Michael Cocks, Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr |344|

Here’s my interview with Michael Cocks.

Michael Cocks: I’m a clergyman, I’ve been a priest for 63 years, I’m an old man now. You mightn’t believe when you look at me, but however, I’ve had enough experience to sink a ship and the experience tells me that we’re all participants in the One Mind.

When the Pope said there are two doctrines, love God and love neighbor and nothing else, I was very pleased. Also Christ’s message for me is, love of God, love of neighbor, we are part of each other, there’s no distinction of race or belief —  it comes under the story of the good Samaritan. Salvation does not, for me, consist of the blood of Christ or anything like that, it consists of coming to God, like the prodigal son. I think Jesus’ teaching was very simple. And we’ve got, in our house, we’ve got a Brahman Indian living with us, and he came to us the other day and he said to me, “I’m not an Indian, I’m not a Brahman, I’m a human being,” and that is a good thing to say.

Alex Tsakiris: How do you reconcile that then with church doctrine —  church dogma, I mean — as I shared with you in the shows that I did: Why do we need Christianity then? What does Christianity add to that equation? Because the message that you’re talking about, the wisdom that you’re bringing is shared across virtually every culture, every wisdom tradition. There is nothing special about Christianity with regard to that message. It’s not unique, it’s not special, it’s not different. Why do we need Christianity, and why do people use this important finding, scientific finding, of after-death communication as a way to prop up and somehow raise up Christianity, above anything else? So, if you want to say Christianity is another jumping off point into the pool, no one has any problem with that, but that’s never really been the message. The message has always been subtly that it is somehow, special, unique, different, better.

Michael Cocks: Right, my mentor Stephen, you’ve read about, said the pursuit of Christ is a pursuit of his consciousness, we should call it Christian, yellow, green, or whatever you like to call it.

Alex Tsakiris: Right.

Michael Cocks: And the same pursuit as the higher forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, all seeking to be […] part of the universal mind or spirit.

So I’ll defend Christians in this way and say that, we are all different people with different points of view and my liberal Anglican church or Episcopalian church, we’ve got Hindus and Buddhists, and we’re all worshiping together, but we’re worshiping together as people, learning love of God and love of neighbor. Some of the Christian hymns are very, very good, exactly as we’ve been saying, and some parts of the bible are very, very good indeed. That’s what I’ve been preaching about for 63 years, the good bits.

But on the other hand, I do recognize, as Jesus himself said, we’re all children of God, including the Muslims and the Atheists and whoever you care to name; we’re all children of God. We’re all connected to each other. My experiences have been very [enlarged] with major synchronicities.

I previously had a major synchronicity with a professor called Steven Rosen, who was a professor of psychology in Staten Island, he’s now a philosopher in Vancouver. Years ago, I’d been reading Fritjof Capra. Fritjof Capra mentioned the physicist David Bohm, and I was very impressed with what he was saying. David Bohm is a way of explaining my experiences.

So, I got off my bed, I was reading in bed, and I went to the entrance of my country vicarage where the postbox stands. In the postbox was a book from Steven Rosen of Staten Island and then the next thing he had was acknowledgements. “I want to give first my deep thanks to David Bohm, Arthur C. Clarke, and Michael Cocks. And there was my name, written under the name of Bohm, five minutes after I’d heard about him.

Now, I’ve had so much of that, it’s forced me to see life in a very different way.

Alex Tsakiris: Michael, as long as you brought up that story let me ask the obvious question. What do you make of, how do you interpret, in general, the idea of a synchronicity? Because this is something that has come into the collective consciousness. We hear, more and more and more, people talking about 11/11 and seeing things, or just more personal synchronicities that they have. Do you have any personal insight into what you think the meaning of synchronicities are in general — not your personal synchronicity —  but why do people have synchronicities?

Michael Cocks: I’ve written a book on that, Into the Wider Dream, trying to answer that. The short answer is, I don’t know. A longer answer would be to say that the spiritual whole, undivided whole, is a little like a spiritual internet. Everything’s in touch with everything else.

John Bell of CERN in Switzerland, talks about universal causation, no local causation. Everything causes everything else.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, let me just interject something, Michael, because I appreciate where you’re going and I think it’s fascinating. But I have to tell you, when you make the association with the internet and the connection, there is a group of people out there that are taking that in another direction. They’re taking everything you said, and they’re saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and then they’re taking the spiritual component out of it and they’re substituting in an artificial intelligence component, a biological component, and it’s called The Simulation Hypothesis.

Michael Cocks: They’re crazy.

Alex Tsakiris: I tend to agree… I don’t know if I’d go quite that far, but I think you’re in a unique position to kind of cross over that bridge in a way that maybe — I think is necessary and that’s that — how do we come to understand the nature of the spiritual, when it does seem to pop up in ways that are almost intentionally disguised as the artificial, the simulated, the automated computerized, if you know what I mean.

Michael Cocks: I think the whole damn thing belongs together — spiritual, physical — it all belongs together. There’s rubbish otherwise. But we’re dealing with an unbroken whole, science says that, experience says that. It’s an unbroken whole.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s talk about channeling because that’s really… I jumped right into the middle of this conversation, Michael I thought that we would just have a chat, you know before the interview, but I think this is turning into the interview, so we’ll just kind of wing it from here and I’ll do a proper introduction early on, or maybe at the end and then I’ll paste it back at the beginning so that first you’re going to have tell people, what is your experience with channeling, who is this being, this entity Stephen, how did he come about? Tell us the basic story, I guess.

Michael Cocks: Maybe it is our first interview.

Alex Tsakiris: Go ahead.

Michael Cocks: It starts off [with] a Catholic lady called Olive Ashman, in bed with her husband Tom. Tom, who’s not previously been a medium, but he starts to talk in his sleep and Olive hears a voice say, “Sic Ecclesia, Spiritus, Sanctus,” “thus in the church is the Holy Spirit,” and she found that Tom was able to go into trance and the spirit continued to talk and then identified him with Stephen.

The Ashmans were living in Sevenoaks in Kent. I, here in New Zealand, although about that same day received a book of prophecies —  from a lady I didn’t know called Mrs. Copinga in North Island of New Zealand —  about me and what was about to happen to me.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so let me get this straight, first of all, what year is this about?

Michael Cocks: 1973.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so this is 1973, so now that’s what 44 years ago and later you discover… you just get the book of prophecies, you don’t know anything about this other experience going on in Kent, but later you find that it happened at exactly the same time?

Michael Cocks: That’s right. Then three months later, Olive and Tom Ashman are here in Christchurch, New Zealand, and by a curious coincidence I met them and they invited me to talk to Stephen. So I joined them and heard several other people talking.

Alex Tsakiris: Wait a minute, so at this point they had established communication with this spirit entity and they understood that spirit entity to be Stephen at that point?

Michael Cocks: They did.

Alex Tsakiris: And who is Stephen? Tell folks who Stephen is and how they knew it was Stephen.

Michael Cocks: Stephen was the first Christian martyr, and he said to Olive who he was, and they believed it. I didn’t initially believe it when I talked. It took a little while to trust him, but his face was humble, loving and… giving us basic Christianity but also trying to tell us about the nature of reality — which was very close to the point of view of reality being put forward by Richard Rohr, who was a Franciscan monk, who was favored by the Pope.

So as reconfirming to me recently that Stephen’s message and Rohr’s message are very similar.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, these folks make contact with the spirit entity in 1973, the same day you get this book of prophecies. By some strange coincidence they to come to Christchurch, New Zealand, they meet you, you’re an Anglican priest, they start talking to you, they say, “We’ve had this amazing experience, we want you to share it with us, we’re talking to Stephen. Join in this experience of ours.” Have I got that right?

Michael Cocks: Yeah. Now after about, maybe a year — it’s a bit of a thing to swallow — I was actually talking to Stephen. I recognized how good the teaching was, but was it actually Stephen. In fact someone suggested it was a kindly spirit masquerading as Stephen. Well I wanted to test Stephen in a language other than English.

Alex Tsakiris: You say you wanted to test Stephen?

Michael Cocks: Yes, I wasn’t quite sure how much of the mind of the medium was in this.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, right, so you wanted to test. That’s good, I like it, yeah.

Michael Cocks:

I did, and he said… sorry, the next time Stephen said, karno dioti, dieta dioti, karno dioti, boro zelai lenaika mela diesta, you probably can’t translate that but it means, “For the carnyx, [symbol for the Celt], two years having elapsed. the Dionysian grape juice must now be diluted.”

Alex Tsakiris: And what language would that be in?

Michael Cocks: The language of common Greek , spoken in the time of Jesus. It was the dialect however, it turned out, that was spoken in Bulgaria, a place called Thrace and the area of Turkey, around Ankara.

Alex Tsakiris: And folks will naturally be interested to know, how did you confirm that precise dialect, you know, identify it and trace it?

Michael Cocks: It took a long while.

Alex Tsakiris: And did you have a recording of it?

Michael Cocks: Yes, I did. I had a recording, and then we transliterated it.

Alex Tsakiris: So they’re coming through this woman’s husband and he’s speaking it in a clear enough way for you to record it and then for some expert to give you an analysis of it. That’s pretty amazing.

Michael Cocks: Yes, I knew it was Greek at that time; that’s how I was able to translate it. But he used some… the word endings were anomalous, and found that he used a word peculiar to the native Thracian language, which actually has never been written, except a Greek grammarian had recorded it It was “zelai”   which meant wine. They’re complicated references, and so it turned up that what he was saying was, the words he had used, speaking to Joseph the parent of Jesus, as he entered an Essene camp in Galilee. The camp belonged to the Nazarene Sect of the Essenes, and he spoke it on the occasion that he had completed two years’ novitiate or probation, and he was about to be received into the Essenes. And from the Dead Sea Scrolls I was able to discover that to enter the Essenes, you had to have a Messianic communion service, in which you diluted grape juice with water, because the Greek talking  about the necessity of diluting this grape juice. It made no sense; when I first heard it – it took another 30 years to work it all out.

Alex Tsakiris: So, big picture story, you begin these dialogues, you have to be intrigued, overwhelmed, you’re skeptical or curious, like you said, you want to check things out, you want to test things. But I’m taking it that the more and more you get into it you’re like, “I have to collect this information and then I have to…” do what with it, what was your first thought when you started doing this? And then, how did it go? I mean, how many sessions did you have, how often did you have them, what did you do with the material, and what were your thoughts when this stuff started coming through? This is a long period of time, this is 40, like you say, 43 years. Were there phases, I mean, what was it like at the beginning, what was it like in the middle, you know, all that stuff?

Michael Cocks: Difficult question. We were always on a high when we were talking to him. We got a little dispirited that he was giving such good advice, such good teaching, we found ourselves not quite able to live up to it and people in our group were getting divorced and we continued on being… we’re all human beings, I’m sorry to say, but the teaching continued.

Alex Tsakiris: Do they go back to Kent or how does it continue? Did they move to Christchurch?

Michael Cocks: No, no, they stayed here.

Alex Tsakiris: And then you formed a little group and then how often would you meet and what would be the nature of these meetings? How long would the sessions go, what would you do with them? How did that hold?

Michael Cocks: We had nearly 200 sessions. So I’ll show you my book. The group kind of… the teachings stopped in 1981. Another session in 1993 and then that was over. But we had all the synchronicity. It was a series of lessons as to what life in spirit meant, sort of continual coincidences, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.

In fact, before I talked to Stephen I was experiencing all these coincidences, and I got acceptance from the University of Melbourne to write a Doctor of Divinity thesis on coincidence. I never did it because, although I had a huge amount of data, Stephen turned up, so we talked to Stephen all this time.

Alex Tsakiris: Before I get into more of the scientific stuff, which is really just not that important, interesting in one sense and in another sense it’s what we all want to, in our logical, rational mind, want to pull apart and I want to do that pulling apart because I think that’s helpful, especially for us men. A lot of times what we need is… we need to deconstruct it and understand it logically before we can feel it spiritually and emotionally. At least I’m like that, and I think a lot of other people are like that. But let’s put that aside because what I want to know is [that] you are a man of God, you’ve been on that path for a long time — how did this information hit you spiritually? How did it make you feel? Did it challenge any of your existing beliefs? It certainly had to challenge some of your “religious beliefs.” What was that experience — the spiritual experience — like for you, encountering Stephen?

Michael Cocks: I was a liberal and I went to a Modernist Theological Hall when I was at Oxford, and so I was always prepared to question. It didn’t question my basic belief and love of God and love of neighbor; I’ve always been a generalist, [and] I’ve always been prepared to say that. People of other religions are like me, and they’ve got equal access to whatever God is, that I have. I did a degree in philosophy and psychology and my problem has been thinking, because most of all of the stuff is feeling actually.

So it took me a long time, not to intellectualize so much. I’m afraid it’s taken me to my 80s before I finally gave away being clever.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s awesome. When you encountered Stephen then, how did it change you spiritually? Was it a slow change, an instant change? Did you fall on your knees and cry? What was it like?. I’ve done that before, I’ll admit it. I’ve had spiritual experiences that have drawn me to that. What was it like for you?

Michael Cocks: Well before I met Stephen, this is an example of how he affected me. I remember a group called Subud which is a mystical Islamic group, where they offer you the chance to submit to  God without the benefit of bible or clergy, and that attracted me, that idea. In the end I found myself falling in a crying heap because I’d given away something and I felt I was dying. I didn’t die of course, but it literally felt like it in the moment.

After that, the very same night and obviously still very much alive, I went to listen to a string quartet and I spoilt the whole evening by being envious about the skill of these people who were playing their music. And I said, “Don’t be such a stupid person Michael, you’re spoiling a spiritual experience by your envy.” Okay, well that’s obvious, you think it’s obvious too.

But I went home, into my study and a voice said to me, I should crawl on my belly and look under a certain bookcase over there, I’d find the book and I was to open it at page 73. So I did what the voices said, I found the book and the poem in question read, Ode for Music by Thomas Gray and I’m a fool at remembering the actual words but, the gist was, don’t spoil a spiritual experience by envy, envying your musicians. Well, I knew that in the first place, but do you see what that taught me? My mind is not here in my head, my mind is much wider than that. But I told you that story, because that’s the general gist of what Stephen was saying, We are all each other, we are all connected to each other and our job is to acknowledge this and feel it.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so now we’re going to do the other part of it, the intellectual part of it. The part of it that you’ve sworn off of and I’m trying to wean myself off of, but we still have to indulge in a little bit.

What do you think is happening during the channeling process? What is your best guess in terms of — if you were going to break that down, you know, so we had an interesting conversation, and I’m glad we did before this — talking about the psychic who’s connecting with the person who was murdered and that person’s agenda or that spirit’s agenda is vengeance and justice. We talk about the mother who dies and meets her mother and her mother holds her and loves her and says, “Yes honey, but it’s not your time, you should go back to your body,” and it’s purely a love experience.

Michael Cocks: I believe all that.

Alex Tsakiris: What is your best guess, in terms of what’s happening here, because this is of a different nature, this is of… I think that’s one of the things that people have a hard time [with], especially me, [I] have a hard time wrapping my head around. What the heck is Stephen doing coming back writing books?

Michael Cocks: I can say that Stephen’s message is very similar to that of the Franciscans, Franciscan theology. It’s down to earth for every day, however it’s not really every day because there are levels of love, levels of spirituality to which we can see the higher we go, the more we are each other, the lower we go, the more separate we are and Stephen says he no longer inhabits the tender personality of Stephen, he has a much more wider consciousness than that. But to talk to us so that we don’t feel frightened, he comes back to [Stephen] and talks from that point of view.

Alex Tsakiris: Let me interject there. I didn’t really phrase my question very well. So I’ll kind of approach it from a different angle. Michael, I’ve interviewed a lot of channelers, not a lot, but I’ve interviewed several channelers on this show. I interviewed one who claimed to channel Thomas and was clearly a fraud, he was proven to me a fraud and his channeled was verbatim of a poor translation of the book of Thomas, and he didn’t even do a good job of it, he had picked one of the wrong translations to do. So, we have that.

We also have people who maybe are doing real channeling but their personal lives to not hold up to scrutiny, you know, the whole What The Bleep Do We Know film was based on the channeled material. The whole film wasn’t based on it, but the person behind it was this woman J. Z. Knight, who claimed to be channeling this 35 thousand year old warrior spirit Ra and maybe she was or maybe she wasn’t but she wound up also getting involved in all this kind of nefarious stuff of making money and selling horses and saying this horse is a reincarnation of this and that. So, there [are] the huxters, there are the fraudsters, but then there [are] a lot of people in between that are getting material, that when it’s scrutinized, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny in the way that we would expect. So how are we to understand the channeled material in that context? One way of asking that; that’s kind of the direct way — why is God letting this go on? Why is God letting all sorts of channeled material come through, some of which is clearly false, some of which is delusional and some of which is probably, as you’ve investigated the best you can —  to the best you can determine — is genuine? What’s going on?

Michael Cocks: I don’t think there’s quite a head office and control. I think together we are God. Some spirits are and some are not. Saint John said, test the spirits. I think Stephen’s teaching on its own is self-validating. I got a couple of professors to test my Greek research and he said it could not have been forged.

Alex Tsakiris: At this point, do you believe that the material you’ve gotten back is historical?

Michael Cocks: Some of it. I questioned Stephen about his dialect and I first thought he must have come from Thrace for the reason I’ve said, but he said, no, he was born on the banks of the Ankara river on the other side of the river from ancient Ancyra or modern Ankara. He lived, he said, in a village called Seletar and I said, “Yes, what does the name mean?” “Fourth landing place,” he said, and then when I looked it up in the [lexicon], in some Greek dialects “tar” can mean “fourth”. “Selia” can mean “tray” so it would be feasible that Seletar would mean “fourth landing place”. That’s one thing.

When referring to the Essenes, the Essenes spoke Hebrew, or Aramaic and they had, in the Aramaic language they had a grape juice festival, given a Hebrew name, which I’ve just forgotten for the moment, Stephen talking in Greek referred to the Athenian Lenes, Dionysian Grape Juice Festival and the Grape Juice Festival had to do with the dilution of the grape juice.

Alex Tsakiris: So there’s two different kinds of grape juice festivals with one of them…?

Michael Cocks: No, well both cultures had their grape juice festivals.

Alex Tsakiris: But one had this specific unique thing where they dilute the wine and…

Michael Cocks: In the service, in the Messianic communion service that the Essenes held, they diluted the grape juice with water. Stephen referred to the Essene equivalent, using a Greek term.

Alex Tsakiris: I kind of see what you mean. So again, the point is, there are all these idiosyncrasies to the tradition of the time that he has this deep knowledge of that it is just impossible to believe that this guy from Kent, just rolls out of bed…

Michael Cocks: He couldn’t have known.

Alex Tsakiris: It’s just impossible to…

Michael Cocks: It took me 30 years of research before I finally got it right and a lot of coincidences, and certainly the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah.

Michael Cocks: Everything.

Alex Tsakiris: Right.

Michael Cocks: It couldn’t have come out of his head. He invited to be checked. One time he was talking to us, Tom, the medium, went into trance with his feet dangling from a high chair and so Stephen comes on air and says, “Yay verily, I perceive that I must be a saint, I see my feet are in the air.”

Alex Tsakiris: So a little bit of a sense of humor, huh?

Michael Cocks: Well he certainly did have one, yes.

Alex Tsakiris: Again, the question, and I’ve asked it a couple of times, but I have to ask it again: what is this telling you about the nature of that other realm that Stephen occupies, number one, and what does it tell you about the nature of the interaction between that realm and our realm? Because here’s a guy [who’s] playing around, he’s kind of transcended beyond this but he’ll come down to this level, embody this spirit level that then he can interact, and then he interacts in a playful way — I mean, there’s a lot of subtle messages, beyond the big picture message of love everyone, tell the truth —  there’s another message about the nature of these realms and how they’re interacting that I find interesting and I think a lot of people find interesting.

Michael Cocks: It’s very hard to characterize. One of the things he says is that we asked him one time, “Why did the murderer kill Kennedy?” and so Stephen said, “I shall have to become the murderer to find out.” So in a sense, it’s very hard to define who we are in the next life.

Alex Tsakiris: There’s a lot of folks out there that have concerns about channeled information, about mediumistic information and about whether it’s dangerous, whether it comes to them, either spontaneously or whether they seek it out, and we know, or we have suspicion that there are spirits out there that are not interested in our wellbeing. Do you have any insight into that, any words of caution, or do you think we don’t really have to worry?

Michael Cocks: I do think we have to worry. As Saint John said in his epistle, test the spirits.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, really practically, what do you mean when you say that, how would you test a spirit?

Michael Cocks: Well, our test with Stephen was that first of all we prayed for protection, we did always pray for that, but Stephen was consistently humble and loving and sensible, so he kind of validated himself, […] to do that.

Alex Tsakiris: I see where the synchronicities would be confirming, but I’m intrigued by this idea of testing him, other than just testing that he was consistently humble and sending messages that you felt were consistent with goodness as you knew it. Were there any other tests that you did, that you would pass along to people as ways to kind of determine if you’re talking to a good spirit?

Michael Cocks: I can’t think of a rule, but like in human relationships, you have to be very cautious. I’m talking to you because I feel in sympathy with you and feel with you, but if you’d come on a different day, I might have been less at ease.

Alex Tsakiris: Have you heard of the trickster as a possible explanation? You have?

Michael Cocks: Yes I have, I have, yes.

Alex Tsakiris: What do you make of that, because there is a certain playful element in this that seems to be a little bit beyond what we normally think of, when we think about pious spiritual training, I mean, there’s a playful part of this that is…?

Michael Cocks: Stephen was playful.

Alex Tsakiris: Why though? Why be playful, why?

Michael Cocks: That’s how we experience.

[box]