#57 Gates McKibbin: Love Is The Only Reality
Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus. I’m Johnny Burke. Today’s guest is Gates McKibbin. She is a clairaudient medium and author of several books, including the Love, Hope, Give series, a saga about love across lifetimes that involves multiple people who agree to reincarnate together. What we’ll be talking about today is the unconventional way the books were written. Gates welcome to the program.
Gates Mckibbin: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
Johnny Burke: These books you’ve written, you didn’t write them in the conventional way as most people do. Can you give us some insight into how that was done?
Gates Mckibbin: I’d be happy to. I am a clairaudient medium which basically translates as a scribe for spirit. I hear messages sent down by spirit and write them as I’m hearing them. It’s not the kind of hearing that we use with our ears. It’s more of an inner knowing that messages are being sent down. I understand the words that are being sent to me and write them as I discern them. The stories in the Love, Hope, Give series, four novels, were sent to me that way. I was given the information that I was to write these novels. I had no idea what they were going to be about. I had no insight into anything other than that I should sit in my living room on the sofa with a pad of paper and a pen and wait for the words to come down through me, which is exactly what happened. I ended up writing four novels that derived from spirit, not from my brain.
Johnny Burke: That’s pretty incredible. And apparently, this series, the Love, Hope, Give series spans thousands of years. It apparently begins in Atlantis. why do you suppose it began there?
Gates Mckibbin: It begins in Atlantis when an androgynous spirit, a person who has no defined gender chooses to go through a very esoteric process involving high-frequency meditation on the part of a number of capable individuals, and crystal technology to split into two people, literally two people, a male, and a female who are exact twins, except for gender.
And that is the beginning of the love story that is told throughout these four novels. Atlantis was a remarkable manifestation of creation here on planet earth, where people had the ability to basically stay healthy for extended periods of time. They didn’t have the same kind of difficulty living apart from the diseases and other things that we have now. so in Atlantis, with all of these high-frequency technologies, with the capabilities that they had to live quite differently from the way we do, this individual chose to be reborn as two. The problem with Atlantis was these abilities that were so remarkable were abused by a number of people in power. Therefore over time, that corruption became so predominant, we had what is known as the fall of Atlantis, but the stories begin there.
Johnny Burke: It would appear that the reason that the stories began in Atlantis is because it’s almost as if someone or something is trying to teach us a lesson, where history repeats itself. Now let’s go back to what you mentioned earlier that spirit basically informs you to write- you don’t know what it’s going to be, you have no idea what it’s about. When you mentioned the word spirit, are you talking about a spirit of a past loved one or a spirit guide or are we talking about something bigger?
Gates Mckibbin: I believe we’re talking about something bigger .There is a larger divine wisdom that in fact guides and informs all of us. It just happens that an aspect of that divinity comes to me and uses me as a means to get messages out into the world. So I don’t and can’t identify an individual spirit I work with it is an energy, it’s a compelling energy quite frankly, that takes over my mind and allows me to transmit what’s being communicated.
Johnny Burke: It’s almost like a force. Takes over driving your car and you have no idea where the car is going to go.
Gates Mckibbin: That’s a really good way of thinking about it. In fact, it’s funny how the process works. I will unplug my rational mind to such an extent that I fundamentally have no memory of what I’m writing after I’ve written it I’ll sit for hours at a time with a journal on my lap and allow the words to come through me and be written. It’s my handwriting. I know that. But at the end of the day, I don’t have any idea what’s on those pages. On the one hand, people say well, how is there proof that these stories didn’t come from your brain? The proof is I didn’t even think about them, and I can’t even remember what I wrote. Then, when I transcribe what was written and put it into the computer, I basically use voice recognition software, and read the stories into the computer. My experience of reading them is as if I were hearing the stories for the first time. I have no recollection of anything that happened. I’ll be reading along, out loud and I’ll be thinking, ‘oh my gosh, that’s fascinating.” or I wonder how that could happened when I wrote it before.
Johnny Burke: What you’re describing is that the same thing as automatic writing or is it something different?
Gates Mckibbin: I think it can be certainly called that, but I don’t have a sense that my hand itself is being guided across the page by another energy. That’s really not it, it’s more, as I said before that I’m hearing words being dictated, and I’m writing that dictation. That’s how it happens.
Johnny Burke: The clairaudient part. Okay, that would make a lot of sense, and is consistent with several cases. Now going back to Atlantis, you mentioned advanced technology; crystal technology. It sounds like you have no doubt that that technology actually did exist thousands of years ago. Were you given a hint- a clue about approximately how long ago this story took place?
Gates Mckibbin: know that it was thousands of years ago. I don’t know how many thousands. There were a number of communities on the planet before Atlantis, that in fact were much more effective. at working with spirit or collaborating with spirit through a very thin, almost non-existent veil between the earthly dimension and the higher frequencies of spirits. Those communities, or those cultures maintain the integrity of the wisdom and the spiritual capability, our technology, if you want to call it that, maintain the integrity of that in almost impeccable ways. It was in Atlantis where that integrity was compromised. And where other agendas began to come forward, which was, we know how to do all of this. We’ve been given this extraordinary ability. Maybe some of us can use it to expand our power, our wealth, our control over people. That was the inflection point that created ultimately the fall.
Johnny Burke: So there were ancient civilizations before Atlantis. How Exactly did you learn of the existence of these civilizations? Was it living through the words of Luke and Grace, or was it something else ?
Gates Mckibbin: Interesting question. About 25, 30 years ago when I began to understand that I might be a scribe for spirit, I was also told not to read anything that had been published in any new age or metaphysical area. And I asked why, why should I be ignorant of a lot of what’s out there that’s really great literature? And the answer was, “we don’t want your rational mind to get filled up with a lot of information that came from somewhere else. Because if that happens, you may start to think that what you’re writing really did come from your own thinking rather than from spirit”. So what I tell you that I believe about places or cultures like Lemuria, all of that has come from what I’ve been told by spirit, not what I’ve read anywhere. People listening to this podcast can either believe it or not. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. My intention is to share what has been so generously given to me and through.
Johnny Burke: Well, I think it’s pretty incredible that you were told by spirit not to read anything, for obvious reasons. It seems to me that they want you to take the information straight from the source
Gates Mckibbin: Exactly, and I can trust that’s where it comes from, because I don’t have a huge library in my brain of books I’ve read. I’m not suggesting that other people follow that same guidance, but certainly for me, And the purpose I’m serving, collaborating with spirit. That sounds like, and it has been a very good recommendation.
Johnny Burke: Not only that, but it tells me that you are a direct experiencer of something, which is called a spiritually transformative event. Like someone who had a near-death experience, or a Kundalini Awakening, or out-of-body experience. I think it’s important to make that distinction.
When we talk about this series, the Love, Hope, Give series about reincarnation. And reincarnation implies that we’re spirits with an eternal life existing temporarily in human bodies. Then we choose to incarnate again and again. As far as, you know, how does this process work?
Gates Mckibbin: Initially when we become a separate unique spirit, which each of us is, that happens when we differentiate ourselves from source. And I define source as all loving, originator of all that is. We all derive from love. We all derive from that source. And when our spirit differentiates from source or separates from source, we have the opportunity then to come into human embodiment. There are lots of other things we can do throughout the universes, but here on planet earth, we are engaged in an experiment, and a lot of us are participating in that experiment by coming into multiple lifetimes.
So each of us have our individual spirit, our soul with all of its memories from incarnations and we establish a blueprint for a lifetime that we are about to be born into. That blueprint provides us with choice points, with opportunities to grow toward spirit, through our ability, to love, to forgive, to be compassionate, to share generously with others. We create those opportunities before we come into this lifetime and then we make choices. Some of them are aligned with our divinity and support that and strengthen it. And some not so much at the end of a physical lifetime, when our spirit leaves our body, we then have the opportunity to review what we did the choices we made, how we treated other people, all of the ways that we either aligned with our divinity and shared that with others or didn’t. That time in between lifetimes then gives us a chance to review all of that and establish a blueprint for our next lifetime. So when we come in we’ve got more choices we could make and hopefully do a better job. That’s how I perceive reincarnation.
Johnny Burke: Great explanation. the Love, Gift, Hope series does feature several people who agree to reincarnate together. I guess you would call that a soul family. They make soul agreements, and this happens in that in-between life space, that I believe Dr. Michael Newton made popular.
That’s where apparently these people that agreed to reincarnate together with Luke and grace and several other people- did they just meet and say, “okay, great- I’m going to be your best friend and this guy’s going to be your worst enemy, and this woman’s going to break her heart, but you need to do that because you need to learn. And we’re going to come back here and then we’re going to see what we need to work on next.” Now that’s probably a very crude way to look at it, but I’ve heard this discussion several times. And I don’t think that’s really too far off the mark, is it?
Gates Mckibbin: I think it’s right on the mark. I don’t think it’s crude at all. It’s exactly what happens. We gathered together with a handful of other spirits we’ve known in prior incarnations, and we select the kinds of relationships we can have. Maybe someone who was a, father in a prior life becomes a brother in this one, or a sister or someone with whom we had a troubled relationship comes into the next lifetime and it’s another troubled relationship. But the two of us have a chance to resolve things through forgiveness, and to complete whatever wasn’t completed before. So to me, it makes complete sense that we would come together with others with whom we’ve had prior experiences, because otherwise, if we just come in by ourselves and we have to start fresh every single time, it’s not as easy to heal and to grow and to transcend and to support each other in our individual paths to our divine love, which is really what this is all about.
Johnny Burke: Almost like cast members of a play or a movie. It sounds like they actually helped facilitate a more direct path back to divinity, which apparently, we somehow forget. It brings to mind a quote that was made by the Long Island Medium. I believe her name is Theresa Caputo. She basically said, “life is like an episode of Saturday night live; everyone constantly wears different costumes and characters, but at the end of the night, they all hug and kiss.” it sounds exactly what we’re talking about here.
Gates Mckibbin: I love it. I love that because we come together. Whether it’s with people we’ve known in prior lifetimes or not, we’re all here for the same reason, which is to recognize that the only reality and I mean this- the only reality is love. . We all derived from love and returned to love at the end of each life. This planet that we live on with all of the material, third dimensional, all of the emotional, all of the different facets of our lifetime on planet earth- we think that is our reality. Those are simply stage props. That’s the stage on which Saturday Night Live occurs. And in fact-
Johnny Burke: that’s this Saturday’s episode. Right?
Gates Mckibbin: Exactly. In fact, we’re here to understand that as we live our lives, if we can fill our hearts with love, and if we can share that generously with others and unconditionally and feel joy, even in the slightest way, we can live that way, then we are moving closer to spirit, closer to our divinity. Yet so often it’s easy to be seduced by the idea that what we’re surrounded with in the material world is what’s real. That’s illusion. That’s the same illusion that we have when we’re watching Saturday Night Live. The reality is that we are love. We always are love. Our spirits are composed of nothing but love and our spirits reside in our physical bodies and are with us constantly as we move through our lifetimes, and with us in between; with nothing but a completely benevolent intention for us to be our best selves.
Johnny Burke: Now a return to love or return to divinity seems to have some type of parallel, some type of relationship with what is referred to these days as Ascension. Trying to move away from the masculine to the feminine energy, from the third dimension to the fifth and so forth. Would you agree?
Gates Mckibbin: Well, yes – with perhaps little bit of a redefinition. Here’s the way I see it; we are in these physical bodies on planet earth that is part of who we are. We also are spirits that can reside or ascend into higher dimensions, higher frequencies while we are in these lifetimes. So I think it’s both, I think the Ascension can occur and can actually be an ongoing part of our lives on planet earth in each incarnation. So we are living lifetimes. We are having to pay the bills. We are having to deal with all these things that are right before us. And we also can have a significant portion of our spirit residing in dimensions that are a higher frequency, which are closer to the divine. We can exist both ways. That’s how I receive Ascension to be.
Johnny Burke: And the third and the fifth. Now going back to Luke and grace, all the way at the beginning. This brings to mind that Atlantis and civilizations before that, had advanced consciousness, right? And somewhere between now and then, we went into something similar to a down market in the stock market; it peaked. And then it started to go down. If you go back to the time of when this story starts, the Love, Give ,Hope series. what do you suppose we were in terms, of not just necessarily technology, but consciousness? Where we at the peak? Were we falling off the peak? Where do you suppose we were?
Gates Mckibbin: We were engaging in a precipitous fall, and the fall occurred because it became more important for people to use divine wisdom and capability for their own selfish purposes, than for the greater good. They separated themselves from their divinity, from their spirit and corrupted what they knew. Once that began, and once more and more people bought into it, then it became very difficult to counteract it. In fact, the first novel ends with the fall of Atlantis. It became impossible to shift the trajectory of the fall.
So you talk about consciousness and in fact, I love that you use that because as people became more and more corrupt in their use of these extraordinary, gifts from spirit that affected consciousness and consciousness began to lose the incredible access to divinity that existed before. So it’s like a circular process; the more corruption there is, the more corrupt consciousness becomes. Then that feeds more corruption. It also goes the other direction. The more transcendent people are, that feeds love and divine consciousness into the collective. So it goes both directions.
Johnny Burke: Hopefully we are coming off the bottom, and we’re starting to turn back up again, which brings to mind the Great Year Concept , based on consciousness going up in cycles. The connection I make there, is what you just said about the more corruption there is, the more selling there is going to be in the market- it’s going to go down. The more transcendence there is, the more buying there is and it’s going to go up. The stock market graph has maybe not the best analogy, but it’s another entity that has a cyclical nature. And apparently maybe on a much grander scale, consciousness does the same thing.
Gates Mckibbin: Well, and also, the stock market is a manifestation of who we are as a collective of choices we’ve made about how to organize, to get things done, how to share profits, how to value the importance of money, which we value incredibly. So it’s a good analogy. What I believe is that each of us individually can create the larger capacity for the collective to be able to represent our divine imperative, or not. Individually as we make our choices, we also are influencing the collective’s ability to live within our own divinity, within the divinity that we all share. And we can either support that or detract from it. We can either add to it or subtract from it. And that’s how the collective in fact is formed and how it’s maintained. It all happens because of individually, how we choose to live our lives moment to moment, day-to-day, choice after choice, decision after decision, emotion after emotion, whether we forgive or not, whether we can love, whether we share all of that creates the collective. Creates collective consciousness.
Johnny Burke: It seems like many of us contribute to it. Either it’s a positive contribution or it’s a negative contribution. I don’t know how accurate that says, but I’ve also been told that with light, there needs to be darkness. With positivity there has to be something negative, otherwise we would have nothing to contrast it with.
Gates Mckibbin: Well, that’s true, but I would say, I welcome less contrast
Johnny Burke: I agree.
Gates Mckibbin: Yeah, let’s choose love and light, yes, the shadow is there, and let’s choose to live in the light. I don’t know that a lot of us need that much darkness or that much shadow really to step into the fullness of our capacity to be light, to be love.
Johnny Burke: I have been told the shadow self is part of the fourth dimension, which we have to get through, to get to the fifth dimension, whether we like it or not. It’s a bit complicated and it’s a lot for us to get our heads around, it’s just something that I’ve never really gotten a completely satisfactory explanation of when we start talking about the dimensions. I agree completely that we should choose the light, the love. Love, forgiveness and compassion. I think the shadow self is something that I was told that we have to at least acknowledge. If we don’t acknowledge it, it can cause problems. That might not have a whole lot to do with what we’re talking about today, but it does apparently have something to do with dimensions.
Gates Mckibbin: I think the shadow is very relevant. One way to think about it is that because it is so present here in our earthly existence. It is present also in the next dimension up the fourth dimension, but we sure have a lot of it here. The last thing I want to indicate is that we should deny it. I believe that denying the shadow actually energizes it. We give energy to the darkness when we deny that it exists.
Johnny Burke: I think that’s what I was trying to get at, because denying the existence actually does give it energy. So by accepting its existence- I don’t know if it takes energy away from it, but it doesn’t give any more.
Gates Mckibbin: I agree with you. I think that what we all can do is acknowledge any examples in our lives where people’s actions are less than love-based- acknowledge that, but don’t allow ourselves to be brought down by it to such an extent that we go into despair. Because even by despairing the existence, we give energy to the dark side by denying it, we give energy to it. So acknowledge it and then transcend it with our own actions.
Johnny Burke: That’s an opportunity for us to exercise one of the three most important things in the universe, which is forgive. And I’ve always been curious about the life in between lives space. Here’s an example: I was watching one of the Gaia shows, I think it was beyond belief, and there was a man talking about one of his books. I believe his name is Richard martini. . He was describing a scene where this man went into the space, the life in between life space, and he recognized some of his relatives and is very happy, but one of his relatives was the mean uncle. And he finally got a chance to communicate with the mean uncle and the uncle says,” don’t you remember? We agreed on this.” So for those people that agree,” you know what? I’m going to be the bad guy this time, because for whatever reason you need the experience, I need the experience.”
So for someone in our life right now who obviously chooses less than love and light, couldn’t that be an example of someone that agrees to play that part in this lifetime for either his benefit or the benefit of someone else in his or her soul group?
Gates Mckibbin: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s absolutely possible. On the world stage, when I see things occurring that are in the news, my first thoughts is, “oh, he or she is playing the role perfectly.” that individual is playing the role that he or she came in to play, and they’re doing it perfectly to hold up a mirror for all of us to say, okay, are we going to allow this to continue or not?
all I can say is. I believe that we each come in with a purpose. And sometimes, the purpose that we’re pursuing can be defined by most of us as awful or negative. But maybe the people who are the most extreme in that area really are giving us the biggest opportunity to wake up and take our power back and get our voice back and say, this cannot continue, or to dig deep and forgive if it’s an interpersonal relationship. So I’m not someone who thinks that just because someone is doing something I perceive to be negative or destructive or whatever, that that is necessarily what everybody would call a bad thing. The question is what’s the opportunity here.
Johnny Burke: What’s the opportunity, and there is no coincidence. I think that’s where a lot of people, myself included get a little confused. We talk about light, love and doing a good thing and ignoring the negative or just trying to look past It. I think a lot of us will miss the point, and it’s not really our fault because this isn’t really something that’s really taught in the mainstream. We’re just trying to make sense of everything. But another way to look at this I believe is that if everything in everyone is pretty much where they are supposed to be, according to what they agree to when they came into this incarnation, then I guess we just do what, we let it play out.? Hopefully, we learned from it. It gets confusing, doesn’t it?
Gates Mckibbin: It does get confusing. The people who are coming in, let’s just say, and being the most destructive, let’s look at it that way, from that third-dimensional perspective. They have the opportunity to do some pretty significant soul searching and decide to shift their, lives and decide to release whatever that pattern is and move beyond it. Probably those who come in and are the most destructive have been that way for many, many lifetimes. It gets more and more extreme. And so they’re here as difficult as it might be for them individually, they’re here to basically face it and say, I choose not to act that way or engage with the world that way any longer.
Johnny Burke: Right? but they have to go through that in order to reach that point where they say, “I can’t do this anymore, and I need to go back. ”
Gates Mckibbin: Exactly. And then that becomes the catalyst for their own transformation, but it has to come from within them. And we don’t know, we can’t know any of that, but what we can know is that it does no one any good to either deny or energize the darkness. . We can do something different with our lives.
Johnny Burke: what else can we learn from The saga of Luke and Grace?
Gates Mckibbin: The saga involves shared love. Unconditional love between two people, and others who incarnate with them throughout . That love in the face of compromised love, our lovelessness that exists in the context in which they’re being born. So, after Atlantis, the couple are born England around 24 A D and have to face the Roman invasion that occurs about 20 years later. They marry, but there is this violence and the intention of the Roman empire to control an entire culture with a long history through military dominance. And so what happens with their love in that context? who are they individually and together as they face that? And that becomes the question in the second novel. In the third novel, he’s born a , Roman Senator, she is a Greek slave. This is about 120 AD.
And according to the laws of Rome, senators cannot marry slaves or slaves who have been freed. It is legally prohibited. They’re born into a situation. When they meet and they realize they love each other from prior lifetimes, they cannot come together in marriage. Society is preventing it. So what occurs then? What happens to their relationship? How do they move forward? And in the fourth novel, which takes place on the 1600s. He is a count with a huge landholding that he’s inherited, a large estate. She’s born the daughter of a Venetian courtesan and a Senator. The minute she’s born, she’s taken to a convent to be raised by nuns and she ends up being sent to France and, decides at age 21, not to take her vows. And so they’re born in these radically different circumstances. How do they come together?
Johnny Burke: and each incarnation there’s challenges,
Gates Mckibbin: Exactly. And so this is a love story, but it’s not a frilly, little love story. It’s the story of two people and others who incarnate with them. Two people who love each other across lifetimes but come into these incarnations and face obstacles that would tear asunder a love that isn’t as strong as theirs. But in each story, their love survives. It survives all of this that I just described. It’s really so heartening for me to talk about these novels because they are affirmations that at the end of the day, love is our only reality. Love is all that’s real.
Johnny Burke: I won’t go any further than that because there’s no way could ever say anything more important. That’s it -love wins.
Gates Mckibbin: Last.
Johnny Burke: Excellent. Gates, thanks for joining us today on Closer to Venus. Great stuff, your books and the way the books were composed and so on. We really appreciate it and I’m sure there’s going to be a part two at some point. In the meantime, how can our listeners find you online?
Gates Mckibbin: My website http://www.lovehopegive.com. They can check out my four novels. My other book called Epic Steps that contains messages from three presidents and also a series of seven books. I published a number of years ago.