Jeff Carreira: First of all, I want to say that it's a real pleasure to speak with you. I've known about you for many years, but we've never had a chance to meet. And you've had a bigger impact on me than you could know. When I first heard about you, I started reading some of your books. In particular, your book Life in the Labyrinth had a big impact on me. More recently, I picked up your book Trump is a Four-Letter Word. And, in that book, you mentioned your earlier book, Slime Wars, so I picked up a copy of that book too. Today, we'll be talking about the transformative pow er of fiction and the role that creativity plays on the path of spiritual awakening.

One of the great American philosophers of the late 20th Century was Richard Rorty, and he eventually came to believe that fiction was a better literary form for conveying subtle philosophical ideas than discursive philosophical essays and texts. Part of his reason for this belief was because in fiction ideas can be expressed with emotional content, and that has a more powerful effect than typical academic writing.

E.J. Gold: Yes, because there is always a hidden factor in transmitting through fiction rather than through, say, nonfictional reporting. In fact, there are two important differences. One is that fiction involves the person more deeply by getting them deeper into the experience of the ideas, more directly into the living space of the transmission.

But there is another factor, which you could say is that it lets you slip the dagger in. This is something I learned from my one of my theater coaches. The story disarms the reader. As Shakespeare said, the listener is disarmed and therefore vulnerable to ideas. A joke is another great vehicle for getting something across. If you want to help a kid understand that they’re not behaving, but you don't want to make them feel upset or wrong. You do it in a funny way. You start a story, “By the way, did I ever tell you about my uncle Harvey? He did exactly what you did…” So, fiction and humor make it easier to get the point across, to stick in the dagger in, if you will.

Jeff Carreira: I use humor a lot when I teach for exactly that reason, because when people are laughing, they're open and you can slip in profoundly transformative truths, even challenging truths, without them noticing.

E.J. Gold: In my art classes, particularly my painting classes, there is something I do at least once in every class. I'll ask people to paint the worst picture they can possibly paint. Make it miserable, wretched, disgusting, obscene, horrible. The worst thing they can do. So bad that no one would ever want to look at it even once, let alone hang it on a wall. The paintings invariably come out beautifully, exactly because they don't care. And they're not invested in the quality of the outcome. It’s a way of diverting our protective coating, which is the height of the lizard brain.

There are three parts to the brain and right in the middle at the core is a lizard brain that is totally reactive. That's the reptilian brain. Around that you have a median cortex and then the lobes that actually do most of the higher-level functioning. Most people function largely on the lizard brain. You have to take that into account when you first introduce challenging ideas, you have to be gentle, so you don’t stimulate reactivity. You introduce ideas gently and carefully, so you don't upset the lizard brain with higher ideas. You need to tickle or tease the higher functioning in the person, without engaging the reactivity of the reptilian brain.

Jeff Carreira: Can you talk about the transformative impact that writing can have?

E.J. Gold: Let’s take that question in two parts. On the one hand there is the transformation of the author. Authors transform. They can’t help it. If you are going to write the truth, and you are going to end up writing it over and over again. You’ll be forced to find new ways to express it. That process will change you. It is unavoidable. But the transformation of the writer is not as interesting to me as the change in the reader. I want my readers to change radically.

Jeff Carreira: One of the things that has always intrigued me about you, is the wide variety of ways that you express yourself creatively. From writing to acting, to online gaming, and so many other things you seem to have done almost anything I can think of.

E.J. Gold: I don't play the violin, so there are a few things I missed. (laughs)

Jeff Carreira: In Life in the Labyrinth, you speak about the condition of maze brightness that sometimes occurs in laboratory rats who seem to awaken to the fact that they are trapped in a maze. You use this as an analogy to say that once we awaken to the fact that we're trapped in life, a deep desire grows in us to continually explore realms beyond the trap. That initiates a journey, and in that journey our exploration of higher realms and our expression of those realms become flip sides of a coin. What I got from your book, was that realms beyond the maze are not just objective places that you find out there waiting for you. They are dimensions that can only be discovered through a higher order learning process in which our own engagement with those dimensions illuminates them for us. These dimensions beyond the ordinary become accessibly to us as long as we can relax our intense habit of familiarizing everything and dragging it back into what we already know. If we can avoid the trap of familiarization, then we can voyage through realms that are beyond our ability to know in any normal sense.

E.J. Gold: That's very well put. What I can add to that is a little about my purpose in learning to do so many different things. I want to show you that you can pull in skills and knowledge from other incarnations. You can demonstrate that you've lived before, because you have knowledge that you couldn't possibly have gotten any other way.

So, I've done about 200 professional level things that it would be impossible for someone to do in a single lifetime. And I did all that as a way of saying, “Check this out. If I can do this, you can too.” How can you do that? You do it the same way I did, you just pull it in. You trust it's going to be there, and it will be as long as you're open enough. You have to have what I call, a big lifetime footprint, which means you must have at least five or six lifetimes open to you. My motivation in doing so many different things is to demonstrate that we all have a lot of lifetimes that we can draw from. We have a lot of skills, and I mean literally millions, and we can do everything from tailoring, to Ouija board operating. Anything and everything, exists somewhere in your lifetime footprint. You want to know how to use an abacus? Give me about five minutes with one and I’ll remember, because I’ve certainly used an abacus before in some other life.

I can play about 200 different instruments. Well, 100 of them are percussion, so that's kind of cheating. But still, I can play a couple of hundred instruments.

Jeff Carreira: And you're saying that all these skills are coming from other lifetimes. In Life in the Labyrinth you talk about drawing down information from the macro dimensions, which means embodying abilities now that already exist in you in higher dimensions.

E.J. Gold: In myself. In yourself. In the higher dimensional state. You can shift right this second into that higher state. It is the state where I say, you're the One. Tag. You're it. I have a couple of techniques of shifting there.

Now, let’s loop all this back to our talk about art. First of all, art is a process, not a product. And when you've finished a piece of art, whether it's music or theater or dance or plastic arts, paper arts, whatever it might be. You have drawn down the composite result of all your experience into that moment of creation. Everything you've ever experienced is embodied in what you're producing right now. You are expressing your idea of the universe at this moment.

When people are afraid to move into the higher dimensions of past lives its often because they’re afraid of remembering too much and they don't want to get overwhelmed by it all. This is what I tell them. What do you remember when you were two years old? Can you tell me one thing from when you were two years old that you remember? Can you tell me the details of the entire year? We don’t remember everything. Past lives are the same, we don’t get overwhelmed because we don’t remember it all.

Here’s what we do to help people remember past lives. We show them a photograph in something we call a past life survey. We put a photograph in front of someone to provoke a memory of the past. And suddenly they find themselves in the photograph. They are one of those people in the photo. And I know this will work for you because you were there in 1906 in San Francisco. Eddison sent a team there to make a film from the font of a streetcar traveling down market street.

Jeff Carreira: I've seen that video. I was fascinated by it.

E.J. Gold: What’s amazing is that you are walking across the street right in front of the cable car. You are walking right in front of the camera. If you look, you’ll see yourself and you’ll say, “Oh, my God, it's me.” I promise that'll happen. It probably has already. You may have recognized yourself, or just got a weird feeling when you were saw it.

Jeff Carreira: I remember I had seen it somehow accidentally, and I got very mesmerized by it for a few days. I kept watching it over and over again because I found it so fascinating.

E.J. Gold: Yes, we had a little meditation hall up the hill. Two years after that video was shot, we had the earthquake, so we had to rebuild the meditation hall and we had it until 1922. I even have the exact address posted someplace. You can do the research and find out where it was.

Jeff Carreira: I'm aware talking to you that I may have absorbed more from your books than I realized. I just finished writing a book called Higher Self Expression, which explores how we can pull into creation, information and wisdom, from the vastness of our being. I always write spontaneously. So, I don't plan out things beforehand. I just write and I can usually write for about two hours at a time. And when I'm done, I generally don't know what I've written.

E.J. Gold: Let me tell you a story about Ray Bradbury. I knew him for many years, and once when he was being interviewed someone asked him why he had written a particular story. And he answered, “Because I wanted to find out how it ended.”

Jeff Carreira: (laughing) Along those lines, I wrote my first novel last year and I had a very interesting experience. I was typing and I thought the story was going to go one way. And I watched my fingers type something different and the story went in a different direction. So, where is the story coming from? Who’s writing it?

E.J. Gold: Yes. That experience makes you different from most writers. You become like a professional when you let the fingers do the walking. That’s the best way to go. When you write or do anything creative, you should have no idea where you're going. When I start a workshop, I have no idea what I’ll cover. I've got no idea what's going to happen. When I start a comedy routine, I look at my audience and they tell me what they want to hear. The same thing happens when I write. The audience I’m writing for tells me what I should write. I'm providing a service. I'm not I'm not informing them. I'm reminding them about what they wanted to know.

Jeff Carreira: I feel like I open to what wants to come through, and then it comes.

E.J. Gold: Yes. If you're lucky. If it doesn't come through, you experience what's called writer's block.

Jeff Carreira: I haven’t experienced that much.

E.J. Gold: Well, you probably won't. Writer's block comes from concern about what people think of you. It comes from egotistical considerations, which I'm sure you've dealt with already. But that's the kind of thing a young writer has to learn.

Jeff Carreira: I think in the creative moment we are both expressing and listening at the same time. You're typing a story that's coming through you, and you’re reading it at the same time.

E.J. Gold: Yes, you're the first audience. You'll get a chance to see that story before anybody else does.

Jeff Carreira: I was fascinated to see that writing my latest book, which isn't fiction, I still never knew what was going to happen next. I had an idea. And things would keep showing up on the page that I wasn’t expecting. So, as you said, the process was transformative for me first. It took me places I hadn’t intended to go.

E.J. Gold: And those inspiration will save you from time to time. Don't edit me, it will say. Let your fingers do the walking, right?

For me, creativity is a way of staying alive. I've got lots of ways of being creative, but my job is really to show others that they also have that in them. They've got the creativity; all they need to do is unleash it. Let it go. Let it happen. And that takes courage and it takes a little bit of overcoming fear. That’s the main thing.