This is a rough draft generated by Otter.ai. Someone is proofreading it, but if you would like to proofread others, please contact me.
Rick Archer: 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 bat gap comm 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. And last time, we talked for almost three hours, built on loads of stories about his experiences in Vietnam, which were you know, not just Vietnam, but all these kind of far out experiences that he had, as he’s been having most of his life and India and, you know, things he has undergone with surgery, and then you know, the kind of mystical magical events that took place around that. And then all these stories are in the previous interview. Plus, he’s told them in other places, and he’s done over 800 interviews, I think. So this time, we’re not just going to we’re not going to talk about those kinds of things. We want to get a little bit more philosophical about it and talk about some deeper principles of life. Topics such as reincarnation and karma, freewill manifesting and spirituality, health and 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 the theme of this show is conversations with spiritually Awakening people. And sometimes people complain that I talk too much, and maybe sometimes I do. But um, this one’s definitely going to be a conversation. So I know, Bill, and I’ll be going back and forth. So don’t get too upset if I talk. Bill, oh, it’s I should add that Bill and I have stayed in touch since his first interview, we’ve become good friends, we’ve had a number of just, you know, Skype chats together. He was at the science and non duality conference last year hung out there a little bit. So, you know, we wanted to have him back for another interview. Particularly since as as you may have heard in the first interview, if you listen to it, he had a Nadi reading a Nadi palm reading in India, which predicted that this particular year is potentially dangerous one for him. So 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, it’s gonna be a challenging year. So we want to make sure to catch him again while he’s still on the planet.
Bill McDonald: So it was good to wake up alive, right?
Rick Archer: Yeah. Or to wake up and find out that even if you’re dead, you’re alive.
Bill McDonald: There you go. It’s all good. Yeah, but it was it was good seeing you at the same conference. And actually, I got to meet some people that have been on your show. Oh, yeah. A lot of them. Kind of elite alumni of souls. Uh huh. And so I want to come back on here because I felt last time i i might inspire a lot of people to my stories. That was that’s not a problem. But once you inspire somebody, what do you inspiring them to do? Right? 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’ve kind of changing my 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 can they come? What gift can they get? What knowledge do you or I or other people on your show? What little pearls of wisdom can we drop to them? What have we learned we can pass along? So that’s kind of like my, my pathway. Now. It’s like, no, it’s time to give somebody something. Stop talking about the menu. Yeah, serve a meal. Right. Here’s, here’s how you did, right. So that’s what kind of read
Rick Archer: Yeah, also, we don’t want people to hear stories about oh, I touched a helicopter and all sudden, I realized what was going to happen to this helicopter or, you know, I had this intuition that I should leave work in the middle of the day and then I picked up this hitchhiker it made a huge difference. I mean, because 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 we’re different people are wired differently. And you just happen to have all these kind of flashy experiences, a freak of nature.
Bill McDonald: I you know what I tell you, I tell you what I admire. I admire those people that meditate every morning and every night. And they have no experiences. They got no measuring stick to say, Wow, I went into this this happen. It 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. That’s, it’s easy to have faith. It’s easy to believe when you know, it’s like, yeah, I know, this will happen. Yeah, that’s, you know, that’s easy. That’s like people say, Oh, you’re such a hero from Vietnam, because I got decorated all these metals and everything. But if you know what’s going to happen, you’re not really a hero. You know, you’ve been there before. It’s like a play, right? You walk through and people are shooting at you and they don’t get me I’m okay. But the guy that’s afraid. I mean, can you imagine and I tried to put myself as somebody who can imagine waking up every day and not really know what’s going to happen. I mean, that happens to people, the normal people I’m finding out, they wake up and it’s like, wow, how could you be? How could you be so upbeat? I said, Well, I know how it ends. I know. But for people, they don’t know that.
Rick Archer: That’s an interesting thought. You know, 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 on the news, they just die. And you think you know that that person got up in the morning, brushed his teeth, ate breakfast, watch the news did those normal so he had no idea that he was not even going to be on the planet by three o’clock in the afternoon. Isn’t that fascinating?
Bill McDonald: I to it, what brought this home? I’ll tell I’ll tell story ahead. Eventually, I don’t think I’ve told the story except in my book. And I was getting all these premonitions about airplanes crashing. People get into accidents, people shooting people, I mean, all kinds of international national stuff. And it was coming to me. And I was like, Well, if I know all this stuff, what good is it do? If I know all this stuff’s gonna happen? And I have no ways or means or contact helping these people before it happens. And is that my job to sound the alarm? You know, like on an airplane crack, imagine calling up an airplane. Airport. Hey, you know, your your airplane flight zone. So today, don’t let anybody on the airplane is good. I’d have FBI at my house. Exactly. It’d be taken me away, right, especially if it crashed. So I was feeling really overwhelmed by this thinking. Why do I got knowledge about this if it’s not serving any purpose. And I actually muttered this, you got to realize when you say things, sometimes words and intentions have power. And 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, oh 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. what feels right, let’s do that. Well, no, the numbers. Don’t forget the numbers. Don’t forget the data. Here’s here’s what we should do. Right? Yeah, always go with that. And if you take away that ability from somebody that’s like, taking away their site. So So I went two weeks, I cried, I meditated. I prayed. I said, forget it. 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 you know, come on, cheer up, you know, 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. Yeah, I get it. They don’t know. So and as I get older now, I have an expression. It’s getting harder for me to remember tomorrow. Because people look at your work. But it’s for some people, they have a hard time knowing what’s going to happen. 10 seconds from now. It’s like they have no grasp of of anything intuitive.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I heard an interesting statistic recently, which was that on 911, the the the occupancy of the for planes that crashed was way below what it ordinarily is, or was for those particular flights on those particular days of the week. And they’re just somehow, in a way that they weren’t even conscious of intuitively, it seems people decided not to book seats on those particular flights, you know, 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 McDonald: 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? Yeah. 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 things where they stop or they pause, and it just makes the difference. Right? Yeah. So a part of them is listening, though. And I really do believe that, you know, when you meditate, when you meditate, you clear your mind and you get into that space. You can improve upon and amplify these abilities. And that’s not why you meditate, of course. But is that an after effect?
Rick Archer: Yeah, side benefit kind of thing? Yeah. And also, would you 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 dole them down,
Bill McDonald: which is true with our children, our children come in, and I think this is on a high level, that they got more concept of what’s going on, because, you know, 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. Yeah, there’s no such thing. But but we’re, we’re telling them, but Santa Claus is real. Use your body’s real tooth fairies, real? Don’t believe it. See an Angels?
Rick Archer: Six O’Clock News, Israel. Huh? Well, that’s interesting. Okay, so we’re talking about intuition here. And then we’re going to get on to many other topics. Another interesting thing that we could discuss, well, here’s the thought, I mean, a lot of the topics we’re going to discuss reincarnation, karma freewill, you know, manifesting and so on. You know, some people believe these things, some people don’t. For me, it’s like, I don’t have to be adamantly certain of them. They’re, 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 know, you just have a gut feeling that this is kind of the way the universe works. And you know, you want you want 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 we really know, you know, can we really gain knowledge about the universe through kind of an intuitive feeling? And so that it’s not really a matter of one guy’s opinion is as good as the other some people are actually more in tune with the mechanics of things.
Bill McDonald: Well, again, but you have to throw in you have to turn another factor here. Time. Einstein comes up with his theory, right? The 1930s or whatever it was
Rick Archer: even earlier. Yeah. It was
Bill McDonald: 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’re smart people. And then now we’re talking about things that string you know, string and string theory. This is evolving. Yeah, so So Einsteins truth 100 years from now, that will be altered change perhaps. So as we grow and I think the proper term would be grow instead of Evolve either way it works but as we we move truth moves. So as a child, you thoughts had childless thoughts you think certain things as you get older you think you know more? I’m at that stage now we’re in 74. I’m looking and saying, I don’t know nothing anymore. And the thing is this. If you told me that the sky was purple, and you were happy with that, I’m not going to be Chuck. You don’t have to have my reality. It’s okay to think different. It’s okay to believe different. That’s the problem with this world because we got political parties, each thing to write. We got religions at all. All things are the chosen ones all think the right and whatever I believe that’s got to be the truth. I said of you know what, if you believe it is true for you, great. 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? It’s there’s something there. But we’re trying to analyze the material world, let’s just take the material world, alright, but I take a look at this material world, which I tell people. It’s not real. I mean, somebody somebody asked me about, 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 if you’re, it’s a dream within a dream. So for all, one for all God, and we’re all having this material world experience. Which is his dream or her dream, then how could it be reincarnation? It’s within this dream, we dreamt we were somebody in a previous lifetime, or millions of lifetimes for 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, and I go, you know, in the essence, that’s true. But we all were John the Baptist, we were all cheeses. We were all everybody because we’re only one. So therefore, but ever existence all one?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think this gets us into the topic of kind of multi multi dimensionality. You know, if we say it’s all a dream, and there’s not 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 actually we are implicitly acknowledging that now by actually having a conversation and wearing clothing, and eating food, and living as if as if this is all real enough, then all kinds of possibilities are there within that, you know, call it a dream, if you like, but there’s this, you know, reincarnation or angels or whatever else may exist in this universe, they all exist out, be it in a relative sense. Ultimately, at the level of, you know, the vacuum state or the unified field, you know, 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, I mean, all these dimensions exist simultaneously. Then, well, let me give you an example. There’s there’s a word in Vedanta called mithya myth, ya, and it means conditional reality. And they use the example of pots. So let’s say I have a room full of clay pots. And you can 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 this is sort of malt kind of paradoxical both and kind of thing that we can we can do. And you can straddle these different dimensions simultaneously in our understanding, and in our experience.
Bill McDonald: We can also say, there is no pots, there is no clay, it’s atoms, we can say that, yeah, it’s so you got all these different levels. And we can say there’s no atoms, it’s only of course down quarks and electrons. 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, it’s about time and space will take away the time you got nothing. And of course, there is nothing. You go that theory to I mean, what space space is something there’s something in space, even though it is labeled as nothing. So there ultimately, I come back to this what you are, I believe, makes no difference. It doesn’t change whatever is yes. Now, but also what you and I believe does create a different reality in times as well. For us, at least, yeah, for us, and what we believe is our truth. And we create a lot of things that we believe if you believe nobody loves you, or you know the boss is going to fire you and all these negative thoughts you could have you believe them. They manifest just as If you think you’re invincible? Well, you know, you’re, you’re a great basketball player and you believe you can beat anybody in the plant, you’re probably gonna be pretty good. Because if you believe that you’re going to manifest that as well.
Rick Archer: Yeah, but if you are, I believe that and went up against LeBron James, we probably wouldn’t do so well, we probably have to adjust our belief after a few minutes.
Bill McDonald: His belief is stronger than
Rick Archer: his body is, too.
Bill McDonald: But no, that’s why this whole thing about well believe something and you can manifest it. And I’m trying to tell people No, I want to, I want I want to beat Mike, Michael Jordan in a basketball game, and it’s never gonna happen. I don’t care what anybody ever says. But just because you think you could do what you tell all these children, teach them, they could be anything they want to be, you know, that’s not true. I know, some children out there that they tie their shoe. You don’t they wipe their nose, I’m happy for him, you know. And then I seen people that are geniuses. So it’s, there’s all these different packages of potentiality. Now, ultimately, you could say it’s all one there’s potentialities is it for same for everybody, but in this particular shell, this lifetime, in this body, in these circumstances that we have created. We have created also limitations set by our karma. Therefore, my karma says I’m only five foot six or five foot seven, you know, and I got an IQ. That’s average. There I am, right. And I can’t play the piano. So if you believe something, oh, that’s good. And well, but manifesting something. It’s a whole different level. But you have to have some basics. You have to have karma. And that they talk about manifesting all these beautiful, you know, what, if your car was is a poverty stricken karma, and you got these debts to pay, no matter how much you try to manifest, you could have difficulties.
Rick Archer: There’s a saying an old Sanskrit saying first deserve than desire.
Bill McDonald: Yeah, as long as we’re desiring things, we’re hung up in this material world. And it’s only when we reach that level where we’re not desiring things, meaning things, even enlightenment’s of thing. Even being joyful, and peaceful. These are all things, if you already desire to love God, and you see God and everything, everything, and everyone. Then, to me, that’s the path. The path is being focused on the singularity of the one and get you to like, but I get people coming to me and they go, Well, should I follow this guru or I should follow this guru or, I tell people, there’s only one guru. One is within all gurus, and within ourselves. This one guru, God. And so be very careful how you treat your guru. Treat every guru every person, you come and treat everybody like God, not just your guru. But treat all with that respect. You don’t have to, like everybody, but you do have to love everybody.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And some speaking guru, some gurus say that, you know, basically they see everyone as God or as the self you know, whether or not the people recognize that in themselves the you know, the girl sees it or can some people can see it. And you know, regarding I was gonna say, I don’t know, we’ll continue
Bill McDonald: well, we were talking the other day about gurus and stuff and in my whole thing with with gurus are this number one. Do I think you need one? Yeah, I seem to problems with people that try to forego no guru be their own self guru. You’re delusional, because you really can’t see yourself in the mirror. As as somebody else could. So it’s always good to have a guru that can see those things and faults in you and help you come to a place hopefully, you pick a wise guru, you pick somebody that reflects your values, etc. That’s another whole issue. But seeking a guru, an outer Guru is a path and and I 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. Yeah.
Rick Archer: This is sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater, man.
Bill McDonald: I seen this with a friend that was Catholic. And she had a bad Catholic priests next, you know, she was anti Catholicism. I’m going wait a second you live 60 years as a Catholic and you run into a bad Catholic priest. Now you’re, you’re against the whole religion. You know, and I see the same thing with people leaving the Mormon Church, the science, whatever group the width. And then the group that nurtured them, for better for worse statistic health, whatever the group that they were with, all of a sudden they’re at war with, instead of just saying, Well, you know, maybe I just grew different way. But I respect what they taught me. I suspect what they learned, I honor. In other words, honor your old teachers. And doesn’t mean you can’t move on. I mean, you can’t change. But you don’t. You don’t go out and bash the old teacher. Yeah, it’s just not good.
Rick Archer: I think there are shades of grey with issues like this, for instance, that there was a people who got out of Jonestown alive. I don’t necessarily, 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 they’re, they’re kind of there’s a spectrum from the really sick to the very wholesome, and all kinds of things in between. But, you know, I think ultimately, we have to, you know, 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, you know, that’s really corrupt or
Bill McDonald: corrosive. Well, let’s talk about that. Because here’s, here’s what I say. First off, when I say Guru, I mean, teachers, pastors don’t have to be all Hindus, they can be Buddhist, they could be, it could be a Catholic priest, but whatever, whoever is your religious, spiritual guide, spiritual teacher, spiritual teacher, which is a better word than guru. But he by using Jim Jones’s example, that’s like, there’s extreme example of what that but he’s not alone. And there’s some people out there that are very dangerous, there’s 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, you’re in the middle. But but it on the fringes of that. There’s some people out there like Jim Jones, my gut, everybody wanted to be as buddy, you know, President Jimmy Carter, all these politicians, you know, all of them went 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 formula. And so, which illustrates
Rick Archer: another point, which is that, you know, you can start out pretty good. And then you can then things can go south. I mean, he literally went south, both figuratively and literally, the power the adulation, the attention can go to your head, and you can get more and more corrupt and more and more burned out. And, you know, things can just get
Bill McDonald: off the rails. But what happens is,
Rick Archer: a lot of people fall along with it, because it happens incrementally. It’s not like a night and day difference. It’s like they don’t see the sort of slow degradation of the themes.
Bill McDonald: It’s like the frog in cold water. Yeah, that that analogy. Yeah. So but the thing is, this, here’s, here’s how you avoid that. Here’s, here’s what happens. With Jim Jones, with the guy in Texas, Waco, Texas, with Branch Davidians Yeah, ranch vineyards, all these different grunt guys out there doing stuff like that. People don’t follow the inner guru in that person, which is God, they start following the personality of that other words, they worship the person. And when you stop when you have a group of people worshipping the personality of whoever the leader is the teacher, instead of saying, don’t just because somebody is your leader, and they’re wise doesn’t make them all knowing. Or always 100% Right. And they don’t have all the answer’s no, not infallible. Soon as you tell somebody they’re infallible and they say some of the goofiest dumbest stuff. Like Osho in Oregon, the web dirty had 96 Rolls Royces driving around on a little ranch. That’s nuts. That group was gonna say, hey, Guru, this is nuts. We don’t need a 97th You know, 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 worshipping them, that they could do no wrong. There’s a danger there. But if you worship the God within that person, you know and realize they’re human beings. Then God is always there and Godzilla is right. You follow God? God’s good. But
Rick Archer: you 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 you know, expressing that divine quality very clearly anymore. But the thing is, it’s insidious people, both teachers and students can very often sort of, kind of get more and more muddled by by degrees. And 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 McDonald: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s, it’s, I try not to judge anybody. And I mean that literally, because you read my book, you know, the story by me going to India, and I judge these not Yogi’s as just dirty old drug addicts, you know, and I had this most wonderful experiences, gaggle that 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, that game. But I’m very supportive of people that outgrow the culture of a group. And they want to move on. That’s okay. Move on. Be kind to everybody involved, move on. But ultimately, there’s that inner guru within us that we have to listen to. Because we’re always looking for the next external stuff coming into us, when we should be developing the internal, because the source is there. Yeah. Anytime you go, every time you go external, you’re separating yourself, at another level, it’s being fed to you instead of self realizing.
Rick Archer: Right? I think there’s a difference between being judgmental, and having judge good judgment. That’s it. Yeah. And, and you know, this, so give us an example. Like, for instance, could a person really be in tune with the inner guru and, 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 McDonald: 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 got to go, Well, maybe it makes you uncomfortable, then you got to start questioning yourself. But having an external Guru is somebody that can look at you, hopefully, without any prejudice, without any layers of delusion, because your egos not getting in their way. I see great benefits from this, like, for example, karate, and learns karate, you go to the best karate teacher you can find right? Yet learn from them, even though look at the great ones. You know, Bruce Lee, all these guys, they all had, they all had a teacher, and never gave up teacher. And Tiger Woods playing golf. And here’s the top of his game. And he hires a teacher to teach him how to, to putt better and how to do stuff better than the guy. And you got to say, well, he’s better than that guy. How could you can always learn from somebody, something. And the great ones are the first people to go out and seek teachers, instructors help. And so I think there’s a Yeah, I’m definitely about teachers. Here, here’s here’s where I kind of draw a line sometimes 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, or homeless person, or CEO or anybody else, and the teacher realize it’s, he teaches but also other people teach him. That’s the balance you’re looking for. So
Rick Archer: I have a friend, I have a friend named Miranda McPherson who has been on bat gap a couple of times, and she’s been a spiritual teacher for over 30 years. And just about every month, she, you know, sits with a therapist or goes to another spiritual teachers satsang or goes on a retreat with some spiritual teacher, she constantly does that to kind of get another pair of eyes on her situation, you know, so it’s not just her own, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps?
Bill McDonald: Well, it’s like, I won’t mention the name of the person or his or his or his clients. But there’s this well known psychologist in Los Angeles actually in Hollywood area, and he treats all these A listers. That’s all his friends and clients and stuff and he calls me up periodically. And it’ll it lays it out, you know, like, how he’s feeling how he’s thinking and all that was nice. And I go your psychiatrist says yeah, but I look at a mirror only see what reflected back at me that I have I’m expecting to see or want to see. Just when I come to you. You don’t have too many filters. You just tell me. And I go, Well, okay. Yeah. And he says, like, anyway, so he, so it gives that to me. And then I get I get four or five of these. And I mean, the world famous world famous psychics do the same thing to me. They will call me up. What’s interesting about psychics, they can read you they can read me they can read this.
Rick Archer: Can’t read themselves?
Bill McDonald: Not very well. Yeah. Not very well at all. And when you get one to omit it, although they and who do they got to go to? They can’t go to the public, they can’t lay it out. Because I mean, they’re supposed to know everything. So they got to call me on the sly, right? And so, I honor I honor that, but it’s nobody is above, needing a teacher. Nobody is above the teacher. If the teacher is just books or, or interaction with other people and getting feedback, but everybody needs a teacher. But it’s the level of the teacher that you’re seeking makes all the difference in how they for example, when I’m when I was working in Folsom prison as a voluntary Chaplain I got guys in there I, the guys I had rolled 25 to life. I mean, bad bad case. But they know that bad guys, they’ve done bad things that was trying to remember that they did bad things. Because when you get them individually, you go, Jesus, what happened here, right? I mean, there’s a part of that is still human. Force, you meet some guys, you go, it’s all a con game. I mean, you gotta be you gotta live with some. But the teacher they’re looking for us to tell them don’t kill your soulmate. You know, you don’t just shove on the on the undercard, you know, the basics, right? The basics, you know, there’s 10 commandments. And then you meet somebody else down the road. That’s, and you have on your show. And I think everybody on this show, myself included. We’re not at the end of the road. We haven’t found the, the, 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, right. And, but we’re all students, and 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 or somebody something
Rick Archer: they won’t admit or they will admit it. Well, most of them do omit it do it? Yes, of course,
Bill McDonald: yeah, they’ve met it. It’s like I’m a product of a lot of self realization fellowships, 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, of several other gurus and all these people that I’ve met and some, 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. And it’s, you know, the old expression, when the students 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 meet them or listen to their video or in the flesh, which is always great meeting somebody, eyeball to eyeball, but it’s very powerful. But with the advent of YouTube, you have the opportunity to meet some really fantastic people that think about this. 30 years ago, the average person could have never heard any of these people a sound on their life and what they’ve learned right now, yeah, so 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, and the rest of it kind of blurs out. But that 10 minute segment, they go, Oh, don’t get that stirred 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 you look on there. Everybody coming to watch that same video is coming away with a different experience. It’s not the same even though it’s it’s random. It’s on the YouTube video. It’s the same message for everybody. But everybody comes away with a slightly different, you know, reception factor. Oh, yeah. They’re hearing what they needed to hear. And so their reality is such that their student, the teacher came for them because they needed to hear that. And so, yeah, so I answer your question. Yeah, everybody. As a teacher, everybody needs a teacher. And everybody is a teacher as well.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And I would add that even if they’re not in a formal relationship with a teacher that you can’t escape the teacher that is life itself. And there’s an intelligence in life and an orchestration of events in life that are intended, we could say, to further your evolution. So I think you’re going to experience stuff. That will that is probably what you need to experience in order to learn what lessons you need to learn in order to continue to progress.
Bill McDonald: What was interesting was I was somebody sent me a book to review. I have it here someplace, but the book was, it looks like it’s a military book. It’s about being comfortable with the uncomfortable. And it’s written by a bunch of special forces, Green Berets, these kind of rangers kind of guy and, and what they go through in their life. But the guy applies, 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 at. So if you want to be comfortable, that’s the most dangerous place to be, you’re not going to make any progress. So if people complain about all these things in their life, you know what, out of discomfort comes great growth. And I think even the Buddha himself talks about, you know, you need all these things in your life to help bring your pain and suffering, they’ll bring you to God. But in order to deal with the realities of life, we, we need to embrace them good, bad or indifferent. Yeah, just
Rick Archer: Susanna Murray, who has also been on bat gap, a couple of times wrote a very nice essay came send it out to her and her email about the just various difficulties she’s been through in her life. And, you know, 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 order to mold her her awakening to be what it has become. I think that post is on her Facebook page, if anybody wants to read it. In any case, I think I mean, an underlying principle here, I think is and not everybody believes this or feels this or is that there’s, you use the word love a lot that there is a sort of a divine intelligence orchestrating the universe, and it loves us in the sense that it wants us say, yeah, it’s probably more. It’s more.
Bill McDonald: Yeah, what is it? It’s
Rick Archer: it’s more of a an intelligence. It’s not a thing. But it fosters the evolution of any everyone and everything. And things don’t happen capriciously, or arbitrarily or accidentally, there’s a if you can zoom out far enough and really see what see it from a God’s eye perspective. I think it said that everything is orchestrated to further our growth and evolution, we can talk more about what evolution means. But anyway, that’s my
Bill McDonald: I’m on the same page with you. Because I was 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. And but I tell people, you know, it’s from that, from that fire. That’s where you get that steel. I mean, it’s it, it creates who you are, yeah, you take a look at somebody, they always say that the character is revealed. Not when people are facing normal times, but when they’re under stress and in great, 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 the good character. And of course, some people give up and that’s what the problem is that but I firmly believe that whatever happens supposed to happen, so therefore, in my life, nothing ever goes wrong, because everything is supposed to happen. That’s good. Okay, I got it. Okay, cut this do that, you know, I gotta change jobs, whatever it is. It’s all okay. You got to look for the gift. What are you going to make of that? Because, you know, you know, you got people, you got friends. And there’s several people in the family like four or five brothers sisters. And I’ll raise the same house, basically. Because there’s nothing exactly the same because your birth order anything but let’s say basically, everything’s the same, and you don’t have them come out. One guy’s a millionaire, one guy’s in jail. I mean, it’s like all over the place, guys. They’re all over the place. Same household, same basic stress. Things happen in that household, like, Oh, those terrible dad poverty. But one guy came out came very successful, that motivated him to do great things. Yeah. Right. Somebody else is crippled, and you know, and they’re handicapped, and then all these problems, and they come out Nick, and he’s To hell with it. I’m going to do it anyway, in spite of that, it becomes stronger. So it’s, it’s all about not giving up. It’s about seeing everything, having purpose to get back
Rick Archer: to your thing. Yeah. Some people say that we choose the life that we are born into. There’s a guy named Paul shorts or some something shorts on bat gap that kind of is into life between lives and the whole, you know, scene that we go through before we take another birth. And, you know, he kind of emphasizes that, you know, we choose a lot of any really significant event that happens in life that you know, an accident or disease or winning the lottery or the person we marry or anything significant. We’ve actually pretty much scripted that in, you know, because we know that that particular thing is going to be conducive to our evolution. And someone, someone might say, Well, geez, why would somebody be born with, you know, retardation or cerebral palsy or some terrible thing? Again, if the universe has an evolutionary agenda in the biggest pictures, then then there must be some kind of evolutionary significance to anything that happens. And if you think that that is not the case, then I guess you have to concede or have to feel that there is something the whole thing is just kind of random and accidental and God’s not really, 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 McDonald: Even chaos as order,
Rick Archer: exactly perfect, there’s
Bill McDonald: 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 that’s they’re born, and let’s say they’re retarded, or let’s, let’s say they they’ve got, you know, major issues, you know, they’re not going to lead a normal life. Why would they that bad of a person to have really terrible carbon, or, today choose to speed up the revolutionary process, by taking it on, by taking that on? To help burn a lot of smaller carbon just plus burn all this stuff, give me give me a worst crappy, let’s get it over with the next type that make it really jump. Or there’s some kind of saint or sage coming into this world, and their burden for us, or someone else. So you can’t judge that. It’s like some of the great saints, you know, they go blind, they burned at the stake. Jesus is nailed to a cross and he’s able to Jesus deserved that. No, he did that for us. How about all these other people? Do they desert? So you don’t know. So passing judgments on people want to have all these things happen in their life is that’s a useless game, because you have no idea. And I’ve seen children that have major physical defects and things bring about in manifest such love and that family, everybody helping them and come into their best game and, and loving back and forth. I’ve seen some families just transformed by having this child that somebody is a burden. But that child played a role in, in making love in that family. So it serves everybody serves a purpose.
Rick Archer: Yeah, there was this kid on the news last night in Australia, who I believe the term is dwarfism, you know, is kind of one of the little people and he was getting bullied and picked on at school and a video came out of him crying on the school bus because the kids are bullying him. And it went viral. And now Hugh Jackman and all these famous people are kind of chiming in, and they’ve sent people have sent in like $400,000, for his, for him to go to Disneyland and get a college education. And, you know, but he’s inspired this is brought like millions of people to tears and inspired compassion and loving them through his situation, you know?
Bill McDonald: Oh, that’s right. Yeah. 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. It’s, it’s a gift to all of us. And so when you start looking at a bigger level like that, you realize, yeah, there’s a rhyme and there’s a reason otherwise, you wake up in the morning and think you’re a victim of everything happened. Everything’s random. Everything’s chaos. It’s just, I don’t live in that world. I live in a world where, even though it may appear to be chaotic, it may appear to be random. It’s not. And I was looking for the gift. I look for the purpose. And 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 myself, right. And that’s the difference between us and animals. Animals, they’re instinctive they graze Do you pet them? Whatever they live they die into story. Maybe? Well, 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. In it’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle. You got one piece missing. You never got to finish the puzzle. It’s got all the pieces in there, they all got value. No one piece of the puzzle is worth more than any other piece on the table. Right? So yeah, I’m, I’m sure there’s people out there this conversation, they’re gonna say, oh, man, if you knew my troubles, cuz I get people call me all the time. Well, this Reverend Bill, if you knew the troubles I had, and you know, it, my boyfriend left me and, and this has happened. And that happened. And so I give advice, tell my team to, and they come right back again. Well, you don’t understand if you really do 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 you’re comfortable being a victim. And they don’t own it.
Rick Archer: They know the story of the Chinese farmer, you’ve, I’m sure you’ve heard the story, but I’ll tell it for people. So somebody left the corral gate open and his horse escaped. He only had one horse and it was he depended on it for his subsistence. And all the neighbors came to him and said, Oh, this is terrible. Your horse escaped. What are you going to do? He said, you know, what was this your thought something like we’ll see. And so but then the next day, the horse came back, leaving a bunch of other horses, wild horses, and they walked right in the corral. And they shut the gate, all of a sudden this guy is is you know, wealthy. He’s got all these horses and the neighbors came said, Oh, this is one of the got all these horses, you know, isn’t that great? And he said, we’ll see. And then so his son is trying to train one of the horses, you know, to break it and ride it and everything. And he falls off and breaks his leg and the neighbor’s got, oh, he son broke his leg. That’s terrible. Now you’re who’s going to help you run the farm? The the, the Chinese man said, the old farmer said, Well, we’ll see. And then next thing, you know, there’s a war on and the army comes through, and it’s recruiting all the able young men, you know, to make them be soldiers and take them off to war, but the son can’t go because he has a broken leg. And so the story could continue on and on. But yeah,
Bill McDonald: it’s it’s like, when you start labeling things and judging things, good or bad. Like, I, I think I talked about this before, but I was dealing with somebody that was stage four, or stage whatever. I think stage four is in right stage four cancer. And the guy was telling me I got six months, I said, well, first off, if you believe you got six months, you got six months. I mean, have you guys set it on your calendar, right? Because most people for whatever they’re told, they pretty much watch it. They pretty much make it to that timeline. But I’m looking at the guy that says what you haven’t talked to your son in 10 years. You got three ex wives, you got no relationship with you got all this anger going. You got a daughter that you never visit. You got all these people used to work for you when you were the boss and they think you’re terrible, you ruin their lives on so I said, You got an opportunity to mend all those fences now. Nice. You got an opportunity to develop a little love with your ex wives with your son reach out to him. So then I saw the guy, but five, six months later, and he didn’t get any healthier. But he was happy. He tells me because he had a relationship with a son. You didn’t tell these people he was dying. He just did it. He found out his son needed some money and some help help the son out of debt. And with no strings attached. No nothing, didn’t ask for anything. Then they had a conversation go anyway, checked out his daughter made friends apologize. So three was kinda like a 12 step program for like, make amends and all that stuff. It’s exactly what he did. And none of these people knew, because he didn’t want sympathy. Now, I don’t know. When I went around with come time to do his funeral. I hear from all these people. They didn’t know that he had that. That’s when I found out Oh, he didn’t tell these guys. He was dying. Right? Yeah. But when he left, everybody had something kind to say about him. It’s like, Wow, it’s so his gift was life changing. Instead of him just dying this big red, a little guy with everybody hate them and mad at him. He left having some beautiful relationships and it’s all about love.
Rick Archer: It’s a nice story. Yeah. So it’s
Bill McDonald: you can’t you can’t judge it. Like guy get a divorce. If people don’t get a divorce at all. It’s the end of the world, you know? Or the wife dies or something happens. You don’t it’s the end of the world. You know, and you come back. Three years later, they’re remarried. They’re happy Got your family, everything’s going well, it’s like, okay. It didn’t, it wasn’t the end of everything he moved on. And those people that move on best are the people that don’t hold grudges, forgive, forget, make amends. I really do believe in that. That’s one thing about, it makes the 12 step program. So it’s a beautiful thing. And because I see these 12 Step programs out there for everything. And the big thing is not just trusting, there’s a power greater an end, but it’s about helping others. And it’s about making amends. You can’t help others don’t make any amends. And you got to clean up the karma as best you can. And so, that’s kind of the nature of life. Yeah. Hey,
Rick Archer: before we get too far away from our discussion about teachers, nice question came in from a fella 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 and with the death of one of the two
Bill McDonald: breaks? That’s a great question. Yeah. Paul, and Paul. Paul, excellent question. And if you belong to a group like self realization fellowship, where their guru, my guru has been dead since 1950, something the answer that is, they don’t have to be alive. If you read their books, you follow their lessons, you follow their teachings. And there’s people that belong to a Nanda Moy, Ma, her group that’s out there, she’s been dead for, what, 40 years, 30 years, whatever. There’s people that follow her to get great blessings, having her as a guru. So a living guru, a dead guru, you can still get what you need from that. Now, in India, following a dead Guru is okay. But they all all kind of want to have a life guru to, it wants somebody to look him in the eye and say, Hey, talk to them. So I see value in doing both. But you don’t have to be 24/7 with your guru. If you have his book, if you have 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 the spiritual, mental health of your guru, your teacher. You want them to be better. You want them to be doing good things. And so as a disciple, your responsibility is to be a good disciple. But also to pray for them. Because they’re humans. They walk, they talk, just like you do. And even though they may be more evolved in many ways, nobody ever gets too many prayers. And I’ll tell you a story. All right. So I was with oz with a Yogiraj gone off. And it been a long time since I’ve been with him. And so it was sighting good India for a couple years. And, and I was feeling one day, I was just, I was laying in bed after a meditation, I was feeling really, you know, you can actually love you, you can love your teacher, right? I mean, you’re at that level, you feel love in your heart for him. Because it’s a friendship. If it’s not a friendship, then you’ve lost something. So here’s my friend, he’s my BFF. And I’m laying them out for meditation. And I’m missing them because I haven’t seen him in a couple years, you know, and I wake up about four o’clock in the morning. And I’m crying out too. And all of a sudden, it’s like, too, masculine, strong arms, wrapped around my back in lift me into a sitting position. I’m in my bed, and I’m getting this hug. I mean, it’s a physical hug my skin, I feel it, it’s a hug. And I’m feeling such love in my spinal cord. It’s just like, Kundalini is going crazy. And it goes on for like 10 minutes. And I knew it was him. But I hadn’t seen him had talked to him. What no letters, no correspondence, no phone calls, just off the radar, right, but I loved him. And I wanted to touch have touched me that night, you know, just to be connected. So I got up the next morning and I wrote a email to a guy named Robert Mackey and Dan Cogan and a couple other people from the group that know me. And I said, Well, you guys don’t be you know, I’m kind of crazy and have crazy stuff happen to me and here’s what happened last night and blah, blah, blah. You know, I told him the time and everything else. So Dan Cogan, Dr. Dan Cogan, was in India at the time and he printed out the message and he took it to the ashram And he read it all the guys. Well, yeah, tell goon off because what they were thinking was the guru was gonna say, well, here’s one of my wacko crazy disciples that thinks I’m there for him, you know. So they were waiting waiting for me to be I guess laughed at. And so, Chernoff was told about the letter Nico’s was at four o’clock in the morning on whatever day it was. And Dan Locke says, yeah, he says, 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. And they all kind of just was like, is it so I got a message back that he did, the guru says that this, he was there. So it’s, I don’t normally share stuff like that. But for them, it was a private email. And I didn’t realize it was being shared. And I certainly didn’t do it for the guru to find out. But there was a fact that I felt the Guru’s love more than I did when I was in his presence. Because when I’m with a guru, with the old garage, let’s say, I’ve spent several months at his ashram for many years, several years in a row, I’d stayed 234 months. And I never asked any questions. I’d sit there at the ashram and all these all these young people, all these people come and they all had a question. They could just sit with the guru without any conversation. And so going, Wow, I wonder if he fails? What if? What if I should be asking questions? I was feeling bad about a guy ever asking me questions. Not right. So all of a sudden, 30 or 40, people got up and left and we’re sitting in this room, or I was outside on a bench. It was just me and him left. And I go, Okay, I didn’t say anything. But he’s picking up on my thoughts. He goes, Bill. He says, There’s a reason I like to hang around you because you never asked any questions. And he gets up and walks away. It’s I didn’t dance. I didn’t throw that out. Right. That’s all thought was right. Yeah. And I’m going, okay. So I would take trips with with him, we drive around India. And I went to a wedding with him. And we left poor town, we drove three, four hours cross country, and I sat in the backseat with and I never said a word. Key. Now never said a word. For five hours, and it was not uncomfortable. It was a quiet, avoiding silence.
Rick Archer: 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. And as long as I am, you know,
Bill McDonald: questions. Your heart is not listening. And I get more from a quiet guru. manifesting his love and energy just by as being a you could tell when you’re around somebody. The energy they have. And I think part of that is also the disciples receptivity. For sure. Because there’s people hanging around and they don’t see it. What are you talking about? I don’t see that. I don’t feel that he’s just a jerk. And I don’t mean this. They don’t see it. But you don’t and if you read the old books on guru disciple relationship, it really says that how the devil T or the disciple sees his guru is a reflection upon him. If you see the guru was a crook, a sexist you know, a cheater a liar, boring, ignorant, whatever you whatever level you see him. He will give you that. That was like Yogananda like, like there’s the guy was there to come visit them, some rich guy was gonna come visit him and everything and make a donation to him or something. But the guy goes, I don’t know if I want to donate said something to people before he went in there. I don’t know if I want to go in there. As I said, he’s so vain. He’s so vain, but he brushes his hair all day long.
Rick Archer: So he went in Yogananda was brushing his hair.
Bill McDonald: And counting all the way to 100 205 users brushing his hair. That’s funny. Right? And then the guy finally got it, you know, like I finally realized it. So it’s like, if you see, 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 now whether the outside Guru, the body, that character, right, if that person’s ego lives up to that or not, that’s, that’s on them. You were worshipping the God that’s in them. So it’s really important to you treat the guru. So yeah, now
Rick Archer: let me just interject here because we kind of covered this earlier. But I think there’s a certain responsibility to teach. I mean, the responsibility is twofold. The student and the teacher, and you just described the students responsibility, but I think the teacher has a responsibility to not be a hypocrite and to live up to what he purports to be. And you know, if the teacher is, is behaving like a scoundrel, then maybe he should seek another profession.
Bill McDonald: Absolutely, then it’s time to
Rick Archer: leave. Sayonara.
Bill McDonald: I mean, there’s real guru, you don’t want to be if you don’t believe in the guru anymore, you don’t want you feel you need some other level of whatever it is. You tell the guru on leaving him a real guru will bless you, and maybe even advise you to go see so and so or so. And so if you look for a certain type of Guru, but a real Google won’t stop you
Rick Archer: go, cuz they don’t need to hear.
Bill McDonald: I just know, go forth that, you know, seek whatever is comfortable for you. But yeah, you’re talking about finite things here. Because it’s like, all these rules don’t apply to every single example. Because there’s 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. I mean, my gosh, I don’t think there’s a guru out there doesn’t have a rumor bottom. So it’s like, so now you get do I judge this, do I? So there’s a lot involved in that. So my thing is, just see God and all and you can’t go wrong and don’t worship the character don’t worship the individual Eagle. worship the God within. So it doesn’t matter. What holy man you with, you will see the same God.
Rick Archer: And you’ll see an answer. You’ll say you’ll see it in the beggar in the street. And yeah, yeah, everybody.
Bill McDonald: So I hope I answered Paul’s question about that. Because I think that’s, that’s a huge area. And this whole thing about yet beauty guru all time is no, not necessary. But you’ve been with them emotionally and spiritually is different. As you could be with them and not be with them. I shouldn’t be there in the background, they’re texting or their mind is elsewhere. You know, they’re there, but they’re not there. Right. So just because you’re with somebody doesn’t mean you’re with somebody. And you know, that’s true across the board, employers,
Rick Archer: that the thing you just said actually segues into a question that Akshay from Poona, India, just sent in, he said, How to recognize the present moment how to be in sync with life. You know, there’s the power of now and all that and be living in the now and being in tune with the present moment. So actually is asking, How do you do
Bill McDonald: that? Well, you have to actually live it. You can’t just you can’t 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, you know, regrets. Things have happened to your 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 that’s the only thing that’s real. In your life is the moment that you’re in right now. Right now. Now, we go into parallel dimensions, you can go into the past the future, that’s all happening at the same time. But ultimately, everything is right now. So how do you? How do you learn to focus on that? I’m gonna tell you, it’s like all these questions that somebody Alas, there’s only two answers to do do more kriya yoga and meditation. And it’s your karma deal with it. So I listed all these people at the ashram when you’re getting advice, and it may come out sugar coated, 1000 ways. But basically, it’s down to two things. It’s your karma deal with it. And that could be sugar coated a lot of ways and to my meditation, right? You It’s, the answer really is within. You can’t enjoy the moment until you really know. Stillness, you have to quiet not just your mind, the quiet time. In other words, when you’re in a meditative state, time slows down, ultimately disappears. You’re in Samadhi. Therefore, you’re always in the, in the true now, which is an enlightened state. I hope that answered the question. That’s a 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, you’ll get 10 different answers. My whole thing is, meditate, get to that meditative state where you you close down time. And when you close time, you’re in that higher state of consciousness. That is the true now.
Rick Archer: Yeah. You know, I think we could say that meditation in most forms of meditation, hope to aspire to get allow you to settle into a state of pure consciousness and You know, settled awareness or whatever you want to call it. And 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 24/7 phenomenon. And then that is the now that’s presence. That doesn’t mean you can’t think about the future, you’ve got to take a trip, you have to plan your, your itinerary and so on and so forth. You can’t doesn’t mean you can’t reminisce about your mother and, or something like that. But this all whatever you do is always on the foundation or the background of a continuum of pure awareness.
Bill McDonald: Yeah, cuz the only place the only place that time is you could do anything. Take any action to take that trip. The plan is now just in and out. Yeah. You can’t plan the trip in the now. Tomorrow. Got to do it. Now. We want to trip right. So it’s almost in the now. So yeah, it’s when we understand the basic concept of, of why we’re here. Let’s Let’s go. Basic concept why we’re here? Because I think it’s the ultimate question. I don’t my my grandson, Gianni’s, his his one of his teachers very philosophical and asked him to write an essay or something on which came first the chicken or the egg, but turns out to be an evolved question, right? Because, you know, it’s like, Well, okay, first, you know, before Adam and Eve, how did you get this? It’s all everything, you know, 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 a brain, in this consciousness in this material world that anybody can answer any of these questions, because you’re using the material mind? To answer a question that’s beyond creation,
Rick Archer: to something interesting, we’re talking about time earlier, and we’re sort of talking about it now. Time is relative, actually. And if you could travel at the speed of light, which you can’t, because you have mass, but a photon, which does travel the speed of light, and has no mass, actually, time and space completely collapse. So 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 that sort of time and space become kind of like completely collapsed. So, you know, the whole thing is, it’s I find that such an interesting kind of little factoid is based upon Einstein’s theories. It just shows that the universe is very different according to the perspective of the observer
Bill McDonald: about this. People say there’s nothing faster than light. And I’m saying yes, there is. A lot. You could pick up if you’re powerful enough being you could pick up a thought that was a billion light years out there. Yeah. It’s instantaneous. Because there’s one one, cosmic consciousness. So thought is instantaneous. back fast, because yeah, people out there now this next generation, everything’s fast, right? I had a guy called I’ve had yet he was doing a satsang in Southern California, and somebody had a sign. He goes, instantaneous is not fast enough. What does what is tedious says actually, when something faster than that, right, I thought that was so funny. But it was like, No, really, everybody wants it right now. And the only thing that is right now. Possibly right now is enlightenment. And unfortunately, we’re in the stream world where it could take a billion trillion years to reach that. So but in the ultimate reality, it’s now
Rick Archer: yeah, it’s that it’s, it’s already there. It’s already there. There’s a thing called quantum entanglement where two particles that are paired, can become separated from one another, even across an entire galaxy. And when one of them changes, its polarity, the other instantly changes its polarity in sync with that with no, you know, even if they’re 100 million light years apart, that that drove Einstein crazy that one, but it kind of shows that there’s some level of creation that is that interconnects everything and that is beyond all limits of time and space and speed of light and everything else.
Bill McDonald: Well, think about this. You remember years ago, there was a study done, where they trained these monkeys, certain type of monkey to do a certain thing, use a little stick as a tool or something anyway. And then six months later, they go this isolated island off Japan or something Monkeys had learned that themselves. They picked
Rick Archer: it up through the Yeah, what Rupert Sheldrake would call the morphogenetic field.
Bill McDonald: Yeah. And there’s been a lot of instances of that, where a species will learn something. And he were the human beings think about this. In the old beginning of the time, you know, we got caveman and all that stuff, primitive cultures, native cultures. Every culture that drums, flutes have some kind of stringed instrument, some kind of sang, laughing as the same exact meaning in every single culture around the world. A laugh is happiness, tears and crying. Same exact. It’s interesting how a species can be all over the planet separate but 1000s of miles, yet the basics. Everybody had the same? Yeah, it is. And you know, so I am always amazed at things and also never amazed. Anyway, so what else you got from a young man?
Rick Archer: 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 anytime you like. But there are a couple more topics you said you might want to cover. Okay. One, and that was we’ve covered most of them that we talked about, but there’s I don’t know. We don’t have to cover all these but freewill manifesting health. Those things interesting to talk about.
Bill McDonald: Yeah, let’s talk about freewill. Because this is that was a subject I talked about at Sand. You know, it’s a freewill when you get a knotty palm reading done, right, the star charge so something right? Is that predestined? And there’s some people that argue that it says this is going to happen, and this is going to happen. And that’s going to happen. And this is your destiny. That’s your fate. And I’m saying no, since all time is now right. At that guy writing something 5000 years ago, saying that this is going to happen to Bill MacDonald in in 2000, or something he’s just tuning into now. Now. That’s all he just looked and see where I was at now. Because writing where I got myself into, and whatever choices I made, in old now’s it all led to where I’m at. Now, all you have to do is tune into, to where I’m at. It’s not like he’s predestined that this is going to happen to you, this is going to happen, you know, it’s I predestined that 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 toward and stay home, did I get married? Well, all these things, lifetime after lifetime, created level after level of karma. So these things happened, you know, where’s your freewill and 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. So, and some people just assume that everything starts from birth. So that shoots them down. So I’m telling you that everything that’s manifested in your life was through your own freewill. Everything for your own freewill. Now, once in a while, I guess you could have some wacko crazy some crazy guy goes on the street and shoot somebody and it looks random. But even wonder if that’s not someplace lonely, 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 here? We don’t
Rick Archer: train crashes or something. How does that
Bill McDonald: all these people ended up with the same destiny but freewill is what separates us from God. In other words, that’s our ego. And our ego decided to do this, this and this and that is when we are able to meditate and surrender consciously surrender our freewill to the divine. That is, the best use of our freewill is to give it back. But see God the divine has everything he needs, doesn’t need anything from us. He said, This is my smallness, saying this is self love. Yeah. So when you give your love to God, that’s the only gift you can give God, that God can’t manufacture himself. They’ll never force you to love them. But since it’s him anyway, it’s like you get back that same argument. You know, it’s like, Well, God loves God. Of course God loves God. Anyway, so freewill is Like with an ATI palm reading? If you believe that’s not your choice, I think you’re mistaken. But I’ll let you believe that, again, whenever you’re free to
Rick Archer: believe it, right?
Bill McDonald: That’s your free will to believe that you get to change anything one way or the other. Yeah. But the fact that for example, some people say, Well, I had my naughty palm reading done in India, and, and all this stuff is supposed to happen, it didn’t happen. Well, there’s a lot of reasons for that. First off, he says, Yeah, I’m supposed to get lung cancer in all this kind of stuff. And 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 things that you could get divorce. So
Rick Archer: there’s a saying in the Yoga Sutras Patanjali, it’s it’s avert the danger, which has not yet come.
Bill McDonald: So when you have an awareness of a potential fate, based on karmic for whatever, just the fact that, you know, it’s like, get back to your atoms, you know, if the other atoms were the other present. In other words, as soon as you start looking at atoms, they’re not they’re just things are there changes 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, think about it, you’ve also altered it with the potential is very few minor has been pretty locked in and stone, 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. So especially especially the predictions of health people go on a workout to change your diet. I mean, nobody waits around for it to become true long was a diet Islam and exercise. So and that’s, subconsciously, you will change things, even though you don’t know you do on your relationships. So, yeah,
Rick Archer: yeah, my stance on freewill 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 kind of in a rut, or we can kind of loosen our conditioning and attain greater and greater freedom of choice. And ultimately, what would it be to have complete otter freewill? Well, I think it would be kind of to get out of the way and be in tune with God’s will or the divine intelligence divine well, 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 McDonald: No, I think we’re on the same page on that. And again, people will disagree with us, and it makes it here’s the thing. There’s nothing that we’ve said, That can’t be argued about it. And people can make a case in debate. It has been in all these. And it’s like, does that make them wrong? Or is making right does it make us wrong right now? Neither. It’s just stuff
Rick Archer: interesting to ponder this stuff. You know, you don’t? I’m not saying that you and I are absolutely right. And anybody who disagrees is is out to lunch. But no, it’s like, learning as we go. Yeah,
Bill McDonald: there’s just too many things out there that when people people scare me off when they go, this is the ultimate truth is the truth. And I’m going, No, because all the stuff I roll out, right? And people come back with an argument and they say, well, like you come back and you say, well, well, sometimes the guru was wrong, you gotta leave, you know, I’m going. Yeah, there’s, there’s other edges to this. There’s other angles that that, you know, I’m just kind of give it an overview. But that’s there’s all kinds of angles on all this stuff. There’s millions of ways to find God. And just because I chose this path to go up the mountain doesn’t mean there’s other trails that aren’t quicker, better. ardor, you know, once they’ll get you lost, but there’s other trails. So
Rick Archer: 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 or my manual 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 experience with with plant medicine. He means like ayahuasca and stuff. I was bathed in love shown that everything is connected with everything and in perfect order. Like the system is learned. The system is learning and nothing is lost. What do you think is a good way to cultivate and retain faith in the Divine? Oh, that’s a separate question. Okay, so there’s a What about plant medicine?
Bill McDonald: Okay, well, let’s let’s talk about this because he’s right. Something he sees right because I find a lot of places right talk against drugs. I’m not an advocate to go go do them. Now. My trip to India, one of my trips to India, my first trip in 2004. I had an encounter with these Not, not the yogi’s Well, these guys were sitting around the sacred fire at this temple. And they were just being crazy. I mean, just passing this big pipe around look like Cheech and Chong movie was big, fat rocks, you know, inhaling the stuff. They’ve been doing it for three days, I was told three days even outside this thing, you know, no sleep, do drugs. And I’m with this guy, an old army friend, Lieutenant that when he got to the army, he lived on an he lived in a commune for 17 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alright, so we’re on different planets, right? And he’s always telling me all in RBL he says, you know, mushrooms and, and plant based stuff, you know, marijuana, all these other things? He says, No, he says, I’ve had some great experiences, even even shamans and all these guys have this great experience. I said, Okay, great. I said, but it’s not, it’s not, it’s always artificial. It’s always less than then the other direction less. So I had all these great opinions. So we go there and pass this thing and he’s smoking it. And I’m not smoking it because I’m dead set against this. And then finally, after about an hour, I found he asked the guru, ask them for some advice. And I said, Look, I come all the way to India, seeking the guru on a mountaintop experience. What bro wisdom can you give me before he opens about the most screwed up messed up? guy that he had in the group? The guy had ashes all over him in his hair while like he’s from Jamaica, or something, you know, and, and he was smoking this stuff. And he goes through and he hardly speak English. And he says, Let me answer let me answer. And I’m going, Okay, God, have fun with me. I mean, this just, yeah, this ludicrous, but go ahead. Right. Okay, go ahead. And then, if you read my book, or you heard me tell the story before, you know that when I first got to India, my first morning, I, I got into a spiritual discussion with some Sikhs, a part of the blood was a blood society. And these guys have certain things they believe in and everything and they gave me a list and, you know, with getting a job, a career health, physical fitness, all these things. And when he gave me the list, first thing I said was, Well, what I really like what I really believe in is not on your list. And what not, it’s all the things you need these 10 things I said, I said, without love. I go this whole thing about love without love. Gulf doesn’t matter. Well, it doesn’t matter all. You have to have love, right? So I got this whole thing about love. And they all got mad at me. And they left me and a friend was laughing at me. But I ticked off everybody within 24 hours of India, I’ve already ticked off all these people. And anyways, there’s several, there’s about a month later. And we’re in a mountain 750 miles away from where that happened. And this guy was told to tell me the secret of life. And once he tells me in perfect English, perfect English,
Rick Archer: this is the wild pot looking
Bill McDonald: guy. Speak English, right? Okay. All of a sudden, he gives me back my exact words. That I told that those Indians three weeks before, says love is the most important thing. And he goes right down the list of all and I’m going 90s This gave me back the same basic philosophy. He gave me back word for word exactly what I said 750 miles away three weeks before different people interesting. And I’m going and I’m already judges guys, these guys all just drug addicts have already passed judgment on him. I mean, I was just, I mean, you could just cut the air with my judgment. I mean, it was just started judging and skies right. And I was just going What? What, what, it’s a totally destroyed by whole concept of being able to judge a spiritual person from a non spiritual person. I plants. And then this whole thing about the drunk things was like, anyway, I’m at this point in time now. 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 call they do this one. I see guys that do marijuana every day. I got friends to do high concept three times a week. I Alaska. I watched it three times a week and they told me that not addicted but they’re doing this for 20 years. 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 it, you know, LSD helped them. I’m not gonna argue with them. But I’m telling you what they would in my world, and it’s my world, my prejudice, my judgment. I understand that. Trying to answer his question from from my smallness. I don’t look at those. 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 alternate. But I would, I would not recommend for the most normal people out there to do that because you get hooked on this stuff. And now it’s you’re going for the experience of getting high instead of fight going for the experience of God. And that’s the whole thing now, where their minds at during this? I don’t know, maybe they’re transcending this at some level? And how do they judge that from when you’re doing it? How do you judge that this is good and bad. So I leave it alone, I don’t go down that road anymore. I just, for example, I was really against marijuana. And my Vietnam veteran friends in the vets coming back with bad burns and stuff and some really horrible stuff, losing their legs, and I mean, their pain, a lot of pain. And they were giving them all these drugs at the VA, which I felt was so terrible for them, changing their personalities and side effects on organs and other things in your body. I found a come to the comfort zone of you know what you did medical marijuana, it’s better than this, go do it. Don’t abuse it, go do it. And they’re able to get their lives together. So I’ve seen on that level, a change in me. So I’m not 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? And and they don’t have to answer those questions to me, they don’t have to answer yourselves. So that’s one of those questions that if you’d asked me 20 years ago when I had a No, I’m saying us wisdom, great wisdom and caution. Yeah, I
Rick Archer: I doubt that there are many, if any examples of people who’ve attained the sort of level of awareness that Ramadan, or Yogananda or Papaji, or, you know, Nisargadatta, 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 and PTSD and alcoholism and stuff and people. Some people have good experiences on Ayahuasca. And so I just, I just don’t see it as a long term solution for anybody. You know, who was it? Alan Watts said, when you when you get the message, hang up the phone, there’s only so much you can learn from these things. And after that, you know, it’s necessary to kind of discover it, I think, in a more natural way. The fellow that I interviewed last week, Roger Walsh, is going to give a webinar through the Association for spiritual integrity, which is spiritual hyphen, integrity dot o RG, on the topic of psychedelics, and he’s a therapist, he’s going to do it with Mariana Kaplan, who’s also a therapist, and Craig Holliday as part of that he’s a therapist, and 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 it’s a bit of a dangerous path. It’s it’s not as natural and gentle and organic, and we could say as meditation can be, and it should be approached with if it’s approached at all, with very great respect and caution and prudence. And, you know, it, I would just my personal opinion, is, 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 McDonald: Yeah, it saw your intentions. And your where your consciousness is that are the real key factor. But But I just, I’ve seen a lot of the downside of it. So but I haven’t met anybody doing meditation where there’s a downside. See, but doing meditation to reach these high levels is work. Versus you got to do a chemical or drug or plant. It’s instantaneous. So we’re back to that fix, you know, we got to have it now.
Rick Archer: The 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 an hour or something. How nice. Pleasant.
Bill McDonald: Yeah, there’s, there’s people out there that work. They’ll tell you to do it partially. In the restless mind and shouldn’t be fighting. So they so they go the they go this other route. So it’s hard to tell somebody that it’s never gotten high on meditation, the beauty of it, because they still got to find that restless mind. And so they go for an alternate source and I. So I don’t know what i Come on, I’m coming on this thing’s thinking I’m not judging anybody that does it, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody who came to me. I see it as with pitfalls. And if you’re going to do it, do it with great caution and wisdom and get some advice from somebody that’s a higher level, somebody you trust,
Rick Archer: yeah, if you read, I interviewed Michael Poland, some six months ago, or whatever. And he wrote a book called changing your mind. And he’s a well known author, and he experimented with a number of different psychedelics. And he also interviewed, you know, all the top researchers and all in the field at Johns Hopkins and so on, and traced the whole history of the thing. But in any case, I mean, he approached it with such great caution, you know, and, and the researchers and so on that he spoke with the people who are doing these studies, they take such great care that the set in the setting and the guidance and the whole circumstances are just so ideal. There’s, there’s no kind of party drug kind of mentality involved in our whoop dee doo, we’re having fun. It’s just done very judiciously and carefully. And, you know, we’re not just saying this to be prudes, I mean, people get damaged, people have all kinds of serious consequences sometimes, especially if it’s if the whole thing is undertaken, you know, with any kind any degree of triviality or frivolousness.
Bill McDonald: Well, I’ll give you an example. There was a guy that was a he was up, he was staying at Self Realization fellowship. He was trying to become a monk. And he spent three years there and decided it wasn’t for him, he left. And I took him into my house up here in northern California to to help get back on the ground and, and he says, I want to come up there. He says, 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 gold, which is 10 miles down the road. He was in a group home. The guy did drugs. He did LSD one time, his brother, this monk guy, the monk guy’s brother, okay. His younger brother did drugs. One time, LSD. He was a top graduate, you know, valedictorian, and all that his high school. And, and he went to Europe and did LSD and never came out of it. I mean, the guy’s been in a loony bin, or, you know, group home. Since 1960s. He’s still there. Never came out of it just unlocked something. That’s the worst case I’ve ever heard. I couldn’t believe it one two times you had what happened? But who knows who that one or two time persons going to be? Yeah,
Rick Archer: I mean, there was a young woman on this show, in the very early days of my doing it within the first month or two of my, my starting this project 10 years ago, who was really bright, and apparently really doing very well. She ended up subsequently getting into ayahuasca and doing quite a bit of it. And she has been so really seriously mentally, mentally ill ever since every time I see your parents in the grocery store, I say, Oh, how she do and they say, Well, you know, it’s difficult, she’s coming along. But um, it’s just, you know, again, we were sounding a note of caution for people who are listening to this and who might be tempted to try this stuff. It’s just, 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 that the fact that it produces it, and this stuff can be cultured naturally. And whatever experiences drugs can give you that are worth having. And again, it’s not it’s not about having specific experiences and seeing Astral snakes, or whatever you end up seeing. It’s a it’s about, you know, Self Realization and knowing who ultimately you are, and having that be a permanent sort of permanent realisation, permanent feature on foundation of your life. So that should be the priority I should think, or the orientation.
Bill McDonald: Now, that’s a serious subject. And I think we’re both treated that way. And the question was outstanding, because that question has been asked by a lot of young people, and they see this as the way and and I always come off as well, you’re an old guy proved you never did. You know, you, you know, whatever. And he’s right. I was hardcore. Because somebody asked me directly. I don’t do them. You shouldn’t do them. Well, I
Rick Archer: did. I’m not much younger than you are. And I was in the 60s and I did them for a year. And my by the end of that year, I had dropped out of high school and gotten arrested a couple times and in life was kind of a mess and I learned to meditate and things turned Round got a lot better. So, you know, and I had great and I, they taught me something that they taught me ultimately that the world is not the same for everybody, it really depends upon how you perceive it. And then there can be radical differences in how different people perceive the very same world. And so my whole orientation became my own motivation became to sort of 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. And it didn’t take me too long to realize that drugs wasn’t weren’t going to do that for me.
Bill McDonald: And again, you use your freewill. And then you made judgments. And actually, the drugs were a teacher to you. Things could be a teacher, even in a negative way, they still teach you something. So anyway, so the sky, Paul was named
Rick Archer: the guy who asked the question, yeah, oh, man. Well, I believe that in Austria,
Bill McDonald: we probably given you a roundabout answer more than here. But the bottom line is, if you’re asking me if this is a, a safe course to follow, I would say it’s risky. And meditation, pure meditation. It’s not risky. I mean, worse, you got to do is fall asleep, you know, relaxed. So it’s, you got to look at the potentials. And I would never, not anymore. Not anymore. Am I going to be black and white on issues? And this? Is it or not for people? That’s up to your free will. But if you were asking me what she was, what she was, I’m telling you. I would be very, very cautious. Yeah. Very cautious. It’s a slippery slope.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and you know, and, you know, 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, you know, find something that really works for you some form of meditation or something that is not a struggle that you find is productive of results. And, and see if you can get into a regular routine of it with it and see how you feel after a month, two months, three months in, what happened to me was, you know, 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 want to ever take them again, I just I lost the desire.
Bill McDonald: Well, you’re a better example me because I didn’t go there. So you got to comparison. I’m speaking to something I haven’t partaken, which is not as valuable as somebody that’s been there. And it’s like a 12 step program. You know, I I’ve officiated a couple of you know, there’s nobody’s around the offer a homeless camp or something, I’ll do one. But it’s like I’ve told you guys, I’m not a 12 step, or I’ve never done the drugs, I don’t do the alcohol. And they’re not going to get the same thing out of it as they listen to one of their own. And that’s why 12 Step works, because 12 steppers listen to somebody that had the problem is now gotten rid of it. And so you listen to somebody who’s been there and done that. So I’m not having the same impact messages as you would on this message. Because I’m just saying, Nope, I saw how bad it looked from friends. I didn’t have to live it. I saw it and other people. Something don’t want to do. So. Yeah. Okay, we beat it. Yeah, I
Rick Archer: was just gonna say we’ve probably exhausted that point. Okay, so is there anything else that you would like to say before we conclude?
Bill McDonald: Now let’s just talk let’s just talk about because people always want to know about manifesting. But most 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. And if you spend all the time and energy focusing on manifesting love for the people around you, like, everybody’s got dysfunctional family, I don’t care what family from everybody’s family is a little bit dysfunctional. And in laws, outlaws, everybody has said there. So give. Give your time and attention to visualizing love in your family, pray for every member of your family, especially those people that are having problems, especially those people that don’t like you. Pray for them. And expand your family. It’s not just your family. It’s the family man. So it’s I’ll go back to what we originally talked about earlier, you manifest everything in your life now. So people don’t know how to manifest Yeah, you do. You did it. Manifest, manifest or divorce. You manifested your or alcoholism. I mean, you’ve done it. I mean, if you’ve manifested that, if it’s negative, so, but the good thing about it is change your thinking first, and your actions. And in time, ever back to time, in time, you can change things. Now you can’t overcome karmic debt so easily. It’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 off my back, you know, so you got to get rid of some of the fat, you got rid of some of the karma? And how do you get rid of that you got, you can live it, go through it all. Or certain forms of meditation will help you burn it, and lessen it. And because God Oh, god knows how long it will take forever to, to live it all. So that’s another thing about why meditation is good. So good. Kundalini meditation
Bill McDonald: will help on that. So manifest love. Become love. Be Love, give love. Read, look. It’s, I can’t think of the reason why we’re here. If, if people heard this conversation with us today, I
Bill McDonald: hope they come away with that. I know we got off on some crazy subjects today that big Yeah, I don’t know. But if they come away with nothing else realize it, 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, and filled with troubles.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and it’s like you say, I mean, it’s life is kind of like an ocean liner. It has a certain mass and momentum. And, you know, you’re not going to turn it on the dime. And necessarily miss the iceberg. Yeah, it has, you know, 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 um, you know, whichever direction we sort of steer the ship of our life, it eventually ends up going in that direction.
Bill McDonald: But I think, you know, they got the expression down in Hollywood fake it till you make it. And it always reminds me Yogananda story that he told him one of the lessons or a hunter, you wanted to hunt on the king’s property in India, right Maharaja, or some? Any notice every time you went out there, this hunting outfit on his weapons, all the animals are run from. But he watched a monk out there in a moment walk around, and all the animals would come up to me feed him and he’d pediment This is our, if I could do that, I could pretend to be a monk out there. And all all these animals make friends with me. Then I can hunt him. So he spent six months pretending to be a monk and he go out there and walk and feed the animals. Next thing you know, he realized that he wasn’t had no thoughts of hunting him anymore, that he loved these creatures changed him. Yeah. Well, I tell people make it to make it mean. Pretend to be a holy person, do everything the holy person would do. A person wouldn’t. wouldn’t wouldn’t harm this person wouldn’t say that. So that’s a
Rick Archer: sweet story. It’s like that song that you know, from the King and I you know, whistle happy tune you remember that one?
Rick Archer: Yeah. And hold my head erect. And Whisler. Happy to
Rick Archer: Alrighty, well, it’s good talking to you, Bill.
Bill McDonald: I will. I will see you at Sand. Yeah. And you take care of blessings and everything. And if anybody’s got to be late questions that we have any more questions we didn’t answer. We got them all.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I’ll forward them to you. Well, no, no others at the moment. But if any come in, I’ll forward them to you. And maybe you can email the person.
Bill McDonald: Oh, yeah. I’ll do that receipt. Yeah, but so it’s a friend. joyous thing friendly thing and a joyous thing to spend time with you. Yeah. And I thank you for the opportunity. And I hope we covered some territory.
Rick Archer: Oh, he did. Yeah. And speaking of San next week, I’m going to interview Ziaja and Riccio, Bonanza, who are the mother and father of San the, the founders of it. I’ll be reading parts part of their book this week, and we’ll, we’ll just be talking about sand. We’ll talk about all kinds of topics but anyway, I thought I’d mentioned that since that’s the next one coming up.
Bill McDonald: Well, you know, interesting, that’s that’s kind of an interesting karma. They’re going. It’s like you with the 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 are people doing things like that? I mean, not everything is a great pearl wisdom is to be able to stuff. But there’s a level for everybody, I’m sure to somebody getting something out of everybody that goes those things. Because everybody’s looking for some different. Yeah. And you offer variety of people on here. I mean, my gosh, you got this thoughts going every different direction, especially the subject we’ve talked about today, you can get 10 Different people go different directions. And that’s good. Yep. Sure, all the sites. So you’re exposing the world to all this.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And exposing myself to it too. And I find I find it very enriching to kind of get input from so many different perspectives. That makes my perspective more multifaceted and broader, you know,
Bill McDonald: what you do is you’ve opened up the teachers to the student, and you’re getting inundated every week, right? Yeah. What are you gonna learn this week?
Rick Archer: It’s a no, it’s a good gig. Great fun. All right. All right. Thanks, Bill. Yeah, 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. God bless
