Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to see previous ones, please go to batgap.com and check the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site. My guest today is Dena Merriam. When I first started preparing for this interview a week ago, Usually, week to week I completely focus on the person that I’m about to interview and I don’t even think about ones in coming weeks beyond that, and so I hadn’t really thought much or tuned into Dena or anything, I just sort of turned my attention to her last Saturday after finishing the previous interview, and I began poking around in her book, “My Journey Through Time,” and my first impression was, “Oh, this will be fun, we’re going to talk about reincarnation,” and I haven’t really talked about that topic much on BatGap, but then as I read her bio and began reading her book, I guess my first impression was, “Wow, this is about much more than reincarnation.” I mean, she has vivid memories of a number of past lives and has kind of understood the connections between them and how they all kind of led into the life she has been living this time around. Now’s my chance to read her bio here, in which she has been working in the interfaith field for 20 years and founded the Global Peace Initiative of Women, GPIW, in 2002. Initially, the organization was designed to provide a global platform for women, women spiritual leaders, to organize and mediate dialogues in areas of conflict and tension. This soon expanded to include an equal number of men and women spiritual teachers and to deal with a range of issues, including climate change, ecological destruction, racial inequality, etc. The premise for the gatherings organized by GPIW is that at the heart of all these issues is a spiritual crisis and the way to address them is a shift in consciousness. That’s a point I’ve been bringing up in many interviews over the years. Dena has served on the boards of Harvard University Center for World Religions, the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Association, among others. In 2014, she was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in Japan. Over the years, as memories of past births have arisen, Dena has recorded them in order to better understand the karmic patterns. She has now shared her memories in this book,”My Journey Through Time,” in the hope that others will gain insight into their own lives through this sharing. I must say that I have. I mean, it’s a very well-written book. She’s a good writer and good speaker. In addition to reading this whole book, I’ve listened to about five hours of her talks over the past week and I really kind of felt like I learned a lot and benefitted a lot from the various stories. It gave me insights into my own life and you know influences in it and challenges in it and stuff like that. So, you know, it’s been a fun week preparing for this and I really appreciate your being here, Dena.
Dena: I’m happy to be here. I’m glad the book had the impact. You know, I struggled a lot with whether to share this openly or not because they’re very personal stories and my hope is that, well, there were a number of hopes. One is that would help people overcome the fear of death and to know that what they’re doing, that they’re in control of their own destiny, so to speak. That their past shaped the present and the present shapes the future. And through the whole process, I began to more consciously think about the future. What do we want to create for ourselves? I mean, we are the shapers of our life and that gives us a different responsibility than just, you know, reacting because most so much of our activities are reactive, you know. We’re just reacting to what comes our way, which means that we’re working through karma from past actions, but how do we take control of the process? That was really the understanding I sought.
Rick: I run into and I’ve interviewed people who are spiritual people, which is why I’ve interviewed them, but who don’t believe in reincarnation, don’t think that that’s the way the universe works, or who don’t think that the law of karma is a real thing, that they think it’s just some Hindu philosophy or something, that the universe doesn’t work that way. So I’m sure you have too.I’m sure you don’t try to badger people into believing anything, but how do you converse with people who express those attitudes and yet have a spiritual aspiration in life?
Dena: My sense is that, you know, the law of gravity worked before people endorsed it. You know, it didn’t just start working with Newton. It was always the universe is based on law, physical law, spiritual or mental law, you know, and actions have reactions. To me it’s not much different from gravity. Actions have reactions, they’re reactions. Everything brings about a reaction. I understand, if people don’t have memories or if they don’t, I mean, I think everybody has clues, inclinations, but if they’re not present in the conscious mind, why should you believe? I think that our beliefs are based on our experiences. I never try to convince anybody. I say if you haven’t had these experiences, then, you know, I can understand why you wouldn’t believe, but what I am struck by is how many more people accept this today. In America, I read a Pew Forum poll that 25% of American Christians accept reincarnation. I’m sure it’s a lot more, actually. These are just people who admit to that, and karma has become part of everyday parlance. They talk about it in the business world. People talk about karma as if it’s just a universal truth, which it is. I think that it’s much easier to talk about the things in public, and it was interesting when I decided to go public with this book, and you know, my family doesn’t know about a lot of my work. They know that Dena is off doing these conferences, but they don’t really understand the spiritual work. And some friends of mine said, “Well, don’t put your name to it. Put it anonymous,” and I thought, you know, either I’m going to come out with it or not, but I think things have changed. Ten years ago, it would have been harder to come out with a book like this and not be looked at as being a little bit off the left field.
Rick: Yesterday we were in the grocery store and some lady was handing out lemonade samples, so I took a couple of lemonade samples and she said, “Well, it’s only two for two dollars,” or whatever, and I said, “My wife wouldn’t let me buy this. It has a lot of sugar in it,” and she said, “Well, you know, you only live once,” and I looked at her and said, “Are you sure about that?”
Dena: Well, you know, I try to reconcile, you know, because I work in the interfaith world and I work with people from the Abrahamic background as well, and I’ve had some conversations with them. If you identify with your personality, if I’m totally identified with Dena, Dena’s only coming around this once. Now, Dena will exist in my memory, and there are aspects of Dena. What I try to understand, though, through this is what is it you take with you and what is it do you shed? So, at the end of the day, what are the impacts? And then I also judge spiritual experiences by the impact it’s had on you. This, to me, was not a curiosity matter. It wasn’t, “Oh, I’m so curious. Who was I?” It was trying to understand the patterns that emerge, what my calling is in this life, how I got here and into this work, and how karma works, and it changed my sense of identity. I mean, I identify with all the–I go back to seven or eight lives–I identify with all of those personalities, and none of them. I can’t go back and say, “I’m the same person that I was in Africa or that I was in Japan. I’m different now because I’ve had a series of experiences. I’m not going to be the same person into the future that I am now, because hopefully I would have grown and learned.” But it’s interesting to think, what are you going to take with you? I mean, I sum up a life in 40 pages, the highlights. And what are those highlights? Very often it’s the spiritual encounters that you’ve had. For me, the beauty of looking back is to see the spiritual guides and teachers in every life there was somebody. To me that was enormously comforting to know that if that was my past, hopefully that will be my future. There’ll always be a spiritual guide to appear at a critical moment. You know, sometimes it was to save me from drowning in the Ganga at one moment, another it was in the jungles of Africa when this shaman woman appeared. Soo these are the memories that you take with you.
Rick: Let’s dwell for a moment more on this sort of comparison of believing or accepting or understanding that reincarnation is the way the universe works versus not thinking that. You and I have been on the spiritual path for 50 years under teachers who taught this, and so it’s kind of ingrained in us, but many people don’t and don’t think that way. And I often wonder, what is their perspective? Like somebody like Anthony Bourdain, for instance, who committed suicide recently, I suppose he thought that that was just going to sort of snuff out his existence, lights out, you know, “I’m out of here and I will cease to exist.” But obviously if you have a reincarnation perspective then you don’t think that, and perhaps if he had had one then it would have altered his choices, you know, he wouldn’t have made that choice because he would have felt that, well, there might be consequences, I better kind of work it out in this life. Go ahead and comment on that before I say anything more.
Dena: Well, I think physics has shown that energy doesn’t disappear, it transforms, so consciousness doesn’t snuff out, it moves into something else. I can’t even get into the mindset of thinking that consciousness just ends.
Rick: Well, obviously materialists though think that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain functioning and they wouldn’t think of it as some energy which is, they would say, you know, when your body dies that’s the end of consciousness and whatever energy is inherent in your physical makeup, sure that’ll be transmuted into other forms as it decomposes, but as far as any kind of soul or entity or some such thing that’s going to carry forward, you’re imagining it.
Dena: Well, it’s how you look at consciousness. I mean scientists would say the mind creates consciousness where we would say consciousness creates the mind. Consciousness, I mean how can you create consciousness? What we’ve lost sight of in this rational period is that everything is consciousness, trees, everything is a manifestation of consciousness, there’s nothing that’s not consciousness. So what I say, I mean what I say in terms of my book, if you want to take it as a good read, as a novel, take it as that, but I think there’s some lessons in there on patterns and relationships that may be useful. To me that’s just a very, that’s not the proper reading of the book obviously because I think that science may be on the verge of discovering more about this thing we call death, and one of the reasons I decided to go public with the book is that there is a new interest, a new interest in looking at death with new eyes I would say, you know, you have books now written about near-death experiences or death experiences that surgeon, neurosurgeon
Rick: Eben Alexander
Dena: Who mocked it until he had an experience himself. Of course the question is how can you know an experience is true? Well you can say that about anything, you can say that about a memory, I have a memory of being sexually abused as a child, but how do you know it’s true? You were the only one there, nobody saw it, why should I believe you? Because it impacted who you were, it psychologically impacted you, something happened that psychologically impacted you. When I looked at these memories and I went and verified things that I had seen, I went to those places, one was in Europe, one was in Russia, and found the streets that I had seen that matched up to what what I had remembered. But also I found things in myself that I had pushed aside that resonated, there were so many things in each life, there was something in myself that remained from that period, I mean you know starting with the previous birth that I talk about in Russia.
Rick: One thing that struck me as I was reading your book is the great degree of detail that you remembered. I couldn’t write that much detail about what I did yesterday, and here you are writing all this stuff about lives that you had hundreds of years ago, right down to like detailed descriptions of circumstances you’re in and conversations you had and all that. I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but did you kind of take a little creative license and embellish this just for the sake of telling an interesting story or did you actually remember it in that much detail?
Dena: I can’t say how these memories came to me, you know, there is the idea, I don’t know, you must have heard about the Akashic records, right, where every action, every thought is recorded. One might say in one subconscious all the past is recorded, there is a database of all that happens and for some reason I was able to access that. I would be meditating and go into this deeply interior state where, if people had spoken to me I wouldn’t have been able to rouse myself. I was in another dimension almost, I was in another time period where I was actually watching a scene, like watching a movie, hearing conversations, knowing that I was the, which actor I was, and I just had to listen and then, you know, I keep a pad and a paper by my meditation, especially when I’m having a lot of these. I mean it’s an ongoing process, the book is not the end, I mean it continues to happen. And I almost finished a second book now, which goes back to an earlier time, but I would come out of it and then just write down what I had seen and heard and then of course as I was doing the editing I would say, “No, that’s not quite the way.” So yeah, I mean my mind was imposed upon these conversations, you know, I was putting my writing ability to try to make it all into make sense, but I have to say that I stuck as closely as I could to the content that I was absorbing.
Rick: As we know, most people don’t remember their past lives. There are some fairly common stories of little children remembering things, like I saw some kid recently on TV that had detailed memories of his life as a World War II fighter pilot, and he knew the name of the plane and he knew the names of his friends back then and all that stuff, and you know they were able to corroborate all that, but most of us don’t remember past lives. So question number one, why do you feel that is, why are those memories blotted out? And question number two is, how come you remembered them where hardly anybody else does, especially later in life?
Dena: Well, I think that there’s a good reason why these memories are submerged. I think it would be very hard, and I had a very hard time. My first experience with this, which was the life just previous, which those memories came back to me maybe over a period of a year, many months. I was, you know, a single mom raising two teenage kids, holding on to a job, commuting to the city to work at a job as a writer. I had been a long meditator since I was the age of 20, and a very serious meditator, not just, you know, doing 30 minutes here and there, a very, very serious meditator. And experiences happen in meditation. I mean, one just doesn’t just sit there, and everybody has different experiences. I know people have talked to me about seeing the third eye and going into the light, and people seeing all kinds of things that never happened to me, you know, and one of the reasons we’re not supposed to share our meditation experiences is so that people don’t get envious and say, “Well, you know, why haven’t I seen that beautiful thing that you’re talking about?” So this is what happened to me through my meditative experiences. The door is just opened. But the first time around, it was very, very difficult, very difficult. As you read the book, you see that there were some very traumatic things that happened in that life. I was in Russia during the Russian Revolution, sent out on a train, never saw my parents again, was stuck in Europe waiting for them in a foreign land, and then World War II happened, caught in Nazi Germany, wanting to escape, get out of there so badly, and then I meet my guru, which to me was the highlight of that life. Here I am trying to hold down a job and raise kids, and I’m finding myself trapped in Nazi Germany, living again and again, you know, being caught by the Nazis and all that. And then of course I died in Europe before I could get out. So I was going back, I’d be in meetings, you know, at work, and be crying internally over being sent out of Russia at 14 and not seeing my mother and never seeing my mother again. So it awakens. It’s not just… you know…you’re deeply engaged in the emotions that are awakened. So it’s not just observing and saying, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It’s like you become that person again. I became that person again. I went through all the emotional turmoil of that life, whatever many years I had in that life, and I think I died young, maybe 40 something, was squeezed into, you know, nine, ten months. I went through the upheaval. There were times when I thought I was losing it. I said to myself, you know, could I be, you know, hallucinating? And then I would say to myself, you know, I’m very grounded. I’m running a household. I’m working at a job, a good job. I’m a serious meditator. I’m doing my practices. I’m not imbalanced. So I can see why people could get imbalanced by these experiences, especially if you don’t know what you’re going to awaken. You know, I caution people and they say, “Well, I want to go find out.” It’s not a curio–I mean, I think that the reason it came to me maybe was so that I could share it and help validate the fact that that we are all eternal beings, that we’ve had a past and we’ve got a future, and maybe if we learn how our past affected our present, we can more consciously direct or shape our future. So that’s why I decided to share it. I said, “Well, these experiences came to me, you know, not just for me to hold to myself, but maybe others would get.” And actually, I shared the manuscript with a colleague, a writer friend of mine at work, who was an agnostic. I trusted her judgment very, very much, and she had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She said, “I know you’re working on something, could I read it?” And she was so moved by this, and it helped her so much at the end of her life, that she said to me, “Dena, you’ve got to publish this.” You know, there are other people like me, because she didn’t know what she was facing. You know, she was facing death, pancreatic cancer, and she didn’t know what she would be facing, and it just gave her a lot of comfort. It’s not the end.
Rick: That’s a good point, worth retouching on that. If we think that death is the end, and yet it isn’t, then I think there’s some deep discordancy or something between what we think and what actually is real, and that must cause great fear, you know, because it must viscerally, intuitively feel wrong that I would come to a complete end, because on some deep level we know we don’t, and yet here we are dying, thinking that we’re going to, and the culture has told us we’re going to, and all. So, it really must, kind of settling into the understanding that life is a continuum, must somehow provide some deep solace or relaxation to our psyche, to our soul, I should think.
Dena: Well, think about this. Our country is in the grips of fear right now, and not, I mean, it’s the world too. I mean, many, many governments are holding people through fear, fear of the other, fear of this, fear of that. People have a lot of fear in their life, and the primal fear is the fear of death. You know, why are people so attached to their guns? They got to defend themselves so they don’t get killed, so they don’t die, you know? Instead of dealing with the more superficial fears, let’s get to the core fear, which is the fear of death, and the religions have been partially responsible for creating this fear, because it’s this concept of punishment. Somebody’s watching you, and you’re going to be punished if you don’t follow the rules. It’s not even if you lead an ideal life, it’s if you don’t follow the rules. If you don’t follow the rules, you’re going to be punished, and your death is going to be bad. So, when you realize that nobody’s judging you, you’re shaping your own life future in order to learn and awaken. It’s all about awakening. So, your past shaped the conditions, which gave you the opportunities that you now have, and it’s up to you whether you can use them for growth or not, and you, by what you do, are creating your future. That changes the whole equation, and people free themselves from a lot of these holds on them that religions and institutions have. People are controlled through fear.
Rick: I think if we look deeply enough into probably every religion, we would find that they weren’t originally intended to produce that kind of fear or produce those kinds of misunderstandings. I’ve seen Yogananda himself argues that Christianity once taught reincarnation, that it was edited out at the Council of Nicaea or something, but things get distorted over the long lapse of time.
Dena: I mean, in the Hasidics they also talk about it, things get distorted when power is accumulated by an institution. Suddenly your main priority is maintaining that base, maintaining your institution rather than liberating people, giving them the tools to free themselves.
Rick: Well, organizations tend to be taken over by administrative types and administrative types tend not to be mystics.
Dena: Exactly, yeah. Maintaining the status quo or growing their wealth and following.
Rick: You were speaking of Yogananda, he was your guru and you of course didn’t discover him in this life until after he had passed away, but then you recount your life, the one you were just mentioning where you were in Nazi Germany. I found it interesting that he had actually stopped through Germany on his way from the US back to India in 1935, I think you said, and that he had actually tried to arrange a meeting with Hitler, hopefully to change Hitler’s way of thinking, and that that didn’t happen, but I found that to be an interesting little tidbit in your book.
Dena: You know I had felt because of my yearning for Yogananda was so intense when I was time a lot of my friends were coming back from India and they had found their guru or they were going to India and you know there were there were teachers coming here and they said, “Well, Yogananda’s not here. Go to this one, go to that one,” and I did try going to a few, but it didn’t help, I mean my guru was my guru and I loved him and I loved him with such depth that I was in tremendous pain that I couldn’t meet him in person, and that went on for years and then when I had the memory of having met him it was like, “Oh yeah, okay,” that bond, that link in the body was made.
Rick: I’m just reading the last chapter of your book and I may not quite have grasped what you’re saying here, but were you saying that this Swami that you met in one of your Indian lives and perhaps some guiding light that you had met in other lives was actually Yogananda in his previous lives or were you not saying that?
Dena: No, I didn’t say that and there’s so many unanswered questions that I have. There were people who showed up like that Swami who I thought he might have been my Sufi father actually because he had such a fatherly attitude toward me. Each time I saw a life more questions came, which is why I say this is an ongoing journey. I’m trying to go back further in time because I put some of the pieces together in the puzzle, but the puzzle is still only half done, maybe less than that. We’re at a very interesting moment in time now where we’re shifting from one era to another era. Most people say into a higher era. So the challenge that we face now is, how do you live in that higher era? What would life look like? What would our society look like? So I’m trying to go back in time to a higher era. I only go back a few hundred years. That’s not very far in time. You have to go back thousands of years to get to a higher era when society was really at a completely different structure in a very different way. I think that that’s important now for us to regain the memories of what a higher civilization would be. What did a higher civilization look like? There was a higher civilization. Again, this is a challenge to the Western model, which is linear. You come out of a primitive time, moving time, and that’s not the way the Eastern world sees it. It’s cyclical.
Rick: Right, yeah, we have the yugas and there were much more glorious times than this and so on, and the time span is so long that it wouldn’t necessarily be expected that archaeological evidence would turn up of these ancient times because they’re millions of years ago. On this note you said in your book declines are said to be times of ascent. That was one sentence I plucked out of it, and from my perspective it seems that our culture, our country, and our society seem to be declining. Some would argue the opposite, but if you agree, what signs of ascent do you see amidst the decline?
Dena: Well, I wouldn’t call it a decline. What I would say is that the institutions of a dark, of a less enlightened time, are breaking down. So the economic, political, social institutions that have kept us in place or that have governed us for the last few hundred years are not working anymore. So something else needs to emerge. What I would say is the signs of ascent is the awakening consciousness, not just more people. The fact that we can have this kind of conversation in a public way is an indication, but also the fact that there’s much more unity among a certain subset of the religious traditions. You know, when I started working in the interfaith world tolerance. People don’t use that word anymore, tolerance, you know, when they talk about unity.
Rick: Tolerance sounds like, okay, I’m going to hold my nose.
Dena: I’ll get close to you, but you know, because I have to. So those who have been working in this field, Christians, Jews, Muslims, there’s a much greater appreciation of the other, and less judging, and that wasn’t true 50 years ago.
Rick: So 50 years ago there was the assumption that, well, my way is the only way and I’ll just sort of be chummy with these heathens here, but they’re deluded and I’ve got the truth, right?
Dena: Even though there are people who believe that, I believe it’s a receding tide.
Rick: One thing that I think about when I think about the whole interfaith thing is that, you know, what it really needs is for the representatives of the various faiths to go beyond faith to direct experience, and if you’re just stuck on the level of faith then you’re never really going to merge at a very deep level. It’s like people who haven’t sort of experientially fathomed the depth of their own religion and arguing with similar people of other religions, it’s like people who haven’t eaten in a particular restaurant arguing over which one serves the best food, none of them have eaten in their favorite restaurants, but they are arguing that they’re the best even though they haven’t tasted the food.
Dena: Absolutely, and I think that’s where the change is. There have been many, many initiatives of monastics, Buddhist and Christian monastics, coming together and complete sharing in unity, Hindu monastics and Christian monastics. It’s a subset, I mean, this is not necessarily the general population, but even among the general population, the fact that 25% of Christians, American Christians, accept reincarnation, believe that’s the way the universe works, that’s a large number of people.
Rick: That’s good. Doesn’t the Pope these days say that you can sort of achieve salvation through other religious paths and so on?
Dena: He said a lot of things that he’s had to then qualify, like he said there was no such place as hell.
Rick: Uh-huh. But you know. Then he gets his wrist slapped or something.
Dena: How can you keep people in fear, control them by fear if there’s no place as hell?
Dena: Yogananda was once asked about that and he said, “Where do you think you are now?”
Rick: Sometimes when I think about religious fanaticism, you know, my religion is the only good one or the only real one, and so on. If I talk to such a person, which I rarely do, I start bringing up astronomy, you know, because there are like 40 to 60 billion earth-like planets in our galaxy and 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe and possibly unlimited universes, and yet so when you start thinking of it that way it seems pretty absurd to think that one particular religion and one particular little teeny tiny speck of dust is the only one and that God has somehow consigned all the other ones to eternal darkness or something.
Dena: I think that there are scientific breakthroughs that could happen in the next hundred years that could really have an impact on human consciousness.
Rick: Like what?
Dena: Like discovering advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Dena: Could happen, right?
Rick: Yeah, I think somewhere in your book you talk about phase transition, I don’t know if you use that, or maybe it was in the talks I heard you give, but the fact that there could be quite a sudden shift that we don’t see coming, you know, but all of a sudden it’s upon us.
Dena: Well, you know, the hundredth monkey, you don’t need all the monkeys, you just need a certain percent of monkeys, and it’s not a big percent, it’s like, you know, one percent or something like that, which is why I think that this spiritual work, I mean, a lot of people I talk to in the spiritual world are discouraged right now because we seem to be taking steps backward now, you take a step forward, now a step backward, and my sense is we can’t allow that feeling to overcome us, because more and more people are embracing this human unity and spiritual unity, and of course there’s going to be a reaction to that, there’s going to be fear, people are fearful of losing their identities, losing what was familiar to them, losing the life that they knew, what are the implications for the future, and so this fear factor is going to try to pull things backward, but you can’t, you can’t slow down evolution. You can’t reverse evolution, it doesn’t work, you know, the universe doesn’t work like that, things move forward, but they move forward at a certain pace.
Rick: I was just reading, I don’t know if it was your book or something else, about how patience is such a virtue, you know, it’s like God has his own timetable and we tend to be impatient, but if you can kind of put yourself in the mindset of the divine and how patiently It has unfolded this 13.72 billion year old universe, you know, I mean, not to say that we should be complacent and let bad situations just fester, but it does give you, it cultures more patience to sort of take the big picture if you can.
Dena: Well, I think we have to think in longer terms, you know, I mean, I see two major human problems is this short-term thinking. We’re conditioned to think in terms of the next election cycle and the next quarterly report in terms of business world, the next financial whatever. That completely distorts our understanding of things. The other shift, I think, is for people to understand the law of cause and effect. I think it’s very important for us to understand that what we do individually and as a collective. So, I talk a lot in my book about how this works, operates at the individual level, but a lot of my thinking recently has been how it operates as a collective, what we’re experiencing as a collective now is a result of actions that have been taken in our name as a collective.
Rick: Let’s talk about that. In fact, I have one of my notes here is “Collective inner spiritual shift a prerequisite to societal change.” So, what is your thinking about the collective?
Dena: I think that as a country we’ve done a lot of things that have been undercover in the world. Well, for example, I took a delegation of religious leaders two years ago to Iran for meetings in Iran. I know that UK and US took out their democratically elected government in the 50s and put in the Shah. This was a man who was democratically elected, but he wanted to nationalize the oil fields and the US and the Great Britain were not going to let that happen. So, is there no impact on that? I mean, do we think that we can just do that and not reap the results of that? There’s not going to be any payback to that? Look how we messed in Central America. We’ve messed majorly in Central America. So, now what’s happening? We’ve such a scene of violence down there that they’re fleeing to get into our country. Do we bear no responsibility? In the public space nobody’s talking about, “Hey, let’s look at our actions and look what we’ve done.” You reap what you sow. I mean, that’s even in the Abrahamic traditions. You reap what you sow. Nobody’s looking at why we’re… We’ve had a coup, so to speak. Our election has been hacked. So, what we’ve done to other countries has now been done to us. But are we going to change our behavior? Are we going to say we’re not going to do that anymore? They’re already talking about regime change in Iran again. It’s like if you don’t learn your lesson once, twice, you’re going to keep experiencing it again and again until you finally learn correct behavior.
Rick: Interesting. Good homework assignment for those who want to read more about the kind of things Dena was just saying is Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” It’s quite an eye-opener in terms of all this stuff. Yeah. We need to know that as Americans to understand and to get out of the situation we’re in, we need to understand deeds that have been done in our name.
Rick: That’s interesting and I suppose for us to understand that as a culture, it’s something that we need to learn individually. I know that reading your book reminds me of something that is one of my operating principles which is this long-term vision and I can’t in good conscience go for some kind of short-term gratification which I know will have long-term implications that are injurious to people, you know, but if you didn’t have that long-term perspective you might think, “Oh my god, I’ve only got 20 years left to live, I’ve got to make these radical changes in my life,” you know, and regardless of the consequences or who it might hurt.
Dena: I mean that’s the big shift that happens when you realize that the law of cause and effect is operational and that you have control to some degree. I mean you have control of a lot. You can’t change your past deeds, you can change whether you learn from them or not, whether you learn from your current situation or not, and then you can help shape your future. But this takes deep reflection, it’s not something that comes easily or automatically, and I think that the reason of that is that we’re meant to reflect deeply on our actions in our lives and to begin to live more consciously.
Rick: You said a few minutes ago that a lot of spiritual friends are kind of feeling discouraged, and somehow or other what you just said reminded me of that, because we’re so bombarded all the time with trivial short-term distractions, you know, and it’s not really conducive to deep reflection, what hits us through the TV all the time and everything. Personally, I think that it’s nice to structure one’s life around having time to meditate and reflect deeply and contemplate all these topics and points, and certainly one has a choice to do that, but a lot of people might feel they don’t have the choice because they’re working two jobs, they can barely make ends meet, and they’re just overwhelmed and bombarded, so that’s a bit of a long statement. But why do you feel that a lot of your spiritual friends are being discouraged?
Dena: I see two movements. I see a lot of people, there’s too much intensity and negativity, so they just want to shut it out. So a lot of people are getting off social media, not even looking at the news, and I understand doing that to a partial degree, but you can’t create a bubble around yourself. I don’t think that, I think the spiritual energy is needed in the streets right now. So I meant that figuratively, not literally.
Rick: Sometimes literally.
Dena: I’m a social activist.
Rick: Those big marches and things like that, those are good.
Dena: Yeah, those are good, the March for Your Life. I mean, I think we have to show up now. I think now is the time for those who’ve been doing spiritual practice for a long time to really work to mobilize that energy, to try to bring ethics back into the public space, a sense of virtue, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of how to behave. I mean, we’ve lost that society. I mean, just every day you see the news. I mean, you look what happens. The Congress is there yelling at each other, screaming at each other. They hate each other. Trump is out there demeaning people. You say to yourself, okay, the compass is going crazy. There’s no moral compass anymore, no sense of right action. Those of us who try to base our life on Dharma, on a sense of living in accordance with some universal laws, need to know what’s going on. We can’t live in a bubble, except for retreat times. There’s retreat time, maybe weekends or whatever, to renew ourselves. I just want to interject that those listening to the live broadcast, feel free to send in a question if you like, or comment, and it could even be a skeptical question, like why I don’t believe in reincarnation or something, we can handle it. To do that you would go to the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com and then down the bottom of it there is a form through which you can submit questions. As you were saying that I was thinking, you know, well Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King didn’t live in a bubble. I mean, though they were spiritual dudes, but you know, they carried their spirituality into the streets, so to speak, and affected huge change in a nonviolent way. So they’re kind of inspiring examples.
Dena: We do a lot of work with young people and I’m always asking them what is the future they want to create? What is the vision? What kind of society? What would the society look like? You know, I mean, our economic system is not working. It’s getting more, the extremes are getting greater and greater. The social divisions are greater than they or maybe they always were bad, but now it’s just more upfront how polarized people are. How do we bring it all together? How do we come up with a new framework? Transition is always difficult. Somebody’s using the phrase, you know, we’re between stories. The old story is breaking down, the new story hasn’t yet arisen. So this is the story between stories, you know. I think it is, in a way, a confusing time, but it’s not like we’re going down the rabbit hole. We’re just trying to create something new and it’s not yet clear how to do that, what that would look like.
Rick: I guess that stands to reason, if we can step back a bit and what you were saying half an hour ago is that the old systems aren’t working, there are all these institutions of government and business and things that impact people’s lives and impact the environment and so on that couldn’t possibly exist in a more enlightened world and that will be their own destruction, because if they continue on the way we’re going there won’t be a world in which for them to exist. Perhaps the reason your spiritual friends get discouraged is they look at that stuff and it seems so entrenched and so powerful and what can little old us do to change it, you know, when there’s so much money and power behind it. I’m kind of reminded of the little sprout that pushes its way up through the asphalt, you know, that has the strength to do that. I think there’s something more powerful in the subtle and what we’re talking about here is something very subtle and therefore much more foundational, much more sort of causal, and that if we kind of keep sticking to that and working with that it’s bound to have a major impact and perhaps even eventually become the predominant paradigm.
Dena: That’s what I believe, you know, I think that things, this is hard to express, but things take formation in the spiritual world before they manifest physically.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good.
Dena: The ideas come together and it takes a while before the inner begins to manifest on the external plane, and so I think we’re at the visioning stage right now of what a new formation would look like and it could take a hundred years. I mean what you said before about looking at longer time periods, you know, World War II went on for how many years, ten years? Not even that long. Well, yeah, the Americans weren’t involved that long, but it started in Germany earlier, yeah.
Dena: That’s a long time to be at war, right? Yeah, and so that made, you know, living in the middle of that, it could have looked like things could have ended, and that’s where patience comes in, and the work that we do to build awareness, so much that to me is the main work right now, is the shift in consciousness and building awareness, and I see, you know, since I’ve been doing radio shows around the book, I see that in all parts of the country there are spiritual communities, there are Dharma centers, there are yoga centers, there are spiritual radio shows, there are a lot of work being done on the divine feminine, I mean there are communities around the country, it’s not just, you know, in the major pockets.
Rick: And around the world.
Dena: And around the world for sure, yeah.
Rick: Compare that with like, you know, what was there? There was Yogananda, you know, doing his thing way back then, and then in late 60s, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came in, and a few other things, but you know, compare that to today, and it’s, I mean, it was weird to talk about meditation back then, now it’s kind of like they’re teaching it in the boardrooms and so on.
Dena: I became a vegetarian in 1970, and when I would go to restaurants they’d think I was ill, and they would just give me some string beans and potatoes and carrots. You look at now how common it is, you know.
Rick: Yeah, so I think that’s a good example of what you just said, which is the subtle stuff takes a while to percolate up and become manifest. We were both, and many of those listening probably were participants in the sort of four or five decades ago when this subtle stuff was just beginning to get enlivened, and then a lot of it has become manifest, but there’s a lot more to go.
Dena: There’s a difference though, because at that time it was really bringing the spiritual ideas into the West, into the public place, where we could talk about, you know, religious unity and truth, you know, all religions being a path to truth. Now I think there’s a greater focus on the institutions, you know, the economic system. No, it’s not a dharmic economic system. This is not right, you know, excluding people. I mean, and maybe the whole Trump phenomenon of bringing this out into the open, maybe it’s like bringing all the dirt up, you know, bringing the mud to the surface, all the prejudices that people have that they didn’t talk about before. I mean, that’s how I look at it, I say to myself, where did all this stuff come from? We were not aware as a society that there was this polarization and anger and hatred, anger.
Rick: I saw a thing on the news yesterday where some woman was setting up a picnic table at a park or something like that, and she had a Puerto Rico t-shirt on, and some guy started screaming at her, you know, “You shouldn’t be in the country, and you shouldn’t be wearing that t-shirt,” and things like that, and “Are you a citizen?” You know, obviously he didn’t even know that Puerto Rico was part of the United States.
Dena: Right, right. I mean, where did this come from?
Rick: He ended up facing two felony charges for behaving that way, but so a lot of this kind of crap is coming to the surface and perhaps getting exposed for what it is.
Dena: It’s like when you have a boil, you know, the pus has to come out, you know, and so maybe this is just a cleansing process. I mean, it may have to get worse before it gets better, I don’t know, but I think that those of us who have been involved in this movement for greater human unity and to build a compassionate society, we really have to step out now and try to mobilize our spiritual energies.
Rick: We could probably rant and rave on that point a little longer, but our question came in from Dan in London who asks, “Are there any special meditation techniques for exploring past lives, or does it more need to be one’s predisposition to experience this?”
Dena: Well, you know, I’m often asked the question about past life regression because that is a technique that people use, and I have mixed feelings about that. I mean, in meditation, I think if one just introspects, you can see things, especially if you look at your earlier life, see strong interests in your earlier life, there are clues along the way, but if details are needed to be known, there are people who go to past life regression, and I have mixed feelings about that because you undergo hypnosis. When you undergo hypnosis, you have to be very careful about who’s hypnotizing you, and you have to make sure that the person is trustworthy and credible, but I know people who have been helped by that, if they’ve had like a phobia that they couldn’t overcome and they’ve gone to past life regression, they’ve discovered where in the past this comes from, they’ve been able to overcome it, but I don’t recommend it just for curiosity.
Rick: Yeah, Maharishi always used to say the past is a lesser-developed state and don’t worry about your past lives and all that stuff.
Dena: I think the important thing is just to know that you’ve been around, that you’ve had experiences and you’ve most likely experienced, I mean, I say that my experiences are everyone’s experience, we’ve all been rich and poor and born in this skin and that skin, we’ve had a diversity of experiences, and so we’ve been around a long time, so we should be able to relate to that, to the fact that we’ve had all these different experiences. I can share some of the ways. In one of my chapters I talk about a life in Africa where I lived in a village and at a certain moment the village was, slave traders came in and raided the village, I was killed, but my younger sister was kidnapped and as was my son and taken across on the ship and my sister was thrown overboard, they had to get rid of some of the slaves and so she died in the sea. That was a few hundred years ago. About two years ago we were in Charleston, South Carolina doing a dialogue on racial healing and there was a young man there who was the head of the Black Lives Matter in Charleston and he said to us, “Tomorrow we’re doing a ceremony for all of those Africans who didn’t make it over, who died in the journey, and you are invited.” We were half white, half black, this group, this dialogue, and so I said, “I want to go.” This life I had remembered, but it wasn’t uppermost in my mind, but as we arrived at the seashore and everyone was throwing flowers into the water and I started the ceremony, throwing flowers, the image of my sister came up and I remembered that moment and I thought to myself, I never was able to bring closure to the fact I had died from that spirit world. I saw that she was being thrown over, but I never was able to really bring that closure. At this moment I was able to bring that to closure and I was able to do the ceremonies for her. One of the young white men who was with us, part of our discussion, felt very uncomfortable and he said, “You know, that was a private thing. We should not have been there. That was not for us. We were intruding on their space.” I turned to him, Of course, you know, I’m limited by what I can say in public. I didn’t say, “No, that was my sister who died in the ocean,” but I said to him, “That was very, very meaningful for me and I’m glad we were invited to join in.” That was a way of us bonding with what the community was doing. It was a very powerful moment for me and it shows how the past comes into our present, even if we’re not conscious. Now, if I had not remembered that life, I would have felt moved by the ceremony, but it wouldn’t have been so personal. It just would have been a moving thing to be part of that, all of that community. We were just a few of us from the white community. There were mostly African-Americans from the Charleston area who were doing their annual ceremony, playing the drums and throwing the flowers in. But the difference is that this young white man felt uncomfortable and felt that this was an intrusion, where I, having remembered my past, saw it in a very personal light. Now, I’ve had a number of things like that happen. So to answer the question, what can be done, I’d say if there’s something compelling that you really need to find an answer to, you can find a guide to help you through this process of past life regression, but it’s not necessary.
Rick: Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras talks about remembering past lives as one of the siddhis, and I think he prescribes some sutra or something that can help you achieve it if you really want to. But one thing I’ve noticed in talking to so many people is that a lot of people who have had profound spiritual awakenings have spontaneously remembered past lives, not in as much detail as you have, or at least they haven’t written books about it, but you know a lot of them have had clear recollections which have kind of come spontaneously, unbidden, unsought, just when something opened to a certain degree, and I imagine they processed it and thought about it and felt through it and then moved on, but it may be something that could be commonly experienced as people reach a certain stage of their evolution.
Dena: I think it is not uncommon to have glimpses, to know, say, my past birth was in China, I was a monk in China. I mean, I know people who tell me this, but they may not have had the detail, but again, I say that I think it came to me for a particular sharing and to help show the patterns of how a cause and effect works from one life to another. When I put it all together and I looked at successive lives, it became such a beautiful tapestry to me. I thought, my God, this is beautiful the way the universe works, and you can see your suffering as prods to awaken, you know, it’s just, there’s no punishment to it, it’s just prods to help you awaken and to show where you’ve maybe missed the step, missed the beat. To me it’s just the universe becomes more, the more you see, the more beautiful and intricate the universe becomes.
Rick: well you really did a good job of weaving it all together and showing the threads that went through the various lives and into your current life, and so you can think of yourself as a kind of an emissary, you know, not everyone has to have these memories or write such books, but not everybody has to be Mozart, but you gave us a nice little taste there and took the skills you have in this life of speaking and writing and so on to do it in an effective way.
Dena: I also, at the end of the book, talked more about my memories of actually dying in my last body and how in that in-between state, which in fact feels more like home than this world, because you go back, you know, between lives, you kind of bring closure to some of the things and you see aspirations that haven’t been fulfilled. So I saw my last birth an aspiration to come to America so I could study with my guru. Well, I did get born in America and even though he was not in the body anymore, I was able to study his teachings from a very early in my life and learn meditation, which was what I so much wanted to do. So it’s a time of putting to rest your experience of your just previous life and laying the blueprint for the future, and that’s very important, this laying the blueprint for the future, because I think at the last part, you know, if you say that the last quarter of your life, as you get to a certain point, you’re already beginning to do that. You feel like a lot of the work, you know, you’re kind of reaching, fulfilling your aspirations, things that you’ve set for yourself, and beginning to think about the next life. I know I find myself doing that a lot.
Rick: I’ve read Michael Newton’s books, you know, “Life Between Lives,” have you read those? I haven’t read that, no. Well, he was a hypnotist, a hypnotherapist of some kind, and he was at some point hypnotizing people to go into their past lives, and all of a sudden he discovered that people were going into the life between lives, yeah, the period between incarnations, and so he ended up specializing in that and hypnotizing literally thousands of people to go into that thing, and he kind of compared all of their accounts and found tremendous consistencies between their accounts, and really kind of mapped out what people apparently commonly experience in between lives. I think you’d enjoy reading those books.
Dena: I will read them, yeah.
Rick: I was going to just say, I’m just at the stage of your book there where you’re talking about between lives, and I haven’t finished it yet, it’s the very last bit. I wonder if we want to talk about that for a few minutes, I think people might find that interesting.
Dena: Well, another interesting point about that is the difference in time. So I was in this in-between space, you know, it varies greatly, somebody could be there for a very brief time or for a very long time, it all depends on the conditions that one needs to come back into a body, but I was there for a short time, it was about ten years.
Rick: Ten Earth years.
Dena: But you might say that a year is like a day in that place, in that dimension. So as you can see, it felt like I had just arrived and suddenly I’m hearing my guru call me again, he’s calling me down again, and I didn’t feel ready to take a new birth, in a way I hadn’t processed everything, but my main goal was to follow him, so I had to respond to that call.
Rick: I know you’re a student of the Gita and there’s a verse in the Gita as you know where Arjuna asked Krishna, “What happens if you die before you complete the journey?” and basically he says, “Well, if you’re a yogi you might end up living in the celestial realms for a long, long time, and then being born in a pure and illustrious family, and if you’re lucky in a family of yogis.” But anyway, the indication is that in the celestial realms where you may reside in between lives, what you just said, where you could be there for in earth years a long time, but up there it doesn’t seem very long at all, just a different perspective on time.
Dena: That’s where I think this idea of heaven, I think some of the Abrahamic notions you can reconcile if you’re identifying with your personality and your body, then you can say, “Okay, that goes away,” and for a period of time you’re living in maybe a heaven realm or maybe, I mean, there’s so many different dimensions, and you may think that that’s it, but of course that’s not it. I mean there’s a lot more to go and so you continue on in the journey.
Rick: Sure, and the Vedic tradition talks about hell realms too, but they don’t say that any of those realms are permanent.
Dena: You know, you go there, you work off some karma and then you come back. I mean, if you’re a very greedy or angry person, you’re going to be drawn into a realm where you can display those qualities, where there are others who have those qualities.
Rick: Since we’re on this topic, I’ll grab my glasses here. There’s a little section in your book that I just read this morning that I wanted to read and have you comment on. You say, “The universe is teeming with life, not only the physical worlds but the astral ones as well, and even the even subtler causal worlds are inhabited by beings who no longer return to earth, having freed themselves from every earthly desire and karmic tie. There are planes of great darkness and planes of great beauty and light, where beings remain absorbed in the bliss of the one all-pervading consciousness, sending vibrations of love throughout the manifest worlds. It is this love that sustains universes.” So I like that passage, and in light of the whole conversation about reincarnation, I think it’s interesting to throw that in too, that the whole notion of there being various strata, subtle realms in which beings reside. It might sound like fanciful New Age ooga-booga, but as we said in the beginning, if the universe really works in a particular way, it behooves us to understand it. Gravity was doing just fine long before Sir Isaac Newton, and if this kind of thing that I just read from your book is actually a reality about how the universe functions, as spiritual seekers it might be good to align with that understanding or at least hold it as a viable hypothesis that we could contemplate and investigate.
Dena: You know, most physicists today abide by the string theory, which claims that their equations only work in a multi-dimensional universe, no less than nine dimensions. I’ve been following this a little bit because I think that science is on the verge of some breakthroughs, you know, because science keeps discovering more and more about the universe, and I think the discovery, they don’t know what dimensions are, they don’t know how to access them, they don’t know anything, except I even heard a scientist say recently that Einstein’s equations only work in a multi-dimensional universe, so could they be on the verge of discovering subtler and subtler realms? We know so little about the mind, I mean there’s always new stuff coming out, but we’re just at the very beginning of understanding what consciousness is. I mean not even in the kindergarten level of understanding in terms of scientific point of view. Now the yogis and the rishis and the great masters based their understanding, their realizations, on personal experience. They had techniques, they had developed technologies, so to speak, spiritual technologies that enabled them to speed up evolution, so they could go very, very far in terms of developing their mental capacity and understanding, and so they’re able to perceive things that we can’t yet perceive. I think as one, as I said earlier, meditation, you’re not just sitting in the darkness calming yourself. My problem with this whole meditation, the way it’s being presented in the mindfulness movement, it’s being dumbed down to just like, it’s just about stress reduction, it’s just about relaxation. That’s not what it’s about at all. You can go for a swim, you can go for a jog, there are lots of things you can do, you can rock in a hammock to relax, lots of things you can do to relax. Meditation is about awakening consciousness and it’s about understanding what consciousness and what life is, what this life is. I have no problem if people want to use it to relax, but understand that that’s not what happens. And maybe I say, maybe it’s a step in the door for people. They start off wanting some stress reduction and then before they know it, they’re beginning to understand things in a new light.
Rick: It is, it does. I mean, I taught TM for many years and in the intro lecture we’d talk a lot about stress reduction and better health and stuff like that, but once they’ve been meditating for four days we’d be talking about cosmic consciousness. Then they say, “Whoa, yeah, I didn’t think about that, that seems possible based on my experience of four days.” So the mundane practical stuff can be an entry point for some people.
Dena: I think it has been and I think it’s creating a wave in society that’s going to bring a lot of benefit, because I think even if a certain percent of those people go in deeper, it’s going to change their understanding of things and that’s what we need now. I mean, we need a wave to carry us to the next stage.
Rick: What you’re saying about scientists discovering subtler things a minute ago is interesting. I was just listening to an interview this morning by Krista Tippett, who does the On Being program, interviewing a physicist who had won the Nobel Prize for something, and he was talking about how Einstein had predicted gravity waves but thought they could never be detected because they were way way too subtle, but with current technology they were discovered a couple years ago. When you think about it, I mean the kind of subtlety we’re talking about here is not just in terms of physical phenomena, such as, well, gravity isn’t actually physical, but it’s not merely about the material universe, it’s about, as your little quote from the book was saying, astral and causal or celestial realms, stuff that scientists wouldn’t dream of being able to explore. But as you said, the yogis have been exploring and the mystics have been exploring for thousands of years. So I always like to think of the human nervous system as a kind of scientific instrument which, if properly applied, can aid science in understanding the full range of the universe. By properly applied, I would mean applied in a scientific systematic way, you know, not just hanging on beliefs but proceeding experientially, step by step, as one goes deeper and deeper and refines the instrument.
Dena: You know, I think one of the, it’s very positive that His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist monks are working with scientists to understand what happens in meditation, what are the changes in the brain that take place. I mean, I’ve often wondered, you know, when I’m having these memories, are there any changes going on in my brain? Yeah, so I think that, you know, the brain is, you can create new grooves. I mean, one of the reasons why it’s important for meditation to be regular is that you create new grooves, new patterns in the brain. So it’s about evolution, really. I mean, I think we’re at an evolutionary moment now and, you know, the more people who can participate actively in speeding up this evolution, the more we’ll be able to, you know, the 100th monkey, bring the rest of humanity along.
Rick: People might enjoy the interview I did some years ago with Rick Hansen, who talks a lot about neuroplasticity and how meditation changes the brain over time. In terms of the, oh, you’re going to say something? No, man. In terms of the 100th monkey, I’ve said this in other interviews, but there are quite a few examples in nature of how small percentages of a system can influence the whole system, like in the heart 1% of the cells are pacemaker cells, they synchronize the beating of the whole heart, or in a laser the square root of 1% of the photons, if they line up coherently, cause the other photons to entrain with them, and then the whole thing becomes one coherent beam and you get a laser. So, you know, that perhaps is applicable to human systems in which a relatively small percentage awaken to a degree of spirituality or coherence, and that kind of causes or allows the rest of society to entrain or to fall into line with that higher consciousness.
Dena: Yeah, I guess our challenge is to keep our eye on the bigger picture and the bigger work and not get distracted by the details which are very distracting.
Rick: Like you said before, don’t hide your head in the sand, I mean there’s no harm in watching the news and being aware of current events and all that stuff, but don’t let it bum you out, because there’s a brighter picture going on that’s not quite getting reported on the evening news.
Dena: Well, that’s it, there is a brighter picture and we have to keep reminding each other of that, the fact that there are so many conversations taking place like this, you know, and I have always felt, ten years ago we organized a gathering of spiritual teachers to look at the changing spiritual landscape of America, and that’s when I saw the integration, you know, churches that are having Sangha meetings, Buddhist practice after their mass and after their sermons, whatever, and I saw that there was such an integration among a growing population. Now, of course it’s not the majority, but it is a significant population now, where it wasn’t a significant population when we were starting out, and so that’s the positive story that we have, and it’s going to grow, it’s going to grow.
Rick: It continues to grow. I don’t see what could stop it really, it’s not like meditation is going to be outlawed or anything, we’re not in the dark ages, we’re not in the middle ages, we’re not getting burned at the stake for doing this.
Dena: I mean, what’s happening is that meditation has moved out from its first group, you know, moved into all communities now, you know, all communities, which is wonderful because it’s not just a middle-class phenomenon.
Rick: There’s inspiring examples, for instance, I interviewed a woman a couple months ago named Cavalier Morgan, who has become a good friend, and she’s got this meditation program started in the Portland Public School system, which is having profound effects and transforming the lives of a lot of kids who potentially might have been suicidal or were getting bullied or in various cliques and gangs and whatnot, but bringing them together in harmony, it’s really inspiring. There’s a video of the whole thing on her website.
Dena: I have to check that out.
Rick: Yeah, Caverly Morgan, yeah, you can find her.
Dena: What’s her first name?
Rick: Caverly, like C-A-V-E-R-L-Y, not Calvary, like calling the cavalry, but C-A-V-E-R-L-Y.
Dena: Caverly, okay.
Rick: Caverly, yeah. Anyway, a question came in from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California. He said, “Could you elaborate on your encounter with Yogananda more? Was the encounter in Germany in your previous incarnation?”
Dena: Yes.
Rick: You don’t look like you would have been an adult in mistake of saying, well, you know, in refugee was living in Europe, came in during the Russian Revolution, was living there, was actually living in Bucharest in Romania, and my brother was living in Germany, and I was going back and forth visiting him. I had taken an interest, had come in contact with the Bhagavad Gita through a library in Germany and was an avid reader and looking for information, spiritual information, which was sparse at that time, anything I could get my hands on. This became known about me, and a friend of my brother said, “There’s a yogi here on his way back from America to India. Would you like to go hear him talk?” It was at a private home somewhere, and so I remembered with such interest, “Yes,” and I walked into the room and was just mesmerized. I had no exchange of words with him. He was speaking to a small group of people. I didn’t understand much English. His English was broken, not clear, so it wasn’t even a matter of…
Rick: Yogananda, I thought he spoke good English.
Dena: He spoke good English, but toward the end of his life, even better, but he had an accent. He had an accent. Yeah, and tapes of his, they’ve had to use technology to improve the quality of the tapes because he did have an accent. I mean, he knew how…his English, he could have conversation, but it was with an accent. If somebody who didn’t know English very well, it would be difficult, but it was the vibration that affected me, and I felt that a moment happened where he glanced at me and something happened in that glance. After he finished talking, there were people around him. I didn’t have a… I was very, very shy. I had no public role. I was a very private person, so I didn’t even go up and greet him. I just quietly left, but it had a great impact on me. My mother had given me before I left Russia a locket with the Virgin Mary in it, and I took that picture out and wrote down his name and put that in the locket, and things went downhill after that. A man I was in love with, a Jewish professor, was captured and taken by the Nazis, disappeared, and the Jews were being round up, and I was briefly held by the Nazis and then let go, and just took a train and went to Vienna, and there I got sick, and while I was in a fever, I had a dream where Yogananda said, “I’m coming to take you to America,” because my aspiration was, “I want to follow this man. I don’t understand what he’s said, but I’ve never been in the presence of someone with such powerful vibration, powerful energy,” and so I had that dream, and I waited. I thought, “He’s coming to take me to America,” and of course he didn’t show up, and I kept thinking, “Well, any day now, he’s going to show up,” and then I got sick and died soon after that, and on my deathbed, I saw him, and he said, “I’ve come to take you to America,” and I died and was reborn in America, and that was my experience. Then I found Yogananda in this life when I was 19 or 20, when somebody in college, somebody handed me an “Autobiography of a Yogi.” All I had to do was see the picture, and I knew that was my guru, and so I knew that I had met Yogananda even earlier in my history, before this past birth, and in the book I talk about an earlier encounter with him in one of his earlier births, and I know that it’s a long relationship with him.
Rick: Which one was that? I forgot.
Dena: William the Conqueror.
Rick: Oh, maybe I didn’t get to that yet. Is it in the very end?
Dena: It’s at the end of the book.
Rick: I’ll have to read that tonight. Yogananda was William the Conqueror, you say?
Dena: That’s what the word is. I talk about a different, you know, he’s known in history in a certain way, and there were other aspects of him where he was spiritually imbuing the land and putting in the energy that enabled Great Britain to become what it became.
Rick: Interesting. So William the Conqueror was a British king, was he?
Dena: He was French, actually, and he actually went during… there was a time when the Vikings were… there were a lot of raids from the Vikings, and he came and conquered England, basically, and brought Christianity to England. I mean, the beautiful thing is, I remember being all different religions and different races, and that changes your feeling about those religions and races when you remember being them.
Rick: Yeah, you don’t recount any lifetimes in which you were a man.
Dena: No, but I do have a memory of being a man, but I just don’t have a full narrative. There are a few things, I mean, there are things that I’ve left out in the book where I just have an image and not a full narrative. So I couldn’t… yeah, there was one in particular being a Native American, but it was a very brief life, and I just had a scene that I remembered from it.
Rick: Yeah, so even now, as you go through your days, are you constantly presented with memories and like little movies popping up in your mind of past life?
Dena: I am, especially since I’m deep in this other book, which is during the time of Lama Sita, and so I’m almost finished [with] that, but even, you know, I still process things that are in the book, those memories still emerge every now and then, things that I’ve written about, and I relate it to something that’s happening in my current life, or people. I mean, the thing, one of the great lessons for me, I would say I would narrow it down to three, changing the relationship I look at death, and knowing myself to have a long history in the long future and just, you know, the shaper of that, changing my sense of identity so that my attachment to this body and this personality is much weaker, and the third thing is the power of love. You know, the universe operates, at the foundation is this, is this love. I mean, I don’t really separate consciousness from love. I think one of the qualities of consciousness is love, and so pure, pure unadulterated consciousness is this blissful conscious being, beingness, which we are a part of, but the beings in the past, my guides and teachers, Yogananda being one of them, but my Sufi father, that Baba, I feel that I’m still connected with them. I feel their love crossing boundaries of time and geography. Another thing, that’s time, time is a creation of the mind and so is space. So, while I can be in different time periods simultaneously, I’m also in different spatial zones, and so I often find myself in that in-between place where I have this mentor, spirit guide there, who often guides me in this life. So, it’s not the way it seems. Our mind packages our life into a linear time and a very limited spatial zone, and then it all seems very confined and rational. It’s not like that.
Rick: I’ve had people tell me that in their insight time isn’t linear and that actually all the past lives that we have have not been sequential, they’re simultaneous, and that we somehow serve as a filter to give a sequential structure to the universe, but it really doesn’t work that way.
Dena: It doesn’t work that way, that’s my experience, but I don’t quite understand it. I think our minds, you know, when people argue about this word God, I say to them, “How can human language or human mind possibly grasp what is the way it is?”
Rick: That brings up another interesting point, which is that you talk about how complex karma is, both individual and collective, and when you think about it, if every little thing that we do has repercussions and ramifications throughout the universe and it all somehow gets calculated and comes back to us, imagine the computing power that would be required to keep track of all that.
Dena: Phenomenal, I mean it’s just beyond, beyond, beyond.
Rick: Some people might say well it couldn’t possibly be because there couldn’t be that much computing power, but think about a single cell in your finger and how complex it is. It’s as complex as a modern city and it also repairs and replicates itself, so if that can be orchestrated and managed by some intelligence and we have, you know, 60 trillion of them in our bodies, then why not, you know, the whole universe being governed or conducted through a law such as karma?
Dena: The universe is not chaotic, it’s based on law and you know there are laws that keep everything, you know, laws of gravitation that keep things from crashing into each other, I mean it works and same thing as these spiritual laws and the sooner we understand them the better off we’ll be.
Rick: Even chaos is governed by law. I gave a talk at the S.A.N.D. conference a few years ago and I took that clip from Star Wars where Han Solo took the Millennium Falcon into the asteroid field in order to evade the Darth Vader’s guys that were chasing him. All those asteroids that seem to be randomly… that’s all perfect, it abides perfectly by laws of nature and laws of gravity in that case and then, one of the people chasing him smacked into an asteroid and I said, “All right, that little bit there was in perfect accordance with the karma of the guy who’s driving that ship.” I mean it’s all just completely perfect like clockwork, you know.
Dena: It’s like clockwork, it really is. It just gives one a sense of just awe and but when you tap into the love, you know, the fact that that love is a very real part of the whole thing and we experience that. I mean, I think the microcosm reflects the macrocosm and we experience it and, you know, we experience it and I think that’s what the human community desperately, that’s probably the greatest call to right now is to awaken more of that love, you know, because we’ve gotten away from it. We’ve become, you know, of course it’s not, you know, there’s still a lot of love in the world, but how do we bring it back into the public space?
Rick: I think it’s, you know, it’s kind of happening. We were talking earlier about, you know, things seem kind of dark but at the same time there’s some rays of light that are shining. There’s so many things, you know, Black Lives Matter and Me Too movement and, you know, people just not tolerating police brutality anymore and all kinds of things are coming to light, especially with social media and everybody carrying a camera.
Dena: That’s true, yeah, that’s true. I mean, you look at the migrant kids and how many people have been moved by those stories. So, I mean, you look at the boys in Thailand, the whole world was watching, you know, and so I think that, we saw the positive impact of the internet and now we’re seeing the dark side of the internet, it has a dark side and all the tech, the same thing with the atom bomb, I mean, there was a positive side to that too and then we saw the dark side of it. There are so many technologies waiting in the future that will benefit, bring a benefit, but they may not come to us until we learn how to reject the dark side of these technologies or manage them better.
Rick: Well, there are technologies even now which could make a huge difference, you know, in terms of, I mean, alternative energies for instance.
Dena: Exactly, yes, that’s the big one.
Rick: Yeah, and it could be applied much more quickly than they are being applied, but there’s people who, as you were saying earlier, are looking at the next quarter profits and trying to repress them because regardless of what happens to the world because of the short-sightedness, so just as sort of a matter of broadening perspective, I guess, and seeing the big picture, being moved by compassion instead of greed, things like that.
Dena: Yeah, yeah, and realizing, I mean, we have a lot of focus on building human unity, that’s what the Interfaith Movement has done, but we’ve got to grow that toward unity with all of life, with the planet, with our forests and with the rivers and just the oceans, everything, seeing them as part of us, not separate from us.
Rick: Which of course is a very spiritual perspective, not an esoteric one, it’s like if we’re really all one then we’re one with the ocean, and why are we putting, you know, Texas-sized patches of plastic into it, and you know, choking all the fish and bleaching all the coral and all that stuff, we’re doing it to ourselves.
Dena: Well, I think that’s one of the shifts in consciousness. I mean, I think that there are a few shifts in consciousness that could really help us forward, and one of them is this understanding that we are the oceans.
Rick: And the rain forests and the rain forest, everything.
Dena: Yeah, they’re part of our body and we’re part of them and we need to treat them like part of our body.
Rick: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
Dena: Right, yeah.
Rick: A question came in from Bill from Cork, Ireland. All right, I always get in trouble when I bring up Trump questions, but here we go. “Hi Dena, right now President Trump is visiting the UK. He has already severely criticized his host Theresa May. Do you think that in reality Trump and Brexit’s gross egotism is in reality giving us all a big wake-up call to the fact that our own individuality is actually equally important to the whole? In other words, it’s Dena and the whole, Rick and the whole, Bill and the whole, my dog Charlie and the whole. I think we have forgotten that our own individuality is of equal importance. What do you think?”
Dena: Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Well, I know a lot of us are reflecting deeply on what the message is, you know, what’s the wake-up call? We know it’s a wake-up call. I have thought of it as both karmically a return for things that we’ve done and bringing up the darkness that people that have been that’s been hiding out in people’s subconscious. But could it be a wake-up call that we are part of the whole? It could be, yeah.
Rick: I guess the way I interpret this question is that everyone matters, you know, no matter how it’s apparently insignificant or small. I mean, I’ve heard people say, “Well, you know, we have to sacrifice the individual for this great cause.” Maybe that’s a heroic sentiment if you’re a soldier or something, but everybody has intrinsic value and, you know, we can’t treat people like objects or like garbage or as disposable and so on. As you were saying earlier, our economic systems tend to do that. They’re structured that way. You know, tiny fraction of the world’s population having tremendous wealth and a huge percentage struggling. So, you know, if we’re all…
Dena: I think everyone is equally important and that’s one of the imbalances in our society, as you just said, is giving importance just to a handful of people and that’s going to reverberate. I mean, that’s going to bring a karmic return that’s ugly. Until we get the message that everyone is equally important and we have to care for everybody, then… you can’t treat people like they’re… call people names as if they’re not conscious beings. It’s being shoved in our face, this attitude, that there are people who are important and everybody else is not important. It’s being shoved in our face and we have to reject it, and we have to state in a positive way. So, how do you turn that negative energy into a positive?
Rick: Sometimes when topics like this come up in interviews I get feedback from people saying, “You know, stop talking about this political stuff and this social stuff, stick to spirituality.” This is spirituality.
Dena: It is spirituality.
Rick: Spirituality is all-inclusive, it’s the whole enchilada, you know, it’s not just some pie-in-the-sky, esoteric, you know, hide-in-an- ashram kind of thing. It has tremendous relevance to all the issues that confront us.
Dena: And things are being done in our name. Things are being done in our name and I know, I think, some people respond with anger and some people respond with pain. My experience has been just pain, pain at the pain that’s being caused. You know, the children, the toddlers who are being separated from the parents, I mean, that’s causing pain to Americans. A lot of us are suffering as a result of that, and that suffering needs to be acknowledged. Things that are being done in our name are causing suffering to the American people and that’s a very real thing that needs to be acknowledged. The problem with having the experience not so long ago of World War II when people did not speak up. People didn’t speak up, the church didn’t speak up. There are people still alive who remember that period and then people who remember it from their past birth. That’s still in our collective memory. What is the lesson we’re supposed to learn from that? That we have to speak up and what we have to speak of not with anger but with a sense of this is not right, this is not dharmic. In order to create a society that’s based on proper values, we have to bring to public mind what those values are. It’s not name-calling, it’s not lying, it’s not cheating, it’s not abusing public funds. We have to speak up in this otherwise we’re creating a society that’s built on false values.
Rick: A related point, I don’t know how much attuned to this whole thing you are, is that I’ve been involved with a group of people who are attempting to sort of draft a code of ethics for spiritual teachers because there’s a lot of unethical things that have been done in the name of spirituality, you know, and I’ve just written a whole essay about it, I’ll share it with you if you like.
Dena: I would like, yes.
Rick: It’s one of those things that its time has come, as with the Me Too movement, and so many people have been puzzled or have been kind of like accepting severe abuse and alcoholism and sexual misconduct from spiritual teachers as something that they just can’t understand because he’s enlightened and I’m ignorant and he’s inscrutable and it must be a crazy wisdom teaching or something. Forget it, the time for that kind of behavior has ended.
Dena: It’s over. I would say, I wouldn’t even call them spiritual teachers, I would say so-called spiritual teachers, because when you’re causing harm to somebody you’re not a spiritual teacher. People who have claimed to be at a state that they’re clearly not, and students, I mean, how are students to judge this, you know? They [teachers] may have a certain spiritual attainment, but certainly not at the level where they behave in a way that brings benefit instead of causing harm to people. To me that’s the barometer, you know, if you’re not being truthful, if you’re not being honest, if you’re causing harm to people, then… and this is more of a, well, I guess it’s always existed, but there’s been a… it’s been a phenomenon that’s been going on for, what, I think it’s caused a lot of the great spiritual leaders to go into retreat, you can hardly find them anymore. They’re not in the marketplace.
Rick: Here’s a paragraph I just wrote this morning, I’ll run it by you. It said, “I think that prospective students are entitled and even obligated to evaluate teachers. One question to ask is, do I want to become like this person? If he’s an alcoholic, a sexual predator, etc., are those qualities I wish to embody? One might argue that one can learn a lot from a person without mirroring his personality. That may be true of a mathematics professor, but is less so of a spiritual teacher. The spiritual aspirant entrains with the personality and consciousness of the teacher. The scenes around some of these bad boy teachers drinking and sexual promiscuity and so on, spirituality is all about attaining inner clarity. Our behavior reflects our inner state. What inner state does debauchery reflect? Think about it.”
Dena: I’m so glad you’re doing this because it’s much, much needed now. It’s been needed for a long time. Too many students have gotten hurt, and then what does it do? It casts a cloud on the whole spiritual movement. It’s been too easy now for people to write off teachers from the East and saying, “Look what they do,” and so not to even have a sense of responsibility for the tradition you’re representing. I mean, there is that responsibility there. When you put yourself out as a teacher, if you’ve got human flaws, fine, go work out your issues, but don’t represent a tradition.
Rick: Of course, some venerable traditions have fairly strict guidelines as to who is qualified to be a teacher, you know, and people like Buddha and Shankara and Ramana and so on, they didn’t just send anybody out willy-nilly to teach, they made sure that they were really qualified.
Dena: I’ve seen too many people, because you and I both work in this world, who want to be teachers, and as soon as there’s the desire there to want to be a teacher, that already says something.
Rick: It should almost disqualify them. I’m sort of joking because some people are legitimately qualified and that’s their dharma and they should do it.
Dena: Yeah, and there are all levels of teachers, I mean, you know, there are people, certainly you can receive help from people at all different stages on the spiritual path.
Rick: All right, enough on that point. If you have time, there is one other thing that you’ve devoted a fair amount of time to, and I thought it might be interesting to discuss it a little bit. You’ve convened meetings of Buddhist and Hindu monks and yogis and so on, to contrast their understandings and experience of the self, whether there’s no self or all self or whatever. How did that go and what are some reflections on that debate?
Dena: Well, it’s interesting because the yogis would come to the point of saying, “We agree with you, there’s no difference,” and the Buddhists would insist, “No, there is a difference.”
Rick: Were the Buddhists a little bit more stubborn or something?
Dena: I think so, I think they want to distinguish themselves from the Hindus, but in actuality, the place that we came to was that it’s all a matter of language. What do you mean by self? It’s all language, you know? I mean, I see the vision, the yogic vision is no different from the Buddhist vision that I’ve heard, but it’s described in different terms and different ways of getting there, but the end result, I’ve seen no difference, and most of my swami friends, yogi friends, agree with that, but it’s harder for me to get the Buddhists to see that, and I think that there’s kind of a built-in attachment coming from the Buddha’s time that the Hindus don’t quite get the end result, as long as there is the concept of the self, so it comes down to what is the self. The self is no different from… I have a very dear friend Tenzin Palmo, I don’t know if you know her, she’s a Buddhist nun, has a nunnery in Dharamsala, and I had this conversation with her once, and she’s one of the few who said, “Of course there’s no difference,” she said, “Of course there’s a primordial consciousness,” and so I said to myself, “Well, that’s the answer,” you know, I don’t use the term “God,” but I use more Vedic terms, but it’s about this primordial consciousness. I mean, what is the self but that primordial consciousness appearing to divide itself into the many, you know, that’s what it means, there’s only one, but there’s the appearance of many, we’re not separate from that in the ultimate sense.
Rick: This is a good point, I mean, there have been so many fights and actual literal wars over these subtle distinctions, I mean, whether God is formless or form, you know, I mean, you went through a couple different lifetimes where you had to experience from both directions, both perspectives.
Dena: And both are true.
Rick: Yeah, they’re both true. Certs is a candy mint, Certs is a breath mint, both.
Dena: That’s right, everybody gets to be right.
Rick: Alrighty, well, do you feel like anything, I mean, there’s a lot of things I could keep bringing up, there are all kinds of cool things in your book, there are various, there are certain themes that you kind of carried from one life to the next, like one of those races in the Olympics where they hand the baton off to the next runner and then that person keeps running, there are certain things that happened in your Russian life that then moved into your next life and so on, and there’s a logical kind of sequence to it. I don’t know if you want to talk about some specific examples of that, or if you feel like wrapping it up, I’m good either way.
Dena: Well, there are two themes that it was interesting for me to become aware of. One was the theme of finding my own voice as a woman and confidence as a woman, and looking to find spiritual, full spiritual flowering in a woman, which I found eventually in Africa and through my shaman woman, shaman teacher was a woman, but that was the theme. When I found myself, I was not particularly involved in the feminist movement as a young girl because I was mostly, seeking to develop my spiritual practice, so I wasn’t [a feminist]. I was active in the civil rights movement, in the anti-war movement, and then search and withdrew a little bit and really spent a lot of time in studying the texts, so I wasn’t so active as a feminist, but then when I found myself working with women’s spiritual teachers, I would often say, “How did I get into this?” You know, yeah, I do want to help, I do want to provide a platform, but how did I get into this? Also, I was not interested in religion, I was interested in my own spiritual practice. So how did I get into working in the interfaith? I got to work with rabbis now again? I was born Jewish, turned away from that, and so I wondered about these two things, working with women’s spiritual teachers and working in interfaith, and when I look back, I saw that these two themes came up again and again. Well, I was in a situation where I had to bridge cultures. One was in India, when I was married as a Hindu to a to a Muslim king, a sheikh, and I had to be some kind of a bridge, and then again in Japan, between warring clans, I had to be some kind of a bridge. So these themes of finding my voice as a woman and finding my spiritual potential as a woman, on the one hand, and then trying to bridge cultures and find a meeting place, on the other hand, these two themes really came to completion in this life as Dena, and so maybe that work is done.
Rick: Do you ever have a feeling like that there might be something in your current life that you are nowhere near really resolving or working out, and that might be the theme of your next life?
Dena: Yes, deep meditation. I’ve always had the desire for a more reclusive life, and I’ve been, found myself, or thrust into, however you want to say it, into a life of a lot of activity. Of a social activist, I’m engaged in climate issues and environmental issues, and mentoring young people, a lot of issues, and I say to myself, “If only I could be… no, ashram, where’s my ashram? I want my ashram.” I think I’ll find my ashram, I’ll get to the ashram in the next time around.
Rick: Cool. Another question came in, this is from Goryana from Belgrade, Serbia. She asks, I presume that’s a woman’s name, “Based on your meditation experience in terms of accessing past lives and finding a guru, is there a validity of accessing past lives and a guru through a dreaming state?” I guess she’s wondering, can we have these experiences in dreams?
Dena: Yes, absolutely. As a matter of fact, the way my awakening happened was through dreams. I moved into a house when I was 30, and for the next 10 years I began dreaming of another house, and it was always the same place, and I’d wake up with a sense of longing, “Oh, I’ve been there again,” and a sense of sadness. As my memories awakened, I realized this was a house that I had lived in as a child in Russia. And so, dreams, things come to me in dreams very often actually. Dreams are a portal, and I can’t control when it’s going to happen, but I would say yes, you definitely can access your past and higher states in dreams.
Rick: You’re more open.
Dena: You’re more open, yeah.
Rick: Irene just scribbled down a note here that I’m sure you’re familiar with this notion that it’s said in the Vedic tradition that the last thought at the time of death determines your next life, and that your last thought is determined by your deepest impression, and that sort of sets the agenda for the next time around.
Dena: That’s right, yeah. So it’s useful to think, it’s useful to in addition to one’s meditation practices, I think a time of reflection of looking at what those deepest impressions and what your deepest aspirations are is very useful, because to be conscious that we are shaping our future.
Rick: I know that in contemporary India sometimes the thinking has been, well, you know, spirituality is for old people, you should be a student, do your marriage and your business career and raise your kids, and then when you get old you can get into that last stage of life and think about spirituality, but it’s really a lifelong undertaking and it’s not only not incompatible with all these other stages of life, but is actually conducive to their success.
Dena: Well, as you said, you can’t separate it.
Rick: Right.
Dena: Your work is your sadhana, your work is your spiritual practice, and work should be looked upon that way as part of your spiritual practice. I mean, everything we do is part of our spiritual practice, and to separate your spiritual practices, just the time that I’m in the cushion, well, that’s a very short part of the day, you know. We don’t want to limit it to that, we want everything, the way we deal with our children, the way we deal with our spouse, it’s all got to be part of our spiritual awareness, our practice.
Rick: Irene just… oh, maybe that’s just… oh, now I got to say it, because I already started saying it. She just said, you know, based upon this thing of deepest impression, in her next incarnation she’s either going to be a dog or a TV. [Laughter]
Dena: A dog’s life with a good owner is not bad.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, we’ve had some ones that are very lucky, lucky dogs. Yeah. Alrighty, well, this has been really fun, Dena.
Dena: It’s been great, I enjoyed it too, very much.
Rick: Thank you so much for a very interesting week reading your book, I’ve really gotten into it.
Dena: Joining me on my journey, huh?
Rick: I look forward to reading the next one.
Dena: Okay, yeah, next one’s going to be interesting.
Rick: Alright, well, it’s great to talk to you and I hope we connect again.
Rick: Now don’t just disconnect, I want to make a couple of concluding remarks. So, I’ve been speaking with Dena Merriam and this is part of an ongoing series of interviews, so if you’d like to be notified of future ones, please go to www.batgap.com and there’s a place to sign up for the email notification. You can also subscribe on YouTube and then I guess YouTube notifies you when there’s a new one. If you go to www.batgap.com explore the menus because there’s several things there you might find interesting. So, thanks for listening and watching and thanks again Dena and we’ll see you all next week.