Guy Spiro: Jean-Claude, I usually like to start by asking people to just briefly tell their story. You know, how did you awaken and come to be who you are.

Jean-Claude Koven: I think I knew more when I was about five years old than I do now. I came here knowing I was totally different and when I was a child, I had this little phrase that I used for myself that said I was an eighth of a second out of phase. I didn’t share it with anybody until I was very much an adult, but what it meant to me was I had no idea what was going on. I was a quick study so I could pretend to be human, but I would look out wistfully to the stars knowing that this was not my home. I would ask my parents, their friends, and anyone I could get near, all sorts of questions, but I realized that they didn’t answer ... they didn’t know the answers either. All they could do was repeat the same old babble that had been handed down to them.

GS: So you were a strange kid, too.

JK: I was a strange kid, too. I was an only child and remain so today, very happy in my own company, making up games to play and playing them and whiling away the time.

GS: What steps did you go through in coming to understand who you are now?

JK: It’s ongoing, Guy. I am driven by curiosity. I love to take the view that whatever I believed yesterday, I want to discard today, to see if I can’t constantly shift the point from which I view. If I have to go back and report to The Council, if there is such a thing, after having lived on this planet, my report is that what you see depends on where you are looking from. We have six and a half billion beings on this planet, each willing to hold a separate point from which they view, to create some sort of parallax, some sort of individuality to the cosmic hologram.

GS: That’s a whole lot of different universes.

JK: Yes. Ideally that is the way it would be. But it isn’t. We collapse into commonality. We share viewpoints, thinking that if enough of us believe something, it must be increasingly true, and our culture and our society demand that we give up our authenticity, our natural selves, to conform. From the time we are a kid, we are rewarded for regurgitating verbatim whatever our teachers told us and not encouraged to be unique or individuals, or to find our own way. To me, the greatest crime that we commit in our collective belief system is to think we have the answers, and stop thinking. That’s the part that saddens me the most, I suppose.

GS: If I had a nickel for every time a teacher said to me, “You think you are different, don’t you? You think you don’t have to be like everyone else” And I’d be thinking, “You bet your ass.” But you learn that you can’t say that.

JK: No, you can’t. You can’t and not go to the principal’s office. You can’t in many ways. Our society really doesn’t reward you if you are different. They will point you out, you might have your fifteen minutes of fame, and you’ll go through all of your stuff. But they will resent you. I lived in Australia for five years and they have something very peculiar there called the Tall Poppy Syndrome, which meant that if anyone rose a little bit higher than the other poppies in the field, they would do everything they could to cut it down.

GS: In Japan they say, “The nail that sticks up must be pounded down.”

JK: Exactly. And we have that, I think latently, in our society. There are very few that move beyond that.

GS: And it’s funny because in this country we play lip service to individuality, but underneath the surface…

JK: Exactly right. We fear it. We fear it because it threatens our beliefs, our views of our own personal identity. That causes us, then, to have to find our own selves rather than adhere to a label that comes from a large quilt that covers us all.

     I just had an amazing experience in Peru. I kind of went there kicking and screaming. It was my wife’s trip; she had always wanted to go Machu Picchu. I said, “Oh my god, the last thing I want to do is be like a little kid at Sea World who has the passport that gets checked off every time I go to an exhibit. Now Machu Picchu is one of those “must sees” on the planet, and I just felt like it would be like a ride in Disneyland, but boy was I wrong. Because of a whole set of circumstances, her best friend couldn’t go and I decided to step in and accompany my wife on the trip. It turned out that the entire trip was for me.

GS: Isn’t that the way of things.

JK: So we went there and we got very lucky. We spent a fair amount of time with the Quechuan people. These are the people that have been in the Andes since before the Inca came. They were subdued by the Incas and joined them. Then they became Christians with a Spanish name. They just pretended to be anything anyone wanted them to be and remained exactly who they were. As you fly over Peru, you see these isolated mountains villages and one of the things remarkable about them is that there are no roads to connect them. There are little footpaths that might go from village to village, but there are no roads. These people live pretty much in isolation in their own world. They are ruled by a concept called “Ayni” which loosely translates to, “Today for you, tomorrow for me.” They realize of course that when tomorrow comes, it is another today, and it is again for you. They live in perfect community. We would think they are backwards, that they are subsistence level. But what I realized is that they are already everything that I aspire to become. They are beautiful beyond words; they have a wisdom that is unspoken. They are not even aware of who they are. Yet they hold for this planet such an incredible beautiful ingenious energy that it blew me out of the water. It made me realize that we are trying to understand with our minds something that our hearts grasped a long time ago. Being with them, you find something very interesting; the self disappears. They don’t have a concept of ego. When you are with them and you allow that energy to entrain you, to wash over you, something strange happens within yourself. I came back completely fractured and I have to tell you, I never returned from Peru, I am still there.

GS: I’ve caught you at an interesting time, then.

JK: Oh, it has been, arguably, one of the most transformative, extraordinary experiences I have ever had or imagine I could have on this planet. One of the things that I would like to be able to do when I come to Chicago is not only to share that experience with people verbally, but to create a space where, for a few moments, people can actually feel what it is like to be in that space.

GS: Describe it.

JK: [Long pause] Imagine ... imagine (I am trying to find the right way to put this) ... Imagine that you are slightly out of phase with yourself and there are all these different points from which one can view. But imagine that for a moment, all of these points  resolve and you fall into the oneness which is you. The mind is not involved, you have no awareness that it is happening, but you lose yourself in the totality of who you are.

GS: When the mind is silent, say in a meditative practice, awareness does remain. And that is who we are.

JK: That is who you are, but you are not aware that that is who you are. You are all that is. Without the self awareness of you being it. I wrote an article awhile back that I keep referring back to in my mind, talking about the three words that we bandy about, “I love you,” and the conflict that we don’t understand any one of those three words. The word “I” is such a slippery word. I want this. I want to do this. I do that. People have no idea what they mean when they use that word.

GS: At any given moment.

JK: At any given moment. What happens is that the “I” is actually an infinite continuum of being, of awareness, from the lowest level of the personality/ego to all that it is. It is all one continuum. There is no difference. We tend to view and we tend to have our motivations within the lower bands, or in many cases the lowest band, and so it has needs, it has wants, it has preferences, it has desires. It has all the stuff that creates the emotional rollercoaster of the illusion. When I was there with those people, that sense of a personal “I” that has needs or desires solid points of view, tended to dissolve. There is a sense (even the word “community” is wrong), but a sense that serving others is the highest form of service. There is no “I,” there was no “me” in this equation. It is without keeping score. It is not “I did your field yesterday, so you need to help me do my field today.” But your field is our field.

GS: So that “their” is completely understood and not necessary to talk about or examine?

JK: Exactly. It is ingrained in their being. Their cosmology is incredibly simple, but unbelievably beautiful. Of course, their survival is based on their crops. So they understand the solstices and equinoxes and the altitude. They know which potatoes will grow in exactly which field and which ones will not. They have done all the experimental work to know exactly what to do without even knowing it. If they don’t cooperate they don’t survive. So that’s part of their life.

GS: That can be said of indigenous people everywhere.

JK: Yes. They worship Pacha Mama, which is Mother Earth, but in a way that is very different. I’ll share a story with you.

     We had a lady with us (and she was part Quechua) who was an incredible psychic and is revered by the villagers for her ability to read the coca leaves. Coca is a major plant there because of the altitude. They chew it almost all the time. She did readings for us. At one point, she stopped the reading and fell into a trance. Pacha Mama came through her and said something to me that just blew me away. She just said, “I love you.” And I just melted. I cannot coalesce; I have no desire to coalesce, since those words came. Just to have the goddess, the entity of Pacha Mama come and say “I love you” ... the words fell away, but the feeling was so incredibly intense that I knew that somehow, almost for the first time ever in this incarnation, I had been recognized. It’s profound beyond profound and touches you in ways that are not verbal. I’ve wanted to do an article about it. I promised myself I would start it this week. But trying to find the entry point into this is very tricky, as I am sure you can pick up as I talk about it.

GS: Oh, yes, words will often fail to suffice in speaking of these things. As you talk, however, something comes up that I want your reaction to. A lot of what is going on, especially with the age change we are going through, is that it is now about individual illumination. And yet that individual illumination needs to be married to this awareness of and cooperating with all else. We have to not only individually illuminate, but then merge into and cooperate with the rest.

JK: Sounds good to me. But I’ve gotten to a point now where I no longer know. What I ask for now is for all the things that I thought were true to be taken away from me, for me to be scattered and then brought back.

GS: That is courageous.

JK: It goes on. After spending time in the Andes, we went down to the Peruvian Amazon. To the Madras Delouse River. We spent some time in the jungle there and arranged for a small group of us to do an ayahuasca ceremony. It was quite incredible and for me, a beautiful rite of passage. When I was given the medicine, I held the cup up and gave a prayer, pretty much what we just talked about, and asked to be shattered. That there be no reservations and no holds barred. Wherever I needed to be guided, taken apart and reassembled, go for it. I took the medicine that started tasting very bitter and then tasted very pleasant. I brought it into my body without resistance. I just opened up and welcomed it as a gift from Pacha Mama and it entered into me and I felt it flowing through me. At no time was there even the slightest bit of nausea. There was only for a brief moment, a little bit of dizziness and then it would go away. But it was extremely gentle.

GS: You went into it with a great attitude, the experience is not always so gentle for many people. Was this your first psychedelic experience?

JK: It was the first one of this magnitude. Ayahuasca is very powerful, but it was incredibly gentle and very loving to me. It didn’t show me pictures so much as it just washed through me. Then what happened, which is really interesting, at the end of the ceremony, when the guide said “I will bring you down now and stop this chanting and whistling,” the birds in the jungle started going bananas. They started making all sorts of a racket and I got the feeling that they were calling the Princess, the medicine, back to the jungle. As I opened up and released her, I could feel her presence moving out of me. Yet a part of her will always stay in me. I am always conscious of her presence in me and I am sure she took a part of me with her when she returned to the jungle. Then as I walked back to the place we were staying, I was like a six year old child. I was thanking the path for being there and the light for shinning so I could see where I was going, and the tree for being so beautiful, and all the stars. I was like a six year old child meeting all my friends.

GS: You refer to her as Princess. A lot of people refer to ayahuasca as Grandmother.

JK: She comes from Pacha Mama and is certainly a gift of the jungle. But to me, she was a Princess and we bonded. I mean we just merged. I willingly took her in. There was no resistance, whatsoever. It was just an incredible intimate experience of entanglement that will never disentangle.

GS: Well, as I said a while ago, I’ve caught you at an interesting time to do this interview. Had it been before this experience, I wonder how different you would be sounding.

JK: I would have had many more answers for you.

GS: I understand completely some of what you are saying. The ongoing title of my editorial column, which I write most months, is “My Current Opinion.”

JK: There you go. I love that. I tell people that if I go to bed believing something and wake up the next morning believing the same thing, I’m stuck.

GS: I really think that if you are truly on the path, all you can have is a current opinion.

JK: That’s all you can have, and not to take it any more seriously than this is what I see at the present time. I am happy to share it with you, provided you don’t hold me to it tomorrow.

GS: If it is not consistently changing and evolving, then it is stuck.

JK: Yes, what you see depends on where you are looking from. If you are so invested in holding onto your point of view, why should it be shocking to either of us if what you see never changes? There is no particular way to deal with this, because those people genuinely believe they have the truth and that those who don’t believe are damned or wherever it might be in that particular perspective.

GS: It always strikes me odd that they don’t realize that what they have is “A truth.”

JK: It is “A truth,” of course. It certainly isn’t wrong. It is just what they perceive.

GS: The way I often put it, if you want to take it to more ultimate levels, is what do we know? We know the “Is is” and that “we apparently are.”

JK: There you go.

GS: That is one and a half things that we know.

JK: There are three levels of processing information. Belief is the lowest. Then you can think things and work them out. Or you can know things. In science it would be hypothesis, theory and law. And yet belief, which is the lowest form of processing information, is the one that defines us the most. It is the only thing we are willing to fight and die for. We are quite nuts.

GS: You can clearly argue that some manifestations of religion can amount to a mass psychosis.

JK: It is, and it is deliberately induced. One of the things that was really interesting was in central Wuman and a few of the other ancient places. One of the things I saw when I went up there was this large statue of Christ, very much like the one in Rio de Janiero, the Christ of the Andes, reaching out over the valley. They light it up at night. So you have this incredible ancient Inca and Quechuan civilization overridden by Pizarro, who was illegitimate, illiterate, and a very nasty human being. But because he prevailed ...

GS: Thanks to barnyard animal diseases. But let’s not even go there.

JK: Beyond that. If you actually get into what these people did, in the name of God. But because they prevailed, they tore down all the Inca sites that they could find, many of them because the Inca poured gold into holes to hold some of the rocks together. Then they built their churches deliberately over them because they were on the ley lines, the power supply.

GS: As they did all over Europe to the pre-Christian sites.

JK: As they did all over Europe, yes. So you have this incredible ancient civilization overridden by the church with this gigantic Christ illuminated at night, lording over the valley. And I asked, “Does anybody not get turned off by this?” I asked the guide, and we didn’t know each other very well at this time, and she said “No. It’s fine. It is just another culture. And it is what it is.” At the end, I spoke to her again and asked her, “What do you really think.” She said, “Sometimes I want to cry.” And I said, “Sometimes I want to cry, too.”

GS: And to really understand Jesus’ teachings ... I mean, there’s really no argument.

JK: No, there is no argument. When people say I am a Buddhist, I say, who cares? If you are a Buddha, I am really interested. When people say I am a Christian, I say, who cares? If you are Christ, I am really interested.

GS: You and I need to hang out more.

[laughter]

JK: All of the ill gotten gains in the name of God…

GS: It is unbelievable. Boy, if there were a Second Coming as some envision, would he be pissed.

JK: A lot of forgiveness to be dispensed, I’m sure.

GS: If they think he threw a fit over the money changers in the temple, there are some televangelists who’d better dig some deep holes.

JK: Oh, but they are brilliant. I actually get off on watching them. I want to ask them, “What are you doing?”

GS: I watch them, too. What’s funny is where they are right, they are really right. But where they are wrong, boy, are they wrong.

JK: They actually mesmerize themselves. In so doing, the whole audience turns into Pavlov’s dogs and follows them.

GS: There was a guy in Germany who was really good at that, in the 30s and 40s, what was his name?

JK: The “Painter.” Yeah, he was an incredible orator. And people want to be led because the alternative is finding your authentic natural self and becoming an absolute individual, swimming upstream whenever you want, in or out of season.

GS: It is denigrating yet illustrating to put it this way, the emerging dichotomy is between the people and the sheeple.

JK: Yes, and there are many more sheeple then people.

GS: There are, but there are more people all the time.

JK: The universe is a hierarchy of awareness. I don’t know how else to say it. There is only the Oneness, and everything is linked; everything is an aspect of that oneness, in various, for lack of a better term, dumbed down concentrations. If we all acted from a point of not being filtered down, we couldn’t have the experiences we are currently having. The purpose of creation is to allow us to experience ourselves infinitely. So everything that finds expression, feeds us. There is no good or bad in a model that large.

GS: Yes.

JK: So this particular illusion was created to allow us to understand and play with concepts of love, in terms of service of self or service to others. All the duality and plurality of separations that bring around the emotional roller coasters that we call life have been experienced by billions of beings, simultaneously, each with different vibrational patterning. What I believe is happening now is that we are going to withdraw into our worlds. So, imagine those who are in service to others, like the Quechua, they will be drawn off into a world where they will be moving into the next love, compassion, Christ-like level of existence.

     There are those who are on the dark side, who are like Attila the Hun, Hitler, and the Stalins of the world. They are going to go to another universe on the dark side, to the flip side of the light.

GS: Y’all have a good time there.

[laughter]

JK: People will go to different expressions of their density, which is where we currently are. Some will be inhabiting versions of this planet, some will be like a Mad Max of society, and others will be Aquarian. There will be all sorts of versions of living underground because of a nuclear wasteland. Each one will be a different expression of a possible outcome. All the possible outcomes, or most of the possible outcomes, will find an expression in one form or another. A large number of people will be taken off and will reemerge or be reborn onto another similar planet in a complete different portion of the galaxy. All of this will go on simultaneously. The best I can see it, we will gradually coalesce onto the one we resonate with most perfectly.

GS: So you think in the aftermath of 2012 there will be a reordering of humanity? Do you think it is going to have that magnitude of an impact?

JK: It is already happening. The shift is already well in place. People are being lifted off the planet as we speak. This is not going to happen. It is happening.

GS: Lifted off the planet in a physical sense?

JK: In a physical sense, yes. Either they are dying or they are disappearing. A lot of it is done through natural death. I mean, if you are paring down the corporation, it can be through natural attrition or it can be through early retirement, or firing. It’s a really interesting concept when you take the macro view and say the entire purpose of this was to create novelty to feed into the common collage. The novelty is gone. We’ve just become grosser and grosser and are just repeating cycles. We are not breaking new ground for the most part. It is time to wind us up and start anew.

GS: So you see a dissolution of societies as they are now in a reformation? Some people are thinking it is going to be huge, massive changes that are going to be visible.

JK: There will be many outcomes. Again, all of this stuff happens simultaneously and it is very difficult, taking this type of model, to say how do you argue that there is a parallel universe that you don’t perceive?

GS: I like the way you talk in terms of models because I do the same. All of these potential universes are just models.

JK: They are all just models. That is all they are.

GS: Right down to a traffic jam where one person seems to sail right through it and another person loses an hour.

JK: Yes. It is highly individualistic right now, and each of us gravitates to exactly where we are meant to be. The big question that comes up for me personally at this late hour is, has the die been cast? Do people still have a modicum of choice, and if so, how do they exercise it? The answers I don’t have, but I am acting as if they do have a choice and maybe something I say, maybe some piece of energy, some little piece of the puzzle, might make a difference. I tend to think that if that is not the case, then I wouldn’t be here.

GS: What will people experience in your workshop?

JK: What happens when we get together is we create a collective energy. I liken it to a trampoline, and if the group is willing, and it almost always is, we can take this energy and all of us go to places far beyond anywhere we could have gone without it on our own. We create an opportunity. We open up a portal for transformation, and invariably at least a handful of people take it. Then some extraordinary things happen because of the collective energy that everyone has added. All that I am is a facilitator for the process, and in fact, I use the process myself to jump to places I couldn’t have gotten to. So I am one of the happy participants in the process. We make it experiential as opposed to informational.

     People can understand what it is like to be where the next stage of evolution would be. What is it like to experience that level of love and compassion? Not talk about it, not mind stuff, but actually experience it? What’s it like if you had all this energy available to you and you wanted to make a personal breakthrough? Where would you go? So, we will evoke those energies and see where we go. I will do a little bit of background, speaking only just to say hello to everyone and give them a chance to sit. But the major part of this is to create something that is totally experiential and transformative. Imagine crawling into a piece of Swiss cheese—you go in through one hole and you wind your way through it and you come out of another one. You can never find the first hole again.

GS: What a privilege and a joy to be a conduit for this kind of stuff.

JK: Oh, it is. It is. I find that my greatest satisfaction in life is being a catalyst, and the more anonymously I can do it, the happier I am.

GS: Well, you know, we just have to honor and enjoy the one perfect moment after another.

JK: Yes, and to be present. The only thing required in this life to make it extraordinary is to show up.

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