Rev. Bill McDonald Transcript: Love, Forgiveness, and Near-Death Experiences

Rev. Bill McDonald Interview

Summary

Reverend Bill McDonald reflects on mystical experiences, combat trauma, near-death experiences, and spiritual encounters in India. He emphasizes love, service, religious tolerance, and living authentically rather than relying on unverifiable beliefs about the past or future.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can someone understand suffering without losing faith in divine love?
• How can spiritual seekers stay committed when meditation or prayer brings no obvious experiences?
• Is there one spiritual path that is right for everyone?
• How can mystical experiences be integrated without becoming attached to labels or explanations?

Key takeaways

• Pain may be unavoidable, but prolonged suffering can involve a choice in how we respond.
• Love is the one spiritual truth he considers directly knowable.
• Spiritual life is less about gaining special status and more about serving others.
• Every person deserves respect because no one is inherently more divine than another.
• A seeker can honor many paths without trying to convert or correct others.
• Present actions matter more than unverifiable claims about past lives or future events.
• Faith is especially meaningful when someone continues practicing without dramatic experiences.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done nearly 500 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see all the previous ones archived in several different ways.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. If you’re not comfortable with PayPal, there’s also a Donations page that tells you other ways you can do it.

My guest today is Reverend Bill McDonald. I’ll read a little bit of his standard bio that he sent me, but then I’ll lapse out of that and let him elaborate more.

What’s the matter? Oh, there’s a bug on Irene’s desk. All right, we’ll look. We have these little bugs that get in the house in the wintertime around here. Yeah, it wasn’t an owl. We’ll talk about owls during the interview.

Bill: Okay, all right. Just don’t bug me.

Rick: Okay, I won’t bug you.

Reverend Bill’s life has been a spiritual journey spanning slightly over seven decades. His whole life has been a mystical trip in search of gurus, the paranormal, and self-discovery. He has written about his many spiritually transformative experiences and near-death experiences, including supernatural events during his combat tour of duty in Vietnam. In his books, he has shared some incredible spiritual events that are beyond the common understanding or explanation. I’ll be sharing them in this interview today.

His autobiography, Warrior: A Spiritual Odyssey—that’s this one—takes us on a life quest for love, understanding, forgiveness, and enlightenment. His follow-up book, Alchemy of a Warrior’s Heart, continues that mystical journey, including four trips to India for even more profound experiences with holy men, miracles, and his personal relationship with the divine.

What he knows for sure, after all these years, is that the only thing that is truly real is love. Bill is an author, as was just displayed, an award-winning poet, motivational speaker, artist, film advisor, veteran advocate, and Vietnam War veteran, in which he won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, 14 Air Medals, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.

He has spoken around the world, including the whole list of countries, and he has been involved with a dozen films and documentaries, such as In the Shadow of the Blade, which was about Vietnam, I believe. He has been on over 800 radio and TV shows in the last 18 years, so he’s probably going to be kind of bored talking to me. He’s done so many of these things.

Anyway, I won’t go on, because you’re going to learn a lot about Bill during this interview. So welcome, Bill.

Bill: Well, thank you for having me on your show.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: I checked your list of previous predecessors coming on the show, so I have a lot to own up to here and fill big boots. I’ll try my best.

Rick: Yeah. Well, as Bill and I were talking for about half an hour before we started here, he was talking about the variety of people I’ve interviewed and what a variety of spiritual people there are out there in the world, of all different types and flavors.

We were just reflecting on how isn’t that kind of true of the universe itself, as a display of the divine intelligence, which just gives rise to such diversity and abundance and displays such creativity? We were also talking about how there’s no one path to the divine or any such thing, and it’s good to be appreciative of everybody’s path, regardless of what form it may take.

Bill: Well, that’s kind of my philosophy. If somebody comes to me and they’ve got a certain religious belief or certain faith or whatever it is or path, if they’re happy, I’m happy for them. I don’t want to change anybody. If it’s working for you, go with it.

We all don’t eat the same flavor of ice cream. That’s why they’ve got 32 flavors, right? Some people like chocolate, some people like vanilla, and some people like tutti-frutti.

So when it comes to our spiritual quest, it is exactly that: our spiritual quest. What do we need this lifetime? What do we need to add to this diversity, to this rainbow we have? What energy do we have to give and share?

It’s not so much about getting; it’s about serving, as I’ve heard some of your guests talk about before. In India, they’ve got this whole thing about serving at the ashram and serving your guru and serving. To me, it’s always about that, whether you’re serving your community, your family, your wife, or your children.

It’s not about getting; it’s about giving.

So that’s just where I’m at.

Rick: Nice. As one begins to read your books, you get the feeling like, “Holy mackerel, this guy has really been through it.” I mean, from your early childhood—and let’s go through some of it, just to get—

One thing that you say later on, I guess I heard it in an interview, and it’s probably in one of your books someplace, is that you were told by some kind of palm reader or somebody, or a tarot reader or somebody in India, that your soul is of the type that kind of volunteers to come here again and again and take on a lot of suffering.

Bill: Yeah, and you have to realize that I don’t make any pretentious claims like, “This is it,” just because somebody said it. My Nadi palm reader, according to the charts and the astral charts with Indian astrology, they all said the same thing: that this is something I’ve volunteered for, and I’m taking it on again and again and again.

Now, whether that’s real or whether that’s the truth, it makes no difference to me. The only thing that’s important is who I am right now, in this moment. I hear a lot of people talk about their past lives and this and that, and I go, “You know what? It doesn’t matter, because you can’t prove any of it. The only thing you can prove is who you are by how you live your life.” That’s kind of where I’m at.

So I wake up every day and try to be the best me I can be, and I’m finding out that I’m better today than I was yesterday. Of course, I’m older today, but I’m better in other ways.

So, yeah, I definitely see that when I was in my teens, I thought I was smart. When I was in my twenties, I knew I knew everything. Now that I’ve gotten into my seventies, I’m realizing I don’t know anything.

The only thing I really know is love.

What I did know—the only thing I really know—is love. That’s the only thing that’s guaranteed that I know. I know when I’m loved, and I know when I give love, and I feel love. Everything else is theory. What difference does it make?

Rick: Yeah, and I’ve heard you say, “God is love,” and obviously that’s almost like a cliché bumper-sticker phrase that people say. So what does that mean to you, that God is love, and how do you reconcile that with all the suffering that you’ve encountered and that people in the world experience?

Bill: People—here’s the thing. Let’s talk about suffering. First off, there’s pain. There are painful things that happen to people. There are what could be classified as negative aspects of their life and their life experience, but suffering is a choice.

Pain, sometimes you can’t avoid. It’s on track for your life’s course; it’s part of your journey. But choosing to suffer or not suffer, that’s the key.

I believe that everything is made in God’s image. That means atoms, everything—the table, the rock, you, the dog—everything’s made of the same thing. And I think that what holds that substance together, what holds those molecules together, the quarks, the strings, the atoms, whatever, that energy is love.

I believe that everything is made in God’s image. That means atoms, everything—the table, the rock, you, the dog—everything’s made of the same thing. And I think that what holds that substance together, what holds those molecules together, the quarks, the strings, the atoms, whatever, that energy is love.

It’s light. You call it light, you call it love, you call it whatever you want, but it’s basically—I feel it as love.

So I experience life on a scale of how I measure life. It’s all measured by love: how much love and light is generated. To me, light and love are everywhere. If you open your eyes—better yet, if you open your heart—you’ll not only see it, you’ll find it, and you’ll generate it for others.

Rick: One way I would understand what you just said is that love abhors disunity. Love wants to unify. It’s a unifying force between people, between people and animals, between anything where love is displayed or expressed. It’s uniting.

So when you say that the quarks and the strings and all that are kind of united by love, and when we say that God is love, then maybe we could say that, yeah, what we experience subjectively as love is the human experience of a deeper force in the universe that kind of binds it together and keeps it functioning. Could you say that?

Bill: You said it wonderfully. You’re going to find, if you talk to me long enough, that I’m a very simple soul. I’m a simple guy. I am more childlike than adult-like. I don’t use highfalutin words. I don’t use all these great philosophies, and I don’t quote all these great Indian classics. I don’t quote any books. I’ve heard the stories, and I don’t know them, or I’ve heard them and I don’t remember them.

I function on the level of what I experience. If I experience something and I tell somebody, and they go, “Oh, that’s Samadhi. That’s this or that,” I don’t care. I experienced it. I felt the love. That’s all that counts.

It doesn’t matter if it has an analytical title, or if you can classify it. If I have a mystical experience, quote-unquote, I don’t analyze it.

And you read my books, and you know that things happen, and they happen often. In this book here, Alchemy, which is 250 pages, you go, “Wow, that’s got a lot of stuff in there.” The original manuscript was 650 pages. I had more stories I could use.

So I said, “You know what? Let’s just get to the heart of it.” And I condensed it down. I mean, why write about 25 out-of-body experiences? One will do.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: We’ll talk about this or that. One example is good enough, because God has such diversity. The universe is so diverse. There are so many unique experiences.

And I shared them not to say, “Hey, look. Look at me. Here’s a spotlight.” I shared them so other people could take that journey with me.

Because there are a lot of people out there—good people, good souls, even people who are praying and meditating and doing all these things—and nothing ever happens. And to me, the people with the greatest faith are those who meditate with no tangible results, and they continue to do it anyway.

They get up early in the morning and do it. At night, they do it. They’re in love with God. It doesn’t matter. If anything happens, great. They have faith. It’ll happen if it’s supposed to happen.

They have more faith than I do, because I sit down and things happen. Anybody can have faith if they have the experiences I’ve had. I mean, anybody. If you saw all these neat things—healings and visions and stuff—you could have faith.

But the person who has no experience, to me, is operating on a level of pure love. And I’ve always loved these people for that. And I told them, “Don’t give up. Just keep going.”

Rick: That was actually one of my primary motivations for starting this show almost 10 years ago. I live in a town where several thousand people have been meditating for decades, and I knew a lot of them were having great experiences and breakthroughs and all kinds of cool stuff. I also knew a lot of others who were feeling discouraged and disheartened because they weren’t having those experiences. Therefore, they even doubted that these other people who said they were having them were actually having them.

I thought, “Well, let me just showcase some of these people who are having these experiences. Let them share them more publicly so people can see that their peers are actually getting the promised result of all this spiritual practice.” It just kind of took off. After a while, I started by interviewing people here in town, but then it branched out.

That’s been one of the primary motivations for this: to give people everywhere the sense that this spiritual development thing is real, that it’s worth pursuing, and that it’s available to everybody—not just somebody who seems to be special or saint-like or famous or anything like that.

That’s been one of the primary motivations for this: to give people everywhere the sense that this spiritual development thing is real, that it’s worth pursuing, and that it’s available to everybody—not just somebody who seems to be special or saint-like or famous or anything like that.

Bill: Which gets me to this whole special thing. There is no special race. There’s no special religion. There’s no special people. When you’re all special, nobody’s special, right? When you’re all God, how could one part of God be greater than the other part of God?

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: Which leads you to this whole thing about, “Well, how about these bad guys out there? There are people doing evil things.” Well, they’re still part of God. It’s all God. Once you see there are no differences between anything, it brings great peace to you.

I think people need to realize that they don’t have to be special. A lot of religions out there—and I’ll say a lot of cults and religions—the leader will inflate people’s egos and give them titles and things like that, and they’ll feel special because they’re with somebody. No. The lowest person there may be the most advanced. You don’t know how it goes. So treat everybody as a saint. Treat everybody as a sage because, you know something? In the ever-presence of having no time and no space—meaning all time is now—that’s true. Everybody is a saint, a sage, a rishi. Everybody is already an ascended master. They just haven’t awakened in this moment.

Rick: Yeah.

🕊️ Past lives and spiritual development

Bill: Realize that in this parallel space over here, this parallel time in the future, as you call it, they are this great being. That’s why it’s said that people who meditate can lessen their karma, and you wonder how that happens. If they’re meditating now and doing these things and praying and so forth, they’re actually helping evolve themselves in the past as well as evolving themselves in the future. So you’ve already changed your past. The past is not set in stone, and neither is the future.

These people who follow that kind of thing—for instance, I’ve had readings and so forth—if you follow some of my charts and readings, I should have been dead. 2016 was the last time somebody told me it was my death day. I always say, “No, no. I’ll know, but that’s not it.” How can one truly know when they’re going to die, even though I’ve been told? God knows. When you’re done being used and you’ve fulfilled your dharma, what you were supposed to do, and you haven’t given up, that’ll be your time to go.

As long as I still have an ounce of energy—physical energy, spiritual energy, mental energy—I have a list of things I’m still doing. I still have people I need to meet.

Now, let me tell you a story, okay? I believe you read Alchemy[holds up book]. I don’t know if you read toward the back, where I have a heart surgery.

Rick: Yes, I read that part.

Bill: Okay, so let me talk about that because it ties into the Nadi palm reading, which is where we’re kind of at.

Rick: Maybe explain what a Nadi palm reading is also.

Encountering Nadi Palm-Leaf Astrology

Bill: Okay, I was a complete ignoramus—and that’s being very gentle with it. I knew nothing about it. When I was at the ashram in Pune, the guru came to me and said, “Bill—”

Rick: He’s your guru, okay, and he has an ashram in Pune, which is in India, just filling in the blanks here. Go ahead.

Bill: There you go. He goes, “Bill, I want you to go downtown Pune, and I want you to get a Nadi palm reading.” I’m thinking, “Reading my palm?” That’s what I’m thinking: reading a palm. I thought, “I don’t want any fortune-telling. I don’t need a mentalist act or something.”

He says, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. They don’t read your palm. This is an ancient reading that they did 2,500 to 5,000 years ago.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

He said, “Well, the great rishis of India, these holy men, sat down and channeled information for people coming in the future.” I don’t know how far the future stretches, but it was from up to 5,000 years ago, so you figure it’s still going today. It’s probably hundreds or thousands of years more; I’m not sure.

They did millions of these readings, and they had a scribe write them on a palm leaf, on the hard part of the palm. They cut the fronds off, leaving just the wood, and wrote ancient Sanskrit or whatever was on there. Then they shellacked them and saved them.

It was said that when you needed to have this information, when that soul needed that information for that particular lifetime—because you could have several different lifetimes in which you were getting these things—you would come in ready to have it, and you would find it.

He told me that, and I said, “Yeah, okay, real great. I really don’t want to do this. I don’t believe it.”

He said, “No, for you it’s real. You don’t have to believe in it; it’s real.”

I said, “Well, how are they going to find mine?”

He said, “Well, they take your thumbprint.”

Rick: Let me just interject a question here. They didn’t do one of these for every person who was ever going to be born, which would be billions of them, but they knew that if you went there, you were going to actually come to get the reading, and they did it for those people. Is that right?

Bill: That’s the way it sounded to me. You’ll probably have people on your show who can explain this whole thing. They’re Nadi chart people or something. But to me, the simple explanation was: if you’re supposed to have this, it’s there. If not, it’s not there.

Rick: Okay, that’s—

Bill: So that was good enough for my feeble, childlike mind. My guru told it to me so I could explain it. But when he said they classified this by thumbprint, I thought, “Wait a minute—thumbprint?”

He said, “Yeah, you give me your left thumbprint or your right thumbprint if you’re a man, and your left thumbprint if you’re a woman. Then they look it up in the files.”

I said, “They have these things filed by thumbprint?”

Then he explained to me that, unlike astrology, where you have 12 zodiac signs, you have 108 different indications on your thumb, so you have about 108 different subgroups.

I said, “Okay, so you have a million, and you divide by 108. You still have tens of thousands of potentials, right?”

He said, “No, no, no. They’ll find it.”

Then I asked about the location, and he said, “I believe yours is going to be in Pune.”

I said, “What do you mean, in Pune, you believe? Are they elsewhere?”

He said, “Yes. They used to be all in one location, and then when the British were there, they stole some of the scrolls and palm leaves, and there was a fire that destroyed some. So they took the collection of these from all the rishis and divided them up. I don’t know what the number is. I’ve heard 12, 15, 19, 20, but there are various locations all around India where these things are stored.”

So even if you had one and went looking for it, you could go into Pune and it could be in Delhi, Calcutta, or Mumbai. When he told me that, I thought, “Okay, what’s the chance of finding this thing?”

He said, “For you? It’ll be there.”

So I went to this place, and I told my friends who went with me, “Don’t call me by my name. Don’t exchange any conversation. We’re not going to give these guys any heads-up.”

I’ve seen Las Vegas mentalist acts, and I know how it works, right? They listen in and pick up things: “Yeah, you’ve got a wedding ring. You’re married,” and so forth. They pick up stuff.

Rick: Now, wait a minute. Your guru knew a lot about you. Is there any chance he could have talked to them and filled them in?

Bill: Actually, he didn’t know that much about me. He didn’t know my parents’ names. At that time, he didn’t—

Rick: Where your wife went to college and all that kind of stuff?

Bill: None of that stuff, no. There was a lot of stuff he didn’t know.

Rick: Right.

Bill: Because, yeah, that thought occurred to me too: maybe just calling ahead, you know, it’s his buddies. But my guru didn’t even know my birth date. So I go there, I sit down, I give him a thumbprint. And they go, “Put your initial next to your name,” and I’m going, “Aha, okay.” I don’t go by William, but I’ll put W. You know, let’s just test these guys, right? So I put W next to the initial, and then the thumbprint.

An hour later, they called me into this little room, about the size of this little computer room, and it’s got an altar. They must have—seriously now—I mean, it’s like rolling smoke. I’m just like, whew, every odor you can think of. And then it’s got candles lit. It’s got Catholic candles, it’s got Jesus statues, it’s got Buddhas, it’s got Krishna, it’s got Shiva, it’s got all the gods. It’s got everybody; they didn’t leave anybody out.

And I’m going, okay, fine. So this Indian guy walks in, and he’s carrying what looks like a niche of blinds—Venetian blinds—that’s about this long. They’re made of solid material from palm leaves, and they’re strung together with strings, so they’re all stacked together. He had about 20 of them in a stack.

He takes one out and goes through it. He says, “I’m going to ask you a series of questions, and as soon as you say, ‘No, that’s not your leaf,’ we leave that one and go to the next one.”

Okay, so based on your thumbprint, somewhere in this stack should be yours. I said, okay. So he asked—nah, nah, nah, no, no. He gets through the sixth one, and he says, “Intuitively”—this is the reader—“intuitively, I know the seventh one is yours, but just answer yes or no.”

I said, “Okay,” which is not yes or no. Anyway, I laughed; he didn’t laugh.

He goes, “Your name is four letters long.”

I said, “Okay, good guess.” I go, “Yes, because I go by Bill.”

And he says that it starts with B. I put W as my initial out there, and he goes, “B,” right? Then he reads it off the thing. He goes, “B-i-l-l. Bill, Bill?”

And I go, “Yeah, Bill, yes.”

And he says, “And your father’s name was exactly the same as yours.”

Notice he says “was” and “exactly.” “Was” meant that he had died. I only found out a few months before that my father had died in 1973, and this was recently. So that’s information I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t been there the year before.

So then he goes on, and the name’s exactly the same. I am William H. MacDonald Jr.; my father was William H. MacDonald Sr., so it’s exactly the same name. And I’m going, okay, that’s an impressive guess. I’m thinking, man, what do these guys do? They go to Wikipedia or something? Where did they dig this up?

So then he goes, “And your mother’s name was…” meaning she’s dead. She died in 1990. My guru didn’t know that; he didn’t know anything about that. “And her name was…” And he mispronounced it. He says, “Marcelli,” and spelled it out: Marcella.

All this Sanskrit on this thing—or whatever it’s written in, whatever language it’s written in—has Bill and Marcella spelled out in English letters. Now realize, when it was written, I don’t know what the relationship was with England. I don’t know if they had English letters in India or not, but it’s in there with English letters.

Rick: They didn’t have them 2,500 years ago, that’s for sure.

Bill: No.

Rick: I don’t think they had them in England back then.

Bill: Yes, so where did that come from, then? Plus, Marcella is an Italian name.

All right, so that kind of threw me for a loop. I’m thinking, that’s odd. I’m thinking maybe the guy added it later, but I saw how old this thing was. I mean, it was all crinkly and falling apart, and I thought, wow, I don’t know if it’s 2,500 years old, but it looked like it was at least 700 or 800 years old.

I’m thinking maybe they redo those things as they start to rot or age. I’m guessing that, because it didn’t look hundreds of years old, though.

And then he goes, “And your mother’s dead.”

And I go, “Yes.”

And he says, “And your wife’s name is Carol.”

And I go, “Wow.” I was impressed that he got my wife’s name.

“And she graduated from a prestigious university in America.”

So 2,500 years ago, there was no America, right? Some of this may be his intuition putting things together from the pieces, I’m thinking, because I can’t read what he’s got there. But he says America, so maybe that was his addition. I’m thinking about all these things in my mind, because I’m a skeptic. I don’t want to accept anything at face value.

And he says, “We don’t have a word for this in India, but when you were growing up, it was something like being a foster kid. One of your parents—your dad—wasn’t there.”

I go, “That’s true.”

“And you were separated from both your parents for a period of probably a year.”

And I was. I said, “Yes.” And you know, from reading my book, I was in the hospital for a year as a child, taken away from my parents. So there I was, alone.

Nobody at the ashram knew that. Nobody. So that was an interesting piece of information. I go, okay.

And then he goes, “And you’ve got a son and a daughter.” He gave some information on them, including the birth order and everything else. They were married. And then he says, “And they both love you.”

Of course, I couldn’t answer yes or no on that, because that’s what I’d like to think versus what they think, you know.

“You’d have to ask them,” I said.

Then he goes, “Your birthday…” And so I was like, okay, let’s see where he goes with this. I figured he could guess a year, maybe. I don’t know how old I look, but I’m 73 in a couple of weeks, so you could tell this was a few years ago.

And he goes, “Your birthday’s March 16.”

“Yes.”

He says, “But we’re unsure of the hour, the time. We think it’s one o’clock, between 1:10 and 1:30 in the morning, but we’re…” For some reason, they couldn’t get it right.

Now, what he didn’t know was that when I was born, there was no doctor there. They gave my mother an enema when she was in the hospital, expecting to be ready to deliver. She says, “I’m getting ready to deliver.”

“No, no, we’ll be the judge of that,” right?

So while the doctor was gone, the nurse was there. I was delivered just right into the—headfirst into a…

Rick: A bedpan.

Bill: Bedpan, thank you. So instead of a silver spoon in my mouth, I was born with a bunch of crap. So that was kind of the beginning.

Anyway, the doctor was sent for, so the doctor didn’t pronounce me born until he got there. They tried to take a guess at what time. The doctor was trying to guess between 1:10 and 1:30, and I think he guessed about 1:15 or 1:20 or something. Anyway, nobody knows the exact minute of my birth.

And in this reading, they didn’t know the exact minute of my birth either, which is unusual for these things. Usually they’re pretty sharp. So when he told me that, it was an interesting thing because, historically, yeah, I mean, I didn’t even know the answer to that.

Then he went through a whole bunch of other questions, and he goes, “I’m going to tell you this piece of information, but I’m going to change it because what’s written here is antiquated. It’s because they didn’t know about things like they do now. So my intuition says this is what they meant.”

He says, “You just recently”—meaning within just a few weeks—“you recently worked on a movie. This thing here says you worked on a play.” But he says, “Intuition tells me, when I’m doing this, that it’s not a play; it’s a real movie. They didn’t have movies back then, so there’s no vocabulary for it anymore. But you just recently worked on a movie, but not as an actor.”

And I go, “Yeah.” Nobody at the ashram knew that I had just helped with the ending of a movie called—whatever it was. I can’t think of the name.

Rick: That one about the blade?

Bill: No, that was another movie. Anyway, I just worked on the film clip for this, and I didn’t like the ending of the movie. I suggested to the director that he needed a happier, more upbeat ending. So I got involved with this thing.

I made a suggestion, and the director went really well with it and did even better than I suggested. But nobody knew that story.

So the point is this: had I gone there the year before, or the year before that, or the next year, that statement wouldn’t have been correct, because it wouldn’t have matched. So that was the time, and the guy told me this was to tell me that it was the right time for me to get this.

Then he went through telling me about my birth in this lifetime all the way up to the moment I walked in there. That stuff was right on. And that was interesting, because I looked at that, saying that’s a better reading than somebody reading your future, which you don’t know if it’s anything, and reading the past, which could be all make-believe, you know—make you feel good, everybody’s this and that.

You can’t bank on either of those two. But the guy tells you all the stuff leading up to walking in there. That kind of gets your attention, because you say, “Wait a minute, this guy’s reading the now moment, and previous nows in my memory.”

Then he went on, and he goes, “You are supposed to—it’s your dharma, it’s your duty—to write a book talking about your guru and Lord Shiva.”

[Holds up book]

And at the time, I was working on it. In fact, I was in the middle of working on it. And here’s this reading saying this is what I was supposed to do.

Then the guy goes, “In spite of the fact that when you write this book, people are going to say, ‘Who does Bill think he is?’”

I mean, he’s telling all your stories, all this, you know. So in spite of that, take those beatings. That’s okay, because in the end, they’re going to smile upon your guru. They’re going to smile upon Lord Shiva. You’re going to bring people to them.

And it’s not about you, even though the book will look like it’s written about you. In the end, it’s about their energy. It’s about the spiritual quest, not just for you but for others. It’s about taking people on a spiritual journey. Write the book so other people are taking the journey.

So he’s giving this whole talk about that, and I’m going, “Wow.”

So I talked to you earlier about that. That’s why, when I wrote this book—especially the second book—the reader gets into it. It’s them on the journey. I don’t give you a heads-up about how I felt later on, a year later or two years later, in retrospect. It’s how I felt then, what I didn’t know then. What I know later doesn’t count, and I take people on that same journey of discovery.

That’s how I wrote the book. And that’s how I was told to write the book. But they also warned me I’d get criticism.

Rick: Some people…

Bill: Some people, yeah. Overwhelmingly, not. I expected more.

Rick: Well, it’s an autobiography. Autobiographies are about one’s life. And I don’t think you come across as boastful or anything. You’re just telling them you had all these far-out experiences that most people don’t have, but you’re just talking about it.

Bill: What’s interesting is, I’ve had several people who are in the chapters, and they say they were with me for something. They’ve come back to me later after they read the book and go, “Wait a minute. I was with you during this. You’re under-telling what happened.” And a couple of them—one of them goes, “I thought you were bragging. I thought you were exaggerating.” He says, “I’m finding out that everything you wrote about that I know about in there, you’ve brought the level down. You’ve under-told it. You could have said so much more.”

And I go, “Yeah, I felt what I said was going to be hard enough for people to believe as it was.” I didn’t want to go that far. I just wanted to take people to the edge.

All right. So then he goes through the 30 questions, and it’s “Yes, yes, yes.” One of the questions was, he says, “Your guru is Lord Shiva.” And I’m going, “Well, that’s impossible. Nobody’s a disciple of Shiva.” Then, in the next breath, he just goes, “Your guru is Gurunath, your present guru.”

And then I’m thinking, he just said Shiva was my guru, and now he’s saying Gurunath. So it’s like, is this like Russian dolls? Is it all in one? Is the guru one? Is it, you know? So that had me questioning. I said, “Yes, I guess I’m a lover of Shiva.”

So he gets through, and I thought he was done. I reach into my jacket, get out my wallet, and start to pay him, and he goes, “No, no, no, no. That’s not the reading.”

I go, “What do you mean, that’s not the reading?”

He says, “No, no. Now we’ve got an index card. Now we know where to go to get your files. That was just to find out if we had the right person.”

I go, “Oh.”

Rick: That was just like doing a blood test before giving you a transfusion. They just want to make sure you had the right blood type.

Bill: Yeah, yeah. And anyway, it’s like my blood type, which is B positive, which is my whole life, right?

Rick: Yeah, “Be positive.”

Bill: That’s my theme. So anyway, six hours later, I’m still sitting around there, and they’re working on these Vedic charts upstairs. They’ve got a guy who’s reading them in one language. I have an interpreter, Froze, I think the guy’s name was. A real nice man, really nice man. He was there to interpret it from this old language into English for me.

So I went upstairs. There were three of us. We sat down and read my previous life because my guru told me I had to tell him, “I want my worst sin from the relevant past life that ties me to today’s situation.”

But I got out. The guru wanted to know what my worst sin was, and I basically ended up having to share it when I got back to the ashram. Now, the people that had it ahead of me—there were people who had tortured somebody, cut off a head, committed adultery, all kinds of things. I mean, theft, wars. I don’t know. Oh, my God, my worst sin. What’s this going to be about, right?

So now realize, this just makes a great story because there is no positive proof of anything that I’m about to tell you. What credence anybody gives it is based on faith. So I’m giving it in the same way it was given to me. People can accept it or not; this is what was given to me.

So basically, the guy says, “In the most significant past life that connects you today with your guru, you had a lifetime in what’s now Sri Lanka.”

Rick: Sri Lanka, yeah.

Bill: “And you were at your present guru’s ashram. You were his senior monk, his brahmachari or whatever. You were his main guy, and he loved you. You had a great relationship, you were friends, you did all these services, you were a good man, but you committed a hideous crime.”

I go, “Holy cow, what did I do?”

He says, “You had a fleeting thought about a woman. You actually fell in love emotionally with a woman, and you thought about that when you’d taken the vows. The guru sensed that and kicked you out, and you went wandering the rest of your life.”

This is what they tell me: You went wandering the rest of your life like a fool with a crazy head.

“And some years later,” according to the chart, “you ended up back in India, bathed in the Ganges, went down underwater, and came up, and there in a blaze of light was Lord Shiva.”

And I’m saying, the only way you can see Lord Shiva is if you’re dead. Then the next thing he says is, “And yes, you leave in a rainbow body with Lord Shiva.”

According to his chart—and this makes a great story again; credibility, who knows?—he goes, “Every lifetime that we can go back and look at, every lifetime, at least ten here, every time you leave, you leave in a rainbow body. You reach a point, you remember who you are, what you are, what your purpose is, and then you go.”

Rick: What does rainbow body mean exactly?

Bill: Literally, I was all light. I mean—

Rick: Was your physical body still floating in the Ganges, but your subtle body went out? Is that it?

Bill: I didn’t even know if the body was there physically anymore. All I remember was him saying, “You just turned into a rainbow. Whoosh, you’re gone.”

All right, so then he tried to say this is the way you ended every life and the way you’ll end this life. I go, “Okay, that’s a great fairy tale. I’d like to believe it, but who knows? You’ll have to come back to me the next lifetime and ask me that question. I will tell you if I pass over.”

Rick: Okay.

Bill: I’m not too sure I want to go yet.

So then he goes through and says, “Now, the reason we’re telling you that past story is, when you had that fleeting thought—it was just a fleeting thought; you didn’t take any action on it, had no desire to do it—the guru put a curse on your mind.”

I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, a curse.”

“And this lifetime, when you met your guru, what’s the first thing he did for you?”

Well, I knew the guru just within an hour or two. I was having epileptic seizures, a couple hundred a year, and when I met this guru, he just—I’ve not had one since 2008. There’s another whole story that we could talk about that. But anyway, the guy doing the reading says, “What’s the first thing the guru did for you? He took back that curse, gave you back your mind, and that’s so you would believe and know that these two are connected.”

I’m going, “Okay, that makes a good story.” But how did that reader know that I had epilepsy? How did he know that I had a problem? So that was kind of interesting.

Then he did a reading for the future, and he says, “Most people, we’ve got a lot to say. Yours is a very short block of time.”

He says, “Almost everybody can change their future. I mean, you’ve got free will, you’ve got this and that. But some people—and you’re one of these people—because of your dharma, your duty, what you’re supposed to do, stuff is pretty much locked into stone.”

I mean, you could still mess it up, you could still change it, but it’s pretty much in stone that this is what you’re going to do. You still have the free will to mess things up, but they’re pretty positive this stuff is going to happen.

And so he went down all these things that were going to happen with my health, along with a couple of neat things, which I’m going to go into during the operation and tell you where they came into play.

Then he says, “You’re going to write this book about your guru, and you’re going to spend your last years of your life talking about Shiva and your guru, and you will win people over. It’s not about you; it’s about them in the end, and that’s your duty, and you’re supposed to do it.”

Then he gave me when I was going to die and how I was going to die and all that. But the only caveat was—and then I think, well, yeah, okay, they’ve got something to cover the bases, right? You make a prediction and then say, “If Lord Shiva or Babaji or your guru have a task for you that’s undone, then you’ll be given that time to do it. But when you’ve finished your plate, when it’s done, if you serve whatever you’re supposed to do, then here’s what happens.”

So I won’t go into that. But I’ve looked at a lot of other people’s readings, and nobody gets a death prediction. They just don’t do that. First off, there are variables out there. Second, it’s something you shouldn’t know.

It didn’t upset me. It actually made it easier for me when I went through all these other things later on in my life, so there was a reason for me to know. It also put me into a speed-up mode. All of a sudden, it was like, you know, I’ve got sand slipping through the hourglass. I can’t just sit around here and wait to finish that book and wait to go and do these things.

All right, so now let’s go where I was going. I’m going to a near-death experience, a near-death-like experience. The next year, I go to India and have a major heart attack while I’m there.

I’m introducing Gurunath to these Indian audiences. I introduced him to the Women’s Club of Pune, that part of India. They all spoke English, and even to each other, nobody spoke the native language. It was like everybody was college-educated.

Then I introduced him in Mumbai and different places. There was one venue where I didn’t introduce him; somebody else did. I was sitting up in the stands, and all of a sudden I have a heart attack and fall down. I’m in the back row, and nobody sees me. I’m lying down, and all of a sudden the guru is giving them this surya, this meditation exercise where you get power from the sun, and he stops the normal thing he was doing.

All of a sudden, he’s telling these thousands of people in the audience—they’re all kind of going, “What’s going on?”—“I want everybody to focus on the energy of the sun. Now I want you to focus on the energy of the heart. I want you to connect the heart and the sun, the energy going from the sun to the heart, the sun to the heart.”

He goes on for about 10 minutes about the sun going to the heart and the energy, and people are going, “We’ve never heard this before,” right? Meanwhile, I’m dying, lying down, and nobody has even seen me lying down in the crowd. I’m getting better and better and better. Pretty soon, I’m standing up.

Then he stops and calls me up on the stage. I’m dying, and he says, “You make too much work for me.”

Rick: That’s pretty good.

Bill: I’ve got to keep saying—anyway, all right. So now Guru Mata, his beautiful wife, a saintly being, says, “Bill, you have to leave India. Time to go home. Don’t come back until you’re healthy again.”

So I’m at the ashram on the last day, sitting there in the kitchen, and there are about four people there. This kind of brings up a point, because people say, “Well, how come this person sees his angels? I didn’t see anything. This person’s delusional. I didn’t see anything, I didn’t feel anything.”

Here’s an example. There were four people in the room. There was this one beautiful lady from Scandinavia, but she was a teacher of yoga—you know, the exercises and all that stuff—and she was just new to meditation, and she was sitting there.

I feel somebody looking at me, and I turn around, and standing there is Sri Riteshwar—a vision, a lifelike body of Sri Riteshwar. Gurunath almost looks like him, but I’m telling you, it was Sri Riteshwar.

Rick: I just want to add that Sri Riteshwar, or however it’s pronounced, was Yogananda’s guru. So go ahead.

Bill: And he’s standing there with his hands behind his waist, and he’s just looking at me. And I’m going, and I’m feeling this great, great love. My kundalini energy, my spine’s kind of going t-t-t-t-t-t-t like helicopters, right? You know that feeling? And, uh, whew… whew… And I’m going, “I wonder if everybody else sees this,” right?

So I turn around and I ask that girl, “Do you see anything behind me?” “No, I don’t see anything. What, are you crazy? There’s nothing going on.” Just, you know—

So there was this guy from Texas, a young man from Texas. I go, “Do you see what—you see anything behind me?” And he says, “There’s a blaze of light behind you, and I’m feeling loved.” I go, “Okay.”

And then, believe it or not, there was Brian Yosevich, a young lawyer from Los Angeles—a lawyer, so even lawyers can be spiritual. I’m sorry, Brian, I had to make a joke.

But anyway, Brian is sitting there and he goes, “You ain’t gonna believe this, Bill.” And I said, “Try me.” He says, “I see Sri Riteshwar standing there like Gurunath always does, with his hands behind his back, looking at you the exact same way he does.” And I go, “Yes, Brian, it’s exactly what I see.”

So there was a situation where the guy had been practicing a really long time—Brian was really into his meditation, open-hearted and receptive—and he saw exactly what I saw, which verifies what I’m seeing.

Another guy meditated in a good way at the time, but his energy was at that level where he could see the energy, the light, and feel the love, but he couldn’t make out the whole image. When he saw the brightness of the light, he knew there was a great being there.

And the other one? So it makes you sometimes—children see things that we don’t. You know, it’s what you believe, right? You have to be open to it.

Rick: Dogs smell things that we don’t, and so on.

Bill: All right, so I get on an airplane and fly back. I collapse at the airport in customs in Denver, Colorado, coming back to Sacramento, and the paramedics had me for six hours.

And I’m telling them, “Look, I’ve got to get back up. I’m going to see my heart doctor, my cardiologist,” because they were reluctant to put me on an airplane to go. Okay, they gave me a medical exam two hours before I got on the airplane. And I was told at the other end that I had to see a doctor immediately.

No way should they ever have let me on the airplane. I mean, I can’t—there’s no way they would do that, but they did, right? You don’t let a guy who’s collapsed at the airport get on an airplane and fly. Come on.

Anyway, I fly to Sacramento, and next thing you know, I go see the doctor. I go into the doctor’s office, and he takes a listen and goes, “Nope,” calls for a wheelchair, and sends me to the ER.

Next thing you know, I’m in intensive care—four days in intensive care—because they can’t even operate on me because I’m so low. I mean, the energy is just practically gone. So, four days of that.

They put me in an ambulance and transfer me to another hospital. From Kaiser, they take me to Mercy Hospital in Sacramento. I get there, and they prepare me for the next day. They’re going to do open-heart bypass surgery—quadruple bypass surgery.

And my wife comes in. She goes, “Should I worry?” I said, “Nah, it’s not my time. Not my time.” She says, “Okay,” because, okay.

So the next day I go in there, and I’m lying on the table—you know, that cold metal table they put you on—and you’re naked, right? They’re getting ready to cut you up.

And if you know anything about open-heart surgery, they’re going to take what looks like pruning shears—crunch, crunch, crunch—and cut all your ribs, right? They’re going to split it open. Then they’re going to put ice or something in there. Somehow, they’re going to stop your heart.

But before they do that, they’ve hooked up one of your arteries to a heart-lung machine. So they stop your lungs and they stop your heart, and you’re being kept alive, oxygenated by a little box that’s got tubes coming and going from it.

And I’m listening to this stuff. I said, “Wow, it’s like I’m dead.” He says, “Well, yeah, you’re artificially being kept alive. Basically, I guess you are dead, because if the electricity goes out, you’re dead.”

I go, “Oh, okay, good.” I said, “Am I going to feel anything?” He says, “Well, unfortunately, about five percent of the people who go on this bypass machine—because we have to bring down the amount of anesthesia we give you—they feel something. You’ll feel pushing, shoving, poking. You’ll know we’re doing something.”

I said, “Okay.” I’ve got no choice now, right? I’m getting ready to—tsk, whoosh—go out now, right?

I find myself unconscious on the table. Boom. My heart has stopped, my lungs have stopped, and I’m… I’m gone. I’m no longer at that table. I’ve traversed the continent. I’m in India.

All of a sudden, I’m looking around, and I’m dressed like I normally dress in India. I’m just, you know, looking around. One of the predictions from the Nadi reading was that I was supposed to go to this temple in the south, seek it out, and then walk uphill for two to four hours. I’d know where to stop.

At the top of this hill, all the rishis—the ascended ones, or whatever—all the rishis would be waiting for me. They weren’t there to impart knowledge to me, but only to reopen it so I would remember the knowledge. So basically, they’re just opening the book for you: “Here you go. You no longer have to ask questions. You can answer them yourself.”

I’m going, “Okay, fine.” So that’s what I was told there.

So in this surgery experience, where I’m leaving my body, guess where I’m at? I’m at this temple. How do I know it’s that temple? Intuitively. I said, “This has got to be the temple,” right? Because I couldn’t say any Indian names. I couldn’t remember the name of it.

But I’m going, the guy told me it’s going to be six to eight hours of surgery. I’ve got time to walk up this hill. And I walk up the hill, and I’m in a physical body. I’m walking past people. I’m in a body.

Rick: Was it a dreamlike experience, or was it as real as if you were there in your physical body?

Bill: Better than this.

Rick: Okay.

Bill: It’d be like you were sitting physically right in front of me. It was like physical.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: And so I get to the top of the hill, and they’re sitting on a log, a couple of stumps, some rocks. Standing around are these guys with beards and funny hair. I mean, but I knew who they were. I couldn’t tell you their names now, but I knew who they were.

They were standing there, and there was a little fireplace, you know, a little fire pit going.

Rick: How many of them were there?

Bill: I don’t know. At least close to a couple dozen, I don’t know.

Rick: Okay.

Bill: All I know is they were there. That was all the guys who were supposed to be there. That’s all I remember, details of that—

See, I’m a child. I just enjoy the moment. It’s like, you know, somebody else has got to go, “Let’s see what people wear, if there are any smells, any sights.” And, you know, I don’t do that. I just go, “Okay, here I am,” right?

And standing amongst them, someone I didn’t see at first, was Gurunath. He’s standing with these guys, you know, his arms folded, just standing there.

So I walk up there and sit on the rock, and I’m just getting so much love. And then this—it was like a download. Like on a computer, you download information: shoop, it’s done. That was it. Boom, it’s all loaded.

Like, I had no questions. I didn’t ask; I didn’t have to ask any. I didn’t have any questions to ask. I didn’t ask a single question. I mean, I was just happy.

So then this blazing light comes, and out of this blazing light, this angel of death, for lack of a better word—this feminine voice, beautiful, loving feminine voice—goes, “Bill, you don’t have to suffer anymore. You don’t have to put up with the pain. You’ve done more than was asked. All you have to do is give up your heart and go. I promise you bliss, love, a long rest, and a rainbow body.”

It’s just, “Come with me. I promise you all that.” I’m going, “Wow, okay.” I’m ready to sign up for this, right?

And then Gurunath—remember him? He’s still there—and he’s going, with his arms folded, “Bill, don’t give up heart. You could skip a few beats, but don’t give up heart.”

He says, “You’ve got a duty to do. You’ve got dharma. You’ve got people who are waiting for your message, for my message, for Shiva’s message, for love, for answers, something. You’ve got duty that’s undone.”

I’m going, “Wait a minute. Okay, what do I get?”

He says, “Well, I’m going to promise you pain and suffering.”

“What? What?!”

He says, “Yes. All your life, when things happened to you that were really painful physically and stuff, you were blissed out always, and it went away. You didn’t have to take any pain pills. We’re taking that away from you. We want you to have real pain and real suffering, so in your life you can become an example to others when they have physical pain.

“You can’t just say, ‘Well, no.’ You’ve got to be able to learn how to handle it yourself, so you can teach them to handle the pain. It’ll have more meaning to them.”

And I go, “Wait a minute. Let me get this straight, Gurunath. She wants to give me bliss and peace and rainbows and love and rest, and you want to give me more pain and suffering?”

“Yeah, but it’s your dharma. It’s your duty.”

“Oh, holy cow.” So I’m thinking she’s got a heck of a deal going here.

And then he does like this, and all around me, in the air space around me, it’s all these faces, like Irene’s—you know, all these faces of people—

Rick: Like Irene’s?

Bill: Like Irene’s. All these faces. And I was being shown all these people in Wales and England, Florida, California, Australia. It was just—

Rick: People you were going to meet?

Bill: Yeah, and maybe it was just going to be a smile I gave, maybe it was somebody I was going to give hope to, maybe somebody was going to hear my story, maybe somebody would be inspired to do something to help somebody else—different levels of help. Maybe they’d be inspired to seek God at a deeper level. It wasn’t about me, you know, and they’d be happy with me, nothing to do with me. It’s me moving them to their next level, whatever their next level may be. And I was told, “If you’re not here, this will not be done,” you know, then you’re delaying the process. Oh, sheesh.

Anyway, so finally I’m going through this whole process, and all of a sudden I’m feeling this poking and pulling, because obviously the anesthesia is wearing off. My physical body in India is feeling this, like I’ve got hands inside me. I’m going, “Oh.” Then all of a sudden there’s this shoonk—an electric jolt that jump-started my heart. Boom. And all of a sudden now I’m feeling great pain.

And I realize I’m in the body. Even though I’ve got my eyes shut, I know I’m on a cold, steel, metal table. There are people pushing, shoving, and wrapping wires around my ribs, all kinds of stuff. Welcome back, welcome back to the world of pain and suffering. And it was painful.

Finally they wheeled me into the recovery room, and I’m in there a couple of hours. I still have my eyes taped shut, and they’ve got tubes in me—tubes down my throat, tubes in my stomach, tubes in my neck. All I keep thinking about is, “Geez, all I’ve got to do is say, ‘I want to go,’ and I’m going to go. This is all over, right?” This is tempting.

So finally they take the tubes out and everything, and my wife looks down at me to see if I’m okay. I don’t know if she heard me or not, but in my mind I said, “I love you,” because, realize, I had a tube down my throat that had come out, and it was all sore and everything. So I don’t know if I actually whispered, “I love you,” or if I actually said it, or if it was all mental, but I think she got the drift.

So another eight to ten days I’m in this process of getting worse. I didn’t get better after the operation; I was getting worse every day. I had five blood transfusions. My chest cavity was filling up. I mean, everything was going bad.

One night, they came to me—it was like ten-thirty at night—and said, “We’re going to take you downstairs and give you an MRI, and we’re going to see why you’re filling up with fluid. Something’s wrong, and we’ve got to do it right now. It’s an emergency.”

All of a sudden, the bedside phone in the hospital room rings—ten-thirty at night, right? And I go, “I’ve got to answer that.” They go, “No, no, no, no, we’ve got—” I said, “No. I have to answer that.” So the nurse gave me the phone, and I go, “Hello,” and I sounded like Elmer Fudd, which I can’t do, but picture Elmer Fudd saying “Hello,” you know how he talks.

Rick: Hewwo. That’s the way he would—

Bill: Yeah, like that.

Rick: Wascally wabbit.

Bill: There you go, there you go. And then on the other end of the phone I heard this Indian voice go, “Yeah, this is Gurunath from India.” Like, how many Gurunaths do I know, right?

So the next thing out of his mouth was, “Don’t give up heart. You can skip a few beats, but don’t give up heart.” That’s exactly what was told to me.

And what was weird was, during the eight to ten days after that surgery, every time I laid down and went to sleep, or was just unconscious, I was back there on that hilltop having that same fight with the angel of death, with Gurunath fighting over my decision. And that was going on for eight to ten days.

The first thing out of his mouth after introducing himself was, “Don’t give up heart. Skip a few…” And then he did something, because he knows I’m a man of duty, you know, being a warrior, military guy, and everything. He knows I’m into duty. Loyalty is everything, right?

So then he lays his trip on me. He goes, “I’ve got about 110 people here right now at the ashram. I’m just sending them now to the temple, the Shiva temple, to pray for you. I told them I was going to heal you. You wouldn’t want them to be disappointed, right?”

So, holy cow. I mean, my God, if I die, I bring shame to my guru. He just told them he was going to heal me. He used the one thing he knew would work with me: duty and loyalty. I couldn’t embarrass him. I couldn’t embarrass him by saying, “I’m out of here.”

All the other things were nice—“I’m going to help people,” all of that—but it ultimately wasn’t my wife, my children, my grandchildren. It just wasn’t. It was that my guru gave his word, and I didn’t want to make him a liar. I said, “Okay.”

Then I told my wife, I said, “I’m going to be out of the hospital in 36 hours.” She goes, “No way. You can’t even—I mean, you’re dying, right? All these blips…”

Of course, I just asked the question, “What do I have to do to get out of the hospital?”

Anyway, while I’m in the hospital, the last day before I left, one of the other predictions in the Nadi was that Babaji would come and sprinkle water and oil on my spiritual eye, on my head, and would bless me. Sometime in the future, right? And I’m thinking, “That’s kind of an odd prediction.” I’m like, “Okay…great.”

While I was sitting in the hospital bed, all of a sudden I feel this energy around me. It was like a crystal bowl turned upside down that you could see through—an energy bowl, a dome of energy around my bed.

And at the end of my bed stood the ever-youthful, long-haired Babaji, with no shirt on and a pair of Levi’s.

Rick: Levi’s?

Bill: Yeah, Levi’s—some kind of pants. It wasn’t a long…it was pants. And he’s pouring oil and water on my head, and chanting in some strange language, and I’m just blissing out.

I’m going, “Well, you know, if you’re going to be delusional, this is a good delusion, right?” This is great, you know. Nobody’s going to believe me. I don’t even believe me. This is cool. This is good, right? Nobody sees it.

So I’m home from the hospital the next day, and my daughter comes over to see me and says, “You know David Ryan”—he was our old neighbor, he was like 40 years old or something—“he came by to visit you at the hospital the other day.”

And I said, “No, I didn’t. I didn’t see him.” She says, “Oh, yeah, he saw you. You see, he came into the room, and you had some crazy young Indian guy with his shirt off and long hair. He was pouring stuff on your head and chanting this crazy stuff. And he didn’t want to embarrass you, so he left.”

So I told her the story. And there’s a case where David came, and he didn’t believe in any of this stuff, but he was my validation for my experience. Otherwise, to this day, I would have thought I was just drugged up or something, right? But it gave me validation that he saw it.

And when I got out of that dome and looked around the hospital, there was a six-minute time gap. I don’t know why or how it happened, but I was six minutes into the future. I knew that doctor was going to walk by, and six minutes later he did. That nurse was going to come in six minutes from then.

I mean, I was in this thing for half a day where everything was—I was six minutes ahead. I knew it was a strange thing. It never happened again, but it was just an odd thing, and it happened in correlation to all that.

So that was the Nadi reading. That’s how it tied together with some of that. And the Nadi palm reading is about 90-some percent complete on all the predictions so far.

For example, one of the predictions was, “You’re going to have trouble with your skin, causing serious skin problems.” Well, you know, you read my book. You know that they cut most of my nose off and rebuilt it. Cancer. It looks pretty good, right? That’s another great story, by the way.

Rick: That’s quite a story. Yeah.

Bill: I could share that story.

Rick: Well, let’s do it. But let me ask you a few questions based upon things I read in your book and some notes that Irene passed me here. I want to make sure to get in these questions. But we’ll get into your nose story too, because it’s an interesting one. One thing—

Bill: You are a nose guy.

Rick: Yeah, I have quite a nose myself, actually. You know, here’s the profile. I remember my father saying to me one time, “Where did you get that beak?” Speaking of beaks, you like owls. We’ll probably get into some owl stories too.

Okay, so there were a couple of stories in one of your books. In one, you were quite young, five or six years old, and these little beings came into your room. They looked like little ETs or something, and you were terrified. You were screaming bloody murder, and your father came in and told you to shut up, and then he left. Then you started screaming again, and your sister heard you from the other room, but she was afraid to do anything, so she stayed in bed. I guess your father didn’t hear you again after that, but that was one aspect of the story.

And then another aspect was, maybe five years later, you were camping in the backyard with a friend. Around midnight, you saw this big light come down into an adjacent field, and the next thing you knew it was dawn. You hadn’t slept; it was like lost time.

So I’m just wondering whether you think that aliens have played a formative role in your life—that they somehow realized that you have a certain destiny and tinkered with you in some way in order to somehow help you fulfill that destiny?

Let’s just call it otherworldly beings. I mean, let me just add one more thing when we talk about aliens. I think if we imagine—in my understanding and opinion—if we take a Venn diagram, you know how the circles overlap like that [gestures], I think there are probably otherworldly people from other places in the universe who visited, who visit, yeah.

And then that’s the second thing: There are beings who live right here on Earth as we do, but live in other dimensions—astral or celestial or whatever. And then there’s probably an overlapping part of that Venn diagram, where there are people from other universes, other galaxies or whatever, who have the ability to travel interdimensionally and could appear on a subtle level, where people couldn’t even see them.

But anyway, that was just a little expression of my opinion. What do you think about my question? Do you think that you were somehow primed to have this?

Bill: Yeah, it’s interesting because what’s…okay, let’s talk about that experience. My brother, who was in the same room, slept through it all.

Rick: And you were screaming your head off.

Bill: My mother and stepfather slept through the whole thing. My two sisters were awake, and they were in a different room. So when I left my room, because they were all there, and I went into the other room, they came in there. And then—

Rick: The little beings.

Bill: Little beings. And the next thing we knew, it was morning, and they were standing there by the window, kind of giving us one of those Vulcan signs or something, you know.

Rick: Live long and prosper.

Bill: Yeah, like loving parents or something. It wasn’t intimidating—

Rick: They weren’t malicious, yeah.

Bill: To me, I wasn’t intimidated at that point in time. My two sisters had a different emotional experience from that, and neither one talked about it for—I mean, we never had a conversation about that until I talked to my little sister Marcia. This happened in 1950 or ’51 or something, and we didn’t talk about it. I didn’t talk about it to her until— But both of them, you know, they were afraid of the dark, they were afraid of things. Something happened. Maybe they were treated differently or whatever. And I didn’t have that experience.

Yeah, there’s a part of me that says, well, you know what? Last year I went and got an MRI at the VA because they were checking my nerve. I’ve had nerve damage in my wrist, because I was having some issues with my neck, and so they did an MRI and an X-ray on the wrist. The guy goes, “Well, you’ve got a piece of shrapnel in here from the war. I guess you never had it taken out.” And I said, “No, there’s no shrapnel there. I didn’t get wounded there.” And the guy shows me, “Well, you’ve got a metal object in there about so big, irregularly shaped. How’d it get there?” And I’m going—

Rick: So you think it’s an implant, an alien implant?

Bill: Well, I don’t remember ever getting wounded there.

Rick: Right.

Bill: I mean, you’d know if something that big was inside there—a piece of metal. I mean, it’s going to bleed, right? So that was odd. That was just a little side note that I didn’t know when I wrote that book.

But I think there are interdimensional beings. Gurunath has an interesting quote that I used in one of my books. I don’t know what chapter—well, I guess it was that chapter for that story. He says, “There are no aliens, there’s only ascended masters,” which I thought kind of fit. It fit what I was writing, because there was a part of me that kind of believed they were imparting something to me. There was knowledge being exchanged; there was a gift. It wasn’t just a take. And I was able to handle whatever it was they were giving me.

I was very psychic, and of course I had nosebleeds forever, throughout all my youth and everything. And I kept having future—well, visitation is the only way I could say it. Because you know that feeling where you’re in bed and all of a sudden, [clap], like you’re 500 pounds, and you’re back in your body again? I mean, every day was like that. It’s like, “Return. I’ve been someplace. I’m coming back,” right?

Sometimes I’d wake up and there’d be a hand on my hand, and then as soon as I focused, it’d be gone. So somebody was taking me on nightly journeys. Things were happening. I hope that it was benevolent and beneficial. I’m the product of it, and I don’t think I’m damaged. I don’t feel like a victim of whatever it was.

I think, depending on your state of wakefulness and the various stages of spirituality—I don’t know—but some people can’t handle that kind of experience. I think it can break them and cause— But again, a normal person would have questions like, “Oh, this happened. Why? What was that?” You know, and talk about it. “Oh, okay, it happened. Great. These guys came. End of story.”

But that’s, I think, one of the reasons I have unique experiences: I don’t overthink them. Too many people analyze things, and when you analyze things, you’re working from the mind, the intellect.

Rick: Right.

Bill: And not the heart. I’m going, “God shows me that? Great. I don’t have to know why. Why did that thing levitate? Why did this happen? Why—you don’t—who cares? It happened. Great. I enjoyed it. Thank you for the gift. Great, let’s move on.”

I’m grateful for all that’s happened to me, and that includes not only the supernatural and mystical, but also the pain. All that pain made me who I am today, and I’m forever grateful, because it made me a better father. You have to ask my kids how good a father I was. Maybe I would have been a lot worse. But it made me a better grandfather, made me a better husband, and makes me a better friend.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all this, it’s love. And the greatest way to show love is through loyalty: loyalty to your family, to your tribe, to your unit, to your town, to your school, to your family, to your friends, to your guru, to your teacher. Whatever it is, be loyal to somebody or something.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all this, it’s love. And the greatest way to show love is through loyalty: loyalty to your family, to your tribe, to your unit, to your town, to your school, to your family, to your friends, to your guru, to your teacher. Whatever it is, be loyal to somebody or something.

If you’re not loyal to anything but materialism or power or money, then you’ve missed it. So, yeah, to answer your question, I really can’t answer that. Someday I’d like to sit down and just see what comes to me, and we can have a show and talk about that.

But I think some people have a hard time accepting those stories. They can accept all this other stuff, but they can’t— And I’m saying, it’s all the same God. It’s all the same energy. It’s all just a different experience, and God was in these things too.

So, yeah, I think in my case they were here to teach me, to guide me, direct me, and they’ve been back. And I think they probably visit people in my family. Whether they’ve remembered or not, I don’t know. I think these things are generational. I think they follow families—if I think they follow genetics.

Rick: Yeah, okay. There’s another thing I want to make sure we get a chance to talk about. Irene wrote some notes here. One of her notes was “experiences of surrender to the universe, serendipity.”

There’s one you told—there are a lot of stories in your book, and we won’t possibly have time to cover them all—but there was one that I thought was really sweet, and I’d like you to tell it. That was where you were at work. You used to work for the postal service, and I guess you were working around the Sacramento area or something. One day you just thought, “I’ve got to go.” And you just told your boss, “I’m leaving.” Not that you’re quitting the job, but, “I’m leaving for the day,” and he didn’t question it.

Bill: Yep, middle of the day.

Rick: Yeah, and so you went out and got in your car. It was pouring rain and kind of chilly, and you were driving along. You saw this kid by the side of the road who was soaking wet and bedraggled, and you didn’t ordinarily pick up hitchhikers, but you decided to pick him up. Take the story from there.

Listening to intuition and serving others

Bill: Okay, that whole week—that whole entire week—started with me going into a bookstore. They had a random pile of books on sale, and underneath, at the bottom of that, I pulled out this book on star signs. The author’s dead now; she was one of those women authors who wrote about star signs.

There was a quote. I just opened it to a random page, and there was a quote in there: “Beware who you talk to and how you treat people, because there goes an angel, unbeknownst to you.”

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s something in the Bible someplace.

Bill: Yeah, it was a quote from the Bible. I read that and thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Then I went to my doctor’s office. I was waiting in the lobby, picked up a Guideposts magazine, and flipped it open at random. That same exact quote was sitting there. I thought, “That’s twice I’ve gotten that quote this week.”

Then I kept having this feeling all week long: Somebody’s waiting for you. You’ve got to help. You have to help. When I went to work that day, I sat there the whole day thinking about it. It was getting greater and greater and greater until it reached the point where I couldn’t say no to my intuition. I thought, “I’ve got to leave.”

I couldn’t offer an explanation to my boss, so I said, “You know, I’m not going to lie, and I’m not going to tell him why. I’m just going to say I’m going to go.” And I said, “I’m going to go.”

“Oh, okay.” Nobody asked me anything. I walked out of the building. There was work on my desk, things going on, phones ringing, and I just walked out and left. I said, “That’s it.” But I didn’t want to lie. I mean, if you do things for people, you don’t lie about doing something good, right? So I just left. I wasn’t sure why I was leaving, but I knew I had to leave right then and there.

I got in my pickup truck and drove down the road. Just before—about seven miles from Elk Grove on Highway 99—there was this tattered young guy. It turned out he was 22 years old. He had one of those what I call a Scooby-Doo beard. You know, a young guy tries to grow a beard, and he’s got a hair here and a hair there. He had no real beard, right?

He had a short-sleeved shirt on, soaking wet, and socks on his hands for gloves because he was cold—and they were wet. He had no equipment, no nothing. I thought, “That’s this crazy guy. I’ve got to pick him up,” right?

After I passed him, I backed up onto the high shoulder of the road and got him in the truck. I said, “Where are you going?”

He said, “I’m going to Texas.”

I said, “I’m just going down the road seven miles. Come with me.”

So he started telling me his story. He had been camping alongside the road in an empty lot the night before. He didn’t have a tent; he had a sleeping bag. But a big thunderstorm came in and rained, and his sleeping bag got soaking wet, so he just left it. He had no sleeping bag, no camping equipment—he had nothing.

That night, he was very despondent. He was very despondent, so I’ll talk about that a little bit later.

He told me that he had just left his grandmother’s house, where she had recently died. He had been there for a couple of years. He was a foster kid, and he was going to go to Texas to try to find his real dad because he had nobody else to go to and no money.

I said, “Okay.” Once I found out all that, we got in the truck and I said, “Well, come on to my house.”

I brought him into the house through the garage, and he smelled. He had been on the road for a couple of weeks. He was dirty. I said, “Look, there’s a shower and a clean towel. I’ll bring you down some clean clothes. Give me your clothes to wash and put them out here. Clean up—for me and you both, right?”

So he went in and took a shower, and the laundry was closed. Then I thought, “This guy has got nothing.” I figured this guy was going to be a bum on the road; he needed stuff, right?

I got a backpack. I got half of a tent—a canvas thing that was waterproof. I gave him a fire starter, a flashlight, a sweatshirt, underwear, T-shirts, socks, a sweater, a couple of pairs of pants, a jacket, a hat—I mean, everything you could think of. All kinds of items, a canteen, and so on. When he came out, I gave him all his equipment and said, “You’re going to need all this for the road.”

I didn’t have any food in the house, so I basically fixed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I gave him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and he was just looking at me, staring at me. My daughter and my wife were there, and he was just staring at me.

I said, “You’ve got some questions. You’re wondering about some things, huh?”

He just kind of shook his head.

I said, “Well, when I give you this…” I reached into my junk drawer, and in the junk drawer was an open pack of sugarless gum. It had sticks of sugarless gum in it. Stupid thing, right? But I reached in there and said, “I’m going to give you this, and when I give it to you, you’ll know why I’m giving it to you, and you’ll remember.”

I put it in his hand, and he looked at it and started crying. Just a pack of sugarless gum, right?

Then he told me this whole story about the night before. He had been drenched, cold, and chilled. He was shaking. He had been thinking about taking his life. He was thinking about ending his life.

Then he said a man came to him who looked exactly like I did, dressed in the exact same clothes I was wearing right there in the kitchen. The man handed him that sugarless gum and told him—when he got to that part, I stopped him—“God loves you.”

God loves you.

Then he really broke down, because that’s what the man in his vision had told him: “God loves you.” He was just all over himself.

My daughter said, “How’d you do that? What’s this thing with the sugarless gum? What is it?”

I didn’t know how I knew that. I didn’t sit there and think, “Yeah, I was there last night for this guy, so I’m going to do this whole act.” No, I just did it. I just did it. I went down, grabbed the gum—he needs this, right?—and I just said those things.

Things come to me. I don’t think about them. I want to show that there’s a law, but I don’t intellectualize it. Sometimes I tell people something, and they ask, “Why’d you tell me that?” A couple of days later they find out, “Oh, here’s why.” I don’t analyze it. I don’t own it. I don’t own it; it’s not mine. The universe gives it to me. I just download it and say, “Here you go.”

Whether what he saw was me, or whatever it was—whether it was an out-of-body experience or being a second body, whatever it was—it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he didn’t commit suicide.

The next day, I not only resupplied him with a shower and cleaned him up and gave him clean clothes, I put some money in his backpack and gave him some food. I put canned food, bread, crackers, peanut butter, and other things in there. I loaded him up so he could travel for a few days.

I prayed for that man for 20-something straight years. In fact, for whatever reason, in the last two weeks I started praying for him again. That was in the 1980s, or maybe 1990, so it’s been 25 or 30 years. He was 22, so he would be in his 40s now.

He’s back on my prayer list. I visualize him and call him in my mind, because I can’t remember his name. I call him the hitchhiker. I ask Babaji, God, Jesus, whatever—shine light on the hitchhiker.

That’s like the story I have about the ebony angel—the young Black woman who came and stayed with me, the 17-year-old who had a beautiful vision of Paramahansa Yogananda. I pray for her.

When people cross my path, I may do a small act or something. I may do something that looks like service, but I don’t forget them. My prayer list—like last night, or the other night—I started going through it after meditation. It took me about an hour and a half to go through my prayer list in my mind, visualizing people and sending them light.

On my prayer list, I not only have people like that; I have people I’ve wronged and people who have wronged me. Those two groups need it the most.

Sorry, tears are coming down for some reason.

Pray for those whom we come across in our lives. You’ve got a hitchhiker on the road, or a guy begging for money. Even if you don’t want to give him money, give him love. Don’t give him judgment; give him love. “Jesus, bless that man. Bless that lady. Bless that family.”

You can’t give money to every beggar out there. Let’s get real—you can’t. You have to draw a line someplace. It’s really hard to do sometimes, but you can give love and you can give prayers.

That’s kind of how I serve. That’s how I do things. It’s the core of who I am, what I do, and why I continue to keep doing it.

Rick: That’s beautiful. I haven’t finished your earlier book about your experiences in Vietnam and everything, but one story—and maybe it would be interesting for you to tell a story or two from that period—is one I’ve heard you tell a number of times. It might be one of your favorites, because I’ve heard you tell it so many times. It’s the time when you touched a helicopter and realized what was going to happen to it the next day.

There was also the story about when you were flying in a helicopter as a gunner. From the altitude you were flying at, you saw these people whom your commanding officer told you were Viet Cong and wanted you to shoot. Do you feel like telling both of those stories? Or—

Bill: Absolutely.

Rick: Unless there are some other stories you’d like to tell.

Bill: Absolutely. Let’s just regress for a moment. I’ve been trying, in my own way, for the last couple of decades to reach out to the New Age group—to reach out to all these yogis and meditators—and I keep getting thrown back to my veterans.

The veterans invite me to things all the time. I’m always doing things, and I keep thinking, “Well, you know, I’m really…”

In the last year or two, I finally realized that the universe is telling me something. There are a lot of people like me out there. The New Age community has all the people they need. But the veteran group is abandoned spiritually, most especially spiritually, because there’s a whole group of New Agers out there—and I’m just making a blanket statement here—who think you can’t be spiritual and be a warrior or a soldier.

Even though history shows us that Saint Francis of Assisi was a warrior, and Saint Ignatius of Loyola was a warrior—

Rick: Arjuna was a warrior.

Bill: Mahatma Gandhi was a Sergeant-Major in the British army in South Africa. I mean, the great ones—Krishna and Arjuna—they’re in a big battle, right? So that was their duty.

A part of me bleeds for them because I am them, and I’ll share these experiences so you kind of know some of the stuff they go through. I was able to survive Vietnam spiritually, emotionally, and physically because when I went there, I was a practicing meditator. I was into yoga, kriya yoga, kundalini energy—I was into all this stuff. I studied Paramahansa Yogananda.

I was into a whole different aspect of reality. To me, it’s all a dream. It’s all God. It’s just a big play, right? People are getting killed; that’s what everybody thinks. But in reality, God is killing God. God never dies. That’s the reality, but that’s a reality that nobody’s ready to accept, and it’s hard.

But I got veterans out there who are hurting. I’m starting to work with them now. In fact, I’ve been invited to be a keynote speaker for the International Association for Near-Death Studies. They have their big international conference in Pennsylvania, outside of Valley Forge, and I’ve been blessed—literally blessed—to be able to do that. Somebody discovered me, found me, and asked me to go, and I am more than willing to go. I am whatever they want me to do. It’s for veterans.

So let’s talk about Vietnam. Vietnam was a war like all wars. There’s stuff that goes on. Warriors don’t make war; they’re pawns in the game of war. They don’t make the decisions. That’s politicians, generals, kings, Congress, whatever—both sides.

So you can’t just say, “Well, I love my American vets, but the guys they are fighting are terrible, too.” A vet’s a vet; a warrior’s a warrior. Now, how you fight that war over there makes a difference.

It’s like the example I was given once upon a time by some swami. He says, “Would you call it murder if a doctor made a mistake in the operation because he accidentally slipped, cut an artery, and the guy dies? Is he a murderer, or is it incompetence?” It’s a lesser—it took somebody’s life, but it’s lesser karma than somebody who stabbed the guy in the heart. A whole different thing, right?

Or if a cop ends up shooting somebody who’s getting ready to kill you—the guy’s got a knife, getting ready to plunge it, and the cop shoots the guy. Well, the cop shot that guy; he killed the guy. But is that murder?

So there are all these levels of karma that we don’t know how to measure when it comes to taking a life. That’s what happens in war, and I think your intentions in war are the difference. Are you intending to be in the light? Are you doing it for what’s right? Are you doing it out of anger, hate, and prejudice?

Because I’ve seen guys in battle who hate these guys, you know, and you see them. Some guys actually get off on this war. Then I’ve seen some guys who are only shooting back because they’re trying to kill their buddy’s attacker, so they want to save their buddy. They have a duty to protect the unit, right?

So you get all these different levels. So let’s take the marching guys. Let’s take what I call the story about mutiny.

Believe it or not, I got decorated. I got all kinds of awards and everything. The one time that I felt I was the bravest, took the greatest risk with my life and career, I got nothing for—except threatened to be locked up for the rest of my life or given a death sentence: mutiny.

Here’s how that day started off. We had a major, a graduate of West Point. He was a nice guy, but he was into rank: “I’m the major,” and “I’m in charge.” He didn’t realize that when you’re in a helicopter, there are only four crew members: two officers and two enlisted men. So you can’t be, “I’m the officer,” and then half the crew is nothing, right?

The helicopter crew was family. It didn’t matter about rank. But he came in new; he came in from Germany. He didn’t know.

So on his first mission out, he’s flying around and trying to—he’s not listening to his pilot. He’s the commander, and he’s trying to navigate. The pilot’s going, “Well, you follow the river, you do this.” He says, “Nah, nah, nah, I’ve got to get up higher so I can see these.”

So he wanted to fly up several hundred feet—like a thousand feet or so, or 800 feet—high enough where people could shoot at you. It was a very dangerous level. We were warning him, but no, he wouldn’t listen to us. He let us know he was in charge: “Don’t worry about it. He knew what he was doing.”

So we’re flying over the Ho Chi Minh trails. In Vietnam, there’s a big, dense jungle, and it’s what they call a free-fire zone. In other words, there aren’t supposed to be people in this area. You could actually, without permission, fire at people.

But there were some friendly villages down there, so I was always aware that there were friendly villages there. I mean, you don’t fire at somebody for no reason, but if it looked like there was a reason, you could fire.

He looks down there, and there’s this column of 30 people in black pajamas, two by two, marching down a dirt road or trail. There’s a guy in the front, and they all look like they’ve got weapons on their shoulders. I mean, they really looked like weapons from up high where we were.

He goes, “Mac”—McDonald—“Hey, Mac, get on your M60. I want you to kill all those guys. Get those guys. You know, it’s Vietcong.”

I didn’t move. I didn’t do anything. Intuitively, I’m going, “No, no, something’s not right here.” I said, “Sir, something’s not right. It’s not what you think.”

“Are you questioning my order? I’m telling you to shoot. That’s the enemy. I want you to shoot.” He gave me that order about five times.

He finally says, “This is a direct order. Failure to follow it, I’m charging you with mutiny. I’m going to have you court-martialed when we get back. You’re going to be in Fort Leavenworth for the rest of your life. You’re never going to see the light of day.”

I said, “You do whatever you’re going to do.” That’s bold, huh? “You do whatever you have to do.” I didn’t fire.

That M60 machine gun fires a 7.62-millimeter round. It’s about that big. I had a belt with about 3,000 rounds on it. I mean, I could have torn those guys up. They were just sitting ducks.

So he turns the aircraft around to the other side. He tells the gunner on the other side—I can’t remember his name—“Hey, I’m giving you the same order. Shoot.”

Here’s the part that made me a little scared, because I’m now responsible for somebody else following my intuition, right? The guy goes, “I’ve flown with McDonald for six months, and if he says something doesn’t feel right, I listen. I refuse to fire.”

Now, that was a braver man than me, because I had the feeling I was going with, but he was trusting me. He already knew that I was facing a mutiny charge, and he basically said, “Sign me up. I ain’t shooting.”

So this guy’s going crazy. Finally, I go, “Sir, tell you what: fly down and make a swoop down there. If anybody looks like they’re going to shoot at me, we’ll both fire. Okay?”

We’d be prepared. Maybe we’d get killed, you know? So he reluctantly took a pass, and we went down there.

It turned out to be 30-something children in black pajamas. What they were carrying were hoes, rakes, and shovels for the community garden. The guy leading them was a Catholic priest in a black robe.

Now, you can imagine: killing the kids would have been bad enough, but killing a Catholic priest has got to be a cardinal sin, right? I would have had a direct letter coming from the pope saying, “Hey, what’s up?”

I could feel the blood just going crazy in this guy, because he had just realized how close he came to committing a criminal act of war.

I could have followed his orders and said, “Hey, I was following orders.” Remember that? That was a defense by some people: “I’m just following orders.” I don’t believe in that. But I would have been scapegoated, you know.

You have to answer to something higher. If it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel right. Did I know it was 30 kids? No. Did I know they were civilians? No. I was prepared that if they had been bad guys, I would have fired back. If they had shot at me, I would have fired. But intuition said, “No.” I got that word: no. I listened.

You have to answer to something higher.

I don’t say, “Well, how come?” Or, “Gee whiz, this guy’s going to court-martial me if I don’t do it.” Can I get a maybe? How about, you know, do I get another answer?

The only thing I regret to this day is that I can’t remember the name of the gunner, because I think the guy deserves a medal. If I ever find out who it was, I think the guy deserves a Silver Star. I mean, that guy put his total trust in me. He knew the penalty, and he did that.

Now think about that. That’s the kind of moral issue that happens in war. You can see how, had I done that, it would have changed my life. The other door gunner’s life, the other pilots’ lives, and the commander’s life—all of our lives would have been impacted forever.

One has to learn to listen.

Now, the other story—

Rick: Before you finish, before we go to the other story, there was a nice conclusion to that story, which was the effect it had on that commander’s personality afterward.

Bill: Let’s talk about that. I could have gloated. I could have said all kinds of stuff. You know what I did? I just gave him kindness, and in return he became my best officer friend that I ever had.

Every time he got on a ship with another crew chief, he introduced himself. He asked where they were from and what he could do for them—favors, you know. He listened to his crew and became a great executive officer. I was so proud of him. That changed his day.

That incident changed him to be a better person—less autocratic, less controlling. So be willing to listen to others. What a lesson. Had I not listened, he wouldn’t have learned that lesson. He would have been… whew. What a lesson. The other lesson:

I act not on faith, because faith is like, “Oh, I think something’s going to happen.” It’s a belief, a wannabe belief. That’s faith: you want to believe.

I act on a knowing, and there’s a difference. I know the sun will come up tomorrow, you know, that kind of thing. I know. When I get an “I know” feeling, I don’t question it.

Now, an intellectual person—I think that’s why me being a little on the dumb side… I’m not that sharp. I’m not the sharpest pencil in the thing. I struggled with geometry, you know.

Okay, there are sharper people out there, but they think about things. They analyze things. They’re using the mind. Anybody will tell you, “Yeah, you know, Bill, he’s out of his mind. He never uses his mind. He’s out of his mind.”

Well, that’s it. I’m really out of my mind. I don’t use it. I think, I feel, I react, and I speak all from the heart center.

When I start something, like this interview, I have nothing prepared. I don’t know where I’m going with this. I don’t even know where I’m going to go in the next sentence. I open my mouth and just rely on the universe, the element of thoughts.

There’s a part of me that, when I’m doing something like this, will sit and watch myself up here. Once in a while, I’ll flash up here, and I’m going, “Well, that’s interesting, how you answered that, Bill. We’re going to go with this question.”

I mean, I’m actually watching now, like there’s two of me watching this.

Rick: Yeah, I get that on this side, too.

Bill: So, all right, let’s go back to some of the other incidents, because I really want to talk about warriors. When I give you these experiences, there’s a new term out there—maybe not new to you—but in the warrior community, in the Vietnam community and among veterans, it’s called a spiritual transformational experience.

You have near-death experiences, and now you can have something like that, but you don’t have to die. You’re having the same kind of experiences, but they’re otherworldly, and I had a lot of those.

This particular one, which I’ll tell you about, still has a life. When I told the aircraft story about when I was going to die, what’s good about this story is that I was investigated by the CIA when I reported it and put under the hot seat. For a couple of days, they wanted me to change my story about it. Then they told me, “We’re watching you because we think you did something, because nobody can know all this stuff.”

A few years back—I’m talking just a few years ago—I got a call from Langley, Virginia. My phone said “Langley, Virginia.” I thought, “Who in the heck is calling me from Langley, Virginia?” It was a CIA contractor who had a computer, and he had my files.

The guy said, “I’ve got your files here.”

I said, “What files?”

“Well, we can’t talk about it.”

I said, “You mean the CIA has a file on me?”

He said, “Yeah, but you can’t get a copy.”

I said, “Why can’t I get a copy? It’s me.”

He said, “Well, you’re going to get all this. Everything will be redacted but your name.”

I said, “What does it say?”

He said, “I can’t tell you. However, I want this information on how you did this and how you knew that.”

He was trying to reproduce it electronically, with electronics and money. They thought they could engineer what happened.

So let me tell you what happened, and you can see why they didn’t want to hear what I wanted to say about it. I was telling the guy, “Well, you’ve got to learn some kind of kundalini energy-rising yoga, some kind of meditation.” They didn’t want to hear that.

Anyway, I was sitting around one day, and my aircraft had been taken and was being fixed, so I didn’t have an aircraft. I had the day off. But they came to me and said, “Hey, would you fly this aircraft tomorrow? We don’t have enough crew chiefs.”

I said, “Well, okay. Let me go take a look at it. I’ll do a preflight on it.”

When I went over to do the preflight, I touched the skin of the aircraft. A Huey helicopter looks like a giant tadpole. I touched it and it was just like that—it was an instant download. It wasn’t drawn out over several minutes. It was instantaneous.

I was watching this helicopter fall apart in the air. I saw the rotor going crazy, spinning, hitting a jungle, spinning around, bursting into flames. I saw bodies falling out, on fire, all over the place. I saw everybody being killed. I felt the heat. I felt the pain of the burns. I felt the spirits leaving the body—all just like that. It takes me longer to tell you about it; it was instantaneous.

I went, “Wow.” So I wrote up the aircraft.

Normally, the crew chief writes up the aircraft and signs it off, saying it’s ready to fly. If there’s something wrong, you put a red X on it, explain what’s wrong, and then you fix it, or someone comes out and fixes it. I put a big red X on it and wrote, “Something is wrong with the aircraft. It’s going to crash and burn.”

That’s not a military thing you do, right? They said, “What is this?”

I said, “I’m not signing off on this. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with the rotor, the rotor head—something. Something’s going to happen. This thing’s going to crash and burn.”

So they sent out a whole team of mechanics and specialists. I said, “You guys sign it off,” because they wanted me to. I said, “I’m not signing it off. I’m saying it’s a red X. I’m saying it’s going to crash and burn.”

All these guys signed it off. They checked it and said, “Yeah, yeah, we think it’s good.”

Then I told the commanding officer, “I’m not flying it tomorrow.”

“Well, we’ve got you scheduled to fly. You’re on flight status. You said you’d fly it, so you’re flying.”

I said, “Sue me. Do whatever you’re going to do.”

“You’re going to be punished.” This was disobeying direct orders. I had a lot of that over there—disobeying direct orders.

I said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what: put me on any aircraft tomorrow. I’m not going on that one, and neither should you let anyone else fly on it.”

Of course, the commanding officer told me, “I’m in charge. You’re not. You’re an E-5; I’m a major.”

I said, “Okay.” So I went back to my bungalow hooch, a little hut where there were about twenty of us.

There was a new guy there, a guy named Al Durell. He had had a really easy job in Saigon. He was actually back in the old computer days, when guys fed IBM cards into machines and used punch cards and all that. He had that kind of job in Saigon, in an air-conditioned building. He ate in a good restaurant and had a hotel room instead of living in the billets.

But there was a part of him that said, “This isn’t right. I’m in Vietnam. I want to fight.” So he volunteered from his easy job to become a door gunner on a Huey, which is—well, the life expectancy of door gunners, you know.

I’m sitting behind a gun, and I know it’s not good. There’s nothing to hide behind, and you’re sitting on a canvas seat. There’s nothing to stop anything.

He volunteered and showed up at our unit that day. I was told he had just transferred in and was going to be a door gunner. They brought me over to introduce him and said, “Hey, Mac, this is Al.”

As soon as I shook his hand, I got that same whole vision. I thought, “Wow.” I said, “You’re a dead man walking.” That’s what I say now. I didn’t know that term then, so I said something like, “You’re going to die tomorrow or something. Don’t go out.”

I told him, “Whatever they do tomorrow, don’t go flying, and don’t go flying on that aircraft.” I told him the number and everything.

He said, “I’m not even on flight status. I don’t have any flight equipment.”

I said, “If they ask you to fly on that tomorrow, don’t go, because you’re never coming back.”

Tears started rolling down my face. People were all looking at me like, “Mac’s been here too long in-country. He’s cracking up.” I was serious, but everybody kind of gave me that suppressed laugh, the “Mac’s been here too long” stuff. They thought I was a crazy guy.

I went back to my bunk. I just knew. I didn’t know what to tell the guy, but I knew.

When I got up in the morning, I was going to fly another aircraft. I showed the commanding officer that I would fly on anything, so I took a real dangerous mission and flew on another aircraft.

I walked by the other aircraft. It was empty. I went back to make sure the guy knew it was empty and wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t on flight status. I told him, “Don’t go,” and I left.

We came back in the afternoon. The helicopter wasn’t there, and neither was the guy.

I went into the commanding officer’s office and said, “How dare you send that aircraft out there on a mission?”

He said, “How dare you question what I do with my helicopters? Who in the hell do you think you are?”

This was totally out of protocol in the military. I was an enlisted man. I told him, “You just killed all those people you sent out there.”

He said, “Oh, no, no, no. It’s just late.”

I said, “How late is it?”

“Well, it’s two hours.”

I said, “It can only fly for about two or three hours with fuel. It’s been flying all day, and it’s two hours late. It’s out of fuel wherever it is.”

He said, “Well, okay. We’ll have to go out and look for it.”

Then he said, “Why don’t you volunteer to come along on this, since you seem to know everything?”

We got out there and went up in the air. The pilot, being a smart-ass, said, “Okay, Mac, where’s it at? Which way should we go?”

I just pointed in some direction on the compass map. They all looked at each other like they had no clue where it was either, so they said, “Okay, we’ll fly that way.”

We flew for about twenty minutes. Pretty soon, we saw a glow off in the jungle. It was just getting dark, and there was a forest fire. In the middle of the forest fire, as we circled around, were the remains of the helicopter, torn into pieces, and all the bodies of those guys, burned up.

I volunteered to go down a rope and check it out, and they said, “No, no, no, no, no. We don’t know what’s down there.” They didn’t want to hang around. If I had been getting shot at, I think they would have left me.

We came back, and nobody said a word to me. Nobody talked to me.

But the equivalent of the NCIS guys—I can’t remember what the Army version is; the Army has a version of NCIS with some kind of initials—came and quizzed me. They put me under a light, a 100-watt bulb, in a hot tent, on a stool, for a couple of days. They questioned me: “How did you know that aircraft was going to crash? You must have done something to make it crash. You killed those guys. We’re going to prove it. We’re watching you for the rest of your life.”

I told them, “Something’s wrong with the rotor or the rotor head. I know it. I know it.”

They said, “How could you know that?”

I said, “I saw it in a vision.”

That was the end of that story.

I thought, “Yeah, sure, these guys.” Weeks went by, and they basically told everybody, “Yeah, he killed them. We don’t know how he did it, but he killed them.” Nobody told me until I wrote the book.

After I wrote the book, one of the guys in my unit, one of my pilots, went to the National Archives and looked up the crash investigation. Three weeks after that investigation, there was a report that said the rotor head had failed. There was a bolt or a nut up there that failed and caused the thing to freeze up, and it crashed.

They knew within three weeks that it wasn’t my fault, and it was exactly what I told them it was. Even after I told them that, they couldn’t find what was wrong with it.

For all those forty or fifty years, I wondered, “Are they watching me? Are they waiting for me? What’s going on?” Then I got the call from the CIA. I thought, “Those turkeys. They believed me the whole time.”

Not only did they have that story, but they had all the rest of my stories that I shared in my unit. They had a whole file on me. Somebody was watching and listening, and they were recording all my stuff.

Apparently, I’m not that hard to find on the internet, because this guy was able to find me. I mean, how many Bill McDonalds are there? Apparently, they found me. It was interesting.

That gets back to what I’m talking about with veterans. There are veterans out there who have had experiences. You can’t share them with the military officials and ranks; they’re going to label you as crazy. If you have a security clearance, you don’t anymore.

I knew an officer—he’s dead now—named Neil Levin. He was one of the first guys to graduate from that flight school thing. What’s that top-flight academy, whatever it was? Anyway, he was a top-flight guy. He was a Navy man and a great fighter pilot.

He was in Vietnam, flying over an area, and he was getting shot down. He was getting ready to eject when he looked over, and sitting on his wing was this young, beautiful girl angel, smiling at him.

He thought, “Wow, this is weird. That’s crazy. I’m getting ready to be shot down.” He just kept that story to himself.

When I talked to him forty-something years later, he told me, “Let me tell you where that went.” He showed me a picture of his granddaughter and said, “This is the angel that was on the wing.”

I know that because she came to him one day and said, “Hey, Grandpa, do you remember when I was on your helicopter—your fighter jet—sitting on the wing when you crashed? I was looking after you, Grandpa.”

But he couldn’t tell anybody.

Just before he got shot down, he and his wingman were flying over an area just outside of Hanoi when he encountered a UFO—the real kind, a flying, odd-shaped thing, zipping around and flying all around him.

He chased it all the way to Cambodia. He called the aircraft carrier and said, “Hey, we’re chasing this bogey, this UFO, unidentified—”

The guy in the tower said, “Colonel, are you sure you want to report this?”

He asked him four times before finally getting the idea: “Oh, okay, we’re chasing a bogey. We don’t know if it’s a MiG or what.”

“Okay, you’re chasing a bogey. All right.”

They couldn’t catch it, but he saw it. He swore to God he saw it.

Another friend of mine from Self-Realization Fellowship, a man named Lee, shared an incident with me when we were at Hidden Valley Ashram for a men’s retreat. Self-Realization Fellowship is down by San Diego.

We were out one day meditating and hiking, and he told me that they were sitting around in a big circle at night. He was in the Ninth Infantry, I believe.

Most people don’t know anything about this because they’re civilians. When they camped at night, they would make a circle, with everybody facing outward. Every other guy would be asleep, and then, after a couple of hours, you would wake up the other guy. That way, somebody was awake all night long.

All of a sudden, he was supposed to be sleeping, and it was so quiet that he said he could hear a trail of ants crawling next to his head. He could hear the ants moving the sand.

He woke up and looked around. All these guys were looking up at the sky. Every other guy was looking up at the sky, and they were all dazed.

He asked them what had happened, and the guys said, “There was that aircraft ahead of us, and it was spinning with lights flashing. It was only about 100 feet up, and it was there for a long time.”

He said, “Yeah, sure.”

Then he went to the other side of the circle, and they all had the same story.

So what was that? I’ve heard many stories like this. I’ve heard stories of near-death experiences in Vietnam. I’ve heard spiritual and other experiences. I’ve had many more that are in my book.

People have to realize that wherever life places you, it’s all God’s territory. Miracles, the miraculous, the mystical, and love happen even in battle. It’s all where the heart is.

If you go into real war and battle, whether it’s with another person, an argument, or whatever it is, wherever you’re at, whatever your battle is, if your heart is focused on love, that’s all that counts. There are no battlefields that are going to harm you.

I don’t know if you have some other questions, but just for a minute, in case we run out, I have a program organization called Spiritual Warrior Ministries.

It’s an organization I put together. It’s a loose affiliation. I’ve got chaplains from all kinds of organizations, ministers from different organizations—actual ministers and reverends. I’ve also got guys who aren’t ordained at all; they just want to be chaplains. I make them chaplains. Great—go. God’s with you.

The basic concept is: no dogma. You can’t preach dogma. Don’t try to change anybody’s beliefs. Wherever they’re at, you accept them as they are, give them spiritual counseling, and that’s the end of the story.

Help veterans and help their families. Don’t charge for your service. If somebody wants to donate to help you with it, great, but don’t ask.

That organization, which I’m expanding into Europe, into Russia hopefully, and around the world, is there to give free help and administer support. It’s best if I can get veterans, or at least people who are interested in helping veterans.

We’re teaching yoga and meditation. We’ve got one guy now whom I just ran into who is speaking at an IANDS conference. He lives in Southern California, and he taught TM meditation at West Point and, I believe, at the Air Force Academy. He went overseas to the War College. That was way back.

Rick: I might know him.

Bill: So you might know him. That’s where things are heading. It’s interesting that I’ve been invited to IANDS, this conference this year, because this is the one year they’re going to bring veterans’ issues in. It’s been kind of a burning thing in the back burners, and now it’s going to get a little light of day. I’m happy to be a part of that.

Again, I am not the message. I’m only one of the many messengers out there, but we have to make peace. This is about everybody. It’s about the vet, the non-vet, the child, the old guy, the crazy, the sick, the lame, the lazy. It’s all the same. It’s all your brother and your sister.

Yes, I really believe we’re our brother’s keeper because basically, they’re our brother. We’re their brother or sister. I mean, it’s one. How can you separate? It’s my left hand—I’m only going to do good things with this left hand, and with this right hand I’m going to cut it off because I don’t like it. It’s all the same body of God.

Rick: Nice.

Bill: You got a question?

🩺 Healing, pain, and rebuilding the nose

Rick: Yeah, actually, Irene sent me a question a couple of hours ago. She said—and this might… No, this will be fine. I think this will lead into it. We’re still going to talk about your nose, if you feel—if you have the time, we can go a little long. Here’s what she wrote:

Your upbringing had some hard knocks in terms of lack of love and support from your family, and yet that helped you develop your experience of “someone out there loves me.” It helped to develop your love for God and surrender to the universe. You had so many experiences of great support and love in spite of what you went through, or possibly because of it.

Could you elaborate on that? Maybe, as you elaborate, you could somehow segue into your nose.

Bill: We could do that, because I was like, “It knows why you’ve been reading that.” That was my segue.

Choosing Response Over Victimhood

Here’s the deal, and this is so cliché that I hate to say it, but it’s not what happens to you; it’s how you handle it. That’s been my philosophy ever since the beginning. It’s never about being a victim. I am not a victim.

Here’s the deal, and this is so cliché that I hate to say it, but it’s not what happens to you; it’s how you handle it. That’s been my philosophy ever since the beginning. It’s never about being a victim. I am not a victim.

People read my book and they go, “Oh my God, you had more stuff happen to you than to me. How could you not get mad? Your parents did this and that.” I’m going, everybody was following their own battle plan, their own dharma. We don’t know if what they were doing was an intended thing I needed to have for whatever it caused me to reflect on or made me a better, more spiritually active person.

Whatever it was, it was a catalyst for who I am today. Therefore, no one should be getting down on a victim. If you’ve got things happening in your life, you’re—I mean, I’m dealing with a couple of abused women right now, and they have some really horrific stories.

At some point in time—it’s not the time now, because I can’t tell them it’s time to move on; they have to deal with that hurt first—people have to be ready to move on. But at some point in time, you’ve got to go, “You know, it was what it was, but it’s not who I choose to be now.”

Right now, I’m not a victim. Right now, nobody’s doing anything to me. Right now, I haven’t been abused. Right now, I haven’t been whatever it is. Everybody has something that happens. Our level of pain is different.

For example, you and I are in the hospital—you’ve never been in the hospital, so you probably don’t know—but they give you this little chart: “Show us your pain level, one through ten,” right? I always laugh because mine’s going to be a one or two even if I’ve been ripped open.

I’ve had my teeth drilled down to the nerve, with no medication, no Novocain. I don’t want any shots. Just drill it down and fill it. The dentist is going, “Mmm,” making a face, and I’m just doing a little Hong-Sau technique. I sit there: “Okay, drill it down.” Boom.

So pain levels are different for everybody. Somebody has something happen, and you would say, “That’s nothing, man. That’s an ache.” This guy says, “Oh, it’s number ten. I better have some Oxy, man. I’ve got number-ten pain.”

Life is like that. If you choose to focus on the pain, the pain becomes number ten for you. I’ve been trying to teach veterans this. I’ve had some guys call me up at two o’clock in the morning. Somebody’s wife would say, “This guy’s getting ready to kill himself. He can’t take the pain anymore. He’s a burn victim, he’s got burns all over, and he’s lost his arm.”

I’d say, “All right, let’s put him on the phone.” Then I’ll go through a technique where you have to take the pain and make it elevator music. The music is still there in the elevator; you still have whoever’s singing in the background, but you don’t hear it. It fades.

You don’t make the pain vanish, but it’s not in the forefront of your mind; it’s not in your thoughts. You can do that with various mantras, whether it’s just “I love you, Jesus,” or whatever. There are ways to refocus that.

Anyway, I’m trying to teach people that because pain, as Buddha learned a long time ago, is one of the great motivators. Pain is not an enemy; suffering is. But pain—yeah. All right, so let’s talk about pain.

Rick: Before you get into it, yeah, I had the same question a little while ago, toward the beginning, when you were talking about pain versus suffering. It sounds very nice to say, “Yeah, if you could just regard pain as pain and not allow it to cause you to suffer, that’s great.”

But I wonder—I mean, some people undergo such horrific things. Do people really have the capacity? If they’re tortured or have serious burn problems, I mean, it sounds glib to just say, “Oh, it’s just pain. Don’t let it cause suffering.”

Bill: My advice—because I have a couple of people I’m talking about right now is this: I don’t do marijuana. I’ve never done it, all right? I’m not into it. But I’m telling people, if your pain is that bad, use marijuana. I don’t want people taking Oxy. There are a lot of drugs that veterans are taking that make them suicidal.

There is some safer stuff out there: meditation, all kinds of things. If you’re dying and you’ve got bone cancer, and it’s just totally horrific pain—bone cancer is horrific—and you’re dying, let the doctor drug you up. Be comfortable. There’s no sin in it. What are you worried about, getting hooked on something? You’re getting ready to leave in a few weeks.

What I’m telling people is, don’t just focus on the pain, complain, moan, and groan. That’s not just physical pain, but also life stuff, because people get down and moan and groan and bitch about things that happen to them.

I’m listening to this woman telling me all this stuff that’s happening, and I go, “Oh my gosh, that’s really terrible.” She’s telling a really painful story; it feels like it happened yesterday. I ask, “When did that happen?”

“Oh, 37 years ago.”

She’s talking about it like it just happened. It’s still fresh. Every time she tells that story about all these painful experiences, it’s like redoing it in her mind. She suffered it, and she’s choosing to suffer it again and again and again. Whether it was abuse or whatever, she’s being abused again and again and again.

Instead of saying, “Once is enough. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of suffering again for it. Once was enough. Let’s move on.” But you can’t tell people that. I couldn’t tell a general audience that—I am in this video, but I have to put quotes around that and say, “One on one.” I’ve got to feel people out. Some people don’t have the strength.

So I tell people, “Mourn as long as you have to mourn for death. Deal with this thing as long as you have to deal with it. You’ll feel what’s the right time for you.” There is no fixed schedule for when you’re supposed to get over abuse or whatever it is. So…

Rick: Yeah. Christianity makes such a big deal out of how much Christ supposedly suffered, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to say, “Christ never suffered.” You know, people from their perspective saw him as suffering, but from his subjective perspective, given the status of his consciousness, he may have experienced pain, but it wasn’t suffering.

Bill: You can have pain and be in bliss.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: I’m just telling you that. I’ve been there. So, let’s talk about…

Rick: Your nose.

Bill: Rebuilding of the nose.

Rick: The schnoz.

Bill: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I had, from my exposure to Agent Orange, my time as a professional lifeguard, my time as a professional scuba instructor, swim team, long-distance swimmer, sunshine surfer, all that stuff, pretty bad skin cancer. In fact, I still have it. I just had a treatment three or four weeks ago, so I still had something taken off. I’ve been doing this since 1979—the easy ones you burn off. But I’ve had some taken off. I’ve had one on the cheek taken off that was the size of a golf ball. Huge sucker. I mean, it was just huge. It took an hour to sew the hole back up.

Anyway, I’ve had some really major stuff, and so my Nadi says, “You’ll have some real bad skin problems.” Well, they weren’t underestimated. So I go to the dermatologist, and I’m going in and I said, “You know, this nose ain’t getting any better.” It looked like—and it was right up in the tear duct. The tear duct was looking funny; it was right next to the tear duct.

They said, “Well, let’s take a sample.” So they take a scalpel and they’re cutting this right next to your tear duct, which is really fun. They sent it to the lab, and it comes back: really bad cancer. We have to cut off lots of flesh, anything that touched it or was close to it.

So I go in there, and I wasn’t sure what they were really going to do. They sent me to this first doctor. I go in there, and he’s a plastic surgeon. I don’t know why they sent me to a plastic surgeon. I got a postcard that said, “You have this doctor appointment here, and then you have this doctor appointment, and you have this doctor appointment.” They didn’t tell me why.

So I go to the first doctor, and he has no bedside manner—none—but apparently he was really good at what he does. I come in there, and he looks at this and says, “Sit down. Let me look at your nose and your eye.” This guy was also an eye surgeon. He says, “I don’t know. I might have to amputate, remove your eye. I might have to cut the cancer out from behind your eyeball.”

I mean, that’s how the conversation starts. There’s no warm-up: “How are you? What do you do for a living?” It was just, “No, I’m probably going to have to do this.” He says, “I’m looking at your lips. I probably have to cut your lips off, probably have to cut both ears off, and have to cut your eyelids off, and for sure your nose. I’m not too sure about parts of your forehead.”

I’m just sitting there going, “Huh? What?!” I went in not having any idea. I thought the guy was going to spray a little liquid nitrogen, cut some tag off, or something. He’s going, “Major, major surgery.”

So I’m going, “Wow!” I was stunned. I have to admit, I usually have my act together, but I was stunned because it was just like, boom. It was about five minutes, and he goes, “Yeah, go see this guy. Go see this guy tomorrow. He’s going to cut off your nose or whatever else needs to be cut off.”

“If he has to cut your ears, whatever. But you’ll find out tomorrow. Just go in there in the morning. Then you have to go the next day to plastic surgery to see what they can fix. It may take multiple surgeries. I’ll be there for that.” Then he walks away.

Nobody’s holding my hand. Nobody was saying, “Golly gee, Bill. This sounds like it’s pretty terrible.” And it wasn’t the thought of pain—this is going to sound terrible—but it was vanity. I’m thinking, “What am I going to look like with no lips, no ears, no nose, no eyelids, and a tear duct gone?” That was my thought. I don’t know if a normal person would think like that, but I’m thinking—because if you get a pimple on your nose, you kind of want it covered up, right?

So I left there and went to sit in my truck. I called up Gurunath and got his answering machine. He was in America, and I got his answering machine on his smartphone—of all things, he’s got a smartphone, an iPhone.

I said, “Gurunath, I’m not asking for anything, not asking for a healing. I never ask for healing. I’m not asking for healing. I’m just asking for courage, strength, and wisdom to handle this. That’s all.” Then I hung up.

Then I sat there because there was a part of me that was still kind of— I was actually a little bit shaky. I was like, “Wow, that’s asking a lot, man.” I hadn’t told my wife yet because that’s like changing your whole life, right? I think I’m kind of okay-looking. I’m an average Joe. But I would have been a monster in my mind, missing parts.

Then I just said, “I can handle this. Whatever it is, it’s a test. I can handle it. I can handle it.” Within about 90 minutes of self-talk, I was saying, “I’m going to learn something from this. If it messes me up, I will learn how people feel when they’re like that. I’ll be able to minister to people like that. I’ll be sympathetic and empathetic.”

And, “Heck, this is funny. I could tell people how I lost my face—you know, I lost face with it. I’ll find humor in this. I will make it work. It’s not the end of the world. Damn it, there’s an inspirational story coming from this. It’s going to happen. Okay, let’s do it.”

Because here’s the way I live my life. I watched Gurunath; everybody comes to him for advice. If you really narrow down what he tells people—they come to him for marriage, work, health—he always tells them two things: “It’s your karma. Deal with it,” or, “Do more. Do more dedication or do more Kriya Yoga.”

So I think to myself, “It’s your karma. Embrace it. Embrace whatever comes to you. That’s it. It’s given to you; embrace it, love it. Love it. It’s a gift. You don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s a gift. Take it.” So that was my attitude: I’m going to embrace it; I’m dealing with it.

So I tell my wife, and I have to be honest, my wife was very, very quiet. We didn’t have much of a conversation. That would be hard on her. This is somebody she apparently likes; she’s been married to me almost 15 years, so she’s put up with a lot. She knows I’m going to go through some pain, some great pain, the next day.

That night, I go to sleep, and I wake up the next day. She drops me off. I said, “Don’t hang around, because this is going to be an all-morning, all-day thing.” What they do is, they cut so much, they shoot you—they were shooting injections behind my eyeball, in my nose, down into my sinuses. The needle was actually in my throat. I could feel it from up by the eyeball; it was down because I could feel the stuff dropping.

They would numb everything up, and then they would cut. Then they would burn it to seal it. Then they would throw general gauze over it, and they would have you go sit in the waiting room for an hour while it was sent to a lab. When they saw how much cancer was there, they would come back.

You kept going through this process, and then you got the shots all over again. You had to sit there in the lobby and think about going back in and being cut again, getting more shots all around the eyeball and behind it. That happened multiple times.

While they’re cutting, I feel the blood just pouring down my face and everything else. Now, I’m going to show you I’m not perfect. I’m going to throw this part of the story in. There’s an evil, evil person in me.

There was this young lady who came in. She had to be about 20 years old, and she had four of her friends come in holding her up and everything. She had a mole that was going to be taken off—a little tiny mole. I couldn’t even see it. They were going to cut it off, and she was—

I said, “Well, don’t worry about it. It’s not that big.” I had all these bandages on my face. I said, “Look, it’s not a big deal. I’m going—”

“Don’t you talk to me, you chauvinist! I’m a woman. I can handle this. I don’t need your chauvinist tripe.”

I’m going, “Oh, okay, fine.” So I just sat back. I’m an old guy trying to help her out, right?

Then the nurse calls her in. She collapses, and they drag her in, her feet dragging. She starts screaming and crying, “Ahhh!” I could hear her back there in the room. She’s crying and screaming and crying and screaming for a half hour.

She comes out with a little tiny Band-Aid here, and they’re done with her. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, but here’s the evil part: inside, I was laughing. I’m sorry to all those people who love me and think I’m a good guy, but inside it was like, “Yeah, babe, all right. You didn’t need my advice, you miss male-chauvinist-telling-you, you know. Okay, great. How did it feel, anyway?”

That was terrible. I felt bad, but I didn’t at the same time. So I go back there and tell the doctor the story, and he starts laughing. He goes, “Yeah, we had to hold her down. It took everybody to hold her down.” He says, “All I did was take a couple of layers of skin off. She was crazy-insane.”

Anyway, then he starts giving me the shots. He’s talking to me, and he’s just cutting away. He says, “You know what? I’m cutting a lot off here.”

I said, “Well, I’d like to see what it looks like. You got a mirror?”

He says, “No, I’m not going to let you look. I’m going to take a picture for the plastic surgeon.” So he took a picture and said, “I’ll let you have a flash glance. I don’t want you to look at it; it’ll make you sick.”

I said, “Well, what’s going to happen tomorrow?” He had finally finished up.

He said, “Well, tomorrow the normal procedure is that he’s going to cut your forehead in a triangle—a big thing here that comes down to the top of your nose—and then he’ll fold that over upside down. They’ll sew that on top of your nose. That will be your new nose; it will be made from your forehead. Your forehead is going to have no skin; it’s going to be all messed up, and we’ll have to stitch that. You’re going to need about five plastic surgeries to make this better. Meanwhile, you’ll have a hump where the nose skin is hanging there. Then they’ll have to have surgery on that and reduce it. But it’ll always look like it’s kind of folded over. It covers the hole.”

I said, “Whatever. Okay, I’m prepared for whatever.”

He says, “Okay, now, when you leave here, all this local stuff is going to wear off. You’re going to be in the greatest pain of your life when you leave here.” He says, “It’s going to feel like your face has been on a barbecue pit. I’ve been burning everything.”

I said, “I don’t need anything.”

He says, “No, no, no.” So he gives me oxy. I didn’t know what it was, right?

“Okay, I’m never going to use it.”

He says, “No, take it.”

So I get home, and my wife’s looking at the pills. She says, “You never take pills.”

I said, “I know.”

“You’re going to take them?”

“Nah. Real men wear black, and they don’t need pain pills.”

Pretty soon, that pain was so great—greatest pain—I mean, it was screaming. I said, “Well, maybe I’ll take a half a pill.” I put the half pill in my mouth, but as I did so, I said a prayer to Babaji: “Babaji, bless me. Let me handle this.”

I took the glass of water, and as I was swallowing the half of the pill, it was still in my throat, and the pain vanished. There was no pain. It wasn’t the pill that did it; it was still traveling. It hadn’t even dissolved.

But I was so exhausted from the operation—blood everywhere, you know, it was just really bad, bandages all over my eye and everything. I told my wife, “It’s late in the day. I’m going to take a nap. I’m going to lie down a little bit. I’m exhausted.”

So I laid down. It was dark in the room, and I’m lying down. Pretty soon, I wake up because my pillow’s wet, the sheets are wet, and the blankets are wet. I go, “My God, what—? I hope nobody sees this, because I must be a big baby. I must have been crying so hard I wet the pillows and everything.” It must have been tears, right?

I come downstairs and tell my wife, “You’re not proud of me, obviously, but I think I was really crying pretty bad up there because everything is soaking wet with my tears.”

She says, “Let me go up there and take a look at this.” So she goes upstairs and comes back down with all these sheets and everything. They’re all bloodstained. Everything was blood. There weren’t tears. She says, “You weren’t crying. You were bleeding.”

I go, “Thank God it was blood and not tears.” Of course, she thought it was nuts at that point. But I meant that. It was part of me saying, “Blood was okay.”

That night I’m in bed, sleeping in a separate room because I’ve got all this pain and everything. At four o’clock in the morning—the Shiva hour—all of a sudden the room is illuminated. I mean illuminated! It’s like you took the sun and shrank it down to the size of my wall. In fact, I couldn’t see the ceiling or the floor, so it was at least the size of the wall, and there were no borders.

It was just this huge disc, a sun. It should have been blinding me, it was so bright, but I’m watching it with one eye. The other eye’s all bandaged up, but I have these—

I’m feeling bliss beyond bliss. I’m feeling love beyond love. I’m feeling—and I wrote this in the book, and I meant it—the love of a billion mothers. Talk about not getting love at home from your mother; this is the greatest. You’ve got a billion of them loving you! It’s unbelievable. It’s like you’ve never been loved before.

In the midst of this, as I’m just watching it, here’s what was interesting: my childlike mind was accepting this. “Yeah, this is cool. This is what happens. God’s here for me. Yeah, why shouldn’t I be seeing this?” There wasn’t one question like, “What is this? Who is this? What’s going on?” It was like, “Yes!” I was just enjoying it.

Then this long arm—no robe or anything, just an arm, no clothing—and a hand reached out from this disc of sun, this omnibus or whatever it was. It reached down and covered the place where the surgery had been that day: the eye, the nose, everything.

My body was just—picture your greatest meditation experience ever and multiply that by billions. That tingling kundalini energy in your spine—it’s like a helicopter taking off, like a rocket ship. It’s, whew—and it’s all love. It’s love!

I’m feeling this love, and there’s no part of me that’s worried about the surgery the next day. I’m not even thinking about it. I’m not thinking about the injury. I’m not thinking about anything. I’m just thinking, “I’m loved, and I’m enjoying it, and I love God back.”

I had this hand on my face, right? I had a feeling of what I thought it was, but I didn’t want to say so. I kind of kept it secret.

A couple of hours later, we’re up, and I tell my wife about it. She’s heard enough of my strange tales, but I told her, and I believe she accepted it. So we went there the next morning.

That doctor—the guy with no bedside manner, the guy who told me he was going to cut my lips, my ears, all the stuff—looks at me and says, “Yeah, it looks pretty bad. I’ve got this stuff. This looks bad.”

He takes out this chart, a picture of my face with a graph on it, showing that it was going to take all these stitches and cuts and stuff. He says, “I’ve been working on this all last night. I’ve got it graphed out this morning, so I’ve planned this. I’ve done this exactly for what I’m going to do.”

Well, I said, “Okay, you’re the boss.”

So I go into surgery and come out. My wife comes in, and she’s just staring at me.

I go, “What’s wrong?” I’m thinking, “What’s wrong?”

She goes, “They didn’t touch your ears. They didn’t touch your lips. They didn’t touch your eyelid. They didn’t do your forehead.”

I look at the bandage on the nose. They had cut everything around it. All the meat, all the flesh around the tear duct, was sitting by itself, and they rebuilt that.

She had demanded to see the doctor. That doctor comes out and says, “Yeah, you know, it’s really weird. I was in there in the surgery. Actually, he was out, and we were ready to do the surgery. I had the instruments, and I was ready to start doing the cutting. An inspiration came to me: cut the shoulder and take the flesh from the shoulder and rebuild the nose. I’ve never done that, but I’m going to rebuild the nose from the shoulder. I didn’t plan it, I didn’t chart it, I didn’t graft it, but it felt like something I should do, and so I did it.”

He didn’t question why. I’m going, “Okay, fine.”

Then he goes, “Hey, by the way, there’s a God-awful amount of stuff in here. You’re going to be in great pain tomorrow, as soon as this stuff wears off.” So he gave me another bottle of oxy.

“I don’t need it. I don’t need it.”

I went home that day, and my wife goes— I say, “No. I proved I didn’t need it yesterday. I don’t need it today.” So I didn’t take it. I went into the bedroom and went to bed.

At four o’clock—zero four hundred—the same exact experience I had the night before came back and revisited me: blazing sun, hand reaching out, hand on my face, and all I could feel was love, healing love. I knew I was being healed in some way, and I knew there was a visitor there. I knew who this was.

Three weeks later, I’m invited to a wedding. First, I canceled the wedding invitation because I didn’t want to show up looking like a monster. But then it didn’t look so bad. I had an eye patch on, which was kind of cool. I had a black eye patch, like an Israeli general or something. The stitches in the nose were out, so it wasn’t too awful bad.

Gurunath was there to help with the wedding. It was in Napa Valley, a beautiful setting. We’re sitting at this table with the wedding party, and they were coming over to talk. There were nine people there, all part of the same group.

Gurunath stops the conversation and says, “Bill”—I’m sitting just across from him—“by the way, that experience you had the other night—”

I’m going, “Okay?”

He says, “That wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t your imagination. It wasn’t a vision. It was real, and it was the Big Boss.”

Now, he calls the Big Boss Babaji, so it was the Big Boss. Of course, all the people are going [looks side to side]. So I didn’t break the news to the people. I was trying to keep it secret. I didn’t want to tell people, “I think it was Babaji,” because that’s just like, “Come on. How arrogant can you be?” But he let it out of the bag. He told everybody. There it is.

And I’m just kind of going— So it was one of those things that—

Rick: And you hadn’t told him you had that experience, right?

Bill: I don’t know how he found out. I don’t know what the deal was, but it was like, “Wow.” It was like, is there anything secret in the universe?

So that was an experience. The only other kind of experience I had with a sphere of some kind, because you kind of had an interest in that, so let’s go there. When I was in my 30s, living in Oakland, I was meditating down in my basement. I was meditating really focused, and all of a sudden the room lit up. I mean, lit up.

And I felt somebody looking at me. This is what I can’t explain, and it happened twice. So I look up, and in the ceiling of the basement here is this orb, about the size of a basketball. But it’s not solid; it’s like spheres of light coming out, different shapes and sizes of light coming out of it. It’s alive. It’s pulsating. It’s a live light. There’s no other way to describe it, not even like crystal.

And I just look at it and I’m staring at it. I didn’t say, “Hey, buddy, who are you? What’s going on? Let me draw this. Let me take a picture.” Nothing. It was just… All kinds of time went by. It could have been 10 minutes; it could have been an hour. I have no clue. Time went by.

And then all of a sudden, boom, it explodes, and there’s this sonic boom. I mean, as loud as a sonic boom. It shook everything. Boom! And there were like shards of glass. This light, the light was like solid, chunks of light just penetrated my heart, and my spiritual eye, and my crown chakra. And just, tchew-tchew-tchew-tchew-tchew… And then, like fireworks, kind of raining sparkles, there was nothing.

And I’m going, “That’s exciting even for me.” I was fresh, right? So I go running out of the basement, I come up the back porch, I go in the house, and I look at my wife and kids. “Did you guys hear that explosion?” No, nobody heard anything. Okay, fine.

So when I was writing this book, Warrior, [shows book] and I was talking about that experience, I thought, “Geez, if I really want to write about the experience, I should know something about it. You know, if that ever happens again…” Seriously, I said to the universe, “If that ever happens again, I’m going to write down some questions.”

And I wrote down, on a sheet of paper, these questions and had them sitting in the corner of my desk. I said, “You know, if that ever happens again, I’m going to commit these questions to mind and I’m going to ask. None of this strange business. I’m going to ask. I’m going to be curious, I’m going to ask. And I’m going to time it, how long and everything else. I’m going to focus on this.”

No sooner had I written the list and made up my mind that that’s what I was going to do, [snaps fingers] there it was. It was like it got called up: “Okay, buddy.”

And then I’m looking up at this thing. I didn’t ask one question. I had the questions right on a tablet. I didn’t ask one question, I didn’t time it, I had no clue. And then, bang! Shards of glass into my heart chakra, into my spiritual eye, into my crown chakra, throat chakra, everything just, whoo…

And then I came out thinking, “Well, let’s see.” Did anybody hear anything? No, nobody heard anything.

But it was interesting that the experience happened twice: once just out of the blue, and the second time when I was trying to write about that experience and remember what it was about, and swore that I was going to ask questions. So the universe says, “Yeah, buddy, you’re going to ask questions? Sure.” Well, nothing. Blank mind. Like I said, I was out of my mind, so…

And then the experience with the sun and the hand coming out, same experience twice, and then with somebody to verify it. And then the fact that the surgeon’s hands were motivated to do something entirely different. Why would you do 30 years one way, and then when this old, fat veteran comes in, you do something different for him? Come on, there’s something afloat there, literally afloat, right?

So the other unique experience… Do we have time for another question?

Rick: Yeah, a little bit more.

Bill: Okay, because I think one of the more—

Rick: Maybe this will be the last one.

Bill: Okay, let’s end on a major one, like when you end up a Fourth of July display, you go, “Pckwheeeew!”

Rick: Right, yeah, the grand finale.

Bill: On the rainbow star story, because you asked about a rainbow, I’m going to get a little bit deeper.

And then—oh, by the way, thank that wonderful person, that lady who sent you the stories and the pictures of the owl that she raised. Sacred. Tell her thank you. Blessings. She wants to write me privately; give her—she could contact me. Do so.

Anyway, that was a beautiful thing. For the people who haven’t seen it, I recommend they do. Anyway—

Rick: Just since you said that, it was Anamika Borst, whom I’ve interviewed. You’ll find her on BatGap, and you could contact her and she’ll send you her story about an owl. It’s a very sweet story about how she adopted this owl when it was only, you know, the size of your thumb, and then she raised it up. Anyway, go ahead.

Bill: It was beautiful. It inspired me. Anyway, I was just appreciating somebody else who inspired me.

So I was meditating. I had been married about three years or so, had two kids, and I was meditating. I had this habit: when I got through with my meditation downstairs, I’d get in bed. I don’t just say, “Okay, now I’m finished meditating, let’s go to sleep.” No. I finished meditating, and on my nightstand next to my bed, on my side, I had—I don’t know if you can see that picture [pointing], that picture back there?

Rick: Of Yogananda? Yeah.

Bill: Yeah. The last photo taken of him before he collapsed and died. In fact, I think that’s the same exact picture, different frame, but the same exact picture.

It was sitting on my nightstand, and my habit was to stare at Yogananda and just say, “I love you. I love you.” And I’m just staring at Yogananda’s picture: “I love you, I love you, I love you.” And the next thing I know, I’m watching this—

Yeah, you stare at these saints’ or sages’ faces, if you’re really staring with great focus, they come alive for you. I mean, this is almost like alive. All right, but then [claps] boom! All of a sudden I’m this thin sheet of light. I’m this rainbow filament. I’m ssooo… It’s like on Star Trek, you know, on Star Trek they go into hyperdrive, whoosh, warp drive, whoosh. Or they go whhoom, and there’s this trail of colors. That’s exactly what it felt like. I was traveling, and it was just like Star Trek, I mean, going by, whhooo, whhooo, whhooo.

Oh, how’s this going? I was just enraptured. I was feeling so much love. I was this rainbow body, and I was traveling to realms of the inner cosmos, or outer cosmos. I have no clue if it was interdimensional, outer-dimensional, but it was not here, in that sense.

And I’m traveling, and I sense and I know that I’m not alone, that this rainbow body I’m in is a body, a community, of consciousnesses. You know, there’s that one great consciousness, and this is functioning like a body. It’s like your toes and your fingers are all part of this body, and the cells are all individual, but they’re all functioning to help this one body.

And that was kind of like what it felt like. I felt like I was functioning in this rainbow-body thing, which is strange. But I could hear colors. I could hear colors, I could see sounds, I could feel the emanation of love expanding everywhere.

At first, when I first had this experience, when I first talked about it, I talked about just going ultra-fast, fast, fast. And then I went to bed one night and I realized I wasn’t traveling fast; I was expanding the consciousness. Expansion, not travel. Which is a whole different concept, just like, whoa.

But there were all these—everything, worlds and everything. In this experience, which only lasted one hour in material-world time, I felt I was gone two to three hundred million years. I mean, a lot of stuff just happened, and I knew the beginning of this and the end of this.

I was given information. I was given certain things that I needed to know. And then I was given things which I could never, ever share. And then I was given things that—pfft—you got amnesia on. You’re not going to come back with that.

And I had this interaction with the cosmic mind, that’s the only way to say it. It was like all was one. It was like it was all one. I wasn’t just this rainbow body; it was all one. I was the sound, that beautiful sound of Om, which is not even like anybody can do here on Earth, that ultimate sound of creation. It’s the sound of love.

So all this was going along, and it was a beautiful experience. Then all of a sudden I remembered my family, my wife and two children. [Claps] Boom! Whooomp, 10,000 pounds back in a human body, right? I go, “Oh my God.”

It was the memory of this material life, in this now, that instantaneously brought me back here. Instantaneous. Nope, just boom. Even though I’d been there for a couple hundred million years doing this, it was a memory of a life here that brought me back here, which is kind of an interesting philosophical question.

So I woke up and I was bawling my eyes out. God, I’d hate to be married to me. My wife must go through it: “What the heck’s going on with her husband?” Anyway, there was that great loss, great loss.

But it profoundly changed me in so many direct and indirect ways. And over the decades, unlayering it like an onion, just unlayering the different meanings of the different things I learned, I’ve kind of realized it was so much greater than any other experience that I’ve ever, ever had.

And I also realized that I’m not alone in this rainbow body, and that there are other people manifesting human bodies who are part of that rainbow body I was in. Like, there are visitors here, but that’s their real home.

And maybe we each have a different rainbow body, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a group of scientists out there that got a special rainbow body. Maybe there’s a group of people that are bringing spiritual stuff. Maybe there’s a group of people that are engineers and scientists.

I’m thinking that maybe the world is being directed by these groups of like-minded entities, souls, consciousnesses, that are working on some aspect of our evolution. That was a thought I had when I came back. I can’t prove it, I don’t know, I haven’t read it anywhere, so I don’t know. But it was a feeling that it had something to do with that.

And I’ve found that to be something comfortable for me to think.

Rick: Yeah, I have the same feeling, although I haven’t had an experience like that, obviously. But I think your whole life is a testament to the idea that there’s more to life than meets the eye. There’s more of the world than meets the eye.

And I think it’s not only comforting but inspiring, and perhaps realistic, to assume—to understand—that there are all kinds of higher levels of creation that may not be perceivable by the average person, but that were perceivable to them, and that they’re very much involved in helping to orchestrate human affairs.

Yeah, Irene said somebody else out there loves us. You know, keeps us from blowing ourselves up and, at the same time, shepherds along our development, our evolution as a planet and as a species.

Bill: Yeah, it’s a—

Rick: Yogananda talks a lot about that, obviously, and many people I’ve interviewed have had experiences along those lines. There’s all kinds of books you can read about it.

So I don’t think it’s just wishful thinking or fantasy indulgence or anything like that. I think it probably is an indication of how the universe is actually operating.

Bill: Yeah, there seems to be a plan. And I’m one of these guys, I don’t question anything. I’m happy if this whole answer to this cosmic thing was a jigsaw puzzle and I was just one of the border pieces. If I wasn’t that flower in the middle with all the colors, it wouldn’t bother me. I’m happy being one piece of the puzzle.

Because I know they can’t finish that piece of the puzzle until I’m in, plugged in, right? So I think each of us is a piece of that jigsaw puzzle, that spiritual jigsaw puzzle. And I really do believe that, ultimately, we’re already there.

And you talked about it in some of your talks. I’ve watched some of your videos where people talk about climbing a mountain and how there are many different trails to it. I always like that as an example because you want to go to the top of the mountain, and you want to take a sherpa who’s been to the top of that particular mountain. But he hooks everybody up to a rope, and you can have somebody down in the valley on that same rope, while the rest of the guys are at the top and others are in the middle. But you know what? Everybody who’s tied to that rope is going to get to the top of the mountain. It’s just a matter of time, and since time is not real, right? There’s no time, so it doesn’t make any difference.

Rick: Yeah, you just reminded me of John Donne’s poem as you were speaking, and I just looked it up. It’s:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Bill: I love that quote.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: That’s one of my favorites. But that’s true. We’re all—everybody. This gets back to that original statement we started with earlier: nobody’s special because we’re all special. And if we’re all special, then nobody’s special. Right back to that. We’re all one.

So who you choose to be your teacher, who you choose to be your guru, there’s only one guru. There’s that one guru within you. Outside you, when you worship a guru, whoever you pick, it doesn’t matter if you see the one guru in your guru.

It’s interesting because people criticize whatever guru: “This guy does this, this guy does that.” He’s human; he does this. You know what? I think how you see your guru says a lot about the devotee. If you see your guru as a crook, as a fake, as a fraud, as a cheater, as an idiot, that’s what they are to you. But if you see in your guru that one God, regardless of the physical guru, you see that one guru, that God within them, then you actually see the face of God while you’re alive.

And so that’s a reflection upon the student, the devotee, the disciple. So all these people are just—no, stop and think. It’s a reflection upon you, the follower. So…

Rick: Which does not absolve gurus from their responsibility, but you have a point. You have a point.

Bill: But that’s up to them.

Rick: Yeah.

Bill: That’s up to them. Everybody’s got to answer for whatever it is. But if we spend our time focusing on ourselves and improving ourselves, and less time worrying about everybody else’s faults, we’re going to get someplace.

And right now, we’re living in a society that’s really terrible out there right now, because I don’t even dare talk politics. I disagree with them all. I’m going, “Both sides are terrible. One’s going so crazy this way, one’s going so crazy that way. Nobody ever says, ‘Let’s work together, let’s compromise, let’s find something that’s of equal value.’”

I’m a man without a party. I’m a man without a candidate, but I have hope, and I have that one guru within me. And I’m hoping that this nation, this country, this world, this cosmos will focus on that one guru within, and we’ll all come to the same understanding.

So that’s where I’m going, and I don’t know if I’m going to be successful there. But meanwhile, I’m going out there trying to help one vet at a time, one person at a time. I don’t just help veterans, in case somebody’s out there. And if somebody wants to come and buy my books, they’re on Amazon.

Rick: I’ll link to them.

Bill: And there are links from my website. They can go to my website. I’m here, I’m available. I’ve got YouTube videos out there if you want stuff, individual stories.

This video itself will probably add some power and impact. People may want to hear me. I am just a messenger, and I am not the message. And I think a lot of people come on your shows and basically echo that same thing. It’s the message that we’re all sending out, and I think the common line that we’re all drawing in the sand here is that it’s all about love. It’s all about love, and if it’s not, why are we here?

Rick: Yeah, the Beatles had it right.

Bill: Yeah, because people ask, “Why are we here? What’s the purpose of my life?” To love and serve, and you can narrow that down to just love. Because serving with love—love is service. I mean, what’s love? Love.

Rick: Great. Well, that’s a good place to wrap it up. You can’t get any better than that.

Bill: Well, namaste. Thank you for allowing me to occupy this cyberspace with you.

Rick: Sure, it was an honor.

Bill: This will live longer than the both of us.

Rick: I hope so. Yeah, I’m sure it will. So thank you a lot, Bill. I really enjoyed this whole week, kind of reading your books and listening to your videos, and then this conversation. This conversation has been the icing on the cake, so I really appreciate your time.

Bill: No accidents. Somehow we connected, and thank Irene for that. Blessings and peace to you, my friend.

Rick: Yeah, let me just make a little concluding remark here. I’ve been speaking with Bill McDonald, and as always, I’ll have a page on BatGap about him and about this interview, with links to his YouTube channel and his books and so on.

When you’re there, if you go there, check out the other menus. There are things you can subscribe to, an email, or subscribe to the audio podcast, or whatever interests you. Check out the different menus.

This is part of an ongoing series, as it said in the beginning. There’s an upcoming interviews page where you will see who we’ve got scheduled, so take a look at that. You can actually sign up to be notified of those things. There’s a little calendar thing that you can fill out to get a notification when an interview is going to be aired, because a lot of people like to watch them live. There were about 150 people on today for this one.

You can send in questions during or before the live interviews if you wish to do so, and there’s a form for that at the bottom of that upcoming interviews page.

Bill: And Rick, if I didn’t answer a lot of questions, feel free to forward any questions to me, with the people’s email address or Facebook, whatever it is, and I will personally answer any question that comes in.

Rick: Okay. Do you want me to put your email address on your BatGap page?

Bill: Yeah.

Rick: All right, I’ll do that, so we’ll have your email address on there. If it gets to be too much, let me know and I’ll take it off again.

Bill: That’s what I do. That’s what I do.

Rick: Okay, good. Well, thanks, Bill. Thanks for your time, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. We’ll see you next week.