Conscious Life Journal: We want our readers to understand your story, so can you tell us what happened to you and how it happened?
Jac O’Keeffe: I knew as a child that adults were a little bit bonkers. Back then they made life much more difficult than what it is. Things are really kind of simple, and play and fun and levity are very important, and there was this access to this innate knowing of the simplicity and beauty of life. But adults project their own fears for their children on us and their own unresolved issues come down and hit some of us as trauma, and then life goes on. And we forget. So I forgot, like most people.
At nineteen a violent sexual assault happened and I went into therapy and stayed there for eight years. I learned all kinds of things about myself—that I can be different, that I can learn how to watch my mind and build my thoughts and choose other options. So I began to accumulate a toolkit on how to embrace change and be comfortable with it. When I was thirty I was having a beer after lunch with my friends and I literally put down my beer and lifted my head and saw dead people everywhere. On the walls and hanging from the ceiling. Some were grotesque, some were Casper images. I thought somebody had given me a drug and I was hallucinating. My friends said no, whatever you’re imagining is your problem.
For three or four days I couldn’t stop seeing people from other dimensions. I ran out of the house we were in and a very vertical, very tall self-propelling mechanism pushed me around this extensive garden and I would be knocked over, then I’d get up and be pushed from another direction. Finally, I stood against the wall and it stopped. I wondered, “Am I going crazy? No, I’m not going crazy!” But my perception of reality had changed. Something had shifted and I was viewing something normally not seen.
A week later a spook was hanging in the living room. She said, “I need you to help me.” I said, “I have nothing at all to give you. You need to leave and all of your kind need to leave. I can’t cope with this.” She said, “I’m stuck between two worlds. A transition happened and I didn’t make it. You’re good at transitions. Please bridge me to the other side.” I said, “I don’t know where you’ve been. I don’t know where you’re going. How can I direct you?” She said, “You have the skill to move me on to where I need to go. If you agree to do this, help will be given to you.” Oh, the hell with it, I thought. Let’s go with it. So this being of light came from the ceiling between the two of us and intuitively I put my hands on it and I could move and direct it like a fire hose. The moment I put my hands on it, this golden liquid poured out of the end and I shone it on her. And she began to glow and release and smile and become translucent. Then I opened the window and she slipped out and left. And I had this peaceful, exquisite feeling. Oh, all is well. That’s all I had to do.
I returned to bed, and I was lying there thinking about it and this being of light stood at the end of the bed, glowing and beaming. He said, “I’m here to tell you everything you need to know.” I began my questions. I spoke for several hours and I ended up with the absolute clarity that I wanted my life to go in this direction. He said, “Your life will change completely. You will start to work as a ghostbuster. You’re moving spirits and that’s the first thing you need to learn. You’ll do that for about a year and you’ll move on from there.”
Everything that being said came true. I told a few friends, and one friend said she had an old cottage with a being in one room. So I went and I spoke to a woman standing in front of the fireplace, and she had this huge regret because she was taking care of somebody else’s children, and one of the children fell into the fire. She couldn’t let go, she couldn’t forgive herself. Everyone else had moved on. There was no spirit of the child or of the family. They had all forgiven her and come to peace with it, but she hadn’t forgiven herself.
Through that work I began to understand what keeps us stuck, what helps us to transition, what brings us to our authentic true nature, which is light, peaceful, clear, simple. The attributes that we knew as children. We forget and then we do this spiritual path so we remember again. I went from ghostbusting to working on regular people who are alive here and now. I opened up an intuitive healing practice, and I started to sound and tone to find blockages in the body. I would hear the pitch of it and sing the same pitch and raise it a semitone up and down and break it, loosen it, and it would dissipate, and I would remove with my hands this form that felt gloopy and not clear. And healing would happen for people’s bodies and thinking patterns. When I started to teach in groups I worked closely with a psychiatrist, and we looked at the linkages between spiritually waking up and psychiatric illness. The psychiatrist would send his patients to me whom he thought were spiritually awakening and who shouldn’t have been diagnosed with psychosis or hearing voices.
My passion is motivated by my own love for personal growth, spiritual growth, my own maturation, my own movement towards wisdom and love of living. What can I explore next? What can I learn next? What is out there and in here? When I sold my practice I lived on a campsite in the south of Spain for three months, just to consider what to do next. When I came back and my husband picked me up at the airport, I knew immediately, oh my God, I have to leave him. Six months later I went to India and stayed for four and a half years, meditating, spending a lot of time solo, completely dedicated to the inner maturation, inner search. And my perspective changed permanently. My life rearranged. How I see the world changed completely. I had a huge amount of deep spiritual experiences, including an incident where my self-referencing network, the belief that who I am is Jac O’Keeffe, the belief that I am this body, that this fundamentally represents who I am, that belief broke down. As a result, making things that happen in the world about me stopped. At the end of two years it all stabilized, and self-referencing totally stopped.
That was ten years ago. Now I can see the unified field as a mental perception and I can see the subjective, the Jac woman perspective, and these are levels of perception that come in and out as they’re required by life. I’m standing on the ground that is prior to that.
CLJ: Were you afraid? Was there fear? Or had fear completely gone?
JO: I had a dance with fear on two occasions. I was petrified when spooks started to appear and would physically move my body and hurt my body. And I had to find out that when I focus on fear it gets bigger. When I was doing healing work and meditating a lot I had horrendous experiences where I was stripped to nothing, just a sense of fear being so huge, but I came to an understanding of how this works. Your belief, which is invariably subconscious until you see what it is, gives rise to an emotion, so there’s a link between thought and emotion, and when the emotion-belief is negative or comes from “I am not safe” then the emotion will be fear. I had to go into those deep, deep subconscious beliefs around not being safe that basically came from trauma, past lives, other dimensions. I became very dedicated to finding the root concept within myself that gave rise to my experience of what I called Jac’s reality. If I hadn’t done much therapy I probably would have gone into dissociation, and that happens with a lot of people who are on the spiritual search. In a lot of my work I talk about non-denialism. Don’t deny any of it. It’s about holding yourself, holding all the pain, being able to embrace and nurture yourself to such an extent that there is nothing in denial, no blind spots that you’re aware of, that you’re not fooling yourself in any way. We’re responsible for ourselves, and anytime you want to hand authority to the patriarchy, to a teacher, to scripture, to someplace else, look at the pattern of why you’re thinking like this. You are an adult. Come into your adulthood, come into your autonomy. That approach unpacks a whole load of pain that can hide until we have the courage to look at our blind spots and really see what we’re denying.
CLJ: What’s happening in the world from that deep perspective? Do you see it changing and shifting?
JO: I think the play of darkness and light, of ignorance and wisdom, has always been there but because of the evolutionary shift, we’re morphing. When we discovered fire there was a huge shift. Our existence changed. We’re in another one of those huge seismic shifts right now. The dark pockets are finding the dark pockets and connecting with each other in this global village that we live in. What joins together gets larger. So ignorance is getting stronger because it’s joining together with itself, connecting underground, overground, on the Internet, in every way it can, supporting itself in its own ignorance and belief systems and causing more suffering. But also there’s the flip side. Look at this movement towards awakening. There are all kinds of walks of life where people are waking up, and they’re able to house that vibration in the world, so while the darkness is getting stronger, the light is penetrating. We’re not being drawn to meditate in an ashram for four and a half years. That’s part of the old cycle. The new cycle is continue with your work, stay in your relationships, let them break up not because you’re looking for God but because you know there is an abusive scenario there that you have to walk out of. Stick with what’s going on, stay in your life, that’s where the learning is, that’s where the growth is, and that’s where the light is needed.
CLJ: There’s an understanding that we are a piece of God—that God is not outside of us, that God IS us, and I hear people getting tripped up with that. What are your thoughts on that?
JO: As we progress into the next decade, neuroscience is going to help us a lot with understanding this. That’s the missing piece. The self referencing network which has built a circuitry in our brain turns everything we see into a story about us. So the self-referencing network would say I am a piece of God, because we have God and then there’s my part in it. If we go more towards right brain spaciousness, unity consciousness, and recognizing the interconnectivity, then we say it’s all God, it’s all love, everything is interconnected. Your self-referencing network is not at work when you see a unified field, like a global community, or the interconnectivity of humanity and animals and nature. When you see that, that’s another part of your brain. From there you would say there is only God.
Pure consciousness itself, the part that is not dependent on your physical body, is where neuroscience is stuck. Scientists have a hard time believing that our brain isn’t the creator of everything, but quantum physics is saying maybe there is something outside and we’re actually just the receptors of it. And, of course, scripture would hold that pure consciousness is independent to our bodies and our minds. So seeing that we are part of God is one part. Your brain viewing that it’s all God, and that must include me too, is another part of your brain. Your actual consciousness knows that those two perceptions are created by your neural pathways, but prior to the two sets of neural pathways is the truth. That’s the stable unconditioned knowing that you lose as a small child. That’s what our children have and we knock it out of them. They stay in that knowing and there the concept of God doesn’t even exist. So there are three tools of our creation by our brains, and the third is what is there prior to our body and it will continue when our body dies.