Scientist, zookeeper, distance runner and gardener Larry Vorwerk balances his love of nature and science with his awakened heart, one that beats in harmony with a sense of oneness with all of creation.
An explorer at heart, Vorwerk’s new book, The Bartholomew Effect: Awakening to Oneness, is a testament to a soul who continues to reach beyond physical dimension for insight on the unseen. What if we were more aware of the power of our intentions? he asks. What if we became conscious, multidimensional spiritual beings? And what if we all spontaneously experience timelessness, weightlessness and the ability to move with a single thought – as if in a dream, just as Larry experienced on a number of occasions? And what if you learn that you are intimately connected – perhaps on the soul level – with someone who walked with Jesus (the apostle Bartholomew) but were uneasy about sharing that information but could not contain the love that the experience contains?
The Iowa native, who now lives with his wife, Nita Wolf, on ten acres of land near Northfield, MN, explores consciousness in the present moment, be it at work at the Minnesota Zoo, tending his fifty varieties of fruits and vegetables or running the byways of the rural countryside. His current incarnation is all about testing the boundaries of reality and the gifts of spiritual transformation.
In this interview with The Edge, Larry tells us that the Earth is undergoing the pains of birth, and we all can feel it deep in our souls. His message, however, is filled with hope as he promotes unconditional love, peace and oneness among us all.
You begin your book by writing, “By keeping an open mind toward everything, listening to our intuition and then acting on it, we begin to live life to the fullest.” What is your perspective on belief systems and the role they play in our lives?
Larry Vorwerk: I was raised Catholic and, as such, I guess that is a blessing and a curse at the same time. It was a very structured life. My parents were very traditional, but as I went to college, I really found it to be beneficial to have a spiritual background, as well as a scientific background. I used that to my advantage in trying to find answers to reality and life from looking at it from both perspectives.
Since I have had some multi-dimensional experiences, it gave me strength as far as having a stronger belief system and knowing that there is more out there than just what science can prove. Being the type of person who always is questioning life, I continue to explore my sense of reality. I never limited myself to what is possible. I explored different belief systems, everything from Native American philosophy to out-of-body experiences and dream states.
I found that in time they all started intersecting and supporting each other. As the puzzle pieces start to fit together, the puzzle border keeps expanding, and so there is really no end to understanding reality or life. But at the same time, as we do grow and become more aware, we do get a bigger and fuller picture of what is life and reality.
In the picture that we think we see, we think we know where the edges of life are, but it is constantly expanding on us.
Vorwerk: Yes, it’s constantly expanding. To give you an idea where science does help, look at modern physics which believes that there are 11 dimensions to reality, and yet we live in a third-dimensional world. A lot of the literature says we are moving into a fifth-dimensional experience. At the same time, I’ve had experiences that I believe were sixth dimensional, and these are the experiences of oneness. And yet, from what science says there are even higher dimensions that are incomprehensible while we are in the physical form.
As you mention in your book, you wrote about numerous experiences of being conscious in the higher dimensions, experiences that you describe as life altering. Why do some people have these and others do not?
Vorwerk: By being open to it. A person can close themselves down and be fearful about anything that is unexplained. That probably keeps a person from having those type of experiences. For myself, being curious and being open-minded, and actually putting out the intention to have higher dimensional experiences, has allowed me to have some of these. In the earlier years, a lot of these experiences came without any control or any way of knowing why they happened, but as the years have gone by I have had more control over some type of oneness experiences, which has been helpful.
What was the purpose for you having them?
Vorwerk: The purpose was to remember Home, meaning the afterlife; also to fulfill my purpose or mission in life and to be of service and to help other people on their awakening process.
You shared that your next incarnation will be as part of a group consciousness overseeing an evolving new planet and that many of your experiences outside of the realm of waking consciousness have been like training exercises for that incarnation. Can you elaborate on what you know about what that incarnation will be and what your role will be?
Vorwerk: There’s not too much I can say about it because it is beyond physical words. But another angle or way to approach that would be an outline view of a book on reality that I include toward the end of my book. I mention that everything converges as everything rises to a higher vibration, and I believe that is true in all aspects of life. The higher the vibration, the more inclusive everything is, including angels, archangels and even souls.
An individual of a species of animal comprises the soul of that species, and yet in humans each individual has a soul. As you get even into the higher dimensions and higher evolution, individual souls merge together to create a higher reality or a higher being, so to speak. From that experience that I mention in the book, post-human graduates merge together to become the consciousness of an evolving planet. Even though it was an experience like my other oneness experience, in the sense that energetically it was so expansive that it is hard to put into words, I did get an understanding of what that meant.
In the book I like to use analogies or parables to try to describe something that is hard to put into words, and another way of putting that experience of being the consciousness of a planet compared to being a human would be like the cells in your body compared with the known universe. A blood cell, for example, has no consciousness of what the whole body is doing, that I’m talking to you on the phone and you are in a different city and all of that. As we evolve and merge into a higher vibration, our reality becomes so much more expansive, so much more loving, so much more joyful, and yet at the same time incomprehensible as we are in a physical body at this time.
What role has emotional healing played in your spiritual journey?
Vorwerk: It helped me to come alive. To give you a little background, I was in an unhealthy marriage before and was not really happy in a lot of ways. My former wife had some mental health issues, and since it was emotionally painful in a lot of ways, I tried to stay out of feelings and be more intellectualized. But as I moved out of that relationship, moved into a healthy relationship, which I have now with Nita, I started to feel more and use my feelings as part of living and part of life. The more that you have feelings, the more you can experience life – the joys as well as the pain. Part of the reason to be on this earth in the physical body is to have those feelings and have those emotions that create your life experiences.
What is the Bartholomew Effect?
Vorwerk: At first when I started writing the book, I wasn’t even going to bring up the Bartholomew connection, but Spirit told me that the title of the book should be called The Bartholomew Effect. To do that, I then had to explain yourself. Once I started to write some of it, it was like, well, if you go this far you might as well go the whole way.
The interesting thing is that I asked myself, too, “Why is it called The Bartholomew Effect? Why wasn’t it called The Jesus Effect or something else?” I asked Jesus about that question. It is only called The Bartholomew Effect because it is my experiences, it’s my journey, it’s my awakening to oneness. If you were to write a book about your experiences, then it would be about your effect. So it doesn’t mean that mine is any better than somebody else’s. The point is that my experiences may be helpful to another person and might trigger some of their own growth. It might trigger some of their own awarenesses as they open up to this oneness experience.
The other aspect of why it’s called The Bartholomew Effect is because of different experiences I’ve had, which I explain in the book fully. There is a reason for me to believe that I am the apostle Bartholomew as a walk-in, but I really leave that open to the reader to come to their own conclusion. I leave it open that I could be a walk-in, I could be just overshadowed, or I’m just tapping into the collective unconscious, because it really doesn’t matter if I am or I’m not, because we are all one anyway. It’s just where my focus is at this point, and so I really didn’t want to make who I am the focus of the book.
It’s more about the message of where are we going, who are we as a whole, and what is the outcome. The main emphasis is how can we change our reality, and the biggest reality change that we can make is when we come to the awareness that we are all one, that we are all interconnected.
Once we come to that awareness, how does that change our reality?
What have you learned about Bartholomew and his role as an apostle?
Vorwerk: I have done a number of past life regressions. In fact, I did one a couple months ago since the book came out. I figured some people will start asking some questions about that. As I went through this session, I realized that a lot of the things that were said about Jesus in that time period did not fully answer who Jesus was in the message. I tried to explain it in some ways in the book, that the real message is that we are unconditional love and that Jesus was the way-shower. What was different between Jesus and most of us is he retained that awareness of Home that most of us have forgotten, for many reasons.
Since I started writing the book, I have a closer relationship with Jesus. When I finally made my commitment to write the book, Jesus came to me and said that He would always be present inside of me from that point forward, and I do feel that energy. I guess that’s the best way of putting it.
Everything is energy. I do feel that unconditional love energy that I would call Jesus, and yet there are many other avatars out there that carry that same energy of unconditional love. I bring up Jesus a lot in the book because that is the relationship I had, but if someone else had a relationship with Mohammed or Buddha or whomever, they could have that same type of experience of oneness and love. This isn’t just a Christian book. The message is the same no matter what avenue you come from.
What you have learned about Jesus that has changed your relationship with Him during this whole process?
Vorwerk: That is that He is very approachable. As I have said, I was raised Catholic, and if you know anything about the Catholic faith or a lot of the other traditional faiths, there is a lot of fear and guilt and shaming put around people because of what they do or don’t do. There is nothing like that from my experience that I had with Jesus, from the Bartholomew Effect.
I am totally acceptable, unconditionally the way I am, and I have my own faults and make my own mistakes like everyone else. And yet what that allows me to do is totally merge with Jesus because of that unconditional love, which is open to everyone. I don’t think traditional religious practice and teachings make that available for people. People see Jesus as something special, something above them, something that they could never attain themselves, and so they never have that true relationship with Him as a true brother that I see and experience at this point. So, from that point of view, my life has changed as far as my viewpoint of Jesus and His message.
The tagline of your book is “Awakening to Oneness.” Understanding oneness and knowing oneness are two different experiences. How does a person truly experience oneness?
Vorwerk: There are different levels of oneness. The one big experience of oneness that I had, where other souls merged with me, was at such a high energy level that if I were to retain that level of energy of oneness, I could not stay on this physical Earth. It is impossible for me to go to that level on a regular basis.
At the same time, I have learned in different ways how to get glimpses of bliss, of oneness, and a lot of that has to do with some of my spiritual insights that I include at the beginning of each chapter. One is to use your imagination. Just imagine yourself being at one with other things. What I have found is that you could be in love with your wife, and yet at the same time you could really feel at one with your pet dog. But try to do feel at one with all of them at one time instead of just one-on-one. I’ve had some experiences that have helped me to do that. There are now six other souls who have moved onto the other side that I can merge with at will now, and then I can do it with all six or seven of them at once. With each one it adds, it exponentially increases that feeling of oneness.
There are many ways to strive for that oneness, but unfortunately I can’t make it happen for someone else. In my book, I just share my experiences, things that have helped me. Some things were out of my control; I do some things now that I do have control of. One exercise that I do is visualize being at one with other souls. Just to let you know, everyone who reads my book is someone I have already merged with, and they have merged with everyone else that has read that book. It is my intention and visualization that as we all merge together at some level of awareness, we will start to feel it more and more. The more we experience oneness, the easier it becomes for others to also experience it. I know there are many other people out there who are doing their own thing on oneness. They may call it different names, but it still has the same effect.
Another thing I mention in the book is that by intention I open up my high self for other people to tap into to help with their awakening and awareness. Why reinvent the wheel? Why not share what we have learned from life experiences with others who are open to it or wanting to gain from it? Your intention and imagination, two of the insights that I mention, are very powerful.
CLICK HERE to continue to Part 2 of the interview.
For more information on Larry Vorwerk and The Bartholomew Effect, please visit www.awakeningtooneness.com.
Interesting story about why it’s called the Bartholomew Effect.