Bill McDonald 2nd Interview Transcript: Love, Forgiveness, Intuition, and Gurus

Bill McDonald 2nd Interview

Summary

The discussion explores intuition, reality, karma, free will, and the limits of manifesting what we want. It also considers spiritual teachers, personal discernment, and how love can guide our treatment of others.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can I become more attentive to my intuition?
• Can beliefs influence what happens in my life?
• How do karma and personal limits affect manifestation?
• Do I need a spiritual teacher, and how can I choose one wisely?

Key takeaways

• Regular meditation may strengthen intuition, even when it brings no dramatic experiences.
• Beliefs can shape how we act and what we experience, but they do not erase our limits or circumstances.
• What seems true can change with perspective; avoid assuming your view is the only truth.
• Treat people with respect and love, while using discernment about spiritual teachers and groups.
• A teacher can help reveal our blind spots, but choosing one requires care.

Transcript

Yeah, and as long as we’re desiring things, we’re hung up in this material world. It’s only when we reach that level where we’re not desiring things—meaning things. Even enlightenment’s a thing. Even being joyful and peaceful, these are all things. But if you only desire to love God, and you see God in everything and in everyone, then to me, that’s the path. The path is being focused on the singularity of the one.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done about 530 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll find all the previous ones archived in three different ways.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website.

My guest today is Bill McDonald, who was on the show about a year ago. Last time we talked for almost three hours, and Bill told loads of stories about his experiences in Vietnam—not just Vietnam, but all these kind of far-out experiences he’s had through most of his life, in India, and things he’s undergone with surgery, and then the kind of mystical, magical events that took place around that. All these stories are in the previous interview. He’s also told them in other places, and he’s done over 800 interviews, I think.

🕊️ Past lives and spiritual development

This time, we’re not going to talk about those kinds of things. We want to get a little bit more philosophical and talk about some deeper principles of life: topics such as reincarnation, karma, free will, manifesting, spirituality, health, gurus, and all kinds of things—whatever else comes up, and whatever the listeners may happen to send in by way of questions.

You know, the theme of this show is conversations with spiritually awakening people, and sometimes people complain that I talk too much. Maybe sometimes I do, but this one is definitely going to be a conversation. So Bill and I will be going back and forth. Don’t get too upset if I talk.

Bill: Not at all.

Rick: Bill, oh, I should add that Bill and I have stayed in touch since his first interview. We’ve become good friends and had a number of Skype chats together. He was at the Science and Nonduality conference last year, and we hung out there a little bit. So we wanted to have him back for another interview, particularly since, as you may have heard in the first interview if you listened to it, he had a naughty palm reading in India which predicted that this particular year is potentially a dangerous one for him.

He just told me a few minutes ago that if he makes it to his next birthday, he could be around for a while, but otherwise this could be a challenging year. So we want to make sure to catch him again while he’s still on the planet.

Bill: It’s always good to wake up alive, right?

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Or to wake up and find out that even if you’re dead, you’re alive.

Bill: There you go. It’s all good. It’s all good.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: But it was good seeing you at the SAND conference, and actually I got to meet some people that have been on your show.

Rick: Oh, yeah, lots of them.

Bill: Kind of an elite alumni of souls. And so I wanted to come back on here because I felt last time I might have inspired a lot of people with my stories. That’s not a problem. But once you inspire somebody, what are you inspiring them to do? How do they connect the dots for their own life? What do they take away from that besides, “Well, that’s a great story,” and they feel good for an hour?

So I’m kind of changing my game plan when I’m doing interviews and things. I’m thinking, people are tuning in. Why? Because what’s in it for them? I mean, let’s get real. What’s in it for them? What gift can they get? What knowledge can you or I or other people on your show offer? What little pearls of wisdom can we drop to them? What have we learned that we can pass along?

So that’s kind of like my pathway now. It’s like, no, it’s time to give somebody something. Stop talking about the menu. Serve them a meal, right? Here’s how you eat it, right? So that’s kind of where we’re at.

Rick: Yeah. Also, we don’t want people to hear stories about, “Oh, I touched a helicopter and all of a sudden I realized what was going to happen to this helicopter,” or, “I had this intuition that I should leave work in the middle of the day,” and then I picked up this hitchhiker and it made a huge difference.

A lot of people don’t have experiences like that. It’s just not wired that way, you know? But it doesn’t mean that they’re not spiritually evolved and evolving and so on. It’s just that different people are wired differently, and you just happen to have all these kind of flashy experiences.

A freak of nature. You know what I tell people? I tell you who I admire. I admire those people that meditate every morning and every night, and they have no experiences. They’ve got no measuring stick to say, “Wow, I went into this, this happened, I’m getting intuitive,” or whatever, but they do it anyway. They do it anyway, every day, every evening, and to me that’s great faith.

Bill: A freak of nature. You know what I tell people? I tell you who I admire. I admire those people that meditate every morning and every night, and they have no experiences. They’ve got no measuring stick to say, “Wow, I went into this, this happened, I’m getting intuitive,” or whatever, but they do it anyway. They do it anyway, every day, every evening, and to me that’s great faith.

It’s easy to have faith. It’s easy to believe when you know. It’s like, “Yeah, I know this will happen.” That’s easy. That’s like people say, “Oh, you’re such a hero from Vietnam because I got decorated, all these medals and everything.” But if you know what’s going to happen, you’re not really a hero. You’ve been there before. It’s like a play, right? You walk through it and people are shooting, “Dad, jinx! They don’t get me, I’m okay.” But the guy that’s afraid—I mean, can you imagine? And I try to put myself as somebody else. Can you imagine waking up every day and not really knowing what’s going to happen? That happens to people. The normal people, I’m finding out, wake up and it’s like, “Wow, how could you be so upbeat?” I say, “Well, I know how it ends.” But for people, they don’t know that.

Rick: That’s an interesting thought. Because sometimes when somebody dies suddenly—sometimes it’s a friend of mine or sometimes it’s somebody I don’t even know, but you hear about them on the news—they just die. And you think, you know, that person got up in the morning, brushed his teeth, ate breakfast, watched the news, did all this normal stuff. He had no idea that he wasn’t even going to be on the planet by three o’clock in the afternoon. Isn’t that fascinating?

Premonitions and the Limits of Knowing the Future

Bill: I’ll tell you what brought this home. I’ll tell a story I had. I don’t think I’ve told the story except in my book. I was getting all these premonitions about airplanes crashing, people getting into accidents, people shooting people. I mean, all kinds of international and national stuff. It was coming to me.

And it was like, well, if I know all this stuff, what good does it do? If I know all this stuff’s going to happen and I have no ways or means or contact to help any of these people before it happens, is that my job, to sound the alarm? You know, like on an airplane crash, imagine calling up an airport: “Hey, you know, your airplane flight’s on today. Don’t let anybody on the airplane.” I’d have the FBI at my house.

Rick: Yeah, exactly.

Bill: They’d be taking me away, right? Especially if it crashed. So I was feeling really overwhelmed by this, thinking, “Why do I have knowledge about this if it’s not serving any purpose?” And I actually muttered this, and you’ve got to realize, when you say things sometimes, words and intentions have power. I go, “I wish I didn’t have this ability at all.”

I woke up the next morning and it was like I was blind and deaf and couldn’t feel anything. I went two weeks without knowing what’s going to happen in the next hour, day, nothing. Totally shut down. And it felt so terrible. And then I realized, my God, this is how everybody else is. They don’t know.

Because every decision I’ve made in my life is based on intuition. “Well, it feels right. Let’s do that.” “Well, no, the numbers—don’t forget the numbers, don’t forget the data. Here’s what we should do,” right? Always go with that. And if you take away that ability from somebody, that’s like taking away their sight.

So I went two weeks and I cried and I meditated and I prayed and I suffered. “Okay, all right, I take it back.” And it did come back. But it was like a huge lesson for me, because two things happened. Number one, I really appreciate the ability. Number two, I found out that almost every decision in my life, from what I eat to everything, is gauged on my feelings. It’s all intuition-based. I’m not a logical person at all.

And then a huge part of me became very empathetic. I’m going, “My God, I’m telling these people all the time, ‘I don’t worry about it. Come on, cheer up.'” And it’s like, no, the guy says, “No, I’m depressed, man. I don’t know what’s happening, all this stuff.” And now I get it. I get it. They don’t know.

And as I get older now, I have an expression: “It’s getting harder for me to remember tomorrow.” People look at you, “What?” But for some people, they have a hard enough time knowing what’s going to happen 10 seconds from now. It’s like they have no grasp of anything intuitive.

Rick: Yeah, I heard an interesting statistic recently, which was that on 9/11, the occupancy of the four planes that crashed was way below what it ordinarily is or was for those particular flights on those particular days of the week. And somehow, in a way that they weren’t even conscious of, intuitively it seems people decided not to book seats on those particular flights. Far fewer people than ordinarily would.

So I forget who I heard this from, but it was a discussion about this kind of thing: how we do have an intuition functioning that we may not even be aware is functioning, but it actually does guide us to some extent.

Bill: Oh, I’m a big believer that everybody has it. The question is this: Do you want to turn up the volume and listen to it? It’s our own skeptical mind. We choose not to see, we choose not to hear, we don’t believe. Our own belief system holds it out.

But, you know, sometimes people make some illogical decisions where they stop, they pause, and it just makes the difference, right? So a part of them is listening, and I really do believe that when you meditate, you clear your mind and you get into that space, you can improve and amplify these abilities. And that’s not why you meditate, of course, but it’s an aftereffect.

Rick: Yeah, a side benefit kind of thing. And also, would it be true to say that the more you pay attention to these things when they do arise, the clearer and stronger they get, and the more you ignore them, the more you dull them down?

Bill: Which is true with our children. Our children come in, and I think this is on a high level, they’ve got more of a concept of what’s going on because they see fairies and angels and all kinds of things, and they believe in everything.

And what we do is we just beat them up with reality—our reality. “There’s no such thing.” But we’re telling them, “Santa Claus is real, Easter Bunny’s real, Tooth Fairy’s real, but don’t believe in seeing angels. Come on!”

Rick: Right. “Six o’clock news is real.”

Bill: Yeah, geez.

Rick: Well, that’s interesting. Okay, so we’re talking about intuition here, and we’re going to get on to many other topics. Another interesting thing that we could discuss—well, here’s a thought. A lot of the topics we’re going to discuss, reincarnation, karma, free will, manifesting, and so on, some people believe these things and some people don’t. For me, it’s like I don’t have to be adamantly certain of them. They’re very viable hypotheses, which seem to have a lot of logic and evidence to them, but there’s also an intuitive sense about them. You just have a gut feeling that this is kind of the way the universe works. And you might wonder, “Well, is that just because I’ve read a lot of books and thought about it this way, and so it’s just a bias or an assumption that has gotten ingrained?

Or can one really gain knowledge about the universe through kind of an intuitive feeling, so that it’s not really a matter of one guy’s opinion being as good as the other? Some people are actually more in tune with the mechanics of things.”

Bill: Well, again, you have to throw in another factor here: time. Einstein comes up with his theory, right? The 1930s or whatever it was.

Rick: Even earlier, yeah.

Bill: There were guys, geniuses—Michelangelo and all these other greats, right? They didn’t have that same exact thought. They were still at another level, but they were smart people. And now we’re talking about things that string—strings, you know. This is evolving. So Einstein’s truth, 100 years from now, will be altered and changed, perhaps. As we grow—and I think the proper term would be “grow” instead of “evolve,” either way works—but as we move, truth moves. As a child, you had childish thoughts; you think certain things. As you get older, you think you know more. I’m at that stage now where, at 74, I’m looking and saying, “I don’t know nothing anymore.”

And the thing is this: if you told me the sky was purple and you were happy with that, I’m not going to beat you up. You don’t have to have my reality. It’s okay to think differently. It’s okay to believe differently. That’s the problem with this world, because we’ve got political parties that each think they’re right. We’ve got religions that all think they’re the chosen ones, all think they’re right. And whatever I believe, that’s got to be the truth. I said, “You know what? If you believe it and it’s true for you, great. If I believe this, great. But I don’t have any locked-in ‘this is ultimate truth’ anymore, other than love. If there’s love involved, then we’re close to the truth, right? There’s something there.”

But we’re trying to analyze the material world. Let’s just take the material world. All right? We’re trying to take a look at this material world, which I tell people is not real. Somebody asked me about it—I was on some talk show, and somebody said, “Well, you believe in reincarnation.” I said, “I believe in dreams. Reincarnation, there is no such thing as reincarnation. It’s a dream within a dream. So if we’re all one, we’re all God, and we’re all having this material world experience, which is his dream or her dream, then how can there be reincarnation? Because within this dream, we dreamt we were somebody in a previous lifetime or millions of lifetimes or whatever, but ultimately we’re all one.”

That’s why I always laugh when somebody says, “Well, in a previous lifetime, I was John the Baptist and I walked with Jesus.” And I go, “You know, in essence, that’s true. But we all were John the Baptist. We were all Jesus. We were everybody, because we’re only one. So therefore, in every existence, all one.”

Rick: Yeah, I think this gets us into the topic of multidimensionality. If we say it’s all a dream and there’s no reincarnation because it’s all a dream, what we’re basically saying is there’s no universe because it’s all a dream. But if we acknowledge the existence of a universe—and we’re implicitly acknowledging that now by having a conversation, wearing clothing, eating food, and living as if this is all real enough—then all kinds of possibilities are there within that. Call it a dream if you like, but there’s reincarnation or angels or whatever else may exist in this universe. They all exist, albeit in a relative sense. Ultimately, at the level of the vacuum state or the unified field, where creation has not yet even emerged at any given time, there’s nothing there, but the potentiality for all the emergence is there.

And once the emergence has taken place—and it continues to take place; all these dimensions exist simultaneously—well, let me give you an example. There’s a word in Vedanta called “mithya,” and it means “conditional reality.” They use the example of pots. Let’s say I have a room full of clay pots, and you could truthfully say that there are no pots in that room, it’s only clay. But it’s also true that there are pots, even though they’re nothing but clay. We recognize them as pots, we use them as pots, we put things in them or play them as drums or whatever. So there’s this sort of paradoxical, both-and kind of thing that we can do, and we can straddle these different dimensions simultaneously in our understanding and in our experience.

Bill: We can also say there are no pots, there is no clay; it’s atoms.

Rick: We could say that, yep.

Bill: So you’ve got all these different levels.

Rick: And we could say there are no atoms; it’s only up quarks, down quarks, and electrons.

Bill: Time is a factor. In a creative world, you have time, and therefore you have reincarnation, therefore you have tomorrow, you have yesterday, you have things. Without time, you can’t have any of that. So that’s the big thing about the material world: you think about time and space. Well, take away time, you’ve got nothing. And, of course, there is nothing—you can go with that theory too. I mean, what’s space? Space is something. There’s something in space, even though it is labeled as nothing.

Every time you go external, you’re separating yourself at another level. It’s being fed to you instead of self-realizing.

Ultimately, I come back to this: what you or I believe makes no difference. It doesn’t change whatever is.

Rick: Yes.

Bill: But also, what you and I believe does create a different reality at times as well.

Rick: For us, at least.

Belief, Negative Thoughts, and Manifestation

Bill: Yeah, for us. And what we believe is our truth. We create a lot of things that we believe. If you believe nobody loves you, or the boss is going to fire you—all these negative thoughts you can have—you believe them, they manifest. Just as if you think you’re invincible, you’re a great basketball player, and you believe you can beat anybody on the planet, you’re probably going to be pretty good, because if you believe that, you’re going to manifest that as well.

Rick: Yeah, but if you or I believed that and went up against LeBron James, we probably wouldn’t do so well. We’d probably have to adjust our belief after a few minutes.

Bill: His belief is stronger than ours.

Rick: His body is too.

Bill: Yeah, but no, that’s why this whole thing about, “Well, believe something and you can manifest it.” I’m trying to tell people, “No. I want to beat Michael Jordan in a basketball game, and it’s never going to happen. I don’t care what anybody ever says.” But just because you think you can do it—”Oh, these children, teach them they can be anything they want to be.” That’s not true. I know some children out there, they tie their shoe and they wipe their nose, and I’m happy for them. And then I’ve seen people who are geniuses. So there’s all these different packages of potentiality.

Now, ultimately, you can say it’s all for all one, there’s the potentiality, it’s the same for everybody. But in this particular shell, this lifetime, in this body, in these circumstances that we have created, we have also created limitations set by our karma. Therefore, my karma says I’m only five foot six or five foot seven, and I have an average IQ. There I am, right? And I can’t play the piano. So if you believe something, well, that’s good and well, but manifesting something is a whole different level. You have to have some basics. You have to have karma. I mean, they talk about manifesting all these beautiful things. You know what? If your karma is a poverty-stricken karma, and you’ve got these debts to pay, no matter how much you try to manifest, you’re going to have difficulties.

Rick: There’s an old Sanskrit saying: “First deserve, then desire.”

Bill: Yeah, and as long as we’re desiring things, we’re hung up in this material world. It’s only when we reach that level where we’re not desiring things—meaning things. Even enlightenment’s a thing. Even being joyful and peaceful, these are all things. But if you only desire to love God, and you see God in everything and in everyone, then to me, that’s the path. The path is being focused on the singularity of the one.

Then I get people coming to me and they go, “Well, should I follow this guru? Or should I follow this guru?” And I tell people, there’s only one guru. One. And it’s within all gurus and within ourselves, this one guru, God. So be very careful how you treat your guru. Treat every guru, every person you come across—treat everybody like God, not just your guru. Treat all with that respect. You don’t have to like everybody, but you do have to love everybody.

Rick: Yeah, and speaking of gurus, some gurus say that basically they see everyone as God or as the self, whether or not the people recognize that in themselves. The guru sees it, or some people can see it. And, you know, regarding—what was I going to say? I don’t know. We’ll continue.

Bill: Well, we were talking the other day about gurus and stuff, and my whole thing with gurus is this. Number one, do I think you need one? Yeah. I’ve seen the problems with people who try to forego having a guru and be their own self-guru. You’re delusional, because you really can’t see yourself in the mirror as somebody else could. So it’s always good to have a guru who can see those things and faults in you and help you come to a place. Hopefully you pick a wise guru, somebody who reflects your values, et cetera. That’s not the whole issue. But seeking an outer guru is a path. I see people get turned off by a bad guru here or a bad guru there, and then it’s like, “I don’t want no gurus.”

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: You know?

Rick: This is sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Bill: I’ve seen this with a friend who was Catholic, and she had a bad Catholic priest, and next thing you know, she was anti-Catholicism. I’m going, “Wait a second, you lived 60 years as a Catholic, and you run into a bad Catholic priest and now you’re against the whole religion?” You know, and I’ve seen the same thing with people leaving the Mormon Church, the Scientists, whatever group they’re with. And then the group that nurtured them, for better or worse, in sickness and health, whatever—the group they were with—all of a sudden they’re at war with, instead of just saying, “Well, you know, maybe I just grew a different way, but I respect what they taught me. I respect what they learned. I honor…” In other words, honor your old teachers. It doesn’t mean you can’t move on. It doesn’t mean you can’t change, but you don’t go out and bash the old teacher. It’s just not good.

Discerning Between Unhealthy and Wholesome Teachers

Rick: I think there are shades of gray with issues like this. For instance, there were some people who got out of Jonestown alive. I don’t think they necessarily have to feel like Jim Jones was a great guy or anything, or that that was a healthy environment. So there’s a spectrum from the really sick to the very wholesome, and all kinds of things in between.

Ultimately, sure, we can have a guru or not. I wouldn’t say it’s a universal prescription, at least not for everybody all the time, but we have to exercise and perhaps strengthen our discriminative abilities so that we don’t get suckered into something that’s really corrupt or corrosive.

Bill: Well, let’s talk about that, because here’s what I say. First off, when I say guru, I mean teachers, pastors. They don’t have to all be Hindus. They could be Buddhist. They could be a Catholic priest, but whoever is your religious or spiritual guide.

Rick: Spiritual teacher.

Bill: Spiritual teacher, which is a better word than guru. But using Jim Jones as an example, that’s like, yeah.

Rick: That’s an extreme example.

Bill: But he’s not alone, and there are some people out there who are very dangerous. There are dangerous groups to be with, and there’s a time and a place to use discrimination, judgment, and wisdom. So when I use the general term, “Don’t knock your old teachers,” I’m trying to take the broad section here in the middle. But on the fringes of that, there are some people out there like Jim Jones. My God, everybody wanted to be his buddy. President Jimmy Carter, all these politicians—all of them had their picture taken with him when he was in San Francisco and California. They all wanted to be with him because he was delivering the minority vote for them, you know? And so, people…

Rick: Which illustrates another point, which is that you can start out pretty good, and then things can go south. I mean, he literally went south, both figuratively and literally. The power, the adulation, and the attention can go to your head, and you can get more and more corrupt and more and more burned out, and things can just get more and more off the rails.

Bill: Well, what happens is—

Rick: And a lot of people follow along with it because it happens incrementally. It’s not like a night-and-day difference. They don’t see the slow degradation of the scene.

Bill: It’s like the frog in cold water.

Rick: Yeah, that analogy, yeah.

Bill: But the thing is this: here’s how you avoid that. Here’s what happens with Jim Jones, with the guy in Waco, Texas, with—

Rick: Branch Davidians.

Bill: Yeah, Branch Davidians, all these different guys out there doing stuff like that. People don’t follow the inner guru in that person, which is God. They start following that person’s personality. In other words, they worship the person. When you have a group of people worshiping the personality of whoever the leader or teacher is, instead of saying, “Just because somebody’s your leader and they’re wise doesn’t make them all-knowing,” or, “They’re 100% right, and they don’t have all the answers, and they’re not infallible.” As soon as you tell somebody they’re infallible, and they say some of the goofiest, dumbest stuff, it’s like Osho in Oregon. He went up there and had 96 Rolls-Royces driving around on a little ranch. That’s nuts! Who in that group was going to say, “Hey, guru, this is nuts! We don’t need a 97th Rolls-Royce, and we don’t need a whole barn full of weapons.

I mean, what’s going on here?” But nobody challenged him.

So it’s the followers who can corrupt the teacher. As soon as you start worshiping them, they can do no wrong, and there’s a danger there. But if you worship the God within that person, and realize they’re human beings, then God is always there and God’s always right. You follow God; God’s good.

Rick: Yeah, and you might have the clarity to leave if you feel like the reflection of God within that person is really getting cloudy and he’s not expressing that divine quality very clearly anymore. But the thing is, it’s insidious. Both teachers and students can very often get more and more muddled by degrees. The interesting thing about maya or ignorance is that the first thing it does is blind you to the fact that it’s blinding you, you know?

Bill: Yeah. Well, you know, I try not to judge anybody, and I mean that literally, because you read my book. You know the story about me going to India, when I judged these not-yogis as just dirty old drug addicts. Then I had this most wonderful experience. These guys left me after that trip to India saying, “How can I ever judge who’s spiritual and who’s not spiritual? What’s crazy and what’s not crazy?”

So I don’t like to get into that game, but I’m very supportive of people who outgrow the culture of a group and want to move on. That’s okay; move on. Be kind to everybody involved and move on. But ultimately, there’s that inner guru within us that we have to listen to, because we’re always looking for the external stuff coming into us when we should be developing the internal, because the source is there.

Rick: Yeah, I agree.

Bill: Every time you go external, you’re separating yourself at another level. It’s being fed to you instead of self-realizing.

Rick: I think there’s a difference between being judgmental and having good judgment.

Bill: That’s it.

Rick: Yeah. So give us an example. Could a person really be in tune with the inner guru and yet still benefit from association with an outer guru? Or does one somehow abdicate one’s inner-guru orientation if one gets involved with an outer guru? Can you do both?

Bill: Well, I think number one, you have to be true to yourself. In other words, if you have certain principles and things that are affirmative truths for you, don’t give them up. If something’s rubbing you wrong and you’ve got to go, “Well, maybe it makes you uncomfortable,” then you’ve got to start questioning yourself.

But having an external guru means having somebody who can look at you, hopefully, without any prejudice, without any layers of delusion because your ego is not getting in their way. I see great benefits from that. It’s like karate: a guy learns karate, and you go to the best karate teacher you can find, right? You learn from them. Look at the great ones, you know, Bruce Lee and all these guys—they all had a teacher. They never gave up a teacher.

Tiger Woods is at the top of his game, and he hires a teacher to teach him how to putt better and how to do his stuff better. And you’ve got to say, “Well, he’s better than that guy.” You can always learn something from somebody, and the great ones are the first people to go out and seek teachers, instructors, and help. So I think there’s a—yeah, I’m definitely about teachers.

Here’s where I sometimes draw a line with teachers: if a teacher believes that they’re always the teacher and never the student, there’s a problem. When you find a humble teacher who can learn from a child in the group, a homeless person, a CEO, or anybody else, and the teacher realizes that he teaches but other people also teach him, that’s the balance you’re looking for.

Here’s where I sometimes draw a line with teachers: if a teacher believes that they’re always the teacher and never the student, there’s a problem. When you find a humble teacher who can learn from a child in the group, a homeless person, a CEO, or anybody else, and the teacher realizes that he teaches but other people also teach him, that’s the balance you’re looking for.

Rick: I have a friend named Miranda McPherson who’s been on BatGap a couple of times, and she’s been a spiritual teacher for over 30 years. Just about every month, she sits with a therapist, goes to another spiritual teacher’s satsang, or goes on a retreat with some spiritual teacher. She constantly does that to get another pair of eyes on her situation, so it’s not just her own pulling herself up by her own bootstraps.

Bill: Well, it’s like—I won’t mention the name of the person or his clients, but there’s this well-known psychologist in Los Angeles, actually in the Hollywood area. He treats all these A-listers; that’s all his friends and clients and stuff. He calls me up periodically and lays it out, you know, how he’s feeling, how he’s thinking, and all that kind of stuff.

I go, “You’re a psychiatrist?” He says, “Yeah, but I look in the mirror, and I only see what’s reflected back in me that I’m expecting to see or want to see.” He says, “When I come to you, you don’t have too many filters. You just tell me.” And I go, “Well, okay, yeah.” Anyway, so he gives that to me.

Then I get four or five of these—and I mean world-famous, world-famous psychics—who do the same thing to me. They will call me up. What’s interesting about psychics is they can read you. They can read me. They can read this.

Rick: Can’t read themselves?

Bill: Not very well.

Rick: Yeah.

Well, I think number one, you have to be true to yourself. In other words, if you have certain principles and things that are affirmative truths for you, don’t give them up. If something’s rubbing you wrong and you’ve got to go, “Well, maybe it makes you uncomfortable,” then you’ve got to start questioning yourself.

Bill: Not very well at all. And when you get one to admit it, although they—and who do they have to go to? They can’t go to the public; they can’t lay it out because they’re supposed to know everything, so they have to call me on the sly, right? And so I honor that.

But nobody is above needing a teacher. Nobody is above needing a teacher. Even if the teacher is just books, interaction with other people, and getting feedback. But everybody needs a teacher. The level of the teacher you’re seeking makes all the difference. For example, when I was working in Folsom Prison as a volunteer chaplain, I had guys in there who were all 25 to life. I mean, bad, bad guys. No—not bad guys. They’ve done bad things. I was trying to remember that. They did bad things. Because when you get them individually, you go, “Jeez, what happened here?” Right? I mean, a part of them is still human.

Of course, you meet some guys and you go, “It’s all a con game.” I mean, you’ve got to have a little wisdom. But the teacher they’re looking for has to tell them, “Don’t kill your cellmate. Don’t use your shiv on the guard.” The basics, right? The basics. Here’s the Ten Commandments.

And then you meet somebody else down the road, and you have them on your show. I think everybody on your show, myself included, we’re not at the end of the road. We haven’t found the ultimate yet. We’re still in a body. We still have an ego. We still fight daily with temptations of the ego—power, money, all these things. But we’re all students. The people that you interview—and I’ve listened to a bunch of interviews—ultimately, most all of them will even admit it. They’re all students of somebody, something.

Rick: They won’t admit it, or they will admit it?

Bill: No, most of them do admit it. They do admit it.

Rick: Yes, of course.

Bill: Yeah, yeah. They admit it. It’s like, I’m a product of—I belong to Self-Realization Fellowship. I’m a product of all that I’ve learned as a child, growing up since the 1940s with that. I’m a product of several other gurus, and all these people that I’ve met, and some really neat, interesting, sacred moments in my life. But everything’s layered. You meet this guy, you get something. You meet this woman, you get something. And it’s all layered.

It’s the old expression, “When the student is ready, the teacher will come.” Because at various times in my life, somebody new will come in there, and I’ll pick up the person’s book or I’ll meet them or I’ll listen to their video. Meeting somebody in the flesh is always great, eyeball to eyeball. It’s very powerful. But with the advent of YouTube, you have the opportunity to meet some really fantastic people. Think about this: 30 years ago, the average person could never have heard any of these people expound on their life and what they’ve learned.

Now, you have a guest on your show, let’s say, and they go on for three hours, like I did, or whatever. But somebody will pick up on 10 minutes of what I said, and the rest of it kind of blurs out. But that 10-minute segment, they go, “Oh, okay, that stirs something. I needed to hear that. I want to hear that. I was looking for that answer.” So you could go through all your videos and look: everybody coming to watch that same video is coming away with a different experience. It’s not the same. Even though it’s the same message for everybody on the YouTube video, everybody comes away with a slightly different reception. They’re hearing what they needed to hear, and so their reality is such that they’re a student, the teacher came for them because they needed to hear that.

So, yeah, to answer your question, everybody has a teacher, everybody needs a teacher, and everybody is a teacher as well.

Life’s Difficulties as Lessons for Spiritual Growth

Rick: Yeah, and I would add that even if they’re not in a formal relationship with a teacher, you can’t escape the teacher that is life itself. There’s an intelligence in life and an orchestration of events in life that are intended, we could say, to further your evolution. So you’re going to experience stuff that is probably what you need to experience in order to learn the lessons you need to learn to continue to progress.

Bill: Well, what was interesting is somebody sent me a book to review. I don’t know if I have it here someplace, but it looks like a military book. It’s about being comfortable with the uncomfortable, and it’s written by a bunch of special forces, Green Berets, Rangers, these kinds of guys, and what they go through in their life. But the guy applies it to every day. In other words, all these lessons you learn—becoming uncomfortable and doing things that are hard to do—is where all the growth is. So if you want to be comfortable, that’s the most dangerous place to be. You’re not going to make any progress.

So the people who complain about all these things in their life, you know what? Out of discomfort comes great growth. I think even the Buddha himself talks about how you need all these things in your life to bring you pain and suffering, to help bring you to God. But in order to deal with the realities of life, we need to embrace them, good, bad, or indifferent.

Rick: Yeah. Susanna Marie, who’s also been on BatGap a couple of times, wrote a very nice essay. It came out in her email today, about various difficulties she’s been through in her life. As much as she didn’t really want to go through them as they were happening, in retrospect she realizes how profound they have been in molding her awakening into what it has become. I think that post is on her Facebook page if anybody wants to read it.

In any case, I think an underlying principle here—and not everybody believes this or feels this—is that, as you use the word “love” a lot, there is a sort of divine intelligence orchestrating the universe. It loves us in the sense that it wants us—and I say “it”; it’s probably more of an intelligence, not a thing—to evolve. It fosters the evolution of everyone and everything, and things don’t happen capriciously or arbitrarily or accidentally. If you can zoom out far enough and really see it from a God’s-eye perspective, I think you’d see that everything is orchestrated to further our growth and evolution. We can talk more about what evolution means, but anyway, that’s my attitude.

Bill: I’m on the same page with you, because my philosophy is, “It’s your karma. Deal with it. Embrace it.” When something happens to somebody, I go, “Hey, they don’t want to hear it at the time because there’s so much pain, right? They can’t see the end of this thing.” But I tell people, you know, it’s from that fire that you get that steel. I mean, it creates who you are.

You take a look at somebody. They always say that character is revealed not when people are facing normal times, but when they’re under stress and great difficulty. The real character comes out. That’s who you are. And I’m telling you that the stress and all that brings out good character. Of course, some people give up, and that’s where the problem is. But I firmly believe that whatever happens is supposed to happen. So, therefore, in my life, nothing ever goes wrong, because everything is supposed to happen. That’s good. Okay, I’ve got to cut this, do that. You know, I’ve got to change jobs, whatever it is. It’s all okay. You’ve got to look for the gift. What are you going to make of that?

Because, you know, you’ve got friends, and there are several people in the family—like four or five brothers and sisters—all raised in basically the same house. Of course, nothing is exactly the same because of your birth order and everything, but let’s say basically everything’s the same. And you’ll have them come out: one guy’s a millionaire, one guy’s in jail. I mean, it’s all over the place. They’re all over the place, same household, same basic stress. Things happen in that household, like, “Oh, it was terrible, they had poverty.” But one guy came out and became very successful. That motivated him to do great things. Somebody else is crippled and handicapped and has all these problems, and they come out saying, “To hell with it, I’m going to do it anyway.” In spite of that, they become stronger. So it’s all about not giving up.

It’s about seeing that everything has a purpose, to get back to your thing.

Rick: Yeah, some people say that we choose the life that we are born into. There’s a guy named Paul Schwartz or something—Schwartz—on BatGap who’s kind of into life between lives and the whole scene that we go through before we take another birth. He kind of emphasizes that we choose a lot of the really significant events that happen in life. An accident or a disease or winning the lottery or the person we marry, or anything significant—we’ve actually pretty much scripted that in because we know that particular thing is going to be conducive to our evolution.

And someone might say, “Well, geez, why would somebody be born with a retardation or cerebral palsy or some terrible thing?” Again, if the universe has an evolutionary agenda in the biggest of pictures, then there must be some kind of evolutionary significance to anything that happens. And if you think that that’s not the case, then I guess you have to concede or feel that the whole thing is just kind of random and accidental, and that God isn’t really there—that there is no sort of omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent intelligence. But if you look more closely, there it is. It’s actually functional in every little iota of creation right in front of your nose.

Bill: Even chaos has order.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. Perfect.

Bill: There’s an order to chaos. And no, we can’t judge karma because we don’t know all the facets that go into it. You see somebody who’s born—and let’s say they’re retarded, or they’ve got major issues, and they’re not going to lead a normal life. Why? What, are they that bad of a person? Do they have really terrible karma? Or did they choose to speed up the evolutionary process by taking that on to help burn a lot of smaller karma? “Just let’s burn all this stuff. Give me the worst crap. Let’s get it over with so in the next lifetime I can really jump.” Or there’s some kind of saint or sage coming into this world, and they’re burning it for us or someone else.

So you can’t judge that. Just like some of the great saints, you know, they go blind, they’re burned at the stake, and Jesus is nailed to a cross. Was Jesus able to—did Jesus deserve that? No, he did that for us. How about all these other people? Do they deserve it? So passing judgment on people when they have all these things happen in their life is a useless game, because you have no idea.

I’ve seen children with major physical defects bring about and manifest such love in that family. Everybody helping them, coming to their best game, and loving back and forth. I’ve seen some families just transformed by having this child that some would see as a burden, but that child played a role in making love in that family. So everybody serves a purpose.

I’ve seen children with major physical defects bring about and manifest such love in that family. Everybody helping them, coming to their best game, and loving back and forth. I’ve seen some families just transformed by having this child that some would see as a burden, but that child played a role in making love in that family. So everybody serves a purpose.

Rick: Yeah, there was this kid on the news last night in Australia who, I believe, the term is dwarfism—you know, he’s one of the little people. And he was getting bullied and picked on at school. A video came out of him crying on the school bus because the kids were bullying him, and it went viral. Now Hugh Jackman and all these famous people are chiming in, and people have sent in like $400,000 for him to go to Disneyland and get a college education. But he’s inspired this—he’s brought millions of people to tears and inspired compassion and love in them through his situation, you know?

Bill: Oh, that’s right! And when people like that come into the world, there’s an empathy—a national and international, worldly empathy—that helps all of us get something out of this. That’s a gift to all of us. When you start looking at a bigger level like that, you realize, yeah, there’s a rhyme and a reason. Otherwise, you wake up in the morning and think you’re a victim of everything happening, everything’s random, everything’s chaos. I just don’t live in that world. I live in a world where, even though it may appear to be chaotic or random, it’s not. I always look for the gift, I look for the purpose. It’s not like somebody’s just going to tell me what it is. I think it’s up to us sometimes to discover it, to create it, to manifest it. Okay, I lost my job, I lost my health—what’s going on here? How can I use that to help? How can I use that to better other people and myself, right?

That’s the difference between us and animals. Animals are instinctive; they graze, you pet them, whatever. They live, they die, end of story, maybe. Maybe, maybe. But when you take on a human soul, you’ve taken on the whole—you’re part of the whole cosmos. You’re part of it all. It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle. You’ve got one piece missing, you’re never going to finish the puzzle. It’s got all the pieces in there; they all have value. No one piece of the puzzle is worth more than any other piece on the table, right?

So, yeah, I’m sure there are people out there in this conversation who are going to say, “Oh, man, if you knew my troubles,” because I get people calling me all the time. “Well, Mr. Reverend Bill, if you knew the troubles I had, my boyfriend left me, and this has happened and that happened.” So I give them advice, tell them, you know, and they come right back again: “Well, you don’t understand. You really do.” In other words, they don’t want to be taken away from that; they don’t want to be shown anything. They just want to vent their problems because they’re comfortable being a victim, and they don’t own it.

Rick: You know the story of the Chinese farmer. I’m sure you’ve heard this story, but I’ll tell it for people. Somebody left the corral gate open, and his horse escaped. He only had one horse, and he depended on it for his subsistence. All the neighbors came to him and said, “Oh, this is terrible. Your horse escaped. What are you going to do?” And, you know, what was his response? Something like, “We’ll see.”

Then the next day, the horse came back leading a bunch of other horses—wild horses—and they walked right into the corral, and he shut the gate. All of a sudden, this guy is wealthy; he’s got all these horses. The neighbors came and said, “Oh, this is wonderful. You’ve got all these horses. Isn’t that great?” And he said, “We’ll see.”

Then his son was trying to train one of the horses, break it and ride it and everything, and he fell off and broke his leg. The neighbors said, “Oh, your son broke his leg. That’s terrible. Now who’s going to help you run the farm?” The Chinese man, the old farmer, said, “Oh, we’ll see.” And then, the next thing you know, there’s a war on, and the army comes through recruiting all the able young men to make them soldiers and take them off to war. But the son can’t go because he has a broken leg. The story could continue on and on.

Bill: Yeah, it’s like when you start labeling things and judging things, good or bad. I think I talked about this before, but I was dealing with somebody who was stage four—or whatever, I think stage four is it, right?—stage four cancer. The guy said, “Oh, tell me I got six months.” I said, “Well, first off, if you believe you got six months, you got six months. I mean, you might as well set it on your calendar, right? Because most people, whatever they’re told, they pretty much watch it. They pretty much make it to that time length.”

But I’m looking at the guy and I said, “Well, you haven’t talked to your son in 10 years. You’ve got three ex-wives you have no relationship with. You’ve got all this anger going. You’ve got a daughter you never visit. You’ve got all these people who used to work for you when you were the boss, and they think you’re terrible; you ruined their lives.” So I said, “You’ve got an opportunity to mend all those fences now. You’ve got an opportunity to develop a little love with your ex-wives, with your son, reach out to them.”

Then I saw the guy about five or six months later. He didn’t get any healthier, but he was happy. He tells me he had a relationship with his son. He didn’t tell any of these people he was dying; he just did it. He found out his son needed some money and some help. He helped his son out of debt, with no strings attached, no nothing. Didn’t ask for anything. Then he had a conversation going; he went and checked on his daughter, made friends, and apologized to his three wives. It was kind of like a 12-step program for him, like making amends and all that stuff. It’s exactly what he did.

None of these people knew, because he didn’t want sympathy. None of them knew when I went around—when it came time to do his funeral, I heard from all these people, and they didn’t know that he had that. That’s when I found out, “Oh, he didn’t tell these guys he was dying.” But when he left, everybody had something kind to say about him. It’s like, wow. So his gift was life-changing. Instead of just dying as a begrudged old guy with everybody hating him and mad at him, he left having some beautiful relationships. And it’s all about love.

Rick: That’s a nice story.

Bill: So you can’t judge it. Like a guy getting a divorce—how many people say, “Oh, it’s the end of the world”? Or their wife dies, or something happens, and it’s the end of the world. Then you come back three years later, and they’re remarried. They’re happy, they have a new family, everything’s going well. It’s like, okay. It wasn’t the end of everything. You moved on.

Those people who move on best are the people who don’t hold grudges, forgive, forget, make amends. I really do believe in that. That’s one thing that makes the 12-step program such a beautiful thing. I see these 12-step programs out there for everything. And the big thing is not just trusting that there’s a power greater than them, but it’s about helping others and making amends. You can’t just help others and not make any amends. You’ve got to clean up the karma as best you can. And so that’s kind of the nature of life.

Rick: Yeah. Hey, before we get too far away from our discussion about teachers, a nice question came in from a fellow named Paul in New Jersey. He said, “Is it necessary to be in the company of the teacher, or can one be connected at subtler levels or through intermediaries? Also, does the teacher-student relationship end with the death of one of the two?”

Bill: Great. That’s a great question. Paul’s his name?

Rick: Paul.

Bill: Paul, excellent question. If you belong to a group like Self-Realization Fellowship, where their guru—my guru—has been dead since the 1950s, the answer is that they don’t have to be alive. If you read their books, follow their lessons, and follow their teachings, that’s one way. There are people who belong to Anandamayi Ma’s group. She’s been dead for what, 40 years, 30 years, whatever. People follow her and receive great blessings, having her as a guru. Whether your guru is living or dead, you can still get what you need from that.

Now, in India, following a dead guru is okay, but they all kind of want to have a live guru too. They want somebody to look them in the eye and say, “Hey, talk to them.” So I see value in doing both. But you don’t have to be with your guru 24/7. If you have his book, if you have him in your heart when you meditate—and when you finish your meditations, you know, here’s something a lot of people don’t do because the guru doesn’t need anything: As a disciple, you should be praying for the wisdom and spiritual mental health of your guru, your teacher. You want them to be better. You want them to be doing good things.

As a disciple, your responsibility is to be a good disciple, but also to pray for your guru, because they’re human. They walk and talk just like you do. And even though they may be more evolved in many ways, nobody ever gets too many prayers.

I’ll tell you a story. I was with Yogaraj Gurunath, and it had been a long time since I’d been with him. I hadn’t gone to India for a couple of years. One day, after my meditation, I was lying in bed and feeling—you can actually love your teacher, right? You feel love in your heart for him because it’s a friendship. If it’s not a friendship, then you’ve lost something. He was my friend, my BFF.

I was lying there after meditation, missing him because I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. I woke up at about four o’clock in the morning, crying out to him. All of a sudden, it was like two strong, masculine arms wrapped around my back and lifted me into a sitting position in my bed. I was getting this hug. I mean, it was a physical hug; I felt it on my skin. It was a hug. I felt such love in my spinal cord. It was like my Kundalini was going crazy. It went on for about 10 minutes.

I knew it was him. But I hadn’t seen him or talked to him. There had been no letters, no correspondence, no phone calls. I was just off the radar, right? But I loved him, and that night I wanted to touch him, to have him touch me, just to be connected.

The next morning, I got up and wrote an email to a guy named Robert Mackey, and to Dan Kogan and a couple of other people from the group who know me. I said, “Well, you guys know me. I’m kind of crazy, and I have crazy stuff happen to me. Here’s what happened last night,” and so on. I told them the time and everything else.

Dr. Dan Kogan was in India at the time. He printed out the message, took it to the ashram, and read it. All the guys said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, tell Guru.” What they were thinking was that the guru was going to say, “Well, here’s one of my wacko, crazy disciples who thinks I’m there for him.” They were waiting for me to be laughed at, I guess.

So Gurunath was told about the letter, and he said, “Was that at four o’clock in the morning on whatever day it was?” Dan looked and said, “Yeah.” And Gurunath said, “I was there for him, and I’d be there for any of you if you had the same love and faith and trust in me that he does.” They all kind of just—well, it was like that. Then I got a message back: “Hey, Dan, the guru says that he was there.”

I don’t normally share stuff like that, because for them it was a private email, and I didn’t realize it was being shared. I certainly didn’t do it for the guru to find out. But the fact was that I felt the guru’s love more than I did when I was in his presence.

I was with Yogaraj, let’s say, and I spent several months at his ashram for many years, several years in a row. I’d stay two, three, four months. I never asked any questions. I’d sit at the ashram, and all these young people and other people would come, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and they all had a question. They couldn’t just sit with the guru without having a conversation.

I thought, “Wow, I wonder if he feels—what if I should be asking questions?” I felt bad about it because I never asked him any questions or anything. Then, all of a sudden, 30 or 40 people who were sitting in this room got up and left. I was outside on a bench, and it was just him and me. I thought, “Okay,” but I didn’t say anything. He was picking up on my thoughts, and he said, “Bill, there’s a reason I like to hang around you: You never ask any questions.” Then he got up and walked away. I didn’t throw that out, right? But that’s what my whole thought was. I was going, “Okay.”

I’ll tell you a story. I was with Yogaraj Gurunath, and it had been a long time since I’d been with him. I hadn’t gone to India for a couple of years. One day, after my meditation, I was lying in bed and feeling—you can actually love your teacher, right? You feel love in your heart for him because it’s a friendship. If it’s not a friendship, then you’ve lost something. He was my friend, my BFF.

I would take trips with him. We’d drive around India. I went to a wedding with him, and we left Pune and drove three or four hours cross-country. I sat in the back seat with him, but I never said a word, and he never said a word. Four or five hours, and it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was a quiet, comforting silence.

Rick: That’s nice. I can definitely learn a lesson from that, because if I were in that situation, I’d probably be peppering him with questions.

Bill: No, you do. As long as you’re asking questions, your heart is not listening. I get more from a quiet guru manifesting his love and energy just by his being. You can tell when you’re around somebody what kind of energy they have. I think part of that is also the disciple’s receptivity.

Rick: For sure.

Bill: There are people hanging around him who don’t see it. “What are you talking about? I don’t see that. I don’t feel that. He’s just a jerk.” I mean, they don’t see it. But in India, if you read the old books on the guru-disciple relationship, it really says how the devotee, how the disciple, sees his guru as a reflection upon him. If you see the guru as a crook, a sexist, a cheater, a liar, boring, ignorant—whatever level you see him, he will give you that.

That was like Yogananda. There was a guy who was going to come visit him, some rich guy who was going to make a donation or something. But before he went in, the guy said to one of the people, “I don’t know if I want to donate. I don’t know if I want to go in there. He’s so vain. He’s so vain, I bet he brushes his hair all day long.”

Rick: So he went in and Yogananda was brushing his hair?

Bill: And counting, all the way to 100, 200. The whole time he was there, Yogananda was brushing his hair and looking in the mirror.

Rick: That’s funny.

Bill: Looking in the mirror, right? Then the guy finally got it. The guy finally realized it. So there’s a saying in India that the only time you’ll see the face of God is when you see the inner guru as God inside your guru, and you see the face of God. Whether the outer guru, the body, that character, lives up to that or not—that’s on them. You are worshipping the God that’s in them. So it’s really important how you treat the guru.

Rick: Yeah. Now, let me just interject here, because we kind of covered this earlier, but I think there’s a certain responsibility on the part of a teacher. I mean, the responsibility is twofold: the student and the teacher. You just described the student’s responsibility, but I think the teacher has a responsibility not to be a hypocrite and to live up to what he purports to be. If the teacher is behaving like a scoundrel, then maybe he should seek another profession.

Bill: Absolutely. Then it’s time to leave.

Rick: Sayonara.

Bill: I mean, if there’s a real guru and you don’t believe in that guru anymore, you need some other level of whatever it is, you tell the guru, “I’m leaving.” A real guru will bless you and maybe even advise you to go see so-and-so or so-and-so if you’re looking for a certain type of guru. But a real guru won’t stop you. Go.

Rick: Because they don’t need you, yeah.

Bill: No, just go forth and seek out whoever’s comfortable for you. But, yeah, you’re talking about finite things here, because all these rules don’t apply to every single example. There’s stuff going on out there that we all know about or hear about. Whether it’s true or not, we don’t even know at times. It could just be rumors. My gosh, I don’t think there’s a guru out there who doesn’t have a rumor about him.

So now you have to ask, “Do I judge this?” There’s a lot involved in that. My thing is, just see God in all and you can’t go wrong. Don’t worship the character; don’t worship the individual ego. Worship the God within. It doesn’t matter what holy man you’re with; you will see the same God.

Rick: And you’ll see it in the beggar in the street.

Bill: Yeah, everybody. So I hope I answered Paul’s question about that.

Rick: I think so.

Bill: That’s a huge area. And this whole thing about how you have to be with your guru all the time—no, it’s not necessary. But being with them emotionally and spiritually is different. You can be with them and not be with them. I’ve seen people in the back of the crowd texting or with their minds elsewhere. They’re there, but they’re not there. So just because you’re with somebody doesn’t mean you’re with somebody. That’s true across the board.

Rick: The thing you just said actually segues into a question that Akshay from Pune, India, just sent in. He said, “How do you recognize the present moment? How do you be in sync with life?” You know, there’s the power of now and all that, living in the now and being in tune with the present moment. So Akshay’s asking, “How do you do that?”

Bill: Well, you have to actually live it. You can’t just fantasize about tomorrow or worry about tomorrow or put off everything you have to do until tomorrow. And you can’t live in the past, with regrets, things that have happened to you, being a victim, all that kind of stuff. So if you actually wake up and every time you take a breath, that’s your life, that’s the moment. The only thing that’s real in your life is the moment that you’re in right now, right now.

Now, we can go into parallel dimensions; you can go into the past, the future. It’s all happening at the same time, but ultimately everything is right now. So how do you learn to focus on that? I’m going to tell you: it’s like all these questions that somebody will ask—there are only two answers. Do more Kriya Yoga and meditation, and it’s your karma; deal with it.

So I listen to all these people at the ashram where they’re getting advice. It may come out sugar-coated a thousand ways, but basically it gets down to two things: It’s your karma; deal with it. And that could be sugar-coated a lot of ways. And do more meditation, right? The answer really is within. You can’t enjoy the moment until you really know stillness. You have to quiet not just your mind, but time. In other words, when you’re in a meditative state, time slows down and ultimately disappears here in Samadhi. Therefore, you are always in the true now, which is an enlightened state.

I hope that answered the question. That’s a tough question. I mean, it’s a good question, but it’s a really tough question. And you may ask 10 different people on your show that question, and you’ll get 10 different answers. But the thing is, meditate. Get to that meditative state where you close down time, and when you close time, you’re in that higher state of consciousness. That is the true now.

✨ Consciousness and the resting point of awareness

Rick: Yeah, I think we could say that meditation, in most forms, aspires to allow you to settle into a state of pure consciousness and settled awareness, or whatever you want to call it. Through regular practice over a period of time, that state becomes more and more permanent. It’s not just something you dip into during your meditation, but it sort of becomes a—

And then that is the now, that’s presence. It doesn’t mean you can’t think about the future. If you’re going to take a trip, you have to plan your itinerary and so on and so forth. It doesn’t mean you can’t reminisce about your mother or something like that, but whatever you do is always on the foundation, or the background, of a continuum of pure awareness.

Bill: Yeah, because the only place in time where you can do anything, take any action to take that trip or plan, is in the now. You can’t plan the trip in the now tomorrow; you’ve got to do it now, before you go on the trip, right? So it’s always in the now.

So, yeah, when we understand the basic concept of why we’re here—let’s go to the basic concept of why we’re here, because I think that’s the ultimate question. I know my grandson Gianni, one of his teachers is very philosophical and asked him to write an essay or something on which came first, the chicken or the egg. That turns out to be an evolved question, right? Because it’s like, “Well, who came first? Before Adam and Eve, how did you get this?” It’s all everything. Everything happened in the now. That doesn’t satisfy anybody when you say that, because philosophically it’s easy to say that. There’s no way, with the creative process of thinking with the brain in this consciousness, in this material world, that anybody can answer any of these questions, because you’re using a material mind to answer a question that’s beyond creation.

Rick: I’ll tell you something interesting. We were talking about time earlier, and we’re sort of talking about it now. Time is relative, actually. If you could travel at the speed of light—which you can’t, because you have mass—but a photon, which does travel at the speed of light and has no mass, actually experiences time and space completely collapsing.

From our perspective, stationary here, it seems to take 2 million years for light to reach us from the Andromeda galaxy. But from the perspective of the photons coming from the Andromeda galaxy, they’re here instantly, and there is no “here,” actually. I mean, there is no “there” that they’re getting to. Time and space become completely collapsed. I find that such an interesting little factoid. It’s based upon Einstein’s theories; it just shows that the universe is very different according to the perspective of the observer.

Bill: How about this? People say there’s nothing faster than light, and I’m saying, yes, there is: thought. You could pick up a thought that was a billion light-years out there if you’re a powerful enough being. It’s instantaneous, because there’s one cosmic consciousness. So thought is instantaneous.

In fact, fast—of course, you have people out there now, this next generation, everything’s fast, right? I had a guy doing a satsang in Southern California, and somebody had a sign that said, “Instantaneous is not fast enough.” He doesn’t want instantaneous satisfaction; he wants something faster than that, right? I thought that was so funny, but it was like, “No, really, everybody wants it right now.”

The only thing that’s right now, possibly right now, is enlightenment. And unfortunately, we’re in a stream world where it could take a billion trillion years to reach that. But in the ultimate reality, it’s now.

Rick: Yeah, it’s already there.

Bill: It’s already there.

Rick: There’s a thing called quantum entanglement, where two particles that are paired can become separated from one another, even across an entire galaxy. When one of them changes its polarity, the other instantly changes its polarity in sync with that, even if they’re a hundred million light-years apart. That drove Einstein crazy, that one. But it kind of shows that there’s some level of creation that interconnects everything and is beyond all limits of time and space and the speed of light and everything else.

Bill: Well, think about this. Remember years ago, there was a study done where they trained a certain type of monkey to do a certain thing, use a little stick as a tool or something? Then six months later, they went to this isolated island off Japan or something, and the monkeys had learned that themselves.

They picked it up through what Rupert Sheldrake would call the “morphogenetic field.”

Rick: Yeah, and there have been a lot of instances of that, where a species will learn something. And even with human beings, think about this: in the old beginning of time, you know, we’ve got cavemen and all that stuff, primitive cultures, native cultures. Every culture had drums, flutes of some kind, string instruments of some kind; they sang. Laughing has the same exact meaning in every single culture around the world. A laugh is happiness. Tears and crying, same exact thing. It’s interesting how a species could be all over the planet, separated by thousands of miles, yet the basics were the same for everybody.

Yeah, it is.

Bill: And, you know, so I’m always amazed at things, and also never amazed. Anyway, what else you got for me, young man?

Rick: Yeah, well, you and I talked the other day, and you said you didn’t necessarily want to make this a really long one, so I don’t want to overstay my welcome, and we can end it any time you like. But there are a couple more topics you said you might want to cover. We’ve covered most of them that we talked about, but there are a few more. I don’t know, we don’t have to cover all these, but free will, manifesting, health—do those things interest you to talk about?

Bill: Yeah, let’s talk about free will, because that was a subject I talked about at SAND. You know, is it free will? When you get a Nadi palm reading done, right, the star charts or something, right? Is that predestined? And there are some people who argue that, well, it says this is going to happen and this is going to happen and that’s going to happen, and that’s your destiny, that’s your fate.

And I’m saying no, since all time is now, right? That guy writing something 5,000 years ago saying that this is going to happen to Bill McDonald in 2000 or something, he’s just tuning into now now. That’s all. He just looked and saw where I was at now. He’s just writing where I got myself. And whatever choices I made in old nows, it all led to where I’m at now. All he had to do is tune into where I’m at. It’s not like he’s predestined that this is going to happen to you, this is going to happen to you. No, I predestined that.

Free Will, Past Choices, and Karma

So I made a whole, whole bunch of free choices: what I ate, what I thought, who I associated with, what jobs I took, what careers I had. Did I go to war? Did I stay home? Did I get married? Well, all these things, lifetime after lifetime, created level after level of karma. So these things happen. You go, “Where’s your free will in this? You got cancer and all this stuff.” I’m saying you created it all, even though you can’t see a relative connection. You can’t connect the dots because you can’t go past birth, right? You don’t have any reliability. And some people just assume that everything starts from birth. So that shuts them down.

So I’m telling you that everything that’s manifested in your life was through your own free will. Everything through your own free will. Now, once in a while, I guess you can have some wacko, crazy—some crazy guy goes down the street and shoots somebody, and it looks random. And I even wonder if that’s not someplace along the way manifested as some karmic thing. Because even though it appears to be random, innocent people got killed, like in Las Vegas. Who knows the backstory and all that? All those people together getting the same fate. What was going on there? We don’t know.

Rick: Yeah. Or if a plane crashes or something. How does that work?

Bill: All these people ended up with the same destiny, but free will is what separates us from God. In other words, that’s our ego, and our ego decides to do this, this, and this and that. It’s when we are able to meditate and surrender, consciously surrender our free will to the divine. That is the best use of our free will: to give it back.

But see, God, the divine, has everything it needs. Doesn’t need anything from us except—and this is my smallness saying this—love. So when you give your love to God, that’s the only gift you can give God. God can’t manufacture himself. He’ll never force you to love him. But since it’s him anyway, it’s like you get back to the same argument. It’s like, well, God loves God? Of course God loves God.

So anyway, free will is like with the Nadi palm reading. If you believe that’s not your choice, I think you’re mistaken, but I’ll let you believe that. Again, whatever you want.

Rick: You’re free to believe it, right?

Bill: You’re free to believe it. That’s your free will to believe that, right? It’s not going to change anything one way or the other. But the fact that, for example, some people say, “Well, I had my Nadi palm reading done in India, and all this stuff was supposed to happen and it didn’t happen.” Well, there are a lot of reasons for that. First off, it says, “Yeah, I was supposed to get lung cancer and all this kind of stuff.” I said, “Well, when you found out about that, what’s the first thing you did?” “Well, I gave up smoking.” Okay. Use your free will. You’ve already changed the course of some direction, right? And the thing said you were going to get a divorce. So what’s the goal?

I don’t normally share stuff like that, because for them it was a private email, and I didn’t realize it was being shared. I certainly didn’t do it for the guru to find out. But the fact was that I felt the guru’s love more than I did when I was in his presence.

Rick: There’s a saying in the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali: “Avert the danger which has not yet come.”

Bill: So when you have an awareness of a potential fate based on karmic or whatever, just the fact that you know—it’s like, get back to your atoms, you know, if the other atom is aware of the other present. In other words, as soon as you start looking at atoms, they’re not there. Things are changed just by you observing them. And I think it’s the same thing when you get a prediction. It may be correct when it was made, but the fact that you now know about it and think about it, you’ve also altered what the potential is.

Very few—mine has been pretty locked in and stoned, but it’s only for a short period of time. So the longer time period they give you, the more chance you have to alter and change it. Especially predictions about health: people go out and work out; they change their diet. I mean, nobody waits around for it to become true. “Oh, I’m supposed to diet this way. I’m going to exercise.” So subconsciously, you will change things, even though you don’t know you do, in your relationships. So, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, my sense on free will is that we have a certain amount of wiggle room at any given time, and we can either strengthen our conditioning and get ourselves more in a rut, or we can loosen our conditioning and attain greater and greater freedom of choice.

Ultimately, what would it be to have complete, utter free will? Well, I think it would be to get out of the way and be in tune with God’s will, the divine intelligence, divine will, because that would probably be in the ultimate best interest of everyone. And that’s ultimately what we would want if we could choose whatever we wanted.

Ultimately, what would it be to have complete, utter free will? Well, I think it would be to get out of the way and be in tune with God’s will, the divine intelligence, divine will, because that would probably be in the ultimate best interest of everyone. And that’s ultimately what we would want if we could choose whatever we wanted.

Bill: No, I think we’re on the same page on that. And again, people will disagree with us. Here’s the thing: there’s nothing that we’ve said that can’t be argued about. People can make a case and debate it.

Rick: Oh, yeah, and has been.

Bill: And it’s like, does that make them wrong? Does it make them right? Does it make us wrong or right? No, neither. It’s just stuff.

Rick: Interesting to ponder the stuff, you know? I’m not saying that you and I are absolutely right and anybody who disagrees is out to lunch, but we’re learning as we go.

Bill: Yeah, there are just too many things out there. People scare me off when they go, “This is the ultimate truth. This is the ultimate truth.” And I’m going, “No.” Because all the stuff I roll out, right? People come back with an argument and they say, “Well, like, you come back and say, ‘Well, sometimes a guru is wrong; you’ve got to leave.’” I’m going, “Yeah, there are other edges to this. There are other angles on that.” I’m just kind of giving an overview, but there are all kinds of angles on all this stuff. There are millions of ways to find God, and just because I chose this path to go up the mountain doesn’t mean there aren’t other trails. Look, aren’t they quicker, better, harder? You know, one will get you lost, but there are other trails.

Rick: It’s interesting. A lot of times you say something and it provides a perfect segue into a question that someone has just sent in, and what you just said segues into this one. This is from Manuel from Vienna, Austria. He said, “You’re a great storyteller. I have the feeling that part of me is resonating with your stories. Listening to you, I realize how strict your opinions about drugs are. Personally, I have had extremely positive experiences with plant medicine.” He means ayahuasca and stuff. “I was bathed in love, shown that everything is connected with everything and in perfect order, like the system is learning and nothing is lost. What do you think is a good way to cultivate and retain faith in the divine?” That’s a separate question.

Oh, that’s a separate question. Okay, so there’s one about plant medicine.

Bill: Okay, well, let’s talk about this, because he’s right. He’s right, because you find a lot of places where I talk against drugs. I’m not an advocate for going and doing them.

Now, on my trip to India—one of my trips to India, my first trip in 2004—I had an encounter with these Nathyukis, where these guys were sitting around this sacred fire at this temple, and they were just being crazy. I mean, just passing this big pipe around, looked like a Cheech and Chong movie, one of those big, fat rocks, just inhaling the stuff. They’d been doing that for three days, I was told. Three days they’d been outside this thing, no sleep, doing drugs.

I was with this guy, an old army friend, a lieutenant, who, when he got out of the army, lived in a commune for 17 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. All right, so we’re on different planets, right? And he’s always telling me, “Oh, no, Bill,” he says, “you know, mushrooms and plant-based stuff, you know, marijuana, all these other things.” He says, “No, I’ve had some great experiences. Even shamans and all these guys have this great experience.” I said, “Okay, great. But it’s always artificial. It’s always less than the other direction.” So I had all these great opinions.

So we go there, and we’re past this thing, and he’s smoking it, and I’m not smoking it because I’m dead set against this. Then, finally, after about an hour, I asked the guru for some advice. I said, “Look, I come all the way to India seeking the guru-on-a-mountaintop experience. What pearl of wisdom can you give me?”

Before he opened his mouth, the most screwed-up, messed-up guy that he had in the group—the guy had ashes all over him and his hair was wild, like he was from Jamaica or something, you know, and he was smoking his stuff—goes, “Guru, Guru,” and he could hardly speak English. He says, “Let me answer. Let me answer.” And I’m going, “Okay, God, have fun with me. I mean, this is just, yeah, this is ludicrous, but go ahead, right? Okay, go ahead.”

If you read my book or you’ve heard me tell the story before, you know that when I first got to India, on my first morning, I got into a spiritual discussion with some Sikhs, part of the Blood Society. These guys have certain things they believe in, and they gave me a list, you know, with getting a job, a career, health, physical fitness, all these things.

When they gave me the list, the first thing I said was, “Well, what I really like, what I really believe in, is not on your list.” They said, “What? No, those are all the things you need, these ten things.” I said, “Without love”—and I went on about love—“health doesn’t matter, wealth doesn’t matter, all this. You have to have love, right?” So I went on about love, and they all got mad at me and left. My friend was laughing at me about how I ticked off everybody. Within 24 hours of being in India, I’d already ticked off all these people.

Anyway, this is several weeks later, about a month later, and we’re on a mountain, 750 miles away from where that happened. This guy was told to tell me the secret of life. And what does he tell me? In perfect English. Perfect English.

Rick: This is the wild pot-smoking guy?

Bill: The wild-faced guy who couldn’t speak English, right? All of a sudden, he gives me back my exact words that I told those Indians three weeks before. He says, “Love is the most important thing,” and goes right down the list of all of it. And I’m going, not only did he give me back the same basic philosophy, he gave me back, word for word, exactly what I said 750 miles away three weeks before to different people.

Rick: Interesting.

Bill: And I’m going—and I’d already judged these guys as all just drug addicts. I’d already passed judgment on them. I mean, I was just—you could cut the air with my judgment. I was just already judging these guys, right? And I was just going, “What? What, what?”

So it totally destroyed my whole concept of being able to judge a spiritual person from a non-spiritual person at a glance. And then this whole thing about the drugs was like—anyway, I’m at this point now where I believe in meditation because the side effects are—there are no bad side effects.

You take these drugs, I don’t care what drug it is. I’ll go out on a limb and say this: I’ve seen guys who do marijuana every day. I’ve got friends who do ayahuasca three times a week.

Rick: Ayahuasca.

Bill: Ayahuasca three times a week. And they tell me they’re not addicted, but they’ve been doing this for 20 years. At what point do you say, “I don’t need this. I don’t need mushrooms. I don’t need that”?

So do I say that it doesn’t help some people? I mean, Timothy Leary and all those guys claimed that LSD helped them. I’m not going to argue with them, but I’m telling you what: in my world—and it’s my world, my prejudice, my judgment, I understand that—I look at those as dangerous helpers.

If you’re given it through the guidance of a teacher or a guru, perhaps that changes it; that alters it. But I would not recommend it for the most normal people out there, because you get hooked on this stuff. And now you’re going for the experience of getting high instead of going for the experience of God. And that’s the whole thing.

Now, where their minds are during this, I don’t know. Maybe they’re transcending this at some level. And how do they judge that while they’re doing it? How do you judge that this is good or bad? So I leave it alone. I don’t go down that road anymore.

For example, I was really against marijuana. My Vietnam veteran friends and the vets coming back with bad burns and some really horrible stuff, losing their legs—I mean, they were in a lot of pain. They were giving them all these drugs at the VA, which I felt were so terrible for them, changing their personalities and causing side effects on their organs and other things in their bodies.

I finally came to the comfort zone of, “You know what? You need medical marijuana. It’s better than this. Go do it. Don’t abuse it, but go do it.” And they’re able to get their lives together. So I’ve seen a change in me on that level.

So I’m at this place now where I don’t condemn anybody; I just caution people. Is there a better way to do it? Do you really need it? Is it addictive to you? Are you still seeking God within? They don’t have to answer those questions to me. They have to answer them to themselves. So that’s one of those questions that if you’d asked me 20 years ago, I would have said, “No.” Now I’m saying, use wisdom—great wisdom and caution.

Rick: Yeah, I doubt that there are many, if any, examples of people who’ve attained the sort of level of awareness that Ramana or Yogananda or Papaji or Nisargadatta, or many of these great sages, have attained through the use of external chemicals that they’ve imbibed. But, you know, obviously there’s great research taking place at Johns Hopkins and NYU about psilocybin helping people with depression, PTSD, alcoholism, and stuff. Some people have good experiences on ayahuasca and so on. I just don’t see it as a long-term solution for anybody. Who was it? Alan Watts said, “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” There’s only so much you can learn from these things. After that, it’s necessary to kind of discover it, I think, in a more natural way.

The fellow I interviewed last week, Roger Walsh, is going to give a webinar through the Association for Spiritual Integrity, which is www.spiritual-integrity.org, on the topic of psychedelics. He’s a therapist, and he’s going to do it with Mariana Kaplan, who’s also a therapist, and Craig Holliday is part of that, and he’s a therapist. All these people have told me that, as therapists, a lot of people have come to them with serious consequences from having taken this stuff, despite the fact that, again, many people have good experiences and it really is an eye-opener. But as you said, it’s a bit of a dangerous path. It’s not as natural and gentle and organic, we could say, as meditation can be, and it should be approached, if it’s approached at all, with very great respect, caution, and prudence.

My personal opinion is that if you do try it, or have tried it, as Manuel has, then think in terms of it not being something you’re going to do for the rest of your life. You know, you’ve gotten a certain glimpse. Now find a way of developing a state of consciousness that will be 24/7 for you and that won’t depend upon continuing to take things in order to have that state of consciousness.

Bill: Yeah, your intentions and where your consciousness is at are the real key factors. But I’ve seen a lot of the downside of it. I haven’t met anybody doing meditation where there’s a downside. But doing meditation to reach these high levels is work, versus doing a chemical or a drug or a plant—it’s instantaneous. So we’re back to that fix, you know? We’ve got to have it now.

Rick: Meditation is enjoyable, or very much can be. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed it. It hasn’t felt like work to me. It’s like, “Ah, I get to do this for half an hour or an hour or something. How nice.” Pleasant experience?

Bill: But there are people out there who will tell you it’s work.

Rick: Depends partially on how you do it.

Bill: They’re fighting the restless mind and all that.

Rick: Yeah, you shouldn’t fight it.

Bill: So they go this other route. It’s hard to tell somebody who’s never gotten high on meditation about the beauty of it, because they still have to fight that restless mind, and so they go for an alternate source. So I don’t know. When I come out, I’m coming out of this thing thinking I’m not judging anybody who does it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody who came to me. I see it as having pitfalls, and if you’re going to do it, do it with great caution and wisdom, and get some advice from somebody at a higher level, somebody you trust.

Rick: Yeah. I interviewed Michael Pollan some six months ago or whatever, and he wrote a book called How to Change Your Mind. He’s a well-known author, and he experimented with a number of different psychedelics. He also interviewed all the top researchers and others in the field at Johns Hopkins and so on, and traced the whole history of the thing.

But in any case, he approached it with such great caution. The researchers and others he spoke with, the people who were doing these studies, take such great care that the set and setting, the guidance, and the whole circumstances are just so ideal. There’s no kind of party-drug mentality involved, like, “Whoop-de-doo, we’re having fun.” It’s all done very judiciously and carefully. And we’re not just saying this to be prudes. People get damaged. People have all kinds of serious consequences sometimes, especially if the whole thing is undertaken with any degree of triviality or frivolousness.

Bill: Well, I’ll give you an example. There was a guy who was staying at a Self-Realization Fellowship. He was trying to become a monk, and he spent three years there and decided it wasn’t for him, so he left. I took him into my house up here in Northern California to help get his feet back on the ground. He said, “I want to come up there. I want to stay at your house for a while, because I haven’t seen my brother in a long time.” I said, “What’s wrong with your brother?” His brother lived in Galt, which is 10 miles down the road. He was at a group home. The guy did drugs—he did LSD one time.

Rick: His brother, or this monk guy?

Bill: The monk guy’s brother.

Rick: Okay.

Bill: His younger brother did drugs one time—LSD. He was a top graduate, valedictorian and all that, in his high school. He went to Europe and did LSD and never came out of it. I mean, the guy’s been in a loony bin or a group home since the 1960s. He’s still there. He never came out of it; it just unlocked something. That’s the worst case I’ve ever heard. I couldn’t believe that would happen from one or two times. But who knows who that one- or two-time person is going to be?

Rick: Yeah. I mean, there was a young woman on this show in the very early days, within the first month or two of my starting this project 10 years ago. She was really bright and apparently doing very well. She subsequently got into ayahuasca and did quite a bit of it, and she’s been seriously mentally ill ever since. Every time I see her parents in the grocery store, I say, “How’s she doing?” They say, “Well, you know, it’s difficult. She’s coming along.”

But again, we’re sounding a note of caution for people who are listening to this and might be tempted to try this stuff. I mean, your brain can produce all these chemicals. Your brain produces DMT, and it can produce it, and it’s there for a reason—the fact that it produces it. This stuff can be cultured naturally. Whatever experiences drugs can give you that are worth having—and again, it’s not about having specific experiences and seeing astral snakes or whatever you end up seeing—it’s about self-realization and knowing who ultimately you are, and having that be a permanent realization, a permanent feature and foundation of your life. That should be the priority, I should think, or the orientation.

Bill: No, it’s a serious subject, and I think we’ve both treated it that way. The question was outstanding, because that question is being asked by a lot of young people, and they see this as the way. I always come off as, “Well, you’re an old guy who proved you never did any drugs,” you know, whatever. And I was hardcore, because if somebody asked me directly, “I don’t do them, and you shouldn’t do them.”

No, you do. As long as you’re asking questions, your heart is not listening. I get more from a quiet guru manifesting his love and energy just by his being. You can tell when you’re around somebody what kind of energy they have. I think part of that is also the disciple’s receptivity.

Rick: Well, I did them. I’m not much younger than you are, and I was in the ’60s, and I did them for a year. By the end of that year, I had dropped out of high school and gotten arrested a couple of times, and my life was kind of a mess. Then I learned to meditate, and things turned around and got a lot better.

They taught me something. They taught me, ultimately, that the world is not the same for everybody. It really depends upon how you perceive it, and there can be radical differences in how different people perceive the very same world. So my whole orientation, my whole motivation, became to shift my perspective to the ultimate extent, if that were possible, and see the world as it ultimately is, and live in that state permanently. It didn’t take me too long to realize that drugs weren’t going to do that for me.

Bill: And again, you used your free will, and then you made judgments. Actually, the drugs were a teacher to you. Things can be a teacher, even in a negative way; they still teach you something. So anyway, this guy, Paul, his name?

Rick: The guy who asked the question, yeah. Oh, Manuel, I believe, in Austria.

Bill: Manuel. We probably gave you a roundabout answer.

Rick: More than you wanted to hear.

Bill: But the bottom line is, if you’re asking me if this is a safe course to follow, I would say it’s risky, and meditation—pure meditation—is not risky. I mean, the worst you’re going to do is fall asleep, relaxed. So you’ve got to look at the potentials, and I would never—not anymore—be black and white on issues, saying this is it or not for people. That’s up to your free will. But if you were asking me, so—

Rick: Which he was, yeah.

Bill: Which he was. So I’m telling you: I would be very, very cautious. Very cautious. It’s a slippery slope.

Rick: Yeah, and you don’t have to tell yourself you’re never, ever going to do it again, no matter what. But find yourself a good spiritual practice. Find something that really works for you, some form of meditation or something that isn’t a struggle, that you find productive of results. See if you can get into a regular routine with it, and see how you feel after a month, two months, three months.

What happened to me was, in a very short period of time, I felt like, “Wow, I’m feeling better all the time than drugs made me feel temporarily, so why would I ever want to take them again?” I lost the desire.

Bill: Well, you’re a better example than me because I didn’t go there, so you’ve got the comparison. I’m speaking of something I haven’t partaken in, which is not as valuable as somebody who’s been there. It’s like a 12-step program. I’ve officiated a couple of them. If there’s a reason around, you know, for a homeless camp or something, I’ll do one, but I have to tell the guys, “I’m not a 12-stepper. I’ve never done the drugs; I don’t do the alcohol.” They’re not going to get the same thing out of it as if they listened to one of their own.

That’s why 12-step works, because 12-steppers listen to somebody who had the problem and has now gotten rid of it. So you listen to somebody who’s been there and done that. I’m not having the same impact with my messages as you would with this message, because I’m just saying, “No, I saw how bad it looked from friends. I didn’t have to live it. I saw it in other people—something they don’t ever want to do.” So, okay, we beat it today.

Rick: So, yeah, I was just going to say we’ve probably exhausted that point. Okay, so is there anything else you’d like to say before we conclude?

Bill: Yeah, let’s just talk about it, because people always want to know about manifesting. Most people want to manifest a new car, a new job, a new wife, a new whatever it is, right? They always want to manifest things. And I tell people, try manifesting love and peace and compassion in your life.

If you spend all the time and energy focusing on manifesting love for the people around you—everybody’s got a dysfunctional family. I don’t care what family you’re from; everybody’s family is a little bit dysfunctional. And in-laws, outlaws, everybody that’s in there. So give your time and attention to visualizing love in your family. Pray for every member of your family, especially those people who are having problems, especially those people who don’t like you. Pray for them and expand your family. It’s not just your family; it’s the family of man.

So I’ll go back to what we originally talked about earlier: you manifest everything that’s in your life now. People say, “I don’t know how to manifest.” Yeah, you do.

Rick: You did it. This is it.

Bill: Yeah, you manifest unemployment, you manifest your divorce, you manifested your alcoholism. I mean, you’ve done it. You’ve manifested that, even if it’s negative. So the good thing about it is, change your thinking first and your actions. And in time—not back to time, but in time—you can change things.

Now, you can’t overcome karmic debt so easily. That’s like if you eat 16,000 calories a day for a year, you’re going to be 200 pounds overweight, and you can’t go on a diet for two days and think, “Well, I’ve been dieting for two days. How come I’m not back?” So you have to get rid of some of the fat. You have to get rid of some of the karma. And how do you get rid of that? You can live it, go through it all, or certain forms of meditation will help you burn it and lessen it. And God knows how long it would take to live it all—it would take forever. So that’s another reason why meditation is good. A good kundalini meditation will help with that.

So manifest love, become love, be love, give love, breathe love. I can’t think of any other reason why we’re here. If people have heard this conversation with us today, I hope they come away with that. I know we got off on some crazy subjects today, but if they come away with nothing else, it’s realizing they have manifested their own lives. Now, knowing that, manifest a loving life. It’s just as easy to manifest a loving life as it is one filled with troubles.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s like you say: life is kind of like an ocean liner. It has a certain mass and momentum, and you’re not going to turn it on a dime and necessarily miss the iceberg. But you start turning, and then the turn kind of picks up speed as you go. So you’re not going to become St. Francis of Assisi overnight or anything like that. But whichever direction we steer the ship of our life, it eventually ends up going in that direction.

Bill: But I think, you know, they have the expression down in Hollywood, “Fake it till you make it,” and it always reminds me of Yogananda’s story that he told in one of his lessons. A hunter wanted to hunt on the king’s property in India, right—the Maharajah’s or something. And he noticed that every time he went out there with his hunting outfit on and his weapons, all the animals would run from him. But he watched a monk go out there, and the monk would walk around, and all the animals would come up to him. He’d feed them and pet them. And the hunter thought, “Ah, if I could do that, I could pretend to be a monk out there, and all these animals would make friends with me; then I could hunt them.”

So he spent six months pretending to be a monk. He’d go out there and walk and feed the animals. Next thing you know, he realized that he had no thoughts of hunting them anymore.

Rick: That’s interesting.

Bill: He loved these creatures. It changed him.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: So I’m telling people, “Fake it till you make it,” meaning pretend to be a holy person. Do everything a holy person would do. A holy person wouldn’t harm this person or say that.

Rick: That’s a sweet story. It’s like that song from The King and I, “Whistle a Happy Tune.” Remember that one?

Bill: Yeah.

Rick: “I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune.”

Bill: I love it. Let me get my ukuleles.

Rick: Yeah, get your ukulele. All righty, well, it’s great talking to you, Bill.

Bill: I will see you at SAND.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: And you take care. Blessings and everything. And if anybody’s got any late questions, any more questions we didn’t answer on there, we got them all.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll forward them to you. Well, no others at the moment, but if any come in, I’ll forward them to you, and maybe you can email the person.

Bill: Yeah, I’ll do that. That’s a courtesy.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: But so is a friend, and a joyous thing, a friendly thing, and a joyous thing to spend time with you.

Rick: Yeah, me too.

Bill: I thank you for the opportunity, and I hope we covered some territory.

Rick: Oh, we did, yeah. And speaking of SAND, next week I’m going to interview Zaya and Maurizio Bonazza, who are the mother and father of SAND, the founders of it. I’ll be reading part of their book this week, and we’ll just be talking about SAND. We’ll talk about all kinds of topics, but anyway, I thought I’d mention that since that’s the next one coming up.

Bill: Well, you know, interestingly, that’s kind of an interesting karma that’s going on. It’s like you with this show: you’re introducing the greater consciousness of all of us out here watching this, by input from all these different people. They’re doing the same thing in Italy and in San Jose, and I guess elsewhere. And the more people doing things like that—I mean, not everything’s a great pro-wisdom; some people do stuff—but there’s a level for everybody. I’m sure that somebody’s getting something out of everybody who goes to those things, because everybody’s looking for something different. And you offer a variety of people on here. I mean, my gosh, you’ve got thoughts going in every different direction, especially the subjects we talked about today. You can get 10 different people and go in different directions, and that’s good.

Rick: Yep.

Bill: You’re covering all the sides. So you’re exposing the world to all this.

Rick: Yeah, and exposing myself to it too. And I find it very enriching to get input from so many different perspectives. It makes my perspective more multifaceted and broader, you know?

Bill: Well, what you do is, you’ve opened up the teachers to the student, and you’re getting inundated every week, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: What are you going to learn this week? You never know.

Rick: It’s a good gig. Great fun.

Bill: All right.

Rick: All right, thanks, Bill. Take care. I’ll see you in about six months out at SAND, and this interview will be up in a few days, and we’ll be in touch. We’ll probably have some more chats on the side over the coming months.

Bill: God bless you. [Music]