Dr. Zohara Hieronimus, D.H.L.
Dr. Bob Hieronimus, Ph.D.
Listen to the the entire interview on our audio archive page.
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DR. BOB HIERONIMUS: Welcome back to 21st Century Radio. I'm Dr. Bob Hieronimus, our Executive Producer and Research Assistant is Laura Cortner, and our engineer is Anita Brockington.
Tonight our very, very special guest is my beloved sweetheart, and the co-host of this program, Dr. Queen J. Zohara Meyerhoff Hieronimus. Zoh is my teacher when it comes to the animal kingdom, and we are very proud to announce that her latest book has just been released and it's destined to be a best seller. It's called White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change, and we're going to talk to her about it for two hours tonight, so hang on to your hats!
I told Zoh she should go brew a cup of tea for or something for a few minutes, because I have a rather lengthy introduction, where I want to explain my personal connection to the animal kingdom, together with the essential role my wife has played in my understanding of the different species.
When I was just a miniature Dr. Bob I used to play on Old Oriole Ballpark, which was behind our house at 2930 Greenmount Ave. This was the ballfield where the International League Baltimore Orioles had played, including my favorite player, Babe Ruth! Old Oriole Ballpark was also the home for many small animals like turtles, frogs, rabbits, and garden snakes. I used to enjoy looking after them, because one of our local boys used to take pleasure in torturing and experimenting on these creatures. When I found them dead, I would bury them and say a prayer. Back then I thought animals were like people and my feelings for them ran deep.
As I grew to be a teenager around the age of 15, however, I entered that stage where I thought I knew everything. I became an agnostic, and a know-it-all, and the most important thing in my consciousness was GIRLS. My relationship with animals completely disappeared. I believed humans were superior in all ways.
Later in college I discovered the reports about the incredible intelligence in dolphins who are even more intelligent and caring than humans. This reawoke my interest, but still my rational mind would not accept that ALL animals were intelligent and caring creatures.
It was not until I met my beloved wife that I discovered my true mentor in this area. Zohara's actions proved to me that not only did all animals have intelligence, but they also shared psychic abilities and could communicate with humans! This was something I never considered before I met her. I watched her work tirelessly to right the wrongs and injustices for all life forms on planet earth and easily fell in love with her.
Dr. Queen Zohara is more than a genius, she is a visionary. Her contributions to the planetary good are permeated with love, and in the words of mystic Rudolf Steiner, works permeated with love will become world happenings. I have proudly watched her research evolve from the mystical Kaballah, to remote viewing and quantum theory, into her new passion, speaking to the animals. Her new book just released this week from Inner Traditions/Bear & Co. is called White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change and in it she shares the message of these totemic animals sacred to indigenous peoples around the world.
This book is racking up some stellar reviews already, such as:
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., the Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University and co-author of The Shamanic Powers of Rolling Thunder, who said:
"Zohara's magnificent White Spirit Animals reminds her readers of the human/animal bond and its continued importance. Her book hearkens back to shamanic practices that employed spirit animals as copractitioners. . . . White Spirit Animals can teach, protect, and heal their human siblings, and in so doing expand the boundaries of what is possible."
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Jungian analyst and author of Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Everywoman, said:
"White Spirit Animals is a beautiful and deep work of art and heart. It provides a wealth of cross-cultural, historical, shamanic, and mythical information. It is likely to connect the reader with the symbolically deep realm where dreams come from. The images and stories resonate with that place of inner knowing in us. I am enthusiastic about this book--thank you, Zohara Hieronimus!"
And one more from Dr. Gay Bradshaw, author of Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity and Carnivore Minds, who said: "Brilliant visionary work that pulls humanity into alignment with our animal kin and forgotten souls."
I don't think we need any further biographical introduction for this 21st Century Radio audience, so with that, I'd like to welcome you back to the guest microphone on 21st Century Radio, Dr. Queen J. Zohara Meyerhoff Hieronimus!!
Zoh, I believe this book, White Spirit Animals promises to be your best and most important contribution to our planet and to all the living beings which call her mother. Congratulations.
What are White Spirit Animals and why did you decide to write a book about them?
DR. ZOHARA HIERONIMUS: You know it's an interesting thing as an author, and you know and anybody in the listening audience who's an author knows, your last work is your greatest work. But I like to think that all of my works have contributed to my ability to write this particular book. When I wrote about the prophets and the prophetesses, I practiced coming into a rapport with their consciousness, which all of us do. We do that with anybody that's deceased when we read their writings, when we look at a picture of them, when we think of them. Whether it's a human, whether it's an animal, whether it's a place on Earth, whether it's a building, whether it's a tree. Anytime we put our attention on something, we come into rapport with that which can connect us to it. It's through our attention and then in terms of communicating, whether it's with a tree or a dog or a deceased cat or a loved one who has passed over, even if you never met them, like a great grandparent that you never had a chance to meet. The process is the same in coming into rapport with all of life because all of life talks. All of life is connected through light because all of life is light.
Having said that, quantum physics has made it possible for us to really appreciate that there are particles and waves. And the research that we've done on prayer that I've covered in my other work over the decades shows us that when we ask for thy will be done, there's a bigger impact, it's like riding the wave. Versus the particle, which would be praying for a specific outcome. And I say this all as preamble to talking about this particular book because I joke sometimes, as you've heard and our audience has heard, that we can intend to do something but the bigger impact is if you compare our goals to being an archer and there's an archery target. Conditioning the field, meaning not aiming for the bullseye, will eventually enable you to hit the bullseye even with your eyes closed.
So, this long preamble as to why did I write this book, I spent decades practicing non-local consciousness arts. And when you and I first met, as you know I had a keen interest in radionics, which is a form of at a distance healing through implements or patterns of consciousness that the operator works with even if it's not plugged in and even if it's just a design because what we have found as in remote viewing, what we put our attention to we then can come into rapport with. I have spent a lifetime of loving animals and loving nature and being an activist and trying to support nature in all ways, both philosophically, personally, literally, scientifically, broadcasting support through all of the various people around the world who are doing such important work. And what happened was in March 2013, when I was washing the dishes, this sounds like a zen story but it's really the truth, wash dishes and you're likely to have a bliss experience. That's what they say you know, there's no spirituality outside your daily life. And that takes a long time to adjust to because when you're young you just want all the highs of spirituality, you want to go to workshops and have your bliss and you go home and it gets very difficult to continue with your life in a normative way.
But here I was washing the dishes and I had this experience of these white spirit animals. Animals who are all white coated unlike their kin, and there was a white bear and a white wolf and a white horse and a white shark and a white whale and a white lion, et cetera. And I was in awe. I mean when you practice non-local consciousness and you become comfortable with having visions, which I have had my whole life since I was very, very young, probably at the age of 3, when I saw the blessed mother when I almost drowned. That was really the beginning of my being conscious that there was a whole other dimensional way of interacting with the visible and the invisible terrain of existence. So, these white spirit animals came to me and I said to them feeling like that I was standing before revered elders, "Why have you come to me? And what can I do for you?" I recount this in the book, White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change and they asked me to tell their story. They made it very clear to me that they wanted the story told collectively, not about one of them at a time, not a book on just one spirit animal and then another book on another spirit animal. They said, we want you to tell our story collectively because then our purpose and our pattern will be better understood.
I was very ill at the time with hyperthyroid and had just finished another book and was in no position in 2013 to commit to doing a book. So, it took me another year and a half in terms of a) being able to write three sample chapters, dreaming with the animals, which I started to do to see if i was I even capable of doing what they asked me because I don't know these animals personally. It's not like I spent personal time like I have with dogs and cats and ferrets and rats and birds, et cetera, or even raccoons and groundhogs and animals that are around us or animals that I've nurtured while they've died because they're on our property or somebody's brought them to me. I can't tell you how many birds have been brought to me on their deathbeds that I nurture and take care of until they pass on. That seems to be part of what most animal communicators run into at some point of their life is stewarding animals that cross over and that kind of empathy is what you cultivate over time. So, I had cultivated this empathy and shamans historically have used dreaming as a way to communicate with all life, whether it's a tree or a location or a deceased person or the animals they're working with. And so, I began to practice after talking to Dr. Stanley Krippner, who I write about extensively in the book and who has been our guest numerous times, who headed up the Maimonides dream laboratory in the 60s and 70s. I had an opportunity to ask him about this process of shamanic dreaming. It's basically what is more modernly referred to as lucid dreaming, but it's a little different from lucid dreaming because you're not controlling the content yourself, in fact what you're asking is each animal, and this is what I practiced for 4 years, was for each animal to communicate in my dreams what it was they wanted me to share.
So, the process is very particular to this book. I didn't do this with any of the other works I've ever authored or produced, whether it was for TV or magazines or radio. It's that I really waited until the animal had told me what it is they wanted shared and I didn't do any research initially. I spent a year dreaming with the animals before I started reading other people's books on each one of them, whether it was the white buffalo or the species of buffalo, or the lion or the wolf or the bear. And in this way I believed I could come into authentic rapport with each one of them.
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B: In your book, White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change you say these five white spirit animals and their species, the bear, lion, elephant, wolf, and buffalo, are critical to the Earth's survival. Why?
Z: You know it's an interesting phenomena when you go into a mystery trip, which this really was, it was a journey for me. I really didn't know what I would find out once these white spirit animals asked me to tell their story. What I did notice initially when they first came to me and I started this dreaming exercise for a year before I even submitted a proposal to my publisher, was I thought these are pretty interesting mammals, that was the first thing I recognized, that these were land mammals, these particular five. Then I thought, that's strange because some of them I knew were represented in the star systems. Then I thought about their relevance to various religious traditions. Historically, we're going back thousands and thousands of years. Actually, we could go back millions of years because that's how long they've been around the planet in various sizes and scale. But because they are all mammals, because they are critical to various traditions, the buffalo to the Native Americans of course, the bear to indigenous peoples worldwide, the lion to Africans and Asians, at one point there were lions all over the world but they've basically been made extinct as have most of the animals that these derive from. The elephant is sacred to the Hindu tradition and the Buddhist tradition. The wolf of course to almost any native tradition anywhere on the earth where which the wolf is present. At one point, the wolf was the most populous land mammal other than humans worldwide.
So, we'll start with the fact that they were and still are all epicenters of cultures. Each and every one of them. The lion, the bear, the elephant, the wolf, and the buffalo. The second thing is what I learned as a result of doing the book and doing the dreaming with them. It was not something I thought about beforehand, and it wasn't really something I was conscious of. But what I learned is they are all matrilineal traditions. They all center around the mother and her offspring. And that this is actually what they urge us to restore, this ethos of care which we have lost in humanity. They're critical to the planet itself because each presides and is the hierarchical apex, the guardian if you will, of entire ecosystems. The bear over the woods and the rivers, the wolf over the plains and the mountains, the lion over the Savannahs in Africa and Asia, and the elephant whom without we wouldn't have watering holes for many other animals in Africa, we wouldn't have the opening up of the forest canopies when they go in and pull down fruit. Each of these animals is basically a bioengineer of the ecosystems they preside over.
The fact that each faces extinction is a horror show for us on Earth because the truth is, and I didn't know this when I started the book but it's what they taught me and what I present in the book, White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change is that without any one of them we will have even more significant ecosystem collapse than we currently have and what we currently have is pretty significant. We're in the sixth extinction and people don't often talk about that. They don't talk about how serious and what a rapid decline we are having of our guardians and those which preserve our ecosystems. The World Wildlife Fund wrote a report in 2014, called "The Living Planet Report" and they show that Earth's wild vertebrate population, that's mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, and when I read this I was stunned, as informed as I am and as many times we'd bring on guests who talk about the change in the Earth and climate change and Earth changes, when you read these statistics it's very sobering. So, those that I mentioned, the population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish declined by 52% between 1970 and 2010. Right now we are losing 27,000 species a year. We used to lose them at a background rate of 1 to 10 a year. It's so increased that it's estimated that at this accelerated rate of ecosystem collapse we'll lose 50% of earth's species in 30 years.
So, back to your initial question, why are these animals important? Each presides over an entire ecosystem whom without will collapse more rapidly. What these mammals taught me and what they said in the very beginning to me, their exhortation was "Save as many of us as you can." It wasn't like, "oh save us because we're important and nobody else is." They were explaining to me through dreams and through the kind of information that elder lore cherishes around the world about these sacred animals is that we've seen the positive effect. As a good example, when the wolf was nearly extinct in Yellowstone National Park, and then wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone and what we saw was an extraordinary reintroduction of other animals in the ecosystem. The elk got healthier because the coyotes weren't as plentiful because wolf took its place again. Each of these animals makes sure that the entire ecosystem under them and all the other animals and insects and wildlife populations, and the ecosystem itself stays intact. So, like buffalo, and buffalo were brought to near extinction on the continent of North America, we had horrendous topsoil loss, that's what happened all during the depression. A large part of that was not only were we doing single crop planting of wheat at government request and destroying all the perennial woods and the incredible way an ecosystem grows itself from the forest to the land. But the buffalo was responsible and still is capable of turning over the soil and when they turn over the soil, you don't have as much runoff from water and it encourages the micro-organic life of the soil. The same thing I mentioned with the life of the elephant earlier. The bear is a wonderful example of what they bring to any environment because they manage to keep through their scale a balance between all the other animals in the ecosystems in which they exist. And it's not as though apex guardians, you know some people will call these animals predators, the wolf, the bear, the lion, and they justify killing them. But the truth is that these are the very essential animals that we should do our best to bolster and restore their environments, not in captivity, but restore the wildlife environments in which they live because once you reintroduce them and we stop killing them, they invigorate the ecosystem on their own.
B: I'm certain that most of our listeners never even believed that was even possible. Now, you are a known telepath. How did you use these skills both for the book and in your life? Would you share a story from the book to demonstrate this? Maybe one about the bonobo that you befriended?
Z: Well, you know when I started this work, I had expressed an interest and I always talked to domestic animals since I was a child, and woodland animals that I grew up knowing, raccoons and blue jays and squirrels and other animals that are particular to the eastern woodlands, which I have been around my whole life. But I interviewed Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who was the lead scientist at a bonobo sanctuary in Iowa, where she worked. And she was responsible as a scientist for showing that bonobos are extremely intelligent and she taught them how to use computers in order to communicate. Matata was the matriarch of a group of bonobos in captivity; her son Kanzi whom she kidnapped after he was a few months old, maybe as old as 6 months old, and adopted him as her own and then she had other kin of her own while she was in captivity. She actually is one of the oldest bonobos ever held in captivity as long as she lived, she lived for 40 years in captivity. So, after interviewing Sue, and by the way Kanzi who was Matata's son one day started using the computers after Sue was unsuccessful in getting Matata to do this, Matata was not interested in the lexigram boards, she actually mentioned it being stupid and it made no sense to her, as in "Why should I bother doing that?"
B: A lexigram board is?
Z: It was like a computer board that they had created for the bonobos to communicate all their needs, their wants, their feelings. It was interesting because she actually communicated specifically about that one day to me. She was saying that she wanted different kinds of signs. That she wanted signs for fruit that was in her native Congo and she wanted signs for saying she was tired of doing certain things, not things that were already part of the lexigram. But what happened was she was not interested in doing this but her son, Kanzi, one day just started doing it and then his sister started doing it. So, having interviewed Sue about the history of their effort and her effort at that time to give them autonomy while they were in captivity with the hope of eventually raising enough funds to take them all back to the Congo so they could live in freedom, Matata managed to contact me. This will sound strange to people, but she appeared to me. I was at the river where I do most of my writing and she showed up in our bedroom and our dog Bella, a white shephard, saw her like I saw her. And it wasn't that she was densely physical, she was in her astral body, but if you're a visionary and you practice remote viewing and dreaming and meditation and using that part of our anatomy, our spiritual anatomy which we all have but we don't cultivate and I've been cultivating mine my whole life a little bit at a time, after a while it can do what it needs to do without you having to think too much about it. I looked at her and I am thinking how strange this is. But what followed afterwards were these exchanges where she would just show up in my consciousness and tell me stories about the bonobo's history during the ice age. She talked to me about the lab. She complained about the cold floors, and she would tell me she had a headache. So, what Sue and I did for a while is Matata would come to me and give me information and then I would write it up and the I would send it to Sue to see if there was any kind of correlation between what Matata was telling me and her daily life. I mean she told me some exceptional things. But one of them was one day she was complaining of the noise and a headache and she couldn't shut it off. And so I sent it to Sue and Sue said, oh yeah, the alarm system broke today and it was ringing and ringing and ringing, and Matata had a headache.
What's interesting about this kind of work, when you do telepathy work with animals, a little different from telepathy with humans, is it's good if you can find somebody who knows the animal or is in a situation with the animal, like if I am doing a reading for somebody's dog, I can call the owner or email the owner and say, does your dog have a green bowl that is now missing? And the owner will go, "oh my God, how did you know we had a green bowl and it's missing?"
B: Yeah, you've done that hundreds of times. People call you with their cat and what's wrong, and within seconds you get back to them and their problem is solved.
Z: Absolutely, for decades. Well, you know I think for people in the audience who experience this maybe with their own pets and the way to practice and develop it as remote viewers do, is you hold the very first image that comes to mind and try not to interpret it, try not to doubt yourself, and over time if you have a period of years practicing it, you'll start to see that the images animals or trees or nature spirits are giving you are very clear. The problem for most of us is that we judge what we're getting and we try to analyze it. We think, it can't be true that the tree is telling me that its neighbor died, I mean trees don't talk about its neighbors. But in fact they do.
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B: In White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change you show how dream telepathy and trans species telepathy can be used to communicate with other lifeforms. Can you explain this more fully?
Z: I sure can. And I started to about Matata and got a little sidetracked in the history of her lab work. Matata is an excellent example of a bonobo because bonobos are very close to humans and Matata insisted that a long time ago, back during the Ice Age and that's what all the white spirit animals are said to be reminiscent of and that's why they are white coated unlike the rest of their kin. She said that they used to take care of discarded humans, the bonobos did. She also told me stories about the white lion living in caves next to the white dragon. It was just a fascinating experience. But as I started to mention earlier about telepathy and telepathy with any form of life manifest or not yet manifest, is that it's all the same process. The truth is and what's sort of been hidden from us and we're made to think we need all these intercessors to do all of these things for us, be they psychics or spiritual leaders or shamans or whatever. Shamans are really showing us what each of us is hardwired to do if we choose to develop those organs of perception for looking into the future, looking into the past, basically anywhere and anywhen. The easiest way to do it and everybody in the listening audience can practice this the next time you feed the birds, just look at them, close your eyes and feel if they are communicating something to you. And you might say, "oh yeah, they're communicating they like a particular seed" or maybe "they're arguing over the territory on a branch." It doesn't matter really what it is, it's the practice that matters. There are always going to be times where we're actually in complete rapport with some other living form and we know exactly what it is. Other times when we might get a piece of it, and that's okay. Getting a piece of it is like when you have a rug and you grab the corner and then from the corner you can unroll the whole thing even if you don't know what the rugs going to look like. But you had a corner of it. So, the same thing with telepathy and the way to make it useful is if you, for instance, with all the Earth changes and all the distress going on in Puerto Rico or Florida or Texas or California, wherever it is we now know there are people enduring such hardship, whether from fires or floods or winds. You can actually talk to the natural systems, and prayer is certainly one form of this rapport, asking it to cause no harm or to lessen harm. And the reason we know it works is prayer is very effective, traditional meditation, transcendental meditation shows us that wherever they meditate, the crime rate goes down 16%. We know for a fact that when we pay attention to something, and it doesn't matter what it is we're paying attention to, our attention allows us to see what comes into view. The same way a lighthouse does for ships at sea, it lights the waters they can see around them. So, that when we intend to communicate with a dog or a cat or our neighbor's dog who is barking and you want it to stop barking, you can talk to that dog at a distance. You don't have to go outside to talk to the dog. If you know the dog's name here's the answer, you just call that dog three times, you picture them coming into your heart, it's really important to have empathic love, that's really the key to this whole puzzle is love and empathy. And you can say to the dog, "What's wrong?" and they might say to you, "I'm locked out," or they might say, "my foot hurts" or "I'm just really excited" or "I don't get enough attention" or whatever it is. And when you learn the source of what it is that's causing distress, whether it's in a human or a weather system or an individual, you then earn a position to be helpful. And it might be the best thing you can do is send them a prayer. It might be that the next day, you say to the owner, "You know Charlie was outside barking and if you don't have time maybe I can walk him when I walk my dog?" Sometimes, it's a very simple shift that has to happen. A good example is that I was in a meeting and a woman came to me and all of the sudden I see her cat drinking out of her toilet bowl and I see her knocking her water bowl over in the kitchen and then she's telling me there's not enough water. I said to the owner, "Your cat's really having trouble getting fresh water." And she looked at me like "wow, that's really strange and how did you even know I had a cat?" And I can't say how I know these things, it's just that I've become accustomed to paying attention to the images that come to the conscious mind. It turned out they had closed the toilet top, they had stopped leaving the water down because she made a mess and the cat was complaining.
B: Well, I just heard a terrible story just the other day concerning these floodings and one was called dog island on which there were 400 dogs on it in various levels of pain and they all died.
Z: Yes, it was a sanctuary for a particular kind of dog.
B: They all died and I think unfortunately with the Earth changes that are coming we are seeing the beginning of what we will see over and over and over again. And I bring this up because I know everyone is trying to put their islands back together again but those islands and Florida and Houston and other areas are going to be hit time and time again.
Z: Well, along those lines of Earth changes, it's very important to say the white spirit animals are prophets of change. And in every tradition in which they're revered, the elder lore makes it clear that these animals, whether it's the white wolf, the white buffalo, or the white elephant, the white lion, the white bear, is that they would return and we would see more white spirit animals when the Earth was ready to cleanse herself again. I mean historically in all of these native traditions, whether it's in India, Asia, the United States, or elsewhere, is that each of these mammals helped humanity, not only with telepathy, but helped humanity survive the Ice Age. They were our teachers, our guides. In the same way wolf taught us to hunt, bear taught us how to find healing herbs, lion was able to show us how it is to work as partners, to have courage, to bring love into our hearts, et cetera. So, all of these animals actually are part of elder lore that says they will reappear when we're in the midst of Earth changes again. And that time is now. And they are here.
B: Well, shamanism is part of the story of the white spirit animals in what ways?
Z: Shamanism, along with the last Ice Age, kind of come together as a package because shamanism really came out of prehistory. When humans began to understand that everything was a massive signaling system. And that's really what quantum physics has allowed us to appreciate and understand; that what is invisible doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's coming into materiality but we exist in so many dimensions simultaneously that the physical world is the most dense of the planes in which we exist. Shamans understood this. They understood that everything represents a power and a possibility. Not just itself alone. So, bear as an example, to a shaman helps with healing and is chief of medicine, as I like to call bear. A shaman who works with a lion might be working with group power, might live in Africa and therefore if they are part of lion shamans will do whatever they can to protect the species and be sure they don't go extinct. I think the interesting part about the Ice Age and shamanism is that the two aspects of being able to come into rapport with that which doesn't speak our language but is speaking life, is what shamans have gifted to us. What is being practiced now worldwide by many westerners and they're being trained by many shamans of various traditions around the world because the elders of all these traditions appreciate that we're in quite desperate times and the quicker we can awaken these non-local consciousness skills, each and every one of us, whether it's using prayer more, using telepathy, or just having more compassion and empathy for everything we encounter in our daily lives. This is the key to the restoration of the world. It's not just about patching things up. It's not just about restoring the soil, it's about restoring our hearts and opening our minds and using all of these incredible gifts that we are born with that make us what we are really termed, which are co-creators.
B: I love that co-creator thing because most people don't realize that it's your actions on this planet, your actions that really account for what you are and who you are and what you are going to leave this planet as you cast off. And if your actions are positive to help others, it certainly encourages other people to feel and do the same things automatically, they don't have to be told.
You said in the prologue of your book that you wanted to become a writer at the age of 9 and at the end of your book you stress not to discount the visions and dreams of children. Why is that?
Z: Well, I think like myself, this book is actually the fulfillment of two childhood dreams. One was to be a writer and the other was to write about animals, and I never did that. I've been a utilitarian writer my whole life, writing about various topics, which our audience is certainly familiar with, the broad spectrum of the new paradigm. Children until about the age of 10 are still tapped into the invisible realms, and their imaginations are still very fertile and open, and their hearts if they haven't been wounded or abused, unfortunately so many of our youth are when they are very young, are still able to communicate with the spirit aspect of their existence and their soul is still very present, if you will. The ego hasn't totally developed, there's not a big backlog of modern day history for them. So, they tend to stay open to what often adults term imaginary. But if we think about it carefully, what is imagined in one decade or one century, often becomes what is manifest form in the next. Children will often and particularly children incarnating now, they're souls that are incarnating at a very difficult time on Earth. Jupiter is now moving into Scorpio which gives us all expanded access to what's invisible, to what's hidden, to the deep hidden part of ourselves and the Earth and nature. So, children, and this is also predicted in so many traditions that prophecy would now come through women and children during this time period. It's very important not to diminish a child's imagination, and if they say they have friends you can't see, don't just assume they're making it up because they're playing with something that doesn't exist, they may in fact be in rapport with deceased beings, human or otherwise, who are helping them help us. And so, it's just very important to nurture children's imagination, dreams, and playtime.
B: Of the many experiences you had as a child, visions and seeing the future, et cetera, what would be the most outstanding one?
Z: Oh, there've been so many and I really can't think of the most outstanding one. But I will just share the earliest one which was when I was drowning and I saw light, which was the surface of the water, and I saw this beautiful woman about the size of a cloud, telling me to come to her. And it turned out, I didn't find out until years later, that this was the Blessed Mother. And she held me and kept me alive until my own mother took me out of the pool and saved my life.
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Welcome back to 21st Century Radio. I'm Dr. Bob Hieronimus, our Executive Producer and Research Assistant is Laura Cortner, and our engineer is Anita Brockington.
We are continuing with our guest, Dr. Queen Zohara, whom you all know as the co-host of 21st Century Radio, but she is also my mentor on the consciousness of all living beings. Zohara's latest book is called White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change and it's just been released this week by Inner Traditions/Bear & Co.
Here are a few of the early reviews:
John Perkins, New York Times bestselling author, says:
"Great Book! White Spirit Animals combines shamanism, transspecies telepathy, historic research, and native stories to show the reader why we must save the bear, lion, elephant, buffalo, wolf, and other species from extinction and how they have guided humanity in the past. A unique testimony to the close relationship between humans and animals and our ability to communicate and collaborate with each other."
And Stephan A. Schwartz, author of The 8 Laws of Change: How to be an Agent of Personal and Social Transformation had this to say:
"Zohara Hieronimus provides an important bridge linking modern objective science and ancient and traditional shamanic beliefs--a very useful contribution."
This hour, I would like to finish what I started in the introduction to hour one when I described your work, Zohara, as permeated with love and that which will become world happenings. That line of thought is taken from Rudolf Steiner. I want to read a little quote from his book, The Bridge Between Universal Spirituality and the Physical Constitution of Man, Freedom and Love, and Their Significance in World Evolution. This was republished by the Anthroposophic Press in 1958.
Here is the quote from Rudolf Steiner:
"Humanity is the bearer of the seed into the future. The thoughts of the past, as realities, are as it were the mother-soil; into this mother-soil is laid that which comes from the individual egohood, and the seed is sent on into the future for future life.
On the other side, man evolves by permeating his deeds and actions, his will-nature, with thoughts; deeds are performed in love. Such deeds detach themselves from him. Our deeds do not remain confined to ourselves. They become world-happenings; and if they are permeated by love, then love goes with them. As far as the cosmos is concerned, an egotistical action is different from an action permeated by love. When, out of semblance, through fructification by the will, we unfold that which proceeds from our inmost being, then what streams forth into the world from our head encounters our thought permeated deeds. Just as when a plant unfolds it contains in its blossom the seed to which the light of the sun, the air outside, and so on, must come, to which something must be brought from the cosmos in order that it may grow, so what is unfolded through freedom must find an element in which to grow, through the love that lives in our deeds." (end quote)
Zohara, I know you are a student of these Western Mystery Traditions and have read a lot of Rudolf Steiner's work. Before we return to your book, can you share your reflections on this passage of his that talks about how love becomes world-happenings?
Z: You know it's an interesting phenomena because I'll just jump back into the book actually because in White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change one of the dream experiences I had was for a period of three nights I kept seeing these men's faces and I couldn't place them. And finally, I realized who they were. It was Charlie Rose, the TV host, and former Senator John Warner of Virginia. I thought at first, well, maybe this is connected to my political work. How could it be connected to this issue? And what you're just talking about is what elephant taught me because what happened was when John Warner went to his alma mater they were having a mock political convention and there was an elephant named Jewel there, and I tell a long story in the book about the Jewel elephant who was a Barnum and Bailey Circus elephant I believe. But Warner evidently was very kind to the elephant. I looked up Charlie Rose in a very minimal google way, like Charlie Rose and elephant, and came across a wonderful TV series he had done on stopping the brutality and the ivory trade and slaughtering of elephants. So, in these two instances and I think it's important that I explain this is how dream telepathy is done, is I ask the elephants, I was on the elephant chapter, "What do you want me to learn?" And they showed me these two men. And then the following day I googled their names with elephant and what I discovered is exactly what Rudolf Steiner says, which is what the elephant says as well, which is that anytime anyone of us performs an act of love, of compassion, of generosity, it literally stirs into deep space. The elephant is considered the guardian of the Milky Way road along with wolf and the elephant is what stirs the Milky Way really to give birth to compassion on the planet. Each one of these animals holds a cosmic role, not just over physical space like bear presides over the northern part of the planet where all the longitudes come together, bear, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the great bear in the sky presides over the pole star.
B: I have to say this you have some great photographs of bears and the constellation bears. I've studied a lot of bear constellations and you've picked out some great ones.
Z: Well, there are beautiful historic prints in the book which I did deliberately to help us appreciate that this kind of reverence for animals has always been a part of planetary history and is so vital. We're talking about revering kin that have very similar needs to our own. You know I think Dr. Gay Bradshaw who founded trans species psychology has done such a beautiful job demonstrating for the academic community that we have to stop this nonsense of thinking you can make an animal suffer with some sort of experiment, or separating them from their mothers, or taking them out of their natural habitats and thinking it has no consequences. Or that they don't have the same kind of experience of pain and family and pleasure and memory that we do, because they do. Everything has memory of its own kind and everything has consciousness of its own kind. But when we're talking about sentient animals and mammals they share a culture and as she would put it, the difference is so slight it's like visiting a foreign nation and maybe not knowing their language but recognizing what they're doing. It's the same thing with our animal kin, they aren't less evolved than us they just have a different purpose. Ok, so they're not building cities but guess what, they can keep nature intact and we can't. We're destroying nature. And that's really an interesting thing that came out of the book for me is that humans have this notion of, "oh my God, what will the Earth do without us, we're going to go extinct." Well, the Earth will be in really good shape without us. Different but initially definitely better because we've done so much to destroy the metasystems and that's the thing the animals are imploring us about. It's not just about saving them, it's also that if we don't save them, we're finished. And if we don't save them, the ecosystem will collapse much more quickly.
And so, what Rudolf Steiner and what the elephant is telling us is that our good acts of love towards anybody and anything is extremely important. It's kind of like the weave and the warp of spirit and love is really what keeps everything contiguous and in harmony. And that doesn't mean you have to have feelings of emotional romantic love, we're talking about empathy. Having an association with everything as having value. That's the problem with humanity as we have assumed this kind of species entitlement, that we're entitled to abuse, we're entitled to take what we want, we're entitled to make other things and other people suffer, and that's just not the truth. Our role, as lion will teach us, is guardian. As bear will teach us, it's healer. As wolf will teach us, it's to be guardians of life and death, of the newborn and the dying. So, each of these great mammals have taught humanity over the centuries. Like buffalo, buffalo teaches us in such a superior way what it is to give of our life, what it is to be part of a community, what it is to be stewards of the land wherever we are. Each of these great mammals teaches us ecosystem principles, agricultural processes, and spiritual values.
B: Well, in the ancient wisdom teachings it is taught that love is the cohesive force of the universe, not just here on this planet, or in this city, or in this state. That love is the cohesive force of the universe.
Now, the bear, lion, elephant, wolf, and buffalo are all sacred to different indigenous peoples worldwide. Can you share some of the things they all seem to have in common, whether Buddhist, Hindu, Zulu, or Cherokee traditions, to name some of those profiled in your book?
Z: Well, I think as I mentioned at the start of our discussion, they are all apex guardians of ecosystems. The elders who have revered them have always understood this. So, they would go out of their way, for instance when they hunted buffalo because that's how they survived, they wouldn't go after the master leader of the herd. They wouldn't deliberately try to take the most beautiful, as hunters do today. Hunters will often kill the matriarchs of a herd and the patriarchs of a herd, thereby causing great disintegration to the entire herd life. When we have this notion that you can kill an animal and in front of its herd mates, and that they don't have psychological distress from it. Gay Bradshaw's beautiful work in "Elephants on the Edge" shows us in fact they do, they suffer the same kind of post-traumatic stress that humans do. The animals are experiencing such stress on the planet, as is humanity. When you consider how many of us and how many of them are now displaced from our homes as a result of Earth changes, poverty, war, appropriation of habitat. It's frightening truthfully, when we become more conscious of how teetering on the edge everything is. So, the elders in each of these traditions revere these animals as being their teachers. Not just as, "oh aren't they nice animals to have around because we need to eat them", or "we need to keep them around because they're part of our tradition." They are literally teachers.
The other thing is most of them are represented in the star systems. So, it shows that they have a purpose cosmologically. And we don't have time tonight but it's in the book. To discover what each one of them teaches and I touched on it a little bit. But in telepathic dreaming with these animal, for instance wolf wanted me to learn, and I tell it in great detail which I really encourage you to read, that they made it certain in the beginning that I understood that they had relatives and friendship with coyote but not with fox. They were really insistent that I understood they have a relationship that's different with coyote than they do with fox. And then what I would do as an example of how to use dream telepathy like I shared with Charlie Rose and Senator John Warner, who I had dreamt about and then found out they had done these great elephant acts of kindness, is that the wolf wanted me to understand that they were also responsible for guarding the dead. And it's a very long story that I tell and I'm not going to give away the end because it's really one of these... the real seeking stories in the book about the relationship between wolf and Anubis, the Egyptian guardian of the dead.
B: What a discovery, what a discovery.
Z: Yeah but we don't want to give it away do we.
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B: You also profile various animal champions and the efforts to save each of these endangered species. What did you learn from the people you profiled in White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change?
Z: Well, we've heard from some of them in little drops tonight. Gay Bradshaw, Charlie Russell, you just heard from Cynthia Heart, Tamarack Song, Carol Buckley. What one discovers is the kind of not only compassion but endurance that any animal lover, preserver, protector, guardian exhibits in their life and we're not talking about easy lives. Cynthia Heart's experience with the White Buffalo Association, which I tell in great detail in the chapter on buffalo, takes her over a period of 16 years, of first her father giving her a prophecy that she would become a buffalo protector, then having a meditation and hearing a voice telling she and her boyfriend to go to a certain place to see the white buffalo which they did, and it's a very long story about how she listened to the buffalo and she took them wherever it was they wanted to go. And this is what you find in all of these animal champions, that they're all telepaths. They all, because of their love and their compassion for the animals that they protect and guard and serve, have come into conscious rapport with them. And it's not necessarily that anybody sets out to be these things, it's that when you come into a loving relationship with anything on Earth, whether it's in existence or non-existence, you are in rapport with it. Because if everything is light and we know that everything is connected through love then consciousness is that which makes everything relatable. So, each of these people, you know Gay Bradshaw is the woman who really founded trans species psychology and has moved the needle in science away from anybody being able to justify animal torture, animal experimentation, or a two-tiered system of analysis that their brains somehow are different and they don't experience the kinds of pleasure and sorrow that we do, but they do. Like we know from elephants for a fact and bears, when you watch these animals grieve and the distress that's caused to them through the hardships humans have caused them, it's extraordinarily heartbreaking.
Each of them has pioneered, in some way, a new generation of people appreciating that what each one of us does matters. Whether it's what we eat, what we grow, how we treat animals in our own neighborhood, how we talk to scientists we know who might be involved in animal experimentation, where we send our donations, whether it's to PETA or to the Natural Resources Defense Council or to any group. They show us that it's by a community of people, each doing their own work whatever that is, for some of you it might mean feeding the birds, for somebody else it might mean taking the vines out of the trees, somebody else it might be volunteering at a dog sanctuary, for somebody else it might be sending a check, for somebody else it might be praying. Or for those of you who want to practice dream telepathy, do you mind if I take a minute to go over this?
B: Oh, please do, I know our listeners would love to learn more about it.
Z: Yeah I don't talk about it actually a lot in the book and I haven't talked about it much tonight but I think it's really important to appreciate that all of us are in a position to be telepaths. We're all designed to be telepathic, and all of us experience it at certain times in our lives. Sometimes we might think of it as premonition, where we think of something that's going to happen and then it does. Or the phone rings and we just know that it's Aunt Doris. Or whatever it is that happens in our lives from day to day, where you get a hunch about the lottery number and that's the number that hits. These are all related skills and they all are happening because you're paying attention to something that you really put your focus on. So, animal telepathy I'd really like to encourage everybody in the audience to practice it. If you have a domestic animal that you love or that is deceased or sitting right there with you now in your lap, when you go to sleep at night ask a particular question. And if you have an animal who is sick, and this is how the Greeks used to dream their own healing was through dream telepathy and dream incubation, and they could come into rapport with elders who had passed on. But ask a question, you know as Dowsers will tell us, the more specific the question, the more specific the answer. So, if you have an animal that's sick, you can ask that animal before you go to sleep at night, "Please show me what I can do to help you?" You don't have to know what's wrong because I'm not a medical diagnostician and I'm not a medical animal healer, though a lot of people call me with their medical problems. What I do is I just ask the animal what can we do for them and they show us. They might say "I am ready to go." They might say, "no I want you to finish moving before you put me to sleep." They might say, "my water bowl is just too dirty." Or "where I'm sleeping outside has maggots or parasites." Or whatever it is, the animals will tell you. The trick to it is not to analyze what they tell you but to just appreciate it.
I'll give you a very quick story. Somebody came to me about a dog they had rescued and that since they had moved it was very, very anxious, never settling down, causing a great deal of stress among all the animal companions in the household, a cat, a rabbit, a tortoise, et cetera. And the dog showed me very quickly that it had had a orange mat at one point in its life. And I said to the owner, "Well, you packed away it's orange blanket." It was like a blanket. And they looked at me and replied, "I can't believe you said that!" I said, "Well, I didn't think of it, your dog just told me it wants its orange blanket." So, they went into a box they put into storage that had been hidden away for two years, brought out the orange blanket. I said to "put it at the end of your bed, the dog needs to know where its home is, where its center is, that it's still needed." Within 24 hours they had a different experience among the pack. So, these things are very minor in the same way with a human being, sometimes it's as simple as opening the window at night or drinking more tea or whatever it is, the animals will tell you. And if you find yourself ever in a situation where you don't trust yourself, let me encourage you to trust yourself. Don't analyze the answer you're getting. Or a tree can be sick and you can say what does the tree need? The tree might just need to be loved. You know, everything in life responds to love and that's why we know prayer is so effective. Prayer is one of our great tools as speaking humans and I write about that at the end of the book because we're in a time period of such drastic change and it will just get precipitously worse over the coming decades. All of us really need to cultivate our intuition, our telepathic abilities, our empathy, our prayer, all of these non-localized skills are those tools that will allow us to communicate when there are no telephones, will allow us to communicate when the satellites go down, will allow us to know what to do for each other even if we're far away from our loved ones. The more we practice now, the easier it will be in times of emergency.
B: Great advice, great advice. You emphasize the qualities we learn from these animals throughout the book. Can you give us a few highlights for each of these great apex mammals?
Z: I can and it was such a beautiful journey with each, they've all changed my life so profoundly in ways no humans ever have. Well, bear as I mentioned at one point is really the Earth healer. And when we think about a bear hibernating, the bear has given us all kinds of secrets that scientists are trying to tap into, which is why don't they lose muscle mass when they hibernate for six months, or why is it that a mother bear can nurse even though she has eaten nothing and it doesn't suffer her body. The bear teaches us how to heal from Earth and how to prepare for Earth changes. She's very insistent about preparation. And I don't stress it in the book but all you have to do is think about a bear, a bear hibernates and those six months they plan for, they eat well. And they come out of hibernation and they breed and then take their cubs and they stay together. You know, that's the other thing that's really amazing about all these animals is that the mother is the center of these mammalian traditions as it was when we had matriarchies and the children. iIn this case the animals stay with the mother for long periods of time, so the bears stay with their mother until they're three. And then the male bear goes off and will mate with another bear but the female bears will stay around in a loose affiliation.
The elephant really teaches us that they live a long time, they live 80 years, the same span as a human. The teach us a great deal about telepathy and they teach us a great deal about kindness. They're so kind even though humans have treated them so horribly and they're strong enough to do any human around them terrible harm and they seldom do. But there was a great story about Lawrence Anthony who is considered 'the elephant whisperer.' When he passed away.elephants he had not seen for over a year and a half actually showed up, several different herds came by his home after he had died in order to pay homage to him. Nobody told them he had died, nobody sent out an announcement hundreds of miles away. But they all showed up and every year on the anniversary of his death they still show up. So, elephants teach us a great deal about compassion, telepathy, caring for each other, living long maternal lives. The herds stay together, the females stay together their entire lifetimes, it's the males who go off and mate and form new families.
The lion really teaches about our hearts and about heart alchemy. Because of where they appear on the Nilotic Meridian, there were whole cultures devoted to the lions in Babylonia, Sumeria, et cetera, where they were considered the queen of heaven. So, the lion really teaches us what it is to guard the Earth and that's our noble hearted purpose.
The wolf, as our spirit guardian is really our companion. The wolf is closest to human than any other mammal and always has been. Our dogs are mostly wolf. It's interesting though that wolf and bear are 97% the same genetically and they diverged a few million years ago. But we have a Mountain Pyrenees dog that actually looks like a bear and I call him bear for fun. It's interesting how close they are. But wolf is really a spirit guardian and teaches that life is a continuum. It's not life and death, that it's not that we're here and then we're not here and we're gone. We're always here and they show us that we're always present.
That's the beauty of all these animals, it's that shamans work with them to use the skill that these animals naturally have and it confers on the shaman, or the animal telepath, those same talents. So, if you want to be a healer, bear would be a good animal to come into rapport with. If you want to fly and look over terrain to see what needs to be done, you befriend birds of some sort. And then the buffalo, I don't want to forget to say because buffalo are very dear to me and are my spirit guardians and they're six of them that came to me years before I did this work and really showed me what's possible in the invisible spectrum. But they're really our Earth stewards, our Earth teachers, and they show us what it is to sacrifice for the good and the welfare of the whole. So, I'm really glad that President Obama signed into law that the bison is now our national mammal. Because to me the buffalo rising is the most wonderful sign that we are awakening to our purpose as Earth guardians. The buffalo are the most sacred mammal to the northern continent and reviving their herds, there used to be 60 million or so buffalo that roamed our Earth and kept the Earth vibrant and kept the land from turning to desert. But more so they invigorate spirit. So, I close all my letters now and I sign everything "Buffalo Rising" and what I mean by that is that the awareness in us is rising. That animals are our kin, brother and sister. That all of the elder traditions speak to them in this fashion. And any elder stories that I have included in the book or that you read on your own, you will see that these are mammals that are co-creators with humans and they are not less than us. They are our collaborators and that's what needs to be driven home. They're not there to be exploited, used, and eaten as table food or table product. They're literally our teachers and they're here to help us preserve what we can of Earth until the Earth can be restored properly.
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B: Do you know what Tamarack Song said about this book? He said, "In these times of turmoil, it is critically important that we listen to the phantom shaman animals who have stepped forward to guide us. Zohara Hieronimus knows where to find them and she knows their language. With White Spirit Animals she has given us an invaluable portal into their world. I implore you to go there."
Z: Can I add something to that? Because you know this book fulfills two childhood dreams of mine and Thomas Moore once said to me in an interview, "The soul is always circling home." So, I want to firstly thank Inner Traditions, Bear & Company for giving me the opportunity, not only to fulfill a childhood dream of mine but to have done something in a way that very few publishing companies will permit an author to do, which is use telepathy or some other form of PSI skills. They have been such supporters of so many wonderful people around the world that I really want to thank Ehud Sperling, who was the founder, and all of his staff for making it possible for so many of us who have sort of lived a little differently than perhaps the status quo but have something to contribute that is important.
One of the things that I want to say about that though is that when we're young, some of us have dreams of what we want to be and we always meet people who go, "oh yeah, I knew by 7 I'd be a doctor" and they went straight on that path. Well, I always loved animals and wanted to talk to animals. But I thought, probably like most people until I got much older and did practice all these non-local consciousness arts, radionics, dowsing, healing at a distance, prayer at a distance, et cetera. I thought I would learn how to interpret a birds call or I'd learn how to interpret a cat's various meows, like I was studying a foreign language. That's how I imagined it as a child, that one day I would understand their languages as if they were a foreign language. What I didn't know then, is that everything talks in the same language, which is it speaks through images. And the receiver will receive it in whatever language it is they need in order to interpret what it is they're receiving. We're all receivers and senders. We're bio-capacitors. So, as light beings we're receiving signals, which are light signals of a certain frequency and then our bio-capacitor, our non-local consciousness has the ability to translate those signals into shape and form and meaning. So, symbols which you are certainly expert in and why Egyptians and other cultures used forms and symbols to communicate because they tell whole stories through which the whole universe is connected.
And these animals communicate sometimes through images, sometimes in language but it really depends on the receiver. So, some of you may get an image from your animal. Some of you may hear a story, some of you may smell something, some of you may remember something, or get a feeling somewhere in your body. And all of these things are right, there's no right or wrong is what I want to say. What I learned later in life is that no, I never learned to interpret a dog's bark, though I love it when our dogs sing, Omaha is a spectacular singer, two range of octaves, extraordinary really. It's that it's through telepathy that we can understand anything. And what that simply means is opening your heart to whatever it is you want to communicate with, whomever, whatever, wherever. And once you open your heart you come into rapport with that which you put your focus on. But I do want to say it's really important to appreciate these are sacred contracts. You know, shamans when they work with animals or when I work with animals, I will do what they ask me to. If I come into rapport with an animal and it says "I'm sick and my owner's not taking care of me will you tell them?" I have to follow through on that. These are sacred contracts that shamans make with these animal helpers. These are not loose affiliations or weekend workshops like, "Yeah, I'm going to work with the jaguar and I'm going to be a jaguar shaman." Well, it doesn't work that way. Once you make a commitment to an animal or to a person or to a tree or to a bird or to an anthill or whatever it is, these are sacred relationships so don't minimize what they ask you if you ask. This is why I am saying it, if you ask and they give you an answer, we have an obligation to do something about it. And it's very important that we appreciate that these are real things of a substantial nature. These relationships are sacred. So, I never learned how to interpret any animal language, but through telepathy you can talk to anything and anyone, living or nonliving, anywhere.
B: Well, as you know, I very much enjoyed the first part of your book in which you talk about what you did as a child, which is something similar to what I did as a child. And that is you gathered all of your stuffed animals, all dozen of them or so, and had one sitting close to you and the next night you'd have someone else sitting next to you.
Z: Oh, I had a whole egalitarian chart of rotation so that each one would sleep next to me at some point, which they all did. And I had a glass menagerie of animals, I collected china animals. I wanted to be a vet, truthfully, from the time I was probably three onward and so when I was nine, our lovely vet let me come to his veterinary center one day and a cat was brought in who had been hit by a car and it was bleeding to death. That was the end of my being a veterinarian. I was so sensitive to the trauma and the pain that it physically hurt me. And that's something that I want to say about coming into rapport with real life suffering, whether it's of human, nature, or animals. It does affect you, it did affect me. I found this book the most difficult thing I've probably ever done in my life. And I cover it, the abuse and suffering that each of these species has experienced and continues to at the hands of humans is atrocious. Whether it's the elephants with their bodies being hacked to death for their ivory. Or bears being put into cages in Asia to have their bile farmed like they are corn and they die after five years of total trauma and suffering, even though their lifespan is 30 plus years. When we come into rapport with things that suffer, you may feel that in your body and I don't want to minimize that for some people. Now, not everyone is as sensitive as I am and I don't know how to turn that off. Some people seem to have that talent, I don't. So, each time I would study the suffering an animal was going through in current time and in the past, I suffered. I cried a lot writing this book, as you know.
But the dream telepathy is magnificent and I really want to encourage everybody in our audience, please, use your dreams. For whatever it is, if you're trying to solve a problem in your marriage or your trying to solve a problem for one of your grandchildren or you're looking to make a change in your life and you don't know what it is. Ask before you go to sleep. And you may not get the answer immediately. Or the answers or information you get in your dream, you need to keep something by your bed to write with, it's not easy if you don't practice this kind of work but I promise you, if you do it a few nights in a row, over a period of time you will get much better at it. And sometimes you might not have a whole dream, it might be right when you're waking up you'll hear something. Write it down because whatever little piece you're gathering, you're really gathering it from the soul. You know our souls all come together when we sleep, we're no longer limited by our experience to the edge of our skin. And it's in that state that any one of us, with scientists we know this for a fact that many of the great discoverers have said, I got the answer in my dream. Our dreams are a sacred part of our consciousness and are a great tool that we have been given and we spend half our lives dreaming. So, make use of your dreams. And you can even incubate good dreams, you can say, I want to dream what my future is going to look like or I want to dream a better future for the Earth. What should I do? Whatever it is, just ask very clear questions and keep notes. And over a period of time you will really be able to interpret it to some degree. Like one dream I had, and I tell this story of what the wolf finally tells us, it gave me a dream about preservation and restoration and conservation. And I understood a few days later what they were telling me was CPR, the Earth needs CPR. Conservation, preservation, and restoration. So, they may speak to you in signs and symbols, but keep track of it because over time, as you see demonstrated in my book, White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change, I relied on the dreams and then what I would do would be go do the rational research afterwards. I would take what they told me and then I'd go look it up and they were always right. Whether it was science or philosophy.
B: Well, you know even though you cover the various animals difficulties with the way we've been torturing them. There are sections, like with in the book on elephants. You introduced me to their families, how their families work, and how they move, and how they stick together. And the love that is shared with them. So there's a lot of positive parts and you do that with the bison and the wolf, et cetera. But I was especially impressed by the way the elephants, that could step on us and squash us, would much rather want to love us and care for us. And yet we treat them so badly.
Z: I really think the elephant is our Buddhist way shower and it is fascinating when you read in the book actually, their real connection to the Buddha himself.
B: Well, how did writing this book affect you?
Z: It changed my life tremendously. I tell a story about animals screaming in my head. You may recall in 2011 when I decided I wanted to broaden my work outside domestic animals to wild animals. And at first I thought I would go to the zoo, but I decided it would be way too full of suffering because that's not a natural place for an animal to be. Wolf said, we'd never put anything in a cage.
It changed my appreciation for what shamans do worldwide. It changed my appreciation for animal telepaths worldwide, and the fact that all of us have this ability. You know me, I have to show myself something is true, it's not enough for me to read it in a book. I really wanted to see if it was possible for me to do what shamans have been doing for millennia. And the answer is yes. And if I can do it so can anybody else who really makes their heart committed to listening to the animals speak. It takes practice. That's really the key, is to come into loving rapport and to know that you're serving them and that it's not about you. It's about being of service to them and that was really the key for me is that now I know I have the capacity to help anybody in any situation, however limited it might be, but I might be able to offer a key that will be helpful. That's why I want to encourage everybody to do it, but because we never know if it's somebody in the grocery store whom we have an impression of that we say, "you're really a beautiful person", that could change their whole life. This one little thing. And that's what the elephant taught me and that's what you mentioned about Rudolph Steiner. An act of love is a great colossal reality.
B: We're coming to closing comments, regarding the lessons you've learned and what you'd like to leave us with tonight?
Z: The most important thing is love. And to be committed when we make a commitment to do something, to follow through. That it can't just be sort of a casual, "I hope the Earth gets better." Well, the Earth will get better if all of us do something wherever we live and our local efforts are probably the most important thing we can now do wherever we are. It doesn't mean we stop being aware of the world, but each of us has the ability to change the terrestrial terrain where we live, both politically, literally, physically, spiritually. And if you find yourself unable to do something physically, just remember prayer. Prayer is one of the most powerful tools we speaking humans have and the animals also make that very clear.
B: Do animals pray you think?
Z: Animals are prayer.
B: We have a minute left, what would you like to leave our listeners with?
Z: To encourage everybody to read White Spirit Animals: Prophets of Change. The book gives you a broad education, not only into elder lore which we certainly couldn't touch on tonight, but also the science and the magic of our ability as humans to help the animal kingdom help us. Because that's what they're here to do, they're here to help us with the changes that are coming and to guide us. And I thank them forever from this life to the next for their great beautiful majestic generosity.
Transcription by Joseph Ford.
