WEBVTT

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[Music]

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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is

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an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We've done

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nearly 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you would like to check out

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previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu.

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This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and

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viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every

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page of the website. I say listeners and viewers because it's also an audio podcast, if you'd like

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to subscribe to that, there's a link for that on the website. And I've said this in quite a few

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interviews as well, so I might as well say it again, we have this project underway where we're

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having all the transcripts of all the interviews proofread, so if you'd like to do some proofreading,

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can get in touch, I'll give you instructions.

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My guest today is an old friend of mine named Bill Witherspoon.

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Bill and I go back over 50 years.

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We were both in Estes Park, Colorado in the fall of 1970, being trained as teachers of

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Transcendental Meditation.

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We both worked in that organization for a number of years, and in more recent years,

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we've both been involved with AMA, ama.org, a spiritual teacher from India.

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Bill is a lifelong visual artist, serial entrepreneur, and lover of sky.

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In his six decades of living on and off in the high steppe desert in southeastern Oregon,

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he has painted watercolor skies, practiced ancient art as spiritual discipline, and weathered

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that pristine geological expanse.

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As an artist, over the last four decades, Bill has mounted over 40 one-man exhibitions

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of paintings, prints, and sculptures, in addition to desert public art projects.

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He is also the founder and creative director of the Sky Factory, which is here in Fairfield,

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Iowa, a fine arts, digital technology, and cognitive science studio that designs and

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manufactures the world's only research-verified virtual skylights, luminous sky ceilings, and

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luminous virtual windows.

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In other words, you could be lying in a dentist's chair looking up the ceiling, and it looks

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like you're looking out of skylight at clouds going by, things like that.

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And there's a whole science behind that, which maybe we'll get into.

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He is publishing his first book entitled "Enter Space Stories from the High Desert," which

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I just read and which is full of beautiful photographs.

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It's kind of a coffee table book in that it has all these beautiful photographs.

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Later on in this interview at a certain point, we will play a slideshow while we continue

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speaking of some of those photographs.

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Anyway, this book lays witness to a life surrounded by that rare, unsummoned vastness, one that

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those of us steeped in the ceaseless churn of urban life can now imagine living through

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the faithful record of the artist's experience.

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In other words, Bill lived in the desert for a long time and wrote the book there.

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Also, some of you may remember back in around 1990, I think, there was a big news story about

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this giant yantra, this geometrical design having mysteriously appeared in the Oregon desert.

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And people were speculating that it was created by aliens.

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Turns out Bill and a bunch of his friends created it, and in fact when he confessed to having

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created it, some of the people who thought it was aliens thought he was with the CIA or

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something, and was just trying to throw them off the track.

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It was really aliens, but it was Bill.

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There's a whole documentary about that, which I have linked to on his BatGap page, which

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I would recommend watching. It's quite an amazing thing these guys did out there. Anyway, welcome

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Bill, good to have you. Thank you Rick. Nice to see you. And hear you. And hear me. And we see and

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hear each other quite often because often I'm out riding my bike on the trail and I run into Bill

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and his dog walking along and we stop and have a chat. So, Bill's book consists of a number of

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stories and maybe he'll launch into telling one or two of these stories during this interview.

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I hope he does. But his whole life has been quite adventurous. In fact, I remember hearing all

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things about Bill before I even knew him that well personally that were kind of mind-boggling,

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the sort of death-defying things that he had done. And yet he is a mild-mannered artist. He doesn't

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seem like the death-defying type. And decades of his life have been lived in deep, deep silence,

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living in the desert in solitude. So he embodies within himself an interesting

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contrast, I guess, between dynamism and silence.

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Think that's fair to say, Bill? Yeah, I don't know if I embody it, but

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definitely I have periods of deep silence out in the desert,

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and it's about as remote a place in the lower 48

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as can be found. And then I'm back here in town and working in a company

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with a lot of people and trying to get stuff done and usually

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somewhat overwhelmed by all the demands and requirements of that. So it does flip back and

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forth. And I guess I've been doing it. This is one of the things about writing a book like this

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that's actually it was started with stories back in the started writing in the 80s. And I just kept

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adding things to it, not really expecting to publish it. Then I got the idea, maybe, you know,

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you never know and so I kind of kept on with it and

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Thank you, but you get to see a pattern and you're right

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The pattern has been one of poof

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Get out in the desert where I feel at home in a way that I don't feel

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It's a kind of being at home that I don't feel anywhere else

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And then back at the sky factory, for example, you know working and trying to build that business and organize do

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everything that has to be done and I'm pretty much at home there too.

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You're at home wherever you are. I was sort of, yeah.

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One of the first stories in your book was that you were

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going off on this hundred mile river rafting adventure

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with two other friends in these makeshift ramshackle rafts and you had

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kind of a near-death experience or out-of-body experience. Why don't you

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tell that story? Well, there were three of us. We had come down into part of Idaho to

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get on to the south fork of the Oahe River, which then went across Idaho and then into

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Oregon. And we didn't know anything about the river. Nobody that we could find had ever

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run it before. And ramshackle is exactly the right word for what we had built out of old

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World War II rafts and pieces of wood and stuff like that. But in our favor, we'd run the Rogue

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River in western Oregon with that kind of equipment, and we'd flip dozens of times,

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you know, and we'd wear life jackets and so forth. And it was fine. It worked. We did it,

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and that's what we expected, and we thought we'd just be in new territory and it'd really be

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exciting and we were early 20s, so that says a lot. Unfortunately, or fortunate, no fortunately,

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definitely fortunately, big fortune, great thing. I was the first one in, heading down river,

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and everything looked great down there, and I'm actually going backwards, you know, because I'm

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I'm rowing and I'm going backwards, and I'd look around, everything looked fine, and then

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I started to hear some noise, and then, "What the heck?

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Where's that coming from?

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That sound, that roar sound, where is that?"

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And I was looking up in the sky, and then I looked around, and then I saw mist coming

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up out of what appeared to be the flat river.

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And in fact, there was what's called a step-dam.

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Up above is an agricultural area.

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Upstream is agriculture.

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So there was a man-made dam there that we didn't know about.

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And that dam was even and went right across and all the water went right over and then

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it dropped, I don't know, 10 feet or something.

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And by the time I realized what was going, I was in the middle, there was no way to do

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anything.

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I just stood up, waved everybody, "Get over, get over, get over," yelled, turned around,

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And then just, it all plunged over the top.

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And I was taken down, and then I was pinned by the force of the water to the bottom.

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And I thought, "Oh, you're going to drown."

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So I didn't really resist it.

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I was never afraid.

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There was no time to be afraid, no nothing.

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I inhaled water and took it into my lungs, and then I left my body.

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And leaving the body, I didn't even really know I left the body.

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The body was just not an issue anymore.

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It was gone behind.

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And it became so big that there was no "I."

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No "I" to leave the body or be in the body.

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It just became wonderful, blissful, huge, indescribable.

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Absolutely indescribable.

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And the only, well, I'll tell you that funny part later.

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And then that persisted for some period of time.

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I have no idea.

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And then, loud and clear in the head, now in the mind, which then became the head, and

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then became the body, you have to go back into the body.

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And I didn't want to, at all.

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This is where I want to be, this is it.

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Why?

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No.

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And then, there's too much to be done.

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You have to do too much.

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You can't stay.

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You gotta go back.

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So the next thing I knew, bizarrely enough, the boat is flipped over so it has a smooth

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bottom, you know, rubber bottom, which is on the upper surface.

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And how I got, and there's nothing to hold on to, but the next thing I knew, I'm on top

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of that and starting to throw up, you know, cough up and actually throw up water out of

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my lungs and stomach and everything else.

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Then I'm in my body and then I start figuring what the heck and then I look over and I see my two

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buddies on the shore and I was very grateful and that was quite a ways away and they then started

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throwing a rope out and meantime the force of the water is creating an eddy that is holding the boat

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in place right at the edge of the falls. It's not going downstream, not going anywhere.

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So I'm stuck there. So finally I got a hold of a parachute cord, very thin thing, and I could just,

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and it wasn't a loop or anything, I just got a hold of it and I just...

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That they had thrown you?

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They threw it and I finally got it. Then they pulled and I hooked my feet on the boat so I

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didn't get dumped in the water, I did not want to get dumped in the water again. Now I'm really in

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the body thing and the body is talking. And they pulled and then it got out of that and then it

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swung down like a pendulum, it swung down because of the current and came up on a big pointed

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rock that was sticking up and wrapped. And I didn't let go and I got out and climbed

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up onto that rock and as I climbed up the boat was wiped off and went on down, never to be

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seen again. So now I'm sitting on this rock and it's all about how to get to the shore,

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the bank. I don't remember if we could hear each other because of the roar of the water or whatever,

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but I knew I finally had to make the decision to jump back into that stuff, which was kind of like

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symbolic of getting back in into life almost in a way. I had to jump in and I was not happy to jump

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back in, but I did jump in and then I got swung down by the current because they held, pulled,

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and then got to a place where my feet could touch bottom and I

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I clamored in they came out helped me in and laid me down in the

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Show on the bank and I coughed for quite a bit and got a lot of water out of my system

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And then shivered and and then they had to pry my hands. That's how good the body is

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They had to pry my fingers open water was cold, but they had to pry my fingers open to get that rope out

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I mean the body doesn't sing when it needs to right

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and then

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We went home

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We didn't get I mean everything was lost. You only had two rafts here. Yeah. Yeah, yeah

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you know, so we got back in the

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This little renault toffee with no backseat and drove back to portland and that was the experience

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You said that you had heard stories of me doing things

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that were risky, high risk. And that's probably true, but this took all need or desire for

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high risk out of me. I used to go on glaciers, I used to spelunk a lot. I loved spelunking,

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and I used to climb and rock climb. And after that, those were excuses for two things. One,

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they were excuses to be out in nature, which ever since I've been a child, that was the

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only time I experienced any kind of freedom. And the other thing it was, was an excuse to

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probably push the boundary a little bit and find out where it goes, you know. And there had to be

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some of that. I mean, you know, when you're in your 20s, you do that sort of stuff. So that was

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all taken care of. So now I started walking around mountains, and I started to go more into the

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desert and flat places and sold a motorcycle, you know, stopped all the crazy climbing and all the

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rest of that stuff. And that's not to say that that kind of climbing needs to be dangerous or

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anything else. It's just how I responded to it. It did change my life. It really, it was a big one.

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And I'll tell you another story where this came back to me big time. And that was when I was

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forming a company in California in the early 80s

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Called Westbridge Research Group and it was a biorational company

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Phil Town and I were partners and we had several thousand acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley

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And we were growing permanent crops grapes and peaches and plums and nuts and you know all that and we got really

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Feeling terrible about all the chemicals we were pouring on the land

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And so we decided there's got to be a better way. And we did some research and found out that it's

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possible. This was before organic, what it has become. It was right at that same early stage.

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So we said, well, let's sell this stuff off and let's form a company, do research and get some

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good bio-supportive inputs for agriculture. So we did that. That was part of the thing that we did.

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and that really led down to a different road.

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Well, building that company had high risk.

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We raised, I think, 30 million or something to get it started, and there

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was a point where we had a bridge loan. A bridge loan is a short-term

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loan backed by every asset you've got, meaning your car, your house,

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your antiques, whatever you've got, and it has to be paid off

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right down here, right, you know, in a couple of months.

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And that was to cover us while we raised more money. Well, those are crazy

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bridge loans

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Uh, and they were crazy then

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We kept going but at a certain point the risk was huge

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I think by that point I had two children and every asset everything was on the line and the date was coming

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And I locked myself in a room the size of a closet. It was actually was a kind of a closet utility closet

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at the place we were renting with a phone and just called and called and called trying to

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find investors and you know deal with the thing and during that period of time I constantly

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remembered the experience of drowning not the drowning part because I don't really that

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wasn't much but the other part the vastness lies that is the worst case that's the worst

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case built. So what are you sweating about? Yeah, work your

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butt off. Put it in do it. But what's the fear? Where's the

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issue? Where's the problem? Just get a gun for Pete's sake. And

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that really lifted me up. I gotta say, it made a big

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difference. Now this was that and that was a to 60. That was

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20 years later.

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Did you pay off the bridge loan?

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Yeah, we did. Bridge loan. The company went ahead and it was

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sold at the beginning of the pandemic here and did well for all the investors and all those folks.

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And it has a whole range of products that are certified by OMRI, which means they can be used

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as inputs in organic agriculture. Cool. It got done. So this almost drowning near-death experience

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really kick-started your spiritual quest as I understand it. I could say that. I think that's

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true, but I could go back to talking with my mother, who was at a very strong spiritual orientation,

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in the kitchen, when I was mid-teenage, struggling in high school, which was a horrible mess,

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and talking to her about things. There was even some discussions about what is meditation,

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She didn't know. But talking about, would it be possible to live a life that is really what is

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prescribed, for example, in the New Testament? Really do it? There are things in there that are

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pretty demanding about, it's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle

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than a rich man to get it to heaven, stuff like that. All right, all those things, you know,

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on, I really wondered. But this did kickstart because it gave that experience. And a funny

00:19:26.500 --> 00:19:33.140
thing that came was after I learned meditation, which was when I was studying art in Europe,

00:19:33.140 --> 00:19:39.100
I just had great experiences. I mean, I just, even the person who taught me just said, "Wait

00:19:39.100 --> 00:19:44.800
a minute, wait a minute, you're sure? It was wonderful. I loved

00:19:44.800 --> 00:19:51.100
it. And I came home, meaning back to Portland area, and I had

00:19:51.100 --> 00:19:55.420
close friends and a lot of people and I tried to get them

00:19:55.420 --> 00:19:59.420
I you know, I'm big on sharing Okay, which you'd say I tried to

00:19:59.420 --> 00:20:05.140
get them to learn meditation. And what I would say is, it's just

00:20:05.140 --> 00:20:12.740
like dying. You gotta do it. You know, it's so far out. It's like dying. And everybody

00:20:12.740 --> 00:20:18.020
would look at me and say, "Thank you." And that never convinced one person.

00:20:18.020 --> 00:20:27.860
It was later, it was later that I learned a little more subtlety. But I would say to this day that

00:20:27.860 --> 00:20:34.820
the transcendent that one can experience in meditation and that field of pure being that

00:20:34.820 --> 00:20:41.060
one can experience in this kind of a, what do they call it, a near-death experience.

00:20:41.060 --> 00:20:45.060
But the same, I mean, that's my experience.

00:20:45.060 --> 00:20:49.220
Yeah, I've interviewed a lot of near-death experience people and almost all of them say,

00:20:49.220 --> 00:20:53.380
"Well, yeah, they told me I had to come back." Presumably, they don't say that to everybody,

00:20:53.380 --> 00:20:56.100
but those are not the ones you get to talk to because they actually died.

00:21:00.500 --> 00:21:08.300
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."

00:21:08.300 --> 00:21:13.500
Yep. And so, what is there to be afraid of? You know?

00:21:13.500 --> 00:21:20.700
I often think that I have a missing gene, because I'll get blue in extreme heights, or something.

00:21:20.700 --> 00:21:29.000
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.

00:21:29.000 --> 00:21:33.200
we could see it from where we were standing and you didn't have any ropes or anything else.

00:21:33.200 --> 00:21:35.700
You were just climbing up the ladder. That would spook me.

00:21:35.700 --> 00:21:41.000
Yeah, I got him to give it to me as a birthday gift because he did that professionally.

00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:43.000
Yeah, I wanted to do it.

00:21:43.000 --> 00:21:49.300
I also heard a story where when you were a course that we were on at Humboldt in California,

00:21:49.300 --> 00:21:54.500
you and our friend Charlie Donahue and maybe somebody else got in this little boat and went out of the bay

00:21:54.500 --> 00:21:58.740
or out into the ocean a little bit, and the waves started coming, and the boat was in

00:21:58.740 --> 00:22:03.460
danger of capsizing, and it was really cold water, and the others were all freaked out,

00:22:03.460 --> 00:22:07.780
and you were kind of like nonchalant about it. Do you remember that? And Charlie was

00:22:07.780 --> 00:22:11.380
a little upset that you were so blasé about the circumstances.

00:22:11.380 --> 00:22:14.340
Yeah, it wasn't that I was deliberately...

00:22:14.340 --> 00:22:16.580
Yeah, you weren't suicidal, but you were just...

00:22:16.580 --> 00:22:23.540
No, so what? And that's kind of the result of that. It's a sort of a so what? You know what?

00:22:23.540 --> 00:22:28.820
It's not even a so what it's be patient bill because you'll get there again

00:22:28.820 --> 00:22:31.140
It is

00:22:31.140 --> 00:22:33.140
an experience

00:22:33.140 --> 00:22:33.860
of

00:22:33.860 --> 00:22:40.420
The beloved it's beyond the beloved the beloved has to be short of that because that is pure

00:22:40.420 --> 00:22:43.460
There's no one to love. There's no love coming back

00:22:43.460 --> 00:22:46.020
But that's the gift

00:22:46.660 --> 00:22:55.460
One impression I've gotten from near-death experience people is that they were given that experience by some higher intelligence,

00:22:55.460 --> 00:23:01.860
because it would implant in them a determination or a sense of mission or something.

00:23:01.860 --> 00:23:05.860
They had some kind of mission to fulfill, and that was the impetus.

00:23:05.860 --> 00:23:11.460
They could never forget it afterwards, and it set them on a course in which they influenced a great many people for the better,

00:23:11.460 --> 00:23:15.760
but wouldn't have been motivated to do that had they not had that experience.

00:23:15.760 --> 00:23:20.760
You know, looking back, that's not impossible in this case.

00:23:20.760 --> 00:23:25.600
Maybe out of that came a desire first

00:23:25.600 --> 00:23:29.920
to understand what my dharma is

00:23:29.920 --> 00:23:34.920
and then an ease in finding it perhaps

00:23:34.920 --> 00:23:37.500
that I didn't have before

00:23:37.500 --> 00:23:42.500
and for sure a willingness to go with it when I knew it.

00:23:42.500 --> 00:23:45.480
It did result in a kind of a focus

00:23:45.480 --> 00:23:54.760
narrowing. But the funny thing is the narrowing was all for expansion. It's just deeper. That's

00:23:54.760 --> 00:24:01.000
the secret. We can either float on the surface and have all kinds of infinite possibilities on

00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:07.720
the surface value of life, material life, and so forth, right? Or we can go for the infinite,

00:24:07.720 --> 00:24:12.920
if you will, which means we have to go deeper and deeper. And that leaves these things behind. It

00:24:12.920 --> 00:24:18.760
it goes to their root. That's my experience anyway, because that's where the goods are.

00:24:18.760 --> 00:24:26.160
That's where the beauty is. I wasn't an artist at the time I had that near-death experience.

00:24:26.160 --> 00:24:32.920
I wasn't an artist. I never thought about art. That came afterwards, being like that. That's

00:24:32.920 --> 00:24:35.240
right, about two, three years after.

00:24:35.240 --> 00:24:41.240
Yeah. And playing off what you just said, I would also say that going deep doesn't mean

00:24:41.240 --> 00:24:47.700
relinquishing experiences on the surface value of life, in fact, it enriches them.

00:24:47.700 --> 00:24:51.320
You can use the analogy of if you're going to build a really tall building, you have to

00:24:51.320 --> 00:24:53.280
dig a really deep foundation.

00:24:53.280 --> 00:24:56.760
The taller the building, the deeper the foundation.

00:24:56.760 --> 00:25:02.180
People who have dedicated their lives to plumbing the depths of human existence or of existence

00:25:02.180 --> 00:25:05.400
itself don't lead drab lives.

00:25:05.400 --> 00:25:07.400
Their lives have become all the more fascinating.

00:25:07.400 --> 00:25:15.400
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. That's true. And really, the metaphor of going deep,

00:25:15.400 --> 00:25:24.840
well, as a person who pursued the visual arts, seeing is kind of the first priority. That's

00:25:24.840 --> 00:25:31.720
a priority, or has always been for me. What I thought that meant is something visual. You

00:25:31.720 --> 00:25:34.020
You learn how to see.

00:25:34.020 --> 00:25:39.480
We are, we're born, we grow, this happens and we're seeing the world around us, but we want

00:25:39.480 --> 00:25:41.260
to see more deeply.

00:25:41.260 --> 00:25:42.680
That's what I thought.

00:25:42.680 --> 00:25:46.000
And so I thought, okay, well then that means you're an artist.

00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:49.200
But it doesn't matter whether it's an artist or not.

00:25:49.200 --> 00:25:57.360
But seeing more deeply, seeing more deeply, I felt for many years, I thought that meant

00:25:57.360 --> 00:26:02.520
Something that had to do with the optic nerves and the nervous system and the brain and the

00:26:02.520 --> 00:26:03.520
interpretation.

00:26:03.520 --> 00:26:07.520
It had to do with all of that, those mechanisms.

00:26:07.520 --> 00:26:09.080
It is that.

00:26:09.080 --> 00:26:10.840
That's the tool.

00:26:10.840 --> 00:26:17.640
But what I've learned from the desert, well, from the desert, from the other tools I've

00:26:17.640 --> 00:26:24.120
been using, but I could say that it's in the desert that this has ripened.

00:26:24.120 --> 00:26:29.680
But it's not limited to the desert, and the desert is only my tool.

00:26:29.680 --> 00:26:34.220
Other people have other tools that work and do the same thing.

00:26:34.220 --> 00:26:42.000
So what it seems is that you look and you look and you look, and you're never quite seeing

00:26:42.000 --> 00:26:44.180
what you know is possible.

00:26:44.180 --> 00:26:47.960
You know there's more, and that's true in the desert.

00:26:47.960 --> 00:26:49.800
It's true of looking in nature.

00:26:49.800 --> 00:26:56.040
true of looking into nature in the forests or on the mountaintops. You must experience

00:26:56.040 --> 00:27:03.240
something of this when you go deep into people. I mean, what are you after? You're after their

00:27:03.240 --> 00:27:09.720
essential nature or even be a deeper than that. Not just the essence of their personality,

00:27:09.720 --> 00:27:17.760
but deeper than their personality, right? What that is, come out. So what drives that?

00:27:17.760 --> 00:27:21.640
I got to believe for you and for me, it's the heart.

00:27:21.640 --> 00:27:23.200
That's what's happened.

00:27:23.200 --> 00:27:29.240
So I now see with the heart and in fact in the book, I've got the manuscript here.

00:27:29.240 --> 00:27:31.600
The Walmart chapter, the Walmart story.

00:27:31.600 --> 00:27:33.800
Yeah, well, yes, exactly.

00:27:33.800 --> 00:27:42.160
And that starts with a quote from St. Augustine, where he says, "Our whole business in life

00:27:42.160 --> 00:27:53.280
then is to heal this eye of the heart. E-Y-E. To heal this eye of the heart whereby God may

00:27:53.280 --> 00:27:54.280
be seen.

00:27:54.280 --> 00:27:55.280
Very nice.

00:27:55.280 --> 00:28:04.320
So, so that's pretty cool. That's the journey. And how you get there is this way or this

00:28:04.320 --> 00:28:16.560
way or this way, there are 8.05 billion paths at the present time because that's an approximate

00:28:16.560 --> 00:28:22.160
number of the human population on planet Earth. That's how many paths there are. Yeah, there

00:28:22.160 --> 00:28:28.060
are things that many people can use, things that few people can use, there are things

00:28:28.060 --> 00:28:32.960
that only one can, and then there's all the combinations and permutations, and then there's

00:28:32.960 --> 00:28:38.040
the time factor, and there's the past, the environmental influence, all of that. So there's

00:28:38.040 --> 00:28:39.920
all these different ways we go.

00:28:39.920 --> 00:28:44.840
But there is a common denominator, I would say, perhaps a number of them, but the one

00:28:44.840 --> 00:28:51.200
I'm thinking of is just that there's this evolutionary force that seems to pervade the

00:28:51.200 --> 00:28:56.880
universe and govern its development, and we are imbued with that. Everything is imbued

00:28:56.880 --> 00:29:00.360
with that, a mouse is, but that drives us along.

00:29:00.360 --> 00:29:02.760
Yeah, I mean a boulder.

00:29:02.760 --> 00:29:03.760
Yeah, anything.

00:29:03.760 --> 00:29:04.760
Everything.

00:29:04.760 --> 00:29:05.760
Everything.

00:29:05.760 --> 00:29:07.440
You're absolutely right.

00:29:07.440 --> 00:29:17.800
So the process of seeing, which has been paramount and changed over since the early 60s when

00:29:17.800 --> 00:29:21.200
I first started going to the desert, but it's always stayed.

00:29:21.200 --> 00:29:24.480
It's just that keeps you focused on that.

00:29:24.480 --> 00:29:28.280
Stay attentive, stay present, stay disciplined.

00:29:28.280 --> 00:29:32.440
And how many different tools have I used to try and enhance that?

00:29:32.440 --> 00:29:37.560
Recently, I'm using a medium format digital camera, you know, which does all kinds of

00:29:37.560 --> 00:29:38.560
things.

00:29:38.560 --> 00:29:44.160
And I've used paint and pigments and I've used printing and I've used making these big

00:29:44.160 --> 00:29:49.200
land art things and sculptures and small things.

00:29:49.200 --> 00:29:50.440
And writing.

00:29:50.440 --> 00:29:53.640
It's always to see more deeply.

00:29:53.640 --> 00:29:59.320
stories I started writing these just to understand. You said that maybe I would

00:29:59.320 --> 00:30:05.600
tell one maybe I I got a one pager. Shall I read it? Yeah sure. Yeah I don't know if

00:30:05.600 --> 00:30:08.760
it's relevant at the moment but I'll tell you the background after I read it.

00:30:08.760 --> 00:30:14.760
It's called the fire. It must have been smoldering for a long time. Why it broke

00:30:14.760 --> 00:30:21.400
into flames when it did is uncertain. Though certainly she was the cause. Why

00:30:21.400 --> 00:30:27.840
though she had been patient so long, maybe too long. Perhaps she saw an opening, an

00:30:27.840 --> 00:30:34.200
opportunity. I had been calling her for some time. I'm sure she had answered, but

00:30:34.200 --> 00:30:39.680
I didn't hear. It started in the center, in the heart of things, in the deepest

00:30:39.680 --> 00:30:46.080
part, where I didn't know how to look. By the time the first flames appeared, there

00:30:46.080 --> 00:30:52.080
was no stopping. It spread like an echo. As the interior burned, everything started to

00:30:52.080 --> 00:30:59.080
come down. Many of my comfortable habits were destroyed. I thought that a shell would remain,

00:30:59.080 --> 00:31:05.920
that something would last and contain me. But the fire continued to smolder. Finally,

00:31:05.920 --> 00:31:13.480
the shell burned out as well. Now, everything is much better. Before, I would hear her only

00:31:13.480 --> 00:31:20.800
faintly, if at all, with all of my little spaces and so many places to be, I was always in the

00:31:20.800 --> 00:31:29.000
wrong one, or too busy, or, I'm embarrassed to say, unwilling to hear what she said. But

00:31:29.000 --> 00:31:37.080
now, with everything gone, her voice is everywhere, soft and quiet.

00:31:37.080 --> 00:31:41.540
Now I have a big caveat on that story

00:31:41.540 --> 00:31:48.260
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

00:31:48.260 --> 00:31:52.700
89 or 90 somewhere in there. I think bill

00:31:52.700 --> 00:31:58.480
That's very misleading to put it in print because it says everything

00:31:58.480 --> 00:32:03.740
Now everything it says but now with everything gone

00:32:04.100 --> 00:32:10.840
Her voice is everywhere soft and quiet and yes, that was true

00:32:10.840 --> 00:32:15.280
But did it persist is that the case today? No

00:32:15.280 --> 00:32:24.220
So this says something about the nature of this kind of experience and the nature of these stories

00:32:24.220 --> 00:32:31.020
but in the prologue of the book I tried to deal with this with a kind of a metaphor and

00:32:31.780 --> 00:32:34.660
I'm just going to read a paragraph here.

00:32:34.660 --> 00:32:41.100
Like everyone who lives in this remote high desert, I always travel with a handyman.

00:32:41.100 --> 00:32:45.980
It's in the back of the pickup with chains and earth anchors collecting dust.

00:32:45.980 --> 00:32:49.420
The truth is, I haven't used that handyman in eight years.

00:32:49.420 --> 00:32:53.060
It's a kind of a tool, like a jack or some kind of a thing.

00:32:53.060 --> 00:33:00.620
The handyman is a heavy chunk of steel, a kind of high leverage, multipurpose jack.

00:33:00.620 --> 00:33:06.540
It can be used to change a flat, stretch fence wire, or pull your truck out of the mud and

00:33:06.540 --> 00:33:07.540
snow.

00:33:07.540 --> 00:33:09.460
That's why I have it.

00:33:09.460 --> 00:33:15.900
Every stroke of its long handle either lifts or pulls two inches.

00:33:15.900 --> 00:33:22.460
Then when the handle returns to its starting position, the two-inch gain snaps back to a

00:33:22.460 --> 00:33:24.940
solid one inch.

00:33:24.940 --> 00:33:31.180
It takes time. If you want two inches, or even a few feet or more, inevitably, you have to

00:33:31.180 --> 00:33:38.460
cooperate. You have to let go and return the handle to its starting point. Then again,

00:33:38.460 --> 00:33:45.180
repeat. And so, being happy with each new inch of progress, you patiently let the inches

00:33:45.180 --> 00:33:46.180
add up.

00:33:46.180 --> 00:33:54.740
Okay, this is a jack. Enter space is similar. It deals with unexpected, fleeting experiences.

00:33:54.740 --> 00:34:02.660
Some glaring, some quiet, each in its own way a peak, with implications that open unknown

00:34:02.660 --> 00:34:04.460
possibilities.

00:34:04.460 --> 00:34:11.540
But by letting go of these peaks and their imagined significance, one can incorporate

00:34:11.540 --> 00:34:18.180
their actual lessons and thereby arrive at a new normal.

00:34:18.180 --> 00:34:26.400
Like the ratcheting handyman, it seems that's how we're designed, how we learn and grow.

00:34:26.400 --> 00:34:35.400
While there's always the possibility of grace, possibility, there are otherwise no silver

00:34:35.400 --> 00:34:37.060
bullets.

00:34:37.060 --> 00:34:42.520
Learning and growth requires perseverance and patience.

00:34:42.520 --> 00:34:52.360
Again and again, lots of little steps and bowing downs, ultimately bringing us to a life in

00:34:52.360 --> 00:34:53.360
beauty.

00:34:53.360 --> 00:34:54.360
Yeah.

00:34:54.360 --> 00:35:02.200
So, that is there to put that story in perspective, and basically everything in the book in perspective.

00:35:02.200 --> 00:35:05.600
Yeah, I think it's a very important teaching.

00:35:05.600 --> 00:35:10.560
In our McDonald's culture, people really want everything now, including enlightenment, once

00:35:10.560 --> 00:35:12.480
they realize that's a thing.

00:35:12.480 --> 00:35:16.560
And you know, there are people who just feel like, "Okay, well, this weekend, the psilocybin

00:35:16.560 --> 00:35:18.120
trip is probably going to do it for me.

00:35:18.120 --> 00:35:23.920
I hope it will, you know, and then I'll be permanently established in some better state."

00:35:23.920 --> 00:35:29.560
And you know, there's something in the Yoga Sutras about the importance of sustained practice

00:35:29.560 --> 00:35:32.480
over a long period of time.

00:35:32.480 --> 00:35:37.260
And there's our old friend, the cloth and dye analogy, which the Jack analogy reminds

00:35:37.260 --> 00:35:40.700
me of where you dip the cloth in the color dye and then you bleach it in the sun, it

00:35:40.700 --> 00:35:45.140
appears to be backtracking because it's losing its color, but that's actually how the color

00:35:45.140 --> 00:35:49.560
gets integrated and stabilized, and you repeat the process enough times and it'll stay fully

00:35:49.560 --> 00:35:51.340
colored even when it's in the sun.

00:35:51.340 --> 00:35:52.980
Yep, yeah.

00:35:52.980 --> 00:36:03.220
So, in a way, all these stories in the book are stories about seeing more deeply, and

00:36:03.220 --> 00:36:06.580
for me to understand about seeing more deeply,

00:36:06.580 --> 00:36:09.700
to recognize it and then to move on.

00:36:09.700 --> 00:36:10.540
- Yeah.

00:36:10.540 --> 00:36:11.460
- To leave it behind.

00:36:11.460 --> 00:36:16.460
One of the things I learned from the big Sri Yantra project

00:36:16.460 --> 00:36:20.300
out in the desert and that like drowning,

00:36:20.300 --> 00:36:22.420
that was a life changer.

00:36:22.420 --> 00:36:26.060
Where that one came from, who the heck knows.

00:36:26.060 --> 00:36:28.940
People think that, oh, you're an artist.

00:36:28.940 --> 00:36:32.300
So that's, you know, I can tell you honestly

00:36:32.300 --> 00:36:39.260
how that came about. The fire, the story I just read, came first. And what happened was

00:36:39.260 --> 00:36:44.860
a friend asked if I would make them a Sri Yantra because I was working with geometries,

00:36:44.860 --> 00:36:50.700
looking through gold leaf geometries into sky. I've made many paintings.

00:36:50.700 --> 00:36:53.580
I've seen some of those, yeah, they're beautiful.

00:36:53.580 --> 00:36:59.060
So they said, "Well, do you know the Sri Yantra?" And I kind of knew it. "Well, would you make

00:36:59.060 --> 00:37:04.100
me one. I thought, well, I don't know. Let me do some research. So I did. I mean, I spent

00:37:04.100 --> 00:37:10.900
two months anyway, doing research on that. And I got deep into it. And I found one at

00:37:10.900 --> 00:37:15.980
one point where I was at the peak of all the research. I was really soaking. It was all

00:37:15.980 --> 00:37:24.180
soaked in. I was in meditation. And that is the experience of the fire. And what is the

00:37:24.180 --> 00:37:33.380
Sri Yantra? The Sri Yantra is a Yantra. What is a Yantra? An instance. Not an example, really,

00:37:33.380 --> 00:37:44.020
not a symbol, certainly not a symbol, but an instance of a law or complex of laws of

00:37:44.020 --> 00:37:51.780
nature. Or, in some other language, an instance of a deity. So, trying to say the same thing

00:37:51.780 --> 00:38:00.060
right? And in this case, the deity is the Divine Mother. The Sri Yantra is said to

00:38:00.060 --> 00:38:03.660
be the sort of top of the line.

00:38:03.660 --> 00:38:11.700
So it's a geometrical representation of a deep impulse of intelligence that's

00:38:11.700 --> 00:38:15.180
fundamental to the universe. Is that a fair way of putting it?

00:38:15.180 --> 00:38:20.940
That is a good way of saying it. That's very nice. And in fact, it is said that all of the

00:38:20.940 --> 00:38:28.700
The fundamental laws that give rise to every aspect of creation are present there.

00:38:28.700 --> 00:38:29.700
Present in the yantra?

00:38:29.700 --> 00:38:30.700
In the yantra, yes.

00:38:30.700 --> 00:38:35.580
Okay, it represents, symbolically or representationally or something.

00:38:35.580 --> 00:38:43.820
And it's through resonance that a yantra can enliven the environment, the consciousness

00:38:43.820 --> 00:38:46.420
of the doer, the maker, etc.

00:38:46.420 --> 00:38:51.580
And as I understand it, some people use these as meditation tools where they'll just gaze

00:38:51.580 --> 00:38:55.380
at it or something and it'll have an effect on their consciousness.

00:38:55.380 --> 00:38:56.980
That and making it.

00:38:56.980 --> 00:38:57.980
Making them.

00:38:57.980 --> 00:38:59.340
Actually making it.

00:38:59.340 --> 00:39:05.400
And when we decided to make it, I was very concerned because I did all this research

00:39:05.400 --> 00:39:09.820
and I read a lot of Sri Vidya and a lot of this stuff, you know.

00:39:09.820 --> 00:39:13.120
So I was very concerned to do it right.

00:39:13.120 --> 00:39:19.660
There are very specific ways to make it, and you don't depart from those ways.

00:39:19.660 --> 00:39:28.880
If you depart, you have a serious problem because you may misalign, if you will, the

00:39:28.880 --> 00:39:32.320
laws of nature or the rules that give rise.

00:39:32.320 --> 00:39:34.060
So you have to be very careful.

00:39:34.060 --> 00:39:39.000
And in fact, over and over and over again, if you read about the Sri Yantra and making

00:39:39.000 --> 00:39:45.720
it, which I was concerned about making it, not just looking at it, you're told that if

00:39:45.720 --> 00:39:54.880
you don't do it properly, then you will have created a very damaging influence in the environment

00:39:54.880 --> 00:39:56.760
and for yourself.

00:39:56.760 --> 00:39:59.920
And I took that very seriously.

00:39:59.920 --> 00:40:02.720
I just bought it 100%.

00:40:02.720 --> 00:40:04.920
It made sense to me.

00:40:04.920 --> 00:40:11.080
And I had this experience that is described in this little short story of the fire.

00:40:11.080 --> 00:40:19.160
And that was all about the peak of the research period, where I finally realized, yes, make,

00:40:19.160 --> 00:40:21.320
do, no problem.

00:40:21.320 --> 00:40:23.040
Here she is.

00:40:23.040 --> 00:40:29.680
And I had been looking for her with a capital H for quite some time, that's another matter,

00:40:29.680 --> 00:40:33.560
and I got some goods, put it that way.

00:40:33.560 --> 00:40:39.360
I was ready to do it, but I had all these cautions, I knew the rules and so forth.

00:40:39.360 --> 00:40:47.720
So then I got to thinking, "Gee, I wonder what would happen if a person could live in

00:40:47.720 --> 00:40:48.720
the bindu."

00:40:48.720 --> 00:40:54.800
The bindu is the center point, which has all of this in seed form.

00:40:54.800 --> 00:41:00.680
So it's like, if you think of the absolute, where the nothing is manifest, and then you

00:41:00.680 --> 00:41:07.480
You think of creation where it begins to manifest and comes forth, right there at that boundary,

00:41:07.480 --> 00:41:11.200
that gap between the two, that's where the bindu resides.

00:41:11.200 --> 00:41:13.860
It's my understanding.

00:41:13.860 --> 00:41:17.800
So I thought, "Whoa, that would be a great place to be physically.

00:41:17.800 --> 00:41:18.800
Could you do it?

00:41:18.800 --> 00:41:19.800
What would happen?"

00:41:19.800 --> 00:41:25.000
And then I thought, "Well, okay, if you wanted a bindu big enough to live in, how big would

00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:26.000
it have to be?"

00:41:26.000 --> 00:41:27.920
I thought, "Oh, well, maybe nine feet.

00:41:27.920 --> 00:41:32.720
I could live in nine feet for a month or something, no problem.

00:41:32.720 --> 00:41:35.900
And then I thought, okay, nine feet, all right, well, let's work it out.

00:41:35.900 --> 00:41:40.000
And so I worked it out and it turned out that it had to be about a quarter of a mile across

00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:43.360
and 13 miles of lines and so on and so forth.

00:41:43.360 --> 00:41:45.560
And then I thought, well, where can I do it?

00:41:45.560 --> 00:41:51.000
Oh, I know where I can do that, Mickey Basin, which is this real remote place.

00:41:51.000 --> 00:41:52.660
Nobody ever goes.

00:41:52.660 --> 00:41:56.800
It's considered to be totally useless because it's playa.

00:41:56.800 --> 00:41:58.680
So I thought, alright.

00:41:58.680 --> 00:42:02.320
And so I called some friends here and said, "Hey, you want to work on a project?

00:42:02.320 --> 00:42:03.320
Here's the idea."

00:42:03.320 --> 00:42:08.600
And yes, yes, and I took my son, and that was what happened.

00:42:08.600 --> 00:42:10.500
That's how it came together.

00:42:10.500 --> 00:42:13.860
But I'm not drifting from seeing.

00:42:13.860 --> 00:42:17.840
The point about seeing, now I want to tell you the point about seeing.

00:42:17.840 --> 00:42:21.920
And I want to remind people at this point that there's a whole documentary about your

00:42:21.920 --> 00:42:26.400
doing this, and with all the guys doing it, and how they carved the lines in the desert

00:42:26.400 --> 00:42:30.960
It's really a cool documentary. So I'm going to put that link again on your page on that gap. Okay

00:42:30.960 --> 00:42:34.160
So one of the things that happened

00:42:34.160 --> 00:42:36.320
an artist

00:42:36.320 --> 00:42:39.940
And I might not be an artist but I act like one sometimes

00:42:39.940 --> 00:42:43.280
So I want to see what i'm making

00:42:43.280 --> 00:42:50.720
That's a natural thing. You want to see what you're making and you turn something upside down you

00:42:51.360 --> 00:42:58.200
Rotate you can stand back you get way back and look at it and that's what artists do get a different perspective

00:42:58.200 --> 00:43:00.960
Well, guess what the ply is huge

00:43:00.960 --> 00:43:02.880
But you've got a little segment of it

00:43:02.880 --> 00:43:08.440
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

00:43:08.440 --> 00:43:12.340
Hear each other even in the silence out there just absorbed

00:43:12.340 --> 00:43:16.520
So that's how big it is and we're making all these lines, right?

00:43:17.320 --> 00:43:24.920
complex, incredibly complex lines, and we're using the old-fashioned ways of doing it,

00:43:24.920 --> 00:43:32.280
no transits, no nothing, nothing like that. And we want it to be accurate, because remember,

00:43:32.280 --> 00:43:38.160
the instructions are, you do it this, step one, two, three, and you must do it perfectly.

00:43:38.160 --> 00:43:44.800
Now, there was a Scottish mathematician who presented a paper, and it was published, and

00:43:44.800 --> 00:43:50.440
I found at the University of Chicago when I was doing research that focused on the Sri

00:43:50.440 --> 00:43:51.440
Yantra.

00:43:51.440 --> 00:43:58.320
And what he maintained, which is correct mathematics, totally correct, is that it is an irrational

00:43:58.320 --> 00:44:02.280
figure like pi or certain other things.

00:44:02.280 --> 00:44:07.320
In other words, to make it simple, it cannot be made perfectly.

00:44:07.320 --> 00:44:09.280
It will not fit.

00:44:09.280 --> 00:44:12.520
Everything will not come together perfectly.

00:44:12.520 --> 00:44:19.520
cannot be done. Now, you go on the internet nowadays and people are using calculus and

00:44:19.520 --> 00:44:25.080
computers to do iterative things again and again and again and narrow, narrow, narrow,

00:44:25.080 --> 00:44:30.480
narrow, get the error down to almost nothing and something that is invisible. But in the

00:44:30.480 --> 00:44:37.080
old days and using the tools that were available and not computers, it can't be made perfectly

00:44:37.080 --> 00:44:45.400
yet you must make it perfectly or you're in deep trouble. All right, so now that's an interesting

00:44:45.400 --> 00:44:52.840
challenge. That's like somebody's putting some squeeze on you, right? So here we are out in the

00:44:52.840 --> 00:45:03.160
desert with that. Plus, we can't see. If you took a gymnasium, flat gymnasium with a basketball court,

00:45:03.160 --> 00:45:08.520
and you lay down at one end of the basketball court and you got your chin on the ground and

00:45:08.520 --> 00:45:15.480
your eyes would be this far off the floor and you looked out. Imagine trying to see the basketball

00:45:15.480 --> 00:45:20.520
lines. That's the kind of perspective that a five-foot person would have on a quarter mile

00:45:20.520 --> 00:45:25.880
on all of these lines. So we couldn't see it. We had to know we could do everything we could to get

00:45:25.880 --> 00:45:32.440
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

00:45:32.440 --> 00:45:38.280
see it? I'm speaking now personally. I had to see it. I needed to see it. I wanted to see it. And I

00:45:38.280 --> 00:45:44.280
was almost, you could say, frustrated in a certain way that I didn't see it. And I couldn't let go

00:45:44.280 --> 00:45:51.160
of the demand and the requirement to see it. And yet I couldn't see it. And then finally, like in

00:45:51.160 --> 00:46:00.520
the case of a Zen koan, where the mind just gives up, I gave up trying to see it. And then it was

00:46:00.520 --> 00:46:05.880
there. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. And I say there, where?

00:46:05.880 --> 00:46:07.080
In your mind's eye?

00:46:07.080 --> 00:46:11.800
No, it wasn't even in my mind's eye. I don't have much of a mind's eye, actually. You'd

00:46:11.800 --> 00:46:14.920
think artists have. I don't know. I don't seem to. It was here.

00:46:14.920 --> 00:46:15.800
In your heart.

00:46:15.800 --> 00:46:22.840
I owned it. Put it that way. I got it. I grokked it. You remember that word from Heinlein?

00:46:22.840 --> 00:46:23.080
Sure.

00:46:23.080 --> 00:46:24.120
I grokked it. Yeah.

00:46:24.120 --> 00:46:25.400
Stranger in a strange land.

00:46:25.400 --> 00:46:34.440
Yeah, yeah, so I got it and bingo, done. And then quite some time after that I did get to fly it

00:46:34.440 --> 00:46:41.560
and photograph it and so on and so forth and that was fun. But this was the lesson in seeing because

00:46:41.560 --> 00:46:50.040
it was a totally new kind of seeing. You had to let go of the normal expectations and everything

00:46:50.040 --> 00:46:54.840
and it was through frustration, but the seeing was huge.

00:46:54.840 --> 00:47:02.520
It was like a step in consciousness and how things work and becoming familiar.

00:47:02.520 --> 00:47:09.320
And it's not different than the story about the Walmart at the end of the book.

00:47:09.320 --> 00:47:11.160
It's not different, really.

00:47:11.160 --> 00:47:16.520
So what I'm trying to say is that one good way for me now,

00:47:17.160 --> 00:47:26.280
looking at the last 60 years, since I was 20, the last 60 years, what has happened to seeing?

00:47:26.280 --> 00:47:31.800
It's been a tool. I've been using it. I've been struggling with it. And we're not done.

00:47:31.800 --> 00:47:37.960
I'm not done. I can't speak for anybody else. But I know I'm not done.

00:47:37.960 --> 00:47:39.320
Pete There is no done.

00:47:39.320 --> 00:47:41.080
David This is a wonderful tool.

00:47:41.080 --> 00:47:44.040
Pete I often quote St. Teresa of Avila. She said,

00:47:44.040 --> 00:47:47.340
but it appears that the Lord Himself is on the journey.

00:47:47.340 --> 00:47:49.580
(laughing)

00:47:49.580 --> 00:47:53.080
So did you end up living in the bindu for a while?

00:47:53.080 --> 00:47:53.920
- I did, I did.

00:47:53.920 --> 00:47:56.940
- And what did you experience?

00:47:56.940 --> 00:48:00.440
- That is one of the more difficult questions

00:48:00.440 --> 00:48:03.720
I've tried hard to answer it.

00:48:03.720 --> 00:48:08.120
I guess a lot of the time I lived in there,

00:48:08.120 --> 00:48:12.280
I mean, I slept in there, I meditated a lot in there,

00:48:12.280 --> 00:48:13.280
I ate in there.

00:48:13.280 --> 00:48:21.920
For one thing, it is now and was immediately after very difficult to remember in the sense

00:48:21.920 --> 00:48:29.360
that what was experienced is not accessible to memory.

00:48:29.360 --> 00:48:38.520
Memory is about relative changing things, events, occurrences, material things, feelings,

00:48:38.520 --> 00:48:40.880
emotions, all that.

00:48:40.880 --> 00:48:46.280
And we have memories, we store them, and so all that information gets stored and we can

00:48:46.280 --> 00:48:47.780
access it.

00:48:47.780 --> 00:48:55.040
What I can honestly say is I remember that I did it, but I'm not surprised now that I

00:48:55.040 --> 00:49:02.040
don't remember the essence of the experience any more than I remember the essence of the

00:49:02.040 --> 00:49:05.240
experience of drowning.

00:49:05.240 --> 00:49:07.560
Because it's too transcendental.

00:49:07.560 --> 00:49:09.440
It's just beyond.

00:49:09.440 --> 00:49:10.840
There's nothing to grab onto.

00:49:10.840 --> 00:49:12.640
No, there's nothing.

00:49:12.640 --> 00:49:15.040
The intellect can't get a hold of it.

00:49:15.040 --> 00:49:16.880
Nothing can get a hold of it.

00:49:16.880 --> 00:49:20.240
And yet, of course, it's so attractive.

00:49:20.240 --> 00:49:25.000
And if there was anything you wanted to see, it would be that, wouldn't it?

00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:26.520
I mean, what is it?

00:49:26.520 --> 00:49:30.680
It's love with a capital L. It's absolute.

00:49:30.680 --> 00:49:37.560
It's compassion with a capital C. It's bliss with a capital B. It's being, it's you know,

00:49:37.560 --> 00:49:43.000
da da da da da, all these words we use which are just pointers, you know, language just

00:49:43.000 --> 00:49:51.360
won't take us there. I keep working, I keep painting, I keep drawing, I keep making things,

00:49:51.360 --> 00:49:56.680
now photographs and so forth, or writing or whatever, I keep doing those things. Do I

00:49:56.680 --> 00:50:03.320
hope that at some point it'll work? I don't think I do. I don't think I'm that foolish

00:50:03.320 --> 00:50:06.600
anymore. I think I know full well that it's never going to

00:50:06.600 --> 00:50:11.080
work. But doing it keeps my attention in the right place.

00:50:11.080 --> 00:50:12.680
It's a matter of discipline.

00:50:12.680 --> 00:50:17.120
I work if you mean, you're going to end up at some terminus point

00:50:17.120 --> 00:50:19.960
where you can sort of kick up your heels and rest on your

00:50:19.960 --> 00:50:22.560
laurels or something. I don't think there is such a place. I

00:50:22.560 --> 00:50:25.400
think that it's not the way the universe works.

00:50:25.400 --> 00:50:29.560
I think you're right. I think you're right. Does this thing

00:50:29.560 --> 00:50:36.200
about seeing make sense to you. I'm just curious, Rick. 700? How many people?

00:50:36.200 --> 00:50:37.560
Almost 700.

00:50:37.560 --> 00:50:41.760
700. Why do you do that? Why do you do that?

00:50:41.760 --> 00:50:45.800
Sometimes people say that you say, wow, you've been doing so much all these

00:50:45.800 --> 00:50:50.040
years. And I think have I been doing anything? It happens. Yeah.

00:50:50.040 --> 00:50:54.920
It happens. That's the process. But there must be some

00:50:55.760 --> 00:50:57.760
It's just a natural inclination.

00:50:57.760 --> 00:50:58.260
Good feeling.

00:50:58.260 --> 00:51:01.760
Have you ever read Suzanne Siegel's book, Collision with the Infinite?

00:51:01.760 --> 00:51:02.260
No.

00:51:02.260 --> 00:51:03.260
Beautiful book.

00:51:03.260 --> 00:51:06.760
Anyway, her mantra was, "Do the next obvious thing."

00:51:06.760 --> 00:51:12.760
And she was operating in a very interesting state of, you know, cosmic consciousness or something.

00:51:12.760 --> 00:51:18.260
But that became the way she lived life, without a whole lot of foresight or planning or anything.

00:51:18.260 --> 00:51:21.260
But it was always obvious what the next thing should be.

00:51:21.260 --> 00:51:23.260
And she just kept following those impulses.

00:51:23.260 --> 00:51:23.760
Yeah.

00:51:23.760 --> 00:51:24.260
Yeah.

00:51:24.760 --> 00:51:31.760
These interviews are kind of like smorgasbords, you can't eat everything but you sample a little of this and a little of that.

00:51:31.760 --> 00:51:45.760
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.

00:51:45.760 --> 00:51:49.280
I think today we're going to see some of those photographs, but not any of your paintings

00:51:49.280 --> 00:51:50.680
perhaps.

00:51:50.680 --> 00:51:56.120
We had this thought that we could play a 20-minute slideshow of some of these photos you've taken

00:51:56.120 --> 00:51:58.800
out there while we continue to talk about things.

00:51:58.800 --> 00:52:00.760
So do you think this would be a good time to do that?

00:52:00.760 --> 00:52:02.280
That's fine, sure.

00:52:02.280 --> 00:52:05.720
Let me say a little bit about what's in that slideshow.

00:52:05.720 --> 00:52:13.000
I think there's 150 somewhere, near 40, 50, something like that, different images.

00:52:13.000 --> 00:52:18.840
And they are organized according to what I tend to think of as events.

00:52:18.840 --> 00:52:19.920
And what is an event?

00:52:19.920 --> 00:52:26.600
An event may be the sun rising and illuminating a certain cloud in a certain way, or the sun

00:52:26.600 --> 00:52:33.080
setting in a certain way, or the moon rising, or this or that, or a storm dropping a load

00:52:33.080 --> 00:52:34.080
of snow.

00:52:34.080 --> 00:52:37.080
Those are events, okay, photographic events.

00:52:37.080 --> 00:52:45.160
So there are events and each event is separated by about two seconds of black in the slideshow.

00:52:45.160 --> 00:52:51.320
And there may be three images to an event or five or eleven or whatever.

00:52:51.320 --> 00:52:56.920
And generally the events are shot from one place, maybe a changed focal length or something

00:52:56.920 --> 00:53:04.840
or even lenses, time maybe five seconds between them or maybe it's ten minutes or whatever,

00:53:04.840 --> 00:53:06.120
something like that.

00:53:06.120 --> 00:53:13.480
And there's a few that are taken across the horizon, maybe they get as much as 90, 100

00:53:13.480 --> 00:53:21.360
degrees, 120 degrees of view, ding, ding, ding, ding, over just 5, 10 seconds, something like

00:53:21.360 --> 00:53:22.360
that.

00:53:22.360 --> 00:53:27.480
So those are what are there, and they just fade from one to the next, and then another

00:53:27.480 --> 00:53:32.520
group, and then, and the groups are organized.

00:53:32.520 --> 00:53:40.120
They occur from end of December of '22 to May of '23, their recent.

00:53:40.120 --> 00:53:46.440
Long hard winter, coldest winter that many people remember in the area, minus 10 degree

00:53:46.440 --> 00:53:49.560
type stuff, a bunch of that.

00:53:49.560 --> 00:54:00.080
And then they start on this slideshow pre-dawn, dawn or sunrise, morning, afternoon, evening,

00:54:00.080 --> 00:54:02.040
sunset and post-sunset.

00:54:02.040 --> 00:54:06.720
So it's also the cycle of a day, but they are taken from many different days.

00:54:06.720 --> 00:54:10.640
So that's the organizing principle behind them.

00:54:10.640 --> 00:54:13.180
Okay, so we'll play that now.

00:54:13.180 --> 00:54:16.560
Those on the live stream won't see it, but the permanent recording will have that in

00:54:16.560 --> 00:54:20.240
there, and we'll just keep talking while that plays.

00:54:20.240 --> 00:54:25.640
So you lived up there, you've lived up there a lot, and not just in the nice weather, you

00:54:25.640 --> 00:54:29.880
just mentioned 10 below zero, you're living in some kind of a funky old converted school

00:54:29.880 --> 00:54:31.640
bus or something.

00:54:31.640 --> 00:54:36.640
I had a funky converted school bus in the end of the 60s.

00:54:36.640 --> 00:54:40.080
Before that, I lived in deserted ranch houses

00:54:40.080 --> 00:54:43.480
that had been deserted for many, many years

00:54:43.480 --> 00:54:47.680
and maybe had a few windows out, which was convenient.

00:54:47.680 --> 00:54:50.400
So I've sort of scaled up.

00:54:50.400 --> 00:54:52.840
I had two school buses converted to,

00:54:52.840 --> 00:54:53.920
and they worked well

00:54:53.920 --> 00:54:56.320
because they're very high off the ground.

00:54:56.320 --> 00:54:58.320
I could get them anywhere.

00:54:58.320 --> 00:55:00.360
I could get them wherever I needed.

00:55:00.360 --> 00:55:03.580
And then I designed actually a little trailer

00:55:03.580 --> 00:55:07.700
with a lot of glass and just 90 square feet

00:55:07.700 --> 00:55:11.280
and a work table and a wood stove over here

00:55:11.280 --> 00:55:15.380
and a bed here and done.

00:55:15.380 --> 00:55:19.460
And that connects onto a four wheel drive rig

00:55:19.460 --> 00:55:23.180
and I can take that anywhere, almost anywhere.

00:55:23.180 --> 00:55:25.100
Certainly where I need to go.

00:55:25.100 --> 00:55:26.300
- Nice.

00:55:26.300 --> 00:55:28.140
I don't know if this is your usual routine,

00:55:28.140 --> 00:55:29.820
but there were periods of time out there

00:55:29.820 --> 00:55:32.140
where you were waking up at four in the morning,

00:55:32.140 --> 00:55:33.620
meditating till noon.

00:55:33.620 --> 00:55:35.660
So you're doing like eight hours of meditation,

00:55:35.660 --> 00:55:37.220
and then you'd obviously eat and stuff,

00:55:37.220 --> 00:55:38.820
and then you'd spend the whole afternoon

00:55:38.820 --> 00:55:40.820
until dark painting,

00:55:40.820 --> 00:55:44.820
and then go to bed when the sun set or when it got dark.

00:55:44.820 --> 00:55:46.640
And that was your routine.

00:55:46.640 --> 00:55:47.820
One thing I was wondering,

00:55:47.820 --> 00:55:50.200
you and I have both done formal courses

00:55:50.200 --> 00:55:51.900
where you do a lot of meditating,

00:55:51.900 --> 00:55:54.140
and you can tend to get a little loopy,

00:55:54.140 --> 00:55:57.100
a little crazy when you're doing that much meditation,

00:55:57.100 --> 00:55:59.140
especially if you're in isolation,

00:55:59.140 --> 00:56:01.700
you have no kind of stimulation or integration.

00:56:01.700 --> 00:56:04.180
I mean, did that tendency afflict you at all,

00:56:04.180 --> 00:56:07.700
or did you remain kind of clear and coherent?

00:56:07.700 --> 00:56:11.060
- You know, I never felt loopy.

00:56:11.060 --> 00:56:13.460
Now, other people might disagree.

00:56:13.460 --> 00:56:15.780
They might say, "Hey, man, what?

00:56:15.780 --> 00:56:16.700
"You're not loopy."

00:56:16.700 --> 00:56:19.860
No, but I never felt out of control.

00:56:19.860 --> 00:56:23.660
I never felt like I wasn't doing it the right thing.

00:56:23.660 --> 00:56:25.220
I never lost--

00:56:25.220 --> 00:56:27.780
- Never got real spacey or anything like that?

00:56:27.780 --> 00:56:29.500
I don't think so.

00:56:29.500 --> 00:56:30.660
Spacey...

00:56:30.660 --> 00:56:32.260
You don't even know Spacey, huh?

00:56:32.260 --> 00:56:37.060
I guess maybe I'm old with Spacey. I don't know.

00:56:37.060 --> 00:56:38.620
It worked for me.

00:56:38.620 --> 00:56:43.820
Yeah, that's cool. No, it's not a major point. I'm just curious because I've done some long things like that.

00:56:43.820 --> 00:56:45.420
I get a little nutty.

00:56:45.420 --> 00:56:47.540
Maybe it's just the way I'm wired

00:56:47.540 --> 00:56:50.740
and need a bit more integration and stuff.

00:56:50.740 --> 00:56:54.040
Well, I would purify like crazy.

00:56:54.040 --> 00:56:55.460
I would know that.

00:56:55.460 --> 00:57:02.540
I would have strong emotions, I would have physical things, all kinds of, especially

00:57:02.540 --> 00:57:04.660
way back when.

00:57:04.660 --> 00:57:06.180
Not so much now.

00:57:06.180 --> 00:57:07.580
But I would do that.

00:57:07.580 --> 00:57:10.180
But I knew what that was.

00:57:10.180 --> 00:57:11.940
It didn't bother me.

00:57:11.940 --> 00:57:16.500
There was one cool story in your book where you'd been living in this ramshackle abandoned

00:57:16.500 --> 00:57:20.940
ranch house and you'd been there quite a while and all of a sudden one day you discovered

00:57:20.940 --> 00:57:25.100
a book sitting on a dresser or something in an obvious place where you probably were in

00:57:25.100 --> 00:57:30.300
that room a hundred times, but you'd never seen the book, and there it was. It was this green book.

00:57:30.300 --> 00:57:38.220
Well, I opened it to a chapter, and I just stood there and read the whole chapter, because the

00:57:38.220 --> 00:57:46.620
chapter was about human beings relating to and living with, in harmony with, rattlesnakes. Okay,

00:57:47.340 --> 00:57:50.620
Now, I have a long history with rattlesnakes.

00:57:50.620 --> 00:57:59.180
When I was 10 years old, my parents, the dog, and my sister all went out to Arizona from upstate New

00:57:59.180 --> 00:58:09.260
York in a 1948 Studebaker and went to a dude ranch. And on the dude ranch, we were riding on horseback,

00:58:09.260 --> 00:58:19.180
all of us with some other dudes at the time. And we were down off the horses and somebody

00:58:19.180 --> 00:58:25.700
saw a rattlesnake. One of the dudes saw a rattlesnake and called everybody's attention.

00:58:25.700 --> 00:58:31.580
I went over and saw the rattlesnake just from here to there, not far away. And I was looking

00:58:31.580 --> 00:58:38.620
at it and this fellow, this man, picked up a rock about this big, lifted it up above his

00:58:38.620 --> 00:58:46.300
head and slammed it down on the rattlesnake. And at 10 years old, that was the most violent,

00:58:46.300 --> 00:58:54.020
destructive thing I had ever experienced. It completely blew me away. I have never forgotten,

00:58:54.020 --> 00:59:00.700
even now I can feel the emotion. And it made an enormous impact. It seemed so wrong, such

00:59:00.700 --> 00:59:08.780
a violation. I yelled, I cried, I said, "Why? It's not doing anything to any..." and on and on and on.

00:59:08.780 --> 00:59:21.260
Okay, fast forward, 1960-something, early one, two, probably. Vietnam is going on and I'm dealing with

00:59:21.260 --> 00:59:28.700
the draft board. I think I'm a conscientious objector and I don't want to go. I'll act as a

00:59:28.700 --> 00:59:35.980
medic, okay fine, but I'm not gonna fight and I'm not gonna destroy life. And in the summers,

00:59:35.980 --> 00:59:44.620
I work on lookout towers, which was so far out. I would get paid to be there looking all day,

00:59:44.620 --> 00:59:52.220
all night, all the time, looking out into the distance. Talk about inner space. I mean, it was

00:59:52.220 --> 01:00:01.180
so great. I love that. So I'm in that place where I have to write a paper stating my beliefs that

01:00:01.180 --> 01:00:07.020
goes to the government and they critique it and then there's a hearing and all that stuff. So I'm

01:00:07.020 --> 01:00:11.900
writing that paper and that's somewhere and I think, "Are you sure?" You know, I'm trying to

01:00:11.900 --> 01:00:19.580
make sure I'm being honest and it's not just chicken shit or this or that. So I'm out walking

01:00:19.580 --> 01:00:25.220
on a road and a rattlesnake comes across the road and I see the rattlesnake and what do

01:00:25.220 --> 01:00:29.260
you do when you work for the Forest Service and you see a rattlesnake if you're anybody

01:00:29.260 --> 01:00:41.700
is you kill it. So I picked up a rock and I killed it. And I knew, I just knew I couldn't

01:00:41.700 --> 01:00:47.820
do it. I couldn't go to Vietnam, I couldn't do that. And I felt terrible. As you can tell

01:00:47.820 --> 01:00:54.940
I still do. It was a great mistake. It was one of those mistakes. I thought I had to prove what I

01:00:54.940 --> 01:01:04.140
knew and I didn't have to. So the end of that story was they had the hearing, they wrote me back a

01:01:04.140 --> 01:01:09.020
paper which was a report on the hearing and they quoted me and said things I didn't even have the

01:01:09.020 --> 01:01:13.500
vocabulary. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. They just made something up

01:01:14.140 --> 01:01:18.860
And I sent him all my papers back. I said you people are not being honest

01:01:18.860 --> 01:01:23.420
And I never said this i'm not gonna deal with you ever again

01:01:23.420 --> 01:01:27.900
I never heard from him again. That was it. So that was that story

01:01:27.900 --> 01:01:30.780
And then there were other stories phil and I

01:01:30.780 --> 01:01:38.700
Phil and I still love you can see something about ralph then one time phil and I had first light expeditions

01:01:38.700 --> 01:01:43.180
I don't know if you remember that I remember that name one-off thing. Yeah, it was a cool deal

01:01:43.580 --> 01:01:50.860
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

01:01:50.860 --> 01:01:56.380
On one occasion, I don't know how many maybe 10 12 people max

01:01:56.380 --> 01:02:00.240
We're all down and there's a rattlesnake small one rattlesnake

01:02:00.240 --> 01:02:05.740
And everybody is in a circle around this rattlesnake and this rattlesnake coils

01:02:05.740 --> 01:02:12.780
And I said to people don't mind it. It's all right. I just have positive thoughts. I just you know said

01:02:13.340 --> 01:02:15.080
Just being cool.

01:02:15.080 --> 01:02:19.520
And the rattlesnake came right over to me,

01:02:19.520 --> 01:02:24.520
curled around my foot, and just then, just, wait, that was it.

01:02:24.520 --> 01:02:25.560
- Took a nap.

01:02:25.560 --> 01:02:26.560
- Yeah, took a nap.

01:02:26.560 --> 01:02:32.600
That was after the event in the story.

01:02:32.600 --> 01:02:33.440
That was after.

01:02:33.440 --> 01:02:36.600
But the event I told you about on the lookout tower,

01:02:36.600 --> 01:02:38.720
that was before the event in the story.

01:02:38.720 --> 01:02:41.120
So in the story, I picked this up.

01:02:41.120 --> 01:02:44.520
You can imagine I just stood there, transfixed,

01:02:44.520 --> 01:02:46.760
read this whole chapter, and I knew it.

01:02:46.760 --> 01:02:47.760
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:02:47.760 --> 01:02:50.480
And it talked about the Hopi, it talked about handling,

01:02:50.480 --> 01:02:52.560
it talked about everything, right.

01:02:52.560 --> 01:02:57.560
So I put the book down and I went to make my lunch.

01:02:57.560 --> 01:03:00.800
And in the process, I had to go get some water.

01:03:00.800 --> 01:03:03.200
I had to go out the back door, out the stoop,

01:03:03.200 --> 01:03:06.360
which was this wide, and a six-inch drop onto the ground.

01:03:06.360 --> 01:03:07.520
I had barefoot.

01:03:07.520 --> 01:03:10.040
I walked out, and as I walked off,

01:03:10.040 --> 01:03:18.040
moving fast with a bucket for water, I stepped on something and instantly I knew and I turned around

01:03:18.040 --> 01:03:23.480
and it was a big rattler. I mean a big one. Was your foot just on and off it and you were past it?

01:03:23.480 --> 01:03:29.560
On and off. I'm moving. Yeah, I just put weight on it and I turned around and I saw it. It was white,

01:03:29.560 --> 01:03:34.840
it was that old, it was practically white and I said, "Boy, I hope I didn't hurt you, your ribs."

01:03:35.560 --> 01:03:41.360
And it coiled up slowly, no buzzing, and just looked at me.

01:03:41.360 --> 01:03:46.680
I looked at it, and I just said, "Okay, you know, you're here.

01:03:46.680 --> 01:03:48.240
I didn't know you were here.

01:03:48.240 --> 01:03:49.760
I gotta go get my water.

01:03:49.760 --> 01:03:50.760
You're welcome."

01:03:50.760 --> 01:03:56.160
Now, I know why there's no mice around here, and no pack rats.

01:03:56.160 --> 01:03:58.320
And that was it.

01:03:58.320 --> 01:04:04.560
And then, within the next few days, 11 rattlesnakes showed up.

01:04:04.560 --> 01:04:10.520
And they had been living all in the rocks, the rock foundation of this old building,

01:04:10.520 --> 01:04:14.600
around the well, there was a water tower and all sorts of things.

01:04:14.600 --> 01:04:18.000
And we just got on fine thereafter.

01:04:18.000 --> 01:04:22.320
So the word got around, "Hey, this guy's okay, he's not going to kill us."

01:04:22.320 --> 01:04:26.040
Yeah, and I would go out every now and then.

01:04:26.040 --> 01:04:33.040
Normally I would paint from up in the second floor, there was a window gone, no frame, no

01:04:33.040 --> 01:04:34.040
nothing.

01:04:34.040 --> 01:04:40.000
porch underneath it. So I would sit there or have my big boards up there and I'd look

01:04:40.000 --> 01:04:44.160
east, it was just what I wanted, I could see the sky, the clouds, everything, and I would

01:04:44.160 --> 01:04:50.240
paint there all the time. Every now and then I'd set up a table out in the field so I could

01:04:50.240 --> 01:04:56.560
see straight up and then I would paint. And I'd move around and when I'd do that, I'd

01:04:56.560 --> 01:05:04.480
hear a loose rattle, just a loose rattle. And I look at it, "Oh yeah, okay, cool, go!" And it would go.

01:05:04.480 --> 01:05:12.000
And then I would just go back to work. I just wanted to make sure I knew not to step on it,

01:05:12.000 --> 01:05:19.680
I think. And it would just go. And so we just lived with each other, then quite happily. And

01:05:19.680 --> 01:05:26.400
This event occurred within 20 minutes of my finishing that chapter. I thought boy, that's funny

01:05:26.400 --> 01:05:28.160
What kind of book is this anyway?

01:05:28.160 --> 01:05:33.840
and I looked I looked at the book and I it's green and it had just like the book off some old

01:05:33.840 --> 01:05:38.000
Bookshelf or something or used book story, you know, I opened it

01:05:38.000 --> 01:05:44.000
I couldn't remember the title but I looked in and the the little page there was a publisher and I think it was

01:05:44.000 --> 01:05:49.040
1922 that's in that struck me and that convinced me it was real and then

01:05:49.520 --> 01:05:54.880
The next day I thought, "Geez, that was strange, you know. I wonder what else is in that book."

01:05:54.880 --> 01:05:59.920
So I go and get it, and I sit down on the... there was an old couch in there,

01:05:59.920 --> 01:06:07.600
leftover from the 1910s or something. I sit down and I open up the book, and then I start reading

01:06:07.600 --> 01:06:14.960
another chapter. And that chapter, Rick describes pranayama as you and I understand it.

01:06:15.680 --> 01:06:23.200
gave instructions for breathing and it said why to do it and what the benefit would be for meditation

01:06:23.200 --> 01:06:28.960
and mind you I'm meditating eight hours a day I don't do any Hatha yoga asana I don't do any

01:06:28.960 --> 01:06:37.040
pranayama nothing just sit so I started doing that bingo you know meditation is clear and everything

01:06:37.040 --> 01:06:45.040
is great. And I think, man, what about that book? What kind of book would have that all

01:06:45.040 --> 01:06:50.680
about rattlesnakes and then this thing about meditation in it? Well, I got to look again.

01:06:50.680 --> 01:06:56.000
And I looked for the book. I never found the book. I never saw it. Nobody was here in the

01:06:56.000 --> 01:07:01.800
middle of nowhere. Nobody's around. Nobody came. Nobody. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. No

01:07:01.800 --> 01:07:02.840
- No way. - That's great.

01:07:02.840 --> 01:07:04.200
- No way.

01:07:04.200 --> 01:07:09.200
So now, that was 1967 or something, I don't know,

01:07:09.200 --> 01:07:12.680
maybe, I don't know, somewhere back there.

01:07:12.680 --> 01:07:14.600
- What year did you learn to meditate?

01:07:14.600 --> 01:07:17.560
- '66, I think it was.

01:07:17.560 --> 01:07:20.800
Somebody just came back off of a course in India.

01:07:20.800 --> 01:07:26.760
Anyway, I never knew, but now I hear so many stories

01:07:27.560 --> 01:07:32.080
from so many people of similar occurrences.

01:07:32.080 --> 01:07:36.360
And the fact that there was a physical material book

01:07:36.360 --> 01:07:41.360
is what makes this so weird for me as a materialist.

01:07:41.360 --> 01:07:44.520
And I have a good bit of scientific training

01:07:44.520 --> 01:07:46.360
in me too, with me.

01:07:46.360 --> 01:07:47.560
So it's that.

01:07:47.560 --> 01:07:51.760
If I had had that input come abstractly, you know,

01:07:51.760 --> 01:07:55.840
into my mind, like a thought or a stream or a series,

01:07:55.840 --> 01:07:58.320
I wouldn't be that surprised, would I?

01:07:58.320 --> 01:07:59.400
No, I wouldn't.

01:07:59.400 --> 01:08:00.940
But it was that it was a book.

01:08:00.940 --> 01:08:02.080
(laughing)

01:08:02.080 --> 01:08:04.720
It was material, and then it disappeared.

01:08:04.720 --> 01:08:06.320
That is hard.

01:08:06.320 --> 01:08:09.480
But no, I'm not surprised.

01:08:09.480 --> 01:08:12.360
Truthfully, I think that there've been a lot of things

01:08:12.360 --> 01:08:17.240
that I now can attribute to my good fortune

01:08:17.240 --> 01:08:19.920
of being taken care of.

01:08:19.920 --> 01:08:22.440
- Yeah, I feel that way too.

01:08:22.440 --> 01:08:24.800
There's those cartoons of somebody

01:08:24.800 --> 01:08:28.760
goes through life with this cloud right over his head raining on him, but it's not raining

01:08:28.760 --> 01:08:34.440
on everybody else. Songs like "Born Under a Bad Sign", "If It Wasn't for Bad Luck I Wouldn't

01:08:34.440 --> 01:08:39.160
Have No Luck at All", and then there's positive songs and the opposites of those kinds of

01:08:39.160 --> 01:08:44.120
images and I feel like I've lived them both. I had the rain cloud thing during some of

01:08:44.120 --> 01:08:50.440
my younger years and then cloud cleared up and now it's a constant reminder of the presence

01:08:50.440 --> 01:08:55.320
of God or Mother Divine or Divine Intelligence or something.

01:08:55.320 --> 01:08:57.960
And there's some more stories like this in your book too.

01:08:57.960 --> 01:09:04.680
I don't see it as miraculous because miraculous implies that it's unusual or there's no explanation

01:09:04.680 --> 01:09:11.600
for it or anything else, but I see it as almost routine and matter of fact, yet profound,

01:09:11.600 --> 01:09:16.840
that there's just so many beautiful, I don't want to use the word coincidence either because

01:09:16.840 --> 01:09:18.160
that also seems random.

01:09:18.160 --> 01:09:19.160
No, that's mathematics.

01:09:19.160 --> 01:09:21.160
No, it's not coincidence.

01:09:21.160 --> 01:09:23.160
It's the divine in plain sight.

01:09:23.160 --> 01:09:25.160
Serendipity or something, yeah.

01:09:25.160 --> 01:09:27.160
Serendipity, synchronicity.

01:09:27.160 --> 01:09:33.160
It's the divine manifest playing an obvious role in the orchestration of our lives.

01:09:33.160 --> 01:09:35.160
It's beautiful.

01:09:35.160 --> 01:09:37.160
Very profound.

01:09:37.160 --> 01:09:39.160
And it just gets better and better.

01:09:39.160 --> 01:09:41.160
And it gets better and better.

01:09:41.160 --> 01:09:43.160
As we grow, as we become more open,

01:09:43.160 --> 01:09:45.160
as we're more able to receive that,

01:09:45.160 --> 01:09:47.160
there's more available.

01:09:47.160 --> 01:09:51.000
It just comes more. The limitations are ours.

01:09:51.000 --> 01:09:56.680
Right. And I think that's by extension, by extrapolation, that's probably how Jesus could

01:09:56.680 --> 01:10:00.920
walk on water or manifest loaves and fishes if he actually did those things. It just,

01:10:00.920 --> 01:10:03.720
it can reach a point at which it becomes that manifest.

01:10:03.720 --> 01:10:05.080
Yeah, definitely.

01:10:05.080 --> 01:10:09.320
A question came in from somebody here. Let me just read it.

01:10:09.320 --> 01:10:15.960
You have had many amazing life experiences that took imagination, creativity, courage,

01:10:15.960 --> 01:10:21.200
and thinking outside the box, but you've also spent a great deal of time going deep within

01:10:21.200 --> 01:10:24.920
consciousness. How have those influenced each other?

01:10:24.920 --> 01:10:32.920
If I understand the question properly, ever since I've been a little kid, I've been a

01:10:32.920 --> 01:10:41.280
little bit out of the box. I didn't fit anywhere as a little kid. I did fit in nature. And

01:10:41.280 --> 01:10:43.840
God bless my mother and father.

01:10:43.840 --> 01:10:51.240
They bought 20 acres of "useless land" that had a swamp, a little woods, a field, and a

01:10:51.240 --> 01:10:52.360
creek.

01:10:52.360 --> 01:10:59.000
And all we did was go out there on Saturdays or Sundays and have canned spaghetti and let

01:10:59.000 --> 01:11:01.280
Billy wander around.

01:11:01.280 --> 01:11:03.020
And that was life for me.

01:11:03.020 --> 01:11:05.200
That was where I lived life.

01:11:05.200 --> 01:11:15.380
So there was some of that, but it's really only after I learned tools for accessing the

01:11:15.380 --> 01:11:22.540
deeper levels of consciousness, if you will, that the creativity and the imagination and

01:11:22.540 --> 01:11:28.800
the out-of-the-boxness became possible in a systematic way.

01:11:28.800 --> 01:11:34.820
There was a time I remember in the mid-80s, I think, when I said, "You know what?

01:11:34.820 --> 01:11:38.520
You gotta stop living by your intellect, Bill.

01:11:38.520 --> 01:11:40.620
You go back and start making art.

01:11:40.620 --> 01:11:45.140
I had done Westbridge Research Group, what I was talking about earlier.

01:11:45.140 --> 01:11:50.140
You gotta go back and do art because that will force you to live by intuition, like the woman

01:11:50.140 --> 01:11:56.740
you were referring to, who was taking the next opportunity instead of rationally thinking

01:11:56.740 --> 01:11:59.220
and planning and so forth.

01:11:59.220 --> 01:12:06.820
And that was only possible and became more and more possible because of deep meditation

01:12:06.820 --> 01:12:10.540
and other spiritual practices.

01:12:10.540 --> 01:12:13.140
That's where my discipline has always been.

01:12:13.140 --> 01:12:14.500
Those have been disciplined.

01:12:14.500 --> 01:12:17.020
I don't miss.

01:12:17.020 --> 01:12:18.260
I do it.

01:12:18.260 --> 01:12:24.460
And then all this other stuff comes and goes, and I go after it with all four feet.

01:12:24.460 --> 01:12:25.460
I haven't missed either.

01:12:25.460 --> 01:12:27.560
I haven't missed a meditation since I learned.

01:12:27.560 --> 01:12:31.240
But the word discipline for many people conjures up unpleasantness.

01:12:31.240 --> 01:12:36.880
I've spoken to many people for whom meditation is a chore and it's painful and it takes great

01:12:36.880 --> 01:12:42.520
self-discipline or control to sit there for the allotted time.

01:12:42.520 --> 01:12:47.720
And I think you and I are both fortunate to have learned a practice that is actually enjoyable

01:12:47.720 --> 01:12:52.200
that you can look forward to and that even if you're tired or stressed out by the day's

01:12:52.200 --> 01:12:56.280
activity it doesn't add a new stressful experience to your day.

01:12:56.280 --> 01:13:01.760
actually provides a refreshment and respite from what you've been going through.

01:13:01.760 --> 01:13:05.200
So I just want to put that out there that meditation isn't necessary.

01:13:05.200 --> 01:13:07.720
I mean, many people I speak to say, "Oh, I tried it.

01:13:07.720 --> 01:13:08.720
I can't do it.

01:13:08.720 --> 01:13:11.520
My mind wanders and I don't enjoy it."

01:13:11.520 --> 01:13:17.440
But don't define all kinds of meditation with the very same word because just like the word

01:13:17.440 --> 01:13:21.800
liquid, there's a lot of different liquids represented by that word and some of them

01:13:21.800 --> 01:13:23.600
will kill you, some of them will nourish you.

01:13:23.600 --> 01:13:28.200
Yeah, you go to a library and you pick up a book and you open it up and you think, "Oh

01:13:28.200 --> 01:13:29.760
my God, this is terrible."

01:13:29.760 --> 01:13:30.760
You throw it down.

01:13:30.760 --> 01:13:34.880
Does that mean you don't go to the library ever again?

01:13:34.880 --> 01:13:40.200
I don't know about you, but I tried one, two, three, four different kinds of meditation

01:13:40.200 --> 01:13:45.680
before I really found one that would work, which was TM.

01:13:45.680 --> 01:13:49.640
And I did Zen meditation and I did various things.

01:13:49.640 --> 01:13:54.080
And it's not that they're not good forms of meditation even.

01:13:54.080 --> 01:13:58.320
Yeah, I know people who have awakened through doing those kinds of practices like Adyashanti

01:13:58.320 --> 01:14:00.480
or Bob Harwood or various others.

01:14:00.480 --> 01:14:03.760
Yeah, it's just what fits.

01:14:03.760 --> 01:14:09.040
That's why I insist there's 8.05 trillion paths.

01:14:09.040 --> 01:14:10.040
Billion.

01:14:10.040 --> 01:14:12.360
Yeah, I mean, yeah.

01:14:12.360 --> 01:14:13.360
That's the account of the whole galaxy.

01:14:13.360 --> 01:14:14.360
Forget the trillion.

01:14:14.360 --> 01:14:15.360
Yeah.

01:14:15.360 --> 01:14:16.360
I don't know what a trillion is.

01:14:16.360 --> 01:14:20.520
A billion is the number of seconds in 35 years.

01:14:20.520 --> 01:14:23.240
That's pretty hard for me right there.

01:14:23.240 --> 01:14:25.040
That's a billion.

01:14:25.040 --> 01:14:26.280
- I would say to somebody,

01:14:26.280 --> 01:14:28.140
it's not like we're beating the TM drum here,

01:14:28.140 --> 01:14:29.800
but find something that works for you.

01:14:29.800 --> 01:14:32.040
And there is something, you'll find it.

01:14:32.040 --> 01:14:33.760
Seek and ye shall find, knock on the door,

01:14:33.760 --> 01:14:34.840
she'll be opened.

01:14:34.840 --> 01:14:37.120
- Yep, exactly, exactly.

01:14:37.120 --> 01:14:38.720
And don't be deterred.

01:14:38.720 --> 01:14:40.520
But then when you do find something,

01:14:40.520 --> 01:14:43.160
understand like all aspects of life,

01:14:43.160 --> 01:14:44.800
everything goes up and down.

01:14:44.800 --> 01:14:45.620
- Sure.

01:14:45.620 --> 01:14:49.040
Everything goes up and down and meditation is no exception

01:14:49.040 --> 01:14:52.280
because it is influenced by the condition

01:14:52.280 --> 01:14:54.880
of the physiology at that time,

01:14:54.880 --> 01:14:56.800
the condition of the environment

01:14:56.800 --> 01:14:59.140
and the impact the environment is having

01:14:59.140 --> 01:15:01.440
and the food that we've been eating and so on

01:15:01.440 --> 01:15:05.440
or whatever else we've taken into the system,

01:15:05.440 --> 01:15:06.720
whether it's what we're seeing

01:15:06.720 --> 01:15:09.340
or what we're eating or whatever.

01:15:09.340 --> 01:15:10.540
- Like you said, there were periods

01:15:10.540 --> 01:15:11.920
when you were doing a lot of meditation

01:15:11.920 --> 01:15:14.800
and all kinds of strong emotions would bubble up

01:15:14.800 --> 01:15:18.240
And one might conclude, "Oh, I must be doing it wrong.

01:15:18.240 --> 01:15:19.080
I don't like this.

01:15:19.080 --> 01:15:20.420
I don't want to be experiencing this."

01:15:20.420 --> 01:15:22.120
But that's actually part of the deal.

01:15:22.120 --> 01:15:24.200
If you're going to go deep like that,

01:15:24.200 --> 01:15:27.120
then there's going to be some release of-

01:15:27.120 --> 01:15:28.120
- House cleaning.

01:15:28.120 --> 01:15:31.600
- Yeah, deep seated, some scars, impressions, impurities,

01:15:31.600 --> 01:15:33.780
whatever, and you've got to weather those.

01:15:33.780 --> 01:15:35.360
- Absolutely.

01:15:35.360 --> 01:15:36.360
- But the nice thing about it,

01:15:36.360 --> 01:15:37.760
I use this analogy sometimes,

01:15:37.760 --> 01:15:41.520
is that if you drop a handful of mud into a glass of water,

01:15:41.520 --> 01:15:43.260
it totally muddies up the water.

01:15:43.260 --> 01:15:45.800
But if you drop a handful of mud into a swimming pool,

01:15:45.800 --> 01:15:49.120
or for that matter, an ocean, it just dissolves.

01:15:49.120 --> 01:15:51.020
So what we're talking about here is a state

01:15:51.020 --> 01:15:53.840
in which you can become unbounded and vast,

01:15:53.840 --> 01:15:55.660
and then in that unboundedness,

01:15:55.660 --> 01:15:58.660
something can dissolve, which would be very traumatic

01:15:58.660 --> 01:16:01.500
if your awareness was boxed in.

01:16:01.500 --> 01:16:02.700
But in that expanded state,

01:16:02.700 --> 01:16:05.180
it's just taken care of efficiently.

01:16:05.180 --> 01:16:07.300
- It's a very good, very nice.

01:16:07.300 --> 01:16:08.340
Yeah, yeah.

01:16:08.340 --> 01:16:10.980
And that leads to a good understanding

01:16:10.980 --> 01:16:19.180
of meditation techniques that are effective because while they do bring about purification

01:16:19.180 --> 01:16:25.940
which results in "bleh" could be discomfort, maybe not, could be pleasure, either way, but

01:16:25.940 --> 01:16:33.220
it does so in the context of an expanded consciousness or an expanded foundation and therefore we

01:16:33.220 --> 01:16:36.420
aren't really shaken around too badly.

01:16:36.420 --> 01:16:41.620
Right and in a way that's a built-in safety factor because you in general you don't encounter

01:16:41.620 --> 01:16:46.140
The heavy stuff until you have the capacity to deal with it true

01:16:46.140 --> 01:16:54.260
Yep, you've been teaching some meditation mamas type of meditation in prisons or something haven't you? Yeah, I did out in Oregon

01:16:54.260 --> 01:17:00.220
The town where I would go to get my groceries which had a Safeway in it

01:17:00.340 --> 01:17:06.580
It had a save way in three gas stations a general dollar and a prison

01:17:06.580 --> 01:17:11.780
And I've a couple thousand people

01:17:11.780 --> 01:17:13.100
so I

01:17:13.100 --> 01:17:18.180
started teaching in the prison and taught there for quite a number of years up until the

01:17:18.180 --> 01:17:23.320
Pandemic and then they didn't want to have people coming in because obvious reasons

01:17:23.320 --> 01:17:29.020
It was great fun. I gotta say I got a lot of personal satisfaction

01:17:30.100 --> 01:17:34.780
out of delivering a technique of meditation to people

01:17:34.780 --> 01:17:37.180
that worked for them.

01:17:37.180 --> 01:17:39.420
- Did it pretty much work for most of those guys?

01:17:39.420 --> 01:17:41.500
- It did, it worked very well.

01:17:41.500 --> 01:17:42.860
- Yeah, it was great.

01:17:42.860 --> 01:17:45.060
That's a whole subject in itself,

01:17:45.060 --> 01:17:47.180
prison system and rehabilitation and all.

01:17:47.180 --> 01:17:49.740
I mean, per capita, we have far more people in prison

01:17:49.740 --> 01:17:51.980
in the US than any other country does.

01:17:51.980 --> 01:17:54.300
And I interviewed a guy who was on death row

01:17:54.300 --> 01:17:57.800
for quite a while and eventually got forgiven or released.

01:17:57.800 --> 01:17:59.520
And it was horrific.

01:17:59.520 --> 01:18:05.920
He was just rotting in a cell with no fresh air, no adequate exercise, anything else.

01:18:05.920 --> 01:18:06.920
You're right.

01:18:06.920 --> 01:18:10.000
I got a taste of it as well.

01:18:10.000 --> 01:18:14.440
This was not maximum security, but still.

01:18:14.440 --> 01:18:16.480
I've done, you know, obviously a lot of meditating.

01:18:16.480 --> 01:18:18.720
I've also done a fair amount of camping.

01:18:18.720 --> 01:18:23.600
Not solitary like you, but Irene and I have, you know, during the 90s especially, we went

01:18:23.600 --> 01:18:27.640
camping just about every year for a month or more in the summer.

01:18:27.640 --> 01:18:33.240
And there is something about getting out in nature that settles your mind down.

01:18:33.240 --> 01:18:36.720
I remember coming back after one of those camping trips and I was standing in line at

01:18:36.720 --> 01:18:41.320
a restaurant here in Fairfield and someone looked at me and said, "You look like you've

01:18:41.320 --> 01:18:44.560
been doing something in a beautiful place."

01:18:44.560 --> 01:18:45.560
Something in my face.

01:18:45.560 --> 01:18:48.360
Maybe I had a suntan, I don't know.

01:18:48.360 --> 01:18:54.360
But it does transform your state of mind when you're out in nature like that for a while.

01:18:54.360 --> 01:18:59.400
And that plus all the meditation you did when you're out there in the desert, I imagine

01:18:59.400 --> 01:19:05.700
you must have gotten into states of deep silence that were quite remarkable, where even the

01:19:05.700 --> 01:19:10.160
slightest impulse of a thought must have been obvious to you.

01:19:10.160 --> 01:19:14.440
Your mind didn't have ten radio stations playing in at the same time.

01:19:14.440 --> 01:19:17.120
That happens, but that comes and goes.

01:19:17.120 --> 01:19:19.440
But everything settles down.

01:19:19.440 --> 01:19:22.760
I lose track of the days when I'm out there.

01:19:22.760 --> 01:19:28.160
I don't know what day it is, so often times I've tried to keep track and I often just

01:19:28.160 --> 01:19:29.620
lose track.

01:19:29.620 --> 01:19:33.460
But I always know when it's Sunday.

01:19:33.460 --> 01:19:42.200
And the reason I know when it's Sunday is because the background vibe becomes a little less.

01:19:42.200 --> 01:19:50.040
And the background vibe there is nothing compared to what it is when I go to Reno or Seattle

01:19:50.040 --> 01:19:52.700
or someplace, you know, travel.

01:19:52.700 --> 01:19:59.500
it's a whole different matter. But even out there, when you spend a bunch, and how much time, maybe

01:19:59.500 --> 01:20:06.780
it takes two, three weeks for me to settle down that way, and then you do get it. So you're saying

01:20:06.780 --> 01:20:12.300
that even though you're miles from anybody, however many miles away, there are people going to church,

01:20:12.300 --> 01:20:17.260
or taking the day off, just having a more relaxed day, and you can feel it out there. Yeah,

01:20:17.900 --> 01:20:30.620
Absolutely. Yeah. Interesting. We're in it together. There are 8.05 billion of us and there is no place

01:20:30.620 --> 01:20:40.220
on planet earth that is free from the human influence, meaning on the subtle level. No place,

01:20:40.220 --> 01:20:48.140
No place. More some places, less other places. Yeah. And for me, personally, going out where

01:20:48.140 --> 01:20:57.500
it's absolute minimum is a great tool. But for somebody else, going to New York is the right

01:20:57.500 --> 01:21:05.420
place to go. Because they're not concerned with... Concerned isn't the right word. Their path or

01:21:05.420 --> 01:21:13.180
So their tool is not to go deep into nature as we normally define nature.

01:21:13.180 --> 01:21:16.860
It might be to go deep into human nature.

01:21:16.860 --> 01:21:18.700
So where do you want to be?

01:21:18.700 --> 01:21:20.820
Where everyone is.

01:21:20.820 --> 01:21:21.820
Where do I want to be?

01:21:21.820 --> 01:21:25.660
Well, we could say everyone isn't, but it's not where everyone is.

01:21:25.660 --> 01:21:27.340
I'm not a hermit.

01:21:27.340 --> 01:21:30.460
It's where something else is.

01:21:30.460 --> 01:21:32.860
And what is the something else?

01:21:32.860 --> 01:21:34.820
You know, I'm not that sure.

01:21:34.820 --> 01:21:38.900
Is it the mountain out there, round mountain?

01:21:38.900 --> 01:21:42.300
Is it the light, the way the light changes?

01:21:42.300 --> 01:21:47.240
Is it the distance that goes 100 miles in every single direction?

01:21:47.240 --> 01:21:52.060
Is it the darkness where there is no light at night?

01:21:52.060 --> 01:21:53.860
No light, no human light.

01:21:53.860 --> 01:21:54.860
Must be beautiful stars.

01:21:54.860 --> 01:22:00.660
Oh yeah, Milky Way comes up over, you know, goes like that.

01:22:00.660 --> 01:22:02.020
And the silence.

01:22:02.020 --> 01:22:07.580
When the wind stops, wind makes noise in your ears, but there's nothing else.

01:22:07.580 --> 01:22:10.580
There's no trees, there's no leaves rattling.

01:22:10.580 --> 01:22:17.860
And when the wind just settles down, and then the best silence of all is when it snows, big

01:22:17.860 --> 01:22:21.620
flames just settles down.

01:22:21.620 --> 01:22:27.380
Those snowflakes absorb every possible sound.

01:22:27.380 --> 01:22:32.260
And that's when you hear your heart, you hear your blood, you hear all your internal things.

01:22:32.260 --> 01:22:34.260
And then you get past that too.

01:22:34.260 --> 01:22:37.860
But that's my favorite silence of all, when that happens.

01:22:37.860 --> 01:22:38.860
That's nice.

01:22:38.860 --> 01:22:42.220
You mentioned your son and you have four kids, I believe?

01:22:42.220 --> 01:22:44.620
Yes, two boys, two girls.

01:22:44.620 --> 01:22:48.900
Were you going out to the desert for months on end while you were married and the kids

01:22:48.900 --> 01:22:50.900
had that workout?

01:22:50.900 --> 01:22:52.740
You'd have to ask them.

01:22:52.740 --> 01:22:59.740
I don't know whether it was selfish on my part to do that, whether it was not selfish because

01:22:59.740 --> 01:23:08.060
it was something that I had to do in order to grow and be ultimately a proper father and

01:23:08.060 --> 01:23:09.900
human being.

01:23:09.900 --> 01:23:12.020
That's not a trivial question.

01:23:12.020 --> 01:23:16.020
And I don't know that I have a complete answer and I don't know that I can have the answer.

01:23:16.020 --> 01:23:18.660
I think they have to give an answer too.

01:23:18.660 --> 01:23:22.620
And I think each one of them would answer that differently.

01:23:22.620 --> 01:23:27.700
The oldest boy, he used to go out some of the times with me.

01:23:27.700 --> 01:23:31.940
And as you saw in the video, he was there for the Sri Yantra.

01:23:31.940 --> 01:23:38.340
And that had a good impression, a strong impression, because he's taken his son, who's 10 now,

01:23:38.340 --> 01:23:44.740
to the desert in Saudi Arabia, to Bhutan, to Mongolia, all over the place.

01:23:44.740 --> 01:23:48.740
he's stationed now in Tokyo, from Singapore to Tokyo.

01:23:48.740 --> 01:23:54.740
And Tori was out there and she and I worked on a project together,

01:23:54.740 --> 01:23:57.740
which was a really sweet project.

01:23:57.740 --> 01:24:02.740
She's in one of those stories called "Goodbye" when we went looking for wild horses.

01:24:02.740 --> 01:24:04.740
Oh, that's a beautiful story.

01:24:04.740 --> 01:24:07.740
That was 2012 or '13, I think,

01:24:07.740 --> 01:24:11.740
and I was trying to learn the Lalita Sahasranama,

01:24:11.740 --> 01:24:18.540
on the Thousand Names of the Divine Mother. I'd known it and I'd written it and I'd listened to it,

01:24:18.540 --> 01:24:25.020
you know, but I was trying to learn it well enough that I could do it every day. And I was

01:24:25.020 --> 01:24:31.580
listening to it and looking at it in English and really trying to get it. And I have a very

01:24:31.580 --> 01:24:38.940
difficult time. I'm not wired for language, so I was struggling. So I thought, well, maybe we could

01:24:38.940 --> 01:24:46.540
do something that would help. So, Hori and I went in the truck way over to a place that I knew about

01:24:46.540 --> 01:24:54.060
where there were these nodules of obsidian. Here's a piece of obsidian, black volcanic glass.

01:24:54.060 --> 01:25:00.220
And these came in a form like an avocado. They looked like avocados, kind of. And they were

01:25:00.220 --> 01:25:07.500
cracked. And we would get these. I had a bunch of diamond scribes. They're little diamonds on the

01:25:07.500 --> 01:25:17.500
the end of a stick, and we could scribe letters. So, I wrote all thousand names on these rocks.

01:25:17.500 --> 01:25:24.420
Wow. One per rock, or sometimes two on a rock like that, on broken surfaces. They weren't

01:25:24.420 --> 01:25:30.540
polished, they were cracked. And Torrey did the same thing with a Sanskrit, Devanagari.

01:25:30.540 --> 01:25:39.280
So we got two complete sets of the thousand names, and then we went to a place that had

01:25:39.280 --> 01:25:44.460
attracted me earlier, and it's in one of the stories called "The Church."

01:25:44.460 --> 01:25:46.260
I don't know if you read that one or not.

01:25:46.260 --> 01:25:47.900
I read them all.

01:25:47.900 --> 01:25:51.860
That's the one where I found this place, and it just blew me away.

01:25:51.860 --> 01:25:54.380
Oh, it's like a circle of something.

01:25:54.380 --> 01:25:55.380
Yeah.

01:25:55.380 --> 01:26:01.540
I actually moved so I could be next to that all the time, and I've been to that for five,

01:26:01.540 --> 01:26:07.220
six years, right nearby. And so we took all this and then we went around the perimeter,

01:26:07.220 --> 01:26:14.180
and we buried each of these stones in order, starting with one pointing to the east directly

01:26:14.180 --> 01:26:19.860
and spaced it so they all came this way, and then the Sanskrit ones came all this way, and then we

01:26:19.860 --> 01:26:27.940
did the undernate names of Amun and we put those on the outside all the way around and we buried

01:26:27.940 --> 01:26:35.940
them so that just the surface, the avocado, which looks like just a black rough surface, was just

01:26:35.940 --> 01:26:41.940
coming up out of the earth and then the written was pointing down. Where did that come from? I

01:26:41.940 --> 01:26:46.940
I needed to learn the Lalita Sahasranama.

01:26:46.940 --> 01:26:49.560
So how does somebody like me do that?

01:26:49.560 --> 01:26:52.300
Well, you gotta do it kinetically.

01:26:52.300 --> 01:26:54.520
Every afternoon I would read it in English,

01:26:54.520 --> 01:26:57.660
I would listen to it on Sanskrit,

01:26:57.660 --> 01:27:00.940
but that ended up with what somebody might say

01:27:00.940 --> 01:27:02.460
was an art project.

01:27:02.460 --> 01:27:03.300
Is it art?

01:27:03.300 --> 01:27:05.180
Probably not, really.

01:27:05.180 --> 01:27:06.000
It isn't art.

01:27:06.000 --> 01:27:08.580
I mean, I've been undone for that.

01:27:08.580 --> 01:27:11.420
- But that's gonna stump some archeologists

01:27:11.420 --> 01:27:18.060
thousand years from now. Yeah. Whoa, this primitive culture had this sophisticated, how did Sanskrit

01:27:18.060 --> 01:27:28.420
get here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So we have a bit more time. There's another story

01:27:28.420 --> 01:27:32.940
you'd like to tell. I don't know if you can just do it off the top of your head. You can

01:27:32.940 --> 01:27:37.300
even read another one from the book. That one about the wild horses was beautiful. Or

01:27:37.300 --> 01:27:43.260
perhaps there's some kind of area of philosophical or spiritual discussion that we want to get

01:27:43.260 --> 01:27:45.260
into in our remaining time.

01:27:45.260 --> 01:27:47.540
Well, I can tell stories.

01:27:47.540 --> 01:27:51.500
Do you think you'll go out there again?

01:27:51.500 --> 01:27:52.500
Oh, of course.

01:27:52.500 --> 01:27:55.260
Now you're 81, something like that?

01:27:55.260 --> 01:27:58.140
I'm 81, I was going to be almost 82.

01:27:58.140 --> 01:28:00.300
I got a better truck now.

01:28:00.300 --> 01:28:01.300
That's a better truck?

01:28:01.300 --> 01:28:02.300
I've seen that truck.

01:28:02.300 --> 01:28:07.540
No, no, that was my better truck, but that hit 200,000 miles.

01:28:07.540 --> 01:28:08.540
So I have a new truck.

01:28:08.540 --> 01:28:09.540
Oh, a new truck.

01:28:09.540 --> 01:28:12.700
Okay, because the one I've seen in recent weeks had a cracked windshield.

01:28:12.700 --> 01:28:14.320
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:28:14.320 --> 01:28:15.320
That's the one.

01:28:15.320 --> 01:28:20.820
And I use that right now because blue, my dog just sheds hair everywhere.

01:28:20.820 --> 01:28:23.460
I wait until I leave.

01:28:23.460 --> 01:28:27.500
So I have a good truck and I know I'll be able to get out there.

01:28:27.500 --> 01:28:32.000
And there's been some more erosion.

01:28:32.000 --> 01:28:33.680
It's a mixed blessing.

01:28:33.680 --> 01:28:38.300
The last time I went in, I hadn't been there for two years and there'd been horrible thunderstorms

01:28:38.300 --> 01:28:40.160
and washing.

01:28:40.160 --> 01:28:44.600
The certain places were just turned into ravines where I would, where there was a trap where

01:28:44.600 --> 01:28:45.880
you would drive.

01:28:45.880 --> 01:28:49.400
And I almost tipped over the trailer trying to get in.

01:28:49.400 --> 01:28:53.440
If I had gone first in the truck, fortunately I didn't.

01:28:53.440 --> 01:28:55.240
I never would have tried it.

01:28:55.240 --> 01:28:57.280
But once I got going, I couldn't turn around.

01:28:57.280 --> 01:29:00.200
There was no choice except to go forward.

01:29:00.200 --> 01:29:05.880
And I did get there, and then while I was there, I worked on the road, bringing rock and moving

01:29:05.880 --> 01:29:10.600
things and developed a way to get through without tipping things too much.

01:29:10.600 --> 01:29:13.080
Got it out just fine.

01:29:13.080 --> 01:29:15.240
So hopefully it'll be easy to get back in.

01:29:15.240 --> 01:29:18.320
Wow, they just had a whole bunch more rain.

01:29:18.320 --> 01:29:22.920
I don't know if the rain that just hit Burning Man has gone up to Oregon, but getting some

01:29:22.920 --> 01:29:23.920
pretty wet.

01:29:23.920 --> 01:29:28.080
It might have, because I keep watching and I see that there've been some thunderstorms

01:29:28.080 --> 01:29:31.200
and so forth, but that's part of the deal.

01:29:31.200 --> 01:29:33.040
Well, you've been living an interesting life.

01:29:33.040 --> 01:29:35.200
Yeah, we all have.

01:29:35.200 --> 01:29:36.560
We have, haven't we?

01:29:36.560 --> 01:29:41.600
Yeah, we have. And you know, that's one of the things that I'm really coming to appreciate.

01:29:41.600 --> 01:29:48.000
So many of the people I know and have known for a long time and I feel a kinship with,

01:29:48.000 --> 01:29:56.560
it's like we're all doing the same thing in a very different way. And I see young people

01:29:56.560 --> 01:30:01.120
coming along that really are after the same.

01:30:01.120 --> 01:30:04.400
So it's the one thing that I see,

01:30:04.400 --> 01:30:06.640
and I don't see it in the media so much,

01:30:06.640 --> 01:30:10.160
but that I see in the world of Kali Yuga

01:30:10.160 --> 01:30:12.160
that is encouraging.

01:30:12.160 --> 01:30:14.160
Well, I know some young people who feel like,

01:30:14.160 --> 01:30:15.280
and they're not so young anymore,

01:30:15.280 --> 01:30:16.720
they're getting into their late 30s,

01:30:16.720 --> 01:30:19.680
who feel that they just haven't quite found their niche.

01:30:19.680 --> 01:30:21.440
You know, they're, "What am I supposed to do with my life?"

01:30:21.440 --> 01:30:24.160
Even though they might be very talented in certain ways,

01:30:24.160 --> 01:30:27.440
They still feel like they're looking for something.

01:30:27.440 --> 01:30:37.160
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?

01:30:37.160 --> 01:30:38.660
How do they find it?

01:30:38.660 --> 01:30:40.460
That's a good question.

01:30:40.460 --> 01:30:45.560
I think, first of all, that that's not an unnatural situation.

01:30:45.560 --> 01:30:48.540
I'm not sure I've hit my stride.

01:30:48.540 --> 01:30:53.960
I know I haven't grown up yet properly, so there's a lot yet to be done.

01:30:53.960 --> 01:31:01.880
But what I would say is look deeper and then don't be afraid to act because what is there to lose?

01:31:01.880 --> 01:31:11.080
What can you lose? What can we lose? Go deeper. Go deeper in your feeling. Go deeper in the outer.

01:31:11.080 --> 01:31:21.720
Go deeper. It is very, very, very difficult to find one's path, one's dharma. And one has multiple

01:31:21.720 --> 01:31:28.440
whole dharmas, cosmic, you know, down to familial, all different levels.

01:31:28.440 --> 01:31:33.120
And it's very difficult, and in this age, it's more difficult than it has ever been

01:31:33.120 --> 01:31:34.120
before.

01:31:34.120 --> 01:31:38.640
So, we are, all of us, up against a challenge.

01:31:38.640 --> 01:31:44.280
You got all this stuff going on, but what's that got to do with deeper experiences of consciousness?

01:31:44.280 --> 01:31:50.040
And the answer is, only deeper experiences of consciousness will support all that, and

01:31:50.040 --> 01:31:51.560
will support the path.

01:31:51.560 --> 01:31:56.400
If you want to be on the path, then there's one way to get on the path, and that is to

01:31:56.400 --> 01:32:02.360
go deeper into the self, because the self is the path.

01:32:02.360 --> 01:32:05.640
So know the self, know thyself, you know.

01:32:05.640 --> 01:32:10.600
It doesn't mean know your ego, it means forget your ego.

01:32:10.600 --> 01:32:14.400
Forgetting everything is one way to remember God.

01:32:14.400 --> 01:32:20.680
Yeah, and I think it's good to remember that, to put it in more poetic language, what you

01:32:20.680 --> 01:32:25.280
actually just said was, "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven," or kingdom of God, and

01:32:25.280 --> 01:32:30.280
"all else shall be added unto thee." Einstein was working at a boring job in a Swiss patent

01:32:30.280 --> 01:32:37.160
office when he first put together his first theory of relativity, which completely transformed

01:32:37.160 --> 01:32:40.880
scientific understanding of how the world works. So, sometimes we have to go through

01:32:40.880 --> 01:32:46.160
rather mundane periods, at least on the surface, but there was something obviously deep there

01:32:46.160 --> 01:32:49.680
going on with Einstein to enable him to come up with that.

01:32:49.680 --> 01:32:53.680
So even under boring or superficially mundane circumstances

01:32:53.680 --> 01:32:57.600
one can be deep, one can be having deep experience, deep thinking, etc.

01:32:57.600 --> 01:33:05.760
P.S. Eliot was a bank clerk. In 2001

01:33:05.760 --> 01:33:12.000
I had been working with Genetic ID as a CEO for four or five years.

01:33:12.000 --> 01:33:14.500
- Oh, I forgot that you did that, yeah.

01:33:14.500 --> 01:33:15.600
- Get it going.

01:33:15.600 --> 01:33:18.860
And then I decided, well, okay, got to do something.

01:33:18.860 --> 01:33:21.000
And I really wanted to go back to the desert.

01:33:21.000 --> 01:33:24.500
I wanted to go back and play the artist's game,

01:33:24.500 --> 01:33:27.100
but I couldn't, too much responsibility.

01:33:27.100 --> 01:33:28.740
Wouldn't have been proper.

01:33:28.740 --> 01:33:31.940
So I had to build a company, I had to start a new company,

01:33:31.940 --> 01:33:33.980
and that was the Sky Factory.

01:33:33.980 --> 01:33:38.220
And I said to myself, okay, man, you don't want to do that.

01:33:38.220 --> 01:33:39.580
You don't want to do business.

01:33:39.580 --> 01:33:40.700
You've done enough of that.

01:33:40.700 --> 01:33:41.600
Okay, fine.

01:33:41.600 --> 01:33:43.960
But look, let's be real here.

01:33:43.960 --> 01:33:48.960
So why don't you try and build a beautiful corporation?

01:33:48.960 --> 01:33:54.320
And when I had that thought, I burst out laughing

01:33:54.320 --> 01:33:58.800
because if ever there was an oxymoron, that's it, right?

01:33:58.800 --> 01:34:01.880
A beautiful corporation is a complete contradiction

01:34:01.880 --> 01:34:05.480
in terms in my mind and was at that time.

01:34:05.480 --> 01:34:08.720
But I thought, all right, go and do it, try that.

01:34:08.720 --> 01:34:13.720
And from that moment on, I started getting thoughts

01:34:13.720 --> 01:34:16.320
about how to build a company

01:34:16.320 --> 01:34:19.940
that did not come from my past experience.

01:34:19.940 --> 01:34:23.000
And I've learned more about that,

01:34:23.000 --> 01:34:26.520
and that when you need something and it's on track,

01:34:26.520 --> 01:34:28.280
the information will come.

01:34:28.280 --> 01:34:31.160
And all kinds of stuff came up.

01:34:31.160 --> 01:34:34.000
This came up and that came up, this idea, this plan,

01:34:34.000 --> 01:34:35.980
we'd pick this from here, go there,

01:34:35.980 --> 01:34:37.480
this and that and so forth.

01:34:37.480 --> 01:34:43.960
And it all worked out extremely well, and somewhere along the line, Inc. did an article as one

01:34:43.960 --> 01:34:46.960
of the ten best places to work for employees.

01:34:46.960 --> 01:34:49.560
Wow, in the whole country?

01:34:49.560 --> 01:34:50.560
Yeah.

01:34:50.560 --> 01:34:58.120
So, instead of working with paint on paper, it was a blank name for a company, concept

01:34:58.120 --> 01:35:02.840
for a company, and working with people, and working with money, and those were the things

01:35:02.840 --> 01:35:06.960
that got moved around, and something came out of it.

01:35:06.960 --> 01:35:11.960
Yeah, there's a cool quote, I just looked it up from W.H. Murray, who I believe was a mountain climber.

01:35:11.960 --> 01:35:15.960
Sometimes this is attributed to Goethe, but this guy actually said it.

01:35:15.960 --> 01:35:20.960
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back.

01:35:20.960 --> 01:35:25.960
Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth,

01:35:25.960 --> 01:35:29.960
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans,

01:35:29.960 --> 01:35:34.960
that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

01:35:34.960 --> 01:35:39.460
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.

01:35:39.460 --> 01:35:42.620
A whole stream of events, issues from the decision,

01:35:42.620 --> 01:35:47.860
raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance,

01:35:47.860 --> 01:35:51.160
which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

01:35:51.160 --> 01:35:54.760
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.

01:35:54.760 --> 01:35:57.860
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

01:35:57.860 --> 01:35:58.960
Begin it now.

01:35:58.960 --> 01:36:00.960
Good. Absolutely great.

01:36:00.960 --> 01:36:04.160
You asked the question, "What would you advise to somebody?"

01:36:04.160 --> 01:36:06.080
That's a great quote

01:36:06.080 --> 01:36:08.480
Give them that quote. I mean, that's true

01:36:08.480 --> 01:36:15.680
Amen brethren and sistering, you know that and I believe that because that's been my experience

01:36:15.680 --> 01:36:23.160
Yeah, yeah, mine too. That's a beautiful quote. It's a good one. Yeah. All righty bill. Well, this has been fun

01:36:23.160 --> 01:36:27.960
Yes, I really enjoyed it. Then you're an easy guy to interview because you just

01:36:27.960 --> 01:36:30.520
You're eloquent. You have a creative mind

01:36:30.520 --> 01:36:32.960
You're not at a loss for words

01:36:33.200 --> 01:36:38.600
You've had so many interesting experiences that they have a vast reservoir to draw from.

01:36:38.600 --> 01:36:39.600
Thank you.

01:36:39.600 --> 01:36:40.600
Thank you.

01:36:40.600 --> 01:36:48.040
And I really appreciate you taking the time to dig a little bit and doing your research.

01:36:48.040 --> 01:36:58.960
And then just for what you've developed as a person, which is someone who knows how to

01:36:58.960 --> 01:37:00.160
gently

01:37:00.160 --> 01:37:02.640
Open up and let what's in there

01:37:02.640 --> 01:37:10.720
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

01:37:10.720 --> 01:37:13.840
Subjected to that and not only that

01:37:13.840 --> 01:37:16.400
It's useful for me

01:37:16.400 --> 01:37:19.060
Because I believe in the importance of introspection

01:37:19.060 --> 01:37:23.280
Not as a neurotic thing, but just to know

01:37:23.280 --> 01:37:27.920
And this is very helpful. Good. Well, thank you. Thank you very much

01:37:28.640 --> 01:37:31.200
And I hope others who have been listening have found it helpful

01:37:31.200 --> 01:37:33.840
So I think we'll wrap it up

01:37:33.840 --> 01:37:36.720
I will have a link on your page

01:37:36.720 --> 01:37:43.360
To a little website that's all about your book and I imagine there will be information there on how to get the book

01:37:43.360 --> 01:37:45.580
It's not inexpensive

01:37:45.580 --> 01:37:51.360
95 or something right? So there's this big beautiful full color coffee table style. You want to hold it up and show it

01:37:51.360 --> 01:37:57.600
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

01:37:58.400 --> 01:38:06.880
It is a big element and it's all handwork because the five volumes, there are five volumes in this

01:38:06.880 --> 01:38:14.080
handmade custom design box which opens up, there's all these volumes and the volumes are all accordion.

01:38:14.080 --> 01:38:20.800
Oh I see, so you can get these panorama shots. Yeah exactly and it's done on very high quality

01:38:20.800 --> 01:38:27.120
paper so it's nice in your hand and you can read it sequentially, you read all down one accordion

01:38:27.120 --> 01:38:33.280
and it flips over and then you read back and there are five of those and to make that it turned out

01:38:33.280 --> 01:38:42.240
was a lot of handwork. So that's the reason why it was very costly to do. But we designed it that way

01:38:42.240 --> 01:38:50.560
and then we didn't want to back off and the publisher agreed. So it is a unique kind of a thing.

01:38:51.440 --> 01:38:58.320
I don't think anybody else is doing it. It came from a visit to the Asian Museum in San Francisco

01:38:58.320 --> 01:39:05.120
several years or 10 years ago or something where they had a display of the Ramayana and that was

01:39:05.120 --> 01:39:14.400
presented in an accordion manner, episode by episode, painted on palm leaves that were hinged

01:39:14.400 --> 01:39:20.080
and the whole thing folded up and opened up and like that and I saw that and I thought oh gosh

01:39:20.080 --> 01:39:28.000
that it's really super. Nice, make a nice Christmas gift for people. Yeah. Well thanks Bill, so I'll

01:39:28.000 --> 01:39:35.360
see you on the trail with your beautiful dog. Yes, all right. Keep on trucking. I will, thank you.

01:39:35.360 --> 01:39:40.800
Again, thank you so much for spending the time with me. Oh, thank you. And thanks to those who've

01:39:40.800 --> 01:39:43.400
been listening or watching and we'll see you for the next one.

01:39:43.400 --> 01:39:46.760
[MUSIC PLAYING]

01:39:46.760 --> 01:40:07.720
Thank you.