Who Are You When Everything Is Stripped Away? 20 Questions with Ant & Meg

We started with ghosts, farting at séances and reincarnating as slugs. Somehow, an hour later, we were talking about love, grief, self-acceptance and who we really are underneath everything else.

“Who is Meg when everything’s stripped away?”

By the time I asked the question, we'd spent nearly an hour talking absolute rubbish and, occasionally, getting surprisingly deep.

We'd discussed farting during a séance.

Whether a ghost would care if it saw you naked.

Whether people in spirit can accidentally walk in on you having sex.

The possibility of reincarnating as a badly behaved Chihuahua.

Whether ants have souls.

Whether the late Queen was secretly a lizard.

And somewhere in amongst all of that we'd also talked about grief, God, intuition, consciousness, spirit guides, self-acceptance and what might actually remain of us when everything familiar has gone.

So when I asked Meg to imagine removing everything people use to identify her — her name, job, appearance, relationships and history — I wasn't really expecting the answer she gave me.

She paused.

Then said:

“She’s just a little girl that wants to give lots of love.”

And then, after another moment:

“She wants somebody to give her love to. That’s all Meg is.”

That stopped me.

Because underneath an episode we'd deliberately designed to be fun, ridiculous and unpredictable, we'd somehow ended up there. 

Ten questions each. No idea what was coming.

This episode was an experiment.

Meg and I haven't actually known each other all that long, but we just seem to bounce.

There's an ease between us where one of us can start talking complete nonsense and the other one immediately understands the assignment.

So instead of another traditional interview, we decided to try something different.

20 Questions with Ant & Meg.

Ten questions each.

Neither of us allowed to see the other's questions beforehand.

The only loose rule was that there should be a slightly metaphysical flavour to it.

I was expecting questions about consciousness, death and spirituality.

Meg apparently interpreted “metaphysical” rather more broadly.

Within ten minutes she was asking me what I'd do if I farted during a séance.

Typical Meg.

And that's exactly why it worked. 

What if everything you believed was wrong?

My first question for Meg was a fairly gentle one.

Or so I thought.

If she discovered tomorrow that everything she believed about life, death and what happens afterwards was completely wrong, what belief would be hardest to let go of?

Meg initially went towards karma.

She believes strongly in treating people as you would want to be treated and trying to be kind — although she quickly pointed out that sometimes you do actually have to try to be kind.

We've all met those people.

Her concern was essentially that if she reached the other side and discovered karma wasn't real, she'd be gutted she'd spent all those years behaving herself when she could occasionally have been an absolute nightmare.

Then I turned my own question on myself.

What would I struggle to discover wasn't real?

The answer came surprisingly quickly.

Love.

If I got to the other side and somebody told me that love didn't really exist — that it was merely some temporary human mechanism and nothing more — I think I'd find that devastating.

So within the first few minutes we were already talking about the things we unconsciously build our lives around. 

Then Meg asked me whether I'd cover myself up if a ghost appeared while I was naked.

And there went the profundity.

Is a ghost naked?

I tried to give a serious answer.

This physical body, I said, is almost like another outfit.

I'm wearing a denim shirt, but I'm also wearing an Anthony Larkin suit — skin, bones, body — while whatever the deeper part of me is sits somewhere inside it.

So if a ghost appeared and no longer had a physical body, would nudity even mean anything?

Meg started laughing at me.

Probably correctly.

But that's the joy of questions like these. Something utterly ridiculous can suddenly push you into thinking about what we actually mean when we talk about the soul, consciousness or identity.

And then we were back to farting.

Meg wanted to know whether, during a completely silent séance, I'd admit that a terrible smell had come from me or let everyone assume spirit was responsible.

I'd own it.

Mostly.

I did confess to one particularly horrific incident while boarding an aircraft where I absolutely did not own it.

Everybody behind me suffered.

Nobody ever knew.

Until now. 

If consciousness survives, would you actually live differently?

One of my questions took us back into more serious territory.

Suppose absolute proof arrived tonight that consciousness continues after death.

Not belief.

Not mediumship.

Not a near-death experience.

Actual, undeniable proof.

Would Meg live differently tomorrow?

Her answer was interesting because she didn't think much would change.

She already believes consciousness continues. She doesn't claim to have scientific proof for that belief; she simply feels it strongly enough that she already lives with it as part of her worldview.

She might, she decided, buy fewer shoes.

Possibly less lipstick.

But fundamentally she'd still be Meg. 

That led naturally into another question I love:

If you could spend an hour with anyone who had died, who would it be?

Meg chose her grandmother Gladys.

She wouldn't waste the hour asking whether she was all right.

She'd want answers.

What is the purpose of spirit?

Do we still have some sort of mission after death?

Are there different realms?

I chose my mama, although I also became distracted by the possibility of interviewing somebody famous.

Eventually I settled on the late Queen.

Not because I wanted constitutional insight.

I wanted to ask whether she was a lizard.

I've read the conspiracy theories.

I don't believe them.

But if you've got an hour with the Queen in spirit and she's compelled to tell the absolute truth, surely you ask.

Settle it once and for all.

Meg thought this was perfectly reasonable, which says quite a lot about our friendship. 

And then Meg asked about sex

I knew she'd do this.

I didn't know when.

Her question was essentially:

If I were having sex and suddenly became aware of a spirit standing there, would it ruin the mood?

This somehow turned into a genuine conversation.

I've been experimenting more with opening myself spiritually after interviewing so many mediums and listening to the techniques they use.

I told Meg about lying in bed beside my partner one night after trying to open up spiritually. I felt what I interpreted as somebody physically grabbing my hand and pulling at me.

It startled me enough to ask my partner whether he'd felt it too.

He said yes.

We both went back to sleep.

Make of that what you will.

But it does raise a strange question.

People often talk about deceased relatives “being around us”.

All the time?

Because there are moments when I really don't want my mama popping in.

Getting out of the shower, for instance.

There are boundaries, Mama.

Meg and I eventually decided that if spirit does exist without a physical body, perhaps it doesn't perceive our embarrassing human activities in anything like the way we imagine.

Or perhaps they simply have the good manners to come back later. 

Intuition: spirit or brain?

One of the questions I particularly enjoyed was whether intuition is spiritual or simply the brain noticing information before our conscious mind catches up.

Meg thinks intuition is something inherent in us.

She wonders whether modern life has distanced us from it — whether we're constantly overriding signals from our bodies because we're too busy thinking, analysing and second-guessing ourselves.

I showed her something I do myself.

Close your eyes.

Ask yourself something where you already know the answer is yes.

Without physically moving your head, notice whether you can somehow feel an internal nod.

Then do the same with something you know is false and notice the internal sense of shaking your head.

Once you've established what “yes” and “no” feel like internally, ask something you don't consciously know the answer to.

I use that as an intuition exercise.

Is it the higher self?

Subconscious processing?

The brain recognising something before conscious awareness?

I don't know.

What I do know is that my intuition is often rather good.

Unfortunately, I'm also extremely good at ignoring it when it tells me something I don't want to hear.

Then six months later I think:

You knew.

Meg pointed out that this opens another enormous question about free will.

If intuition nudges us one way but we consciously choose another, which one is actually “us”?

We got quite deep there.

Naturally, one of us immediately needed a drink. 

“What would you want your spirit guide to unsee?”

Meg asked me to imagine that my spirit guide could see absolutely everything I do.

What would I most want them to unsee?

I couldn't think of anything.

Not because I've lived some faultless existence.

Far from it.

But if a guide is genuinely there to help me, surely hiding part of myself defeats the object.

How can something guide the complete Anthony if I'm editing the version it sees?

Meg's answer took it further.

For her, self-awareness means being willing to look directly at the uncomfortable bits too — the moments when you've behaved badly, felt ashamed, been frightened or weren't the person you would like to think you were.

You don't develop by pretending those versions of yourself never existed.

Which brought us rather nicely to the life review.

“Do I really have to watch the chicken bit again?”

If there really is a life review after death, what moment would Meg most dread reliving?

Apparently there is footage somewhere of three-year-old Meg dressed as a chicken.

She doesn't want to see it again.

Fair enough.

But underneath the joke was something more personal.

Meg talked about the difficulty of recognising all the earlier versions of ourselves.

The child.

The teenager.

The young adult.

The periods where we were awkward, frightened or behaved in ways we'd now handle differently.

She described herself as having sometimes been abrupt when she was younger because she was socially awkward and shy.

And then something changed in the room.

She started talking differently.

More quietly.

I joked that her higher self had got out of bed, put her slippers on and was sitting outside having a cigarette.

Apparently her higher self is Elizabeth Taylor.

Red lipstick, heels, pearls.

Obviously.

But then Meg said something that wasn't funny.

Coming on camera that day had been genuinely difficult for her.

She had nearly postponed.

She has struggled with putting herself out there and with how she feels about her appearance.

Yet she came.

She sat in the chair.

And she let herself be seen.

“This is part of my journey,” she said.

That mattered far more than whether every answer to our twenty questions was clever. 

Pigeons, slugs and badly behaved Chihuahuas

Then we got ridiculous again.

If reincarnation exists and Meg had to choose between returning as a pigeon, a slug or somebody's badly behaved Chihuahua, what would be the worst option?

We spent far too long analysing this.

The Chihuahua might get told off constantly.

A pigeon risks being shot, apparently.

A slug can spend most of the day eating lettuce.

Slug it is.

I said I'd rather come back as an eagle.

Top of the bird food chain.

Can fly.

Regal.

Seems sensible.

Meg chose a beautiful tropical bird.

Then we somehow started wondering why neither of us regularly sees animals that have simply died naturally.

Roadkill, yes.

But where are all the elderly foxes and pigeons?

That led me onto something I'd genuinely thought about before.

I'd killed an ant colony at home and felt guilty afterwards.

Do ants have souls?

I have no idea.

But if consciousness isn't exclusively human, where exactly do we draw the line?

A dog?

A bird?

An ant?

A fly named Jeff?

By this stage we'd moved dangerously close to wondering whether Earth itself might be some enormous ant farm being watched by something else.

This is exactly why nobody should leave Meg and me unsupervised. 

If the universe had to answer one question

Then I asked Meg perhaps the biggest question of the night.

If she could ask the universe one question and receive a completely truthful answer — no symbols, no synchronicities, no mysterious “trust the process” — what would she ask?

Her answer was immediate.

Why is there so much suffering?

Especially children, older people and people enduring terrible hardship.

Why would God allow it?

We talked about spiritual ideas we've both encountered — including the belief that souls might choose difficult experiences before incarnation as part of learning or growth.

I made an important distinction in the conversation: that isn't necessarily my own explanation. It's something I've read.

Because when you're sitting with the reality of a child suffering, a neat spiritual explanation can become incredibly uncomfortable incredibly quickly.

Meg didn't pretend to resolve it either.

She simply doesn't like seeing people suffer.

Neither do I.

Maybe some questions remain questions. 

My own guaranteed question to the universe was considerably less developed.

Eventually I landed on:

Are angels real?

Which, considering I practise Angelic Reiki, even made me laugh.

I believe in something.

I've experienced things I interpret as angelic energy.

But what are angels?

Human-looking beings with enormous wings?

Higher intelligences?

Something entirely different?

Again: I don't know.

That's why I ask.

The telephone call to Mama

Perhaps the most personal moment for me came towards the end when we started joking about the afterlife having a complaints department.

I said I already knew the man on reception.

I was referring to a dream — although “dream” doesn't quite capture how real it felt at the time.

After my mama died, during a dream-like state, I became aware that I was dreaming and decided I wanted to telephone her.

I reached for a phone.

It wasn't physically there in the normal sense.

But somehow I made the call.

A man answered.

I asked for my mama.

He told me, essentially, that he'd put me through this time, but I shouldn't call that number again.

Then Mama came through.

I remember having what felt like a completely ordinary telephone conversation with her. She talked about her transition and described being in something she called “processing” before moving into another stage.

When I woke, I could only retain pieces of it.

Was it genuinely some form of contact?

Was my grieving brain creating exactly what I needed?

I don't know.

And in that particular case, I'm not sure I need to.

Because it helped me.

It softened something in my grief.

Whatever happened, the healing was real. 

Who are you underneath everything?

Which brought us back to that final question.

Take everything away.

Your name.

Job.

Appearance.

Relationships.

History.

The stories people tell about you.

Even the stories you tell about yourself.

What's underneath?

For Meg:

“Just a little girl that wants to give lots of love.”

I understood why she became emotional, because I'd had something similar happen when she interviewed me previously.

Someone asked me who Anthony actually was.

And I didn't know.

Not really.

I'm still figuring that out.

Maybe we all are.

But I wasn't going to add some grand spiritual conclusion to Meg's answer because she didn't need one.

She'd already said it.

She wants to give love.

She wants that love to be accepted.

And an hour that began with two mates laughing about ghosts, flatulence and whether spirits watch people having sex somehow ended with that.

That feels very Ant & Meg to me. 

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on the first 20 Questions with Ant & Meg episode of the Anthony Larkin Podcast.

Neither of us knew what the other was going to ask, and as you'll probably gather from the article, the conversation went absolutely everywhere.

If you enjoy conversations about spirituality, consciousness, life, death and the questions we don't necessarily have answers to — along with the occasional completely ridiculous tangent — subscribe for future articles and conversations.

— Anthony