Standing in the Spiritual Heart

An Interview with Laurie Conrad by Diana Souza. Ithaca, NY.

Q Laurie, the first question Let me ask - I'd like to know everything you mean by the phrases "standing in my own 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 merely 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's How to Start Up a Teenage Business that beats and gives us life, and there is also a spiritual Heart where clairvoyants often go to find their images. You can say that it's where the soul, the individual soul has its mysterious connection to the Divine, to God.

So the divine images, the images that are directed at the soul by the Divine, are first received by the soul in what I'd call the spiritual Heart. I am 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.

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

Q The average reader is going to wonder how your heart could possibly be in the room all around you?

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

The spiritual Heart is normally 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 center of my own body. The soul itself is indeed beyond the limits and boundaries of our physical body, we can not even begin to imagine the grandeur of the soul. So my own self, along with my individual little mind - was sitting in that room with the great sage Paul Brunton. He was near the end of his life on earth and he was fully enlightened. A Christian may possibly 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 some months when I met him. So it was an extremely memorable and fortunate experience.

This human body that people are in, compared to the soul - and the physical brain in comparison to Consciousness Itself - are minuscule in comparison. So, I might have been allowed to experience my Heart around me, filling the complete room to teach me this. I might have been given the knowledge so that I could see and understand that we are all so much larger than we believe ourselves to be, that the Soul is immense. There are other meanings to this occurrence aswell, 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. Tell us your impressions of the Dalai Lama. Anecdotes...

A Our Holiness, the Dalai Lama of Tibet. Well, he is an extraordinary person. I have seen him and met with him in a group setting many times. One of the first things that struck me is his incredible sense of humor - and his tremendous joy. The following point 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 love that juxtaposition of those two attributes of his personality, the humor and the holiness. He could be said to be the incarnation of Compassion, and precisely what he says and does revolves around the higher Compassion.

When How to Start Up a Teenage Business speaks concerning the higher Compassion, it is always coupled with Wisdom - the bigger Wisdom which roughly corresponds to the Wisdom of the Catholics and other religions: that we are not the body, that the material world isn't Ultimate Reality. This higher Compassion is not the normal, sentimental emotion most people call compassion; Paul Brunton would call that emotion, or the sentimentality of empathy, the low 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 for that reason, suffer. That is the true Compassion. This Compassion would likewise incorporate the view that you stop people if they're 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, suppose, of Paul Brunton, when we have the ability to clearly see what is truly best for everyone 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, like the Dalai Lama and the sages, the saints - all of them are trying to get us to come from the higher position, the bigger octave of all the personal emotions. Brunton speaks concerning this at length in his Notebooks, and the Dalai Lama also has written many volumes of books.

As for anecdotes, I wouldn't even understand where to start. Mainly I recall his laughter, his joy. Next the sacredness that he brings with him. The clarity of his mind. The very first time I was in exactly the same room with him, I clairaudiently heard a very low tone everywhere in the room, vibrating the complete room - perhaps it had been the power of his very being, or his mantra, his inner prayers. I had not heard that phenomenon before that day, nor since, not during his presence.

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

A Yes, that was in Boston, when he spoke at Harvard. A friend and I were residing at Mataji's ashram for a few days. I really believe Mataji took over for Ramakrishna. She had an ashram near Boston, and we had made a decision to stay there instead of at a hotel in Boston. We had come to 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 many Dalai Lama's first visits to the 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 speak to his entourage, and arrange it. I always thought this unusual assignment was a ruse of some kind - Mataji was fully enlightened, she didn't have to send three young human seekers to arrange this ending up in the Dalai Lama. She and the Dalai Lama were perfectly in a position 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 - as I had visited with the Dalai Lama first in dreams as an adult. In those dreams, Brunton instructed her. She discovered who he was years later, when she saw his photograph in a book. That has been probably why Mataji sent us ahead together, so that my friend and I would meet this young woman and hear her story. Also that I'd experience the storm, to one day tell the story in this interview. Mataji, like Paul Brunton, was perfectly able to see into the future.

Regardless, the three of us all got into a little car, an old, very beaten down car that we hoped would get us there. And we did get there early enough to arrange a meeting between the extraordinary Mataji and the saintly Dalai Lama.

Directly after we had finished talking to his people, they readily agreed to the meeting, and we were very pleased and happy our mission have been accomplished so easily. I decided to go outside by myself to hold back for Mataji to arrive. It was a lovely, calm, early fall day. The sun was shining and there I was, on the stunning Harvard campus; I had never been there. Students were sitting beneath the trees studying, or strolling to or from their classes across the paths. I walked out of the lecture building door just a little way and happily stood there, consuming the beauty of the scene. Suddenly, a huge storm came up; a rigorous and surprising, shocking wind. Students' papers were flying everywhere, 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 along the paths, bent over against the storm, attempting to retrieve their scattered papers. It had been quite something. It felt like I had inadvertently stepped right into a vacuum cleaner or a washing machine.

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

Then I laughed. I realized that it had been most likely the Dalai Lama purifying the lands of Harvard before he arrived. And that is still my view. He's a very powerful being, the Dalai Lama. He has tremendous power. Yet, with regard to his teachings, probably his biggest message to the world is kindness, to be kind to others. And when you have followed the messages from Our Lady, the Madonna, to the world - She has been appearing in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia for almost twenty years to six visionaries - She also says to lead a sort, simple life. She says that we should make an effort to pattern our lives after St. How to Start Up a Teenage Business of Lisieux. And St. Therese of Lisieux never even left her convent! She had the easiest of lives. She had, for the most part, 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 may be getting too attached to 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. And yet she became one of the biggest Catholic saints. In Medjugorje, Our Lady said basically: pick your way and lead a kind, simple life.

The Dalai Lama is currently a celebrity, he is an extremely famous man. He has written books and lectured in lots of countries. He is world known. And he could be still one of the most humble and simple of men. They say that he has one footwear and two sets of his maroon robes. He remains completely untouched and unspoiled by the world. He considers himself a monk, yet he is both temporal and spiritual leader of his country. But he lives such as a simple monk. So, for the reason that sense alone, I believe 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 in person, I inwardly told Our Lady that I felt as though I had met Her Son. I felt as though I had seen Christ on the planet, 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 may call what you make reference to as "inner vision" and "movies in my head" as delusional. How can these mystical, inner visions and movies be differentiated from a vivid imagination?

A That is a very astute question. And I believe, in my case, most likely the biggest "proof" that an experience isn't just imagination or delusion is easily inwardly saw a location, and then I later saw that exact place in a book or magazine or in waking state consciousness. Or easily had a vision of the future, it then happened in the same way I had seen it unfold a couple of days or weeks later, which luckily it always did. EASILY clairvoyantly saw a lost animal in a specific spot, the animal was found there. When I clairaudiently heard Our Lady's voice talking with me, my little dog Guinivere heard in addition, it - she was still standing on the street corner, looking for the individual behind the voice despite the fact that I had already walked on half of a block. The majority of my experiences have already been validated right here on the earth plane. So if I had an inner vision of somebody doing something or saying something or understanding that they were in trouble - I would find out later that yes, that had, in fact, happened just as I saw it. So I actually was very lucky by doing so. Personally, I had many validation. Otherwise, I would have wondered myself if my experiences were just imagination or hallucination.

This is a fascinating and important topic. Should you be having high mystical experiences, you're being thrown into another, higher consciousness. You're already probably more sensitive than most people. And if people tell you that you are crazy and they keep telling you that you are crazy, you may just begin to believe you are. But there are also those who are delusional. One easy way to determine the truth of these clairvoyance would be to see if the predictions come true. The saints were never wrong.

In the Catholic Church, visions and clairvoyance will not make you a saint. And the Church is incredibly careful about testing and evaluating such abilities. First, they go through the general behavior, virtue and rationality of the individual. Many visions cannot be verified. A few of the saints have seen their guardian angel. How can that be verified? Is this person rational all of those other time? Do they seem to have a hysterical nature? Do they see or predict things that can be proven wrong later? The Catholic Church observes see your face carefully and analyzes their lifetime on earth, that i think is very wise.

St. Teresa of Avila, in her books, her Autobiography and in The Interior Castle, speaks of these things. She says that ordinarily she is not an imaginative person. Therefore, it seems unlikely that her visions would be produced by her own mind, by her imagination. But she also says that when we have visions of any sort, we have to categorically discount them, merely to be on the safe side, just in case it is the imagination or Old Nick producing them. She also says that when this is a true experience, you will just know it. Part of that knowing is something intangible that cannot really be verbalized.

Part of it is the stamina of the mystical experience. It will stick with you for the rest of your life, word after word, image by image. That has always amazed me. But anyone who has had mystical experiences concur that this is true.

Just as at the birth of Christ, when the angel seemed to the shepherds, almost all of the children our Lady, the Madonna, has seemed to throughout history are shepherds. As in Medjugorje, in these current visions of Our Lady on earth. (She says they'll be Her last appearances on earth.) The children in Medjugorje were on their way to look after the sheep when Our Lady first appeared to them. In Fatima, the children were tending the sheep once the angel first seemed to them. And of course, Christ is called the Shepherd, and we are His flock. Throughout history, She's 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 a very long, complicated message beautifully stated and using words they did not even know. The kids 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. This is quite not the same as our ordinary experience.

Q How can we see the inner purpose of the fall of a sparrow? You had an accident that nearly ended your life. It has partially disabled you. Also it even erased for a while your clairvoyant abilities. Yet you say you don't believe in accidents. Because of the destruction and disability it brought into your 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, rather than that easy 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 the fall of a sparrow. Now the scientists agree, they call it DNA, the tiny chart of our life in those strands.

Definitely, I believe my car crash was Divinely orchestrated. If there is negative intent, that is also possible, certainly God allowed it. And in my belief framework, if He allowed it, it could 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's 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 have had enough time to take into account why it might have already been allowed to happen. Personally, I might prefer that I either didn't need to learn those lessons or that I could learn them a different way. But I am certainly not likely to question the higher vision that God and the soul possess. Luckily, the small person, the person within the body, Laurie Conrad in this situation, was not in control the day of the accident. Or any day. God and the soul come in charge. We can see the poverty of our own judgment even in your own lifetime on earth: items that we wanted so very badly whenever we were young now seem so undesirable, or even harmful. Has that ever happened for you? Well, I look back and just inwardly say: "Thank God you didn't get everything you wanted". Because either it was not good for me personally or something much better came along. So, even within enough time frame of our earthly existence, we can commence to have that overview of events and the worthiness 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 - which is always the easiest method to reflect on events - as hard as it has been for myself and the ones around me, a number of the biggest lessons of my spiritual life probably came as a result of this accident.

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

I remember reading, way back when, reports and stories that said people who have 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 to meditate, I have been meditating for many years.

And I mainly meditated while I was lying there half conscious and feeling half alive. But, I believe that even if I did so not learn how to meditate, I would have been thrown into that beautiful inner place anyway. Also it was an extraordinary 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 individuals were saying if you ask me or really speak for almost a year. I had amnesia. You may already know, I still can get into a semi-coma state easily overload myself with work or ideas, when i did earlier this week.

At that time, after the accident, the body, the vehicle was totally dysfunctional - but this other place was so vast and so deep, so filled up with Love. And I have no idea if I would have ever experienced it without that accident.

I believe 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, which is another way of saying humility. When I was first injured, it was very humiliating. Not for long, as the emotion was too difficult for me to bear. I have been a smart, capable, respected and independent person with a large career - and all that changed in an instant. Suddenly, I couldn't do anything, not for myself or others. I couldn't dress or feed myself. I couldn't sit up. Doctors discussed me as if I was not there. I could not really speak or understand what people were saying. I could not even form words interiorly, this means I could not pray. I had forgotten most of my own personal history so 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 the backs because I couldn't tell where the cars were. I couldn't play concerts for seven years.

And so I had to rapidly discover how to inwardly stand in another place, a place 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 humans. Comparing ourselves to others can be neurotic, and it could be dangerous. Humiliation is a lot more than counter-productive, it is ruinous.

But when you're truly humble, you're just simply kneeling before God. So when I just humbly knelt before God inwardly and thought to myself: "Well, I'm 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 more peaceful than I had ever felt.

With regards to healing others, after the accident, I now did not even need to receive healing requests consciously, in order for people to be entirely healed. Before the accident, I often had to work quite diligently and pray much to obtain miraculous healings for others. I think this new, more automatic healing for others began because this higher, divine Love, healing energy - anything 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 an incredibly deep peace and Love and strength - and others were being spontaneously and miraculously healed without my even working at it consciously. This is still true.

But this difference between humiliation and humility is, I believe, very important for everybody. And we have to learn it, I believe, if we truly want to stand before God. Or we could say, so as to stand in your higher self, stand with the soul, in a continuing way. Not just the mystical glimpse occasionally that you might get 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 volume of true stories, is scheduled for publication this year 2010. She actually is currently working on a fresh book, "We Meet in Dreams/ The True Nature of Dreams", also scheduled for publication this year 2010. Website: http://www.figarobooks.com