Interview: Mike Dooley | Infinite Possibilities
Mike Dooley
Infinite Possibilities
Interview by Kristen Noel, October 22, 2016, Rhinebeck NY
Photographs by Bill Miles
“If the car’s in park…you’re not ready.”
—Mike Dooley
Kristen: Mike Dooley, you are certainly not in Florida anymore.
Mike: Nor in Kansas.
Kristen: But you are such a great sport to bring your warm Florida-blood into this rainy fall weather for our cover shoot.
Mike: Well, it happens to be the peak week of leaves changing colors, so I couldn’t be in any better place. It’s great to be here, rain and all.
Kristen: I want to start by thanking you for making the time to chat with us — taking the time from your world travels, product launches, speeches, workshops — and of course from sending out those daily messages to a current following of 700,000+ ‘Tutters’.
Mike: Woo-hoo!
Kristen: Let’s go ‘Tutters’! Even my manicurist knows who you are.
Mike: Are you kidding?
Kristen: She always asks me, “Who are you interviewing next?” When I said, “Mike Dooley,” she lit up and said, “Wow, Notes From the Universe, TUT.com.”
Mike: Oh my gosh. That’s so cool.
Kristen: There you go. You’ve made it.
While you are a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and entrepreneur with an official title ‘Life Adventurer’ — I feel what’s most interesting to talk about is the story behind the ‘Life Adventurer’. I want to talk about the man behind the messages — and by messages, I’m talking about the Notes from the Universe, which you have, remarkably, been putting out for 15 years! That is a story in itself.
Mike: Yes.
Kristen: Before we get into all of this talk about the Universe, I wanted to reel it back. As I was researching, you stuck me as quite an enigma. I was thinking about it in a right brain / left brain, traditional / non-traditional, corporate world / spiritual vortex, feet on the ground, maybe a little bit woo-woo kind of way. You said that you were raised in a relatively traditional way, but at 13-14 years old, you were asking big questions.
Mike: I’ve always kind of been drawn to the fringe, and I’ve always wanted answers, although at 13-14, I wasn’t really trying to figure out the nature of reality — but I was thinking about stuff like time, infinity and space.
Kristen: That’s big thinking for a teenager, don’t you think?
Mike: You know, it wasn’t really so bold. I mean, in addition, I was trying to find out about Big Foot and UFOs — stuff that has always hinted to me that there’s a lot more going on than we really have the pulse on. I wanted to know that stuff. I would get books on hypnosis and hypnotize the neighborhood kids. It was silly.
Kristen: Were you using your powers for good? [laughing]
Mike: I didn’t know any better. I was just dabbling and I do remember some fleeting conversations with my mother. The big question was about God and Hell. I wanted to understand how there could be such a place in this amazing world.
How could God not be able to see beyond the fact that virtually any and all sins are born of mass confusion?
How could God not see the circumstances of someone’s life that contributed to their actions? God could surely recognize that, and thus there couldn’t be any such thing as Hell. How could anything not be of God, by God, pure God?
Like you, I was raised in a traditional Catholic upbringing, so there was a lot of dogma that we had to unpack, right? You started asking your mom these questions, and you’ve stated that she began to feed you some books. Was there a specific event where it
