Jungian Psychology Meets the Paranormal: Unlocking Your Infinite Consciousness with Dr. Susan Plunket- EP 407

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Hey there, welcome to Grief to Growth, the podcast that explores the profound questions of life, like life and death, and even beyond that. I'm your host, Brian D Smith, and I'm so glad you're here. So whether you're tuning in for the first time, or you're one of our longtime listeners, welcome to the show. The show is all about helping you navigate life's challenges, and deepen your understanding of who we are, why you're here, and what lies ahead. So today we're diving into the fascinating intersection of psychology and the paranormal with Dr. Susan Plunkett, and she's a psychologist, an author, a guide to transcendent experiences. She has decades of experience, a private practice, and a doctorate from the New School for Social Research. She brings a unique perspective that blends Jungian psychology, alchemical wholeness, and her own incredible journey in the higher dimensions. That's a mouthful there. In her new book, A Jungian Understanding of Transcendent Experiences, Susan recounts her personal encounters with the, with the numinous and helps us to explore the deeper meaning of these phenomena. From astral projection and shapeshifting to the wisdom of beings from other dimensions, Susan's work challenges us to rethink what it means to be human and invites us to integrate these extraordinary experiences into our lives. So in today's episode, we'll discuss what happens in our consciousness during paranormal experiences like seeing a ghost or astral projection. Excuse me. We'll discuss the role of transcendent experiences in awakening and healing, and we'll discuss her personal journey including psychic attacks and out-of-body experiences. Excuse me again. You may have noticed I do have a cold, so I'm going to try to get through this today. So the guidance that she's received from non-human entities and how Jung's insights in alchemy Influencer work is another area we'll discuss. So get ready for an exploration that's going to open your mind and inspire your soul. And don't forget, you can join the conversation afterwards at grieftogrowth.com/community. And with that, I want to welcome Susan Plunkett to Grief to Growth.

Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Hi, Susan. It's great to have you here. I apologize for my voice in advance. I am— just got a cold. This is on Monday. I just hit this— this hit me on Friday. So we're going to get through this the best we can. So Susan, um, you know, it's interesting being a psychologist but also exploring the paranormal because I know a lot of times they teach us in school we don't— we ignore the paranormal, we don't talk about that, right? So how did you get into that?

Well, I am a psychologist, it's true, but I'm a Jungian psychologist, which means I follow the work of Carl Jung and Carl Jung was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, and he was a mystic. He didn't like it when Freud called him a mystic, but in fact, he had paranormal experiences. He had transcendent experiences. By transcendent, I mean a slightly different feel of a word than paranormal. Transcendence is something really uplifting. All paranormal experiences aren't actually uplifting. Some are frightening to people, but those that are transcendent kind of lift us out of ourself to awareness of our greater identity as pure consciousness. Jung believed, and I believe, that our ultimate being, who we ultimately are, is consciousness, pure consciousness. So we don't need a body to be conscious. And in fact, we are conscious before we take a body, and we are conscious after we take a body. So people who die suddenly don't even realize they're dead very often, as hospice people will tell you. Well, not hospice people, because those usually are sudden death— I mean, slow deaths. But people at accident scenes, people who are with people who have a heart attack, um, they don't often know that they're dead because their consciousness is continuing. Um, and that's kind of a beautiful thing because it allows us to astral travel because we leave the body lying on the bed usually and our co— we travel in our consciousness. It also allows us to connect to the other side, uh, and to commune with people who don't have a body, or beings, entities that maybe were never human that don't have a body. The body is a temporary rental that we use for whatever number of years we are here in Earth School, like learning about our oneness with, with all beings, um, and hopefully coming to accept we are not our body, and in fact everything including our body is a simulation that we accept. But physicists now tell us that there isn't really anything but energy. That is the ultimate reality for physicists. They also tell us that the number of minds in the universe is one. One mind. We're all in it. In fact, what happens when you die? Nothing, because you never left the quantum field. You are always in the field. You're still in the field. There isn't really anything to fear. It's just that when we're born and we take a body, which is a very scary thing for many people, for many bits of consciousness to do, to come into the physical, to put part of our consciousness— part of our consciousness does not incarnate, it stays in the life between life space, but a large part of our consciousness incarnates, and that's very frightening to be so associated. And at first, babies don't get it, that, uh, they don't know how to work the body. They don't even know how to see, really, because we have to learn to see, we have to learn to hear, to feel. And then what happens over the first 7 years of life when we're in theta waves is that we learn so much, and we just come to believe this is reality and this body are who we are and where we are. That's why they— scientists and even psychologists say the age of reason is 7, because after 7, you're no longer totally only in theta waves. You go through all the brain waves. The theta is so you can learn fast how to walk, crawl, talk, use, use this, use this body, because we don't— we aren't born knowing it because we're pure consciousness., and that's a lot of work we do in that first 7 years of life. But it also convinces us that we are human. We are not human. We take a temporary human form. We are much grander than human. I mean, humans are wonderful. The body is a beautiful machine, and it is also divine. But our true essence is consciousness. And oneness with all consciousness and ultimately love. Because pure consciousness, when we— I mean, I'm not an enlightened being. I just know what I've learned from my experiences in my 77 years on this planet. And I've only, like, really been able to articulate this position I had inklings in my 40s and 50s, but it was really in my 60s and 70s that I put together all my experiences, both as a psychologist, a Jungian psychologist, and as a, just a consciousness, you know, having had experiences which taught me that I, you, all of us are so much grander than just our temporary identification with this human form, which is a magnificent form. I mean, one of my teachers said, a Tersch person who had never been a human, a consciousness that had never been a human, that of all the different species on Earth, which many have come and gone and are extinct, but still plenty are here, it is only from a human, form that we can achieve enlightenment. So it is kind of a special form among dogs, cats, horses, and only humans see this reality. We see reality depending on what our sensory things are. We have eyes that look straight ahead because we're not usually prey, whereas like rabbits and animals that are prey, their eyes more on the side of their head, they see different reality. Reality is species-specific. That's what I'm trying to say. A dragonfly has 60,000 eyes, so they don't see the same thing. A fly doesn't see what we see. Even dogs and cats see variations on what we see. So if no humans were here, this reality would cease, cease to exist if no one was perceiving it. So I mean, that tells us right there that it can't really be physical. It's created in the mind, in the consciousness, as a physical thing, even though we experience it as physical.

Yeah.

I forgot now what your original question was. Oh, how did I get into it?

Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting to me because, um, you know, as I was telling you before we started recording, my daughter is a mental health counselor, and I know when she was in school and, and my She has, as she says, my wife and I are very woo-woo because since my, my other daughter passed away, we've gotten all the spirituality. And when she was in school, they were just basically drumming that out of her. It's like, you know, people are just— we're biological robots. It's all about brain chemistry, you know, etc. And I've met very few psychologists or psychiatrists who actually understand, I think, who we actually are as whole people. But Jung is fascinating to me because a lot of people talk about him, but I guess he wasn't really accepted by people like Freud at the time.

Right. He and Freud were best friends initially. They were two different generations. Freud is a generation older, and he was a mentor of Jung because they were both interested in healing and psychoanalytic ideas. But they had like a bromance, you know, they were like really tight. They even got matching tattoos on their calves at one point. Um, but Jung being younger and being more mystical, uh, had ideas that he wanted to develop, and Freud wanted Jung to be his to follow his teachings and take over. So they split. It's like the acorn under the oak. You gotta roll further away or you're not gonna grow into your own tree. And it was excruciating and painful. Both of them said Freud became very angry and felt betrayed, and Jung got a little destabilized, slept with a revolver next to his bed for months, couldn't see patients, just he really lost this mentor, this father figure, this great intellect, which Freud is. But Freud could not accept anything mystical or invisible. He would not have it. He had beautiful ideas, a genius. But Jung had beautiful ideas, too, but they didn't align. So after their time together, which was probably, I don't know, less than a decade,, they went their separate ways and never reconciled, which was very sad. And so Freud had his tattoo on his calf that matched Jung's removed surgically. Jung had his transformed, and that tells you something about the men. He had more ink and just had it transformed. So Jung was about process and alchemical process, and Freud was more dogmatic. Both genius.

Yeah.

I always was more interested in Jung because of his mysticism.

So when did your mysticism— you mentioned that in your 50s and 60s, I think you said, is when you kind of came to this understanding that you have now. Was there an event? In your earlier life that triggered you to move towards— more towards Jung than to, say, a Freudian point of view?

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Probably being born the way, being born who I am, uh, and events in my childhood. Um, because when I was little, I was able to astral travel, and I did that with my sister, my younger sister. Um, I think in the first 10 or so years of my life, I had a lot of mystical experiences and then shut them down as a result of socialization, education, parents. My father was quite open to things, but my mother was like, don't talk about these things, behave yourself in school, get good grades., you know, buy into what you're supposed to buy into and get educated. But I shared a lot of things with my sister. And when I was 11, I was trying to behave and be socialized, but I accidentally froze my feet ice skating. I grew up in the country and I was outside ice skating and it was about 10 below and I put on extra socks, laced up my skates, and cut off the circulation to my feet without realizing it, and skated for hours. So when I got home and I took off my socks, my toes were black as coal. And I called my mother and she screamed. My mother was a nurse, so she understood what it meant. And we lived in the country, like, 45 minutes from a hospital. She called my father and, um, they each took a foot and a towel and began rubbing, and it was excruciating. Uh, and they were discussing, like, we have— do they have— we have to go to the hospital anyway because she could lose her feet, maybe her lower leg if gangrene sets in. Slowly the feet turned like a bluish white. And I begged not to go to the hospital because they talked about— they were so shocked— in shock, cutting off the toes. And I was like, please, let's not go. Let's just wait and see. Of course, the next day we did go to the hospital. But that night I had a visitation. I was like crying in my bed and saying, oh, you know, thinking, how will I How will I go to school dances with no toes? How will I do the bunny hop? You know, whatever an 11-year-old is gonna be worried about. And this figure appeared next to my bed. And since I had been praying, I thought it was Jesus. But I said, are you Jesus? And it was a light figure and said, no, I'm Master Hilarion. I'm here to help you heal yourself. And, uh, you know, since I was still part child, I was a little accepting. And, um, he was using Emerald Light and teaching me to use Emerald Light. Um, and then I guess I went to sleep because I woke up and I thought there was a reptile next to my bed, a scary dark reptile. Children often dream of monsters and bears, but I actually thought this reptile was there and laying paralyzed in bed. But so the next morning, my father— I wasn't able to walk. My feet were swollen by then. Carried me to the backseat of the car, covered me with a blanket, and I had like a flash into what I now think of was another lifetime, simultaneous lifetime, where I was in a barn being eaten by rats., and a man came in and lifted me up and put me in the back of his, his wagon, his hor— his horse-drawn wagon. And I, it didn't look like my father, but I thought, that's my father and this is me and he has saved me. But at the time I thought, has frozen my feet made me go crazy? And is my brain like, why am I seeing this? Um, Now I know that that happens all the time. We drift into daydreams, which are really alternative realities that we're also functioning in. So that experience was— I did not lose my toes, but I had to relearn how to walk a month later. That was a big experience.. And I really felt I had a lot of help from the other side, partly from praying. And I write about that in this book, and I write about many other— but one of the paranormal— I write about 19 different ones— was about seeing other beings that we don't normally see. And children often see them. I don't know if your children had imaginary friends when they were little,. But imaginary friends are not imaginary. Many children have them. They are guides. Mine was a twin who decided not to incarnate. She was going to incarnate, but she made the decision not to come. So only I stayed and was born, and my mother lost the other twin, um, early on in the pregnancy.

Mm-hmm.

Um,. But she then became my imaginary friend, reminding me of things that are very Jungian. Like, we are not just our body. We have a self. Even in this body, Jung said, we are two. We are our identity, our persona, our ego. Me, a psychologist, you, a healer, a podcaster, spreader of wisdom. But we have our eternal aspect, our self. Jung called them when he was a little kid, my number one and my number two, the part of me that's my million-year-old man that's always been, then my temporary self living this life in Switzerland. Later, he called them the ego and the Self, Self with a capital S, which is our eternal aspect that is part of the oneness.

You know, it's interesting, you, you start off and you mentioned this concept, which I only heard fairly recently myself, um, that we are, we are pure consciousness, of course, but that only a part of us incarnates. Um, when I was, when I was younger in Sunday school, they said we have a soul and nobody ever really knew what that kind of was. But it's like, well, we are a body, but we have a soul. And then we heard, well, no, you're a soul living in a body. And that makes, I think, more sense. But just even this idea that we are this higher level being, the capital S, could you talk more about that? Because I think that's new to a lot of people.

Yeah, that part of us, part of it incarnates with us.. But part of us stays. It's not that, it's not that there are places there. There are no places because everything is in the same field. But maybe in a, think of it maybe as a different part of the field. If you do this thing called life between life regression, which anyone can do, that you can contact the Michael Newton Institute. If there's someone on the other side you wanna visit and communicate with, I did it when my younger sister died because I wanted to communicate with her. So I went over there and I saw parts. I saw aspects of beings that I knew were alive in what we think of as Earth. And it was explained to me over there that not all of your soul, not all of your energy incarnates in any given one life. Maybe you're in several lives at one time, or maybe part of— definitely part of you stays in the eternal realm. And when you go to the life between life place, everything is telepathic, and it's such a very beautiful experience. Because you're just— it's so easy that words start to feel unbelievably clumsy because you're laying— your body is left on a chaise with the psychologist who is— who has helped you. You go to your last death, you kind of piggyback on that. To get into that space. Your consciousness, your body's not going anywhere. It's staying on the chaise, but your consciousness is roaming and over there and kind of connected, people say, by a golden thread. But the psychologist guiding you is keeping a hold on your consciousness by asking you to say what's going on, and you just want him to shut up. I just— leave me. Don't make me talk. I can't put my consciousness. I want my consciousness there. It's so beautiful. I'm with my sister. I see my father. I see Jung. I don't want to be back in the body talking to you. But they want to make sure that the part that's supposed to be here now comes back. But the words were so hard to get out. Unbelievably hard to get it out. Um, but that really shows you, as does astral travel, um, that we don't need the body. Because when you're astral traveling, you, you see your body lying on the bed when you come back. Usually you slam back in because you're so freaked out. Um, but many people have astral traveled, or shamans bilocate. And anyone can learn to do these things. Anyone can learn to do these things if they want to, if fear doesn't stop them, because you see everything. So if your body's lying on the bed, your eyes are in the body on the bed. So how are you seeing your body? Your consciousness is seeing when that body lying on the bed without your consciousness, It cannot see. It can't see till the consciousness is in the body, because the consciousness is seeing.

Yeah, I know you talked about the life between life experience. I had a life between life regression. And it is a very interesting experience, because you said you're here, and you have this, and that person's talking to you, and you just want to say, I really don't feel like talking right now, but you have to, to record it, right? Because you've got to, you've got to record what you're experiencing.

Yeah, because they make a recording.

Yeah, yeah. But, uh, it is, it's a very interesting experience of that.

Did you, did you see your daughter when you did it?

Uh, yeah, yeah, in different lives. Yeah, yeah.

So amazing. Did you do it through the Michael Newton Institute or one of those?

No, I didn't. I did with a woman named Vondi Lozano. But I think she, she might have trained with Michael.

She probably trained there.

I think she did.

It's a wonderful thing. I mean, were you glad you did it?

I was. I have to tell you, I was really skeptical because I'm one of those people, it's like, oh, I can't be hypnotized, and I don't know what this is really going to be like. And, um, when I went through it, I was really amazed at how, you know, how impactful it really was. And, um, you know, the time— I forgot how many hours it was, but, you know, you like Wow, I can't believe it was that much time. So it's a totally different state of consciousness than I've ever experienced in normal way of life.

Yeah, it's amazing. Shortly after I did it, I was lying on my bed, re-listening to the recording, just lying there, eyes shut, lying on the bed. And headphones on. And I thought that I was lying on the bed, but in fact my daughter came into the room. I wasn't aware of it. I wasn't lying on the bed, I just— my body was. And she said something to me. Of course I didn't hear because I wasn't in the body. So she touched my leg and my body levitated off the bed as I consciousness slammed back in. And I realized just listening to it, I went back over there. But of course you would, because you get rehypnotized and then your consciousness just is gone. So there was that. And I freaked her out. And I said to her, don't ever touch me when I'm meditating or just don't. And she was like, don't worry. Yeah, so let's start using somebody, levitate.

Let's talk about some of these experiences because, you know, we have dreams. And so we have dreams that just are like crazy, that just don't make any sense, that we don't remember. And then we have these dreams that are like, feel very real, like we have actually gone someplace and met with somebody. And you wake up and you go there was something different about that. There was something that I'm supposed to learn or remember or whatever. So how does Jung talk about that?

Jung believed that all dreams are experiences more real than waking consciousness, even the crazy ones that don't seem to make sense, because we are not remembering the whole dream usually. Dreams where we can't— we think about them the whole day and even days forward. Sometimes they are visitations. We've been visited by someone, or we've gone to visit someone and had a specific experience. But all dreams have meaning. We don't always get the whole— the waking consciousness is secondary process thinking. So once you wake up and you know, okay, my name is Brian D Smith, today is Monday, I have a cold, you're in secondary process thinking. But when you first wake up and you can't remember where you are or what your name is, you're still in primary process, a different part of it. And we don't bring everything through to waking consciousness. A lot of it is lost because once we start to focus on this reality, we lose bits. Yeah, but all dreams are experiences which are as real as our conversation right now. And that includes nightmares. It includes all of it. They're all experiences, as are daydreams. Because many realities are right here, just a slightly different vibration. So you're watering the garden or washing the dishes, and you're just spacing out and you're in a daydream. Your consciousness has left your body and it's wherever the daydream is. Same at night when you're dreaming.

Okay, so this brings up a question because, you know, a lot of us in the space I'm in, we talk about visitations with our loved ones who have passed. And some of them are very peaceful and uplifting, and we feel like they're, they're younger than they were when they were here, and they're smiling, etc. And then we have nightmares. And so what, you know, typically we'll say, well, if it's a nightmare, it wasn't really a visitation. But if it's comforting, it is a visitation. So are you saying that these are all some sort of reality, but we're just not remembering them correctly?

Yeah, they're all some sort of reality.

Okay.

Um, yeah, uh, the visitations have an intense feeling because it's much easier for a consciousness, a disembodied consciousness, to contact us when we are not so attached to the body. That's how That's why most visitations happen when we're in the dream state, because we're pure consciousness and they're pure consciousness. Much easier for them to contact us because when we're awake, we're focused on this reality. We're just at a slightly different brainwave when we're dreaming, which is more accessible. So many teachings happen in dreams. Many downloads happen in dreams. Many communications for writers. A lot of my books are downloaded in my sleep, and then I write in the morning because they tell me, write in the morning before you lose the download.

Yeah.

Not this book, though. This book is my personal experiences. This is not channeled information. This is just real.

Okay.

Yeah.

The other stuff is not that the other books are not real, but they're stories that, uh, my guides want to, to be shared to explain the human experience.

Yeah. So speaking of the human experience, we, we talk about this, and it's really interesting. One of my friends has posted on Facebook a couple days ago. She said, um, what did she say? Where, where were you before you were born? And she poses kind of a philosophical question, I guess. I said, well, the same place I'm going to be after my body dies, you know. I think that's— I think we do come full circle. But what is the— what is the point? We come in, as you said, we come in, we come into these bodies, we're totally disoriented. I've heard— I don't know if you heard of Christian Sundberg, but he talked about having these life-between-life memories, and he remembers incarnating and being in the womb in his body and just being terrified. And, and I think that's experience a lot of us have. I know I, I felt really disoriented for the first, I don't know, 5, 6, 7, 8 years of my life, like Why am I here? Why do we do this?

I think we do it because it's Earth school. I actually start the book with this question. I start the book actually before I'm born, deciding to incarnate. But then the first experience, I'm in my first grade class feeling like just what you described. I'm probably 6 years old, 5 and a half or 6. And I look up and I say, Miss McInnis, what are we doing here? What are we all doing here? I remember that. That was 71 years ago. I remember it. I could touch that experience right now. Of course, there's no time, so of course I could touch it. And she was like, aren't you Christian? And that— I didn't know what she was talking about. I did not know why she said that. And so I said, no, I'm not talking about church. I'm asking you, What are we doing here? Like, all of us on Earth? Because I wanted to know this. I think I've always wanted to know it, as you did. And of course, she had no answer for me because I didn't understand for years what religion had to do with the meaning of a human life. I still don't, actually, because I believe I believe in the divine and God, but not necessarily in any religion. Maybe they have something, but I don't know what. I forgot what you asked me.

Well, we were talking about that experience of being so disoriented when we get here.

Oh, right, right.

And we come here and then the people that are already here are just like, okay, get with the program.

Yeah, because they get numb. Yeah. After the first 7 years, we are programmed. We're in theta so we can receive the programming. And we get programmed by school, by parents, by all the people around us. And we learn to use our senses. We learn to sit, we learn to crawl, we learn to walk, to feed ourselves, to tie our shoes. None of this stuff our consciousness needs once we leave this body. Because we could be in a different body on a different galaxy, but we come here to learn. And Buddha said this is a great privilege to have this human vehicle to learn in because you can achieve enlightenment from a human form. Buddha did. He was born a man and became enlightened. It's an amazing trip we're on.

It is. It, it really is. And it's interesting, so you've talked about enlightenment a couple times. What does it mean to become enlightened?

To be— well, one teacher said to me, Manka, who was one of my most precious teachers, who has never been a human, he said, to become enlightened means to be aware on Earth every moment of your ego and what it's trying to do. Being aware you are not your ego, you are a greater self. Because a lot of times we slip. I mean, that's one definition of enlightenment. I think really the general one is to understand that we are divine, that we are part of the one mind, and that we are divine. But to really know it and to really know it, to really accept it, I think we have to be aware that our ego gets invested in this life and in our success in this life and in making it and doing well and all the stuff we're programmed to do. But if you're constantly and always aware of your ego, that you have a greater self, Manka at least said that that is enlightenment, to be continually aware that you, that you have an ego, but you are not your ego. You are your greater self. You are part of the divine. Um, and I think that's probably a really hard achievement.

Yeah, I think it is. So these, these beings who have never incarnated as a human— so the thing about— and I know Buddha said that it's a great privilege to be incarnated as a human. And, you know, people or beings do go through it knowing that it's a rough thing. And I— but my understanding is there are beings on the other side that, that kind of look at us and like with admiration that, you know, you, you've— you're the brave ones, you've taken this on. So help people understand, because I know there are people listening right now going, yeah, it's still— it's not worth it. This, you know, I've been through— you don't know what I've been through. You know how much I've lost loved ones. I've experienced abuse. I don't like all the wars. I would never choose this, right?

Yeah. The ego would never choose this. The human aspect would never choose it. But my belief and understanding is that the greater self did choose it because the catalyst for growth is always pain. Sorrow, heartbreak, sickness. There's some wonderful books called The Law of One, which you may know, the Ra material, R-A material. And Ra talks about the choice to become a human and how catalysts work. If you wake up from one catalyst, then you might not get the next. But we organize, we, we pile stuff on our plate on the other side. Okay, I want to wake up in this life, so okay, uh, maybe I'll be born blind, or, uh, maybe I won't, but I will lose my sight if I don't wake up by a certain time. We make a design with our guides. I know it sounds a little contrived, but, um, I think it might be true. Raw seemed to think it was true. But there are beings who are never human and never will be human because they are a different form of consciousness. For example, Manka, one of my teachers that I got in my late 30s, and still every day I contact Manka, every day, every morning of my life. And I didn't know until I was 65, what the nature of Manka's form besides the pure consciousness form, if it wasn't human. Because I said to him once in my early 40s, well, when you were a human, did you have to go through this? And he said, my dear, I've never been a human. And I didn't ask him at that time, well, what was your growth experience besides being pure consciousness?. And, and a short— a month or so later, my father was ill, and I was upset, and I was telling Manka, I'm scared. And Manka said, well, if you, you say you believe in consciousness and eternal life, what are you scared of? And, and then he said, but I will be with him at the hour of his death, which is not now, if you wish it. And I said, I do wish it. And he said, The prayers of a child— is my dog barking? Prayers of a child for a parent are always answered. Fast forward 20 years, I'm at my father's deathbed, um, and I am wondering, is Manka here? I wonder if Manka came. And my father's delirious at this point, and, he tells me there are golden angels, and then he tells me one of them called Manka was sent by you. No one in my family— wow— ever heard the word Manka or anything about this, because as I said, you know, my mother was like, don't talk crazy, Susan. Um, so then I knew Manka was an angel, a golden angel. I didn't know he was a golden angel. I knew he was wise and poetic, and like, I was so in love with him, you know, as a being. Um, once I said to him, I want to hug you. I'm so grateful for everything you've taught me. And he said, hug yourself, we'll understand, talking about himself as a group consciousness. And I think in certain levels of evolution, beings think of themselves as a group consciousness. So maybe he was a group, part of a group of angels. But I never knew for that initial 20-some years that he was a Golden Angel. Now I know. Yeah. So, and it's been like 14 years since my father died.

Wow. Yeah, well, you know, it's these experiences, I guess, maybe a little ways to help along the way as we go through, you know, these things in life. And I know you had an experience when you were, I think, when you were younger, where someone said you were like transforming physically.

Oh, yeah. Uh, in my 30s, um, I had a boyfriend. There was always a boyfriend. I think that's partly loving our part— or a husband. I've had a few of those. But, um, yeah, he— one night, it was in the early days of our relationship, like where you're always having a lot of sex in those early days if you're 30, um, if you're lucky, I guess, and He was looking at me in this really— he was a musician, a singer-songwriter. He was looking at me in a really strange way, but I didn't— I was just like, okay, but I was just engaged in the activity. So the next day, I was in graduate school at the time. I came home from graduate school the next day. I was learning to be a psychologist, and he was writing a song. Uh, back then he was singing it, he was playing and singing it into a handheld tape recorder because it was 1980. Um, so I said, what's that? He said, it's called The Girl with the Golden Eyes. And I said, what's that about? He said, uh, I was going to tell you this, but when we're making love, my eyes are brown. Um, you, you look different. And I said, what are you talking about? He said, well, your eyes become this bright yellow gold, and your face has a slightly different shape, and your neck is longer. And that's really all I can see when we're making love. But I said, what? He said, I'm not making it up. I'm not making it up. So I went to an intuitive. I hadn't met Monka yet. And she said, Susan, You knew him on Atlantis. You appear to him when you're making love because you love each other in your Atlantean form. And I said, well, how come he doesn't appear to me in his Atlantean form? She said, I don't— that I don't know. It may be a woman thing, or it may be you're different, uh, have different abilities now. Um, yeah, that was a weird thing. One other person, one other man ever told me that. But he told me right during it. And then I knew I must have known him in Atlantis. And I checked with yet a different intuitive. Yes, Atlantis. Because we come, we have experiences with the same people. Because Atlantis is happening now. It's happening now., and perhaps my consciousness got confused because we are manifesting our bodies all the time. We are manifesting everything we see and experience, and then we are perceiving what we're creating. It's wild. It's wild.

It is a really interesting thing to think about and frankly, kind of mind-blowing because we think of past, present, and future because that's our experience when we're here. But then As you said, physicists are telling us that time doesn't make any sense and there's no reason why it shouldn't flow backwards as opposed to forward. And it's like the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once is kind of what science is starting to say now. It's everywhere, everything all at once.

But if we perceived everything all at once, our heads would explode. So we pretend that it's just spread out over time. And that's okay. That's what we do in the third dimension on Earth. In other dimensions, we probably don't do that, but I'm not in touch with those at the moment, even though all the dimensions are happening all the time. As you said, everything all at once. All the wild— it's wild when you start thinking about what ultimate reality is.

Yeah. There's another story you talk about. Your daughter had a vivid astral projection. What was that about?

Uh, yeah, one morning she came into my room and she said, Mom, the weirdest thing just happened. And I said, what happened? And she said, uh, I thought that I was in the middle— we're in— we live in New York City. Um, I thought that I was in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, uh, on an island in a cabana, and I was trying to get out of the cabana. I thought, I'm going to have to stay here all night. I want to get out of this cabana, even though she— I'll tell you, for various reasons, she loves the southern coast of Spain. And, and so she, she said she was trying to unlock the door, the lock on the cabana, and all of a sudden she woke up and she didn't know where she was. And she looked across the room And the first thing she saw was the little green light where your plug goes into your computer. And she thought, oh, I'm not in the Mediterranean, I must be in my room. And then her eyes moved toward the bed and there was her body lying on the bed.

Wow.

And she slammed, of course, back into it. And she was like, Mom, I saw my body lying on the bed. I wasn't in it and I saw it. And I reminded her about that. Many people do this. They just usually— that you go out of your body every night. You usually just don't wake up while you're out of your body. 3 times in the course of a couple of months, she went back to the Mediterranean because it was somebody that lived on the Mediterranean Sea that she really longed for. And so she would just go at night.

Yeah.

Because we can go anywhere we want and we go to other galaxies. I have seen the Earth from the heavens and many people have. I've been on other planets because your consciousness can go to the moon. Your body can't unless you're SpaceX or something, but your consciousness can go anywhere. Wherever you put it, that's where you are. You imagine it, you don't will it, you imagine it, and then there you are, wherever you imagined.

Interesting, interesting.

Fascinating creatures.

Yeah, absolutely. So I know you've written a series of books, Paranormal Perspectives. What is, what is the aim of the books? What will people get out of those?

Okay, the Paranormal Perspectives is a series of books I only wrote one of them. So far there are 5. So there are 5 different authors, each talking about their experiences of the paranormal. I chose to write about my personal paranormal experiences, but they're— one of the guys, John Fraser, is a paranormal researcher, so he writes about his par— he's British— about his paranormal research. Another one, Gavin Davies, who conceived of the series, he created the series and invited each of us. He writes about his paranormal experiences. So, so far, he— there are 5 authors. Only 2 books are out so far. Mine, which is the book on Jung and my experiences, and John Fraser's, which just came out. It's called One Big Box of Paranormal Tricks. And the others will be coming out like November, January, and in the spring.

Okay.

And the whole series was conceived by Gavin, who is one of the— will be one of the authors on the series.

Okay.

So you might be interested in talking to— I'm sure you've talked to Gavin because Gavin is the one who connected you and I.

Yeah, I know Gavin.

He's adorable and wonderful, and he's one of the authors, and this is his idea.

I didn't know that he was writing a book, so it's, it's interesting. I have to talk to him about that.

This is his third book, will be his third book.

So as we are sitting here in our physical bodies doing our daily lives and going to work and putting food on the table, all that stuff, how does understanding or thinking about the paranormal, how can that help me with my life? How does that help people that are just like, I just want to get by?

I think having paranormal experiences or understanding them reminds us that we are much greater than this life that we're living and this body that we're inhabiting. It's— the paranormal helps us move toward enlightenment because it shows us the ways in which We're so much more than this life and this body. So the paranormal is a great gift toward our evolution, toward our enlightenment.

Yeah, I think that's a great answer. And as I was thinking about that, you know, I've talked to several people that have had kind of experience that you and I talked— shared earlier. I don't have a lot of memories of my childhood. One of the first memories I have is being disoriented. Looking at, looking at television. I grew up in the '60s and what was going on with the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement and stuff. I was like, what kind of a planet is this? And, and I don't, I don't really want to be here. Um, you know, I, I just thought it was so weird. And then, you know, and I looked around other people like, why isn't everybody else seeing this? You know?

And then they were already programmed, but you weren't programmed yet.

Yeah, yeah. And that's something that I remember. So as people are listening to this, this might sound really strange to you and everything, but see if you can remember having that feeling. Because I think a lot of us did.

We all did in the beginning.

Yeah, I think so.

How'd I get in this helpless little body that I don't even know how to operate? I didn't— I— who made this choice for me?

Yeah, yeah. Well, some people say that's why babies can't talk, because they would tell us. It's like, yeah, there's an angel over there in the corner. Don't you see the angel?

Exactly. Exactly. But then we accept the programming because that's what we agreed to, to live here. But you don't want to accept it so much that you don't remember your greater self. We have to keep one foot in the realm of remembering the greater self as our ego goes about coping with life here, which can be wonderful and horrible.

Yeah, I think you said it really well earlier, that idea of enlightenment is being aware of our ego. We're not going to get rid of our ego.

No, it serves us.

Yeah, we're not going to get rid of it, but being aware that this is not who I am, this is not entirely who I am.

It's not the whole of who I am.

Right.

And, you know, watching the ego's tricks, it's always the same stuff. I want to have attention. I want to be recognized. I want to—

Yeah, absolutely.

Our little egos.

Yeah, we're coming to the end of our time. So we've talked about your book. So we're going to remind people of the name of your book and where people can find out more about you.

Thank you so much. My book is called A Jungian Understanding of Transcendent Experiences. It's on Amazon. It's in bookstores. It's on barnesandnoble.com. If they want to, if they forget that complicated title. I get that it's complicated. They can just go to my website, which is SusanPlunkett.com. And Plunkett has one T. Yeah. SusanPlunkett.com. All right. And they can contact me.

Any last messages you'd like to leave with people listening today?

Everybody listening is divine. And has a huge consciousness and is, is a self, a gazillion-year-old self that always has been and always will be, not just our ego.

Awesome.

Thank you so much, Susan. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you, Brian D Smith.

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