[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is
an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We've done
nearly 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you would like to check out
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My guest today is an old friend of mine named Bill Witherspoon.
Bill and I go back over 50 years.
We were both in Estes Park, Colorado in the fall of 1970, being trained as teachers of
Transcendental Meditation.
We both worked in that organization for a number of years, and in more recent years,
we've both been involved with AMA, ama.org, a spiritual teacher from India.
Bill is a lifelong visual artist, serial entrepreneur, and lover of sky.
In his six decades of living on and off in the high steppe desert in southeastern Oregon,
he has painted watercolor skies, practiced ancient art as spiritual discipline, and weathered
that pristine geological expanse.
As an artist, over the last four decades, Bill has mounted over 40 one-man exhibitions
of paintings, prints, and sculptures, in addition to desert public art projects.
He is also the founder and creative director of the Sky Factory, which is here in Fairfield,
Iowa, a fine arts, digital technology, and cognitive science studio that designs and
manufactures the world's only research-verified virtual skylights, luminous sky ceilings, and
luminous virtual windows.
In other words, you could be lying in a dentist's chair looking up the ceiling, and it looks
like you're looking out of skylight at clouds going by, things like that.
And there's a whole science behind that, which maybe we'll get into.
He is publishing his first book entitled "Enter Space Stories from the High Desert," which
I just read and which is full of beautiful photographs.
It's kind of a coffee table book in that it has all these beautiful photographs.
Later on in this interview at a certain point, we will play a slideshow while we continue
speaking of some of those photographs.
Anyway, this book lays witness to a life surrounded by that rare, unsummoned vastness, one that
those of us steeped in the ceaseless churn of urban life can now imagine living through
the faithful record of the artist's experience.
In other words, Bill lived in the desert for a long time and wrote the book there.
Also, some of you may remember back in around 1990, I think, there was a big news story about
this giant yantra, this geometrical design having mysteriously appeared in the Oregon desert.
And people were speculating that it was created by aliens.
Turns out Bill and a bunch of his friends created it, and in fact when he confessed to having
created it, some of the people who thought it was aliens thought he was with the CIA or
something, and was just trying to throw them off the track.
It was really aliens, but it was Bill.
There's a whole documentary about that, which I have linked to on his BatGap page, which
I would recommend watching. It's quite an amazing thing these guys did out there. Anyway, welcome
Bill, good to have you. Thank you Rick. Nice to see you. And hear you. And hear me. And we see and
hear each other quite often because often I'm out riding my bike on the trail and I run into Bill
and his dog walking along and we stop and have a chat. So, Bill's book consists of a number of
stories and maybe he'll launch into telling one or two of these stories during this interview.
I hope he does. But his whole life has been quite adventurous. In fact, I remember hearing all
things about Bill before I even knew him that well personally that were kind of mind-boggling,
the sort of death-defying things that he had done. And yet he is a mild-mannered artist. He doesn't
seem like the death-defying type. And decades of his life have been lived in deep, deep silence,
living in the desert in solitude. So he embodies within himself an interesting
contrast, I guess, between dynamism and silence.
Think that's fair to say, Bill? Yeah, I don't know if I embody it, but
definitely I have periods of deep silence out in the desert,
and it's about as remote a place in the lower 48
as can be found. And then I'm back here in town and working in a company
with a lot of people and trying to get stuff done and usually
somewhat overwhelmed by all the demands and requirements of that. So it does flip back and
forth. And I guess I've been doing it. This is one of the things about writing a book like this
that's actually it was started with stories back in the started writing in the 80s. And I just kept
adding things to it, not really expecting to publish it. Then I got the idea, maybe, you know,
you never know and so I kind of kept on with it and
Thank you, but you get to see a pattern and you're right
The pattern has been one of poof
Get out in the desert where I feel at home in a way that I don't feel
It's a kind of being at home that I don't feel anywhere else
And then back at the sky factory, for example, you know working and trying to build that business and organize do
everything that has to be done and I'm pretty much at home there too.
You're at home wherever you are. I was sort of, yeah.
One of the first stories in your book was that you were
going off on this hundred mile river rafting adventure
with two other friends in these makeshift ramshackle rafts and you had
kind of a near-death experience or out-of-body experience. Why don't you
tell that story? Well, there were three of us. We had come down into part of Idaho to
get on to the south fork of the Oahe River, which then went across Idaho and then into
Oregon. And we didn't know anything about the river. Nobody that we could find had ever
run it before. And ramshackle is exactly the right word for what we had built out of old
World War II rafts and pieces of wood and stuff like that. But in our favor, we'd run the Rogue
River in western Oregon with that kind of equipment, and we'd flip dozens of times,
you know, and we'd wear life jackets and so forth. And it was fine. It worked. We did it,
and that's what we expected, and we thought we'd just be in new territory and it'd really be
exciting and we were early 20s, so that says a lot. Unfortunately, or fortunate, no fortunately,
definitely fortunately, big fortune, great thing. I was the first one in, heading down river,
and everything looked great down there, and I'm actually going backwards, you know, because I'm
I'm rowing and I'm going backwards, and I'd look around, everything looked fine, and then
I started to hear some noise, and then, "What the heck?
Where's that coming from?
That sound, that roar sound, where is that?"
And I was looking up in the sky, and then I looked around, and then I saw mist coming
up out of what appeared to be the flat river.
And in fact, there was what's called a step-dam.
Up above is an agricultural area.
Upstream is agriculture.
So there was a man-made dam there that we didn't know about.
And that dam was even and went right across and all the water went right over and then
it dropped, I don't know, 10 feet or something.
And by the time I realized what was going, I was in the middle, there was no way to do
anything.
I just stood up, waved everybody, "Get over, get over, get over," yelled, turned around,
And then just, it all plunged over the top.
And I was taken down, and then I was pinned by the force of the water to the bottom.
And I thought, "Oh, you're going to drown."
So I didn't really resist it.
I was never afraid.
There was no time to be afraid, no nothing.
I inhaled water and took it into my lungs, and then I left my body.
And leaving the body, I didn't even really know I left the body.
The body was just not an issue anymore.
It was gone behind.
And it became so big that there was no "I."
No "I" to leave the body or be in the body.
It just became wonderful, blissful, huge, indescribable.
Absolutely indescribable.
And the only, well, I'll tell you that funny part later.
And then that persisted for some period of time.
I have no idea.
And then, loud and clear in the head, now in the mind, which then became the head, and
then became the body, you have to go back into the body.
And I didn't want to, at all.
This is where I want to be, this is it.
Why?
No.
And then, there's too much to be done.
You have to do too much.
You can't stay.
You gotta go back.
So the next thing I knew, bizarrely enough, the boat is flipped over so it has a smooth
bottom, you know, rubber bottom, which is on the upper surface.
And how I got, and there's nothing to hold on to, but the next thing I knew, I'm on top
of that and starting to throw up, you know, cough up and actually throw up water out of
my lungs and stomach and everything else.
Then I'm in my body and then I start figuring what the heck and then I look over and I see my two
buddies on the shore and I was very grateful and that was quite a ways away and they then started
throwing a rope out and meantime the force of the water is creating an eddy that is holding the boat
in place right at the edge of the falls. It's not going downstream, not going anywhere.
So I'm stuck there. So finally I got a hold of a parachute cord, very thin thing, and I could just,
and it wasn't a loop or anything, I just got a hold of it and I just...
That they had thrown you?
They threw it and I finally got it. Then they pulled and I hooked my feet on the boat so I
didn't get dumped in the water, I did not want to get dumped in the water again. Now I'm really in
the body thing and the body is talking. And they pulled and then it got out of that and then it
swung down like a pendulum, it swung down because of the current and came up on a big pointed
rock that was sticking up and wrapped. And I didn't let go and I got out and climbed
up onto that rock and as I climbed up the boat was wiped off and went on down, never to be
seen again. So now I'm sitting on this rock and it's all about how to get to the shore,
the bank. I don't remember if we could hear each other because of the roar of the water or whatever,
but I knew I finally had to make the decision to jump back into that stuff, which was kind of like
symbolic of getting back in into life almost in a way. I had to jump in and I was not happy to jump
back in, but I did jump in and then I got swung down by the current because they held, pulled,
and then got to a place where my feet could touch bottom and I
I clamored in they came out helped me in and laid me down in the
Show on the bank and I coughed for quite a bit and got a lot of water out of my system
And then shivered and and then they had to pry my hands. That's how good the body is
They had to pry my fingers open water was cold, but they had to pry my fingers open to get that rope out
I mean the body doesn't sing when it needs to right
and then
We went home
We didn't get I mean everything was lost. You only had two rafts here. Yeah. Yeah, yeah
you know, so we got back in the
This little renault toffee with no backseat and drove back to portland and that was the experience
You said that you had heard stories of me doing things
that were risky, high risk. And that's probably true, but this took all need or desire for
high risk out of me. I used to go on glaciers, I used to spelunk a lot. I loved spelunking,
and I used to climb and rock climb. And after that, those were excuses for two things. One,
they were excuses to be out in nature, which ever since I've been a child, that was the
only time I experienced any kind of freedom. And the other thing it was, was an excuse to
probably push the boundary a little bit and find out where it goes, you know. And there had to be
some of that. I mean, you know, when you're in your 20s, you do that sort of stuff. So that was
all taken care of. So now I started walking around mountains, and I started to go more into the
desert and flat places and sold a motorcycle, you know, stopped all the crazy climbing and all the
rest of that stuff. And that's not to say that that kind of climbing needs to be dangerous or
anything else. It's just how I responded to it. It did change my life. It really, it was a big one.
And I'll tell you another story where this came back to me big time. And that was when I was
forming a company in California in the early 80s
Called Westbridge Research Group and it was a biorational company
Phil Town and I were partners and we had several thousand acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley
And we were growing permanent crops grapes and peaches and plums and nuts and you know all that and we got really
Feeling terrible about all the chemicals we were pouring on the land
And so we decided there's got to be a better way. And we did some research and found out that it's
possible. This was before organic, what it has become. It was right at that same early stage.
So we said, well, let's sell this stuff off and let's form a company, do research and get some
good bio-supportive inputs for agriculture. So we did that. That was part of the thing that we did.
and that really led down to a different road.
Well, building that company had high risk.
We raised, I think, 30 million or something to get it started, and there
was a point where we had a bridge loan. A bridge loan is a short-term
loan backed by every asset you've got, meaning your car, your house,
your antiques, whatever you've got, and it has to be paid off
right down here, right, you know, in a couple of months.
And that was to cover us while we raised more money. Well, those are crazy
bridge loans
Uh, and they were crazy then
We kept going but at a certain point the risk was huge
I think by that point I had two children and every asset everything was on the line and the date was coming
And I locked myself in a room the size of a closet. It was actually was a kind of a closet utility closet
at the place we were renting with a phone and just called and called and called trying to
find investors and you know deal with the thing and during that period of time I constantly
remembered the experience of drowning not the drowning part because I don't really that
wasn't much but the other part the vastness lies that is the worst case that's the worst
case built. So what are you sweating about? Yeah, work your
butt off. Put it in do it. But what's the fear? Where's the
issue? Where's the problem? Just get a gun for Pete's sake. And
that really lifted me up. I gotta say, it made a big
difference. Now this was that and that was a to 60. That was
20 years later.
Did you pay off the bridge loan?
Yeah, we did. Bridge loan. The company went ahead and it was
sold at the beginning of the pandemic here and did well for all the investors and all those folks.
And it has a whole range of products that are certified by OMRI, which means they can be used
as inputs in organic agriculture. Cool. It got done. So this almost drowning near-death experience
really kick-started your spiritual quest as I understand it. I could say that. I think that's
true, but I could go back to talking with my mother, who was at a very strong spiritual orientation,
in the kitchen, when I was mid-teenage, struggling in high school, which was a horrible mess,
and talking to her about things. There was even some discussions about what is meditation,
She didn't know. But talking about, would it be possible to live a life that is really what is
prescribed, for example, in the New Testament? Really do it? There are things in there that are
pretty demanding about, it's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle
than a rich man to get it to heaven, stuff like that. All right, all those things, you know,
on, I really wondered. But this did kickstart because it gave that experience. And a funny
thing that came was after I learned meditation, which was when I was studying art in Europe,
I just had great experiences. I mean, I just, even the person who taught me just said, "Wait
a minute, wait a minute, you're sure? It was wonderful. I loved
it. And I came home, meaning back to Portland area, and I had
close friends and a lot of people and I tried to get them
I you know, I'm big on sharing Okay, which you'd say I tried to
get them to learn meditation. And what I would say is, it's just
like dying. You gotta do it. You know, it's so far out. It's like dying. And everybody
would look at me and say, "Thank you." And that never convinced one person.
It was later, it was later that I learned a little more subtlety. But I would say to this day that
the transcendent that one can experience in meditation and that field of pure being that
one can experience in this kind of a, what do they call it, a near-death experience.
But the same, I mean, that's my experience.
Yeah, I've interviewed a lot of near-death experience people and almost all of them say,
"Well, yeah, they told me I had to come back." Presumably, they don't say that to everybody,
but those are not the ones you get to talk to because they actually died.
But they also say, "I am not afraid of death. That was really something, and when my time comes, I'm all for it. It'll be fine."
Yep. And so, what is there to be afraid of? You know?
I often think that I have a missing gene, because I'll get blue in extreme heights, or something.
But you do that. You told me a few weeks ago that on your 70th birthday, you and a friend climbed up this radio tower here in Fairfield that was super high.
we could see it from where we were standing and you didn't have any ropes or anything else.
You were just climbing up the ladder. That would spook me.
Yeah, I got him to give it to me as a birthday gift because he did that professionally.
Yeah, I wanted to do it.
I also heard a story where when you were a course that we were on at Humboldt in California,
you and our friend Charlie Donahue and maybe somebody else got in this little boat and went out of the bay
or out into the ocean a little bit, and the waves started coming, and the boat was in
danger of capsizing, and it was really cold water, and the others were all freaked out,
and you were kind of like nonchalant about it. Do you remember that? And Charlie was
a little upset that you were so blasé about the circumstances.
Yeah, it wasn't that I was deliberately...
Yeah, you weren't suicidal, but you were just...
No, so what? And that's kind of the result of that. It's a sort of a so what? You know what?
It's not even a so what it's be patient bill because you'll get there again
It is
an experience
of
The beloved it's beyond the beloved the beloved has to be short of that because that is pure
There's no one to love. There's no love coming back
But that's the gift
One impression I've gotten from near-death experience people is that they were given that experience by some higher intelligence,
because it would implant in them a determination or a sense of mission or something.
They had some kind of mission to fulfill, and that was the impetus.
They could never forget it afterwards, and it set them on a course in which they influenced a great many people for the better,
but wouldn't have been motivated to do that had they not had that experience.
You know, looking back, that's not impossible in this case.
Maybe out of that came a desire first
to understand what my dharma is
and then an ease in finding it perhaps
that I didn't have before
and for sure a willingness to go with it when I knew it.
It did result in a kind of a focus
narrowing. But the funny thing is the narrowing was all for expansion. It's just deeper. That's
the secret. We can either float on the surface and have all kinds of infinite possibilities on
the surface value of life, material life, and so forth, right? Or we can go for the infinite,
if you will, which means we have to go deeper and deeper. And that leaves these things behind. It
it goes to their root. That's my experience anyway, because that's where the goods are.
That's where the beauty is. I wasn't an artist at the time I had that near-death experience.
I wasn't an artist. I never thought about art. That came afterwards, being like that. That's
right, about two, three years after.
Yeah. And playing off what you just said, I would also say that going deep doesn't mean
relinquishing experiences on the surface value of life, in fact, it enriches them.
You can use the analogy of if you're going to build a really tall building, you have to
dig a really deep foundation.
The taller the building, the deeper the foundation.
People who have dedicated their lives to plumbing the depths of human existence or of existence
itself don't lead drab lives.
Their lives have become all the more fascinating.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. That's true. And really, the metaphor of going deep,
well, as a person who pursued the visual arts, seeing is kind of the first priority. That's
a priority, or has always been for me. What I thought that meant is something visual. You
You learn how to see.
We are, we're born, we grow, this happens and we're seeing the world around us, but we want
to see more deeply.
That's what I thought.
And so I thought, okay, well then that means you're an artist.
But it doesn't matter whether it's an artist or not.
But seeing more deeply, seeing more deeply, I felt for many years, I thought that meant
Something that had to do with the optic nerves and the nervous system and the brain and the
interpretation.
It had to do with all of that, those mechanisms.
It is that.
That's the tool.
But what I've learned from the desert, well, from the desert, from the other tools I've
been using, but I could say that it's in the desert that this has ripened.
But it's not limited to the desert, and the desert is only my tool.
Other people have other tools that work and do the same thing.
So what it seems is that you look and you look and you look, and you're never quite seeing
what you know is possible.
You know there's more, and that's true in the desert.
It's true of looking in nature.
true of looking into nature in the forests or on the mountaintops. You must experience
something of this when you go deep into people. I mean, what are you after? You're after their
essential nature or even be a deeper than that. Not just the essence of their personality,
but deeper than their personality, right? What that is, come out. So what drives that?
I got to believe for you and for me, it's the heart.
That's what's happened.
So I now see with the heart and in fact in the book, I've got the manuscript here.
The Walmart chapter, the Walmart story.
Yeah, well, yes, exactly.
And that starts with a quote from St. Augustine, where he says, "Our whole business in life
then is to heal this eye of the heart. E-Y-E. To heal this eye of the heart whereby God may
be seen.
Very nice.
So, so that's pretty cool. That's the journey. And how you get there is this way or this
way or this way, there are 8.05 billion paths at the present time because that's an approximate
number of the human population on planet Earth. That's how many paths there are. Yeah, there
are things that many people can use, things that few people can use, there are things
that only one can, and then there's all the combinations and permutations, and then there's
the time factor, and there's the past, the environmental influence, all of that. So there's
all these different ways we go.
But there is a common denominator, I would say, perhaps a number of them, but the one
I'm thinking of is just that there's this evolutionary force that seems to pervade the
universe and govern its development, and we are imbued with that. Everything is imbued
with that, a mouse is, but that drives us along.
Yeah, I mean a boulder.
Yeah, anything.
Everything.
You're absolutely right.
So the process of seeing, which has been paramount and changed over since the early 60s when
I first started going to the desert, but it's always stayed.
It's just that keeps you focused on that.
Stay attentive, stay present, stay disciplined.
And how many different tools have I used to try and enhance that?
Recently, I'm using a medium format digital camera, you know, which does all kinds of
things.
And I've used paint and pigments and I've used printing and I've used making these big
land art things and sculptures and small things.
And writing.
It's always to see more deeply.
stories I started writing these just to understand. You said that maybe I would
tell one maybe I I got a one pager. Shall I read it? Yeah sure. Yeah I don't know if
it's relevant at the moment but I'll tell you the background after I read it.
It's called the fire. It must have been smoldering for a long time. Why it broke
into flames when it did is uncertain. Though certainly she was the cause. Why
though she had been patient so long, maybe too long. Perhaps she saw an opening, an
opportunity. I had been calling her for some time. I'm sure she had answered, but
I didn't hear. It started in the center, in the heart of things, in the deepest
part, where I didn't know how to look. By the time the first flames appeared, there
was no stopping. It spread like an echo. As the interior burned, everything started to
come down. Many of my comfortable habits were destroyed. I thought that a shell would remain,
that something would last and contain me. But the fire continued to smolder. Finally,
the shell burned out as well. Now, everything is much better. Before, I would hear her only
faintly, if at all, with all of my little spaces and so many places to be, I was always in the
wrong one, or too busy, or, I'm embarrassed to say, unwilling to hear what she said. But
now, with everything gone, her voice is everywhere, soft and quiet.
Now I have a big caveat on that story
I'll tell you where that came from but I want to say that when I read that story now this this was written in
89 or 90 somewhere in there. I think bill
That's very misleading to put it in print because it says everything
Now everything it says but now with everything gone
Her voice is everywhere soft and quiet and yes, that was true
But did it persist is that the case today? No
So this says something about the nature of this kind of experience and the nature of these stories
but in the prologue of the book I tried to deal with this with a kind of a metaphor and
I'm just going to read a paragraph here.
Like everyone who lives in this remote high desert, I always travel with a handyman.
It's in the back of the pickup with chains and earth anchors collecting dust.
The truth is, I haven't used that handyman in eight years.
It's a kind of a tool, like a jack or some kind of a thing.
The handyman is a heavy chunk of steel, a kind of high leverage, multipurpose jack.
It can be used to change a flat, stretch fence wire, or pull your truck out of the mud and
snow.
That's why I have it.
Every stroke of its long handle either lifts or pulls two inches.
Then when the handle returns to its starting position, the two-inch gain snaps back to a
solid one inch.
It takes time. If you want two inches, or even a few feet or more, inevitably, you have to
cooperate. You have to let go and return the handle to its starting point. Then again,
repeat. And so, being happy with each new inch of progress, you patiently let the inches
add up.
Okay, this is a jack. Enter space is similar. It deals with unexpected, fleeting experiences.
Some glaring, some quiet, each in its own way a peak, with implications that open unknown
possibilities.
But by letting go of these peaks and their imagined significance, one can incorporate
their actual lessons and thereby arrive at a new normal.
Like the ratcheting handyman, it seems that's how we're designed, how we learn and grow.
While there's always the possibility of grace, possibility, there are otherwise no silver
bullets.
Learning and growth requires perseverance and patience.
Again and again, lots of little steps and bowing downs, ultimately bringing us to a life in
beauty.
Yeah.
So, that is there to put that story in perspective, and basically everything in the book in perspective.
Yeah, I think it's a very important teaching.
In our McDonald's culture, people really want everything now, including enlightenment, once
they realize that's a thing.
And you know, there are people who just feel like, "Okay, well, this weekend, the psilocybin
trip is probably going to do it for me.
I hope it will, you know, and then I'll be permanently established in some better state."
And you know, there's something in the Yoga Sutras about the importance of sustained practice
over a long period of time.
And there's our old friend, the cloth and dye analogy, which the Jack analogy reminds
me of where you dip the cloth in the color dye and then you bleach it in the sun, it
appears to be backtracking because it's losing its color, but that's actually how the color
gets integrated and stabilized, and you repeat the process enough times and it'll stay fully
colored even when it's in the sun.
Yep, yeah.
So, in a way, all these stories in the book are stories about seeing more deeply, and
for me to understand about seeing more deeply,
to recognize it and then to move on.
- Yeah.
- To leave it behind.
One of the things I learned from the big Sri Yantra project
out in the desert and that like drowning,
that was a life changer.
Where that one came from, who the heck knows.
People think that, oh, you're an artist.
So that's, you know, I can tell you honestly
how that came about. The fire, the story I just read, came first. And what happened was
a friend asked if I would make them a Sri Yantra because I was working with geometries,
looking through gold leaf geometries into sky. I've made many paintings.
I've seen some of those, yeah, they're beautiful.
So they said, "Well, do you know the Sri Yantra?" And I kind of knew it. "Well, would you make
me one. I thought, well, I don't know. Let me do some research. So I did. I mean, I spent
two months anyway, doing research on that. And I got deep into it. And I found one at
one point where I was at the peak of all the research. I was really soaking. It was all
soaked in. I was in meditation. And that is the experience of the fire. And what is the
Sri Yantra? The Sri Yantra is a Yantra. What is a Yantra? An instance. Not an example, really,
not a symbol, certainly not a symbol, but an instance of a law or complex of laws of
nature. Or, in some other language, an instance of a deity. So, trying to say the same thing
right? And in this case, the deity is the Divine Mother. The Sri Yantra is said to
be the sort of top of the line.
So it's a geometrical representation of a deep impulse of intelligence that's
fundamental to the universe. Is that a fair way of putting it?
That is a good way of saying it. That's very nice. And in fact, it is said that all of the
The fundamental laws that give rise to every aspect of creation are present there.
Present in the yantra?
In the yantra, yes.
Okay, it represents, symbolically or representationally or something.
And it's through resonance that a yantra can enliven the environment, the consciousness
of the doer, the maker, etc.
And as I understand it, some people use these as meditation tools where they'll just gaze
at it or something and it'll have an effect on their consciousness.
That and making it.
Making them.
Actually making it.
And when we decided to make it, I was very concerned because I did all this research
and I read a lot of Sri Vidya and a lot of this stuff, you know.
So I was very concerned to do it right.
There are very specific ways to make it, and you don't depart from those ways.
If you depart, you have a serious problem because you may misalign, if you will, the
laws of nature or the rules that give rise.
So you have to be very careful.
And in fact, over and over and over again, if you read about the Sri Yantra and making
it, which I was concerned about making it, not just looking at it, you're told that if
you don't do it properly, then you will have created a very damaging influence in the environment
and for yourself.
And I took that very seriously.
I just bought it 100%.
It made sense to me.
And I had this experience that is described in this little short story of the fire.
And that was all about the peak of the research period, where I finally realized, yes, make,
do, no problem.
Here she is.
And I had been looking for her with a capital H for quite some time, that's another matter,
and I got some goods, put it that way.
I was ready to do it, but I had all these cautions, I knew the rules and so forth.
So then I got to thinking, "Gee, I wonder what would happen if a person could live in
the bindu."
The bindu is the center point, which has all of this in seed form.
So it's like, if you think of the absolute, where the nothing is manifest, and then you
You think of creation where it begins to manifest and comes forth, right there at that boundary,
that gap between the two, that's where the bindu resides.
It's my understanding.
So I thought, "Whoa, that would be a great place to be physically.
Could you do it?
What would happen?"
And then I thought, "Well, okay, if you wanted a bindu big enough to live in, how big would
it have to be?"
I thought, "Oh, well, maybe nine feet.
I could live in nine feet for a month or something, no problem.
And then I thought, okay, nine feet, all right, well, let's work it out.
And so I worked it out and it turned out that it had to be about a quarter of a mile across
and 13 miles of lines and so on and so forth.
And then I thought, well, where can I do it?
Oh, I know where I can do that, Mickey Basin, which is this real remote place.
Nobody ever goes.
It's considered to be totally useless because it's playa.
So I thought, alright.
And so I called some friends here and said, "Hey, you want to work on a project?
Here's the idea."
And yes, yes, and I took my son, and that was what happened.
That's how it came together.
But I'm not drifting from seeing.
The point about seeing, now I want to tell you the point about seeing.
And I want to remind people at this point that there's a whole documentary about your
doing this, and with all the guys doing it, and how they carved the lines in the desert
It's really a cool documentary. So I'm going to put that link again on your page on that gap. Okay
So one of the things that happened
an artist
And I might not be an artist but I act like one sometimes
So I want to see what i'm making
That's a natural thing. You want to see what you're making and you turn something upside down you
Rotate you can stand back you get way back and look at it and that's what artists do get a different perspective
Well, guess what the ply is huge
But you've got a little segment of it
Quarter mile by quarter mile and a quarter mile by the way from one corner to the other we couldn't yell at each other and
Hear each other even in the silence out there just absorbed
So that's how big it is and we're making all these lines, right?
complex, incredibly complex lines, and we're using the old-fashioned ways of doing it,
no transits, no nothing, nothing like that. And we want it to be accurate, because remember,
the instructions are, you do it this, step one, two, three, and you must do it perfectly.
Now, there was a Scottish mathematician who presented a paper, and it was published, and
I found at the University of Chicago when I was doing research that focused on the Sri
Yantra.
And what he maintained, which is correct mathematics, totally correct, is that it is an irrational
figure like pi or certain other things.
In other words, to make it simple, it cannot be made perfectly.
It will not fit.
Everything will not come together perfectly.
cannot be done. Now, you go on the internet nowadays and people are using calculus and
computers to do iterative things again and again and again and narrow, narrow, narrow,
narrow, get the error down to almost nothing and something that is invisible. But in the
old days and using the tools that were available and not computers, it can't be made perfectly
yet you must make it perfectly or you're in deep trouble. All right, so now that's an interesting
challenge. That's like somebody's putting some squeeze on you, right? So here we are out in the
desert with that. Plus, we can't see. If you took a gymnasium, flat gymnasium with a basketball court,
and you lay down at one end of the basketball court and you got your chin on the ground and
your eyes would be this far off the floor and you looked out. Imagine trying to see the basketball
lines. That's the kind of perspective that a five-foot person would have on a quarter mile
on all of these lines. So we couldn't see it. We had to know we could do everything we could to get
it right but we could not see it and we couldn't fly it. We did in the end fly it but we had to
see it? I'm speaking now personally. I had to see it. I needed to see it. I wanted to see it. And I
was almost, you could say, frustrated in a certain way that I didn't see it. And I couldn't let go
of the demand and the requirement to see it. And yet I couldn't see it. And then finally, like in
the case of a Zen koan, where the mind just gives up, I gave up trying to see it. And then it was
there. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. And I say there, where?
In your mind's eye?
No, it wasn't even in my mind's eye. I don't have much of a mind's eye, actually. You'd
think artists have. I don't know. I don't seem to. It was here.
In your heart.
I owned it. Put it that way. I got it. I grokked it. You remember that word from Heinlein?
Sure.
I grokked it. Yeah.
Stranger in a strange land.
Yeah, yeah, so I got it and bingo, done. And then quite some time after that I did get to fly it
and photograph it and so on and so forth and that was fun. But this was the lesson in seeing because
it was a totally new kind of seeing. You had to let go of the normal expectations and everything
and it was through frustration, but the seeing was huge.
It was like a step in consciousness and how things work and becoming familiar.
And it's not different than the story about the Walmart at the end of the book.
It's not different, really.
So what I'm trying to say is that one good way for me now,
looking at the last 60 years, since I was 20, the last 60 years, what has happened to seeing?
It's been a tool. I've been using it. I've been struggling with it. And we're not done.
I'm not done. I can't speak for anybody else. But I know I'm not done.
Pete There is no done.
David This is a wonderful tool.
Pete I often quote St. Teresa of Avila. She said,
but it appears that the Lord Himself is on the journey.
(laughing)
So did you end up living in the bindu for a while?
- I did, I did.
- And what did you experience?
- That is one of the more difficult questions
I've tried hard to answer it.
I guess a lot of the time I lived in there,
I mean, I slept in there, I meditated a lot in there,
I ate in there.
For one thing, it is now and was immediately after very difficult to remember in the sense
that what was experienced is not accessible to memory.
Memory is about relative changing things, events, occurrences, material things, feelings,
emotions, all that.
And we have memories, we store them, and so all that information gets stored and we can
access it.
What I can honestly say is I remember that I did it, but I'm not surprised now that I
don't remember the essence of the experience any more than I remember the essence of the
experience of drowning.
Because it's too transcendental.
It's just beyond.
There's nothing to grab onto.
No, there's nothing.
The intellect can't get a hold of it.
Nothing can get a hold of it.
And yet, of course, it's so attractive.
And if there was anything you wanted to see, it would be that, wouldn't it?
I mean, what is it?
It's love with a capital L. It's absolute.
It's compassion with a capital C. It's bliss with a capital B. It's being, it's you know,
da da da da da, all these words we use which are just pointers, you know, language just
won't take us there. I keep working, I keep painting, I keep drawing, I keep making things,
now photographs and so forth, or writing or whatever, I keep doing those things. Do I
hope that at some point it'll work? I don't think I do. I don't think I'm that foolish
anymore. I think I know full well that it's never going to
work. But doing it keeps my attention in the right place.
It's a matter of discipline.
I work if you mean, you're going to end up at some terminus point
where you can sort of kick up your heels and rest on your
laurels or something. I don't think there is such a place. I
think that it's not the way the universe works.
I think you're right. I think you're right. Does this thing
about seeing make sense to you. I'm just curious, Rick. 700? How many people?
Almost 700.
700. Why do you do that? Why do you do that?
Sometimes people say that you say, wow, you've been doing so much all these
years. And I think have I been doing anything? It happens. Yeah.
It happens. That's the process. But there must be some
It's just a natural inclination.
Good feeling.
Have you ever read Suzanne Siegel's book, Collision with the Infinite?
No.
Beautiful book.
Anyway, her mantra was, "Do the next obvious thing."
And she was operating in a very interesting state of, you know, cosmic consciousness or something.
But that became the way she lived life, without a whole lot of foresight or planning or anything.
But it was always obvious what the next thing should be.
And she just kept following those impulses.
Yeah.
These interviews are kind of like smorgasbords, you can't eat everything but you sample a little of this and a little of that.
So we definitely want to get into more of your desert phase, even though the whole yantra thing was a desert thing, but there's been the years, if not decades of desert solitude, and some beautiful photographs to accompany them as well as your paintings.
I think today we're going to see some of those photographs, but not any of your paintings
perhaps.
We had this thought that we could play a 20-minute slideshow of some of these photos you've taken
out there while we continue to talk about things.
So do you think this would be a good time to do that?
That's fine, sure.
Let me say a little bit about what's in that slideshow.
I think there's 150 somewhere, near 40, 50, something like that, different images.
And they are organized according to what I tend to think of as events.
And what is an event?
An event may be the sun rising and illuminating a certain cloud in a certain way, or the sun
setting in a certain way, or the moon rising, or this or that, or a storm dropping a load
of snow.
Those are events, okay, photographic events.
So there are events and each event is separated by about two seconds of black in the slideshow.
And there may be three images to an event or five or eleven or whatever.
And generally the events are shot from one place, maybe a changed focal length or something
or even lenses, time maybe five seconds between them or maybe it's ten minutes or whatever,
something like that.
And there's a few that are taken across the horizon, maybe they get as much as 90, 100
degrees, 120 degrees of view, ding, ding, ding, ding, over just 5, 10 seconds, something like
that.
So those are what are there, and they just fade from one to the next, and then another
group, and then, and the groups are organized.
They occur from end of December of '22 to May of '23, their recent.
Long hard winter, coldest winter that many people remember in the area, minus 10 degree
type stuff, a bunch of that.
And then they start on this slideshow pre-dawn, dawn or sunrise, morning, afternoon, evening,
sunset and post-sunset.
So it's also the cycle of a day, but they are taken from many different days.
So that's the organizing principle behind them.
Okay, so we'll play that now.
Those on the live stream won't see it, but the permanent recording will have that in
there, and we'll just keep talking while that plays.
So you lived up there, you've lived up there a lot, and not just in the nice weather, you
just mentioned 10 below zero, you're living in some kind of a funky old converted school
bus or something.
I had a funky converted school bus in the end of the 60s.
Before that, I lived in deserted ranch houses
that had been deserted for many, many years
and maybe had a few windows out, which was convenient.
So I've sort of scaled up.
I had two school buses converted to,
and they worked well
because they're very high off the ground.
I could get them anywhere.
I could get them wherever I needed.
And then I designed actually a little trailer
with a lot of glass and just 90 square feet
and a work table and a wood stove over here
and a bed here and done.
And that connects onto a four wheel drive rig
and I can take that anywhere, almost anywhere.
Certainly where I need to go.
- Nice.
I don't know if this is your usual routine,
but there were periods of time out there
where you were waking up at four in the morning,
meditating till noon.
So you're doing like eight hours of meditation,
and then you'd obviously eat and stuff,
and then you'd spend the whole afternoon
until dark painting,
and then go to bed when the sun set or when it got dark.
And that was your routine.
One thing I was wondering,
you and I have both done formal courses
where you do a lot of meditating,
and you can tend to get a little loopy,
a little crazy when you're doing that much meditation,
especially if you're in isolation,
you have no kind of stimulation or integration.
I mean, did that tendency afflict you at all,
or did you remain kind of clear and coherent?
- You know, I never felt loopy.
Now, other people might disagree.
They might say, "Hey, man, what?
"You're not loopy."
No, but I never felt out of control.
I never felt like I wasn't doing it the right thing.
I never lost--
- Never got real spacey or anything like that?
I don't think so.
Spacey...
You don't even know Spacey, huh?
I guess maybe I'm old with Spacey. I don't know.
It worked for me.
Yeah, that's cool. No, it's not a major point. I'm just curious because I've done some long things like that.
I get a little nutty.
Maybe it's just the way I'm wired
and need a bit more integration and stuff.
Well, I would purify like crazy.
I would know that.
I would have strong emotions, I would have physical things, all kinds of, especially
way back when.
Not so much now.
But I would do that.
But I knew what that was.
It didn't bother me.
There was one cool story in your book where you'd been living in this ramshackle abandoned
ranch house and you'd been there quite a while and all of a sudden one day you discovered
a book sitting on a dresser or something in an obvious place where you probably were in
that room a hundred times, but you'd never seen the book, and there it was. It was this green book.
Well, I opened it to a chapter, and I just stood there and read the whole chapter, because the
chapter was about human beings relating to and living with, in harmony with, rattlesnakes. Okay,
Now, I have a long history with rattlesnakes.
When I was 10 years old, my parents, the dog, and my sister all went out to Arizona from upstate New
York in a 1948 Studebaker and went to a dude ranch. And on the dude ranch, we were riding on horseback,
all of us with some other dudes at the time. And we were down off the horses and somebody
saw a rattlesnake. One of the dudes saw a rattlesnake and called everybody's attention.
I went over and saw the rattlesnake just from here to there, not far away. And I was looking
at it and this fellow, this man, picked up a rock about this big, lifted it up above his
head and slammed it down on the rattlesnake. And at 10 years old, that was the most violent,
destructive thing I had ever experienced. It completely blew me away. I have never forgotten,
even now I can feel the emotion. And it made an enormous impact. It seemed so wrong, such
a violation. I yelled, I cried, I said, "Why? It's not doing anything to any..." and on and on and on.
Okay, fast forward, 1960-something, early one, two, probably. Vietnam is going on and I'm dealing with
the draft board. I think I'm a conscientious objector and I don't want to go. I'll act as a
medic, okay fine, but I'm not gonna fight and I'm not gonna destroy life. And in the summers,
I work on lookout towers, which was so far out. I would get paid to be there looking all day,
all night, all the time, looking out into the distance. Talk about inner space. I mean, it was
so great. I love that. So I'm in that place where I have to write a paper stating my beliefs that
goes to the government and they critique it and then there's a hearing and all that stuff. So I'm
writing that paper and that's somewhere and I think, "Are you sure?" You know, I'm trying to
make sure I'm being honest and it's not just chicken shit or this or that. So I'm out walking
on a road and a rattlesnake comes across the road and I see the rattlesnake and what do
you do when you work for the Forest Service and you see a rattlesnake if you're anybody
is you kill it. So I picked up a rock and I killed it. And I knew, I just knew I couldn't
do it. I couldn't go to Vietnam, I couldn't do that. And I felt terrible. As you can tell
I still do. It was a great mistake. It was one of those mistakes. I thought I had to prove what I
knew and I didn't have to. So the end of that story was they had the hearing, they wrote me back a
paper which was a report on the hearing and they quoted me and said things I didn't even have the
vocabulary. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. They just made something up
And I sent him all my papers back. I said you people are not being honest
And I never said this i'm not gonna deal with you ever again
I never heard from him again. That was it. So that was that story
And then there were other stories phil and I
Phil and I still love you can see something about ralph then one time phil and I had first light expeditions
I don't know if you remember that I remember that name one-off thing. Yeah, it was a cool deal
We took people on horseback to places they could not go to we got permission from the navajo tribe took them into canyon to shake
On one occasion, I don't know how many maybe 10 12 people max
We're all down and there's a rattlesnake small one rattlesnake
And everybody is in a circle around this rattlesnake and this rattlesnake coils
And I said to people don't mind it. It's all right. I just have positive thoughts. I just you know said
Just being cool.
And the rattlesnake came right over to me,
curled around my foot, and just then, just, wait, that was it.
- Took a nap.
- Yeah, took a nap.
That was after the event in the story.
That was after.
But the event I told you about on the lookout tower,
that was before the event in the story.
So in the story, I picked this up.
You can imagine I just stood there, transfixed,
read this whole chapter, and I knew it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it talked about the Hopi, it talked about handling,
it talked about everything, right.
So I put the book down and I went to make my lunch.
And in the process, I had to go get some water.
I had to go out the back door, out the stoop,
which was this wide, and a six-inch drop onto the ground.
I had barefoot.
I walked out, and as I walked off,
moving fast with a bucket for water, I stepped on something and instantly I knew and I turned around
and it was a big rattler. I mean a big one. Was your foot just on and off it and you were past it?
On and off. I'm moving. Yeah, I just put weight on it and I turned around and I saw it. It was white,
it was that old, it was practically white and I said, "Boy, I hope I didn't hurt you, your ribs."
And it coiled up slowly, no buzzing, and just looked at me.
I looked at it, and I just said, "Okay, you know, you're here.
I didn't know you were here.
I gotta go get my water.
You're welcome."
Now, I know why there's no mice around here, and no pack rats.
And that was it.
And then, within the next few days, 11 rattlesnakes showed up.
And they had been living all in the rocks, the rock foundation of this old building,
around the well, there was a water tower and all sorts of things.
And we just got on fine thereafter.
So the word got around, "Hey, this guy's okay, he's not going to kill us."
Yeah, and I would go out every now and then.
Normally I would paint from up in the second floor, there was a window gone, no frame, no
nothing.
porch underneath it. So I would sit there or have my big boards up there and I'd look
east, it was just what I wanted, I could see the sky, the clouds, everything, and I would
paint there all the time. Every now and then I'd set up a table out in the field so I could
see straight up and then I would paint. And I'd move around and when I'd do that, I'd
hear a loose rattle, just a loose rattle. And I look at it, "Oh yeah, okay, cool, go!" And it would go.
And then I would just go back to work. I just wanted to make sure I knew not to step on it,
I think. And it would just go. And so we just lived with each other, then quite happily. And
This event occurred within 20 minutes of my finishing that chapter. I thought boy, that's funny
What kind of book is this anyway?
and I looked I looked at the book and I it's green and it had just like the book off some old
Bookshelf or something or used book story, you know, I opened it
I couldn't remember the title but I looked in and the the little page there was a publisher and I think it was
1922 that's in that struck me and that convinced me it was real and then
The next day I thought, "Geez, that was strange, you know. I wonder what else is in that book."
So I go and get it, and I sit down on the... there was an old couch in there,
leftover from the 1910s or something. I sit down and I open up the book, and then I start reading
another chapter. And that chapter, Rick describes pranayama as you and I understand it.
gave instructions for breathing and it said why to do it and what the benefit would be for meditation
and mind you I'm meditating eight hours a day I don't do any Hatha yoga asana I don't do any
pranayama nothing just sit so I started doing that bingo you know meditation is clear and everything
is great. And I think, man, what about that book? What kind of book would have that all
about rattlesnakes and then this thing about meditation in it? Well, I got to look again.
And I looked for the book. I never found the book. I never saw it. Nobody was here in the
middle of nowhere. Nobody's around. Nobody came. Nobody. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. No
- No way. - That's great.
- No way.
So now, that was 1967 or something, I don't know,
maybe, I don't know, somewhere back there.
- What year did you learn to meditate?
- '66, I think it was.
Somebody just came back off of a course in India.
Anyway, I never knew, but now I hear so many stories
from so many people of similar occurrences.
And the fact that there was a physical material book
is what makes this so weird for me as a materialist.
And I have a good bit of scientific training
in me too, with me.
So it's that.
If I had had that input come abstractly, you know,
into my mind, like a thought or a stream or a series,
I wouldn't be that surprised, would I?
No, I wouldn't.
But it was that it was a book.
(laughing)
It was material, and then it disappeared.
That is hard.
But no, I'm not surprised.
Truthfully, I think that there've been a lot of things
that I now can attribute to my good fortune
of being taken care of.
- Yeah, I feel that way too.
There's those cartoons of somebody
goes through life with this cloud right over his head raining on him, but it's not raining
on everybody else. Songs like "Born Under a Bad Sign", "If It Wasn't for Bad Luck I Wouldn't
Have No Luck at All", and then there's positive songs and the opposites of those kinds of
images and I feel like I've lived them both. I had the rain cloud thing during some of
my younger years and then cloud cleared up and now it's a constant reminder of the presence
of God or Mother Divine or Divine Intelligence or something.
And there's some more stories like this in your book too.
I don't see it as miraculous because miraculous implies that it's unusual or there's no explanation
for it or anything else, but I see it as almost routine and matter of fact, yet profound,
that there's just so many beautiful, I don't want to use the word coincidence either because
that also seems random.
No, that's mathematics.
No, it's not coincidence.
It's the divine in plain sight.
Serendipity or something, yeah.
Serendipity, synchronicity.
It's the divine manifest playing an obvious role in the orchestration of our lives.
It's beautiful.
Very profound.
And it just gets better and better.
And it gets better and better.
As we grow, as we become more open,
as we're more able to receive that,
there's more available.
It just comes more. The limitations are ours.
Right. And I think that's by extension, by extrapolation, that's probably how Jesus could
walk on water or manifest loaves and fishes if he actually did those things. It just,
it can reach a point at which it becomes that manifest.
Yeah, definitely.
A question came in from somebody here. Let me just read it.
You have had many amazing life experiences that took imagination, creativity, courage,
and thinking outside the box, but you've also spent a great deal of time going deep within
consciousness. How have those influenced each other?
If I understand the question properly, ever since I've been a little kid, I've been a
little bit out of the box. I didn't fit anywhere as a little kid. I did fit in nature. And
God bless my mother and father.
They bought 20 acres of "useless land" that had a swamp, a little woods, a field, and a
creek.
And all we did was go out there on Saturdays or Sundays and have canned spaghetti and let
Billy wander around.
And that was life for me.
That was where I lived life.
So there was some of that, but it's really only after I learned tools for accessing the
deeper levels of consciousness, if you will, that the creativity and the imagination and
the out-of-the-boxness became possible in a systematic way.
There was a time I remember in the mid-80s, I think, when I said, "You know what?
You gotta stop living by your intellect, Bill.
You go back and start making art.
I had done Westbridge Research Group, what I was talking about earlier.
You gotta go back and do art because that will force you to live by intuition, like the woman
you were referring to, who was taking the next opportunity instead of rationally thinking
and planning and so forth.
And that was only possible and became more and more possible because of deep meditation
and other spiritual practices.
That's where my discipline has always been.
Those have been disciplined.
I don't miss.
I do it.
And then all this other stuff comes and goes, and I go after it with all four feet.
I haven't missed either.
I haven't missed a meditation since I learned.
But the word discipline for many people conjures up unpleasantness.
I've spoken to many people for whom meditation is a chore and it's painful and it takes great
self-discipline or control to sit there for the allotted time.
And I think you and I are both fortunate to have learned a practice that is actually enjoyable
that you can look forward to and that even if you're tired or stressed out by the day's
activity it doesn't add a new stressful experience to your day.
actually provides a refreshment and respite from what you've been going through.
So I just want to put that out there that meditation isn't necessary.
I mean, many people I speak to say, "Oh, I tried it.
I can't do it.
My mind wanders and I don't enjoy it."
But don't define all kinds of meditation with the very same word because just like the word
liquid, there's a lot of different liquids represented by that word and some of them
will kill you, some of them will nourish you.
Yeah, you go to a library and you pick up a book and you open it up and you think, "Oh
my God, this is terrible."
You throw it down.
Does that mean you don't go to the library ever again?
I don't know about you, but I tried one, two, three, four different kinds of meditation
before I really found one that would work, which was TM.
And I did Zen meditation and I did various things.
And it's not that they're not good forms of meditation even.
Yeah, I know people who have awakened through doing those kinds of practices like Adyashanti
or Bob Harwood or various others.
Yeah, it's just what fits.
That's why I insist there's 8.05 trillion paths.
Billion.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
That's the account of the whole galaxy.
Forget the trillion.
Yeah.
I don't know what a trillion is.
A billion is the number of seconds in 35 years.
That's pretty hard for me right there.
That's a billion.
- I would say to somebody,
it's not like we're beating the TM drum here,
but find something that works for you.
And there is something, you'll find it.
Seek and ye shall find, knock on the door,
she'll be opened.
- Yep, exactly, exactly.
And don't be deterred.
But then when you do find something,
understand like all aspects of life,
everything goes up and down.
- Sure.
Everything goes up and down and meditation is no exception
because it is influenced by the condition
of the physiology at that time,
the condition of the environment
and the impact the environment is having
and the food that we've been eating and so on
or whatever else we've taken into the system,
whether it's what we're seeing
or what we're eating or whatever.
- Like you said, there were periods
when you were doing a lot of meditation
and all kinds of strong emotions would bubble up
And one might conclude, "Oh, I must be doing it wrong.
I don't like this.
I don't want to be experiencing this."
But that's actually part of the deal.
If you're going to go deep like that,
then there's going to be some release of-
- House cleaning.
- Yeah, deep seated, some scars, impressions, impurities,
whatever, and you've got to weather those.
- Absolutely.
- But the nice thing about it,
I use this analogy sometimes,
is that if you drop a handful of mud into a glass of water,
it totally muddies up the water.
But if you drop a handful of mud into a swimming pool,
or for that matter, an ocean, it just dissolves.
So what we're talking about here is a state
in which you can become unbounded and vast,
and then in that unboundedness,
something can dissolve, which would be very traumatic
if your awareness was boxed in.
But in that expanded state,
it's just taken care of efficiently.
- It's a very good, very nice.
Yeah, yeah.
And that leads to a good understanding
of meditation techniques that are effective because while they do bring about purification
which results in "bleh" could be discomfort, maybe not, could be pleasure, either way, but
it does so in the context of an expanded consciousness or an expanded foundation and therefore we
aren't really shaken around too badly.
Right and in a way that's a built-in safety factor because you in general you don't encounter
The heavy stuff until you have the capacity to deal with it true
Yep, you've been teaching some meditation mamas type of meditation in prisons or something haven't you? Yeah, I did out in Oregon
The town where I would go to get my groceries which had a Safeway in it
It had a save way in three gas stations a general dollar and a prison
And I've a couple thousand people
so I
started teaching in the prison and taught there for quite a number of years up until the
Pandemic and then they didn't want to have people coming in because obvious reasons
It was great fun. I gotta say I got a lot of personal satisfaction
out of delivering a technique of meditation to people
that worked for them.
- Did it pretty much work for most of those guys?
- It did, it worked very well.
- Yeah, it was great.
That's a whole subject in itself,
prison system and rehabilitation and all.
I mean, per capita, we have far more people in prison
in the US than any other country does.
And I interviewed a guy who was on death row
for quite a while and eventually got forgiven or released.
And it was horrific.
He was just rotting in a cell with no fresh air, no adequate exercise, anything else.
You're right.
I got a taste of it as well.
This was not maximum security, but still.
I've done, you know, obviously a lot of meditating.
I've also done a fair amount of camping.
Not solitary like you, but Irene and I have, you know, during the 90s especially, we went
camping just about every year for a month or more in the summer.
And there is something about getting out in nature that settles your mind down.
I remember coming back after one of those camping trips and I was standing in line at
a restaurant here in Fairfield and someone looked at me and said, "You look like you've
been doing something in a beautiful place."
Something in my face.
Maybe I had a suntan, I don't know.
But it does transform your state of mind when you're out in nature like that for a while.
And that plus all the meditation you did when you're out there in the desert, I imagine
you must have gotten into states of deep silence that were quite remarkable, where even the
slightest impulse of a thought must have been obvious to you.
Your mind didn't have ten radio stations playing in at the same time.
That happens, but that comes and goes.
But everything settles down.
I lose track of the days when I'm out there.
I don't know what day it is, so often times I've tried to keep track and I often just
lose track.
But I always know when it's Sunday.
And the reason I know when it's Sunday is because the background vibe becomes a little less.
And the background vibe there is nothing compared to what it is when I go to Reno or Seattle
or someplace, you know, travel.
it's a whole different matter. But even out there, when you spend a bunch, and how much time, maybe
it takes two, three weeks for me to settle down that way, and then you do get it. So you're saying
that even though you're miles from anybody, however many miles away, there are people going to church,
or taking the day off, just having a more relaxed day, and you can feel it out there. Yeah,
Absolutely. Yeah. Interesting. We're in it together. There are 8.05 billion of us and there is no place
on planet earth that is free from the human influence, meaning on the subtle level. No place,
No place. More some places, less other places. Yeah. And for me, personally, going out where
it's absolute minimum is a great tool. But for somebody else, going to New York is the right
place to go. Because they're not concerned with... Concerned isn't the right word. Their path or
So their tool is not to go deep into nature as we normally define nature.
It might be to go deep into human nature.
So where do you want to be?
Where everyone is.
Where do I want to be?
Well, we could say everyone isn't, but it's not where everyone is.
I'm not a hermit.
It's where something else is.
And what is the something else?
You know, I'm not that sure.
Is it the mountain out there, round mountain?
Is it the light, the way the light changes?
Is it the distance that goes 100 miles in every single direction?
Is it the darkness where there is no light at night?
No light, no human light.
Must be beautiful stars.
Oh yeah, Milky Way comes up over, you know, goes like that.
And the silence.
When the wind stops, wind makes noise in your ears, but there's nothing else.
There's no trees, there's no leaves rattling.
And when the wind just settles down, and then the best silence of all is when it snows, big
flames just settles down.
Those snowflakes absorb every possible sound.
And that's when you hear your heart, you hear your blood, you hear all your internal things.
And then you get past that too.
But that's my favorite silence of all, when that happens.
That's nice.
You mentioned your son and you have four kids, I believe?
Yes, two boys, two girls.
Were you going out to the desert for months on end while you were married and the kids
had that workout?
You'd have to ask them.
I don't know whether it was selfish on my part to do that, whether it was not selfish because
it was something that I had to do in order to grow and be ultimately a proper father and
human being.
That's not a trivial question.
And I don't know that I have a complete answer and I don't know that I can have the answer.
I think they have to give an answer too.
And I think each one of them would answer that differently.
The oldest boy, he used to go out some of the times with me.
And as you saw in the video, he was there for the Sri Yantra.
And that had a good impression, a strong impression, because he's taken his son, who's 10 now,
to the desert in Saudi Arabia, to Bhutan, to Mongolia, all over the place.
he's stationed now in Tokyo, from Singapore to Tokyo.
And Tori was out there and she and I worked on a project together,
which was a really sweet project.
She's in one of those stories called "Goodbye" when we went looking for wild horses.
Oh, that's a beautiful story.
That was 2012 or '13, I think,
and I was trying to learn the Lalita Sahasranama,
on the Thousand Names of the Divine Mother. I'd known it and I'd written it and I'd listened to it,
you know, but I was trying to learn it well enough that I could do it every day. And I was
listening to it and looking at it in English and really trying to get it. And I have a very
difficult time. I'm not wired for language, so I was struggling. So I thought, well, maybe we could
do something that would help. So, Hori and I went in the truck way over to a place that I knew about
where there were these nodules of obsidian. Here's a piece of obsidian, black volcanic glass.
And these came in a form like an avocado. They looked like avocados, kind of. And they were
cracked. And we would get these. I had a bunch of diamond scribes. They're little diamonds on the
the end of a stick, and we could scribe letters. So, I wrote all thousand names on these rocks.
Wow. One per rock, or sometimes two on a rock like that, on broken surfaces. They weren't
polished, they were cracked. And Torrey did the same thing with a Sanskrit, Devanagari.
So we got two complete sets of the thousand names, and then we went to a place that had
attracted me earlier, and it's in one of the stories called "The Church."
I don't know if you read that one or not.
I read them all.
That's the one where I found this place, and it just blew me away.
Oh, it's like a circle of something.
Yeah.
I actually moved so I could be next to that all the time, and I've been to that for five,
six years, right nearby. And so we took all this and then we went around the perimeter,
and we buried each of these stones in order, starting with one pointing to the east directly
and spaced it so they all came this way, and then the Sanskrit ones came all this way, and then we
did the undernate names of Amun and we put those on the outside all the way around and we buried
them so that just the surface, the avocado, which looks like just a black rough surface, was just
coming up out of the earth and then the written was pointing down. Where did that come from? I
I needed to learn the Lalita Sahasranama.
So how does somebody like me do that?
Well, you gotta do it kinetically.
Every afternoon I would read it in English,
I would listen to it on Sanskrit,
but that ended up with what somebody might say
was an art project.
Is it art?
Probably not, really.
It isn't art.
I mean, I've been undone for that.
- But that's gonna stump some archeologists
thousand years from now. Yeah. Whoa, this primitive culture had this sophisticated, how did Sanskrit
get here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So we have a bit more time. There's another story
you'd like to tell. I don't know if you can just do it off the top of your head. You can
even read another one from the book. That one about the wild horses was beautiful. Or
perhaps there's some kind of area of philosophical or spiritual discussion that we want to get
into in our remaining time.
Well, I can tell stories.
Do you think you'll go out there again?
Oh, of course.
Now you're 81, something like that?
I'm 81, I was going to be almost 82.
I got a better truck now.
That's a better truck?
I've seen that truck.
No, no, that was my better truck, but that hit 200,000 miles.
So I have a new truck.
Oh, a new truck.
Okay, because the one I've seen in recent weeks had a cracked windshield.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the one.
And I use that right now because blue, my dog just sheds hair everywhere.
I wait until I leave.
So I have a good truck and I know I'll be able to get out there.
And there's been some more erosion.
It's a mixed blessing.
The last time I went in, I hadn't been there for two years and there'd been horrible thunderstorms
and washing.
The certain places were just turned into ravines where I would, where there was a trap where
you would drive.
And I almost tipped over the trailer trying to get in.
If I had gone first in the truck, fortunately I didn't.
I never would have tried it.
But once I got going, I couldn't turn around.
There was no choice except to go forward.
And I did get there, and then while I was there, I worked on the road, bringing rock and moving
things and developed a way to get through without tipping things too much.
Got it out just fine.
So hopefully it'll be easy to get back in.
Wow, they just had a whole bunch more rain.
I don't know if the rain that just hit Burning Man has gone up to Oregon, but getting some
pretty wet.
It might have, because I keep watching and I see that there've been some thunderstorms
and so forth, but that's part of the deal.
Well, you've been living an interesting life.
Yeah, we all have.
We have, haven't we?
Yeah, we have. And you know, that's one of the things that I'm really coming to appreciate.
So many of the people I know and have known for a long time and I feel a kinship with,
it's like we're all doing the same thing in a very different way. And I see young people
coming along that really are after the same.
So it's the one thing that I see,
and I don't see it in the media so much,
but that I see in the world of Kali Yuga
that is encouraging.
Well, I know some young people who feel like,
and they're not so young anymore,
they're getting into their late 30s,
who feel that they just haven't quite found their niche.
You know, they're, "What am I supposed to do with my life?"
Even though they might be very talented in certain ways,
They still feel like they're looking for something.
What would you say to advise young people who feel like they don't want to be doing what they're doing all their life and they haven't quite hit their stride yet?
How do they find it?
That's a good question.
I think, first of all, that that's not an unnatural situation.
I'm not sure I've hit my stride.
I know I haven't grown up yet properly, so there's a lot yet to be done.
But what I would say is look deeper and then don't be afraid to act because what is there to lose?
What can you lose? What can we lose? Go deeper. Go deeper in your feeling. Go deeper in the outer.
Go deeper. It is very, very, very difficult to find one's path, one's dharma. And one has multiple
whole dharmas, cosmic, you know, down to familial, all different levels.
And it's very difficult, and in this age, it's more difficult than it has ever been
before.
So, we are, all of us, up against a challenge.
You got all this stuff going on, but what's that got to do with deeper experiences of consciousness?
And the answer is, only deeper experiences of consciousness will support all that, and
will support the path.
If you want to be on the path, then there's one way to get on the path, and that is to
go deeper into the self, because the self is the path.
So know the self, know thyself, you know.
It doesn't mean know your ego, it means forget your ego.
Forgetting everything is one way to remember God.
Yeah, and I think it's good to remember that, to put it in more poetic language, what you
actually just said was, "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven," or kingdom of God, and
"all else shall be added unto thee." Einstein was working at a boring job in a Swiss patent
office when he first put together his first theory of relativity, which completely transformed
scientific understanding of how the world works. So, sometimes we have to go through
rather mundane periods, at least on the surface, but there was something obviously deep there
going on with Einstein to enable him to come up with that.
So even under boring or superficially mundane circumstances
one can be deep, one can be having deep experience, deep thinking, etc.
P.S. Eliot was a bank clerk. In 2001
I had been working with Genetic ID as a CEO for four or five years.
- Oh, I forgot that you did that, yeah.
- Get it going.
And then I decided, well, okay, got to do something.
And I really wanted to go back to the desert.
I wanted to go back and play the artist's game,
but I couldn't, too much responsibility.
Wouldn't have been proper.
So I had to build a company, I had to start a new company,
and that was the Sky Factory.
And I said to myself, okay, man, you don't want to do that.
You don't want to do business.
You've done enough of that.
Okay, fine.
But look, let's be real here.
So why don't you try and build a beautiful corporation?
And when I had that thought, I burst out laughing
because if ever there was an oxymoron, that's it, right?
A beautiful corporation is a complete contradiction
in terms in my mind and was at that time.
But I thought, all right, go and do it, try that.
And from that moment on, I started getting thoughts
about how to build a company
that did not come from my past experience.
And I've learned more about that,
and that when you need something and it's on track,
the information will come.
And all kinds of stuff came up.
This came up and that came up, this idea, this plan,
we'd pick this from here, go there,
this and that and so forth.
And it all worked out extremely well, and somewhere along the line, Inc. did an article as one
of the ten best places to work for employees.
Wow, in the whole country?
Yeah.
So, instead of working with paint on paper, it was a blank name for a company, concept
for a company, and working with people, and working with money, and those were the things
that got moved around, and something came out of it.
Yeah, there's a cool quote, I just looked it up from W.H. Murray, who I believe was a mountain climber.
Sometimes this is attributed to Goethe, but this guy actually said it.
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back.
Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth,
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans,
that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events, issues from the decision,
raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance,
which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Begin it now.
Good. Absolutely great.
You asked the question, "What would you advise to somebody?"
That's a great quote
Give them that quote. I mean, that's true
Amen brethren and sistering, you know that and I believe that because that's been my experience
Yeah, yeah, mine too. That's a beautiful quote. It's a good one. Yeah. All righty bill. Well, this has been fun
Yes, I really enjoyed it. Then you're an easy guy to interview because you just
You're eloquent. You have a creative mind
You're not at a loss for words
You've had so many interesting experiences that they have a vast reservoir to draw from.
Thank you.
And I really appreciate you taking the time to dig a little bit and doing your research.
And then just for what you've developed as a person, which is someone who knows how to
gently
Open up and let what's in there
Come out in a nice way. That is a skill rick and and it's a beautiful skill and i'm honored to have been
Subjected to that and not only that
It's useful for me
Because I believe in the importance of introspection
Not as a neurotic thing, but just to know
And this is very helpful. Good. Well, thank you. Thank you very much
And I hope others who have been listening have found it helpful
So I think we'll wrap it up
I will have a link on your page
To a little website that's all about your book and I imagine there will be information there on how to get the book
It's not inexpensive
95 or something right? So there's this big beautiful full color coffee table style. You want to hold it up and show it
I don't have it. Oh, I thought you were leaping through it there a second ago. Oh, no. No, that was just a man's galley
It is a big element and it's all handwork because the five volumes, there are five volumes in this
handmade custom design box which opens up, there's all these volumes and the volumes are all accordion.
Oh I see, so you can get these panorama shots. Yeah exactly and it's done on very high quality
paper so it's nice in your hand and you can read it sequentially, you read all down one accordion
and it flips over and then you read back and there are five of those and to make that it turned out
was a lot of handwork. So that's the reason why it was very costly to do. But we designed it that way
and then we didn't want to back off and the publisher agreed. So it is a unique kind of a thing.
I don't think anybody else is doing it. It came from a visit to the Asian Museum in San Francisco
several years or 10 years ago or something where they had a display of the Ramayana and that was
presented in an accordion manner, episode by episode, painted on palm leaves that were hinged
and the whole thing folded up and opened up and like that and I saw that and I thought oh gosh
that it's really super. Nice, make a nice Christmas gift for people. Yeah. Well thanks Bill, so I'll
see you on the trail with your beautiful dog. Yes, all right. Keep on trucking. I will, thank you.
Again, thank you so much for spending the time with me. Oh, thank you. And thanks to those who've
been listening or watching and we'll see you for the next one.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thank you.