November/December 2002

Road's way: A common man's tale of enlightenment
An interview with Michael Roads
by Ravi DykemaIn 

1976, Michael Roads, an ordinary farmer in Tasmania, Australia, suddenly realized that his life was driven by fear, and he didn't know who he was. This event launched his single-minded journey toward what some would call enlightenment. Over the next 10 years- guided by books, teachers and his own intuition, and grappling with devastating illness- Roads says he "learned to cross the membrane separating the physical from the metaphysical." He writes about those experiences in his book, Talking with Nature, followed by three more books: Journey into Nature, Journey into Oneness and Into a Timeless Realm. His latest book, a novel entitled Getting There, was voted "Best Visionary Fiction of the Year" at the 1999 International New Age Book and Trade Show in Denver. Roads and his wife Treenie travel around the world to hold seminars and retreats, and visit Colorado regularly. He talked to Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado.

RD:  Tell us about self-realization, or what we might call "the game of enlightenment."

MR:  The game of enlightenment is looking for truth in life. Each country has its own set of beliefs, its own consensus reality. But if you look at the unhappiness in people's lives, obviously there's something wrong with consensus reality. If you look around and decide there is something called "truth," the more you focus on it, and find ways of empowering your life, the more it reveals itself to you. There comes a time when you pierce the veils of illusion and step into a greater reality. It's called "enlightenment" or "awakening" or "self-realization." And from 35 until I was 49, that was my only real focus in life.

RD:  How did you come upon that focus at 35?

MR:  It was very simple. I was living in Tasmania, Australia, and not particularly liking it. Oh, I loved the land and the cows. My day consisted of working from five in the morning until nine at night. And one morning about 10 minutes to five, I was walking across the garden and there was the merry-go-round I had built for my kids. And for some reason, I hopped on it and spun around, and the thought came to me, "This is me. This is my life. 'Round and 'round on a merry-go-round. Where am I going? Where have I come from?"
      Suddenly it wasn't a funny thought. Suddenly I thought, "I don't know where I've come from. I don't know where I'm going." And I wasn't asking a biological question. And it sort of spun around, and I suddenly had the feeling that one day I'd lay in a coffin and I'd look at the closed lid, and I'd think to myself, "So what was that all about? Have I missed something here?" And I began to feel uncomfortable, and I thought, "Why am I milking cows? I mean really, why am I doing this?" The answer was there, very startling and very clear: "I milk the cows because fear cracks the whip."
RD:  You were afraid?

MR:  Yes, I was afraid. My thoughts were, "I've got to work. I've got to get muddy. I've got to do this. I've got to do that. I've got to pay the farm off, I've got all these things that I've got to do, so I've got to work." And I thought, "This is crazy." The simple fact is, fear was behind everything I was doing, as a motivator. When I saw that, I felt very uncomfortable. I had never given any thought to such a thing before. And I spun around a few more times, and I thought, "So what is life?" No answer. I hadn't a clue. And then the big one hit me: "Well, who am I?"
      It didn't hit me intellectually. It hit me with the force of a battering ram. I was so shocked. I'd never even thought on those lines before. I stopped the roundabout, thinking, "My God, who am I?" So I walked back into my wife and she said, "What's wrong?" And I said, "Nothing." Then I said, "Hmmm. It's an interesting morning. I've just discovered I don't know who I am." And she said, "Funny, I've been thinking things like that myself. I've been asking myself that same question." And I said, "Well, this is the first time it's ever come to me. And I want to know." That was the beginning. I spent the years until I was 49 and three months looking for the answer.

RD:  Where did you look? Did you have a religion?

MR:  I was born in the Church of England, which was essentially a religion created to take power from the Catholics by Henry VIII, who then beheaded a few wives. So it's not a hell of a good spiritual platform.

RD:  Maybe not, but it does provide answers to those kinds of questions- why you're here and what you're to do. Christian faith says something like, "Take Jesus as your savior, be absolved of your sins and achieve salvation upon death." It tells you what to do now and what's going to happen as a result.

MR:  I'm not mocking that, because millions live that way, but it's the sort of thing you would feed to a child, and not expect too much query about it. I asked a lot of ministers, "Do you know what life's about? Do you know what it means?" And none of them had a clue. They were friends, and I was not anti-Christian- I'm still not. Christianity is wonderful for a stepping stone. But none of them could answer any of my questions. In fact several of them candidly said, "If you ever get answers, come back and we'd love to talk to you."
      I put one question to them: "It says in the Bible - Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else shall be added unto you.' But I have never yet heard of a Christian who spends their life seeking first the kingdom of heaven. What everybody does is seek first anything that could be added unto them, then if there's any time left over, they seek the - kingdom of heaven.'"
      And I said, "I don't know what that means, - the kingdom of heaven.' All I know is that it stirs my heart when I think of it. I get a breathtaking moment of a glimpse of a whole different way to live." I told my wife, "I have to live this. I'm going to live it." It sounded like the craziest thing I'd ever done, and it frightened the living daylights out of me, but we both decided we would live this the best we could.
      I didn't know what the kingdom of heaven meant. I knew the words. I knew the nice idea of a sweet old gentleman living up in the sky. But I really didn't believe that. If you stop people on the street and say, "Okay. Define God for me," I don't care what sort of Christians they are, the answers are either completely ridiculous, or they'll say something like, "Well, look, I really don't know. You just have to take that on faith."
      And, why? What is faith? Why not take it on intelligence, consciousness and awareness, and see where that takes you? It doesn't take more than a cursory study of religions to find out most of them are power-based. The history of religion through the ages is absolutely appalling. Pretty well every war on the planet today is a religious war. And I'm not getting at religions- they do what they do. People obviously need it. But to me, that was not the way to go. I carried on working the same as before on the farm, but I had a whole different focus. I was suddenly alive with inquiry, instead of just working blindly day after day, the way so many people, unfortunately, live.
 
RD:  What question was foremost in your mind?

MR:  "Who am I?" I looked around, and I gave up asking people. People of religion would just laugh and say, "Ha, ha. You don't expect to know that, do you?" And I would say, "Yes, I do expect to know."
      There's something we're all missing. When you change your focus in life, whatever you focus on, you give energy to it and you attract it. Either you're attracted to it or it's attracted to you. Unfortunately, most people focus with fear and attract what they don't want, and then consider themselves unfortunate. Generations ago, even this generation, the big fear was cancer. And statistics show it shot up alarmingly. People attracted that to them.
      So I was focusing on ideas that are in the Bible, and things that I'd heard ministers talk about. And people began to come into our lives who were different. They were also seekers, and they weren't doing it through religion. We would talk, sharing ideas as a sort of gestation. I didn't know then, but I have since learned that if one person contains the truth, then everybody has truth. And there have always been enlightened people on this planet.
      Most of those were transitory people traveling, searching, questing. I began to buy books by various authors, people like Joel Goldsmith, Rudolph Steiner and other deep-thinking people. I came across a variety of people and ideas. Some ideas I followed, others I dropped off because they didn't fit me. These were mostly Western thinkers. I was never attracted to Eastern philosophies. And I learned I was just not a follower. No matter how attracted I was to someone's writings, I couldn't become a follower. I was a bit like a butterfly- I've tasted the nectar of many flowers of truth.
 
RD:  Did you sit with many teachers?

MR:  I didn't sit with any. Books were my main source. I didn't like people. Of course it took me a while to find out they didn't like me either. As a boy, I turned to nature. To me, nature would never betray you. It didn't argue with you. It was very nurturing and I never had the vaguest sense of danger with it. In my late 30s, I realized I had enormous issues around other people, and I had to address that. I went to the Findhorn Community in Scotland and I got to know Peter and Eileen Caddy.
      I realized I couldn't continue my journey being a farmer. Everything I had wanted when I went to Tasmania, I had. But I realized I didn't want it anymore. That fit for Treenie, too. We sold the farm and began traveling around Australia with our four children, and we started a community, called the Homeland Foundation Center of Life. It still exists in Australia, but I really wouldn't call it anything more than a dropout center- it's not a thriving community.

RD:  What impulse started the community?

MR:  My impulse was to change the world, because it was a rotten place and somebody had to make it better. Now, looking back, I realize my view of the world was my view of me. That wasn't a nice thing to find out. One thing that happened there was that I took off my mask. My mask was articulation and arrogance and aggression. I grew up in a very articulate family, where words were used for dueling. I got to be very good at words. I could use words cleverly and aggressively to ridicule people, and that was my mask of defense against the world.
      But you can't go through a community like that. In the community, my inborn wisdom began to come out, and I had a dream where I knew I had to take off my mask and my armor. That was not a good process, because I'd hurt a lot of people, and I knew they'd like to hurt me. Nevertheless, I took the mask off and the armor, and found underneath a 12-year-old boy who had somehow managed to acquire a family. And this grown man that I was on the outside, was still an incompetent 12-year-old, terrified of life.

RD:  Was that part of your answer to, "Who am I?"

MR:  No, not exactly. In the community, I allowed myself to cry. I would go down to the river and cry, and gradually I learned to become vulnerable to people. I knew I didn't love me. I knew I didn't have enough love in my life. I figured if God was going to bring love to me, it wouldn't come from some cosmic source. It would come through people, so I had to let people in. I knew they'd bring their hurt, and they did. I knew if I became vulnerable to that, maybe I could move beyond it. And I did, but it took a while. After four years, I came out of the community and had respect for myself. I didn't love me, but I liked me.
      During the time I was in the community, I felt as if I was in a big bottle with a cork in it. I felt the pressure of being bottled up for so long, and as I watched, the cork flew out, and a genie came out of that bottle. I could almost see him. This was my metaphysical self- this was me, but not the practical, physical Michael. This was a completely different reality, far more powerful than I could have conceived of. It began to change my life. I began to hear trees and plants talking, I began to hear the river, and I spent five years fighting that. It didn't fit in with other people's reality and it frightened me. I wanted a reality that would fit in with everybody else's. So I went through five years of fighting against these pressures, and it was a time of enormous growth.
      Around the time I was 40, I had this metaphysical experience. I had sprained my ankle and I woke up at two in the morning in pain, and as I woke, it was as though 90 percent of me just got up and walked away, like a light body moved away. It took three hours of physical time, yet it felt like years and it felt like a second. Finally, complete exhaustion brought me back. But in that experience, I met a being. I call it a shepherd, but that doesn't refer to Jesus. This being had taken me through a lot. And I said to this being, "I have to wake-up. I have to. Whatever enlightenment is, whatever self-realization is, I have to do this. I can't play this game anymore." I told this being, "I'm going to make a vow to you. If I'm not awake and self-realized by the time I'm 50, will you come for me? I want to die." When I came out of it, I remembered that, and I thought, "It's okay, it's okay. I don't want to play the game anymore." I was understanding what my potential was and I made a mockery of my potential by the life that I was living.
 
RD:  When you say "mockery of your potential," do you mean that reality was far short of what you recognized it could be?

MR:  My reality was far short of what I could see. I'd already begun public speaking, but I could become inspired and speak of things I couldn't live. I represented a spirituality I couldn't live, and then I felt like a hypocrite. People wanted me to talk, and I did. But I felt it was an act. I would come home from talking and one of my young sons would just put his finger through my act, hit my buttons, and I'd be a reacting mess. What am I? I'm a mockery of what I'm talking about. I could be inspired and see all this, but I couldn't live it.

RD:  Did you admit that to people?

MR:  Yes, and they still wanted to listen. During my 40s, I got sicker and sicker. I'd ruptured a disk in my spine at 29, and the pain of that got worse. X-rays showed it was completely degenerated and the subcutaneous tissue was filled with calcified lumps. I had terrible pain, and it put me in the hospital. It was an ever growing cycle of pain and suffering. I couldn't urinate. I developed insomnia. My immune system began to break down. I developed cellulitis, which is swelling of the subcutaneous tissue. It itched, and it stopped me breathing.
      I tried homeopathy, I tried herbs, I tried everything, and finally I had to go back to the doctor's drugs. Through those years, my suffering just grew until I was about 49 and 3 months. Then I discovered, in not a very nice way, that I had no idea what love is. For everybody I loved, there was a condition- do you love me? I'll love you, but you have to love me back. But love is unconditional. What I had wasn't love, it was emotional attachment.
      I also knew I had no idea what peace is. Government leaders talk of ceasing conflict, but never of creating peace. It's a joke. And I saw this for me- I've never had peace. And joy? I've been happy, but as for joy that comes from within, I didn't have a clue what it was. I looked at myself at that time and realized, well, I must be at the top of the heap of the world's failures. So one morning, I woke up and the cellulitis had come back, and I'd had six weeks of back pain. I couldn't even move. But I woke up with a clear knowing, not a thought, not a suspicion, a clear knowing, that I could heal myself. The problem was, I didn't have a clue how to do it. And I realized, "This is it. Forget 50. We're in our final run here. I'm not gonna make it."
      But as big as my fear was, my longing for awakening was greater than ever. So I said to my wife, "Do you love me?" And she said, "Yes, I do." I said, "Will you make me a promise? If I can't heal myself, will you let me die?" She looked at me for about half a minute and she said, "Because I love you, I'll promise that." I went into deep shock then. I hadn't expected that. This was not an intellectual process. Just because we're intellectual beings does not make life an intellectual process. I went into complete shock, feeling abandoned.
      The next few days were bad, seriously bad. The cellulitis went unchecked. It was in my eyes- they were just slits. My nose was blocked solid. My lips were swollen up. My tongue swelled. And then the tissue in my mouth began to swell. I was terrified- all I knew was fear. On the third day, I managed to get out of bed, dragging my leg along, and sat on the veranda. I looked a mess. My face was swollen, with purple and red streaks. I hadn't shaved in a week. A friend came over and said, "God, Michael, you look a mess." And I said, "I'm healing myself." Then Treenie came out onto the veranda and said, "Michael believes that he grows through pain and suffering."
      Treenie had been saying these words for 15 years, but for the first time, I truly connected to them. In one flash of insight, I thought, "My God, if I believe I grow from pain and suffering, how could I know what love is? How could I know what joy is or peace?" I was completely shocked.
      I dragged my way off of the veranda, looked in the mirror and saw this caricature of something that once looked like my face staring back at me. All I could do was cry. I just cried. I couldn't tell it I loved it. It was just the most repulsive thing. I had always believed that I was climbing the mountain of truth, and I would step over to a heavenly state. But instead, I knew I was at the bottom of the pit. There was nowhere else to go. I couldn't have fallen any deeper. As I looked in the mirror, I realized I had failed. Everything I had learned was useless. Everything I'd read, everything I'd ever told anybody, useless. As I stared in the mirror, I let go of God, I let go of enlightenment, I let go of Treenie, I let go of my children, I let go of everything. Everything I'd ever wanted, I just let it go. And metaphysically, I stepped into that shadowy, dark-looking place I could see beside the mirror. My experience was like an explosion of light.
      I stood in the center of this incredible light, and it was just an instantaneous falling in love with self. Over the next 20 minutes, I was aware of my whole life's pattern. Not just this one, but all the lives of my future and my past. I saw the whole lot simultaneously, and I experienced God totally. I knew what God was and that I'd never been abandoned. Gradually, after about 20 minutes, I came back to my physical awareness. When I looked in the mirror, there was no cellulitis- it was gone completely. My back pain was gone completely. And the crushing weight I'd never known I'd carried, the anxiety and worry, was gone.
      But the person in the mirror was just the most incredibly beautiful person. And I laughed at myself: How could I have never seen this beauty? The next day, I went to see two people in a nearby township. One, the man, had long ago been kicked in the face by a horse, and his face had been rearranged in a rather alarming way. He had married, I guess, the woman nobody else wanted- she was not what we would define as beautiful. I always called them the ugly couple, but I liked them. We had a common interest in plants, and when I went to see them, I had never seen such beautiful people. Their faces were exactly the same, and they were beautiful. And everything changed.

RD:  Do you ever have days when you're feeling blue? Or grumpy, or short-tempered, or bummed out?

MR:  No, that doesn't happen. I can remember it. All that was created by me. Imagine a movie. Suppose I took out one frame and gave it to you and said, "Tell me what the movie is about." You'd say, "Well, of course, I can't. I need to put it back to see all the frames." In the movie of who you are, this life here and now is just one frame. How do you understand the movie? How do you understand you? You can move to a place that passeth understanding. Understanding is incredibly limited- it's limited to the mind, whereas we are not. We are beings of consciousness and intelligence.
      In this movie that's your life, you're the script writer. You're the director. You're the producer. In other words, you've put up all the energy and money, you've directed it, you even write the script. And guess who the number one actor is. That's simply the way it is, because we really and truly are learning the rules of creation. The best way you can learn the rules of creation is to create your own reality. One day you'll realize, "I can create a reality that honors all life."
      For me, after a few years, I didn't want to. To me, the world is perfect. It doesn't mean there's no pain and suffering. But the universe is unfolding perfectly. If everything is perfect, how do I contribute more? I've only got to live truth, and that affects every human being, whether they know it or not. The being I was with at that time said to me, "If the flowers are not pollinated, what would happen?" I said, "Well, in a few generations, there'd be no flowers." The being said, "Well, that would be perfect." I said, "Yes, it would be perfect. But I do get your point. The point is I like flowers on the planet."
      The point, of course, was that human beings are the flowers, and when a person in their bud stage is prepared to open a bit, the pollination is truth. And then truth is an alchemy of immense proportions. It goes directly to the heart, and the heart has never had a problem with life. Unfortunately, people are very brain focused, not heart focused.
      So I've come to this place: I share truth. I see people. But there's nothing I have to do. I don't tell anyone, "You must change." Change from what? To what? That's all based on a judgment. So I share truth. Those who are ready to receive, receive it, and their lives go through transformations, which I've witnessed many, many times. And those who are not ready to receive get up and walk out by the second day because it's too threatening. And those who are partly open, many of them during a year or two will open up and may be ready to come back or find truth from some other source. And that basically says it.   
      How could you have a bad day when you're living from a place of love and truth? Here's an example: We were in New York and getting ready to fly out, and a whole line of storms came in, so all the planes were grounded everywhere. And of course airlines are not that efficient. They get swamped with people. Around mid-day, we were caught up in the panic of everyone wanting to get out the next day. My wife went to the counter and simply dealt with it, and we decided to stay in a hotel overnight. We went to get a taxi; it took us an hour to get one, and we found out every motel, every hotel was full. So we went into the Marriott, and outside it was pouring rain, and my wife was feeling a little bit down. And I said, "Well, it's pouring rain, and there are thousands of homeless people out there, but we're sitting in a nice foyer. It's warm and dry. We have everything we need, except a bed." So she curled up and settled-down to go to sleep. Around midnight a room opened up, so we went there and went to sleep. We were delayed half a day. So what? If you look at the sum of days, what does half a day matter?

RD:  If I asked the question, "Are you enlightened," what would you say?

MR:  I would say "yes." But it's not something I would go and tell people in an ordinary way. It's such a vague concept. When I started reading and looking at all this, enlightened people were like incredible masters out of reach. But enlightenment is not the end- it's just a new beginning. I've written a new book called Getting There about the path to enlightenment. The next book to follow, Miracles Happen, is about the path after enlightenment. It doesn't end. It continues, and you can either stop growing and sit on a platter of enlightened complacency and get cancer and die enlightened, or you can continue moving on, realizing this is just the beginning of a new, wonderful journey, where you don't have pain and suffering and anxiety and worry.
      What I want to do is bring enlightenment onto the kitchen table, so you don't look up at it. You can say, "Hey, I could use this. I could use some of this in my life right now." People who are true seekers can bring it down to the realization, "This can happen to me. This is not unreachable." Anything I can do, you can do. I have no qualifications. I left school at 15. This has nothing to do with education. It was just one moment when I realized I did not know who I am, and I wanted to know.

RD:  That started your journey, but then your journey also included such tremendous extended suffering.

MR:  I created it all, because I believed in the Christian ethic, that you're born in sin and you grow through pain and suffering. I was saturated in it. It's like a software program in a computer. I couldn't get rid of the software, which kept telling me, "You grow through pain and suffering." I would say, "Nonsense. Only an idiot would believe that." What I didn't realize was that I was probably an idiot as well. But the longing for enlightenment, for God, was greater than my fear.

RD:  Is part of your work with people to help them find that longing in themselves?

MR:  No. I simply take people through inner exercises and talking and presenting truth to them. It will either enter that open flower and ignite them, or they will just push it away. Most begin to move toward life-changing experiences. When you open your heart and move into a position of trust, anything is possible. I say to people, "If you listen to me totally, and I tell you one lie, it will strike you with such an impact of pain. If I tell you a lie, and you go and hurt yourself with it, that comes back to me, because we are one. There's nothing outside of self."
      I've never had one person who receives their power in me. I don't present it in that way. I do not take any questions, because that's too easy a game to play. If somebody keeps asking me questions, and I keep answering them, there's a transference of power, because they think I've got their answers. It's a game of separation. At the end of a retreat, I've never had a single person see their power in me.
 
RD:  Do you have certified teachers or authorized staff?

MR:  No, we don't do anything like that. People ask me if I would certify or train people. I say, "Look, if you have truth, you don't need me. If you don't have truth, how can I teach you how to speak it? Once you live it, you are it. Once you are it, you can speak it. I could teach you every one of the words, but what's that got to do with anything?" I change them frequently anyway.