Interview by Iain McNay

Iain McNay:   Hello and welcome once more to conscious TV. I am Iain McNay and my guest today is Mary Reed. Hi, Mary.

Mary Reed:  Hello

Iain McNay: Mary was recommended by somebody who wrote in and we had a copy of her book.  I thought “This sounds interesting”.  She’s come especially in from America to talk to us, which we really appreciate, and her book is called “Unwitting Mystic: Evolution of the Message of Love”.

So, Mary, you’re… we won’t start at the beginning of your book because it starts in a very dramatic fashion. We’ll come to that fairly shortly.  But let’s kind of start with your childhood because when we talked on the phone you said when you were a child you felt Jesus in your heart.

Mary Reed:  Mmm...I did, from a very young age I could feel and hear and sort of be with Jesus constantly in my heart and I was very confused why other people didn’t have that same kind of experience. And I was really specially confused why people would go to church to learn about Jesus when he was really right in their heart. It just really never made any sense to me. And I was more confused why people would come out of church talking about a Jesus that didn’t sound familiar to me because mine was always deeply loving and unconditional about everybody but what people were coming out of church talking about was a lot of sin and judgement.  It felt quite resentful almost and I just couldn’t relate so from a very early age I knew that something was quite different within me.

Iain McNay: And were you able to talk to people about this or you kept it to yourself?

Mary Reed:  No, I grew up around a lot of southern Baptists and around the countryside in Clovis, New Mexico, which is where my family are from, and there, people just weren’t interested in talking about something they couldn’t see or hadn’t learned in church, and so I just kept it to myself.

Iain McNay:   I understand.  I think there’s a lot of children that have special experiences and somehow there is a nervousness about sharing this because it’s not something that’s in the ethos of them, it’s not something that’s invited really.

Mary Reed:  Yes, and actually I hear a lot about this now from parents in my audiences saying that their children have been talking to them about things they can see or hear, oftentimes it’s about Jesus, and what I love watching is first of all more and more children telling their parents about this, but more and more parents being receptive to the kids being able to talk about it. [02:45]  And I actually did a talk for youth this year and last year as well, talking about parents creating an environment for their children to be able to talk more about what’s happening with them, and letting the children be the teachers instead of the students always.

Iain McNay: Yeah, it’s such an important thing with the whole world of the social media and everything going more and more less personal that they’re… those conversations can take place at an early age.

Mary Reed:  yeah… yeah …

Iain McNay: Then you were telling me also that in your later teens you were starting to see ghosts?

Mary Reed:  Yeah… I’ve actually for many, many years had unexplained experiences.  I could see what might be called ghosts, apparitions or I could have parallel life experiences where I’m in somebody else’s life the same time I’m in mine, or I could have really crystal clear moments of clairvoyance when I know exactly what’s getting ready to happen right before it happens.  So I would have all these different things but I never tried to figure it out because I just thought, you know, everybody has odd things here or there and it’s just one of those things, so I didn’t tell people about it. I never told anybody and then it wasn’t until December of 2000 that then I started having these really weighty metaphysical events happen. But they were all entirely related to God and Jesus and Buddha and angels and divinity and the energy field we exist in.  So, everything dramatically shifted about 16 years ago.  And nothing… It hasn’t been these sort of ghostly appearance or these other things so much as everything is now something that is teaching me, and…

Iain McNay: Yes…I…The thing I’m interested in is I often look at the beginning of interviews at people’s childhood and teens about how things developed and obviously, you did have the experience of Jesus…

Mary Reed:  Right…

Iain McNay: You felt this connection which was quite unusual.  You also… you could see ghosts, which not everybody does, and the other thing which you told me on the phone which I thought was very interesting, your father was a criminal and you were always on the run, so there was lots of change in your life.

Mary Reed:  That’s right…

Iain McNay:   So somehow you lacked that... maybe lacked that stability and holding and that somehow opened things up for you more as if you… The plus of that was that you saw much more of the picture of life and how vast it was…

Mary Reed:  That’s right…

Iain McNay: And the minus side was that it must have been very difficult to always be on the run, and not have that stability to hold you to the earth more.

Mary Reed:  That’s right, that’s exactly right.  And I have often wondered if I didn’t make a plan to have the entire full continuum of experiences in a very rich way, because I have certainly… You are absolutely right, from the time I was a small child my father was always doing the criminal activities, so we ran from town to town to town, and we would always have to tear up our identity and throw it out of the window as we were driving down the road, pictures, report cards, anything that had our identity on it and so there was a lot of facing very early on consistent change, consistent shame, consistent hiding.  This idea that I know that this isn’t normal, and so there was a lot of things in the growing up that I had to manage that felt very different.  Everybody has their ways of felling different, and that’s just what mine happened to be.

Iain McNay:   The interesting thing for me there is that you were getting rid of your identity, and that somehow is the crux of this spiritual path…

Mary Reed:  Definitely, yes…

Iain McNay:   Somehow we must, not get rid of it, that’s the wrong word, but we let go of this identity we’ve inherited and we build up through the years and somehow, on one level anyway, you were getting used to that.

Mary Reed:  That’s right, I never thought about that, but that’s exactly right.  From the time I was a child I was losing the identity of who I was, each place that we went to.  Actually, we were hiding it as well, not just losing it, but hiding it …

Iain McNay:   You were hiding it…was that difficult, or did you find you got used to that?

Mary Reed:  I never got used to that, never, no, no, because you enter a new school, that school is in a completely different place from where you were here, then you're faced with all of the… I don't know… people. My father is different, we don't have a mother that… You know, there was all of these things from school to school to school that you … You face every single time something new, so I never got used to it, it was never fun.

Iain McNay: And what was your relationship like with your mother we share able to cope with it on one level, or was it difficult for her …

Mary Reed:  Actually my mother left when I was five and so she left all three of us kids. She was a woman who just couldn't manage being a mom so …  

Iain McNay: So there was three of you, with a dad, on the run …

Mary Reed:  But my father did a lot of, really, what we might call bad things, but nonetheless he was still a father who loved his children, and we just happen to have a father that did bad things, but our Father loved every one of us.

Iain McNay:   That's wonderful, isn’t it?

Mary Reed:  Yes it was and still is … It was interesting. He passed, as you know from my book, he passed in 2012, and in a skype call with my brother and sister, we were remarking on the fact that no matter how bad our Father was, it was still important to each of us that he was proud of who we were as individuals, so there was always still a loving father-child relationship with each of us, even through all of that.

Iain McNay:   Yes, it's so interesting people are very, you know … Renate and I, we support an organization called The Prison Phoenix Trust, and every now and again they have… and what they do in the UK is they send teachers into prisons to teach prisoners yoga and meditation.  And so every now and again they have an open day in the prison, and we go along there and they let me chat with some prisoners and some prison officers, and it is always so interesting to see, because prisoners are so vilified in the outside world, especially ones that are violent.

Mary Reed:  Right …

Iain McNay:   Actually, we did interview with somebody on conscious.tv that murdered six people, a few years ago, and there was very much a human side to him.  It's not to say that, of course, what he did was right, it was terrible what he did, but on the other hand, there is inherently some kind of humanist, that was obviously, absolutely… that you could  see in your father.

Mary Reed:  Yes, my father… I talked about this on my tour this year.  My father was a deeply wounded man, he was in a great deal of pain and that pain and that sense of rejection of everything that he sought, came out in many forms.   It came out in brutality, he was a very violent man. It came out in, sort of, trying to beat the system constantly, so he could win over the ways of the world,  and … You know, when you can step way back from it,  you see that all of this was because he was in pain.  He was not a man that intended to be a bad man in the world.  It was never his intention to be bad, it was his intention to feel better and it was an … I say, in the back of my book he was my greatest earthbound teacher of unconditional love and forgiveness, because he taught me a great deal about the human side of what's happening when people are doing bad things.

Iain McNay: So, you obviously grew up and you need to earn some money and you worked in healthcare …

Mary Reed:  I did…

Iain McNay:  in  Africa and third world countries.  So, what drew you to that could do that kind of work?

Mary Reed:  You know, I've always felt like I was sort of guided around by my elbows by angels that just sort of took me here and took me there.   I never really had a plan, I never ever had a plan. I was a high school dropout, and I had a bad car accident in 1988, and I had three years of rehabilitation, and I got really bored in that, and so I decided to start taking some college classes, when I could walk to one class, and then the next semester I could walk to two.  So, I ended up getting a couple of degrees, and while in that process I had somebody give me a job offer to be a respiratory therapist in a hospital.  And so that got me into the healthcare field, and then I started clinical research and respiratory medicine when I moved to Washington DC.  And then that just sort of took off from there. And it was a field that I was naturally interested in and very good at, and that then expanded out into non-profit work in healthcare partnerships in Africa, and so it just I just was guided there, and always had a good time in it.

Iain McNay: Yes, and then your life started to disintegrate at some point., I think…

Mary Reed:  That's a good word for it…

Iain McNay:   I think that’s your word in your book…

Mary Reed:  Yes, starting around 2009.  I had been having, it started, as I mentioned earlier, having these metaphysical events around 2000, and these events were incredibly weighty. You know, I would find myself suddenly swept up into the arms of Jesus, incorporated up into the Christ consciousness, and suddenly I'm being taken to see the beginnings of the universe or to see here the government is this…

Iain McNay: Let's just kind of take that.  So, when you say you felt yourself taken into the arms of Jesus, the Christ, what did that actually mean?  It means that you physically felt something, or you saw an image …?

Mary Reed:    No, no,  it’s an embodied experience, yes, it's totally an embodied experience.  It is about literally everything in me is now swept up, and is being held within Jesus and then incorporated into the body.  So now, I am one with Jesus and then incorporate both of us into the greater Christ consciousness, and so, I'm part and parcel of the greater Christ consciousness.  I am aware that I have, at some level, a body, but I am this whole entire thing as well, and so I'm given instantly this information from different varying perspectives, and I never know what it's going to be.  It's entirely uncontrolled, and so this is the kind of thing that started happening in December.  It originally started with hypnosis.  I was hearing a voice that kept telling me I was supposed to be doing something very important, and I kept trying to ignore it…

Iain McNay: I’m trying to understand this more practically.   There’s a lot of people I know who have experiences.  They hear voices… Sometimes, it's very positive.  Sometimes, they end up in the mental asylum.  So I want to try and get to the… get in here and find out exactly how it worked for you.  So, when you say you heard a voice, was it like… did it appear as an external voice or was it like an inner voice...?

Mary Reed:  The way that I described it in my talks is … Do you know the singer Barry White?

Iain McNay: I don't know, I remember, I think he’s dead now…

Mary Reed:  OK, well, he hits a really deep bass note.  There’s this is beautiful vibration that comes afterwards.  That's what it felt like.  This really deep vibration, that was interpreted in my body as, you're supposed to be doing something very important.  And it just came out of the blue, and then I thought, well, I'm already doing something very important.  At that time, I was in clinical research and respiratory medicine.  And then it started happening again…

Iain McNay: So, what was your response when you first heard that?

Mary Reed:  I had no idea what it was, and again, you know, I had already periodically had these odd things happen and I thought, uh, that's an odd thing, but I'm already doing something very important.  And so, I tried to ignore it, and the more I tried to ignore it, the more persistent and pronounced it got.  So, it just was getting stronger and more persistent, and then it would happen on airplanes, and in elevators, and in meetings and conference calls, and it was… It started out maybe once every couple of weeks, and then it got down to once a day, and then it just wouldn't go away.  And so, I finally called a friend of mine, who's a psychotherapist, and asked her if she could help me figure out what this is, because it's not going away.  And so, she put me under hypnosis, to see if we could dig a little deeper about what is this that I'm supposed to be doing.  And it was that hypnosis session that the very first thing that happened was going into the body of Jesus at his moment of crucifixion.  And then, I get this enormous instant information insight about the evolution of man over untold millennia at that point. And then I can see exactly what led to the crucifixion moment.   I can see the ideologies and all of the tributary thoughts that come into the crucifixion scene.  And then, I can watch the world evolve from that moment forward to current day.  And so, it was essentially in that moment, me understanding the world before Christianity, with the birth of Christianity, and the evolution of Christianity, from the vantage point of Christ.  And this is then what began to happen spontaneously with me, after this, for the last 16 years, is that I go into these origin points of divine truths, or things that we think are relevant to the understanding of divine truth.  And so about ninety percent of the events that happened to me are that kind of origin experience.  So, going into the mind of Buddha, at his first moment of enlightenment, and seeing what he's seeing before any words are ascribed to it, or any teachings come out of it.  So it's the foundation of Buddhism from the vantage point of Buddha.  And so, these are just repeatedly… this is then what started happening.

Iain McNay:   And so when these experiences started happing on a regular basis, how was that for you?

Mary Reed:  It was… In the moment, it's exquisite because everything makes sense. It's incredibly simple and there's… it's a… there's not the process of time and space, so everything is instant knowledge, instant wisdom.  And there's no sense of confusion, there's no sense of responsibility, it's just understanding.  But the more difficult part is then coming back into this world, and now… I have, you know, I had a very big job, and so trying to live my very big job in Washington DC and Africa and other places, while I have this new backdrop of really profound information, and so I began to really struggle significantly with trying to hold both of those pieces.  And I couldn't talk about it because, first of all, I didn't have the words to talk about it, but it's also not something that you can tell people at the office, about this thing happened, it's just… you sound crazy.  So, I began to seek help. I began to start going to psychotherapist after psychotherapist after psychotherapist, and then acupuncturist and Reiki practitioners and allopathic physicians and shamans, and back to the psychotherapist and … Originally people dismissed me pretty quickly … you know, thinking that I had a God complex, or that these are hallucinations, or … Some of the psychotherapist were a little clingy, they wanted to know if I could fix their relationship, or if I could predict their future or… Just all kinds of problems, but it… Nobody could help me, nobody could help me understand what was happening.  They couldn't help me process this really weighty information, and they couldn't help me understand what to do with it.  So, the further and further along I got, and trying to seek help, the more failure I kept having, at the same time when I'm having these big events, and trying to do my normal life.  So you mentioned earlier about things starting to fall apart, and it was around 2009 when all of these successes that… the normalcy of my life, just started crashing down one by one by one, my work, my home, my relationship, my money, everything just… And it was, it was not like something just, you know, just sort of lapsed for a little bit.  It's more like if you just drop the egg and it cracks.  It's… you can't put it back together.  There was nothing that I could do, and so over the course of two years, it just went away.

Iain McNay: I’m just going… I’m going to stop you here.  So, that… There's a lot of people, not lot, but certainly people who have got real mental problems, that do have hallucinations…

Mary Reed:  Yes…

Iain McNay: We don't know… I say, we… A lot of the practitioners who work with them, professionals, don't know whether they are really real or not, or if they are real what to do with it, so they drug them…

Mary Reed:  That's right…

Iain McNay:   So how did you, knowing yourself, or maybe you didn't know, that what was happening to you, what was happening to you was a real experience as opposed to a hallucination?

Mary Reed:  You know, when you have these experiences, especially an embodied experiences versus a vision of something. An embodied experience feels so much more real than this reality.

Iain McNay: But embodied means you …

Mary Reed:  Embodied means that I'm engorged with the entire experience.  I am one with this being, this event, this, this energy, entirely.  And the information that comes in that moment is… is entirely pure, it's pure and it's so simple.   It's everything in one moment that is true.  And then when you come back to this reality, you realize… You know, I didn't have the language for it then, but you realize the conflict nature of our world, which is often part of my… my teachings… But what I… Ultimately when I was able to get help,  what I understood then was that the reason why, ultimately, the person who was able to help me, said that she believed me, was because a disturbed mind and a disturbance event is more about fear.  It's entirely in the sort of fear-based kind of thing.  And I never had any anything like that.  Everything was profoundly loving and profoundly joyful and gentle, and so it was never a disturbing event, ever, not for a single moment.  And so there was never anything in my experiences that hinted that this may be some sort of illness, per se, that would lead to something terrifying, or fearful, or anything like that.

Iain McNay: OK… Alright, so go on with the story …

Mary Reed:  Yes, so when the when I had, you know, I wasn't able to get any help, and all of my normalcy was gone I… I hadn't… I thought I'd tried everything.  I tried to push open any door, and I made a decision at that time… this was in early 2011… that what must be happening in the loss of all my normalcy was that this is all a sign that it's time for me to leave this… this earthly world and do my work from the divine realms. That wasn't anything that I was shown, it was just a decision that I made in my massive state of despair.  So, on March 23rd 2011 I took a very carefully timed out and arranged combination of…

Iain McNay:   When you say, massive state of despair the route… because you say the experiences weren’t frightening…

Mary Reed:  Yeah.

Iain McNay:   They seemed to you very real and grounded…

Mary Reed:  Yes.

Iain McNay:   So the dis… So what was exactly the despair?

Mary Reed:  Yeah, the despair was that I didn't know what to do with all of that. I have all of this beautiful information, this exquisite information, that I understand, I understand all of it, but I don't know what to do with it, in this world. What am I to do with it?  I have no religious background. I have never had any religious background. I've never read a single teaching of Christian, or Jewish, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or anything. I don't… I don't know those.  And so I didn't have any context for anything that I was learning, and I didn't know what to do.  And at the same time I don't know what to do now that all of my life has fallen apart here.  So I had two worlds that I couldn't exist in, both demanding that I live in them. And.. and do something in them or be some way, and I'd had no idea. And I … everywhere I tried to turn for help, nobody could help me.  So, I just kept seeking help and… and not getting it, and seeking help and not getting it.  So, I was just completely lost, completely lost and so that's why… are we…

Iain McNay:   I'm just thinking back to what was happening with your father now, and always being on the run.  So, there you weren't really being held, although you had his love, which… you felt his love.  But again, it was a situation where ground was lacking a lot of the time, but here it sounds like it was a situation where the ground was completely being taken away…

Mary Reed:  Yeah

Iain McNay: Is that correct?

Mary Reed:  Yeah, that's right, and as far as family… you know, my family … I lived in Washington and they lived in Texas.  My father at that time was extremely sick, and so we really didn't, we didn't have a lot of contact at that time.  And not through any problems really, it’s just the way that we had lived our lives.  And so, yes there was no…  I had friends, but even in the Friends Network, I couldn't really tell them what… about all of these really deep things that we're going on, and so there was no ground for me to stand on, essentially.  And so that's why … I took the 97 prescription pain and sleeping pills, with three glasses of wine, and then I lay down, I said my prayers, and just thought that was it.

Iain McNay:   So, you made this decision to kill your body?

Mary Reed:  I did.

Iain McNay:   At that point, did you feel you were killing you, as such, or was it just your body?   You mentioned that you felt that maybe it was time to do work on a different plane.   So what actually went through… you were just going to kill your body, and you would carry on working, or was it pretty much killing everything?

Mary Reed:  Well,  there was in my experience… there was no question that this was just a…, you know, you transition from one state to another, so there was no question that I would then be able to do my work

Iain McNay:   You were in New York at that time?

Mary Reed:  Yeah, I mean, I didn't think of it specifically as a body, but simply leaving this, this reality, this world, and that's … that was what I wanted to do, because I couldn't figure out how to do it, I couldn't figure out how to be normal here, and it didn't look like there was that was meant to be for me.  And so, after I took all of those, and I was very careful in my planning… I have a medical background and so I researched for a long time how to do it, by shutting down my organs in the right order and taking them in the right timing, so I didn't throw up or lose my body functions or whatever.  So, I took everything over the course of 22 minutes, and then lay down and said my prayers, and just thought that was it.  And then, two days later,  my body just woke up, and it woke up entirely on its own, in excruciating pain and with no ability to control my motor skills, but I was alive.   But I still woke up into the same exact two worlds that I went to sleep in.  And so, it was finally then and that I just realized that there was only one thing that I could do and that was just to quit, just to stop, everything, to surrender in the most supreme way, to stop trying to figure it out, stop trying to fix it, stop trying to plan, and just be. I didn't have anything else to do, there was nothing I could do, except go with the honesty of what I felt.  And what I felt in one moment might be profoundly sad and just can't do anything but cry, in another moment it's just profoundly numb and you can't do anything but just sit there…

Iain McNay: So, the difference between before suicide and after suicide was this letting go, complete letting go…

Mary Reed:  …was the surrender…

Iain McNay: Beforehand you felt you hadn't completely let go…

Mary Reed:  Well, I felt like I  had to fix it, I had to be in control, I had to figure it out,  I had to… I had to be in charge.  And I actually said several times, many times a day actually, you know, God, you can see I have no idea what I'm doing, and so if you need me to do something, you're going to have to open the doors. I can't be the project manager for my life anymore.

Iain McNay:   Now, it's interesting, because there was two … a couple years ago there were two people who had a bit of a profile on the non-dual scene in the UK that committed suicide, different times obviously, one had been on conscious.tv the previous year.  And it kind of shocked me that they would do this, because they were quite evolved in terms of their understanding, yet they  successfully took their own lives.  And it's… I don't know how it is in America but more and more now, especially with younger boys, suicide on the increase, and it is this despair, and they… Part of the words that you use, obviously completely different backgrounds, in terms of they didn’t… hadn't had these experiences or … I'm not aware of that happening, but it's as if they have got to the bottom of the pit and they think that's it, and there's no way to go.  The interesting thing you're saying now is, when you woke up you were still at the bottom of the pit, but somehow, there is some way to go, although it's no way to go and that's… it's a complete surrender…

Mary Reed:  It’s the surrender.  It is the most supreme surrender possible, yes.

Iain McNay:   So, talk about how that felt, how that feels, this supreme surrender…

Mary Reed:  Yeah, and I just wanted… before I do that, I wanted to say, Iain, that what you're … what you're talking about is a very important subject because… I did an interview back in March in which this subject came up, and the interviewer had some rather strong opinions about suicide, and that led to a conversation about increasing in suicides in the spiritual community.   And in our sort of awakening world, when we have a lot of confusing things happening, and we don't know how to get where we want to go, yet, or what the breakdown is in our lives. There's a lot of confusion about it, and so there's an increase in depression and suicidal tendencies, whatever, and going to psychotherapists, who don't have the resources to help, specifically in the spiritual community, this is a big conversation now, in more and more of the psychotherapy circles and the services for mental health, which is a very important and great conversation for people to have.  And I've just done two talks this year with groups of psychotherapists on this very issue, about the client and patient relationship and working together to figure out the resources necessary for both parties.  And so, I just wanted to mention that.  But this state of surrender, you know, there's a… there's a great sense of freedom that we don't… we don't access, because we constantly feel like we have to be in charge of our lives, we’re responsible for our lives.  And in that time where I realized I can't be responsible, I've done everything I know how to do and it doesn't work, so I just have to quit, it was like… I say in my book,  it’s like exhaling that last bit of air out of my lungs, that I just I can't do it, I just can't do it, and in that land of unknown was the greatest sense of freedom, that I don't have to feel anything except my honest feelings, I'm really sad or I'm really numb, I'm really lost.   That was it, every single day that I just owned the honesty of that.  And sitting with that very deeply each day was a … it's almost like honouring the truth, the real truth, that I wasn't able to really face, for so long and so really letting that have its space, and have its playing out, and it was in that space and in that playing out that then the doors just began to open, very easily, doors that I had been trying to open for 11 years at that point, and was never able to.   Suddenly, the very first door was to the perfect psychotherapist who met me right where I was and was able to, in very quick order, get me stable, psychologically, mentally and emotionally, and she just happened to have trained with Dr. Rudy Bauer at the Washington Consciousness Institute, whose whole area of specialty is the field of consciousness, working with people like me.   And he just… he was 15 minutes away from my house and I never knew it…

Iain McNay: Yes…

Mary Reed:  And it was he who finally helped me understand metaphysically what was happening, that he said, you know, that most people will study and meditate and train to get from A to B to C, to get to the Z of spiritual wisdom, but I just jumped from A to Z, but because I have no religious background that has no context for me because I don't know B, C, D etc.   And so, that was the first moment, finally, that I understood what my problem was, and that it was that I began this really profound journey at the destination point, and there's not a manual there for the how I, you know, the in-between paths.  And so, my life then became about letting all of the BCD etc catch up to me and unfold in the way for me that it needs to.  I don't follow other teachers, I don't read other teachings, I don't know anything about the languages of duality or non-duality or awareness or the Bible or the Vedas or any of that sort of stuff.  I have to have it in my own way and my own wisdom and what…

Iain McNay: We're coming in a little more to the way of story goes, because that's also very interesting, but I want to just not lose … this is a very important point about, you know, Renate and I watched some documentaries recently and it's very much about being a, you know, teachers and gurus and it’s very much about, if you’re a disciple you surrender.  And I was… I was with that, I was with a guru for a time. It was all about surrender, surrendering the ego, the surrender to your master, the master knows. And in that surrender freedom comes, and so surrender has got certainly pretty bad PR in many ways, and what I'm interested in your particular case,  your surrender was not, obviously, to anybody else, it was a surrender to feeling in a way the hopelessness of life, and yet life wasn't hopeless, because as you say, doors started to open.   So, you know, there’s many people who get in these situations, not necessarily as dramatic as you in terms of all the visions, and they really feel they want to end their human life, but there’s many people who are in this situation where things for whatever reason don't work.   So, what is the,  not so much the clues, but… or even the tips, but can you talk more about this state of absolute surrender?  Because I think that's very important, that it gets completely misunderstood in so many ways, in the spiritual world…

Mary Reed:  Yeah, you know, I …  since waking up, and since moving to the Buddhist nunnery where I live in India, my whole life is about staying in a state of surrender.  I have to consciously make sure that I'm staying in the state of surrender, but we can call it something else.   We can call it staying in the state of allowing, and … versus controlling and so in the surrendering I …  You said that I didn't surrender to anybody, which is technically true, however, I do have teachers,  I have… I have very real teachers, Jesus, Buddha, God or the universe or source,  I have a team of … beings that guide me and so my ultimate surrender was to them, was to…OK, if you tell me that you give me this wisdom, and you're asking me to trust, all right, I'm gonna do it.   I didn't, in that first moment of surrender, that wasn't my specific words, I didn't say I'm surrendering to you, I just surrendered because I was defeated. It was more of a decision to …

Iain McNay:   This isn't… Because most people don't have these this access or always access to two masters and beings who are up there somewhere, they are… their just their life doesn't work…

Mary Reed:  Right

Iain McNay: They’re in despair and it … you know, maybe it may have very personal ramifications, like money problems. All the more the obvious things that most of us have at one time or another, but… What does surrender mean to them?  Because you surrender, you’ve still got to pay your rent, you still… you've still got to … you’ve still got to find some food, somehow.  You need some way to live you, you need something to occupy your mind, maybe.  It's like… I'm just trying to find if there’s any clues and helpful experiences, in your experience, for people that are in that situation.[36.22]

Mary Reed:   For me, it is always … In the … in the moment of defeat, it wasn't even a fight … I trust my guides, or I trust my teachers or anything.  Literally, it was a moment of defeat.  But that's how I got to the state of surrender.  So, that was just my path into it.  For people who can make an intentional choice of surrender, there's always this question of … Really, we talk a lot about, you know, today, honesty, the truth of whether we… We talk a great game about trusting in the universe or trusting in God or trusting in our guru or whatever.  But that really… that comes into question, that comes into real challenge, when you're everything else has failed.  Do you really trust enough to just surrender, and trust the process, trust the divine process,  that will take you to that which is your greatest potential at this point in your life with everything.   And that that question of trust is a great leap for people to take, and most people don't want to take it.  I didn't want to take it, and so that I understand the difficulty in doing that, but ultimately that's what it comes down to.  How willing are you to walk the walk?  We talk a great game about it, but can we walk the walk?  We're it really willing to say, I trust in God, or I trust in the universe, or I trust in my teacher, and this… When the chips are down, that's when you really have to be honest about how willing are you.

Iain McNay:   Yes, but I feel also… I guess I'm challenging here.  I feel a degree of judgment in that, because for many people they are in a… in a hopeless situation, and I kind of, I feel for myself.  It's almost like the grace of God is in there, as well. And it's not like saying, well, somewhere, you don't necessarily… you're not able to surrender enough.  It's like you were, you know, what you did was incredibly dramatic, and very brave in one way, and then, in my words, the grace of God was there somewhere, to show you the way.  And I'm just wondering what that dance is, because I think… I think that grace somehow is always there, it is always something special that illuminates something, that's not been seen before.

Mary Reed:   I couldn't agree more.  I totally couldn't agree more.  So, the question is, do you need to worry about it, right?  If everything is falling apart and you are still hopeless, is it worth worrying about it, or do you really trust that everything's going to be okay?  You can let the worry be your guide, and that defines your way through it.  Or, you can say, you know, what I really have is a lot of trust, or you can kiss the cut, like I did, into a state of defeat.

Iain McNay:   You don't know whether it works out, you really don’t know …

Mary Reed:  Yeah, and what would it look like if it didn't work out?

Iain McNay:   If you are in Aleppo at the moment, or Homs. Not Homs, but in other places that are being bombed, I forget where it is in Iraq, but you know, if you're being bombed, and you've got your kids there, and you don't know whether you're going to be alive in the next few minutes, it's like heavy-duty stuff, very heavy duty.   I think in the West, we have it comparatively easy.  I know you have… you have Mr. Trump in America, but you still have it comparatively easy. Anyway, let's get on with you.  I don't want to…it’s just something that interests me personally…

Mary Reed:   Can I just say that I'm happy to be out of America, right now, in the last week of the campaign, and over in London.  I couldn't escape it over there.

Iain McNay:   Ok, so, I don't… I think… you know, people who get your book, which I recommend because it is a good story.  It starts very much with the suicide attempt, which you go into a lot of detail, which we don't need to go into in this program. But then you go through… you see two or three people, and then you are advised to go to India.  Just talk about how that happened.  Let's go to India.

Mary Reed:  When my two therapists at this point, Dr. Bauer and Marjorie, the therapist that I was saying, when they got me, sort of, on my feet and well enough, what they knew, especially understanding what my problem was metaphysically that I have this profound wisdom, but I don't know the middle part of it. What they realize is that I needed community, I needed a place where I could just go and let everything sort of catch up to me, and let all of it integrate.  And so, we began to search around for different communities for me, and they had a lot of contacts, especially Dr. Bauer, around the world, so Christian nunneries, Hindu ashrams, Buddhist teaching centres, yoga centres, spiritual centres, everywhere around the world.  And we just would sort of knock on doors and see what would happen, and the finally, the door that just sort of blew open easily, was an invitation to come and meet the Karmapa, and in Tibetan Buddhism, the Karmapa is seen as the one who will take over as spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism when the Dalai lama passes away.  So, someone in his camp invited me to come and meet him, and tell him my experiences, because by this time I was starting to experience the Dalai Lama, Buddha, whatever, in my… in my experiences.  And so, I was invited to go there.  They set up a room for me, and I went and had a big meeting with him, and his guidance to me was, stay and slowly, slowly, understand who I am, and that was going to be my work, understanding who I am.  And so, that's how I was able to stay in India and ended up living at a nunnery, at the foothills of the Himalayas.

Iain McNay:   Understand who I am?

Mary Reed:  Understand who I am, and that was a very difficult thing for me to hear, actually, in that moment, because from the very beginning that was my confusion. Who am I, that I … ?  These things are happening, why is it that I can go into the …?

Iain McNay:   …confusion…

Mary Reed:  What is happening? Why is it that I can go into the body of Jesus in the crucifixion? Why is it that I'm being called into the mind of Buddha. What is it? Why can I go into the universe and know these things? Who am I?  What, what … It was a great source of confusion, a massive source of confusion, and as everybody is confused about who we are, but I so … It was in letting everything sort of, all of the pieces fall into place, and then realizing that I'm simply a person that has access to the collective mind, and I know what I'm supposed to do now with all of it.  So, yeah.

Iain McNay: But I think he also said to you, these different levels, or was that your interpretation of what he said?  You said in the book, different levels of who you are.

Mary Reed:  I don't know. I mean, I did… I did sort of come into that understanding, you know a little at a time, and as one with access to the collective mind I am.  You could pretty much leave it there.  I am, but I understand all the ways that we can be this or that or the other or this narrow or that bigger, yeah.

Iain McNay:   So what does I am mean to you?

Mary Reed:  It means, there's no limitation.  That everything that's experienced is part of who I am or what I am or whatever.   There's without limitation, without definition, I am all of it.   Any particular thing we can label it, but I don't need to label, I don't need any kind of label at all, and you know, categorizing nothing, I am all of it.

Iain McNay:   Do you feel that I am now?

Mary Reed:  Absolutely.  Yeah, no question about it, yeah.

Iain McNay:   I think I am in the studio now.

Mary Reed:   Yeah, yeah, I do…

Iain McNay:    So, you wanted to be quiet.  You went to the… The initial place you were staying at in India was very noisy. You found a taxi… I like this little story, you found a taxi driver, you said,  “Take me to somewhere that’s quiet”,  and that's how you, I think you said, found the nunnery where you are now.

Mary Reed:  Yes, he was a my taxi driver friend, Yogesh.  He is still to this day my best friend in India.  He was… I was trying to sit still, with this, what the Karmapa told me about understanding who I am, and I was in a meditation.  I was in what I call, this little pink palace.  It was a tiny little pink room, and in India, they burn their trash, and so they were burning the trash underneath my window.  It was coming into my window, and it was really noisy.   There was honking and brakes… You know, it was just crazy.  So, I couldn't sit still and I got up to just go for a walk.  I just wanted to go for a walk, and I open the gates to the guesthouse where I was staying, and there was my taxi driver friend, just randomly, leaning against his car, and without thinking, I just said, “Yogesh, do you know a really quiet place where I could live?”.   And he thought for a moment and says,  “Yes, I do, I think I'll take you up this way…”.    And so, it's a place where there is about a 10-minute drive, and then you have to walk.  It's not accessible by road.  You have to walk up this narrow little path up through the rice fields, and in the middle of the rice fields, there's this little quiet little nunnery.   That's where I've been now for the better part of five years.

Iain McNay: Wow…

Mary Reed:  So, I spent a lot of time in silence and meditation and contemplation.  Part of my practice is hiking in the Himalayas before sunrise.  And yeah, it's a deeply… it's a deeply spiritual place, and it's a perfect place for people to be held, in their spiritual exploration.  So, I spent a lot of time being quiet.

Iain McNay:  I told Renate about this place, and she was jealous.  I want to go there, hiking in the Himalayas and being quiet…

Mary Reed:  Come,  I'll take her on a tour there, you can come as well…

Iain McNay:  It's just, you know, we watched this film another night, In Pursuit of Silence.  It's a new film, which, unfortunately, wasn't very well made, so there weren’t many people in the cinema with us. But it was good in one way, in so far as you saw the noisiness of the world, and I think we knew that anyway, but in it the world becomes more and more noisy, and just being in a restaurant is more and more noisy.   There was one restaurant, apparently, and it’s in New York now, where you have to whisper,  no music, I think was in New York.  I's in the film, anyway, that you have to have a whispering conversation.  Now, whether it works commercially I have no idea, but I thought, that's the kind of restaurant I would go to.

Mary Reed:  Uhmm, yes, yes…

Iain McNay: A restaurant is normally so noisy.  And it is this thing about being silent, but I realized also when I left the film, but it's not just about being silent, but the silence could lead to something else, which is stillness.  Because silence in itself is nice, but actually it’s the stillness, for me anyway, that's the important thing.

Mary Reed:  You know, there is this stillness for the individual, but there's also something that happens in relation to other people. You know, as I mentioned I hike in the mountains a lot, and in the area where I live, they really do believe still that the guest is God, and so if you're in the mountains and you encounter a mountain family, whatever, for them,  God has sent them a guest, and so they will invite you in for chai.  All the time this happens, and they don't speak English, I don't speak Hindi, and so someone will run and make chai, and we're often just sitting on the veranda looking out at the Congra valley, and there is nothing happening in our time, except divine togetherness.  That's it, and it is… that's the intention and that's what happens.   And there is such a lovely feel of union in this time, and it feels like a divine union.  And so, in our quietness, yes, we have this within ourselves, but we also have that opportunity then, to meet other people in that place as well, and I live that in the mountains when I’m there and it's exquisite, it really is.

Iain McNay:   Yeah, there was... we have to finish in  a minute, we have just about three or four minutes left…

Mary Reed:  It’s just way too fast…

Iain McNay:   Well, that's what always happens to me in interviews, you get all excited, you meet each other and then, time goes very fast, yeah.  I think I've covered most things I wanted to ask.  You feel like a vessel, you’re saying the book, you feel like a vessel.  Do you still feel like a vessel?

Mary Reed:  Most assuredly, yup, anytime that I get ready to go onstage for a talk, or even here for this interview my job is just to be the open vessel for whatever needs to come through.  I ask for guidance for the words, the thoughts, whatever needs to come through, to be in the most beneficial way for whoever is present or for all of humanity.  And this is all I ever think about.  I'm just supposed to allow, to be the vessel.

Iain McNay:   And I liked… in your email address, it’s happy easy life…

Mary Reed:  Yes, happy easy life, at me, dot com.

Iain McNay: That’s a great address, isn’t it?

Mary Reed:  I tried to the live…

Iain McNay:   How do you feel that life is now, happy easy life?

Mary Reed:  I do, I haven't… you know, for me, the sort of meaning of life is about exploring all that we can be.  It is exploring our greatest potential.  We have no idea the scale of our potential, and for me it is about recognizing that that's a joyful exploration.  We always enjoy, joy is the undercurrent of our nature, and letting that joy guide us in the exploration of all that's possible.  So, I find a lot of joy in being able to live this kind of life, travel, meet new people, talk about divine issues, find kindred spirits, lift spirits when I'm able to, and I find an immense amount of joy in that. 

Iain McNay:   And joy, I guess, is one of the essential things lacking in your life when before the 23rd of April 2001, I think it was, you had this… this suicide attempt.  Was that the one thing that was lacking, the joy, or one of the things… the main things that was lacking?

Mary Reed:  Well, I mean, there was no joy in my despair.  I… you know, I had a lot of reasons to feel joyful about.  I had friends and I had family and those sorts of things, but it was about that the despair and being lost completely lost.  And I don't feel lost anymore at all.  No, on the contrary, I feel like I'm just the explorer.

Iain McNay: And the living in the nunnery and being based a lot in silence is the key to keeping this joy, would you say that, or one of the elements in keeping the joy?

Mary Reed:  Well, it's a… it's been key for me to integrate all of my understanding and it's a key way for me to listen, to what my work is, because I'm … again, I'm not in control, so I just listen to the guidance that I get, about where to go and what to do and what to speak about.   And so, for me that's a key area, and I just find joy in being able to stay in a state of allowance, and enjoy the miracle of whatever appears.   Because it's always, it always feels miraculous.  The fact that we're sitting right here feels very miraculous to me.  I couldn't have predicted it.

Iain McNay:   I really appreciate you coming to London, especially to the … it’s wonderful.

Mary Reed:  It's my pleasure truly.

Iain McNay:   And of course, I'm going to show your book again, Unwitting Mystic:  Evolution of the Message of Love, which… the first few chapters really are very dramatic, and there's a good story unfolds, and we haven't gone into all the details, but you have a basic feel for the story.  So thanks again for coming along to conscious.tv…

Mary Reed:  It's my pleasure, thank you for having me.

Iain McNay: And I hope we see you on again soon. Bye…

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To watch the original video interview click here. This programme has been transcribed by Denis Alder (post@denisalder.com) on a voluntary basis. If you would like to offer to transcribe a video on the same basis, then please contact: info@conscious.tv

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