Summary:
- Spiritual Journey: Rev. Bill shares his life as a spiritual journey, detailing his experiences with gurus, the paranormal, and self-discovery.
- Military Service: He talks about supernatural events and near-death experiences during his combat tour in Vietnam.
- Philosophy of Love: Bill emphasizes that love is the only truly real thing and discusses the importance of service and giving rather than receiving.
- Mystical Experiences: The interview delves into Bill’s profound spiritual experiences, including encounters with holy men and miracles during his trips to India.
The conversation explores various spiritual topics and Bill’s understanding of love as the fundamental force in the universe.
Full 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 and 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. So, 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, here’s this one, 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 it was just displayed, an award-winning poet, motivational speaker, artist, film advisor, veteran advocate, Vietnam War veteran, in which he won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, and 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, and 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, so I’ll try my best.
Rick: Yeah, well, as you and I were, Bill and I were talking for about half an hour before we started here, and he was talking about the variety of people I’ve interviewed, and kind of what a variety of spiritual people there are out there in the world of all different types and flavors, and 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. And we were also talking about how, you know, 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 ice cream, that’s why they got 32 flavors, right? So some people like chocolate, some people like vanilla, some people like tutti-frutti. So when it comes to our spiritual quest, it is exactly that, our spiritual quest. So what do we need this lifetime? What do we need to add to this diversity of this rainbow we have? What energy do we have to give and share? And 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 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, you’re serving your wife, you’re serving your children. It’s not about giving, or, it’s about giving, it’s not about getting. 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. I mean, just to get— And one thing that you say later on, I guess I heard it in an interview, it’s probably in one of your books someplace, is that you were told by some kind of palm reader or somebody or 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, you know, “This is it,” because somebody said it, but the reader’s, my Nadi palm reader, according to the charts and the astral charts, you know, with the 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, whether that’s truth, it makes no difference to me. The only thing that’s important is who I am right now in this moment, because I hear a lot of people that 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,” and so that’s kind of where I’m at. So it’s like I wake up every day and I 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 20s, I knew I knew everything. In my gotten into my 70s, I’m realizing I don’t know anything. And what I did know, the only thing I really know, is love. That’s the only thing that’s guaranteed I know. I know when I’m loved, and I know when I give love, and I feel love. Everything else is theory. You know, it’s, what difference does it make?
Rick: Yeah, and I’ve heard you say, “God is love,” and obviously that’s almost like a cliche bumper sticker phrase, you know, 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’s painful things that happen to people. There’s 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 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, table, 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 all, you call it whatever you want, but it’s basically, I feel it as love. And 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, and to me, light and love is 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, you know, love abhors disunity, love wants to unify, and it’s a unifying force between people, between people and animals, between anything that where love is displayed or expressed, it’s uniting. So, you know, when you say that the quarks and the strings and all that are, you know, 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 wonderful. You’re gonna 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 I am adult-like. I don’t use highfalutin words. I don’t use all these great philosophies and quote—I don’t quote any books, all these great Indian classics. I, it’s so, you know, what are the stories? 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, and if I experience something and I tell somebody and they go, “Oh, that’s Samadhi. That’s this, that.” I don’t care. I experienced it. I felt the love. That’s all that counts. It doesn’t matter if it has a analytical title, if you can classify it. I don’t, if I have a mystical experience, quote-unquote, I don’t analyze it. And you read my books, you know that things happen and they happen often. And, you know, in this book here, Alchemy, which is 250 pages, and 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: You know, we’ll talk about this or that. One example, that’s good enough. Because God has such a diversity. The universe is so diverse. There’s so many unique experiences. And I shared them, not to say, “Hey, look. Look at me. Here’s a spotlight.” I talked about this earlier with Irene. I shared them so other people could take that journey with me. Because a lot of people out there, good people, good souls, even people that are praying and meditating and doing all these things and nothing ever happens. And to me, the people with the greatest faith are those that meditate with no tangible results. And they continue to do it anyway. They get up early in the morning, they do it. At night, they do it. You know, they’re in love with God. It doesn’t matter. 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, things happen. Anybody can have faith if they have the experience I’ve had. I mean, anybody. I mean, if you saw all these neat things and healings and stuff and visions. But the person that has no experience, to me, they’re operating on a level of pure love. And I 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 about almost 10 years ago, was that, you know, I live in a town where several thousand people have been meditating for decades. And I knew a lot that they were having great experiences and breakthroughs and all kinds of cool stuff. And I knew a lot of others that were feeling discouraged and disheartened because they weren’t having those experiences. And therefore, they even doubted that these other people were having them, who said they were. And I thought, “Well, let me just kind of 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, you know, getting the promised result of all this spiritual practice.” And it just kind of took off. And then after a while, I started by interviewing people here in town, but then it kind of branched out. But that’s been one of the primary motivations for this, is to give people everywhere the sense that this spiritual development thing is real and 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, then how could one part of God be greater than the other part of God?
Rick: Yeah.
Bill: Which lends you to this whole thing about, “Well, how about these bad guys out there? There’s people doing evil things.” Well, they’re still part of God. It’s all God. And once you see there’s no differences between anything, it brings a great peace to one. And I think people need to realize that they don’t have to be special, you know. A lot of religions out there, and I’ll say a lot of cults and religions, the leader will inflate people’s ego and give them titles and things and that, you know, and if they 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 an ascended master already. They just haven’t awakened in this moment.
Rick: Yeah.
Bill: Realize that this parallel space over here, this parallel time in the future you call it, they’re not, you know, they are, they’re this great being. And so that’s why people that meditate, it’s said that they can lessen their karma and you wonder how that happens. Because if they’re meditating now and they’re doing these things and praying and stuff, they’re actually helping evolve themselves in the past as well as evolving themselves in the future. So you’ve already changed your past. Past is not in stone and neither is the future. And so these people that follow, like you know, I’ve had readings and stuff. If you follow that stuff, according to some of my charts that I’ve had and some of my readings, I should have been dead. 2016 was the last time somebody told me it was my death day. I mean, and I always say, “No, no. I’ll know, but that’s not it.” No. And how can one truly know that when they’re going to die, even though I’ve been told, God knows. And when you’re done being used and you filled your dharma, what you were supposed to do, and you haven’t given up, that’ll be your time to go. But as long as you still got, as long as I still got an ounce of energy, physical energy, spiritual energy, mental energy, I have a list of things I’m still doing. I still have people that I still need to meet. Now, you know, let me tell you a story, okay, because I believe you read Alchemy [holds up book], I don’t know if you read towards the back, where I have a heart surgery.
Rick: Yes, I was—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.
Bill: Okay, I was a complete ignoramus, you know, and that’s being very gentle with it. I knew nothing about it. When I was at the ashram in Pune, and the Guru comes to me and he says, “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, and he goes, “Bill, I want you to go down downtown Pune, and I want you to get a Nadi palm reading.” And I’m going, I’m thinking, reading my palm, you know, that’s what I’m thinking, reading a palm. I go, I don’t want no fortune-telling, I don’t need a mentalist act or something. He says, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.” He says, “They don’t read your palm.” He says, “This is ancient readings that they did 2,500 to 5,000 years ago.” And I go, “What are you talking about?” He says, “Well, the great rishis of India, these holy men, they sat down and they channeled information for people coming in the future.” And the future, I don’t know how far the future stretches, but it was from up to 5,000 years ago, so you figured it’s still going today, so it’s probably hundreds or thousands of years more, I’m not sure. But they did millions of these, and they did these readings, and they had a scribe write them on a palm leaf, on the hard part of the palm, you know, they cut the fronds off, it’s just the wood, and they wrote ancient Sanskrit or whatever was on there, and then he shellacked them, and they saved these. And 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 you’re getting these things, I mean, you know, you come in at ready to have it, you’ll find it. And so he told me that and I’m going, “Yeah, okay, yeah, real great,” I said, “I really don’t want to do this. I don’t believe it.” He says, “No, for you it’s real, you don’t have to believe in it, it’s real.” I said, “Well, how are they gonna find mine?” So he goes, “Well, they take your thumbprint.” Now, and—
Rick: Let me just interject a question here, so 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 then, they knew who was 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. And you’ll probably have people on your show that probably could explain this whole thing, you know, 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, so my guru tells it to me so I could explain it. But when he says, they classify this by thumbprint, I’m just going, wait a minute… thumbprint? He says, yeah, you give me your left thumbprint or your right thumbprint if you’re a man, left thumbprint if you’re a woman, and then they look up in the files and stuff, and I said, I mean, they got these things filed by thumbprint. Then he explained to me that, unlike astrology, where you got 12 zodiac signs, you got 108 different indictations on your thumb, so you got like 108 different subgroups. I said, okay, so you got a million, so you divide by 108, you still got tens of thousands of potentials, right? So he says, no, no, no, they’ll find it, and then I said, well, and he says, I believe yours is going to be in Pune. I said, what do you mean in Pune you believe? Are they elsewhere? And he goes, yes, he says, they used to be all in one location, and then when the British were there, they were stealing some of the scrolls and the palm leaves, and there was a fire, destroyed some. So they took the collection of these from all the rishis, and they divided them up. I don’t know what the number is, I’ve heard 12, 15, 19, 20, but there’s various locations all around India itself where these things are stored. So even if you had one, right, and you went looking for this, and you go into Pune, it could be in Delhi, it could be in Calcutta, it could be in Mumbai. So when he told me that, I’m going, okay, what’s the chances of finding this thing. He says, for you? It’ll be there. So I go to this place, and I told my friends that went with me, I said, don’t call me by my name, don’t exchange any conversation, we’re not going to give these guys any heads up. Because I’ve seen, I’ve seen Las Vegas mentalist acts, and I know how it works, right, they listen in, and they pick up, yeah, you got a wedding ring, you’re married, you know, and 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 parents’ names, he didn’t know, 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’s 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, you know, and then the thumbprint. And an hour later, they called me in this little room, about the size of this little computer room, and it’s got an altar and they must have, seriously now, I mean, it’s like rolling smoke, I’m just like, whew, you know, 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 guy walks in, this Indian, and he’s carrying what looks like a niche of blinds, Venetian blinds, that’s about this long. And they’re the solid material from the palm leaves, and they’re strung together with strings, so they’re all stacked together. So he had like 20 of them in a stack. And he takes it out, he goes through, 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, we go to the next one.” Okay, so based on your thumbprint, this stack someplace should be yours. I said, okay so he asked—nah, nah, nah, no, no. So he gets through the sixth one, and he says, okay, intuitively—this is the reader— intuitively, “I know the seventh one is yours” he said, “but just answer yes or no.” I said, “Okay” which is not yes or no, I said, “Okay.” Anyway, I laughed, he didn’t laugh. Anyway so… 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 on my initial out there, and he goes B, right? And then he goes, and 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 meaning he was died. I only found out a few months before that, that my father died in 1973 and this was recently my father was died. So that’s information I wouldn’t have had, had I hadn’t been there the year before. So then he goes, 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— they go to Witipekia or something, you know, where’d they dig this up at? So then he goes, “And your mother’s name was…” meaning she’s dead, and she died in 1990, and see, my guru didn’t know that, didn’t know anything about that, “and her name was…” and he mispronounced it, he says “Marcelli,” spelled it out Marcella. And all this Sanskrit on this thing written, or whatever it’s written in, whatever language it’s written in, Bill and Marcella are spelled out in English letters. Now realize when it wrote these things, I don’t know what the relationship was, 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 it 2,500 years ago, that’s for sure.
Bill: No. So it’s like—
Rick: I don’t think they had it in England back then.
Bill: Yes, so where did that come from then, right? 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, 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, you know, rot or something, 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,” okay I was impressed with 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? So some of this may be his intuition putting it 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 add-on. So I’m thinking all these things in my mind, because I’m a skeptic. I don’t want to accept anything at face value. So, 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 and so there I was alone. So nobody knew that at the ashram, nobody. So that was an interesting piece of information. I go, okay. And then he goes, “And you got a son and a daughter.” And he gave some information on them, and the birth order and everything else. And they were married. And then he says, “And they both love you.” And then 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. So 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 weeks, so you could tell this was a few years ago. And he goes, “Your birthday’s March 16th, Yes. He says, “But we’re unsure of the hour, the time. “We think it’s one o’clock, between one ten and one thirty 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— it’s terrible, but they gave my mother an enema when she was in the hospital, expecting, you know, 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, you know, just right into the, head first 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 like the beginning. Anyway, but they didn’t know the story because the doctor was sent for, so the doctor didn’t pronounce me born until he got there. And they tried to take a guess at what time. So the doctor was trying to guess between one ten and one thirty, and I think he guessed about one fifteen or one twenty or something. Anyway, so nobody knows the exact minute of my birth. And in this reading, they didn’t know my exact minute of my birth either, which is unusual for these things. Usually they’re pretty sharp. And so when he told me that, that was an interesting thing because it was historically, yeah, I mean, I didn’t even know the answer to that. So 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. And 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.” He said, “But you just recently worked on a movie, but not as an actor.” And I go, “Yeah.” And nobody at the Ashram knew that I 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, I saw the the film clip on this, and I didn’t like the ending of the movie, and I suggested to the the director he needed a more happy, upbeat ending. And so I got involved with this thing. And so I made a suggestion, and the director just went really great 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 no, it wouldn’t have matched. So that was the time, and the guy told me, this is to tell you this is the right time for you to get this. So then he went through telling me about birth in this lifetime all the way up to the moment I walked into there. And 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.” And 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 says this is what I was supposed to do. And 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 spiritual quest for not just 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, it’s really written, especially the second book, the reader gets into it, it’s them on the journey. And I don’t give you a heads up how I felt later on, a year later or two years later, 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: And what’s interesting is, I’ve had several people that I got, they’re in the chapters, and say they were with me for something. And they’ve come back to me later after they read the book and they 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 it 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.” And I didn’t want to go that far, I just want to take people to the edge. All right. So then they go and he goes, “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.” And then he just, 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? You know, is all in one? You know, is the guru one? Is it, you know? So that had me questioning. I said, “Yes, I I’m…I guess I’m a lover of Shiva.” So he gets through and I thought he was done. So I reach into my jacket, I get out my wallet, I 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 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. You know, and anyway. So it’s like my blood type, which is B positive, which is my whole life, right? Yeah, “Be positive.” That’s my theme. So anyway, six hours later, I’m still sitting around there and they’re working these Vedic charts upstairs. They got a guy that’s reading them in one language. I have an interpreter, Froze, I think the guy’s name was. Real nice man, really nice man. He was there for me to interpret it from this old language into English for me. So I went upstairs. There was the three of us. We sat down and we read my previous life because my guru told him I had to tell him, I want my worst sin from the past, revelant 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 was people that, tortured somebody, cut off a head, adultery, all kinds. I mean just 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 proof positive about anything that I’m about to tell you. And so what credence anybody gives, it’s on faith. So I’m giving it in the same way it was given to me. So 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 had a, you fell in love emotionally with a woman and you thought about that when you’ve 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, you go down underwater and you come up and there in a blaze of light is Lord Shiva.” And I’m saying, like, the only way you can see Lord Shiva is you’re dead. And then next thing he says, “And yes you leave in a rainbow body with Lord Shiva.” And according to his chart, and and this makes a great story again, credence who knows, he goes, “Every lifetime that we can go back and look in this, every lifetime at least 10 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: Does rainbow body, 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 he’s 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. So 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 he 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 no action on it, had no desire to do it, the guru put a curse on your mind.” Like, 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, hadn’t had one since, since 2008. There’s another whole story that we could talk on that. But anyway, so the guy doing the reading says, “What’s the first thing the guru did for you? He took back that, 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’d that reader know that I had epilepsy? How do you know that I had a problem? So that was kind of interesting. So then he did a reading for the future and he says, “Most people, we got a lot to say. Yours is a very short block of time.” He says, Almost everybody can change their future,” I mean that’s, you got free will, you got this and that he says, “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. I mean you still got the free will to mess things up but this is pretty much, 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, with a couple of neat things which I’m going to go into the operation on and tell you where they came into. And then he says and 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, and it’s not about you it’s about them in the end, and that’s your duty and you’re supposed to do it. And 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 got something to cover the bases right, you make a prediction and you go there’s a— 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 what everything 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, nobody gets a death prediction, they just don’t do that. First off, there’s variables out there. First off, it’s something you shouldn’t know, um, 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. And it also put me into a speed-up mode, all of a sudden it was like, you know, I 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. My next year I go to India and I have major heart attack when 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 you know even, even to each other, nobody spoke the native language, it was like everybody was college educated all right. And then I introduced him in Mumbai and different places, and there’s one venue I didn’t introduce him somebody else did. I was sitting up in the stands, all of a sudden I have a heart attack and I fall down and I’m in the back row and nobody sees me. I’m laying down and all of a sudden the guru’s giving them this surya, this meditation exercise where you get power from the sun, and he stops the normal what he was doing. And all of a sudden he’s telling these thousands of people in the audience— they’re all kind of going, what’s going on?— he says 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, and the energy going from the sun to the heart, the sun to the heart. And he goes on for like 10 minutes on this sun to the heart and the energy, and people are going, we’ve never heard this before, right? Meanwhile I’m dying laying down, and nobody’s even seen me laying down in the crowd, and I’m getting better and better and better and better, pretty soon I’m standing up. And then he stops. And he calls me up on the stage, and I’m dying, and he says, “You make too much work for me.”
Rick: That’s pretty good.
Bill: I gotta keep saying, anyway all right, so now Guru Mata, his beautiful wife, saintly being, she goes, “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 the last day and I’m sitting there in the kitchen and there’s like four people there. And 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 nothing, I didn’t feel nothing.” So here’s it, here’s an example. Four people in the room, this one beautiful lady from Scandinavia, but she was a teacher of yoga, you know the exercise and all that stuff, and she just new to meditation and she’s sitting there. And I feel somebody looking at me and I turn around and sitting there or standing there is Sri Riteshwar, a vision, lifelike body of Sri Riteshwar. Gurunath…uh, almost looks like him, but I’m telling you it was Sri Riteshwar.
Rick: And 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 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 nothing. What are you crazy, there’s nothing going on.” Just you know— So she had this guy from Texas, young man from Texas, I go “Do you see what— you see what 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 a, Brian Yosevich, a young lawyer from Los Angeles—a lawyer, so even they, even lawyers can be spiritual. I’m sorry Brian, I had to make a joke. But anyway so 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 real long time, Brian, really into his meditation and open, open heart receptive, sees exactly what I see, which verifies what I’m seeing. Another guy that meditated in good way at the time, but his energy was 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 see the brightness of the light he knows there’s 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 got 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, I fly back, I collapse at the airport in customs in Denver Colorado coming back to Sacramento, and paramedics got me for six hours. And I’m telling them, look I got to get back up, I’m gonna see my heart doctor cardiologist, because they were reluctant put me on an airplane to go. Okay, it’s two hours they gave me an exam, medical, just before I got on the airplane. And I was told at the other end, I had to see a doctor immediately. No way they should ever 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 that’s collapsed at the airport get on an airplane and fly, come on. Anyway so I fly to Sacramento, and next thing you know I go see the doctor, and I go in the doctor’s office and he takes a listen and he goes nope, calls for a wheelchair, sends me to the ER. Next thing you know, I’m in intensive care, four days intensive care, because they can’t even operate on me because I I’m so low. I mean the energy is just practically gone. So four days of that. They put me in an ambulance, they transfer me to another hospital, from Kaiser they take me to Mercy Hospital in Sacramento. And 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 next day I go in there and I’m laying on the table, you know that cold metal table they put you on, and you’re naked right, and they’re getting ready to cut you up. And if you know anything about open heart surgery, well, they’re going to take what looks like pruning shears, crnch-chrnch-chrnch, they cut all your ribs right, they’re going to split it open. And 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, 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 that go on this bypass machine—because we have to bring down the amount of anesthesia we give you—uh, they feel something. You’ll feel pushing, shoving, poking, you’ll know we’re doing something.” I said, “Okay.” I got no choice now, right? I’m getting ready to, tsk-whoosh, going out now, right? I find myself unconscious on the table. Boom, my heart has stopped, my lungs stopped, I’m…I’m gone. I’m no longer at that table. I have transversed 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, I’m looking around and 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 two to four hours up this hill and I’d know where to stop. But at the top of this hill will be waiting for me all the rishis, the ascended ones or whatever, all the rishis will be waiting for me. Not to impart knowledge upon you, but only to reopen and so you remember it, 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? Intuitive, I said this has got to be the temple, right? Because I can’t say any Indian names, I couldn’t remember the name of it. But I’m going, the guy told me it’s gonna be six to eight hours of surgery, I 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: Like 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 the top of the hill, and they’re sitting on a log, a couple of stumps, some rocks, standing around are these guys with beard, funny hair. I mean, but I knew who they were. I couldn’t tell you now the names, I knew who they were. And they were standing there, there was a little fireplace you know, a little fire pit going.
Rick: How many of them were there?
Bill: I don’t, at least, close to a couple dozen, I don’t know.
Rick: Okay.
Bill: Alls I know is they were there, that was all the guys that were supposed to be there. That’s all I remember, details of that— See, I got, I’m a child, I just enjoy the moment. It’s like, you know, somebody else gotta go—let’s see people, what they wear, if there’s any smells, any sights. And you know, I don’t do that. I just go, okay here I am, right? And standing amongst them, once you know, I didn’t see at first, was Gurunath. He’s standing with these guys, you know his arms folded, you know just standing there. So I walk up there and I 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 just, I was happy. So then this blazing light comes, and out of this blazing light, this angel of death for a better word, uh, 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, alls you gotta do is give up heart and go. I promise you bliss, love, a long rest, and a rainbow body.” It’s just it, “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, he goes, “Bill don’t give up heart. You could skip a few beats, but don’t give up heart.” He says, “You got duty to do, you got, you got dharma, you got people that are waiting for your message, for my message, for Shiva’s message, for love, for answers, something. You 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,” he says, “all your life when things happen 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 could become an example to others when they have physical pain. You can’t just say, ‘Well no.’ You 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 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 [hands open] and all around me in the the air space around, 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 gonna meet?
Bill: Yeah, and maybe it was just gonna be a smile I give, 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, not 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, and my physical body in India is feeling this like I got hands inside me I’m going “Oh,” then all of a sudden there’s this shoonk, 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 got my eyes shut, I know I’m on a steel cold metal table. And there’s 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. And finally they wheeled me into the recovery room, and I’m in there a couple hours, I still got my eyes taped shut, they got tubes in me, tubes down my throat, tubes in my stomach, tubes in my neck. And alls I keep thinking about, geez, all I gotta do is say, “I want to go” and I’m gonna 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. And 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 came out and it’s all sore and everything. So I don’t know if I actually whispered “I love you,” or if I actually said it, or 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, I was just a, chest cavity was filling up, I mean everything was going bad. And one night, they came to me, it was like ten thirty at night and they go, we’re going to take you downstairs and give you an MRI and we’re going to see what’s, why you’re filling up with fluid. Something’s wrong and and we got to do it right now, it’s an emergency. Okay… All of a sudden the bed, bedside phone in the hospital room rings, ten thirty at night, right? And I go, “I got-I got to answer that.” They go, “No no, no, no we 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 this Indian voice go, “Ye-ah this is Gurunath from India,” like, and how many Gurunaths do I know, right? So, uh, and then 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 just was 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. And 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 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 thing was nice, I’m gonna help people, all of that. But it was ultimately not my wife, my children, my grandchildren and you know, it just wasn’t. It was my guru gave his word and I didn’t want to make him a liar. I said, “Okay.” And then I told my wife, I said “I’m gonna 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…” hospital. Of course, I I just asked the question, “What do I gotta do to get out of the hospital?” So anyway, so while I’m in the hospital the last the last day before I left, one of the other predictions in the Nadi was that Babaji would come and he would 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 ok…great. While I was sitting in the hospital bed all of a sudden I feel this energy around me and 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 with a pair of Levi’s.
Rick: Levi’s?
Bill: Yeah, Levi’s some kind of pants. Wasn’t a long…it was pants. And uh, and he’s pouring oil and water on my head, and chanting in some strange— 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, long hair, 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 so, so 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 why I was, when I got out of that dome and I looked around the hospital and there was a six minute time gap, I don’t know why, how come, but I was six minutes into the future. I know that that doctor was going to walk by and six minutes later he did. That nurse was going to come in six minutes from now. I mean, I was in this thing for, for half a day where everything was, I was six minutes ahead. I knew it was a strange thing, never happened again, but it was just an odd thing, but 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 it’s been, like for example one of the predictions was you’re gonna have trouble with your skin, cause serious skin problems. Well you know, you read my book, you know that they cut most of my nose off and I had it rebuilt. You know, cancer and 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 let’s do it. But let me ask you a few questions based upon things I read in your book that, and some notes that Irene passed me here. I want to, you know, make sure to get in these questions. But we’ll get into your nose story too because it’s an interesting one. Um, um 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 stories in one of your books where one was, 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—your stepfather—and 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, and I guess your father didn’t hear you again after that, but that was one aspect of the story. And then another aspect was like maybe five years later, you were camping in the backyard with a friend, and around midnight you saw this big light come down into an adjacent field and next thing you knew it was dawn, and 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, you know, realize 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 this other worldly beings. I mean, let me just add one more thing when we talk about aliens. I think if we 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 other worldly—people from other places in the universe—that visited, that 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 universe, other galaxies or whatever, have the ability to travel inter-dimensionally 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 but what do you think about my question? Do do you think that you were somehow primed to have this?
Bill: Yeah it’s uh, it’s interesting because what’s…okay, let’s 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: Mother and stepfather slept through the whole thing, my two sisters were awake and they were in a different room. So when I left out of my room, because they were all there, and I went in the other room, they came in there. And then—
Rick: The little beings.
Bill: Little beings, uh and the next thing we know it was morning, and they’re standing there by the window and kind of giving us one of those Vulcan signs or something, you know.
Rick: Live long and prosper.
Bill: Yeah, it’s like, like loving parents or something. It wasn’t, 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 experience, emotional experience from that, and neither one talked about it for over I mean, we never had a conversation about that until I talked to my little sister Marcia, like 50— this happened like in 1950 or 51 or something, and we didn’t talk about it, I didn’t talk about it to her till And, uh, 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 or whatever. And I didn’t, yeah, there’s a part of me says, well, you know what— Last year I went and got an MRI at the VA because they were checking my, my nerve, I’ve had nerve damage in my wrist, because I was having some issues with the neck, and so they did an MRI and an x-ray on the wrist. The guy goes, Well, you got a piece of shrapnel in here from the war I guess you never had taken out.” And I said “No, there’s no shrapnel there, I didn’t get wounded there.” And the guy shows me, “Well you got a metal object in there about so big, irregular shaped, how’d it get there?” And I’m going…
Rick: So you think it’s an implant, an alien implant?
Bill: Well there’s, I don’t remember ever getting wounded there.
Rick: Right.
Bill: I mean, you’d know if something’s inside there, big you know, piece of metal. I mean it’s gonna bleed, right? So that was odd, that was just a little side note that I didn’t know when I wrote that book. But um I think there are inter-dimensional beings. And Gurunath, he has an interesting quote 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 it was a part of me 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. And I was very psychic, and of course I had nosebleeds forever, in 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 your 500 pounds, your 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? And sometimes I wake up and there’d be a hand on my 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 in, depending on your state of wakefulness, in various stages of spirituality, I don’t know, but some people can’t handle that kind of experience, and 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 is I don’t overthink them. I think 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’d that thing levitate? Why’d 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 mystical, but also the pain. For 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, makes me a better friend. What, if there’s one thing I’ve learned through all this and 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, 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 don’t think, I think these things are generational, I think they follow families, if I think they follow genetics.
Rick: Yeah, okay um 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. And there’s one you told, there’s a lot of stories in your book where we don’t possibly have, we won’t have time to cover them all, but there was one that I thought was really sweet and I’d like you to tell it. And 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, and 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: Yup, 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 walking, you’re driving along, and 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. And, take the story from there.
Bill: Okay that whole week, that whole entire week, started off me going into a bookstore and they had a random pile of books on sale, and underneath at the bottom of that I pulled out this book uh, on star signs, that, the lady’s dead now, is one of those women authors writes about star signs. And there was a quote, I just opened up at a random page, and there was a quote in there about “Bewares 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. And I read that I go, “Oh that’s interesting.” And then I went to my doctor’s office, I’m waiting in the lobby and I pick up a Guideposts magazine, I just flip it at random, and that same exact quote sitting there. I go, that’s twice I got that quote this week. And then I kept having this feeling all week long, somebody’s waiting for you, you gotta help, you have to help. So, when I went to work that day, I’m sitting there the whole day going, it was getting greater and greater and greater until it reach the point where I couldn’t say no to my intuition. I go, I gotta leave. And I couldn’t offer an explanation to my boss so I said, you know, I ain’t gonna lie, I ain’t gonna tell him why, I’m just gonna say I’m gonna go. And I said, “I’m gonna go.” Oh, okay. Nobody asked me. I walk out of the building, work on my desk, there’s stuff going on, there’s phones ringing, I just walk and leave, I said that’s it. But I didn’t want to lie I mean, I do things for you, you don’t lie about doing something good, right? So I just, it’s like I just left and I wasn’t sure why I was leaving, but I knew I had to leave right then and there. Got in my car, pickup, and I drove down the road and just before about seven miles from Elk Grove on the Highway 99, there’s this tattered young guy, it turns out he’s 22 years old. And uh, he’s got one of those what I call Scooby-doo beard, you know a young guy tries, he’s got a hair here and a hair here, I mean, you know, he’s got no real beard, right? And he’s got a short sleeve shirt on soaking wet, and he’s got socks on his hands for gloves because he was cold, and they’re wet. And he’s got no equipment, no nothing, I says that’s this crazy guy, I’ve got to pick him up, right? So I back up, after I pass the road, I back up on the high shoulder of the road, get him in the truck. I said, “Where are you going?” He goes, “I’m going to Texas.” I’m going, yes going down the road seven miles, come with me.” Okay so he starts telling me the story that he was camping alongside the road there in the 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 and he just left it. So he had no sleeping bag, he had no camping equipment, he had nothing. And that night he was very despondent, he was very despondent, so I’ll talk about that a little bit later. So anyway so he told me that, and he says that he just left his grandmother’s house where she just died and he’d been there for a couple years he was a foster kid, and he was going to go to Texas, try to find his real dad because he had nobody else to go to and he had no money. I said okay so I found out all that we get in the truck, I said, “Well come on to my house.” So I bring him in the house through the garage and he smells, I mean he’s been on the road for a couple weeks. It’s like he smells, he’s dirty. I said “Look, there’s a shower, there’s a clean towel, I’ll bring you down some clean stuff, give me your stuff to wash, put it out here, and clean up, because you know for me and you both, right?” Anyway so he goes in, he’s showering and laundry’s closed. And then I think, this guy has got nothing, so I take a back— I get a backpack. Okay, this guy’s gonna be a bum on the road, he needs stuff, right? I get a backpack, I get half a part of a tent, a canvas thing, that you know waterproof, I give him a fire starter, I give him a flashlight, I give him sweat shirt, I give him underwear, t-shirts, socks sweater, a couple pairs of pants, a jacket, hat, I mean everything you could think of, all kinds of items you know, canteen. And he comes out and I gave him all his equipment, said “You’re gonna need all this for on the road.” And uh and 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’s just looking at me, staring at me now. You know my daughter’s there, my wife’s there, and he’s just staring at me. And I said, “You got some stuff, you’re wondering about some stuff, huh?” And he just kinda shook his head, right. And I said, “Well when I give you this…” and I reach into, I pull out my junk drawer, and in the junk drawers an open pack of sugarless gum, it’s got sticks of sugarless gum. Stupid thing, right? But I reach in there and I said, “I’m gonna give you this and when I give you this, you will know why I’m giving it to you, and you’ll remember.” And so I put it in his hand, and he looks at it he starts crying. Just a pack of sugarless gum, right? And then he went into this whole story about the night before he’s drenching, he’s cold, he’s chilling, I mean, he’s shaken, he was thinking about taking his life. He was thinking about ending his life. And then he said a man came to him who looked exactly like I did, dressed in the same exact clothes I was wearing right there in the kitchen, and handed him that sugarless gum and told him— and as he got to that part and I stopped him— and “God loves you.” And then he really broke down because that’s what the man in his vision told him, “God loves you.” And he was just all over himself. My daughter’s going, “How’d you do that?” What’s this thing with the sugarless gum, what’s it, you know? And I didn’t know how I knew that. I mean I didn’t sit there and think, yeah, I was there last night for this guy so I’m gonna do this whole act. No, I just did it. I just did it. And I just went down, grabbed the gum he needs this, right? And I just said these things. So things come to me. I don’t think about them. I want to show this, there’s a law, but I don’t intellectualize “Well, why’d you tell me that?” Because sometimes I tell people something…”But why’d you tell me that?” A couple 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, here it is, I just downloaded it, here you go. You know, how you saw me, whether that was me, whatever it was, was it an out-of-body experience, was it being a second body whatever it was, it doesn’t matter. All that matters was he didn’t commit suicide. And the next day I not only resupply him with a shower and cleaning him up, and give him clean clothes, I put some money in his backpack and gave him some food, put some food canned food and some bread and crackers and peanut butter and stuff, and I’ve been loading him up so he could travel for a few days, right? And I prayed for that man for 20 something straight years. In fact, this last two weeks for whatever reason, I started praying for him again. Because now it’s, that was like 1980 something you know maybe 1990, anyway so it’s got to be 25 30 years, he was 22 so he’s in his 40s. So I’m thinking he’s back on my prayer list, so I visualize him, I call him in my mind because I can’t remember his name, the hitchhiker, so I asked Babaji, and God, Jesus, whatever, shine light on the hitchhiker. That’s like the story I got in there about the ebony angel. The black, young black lady that came, girl stayed with me, the 17 year old and she had a beautiful vision of Paramahansa Yogananda. I pray for her. So 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, the other night, I started going through my prayer list 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, visualizing… Because on my prayer list I not only have people like that, I have people that I wronged, people that have wronged me, those two groups need it the most. Sorry, tears coming down for some reason. So praying for those that we come across in our life, you gotta hitchhiker on the road, you got a guy begging for money, even if you don’t want to give him money, give them love, don’t give them judgment give love. Jesus bless that man, bless that lady, bless that family. Because something, you know, you can’t give money to every beggar out there and I mean, let’s get real, you can’t, I mean, you can’t. So you have to draw a line someplace it’s really hard to do sometimes but you can give love, and you can give prayers. So that’s kind of like how I serve that’s how I do things and um… it’s the core of who I am and 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’d be interesting for you to tell a story or two from that period, but one story I’ve heard you tell a number of times which might be one of your favorites, which is I’ve heard you tell it so many times, is the time when you touched a helicopter and you kind of like realized what was going to happen to this helicopter in the next day. And there was that, and there was also the one about where you were flying in a helicopter as a gunner and from the altitude you were flying at you saw this who your commanding officer told you were Vietcong and wanted you to shoot them. And do you feel like telling both of those stories? Or—
Bill: Absolutely
Rick: Unless there’s some other stories you’d like to tell.
Bill: Absolutely, because let’s just regress for a moment, I’ve been trying to, in my own way for the last couple decades, reach out to the new age group, you know, reach out to all these yogi guys and meditators and I keep getting thrown back for my veterans. I mean, the veterans invite me to stuff all the time I’m always doing stuff and I keep going well, you know, I’m really, yeah… And the last year or two I finally realize you know, the universe is telling me something. There’s a lot of people like me out there for the new age community they got 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 like, I’m just throwing a blanket statement out here, that think you can’t be spiritual and be a warrior or soldier. Even though history shows us Saint Francis of Assisi was a warrior, 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, uh, I mean the great ones, Krishna Arjuna, they’re in a big battle, right? So that was their duty. So 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 and emotionally and physically because when I went there I was practicing meditator, I was into yoga, I was into kriya yoga, I was into you know the kundalini energy, I was into all the stuff, I studied Paramahansa Yogananda. I was into a whole different aspect of reality, to me it’s all a dream you know, it’s just, it’s all God. It’s just a big play, right? People are getting killed, that’s what everybody think, but in reality God is killing God, God never dies that’s the reality uh, but that’s a reality that nobody’s ready to accept and it’s hard. But I got veterans out there that are hurting, I’m starting to work with them now. In fact I’ve been invited to be a keynote speaker for International Association Near Death Studies, they have a 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 you know, 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, that’s generals, that’s 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 and he cut some artery and the guy dies?” Is he a murderer or is it incompetent? But it’s a lesser, he took somebody’s life but it’s a lesser karma than somebody that you know, stabbed the guy in the heart. Whole different thing, right? Or if a cop ends up shooting somebody that’s getting ready to kill you, guy’s got a knife getting ready to plunge you and the cop shoots the guy. Well, the cop shot that guy he killed the guy, but is that murder? So there’s all these levels of karma that we don’t know how to measure when it comes to taking of a life. And that what happens when 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 and hate and prejudice? Because I’ve seen guys in battle they hate these guys you know, blah, blah, blah, and they, and you see them they and some guys actually they get off on this war you know, just— And then I’ve seen some guys they’re only shooting back because they’re trying to kill their buddy so they want to save their buddy. They have a duty to protect the unit, right? So you get all these different levels, you know? So let’s take the marching guys, let’s take what I call the story about mutiny. Because believe it or not I got decorated, I got all kinds of awards and everything. And the one time that I felt that 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. So here’s how that day started off, we had a a Major, graduate of West Point, nice guy but he was into the rank and “I’m the Major” and “I’m in charge.” And he doesn’t realize that when you’re in a helicopter there’s only four crew members, two are officers and two enlisted men, so you can’t be, “I’m the officer” and then half the crew is nothing, right? So it’s like 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. And so his first mission out and he’s flying around and he’s trying to, he’s not listening to his pilot, he’s a commander and he’s trying to navigate. And the pilots going, “Well you follow the river, you do this.” “Nah, nah, nah I got to get up higher so I can see these.” So he wanted to fly up several you know, like a thousand feet or so or 800 feet up, high enough where people could shoot at you, it was a very dangerous level. And we were warning him, but no, he wouldn’t listen to us, he’d 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 Min trails and in Vietnam there’s a big, dense jungle and it’s what they call a free fire zone. In other words, there’s not supposed to be people in this area you know, you could, you could actually without permission, you could, you could fire at people. But there was some friendly villages down there so I was always aware it was 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. So he looks down there and there’s this column of 30 people in black pajamas, two by two, marching down this dirt road, trail. And there’s a guy in the front and they look like they all got weapons on their shoulder, I mean they really look like weapons from high up where we were at. And he goes, “Mac” you know, the McDonald, “Hey Mac, get on your M60 I want you to kill all those guys, get those guys, you know it’s Vietcong.” And I didn’t move, I didn’t do nothing. I mean intuitively I’m going, no, no, something’s not right here. I said, “Sir, something’s not right, it’s not what you think.” “You questioning my order? I’m telling you to shoot. That’s the enemy, I want you to shoot,” and he gave me that order about five times. He finally says, “This is a direct order, failure to follow I’m charging you with mutiny. I’m gonna have you court-martialed when we get back, you’re gonna be in Fort Leavenworth the rest of your life, you’re never gonna see the light of day.” I said, “You do whatever you’re gonna do.” I said, that’s bold huh, you do whatever you gotta do, right? I didn’t fire. That M60 machine gun fires a 7.62 millimeter round, it’s about that big, I got a belt with about 3,000 rounds on it. I mean, I coulda tore those guys up. I mean, it just, sitting ducks. So he turns the aircraft around the other side, he tells the gunner on the other side he goes, I can’t remember his name, and he goes, “Hey, I’m giving you the same order, shoot.” And here’s the part that just kind of made me a little scared a little bit 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. And he already knows that I’m facing mutiny charge and he says basically, sign me up, I ain’t shooting. So this guy’s going crazy, you know. Finally I go, “Sir, tell you what, you fly down make a swoop down there, and if anybody looks like they’re gonna shoot at me, we’ll both fire. Okay?” We’ll be prepared maybe we’ll 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 and what they were carrying were hoes and rakes and shovels for the community garden, and the guy leading them was a Catholic priest in black robe. Now you can imagine killing the kids would have been bad enough, but killing a Catholic priest’s got to be a cardinal sin, right? I would have had a direct, you know a direct letter coming from the pope saying, “Hey what’s up?” So I could feel the blood just going crazy with this guy, because he 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? There was a defense by some people, I’m just following orders. I don’t believe in that. But I would have been scape—, 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 it was civilians? No. I was prepared if it was been bad guys, I would have fired back, if they would have shot at me, I would have fired. But intuition said, no. I got that word, no. I listen. I don’t say, “Well how come?” Or “Gee whiz, this guy’s gonna court-martial me if I don’t do it.” Can I get a maybe, you know? How about, you know, do I get another answer? And would— only thing I regret to this day is, 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 that, he knew the penalty and he did that. Now think about that, now that’s the kind of moral issues that happened in war and you can see how had I done that, how that would have changed my life and the other door gunner and other pilots and the commander, all of our lives would have been impacted forever. One has to learn to listen. Now the other story—
Rick: Oh, before you finished, 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 afterwards.
Bill: Let’s talk about that. What’s, you know, I could have gloated, I could have said all kinds of stuff. You know what I did? I was just, gave him kindness and really in return he became my best officer friend that I ever had. And every time he got on a ship with another crew chief he introduced himself, he asked where they were from, what he could do for them, you know favors. He listened to his crew, 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 and in control and you know. 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. So 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 song will come up tomorrow, you know that kind of thing. I know, and when I get “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 you know, I’m not that sharp, I’m not the sharpest pencil in the thing, I struggled with geometry you know. Okay, there’s 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, I speak all from the heart center. And 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 I 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, I’m watching myself up here. Once in a while I’ll flash I’m up here and I’m going, “Well, that’s interesting how you answered that Bill. We’re gonna 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, so let’s go back to some of the other incidents because I really want to talk about warriors. Because when I give you these experiences with what you call uh, there’s a new term out there, maybe not new to you, but in the warrior community, in the Vietnam community and veterans, stuff called spiritual transforming experience. So spiritual transformational experience. You know, because you got like near-death experience and now you can have something like that but you don’t have to die. You’re having the same kind of experiences, but otherworldly, and I had a lot of those. This particular one, which I’ll tell you about but when I told the aircraft story when I was going to die, what’s good about this story is, this still has a life. Because I was investigated by the CIA when I reported this and put under the hot seat. They, you know, for a couple days they wanted me to change my story about it. And then they told me we’re watching you because we think you did something because nobody can know all this stuff. And then a few years back, I’m talking just a few years ago, I get a call from Langley Virginia. So my phone said Langley Virginia, who in the heck’s calling me from Langley Virginia on my phone? It was a CIA contractor who had like a amount, and he had my files. And the guy says, “I got your files here.” I go, “What files?” “Well, we can’t talk about it.” I said, “You mean the CIA has a file on me?” He goes, “Yeah, but you can’t get a copy.” I go, “Why can’t I get a copy, it’s me?” He said, “Well you’re gonna get all this, good, everything will be redacted but your name.” I go, “What does it say?” He says, “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, and they thought they could engineer what happened. So let me tell you what happened in it, and you can see why they didn’t want to hear what I wanted to say about it. Because I’m telling the guy, “Well, you got to learn some kind of kundalini energy rising yoga, you know some kind of meditation.” They didn’t want to hear that. Anyway, so I’m sitting around one day and my aircraft was taken and being fixed, so I didn’t have an aircraft, I had the day off. But they came to me and they said, “Hey, would you fly this aircraft tomorrow? We don’t have enough crew chiefs.” And, you know… I said, “Well okay, let me go take a look at it I’ll do a pre-flight on it.” And when I went over to the pre-flight when I touched it, the skin of the aircraft—Huey helicopter looks like a giant tadpole yeah, this—I touched it and it was like [snaps fingers] just like that, it wasn’t like this whole drawn out several minutes, it was [snap] like instant download I had. I’m watching this helicopter fall apart in the air, I see the rotor going crazy, I see it spinning, hitting a jungle, spinning around bursting into flames and I see bodies falling out on fire all over the place. I see everybody being killed. I feel the heat, I feel the pain of the burns, I feel the spirits leaving the body all [snap] just like that. It takes me longer to tell you, I mean it was instantaneous. So I went “Wow” man. So I wrote up the aircraft. Now normally, the crew chief writes up the aircraft and he signs it off says ready to fly. If there’s something wrong you put a red X in it and you explain what’s wrong and then you fix it, of he comes out and fixes it. I put a big red X in there, and I just put something wrong with the aircraft it’s going to crash and burn. That’s not a military thing you do, right? They go, “What is this?” I said, “I ain’t signing off on this, something’s wrong, something’s wrong with the rotor, the rotor heads something, something’s gonna happen this thing’s gonna crash and burn.” So they sent out a whole team of mechanics and special people and I said, “You guys sign it off,” because they want me, and I said “I ain’t signing it off, I’m saying it’s a red X, I’m saying it’s gonna crash and burn.” So all these guys signed it off and yeah, they all checked and yeah, yeah we think it’s good. And then I told the CO I said, “I ain’t flying it tomorrow.” “Well we got you scheduled to fly, you’re on flight status, you said you’d fly it, you’re flying.” I said, “Sue me. Do whatever you’re gonna do, right?” Well, “You’re gonna be punished,” I mean this is disobeying, back to, “this is disobeying direct orders.” I had a lot of that over there, disobeying direct orders. I said, “Okay I’ll tell you what, you put me on any aircraft tomorrow I ain’t going on that and neither should you let anyone else fly on that.” And of course the CO tells me, “I’m in charge you’re not, you’re an E5 I’m a major,” you know. I said okay, so I go back to my bungalow hooch in a little hut there was like 20 of us in there or so. And there was a new guy there, a guy named uh… Al Durell. And he had had a really easy job in Saigon, he was actually back in the old computer days that guys feed IBM cards in and the punch cards and all that. He had that kind of job in Saigon, the air-conditioned building, ate in a good restaurant, you know had a hotel room instead of a billets. I mean, but there was a part of him says, this ain’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 like, the life expectancy of door gunners…you know. I’m sitting behind a gun, I know it’s it’s not good, I mean there’s nothing to hide behind and you’re sitting on a canvas seat. I mean, there’s nothing to stop anything. So he volunteered and he showed up at our unit that day and he says, I was told he just transferred in and he was gonna be a door gunner. So they brought me over to introduce him and said “Hey Mac, this is Al,” and as soon as I shook his hand I got that same whole vision. I, just like wow… And I go, “You’re a dead man walking.” That’s what I say now, I didn’t know that term there so I, but basically it was something like, you’re gonna die tomorrow or something, don’t go out. So I told him, I said “Whatever they do tomorrow, don’t go flying and don’t go flying on that aircraft,” I told him a number and everything. And he goes, “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.” And I started, tears started rolling down my face, I was just, people were all like, “Mac’s been here too long in country man, he’s cracking up,” right? I was serious and everybody kind of gave me that [suppressed laugh] you know, Mac’s been here too long stuff, a crazy guy, right? So I went back to my bunk and I just, I knew, I knew. I didn’t know what to tell the guy, I knew. And when I got up in the morning, because I was gonna fly another aircraft, and I showed the CO I’ll fly on anything so I took a real dangerous mission I flew on another aircraft. And I walked by the other aircraft and it was empty and I went back make sure the guy knows it’s empty, it ain’t going anywhere, it’s not on flight status, don’t go, right? And I left. We come back in the afternoon the helicopter’s not there, neither is the guy. So I go into the CO’s office I go, “How dare you send that aircraft out there in a mission?” Well, “How dare you question what I do with my helicopters. Who in the hell do you think you are?” So it was like, and I mean this is totally out of protocol in the military I’m an enlisted man, right? So I’m telling him I said, “You just killed all those people you sent out there.” “Oh no, no, no it’s just late.” I said, “How late is it?” “Well, it’s two hours.” I said, “It only can fly for about two or three hours with fuel, it has been flying all day and it’s two hours late, it’s out of fuel wherever it’s at.” “Well, okay, we’ll have to go out and look for it.” So uh, he says, “Why don’t you volunteer come along on this since you seem to know everything.” So we get out there, we get up in the air and the pilot goes, being a smart ass he goes, “Okay Mac where’s it at, which way should we go?” I just pointed off in some direction on the compass map and they all look at each other like they had no clue where it’s at either, so they say, “Okay, we’ll fly that way.” We’re flying about 20 minutes, pretty soon we see this glow off the jungle, it’s just getting dark now and there’s this forest fire. And in the middle of this forest fire as we circle around there’s the remains of the helicopter torn in pieces, and there’s all these bodies of all these guys all burned up. I volunteered to go down a rope and check it out and they go, “No no no no, no, no, no we don’t know what’s down there,” right? You know they didn’t want to hang around, if I was getting shot at they would have left I think. So we came back, 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 of that, there’s an army version of the NCIS they got some kind of initials, and they came and they quizzed me. And they put me in under, under a light, 100 watt bulb in a tent, hot tent, on a stool, for all day, couple days, questioning “How’d you know that airplane was going to crash? Uou must did something to make it crash. You killed those guys, we’re gonna prove it, we’re watching you for the rest of your life.” And I told him I said, “Well something’s wrong with the rotor or the rotor head. I know it, I know it.” “How could you know that?” I said “I saw it in a vision,” and that was the end of that story. So I thought, yeah sure these guys. So I thought, you know, weeks went by and they basically told everybody, “Yeah, he’s killed them, we don’t know how he did it, but he’s killed them.” And nobody told me until when I wrote the book. Just if I wrote the book, one of the guys in my unit, one of my pilots, went on the national archives and looked up the crash investigation. Three weeks after that investigation there was report that said the rotor head failed. There was a bolt, a nut up there that failed and caused the thing to freeze up and it crashed. So they knew within three weeks that it wasn’t my fault, and it was exactly what I told them it was. And even me telling them that, they couldn’t find what was wrong with it. So for all those 40, 50 years I had that— are they watching me, are they waiting for me, what’s going on, right? And then I got the call from the CIA, I said 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. And apparently I’m not that hard to find on the internet because this guy was able to find me, I mean how many Bill McDonald’s there are, but apparently they found me. So it was uh, interesting. So that gets back to what I’m talking about with veterans. There are veterans out there that had experiences. You can’t share them with the military official ranks, they’re gonna label you as crazy, if you got a secretive clearance, you don’t anymore. I knew an officer, he’s dead now, Neil Levin, and 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, whatever the name of that is, but he was a Navy guy, and he was a great fighter pilot. And he was in Vietnam flying over an area, and he’s getting shot down, and he’s getting ready to eject, and he looks over and on his wing sits this young, beautiful young girl angel, smiling at him [waving]. And he goes “Wow, this is weird, that’s crazy, I’m getting ready to be shot down,” so he just kind of kept that story to himself. When I talked to him 40 something years later, he tells me he says, “Let me tell you where that went,” and he shows me a picture of his granddaughter, says this is the angel that was on the wing. And I know that because she came to me one day and said, “Hey grandpa, you remember when I was on your helicopter on your uh, fighter jet, sitting on the wing and you crashed? I was looking after you, grandpa.” So, but he couldn’t tell anybody. And then, just before he got shot down, him and his wingman were flying over just outside of Hanoi when he encountered a UFO, the real kind, flying odd-shaped thing, flying zipping around, flying all around him. And so he chased it, he chased it all the way to Cambodia, calls into the aircraft carriers and says, “Hey we’re chasing this bogey, this uh UFO, unidentified—” And the guy in the tower goes “Uh, Colonel, are you sure you want to report this?” Asked him four times to finally get 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.” Couldn’t catch it, but things all—but he saw it, he swore to God he saw it. Another guy, a friend of mine from Self-Realization Fellowship, his name is Lee, and this incident uh, he shared with me when we were at Hidden Valley Ashram for the men’s retreat there and Self-Realization Fellowship down by San Diego. We were out one day meditating and hiking and he told me that they were sitting around, he was in the ninth infantry I believe, in a big circle at night. Now you don’t know anything about this, most people don’t know, they’re civilians. But when he was camping at night they’d make a circle, everybody facing outward in a circle, and so every other guy was asleep and then a couple hours later you wake up the other guy, so somebody’s awake all night long. So all of a sudden he’s supposed to be sleeping and it’s so quiet, he said it was so quiet he could hear a trail of ants crawling next to his head, he could hear the ants moving sand. And he wakes up and he looks around, all these guys are looking up at the sky, every other guy’s looking up at the sky, and they’re all dazed, right? So he asked them what happened and these guys go, “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 goes, “Yeah sure.” So he goes to the other half, other sides of the circle they all have the same story. So what was that, you know? So I’ve heard many stories like this, I’ve heard stories of near-death experiences in Vietnam, I’ve heard spiritual other experiences, I’ve had many more that are in my book. So people have to realize that where life places you it’s all God’s territory, miracles, the miraculous, the mystical, love happens even in battle, and it’s all where the heart is. So if you go into real war and battle, whether it’s with another person or argument or whatever, wherever you’re at whatever your battle is, if your heart is focused on love that’s all that counts, so there are no battlefields that are going to harm you. I do—I don’t know if you got some other questions but just for a minute in case we run out—I have a program organization called Spiritual Warrior Ministries. It’s a organization I put together, it’s a loose affiliation, I’ve got chaplains from all kinds of organizations, I’ve got ministers from different, you know actual ministers reverends, I got guys that aren’t ordained at all they just want to be a chaplain, I make them a chaplain, great, go, God’s with you. Anyway, 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 at that, give them spiritual counseling, end of story. Help veterans, help their family. Don’t charge for your service, if somebody wants to donate to help you with it great, but don’t ask. So 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, at least people that are interested in helping veterans. And we’re teaching yoga, we’re teaching meditation, we got one guy now that I just ran into that’s speaking at IANDS conference, he lives in Southern California, and he taught TM meditation to West Point and to the Air Force Academy I believe, and he went overseas in the war college, that was way back.
Rick: I might know him.
Bill: So you might know him. So uh that’s where things are heading. So it’s interesting that I’ve been invited to IANDS, this conference this year, because this is the one year they’re going kind of bring veterans issues in, and it’s kind of been a burning thing in the back you know, the back burners. And now it’s going to get a little light of day and I’m happy to be a part of that. And again I am not the message, I’m only one of the many messengers out there, but we have to make peace. And this is, 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—I’m only going to do good things with this left hand, 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?
Rick: Yeah, actually Irene sent me a question a little, couple hours ago actually. She said— and this might… This, no, this will be fine. And I think this will lead into, 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, she said, “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 quote someone out there loves me end quote. 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, and maybe as you elaborate you could somehow segue into your into your nose.
Bill: We could do that, because I was like it knows why you’ve been reading that. That was my segue. Here’s the deal it’s— and this is so cliche that I hate to say it— but it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you handle it. And that’s been my philosophy ever since, ever since the beginning. It’s never about being a victim, I am not a victim. People read my book they go, “Oh my God, you had more stuff happen to you than to me, and how could you not get mad, and 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 that for whatever it caused me to reflect on or made me a better, more spiritual active person. I mean whatever it was, it was a catalyst for who I am today, so therefore no one should be getting down on a victim. You know, if you got things happening to your life you know you’re—I mean I deal with, I’m dealing with a couple of abused women right now that I mean, they just, some really horrific stories. And at some point in time, it’s not the time now because I can’t tell them time to move on, they have to they have to deal with that hurt first, people have to be ready to move on. But at some point in time you 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. Because everybody has something that happens, our level of pain is different. For example, me and you 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? And I always laugh because mine’s gonna be a one or two even if I’ve been ripped open. It’s like, I’ve had my teeth drilled, drilled down to the nerve, no medica—no novocaine, no, just I don’t want no shots, just drill it down fill it. And the dentist is going, mmrrrgh [makes face]. I’m just, I do a little Hong Sau technique, I sit there, okay, drill it down, boom. So pain level is different to everybody. There’s somebody has something, you would say “That’s nothing man, that’s an ache.” This guy, “Oh it’s number 10, I better have some oxy man, I got number 10 pain,” you know. So life is like that, if you choose to focus on the pain, the pain becomes number 10 for you. I have been trying to teach veterans and 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, he’s lost his arm. He says all right, let’s put him on the phone and 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 got whoever’s singing in the background, but you don’t hear, it fades. So you don’t make the pain vanish but it’s not in the forefront of your mind, it’s not in your thoughts. And you can do that with various mantras whether it’s just “I love you Jesus” or whatever, and there’s ways to refocalize that. Anyway so I’m trying to teach people that because pain, as Buddha learned a long time ago, is one of the great motivators. So pain is not an enemy, suffering is. But pain, yeah, all right so let’s talk about pain.
Rick: Before you get into… yeah, I just have the same question a little while ago, towards the beginning when you were talking about pain versus suffering. And it sounds very nice to say, yeah if you could just sort of 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, that many people really have the capacity? You know, if they’re tortured or serious burn problems I mean, it’s sounds glib to just say, “Oh it’s just pain, don’t let it cause suffering.”
Bill: Now my advice, because I got a couple of people I’m talking about right now— I don’t do marijuana, 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. I mean there’s a lot of drugs that veterans are taking to make them suicidal. But there’s some safer stuff out there, meditation, all kinds of things. And if you can, if you’re dying and you got bone cancer and it’s just totally, I mean it’s horrific pain bone cancer, and you’re dying, let the doctor drug you up, be comfortable. There’s no sin you know. What are you worried about, getting hooked on something? You’re getting ready to leave in a few weeks. So what I’m telling people, don’t just focus on the pain, complain, moan and groan. And that’s not just physical pain but that’s also life stuff because people get down, and moan and groan and bitch about things that happen to them. And I listen to this person—I’m listening to this woman telling me all this stuff that’s happening, I go “Oh my gosh, that’s really terrible.” She’s telling a really, it’s like, feels like it happened yesterday. “But when did that happen?” “Oh, 37 years ago.” And she’s talking about it like it just happened, it’s still fresh. And every time she tells that story about all these painful experiences, it’s like redoing it in her mind. It’s like she suffered it, 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 satisfaction of suffering again for it. Once was enough, let’s move on.” But you can’t tell people that because, 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 gotta tell, I gotta feel people out. Some people don’t have the strength. So I tell people “Mourn as long as you have to mourn for death,” you know, deal with this thing as long as you have to deal with it, you’ll feel what’s right time for you. There is no fixed all time schedule, that you’re supposed to get over abuse or whatever it is. Right so…
Rick: Yeah, just, you know Christianity makes such a big deal out of how how much Christ supposedly suffered and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to say, Christ never suffered.” You know, he— suffering 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, been there. So, let’s talk about…
Rick: Your nose.
Bill: Re-building of the nose.
Rick: The schnoz.
Bill: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Okay… I had you know, from my exposure exposure to agent orange, my time as a professional lifeguard, my time as a professional scuba instructor, swim team, long distance swimmer, all kinds of stuff, sunshine surfer all that stuff, I had pretty bad skin cancer. In fact, I still have, I just had a treatment three weeks ago, four weeks ago, so I still had something taken off. So I’ve been doing this since 1979, the easy ones you burn off you know. But I’ve had some taken off, I’ve had one in 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 it back, you know the hole up. Anyway so 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 doctor, dermatologist, and I’m goin on I said, “You know, this nose ain’t getting any better,” it looks like— and it was right up in the tear duct, tear duct was looking funny, it was right next to the tear duct. And they said, “Well, let’s take a sample.” So they take a scalpel and they’re cutting this right next to your tear duct, of course, which is really fun. And they sent it to the lab and it comes back it’s really bad cancer, we got to cut off lots of flesh anything that touched or close to it right? So I go in there and I wasn’t sure what they’re really going to do. Because you know, it was, I went, they sent me to this first doctor. And I go in there and he’s a plastic surgeon, I don’t know why they send me to plastic surgeon. Because I got a postcard says, you got this doctor appointment here, and then you got this doctor appointment, you got this doctor appointment. So they didn’t tell me why. So I go to the first doctor and he goes— he has no bedside manner, none, but apparently he was really good at what he does— and I come in there and he looks at this and he goes, “Sit down, let me look at your nose and your eye.” And 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 cancer up behind your eyeball.” I mean, that’s just conversation starts off, there’s no warm-up “How are you? What do you do for a living?” you know, “Oh this thing could be…” you know? It was just, “No I’m probably gonna have to do this,” he says “I’m looking at your lips, 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, and I’m not too sure about parts of your forehead.” And I’m just sitting there going, “Huh? What?!” I went in not having any idea, I thought the guy’s gonna, you know, spray a little liquid nitrogen, cut some tab off or something. He’s going, “Major, major surgery.” So I’m going, “Wow!” right? So I’m stunned and I have to admit, I usually got my act together, but I was stunned, because it was just like, “Boom.” And it was like five minutes and he goes, “Yeah, go see this guy, go see this guy tomorrow he’s gonna cut off your nose or whatever else needs to be cut off.” Yeah, that was about the conver— “If he has to cut your ears, whatever. But you’ll find out tomorrow, just go in there in the morning. And then you gotta go the next day to plastic surgery to see what they could fix. It may take multiple surgeries, I’ll be there for that.” And 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 gonna sound terrible— but it was vanity. I’m thinking, “What am I gonna look like with no lips, no ears, no nose, no eyelids, you know 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’re kind of going like, you know, you want it covered up, right? So I left there and I go sit in my truck. And I call up Gurunath and I get his answering machine, he was in America, I get his answering machine on his smartphone of all things, he’s got a smartphone an iPhone. And I go, “Gurunath, I’m not asking for anything, not asking for a healing,” I’d 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.” And then I hung up. And then I sat there, because there was a part still kind of— I was actually a little bit shaky, I was like, “Wow, that’s asking a lot man.” I haven’t told my wife yet, I mean, because that’s like changing your whole life, right? Because I think I’m kind of okay looking I’m you know, I’m an average Joe, but I would have been a monster in my mind, missing parts. And then I just said…you know “I can handle this. Whatever it is, it’s a test. I can handle it. I can handle it.” So within about 90 minutes of me self- talking to myself saying, “I’m gonna learn something from this. And if it messes up I will learn how these how people feel when they’re like that. I’ll be able to to minister 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 mean, 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 gonna happen. Okay, let’s do it.” Because my, because here’s the way I live my life. So I watched Gurunath, everybody comes to him for advice. And 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. Don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s a gift, take it.” So that was my attitude, I’m gonna embrace it, I’m dealing with it, right? So I tell my wife and I gotta be honest, my wife was kind of like very, very quiet. We didn’t have much of a conversation. I mean, that’d be hard on her, this is somebody that she apparently likes, she’s been married to me almost 15 years so she’s put up with a lot. And she knows I’m gonna go through some pain, some great pain, the next day. And so I had… that night, I go to sleep and uh, and I wake up the next day and I go, 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 eyeballs, in my nose, down into my sinuses. The needle was actually in my throat, I could feel it from up the eyeball, was down because I feel it drops to the stuff. And they would numb everything up and then they would cut. And then they would burn it to seal it. Then they would throw general gauze over it and then they’d have you go sit in the waiting room for an hour while it was sent to a lab. And then when they saw how much cancer was there then they come back. And you kept going through this process, and then you got the shots all over again, so you have to sit there in the lobby and think about going back in and being cut again, and getting more cut, and more shots all around the eyeball and behind it. That happened multiple times, right? So uh and while they’re cutting I feel the blood just pouring down my face and and everything else. And then this— oh, I’m gonna show you I’m not perfect, I’m gonna throw this part of the story in. There’s an evil, evil person in me. There was this young lady come in, she had to be about 20 years old, and she had four of her friends come in holding her up and everything. And she was, she had a mole that was going to be taken off, a little tiny mole, I couldn’t even see it. And they were gonna cut it off and you know she was, and I said “Well, don’t worry about 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 trite.” I’m going, “Oh okay, fine.” So I just sat back, I’m an old guy trying to help her out, right? So then the nurse calls her in, she collapses, and they drag her in, her feet are dragging, and she starts screaming and crying, “Ahhhh.” And I could hear her back there in the room and she’s crying and screaming and crying and screaming for a half hour. She comes out she’s got a little tiny band-aid here and they’re done with her. And I’m going, she wouldn’t look me in the eye but here’s the evil part, inside I was laughing. I’m sorry, all those people that love me, 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’d it feel anyway?” That was terrible. I felt bad but I didn’t at the same time. It was like, so I go back there and I tell the doctor I said, I told him the story, he starts laughing. And he goes, “Yeah we had to hold her down, it took everybody to hold her down.” He says, “All I did was that I just took a couple layers of skin off, she was like crazy insane.” Anyway, so then he starts giving the shots, he says, he’s talking to me and he’s just cutting away. He says, “You know what, I’m cutting a lot off here you know?” I said, Well, I’d like to see what it looks like, you got a mirror?” And he says, “No, I’m not gonna let you look. I’m gonna take a picture for the the plastic surgeon.” So he took a picture and he says, “I’ll let you, kind of give you a flash glance I don’t want you to look at it so it’ll make you sick.” Yeah I said, “Well, what’s gonna happen tomorrow?” Because he finally finished up. He said, “Well, tomorrow the normal procedure is, he’s gonna cut your forehead in a triangle, big thing here and it comes down to the top of your nose, and then he’ll fold that over upside down, and then they will sew that on top of your nose. That will be your new nose will be a forehead. And your forehead is going to have no skin, it’s going to be all messed up, we’ll have to stitch that. And you’re going to need about five plastic surgeries to make this that better. And meanwhile, you’ll have a hump of the nose that’ll grow where the skin is hanging there. Then they’ll have to have surgery on that, and reduce that. But it’ll always look like it’s kind of folded over it’s—but it covers the hole.” I said, “Whatever, okay, I’m prepared for whatever.” And he says, “Okay, now when you leave here, all this local stuff is gonna wear off, you’re gonna be in the greatest pain of your life when you leave here.” He says, “It’s gonna feel like your face has been on a barbecue pit, I’ve been burning everything.” And 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 gonna use it.” He say, “No take it.” So I get home and my wife’s looking, I mean she looks at the pills she says, “You never take pills.” I said, “I know.” “You’re gonna take them?” “Nah, real men wear black and they don’t need pain pills.” Pretty soon that pain was soooo great, greatest I—I mean, it was screaming. And I said, “Well you know, maybe I’ll take a half a pill.” And 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.” And I took the glass of water, and as I was swallowing the half of the pill, it was still in my throat, the pain vanished. There was no pain. It wasn’t the pill that did it, it was still traveling, hadn’t even dissolved. But I was so exhausted from this operation, blood every—you know, it’s just really bad, bandages all over my eye and everything. I told my wife, I said, “You know, it’s late in the day, I’m gonna take a nap. I’m gonna lay down a little bit, I’m exhausted.” So I laid down, it was dark in the room and I’m laying down and pretty soon I wake up because my pillow’s wet, sheets are wet, blankets wet. I go, “My God, what— hope nobody sees this because I must be a big baby, I must have been crying so hard I wet the pillows and everything, you know?” Must have been tears, right? So I come downstairs I tell my wife, I said, “You’re not proud of me, obviously, but I think I was really crying pretty bad up there because everything is soaking wet, you know, with my tears.” She goes, “Let me go up there take a look at this.” So she comes down she goes, and she’s got all these sheets and everything, they’re all bloodstained, everything was blood, there wasn’t tears and she says, “You weren’t crying, you were bleeding.” And I go, “Thank, God it was blood and not tears.” And of course she thought it was nuts at that point. But anyway, but I meant that, you know it was part of me saying, “Blood was okay.” So that night I’m in bed, I’m sleeping in a separate room because I’ve got all this pain and everything, four o’clock in the morning, shiva hour, and all of a sudden the room is illuminated. I mean illuminated! It’s like you just took the sun, shrunk it down to the size of my wall, in fact, I couldn’t see the ceilings and the floor, so it was at least the size of the wall and there was no borders. So it was just this huge disc, 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 got these… And 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 you didn’t get love at home from your mother, this is the greatest, you got a billion of them loving you! It’s unbelievable, it’s like you’ve never been loved before. And then in the midst of this, as I’m just watching it and here’s what was interesting, my childlike mind, I’m accepting this, as “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!” And I was just enjoying it. And then this looong arm, no robe or nothing, just an arm, no clothing, and a hand reaches out from this disc of sun, this omnibus or whatever it was, and it reaches down and it covers my, all the place that the surgery was at that day, the eye, the nose, everything. And just, my body was just… picture your greatest meditation experience you ever had, multiply that by billions, that tingling kundalini energy in your spine, it’s like a helicopter taking off, it’s like a rocket ship, it’s whew… and it’s all love. . It’s love! And 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 nothing. I’m just thinking… “I’m loved, and I’m enjoying it, and I love God back.” And I got 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. So a couple hours later we’re up, I tell my wife about it. She kind of, she’s heard enough of my strange tales and I told her and she had to—I believe she accepted it. So we went there the next, that morning and that doctor—remember the guy with no bedside manner, the guy who told me he’s gonna cut my lips my ears all the stuff— and he looks at me he says, “Yeah, it looks pretty bad, I got this stuff—this looks bad.” And he takes out this chart, picture of my face with a graph on it, showing it’s 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 for exactly what I’m gonna do.” Well I said, “Okay, you’re the boss. So I go into surgery, I come out… and my wife comes in, she’s just staring at me, she going— I go “What’s wrong?” I’m thinking, “What’s wrong?” right? 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 go, “Really?” She’s on the bandage on the nose, and they cut everything around, all the meat all the flesh around the the tear duct was sitting by itself, and they rebuilt that. I said, so she had demanded to see the doctor, that doctor comes out and goes, “Yeah, you know it’s really weird, I was in there in the surgery, actually he was out we’re ready to do the surgery, I got the instruments, I’m ready to start doing the cutting, and an inspiration came to me. To cut the shoulder and take the flesh from the shoulder and rebuild. I’ve never done that but I’m gonna 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.” And then he didn’t question why. I’m going, “Okay fine.” And then he goes, “Hey by the way, you know like there’s I mean there’s a God-awful amount of stuff in here you know, you’re gonna 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. So I went home that day and my wife goes—I go, “No. I proved I didn’t need it yesterday, I don’t need it today.” So I didn’t take it, I went in the bedroom, I went to bed. And at four o’clock, zero four zero zero, the same exact experience I had the night before comes back and revisits 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 I knew who this was. And then, 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 you know as an Israeli general or something. And the nose was you know, stitches were out, so it wasn’t too awful bad. And Gurunath was there to help with the wedding, it was in Napa Valley, beautiful setting. So we’re sitting at this table with the wedding party or they were coming over to talk, and there was nine people there all part of the same group. And Gurunath stops the conversation and he 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, 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, and and then tell people I think it’s Babaji, because that’s just like, “C’mon. 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 and 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. And so I look up, and in the ceiling of the basement here is this orb, about size of a basketball, that’s all, about size of basketball. But it’s like, there’s no, 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 alive, 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? Uh, 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 explodes, and there’s this sonic boom. I mean, as loud as a sonic boom, it shook everything. Boom! And there was 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-tschew-tschew…. 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 go, looking at my wife and kids, “Did you guys hear that explosion?” No, nobody heard nothing. Okay fine. So when I was writing uh this book, Warrior [shows book] and I was talking about that experience and I want to say, “Geez, you know, 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 gonna write down some questions.” And I wrote down, on a sheet of paper, I had these questions sitting in the corner of my desk. I said you know, if that ever happens again, I’m gonna commit these, the questions to mind and I’m gonna ask. None of this strange business, I’m gonna ask. I’m gonna be curious, I’m gonna ask. And I’m gonna time it, how long and everything else, I’m gonna focus on this. And no sooner I’d written the list, made up my mind that’s what I was gonna do, [snap] there was 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, in my crown chakra, just, throat chakra, everything just, whoo… And then I came out thinking, “Well, let’s see.” Did anybody hear anything? No, nobody heard nothing. 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 gonna 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 motivated to do something entirely different. Why would you do 30 years one way, and then when this old fat, old veteran comes in, and you do something different for him? Come on, there’s something afloat there, literally afloat, right? So the other unique experience, we got time for another question?
Rick: Yeah a little bit more.
Bill: Okay because I think one of the, one of the more—
Rick: Maybe this will be the last one.
Bill: Okay let’s give it, let’s end on a major one like in, when you end up a fourth of July display, you go, Pckwheeeew!
Rick: Right, yeah, the grandstand.
Bill: On the rainbow star a 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 that sent you the stories and the pictures of the owl that she raised. Sacred. Tell her thank you, blessings. She wants to write me private, give her— she could contact me, do so. Anyway, uh that’s, that was a beautiful thing. For the people haven’t seen it, I recommend they do. Anyway—
Rick: Just for, well, since you said that, it was um Anamika Borst whom I’ve interviewed, you’ll find her on batgap, and uh 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 like a, you know the size of your thumb, and then she raised it up. Anyway, go ahead.
Bill: It was a beautiful, it inspired me. Anyway so I was just pushing somebody else that inspired me. So… I was meditating. I was married about three years or so, had two kids, and I was meditating and I had this habit when I got through with my meditation downstairs, I’d get in bed. I don’t have just like, okay now I’m finished meditating, let’s just 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 the last photo taken of him before he collapsed and died. Well in fact, I think that’s the same exact picture, different frame, but same exact picture. And it was sitting on my night stand and my habit was to stare at Yogananda and just, “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 and next thing I know I’m watching this— Yeah, you stare at these saints or sage 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 sssooo…it’s like on Star Trek, you know on Star Trek they go hyperdrive, whoosh, warp drive, whoosh. Or they go whhoom, there’s this trail of colors, it’s exactly what it was feel like. I was like traveling and it was just like Star Trek, I mean going by, whhooo, whhooo, whhooo. Oh how’s this going, and 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, uh 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 like, functioning like a body of— It’s like your toes, your fingers are all part of this body you know, in the cells, they’re 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, um 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. And 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 was all these, everything, worlds and everything… In this experience, which only lasted one hour 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 mean. And I was given information. And I was given certain things, like, that I needed to know. And then I was given things which I could never, I could never share. And then I was given things that fffttt, you got amnesia on, you’re not gonna 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 that was just, it was a beautiful experience and 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 I’ve been there for a couple hundred million years doing this, it was a memory of a life here, that I came back here, which is kind of 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 but 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 also realized that I’m not alone in this rainbow body, and that there are other people manifesting human bodies that are part of that rainbow body I was in, like there are visitors here, but that’s their real home. And maybe we each got 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 science. I’m thinking that maybe the world is being directed by these groups of like-minded entities, souls, consciousness, 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, something to do with that. And I’ve found… that to be something comfortable with 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 are, but that were perceivable to them, and that they’re very much involved in helping to orchestrate human affairs and…yeah, Irene said somebody else out there loves us. You know, keep us from blowing ourselves up and at the same time, shepherd along our development, our evolution as as a planet 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 and 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 nothing. I’m happy if I was, if this whole answer to this cosmic thing was a jigsaw puzzle, and I was just one of the border pieces, but 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.
Rick: Sure.
Bill: Because I know they can’t finish that piece of 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 on some of your talks, I’ve watched some of your videos that people talk about climbing a mountain and stuff, you know, and there’s many different trails to it. Because I always like that as an example because you want to go to the top of the mountain, you want to take a sherpa that’s been to the top of that particular mountain. But he hooks everybody up to a rope and you can have somebody down the valley on that same rope, the rest of the guys are at the top, guys are in the middle, but you know what? Everybody that’s tied to that rope is going to get to the top of the mountain, and 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 know 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, every—this is to get back that original statement we started off 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, with 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, where you know, this guy does this, this guy 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 is a crook, as a fake, as a fraud, as a cheater, as you know an idiot, that’s what they are to you. But if you see in your guru that one God, regards with the physical guru, you see that one guru that God within them, then you actually see in 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. Its a reflection upon you the follower. So…
Rick: Which is, which does not absolve gurus from, you know, 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. You know they, everybody’s got to answer for whatever it is. But you know, if we spend our time focusing on us and improving us, and less time worried about everybody else’s faults, we’re going to get someplace. And right now, we’re living in a society it’s really terrible out there right now, because I don’t even dare talk politics because I disagree with them all. Because I’m going both sides are terrible, one’s going so crazy this way, one’s going so crazy this 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 got hope and I got 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 there successful. 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 be linked into them.
Bill: And there’s links from my website, they can go to my website. I’m here, I’m available. I got youtube videos out there if you want stuff, individual stories. This video itself will probably add some power and impact, for people people they 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 echoed that same thing, it’s the message that we’re all sending out and I think the common line that we’re all being drawn in the sand here, 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, you know kind of reading your books and listening to your videos and then this, 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, and blessings and peace to you my friend.
Rick: Yeah, let me just make a little concluding remark here. So I’ve been speaking with Bill McDonald and as always I’ll have a page on BatGap about him, about this interview and 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. And 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, 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, and 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, because I didn’t answer a lot of questions, if you can forward 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, and we’ll see you next week.