Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus. I’m Johnny Burke, and today’s guest is Rick Schnabel. He is a transformational coach, brain untrainer, and author of Life Beyond Limits For Your Rich Mind. He has a very interesting story about events that changed his life, and today will be talking about ghosts, apparitions, and what this means for your spiritual development. Rik, welcome to the program.
Rik Schnable: Thank you very much, Johnny. Thank you very much for having me on the show.
Johnny Burke: You’re welcome. Why don’t you give us some background and how you made the transition into a transformational coach?
Rik Schnable: it’s a very long story, but I’ll, I’ll shorten it as best as I can. I got to a particular point in my life where I was down to my last $27 about to be homeless and in a really horrible position. I had just done some training and I learned some things that I wasn’t using, and I began using those things that I was taught. And in the next three phone calls that I received after utilizing the training that I was given, I earned two years income. And my debts disappeared, and my life has never been the same ever since.
Johnny Burke: so how did that put you on a path to become a transformational coach, or was it something else?
Rik Schnable: It was definitely that, that put me on the path because, the thing that I noted was a lot of people around me had issues with money and big problems with money, I began to realize that much of it was due to their thinking just like it was me. what I began to do is once I had the transformation, my life just changed so dramatically that in truth, I couldn’t shut up about it. I wanted to share what I had experienced with everybody. And of course, I wrote Life Beyond Limits, a richer way to think. And that became a best seller and people came from all around the world and really wanted help to change how they were thinking and that’s what led me down that path.
Johnny Burke: Now, before that happened, this was the experience I believe that we did talk about last time, low part of your life; down to your last $27, you actually saw angels. Can you tell us about how that happened and what it was like?
Rik Schnable: Just before that time where I realized that we, my wife and I were down to our last $27, things of course weren’t looking good much prior to that. And I must admit, I was at a point in my life where I just really didn’t want to be around here anymore. I laid in my bed one particular night and I just thought to myself, could I actually choose not to wake up in the morning? Could I just pass in my sleep? And I prayed and I wished, and I did everything I thought I could with my thinking to take my own life.
I woke up, something woke me up and I don’t know what time it was. It felt like it was about three o’clock in the morning or two o’clock in the morning, or four or something and there were all of these heads above me. There were these five heads above me and their bodies were going out from this central point. The only thing I could really describe those apparitions were angels. They looked to me like angels. They were females. They were all female. I felt this level of calm. The words that came to me as I was looking at this is you’ll be okay. You’ll be okay. You are protected, you’ll be okay.
Later on I went to see a clairvoyant, because I was very lost in my life at this particular point. And she actually repeated those words. She said,” the thing that you have to understand is you are highly protected. You are here for a reason, and you are highly protected. Just get on with it. Just do what you’ve got to do.”
Johnny Burke: so the angels, the five females, can you give us a little bit more detail, what they looked like? You already told us what you were feeling at the time, did you have specific visuals or was it really just more of an impression?
Rik Schnable: they were visuals- if you could imagine, kind of puffing telecom powder into the air, white talcum powder ; where there are areas of dark, there’s hardly any talcum powder and where there were areas of light, there’s a lot more talcum powder. It kind of looked a bit like that. Kind wispy images. There was no color in it at all. They were all black and white sort of images, so you couldn’t see eye color or anything like that. And it wasn’t to that greater level of detail. You could see that they looked young. Like in their early twenties, maybe thirties as far as age is concerned. And they were moving, even though there was, of course, no air or no wind, you know, any movement within the room.
Their clothing was essentially like silk gowns that just sort crew neck off their neck like hospital gowns to a degree, but they’re very light you could see them moving and they just sort of hovered. The very first thing that happened, of course it frightened me at first, to open my eyes and, and see it, I put my hand up and I put my hand through one of the angel’s faces
Johnny Burke: Were they offended by that?
Rik Schnable: Didn’t flinch at all, it was like an image projected from; I don’t know. When I put my hand in, I kind of paused for a moment and then pulled my hand down and I just looked at them. there was no communication. Like they didn’t say anything to me, I felt this energy that you are protected, you know, everything’s going to be okay. they were sort of the only two messages that I felt that I got. Know, that feeling you sometimes get in your chest area, like your heart, where you feel a sense of relief, or you feel a sense of everything’s okay. that’s what I felt looking at them in the room.
I don’t know how long they were there, whether time kind of distorts whenever I have these experiences. It seemed like it was two minutes, three minutes.
It wasn’t long. And then they slowly just began to fade just like a dimmer, like the light was being dimmed.
Johnny Burke: when you saw these creatures, these entities, I know they didn’t say anything to you explicitly where you can actually hear them talk, but did you get a sense that they acknowledged you, that they noticed you?
Rik Schnable: I got a sense that they were I got a sense that they were specifically there to make it very clear that the decision that I made in my mind was the wrong decision. I felt a sense of support. It was an experience that even when I reflect upon it, I feel a deep level connection, like an emotional connection.
It almost makes me feel to cry. It’s very hard to describe exactly what went on. There were like literally no words, but it just kind of felt like there was a communication, like there was a telepathic sort of message.
Johnny Burke: Telepathic. Fairly common to hear reports of these beings coming, arriving at a time when you are at a low. I actually, I heard something. Just like that last night. a different, episode. Also, she’s from Australia as well. I’m not sure if she’s in your neighborhood, but, she had just had a miscarriage and she was, pretty down to say the very least. You had mentioned you went to see a clairvoyant after this, right?
Rik Schnable: Yeah.
Johnny Burke: Was it A woman? So did she mention that maybe they could have been spirit guides or did that not come up?
Rik Schnable: No, through the actual reading that I had with this particular lady, her name is Sally. none of them, none of the things that I had seen had actually come up. I was on a bit of a mission around that particular point in my life. I was looking for meaning, I was looking for why am I here, what am I meant to do? it was around that time I had, of course, the biggest transformation in my life. was looking for clues, I was looking for information.
When I was a kid sharing my experiences with people, people just look at you like you are weird or strange or dumb or stupid. It stops you from sharing. When a lot of people start telling you that, you start to believe that that might be true. You know, that maybe, maybe there’s something wrong with you. Maybe you’re insane, because not a common occurrence. There’s not a lot of people that you can get together with and say, oh wow, did you experience that too? How was it for you? So, I really embrace what you’re doing here, Johnny. I think it, it’s a great thing you’re doing for humanity, actually.
Johnny Burke: Oh, thanks. All right. That’s, definitely a good thing. You brought up something about sharing and when you share these types of experiences, people tend to frown upon it unless they’re intuitives, of course. They have no other basis or no other reasoning other than to judge you as being a little strange. A little bit unusual, which is pretty common. When you were young, when you were a kid, did you have any experiences like that? Maybe seeing spirits or maybe having make-believe friends, which maybe weren’t so make-believe, did, did that happen with you?
Rik Schnable: Yeah, it did. I can remember the very first dream I ever had. I saw animals on clouds, it was like visiting a zoo. That was the very first dream that I could recall. So having that dream experience, I know what it feels like to be asleep and then to be awake and then to recall a dream. The very first experience that I ever had that I could recall, I think I was six, seven, somewhere around that particular age. I had this kind center where there was a big library and then there were all these cupboards then there was a window there, and right in the corner I woke up- every time this has happened, it’s almost like you know where to look. And I looked in this corner and this was the first time I can consciously, recall an experience like this. And I saw these tiny, tiny, tiny little men. When I say tiny men, they were maybe about, 5, 6, 7 inches high. and I could hear them too. And there was like a little bit of a glow around them I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen The Wiggles, the Australian kid performing group, the Wiggles. They have very bright tops. Very bright bottoms, pants, and things. And that’s exactly what these characters looked like. They had, red and blue, and green and yellow. They were all very, very brightly clothed. What they were doing is they were playing, and you could almost hear them giggling or laughing, where I can recall one of them went back, put up their hands like that up high, and then another one ran, jumped, and landed on their hands and then from their hands did a double flip and landed on their feet behind them. They were kind of like circus performers. And I remember it was so magical and I felt like this was very special I would call it sacred now, but back then, I didn’t even know the meaning of sacred.
So what I did is I wanted to get up close to them. I wanted to speak with them.I wanted to say, Hey, I’m okay. You can trust me. I’m fine. I’m a kind person. I’ll look after you, and all that sort of stuff. And so I started moving in my bed very slowly, because I didn’t want to scare them. But I remember I had a great big duvet, on my bed, and I just moved. And it rustled you could, you could just hear the sound of the fabric rustling. And the moment that happened, they disappeared completely light really fast.
Johnny Burke: This is when you were, about six years old.
Rik Schnable: Yeah, six or seven. I think I was actually younger. I think I was six rather than seven.
Johnny Burke: you have a history of seeing these things these beings, these entities, whatever you want to call them. That’s what I was trying to figure out because often intuitives when they report, ghosts and apparitions and experiences beyond the veil, afterlife communication, often have those types of experiences when they’re young. It’s usually when they’re under nine years old for some reason. I’m not sure why. You’ve also seen pixies and fairies? what you just described, was part of that experience or was it different?
Rik Schnable: No, that was it. That was what I would describe as pixies or fairies. I’m only going from animations and things like that. So I would call them sort of pixies or fairies, but they were little people essentially but they
But they weren’t distorted in body shape, they looked like humans, but just in very, very small form,
Johnny Burke: The few times I’ve had these kinds of experiences, what these people all have in common is they come from an Anglophile, or Anglican background, British, Australian, New Zealand, Ireland. I heard someone just last night talk about her experience with a leprechaun. I’ve heard a lot of things over the last few years, but never a leprechaun. But why do you suppose that folklore is common, with I guess what you call an Anglican background? I never hear Americans talk about pixies or, fairies at least not yet.
Rik Schnable: Yeah. It’s a good question. I’ll take it from a general position first, and that is I think that you see things like this because you believe in its possibility. I think that people see what they can believe, and they will not see what they can’t believe.
A gentleman called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who wrote a book called Flow, spoke about the perception that we can gain within our understanding. And he said that at any given second, there are 2 million bits of information that can come into our sensors and then go into our mind to be interpreted. However, the human brain doesn’t like too much data. It likes to simplify, and so it deletes, distorts, and generalizes that information from 2 million bits to about 134. So it’s a lot of data is actually deleted. It’s a little bit like snakes can see colors that we cannot, and dogs can smell things that we cannot. But it’s that general belief system that creates that biology. Our D N A as Bruce Lipton once said, can change, you can change your D N A. If you begin to believe that you can jump high, you will jump high. Fleas are a great example of this. When you think of the size of a flea, but they can jump about that high. But if you put them in a jar and put a lid on it, over a period of about 48 hours, you take the lid off that jar. Those fleas have changed their D n A to the degree that they can no longer jump as high as they once could.
Johnny Burke: So for someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts, angels or any experiences involving beyond the veil, then they’re just not going to experience it for the most part. There have been reports of people that were the most hard-boiled skeptics you could possibly imagine that had life-changing experiences. But I get the meaning of that. Speaking of which, a Ghostly experience when I think you’re 16 or 17, and after that, I think the experiences had stopped for a while. How did that happen?
Rik Schnable: I remember I had an aunt who came from overseas and my mom said look could you give up your bedroom to our aunt, to my sister? And I said, sure. Fantastic. So I went into the next room and back then I just had a mattress on the floor, which was very cool. And you know, and so I was just laying on this mattress on the floor. I was also finishing high school and back then I had a typewriter, and it was kind of sitting on a higher stand, so I could do all my assignments for school.
I just woke up I don’t know, two o’clock, three o’clock, one o’clock in the morning, I knew exactly where to look, and I looked across above the typewriter, there was a guy standing there, in a ghostly, appearance. I could see through him, but I could see the detail. And he had a fair isle vest woolen jumper, Pharaoh with the diamonds. And so it kind of looked like he was from the 1920s, the 1930s, and he had braces. He had a little peak cap, he looked like a guy that I remember seeing on a series, National Velvet- he was the stable hand. That’s what he looked like, and he had kind of like a bit of a triangular sort of shaped face. I was just looking at him and he was looking directly at me, and I was looking at him, and then he started to rise up and he started to come up and then he got to the ceiling and it was like he didn’t have a skeletal system. His whole body started to arc. He sort of folded his body along the ceiling, so now he’s flat to the ceiling. I was just looking at him, and then all of a sudden, he just came straight from for me, for my head.
I did the big heroic thing, I put my head under the blankets ,then I just laid there and I was terrified. Then I thought to myself, I know what he’s going to do.
He’s going to be right in front of my face and he’s going to try to scare me and I’m not going to be scared. I built up the courage and I brought down the blankets to see his face. And of course, he wasn’t there. He was completely gone.
That was a traumatic experience for me. From that particular point, it’s like I mentally shut it down. I didn’t see anything until the angels. and once I saw the Angels, I then started seeing other things again. If I kind of rationalized that from a theological perspective or even a psychological perspective, I would say that what I essentially did is I didn’t want to believe in them anymore, didn’t want them around and I didn’t want to see those things anymore. I shut them off just like a person can have amnesia after a trauma. It felt a bit like that.
Johnny Burke: I can see that after an experience like that. I don’t think I would want to see anything like that either. There were more experiences after that. There was one I believe that involved your best friend.
Rik Schnable: Oh yeah. Yeah. There’s something that I want to share just before this because it makes sense o of this. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, or why I was seeing many of these things. The very first experience I ever had of someone close to me dying was the mother of a girlfriend that, that I’d been going out with for some time, and we had a really good relationship.
She had an aneurysm and passed away. I became down, I was grieving for quite a while and to make sense of this, I ended up going to see a clairvoyant.
This clairvoyant said from the very beginning, she said, “I cannot get anything for you. And I said, “What?” She said,” I cannot read anything for you. She said,” Has someone just passed recently? ” And I said,” Yeah.” And she said, “Is her name, Dorothy?” And I said, “Well, her name’s Dot, we used to call her Dot, but her official name was Dorothy.” And she said, “She is pushing you on the back. She’s pushing you on the back. And she just needs me to say this because I cannot get anything else until I share what she’s saying. ” ” The first thing that she wants to say is that you’ve got a job to do here. That you were born for the thing that you do that you have not yet done. So you need to get on with life. Stop mourning me, stop grieving, and get on with life. ”
Now, there was a funny instance that happened before that, where before Dorothy passed, I was living in Western Australia with a family there. And I said to Dorothy, “Look, I’m going back to Melbourne. Is there anything you want me to do? “And she said, “Yes. She said, could you dig up those trees?” they were small ferns. And she said, “Could you move them beyond the fence line?” And I said,” Sure. “And she said,” But one little trick, you’ve got to keep their feet wet.” And I said, what do you mean?”. And she said, “Keep a hose just kind of dripping on the roots. all plants need to keep their feet wet.”
So in this reading I get, she says these things to me that I need to move on.
The clairvoyant said, “There’s one more thing that she wants you to know,” which completely brought me to tears. She said, “Thank you for keeping their feet wet.” that to me was an amazing piece. To me, that was proof of life on the other side, and I’ve had so many experiences since that experience. I, I’m absolutely certain to have no doubt, death is not real. It’s just a veil. that’s all it is.
So that leads me to my second death, and that was my best friend, Tony.
Tony was an incredibly encouraging man and, a wonderful friend of mine. He was 10 years older than me. When I learned how to manifest the life that I want. And I’d gone from that instance of being almost homeless down to my last $27. Tony was running a sales department, and I used to say to Tony, “Look, this is how you need to think. If you want success, this is how you need to think. This is what you need to do. “And so I was teaching him what I had learned. And he started taking it into his work and starting to get all these great results. I was told by a clairvoyant in Hawaii actually, who said I was going to write a book that was going to change the way the world thought and it was going be a significant book. And I’ve shared this story with Tony, and Tony said to me, ” This is the book you need to write down everything you have done, how you did it, how you were thinking, everything- everything you’ve been telling me, put it in a book”. The very first version of the book before it became A Richer Way To Think, was called A Life Beyond Limits.
And Tony, when I gave him the copy of the book, the first book when I wrote it, he held it near his heart and he said, “Oh, this has got good energy.” And so he was such a supporter, such a wonderful man. But he got colon cancer and he passed away. And I used to say to Tony, anything is possible. It really, really is. Anything is possible, but what you’ve got to be is you’ve got to be absolutely the beacon of that message, and you’ve got to be a total believer. you can’t have any doubt. You’ve got to be so certain. Don’t let doubt creep in. Don’t let anyone steal your dreams. Then one night after Tony died and I really mourned his death hugely because he was a wonderful dear friend.
This one night made me feel so much better. I was laying in my bed, and I just woke up and I didn’t even move my head from the pillow. And Tony was sitting in the bed, which I don’t know how physically that was possible, but he was right in the middle of the bed between my wife and I, and he had his hands like this folded and he had a bare chest and he just said, ” you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Anything is possible. Here where I am. It’s proof. Anything is possible and then just disappeared. And I couldn’t wait of course to tell my wife about what I just experienced, but, to me, it’s almost like all my grief stopped at that point because I started to get to a point where I stopped believing in death. I didn’t believe in death anymore.
Johnny Burke: I do hear that a lot as well. A quote from John Lennon; I don’t believe in death. It’s just like getting out of one car and getting into another one.
Rik Schnable: I saw that on your signature, and I’ve got say I’m a fan of John Lennon, and I’m a fan of that quote.
Johnny Burke: Yeah. Well, who isn’t a fan of John Lennon? Seriously. Question about proof of life. That was a very good point. Did you get more proof of life from what the clairvoyant said or was it more the experience of seeing Tony in between you and your wife in your bed?
Rik Schnable: I believed it when the clairvoyant had done that reading for me and Dorothy appeared. I believed it from that point. The second time I experienced it of course, was with Tony. From that point even though I already believed her, it really reinforced it to me. I just thought to myself, this is reality; it makes so much sense to me.
Johnny Burke: So basically, you’re saying that for you, the proof of life was more so than the medium or the clairvoyant. It was seeing your best friend after he had passed, appear in your bed, basically telling you that you were right- anything is possible.
Rik Schnable: Yeah.
Johnny Burke: Especially here, which means what many people refer to as home or heaven.
Rik Schnable: Absolutely.
Johnny Burke: You have no doubt then that there is an afterlife and that we really don’t die. That’s what it sounds like.
Rik Schnable: I do, I completely do. I’ve got two sisters. Both of them have passed away and I was running a training one particular day and there was this lady at the back of the room, and she had eyes like s And everyone had left.
It was the end of the training and I’d wrapped up the training. I said, thank you everyone, I’ll see you tomorrow morning. And everyone went out of the room, and she was still sitting there. And I said, “Are you okay? And she said, “I’m getting very strong messages.” She said, “Do you know what I do?” And I said, “No, I don’t know what you do. “And she said”, I’m a medium. There is someone trying to get a message to you.”. And I said, it’s my sister, isn’t it? And she said-
Johnny Burke: You shouldn’t have tipped her off. I was waiting for you to say I didn’t say anything to her, and she said it was whatever it was.
Rik Schnable: Yeah, well, I did. I said,” It’s my sister, isn’t it? “And she said, “Yes, it is. She’s very persistent’. And I said, that’s my sister. And she said, “Can you spend some time now? “And I said, “Yeah, sure.” And we sat down, and I started, she said, “do you want to talk to her?” and I said, “yes, I do”. So I said to her,” She had cancer. And I said, “Did you have to die?” Erica was her name. And Erica said,” You know I let myself go. You know I was really fighting cancer for a long, long time, and then I was just too tired, and I let myself go.” And she said it was like walking backward downstairs. Then she said, One step was a doozy, which was totally my sister’s language. You know, she loved the word doozy. and she said once I took that final step, that was the doozy step, I couldn’t get back up. I just could not get back up. I didn’t have the energy. so she said,” no, I didn’t have to die. I was just too tired.” I was able to have this conversation with my sister and I can’t recall the full conversation, but I remember hearing things that I thought only my sister knows these things. So that was confirmation.
I also lost my younger sister to cancer. I actually went to a medium to get some ideas, some concepts, some life plans, and things like that. And she started tapping into my younger sister and she said to me, “Your younger sister was not so spiritual, was she? ” And in fact, she doubted the existence of another life and so forth. And I said, “totally she completely didn’t want to go down there. And she said ‘she is there, and she is very confused. She doesn’t really know where she is yet, I can’t really get too much from her, but she’s very confused as to why she’s where she is and, and all of that.
Johnny Burke: That brings up a very important point about what happens when we pass. You’ll hear some mediums say, everybody goes to heaven. Nobody gets left behind. And then you hear other people, other intuitives, that will say some people get stuck. We don’t really know the mechanics of it, but that is one thing I could never really get, a consensus on, other than there is an afterlife, but some people apparently do get stuck. Some mediums apparently will help others crossover. What happened when she said she was confused, she doesn’t really know where she is, is that where you left it with that particular medium or did you pursue it further?
Rik Schnable: I tried to pursue it further, but it didn’t really go very far because she said that she’s very confused as to what is going on and what she can and can’t do. Years later, we have had messages that, my sister was a little sorry for some of the things that happened and she was a little bit clearer about where she is now and what’s going on. So she’s come to the level of understanding where she’s accepted where she is.
I think it it comes back to our openness. The more open we are, of course, the more we can receive, the more closed we are, we’re tuning things out. My wife and I have been doing a huge amount of work, particularly over these last few years in getting ourselves as clear as possible. Clearing our nutrition, and getting any toxins out of our lives, including anything from scented candles to anything that starts bleaching or leeching toxins into our life. And I’m finding that the clearer we are body-wise, And the more work we do to get rid of all our baggage of the past and all our limitations, the more able you are to be receptive.
My purpose here on Earth is to show people how to create that cleaner life, how to create that life without the limits, without the baggage, It’s when we have hatred, anger, resentment, jealousy, blame, guilt, fears, sadness, all these sorts of things, they interfere with our signals. They interfere with our potential. Even from a scientific level, what happens is when we feel those feelings, there’s a thing called chromosome and it sits over the top of our DNA and it actually literally strangles our d n a. So when we get stressed, we strangle our D N A and our potential is hugely limited.
The road is about opening yourself, and this is why I love what you’re doing here because what you are doing here is you are creating a narrative that allows people to maybe like me like I even feel better talking to you today about all of this and you sharing some of your stories about some interviewees that you’ve worked with. It starts to make us feel like, we are actually quite normal. This is very normal, and this is a possibility.
Johnny Burke: Great point. Intuitives are becoming the new normal. A lot of these people thought initially when they were young, they were a little weird and maybe they were treated as outcasts, but then they come to realize that those experiences are a lot more common than they thought. They think, oh, I’m not weird,just extra sensitive. Those other people might be weird. Think about this; we might get to a point where the people that don’t have those experiences. they might be weird. There are people- there are intuitives that have past life memories from ancient civilizations who will basically testify that we lived in a fifth-dimensional frequency where things like telepathy and psychic powers were normal. Everyone had them so, a very good point. Great stuff. Rick. Thanks for joining us today. How can our listeners find out more about you online?
Rik Schnable: probably the best way to reach me would be via life beyond limits.com.au.
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