Notes

Standing in the Spiritual Heart
An Interview with Laurie Conrad by Diana Souza. Ithaca, NY.

Q Laurie, the first question I'd like to ask - I'd like to know everything you mean by the phrases "standing in my heart" and "I looked within and found him in the spiritual heart". You wrote: "I was standing in my own Heart. My Heart was all around me in the room, surrounding me. I could do little more than look around the area at all that was manifesting from my Heart, intrigued and wondering."

A The passage you just read was about my experience with the sage Paul Brunton, almost thirty years ago. When I say "I looked within and found him in the spiritual heart"... There is the physical heart that beats and gives us life, and there is also a spiritual Heart where clairvoyants often head to find their images. You could say that it is where the soul, the individual soul has its mysterious link with the Divine, to God.

Therefore the divine images, the images which are given to the soul by the Divine, are first received by the soul in what I'd call the spiritual Heart. I'm not the only real person to use that term -- I didn't come up with that vocabulary. The spiritual Heart is really a mystical term.

Once the clairvoyant or mystic is clairvoyantly seeing into other realms or tapping into the future, or seeing or going to other places on earth while in waking state consciousness or in dream state, they are often looking in the spiritual Heart to find these images. I really believe that many, if not most people have these experiences while in dream state, they are just not alert to it. But clairvoyants can go there during ordinary waking state consciousness to get these images of other realms or other places on earth or the near future.

Q The average reader will wonder how your heart could possibly be in the room throughout you?

A Well, I think I wonder about that myself. It is part of that grand mystery of Life. I've had a similar experience with music, where I will suddenly be in my heart, standing in that mystical Heart, and the notes to my pieces will be all around me. So I suppose that I go to a similar place when I'm interpreting Chopin or writing my music. I have no idea that we really can explain these things. When you meditate, in the event that you meditate, I think it really is easier to understand why. In fact, it may be very difficult to describe or describe it for those who do not meditate.

The spiritual Heart is generally believed to be situated in the seat of the soul. If you ask me, it is roughly where the physical heart is, and much more in the heart of my body. The soul itself is so beyond the limits and boundaries of our physical body, we cannot even commence to imagine the grandeur of the soul. So my personal self, along with my individual little mind - was sitting for the reason that room with the fantastic sage Paul Brunton. He was near the end of his life on the planet and he was fully enlightened. A Christian would probably say he had reached sainthood. In the Indian traditions, they would say he was fully enlightened. In his presence, I did have this big mystical experience, where I experienced the contents of my heart all around me in the area - as though I were in a very deep, advanced meditation or contemplation.

I had only been meditating, I think, for a couple months when I met him. So it was an extremely memorable and fortunate experience.

This human body that we are in, compared to the soul - and the physical brain in comparison to Consciousness Itself - are minuscule compared. So, I might have already been allowed to experience my Heart around me, filling the complete room to teach me this. I would have been given the experience so that I possibly could see and understand that we are all so much larger than we believe ourselves to be, that the Soul is immense. You can find other meanings to this occurrence as well, meanings that we would not have time for in this interview. It was a mystical experience. It's not something we humans can simply find words for.

Q Additionally you said that you first met the Dalai Lama in your dreams, before you even knew who he was. Later you met him personally. Reveal your impressions of the Dalai Lama. Anecdotes...

A Our Holiness, the Dalai Lama of Tibet. Well, he could be an extraordinary person. I have seen him and met with him in an organization setting many times. One of the first items that struck me is his incredible love of life - and his tremendous joy. The next thing that I noticed was his extraordinary earnestness and seriousness whenever he speaks about prayer. He and his monks are constantly praying for the world. He is a very humble and holy man. And I really like that juxtaposition of these two attributes of his personality, the humor and the holiness. He could be said to be the incarnation of Compassion, and everything that he says and does revolves round the higher Compassion.

When he speaks about the higher Compassion, it will always be combined with Wisdom - the Higher Wisdom which roughly corresponds to the Wisdom of the Catholics along with other religions: that we are not the body, that the material world is not Ultimate Reality. This higher Compassion is not the normal, sentimental emotion a lot of people call compassion; Paul Brunton would call that emotion, or the sentimentality of empathy, the lower octave of true Compassion. The Dalai Lama would say that true Compassion also includes this higher Wisdom. By applying Wisdom, we'd have Compassion for each and every sentient being, every being on the planet - just because they're in the body, and therefore, suffer. That is the true Compassion. This Compassion would likewise incorporate the view that you stop people if they are behaving badly, because within their bad behavior they are hurting themselves among others. So, in this definition of Compassion, Wisdom stands in the background in a loving, detached way. The Witness position, let's say, of Paul Brunton, when we have the ability to clearly see what's truly best for everybody in the situation. That's true Compassion.

Overall, we humans come to the world mainly from our personal thoughts and lower emotions. The big Teachers, including the Dalai Lama and the sages, the saints - they are all looking to get us to come from the higher position, the bigger octave of all personal emotions. Brunton speaks concerning this at length in his Notebooks, and the Dalai Lama also offers written many volumes of books.

As for anecdotes, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Mainly I remember his laughter, his joy. Next the sacredness that he brings with him. The clarity of his mind. The 1st time I was in the same room with him, I clairaudiently heard an extremely low tone all around the room, vibrating the entire room - perhaps it was the power of his very being, or his mantra, his inner prayers. I hadn't heard that phenomenon before that day, nor since, not while in his presence.

Q I remember a tale you told concerning the Dalai Lama coming and clearing a space where he would speak, with a storm?

A Yes, that has been in Boston, when he spoke at Harvard. A pal and I were residing at Mataji's ashram for a couple days. I really believe Mataji took over for Ramakrishna. She had an ashram near Boston, and we'd made a decision to stay there rather than at a hotel in Boston. We'd arrived at hear the Dalai Lama when he spoke at Harvard.

I have no idea what year this is, but it was many years ago. It was one of the Dalai Lama's first visits to this country. Mataji sent three of us ahead, to arrange a gathering between her and the Dalai Lama just before the lecture. She had never met him. So she sent us ahead to talk to his entourage, and arrange it. I always thought this unusual assignment was a ruse of some kind - Mataji was fully enlightened, she did not have to send three young human seekers to set up this meeting with the Dalai Lama. She and the Dalai Lama were perfectly able to arrange it themselves, through non-verbal communication, mentally. As it proved, the young woman driving us there had met Paul Brunton in dreams throughout her childhood - when i had visited with the Dalai Lama first in dreams being an adult. In those dreams, Brunton instructed her. She discovered who he was years later, when she saw his photograph in a book. That was probably why Mataji sent us ahead together, in order that my friend and I'd meet this young woman and hear her story. Also that I would experience the storm, to one day tell the story in this interview. Mataji, like Paul Brunton, was perfectly in a position to see in to the future.

In any case, the three of us all got into a little car, an old, very beaten down car that people hoped would get us there. And we did make it happen early enough to set up a meeting between the extraordinary Mataji and the saintly Dalai Lama.

Directly after we had finished speaking with his people, they readily agreed to the meeting, and we were very pleased and happy that our mission had been accomplished so easily. I went outside by myself to wait for Mataji to arrive. It was a beautiful, calm, early fall day. Sunlight was shining and there I was, on the beautiful Harvard campus; I had never been there. Students were sitting under the trees studying, or strolling to or from their classes across the paths. I walked out of the lecture building door a little way and happily stood there, taking in the wonder of the scene. Suddenly, a huge storm came up; a rigorous and surprising, shocking wind. Students' papers were flying everyw here , branches waving everywhere, the trees were almost bending. I tried to take shelter against a huge tree close to the door, wind and leaves flying, students now scurrying across the paths, bent over against the storm, trying to retrieve their scattered papers. It had been quite something. It felt like I had inadvertently stepped right into a vacuum cleaner or perhaps a washing machine.

It probably lasted for about several minutes. Then your storm stopped in the same way quickly as it had arisen. I thought to myself: "Good Heavens, that which was that?"

Then I laughed. I realized that it was probably the Dalai Lama purifying the grounds of Harvard before he arrived. And that's still my view. He's an extremely powerful being, the Dalai Lama. He has tremendous power. Yet, regarding his teachings, probably his biggest message to the world is kindness, to be kind to others. And if you have followed the messages from Our Lady, the Madonna, to the world - She has been appearing in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia for nearly two decades to six visionaries - She also says to lead a kind, simple life. She says that we should make an effort to pattern our lives after St. Therese of Lisieux. And St. Therese of Lisieux never even left her convent! She had the simplest of lives. She had, at most, just a little table in her convent cell and a bed. Maybe a chair. At one point she had a vase in her room, but she thought she might be getting too mounted on it, so she asked them to remove it. She basically did her daily work and chores at the convent and was kind to another nuns. Yet she became one of the biggest Catholic saints. In Medjugorje, Our Lady said basically: pick the journey and lead a kind, simple life.

The Dalai Lama is currently a celebrity, he could be a very famous man. He's got written books and lectured in many countries. He is world known. And he is still just about the most humble and simple of men. They say that he has one pair of shoes and two sets of his maroon robes. He remains completely untouched and unspoiled by the planet. He considers himself a monk, yet he is both the temporal and spiritual leader of his country. But he lives such as a simple monk. So, in that sense alone, I think he is an unbelievable and saintly man, and a role model for humanity.

Our interview couldn't be long enough to really discuss the Dalai Lama. When I first saw him personally, I inwardly told Our Lady that I felt as if I had met Her Son. I felt as though I had seen Christ on earth, that I had listened to Him speak.

Q Modern psychiatric science probably wouldn't be too friendly in their evaluation of mystical states and the saints and persons who experience them. Many modern psychiatrists might even call what you refer to as "inner vision" and "movies in my own head" as delusional. How can these mystical, inner visions and movies be differentiated from the vivid imagination?

A That is clearly a very astute question. And I think, in my case, probably the biggest "proof" that an experience isn't only imagination or delusion is if I inwardly saw a location, and then I later saw that exact place in a book or magazine or in waking state consciousness. Or if I had a vision into the future, it then happened in the same way I had seen it unfold a few days or weeks later, which luckily it always did. If I clairvoyantly saw a lost animal in a particular spot, the animal was found there. When I clairaudiently heard Our Lady's voice talking with me, my little dog Guinivere heard it also - she was still sitting on the street corner, looking for the person behind the voice despite the fact that I had already walked on half of a block. Most of my experiences have already been validated the following on the earth plane. So if I had an inner vision of somebody doing something or saying something or understanding that they were in big trouble - I would learn later that yes, that had, actually, happened just as I saw it. So I actually was very lucky by doing so. Personally, I had a lot of validation. Otherwise, I would have wondered myself if my experiences were just imagination or hallucination.

This is a fascinating and important topic. If you are having high mystical experiences, you are being thrown into another, higher consciousness. You're already probably more sensitive than a lot of people. And if people let you know you are crazy and they keep telling you that you will be crazy, you might just begin to believe that you are. But there are also those people who are delusional. One easy solution to determine the truth of their clairvoyance would be to see if the predictions become a reality. The saints were never wrong.

In the Catholic Church, visions and clairvoyance will not cause you to a saint. And the Church is incredibly careful about testing and evaluating such abilities. First, they look at the general behavior, virtue and rationality of the person. Many visions cannot be verified. A number of the saints have seen their guardian angel. How can that be verified? Is this person rational the rest of the time? Do they appear to have a hysterical nature? Do they see or predict things that can be proven wrong later? The Catholic Church observes that person carefully and analyzes their lifetime on earth, which I think is quite wise.

St. Teresa of Avila, in her books, her Autobiography and in THE INSIDE Castle, speaks of the things. She says that ordinarily she actually is not an imaginative person. Therefore, it appears unlikely that her visions will be produced by her own mind, by her imagination. But she also says that whenever we have visions of any sort, we should categorically discount them, merely to be on the safe side, in the event it is the imagination or Old Nick producing them. She also says that when this is a true experience, you will just know it. Section of that knowing is something intangible that may not be verbalized.

Part of it is the staying power of the mystical experience. It will stick with you for the others of your life, word for word, image by image. That has always amazed me. But those who have had mystical experiences agree that this is true.

In the same way at the birth of Christ, once the angel seemed to the shepherds, almost all of the children that Our Lady, the Madonna, has appeared to throughout history are shepherds. As in Medjugorje, in these current visions of Our Lady on the planet. (She says they'll be Her last appearances on earth.) The children in Medjugorje were on the way to look after the sheep when Our Lady first seemed to them. In Fatima, the kids were tending the sheep when the angel first appeared to them. And of course, Christ is named the Shepherd, and we are His flock. Throughout history, She has mainly seemed to children shepherds and shepherdesses. In one instance, the children were very uneducated, they might probably neither read nor write. They spoke a local, rural patois, and Our Lady gave them an extremely long, complicated message beautifully stated and using words they didn't even know. The children repeated it verbatim afterward, without changing a syllable, even years later. This again shows the energy of true mystical experiences, they are indelibly imprinted on our consciousness. That is quite different from our ordinary experience.

Q How can we see the inner purpose of nov a sparrow? You'd a major accident that nearly ended your daily life. It has partially disabled you. Also it even erased for some time your clairvoyant abilities. Yet you say you do not believe in accidents. Because of the destruction and disability it brought into your daily life, if that accident was Divinely orchestrated, then what possible purpose could it have served to boost your life and consciousness?

A That's another deep question, and not that simple to answer.

Q The fall of a sparrow?

A Yes. That was from a quote from Christ Himself. He told His disciples that every hair on our head is numbered and that there is Providence in nov a sparrow. Now the scientists agree, they call it DNA, the little chart of our life in those strands.

Definitely, I think my car accident was Divinely orchestrated. If there was negative intent, that is also possible, certainly God allowed it. And in my belief framework, if He allowed it, it would be allowed for the purification of my soul - and/or for the souls of others, or with regard to the world. Our life on earth, in my mind, is a continual deepening.

A continual deepening of being and understanding. Certainly, I would also hope that it is a deepening of holiness; and there are specific experiences that we receive to help deepen wisdom and strength.

It has been more than fifteen years because the accident, and I certainly experienced enough time to take into account why it might have already been permitted to happen. Personally, I would prefer that I either didn't have to learn those lessons or that I could learn them another way. But I'm certainly not going to question the higher vision that God and the soul possess. Luckily, the tiny person, the person in the body, Laurie Conrad in this situation, was not in control your day of the accident. Or any day. God and the soul are in charge. We can start to see the poverty of our very own judgment even in your own lifetime on earth: items that we wanted so very badly when we were young now seem so undesirable, as well as harmful. Has that ever happened for you? Well, I look back and just inwardly say: "Thank God you did not get what you wanted". Because either it was not good for me personally or something far better arrived. So, even within enough time frame of our earthly existence, we are able to begin to have that summary of events and the value of events, even while they happen. How could we possibly second guess the wisdom of the soul and of God? You cannot. If I look within with total honesty - that is always the best way to reflect on events - as hard as it has been for myself and those around me, a few of the biggest lessons of my spiritual life probably came due to this accident.

Well, I possibly could say, I think, that whenever I was flat on my back all those months and years, it was the 1st time that I felt union with the bigger Love, the Love from the universe. That the universe, the total of the Hearts of all creatures that populate the universe, really does hold this extraordinary Love for every and most of us. And yes, needless to say, it's the higher Love, the Divine Love from God expressing Itself through all the souls of all creatures - but it is also from those combined souls and the universe itself. I was shown this in a vision of sorts, and I could still see it hung in my mind's eye, like a little movie. A cosmic Love. It is the Divine Love from God, but there is also a cosmic or universal love that I felt pouring into me and around me. It was as though every creature on earth wished me well, was sending me love and healing. And that, I think, in my vocabulary, will be a high mystical experience. To feel that universal Love from all creatures. In fact it is there for all those, every moment of every day. We are just not conscious of it, alert to it. And I was aware of it because I was knocked flat on my back for such a long time with a certain type of injury. I have the feeling that anyone who's that seriously injured, or that seriously ill, is given that opportunity.

I remember reading, way back when, reports and stories having said that people with polio, in iron lungs, sometimes experienced an unbelievable peace. I think it might be much like what I experienced. In spite of the terrible difficulties and the horror of it, I also felt the deepest peace I had ever felt in my own life. Granted, I knew how exactly to meditate, I have been meditating for quite some time.

And I mainly meditated while I was lying there half conscious and feeling half alive. But, I believe that even if I did not know how to meditate, I would have already been thrown into that beautiful inner place anyway. And it was a fantastic peace and love coming in, even at the same time that the vehicle, your body was dysfunctional and miswired. I had fairly severe head injuries. I could not understand what people were saying to me or really speak for almost a year. I had amnesia. You may already know, I still can go into a semi-coma state easily overload myself with work or ideas, as I did this past week.

At that time, after the accident, the body, the vehicle was totally dysfunctional - but this other place was so vast therefore deep, so filled up with Love. And I don't know if I would have ever experienced it without that accident.

I think another invaluable lesson or virtue I learned after my accident was the difference between humiliation and humility. In the monastery they require poverty, chastity and obedience, that is another way of saying humility. When I was initially injured, it was very humiliating. Not for long, as the emotion was too problematic for me to bear. I had been an intelligent, capable, respected and independent person with a large career - and all that changed immediately. Suddenly, I couldn't do anything, not for myself or others. I couldn't dress or feed myself. I couldn't sit up. Doctors talked about me as though I was not there. I could not necessarily speak or understand what people were saying. I could not form words interiorly, this means I could not even pray. I had forgotten most of my own personal history and when I tried to walk I fell over. Six years later, I was still crossing the road following grade school children with little bright-colored back packs slung on their backs because I couldn't tell where in fact the cars were. I couldn't play concerts for seven years.

Therefore i had to rapidly learn how to inwardly stand in another place, a location which I would call humility, being humble. And what I mean by that's being humble before God - because humiliation only comes when we compare ourselves to other human beings. Comparing ourselves to others can be neurotic, and it could be dangerous. Humiliation is a lot more than counter-productive, it really is ruinous.

But when you are truly humble, you're simply just kneeling before God. So when I just humbly knelt before God inwardly and said to myself: "Well, I am terribly injured and God wants this from me", the energy of the Divine came through me, the energy of the universe came through me - and suddenly I felt stronger and much more peaceful than I had ever felt.

In terms of healing others, after the accident, I now didn't even have to receive healing requests consciously, in order for people to be entirely healed. Prior to the accident, I often had to work quite diligently and pray much to acquire miraculous healings for others. I think this new, more automatic healing for others began because this higher, divine Love, healing energy - whatever you want to call it -

Q Presence.

A The Divine Presence was now coming through me. I was just naturally radiating it, because I was so filled up with it.

So there were tangible rewards. I was now feeling a remarkably deep peace and Love and strength - and others were being spontaneously and miraculously healed without my even working at it consciously. That is still true.

But this difference between humiliation and humility is, I believe, very important for everybody. And we must learn it, I believe, if we truly want to stand before God. Or we're able to say, in order to stand in your higher self, stand with the soul, in a constant way. Not just the mystical glimpse occasionally that you might be given in meditation.

Laurie Conrad may be the Author of two books: "Realms of Light: Clairvoyant Experiences of Life After Death" and "The Spiritual Life of Animals and Plants", both collections of true stories. "Visits With Angels", another level of true stories, is scheduled for publication this year 2010. She is currently working on a fresh book, "We Meet in Dreams/ THE REAL Nature of Dreams", also scheduled for publication in 2010 2010. Website: http://www.figarobooks.com
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