Ishtar (Thomas Howell) Transcript: NDE, Ascension Meditation, and Subtle Realms

Ishtar (Thomas Howell) Interview

Summary

The conversation explores unusual spiritual perceptions from childhood, including samadhi-like states, encounters with apparitions, and communication through intuition. It also considers how sensitivity changes over time, how such experiences can be handled, and whether spiritual development may carry momentum across lifetimes.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How should unusual spiritual experiences in childhood be understood?
• How can someone respond to frightening or unsettling paranormal experiences?
• Are mystical or paranormal experiences necessary for spiritual awakening?
• Can spiritual sensitivity change or fade over the course of life?
• Might spiritual momentum or past-life tendencies shape a person’s development?

Key takeaways

• Paranormal experiences can be meaningful without being accepted uncritically.
• Spiritual awakening does not depend on seeing spirits or having unusual perceptions.
• Opening to love can dissolve fear in difficult encounters.
• Spiritual sensitivity may lessen as ordinary identity and mental conditioning develop.
• A committed spiritual life can change how subtle experiences unfold.
• Past-life influence and spiritual momentum are possibilities to examine, not beliefs to adopt blindly.

Transcript

Welcome and introduction

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. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and would like to support it, even in a modest way, we really appreciate it. It enables us to put as much time into it as we do, which is a heck of a lot of time.

My guest today is Ishtar, whose birth name is Thomas Howell. Ishtar was recommended to me by a couple of good friends, Sarah Taylor and Susanne Marie, both of whom have been on BatGap. Based on my respect for them, I decided to get to know Ishtar.

He came to the Science and Non-Duality Conference, and we’ve had some good adventures there. We came down to Sedona together. We’re in Sedona, by the way, at the home of Nirmala and Gina Lake, both of whom have also been on BatGap. We’re going to be taking some hikes and doing this and that.

But I wanted to interview Ishtar, and getting to know him has been interesting. He is kind of a… What do they call those people who are really good at a lot of things? Not a polyglot—that’s language.

Ishtar: Polymath.

Rick: Polymath.

Ishtar: I call myself a dilettante.

Rick: He’s somewhere between a dilettante and a polymath. On the airplane, he gave me a detailed account of why and how the Roman Empire collapsed. We talked about all the potential Democratic candidates and the strengths and weaknesses of each one. He mainly talked; I just don’t have such detailed information.

He happened to be, at one point, a professional drummer. I was a semiprofessional drummer myself—very semi. And he’s a gourmet chef, although he says he’s out of practice on that, among a number of other things, which I would discover if I got to know him better.

He has all these relative interests and areas of expertise. I say that to emphasize that he’s definitely got a foot in the real world—the so-called real world—because a lot of the stuff we’re going to talk about today might seem like it all relates to some unreal world, or a world which many people would consider merely imaginary.

I just want to contrast that with the practical side of him and his life, so you realize he’s not just total woo-woo. He’s very well integrated, I would say, with a great sense of humor. We’ve been joking around about this, that, and the other thing. Anyway, you’ll get to know him better as we have this conversation.

There are many subtle realms. There are phenomena that take place in these subtle realms, happening all around us and in our midst, of which the vast majority of us are oblivious.

Regarding the woo-woo side of it, as you may know if you’ve watched many of my interviews, I’m very open-minded about the all-possibilities nature of the universe. Just about anything anybody were to say to me, I would not necessarily believe it or disbelieve it. I would take it as a hypothesis that had varying degrees of probability of being true. Some of the things we will be talking about are way up on the scale of probably true, in my opinion.

My understanding, and to some extent my experience, of creation and life is that it is multidimensional. There’s much more to it than meets the eye. Some people have—and Jesus was always saying, “If you have the eyes to see it,” or “the ears to hear it,” or something along those lines—statements that imply our assessment of the world is very much dependent upon our subjective ability to perceive and understand.

That was a big revelation to me when I was about 17 years old. I kind of thought the world was what it was, and then I took LSD for the first time and realized that the world is vastly different for different people according to how they experience it.

I went into a doughnut shop in the morning, and my mind was amazed at how the doughnut-selling ladies were probably perceiving the world compared to how I was perceiving it at that point. They had the advantage in terms of being able to function and sell doughnuts. I don’t think I would have been able to do that just then.

In any case, I’m getting a little long-winded here. But there are many subtle realms. That’s what I’m alluding to. There are phenomena that take place in these subtle realms, happening all around us and in our midst, of which the vast majority of us are oblivious.

Certain people, Ishtar being one, have been tuned into these subtle realms—or at least some portions of them—ever since childhood, really. His life has been an interesting adventure of functioning on these subtler levels as well as functioning on mundane, practical levels. It continues to be such to this day.

I’m thinking that in this interview we’ll take a chronological, biographical approach, which we don’t always do. Sometimes I don’t talk much about the person’s life; we just plunge in and talk about their ideas, their awakening, or whatever.

But in your case, your life has been so interesting, and from infancy, practically, there are things you remember and things you did that I think it would be fascinating for people to hear in some detail. So let’s start as early as you would like to start, with anything that began to happen to you as a young child that perhaps wasn’t happening to other kids your age.

Ishtar: Sure, yeah. Of course, I really had no idea until much later that that was the case—that other people were having different experiences. And I didn’t particularly…

Rick: Yeah, a lot of people say that. I thought everybody saw angels, and then I started talking about it at school, and they thought I was crazy or something.

Ishtar: Yeah, you basically accept the world that you come into. You don’t question it a whole lot. I think that, for one, with the early memories, I didn’t know that they were odd until maybe my AP Psychology course in high school.

Rick: Early memories meaning being able to remember things?

Ishtar: Stuff you ought not to remember. I had a lot of spiritual experiences early on—experiences of samadhi. I obviously didn’t have any words for any of this; I didn’t have any words yet. I would just sit in my crib and sense that I was in this vast presence.

I loved my mornings. I would get up well before my parents would, before the sun would come out, and I would just sit in my crib and chill out. Sometimes I would watch my curtains, but they weren’t just curtains for me. They had this… They were like a sort of dancing emanation of this subtle thing that I felt connected to.

It was very pleasurable. There would be these waves of joy, pleasure, and appreciation when I would sort of play with this awareness, as I might call it now.

There were all sorts of other kinds of experiences that happened in that little realm of the crib. I think I probably met my great-grandmother, who was deceased.

Of course, with all of this stuff, I was taught that having an imagination was good. So, as a kid, I just put everything in the large folder of imagination. I think that sort of allowed me to keep those perceptions and not repress them, as I think many children learn to do. They’re quite sensitive to what their parents say, even offhandedly.

Of course, with all of this stuff, I was taught that having an imagination was good. So, as a kid, I just put everything in the large folder of imagination. I think that sort of allowed me to keep those perceptions and not repress them, as I think many children learn to do. They’re quite sensitive to what their parents say, even offhandedly.

I was sitting in my crib, and this lady came through the doorway. That was normal enough. At first I thought, “Grandma!” But she was shorter than Grandma. She had similar curly white hair, a blue nightgown, and a white lace collar. She just sort of walked by my crib.

I was watching her, and she didn’t look at me, but I felt that she was kind of reaching out to me in a certain sense. I wasn’t afraid at all. I just watched her, kept watching, and then she did something rather unexpected: She walked through the wall of my bedroom.

That got me quite excited. I thought, “Whoa! When I can get out of this crib, I’m going to do that!” That was the plan. That was what was going to happen.

A few years later—I must have been three or something like that—I was sitting on my mother’s lap, and we were going through a family picture album. We turned the page, and there was this lady in a blue nightgown with a white lace collar, curly hair, and the same face.

I was like, “Aha! Oh, that’s your great-grandmother.” My mother said, “She would have really loved you.”

Rick: So she died long before you were born?

Ishtar: She died a year before I was born. We missed each other by about 18 months, I’d say.

So, yeah, that was one of the sort of… Maybe I kind of wanted to be a mystic in some way. She wanted to go into the mystical, but she didn’t quite really dive into it.

Rick: She did? In her life?

Ishtar: In her life, yeah. In some ways, I felt a little bit like—at least in the family dynamic that I was picking up—that I was taking up somebody else’s work in the family, and she was one of them.

Rick: Cool. All right. What’s another experience?

Ishtar: Well, we’ve talked about these all before, so I’ll have to…

Rick: Well, yeah, but these people haven’t seen it. So just pretend you’ve never talked to me about this stuff.

Ishtar: Yeah, of course. Well, I used to have a lot of beings sort of walk into my room as a kid. Later, I would put the label “ghosts” on them, or “discarnate beings.” I think there were various types of beings. There were maybe discarnate spirits, and there were beings that were a little more what we might call angelic. They had a brighter light about them, and they would kind of come in and descend and visit.

But the spirits were, I think, the most frequent visitors as a child, and I wasn’t wholly comfortable with it. So I had to do things to protect my psyche. I didn’t want to overload my nervous system.

At age six, for instance, I had a really deep interest in Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes, the series from the ’80s. I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes for a while. It happened that my mother was also a big lover of Sherlock Holmes, and years before, when she was in England, she’d bought a proper deerstalker hat and a costume.

Rick: A pipe.

Ishtar: A pipe. I had a pipe. So I figured, “Okay, I want to be like Sherlock Holmes, except maybe kind of psychic and maybe like a Jedi, too.” I would deal with these spirits as if I were working on their case.

I would dress up as Sherlock Holmes. I turned my room into something as close as I could make it to a Victorian consulting detective’s office. I had to use a lot of imagination there, but I would sit down, and then I would have this being come and sit down.

Using Vastness to Clear Discarnate Presences

I would close my eyes and go into this vast spaciousness, which I knew. Then somehow I would instinctively project it into the room and put it right in front of the discarnate being. When I would open my eyes, the room would feel spotlessly clean. There would be this sense of upliftment in the air, and there would be no more spirit. This kind of went on for a while.

Rick: Like you helped them transition?

Ishtar: Yeah, that was the idea. That’s what I wanted to do.

Rick: Was it kind of like The Sixth Sense, where they knew you could see them, and so they came around more than they would come around another person?

Ishtar: I would say that. Thankfully, it wasn’t so scary as that movie. Nobody was grabbing my leg…

Rick: No one had their head blown off or anything.

Ishtar: Nobody had their head blown off. Nobody was vomiting green stuff on me or anything like that. It wasn’t so graphic and scary, and I was kind of wanting to avoid that, in a certain sense. So I would do all sorts of things to try to create parameters about who would come in. Sometimes, there were a couple of occasions where I would sort of commandeer, or strongly request, a spirit to sort of say, “Okay, if you don’t want to transition, watch the door. Watch the door, and make sure that only one comes at a time.”

Rick: Yeah, there was one particular guy that you assigned to that task.

Ishtar: That’s right. He was the longest-serving in that function.

Rick: How did you actually communicate with these beings? I mean, was it in English? Was it just telepathy without any language, or what?

Ishtar: It was both, but it was primarily kind of telepathy without any language.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: It was often in pictures and sort of geometric thought forms.

Rick: But somehow it would encapsulate the message?

Ishtar: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think I was a particularly good medium, like some people maybe. I’m kind of broad strokes, maybe not the fine stuff. So it was mainly almost binary. It would break down to, like, “Want to transition” or “Don’t want to transition?”

Rick: That one didn’t want to?

Ishtar: No. Yeah, you could tell he didn’t want to hang around.

Rick: And then, did you tell any of your friends or your parents about what you were doing?

Ishtar: No, not at all.

Rick: It was totally a private thing?

Ishtar: Mainly private. Mainly private. Sometimes, I think I mentioned it, and it would kind of be like, “Oh, what a wonderful imagination!”

Rick: Yeah. All right.

Ishtar: Okay? Thank you.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. So, how many years did this go on?

Ishtar: Well, let’s see. It was particularly strong at age three. Well, two? I mean, actually, it was probably stronger than I thought it was before that. But three, four, five, six, seven. Then, at about age seven and eight, my sensitivity started to become less consistent. I would still feel the things going on, and I think they could sense that I was feeling what was happening.

But I was growing up, like people do. I was developing the ego structure, I was falling asleep, and I would even say I was kind of conscious of that. I would say, like, “Hey, you know, you can tell I’m getting worse at this. So I don’t know if I’m going to be of particular help, and I would rather sleep tonight because this gets a little bit nervy for me.”

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: You know, feeling you over there. Please go!

Rick: So you mean they would keep you awake in the past?

Ishtar: Yeah. Well, my nervous system would kind of just feel…

Rick: Yeah, it would be kind of keyed up from it.

Ishtar: Keyed up and agitated. It wasn’t comfortable to have the hair on my neck standing up at all hours and then have the sense of thought forms coming into my emotional body. I would just feel different things, and have this feeling: “I don’t think this was produced by this life. This is somebody else here. That does not feel like my story.”

Rick: Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like it was kind of good that it shut down, finally.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah. It would reappear whenever there were periods when I would be more in the Presence.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: It would just happen that I would be more in the Presence and the clouds would lift for periods, and then the sensitivity would come back. Like, okay, it’s the price you have to pay, because when I would be more in the Presence, life would move much nicer.

Rick: Yeah. And so, when it shut down, I guess you told me you told that door guard guy, “Okay, your time is up. We don’t need you to do this anymore.”

Ishtar: He stayed on…

Rick: It’s kind of poignant.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah. Well, he actually stayed on through age seventeen. I still had enough activity after age eight that I kind of wanted somebody to minimize it.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: Because the activity I did get, I was worse at dealing with.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: Things really sort of shut down when I made a very big shift in my life. I decided I was going to jump into the spiritual path in a very committed way. I was going to throw my hat into this ring fully. I basically got rid of most of my possessions and turned my room into a little ashram.

Then, three mornings in a row, I had visitations from three different spirits.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: Each one of those visitations was kind of like a goodbye. It played out in the same way. I’d be waking up, and as soon as my eyes would open, I would see a particular being walking towards me.

The first one was, I think, Mexican. He had a shirt that looked like it was from the ’50s or the ’70s, some sort of garish colors that they liked in those two decades—a certain red and a certain green and yellow, or something like that. He was quite friendly, and there was a sense of a heart connection. Something hit my heart and was like, “Thank you. We’ve enjoyed being here with you, and we’re going to go now. We’re going.”

Then the second one was a rather stern lady who I’d seen before. She would freak me out sometimes because she just had a permanent frown on, a scowl. She was one of those where, after a while, I kind of got used to her: “Oh, she has a scowl, but she means well below that.” Like, okay, instant freak-out, but she means well. She was dressed in what looked like Edwardian wear and had a very tender, like…

Rick: Kind of like the old aunt in Pride and Prejudice. You know, it turned out in the end to be a good…

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah. So she left, and then the third one came to me in a much different fashion. Those two, I think, were discarnates who might have been bound to the house in some way, or the property, or somehow found their way there.

Then the third one was a fellow who—I don’t know if I ought to call him a demon or just someone who was particularly troubled—but when I met him, he was quite dark-feeling. Thankfully, I’d had a previous experience where a similar sort of entity had peered into my room and kind of terrified me. Then a voice from my heart came up and said, “Just open to love. Open to love,” and that seemed the best option at the time.

So that’s what I did, and that ran away. After that, I knew how to deal with these beings. This being came to me, and I kind of just, off the top of my head, said, “Hey! Yeah, I know your ilk! And guess what? Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to watch that door for me, and you’re going to do a job!”

Rick: He became your dog.

Ishtar: He became my door guy and did a damn good job at it. That place was really clean. I mean, I think a demon—I don’t know what he was, but it felt like a he—was probably a pretty good door guy.

Rick: He had a certain intimidation factor.

Ishtar: I had myself my own tough guy. So that thing came to me, and when they first came to me, they were like an undifferentiated mass. I could see no features. I could feel a bunch of stuff. But when they left, it was as if they had been taking a shower for eight years.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: You could see streaks of other beingness coming through. That was especially heartfelt…

Rick: So it was real evolutionary time for them.

Ishtar: I’m taking it to be so, because they told me, “Thank you.” They said just the same as the others: “It’s been really wonderful doing this, and guess what? I’m going on to something much better.”

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: “See you later. You don’t need us anymore, because once you turn this place into an ashram, a whole different set of possibilities sort of comes into being, and you won’t be bothered anymore.”

Just open to love. Open to love.

🛤️ Spiritual momentum and the search for a path

Rick: That’s great. That’s interesting. Okay, so I just want to interject that I think the relevance of this to the whole BatGap theme—which is spiritually awakening people, the whole topic of spiritual awakening and spirituality, and what’s real and what isn’t, and all that—is that most people, myself included, and many others—most others—are not going to have experiences like this. And that’s okay. It’s not at all necessary.

No one should get the idea that if they don’t have experiences like this, they’re missing the boat, or they’re not as enlightened as somebody who is having experiences like this, or any such thing. But there’s a certain segment of the “spiritual population,” so to speak, who do have experiences like this.

I don’t think it’s helpful for them to just sort of brush it aside and say, “Oh, it’s just an illusion,” or, “Oh, you have an overactive imagination.” If people say—whatever people’s experience—they should be met with respect and not necessarily complete credulity. We don’t have to… I mean, some people do have vivid imaginations.

Ishtar: Yes.

Rick: You don’t necessarily want to indulge in that. But many sincere people might be having such experiences, and I’ve talked to some, and they were kind of freaked out by it. Jac O’Keeffe, when she first got into spirituality, was sitting in a pub in Dublin having a beer with friends. She had no kind of spiritual background or anything, and all of a sudden, she kind of shifted into astral perception. She saw all these spooks in the room.

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: As I recall, she ran outside the pub and was leaning against the wall: “Oh, my God, what just happened?” So…

Ishtar: One funny thing is that, at about age seven, I was having these experiences, but I sort of became a philosophical atheist. That was weird, because…

Rick: A clash of worldviews?

Ishtar: Yeah. I thought, “Scientific materialism. That makes sense.” But at the same time, I was having all these things and saying, “Okay, all right.”

Rick: It’s funny that you would shift into that philosophy, because obviously your whole life had been about the fact that there’s more than materiality to the world.

Ishtar: In my case, it was rather a fact.

Rick: Was it a rebellion against all the subtle stuff?

Ishtar: I think it was a rebellion, actually. It was more to do with my upbringing. It was a rebellion against what I was learning in history about the history of religions, and…

Rick: And this is at the age of seven or eight? I mean, when I was eight years old, scientific materialism or atheism—all this stuff would have been way over my head. I was just thinking about whatever. I was going fishing, riding my bicycle, and playing baseball in the neighborhood, not particularly liking school or thinking about anything very deeply.

So it’s kind of cool that you were mature enough to be thinking deep thoughts at that age.

Ishtar: Yeah, I think we kind of hit the ground running, in a certain sense. I think I was always very enthusiastic to be born and alive, and always had a sense of a real wind at my back. I wanted to run as fast as I could to sort of keep up with it.

Rick: That’s pretty neat. I mean, it’s worth mentioning that people do come into this life at different levels of evolution, with different degrees of spiritual momentum. And if there has been a very strong momentum established in a previous life, one can just sort of hit the ground running, as you said.

And there’s an example of a statement that—you don’t need to believe this. Certainly don’t believe it because I said it, but take it as an interesting hypothesis you can explore. Is there such a thing as spiritual momentum? Are there such things as past lives? Do we carry lessons learned and inclinations reinforced from one life to another? It’s interesting to think about this stuff.

Ishtar: Yeah. Once I heard about those concepts—I think I came across reincarnation maybe at age seven, from one of those Time-Life book series or something like that—it had deep resonance, because I had been thinking, “Why do I have all these… Why am I obsessed with Abraham Lincoln, for instance, or these moments in history?”

Then later on, looking back at my life, I had a lot of experiences of just going into the silence, without doing anything in particular to make it happen. I would close my eyes. Even later, between ages eight and thirteen, which was kind of an ego-development time, if I got in a real pinch, I would just instinctively sit down and close my eyes. Somehow, my awareness would—my mind would—quiet and go into this big vastness.

If I was really frazzled, that’s what I would do. I could come out of that and then just go about things in a more coherent kind of manner.

Rick: Yeah. That is so cool. I mean, it’s like you intuitively knew what to do.

And obviously, it kind of seems like you probably had that habit in the past.

Ishtar: Yeah. So I think something must have been there. There were silly little, trivial things, like—I loved, as many people in my generation did, the Ghostbusters cartoon. I would get up early in the morning to watch it before the rest of my family. One day I was watching it, and one of the characters—they were trying to find something, and one of the characters decided to sit down and said a line like, “I know. If you just stay in one place, the whole world will come to you.”

When I heard that line, it was just like a whoosh! I was immediately sent back into this sense of vastness, and my awareness was everywhere. It rang like a bell for the rest of the day.

There was another time I was at a youth-camp-type thing. They had you climb ropes and do team-building exercises, trying to trust people that you should never trust with your life. I was doing this thing called the Jacob’s Ladder, and something deep inside me, when I was doing it, just threw me—it clicked on somehow, like how to do it properly. It helped me relax completely, let go, and go into the silence.

So I did, and I ended up climbing it upside down, which was not the way you were supposed to do it. But that was the only effective way to do it, it turned out. Something about that experience sent me into this quiet state, too.

I had these little moments throughout my childhood that were just kind of reminding me and pushing me in that direction. I just didn’t put them at the center—the central context—of my life until a couple of years later.

If you just stay in one place, the whole world will come to you.

Rick: Yeah, you know, the whole story of the Bhagavad Gita is that Arjuna, this great warrior, is about to fight a battle. Unfortunately, the armies were arranged such that he had some dear relatives and respected elders in the opposing army. So he had this moral dilemma. On the one hand, it was his duty to fight this battle. On the other hand, he didn’t have the heart to fight these people. He was in a quandary.

He just sat down in his chariot and said, “I don’t know what to do.” Lord Krishna, in a nutshell, after saying many other things, basically said, “Transcend. Be without the three gunas”—Nishtrigunyo bhava Arjun.

Turning to the Absolute for Relative Problems

So the solutions to intractable or insoluble relative problems can often be found by taking recourse to the absolute. It’s not like you get down there and it’s, “Oh, here’s the solution: XYZ.” It’s more that you reach a more resolute or fundamental level of functioning or awareness, and from there, spontaneously, the right course of action will ensue.

So the solutions to intractable or insoluble relative problems can often be found by taking recourse to the absolute. It’s not like you get down there and it’s, “Oh, here’s the solution: XYZ.” It’s more that you reach a more resolute or fundamental level of functioning or awareness, and from there, spontaneously, the right course of action will ensue.

Ishtar: Yeah, absolutely. And shall I keep going through my life?

Rick: Yeah. I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about the scientific-materialism phase. Did you have it worked out—the logic of it and everything—and were you having little arguments with your friends?

Ishtar: Well, I kind of found out that not everybody was keen on going to the logical points.

Rick: Yeah, a bunch of eight-year-old kids… “Boring, dude!”

Ishtar: Neither was I. I don’t think I was particularly tactful, or I needed to develop more tact. I just… yeah, trouble ensued from that, so I had to learn how to take my foot off the gas pedal on that one.

For me, it was kind of a phase, because I started looking at some of these phenomena in my life and elsewhere that I found interesting. They seemed to be poking holes in the paradigm, as it were.

Rick: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite topics: the paradigm of scientific materialism, how it dominates our society, and how it has resulted in so many problems in the world because we regard the world as dumb, insensitive, insensate matter. Whereas really, the whole thing is imbued with life and imbued with the Self. You know, it’s us. Yet we treat it, put it at arm’s length, and regard it as dumb stuff.

Ishtar: We look at it as a resource that we can do anything with.

Rick: Do anything with. And we’re soiling our own nest, to say the least. But in any case, if that is the problem, the solution is to regard consciousness as primary, fundamental, universal, all-pervading, and all that stuff. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Ishtar: Yeah, that was the answer that was pointing me toward it. Once I had reached that point, once the probabilities were stacking on that side and toward that answer, my great interest started to be, “Well, if that’s true, then how do I experience that? How do I experience that all the time?”

I wasn’t even thinking about my prior experiences as that. They weren’t crossing over.

Rick: You didn’t put two and two together?

Ishtar: I did not put two and two together, because I kind of thought that maybe it wasn’t all that possible in my life. I’m from Wisconsin, after all. So what are you going to do?

Rick: A cheesehead.

Ishtar: Yeah, a cheesehead. I owned one. They’re actually quite useful in their own way.

But yeah, that became—it started more and more to become a big interest. Then it became a primary interest after I had a near-death experience.

Rick: Yeah. And would that be the next significant point?

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Well, let’s talk about that.

Ishtar: That’s really kind of the fulcrum on which my life moved.

That was, for me, the great wound and, in many ways, the great blessing, just together as they so often are. It involved the death of my mother. We were in a car accident together.

It was made a little bit more interesting, to use that word, by the fact that the day before, I’d actually broken my arm playing baseball. I got hit by a really real zinger of a fastball. That was my big complaint: “Oh, I’m going to miss baseball season.”

We were standing there in my room just talking to each other, my mother and I, before I went to bed. As had happened so many times in my life, I got these precognitive flashes. They had a certain flavor or quality about them that I could recognize. Only this time, the words came out of my mouth: “Mom, I have a feeling you’re going to die soon.”

When it came out of my mouth, it really hit her. Something was powerful in it. Then she shrugged, kind of wiped it off, and said, “I’m going to be around, you know. Rest assured. I will be here for you for a long time to come.”

I thought, “Okay, that’s good.” My fears were allayed, and I went to bed. But they must have come back, because the next morning I woke with quite a start, like they do in the movies or cartoons.

Rick: Bing!

Ishtar: Like that! Just like that, gasping as if I were running. It was at the moment that my mother and father were walking right outside my bedroom door, which I liked to sleep with open.

Rick: Because you’re afraid of ghosts?

Ishtar: I liked to have a good escape path.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Better to have it open and have the route there than have it closed, for whatever reason.

Ishtar: Yeah. They were walking past, and somehow there was a clerestory window up there, and some sunshine was hitting them. That was kind of a mystical moment.

But I was distraught. I was like, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

Rick: You actually said that to them?

Ishtar: Yes. I said, “There’s something I’ve got to tell you two. There’s something I’ve got to tell you, but I don’t know what it is.” I was so frustrated and so distraught by that. They had to calm me down so that I could go to school. It took me about twenty minutes to collect myself and get my breath down.

I felt as if I’d just been the guy at a marathon running, only the scroll had fallen out of my pocket somewhere along the way. It felt like that. They calmed me down, and I went off to school and did the school thing and came back home. Then we dropped my…

Rick: Did you have a cast on by this time?

Ishtar: No. That day, we were actually going to the same hospital where we ended up, to put a cast on.

Rick: I see.

Ishtar: So I just had a sling on. I went to school and came back home, and we dropped my sister off at her work. We were driving out to make a left turn across a divided highway—a two-lane, four-lane divided highway.

It was one of those situations where you had two cars going forty-five miles an hour, and the car that hit us was totally obscured by them. If they had been going the speed limit, they wouldn’t have hit us. Instead, they were going twenty miles over the limit, or they decided to accelerate at just that time.

We pulled out, and I think, actually, funnily enough, my mother was asking me to put on the Luther Vandross tape. I was like, “No more Luther Vandross.” She loved Luther Vandross. I was looking over to get it, and I looked to my left. About—I don’t know—six feet from where my body is right now was this big Lincoln Town Car or Continental or something like that, right outside the door, right outside my mother’s door.

Rick: Going sixty miles an hour.

Ishtar: You know, just really booking it. In that moment, to me, it was pretty clear: the jig was up.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I was like, “Oh, shit. I hope we can swear on the show.”

Rick: Yeah, occasionally.

Ishtar: That was the first thought. I think anybody would have that. And then the next… Instead of kind of clenching up, I completely relaxed. And the next set was kind of from this deeper, sort of place or strata. It was like, “I really thought this one was going to go more than 13 years.”

And at that point, the whole sort of what I’d read about and was interested in—the whole kind of life-flashing-before-one’s-eyes thing—happened. And only in this case, it was a little bit richer than the descriptions I had read previously.

When we went through each… it was a seamless whole, not just a bunch of little fragments, but almost like taking a string and pulling it back and experiencing each part of the string in complete detail. And there was—it was as if I was connected with this sort of completely objective or omniscient part of my consciousness.

I had had dances with that part before, but I would often kind of be like, “Shut up. I’m going to do it my way.” And kind of, “Go away.” But only there, I completely embraced it. I felt completely embraced by it.

Every place where there was tension, every place where I was holding a grudge, every moment where I acted in fear or acted out of spite, or anything that was really anything other than love, was just sort of seen completely and then forgiven.

Every place where there was tension, every place where I was holding a grudge, every moment where I acted in fear or acted out of spite, or anything that was really anything other than love, was just sort of seen completely and then forgiven. I totally accepted myself and everybody out there—everything.

Rick: Yeah. And so obviously, this happened in a split second, but if it had played out in real time, so to speak, it might have been hours to go through all the information you went through?

Ishtar: God knows. Yeah, it was hyper-condensed. I mean, it must not have been—I don’t even know if it was a second between when I saw the car and…

Rick: Probably not. It’s actually probably just a fraction.

Ishtar: Exactly. And so that was—it was all there. And it was a very palpable and visceral sensation, too. It really felt as if I had, my whole life, had a sort of Saran Wrap—constrictive Saran Wrap—on top of me.

With each sort of forgiving and release, and an appreciation of the love that was kind of running the show the whole time in my life, there was this sense of it coming down off of my body. And by the end, I was just completely weightless. I had no fear.

Even visually, I remember the dashboard of our Chevrolet and my mother’s shoulder, all the details of the scene, the clouds that were in the background, the face of the other driver.

Rick: Who was driving?

Ishtar: He didn’t notice, you know.

Rick: Oh, really?

Ishtar: Until it was really late. He was…

Rick: He was distracted?

Ishtar: I think he was probably drunk. But the car—everything turned. Everything seemed to almost reveal that it had this kind of underlying light underneath it. And there was a sense in my heart that everything was love, that my presence went from a little, localized, thirteen-year-old body to just being everywhere.

There was a sense that I was everywhere, and I was the whole scene, and that was the whole thing that was happening. And then, boom, the crash.

Rick: The crash. Yeah.

Ishtar: Yeah. And, you know, it was quite a crash. We were pushed a long way, and the car was totaled. I woke up—came to—with the sound of the seatbelt thing going off and my mother having kind of labored breath.

They got up the giant skill saws—Jaws, or whatever—and they were cutting things out. They were really good. They got that door off quickly and kind of very professionally pulled me out of the car. They were really concerned that I had spinal injuries and things like that. They got us on the gurney and got us in the ambulance.

The whole… I was certainly concussed. Yeah, and I didn’t know what my name was and didn’t know a lot of those details. But, like I say, “That’s my mom. I don’t know anything, but that’s my mom.”

Rick: Yeah.

Awareness on the Gurney and Everywhere

So I had that. They put us in the ambulance, and I had one of those kind of experiences that a lot of people seem to report, where I had both the awareness of being on the gurney and being strapped down, and also this awareness of still being everywhere.

Ishtar: So I had that. They put us in the ambulance, and I had one of those kind of experiences that a lot of people seem to report, where I had both the awareness of being on the gurney and being strapped down, and also this awareness of still being everywhere.

My mother called my name twice, and two times I said, “I’m okay, Mom.” The second time, she registered it. It was as if, when she was saying those words, those words were happening within my own consciousness, and I could feel her as fundamentally the same as my own consciousness.

I could feel it when she registered it, and I felt her just go.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I felt her leave. And after she did that, her breathing went from this really sort of labored breathing to this really even, relaxed kind of breath, kind of just winding down.

I didn’t put two and two together. I didn’t know that that was her maybe leaving. Then they got into the hospital, and I heard, from my father, “Your mother’s gone.” Of course, that hit like a punch to the gut—the biggest one I’ve ever had—and tears and all that.

Rick: Sure.

Ishtar: Falling apart on the hospital floor, and maybe being hugged by the Lutheran Social Services people that didn’t want to be in trauma. I knew they meant well. Going home, I still had that big sense of presence, and I just… my brain was coming online again. I said, “Oh, this is shock. This is shock.”

Then life kind of kept going, and all the things that happen when somebody dies so suddenly, like that, with their family gathered and all of that. You’re going through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages like clockwork.

It just happened that over that summer, while I was going through all of that grief and everything, I also had the sense of this presence that was there. That was weird to me. At first, I thought it was shock. But then, after a couple of months, I started thinking, “This is something else.”

When I would… I could go into it as if it was a vast dimension. And when I would do that, and kind of put my awareness intentionally there, all sorts of joy would bubble up, and bliss would come out. But, whoa, what’s going on? Why am I feeling joy and bliss when I am, otherwise, at the same time, so distraught and so much in the process of grieving?

Rick: And you’d had the experience before of presence and being able to go into it, and various things that evoked that. But this is different somehow?

Ishtar: Well, it felt in some ways deeper. It felt more raw. It felt more fundamental. And again, I was kind of silly. For whatever reason, I wasn’t categorizing them together.

I knew what I was doing when I was young, and I knew that it was a particular dimension, but it had a different flavor when I was thirteen than when I was three or five or six.

I think at thirteen I’d also fallen asleep enough in grade school. I was trying to be a good intellectual and become really as heavy as I could be, because that seemed like how to be in this world—like just being a walking intellect.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: And so you can fall asleep really fast when you try to do that, you know? I think I’d gotten enough. I’d distracted myself enough from those things that when this came, it was a big kind of wake-up call.

Rick: And what do you think were the mechanics of how this accident and this trauma kind of kick-started you into a different, more spiritual phase of your life? Was it like a sudden burning off of a big chunk of karma, or was it some kind of shock to the subtle body that sort of unleashed energies that had been trapped and dormant, or what?

Ishtar: I, for one, felt it was almost like a prearranged wake-up call. I mean, it felt so… It had a feeling of being prearranged, with my becoming prescient of it beforehand. It had the flavor of, “Oh, this is in the script.”

Rick: According to Rob Schwartz, whom I interviewed a month or so ago, who studies how we plan out our life before we enter into it, any major event like that is prearranged, according to him.

Ishtar: Yeah, and I’ve read a lot of the literature in his field, and I think a lot of it—there are so many similar accounts—that it seems to shake out that way. It definitely felt like, “This is in the script.”

I think if I didn’t have that happen, I could have lived a relatively happy life and had a lot of these things on the back burner. Losing my mother not only tuned me into those dimensions again, but, again, the wound-blessing thing: it left me with this hunger.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: A real hunger, because it was a big loss. I was really hungry to kind of fill that hole. With those things together, there was kind of a desire and direction to get back to that.

When that sort of sense of presence faded out—it kind of faded out over the summer until I went back to eighth grade and attempted to be a teenager again. When that faded out, kind of after my eighth-grade year, which was in some ways kind of miserable, I had the wherewithal, after school was over, to go, “I’ve got to get back to that.”

“Yeah, you know, what was that exactly? I’ve got to get back to it. I’m going to just try anything to do it.”

Over the next few years of wholeheartedly experimenting—maybe half of my time!

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: Eventually, that led me to the practice of meditation and to deciding to throw it all in that camp. I was still trying to be a normal person, whatever that was, and I thought I did want to please my family still. That was still there.

I wanted to do some of the things that I used to want to do. I felt like, “That’s what I used to want to do. I mean, isn’t that what I ought to be doing?”

So it was kind of a transition process. There was kind of a crazy monk in me, which is what I call it. There’s a crazy monk in there. “I don’t think we should do that, because if we do that—if I open that, if I open up to that—I have to go one hundred percent.”

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: That was the sense. And that’s why I was a little bit like, “I’ve got to do things one hundred percent and everything. The whole ship will be scuttled if I go and open that up.”

Eventually, it seemed like I had to open it up, because that’s what I’m here to do. I’m not here to be a politician. I’m not…

Rick: Yeah, you mentioned you wanted to be what—a politician or an actor or something?

Ishtar: Yeah. Actually, yes, both of those things. And I wanted to be a musician and a stand-up comic—politician, yeah. I mean, first it was a politician. Then when I had the spiritual thing, I tried to kind of find middle ground between politician and crazy monk.

I thought, “What big artist sounds like middle ground? You know, I have that in me, too. So I’ll go—I’ll try to be an actor.”

I also had this desire as a child, when we’d do career day. They force that upon kids far too early.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I’d do the career day and think I would just go inside and be like, “The only answer that was true was, I just want to be everything.”

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I want to be everything. And it’s like, how do you do that? I thought there were two paths. One was being an actor, which was kind of sorted—

Rick: Yeah, because you could be all kinds of things.

Ishtar: That’s right. And one was being enlightened. So I felt like, well, I don’t think enlightenment is in the cards for me. So I’m going to try to be the actor. That’ll…

Rick: Yeah, but you knew about enlightenment?

Ishtar: I did.

Rick: That was pretty impressive.

Ishtar: Yeah. Well, I loved the Time Life books and the show In Search Of…, and the internet started to happen and all that sort of stuff. As a little kid, I would open books on yogis and Buddhist monks meditating in the snow, and there was something deeply arresting about that. I was like, “Whoa! Could I do that?” Even though I’m from Wisconsin!

Rick: Well, you get snow in Wisconsin!

Ishtar: We do get snow! So I would try my best, but somehow… Yeah.

Rick: Interesting. Okay. So you were on this precipice of whether to jump into meditation big time or whether to try to be a real person in the world.

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: Although I think you can do both, as you’ve now discovered. But how did you… what helped you make that decision? And then I guess you went in the meditation direction. So how did that go after all, when you got into it?

Ishtar: Well, I think I was sent some wonderful helpers, guides, and mentors along the way in a little town called Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Rick: I’ve been there.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah. Swam in the lake and water-skied on it and stuff. You know it, then. Yeah, beautiful little place. But small, maybe five or six thousand people when I was living there.

Rick: I even gave it a TM lecture there one time.

Ishtar: You did? Yeah. So, for a small town, at the time I was quite astounded by all these interesting people who had kind of moved in.

And one day—I think it must have been the summer before my freshman year of high school—I was going around with my big sister, to whom I was always close. I would just go wherever she would go, kind of as a tagalong, a happy tagalong.

We walked into a metaphysical bookstore, and I had not much inclination in that direction. I was like, “Okay, I’ll come. I’ll go everywhere else!” She was shopping for something in the front, and I sort of gravitated toward the back and picked up a book. It was on this whole subject of mysticism and meditative experiences, and it was so similar to what I had experienced in the accident and afterward that I stayed in that bookshop for about two years.

I would say I had a tacit agreement.

Rick: Didn’t your sister want to go home?

Ishtar: Oh, well, yeah, she stayed too! Okay, it was payback for all the places that I didn’t want to go before. So I think she got the worst end of the deal there. That was a major inconvenience for her: two years.

Rick: I don’t know… sleeping in the aisles.

Ishtar: Especially the bargaining with the police and the eviction notices from the owner. But, yeah, over a period of two years, I was there quite frequently, reading all the books. It seemed to be that, as long as I bought an amulet about every two months, the owner was really cool.

Rick: Did she try to foist TM on you?

Ishtar: Put up with me.

But I set this up because it was there that I met some of those guides and mentors. One was a lovely—I don’t know if I should mention people’s names, because I don’t embarrass the living—but a wonderful friend to me who was a TM teacher named Pam. She was in my town and was working as a TM teacher, but also as kind of a local clairvoyant.

She was a very human person, but there was something about her. She had this resonance that reminded me of what I had been tuning into before, and I was just glued and totally interested to find out what was going on over there.

She was a wonderful listener and wonderful at asking the perfect questions of me, guiding me into different facets of my experience, and telling me, “That’s perfectly normal. That’s something that’s natural to human beings. It’s there.” It was mainly just the resonance. We could talk about anything. She was totally easygoing.

Rick: Sometimes. Well, in any group, people can be proselytizers, you know, so it’s nice that she had the wisdom to be gentle like that.

Ishtar: Yeah, she was just my friend. And she was also there—I mean, I think a lot of people became surrogate family to me. When they heard my situation, they wanted to help me out, pat me on the shoulder, and try to keep me on a good track—or a bad track, as the case may be!

So we were close, and then she introduced me to another friend who was a, quote, “walk-in.” He had the same sort of resonance to him, just a different flavor. But I could tell there was something quite similar about this fellow. His name was Austin.

We spent two years as friends. He was 54, and I was 16, and we just hung out like we were the same age.

Rick: Incidentally, a walk-in, in case anybody doesn’t know, is when a soul leaves the body and another soul comes in and takes that body. Sometimes it supposedly happens when you have a near-death experience or something, and your soul checks out and another soul says, “Wow, this body has a bit more mileage in it. I’ll come in here.”

In fact, there was a cool story where Shankara became a walk-in.

Ishtar: Oh, that’s right. I know that one. Yes, I’ve heard that story.

Rick: Shall we tell it? I don’t know, just as a tangent. So Shankara was this great sage, the founder of Advaita Vedanta, right? He used to go around the country debating people and generally defeating them in debate, after which they would become his disciples.

There was this woman who was, I guess, an expert in amorous arts—the Kama Sutra, or whatever—and Shankara was like, “I can’t beat her in a debate. I don’t know anything about that. I’m a monk.” But then an opportunity came up where he could live that sort of life a little bit.

There was some king who died, and Shankara walked into his body and became the king, but it was really Shankara. All of a sudden, the king woke up from his deathbed and was really bright and much more intelligent than he had been.

I guess the king had several queens, and they were like, “This is a great big improvement. He seems to have forgotten a few things about what to do in the bedroom, but we can work that out.”

So this went on for a while. Eventually, the queens found out; they got hip to what had happened. They realized, “This isn’t really our husband. This is this other guy, this monk, and his body is hidden someplace in a cave.” So they sent emissaries to find the body and destroy it, so Shankara couldn’t leave. They wanted him to stay and be in the king’s body.

As this was about to happen, Shankara’s disciples realized that he was kind of losing it in terms of remembering who he really was. Some of them came to the king’s court and asked to read some poetry to the king.

They read poetry that had actually been written by Shankara about the nature of the Self and so on. Shankara kind of woke up and remembered, “Oh, yeah, me. I wrote that. It’s time for me to split.”

So he left the king’s body, and the king’s body dropped. He reoccupied his own body, which was sitting in some cave, just as the emissaries from the kingdom were about to burn it or something. He kind of hopped up and came back to life, and they lived happily ever after. End of the story. Anyway, fun story.

Ishtar: I could almost believe my friend’s account, because it was a small town and everybody knew everybody’s dirty laundry. Basically, it didn’t take long to find it out.

He had been a notorious town asshole most of his life. Then, after he apparently was running a stress test at the hospital, of all places, he had a heart attack right there and died. They put him on the table, and then he says, “I came in. The other guy went out. I came in on the table,” which freaked people out when he sat up.

It wasn’t long after that he was deeply into Native American ritual spirituality and all this sort of stuff. That wasn’t a big part of our relationship. It was mainly just the presence that came off him and some of the fun things that would happen there.

I would just go to his house. I would actually take naps for 20 minutes on his couch, because his house had this electric presence you could cut with a knife. He would be working on his car in the garage, and I’d say, “Hey, Austin, I’m just going to take a nap.” He didn’t mind me using his house in such a way.

I’d go down, come up completely refreshed, and just leave the house and go swimming or something. So I was kind of sent a lot of even more of these people. I can’t get into everybody, but sure, there were more.

Rick: Whatever you feel is relevant. We have plenty of time, so whatever you want to talk about.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah. There was, for a very white Wisconsin town, a wonderful African American man who was a qigong master, also named Walter Matthew Brown. He has since died, a few years back, but he kind of took me under his wing as well.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I would go to his classes, and he didn’t want to charge me anything. He would teach me these interesting, sort of Chinese-style meditations.

He would create these big balls of qi, and I would be palpably affected by what he was doing. I always thought, “Well, maybe this is the placebo thing happening.” There were these people around while I was growing up, still as a teenager and kind of at this precipice.

Rick: Now, when I was recounting your various skills and accomplishments, I neglected to mention that you actually speak a fair degree of Chinese.

Ishtar: Well, yeah, it’s quite rusty now, but yeah.

Rick: How did you learn that?

Ishtar: Oh, that was much later on.

Rick: Do you speak Japanese also?

Ishtar: No, no, no.

Rick: Because I know your wife is in Japan.

Ishtar: Yeah. My wife is the real polyglot. She’s got all that stuff down.

Rick: You’re the polymath; she’s the polyglot. So, okay, at this stage, did you start meditating in some fashion?

Ishtar: I did, I did. I started doing—I was taught some breathing meditations and basic, effortless breathing meditation.

Then I learned some maybe more rigid, ascetic-type practices, which my brain was quite tuned into, biased in that direction. I did this practice of counting from one to ten and not letting my mind go onto anything else but the numbers. I actually became quite good at that and enjoyed it.

While it gave my mind a sort of razor-sharp concentration, it was stressing me out in other ways. It was like an athletic strain.

Rick: It was a bit of a strain.

Ishtar: Yeah, it was quite a strain. I was recommended some books, like Meditation: If You Want Enlightenment, which I really did like. I wanted to meditate as much as possible. I was like, “I’ve got to do this 200 percent.” That was how I was wired. I was very intense. It had to be…

Rick: A natural-born fanatic!

Ishtar: Yeah. Instead of, “I knew the line to be intensely vehement soon,” I think I was often vehemently intense.

Rick: Yeah. That’s a line from Patanjali, by the way: “Vehement intensity.”

High-School Meditation, Fasting, and Yoga

Ishtar: Yeah, I was definitely intense, a little bit too much. But this book had me. With various books, I would wake up at three in the morning and take a cold shower, then do yoga and meditate for two or three hours before either being driven or walking off to school in my last year of high school. Then I would spend a lot of my lunch hours meditating. I would get home and do two hours of meditation, or one hour, and then do an hour before I went to bed.

And so I had this schedule. I was fanatically devoted to it, and I became totally antisocial. I got rid of my possessions, thinking, “I don’t need these around.” I wanted to live in an ashram. As a child, I would often have these visions that came back during this period, of my room turning into what looked like a room in an ashram. Even visually, the walls would fade away, and I would see a completely different room and look out a window. There were these Himalayan peaks.

I was so immersed in this period. It was like that song was really singing to me, is how I could describe it. Apparently, at the high school, I found out later that, since I was giving away a lot of my most precious possessions and becoming antisocial, they put me on suicide watch.

Rick: They thought you were getting ready to check out.

Ishtar: I was getting ready to check out! Everybody meant very well. I was fasting a lot, too. They said fasting is good for you, so my thought was, “If fasting is good, then I’m going to do it!”

Rick: There are so many similarities between you and me. I’ve gone through such fanatical phases, including radical fasting. With any little instruction that was given, I would do it ten times more than I was supposed to!

Ishtar: Yeah. I was told, “Drink a gallon a day,” so I thought, “I will drink two gallons!”

Rick: We have a similar mindset.

Ishtar: Yeah. When I was fasting, I thought, “I should not stop my running program. I should double it.” When it was too easy, I thought, “This is too easy. I need to put rocks in a backpack and run up the highest hill in town.” And I did it!

Rick: Oh, man, you’re worse than me.

Ishtar: I was a nut. I was a total nut.

Rick: You were way worse.

Ishtar: But even though I was in that phase—and I don’t recommend this; I don’t necessarily recommend this—I think it was good for me because it was in me. It was in me to do it. It really felt like I needed to burn it off, or express this. I needed to really do this, to appease whatever was going on, whatever I needed. And so I did it.

Rick: Yeah. You probably had some ascetic practices in past lifetimes: those Himalayan mountains, bathing in cold streams, sitting in the snow, and all that.

Ishtar: Yeah. I would go out during lunch hour in Wisconsin. Sometimes I would go out into the middle of the soccer field that was right outside the lunchroom. It would be covered in snow, and I’d think, “I’m going to sit in the snow and meditate.”

Rick: Did people see you? The school authorities would say, “Uh-oh, we really have to watch this guy!”

Ishtar: I think that probably contributed to the suicide watch.

Rick: You were getting good grades.

Ishtar: It was amazing. I always had good grades, but they kind of fell off a little bit. They weren’t total straight A’s so much.

Rick: Because you were meditating so much.

Ishtar: Well, they fell off in high school before the meditation because I was sad and depressed, and on the fence. Before the car accident, I was totally lined up with a plan. Afterward, I was thinking, “What’s the plan now?” I was really kind of flailing a little bit.

But when I was meditating, I thought, “I could very well fail this year if I do six hours of meditation every day,” because I had signed up for AP courses and all of these sorts of things.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: It was a pretty busy schedule. I kind of prayed to whomever might be listening, if there were any spirit guides, God, Babaji, or whomever: “Anything you can do to help, I’m doing this because I think this is the purpose of life. Any help that can come along the way to make this easier would be great.”

But there were no problems at all academically. I would read my psychology textbook, and suddenly I could speed-read very well. There would be some sort of grokking that would happen, this global grokking of the pages. When I would sit down to take a test, I didn’t necessarily have all of the information in a folder in my mind. But when I would look at the answers to the multiple-choice questions, I would see the page that the answer was on.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I would see the number. I would see it all in my mind.

Rick: Like page 323, paragraph 2?

Ishtar: Yeah. I think I did most of the extra credit. I think I finished the year with 126 percent in that class. Similar things happened in an English class.

All of the teachers I had then were wonderful mentors as well. I don’t think they put me on suicide watch, but if they did, they meant well. They were there for me spiritually as well.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I had an English course, and I remember I had a five-page essay to type and turn in. I hadn’t done it yet because I was meditating. As I was meditating, I was saying, “Okay, are you going to help me out?”

Thirty minutes—an hour and a half—before the class, I sat down at a computer and thought, “Okay.” Then, all of a sudden, kind of like in Bruce Almighty when he’s typing all those emails, there was so much coherency in my mind, and it was so clear.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: It was just so effortless. Then I came out, turned it in, and it was a good paper, apparently.

Rick: That’s great.

Ishtar: So stuff like that came into the light.

Rick: An obvious question to ask would be: Did all that meditation make you spacey? It can when you’re meditating that much. You can’t really function in activity, but it seems like you plunged into activity when you weren’t meditating, with such intensity—with rocks in your backpack and all this other stuff—that it kind of counterbalanced the long meditations and grounded you and focused you.

Ishtar: That helped. I mean, I certainly could be spacey, also because I was attempting to fast. The rest of the time, I was thinking, “Maybe I could be a breatharian.”

I was a proper Wisconsin salt-and-bratwurst meat-eater at the start. Then I thought, for various reasons, “I need to be vegetarian.” Then I found out about veganism: “I need to be vegan.” Then I found out about fruitarianism and thought, “I need to be a fruitarian.” It kind of escalated.

Rick: I’ve experimented with all those things, including fruitarianism.

Ishtar: Yeah. I wanted to reach whatever the aperture or apex seemed to be. I was wired to try to get myself in position to be there.

Rick: Yeah. Your basic attitude was, “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: “And I’m going to do it 200 percent, because I am so hot to trot. I’m just not going to be wishy-washy about this.”

Ishtar: That’s right.

Rick: There’s a line in the Bible. Christ said, “Either be hot or cold. If you’re lukewarm, I’ll spit you out of my mouth.”

Ishtar: Yeah. “Let thine eye be single and thy body be filled with light.” I felt like, “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it.”

Also, seeing one’s mother go through her life, paying attention to her struggles and the dynamics of having it end unexpectedly at 45, put a pall of urgency over my whole life from that point. There was always a sense that I could be living on borrowed time, in a very visceral sense. It was “Gather ye rosebuds while you may” times ten.

That was always in the background pushing me. It was always, “What is the highest life I could manifest here on Earth?” Then I would do whatever I could. Of course, I fell off the horse quite a few times.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Ishtar: Nonetheless, the long-range goal was to do whatever I could to get there, to connect with that.

Rick: Yeah. I think it can be taken to extremes, and one can become too fanatical.

Ishtar: Quiet, Sedona!

Rick: Yeah. Oh, it’s a garbage truck. But I think there is something to be said for a sense of urgency. Amma always says, “Live your life as though you’re a bird on a branch that could break at any time.”

I think when she says that, the implication is, “Don’t be attached.” She’s not saying, “Be a fanatic.” She’s saying, “Don’t be attached,” because anything you’re attached to could be pulled out from under you at any time.

But others—Shankara and others—have always talked about living each day as if it were your last. Take care of the highest first. Whatever the highest, most important, best thing you can do, do that.

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: Don’t waste time, because time is precious. Life flashes by.

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: Not that we can’t take the long-range view and recognize that there will be other lives and all, but there’s a precious opportunity, especially if you realize what you’re realizing here. You know that there’s this thing that can be achieved. It’s a precious opportunity to actually achieve it, to whatever extent you can.

Ishtar: That’s right.

Rick: Because if you don’t—if you know it and then just brush it off—you may not know it next time. You might have who knows how many lifetimes in which you’re just spinning your wheels.

Ishtar: Right. You don’t necessarily need a sense of urgency. I’ve known plenty of people who woke up when they weren’t looking for it. Everybody’s different.

But I do agree that, in general, there’s a use and value to having that appreciation: right now, carpe diem. Seize the moment, seize the day. Dead Poets Society. I’ve always had this thought in my mind: Don’t leave anything on the table. You never know if this is going to be your last interaction with any particular person.

If you have love in there, if you have songs of your soul in there, don’t leave them unsung. Sing them and get them out. That’s certainly been a big theme of my life.

Rick: Yeah. Again, just to keep it balanced, it doesn’t mean, like the Buddha, leave your wife and kids and go off to perform austerities or something. One can, within one’s dharma—we have a dharma—

Ishtar: We do.

Rick: It doesn’t mean abandon your dharma and try to adopt somebody else’s dharma, which you probably can’t perform anyway. But within your dharma, you have wiggle room and leeway. You can always be pushing the envelope in terms of what’s the best thing you can do, the highest thing you can do, the most evolutionary thing you can do within the realm of the possible in your life—not in somebody else’s life, but in your life.

Ishtar: Yeah. I’ve moved out of the ascetic phase very much, which was interesting.

Rick: Yeah, I can tell. You’re a little pudgy now!

Ishtar: Yeah, I was also a thin, non-aesthetic, too. So, you know, this is extra credit, probably.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah!

Ishtar: But, yeah, I came out of that.

Rick: So, okay, you were in high school, meditating six hours a day and doing okay academically. Were you doing any sports on top of all that? Well, you said you were running up hills with rocks.

Ishtar: Yeah, that was a sport. I didn’t have much time. I didn’t have time for sports. And actually, the whole car accident thing, in many ways, for a while kind of knocked out my competitive drive. I just didn’t have the juice to do it. I was so… which was disappointing to me. I was like, “Hey, where is it?”

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: Instead, I was like, okay, all my juices are now trying to go back into this sort of dimension, this inner dimension, however I could do that. So that kind of changed. But I was in a traveling jazz band.

Rick: Oh, cool. You were the drummer?

Ishtar: Yeah. That was great fun. And that kind of gave me a good physical coordinating activity to balance things out a little, I think.

Rick: Drumming is very integrating.

Ishtar: Yes.

Rick: When you’re really playing for an hour or something, and you’re really into it, the mind gets into this coherent…

Did you ever see Zakir Hussain play the tabla?

Ishtar: Right.

Rick: The world’s best tabla player. You watch him play, and it’s just such lightning-fast stuff. You know that none of it’s random. He’s working within time signatures and beat signatures that have to be done a certain way, but he’s going at the speed of light. You think, wow, the level of coherence in his brain to be able to do that is unbelievable.

Anyway, we’ve gone off on little mini tangents here, but that’s okay.

Ishtar: I don’t think so. Lots of tangents. Roll the sleeves up now, too. Go to work.

Rick: Okay, so what’s the next major phase? We’re getting serious here. We got our shirts off, coats off. So what was the next phase for you after this whole high school phase? I mean, this obviously didn’t go on forever.

Ishtar: No. Well, you know, for all its merits, my crazy aesthetic path wasn’t totally fulfilling. And I think I was given the book Autobiography of a Yogi. I believe it was my future brother-in-law who gave it to me, if I remember correctly.

When I read that book… that…

Rick: That’s a biggie for a lot of people.

Ishtar: Yeah. Something… dams broke in my heart, and worlds opened. And there was a sense that I had been quite provincial in what I thought were all the paths out there, all the practices, and just the world.

Rick: Provincial meaning kind of narrow-minded?

Ishtar: Kind of narrow-minded. Yeah. I realized I was quite myopic after reading that book. It opened things up for me, and even without any proper Kriya instruction, somehow the tenor and timbre of my meditations changed. There was this blissfulness that started showing up.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: The mind would get quiet after a while, but my heart would start to open. Noticeably, there was a sense of my heart opening into the silence as well.

Yogananda made this big promise in the book, if you’ve read it. He said, “If you just pray to Babaji earnestly, he’ll answer you,” of course. From what you’ve heard, you would guess that I would say, “I’m just going to pray to Babaji all the time!”

Rick: Yeah, okay.

Ishtar: All right, Yogananda, I hope this promise is true. I started doing that earnestly at the end of my meditations because I wanted to find my path. I was shopping around for monasteries. It didn’t matter if it was Zen or Carmelite.

Rick: You wanted to join one.

Ishtar: Yes. My heart said, “You’ve got to go be somewhere and be amongst people,” and I knew that was true.

By happenstance, this same future brother-in-law, now named Darshan, who gave me this book, knew this practice called the Ishaya’s Ascension. At first I was maybe a little bit skeptical of it.

Rick: Because of the name?

Ishtar: Yeah, the name and the tagline: praise, gratitude, love. They were talking about stress release. I was like, “Stress release? I could take more. That’s not interesting.” It wasn’t initially presented to me as enlightenment, which was the word that would have made sense to my little mind.

Rick: The reason they mention stress release is that it was founded by a guy who had been a TM teacher who was on my course when I became a TM teacher. He picked up some of the nomenclature and kept some of the nomenclature, and actually also the mechanics and practices, as I understand it.

Even in the TM movement, there was sort of a split personality disorder in terms of, are we a university or are we an ashram? Is this a spiritual thing or is it a stress-relief type of thing?

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: When you gave lectures, you’d try to present real practical things: stress release, better health, clearer and better behavior, and stuff like that. But then there was this more esoteric teaching of all the higher states of consciousness that could be attained and so on. You don’t hit people with that right off the bat.

Ishtar: Yeah. And I was the one who wanted to get hit with that right off the bat. That was what I was interested in.

Initially, I wasn’t going to do it. I liked—I loved—having him meditate with me because I could feel that he was tapping into this presence.

One day I came home from—I think I founded the Lake Geneva Environmental Society, which just consisted of me picking up cigarette butts and garbage and putting them into plastic bags. Our hot dog tongs were probably ruined for any other use by doing that.

Rick: Yeah. You just did that around town?

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah. I thought, “I’ve got to do something. I want to be out there showing, tangibly, making an example.”

Rick: You and I have so much in common. I don’t mean to keep talking about myself, but even now, as I ride around town on a bicycle, if I see a can, or even sometimes a cigarette pack or something, I’ll just get off my bike, pick it up, put it in my little baskets, and keep riding. Just because it’s the kind of thing where, if everybody did it, we’d have a real clean town, a real clean world. Everybody’s not going to do it, but at least I’ll do it.

Ishtar: Yeah, that’s right. My record was 1,200 cigarette butts counted in a day. I was astounded it got that high. I was just around maybe ten city blocks, crisscrossed. That was my area that day.

I would go and pick up cans from the stream. One time, it was frozen over, and I was reaching out to get a can, and I fell in! I actually felt quite good, but it was quite cool.

Rick: You’re used to cold baths.

Ishtar: So let the crazy meditating environmentalist do his thing. It was great. They gave me a complimentary chai that day to help me warm up, so thank you for that decision 16 years ago.

I came home from one of these forays, and he asked me, “Do you want to come to a course on Friday, go up to Minneapolis, and learn Ascension?” He said, “There are $300 extra that kind of showed up in my bank account for it.”

I was notorious for not doing anything but my schedule. I was really rigid. I felt, “If you’re an enemy of my schedule, you are an enemy of enlightenment.” It was very harsh there.

But I found myself totally saying, “Yeah.” I surprised myself. “Yep, yeah, we’re doing it.” A few days later, we went off and did this course.

We went into the basement of a chiropractic office, and there were maybe ten people down there, with two teachers wearing sort of monochromatic garb. Right away I was going, “Oh, my God.”

So I stripped my clothes off down to my boxer shorts. Thankfully, they were friendly with me at the local Starbucks. They had a fireplace to warm up, and they let me hang my clothes up in front of the fireplace because I was already kind of crazy.

Rick: What am I getting into?

Ishtar: What am I getting into here? I was skeptical of the word “workshop.” It sounded like something for middle-aged people who wanted to have some frivolous distraction and non-serious activity, but I was open.

Testing Ascension Through Spiritual Experiment

I was trying to go with the spirit of Gandhi, or the spirit of an open-minded spiritual scientist. That was what I had about me: “I’m just going to be an empiricist. We’re going to do it exactly as they tell me and see what happens.”

I was still quite skeptical. As the teachers were explaining how to do the practice, once I saw the first technique, I thought, “That’s going to work!” They said, “It’ll even work if you’re completely skeptical,” and they both looked at me at the same moment. I was like, “Yeah, good!”

I said that as a teenager we did a meditation course, with a little irreverence. And it did.

Rick: So “worked” meant what?

Ishtar: Well, it didn’t take long for me, and this isn’t for everybody, but for me it was within 30 seconds.

At first, I was… It’s an effortless practice, and it’s kind of a mantra-based practice. You think the technique, and then you allow your mind to do what it does. Like TM, you come back to the technique.

Most of the quality of my thoughts was, “This is stupid,” or “This ain’t going to work.” All of a sudden, even while my mind was having those thoughts, I found this vast silence just kind of overwhelmed me, overtook me. I rose or fell into it, and my body was completely relaxed.

I wasn’t getting that much relaxation in all this aesthetic stuff. I really wasn’t. It was, “Oh, my God, what is going on with my leg?”

That basically lasted, more or less, in that range through the rest of the weekend. It was incredible. I was really stunned, and I kept up with it.

It was like, “That was it.” Before, there had been a sense of being scattered, but now it was like, “No, I think this is my North Star.”

By the end of the weekend, I was asking them at the end of the course, “Do you have a monastery that I could join? I could come and join. I could be ready within 48 hours. I just need to go home, settle most of my affairs. I’ve got my bag packed.”

They were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” It had actually gotten sold, and I was like, “Oh, shucks.” But they gave me some numbers of people I could call. They thought those people were doing something similar. I was like, “Okay, thank you.”

They said, “Don’t do it for six hours.” So I was going to do it for six hours. They said, “It could be intense.” And I said, “I am the intensity,” or something like that. “I can handle it.”

Rick: I am your father.

Ishtar: Yeah. I was really raring to go there. But I was also thinking, “I’m going to give this a few weeks and see. Maybe I stumbled into some sort of anomalous high. Maybe we’ll see what happens with the honeymoon, if it’s a honeymoon period.” I wanted to give it some time.

It didn’t take many days for me to know, “Oh, my God, no. This is the path I had been praying for.” There was a sense in me, my whole life, of a connection, almost like a song or an energetic signature, or something that was calling to me and impelling my life. I had seen it in visions as a child or felt it under the surface.

When I ran into this, that was it. There was a sense of, “That was it.” Before, there had been a sense of being scattered, but now it was like, “No, I think this is my North Star. So I’m going to give it a shot and see what happens.”

Rick: So you joined some monastery-type place?

Ishtar: Yeah. It wasn’t long after. It took me about three months from the time I learned about it to move out to Seattle with my sister and my brother-in-law and get a little apartment. My plan was to work the summer in Seattle, give it a little more time, and then see if I could go down to this sort of ashram-monastery-type meditation center on the Oregon coast.

My heart was saying, “No, just do it now.” I had the sense of, “What am I doing here? I’m just treading water. I’m just wasting time here. I just need to go.”

So I paid them two or three months’ rent, because I wasn’t planning on not being there, and I came down to interview at this center in Oregon. I had the idea in my mind that if they kicked me out, I would just camp in the forest and show them my dedication, because that’s how I thought it worked in the books and movies. I didn’t have to do that.

As soon as I came there, it was kind of clear that each person, each face I met, was like, “Oh, my God. I know you.”

Rick: Like this is your little soul family.

Ishtar: Yeah. It was powerful. It’s like—

Rick: It could also have been that there was some dawning unity and you were seeing the Self in all beings. So there was that familiarity.

Ishtar: That could be the case as well. I certainly had, and still had, some neuroses that I had developed. Although I was told—I was always told—I would say to people, “Oh, I’ve got to have a lot of stress. I’m sure I have a lot of stress.” Then people would laugh at me and say, “You don’t have any stress,” or whatever.

Rick: By that you mean vasanas, accumulated impressions in the nervous system from life experiences? You were saying you must have a lot of it stored there, and they were just saying you didn’t?

Ishtar: Yeah. I was convinced I had an awful lot of work to do. I had to roll my sleeves up and really be earnest about all this.

Rick: So how long were you in this place, and how did it go?

Ishtar: It went very well. Just like with TM, they had these long, very long, in-residence retreat programs. I wasn’t really interested in being a meditation teacher at the time. I just wanted to get enlightened. If I could be in a center for many years, that sounded great to me: chop wood and do all that sort of stuff.

They suggested, “Well, if that’s your desire, you should do this long course.” I thought, “Okay, we’re dovetailing, then.”

Rick: It was a teacher-training course?

Ishtar: Yeah. I didn’t really have the money to pay for it, but they were wonderful in offering me a work-exchange program, which was really cool.

That also matched a very interesting experience that had happened the year before. I wasn’t yet clear that I was going to go be a monk. I thought, “I’m going to go to some college, and I’ll just meditate as much as I can there.” That was the idea.

I was walking into Walmart in Lake Geneva, and I had the intuition to ask myself, “I wonder where I’m going to be a year from now?” To my surprise, I had this full visual answer, with captioning. It was, “Well, you’re going to be working in a mostly vegetarian café, living with a bunch of monks, many of whom wear white.”

It all came to me. It was very detailed: “You will start out as the dishwasher, and then you’ll be progressively trained to do more and more of the jobs. Eventually, you’ll study with a chef and be taught to cook like you’ve always wanted.”

I had that experience and thought, “Unlikely!” I just kind of threw it away and kept on being a happy, seventeen-year-old. Then, when I was on a phone call with this group in Oregon, the last thing my interviewer mentioned was, “Oh, and by the way, we’re about to open a café. Maybe you could have a job there?”

I didn’t want to tell him, because I thought maybe if I told him that, I’d get kicked out. I ought to have, but I thought, “That’s just a coincidence. That whole thing is probably just a coincidence.”

Rick: And this all came to you? You’d think you should have known by then.

Ishtar: I should have.

Rick: You know, because this kind of stuff had been happening.

Ishtar: I know, but I was still such a rationalist. In some ways, I wanted to be able to engage with the credible world and build bridges. So I always had to be as scientific as I could. But, yeah, I probably ought to have known.

Then I was doing my apprenticeship program, my work-study thing. I was at the kitchen window chopping one day, and when I looked up—as I’ve always been a very visual person, and I see things before they happen—it was the exact scene from that Walmart vision.

Rick: I see. Was it like déjà vu?

Ishtar: So strong. Déjà vu times ten. That threw me into this presence, and I was in that for about two days. It was especially thick. I was just like, “Whoa.”

Rick: That’s interesting. I remember some line from Maharishi’s commentary on the Gita where he talks about how the future can cast its vision upon the pure of heart. You can actually have clear prognostications like that.

Ishtar: Yeah, it seems to come with the important nodal things, especially in my life—the big directional things. That was—

Rick: Almost like an opportunity to have a confirmation. You’d had the vision, and then, sure enough, here it was. “Okay, this must have been where I was supposed to go.”

Ishtar: Yeah. I was always an amateur parapsychologist, so those sorts of confirmations that would blow my logical mind were especially interesting to me. They made it so that I couldn’t really describe it or explain it any other way.

Rick: So you cooked—you were a chef there in this café—and I think you said there was a Mexican chef who was your mentor or something?

Ishtar: Oh, yes. He was named Yogananda.

Rick: Does this mean you can cook really good Mexican food?

Ishtar: Well, it means that—

Rick: Are you going to prove that to me?

Ishtar: Well, okay. I think my education in some ways was a little uneven, but I will say that I make wonderful chilaquiles. I can knock your—The chilaquiles will knock your socks off.

Rick: Okay. I don’t even know what those are, but we may have to talk about that.

Ishtar: It’s what you do with leftover tortilla chips. This is going to turn into a cooking show, but you sauté onions and add leftover tortilla chips and some scrambled eggs. You cook them together, and I like them with salsa verde. They’re good with mole, too. It’s kind of good peasant-worker food, like so much of the best food.

Rick: Maybe we should have that for dinner tonight, or lunch today. I’m a peasant-worker.

Ishtar: Yeah, me too.

Life in the monastery

Rick: So, how long did you stay in that monastery? What did you learn there? How did you change there?

Ishtar: I changed immensely. I was there for six and a half years, both at the center on the Oregon coast and at satellite meditation centers. A lot of students had learned and wanted to have teachers there full-time, to be more available.

I was in this restaurant until we sold it. Of course, I had that six-month-long, in-residence teacher-training program, which was wonderful. The transformation that happened there is difficult to describe adequately in words.

I would come to some days when I’d go down to meditate, maybe after doing yoga asanas and sun salutations, and then go back to the meditation room and be down for nine hours or something. When I’d get up at six, or whenever dinner was—

Rick: You would have just sat there without a break for nine hours?

Ishtar: Sometimes, yeah. Or I’d get up and go to the bathroom. But especially with two gallons of water a day, I was told to stop that. “It’s okay if you only do one.”

Rick: You were drinking two gallons of water a day?

Ishtar: So I’ve been told. I’ve done a lot of things that ought to be bad for me, and I kind of survived them. Luck was on my side.

The teacher training was incredibly transformative. It also helped that, before then, I had had very clear experiences through meditation of what, in TM, you’d call the Transcendent, and what my system calls the Ascendant, or the Presence, the Unmanifest.

Going into the teacher training was just exploring that, sinking into it, and deepening it. Some days, I would wake up in the morning with this feeling that I could only describe as, “It feels like two lifetimes have just vanished.” I didn’t know they were there, but they were gone.

Rick: Like you’d worked through that much.

Ishtar: Yeah. I would feel so fundamentally lighter. Those would be the words I would use to describe it.

I know that some of the things you talk about on this show, a lot of those things sort of happened and transpired at the beginning of that course. After that, it must have been four more years of teaching meditation, traveling around, and living in the centers.

I went to places that, as a teenager with lots of wanderlust, I’d always wanted to go. But I had given up my big desire basket. I thought, “I just want this one desire. You can have the rest.” Then I found, “Oh, my God, that’s the thing I wanted to do.”

Rick: Like Switzerland?

Ishtar: Like school! Yes. Like Switzerland? Yes. Yeah, yeah. And so I had a strange, sudden obsession. Well, maybe it’s not strange, because Switzerland is a beautiful place. I was 16, and I’d let that go. And then here I am, 20 years old, and I’m invited to go for a two-week teaching tour in Switzerland, and I didn’t have a passport.

This was another little miracle that went real fast. I think it went real fast. I did all the things right, and I went to the Lincoln County Courthouse to get the passport. I was going to pay for it expedited, but then they told me—and I needed it the next day; I didn’t know—that there was no way it was going to get to me the next day. It was like three or four in the afternoon.

They said, “Well, there’s no way this is going to get to you the next day. That’s because we have to send it to the Seattle Passport Agency, they have to process it, they have to stamp it, and then they have to mail it to you at your café in Lincoln City. If you expedite it here, the best we could do for you, we think, is three days.”

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: And I was so destroyed.

Rick: Did you have a plane ticket or something?

Ishtar: Yeah, I had a plane ticket already. I acted, and I began to act, as if it were so. But I was like, “Well, if I can’t go, then I can’t go. But I have faith that whatever needs to happen is going to happen.” I thanked them profusely: “Thank you for whatever you can do. I appreciate it. I really hope it shows up tomorrow, nevertheless.”

And that’s what happened. I still don’t quite know how that happened. I didn’t know bureaucracies could normally work that fast. But it was 11:00 the next day in the café, and there were people there. When I got this package with my name on it from the Seattle Passport Agency, I definitely said, “Holy fuck!” really loudly.

Then I was so joyous, so joyful. The guy was going, “Oh, shh, shh, shh, Ishtar. No, no, no.” It was like, “It’s okay. I know you’re joyful. This is great.”

And so I was going to Switzerland. When I got there, it was like another one of those weird nodal points of déjà vu and destiny times ten. Somehow, I was just completely in a strange bliss by being there and teaching meditation and being on Lake Lucerne. All of that sort of stuff was hitting me from so many different angles.

Later, I got to go back again, two years later, and live there for about a month and a half. I had a similarly profound experience and was sent off to different places like Helsinki, Finland; Hong Kong; and Michigan. I loved being in Michigan. That was kind of my own Shangri-La experience for all those years, getting to do that.

Rick: That’s pretty neat. Yeah. Tell that experience about when you were in Brunnen, Switzerland, and you looked up at the cliff.

Ishtar: Yeah, that’s right.

Rick: I used to meditate up there, at that facility on the cliff in Brunnen.

Ishtar: I may very well have been picking up on your wave. Anyway, I was sitting in this lovely lakeside café. It was a beautiful day, and there was a little, sort of, concrete jetty out into the water. My seat was oriented right toward this kind of bluff over Lake Lucerne.

Suddenly, I was tearing up. I can do it now—tears of joy. My heart was like a sun shining through my whole being. There was this deep sense of being home, looking up at that bluff. It was like, “Oh my God, I’m home.”

I saw this kind of light coming up off the cliff, and I asked my hosts, “What’s up there? Is there anything going on up there?” And they were like, “Yo, yo, there is.”

Rick: Do the Swiss accent.

Ishtar: It sounds Swedish, but it’s not. “That is the old Maharishi place.” The Maharishi people—they call TM people the Maharishi people—used to meditate and live up there. “That is Seelisberg.”

I was like, “Oh.” And that was just, “Okay, all right.”

Rick: Incidentally, at the foot of that cliff, down by the lake, is a place called Rütli, which is supposedly where Switzerland was founded, and also supposedly where the apple was shot off William Tell’s head.

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: So the story goes.

Ishtar: Yeah. The fact that the foundation of Switzerland is right there.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. That’s pretty cool. What year were you born?

Ishtar: 1983. Good year.

Rick: I was just wondering if you had been somebody in the TM movement who had died, you know?

Ishtar: Yeah, maybe. Yes. I never felt that I had a 20th-century life. I just never felt, you know, “Oh, I’m here in the 20th century. Oh, Lord. Okay.”

Rick: Interesting. But, okay, so obviously the monastery and the traveling and all that stuff—that phase came to an end somehow.

Ishtar: That had to. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting it. It kind of—I felt like I was having these experiences where I was more and more regularly feeling like I was in everything.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I would look at myself through other people’s eyes. Or I would see people as if I were looking at me. I felt as if I could be up until three in the morning, writing these newsletters, and I just felt like I was being powered by a bunch of juice, like something plugged into my back. It was just going, and it was so much joy living this life. I was so joyous to do that.

The Inner Call to Leave the Organization

Then, all of a sudden, I would take these midnight walks to chill out, and from my heart I started getting some sort of invitation: “You should get fired.” It was like, “What?” “Yeah, you should get yourself kicked out. Get yourself kicked out of the organization.”

Then, all of a sudden, I would take these midnight walks to chill out, and from my heart I started getting some sort of invitation: “You should get fired.” It was like, “What?” “Yeah, you should get yourself kicked out. Get yourself kicked out of the organization.”

I was like, “Oh.” It was coming from the same sort of place that I had trusted my whole life, and it had the same resonance of, “That’s what you really ought to do.” But I wanted to fight it.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I was like, “No, no, no. You can’t be serious.” It was like when you shake the eight ball: “I’m going to do this again.” It was pretty insistent. I just kind of pushed that away because I really thought, “I need to be…”

I did feel a sense of safety being part of, being tethered to, an organization and teachers who had more consciousness than me. I had a deep respect for lineage, for the value of passing things down as purely as possible, and all the things that sort of attend that. I really appreciated that. But at the same time, this thing in my heart was saying, “No, get kicked out.”

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I think I stayed about a year past my expiration date. I think that was it. It was funny, because after I ignored that, I was on such an expanded track. It just imploded, or it just…

Rick: I think because you were ignoring it.

Ishtar: Because I was ignoring it. I was fighting it, and things got gummy. Thankfully, years before, I’d made a promise to myself that if I ever found myself as a kind of malcontent—if this somehow was no longer my own Shangri-La, if I was not expanding, if I was not able to expand every day and shed the stuff that might accumulate—then it was time for me to go.

I found myself in that place. It was hard, but I was like, “Yep, I’m going to honor that promise.” I didn’t want to do it, because life might really suck, you know?

Rick: Interesting.

Ishtar: But I did it.

Rick: Yet another similarity between you and me, because I got kicked out of the TM movement. I did it—I mean, it happened because I was getting involved with Amma. I was just doing things like sending out little emails about little Amma events in town, which I kind of knew in the back of my mind could get me kicked out of the TM movement.

But it was like, “If it happens, it happens. Maybe it should happen. I don’t care. I’m just going to do this. I’ll still go to the dome and meditate if they want me to.” But sure enough, they got wind of it and kicked me out.

These are almost like our typical patterns or something that you and I both follow.

Ishtar: Life tracks.

Rick: So many similarities that we’ve come up with so far.

Ishtar: Same song structure, maybe different notes.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Maybe they’re just reflective of human psychology and how it often plays out in groups and spiritual organizations and with seekers and stuff—fanatical people, administrative types, and all this different stuff.

Ishtar: I mean, it’s funny too, because part of the reason—I’ve learned to call him MSI; that’s all I ever knew him as—part of the genesis of my particular meditation teaching was often presented as moving away from the rigidities, or maybe some of the cultish aspects and facets, or the overcontrolling aspects, of the TM world.

Then I found that those things crept into that ascension world.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: I would find myself—maybe they were totally unimportant arguments—but I found myself becoming so argumentative about stuff that I felt was groupthink, or stuff that I felt was like, “This isn’t the important stuff. This isn’t good. This isn’t a good direction.”

I started to find myself in the minority there.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: Maybe I was sometimes characterized as just saying that because I had stress, or because I’d got a…

Rick: Yeah, that same thing they used to say in TM: “You’re unstressing.” If your behavior was not kind of kosher, or at least according to the group mentality, they would say, “Oh, you’re just unstressing.”

Ishtar: Yeah. Maybe some of that might have been true, because I think I certainly was causing myself friction by ignoring the necessity, probably, to follow the Holy Spirit and leave. But that was what had to happen. And so I kind of…

Rick: Yeah. You know, when the chick hatches, it’s not really helpful for the chick—or for the other eggs—for him to stay in the incubator. It’s time to get out of the incubator. He’s just going to cause trouble there and restrict his own growth.

There are times to be in groups and movements and this and that, and there are times to leave.

Ishtar: That’s right.

Rick: A lot of people who leave do so with sour grapes. They just reject the whole thing as having been a complete waste of time. But I think maybe sometimes it has been, though I think it’s usually a healthier attitude to say, “Well, I’m grateful for everything I learned in that, and now I’m on to my next phase. Those who are still in it, I wish them well. They can stay in as long as they want. It seems to be working for them.”

Ishtar: Right, right. I have an interesting position internally, where I have all this love and appreciation for so many of the people who were my mentors, who I looked up to, and who were there for me as almost a surrogate family in many ways—a second spiritual family.

At the same time, there’s not really much contact, and some of my best friends—former best friends, maybe…

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Ishtar: I still consider myself a friend, but from what I see and what I hear in the emails and messages sent to me, maybe it’s not mutual all the time. The hand is always open on this side.

Rick: You’re kind of a black sheep.

Ishtar: A little bit. Yeah, it seems to be the case. Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Interesting.

Ishtar: But yeah, for some people, that monastic experience was essential. It was perfect for me. It was definitely in my script.

Rick: A good phase for your life.

Ishtar: Wonderful. Yeah, it was everything I wanted and so much more. And so many experiences that I thought, conservatively, well, this could take three lifetimes, so you better start on it now. And then, to get to certain experiences, I thought, whoa, is that what I had read about? Wow, I didn’t think that it would happen.

Witnessing and subtle perception

Rick: What were some of the experiences? We’ve been talking about the external circumstances a lot now, right? I mean, what were some of the subjective stages of advancement?

Ishtar:(Hello. Oh, I’ll keep going with the interview.)

Rick: Yeah, keep going.

Ishtar: Yeah, well, so I would say certainly having…

Rick:(There’s a little doggie here.)

Ishtar: Certainly having so much activity and working in that kitchen, it was a wonderful, wonderful ground for experiencing the silence while being very dynamically engaged. And so the witnessing was very strong at points.

Rick: It’s a good stabilization of that, to see if it can maintain, and to learn how to maintain it in the midst of intense activity.

Ishtar: Yes, it was a beautiful…

Rick: Not that you’re making an effort to maintain it…

Ishtar: No, there was no effort. There was no sense of a weird, dissociative-type thing. No, it’s just natural. And it would sometimes kind of sneak up on me. I’d be at the ticket window and considering when to put these eggs in and when to start this, doing all the gymnastics you have to do as a chef at lunch hour. But then I would notice, whoa, what is this? I’ve in fact been in silence this whole time.

Rick: Right. And you’re just kind of on automatic, doing your stuff.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then once I would appreciate that, it would kind of deepen and become thick. I would then start to, as soon as I would go in one of those doors, be in the whole restaurant, kind of feel into people and feel into the food, and be in that space.

And it was a wonderful, beautiful dance, especially as one of my best friends from Finland was kind of my co-cook. He did the cold side, and I did the hot side. I said, “Let’s make it a show kitchen.” We were really tuned into each other, and it was like a ballet. He would frisbee tortillas to me, and I’d catch them behind my back and stuff. I would flip things from the sauté pan onto the plate and…

Rick: Oh, okay. I thought it was more like that Seattle fish market where they’re throwing the fish.

Ishtar: No, no. It would have been nice if we’d had an audience. I would have liked that. It would have been fun. But he was Wushu-trained before, and so he was quite good with his body, as a dancer. We just did it for fun.

There was a shared joy, because we were both sort of tuned into the silence together and we knew it. It was a wonderful kind of play, just for fun. So that was one thing.

I never sought out awareness during sleep because, frankly, I’d never read about it. So that took me by surprise.

Rick: When it started happening?

Ishtar: Yes, yeah. That was… Actually, I didn’t like it, because many of the times it felt like I was stuck inside an inert log. I remember I would try to move, but it felt as if my mind was asleep, too, which of course later would produce the question…

Rick: Well, if you’re aware and your mind is asleep, how do you know you’re aware?

Ishtar: Exactly. I remember I was almost like knocking on my mind, and my mind was going, “Duhhhhh,” like that. That’s the best I could describe the thought of nothing. I was like, “Hey, I’d like to move this body,” but it was like nothing would happen.

Then I just would have to give up because nothing would happen, and I would spend however long it was just kind of being in awareness. And I didn’t like it. So I said, “If anybody can just not have that happen, that would be great.” And so it kind of stopped.

Rick: Yeah. I’ve talked to friends who have had it start and then have wanted it to stop, and it eventually did. I’ve talked to other friends, like Harry Alto, who says he hasn’t slept in 60 years because his body has slept, but the inner awareness just doesn’t get overshadowed or clouded by sleep.

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: So I don’t know. Maybe it’s optional, or whatever. Maybe it depends on the individual’s makeup. But it’s a thing. And sometimes when people first start having it, they think there’s something wrong with them. They think they have insomnia or something. But it’s just a matter of the inner awareness having been sort of enlivened to the extent that the tamas, the dullness of sleep, can’t overshadow it.

Ishtar: Right. Yeah.

Rick: By definition, most people watching this are familiar with the notion that pure awareness is a continuum. It just is always there, whereas the cycles of waking, dreaming, and sleeping kind of go on. And one can reach a stage at which one is aware of that continuum twenty-four seven.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah. And then there were also fun experiences with what, at least in our little collective, may have been improperly named Ritam Bhara Pragya. Or I might say manifesting things. But that’s only a small facet of a greater sort of context. So maybe I shouldn’t use that word, but I’ll just say crazy, weird manifestations. That’s what I’ll use.

Rick: Ritam Bhara Pragya means “that level of intellect which knows only truth.” And it’s said that if one can function on that level, then whatever one wishes to know, one will know with truthfulness and certainty. Also, certain things can be accomplished if you can learn to function on that level. So, to proceed…

Ishtar: Right. So one day, again in this wonderful café that I had dreamed up as a seventeen-year-old, which proved again to be sort of the witness of a miracle, I was in the kitchen with my buddy.

Rick: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Ishtar: Exactly. That’s how I’ve always thought of it!

Rick: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Zen and the Art of Cooking.

Ishtar: Exactly. That was always in my mind about the Magical Mystery School, which owns the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

But I was just there, and it was near closing. Suddenly, it just came through me. We were in the silence pretty much all day, and then it just emerged out of it, right through my mouth. I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if twenty people”—because we never had a table that large. I think we had an eight-person party once—“wouldn’t it be cool if twenty people just walked into the café soon?”

Then it kept going. I said, “Yes, in fact, we will be so quick in the kitchen that we’ll get everything out within five minutes and beat the drink orders. We’ll have to take them out ourselves.” We kept going, and then I stopped. My co-cook was like, “Yeah, okay.”

Then I heard a voice and a phone ring outside. It was the voice of a colleague, a waitress and bar person. She said, “You better get ready, because twenty people are about to come in five minutes!”

I thought she’d heard me. I was like, “Yeah, very funny.” She played jokes. I thought, you could hear everything that was said in that kitchen. I said, “Very funny. Yeah, right.”

Then she came up and said, “No, you know, I’m serious. You really better get ready!” I thought, whoa, okay. I couldn’t believe it. And I still couldn’t believe it when twenty people streamed through the door. Something dropped. That’s what it felt like. It was odd.

We were so in the silence that I don’t know how we did it. It was like everything went into slow motion. We had about four appetizers and twenty hot and cold plates, and we were just the most efficient we’d ever been in our lives. Zen and the art of short-order cooking.

We had to carry the food out because they were at the bar mixing the drinks. When we took it out to the table, they were shocked. We got one mild accusation: “You’ve just given us stuff that you already cooked?”

I said, “No, we just made this right now.” There was a lot of intensity coming out. They were like, “Whoa.” They gave us a huge tip, cleaned their plates, and said, “That was the best meal we’ve ever had.”

We cleared them out, but then it happened again, right after, the same day—ten minutes later, after we cleared the table. It was like we were on a kind of gambler’s streak or something. I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if eighteen people came in?”

Rick: At how fast it was. And it happened again? Eighteen!

Ishtar: Eighteen! We sat them back there because that’s the only place you could sit people. Parties of that size were in the back garden.

Then eighteen came, except this time my prognostications were, “Since we’re almost out of prepared food, it’s going to be a little bit more difficult. You’re going to have to come in here and probably chop potatoes ad hoc, because we’ve almost cleaned ourselves out of certain food items.”

And that’s what happened. We served them with the same sort of bliss. Then I was about to say it again, and they said, “We’re closed.” I thought, “Okay, you’re right. We’re out of food. We have to restock!”

It was wonderful. I think part of the reason I mention that now is that I had always wanted an experience of that magnitude, which I absolutely would have had difficulty rationalizing in a random universe. I’d wanted something that big to counter my mind’s arguments, and it was given to me that day.

Rick: Yeah.

Watch out for what you wish for! There are a lot of stories in the Vedic literature about this kind of thing, where some yogi will make a vow or say such-and-such is going to happen. And because Ritam Bhara Pragya, that level of intellect which knows only truth—because the yogi is so truthful and so in tune with absolute truth—it has to happen because he said it had to happen. So it happens.

There are a lot of cool stories about it. The whole Srimad Bhagavatam was based on a story where this yogi was sitting in samadhi. Some king came along and wanted to talk to him and ask him a question or something, and he ignored the king because he was in samadhi and didn’t know the king was there. So the king got really mad and picked up a dead snake with his stick or something and draped it around the yogi’s shoulders.

The yogi’s son comes home and sees this insult that has been done to his father and says, “Whoever did this is going to die of snakebite in a week.” Then his father finally comes out of samadhi and takes the snake off, I guess, and comes to realize what his son has said. It’s like, “Oh, no, you said this. It’s got to happen because of who you are and the level from which you operate.”

The king gets wind of it and realizes, “Oh, I was a jerk. I shouldn’t have done that. Well, I’m going to die anyway. How can I make good use of this week?” So he gets together with—who was it, Narada or somebody?—who ended up reciting the whole Srimad Bhagavatam. The whole thing came out in that week, and the king got enlightened, I guess. Then the snake came along and bit him. End of story.

But the thing is, if you’re operating from that level, with that degree of truthfulness in your life and in your consciousness, what you say has to come through.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Anyway, yeah. Okay, so you left there?

Ishtar: Yeah, I left there. And I kind of gave myself a hard time afterward, truth be told. I mean, I didn’t leave with that many sour grapes.

But I did leave with some questions. I certainly, even though I tried never to put anybody up on some sort of idealized pedestal of perfection—I saw the dangers in that—it was nevertheless so easy to want that, and to really want this organization that had been such a part of your young life to be perfect. I didn’t think it necessarily was, so when I left, I questioned…

Rick: You were sort of disillusioned?

Ishtar: Yeah, I questioned my own experience. I said, “All these things I’ve experienced, are they just…? Is there more? Are they really real or important?” Because I would also look at the world and think, “I don’t know. When I meet people, they don’t seem to think there’s still too much going on there. So maybe it’s not.”

Maybe I started so young that I didn’t have that much contrast—a contrast of experiences to make sense of it.

Rick: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. Some of us managed to mess ourselves up and get ourselves pretty miserable, and so then we start on the spiritual path. The contrast is like, “Oh, it’s such a relief.”

Ishtar: Yeah. Even though I had some pain and things that were there, all in all I felt like I had a really good life. I had been gently moved into that dimension. So I thought, “Well…” Sometimes I would be a little bit jealous. A lot of my friends, fellow monks, were in their fifties or sixties, and they would say, “Well, I had a job in corporate America and a family, and let me tell you…”

I was really impressed. I thought, “Wow, they’ve lived life. They’ve had something there, and I haven’t. What have I been doing?” So I thought, “Well, I’m going to see what it’s like to try to be a normal person.”

I didn’t really have many wild oats I felt inclined or needed to sow, but for me, the wild oat was, “I’m going to go to university. I’m going to spend some time with my sister, then go to university and get a degree of some kind.”

Rick: Not a bad idea.

Ishtar: Yeah. Maybe I’ll try to see if I can revive some of that old life. It turned out that it was ultimately a good exercise in suffering.

Rick: Being at the university?

Ishtar: Yeah. Or trying to. I was trying to deny a lot of what I had experienced for the purposes of the experiment. I wanted to do the experiment purely, but it was painful. It was like trying to fit into a size-two shoe after being a size ten.

Rick: Yeah. What did you end up studying?

Ishtar: I ended up with a degree in philosophy.

Rick: So you earned it. Yeah, that must have been rough. Here you are, deeply experienced, and the things that a lot of these philosophies are groping to understand and skimming around the surface of with all kinds of complex theories—you’ve already gone down to the depth of the lake and had the experience. It must have been a little bit difficult to sit in classrooms with all these people discussing this stuff.

Ishtar: Yeah, it did make me depressed.

Rick: And you couldn’t just say, “Hey, dudes, I’ve experienced this. I know…”

Ishtar: That’s not going to do anything. I can’t do anything. Actually, at one point, I made a sort of resolution. I’m kind of a talker, I’m gregarious, and I like to talk with people, but I decided that I wasn’t going to tell anybody anything about myself unless they solicited it. I figured someone was going to ask me.

I realized how uncurious people seemed to be. When I talk with people, I love to get to know them. I want to probe and question and see what they’re about, touch their essence.

Rick: I’m that way, too. I start asking them questions right away.

Ishtar: Yeah, I want to experience people at their essence, at the bottom of the lake, in that place of unity. But I found that I was a little bit naive, because I realized that nobody seemed to have time for anything except everything that was going on in their heads. I thought that maybe at university people would be curious and joyful and, if not conscious, at least wild and free enough to be fluid and explore.

Rick: Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of people, perhaps the majority, who—you’ll be having a conversation with them and you’re interested, you’re asking them questions, you’re listening, and you’re really getting their story. Then you start saying something about yourself, and it’s like, “Okay, well, I gotta go. I’ll see you later.”

Ishtar: Yes, exactly. I’m not confused by that, but I certainly found it strange when I first encountered that in people.

Rick: Yeah. It’s like they get off on talking about themselves, but they’re not really interested in anyone else.

Ishtar: Yes. So I kind of wore a costume. I decided I was going to wear a costume, this costume of Thomas Ward Howell again, and see what it was like. It was ill-fitting at the time. It could probably have been better fitting.

Rick: Yeah. What did you do, two years of it?

Ishtar: No, I did five years.

Rick: Wow.

Ishtar: I could have tried to do architecture at the start because it was a lifelong passion. Then I realized I did not want to sleep under a drafting table and produce dreary cardboard models of ugly modernist structures, because I had a different aesthetic than the standard modernist aesthetic.

Rick: So you went into philosophy? You and I were in the airport yesterday, and I was saying, “Imagine the amount of planning it takes to build a place like this.” We were in Phoenix Airport. It’s just mind-boggling. Every little wire has to be taken into account, and every little placement of every little thing. Anyway, that’s a tangent, but it’s something I’ve often wondered about when I look at big buildings or bridges or anything else—the whole science of being able to do that.

Ishtar: Look at a termite mound. It’s so complex, and they’re just doing it. Or a beaver dam. We’re just doing it by a different route.

Rick: With termites, no one termite knows what’s going on in its entirety. But somehow they work as a collective, because the network gets built.

Ishtar: Yeah. Interesting, wonderful, incredible structures.

Rick: That’s also true of human-made attempts. They say no one knows how we got to the moon, because it was too much information for any one person to figure out. But through the collaboration, and the proper way of all these people working together, we got there—according to most people. We were talking about how certain people think we staged it in Hollywood.

Anyway, okay, so you did five years of academics, and then you finally got out of there.

Ishtar: Yeah, I was just cooking with the suffering near the end. I got to the point where I started waking up at night and not being able to breathe.

Rick: Stifled by the whole experience?

Ishtar: Something like that. I thought, “I’ve got to be sick and dying, right, Doc? Do I have cancer?” They checked me out and said, “You do not have cancer.” I said, “Are you sure?” They said, “We’re pretty damn sure.”

Rick: Were you getting sleep apnea or something?

Ishtar: Yeah, I was getting to the point where I would have panic attacks in the night. There were some points where I would kind of go into some of those NDE spaces I’d experienced before and was sort of familiar with.

It was like in that movie Gladiator, where I would see a door, an ethereal kind of door, and I would start walking toward it and leave my body. I would think, “Yeah, I can do this.” Then I had some sort of voice talk to me and say, “You actually could. You could leave right now. You’ve accomplished a great deal, and you could leave it here, and that would be just fine. Or you could stay around and…”

Rick: Go on Buddha at the Gas Pump six years from now! Not on the horizon!

Ishtar: Or you could stay around, and you’re going to have to dust off the old armor—that made sense to my brain—get out, get back on the horse, and get back into your old shape. Let whatever barnacles you’ve accumulated come off, and live and be of service.

I thought, “Well, let me think about that.” Then I said, “Yes, I will. I will do that. I’m going to…” And right when I made that choice, it stopped. That stopped happening.

Rick: That’s interesting. And just as in NDEs, how very often some guides or something come to people and tell them they have this choice, I tend to believe that something like that happened to you, even though you weren’t dying. Some kind of guardian angel or spiritual guide, or whatever these things are, was sort of talking to you there.

Ishtar: Yeah. I mean, I was kind of out of my body. Like I said, it was like in that movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen Gladiator. He’s always walking toward this door.

Rick: I don’t remember. Was that with Russell Crowe? I’ve never seen the movie. I think he got stabbed, but he still had to fight the fight even though he’d been stabbed. And he won.

Ishtar: But throughout the film, he kept having visions of the other side, where his family—his dead family—was on the other side of the gate. He was longing to go there.

Rick: Yeah. So that was a great movie. And I like Russell Crowe. But anyway, yeah. So you went to university in Portland?

Ishtar: Anyway, so that’s enough of Gladiator! I got that into a Buddha at the Gas Pump conversation. Score. But yeah, when I made that choice, stuff started falling off, and there was a center. I just needed to finish at university. It must have been a week later that I met my wife.

And the whole time in Portland, I was thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?” When I got to the monastery, I felt like I’d had all these experiences that I thought were going to take me three lifetimes. I’d experienced all this. I was sure a bus was just going to come and kill me soon.

In Portland, you know—yeah, yeah—because that was the nearby town. That’s where my sister lived. And I decided, “Oh, let’s just get going as fast as I can.” Years later—well, a week after I made my decision to stay—I met my wife, and she had the energetic signature of that forward path all about her. It was so clear that, as part of coming back in here, she was there.

Rick: Cool.

Ishtar: In so many ways, she helped me, just by being herself, shed these barnacles, come back to life, and come back to my path. And when I was coming back, I felt like, truth be told, I was able to come back in a much deeper sense than I had left off.

Mainly because, before, I would often feel this sort of creeping sense of judgmental insularity—the sense that the teaching was, you know, like, the people outside the walls of the teaching, even if you felt one, were somehow less than. There was a sense, even a very subtle sense, that people were somehow less than, and that was barbarian. And when I would feel that strongly, I would feel myself talking or acting from that space. I would want to go and take a shower with Scotch-Brite.

Rick: I know what you mean. I’ve been through phases like that. I started this conversation with a couple of fundamentalist preachers recently, because there’s this big controversy because one of them was trying to raise $40 million for a new jet or something. I had this conversation with the two of them. One of them was saying, “Yeah, you’ve got to have a Gulfstream jet such-and-such. Otherwise, you have to fly commercial, and you have to sit in a big tin can with a bunch of demons.”

Ishtar: I remember that. Yeah, yeah. Like that. Yeah, yeah.

Rick: It was like, obviously, he had gone farther and farther down that rabbit hole.

Ishtar: I think so.

Rick: His perspective was that anybody who wasn’t a fundamentalist of such-and-such a type, in his ilk, was a demon.

Ishtar: That’s right.

Rick: And you start looking at people like that around in society, and what a terrible way to see the world.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: As opposed to seeing them all as your brothers and sisters and people that you can feel love for.

Ishtar: Right. I feel like maybe I had screwed up enough and been enough of an idiot that it became—there was much softness in my heart, a softness in my gut. I was like, “Okay.” And that was it. Something that had bothered me in my first tenure as a monk was gone. And then I was like, “Okay, that’s great.”

So I gradually—I didn’t know I was going to be a meditation teacher again, because I still had a lot of respect for doing things properly. Regardless of any objections or whatever, I wanted to make sure that I would teach from a very good place. But as time wore on, it became gradually more apparent that teaching was going to be part of my life again, and that I ought to be doing that.

I started teaching folks for donations. I had to have some guinea pigs. I’d say, “Well, you’re going to be my guinea pig here. Are you cool with that? Because I might suck.” And they’d say, “Oh, that was great. You should go back to doing that professionally again.”

Rick: So that’s what you’ve been doing? You’ve been teaching meditation?

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And you’re also somewhat of a gifted astrologer?

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: I haven’t sampled your wares in that department yet, but I’ve heard you talk about it a little bit. As I gather, we don’t have the time to really go into justifying astrology, how it might work, and whether or not it’s valid, and all that business. But you do it, and you sort of bring intuitive skills to it as well. So you’re not just going by what a regular astrologer might do.

Ishtar: Right, right. Yeah, it’s quite different. Yeah, yeah.

Unity and celestial perception

Rick: And your wife is in Japan, teaching English as a second language, and the two of you kind of go back and forth. So we’ve kind of swung between subjective experiences you’ve had during your life and objective external events and things you did. Let’s take another swing toward the subjective at this point. What is your experience these days? Do you feel like you’ve attained some awakening or liberation or anything else? Do you still have all that subtle perception stuff? Do you feel like you’re still very much a work in progress in terms of the evolution of your subjective experience and what’s going on in that way?

Ishtar: Of course, the latter thing, I think, has always been the case. I would hate to ever think that there would be a sense of doneness or an end, because that’s always ongoing—the wonders that are out there to experience.

Certainly, coming back afterward, it didn’t take too long for there to be some rough patches, getting the newly encrusted barnacles off, and maybe some deeper stuff that I never really touched in the beginning. A lot of stuff was much more visceral, more at the heart level and gut level—more of that type of stuff. I never quite relaxed enough to get that stuff out.

So there was a process of having that clear out, and after that, there was a sense of just being able to relax more fundamentally into that sense of consciousness—not only being this kind of witnessing place, or this kind of thing I could see, kind of behind me, as I would often put it, but a sense of being relaxed enough to feel it pop up in Rick Archer and the chair, or in the rocks.

Rick: So it kind of went from witnessing to unity more?

Ishtar: Yeah. I never kind of—you know, all taxonomies seem to be imperfect and a little bit loose, so I kind of just—

Rick: They’re just words and not very precise. I’m not very precise, but—

Ishtar: Yeah. So I might say that that’s a part of the ocean that I seem to be visiting much more frequently than, say, 12 or 14 years ago, and that seems to be a more consistent experience.

Actually, along with that, almost at the same time, came this sort of explosion of what is often called celestial perception, or what some people call the psychic stuff.

Rick: Was it different from the stuff you had when you were a kid, when you were seeing spooks? Is it more of an—there’s a difference between astral and celestial?

Ishtar: Right, right.

Rick: Maybe you can explain that difference, and explain the difference in your experience between the two.

Ishtar: I would say there were a lot of similarities, but the experiences I’ve had in the last two years were much more precise or exacting than the stuff I had as a seven-, eight-, or nine-year-old.

There’s much more of a kind of—I don’t know how to quite describe it—a golden light. A kind of golden light underneath.

Rick: More subtle?

Ishtar: Yeah. And there was almost often a sense of—and not everybody gets this, or understands how I’ll describe it—but a sense of almost being able to investigate different stories of great building, as if this universe had a lot of different strata.

Rick: In my Father’s house are many mansions.

Ishtar: That’s right, that’s right. There’s a kind of going to them naturally, and a sense of my being sort of expanding out. Then every once in a while, I’ll start to notice, “Hey, what’s this room I’m in? I haven’t noticed this one before, but here it is,” and I’ll kind of look around.

There have been interesting experiences with going up through the top of my head, where there’s kind of a golden door, where people place the crown chakra. Then I go up this long sort of channel, and there are beings up there. They’re kind of golden beings, and I’ll say hi to them.

When I look horizontally—this is getting really weird, I apologize—there are kind of worlds, worlds where these different beings with different energetic signatures exist.

Those things have been, in some way, spontaneous and mundane. I use the word “mundane” because they’ve been almost as normal as having a memory or thinking about this or that. So that has been an interesting feature.

They haven’t slammed me and made me incapacitated or anything like that. They’ve just been almost like being ushered into, or invited into, exploring more and more of what’s happening right here.

Rick: It’s interesting, the way Maharishi laid it out. He said to get Self-realization established as a foundation, and then begin to develop the capacity to experience the full range of the relative, from gross to subtle. I remember him saying one time, “When you open up to that subtle perception, you discover that a world of being is there.” You can say worlds of beings.

Ishtar: Worlds. Yeah.

Rick: And they’re sort of right here, but just in a different dimension from our gross world. It’s not like you’re going off to Alpha Centauri or something to tune into them.

Ishtar: No, no.

Rick: There are just all these strata. It’s almost like, to take an example, you have your body, and it’s meat on this level. You go down to the molecular level, and it doesn’t look so much like meat anymore. It’s these little molecules. Even on the cellular level, it looks very different from this level. Then you get down to the DNA level or the molecular level, and then the atomic level. Each one of those worlds, as it were, is on its own level and would be unrecognizable to any other world. It’s so dissimilar, and yet those are the building blocks of this world.

So, the whole subtle-realms thing—I suppose, and you can speak to it better than I can, but I suppose you would find it—or do you find it? Have you found it to be very different in certain respects from our conventional world? Or are there differences and similarities?

Ishtar: Well, in some ways, I might contextualize it differently. It’s almost like it has become part of my conventional experience.

Rick: It’s true. Yeah, good. Well put.

Ishtar: It’s more like—

Rick: Like you’ve incorporated it.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah, it’s more like my definition of the conventional world has sort of expanded to accommodate these new types of data, if you will.

Rick: So you’re functioning in several worlds at once.

Ishtar: Yes, and often that’s the case. Sometimes it’ll be a classically physical sort of experience, like digging a hole in the garden. But just as often, I find myself doing some very physical work, like working on a house or planting a garden, and then there’s—good Lord—the plant is talking to me, and I start to sometimes phase into different time periods, and my clothing will look different.

But it’s never been too much to distract me from being able to function and appear as if I’m functioning in just the same manner as anybody else.

Rick: Yeah.

Ishtar: And so, that’s kind of how it’s gone.

Rick: So, to take another example perhaps—and this will just catch you unawares with this one—we’re here in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is notorious for having all kinds of vortexes and all kinds of woo-woo taking place. So, have you noticed anything here in Sedona since we arrived that I probably haven’t noticed?

Ishtar: Well, lately, I haven’t noticed. I don’t like to assume anything, but now you’ve taken care of my fear of assumption.

Besides a certain sense of feeling that there are these columns around where people probably reckon there are vortexes—I don’t know where people reckon they are—I see things. There’s a sense that I’ve seen large tracks of lines of gold that seem to carry energy and information, kind of connecting these points. I also have a sense of subtle beings walking around in town who aren’t discarnate spirits, but seem to be of a different sort of…

Rick: Like celestial beings?

Ishtar: Like celestials, a different sort of function in the universe. It seems to actually be quite a city here—a celestial city.

Rick: Interesting. So, kind of like a celestial city superimposed on a terrestrial city.

Ishtar: Kind of a terrestrial city superimposed on… Yeah, yeah, you could say it either way. I had the same experience with Mount Shasta. I actually, funnily enough, visited both of these cities about 13 years after my last visit or so. Coming back for the second round has been a much different experience, as far as all that sort of stuff goes.

Rick: That’s cool.

Ishtar: But yeah, I can see why human beings want to put beautiful stone houses in this environment, because there’s something interesting in the sauce here. Yeah, for sure.

Rick: I mean, just as an aside here, but related to our point, all these records in religious literature and all the artwork about angels and so on—you get it in Christianity, you get it in Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism especially, all these big, fancy murals with all these beings with various appearances and all that stuff.

It’s not just folklore. It’s not just myth. People have these experiences and probably did their best to put them into some kind of graphic form. It’s almost a record of humanity’s familiarity with, and acquaintance with, the subtle realms. So, if you take it in that light and don’t just brush it off as some kind of artistic imagination, it gives you a deeper appreciation of these traditions and of life itself.

Ishtar: Yeah. Yes, absolutely.

Rick: Okay, so anything else you want to say that I’m not thinking of?

Ishtar: Well, there are certainly more campfire stories, as it were, in the files, but it seems like we’ve probably brought enough out right here.

Rick: And so, I suppose if people want to get in touch with you, get involved with you, or learn something from you, it seems to me there are two main things.

Ishtar: Yes, right.

Rick: Unless you want to go cook in a restaurant someplace, there’s the meditation instruction thing, which I imagine you’d be happy to travel around and do over Skype?

Ishtar: I love traveling around to do it. Yeah. And I’ve never really done it over the internet. I’ve done it in a way that’s another big no-no for my organization. But I’ve done it in a couple of cases recently and found that people have had quite good experiences with it that way. I was skeptical, but…

Rick: I imagine it might be a little nicer, though, if people can get a group together and you could go and be with the group.

Ishtar: But that’s optimal. Yeah, yeah.

Rick: So there’s that, and people could—I’ll link to your websites—get in touch with you and invite you to come here and there.

Ishtar: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And then there’s the whole astrology thing. You still like to do that professionally?

Ishtar: Oh, I love doing that. Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And you have a website dedicated to that, right?

Ishtar: I do.

Rick: In which you describe how you do it a little bit more. You were telling me this morning at breakfast how much time you put into preparation for an astrological reading. Do you want to just quickly buzz through that, so people get a flavor?

Ishtar: Sure. Yeah. I really roll up my sleeves for it. I do these in person or over Zoom, Skype, or whatever video thing we use, and do a 90-minute reading with the client.

Usually, as I get better at it, my preparation time will probably shorten. But I like to put in, or at least have, two to three hours available for my own preparation of the chart and for looking into the person intuitively before the reading itself. And so, that’s…

Rick: So, three and a half to four and a half hours you’re spending on each one?

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: And how much do you charge for that?

Ishtar: One hundred and fifty U.S. dollars.

Rick: Hear that? That’s a pretty good deal.

Ishtar: I hope so. I try to make it a good deal. I want to be accessible.

Rick: Yeah, so it’s less than $50 an hour. It’s pretty reasonable.

Ishtar: Yeah.

Rick: And you were saying to me—and I appreciate this—that you just didn’t want to have it be all about money, and intentionally charged less than the going rate for such things. But not because you’re trying to compete with other astrologers. That’s your mindset.

Ishtar: Yeah. And if I become so busy and well known or something that I have to raise my prices, I’ll try to do that as moderately as I can.

And I always, whether it’s been meditation or anything else, have sliding-scale options. I always put that on my website. So, if you don’t have two dimes to rub together, if you really want to do this, I really want to find a way to make that happen so that it works for you.

It’s the same with the meditation, and I think I charge a very reasonable rate for that—like $300 for, I think, a very involved weekend class. I also kind of go out of my way to be available after the class for follow-up as much as possible. I’ve typically never charged for that. And so, yeah.

Rick: Great. Okay, so I think that gives people a glimpse of the Ishtar Thomas phenomenon. Thanks. I really appreciate it. I’m glad you were able to be here with me in Sedona. We’re going to go do some hiking over the next couple of days and have a potluck dinner with some friends and a bunch of other stuff before we go flying off back to our respective cities.

Ishtar: Yeah, this was great. Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Sure.