Interview with Stephen Hawley Martin

With a seeker’s mind and a pundit’s wit, Stephen Hawley Martin regaled me with tales that seem, on the surface, to be far-fetched, but science is bearing out the veracity of these anecdotes. In his most recent book, entitled The Truth: What You Need To Know Before December 21, 2012, Stephen offers guidance arising from his own experiences and those of documented writers. The table of contents offers enticements to read further on subjects such as ‘creating your reality’, ‘why you are here on Earth’, and ‘the mind and how it works’.

Wisdom: What prompted you to write the book and what was the inspiration behind it?

Stephen: This is a book that has been percolating for me for about 15 or 20 years. I have written other similar books, but this one was what I knew I would always write. It was my ‘magnum opus’ if you will. What really prompted me to actually sit down and do it was that I had Stephen Braude on my Internet radio show on www.webtalk radio.net called "The Truth About Life" where I am investigating all kinds of the things from the paranormal to the spiritual. The man is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County who had done a number of investigations on the paranormal. He was telling about this lady he had investigated who has brass foil appear on her skin. It is her mind that causes it; he has a theory about how it happens. It was the missing piece I felt I needed to write this book because it really is the evidence that science has been missing to show that mind and awareness is primal. It is the underlying ground of being of the physical universe. When I got the information, it just clicked with me. I sat down and wrote this book in about two or three weeks which is incredibly fast, as you know. It was all up there and it just came pouring out. I’m very happy with the results of it. I’ve gotten about a dozen reviews and all have been positive. It really opens people’s eyes who may not have looked at the world the way they now look at it, after reading this book.

Wisdom: And the woman Stephen Braude talked about was named Katie?

Stephen: Yes. "Katie the gold leaf lady" He has been investigating the paranormal for about 30 years, after he got tenured. He wasn’t stupid enough to do it before he got tenured. He has a number of fantastic and fascinating stories about mind over matter. This happened to be the one that shows that mind, in this case, Katie’s mind, can produce physical things and in this case, brass on her skin. His theory is that Katie is a psychic type person. She has helped police solve crimes. She has known so much about a crime and told police so much about it, that at times, she has become a suspect. They figure she can’t possibly know all these things, until they catch the person. She is apparently able to apport things; making them disappear from one place and appear in another. This is something you read about in books. A little off the subject, but one of the books I wrote was about one of my ancestors who was hanged during the Salem Witch trial. She wasn’t really a witch, I don’t think. Back in those days, people believed in magic and all sorts of things happened, like levitation, that credible people told about. That kind of thing doesn’t happen today and my theory is that it doesn’t happen because people are told it’s impossible. Katie happens to be a domestic. She is illiterate, never went to school, she was the 10th of 12 children who grew up in Tennessee. She’s never been told that she can’t do these things, so she does. I think that’s the way it may have been in times past. Dr. Braude thinks it’s the way she has of getting back at her husband. They have a difficult relationship. She once apported a carving set and he said "Well, what’s so great about that? It’s not worth anything." After that, this gold leaf started appearing on her skin and he thinks he’s now married to the golden goose. When they take it to be analyzed, it turns out to be brass, which is 80% copper and 20% zinc.

Wisdom: And he doesn’t see that in and of itself as miraculous?

Stephen: Apparently not. At least he pretends not to.

Wisdom: Do our minds work as part of a collective, like the Star Trek characters called The Borg?

Stephen: The mystics have been saying for millenia that all is One. Carl Jung called it the Universal Mind or the Super-conscious. There is One Mind and we all evolved out of that mind and in a way, we all are that mind, except it appears to us that we are separate human beings, which we are because we have this brain which is how we interact with the physical Universe. Our brain becomes the nexus that makes us think that it is where consciousness and the "I Am" is, when, in fact, it can be compared to a television set where the program you are watching isn’t in the set, even though it looks like it is. What the television set is doing is picking up the waves and signals, if you have one that comes over the air and not cable, it is everywhere around you. Our minds are non-local, but it appears to be centered in our head. In fact, we have One Mind, but we each have our little view point and place in it. There is a quote in my book about it that it is more like we are each focal points of energy or focal points of awareness within this larger awareness that we all share.

Wisdom: Why do we persist in believing that we are such separate entities that we can’t possibly believe that what I think effects you and what you think effects me?

Stephen: That’s the way it appears to us, even though my thoughts not only effect my reality, but also, those around me. It appears that we are separate and that is what we are taught in school and by science. Science has yet to catch up with what’s really going on. The problem is that back in the 19th century, old Charles Darwin came along with the book "The Origin of the Species". He quite correctly observed that organisms adapt to their environment. Science then started figuring that survival of the fittest, which was one of the mechanisms, was the way evolution works and it does, to a certain extent. I’m not arguing that things evolve. There is much more to it than that. Most life scientists, at least, not quantum physicists, think that awareness, thought and intelligence, all came about as a result of brains which evolved through this incredible series of accidents and mutations, which defy the second law of thermodynamics which says that things don’t get better by themselves. Your old car isn’t going to fix itself, but that is what has to happen for an organism to evolve. That is where we are each seen as a separate machine, with a brain that is like a computer and that in no way are we connected. Our thoughts are inside our head and are a result of electrons jumping across these synapses and that awareness is just an illusion created by the brain, which is totally wrong. What we are, are a way for awareness and consciousness to come into physical reality and experience it. That’s what a brain is; what brings this consciousness awareness to this physical body. We are experiencing that. We are not just bodies and minds. We are spirit that’s having an in-body experience. When we die, we’ll be going back to our normal state, which is not having a physical body.

Wisdom: Do you think that anyone who has the capacity to "believe" can do what Katie does?

Stephen: I believe that the potential is there. In theory, anybody can do it. I believe that psychic abilities are like any abilities. Some have more talent than others. Some people are born singers and can carry a tune from the very first time they try and there are others that couldn’t carry it in a bucket. That’s the same with psychic powers. Some people are prone and others are not. It’s hard to overcome the conditioning that we can’t do these things. Who knows? In studying the witch trials and what was going on back then and I believe that a lot of the things really did happen. Scientists today pooh-pooh it They thinks those girls who accused people of being witches which got a lot of people hanged, were just play-acting to get attention. I think there was more to it than that and they believed that some people were witches and they did have pins appear on their skin. When they fell on the floor and appeared to have fits, they really were having fits, because they believed. That’s another whole chapter in my book about belief and the placebo effect. Studies have shown that placebos can be, in many cases, even more effective than medicine, because people believed it.

Wisdom: So what our minds conceive of and what we hold onto, becomes our chosen reality?

Stephen: I would say it was chosen and what we expect, occurs. The complicated part is the stuff we have learned from birth, that works like any positive affirmation. There are these negative things that in are in your unconscious that are creating things that you are not aware of. You can become conscious of them. If you were brought up in a family where all you ever heard was "People in this family are overweight and have a fat gene and there’s nothing you can do about it, you look at an ice cream sundae and it goes straight to your hips.", and that whole family is overweight because they have come to believe that’s the way it is for them. If you could get that out of your head, think thin and replace that erroneous belief with something that says "You’re slim and trim," they probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.

Wisdom: Is that because of family loyalty and not wanting to be different from other family members?

Stephen: There is all kinds of psychological stuff going on. It could certainly be argued that a lot of it is psychological and there is nothing mystical about it. The fact of the matter is, we are sending these thoughts into the Universal Mind I have been talking about. It comes back to us like a boomerang. People who want love should give love and people who want money, should give money. What you send out is what you give back.

Wisdom: What is the premise of your latest book?

Stephen: It’s based on the idea that is pretty widely held by a number of people that we are going through a time in which the consciousness of human kind is raising and we are becoming more enlightened. I see this book as a catalyst to help along that process. The thesis is that if you read this book, you will understand how the world works and who you really are. Once you know that, you can take control of your life. I quote Timothy Freke who is an English philosopher who I have had on my show. He talks about ‘lucid living’. It’s like when you have a dream and you know you are dreaming, you can control the dream, because you are both the person having the dream and the one who is a character in the dream. This is what I am trying to do with this book. Life can be like a lucid dream. Once you really understand it, you know that you are not only the character in this larger scheme of things called ‘life’, but you are also the one who is having the dream of life and can therefore take control of your life and not think that outside forces are taking control of your life. Once you reach that state, life becomes more joyful. I’m not saying that you can, like Katie, materialize brass, but you can certainly change situations that you wish you didn’t have because you realize that you can pull your own strings. So many of us have victim mentality and once you read this book, it is hard to hold onto that, because you will have your eyes open to the true reality that you live in. You are an amazing human being. You are this Universal Mind manifesting in that body that you have and chose that situation before you were born. Once you realize that you are right where you chose yourself to be, it is hard to become a victim anymore.There was a man on my show, who when he was 16 years old, was contemplating suicide. He was born into a family in which his mother was paranoid-schizophrenic and impossible to live with. His father was a psychiatrist. He had a really bad time of things. He is now 64 years old and a managing partner in a fairly good size law firm and very articulate. When he was lying in bed one night and having these thoughts, it was like a tornado came down and ripped his consciousness out of his body and pulled him up through the roof and two hundred miles above the Earth. He blipped into this place that was no-place and he looked at himself and all he saw was a flickering light and all these flickering lights around him. He called out "Who’s there?" and they said "We are your guides and we just want you to know that you can do whatever you want with your life and you can even end this life if you want and you will not be judged. But, we do want you to know that it will be a waste of time, because you are thinking that you can end this life and it will be the end of your consciousness and you will cease to exist. The one thing you can not do, is end your consciousness and cease to exist. You can end that body, but you can not end life. If you do, it’s your choice. You will have to go back and do it again, until you get it right." That is the way it is.

Wisdom: What is the significance of December 21, 2012?

Stephen: There are two ancient texts that point to that date. The Mayans were terrific astronomers and astrologers. They were able to predict eclipses within a few seconds, a thousand years ahead. Their calendar ends on that date. People have known this for at least 25-30 years and those who study it, say that the Mayans believe that the world as we know it, would end. We are passing into a new situation, whatever that is. The I-Ching, a 5000 year old book from ancient China, predicts the end of the world as we know it on the same date. There is a computer program called the web bot developed to predict the stock market. It’s also since predicted things like Katrina and 9/11. It also predicts something big happening in 2012. However, prophecies that may not have the exact date, but point to it. They come down in two areas; one is that we are going to have this shift in consciousness. The other is that something catastrophic is going to happen, like an asteroid hitting the Earth, or bird flu or polar ice caps melt and the seas rise, or some combination. I believe that some shaky things are going to happen; they already are happening. The best way to deal with those things and help raise the consciousness is for me to write this book. It‘s my little role, along with my radio show.

Wisdom: Does it feel like a Divine assignment?

Stephen: No angel came and told me. It’s a calling that I have felt for 20 years. This is the direction I am being led and I’m not fighting it. I’m going with it.

You can learn more about Stephen and his work by visiting his website www. shmartin.com