John Audette Transcript

John Audette Interview

Summary:

  • Background: John Audette is the author of “Loved by the Light: True Stories of Divine Intervention and Providence.” He has a background in hospital and hospice administration and has contributed to various scholarly works on spiritually transformative experiences.
  • Near-Death Experiences: John discusses his involvement in founding the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) and his work with notable figures like Raymond Moody and Edgar Mitchell.
  • Spiritual Journey: He shares personal stories, including a significant childhood incident and a transformative meeting with an Apache shaman.
  • Future Projects: John is working on a novel trilogy that blends political thriller elements with spiritual messages.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. The Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over seven hundred 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 interviews menu where you’ll see them organized in several different ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. We don’t monetize it in any intrusive way like some podcasts do, but we do rely on donations. So, if you feel like supporting it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website. My guest today is John Audette. He is the author of a book which I just finished listening to called “Loved by the Light True Stories of Divine Intervention and Providence.” John earned a Master of Science degree from Virginia Tech. He’s a native of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and he’s been for decades a senior executive in hospitals and hospice administration and physician practice management, as well as the performing arts and public broadcasting. He contributed several scholarly chapters to various books by other authors about spiritually transformative experiences and non-local consciousness, including works by Dr. Irvin Laszlo. He is also gratefully acknowledged in many other books on these subjects by various well-known authors whom he assisted dating back to 1974. In fact, John, that’s one thing I noticed about you, kind of like a Forrest Gump character in a way, because you’ve run into all these amazing people, like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Edgar Mitchell and, Kenneth Ring and all these people going back decades. You just seem to have a knack for traveling in those circles. What’s his name? Moody, Dr. what was his first name?

John: Raymond.

Rick: Raymond Moody, right. We’ll get into some of those stories, but that’s been kind of an interesting aspect of your story. You’re writing a book of fiction, a novel trilogy. Have you written all three or are you just the first?

John: Yes, all three are written. They’re finished. I’m actually just doing some final editing and polishing, and I hope to have them self-published sometime next year.

Rick: That’s great. Is it sort of like spiritual fiction?

John: Yes, I mean it’s political thriller in the genre of Dan Brown, suspense thriller, but it’s, I call it fiction, but a lot of it is historically accurate.

Rick: Wow.

John: I changed the names to protect the guilty. But I’m trying to basically do the same thing I did in writing Love by the Light, which is to convey some spiritual message points and some very important calls to action. Like, one of the main ones is to encourage people to practice critical thinking, do their own research and form their own opinions that are grounded in credible evidence.

Rick: Yes, and that can be taken different ways because people on both sides of various contentious debates say those same words. like, “All of a sudden I’ve become a molecular biologist and here’s my opinion about this.” If you want brain surgery, come to me. I’m an expert.

John: Yeah, but I like that quote, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”

Rick: Yes, who was that?

John: That Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that.

Rick: Yes. Yeah, good one. Okay, let me keep reading your bio, and I might interject again, because there’s a lot of interesting tidbits in here. So, you were the primary founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, IandS.org, co-founders Raymond Moody, Bruce Grayson, who’s been on BatGap, Michael Sabom, MD, and Kenneth Ring. And you now serve as CEO of Eterna, Eterna.org, which you co-founded with Eben Alexander, who’s been on BatGap, and Edgar Mitchell. One thing I was wondering about Edgar Mitchell, in your book, you kept saying he’s a skeptic. He’s a skeptic right up until his death, practically. But then I’ve always heard that he was the founder of, what was it, IONS? or some other…

John: Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Rick: Yeah, that one. So, if he was… I was kind of surprised because I figured he had had some kind of mystical experience when he went to the moon or something, that inspired him to start the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

John: But… Edgar wrote a great book called The Way of the Explorer. He talked about his oneness epiphany on the way back from the moon. And it started him on the path to explore consciousness. And we would often engage in dialogue about whether consciousness survives bodily death. In fact, John Fetzer of the Fetzer Foundation offered to help fund the Institute of Noetic Sciences if Edgar would agree to seriously pursue the issue of life after death from a scientific perspective. And Edgar said, “John, I would love to do that. I’d love to accept your money, but in all honesty, how can I agree to do that when I don’t even know the definition of consciousness? What can I tell you that survives bodily death if I don’t know what it is, or how to measure it, or how to operationally define it from the standpoint of a research protocol. So, this sort of reminds me of an incident that happened with Dr. Moody, Raymond Moody in Charlottesville, and I think it was 1976. James McDonald from McDonald Douglas Aircraft was in town to attend a symposium on future relations with, at the time, the Soviet Union. And he came in looking very somber and concerned. Life After Life had just come out. Raymond Moody’s bestseller.

Rick: Right.

John: Raymond Moody’s bestseller where he was pioneering groundbreaking work, where he defined near-death experiences for the first time and laid out what’s called a Moody model, which the common elements that are often reported. And it was catching fire. The book was truly riveting for a lot of people, because I think it was really the first time that a PhD MD seriously waded into the waters of survivalism. Now, Raymond would always say in the beginning that he did not know what these experiences signified. He could not, being a philosopher, a doctor philosophy, he could not legitimately claim them to be proof of survival, but they were interesting anecdotal stories that deserved everyone’s attention. So Mr. McDonald came in and he said, “We had a meeting,” and Bruce was there, Bruce Grayson, and Bob Monroe, Monroe Institute, out of body experiences, binaural beat, hemi-sync, and Ian had written a book called “20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.” So, he felt he was in good company, and he said, “Look, I’ve got my checkbook right here.” He kind of pulled it out of his jacket. “I’m willing to write you a check for any amount. You name the amount, I’m a wealthy guy, but I need you to produce evidence that there’s life after death. Because if you can do that, we will create ideological havoc in the Soviet Union, because their whole society is predicated on atheism. They said, “I’m concerned that we’re going to have a nuclear confrontation, that we will not survive. Nobody.” So, we have to diffuse this while we can. And your book is the most important and exciting thing I’ve read ever, that might serve as a solution. So will you do that and form a non-profit and I’ll fund it. You can direct the research. And Raymond, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He was well trained in what constitutes proof. Scientific method, yeah, what constitutes logic and deductive reasoning and all that and critical thinking. And so, Raymond said, I mean, this is Raymond. He’s an “ah shucks” kind of guy, and very unassuming and he just basically said, “Mr. McDonald, I appreciate the offer. I’m honored, I’m humbled, but I can’t accept it because proof sets a very high standard and we cannot possibly meet it to the point where it would create ideological havoc in the Soviet Union.” So, he declined the gift. Yeah. I was… It’s a tribute to his integrity. Yeah, you have to honor of that, but at the same time, I think he could have stayed in integrity and answered the question a little differently, which is what I was hoping. I wish I could have telepathically communicated to Raymond how he should respond. We didn’t know what Mr. MacDonald wanted to meet about or what his offer was going to be, so there was really no chance to more or less script of the conversation. But we were talking about at that time creating a 501(c)(3) to advance research in the area. And what I wish Raymond had said, by the way, he just turned 80 years old, I think it was June 29th, and he’s in good health and good spirits and still very much the laughing Buddha. But Raymond has the best sense of humor of anybody. He’s quite the comedian and a great storyteller. But anyway, I had hoped he would have said, we’re fortunate to be embarking upon fertile ground embryonic phenomenon called the near-death experience, which we know very little about. And we certainly could further the state of the art if we had adequate funding. I can think of lots of protocols and hypotheses, controlled studies, give grants to major universities, medical schools to undertake some of this work. And I can assure you that at the end of the day, while we might not have definitive proof, we will advance the state of the art that much further and probably make it that much more compelling because to be honest, my personal opinion, and I think this is probably Raymond’s point of view too, we could spend billions on research And yes, we would further the state of the art. We would accumulate some compelling information, and very interesting data cross-culturally, maybe even some longitudinal studies to determine aftereffects, and some prospective studies designed before experiences happen. But I think the takeaway at the end of the day would be to more or less validate what we already know, which I put in “Attorney in Seven Statements.” I summarized it as best I could into seven observations about the nature of reality based on a convergence model, which brings together frontier science and its exploration of these experiences, not just near-death experiences, but a whole array of exceptional, transcendent human experiences, together with the cornerstone pillar teachings of the world’s great religions, aligned with what the great sages and avatars and spiritual teachers have said over millennia. They all converge into those seven observations about the nature of reality. No matter how much more research we do, or how well funded it is, I really don’t think we’re going to improve upon those observations. At the very least, I think we might help to empirically validate them and make them more acceptable, and credible in the minds of a lot of folks who are still on the fence, still sort of tied to materialism. But nevertheless, I think they will stand the test of time. So, I’m a fan of research. I’d like to see a lot more of it. Frankly, this whole area has not been very well funded for decades, and especially, the burgeoning field of torsion physics, quantum physics, and how it makes use of consciousness, which I believe is the missing link that Einstein sought for his unified field theory. So that’s my long-winded answer to your question about Edgar Mitchell and John Fetzer and Raymond Moody and James McDonald.

Rick: Yeah, well I’d say that proof is not the right word because it’s too strong a word and there are many areas of science which are very mainstream and very widely respected, but which are still accumulating data after decades and they couldn’t honestly say they have proven a thing but there’s just, I mean science never ultimately proves a thing, there can always be a white crow that shows up, that refutes the notion that all crows are black, but, science works by virtue of just continually amassing greater and greater evidence. And so, your hypothesis gets stronger and stronger. And I think there’s a heck of a lot of evidence now for the kinds of things you’re discussing here. I mean even some, when you talk about subjective experiences. Have we ever proven that people dream? How do you videotape a dream? You don’t. Everybody says they have them and we can associate rapid eye movement and certain brain waves with them and so on, but I think the same thing could be done of higher states of consciousness. A lot of people have said they have them and there could be neurophysiological correlates which enable us to kind of establish a standard for these states.

John: Yes, well said. Well said. It reminds me of a cliché. To the one who knows, no amount of evidence is necessary, and to those who don’t know, no amount of evidence is sufficient. And that’s so true. Materialist science is dismissive of the phenomenology that falls under the rubric of spiritually transformative experiences. They like to be dismissive of the things that material science cannot explain, like the vertical perception, for example. So proof is an intellectual trap. That’s all it is. It doesn’t serve us well at this point. That’s not to say that we should buy into falsehoods or half-truths. We should, each one of us, engage in very aggressive critical thinking, but when the anecdotal evidence is so compelling and goes back for millennia, back to Plato, if not before, in the case of these experiences, and when science cannot adequately account for them, then the default position has to be, logically, to take these folks at face value. What do they believe it signifies? I’ve been very fortunate. I started this work at the age of twenty-two because of my meeting with Raymond, which was an amazing synchronicity. I call it “cosmic choreography” in my book because it was a journey that went back to 1960 when I was in third grade, the age of eight, the seeds were planted firmly back then. But I was raised Catholic, I gave it up for Lent when I left home at age 18. I was agnostic because I did not know what I did not know. And I wasn’t going to buy anything unless I could be reasonably sure that it was true. So, when I met Raymond, I was a full-fledged agnostic. The way in which I met him was extraordinary and he had my full attention because I could tell that spirit was at work without knowing what spirit was. I really felt guided and I felt I’d heard the ring of destiny for the first time. And when he spoke, I organized his first talk, his first major talk about his research. He was a medical student at the time at the Medical College of Georgia. And I was an undergraduate at Augusta College. I’d just been discharged from the army, and I’d been elected president of the Sociology Club. And our job was to bring interesting speakers to campus and I asked my club members if they had any ideas for good speakers and only one person raised her hand and it was Kathy Tabakian, who’s acknowledged in Life After Life, by the way. And Kathy said, “Yeah, I know somebody, Dr. Raymond Moody.”

Rick: Oh, he’s a doctor?

John: Yeah, he’s a Doctor of Philosophy.

Rick: Literally philosophy?

John: Yes, literally philosophy. And I said, “Well, what’d he talk about, Plato?” And she said, “Oh, no, no, no, he’s a medical student, He’s doing this fascinating research. I’m helping him with it, about people who have clinically died and been resuscitated. They come back telling these fantastic experiences. Well, I lit up like a Christmas tree when I heard that, because when I was eight years old in third grade, my best friend at the time, Mike Waters, I used to go to Mike’s house frequently after school for the proverbial milk and cookies and to play, do what eight-year-olds do. And I knew that his mom had been taken by ambulance to the hospital a few weeks before. She had had a heart attack. Apparently, she was clinically dead and resuscitated. And she came back home, I think two or three weeks later. And on this particular day, we’re walking home. Mike says to me, I want my old mom back. I miss my old mom. He was depressed because he didn’t know who this new person was. And I said, “What do you mean? “I thought she was fine out of the hospital.” “Well, yeah, she is, but she’s not the same.” “Well, how is she different?” She said, “Jesus freak.” “Jesus freak, what do you mean?” “Well, she talks about God and angels, and heaven and Jesus and how much he loves us.” And so, we get to his house that day and I’m seeing his mom for the first time. And oh my gosh, I mean I don’t see auras, but she was a glow. She was definitely a changed woman. You could see it in her face. Her countenance was remarkable. So, she had my attention. And she was reassuring me that nothing to fear, and God loves us, and we’re all greeted with incredible, beautiful love and compassion. And there is the death of the body, but not the death of the soul. So, nothing to fear, all is good. And I never forgot that story. It kind of stayed with me. I didn’t, not in the forefront of my thinking, of course, but there in the inner recesses. So, when Kathy told me this story that she was doing this research with Raymond, I was like, I’ve gotta meet this guy. I’ve gotta meet him. And then I did the next day, and it was love at first sight. And when we brought Raymond to campus, it was standing room only and panel discussion. His book didn’t come out until I think the fall of 1975. And I couldn’t wait to do my first ever interview with a near-death experiencer, at the age of eight. “Ms. Waters, Mike tells me that you went to the hospital, and you had a heart attack and you died.” “I sure did, honey. I sure did. What was it like to die? Oh, it was the most beautiful experience of my entire life. And she went on to describe it, A near death experience in classic terms. And this was April of 1974. But in that presentation, I don’t channel that I’m aware of. However, I received, I would call, thought implants during that time. They were not really my thoughts, but it was information coming through to me, I presume from spirit, and it was more or less like bullet points, like this is powerful stuff, this can change human nature, this can change the nature of social, political, and economic systems. Pay attention, form an association, do more research, kind of stuff. So, from that point on, I just kept bugging Raymond about letting me move forward with what turned out to be the International Association for Near-Death Studies.

Rick: Good. A question just came in about Raymond from a fellow named Stuart Finney in the UK. He wonders if you’ve ever read Making Sense of Nonsense by Raymond Moody, and he feels that this particular book is very important with no other like it, and he has been profoundly affected by it.

John: Yes. Well, thank you for that question. Great question. I am familiar with Raymond’s nonsense work. In fact, he’s been working on this. This is what he did when he was a student at University of Virginia, a doctoral student, and he created a taxonomy of nonsense. I forget how many different types, but oh my god, Raymond has an intellect unlike anybody I’ve ever met. And nonsense, his work in nonsense proves it to my way of thinking. And it’s the work he’s proudest of, most excited about, and he feels he gives work, he has been giving workshops in how to employ nonsense techniques, nonsense exercises that are intended to suspend the rational mind.

Rick: Can you give us an example because I don’t know what this would be about?

John: Well, nonsense is by definition a statement or a subject that one cannot logically or rationally interpret. So, if I made a nonsense statement, “Giraffes, pickles, onions, and I don’t know where this goes,” I mean a nonsense statement, that’s probably a poor example, but if I made a nonsense statement… How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Well, that’s not really so much nonsense. Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense. Raymond could come up with like, he’s very good at nonsense. Why is a mice when it spins? you go, something like that. So, in fact, we had a nonsense party one time and we were supposed to bring their favorite nonsense phrase, but when you hear nonsense, it suspends the rational mind.

Rick: It’s like a Zen koan of the kind.

John: Correct. Well, and what is the sound of one hand clapping? Yeah, Zen koan is much more contemplative. To me, it’s much, this nonsense, it’s not something that logically computes. The rational mind goes into what the computer called in computer programming, this is concept of do loop, where the computer is trying to make sense of the command so that it can do the next task. But it’s really kind of going on a circuitous, in a wild goose chase through the circuits, trying to figure out what the meaning is of this command, when in fact it might not have any real meaning. Raymond’s theory is that this suspends ego, and it parks the intellect, the rational mind, and puts it in a state of suspended animation. He thinks that nonsense exercises work really well for people who are very analytical, and the type A’s, because he feels that when you suspend the realm, I mean meditation does this, when you’re in deep state meditation, you move outside of ego, and you move outside of rational thought, and you move into what I affectionately call the twilight zone, but it’s that place where you enter the realm of the unseen and Spirit begins to communicate. So yes, I personally believe that nonsense is Raymond’s most important work, and he also says that nonsense gives people a language that they can use when they come back from their death experiences to more effectively convey what happened to them. He believes it provides a whole new vocabulary to work with. One of their biggest problems is, the ineffability of what happened to them. They don’t quite know how to put it into words. So, yes for those of you listening, I highly encourage you to get Raymond’s book, Making Sense of nonsense. And I think he does offer CDs or downloads on how to engage in nonsense training. And he believes that through doing this, one can engineer one’s own epiphany, one’s own astral travel, if you will.

RICK: Interesting. Okay, well let’s do an abrupt segue here. So, in your book you tell the story of where, as an adult, you went to see an Apache shaman who happened to be a chain smoker, although that’s not really relevant, and he immediately picked up on an incident that happened to you when you were what six or eight years old. Something like that where some bullies made you fall off your bike. Tell us about that story.

John: Yeah, that’s an interesting, one of my interesting adventures in life. The year is 2008 and a friend of mine said there’s an Apache shaman in town who’s giving readings. I think you’re supposed to meet him. That’s my guidance and I’d like to suggest that you call for an appointment. And I’m like, well I don’t really do these kinds of things. I mean, having been involved with Noetics and with IANDS and Eternea, I meet a lot of psychics, channels, mediums, shaman, and generally, it’s sort of a casual thing, but I don’t really, pay for greetings, if you will, because I’ve only met a handful of really good ones who I think had legitimate talents. This guy was pretty remarkable, but I didn’t know that going into it. So, my knee jerk was, “Well, I told him your name. I told him I was going to call you, and he said he wants to meet you. So, if you like what he has to say, you can make a donation.” And I said, “Okay, fine. I can agree to it on that basis.” So, I went to a high-rise condominium in Pompano, where he was staying with a friend, and he was out on the balcony overlooking the Atlantic Oceans, and he was a chain smoker, and on the table in front of where he was seating, coffee tables, a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, flip-top bucks, red and white. That has spiritual significance for me. Yeah, we’ll get into that story later. Yeah, and when I tell that story, this whole meeting with him will take on new dimension, but he was smoking, and the interesting thing was the box of cigarettes was open, and there was only one cigarette missing, and it was the one he was smoking. And I sat down, looked at him, he’s definitely, Native American, you could definitely see the attributes, qualities that would establish him as that. And he had me, he was kind of sizing me up and he was doing so very quickly. And he said, he pointed to the cigarettes on the table. He said, “I know those cigarettes have meaning for you. I just want you to know that they’re my calling card. And I’ve been smoking these cigarettes for years. So, it’s not a plant. Many, many years this has been my brand. So, he said I just want you to know who you’re dealing with. Then he kind of steps up and he puts his left hand on my left shoulder and he’s feeling the spot I have my left shoulder which it sends me through the roof whenever anybody touches it and it’s like a pinched nerve or something. And he knew right where it was, and he said tell me about that what happened there. So, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know what that is. It could be a pinched nerve maybe. “No.” He says, “you’re carrying a traumatic incident from your past.”” Oh really? You think?” He said” yeah. When you were six years old, first grade, what happened? Involves riding a bicycle.” He saw all this.

Rick: Wow. That’s impressive.

John: Oh my god. I’m not a scientist, but I’m trained as a scientist.

Rick: And you didn’t tell your friend that story that he was staying with, right?

John: I didn’t. The friend who introduced me to him was not the one he was staying with. It was somebody different. But I told her. I thanked her profusely later because it turned out to be a powerful meeting. But, as a scientist, it’s like, how do you see this? How do you know this, as I try to approach things with the discipline of a scientist. So, I immediately go into my wanting to ask twenty questions, but he won’t let me go there. He’s like, “I want to hear about the experience. Tell me from your perspective what happened.” I said, “Well, I just got off training wheels, and I was very good at riding my bike without training wheels, And I was going down this asphalt street, and it wasn’t smooth asphalt, it was rocky asphalt. And I was maybe a couple blocks from my home, and these boys, these two young boys, I think they were older than me, I’m guessing, eight and ten, eight and eleven, something like that. The car was in the driveway, the father’s car, and the hood was up, the father was working on it. mechanics dolly which is a dolly you lay on with four wheels and slide under the car. And they were playing with the dolly. The driveway was sort of slanted and when they saw me riding by they just shoved the dolly down the driveway, and I couldn’t brake fast enough, and it ran right in front of my bike to the front tire and I hit it and the bike you know reared up and I flew off the handlebars and over the handlebars and glided along the street. My face made contact with it. I still have a big scar here from that event. It just turned my face into a bloody pulp and shredded skin. It was quite painful. I was quite traumatized. I left the bike there and I picked myself up and I went home. I was crying. My mom was outside with my older sister and she saw me bleeding profusely, and she brought me in the house and put cold face cloth on it and she was patting it and treating it and she wanted to know what happened, and I told her. And my sister went and retrieved my bike. My mother had choice words for his parents. They denied the whole thing. When my father came home from work, my mother told him what happened, and he went down and spoke with the parents, the two boys, and their story was, it was an unfortunate accident. The dolly rolled down the driveway by itself, the boys did not push it, and it collided with my bike. Just an unfortunate accident. So, you know, the shaman’s name was Eagle Bear, and he said to me, “How do you interpret that?” I said, “I don’t know what to make of it. I just know that it was very traumatic and painful, and my face wasn’t the same for quite a while.” So, he said, “Well, those weren’t little boys. Those were lizards.” I said, “What do you mean by lizards?” He said, “Low vibration, interdimensional beings.” Well, of course I don’t have a context for that. And so, I’m like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.” He said, and he got into other things, which I write about in the book, where he goes on about me being one of forty-six people on the planet, and I’m supposed to help bring more love and light to help us, humanity, avoid a very unpleasant future. And I’ve heard this before from other psychics and mediums, so I don’t accept it as true, I don’t deny it as false, I just have an open mind about it. So, he wanted me to do some more work, some sweat lodge, fire ceremony stuff, some peyote, maybe some ayahuasca, another vision quest and so on. And he said my vision quest was my opening and my initiation, but I had a lot more inner work to do before I could open up these abilities of mine that would surpass his abilities. And he started getting into what I would be doing in the future once I unlocked all of my hidden talents, which I still don’t know about. If I have these talents, I’m the last to know. I don’t know where they are, and I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know how to access them.

Rick: Yeah, but the key point of that story was that these so-called lizard beings, these lower dimensional beings posing as boys or inhabiting the boys or something, their intention was to thwart your spiritual aspirations, to dim your spiritual luminance so you wouldn’t have the confidence to be all you could be in that way.

John: That’s true Rick, yeah. That’s the gist of the story really.

Rick: And the reason I wanted you to tell it is that I kind of think that in a way that’s true of everybody on earth. Everyone has been sort of dampened down. It kind of reminds me of that song by George Harrison. I forget. Anyway, go ahead. And we all need to kind of get the monkey off our backs, so to speak, to clear away whatever it is that’s repressing us. Yeah, “I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love,” that’s the song I’m thinking of. And so, we all have that tremendous potential. In fact, there’s a quote from Yogananda, that I read you earlier. This might be a good time to read it. Someone just sent this in today. Yogananda stated, “Spiritualization of material life is the real need of the modern world. We want Christ and Buddhas walking the busy streets of New York and Esplanades of Calcutta. Christ and Buddhas sweeping the streets and running the big banks, performing all duties from the humblest to the most exalted. All duties are important, great ones as well as small ones. Both kinds are necessary for keeping the wheels of the world going. Small or great duties do not make their performers great or small. Both should be performed only by great ones. When all duties of this imperfect earth will be performed by angelic men and women, when the stock market and church both will be run only by those who are nothing less than prophets, then our earth will be heaven and darkness will be changed into light. And I think Yogananda and you would both agree that essentially, inherently, intrinsically, we all are prophets, but our full capabilities as spiritual beings in a human body have been squelched, have been dampened or repressed by whatever it is. We can discuss what that might be. And that our duty in life ultimately is to unleash those capabilities, let our light shine. Amen and amen and amen.

John: I love that quote by Yogananda. It’s a whole thrust of my book Love by the Light and the exercise God for a day Getting back to your point. We are all for walking wounded. Life can be challenging. It can be difficult. We all have our scars and the truth is We can be victimized by them and kept down by them oppressed by them or we can heal them we can forgive and we can blossom Into the great beings that were meant to be the Christ said it pretty well He said these things I do you can do and greater So, this is … I love the title of your podcast Buddha at the gas pump got me to thinking what would I say to Buddha if I met him at the gas pump? And nothing, because that was the whole point. I love that quote by Buddha, which is, “Unless you can improve upon the silence, say nothing.” And that lecture he gave, it’s often written about, where he just sat on the stage in the lotus position and said nothing, and finally, an hour or two later, a monk in the audience gets it. He held up a flower or something and then… Yeah, he’s staring at the lotus flower the whole time. That’s the whole thing, the spirit is elegant. The dance of spirit is magnificent. And when we lower the RPMs through meditation, force bathing, whatever the mechanism might be, that’s when the unseen becomes visible to us with our inner eye. eye, and that’s where we start to effectuate this communion with Spirit. It’s where all the great things happen. And I believe Yogananda’s quote was quite powerful. This is the challenge before us right now. We have a crisis that’s unprecedented on many, many levels, political, economic, climatic, but our greatest challenge is what I would call the crisis of meaning. We don’t know who we are or why we’re here. has failed us miserably with dogma, with flawed theology, with sexual abuse, with things that just don’t hold up under scrutiny.

Rick: Right.

John: And, it’s no wonder that people have been turned off to the whole idea of Source Creator, the whole idea of God, the whole idea of the golden rule, if you will, in favor of the Golden Calf because it’s not real to them. And if religion has been their only introduction and orientation, well, obviously then they are lacking for true divine inspiration and true connection. So, it’s not real in any meaningful way. The whole point of my book is to say, “Hey, look, Ken Ring and I are good buddies from way back, and it was Ken who encouraged me to write Love by the Light because of the angel stories.” He remembered me telling him one of the angel stories about the hitchhiker, and he said, “Write it up for me.” And I did, and he said, “This is fantastic. You’ve got to publish it.” I said, “Well, Ken, it wasn’t just the one angel story, there were seven others. He said, “Well, write them all up,” and I did, and then he said, “This is great, you got to publish.” I said, “Well, it wasn’t just the angel encounters, there was all this other stuff too.” So that’s kind of part two. And then he said, “You got a book, you got a…” I said, “No, no, no, there’s a part three, which is, what does all this mean? What does the rubber meet the road?” And this is where, I give great emphasis to this because it’s the most important thing that I can convey today, which is we need to evolve into a greater spiritual awakening. We need a global spiritual revolution. We need to understand, not intellectually, but emotionally, psychologically, experientially that God is real and so too is the afterlife. I think it all stems from that fundamental issue. Is there a God, Source/Creator, and is there an afterlife? If there is no God, Creator, and if there is no afterlife, then there are no transcendent consequences or meaning to earthly behavior. But if the opposite is true, if there is a Source/Creator and there is an afterlife, then of course there’s transcendent meaning and purpose, significance to what we do. In the book I talk about one’s God quotient, and I talk about the life review within your death experience, where one is only met by love. There’s no judgment that’s taking place externally. It’s all internal. The soul or the spirit is looking at their life review and it’s portrayed instantaneously and panoramically, and it’s a sort of a binary process. They look at what they did that was loving contrasted with what was unloving. And it’s pretty clear that what they did that was unloving takes them out of resonance with this being of light, which is pure, perfect love. And in order to stay with that being of light, which is the goal, because that’s all they want to do, they don’t want to come back. They don’t want to leave this place of perfection. But in order to stay, they have to match the vibration or the signature frequency.

Rick: Speaking of frequency, going back to the Pachi Shaman, he made your point. He said, they did that deliberately to shut you down, because they want to keep you from fulfilling your destiny, which is to bring more love and light into the world.

John: And I said, a logical question, well, I don’t know about this destiny. I have no great gifts or talents, and I certainly don’t feel I have this great destiny. One of forty-six, how do they know who I am when I don’t know who I am? He said, oh, in the realm of spirit, it’s all frequencies. And they know who you are, even if you don’t know who you are. And that’s the point, you’re a dead man walking and you’ve gotta wake up, which is why you’ve gotta come to my place do the audience one. But this is the whole point about the life review. They want to hang with God, with pure love and pure compassion. Can’t improve upon it. It’s ecstasy, beyond ecstasy, but they can’t hang there unless they are the equivalent, which I believe, Christ demonstrated on the cross when he said, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” In truth, they did not know what they were doing. Any enlightened being would never think of doing such a thing. But they were coming from myopia, from blinders, and ego, which to me is evil. Ego to me is synonymous with ego.

RICK: With evil, you meant to say.

John: Yeah, with evil. Yeah, I’m sorry. Ego is synonymous with evil. And this is the whole point. They get the resolve to go back, I guess, through reincarnation, not necessarily in human form, not necessarily on planet Earth, but wherever or whoever, or whatever, to work out this karma, to seek forgiveness, and to heal, and to give love where love was denied in the past. And this was Raymond’s point in his lectures. He said it many times, he would say, “I can’t imagine a worse hell than being an Adolf Hitler and having to live through tens of millions of deaths that I personally caused, and trying to figure out a lifetime that would atone for all of that.

Rick: Yeah.

John: Couple of Ross used to say–

Rick: A little bit of Ross, yeah.

John: Yeah, she was a mentor as well. I met her through Raymond. She wrote the foreword to “Life After Life,” and she’s a beautiful lady, a force of nature, miss her dearly. She would say, and I don’t know if this is true scientifically speaking. I don’t have data to support this, but I love it poetically. She said, “One lifetime as a Jesus Christ can wipe out all the bad karma of an Adolf Hitler.” So, I don’t know how you go from one extreme to another. But this is the whole point. We have to become God-realized. My original title for this book was “Affirming God.” Two stories of…

Rick: That’s the name of your website.

John: Yeah, that’s the name of the website for the book. I gave it up because many people said to me, “Don’t use God in the title. It’ll be off-putting to a lot of people. If you want people to read the book, don’t use God in the title.” So, I kept the website name because I could only compromise so much. But this is the point. Until God becomes real through a person, you can talk about it and intellectualize about it and listen to these near-death experience stories, read my book, “Oh, John, how do these great angel encounters and these terrific vision quests and what have you?” But maybe, yes, maybe, it’s all abstract to me. So, until a person actually goes through it for themselves, it doesn’t become real in any visceral sense. Hence, it doesn’t become real from the standpoint of behavior and values, perspectives. So that’s why I recommend exercises at the end of the book, part three, where the rover meets the road, to if you don’t want to take my word for it or the word of others who have come before me and who will come after me, that God is real, Source Creator is real, and life after death is real. Not the God of religion, and not the survival of dogma, the heaven, hell, eternal salvation, damnation, but you know the New Testament stuff, well there’s only love. There’s only love. God can’t be anything other than pure perfect love and compassion by definition. So, when it becomes real, that’s when transformation takes place. And we need to get to critical mass transformation now more than ever, because the hand grenade is in the trench and it’s smoking and fizzing and about to detonate. So, I’m very concerned with the state of human affairs. I don’t want to see the gnashing of teeth, darkness on the face of the land, the dark night of the soul, collective soul. We can evolve, we must evolve, or face ungodly challenges unlike we’ve seen in the past. Today we have wars, rumors of wars, pandemic, economic pressures and woes, lack of integrity in government, unprecedented malfeasance in government, no visionary leadership coming from true reliable integrity. We’re in a sticky wicket. And that’s why I finally decided, I had many opportunities to publish, but I didn’t feel motivated to do it until Ken really left me an alternative and actually guided me through the book process, which resulted in Love by the Light. And I only agreed to put it out there for all the good it can do to help wake people up and give them a road map to what can be Enlightenment, expedient Enlightenment. Now I wanted to demystify Enlightenment and I wanted to demystify God in this book. It’s really no great mystery. It’s all about love. It’s all about getting away from the golden calf and becoming a purveyor of the golden rule, practitioner of the golden rule, not about what can I do to further my own interests, but what can I do to further the collective good. If we all got on that page, as Yogananda said in your beautiful quote there, we’d have heaven on earth. I would say to you, we must get on that page, lickety split or face nightmarish conditions beyond what we have now. So, we have the power to do it, we have the tools to do it, we have the inspiration to do it. If not my book, then there are dozens of others that certainly give adequate foundation to compel this kind of transformation. But we must act because the time is short.

Rick: Yeah. Alright, let me say a few things based on what you just said and then I’ll have some questions and we’ll kind of figure out what we want to cover in our next hour. But firstly, have you heard Dannion Brinkley’s near-death experiences? Yeah, so just for the audience’s sake. So, I haven’t interviewed him, but I’ve read a couple of his books and he was this guy who had been a sharpshooter in Vietnam and had shot people and he ended up having four near-death experiences, two by lightning and I think two by heart attacks. And in each one he had like a life review in which he experienced not only the impact that his having killed people had on the people he killed, but the ripple effect, all the people connected with those people, their families and communities and whatever, and the effect that their death had on those people. So, he ended up becoming like a hospice person like yourself, you’ve done a lot of work in that area, and in order to perhaps atone for what he had done in Vietnam. And you can imagine if that was his experience, what Hitler’s experience might have been, when he had his life review. And what kind of, like you said, what kind of atonement it might take to burn off that karma. I don’t know. Then, the whole thing about God. I have a really good friend who used to believe all the stuff that you and I are talking about, but kind of eventually turned around and is now considers himself an atheist. And we have these long, friendly discussions in which neither of us make any headway. Because like, what was that quote you said, “For those who don’t believe, there’s nothing you can say.” How did that go?

John: What I said was, “For those who know, no amount of evidence is necessary. And for those who don’t know, no amount of evidence is sufficient.”

Rick: Yeah, so that to me means, that somehow or other you have to have an experience which turns you around. No amount of talk is going to do it. And this reminds me of another friend who interviewed me recently who has some, he used to be the Amazing Randy’s protege, if you know who the Amazing Randy was?

John: Yes.

Rick: He was this kind of magician but professional skeptic who tried to shoot down, disprove pretty much everything. And this guy was of the same mindset, but he had some kind of spiritual epiphany, which completely turned him around. It totally flipped him in terms of understanding consciousness to be fundamental, and all this spiritual stuff and everything. But it was the experience. It wasn’t his brainwashing with Randy. It was an experience that then restructured his whole philosophical outlook and his spiritual outlook. So, I think that, that kind of experience is, there’s something in the water these days, that kind of experience is becoming more and more common, there is some kind of an enlivenment of collective consciousness that’s making it more likely and possible to have spiritual awakenings, which has been the whole premise of this show, and more and more “ordinary” people are having them. And I think it is kind of nip and tuck, between the forces which would give us a dystopian nightmare for who knows how long, or an enlightened world, kind of an ideal or enlightened society. And if I only had the news media as my source of information, I would probably be pretty depressed and cynical. But there’s a whole other world going on here that we don’t see on the news that you and I are very much tuned into and all the listeners of this show, and that makes me optimistic. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a totally smooth transition. There could be a lot of chaos and destruction as things shift from the way they’re done now to the way they ought to be done. But I do feel we can make it. And I am therefore optimistic and that’s my deepest motivation for doing this show and for having dedicated my life to teaching meditation and stuff since I was twenty-one. And I don’t know, that’s all I have to say about that. I want to get into some other aspects of your book, but let’s have you comment on what I just said.

John: Well, I love what you just said. It’s, yes, while there’s opportunity, there’s hope. While there’s time, there’s hope. I, like Kubler-Ross used to always say, she didn’t originate this quote, I don’t know who did, but she used to always say, it’s better to light the candle than curse the darkness.

Rick: Ah, might be Ghandi, but I’m not sure.

John: Yeah, she would also say, we would not know the beauty of the Grand Canyon, if it weren’t for all the windstorms. So here we are, we’re kind of being wrestled to the mat, collectively. People are in fear, they’re confused, they have high levels of anxiety. For the most part, they don’t know what the future is going to hold. There’s just chaos everywhere. And what’s worse is that there doesn’t appear to be visionary leadership anywhere that’s going to lead us to the promised land. And so, what’s exciting…

Rick: I think there’s some potential visionary leaders, but they don’t tend to go into the mainstream easily, because the collective consciousness just doesn’t support that so much.

John: What’s exciting about what I write about in my book, is we don’t have to take the existence of God, Source/Creator, or the existence of life after death on the basis of faith. No one’s asking anyone to accept these premises or hypotheses as a matter of blind faith. is ample evidence, if one chooses to embrace it or become familiar with it, that every day is a miracle, and every day Spirit surrounds us in different ways, in ways that are discernible, palpable. And if people are not aware of this, then there’s inner work to do. And I explain different things they can do in part three of the book. But one of the things I talk about is the God for a Day exercise, which to me was my highest high. I’ve never, ever been able to top the natural high I got when I went into my persona as God, which I could also have called it Love for a Day. So, it’s being anonymous and going someplace or no one knows you, or you don’t know anyone, and you become a purveyor of unconditional love, love without strings, without attachment, you basically are not looking for reward, or appreciation or recognition, you just give freely. And to see how that impacts people, impacts the environment, because it’s not just what you do for other human beings, that’s what you do for animals, what you do for the ocean, or for the rivers and streams and lakes, cleaning up pollution, planting trees. This is all about being a purveyor of love. When you start to emulate God, emulate Christ, emulate Buddha, the love that they had for all things, that’s when you feel the connection, and the communion most strongly. So, it’s a way to kind of shortcut one’s spiritual awakening by doing this exercise. And it’s easy to do. Anyone can do it. So, this is part of my appeal to the people who are reading the book. Do God for a day. If you can’t do it for a day, do it for a half day. Do it for an hour. If you can do it every day, do it every day. Because if you do it every day, and if we all do it every day, well then, hey, we’re going to have a perfect world. And by the way, a perfect world is not such a bad thing. I don’t know what it is that keeps us in the dark. I don’t know why we’re so attached to it, to a point of not wanting to let go of it, because it’s not serving us at all.

Rick: Well, people don’t let go of heroin, even though it’s not serving them. I mean, we do get addicted to all kinds of things.

John: Well, the question is why did they go to heroin? It is a form of escapism. There’s something lacking within them. I call it, well, Blaise Pascal called it, the God void, the God hole.

Rick: Yeah, if they had sort of a divine inner experience, heroin would be extremely distasteful. If they did it once, they would think, “Oh my God, I’m never going to do that again.” Same with any drug or even alcohol, in my opinion.

John: Yeah, the highest high is to be God-centered, to live one’s God quotient, to become in total perfect, like I call it a resonant energy connection with God. I’ve never known a more profound state of being. To me, it is nirvana. And yes, you can achieve it every minute of every day. And not just in meditation, but going out there, and getting outside of ego, putting your identity, your social identity to rest for a bit, and becoming pure love, a vessel of pure love. Getting outside of ego is a tough thing to do, it’s a tall order, but with practice one can do it.

Rick: That’s why Seva is prescribed as a spiritual practice. You know the word seva?

John: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Like a service.

John: Yeah, Ram Das. Ram Das’ foundation; He had a foundation and it’s a kind of ancient word in India as a known means of spiritual development.

John: Right. So, I, again, this is simple stuff. There’s nothing complicated about enlightenment or spiritual awakening, and we all need to do it, But by doing it, collectively, we will open ourselves to an optimal future for Earth and all its inhabitants. And our reality then could hardly compare to the reality we have now. We’re in the darkness right now. We’re here suffering on a trail of tears. But if we all wake up to this, we can dance on the clouds and know bliss. What’s interesting is,

Rick: And you and I are pretty fortunate. You’re in Florida, I’m in Iowa. We’re not in Gaza, we’re not in Ukraine, we’re not in Somalia. Tare places which are far worse, and we should count our blessings. But I’ve heard it said that the resources exist for everyone to live, to have enough food, to have proper shelter, for everything to be just hunky-dory. But it’s, and then sometimes in their next breath they’ll blame the politicians, but I don’t think that’s where it goes. I think it has to do with the collective consciousness of the world, of which the politicians are a symptom or an expression, but which we all are responsible for and contribute to.

John: Well, we do not live in a scarce universe. It’s an abundant universe. There’s no such thing as scarcity. Hunger, poverty, illiteracy, these things are unacceptable, inexcusable and intolerable. There’s no reason for them. Why do they continue to exist? Well, there are many who would like to blame the ruling elite, the power brokers, the ones with the greatest wealth and the greatest political power, the ones who start wars or decide where wars will be fought and when. The ones who determine the relative value of currencies on any given day. They like to, scapegoat it that way. And I often say to myself, what would it take in a top-down and bottom-up approach to bring us into a new way of looking at things, a new paradigm? What would it take to bring about paradigm shift? And there are many who are now talking about post-materialism, because materialism is a flawed model. It doesn’t work. It’s a lie. It’s a product of myopia and limited thinking. The evidence strongly disproves it. So why are we still practicing or subscribing to that point of view? And what would it take to get us away from that? Because if you’re coming from materialism, then nothing comes after this lifetime. Hence, this is all there is. Hence, while the getting is good.

Rick: Yeah, there used to be a beer commercial that said, “You only go around once in this world, and so, grab all the gusto you can get.”

John: Exactly. Well, the truth is, we’re infinite eternal beings. Anything else is a lie. We’re not condemned to hell forever and ever and ever. This lifetime is not the only chance you get to demonstrate your divinity. You have infinity and eternity to demonstrate it. But why suffer when—and this was the whole point of the message that Christ was trying to convey—if you pick up my yoke and walk in my footsteps, you too can know the Kingdom of Heaven. You too can, figuratively speaking, sit at the right hand of the Father. I don’t think God has a gender, frankly, and I don’t know if God has hands or arms or any of that stuff.

Rick: Or a right or left, because of omnipresent.

John: Yeah, but I think that’s just a figure of speech. But his point was, if you had the faith of a mustard seed, you too could move mountains. So, I asked myself, I’d like to, I think it was Timothy Leary who said, “I’d like to give LSD to everybody.” Because LSD is an entheogen, it’s one of the ways to have a breakthrough experience beyond nonsense exercises and vision quests and meditation and fasting and so on, is to take peyote or ayahuasca or bufo or ibogaine or pick your drug, ecstasy, LSD, whatever. This is another way to do it. I personally don’t like doing anything that causes a loss of control and I prefer other methods to open up to the divine, including the God for a Day exercise, which is my recommended method. But the thing is, until it becomes real for the decision makers, they’re going to continue to worship the golden calf, they’re going to continue to stay in egocentrism, nihilism, and dualism, until they recognize that the same God who made you also made me, and that we’re all one, which can be demonstrated convincingly through quantum physics, especially Torsion physics, which shows the interconnectivity of thought, intention with quanta, with the actual behavior of quanta, until it becomes real at that level, they’re not going to change, they’re not going to transform, they’re not going to say, “Hey, all for one and one for all.” No, they’re going to keep saying, “Every man for himself. So, yes, we must get beyond materialism. We must do so quickly. And that’s why I formed Eternea, Eternea.org, to advance this strategy and this model. It’s all explained on the website. And it’s my offering to humanity. It’s the best blueprint I could conceive from

Rick: What are some of the specifics that it offers, aside from the God for a Day exercise? Eternea, you said it’s your best offering. So, if somebody goes to that website, what do they find that’s going to help?

John: Eternea is a prayer. Eternea is a concept. It is operational, but only in a minimal way. We publish a quarterly digital bulletin, which has 15,000 subscribers or so, and we occasionally sponsor webinars and that sort of thing. But we have never been appreciably funded. There are seven program components, and it’s a holistic, comprehensive, multifaceted strategy, to achieve individual and global transformation. And it’s been refined over the years, but basically what I had in mind when I received that download from Spirit in 1974, when Raymond Moody first spoke about his work in near-death experiences. So, if I had an audience with Warren Buffett who says he’s going to give away his billions again a second time, I would encourage him to consider, Eternea, because for me it’s the mother of all causes.

Rick: So if you had a billion dollars, what would you do with it?

John: Well, I would operationalize the seven program components, look at each split, I mean…

Rick: Which are?

John: Which are research, number one, and I said before that there hasn’t been good funding for research, and there’s only been just precious little good work. And I think that there are all kinds of different things we could do if the funding were there, in the form of giving grants to major medical centers and academic institutions to undertake our protocols.

Rick: Yeah, so there’s people like Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake and others doing research, But you’re just saying that’s a trickle compared to what could be done.

John: We have a frontier science forum on paper. It would be populated with the best thinkers, the MDs, the PhDs, the great academicians, and we would put together the protocols and award generous funding to the major medical centers and universities. The ones that are most credible because when this comes out in the way of findings, we want press conferences and we want people to realize that the best, brightest minds on the planet, from the hallowed halls of academia and science, have put their imprimatur to this and for what good it might do. Education is the second component. People say to me, “What would you do to educate?” And I say, “Everything conceivable, limited by our own creativity.” There’s a lot we already know. People… near-death experience has become a household word, but that’s only one of many, many phenomena that validate the seven statements. So, there’s a lot that needs to be done in the area of education. The third is outreach. Outreach has many different initiatives, but outreach is intended to put love in action. Leo Buscaglia, Dr. Buscaglia was a great, great teacher about the importance and power of love. And if I had my druthers, if we brought the major religions on board with this convergence, which is the other program component of the Convergence Coalition, we would help them reinvent themselves along the lines of what I think they were originally intended to do, which is to teach people how to love one another.

Rick: If they wanted to reinvent themselves. I can’t imagine going to the Vatican and convincing the conservative cardinals that they needed to reinvent themselves. As it is, they can’t stand Pope Francis because he’s so innovative. But I don’t want to single out any particular religion. I want to say that in my early days I used to think that this work could be the antithesis of religion, it would make religion superfluous. And today, I don’t say that. Today, my attitude is all religions can serve a purpose, a very valid, important purpose– teaching people how to love one another, being a support system to keep people in unconditional love when the going gets tough, implementing some of these projects and outreach, the Love in Action projects, and the Loving Each Other Global Campaign, and the One World Leadership Project. There are so many different projects that are all on the website. People who are interested can go there.

Rick: And of course, to a great extent, religions have made themselves superfluous. People are leaving the churches in droves, and that term “spiritual but not religious” has become very popular. People don’t feel they need mainstream religions in order to pursue spiritual development.

John: Well, yes, that’s exactly true, but religions have established constituencies, albeit smaller ones. They have vast resources; they have a lot of real estate.

Rick: They have a structure.

John: They have an infrastructure. I mean, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If they all took one of these, I call them induction techniques, or explained in my book, if they all took one of those exercises and saw the error of their ways and became instantly enlightened and non-centric. By the way, the neighborhood movie of all, The Shoes of the Fisherman, have you seen it?

Rick: What is it?

John: The Shoes of the Fisherman.

Rick: I’ve heard of it. What is it, a movie?

John: Anthony Quinn.

Rick: Oh, right.

John: Starred in this, I think it’s 1960-something, great film, but there’s a Pope who transformed the Catholic Church. And that’s what I’m talking about. The kind of transformation that needs to happen within all the major religions, and that’s what our other program component is all about, the Convergence Coalition, which is to bring science, spirituality, and religion into close collaboration with one another, along the goal of promoting the seven statements, and further establishing their validity. And then the other is technology development, which is, with AI and virtual reality and augmented reality, nanocomputing, and linking the brain to the cloud and so on. There are all kinds of technological possibilities, to use devices that can help engineer an out-of-body experience in a safe manner that isn’t overly invasive or intrusive. –

Rick: Jeff Martin, who established the FINDERS course and whom I’ve interviewed, has been doing some things with Shinzen Young, who’s a Zen teacher, using some kind of device that very specifically uses magnets to target particular parts of the brain. And Shinzen said he’s had the best experiences he’s ever had using this thing. So yeah, there could be physiological traps. Now of course you mentioned Robert Monroe, and binaural beats or whatever they’re called. I’ve heard from people who say that that has been extremely profound. So, there could be external modalities like that, technologies that could elicit profound spiritual awakenings or give you a taste anyway.

John: Well, that’s why technology development is up there as one of our most important priorities. And then synerge with a GE at the end, it’s kind of a made-up word for synergy for the earth. And that’s bringing kindred spirit organizations together, and get them coordinated and galvanized around specific priorities to affect institutional change, and to achieve certain high priority goals that could be more met efficaciously and more expeditiously if we all work together in a coordinated fashion, cooperatively. Kind of a hybrid of the United Way, Chamber of Commerce model, both from funding and implementation. So yeah, all these components are explained in great detail at Eternea.org.

Rick: Yeah, well, “all work together cooperatively” is a key phrase, because when you’re talking about the religions I kept thinking in the back of my mind, “Yeah, but people are going to have to get over the attitude that our way is the best and everything else is either completely off or not as good as what we have.” It takes a certain amount of spiritual maturity and broad-mindedness, I think, to come to the realization that, God is not a one-trick pony and there are just so many different possibilities that suit different people and appreciate your own thing but appreciate other people’s choices.

John: Well that’s exactly right. You can’t be an ego and do this work. If you’re in service to yourself or to your own agenda or your own ulterior motives, then this can’t work. That’s the whole point. That’s why someone every individual needs to have their own epiphany.

Rick: That’s the key thing.

John: They can either have a virtual epiphany by reading the book and say, “Oh wow, this guy was an agnostic and look at what happened to him.” It’s some part of, I hear this from people all the time, the book speaks to them energetically, and brings them into new corridors of thinking, new ways of looking at things. I had a woman, 28-year-old, as a law student in Madrid, finishing up law school, her fiancé killed himself from despair over the world situation. And a friend of hers gave her my book and she read it and she said she was suicidal and she said it brought her out of suicidal ideation and you couldn’t pay me a higher compliment. But she’s going to go on now and do all kinds of good things based on what she’s learned from the book. And so, this is the point. It’s very simple. We just need to become purveyors of love. What’s the incentive? The best incentive you could possibly have. What’s the common denominator that links us all together as human beings? We’re all mortal, at least the body is. We’re all going to die. Kubler-Ross used to say, “We’re all in death denial, to thee, to thee, to thee, but never to me.” But the truth is, our days are numbered, and sooner or later, it’ll be the blinking of an eye when it happens, this life and this body will come to an end. And like John Lennon said, recorded George Harrison, John Lennon said, in one of his songs, I think Ballad of John and Yoko, your song was While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Rick: That’s what I was trying to say. Yeah.

John: He said, “Last night the wife said, ‘Oh boy, when you’re dead, you don’t take nothing with you but your soul. Think, think.'” Which is the title of Blaise Pascal’s book from 1674. He had a near-death experience in 1654, and he invented that term, “The God-Shaped Hole,” that only God can fill. That yearning that we all have to connect with something greater than ourselves, a cause greater, an entity greater. Only God can fill the God-shaped hole, and one can only find God if God is sought in the silence. By emulating God, emulating God’s love, we can strengthen the communion, improve the resonance, until God becomes real. So, if I could convince Warren Buffett or Bill Gates to give their billions to Eternea, I would quickly implement those seven program components. And I often say Eternea needs the budget of a small nation and the army of a small nation to succeed. If our vision was, “Hey, let’s clean up Lake Okeechobee from pollution,” that’s very nicely defined and neatly contained. But Eternea’s vision is to co-create an optimal future for Earth and all its inhabitants. And it can only do that by effecting a convergence between science, religion, and spirituality to catalyze a global spiritual revolution. So that’s a pretty tall order. It’s very utopian, some would say naïve. But frankly, there is no other way. There is no other answer.

Rick: Yeah, and I hope you realize that Eternea would be one of many things which are contributing to this.

John: Absolutely.

Rick: Yeah, you’re not saying there’s no other answer than Eternea. You’re saying there’s no other answer than this kind of transformation.

John: It has to be the one that waves all flags.

Rick: Right, right.

John: We have to get out of the tower of Babel.

Rick: Yeah.

John: Proof, we’re never going to get it. The best we can get is this very powerful anecdotal stuff. It’s enough to build a phenomenal, advanced civilization, so why are we not doing that? And somebody needs to be the rising tide to raise all boats. I don’t care who it is or what it is, so long as it’s God-centered authentically and coming from full integrity. It’s unassailable and it’s basically impeccable. It’s tough to find that kind of leadership. It’s tough to find people or organizations that rise to that standard, but when you find them, they’re golden, and we’ve got to come together and try to bring about mass social change while we still have the opportunity to do so.

Rick: Yeah, what you’re saying is you want to flip the paradigm. There’s a fellow named Mark Gober, whom I’ve interviewed, whose first book was “The End to Upside-Down Thinking,” and the whole premise of the book was that our whole way of thinking about the world is upside down. We consider consciousness to be this little epiphenomenon of brain functioning, whereas in fact consciousness is the rock bottom foundation of the universe and everything else is an expression of that. And if all of modern science and our quest for knowledge and our technologies is based on such a flawed paradigm, then it necessarily has huge ramifications for the quality of the world, for the impact that all of our technologies have, which is why we’ve desecrated the environment and so many people are starving and there’s so many wars and all this stuff, but the more pivotal level at which you can work, the easier you can affect major change with less effort. So, I think that’s what you’re getting at, that if we could sort of establish consciousness and God or spirituality as the foundation, then -who was it, Thoreau or Emerson, he said, “Go ahead and build your castles in the air, that’s where they belong, just establish foundations under them.”

John: Yes, Abraham Lincoln said that. He also said” The best way to predict the future is to create it. Amen.” So, this is the whole point. And I call it the mathematics of eternal existence. Do the math. If you’re a smart person and you care about, if your eyes are on the prize, Well, whatever net worth you have, you can’t take it with you. All that you have will one day be given. One day your voice will fall silent, never to speak again, and your time to make a difference, to make an impact is going to be at an end. So, we’re all going to die. And I’ve been at the bedside of many in my hospice work, and the worst nightmare I’ve Experience, is when they don’t have any spiritual moorings and they go into this identity crisis of the first order. “Who am I? What’s going to become of me?” They can’t see beyond the body or the ego. That’s very sad. There’s so much beyond that. And when people wake up to that one way or the other, it’s a whole new universe that unfolds. And Kahlil Gibran said it the Prophet, he said that when you die, and I’m paraphrasing, he said the veil is going to be lifted and you will see the light. And once you see the light, you will wonder why you ever spent any time in the darkness. The darkness is not where it’s at. And this thing about, lack of tolerance for diversity and wanting to be the 500-pound gorilla and the alpha male and the dominant species with the most toys and the most money and the most women or whatever. That’s all flawed thinking, that’s all illusory. At the end of the day, you take none of that with you. And so, the golden calf at the end of the day leaves you broke. It’s what have you done to advance love and light? How much love have you given? It’s not how much love have you received, it’s how much have you given. This guy with a blog, he always ends it by, he says, “In the end, the only tragedy is not to have been a saint.” I don’t know that any of us can be a saint, but we can certainly be more loving. We certainly can-do God for a day. It’s a simple thing to do. Love for a day. Love it for a day every day. And that’s really the whole point of why I wrote the book. I hope people take it to heart because me, for one, I’m tired of living in a world that is so suboptimal and dystopian. I’m tired of seeing suffering. It affects me. I don’t suffer. I’m fine. I’m living a good life. But I have great empathy for animals and for trees and for rivers and for streams and for oceans and for people. Who’s starting these wars and why? What kind of bonehead decision is that? They’re fighting over Anthills, that it amounts to nothing at the end of the day, and don’t they realize that they’re just shooting themselves in the foot?

Rick: Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot.

John: , right.

Rick: All the wars that are being fought, this little pale blue dot. What you were just saying reminds me of a couple of cartoons for humor break. There was a guy, one cartoon was a guy standing in front of a bank and it says, “First Reincarnation Bank. You can’t take it with you, so leave it with us until you return.” And then the other cartoon was a tombstone and it said, “I’ll be back. Don’t touch my stuff.”

John: Well, that’s the whole point. You’re rich when you are a purveyor of love. I was never more rich than those days when I dedicated to God for a day. It’s the highest time I ever had, and I encourage people to learn about that and practice it often. Eventually, it’s like the random acts of kindness that pay it forward. It’s a variation on the same theme. And I’m not reinventing the wheel here. This is ancient wisdom. It goes back to Plato, if not before. And I just hope that humanity becomes inspired by this and engages in proactive behavior to turn things in the opposite direction from where we’re going, because we definitely need a course correction.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah, when I contemplate God for a day, it reminds me of that Christian saying, “What would Jesus do?” which you also mention in your book. Whenever I’ve heard that phrase, I’ve thought, “Well, you kind of have to be Jesus, to know that,” because you can only act from your level of consciousness. And if you’re actually at the level that Christ was at, then your action is going to be different than the ordinary person, no matter how hard they try. But I don’t quite think that as much as I used to, because I think it really makes a difference if you do try to emulate saintly people or to embody saintliness. I know people who have just been meditating for decades who will still rip people off in business deals and be unkind and things like that. And I think it takes a certain amount of discernment and a certain amount of effort to be a good person. If it doesn’t come automatically, then try a little bit and it could make a big difference, don’t you think?

John: Well, what you do to others, you do to yourself. So that’s another way of saying the mathematics of eternal existence. Ben Franklin figured this out in his 13 Virtues. One of the 13 Virtues was emulate Christ, Socrates, and be learned, be loving, be compassionate. Thomas Jefferson had the same philosophy. Our founding father documents are expressive of this philosophy, “E pluribus unum,” “of many one.” In God we trust, in love we trust. This stuff goes back to, it’s like I say, it’s ancient wisdom, but you bring a good point about, we’re not Jesus Christ. I don’t know, I’d probably have to have a million more lifetimes before I can even think of that. But again, I’m trying to demystify the whole thing of enlightenment and the whole subject of God. It’s not too complicated. It’s just, I called love, but another word for love is kindness. Another word is compassion. Another word is empathy, sensitivity, generosity. Forget about love. If love is too abstract, too complicated a term, or Christ consciousness confuses or intimidates people, then just think about being more sensitive, being more kind, being more gentle, being more loving, being more empathetic. These are the siblings of love, if you will. And I actually think they’re in some ways synonymous with love. So again, it’s not that difficult. And this lifetime is the blinking of an eye. We’re here today and we’re gone tomorrow. And tomorrow is promised to no one. So, every day, my prayers, my meditations, I focus on gratitude, giving thanks for all my blessings and asking that everybody and everything become equally blessed, not more so. And I ask, how can I be of best service with my opportunities today to promote more love and light in the world? We truly are right now in a struggle for our future.

Rick: We the United States, we the humanity,

John: The entire world. There’s chaos everywhere right now. It’s all throughout Europe and Asia, South America, Africa, Name a continent, maybe Antarctica is having environmental stresses. But all seven continents right now are in chaos.

Rick: The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica could slip off and we’d raise sea levels by twenty feet or something which would cause a bit of a disruption.

John: So, we’ve been dominating this conversation, I just want to make sure, are there questions?

Rick: Well there are a couple, yeah, let’s see here. Two more questions have come in. So the first one is from Patrick Wiggins in Gainesville, Florida. “Looking forward to reading your book. You equated evil with the ego. I’ve come to believe that evil is taking pleasure in the suffering of others. I’m puzzled about two or three things. Is there some sense of personhood always tainted by ego? So even angels would have some quality of ego. And isn’t it possible that those who enjoy the suffering of others, will continue to do so by choice?

John: Great question. Ego is self-differentiation. It’s coming from separatism, dualism, me and everybody else, me against everybody else. It’s self-absorption, self-possession, self-importance. It’s, “I’m going to get mine and to hell with the other guy.” That’s what I mean by ego. Raymond Moody and I had a conversation not long ago where he talked about his only goal right now is to overcome self-esteem and ego, because he calls them, the great imposters, and they are, because you can never be the best-looking or the wealthiest or the strongest. Now this other dimension of taking pleasure in the suffering of others, I would say that evil exists along a continuum, and you have maybe the most diabolical, devilish form of evil that likes to inflict pain on others and maybe enjoys, in some perverse sort of way, watching people suffer. I can’t relate to any of that. I can’t watch any of that. It is too offensive to me. It’s too low vibration. Somebody who is that lost is so far removed from the light that I don’t know how one transforms an entity like that other than, as I say in the book, the only example I have for how to deal with evil, whatever form it takes, is the same example that we were taught by God and by Jesus and by all the great teachers, which is to pour love and light all over it, to extend compassion. Now you might still get beheaded or fed to the lions or nailed to the cross, but again, it’s not about the love you receive or the compassion you receive or the kindness you receive. It’s about what you give to others. That is godliness. And I think the purpose of this existence is to evolve into more godliness. And one can do that by giving love in an egoless way. Now, it’s very hard to do that because we’re taught that, our ego is all-important and we’re so conditioned to stay in ego that we’re all kind of operating from the principle of self-interest and what’s in it for me and that’s the motivator. But when we know that the goal is to merge with Source Creator and that we can only do that, by matching the frequency and vibration, that’s the prize, that’s the ultimate, that’s Nirvana. How do we get there? Well, we have to raise our God quotient, we have to purify by being a vessel or purveyor of selfless love. And evil is going to do what evil is going to do. That’s evil’s karma. And evil has to atone for that, one way or the other. God is not, in my opinion, God is not damning evil into the infernal regions, but one cannot be with God on any sustained basis unless one comes from pure love on a sustained basis. Being deprived of God, removed from God to me is hell. And I personally don’t want to hang out in hell any longer than I have to. Being without God is hell. So, God could pull the plug on evil any time God wanted to. Did God create evil? No. God created free will, and with free will came choice. And with choice came, well, when you’re in this time-space three-dimensional illusion, it’s a very powerful illusion, you get to thinking this is all there is, and so Ego kind of takes over and it’s easy to see how people lose their way, how they literally fall off the cliff. So, God is not a camp common nut. God doesn’t want sycophant slaves or automatons. God us all free will. That means we can do whatever we want. But the nature or structure of reality is such that unless we’re coming from pure love, we can never find our way back home, which is God Source. And so, God doesn’t pull the plug on evil. And if God were ever going to smite evil, my opinion is God would have done so at the crucifixion. How intolerable and ugly and horrific was that? But God did not. There were little things that happened. I talk about it in my book that’s not often talked about, but it comes from the Bible. Parts of it you can trust and believe, maybe, that show that God could create earthquakes, could bring down the temple, could make the birds fall from the sky, could raise the dead from the graves, but wasn’t going to smite Pontius Pilate or the Romans or the Sanhedrin or Caiaphas or all those who, the soldiers who drove in the spikes, forgive them for they know not what they do. Go in peace and sin no more. So that’s God’s reaction to evil. So, who am I to say we should banish evil, we should exterminate evil, we should meet evil with evil by being its equivalent. To me, that’s the antithesis of perfect, pure, unconditional love and compassion. I don’t like it. I would rather round up all the people who are causing all the problems and send them to a penal colony or another planet somewhere, but that’s not how creators structure things. Creators structure things with this reality to be a proving ground for the spirit and nothing else. So, we’re here doing time on a penal colony and how we respond to evil and to need when we see it is how we’re going to evaluate ourselves when the life review takes place. And we’re all going to have one. So, Warren Buffett, if you’re listening.

Rick: How about Elon? Go after Elon.

John: How about Elon Musk? Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, whatever.

Rick: Zuckerberg.

John: Yeah, whatever. – Zuckerberg, and so on.

Rick: Okay, so I’m gonna make a quick comment on Patrick’s question, and then I’ll move on to the next question. Patrick seemed to be, he said, “Is some sense of personhood always tainted by ego?” And I often run into spiritual teachers who claim to have lost all sense of a personal self. And they claim that as being some kind of a goal, and they kind of psych others into starting to think that way. And there have been a lot of casualties of that approach in terms of people becoming nihilistic and spiritually bypassing and losing interest in their families and stuff like that. I could get into quoting scriptural references that at all levels of creation, there’s always going to be some sense of personal identity. Otherwise, , you could put your hand in a flame and you wouldn’t know it was happening. And I’ve heard some spiritual teachers actually using that as an alibi for sleeping with their students and stuff. Oh, I’m not doing it, God is doing it, I’m not the doer, yada yada. So anyway, I just wanted to touch on that because it bugs me when I hear people…

John: It brings up an important point, I guess, about the definition of consciousness. Right now we’re in individuated consciousness and ego, social identity. But when we leave the body, we’re no longer the body, we’re no longer the social identity, we’re no longer the possessions, we’re no longer American citizens or whatever citizenry we have, or citizenship, and when we go to our life review, I imagine we see past lives too.

Rick: We probably do. And we’re still a soul, there’s still some, “Oh, I did this, I did that.” Yeah. And of course, there are scriptural verses which will say, well, ultimately you are not the doer, God is the doer, God is all there is, God is doing everything, And that’s true, but reality is different at different levels of consciousness.

John: Right. Well, Valentinus, Saint Valentinus, talked about his abilities as a healer in third century Rome, for which he was put to death. And he used to say, “I’m not going to renounce my faith because how can I renounce what’s real? And when I heal, I feel God’s love coming through me. I don’t do the healing God does. I just get out of the way and God’s love comes through.” Well, what is God if we are all, and what is consciousness? In my book I talk about it, I define it as an aspect of the divine, a tiny, tiny, microscopic aspect of the divine.

Rick: What is it, consciousness?

John: Yes.

Rick: Individual consciousness.

John: Well, the individuation comes about through socialization and culturation. if the programming were different, our social, our identity would be different. If we were raised to say, by our parents, well, let’s just say by parenting, culture, social institutions, and this gets back to the whole thing about ideological infrastructure, when we have to come to some agreement as a species about who we are and why we’re here, because from that we will derive our ethics, our morals, and our values. And from that we will derive our behavior. This is what Confucius was saying, it was the basis for Buddhism. We have to get right in our perceptions of reality. We have to get right in our knowledge so we can be right in our action. I’m missing a few steps, but you get the idea. So, until we agree on a few fundamentals, which I offer as a straw dog in the seven statements, I call them seven statements and not seven truths, I think they’re truths, but that’s for everybody else to weigh in on, until we can get there, we’re never going to have a shared ideological infrastructure, hence we’re never going to get on the same page, hence we’re going to have these problems with diversity. Do we only want one kind of tree or one kind of flower, one kind of fish, one kind of bird in the sky? What is wrong with diversity? Except when it puts us into dualism and makes us contentious, and we use it as reason for conflict and competition. There should only be cooperation and collaboration. We should all be pulling in the same direction for the same reason. That’s the only way we’re gonna get out of the madness that currently is suffocating the species and the planet.

Rick: Yeah, I would say that unity harmonizes diversity and enriches it. So, you have the fertile ground of the rainforest, there’s a proliferation of variety of plants and animals and all that stuff because there’s so much nutrient available to them all. And like that consciousness is the ultimate nutrient or God, you could say, as the ultimate nutrient. And I don’t think an enlightened world would be one in which everyone was the same in some way. There would be probably even greater flourishing of diversity and cultures and so on and so forth, but they’d all be harmonized in a common foundation.

John: Exactly. We all come from the same source. We all will return to the same source. We are all one.

Rick: Yep. Okay, here’s another question for you. Let me get this up. This is from Abaya Kim in California. Bliss, this is more of a statement than a question. Bliss and joy are always available. Many are able to feel it from others, especially when their hearts are open with joy. It sounds like you may be in constant peace, joy, and bliss.

John: No, I’m not, because I weep for the world. When I meditate, when I go off in nature and commune with God, I have that connection. And that, I have that connection always. I’m sustained by it always. And the most remarkable things happen. I don’t have remarkable things every day. Every day is a miracle and remarkable in its own way, but I do stay connected with it. But when I’m really connected is when I have my greatest self-transcendence and bliss. But no, I have a weight for the world. I’m sad because I’m feeling the pain. and I’m recognizing that it’s so unnecessary. And I also recognize that it’s so fixable. It’s not unrepairable. We can fix this. We can fix this. We can get beyond this. We were meant to be more than this. And I don’t know what’s holding us back. I really don’t. I don’t understand why we’re sitting in the dark when we could be enjoying the light. This was the message of my vision quest. I got the medicine named First Light, and the message was, you’re not going to the conference room that’s dark, where all these people are sitting around a table and just turn on the light switch and say, “Let there be light.” You have to put in a dimmer switch, and you kind of have to raise it a little bit at a time so people adjust to the light as it gets greater.

Rick: Yeah.

John: And I watched that in the cave up in the Mojave Desert, where I had this…

Rick: And you’re alluding to a cool story that we didn’t get to in your book. There’s a… We’ve hardly talked about your book. We’ve been going off on all these things.

John: Well, in a way, this has been the book.

Rick: It has been, but there’s some cool stories in there about your angel encounters and your vision quest in the Mojave, Joshua Tree, and other things. So, people are going to have to read that book. I didn’t mean to cut you off but keep going.

John: No, that’s what I wanted to say. Thank you.

Rick: Okay, another question came in, I want to get to them all. This one is from Anthony Parshall in Burlington, Vermont. “What is the role…” This is interesting. I don’t know what he means by this, but maybe you’ll get something. “What is the role of the idea of paradise for the seeker?”

John: Well, to me, paradise cannot be improved upon. That’s the perfect world. By definition, perfection is that which cannot be improved upon. And to me, there’s no fixed definition of perfection because we’re going to continue, if we truly move into cooperation and collaboration out of a sense of oneness, out of a sense of love for each other, out of a duty to each other, not just to one human being to another, but to the animals, to the flora, fauna, the forest, the trees, the rivers, the streams, the oceans, atmosphere, space; we have to first work to restore our environment, our planet, and our atmosphere and outer space. We’ve got so much space junk it’s unbelievable. But we’ve done a lot of damage. So perfect love, perfect cooperation, perfect collaboration first would cleanse, detox, and restore. And then, it’s the Star Trek mentality. The universe is our playground. If all the money and energy, we put into fighting each other and competing with each other, if we put that into, hey, let’s figure out how we can get to Mars or to an exoplanet somewhere, it can be our sandbox. That’s what we were meant to do. We’re not meant to be stuck in the tar pits clubbing each other with femur bones. We’re meant to have this wonderful, blissful dance throughout perfection. And perfection is going to be an ongoing dance of realizing our limited potential. We’ll go on to create more and better and newer things, but in a conscious way, not in a way that’s going to hurt anything or deprive anyone or disenfranchise anyone. It will be ethical evolution, if you will, God-centered evolution. So, yeah, that’s where I want to be. And I don’t want to have to die to get there. I’d like to experience that in my lifetime. So, until we get there, I do feel sadness because I’m painfully aware of what is versus what could be. And my job, and everybody’s job, frankly, is to help build a bridge between what is, where we are now, to where we could be. And where we could be is nirvana, while still on the body.

Rick: Yeah, very good. if enough of us were, then the world itself would display the qualities of nirvana, the heavenly qualities that it could potentially have. I just think that the world is a clear reflection of the ambient level of the subjective experience of eight billion people, and if that subjective experience were more nirvanic, if that’s an adjective, then the world, think about just as an example, the amount of money that we spend on wars and the other countries spend on wars, if all that money were put into education and health care and all kinds of positive stuff like technological innovations and so on, it could make a huge difference. Even for, the reputation of the United States, in these countries that in which we have fought wars, they might love us if we put all that money into schools and health care and beautiful good things. Anyway, but again it takes a changing of the heart in order for the institutions to change and that’s got to happen on a more of a mass scale.

John: Yeah, it takes everybody having their own personal epiphany. I would like to think that they would come to transformation just from reading my book because it’s fairly comprehensive and I think it speaks to a lot of the questions people have, but I know that that will only be the case for a few. So, for the rest I put in there the formula for their own epiphany. And I really hope the wealthy and powerful, the ones who start the wars, the ones who could eradicate poverty, the ones who could eradicate abuse and illiteracy and all the other social ills, I would hope they would be among the first to undergo that transformation because I think they could be very instrumental and bringing about rapid progress and doing no further harm to any species, not just our species, but to any species, and to the planet. It’s karmic. What we do to others, we’re going to do to ourselves.

Rick: Yep. Well, may it be so. Alrighty, well, this has been an enjoyable conversation, and I encourage people to read your book. You had a proclivity for DWS, which is driving while sleeping. And there are a bunch of stories about that in the beginning of the book, and how you were quite miraculously saved from certain death. And then there are all kinds of other stories from your life about divine intervention and providence, all of which kind of make the case that we’re not alone, that there is some higher intelligence that helps to orchestrate things and helps to help save us and support us, particularly if we make ourselves receptible to such help. And then again, part three is Reflections About God and Divine Emulation with some practical tips and exercises on how you might actualize this in your own life. So is that a fair one-minute synopsis of your book?

John: Yes, thank you. Thank you. That’s good.

Rick: Alright, so John, I’ll put up a page on BatGap and it’ll have a link to your book and a link to your websites. And you want to just say quickly what kinds of ways people can engage with you? It might be, are there webinars, are there courses, are there…

John: Well, my book really speaks for itself. And The Love by the Light, the trilogy will be out next year. I don’t know if we’re going to publish it one volume at a time or all three, depending upon where things go between now and then.

Rick: Tell Peter Jackson to make a movie of it.

John: Yeah, I would hope so. It would make a great mini-series, to be honest.

Rick: Or Spielberg or somebody.

John: Yeah, it’s too much for one movie. Although you could do like a Star Trek thing or a Lord of the Rings thing where you reinforce it.

Rick: Serialize it.

John: Eternea.org has a lot of information, AffirmingGod.com has a lot of information, the contact information is on both websites, the email address and the mailing address, and I encourage people to go there and learn more about it.

Rick: Great, well, thank you for all you’ve been doing. I’m glad you got the lizards off your back, and you’ve been living a good life, making a wonderful contribution, and it’s always inspiring to see that.

John: Well, back at you, Rick. Thank you for all you do.

Rick: Yeah, well, thanks. That’s all.

John: Yeah, this is what we came to do.

Rick: To quote the Beatles again, we’re all doing what we can.

John: Doing what we can to try to make a difference, and that’s the whole point. Look how much did the world change because of what Christ did? Not that much. And if Christ came back, I think the same thing would probably happen all over again for the same reasons. So, this is what Einstein was warning about. He was saying technology is outpaced consciousness. And he said, “I don’t know what World War III will be fought with, but I know that World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” And that’s the whole point. Until we have enlightenment, spiritually awake and aware individuals, as this is your quote from Yogananda, heading up all of the major social institutions and governments, we’re going to find ourselves right in the thick of it, all over again, shooting ourselves in the foot, doing brain dead things and making poor choices. Until we are enlightened, we’re going to continue to play out the suboptimal reality, which is no fun for anyone. So yeah, so…

Rick: I think we may be heading for that, and it may not be in our lifetimes, at least this particular lifetime of ours, but I think there’s a momentum and that’s why I was saying earlier I feel optimistic and it’s not obvious to the majority of people in the world, but I think that there’s something real going on and significant and it’s gaining momentum.

John: Right, amen, and we can’t we do what we can do

Rick: Yeah,

John: In all the ways we can do it, without being attached to the results because we cannot control results

Rick: Exactly. Bhagavad Gita says you have control over action alone never over its fruits.

John: That’s right

Rick: Great. All right. Well, thanks so much John. Hope to meet you in person someday. I always say that. I never get out of Iowa, but it would be you know, wonderful to have some big conference someday where everybody can give each other a hug.

John: Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. It was a pleasure to be with you.

Rick: Yeah, thank you. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching. And we will visit the BatGap website if you’d like to sign up for an email to be notified of each new interview, or if you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, or some of the other things that we have. There’s the BatGap bot. I haven’t talked about that. about that. We have an AI chatbot with over 100,000 documents in it and it’s very interesting. Okay, we’ll leave it at that. Thanks, John.

John: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Talk to you later.