Interview: Maureen Caudill, Author of “Suddenly Psychic”

Maureen Caudill was a University Scholar and received her bachelor’s degree in physics (with a mathematics minor) with highest honors (summa cum laude) from University of Connecticut, following that with a master’s degree from Cornell University. She spent more than twenty years as a computer scientist, with fifteen of those as a researcher in artificial intelligence and neural networks. She was a program manager and researcher for a major government contractor on advanced projects such as DARPA* ( High Performance Knowledge Base program) and ARDA* ( Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence program) that strove to develop computer systems that can demonstrate human expertise in complex question understanding and intricate knowledge of detailed real-world scenarios.

Since beginning the experiences described in her book “Suddenly Psychic,” she has become accredited by The Monroe Institute as a nonresidential Outreach trainer, and now offers several different weekend workshops on learning to access altered states of consciousness and incorporating skills accessed in those states in your daily life. This includes training people in the esoteric skill of spoon-bending something that she’d have sworn was a physical impossibility, but that now virtually all students succeed at learning.

Since becoming “suddenly psychic”, what psychic experience stands out from the rest –what experience was the most extraordinary?

My first response to this question was, how could I possibly choose? But then I realized one particular meditation does stand out for me. It was when a friend and I went past Focus-49 for about the second or third time. I got to Focus-253 (although past F-49, the focus levels don’t seem to me to be at all hierarchical as they are from C-1 to F-49). That was my experience of being in, with, and part of the Mind of God. It was the experience of total love, lack of separation, and complete Oneness. It’s impossible to describe in words what is utterly immutable and indescribable. You really had to be there!

I am not, and never was a Catholic, yet St. Teresa of Ávila, one of the great mystics of the Catholic Church, speaks to me in a way other mystics do not. I’ve sometimes wondered whether my experience of F-253 was similar to what she experienced when she was invited into her seventh, innermost castle. (Reference is to her classic description of her experiences as a mystic, INTERIOR CASTLES.) The first time I read INTERIOR CASTLES I was shocked. As I read her description of the various castles and so on, I realized that I’d been there too. And yes, many of her descriptions were dead-on accurate for the kinds of experiences I’ve had. They’re not exactly the same, of course. She was known to go into mystic ecstasies without warning, and was well known (and often observed) to levitate during many of these trances. As head of her convent, she found this embarrassing, and she often reminded her sister nuns to pull her down if she started floating! The one time I felt myself start to levitate, I freaked out and collapsed back into regular consciousness. To this day I don’t know if I actually lifted off my chair, or was about to lift off my chair, or simply imagined the whole thing. For some reason—maybe that physics major background that says levitation is clearly “impossible”—I have never wanted to try that particular meditation again, lest I actually succeed and destroy the last remnants of my belief in physical reality. Heck, I’m still having enough trouble getting past the whole time thing, without wiping out gravity too! Sir Isaac Newton would be appalled!

Do you believe in the existence of evil? If so, have you ever experienced it (i.e. an evil energy/entity) firsthand?

You know, I never used to believe that evil existed. One of the reasons for that is that I approached the energetic world via The Monroe Institute (TMI). At TMI you are never really told about evil—there’s simply no discussion of it on the part of trainers, and so on. I guess they don’t want to scare people away by warning them of dangers. Instead, you’re given a technique that you use to access altered states of awareness. And they teach you to go through this process every time you access altered states, till it simply becomes a habit. So that’s how I learned to access altered states of awareness and that’s what I did. And I really didn’t have any problems. That said, as I explored the literature and trained in other methods too, I realized that at least two or three of the half-dozen or so steps of the TMI method involve protecting yourself from negative influences. Coincidence? No, I don’t believe so. I’m very sure this protection was deliberately designed in by Bob Monroe and the others who established the procedures. Furthermore, by training people to automatically protect themselves against evil forces, I believe TMI does a huge service to the world. This is, I think, one of their truly unsung services to those exploring psychic realms. Of course, they can’t guarantee that everyone (or even anyone!) will follow their guidelines, but they give absolutely everyone who attends one of their programs a set of very effective and easy tools to protect themselves against attack, all without ever mentioning the word “evil.” I think that’s tremendous.

And, yes, I have been attacked by negative entities, and I’ve observed and encountered them when good friends have been attacked. In one case a very powerful wizard I know subjected me to a vicious energetic attack that came out of nowhere. (I use the term “wizard” to mean someone who uses their psychic skills in large part to gain or exert power over others, instead of primarily to improve their own spiritual self. Such people seem to me to be heavily ego-based instead of focused on spiritual development.) I had tremendous psychic and physical damage done to me in that attack, damage that took me nearly six months to recover from. I don’t know that I could have protected myself from that attack, given the specific circumstances and timing of it. But ever since then I try to be extremely careful about setting protection around me—those TMI techniques really do work!

The real question about evil is why it exists. I don’t know if my own conclusions will assist anyone else in coming to terms with it, but here’s my answer to that question. It derives from the fact that I take a very long term perspective on life. Because I believe that our thousands of physical lives are only brief but important moments in our overall spiritual development, I don’t put nearly so much value on any given physical lifetime as most people do. We nearly all have thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of lives. In some of them we die tragically young. In others we live to ripe old ages. Some are painful and sorrowful throughout. Some are filled with joy. Some are healthy. Some have horrific or crippling diseases. So the tragedies of any one given lifetime—the joys, the sorrows, the agonies—are all just transient blips in our personal spiritual development.

We clearly seem to be placed on Earth to learn specific lessons. It is my conclusion that those lessons are all about love. But we cannot simply love people who are nice to us. We have to learn to love people who hate us, who abuse us, and who cheat or steal from us. That is the challenge of physical reality: to love everything and everyone, no matter what.

For example, one of the messages I was given from my guides a number of years ago was that I had to expect to be attacked violently and that I must forgive my attacker while the attack was going on and return love and forgiveness in the face of violence. I was so not happy with that particular message! I whined about it to my guides for weeks and weeks! Nevertheless, I spent 2 or 3 years practicing returning love—loving the person who cut me off on the freeway, and the person who cut in line at the grocery, and the person who insulted me, and the person who…You get the point. We all encounter this kind of mini-evil every day. And I practiced and practiced until I was able to return love for pretty much anything. Just as I finally thought I was ready to return love for anything, that was when I underwent that attack of evil. Despite all my preparations, the psychic attack was so unexpected, so violent, and so hurtful, coming from someone I considered a dear friend, that I was shocked. But what I am most proud of is that I did return love back. I wasn’t particularly good at it, especially given that I was attacked before I could put any barriers up, so I was dramatically weakened psychically. And of course, my love and forgiveness were both unacknowledged and intensely rejected, but I did it—I was able to offer forgiveness and love in return for violence.

So here’s the thing. Could I—would I—have done all that training in returning love without the evil event? I don’t think so. I think evil events are handed to us as training platforms so we can learn how to cope with them in a loving, forgiving way. I think only when every single person in the world learns how to return love for evil will evil simply cease to exist. Of course, at that point, it may no longer be necessary for any of us to have a physical-reality existence at all!

The bottom line is that returning evil, hatred, vengeance, or anything of that sort in response to an evil event or an evil person is always, ALWAYS the wrong thing to do. The perfect example of the correct response is the Amish community who, in response to a gunman who deliberately went to their school to shoot and kill a number of their children, chose to forgive and love the gunman. Every one of the members of that community who actually chose love instead of vengeance is someone I admire deeply. They are the exemplars that all of us should follow.

None of this means you should not protect yourself and others from evil as best you can. Just because you can return love for evil doesn’t mean you have to set yourself up to be preyed upon. Prudence in physical reality is sensible and reasonable, and remember that I am very careful with my protection strategies these days! It does mean, however, that you do have to give up vengeance and the eye-for-an-eye “payback” concept. Jesus said it best when he spoke about turning the other cheek, but virtually all other prophets have said similar things. Vengeance is not ours to take. Vengeance eats our souls.

How often do you meditate? How long do your meditations typically last?

It varies quite a lot these days. I try to do a little bit every single day. In terms of how long they last, it depends on the day and how much I think I need (and have time for!). A typical meditation might be anything from 15 minutes to 45 minutes. I’ve been known to meditate for several hours, with occasional brief breaks. When I’m doing a joint session with a friend, those usually run a minimum of 40 minutes or so, and sometimes go well over an hour. They’re fun usually!

What is your current role at The Monroe Institute?

I’m not now, nor was I ever, a paid member of the institute staff. I did get accredited as an Outreach trainer, and I give Hemi-Sync-based workshops. But I’m not an employee of the Institute. Thus, my opinions are solely mine, and do not reflect TMI’s policies necessarily.

Do you believe in a higher power (e.g. God, the Source, etc.)? If so, what is your impression of the higher power?

This is the key question, isn’t it? When I started on this path, I can honestly say I was a flat-out atheist. I strongly believed that death meant simply ceasing to be. No heaven, no purgatory, no hell. You just…stopped. With the training I had in college from a hard-nosed experimental physicist who indoctrinated me in the “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” school of thought, how could I possibly be anything else?

Yet…when you personally begin to communicate with the dead, and get meaningful messages from them when you personally review many of your own lives, experiencing them not like a movie, detached and observant, but by living them…and when you personally experience being part of the Oneness of God…well, then any doubts about survival after death, multiple lives, and the reality of God go right out the window.

Doing a complete U-turn in my belief structure was horrifically difficult, and (as I mentioned with the time and the levitation thing) something I still struggle with. But I have absolutely no doubts that God is real. And God is us. We are all God. And that is the goal: to learn to perceive God in everything and everyone around us, from the people we see, to the animals which share our world, to the rocks and stones that make up our world, to the hydrogen atoms between galaxies. There is nothing else except God. All this apparent individuality and separation one from another is our own delusion, just as we delude ourselves that time exists. When we use or abuse anyone or anything else, we use and abuse ourselves. Talk about an incentive to “go green”!

It’s not an easy thing to get your head around, is it?

If you were given the opportunity to lecture a group of skeptics, what would be your core message to them?

The thing is, it’s pointless to talk to skeptics at all. In my experience with them, they simply refuse to hear anything they don’t want to know. I never believe that my experiences will ever convince anyone else of anything. My advice, for anyone who actually does have an open mind willing to admit the world might not be exactly as mechanistic as you think, is to go out and have your own experiences. Don’t believe what I say. Believe what you do.

The problem with psychic and spiritual experiences is that they really don’t translate into the laboratory at all well. They tend to be anecdotal and not always replicable. Because the results are often talent-based, they tend to be personal to the individual in the experiment rather than generic. The attitude and energy of the experimenter absolutely impacts the results obtained in experiments, meaning that skeptics will very often get negative results, while those with more open minds can get highly positive results using the exact same subjects and experimental protocols—that’s well documented, in fact. Psychic experiences also tend to be shrouded in metaphor instead of facts. All those things make it very hard to establish a methodology to measure such experiences. Without measurement you don’t have science, you have only opinions. So in a very real sense, psychic and spiritual experiences at this stage seem to me to be outside the realm of science (at least of the “hard” sciences like physics and such). If we ever get devices that can, for example, measure the human aura or the subtle energy fields, that might change in a very big way. But for now, it’s not a hard science at all, at least as far as I can tell.

Heck, we can’t even define what “consciousness” means. Or “life.” Or “death.” How on earth could we say anything even remotely meaningful scientifically about altered states of consciousness? Or spiritual reality? These are things that we know when we experience them, but coming up with a hard, scientific definition for them is almost impossible at our current level of development.

Bottom line is, talking to skeptics is just like talking to a black hole. You’re always talking opinions, and their opinions will never match yours, and they tend to be both stubborn and rude. So what’s the point?

Do you think the scientific community is moving closer to, or farther away from, accepting a metaphysical (i.e. paranormal, supernatural) reality?

I think it strongly depends on what part of the scientific community you’re talking about. If you’re talking cosmologists, and quantum physicists (the two ends of the size spectrum in physics: cosmologists study the entire Universe, and quantum physicists study the extremely small), I think there’s a whole lot of overlap between the physical and the metaphysical. Pretty much all the other “hard” sciences—chemistry, biology, geneticists, etc.—seem to me to be as hard-line as ever. Anthropologists, and some psychologists and medical professionals are beginning to understand the key role of subtle energies and spiritual reality.

There does also seem to be a rising interest in biology to better get a grip on consciousness, but everyone seems to be focused on keeping the study of consciousness firmly tied to our physical brain. Personally, I am firmly convinced that is a false assumption. Still, it’s a step in the right direction that people are at least considering the problem and holding conferences and seminars and such trying to figure out what it is.

What suggestions do you have for readers interested in psychic development?

Find a teacher. It’s a whole lot easier to learn how to access psychic skills if you have a mentor or teacher who helps you and answers questions. Not every teacher is a good fit for any given student, so you may have to look around a while to find the teacher who is right for you. If you’re persistent, you’ll find someone who is right to help you along the next stage of your journey.

Be open to whatever happens. I’ve known people who wanted to learn how to communicate with their dead relative solely to learn what drawer they put the will in. Ridiculous! Don’t have specific expectations.

Don’t undertake this frivolously. This is powerful, spiritual stuff. It’s not about impressing everyone at a party because you can make a spoon bend, or always finding a free parking space right in front of the building you need to go to. It’s about learning how to access your spiritual self, learning how to connect with your guides and angels. It’s learning how to become a better, more highly spiritual person and using your talents to help others. Almost any other use of these skills and talents is frivolous at best, and self-destructive at worst.

Don’t insist that you must be really good a specific talent. There are dozens of psychic skills, and most people can do any of them to one degree or another. But no one is equally good at all of them! Figure out what you’re best at and develop those. Maybe you’re never going to be a great remote viewer—you may not have the talent for that. Maybe you’ll never get conscious control over going out of body. Get over it and become a great healer instead. Or learn psychometry.

Be prepared to put in lots of time, energy, and hard work to develop your skills. This is just like learning to play the piano. If you don’t practice, work hard, and learn about your talent, you’ll always be stuck playing two-fingered “Chopsticks” no matter what natural talent you may have. If you want to be on stage at Carnegie Hall, you have to work, work, work and practice, practice, practice. If you want to be a terrific psychic, you have to do the same thing.

What kind of projects are you currently undertaking?

I have started a company with a couple of immensely talented energy workers, Catherine Moses and Deborah Aaron, called Vision Intuitives. We’re focusing initially on helping with animal and pet communications and healing work, but we plan to offer across-the-board psychic services—energy work, past life access, psychic readings, mediumship, and so on—as well as pet communications. We all happen to be animal lovers, so that’s why we’re starting there. Because we do most services remotely or over the phone, we work with clients anywhere in the U.S. or Canada.

We also are doing workshops to teach pet owners and animal lovers how to communicate with their animals. The first one will be October 23 & 24, 2010 in Winston-Salem, NC. Details of the workshops and our other services are on our website, www.VisionIntuitives.com.

Of course, my “feline manager”* Tinkerbell insists that talking with pets, particularly cats, is the most important conversation you can possibly have. (It’s possible that she has a slightly biased perspective on that.)

*Dogs have owners. Cats have staff. I’m staff. Tinkerbell is management.

For more information on Maureen, and her endeavors, please use the following links:

Websites: www.maureencaudill.com, www.visionintuitives.com

Book: Suddenly Psychic

“Talk to the Animals” newsletter (Vision Intuitives): VI Flyer Aug-Sep 2010.pdf