Kevin Ryerson Interview
Appeared in Dreamweaver Magazine March/April 2004
Copyright Kevin Ryerson & COMPANY 2004
I recently had the opportunity to talk at length with Kevin Ryerson. In an extraordinary interview with Kevin Ryerson, I was deeply touched by his humor, wit, compassion and wisdom. Being from Ohio, his delightful Midwestern humor was obvious. His genuine nature allows him to be approachable and yet his vast studies, experiences and professional efforts have also given him an extensive background from which to draw upon. I was struck by how the words just flowed from him – simple, easy to understand and profound. I was graced with a presence of spirit and intellect that touched my imagination, heart and spirit. If you have not had the chance to read his book – Spirit Communications; I urge you to. The pages are filled with profound truth that leaves you wanting more.
TAMMI: Would you like to talk about your childhood in Sandusky, Ohio?
KR: Well, it’s always a place to begin! I always introduce myself as Kevin Ryerson. I’m your friendly neighborhood psychic and trance channel in the global village. I always paraphrase the American comedian Bill Cosby by saying that I started out as a child! I was born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, which dealing in what’s considered the unique fields of parapsychology and spirituality and New Age gives me good solid Midwestern credentials coming from the state that’s been known as the mother of presidents. Sandusky has mystical claims to fame itself in that it is considered to be a jewel of communities that has been designed by the Free Masons. The entire town is not only famous for its amusement park, Cedar Point; the city itself was famous for its sacred geometry laid out by the Masons. Its’ park is considered to be one of the most perfectly preserved in the city and was laid out by the Masons. It almost has sort of a little bit of a claim to fame of a mystical history unto itself.
As for myself, I was interested in parapsychology initially as a hobby. I say parapsychology because that is the scientific investigation of what is normally considered psi or the so-called paranormal. I did not approach spirituality religiously although I had my upbringing in a local Baptist church in Sandusky. My interest in spirituality began with the study of ESP by the work of Dr. Rhine from Duke University who was the inventor of such innovations as the so-called Zenner Cards which were used in scientific testing to be able to test the validity and/or high degree of percentile if a person may or may not possess extrasensory perception, the famous cards of wavy lines, triangles and circles, to be able to see under certain conditions the person was able to predict the pattern in which the cards would emerge after they have been randomly generated.
I went on to actually found, for about a year or so, an ESP club in my high school. So, as I put it, while other students had been studying putting together model airplanes, I was studying ESP and Zenner Cards. While they maybe went on to become flight engineers, I eventually went on to pursue parapsychology as a full-time career.
TAMMI: But it’s very progressive, too.
KR: Parapsychology is a very progressive science. It’s making some major contributions to our society today. It’s intriguing. Parapsychology’s contributions have been not only the establishment of extrasensory perception but it is the direct result of parapsychology. It is almost like a branch of anthropology that has brought prominent practices such as acupuncture into the social mainstream as an alternative healthcare practice and, along with acupuncture, the whole range of the use of herbalism. It was parapsychologists, for instance, who brought Edgar Cayce, probably America’s most famous psychic and trance channel, into prominence in the mainstream. The American Medical Association itself has said probably that Edgar Cayce was the single most important provocateur of the American Holistic healthcare movement and may have single-handedly kept the whole holistic healthcare movement alive in the country today to where now what is considered to be complimentary medicine is being accepted as an important adjunct to traditional medicine.
TAMMI: It is amazing that scientific technology is now being able to actually capture and measure the things that people have known or sensed and they can actually have their graphs and charts and things. It’s amazing how the two are coming together.
KR: Well, the whole concept behind alternative medicine began with Edgar Cayce, which interestingly enough, by the way, if my memory serves me correctly, began his career psychically in Ohio, even though he was born in Kentucky, as I recall. His first channeling state occurred in Canton, Ohio, where he was in private practice, initially, as a photographer as the family business. So, there’s another attribute for us folks from Ohio. But it was the Edgar Cayce Foundation, by his founding a hospital, combined with the scientific research with people such as Dr. Rhine that eventually had led to the popular core of the use of the scientific method in the use of contemporary technology to create the contemporary holistic healthcare movement as we understand it today.
TAMMI: One of the things that struck me in going through not only your book but some of the other things that I’m familiar with is the phrase “trance channel.” I’m not sure that everyone will realize exactly what the difference is between a medium and a trance channel. Can you explain what that is?
KR: Yes. The term “channel” was actually first developed and applied to Edgar Cayce to distinguish him from what is considered to be traditional mediumship. Nowadays, the popular image of mediumship is the work of John Edward on the popular TV show Crossing Over. John Edward’s work, as he puts it, is to work with what is called conscious clairvoyant which means to see clearly or is classic ESP, in order to communicate with souls who have immediately passed to the other side. This ability to speak with the so-called surviving psyche of the person post-mortem, which is just a fancy way of speaking with loved ones who have past to the other side, is considered to be classic mediumship.
The modern spiritualist movement began in the United States with the Fox sisters in upstate New York. Mediumship had its real heyday up and to with the popular medium Arthur Ford who also was an American. It still continues to flourish very much in England. This form of mediumship was considered almost a form of grief counseling. It was a way of helping people cope with the trauma of loved ones who had passed to the other side by reassuring them of their capacity for survival.
On the other hand, Edgar Cayce was a channel. They developed the term channel as a way of distinguishing him from orthodox or classic mediumship, which I just described. Edgar Cayce, although he had the capacity to see people who had passed to the other side, felt that he was in communication with another dimension of his own psyche. Freud had established the concept of the subconscious mind, which everyone is familiar with, where, however, in the party of the psychologist Carl Gustof Jung, he established the principle that people also have what is called the collective unconscious or the super subconscious. Edgar Cayce felt that when he would go into a trance state, which initially was hypnotically induced in him, he could tap into a state of consciousness of almost unlimited information. In the simplest terms, although Edgar Cayce had a 6th grade, 19th century education, under hypnosis or in self-induced trance states, he was able to tap into that level of genius that artists are able to tap into by tapping into what’s called their superconscious.
Probably everyone who is a peruser of this information has had the experience of daydreaming, like where you are speaking with someone and suddenly you just go into a mild altered state and you have a keener insight into the conversation you had with the person and when you come out of the daydream and you go, oh, excuse me, I don’t remember our conversation but I just had this extraordinary insight into what we were talking about that I would like to address, that is almost a brief moment of entering into a channeling-like state. What people like Edgar Cayce and myself have done, we have trained ourselves to use those reflexes so that we can use them at will so that, in this so-called altered state, when tapped into what’s called this so-called super consciousness, questions can be posed where in Edgar Cayce’s case, in spite of his being limited by his 6th grade education, he could discourse on medical issues. He could discourse on geology. He could discourse on ancient history later verified through other medical examinations of the issues that he was addressing or through anthropological examinations of the new issues of history he was bringing heretofore.
What I consider channeling, which is simply a term that means to cut through or go directly to a source, is tapping into the latent genius or extrasensory capacity that is inside of everyone.
TAMMI: What struck me with your work is that it appears to be more spiritual more esoteric, not to say that the messages from departed loved ones are not very important to us, but yours is on a different level where people can do the soul-searching.
KR: It’s a little bit what distinguished Edgar Cayce from the traditional spiritualists of say the Fox sisters and maybe even Madam Blavaski of the Theosophical movement. The stated work of classic mediumship is the attempt to establish what they consider the important spiritual principle that there is no death and there is no dying. There is only the continuity of life.
Edgar Cayce came along at the beginning of the century almost in anticipation of what we now call the Information Age. You might almost think of channeling as sort of like "googling" the Universe comparable to the Internet where you go to a search engine, type in a question and then suddenly bodies of information in various thesis in various fragmentary and whole forms are accessible to the person.
Also, contemporary science says that everything can be digitalized, every object, every type or source of energy can be translated into information and then the challenge is to be able to translate that information in ways that is useful to human beings. Edgar Cayce appeared to have that ability because his emphasis was less on the afterlife than it was emphasizing the quality of life we live here and now to develop the soul so that in perhaps the next so-called reincarnation or incarnation here on the earth plane souls could live in ever-increasing heightened quality of spiritual awareness. That is really the focus of Edgar Cayce’s work. I also like to think it is probably the overwhelming focus of my own work as a trance channel.
TAMMI: Right. By the way, your book is absolutely phenomenal.
KR: Oh, you enjoyed Spirit Communications?
TAMMI: I think it should be on everybody’s to “read list,” personally.
KR: Well, it’s currently out of print but it is accessible because I encouraged people who actually have it to go ahead and feel free to make some copies of it and them maybe make the original either hardback or paperback available. There are about 80,000 of them floating around out there. You can always pick one up on E-Bay or in some of the used book stores or on-line at Amazon.com.
TAMMI: Is there any talk of bringing it back?
KR: Not so much in it’s original form simply because I think some of the chapters need to be readdressed, more contemporary issues and new bodies of channeled information added. But I believe some of the same principles will be rearticulated in a new book that I am working on that will probably be released within a publishing season or two. In other words, it might be a summer read for 2004.
TAMMI: Congratulations! Do you have a title yet?
KR: Thank you. Yes. There’s one working title called Ancestral Intelligence.
TAMMI: But people can always visit your website, too? (Address: www.kevinryerson.com)
KR: That is true.
TAMMI: Can you touch upon how people are opening up and moving into a more spiritually aware consciousness right now?
KR: Yes. If I could draw on some of the personal experience of some of the people that have visited me. People may be aware of me from my work with Shirley McClaine and from the mini-series based on her own best-seller Out on a Limb. In Out on a Limb Shirley, at that time, was mapping out in her book her own spiritual journey. She was exploring who she was and what she was doing here from the context of past lives. What were the roots and sources of her talent? Did they evolve in other lifetimes through what is called karma? She refers to me as sort of like one of the telephones in her life as a way of getting in touch with her spiritual guides and teachers.
In her exploration with Spirit, of which if people want the visuals on that, they can still acquire copies of Out on a Limb from Shirley’s own website which is simply ShirleyMcClaine.com. I’ve done a series of interviews with Shirley, which are archived on her site, and can elaborate on some of the things we’re saying here. I mention that mostly because what Shirley was exploring at that time is what people are now exploring and are beginning to unfold in this period of time.
When people come to me for what’s called an individual consultation, they’re exploring the fundamental issues that they have come here for, but less so from what is called the karmic contract perspective. It is less that people feel nowadays as we are approaching quite literally what we call the New Age or what we call the Aquarian Age, they are less exploring the phenomena of karmic debt and approaching it from sort of like, well, how can I get out of the Earth plane so I don’t have to come back here anymore because it’s not particularly a pleasant place to be, but are not approaching it as though the Earth plane or Earth or being human is somehow part of being separated from a greater Divine state of energy.
They’re exploring it from a different perspective. Rather than emphasizing the concept of karma in their sessions, they are emphasizing what in Hinduism is called their dharma, which the closest English equivalent might be God-given talents. It also means the Energy that does the work. So, what people are looking at are what are the talents that I have that can serve me and serve society and serve humanity? What is it that I can do with who I am to be a greater relevance to myself and to other people around me?
Individually that would often translate into something like, there was one person, for instance, who had administrative skills, but that wasn’t satisfactory to them because they always ended up in management positions. It really turned out what they had were high level communication and organizational skills and they also had an intense interest in natural healing. What was suggested to them was that they might want to pursue a career in hypnotherapy as well as in energy healing such as popularized in Barbara Brennan’s book Hands of Light. Initially, it appeared to them to be difficult to make that transition. But a strategy had been set up for them to take their administrative skills and go to work in a holistic clinic where there is a chiropractor or acupuncturist. With a little bit of humor one of the entities that speaks through me, Tom McPherson, had told them that many healers are fabulous healers but they are lousy organizers! So, this person used their administrative skills to go in, stabilize the public service of this holistic clinic and then, apprenticing with these people, eventually went into a full scale practice of acting as a healer themselves.
What this shows to me is that where we are now as a people and as a society, just looking at that one case history, is that we are in to transforming ourselves as a human being. We are moving out of the idea that we must just live by our labor but that we are really here to transform ourselves in relationship to deeper energies and deeper talents that we have that we are here to be of service to. This is the beginning of entering into the Aquarian Age.
I’ve had the privilege of working in directly with a person by the name of Dr. Dean Ornish. Dr. Dean Ornish was the first person to establish that through changes in diet, by shifting to what’s called a low-fat, low-oil diet, preferable vegetarian, it was possible to reverse heart disease that was initially considered irreversible, congenital or would demand radical surgery in the form of, say, angioplasty or by-pass surgery. But he was able to demonstrate unequivocally that new heart ventricles can grow through change in diet, but, above all else, change in emotional attitude. In other words, by tapping into these deep levels of the soul through techniques such as biofeedback, visualization, yoga, combined with healthy changes in the diet, the body could be self-healing. When you look at the statement that he made that when he was accused of being radical by using these spiritual methodologies, he said, “What is more radical? Putting a person on a surgical table, using stainless steel tools or lasers to open them up, cracking their chest open in order to perform radical surgery on their fundamental organs or just encouraging them to eat a few more vegetables and develop a healthy spiritual attitude?” Which is the more radical of the two?
So, by spirituality coming to the mainstream, we are bringing enlightenment to our key institutions. The Rudolph Stiener schools, the Waldorf schools, which has its roots in an educational model by tapping into the collective unconscious, by teaching children, rather than by complex mathematical skills, teaching them the fundamental skills of art and tapping into their natural intuition and then going on to learning the other logical skills to support the growth of the soul is the single most rapidly growing private educational movement in the world. They have 100,000 to 200,000 graduates every year.
Medicine is being transformed through the work of people such as Dean Ornish and, of course, the Edgar Cayce readings and the synergizing from other cultures, such as acupuncture. Architecture is being transformed because architect from our largest home builders such as Kaufman are using fundamental principles such as Feng Shui which allows for the free flow of the life force to move throughout the whole of the architecture and bringing that into the consciousness of the occupant. The largest home developer is building that into architectural principle, not just into the interior design of the home but into the planning of whole home communities. So, if you will, each one of our key institutions are beginning to be transformed.
When you have political candidates nowadays, such as Dennis Kusinich, for instance, wanting to establish, of all things, a Department of Peace rather than a Department of War even on the high end levels of government, I believe we are beginning to make the right moves of using some of these inner resources to make permanent value changes in our society as a whole.
TAMMI: It’s the filter-down effect. We can’t but not be changed. A lot of what you were talking about falls into your 8 principles of what you call the primary needs of the human. Personally, I thought those were the simplest and easiest to understand concepts I’ve ever read. The wisdom in them made so much sense. I’d like to see a poster of that somewhere. Can you talk about the nature of prophecy and predictions?
KR: The nature of prophecy and predictions is a little bit like what we were relating to. The nature of prophecy itself is important to understand because we are beginning to transform our way of looking at it. Prophecy has long been traditionally interpreted in the West principally through the filters and concepts of Biblical prophecy. There’s a tendency for the media, in particular, to look at prophecy as though it is an event that has been divinely decreed that, because of conditions in the social order, usually of which are highly negative, become a part of the citizenry of an event that is disastrous usually the very term of biblical scale usually resulting somehow of the destruction of the citizenry by natural or almost supernatural-like forces of nature, such as earthquakes or hurricanes are the traditional interpretation of prophecy. Even the Edgar Cayce readings with the famous earth changes carry, if you will, that same sort of consequence of almost stereotyping. However, prophecy has always had greater complexity.
Biblically, when accounts, whether its the classic Biblical prophecy, such as when Egypt had been visited by 7 years of famine that had been predicted by the dreams of Pharaoh and had been interpreted by the prophet Joseph in the Bible, there was always a question that was asked. Why do these things occur? Why do these prophecies occur? The answer has always been the same. Because people did not keep the laws of the prophets, which brings us to the point of complexity. Prophecy is not the phenomena but a statement being made to which then there is a reaction. Prophecy is actually a set of revelations that allow people to live their lives to a greater and fuller measure of who they are. In other words, prophecy is the fulfillment of human nature.
The so-called laws of the prophets are not some, if you will, overwhelmingly burdensome moral code that is almost unfulfillable. It is really a way of conducting life that people can use to measure the enlightenment they already possess in order to create relationships in a society that reflects the greater part of human potential.
As an example, perhaps, the most successful prophet in the whole Bible was Jonah. Jonah, of course, was the famous story about a reluctant prophet who eventually, in attempting to flee on a ship, was swallowed by a whale and then almost archetypically was released three days later and he went and prophesied the fall of a city and yet all the people in the city, hearing the prophecy, repented. They went about performing acts of humility, almost acts of purification. Then when Jonah returned to the city and saw it still standing and the people prospering, he thought he had failed as a prophet. But God spoke to Jonah and said it was not about the destruction of the city that is the fulfillment of the prophecy. It is about the quality of life that is brought to people that is the fulfillment of prophecy.
Which then brings us to some of the prophecies that still are resonating with people. Edgar Cayce’s predictions about earth changes years ago were classic prophecy in that they were almost acts of faith. People were moving from urban cores into the country and reestablishing arms. The remnants of those persons moving back to the land are now the core of the organic farming movement in this country. They are the principle suppliers of organic food in rapidly growing institutions such as Whole Foods, Wild Oats which are growing more quickly than conventional distributors of foods such as Safeway. People who responded to the concepts of the earth changes initially were people who were spiritual.
Nowadays, under the influence of famous thinkers and skeptics, such as Carl Sagan, it is scientists who are warning us about the earth changes due to the need to make lifestyle choices that are more in harmony with the ecology. If we don’t, there will be the melting of the polar ice caps and, eventually, the inundation of our coastal cities if we raise the temperature of the planet by just a matter of three to six degrees. So what was once exclusively the domain of Edgar Cayce is now interestingly enough the domain of science and the ecological sciences. You can see from this that prophecy is about humanity observing its own choices and expressing its own nature.
We are very much what Edgar Cayce said the new Atlantians. If we make certain lifestyle choices, our coastal cities
are inundated, and the oceans reclaim that element of our citizenry and our society just like when Atlantis sank. But, however, because we are the new Atlantians and we can learn from history, it is much more likely that with the social forces that have been set in motion that I have been trying to articulate here, such as the organic food movement, the new models of medicine that are emerging that where we draw from herbs and the natural ecology, the ability to use meditation as a tool to enhance the education of children, the new educational movement that has less the breakdown of the public school paradigm than it’s the transformation of educational programs by including things such as yoga and non-competitive sports as part of the school curriculum.
These things will not be without their points of resistance because without resistance there is no free-will, but that these things are emerging out of peoples’ freewill and it is the emergence of the new culture that is the fulfillment of prophecy much as the way Jonah’s city that he prophesied to prospered. It is an act of humility and an act of wisdom to alter negative qualities in ones’ lifestyle in order to achieve the greater results for oneself and the benefits of society as a whole. I think that there are now irreversible trends of what I call the darma prophecies or the positive prophecies that have been set in motion and that there is a newly emerging parapsychological way of looking at the world around us. It is less that it is the new Atlantians and Atlantis is on the threshold of being, once again, washed over by the oceans, but rather that we are being washed over by whole new expressions of consciousness.
TAMMI: Is that where we have the problem with our ego?
KR: Oh, the ego is kind of fascinating. I don’t beat up the ego. There are people who articulate all kinds of measures of the ego. There are philosophical articulations about negative ego that we need to build up our self-esteem in order to be receiving of how great and aware we are. Quite frankly, I think that coping with the ego is in and of itself part of the life process. It’s what individualizes us and makes us unique. There was a whole movement based around a thinker such as Ayn Rand, although I don’t agree with everything she said, I did agree with something that Frank Lloyd Wright said that he believed in what he called “enlightened ego” in the idea that a person had to have at least enough of a measure of sense of self-worth in order to make a healthy contribution to society. Otherwise, he’d be running with what would be called a martyr complex.
My real sense of the loss of ego comes at.... Let me just play off of you for a moment. Have you every had one of those days where everything flowed just so smoothly? You got up in the morning, your coffee was hot, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, the paper was on the front doorstep and you just flowed smoothly through the whole day?
TAMMI: Few and far between some weeks, but yes!
KR: But you just had one of those synchronistic days, no matter how few and far between. I just realized this phone call is coming from Ohio! It might be a little more rare than out in California, particularly during those long winters! The bottom line is that those synchronistic days like that when the energy is just flowing, those are what I call dharma enlightened days. Those are the days when we are really feeling the full measure of the Deity’s love for us. On days like that we don’t have to think about anything, it’s like our ego dissolves.
But one of the things we do at the end of those days is that we go, this day was so miraculous and so wonderful it doesn’t feel like it’s real. Unfortunately, the subconscious mind, which is kind of like the inner child, children take everything literally, the subconscious mind will go like, gosh, they just tapped into the wonderful nature of Reality itself and everything is flowing but they just said that this isn’t real to them so they must want to go back to the old model of karma and suffering because that is what they are familiar with.
TAMMI: I am a numerologist so my readings are very different than most traditional readers. I do a lot to help people build up their strengths and their inner qualities that they or may not be aware of. I found it interesting what you were talking about earlier with the gifts. There are times where the message just comes through, get out of your own way. Sometimes, I don’t know if we’re trained to do this or if it’s part of a universal karma with everyone, it’s like we want to complicate life. We forget that it is an experience and a journey. The destination is important, but it is the daily journey that we really need to stop and pay attention to.
KR: Most definitely. It’s what I refer to as the "Brigadoon" factor. If we begin everyday with the sense and the feeling of those synchronistic days of the Deity’s profound essence, that God is Love and those synchronistic days are a testimony to, if you will, the ultimate resolution of the equation of the human condition and that there is just a flow of that energy and that that is the Reality that we are here to live and that is not an exception but that is actually us being fully conscious of the full measure of our human potential, then I think that we have fulfilled the ultimate prophecy.
Kevin Ryerson & COMPANY