Usually goddesses float into a room, but Terry Cole-Whittaker is the exception. The petite towhead bounces in and lights up the space so completely you might find yourself looking for her magic wand. With her twinkling blue eyes and peals of laughter that bubble up like a just-popped bottle of Dom Perignon, Terry could almost pass for a beneficent Hans Christian Anderson character. But unlike fairy godmothers, Cole-Whittaker’s path has had a number of bumps and twists.
When we first met in the late 1980s, Terry had recently broken away from a large ministry that she’d nurtured into an Emmy award-winning TV show syndicated in 400 markets. She’d also survived a rocky marriage that left her with two terrific daughters.
The high school homecoming queen (she seems a perfect candidate but insists she was least likely, and won it through the powers of her mind) and former “Mrs. California” sought spiritual truth through numerous diverse paths. She built a retreat center in Washington and a Vedic ashram in India, joined the Hare Krishna community, and established a media ministry called Adventures in Enlightenment. She also authored five books, including the best-selling What You Think of Me Is None of My Business. Her latest, appropriately entitled Live Your Bliss (New World Library), consolidates a life’s worth of lessons learned from her own company (human potential seminars for Fortune 500 companies), mystic masters and transformational philosophies.
Although she’s quite serious about her mission in life, Terry is irreverent and fun. We laughed abundantly over an organic, vegan lunch, and it was fortunate I’d suggested Santa Monica’s Golden Mean Café rather than Starbucks; it’s the only type of food she’ll eat.
WLT: You say in your book, “The world is full of trouble because the people, the gods, are not happy.” Why are we not happy, and how can we change that?
TC-W: We don’t have to pursue happiness, we just have to be who we are. It doesn’t matter what’s going on around you, that doesn’t have anything to do with your state of being. We’re not a mind; we have a mind. The mind is a computer, and for most of us, the computer is running us and we believe our thoughts. But you would never go to your computer to tell you how to live your life, so why would you let your mind tell you how to live your life? The mind is a tool, and when you don’t control your mind it runs amok, it doesn’t know what to do cause nobody’s in charge. It’s like sitting at the wheel of a car but your hands aren’t on the wheel and you wonder why you’re crashing.
If we’re not our minds, what are we?
The nature of the soul is satchidananda—eternity, consciousness and bliss. Never born, never die, always conscious, and we don’t just merge into the blob and lose our identity; we’re always a person. I have lots of past-life memories and one is of being in the brahmajyoti, that place where people want to go and be part of the light—it’s very boring. It’s static, nothing going on.
You talk a lot about bliss, and you also describe yourself as a pleasure seeker. What’s the difference?
I would call bliss supreme pleasure, because once we get into that zone we also start accessing love—and there’s love we can’t even experience in this body because of the density of the body. When we are viewing life from our mind, we naturally want to be happy, cause that’s who we are. We want to feel good and we think we deserve to, and maybe we do. But it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in our lives, cause we are independent from the world, we’re not part of the world. We have a spiritual mind and body but for most of us that’s inactive. It’s been asleep. So we awaken to who we really are and start accessing our divine mind, which goes outside the material world, and that’s where we come from.
What made you decide to write this book?
I had my ministry in San Diego, moved to La Jolla as a minister at the Church of Religious Science in ’77, started my TV ministry in ‘79, and in 1985 I was at the top of my career—but something was missing. I wasn’t really happy. I was happy sometimes and then miserable. So I put my mind right at my third eye and let it sit there. I stayed in that bliss zone, meditating, being happy no matter what was going on, and one day I was lifted out of that situation, never to return. A new opportunity came and I was lifted out. It was not me in my mind planning how to get away, how to do this or that. I did use my intelligence and my mind to think about what I needed to do to prepare myself for my next life and what I wanted to do, but I didn’t lower my feelings into negative emotions and suffer and feel bad. Cause that doesn’t change anything or make it better. It’s what I’ve learned that helps me live a happy, fulfilled life, and live as I choose. So I wrote the book to help other people.
You’ve explored so many spiritual paths. Where are you at now?
I’m not a member of any organized religion cause they always get basically corrupt, and could become cultish cause you’re not supposed to do your own thinking or make your own decisions. But I love the Vedic teachings, the Bhagavad Gita; and I love Jesus and the Gnostic Gospels. I’m a practicing vaishnava—we practice bhakti yoga.
Is fear what drives people to organized religion?
All fear is about future lack and future loss. It’s the number one motivator. We don’t need to live in fear, we need to be aware. We don’t want to walk into quicksand, but don’t fear it, just be aware of it.
The Course in Miracles, which I studied for a while, says everything is either fear or love. I’ve taken a little from this, a little from that, and I’ve noticed that if something’s really true, it always stays. Scum and cream both rise to the top, and you have to be able to discern which is which.
When we focus on what we don’t want, and put out all those negative energies, we create through our thoughts, words and actions. So if I’m making my decisions and choices out of negative emotions and fear, what am I going to get? The very thing I fear. I’m going to make decisions not from what I really want and who I really am. It’s about choosing. But how do you know what’s you, and what you’ve been programmed to believe and think is you? That’s the real challenge.
