Guy Spiro: Lawrence , I usually like to start by asking people to briefly tell their story.

Lawrence Lanoff: I was four, sitting in New York City at the kitchen table with my mom and seeing something in my field of vision that I didn’t understand. I was curious, wondering what I was seeing. So I asked her and she said that she didn’t know, but that she had seen things like that when she was a kid. I was so dissatisfied with that answer.

GS: That was a better response than a lot of kids get. A lot of kids get, “there’s nothing there. You’re not really seeing anything. Stop being silly.”

LL: Fortunately, my mom is kind of a hippie and was pretty open to things. But that was my first real question and dissatisfying answer. The next major piece came when I was nine. My and mom and I were backpacking through Greece , Turkey , and Egypt , heading towards Israel and we got stuck in Egypt just before one of the wars broke out. There two things happened. I had this very vivid past life memory and literally fell to my knees when I saw the pyramids. It was so stirring that I couldn’t sleep. I was just so deeply moved. It was like a voice. Something woke up inside me, telling me that this life is not what it appears to be. And I saw a lot of kids my age starving. What in the heck was I feeling? Why was it that I felt like I could read the hieroglyphics, and what do I do about these children who are dying in front of me?

     Getting back to New York City, I was still very dissatisfied with the answers I was getting as to why things were the way they were. Why was there so much poverty and despair? I had thought I had it bad in New York . I grew up in pretty impoverished conditions, but I was on a holiday compared to the kids in Egypt . So I started exploring pyramid power. I did EST. I did anything and everything that I possibly could. When I would ask really big questions, my mom would point me in the direction of a book. I asked a question about life and she handed me Carlos Castaneda. We actually started a group workshop at that time. She and I would lead an exploration of psychic phenomenon and meditation. That was where things really began.

     I went with these very big questions about life. I found myself in my late teens really grappling. I met a couple of teachers along the way, including Jonathan Parker. He had a tape series called “A Pathway to Mastership” and he was one of the first teachers to help me understand the universe a little bit. I then went into studying with someone who taught me how to discern and track soul energy. When my training was done, I did hundreds and hundreds of sessions with people to practice the technique. In being able to discern subtle energy, I found that I could then go into my own consciousness using the same tools. I began to find out things that I had questions to. When I was in my late twenties or early thirties, I decided that I was no longer going to read any books or take any more workshops. I was going to use the tools that I had and go study my own consciousness.

GS: I hit that same place in my thirties.

LL: So you understand there is a moment when you go ...

GS: It’s all the same stuff and it’s about the practice.

LL: That’s right. So I began this journey. I called up Jonathan who I had become friends with early on. I told him that I needed a meditation partner and he agreed.

GS: What do you mean, “meditation partner?”

LL: It’s one thing to sit alone ...

GS: Where two or more are gathered.

LL: Exactly. All I wanted him to do, and all I wanted to do for him, was hold space and if and where I got stuck, to just give me a little nudge. It was very supportive. No answers. Let’s just explore and find what we find.

     The places that I got to go by doing that kind of work were just unspeakable. I realized, over the course of eight years, that I was attaining levels of consciousness that I didn’t think would be possible in this lifetime. Not only attaining, but sustaining them; hanging out in them. This is what the sense of oneness of all things feels like, walking along the beach and just no separation between beach, ocean, and birds.

     As a result of that, I became very fierce in my knowledge because it was first hand. It wasn’t that I read it in a book. I know what this is all about because I had and continue to experience these various states of consciousness. I had this phenomenal shift of consciousness every five or six months.

GS: The infinite onion.

LL: Exactly. Keep peeling those layers, my friend. The crazy part is that, because I was in a place where I had experienced these things, when I would read a book or someone would start to speak to me, I knew, because I was living in those spaces, exactly what they were talking about. I don’t mean the content, but the energy level. So I hung out in that space for a while. But part of the journey is that I have never cloistered myself. I never decided that I had to live in an ashram or create a cloistered environment where I’m not participating in life. I never had that impulse. I can be in touch with “real” life. I found myself wanting to participate more in “real” life.

GS: That is part of the old model, that separation from life.

LL: Exactly. That is the old paradigm. I’m not that kind of guy. So now fast forward through about fifteen years of hitting, attaining, and living states of consciousness. It was great, but all of those states of consciousness did not clear trauma and pain and stuff from my psyche. This was a horrifying realization. I was in these states of infinite God consciousness. States where I was actually at the point of everything, all creation; in that zero point where there is nothing. Vast expanded states experiences were raging through my body. This was walk on water material. It would take me a month or two, or three or four, to integrate these states of consciousness. I would always throw myself back into life, but I began to find that they did not “heal” me or do anything that would affect the body and the tissue. This was horrifying because all of the stories say ... well, like Masters of the Far East , I took that as literal. I knew that when I attained these states of consciousness, I’d be “healed.” But I wasn’t.

GS: I frequently say that, “they’ll tell you that the physical plane is Maya, an illusion, a dream plane. And they’re right, it’s a dream plane like any other plane. But when you stub your toe, it freakin’ hurts.”

LL: Exactamundo. That started me on a different path because I had done the old guard version. The biggest slap was coming to the realization that these vast states of consciousness changed nothing physically. I found myself dealing with trauma of physical and sexual abuse that I had gotten as a little kid.

GS: Around the time that you were seeing what you were seeing and beginning your questioning?

LL: Yes. And that was a significant piece in my past. I was molested for a year and a half. All this didn’t make sense to me. When I would ask people about why ... like karma, they’d talk about how you have lessons to learn and again, these were not satisfying answers. So here I am, really working my ass off, and this four-year-old molestation trauma is still part of my body and affecting me. That was horribly disturbing.

GS: Because you were supposed to have transcended all of that.

LL: Exactly. My first path was to listen to mythology. It told me that it wasn’t the state of consciousness, but that I was the problem, that I wasn’t doing something right. But see, I had done enough tracking and had worked with thousands of people, to the point where I realized that was bullshit. I realized that something was going on here and I knew that I had to reexamine everything that I thought that I knew. My new work, where I am now, started right there.

     Curiously, I moved to Sedona, started building a house, and was immediately fully ripped off by contractors. The mythology says, “Love thy neighbor.” The mythology says that I can embrace this criminal. That I will through my consciousness. That I will transform this being. He’ll come around. So, one hundred thousand dollars later; with a broken house, I realized that the mythology was the basis of my destruction. It was so traumatic. Not the thing itself, but the fact that it was triggering the four-year-old trauma which, by all accounts by the states of consciousness that I was living in, should’ve been gone.

GS: And once again, somebody that you should have been able to trust ...

LL: Yeah. I couldn’t stop them. My body froze. I wondered, what is this? Again, I went to the standard mythologies and religions and the things that are out there, and it was the same: karma, and you’re learning your lessons, and yada, yada, yada.

     I then said, okay, what I need to do now is go even deeper and further beyond. I’m going to question absolutely everything. All bets are off. That is the work that I’m teaching and working in now, because it is exactly what I wanted which was, what is beyond the whole school, if you will. I did start to understand how to work with trauma, but it turned out that I had to go into sexual energy and work with one of the people I work with. I tried fifty million things. I was like ... I’ve got to clear this trauma out of my body. But I realized that it’s in the body. That’s why these crazy contractors could come in, because they would see, like any predator does, that the brain freezes. They could just come in and do whatever they wanted.

GS: Predator knows prey.

LL: Exactly. They had interviewed me. They knew that they could rip me off and that’s what they did. Ultimately it was through doing the work that I’m doing now, sort of really demythologizing my patterns, demythologizing my psyche, my consciousness, my central nervous system, that I am probably as close to free of trauma as I will ever be. It’s not because I was in the realm of love and bliss, which didn’t do jack, it was because I went in and took radical approaches to trauma.

GS: Now, do you want to say that all of that meditative work and love didn’t do jack or that it didn’t do jack for the trauma that was stored in your body?

LL: Yeah. I mean that. But that’s where I start getting radical, because, I have to tell you, in this current reexamination of life, I don’t mean it in some intellectual way. I mean that I started to see more and more clearly. I decided it was more important for me to see clearly what’s actually going on than to keep relying on the mythology that makes me feel comfortable.

     In retrospect, I know that it was helpful to get me to the place of seeing clearly, but really, that delusion about the universe being love, that was ultimately very hurtful for me. Instead of seeing the way it was, I just kept thinking that love will cure everything. That caused tremendous volumes of pain in my life. And I don’t have a mythology that pain and suffering is good and the way to learn. I don’t teach that. I don’t encourage people to do pain and suffering at all. I’m not interested in that. Pain and suffering gives you more pain and suffering.

GS: How do you deal with pain and trauma?

LL: What I’ve discovered is that so much of pain and trauma has to do with overlapping mythologies. Not physical pain like broken bones ... we are in physical bodies having physical experiences. Like you said, if you stub your toe, it hurts.

GS: And you’re going to.

LL: Absolutely. What I’ve realized now, though, is that people have psychological problems, mental and emotional issues; things that are going on and won’t necessarily be corrected with a magic wand. What I found is that a pain point is an intersection where two mythologies collide. In that collision there is pain.

     For example, the contractor comes to me and I feel something wrong in my body, but my mythology says, “open your heart and love thy enemy and everything will be fine.” Well, that’s a pain point because that’s not the way it really is. The conflict was that I could see that this guy is potentially a criminal but I’m not taking action. I’m moving into a freeze response and I’m trying to use my new age mythology to make it okay. My body was telling me not to do it, that I was freezing. But then I would go, “oh, but then there is love.” I would go and speak to my mentors at the time. I don’t speak to anyone anymore about this stuff, but at the time we would discuss trying to see the other side.

GS: There is a Jesus quote where at one point he is sending the disciples out to teach and he says, “Be gentle as doves, but wise as serpents.”

LL: Absolutely. That’s probably one of the most intelligent things. So, that’s really what the work is for me right now; helping people see those conflicts. For example, there is a lot of pain that people have around money, religion, and sexuality. Those are the key pain points—I want to have fun, but God doesn’t want me to feel good.

GS: That’s part of the old paradigm that we’ve got to get rid of.

LL: It’s insane. What I say to people is, the God you worship is the God you deserve. If you’re going to worship a God that punishes you because you feel good, which is what most of the population is doing, I’m not interested. I don’t want to worship that God. I don’t believe in that God. I don’t want to participate with anything about that. Does it exist? Yes it does. But like you said, that’s an old paradigm God.

     So, that’s part of teaching people, to push them to the edge of their mythology where they go, for example, “No, I really am about pleasure.” I’ll respond, “Yeah, you’re about pleasure, but every time you have an orgasm, you feel guilty, feel ashamed, and shut down.”

     So, my world has become asking a very simple question. My life has gotten simpler and simpler and now it’s so simple, it’s stupid. It’s “what’s really going on here?” and where is what’s really going on conflicting with the mythology, because wherever that is, is the pain point.

     Another example, because it gives you the idea, somebody says to me, “God wants monogamy and you can see it ... you’ve got to watch March of the Penguins ... that’s what it’s really all about. Here are these pair bonds forever.” I happened to be teaching a class in Santiago and went to the Wild Animal Park and I’m looking around listening to people discuss mythology: “Oh, God’s little creatures. Oh, isn’t that sweet.” But one of the little kids on this tour that we’re taking goes, “How come there is, like, only one big male reindeer and then all of these other girl reindeer? Where are their partners?”

GS: They’re all in a bunch over there, all pissed off and fighting with each other.

[laughter]

LL: Because they ain’t getting laid. So the guide immediately goes, “blah, blah, blah.” I don’t remember the words but they were just basically fairytale stuff. And I realized that that’s what human beings are up against. Every time we have an opportunity to see something clearly, somebody is there to stick a spoon of BS belief system in our mouth and say, believe this because this is the way it is. That’s the way you see it, but this is the way it is. So we’re sort of brought into this trance.

GS: Try to take a moment and boil your new level of teachings down to a few statements of essence.

LL: Number one, who knows? Number two, I don’t know. Number three, I’m okay with not knowing—comfortable with the uncomfortable-ness of not knowing. I teach from that, I don’t know, and that leaves me open to have these beautiful and delicious and yummy workshops. I don’t know. It all unfolds out of that unknown. It’s so freeing and beautiful.

GS: I’m fond of the saying, “the Is simply is, and we apparently are.”

LL: You know what, there you go, my friend.

GS: Beyond that, it’s all fairytale.

LL: And that’s it. In my private practice now, I don’t really mediate. I just kind of hang out in the nothingness, in the unknown, and there is a chance that I can see things more clearly and I can teach from that place and help people out of their quagmire, the weeds of fairytale. That’s the essence of what I’m doing, teaching people how to more and more track subtle energy.

GS: How would you describe the process of helping people to heal from whatever their individual traumas may be?

LL: A lot of trauma is mythologically based. It’s culturally based. Take for example the molestation that I experienced as a child. If I were in a different culture at a different time, that wouldn’t even be molestation. It would be just part of the tribe or the culture. If it was part of the culture, then it wouldn’t have the shame behind it because it would be an open part of the culture. But when it becomes this really dark, icky space, that is what triggers the trauma. So, not only are people having these incredibly lonely experiences, but they are grappling to understand these traumas through whatever the dominant mythology is. Currently the dominant mythology is the Christian mythology that we live in. It says that, even if you’re young and broke, you should keep the kid because it is life. I was working with someone who had an abortion and 25 years later, she was still feeling shame about that. Guilt, shame, blame, with the blaming, shaming god, punishing her. She was never able to get her life on track or have another relationship. She still feels the little baby staring down on her. I’m like; there is something wrong with a 52-year-old woman still feeling ashamed about her body and guilty about an abortion that happened so long ago.

GS: So then how do you help this person let this go?

LL: I take them through what a mythology is. I take them to the point where they can ask themselves if they know this as a fact. And when they get to that place where they realize that it’s a good point and ask, “Why would God want me to punish myself this way? Why would I want to be involved with a God that punishes me in this way?” But the truth is that she made the decision when she was young and scared and based on horrible mythology.

GS: At another level, these things didn’t even happen to us, they happened to our personalities.

LL: And yet, unfortunately, how to negotiate our life through the personality. If that is clogged, you have an interesting phenomenon because the personality is sucking fumes and that is completely limiting your spiritual evolution, your sense of freedom, your expansion of consciousness, because we’re not the personality, but yet the personality is experiencing that. We’re living through that and, as you said earlier, when you stub the personality’s toe, it freaking hurts.

     My intention in sharing this work is to let people know that there are some new paradigms and new ways of looking at life. In my workshops, one thing for sure that you will experience is that you’re going to get your life turned on its ear. What you thought you knew will be challenged and turned around. It’s not for the faint of heart. If you can come and be open and willing, there is tremendous growth that comes from that. I create a transformational environment using group energy to create a space where people can free themselves, release old blocks, fears, traumas, and come to hopefully join me in some time in the unknown.

     We do some mediating, prophesying, conversing one on one work ... in a nutshell, the workshop is not really about the content. I want you to get the underlying energetic experience. There is an entire workshop that goes on behind the scenes that fundamentally transforms the way that people are experiencing their lives. I love workshops that give people their own experience. Once you experience the infinite, your soul, your expanded states of consciousness, they’re yours. You can never turn back—in this field of your awareness, you now have to figure out how to integrate. We live in a universe that is infinitely expanding, infinitely. My intent is to tap people into that momentum and expansion so that they can begin to feel this phenomenal sense of freedom that emerges as a natural result of releasing our inherited mythologies and stories and having that energy come rushing back to that core sense of self and having the experience of moving through life from this self centered expansiveness. Not self in the small sense, but self with a capital “s”—the true self.

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