> 00:43:35.550
wild that just yesterday, he sends this to me. So
717
00:43:35.809 --> 00:43:38.070
I think it's and the reason we were talking about
718
00:43:38.090 --> 00:43:40.159
it is because I was saying there is this, I
719
00:43:40.179 --> 00:43:42.719
wasn't calling it spiritual materialism, because I didn't have that
720
00:43:43.179 --> 00:43:45.579
and coined that term. But I would call it a
721
00:43:45.619 --> 00:43:48.300
spiritual bypass, you know, or where we go, or a
722
00:43:48.340 --> 00:43:51.000
spiritual ego, where we go, oh, I'm special because angels
723
00:43:51.039 --> 00:43:53.260
talk to me, or I'm special because God told me.
724
00:43:53.280 --> 00:43:55.519
That drives me nuts when people do that. God told me.
725
00:43:55.960 --> 00:43:58.239
Do you know, especially if they, it doesn't drive me
726
00:43:58.280 --> 00:44:00.110
nuts if they're using it in a beautiful way, but
727
00:44:00.139 --> 00:44:02.630
if it's against someone else, that drives me nuts. Do
728
00:44:02.650 --> 00:44:07.289
you know? So, see, the thing is, is my favorite
729
00:44:07.349 --> 00:44:13.780
saying from my teacher, who's long past, but is, ordinariness
730
00:44:13.840 --> 00:44:18.570
is the prior condition to God, right? Because nobody is
731
00:44:18.610 --> 00:44:21.130
special if angels talk to them or Jesus talks to
732
00:44:21.170 --> 00:44:24.349
them or Buddha talks to them because we're all the same.
733
00:44:24.389 --> 00:44:27.289
The ego loves to be special. And the tricky thing
734
00:44:27.329 --> 00:44:29.449
about the ego is if it can't be the greatest
735
00:44:29.510 --> 00:44:31.730
of the great, then it's the lowest of the low. Well,
736
00:44:31.909 --> 00:44:33.909
I suck and I should eat worms and that, but
737
00:44:33.949 --> 00:44:36.489
still being special. So we want to watch for that
738
00:44:37.469 --> 00:44:40.550
form of the ego too. So I think spiritual materialism
739
00:44:40.630 --> 00:44:44.429
is definitely a thing. And it's something to watch out for.
740
00:44:44.630 --> 00:44:48.650
And it's something not to fear, but to respect. Because
741
00:44:48.710 --> 00:44:54.449
we want to go, wait, am I making an excuse?
742
00:44:54.530 --> 00:44:57.110
Am I going, oh, I'm too spiritual to actually handle
743
00:44:57.150 --> 00:44:58.989
the world, you know, to deal with the world and
744
00:44:59.170 --> 00:45:04.550
checks and, you know, and radical responsibility. And, you know,
745
00:45:04.610 --> 00:45:06.969
somebody else should be doing these things. And the thing is,
746
00:45:07.070 --> 00:45:11.630
is the more grounded we are, You know, for a
747
00:45:11.670 --> 00:45:14.440
tree to go taller, it has to sink its roots deeper.
748
00:45:14.460 --> 00:45:17.480
So the more grounded and ordinary we are, I think
749
00:45:17.619 --> 00:45:20.800
the higher we can go in our awareness. And it's
750
00:45:21.280 --> 00:45:26.460
continual discernment and vigilance called like, let me surrender. Let
751
00:45:26.860 --> 00:45:32.710
me experience what I experience. And then to keep surrendering
752
00:45:32.750 --> 00:45:34.909
and keep checking it out. And when you come back,
753
00:45:35.280 --> 00:45:40.039
from these beautiful enlightening experiences. As you are very familiar with,
754
00:45:40.059 --> 00:45:41.280
chop wood and carry water.
755
00:45:42.260 --> 00:45:48.469
Yeah. So, yeah, first enlightenment, then the laundry. Exactly. By
756
00:45:48.489 --> 00:45:52.570
the way that's been said. Exactly. Yeah, and interesting, you know,
757
00:45:52.929 --> 00:45:55.670
one of the descriptions of the way the nature of
758
00:45:55.730 --> 00:46:00.030
mind or what one would experience with a full awakening,
759
00:46:00.090 --> 00:46:03.469
what you're actually experiencing, that level of reality, is sometimes
760
00:46:03.489 --> 00:46:07.929
called ordinary mind. And many spiritual teachers have unpacked the
761
00:46:07.949 --> 00:46:12.610
word extraordinary that just means extraordinary, right? So that ordinariness,
762
00:46:12.719 --> 00:46:18.900
I think, is very powerful. So you've interviewed some really
763
00:46:18.940 --> 00:46:25.440
interesting figures, including, you mentioned Byron Katie, Neal Donald Walsh,
764
00:46:26.139 --> 00:46:30.449
Marianne Williamson. I've interviewed Marianne for one of our summits before.
765
00:46:31.110 --> 00:46:35.300
And I think we mentioned one other person in your bio,
766
00:46:35.320 --> 00:46:37.989
Jack Canfield, who I also had the privilege of interviewing
767
00:46:38.030 --> 00:46:41.050
not long ago. And I imagine you've interviewed many others
768
00:46:41.090 --> 00:46:48.130
for your podcast. So is there one teacher, one conversation,
769
00:46:48.230 --> 00:46:53.190
one interaction that kind of stands out for you in
770
00:46:53.210 --> 00:46:58.989
your history of having these conversations with spiritual teachers?
771
00:47:01.420 --> 00:47:05.320
I'd have to pick a few, but the ones where
772
00:47:05.619 --> 00:47:11.150
they are speaking from spirit, from the universe, from wisdom,
773
00:47:11.230 --> 00:47:15.110
not about it, are the ones that strike me the most.
774
00:47:15.429 --> 00:47:17.389
The ones where you just are like, I'm in the
775
00:47:17.429 --> 00:47:23.050
presence of the divine through this person, right? So it's
776
00:47:23.070 --> 00:47:26.110
the ones where they have presence more than the words.
777
00:47:26.170 --> 00:47:29.099
The one that I... it strikes me the most at
778
00:47:29.139 --> 00:47:33.280
this moment is Irvin, Dr. Irvin Laszlo, who brought quantum
779
00:47:33.340 --> 00:47:37.039
physics into the popular conversation, wrote something like a hundred books, founded,
780
00:47:37.059 --> 00:47:39.780
he was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, extraordinary man.
781
00:47:40.739 --> 00:47:44.050
I was so, so honored to be able to not
782
00:47:44.090 --> 00:47:46.630
only have him on my podcast, but the way I
783
00:47:46.690 --> 00:47:51.130
met him was he had me on his, he wanted
784
00:47:51.329 --> 00:47:53.809
something of the angelic on his and, and he liked
785
00:47:53.849 --> 00:47:57.730
that I, I had a scientific background because, of course,
786
00:47:57.769 --> 00:48:03.909
he's the consummate scientist. And, oh, my gosh, really, we
787
00:48:03.949 --> 00:48:07.840
were speaking about coherence. And, you know, I like to
788
00:48:08.780 --> 00:48:13.360
speak about things of the intellect and brilliant concepts. And
789
00:48:13.380 --> 00:48:15.639
then I said, to me, the greatest coherence is love.
790
00:48:16.579 --> 00:48:19.389
And then the whole conversation just became about love. And
791
00:48:19.550 --> 00:48:25.599
he demonstrated lovingness. moving through him the coherent field of
792
00:48:25.679 --> 00:48:28.920
love was moving through him and i cannot tell you
793
00:48:28.960 --> 00:48:30.980
a word he said i can just tell you we
794
00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:33.500
were sitting in the presence of the divine for the
795
00:48:33.739 --> 00:48:36.460
rest of that conversation who knows if we talked i'm
796
00:48:36.500 --> 00:48:40.469
sure we did but it was just that experience of
797
00:48:40.530 --> 00:48:43.869
someone who had done the work and it was in
798
00:48:43.909 --> 00:48:49.429
the presence of it and speaking from the divine those
799
00:48:49.449 --> 00:48:55.510
are the conversations that affected me the most. There were others. Sadly, Dr.
800
00:48:55.550 --> 00:48:59.590
Laszlo passed recently and I was at his memorial and
801
00:48:59.610 --> 00:49:02.969
it was just world leaders from all corners of the
802
00:49:03.050 --> 00:49:07.769
globe speaking that about him. Do you know that he, yes,
803
00:49:07.809 --> 00:49:11.869
he was by many considered the Einstein of our generation,
804
00:49:13.010 --> 00:49:15.949
but there was something deeper and it was more towards
805
00:49:15.989 --> 00:49:18.829
the latter part of his life. Some said the last
806
00:49:18.889 --> 00:49:21.440
few years where it's just he was in this place
807
00:49:21.539 --> 00:49:22.360
of surrender.
808
00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:27.739
Beautiful. Beautiful. And you brought up the idea of surrender
809
00:49:29.219 --> 00:49:31.389
quite a few times in our conversation. And this is
810
00:49:32.329 --> 00:49:36.969
all across spiritual traditions and historically and cross-culturally and across
811
00:49:37.010 --> 00:49:40.909
all traditions. At some point, or another, surrender plays a
812
00:49:40.949 --> 00:49:45.119
key role in being able to reconnect our individual spark
813
00:49:45.179 --> 00:49:48.659
with the greater field of consciousness, however one wants to
814
00:49:48.699 --> 00:49:52.760
think about that, with source and so forth. And in
815
00:49:52.800 --> 00:49:58.610
some ways, you know, I'm trying to remember who this
816
00:49:58.650 --> 00:50:06.409
teaching came from, but they were reminding us us that
817
00:50:06.489 --> 00:50:08.690
you know those of us involved in spiritual work of
818
00:50:08.769 --> 00:50:12.150
one kind or another whatever path we're on to remember
819
00:50:12.250 --> 00:50:16.179
that uh who's doing that work it's the ego that's
820
00:50:16.239 --> 00:50:19.280
on that path and doing that work right and so
821
00:50:19.300 --> 00:50:21.960
there is always the there is the risk of of
822
00:50:22.079 --> 00:50:25.679
spiritual bypassing or spiritual materialism or inflation of the ego
823
00:50:25.699 --> 00:50:29.079
through spiritual work and spiritual experiences or the accumulation of
824
00:50:29.159 --> 00:50:32.659
knowledge what have you but there's also the possibility of
825
00:50:32.719 --> 00:50:36.050
continually sort of refining, that our ego gets lighter and
826
00:50:36.110 --> 00:50:38.809
lighter and lighter and lighter. It's there. It's a structure.
827
00:50:38.849 --> 00:50:41.030
We all have one until we don't, or probably as
828
00:50:41.050 --> 00:50:42.409
long as we have a body, we have in some
829
00:50:42.449 --> 00:50:46.170
form or another. It has a purpose. So it's becoming
830
00:50:46.250 --> 00:50:49.710
lighter and lighter and lighter and more refined. But that
831
00:50:49.769 --> 00:50:54.989
at some point, the ultimate awakening across traditions has to,
832
00:50:55.130 --> 00:50:58.650
at some point, the ego becomes light enough that it
833
00:50:58.690 --> 00:51:01.769
can actually surrender itself to that connection with whatever it is,
834
00:51:01.809 --> 00:51:05.550
higher self, greater consciousness. Because until it gets light enough,
835
00:51:06.530 --> 00:51:09.670
when you think about it, just the idea of surrender
836
00:51:10.210 --> 00:51:12.730
from the ego's viewpoint is going to create this real, whoa,
837
00:51:13.429 --> 00:51:17.610
what does that mean? Annihilation? What does that mean? But
838
00:51:17.670 --> 00:51:20.150
it finally gets light enough and refined enough through the
839
00:51:20.190 --> 00:51:24.010
work we do that it can naturally or spontaneously surrender
840
00:51:24.070 --> 00:51:28.099
into a greater field of consciousness. So I think that's
841
00:51:28.179 --> 00:51:33.590
really cross-cutting. cross traditions. You know, the world we're in today,
842
00:51:33.730 --> 00:51:37.110
we're speaking a lot about spiritual realities and possibilities and
843
00:51:37.170 --> 00:51:42.300
paths and divine guidance and so forth. We live in
844
00:51:42.360 --> 00:51:45.440
a world today where there's a lot of stress, a
845
00:51:45.480 --> 00:51:49.139
lot of distraction, a lot of, you know, in some ways,
846
00:51:49.159 --> 00:51:50.900
I don't really have a, I'm not one of these
847
00:51:50.920 --> 00:51:55.030
people that has a super negative view of neither of humanity,
848
00:51:55.070 --> 00:51:57.630
I believe in basic goodness, but also of life. And
849
00:51:57.670 --> 00:51:59.769
in many ways, we're better off than we've ever been.
850
00:51:59.849 --> 00:52:01.989
People don't often see that because if you watch the news,
851
00:52:02.010 --> 00:52:04.389
you get a very skewed view of what's going on. Now,
852
00:52:04.429 --> 00:52:08.090
we are up against the challenges of climate change. There
853
00:52:08.110 --> 00:52:10.409
are some real limitations there because there are so many
854
00:52:10.449 --> 00:52:12.550
of us on the planet. And until we figure out
855
00:52:12.590 --> 00:52:18.409
how to shift what we're doing, which I'm optimistic that
856
00:52:18.429 --> 00:52:22.300
we'll figure that out. But still, there's a lot going on.
857
00:52:22.329 --> 00:52:24.590
There's a lot of causes for anxiety, uncertainty. The world
858
00:52:24.650 --> 00:52:27.860
is changing very quickly. AI is changing things in ways
859
00:52:27.909 --> 00:52:31.110
we don't even understand yet. And, and even the experts
860
00:52:31.150 --> 00:52:33.130
don't even know where we'll be in three, four, five
861
00:52:33.170 --> 00:52:35.269
years even. So, you know, a lot of people are
862
00:52:35.289 --> 00:52:37.809
feeling a lot of anxiety and a lot of people
863
00:52:37.849 --> 00:52:43.809
come through their childhoods with no small amount of trauma. Um, and, um, so, uh,
864
00:52:43.889 --> 00:52:49.510
you know what, I mean, in our, uh, audience, um, what,
865
00:52:49.949 --> 00:52:52.699
you know, we still hear, there's just a lot of, uh,
866
00:52:52.880 --> 00:52:57.599
anxiety and overwhelm and concern and, and, and, um, And
867
00:52:57.920 --> 00:53:00.559
still a lot of strong need for healing work. So
868
00:53:00.579 --> 00:53:04.090
I wonder if we could circle back and talk about
869
00:53:04.690 --> 00:53:08.449
how the path of maybe awakening to one's own divinity,
870
00:53:08.489 --> 00:53:11.630
awakening to the divine, or connecting with this angelic energy
871
00:53:11.650 --> 00:53:16.360
or presence, how that travels in parallel with or can
872
00:53:16.400 --> 00:53:19.239
be fully integrated into a path of healing, healing ones,
873
00:53:19.739 --> 00:53:24.599
whether they're childhood traumas or later adult traumas, and being
874
00:53:24.679 --> 00:53:28.030
able to be in the world with a greater sense
875
00:53:28.150 --> 00:53:31.409
of not hope in terms of hope and fear, but
876
00:53:31.449 --> 00:53:33.409
a more positive sense of where we are in the
877
00:53:33.449 --> 00:53:37.800
world as humanity and a little more confidence about that
878
00:53:38.239 --> 00:53:41.920
and oneself and one's place in the world. And, you know,
879
00:53:41.960 --> 00:53:45.619
just have a better feeling about ourselves, about life and
880
00:53:45.659 --> 00:53:49.719
so forth in the context of today's world.
881
00:53:51.019 --> 00:53:54.579
Yes, and it's a beautiful question. And again, so important.
882
00:53:55.000 --> 00:53:57.079
I mean, I think a lot of us on spiritual
883
00:53:57.139 --> 00:54:00.489
paths sometimes can sort of disdain this level and go, oh,
884
00:54:00.510 --> 00:54:04.750
you know, I want to be done with my physical lifetimes.
885
00:54:04.809 --> 00:54:07.349
I want to just, you know, focus on the higher realms.
886
00:54:07.769 --> 00:54:12.710
And yet this level is very consecrated. There's the purposefulness
887
00:54:12.789 --> 00:54:16.860
to it. So I think the healing goes hand in
888
00:54:16.929 --> 00:54:24.110
hand with our spiritual heritage, our spiritual connection. So I'll
889
00:54:24.139 --> 00:54:28.739
tell you a story about a client, Grace. And Grace,
890
00:54:29.440 --> 00:54:32.619
not her real name, but she's a real girl, came
891
00:54:32.659 --> 00:54:36.940
to me. She had five suicide attempts. She was 15,
892
00:54:36.940 --> 00:54:39.539
darn near successful, the last one. And she was from
893
00:54:39.599 --> 00:54:42.300
a big showbiz family. They had taken her to all
894
00:54:42.360 --> 00:54:46.719
the biggest therapists and counselors and nothing was working. She
895
00:54:46.760 --> 00:54:51.300
was just, life was untenable to her. And, and, you know,
896
00:54:51.340 --> 00:54:57.440
she's beautiful girl and obviously well-resourced, et cetera, and just
897
00:54:57.480 --> 00:54:59.980
did not want to live. And I, and I looked
898
00:55:00.019 --> 00:55:02.400
at her and I, you know, I can certainly do
899
00:55:02.460 --> 00:55:05.420
gestalt therapy and different psychological. And I went, she's done this.
900
00:55:05.440 --> 00:55:07.579
This is not what she needs. And I looked in
901
00:55:07.619 --> 00:55:10.199
her eyes and I saw that she had, she'd recently
902
00:55:10.260 --> 00:55:13.039
been from the angelic realm. So let me tell you
903
00:55:13.099 --> 00:55:17.570
what that means. So the angelic, We're going to take
904
00:55:17.590 --> 00:55:19.489
a little leap into the esoteric. Can we go to
905
00:55:19.510 --> 00:55:20.260
that for a second?
906
00:55:20.639 --> 00:55:22.980
Sure, go ahead. Okay.
907
00:55:23.840 --> 00:55:27.500
So the angelic, as mentioned, predates the human by many, many,
908
00:55:27.539 --> 00:55:32.909
many millennia. But there's obviously crossover. People talk about guardian
909
00:55:32.969 --> 00:55:35.489
angels and archangels. I mean, it's a ubiquitous word in
910
00:55:35.550 --> 00:55:39.289
our culture and across many, many cultures, if not most. So.
911
00:55:41.880 --> 00:55:45.039
In the angelic, angels don't have free will. They evolved
912
00:55:45.059 --> 00:55:48.860
to it when they were an archangel. And so in
913
00:55:48.960 --> 00:55:53.539
a wild act of faith, archangels started incarnating into the
914
00:55:53.639 --> 00:55:57.659
human realm to learn more about free will. So it's
915
00:55:57.719 --> 00:56:00.320
not so radical when you think about there's other realms
916
00:56:00.389 --> 00:56:03.849
of existence. There's realms of non-existence, though. To me, it's
917
00:56:03.909 --> 00:56:06.630
not really non-existence. It's just all existence.
918
00:56:07.090 --> 00:56:07.349
Right.
919
00:56:07.489 --> 00:56:10.630
So we there's lots of cross purposes and cross and.
920
00:56:11.260 --> 00:56:15.840
and permeability between the realms. So I looked into, and
921
00:56:15.860 --> 00:56:19.150
that's part of what I mean by your angelic ancestry,
922
00:56:19.269 --> 00:56:23.409
you know, it's connected to your own archangelic heritage, to archangels,
923
00:56:23.489 --> 00:56:26.130
to divinity, who cares if you call it angels or
924
00:56:26.309 --> 00:56:32.079
Buddha or Christ or nature, doesn't matter. So I looked
925
00:56:32.119 --> 00:56:33.960
in her eyes and I saw that she'd come recently
926
00:56:34.019 --> 00:56:38.320
from the angelic realm and it so she was so
927
00:56:38.380 --> 00:56:41.239
sensitive and this world was really difficult for her because
928
00:56:41.280 --> 00:56:43.500
she had a rare open access to it. We were
929
00:56:43.539 --> 00:56:46.320
in this wondrous time where there is cause for a
930
00:56:46.360 --> 00:56:48.510
lot of optimism. Yeah, there's a lot of darkness on
931
00:56:48.530 --> 00:56:51.869
the planet. There's some crazy things going on, but there's
932
00:56:51.909 --> 00:56:55.849
also more light, I believe. We couldn't have this discussion
933
00:56:55.989 --> 00:56:58.769
as openly 20 years ago, right? You and I have
934
00:56:58.789 --> 00:57:00.929
been doing this for a long time, you longer than I,
935
00:57:01.070 --> 00:57:04.139
and I'm willing to bet there's conversations you're having now
936
00:57:04.199 --> 00:57:06.599
within the public that you couldn't have had 50 years
937
00:57:06.659 --> 00:57:08.719
ago or 40 years ago or even 10 years ago.
938
00:57:08.760 --> 00:57:13.909
There's more light. People are more open. And so I
939
00:57:14.969 --> 00:57:16.769
looked in her eyes and, you know, her dad and
940
00:57:16.789 --> 00:57:20.550
her mom were there. Very, you know, Hollywood couple. And
941
00:57:20.610 --> 00:57:23.699
I'm like an archangel. Michael started coming through me. An
942
00:57:23.760 --> 00:57:27.719
angel means messenger of God. And I'm like, great. I mean,
943
00:57:27.739 --> 00:57:31.239
a talk angel to Mr. Hollywood, Mr. Mogul in front.
944
00:57:31.280 --> 00:57:36.539
And I'm like, but you know, if we don't listen
945
00:57:36.699 --> 00:57:43.230
to that higher guidance, those higher voices, they shut up.
946
00:57:44.590 --> 00:57:49.449
And I very much trust those voices at this point.
947
00:57:49.650 --> 00:57:52.210
It sounds like I'm hearing voices. It's really the voices
948
00:57:52.289 --> 00:57:54.489
we all hear, the higher voice, the voice of love,
949
00:57:54.829 --> 00:57:57.849
the voice that says, Yeah, you could lay that person low. No.
950
00:57:57.989 --> 00:58:02.730
You know, the voice that says, I'm really afraid to
951
00:58:02.789 --> 00:58:06.010
go walk on stage and pretend I know anything, but
952
00:58:06.050 --> 00:58:06.769
I'm guided to.
953
00:58:07.590 --> 00:58:07.829
Right?
954
00:58:08.010 --> 00:58:13.139
Those voices. And so I allowed this archangel to speak
955
00:58:13.199 --> 00:58:15.380
through me, but more to look through my eyes at her.
956
00:58:16.239 --> 00:58:18.659
And I share what I just shared with you that
957
00:58:18.679 --> 00:58:22.800
I saw she had an angelic heritage, etc. And that
958
00:58:22.840 --> 00:58:24.880
she was an archangel and she was comparing this level.
959
00:58:25.489 --> 00:58:28.269
where there's time and space and bodies that age and
960
00:58:28.349 --> 00:58:31.150
die and money. None of that's in the angelic. That's
961
00:58:31.630 --> 00:58:34.090
why a lot of angels started incarnating here because it's
962
00:58:34.150 --> 00:58:38.070
beautiful realm. It's heaven basically, but it takes a long
963
00:58:38.110 --> 00:58:42.489
time to grow precisely because it's not as challenging. So
964
00:58:42.550 --> 00:58:46.079
I said this to her, you know, after my momentary
965
00:58:46.139 --> 00:58:49.179
hesitation in front of Mr. Mogul and she looked at
966
00:58:49.260 --> 00:58:53.679
me wide eyed and I said, how's that sit with you?
967
00:58:54.639 --> 00:58:58.429
And she said, She started weeping and she said, well,
968
00:58:58.469 --> 00:59:02.079
it's way out there, but I feel hopeful for the
969
00:59:02.179 --> 00:59:07.570
first time in my life. So, yeah. Started driving to
970
00:59:07.610 --> 00:59:09.730
me every week. She was always on time and she
971
00:59:09.769 --> 00:59:13.610
lives in an hour away. And we started working and
972
00:59:13.690 --> 00:59:16.969
it's 10 years later. She never hurt herself again. She
973
00:59:17.010 --> 00:59:19.199
had been cutting. She'd been, like I said, darn close
974
00:59:19.219 --> 00:59:23.179
to successful. Never cut again. Never hurt herself again. Certainly
975
00:59:23.239 --> 00:59:30.179
never had an attempt again. And she's thriving. Now, We
976
00:59:30.239 --> 00:59:33.320
did keep working on the psychology, but mostly focused on
977
00:59:33.360 --> 00:59:36.469
just reminding her of who she is so she could
978
00:59:36.510 --> 00:59:39.469
be true to that. So she could be true to that.
979
00:59:39.750 --> 00:59:45.130
So she's still young. She's in her mid-20s now. She's
980
00:59:45.150 --> 00:59:49.070
a Buddhist, actually. How beautiful is that? She's a Buddhist.
981
00:59:49.809 --> 00:59:53.650
But she needed that spiritual element. The psychological wasn't doing
982
00:59:53.670 --> 00:59:56.250
it for her. The trauma work wasn't doing.
983
00:59:55.949 --> 00:59:56.449
It for her.
984
00:59:56.869 --> 00:59:59.250
We did all that because I'm a big believer in
985
00:59:59.289 --> 01:00:01.420
all that as well, but it was the spiritual that
986
01:00:01.460 --> 01:00:01.820
healed her.
987
01:00:03.320 --> 01:00:06.059
Wow, that's a beautiful story, and it communicates so much.
988
01:00:06.679 --> 01:00:09.099
So we're near the end of our time here, Alicia.
989
01:00:09.119 --> 01:00:14.469
I really enjoyed this. Maybe just one last question. Since
990
01:00:14.550 --> 01:00:17.630
a lot of your work does focus on angels and
991
01:00:17.670 --> 01:00:22.130
angelic presence communication, what's the biggest misconception you think people
992
01:00:22.170 --> 01:00:23.320
have about angels?
993
01:00:24.269 --> 01:00:26.889
That if they're not seeing fat flying babies or hot
994
01:00:26.929 --> 01:00:33.199
men in dresses, they're not seeing angels. True story. They
995
01:00:33.340 --> 01:00:36.699
are formless. They are essence. They look like the space
996
01:00:36.760 --> 01:00:39.679
between my hands. So they'll come to us in visions.
997
01:00:39.719 --> 01:00:42.280
They'll come to us with a form, but it's really,
998
01:00:43.340 --> 01:00:46.289
I'm going to go on a limb here, like I haven't.
999
01:00:46.050 --> 01:00:48.150
Already, but I'm going to go on a limb.
1000
01:00:49.769 --> 01:00:53.289
And say, I think you probably have experienced angels. You weren't,
1001
01:00:53.710 --> 01:00:56.809
just weren't calling it that. You know, those moments where
1002
01:00:56.829 --> 01:00:59.829
you go, I'm not alone. Even you even talk about
1003
01:00:59.869 --> 01:01:03.280
in Buddhism, we're not alone. There's other beings here that
1004
01:01:03.300 --> 01:01:06.360
just not as visible with us. So it's like, I
1005
01:01:06.400 --> 01:01:09.519
would say to people, you're probably already experiencing angels. One,
1006
01:01:09.639 --> 01:01:14.449
you experience them with spiritual sensing, inner sensing, right? Not
1007
01:01:14.639 --> 01:01:16.989
as clearly as you're looking at me and I'm looking
1008
01:01:17.030 --> 01:01:20.349
at you, but with your inner sight, with your inner ears.
1009
01:01:20.469 --> 01:01:23.559
And as you start to connect with, And trust that
1010
01:01:23.820 --> 01:01:26.539
with angels. It's not a big leap to go, okay,
1011
01:01:26.880 --> 01:01:29.159
I can experience all that is invisible.
1012
01:01:30.760 --> 01:01:32.980
Well, consider that. Now, I feel very grateful. I've had
1013
01:01:33.019 --> 01:01:37.420
countless experiences throughout my life of profound oneness and interconnectedness
1014
01:01:37.500 --> 01:01:40.699
and peace and openness and all these kind of things
1015
01:01:40.739 --> 01:01:42.719
from early in my life, then through some very dark
1016
01:01:42.739 --> 01:01:46.090
years and through my practices. A lot of that. I'm
1017
01:01:46.329 --> 01:01:48.949
very grateful for that and feel a lot of confidence
1018
01:01:49.030 --> 01:01:52.460
in that. I don't generally articulate it as angelic presence,
1019
01:01:52.539 --> 01:01:57.119
but I'm open to that. I'll keep it under consideration. Okay.
1020
01:01:57.340 --> 01:01:59.780
And I won't necessarily be looking for, you know, some
1021
01:01:59.900 --> 01:02:05.139
figure with wings necessarily. No. Well, this has been really
1022
01:02:05.179 --> 01:02:10.389
a joy, Alicia. I've enjoyed connecting with you and really
1023
01:02:10.429 --> 01:02:13.269
happy you could share your wisdom with our audience and
1024
01:02:13.309 --> 01:02:15.150
really appreciate the work that you're doing.
1025
01:02:15.780 --> 01:02:19.360
Thank you. It's been such a joy to be with you, Flea.
1026
01:02:19.500 --> 01:02:24.050
And really, you are infinitely inspiring. And so thank you
1027
01:02:24.070 --> 01:02:26.570
for the work that you're doing, truly, and bringing it
1028
01:02:26.650 --> 01:02:28.030
into our world at this time.
1029
01:02:28.690 --> 01:02:31.030
So where can people find out more about Alicia Doss
1030
01:02:31.150 --> 01:02:33.570
and your work and your books and so forth?
1031
01:02:33.590 --> 01:02:36.610
Well, thank you for asking. So my book, Your Angelic Ancestry,
1032
01:02:36.630 --> 01:02:39.570
just launched a few weeks ago. It's everywhere books are found.
1033
01:02:40.219 --> 01:02:44.179
It's with Hay House, distributed by Penguin Random House. So
1034
01:02:44.769 --> 01:02:53.179
It's everywhere. And then my website is alishadas.com, my name, A-L-I-S-H-A-D-A-S.com.
1035
01:02:53.489 --> 01:02:56.480
Lots of free resources there. And my podcast, which I
1036
01:02:56.519 --> 01:02:59.280
want to have you on, is called Live Your Love.
1037
01:02:59.639 --> 01:03:02.480
Live Your Love. And it's also anywhere podcasts are found.
1038
01:03:03.079 --> 01:03:04.920
Wonderful. Well, I'd be very happy to be a guest
1039
01:03:05.000 --> 01:03:07.300
on your podcast anytime. So thank you so much.
1040
01:03:08.269 --> 01:03:10.690
Thank you. Absolutely a joy. Thank you.
1041
01:03:11.190 --> 01:03:11.590
Be well.
1042
01:03:11.969 --> 01:03:13.090
You too. Bye-bye.
1043
01:03:15.070 --> 01:03:18.489
Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember,
1044
01:03:18.650 --> 01:03:21.869
real change happens when we commit to our growth, face
1045
01:03:21.929 --> 01:03:25.730
our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If
1046
01:03:25.750 --> 01:03:28.429
you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe
1047
01:03:28.469 --> 01:03:31.449
and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment.
1048
01:03:31.780 --> 01:03:35.159
Until next time, stay grounded, stay present, and stay true
1049
01:03:35.179 --> 01:03:36.219
to yourself. Take care.
1
00:00:00.270 --> 00:00:03.770
We're not connecting to something outside of us. We're connecting
2
00:00:03.790 --> 00:00:06.879
to something that is this built of the same source
3
00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:10.660
as us, which is light, which is love, which is divinity,
4
00:00:10.699 --> 00:00:13.779
which is ultimate goodness to come back to, hearken back
5
00:00:13.800 --> 00:00:19.000
to your beautiful Buddhic tradition. We are ultimately good, original
6
00:00:19.089 --> 00:00:23.070
innocence in Christianity. And so it's really connecting to our own,
7
00:00:24.010 --> 00:00:26.410
not only angelic, but archangelic nature.
8
00:00:26.980 --> 00:00:30.480
What if some of the moments you've called intuition, coincidence,
9
00:00:30.699 --> 00:00:34.750
or feeling that you weren't alone were actually invitations into
10
00:00:34.770 --> 00:00:39.109
a much deeper relationship with the unseen? Today I sit
11
00:00:39.149 --> 00:00:42.590
down with spiritual teacher and angel expert Alicia Doss for
12
00:00:42.609 --> 00:00:47.020
a fascinating conversation about angels, divine guidance, and the delicate
13
00:00:47.079 --> 00:00:52.079
balance between spiritual surrender and personal responsibility. We explore why
14
00:00:52.140 --> 00:00:55.320
spiritual experiences can sometimes be hijacked by the ego and
15
00:00:55.719 --> 00:00:58.359
how healing our trauma can help us discern a deeper
16
00:00:58.420 --> 00:01:02.450
voice from our conditioning, and why becoming more spiritual should
17
00:01:02.509 --> 00:01:06.489
actually make us more grounded, not less. Alicia also shares
18
00:01:06.549 --> 00:01:10.769
a remarkable story of surrender inside Folsom Prison and explains
19
00:01:10.829 --> 00:01:14.790
why connecting with what she calls our angelic nature is
20
00:01:14.890 --> 00:01:18.890
ultimately less about finding supernatural beings outside ourselves and more
21
00:01:18.930 --> 00:01:22.420
about remembering the love, goodness, and divinity already within us.
22
00:01:23.349 --> 00:01:26.129
Alicia Das, welcome to Radical Responsibility.
23
00:01:27.129 --> 00:01:29.629
Thank you so much, Fleet. I am really happy to
24
00:01:29.670 --> 00:01:30.030
be here.
25
00:01:30.530 --> 00:01:32.019
Well, it's a joy to have you. I've been looking
26
00:01:32.030 --> 00:01:34.560
forward to this conversation. So I'm going to share a
27
00:01:34.579 --> 00:01:36.359
little bit of your background and then we'll jump right in.
28
00:01:36.400 --> 00:01:36.819
Sound good?
29
00:01:37.140 --> 00:01:37.640
Sounds great.
30
00:01:38.280 --> 00:01:42.680
Okay. So Alicia Das is an angel expert and communicator,
31
00:01:43.659 --> 00:01:47.140
ordained minister, speaker, and spiritual teacher with more than 30
32
00:01:47.140 --> 00:01:51.019
years of experience helping people reconnect with their divine lineage
33
00:01:51.379 --> 00:01:54.640
and higher purpose. She holds a degree in spiritual psychology,
34
00:01:54.939 --> 00:01:58.579
has led more than 500 seminars worldwide, and hosts the
35
00:01:58.900 --> 00:02:03.189
Live Your Love podcast, featuring conversations with leading spiritual voices,
36
00:02:03.250 --> 00:02:07.489
including Marianne Williamson, Jack Canfield, Neil Donald Walsh, and Lorna Byrne.
37
00:02:07.950 --> 00:02:10.349
Prior to her work in the spiritual arena, Doss worked
38
00:02:10.469 --> 00:02:13.509
as an actress and a DJ, experiences that continue to
39
00:02:13.550 --> 00:02:19.960
influence her dynamic teaching and communication style. So, we like
40
00:02:19.969 --> 00:02:22.729
to get our conversation started on a little bit of
41
00:02:22.750 --> 00:02:27.069
a personal note. So I'm going to ask you kind
42
00:02:27.090 --> 00:02:30.289
of what took your life in this direction. You know,
43
00:02:30.340 --> 00:02:32.659
you have a degree in spiritual psychology, so kind of
44
00:02:32.680 --> 00:02:36.599
when did that happen, before or after? But even before that,
45
00:02:37.539 --> 00:02:40.879
there's just a question, you know, when you introduce yourself
46
00:02:41.930 --> 00:02:46.270
as an angel expert, does that, you know, take some...
47
00:02:47.099 --> 00:02:51.150
uh work to get people around the considering that because
48
00:02:51.229 --> 00:02:53.389
i mean i know there's many people who are tuned
49
00:02:53.449 --> 00:02:57.189
into angels and angelic visions and a whole angelic energy
50
00:02:57.590 --> 00:02:59.000
but for a lot of people there might be a
51
00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:01.439
little eye rolling so i'm just curious how you work
52
00:03:01.479 --> 00:03:01.960
with that.
53
00:03:02.639 --> 00:03:06.659
Well absolutely and i'm from a very scientific family everybody's
54
00:03:06.699 --> 00:03:10.509
an md and i was pre-med um a biology major
55
00:03:10.590 --> 00:03:14.930
and um So I really understand that. And I actually
56
00:03:15.009 --> 00:03:17.879
welcome the skepticism because we want to be discerning and
57
00:03:17.909 --> 00:03:20.039
we don't want to do a spiritual bypass. And I'm
58
00:03:20.099 --> 00:03:24.379
sure my type AAA Indian physician father would have loved
59
00:03:24.419 --> 00:03:30.699
the term angel expert and not. And so, but really,
60
00:03:30.719 --> 00:03:34.860
you know, Fleet, angels are ubiquitous. And the recent study,
61
00:03:35.259 --> 00:03:36.860
I did warn you that I'm a nerd, a recent
62
00:03:36.879 --> 00:03:40.340
study by the NORC, the University of Chicago and the
63
00:03:40.379 --> 00:03:46.729
Associated Press, demonstrated that 69% of U.S. adults believe in angels.
64
00:03:47.150 --> 00:03:49.310
That is more people than believe in God or a
65
00:03:49.370 --> 00:03:53.530
higher power. So, and it goes, they go through all religions,
66
00:03:53.650 --> 00:03:58.610
even Buddhism, even, of course, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, et cetera,
67
00:03:58.629 --> 00:04:04.599
even indigenous culture. So a belief that transcends so many
68
00:04:04.759 --> 00:04:09.949
different diversities as well as religions, there's probably something to it.
69
00:04:10.580 --> 00:04:13.229
Do you know, so... It's not so much of a
70
00:04:13.270 --> 00:04:15.569
leap for people to believe in angels. But when you
71
00:04:15.590 --> 00:04:17.839
say you're an angel expert, yes, that that can get
72
00:04:17.879 --> 00:04:21.720
some eye rolling. And so for me, it's funny because,
73
00:04:21.860 --> 00:04:23.839
you know, I've talked to people like, why don't you
74
00:04:23.899 --> 00:04:25.920
lead with the fact that you have a doctorate? And
75
00:04:26.959 --> 00:04:30.680
I mean, that it definitely informs my work. But really
76
00:04:30.740 --> 00:04:34.120
the heart and soul is learning that we can go
77
00:04:34.279 --> 00:04:38.759
only so far with beautiful psychological techniques and mental techniques
78
00:04:38.819 --> 00:04:40.519
and et cetera. And then we have to surrender to
79
00:04:40.579 --> 00:04:43.930
something greater. And that's where the angels come in. So
80
00:04:44.110 --> 00:04:46.589
for me, it wasn't a leap. I think it can
81
00:04:46.670 --> 00:04:50.009
be for others. And I welcome that because I want
82
00:04:50.050 --> 00:04:51.610
people to go in their own experience.
83
00:04:53.170 --> 00:04:57.699
And so how with your background... your father being an
84
00:04:57.839 --> 00:05:01.240
MD and so forth, your family being very science oriented.
85
00:05:01.300 --> 00:05:03.480
At some point, you made a left turn or a
86
00:05:03.519 --> 00:05:07.319
right turn one way or the other. So what brought
87
00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:07.839
that about?
88
00:05:09.240 --> 00:05:13.040
Really, again, experience. I mean, I had spoken to angels
89
00:05:13.100 --> 00:05:17.420
in their own language at age four, had lots of
90
00:05:17.480 --> 00:05:20.879
experiences growing up. And we just we spoke about Indiana
91
00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:24.699
before we started. And Do you know in rural Indiana,
92
00:05:24.779 --> 00:05:27.370
when you start telling people things about themselves you can't
93
00:05:27.430 --> 00:05:30.250
know and things about the universe you can't know, according
94
00:05:30.290 --> 00:05:32.569
to them as a child, you learn to keep quiet
95
00:05:32.629 --> 00:05:34.930
about these things. So it was really always the heart
96
00:05:34.970 --> 00:05:38.389
and soul of who I was. And once I left home,
97
00:05:38.410 --> 00:05:41.509
I was again pre-med for about a year and then
98
00:05:41.550 --> 00:05:44.329
I went, wait, this is not who I am. So
99
00:05:44.350 --> 00:05:49.230
I kept the scientific predilection and then really pursued. First
100
00:05:49.269 --> 00:05:53.329
I was an actress and then, but once I kept
101
00:05:53.350 --> 00:05:56.569
having spiritual experiences, moved to an ashram, got ordained, etc.
102
00:05:56.589 --> 00:05:59.050
That was where my heart and soul was. So I
103
00:05:59.110 --> 00:06:03.509
don't have any argument between science and spirit. Many do,
104
00:06:03.769 --> 00:06:04.379
but I don't.
105
00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:08.660
And so it sounds like you had some kind of
106
00:06:09.699 --> 00:06:13.319
intuitive capacity or you were in some ways in touch
107
00:06:13.399 --> 00:06:18.379
with the subtler dimensions of life from an early age.
108
00:06:19.699 --> 00:06:23.420
I really was, yes. When I was very young, I
109
00:06:23.980 --> 00:06:28.170
started having visions and they really had some extreme trauma
110
00:06:28.310 --> 00:06:33.250
as a child. And these visions, angels, if you will,
111
00:06:33.329 --> 00:06:36.709
really kept me whole and kept me very functional until
112
00:06:36.790 --> 00:06:39.509
I could work much later to heal the trauma altogether.
113
00:06:40.170 --> 00:06:43.699
And so for me at some point... you know, it
114
00:06:43.720 --> 00:06:46.420
really does go with a scientific mind to go, well,
115
00:06:46.540 --> 00:06:50.920
I'm going to trust my experience and then keep checking
116
00:06:51.000 --> 00:06:53.000
it out and see if it holds and see if
117
00:06:53.060 --> 00:06:56.490
it's consistent and see if it changes my life. And
118
00:06:57.319 --> 00:07:00.689
once that was the case, I surrendered.
119
00:07:02.290 --> 00:07:06.490
So, um, and your work, as I understand it, um,
120
00:07:07.329 --> 00:07:11.649
it's about helping people reconnect with their own, uh, well,
121
00:07:11.689 --> 00:07:14.439
with the divine in whatever way, but also with their
122
00:07:14.500 --> 00:07:17.000
own kind of divine lineage, that people have their own,
123
00:07:18.300 --> 00:07:21.560
I guess, everybody has their own innate connection or might
124
00:07:21.579 --> 00:07:24.500
be karmic connection or lineage connection with some sense or
125
00:07:24.540 --> 00:07:27.509
some manifestation of the divine or the sacred. So tell
126
00:07:27.529 --> 00:07:28.189
us more about that.
127
00:07:29.009 --> 00:07:33.230
I'm really passionate about people really connecting to their own
128
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divine heritage, to their divine self. We're all God, we're
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all the divine, the universe, whatever we want to call it.
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I'm I did my ancestry.com and it was very boring.
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I'm exactly half Eastern and half Western. I'm half English
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and half Indian. There's like a little bit of Chinese
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in there. I don't know how that snuck in, but
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that's like 1%. So for me, I'm very passionate about
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bridging the religions, the cultures, about bringing us together and
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So I really love to help people. I don't know
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if it's the best business model, but I love to
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make myself obsolete and really empower people to connect to
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the divine on their own. I hold a container. I
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help them. I do clear past lives and karma, et cetera,
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so that they can then connect on their own. And
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we do have to address the psychology and trauma and
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emotions and mind so that they can have that clear
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shot at really connecting to that which is beyond us all.
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So my work, one of the frames for my work
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is the name of my book, Radical Responsibility. And it's
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about a very high degree of personal ownership and responsibility.
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It has nothing to do with blaming others, obviously, but
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it has nothing to do with blaming oneself either. It's
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just about taking ownership for one's choices and creating one's
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own destiny. And also I work at my company, HeartMind.
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All my work really is grounded in the values from
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my own Buddhist tradition of what my first Tibetan teacher said,
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simply called basic goodness. Now, there's a more technical term
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in the Buddhist tradition called Buddha nature. And he used
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basic goodness as just that kind of very simple, accessible term.
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But it's pointing to the fact that underneath all the
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challenges we have, underneath all this stuff, at the core
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of our being, we are innately whole, innately wise, innately good.
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One could say innately sacred, innately divine, right? as opposed
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to ideas of the fallen nature or any of those
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kind of ideas that are out there. But mixing that,
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so I think it's very helpful. Actually, for me, a
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lot of my work is helping people get in touch
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with that so that they can embrace higher degrees of
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radical ownership and responsibility in their life without that triggering
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them into self-blame or self-doubt or self-loathing of some kind, right?
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So you first need a foundation. Now you can cultivate
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self-compassion on a kinder relationship with oneself and work with
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deconstructing limiting core beliefs and all that but actually have
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an experience where you experience in a depth of your
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own being that you're not broken that you don't need
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fixing that you're whole and innately good is profoundly transformative
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and then gives us the courage and resilience to embrace
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greater ownership in our life Having said all that, how
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do you distinguish between the idea of surrendering to divine
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grace and personal agency?
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I absolutely love everything you said, and I do want
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to celebrate your book title. That really says everything. It's
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not responsibility. It's radical. Everything. And I think that goes
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to really accepting who we are as human beings as
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well as divine beings. It's so important. Having... So to
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answer your question, to me, the two are not mutually
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exclusive at all. I want to tell you about my
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friend Robert, and it is literally the favorite story in
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my book, Your Angelic Ancestry. So I was sitting on
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a kitchen floor at a retreat in the desert, in
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the high desert. So we're away from everybody, away from civilization.
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And a very enormous gentleman was saying to me, I.
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I could get my guys to kill for me, but
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I liked it to be up close. And I would
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kill the child molesters and the drug dealers and, you know,
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the bad guys. This is an actual conversation I had.
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This was from a man named Shadow. And it was
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at a retreat in the desert with Byron Katie, who
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you probably know, a spiritual thought leader.
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And so....
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Former lifers were joining us with civilians in the desert
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to show us their work with the Inside Circle Foundation.
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And in an amazing ceremony to pick our dog, which is,
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you know, one's protector in prison, I picked Robert, who
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is this enormous, I mean, I've got to say he's
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probably 250 pounds of solid muscle, bald, a behemoth of
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a gentleman. And we went and sat in the desert,
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far away from everybody. Robert had just been in Folsom
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prison for 24 years, six years in solitary. He'd been
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out less than six months. And I'm a small woman.
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And I realized as I was listening to him tell
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me about acts of violence I'd never even heard of,
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and he'd murdered someone and his own story of alcoholism
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at age 11, etc. I realized that I was not
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afraid for a moment. I was sitting in the calm
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of a storm that had long passed and here's Robert's story.
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And it is about surrender and agency, both. So Robert
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had started doing work with the inside circle foundations, a
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blend of Christianity and Buddhism and, um, radical responsibility, trauma work,
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et cetera. And so he'd been doing this work in prison.
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He had become a Christian. And he had learned of
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a fellow inmate that was going to murder him. And
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this happens so much more in prison than I had
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any idea. And I mean, Shadow, who was another former inmate,
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just laughed at me when I'm like, well, how do
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you kill in prison without weapons? And Robert looked at
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me and he said, I said, how did you get parole?
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And he said, so this inmate was going to kill him.
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And Robert went to his inner inside circle mentor and
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they said, meditate on it first, meditate on it first.
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And so Robert really did. And in his meditation, an
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angel came to him, an archangel came to him, giant,
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much bigger than the prison, bigger than the mountain he
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was on, came to him and said, surrender and showed
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him a vision of himself, arms out like Christ on
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the cross and said, surrender. Robert came in out of
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his vision and he had this moment of radical responsibility
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where he took responsibility for everything he had done that
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got him into prison, in prison. And rather than take
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a life again, he was going to surrender. So the
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inmate came to his cell or wherever it is that
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they go. I guess it wouldn't have been his cell
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when they were out on the yard, came to him
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with all this violence. and Robert looked at him and surrendered.
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Knowing that that would cost his life, he surrendered rather
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than take a life again. The inmate saw this and
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it affected him and they ended up working out their differences.
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No violence and Grace, as if watching, entered in and
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Robert was paroled. He was released. And I saw him
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six months later in the desert, completely alone, pitch black.
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And I said, what is it like to be out
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after 24 years? And Robert said something fleet to me
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that I had never forgotten. He said, well, it's great,
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but really what's the difference? It's all an inside job.
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And so to me, Robert fully took responsibility and he surrendered.
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Full agency and surrender.
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That's a beautiful story. And there's so much within that.
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And I really deeply resonate with it. I think you
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may know that about my background, I spent 14 years
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in a federal prison on drug charges. So I'm very
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familiar with the world of prisons and what you were
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referencing there. And I can well imagine Robert and I
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knew many men like Robert. And, um, my philosophy of
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radical responsibility was actually born in my own prison experience
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that I saw the only, the only way through and
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the only way out for me was to embrace that
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kind of radical ownership, radical responsibility. So I really resonate
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with that story. and, um, interesting. My own spiritual path
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is very much about the integration of surrender and, uh,
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personal agency. So people often think of them as being, um,
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you know, oppositional or something, or at least confusing. Right. And, um, but, uh,
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they're very much, uh, very much integrated. And so, um,
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you know, I haven't had any angelic, uh, visitations or
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visions that I'm aware of in my life. Uh, given
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that I've survived three quarters of a century now, and
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given the nature of my life, I often feel like
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maybe I've got an angel or two, uh, riding on
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my shoulder, you know, um, very, very possibly I've survived
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a lot of near scrapes in life. Um, and, uh,
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In my own spiritual tradition, Buddhism, and I've practiced deeply
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in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism for over 50 years, Zen
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tends to be pretty austere, mostly about the practice and
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about insight. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition really includes the full
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breadth of the Buddhist tradition, including the Buddhist Vajrayana and
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the tantric tradition. And from that view, kind of the
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way reality is conceived of or experienced, is that there's
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the unmanifest realm, and then there's this realm that we
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live in. And in between the two, there's kind of
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a realm of form, has different names. What I'm referencing,
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if there are any Buddhists in the audience, would be
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the dharmakaya, the unmanifest, the unformed, the pure potentiality. And
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then this realm, the nirmanakaya, the realm of physical form,
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relative reality. And in between the two is something called
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the samogakaya, which is sometimes called the enjoyment body, literally.
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But the Samogitai realm is populated with all the Buddhas
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and Bodhisattvas and Dakinis and Dakas and a whole realm
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and pantheon of all kinds of beings who would be
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considered enlightened to one degree or another. There's also the
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notion of, you know, within realms there can be dark
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energies and different kind of things, although it doesn't get
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into quite the same way that's depicted in the Christian tradition.
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But there's very much, we're not alone in the world
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from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. And a lot of Tibetan
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Buddhist practices involve offerings and connection with that and so forth.
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And at the same time, though, very importantly in the
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Buddhist realm, because Buddhism is not a theistic tradition. It's
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a non-theistic tradition, which means it's kind of, it's not
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saying there is a God, it's not saying there isn't
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a God, it just doesn't use God language to describe reality,
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and also feels that ultimately reality is empty of anything
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that could define it, and certainly empty of anything like
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a self. And so it's ultimately a non-dual tradition. So
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even though we, in Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana practices, we work
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with this whole realm of having a rising of deities,
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whether receiving blessings or oneself arises. There's all this whole
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realm of practices where you're working with that energy, but
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it all arises out of emptiness and dissolves back into emptiness.
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So the notion of emptiness or shunyata is very important
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in Buddhism, and it's a little different than your more
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God-centered and theistic traditions, which don't point to that so often,
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except some of the mystics do in the Christianity. tradition,
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certainly St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila
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and other mystics point to this realm that's kind of
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beyond the notion of God and me or that kind
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of dualism, right? But anyway, just a background to that.
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So you often speak about communicating with angels. And so
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For someone who's both curious and skeptical about that, what
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does that exactly mean and what does that look like? Because,
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you know, I mean, for me in my practice, you know,
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sometimes I feel, I have a session where I'll feel
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particularly connected to that realm, right? It's not like I'm
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necessarily having a direct vision or hearing communications, but I'm
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able to tune my mind and emotionality. So I'm feeling
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more really connected and And you come out of it
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in the meditation and it's always profoundly enriched and so forth.
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So it has a profound impact. Um, and others in
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terms of receiving communications beyond our normal discursive thinking or
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beyond our normal interactions, a lot of people, you know,
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might categorize some things as kind of an intuitive feeling. Some, uh,
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some things as, as an idea that arose in their
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own mind with great clarity, almost like a vision or, um,
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And then, of course, you have the whole realm of
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psychopathology where people are hearing voices, right? But so when
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you talk about communication with angels from the one you
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mentioned before, it sounds like this feels like a very
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real experience where you're literally communicating with another being. So
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I wonder if you could describe it and see, are
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there different forms of this or ways it shows up
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for you and for others and so forth? I'm trying
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to describe the spectrum of this kind of communication with
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a subtler realm, with the divine you know, in broad
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terms to see how accessible we can make it and
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then talk about the particulars. I don't know if that
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makes sense, but.
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Yeah, absolutely. Well, and as mentioned, my heritage is half
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Eastern and half Western. My practice is as well. I
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have been an ordained minister since very, very young, but
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equally committed, also very young. At 23, I moved into
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an ashram dedicated to Eastern practices. So, and I'm half Indian,
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half English. And so for me, I absolutely concur with
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what you're saying. And I love the way you've described
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the Buddhist philosophy and practice really much more than philosophy,
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but practice reality. So ultimately, the soul, we are souls,
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we have a spark of light that is eternal. But
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even ultimately, as we continue our practice, we give up
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even that and we are in the selfless self, we
364
00:22:27.980 --> 00:22:31.789
are in The undifferentiated consciousness, what you're calling the void,
365
00:22:31.829 --> 00:22:35.400
the emptiness, no self. That is who we ultimately are.
366
00:22:35.539 --> 00:22:38.220
And that's a little bit of double talk. No, but
367
00:22:38.400 --> 00:22:42.019
ultimately we are. We are not. You know, we are
368
00:22:42.059 --> 00:22:44.849
and we are not. And we are this endless stream
369
00:22:44.920 --> 00:22:48.650
of I call it love because that's how I relate
370
00:22:48.690 --> 00:22:52.170
to it. But it is well beyond religion, is well
371
00:22:52.210 --> 00:22:58.559
beyond identity. Got it. and so where angels fit in
372
00:22:58.640 --> 00:23:04.819
that um they tangibilize that invisible realm and i do
373
00:23:04.880 --> 00:23:07.779
suggest i do believe that everyone has a guardian angel
374
00:23:08.119 --> 00:23:10.160
they're with us before our first breath and will be
375
00:23:10.200 --> 00:23:14.369
with us after our last so those are so the
376
00:23:14.400 --> 00:23:17.690
angelic realm predated the human realm by trillions of years
377
00:23:17.710 --> 00:23:21.210
this very ancient realm parallel to ours not higher lower
378
00:23:21.410 --> 00:23:25.579
but very ancient realm so But angels are essence. They
379
00:23:25.640 --> 00:23:30.400
are the space between our hands. So connecting with these
380
00:23:31.319 --> 00:23:35.970
angels are in a collective. They don't have individuation. When
381
00:23:36.009 --> 00:23:38.829
they evolve to an archangel, they have individual souls like
382
00:23:38.890 --> 00:23:43.650
we do. But then these great archangels, these monolithic, very, very,
383
00:23:43.690 --> 00:23:47.410
very highest angels are really much more beingness than beings.
384
00:23:47.769 --> 00:23:52.559
More in that beautiful void. More in that selfless self. Right?
385
00:23:52.660 --> 00:23:58.440
That uh overarching presence and so i do recommend we
386
00:23:58.480 --> 00:24:00.660
work with those and connect with those and what they
387
00:24:00.799 --> 00:24:04.579
do is they bring more present in a way we
388
00:24:04.619 --> 00:24:08.880
can perceive it they're a living bridge to higher consciousness
389
00:24:09.099 --> 00:24:12.329
to god to the divine to the void whatever we
390
00:24:12.369 --> 00:24:15.269
want to call it because they are essence and yet
391
00:24:15.329 --> 00:24:18.650
they have sentience so they are are a a a
392
00:24:21.470 --> 00:24:25.230
divinely ordained shortcut, a legal shortcut, if you will, to
393
00:24:25.250 --> 00:24:30.170
higher consciousness, because they help us experience the invisible and
394
00:24:30.210 --> 00:24:32.009
bring it very tangible.
395
00:24:34.430 --> 00:24:41.059
You know, seeing aside, I go to Auschwitz every year
396
00:24:41.140 --> 00:24:44.930
with the Zen peacemakers. I've been going for Almost 25
397
00:24:44.930 --> 00:24:46.650
years now, I'm one of the leaders of a bearing
398
00:24:46.690 --> 00:24:49.190
witness retreat where we bring people from all over the world,
399
00:24:49.230 --> 00:24:51.809
many of whom have a family background in history with
400
00:24:51.829 --> 00:24:56.230
the Holocaust or with Auschwitz in particular, but also many
401
00:24:56.250 --> 00:24:59.619
people who don't, Germans and Poles, people from the Middle East.
402
00:24:59.839 --> 00:25:02.539
We've had Native Americans from the U.S. with us. People
403
00:25:02.559 --> 00:25:05.140
have all come there and bear witness to the horror
404
00:25:05.180 --> 00:25:08.400
of what happened there, and people find it very transformative.
405
00:25:08.420 --> 00:25:12.799
It's very difficult, but very transformative. And we always have
406
00:25:12.900 --> 00:25:15.519
clergy with us and have some religious services in the camps,
407
00:25:15.539 --> 00:25:17.940
and we always have a rabbi with us. And we
408
00:25:17.960 --> 00:25:22.509
had a rabbi for a number of years. And when
409
00:25:22.549 --> 00:25:25.730
the retreat finishes on Friday night, there's a Shabbat service
410
00:25:26.490 --> 00:25:30.450
and then a meal and so forth. And so he
411
00:25:31.150 --> 00:25:34.440
also was a singer and played music and so forth.
412
00:25:34.880 --> 00:25:36.799
So there was a song he did that I always
413
00:25:36.819 --> 00:25:39.359
felt a strong connection to. Again, I haven't had any
414
00:25:39.380 --> 00:25:42.440
direct connection with angels or any angelic visions. But I
415
00:25:42.460 --> 00:25:44.720
grew up Roman Catholic, so it's, you know, that's there.
416
00:25:44.759 --> 00:25:47.180
And it's not super emphasized, at least not the way
417
00:25:47.220 --> 00:25:50.529
I grew up, but it's there, right? There's, you know, depictions, iconography,
418
00:25:50.569 --> 00:25:53.200
and so forth. But anyway, this one song, it was
419
00:25:53.240 --> 00:25:55.329
a calling in the archangels. And it had to do
420
00:25:55.349 --> 00:26:02.390
with Gabriel and Mikael and Gabriel. And what are the four? Raphael,
421
00:26:03.210 --> 00:26:03.769
missing one.
422
00:26:04.990 --> 00:26:07.230
Well, there's many, many more than four.
423
00:26:07.269 --> 00:26:09.549
But aren't there like four principal archangels?
424
00:26:10.490 --> 00:26:12.670
Is this in Judaism or Christianity?
425
00:26:12.690 --> 00:26:13.670
This was in Judaism, yeah.
426
00:26:13.710 --> 00:26:20.039
In Judaism, it would be Gabriel, Raphael, Mikael, and probably Uriel.
427
00:26:20.480 --> 00:26:26.119
Or Raphael. Yeah, okay, so the four. So anyway, it
428
00:26:26.180 --> 00:26:28.559
was a beautiful, beautiful, you know, he was kind of,
429
00:26:29.019 --> 00:26:31.529
I saw him kind of calling their energies into the
430
00:26:31.589 --> 00:26:34.500
space and I found it always stuck with me. I found,
431
00:26:34.539 --> 00:26:39.779
always found it very, very, very, very beautiful. So, um, um,
432
00:26:41.700 --> 00:26:44.049
and I, and I love what you said about, um,
433
00:26:44.549 --> 00:26:48.529
about balancing that East West background you have of we are,
434
00:26:48.589 --> 00:26:53.230
and we're, and we aren't to do the relative sense
435
00:26:53.289 --> 00:27:00.200
of self and then the selflessness of beyond. Um, and, um, um,
436
00:27:03.710 --> 00:27:11.509
I'm wondering how this, getting more of a connection, well,
437
00:27:11.789 --> 00:27:16.400
it sounds like that this connecting to those energies, if
438
00:27:16.579 --> 00:27:19.779
one actually begins to have some intuitive or visionary connection
439
00:27:19.819 --> 00:27:23.839
to these energies, that that can also be reaffirming of
440
00:27:24.000 --> 00:27:28.160
one's own divine nature or sacred nature and innate goodness,
441
00:27:28.549 --> 00:27:33.190
which could then also, in terms of, healing trauma and resilience,
442
00:27:33.230 --> 00:27:36.009
you know, overcome a lot of the self-doubt, the self-hatred,
443
00:27:36.029 --> 00:27:41.359
the self-loathing, all the limiting core beliefs, all the, you know,
444
00:27:41.500 --> 00:27:45.359
internal poverty and negativity that most of us arrive in
445
00:27:45.400 --> 00:27:48.799
adulthood with as a result of conditioning in the human condition, right?
446
00:27:49.299 --> 00:27:50.720
So it sounds like there could be a lot of
447
00:27:50.779 --> 00:27:54.140
healing in that and developing more confidence in one's own
448
00:27:54.420 --> 00:28:00.109
innate goodness and divinity by connecting with this representational energy
449
00:28:00.170 --> 00:28:01.809
of the, of the ultimate divine.
450
00:28:02.950 --> 00:28:06.190
Oh, absolutely. And that's really how my book is different
451
00:28:06.230 --> 00:28:08.630
than most angel or any other angel book that I've
452
00:28:08.670 --> 00:28:11.259
seen is yes, we want to connect to these beauties.
453
00:28:11.279 --> 00:28:14.460
I mean, for Robert, you know, he, he took radical responsibility,
454
00:28:14.500 --> 00:28:17.440
he surrendered, but it was a messenger of grace that
455
00:28:17.559 --> 00:28:21.759
really directed him, you know, so he, he found his
456
00:28:21.819 --> 00:28:26.200
way through that. It was divine intervention. So, um, The
457
00:28:26.220 --> 00:28:29.319
way that this book is different is really about connecting
458
00:28:29.359 --> 00:28:32.700
to our own angelic nature and all the things we
459
00:28:32.740 --> 00:28:39.809
associate with angels. Divine remembrance, connection to God, grace, beauty.
460
00:28:39.829 --> 00:28:41.509
You know, when you say to somebody, you're an angel,
461
00:28:41.990 --> 00:28:44.990
you're compassionate, you're giving, you're service oriented.
462
00:28:45.569 --> 00:28:45.750
So.
463
00:28:46.349 --> 00:28:49.859
It's really to say we're not connecting to something outside
464
00:28:49.880 --> 00:28:52.900
of us. We're connecting to something that is built of
465
00:28:52.960 --> 00:28:56.700
the same source as us, which is light, which is love,
466
00:28:56.740 --> 00:29:00.299
which is divinity, which is ultimate goodness to come back to,
467
00:29:00.359 --> 00:29:05.470
hearken back to your beautiful Buddhic tradition. We are ultimately good,
468
00:29:05.490 --> 00:29:09.470
original innocence in Christianity. And so it's really connecting to
469
00:29:09.549 --> 00:29:13.490
our own, not only angelic, but archangelic nature.
470
00:29:15.359 --> 00:29:21.690
Mm-hmm. So, in the years after I got out of prison,
471
00:29:21.710 --> 00:29:26.150
in the early 2000s, there was a training program I
472
00:29:26.190 --> 00:29:30.089
led for quite a few years. We had a lot
473
00:29:30.109 --> 00:29:32.329
of things involved in it, but I had a primary
474
00:29:32.329 --> 00:29:35.519
co-teacher that we led a lot of the core trainings with,
475
00:29:35.519 --> 00:29:37.880
and it was it was uh it was really a
476
00:29:38.140 --> 00:29:42.640
a training in contemplative peacemaking but it involved all kinds
477
00:29:42.700 --> 00:29:44.880
of inner work to do our own healing work and
478
00:29:44.980 --> 00:29:49.460
you know um but she was big into into getting
479
00:29:49.500 --> 00:29:53.789
people in touch with their inner guidance and discernment and
480
00:29:53.809 --> 00:29:55.869
we had a big conflict for a while around that
481
00:29:55.930 --> 00:29:58.630
and arguments around because you know in my view um
482
00:30:01.460 --> 00:30:03.440
I felt like more often than not, what she was
483
00:30:03.460 --> 00:30:09.559
getting people in touch with was their own egoic voice, right? And,
484
00:30:09.700 --> 00:30:12.299
you know, until we do a lot of inner work,
485
00:30:13.480 --> 00:30:16.619
I mean, maybe people have spontaneous experiences where it's just
486
00:30:16.720 --> 00:30:19.690
absolutely clear one thing. But I think for a lot
487
00:30:19.710 --> 00:30:21.450
of us, until we do some inner work to really
488
00:30:21.470 --> 00:30:24.410
get clear that we do have all this conditioning and
489
00:30:24.569 --> 00:30:27.630
we do have a fear and survival programming, we actually
490
00:30:27.670 --> 00:30:30.150
do have something called the ego, which is there's nothing
491
00:30:30.190 --> 00:30:31.630
wrong with that, but it tends to be fear and
492
00:30:31.670 --> 00:30:35.759
survival based and pretty self-centered until it's not. Right. So, um,
493
00:30:36.440 --> 00:30:39.259
until you know that almost your entire experience is being
494
00:30:39.339 --> 00:30:42.960
filtered through that, then, uh, and you start to get
495
00:30:43.019 --> 00:30:44.640
in touch with the inner discernment. Well, how do you
496
00:30:44.680 --> 00:30:48.529
know whether that's actually something inner and deeper or angelic
497
00:30:48.609 --> 00:30:52.089
or just deep versus, you know, just the latest survival
498
00:30:52.130 --> 00:30:54.609
strategy from your ego. Right. So we had a lot
499
00:30:54.630 --> 00:30:59.160
of arguments about that. And, um, And it's not that
500
00:30:59.220 --> 00:31:01.440
I doubt that there's such a thing as inner guidance,
501
00:31:02.140 --> 00:31:05.279
but I do think we need to be well aware
502
00:31:05.299 --> 00:31:11.630
that until we don't, most of us, the psychology we
503
00:31:11.670 --> 00:31:14.170
arrive in adulthood with, there's a lot of hope and
504
00:31:14.210 --> 00:31:18.230
fear involved in it. We're very hopeful that we'll be loved,
505
00:31:18.250 --> 00:31:20.769
that we'll be wanted, that we'll belong, that we'll fit in,
506
00:31:20.829 --> 00:31:23.450
that nothing terrible will happen to us. We're very fearful
507
00:31:23.490 --> 00:31:25.589
that we'll be rejected, that we won't be loved, that
508
00:31:25.609 --> 00:31:28.289
terrible things will happen to us. And a lot of
509
00:31:28.369 --> 00:31:30.730
our personality, which began as soon as we had to
510
00:31:30.750 --> 00:31:34.410
start individuating around six months or so, is about, you know,
511
00:31:34.509 --> 00:31:36.910
I'll be whatever you want. Don't leave me, love me,
512
00:31:36.930 --> 00:31:38.579
don't leave me, or love me, don't hit me, right?
513
00:31:38.599 --> 00:31:43.000
So we develop our whole personality around, you know, trying
514
00:31:43.019 --> 00:31:46.039
to get the world to accept us and have us belong, right?
515
00:31:46.079 --> 00:31:49.900
So all that conditioning runs very, very deep. And our
516
00:31:49.940 --> 00:31:54.829
experience is continually getting filtered through that. So how does
517
00:31:54.940 --> 00:32:01.490
one discern one's maybe a wishful thinking about divine guidance
518
00:32:01.549 --> 00:32:05.509
versus genuine divine guidance. And then how does one assume,
519
00:32:05.630 --> 00:32:07.670
even if one is kind of in some way or
520
00:32:07.710 --> 00:32:11.289
another getting in touch with something kind of an extraordinary
521
00:32:11.329 --> 00:32:15.430
intuitive perception or visionary perception, that one isn't further filtering
522
00:32:15.490 --> 00:32:19.930
it based on one's own kind of more egoic needs
523
00:32:20.029 --> 00:32:23.319
and desires versus really, you know, hearing the truth.
524
00:32:24.930 --> 00:32:28.390
Yes, it's an excellent question. And it's an incredibly important question.
525
00:32:28.450 --> 00:32:31.660
And it's one I wish more spiritual seekers would ask
526
00:32:31.799 --> 00:32:34.619
more often of themselves. It's a question I ask of
527
00:32:34.680 --> 00:32:39.319
myself still after 37 years at this, most of my
528
00:32:39.359 --> 00:32:43.670
adult life. Because we, you know, and going back to
529
00:32:43.890 --> 00:32:47.289
having a scientific background, we don't want to leave our
530
00:32:47.309 --> 00:32:49.710
mind at the door. But the challenge is our mind
531
00:32:50.049 --> 00:32:54.539
is a great servant, a terrible master. So we don't
532
00:32:54.579 --> 00:32:57.440
want to do, in my opinion, we don't want to
533
00:32:57.480 --> 00:33:00.059
do a spiritual bypass, which is what it would be
534
00:33:00.119 --> 00:33:02.279
if we go, oh, yes, that was God told me,
535
00:33:02.299 --> 00:33:05.720
you know, an angel told me. And it's like, well,
536
00:33:06.069 --> 00:33:10.809
that is through your perceptual filters. Now, sometimes people are
537
00:33:10.869 --> 00:33:12.950
very clear. And of course, that is my work of
538
00:33:13.029 --> 00:33:17.750
helping people to connect to that higher voice. But that's
539
00:33:17.809 --> 00:33:20.789
also why I started getting degrees in psychology and practice
540
00:33:20.829 --> 00:33:23.730
in psychology and life coaching certification so that I could
541
00:33:23.769 --> 00:33:27.349
address the whole being first. Because often, because if our
542
00:33:27.390 --> 00:33:29.210
windshield is very dirty, we're not going to be able
543
00:33:29.230 --> 00:33:30.970
to see down the road to drive and we shouldn't
544
00:33:30.990 --> 00:33:33.619
be starting the car and going, yes, I'm enlightened now,
545
00:33:33.740 --> 00:33:37.470
you know, and meanwhile, we're driving off the road. So
546
00:33:38.029 --> 00:33:41.970
for me, I'm really passionate about let's address trauma. Let's
547
00:33:42.029 --> 00:33:46.619
address emotionality. Let's address, in my parlance, let's clear past life,
548
00:33:46.670 --> 00:33:49.890
not to go back to them, but to clear what's
549
00:33:49.950 --> 00:33:53.900
incomplete so that we come present. Let's clear your auric field.
550
00:33:54.500 --> 00:33:58.880
Let's work with your psychology, your emotions, your repeating thoughts that,
551
00:33:59.160 --> 00:34:04.089
you know, sabotage you. Let's work with all that. But
552
00:34:04.130 --> 00:34:06.509
the thing is, is there's also something. So we want
553
00:34:06.529 --> 00:34:07.950
to work, address all that.
554
00:34:08.030 --> 00:34:08.210
Right.
555
00:34:08.469 --> 00:34:10.210
But then people go, oh, my God, I'm going to
556
00:34:10.230 --> 00:34:11.849
have to be doing that for 20 years before I
557
00:34:11.889 --> 00:34:15.260
can connect. And that is not true either. It's a both.
558
00:34:15.460 --> 00:34:19.000
And as you know, with Buddhism, you know, we don't
559
00:34:19.019 --> 00:34:23.179
want to do duality. It's it's a both. And so
560
00:34:23.219 --> 00:34:27.840
we address the psychology. And in the Hindu tradition, there's
561
00:34:27.860 --> 00:34:32.019
something called the Royal Road. And that means, like Einstein said,
562
00:34:32.059 --> 00:34:34.619
you don't address a problem at the level which is created.
563
00:34:34.659 --> 00:34:38.019
You get above it. And so that's where the spirituality
564
00:34:38.079 --> 00:34:42.820
comes in. And we work the psychology. We clear our
565
00:34:42.960 --> 00:34:46.949
mental fog, et cetera. And we continue to work with
566
00:34:47.170 --> 00:34:50.550
and to heal our trauma. And then we go, and
567
00:34:50.630 --> 00:34:54.289
I surrender. And I am open. And I don't, at
568
00:34:54.329 --> 00:34:55.949
some point we go, I don't need to keep fixing
569
00:34:55.989 --> 00:35:00.130
myself because God is divine universal life force, whatever we
570
00:35:00.150 --> 00:35:05.469
want to call it, intuition, is not limited by my limitations,
571
00:35:05.789 --> 00:35:09.550
by my humanity. God, the divine, the universe is not
572
00:35:09.590 --> 00:35:12.969
limited by my humanity. So the royal road is where
573
00:35:12.989 --> 00:35:18.630
you go from the top down and you truly surrender.
574
00:35:19.510 --> 00:35:22.949
You choose, that's your agency, you choose to surrender your
575
00:35:23.030 --> 00:35:27.000
free will, which humans, somehow God, spirit, the creator had
576
00:35:27.059 --> 00:35:29.860
some pretty amazing faith in us humans to give us
577
00:35:29.920 --> 00:35:32.949
free will, to endow us with free will. Sometimes I'm like,
578
00:35:32.989 --> 00:35:36.650
what were you thinking? So, but don't we learn so
579
00:35:36.710 --> 00:35:40.730
much through our free will and through that challenge with
580
00:35:40.789 --> 00:35:44.110
how do I discern the highest voice amidst all the
581
00:35:44.150 --> 00:35:49.239
distractions of this level, amidst my ego, amidst all the illusion.
582
00:35:49.260 --> 00:35:53.920
And that's where we surrender and we take that divine
583
00:35:54.000 --> 00:35:58.280
pause and we allow ourselves something higher, we go, well,
584
00:35:58.570 --> 00:36:01.360
is it my higher self? Is it God? Is it
585
00:36:01.409 --> 00:36:05.210
an angel? Who cares? Is it positive? Is it loving?
586
00:36:05.610 --> 00:36:10.269
Is it wise? Is it beyond this? You know, is
587
00:36:10.309 --> 00:36:13.869
it beyond your mind and emotions? Is it that living stream?
588
00:36:14.929 --> 00:36:18.349
Then trust that and speak from that. And I, that's
589
00:36:18.369 --> 00:36:20.489
the thing where I've seen people who think they can't
590
00:36:20.570 --> 00:36:22.710
do it. And I just hold the vision and the
591
00:36:22.769 --> 00:36:26.719
container for them. And they will start speaking these messages
592
00:36:26.760 --> 00:36:28.179
that will heal a whole room.
593
00:36:31.800 --> 00:36:36.119
What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently, but feeling differently?
594
00:36:36.619 --> 00:36:39.389
Science shows us that true change happens when we align
595
00:36:39.449 --> 00:36:42.809
not just our minds, but also the neural networks in
596
00:36:42.889 --> 00:36:46.570
our hearts and guts. This heart-mind connection is the key
597
00:36:46.610 --> 00:36:50.500
to deeper healing, resilience, and expanded awareness. That's why I
598
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600
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601
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610
00:37:41.469 --> 00:37:44.070
to join us. Click the link to learn more and
611
00:37:44.130 --> 00:37:49.750
start your journey today. So I want to unpack this
612
00:37:50.289 --> 00:37:51.989
even a little further. And I want you to know
613
00:37:52.010 --> 00:37:54.130
that I'm doing so, I'm not wanting to challenge you
614
00:37:54.530 --> 00:37:56.369
at all. I just really wanted to unpack this to
615
00:37:56.409 --> 00:37:59.050
make it accessible to our audience on so many levels.
616
00:37:59.110 --> 00:38:00.969
And if there are any people in our audience who
617
00:38:01.050 --> 00:38:04.269
are just sort of angel devotees that feel I'm like
618
00:38:04.309 --> 00:38:11.079
being too challenging, I apologize for this. So I mentioned before,
619
00:38:11.139 --> 00:38:15.300
my first and principal Buddhist teacher, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher
620
00:38:15.340 --> 00:38:17.829
that I started studying with back in the early 70s,
621
00:38:18.929 --> 00:38:23.909
his name was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and widely regarded as
622
00:38:24.050 --> 00:38:27.360
one of the great masters of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition
623
00:38:27.380 --> 00:38:31.539
by his peers, by the other teachers of the 20th century,
624
00:38:32.000 --> 00:38:35.199
and a deeply spiritual human being and a very visionary
625
00:38:35.400 --> 00:38:41.400
human being, received whole bodies of teaching in a visionary way,
626
00:38:42.780 --> 00:38:45.239
which is part of that tradition, and not all Tibetan
627
00:38:45.780 --> 00:38:48.780
Buddhist teachers and masters receive teachings that way, but some do.
628
00:38:48.800 --> 00:38:52.780
They're called tertans or treasure discoverers. And that's a whole
629
00:38:53.119 --> 00:38:55.500
other subject. But anyway, so he was a deeply spiritual
630
00:38:55.539 --> 00:38:58.380
visionary being. But at the same time, so he came
631
00:38:58.420 --> 00:39:00.389
here to the West in the 70s, and he saw
632
00:39:00.429 --> 00:39:02.909
what was going on in the 1970s and in the 80s,
633
00:39:02.909 --> 00:39:05.510
you know, which was quite a spiritual circle. You could
634
00:39:05.530 --> 00:39:07.510
call it a spiritual awakening in the U.S., but it
635
00:39:07.550 --> 00:39:10.329
was a bit of a spiritual circus as well. And
636
00:39:10.389 --> 00:39:15.690
he actually coined the term spiritual materialism. And that kind
637
00:39:15.710 --> 00:39:18.389
of goes along with what you could call physical materialism,
638
00:39:18.510 --> 00:39:23.480
psychological materialism, and spiritual materialism. And that view was, the
639
00:39:23.539 --> 00:39:27.659
idea the materialism part of it was uh the way
640
00:39:27.719 --> 00:39:31.280
in which our our egoic self are that part driven
641
00:39:31.320 --> 00:39:33.300
by fear and hope and fear and you know wanting
642
00:39:33.340 --> 00:39:38.030
to survive that survival psychology uh co-opting things right so
643
00:39:38.050 --> 00:39:40.250
on a physical level we could try to achieve physical
644
00:39:40.289 --> 00:39:42.670
perfection and now then i'll be survived and i'll be
645
00:39:42.710 --> 00:39:45.789
loved and right so Or maybe I, you know, develop
646
00:39:45.849 --> 00:39:50.199
psychological perfection, become really brilliant psychologically and master that, you know,
647
00:39:50.920 --> 00:39:56.599
or spirituality. So there's a tendency, and it really isn't
648
00:39:56.639 --> 00:39:58.480
picking those certain bad people to do it. It's just
649
00:39:58.559 --> 00:40:02.760
a natural human tendency when we have spiritual experiences for
650
00:40:02.800 --> 00:40:05.659
the egoic part of our nature to go, oh, wow,
651
00:40:06.059 --> 00:40:10.070
I had that experience. Now I'm a spiritual person. Now
652
00:40:10.269 --> 00:40:12.860
I'm somebody. Now I'm this. And, you know, that can
653
00:40:12.880 --> 00:40:16.690
be completely unconscious, conscious, unconscious, by degree, varying degree. But
654
00:40:16.730 --> 00:40:18.630
he felt like he saw a lot of that in
655
00:40:18.650 --> 00:40:22.289
the culture. In fact, one of his most popular early
656
00:40:22.329 --> 00:40:26.829
books was called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. And I used
657
00:40:26.849 --> 00:40:29.769
to tell, I've been teaching for almost 50 years, and
658
00:40:29.809 --> 00:40:31.610
I used to tell people, you know, who've read that book,
659
00:40:32.050 --> 00:40:34.710
you know, he wasn't talking about those other people. He
660
00:40:34.750 --> 00:40:39.010
wasn't talking about, you know, some charlatans out there, or
661
00:40:39.050 --> 00:40:41.150
the worst example we can think of it. He's talking
662
00:40:41.170 --> 00:40:43.550
about all of us because we're all doing that until
663
00:40:43.570 --> 00:40:44.010
we're not.
664
00:40:44.530 --> 00:40:44.929
Absolutely.
665
00:40:45.309 --> 00:40:49.630
And so I've often encouraged people rather than, you know,
666
00:40:49.690 --> 00:40:51.780
living with ritual thinking, well, I hope I'm not involved
667
00:40:51.800 --> 00:40:55.039
in spiritual materialism to rather consider, well, of course I
668
00:40:55.099 --> 00:40:57.360
am on whatever degree. Let me look at that. And
669
00:40:57.400 --> 00:40:59.599
when I can recognize a layer of that, oh, I
670
00:40:59.639 --> 00:41:02.559
can peel back that layer. And there's one less layer
671
00:41:02.619 --> 00:41:05.130
and another layer and layer to have that. it's not
672
00:41:05.190 --> 00:41:08.699
quite an internal skepticism, but it's slight. It's not a
673
00:41:08.800 --> 00:41:12.480
negative view of oneself, but it's being savvy about the
674
00:41:12.519 --> 00:41:15.380
way our psychology works, right? And having a little bit
675
00:41:15.400 --> 00:41:17.760
of skepticism so that we can get, we can peel
676
00:41:17.800 --> 00:41:22.170
away those layers of the self-delusion around it and then
677
00:41:22.190 --> 00:41:25.389
get in touch with something more direct, something, right? So,
678
00:41:25.690 --> 00:41:28.909
and I would say, you know, maybe this is just
679
00:41:28.929 --> 00:41:33.349
my bias, but the notion of angels and angelic communication is,
680
00:41:34.710 --> 00:41:38.210
is probably a pretty ripe fruit for the idea of
681
00:41:38.250 --> 00:41:42.489
spiritual materialism for people. If I had an angel vision
682
00:41:42.570 --> 00:41:46.730
and now, but anyway, so I'm just putting it out there.
683
00:41:46.769 --> 00:41:49.929
And so again, I guess this comes back to the
684
00:41:50.010 --> 00:41:54.099
discernment of how people work with being savvy enough about
685
00:41:54.119 --> 00:41:58.019
their own psychology and being able to separate that and
686
00:41:58.059 --> 00:42:02.030
the way that might make use of spiritual experiences so
687
00:42:02.070 --> 00:42:04.260
they can really hone in on the truth of the
688
00:42:04.300 --> 00:42:09.460
spiritual experiences and their spiritual path and stay in that
689
00:42:09.500 --> 00:42:12.920
kind of self-honest relationship to their own spiritual path.
690
00:42:13.860 --> 00:42:16.460
Absolutely. I actually, and I don't mind the challenge at all.
691
00:42:16.559 --> 00:42:19.980
I actually welcome it because I want to keep discerning
692
00:42:20.099 --> 00:42:23.460
and going, well, I think we need to keep questioning
693
00:42:23.500 --> 00:42:26.739
and be open and curious and ever-growing. So I just
694
00:42:26.760 --> 00:42:31.010
think this is remarkable because Literally, I had a lunch
695
00:42:31.230 --> 00:42:36.369
with a CEO of the Los Angeles Tribune, and he
696
00:42:36.409 --> 00:42:40.730
sent me this text yesterday. And that is spiritual. That is,
697
00:42:41.070 --> 00:42:45.260
I'm not going to say this right, Shogun Trungpa on
698
00:42:45.360 --> 00:42:48.500
spiritual materialism. Because we were talking about it. We were
699
00:42:48.519 --> 00:42:49.920
talking about it. Yeah, literally right here.
700
00:42:49.980 --> 00:42:50.900
A little serendipity there.
701
00:42:51.739 --> 00:42:52.579
Well, absolutely.
702
00:42:52.679 --> 00:42:55.929
Or what Trungpa Rinpoche called it, he called it auspicious coincidence.
703
00:42:56.329 --> 00:42:56.829
Exactly.
704
00:42:56.869 --> 00:42:59.070
Things coming together that you can't quite explain, but there
705
00:42:59.110 --> 00:43:01.670
seems to be something auspicious about them coming together.
706
00:43:01.989 --> 00:43:04.300
And see, we're all talking about the same thing. And
707
00:43:04.320 --> 00:43:05.800
it drives me nuts when people go, oh, well, it's
708
00:43:05.840 --> 00:43:08.739
this or it's that. Like we're talking about whether we go,
709
00:43:08.820 --> 00:43:11.460
I would call it divine intervention. That's what I would
710
00:43:11.480 --> 00:43:15.179
call it. But it's absolutely, you know, auspicious coincidence. I
711
00:43:15.489 --> 00:43:19.300
was privileged to be able to spend some time with
712
00:43:19.500 --> 00:43:23.679
Andrew Young, who was on the balcony when MLK was shot.
713
00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:26.219
And he said to me, we had a beautiful conversation.
714
00:43:26.280 --> 00:43:29.030
And he said to me, coincidences are God's way of
715
00:43:29.289 --> 00:43:32.909
remaining anonymous. You know, so I mean, I think it's
716
00:43:32.949 --> 00:43:35.550
wild that just yesterday, he sends this to me. So
717
00:43:35.809 --> 00:43:38.070
I think it's and the reason we were talking about
718
00:43:38.090 --> 00:43:40.159
it is because I was saying there is this, I
719
00:43:40.179 --> 00:43:42.719
wasn't calling it spiritual materialism, because I didn't have that
720
00:43:43.179 --> 00:43:45.579
and coined that term. But I would call it a
721
00:43:45.619 --> 00:43:48.300
spiritual bypass, you know, or where we go, or a
722
00:43:48.340 --> 00:43:51.000
spiritual ego, where we go, oh, I'm special because angels
723
00:43:51.039 --> 00:43:53.260
talk to me, or I'm special because God told me.
724
00:43:53.280 --> 00:43:55.519
That drives me nuts when people do that. God told me.
725
00:43:55.960 --> 00:43:58.239
Do you know, especially if they, it doesn't drive me
726
00:43:58.280 --> 00:44:00.110
nuts if they're using it in a beautiful way, but
727
00:44:00.139 --> 00:44:02.630
if it's against someone else, that drives me nuts. Do
728
00:44:02.650 --> 00:44:07.289
you know? So, see, the thing is, is my favorite
729
00:44:07.349 --> 00:44:13.780
saying from my teacher, who's long past, but is, ordinariness
730
00:44:13.840 --> 00:44:18.570
is the prior condition to God, right? Because nobody is
731
00:44:18.610 --> 00:44:21.130
special if angels talk to them or Jesus talks to
732
00:44:21.170 --> 00:44:24.349
them or Buddha talks to them because we're all the same.
733
00:44:24.389 --> 00:44:27.289
The ego loves to be special. And the tricky thing
734
00:44:27.329 --> 00:44:29.449
about the ego is if it can't be the greatest
735
00:44:29.510 --> 00:44:31.730
of the great, then it's the lowest of the low. Well,
736
00:44:31.909 --> 00:44:33.909
I suck and I should eat worms and that, but
737
00:44:33.949 --> 00:44:36.489
still being special. So we want to watch for that
738
00:44:37.469 --> 00:44:40.550
form of the ego too. So I think spiritual materialism
739
00:44:40.630 --> 00:44:44.429
is definitely a thing. And it's something to watch out for.
740
00:44:44.630 --> 00:44:48.650
And it's something not to fear, but to respect. Because
741
00:44:48.710 --> 00:44:54.449
we want to go, wait, am I making an excuse?
742
00:44:54.530 --> 00:44:57.110
Am I going, oh, I'm too spiritual to actually handle
743
00:44:57.150 --> 00:44:58.989
the world, you know, to deal with the world and
744
00:44:59.170 --> 00:45:04.550
checks and, you know, and radical responsibility. And, you know,
745
00:45:04.610 --> 00:45:06.969
somebody else should be doing these things. And the thing is,
746
00:45:07.070 --> 00:45:11.630
is the more grounded we are, You know, for a
747
00:45:11.670 --> 00:45:14.440
tree to go taller, it has to sink its roots deeper.
748
00:45:14.460 --> 00:45:17.480
So the more grounded and ordinary we are, I think
749
00:45:17.619 --> 00:45:20.800
the higher we can go in our awareness. And it's
750
00:45:21.280 --> 00:45:26.460
continual discernment and vigilance called like, let me surrender. Let
751
00:45:26.860 --> 00:45:32.710
me experience what I experience. And then to keep surrendering
752
00:45:32.750 --> 00:45:34.909
and keep checking it out. And when you come back,
753
00:45:35.280 --> 00:45:40.039
from these beautiful enlightening experiences. As you are very familiar with,
754
00:45:40.059 --> 00:45:41.280
chop wood and carry water.
755
00:45:42.260 --> 00:45:48.469
Yeah. So, yeah, first enlightenment, then the laundry. Exactly. By
756
00:45:48.489 --> 00:45:52.570
the way that's been said. Exactly. Yeah, and interesting, you know,
757
00:45:52.929 --> 00:45:55.670
one of the descriptions of the way the nature of
758
00:45:55.730 --> 00:46:00.030
mind or what one would experience with a full awakening,
759
00:46:00.090 --> 00:46:03.469
what you're actually experiencing, that level of reality, is sometimes
760
00:46:03.489 --> 00:46:07.929
called ordinary mind. And many spiritual teachers have unpacked the
761
00:46:07.949 --> 00:46:12.610
word extraordinary that just means extraordinary, right? So that ordinariness,
762
00:46:12.719 --> 00:46:18.900
I think, is very powerful. So you've interviewed some really
763
00:46:18.940 --> 00:46:25.440
interesting figures, including, you mentioned Byron Katie, Neal Donald Walsh,
764
00:46:26.139 --> 00:46:30.449
Marianne Williamson. I've interviewed Marianne for one of our summits before.
765
00:46:31.110 --> 00:46:35.300
And I think we mentioned one other person in your bio,
766
00:46:35.320 --> 00:46:37.989
Jack Canfield, who I also had the privilege of interviewing
767
00:46:38.030 --> 00:46:41.050
not long ago. And I imagine you've interviewed many others
768
00:46:41.090 --> 00:46:48.130
for your podcast. So is there one teacher, one conversation,
769
00:46:48.230 --> 00:46:53.190
one interaction that kind of stands out for you in
770
00:46:53.210 --> 00:46:58.989
your history of having these conversations with spiritual teachers?
771
00:47:01.420 --> 00:47:05.320
I'd have to pick a few, but the ones where
772
00:47:05.619 --> 00:47:11.150
they are speaking from spirit, from the universe, from wisdom,
773
00:47:11.230 --> 00:47:15.110
not about it, are the ones that strike me the most.
774
00:47:15.429 --> 00:47:17.389
The ones where you just are like, I'm in the
775
00:47:17.429 --> 00:47:23.050
presence of the divine through this person, right? So it's
776
00:47:23.070 --> 00:47:26.110
the ones where they have presence more than the words.
777
00:47:26.170 --> 00:47:29.099
The one that I... it strikes me the most at
778
00:47:29.139 --> 00:47:33.280
this moment is Irvin, Dr. Irvin Laszlo, who brought quantum
779
00:47:33.340 --> 00:47:37.039
physics into the popular conversation, wrote something like a hundred books, founded,
780
00:47:37.059 --> 00:47:39.780
he was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, extraordinary man.
781
00:47:40.739 --> 00:47:44.050
I was so, so honored to be able to not
782
00:47:44.090 --> 00:47:46.630
only have him on my podcast, but the way I
783
00:47:46.690 --> 00:47:51.130
met him was he had me on his, he wanted
784
00:47:51.329 --> 00:47:53.809
something of the angelic on his and, and he liked
785
00:47:53.849 --> 00:47:57.730
that I, I had a scientific background because, of course,
786
00:47:57.769 --> 00:48:03.909
he's the consummate scientist. And, oh, my gosh, really, we
787
00:48:03.949 --> 00:48:07.840
were speaking about coherence. And, you know, I like to
788
00:48:08.780 --> 00:48:13.360
speak about things of the intellect and brilliant concepts. And
789
00:48:13.380 --> 00:48:15.639
then I said, to me, the greatest coherence is love.
790
00:48:16.579 --> 00:48:19.389
And then the whole conversation just became about love. And
791
00:48:19.550 --> 00:48:25.599
he demonstrated lovingness. moving through him the coherent field of
792
00:48:25.679 --> 00:48:28.920
love was moving through him and i cannot tell you
793
00:48:28.960 --> 00:48:30.980
a word he said i can just tell you we
794
00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:33.500
were sitting in the presence of the divine for the
795
00:48:33.739 --> 00:48:36.460
rest of that conversation who knows if we talked i'm
796
00:48:36.500 --> 00:48:40.469
sure we did but it was just that experience of
797
00:48:40.530 --> 00:48:43.869
someone who had done the work and it was in
798
00:48:43.909 --> 00:48:49.429
the presence of it and speaking from the divine those
799
00:48:49.449 --> 00:48:55.510
are the conversations that affected me the most. There were others. Sadly, Dr.
800
00:48:55.550 --> 00:48:59.590
Laszlo passed recently and I was at his memorial and
801
00:48:59.610 --> 00:49:02.969
it was just world leaders from all corners of the
802
00:49:03.050 --> 00:49:07.769
globe speaking that about him. Do you know that he, yes,
803
00:49:07.809 --> 00:49:11.869
he was by many considered the Einstein of our generation,
804
00:49:13.010 --> 00:49:15.949
but there was something deeper and it was more towards
805
00:49:15.989 --> 00:49:18.829
the latter part of his life. Some said the last
806
00:49:18.889 --> 00:49:21.440
few years where it's just he was in this place
807
00:49:21.539 --> 00:49:22.360
of surrender.
808
00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:27.739
Beautiful. Beautiful. And you brought up the idea of surrender
809
00:49:29.219 --> 00:49:31.389
quite a few times in our conversation. And this is
810
00:49:32.329 --> 00:49:36.969
all across spiritual traditions and historically and cross-culturally and across
811
00:49:37.010 --> 00:49:40.909
all traditions. At some point, or another, surrender plays a
812
00:49:40.949 --> 00:49:45.119
key role in being able to reconnect our individual spark
813
00:49:45.179 --> 00:49:48.659
with the greater field of consciousness, however one wants to
814
00:49:48.699 --> 00:49:52.760
think about that, with source and so forth. And in
815
00:49:52.800 --> 00:49:58.610
some ways, you know, I'm trying to remember who this
816
00:49:58.650 --> 00:50:06.409
teaching came from, but they were reminding us us that
817
00:50:06.489 --> 00:50:08.690
you know those of us involved in spiritual work of
818
00:50:08.769 --> 00:50:12.150
one kind or another whatever path we're on to remember
819
00:50:12.250 --> 00:50:16.179
that uh who's doing that work it's the ego that's
820
00:50:16.239 --> 00:50:19.280
on that path and doing that work right and so
821
00:50:19.300 --> 00:50:21.960
there is always the there is the risk of of
822
00:50:22.079 --> 00:50:25.679
spiritual bypassing or spiritual materialism or inflation of the ego
823
00:50:25.699 --> 00:50:29.079
through spiritual work and spiritual experiences or the accumulation of
824
00:50:29.159 --> 00:50:32.659
knowledge what have you but there's also the possibility of
825
00:50:32.719 --> 00:50:36.050
continually sort of refining, that our ego gets lighter and
826
00:50:36.110 --> 00:50:38.809
lighter and lighter and lighter. It's there. It's a structure.
827
00:50:38.849 --> 00:50:41.030
We all have one until we don't, or probably as
828
00:50:41.050 --> 00:50:42.409
long as we have a body, we have in some
829
00:50:42.449 --> 00:50:46.170
form or another. It has a purpose. So it's becoming
830
00:50:46.250 --> 00:50:49.710
lighter and lighter and lighter and more refined. But that
831
00:50:49.769 --> 00:50:54.989
at some point, the ultimate awakening across traditions has to,
832
00:50:55.130 --> 00:50:58.650
at some point, the ego becomes light enough that it
833
00:50:58.690 --> 00:51:01.769
can actually surrender itself to that connection with whatever it is,
834
00:51:01.809 --> 00:51:05.550
higher self, greater consciousness. Because until it gets light enough,
835
00:51:06.530 --> 00:51:09.670
when you think about it, just the idea of surrender
836
00:51:10.210 --> 00:51:12.730
from the ego's viewpoint is going to create this real, whoa,
837
00:51:13.429 --> 00:51:17.610
what does that mean? Annihilation? What does that mean? But
838
00:51:17.670 --> 00:51:20.150
it finally gets light enough and refined enough through the
839
00:51:20.190 --> 00:51:24.010
work we do that it can naturally or spontaneously surrender
840
00:51:24.070 --> 00:51:28.099
into a greater field of consciousness. So I think that's
841
00:51:28.179 --> 00:51:33.590
really cross-cutting. cross traditions. You know, the world we're in today,
842
00:51:33.730 --> 00:51:37.110
we're speaking a lot about spiritual realities and possibilities and
843
00:51:37.170 --> 00:51:42.300
paths and divine guidance and so forth. We live in
844
00:51:42.360 --> 00:51:45.440
a world today where there's a lot of stress, a
845
00:51:45.480 --> 00:51:49.139
lot of distraction, a lot of, you know, in some ways,
846
00:51:49.159 --> 00:51:50.900
I don't really have a, I'm not one of these
847
00:51:50.920 --> 00:51:55.030
people that has a super negative view of neither of humanity,
848
00:51:55.070 --> 00:51:57.630
I believe in basic goodness, but also of life. And
849
00:51:57.670 --> 00:51:59.769
in many ways, we're better off than we've ever been.
850
00:51:59.849 --> 00:52:01.989
People don't often see that because if you watch the news,
851
00:52:02.010 --> 00:52:04.389
you get a very skewed view of what's going on. Now,
852
00:52:04.429 --> 00:52:08.090
we are up against the challenges of climate change. There
853
00:52:08.110 --> 00:52:10.409
are some real limitations there because there are so many
854
00:52:10.449 --> 00:52:12.550
of us on the planet. And until we figure out
855
00:52:12.590 --> 00:52:18.409
how to shift what we're doing, which I'm optimistic that
856
00:52:18.429 --> 00:52:22.300
we'll figure that out. But still, there's a lot going on.
857
00:52:22.329 --> 00:52:24.590
There's a lot of causes for anxiety, uncertainty. The world
858
00:52:24.650 --> 00:52:27.860
is changing very quickly. AI is changing things in ways
859
00:52:27.909 --> 00:52:31.110
we don't even understand yet. And, and even the experts
860
00:52:31.150 --> 00:52:33.130
don't even know where we'll be in three, four, five
861
00:52:33.170 --> 00:52:35.269
years even. So, you know, a lot of people are
862
00:52:35.289 --> 00:52:37.809
feeling a lot of anxiety and a lot of people
863
00:52:37.849 --> 00:52:43.809
come through their childhoods with no small amount of trauma. Um, and, um, so, uh,
864
00:52:43.889 --> 00:52:49.510
you know what, I mean, in our, uh, audience, um, what,
865
00:52:49.949 --> 00:52:52.699
you know, we still hear, there's just a lot of, uh,
866
00:52:52.880 --> 00:52:57.599
anxiety and overwhelm and concern and, and, and, um, And
867
00:52:57.920 --> 00:53:00.559
still a lot of strong need for healing work. So
868
00:53:00.579 --> 00:53:04.090
I wonder if we could circle back and talk about
869
00:53:04.690 --> 00:53:08.449
how the path of maybe awakening to one's own divinity,
870
00:53:08.489 --> 00:53:11.630
awakening to the divine, or connecting with this angelic energy
871
00:53:11.650 --> 00:53:16.360
or presence, how that travels in parallel with or can
872
00:53:16.400 --> 00:53:19.239
be fully integrated into a path of healing, healing ones,
873
00:53:19.739 --> 00:53:24.599
whether they're childhood traumas or later adult traumas, and being
874
00:53:24.679 --> 00:53:28.030
able to be in the world with a greater sense
875
00:53:28.150 --> 00:53:31.409
of not hope in terms of hope and fear, but
876
00:53:31.449 --> 00:53:33.409
a more positive sense of where we are in the
877
00:53:33.449 --> 00:53:37.800
world as humanity and a little more confidence about that
878
00:53:38.239 --> 00:53:41.920
and oneself and one's place in the world. And, you know,
879
00:53:41.960 --> 00:53:45.619
just have a better feeling about ourselves, about life and
880
00:53:45.659 --> 00:53:49.719
so forth in the context of today's world.
881
00:53:51.019 --> 00:53:54.579
Yes, and it's a beautiful question. And again, so important.
882
00:53:55.000 --> 00:53:57.079
I mean, I think a lot of us on spiritual
883
00:53:57.139 --> 00:54:00.489
paths sometimes can sort of disdain this level and go, oh,
884
00:54:00.510 --> 00:54:04.750
you know, I want to be done with my physical lifetimes.
885
00:54:04.809 --> 00:54:07.349
I want to just, you know, focus on the higher realms.
886
00:54:07.769 --> 00:54:12.710
And yet this level is very consecrated. There's the purposefulness
887
00:54:12.789 --> 00:54:16.860
to it. So I think the healing goes hand in
888
00:54:16.929 --> 00:54:24.110
hand with our spiritual heritage, our spiritual connection. So I'll
889
00:54:24.139 --> 00:54:28.739
tell you a story about a client, Grace. And Grace,
890
00:54:29.440 --> 00:54:32.619
not her real name, but she's a real girl, came
891
00:54:32.659 --> 00:54:36.940
to me. She had five suicide attempts. She was 15,
892
00:54:36.940 --> 00:54:39.539
darn near successful, the last one. And she was from
893
00:54:39.599 --> 00:54:42.300
a big showbiz family. They had taken her to all
894
00:54:42.360 --> 00:54:46.719
the biggest therapists and counselors and nothing was working. She
895
00:54:46.760 --> 00:54:51.300
was just, life was untenable to her. And, and, you know,
896
00:54:51.340 --> 00:54:57.440
she's beautiful girl and obviously well-resourced, et cetera, and just
897
00:54:57.480 --> 00:54:59.980
did not want to live. And I, and I looked
898
00:55:00.019 --> 00:55:02.400
at her and I, you know, I can certainly do
899
00:55:02.460 --> 00:55:05.420
gestalt therapy and different psychological. And I went, she's done this.
900
00:55:05.440 --> 00:55:07.579
This is not what she needs. And I looked in
901
00:55:07.619 --> 00:55:10.199
her eyes and I saw that she had, she'd recently
902
00:55:10.260 --> 00:55:13.039
been from the angelic realm. So let me tell you
903
00:55:13.099 --> 00:55:17.570
what that means. So the angelic, We're going to take
904
00:55:17.590 --> 00:55:19.489
a little leap into the esoteric. Can we go to
905
00:55:19.510 --> 00:55:20.260
that for a second?
906
00:55:20.639 --> 00:55:22.980
Sure, go ahead. Okay.
907
00:55:23.840 --> 00:55:27.500
So the angelic, as mentioned, predates the human by many, many,
908
00:55:27.539 --> 00:55:32.909
many millennia. But there's obviously crossover. People talk about guardian
909
00:55:32.969 --> 00:55:35.489
angels and archangels. I mean, it's a ubiquitous word in
910
00:55:35.550 --> 00:55:39.289
our culture and across many, many cultures, if not most. So.
911
00:55:41.880 --> 00:55:45.039
In the angelic, angels don't have free will. They evolved
912
00:55:45.059 --> 00:55:48.860
to it when they were an archangel. And so in
913
00:55:48.960 --> 00:55:53.539
a wild act of faith, archangels started incarnating into the
914
00:55:53.639 --> 00:55:57.659
human realm to learn more about free will. So it's
915
00:55:57.719 --> 00:56:00.320
not so radical when you think about there's other realms
916
00:56:00.389 --> 00:56:03.849
of existence. There's realms of non-existence, though. To me, it's
917
00:56:03.909 --> 00:56:06.630
not really non-existence. It's just all existence.
918
00:56:07.090 --> 00:56:07.349
Right.
919
00:56:07.489 --> 00:56:10.630
So we there's lots of cross purposes and cross and.
920
00:56:11.260 --> 00:56:15.840
and permeability between the realms. So I looked into, and
921
00:56:15.860 --> 00:56:19.150
that's part of what I mean by your angelic ancestry,
922
00:56:19.269 --> 00:56:23.409
you know, it's connected to your own archangelic heritage, to archangels,
923
00:56:23.489 --> 00:56:26.130
to divinity, who cares if you call it angels or
924
00:56:26.309 --> 00:56:32.079
Buddha or Christ or nature, doesn't matter. So I looked
925
00:56:32.119 --> 00:56:33.960
in her eyes and I saw that she'd come recently
926
00:56:34.019 --> 00:56:38.320
from the angelic realm and it so she was so
927
00:56:38.380 --> 00:56:41.239
sensitive and this world was really difficult for her because
928
00:56:41.280 --> 00:56:43.500
she had a rare open access to it. We were
929
00:56:43.539 --> 00:56:46.320
in this wondrous time where there is cause for a
930
00:56:46.360 --> 00:56:48.510
lot of optimism. Yeah, there's a lot of darkness on
931
00:56:48.530 --> 00:56:51.869
the planet. There's some crazy things going on, but there's
932
00:56:51.909 --> 00:56:55.849
also more light, I believe. We couldn't have this discussion
933
00:56:55.989 --> 00:56:58.769
as openly 20 years ago, right? You and I have
934
00:56:58.789 --> 00:57:00.929
been doing this for a long time, you longer than I,
935
00:57:01.070 --> 00:57:04.139
and I'm willing to bet there's conversations you're having now
936
00:57:04.199 --> 00:57:06.599
within the public that you couldn't have had 50 years
937
00:57:06.659 --> 00:57:08.719
ago or 40 years ago or even 10 years ago.
938
00:57:08.760 --> 00:57:13.909
There's more light. People are more open. And so I
939
00:57:14.969 --> 00:57:16.769
looked in her eyes and, you know, her dad and
940
00:57:16.789 --> 00:57:20.550
her mom were there. Very, you know, Hollywood couple. And
941
00:57:20.610 --> 00:57:23.699
I'm like an archangel. Michael started coming through me. An
942
00:57:23.760 --> 00:57:27.719
angel means messenger of God. And I'm like, great. I mean,
943
00:57:27.739 --> 00:57:31.239
a talk angel to Mr. Hollywood, Mr. Mogul in front.
944
00:57:31.280 --> 00:57:36.539
And I'm like, but you know, if we don't listen
945
00:57:36.699 --> 00:57:43.230
to that higher guidance, those higher voices, they shut up.
946
00:57:44.590 --> 00:57:49.449
And I very much trust those voices at this point.
947
00:57:49.650 --> 00:57:52.210
It sounds like I'm hearing voices. It's really the voices
948
00:57:52.289 --> 00:57:54.489
we all hear, the higher voice, the voice of love,
949
00:57:54.829 --> 00:57:57.849
the voice that says, Yeah, you could lay that person low. No.
950
00:57:57.989 --> 00:58:02.730
You know, the voice that says, I'm really afraid to
951
00:58:02.789 --> 00:58:06.010
go walk on stage and pretend I know anything, but
952
00:58:06.050 --> 00:58:06.769
I'm guided to.
953
00:58:07.590 --> 00:58:07.829
Right?
954
00:58:08.010 --> 00:58:13.139
Those voices. And so I allowed this archangel to speak
955
00:58:13.199 --> 00:58:15.380
through me, but more to look through my eyes at her.
956
00:58:16.239 --> 00:58:18.659
And I share what I just shared with you that
957
00:58:18.679 --> 00:58:22.800
I saw she had an angelic heritage, etc. And that
958
00:58:22.840 --> 00:58:24.880
she was an archangel and she was comparing this level.
959
00:58:25.489 --> 00:58:28.269
where there's time and space and bodies that age and
960
00:58:28.349 --> 00:58:31.150
die and money. None of that's in the angelic. That's
961
00:58:31.630 --> 00:58:34.090
why a lot of angels started incarnating here because it's
962
00:58:34.150 --> 00:58:38.070
beautiful realm. It's heaven basically, but it takes a long
963
00:58:38.110 --> 00:58:42.489
time to grow precisely because it's not as challenging. So
964
00:58:42.550 --> 00:58:46.079
I said this to her, you know, after my momentary
965
00:58:46.139 --> 00:58:49.179
hesitation in front of Mr. Mogul and she looked at
966
00:58:49.260 --> 00:58:53.679
me wide eyed and I said, how's that sit with you?
967
00:58:54.639 --> 00:58:58.429
And she said, She started weeping and she said, well,
968
00:58:58.469 --> 00:59:02.079
it's way out there, but I feel hopeful for the
969
00:59:02.179 --> 00:59:07.570
first time in my life. So, yeah. Started driving to
970
00:59:07.610 --> 00:59:09.730
me every week. She was always on time and she
971
00:59:09.769 --> 00:59:13.610
lives in an hour away. And we started working and
972
00:59:13.690 --> 00:59:16.969
it's 10 years later. She never hurt herself again. She
973
00:59:17.010 --> 00:59:19.199
had been cutting. She'd been, like I said, darn close
974
00:59:19.219 --> 00:59:23.179
to successful. Never cut again. Never hurt herself again. Certainly
975
00:59:23.239 --> 00:59:30.179
never had an attempt again. And she's thriving. Now, We
976
00:59:30.239 --> 00:59:33.320
did keep working on the psychology, but mostly focused on
977
00:59:33.360 --> 00:59:36.469
just reminding her of who she is so she could
978
00:59:36.510 --> 00:59:39.469
be true to that. So she could be true to that.
979
00:59:39.750 --> 00:59:45.130
So she's still young. She's in her mid-20s now. She's
980
00:59:45.150 --> 00:59:49.070
a Buddhist, actually. How beautiful is that? She's a Buddhist.
981
00:59:49.809 --> 00:59:53.650
But she needed that spiritual element. The psychological wasn't doing
982
00:59:53.670 --> 00:59:56.250
it for her. The trauma work wasn't doing.
983
00:59:55.949 --> 00:59:56.449
It for her.
984
00:59:56.869 --> 00:59:59.250
We did all that because I'm a big believer in
985
00:59:59.289 --> 01:00:01.420
all that as well, but it was the spiritual that
986
01:00:01.460 --> 01:00:01.820
healed her.
987
01:00:03.320 --> 01:00:06.059
Wow, that's a beautiful story, and it communicates so much.
988
01:00:06.679 --> 01:00:09.099
So we're near the end of our time here, Alicia.
989
01:00:09.119 --> 01:00:14.469
I really enjoyed this. Maybe just one last question. Since
990
01:00:14.550 --> 01:00:17.630
a lot of your work does focus on angels and
991
01:00:17.670 --> 01:00:22.130
angelic presence communication, what's the biggest misconception you think people
992
01:00:22.170 --> 01:00:23.320
have about angels?
993
01:00:24.269 --> 01:00:26.889
That if they're not seeing fat flying babies or hot
994
01:00:26.929 --> 01:00:33.199
men in dresses, they're not seeing angels. True story. They
995
01:00:33.340 --> 01:00:36.699
are formless. They are essence. They look like the space
996
01:00:36.760 --> 01:00:39.679
between my hands. So they'll come to us in visions.
997
01:00:39.719 --> 01:00:42.280
They'll come to us with a form, but it's really,
998
01:00:43.340 --> 01:00:46.289
I'm going to go on a limb here, like I haven't.
999
01:00:46.050 --> 01:00:48.150
Already, but I'm going to go on a limb.
1000
01:00:49.769 --> 01:00:53.289
And say, I think you probably have experienced angels. You weren't,
1001
01:00:53.710 --> 01:00:56.809
just weren't calling it that. You know, those moments where
1002
01:00:56.829 --> 01:00:59.829
you go, I'm not alone. Even you even talk about
1003
01:00:59.869 --> 01:01:03.280
in Buddhism, we're not alone. There's other beings here that
1004
01:01:03.300 --> 01:01:06.360
just not as visible with us. So it's like, I
1005
01:01:06.400 --> 01:01:09.519
would say to people, you're probably already experiencing angels. One,
1006
01:01:09.639 --> 01:01:14.449
you experience them with spiritual sensing, inner sensing, right? Not
1007
01:01:14.639 --> 01:01:16.989
as clearly as you're looking at me and I'm looking
1008
01:01:17.030 --> 01:01:20.349
at you, but with your inner sight, with your inner ears.
1009
01:01:20.469 --> 01:01:23.559
And as you start to connect with, And trust that
1010
01:01:23.820 --> 01:01:26.539
with angels. It's not a big leap to go, okay,
1011
01:01:26.880 --> 01:01:29.159
I can experience all that is invisible.
1012
01:01:30.760 --> 01:01:32.980
Well, consider that. Now, I feel very grateful. I've had
1013
01:01:33.019 --> 01:01:37.420
countless experiences throughout my life of profound oneness and interconnectedness
1014
01:01:37.500 --> 01:01:40.699
and peace and openness and all these kind of things
1015
01:01:40.739 --> 01:01:42.719
from early in my life, then through some very dark
1016
01:01:42.739 --> 01:01:46.090
years and through my practices. A lot of that. I'm
1017
01:01:46.329 --> 01:01:48.949
very grateful for that and feel a lot of confidence
1018
01:01:49.030 --> 01:01:52.460
in that. I don't generally articulate it as angelic presence,
1019
01:01:52.539 --> 01:01:57.119
but I'm open to that. I'll keep it under consideration. Okay.
1020
01:01:57.340 --> 01:01:59.780
And I won't necessarily be looking for, you know, some
1021
01:01:59.900 --> 01:02:05.139
figure with wings necessarily. No. Well, this has been really
1022
01:02:05.179 --> 01:02:10.389
a joy, Alicia. I've enjoyed connecting with you and really
1023
01:02:10.429 --> 01:02:13.269
happy you could share your wisdom with our audience and
1024
01:02:13.309 --> 01:02:15.150
really appreciate the work that you're doing.
1025
01:02:15.780 --> 01:02:19.360
Thank you. It's been such a joy to be with you, Flea.
1026
01:02:19.500 --> 01:02:24.050
And really, you are infinitely inspiring. And so thank you
1027
01:02:24.070 --> 01:02:26.570
for the work that you're doing, truly, and bringing it
1028
01:02:26.650 --> 01:02:28.030
into our world at this time.
1029
01:02:28.690 --> 01:02:31.030
So where can people find out more about Alicia Doss
1030
01:02:31.150 --> 01:02:33.570
and your work and your books and so forth?
1031
01:02:33.590 --> 01:02:36.610
Well, thank you for asking. So my book, Your Angelic Ancestry,
1032
01:02:36.630 --> 01:02:39.570
just launched a few weeks ago. It's everywhere books are found.
1033
01:02:40.219 --> 01:02:44.179
It's with Hay House, distributed by Penguin Random House. So
1034
01:02:44.769 --> 01:02:53.179
It's everywhere. And then my website is alishadas.com, my name, A-L-I-S-H-A-D-A-S.com.
1035
01:02:53.489 --> 01:02:56.480
Lots of free resources there. And my podcast, which I
1036
01:02:56.519 --> 01:02:59.280
want to have you on, is called Live Your Love.
1037
01:02:59.639 --> 01:03:02.480
Live Your Love. And it's also anywhere podcasts are found.
1038
01:03:03.079 --> 01:03:04.920
Wonderful. Well, I'd be very happy to be a guest
1039
01:03:05.000 --> 01:03:07.300
on your podcast anytime. So thank you so much.
1040
01:03:08.269 --> 01:03:10.690
Thank you. Absolutely a joy. Thank you.
1041
01:03:11.190 --> 01:03:11.590
Be well.
1042
01:03:11.969 --> 01:03:13.090
You too. Bye-bye.
1043
01:03:15.070 --> 01:03:18.489
Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember,
1044
01:03:18.650 --> 01:03:21.869
real change happens when we commit to our growth, face
1045
01:03:21.929 --> 01:03:25.730
our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If
1046
01:03:25.750 --> 01:03:28.429
you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe
1047
01:03:28.469 --> 01:03:31.449
and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment.
1048
01:03:31.780 --> 01:03:35.159
Until next time, stay grounded, stay present, and stay true
1049
01:03:35.179 --> 01:03:36.219
to yourself. Take care.