Rick: Hi, my name is Rick Archer and you’re listening to the second installment of an interview show in which we discuss spiritual awakening or shifts in consciousness or whatever you want to call them, we’ll be using various terms. The first installment was taped about a month ago as a pilot for a radio show, which you may have seen on YouTube or even on FPAC, the Fairfield Public Access Channel. But plans changed such that we’re now going to make this primarily a TV show. And at some point it may also become a radio show. And I’ll also be continuing to put them up on YouTube. And FPAC, the Fairfield Public Access Station, will also be streaming them to the web eventually, or archiving them to be viewed on the web. The idea for this show, a show in which I interview people who have undergone a spiritual awakening or a shift in consciousness, occurred to me a couple of months ago when I was working out on my Bowflex machine, listening to a spiritual teacher named Adyashanti. Thought just came, I want to do a show. And so I took about a month before I taped the pilot. And all along I’d been thinking to use the term “Awakenings” for the show. And I may yet continue to use that name, although just the other day I thought, well, maybe we should call it, “Shifts happen.” But then someone objected to the scatological implications of that term. And just today a friend of mine got creative and came up with a few titles for the show. Some of them tongue in cheek, but one of them potentially serious. Here’s a few. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Self.” “Is that Self-Realization or You’re Just Happy to See Me?” “Rick Archer’s Evil Ploy for World Awakening.” “That Which Cannot be Simpler.” And this one I actually like and may end up using, “Buddha at the Gas Pump.” “Interviews with the Enlightened Among Us.” Now if I end up calling it that, I will have to rather carefully qualify the use of the word enlightenment. Because to me, that term implies some sort of ultimate stage in the development of human consciousness. And I don’t think too many people in the world have reached an ultimate stage. It all depends on how we want to use our terms. I prefer the term awakening or shift or something like that. With the understanding that there are many degrees of awakening or levels of awakening that people undergo as they evolve spiritually. And so that’s why I initially decided to call this show “Awakenings.” So we’ll see what we end up calling it. But in any case, I asked our tonight’s guest to come in because she has lived a very fascinating life. And I knew that I wouldn’t — since I’m rather inexperienced as an interviewer, I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble filling up an hour, an hour and a half talking to this person. Her name is Angela Mailander and she has lived here in Fairfield for a number of years. Although prior to this, she’s lived in six other cultures and we’ll be hearing some stories about her experiences in those cultures. As Angela and I were chatting back and forth through email the other day in preparation for this show, she wrote something that I thought was very clear and cogent definition of awakening. It sort of jives with my definition and I thought I might read it. Just a paragraph. She said, “I don’t really identify with my own individuality. I mean, I’ve got one and it’s pretty distinctive on account of a pretty unusual life in six different cultures. It’s like a car I’ve got to drive around in, but it’s not who I consider me.” And when I ask, “well then, who is that?” “The answer is infinity, silence, unknowability, mystery, life. On the other hand, my individuality is human. And being that, it seems I have human responsibility to humanity. It seems the only legitimate reason to me to be incarnated at all.” So I thought that was beautiful and I just wanted to start by reading that. When I say that Angela has all kinds of interesting stories to tell, I sort of think of telling stories on a show like this in the context of, if you’ve ever read the book, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” in which Yogananda came out with all kinds of interesting stories. But they weren’t stories for stories sake. The central theme of that book was that there are people who are living in an enlightened state. And various anecdotes from their lives can illustrate what is really a very subjective and abstract experience and sometimes hard to articulate. So, enough of me doing monologue. I’d like to reintroduce Angela Mailander. And Angela, as we talk and as I ask you questions and so on, feel free to take as long as you like. And if something is on your mind that I don’t seem to be bringing out with a question, just bring it out. Just talk about it. Don’t wait for me to come up with a question. So, where would you like to start?
Angela: Uhm, I would like to start with my first clear experience of witnessing.
Rick: And you’ll define witnessing in the process.
Angela: Yeah. And I was five years old at the time. But it was so clear that I’ve never forgotten it.
Rick: Mm-hmm.
Angela: We were — “we” being a group of about 30 of us, including my mom, two baby sisters, an aunt, and my grandmother, and a group of Russian prisoners of war. We were all 30 of us running away from the invading Russian army in Germany in the very early spring of 1945. We had bicycles and we were, my two baby sisters and I were in a two-wheel trailer being pulled by a bicycle. We had orders to stay under a tarp, but I couldn’t do that. I had to see what was going on. And we came to a fork in the road where the road went around a huge circular field. And as we were coming to this fork in the north, we saw a battle developing at about the two o’clock position of this huge circle. And I’m very certain of my geographic directions here. So Russian tanks were moving in at the two o’clock position of this huge circle, driving the retreating German army in front of them diagonally across this huge circular field toward the eight o’clock position. So because they were, at the moment we arrived, they were on that side of the road there. We didn’t go that way, we went this way instead.
Rick: Counterclockwise.
Angela: Counterclockwise. To try to outrun them and then go south. Our intent was to get to the Elbe River, which was going to be the demarcation line between the advancing Russian army on one side of the river, pushing the refugees and the German army in front of them, and the advancing American army on the other side of the river. So we’re bicycling, and as it happened, this battle and we got to the eight o’clock position at the same time. So we were riding through hand-to-hand combat, with tanks also in the picture, and it was the most hellish scene you can imagine. But for some reason, none of our group of 30 seemed to mind it at all. We as one were intent on getting through there and getting past it and then going south. How we managed it, I have no clue. I mean, there were… We should have slid on somebody’s brains. There were body parts flying around, soldiers screaming and shaking and dying and running and bombs exploding and a thing called Panzerfaust, which is intended to kill a tank. And by the way, I had never seen tanks before, but with a tank, you don’t have to have prior experience to see that they’re evil. So our group rode through this mess. Not one of us crashed a bike. Not one of us was hit. We passed through that battle like one wave passes through another, not affected. And I remember this scene from outside, from a distance above, and I remember the abso- Even though I heard the noise, I remember that it was also going on in deep silence. And this deep silence permeated everything. It made everything seem like it was going on in slow motion and silently. And we came through it, all 30 of us. I remember it. Every time I see the Tour de France on television, it looks exactly like that. All these riders as one going through that scene unscathed and then escaping south. So… It was so memorable that I’ve never forgotten it. And I’ve never forgotten that silence. And it, of course, came back often.
Rick: Now at the time, when you were five years old, and this happened, were you thinking to yourself, “Wow, that was so unusual. There was this deep silence in the middle of this chaos.” Or did it not dawn on you until years later when you’ve reflected on that experience that that had been an unusual way of reacting to a thing like that?
Angela: Years later. Many years later. No, it didn’t seem unusual at the time. Even the battle didn’t seem unusual at the time. I didn’t know that… We’d come through other horrors before we got to that scene. And we’re going through more horrors before it was over. But I was only five years old. I didn’t know that life wasn’t supposed to be like that.
Rick: Yeah. And I imagine that that silence you experienced when you were five years old, you’re experiencing right now as well.
Angela: Now it never leaves. No matter what.
Rick: I see. Then it rose to the fore in response to an intense situation, but now it’s always there.
Angela: Yeah. I don’t always pay attention to it, but it’s always there.
Rick: Could you say that it’s sort of like a tone, which is always going on, and because it’s always going on, you don’t always pay attention to it, because you’re doing other things.
Angela: That’s a really good…
Rick: But any time you chose to, you could say, “Oh yeah, there’s the tone.”
Angela: There’s the tone, it’s there. It’s good to know that it’s there, because if you can go through a battle like that and feel it’s okay, because that tone is there. That tone is really a good metaphor for it.
Rick: Do you find that even now, when you’re confronted with trying situations, that tone, so to speak, that silence, kind of rises up and buffers the situations? Or is it more of a continuum which doesn’t ebb and flow anymore, it just sort of stays?
Angela: It’s just always there. And it doesn’t seem to do much of anything to what’s happening in the moment. It doesn’t seem to me to affect… It just witnesses, it doesn’t interfere.
Rick: Right. Silent witness sort of thing.
Angela: Yeah, it doesn’t… If I get angry, that’s fine, it allows that. It’s there. If I’m laughing, that’s okay too. It just always is there.
Rick: You mentioned in that little paragraph that you emailed to me, that if you have to ask yourself, “Well, who am I?” then it is that silence that… You used a few other adjectives, but that was one of them.
Angela: Well…
Rick: Or at least part of who you are.
Angela: That I am that became clear very early in my life because I grew up speaking… I was fluent in four languages when I was… by the time I was 16. And…
Rick: Because you studied them or you happen to live in different cultures? Mixed with different people?
Angela: My grandparents spoke Russian at home, but we were living in Germany. They had gone through World War I and the Russian Revolution and had been sent to Siberia in Russia and then had fled to Germany just in time for the Great Depression and World War II. So they were… My grandmother… I think without her, we wouldn’t have made it through that flight from the Russian army. But she was so experienced in how to do that. And my grandparents raised me because my mom was busy working. My father didn’t come back from the Russian front. So my mother was working for the American occupation government and was gone a lot, traveling behind the Iron Curtain in disguise. So my grandparents raised me and we spoke Russian at home. We spoke German with kids on the street later in school. We came to America, my mother and my surviving sister and I, when I was 12 in 1952. So we had to learn English. And then mom was not happy with the American school system. So she sent us to a boarding school in France.
Rick: And you learned French.
Angela: And we had to learn French. So by the time I came back from France, I was 15, and it was obvious to me that I was a different person in German, in French, in Russian. A different language is a different self. In fact, when the process of establishing a small separate self and the process of acquiring mother tongue is one and the same for a child, for a baby. So it becomes very obvious that a different language is a different self and a different world, a different way of seeing the world. It’s even obvious in small things, like different languages don’t divide the spectrum into colors in the same way. So if you speak a different language, you might not see colors the same way as someone speaking yet another language. So it really is a different world. And so when there is that much obvious difference in the way you experience yourself, where is the stability? Um, unless you discover something deeper and something silent. I have a young Korean student living with me who has been here ten months, has learned English in really record time, amazingly quickly. And he is beginning to make that discovery also, that he’s a completely different person in Korean than he is in English. And he begins, he asks me about it. He begins to feel a spirit that is without words and that is deeper than his experience of himself in English and in Korean.
Rick: That’s interesting. So, theoretically, if you had just stayed in one culture and spoken one language, you might not have noticed that contrast and you might have thought, “Well, this is just who I am.” But having to jump from one to the other almost forced you to recognize that there was something that remained consistent despite the different personas that you would assume as you spoke different languages.
Angela: That’s right. In France, I’m in a girls’ boarding school in a hunting castle that used to belong to Francis I, who was a Renaissance king. So, that’s just such a totally different world from the world I was living in as a new immigrant in America, in a slum. So, even just the environment was so different.
Rick: I kind of noticed that myself when I was a kid. I mena, I’d be one person at school, maybe high school or whatever, usually and even different people as I moved around in the high school, sat with this group or sat with that group. But basically, in school I was very kind of insecure and kind of a little bit lost. And then back home in my neighborhood, I’d feel very confident and I’d be completely different at sports than I was at school, and things like that, so much better. I could hit home runs in the neighborhood, but I was a total flop at school. But unfortunately for me, I didn’t notice or didn’t even conceive of any sort of underlying thread that would tie all those things together. And so, it was really sort of a schizophrenic kind of existence. But didn’t you mention to me at one point, not in this interview, but earlier, that you actually learned a form of meditation at a very early age?
Angela: Yeah, when I was six.
Rick: Maybe that accounts for the fact that this shifting of cultures for you was a stimulus to awakening.
Angela: It’s possible, because… And it’s happening maybe for that reason to this 14-year-old Korean boy as well. But yeah, I learned a form of meditation when I was six years old from someone who presented himself as an illiterate shepherd. I am very certain that that was not really who he was. And I suspect that my grandfather had set this up, because the day I learned the technique, and I’ll describe it in a minute, and it should sound familiar to any meditator. He said he always wanted a full report of whatever my adventures had been that day. So when time came for the full report, I gave him a complete description of what I had learned that day. And he said, “It will be good to do this regularly, because this is the piece that…”
Rick: Passeth understanding.
Angela: Passeth understanding. “And it will be good for you, considering what you have already seen in your short life.” So I suspect he may have set it up. I remember meeting… When I met the shepherd, I didn’t really meet him, but the first time I saw him, it was one of those witnessing experiences. My grandmother and I were out collecting wild greens for dinner, and also scooping up molehills. You know what molehills are?
Rick: Sure.
Angela: Good. We… Molehills make really good potting soil, and there was no Walmart where you could… (laughter) So we were scooping up molehills and collecting greens, and then suddenly this herd of sheep broke over the crest of a hill like a cloud, or like a slow-motion waterfall. And then after a small gap came the shepherd, and in Germany, even today, shepherds wore the clothes, still wear the clothes that had been fashionable for shepherds in the Middle Ages. So a long black cloak and a crooked staff. He came striding after the sheep, and he had a dog that defined the perimeter of the cloud of sheep, and they passed through the valley, passed us, just like a cloud passing. And it was stunning to me. Something about that event was completely breathtaking for me. And I saw him often after that, but… and I desperately wanted to meet this guy, but I didn’t dare. I was only… Six. Not even quite six. My birthday was a few weeks away. And…
Rick: And you were in Germany then, and the war was over.
Angela: Yes, the war was over. And it seemed to me that he was protected wherever he was by an invisible glass bell, that I could not enter that field. And I told my grandfather about that one day, and he said to my grandmother, “I’m going out to learn if this is a man of God.”
Rick: Ha! So your grandparents must have been quite spiritual.
Angela: Well, you know…
Rick: To have wanted… to have had that desire to go see if this is a man of God, you know?
Angela: Yeah, my grandfather… I think my grandfather was quite awake. So was my grandmother. After all… after all they had been through, they were kind and happy. So that, to me, is a pretty good indication.
Rick: Yeah, some people might be totally traumatized.
Angela: Traumatized, bitter. And they were not. So he came back that evening and said, “I don’t see why you don’t just go up and say hello.” And I said, “Well, I can’t do that. We’ve never met before.” He said, “This will not do. One day God will say, ‘Come to heaven,’ and you will say, ‘Well, I don’t think we’ve ever been introduced.'” (laughter) And he took me through a process of learning to talk, to be comfortable talking to strangers. And so I did one day go to meet up with him, and it was a kind of nothing occasion. He asked me if I wanted a glass of milk. He had a cow with him very often. And of course I wanted a glass of milk. Milk was…
Rick: A luxury?
Angela: Ah, it was an amazing luxury. And then he asked if I wanted to take a nap. So I took a nap, had a glass of milk, that was it. The next day was actually my birthday, and I went to see him, and I said, “They tell me I am six years old today. I don’t have any idea what that means.” And he said, “Come.” And we took the sheep and went to a pond. And he took up six rocks, and one by one he tossed them in the water, called my attention to the rings on top, called my attention to the way the rings cut across each other and made complicated patterns. And then he said, “But if you want to know what anything means, follow the rocks to the bottom.” And somehow I knew he didn’t mean…
Rick: Dive in.
Angela: Dive in. And he said, “Do it now. Close your eyes and follow the rocks to the bottom.” And then he took me through something very like the checking notes.
Rick: Of transcendental meditation.
Angela: Yeah, yeah. And I practiced throwing rocks in the pond of myself from then on.
Rick: Did you literally visualize rocks, or was it more of an abstract thing?
Angela: At first, at first. But you know, the mantra refines itself, and so the rock image refined itself in that same way also until it became something almost unmanifest.
Rick: For those who might not be familiar with the term mantra, although most people watching this probably are, it’s a word or sound which has no particular significance in terms of its meaning, but which has a vibratory influence such that if it’s thought in a certain manner, it enables the mind to settle down, much like the metaphor of diving deep into a pond. So I just want to-
Angela: Yeah, follow the rocks to the bottom and stay there. And the instruction was, “Well, if you have thoughts, throw another rock.”
Rick: And so you started doing this regularly?
Angela: Yes, my grandfather encouraged that, and I practiced it regularly until we came to America. Now, my mother, I had never really lived with her until we came to America, because she was always traveling on her mysterious secret projects for the Americans behind the Iron Curtain, which I took very literally.
Rick: Oh, Iron Curtain.
Angela: An Iron Curtain somewhere, that’s right. And so when we came to America, she saw me do this for the first time. “What are you doing?” she said. And I explained it. She went bananas. And forbid this practice.
Rick: Interesting, what was — why would she have forbidden it?
Angela: Because she associated meditation with the Nazis.
Rick: Really?
Angela: Yeah.
Rick: Were the Nazis into meditation?
Angela: Yes, they were. Hitler practiced a form of meditation. I don’t know what form. He was a vegetarian. He did group meditations with the top brass of his SS.
Rick: The swastika is a Sanskrit symbol.
Angela: Yes.
Rick: Turned backwards.
Angela: Yes, and there were all kinds of spiritual teachers. In fact, Hitler was kind of discovered and groomed in something I can only call an ashram.
Rick: Wow.
Angela: And there were many, many spiritual teachers like that in Germany especially, but also in England, in France. And that whole, it was a kind of a new age scene. And that whole scene vanished overnight when the war was over.
Rick: But it was thriving during the war?
Angela: Nothing was thriving during the war.
Rick: Because everything was –
Angela: Towards the end, it was chaos. But I suspect that that shepherd was actually a teacher of meditation during the Nazi years and then went underground as a shepherd.
Rick: I don’t want to take you off on a tangent if you were on a kind of a train of thought there that was leading on to something.
Angela: Well, my mother forbade the practice. But I became a closet meditator at that point. And then of course she wasn’t very practiced at being a mom and sent us to the boarding school in France. We were supposed to stay there until high school graduation, but another aunt was released from a concentration camp the following year and our family finances were needed to put her back on her feet. So we came back to the States. But a year later my mother sent me to Germany to a boarding school. And by that time I was 17 and I looked for the shepherd. I had looked for him when I had gone to France to school as well because we spent our vacations in Germany and couldn’t find him, couldn’t find a trace of him. But when I was 17, I ran into an old man in the village where I’d grown up and he said, “Aren’t you that Angela that used to hang out with that weird shepherd?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, he’s in an old age home in Aachen. I bet he would love to see you.” And so I took a train to that town and found him there. And he devised an advanced technique for me at that point. And it was again visual, but I think anyone who has an advanced technique in the TM program will recognize what he did.
Rick: Made the rocks slow down?
Angela: No, not exactly. He reminded me of a scene when we were hanging out in the pastures with the sheep near a pond that had a couple of swans on it. And if there are swans, there will be swansdown. And it is, during molting season there’s a lot of it. And it’s so light it lies on the surface tension of the water. And the larks were up. And the larks would come swooping down and pick up some swansdown and take it high into the air and let it drop and catch it.
Rick: Like a game?
Angela: And let it drop, sometimes two of them playing. And the winner was the lark who could pick it up nearest the water without getting the wing feathers wet. So he reminded me of the game the larks were playing and said, “Don’t do the rocks, do the swansdown.” Sort of drifting in the wind like this.
Rick: Interesting.
Angela: And it is a slowing down of the process.
Rick: So you kept doing the practice then? It sounds like you never stopped, you just had to be more clandestine about it.
Angela: Yeah, I was… Whenever I was at home, yeah. And so I… Clandestine about it meant that I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even have a name for this practice. I didn’t know to call it meditation. It was just something I did, it made me feel better. Much later, when I got into TM; I got into TM because I inherited by marriage a severely mentally, emotionally disturbed stepdaughter. And I figured she would be helped if I taught her to meditate because I knew that it had helped me get over the war experiences. But I didn’t think that it would be good to teach her because I was the stepmother in that scenario. And that isn’t exactly a good position for… I had to do things that would run counter to what a meditation teacher would have to do. And so I’m kind of fretting about this and at that moment ran into a table that the TM organization had set up at my university.
Rick: Where was this?
Angela: Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland State University, I was getting my master’s degree there.
Rick: Back in the 70s?
Angela: Early 70s, ’71. And when she learned TM, I decided we would all do it. And then she never missed a meditation either because she understood, as I had, that this was going to be helpful in getting her past bad experiences that she’d had as a small girl, as a baby even.
Rick: Well, we’ve skipped ahead to 1971. Have we missed anything in between there that’s particularly noteworthy?
Angela: I don’t think so.
Rick: Okay, we can keep going. So you learned TM. Incidentally, many of the people that I’ll have on this show will be people who have practiced Transcendental Meditation, but not all. I have a whole list of people that I want to interview and some of them are from completely different traditions. Hopefully we’ll also gain the technical wherewithal to interview people from out of town and yet have their video either through Skype or some such thing like that so it won’t just be me talking on the phone to somebody. But in any case, we here in Fairfield, most of us who are interested in this sort of thing have a TM background. So you learned TM in the early 70s along with your whole family. Was your experience in TM significantly different than your experience with the meditation the shepherd had taught you? Pretty much the same thing?
Angela: My initiator was…
Rick: Your TM teacher.
Angela: My TM teacher was Harry Langstaff.
Rick: Janet Langstaff’s brother?
Angela: Yeah. He is no longer among us.
Rick: Neither is she. Is she? Or am I thinking of a different person?
Angela: I think you’re…
Rick: I was thinking of Don and Janet.
Angela: Don- Don’s brother.
Rick: Don’s brother! Of course. Because her maiden name would have been something different. So Don’s brother.
Angela: Don’s brother.
Rick: Good.
Angela: And, you know, one of the questions they ask is, “Have you ever done any other kind of meditation?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “How long?” I said, “Well, 25 years, something like that.” And he didn’t know what to do about that. And that was in ’71. It was still possible to call Maharishi on the phone. And he called Maharishi and said, “What do I do about this?” He had never run into anyone. None of the other teachers who apparently he asked had never run into anyone who had been meditating 25 years. It was unheard of. So they called Maharishi and Maharishi talked to me about it.
Rick: He talked to you personally?
Angela: Yeah. He said, “Oh, well, this is TM by this time.” We talked about — he asked me about experiences. He said, “If it works, it’s TM. Just keep doing. Keep.. You’re fine.”
Rick: Good. So did you actually use your TM mantra or did you just keep doing what you had been doing?
Angela: The mantra immediately refined itself in that same way. So that I recognized — it was as if I recognized it.
Rick: Yeah.
Angela: As if I’d had it all along. That, to me, is still pretty mysterious how that happened. Because it didn’t feel like anything different.
Rick: Different than what you had been doing.
Angela: Than what I had been doing.
Rick: Right.
Angela: It immediately dropped to a level beyond sound.
Rick: Right.
Angela: I think the senses are all the same at the deepest level anyway. So since that visual image, I guess you’d call it a yantra had refined itself beyond that differentiation. The mantra just went right there also. So at this point, you’d been meditating for 25 years, since the age of five or six.
Angela: Six.
Rick: Six. And in addition to the fact that you enjoyed it, and it was relaxing, and so on, was there any sort of progression discernible in terms of your not so much your experience in meditation, although that’s interesting too but in terms of just your 24-hour-a-day state of being?
Angela: There was a kind of huge sort of shifting going on a couple different times.
Rick: Let’s talk about those.
Angela: One of the reasons my mom decided to send me to France, to boarding school, was not just because she didn’t like the American educational system, but she didn’t really know what to do with me. I was too weird. And this was the first time I’d had what here in town is called a celestial experience.
Rick: Let’s define that too. Elaborate on the term as you continue.
Angela: It’s a subtle experience. It’s not exactly like the normal physical world that we recognize as real. If a shrink had heard my story, I think I’d have been a goner.
Rick: And this was when, this celestial experience?
Angela: I had just returned from France.
Rick: So you were about 14, 15?
Angela: 16, possibly. And I was in my other life, I’m an artist, so I was playing with enameling on copper in the garage. My stepfather had rigged a big coffee can with a Bunsen burner, and I was doing enameling. And I noticed that blues and greens on copper don’t look as cool as I wanted my blues and greens to look. I figured they would look cooler if I were to enamel on silver. And my mom had some antiques left that she had managed to bring. So there were some small 16th century silver little plates or coasters that she had.
Rick: Probably priceless.
Angela: Probably priceless. And I got one of them and put my design on it with copper. But maybe we should break for a minute.
Rick: Okay, we can pick up this story again?
Angela: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Alright, we’re going to take a little break, and we will be right back. Welcome back. You’re listening to a show which, for the time being, is entitled “Awakenings,” although I’m playing with other titles, my favorite one being “Buddha at the Gas Pump,” interviews with the enlightened among us. And my name is Rick Archer, and I’m interviewing Angela Mailander. And so far we’ve covered her life from the age of about 5 to, I don’t know, 20-something, or maybe 30-something. She learned to meditate when she was 5 from a shepherd in Germany, and practiced it regularly throughout her life, and very quickly developed a state in which a field of unperturbable silence characterized her inner life, despite a very varied and sometimes tumultuous outer life. And she was just before the break beginning to talk about a — what we might call a “celestial experience” that she had when she was a teenager. And I’ll just turn it back over to Angela and let her define what we mean by the term “celestial experience” and what her particular experience was.
Angela: Well, I was enameling, and wanted to see what blues and greens looked like with a silver background instead of the copper. And my mom had these 16th century little silver plates, so I got one of them. That was part of my problem with her. I never really thought about what I was doing. And she kept telling me that I should think about what I was doing. And I never developed that skill.
Rick: You just did it.
Angela: I just did. So I got this thing, set it in my little rigged kiln. But 16th century silver is more pure than a modern alloy, and so it melted.
Rick: I was going to say.
Angela: And before it flowed, it became incandescent. And it held its shape for a moment. And it seemed to me that it was an angel. That it was the angel responsible for creating silver. It wasn’t a creature with wings. It was what it was. It looked like an incandescent plate. But it was alive. It was intelligent. It was benevolent. And so intensely beautiful, I could hardly bear it. And then the silver flowed into the bottom of my coffee can. And I could not bear “the common light of day,” as Wordsworth, I think, would have called it. And I got one after another of those silver plates. There were 12 of them. And melted all of them down.
Rick: Oh, brother, you must have caught hell. I think you can say hell on TV.
Angela: I think you can say hell on TV. My mother was so upset. And I think that was one of the causes. She could no longer deal with me. Now, she…
Rick: Did you have the angel experience every time you melted?
Angela: No, no.
Rick: Oh, just the first time.
Angela: No, just the first time. That’s why I melted down all of them. I was going to have that again. But that didn’t happen that time. And of course, every time I did something– and I did a lot of crazy things, apparently, when I was a teenager. And that was no doubt a crazy thing to do. I knew – my mom was a scientist. She was an atheist. I knew that I could not say to her, “I saw an angel.” And so I knew she would ask me why. Why in the world? And all I could say was, “I don’t know.”
Rick: Why did you melt them, or why would you call it an angel?
Angela: Why did you melt them? And all I could say was, “I don’t know.” And she hit the ceiling, “I’m tired of your I don’t knows.” Because that’s all I could ever say to her.
Rick: Right. Because you probably could have said something, but she wouldn’t have comprehended it, so you didn’t bother trying.
Angela: No, I knew better than to try to explain this to her.
Rick: Pearls before swine, so to speak.
Angela: Well, she wasn’t exactly a swine, but…
Rick: No, it’s not a very complimentary metaphor.
Angela: She was an intelligent person.
Rick: I’m sure she was, yeah.
Angela: But she certainly had no soft spot in her heart for any kind of spirituality, because of my grandfather’s spirituality. And he was her dad, so there had to be some rebellion against it.
Rick: And you also said that she associated that sort of thing with the…
Angela: Meditation with the Nazis.
Rick: With the Nazis, right.
Angela: And she hated them with a passion. So she sent me to France, but from then on, I had experiences like that regularly.
Rick: Just unexpectedly?
Angela: Just unexpectedly, the world would become alive, intelligent, completely present, and I did not understand it. I had no one to talk to about it. Almost unbearable to have that continuously. It continued until I went to college. I remember one time I took a Greyhound bus from Cleveland to Kent, Ohio. I went to Kent State University as an undergraduate. And on the trip to Kent, I had one of those experiences. I landed in a hospital, spent all my money, did things I shouldn’t have done.
Rick: So you checked yourself into a hospital?
Angela: No, I landed in a hospital, because I kept taking the bus to see if I could find that again.
Rick: So just like you thought that melting another plate…
Angela: Melting another plate was going to do it.
Rick: …that you thought that taking the same bus ride…
Angela: Taking the same bus ride, I would drop into that world again.
Rick: I believe someone noticed you doing this and thought you were crazy for taking the bus ride?
Angela: I was just – I became so exhausted.
Rick: Right, you needed to…
Angela: I needed to recuperate. And it wasn’t – it never occurred to me that it was my awareness, that it wasn’t a proper view.
Rick: It wasn’t the circumstance.
Angela: It took forever for me to figure that out.
Rick: And yet even then, was that silent awareness still a characteristic of your life?
Angela: Yes, and that was the only thing that actually kept me from going crazy.
Rick: Right, because there’s a lot of sustenance in that.
Angela: Yes, because otherwise, it was a roller coaster.
Rick: Right.
Angela: You know, normal college student awareness, classes, and then all of a sudden, usually associated with nature.
Rick: Right.
Angela: And no one to talk to, no one to tell.
Rick: Did you try… were you drawn to spiritual books and all?
Angela: No..
Rick: Or did you not even think that this might be a spiritual experience that someone had talked about in books?
Angela: Not at all. Not at all.
Rick: You didn’t have a clue, but you knew you loved these experiences. You didn’t know what they were.
Angela: And I did not like coming back to a normal, flat, dead world.
Rick: How long did you stay in these states?
Angela: Varied.
Rick: Seconds to minutes to hours?
Angela: Yeah. And then that stopped.
Rick: Okay.
Angela: It became fewer. I think the last one, though, I had, I was already in my early 30s, already doing TM. My second husband and I, we had bought some property in Pennsylvania, and there were some logs and an old cabin and a lot of old stuff. We built a huge pile, and we were going to burn that. And I was walking around on this smoldering thing. It wouldn’t burn. I was walking around on it with a gallon jug of gasoline and pouring it on there. He yelled at me not to do that, but too late. All of a sudden, I’m in the middle of a bonfire.
Rick: Wow.
Angela: And I dropped into that world of utter beauty.
Rick: You were actually engulfed in flames?
Angela: Yes.
Rick: Your body was?
Angela: Yes. I heard from an immense distance, “Throw yourself down.” And I understood what he said to be out of fear that the fire would hurt me. And then my own thought came from an equally immense distance. How can fire hurt me when I am fire? And that was the last time that I had any kind of experience like that. It was in my early 30s. And at that time, after that, there was another shift.
Rick: Explain that.
Angela: I went to graduate school. And I immediately ran into the Gita–the Bhagavad Gita, the poetry of William Blake, to whom I was immediately drawn. I’d never seen anyone, heard of anyone, who thought as I did. And I immediately understood what he was talking about. And it seemed to me that not only was he writing poetry, he was talking about the mechanics of how the physical world is created. And there was a very strict logic to it. It wasn’t just poetry. It was also logic. It was also physics. And I didn’t know how to express that exactly. So I asked everyone I knew questions about it in the hope of finding someone who would be able to figure out what in the world I was talking about. And one of the TM teachers at the center handed me a book called Laws of Form by the British mathematician, G. Spencer Brown. And that work is kind of a mathematical equivalent of Vedic knowledge. It begins with, “We take as given the idea of distinction.” So it begins at a beginning point. “We take as given the idea of distinction.” And then goes into an iconic mathematics, a non-representational, non-numerical mathematics, and creates first an arithmetic, then an algebra, and finally a calculus. And it ends with basically the statement, “We see now that I am that, thou art that, and all this is that,” only expressed in modern English, that the observer and the distinction are really one. So it’s Vedic in essence.
Rick: So you read that book.
Angela: I read that, and he mentions Blake. But Blake had a clue about this. And it expressed exactly what I thought Blake was doing, that it was not just poetry but strict logic, very strict logic. And at the same time I ran into Noam Chomsky, who says that in the deep structure all languages are one. That was my experience in any case. So it was like a flood of– Maharishi says there are two steps of knowledge, experience and understanding. I’d been having all kinds of experience but no knowledge. And 1971 was the year I got flooded, totally flooded with knowledge from all sides. And so that created another shift.
Rick: So did you feel, obviously you’re implying that the knowledge that you were picking up from those authors was corroborating what you had actually been experiencing but hadn’t been able to express?
Angela: It was calming and exciting at the same time.
Rick: And enlivening, maybe, enlivening, do you mean by exciting? And so that triggered a shift.
Angela: It triggered a shift and —
Rick: And what was the nature of that shift?
Angela: I felt really secure, really secure. And at the same time I also no longer really cared about much of– I just did what was in front of me to do.
Rick: The next obvious thing.
Angela: The next obvious thing. I was in grad school so I did that. But it was play. It wasn’t work for me. I also made a conscious decision that I would never pretend I knew something that I didn’t know. Because I saw a lot of that pretense all around me.
Rick: In academia.
Angela: In academia, it’s full of that. I swore to myself I would never get involved in that. I would never–and I would never stay up late to study for an exam. If I flunked the exam, too bad. So I never worked hard at it. I never got stressed out about it. I never cared whether I flunked an exam or not. I didn’t cram for exams. I just enjoyed myself.
Rick: Yeah, you enjoyed yourself. I get the impression that you weren’t– you hadn’t necessarily become irresponsible or self-indulgent or lackadaisical. You had just started flowing a lot more with life.
Angela: Yeah. I started writing poetry at that time too.
Rick: Maybe you became more intuitive, you might say.
Angela: Yes. And I got a lot of support of nature because — I liked being in school. I liked learning. So I went on for a PhD at the University of Iowa. That was not an entirely pleasant experience. But I sailed through the exams. They were actually – at the University of Iowa, they actually flunked me on the doctoral exams the first time.
Rick: What was your subject?
Angela: That was comparative studies. And so an interdisciplinary kind of thing. I was investigating how different disciplines create languages to create themselves, really, out of nothing. But on the way from the examination room, my professors who had been examining me were overheard by the department secretary, and they were laughing and joking with each other about how they had read none of the books that I had submitted to be examined on. I said to her, “Why don’t you and I go to the dean and talk about this?” And so they had to give me another exam. And of course they couldn’t flunk me the second time. My experience with them was they were — They did not want a woman among them, especially not an intelligent woman. And they did not like it that I would not play their game. But I nevertheless got all kinds of support of nature. Because I refused to cram for exams, but the exams just happened to ask me the questions I knew the answers to. They could have asked many things that I didn’t know.
Rick: That sort of defines the phrase “supportive nature,” which I was going to interject and do because it’s kind of a TM movement phrase. But it basically means that your life is so in tune with whatever it is that governs the universe that your individual initiatives and the sequence of events that unfold kind of mesh smoothly.
Angela: Smoothly.
Rick: And things just kind of fall into place for you.
Angela: I went on for a second PhD because a university fellow — I couldn’t find a job in my field at the time. So I went on for a second PhD because being a graduate fellow paid more than being out there with minimum wage somewhere and was more fun. So the same thing happened. I decided to be examined in the 18th century. This time it was a PhD in English. I didn’t know anything about the 18th century. They happened to ask the only things I knew about the 18th century on the doctoral exams.
Rick: At this stage of the game, when you’re spending years getting PhDs, what was the structure of your inner life? Did you feel that you were kind of living predominantly in your intellect and you were primarily occupied with the thoughts of the things you were studying? Or was there sort of a deeper reality that was kind of more predominant and you dwelt in that and continued to just sort of play this game on the waves of the surface?
Angela: It was a game. It was a game. I certainly could — That was the only thing that really was a little bit against me because everyone could see that I was not taking this very seriously.
Rick: And for them it was their whole world.
Angela: And for them it was their whole world. And I also had a tendency to ask questions that tended to destroy.
Rick: Outside the box kind of questions.
Angela: Yeah. And at the University of Iowa, the intellectual climate was to deny anything transcendental.
Rick: Right.
Angela: Wasn’t allowed to think that way. And I just refused to buckle under.
Rick: This was in the Seventies now. Seventy what?
Angela: University of Iowa, Seventy five to late Seventies.
Rick: So MIU was going strong at that point.
Angela: Yeah. We used to drive down from the University of Iowa to MUM, to what’s then MIU, because the food at Annapurna in those days was really great.
Rick: I hear it’s still pretty good. Anyway, we won’t get into that. [laughter] All right. Well, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt. Do you want to keep on this track or do we want to —
Angela: Totally up to you.
Rick: Well, I know you say you’ve lived in six cultures. So far we’ve covered Germany, France–
Angela: United States.
Rick: United States. I know China’s in there someplace. There’s interesting things to say about that. That leaves us two others.
Angela: In the ’80s, I spent a year in Greece in the very early ’80s. My sister lives in Greece, and I spent a year there. And then later on in the ’80s, I spent a year in India.
Rick: Let’s talk about your experiences in those places, but let’s do it kind of in the context of the continuing development of your inner life and picking out whatever incidents you think are most sort of significant in terms of correlate to what’s going on inside as you went along through the years.
Angela: I went to Greece because my personal life had crashed.
Rick: Marriage or–
Angela: Yeah. Crashed really badly and within a split second like that. And so my sister invited me just to get away from it, and I took my daughter and we went to Greece. But I began to really go through emotional trauma over this crash. But it felt like a necessary development, that this was an attachment and that I had to get past it.
Rick: The marriage was an attachment?
Angela: Yeah.
Rick: Not to say that awakening people have to all give up their marriages, but in your particular case–
Angela: In my case–
Rick: There was something else in store for you that you had to kind of move along to experience.
Angela: This kind of emotional attachment to a guy, obviously in my own life was something I had to work through and get beyond. And it was very painful. But at the same time I had not just physical distance in Greece, I still had that silence sustaining me, even though I was suffering emotionally. It was okay, so now I’m watching this creature suffer. And I felt the necessity of it. I felt that it was somehow in the long run good for me to go through this. And so on the surface, this took 16 years. This was a long time.
Rick: You mean breaking up with your husband and going to Greece and–
Angela: That whole process.
Rick: Working through this emotional stuff.
Angela: Yeah, it took 16– I mean I wasn’t in Greece 16 years.
Rick: No, no, just a year.
Angela: A year. And another culture, another language, I wasn’t there long enough to actually learn Greek, but by that time, after you’ve mastered three or four languages, another one is not that big a mystery.
Rick: Right, especially since the ones you’ve mastered all came from Greece.
Angela: They all came through Latin and Greek. But it was another world. It was definitely another world. My sister had married a multimillionaire who was involved with the World Bank, and I got to see how the ruling classes of this world actually live and do business. So that was an education all by itself. Then I got a job. But even though I was in emotional pain, I functioned in the world. I did my job. People thought I was an unusually calm and cheerful person.
Rick: Was the pain incessant, or did you work through it in waves?
Angela: In waves.
Rick: Yeah, like you take a chunk of it, work through it, then take another chunk.
Angela: Yeah, work through it, take another chunk. Work through it. But only my very closest friends knew.
Rick: Knew you were going through this.
Angela: Yes, my colleagues at school all thought I was an unusually calm and cheerful person.
Rick: Now you say it took you 16 years to get through this emotional pain. Did you actually get to the bottom of it and root out last vestiges of it?
Angela: It just evaporated one day.
Rick: Done.
Angela: Done. As suddenly as it had come.
Rick: Just emotional pain around your marriage and attachment to a guy, or kind of emotional pain in a broader sense?
Angela: It became a broader thing. I mean, after a while it was very obvious to me that this was not about this guy. It was a much deeper thing. Then toward the end of it I undertook the job of — I gave up my career to take care of my mother. So that was a difficult time because she was completely paralyzed and there was no one else to help me. I was on call 24/7, on duty, with a difficult task. And mom was hell on wheels to live with. But I would do it again just for seeing what happened to her two weeks before her death. She dropped her personality. She had been bitter and unhappy. Obviously, she couldn’t even use a call button I had taped under her fingers. I had to spoon feed her, diaper her.
Rick: Could she talk?
Angela: She could talk. Her mind was clear, to the extent that a depressed mind is clear. But then two weeks before she died, the person she had been was gone and she became a radiant soul without any real personality at all. Just radiant love.
Rick: Was she still able to talk at that point?
Angela: Yes.
Rick: Did she realize something was happening and was she able to talk about it?
Angela: She didn’t say much. There was no need. We understood each other at that point very perfectly. It was totally wonderful to have that communion with her at the end because we had never really gotten along before. In spurts, I mean, intellectually we respected each other. But emotionally there was always conflict. So I was very happy to be able to see that a life is an act we take on, a role we play, but it’s not who we are. And I saw her drop it.
Rick: And who she was shown through.
Angela: Yeah, yeah, for the last two weeks. And so that same year I was freed of everything. And as soon as I could pick myself up, I went to China. Had a great time.
Rick: And what year are we at now?
Angela: I went to China in 2001.
Rick: Okay.
Angela: Ah no, 2002. 2002.
Rick: So what we’ve kind of gone through in terms of your inner development is learning to meditate when you were six, experiencing deep silence even before that, but kind of culturing and stabilizing that silence over the course of the years, beginning to have some celestial experiences, seeing an angel or seeing the innate beauty and intelligence in the concrete objective world when you were a teenager.
Angela: Between teen, nature, and then, with decreasing frequency.
Rick: Decreasing frequency, and that eventually went away. And then you had a flood of knowledge when you got into graduate school, and it enriched or counterbalanced the experience you’d been developing all those years and kind of put it in a context that made sense or helped you integrate it. Then you went through an emotional exploration or purging in which you kind of, for over the course of 16 years, went through layer after layer of emotional garbage or whatever that needed to be cleaned out. And then you took care of your mother and you had that experience. And so now here we are. You’ve got the inner silence, you’ve had some celestial experiences, you’ve cleaned through a lot of emotional junk, and you’re heading off to China, which in itself is a fascinating place, but you’re kind of bringing to it a personality or a state of inner development that has gone through a lot of transitions and has arrived at a — I don’t know what we would call it, but a fairly mature spiritual state of development perhaps.
Angela: I don’t have a name to it.
Rick: Labels are ridiculous. So how did that go in China, and what further inner developments did the China experience stimulate or bring about?
Angela: Well, there was again this kind of nature supporting that trip. I had no money, no job, and had no clue. I just decided, okay, I’ll go where my talents might be needed. I’m a language teacher. I teach English. I’ve been all this time on the side. I was developing my own methodology for teaching English as a second language quite apart from the academic establishment. So I thought, well, I will go and do this in China. The most astonishing things happened. Down to lightning actually striking, I borrowed money to buy a laptop to take with me, and I was transferring data from my computer to this laptop when a thunderstorm came up, and I had the plug of the laptop. I’d just finished transferring all the stuff. Had the plug, saw the storm coming in so quickly. I didn’t have time to shut it down, just unplugged it. Had the plug still in my hand when lightning threw me off my chair and killed every piece of electrical equipment in the entire house and my neighbor’s house. And the insurance paid for my trip to China.
Rick: Oh, cool. Did you lose all the data on your computer?
Angela: No, I had it all already transferred to the laptop.
Rick: Ah, and you unplugged it just in time.
Angela: And I unplugged it just in time. And so that happened, and I had no clue where in China I was going. But I made the decision I was going. So I went to “Everybody’s.”
Rick: Everybody’s is a Whole Foods store here in Fairfield, Iowa.
Angela: It’s where you meet everybody.
Rick: Right.
Angela: So at Everybody’s I ran into a former student I had taught at the high school on campus, and he said, “What’s new?” I said, “I’m going to China.” He said, “Wow, so am I.” I said, “When are you leaving?” I’m kind of shortening this a little bit. He said, “In two days.” I said, “Well, find me a job, make me a hole in the Great Wall of China.” And two weeks later, I had a job at a university in China. And somehow I knew that I would be there for two years. And it was two years to the day that I came back. I had actually tried to come back. Actually, I had wanted to stay in China because it was lovely. I had a job. I was paid very well, considering — on the local economy, translated into dollars, it was nothing but — In the local scene, it was great pay. I loved the campus. I loved my colleagues. Had a great life there. But I am not a U.S. citizen, so I had to come back to renew my green card status. The bureaucracy sent the papers to the wrong town, so I couldn’t come during the summer vacation. And so it was on the same day, the 11th of October —
Rick: My birthday.
Angela: Really? I left for China on the 11th of October, and it wasn’t until the 11th of October that I could get stuff together to go to America. And I kept thinking, “I’ll just kiss American tarmac and then I’ll go back to China.” But something kept saying to me, “Since May, something of a political nature will prevent your return.” And that message kept coming so insistently that I didn’t know what to do. I’m under contract with the university. So what I essentially did was I prepared one of my students to take over my classes in case I didn’t. I told her, “I’m getting this feeling,” I can’t go to the head of the department and say, “Hey, I got a feeling.” (laughter) I sent everything I didn’t want to lose to the States, gave everything away in case I couldn’t come back. I gave my student instructions. My video collection goes to, my books go to, my dishes go here. Had it all arranged. And then as soon as I got to the L.A. airport, Homeland Security arrested me. (laughter) What in the world for? They wouldn’t say, but they said, “You can go back to China if you want, but if you do, you’re never coming back here. If you go back, you might as well give us our green card right now because you’re not coming back.”
Rick: Huh, lovely gentleman.
Angela: So I had two suitcases full of presents for friends and a decision to make — rich woman in China or bag lady in the U.S. And I went for bag lady. I can give you reasons, but I know that I don’t know the reason.
Rick: But it seemed like the next obvious thing to do. I had known before I left it would be two years, and it was two years to the day. So from that time on, it seems that I’m residing outside of my life in some way, and it’s playing itself out. I sometimes get a vision for where it’s going, what I’m going to be doing next. Sometimes I don’t have a clue. It doesn’t matter.
Rick: Do you have any visions now about where it might be going?
Angela: Well, no. (laughter) No.
Rick: You’re just taking it as it comes.
Angela: It’s confusing because on the one hand, I think everything’s going to be okay, but on the other hand, the reason I moved to Fairfield in ’92 was because by the early ’70s, I could see that I was not going to like the political scene at the turn of the century and thereafter. And that I did not want to be in a big city during that time. So that’s not an entirely positive vision of things, but I’m not really worried at the same time.
Rick: You feel secure. I think you said that earlier in the interview. There was a certain stage at which you just felt secure, and I suppose, would you say that that sense of security has remained since that time?
Angela: Well, it has fluctuated, but my grandfather told me as a child about the lilies in the field and the fall of the sparrow, and I did not get it then, but I sure get it now. So I feel quite all right.
Rick: Good. Mother is at home, as Maharishi used to say.
Angela: Yes, and I feel rather privileged because I get to do exactly what I like doing. I have a part-time job teaching at the high school on campus. I get to take care of teenage boys at home. Two of them are living with me. They keep me laughing. They’re fun. And I even have time to write and to continue to do my artwork. My work is at the Teeple Hansen Gallery. So it feels like a privilege to be able to serve and do whatever I’m doing.
Rick: Towards the beginning of the interview, I read something you had emailed me where you said that I don’t really identify with my own individuality. I mean, I’ve got one, and it’s pretty distinctive. It’s like a car I’ve got to drive around in, but it’s not who I consider me. When I ask, “Who is that?” the answer is infinity, silence, unknowability, mystery, life. You said, on the other hand, my individuality is human, and being that, it seems I have human responsibility to humanity. It’s interesting because I think we sometimes forget, but it’s my understanding that the vast majority of people in this world identify predominantly with their individuality and cannot really locate anything other than their individuality, which they could call themself. If you begin to ask them who they are, they give you their name, they give you their age, they give you their occupation. They go on and on, describing more and more details about their individual life, but they don’t generally allude to something that is infinity, silence, unknowability, mystery, and so on. Of course, more and more people would give you that kind of response.
Angela: More and more people, yes.
Rick: It’s becoming more commonplace. But it’s interesting to reflect, as we come to the end of this interview, it’s interesting to reflect what you’ve just been saying, the security and even the guidance that seems to grace one’s life, when there’s this balance between individuality and universality – It’s not that we’re all one or all the other. Both are kind of components, as it were, or different points on the spectrum of our life. And it grants one a kind of protected status.
Angela: It feels that way, yes. It feels there’s work left to be done, things left to be done, but it also feels very secure, that nothing can really happen, that no matter what happens, there is a level of silence that is untouchable.
Rick: Invincible, as Maharishi always used to like to say. And all is well and wisely put. What is that saying? “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.”
Angela: Well, all is right with the world, yes, ultimately, but we are here to make it a better world.
Rick: Right. Yeah, “all is right with the world” does not imply that all the stuff that’s happening in the world is fine, just as it is. In some respect, it is, but it’s also fine that we improve it a great deal.
Angela: That’s the job. That’s the reason to be here.
Rick: Right.
Angela: Yes.
Rick: You know, you think of yourself perhaps as a conduit. Early in life you cultured or became aware of a deep level of life, and throughout your life you have been, I don’t want to say using, but on that foundation you have been able to express a deeper value of life through your activity to those around you, you know, the boys that you take care of, students that you teach, your mother that you took care of, and so on.
Angela: The children that I have raised, I have always had kids at home to raise, not just my own. And taken care of, a lot of students.
Rick: For some reason, biblical quotes keep coming to mind, but, you know, “My cup runneth over.” If the cup is full, then it can overflow and nourish others. I kind of see your life as having had that nature, that tendency.
Angela: Yes, I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed being a teacher. I have enjoyed being a writer and an artist. It has all been really good.
Rick: Good. Well, I have enjoyed having you here to talk to.
Angela: Thank you.
Rick: This has been nice. I would like to, well, thank you, thank you very much. We have been talking with Angela Mailander, who lives here in Fairfield, Iowa, as I do, and who is a teacher at the local private high school. If you missed any of this interview, I imagine it will be played again on FPAC, if that is how you are watching it. If not, it will be on YouTube. I’d like to give out a few practical points about how to kind of stay in touch with this show and actually interact with it. I will be doing a number of things. One is, I have already set up a YouTube channel. It will be a little hard to give the address of that verbally, but if you would like to know what it is, just email me. My email is [email protected]. I will put you on an email list, to which I will send very occasional emails, maybe once or twice a month, just to announce certain things, changes in schedule, any practical little point that needs to be announced. My first mailing to that list will include the address of this YouTube channel, where you can watch this interview, and the previous interview I did, and all future interviews I will do. I am also going to establish, I actually have set up a chat group, a Yahoo chat group, where people who watch this show can go and discuss points that have been brought up on the show and address questions to the guests whom I will interview. I will ask the guests to join that chat group too, if they will, so that people can ask them questions and interact with them. As time goes on, we may be able to create podcasts of this show. As I said earlier, we might be able to set up a Skype arrangement, where we can interview guests out of town and see them as well as hear them. All sorts of things. I am having a lot of fun with this project, and would like to continue to develop it. My email address, again, if you would like to get in touch with me, is [email protected]. Also, for about six or seven years now, there has been a spiritual discussion group here in Fairfield, which we sometimes refer to as a “Satsang.” It takes place every Wednesday night in someone’s home. If you would like to participate in that, either in person or over the telephone, you could call a fellow named Tom Traynor. His phone number is area code 641, which you don’t need if you are calling from a local number, Tom will tell you where that is and how to call in on the conference phone if you are out of town. So, I think that about wraps it up for this evening. I would like to thank Brian Hawthorne for his help here at the Fairfield Public Access Channel, or FPAC. I really appreciate this opportunity, and thank you, Angela, for coming in.
Angela: Thank you, thank you for having me. It was fun.
Rick: We will do it again in a couple of years when you have had more experiences.