INTERVIEW WITH
MICEAL LEDWITH, L.Ph.,L.D.,D.D., LL.D
About His New Book, New DVD and
What He Is Up To These Days...
December 7, 2007 by Louise SaintOnge for MastersConnection, LLC,
©2008 MastersConnection, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

MC: Part of this interview is about your recently released book
The Orb Project, co-authored with German physicist Dr. Klaus Heinemann (published by Simon and Schuster/Beyond Words), but primarily it is to connect with our community, to let them know what you are up to these days.
    You taught for nine years at every Beginning Retreat at RSE but now since you no longer teach there we don’t see you much any more. There are certainly some that are new to the school that don’t know much about you at all.
    You’ve now released 3 DVDs, this new book, you’re working on at least a couple of other books and another DVD, and doing interviews and giving lectures around the country. Amazing!
     I understand your new DVD about orbs was just released a few days ago (February 2008). This isn’t the same one that came out at the time The Orb Project book was released last November is it? That one featured interviews with ten people, including you and Dr. Klaus Heinemann.
MICEAL: No. The DVD that has just been released is called Orbs: Clues to a More Exciting Universe. It is designed to be a partner to the book, and even though it contains about 500 extraordinary orb pictures, the focus is on what the orb phenomenon can tell us about what we really are, and the universe we live in, and how we can best relate to it. Many of our most cherished fundamental beliefs stand in sore need of redefinition and the phenomenon of orbs gives us the clues to do precisely that. It is not a loss but an immense gain, and as it says on the DVD case it is “a message of hope, comfort and inspiration for all who cherish the divine within.”
MC: Wonderful! Let’s just start our interview with your latest book about orbs and wander from there.
     Before this book was even a thought, what interested you in even undertaking the project of photographing orbs?
MICEAL: I had first read about orbs in JZ Knight’s autobiography A State of Mind, nearly twenty years ago, and then I heard a very extensive teaching from Ramtha about the nature and meaning of orbs back in 2001 or 2002*. When he explained what they were, which is basically what you and I are without a physical body, I was fascinated. I started taking orb pictures consistently every night for an hour, maybe two, with a digital camera.
     I kept that up for about two years every day with very, very few omissions. I’d take the pictures for an hour, maybe two hours, a hundred, two hundred pictures a night. Then I would go in and look at them on the computer and try and break them up to see what details were there and what I could make of them.
     Basically, all my nights were spent at this for a couple of years while I was at home. I was away teaching on the RSE World Tour for about two thirds of every year, but even then in places as far away as Australia or Japan or South America I continued the daily photography.
MC: In regards to your book, I was taken by how rather scientific and technical the it is in parts. While it got heady at times for me, and I had to reread sections multiple times, it does serve to ground the orb phenomenon into an arena of serious science and study, taking it out of the ‘ethereal’, spirit guide, ‘ghost’ boxes that so many love to put these things into. Easier to cast aside, I suppose. As you say, it’s not a matter of faith, but of physics.
     For example, in William Tiller’s foreword, there was so much math, and equations and symbols. I was initially overwhelmed and said no, no, no, you start from the beginning again and read this through. What came from that for me was the beautiful language of mathematics, which ultimately came to the conclusion that everything has an effect on everything else.
MICEAL: Yes, right. Bill Tiller is a very good friend of mine. He is a very gifted scientist, a marvelous, and enormously erudite scientist, Chairman of the Materials Science Department at Stanford University for years. But his material is dense. He knows that. I know that. But he has an openness and a level of credentials that few physicists have.
MC: Yet I don’t want people to get the impression when they open up the preface from Tiller that this is the way the book is going to be, because it could be an absolute turnoff for the non-scientist. It’s not.
MICEAL: Oh, no, on the contrary. I think that the discovery of the phenomenon of orbs is one of the most significant things that has happened in human history, and for the first time anyone can contact and see these beings, and beings is what they are.
     As I say in the new orb DVD, "...the discovery of orbs ranks with those other great discoveries that changed our whole way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world!" We know what orbs are. Ramtha has told us what they are. But let’s take it from the scientific point of view. If I am dealing with an audience that is skeptical, that has never heard of Ramtha or his teachings, I can obviously say, and I do say to such an audience what Ramtha said they were. I am absolutely thrilled to know that and I accept it fully, but they won’t necessarily accept it.
     So I have to try and produce for them the best evidence that I can about what orbs are if they have never heard of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, which most of the people I speak to nowadays haven’t. That is why I think it is really important to approach this from a scientific perspective. By that I don’t mean something boring and off-putting and technical. But if we don’t keep our feet firmly planted on the ground in this discipline, I think the orb phenomenon is just going to become another fad which will appear and disappear quickly, and we would have missed the opportunity to learn something fascinating about what we human beings really are and about the universe in which we live.
MC: This book has taken you around the country doing interviews and giving talks…
MICEAL: Yes. That’s nothing new though. During all my years when I was a professor in Ireland, I always gave a large number of talks outside the university to interested groups all over Europe and here in the USA, principally. I remember in one particularly busy year I gave 84 such sessions. It’s hardly necessary to point out of course that such groups stopped inviting me after I came to the RSE!
     Since the book was published I have given over 40 television and radio interviews, most of the radio interviews being an hour long or more. I have also done a lot of magazine interviews, such as yours now, and in recent weeks several others have come out, including appearing on the front cover of the February issue of Edge Life Magazine, one of the top holistic magazines in the country.
     I spoke for an hour at the official launch of the book in New York last November and had a two hour meeting with the top people at the headquarters of Simon and Schuster. I think everyone was very pleasantly surprised that a mainline major publisher dared to take on a topic such as this. I have talked with a huge number of people over the last couple of months, on radio and television, and face-to-face, from New York to California.
I even got on the ABC main TV news program at breakfast time in Portland. The publicists were amazed that we even got the subject on television that day, but afterwards I was the one amazed that the reception was so positive.
MC: Was it live?
MICEAL: It was live television - seven minutes on ORBS at 9:00 a.m. You know, it reaches so many people, and obviously a lot of the people who turned out for the four events that we were doing in the Portland area that week came because they had seen the program.
MC: Is that something archived that we could see?
MICEAL: Yes, it is on ABC Report. I think it is Channel 2 in Portland, KATU. Elena Young, my webmaster, has just gotten the clip from ABC and it has just been put up on my website (see link below) where you can see it for yourself under “Archived Programs and Interviews.”
MC: What did they focus on?
MICEAL: Well, seven minutes is not very long, but it is an eternity on breakfast television! They were very positive. They said they were skeptical, and I said, “The only difference between you and me is that I was more skeptical than both of you put together.” I said I believed that was precisely why I had discovered a fair amount of very significant things about orbs - because I didn’t go into “woo, woo” and sentiment and just say that “They’re sooo wonderful.” Some people start to talk about the orbs as if they were their pets or something, and seem to be almost on the verge of putting out saucers of milk and bird seed for them! If you go down that path then your understanding of orbs is going to be very limited indeed.
     On that program we were interested in getting the word out about orbs to as many people as possible, and to let them know it was real and an enormously interesting phenomenon of great relevance to us all. I think we succeeded in getting that across.
MC: How did the project turn into a book?
MICEAL: That in itself is quite an interesting story. Four years ago I had been invited to speak at the first Prophets Conference in Santa Monica, held just after I had appeared in the film What the Bleep Do We Know. I had rather cautiously introduced about ten minutes on orbs towards the end of my presentation, including about a hundred pictures. There was well over a thousand people present in the room, including Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship USS Enterprise –actor William Shatner - in the front row! I think it was the first time orbs were discussed at a major conference.
     Cynthia Black, the Editor-in-Chief of Beyond Words Publishing, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, was in the audience, and she approached me after the presentation and asked if I would consider doing a book on orbs. I told her I already had a manuscript of such a book done, and she asked me to send it to her which I did about two months later.
     My original version of the book was rejected as they considered it was too controversial. As well as a thorough treatment of what orbs were, such as is in the present book, I had also drawn some implications for the re-interpretation of so many of our fundamental beliefs about matters such as soul, spirit, ghosts, the paranormal, the supernatural and the occult, survival of death, what precedes life, etc., etc.
     After the rejection I did a new version which focused on the several significant discoveries I had made about the nature of orbs and their understanding, and photography. Later on, Klaus Heinemann, a German physicist with a doctorate from Tubingen University in Germany came in with me, and we did a joint project.
     I submitted this new text to Beyond Words and Simon and Schuster. Various outside people are employed by the publishers to read over the text for editing and stylistic changes. They had only a few small suggestions to make under those headings, but one of the experts said to me that I would have to leave out the references I had made to Ramtha. They said you have no idea of how referring to somebody as controversial as Ramtha, would impact sales.
     I said “I really don’t have any idea how putting in references to Ramtha would impact sales, but I know exactly how not putting him in would impact sales; there would be none, because I would have to withdraw the book.” No compromise was reached between us and I withdrew the book.
MC: You did!
MICEAL: Yes. For more than three weeks the project was dead. I said it was a matter of principle for me as to whether Ramtha was referred to in the book or not, because if I hadn’t heard about orbs from Ramtha I would never have gotten involved in this at all.
I think I have about ten references to Ramtha throughout the book. In fact Ramtha has thanked me for acknowledging him in the book.
MC: Yes, it is not that you are doing this book for the gratification of getting published.
MICEAL: No, no. I was asked to do the book, and I was very honored to have been asked, I might say, and I can only pay the highest tribute to Cindy Black in particular from Beyond Words, because probably the book would never have appeared without her initiative, encouragement and constant support.
MC: Beautiful.
MICEAL: Anyway, I withdrew the book then, and for a few weeks there was no book. I was really happy in an odd sense because I had submitted to the publishers, maybe five or six hundred pictures to go with the text, and we were going to select about sixty of my pictures, and sixty from Dr. Heinemann. Most of the pictures that I thought were significant and which I had used over the years when I spoke about orbs with RSE in places as far apart as Australia, Europe, Japan, South America and all across North America, as well as independently of RSE in many places; those pictures that I had selected from the thousands upon thousands upon thousands in my collection, I had put into a Power Point program, so I could show them conveniently to the audiences. Now I knew that I couldn’t use the Power Point versions of the images for the book because the quality of resolution was not sufficiently high. I would have to go back and find the original versions of all the pictures!
But obviously to locate all those pictures, even only sixty pictures, was going to take a lot of work. I had over 100,000 images at that time and they were filed according to date, not subject. So I was actually in a way somewhat relieved that there wasn’t going to be a book because I’d have to search through all of these pictures, probably for weeks, to find the originals.
    Anyway I had a call from Beyond Words and Simon and Schuster about two or three weeks later to say that they had no problem at all with the references to Ramtha. I said that’s great because then we can go ahead.
MC: That’s such a blessing, you know.... (to be continued)

                Second part coming the week of March 5th... Stay Tuned...