Bill Farber Transcript

Bill Farber Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Bill Farber. And I didn’t know about Bill up until a few weeks ago and then he came to my town, Fairfield, Iowa, to do some healing sessions and somehow it got into my head that he would be an interesting person to interview. This might be a deviation from our usual interviews in the sense that, you know, but maybe not. Most of the people I interview, it’s all about their having had a spiritual awakening and we try to get into describing that. And maybe Bill has had one and maybe that’s how he has acquired some sort of healing abilities. So we’ll find out. So welcome, Bill.

Bill: Thank you.

Rick: Thank you for coming on. Bill lives in the Chicago area, right?

Bill: That’s correct.

Rick: As I understand it, there’s a very brief sketch about you on your website, which is BillFarber.com, and it says you learned to meditate many years ago, back in the 70s, I guess, huh?

Bill: Yeah, it was ’71, pretty early 70s.

Rick: And why don’t you just kind of start telling your story and I’ll kind of ask you to elaborate and embellish it at various points during it. You know, were you always inclined towards spiritual things? Did you ever feel in the past that you would end up working as a healer? You know, how did you end up where you are?

Bill: Well, interestingly enough, the answer to both is emphatically no. When I was growing up, I really had no interest at all in what we would say spiritual or metaphysical or subject matter such as that. All the way through, essentially, grammar school, high school, and college, I really still didn’t have an interest in it, the least that I knew of. Looking back, there was something underlying that probably was there, must have been, something that kind of trailed along, following me along, you know, like sneakily in some way. But after college, graduating in 1970, like many people at that time, I was a little bit disoriented, didn’t really know what I wanted to do with myself. I was married at that time, though, to my wife, who I’m still married to. It was a very stabilizing and fortunate thing for me, and very lucky. However, I was a very depressed person, kind of aimless, maybe a little too much dependent on some artificial means of raising my spirits. Just kind of maybe 60 pounds heavier than I am now at that time. And I really didn’t know what to do with my life, where I was going with things. Really a deep discontent, I wouldn’t even call it a questioning at that time, other than, “Get me out of this misery.” So one day my sister showed up at our apartment and said, “Oh, I met this guy on the L in Chicago.” He sat next to me, he was rapping to me about this meditation that he does. He was hyped up about it, excited. And she said, “I decided to do it.” I went to this talk the other night and I said, “You know what? Let me know how that goes. It sounds like something that I need, if it’ll get me out of whatever this I’m in now.” So she went and she took this meditation course, came back all excited and all this. She says, “Okay, that’s it for me, I’m doing it.” She says, “Well, I’ve actually got to warn you about one thing.” I said, “What’s that?” She says, “Well, they’ve got this 15-day requirement.” I said, “What’s that?” She says, “Well, you can’t use marijuana or other recreational drugs for 15 days or else they won’t teach you.” I said, “You know what? I’m doing it, I don’t care. I can’t live this way anymore. There’s got to be something more to life than this.” So I set up, as you probably know, they have an introductory talk and then a second, a more preparatory talk.

Rick: Yes, transcendental meditation that you’re referring to.

Bill: Yes, that’s what I’m referring to. So I went to the introductory talk. Some things stand out in your mind because they’re memorable. And at the end of the talk he started talking about the 15 days. So I raised my hand and I said, “Hey, does that 15-day start tonight or tomorrow?” And the whole place laughed. He said, “Well, why do you ask?” I said, “Well, I’m having a party tonight, a goodbye pot party.” He said, “No, it starts tonight.” So I thought to myself, “You know, if I don’t do this now, I’m never going to do it.” So I called my friends and said, “No party tonight.” So I went to the initiation instruction ceremony. And I was expecting to feel this way or that way, like it would be nice, but I really wasn’t prepared for what I experienced. It was an utter, complete arresting of my current life up to that point, my experience of what life was. It was an indescribably deep, transformative thing, and it happened to snuck up on me like, “What?” You know, this couldn’t have happened based on the simple thing this guy just told me.

Rick: So you mean that was your immediate reaction, right?

Bill: My immediate reaction.

Rick: Within that first session, it was like, “Holy mackerel, what was that?”

Bill: Right, “Holy mackerel, what was that?” Maybe not an exact quote.

Rick: And what was that? I mean, exactly what did you experience?

Bill: What I experienced was an utter letting go. It was a letting go of the feeling of all this weight being carried, these deep concerns, these questions, this feeling of aimlessness. All that just lifted, albeit momentarily at the time. And then, of course, they asked me to write down my experience. I wrote for like 20 minutes. My hand would not stop going across the page like that. I couldn’t say enough. And after that, my life was never the same, not to say that it didn’t fluctuate, obviously. It wasn’t an instant enlightenment, quote-unquote, experience. But it was a significant enough, dramatic shift in something I’d never experienced before that I really had such a deep appreciation for the value of having the experience and then wanting to know about it afterwards, rather than someone cramming you full of information, facts, philosophies, and then teaching you something. The way this was done was a basic description of what it is and maybe something about how it works, but it’s really left to you to have the experience. And afterwards, the experiences are explained, embellished, and you have deeper understanding because you want to know, “What is this? Where did this come from? What does it mean?” And I became maybe obsessed with finding out these things. Of course, at the time, I was just starting law school at the time. I was busy, so I had a full-time job in law school at night. So if I wasn’t in law school, I was studying. If I wasn’t studying, I was at work. So there was really no leisure time. But I’ll tell you, I was brutally fanatic about not missing these meditation sessions. You know that joke about if your house is on fire, you get up and then you finish your meditation? That was me.

Rick: Would you do it on the L or what? When did you get the chance to actually do it?

Bill: Sometimes on back and forth, not on the L, but the train. The L was a little bit too intense. The commuter train was a little better later on. Maybe a little bit too much of a policeman about everybody else doing theirs. But anyway, so that was a big experience for me. And then to move on to the healing work, in the late ’80s, around ’89, I was introduced to the concept of qigong and energy work. And I really wasn’t familiar with it before. And I said, “Well, what is that?” So basically, what I experienced with it was, it was really kind of a revelation for me, because all those years of the meditation and understanding that not only does it work within yourself, but it radiates out to the environment and to other people. But with the qigong and with energy work, what happens is you actually can direct energy to someone intentionally, and it’s a very direct personal experience and a personal connection. And it’s almost like this consciousness, this unbounded consciousness, becomes focused like a beam, and it actually can have an immediate effect on the person’s well-being, physiologically or psychologically or mentally. So as I started to experiment with it, I was real impressed with it. And then a friend of mine had taken a class in Reiki, and I thought, “Well, that sounds interesting.” So I took a weekend Reiki training, and that’s really what did it for me, really locked it in, because it was very much like meditation for me. It was very simple, uncomplicated. I didn’t really know what to expect from it. No one told me so much, “You’re going to feel this.” Yes, they said people feel relaxed, they feel certain things, but I wasn’t prepared for the extent and the depth of the thing, similarly to my experiences in meditation. So I got really excited about that, and I started … everybody I knew I was trying it out on them, you know, and I took some advanced training, the master training, and started teaching. I’ve been teaching that particular system for about 20 years. But people would report back to me when I was working on it that they felt something a little different or maybe something, you know, in addition to what they normally felt from a typical session, and they would encourage me to investigate more deeply into what this really was I was doing. And as time went on, it kind of deepened, and it got to be more and more of my own quality to it. And now, I basically … I don’t really call my work Reiki, and I don’t really call it healing. I call it the Life Energy Alignment Program. And the energy alignment which occurs sometimes produces healing, but the purpose of it isn’t healing; it’s aligning the person’s energy, aligning the energy within the person individually, and also aligning it with their highest possible potential form of consciousness, and also their highest potential physiologically, psychologically, and mentally that they can possibly reach in the current circumstances. And it’s a tremendous joy to do, because in my experience it doesn’t drain me. I’m not giving the person my energy. What I’m doing is bringing in, you could say, universal energy and facilitating the flow of that energy to them. And my ability is that I can feel, generally speaking, where that energy is moving within them. And it could be done in a long distance as well as it could be done in person, because of course energy is non-local, it’s universal, it’s present everywhere, equal. So it’s kind of interesting what I found when I started doing the distant work, was that we all understand the omnipresence of energy, the omnipresence of the consciousness, and how everything that exists is contained within this field, and really is that field, but we don’t all experience it. We understand it, we believe it, we feel it within ourselves, maybe during meditation. But I started actually being able to prove this to myself, because say I’d be sitting in my office in Chicago or in my house, and talking to someone in Canada or even Australia, and instantly, not only do they feel the energy connecting with them, but I can feel what’s going on in their body. I report it to them and they confirm it back to me. So how could it not be true?

Rick: Is this something that they kind of go into a meditative state with their eyes closed and you kind of tune in on them, or can it just happen in the course of a normal conversation?

Bill: It happens in the course of a normal conversation. They can, if they want, close their eyes. But there’s no requirement, quite honestly, I do a lot of my work back and forth, driving back and forth downtown Chicago.

Rick: Really? You mean while you’re driving, you’re talking to someone?

Bill: While I’m driving I’m talking, right. I do a lot of my sessions, I probably shouldn’t say that, but I do a lot of my sessions driving back and forth to work, in my downtown job, and it doesn’t disturb the effectiveness at all, because I’m not giving them the energy. I’m using a certain attention on them, a certain type of attention, with an intent that this universal energy – they’re already connected to it, obviously, so it amplifies the connection and it starts to flow, and then I sense where the flow is going, and the energy will do exactly what is needed. I don’t direct it. So the energy has an omniscient quality.

Rick: So could we do it right now with me, or would it make the interview kind of boring because we’d have to be quiet or something like that?

Bill: It would make the interview boring, but why don’t we do this? Why don’t we just have the intent that as we go on, I’ll just start the energy rolling for you?

Rick: Okay, and if it were appropriate, if you were to actually make comments of what’s going on in my body or something, that’s fine with me. You can say it during the interview, I don’t care.

Bill: Right. It’s possible. Interestingly enough, it’s not something I do on purpose. It’s something – and I try to be as clean as I possibly can as far as having an agenda. Because if it’s my agenda, it may not be the agenda of the energy. The energy has this – as I said, it has an omniscience to it or an all-knowingness. The energy will connect with the person and it will sense or know what it is that person needs the most. Now, the person may come to me and say, “I’ve got a headache.” Of course, as a human being, I want their headache to be better, to go away. And I can start the energy moving with them, and then they may notice that it’s going to their stomach or their foot or something, not their head. And it could be that something else that’s concerning them, of a bigger import to their lives, is facilitated or resolved, and the headache is maybe still there. Or the headache goes away as a byproduct of that other thing. So it’s not a very specifically focused, directed thing. Now, as I said, if someone comes to me with an illness – I’m not a doctor, I don’t claim to cure diseases – but the energy will find its way and it will self-prioritize. So it may start on one thing, then it goes to the next thing, depending upon whether we have a half hour, an hour, whatever the situation is. And I just kind of sit back and just watch, and then I will comment if I feel that it helps the person to let go of something. I’ll say, “Hmm, something’s going on in the upper abdomen. What do you feel there?” And they may report back, “Well, I feel X, Y, Z,” and I’ll assist them verbally in maybe letting something go. I do use some of these release techniques that are out there, like Sedona Method-type things, where I encourage the person to feel what’s happening and then let go of it. The thing is, though, is that the energy current is moving through them. So when they do release something, it just shoots out so much faster than if the energy weren’t moving through them. I still encourage them to use those things when they’re not in energy sessions as a tool, but they really are amplified tremendously. And this is just something I stumbled upon about three or four years ago, to sometimes combine the energy work with some of these other more techniques about intentionally letting go of things. It’ll let go without that, but it’ll let go faster sometimes with that. So sometimes I’ll mix and match that type of thing.

Rick: So it really makes no difference to you whether you’re sitting quietly in your office with somebody or talking to them on the phone.

Bill: Your lower back is actually getting some energy now.

Rick: Is it?

Bill: And it’s moving up your spine. Anyway, sorry to interrupt.

Rick: That’s okay. Or driving in the car. It really makes no difference exactly what you’re doing in order to be able to do this.

Bill: No.

Rick: It doesn’t distract you, If you’re driving your car, obviously a large percentage, hopefully, of your attention is involved in driving the car. Oprah Winfrey would be rather upset with you if she knew you were… She’s on a campaign to get people to stop using their cell phones while they’re driving.

Bill: Yes, she is. And I think she’s right about that. This does not distract me. It’s almost like when you’re driving a car, you don’t really think about driving the car, unless you’re a brand new driver. Or if you’re on a treadmill, you can make a phone call. Your feet know what to do without your conscious attention directing your feet. It’s sort of like that with the energy work. I don’t really need conscious… I’m not controlling it. I’m aware of it. So I can be aware of several things at once and still not lose my drivability. I’d rather be sitting quiet in my office if I can, but it’s not a significant difference.

Rick: So what is your subjective experience that would enable you to know what the energy is doing in my lower back, several hundred miles away from you? If I hear a dog barking outside, I hear a dog barking outside and I can tell you about it, but that everybody understands how that works. In this case, you’re sitting a few hundred miles away. What perception are you having that enables you to know what’s happening in my lower back or whatever?

Bill: Well, I don’t feel it in my back, so it’s not a super empathic type of thing. Some people would actually feel that in their own body. Some people do healing work. I don’t do that. I’m completely detached from it, at the same time It’s almost like I sense it in your body, so I can feel it as it’s moving through the other person. And sometimes I get visuals, but not too much. It’s mostly, I would say, a clairsentience. Is that the word for it?

Rick: I think it might be.

Bill: Like being able to feel something in the distance?

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: Not particularly clairvoyant. That happens from time to time, but it’s primarily clairsentient, where I just feel. I become almost identified with them to the point where I can feel what’s going on, but also there’s a detachment where I don’t get wrapped up in it personally. And because of that, they can go through some big releasing and big shifts, and it doesn’t disturb my equilibrium. So I can stay with them in a very silent place, even if I’m talking, but you know what silent means in this regard. It’s a steady, grounded, quiet space that I stay in, no matter what is going on with them. So because of that quiet space that I can hold, they can really let go of a tremendous amount of stuff in a very short time. And have sometimes really big breakthroughs, which is really a tremendous thing to experience or to participate in.

Rick: Have you had big breakthroughs yourself over the years, aside from your initial profound experience with meditation? Sometimes people talk about shifts or spiritual awakening.

Bill: I’ve had so many, I can’t count. stage after stage after stage. So I can’t really say, I was watching, and you get addicted to watching your interviews on your website. Thanks a lot, I don’t have already enough to do. But they’re fascinating, and just watching these different people, and they remember a day in time when this thing happened.

Rick: Yeah, they can mark it on the calendar or something.

Bill: Yeah, which is incredible. But they all admit that it probably wouldn’t have happened had certain other things hadn’t happened first, or they’ve been in a state of readiness of some kind. For me, there’s been a lot of those, you could say, steps, but I can’t say that there was one final step, so that made before and after, there was an utterly different thing. For me, it’s more of a gradual, but fairly rapid. And of course, we all go through, you know, it’s been 40 years, so we go through shifts, and then things get flattened, and then they get shifted again. But the energy work, since I started doing that, for me, the biggest shifts have happened when I facilitate people’s shifts that I’m working with, because it’s almost like I can kind of experience their breakthroughs. And the other major experiences I’ve had, interestingly enough, have been working on very highly advanced people. And, for example, I had the good fortune to be introduced to a saint from India about nine years ago. I was just visiting friends here in Chicago.

Rick: That older gentleman?

Bill: – Bapuji, they call him.

Rick: – Yeah, yeah, I’ve met him.

Bill: Yeah, okay. You met when he was in Fairfield?

Rick: Yeah, he comes to Fairfield.

Bill: yeah, So when I first met him, I was the only Westerner that was around him for about a few months, and then I started telling some meditator friends about him. I said, “Hey, this is unbelievable. You come on over and sit in someone’s living room, and you’re sitting with a major, fully realized saint who has no movement.” He was a completely different type of lifestyle, a different tradition, the Dattatreya tradition. I learned a lot about that, too. But he actually encouraged me or permitted me to do energy work on him. I’m thinking, “Why would he need energy work from someone like me?” But for whatever reason, he said, “Come on.” So he would lie down in the bed. I’ve got some pictures of me working on this saint, and then his people were there videotaping him. My experience was really remarkable, because with most people you can feel energy being taken in by them. It’s almost like someone who hasn’t had a drink in a year who gets a drink of water, and it’s like, “Oh!” It’s like, “Where have you been?” And you can feel it’s almost like they become revived. And not all the time, but quite frequently. People are really hungry for this particular type of energy. And so when I started working on the Bapugi, for maybe two or three minutes I could feel his body was taking in energy. This is a physical body, a human body. After that, something different happened. And the only way I could describe it is that he would take the energy in, and it would literally blast out of him to the environment. First the immediate environment, then a larger environment, and then the galaxy. Literally, I could see his energy permeating the entire universe. I thought to myself, “This is what it means to be so full.” It’s not like he tried to do it. His natural state was, “It’ll take enough for subsistence.” Then everything else is given.

Rick: My cup runneth over.

Bill: Yeah, and literally, it was running over. I could feel it running over. It was blasting through me, which was a nice thing for me. And it’s just… It’s really indescribable. I’m doing a moderate job of describing it, moderate to poor. But anyway, that was an incredible experience. And of course, for me, after that… Actually, I think I had a headache for three days after that. That blasted me way off my normal comfort zone. But I’ve had opportunities to work on very advanced people. And there are several advanced or teachers that have even followings of people that will ask me to work on them, but they won’t let anyone else touch them or deal with their energy, because they’re sensitive to energy, rightfully so. Because when you’re dealing in these energetic levels and frequencies, if they aren’t clean, there could be a little disturbance or a little static that could come up.

Rick: Have you ever gone to see Amma? Ammaji?

Bill: Yes, yes.

Rick: What’s your experience around her?

Bill: I love being around her. With me, I have delayed reactions to things. So with her, the first time I met her, I stood and I waited in line, and I moved up, and I thought, “Come on, already, I’m looking at my watch.” (laughter) And I get up there, I get a nice hug and all that, and it was really beautiful. And I said, “Okay, see you guys later, I’ve got to get down to work.” So I’m driving down the expressway to Chicago, and about 20 minutes later, I thought my head was going to blow up. Literally, like, “Pow!” I thought, “Oh, my God!” So it was almost like an after-effect that happened a half hour later. That happens to me a lot with people. While I’m with them, it’s almost like, okay, it’s an ordinary, it’s nice, it’s good vibes and all that. But then I usually feel it later. I don’t know why that is, I guess it’s the way my nervous system works.

Rick: The reason I thought of her, because you were talking about Bapuji sort of flowing over, and how much energy and all that stuff. And she’s famous for these marathon sessions of hugging people. And recently it was her 57th birthday, and she did a session where I don’t know how many tens of thousands of people she gave darshan to, but basically she was on the stage for 24 hours, non-stop. Some of it was bhajans and a talk and all that, but there were 19 straight hours of darshan sitting on the couch. People who may not be familiar with her, she doesn’t even get up to go to the bathroom. I mean, it’s 19 hours, hugging people one after another in the Indian heat, and always looking sort of fresh as a daisy, pretty much.

Bill: Well, I will say this, not to compare what I do to her by any stretch of the imagination, but I will say that I can do this energy work literally all day, 10 hours, and at the end of the day I feel completely, totally blissful and quiet, like I haven’t done anything.

Rick: Oh yeah, I imagine it gives you more than you …

Bill: It gives me much more than it has, because it has to come through me first. It’s just a wonderful bliss banquet, is what I call it. It’s just such a win-win.

Rick: Yeah, I’m sure that’s the way it works with her too. She’s not using her personal energy, so to speak, to do this. She’s just a conduit for something much …

Bill: A complete, utter conduit. I mean, there’s nothing in there that you could call an individual, really, in the sense that we would consider individuals, usually. There’s just this, maybe a little tiny bit of identity, so someone could say “Amma,” and she’ll turn around. That’s about it.

Rick: Right, some lesh avidya. What is your experience in that regard? How much individual is there for you?

Bill: It fluctuates a lot. There’s almost none when I do the energy work. Someday that will spill over completely, I really feel, but it fluctuates a lot for me. But I always, quite honestly, I have an unshakable conviction about the truth. So even when I go through the emotional things and the business things and the day-to-day challenges, I never lose that basic underlying understanding. And I’m never completely knocked off balance.

Rick: Yeah, and when you say understanding, I presume you don’t mean intellectual understanding.

Bill: No, it’s not intellectual.

Rick: Like, “I’ve got it all figured out.” It’s more of an experience thing.

Bill: It’s an inner …

Rick: Knowingness.

Bill: It’s a knowingness, right. It’s a knowingness. The intellect agrees with it, though. The intellect understands the non-dual, the Advaita-type non-dual reality.

Rick: Right.

Bill: And for me, it’s not a philosophy. You could say it’s a conviction in the intellect and a knowingness inside. The personality, it does what it does. It goes through ups and downs, changes in perception, changes in mood. And I think that’s pretty much true for everybody, even the people that “have claimed awakening.” I think they will all say that there are still fluctuations in life. Crises happen, relationships with people, people get sick, this and that. And so the difference is that there’s an absolute understanding which has permeated beyond the intellect into the core, where you just know the truth. And no matter how much your personality may think it’s kind of whacked out, this underlying truth just never fades.

Rick: And can you elaborate on what you mean by “truth”? I mean, I have a sense of it, but that word gets bandied about a lot and is sometimes used in a dogmatic sense. So what do you mean by “truth”?

Bill: Well, this kind of truth really we can’t talk too much about. The best I could do, basically, the truth is that I am not the personality, I am not the fluctuating, changing part of my experience. The “I” part is completely untainted and is always just purely present. And that’s what I am. So I have no doubt, either intellectually about that or on the knowing level about that. The personality continues along its merry way with its ups and downs and that kind of stuff. And some days I will have to sit down and center and release for a while, just to re-establish that. But I would say I can never be completely thrown off. There might be temporary ups and downs or glitches with it, but I’m firmly established, at least within that understanding, and the conviction has gone deep. But as I said before, I don’t claim to have all of a sudden become a dramatic thing and then it happened at 3 o’clock on a Wednesday.

Rick: It doesn’t always happen that way for people. I heard a nice metaphor a while back that I think I mentioned in one or two of these interviews, and you may have heard me say it, but it’s like you could be out walking and get caught in a sudden downpour. And you can look at your watch and say, “Okay, I got drenched at 3: 15 this afternoon.” On the other hand, you could be out walking, let’s say, in a heavy mist, taking a long walk, and at a certain point you realize, “I am drenched,” but you don’t know exactly when it happened. You couldn’t put a time on it because it happens so subtly and gradually. You never notice a dramatic shift.

Bill: I don’t think there’s an end to it, though.

Rick: I don’t either. Just from my own experience and everyone I’ve ever talked to, I don’t think. There are milestones, but I don’t think there’s any point at which you could say, “I could not possibly grow any further than this.” There are people who say that, but I think they’re mistaken.

Bill: Well, I would say it’s unlikely. The human body can always be refined more, could always be more learned, more experienced. So I think you have a certain base, and then you build on that base, and there’s no limit to where you can build to. I don’t like to think of a finality to it, or like, “This is it. Okay, got that done. Done.” I don’t feel that that’s so much the case.

Rick: I think what happens with a lot of people is that they have, initially, such a strong identification with the absolute, or with being, or whatever you want to call it, and they can see from their experience that that really doesn’t change. So they figure, “Well, the whole notion of progress is meaningless, because how can this progress? It’s just the same all the time. It doesn’t get any more absolute than it is.” But I would counter that by saying that there is an infinite range of possibilities in terms of the infusion of that into one’s experience of life, into, as you say, the refinement of the physiology, the perceptual refinement, the ability to express that, the ability to live it more fully. It’s like a light. Light is light. But you can have a relatively dim light, or you can have this blazing… you can have the sun or something really, really bright. It’s the same thing. It’s light. Certain electromagnetic waves within a certain spectrum, but there are so many degrees of intensity possible. And in my experience at least, the clarity of the intensity continues to grow.

Bill: Yes, absolutely. Now what I found using the energy work, which is really a tremendous thing for me to witness, is that this wholeness, whatever, starts to actually, almost like a beam, work on the individual and actually facilitate further openings and further advancements in that person’s energy and awareness. And just to see that there’s really no limit to it. I can’t really feel an end to it, you know, because the body can always be a little bit more refined. There’s more capacities awakening, more and more and more in the brain, whatever. And I don’t really feel that there’s a limitation on that, even though they may be perfectly established in that sense of being that’s unshakable. Within the physical realm, there’s infinite potential of growth and expansion, and the whole universe is still expanding. That’s not stopped. Who thinks we could stop? My perspective, anyway.

Rick: So do a lot of people who interact with you as a healer do so because they want to enhance their spiritual progress, as opposed to just dealing with some physical issue?

Bill: You know, a few. But generally people are attracted to it because they feel like there’s something that needs to be corrected or enhanced in some way, physically. For example, I work with people a lot recently with chronic fatigue, chronic pain. But it’s similar to why I started meditation. I didn’t start meditation to realize some deeper truth. I started because I was suffering in some way. I wanted relief. So that’s okay, because once they feel the relief happening, and other things open up for them where they didn’t expect, that’s the thing that’s so much fun about it. I work with people that don’t know what meditation is, nor have they had any inclination to try it or even have any interest in it at all. Completely outside their realm of interest or experience. And in an energy session, they’ll go into a profoundly deep meditation. And then they’ll come out and they’ll go, “What was that?” I said, “Well, were you wide awake and felt like your body was completely gone?” They said, “Yes.” I said, “That’s a different state of consciousness.” You want to know what that’s about? You want to know what happens to your physiology, how it repairs itself much faster than it does even sleep during the sleeping state. And they literally go right into that. I could be talking to them at the time. It’s not like I’m telling them to even close their eyes. But what happens is that when the energy comes in, it starts to bring that brain synchrony up into being. And one person I was… Back in the early days, any chance I had to do this work, I would do. This guy I knew owned a beauty salon. So he says, “Come on in to the salon and work on people there.” So I’m in this beauty salon thinking to myself, “What am I doing here?” But here I am, you know. And it was noisy and the dryers were going. And it was like utter pandemonium. And so the owner’s daughter was there. And I was sitting, you know, she sat down in a chair. I said, “Hi.” I said, “I’m going to do this energy thing.” I said, “Is there anything that you’d like to tell me first?” She goes, “Well,” she says, “my mind never stops moving, thinking, whirling constantly. From the time I get up to even all night since I was born it’s been like this.” I said, “Well, what do you think about that?” I said, “Are you happy with that?” She goes, “No.” She said, “I want quiet. I just want quiet.” And I said, “Well, I can provide that for you, I think.” She goes, “Good luck.” People have tried. I’ve been to everything. Hypnosis, acupuncture, this, that, and the … And she says, “There’s no hope.” I said, “Okay.” So I started working on her. And I can tell when the thing connects. You know, it’s like a … Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it may take a few minutes. There might be some resistance or some confusion in the person or whatever. But once it connects I can feel like, you know, something has finally been plugged in.

Rick: Right.

Bill: So I could feel this thing plug into her. And then I looked down and I kind of whispered to her. I said, “How you doing?” And she looked up at me and she said, “What are you?” [Laughter] I said, “I wish I could tell you.” But she went into a deep silence.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: So what I realized was the reason this is so valuable is not because it fixes the body and things like that. That can happen as a byproduct. But really what it does, it produces this deep silence, not only subjectively but in the physiology. Quickly.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: With many people. I can’t say every person, but relatively quickly and sometimes very quickly. And so that’s why sometimes in my day job business, where I do real estate and do a lot of real estate closings, I’ll be in the middle of a closing and they can be pretty intense, especially these large commercial transactions. And somebody will express that they have a headache or something’s going on. So I use my discretion, but from time to time I’ll say, “You know, I might be able to help you with that.” And they’ll go, “What do you mean?” So they’ll come to my office for a second and I’ll spend five minutes with them and pow! They let go of the headache, but also what happens is the clarity comes back and they let go and they can actually function much better. Sometimes I don’t tell them, although there’s some question about ethics with that, whether you should work on someone without their permission. I usually don’t do that, but sometimes if I’m prompted and I feel it’s correct, I’ll do it. And it’s rewarding to see because the negativity lifts up and then direction changes. So I would like to use this in a corporate setting. I’ve done a few things like that, but I’d like to really do a lot of it. Because I feel you can take an organization and take maybe a group of key people in the organization and work on them and then train them, because I can teach them how to do some of these things. And then just use that as a way to generate coherence. And also using this distant energy techniques, you can use that energy not only on a one-on-one person basis, but also to send energy to a relationship, for example, with a client or a department in the company or something like that, to facilitate the more harmonious functioning and more creativity to flow, because then you’re going to balance out the collective brain of the recipient of that energy. So it’s very intriguing, the applications of it.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting. One thought that comes to mind is that you would probably consider yourself to be a catalyst rather than an agent that is really doing something. Because what you’re essentially doing is, it’s not like energy – you said this earlier – energy is not going from Bill to Mr. X. You are just like a mechanic who can tune the engine of the car a little bit so it runs more efficiently. You’ve found a way of bringing people more into alignment, and then that energy, which essentially we are and which is bigger than all of us, takes care of things for you.

Bill: Totally, totally. Anything that lives is alive because its energy is connecting and moving through it. What I do, the best I can describe it, is to solidify and amplify that connection. And when that connection is solidified, this type of energy is a higher frequency than just normal, everyday, keep you alive kind of energy. It’s an evolutionary energy. It amplifies that evolutionary force dramatically. So what I do is I just take the connection that’s already there, and I somehow solidify that that connection is stronger, and then the amplitude or the force of the energy is increased. So it moves through with more, say, more push. Now it’s very non-invasive energy. It’s not going to blast them out of the water because it modulates itself so that it’s gentle, but it’s also strong enough or powerful enough to deal with what’s going on, what’s presenting itself at the time. So it’s fascinating to watch how it modulates itself. It will get really, really strong in a particular area, then it will just ease up, then it will start to move here and there, and it’s just fascinating. To me, every single session is completely different. It’s like an art form.

Rick: It’s fascinating to me that you can perceive all that or sense all that, because if I were in a room with a person, I don’t know, I just wouldn’t pick up on all that stuff. Maybe I have the ability if I were trained, but I haven’t been and I don’t, and I wouldn’t have a clue as to how things are moving or loosening up or anything like that.

Bill: Interestingly enough, I don’t go into a room and see that either, unless I’m doing energy work. Now maybe this is just a way to shut that off, because there’s a lot of data that may not even be relevant for any of my business. But when I’m doing an energy session with someone, that’s when this happens for me.

Rick: I wasn’t suggesting that you do it in a business meeting or something, but just that when you’re actually doing your energy thing, that you perceive all this stuff or sense it, and I find that kind of interesting. Some people would be skeptical and they would just think that you’re making it all up or something. There’s this fellow in this chat group that I frequent that is a really nice, intelligent guy, but he’s very skeptical. He used to be a long-term meditator, he’s sort of become an atheist and very skeptical about things, but he’s skeptical in a very intelligent way, and he’s very honest. He’ll admit when he’s wrong or when he’s been proven wrong, but he really wants nitty-gritty evidence of things.

Bill: I really value those people so much. Those are my favorite clients. I’ll give you an example. In fact, I was just as skeptical as they were, because I really hadn’t had any experience with this kind of thing. I’d read all these books like Yogananda and all this stuff, these miraculous things that can happen, but I was so hungry for something like this, but I never had it. I’ve had great meditations and stuff like that, but nothing like, say, a phenomenon. So when I was kind of a novice at this energy work, I had this woman at my house, and she happened to be a very prominent doctor of education, who was my son’s guidance counselor in a big high school in the north suburbs here. I was in her office talking about my son one day, and he was a special ed student back then, and we were just talking, and something prompted me to mention that I was practicing this Reiki. And she says, “Oh, I was just researching that last week. I’ve got an interest in it.” “Wow.” So I said, “Come over to the house, and I’ll do a treatment on you.” So I was working on her, and I had my hands on her neck. And all of a sudden, in my mind’s eye, I see horses galloping. So I said to her–I really was weighing whether I should say it or not, because I didn’t want this person to think I was a nutcase, although it was probably too late for that anyway. So I said to her, “I’m seeing horses galloping.” She goes, “Well, I fell off a horse, and that’s how I hurt my neck.” So I thought to myself, “Nah, this is far-fetched.” I mean, I completely was skeptical about it, but it was so clear.

Rick: This is when you were really kind of new at this?

Bill: Yeah, it was six months into it. And so I thought, “Okay, that’s a fluke.” I had to admit that it was pretty right on. It was a fluke. But every time someone would come over for a session, something like that would happen. And each time I felt more and more confident that if I spoke it out, I only would speak it out if I felt it was helpful.

Rick: So you mean you would often have visual things like that?

Bill: Sometimes visual.

Rick: That pertain to the thing that caused the problem?

Bill: Yes. For example, I’d feel them drowning. And I’d ever ask them if they were a swimmer, and they said, “Yes.” I said, “Did you ever swallow water?” “Yes, they had to pull me out of the pool.” So that kind of stuff. I also saw some pretty unpleasant things, like abuse and things like that. And I’m always very careful how I express it. I’ll say to the person, “Were you ever treated roughly in any way?” Or something like that. And then if they want to talk about it, they do. Otherwise, we just let it go. I’m very sensitive to how people feel, and I don’t want to make them uncomfortable in any way, or feel like I’m using some kind of a spooky power to dig into their secrets. But it’s so frequent for me now. I’m surprised when people make a big deal out of it. It’s not a big deal. It’s just the way the energy functions. And sometimes I need to know that, because I may say a word or two and that will help them release that thing that maybe has been with them for their whole lives and they didn’t know it. And it’s just pointing it out to them intellectually, while that energy is dislodging it. Sometimes that’s the missing piece and then it just comes out. But I will be using a lot of discretion when I bring those kinds of things up. And yes, it doesn’t happen every time. So if someone were going to use me as a science experiment, I would say, “Find someone else,” because it’s not like on command, like, “I’m going to read you now.” Like this friend of mine, Carolyn Mace, she can do that, because that’s what her gift is. When she first started out, Dr. Sheely, this famous, Norm Sheely, this great doctor, was doing an experiment with her. He’d be in Missouri and she’d be here in Chicago. And he’d say, “Rick Archer walked into my office,” and he’d shut up. And she’d talk about 15 minutes, everything conceivable, about your physiology, your psychology, what’s wrong with you, why it’s wrong, all this stuff. And then he would document it and he would verify the testing with his own medical, scientific, diagnostic tools. And he verified about 95% accuracy. Now, that’s not my talent, although for me, I will feel things only when they’re appropriate in the moment for that person.

Rick: So, in other words, it’s not just sort of a circus act. It’s more like when something needs to be seen or known, you see or know it. And it’s not just sort of for amusement or something like that.

Bill: No, it can be amusing. I find it amusing sometimes, and the people find it interesting. But it’s definitely not a circus act in the sense that I can’t do it on command, necessarily, because I’m not really doing it. It’s just something I’m feeling or picking up on. And I don’t have an agenda that I’m going to see stuff and read stuff about with people. It’s just that when the energy facilitates that knowingness, and it’s appropriate to mention it, then it will come up.

Rick: There’s a friend of mine whom I’ve interviewed on this show, Mary Foster, I don’t know if you saw her interview, it was one of the earlier ones. She said that she has a thing still, I guess, where if she can be talking to somebody on the phone, like a customer support salesperson or something at a company, and just from the sound of the person’s voice, a few words, she’ll start to know all this stuff about their life. “Oh, the woman’s going through a divorce, she has three kids, this kid’s on drugs,” you know, just sort of all kinds of details just start coming to her.

Bill: A tremendous talent. Sometimes it happens. I can’t say that consistently if I’m not doing an energy session for someone. It happened to me, I was on the phone with a woman at a company once, we were working through some real estate situation, and I talked to her for a few minutes, and then I couldn’t help it, I started telling her about herself. And it was just so frequently right. It really kind of scared her, but she laughed about it. I think she was a little slightly- One time when I first started doing this work back in like 1989, there was a woman that worked across the hall from me with an affiliated company, and I was over there talking to her about something I was working on with her. And I looked at her, and in those days I hadn’t really developed much of a discretion, or I was such a new toy. So I said to her, “Is there something wrong with your ears?” just blurted it out. She looks at me, she goes, “No!” Like, “Get out of here.”

Rick: She must have been thinking that she couldn’t hear what you were saying, like she was dense or something.

Bill: So anyway, I said, “I’m sorry.” So I went back to my office, and I’m on the phone. About an hour later, she bursts into my office, mad as hell. She goes, “How did you know about my ears?” I sat back and, “What are you talking about?” She goes, “I can’t even shower in the morning without putting earplugs in my ears. I have hyper, hypersensitive ears.” It’s just going on and on, and she was upset.

Rick: Like you’d been hacking into her Facebook account or something.

Bill: Yeah, way before Facebook. So I said, “Well, here, why don’t you read this book?” I gave her this Reiki manual. She took it with her, and she came back an hour later, she threw it back at my desk, and she says, “I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to hear about it.” So obviously, she wasn’t ready, nor did she appreciate it. So I learned a lesson with that. It was a minor thing. But like I say, it’s not a parlor trick. And what happened was, the energy was trying to correct her ears. The only time I see this stuff is if it’s being corrected. It’s not just for the sake of diagnosis. I don’t claim to diagnose people’s diseases. When I feel something happening in them, it’s because it’s being corrected or being unwound or being facilitated in some way. Otherwise, I wouldn’t see it. It’s just not a casual observation.

Rick: Now, when you speak of the energy, you do so in a sort of anthropomorphic sense. In other words, you speak of it as though it were an intelligent being who is working on the person and intelligently channeling itself here and channeling itself here and doing this and doing that. It’s not just some kind of vague, amorphous thing. Do you concur with what I’m saying? That’s what you’re implying when you speak about the energy. And it’s not as though you are directing the energy like a puppeteer. It’s more like the energy has a flow and you’re just calling its attention to something, like a traffic cop or something.

Bill: An air traffic controller.

Rick: Yeah, kind of participating in what the energy really wants to do anyway, but as though it needed an earthly representative to help facilitate a transition for a person.

Bill: I believe, I won’t say it needs it, but I guess you could say it needs it, or it requires a conduit.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: And why that is?

Rick: Maybe it’s a sense of an intermediary, where the energy is on its level and the person needing help is on another level, and they’re so disconnected from one another because of the person being out of alignment that it needs someone who is well-connected to intermediate and help to bring the two together.

Bill: From a cosmic sense, we are that energy, so the energy will form a certain type of individual who can facilitate this flow of energy to help another type of energy form that needs that energy. It’s kind of like that illusory part of life, the Maya. So within the Maya context, yes, I’m a conduit for it, and it “seems to need me” in that case, because I have a particular connection with it. And not any better or worse than some of these talented healers coming in and out of your town, too, that each have a tremendous gift to offer, but they’re not exactly the same thing. So I don’t feel myself as a competitor to anyone. I feel that what I do facilitates and enhances whatever else the person is doing. That’s the nature of it. In other words, it supports and enhances whatever that person’s direction or whatever they want to do, whether it’s chemotherapy they choose or whether they want to develop bodybuilding skills or taekwondo or whatever. The energy will help them to make the most optimal possible situation and outcome with whatever they’re doing.

Rick: Yeah, and this is just a role that you’re playing, that you’re well-suited to play.

Bill: I didn’t consciously choose it, really.

Rick: No, but you were just attracted to it.

Bill: I was attracted to it.

Rick: reiki, “This looks interesting. I think I’ll check this out.” Your life just kind of flowed in that direction and you found you had a knack for it.

Bill: That’s it. Perfectly accurate. Absolutely.

Rick: Somewhere a bit earlier when you were talking, I was reminded of the story of Jesus and the centurion who came to him. Remember that story? If you know the Bible very well, it’s a Roman soldier who came. And of course, Jesus was in a totally different social group than the Roman soldier. But the Roman soldier had heard about Jesus and had a great deal of respect for him. And said, I forget what it was, whether it was someone in his family or one of his other soldiers, or somebody who needed help. And he asked Jesus if he would come and help the person. How was it? I’m sorry. Do you know this story? It’s like he went to him and asked for his blessings.

Bill: My upbringing, we focused on the Old Testament.

Rick: He asked for his blessings on the situation somehow. And Jesus offered to come there to help. And he said, “No, no, you don’t need to come there.” He said, “I’m an officer in the military and if I want something done, I just order my men and they go and do it.” And so I know you can do it that way. You don’t have to physically go there. If it’s your intention that this help be provided, it will be provided by virtue of just whatever powers are at your beck and call. And Jesus appreciated the guy for his faith and his insight, and that’s the way it turned out.

Bill: Yes, yes. Right. And I think from my limited understanding of the New Testament, Jesus said that all these things he was demonstrating are capacities we all have, and that we would eventually manifest them in even greater things.

Rick: Yeah, he said that.

Bill: So he did. And many of these things reflect what he was doing. Being able to do healings at a distance, with or without the person’s knowledge or participation. Some things that happen would be considered miraculous if that’s the way you view things. Things that happen that are not explainable are miraculous. Maybe one day they’ll be scientifically explained just like everything else is. But at this point in our evolution as a culture, certain things are still considered miraculous.

Rick: Sure.

Bill: If they don’t fit into any scientific paradigm.

Rick: Miraculous just means something’s happening that is based upon principles that we don’t yet understand.

Bill: And I’ve experienced…

Rick: 200 years ago, if someone had seen a 747 fly over, that would have been pretty miraculous.

Bill: Right.

Rick: But now we understand how that works.

Bill: The things that people who do energy work, for example, experience fairly regularly, many could be qualified as miracles. Maybe minor, not major. Sometimes they’re major. The thing is that the understanding is that the doer…

Rick: You can put this cord in front of your arm if you want, like this.

Bill: Oh, okay.

Rick: Now you won’t have to keep flipping it over your shoulder.

Bill: Okay, good. That saves some energy that I can use for you. But anyway, I’ve had so many experiences that one would say are miraculous, doing this work and experiencing it along with the person, or hearing about it later. It was really funny that when I first started teaching this stuff, I taught people this distant healing technique, and part of our class was we sit around in a circle and we each choose someone as a recipient. So one of the people chooses her Uncle Fred, who lives in Fresno or whatever. So we didn’t have a picture of him, we just knew his name was Uncle Fred. And we all did this process and we spent five minutes sending this energy to Uncle Fred. Didn’t know anything about him, he didn’t know anything about us. And then I asked them to contact me the next day and let me know if any experiences or any feedback came from these recipients. She calls up, she goes, “Well, I talked to Uncle Fred tonight.”

Rick: Did Uncle Fred even know that you guys were doing this for him?

Bill: No clue. He didn’t know what it was that his niece was involved in or anything. So she calls up Uncle Fred, she goes, “Fred, how was your day today?” He goes, “The weirdest day of my life.” She says, “What happened?” Well, it turns out Fred had MS and he usually used a walker or even a wheelchair from time to time. So the family went out for Sunday brunch to this really nice hotel. So Freddy said that he was sitting down at the table. He said, “I got up, grabbed a tray, took my food, came back and sat down and said, ‘Hey, I can’t do that.'”

Rick: He didn’t use his walker.

Bill: Just spontaneously, without his walker. And he felt great the whole day. And she says, “What time was that?” He goes, “It turned out to be around the time we were doing this.” Did we prove that it was the direct cause? Of course not. But we’re pretty sure it was. And it was just our intent, with a particular kind of focus, on Fred, whoever Fred may be. Consciousness knows who Fred is. He is Fred, right? So we don’t have to say Fred was born on such and such a day as a birthday, a numerology or anything like that. We just said, “Uncle Fred.” The intent was there. We all had the intent that it was her uncle Fred. Consciousness knows who Uncle Fred is, as I said before. Energy knows. It’s the same energy that flows through everything that’s alive, everywhere.

Rick: Yeah, that’s interesting. That gets back to that thing I was saying earlier about the intelligence of it. Because you get a room full of people in Chicago thinking about some guy in Fresno, and how in the world can that possibly connect? Because they wouldn’t know. They as individuals wouldn’t know anything about Uncle Fred or what he looks like or what his ailment was or anything else. But as you say, that intelligence, which is fundamental to both them and him and everything, knows what they’re up to. And somehow you tickle it here and it laughs over there.

Bill: Totally. And it’s not only a demonstration, but experiential. Because when you’re doing this, you can feel something happening to this Fred guy. You know something’s going on. Something’s moving through him. In fact, some people in the group may even say, “It’s his legs,” or “It’s his back.” And these people aren’t psychics. Many of them are ordinary people that had no previous experience with this.

Rick: Interesting.

Bill: So what happens is it accesses this level of awareness that is kind of underneath the surface, the ego personality. It’s always there, just kind of waiting to be discovered. And these are just ways that it opens it up, and it flows in a certain way. And the beautiful thing is it’s always for healing or upliftment. It can’t be used for any kind of negative or destructive purpose.

Rick: Yeah, that would make sense, because this energy that you refer to, and I’m sure there are other words that we could apply. It’s not in the harm game. It wouldn’t allow itself to be used to fry somebody’s brain.

Bill: No, and not only that, and it’s an interesting distinction, it also cannot be used to manipulate, even though if you think you’re helping someone. For example, Joe and Susie are having a terrible fight, and they may be getting divorced. You could send energy to fix their relationship. Big no-no. You could send energy to each of them individually to uplift them and to have the best thing for them. But it may be that they split faster, amicably, or maybe they get back together, whatever the outcome is. You have to learn, and this energy is a very wonderful teacher, because you learn how to let go of individual insistences of the outcome that you as an individual ego want to see happen. I’ve worked with a lot of people that are very ill, really near the end of their lives, and I go in there with the intent, my intent as a human being, I want them to live and thrive and live another ten years. But I defer to the energy, because the energy knows their soul and knows what they need and what the highest good. And sometimes what has happened was they die really fast and peacefully. Sometimes they live a lot longer. I don’t have an agenda. My agenda is that this happens for them in the most evolutionary, peaceful, and blissful way as possible. And many times that means they pass easily. One time I had an experience, do I have a couple of minutes?

Rick: Oh, you have all the time you want.

Bill: So this maybe gets a little bit on the “occult.”

Rick: People will find that interesting.

Bill: I don’t know if people here would be too offended by that.

Rick: I don’t think so.

Bill: Okay. Believe me, I have no experience.

Rick: If they are, I’ll give them their money back.

Bill: Okay, good. [Laughter] Yeah, so now anything goes, right?

Rick: Right.

Bill: I’ll avoid the jokes, I promise. But anyway, this friend of mine I’ve known since eighth grade told me his mother-in-law was very sick in hospice, and she had cancer for the last year or so. And I knew this woman very well because I used to be her attorney. I handled a lot of real estate closings for her. In another role I was playing on a different day. And I said, “Well, I’d like to come visit her.” She was at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago. And I went to see her, and my friend was there, and his wife was there, and her daughter was there, and her other kids, and her granddaughter was there too, in the room. And the woman was really in a lot of–I mean, she was full of IVs, in a lot of terrible pain, and she had a lot of emotional pain. She had lost some really–she had some tragedies in her life, really kind of major ones. And so I came, I bent over to the bed, and I said, “Hi.” I said, “Do you remember me?” She said, “Oh, yes.” I said, “Well, I’m not here for a real estate closing today.” In a different capacity. She goes, “Thanks for coming. What do you do?” I said, “I do energy healing work.” “I won’t try to explain it to you, but can I just try it on you?” She says, “Okay.” So I started doing this, started channeling, for lack of a better word, the conduit, this energy, and I could feel, after ten minutes or so, wow, that connection was there. It was starting to flow and circulate. And after about another ten minutes, she looks up at me, and she says, “I don’t know what this is, but you have no idea what this is doing for me.” I said, “What?” She goes, “I can’t describe it. I feel such peace like I’ve never felt in my entire life.” She was like 80. And I just have this– She says, “Is this something you teach?” I said, “Yes.” She goes, “Promise me you’ll teach my granddaughter how to do this.” I said, “I promise.” So I stayed with her for about an hour, and the room got so silent, because there’s so much anxiety and pain going on there. Everything just settled down, almost like a golden mist. All of a sudden, I could feel the hairs on my neck stand up. And I turned around and I said to her daughter, “Did she have a sister?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Did the sister die?” She’s already passed. She goes, “Yes.” I said, “Were they really close?” She goes, “Yes. Why are you asking?” I said, “I don’t know, but I think the sister’s here.” I didn’t see anything. You know, like a medium, when she sees people walking in and out of the room. I didn’t see anything, as far as an apparition. All it was was a knowingness that this was going on. Anyway, I shared that. I couldn’t help it. So I left, and I got a call the next morning at 6 a.m. She had passed at 4 a.m. And she wasn’t expected to pass quickly. She was going to keep going. They had her pumped full of all these medicines. Constant agony. She let go. She just let go. And I thought, “That’s what I call a healing.” The other experience I had, and I’ll get off this subject, but one time I was called by one of my students to visit her close friend who was ill, you know, cancer. And she was in the hospital, and she had talked to her on the phone an hour before. She said, “Come on over. You guys can do some energy work for me.” So we walked in the hospital room, and I was shocked when I walked in because the woman was near death, completely gone, you know, out of it, and had really that look of the body, the life force had almost completely gone. And we were standing in the back of the room, and the doctor comes in and tells the family, you know, she’s got minutes to hours left. So I said, “Gina, we don’t belong here. This is the family. I don’t even know this woman.” I said, “Let’s get out of here, but I’m going to continue to send her energy.” “Okay, fine.” So I leave the hospital, and I was a little taken aback. I was expecting someone who wasn’t feeling well sitting up talking, you know, and I saw something that was really extreme, which I really was not that accustomed to. So I was driving home, and I continued to send energy to her while I was driving. And I had this vision in my mind, like an image of, you know, like a hot air balloon, you know, and they have the ropes tethered to the ground. Well, imagine a really big, powerful hot air balloon, and the rope is starting to fray, and it’s starting to unwind and pop, you know, the threads popping, and all of a sudden it’s hanging by a thread. And I’m seeing this in my mind’s eye, almost visually. All of a sudden it pops, and the only way I could describe it was this uprushing of energy, an ascension of energy, such force that I thought, “How am I going to drive this car?” Like, “Oh, my God!” And I felt this release, and the rushing up was so amazing and powerful, I thought, “Hey, I am never going to feel sorry for people that die again.” She’s obviously a good person, had a lot of peace built up. She was an energy worker herself, and a meditator and all these. And what an incredible experience.

Rick: So you knew at that time that she had just died and that you were tuning in to …

Bill: I didn’t have confirmation, but it was confirmed later. But I knew at that instant, I could feel that string snap. And that what happened afterward, oh, man, she was ready. I mean, that doesn’t always happen. I think there’s sometimes a longer, more difficult transition. But in her case, it was an instant, like, “Wow!” So I’ve had some interesting and really rewarding experiences with that, although that’s my main thing.

Rick: Even though you sometimes have a real high experience when somebody else is undergoing a high experience, you don’t have the low experiences. In other words, you don’t feel depression or pain or something.

Bill: I don’t feel depression, but I know they’re depressed. I can feel their depression very deeply.

Rick: You feel it, but you somehow don’t own it.

Bill: I feel it like it’s in them, it’s not in me. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost like such a simpatico. In a sense, you become that person, but you’re not them. It’s very difficult to describe, but it’s a sense. It’s a knowingness about what they’re feeling. And you can actually feel the feeling, but the feeling is theirs, not yours, as it were. And you can also feel when it unwinds and it starts to shift. I can tell when someone’s getting lighter. And they almost always confirm it. Maybe I’ll say something and they don’t really notice it until five minutes later. But I tell them as little as possible ahead of time, because I don’t want them to think that I’m planting these post-tabletic…

Rick: Suggestions, yeah.

Bill: So they’ll say, “What am I supposed to feel?” I say, “You’re not supposed to feel anything. You feel whatever happens.” I will say generally people feel some sense of quiet, and the nervous system settling down. Beyond that, I don’t say a thing. I don’t tell them they’re going to get hot or they’re going to get cold, or they’re going to feel something moving. Because then, first of all, it’s more of a surprise and interesting for them. It spontaneously happens. And if I had told them ahead of time, there’s always that little doubt, “This guy is really good. He gave me some suggestion, and now I’m feeling it. Big deal.” I keep as mum as I can about what I expect to happen ahead of time.

Rick: What do you feel is happening with me now?

Bill: Oh.

Rick: You’ve forgotten all about me.

Bill: I forgot about you. I’m sorry. It’s such a good interview, but you’ve got my ego and intellect all cramped up. I do feel like your eyes took in a lot of energy. Maybe you have some eye strain or something going on with that. I also feel a lot of loosening here and loosening here. You know, that has happened over the last half hour.

Rick: For the sake of those who are listening in the audio, without the video, I’ll say here and here he pointed to his heart and the back of his neck.

Bill: Yeah. Also, what I would say is perhaps you have a little bit of the jaw tensing, Maybe when you sleep, so I feel that that’s loosened up a little bit, the jaw is loose. I think your respiration is a little better. There might have been a little respiratory thing that happens. Maybe it’s an allergy or something.

Rick: Not so much. The other things you mentioned were kind of right on. I get a headache almost every day from sitting at the computer for all those hours, which I have to do for my job. Every cell in my body wants to just jump up and go take a bike ride or something, but I have to keep working. By the end of the day I often feel a headache from just forcing myself to sit like that. I have a bit of one now, still left over from today, although I got rid of most of it when I meditated. As we were talking earlier, you said the energy was rising up from the base of my spine. One thing unusual that I noticed a few times was a very specific sharp pain in my heart area.

Bill: That’s why I said respiration.

Rick: It was subtle. It wasn’t like a general overall ache. It was more like a little knife pain, not strong, but just sort of throbbing. I felt like something good was happening there, but I still have the headache. Whenever I mention this headache stuff to my wife, she always says, “You might need glasses or something,” but I don’t think it’s that, because my eyesight is very good. I can see precisely little letters on the screen. But it’s more just the sort of the…

Bill: I think it’s more of an eye strain than it is a…

Rick: Yeah, it’s just having to sit in a sedentary way and stare and do this detailed stuff, much of which is not inherently interesting, and do it hour after hour. It gives me a headache.

Bill: Would it be possible for you, this is just occurring to me, and this is more along the lines of using energy with these releasing techniques, but could you welcome the sense of that headache just for now?

Rick: Every day or right now?

Bill: Just now.

Rick: Well, in a sense I do that. When I meditate, for instance, I’m not trying to get away from any discomfort. I’m actually looking for it. Just allowing my, “Okay, here’s the pain. Now let’s just dwell on that,” and just keep dwelling on it. I can feel it sort of soothing and healing and stuff like that.

Bill: Good, good. There’s a non-resistance to it that really allows it to let go.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: Because when we have a pain, our initial response is to grip, to push against it.

Rick: Yeah, try to put our attention somewhere else. I know about that. Although when you’re working, you might be kind of ignoring a headache because you’re focusing on other stuff and doing stuff. But when I stop working and I’m just resting or meditating, then that’s the time to just really dwell on whatever physical discomforts may be there.

Bill: This is a part that might bore the audience here. Let’s just a minute. I’m just going to be quiet for a minute.

Rick: Okay. I’ll close my eyes for a minute. Bear with us, those who are just listening in the audio.

Bill: Yes, talk amongst yourselves.

Rick: Think about Uncle Fred.

Bill: Okay. [dog barking] [dog barking] [dog barking] [dog barking] [dog barking] [inaudible]

Bill: I’m feeling a lot of what’s commonly known as Kundalini moving up and down your spine.

Rick: I’m not feeling it, but it is soothing. It’s just sitting close to my eyes.

Bill: I also feel like the headache wants to lift up out of the top of your head.

Rick: Huh.

Bill: So just put your attention up there for a second.

Rick: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]

Bill: Yes, loosening up the neck and shoulders too. That’s going to help with it.

Rick: Yeah, they tend to get tight.

Bill: Yeah. If you want, afterwards we can do some more.

Rick: Yeah, or maybe when you come to Fairfield. Ooh, that was interesting. I just felt a real jolt in my head there.

Bill: Yeah, there’s a lot of the Kundalini energy shooting up there. You might be so used to it that you don’t notice it.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t usually. I’ve been doing all kinds of things over the years, but I don’t usually have anything intense like that going on.

Bill: It’s like there’s something right about here that’s…

Rick: Sometimes I’ll have a thing here. There’s a feeling in the top of the head like a chick trying to hatch, or in this chakra here.

Bill: So what’s going to happen is there’s a slight, not even a block, but a slight tweaking that needs to be done. Once that happens, there’s going to be some real cool stuff.

Rick: Maybe when you come to Fairfield you can tweak me.

Bill: Oh, absolutely. I’ll be there on the 4th, 5th, and 6th of November.

Rick: Good. So we won’t bore people with any more of this.

Bill: Okay. I’m looking forward to this one.

Rick: Especially our audio people. They’ll sit here and think, “All right.”

Bill: They may have picked up a buzz from this.

Rick: They may have. And most of the people who listen to this show will appreciate this kind of thing and wouldn’t mind a few moments of silence anyway.

Bill: Good. Great.

Rick: Well, is there anything you feel like we haven’t covered that you’d like to say?

Bill: I think we did a really good job. I could go on for hours about it because there’s so many experiences I’ve had, but I’m not going to do that. I would love to have people come listen to me talk on November 4th at the Main Stay on Main Street. There’s a really nice bed and breakfast there.

Rick: If the people are in Fairfield, they’ll see ads for it or something like that.

Bill: Yeah, there’ll be a couple of ads and stuff. What I do when I do the group thing is I do a group energy session where I essentially send energy to everybody in the room together. I have a process that I go through, like a four-step process, where the energy comes in waves. Last time, the people really enjoyed it. They really had a lot of great feedback.

Rick: Yeah, people in Fairfield tend to be fairly receptive. I mean, you’ve got a group of people who have been meditating for 30 or 40 years and doing all kinds of other things as well.

Bill: They’re so sensitized, it’s just amazing.

Rick: And it’s all kinds of people like yourself and some of these saints we’ve been mentioning. They like coming here.

Bill: It’s an absolutely wonderful place to come. I’ve been in and out of there since the early ’70s.

Rick: I used to teach in Chicago. I don’t know if I knew you then.

Bill: No.

Rick: Back around 1981 or something like that, I was in this group in downtown Chicago. Anyway, TM teaching.

Bill: Yeah, but was that on Michigan Avenue or was it at Lincoln Park?

Rick: Lincoln Park, yeah.

Bill: Was that the one that had the restaurant?

Rick: Yeah, it was an Italian restaurant right next door.

Bill: Yeah, it was a great place. I shouldn’t tell this story, but I represented the guys at the center when they had to vacate the previous location. And going to that location, they had some landlord issues there.

Rick: Do you ever feel like you’d rather be doing this full-time rather than having to be a real estate lawyer?

Bill: Do I ever feel that?

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: Quite frequently. I would say as I go on in life, it’s going to happen.

Rick: You’ll transition into it.

Bill: I’m doing a lot more of this work. Within the last couple of months, it’s really made some shifts and I intend to do a lot more of it. I could still handle both things right now pretty easily, but I do intend to do a lot more group energy work, which has been very successful. And I could also do maybe conference calls and things of that nature where we can do a group energy transmission, which would be, I think, a lot of fun plus very beneficial. I just love it. Any way I can do more of it, I’m going to explore.

Rick: Well, people will have a little section on the BatGap website, as we do with all the other guests, and we’ll have a link to your website and contact info and stuff like that.

Bill: That would be wonderful.

Rick: People can get in touch.

Bill: I would really look forward to that. That would be great. I really appreciate this. This is fabulous.

Rick: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. All right, so let’s conclude. This has been another episode, number 40 I think, of Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and I’ve been speaking with Bill Farber. And I’m not quite sure who our next guest is going to be, because we might be going on vacation, but everything is a little bit up in the air, so we’ll just surprise you with whoever it is. I’ve got a couple of possibilities. So thanks a lot and we’ll see you next time.

Bill: Thanks everybody.