Evolution of Consciousness (2005) with Jeffrey Mishlove

Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. I imagine that by now many of you already realize that in conjunction with White Crow Books, we've just launched the new Thinking Allowed Dialogues book imprint, and our first title is, "Is There Life After Death?" Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.

Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today is a very special video. Many of the viewers will know Leanne Whitney, who has been a guest on New Thinking Allowed many times. She is the author of the book "Consciousness in Jung and Patanjali" and is an expert on yoga and psychology. However, before Leanne received her doctoral degree, before she wrote her book, she was a filmmaker. In 2005, she came to Las Vegas where I was then living and conducted an in-depth interview with me, which has never been released before until now. I'm going to turn it over to Leanne who will introduce this video.

Thank you, Jeff. Nice to be with you and the New Thinking Allowed audience again. I do. I want to set up the context for this because it's, oh my gosh, almost two decades old at this point. After I had had my Pure Consciousness event, which we spoke about briefly in one of the episodes we did on New Thinking Allowed, and I was in a yoga room and it was very instantaneous, but it was an awakening to the fact that consciousness is all there is and really that knowledge is structured in it. As a creative, as an artist, I wanted to make a film about the evolution of human consciousness. Again, this is the early aughts. I remember when I reached out to you to potentially be in the film, you had said to me, "Boy, you are taking on a really big topic." Really, that ended up being the case, but I came to your home in Las Vegas and we sat down and we talked for an hour or so and pulling that footage out now, it really, it holds the test of time because my original idea, again, almost 20 years ago, in this movie of the evolution of human consciousness, and again, I think you and I agree, it's really just the evolution of consciousness and it's a realization for human beings, but I thought intuition and sigh is really a great way for people to learn about clearing the lens of perception and leaving behind that illusion of separation and I think rewinding and now cutting together this piece, again, that message really stands out and so I'm happy to be sharing it with your viewership and to be with you here again on New Thinking Allowed.

Jeffrey. Hello, Leanne.

Hi. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too. Come right in. Thank you. How are you?

I'm doing well. Did you have a good trip?

Yes, it was great. Thanks very much. Welcome.

Thank you very much. So your friend, Peter, had recommended that I come see you because Peter and I were talking about the evolution of mankind and is mankind potentially at a place right now? We're almost at the fork in the road. Either we're going to make a choice to heal ourselves as a species or potentially annihilate ourselves. Do you have an opinion on that or do you believe that's where we are?

Well, it might be that Las Vegas is a city that sort of embodies that choice here. It represents, in a way, the most materialistic place on Earth. It's also the most popular destination on the planet. So I see it as something of a turning point. Yeah. Humanity is at a crisis. We have the power to destroy ourselves. We literally, for the first time in human history, we do have that power and there are lots of signs already. I'm sure you and Peter talked about pollution being a big one and nuclear weapons being another big one and oppression and so on. Yeah, so I do agree.

Right. But can I add one more little thing?

Oh, of course.

I wouldn't say mankind. Okay. I would say humanity or something. Like you're leaving the other half out, womankind.

I gotcha. That's a problem right there.

Right, right, right. Sure. Yeah, the human species in general.

Absolutely. Okay, so that's a potential. But also, do you feel like we're evolving as a species? Is that a potential as well?

It's almost as if we have deliberately brought ourselves to a point of crisis in order to force ourselves to evolve or go extinct. And if you look at the history of evolution, you can see that this has happened many times in the past. A classic example, some of our very first biological ancestors were anaerobic bacteria and they didn't breathe oxygen. In fact, oxygen was a poisonous waste gas that they produced and it got to the point where our earliest ancestors were drowning in their own pollution, this terrible gas oxygen, and they evolved to become oxygen breathers. And throughout the history of evolution on this planet, there have been these, it's called the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Crises keep coming up and as a response every time, if you look at evolution, life itself has evolved, but many species end up going extinct nonetheless.

Right, right, fascinating. So what is this exact point then that you see? So like you mentioned that point of oxygen usage or toxicity, so what is it right now? Like what is the toxic point?

Well, if you look at the problems facing this planet, they're almost all caused by people. We've had a tsunami recently, that's a terrible natural disaster, but the problems of the ecology are generally created by human beings. The problems of warfare are human problems, the problems of oppression and suppression of different political and racial and religious groups. Those are human problems, the problem of the inequality of the sexes and discrimination of all sorts. These are human problems and because we have this awesome nuclear power, this ability to literally, I don't think we would destroy the planet, I don't think we would destroy all life, but we have the power to pretty much destroy the human species if it were unleashed.

Right, right, right. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is let's distill the problem down to its nutshell and what I hear you talking about is a lot of violence, first of all, violence towards each other, violence towards the mother in general. So why the violence? I mean, because my whole thing is, at the end of the day, I really feel that all men, all women, all human beings in general want two things, one in particular, which is love. That's what we all want, is to love, and the other thing is peace. So, and again, that's my gut response to being a human and what we want. So why the violence then?

Well, nature maybe doesn't agree with you on this. It's sort of human to want those things, and I want them too. I think it's the most wonderful thing in the world to be a loving and peaceful person, but if you look at nature as a whole, it's violent, it's punctuated by all sorts of savagery, and you might say that all of nature feeds upon itself, ultimately.

Right, right. So, and the system may not have been designed that way, and in a way it's still all perfect. I'm perfectly happy to accept that this wouldn't exist at all. There would be nothing here if it wasn't in the finest tuned balance. Okay. Well, what do you see as the potential choice for the human species not to annihilate itself, to stay, or to not go extinct, but to flourish and continue to evolve? What does that path look like? What are our choices there?

Well, it seems to me that a lot of our problems are created because we live under certain illusions. You know, in yoga they call it Maya, the idea that they're illusions. In Buddhism, they call it Dukkha. It's a kind of insanity that permeates everything, and one of the most fundamental illusions that we live under is the idea that there is a basic separation between me and everything that is not me. That, for example, I'm a person, and you're a person, and we are separate and distinct. Or that I'm separate from this chair or from these books. That there is such a thing as a me that exists at all, separate and distinct. And therefore, I want to fight to preserve that sense that I have of me, so that I can live forever and accumulate as much as I might desire. Actually, I think that is an illusion. Me is simply a concept that I have in my mind. The truth of the matter is that I am a a nexus in the quantum foam, and I'm intimately interconnected with all of creation. So we have social groups, you know, where it sort of evolves. Now I'm not only going to protect my own sense of identity, I'll protect my family, I'll protect my tribe, I'll protect my nation. And so now we have a so-called war on terrorism, and that means that in order to protect what we identify with as ourselves, it doesn't matter if we go and kill other people, because they're not us. They're the enemy. They're somehow separate, distinct, other. And this very concept of otherness, I think, is a problem. You could say it's about duality. As soon as you accept the idea of duality, you get into good and evil. Good and evil means usually to ask just about anybody, whether it's an Arab fundamentalist or the President of the United States, they'd say good and evil means I'm good and you're evil. So if I want to kill you, I'm fighting evil, and that's a good thing. And it's a fundamental error in my view, because it's a denial of the wholeness, it's a denial of the oneness, and that's the realm of spirit.

Right, okay. So basically that there's annihilation and the other four obviously is to continue to evolve, and you see that as the dissolution of separateness, the dissolution of ego or I-identity, and the embracing of the wholeness, of the unity, of the oneness.

I do see it that way, but I don't think, Leanne, that it means that we want to sacrifice our egos on the altar of some kind of spirituality. There are lots of cults and groups where they say you have to let go of yourself and just be a spiritual person and give up that ego. That's not the way to do it, because we were put on this planet for a reason. We were brought into physical manifestation for a reason, and in my view that reason, it's not just to merge back to the oneness from which we came without doing anything first, it's to achieve a sense of mastery of this planet and of the physical world that surrounds us. Not necessarily mastery over other people, but mastery over ourselves and mastery over physical reality, and it's through the path of mastery, I think, that we can achieve this understanding that I've described of unity, the fundamental unity of things.

I think what you're saying, too, is the uniqueness in the unity. Yes, we're all one, but we all have the capability of, I think Jung calls it individuation or whatever, but being that individual and being that unique expression of the one.

Exactly, you put it beautifully. Yeah, okay.

Well, how do you think we connect to the spirit then? Because what I see, I guess, is maybe a disconnection and maybe, again, that's what causes a lot of the anger and frustration and the separateness, that separate identity, because we're not infused with the spiritual identity. So how do we get there?

We are infused with it, and we've lost touch. Okay. We look for answers externally, outside of ourselves. We find answers in our religions and our sciences and our institutions of commerce and business, and they'll all be happy to create a culture that emphasizes duality and separateness so that people are constrained to obey their leaders and they're afraid of the other out there. But when we look within instead of without, that's where we'll find spirit, and that's why I'm involved in the Intuition Network. It's all about basically encouraging people to look within, to find answers within themselves rather than to trust authority of any kind.

What is intuition exactly then? How do you define intuition?

Well, it's a Latin word originally, intuary, which means to look within. Intuition is, it usually is knowledge that comes to us from a place that's so deep that it's beneath consciousness. Sometimes you know something you shouldn't know without knowing how you know it. That's how profound intuition can be, and it manifests in many different ways in science and language and art and commerce. But ultimately, I think intuition is an expression of spirit and inner spirit, and specifically what I mean by spirit, it's an expression of our life purpose. I think each individual is born with a purpose. That's a concept that is almost totally alien to science. Science can deal with cause and effect, but not purpose so much, and yet you're here with me right now because you're motivated by something inside of you, a purpose, a sense of direction, a sense of longing, of questing, and of moving towards something, and each person is that. And when people say to themselves, "I want to get in touch with my purpose, I want to live a life that is based on purpose," then at the level of spirit things begin to happen to support that intention.

Right, okay. Well, are there specific tools or ways that people can get in touch with their intuition? Because obviously you believe that everybody has it. So let's just say, okay, let's go back to Jung for a second because I'm an extroverted thinker. So you know intuition maybe isn't necessarily my first function, you know what I'm saying, if you go to his typology kind of thing. So if you're not used to, you know, if you're more of a thinker or a feeler, how do you know intuition?

We're using the word a little differently here. Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, talked about four human mental functions, thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting. So it's one of four, and I'm referring to something having to do with the level of spirit, which underlies all of those, but is particularly identified with what Jung called intuition. Okay. And I think, you see, we all use it all the time. Anyway, we don't even know it. Everybody is an expert in intuition. That's the funniest thing, and people don't know that they are typically. So if I were to be like traditional about it, I'd say, oh, you should meditate, you should practice yoga breathing, that'll help you get in touch with your intuition, learn to quiet your mind. But the truth is that, let's think of a totally chaotic scene for a moment, a mother with a screaming baby, and she's trying to cook dinner, and the TV is blaring. That mother probably knows an extraordinary amount about intuition. She's in touch with every nuance of what the baby is thinking, and feeling, and needing. And if the baby gets a pin, pops out of the diaper, and pokes into the baby, the mother will be there right away. So mothers and their children just naturally experience intuition. Martial artists who are very active, not at all passive, experience intuition naturally through their discipline. So do athletes. People who pay attention to their dreams get in touch with their intuition. People in business, if you talk to almost anybody who have founded a successful business, it was based on an intuition, and it can come to people in the most unexpected ways. Martin Luther, who founded the whole Christian Reformation, I understand, the intuition came to him while he was sitting on the toilet. So there's no limitation to how intuition works, and everybody does it most of the time. I'll give you an example, really graphic. You know what I'm saying. The words, the sounds, that are coming out of my mouth make sense to you because intuitively you're grasping my meaning. And I know what noise to make next out of intuition. All language is intuitively based, actually. So we all live with it all of the time, and yet society denigrates it. Society will tell us that thinking is good, feeling is good, sensing is good, but intuition isn't supported by society. In fact, a young child growing up in a family, if they get too intuitive, will frighten their parents. The parents may discourage it, and in school it may be discouraged as well. So it's the one function we tend to suppress. I think there's deep metaphysical reasons for that, actually. You can think of it this way, Leanne. What game do children all over the world play universally?

Can I throw out an answer?

Hide and seek?

Exactly. That is it. Every culture, children know how to play hide and seek. And to me, it's a metaphor for why we're here in the first place. We're all the children of, you could say the children of God, of course, but we're all evolved. Originally, our source is a spiritual source. We're descended from the one spirit. You could say, well, we came up from the slime, according to Darwinian evolution, and that's also true. But at the same time that we arose from the slime, we descended from the realm of spirit in our consciousness. And we've come here on a spiritual quest, ultimately, but part of that quest involves hiding, hiding from ourselves, and then rediscovering ourselves. And part of how we hide is through our society, through a social reality that gets created where we all kind of pretend to agree that it's not true, that we have this divine spark within each and every one of us.

So do you think the intuition then potentially, you know, is maybe a large part of that answer? Because if our intuition is our connection to spirit, and what we're doing here is discovering that our source is spirit, intuition might be a large part of the answer going back to that fork and potentially evolving and where we're going.

Yeah, that's why we're having this conversation, I suppose. And the way to help get over the social pressure, not to be in touch with your intuition, is to find a few really good friends who you can be with in a regular way and support each other and encourage each other and honor and respect the intuitive part of each other, instead of kind of giving it negative feedback that so many social institutions will do, give it positive feedback instead, and recognize that everyone is already an expert, and then help bring that out.

Right, right, right. Small groups of people.

Right, as well, start small, right? Starts with one and then you kind of move out and into your little group and then the community. That's what the Intuition Network is, in a sense, it's a network of small groups of people who help encourage each other to just be in touch with that part of reality.

And so does that look like a healing reality to you? Like?

Absolutely. Healing for self, healing for community, healing for the mother, I mean, just healing all over the place?

All over the place. And again, it's a paradox because everything's already perfect. Right. What's there to heal? But at the same time, my sense is that as people get in touch with their own inner spirit, well, what emerges or what it's called in religious terms, the gifts of the spirit or the siddhis or the psychic gifts, and amongst those is the gift of healing. And as people become more and more conscious, they realize, and it's now been well documented in scientific research, that our intentions, our thoughts and our intentions, make a difference. And if you have healing intention towards a particular person, towards a plant, an animal, towards the planet as a whole, towards God as a whole, those intentions manifest. And certainly in experiments involving people can be measured in double-blind tests.

Interesting, interesting, because I always have the question, you know, because today there's so much talk about consciousness, but my understanding of the brain is there's a large portion of it actually held in the unconscious. And I know in my own life, my unconscious thoughts have precedence over my conscious. No matter how much I want to like talk my way into one thing, if there's an unconscious behavioral pattern going on, it's going to show up. But if the underlying intention, like you said, is healing or something, let's just say altruistic, I don't know if that's the right word, then you will get there. You know what I'm saying? Like the unconscious aspects will come up into the consciousness and it will be healed and a wholeness will take place. Does that make sense?

Well, I think part of the process I referred to earlier of acquiring mastery involves making the unconscious conscious. It's one of the reasons we're here. And you see it all over these days, especially in the media, all these TV shows where people are now talking about subjects that were taboo only a few decades ago. It's a way of revealing at a socially collective level all of our inner drives and conflicts and urges and lusts and so on. So that comes out and then we can process it. Then we can, through feedback, we can look at ourselves. And as we move through the realms, like in particular our addictions, our desires, the things we lust after, you get in touch with what I would call not just the unconscious, but the super conscious mind. A super conscious mind is your higher desires, your longing for union, your longing for a sense of oneness, for a spiritual connection. And ultimately it seems to me, Leanne, that many of the things that we act out in life, particularly let's say drug addiction or many things that people do in relationships, what they're really looking for is a spiritual connection. But because there's not a lot of support for that in our culture, that drive gets misplaced. And some people, they seek food or they seek drugs or they seek sex when what they really want is to connect with their own spirit.

Right, so they externalize.

They externalize it instead of internalizing again intuition and bringing it in and inside and connecting that way. So really then in order to think, in order to have the greatest amount of healing or mastery or spiritual connection, it's about peeling back those layers, cleaning those layers of the unconscious and bringing all that stuff forward and understanding yourself. I mean, that's what self-mastery is really. Know thyself, right?

Right. It's a process that takes place on many levels. You could say physical disciplines like yoga, athletics, the martial arts. It's a psychological process that we've been talking about. It's also philosophical. It involves having an intellectual framework that can fit all of these things in. An intellectual framework where there's room for the very idea of spirit.

Right, is there room for that right now? In our world, how much room do we have for that?

Well, there are competing forces in our culture right now. There are the traditionalists who basically maintain, you know, the conversation that you and I are now having is dangerous, new age sort of thing and that it's not in accordance with scripture or not in accordance with theology and it's not good for people to be intuitive because they could be misled by their own base desires and confuse those for intuition so they ought to pay attention to scripture and to what their churches are telling them instead rather than to be intuitive. On the other hand, then you have the scientific modernists who would say, well, intuition is just an illusion. We've got to be rational. We've got to base our thinking on materialism. We have to understand that any sense of mystery is an illusion, that this world is all very cause and effect based. There's no sense of purpose. There's no sense of a spiritual quest at all. It's just, from this point of view, an effort to return back to the womb into a kind of infantile state. So between those two forces, there needs to be a balance. There needs to be an openness to the spiritual side of religion, the authentic spirituality that permeates religion. At the same time, there needs to be an openness to the rigors of science and to the empirical data of science. But if you look at science as rigorously as you can, science is based on a philosophy called empiricism. Empiricism says that what is real is what we experience through our senses. Right, right, right. I'm a student of William James, the great psychologist who looked a little deeper, and he said, well, where do we get our sensory information from? We get it from consciousness. Even underlying our senses is consciousness, and if we can look directly into consciousness, which is what intuition is, that's what he called radical empiricism. That's taking the empiricist philosophy all the way, and the information that comes directly from consciousness is even more direct than the information that appears through our senses. It, therefore, deserves to be recognized and admitted into scientific discourse. It's not just the five senses that we really know. It's moving beyond the five senses into the subtle senses that aren't necessarily honored today. They're not honored, but now we have for over a hundred years a big body of research in the fields of parapsychology and near-death experience and psychic healing and human potential. Dream research is another area that points to the validity of these areas.

Right. Do you think maybe intuitive healers or even psychics are maybe on the forefront of this evolution?

Yeah, I personally do, although I know what a difficult time it is. I have hundreds of dear friends who are psychics through the Intuition Network, and they live in a world where they don't get a lot of social support. They're under extra stress, and it's not easy. To be a psychic under those circumstances is any more than it would be to be a member of any other persecuted minority. And so, as a consequence, the world of intuition and psychics is a little bit like a ghetto. It has its own culture. It has its richness and its vibrancy, and also its pain. And if I can elaborate a little.

Yeah, absolutely, because I have a lot of friends who are psychics too, you know. So go ahead, yeah.

Well, pain is an important topic to deal with here. I saw your movie, "The Fire Within," and I know what you were dealing with there was pain, people who were experiencing enormous inner pain and yet also a great vibrancy and joy of life. And I commend you for making that film because we live in a culture where we don't want to see other people's pain. And the reason is because it's painful. And so one of the things that we do is we become numb. It's easier to feel nothing at all sometimes than to have to take in the pain of the world. But as we open up to this idea of oneness, if I open up to the idea that I am you, you are me, then how can I not feel your pain? And I have to let it in. That's part of the art of becoming intuitive is being willing to take in the pain of the world, at least a little bit more than we normally do. And one of the reasons why there's this subtle conspiracy to dampen our intuition is because then we don't have to. Experience so much pain. And how else can we oppress other people? How else can we engage in warfare? Or can we tolerate situations where millions of people starve to death in a world where there's plenty of food? Unless we dampen that sense of their pain.

Absolutely. And Peter and I touched upon this when we spoke as well. And that's what really saddens me as a human being right now on this planet at this time. How can we be so desensitized? It comes down, I think, to willingness and courage to want to open the heart and want to sit and feel all of that, feel what it means to be human, which there's a lot of feelings involved in that. It's wanting to express the emotional body, so to speak. I don't know if it's predominantly here in the West or if this is a global thing or whatever, but really allowing our emotional bodies to express themselves.

Well, people get overwhelmed by their emotions and we don't get a lot of social support for doing that. And there's so much pain in the world it's hard to take it in sometimes without getting overwhelmed. Just one little thing, starvation is a huge thing. Millions of people die every year from starvation. Thousands every day from starvation, unnecessarily. It's a situation that can only exist because people have sort of pushed it out of their awareness. We don't want to know. And it goes even deeper, I think. I don't want to go on a crusade about vegetarianism, but I'm a vegetarian and I made that decision actually recently when it occurred to me that killing animals for food causes a lot of unnecessary pain. I don't think everybody needs to make that decision and I'm not going on about it, but I do know that in many spiritual traditions there is a moment where time is taken to acknowledge that sacrifice that an animal makes so people at least are aware of what is involved in just putting food on their plates.

Yeah, and I think that just goes back to spirit being infused in our lives in general. If you look at the Native Americans or a lot of primitive cultures, they had a lot of that reverence, again, for the mother, for spirit. You know, and we're seemingly, I mean, I know that I was cut off from that for a long time. I had to go seek it to find out what it was and, you know, picking up Gary Zhukov's "Seed of the Soul" is really what did it for me. It really opened my mind because I grew up a Catholic. That didn't speak to me at all. I didn't understand that whole fear-based God-outside-themselves kind of idea, but when I picked up the idea that we are spirit and we are one with it all, it really, really rang true to me. So I guess my question is, where did we go? Where in the evolutionary track did we go so far off? Because I think we had it before. Like, maybe we're coming back to it.

Well, there are different theories about it. There's a beautiful story that's told in the Jewish mystical tradition about how that happened. The story is Moses goes up to the top of Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, the Torah, and he was given by God what they call the Torah of the Book of Life. And the Book of Life is this way of seeing the world of oneness, the unity with all of life and all of nature. And Moses is now coming down the mountain with the Torah of the Book of Life to give to the people. And what does he see? He sees them worshipping the golden calf. And he gets incensed. He gets so angry at what they're doing after he brought them out of slavery in Egypt that he takes the tablets and he smashes them on the ground. And at this point, according to the oral tradition, the letters from the tablets flew back up to heaven. And then Moses went back up again a second time to the top of Mount Sinai. And this time, he said, the people aren't ready for the Torah of the Book of Life. So he was given a different Torah, which is the Torah of the Book of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Torah of duality, right and wrong, do thou shalt and thou shalt not. And that's the one that he brought down because the people weren't ready. So now the mystical traditions are the traditions involved in bringing back the Torah of the Book of Life instead of the Torah of the Book of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Interestingly, which brings me to another point, which I don't understand is, you know, isn't one of those commandments, "Thou shalt not kill"? And like, there's no sub clause there, unless you're Americans in Iraq. I mean, there's no sub clause. "Thou shalt not kill." Well, I don't like, I'm not quite clear on the lack of understanding on that one.

Okay, let me try and give you some context for that one too, because a very interesting theorist is Daniel Quinn, who's a novelist, who's written many books on the evolution of humanity. Why did we get into the trouble that we're in now? And he believes that it all began actually about 20,000 years ago with agriculture. When we said, "Okay, I'm going to plow this field, I'm going to grow my crop in this field, and any animals that try and come and eat my crop are invading my territory and I'm going to have to kill them." And so we began developing agricultural surpluses and we also began destroying the natural ecology at that point, even long before recorded history. But it was at about the time of the agricultural, the agrarian revolution, that we also had the great religions evolve. And according to Daniel Quinn, basically, the function that the great religions have served is to assuage our guilt. So basically, the religions have said to us, "Oh, you're doing a bad thing, you're killing somebody, a little slap on the wrist for you, you should feel guilty, but everything stays the same." Anyway, so we feel, "Okay, I've slapped myself on the wrist, now I can go on and continue to do what I'm doing." That all the great world religions actually end up supporting the very behavior, ultimately, that they, in their deepest teachings, suggest is wrong.

Yeah, absolutely, I agree with you. And again, it just comes back to one by one, humans making the decision, what is the ultimate goal of your life? Is it self-mastery? That's a beautiful goal for an existence, because in that choice, that I want to master myself, knowledge of myself, you're going to clean up so much. You're going to clean the unconscious and you're going to, again, really understand the depth of those teachings, which, to me, is so much about love and about unity.

Well, it's often easier said than done. Yeah, that's the truth. And there are many, many pitfalls on the metaphysical path, which is why it's good, even though it's about self-mastery and it's about going within. As the Beatles said, it's good to have help from your friends at the same time, people who will kind of help correct you on your path from time to time, people who can give you some perspective and some guidance, and social institutions, hopefully, that support these things. Eventually, we need social institutions that understand the idea of a metaphysical or a spiritual quest.

Sure, and so let's talk about intuitive healers then. How do you see that they can help us evolve? I don't know if you're being involved with the Intuition Network or different people that you know. I've found, at least in my own life, a great benefit working with people like that, who can see into me in a way.

Well, we're facing a crisis in our culture in terms of the rising costs of health care. People talk about the balance of trade problem and they talk about the unfunded social security liabilities that we have. The unfunded Medicare liabilities are enormous. They run into trillions and trillions, 60, 70 trillion dollars, maybe 100 trillion dollars, and so much of it is emergency medical care in the last three weeks of life. There's something about our current medical model, which is becoming untenable, untenable economically, and yet we say we believe in saving life. Forget about the quality of life. Forget about honoring life. It's like saving life from death at the last minute because we're afraid of death. Now, spiritual healers in general offer a different approach and not just spiritual healers but many forms of alternative healing are less expensive and less invasive and may actually help a little bit. Let's just say a little bit. The problem with so many of these huge medical interventions now is what we call iatrogenic illness, which means that they cause problems. Iatrogenic illness accounts for a huge percentage of people who die because of things that are done to them in the name of medicine. In the United States, I think it's about 100,000 people a year today are dying because of mistakes that are made in hospitals or exposure to other diseases that occur in hospitals. We really need to totally rethink this whole issue of the way we treat medicine in general. It's very important for us. We'll go bankrupt as a nation, not just as a nation but as a species in our culture. Spiritual healing goes back to the most ancient and fundamental ideas of medicine and doctors know about it too. It's sometimes called the bedside manner. It has to do with not seeing the other person as, let's say, a kidney or I had a broken leg that came into my office. It means dissecting, not seeing the whole being. It means recognizing the whole being, recognizing that there's a heart and there's a soul there and ministering to the needs of the heart and the soul completely in a loving way. We now have lots of good research from double-blind studies published in medical journals that show that healing intentionality makes a difference. Not just in simple things like they've done studies back in the 1950s where they take a mouse and cut a little patch of skin and then they'd have healers try and heal the skin of the mouse and they'd show a difference. The mice subjected to the healing energy healed faster. They've done studies with ryegrass. Any high school student can take some grass and two trays of grass, equal amounts of water and sunlight and send healing energy to one tray and not to the other tray. With fruit flies, they've done studies. But more than that, people with cancer patients, with breast cancer, with AIDS, with very serious conditions. One of the real classic stories was the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the children who are suffering from terminal illness. One child said, "I wish that people would send me postcards from all over the world before I died." It was advertised on TV. This child received over 100,000 postcards from all over the world, people wishing him goodness and sending him healing thoughts. His terminal illness suffered what was called a spontaneous remission. Can't explain it by medicine. It's a miracle, in effect, but it's an example of the power of healing intentions. When we hold healing thoughts towards others, I believe those thoughts reach out through the quantum foam and have an effect. If we all held healing thoughts on this planet, we would heal this planet. And as people become involved in a spiritual or an intuitive path, one of the things I think that you realize is that you have the ability to exercise some conscious control over your stream of consciousness. If you have negative thoughts, you have the ability to notice those thoughts, to cancel them, and to replace them with positive thoughts. So in my case, for example, sometimes I don't sleep well at night. Maybe I had too much coffee, for example, because sometimes I'm up because I'm worried and so then I have to worry. But sometimes I'm awake at night and I just can't get to sleep and I think, "Oh, I have some time on my hands right now. I have nothing else to do. Why don't I sit and imagine that I'm sending healing energy?" And that's how you do it. You imagine that you are doing it because it's thought itself. So I might visualize a kind of golden radiant light radiating out to particular people, my family members and my friends and maybe to the city in which I live and to the animals and even the insects and so on in the city and then to the whole country and then to the mountains and the oceans and overseas and the whole planet and then even beyond the planet and to space itself and to the whole universe and then penetrating different dimensions of other universes and just imagining that I'm sending out this healing energy everywhere, even to the divine. And I can say this, I have, of course, no scientific proof whatsoever that this has any effect, but my own intuition tells me it does and I know I'm healing myself when I do that. I know it's a really good thing to do. It's a great way. If you find that you have nothing better to do, why not?

Right, exactly. It's not going to hurt. So what role does belief play in all this? Do you have to believe in the world of spirit, so to speak?

That is a real paradox because belief is important. Reverence is important. You could say sometimes belief gets you through situations when nothing else will. And on the other hand, nobody wants to get caught up in believing something that isn't true. The Buddha said, "Don't believe anything because I told you. Test it out for yourself. See if it works for you. Then you can form a belief in it." And I think the whole world of religions and religious dogma contains many beliefs that are offensive from a scientific point of view. I don't think we want to have beliefs that stand in stark contrast to the facts. If anything, we should believe in ourselves.

As a species or as one individual?

As individuals. I'd like to encourage people to believe less and less the doctrines that are being propounded externally and more and more people believe in themselves because you'll find there'll be situations in your life where your belief in yourself will really carry you through when nothing else is there because everybody else may be telling you, "You can't do this, it's not going to work, it's not going to happen." But if you do believe in yourself and that belief is based on a real knowing, on a sense of intermastery, you will get through it.

Right. So belief in spirit, just forget like religions or doctrines or any of those things, but just a belief that the natural world is enclosed in the supernatural world, so to speak, or it's beating within the unity of the supernatural or the divine? Is that necessary?

No, I don't think that's necessary. I don't even think it's a good thing. I think that it's useful to treat those beliefs like a language. I'll give you an example. I don't believe in astrology, but I study astrology because it has a language. It has a way of dealing with the world of mythos, with the world of archetypes. It's a very important language and you don't have to believe it to use it. You and I are speaking the English language right now. It's very powerful. It enables us to communicate, but we don't have to believe in it to use it. Spirituality is very much this way. It's good to understand the spiritual heritage of all of humanity. The way I see it, we're all Christians, we're all Jews, we're all Buddhists, we're all Hindus, we're all Native American shamans. That's all our heritage, but not so that we believe in it, but so that we can appreciate it and understand it. A good friend of mine, Russell Targ, wrote a great book along with Jane Catra. The subtitle is "How to Experience God Without Believing." He wrote this book for scientists, for atheist types. He lives in Silicon Valley where there are a lot of those people. Often they want to experience God, but they don't want to have anything to do with religious beliefs. He said, "Here's what you do. You meditate. You get in touch with a place within yourself that is loving. Let that feeling of love and joy and compassion and oneness fill you up so that it's tangible. See what that feeling does to you in your life." He said, "That's God." You don't have to believe in it to experience it.

I see. Okay, which brings us back to the whole idea of love and being full of love and working from that place of just being full of love. That sounds good to me. Regardless of where it's originating from, it's a really powerful source.

I think it is. Let me just say this because there are always pitfalls. One of the things about love is we are mammals. We're cuddly kinds of creatures. We're warm-blooded. We like to snuggle. Not all creatures are that way. Insects, for example. We sometimes think of insects as being beneath us, being undeserving of our love because they're not as cuddly as a pet dog or a pet cat. Sometimes we confuse love in a spiritual or cosmic sense with some of the local habits that we've developed because we're part of the mammalian family. We don't even think of reptiles necessarily in the same way. As a result, we get a little sentimental. You'll see this in various spiritual organizations from time to time where a universal love gets confused with a kind of sentimentality. I think that's a trap as well because if we think that just as long as we fight to protect all the cuddly creatures on this planet and ignore the others, we'll be in big danger.

I just want to clarify the role of intuition. Do you see it as a bridge between sort of man and spirit or mind and soul? Is it the bridge that brings that information through?

Sure it is. It's the link between our conscious mind and something much, much deeper than our own consciousness. The initial impulse that created the whole universe you might say. Intuition is how we're connected. It bubbles up from somewhere below consciousness and it's almost as if we can't open up to it as much as it opens us up.

Let me rephrase that a little bit if I may. Another way to think of it is intuition isn't something that we can learn. What we need to do is unlearn the ways that we block it. What are those ways? We block our intuition by not believing that it's possible. We block our intuition by thinking, "Oh, if I go in that direction I might go crazy," or "I better not go there because my parents will disapprove," or "People won't like me." We have dozens of fears of getting involved and some of those fears are are quite.

legitimate. After all, human folly is everywhere, and many, many times you can see people who thought they were doing the right intuitive thing, and they made horrible mistakes. George W. Bush and his war in Iraq, people say, "Oh, we're a very intuitive president," but sometimes it's the hardest thing in the world is to discriminate between an authentic intuition and what we imagine or what we fear. We can easily be deceived, and that's one of the reasons why it's important to have a culture that supports intuition, a well-grounded culture, friends that can help keep you honest, and a sense of a philosophical perspective in terms of leading a well-balanced life, taking care of your mind, your body, your emotions, your spirit. All of those things are necessary to be well integrated, to achieve mastery. In other words, intuition alone isn't enough.

Right, and I'm just wondering too, then, you know, it's this whole thing about fear versus love because to me, they're like polar opposites. If you're making a fear-based decision, it's coming from one end, and if you're making a love-based decision, it's coming from the other end. So, is it possible that we can listen to the intuition, observe whether there's fear or there's love intermingled with that, and try to read it from that perspective? You see what I'm saying? Am I afraid? Like, am I in fear mode, and then taking a step back to observe why we're afraid, as opposed to why aren't we in the love?

Well, Leanne, what I'm kind of hearing is a little bit of a dualistic thinking, like fear is bad, love is good. And actually, if you open yourself up to the wholeness of it, one might say, you know, fear can be good at times, and love can be bad at times, or it's all part of reality. If we embrace it all, you might find that even fear has a message. Even fear is here for a reason at times, not necessarily to control your life, but I like to think of maybe the positive power of negative thinking. Sometimes fear is a way of letting us know, "Oh, there's a pothole in the road ahead," and I could just avoid it. So, I don't think all fear is bad. There are teachers of intuition who, for example, with young children, say, you know, if you're in a situation where you feel afraid, maybe some adult is approaching you in a certain way, and you're afraid, it's good. Listen to your fear. Right. So, fear can be as much of a source of intuition as love can be. Even though that fear sometimes puts us into dualistic thinking, and it's hard to be in fear and also appreciate the wholeness of everything, there are times, there are moments when fear is appropriate.

Right, no, yeah, yeah. It's a tough one, but I completely understand what you're saying. See, I don't think I can give you any simple formula and say, you know, this is all you need to do is memorize this phrase, and you'll be saved. You'll achieve enlightenment. It's not that easy. No, no. That's probably why we're human. And if we were, if there were such a formula, it'd probably be what you're saying, it's about love, it's about oneness, it's about wholeness, but, but it's not about formulas.

Right, right, right, right. No, it's about taking the steps to get there. Well, any other steps that you that you would like to share or or that you find important, just as far as either getting in touch with your intuition or wanting to spread, you know, some other message about intuition or anything else that you can think of?

Oh, I think we've covered it. Yeah. Got it all. Okay. Well, thank you. You're welcome. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. It's a pleasure. Share. You're doing good work. It's very important. Thank you. It's important for me, you know, which at the end of the day is what it's all about, is I, you know, I'm trying to work it all out, so. Yeah, well, you're representing your generation of people and and the people who are coming up after you, and I hope you find a big audience for this. Thank you. And that's what I say, you know, I said this to Gary the other day on the phone, and you know, I'll say it to you as well, you know, you guys have paved the way because without your books and, you know, all the work that you've done, I have nothing to feed off of, so it just, you know, it just goes that way, so I'm very grateful for all the research that you've done and all the work that you've done, and it's definitely really important to me. Good. Appreciate it. You're welcome. Good. Okay. Jeff, I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for that yes that you gave to me all those years ago, and also just thank you for the amount of material that you've brought forth through your interviews, your books, all your research. Congratulations again on your award from the Bigelow Institute, and I look forward to continue to watch your your work being brought out into the world. Thank you so much, Leanne, for sharing your wonderful work with the New Thinking Allowed audience, and for those of you watching or listening. Thank you for being with us. You are the reason that we are here. We've just released issue number two of the New Thinking Allowed quarterly magazine. You can download a free copy at the New Thinking Allowed Foundation website, newthinkingallowed.org.