Summary
Pamela Eakins explains visionary cosmology as understanding how the universe and human society unfold so people can consciously help shape what comes next. She reflects on witnessing war in El Salvador and how encounters with suffering, courage, and compassion changed her understanding of social change and spiritual vision.
Questions This Interview Explores
- What is visionary cosmology, and how does it differ from conventional cosmology?
- How can human beings participate consciously in the creative unfolding of the universe?
- What kind of vision is needed to create lasting social change?
- How can spiritual insight change the way we respond to violence and injustice?
Key takeaways
- Humans are part of the universe and carry its creative principles within themselves.
- Understanding how social systems unfold can help people intervene and shape better outcomes.
- Winning political power does not by itself provide a vision for transforming society.
- Lasting change requires addressing the deeper patterns that recreate oppression.
- Seeing the sacred in every person can inspire compassion even amid war and fear.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people and discussions of related topics. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to look at previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu.
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My guest today is Dr. Pamela Eakins. Pamela is a sociologist and visionary cosmologist. She has taught at Stanford University, the University of Colorado, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. She’s the founder and director of Pacific Center.
Her books include Tarot of the Spirit, Kabbalah and the Tarot of the Spirit, The Lightning Papers, Ten Powers of Evolution, Visionary Cosmology: The New Paradigm, Mothers in Transition, The American Way of Birth, Passages for a Spiritual Birth, and Priestess.
So, judging from the titles of your books, Pamela, I guess it would be fair to say that your interests have included tarot, visionary cosmology, and motherhood or birth—not necessarily in that order, right?
Pamela: That is true. And would you say my interests also include writing? I love to write.
Yeah, I do. I love recording experience and going inward and finding words to describe things, and maybe to change things, too.
👁️ What is visionary cosmology?
Rick: So, we’re going to loop back and kind of go through things chronologically a little bit, but I thought I’d start by asking you first what cosmology is. You have a definition, so I’ll read your definition and tell me if you want to elaborate. You said, “Cosmology is the art of articulating the evolution of creation, how the universe has unfolded and is unfolding.” Anything more you want to say about that?
Pamela: I’ll stay with that definition, but I want to add that, being a sociologist, we humans are the universe, and I am very interested in the way human cosmology unfolds. A lot of times, people think of cosmology in relationship to the unfolding of the universe itself, starting with the Big Bang or what have you, and then the continuation of that.
I am interested in that, because the universe operates by certain principles, and as it turns out, we, too, are universe and probably contain many of those operating principles of the universe within ourselves.
So, I’m interested in how the human universe unfolds in particular, and how human society unfolds. That’s one of my big interests. For example, I have taught in the past a course called Social Cosmology, and that’s about society, the development of social cosmology, and society and how that works. So, that’s the part that really holds my attention.
Rick: Okay, so does what you just said explain why you use the adjective “visionary” to distinguish what you do from plain-vanilla cosmology?
Pamela: Okay, visionary—from the two V’s, you know? Visionary. So, where the visionary part of it came from is this: if one comes to an understanding of how things unfold, what the principles are by which things unfold, and how it all fits together, there’s a possibility then that you can move into that and intervene in certain areas or with certain aspects of the principles.
Using Cosmological Principles to Shape Society and Inner Life
You can use the principles themselves—the operating principles—to intervene so that you can actually create the social world, for example, and maybe even engineer or cultivate components of that social world or the world within our own being.
So, the visionary has to do with what your vision is and what you would want to create, and then you create the ongoing cosmos.
Rick: Okay, so the universe obviously is almost 14 billion years old, according to our current understanding, and we are a very recent arrival on the scene—extremely recent, the last fraction of a second if the length of the universe were put on a 24-hour timescale.
The universe has obviously been creating quite well without our involvement all this time, and now you’re talking about what we want to create. So, does that relate to a point you made a minute ago about how we contain the principles of intelligence that govern the universe? Are you talking about kind of harnessing or utilizing those principles in order to participate in the universe’s creative drive and kind of harness that for our own purposes or something?
Pamela: In a sense, yes, because there is a flow to universal energies, and if we begin to understand the flow of the universal energies, we can participate with that flow.
And, like you said, we are the new kids on the block and we’ve got a long way to go, but I would love to tell you a story about vision, if I could. This is a story that began to move me into visionary cosmology, but I didn’t know it at the time.
Pamela Eakins’s El Salvador War Experience
The story that I’m telling right now, the one that I just began to tell in my life, is the story of going to El Salvador in the middle of the war. Previously, I did not tell this story. This was 1985 when the story began, so it’s a long time ago now, but I was unable to tell it for several reasons.
One reason was PTSD from having been in the war, but another reason was that I was also harassed, actually, a bit by the U.S. government. There were a few other reasons, too, because people’s lives were at stake. I didn’t want to tell the story, but now I want to tell you a story about vision, because this is really where it began.
So, I went to El Salvador as part of a delegation—a professional delegation. It was a humanitarian delegation of 16 health workers, all doctors and nurses in public health; one social scientist, which was me; and one reporter from the Los Angeles Times. That was our team.
We were going there to study, of all things, the effects of war on health, and to do that, we were meeting…
Rick: I could have saved you the trip. I could have said, “Pamela, it’s bad for your health. Don’t go.”
Pamela: Oh my gosh. I’ll cut to the conclusion and then go back. The conclusion was, “War is not good for children and other living things.” So that was the conclusion.
It’s quite amazing that we did this, but our mission was to prepare a report for Congress, which we did, and that was, in a sense, the essence of the report. None of us fully realized what we were getting into. None of us had—well, a couple of people had been in a war zone, but not to the extent of the war zone we were entering at that time.
The night before we went into El Salvador, this is the story I want to tell you about vision—being visionary. The night before we went into El Salvador, we were in Mexico City, and we met with Salvadoran guerrillas who were masterminding the war from Mexico City. They were part of masterminding the war. They could not go into El Salvador because it was too dangerous for them to be there, and a lot was taking place in Mexico City that had to do with that war.
We were led in a van down curving streets at night. It was dark, and we went around and around so that we would get mixed up and not know where we were. We were taken into an abandoned warehouse district, around and around the warehouse district, and then into a warehouse where we walked in. There was no power anywhere, so there were no lights. We walked in, again around and around, so we would be confused, and some people in our delegation had flashlights.
Now, how they knew to bring flashlights, I don’t know. We did not know each other before going. We were from all across the United States, but some people seemed to be a little better versed than others, including—I don’t know how all the appointments were made with all of the people, or how they got this meeting with the guerrillas. I doubt I was part of that.
We went into what was almost like a conference room. It had something like a conference table, which we all sat around. At the head of the table was a guerrilla, the leader, and standing next to him on both sides—he was flanked by men, all of them bearing machine guns, automatic weapons, big machine guns.
We sat down, and he told us the story. Basically, what he was asking us to do was take the story he was telling back to President Reagan. Reagan was president at the time, and he definitely believed we would be able to do that. In other words, he believed that we had that kind of power, and that upon our return, we would probably be sitting down with the president.
That was interesting to me to start with, and this was our very first meeting. He proceeded to tell us about what was wrong, and everything that was wrong was, of course, right. For example, here’s what we need: We need food, sanitation, clean water, shelter, education, jobs—all of the things that you would think of that human beings need. Fifty percent of the children were suffering from malnutrition. It was very high. It was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
He laid it out, and then he said, “We need the United States to be out of El Salvador. There’s a big U.S. presence of money and military in El Salvador. We need the U.S. out of El Salvador. Here’s what we want you to tell your president. Tell your president that El Salvador is a country—a very small country, about the size of Massachusetts. We have internal problems here, very serious internal problems, and these are not East-West problems, meaning it’s not a Communist problem or something like that. What is going on here is more like a class and race problem.”
So he said, “We need the U.S. out because we need to take care of our own issues, and we need to look at how to work our own land and things like that.”
Here’s me: I’m very young, I’m very naïve, and I understood him, and I agreed with him. But at the same time, my mind was going to the place where I couldn’t grasp what he was saying in terms of how things might change, because I already was aware of how many people were being killed every day and what was happening with this war.
I raised my hand very tentatively. This is me raising my hand very carefully. He was extremely surprised that anyone would have the audacity to ask a question, and he was not pleased. He called on me: “What do you want?”
By the way, this was all in Spanish.
“What do you want?”
I said, “Okay, I have a question for you. When you win”—because there was absolutely no doubt; there was no “if” you win. It was “when” you win—“when you win, what will you do to change things?”
No, excuse me. “When you win, what is your vision?” That was the question: vision. “When you win, what is your vision?”
He was furious, pounding the table or whatever he did—I can’t remember—and he said, “I just told you the vision. I just told you the vision, and I just told you what we want.”
I said, “I mean, what I mean is…” And I said, “I respect what you just said.” I really respected it. Believe me, I was terrified. I said, “I really respect what you said, and I understand that the children are starving. What I mean by the vision is: How would you do things differently? What would your vision be to do things differently so that you would not wind up entering into the same problem again, where you would have one group in power and then another group would get in power, and then you’d have the same issues and the power would keep changing hands, but the issues wouldn’t be resolved?”
Again, he was furious. He paused and calmed down.
Before I tell you what he said, I want to tell you that this man had been in the Salvadoran Army, and he switched sides and became a guerrilla leader. So that’s a little background on him. But he calmed down, thought for a minute, and said, “Okay, we are not prophets. That is not what we do.”
He said, “We are working to get the power. We will get in power. Once we get in power, we’ll turn our attention to these other things.”
Wait a minute—new paradigm.
I, myself, without fully realizing it, had a little “ding” right in that moment. It was a ding, and it didn’t come in fully, but the gist of it was, “Wait a minute—new paradigm.” That’s where I began, and it was before even arriving.
That stuck with me. It has stuck with me my entire life, and basically, that’s what I’ve been working on ever since. That wasn’t the moment that moved me the most, but it was a real awakening.
Rick: Yeah. I presume everybody understood the gist of what you just said, but basically, you get the sort of violent, incoherent—you mentioned several times how angry and volatile he was—people who presume that they’re going to be able to govern a country.
What qualifies such people to govern a country? Which points to a deeper issue: What really governs a country? Is it the so-called leaders, or is it the general level of consciousness of the people in that country?
Could you get Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King into the leadership of a country full of crazy, incoherent people, and would that become an ideal country just because you had some really great leaders? Or do all the populace have to be raised up to a higher level of functioning in order for society to really work?
Pamela: Well, I think that is a question that we are—we, this large “we,” and many of the people you are speaking with—that’s a question that a lot of us are working on.
But if I could, perhaps, tell another story that happened there, and then I could maybe bring you a little bit up to date about why I started doing the work that I’m doing.
Rick: Sure.
Pamela: So, when I went there, I was a researcher at Stanford University, and I had a joint appointment at the UCLA School of Public Health. That was where the books on childbirth and those things came from, because that’s what I was working on.
We had a grant from the state of California—a big grant—to study out-of-hospital births and look at medical outcomes. That’s what I was doing. I was working in women’s health, and that’s what I was looking at when I went to El Salvador. That was going to be one of my areas of specialization.
By the way, because of that, I was assigned to the Mothers of the Disappeared. That was going to be the area I would report on to Congress. My other area was the refugee situation: What is happening with the refugees?
So I spent quite a bit of time with the Mothers of the Disappeared, at a number of refugee camps, and with refugees.
On the way, I met another person. This goes back to your question that you just raised, because I want to mention something about another person I met who really did become the turning point for me. This person was a doctor, a medical doctor, and a professor of medicine.
When we left Mexico City, first of all, that night after we met with the guerrillas, we met in our hotel room. We had a debriefing every night, and a briefing at about 10 o’clock every night for a long time—the whole time.
That night, we had our debriefing, and people were really uneasy because they had not expected what happened with the guerrillas. We thought we could be sitting with those guerrillas, and we thought that, if they were in the mood, they could have very easily wiped us out if they had felt like it. We became aware of that, but it was nothing like what we actually experienced in El Salvador, where at any moment we could be wiped out.
We found that we had a lot of enemies, and we weren’t even sure who they were. We were followed everywhere we went, and all of our bags and everything were rifled through every day. We had to carry everything with us that was of value. We had notes, film, and all kinds of things from our interviews.
The American government voiced their displeasure with us and called us in for a mandatory session at the American Embassy. The American government was primarily funding the war in El Salvador.
In terms of who was the government in that case, we were trying to get an appointment with the president of the country at the time, Duarte. We were unable to get an appointment with him, but the people at his office laughed and said, “Well, you’ve already gone over his head anyway,” because we were already meeting with the American ambassador.
They said, “You’ve already been to the highest point in the country. You don’t need to speak to Duarte.”
So that was part of it. That was the feeling: Who is running the country? This is just a country—some country. Who gets to run a country?
In this case, the United States was basically representing landowner interests. It was very similar to what one person said. One of the landowner people said, “Well, we don’t want anything different than you Americans want. We’re dealing with the same situation you’re dealing with in the United States, where you’re trying to get the land from the Indians. It’s very similar to what you are going through.”
This land in El Salvador was not surveyed or cordoned off. It was, “The land goes from this rock to this tree,” and so on. Then it was bought up, and there were all these people living there who were the indigenous people. So that was a big problem.
Now, back to our delegation going into El Salvador. In that night’s debriefing after the guerrillas, we were also told that we were taking a lot of medical supplies into El Salvador. We were told what to say: “These are going to be medical supplies for political prisoners.”
Then our two delegation leaders started telling us how to answer questions. As I mentioned, we didn’t know each other before, and a number of us—not just me—did not want to be told how to answer questions. We were professionals, and we felt we would answer questions any way we wanted to if someone asked us.
Secondly, we didn’t even know we were taking in medical supplies. Why were we taking in medical supplies? We were a delegation to create a report for Congress, not to take medical supplies. Maybe taking medical supplies would somehow hinder our delegation because it would be claiming a side or something like that.
I’m not quite sure how to express that, but I was uneasy. I just wanted not to know about it—that we were taking medical supplies, if we were—because I wanted to do my job on the delegation, and I didn’t want to become involved with taking sides or anything like that.
After we got on the ground in El Salvador, it was such a frightening experience that, after about three days, I started really bonding with my delegation—with all the people in the delegation. We all started bonding, and I wound up being one of the people who delivered the medical supplies.
Those medical supplies were going to be picked up. They would be delivered to the university and picked up there by a professor of medicine, who is the person I wanted to tell you about, and some graduate students.
I thought, “Oh, this is good, because I’ll feel more comfortable at the university.” I have always felt at home on university campuses. That’s the way I felt.
This was after experiencing things like listening to bombs, especially all night long—mortars continually crashing, gunshots all night, just continuous gunfire. It was after seeing groups of people rounded up in front of our hotel and seeing pools of blood on the street. This was serious. We were in a war.
Pause for a moment. I’m taking that in myself. I’ve not been able to talk about this before.
So then we took the medical supplies by taxi to the university, and I was looking forward, in a certain sense, to being at home at the university. We’re unloading the medical supplies and suddenly realizing that we were in a very open space. It was kind of an open plaza.
Then we realized the extreme danger we were facing by being in a very open space, because we had already been told that people like us were in extreme danger in El Salvador. The four nuns had been killed, the four Dutch journalists had been killed, and other humanitarian workers had been killed. We were prime targets.
So we quickly tried to get the medical supplies out of the way and get closer to the walls, where we would have more cover. As we got closer to the walls of the university, I could see that they were full of bullet holes. This was something we experienced everywhere we went.
Here were walls that had been knocked down, with rebar sticking out, covered with graffiti. And, by the way, it was a ghost town. Where were the students? There weren’t any. There were about three students who came to help load up the medical supplies, and there was the medical professor, but there weren’t any teachers.
Where were all the people? They were gone.
He took us into his office and sat down with us, but he started speaking to me. He asked, “What field are you in?”
I said, “Sociology. I’m a sociologist.”
He said, “Oh, oh, oh, yes. The sociologists were the first people to disappear. The sociologists are the first to go because they care about people, and they’re coming up with ideas that might help the situation. That is not something that is valued in this country.”
The Radiant Glow of Spiritual Awakening
So the sociologists were gone. As he was speaking, I noticed a strange light in his eyes. I realized I had seen this light before, with other people we had met. It was a glow, a radiant glow, a brilliant light coming out of his eyes.
He had just finished telling us how much his life was in danger because of what he was doing, which was not discriminating in terms of who needed health care. He would serve anyone who needed it.
He said to me, with those glowing eyes, “These people, these people, you know, they’re beautiful.”
What he meant was the people out in the country. They were supposed to be the enemy.
I said, “You have this glow in your eyes. I’ve seen it in the eyes of other people. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
He said, “I do know.”
I thought he would think I was crazy, but he said, “I know what you’re talking about. I do know.”
I said, “Well, what is it?”
He said, “It’s Jesus. It’s Jesus. Jesus is looking out of my eyes. Jesus is in my body. Jesus is with me. Jesus is looking out of my eyes.”
He said, “When I see the people, when I go into the country, when I see the people, I see Jesus in them. I see Jesus in each and every one of them.”
When I see the people, I see Jesus in each and every one of them.
He said, “You go into the country and you have to love them. You learn to love them. They are Jesus.”
That was the moment for me. I didn’t realize it at the time. First of all, Jesus was not in my vocabulary—not at all. This was not my way of thinking. I was interested in political solutions to the conflict, if I was interested in anything. Basically, that meant you talk, you vote, and you do things like that. That’s how you determine who’s the government. You try to initiate a democratic system.
I could see that was going to be very difficult there, but when he said, “Jesus is in my eyes,” that was when the really big awakening began for me. It would stay with me for the rest of my life, and it will be with me for the rest of my life.
I realized—and this goes back to what you were saying about who could govern the country, whether it would change, and what needed to happen—that I didn’t know if we would be able to change on a mass scale. But that sense and that experience of having that kind of awakening is such a powerful experience.
I will mark that moment. I know that very moment, when I looked into his eyes, was the moment that my own personal awakening began. I could no longer return to the life that I had been living.
I would find out, once I was able to get out of El Salvador—which I did not think I would be able to—that I was not able, after that, to return to the life I had been living. That life was over. It was over.
Rick: So the main shift of view there was the realization that political, and certainly military, but even political manipulation is kind of superficial, and that really it has to go deeper, to a spiritual solution.
Incidentally, I spent about three months in Iran, right up until the time before the Shah left. I used to go walking on the streets with this Swedish friend of mine with blonde hair, and we really stuck out. People would come up to us and say, “Are you crazy? Get off the streets. Your life is in danger. Go back to your hotel.”
Then I spent about nine months in the Philippines just before Marcos left, and things were starting to get a little crazy there. But those were nothing compared to your experience, and there are degrees and degrees. I mean, if we were to go to Yemen today or someplace like that, or parts of Syria, it would be even more horrible.
So there are all these degrees of chaos and incoherence in the world, and I think ultimately what you and I are kind of coming around to here in this conversation is—and it’s interesting, because my next interview is going to be with James O’Dea, who was the head of the Washington Bureau of Amnesty International for quite a while and has done all sorts of interventions to try to stop torture and things like that.
There have been all kinds of well-meaning people who want to change the world, obviously. Some of them have gone about it in a political way, some in an economic way, and some have tried to marry spirituality of some sort with their efforts, like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.
But maybe it begs the question: What is the ultimately most effective thing that one can do to shift the trends of time, to change a society? I think I’ll be talking about this with James O’Dea also.
So you shifted to an appreciation that it must be spiritual in some sense. It can’t just be political; that’s not working. That was decades ago that you began that shift. What have you come to in terms of any kind of conclusion? Do you feel that peace in society will ever be possible, and if so, what will bring it about?
Pamela: Mm-hmm. Maybe on the road to complete enlightenment, we come to places where humanitarian efforts make a huge difference.
I just want to back up for a moment. I’m thinking about your next guest. One of the things that I did not realize in El Salvador was that, as I mentioned, we interviewed probably 200 people from many, many groups and many walks of life, on all sides of the war.
We spent quite a bit of time with the American Embassy and with Salvadoran officials and military. We spent a lot of time with political prisoners in the jails, with refugees, with legal defense people, and with legal defense funds.
I want to say, I want to thank your next guest, because what I realized is that all of the people who were speaking to us, almost all of them, were risking their lives by speaking to us. That was part of it. But they spoke to us because they believed that we could make a difference as international observers, as international witnesses.
We were performing a role that was similar to Amnesty International, which I did not realize. But I heard about Amnesty and what they were doing when I was there. It wasn’t just Amnesty, but also other groups compiling the names of political prisoners, keeping tabs on them—where they were, what jails, and so on—and then bringing as much illumination as possible to those cases, because the people would not be killed if their case was visible. Maybe. Maybe.
We did spend time with political prisoners. They were telling us their stories. It was also how we got access into the prisons, because we were international observers. The authorities were a little bit worried about not allowing us access, but they were also worried about allowing us access.
The prisoners, the political prisoners, were prisoners of conscience. Maybe they had some ideas about how things could change that were not appreciated, which is why they were in prison, and why they had all been tortured—one hundred percent of them—and were being kept quiet.
So I came to a full appreciation, a very big appreciation, of organizations, especially international organizations like Amnesty International, and the work that they are doing to try to preserve the people and their views—people who may have a differing viewpoint, one that is different from the norm. So that was really important, too.
So the question is, can we ever do this? Can we bring peace? Is it even possible? Can we ever get to that point? I don’t know whether we can get to that point or not.
Actually, this is what my book is about. I have just finished my new book, which is a memoir of this period. That’s why I’m talking about this time period; it’s very fresh in my mind right now.
The book is called The Land of Kindness, but there are three volumes. The first one is called Blindness and Sight, and the second one is called To End the War. So it’s The Land of Kindness: To End the War.
In this book, The Land of Kindness: To End the War, I address this question: Is it even possible that we could bring peace, that we could come up with different ways of knowing and something that might help?
I’ll just interject that I have been spending all of these years since then, the last more than three decades, working on developing a new paradigm. So I just want to put that to the side right now and say that people have very different views. Even in my own family, the views are very different about what should happen.
We see it in our country right now: this split right down the middle, almost down the middle, between support for our government and the way our government is going, and complete disapproval on the other hand. That may always exist; I don’t know.
But my vow, my personal vow, is to continue the work. Well, I must say, actually, I have taken the Bodhisattva vows with the Dalai Lama along the way. Part of my personal work is to keep doing it, as Mother Teresa would say, “anyway.” Keep doing it anyway.
But the part that I need to do, and be very clear about, is that in order to do that, I need to be very clear about my own values: what’s important to me, what I value, and what I want to bring forward. Then I need to keep working on that, keep talking with people, and keep expanding the ideas.
There are people all over the world, internationally now, as you know, with whom we are on the same wavelength, with the kind of values that we want to bring forward in our world as we try to work for peace and try to operationalize love.
There are people all over the world, internationally now, as you know, with whom we are on the same wavelength, with the kind of values that we want to bring forward in our world as we try to work for peace and try to operationalize love.
I say “operationalize love” because we can talk about peace and love, but we need to talk about what that means. How do you—what is compassion? How do you take care of people or help people find their way?
Maybe, for example, self-determination might be an issue, or empowerment, and those kinds of things for all, along with respect for all and respect for diversity.
Those are just some of the things I am working for, as so many of us are. So many of us are working on these issues, and it’s a movement, as you know. Yes, we’re all part of a movement.
Peace, mediation, and changing power
Rick: I mean, let me know if this sounds simplistic to you, but I’ve always thought that just as the individual is the unit of a family, the unit of a community, and the unit of society—the greater society—individual peace would have to be the unit of world peace, national peace, or whatever.
If you have a nation or a world comprised of very unpeaceful people who are full of anger and violence within their own psyches, then what do you expect on a national or international level? Surely, there is going to be a lot of craziness on that level.
It’s like the old forest analogy: If you want a forest to be green, then every tree in the forest is going to have to be green. If each tree is withered and dry, it’s going to be a gray forest.
So I guess it comes down to this: Is it idealistic or naive to think that possibly enough individuals could become genuinely peaceful within themselves, so that this would ripple up and we’d see a peaceful society?
Then that requires us to ask the question: What is peace? Is it enlightenment? Is it some degree of spiritual development? How would we define individual peace?
You just a minute ago mentioned compassion and certain qualities like that, which we shouldn’t simply call peace, because obviously there are some very beautiful values that, if they were more fully flowered in large numbers of people, we would see them at large in society.
People would tend to vote that way; they would tend to act that way. We wouldn’t necessarily have the imbalances we have in society, where a tiny fraction has huge wealth and billions of people are starving.
Anyway, those are some thoughts running through my brain.
Pamela: Exactly, and so do I think it’s idealistic? Yes, I do. Am I idealistic? Yes, I am. The older I get, the more idealistic I get. I was very cynical when I was young. I’m not cynical anymore; I’m just doing what I can.
But some of the things that come in there that I am trying to do to move in this direction would be to work toward a redefinition of certain things in our society. For example, I’m a mediator, and that’s a big part of what I do. I’ve done lots of court-ordered mediation where I live, and what we do in mediation is try to redefine the conflict and turn it into a win-win situation.
Mediation is the same kind of mediation that you would do at any level. You could do it between neighbors who are having an issue with a tree or between countries. It’s the same process.
Basically, the core of mediation has to do with not the presenting issue. So let’s say the presenting issue is the tree that borders two properties. That’s the presenting issue. But the way the mediation is always solved is by each party hearing the other party’s story in a deep way—active listening, really hearing the story, and then validating the story from the other person’s point of view.
So it’s really all about validation and communication. Basically, what that kind of process does is change the way we view conflict. And that is one of the keys: instead of conflict being a win-lose situation, conflict becomes an “Oh, let’s explore this issue” kind of situation.
But of course, people have to be on board with that. You’re talking about the spirit of wanting resolution having to be there. And that’s a part that’s missing a lot of times. So then we go back to the one-on-one.
But before leaving that, I want to say one other thing: redefining conflict is a key, but the other one would be redefining power. Right now, the human species is invested in the idea of, essentially, the power-over model. We’re still invested in that idea.
What we want to do, those of us who are working in this movement, is work more toward a synergistic model where people are contributing what they’re able to contribute, so to speak. Power becomes redefined as linking together with other people. So that would be power-with.
Instead of conflict being a win-lose situation, conflict becomes an “Oh, let’s explore this issue” kind of situation.
These are some very basic ideas, but they are some of the key ideas we are working with. I’ve worked very extensively here in the school systems with children around these ideas, and I saw them make a difference over many years with a whole community of children as they grew up. It makes a difference. It does make a difference. And they want to make a difference too, by the way.
The kids I worked with were at the middle- and high-school levels, and their biggest issue—the biggest issue, by the way, and this is one of the biggest issues I work with in my life with adults too, and groups of people—is called “disconnect.” That’s the word they use. And the thing they want the most in the world is to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. I’m using their language. And to make a difference.
So we’ve got a lot of young people here who really want to make a difference. We are making a difference. I feel like, Rick, we are making a difference. But I don’t know how. I don’t know. I’ll go back to the guerrilla. I’m not a prophet. I want to sometimes believe I’m a prophet. I’m not a prophet.
But I will continue to do this work that we’re talking about. I’m very, very dedicated. And also to coming up with—we sift through ideas.
Here’s one other piece: our consciousness shifts through ideas. A lot of times, it does start intellectually. We just get an idea. A new idea comes into our mind, and we say, “Oh, I see how that could work.” And then eventually, as it becomes stronger within us, it gets embodied. Then we can really work with it, and it can really change us.
It’s like one of the teachers I studied with said, “Oh, I used to always be engaged in the laying on of hands. And right now, what I’m engaged in is the laying on of ideas. And I’m watching how the ideas go out.”
That’s what I’m doing. I’m engaged in the laying on of ideas, which is why I’m working so hard to develop some of these ideas, put them into essentially paragraph form, so to speak, and then lob them out into the world, which is what I’m doing with the writing.
Rick: Which is what you’re doing with what?
Pamela: With the writing process. I also teach writing, by the way. I also have—basically, there are several things I do. One of them is teaching writing, because writing is a process in which, when people go inside and find the words, they know what they believe.
And then there’s a legion of writers, right? Writers and speakers and even politicians out there working with all this information to bring about the kind of change that we’re talking about. So people are working on it. We’ve got a lot of great representatives, by the way, in California who I share many values with.
Rick: About a month ago, I interviewed a woman named Caverly Morgan, who is doing a very successful mindfulness program in the Portland Public Schools. We’re hearing all the time stories about bullying in the schools and kids committing suicide and stuff like that. Her program has had a marvelous effect on transforming the culture of the schools in which it has been taught.
Bullying has virtually disappeared, and suicide and that kind of thing are way down. And it’s very profound. There’s a whole video about her program that you can find a link to from her page on batgap.com.
If that kind of thing could be spread universally throughout society, it wouldn’t necessarily always be the same kind of program, and it would have to be spread in the hands of people who are really qualified to spread it, who themselves were embodying what they were teaching in their own realization.
Caverly had spent eight years in a Zen monastery and was quite a highly realized person. It could be applied to older people too, but if it could be provided to youth in their developmental stages, imagine how transformed society could be. What a difference that could make in terms of all these intractable political problems that we keep facing.
Youth Summits as Civic Leadership and Support
Pamela: Absolutely. I’d like to mention now what I think was my biggest contribution in the school district. It’s funny that such a small thing could make such a difference. For 13 years, I organized something called a youth summit and speak-outs. At the speak-outs, the kids would come and talk about what was important to them, what the issues were, and what was going on. They would pick topics for their youth summit, where, once a year, they would come together and share.
This was a very important time. They would determine the topics, and then I would bring in counselors, mostly counselors, along with people from the community, psychotherapists, and people like that to facilitate breakout groups. There was a big buildup to this all year, and then we would have the youth summit.
What I introduced at the youth summit made such a giant difference. The kids picked the breakout group they wanted to be involved in. It could be drugs and alcohol, gangs, or anything that was on their minds. A friend of mine made 25 talking sticks for me, and I took these talking sticks into the breakout groups so that each kid would have a chance to speak. For most of them, this was the first time in their lives they had had this opportunity.
These were mixed cultural groups. When the youth picked a breakout topic, it broke them out of the normal cliques they would be in. Those normal cliques reinforced the ongoing behavior. When the kids were able to break out of the cliques and listen to other people’s stories, they would have very dramatic breakthroughs. They would begin to tell their own stories because they had the opportunity. They were holding the talking stick in their hands, and everyone was listening.
Many times, these were kids who had never spoken. They said, in their own words, that starting in first grade or so, the teacher would recognize only certain kids in the class and scan over the rest of the class. Certain kids got in the habit of speaking all the time, and a lot of kids never spoke. Then this just continued.
For me, a big part of liberation is self-expression. If we cannot express ourselves, we are not free.
For me, a big part of liberation is self-expression. If we cannot express ourselves, we are not free. So this is another aspect of it.
I’d like to tell you a little story about one group, one year. I was chairing the gang breakout group. There were several gang breakout groups, but in this one, a young man wanted to come and talk about his experience. He was beyond high-school age, probably 19 or 20, and he had been jumped out of a gang.
Everybody probably has gangs, but we definitely have gangs here. It’s not just the children; their parents are also in gangs. I am on the California coast, south of San Francisco. There’s a lot of immigration, a very mixed cultural community, and a lot of gang activity. People are searching for security in gangs, which I understand.
This one young man had been jumped out of a gang, and he made a vow that he was going to try to bring gangs together as his life’s work. He wanted to come and speak and talk. I happened to be in the breakout group with him; I was facilitating it. He came in wearing a red-and-blue plaid shirt, integrating both of the gang colors, red and blue.
Some of the kids in the group were in gangs, and some were gang wannabes. They were younger and were considering entering a gang. One young man had no affiliation. He was very young, only about 14, and he had never heard the things people in this particular group were talking about. I remember him sitting there with his eyes so wide open, taking it all in. He was just interested in the subject.
There were all these gang kids, and on top of that, there was a police officer in the group. He was off duty, just helping and wanting to be part of it. There was also a high-school counselor in the group, and she wanted to be part of it, too.
The young man in the red-and-blue plaid shirt was talking about what else you could do to help, so that kids did not go into gangs. You could support them in a different way. He was lamenting that he had not been supported by his father. Everything he did was an attempt to get his father’s attention. He only wanted one thing in his life: he wanted his father to tell him he was proud of him. “Son, I’m proud of you.” That was all he wanted. He had never heard this from his father.
He tried every good thing he could think of, and then he started going into bad things and still could never get any attention. When he told this story, it struck a nerve. It struck a chord with the rest of the kids.
Interestingly, as he was telling the story, it also struck a chord with the high-school counselor and the police officer. Both of them started to cry. The counselor was weeping, and the police officer was just tearing up. But because we had the talking stick, they didn’t get to speak yet.
Then we passed the stick around, and what happened was that the people in the group—the youth and the adults—agreed that a key point was parental support. The police officer said he had had the identical experience as the young man in the gang. He had done everything he could to get his father’s attention but never could get it. He wound up becoming a police officer, which is similar to becoming a gang member in the sense that he was part of this gang, but he was on the, quote, “good side.”
The high-school counselor also had the same experience. No one, including her parents, had ever told her they were proud of her. This became a theme. It was a theme among a lot of the kids in the gang group.
Tell your kids you’re proud of them. And what that means is support people. We have to begin by supporting the people sitting in this very circle, no matter which gang they belong to. If they’re red or blue, it doesn’t matter. We need to support each other. If you’re a cop or if you’re a gangster, we need to support each other.
The conclusion that year was: tell your kids you’re proud of them. And what that means is support people. We have to begin by supporting the people sitting in this very circle, no matter which gang they belong to. If they’re red or blue, it doesn’t matter. We need to support each other. If you’re a cop or if you’re a gangster, we need to support each other.
This cop is a real person; he’s not just a cop. This gang leader is not just a gang leader. These are people with deep experiences in society. The answer here comes in telling your story, being allowed to tell your story in a safe place, and being witnessed—having your story witnessed.
The final part of this story is that, first, the story of that particular group traveled throughout all the kids at the youth summit. They all heard about the “tell your kids you’re proud of them” theme, and they were all talking about it. “Did your father ever tell you he was proud of you?” It had to do mostly with the men, I want to say. They didn’t talk about whether their mothers had told them they were proud of them. It was the father. It was all about the father.
That night, hundreds of parents came at the end of the day. The youth put on a presentation, with speeches that had grown out of this experience for the parents. There was a very impassioned speech by this young man about “tell your kids you’re proud of them,” and why.
Many of the parents were sitting there literally weeping. Some were tearing up, and all were very thoughtful. I am quite sure that they went home and told their kids they were proud of them. I can tell you that I came home and told my kids how proud I was of them. I told my husband how proud I was of him.
Ever since that day, this has also been a theme in my life: to listen to people very carefully and always try to support that person. Even if I don’t completely understand the story, I want to understand it in a much deeper way and be as supportive as possible.
I think that just having the opportunity within the schools, you can build this, and it’s possible. Like building in mindfulness, you could do that—building in a mindfulness practice. We had built in, and it’s still built in, these annual youth summits in our area, along with after-school speak-outs where the kids can come.
I was also heavily involved in the peer counseling programs, which you can also do: peer counseling and conflict resolution in the schools. When you have a bullying situation—and we’re doing this in our legal system, too, since I’ve worked in the legal system—you can bring a bully and a child who has been bullied together to listen to each other’s stories and get to a deeper level of where this is coming from and what’s behind it. That’s another way to go: with storytelling.
Breaking down fear and social barriers
Rick: So as you speak, what comes to my mind is that there may be two components here. One is the kind of things you’re talking about—communication, mediation, storytelling, and getting new grooves carved in the way we behave with one another.
Another is to increase our capacity as human beings. By that, I mean the kind of thing that deep spiritual practice can do. So it wouldn’t be enough, for instance, for Caverly Morgan to go into the Portland public schools and say, “Okay, here’s how to meditate. Do that, and let’s go about our day.”
In addition to learning practices such as that, there are all sorts of interactive, communicative, social-barrier-breaking kinds of activities that really help the kids see each other as human beings, appreciate each other, and be more loving and kind toward one another.
You can meet people who have been spiritual practitioners for decades, and they’re still very selfish. It’s all about me and my program and my spirituality, and to heck with you.
So perhaps you need both. Some people these days say that you need both spiritual development and social activism to change the world. In this case, you need some spiritual foundation, but then also all kinds of interactive engagement with one another to develop our skills as human beings, our emotional capacity, our communication skills, and so on.
Pamela: As you’re speaking, I just had this thought: one of the things that is critical here is breaking down the barrier created by fear. When we do these kinds of activities to bring people together, what we’re doing is getting people excited about knowing each other and getting people excited about diversity rather than being afraid of it. We’re getting people to break out of their groups, their social groups, and interact with other social groups that they may not normally interact with, such as groups based on race or language.
We’ve got all these problems here where I live: race, language, and culture. We’ve also got immersion programs here that children can enter to learn other languages. The two main languages here are English and Spanish, but we have three languages in our county that are the official languages: English, Spanish, and Chinese.
I live in a bilingual community, and the community can easily divide just on the basis of language and culture. Well, language is basically the culture: language and culture. Part of what I had worked toward for years and years was breaking down that barrier.
The year that I left—I’ll tell another dangerous story—the year I left as coordinator of the Youth Summit, first I had children… It was more than the Youth Summit, by the way. I was on the board of an organization called the Coastside Collaborative. The vow, or mission, of this organization was to make sure that no one in our area was left without services.
Our area is a geographical region thirty-five miles long and three miles wide, with about seven towns. It’s geographically bordered; that’s how it gets its shape. It’s between the ocean and a mountain range. Our goal was to make sure that every person in that area was served.
In terms of what the guerrillas were saying from El Salvador—“We need food, we need sanitation, we need medical supplies, we need medicine, we need health care”—these were all the things that we supplied.
I was on the board, and we were an umbrella organization for about fifty nonprofit organizations. We met once a month, and a representative from each nonprofit would come. We would share information about the services and make sure that we weren’t duplicating services, so that we weren’t wasting money, and so on. We came up with a system where everybody was served.
The thing was, there wasn’t anyone hungry, and there still isn’t. Nobody is going without food here. We were not the only collaborative around. Our entire county was divided up into collaboratives, and San Francisco was divided into collaboratives—the same kind of collaboratives—to make sure that people were not falling through the cracks and to find ways to help.
So this was really service. Going back to Mother Teresa, this is prayer in action. That’s what she called it: prayer in action. It’s where you really work to make these things happen, because one of the causes of war—and I use that term broadly—is basically the haves and the have-nots. If we help to take care of each other, to reach out to people, and so on, then the community is going to be a better place.
But here’s what I wanted to say. I started it—that was parenthetical. I can do these really long parenthetical statements. What I was going to talk about was my last year with the Youth Summit.
By then, I’d been doing it for thirteen years, and my children had already passed through. They were gone. They had gone to college and maybe were even out of college, and I was still doing it, still working in the schools.
So the last year I did this, after the Youth Summit, I got called into the principal’s office in the middle school, and I was in trouble, like the kid. He said to me, “What went wrong at the Youth Summit?”
I said, “Nothing?”
He said, “Where were the white kids?”
I said, “Oh, I see what you mean. I don’t know. You have to apply to come.”
It turned out that we had many more children of color. It was probably ninety percent youth of color and maybe ten percent white, which did not match our community demographics.
He was very upset, and he said to me, “This cannot happen again.”
I said, “Oh.” But he’d been there as long as I had. And I said, “But we succeeded.”
When we first started, the ratio was the other way around: ninety percent white. The kids who were very outspoken were the ones who came. Maybe what happened was that, over time, those children who had previously not had a voice found their voice. Their voice became louder and louder and louder, until there was fear generated that they had gained so much personal power and so much empowerment through this experience that the people at the schools began to get worried about the power dynamics.
Interestingly, as I walked out the door of his office, I said to myself, “I think my work is done here.” I felt like I was walking off into the sunset. It was like, “Trigger, call it—you know, Trigger.” That’s a horse. “Come on, let’s go. Let’s ride on to the next town.”
It was actually very satisfying, but I left. I did leave right after that, and interestingly, so did he. I think that we both saw that we had entered a new era. We both left the same summer.
❤️ Meeting the fishwife and entering the Kabbalah
Rick: So you mentioned that after you got back from El Salvador and your vision went from political to spiritual, you met many mysterious people with different ideas, different spiritual ideas. What sorts of people?
Pamela: Oh my gosh, this is the question. When I came back, I was completely shifted.
For example, as I mentioned, I live in Northern California, and I had been planning to move to Southern California as soon as I returned from El Salvador. In fact, the only person I knew on the delegation was a doctor—one of the doctors—and I happened to be engaged to him. We thought, “Going into this war zone, this is good. We’re in public health; this is good for us.”
We responded to that war in a very different way. I came out with my spirituality, you might say, blasted wide open, although I didn’t really realize it. I couldn’t yet understand what was going on, because I did come out with PTSD.
Anyway, I broke up with him in the Mexico City airport on the way home. I told him, “I need to go home. I need to go home.”
My home at the time was on the market; it was being sold. I was supposed to move to Los Angeles to work at UCLA and be with him the following day. My kids were being taken care of by my assistant, who took care of the kids, and by my aunt while I was in El Salvador. I was a single mom at the time.
As soon as I got home, I called up the realtor and took my house off the market. I just said, “I cannot move. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m not going to UCLA. I am not going to Los Angeles. I am not going to get married. I’m not doing any of that. I need to rethink my life. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no idea.”
My brother was coming. He was already there with his friend to help me drive the moving van to Los Angeles. Everything in my house was packed. It was all in boxes and ready to go. I canceled it all. I just said, “I can’t do it.” Then I started unpacking the boxes, not even knowing what the future held.
The first person I met in this time frame was a woman my daughter and I encountered on a Sunday morning. My daughter was about five years old, and we were going out for breakfast.
The restaurants were packed. We went to a little restaurant at a harbor near here, a working commercial fishing harbor, and the restaurant was packed. The hostess said to us, “Well, if you want to, you can sit here at the fisherman’s table.”
It was a big square table, and all the fishermen were commercial fishermen getting ready to go out on their boats. We said, “Sure, we’ll sit here.”
There was one woman at this table, sitting back in the corner. It was a big table, and she was sitting way back in the corner, wearing a long black dress and a white turban. That was the open area at the table. We scooted down the booth all the way into that corner with her.
The fishermen were talking about the phases of the moon and the tides. My daughter got very excited about this and said, “Oh, oh, I love the faces of the moon. I love the faces of the moon. I draw them all the time.”
We hadn’t been part of the conversation until then, and I said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. They’re talking about phases of the moon, when the moon’s really big and then it gets really small. Those are called phases.”
The woman who was sitting there then began to engage us in conversation. She started talking about the ancient women’s tradition, the moon, and the moon goddess—just all of this different kind of conversation. The three of us got into this small conversation in the corner.
She leaned back and said, “I have been waiting here for you for two months. They told me that you would be here.” She said, “I recognized you as soon as you walked in the door, and you are to begin an apprenticeship with me.”
I just laughed. This was a Sunday. I was the director of a big research project at Stanford. I carried a briefcase. I wore suits. This is hard to imagine. For me, it’s hard to imagine, but that was the life I was living.
I said, “I don’t think so.”
She said, “No, I’m right about this. I know it. I recognize it, and we start tomorrow.”
I said, “Impossible. This is impossible.”
Rick: Who were the “they” who told her about you?
Pamela: They were her guides.
Rick: Astral guides or celestial guides?
Pamela: Her astral guides. This woman was a fish cleaner. She had a job there. She was a fish cleaner on a commercial fishing boat—I mean, a sport boat, a party boat, as they call it. People would come in and go out on the boat and catch a fish, or many fish. They would go out early in the morning, 5:30 or 6 o’clock.
So she’s cleaning the fish on the boat, a party boat, as they call it. The name of the boat was the Queen of Hearts. She’s working on the boat, and she’s a vegetarian. She doesn’t eat fish. This is what she was telling us.
So we said, “Well, why do you do that, then?”
She said, “I’m trying to come to terms with food on the planet. We have to eat, and I’m trying to understand.”
She said, “I came here. I was looking for you.” She was looking for me. “I got this job on the boat, and I’ve been waiting here every day for two months.”
I said, “Well, I can’t do it.”
She said, “Oh, but you are going to do it.”
I found myself saying, “Oh, maybe, maybe.”
She said, “Tomorrow morning.”
I said, “Oh, maybe I could call in.”
These were the days before people worked at home, before we had all this set up to work from home. But I did have a secretary. Those were the days when people actually had secretaries, and we don’t do that anymore, either.
So I called my secretary and said, “You know, do you think it would be okay”—I did this—“if I worked from home tomorrow?”
She said, “Sure. I can handle the office. No problem. No problem at all.”
I said, “Oh my gosh.”
I found myself driving down to the parking lot at the harbor, and I found her in the place she had described: a little blue truck with a camper shell on the back and a Doberman guarding the door. She invited me to come in. I crawled in. It was a very small space, and she had what appeared to be a television in the corner, covered by what I am certain was a black altar cloth, with some little objects on top.
Now, this would be normal to us right now, but it wasn’t normal at that time, in 1985, for this to happen.
She said to me, “Okay.” This is where the new paradigm actually began.
She said to me, “You are going to create a tarot deck.”
She said, “I had planned to do it myself, but I can’t do it now. I’m too old, and I was told to meet the person who would be doing it here at this harbor.”
I said, “I don’t think so.”
A Tarot Deck Balanced Between Dark and Light
“You are going to make a tarot deck,” she said, “and it is going to be completely balanced in dark and light, and in masculine and feminine, because there is not one that exists that has this kind of balance, and it is critically important for the future of our species.”
It was hard for me to even process this, because if I actually had made a tarot deck, I would have been out of a job. It doesn’t cohabitate with the university. It just doesn’t work. Stanford has a very strict image, and they make sure that people rise into that image. It’s really important.
But what happened was, she said, “Come on, come with me,” and we went back to the same restaurant we had been at the day before. She pulled out this tarot deck, laid it out on the table, and said, “Read it. Read for me.”
I said, “I don’t know how. I don’t know how.”
She said, “Yes, you do. This is something—you have known this. You have known this for many lifetimes.”
So I started looking at these cards, and the strange thing was, I got them. It was beyond getting them. It was beyond getting them. I saw that they fell into the most profound order.
That’s when it began, but it was another thing that, again, I didn’t fully understand. At that time, there were seven decks on the market—seven tarot decks—and I started working with them. She had all of them. She gave me the decks and said, “You study these, and you’re going to see what this is you’re working with.”
These tarot decks weren’t just random tarot decks. All of them were designed based on the Tree of Life, which was from the Western Mystery School tradition and contains the energies and principles—the operating principles, or whatever—of the Kabbalah. They were Kabbalistic tarot decks.
Within maybe two days of apprenticing with her, I walked through the doorway of tarot. I think of it as a doorway into the Kabbalah. I walked inside this body of mystical knowledge within about three days, and previously I had had no idea that it existed. I probably should have known, because I—
Rick: So when you said in your notes, “awakening into this zone,” is that what you’re talking about—walking through this doorway and into this world of Kabbalah?
Pamela: Yes, yes. It was a different worldview. It was a different worldview, and I could see the way that it was laid out.
First of all, it contained all—you and I are talking about something like, part of our conversation is about contradictory forces, or forces that might potentially oppose each other, opposing forces or something like this.
So the Tree of Life, which is what the tarot is based on—the tarot fits on the Tree of Life, essentially—and this Tree of Life contains all of these opposing forces, like light and dark, hot and cold, male and female, all sorts of paradoxical forces, like paradoxes. They all fit on this tree, along with these complementary and supplementary forces that power things and make them work.
I was able to see how these tarot cards fit on this Tree of Life and how it contained this Kabbalistic mystical knowledge. It’s mystical; there’s a lot of mysticism involved here. But I could see how it fit together, and here is the part that I want to tell you.
Being a PhD, having a PhD in sociology, I had studied all of these—I’d studied theories of society, like how society fits together, what makes society move, social movements, how social movements happen, and what you need to create a social movement.
Believe me, the CIA studies sociology, because sociology has outlined how to make a social movement happen, which includes a revolution. You can actually activate a revolution. It’s not that difficult if you have certain pieces.
You need certain pieces. An example would be that you have to find a key person in the community whom everybody respects and responds to, and then work with that person on developing a certain agenda, and so on. That person will already have built-in followers. That person is a charismatic individual. Then you work on creating sound bites, and there are just different ways that you create a revolution.
This has been based on studies of all of the revolutions. That’s where it came from. It’s extracted material from studying a revolution, which you would then abstract into a theory. People like the CIA work with these theories of revolution, or theories of intervention in a community, something like that.
Anyway, I had studied all these theories, these grand theories of how society works and how it fits together, and economic theories and how those work.
When I looked at this theory, I saw that this Tarot–Tree of Life–Kabbalah is actually a theoretical system that shows how aspects of the world fit together, and it also provides intervention points.
I believed, and I still do, that this theory I was looking at was more comprehensive, more profound, and more precise than anything I had studied in graduate school in sociology and psychology. I had never seen anything as profound as what I was looking at and what this fishwife was showing me.
Rick: Who dreamed it up? Where did it come from?
Pamela: Well, it’s been evolving over a period of maybe a couple thousand years or so. It is held by many groups, and when I say it’s evolving, it’s because they call it the Living Kabbalah or the Living Tree of Life. It’s basically the same structure. Everybody’s holding the same structure, with the same diagrams and things like that, but it’s held by a lot of different groups.
The one that is most well known would be Esoteric Judaism, but also the Masons, the Rosicrucians, the Gnostic Christians—there are many, many groups, all Western groups. This is a Western system, a very profound Western system. The diagram of the Tree of Life also accounts for Eastern ways of knowing, because you can actually place them on the diagram, which is something I’ve done.
I have a seminary. I started a seminary—this is another story, and I don’t really want to go into it too much right now—where we use this system and look at all of the world’s religions, all the dominant or most well-known religions.
What I want to say is about the Masons. I should have known this, but I didn’t. I do have Masonic history in my family, but the Masons are very, very secretive. Even my grandfather, who was a Mason, and my grandmother never spoke about what they learned. You were not supposed to speak about it. That’s all there was to it.
As I got deeper into the study of this, what I found and what I learned—oh, I will say that I did start to create a tarot deck. I did. She was right; I was destined to do that. I started to do that, and I started to study. I went to the library. This was pre-Internet, so we didn’t have the Internet to go to. I went to the library and looked for anything I could find.
I found one thing that interested me: one book. First, there was virtually nothing in the library about Tarot, Kabbalah, or the Tree of Life, but I found a book by Joseph Campbell on the Tarot, Kabbalah, and Tree of Life. I knew Joseph Campbell. I had studied Joseph Campbell, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, Joseph Campbell did this. This is amazing.”
So I checked that book out of the library, fearful that the librarians were going to judge me for checking out a book about this, because I knew the librarians. Then I took the book home. This is hilarious to me. I took the book home and opened it to devour it. That was my plan.
Out of the Joseph Campbell book fell a Tarot card. The Tarot card was called the Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel of Fortune, as I now know, means your fortune is about to change—and here we go.
That was not my first thought. My first thought was, “Oh no, someone lost their card. I need to take it back to the library.” Then I thought, “Oh no, don’t take it back. That’s going to attract a lot of attention.” So I didn’t take it back. I kept it. I still have it. It’s a bookmark in the book I wound up creating called Tarot of the Spirit.
Let me tell you this part, too. I found out in my studies that, as you probably know, this country, the United States, was founded primarily and built by Masons, by Freemasons. Many of the early people, such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, almost all of them, were Masons.
They were using Masonic ideas to create the American Revolution, and they were also the same people who brought us the French Revolution. What they did was look at this paradigm, the Tree of Life paradigm, which comes from the Western Mystery School that they were very versed in. They were studying it in the Masonic lodges, and on the basis of this paradigm, they affected the American Revolution. They put together all the pieces they needed based on this paradigm and created the revolution, and then exported it to France.
They did the same exact thing in France with French Masons and created the revolution there. At the same time, they were constructing the U.S. government system, which they created on the diagram. It’s a diagram of the Tree of Life, which underlies the tarot deck.
Basically, the diagram has what are called three pillars, and they turned the three pillars into the three branches of government. Those three branches are executive, judicial, and legislative, which match part of this diagram. Then it’s got three layers, or three levels, in addition. There are three vertical and three horizontal divisions.
The three horizontal levels are federal, state, and local, so those are the three levels down. What I found out is that the entire U.S. system had been based on this particular diagram. I did not know that in the beginning.
We think of the Tarot as a parlor game, right? It’s a good parlor game, and it’s a fun one, too. It does have the power of predictability. The reason it has that power is because it outlines a flow, and when you know what the flow is, you know what’s coming next.
It turns out that, after being developed for so many years—thousands of years—and being, in a sense, not perfected, because it’s alive, this system is based on ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek teachings. You can study where it comes from, and I don’t want to go into that right now. As it turns out, it matches the outflow of systems in the universe as they are developing outside of human society and outside of human consciousness. That would be what science is now discovering: the operating principles of the universe.
That later brought me to one of the more recent books that I wrote, called Visionary Cosmology: The New Paradigm, which is all about science. It actually shows the outflow of how—then we’re back to the very beginning of our conversation about cosmology, because it shows the outflow.
I started awakening to that through the fishwife, this woman with whom I only apprenticed for six months, and then she absolutely disappeared. She disappeared the same way she showed up. She just got me started, got me going, and then she disappeared into the sunset in her truck. It was an amazing experience.
But she wasn’t the only one. I had Eastern people showing up, too. She was Western—that was Western mysteries—but Eastern mysteries people were showing up, and I was just saying, “Yes, come, come. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Hop on. Tell me your story. Let’s learn. Let’s find out. Let’s see where we’re going.”
So it’s a very exciting time. I was opening, opening, opening, and as I was opening, I could almost feel the whole university that I had been involved in for so many years receding in the rearview mirror. It was really interesting as I opened to this massive—I will definitely call it now—a massive spiritual awakening on so many different levels.
Once I let all these people in, and then I sought them, I was looking, and then I became one of them. How frightening. Anyway, yeah.
✨ Inner awakening and the living universe
Rick: Let me ask you a two-part question. I may need to remind you of the second question after you answer the first question.
The first question is, you mentioned that the fish woman said that they had told her that you were coming, and that they are some kind of astral guides or something. So is the Tarot inspired by some kind of astral or subtle beings? Is it something that was channeled to people thousands of years ago and continues to be channeled and thereby developed more and more?
“Channeled” is one word; “cognized” is another—that seers could cognize deeper laws of nature and then express them in words. That’s the first question.
The second question is that you just talked about how utterly transformative this has been for you and what a massive spiritual awakening it has elicited, but you haven’t spoken too much about your inner life. You’ve spoken about a lot of outer events that you’ve gone through over the years, but you really haven’t talked too much about your subjective perspective, your deeper mystical changes, if any, that have taken place. So those are the two questions to answer.
Pamela: Okay, so the first part of the question is about where this came from. We’re really talking about this Tree of Life paradigm, the Tarot. It has history, and then this is more objective, but the ten-point system is based on a ten-point number system, and the ten-point number system comes from ancient Egypt. They developed it, and then it goes through Greece.
Pythagoras picked it up. He studied in Egypt, picked up the ten-point system because it wasn’t being used in Greece, learned the ten-point system, and brought it back to Greece. In Greece, they were already using very widely something which is also used in shamanic systems the world over, and that’s the four directions, or the four elements, basically consisting of fire, water, air, and earth. That was predominant in ancient Greece.
That seems to be very foremost in our primal thought pattern: the circle crossed with—you see it cross-culturally everywhere—composed of fire, water, air, and earth as these four elements that bring us into being.
When Pythagoras picked up the ten-point system and brought it back to Greece, he started teaching it in what was called, at that time, a mystery school. In Greece, they were using different forms of trading and different number systems, and it wasn’t really regulated how you would use a number, or how you would use a number system for things like trading. They would trade, “Maybe I’ll trade you this sheep for this”—bartering, more bartering—but not a token economy-type system based on these numbers.
When he introduced the ten-point system to Greece, he disrupted the culture, and his life was in danger for disrupting the culture with this idea that you could actually abstract from “I’m going to trade you sheep for something else.” You could make this abstract system.
Essentially, this is a system that we don’t realize was, in the beginning, an archetypal system. What that meant was that one wasn’t just original being. Maybe it’s arbitrary, but it’s unique, original, and new. Then you move to two. Two becomes the power of the one moving into a space of attraction. It’s like putting up two points on a board. You start with one—it’s arbitrary—and put up another one, and all of a sudden you have directionality, maybe polarization, a relationship. It’s very archetypal, the number two.
Then the number three: one and two come together to give birth to something new. Three is a place of birth; it’s a space of creation. And so on down. I’m not going to go through all of them right now, but each one is very, very archetypal, and it all comes together sort of in the middle, on the number six.
Six is the place of balance in the middle. It would be the sphere of mediation, the sphere of understanding, the sphere of truth and beauty, where everything comes together.
I’ll mention a couple more, because the number four—I mentioned one, two, and three: one, originality or original being; two, attraction, we’ll say; three, creation. Four is stabilization, because we create more things than we can possibly stabilize. So we have to choose: What are we going to pick to nurture and stabilize and make sure thrives?
Number five is called cataclysm, and that’s the things that come in sideways and disrupt us and tear us apart. It could be illness, financial problems, you name it—anything that is going to destroy us: war.
Usually, what we do in our culture is go back and forth between the five and the four, between cataclysm and restabilizing. We get it stable, but then the next cataclysm is going to come. So we just get stuck between those two things: break it up, tear it down, or build it up; tear it down, build it up; tear it down, build it up. That’s our normal way of operating.
This system gives us a lot of different areas to go in. Now go to the six. Six mediates between the four and the five: four, stabilization; five, cataclysm. Six is a place of synergy, where we can pull in the aspect of building up and stabilizing, and we can also pull in the aspect of tearing down. There is a time for tearing down, and there’s a time for building up, but that process is not going to be the end process.
Working with those pieces and intuitively learning how to understand when we need to bring in one or the other is really important. But we can’t stop there, because if we want something to really, really change, we need to go get—and I guess I’ll segue here into the second part of the question—what we need to get is new information that we don’t have yet, something that’s going to pull us out of the game.
For example, back in El Salvador, the guerrillas, the government of El Salvador, and the U.S. government were all in the same game. Even if they were on different sides, they were still in the same game. They believed that they were fighting over the same thing and that was all there was, and they would continue to fight over it.
The Vision Quest as a Source of New Knowledge
According to the Tarot, Tree of Life, and Kabbalah—those are three different levels of the same thing—what is needed is to go to what’s called the number seven. To make the seven really, really simple, I’m going to call it the vision quest. It’s the sphere of the vision quest. That’s where we have to go get new information we never thought about before.
My life, I think, since learning this has basically been an ongoing vision quest.
So, I’ll divide the answer to the second part into two parts. One is that I didn’t know at the time, but I know now—like we all know—this is a movement. When this woman, this “fishwife,” as I call her, spotted me in the field, pulled me out of the field, and lassoed me to create this Tarot deck, I didn’t realize that it would be part of a movement.
There were seven decks on the market, and it took us seven years to create it. “Us” means my mom painted the cards, and my mom was an art professor at a university. I was a sociologist and a writer at some other university, and we collaborated on this.
I won’t tell you right now about getting my mom to do that. That was a really interesting time, because she didn’t want to do a Tarot deck. She was a serious artist. My mom was a serious, very well-recognized artist before she did a Tarot deck.
Anyway, we did it, and it took us seven years because of the publication process and so on. By the time we finished, and by the time Tarot of the Spirit came out, there were 700 Tarot decks on the market.
This concept had come down like rain all over the planet, and we picked it up, and so did a lot of other people. It wasn’t just Tarot decks. It was all these oracles: the runes, the Tarot deck, the I Ching, pendulums, all kinds of oracles, animal cards—everything was coming out at the same time. It all just hit.
Why did it hit? What was happening? I think it’s because we all knew that the paradigm we were living in—we got it all at the same time—had to come down. But we had no leaders. We didn’t know how to move it; we didn’t know how to make it happen.
The wisdom that began to come out was that we’re the ones we’re looking for. We’ve got to find it within ourselves. We’ve got to go to a new level within ourselves.
For me, what happened was that I became a deeply introspective person. I started doing a lot of vision quests. I did Native American vision quests. I did a lot of meditation. I taught meditation. I opened a spiritual center. I taught lots of groups and just took myself deeper and deeper and deeper into my own consciousness.
Then I found, at certain places in my own consciousness, that it felt like it was opening out into the universe. I began to recognize and realize in the cells of my body—I got it first intellectually, but then I got it in the cells of my body—that I am living universe.
You are the state-of-the-art universe. You are the cutting edge, and you are unique.
All of the processes and laws of the universe are in this body. They apply to this body. So I’m coming together as one individual for a little while, and then I will disperse and become something else, maybe. But the uniqueness of that individual path is absolutely critical.
If we recognize the uniqueness each one of us has, and then begin to step into that and push out the boundaries of that uniqueness, that may not sound like a spiritual path, but it is a spiritual path for me.
Just to talk about what the word means: What is it? Spirit. Spirit is when we’re connected with the Earth, when we’re connected in the cosmos. It’s the opposite of what the youth call disconnect. It’s feeling a strong sense of connection, of belonging: I belong here. I am the universe. The universe has given birth to me, and I belong here in the universe.
That’s a big part of the message that I want to bring forward for the kids, for the young people: You belong here. You’re not an alien. So many adults say, “I’m an alien here. I never fit in with my family. I never belong.” And it’s like, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait. Let’s look at this. Let’s rethink this.” Yes, you do belong here.
It took 13.8 billion years for the universe to arrive at you. You are the state-of-the-art universe. You are the cutting edge, and you are unique. You have this unique aspect to your DNA that no one has had before and no one will have again. Let’s explore it.
The question is not, “Who are you to do this?” The question is, “Who are you not to do this?” Who are you not to do this? It’s built into the universe.
The question is not, “Who are you to do this?” The question is, “Who are you not to do this?” Who are you not to do this? It’s built into the universe.
When we wind up getting our sense of how the universe works and how it fits together in alignment with our bodies, ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and our spirits—getting it all in alignment—then our spiritual path can help us do that. We become life alive in our task, living in this exciting place where we feel our sense of purpose and the interconnectedness of all that is.
That was what I turned my attention to: not just awakening that aliveness inside myself, but also, through various means, helping other people find this aliveness in themselves—aliveness and connection.
I don’t know if that answers the question, but my entire life, 24/7, is dedicated and devoted to spiritual practice.
I taught a meditation group last night. The theme, or the type of meditation, was one that many people had experienced before, but I brought in a version that was for today and for some of the issues that we were working on: a loving-kindness meditation, or a metta meditation, about cherishing ourselves, basically, cherishing others, and then even cherishing our enemies.
That’s one of the areas I’m working on myself: redefining the enemy, internally and externally; finding the schisms in ourselves; and then finding the ways, spiritually, to work with those schisms within ourselves and become healed and whole, an integral human being.
For me, that’s all about the spiritual path. It’s connecting us with the universe in a way that is enlivening, makes sense, works, and is thrilling.
Can a new paradigm become predominant?
Rick: Okay, I have a final question. I know you’re interested in paradigm shift, and our society, we could say, is built on paradigms. There’s a materialistic paradigm, which is often considered to be the foundation or guiding light of the scientific endeavor, the scientific worldview. Basically, it’s that the universe is made of stuff and it’s sort of dead and inanimate, and the universe is some kind of random process that functions according to some laws of nature as defined by Newton and others.
Nonetheless, there’s no intelligence involved. It’s somehow this mechanistic thing that just carries on on its own without any guiding intelligence. And yet, obviously, there are more enlightened paradigms that have been espoused by spiritual luminaries throughout the ages and even by scientists. I mean, many of the quantum physicists—Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and all those guys—studied Vedic philosophy, quoted it, and felt like the new physics they were discovering jibed with those ancient traditional understandings.
So my question is, it seems to take a while for paradigms to percolate up into practical social structures and ways of being. It’s just as if you dump some paint near the source of a river—it’s going to take a long time, not that you’d want to do this, but it’s going to take a long time for the paint to go all the way downstream and reach the ocean. To what extent do you think the newer paradigms have begun to percolate up, such that we could begin to see real change on the so-called surface of life? You might even want to resort to Tarot in order to answer this question. When, if ever, do you feel like they will become predominant and the old paradigms will be put to rest?
Pamela: Oh my. Oh, this is such an interesting question, and it’s a hard question, because sometimes I wonder if there have always been, from the beginning, people who were awake and alive and aware, and who always had the feeling and understood and knew for themselves that the universe was alive and conscious.
Rick: I think they have, and traditions identify them, even thousands and five thousand years ago. But they’ve been in the minority, and perhaps our hope for survival of the species lies in such people becoming the majority, or at least a sizeable percentage of the world’s population.
Pamela: Right. So I have a client this week. I also have a private practice, and I had a client this week, a man who told me that mysticism—which would include the idea that the universe is conscious—is sheer idiocy. Yes, sheer idiocy. That struck me as interesting because he was a very, very successful Silicon Valley high-tech CEO type.
I thought that was interesting, but for me, with all of the meditation I’ve done, the deep meditation and the intense work—I’m shuffling the Tarot cards they left in my hands—but with all the work that I’ve done, what’s come alive inside me is that the universe is alive, is aware, is conscious everywhere. Every tree, every flower, every rock—it’s all alive, it’s all conscious, it’s all in communication.
Vivekananda said, you know, “To the one who is alive, aware, and awake, the rocks and trees and rivers preach sermons, and to others they’re just rocks and trees and rivers.” To me, I’m one of the ones the rocks and trees and rivers are teaching sermons to.
So I pulled out the Tarot cards, maybe to end on, and I’m asking the cards. I’m saying, “See, this is mysticism.” I told that man this week, I said, “I’m a mystic.” And he sees me as a—yeah. Basically, he was saying, “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense.” And I said, “But you haven’t experienced it.” I said, “You’re judging something that you haven’t experienced, but I have experienced it. You can judge me on that basis if you wish, but it’s something I’ve actually had experience with in my life.”
Part of what I’m trying to do is open to other people’s experience as well. That is part of my mission: to listen to other people and try to open, and I’m always hoping other people will also try to open. But that is one of those “release the outcome” things. Let go of the outcome, because I don’t know.
But let’s see what the Tarot has to say. Let’s ask the Tarot. I love to challenge it. I’m just thinking: You said, “Well, is this ever—how can we make this more specific?”
Rick: Let me give you a moment to think. And I’m not asking for a timeline or one of these predictions, but there’s a percolation of a new paradigm, a new vision, a new way of thinking that’s slowly working its way up into the culture. It’s kind of a hit-and-miss arrangement, where there are opposing forces that would dampen down such perspective and such thinking, and there’s no clear-cut assurance that one or the other is going to win out.
But the fate of the planet hangs in the balance, as far as I can tell—the fate of humanity, of all the species, everything. There’s a lot riding on this.
Pamela: Oh my gosh, I am so with you. I am so with you on this. This is it.
Rick: So that gives you a moment to think a bit and to pull out a card and perhaps respond.
Pamela: Exactly. But I just have to echo that really quickly, because what is the difference between looking at the world as if it’s dead stuff? Believe me, I met a lot of people in El Salvador who could kill because they felt they were already dead.
Rick: Yeah.
Pamela: Dead stuff. Dead stuff.
Rick: And even the people they regarded—even the people they killed—as dead stuff, whereas perhaps you and I would have a real hard time squashing a bug. We need to pick it up and get it out of our path so we don’t accidentally step on it, because we feel reverence for it or compassion for it.
Pamela: Thank you. Reverence, for me, is the key word, because if we feel that the universe is alive and is conscious, it takes us into a different place than if we feel the universe is made of dead stuff and is not conscious.
Reverence, for me, is the key word.
So, to raise awareness for the living creatures—and this is another thing we can do for kids—is help them raise their awareness. A friend of mine has an animal rescue center around here where they rescue wild animals, anything—mountain lions, whatever—and then those animals become teachers for the kids. The kids connect with them and realize, “Well, this isn’t just some wild animal. This animal has a personality.”
Okay, so I just got another idea while you were talking.
Rick: So the gist of the question is, what’s it going to take for this sort of more enlightened paradigm to become predominant? Could it be squashed and die on the vine, or will it eventually gain ascendancy?
Everyone listening, everyone who’s interested in this: What can we all do to shepherd this along?
Pamela: Everyone, okay, because I want to change the question to say, “What can we do to make sure it happens?” It’s a really big question that you’re asking, and I want to say, “What can we do to bring this forward, to help it sail, to work with the energies, and to really get them to move?” Let’s see what happens. Okay, here we go.
All right, the first card is called Fire Sister. The funny thing about this card is that it says this card assumes there is guidance from another plane. On this card, you will see a salamander at the bottom. The salamander says, “We are in the business of creating a new world,” because, mythologically, the salamander is the first creature to be born into the new world.
All right, the first card is called Fire Sister. The funny thing about this card is that it says this card assumes there is guidance from another plane. On this card, you will see a salamander at the bottom. The salamander says, “We are in the business of creating a new world,” because, mythologically, the salamander is the first creature to be born into the new world.
We are going to create this through Fire Sister. Fire represents spirit, and the sister represents earth. So this is about, interestingly, what we’ve just been talking about: bringing a new spirituality to Earth.
She also has a tiger in her hair. I just mentioned the mountain lion being with the kids, but this tiger in her hair is like a different way of knowing the world and working with all the different aspects and energies of the world. Her secret name—the secret name of this card—is Free Spirit.
So it’s about getting ourselves free on Earth and spiritually free. When we free ourselves and free our imagination so that we can enter into new dimensions within our own being, we are “favored by the lords of the fires of spring.” The lords of the fires of spring have to do with all the energies beginning to work together to bring it into form.
It’s like: Get yourself free. The essence of the energy that comes forth is to get yourself free and stay free.
The second card that comes up is the Devil, which I will also hold up. The most important thing that’s showing on this card is that it shows people artificially separated from one another. They are chained apart, but the link of the chain surrounding each one is so big they could just lift it off. So they’re chained by their own consciousness.
It also shows an altar on the card, and the altar is only half the size it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be double the size. Also, in Hebrew, the card is called “Ayin,” which means “eye,” but it means the third eye.
Having an altar that’s only half the size it’s supposed to be, having to focus on the third eye, and also the idea that we can lift off the chains says that what we need to do is see a picture that’s at least twice the size of what we’re seeing right now. We need to see a much larger picture.
There are maybe two things that are really holding us up. The card is Capricorn, and it’s about material things. We’re going to need to take a new look at that. It’s also about ego, so whatever our ego is associated with, we may have to let go of.
One of the models I was just looking at, which I’m working with now, is something I’m developing called a coming-home ceremony, or blessing ceremony, to help heal the schism within individual people or groups of people—things like PTSD and whatever. As we’re working with that, one of the things is that if we want the same things our oppressor wants, we’re never going to be able to get beyond the situation we’re in now. We have to think bigger.
That was the problem in El Salvador: Keep turning over the power to the next group, keep turning it over, turning it over, turning it over. When I was there, everyone wanted exactly the same thing. Unless we think bigger and start to imagine a different kind of world, we’re not going to be able to escape the things that bind us.
It’s going to mean releasing some of the things our ego can become attached to, and releasing some of the methods and ways that we do things.
If we do that and keep seeing a bigger picture, the last card is—oh, yes—the last card is called Earth Sister. I love this, because this is Earth Sister, and she’s on the cover of the book. She is called the Mountain in Fruition, and the mountain is a metaphor for life on Earth itself.
I told you a little bit about the structure of the Tarot, but I’ll tell you a little bit more. It goes on a one-through-ten pattern. There are four suits: one is fire, one is water, one is wind, and one is earth—or air and earth. So there are four elemental suits, and there are ten stages in each suit. At the top of each suit, there are four face cards: a mother, father, brother, and sister, roughly, just like a regular card deck.
The Earth Sister—the suits are cumulative, so they go in the order of fire, water, air, and earth. By the time you get to earth, you are holding inside yourself the spirit, heart, and mind, which correspond to the other three suits. Earth is body. So we are walking spirit, heart, and mind in a body.
By the time you get to Earth Sister, there’s a father, mother, brother, and sister at the top of that suit. She is the very last card, after going through all the stages of spirit, which is fire; all the stages of water, which is heart and emotion; and all the stages of air or wind, which is intellect and consciousness. Now she embodies it all.
She does not know what the future holds, but she is one hundred percent ready to enter every big initiation that is now going to come her way. She’s prepared. I would say she’s pregnant with the future: the Mountain in Fruition. This is Earth pregnant with its future.
So what do we need to do? Get free from old ways of knowing. Free ourselves from aspects of the material world and our ego that are holding us back, which means we’re going to have to break through many layers of fear.
Realize we can just lift those chains off ourselves right now. But if we don’t want to lift them off right now because we’re too afraid and it’s too dangerous, we can make a plan to lift them off over a period of time. Start making the change, but start working toward imagining what it’s going to look like. Imagine with our third eye what it’s going to look like.
Then allow ourselves to know we’ve completed all the minor initiations. We’ve learned all the things we need to know, and now we don’t know where it’s going to head. But what we’re going to do is think on our feet, and we are going to go there.
So that’s where we are. We’ll just keep moving the energy, keep releasing the things we need to keep releasing, and keep getting free. That’s the only path we really have ahead of us, I think, at this point in time. So we’ll just keep on—keep on opening, keep on trucking.
Rick: Exactly, and keep that third eye open and looking.
Pamela: Yeah, and keep working together.
Rick: Good place to conclude. Okay, well, thank you, Pamela. I’ll just wrap it up here. I appreciate the time we’ve spent together. Keeping on is a good place to end, because we’ll both keep on doing what we’re doing and doing what we love, and hopefully we’re making some kind of a contribution to the fate of the planet. If we’re not, we’re having fun trying anyway.
Pamela: That’s right.
Rick: So thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. My interviews tend to be rather long. Some people like that, and some people find them too long, but you can always watch them in bits if you don’t like them so long. I like to get into an extended conversation with a person and not feel that they’re rushed or that they have to cut things out that they might feel are important. I want everything you wanted to know about Pamela Eakins but were afraid to ask, kind of style.
Pamela: I’m in appreciation.
Rick: Good. In any case, I’ll be continuing to do these, and Pamela will be continuing to do what she does. You can get in touch with her through her website, which I will be linking to from her page on www.batgap.com, as well as linking to her many books.
Regarding BATGAP, if you like this and would like to be notified when new interviews are posted, subscribe to the YouTube channel and/or subscribe to the little email notification list that we have a link for on BATGAP. You’ll get about one email a week if you do that.
Also, check out the other menu items on the site. We’ve been having some problems with the audio podcast, but we managed to fix that just yesterday. So those who’ve been having difficulties, check your iTunes or however you subscribe. You should see everything up to date now. I think we’ve fixed those problems.
So thanks again, Pamela, and thanks again to those who’ve been listening or watching. We’ll see you next week.
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