Dena Merriam Interview

Summary

Dena Merriam describes vivid past-life memories arising through meditation and how they revealed recurring patterns, spiritual guidance, and a continuing identity beyond one lifetime. She also explores karma, fear of death, and the possibility of taking greater responsibility for the future.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is reincarnation, and how might karma shape a person’s life?
• Why might past-life memories remain hidden, and can meditation bring them to awareness?
• How can belief in the continuity of consciousness change the fear of death?
• How can understanding past patterns help someone consciously shape the future?

Key takeaways

• Past actions shape present conditions, while present choices help create the future.
• Karma is a universal law of action and reaction, not divine punishment.
• Past-life memories can reveal recurring patterns, relationships, and spiritual purpose.
• Meditation may open access to memories, but the process can be emotionally intense.
• Spiritual guides can appear across lifetimes as sources of help and direction.
• Seeing life as continuous can lessen fear of death and fear-based religious control.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to see previous ones, please go to batgap.com and check the past interviews menu.

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🛤️ Dena Merriam and the journey through time

My guest today is Dena Merriam. When I first started preparing for this interview a week ago, usually, week to week, I completely focus on the person that I’m about to interview, and I don’t even think about ones in coming weeks beyond that. I hadn’t really thought much or tuned into Dena or anything. I just sort of turned my attention to her last Saturday after finishing the previous interview, and I began poking around in her book, My Journey Through Time.

My first impression was, “Oh, this will be fun. We’re going to talk about reincarnation.” I haven’t really talked about that topic much on BatGap. But then, as I read her bio and began reading her book, I guess my first impression was, “Wow, this is about much more than reincarnation.”

I mean, she has vivid memories of a number of past lives and has kind of understood the connections between them and how they all led into the life she has been living this time around.

Now’s my chance to read her bio here. She has been working in the interfaith field for 20 years and founded the Global Peace Initiative of Women, GPIW, in 2002. Initially, the organization was designed to provide a global platform for women spiritual leaders to organize and mediate dialogues in areas of conflict and tension. This soon expanded to include an equal number of men and women spiritual teachers and to deal with a range of issues, including climate change, ecological destruction, racial inequality, and so on.

The premise for the gatherings organized by GPIW is that at the heart of all these issues is a spiritual crisis, and the way to address them is a shift in consciousness. That’s a point I’ve been bringing up in many interviews over the years.

Dena has served on the boards of Harvard University’s Center for World Religions, the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Association, among others. In 2014, she was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in Japan.

Over the years, as memories of past births have arisen, Dena has recorded them in order to better understand the karmic patterns. She has now shared her memories in this book, My Journey Through Time, in the hope that others will gain insight into their own lives through this sharing.

I must say that I have. I mean, it’s a very well-written book. She’s a good writer and a good speaker. In addition to reading this whole book, I’ve listened to about five hours of her talks over the past week, and I really kind of felt like I learned a lot and benefited a lot from the various stories.

It gave me insights into my own life, and influences in it and challenges in it and stuff like that. So, you know, it’s been a fun week preparing for this, and I really appreciate your being here, Dena.

Dena: I’m happy to be here. I’m glad the book had that impact. You know, I struggled a lot with whether to share this openly or not because they’re very personal stories, and my hope is that—well, there were a number of hopes.

One is that it would help people overcome the fear of death and know that what they’re doing, that they’re in control of their own destiny, so to speak. Their past shaped the present, and the present shapes the future.

Through the whole process, I began to more consciously think about the future. What do we want to create for ourselves? I mean, we are the shapers of our life, and that gives us a different responsibility than just reacting, because most of our activities are reactive. We’re just reacting to what comes our way, which means that we’re working through karma from past actions. But how do we take control of the process? That was really the understanding I sought.

Rick: I run into and I’ve interviewed people who are spiritual people, which is why I’ve interviewed them, but who don’t believe in reincarnation, don’t think that that’s the way the universe works, or who don’t think that the law of karma is a real thing. They think it’s just some Hindu philosophy or something, that the universe doesn’t work that way.

So I’m sure you have, too. I’m sure you don’t try to badger people into believing anything, but how do you converse with people who express those attitudes and yet have a spiritual aspiration in life?

My sense is that the law of gravity worked before people endorsed it. It didn’t just start working with Newton. It was always there. The universe is based on law: physical law, spiritual or mental law. Actions have reactions. To me, it’s not much different from gravity. Actions have reactions. Everything brings about a reaction.

Dena: My sense is that the law of gravity worked before people endorsed it. It didn’t just start working with Newton. It was always there. The universe is based on law: physical law, spiritual or mental law. Actions have reactions. To me, it’s not much different from gravity. Actions have reactions. Everything brings about a reaction.

I understand if people don’t have memories or if they don’t—I mean, I think everybody has clues and inclinations—but if they’re not present in the conscious mind, why should you believe? I think that our beliefs are based on our experiences.

I never try to convince anybody. I say, if you haven’t had these experiences, then I can understand why you wouldn’t believe. But what I am struck by is how many more people accept this today.

In America, I read a Pew Forum poll that said 25 percent of American Christians accept reincarnation. I’m sure it’s a lot more, actually. These are just people who admit to that. And karma has become part of everyday parlance. They talk about it in the business world. People talk about karma as if it’s just a universal truth, which it is.

I think that it’s much easier to talk about these things in public. It was interesting when I decided to go public with this book. My family doesn’t know about a lot of my work. They know that Dena is off doing these conferences, but they don’t really understand the spiritual work.

Some friends of mine said, “Well, don’t put your name to it. Put it out anonymously.” And I thought, either I’m going to come out with it or not. But I think things have changed. Ten years ago, it would have been harder to come out with a book like this and not be looked at as being a little bit off the left field.

Rick: Yesterday we were in the grocery store, and some lady was handing out lemonade samples. So I took a couple of lemonade samples, and she said, “Well, it’s only two for two dollars,” or whatever. And I said, “My wife wouldn’t let me buy this. It has a lot of sugar in it.” And she said, “Well, you know, you only live once.” I looked at her and said, “Are you sure about that?”

Dena: Well, you know, I try to reconcile this because I work in the interfaith world and I work with people from the Abrahamic background as well, and I’ve had some conversations with them.

If you identify with your personality, if I’m totally identified with Dena, Dena’s only coming around this once. Now, Dena will exist in my memory, and there are aspects of Dena. What I try to understand, though, through this is: What is it that you take with you, and what is it that you shed?

So, at the end of the day, what are the impacts? I also judge spiritual experiences by the impact they’ve had on you. This, to me, was not a curiosity matter. It wasn’t, “Oh, I’m so curious. Who was I?” It was trying to understand the patterns that emerge, what my calling is in this life, how I got here and into this work, and how karma works. It changed my sense of identity.

I mean, I identify with all the—I go back to seven or eight lives—I identify with all of those personalities, and none of them. I can’t go back and say, “I’m the same person that I was in Africa or that I was in Japan.” I’m different now because I’ve had a series of experiences. I’m not going to be the same person into the future that I am now, because hopefully I would have grown and learned.

But it’s interesting to think: What are you going to take with you? I mean, I sum up a life in 40 pages, the highlights. And what are those highlights? Very often, it’s the spiritual encounters that you’ve had.

For me, the beauty of looking back is to see the spiritual guides and teachers. In every life, there was somebody. To me, that was enormously comforting, to know that if that was my past, hopefully that will be my future. There’ll always be a spiritual guide to appear at a critical moment.

Sometimes it was to save me from drowning in the Ganges. At another time, it was in the jungles of Africa when this shaman woman appeared. So these are the memories that you take with you.

The past shaped the present, and the present shapes the future.

Rick: Let’s dwell for a moment more on this sort of comparison of believing or accepting or understanding that reincarnation is the way the universe works versus not thinking that. You and I have been on the spiritual path for 50 years under teachers who taught this, and so it’s kind of ingrained in us, but many people don’t and don’t think that way.

I often wonder, what is their perspective? Like somebody such as Anthony Bourdain, for instance, who committed suicide recently. I suppose he thought that that was just going to sort of snuff out his existence: lights out, “I’m out of here, and I will cease to exist.” But obviously, if you have a reincarnation perspective, then you don’t think that. Perhaps if he had had one, then it would have altered his choices. He wouldn’t have made that choice because he would have felt that, well, there might be consequences; I better kind of work it out in this life.

Go ahead and comment on that before I say anything more.

Dena: Well, I think physics has shown that energy doesn’t disappear; it transforms. So consciousness doesn’t snuff out; it moves into something else. I can’t even get into the mindset of thinking that consciousness just ends.

Rick: Well, obviously materialists think that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, and they wouldn’t think of it as some energy which is—they would say, when your body dies, that’s the end of consciousness. Whatever energy is inherent in your physical makeup, sure, that’ll be transmuted into other forms as it decomposes. But as far as any kind of soul or entity or some such thing that’s going to carry forward, you’re imagining it.

Dena: Well, it’s how you look at consciousness. Scientists would say the mind creates consciousness, whereas we would say consciousness creates the mind. Consciousness—I mean, how can you create consciousness? What we’ve lost sight of in this rational period is that everything is consciousness: trees, everything is a manifestation of consciousness. There’s nothing that’s not consciousness.

So what I say in terms of my book is, if you want to take it as a good read, as a novel, take it as that. But I think there are some lessons in there on patterns and relationships that may be useful.

To me, that’s just a very—that’s not the proper reading of the book, obviously, because I think that science may be on the verge of discovering more about this thing we call death. One of the reasons I decided to go public with the book is that there is a new interest in looking at death with new eyes, I would say. You have books now written about near-death experiences or death experiences by that surgeon, neurosurgeon—

Rick: Eben Alexander.

Dena: Who mocked it until he had an experience himself. Of course, the question is, how can you know an experience is true? Well, you can say that about anything. You can say that about a memory. I have a memory of being sexually abused as a child, but how do you know it’s true? You were the only one there; nobody saw it. Why should I believe you? Because it impacted who you were. It psychologically impacted you. Something happened that psychologically impacted you.

When I looked at these memories and went and verified things that I had seen, I went to those places—one was in Europe, one was in Russia—and found the streets that I had seen that matched up to what I had remembered. But I also found things in myself that I had pushed aside that resonated. There were so many things in each life. There was something in myself that remained from that period. I mean, starting with the previous birth that I talk about in Russia.

How past-life memories arise

Rick: One thing that struck me as I was reading your book is the great degree of detail that you remembered. I couldn’t write that much detail about what I did yesterday, and here you are writing all this stuff about lives that you had hundreds of years ago, right down to detailed descriptions of the circumstances you were in, conversations you had, and all that. I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but did you take a little creative license and embellish this just for the sake of telling an interesting story, or did you actually remember it in that much detail?

Dena: I can’t say how these memories came to me. There is the idea—I don’t know, you must have heard about the Akashic records, right? Every action, every thought is recorded. One might say that in one’s subconscious, all the past is recorded. There is a database of all that happens, and for some reason I was able to access that.

I would be meditating and go into this deeply interior state where, if people had spoken to me, I wouldn’t have been able to rouse myself. I was in another dimension, almost. I was in another time period where I was actually watching a scene, like watching a movie, hearing conversations, knowing which actor I was. I just had to listen.

I keep a pad and paper by my meditation, especially when I’m having a lot of these experiences. I mean, it’s an ongoing process. The book is not the end; it continues to happen. I’ve almost finished a second book now, which goes back to an earlier time. I would come out of it and then just write down what I had seen and heard. Of course, as I was doing the editing, I would say, “No, that’s not quite the way.”

So, yes, my mind was imposed upon these conversations. I was using my writing ability to try to make it all make sense, but I have to say that I stuck as closely as I could to the content that I was absorbing.

Rick: As we know, most people don’t remember their past lives. There are some fairly common stories of little children remembering things. I saw some kid recently on TV who had detailed memories of his life as a World War II fighter pilot, and he knew the name of the plane and the names of his friends back then. They were able to corroborate all that, but most of us don’t remember past lives.

So, question number one: Why do you feel that is? Why are those memories blotted out? And question number two: How come you remembered them when hardly anybody else does, especially later in life?

Dena: Well, I think there’s a good reason why these memories are submerged. I think it would be very hard, and I had a very hard time. My first experience with this, which was the life just previous, came back to me over a period of maybe a year, many months.

I was a single mom raising two teenage kids, holding on to a job, commuting to the city to work as a writer. I had been a long-time meditator since I was 20, and a very serious meditator—not just doing 30 minutes here and there, but a very, very serious meditator.

Experiences happen in meditation. One doesn’t just sit there, and everybody has different experiences. I know people have talked to me about seeing the third eye and going into the light, and people see all kinds of things that never happened to me. One of the reasons we’re not supposed to share our meditation experiences is so that people don’t get envious and say, “Well, why haven’t I seen that beautiful thing that you’re talking about?”

So this is what happened to me through my meditative experiences. The door just opened. But the first time around, it was very, very difficult—very difficult. As you read the book, you see that there were some very traumatic things that happened in that life.

I was in Russia during the Russian Revolution, sent out on a train, and never saw my parents again. I was stuck in Europe waiting for them in a foreign land. Then World War II happened, and I was caught in Nazi Germany, wanting to escape and get out of there so badly. Then I met my guru, which to me was the highlight of that life.

Here I am trying to hold down a job and raise kids, and I’m finding myself trapped in Nazi Germany, living again and again, being caught by the Nazis and all that. Then, of course, I died in Europe before I could get out.

I would be in meetings at work and be crying internally over being sent out of Russia at 14, not seeing my mother, and never seeing my mother again. So it awakens. It’s not just observing and saying, “Oh, that’s interesting.” You’re deeply engaged in the emotions that are awakened. It’s like you become that person again. I became that person again.

I went through all the emotional turmoil of that life, whatever many years I had in that life, and I think I died young—maybe in my 40s. All of that was squeezed into nine or ten months. I went through the upheaval. There were times when I thought I was losing it. I said to myself, “Could I be hallucinating?”

Then I would say to myself, “I’m very grounded. I’m running a household. I’m working at a good job. I’m a serious meditator. I’m doing my practices. I’m not imbalanced.” So I can see why people could get imbalanced by these experiences, especially if you don’t know what you’re going to awaken.

I caution people when they say, “Well, I want to go find out.” It’s not a curiosity. I think the reason it came to me may have been so that I could share it and help validate the fact that we are all eternal beings, that we’ve had a past and we’ve got a future. Maybe if we learn how our past affected our present, we can more consciously direct or shape our future.

So that’s why I decided to share it. I said, “These experiences came to me not just for me to hold to myself, but maybe others would get something from them.”

Actually, I shared the manuscript with a colleague, a writer friend of mine at work, who was an agnostic. I trusted her judgment very, very much, and she had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She said, “I know you’re working on something. Could I read it?”

She was so moved by it, and it helped her so much at the end of her life, that she said to me, “Dena, you’ve got to publish this.” There are other people like me, because she didn’t know what she was facing. She was facing death—pancreatic cancer—and she didn’t know what she would be facing. It gave her a lot of comfort. It’s not the end.

It’s not a curiosity. I think the reason it came to me may have been so that I could share it and help validate the fact that we are all eternal beings.

Rick: That’s a good point, worth touching on again. If we think that death is the end, and yet it isn’t, then I think there’s some deep dissonance between what we think and what is actually real. That must cause great fear, because it must viscerally and intuitively feel wrong that I would come to a complete end. On some deep level, we know we don’t, and yet here we are dying, thinking that we’re going to, because the culture has told us we’re going to.

Settling into the understanding that life is a continuum must somehow provide some deep solace or relaxation to our psyche, to our soul, I should think.

Dena: Well, think about this. Our country is in the grips of fear right now, and it’s the world, too. Many, many governments are holding people through fear—fear of the other, fear of this, fear of that. People have a lot of fear in their lives, and the primal fear is the fear of death.

Why are people so attached to their guns? They’ve got to defend themselves so they don’t get killed, so they don’t die. Instead of dealing with the more superficial fears, let’s get to the core fear, which is the fear of death.

The religions have been partially responsible for creating this fear, because of the concept of punishment. Somebody’s watching you, and you’re going to be punished if you don’t follow the rules. It’s not even if you lead an ideal life; it’s if you don’t follow the rules. If you don’t follow the rules, you’re going to be punished, and your death is going to be bad.

When you realize that nobody’s judging you, you’re shaping your own future in order to learn and awaken. It’s all about awakening. Your past shaped the conditions that gave you the opportunities that you now have, and it’s up to you whether you can use them for growth or not. By what you do, you are creating your future.

When you realize that nobody’s judging you, you’re shaping your own future in order to learn and awaken. It’s all about awakening. Your past shaped the conditions that gave you the opportunities that you now have, and it’s up to you whether you can use them for growth or not. By what you do, you are creating your future.

That changes the whole equation, and people free themselves from a lot of these holds that religions and institutions have on them. People are controlled through fear.

Interfaith understanding and direct experience

Rick: I think if we look deeply enough into probably every religion, we would find that they weren’t originally intended to produce that kind of fear or those kinds of misunderstandings. I’ve seen Yogananda himself argue that Christianity once taught reincarnation, that it was edited out at the Council of Nicaea or something. But things get distorted over the long lapse of time.

Dena: In the Hasidics, they also talk about it. Things get distorted when power is accumulated by an institution. Suddenly, your main priority is maintaining that base, maintaining your institution, rather than liberating people and giving them the tools to free themselves.

Rick: Well, organizations tend to be taken over by administrative types, and administrative types tend not to be mystics.

Dena: Exactly, yes. Maintaining the status quo or growing their wealth and following.

Rick: You were speaking of Yogananda. He was your guru, and you of course didn’t discover him in this life until after he had passed away. But then you recount your life—the one you were just mentioning, where you were in Nazi Germany. I found it interesting that he had actually stopped through Germany on his way from the U.S. back to India in 1935, I think you said, and that he had actually tried to arrange a meeting with Hitler, hopefully to change Hitler’s way of thinking. That didn’t happen, but I found it to be an interesting little tidbit in your book.

Dena: I felt that, because my yearning for Yogananda was so intense at a time when a lot of my friends were coming back from India and had found their gurus, or were going to India, and there were teachers coming here. They said, “Well, Yogananda’s not here. Go to this one, go to that one.”

I did try going to a few, but it didn’t help. My guru was my guru, and I loved him with such depth that I was in tremendous pain because I couldn’t meet him in person. That went on for years.

Then, when I had the memory of having met him, it was like, “Oh, yeah, okay.” That bond, that link in the body, was made.

Rick: I’m just reading the last chapter of your book, and I may not quite have grasped what you’re saying here, but were you saying that this Swami that you met in one of your Indian lives, and perhaps some guiding light that you had met in other lives, was actually Yogananda in his previous lives, or were you not saying that?

Dena: No, I didn’t say that, and there are so many unanswered questions that I have. There were people who showed up, like that Swami, who I thought might actually have been my Sufi father because he had such a fatherly attitude toward me.

Each time I saw a life, more questions came, which is why I say this is an ongoing journey. I’m trying to go back further in time because I put some of the pieces together in the puzzle, but the puzzle is still only half done, maybe less than that.

We’re at a very interesting moment in time now, where we’re shifting from one era to another era. Most people say into a higher era. So the challenge that we face now is, how do you live in that higher era? What would life look like? What would our society look like?

So I’m trying to go back in time to a higher era. I only go back a few hundred years. That’s not very far in time. You have to go back thousands of years to get to a higher era, when society was really at a completely different structure in a very different way.

Cyclical History and the Memory of Higher Civilizations

I think that that’s important now for us to regain the memories of what a higher civilization would be. What did a higher civilization look like? There was a higher civilization. Again, this is a challenge to the Western model, which is linear. You come out of a primitive time, moving forward through time, and that’s not the way the Eastern world sees it. It’s cyclical.

Rick: Right, yeah, we have the yugas, and there were much more glorious times than this and so on. The time span is so long that it wouldn’t necessarily be expected that archaeological evidence would turn up from these ancient times because they’re millions of years ago.

On this note, you said in your book, “Declines are said to be times of ascent.” That was one sentence I plucked out of it. From my perspective, it seems that our culture, our country, and our society seem to be declining. Some would argue the opposite, but if you agree, what signs of ascent do you see amidst the decline?

Dena: Well, I wouldn’t call it a decline. What I would say is that the institutions of a dark, less enlightened time are breaking down. So the economic, political, and social institutions that have kept us in place, or that have governed us for the last few hundred years, are not working anymore. Something else needs to emerge.

What I would say are the signs of ascent is the awakening consciousness, not just more people. The fact that we can have this kind of conversation in a public way is an indication, but also the fact that there’s much more unity among a certain subset of the religious traditions.

When I started working in the interfaith world, “tolerance”—people don’t use that word anymore when they talk about unity.

Rick: Tolerance sounds like, “Okay, I’m going to hold my nose.”

Dena: “I’ll get close to you, but because I have to.”

So, among those who have been working in this field—Christians, Jews, and Muslims—there’s a much greater appreciation of the other, and less judging. That wasn’t true 50 years ago.

Rick: So 50 years ago there was the assumption that, well, my way is the only way, and I’ll just sort of be chummy with these heathens here, but they’re deluded and I’ve got the truth, right?

Dena: Even though there are people who believe that, I believe it’s a receding tide.

Rick: One thing that I think about when I think about the whole interfaith thing is that what it really needs is for the representatives of the various faiths to go beyond faith to direct experience. If you’re just stuck on the level of faith, then you’re never really going to merge at a very deep level.

It’s like people who haven’t experientially fathomed the depth of their own religion arguing with similar people of other religions. It’s like people who haven’t eaten in a particular restaurant arguing over which one serves the best food. None of them have eaten in their favorite restaurants, but they’re arguing that they’re the best even though they haven’t tasted the food.

Dena: Absolutely, and I think that’s where the change is. There have been many, many initiatives of monastics—Buddhist and Christian monastics—coming together in complete sharing and unity. Hindu monastics and Christian monastics, too.

It’s a subset; this is not necessarily the general population. But even among the general population, the fact that 25 percent of American Christians accept reincarnation, and believe that’s the way the universe works, is a large number of people.

Rick: That’s good. Doesn’t the Pope these days say that you can sort of achieve salvation through other religious paths and so on?

Dena: He said a lot of things that he’s had to then qualify, like when he said there was no such place as hell.

Rick: Uh-huh. But then he gets his wrist slapped or something.

Dena: How can you keep people in fear, control them by fear, if there’s no place as hell?

Yogananda was once asked about that and he said:

Where do you think you are now?

Rick: Sometimes when I think about religious fanaticism—my religion is the only good one, or the only real one, and so on—if I talk to such a person, which I rarely do, I start bringing up astronomy.

There are 40 to 60 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy and two trillion galaxies in the known universe, and possibly unlimited universes. When you start thinking of it that way, it seems pretty absurd to think that one particular religion and one particular little, teeny-tiny speck of dust is the only one, and that God has somehow consigned all the other ones to eternal darkness or something.

Dena: I think that there are scientific breakthroughs that could happen in the next hundred years that could really have an impact on human consciousness.

Rick: Like what?

Dena: Like discovering advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Dena: Could happen, right?

Rick: Yeah. I think somewhere in your book you talk about phase transition. I don’t know if you used that term, or maybe it was in the talks I heard you give, but the fact that there could be quite a sudden shift that we don’t see coming, and all of a sudden it’s upon us.

Dena: Well, you know, the hundredth monkey—you don’t need all the monkeys; you just need a certain percentage of monkeys, and it’s not a big percentage. It’s like one percent or something like that.

That’s why I think that this spiritual work—I mean, a lot of people I talk to in the spiritual world are discouraged right now because we seem to be taking steps backward. You take a step forward, then a step backward. My sense is we can’t allow that feeling to overcome us, because more and more people are embracing this human unity and spiritual unity.

Of course there’s going to be a reaction to that. There’s going to be fear. People are fearful of losing their identities, losing what was familiar to them, losing the life that they knew, and wondering what the implications are for the future.

So this fear factor is going to try to pull things backward. But you can’t slow down evolution. You can’t reverse evolution. It doesn’t work. The universe doesn’t work like that. Things move forward, but they move forward at a certain pace.

Rick: I was just reading—I don’t know if it was your book or something else—about how patience is such a virtue. God has His own timetable, and we tend to be impatient. But if you can put yourself in the mindset of the divine, and how patiently it has unfolded this 13.72-billion-year-old universe, I mean, not to say that we should be complacent and let bad situations just fester, but it does cultivate more patience to take the big picture if you can.

Long-Term Thinking Beyond Elections and Quarterly Reports

Dena: Well, I think we have to think in longer terms. I mean, I see two major human problems. One is this short-term thinking. We’re conditioned to think in terms of the next election cycle, and the next quarterly report in the business world, and the next financial whatever. That completely distorts our understanding of things.

The other shift, I think, is for people to understand the law of cause and effect. I think it’s very important for us to understand that what we do individually and as a collective has consequences.

I talk a lot in my book about how this operates at the individual level, but a lot of my thinking recently has been about how it operates as a collective. What we’re experiencing as a collective now is a result of actions that have been taken in our name as a collective.

Rick: Let’s talk about that. In fact, I have one of my notes here: “Collective inner spiritual shift a prerequisite to societal change.” So, what is your thinking about the collective?

Dena: I think that as a country we’ve done a lot of things that have been undercover in the world. For example, I took a delegation of religious leaders two years ago to Iran for meetings in Iran. I know that the UK and the US took out Iran’s democratically elected government in the 1950s and put in the Shah.

This was a government that had been democratically elected, but the leader wanted to nationalize the oil fields, and the US and Great Britain were not going to let that happen. So, is there no impact from that? Do we think that we can just do that and not reap the results? That there’s not going to be any payback for that?

Look at how we messed around in Central America. We’ve messed majorly in Central America. So now what’s happening? We’ve sowed such a scene of violence down there that people are fleeing to get into our country. Do we bear no responsibility?

In the public space, nobody’s talking about, “Hey, let’s look at our actions and look at what we’ve done.” You reap what you sow. I mean, that’s even in the Abrahamic traditions: You reap what you sow.

Nobody’s looking at why we’ve had a coup, so to speak. Our election has been hacked. What we’ve done to other countries has now been done to us. But are we going to change our behavior? Are we going to say we’re not going to do that anymore?

They’re already talking about regime change in Iran again. It’s like, if you don’t learn your lesson once or twice, you’re going to keep experiencing it again and again until you finally learn correct behavior.

Rick: Interesting. Good homework for those who want to read more about the kinds of things Dena was just saying is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It’s quite an eye-opener in terms of all this stuff.

Yeah, we need to know that as Americans. To understand and get out of the situation we’re in, we need to understand deeds that have been done in our name.

That’s interesting, and I suppose for us to understand that as a culture, it’s something that we need to learn individually. I know that reading your book reminds me of something that is one of my operating principles, which is this long-term vision.

I can’t, in good conscience, go for some kind of short-term gratification which I know will have long-term implications that are injurious to people. But if you didn’t have that long-term perspective, you might think, “Oh my God, I’ve only got 20 years left to live. I’ve got to make these radical changes in my life,” regardless of the consequences or who it might hurt.

Dena: I mean, that’s the big shift that happens when you realize that the law of cause and effect is operational and that you have control, to some degree. I mean, you have control of a lot. You can’t change your past deeds; you can change whether you learn from them or not, whether you learn from your current situation or not, and then you can help shape your future. But this takes deep reflection. It’s not something that comes easily or automatically, and I think that the reason for that is that we’re meant to reflect deeply on our actions in our lives and to begin to live more consciously.

Rick: You said a few minutes ago that a lot of spiritual friends are kind of feeling discouraged, and somehow or other what you just said reminded me of that, because we’re so bombarded all the time with trivial, short-term distractions. It’s not really conducive to deep reflection, what hits us through the TV all the time and everything.

Personally, I think that it’s nice to structure one’s life around having time to meditate and reflect deeply and contemplate all these topics and points, and certainly one has a choice to do that. But a lot of people might feel they don’t have the choice because they’re working two jobs, they can barely make ends meet, and they’re just overwhelmed and bombarded. So that’s a bit of a long statement, but why do you feel that a lot of your spiritual friends are being discouraged?

Dena: I see two movements. I see a lot of people—there’s too much intensity and negativity—so they just want to shut it out. A lot of people are getting off social media, not even looking at the news, and I understand doing that to a partial degree, but you can’t create a bubble around yourself. I don’t think that—I think the spiritual energy is needed in the streets right now. So I meant that figuratively, not literally.

Rick: Sometimes literally.

Dena: I’m a social activist.

Rick: Those big marches and things like that, those are good.

Dena: Yeah, those are good—the March for Our Lives. I mean, I think we have to show up now. I think now is the time for those who’ve been doing spiritual practice for a long time to really work to mobilize that energy, to try to bring ethics back into the public space, a sense of virtue, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of how to behave.

I mean, we’ve lost that in society. Every day you see the news. You look at what happens: Congress is there yelling at each other, screaming at each other. They hate each other. Trump is out there demeaning people. You say to yourself, “Okay, the compass is going crazy.” There’s no moral compass anymore, no sense of right action.

Those of us who try to base our lives on Dharma, on a sense of living in accordance with some universal laws, need to know what’s going on. We can’t live in a bubble, except during retreat times. There’s retreat time, maybe weekends or whatever, to renew ourselves.

I just want to interject that those listening to the live broadcast, feel free to send in a question if you like, or a comment. It could even be a skeptical question, like, “Why don’t I believe in reincarnation?” or something. We can handle it. To do that, you would go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com, and then at the bottom of it there’s a form through which you can submit questions.

Rick: As you were saying that, I was thinking, well, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King didn’t live in a bubble. I mean, they were spiritual dudes, but they carried their spirituality into the streets, so to speak, and affected huge change in a nonviolent way. So they’re kind of inspiring examples.

Dena: We do a lot of work with young people, and I’m always asking them, “What is the future you want to create? What is the vision? What kind of society? What would the society look like?”

Our economic system is not working. It’s getting more—the extremes are getting greater and greater. The social divisions are greater than they were, or maybe they always were bad, but now it’s just more upfront how polarized people are. How do we bring it all together? How do we come up with a new framework?

Transition is always difficult. Somebody’s using the phrase, “We’re between stories.” The old story is breaking down; the new story hasn’t yet arisen. So this is the story between stories. I think it is, in a way, a confusing time, but it’s not like we’re going down the rabbit hole. We’re just trying to create something new, and it’s not yet clear how to do that or what that would look like.

Rick: I guess that stands to reason. If we can step back a bit, what you were saying half an hour ago is that the old systems aren’t working. There are all these institutions of government and business and things that impact people’s lives and impact the environment and so on, that couldn’t possibly exist in a more enlightened world, and that will be their own destruction, because if they continue on the way we’re going, there won’t be a world in which for them to exist.

Perhaps the reason your spiritual friends get discouraged is they look at that stuff and it seems so entrenched and so powerful. What can little old us do to change it, when there’s so much money and power behind it? I’m kind of reminded of the little sprout that pushes its way up through the asphalt, that has the strength to do that.

I think there’s something more powerful in the subtle, and what we’re talking about here is something very subtle and therefore much more foundational, much more causal. If we kind of keep sticking to that and working with that, it’s bound to have a major impact and perhaps even eventually become the predominant paradigm.

Dena: That’s what I believe. I think that things—this is hard to express—but things take formation in the spiritual world before they manifest physically.

The ideas come together, and it takes a while before the inner begins to manifest on the external plane. So I think we’re at the visioning stage right now of what a new formation would look like, and it could take a hundred years. I mean, what you said before about looking at longer time periods—World War II went on for how many years? Ten years?

Rick: Not even that long. Well, the Americans weren’t involved that long, but it started in Germany earlier.

Dena: That’s a long time to be at war, right? Yeah. And so that made—living in the middle of that, it could have looked like things could have ended. That’s where patience comes in, and the work that we do to build awareness.

So much of that, to me, is the main work right now: the shift in consciousness and building awareness. Since I’ve been doing radio shows around the book, I see that in all parts of the country there are spiritual communities, Dharma centers, yoga centers, spiritual radio shows, and a lot of work being done on the divine feminine. I mean, there are communities around the country; it’s not just in the major pockets.

Rick: And around the world.

Dena: And around the world, for sure. Yeah.

Rick: Compare that with what was there. There was Yogananda doing his thing way back then, and then in the late ’60s, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came in, and a few other things. But compare that to today. It was weird to talk about meditation back then; now it’s kind of like they’re teaching it in the boardrooms and so on.

Dena: I became a vegetarian in 1970, and when I would go to restaurants, they’d think I was ill. They would just give me some string beans and potatoes and carrots. You look at how common it is now.

Rick: Yeah, so I think that’s a good example of what you just said, which is that the subtle stuff takes a while to percolate up and become manifest. We were both, and many of those listening probably were, participants in what was happening four or five decades ago, when this subtle stuff was just beginning to get enlivened. A lot of it has become manifest, but there’s a lot more to go.

Dena: There’s a difference, though, because at that time it was really bringing the spiritual ideas into the West, into the public place, where we could talk about religious unity and truth—all religions being a path to truth.

Now I think there’s a greater focus on the institutions, the economic system. No, it’s not a dharmic economic system. This is not right, excluding people. Maybe the whole Trump phenomenon of bringing this out into the open is like bringing all the dirt up, bringing the mud to the surface—all the prejudices that people had that they didn’t talk about before.

I mean, that’s how I look at it. I say to myself, “Where did all this stuff come from?” We were not aware as a society that there was this polarization and anger and hatred.

Rick: I saw a thing on the news yesterday where some woman was setting up a picnic table at a park or something like that, and she had a Puerto Rico T-shirt on. Some guy started screaming at her, saying, “You shouldn’t be in the country, and you shouldn’t be wearing that T-shirt,” and things like that. “Are you a citizen?” Obviously, he didn’t even know that Puerto Rico was part of the United States.

Dena: Right, right. I mean, where did this come from?

Rick: He ended up facing two felony charges for behaving that way. A lot of this kind of crap is coming to the surface and perhaps getting exposed for what it is.

Dena: It’s like when you have a boil. The pus has to come out, and so maybe this is just a cleansing process. It may have to get worse before it gets better; I don’t know. But I think that those of us who have been involved in this movement for greater human unity and to build a compassionate society really have to step out now and try to mobilize our spiritual energies.

Exploring past lives safely

Rick: We could probably rant and rave on that point a little longer, but our question came in from Dan in London, who asks, “Are there any special meditation techniques for exploring past lives, or does it more need to be one’s predisposition to experience this?”

Dena: Well, I’m often asked the question about past-life regression because that is a technique that people use, and I have mixed feelings about that.

In meditation, I think if one just introspects, you can see things, especially if you look at your earlier life and see strong interests in your earlier life. There are clues along the way. But if details need to be known, there are people who go to past-life regression, and I have mixed feelings about that because you undergo hypnosis.

When you undergo hypnosis, you have to be very careful about who’s hypnotizing you, and you have to make sure that the person is trustworthy and credible. But I know people who have been helped by that. If they’ve had a phobia that they couldn’t overcome and they’ve gone to past-life regression, they’ve discovered where in the past this comes from, and they’ve been able to overcome it. But I don’t recommend it just for curiosity.

Rick: Yeah, Maharishi always used to say the past is a less-developed state, and don’t worry about your past lives and all that stuff.

Dena: I think the important thing is just to know that you’ve been around, that you’ve had experiences, and you’ve most likely experienced—I mean, I say that my experiences are everyone’s experience. We’ve all been rich and poor and born in this skin and that skin. We’ve had a diversity of experiences, and so we’ve been around a long time. We should be able to relate to that, to the fact that we’ve had all these different experiences.

I can share some of the ways. In one of my chapters, I talk about a life in Africa where I lived in a village. At a certain moment, slave traders came in and raided the village. I was killed, but my younger sister was kidnapped, as was my son, and taken across on the ship. My sister was thrown overboard; they had to get rid of some of the slaves, and so she died in the sea. That was a few hundred years ago.

About two years ago, we were in Charleston, South Carolina, doing a dialogue on racial healing. There was a young man there who was the head of Black Lives Matter in Charleston, and he said to us, “Tomorrow we’re doing a ceremony for all of those Africans who didn’t make it over, who died in the journey, and you are invited.”

We were half white and half Black, this group, this dialogue, and so I said, “I want to go.” This life I had remembered, but it wasn’t uppermost in my mind. As we arrived at the seashore and everyone was throwing flowers into the water, I started the ceremony, throwing flowers, and the image of my sister came up. I remembered that moment and thought to myself, I never was able to bring closure to the fact that I had died from that spirit world. I saw that she was being thrown over, but I was never able to really bring that closure.

At this moment, I was able to bring it to closure, and I was able to do the ceremonies for her. One of the young white men who was with us, part of our discussion, felt very uncomfortable. He said, “You know, that was a private thing. We should not have been there. That was not for us. We were intruding on their space.”

I turned to him. Of course, I’m limited by what I can say in public. I didn’t say, “No, that was my sister who died in the ocean,” but I said to him, “That was very, very meaningful for me, and I’m glad we were invited to join in.” That was a way for us to bond with what the community was doing. It was a very powerful moment for me, and it shows how the past comes into our present, even if we’re not conscious.

Now, if I had not remembered that life, I would have felt moved by the ceremony, but it wouldn’t have been so personal. It would just have been a moving thing to be part of, all of that community. There were just a few of us from the white community. There were mostly African Americans from the Charleston area who were doing their annual ceremony, playing the drums and throwing the flowers in.

But the difference is that this young white man felt uncomfortable and felt that this was an intrusion, whereas I, having remembered my past, saw it in a very personal light. I’ve had a number of things like that happen. So, to answer the question of what can be done, I’d say that if there’s something compelling that you really need to find an answer to, you can find a guide to help you through this process of past-life regression, but it’s not necessary.

Rick: Patanjali, in the Yoga Sutras, talks about remembering past lives as one of the siddhis, and I think he prescribes some sutra or something that can help you achieve it if you really want to.

One thing I’ve noticed in talking to so many people is that a lot of people who have had profound spiritual awakenings have spontaneously remembered past lives—not in as much detail as you have, or at least they haven’t written books about it. But a lot of them have had clear recollections that came spontaneously, unbidden, unsought, just when something opened to a certain degree. I imagine they processed it and thought about it and felt through it, and then moved on. But it may be something that could be commonly experienced as people reach a certain stage of their evolution.

Dena: I think it is not uncommon to have glimpses, to know, say, “My past birth was in China. I was a monk in China.” I mean, I know people who tell me this, but they may not have had the detail. Again, I say that I think it came to me for a particular sharing and to help show the patterns of how cause and effect works from one life to another.

When I put it all together and looked at successive lives, it became such a beautiful tapestry to me. I thought, “My God, this is beautiful, the way the universe works.” You can see your suffering as prods to awaken. There’s no punishment to it; it’s just prodding you to help you awaken and to show where you’ve maybe missed the step, missed the beat. To me, the more you see, the more beautiful and intricate the universe becomes.

Rick: Well, you really did a good job of weaving it all together and showing the threads that went through the various lives and into your current life. You can think of yourself as a kind of emissary. Not everyone has to have these memories or write such books, but not everybody has to be Mozart. You gave us a nice little taste there and took the skills you have in this life—speaking and writing and so on—and used them to do it in an effective way.

✨ Between lives and the continuity of consciousness

Dena: I also talked more at the end of the book about my memories of actually dying in my last body, and how, in that in-between state—which, in fact, feels more like home than this world—you go back between lives and kind of bring closure to some of the things, and you see aspirations that haven’t been fulfilled.

So I saw in my last birth an aspiration to come to America so I could study with my guru. Well, I did get born in America, and even though he was not in the body anymore, I was able to study his teachings from very early in my life and learn meditation, which was what I so much wanted to do.

So it’s a time of putting to rest your experience of your just-previous life and laying the blueprint for the future. This laying of the blueprint for the future is very important, because I think that, in the last part—if you say the last quarter of your life—as you get to a certain point, you’re already beginning to do that. You feel like a lot of the work is done, you’re kind of reaching and fulfilling your aspirations, the things that you’ve set for yourself, and beginning to think about the next life. I know I find myself doing that a lot.

Rick: I’ve read Michael Newton’s books, Life Between Lives. Have you read those?

Dena: I haven’t read them, no.

Rick: Well, he was a hypnotist, a hypnotherapist of some kind. At some point, he was hypnotizing people to go into their past lives, and all of a sudden he discovered that people were going into the life between lives—the period between incarnations. He ended up specializing in that and hypnotizing literally thousands of people to go into that state. He compared all of their accounts and found tremendous consistencies between them, and really mapped out what people apparently commonly experience in between lives. I think you’d enjoy reading those books.

Dena: I will read them, yes.

Rick: I was going to say, I’m just at the stage of your book where you’re talking about between lives, and I haven’t finished it yet. It’s the very last bit. I wonder if we want to talk about that for a few minutes. I think people might find that interesting.

Dena: Well, another interesting point about that is the difference in time. I was in this in-between space. It varies greatly: somebody could be there for a very brief time or for a very long time. It all depends on the conditions that one needs to come back into a body. But I was there for a short time; it was about ten years.

Rick: Ten Earth years.

Dena: But you might say that a year is like a day in that place, in that dimension. So, as you can see, it felt like I had just arrived, and suddenly I was hearing my guru call me again. He was calling me down again. I didn’t feel ready to take a new birth; in a way, I hadn’t processed everything. But my main goal was to follow him, so I had to respond to that call.

Rick: I know you’re a student of the Gita, and there’s a verse in the Gita, as you know, where Arjuna asks Krishna, “What happens if you die before you complete the journey?” Basically, he says, “Well, if you’re a yogi, you might end up living in the celestial realms for a long, long time, and then being born in a pure and illustrious family, and, if you’re lucky, in a family of yogis.”

Anyway, the indication is that in the celestial realms where you may reside in between lives, as you just said, you could be there for a long time in Earth years, but up there it doesn’t seem very long at all—just a different perspective on time.

Dena: That’s where I think this idea of heaven—I think some of the Abrahamic notions can be reconciled. If you’re identifying with your personality and your body, then you can say, “Okay, that goes away,” and for a period of time you’re living in maybe a heaven realm. There are so many different dimensions, and you may think that that’s it, but of course that’s not it. There’s a lot more to go, and so you continue on in the journey.

Rick: Sure, and the Vedic tradition talks about hell realms too, but they don’t say that any of those realms are permanent.

Dena: You know, you go there, you work off some karma, and then you come back. I mean, if you’re a very greedy or angry person, you’re going to be drawn into a realm where you can display those qualities, where there are others who have those qualities.

Rick: Since we’re on this topic, I’ll grab my glasses here. There’s a little section in your book that I just read this morning that I wanted to read and have you comment on. You say:

The universe is teeming with life, not only the physical worlds but the astral ones as well, and even the subtler causal worlds are inhabited by beings who no longer return to Earth, having freed themselves from every earthly desire and karmic tie. There are planes of great darkness and planes of great beauty and light, where beings remain absorbed in the bliss of the one all-pervading consciousness, sending vibrations of love throughout the manifest worlds. It is this love that sustains universes.

So I like that passage. In light of the whole conversation about reincarnation, I think it’s interesting to throw that in too: the whole notion of there being various strata, subtle realms in which beings reside.

It might sound like fanciful New Age ooga-booga, but as we said in the beginning, if the universe really works in a particular way, it behooves us to understand it. Gravity was doing just fine long before Sir Isaac Newton. If this kind of thing that I just read from your book is actually a reality about how the universe functions, as spiritual seekers, it might be good to align with that understanding, or at least hold it as a viable hypothesis that we could contemplate and investigate.

Dena: Most physicists today abide by string theory, which claims that their equations only work in a multidimensional universe, with no fewer than nine dimensions. I’ve been following this a little bit because I think science is on the verge of some breakthroughs. Science keeps discovering more and more about the universe, and I think the discoveries are leading somewhere, although scientists don’t know what dimensions are, they don’t know how to access them, and they don’t know much about them. I even heard a scientist say recently that Einstein’s equations only work in a multidimensional universe. So could they be on the verge of discovering subtler and subtler realms?

We know so little about the mind. There’s always new stuff coming out, but we’re just at the very beginning of understanding what consciousness is. We’re not even at the kindergarten level of understanding it from a scientific point of view.

Now, the yogis, the rishis, and the great masters based their understanding and their realizations on personal experience. They had techniques; they had developed technologies, so to speak—spiritual technologies—that enabled them to speed up evolution. They could go very, very far in terms of developing their mental capacity and understanding, and so they were able to perceive things that we can’t yet perceive.

I think that, as I said earlier, with meditation, you’re not just sitting in the darkness calming yourself. My problem with meditation as it’s being presented in the mindfulness movement is that it’s being dumbed down. It’s presented as if it’s just about stress reduction or relaxation. That’s not what it’s about at all. You can go for a swim, go for a jog, or rock in a hammock. There are lots of things you can do to relax.

I think that, as I said earlier, with meditation, you’re not just sitting in the darkness calming yourself. My problem with meditation as it’s being presented in the mindfulness movement is that it’s being dumbed down. It’s presented as if it’s just about stress reduction or relaxation. That’s not what it’s about at all. You can go for a swim, go for a jog, or rock in a hammock. There are lots of things you can do to relax.

Meditation is about awakening consciousness and understanding what consciousness and life are—what this life is. I have no problem if people want to use it to relax, but they should understand that that’s not all that happens. Maybe it’s a step in the door for people. They start off wanting some stress reduction, and then, before they know it, they’re beginning to understand things in a new light.

Meditation is about awakening consciousness and understanding what consciousness and life are.

Rick: It is, it does. I taught TM for many years, and in the introductory lecture we’d talk a lot about stress reduction, better health, and stuff like that. But once they’d been meditating for four days, we’d be talking about cosmic consciousness. Then they’d say, “Whoa, yeah, I didn’t think about that. That seems possible based on my experience of four days.” So the mundane, practical stuff can be an entry point for some people.

Dena: I think it has been, and I think it’s creating a wave in society that’s going to bring a lot of benefit. Even if a certain percentage of those people go in deeper, it’s going to change their understanding of things, and that’s what we need now. We need a wave to carry us to the next stage.

Rick: What you’re saying about scientists discovering subtler things a minute ago is interesting. I was just listening this morning to an interview by Krista Tippett, who does the On Being program. She was interviewing a physicist who had won the Nobel Prize for something, and he was talking about how Einstein had predicted gravitational waves but thought they could never be detected because they were way, way too subtle. With current technology, they were discovered a couple of years ago.

When you think about it, the kind of subtlety we’re talking about here is not just in terms of physical phenomena. Gravity isn’t actually physical, but it’s not merely about the material universe. It’s about, as your little quote from the book was saying, astral and causal or celestial realms—stuff that scientists wouldn’t dream of being able to explore. But, as you said, the yogis and the mystics have been exploring these realms for thousands of years.

I always like to think of the human nervous system as a kind of scientific instrument which, if properly applied, can aid science in understanding the full range of the universe. By “properly applied,” I would mean applied in a scientific, systematic way—not just hanging on beliefs, but proceeding experientially, step by step, as one goes deeper and deeper and refines the instrument.

Dena: I think it’s very positive that His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist monks are working with scientists to understand what happens in meditation and what changes take place in the brain. I’ve often wondered, when I’m having these memories, whether there are any changes going on in my brain.

The brain is—you can create new grooves. One of the reasons why it’s important for meditation to be regular is that you create new grooves, new patterns, in the brain. So it’s about evolution, really. I think we’re at an evolutionary moment now, and the more people who can participate actively in speeding up this evolution, the more we’ll be able to bring the rest of humanity along—the hundredth monkey.

Rick: People might enjoy the interview I did some years ago with Rick Hanson, who talks a lot about neuroplasticity and how meditation changes the brain over time.

In terms of the hundredth monkey, I’ve said this in other interviews, but there are quite a few examples in nature of how small percentages of a system can influence the whole system. In the heart, for instance, 1 percent of the cells are pacemaker cells. They synchronize the beating of the whole heart. In a laser, the square root of 1 percent of the photons, if they line up coherently, cause the other photons to entrain with them. Then the whole thing becomes one coherent beam, and you get a laser.

Perhaps that is applicable to human systems, in which a relatively small percentage awaken to a degree of spirituality or coherence, and that causes or allows the rest of society to entrain or to fall into line with that higher consciousness.

Dena: I guess our challenge is to keep our eye on the bigger picture and the bigger work and not get distracted by the details, which are very distracting.

Rick: Like you said before, don’t hide your head in the sand. There’s no harm in watching the news and being aware of current events and all that stuff, but don’t let it bum you out, because there’s a brighter picture going on that’s not quite getting reported on the evening news.

Dena: Well, that’s it. There is a brighter picture, and we have to keep reminding each other of that—the fact that there are so many conversations taking place like this.

Ten years ago, we organized a gathering of spiritual teachers to look at the changing spiritual landscape of America. That’s when I saw the integration: churches having sangha meetings and Buddhist practice after their Mass and after their sermons, or whatever. I saw that there was such an integration among a growing population.

Of course, it’s not the majority, but it is a significant population now, whereas it wasn’t a significant population when we were starting out. That’s the positive story that we have, and it’s going to grow. It’s going to grow.

Rick: It continues to grow. I don’t see what could stop it, really. It’s not like meditation is going to be outlawed or anything. We’re not in the Dark Ages, we’re not in the Middle Ages, and we’re not getting burned at the stake for doing this.

Dena: What’s happening is that meditation has moved out from its first group and into all communities now—all communities—which is wonderful, because it’s not just a middle-class phenomenon.

Rick: There are inspiring examples. For instance, I interviewed a woman a couple of months ago named Caverly Morgan, who has become a good friend. She’s got this meditation program started in the Portland public school system, which is having profound effects and transforming the lives of a lot of kids who potentially might have been suicidal, were getting bullied, or were involved in various cliques and gangs and whatnot. It’s bringing them together in harmony, and it’s really inspiring. There’s a video of the whole thing on her website.

Dena: I have to check that out.

Rick: Yeah, Caverly Morgan. You can find her.

Dena: What’s her first name?

Rick: Caverly, like C-A-V-E-R-L-Y, not Calvary, like calling the cavalry, but C-A-V-E-R-L-Y.

Dena: Caverly, okay.

Rick: Caverly, yeah. Anyway, a question came in from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California.

Could you elaborate on your encounter with Yogananda more? Was the encounter in Germany in your previous incarnation?

Dena: Yes.

Rick: You don’t look like you would have been an adult in that incarnation.

Dena: Well, you know, I was a refugee living in Europe. I came in during the Russian Revolution, was living there, and was actually living in Bucharest, Romania. My brother was living in Germany, and I was going back and forth visiting him.

I had taken an interest and had come in contact with the Bhagavad Gita through a library in Germany. I was an avid reader, looking for spiritual information, which was sparse at that time—anything I could get my hands on. This became known about me, and a friend of my brother said, “There’s a yogi here on his way back from America to India. Would you like to go hear him talk?”

It was at a private home somewhere, and I remember with such interest saying, “Yes.” I walked into the room and was just mesmerized. I had no exchange of words with him. He was speaking to a small group of people. I didn’t understand much English. His English was broken and not clear, so it wasn’t even a matter of…

Rick: Yogananda? I thought he spoke good English.

Dena: He spoke good English, and toward the end of his life, even better, but he had an accent. Tapes of his talks have had to be improved using technology because he did have an accent. I mean, he knew how to have a conversation in English, but it was with an accent. If somebody who didn’t know English very well heard him, it would be difficult. But it was the vibration that affected me, and I felt that a moment happened when he glanced at me and something happened in that glance.

After he finished talking, there were people around him. I didn’t have a public role. I was very, very shy. I was a very private person, so I didn’t even go up and greet him. I just quietly left, but it had a great impact on me.

My mother had given me a locket with the Virgin Mary in it before I left Russia, and I took that picture out, wrote down his name, and put that in the locket. Things went downhill after that. A man I was in love with, a Jewish professor, was captured and taken by the Nazis and disappeared. The Jews were being rounded up, and I was briefly held by the Nazis and then let go. I took a train and went to Vienna, and there I got sick.

While I was in a fever, I had a dream in which Yogananda said, “I’m coming to take you to America,” because my aspiration was, “I want to follow this man. I don’t understand what he’s said, but I’ve never been in the presence of someone with such a powerful vibration, such powerful energy.” So I had that dream, and I waited. I thought, “He’s coming to take me to America.” Of course, he didn’t show up, and I kept thinking, “Well, any day now, he’s going to show up.” Then I got sick and died soon after that, and on my deathbed, I saw him, and he said, “I’ve come to take you to America.” I died and was reborn in America, and that was my experience.

Then I found Yogananda in this life when I was nineteen or twenty, when somebody in college handed me Autobiography of a Yogi. All I had to do was see the picture, and I knew that was my guru. So I knew that I had met Yogananda even earlier in my history, before this past birth. In the book, I talk about an earlier encounter with him in one of his earlier births, and I know that it’s a long relationship with him.

Rick: Which one was that? I forgot.

Dena: William the Conqueror.

Rick: Oh, maybe I didn’t get to that yet. Is it at the very end?

Dena: It’s at the end of the book.

Rick: I’ll have to read that tonight. Yogananda was William the Conqueror, you say?

Dena: That’s what the word is. I talk about a different aspect of him. He’s known in history in a certain way, and there were other aspects of him where he was spiritually imbuing the land and putting in the energy that enabled Great Britain to become what it became.

Rick: Interesting. So William the Conqueror was a British king, was he?

Dena: He was French, actually. He lived during a time when the Vikings were conducting a lot of raids, and he came and conquered England, basically, and brought Christianity to England.

The beautiful thing is, I remember being all different religions and different races, and that changes your feeling about those religions and races when you remember being them.

Rick: You don’t recount any lifetimes in which you were a man.

Dena: No, but I do have a memory of being a man. I just don’t have a full narrative. There are a few things that I’ve left out of the book where I just have an image and not a full narrative. So I couldn’t… There was one in particular in which I was a Native American, but it was a very brief life, and I just had a scene that I remembered from it.

Rick: So even now, as you go through your days, are you constantly presented with memories, like little movies popping up in your mind of past lives?

Dena: I am, especially since I’m deep into this other book, which is during the time of Lama Sita. I’m almost finished with that, but I still process things that are in the book. Those memories still emerge every now and then, things that I’ve written about, and I relate them to something that’s happening in my current life or to people.

One of the great lessons for me, I would say, I would narrow it down to three. The first is changing the way I look at death and knowing myself to have a long history and a long future, and knowing that I am the shaper of that. The second is changing my sense of identity so that my attachment to this body and this personality is much weaker. The third thing is the power of love.

The universe operates on this foundation of love. I don’t really separate consciousness from love. I think one of the qualities of consciousness is love. Pure, unadulterated consciousness is this blissful conscious beingness, which we are a part of.

But the beings in the past—my guides and teachers, Yogananda being one of them, and my Sufi father, that Baba—I feel that I’m still connected with them. I feel their love crossing boundaries of time and geography.

Another thing is time. Time is a creation of the mind, and so is space. While I can be in different time periods simultaneously, I’m also in different spatial zones. I often find myself in that in-between place where I have this mentor or spirit guide who often guides me in this life.

It’s not the way it seems. Our mind packages our life into linear time and a very limited spatial zone, and then it all seems very confined and rational. It’s not like that.

Rick: I’ve had people tell me that, in their insight, time isn’t linear and that all the past lives that we have have not been sequential; they’re simultaneous. Somehow, we serve as a filter to give a sequential structure to the universe, but it really doesn’t work that way.

Dena: It doesn’t work that way, that’s my experience, but I don’t quite understand it. When people argue about the word “God,” I say to them, “How can human language or the human mind possibly grasp what is the way it is?”

Individual and collective karma

Rick: That brings up another interesting point, which is that you talk about how complex karma is, both individual and collective. When you think about it, if every little thing that we do has repercussions and ramifications throughout the universe, and it all somehow gets calculated and comes back to us, imagine the computing power that would be required to keep track of all that.

Dena: Phenomenal. I mean, it’s just beyond, beyond, beyond.

Rick: Some people might say, “Well, it couldn’t possibly be, because there couldn’t be that much computing power.” But think about a single cell in your finger and how complex it is. It’s as complex as a modern city, and it also repairs and replicates itself. If that can be orchestrated and managed by some intelligence, and we have sixty trillion of them in our bodies, then why not the whole universe being governed or conducted through a law such as karma?

Dena: The universe is not chaotic. It’s based on law. There are laws that keep everything in order, laws of gravitation that keep things from crashing into each other. It works, and the same thing is true of these spiritual laws. The sooner we understand them, the better off we’ll be.

Rick: Even chaos is governed by law. I gave a talk at the SAND conference a few years ago, and I used that clip from Star Wars where Han Solo took the Millennium Falcon into the asteroid field in order to evade the people working for Darth Vader who were chasing him. All those asteroids that seem to be randomly moving around are abiding perfectly by the laws of nature, and the laws of gravity in that case. Then one of the people chasing him smacked into an asteroid, and I said, “All right, that little bit there was in perfect accordance with the karma of the guy who was driving that ship.” I mean, it’s all just completely perfect, like clockwork.

Dena: It’s like clockwork. It really is. It just gives one a sense of awe. But when you tap into the love, the fact that love is a very real part of the whole thing, we experience that.

I think the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, and we experience it. I think that’s what the human community desperately needs. That’s probably the greatest call right now: to awaken more of that love, because we’ve gotten away from it. Of course, there is still a lot of love in the world, but how do we bring it back into the public space?

Rick: I think it’s kind of happening. We were talking earlier about how things seem dark, but at the same time, some rays of light are shining. So many things—Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, people just not tolerating police brutality anymore—all kinds of things are coming to light, especially with social media and everybody carrying a camera.

Dena: That’s true. You look at the migrant children and how many people have been moved by those stories. You look at the boys in Thailand; the whole world was watching. I think we’ve seen the positive impact of the internet, and now we’re seeing the dark side of the internet. It has a dark side.

It’s the same thing with the atom bomb. There was a positive side to that, too, and then we saw the dark side of it. There are so many technologies waiting in the future that will bring benefits, but they may not come to us until we learn how to reject the dark side of these technologies or manage them better.

Rick: Well, there are technologies even now that could make a huge difference, in terms of alternative energies, for instance.

Dena: Exactly. Yes, that’s the big one.

Rick: They could be applied much more quickly than they are being applied, but there are people who, as you were saying earlier, are looking at the next quarter’s profits and trying to repress them, regardless of what happens to the world, because of their short-sightedness. It’s a matter of broadening our perspective, I guess, and seeing the big picture, being moved by compassion instead of greed, things like that.

Dena: Yes, and realizing that we have a lot of focus on building human unity. That’s what the Interfaith Movement has done, but we’ve got to grow that toward unity with all of life—with the planet, with our forests, with the rivers, with the oceans, with everything—seeing them as part of us, not separate from us.

Rick: Which, of course, is a very spiritual perspective, not an esoteric one. If we’re really all one, then we’re one with the ocean. Why are we putting Texas-sized patches of plastic into it, choking all the fish, bleaching all the coral, and all that stuff? We’re doing it to ourselves.

Dena: Well, I think that’s one of the shifts in consciousness. There are a few shifts in consciousness that could really help us move forward, and one of them is this understanding that we are the oceans.

Rick: And the rainforests, everything.

Dena: Yes, they’re part of our body, and we’re part of them. We need to treat them like part of our body.

Rick: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Dena: Right, yeah.

📚 Ethics, responsibility, and spiritual teachers

Rick: A question came in from Bill from Cork, Ireland. All right, I always get in trouble when I bring up Trump questions, but here we go.

“Hi Dena, right now President Trump is visiting the UK. He has already severely criticized his host, Theresa May. Do you think that, in reality, Trump and Brexit’s gross egotism are giving us all a big wake-up call to the fact that our own individuality is actually equally important to the whole? In other words, it’s Dena and the whole, Rick and the whole, Bill and the whole, my dog Charlie and the whole. I think we have forgotten that our own individuality is of equal importance. What do you think?”

Dena: Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way. I know a lot of us are reflecting deeply on what the message is. What’s the wake-up call? We know it’s a wake-up call. I have thought of it as both karmically a return for things that we’ve done and as bringing up the darkness that has been hiding out in people’s subconscious. But could it be a wake-up call that we are part of the whole? It could be, yeah.

The Spiritual Meaning of Human Dignity

I guess the way I interpret this question is that everyone matters, no matter how apparently insignificant or small. I mean, I’ve heard people say, “Well, you know, we have to sacrifice the individual for this great cause.” Maybe that’s a heroic sentiment if you’re a soldier or something, but everybody has intrinsic value. We can’t treat people like objects or like garbage, or as disposable, and so on.

Rick: I guess the way I interpret this question is that everyone matters, no matter how apparently insignificant or small. I mean, I’ve heard people say, “Well, you know, we have to sacrifice the individual for this great cause.” Maybe that’s a heroic sentiment if you’re a soldier or something, but everybody has intrinsic value. We can’t treat people like objects or like garbage, or as disposable, and so on.

As you were saying earlier, our economic systems tend to do that. They’re structured that way: a tiny fraction of the world’s population having tremendous wealth, and a huge percentage struggling. So, you know, if we’re all…

Dena: I think everyone is equally important, and that’s one of the imbalances in our society, as you just said: giving importance just to a handful of people. That’s going to reverberate. I mean, that’s going to bring a karmic return that’s ugly. Until we get the message that everyone is equally important and we have to care for everybody, then…

You can’t treat people like they’re… call people names as if they’re not conscious beings. This attitude that there are people who are important and everybody else is not important is being shoved in our face. It’s being shoved in our face, and we have to reject it. We have to state that in a positive way. So how do you turn that negative energy into a positive?

Rick: Sometimes when topics like this come up in interviews, I get feedback from people saying, “You know, stop talking about this political stuff and this social stuff. Stick to spirituality.” This is spirituality.

Dena: It is spirituality.

Rick: Spirituality is all-inclusive. It’s the whole enchilada, you know? It’s not just some pie-in-the-sky, esoteric, hide-in-an-ashram kind of thing. It has tremendous relevance to all the issues that confront us.

Dena: And things are being done in our name. Things are being done in our name, and I know—I think some people respond with anger, and some people respond with pain. My experience has been just pain, pain at the pain that’s being caused.

You know, the children, the toddlers who are being separated from their parents—I mean, that’s causing pain to Americans. A lot of us are suffering as a result of that, and that suffering needs to be acknowledged. Things that are being done in our name are causing suffering to the American people, and that’s a very real thing that needs to be acknowledged.

The problem is that we had the experience, not so long ago, of World War II, when people did not speak up. People didn’t speak up; the Church didn’t speak up. There are people still alive who remember that period, and then people who remember it from their past birth. That’s still in our collective memory.

What is the lesson we’re supposed to learn from that? That we have to speak up, and what we have to speak of—not with anger, but with a sense of, “This is not right. This is not dharmic.” In order to create a society that’s based on proper values, we have to bring to public mind what those values are. It’s not name-calling, it’s not lying, it’s not cheating, and it’s not abusing public funds. We have to speak up about this; otherwise, we’re creating a society that’s built on false values.

Rick: A related point—I don’t know how attuned to this whole thing you are—is that I’ve been involved with a group of people who are attempting to draft a code of ethics for spiritual teachers, because there are a lot of unethical things that have been done in the name of spirituality. I’ve just written a whole essay about it. I’ll share it with you if you like.

Dena: I would like that, yes.

Rick: It’s one of those things whose time has come, as with the Me Too movement. So many people have been puzzled or have been kind of accepting severe abuse, alcoholism, and sexual misconduct from spiritual teachers as something that they just can’t understand: “He’s enlightened and I’m ignorant, and he’s inscrutable, and it must be a crazy-wisdom teaching or something.” Forget it. The time for that kind of behavior has ended.

Dena: It’s over. I wouldn’t even call them spiritual teachers. I would say so-called spiritual teachers, because when you’re causing harm to somebody, you’re not a spiritual teacher.

People who have claimed to be at a state that they’re clearly not at—and students, I mean, how are students to judge this? They may have a certain spiritual attainment, but certainly not at the level where they behave in a way that brings benefit instead of causing harm to people. To me, that’s the barometer. If you’re not being truthful, if you’re not being honest, if you’re causing harm to people, then…

This is more of a—well, I guess it’s always existed, but there’s been a… It’s been a phenomenon that’s been going on for… I think it’s caused a lot of the great spiritual leaders to go into retreat. You can hardly find them anymore. They’re not in the marketplace.

Rick: Here’s a paragraph I just wrote this morning. I’ll run it by you. It said:

I think that prospective students are entitled and even obligated to evaluate teachers. One question to ask is, “Do I want to become like this person?” If he’s an alcoholic, a sexual predator, et cetera, are those qualities I wish to embody? One might argue that one can learn a lot from a person without mirroring his personality. That may be true of a mathematics professor, but is less so of a spiritual teacher. The spiritual aspirant entrains with the personality and consciousness of the teacher. The scenes around some of these bad-boy teachers—drinking, sexual promiscuity, and so on—spirituality is all about attaining inner clarity. Our behavior reflects our inner state. What inner state does debauchery reflect? Think about it.

Dena: I’m so glad you’re doing this, because it’s much, much needed now. It’s been needed for a long time. Too many students have gotten hurt, and then what does it do? It casts a cloud on the whole spiritual movement.

It’s been too easy now for people to write off teachers from the East, saying, “Look what they do,” and so not to even have a sense of responsibility for the tradition you’re representing. I mean, there is that responsibility there. When you put yourself out as a teacher, if you’ve got human flaws, fine—go work out your issues—but don’t represent a tradition.

Rick: Of course, some venerable traditions have fairly strict guidelines as to who is qualified to be a teacher. People like Buddha, Shankara, and Ramana, and so on, didn’t just send anybody out willy-nilly to teach. They made sure that they were really qualified.

Dena: I’ve seen too many people—because you and I both work in this world—who want to be teachers. As soon as there’s the desire to be a teacher, that already says something.

Rick: It should almost disqualify them. I’m sort of joking, because some people are legitimately qualified, and that’s their dharma, and they should do it.

Dena: Yeah, and there are all levels of teachers. I mean, you know, certainly you can receive help from people at all different stages on the spiritual path.

Rick: All right, enough on that point. If you have time, there is one other thing that you’ve devoted a fair amount of time to, and I thought it might be interesting to discuss it a little bit. You’ve convened meetings of Buddhist and Hindu monks and yogis, and so on, to contrast their understandings and experience of the self—whether there’s no self or all self, or whatever. How did that go, and what are some reflections on that debate?

Dena: Well, it’s interesting, because the yogis would come to the point of saying, “We agree with you. There’s no difference,” and the Buddhists would insist, “No, there is a difference.”

Rick: Were the Buddhists a little bit more stubborn or something?

Dena: I think so. I think they want to distinguish themselves from the Hindus, but in actuality, the place that we came to was that it’s all a matter of language. What do you mean by self? It’s all language, you know?

I mean, I see the vision—the yogic vision is no different from the Buddhist vision that I’ve heard—but it’s described in different terms, with different ways of getting there. The end result, I’ve seen no difference, and most of my swami friends and yogi friends agree with that.

But it’s harder for me to get the Buddhists to see that, and I think that there’s kind of a built-in attachment coming from the Buddha’s time that the Hindus don’t quite get the end result, as long as there is the concept of the self. So it comes down to: What is the self?

The self is no different from… I have a very dear friend, Tenzin Palmo. I don’t know if you know her. She’s a Buddhist nun and has a nunnery in Dharamsala. I had this conversation with her once, and she’s one of the few who said, “Of course there’s no difference.” She said, “Of course there’s a primordial consciousness.”

So I said to myself, “Well, that’s the answer.” I don’t use the term “God,” but I use more Vedic terms. It’s about this primordial consciousness. I mean, what is the self but that primordial consciousness appearing to divide itself into the many? That’s what it means. There’s only one, but there’s the appearance of many. We’re not separate from that in the ultimate sense.

Rick: This is a good point. There have been so many fights and actual literal wars over these subtle distinctions—I mean, whether God is formless or has form. You went through a couple of different lifetimes where you had to experience both directions, both perspectives.

Dena: And both are true.

Rick: Yeah, they’re both true. Certs is a candy mint; Certs is a breath mint. Both.

Dena: That’s right. Everybody gets to be right.

Life themes and the next incarnation

Rick: All righty. Well, do you feel like anything—I mean, there are a lot of things I could keep bringing up. There are all kinds of cool things in your book. There are certain themes that you kind of carried from one life to the next, like one of those races in the Olympics where they hand the baton off to the next runner, and then that person keeps running.

There are certain things that happened in your Russian life that then moved into your next life, and so on, and there’s a logical kind of sequence to it. I don’t know if you want to talk about some specific examples of that, or if you feel like wrapping it up. I’m good either way.

Dena: Well, there were two themes that it was interesting for me to become aware of. One was the theme of finding my own voice and confidence as a woman, and looking to find full spiritual flowering in a woman, which I eventually found in Africa. My shaman teacher was a woman, but that was the theme.

When I found myself, I was not particularly involved in the feminist movement as a young girl because I was mostly seeking to develop my spiritual practice, so I wasn’t a feminist. I was active in the civil rights movement and in the anti-war movement, and then I withdrew a little bit and really spent a lot of time studying the texts. So I wasn’t very active as a feminist, but then when I found myself working with women’s spiritual teachers, I would often say, “How did I get into this?” I do want to help, and I do want to provide a platform, but how did I get into this?

Also, I was not interested in religion; I was interested in my own spiritual practice. So how did I get into working in the interfaith? I got to work with rabbis again? I was born Jewish, turned away from that, and so I wondered about these two things: working with women’s spiritual teachers and working in interfaith. When I look back, I saw that these two themes came up again and again.

Well, I was in situations where I had to bridge cultures. One was in India, when I was married as a Hindu to a Muslim king, a sheikh, and I had to be some kind of bridge. Then again in Japan, between warring clans, I had to be some kind of bridge. So these themes of finding my voice as a woman and finding my spiritual potential as a woman, on the one hand, and then trying to bridge cultures and find a meeting place, on the other hand, really came to completion in this life as Dena. So maybe that work is done.

Rick: Do you ever have a feeling that there might be something in your current life that you are nowhere near really resolving or working out, and that might be the theme of your next life?

Dena: Yes. Deep meditation. I’ve always had the desire for a more reclusive life, and I’ve found myself, or been thrust into, however you want to say it, a life of a lot of activity. I’m a social activist; I’m engaged in climate issues and environmental issues, mentoring young people, and a lot of other issues. I say to myself, “If only I could be in an ashram. Where’s my ashram? I want my ashram.” I think I’ll find my ashram. I’ll get to the ashram the next time around.

Rick: Cool. Another question came in. This is from Goryana from Belgrade, Serbia. She asks—I presume that’s a woman’s name—”Based on your meditation experience in terms of accessing past lives and finding a guru, is there validity in accessing past lives and a guru through a dreaming state?” I guess she’s wondering, can we have these experiences in dreams?

Dena: Yes, absolutely. As a matter of fact, the way my awakening happened was through dreams. I moved into a house when I was 30, and for the next 10 years I began dreaming of another house. It was always the same place, and I’d wake up with a sense of longing: “Oh, I’ve been there again,” and a sense of sadness. As my memories awakened, I realized this was a house that I had lived in as a child in Russia.

Dreams—things come to me in dreams very often, actually. Dreams are a portal, and I can’t control when it’s going to happen, but I would say yes, you definitely can access your past and higher states in dreams.

Rick: You’re more open.

Dena: You’re more open, yeah.

Rick: Irene just scribbled down a note here. I’m sure you’re familiar with this notion that it’s said in the Vedic tradition that the last thought at the time of death determines your next life, and that your last thought is determined by your deepest impression, which sort of sets the agenda for the next time around.

Dena: That’s right, yeah. So it’s useful to think—in addition to one’s meditation practices, I think a time of reflection, of looking at what those deepest impressions and deepest aspirations are, is very useful, because we should be conscious that we are shaping our future.

Rick: I know that in contemporary India sometimes the thinking has been, well, spirituality is for old people. You should be a student, get married, pursue your business career, raise your kids, and then when you get old you can get into that last stage of life and think about spirituality. But it’s really a lifelong undertaking, and it’s not only compatible with all these other stages of life, but is actually conducive to their success.

Dena: Well, as you said, you can’t separate it.

Rick: Right.

Dena: Your work is your sadhana; your work is your spiritual practice, and work should be looked upon that way, as part of your spiritual practice. Everything we do is part of our spiritual practice. To separate your spiritual practices—to think that the only spiritual practice is the time that I’m on the cushion—well, that’s a very short part of the day. We don’t want to limit it to that. We want everything—the way we deal with our children, the way we deal with our spouse—to be part of our spiritual awareness and practice.

Rick: Irene just—oh, maybe that’s just—now I’ve got to say it, because I already started saying it. She just said, based upon this thing of deepest impression, in her next incarnation she’s either going to be a dog or a TV. [Laughter]

Dena: A dog’s life with a good owner is not bad.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, we’ve had some that are very lucky—lucky dogs. All righty, well, this has been really fun, Dena.

Dena: It’s been great. I enjoyed it too, very much.

Rick: Thank you so much. It was a very interesting week reading your book; I’ve really gotten into it.

Dena: Joining me on my journey, huh?

Rick: I look forward to reading the next one.

Dena: Okay, yeah, the next one’s going to be interesting.

Rick: All right, well, it’s great to talk to you, and I hope we connect again.

Now, don’t just disconnect. I want to make a couple of concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Dena Merriam, and this is part of an ongoing series of interviews. So, if you’d like to be notified of future ones, please go to www.batgap.com , where there’s a place to sign up for email notifications. You can also subscribe on YouTube, and I guess YouTube notifies you when there’s a new one.

If you go to www.batgap.com, explore the menus, because there are several things there you might find interesting. So, thanks for listening and watching, and thanks again, Dena. We’ll see you all next week.