Jeff Carreira: I’m excited to speak with you. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to your interviews and teachings online, and I’ve been struck by how much similar territory we’ve both explored. I’d love to start by asking you to speak about something you mentioned in one of your talks—a spiritual opening that occurred when you were about 30 years old, which initiated you into this path of deeper spiritual work. Could you share a bit about the nature of that experience and what shifted in you as a result?

Jac O’Keeffe: During that experience, I was given a choice—to change my life or not. I mean literally: a being appeared at the end of my bed and said, “You can continue the way you're going, or you can go in this new direction.” I had been an atheist for a number of years, and suddenly the non-physical was undeniably real. So, from my small self—my 30-year-old fish-in-a-bowl perspective—I asked, “What’s in it for me if I change?”

And the being said, “Here.” That’s when I felt a wave of love flood every cell of my body. It was unlike any love we know here—indescribably intense, completely off the charts. I remember thinking, Oh my God, what was that? I’d had plenty of intense experiences before—lots of illegal drugs, though I hadn’t yet started exploring the spiritual ones—but this was different.

This was in a category of its own. Pure ecstasy, but not drug-induced—something beyond all of that. And something in me knew: this is real. There was a rightness to it that rattled something deep in my being. It was more than an experience—it was something else. Of course, I had no language for it at the time. It was like I’d been brought into another realm—something beyond experience itself. But of course, we pick it up phenomenally as experience, because that’s how we’re wired.

I asked, “What was that?” He said, “That’s love. That’s divine love.” And I said, “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Give it to me again—give it to me again!” Because the first time caught me by surprise, and now I wanted to stay aware, to really observe it rather than just get swept away in the experience of it.
And the same thing happened again. At that point, I was sold. I knew I needed to figure out what this was.

I asked, “Is this unconditional love?” He said, “Yes, you can call it that. But I’m only giving you a teaspoon.” And I said, “That was a teaspoon?” He said, “There’s an ocean of it—for you, for everyone. But all you can take right now is a teaspoon.” And I knew he was right, more would fry me.

He said, “Yeah. It could fry you.” I said, “Okay. I’m in. How do I change my life then?” And then I was given very specific instructions: Do this kind of inner work. Exit your current path at this moment. Don't worry, I’ll tell you what to do next. It was like having a career guidance counselor from another dimension, giving me a blueprint for how to begin again.

That being turned out to be someone I actually met—or at least recognized—seven years later. I discovered who it was while I was on a meditation retreat. At the time, I was living in a campsite in the south of Spain, just trying to figure out what was next for me. I ended up attending a weekend retreat somewhere around Granada. The people running it had a photograph of the guru on the wall. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. I had no interest in gurus. I just liked the frequency of the meditation and what I was experiencing.

This particular retreat was being offered by one of the guru’s disciples. We knew the guru was still alive, but he lived in seclusion in the north of Spain, always in retreat.Over the course of the weekend, something extraordinary happened. Deep in meditation, the guru appeared in front of me in a vision. He said, “I’ve been waiting for you.” I wasn’t very impressed because I still didn’t have much respect for gurus of any sort at the time. Then he said, “Do you remember this?” And he opened both of his hands, and suddenly I experienced that love again and saw that he was standing at the foot of my bed. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, “until you could actually follow me closely.” I just gasped and said “Oh my God, that was you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been waiting through all your ayahuasca years, your South America explorations, your Santo Daime work—I’ve been waiting for you to finally become interested in the truth. Walk with me now.” And something in me surrendered. I just bowed down. A whole new level of devotion was born in that moment. And it’s still alive in me.

Jeff Carreira: That’s such a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing it. I want to follow up with a question that I think is really important. You mentioned that when the wave of divine love hit you the first time, you weren’t fully ready for it. You were so overwhelmed by the experience that you couldn’t really take it in. And so you asked to feel it again—not just for the ecstasy, but because you wanted to meet it with awareness.

That distinction strikes me as profound. So many people chase spiritual experiences, but you were already orienting toward the deeper reality beneath the experience.

I think what you’re pointing to is something that often goes unappreciated—and it’s one of the central challenges of spiritual experience in general. We’re so impacted by the experience itself—by its intensity, beauty, and emotional or energetic force, that we miss what it’s pointing to. But the real value isn’t in the experience. It’s in the reality behind it. That distinction is crucial. And yet it can be so difficult to grasp, especially early on. Sometimes it takes time, or even disillusionment, to realize that the most important thing about a spiritual experience isn’t how it feels, but what it reveals.

Could you speak more about that distinction? What helped you learn to stay steady in the face of something that powerful? And how has your relationship to spiritual experience evolved over time—especially in terms of not getting lost in the highs, but letting them reveal what’s real? How did you learn to navigate it in your own journey—and how do you help others see through the experience to the truth it points to?

Jac O’Keeffe: That’s a very good point to put language on. Yes, it’s crucial, as you say, because we live in a culture where experience is given tremendous value. I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. The experience of buying something new, the excitement of a new relationship, a new spiritual high—it’s all about experience. In the U.S. especially, entertainment is the biggest industry. That tells us a lot. Why do we commercialize and glorify experience so much when, in truth, it comes and goes? It ends up feeding desire because as soon as one experience fades, it creates the hunger for the next.

On my own path I had to see through experience. And I believe this is true for everyone at a certain point. You have to see through the construct of what we call experience, which is only how something echoes through the body-mind. But that echo rests on something else entirely. The key is the foundation of experience that lies beneath it. That’s the thing, the capital R, Reality. That’s what matters.

Your body-mind may register something profound, but what’s truly real isn’t the sensation or the story. What’s real is the beingness underneath it all.

If someone were listening to this conversation so far, I wonder if they might be thinking, Oh, I’d love to have the experience she had. I want to feel unconditional love like that. And that’s exactly the trap. That’s how easy it is to get seduced by the experience. But the point isn’t the high. The point is what it opens. The significance of the wave of love I described wasn’t in how it felt. It was in what it pointed to.

That experience showed me something more true than the phenomenal story of Jac O’Keeffe. It revealed something that has a different resonance, a deeper reality. Jac O’Keeffe will come and go. The experience came and went. But it opened a doorway to something purer, more refined. And that’s where the path really begins.

Jeff Carreira: When I teach about spiritual freedom, I often emphasize that freedom doesn’t mean feeling free. Everyone wants to feel free, but true freedom is being free regardless of how you feel. Being free when everything is going great is easy. Most of us are free when we're happy, at peace, or inspired. But a deeper freedom reveals itself when we can be content and at ease no matter how we feel. That’s when you’re resting on different ground.

It’s a ground of contentment that isn’t dependent on circumstance or emotion. It’s not a passing state. It’s a deeper reality. And that’s very hard for most people to grasp, because we’re so conditioned to equate freedom with pleasure, relief, or positivity. But real freedom isn’t just another feeling. It’s what holds all feelings without resistance.

Jac O’Keeffe: Yes, and as an addendum to what we’ve been saying that might be useful for readers. When you're out of the story of “me,” it doesn’t feel like some grand spiritual attainment. It just feels like… Oh. Something’s gotten out of the way. There's no “me” story running. It’s not dramatic—it’s spacious.

But of course, language is so limited. You say, I'm out of the story of me, and then the mind jumps in asking, who is the one who’s out of it? And then you're right back in the loop.

So don’t get caught in the language about it, feel into it. There’s a felt sense of being outside your own story. I think it was Byron Katie who would ask: Who are you without your story? Yes. Go there. Go there. If you’re halfway out of the story, there can be a felt sense of loss. But there’s also a felt sense of expansion. Like, The game is over. Jeepers. That whole thing—that whole identity project—can be dropped. So fall into that. Fall into it. And then surrender, surrender, surrender. Let it go deeper and deeper and deeper. Dissolve into nothing.

There never was a “you.” You made the whole thing up in your head. Consciousness made it up. And then it became your story. But it was all imagined. Drop it all. It’s not about tying everything up in a neat little package with a pink ribbon—forget it. That’s never going to happen. And the beautiful thing is: it doesn’t need to happen. What matters is that you see through the false identity that’s developed—and you rest in something more real. You rest in… well, it’s you. But not the “you” you thought you were.
And at that point, you don’t really know what to do. And that’s perfect.

Jeff Carreira: A scene from The Matrix comes to mind.

Jac O’Keeffe: The Matrix is a fantastic teacher. A fantastic movie.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, there’s that scene driving down the street, and Neo sees the Chinese restaurant and says, “Oh, I used to eat there.”

I had almost exactly that experience years ago when I was first stepping onto the spiritual path. Something big had just occurred and I ended up leaving my marriage at the time. I was riding in the car with my mother-in-law, explaining what had happened, and as we drove down the street, I looked around and thought: None of this is real. It all used to feel so real to me. And now it was like I had stepped off the conveyor belt, and the conveyor belt was still going. But I wasn’t on it anymore.

Jac O’Keeffe: That’s right. You’re not on it anymore. And you’re like, That’s what I was caught in? That’s where I put my time and attention? And now it’s just… nothing. When you’re in it, though—oh my gosh—it feels so important. Everything about it is serious and meaningful. But once you’re out, it’s like, What the heck was that about? It wasn’t necessarily bad—it might have even had its beauty—but now you're somewhere else entirely.

Jeff Carreira: Something I really appreciate about your teaching is how clearly you emphasize that freedom is not the end of development. So often, spiritual freedom is framed as the final destination. The story ends, the ego dissolves, and you’re free. You’ve stepped out of the matrix. But in your teaching, that’s not the end. It’s a threshold. You’re in a different reality now, but there’s still room to grow, to evolve, to contribute in new ways. I’d love to hear you speak more about that. What does the path look like after freedom for you personally? How do you understand what’s next?

Jac O’Keeffe: Knowing the truth is one thing. Living it is quite another. And honestly, there isn’t enough out there about living the truth. Not enough teachings, not enough material, not enough voices speaking to that part of the journey. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you, Jeff, because these conversations need to happen.

For thousands of years, if someone woke up, they became a monastic, a sadhu, joined an ashram, or were possibly institutionalized. In some cases, society said, “Oh no, this person’s in psychosis,” when in fact they were just seeing clearly that the world isn’t real in the way we think it is.

So there’s been this historical pattern of extracting the awakened person from society. And because of that, we don’t have a lot of models for what it looks like to be awake and still live fully in the world. That’s a problem because a lot of mistakes get made. There’s so little guidance, and too often someone wakes up and thinks, “Oh, I should become a teacher.”

And I’m like, Oh my God—no. Get a job. Become a barista at Starbucks. Do something normal. That’s where the real integration is. Live your life. Be a parent, if you haven’t. Get involved. Enter fully into the conveyor belt world—not to be caught in it, but to engage with it while abiding in Reality, capital R. Keep your attention anchored in the bigger picture, but get your hands muddy in the world. That’s the real practice.

And yet, there’s a kind of collective assumption that once you're awake, everything just falls into place. That life becomes easy or somehow neatly resolved. But I’ve had people come to me and say, “I’m awake. I know it’s all fine. But my life sucks. I’m in hell. I just want to die.” And I say, Okay, we’ve got work to do. This is the post-awakening challenge.

Jeff Carreira: It is important that you point out that the only model that really exists for a post-enlightment life is teaching. But if you did become a barista at Starbucks and you're awake, something's going to happen. If everyone's awake, then the world will change. That's what's exciting about it.

Jac O’Keeffe: Yes.

Jeff Carreira: For 20 years, I lived in a spiritual community and somewhere in the middle of that time, a quiet unease began to stir in me. I started wondering about the value of all this spiritual work? I remember drawing a cartoon to capture the feeling. It was a kind of “Superman factory.” Ordinary people entered through one door, moved along a conveyor belt, and were transformed into superbeings. Then they walked out—only to re-enter the building through a different door and start working in the factory themselves. And I thought, that can’t be the only end result. What are we creating, and for whom? What happens after awakening, after transformation? Is the goal just to perpetuate the system of awakening? Or is there something deeper we’re meant to live, something we haven’t named yet?

Jac O’Keeffe: Can I draw people’s attention—just for a moment—to the state of the world? Look at what’s happening in global governments right now. Look at Gaza. Look at what ICE is doing to people in the United States. Look at the war zones, the famines, the ecological devastation we’ve inflicted on this planet. And I ask: Where are the spiritual leaders? What are they doing? Too many are walking back through the side door of that same factory—getting busy waking up more people. Perpetuating the conveyor belt. And meanwhile, the world is burning.

We need more awakened beings to get out there. Put on their boots. Influence change. Get active. Bring the awakened perspective into global politics. Into justice work. Into humanitarian action.

Get up from the meditation cushion and contribute. We can’t forget that as long as our body is still here, we are contributing to the illusion—to the dream. So we should be sure to make it better and reduce suffering.

We all know that matters, because no matter how long we’ve been awake, we remember what it’s like to suffer. We remember what trauma feels like. We know it’s hard. We know how tough it is to feel broken, to feel lost. So we should do something to alleviate that for others. Let your awakening be a force for change—not just for yourself, but for this world.

Jeff Carreira: I’d love to hear you speak a little more about why spiritual practice still matters, especially in the world we’re living in today, because one way someone might interpret your last statement is, “Forget spiritual practice—let’s just get busy and fix the world.” But I don’t think that’s quite right either. There’s a depth, a grounding, a clarity that comes through practice that transforms how we act, why we act, and from where we act. So why, in your view, should people care about spiritual practice today? Why does it matter—not just for the individual, but for the world?

Jac O’Keeffe: You know, there’s one prayer I say every morning. I walk outside and face the sun—because it’s usually shining here. But even if it’s raining, I still walk out into it and say this prayer. It’s just one page. Simple. But I do it every single morning, no matter what. If I have time afterward, I’ll do mantra. But if I don’t—if all I have time for is that short prayer—I still begin my day that way. And on the days when I can’t get to a full practice, when work takes over, I find myself repeating a kind of invocation throughout the day:

Let everything I do be from my heart.
Let everything I do be an act of devotion.
Every person I speak to, every morsel of food I prepare, even taking out the trash—let it all be a prayer.

Somehow, that helps my humanness stay attuned to the unified field. It makes me aware of the energy I’m putting back into the whole. That matters. Outside the movie, nothing is ultimately important. But as long as we’re alive, every breath we take is significant. Every single one influences the whole. If someone thinks they’ve awakened because they understand the concepts—but they haven’t yet dropped into compassion—then they’re not done. They’re not cooked.

For me, everything comes back to that moment, nearly 30 years ago now—when divine love first exploded through my being. When I really saw what love is. Not emotional love, not transactional love, but divine love. Non-phenomenal. Pure. And I’ve come to see that the work is simply this: Everything in you that is not of divine love has to go. That’s it. That’s the path. If I had to oversimplify, that’s what I’d say:
Everything that is not of love must leave your system. That’s the real work.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, it's beautiful. Your life becomes a prayer. It's not like you're living a life and saying prayers. Your life is a prayer.

Jac O’Keeffe: Your life becomes a prayer. Yes. My life is a prayer. Yeah, it is. I'm very aware of that, actually. That's beautiful. Even in the shower, it's like I'm cleansing this beautiful mechanism, which is God in form. There is devotion in having a shower This is divine consciousness in human form. It's like something in me goes, wow, that's exquisite. It's very easy to find awe, A-W-E, that awe. It's very easy to find that when you go into your heart, and it's a beautiful thing, and it brings reverence, and grace, and compassion, and love. That feels good. That feels really good. It does. There is something wonderful there for the human part of you. There is, because it's easeful and it's open. It's gentle, it's soft, it's kind, it's understanding. Those are the qualities I like to cultivate in Jac. That's the project. Can I cultivate those qualities in Jac’s personality? I want to keep doing that. I can go much further on those for myself. What's that got to do with awakening? This is post-awaken, post-integration material we're talking about. Sometimes when I guide people in this work, they're like, Oh, my God, am I awake at all? I never knew all this crap was inside me.

Awakening is not a finish line—it’s a spectrum of evolution. And the most honoring thing you can do is to stay open to that ongoing evolution. Everything that shows up here is constantly changing—moving, growing, unfolding. Nothing stays the same in this realm. So your experience of awakening—how you hold it, how it expresses—that, too, will keep evolving. Let it make you wiser. Let it humble you. Let it move you to help the world. Help people. Because in doing so, you’re also evolving.

I experience less and less of an “individual consciousness” and more of a unified field of being. There’s less of “me” as a separate part occasionally plugged into the whole—and more of the wholeness expressing through everything, all the time. And that shifts how I live. It trickles down into how I recycle, what I consume, how I care for the world. The impact I have—it matters.

So for me, there’s micro-work and macro-work. That’s how it shows up in my system. Not “my life” over here and “my work” over there—but a continuous field of participation. What I do as a human being and what I do as a vessel of consciousness—they’re not separate. And I feel the urgency in consciousness to help, to participate, to respond. Even if we’re headed toward collapse. Even if we blow up the planet and everyone dies. It doesn’t matter. Because this—the living, the serving, the loving—is what I’m here to do. Regardless of where it’s going. I’m still going to do this.