The Power of Dreams & Synchronicity in Spiritual Evolution

What if reality is far more expansive than we perceive? What if dreams, synchronicities, and past life memories hold the key to a deeper understanding of ourselves? In this fascinating episode of Happy Hour for the Spiritually Curious, Dr. Sandra Marie sits down with Stephen Daniel, the visionary behind Brighter Realms, to explore the connection between higher consciousness, intuition, and the unseen forces that shape our lives.

In this episode, you’ll discover:
✔️ The role of dreams in self-discovery and spiritual evolution
✔️ How synchronicities guide us toward life-changing moments
✔️ What the Higher Self truly is and how it influences our path
✔️ The connection between past lives and present-day emotions
✔️ A powerful real-life story of synchronicity that changed everything for Stephen

Whether you're new to exploring spirituality or already on a path of self-discovery, this conversation will expand your awareness and offer insights into energy, intuition, and multidimensional existence.

Links
Stephen Daniel
Website: https://brighterrealms.com/

Email: Brighterrealms@gmail.com
📖 Get Stephen Daniel’s book, Brighter Realms! On Amazon, Good Books, and Books2Read

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Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:03.084)
Enjoy this Wild Soul gathering production. I'm Dr. Sandra Marie. Pour yourself a really tall glass of spiritual curiosity and join me for the happy hour for the spiritually curious podcast. In the spirit of happy hour, cheers to some new insights, peace, revitalization, and perhaps an aha moment that may change your life. What if reality is far more expansive than what we see?

What if hidden realms, untapped intuition and creative genius are just waiting for us to access them? Today we dive deep into the unseen with Stephen Daniel, the visionary behind brighter realms. If you've ever felt there's more to this life, more magic, more synchronicity, more wisdom, then open your mind. Things are about to get interesting. This episode might just shift your entire perception of what's possible. Let's step into the brighter realms together.

Welcome to the show, Stephen. How are you doing today?

I'm well Sandra, how are you? Thank you so much for having me.

Doing well.

Speaker 2 (01:06.314)
I'm excited to have you on here. think today's going to be a great conversation. To start with, if you can just share a little bit about your personal journey and what actually led you to explore the themes of higher consciousness and spiritual awakening.

Sure. Going back to my childhood, I had unusual events that I would call transcendental experiences, dreams, in particular a dream when I was about six years old. It was a reoccurring dream that occurred many times. In the dream, I'm walking on a path through a forest. I come to a footbridge. I cross over a stream on this footbridge and I arrive at a small house made of screens.

and I remove a pair of sandals and I place them on a platform to the right and I step to a door on the left. And the door is a image for me that I was unable to cross. There was a threshold there that I was unable to see past for many years. In later years, I came to understand that that door represented another world for me in a timeline of my experience in the Earth life system. It was very difficult to

because it held pain, it held challenges in the interior of that house. Eventually, I began to explore this dream or try to understand it. As I placed my attention in that direction, and I was older, this is a number of years later, I found the door was open. And I had a choice. I could either enter the door or remain on the outside.

and move on with my life and forget about those events. But I chose to enter the door. I was immediately confronted with a woman and a child, my wife and child. And I say confronted because of the circumstances around our life together. I had brought many traumas into that house. I was a soldier in various campaigns, in war. I was tormented by this lifestyle.

Speaker 1 (03:15.542)
As a soldier, spent long times away and I would bring that pain home to my family. There was a turning point for me when I recognized that I had participated in the kinds of events that I participated in and had a family and how they were neglected and how the, in a sense, the love I withhold was the pain I carried, how I inflicted my trauma into their life.

how that trauma diminished my capacity for empathy, compassion, and love. And that by becoming aware of those circumstances, I was able to make decisions about my evolution, acknowledge the past, recognize my roles there, the choices, the things that I created, and then make a decision at the core of my being to sever ties from that period. Because in a sense,

I was still holding onto it and that's why the dream kept repeating itself. I was still holding on to the pain and the attachments to fear and anger and sadness from that period in my life. It really helped me to look at the experiences of past life. That was the real awakening for me. was recognizing my role in that past life and then reaching a stage in my evolution where the events continued to plague me.

In a sense, I was creating some of those similar situations in my present life. You know, until we resolve the past, we're going to relive it in some way, shape or form. Although my life currently has been very different than that life, I was still returning to the sadness and the pain and fear and the anger. The trauma was still well and alive within me.

but it was seeing those events that helped me make that decision, that final decision to sever ties and move on, to let go. And that helped me to open new pathways in the future, in the present and the future. But even without, I just wanna say, and then we'll continue, without the awareness of the past life, it's very possible I could have resolved these conflicts, even without understanding where I'd come from. It certainly helped.

Speaker 1 (05:38.178)
for me to understand where I came from, to see where I am and know where I want to go. But, you know, there are many stories, I think, of people who have found themselves up against a wall and their shadows and the experience of life hasn't been so pleasant and they're able to overcome that. They don't necessarily have to have the full awareness of their past lives, but they do have to have, and this is what I had, a desire.

and a determination to accept who we will become when the old ways are no longer present. And that was the most difficult decision that I had to make for myself.

Well, that sounds like it was quite the journey. You brought a lot of that emotion, the emotional baggage, and it felt like it was very real to you, even though it was a past life. And I think that there's a lot of folks out there that are confused sometimes because they're experiencing many of the things that are parallel to what you experienced, but they don't recognize that connection.

I'm sure we'll unpack that journey a little bit more as we go on with the show. Thank you. That's a powerful way to jump out of the gate. What does the term higher self mean to you and how do we consciously connect with it?

Well, that's very, very interesting subject for me. Keep in mind that I use the word higher self or core essence to describe my origin. Who I am essentially is an energy being, a physical body, as an extension of a higher self, a core essence. These are just names and labels that I give to relate to it from my human perspective. But the higher self for me and the awareness of my higher self

Speaker 1 (07:31.406)
I think had been fundamentally instrumental or fundamentally I was connecting to that awareness at a very young age, but I really couldn't give it a name or understand it. I see the world that we live in as a stage. It's a stage that is in part directed by us. We're the writer of our story, but it's also directed by a higher self. A higher self I could see as the ultimate producer.

setting the stage for me, the actor, to play my part. Certainly we can give the Higher Self many different names, but for me, there were direct encounters and I began to form these views and maybe their beliefs, you know, from my point of view, but I based them on my experiences. I feel strongly that each of us is connected to a Higher Self and we are an energetic extension.

And by extension, we are an aspect, a part of that larger self, which is infinitely more massive than us. And that that higher self is a part of an energy system. And that energy system is essentially where I come from, where we all come from. That we are all split off from an energy system, like a projection into various environments. And right now I happen to be in physicality. I'm having this experience here.

Therefore, those connections are existing connections and they are always available. Meaning that I have these existing connections and as I become aware of them, I'm able to tune in through my essence. I'm a human essence, essentially, beyond my personality, my body, my ego, my intellect. I am a human essence. Fundamentally, my energy is essence. It's the is-ness of me.

These existing connections are not far away. They are just a short leap from here to there, the non-physical, the environments that I perceive that we come from and return to someday.

Speaker 2 (09:41.186)
What would you say are the biggest obstacles to people when they're trying to tune into the higher self?

Well, I think that we become preoccupied in our lives and we're preoccupied with many things. We're constantly focused, in fact, every day on how we're going to, where we're going to be certain times of the day, what we're going to do, what we're going to get done. Maybe we're in survival and we're struggling financially and then that becomes the focus. Maybe we're raising a child and the child has a cold and that becomes the focus.

Maybe our dog hurt its leg and that becomes the focus. You know, we're constantly pulled by the world in multiple directions. We spend most of our time focusing on the external world, but our inner world, I should say that inner self needs an equal amount of attention. In fact, that should be the first stance is that we're tuning into ourselves and then we're setting that intention and that stance and then going out into the world and exploring it.

getting done what needs to get done. But we always have that point, that hub that we can connect to. And that hub for me begins with my essence, the fundamental part of me that I consider my true self, the real me, beyond the body, beyond what I see when I look in a mirror, beyond the ego, the intellect. Don't get me wrong, I think that the ego and the intellect have enormous intrinsic value. They give us a sense of separation and independence.

But that can be taken far. can have the experience, for example, of fear and anger in this environment. And fear and anger is something that can diminish our connection to our essence and diminish our connection to our higher self and our energetic counterparts in non-physical environments in the worlds that we come from and return to someday. To enable ourselves to be informed by our non-physical counterparts, that doesn't mean that we're living this lifestyle every minute, but in fact,

Speaker 1 (11:44.844)
What I'm trying to say is for me, it's a balance. You know, I have a foot in this world. I have a foot in that world. And that way I achieve a balance. And so when I have a question or I'm looking to understand something, I can get a point of view from my friend. I can get a point of view from my partner, from a teacher, from a business partner. I always have a perspective, but I can also get a point of view from sources.

outside of the physical environment, outside of mental or technological or et cetera. It's acquiring multiple views and having a balanced perspective that I feel is in the best interest of me being grounded, helps me be grounded in this world.

But we are living in both worlds simultaneously.

whether we realize it or want it or not.

It is the reality of what's happening and that there is a purpose with it and we do have choices with it. When we talk about connecting with our higher awareness, higher self, that unseen part of life, how can we leverage that a little bit to unlock maybe a greater creative potential within ourselves?

Speaker 1 (13:04.75)
You know, we all are intuitive. We all have insight and intuition and creativity. This is an innate part of us. Whether we're aware of the non-physical or not, we're connecting to sources of information, and these sources of information are fundamental in our insight, intuition, and creativity. One of the things that I did years ago is I began to take a mental note of

my feelings, emotions, my urges, desires. I began to look at myself and how I was interacting in this environment. And then I began journaling through this introspection. But I'll give you several different examples. This is one of the ways that I focused my attention to understand why I am the way I am. You could see this as a very psychological approach. But in that psychological approach,

When we are paying attention and tuning in to the hidden layers of our inner life, we are essentially operating or beginning to operate in the realm of the essence. That's where the essence resides. If we're out here on the surface and we're just focused on our physical world all day long, we're not really tuned inwardly. But when we start paying attention to ourselves and simple qualities of the choices we make, the decisions and why we're creating what we create,

Journaling is a great way to do that because as we explore memories, for example, it's not the memories that are important, but it's the feelings around the memories. You see, it's the feelings that we tune into through our essence because our essence learns to see and feel the world. So as we learn to see and feel the world with our essence as the lens, we begin to discover greater discernment.

of ourselves and our relationship to this environment, etc.

Speaker 2 (15:01.364)
So you talked about the dreams and you talked about the journaling. How do you personally?

talk about dream journaling next.

okay. What other practices are you using?

Another practice is if we have an eventful dream night, what we try to do with our mind is, well, what did that mean? And we try to understand it. We may write about it. We really try to pick it apart to understand what it means. But you know, the intellect is a great tool for many purposes here. But when we can connect to what, how did we feel in that dream? And we look at the memory as a feeling. We begin to identify with it as a feeling.

Then again, we're connecting to the hidden layers of our inner self. And in that journey inwardly to feel, we are touching our essence. And our essence is the timeless part of ourself, timeless immortal aspect of us. So what I like to do is take an idea, take that feeling, or maybe a question around that feeling, well, why did I feel that way? And then forget about it, you know? And then I let it go.

Speaker 1 (16:09.772)
I take a visualization, I may write it down visually on a piece of paper and then let the wind take it away into the universe and forget about it. And what's interesting is, is that now we're allowing the essence to take that information and interact with our counterparts in the non-physical. And later we may discover a very unique awareness we didn't have before. And this is what is meant by tuning in. These are the exercises that are coming out in my next edition of the book.

which is gonna be released in about six weeks. These are a couple of the exercises. I have about eight or 10 exercises going into the book and all of them are about tuning in to our essence as a way to unconsciously interface with our higher self and energetic counterparts to acquire insight, intuition and creativity into the questions that we have. know, creativity is an interesting thing. Fundamentally,

insight, intuition, and creativity are the same thing, although a psychologist will have very different descriptions for each one. But essentially, when we have an insightful moment, that is tapping into our creativity when we have a moment of intuition. So I'm a painter. You can see the paint, and one of my paintings behind you there. And the way that I paint, and the way that I am able to create art and do it consistently is

getting into that flow of insight and intuition and that flow of connectivity to my energetic counterparts so that my artwork is a reflection of myself. It's not necessarily conjured by ideas. Certainly it is abstract, although I do figurative concepts within my abstract and sometimes I'll set my intention to do a figure and it still is an abstract work of art. And I certainly

have many beliefs about abstract art because I've studied it and I've learned about it. It is a significant part of the art world. So I definitely took those beliefs about abstract art and I applied them to my with my own technique and my own method methodology for creating art so that my art is a reflection of me. It's individual and it's a part of who I am. I think of creativity as really a natural flow and extension of

Speaker 1 (18:36.522)
insight and intuition and a continuous stream of thought. It's unending. Then what I'll do is I'll link with through my essence with counterparts in the non-physical and I will paint portraits. I will draw them first. And these are portraits of energies that I am tuned into in non-physical environments. So that the art, I call them living portraits, basically.

You mentioned the intuition. Intuition is getting a lot of discussion these days. Many people struggle with trusting their intuition. What advice do you have for developing a deeper relationship with that inner guidance?

It's a very challenging place to be, this environment, because we are constantly tested. We're trying to tune in to trust our intuition, and yet there are many, many distractions. And so when we're preoccupied emotionally, which it is a chronic condition in our world, many of us can experience a chronic emotional state, and then tuning into our essence from that point of view can be very challenging.

getting accurate intuition, feeling that our intuition is real and substantial. Look, there's no easy road. I would love to be able to say, well, you simply do this and this and this and that's it, you're done. But it takes effort, it takes work, and it's ongoing. What I do is I recalibrate with the exercises, my exercises, and I just kind of go back to basics. And the basic is,

paying attention to our feelings, paying attention to our dreams, learning to read between the lines, really get to the bottom of who we are. So here's another idea in this context. We tend to, and I have for years, looked outside me for answers so that I may go to a book. Even my book doesn't have all the answers. There are no answers here. The book is an exercise in learning

Speaker 1 (20:43.512)
to get to know oneself. It's as simple as that. But we tend to place most of our attention outside of us to answer our questions. know, answers are something that make us, you know, brittle and inflexible, but it's the questions that keep us young. So it's great to have questions. It's always important, I think, to be curious, to wish and dream. And our wishes are our first.

rehearsal for dreams imagined. It's through our wishes and our dreams that we are allowing ourselves to free ourselves up and to be able to not acquire answers necessarily, but points of view, perspectives, so that we're gaining an understanding, a broader understanding of who we are and where we come from and sort of realigning ourselves with the fundamental values that our essence can provide.

and our energy system, our higher self, and our energetic counterparts. You know, I speak a lot about the energetic counterparts. They're really an energetic family. We have a physical family. We have a family in non-physical environments. I hope I answered your question. It's a complicated question.

You did, and there's a lot of different paths to go with it. I agree, like asking questions, staying curious, that has to be part of everyday life. You shared a lot of your journey and what inspired you, but what actually inspired you to sit down and write Brighter Realms? What key message do you hope readers take away from it?

For many years, that dream that I told you about in my childhood is just one of what I would consider countless transcendental experiences. So I took a lifetime of transcendental experiences, which for many years were so commonplace, they seemed unimportant to me. I really didn't understand what these experiences meant to me when I was a child. And I'll get to...

Speaker 1 (22:49.118)
your question, answering your question very quickly here. I had the dream, flying dreams where I was away from my body. And if I dared to talk to somebody about it, my parents, they would just look at me like something was wrong with me. So I kept very quiet. And again, around six years old, five or six years old, there was a commercial on television. It ran during the late sixties and the early seventies. It was a

No, don't worry.

Speaker 1 (23:18.474)
a woman in bed, an animated woman in bed, and the covers flow off of her and she begins to rise above her bed and the walls dissolve and she moves into these beautiful, colorful environments. And there's this very soothing female voice, a Lynn Redgrave-like voice that says, if you've ever had flying dreams, you're not alone. In that moment, I understood that

my flying dreams were experienced by other people. And suddenly I felt that I was not alone in these experiences, that I was no different, that other people were just like me. The commercial ended with the letters TM for Transcendental Meditation. And these were the first Transcendental Meditation commercials, as far as I understand. And they were trying to get the word out that people can learn to transcend the physical environment and have experiences that gave them a sense of their wholeness.

But even without transcendental experiences through techniques like meditation or, you know, meditation happens anywhere and anytime in any place. We can live in a state of meditation. We can play with a child or an animal that's interfacing with other worlds. We can stand in a sunset to interface with other worlds. We can take a nap, lie down and unhook from the external world and interface with other worlds.

The ways that we tune into other worlds are countless. We all do it, but it's just taking this idea a little more directly. Meditation is something that I like to do, but it's not required necessarily to develop a sense of our wholeness, a greater sense of our awareness of who we are as connected beings who have forgotten that that connection exists, who can.

reestablish those connections beginning with the awareness of our essence and learning some skills to tune in to our essence, to our fundamental self where the connections can transpire. You know, I wanna just preface this, this is important. I would love to be able to offer tools to say, hey, if you do this tool, you're going to connect with your higher self. But what I have discovered and learned is that that relationship between an individual and their higher self is so fantastically unique.

Speaker 1 (25:42.58)
as individual as a fingerprint, and therefore it's not something I can touch. And I've been asked to not go into that area, to not offer any advice about how people can connect to their higher self. In other words, tools to connect to the higher self. But what I can say is that as we learn to connect with our essence, and I can say this with great clarity, we have the potential to connect with our higher self.

It is through our essence, where the higher self, where we can meet our higher self. And you know, our higher self doesn't just come necessarily meet us. We've got to go and meet halfway. It's like anything, anything takes effort. Regarding the higher self as a, ultimate director, the ultimate creator of the stages that I operate in. My higher self, nothing in this environment happens without oversight of the higher self. The higher self.

is the guardrail and gatekeeper to any and all experiences for the human essence.

Can you share a personal experience of synchronicity that affirmed your spiritual path? You've hit on a lot of things. You've not hit on synchronicity.

In the new version of the book, I added a story. So this version of the book, this is my first edition and it was really a test for the market. It has been well received and now I'm taking the concept quite a bit further with a lot of context. And one of the stories, I had a business partner and this is before I was even conscious of the non-physical or my essence, my higher self. I was in my 20s and I...

Speaker 1 (27:27.692)
got into business with a guy buying and selling cars. He would go pick them up in another state in Arizona or Utah. We would ship them to Los Angeles and I was responsible for selling them. The business went very well, but after about four months, I got suspicious that something wasn't quite right and my intuition was saying, pay attention, something isn't quite right here. When I asked my partner about the books, he assured me,

that everything was fine and the books looked fine. There was nothing about the business that looked out of place. He assured me that everything was fine. He basically built my trust and we continued for another four five months before I became suspicious again. The story's in the book. I don't want to get into all the details, but this time I was able to find evidence that he had been embezzling from the business. And when I confronted him, he disappeared.

Now keep in mind, we're almost a year into this business. I'm pulling my hair out. Here's this guy who's taken advantage of me. I feel hurt. I feel taken advantage of. feel like all I want to do now is recover any funds that I can and sever ties with this guy. Now he's disappeared and I have to investigate him. One thing leads to another and I find myself out of state talking to probation officer, his probation officer for fraud conviction that he had created.

Without revealing what transpired between us, I was able to get information as to his whereabouts. And I was able to locate him and I confronted him one morning at 8.30 AM. And I knocked on an apartment in Venice, California, and his roommate answered the door. I had no idea this guy even existed. He directed me to the back room. Then the guy excused himself and walked away. And I just had the feeling when I met the roommate that he was downcast.

Something was going on with him. He was preoccupied. He seemed downcast. He left the scene and then I confronted my partner. When I confronted my partner with evidence, he said, let's go to the bank. Those were his words. I went out to my car, started the car and waited for him to come out. He was getting dressed. He was gonna come out, meet me in the car. We were gonna go to the bank. About three minutes later, his roommate came out with a towel, something wrapped in a towel. He opened a trunk, put it into the trunk and drove away.

Speaker 1 (29:54.134)
And then my partner came out three minutes after that and he had a note in his hand and he was in sheer and utter panic. He showed me the note. It was a suicide note from his roommate who had put a nine millimeter in the trunk of was going to a church to commit suicide. This was a guy who was calm, cool and collected. I had never seen him behave like this. As he showed me the note and told me the circumstances, suddenly I saw empathy and compassion in him.

He loved this guy. He cared for this guy. I said, get in. And he gets in the car with me and we go and we chase after the roommate. It's morning rush hour traffic in Los Angeles and I run into a line of cars and I'm desperately trying to find this guy. We think he may have gotten on a freeway here, but here I am in rush hour. It's like a bad dream. You're trying to get somewhere fast and you're moving in slow motion. We're on the freeway. get on the freeway. And after about

A few minutes, we spot him a hundred yards ahead, but we are in rush hour traffic and he's about to get off the exit where the church is. Then lo and behold, I see a highway patrol. I need a cop right now. Cause I did not want to take a gun away from a guy intent on using it. And here's a highway patrol. And I said, officer, there was a guy up there with a nine millimeter in the trunk, silver sedan. The officer pulls ahead. We've lost sight of both of them.

As we pull off the freeway, we finally catch up a few minutes later to a traffic stop in front of the church. The gentleman in the car is taken into protective custody. They find the gun. I understood in that moment that my partner and I had come together and saved this guy's life. That the year of deception, the year of all of this relationship that I had formed with this person had brought us to this exact moment.

have brought me to that exact moment where I could save the life of another person. That may have been our purpose for that entire year that culminated with saving the life of this gentleman. That to me was a fantastic synchronicity. I did not see it at that time. It took me years to fully integrate and understand exactly what had transpired.

Speaker 2 (32:12.994)
That's incredible. Yeah.

Because if I had not been searching for him that morning, determined to find him, I would not have shown up at that apartment. And that guy would have gotten to his car and driven away. And my partner, who was cool, calm, and collected on the surface, who understood how to conduct business, but he had no capacity to understand emotional affairs. And when he saw the suicide note, he panicked.

That was before the days of cell phones. He was not thinking. He had lost his capacity to be in tune with himself and his insight and intuition and creativity because had he, he probably would have called the police even before he came out to me with the suicide note, but he just didn't have that capacity. But even the police in this matter may not have been able to have somebody there for 20 minutes and then it would have been too late.

No, I was just thinking this like literally you were in the car with the car running ready to go like you were in go mode like you can't

I the direction he drove away, you know, so I knew where he started from and I was very determined to catch him. And the logic was he would get on a freeway because that would be the fastest route to the church. But it's called the 405 freeway and it's one of the most crowded freeways in the world at 830 a.m. in the morning, rush hour traffic.

Speaker 2 (33:37.506)
That is, that's a magical, magical synchronicity.

It was a magical synchronicity. And then my partner called me about six months later, and it may have been longer than that, but I was working for another company in Los Angeles. He found me, called me, and we were chatting, and I knew he wanted something. I asked him how this gentleman was doing, was he still suicidal, what was going on? He told me he was back at home in another state with his family, and he was doing well.

Then my partner pitched me on another business proposition, which he was good at doing. He was a great salesperson. But I said to him flat out, no, I won't be doing business with you again. But you know, then I thought to myself, who knows when and where our paths will cross again.

Really? You have talked a lot about the dreaming and what a significant part of dreaming has been in your life. Yeah. From a very young age. you lucid dream?

Yes, I write quite a bit about lucid dreaming. And for me, a lucid dream is deep, restful, yet alert. Alertness. One of the lucid dreams that I had that I write about in the book, it became so frequent, my lucid dreaming, just being aware that I was away from my body. When I could unhook myself and not feel any fear is when I could really have fun in these other environments and sometimes wanting to stay in them.

Speaker 1 (35:03.636)
often times actually, and not wanting to return and really being forced to return by my higher self. I use the word force. It's a very strong word to use the word force, but there have been experiences where I've been so determined to just stay there and commit myself to the adventure and ready to give up my life. And yet my higher self is saying, no, you're going back. You don't have any choice about it. Yeah.

There's a lot of the listeners who aren't real familiar with lucid dreaming. How would you say altered states of consciousness, whether it's meditation, lucid dreaming, other methods, help us access that higher wisdom?

We have this aspect of us, it's the is-ness, it's who we are. It's essentially what we are. We are energy beings, we are in essence. And that essence is a timeless part of us. When we interface in a dream world, we may go into non-physical environments, or we're going to essentially, in my view, stay within the physical, the mental, psychological, and spiritual aspects of our being, which is our inner landscape.

our inner world, our desires, our fears, our joy, all of the components of us that make up our fairly complex inner landscape. And no psychologist would deny that we have an inner landscape. Lucid dreaming is simply dreaming with the awareness that we are separate.

from our body that we've left our body behind and that we're interfacing in the non-physical with an awareness of who we are. When we dream, regardless of how we dream or what we dream about, that is our essence leading the way. Our essence is what enables us to experience dreams and to remember them, to transcend the density of our physical environment and have experiences in other worlds, which we all do.

Speaker 1 (37:08.118)
And part of that connection to other worlds is a way to restore the physical, mental and psychological, spiritual aspects of self and of course the physical body. So that we're recalibrating through this connection with the non-physical and returning to our body renewed. We wake up fresh in the morning. There's a reason why we dream because it helps to reset us. It helps to give us a fresh outlook. That is precisely why we connect in the dream world, why we dream.

is to help us adapt. It's to help us approach life now with a fresh day, a new day ahead. When we don't sleep, of course, we become a wreck. And nobody can deny that. Sleep deprivation is a very difficult and challenging thing to experience because of the importance of sleep for our biological, mental and psychological and spiritual functioning.

Absolutely. What role does surrender and flow play in accessing deeper states of awareness?

Well, that's a fantastic question because some of the exercises that I have created are about tuning into acceptance. I'll give you an example. There was a major fire event in Los Angeles recently. I'm sure you're aware of it. Yes. My brother lost his home. Friends of ours lost their homes in the Palisades. It was tragic. Beyond tragedy, you know, we're still processing, Yeah. mean, look, my home is still here.

I can't even imagine.

Speaker 1 (38:43.358)
As the events unfolded 24 hours after the event started unfolding, we're in the heat of it. Suddenly we see smoke less than a mile from our house and it's as tall as a 20 story building. We understand in that moment that we are next, potentially next. We're in the crosshair. We're very close and we have, if the fire moves toward us, we have maybe an hour before the house goes. We had two choices.

The first thing that happens is, my God, it's happening here. And your heart races a little bit, and you experience a little bit of fight or flight. Then that fight or flight can really grow with intensity very quickly. That's called panic. And that can be traumatizing. But within three minutes, this peaceful, calm feeling came over me. I had spoken with a friend about this later, and he said, you surrendered.

to circumstances beyond your control. And I thought that's correct. That's exactly what I did, knowing that there was nothing I could do about it. I could either remain in fight or flight and lose access to greater capacity to help myself or become calm and peaceful. It was a choice, but it was a choice that I was able to implement based on my lifestyle and some of the things that I ascribe to personally.

that I like to share through my book and here we are talking about it. By accepting the circumstances that were beyond my control, I was able to tune into myself at a deeper level. And I was able to kind of get at my ego out of the way, know, it's my ego and my intellect and God, you know, I can control this or maybe I can't control and I just have to feel fear and anger, you know.

When we feel enormous fear, usually the next thing that comes is anger because we're attempting to control the fear. And anger is a way to in some way manage fear. And I've experienced it. I've seen people I love experience it. People I care for experience it. And I think we've all experienced it. In this case though, I made a determination that I was simply going to go with the flow and I was going to not fight what was not fightable.

Speaker 1 (41:10.668)
but to surrender, to accept the circumstances. And with that acceptance, I was able to tune in to a deeper part of myself, my essence, and then became extremely resourceful for the next hour managing the crisis, getting the dogs ready, getting the house ready, getting everything I needed. And my partner said she was just following my lead. And she said she was surprised how calm I was.

It helped her be calm and resourceful. Don't get me wrong. There are circumstances where she's far more resourceful than I am.

That's what makes a great partnership.

That's what makes a good partnership. Yeah. Where she can just be tuned into the moment so clearly. And I'm like, wait a minute, we got a real problem here. And she's saying, no, we don't have a problem. I've got it managed. Just relax. You know, so it goes both ways.

go. I love it. What would you say are some common misconceptions about connecting with the higher self and exploring non-physical realities? I think there's a lot of curious people out there and you know there's great information and people like you and you know sometimes there's information out there that leads people down a I'm not really sure about.

Speaker 1 (42:29.678)
So I'm going to be very frank when I say this. The world will attempt to redirect our attention in such a way as to learn about ourselves through external sources of information. know, read this book. Here I am, an author of a book, right? Do this, do that. Use this ritual. Use this meditation technique so that we are going through these alternative paths

that are really another external interpretation. What I'm saying fundamentally is to get ourselves out of the way and learn to connect. And doesn't require a belief system, doesn't require a ritual, doesn't require a tradition. It just requires a determination and intention and a few tools, right? A few tools for

getting ourselves out of the way and tuning in to our essence, tuning into ourselves. When we talk about the essence, we're really just tuning into ourselves. I've been down a lot of different paths and for many years, when I was younger, I became very curious about inner exploration and I began to study different belief systems. And I was friends, I grew up in Judaism and I was friends with a Kabbalah scholar and I studied the Kabbalah.

for a number of years. And then I met a Hasidic, it was actually Orthodox, I mean, they were as rigorous as Hasidic Jews. And he and I became very close friends. And we would spend hours talking about the interconnected nature of physical and non-physical worlds and our role in the scheme of things. And then the rabbi in his community,

forbade contact with me because I was perceived as an outsider. I was interrupting their flow. And I became very disillusioned that I would be separated like that. And I began to look at different belief systems and how they attempt, and in many cases, they offer fantastic values of empathy, compassion, equality. And yet they still had another side to them, a flip side where they could

Speaker 1 (44:53.518)
create a fragmentation in society. Me from you, my belief from your belief, black from white, on and on. This theme of fragmentation divides us from what is essentially the undivided wholeness of ourselves so that we then are influenced in many ways by these different systems that take us away from ourselves and in some weird way unite us with ourselves at the same time.

It was this strange and awkward juxtaposition that just didn't make sense to me. And when I lost this friendship, it drove me to understand why. And this was one of the motivations for writing the book. So I do approach the idea of beliefs, belief systems, ritual. It's interesting because if you look at indigenous cultures around the planet, or even any belief system, they all stem from an origin. And that origin.

is essentially very similar in the dynamics of those systems. So that if we go back thousands of years to the origin of these systems, we find very strikingly similar values that are still being related through these systems today. And yet, because they have been interpreted by humans for centuries and millennia, they have taken on a very different intention. So that

Judaism is quite different than Christianity and Christianity is quite different than Islam. You know, it just goes on and on and on that there is this theme that separates and divides when really we are a unified whole connected through our origin, who we are, where we come from, the non-physical. So the non-physical has been very influential in some of these views that I present in the book.

as a way to understand how we can lose sight of ourselves and how we can become distracted. know, belief is a very powerful thing. I may not believe today what I believed in a past life, yet that belief system has been come embedded energetically in my inner world. When I have transcendental experiences, I may see things that reflect that belief system. And that's also explored in brighter realms.

Speaker 2 (47:14.486)
Okay. So what do you think the next evolution of spiritual awareness looks like for humanity?

Well, I think that the next phase of humankind's evolution is its linking with the multiple in the larger field. The multiple being the counterparts of humans, their energetic family, and recognizing the unity, the oneness, the wholeness of a cohesive system. We are a part of each other in a sense. We come from different energy systems and these different energy systems have a very different intention. They have very different degrees.

of intensity, but we are essentially the same. So that, for example, when you communicate with your best friends, oftentimes there are very few words that are spoken. You don't need to speak with people that you love and you connect with. We're speaking on a nonverbal level. And yet here we are using language to try to understand each other. It just doesn't work.

When we get that out of the way, get that equation out of the way, we connect on a fundamental level. The non-physical provides that awareness and that intuitive exchange that gives us a sense of connection to the whole. So I think that we are rapidly moving in that direction in spite of what we're seeing in the world and all the pockets of negativity. Those really don't relate to me, okay?

I don't want to get off a plane in certain countries right now because there's a very good chance something could happen to me. Even in my own country, there's something can happen to me. Something can happen to us anywhere, anytime, any place, right? We're just in a very awkward and potentially destabilizing world. It depends where you're sitting at the moment. We have this capacity for connecting to that part of ourself that is without conflict, that is without disturbance.

Speaker 1 (49:10.092)
And that's what I'm encouraging in the book. That's what I encourage.

That's really important, especially at these particular times globally. Kudos to you for saying that. Happy hour for the spiritually curious. We have three questions we ask as we're winding up. Question number one, if you could share one spiritual truth with every person on the planet, something you believe would elevate the collective and consciousness, what would it be? I sort of feel like you just answered this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

I think I've answered it a few times over.

the next one unless you want to add this.

What I would say then, to sum up this question is learn to learn from yourself. We have the answers within us.

Speaker 2 (49:54.177)
Absolutely.

If you could have a conversation with any spiritual teacher, mystic or enlightened being living or past, who would it be and what would you ask them?

Well, that's really good, but it would be a number of them. But one of them I like is Robert Monroe, who had the out of body training program. And Krishna Murthy. mean, it's such such so difficult to, to narrow that down to one individual. like Joseph Campbell. I would probably simply want to have a conversation with them. You know, we all have a piece of the puzzle, so to speak, but they have their experience and I'm just curious.

how they're doing it. So I would love to be able to converse with these people to ask them what does wholeness mean for them.

Good question. Probably a conversation for another day, but you just said that we're all a piece of the puzzle, and I believe that that's very true, that we all bring a different fit in to create the whole. If you could travel anywhere in time past your future to witness a pivotal spiritual moment, where would you go and why?

Speaker 1 (51:07.97)
That's another very good question. Where I think I would like to go is back to the very moment that humans and there are many different species that we've been able to learn about through anthropology. But the moment that humans arrived in the physical world, in this particular environment, in this particular planet, what they brought with them, what they believed, and when those beliefs began to form,

specific Earth-based systems and how that influenced the history of humanity. But it's an interesting point because if we look back, let's say 50,000 years ago, well, 50,000 years ago, there were a lot fewer people on the planet, a heck of a lot fewer people. And here we are, even going back to the 1800s, there was 2.5 billion people on the planet. Now we're pushing 7.5, 8 billion. I don't really know, but...

There's a lot more people here and the earth has never, and we know this historically, seen that many people on the planet, even going back in our history. We've never seen 2.5 billion people before the 1800s, you 500 million people going back 5,000 years. Don't mark my words. I don't know the exact timeline of how many people were here at different periods in life. But what I can say is where did all these people come from? Where did we come from? Well, we came from the non-physical.

And here we are. Trying to understand that a little bit better is very curious for me.

Okay, I like that one. So what's next for Steven in brighter realms?

Speaker 1 (52:48.558)
So I have a new edition of the book coming out in six weeks or two months or so. It's the second edition, which I'm not promoting the first edition anymore. This is the first edition. The second edition will be out through all of the sales platforms. And for anybody who would like a copy, I'm happy to send a PDF. All they have to do is reach me. If they want to send me an email, I will put a PDF of the advanced reader copy of the second edition for free.

no charge, and I do that for anybody who asks for the book.

So I will make sure that I get that posted on our website so that they have that information. Are you just promoting your book or is there other work that you do in the field or it's just wherever life takes you?

Certainly it's where life takes me. The work that I'm doing has opened up other opportunities for me, but unrelated to the book. So the way that I see it is there's a lot of work to do in this environment. I'm trying to be a unifying figure in a time of disunity. That is essentially my fundamental intention and goal.

Any last thoughts you'd like to share?

Speaker 1 (54:04.61)
We can do this together. Yes.

we can. absolutely agree with you. I want to thank you for being on the show. I've truly enjoyed the conversation, Stephen. And for all our listeners out there, thank you for taking time out of your precious day to join us. Until next time, remember, embrace that wild soul. Thank you, Stephen.

Thank you, Sandra. Pleasure.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Wild Soul Gathering's Happy Hour for the Spiritually Curious. To learn more about our guests, please go to our website, WildSoulsGathering.com. We're very eager to hear from our listeners what you thought of the episode, topics you might like us to cover in the future, your thoughts on spirituality, questions you may have. Please feel free to send us an email at WildSoulsGathering.gmail.com.

This is your host, Dr. Sandra Marie, sending each of you peace and love. Until we meet again, embrace your wild soul.