Looking Inward with Marcus Anthony

Here’s an interview with futurist Marcus Anthony, Phd, author of Discover Your Soul Template. An Australian who lives in Hong Kong, Marcus talks about his life and how he came to write his spiritual self-help tome. He notes that his new book diverges substantially from what he publishes in his formal research, which he has also pursued with more than a thirty articles published in academic journals. His doctorate is in Futures Studies. Besides his writing and speaking as a futurist, he also works as a teacher and spiritual counselor. He does not presently hold a formal academic position.

1) What motivated you to write your book and what are the primary sources of your ideas? Where do the terms Integrated Intelligence and soul template come from?

Firstly, I love writing. I have always written, even as a child. For the decade or so leading up to the Writing of Discover your Soul Template (originally Sage of Synchronicity) I was mostly writing academic stuff related to the discipline of Futures Studies. Academia is incredibly restrictive, and there are numerous taboos in relation to writing about consciousness and psycho-spiritual development. I wanted to write a book which incorporated some of my academic ideas, but allowed me to tell the truth about life as I experienced it. However, in the end the book turned out to have virtually no academic content, and is full of personal stories and spiritual adventures I have experienced over the years.

2) Where do the ideas come from?

The truth is that they are mostly from my personal spiritual experience, and the simple experience of living in the modern world. I learned a lot from spiritual teachers like Leonard Jacobson, and a group of spiritual seekers in New Zealand, when I lived there in the late 90s.

I am very clairvoyant. Every time I stop to be present, sleep, meditate, or just get drowsy, images, songs and intuitive feelings come to me automatically. A great deal of my insight has come from that spiritual guidance. Of course I have done years of formal research too, and use it when talking about human intelligence, consciousness and so on. But to be honest, the direct experience of mind and spirit (and learning to apply them in my life) have been my greatest teachers, not books.

 3)    In the beginning of your book, you tell a story of a series of synchronicities related to New Zealand that culminated in a teaching job in New Zealand. The synchros seemed to guide you to the job. But it turned out to be a hellish experience. Did you think that you misinterpreted the meaning of those synchronicities? Was the abuse you took a test of sorts?

No, I don’t think I misinterpreted them. I just didn’t realise where they were leading me! As I mention in the book, sometimes we have to go through painful experiences in order to address the deepest needs of our souls. Naturally we all want to experience joy and pleasure, and avoid pain. So if the universe suddenly announced that part of your healing journey would require you to acknowledge that you are a complete psychological basket case and needed to feel the hurt that is inside you, of course most of us would run in the other direction! So Spirit has to be a bit sneaks sometimes!

It is important to acknowledge that while the end point is the same, every person’s journey is different. In my case I came from a background of harsh personal abuse in my childhood. This left me with incredibly deep personal scars. Several of my family members completely disintegrated under the weight of the darkness, descending into insanity, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual abuse. One of my brothers committed suicide. Given this scenario, I have been called upon to address my own pain and suffering, bring it into the light, and to allow grace and healing to occur. We all have soul issues we need to address. Not everyone needs to do it the way I did it, however.

When I got to NZ I was immediately set upon by a psychopathic female boss at the international school where I worked. But at a deeper level, she merely played out some lingering pain from my childhood related to certain female figures. Because of her personal and psychic attacks, I was able to admit that I still carried a lot of pain in that area. By addressing that pain through inner child work, I was able to stand more fully in my power as a man. Till that age (30) I was walking man-child. That is, I was still a boy inside. There are a lot of big people walking around like that!

 4)    What role does synchronicity play in your life and how do you differentiate a synchronicity that is telling you that you are on the right path with one that is a warning that you might be taking a wrong turn?

I do believe that the universe and our psyches are in intimate relationship. It is a mysterious process. I cannot say I understand exactly how it works, but it just does. I allow synchronicity to guide me. I generally don’t go searching for it, however. When we habitually search for signs it is generally evidence that the ego has set up an agenda for power and control, and is refusing to trust life.

Generally, when a synchronicity occurs, the ‘energy’ of the event lets you know if it is a moving you toward something, or warning you of possible ‘negative’ consequences. The feeling you experience within is key. If it feels light and joyous, it is evidence that you are being drawn towards something that is ‘right’. If there is fear and a sense of foreboding, it probably means that it is a warning of an undesirable future.

5)    Could you summarize what you mean by Integrated Intelligence and how it relates to the  Law of Attraction?

Integrated Intelligence is merely the term I give to spiritual intelligence. It is a little more specific than the way people typically use the phrase ‘spiritual intelligence’. I identity specific ways of knowing such as unity experiences, intuitive synthesis of information, sensing the future, sensing the cause of problems, and identifying a person, place or book as being important. When I researched the literature I went about listing the kinds of things that people claim they can do with spiritual intuition, then I melded them with my own experience to come up with a core set of cognitive abilities.

6)    You have questioned the wisdom of books like The Secret. Why is that and what kind of inner work does it take for a person to achieve his or her desires?

I like Wayne Dyer’s upgraded take on the law of attraction: “You attract what you are, not what you want.” I can’t say I’m an expert on the law, whatever the truth about it may be. I personally believe it is better to allow life to speak to you, rather than trying too hard to command it to follow your instructions. I suggest people follow their excitement, set general goals related to this higher sense, and then move lightly and joyfully towards the goals.

Work hard if it is required; and most of all follow through with committed action! Far too many people in the New Age and spiritual communities expect that they can manifest their desires by merely imagining them! The modern world is competitive, and it may take years of deliberate practice to develop the skills to become a master in some fields of expertise. For example, I have spent countless thousands of hours developing my intuitive abilities through meditation, recording dreams and visions, paying attention to intuitions and taking specific actions based on them, and also working on my emotional body.

My concern with some philosophies in this area is that they tend to be overly materialistic and cater towards our inner narcissist! You might be aware that James Arthur Ray, one of the presenters on the Secret, got into an awful lot of trouble on one of his spiritual rebirthing retreats, where three people ended up dying in an Indian sweat lodge in Sedona. Ray apparently set himself the goal of being the first New Age billionaire. He was charged with negligent homicide. Now that was some ego fall!

6)    What can the reader hope to gain from reading your book and making use of the tools of Integrated Intelligence that you present?

Discover your Soul Template is a very practical book which teaches you how to develop Integrated Intelligence and then apply it in creating a life aligned with the deepest needs of your spirit, and the greater good of humanity. The book goes beyond law-of-attraction-type books by encouraging the reader to explore their own spirit as they go about living their bliss. Although it covers some serious topics, it is written with a light heart, and most people who have read it have told me that it made them laugh a lot.  I enjoy self-derogatory humour. After all, why wait for others to beat you up when you can do it yourself! In the end we are only human. Let’s stop being so serious and have a good laugh about ourselves.

7)    You call the inner voice that connects with Integrated Intelligence as the sage, but how do you distinguish the voice of the sage from the voice of the ego?

This is an important question for all of us. The best time to listen to inner feelings and voices is when we are in a state of peaceful presence. The worst times are when we are in states of fear, stress, expectation, and dare I say, lust! The ego is a trickster. It sets up agendas, and then gets excited when it thinks it is about to hit pay dirt (or throws tantrums when it thinks it about to be denied). The feelings associated with this are not genuine ‘intuitions’, but ego projections. For example, after I got my PhD I set up an agenda to become an academic in the discipline of Futures Studies. There were jobs I applied for, and there were interviews I attended where I got really excited and believed the job was ‘meant to be’. Then, when I got rejected there was the pain of having the ego’s agenda deflated. The payoff for my ego, in terms of gaining academic success, is ‘prestige’. Status, face, honour, prestige: these are all the same ‘energy’: the mind attempting to validate itself through manipulating the external world of people and experience so that it can feel ‘OK’.

In my spiritual counseling work, I once had a woman come to me saying she had issues of trust with God and the universe. She had a history of disappointment, of feeling denied. But the truth was that she had set up the mother of all ego agendas for herself. She believed that she was to be elevated into some higher spiritual realm where she would become ‘enlightened’. She was told by a clairvoyant that she was ‘star seeded’ and that she was going to ‘ascend’ sometime soon. In other words, she had created a delusion, and built a false idea of who she was around it. Of course God is not going to entertain such pompous nonsense! It is not God who was letting her down. It was just that her delusion required masses of emotional and life energy to be channeled into something that was never going to happen, and the impending realisation that it was all about to come crumbling  down threatened her entire ‘story’. Naturally, her life was one of constant denial. Yet fall down she had to!. I call these ‘ego-falls’. The bigger the delusion, the more painful they tend to be. Yet they are ultimately blessings in disguise. Until the mind releases its delusion, we cannot know who we are, and we cannot heal.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the present moment. The idea that we are going to achieve ‘enlightenment’ is a spiritual trap. You are either here being human, or you are tripping off into the flighty word of imagination and super-selves; that is, trying to become something that you are not in order to compensate for your sense of inadequacy. We are human beings. Let’s celebrate that. The state of presence naturally brings two feelings: gratitude for existence and love for life and all things. That is where our light shines. It cannot shine in some imagined future where we are ‘enlightened’ or elevated into some super-human form. That is the ego’s subtle agenda for escape. It is a rejection of what God has given us: this moment, this life, this self. How can your light possibly shine when you are rejecting who you are, and the life you have been given!?

8)    As a futurist, what is your perception of life one hundred years from now, and how does that differ from the views of mainstream science?

I usually avoid making predictions with a timeline, as they are inevitably going to be wrong. It appears inevitable that there will be suffering, as the world is in the grip of the mind and its projections. Just as individuals suffer ego falls when they go into delusion, collectives of people do too: families, cities, nations, cultures, races, and ultimately the human race. In the 1950s in China, Mao ze Dong talked up a huge ego agenda for the Chinese people. He decided that China, then a nation six hundred million peasants, would overtake western countries in the production of steel (and other areas) within a short period of time. He worked everyone into a frenzy, getting everyone to melt down their pots and pans in backyard furnaces to increase steel production levels. The people bought the lie. Unfortunately Mao’s plan forgot the simple fact that when you take everyone off the fields to make useless pig iron, then there is nobody to plant or harvest crops. The result was the biggest manmade disaster in human history. Probably about 45 million Chinese people starved to death in the ensuing famine. In the history of stupid ideas this gets my vote as the most stupid. Yet hundreds of millions of Chinese people bought the lie!

Yet there are equally absurd ego agendas on sale in modern education, media and life today, and masses of people still buy them. For example the idea that human beings are discrete, isolated entities, and that consciousness is contained only in our heads is just dumb. Anyone who has done any inner work at all and allows their experience of life to inform them of what is real knows that mind and environment are entangled. The claim that the purpose of ‘life’ is to make genes replicate themselves (the selfish gene) deserves a special mention too. This is about as bright as saying the purpose of a car is to make the wheels go round. But because these things are written in science text books by people with PhDs, we assume they must be true.

9)    What role do spirit guides play in your life and how do you distinguish them from your inner sage or higher self?

I have had many experiences where I have found myself in the presence of spiritual guides. These occur during sleep or meditation. When the busy mind is quiet it is easier for guides to communicate with you. In Discover Your Soul Template I mention my first major experience in this regard. It occurred just a few months after I began my spiritual journey, when I began to meditate. A female guide came to me as I slept. She had a very soft, feminine and beautiful energy. She was using her hands, moving them above my body in what seemed to be a healing process. She told me that I was rather more damaged than I realised, and that I was only using three per cent of my intelligence. That experience is what really confirmed that my exploration of the mind and spirituality was the correct life path.

I get daily spiritual guidance, mostly through words and song lyrics that some to me spontaneously. At least some of these must be placed there by spirit guides. For example, the night my brother committed suicide I was hearing the song “suicide is painless”, the theme from the TV series MASH. Only hours later the police knocked on the door to deliver the terrible news. It was a truly painful time for me and my family. However I was comforted by some of the songs that came to me over the next two nights. The first was from Oasis: “Someday you will find me in a champagne supernova in the sky.” I knew that I was being told I would meet my brother’s spirit again in the next life. The other song was “Don’t cry for me Argentina”. I felt this was telling me not to assume responsibility for my brother’s emotional energy, and to let him move on. We can unconsciously channel other people’s pain if we feel guilt or sympathy (as opposed to compassion) for them. I was being told to let him go. This was very, very difficult.

10) You write about the importance of following your soul template. Do you think that an astrological birth chart is a viable reflection of a soul template?

To be honest my knowledge of astrology is limited. I do sense that astrology is relevant to human consciousness. The connections are probably more archetypal than anything to do with physical forces. For example, the gravitational effect of Pluto on a human being is so tiny it is effectively zero. Yet waves, cycles and pulses are primary features of the universe. The movements of the heavens about us can be seen as being part of these kinds of processes. So yes, I do sense that astrology has some effect on our lives, although I am not sure of the extent of it.

11) Does the ego survive death?

There are many mystics, such as Krishnamurti and modern mystic Garry Webber, who consider there is no life after death at all, and I respect their knowledge, amd I am open to the possibility that they may be correct. However I have had an awful lot of psychic interactions with people’s ego-based projections after they have passed on. So either I am interacting with some aspect of their consciousness which still resonates even though ‘they’ don’t, or the human psyche goes on. By the ‘psyche’, I mean the reservoir of emotional and psychic energy which lies within all human beings on this earth. And if the psyche survives death, it is reasonable to assume some part of the personality does too. For example, not long ago I had a very graphic vision of a relative of mine who passed on more than a decade ago. In this vision I saw him on his knees with his hands over his face, absolutely distraught. He kept repeating that he had sexually molested two female relatives of mine, who are about the same age as me. So when I recently went back to Australia for the first time in five years, I rather subtly brought up the subject with one of the sisters of one of these relatives (not actually one of the two ‘alleged’ victims’, who I did not meet on the trip). She came right out and said one of the ‘victims’ (her sister) had indeed alleged that she had been sexually molested by the now dead relative. It is my many visionary experiences like this which have led to to conclude that at least some aspects of the personality survive death.