Kevin Ryerson discusses Spirit Communication
Spirit Communication: The Soul’s Path
Kevin Ryerson came to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in May 1994 to talk about his book Spirit Communication and trance-channeling. Some years ago, in the early 1980s, there was a surge of interest in trance-channeling that continues to this day. We went through the Bodhi Tree Bookstore and discovered that more than 30% of the titles were channeled, from the Oahspe Bible to the Urantia Book. Kevin Ryerson is one of the people who made trance-channeling a common word, common knowledge. Kevin Ryerson is more than a medium, clearer than a clairvoyant. He’s a professional intuitive whose mission is to bridge the gap between science and spirituality. He has taught and lectured extensively for the past several years.
Spirit Communication: The Soul’s Path by Kevin Ryerson and Stephanie Harolde. This book was published in 1991 and as of 1994, it is out-of-print.
What follows, is a partial transcript of Kevin Ryerson’s Bodhi Tree presentation.
Kevin Ryerson: I always like to re-introduce myself. My name's Kevin Ryerson. I'm your friendly neighborhood psychic and trance-channel here in the global village and this trip to The Bodhi Tree to me is very synchronistic in several ways. When I first came to the Bodhi Tree sometime in 1976 or 1977, it was like my trip to Mecca, because The Bodhi Tree already had a reputation at that time as having well-thought-out source materials for people who were spiritually seeking. The Bodhi Tree was still in its cottage industry phase. Years later, as I continued my own studies and I met with Shirley MacLaine, Shirley noticed that I was able to quote a lot of different books, and sources and that impressed her that there was something that she could access. She asked me where my information came from or where it was accessible. I explained to her The Bodhi Tree was considered one of the definitive resources. Shirley came here incognito at times --which is pretty hard for Shirley MacLaine -- but my comment to her at the time was that going to The Bodhi Tree was almost like a trip to Mecca.
So, finally, in speaking here at The Bodhi Tree many years later, I found it wonderful that we're in this Middle Eastern environment [Bodhi Tree Meeting Room] and that this literally constitutes my own trip to Mecca. But before going into anything overly formal, I would like to field questions that you may have. This is what I refer to as the "Grill the medium" portion of the program.
Question: If you’re not naturally a psychic, to what extent can you develop the abilities?
Kevin Ryerson:The ability to develop psychic abilities comes more naturally to people than they first might suspect. There are people, for instance, who go to our classes for the first time, or pick up a book called, Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain [by Betty Edwards] and they're really quite startled, as to what level of talent they already possess. It's very similar to developing any other ability. I would suggest that people who want to develop their psi-abilities look into such things as channeling of healing energy as the first step. What that does is to help heal the emotions, and it gives them meditation perspectives.
Question: What is channeling?
Kevin Ryerson: There are basically four types of channeling; the oldest and probably the principal one is the channeling of healing energy, which in the past was used to help heal a person's emotions to prepare them for events in life. The second oldest was the channeling of ancestors -- ancestral intelligence --which was to get in touch with heroic ancestors to again to prepare for events that were occurring in life. The third level was fortune-telling, which was the examination of the character of the person to tell them what their potential was to respond to situations. The most recent is information resource channeling, which is what Edgar Cayce became most noted for Channeling is about the improvement of the quality of the way the individual perceives themselves as a spiritual being. Simply put, channeling is a opening to someone who cuts through and goes directly to “the higher self.” I am not fostering a religious conversion or a spiritual conversion on people. I am just trying to articulate the idea that there is a human spirit, whatever your belief system, and that it can be tapped into on a demonstrable, quantifiable level for problem solving in the here and now, and that is ultimately the process that is called channeling.
Question: Can you comment on Edgar Cayce’s prediction of earth changes and earthquakes?
Kevin Ryerson: Edgar Cayce said earth changes would happen, they're gradual. The classic Cayce thing is that we are now acting out the Atlantian myth in which Atlantis was a culture where technology outstripped their spiritual sensibilities. We are a culture that has become overly-dependent on the infrastructure of our technology --freeways, cars, radio, television -- for a sense of spiritual identity. Earthquakes generate other things than earth shaking and damage, that effect our social reactions to the tensions that are in an environment that is active, both as a climate, and geologically. There is also a migration that is going from Los Angeles, from California in general, to other parts of the country. What this is doing is spreading the cosmic ocean of consciousness, which is sort of a metaphor for the idea that Cayce wasn't only predicting the idea of California falling in the ocean and there being beachfront property in Phoenix, Arizona, but of the cosmic migrations, or ties of consciousness that would be originating in this particular state and going to other parts of the country. L.A., of course, has more than pulled its weight, in the area of consciousness-raising, with all of its strengths and frailties. So, I would say that we're kind of going through Climate Changes 101. This will not only continue to be a very vital place to live, I think it will be a very vital center of on-going consciousness-raising activities
Question: Why do we forget our past lives when we incarnate?
Kevin Ryerson: We don't completely forget our past lives. We actually have sometimes more startlingly dramatic and clear influence from past lives than we do from events in our own childhood shaping our adult personalities. Spiritualists say that in the same way that events in childhood shape the adult personality, so in turn, events from past lives shape entire lifetimes because past lives are the childhood of the soul.
Why do you forget? Because, the same way you don't recall with photographic recall everything in childhood and yet it is still accessible to you when it is relevant. You choose to come into this lifetime with what is essentially relevant and then it reveals itself according to your need of spiritual growth.
Question: Why do spirits reincarnate?
Kevin Ryerson: There’s something extraordinarily heroic about human nature. Once we obtain that state, we want to share it with other people and our live becomes so reinvigorated from our sense as a spirit we transcend what we normally had considered burdens before. Some may at first be reluctant to return, but because of a spiritual objectivity and a heroic quality about the human spirit, they would probably choose another appropriate incarnation.
Question: When you channel, do you go somewhere else? Do they actually inhabit your body?
Kevin Ryerson: Well, I don't like the term “inhabit my body”. I feel I function more like a radio where one station called Kevin is tuned down and then something called Tom McPherson speaks through. I don't feel I ever leave my body and I really have sort of a theory that most channels don't really leave their body. It's more of an altered state of consciousness that they're in and the spirit just speaks through. There's nothing scary about the idea of channeling. It is just part of the ability of working with altered states.
Question: How do you find life's purpose?
Kevin Ryerson: Life's purpose should be something that flows out of your own talents and is something you love to do so, therefore, it is self-sustaining. You just need to ask yourself the question, "What brings me real joy that is an activity that can either be a hobby, it can be a purpose or it can be a career?" And sometime it's all three. Sometimes it starts out as a hobby, it becomes a purpose and then it becomes a career and it becomes self-sustaining and that is probably why you're uniquely here. But your universal life purpose is to discover yourself as a human spirit. And, in my opinion, you're here to discover that you are part of the greater process, to be either part of the planetary consciousness or to rediscover the divine element that makes you human and makes us all human. All you need to do is go through the inner preparation to receive what already belongs to you.
What I'd like to do now is give a very brief discourse on something I consider to be very valuable that's been channeled through. The next book I'm working on is called, The Sacred Relationship The sacred relationship means becoming once again, emotionally literate. I feel that most of us are emotionally illiterate. In other words, we're emotionally myopic and we do not have the capacity to read our own emotions.
I refer to myself as an expert intuitive in the sense that intuition is the phenomenon of direct memory. It is the knowledge and information that you can derive from your personal aesthetics. It constitutes the ability to see the beauty or the lack of beauty in your own actions. And the way that you do that is to absorb them with your inner feelings or your inner eye.
I would like to offer to you very briefly and hopefully consistently, a few new insights because, in my opinion, if you can provide a person with key insights, it is like providing a missing piece of the puzzle that allows the whole image to begin to reemerge. The idea is that fear is actually your natural ability to feel concern. It is your natural ability to feel concern because there is a strong human need to live life without fear, which we are entitled to do. There's only two ways of getting rid of fear, and getting rid of fear is normally the idea. The first is you put a name on it, you confront it, you struggle with it, you wrestle it to the ground and usually, you are emotionally exhausted by the end of the process.
The other way of getting rid of fear is to redefine it. Because if you ask your subconscious mind or your meditations, "What am I afraid of," they'll be more than happy to put lots of Freddy Krugers on the elevator and send it up. But, if you have a better description, say, "What are my concerns?"-that you can cope with. Then you can begin to build an agenda and be effective and act. Functionally the emotion of fear serves to alert you as to what your concerns are in any given situation.
The next natural emotion is anger. Anger simply put is a psychic state. The process of life is supposed to be wave after wave of events that strengthen and nurture you. Anger is the ability to acknowledge and feel the pain that something has gone wrong in the process of life.
The third natural emotion is jealousy. And this one is always a kicker for some people. I'm always surprised at how audiences respond to this. But jealousy really is your natural ability to identify what already belongs to you. The problem is when you project it on other folks and try to take it from them rather than cultivating and developing it inside of yourself.
The key to these emotions is that you need to incubate them and feel them and then they will gradually release the knowledge that is there. It's the ability to recognize some element within yourself. The key to it is the alchemical emotion of joy, where joy is synonymous with spiritual attitude. If you have ever done something simple, such as prepare a meal for a friend, or wash the dishes, or prepare for a holiday, and you feel calm and intimate and you say to yourself, "If I could feel the way I feel now, I could solve any problem, meet any person and answer any question," that is who you are. That is who you are as a spiritual person. That is what the Buddhists call remembering who you are. There is a saying that when you experience, preserve the joy. And the most profound activity you can do is to remember the joyful events in your life and relearn that feeling.
If you go to an event to experience joy and you don't take that joy to all parts of your life, you've developed an addiction. But, if you've experienced joy and you take it to all parts of your life and you allow it to transform yourself and other people through that healthy attitude, you've developed a ritual. Because you have developed a process of repetition and reinforcement to remember who you are. It's exercising the memory of who you are as a person, as a spiritual identity.
Joy is your destiny. Joy is inevitable. You can experience it now, or you can put it off until tomorrow, but it will come and get you. Okay? Joy's the alchemical emotion. One drop of joy transforms oceans of fear, anger and jealousy. Also, this is keeping the sacred relationship with yourself.
And have you ever gotten angry and felt like you were ready to move on it and some fool screws it all up by saying, "Have a nice day." And you feel all of your pseudo-effectiveness slipping away. And above all else, you don't want to crack a smile under any circumstances because you will be labeled a fool. And you know what? You should be, because the fool is the most powerful card in the Tarot deck. It means you're at the beginning. You have beginner's mind, which the Buddhists say is the most potent state that you can be in.
Keep your beginner's mind. Anger plus joy becomes courage. Courage is the ability to take effective action in your outer environment. And jealousy becomes obsession which is the ability to focus your will and receive what already belongs to you. The joy is so powerful it doesn't stop there, because concern will become compassion. Concern will become compassion and compassion is the power to give of yourself altruistically with the knowledge it will return to you. It is the courage to extend who you are to other people, with the knowledge that it will return to you. So be compassionate with yourself and other people.
Courage becomes passion and passion is the effective action you can take without thinking about it. When you learn to be effective in your outer environment, you become a passionate person. And that's when you're really following your joy. And obsession becomes possession; possession in the positive sense of the word of being possessed by your enlightenment because your enlightenment is when you remember who you are. A very powerful but elegant meditation that spirit gives is, "Find a joyful moment in your life.", remember it, but let the event fall away and preserve the joy. It'll be like embracing a lover, which is keeping the sacred relationship. It is merging the male and the female side of yourself so the god and goddess can awaken inside of you and you give birth to your spiritual identity.
And what is it that will allow you to receive what is essential to you in life? It is working on those psychic states. So it's just like a prism. You learn mind, body and spirit and when the unbroken light of the soul comes in, it refracts into the three emotional state It's like an inner symphony. If you tune your life up with the key pitch of joy, you can orchestrate anything in your life.
Now, if I can leave you with that as a psychic suggestion or a psychic state, it's called "keeping the sacred relationship." Some of the clues are in my book Spirit Communication. Elements of it are, but I'm reorganizing this body of knowledge into a new book called The Sacred Relationship. It's about the ancient art of emotional healing. If you discover what is well for you, then you can begin the healing process. It's that simple. Begin to read your emotions, read your feelings. Become emotionally literate. And keep the sacred relationship. Okay?
