Mellen-Thomas Benedict: I actually like duality.
Guy Spiro: So do I. This “let’s get off the wheel and not have any more lifetimes” does not appeal at all to me any more. I like it here. I know I am going to stub my toe once in a while.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Oh yeah. It surprises people sometimes, but I have often said, “The other side is not all that it is cracked up to be.” [laughter]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Having organs is absolutely marvelous. You don’t want to suffer, but having organs is absolutely marvelous. What I learned is that having a body without conscious awareness of spirit is a wasteland, but also, spirit without a body is sort of a wasteland. The two together, heaven on earth, is what we are really talking about.
Guy Spiro: I believe the Earth, the physical plane, is basically a theme park.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: I heard once that Earth is one of the more favored reincarnation destinations because this is where you get a rest or a vacation from eternal bliss. [laughter]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Don’t expect it here. You can always have eternal bliss, but you are here because you need a vacation from it.
Guy Spiro: We’re attracted to this plane for its density because what we experience here seems so real.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: And it is. What astounded me on the other side is that it is all more real than what we imagine and even the unimagined is real. It is various layers of ultra subtle energy to ultra dense energy and it is everything in between. What is amazing is that all of this, every band of energy, every thought, every vibration in the entire universe, is self organizing and self correcting. You know, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Water seeks its own level. It’s absolutely amazing how that works.
Guy Spiro: So what are you teaching for the individual to grab hold of and change their lives?
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: It actually has boiled down to four subject areas and it covers almost everything. The four subject areas that I love to teach in my workshops, and these are the four questions in all cultures of mankind over history, is this. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going, and is there life after death? One of the great things I learned on the other side is that reincarnation is more real than most people imagine. But I was shown on the other side the quantum physics and the quantum mechanics of reincarnation and it is solid. I love to work with people on this and draw them pictures and show them how it works, because once you get a grip on this, you can become interactive with the reincarnation path you are on.
Guy Spiro: Have you found that there are actual systems in place or it is more chaotic than that?
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: It is both. It can be absolutely chaotic and it can also can be absolutely, fully conscious. Every day of your life can be chaos or as much order as you want in it. That is one of the greatest gifts that we have been given. Interestingly enough, the universe has no meaning whatsoever. Those stars in the sky have no meaning whatsoever except to you. That is the beautiful gift that we have been given, that we give meaning to everything and that is open ended, also. Catholics can believe one thing, Buddhists another, an Atheist can believe something else, a naturalist can believe that. It all comes together. The great gift that we have is that we can look out at the universe, name stars, and come up with astrology. When you look at those stars in the sky, most of them aren’t even there anymore and new ones are there that we haven’t seen yet. In the last 10,000 years those stars have moved on. They only make sense to us if you are standing on planet Earth. If you were on another planet, those stars don’t look anywhere near the same as they do to us. Astrology works for us here and now, and it is amazing that it has been developed to such a high art that people can turn it into useful information.
Guy Spiro: When people ask me about astrology, I tell them that the planets and the stars cause nothing. They are not causative, they are reflective. And they are reflective because we have put those meanings on them.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Exactly. That is one of the metaphors. We are a very metaphorical species. We live more in our dreams and daydreams than we actually do with our feet on the ground most of the time. One of the great metaphors is Adam and Eve in the garden started naming everything. That is very human.
Guy Spiro: The whole creation myth is allegory.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Yes, of course, it has to be. I have shown a history of religions from the most modern religions to where there weren’t any religions at all, where there weren’t any humans on the planet. In the early times, in the earliest spiritual thoughts, we worshiped nature directly. We worshiped the rain, we worshiped the ground, we worshiped the trees, and the more our intellect developed, the more we started then worshiping like at Stonehenge and calculating the stars. So the mind began to evolve and create these cosmo conceptions, which overrode our natural lower brain. Then you move to where you get to Egypt, where they started combining humans and animals as gods, and then you move up to the Greeks who just had the human form of the gods. And then, maybe 2000 years ago, in that range, you have what I was told were religions of the mind, and these are the people that must have a book and the book is the word. Anybody that has to have the book and it’s all in the book, these are religions of the mind. These are religions of a mental system, which have in many ways tried to disconnect us from the natural system. It is not that there is anything bad about it. It is just that the mind has become super dominant and really, these cells in your heart are infinitely more ancient than the cells in your brain. If you look at the highly developed natural order of things, how rain is made, how blood circulates, how your immune system works, compared to the systems created by the minds, the legal system, banking system, politics, which is more evolved? We are maturing as a species, which is very good because we have been acting a lot like teenagers. “My God can beat up your God.” It is all very childish.
Guy Spiro: That is one of my own lines.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: It doesn’t mean we are bad or we are doomed, but the Gaia, the living system, just loves us and is giving us everything that we are going to need for our manifest destiny. So in my workshops, I love to go through both of these concepts. My big focus is on practical things, practical things that you can use.
Guy Spiro: People think that their mind is who they are. They identify with the noise in their heads. And I usually go, “Think about it for a second. If the noise in your head is who you really are, oooooh!” [laughter]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Then God help you. That is true. From the Gaia perspective, I learned that the brain is the latest thing on planet Earth. Humans, by the way, are going to be the last new species. There are going to be no new species after us. Eventually we are going to leave the planet. Very soon in cosmic times, within the next thousand years or so, actually within the next 400 years we’ll be colonizing other planets. Because we have to leave here. Every star, every planet has a certain life span. The Earth, in human years, is about 80 years old already. She has already expended about ninety percent of her life energy. That is why humans, which are at the top of the DNA chain, not that that is more superior or anything, are the book of life on this planet, and it reflects in our DNA. Every human alive today has been everything. We have been through everything from the first cell to the present. Every one of us alive has taken that path and made it and we are like Noah’s Ark. When we start colonizing, we will take all life with us, everywhere we go.
Guy Spiro: We better learn to get along with each other here before go to other places.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: That is why we are coming to the end of wars and to the end of religions as we have known them. One clear message that I keep getting is that fundamentalism is more dangerous than nuclear proliferation, and patriotism without conscience is fanaticism.
Guy Spiro: If you look at the last, say 300 years, the prevailing wind is towards liberality and enlightenment.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Absolutely. I keep trying to point this out to people. Despite some of the things that are happening, like Iraq now and the leadership that we have now, things are generally getting better. It is the dance of light, which is typically two steps forward, one step back. I have often said recently that the people that seem to be the most lost right now are our leaders. The guy on the street seems to know better.
Guy Spiro: Well, except to the point that they are scared by leadership.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Fear sells. Fear controls, and that is one of the reasons why the near death experience is becoming larger than ever, and will become larger. We have to transcend the fear of death. In the future, money doesn’t make any sense. There is super abundance here. There really is. There is more than enough food, more than enough light, more than enough land.
Guy Spiro: The belief in limitation and lack is the worst form of materialism.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Yes, absolutely. To live your life that way is very stressful. I asked about the future and I asked why most people are wrong about predicting the future. You cannot predict, it is extremely rare that you can predict the exact date and time of something. The future is the present, it depends on whatever the mass potential is, and that changes. If you want to be accurate about predicting the future, you look at the mass potential and not the minutia. The mass potential is way, way to the positive and spectacular and brilliant.
Guy Spiro: For a variety of reasons, I lost my fear of death a long time ago, but I am very interested in how it happens. [laughter]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Now that the baby boomers are the dominant population on earth, this has become a very interesting subject. My research has shown that one of the hottest subjects on the internet for baby boomers is the subject of reincarnation. I was just in Canada for a week doing talks up there, and when I was doing talks ten years ago, I would ask the audience certain questions so I could kind of see where they were at. One of the questions that I would always ask was, “Who believes in reincarnation?” Maybe a couple hands would come up. Well, I just got back from Canada and I asked that same question and nearly every hand in the room went up. Fascinating.
Guy Spiro: We are really morphing into the next level of no longer homo sapiens, but homo luminoso, with such things as seeing the planet from space. Human consciousness is changing so radically, so fast.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: The average child today has more information at their fingertips than Einstein could imagine. They are born with it. It is given to them.
Guy Spiro: What a toy store of a lifetime.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: It really is. Sometimes I feel like a wonder child in wonderland.
Guy Spiro: We talk about reincarnation and we know that it is a real thing that really happens, and at the same time we know that everything is happening simultaneously. So this linear experience is really only linear at the levels that we are experiencing it, when we know that that’s not really the case.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Right, and more and more awareness is coming up. Sometimes it scares people when they become aware of these things that they can’t quite grasp because of their knowledge base. Really, one thing that I have learned, and I like to go into great detail in my workshops, is the concept of the past and the present and the future being now. If you change the present, you change the future. But, the cat’s out of the bag. The past is also just as changeable as the present and the future. Through techniques, such as past life regression, you can go back and rescue tortured selves in past lives and bring them into the present. That is what I call the big now, the big moment of now. There are certain techniques and certain processes that really facilitate that and give you tools to actually do that, because you shouldn’t leave any part of yourself in the past that is suffering or lost. You can rescue all the fragmented parts of yourself, and that includes some of your future selves that can also be brought into harmony with the present.
Guy Spiro: I recently wrote that in one of my editorials, that fixing things here and now fixes things in all the other lives.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: It does. It goes both ways, because it is an open ended thing. You can bring the past, present and future into a more harmonious awareness of existence.
Guy Spiro: So any tips on how the rest of us can ask questions of the light?
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Well, I suggest don’t do what I did. [laughter] It can work through hypnosis, it can work through meditation. It can work through a spontaneous event. What I tell people is just try. But that light, that you see at the end of the tunnel that everybody talks about, that light starts at your heart. It is already there.
Guy Spiro: It is really the same thing as the guidance that we receive all the time. Not the noise in the head, but the true still small voice.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Yeah, but the mental realm is really tricky and slippery, so you want to seek the higher guidance rather than the strictly mental. That higher guidance is your own higher self. Anytime you spend time channeling anything but your higher self, you are wasting time.
Guy Spiro: Talk a little bit about what you will be doing at the workshop here ...
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: In workshops, I give the essence of this whole Gaia paradigm and how it affects you right here and now, the living system you are a part of. How to more effectively interface with it and how to improve your health in dramatic ways with techniques I learned from the other side. I will be bringing a Kirlian photography set-up where we will actually do experiments and we will actually measure the before and after of your energy. And I am talking about true Kirlian and not fake Kirlian. The real Kirlian is a phenomenal tool for showing you where your consciousness is at. True Kirlian, which is used all through Europe and used for research is an amazing tool to check out conscious state, homeopathic, and much more sensitive than muscle testing, so I will be bring a fantastic Kirlian system that you can actually play with. I love feedback devices and one of the amazing things about the time that we live in is that you can test almost anything now in subtle energy realms. It is an amazing time to be alive. I will bring a variety of toys and techniques. I like to call it a playshop instead of a workshop.
