Sandy Jones Transcript

Sandy Jones Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Sandy Jones. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people and if this is the first you’re aware of it, please go to batgap.com and check it out. There are hundreds of interviews that have been done. They’re all archived there and if you’d like to support our efforts, you can do it through the donate button on that page on that site. So Sandy is the literary executor for William Samuel and many of you will not have heard of William Samuel but I’ve gotten a couple of emails from people since I announced that I was going to do this interview saying, “Oh boy, William Samuel, he was really special and not many people know about him, so I’m so glad you’re doing this.” So Sandy’s going to tell us about William Samuel and she’s also going to tell us about herself because I think that the quality of a teacher, the effectiveness of a teacher can be judged by getting to know some of his students and they tend to reflect the quality of a teacher. And Sandy was a close student of William Samuel’s. She lives in Ojai, California and take it from there, Sandy, tell us a little bit more about yourself and about William.

Sandy: Well, let’s see. I agree. William is like an undiscovered gem. And he had been teaching in the 50s and 60s and I discovered him in the 70s. My mother used to be a reader of metaphysics and so she had his books and then years later I found his book again and that’s when I found him. And he’s just absolutely brilliant and he was making statements about the presence now, the power of now really, way back in the early 60s and his message is incredibly clear and simple and beautiful. And so, yes, I would love to have people rediscover him and that’s kind of why I’m starting to come out here and say what I’m, you know, give what I want to give.

Rick: Yeah, and if anybody’s thinking, “Well, I mean, how important can somebody who is no longer alive be for me as a teacher,” just think of Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta or Papaji or Jesus or any of these people. I mean, we tend to give a lot of attention to teachers who have deceased and derive a lot of value from studying their teachings. So, the same would apply to William. So, William, his life, he died in what, 96 or so?

Sandy: Yes, exactly.

Rick: Yeah, born in 24, I think you said, or 28 or something.

Sandy: Yeah, yeah, I think he was in his early 70s, so he was fairly young, but yeah.

Rick: And he was a military man and he was involved in World War II in China, battling somewhere or other in Western China, right? And then he had a break and he went down and met with Ramana Maharshi for a couple of weeks.

Sandy: That’s exactly what the story is. He went to see Ramana Maharshi in 1944, I believe, yeah. And he never told anybody about that. He always kept it very, he did just say that he went to visit this silent guru and that the silent guru had taught him how one can actually receive a beautiful message, let’s say, or some kind of inspiration or insight through the silence, just sitting there with that guy. But he didn’t tell anybody who it was. It took me 30 years, I think, to figure out who it was, because he wouldn’t tell a soul, which is a very interesting part of his, what I loved about his teaching was that he didn’t want anybody to be a follower of a particular teaching or dogma or he was anti, kind of anti, how would you say it?

Rick: Anti-adulation?

Sandy: Yes, there you go, thank you.

Rick: So, would you think that maybe he didn’t want people, he didn’t want to name who that teacher was because he didn’t want to sort of necessarily attach an endorsement to himself by saying, “Oh, I spent two weeks with Ramana, I was the first Westerner to be there, first American,” and so on. He just wanted whatever he had to say to stand on its own merits without some kind of imprimatur from his having been with Ramana.

Sandy: That is exactly what it was. He wanted, what I love about his teaching is that I know what inspired me when I was first reading his books and everything is that he was all about freedom, and my heart is about freedom. And so when I started picking up on that, that there was not going to be any rituals or disciplines or restrictions, I’m going, “Yes, this is my kind of teacher.” And we clicked, right off. I mean, our compatibility and the way he would say things would just, the lights would go on. And what he loved about me was that he didn’t have to really teach me, he only had to say something and I would go, “Yeah, okay.” And so we would both get really enthused about this interchange of my enthusiasm for what he would open a door for me. And rather than clinging to him, I was finding freedom. And that gave him great joy to see that I did understand it and that it was about freedom.

Rick: Did you spend much actual face time with him or was this mostly through correspondence?

Sandy: A lot of letter writing back and forth, telephone calls. I went to see him in Alabama about four times and would stay maybe two days, not too long. And then he came to visit us in Aspen with his wife, Rachel, and that was really fun. I got to find out, I mean, every time I’d go to see him, it was always such a kick because he had the best sense of humor. He was so funny and entertaining. Often he wouldn’t even want to talk about this stuff, which he would just want to enjoy. And he’d say, “Why are you coming here? Why don’t you take your husband and go to New Orleans for a few days?” And I’d just go, “Okay.” So yeah, he was special.

Rick: There’s an interesting story around how you discovered that this teacher he had visited in 1944 was Ramana Maharshi. I’d like you to tell that story if you wouldn’t mind. You told it in your interview with Jerry Katz and Nonduality.

Sandy: Oh yes, it’s such a kind of a weird, convoluted story. It’s a little hard to tell. It was not easy to write. But everybody kept asking me, “Who was this silent teacher that Bill mentions?” And I said, “I don’t know. I have asked everybody who used to know him. I even asked his wife, Rachel, before she died. And nobody knows. He told no one.” So there came a point about, I think it’s been about four years ago, and I said, “Bill, everybody,” I mean, I’m speaking to him across the distance here, because he’s gone, right? But I’m saying, “Bill, if you could tell me who this guy is, I will get a double, it’ll be a double message. It’ll be first of all, that you’re ready to reveal who it was. And second of all, if you reveal it to me, I will share it with everyone, because I think it’s important.” I said, “I think people really want to know. And everybody suspects that it’s Ramana Maharshi. And so I want to know.” So I asked this out there and, gosh, within days, it was just astounding. I don’t know, it was a few weeks, whatever it was. I don’t know how it happened, but it was one of those weird searches on the internet, and I’m going here and there and doing this and that. Unsuspecting, I come upon a website called The Wanderling. And where I turn up on his millions of pages, I turn up on this one page that says, and then among the people that I recommend is William Samuel, because I met him when I was a little boy at Ramana Maharshi’s place. And William Samuel was in China. He came to visit. I was a little boy. I was with, there was another little boy, Osborne. Anyway, another little boy there. His father was like the biographer of Ramana Maharshi’s work. So anyway, he tells this story about how he met William Samuel in 1944, and how they took that walk around the mountain in the moonlight. And so I go and I look, when was there a walk? When was the moon out? And I look and it was like full moon, April 4th, something like that. And I just go, “Oh my gosh, this is my answer.” It was, it was that Bill truly was there, and that’s who it was. And it was so clear to me. I mean, it was absolutely obvious that that’s what it was. And that I had gotten led to this Wanderling’s website was so mystical. And I just went, “Wow, Bill really did come through to me and guided me here.” And Wanderling, who was a little boy at the time of meeting Bill, tells the whole story about him being there and who he was. And so I put it all together and I had my answer, and there was no doubt.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a cool story.

Sandy: Yeah, really nice.

Rick: Yeah. So what I’d like to do over the next hour, hour and a half, or however long we talk, is first have you kind of tell us a bit more about William’s spiritual unfoldment, you know, his awakening or whatever he might have called it, and how that came about and when and whatever. And then summarize, and it doesn’t have to be a brief summary, it can be quite extensive, unfolding or expression of his teaching, if you can do that. And then after that, and we might mix the order up, but then probably after that, your own story in the same respect, you know, I mean, the course of events that led to your spiritual development and your perspective on things. I heard some interesting things when I was listening to some other interviews with you that resonated nicely with the way I see things. So what do you think about that?

Sandy: I think that sounds lovely. Let’s see if I can do it.

Rick: All right. So we’ll start with William. And you know, we’ve had some tidbits now of, you know, he was a military man, he went to, he was fighting World War II, he went to Ramana Maharshi’s ashram, but that’s pretty sketchy. So let’s unpack it some more.

Sandy: Well, okay. So he grew up in Alabama, which is, you know, there in the deep south. And he was, it was not an easy childhood. And his mother was a Christian Scientist. So that’s what sort of got him started in understanding that God, truth, is a principle, the power of love, because the Christian Scientists, even though they seem to have kind of, I feel that, and Bill felt it too, that they sort of lost track of what their original teaching was, which seems to happen with everything that gets, turns into an organized religion, it gets kind of destroyed. But anyway, he started with that. And that was the roots of his beginning was that everything is metaphysical. It isn’t, everything is made of love, and God is all. And that’s the basic premise, God is all. What is this God? And then he goes on to explain in all of his works, where he’s coming from when he uses this term, God is all. But it’s very much based on God is love, God is the infinite light, God is life. And a divine principle. Anyway, so that was what he was raised with. And then his father sent him off to military school. And that was only, he was like 14 years old, and he was a very sweet, kind, sensitive little boy that ended up in military school. And that was rather brutal. And he tells a lovely story that during military school, he kept getting these visions of being this pure child. There was a child that would come to him and save him during this time in military school. He had some profound visions, and he was a profound being, even as a little boy.

Rick: You mean like it was his own inner child or what?

Sandy: It was a feeling of an uplifted joy, it was a feeling of everything’s okay, that there was something watching over him, that everything was going to be all right. And it felt very, he called it the child because it was so pure.

Rick: Like a guardian angel kind of thing.

Sandy: Like a guardian angel, yes. And it would sort of lift his spirits. And it had a lot to do with his, he related it a bit to, because he had been raised with the Christian Science, he at that time related it a bit to this Christ consciousness kind of thing that people will talk about, that this light would fill his being. And so he called it this child. But he said he would lose this child, it would come and go and he’d lose it and he’d feel so bad when it was gone. So anyway, he suffered through military school, but by the end of military school he had become a captain, and they made him captain of infantry and they sent him off to the worst place in China.

Rick: And he was like 18 years old.

Sandy: 18 years old, 18 years old, captain of infantry, leading his troops through the outbacks and the mountains and the treachery of this ends of the earth place in China. And that’s what he did. And the stories are amazing because this young man had to go through killing. I mean, there was killing and squalor, and I mean, and mass destruction and bombs going off. And he writes about that in some of his, in one of his books or a couple of his books. And as a student of wanting to understand enlightenment, let’s say, you start reading this and you go, “Wow, this is amazing that this man walked, that he had this light within him and still had to go into a war and do battle and live like this?” And you just, you’re amazed by his…

Rick: Bhagavad Gita.

Sandy: Yeah, truly. And he writes about it beautifully because one of his stories is about how in the middle of bombs going off and his men dying and people dying, he writes about this state of silence that occurred to him, that happened to him, and that we’re in this silence above, beyond all the commotion and all the terror, he was at peace. And there was this beauty and this light, and he could walk through and go over to his men and make sure they were okay, and he was calm. And you read about this in his book. And so that’s very inspiring. And you start to pick up on what he’s talking about because he writes in a way that…this is the beauty of his work. He writes in a way that you can feel, you can actually get in touch with this presence, this sweet, silent awareness, and it washes over you as you’re reading his work. And you just go, “Wow, this is amazing.” And those were his first few books. He takes a big leap in his third book, but I’ll get to that later. So those books set that foundation of the discovery of this presence that is here, no matter what might be going on, that one can find this inner grace, balance, light, peace, and walk through things. And that for me was…that was the key. That was like, “Yes, that’s it. If you can walk through this world with that inner calm, understanding what it is you’re looking at, understanding what this world is.” And so that’s how we would communicate when we started communicating with each other. But anyway, back to his work.

Rick: Yeah. Of course, at this stage he hadn’t really done any spiritual practice or much seeking or anything. He was just a kid.

Sandy: Right.

Rick: But he already was imbued with a lot of silence, which is good quality for a military commander to have, actually.

Sandy: Oh, beautiful. And he does even say, he will even give us, “Maybe in the middle of battle, these things happen. Maybe you’re so stressed that this is some way of protecting yourself.” So it’s kind of beautiful the way he is always open to not drawing major conclusions about anything. And I love that, because for me it all keeps growing and going and we keep learning.

Rick: Although these days a lot of soldiers are coming back with PTSD, so they don’t really have the resilience that he had.

Sandy: Yeah, he had resilience. He had that spirit somehow. I think it was his background he came from, or he was just meant to be this. You never know.

Rick: Yeah, I would also suggest that he was born in a high level of consciousness.

Sandy: Exactly.

Rick: Already had a lot of being established.

Sandy: I think that was it. And so during his time in China, and he writes this so cute and so funny, and this is where you get his humor and I don’t have a gift for humor. I have a gift for laughter, but not a gift for telling jokes. So anyway, during the war he was given an interpreter. And he tells this funny story about because he was the youngest kid there, he got the last choice. And he ends up with this little fat Chinaman who turns out to be almost royalty. He had been a Taoist monk, a very revered Taoist monk who could speak English and speak English very fluently. And so Bill ends up with this Taoist monk who was to be his Chinese interpreter. And this is Mr. Shien and he writes about Mr. Shien and Mr. Shien walks hand in hand with Bill through this war and becomes way more than his interpreter and teaches him, keeps teaching him the Tao of living, the flow, the light, the truth, and teaches him all the way through. And there’s a wonderful story about how they’re trying to escape the Japanese and the Japanese are after them and they’re on the run and they’ve got their troops and they’re climbing through mountains. And it sounds at this point, it’s almost just Bill and Mr. Shien out there in the middle of the mountains. And Mr. Shien falls down and he’s an old guy and he falls down and he can’t get up and he’s pointing at something and he’s pointing across and Bill says, “Why are you pointing?” And Mr. Shien’s like almost sick, just laying there, just almost dying. And he keeps pointing at something and Bill says, “What are you pointing at? Yes, I see the damn mountains beyond. I know we got to get there. I know. Get up, old man, get up.” And then he looks and he gets down at his level and he says, “Wait.” And he looks and Mr. Shien is pointing at a beautiful little flower coming up through the snow. And he goes, “Oh my God.” And so it was this kind of teachings, you know, that you just go, “Wow, extraordinary.” Now the other thing Bill does that I really appreciate and I know that people are so speedy nowadays, it’s hard to do this, but Bill teaches in stories. He’s a storyteller and that rings really beautiful to my heart. I get stories. I understand storytelling. I’m kind of like, you know, a fan of the mythical and the Joseph Campbell kind of, you know. Oh, I love that stuff. And Bill teaches with that formula and it worked for me. It’s a beautiful way to teach for me. I’m very poetic and an artist and so that worked. I can barely listen anymore to the very intellectual inquiry or however they’re calling it. I mean, I almost get belligerent. I just go, “Wait, you know, just stop. Find your heart. Speak your truth. Don’t just rattle off intellectual nonsense that doesn’t mean anything.” Anyway, sidetracked again. So yes, Bill, the war. Then he also, he came home. His father owned a bakery in Alabama and Bill took the bakery over when he came home from the war.

Rick: So before he came home from the war he did this stint with Ramana.

Sandy: Oh, exactly.

Rick: Anything more to say about that?

Sandy: Yes, what he writes in his book is that he says, “Yes, words can get in the way,” and his little description is why he’s saying words can get in the way. And he says, “I went and sat with a silent guru and I came out of there with more than I’ve ever gotten from words.” He said, “Don’t let words get in the way. You can get it by just listening with your heart.”

Rick: So he sat at Ramana’s feet for two weeks and Ramana didn’t say a word.

Sandy: Didn’t say a word.

Rick: And then the day they were leaving Ramana said, “You’ve learned a lot here.”

Sandy: Yes, exactly. And he says, “Wow, you know, I didn’t think I had.” And he said, by three months later I went, “Wow, I had learned a lot.” He had really been given something. And of course Bill wouldn’t use those terms that they use today, you know, like this transmission or however they call it, but you do know that something incredible happened between the two of them. And the gift for me was when I made this discovery who it was and then that Bill had given me license to tell people now who it was. It was such a joyful feeling because I know how many people respect and admire Ramana Maharshi’s teachings. And I haven’t read any of his stuff. I must say I just don’t read a lot. And my inspiration has been purely just my own self, my own heart, my own little trip. But I don’t know anything about Indian philosophies. I’m slow at that. So you won’t get a lot out of me with all that. But I know I do pick up enough that I realize how important Ramana Maharshi is to everybody. And I feel so honored that between Bill and Ramana Maharshi and me, there is this sweet little triangle of love. And I’m here to share that and that’s what I want to do.

Rick: Okay. So, then he came back to Alabama after the war.

Sandy: Back to Alabama, ran his little bakery and wrote his first little book because the atheists would always come by his bakery. Back then it was like his bakery was kind of like the …

Rick: Like a Starbucks.

Sandy: Yeah, like a … where people would kind of meet and have little talks. Well, the atheists would come through every year going on their way to Florida from California.

Rick: Well, that’s funny you should say that because I was thinking, “How did he scrape up atheists in Alabama?” But I guess they were coming through from California.

Sandy: They were Californians for Florida. And I don’t know how they found him, you know. But also I know that the university was there and I know the university students would come to see Bill too. So, he was very hip with the young people at that time. This was in the late 50s, I’d say, and starting to go into the 60s. So, he wrote his first little book called “Two Plus Two Equals Reality,” and it was a little basic book because he wanted to explain to these atheists what he meant by his term “God,” because they came to talk about God, but of course they came to argue about God. And he would say, “Wait, you’re only arguing about the definition. You’re not arguing about the truth.” And so, he wrote that first little book, “Two Plus Two Equals Reality.” I have it in many different formats. One of them is a free gift I just give away in a little PDF for people and you can find it on the internet. The other, you can find it on Amazon and all that.

Rick: We’ll link to it from your page.

Sandy: But it’s a wonderful little book because he describes so beautifully with analogy again and he uses a lot of analogy, which works with me, how God, when he uses that term, he’s talking about a principle, something you can’t see, but something that’s real. And then he describes how math, mathematics, arithmetic is a principle. And all the numbers exist because the principle exists. And so, he relates this to his word and why he can use the word God so freely, which was beautiful to me because I think I like to use the word God. It means everything to me. It’s like, yes, it’s, how else do you describe something that’s infinite and impossible to describe? We use the term God.

Rick: And that’s so abundantly intelligent.

Sandy: Exactly, exactly. And it has no beginning and no end and it existed before anything existed. And how does that be? It’s got to be what we call God, some kind of beginning that didn’t begin. And yes, we can call it first cause and we can call it Source. But to me, those don’t touch my heart. The word God is beautiful to me and I love it, so I use it.

Rick: Now, before we go on, one of the things I noticed in one of William’s books is that he emphasizes that you really don’t want to be talking about things that you haven’t personally experienced or investigated on the basis of experience. So at this stage in the story, William is still a fairly young man in his early 20s and already he’s beginning to write books. And I know you consider William to have been an enlightened man or a self-realized man, so at whatever point is relevant in your unweaving of this story, please describe when that realization took place or what the nature of it was. Because there are a lot of people out there, and I want to probably emphasize that William was not one such person, who are good philosophers, but who are not necessarily realized in an experiential sense.

Sandy: Yes, yes, yes. He was experiencing all kinds of light and truth and enlightenment all during the war, after the war, while he was working at the bakery. I mean, this book was written on what he did know and discover. He was living it all those years. He was living it. He would often say, “If you get a message, if you get a glimmer of the truth, put it to practice, test it, try it, see if it works.” He always recommended, “Prove it, test it.” He says, “Don’t take my word for it, test it, go find out for yourself.”

Rick: So for him, was there any sort of enlightenment of the Bodhi tree moment or was it just much more of an incremental kind of development?

Sandy: It was incremental and he often, very often, uses the expression which I love, and it’s biblical, but it is, “Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little.” And so, for him it was a slow, gradual unfolding and a discarding of what wasn’t it. And his living it, his journey, it was slow. He does tell about, like that, the experience of the silence during the war was a major moment. He also tells about what he calls his pond experience, which he says was when he learned, he says he was taking, he used to like to hike the hills of Alabama, he loved nature. And so he was on a walk, he was constantly searching, he was always open to learning and living and seeing the truth. So he would go on these nature walks and he was going to go camping and he came to a pond and he tells the story that he bends down to take a drink from the pond and he looks back up and the whole world had changed. He said it was just filled with beauty and light and love and glory and it was a new dimension. And he was just going, “Oh my God, I found it, I found it, this is it.” And he’s joyfully going on his little hike and he’s going to go camp out on the top of the mountain and he comes to a man on a little farm on the side of the road and they chat and he says, “It’s just glorious.” And he gets to the top of the mountain, he lights his little fire and then this gloom, this darkness just starts to come over him and he’s just there alone, fire burning in the darkness on this mountain and he’s just, the agony and the pain and the sorrow and the loss and the suffering is huge. And then how he tells his story is by the morning he wakes up and he realizes that this was to show him that this light, it has an is-ness to it and a not-is to it. And he had the hardest time trying to explain this and he calls it contradistinction. And eventually in my life I saw what he’s talking about, I saw exactly what he meant. It is very difficult to explain but this seeing that what is not is exactly what leads us to what is. And so its beauty is in that it is a part of the journey to take us to what is and we don’t discard it, we understand it.

Rick: Also as I understand the whole Dark Night of the Soul experience, which many, many people have, there can very often be profound spiritual awakening and that serves to dredge up a lot of hidden stuff that ultimately has to be cleared through in order for that awakening to really be established. So it could very well be that he had that experience by the pond and it stirred up some sleeping elephants that needed to be cleared out of the territory before he was free to roam in that territory without fear of getting trampled.

Sandy: Very, very true. Yes, a beautiful way to put it. I’m sure that that was probably exactly what that was. And that’s right, the fearlessness. To see that the darkness isn’t real, that’s when the fearlessness happens. That’s when the true joy of living in that freedom happens.

Rick: So after that morning when he had that, you know, the dark night and then the morning kind of like, you know, it’s almost literal and figurative here.

Sandy: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Was that sort of like an epiphany and thereafter he was, you know?

Sandy: I would say yes, yes, I would say that’s true. But then he wants to tell people, you know, just because you have a road to Damascus experience, he says, “It’s not necessary.” And he does say that this is a slow, long journey. So even though that did happen for him, he still doesn’t put a whole lot of emphasis on that that’s how one has to arrive there.

Rick: Yeah, I’m just kind of probing you here because, you know, I agree with that. But a lot of people are kind of looking for the big “wow” experience after which they’re just going to be able to rest on their laurels and be home free, you know. But you talk to even very advanced spiritual teachers and they say, “Well, I’ve had many awakenings and it just keeps unfolding.”

Sandy: Exactly, yes, yes. And that’s how it was with Bill too, even though he had this and he had that and yes, there were glorious moments. I have two boxes full of his old journals that haven’t ever been published, so it’s kind of like his private journals. He suffered a lot. He went up and down and it took a lot for him to give what he’s given to us. It killed him, really.

Rick: How so?

Sandy: Well, I think that’s what kind of made it. He died of a heart condition. And I do believe that his heart had just been literally torn to pieces, you know, trying to bring what it was he was supposed to bring to us. And I think he gave us the gift of his life in a way.

Rick: Why would that be a heart-rending experience, trying to teach truth? You’d think it’d be edifying.

Sandy: It was hard for him. No, he didn’t like it. It wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t like it. He wanted to just go wander the hills and enjoy the rivers. And he tried to teach in a very simple, joyful, easy way, and he did do that.

Rick: People were always complicating it?

Sandy: Yes, exactly. It was very difficult. And he didn’t really want all this. He would turn people away until they would come to him for the third or fourth time. He would not just let anybody come to see him. He did not want a following. He did not want to be idolized or be thought of as a guru. He didn’t even want to be thought of as a teacher. He says, “I’m just telling you my story.” But he knew, he knew that he was here to give us what he had to give.

Rick: So you think that casting pearls before swine actually killed the guy?

Sandy: Well, I’m not so sure. But people will say, “Well, if he was so enlightened, why did he have these physical problems?” And I’m just like, “No.”

Rick: Oh, that’s silly.

Sandy: Exactly.

Rick: You can name any number of spiritual teachers who had physical problems who were very enlightened. I mean, Nisargadatta with his cigarettes and everything.

Sandy: Right. It doesn’t have anything to do with it. I mean, I’ve discovered that. The beauty is the freedom to live with what you are and what you do and be, and not put any importance on the physical conditions.

Rick: Which is not to say, I mean, some people say, “Oh, do whatever you want, drink and smoke and take drugs. It doesn’t matter, it’s just physical.” But the body is the temple of the soul and it’s the vehicle to higher consciousness. But nonetheless, there have been some very enlightened people who’ve had cancer or various other things and didn’t lose their enlightenment by virtue of it.

Sandy: Exactly. And that’s another point. What he brings with this is that it isn’t a … because he did come out of Christian Science, which is very much about trying to manifest what you’re … manifesting the beauty of the light within you should be manifested in the world so there should be perfection everywhere. And of course, he had to leave that behind because he realized that isn’t how it works either. So there was a lot of things that he had to leave in the dust and realize that that wasn’t it either, which is a gift in itself because it’s like he already sort of, for me, he broke the trail, you know. And he said, “That’s not it, trying to manifest your world to look like this perfection that you understand or realize, you know, the realization of God’s perfection being everything, it doesn’t manifest necessarily in what we think of as perfect.”

Rick: Yeah, because we actually are not running the show.

Sandy: That’s right.

Rick: God is, right?

Sandy: We don’t know what perfect is, exactly.

Rick: Well, we could elaborate on that. But alright, so we’ve gotten a sense of William’s personal journey in terms of continual unfoldment and exploration and deepening and greater and greater clarity. So if you were to summarize, let’s say you’re on a plane flight with somebody and you had an hour or so, not that we have to go on nonstop for an hour about it, but you had a good bit of time to really explain to them what he taught. How would you summarize his teaching?

Sandy: For me, he taught the very basic premise, and if you get this, if you really trust this, it’s true. But his basic premise is that God is all there is. There’s nothing else. This experience we’re living is the light and presence of God. And we are the expression of this infinite presence. And to be able to really see that is to trust, to trust, to walk in it, to see if it’s real. And then to walk in this and to realize it is true, this is it. I mean, it’s exactly what, that’s all there is to it. It’s that simple and that pure, really.

Rick: Okay, so most of the people who are listening to this will agree with that statement that God is all there is, as long as we understand what we mean by God. And most people listening to this program will not think of God as some old dude in the sky with a beard, you know, more the all-pervading intelligence that’s at every level of creation, governing things. But it’s one thing to hear a statement like that, and another thing altogether perhaps for it to become a living reality that one lives and breathes 24/7. So, you know, many philosophers and others have, and we’ve all read spiritual books with that kind of concept presented. So, how do we go from appreciating the concept to having it be kind of a living, breathing, nitty-gritty, you know, 24/7 experiential reality for us?

Sandy: First I would say you have to be brave. You have to let go of, and it’s just like everybody else describes, it’s exactly that. You do have to like uncover, let go, trust that this is true. I don’t know, I don’t know. See, that’s why I keep saying I’m not a teacher, I can only tell what I have discovered, and live what I’ve discovered. I’m not even so sure if I can tell what I’ve discovered. I can live what I’ve discovered, and I’m living what I’ve discovered, and I know it’s real, and I have been, the joy of this wonder of this presence is here. And I would give that if I could, and that’s what Bill gave to me. And so, I guess for me it’s almost like, boy, he wrote all those books, page after page. If it did it for me, and maybe this is why I’m out here in these days, is that if he did it for me, and he did, his words eventually, took a long time, but eventually they soaked in, they soaked in, I got a little here, I got a little there. You still have to go on your journey. You have to go on your own heartfelt listening to yourself and not to anyone else. You have to trust what yourself is telling you. You have to trust your own words. You have to trust, it all comes back to you. And so, to say, what did Bill say, what he said was for me to do it myself. For me, that I had it, that it’s in me, that I can do it, that it isn’t in him, that it’s mine, and it’s in my heart, and it’s always there, and I was given this since time began. And so, I start going, “Okay, okay, I can do this.” And I think that’s more of his message than anything else, even though he’s written these three books that are profound, those books, all they did was they kept bringing me back to me. They didn’t take me anywhere else but back to me, and I think that may be where the message really is.

Rick: So, I’m getting two things here. One is, Bill spent a couple of weeks sitting at Ramana Maharshi’s feet. Ramana didn’t say a word, at the end he said, “You’ve learned a lot,” and Bill went on his way. So, obviously maybe he didn’t use the word “transmission,” but if Ramana had any effect on him, and I’m sure he had a profound effect, it was at a level beyond words. There was some transmission or resonance or entrainment or whatever word you want to use.

Sandy: Oh yes, that’s Bill’s word, thank you. Bill just spoke to you that word.

Rick: Oh, that’s a good word, yeah. Entrainment means like two frequencies kind of come into … like in a laser light, you know, ordinary light is all incoherent, you have all the wavelengths going every which way, but in the laser light all the photons line up synchronously and they become entrained, and even if a small percentage of the photons begin to do that, the rest of the photons kind of join in and follow suit and you have one big beam of light that acts like a single photon. So, there’s this entrainment principle when you sit at the feet of somebody like Ramana. So, that was major for Bill. And then for you, obviously, you immersed yourself in Bill’s books and read them over and over again, and you had conversations with Bill, and not emails in those days, but letters with Bill, but you also got together with Bill. So, you actually spent time with a guy who had spent a couple weeks with Ramana, and it seems to me that for you perhaps even also the entrainment principle was more significant than all the words. But I’m going on a little long here, but also I would say that the words were very important because you have to remove doubts, you know, you have to sort of gain self-confidence, and Bill did that with you like layer after layer after layer and instilled in you over time the confidence to stand on your own two feet and live this.

Sandy: Thank you.

Rick: You’re welcome.

Sandy: That’s beautiful. Yes, exactly. Going back to that entrainment idea too, he does tell a story. He did a talk, his last talk, it was held in White, Georgia, and it was a weekend, and he talks about entrainment. And he uses, rather than your description, but I must say he loved quantum physics, loved it. His last book has a lot of the quantum physics in it, so if you like quantum physics you’re going to love his last book.

Rick: Which one was his last book?

Sandy: The last book was “The Child Within Us Lives, a Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Metaphysics”.

Rick: Sounds good.

Sandy: That’s very good. That one just blew my mind. That one was the one that took me there. It took me still, again, I must say it took me a long time. At first I read that book and I just said, “What is he writing about?” He’s completely gone off from his absoluteness, you know, there’s only one, you know. And then what is this child? What are we doing here? But I knew, I knew that I trusted him. I knew he knew something I didn’t know. And so I kept going with it. He told me, “Keep going, you’re going to get there, keep going, this is it. If you’ve trusted me this far, believe me.” Anyway, that’s his last book. But he talked about entrainment. He was saying that, and he said that if you put all these pendulum swinging clocks in one room, that eventually they’ll all start swinging together. I was going, “Wow, is that magical?”

Rick: There are a lot of examples of that.

Sandy: So that was his little description of it.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, in nunneries, all the women eventually begin to have their menstrual cycle in sync with one another, you know.

Sandy: Exactly.

Rick: There’s all kinds of examples.

Sandy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he loved that. That was his word, entrainment. So I think he just spoke to you there. He’s there with you. Hey, Bill. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And anyway, I mean, he loves this. I can feel him. He used to just look, he’d go, “Oh, I’m clapping my hands.” He’d clap his hands like a little boy, you know. He had such a little boy to him. I just loved it, you know. And I love that spark of, I mean, after all he’d been through, amazing that this man was so delightful.

Rick: Yeah, really, I mean, considering all the brutal, and he also went to the Korean War. He could have ended up a basket case in a VA hospital or something.

Sandy: Oh, he.

Rick: I hope that wasn’t politically incorrect. I get blasted for saying things like that. But anyway, it could have turned out very differently.

Sandy: Yeah, but what happened was, after the bakery, he got called, I don’t know when the Korean War started.

Rick: ’52, I think. ’52? ’50, somewhere in that range.

Sandy: He had to go back in, and he went into the Korean War. He doesn’t talk about that one as much, but he said that was even worse than being in China. But this time he knew who he was, and he did it, and he walked it. That was his confirmation of that he had found and was living this new light that was coming to him. And so, going into battle again was his living proof that he was, I’m hearing the word “immune.”

Rick: Yeah, establish an equanimity. You know the story of the Bhagavad Gita, don’t you? That Arjuna, the great warrior, didn’t want to fight the battle, and he said, “I’m just not going to do it.” And he sat down in his chariot, and then his charioteer, who happened to be Lord Krishna, said, “Well, you have to, but first get established in being, get established in the self, then perform action, and you won’t be making mistakes, and you won’t be overshadowed or overwhelmed by the experience. You’ll be established in equanimity in the midst of all the intense diversity that you’re about to experience.”

Sandy: Well, yes, that’s exactly what it was like for him on the second time he had to go to war. And I guess in some ways it was kind of a beautiful experience because he realized how much he understood now and how it had transformed him. I mean, he had been transformed. So he was capable of going through that and doing whatever he had to do there. And yeah, Korean War. And then he came home and that’s when he really started writing his books.

Rick: Alright, so I had been asking you to summarize his teaching and you said one major thing is just that God is all and all is within God.

Sandy: That’s about it.

Rick: There’s a friend of mine, Francis Bennett, who likes to say, his little slogan on his Facebook page or something is like, God is in everything and everything is within God. It’s sort of like this totality kind of statement. So that’s a good starting place. Now, what are some other tidbits and details and facets of what he taught?

Sandy: Well, he did, long before all the non-duality books started coming out, you know, in the last 10, 15 years, whatever it’s been and gotten very popular, he was writing, you read the beginning of his book, A Guide to Awareness and Tranquility, and he starts right off with, “There’s only now.” And you just go, “Well, this guy was writing about there’s only now,” you know, and he writes it so beautifully and makes it so available. And this is why I love his work, and many people have told me this, what happens when you read his work is you will be able to understand all the other guys who have come along behind him. He makes it possible to understand everybody else’s stuff, because something about the way Bill writes and the way he makes these statements about here and now and the presence and the allness and the oneness, you begin to understand this all-inclusive, there isn’t a battle with an ego, there isn’t a battle with trying to get rid of something, there’s not this annihilation thing that the very absolute guys tend to, you know, there’s always this struggle, there’s always this almost an anger and a bitterness about that there’s this terrible part of us that stands in the way of the truth. And I’m just going, “Yeah, old-time religion,” you know, it’s like you’re still carrying around that there’s this sinner standing in your way. And Bill’s message is this, the truth is that you are already this holy beauty, this holy light of this presence. And for me, and this is the only way I can kind of get into Bill’s work is to say how it’s understood for me, but for me it was the realization that there wasn’t anything standing in my way. And I just thought, “Wow, this is amazing that they use this word ‘ego’ as if it’s like something real.” And I go, “You shouldn’t even be using the word, because you start believing there’s something there that is connected to this word.” And I’m going, if there’s an ego, it’s the all-encompassing identity that we are, it’s the identity that makes us aware of knowing I’m here, it’s my wholeness, it’s the sense of knowing I am. And I don’t want to even use the word “ego” in a negative sense anymore. It’s like to me I want to use the word “ego” as the joy that leads me. And if it did anything, if there was something in me that caused me anguish, it caused it so that I would walk through the door, so that I would search, so that I would go, so that I wouldn’t just accept the world as an objective place, that I would go, “Wait, what is this world about? Who am I?” It’s like the ego was a beautiful part of me, it was holding me and walking with me and saying, “Look, it isn’t the way you think it is.” And so there’s a whole combination of a lot of things, but that was part of it for me, was that he explained ego in a way that made it so that it wasn’t something I had to get rid of, it was something I had to understand, and there’s a difference there.

Rick: My understanding of ego, and you can tell me how well this jibes with Bill’s understanding or teaching of it, is that it’s a necessary faculty without which we wouldn’t be able to function in the world, we wouldn’t know to put food in our mouths, there would be no distinction between ourselves and a fire or a rock or anything else. And on some level there is no distinction, but there needs to be on another level some distinction in order for us to function. But that functioning faculty tends to become the be-all and end-all for many people, they think, “Well that’s all I am,” is this thing. And so to the people who say, “There is no self, I am not a person,” I would say, “Sure you’re a person, you’re just not only a person. Fundamentally, primarily, and predominantly, you are much more than just a person, but you’re also a person, otherwise you couldn’t be talking to me.”

Sandy: Exactly, and that’s when the beauty starts to happen, and that’s what his third book is about, is that there is this third position, and it’s the understanding of myself as both, and yet I am neither in a sense, I am beyond both, but I’m at that third place. And when I discovered that I said, “Wait, this is what they’re talking about when they talk about the Holy Trinity, there’s three going on here.” And with this discovery of what he calls the child, which is the original self, which is who you truly are, you get to see all of it at the same time. There’s no more, it’s this, it’s that, and it’s this three become one.

Rick: So what are the three you’re referring to?

Sandy: Well for me it’s like, he describes it in a way that’s a little hard for me to put into words, but just on my own wording, for me it’s like there’s this third point, it’s like a triangle. And so at the very peak of the triangle is the true identity, who you really are. And that encompasses the bottom of the triangle, which is I am Sandy in a body, who seems to have been born into this world and has a birthday and will be leaving this world someday. I am also along this linear line at the other end, the infinite all that is, but I’m more than that. I am those two things combined, which also makes like an alchemy of those two things become a third, which is greater than both.

Rick: Absolutely. This is the way that Vedanta describes Brahman actually. There’s a beautiful verse in one of the Upanishads which goes like, “Two birds sit on the self-same tree, one eats of the fruit and the other does not.” And it sort of describes the situation of our being an individual functioning in the world and yet being something which does not partake of experience, which is beyond the realm of experience, which is silent, absolute, nothing going on there. And yet the two together become a wholeness that’s greater than the sum of their parts. And that’s what Brahman is supposed to be when they speak of Brahman consciousness. It’s the knower creates Brahman. The absolute alone would be nothing, would be flat, no experience.

Sandy: The knower, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, the knower creates Brahman, creates the wholeness that’s more than the sum of absolute and relative put together.

Sandy: That’s it, that’s it. Then you become the knower and that’s like I can be confident, I can be whole, I don’t have to take any of this baloney, I can see it all, I got it. And you know when somebody’s way over here on this other extreme of there’s nothing, you just go, “Oh boy, you haven’t seen how much there is.”

Rick: That’s just one of the birds.

Sandy: That’s just one bird. And then you get to have the two birds together, exactly. That’s beautiful, thank you. But that’s exactly what it is and that’s what he’s writing about in this child book. And I know a lot of people don’t get attracted to this book because they go, “The child, what a strange thing to be called, you know, nobody wants to, the child within us lives.” And there was a point where I said, “I wonder if I should change the title to his book?” And I felt him say, “Nope, no.” He says, “I want it that blatant, that out there, just let the people find it that are meant to find it and they will find it.”

Rick: You mean you’re not going to change it to “Get Rich and Lose Weight” like Rachael Ray or something? And then they buy the book and go, “Oh, what’s this?”

Sandy: Right, exactly. I thought about it. But that’s it and that’s what this child likeness is. It encompasses both ends and everything in between. And then you get to live the whole joy of living again and that’s why for me when I finally discovered this I went, “Oh, this is being born again.” I’m just going, “I’ve been born again. I have come back to really who I was as a little girl but this time I know what I have and I know who I am.” And there’s a difference because once you know…

Rick: You’ve come full circle.

Sandy: Yes. And then you get the joy of knowing. It reminded me of a little kid. Mom’s watching her little kid learn to tie her shoes and Mom’s going, “Now let her do it herself. She’s got to do it. She’s going to get it. She’s going to get it.” And then one day the little girl goes, “I learned to tie my shoe. Look, Mommy, look, Mommy, I learned to tie my shoe.” It’s the knowing that you know and then you’ve got it and you can always forever tie your shoes. And I’m just like, “Oh, yes, this is what he was talking about.” And why it’s so childlike is because it’s just so spirited and so alive and so… And it is moment to moment and it is living in the presence but you don’t have to remember all that stuff. You don’t have to meditate. You don’t have to stand on your head. You are completely free being yourself and a self that you are fully familiar with. This self for me and your self for you is a self that you go, “Oh, I remember being that little boy. I remember who he is. I love that kid.” And so it’s like it becomes this beautiful, again, it is a combination but it’s an all-knowing combination and the sweetness of finding yourself and saying, “Oh, I love that little girl. I remember her. She was so fearless and so spunky.” You come back to that. There’s an original self and each one of us has our very own. And I’m just going, “Wow, God is good. I mean, this is great. This is like I get to live my life in this joy of being full again.” It’s like that.

Rick: Nice. It seems to me that there’s kind of a pendulum thing that happens in life where we’re a baby and we’re all being but we can’t function in the world. And then we get more and more and more into the world and learn how to function in it but we get totally lost in it. And then we maybe get on the spiritual path and we think, “Oh boy, the transcendent,” and we kind of go for that and wake up to that. And many people kind of hide out there for a while and it’s sort of unmanifest and the world is an illusion and I’m not a person and it’s all unreal and to hell with the environment and whatever, you know. But then the pendulum eventually needs to swing again and say, “Oh, this too,” like we’ve been saying, the two wholenesses, the two fullnesses. You know that, oh, there’s a, I won’t quote.

Sandy: No, do, go.

Rick: Oh, there’s this beautiful Upanishadic verse, I hope I can do justice to it. It goes, “Puurnnam-Adah Puurnnam-Idam Puurnnaat-Puurnnam-Udacyate, Puurnnasya Puurnnam-Aadaaya Puurnnam-Eva-Avashissyate.” And it means, whew, I did that. It means this is full, that is full. Taking fullness from fullness, fullness remains.

Sandy: Oh, absolutely. That’s it.

Rick: Yeah, so it’s like this pendulum thing. So it kind of can go easy on the world is an illusion crowd because their pendulum just hasn’t swung back yet to incorporate this as well.

Sandy: Yes, that’s very true. And what Bill says in The Child, which was really intriguing to me, and I had to finally fully understand it, but he would keep saying, “Once you discover this, you’ll be back in the world doing what you have to do.” And I go, “Oh, this is now I get it.” And in many ways, that’s why I’m doing now what I have to do. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m writing my own book. That’s why I’m, I mean, even for me to attempt to getting on Facebook, I mean, I was not one of the first people out there, believe me. I haven’t been able to figure out all this stuff, but I’ve been doing Bill’s books for about 15 years now.

Rick: You had any grandchildren? You need to get your grandchildren in there.

Sandy: I have. I just have grown-up children, but they’re good with computers and they’ve been good to me. And at this point, they’re just laughing at me going, “What in the hell happened to mom?” It’s just like gone. I’m just going, “You know, take me. I’m here for you for the rest of my little bit of the journey I’ve got left. I just want to give what I’ve got to give and take what I got. I’m here for you.” And that’s the doing for me. And what everybody’s doing is going to be different once you figure this out, once you discover your wholeness. You’re so able to just keep giving because it’s the source is endless and you have no fear. It’s like, “Whoa, this is cool.” So you can just start sharing this, this love, this bounty of love in all kinds of ways, in all beautiful ways.

Rick: And the doing evolves. We have different dharmas at different stages of life. What I was doing 25 years ago, I thought I’d be doing for the rest of my life. Now I’m doing something quite different, although in some ways similar, and who knows what it’ll be ten years from now. But there is a beautiful principle here, which is that a lot of people are struggling for what they should do in life and what can I do that will be meaningful and so on. But you know, it’s like that biblical verse, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else shall be added unto thee.” If you kind of get yourself established there in that, then the all else will be added in ways you might not have envisioned, but that will be just perfect.

Sandy: I never anticipated, because I am, if you can believe it, rather shy and private. And then to have this light go on that just says, “Well, you got to go out there, honey,” and I just say, “Okay.” And it is, and it keeps evolving. That’s what’s so beautiful. It’s not like, I mean, don’t look at me and say, “Oh, I’ve got it. I got something.” I don’t have something in that sense that it’s the end of the road. It’s that I have discovered something that is like the door opened and now there’s this field of possibilities that I’m just like, “Wow, this is beautiful. Let me just go see where it goes and I will, I’ll just watch and see.” It’s like I feel like I’m riding a wave. It feels like I grew up at the beach and some of my book has little stories about that, but a lot of the analogy is about riding waves. I used to love to body surf and riding those beautiful waves and catching a wave. And I just go, “Wow, life is so,” and getting pummeled by the waves. And it’s like, life is really, we’re riding these wonderful waves. It’s always about riding to me or it’s about riding on the back of a motorcycle and speeding through the hills.

Rick: Or skiing. You were a skier for 30 years.

Sandy: It’s exactly like skiing. You have to be strong and agile and free and go for it and balance. Everything is an analogy for this living it. And it doesn’t end. It’s just, it keeps going. And I keep learning. I keep seeing new insights and glimmers of the truth. But now it’s in a way that I’m rejoicing in every new thing that happens and comes to me. And I know that whatever is going to happen is good. That I know. And it’s a beautiful way to be able to live in this world. The child does that. I don’t know how, but it does.

Rick: You know one cool skiing analogy that I just thought of is that when you’re skiing and you’re turning and all, you kind of dive down the fall line.

Sandy: Oh definitely.

Rick: And that takes a certain kind of trust, but your skis come around, you know.

Sandy: Yes, exactly.

Rick: And so there’s an analogy for living here where you just sort of do it and all else follows.

Sandy: Exactly. It’s exactly like skiing straight down. And I remember when I was first learning to ski and I finally had to let go and do that and really just go right down the fall line.

Rick: Because there’s a tendency to sit back and try to hold back and you end up on your butt.

Sandy: Yeah, and then once you let go and you go forward into it, and you’re right, those skis just turn and you can just carve and then you got it. But it is, you got to fall into it and let go and not be afraid. So all of that is, yeah, all that is part of it. And our journeys are so part of it. I mean, even speaking of how my, I think part of writing this book that I wrote, I never thought that I would be writing kind of my personal little story because it just didn’t seem my nature to do that. But once I got the realization of what it was that I had to write, I started writing. And I was just going to kind of write the song in my heart, let’s say. But the song kept going, taking me back to descriptions of my life. And I went, “Wow, this is really interesting. I’ll just trust it. I’ll just do this.” But then you realize that everything in everybody’s life has been, that’s what’s been teaching them. That’s what’s been their journey in their own way. And what a gift to share. What I’m sharing is that it’s our journey through life that is the teacher. If you listen to it, if you watch everything about your life, it’s teaching you all the time. And I ended up in some of the most remarkably beautiful places to live with a wonderful story. But all of it was teaching me. It wasn’t like my story is any different or special, I guess is what I’m trying to say. It’s just that it’s my story.

Rick: Sure, and there’s a fundamental kind of understanding here, which is if we say that everything is teaching us, then there’s a fundamental understanding that nature is intelligent, that things don’t happen just mechanically or arbitrarily. But you know, some people say, “Well, the world is your guru,” that every little bug that flies across your path or leaf that falls or anything else is just a display of intelligence and that the people, circumstances, experiences we encounter are not just happening capriciously, they’re happening to facilitate our growth and evolution.

Sandy: And as I started writing my book, that became so clear to me. I mean, if there’s anybody I wrote the book for, it was me, because I went, “Wow, that’s really interesting.” Everything, the whole journey of my life was designed perfectly for me. I mean, anybody else’s will be designed perfectly for them. And you just go, “Wow.” And even if it’s not in this lifetime that they maybe get it, or you know, I mean, there’s a lot of people out there struggling with their life. If they don’t get it this lifetime, they’ll get it another lifetime. It’s on its way. This is just, you know, wherever they’re at is part of their journey, part of their unfolding. And it is, and it’s coming back to that we already, it’s like we already know what we know, but we just get to rediscover what we know. We didn’t even realize that we’d covered it up, I guess. And that journey through adulthood is very necessary. That journey of covering up that child, like you were describing, you know, the baby doesn’t know who it is or what’s going on. The journey through growing up and losing that childlikeness, that innocence, that pure state of awareness, let’s say, is a necessary part of it, because you have to like go through losing it, because by the time you come back to realizing you are that pure awareness, now you know what it is. So now you have understood it as something very important and essential. That’s different from the baby that started with that pure awareness. Now it’s the knowing of that pure awareness, and that’s important. You have to know. If you don’t know what you know, it doesn’t reach that fullness.

Rick: And you know, this whole hide and seek point that you just brought out kind of reminds me of something, which is that, you know, they say man is made in the image of God, and if you think about it, the whole universe goes through a similar cycle, and we’re just kind of microcosmic examples of that, but there’s this whole explosion and proliferation of the universe and formation of stars and creation of heavier elements and eventual formation of sentient beings and so on, and those sentient beings eventually come to, through those instruments of sentient beings, God sort of recognizes itself in a living sense, in a living reality kind of way. And so there’s this whole kind of hide and seek thing that seems to take place on a cosmic scale, because in dumb matter, you know, just a rock, there isn’t the structure or the capacity to have that self-recognition. The instrument has to become much more sophisticated. And so in the course of our individual evolution, it almost seems like a similar pattern where we get totally lost, and then we come back to becoming found or finding in a way that is much more than where we started out.

Sandy: Exactly, that’s exactly right, yeah. It’s more than what we started with and yet it is back to the beginning. It’s an extraordinary journey.

Rick: Who’s that poet? Not e.e. cummings, somebody else, but he said that the end of all our seeking shall be to arrive at the place from whence we started and to know the place for the first time.

Sandy: Oh, exactly, and it’s just like you just go, “Wow!” It’s like a whole new dimension, it’s like a whole new world, and yet I know myself, I’m back at something that I know that it’s real. And it isn’t confusing, it isn’t a non-reality, it isn’t an illusion, it isn’t … that’s the other thing I would love to be able to share is that trying to call this world illusion is as if we’re dreaming or … no, I don’t think that’s what all those teachers really meant. What I think they were trying to do is to describe the subjective view. It is all within awareness, it’s all light, it’s all like stuff of dream. They’re not saying it’s a dream, they’re saying it’s like in a dream where everything is yourself. But this is like a really hard thing to describe with words because people cling to the word dream and then they cling to the word illusion and it’s like, no it’s real, like a prism on the wall is real, I can see it, it just doesn’t have any solidity to it. It’s made of light, it’s made of something, it’s subjective. And yet it’s objective too, I mean I’m walking here and if anything, I can spill this and turn over and I can get hurt and it’s objective too. So again, it’s back to that nothing is eliminated, that’s what’s really beautiful, but it is understood.

Rick: Yeah, Anandamayi Ma said, “Everyone is right from their own perspective,” and Bob Dylan said, “I’m right from my side and you’re right from yours,” or something like that. And it’s like we’re all filters, you know? And there actually is no red out there or hard or anything else, those are just ways that the apparatus of our nervous system interprets light waves and other things in order to make it an intelligible world that we can live in. So maybe in that sense we can say the world is an illusion because it’s not actually, utterly what it appears to be to our ordinary senses. But that’s not to say that it should be brushed off or dismissed or devalued or anything like that.

Sandy: Exactly, and for me that it is, let’s use that word, an illusion, what’s so beautiful or light or something immaterial, it’s like, wow, that’s where the magic is, to see that I can make something feel like it’s real and that this world around me feels so solid. And what a profound beauty God is, I mean, to give us this to be able to enjoy and feel. And that was another thing, that was another thing that happened. When I discovered this child, and as I say, it began to grow, it began to get more confident, I guess is a way to describe, I began to realize that I was feeling way more like my senses have come alive. I have completely, I mean, everything feels alive and real now, which is interesting because to call it an illusion is sort of like to think it isn’t there. And it did just the opposite for me, it’s now like everything is so beautiful, you know, it’s like everything is rich and the feelings and the taste and the sounds and the music and the people and the variety and the individuality and the expressions. And people come in my store and I just love every single one of them. I’m just like, wow, this is so much fun. And people will walk in and it’s always like such a nice surprise to see who’s coming into my life today, you know, or who isn’t. And I’m just like, wow. I don’t know.

Rick: That’s cool about your senses coming alive, you know, because that to my way of understanding is a kind of a second stage, if you will, in the growth of consciousness, where initially one might realize the self as unmanifest pure consciousness or something, but without much impact on sensory experience. But then kind of living as that for a while, the senses do begin to appreciate more, because you know you know who you are. How can you appreciate what anything else is if you don’t know who you are? Who’s going to appreciate the rose if I don’t even know who I am? What’s this thing? But once you know who you are, then you can begin to appreciate what everything else is, and that begins to grow by degrees and greater and greater, deeper, deeper, more and more refined until eventually, you know, you really kind of want to meet the artist that painted this beautiful picture.

Sandy: Oh, yeah, so beautiful.

Rick: And then that desire becomes significant.

Sandy: And everything about what I thought I was supposed to get rid of is, I’m going, wait a minute, I didn’t have to get rid of my, even my desire! Now I’m going like you just said, the desire to see and to touch and to know. I’m like, wow, there is a desire that is so beautiful and to create and to love and to, I’m going, I’m alive again. This really is being born again. I’m going, this is, this is extraordinary, except this time I’m not afraid. It’s like, again, it’s like when I was a little kid, I wasn’t afraid of anything. I just really wasn’t. And I look back and I go, wow, this is really fun to be able to be living in this world and not be afraid of it and to feel it. I mean, now it’s like, now it’s so close to me. It’s like the living presence, as they talk about the living presence, I just go, wow, the living presence is just thundering through me now all the time. I feel this living presence. And it’s almost, it’s almost breathtaking. I’m just like, wow. And that other thing that we get stuck in, and I would just like to sort of put this in there, is when you’re studying this sort of non-duality thing and they do the non, you know, don’t label. I understand all that. I went through it, not to label things, not to, you know, to try to see things as just one and a tree, if you tried it, if you don’t describe it, it’ll just be. You’re trying to make a tree just be without describing it.

Rick: Trying to make a bee just tree.

Sandy: Yeah, it can’t be just tree. It is tree. And you’re going, and each tree and each leaf and each little bit of bark and the little bugs climbing up, and it’s just like, everything comes alive again. So that thing about labels is, it doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s just label it, label it. That’s fine. I know that’s a rose and that’s a tree and that’s Rick and that’s Sandy and I know all this.

Rick: It’s not a problem.

Sandy: It’s not a problem, exactly. It’s a joy, it’s a real joy.

Rick: I thought of a metaphor as you were speaking. You know, kind of the overarching principle would be that individual love is concentrated universal love. And I thought of the metaphor of a magnifying glass. You know how when you’re a kid you take a magnifying glass and you can light a fire with it by holding it a certain way and letting the sun shine through it. So the sunlight gets kind of focused or concentrated by the magnifying glass and you can light a fire. So like that, we’re like focal points or lenses or magnifying glasses through which universal love, universal consciousness can focus and become even more concentrated and more appreciative than if it were to just remain in an abstract, unmanifest state.

Sandy: Oh, exactly, exactly. And then you get the joy of actually falling in love again, you know. And finding somebody that you love and it’s a really fun thing and you get to enjoy your life without, like you say, making it a problem. And then the joy of even personal love with another person is like, wow, what a great, fun experience. It’s like, this is what love is supposed to be, you know, instead of complications. You know, it’s like you’re just going, the freedom in me gets to be expressed in a love for another. What a gift, you know.

Rick: Very nice. Are you still married to the same person you’ve been married to for so many decades?

Sandy: My husband, I was married to him for 30 years. He was a handsome, beautiful, I adored him, he adored me. We had these three kids together. We lived in Aspen, he owned a restaurant, he was cool. I was in love with him all those years. And when we moved to Ojai, he got himself, he used to be a race car driver. He used to race with Charlie Hayes, so they knew each other.

Rick: I don’t even know who Charlie Hayes is.

Sandy: Charlie Hayes was a non-duality teacher.

Rick: Oh yeah, I guess so.

Sandy: Anyway, he used to be a race car driver. Anyway, I thought maybe you’d know him because of that. But anyway, when we moved to Ojai, he got himself three or four beautiful motorcycles because he loved race, he always loved speed and racing, and he got killed on a motorcycle wreck.

Rick: Oh, sorry to hear it.

Sandy: It’s been 12 years and it’s going to be in my book about it. I mean, I write about it. That was hard to do. But I love him, I love him, I will always love him. He’s in my heart forever and he’s with me and he’s watching all this and he’s just going, “Hey girl, there’s the girl I married,” you know, and I’m just going, “This is really sweet.” But it took me a long time to recover, but also that was the point where I found this child and understood what Bill was talking about. I had to. I had no choice at that point. I had to live it or not. I mean, I knew that was it. I had to live what I had been studying all those years. I had to walk it and I did. And that’s where the child was discovered, the true wholeness of myself and how it brought me to be where I am now.

Rick: You still wear a wedding ring. Did you remarry or is that just you keep wearing it?

Sandy: No, no, no. I just like all my diamonds.

Rick: Okay. Well, I just mentioned because you were talking about falling in love, like a new fresh thing or something.

Sandy: I have a sweet … I just got somebody sweet in my life. But that was very recent and I don’t know where it’s going. It isn’t anything, but I mean, it is. But I’m just saying.

Rick: No, that’s great. Congratulations.

Sandy: I’m just riding this whole thing like a joyful wave and just going, “Wow, love is really fun,” you know, getting to come back and do this again. And as I say, being born again is like, it really is. I’m just going … and this child-likeness really transformed me. I mean, even just my whole life, it’s like I know that something happened because I’m a different person. Even though it’s a familiar person to me, it’s what people would have known me and see me now. They’d be going, “Wait, who are you?”

Rick: That’s great.

Sandy: Yeah, so anyway.

Rick: So, is there anything … what else is in your book that you want to give us a sneak preview of? Because I guess you’re still writing it, right? So any other cool little tidbits in there?

Sandy: It’s actually done and it’s at the editor. Oh, and I’m going to do it. I’m just going to put it out there. You know, I don’t have any idea if anybody’s going to … what they’re going to think, but it’s just putting my heart out there and it seems like I’ve been called to do it.

Rick: Do you have some kind of an email list on your website that people can sign up for so that if your book isn’t ready now, which it isn’t, but they could sign up and you’ll notify them when it becomes ready?

Sandy: I don’t, but that’s a good idea.

Rick: You should try to set that up in the next few days if you can, because I’ll be putting this interview up. But at least you have an email address that people can contact you through, right? Or no?

Sandy: Yes, on my website I have …

Rick: A contact page.

Sandy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll go check it out.

Rick: All right, so when I put this interview up, I’ll link to your website and people can go to that contact page and say, “Please notify me when your book comes out,” or something.

Sandy: Right, exactly, yes. And it should be … I think it’s going to be out in March, so it shouldn’t be …

Sandy: too long, yeah, yeah.

Rick: But usually with these interviews, the big flood of views comes in the beginning and then it kind of tapers off.

Sandy: I know, it was too bad my book wasn’t ready, but it wasn’t. But hey, maybe I get to come back.

Rick: There’s a lot of demand for that.

Sandy: Oh, what a sales girl. So mad.

Rick: So, what else do you want to tell us, more or less in conclusion, about yourself, about Samuel, anything, about William rather, anything we haven’t covered that’s kind of a sweet thing that you want people to know, you want to leave them with? Anything?

Sandy: Boy, I don’t know. Do you want me to read something? Oh, I was going to read you something.

Rick: If there’s some little passage, yeah, that you want to read.

Sandy: I was going to read you something from Bill. This was very good.

Rick: As long as it’s not too long.

Sandy: I don’t think it’ll be too long. Let’s try this. See if I can read. Let’s see. The … oh, here it is. The receptive heart intuits a divine, super-sensible inversion of things. I guess I just wanted to mention that. I won’t read the whole thing, never mind.

Rick: Oh, that’s all right. So far it was good.

Sandy: Was it? Do you want to hear it?

Rick: Yeah, so far so good. It was nice.

Sandy: Okay.

Rick: The sensitive heart intuits a divine inversion of things.

Sandy: A version of things. Plotinus and Eckhart called it just that, the divine inversion. It is the preface to the tangible world and it is very difficult to either write or speak of because it has no recognizable frame of reference. Whatever has been said of it sounds mystical and arcane until we listen to our own heart in this matter. Then it is for each of us sublimely simple, a strange excitement and a deep joy. It is the goal of all honest disciplines, but the most distant and undeliverable dream of a charlatan, which I love that. Because he’s saying, you know, you can’t really find it until you really are honest and pure. And I just think, isn’t that beautiful that people who would want to use it won’t be able to because it can’t be used. You can’t get there, you can’t know it until there’s this purity and honesty in your own heart and that you’ll know yourself. That’s only between you and God.

Rick: Yeah, except you be as little children you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. To me that passage meant that, especially the word inversion, that there’s an inner treasure, because inversion means to turn inward. And that inner treasure lies within us, but there has to be a certain innocence, a certain purity, a certain sincerity, a certain bravery, as you were saying earlier, to really take that journey.

Sandy: Yeah, yeah, it does. But it happens and you just have to keep trusting your own heart and trusting yourself and trusting yourself and trusting those glimmers of insight that you get. And it’s really a matter of listening to yourself rather than it is to anybody else. And if you hear what they’re saying, keep reinterpreting it for you, you know, don’t just accept those words and think you know what they’re saying, but keep working with it. And every new level you come up the mountain you’ll see the same view, but you’ll see it in a new light every time. And we’ve all had those experiences, we all know this.

Rick: And one thing leads to the next, doesn’t it?

Sandy: Exactly, it really does.

Rick: The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

Sandy: Exactly, exactly, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s an important principle to remind people of every now and then that this is not an overnight process necessarily, it’s a lifelong process. And there are people who say, “Well, reality is here now, why chase the dangling carrot for years and years when you can just be that now?” And that’s true, because now is now, but there’s also, as we’ve been discussing, this ongoing unfoldment. So, it’s kind of one of these paradoxical both/and kind of things.

Sandy: Yeah, and that’s been the other beauty about this, is that now I realize the ability to see it all at once, all at the same time, to understand that yes, there is this journey, yes, there is time, yes, it does grow, yes, it needs to be unwound and untangled, every single truth that you’ve ever heard is true. And yet, there is this wholeness that includes it all, and that goes back to this childlikeness that can see and be and live all of it at the same time. And that is what I am just so astounded by, is that I don’t have to take either side, I don’t have to say, it’s no longer a paradox. It’s like it completely includes the whole thing and I can see it all and love it all, and that’s been divine.

Rick: Yeah, Nisargadatta said that something like the symptoms or indications of spiritual maturity are the ability to embrace paradox and ambiguity. And so paradox doesn’t necessarily mean either/or, it means the embracing of things which others might see as having to be one or the other, but you know, a spiritually mature person can wrap her arms around both of them and they get along quite fine.

Sandy: Exactly, they get along beautifully and it’s like, wow, this is really amazing. And for me, all I want to do is just, I keep thinking, I just want to share my joy, I don’t know what else to do, I don’t want to teach. I know that Bill has written everything that you could possibly need because I got here and I’m still going, and I don’t mean to imply there’s an end of this, but I, okay, this opened the door, and so it’s like I want to just share that there really is a joy, there really is a freedom, I mean it’s real, and you just go, okay, what else can I do? I just got to give my heart to my world and that’s what I’m here for.

Rick: Yeah, I was listening to a talk yesterday by my friend Gary Weber whom I interviewed a couple years ago, and someone asked him about the value of this, and he said, “Whatever it takes, go for it.” He said, “I wouldn’t trade this for the world.” And if I had to somehow snap back to where I was before this dawned, it would be unbearably agonizing. So, whatever it takes.

Sandy: Truly, truly, yeah, yeah. Fortunately, I don’t think we can snap back. It’s like there’s another dimension. I just went, whoa, it’s slight, it’s the slightest. I keep going, this was just a nanosecond of another dimension, but I’m another dimension. I’m just going, whoa, this is cool. But it isn’t like weird, it’s like beautiful. You’re just going, it’s the whole dimension. It’s like now it doesn’t have just a part of this or that, it’s like this is …

Rick: All this and heaven too.

Sandy: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: And one thing I want to say about William’s books, I have a couple of them here, is that they’re like, I don’t mean to sound crude, but you could take them as good toilet reading because they’re all these little nuggets, you know, like a paragraph here and a paragraph there, and there’s hardly anything that’s more than a page long that doesn’t stand on its own as a nice little self-contained passage. So it’s good to know because some people don’t like to read big long tomes, you know, and these are all kind of laid out in little bite-sized pieces.

Sandy: Right, and the way he writes in those first two books will trigger, I mean they will pour over you so that while you’re sitting there you will go, “Oh my gosh, I feel it. I can feel this, what he’s talking about. I can feel what all these other guys are describing as awareness.” He kind of has a way of actually bringing you there, and I don’t know how he does that, but he’s done it with a lot of people, so I know it wasn’t just me. And it’s such a gift to get to realize what they’re talking about when they talk about awareness because I see so much confusion about what awareness means, you know. And he has a way of bringing it so that you’re just going, “Oh, it’s just this. We are awareness. I am alive. I know. I know I am. This is awareness. It’s nothing out there. It’s nothing distant. It is what I am.” And somehow you just feel it sort of grace you and it’s really a nice thing.

Rick: Cool. Well, some people love the fact that these interviews are really long and other people don’t like it. They say, “Can’t you just do it in an hour?” But I like to go on with people for some time and really kind of cover it thoroughly. But we’ve probably done justice to it.

Sandy: I think so, yes. Thank you.

Rick: Yeah, so let me make a few concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Sandy Jones, who is the literary executor for William Samuel, and I’ll have a page up on batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, as I always do for this particular interview. And it will have little bios of Sandy and William and also links to William’s books. And also when Sandy’s book gets published, I’ll link to that. And incidentally, you mentioned that you have a whole box full of his writings that haven’t been published. Are they just handwritten or are they typed or what?

Sandy: Most of them typed, some of them handwritten.

Rick: If I were you, I’d get them scanned. I mean, what if there were a fire or something? You can get them scanned, you can get them backed up.

Sandy: I have to do that. You’re absolutely right. Yeah, I don’t want to lose those treasures, but – I’ll do that. Thank you.

Rick: You can buy a scanner and do it yourself. There are scanning services that will do it for you.

Sandy: Sounds good. I’ll do that. I did want to someday maybe make a book out of them. I’m not sure, but anyway, I just haven’t ever gotten to it. But I’ll be sure and do that.

Rick: Okay, good. So back to my conclusion. So this is an ongoing series and if you’ve enjoyed this interview and you want to check out others, go to batgap.com, explore the menus there. You’ll see the past interviews categorized in various ways, you’ll see upcoming interviews listed, there’s a donate button as I mentioned in the beginning, which we depend upon people clicking. There is a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, which means you’ll get about one email a week, and a bunch of other things. Just explore the menus and you’ll see what’s there. So thanks, Sandy.

Sandy: Hey, thank you, Rick. It was just beautiful that I got to do this. I appreciate it very much.

Rick: A lot of fun.

Sandy: Yeah, thank you.

Rick: Yeah, thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and we will see you next week.