Tom Catton Transcript

Tom CattonTom Catton interview

Summary:

  • Tom’s Background: Tom Catton shares his journey from a tumultuous life of addiction in the 1960s to spiritual awakening and recovery. His book, The Mindful Addict, details this transformation.
  • Spiritual Awakening: Despite severe drug addiction, Tom always had a spiritual yearning. His recovery began with the help of the 12-step program and a profound spiritual experience.
  • Guidance and Recovery: Tom emphasizes the importance of spiritual guidance in his recovery, often receiving intuitive directions that led him to significant life changes.
  • Helping Others: Tom believes his experiences with addiction uniquely qualify him to help others struggling with similar issues, turning his past challenges into a way to guide others.
Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Tom Catton. Welcome Tom.

Tom: Thank you Rick. Namaste.

Rick: Namaste. Good to see you.

Tom: Aloha.

Rick: Aloha. Tom is in Hawaii on three acres in the rain forest. Tough life.

Tom sent me his book, The Mindful Addict, A Memoir of the Awakening of a Spirit. I get a lot of books and one night I was sitting there browsing through things on my iPad and I thought, “I’ll read a bit of this one and see what it’s like.” The story just sucked me right in. It was really compelling. It was a story about someone who lived a life somewhat similar to mine back in the late 60s – drugs, high school dropout, all that stuff, but did it to about the nth degree, or tenth degree more. It was completely intense.

At first, I was thinking, “How am I going to fit this into BatGap if I do it?” It’s really a story about the very tumultuous life this guy lived, but then it became very evident as you went along. Even in the beginning when you start talking about being there on the bathroom floor shooting meth, there is this spiritual fervor that wouldn’t die. Even in the midst of the most horrific drug experiences, there was this prayerful entreaty to save you from this, get you out of this. I’ll say one more thing and then we’ll get into a dialogue, but somehow or other in reading the book, I thought of that saying that we are not human beings having spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Somehow, I was reminded of that. Of course, it goes deeper than that because we are not just spiritual beings, we are being itself. I was reminded of that by your book because we are all thrown into this world and it’s a very dense planet, as planets go, perhaps. Life can be very intense and is very intense for billions of people. The Maya, so to speak, is very thick, very compelling.

The name of the game is to find our way to clarity and find our way to the spiritual reality that underlies all this drama. It’s so easy to forget that that is even possible or that that possibility even exists and to get completely sucked into the dramas of life. And yet, in the midst of rather serious traumatic experiences, you never forgot that, or at least you couldn’t forget it for long. It eventually pulled you out. That’s my intro. You’ve really made something wonderful of your life.

Another thing is, I don’t think that anyone could really be in a position to help people who are going through the things that the people you help are going through, drug and alcohol abuse, without having gone through that themselves. It is almost as if you volunteered to go through that in order to be able to turn around and be a guide to others.

Tom: That’s the way it works, absolutely. I might say that if I was going to go through this addiction game, which I did, it was the perfect time to do it in the sixties. Tim Leary said, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” I turned on, I was dropped out, but I don’t think I ever really tuned in. Yet the thirst for this spiritual path was always there, because it was the ’60s. As you know, all the teachers were coming. I started meditating in 1966. I became a vegetarian in 1966, and yet I was strung out. I read this book that most people know, the Autobiography of a Yogi, and something just touched me. I knew there was something better than what I was doing. I even started taking the meditation lessons in the mail sent out by the SRF, the Self-Realization Fellowship. The only problem, Rick, was I would get my lessons, and then I’d go shoot some speed or something. Look, it’s hard enough to still our minds, but when you are rushing on methedrine, it’s impossible. There was just that desire. I knew there was something there. I knew there was something to meditation, and I never stopped meditating. I was one of those guys who would tell people to meditate and don’t eat meat, but I had a syringe hanging out of my arm, so I don’t think I had too much credibility.

Rick: I was kind of like that too, although I never got into syringes very much. It was this spiritual alibi that I would use for even doing the drugs. I thought, “This is expanding my consciousness. I’m exploring deeper realities.” After about a year of it, I thought, “Who are you kidding? You’re just screwing around here. If you want to get serious, you have to stop all this stuff.” Fortunately, I wasn’t addicted to anything. I was able to just stop cold turkey from what I was doing, which was mostly acid and grass, and just go on to meditation and stick with it. For you, it was more of a struggle.

Tom: It was a struggle I had. Here’s the gift. That was my challenge. We all go through many challenges. I look at addiction today as an oddly wrapped gift. This was what it took for my awakening to begin. People look at addiction and think, “Oh my God,” but just look at it as another challenge that comes into our lives. If we are in the body, they are always coming. They are relentless. I always thought, once I got clean that I would get this gold star just as I got in nursery school if I was a good boy. Nothing bad would ever happen, but I’m in the body and stuff happens every day. I believe addiction was my gift this lifetime. As we know, in 1968 something began to change when I was introduced to the 12-step recovery at that time. It will be 42 years this October, in a few months, since I’ve ever used anything again. It has been a long, beautiful path.

Rick: Yeah. Didn’t you find, not too long after you had gotten clean and perhaps started to have some real spiritual clarity, that the spiritual clarity was so much better than anything drugs had ever been able to do for you? Didn’t that cause you to lose the desire for drugs? At a certain point, wouldn’t drugs have just been a bring down instead of a high?

Tom: Yes. That is obvious if you can break that cycle of addiction, but it wasn’t until that happened that I was clear. In the midst of it, especially in the 60s, there were all these 12-step programs. I don’t ever identify specifically with any of them because we have traditions. I am a recovering addict and I am involved in 12-step recovery, but in those days, it was very anonymous. I had never even heard about the disease of addiction or any of that stuff in the 60s. I didn’t know where to turn. Yes, maybe somebody like you who didn’t have that can see, we all have these different karmas. Mine was to go that route heavily and not be able to put it down until this awakening happened and this profound personality change began to take place. Of course, yes. Today, the drugs are an opportunity. I guess for some people it opens up doors, the LSD, the pot, and stuff like that, but eventually you’ve got to just sit.

Rick: Do it naturally.

Tom: Yeah, we have to do it naturally.

Rick: Those things can show you a glimpse of possibilities. That is not to say that what you experience on LSD is what you are going to experience when you are “enlightened” or something, but it just shows you that there is a deeper dimension or other dimensions to life.

Tom: There is something else.

Rick: Yeah, there is something else here that doesn’t mean that the doors of perception are opened a bit. I know addicts and alcoholics often say that once an addict, always an addict, or once an alcoholic, always. You even just referred to yourself as a recovering addict, yet it has been 42 years since you did anything. Doesn’t there, or shouldn’t there or can’t there come a point at which the impression has been so thoroughly rooted out, that you would no sooner take a drug than stick a screwdriver up your nose or something? It just becomes completely as if it is not in your world of possibilities anymore.

Tom: Right, but, you are so true. Obviously, that is the freedom in recovery, but we just look at it as, and you can use the words “karma” or “what you chose this lifetime,” whatever. But I do call myself a recovering addict because I know, if I picked up anything again it could start off that obsession. It doesn’t matter if I’ve been clean, I now embrace the spiritual life I’m living, because the program is a spiritually-based program, and of course it takes us outside to other stuff.

Rick: Maybe it’s an expression of humility that one refers to oneself as a recovering addict because if you say, “I am recovered,” there is this implicit, subtle arrogance. As if, “nothing could happen to me anymore. I’m invincible.” I presume there is always the possibility of falling.

Tom: Absolutely, for any of us.

Rick: In fact, I know people who, after decades of living a spiritual life, for some reason got back involved in drugs of various kinds. Not necessarily terribly destructively, but they got back into it. I know of one couple who got arrested, and one guy who was actually a meditation teacher died of alcoholism. We even hear stories of famous gurus who are having problems or had problems with drugs.

Tom: Just all that stuff you just brought up. When you first read my book, you were saying, “Where does this fit in?” I don’t know, out of all your wonderful, wonderful hundreds of interviews, if you have ever really interviewed anybody in recovery or for whom that was their path. But, even if you haven’t, I know that anyone listening to this, yourself, anybody who is going to be tuning in to this Skype call, well, addiction has touched their life somewhere. If not personally, with a friend, with a relative, it is rampant on the planet. It’s rampant. Twelve Step Recovery is growing worldwide. I have been all over the world with this, being led, guided, just to work with addicts. It is everywhere.

Rick: That is one of the reasons I felt like doing this interview, because I felt as if there are millions, if not hundreds of millions of people out there who are addicted to something or other. These people are not worthless by any means. They are precious. Probably a great many of them are spiritually inclined, the way you were. Of course, we are all on a spiritual path, all seven billion of us, so I don’t want to separate spiritual people from non-spiritual people. That’s not fair. But I think many people are consciously seeking and knowing that there is something more, but they are just caught up and are perhaps ready to move on if given the right help and opportunity.

Tom: Right, exactly. We are all searching to be fulfilled inside, and when we are still somewhat asleep, we are just looking in the wrong places, as we know. There are people who may never have taken a drink or a drug, but their obsession to be fulfilled comes in other areas, like more money, it’s never enough, or woman after woman, or whatever. That is why I say addiction is just like any of the stuff we go through. It is just wanting to fill the hole inside, and we just did not know where to look. We do not know where to look until something happens.

Rick: I agree with you. Don’t you feel as if there is an innate, very fundamental, if not most fundamental, tendency to want fulfillment, to want happiness, and to move in that direction, however we perceive it to lead us? As you say, most people are trying to fill it with external things, material things, and that is fine, but we have never heard of anyone who has gotten fulfilled that way.

Tom: No, because we love that whole thing about impermanence that we learn about once we get on the path. It all disappears. Eventually we have to turn within.

Rick: So, what do you think distinguishes someone like you from others? In your book you even talk about going to kindergarten or first grade or something, and being separated from your mother and feeling as if you were different from the other kids. What is different from someone who doesn’t go that route and didn’t end up getting into drugs and doing such destructive things? Is there some sort of missing gene in the addicts, or is there some flaw in the personality of somebody who goes for addiction that the average person does not have?

Tom: There is something different, there really is. There is a gene. Listen, this is now medically proven. Addiction is a disease. Neither of my parents were, but it is in the family somewhere. We are somewhat different. I don’t know about when you grew up, but yes, there is that feeling of separation. You will hear it when you’re in a meeting, all the time when people are talking. “I felt so different. I felt separated. I didn’t feel as if I fit in.” When I took my first drink, it probably tasted awful to me. I threw up that night. I blacked out. I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover, but you know what? I had a glimpse. I wanted more because there was that moment all of a sudden, I felt a part of. The drugs were just that way of looking to fill that emptiness within. Maybe sometimes the emptiness is different than others. I came from a very loving family, so why I felt that separation I don’t know. My parents never were alcoholics or addicts. I have a wonderful sister who is a couple of years younger, who didn’t have to go that route and has always been just this loving human being. For some reason I had to go through this stuff.

Rick: In the Sanskrit puja that TM teachers do when they initiate someone, there is a line that the English goes, “The blinding darkness of ignorance has been removed by the application of the ointment of knowledge.” That phrase, “The blinding darkness of ignorance,” isn’t it so strange? You could get plastered and spend a horrible night throwing up, wake up feeling terrible and want to do it again because there was some kind of moment of something that you liked in there.

Tom: Yeah, it’s insanity. It really is insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and looking for different results.

Rick: Right, that’s what Einstein said, wasn’t it?

Tom: Yeah, somebody said that. Yeah, but as I said, I wouldn’t trade. I was a hopeless addict, but luckily, I lived in Hawaii through the 60s and was on the north shore of Oahu where there wasn’t a bunch of gangs out there. Tim Leary and the White Brotherhood were out there and all that kind of stuff. If I was going to use it, it was the best time ever to use.

Rick: So, you would just sleep on the beach or whatever.

Tom: Yeah, I often tell people I didn’t wake up on Skid Row, but I woke up underneath a coconut tree with my face in the sand. But that Skid Row, that stuff comes within. You have to get your bottom within. You have to get to a place, and we don’t know whoever gets to it.

Rick: Sure. You can be in hell in paradise and you can be in paradise in hell. You can be sitting in a jail cell in ecstasy of divine awareness, or you can be in a place like Hawaii in a horrible state.

Tom: Right, right. But I was blessed to be out there in the 60s and I never got arrested or had to go to jail for any of it. I was the surfer guy.

Rick: Yeah. So, we can elaborate on all your drug experiences, but I think people get the picture.

Tom: Even the book, only the first chapter or so, the first chapter or two is about that.

Rick: I know, and it makes quite an impression when you read that. So, people can read it if they want to know more about it, but I think people get the picture on that.

Tom: Yeah, yeah. I only covered that addiction part in the first chapter. The rest of it is just a spiritual adventure.

Rick: Yeah. So, let’s go on more about the spiritual adventure. And there is this fascinating woman, Flo Bird, we want to talk about her.

Tom: We do.

Rick: But in what order shall we do this?

Tom: Well, let me set the stage here. First of all, and this is very important for people to know, back in the early 30s, before there was any 12-step program, somebody like me, some hopeless dude that only ended up in jail and institutions, lost families, they couldn’t live without substance or else they were locked up. There was no hope for people like me. And this guy happened to be seeing Carl Jung. And he saw him for a while there. He had several sessions with Carl. And this was kind of the birth of the spiritual 12-steps. Finally, Carl Jung was honest enough to tell this guy, he said, “Look, I can’t help you.” As we said, this addiction thing, this insanity of just picking up a drink after you lose everything, you keep doing it. Carl recognized that. He said, “I can’t help you.” But he said, “In a few rare incidences, I have seen people go through a profound personality change brought on by a spiritual experience.” Now, there is a whole thing that goes on after that with him going back to the U.S. and so on. But that was the birth of the 12-steps. So, the steps were designed to bring us to this awakening. That is very important to know for people who don’t realize where it is based and what the whole purpose is.

Now, I’m living on the North Shore, as we know. It’s 1968, February of 1968. I’ve already been practicing SRF for a couple of years then. And in my SRF lessons, I used to read about – this is another saying we have all heard – “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Now, because I was so attracted to these gurus coming to the West and stuff, I always thought that I would end up going to India and I would meet a teacher. That was in my head during those days. That was hilarious because I couldn’t even get from the North Shore into Honolulu, let alone to India. I’m out there just strung out. Anyway, I know you have been a TM guy. I think we talked about that earlier, that in 1968, I don’t know when officially they started giving out mantras and you could get your mantra and stuff like that. But mine was 1968, and it was this little Japanese lady, the only one in Hawaii doing that. I had read Maharishi’s book, The Science of Love, or I forget what it was.

Rick: The Science of Being and Art of Living.

Tom: Yeah, I love it. I love that book. Of course, as I said, I’m just craving something different inside. I did not know that it was my drug use that was the problem, but I knew I wanted this other thing. I wanted this love. I wanted this light within that I needed.

Rick: So, you learned TM back then?

Tom: I did. I went into Honolulu.

Rick: Now, they make you stop taking drugs for two weeks beforehand. Did you do that?

Tom: Yeah, the thing is I actually stayed clean a couple of weeks. I would stay, I would try to just put it down and then I would use again. It was hopeless. Anyway, right after this experience, this is a beautiful thing. Right after that experience with TM, I was living in a little house right back from the ocean, right at a place called Rocky Point. For any surfers who may listen to this, they probably know where Rocky Point is. It’s right between Sunset Beach, the famous Sunset Beach, and the famous Banzai Pipeline. So, that is where I lived, right in between those two spots. Right on the beach, there was a four-bedroom beach house. It was for rent. It was furnished, all that. All of a sudden, one day, this weird lady appeared. Now, what happened is, this weird lady, who we know as Flo Bird in the book, at this point, she had been in 12-step recovery for about eight years. She had gone through one of these huge spiritual awakenings in 1962, the kind that you read about. I call them the 20th Century Fox spiritual awakening, when the whole universe turns to white light and love just gushes through you like mad. You’re just, “Oh, my God.” You’re just never the same after that. Anyway, that happened to this lady. She completely left everything. Her life became listening to the guidance. She would meditate two or three hours every morning, and she would be guided. Now, her main thing was helping alcoholics and addicts.

At that time, she was about 40 miles away in a town called Kaneohe. Early in the morning, her guidance said, “Go to the North Shore right now.” She got into her car and she drove out there. She was led to this beach house that was for rent right next door to mine. She reached above the door, because she was guided there, found the keys, and went in. Later that day, the real estate guy was out showing the house, because it was for rent or for sale. It was furnished and all that. He walks in and here’s this lady there. He says, “What are you doing here?” She said, “God told me to come here. Can you please have the electricity turned on?” Anyway, she was in that house for six more months. What she did was, she started a 12-step meeting, because that’s what she was. I went to it.

Rick: So, when the student is ready, the guru appears.

Tom: There it is.

Rick: It came to you. The mountain came to Mohammed.

Tom: I had never heard of this stuff, Rick. I had never heard of 12-step recovery. I went to a meeting. I’d been connected with the program since ’68, but I didn’t get clean until ’71. But there it was. I went and I found out I had a disease. I found out that is why I could not stop. I bounced in and out for three years. That set the tone for my recovery. Here’s this Carl Jung experience. This is a spiritual program, totally. Here’s this lady meditating and following guidance. As you know, the journey continues. I traveled all around the world with her with no money, a whole group of us, only by guidance.

Rick: That was a very interesting thing. Flo Bird herself, she gets up early in the morning, has a cigarette, has some coffee. It’s a very atypical kind of spiritual way to start your spiritual day. But then she sits down and has this profound meditation for a few hours. Her whole life was this intuitive flow. You depict her very beautifully in the book. Obviously, I like this book and I encourage people to read it because it is a fascinating story even if you don’t have any problem with drugs or anything. She blew away a few stereotypes for me about what a spiritual person is supposed to look like or how they are supposed to behave. At first glance, many people might have brushed her off as not being a very spiritual person if they saw her puffing away on her cigarettes. Of course, Nisargadatta was famous for doing that.

Tom: This is in the ’60s too.

Rick: Yeah. It was so profound, the degree to which she could trust her guidance and intuition. We all have little intuitional glimpses, but this woman, it was just a powerful force that really was the charioteer of her life.

Tom: There are many, many stories in the book about how we traveled, what those early days were like. There are so many unbelievable stories. Whenever I’m at a 12-step convention, I always tell how I found it. Right about then, after being with her for about six months, my wife and I went back to the mainland, California, for a while, Venice. I always tell this too, because this really shows another one of them, there was a good friend of mine, who had just gotten out of Atascadero Mental Institution for the criminally insane. The guy was so strung out, like me, but I always considered him worse than me. At this point in his life, he can’t even talk. He’s stuttering. He’s just really out of it. He comes over to my house because he wants to go to Hawaii. I’ve been in Hawaii since nineteen-sixty-two most of the time. He comes over and I tell him. We sit down. I really wasn’t clean then. We were smoking a joint or something. In the program, we call them twelve-step calls if you go help somebody. I did tell him about the program, but he didn’t understand it and I wasn’t clear. I said, “Go to the North Shore. That is where all the young people go. You want to go there.” I showed him a picture of this lady. I told him about Flo Bird.

What he heard that day was, as we were both getting loaded, “Oh, well, in case I get hard up, there is this alcoholic I can shack up with.” That was the clear message I gave out. He lands in Hawaii and it is a much bigger place than he thought. He gets out to the North Shore about 1 a.m. in the morning. He just goes right to Sunset Beach and he goes down and falls asleep in the bushes. He just arrived that night. He wakes up the next morning early and he’s sitting there and he’s going, “Oh, my God. What have I done? I’m over here in Hawaii. I know no one. I’m strung out. I’ve got no money, no dope. What am I going to do?” He’s sitting there going, “Oh, my.” It’s really hitting him now.

In the meantime, we know Flo Bird gets up every morning early and meditates. At this time, she’s living at a house in front of a surfing spot called Velzyland. It’s only about a half a mile up the beach, a little more, three-quarters from Sunset Beach. She gets up and she gets in her car. She’s told “right now,” the messages are always very clear with her. It says, “Go to Sunset Beach right now.” It was just that clear. She gets in her car and drives down to the beach. She walks out to the water and she puts her hands on her hips and she goes, “Okay, God. Here I am. What do you want?” As we know, in the meantime, Tom is in the bushes waking up going, “What am I doing?” He looks up and here is this lady from the photo I had showed him. He’s going, “Oh.” He walks over and he starts stuttering. He just gets my name out and she says, “You’re why I’m here!” He’s never been loaded since and he was so strung out. That was December of ’69. He’ll be celebrating 46 years this year. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it was, traveling with her all over the world. No money, no nothing.

Rick: That is so cool. It’s fun to read those stories in the book. It’s fun to see an example of someone who operates that way, who lived her life that way. As I say, we all have little intuitive inklings, but they are usually so subtle that perhaps we don’t even know that they’re intuitions. We ignore half of them. For her, they were loud and clear and she did them no matter what, without question.

Tom: I think we all can do that more. I got started with the Vedanta type of teachings in the sixties and ’70s with Yogananda, Maharishi, and many more with that Hindu type influence. Then probably late ’80s, early ’90s, I started doing a different type. I went through Yogananda’s whole thing, Kriya Yoga, for anybody that knows what Yogananda does. It’s all very beautiful, but somehow, I was just led to mindfulness. I’ve been practicing mindfulness now since the early ’90s, mid ’90s, something like that. Most meditation practices don’t talk about following guidance. I know in the mindfulness world they don’t, and yet I bring it into all my talks, wherever I talk about mindfulness. Some of the people think it’s too much of a deity, and the Buddhists don’t like that type of thing. But anyway, it works for me. I’ve gotten lots of guidance in my 40-some years of recovery and practice now.

Rick: I suppose if we start talking about who is guiding us and all, it might just get speculative. I’m not sure if either of us really know, but there is this sense that there is some kind of benign intelligence that cares for us and that actually gives specific instructions, so to speak, specific direction if we’re open to following it.

Tom: Yeah, in the 12-step programs they say, “God as we understand God.” They don’t force anything on you. We’ve got 12-step meetings in Bhutan and all over India and Bali and a lot of these Buddhist countries. It opens the doors for anything. What I tell people is that after 40-plus years now of recovery, I have no understanding of God. It is out the window, gone. I don’t mind the word “God.” It’s a wonderful way to express things. I don’t have any old ideas attached to it. I don’t think it’s a heavenly babysitter that I can go to and plea my case with. I do think there is something very wonderful and beautiful happening in the universe, and it seems as if it’s not random. I just want to know it and serve it, and that is my whole thing. I don’t understand it. I don’t have to understand it. I have been guided. I go into prayer and meditation every day, as I know you do. My meditation is just about sitting and listening and observing what arises. I’m going to tell you, Rick, we have thoughts. I’ve listened to some of the people on your thing who say they don’t even think anymore. That’s groovy, I guess. I think, you know? I like what Sogyal Rinpoche said about thinking. He said, “The ocean has waves. It will always have waves. It’s the most natural thing for the ocean to do. It has waves. The mind has thoughts. It’s okay.” To me, although when you go deep into meditation, you can get to a spot where all of a sudden, thought stops, but that is not what my practice is necessarily about. I’ve been there. I can’t make that happen, but it happens, and it happens enough that it is a very beautiful experience, but I let it go. The one thing is, I don’t try to attach to my thoughts. I think that is the whole secret. I’m going to think, but I’m not going to attach to them. I happen to know when a certain thought keeps reappearing in the mind’s eye, and all of a sudden, some kind of vibration goes with it. All of a sudden, my hair is standing on end. I start to pay attention. I pay attention to that thought.

Rick: Yeah, this whole thing about thoughts. The first or second verse of the Yoga Sutras goes, “Yogaś chitta-vŗitti-nirodhaḥ,” which means that yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind or of the thought process. But that is not meant to be a permanent condition. It is meant to be a state where you allow thought to subside so that pure consciousness can be reflected clearly, the way the sun is reflected clearly by still water as opposed to turbulent water.

Tom: Right.

Rick: Then over time, over years of practice, there develops a condition in which that stillness is maintained in the midst of thoughts, in the midst of activity. So, it doesn’t have to be either/or. It can be both/and. You can be doing something very dynamic, and yet there is that perfect stillness that was once only accessible with eyes closed in meditation or whatever. I don’t know if this is a tangent or not, but anyway, that’s the whole thing about it.

One thing I wanted to get onto is: you mentioned at one point in your book that maybe you thought, or some people think that the Twelve Step Program itself is some kind of divine gift. I don’t know whether it was channeled or somehow bequeathed to mankind by some higher intelligence. Perhaps it was more or less cognized, maybe it was the guy who studied with Carl Jung?

Tom: Yeah. Well, no. I always talk about that because that was the beginning. Now, he went back and actually met with this guy Bill W.

Rick: The founder of AA.

Tom: Yeah, AA. He and himself, Dr. Bob was one of his first Twelve Step calls. So that’s what kind of was the beginning of it. I’ve even read, I don’t know if it was in a People magazine or something, seriously, that they considered the Twelve Step Program to be one of the hundred most important spiritual movements that came out of the 19th century, or was it the 20th century? The 1900s.

Rick: Oh, I’m sure it would easily rank among the top 100. I would maybe rank it among the top 10 or something.

Tom: Yeah, right. So, the point being, writing the steps out, they went through all their stuff and they have their traditions now to protect. That’s why I don’t want to identify with any specific program. I don’t represent anything. I’m just me, doing recovery. You’ll see in my book, I don’t mention anything like that. But yeah, we do. I think it divinely came through. And it is not for everyone.

Rick: Nothing is for everyone. Except for breathing. And I don’t know if we want to go through step-by-step-by-step explaining what each of the 12 steps are. That might be a little tedious. You do that in your book anyway. But maybe you could give us the gist of it. It is really a matter of turning your individual life over to a higher power, isn’t it?

Tom: Right. And as I said, they don’t force on you what that is. The first three steps get you out of the way. The first one is that we are admitting we are powerless over this disease. The 12 steps are very similar. I hold a Buddhist recovery meditation at our house every second and fourth Sundays, and I do retreats here. The 12-step people are very attracted to the Eightfold Path of Buddhism because the Buddha, his fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path. But the first Noble Truth is just, there is suffering. There is suffering in life, and until you admit that, you can’t go on. And the first step is “I’m admitting I’m powerless over this disease, that my life is completely unmanageable.” I’m hopeless. If you don’t get to that hopeless state somewhere, then why would you even turn for help? You see what I mean? And the second step actually says, “We came to believe that a power,” it doesn’t even say God yet, it says, “We came to believe that a power greater than us could restore us to sanity.” Meaning, once again, that there has got to be this spiritual transformation that takes place in us. That we can get locked up, our wife or husband can say, “I’m leaving. If you ever use again, you’re going to lose the kids, you’re going to lose your job.” None of that matters. We always, always use again. Those ultimatums don’t touch us. We just use because we are insane. So anyway, that step kind of talks about that. The third step is, we made a decision, and the second Noble Truth is about recognizing that suffering arises from grasping and running from something.

Rick: Attachment and aversion.

Tom: Yeah, attachment and aversion. Those are the words I was looking for. So that is in line with the second step. You are seeing that there is a way out. The third step is, we made a decision to hand over this whole mess to God or to a higher power, to Buddha, to whatever you want, but something outside of us because we have never worked. And that was the third Noble Truth, about seeing the freedom, now that we can have freedom from suffering. Then, of course, the fourth Noble Truth is the whole eightfold path of right speech, all the little spiritual principles you want to live by. It looks like that is step four through twelve.

So real briefly, the fourth and fifth steps, for those who don’t know, is inventorying your life, really looking at your life, putting it on paper, going to someone whom you respect spiritually in the program or even outside the program, and just letting them know. Getting that stuff out, you knew you would never tell anyone because our secrets are what keep the disease alive. Then step six and seven are about just looking at what came out, all this stuff that we got in touch with doing our inventory, our character defects, our shortcomings. We go to this power and ask to have them removed. We ourselves are never able to do it. It’s always done by this other thing. Then eight and nine are amends. We have to start amending our behavior. We can’t just say, “I’m sorry.” It has got to be more than that. But we have to go make amends. If we owe a bunch of money, we have to be willing to pay it. If we might go to jail for making an amends, we have to be willing to keep making the amends.

The program to stay clean, Rick, has to be as feverish as our spiritual path. I am sure you have the same feeling I have. I want this spiritual path. I want to keep awakening no matter what. It’s like having your head held under the water. I think you were talking about that with somebody that I was listening to. That is a great analogy. Your head being held under the water and you are just grasping for that breath. I want this path. That is how you have to want recovery.

Rick: We will continue with the steps, because you are going through them very nicely. I just want to interject here that you would probably agree, would you not, that this is not something you can do on your own. You cannot pick up a 12-step book and do it yourself. You need to be with others.

Tom: That’s why I said we pick somebody in the program who has what we want, whom we respect, and they are called a sponsor.

Rick: That should be somebody who is really in the program. It should not be just my next-door neighbor who is a nice guy and say, “Hey, help me through these steps here.”

Tom: I sponsor guys all over the world.

Rick: You talk to them on Skype or something?

Tom: Because of Skype we do steps over the Internet. On Facebook I sometimes say, “I’m not a dharma teacher, I’m a sponsor. I’m not an inspirational speaker but I do speak at conventions.” It’s very similar, but I’m doing this to stay alive. It’s service.

Rick: Yeah, it’s your function.

Tom: We are very lucky, Rick. The people in 12-step recovery are lucky because we either have to do this spiritual life or we use again, which could be to die. It’s always there. It’s a cool thing to tell you the truth. There is always service.

Rick: You have a gun to your head.

Tom: Yeah, and we either get into service to get off our selfish, self-centered self or we are miserable.

Rick: Yeah, and as you know and as you probably discuss in your book, service is one of the most universal and widely prescribed spiritual techniques or paths.

Tom: It’s in everything.

Rick: It’s seva, selfless service.

Tom: Yeah, seva. What happened when Richard Albert, who ended up as Ram Dass, went to India and they were searching for that Maharaji they had heard about and they found him on a hillside. He was talking to a group of people and one of the Westerners said, “Maharaji, how do you find enlightenment?” He just paused a minute and he said, “Feed people, serve people.” It’s there. That is the answer. Enlightenment is a groovy thing. There is no doubt about it. It’s a groovy experience every time we wake up a little bit or have one of those experiences. But if we don’t go give selflessly every moment, what good is it? Enlightenment ends with that feeling you get. You have to go give it away. It is like, how do I know somebody is living an awakening life? Not because they told me they had an awakening, but because they are giving out unconditional love. It’s there. Once that stuff starts to happen to us, that joy that starts to bubble up, just that love, we have to go give it away.

Rick: That’s very important. I’ve been around a lot of spiritual people for decades and I know that a person can get stuck if they don’t do that. They can become narcissistic, self-centered, “My routine, my diet, my this, my that, it’s all about me,” I feel as if that is a dead end for them. Whereas you see people who are really into selfless service of some sort and they seem to be thriving. Even in many cases where they are not explicitly spiritual in the ordinary sense. You see some of these people who go out and do these wonderful things like Doctors Without Borders or whatever. It cultures their hearts so much and makes people so … I think it might have been something the hugging saint, Amma said, that if you do enough selfless service then after that, just a little bit of spiritual practice will enlighten you. You can sit on your butt for a long time without doing anything of that nature and it could be a long road. I suppose it’s different. Buddha spent plenty of time sitting on his butt and it wasn’t until he attained enlightenment that he actually went out and began teaching.

Tom: That’s what I mean. That stuff starts to happen, though.

Rick: It does, spontaneously.

Tom: You just can’t do anything. If I don’t go out and just embrace everyone … I can’t even watch the news on TV because I just start crying because there is so much suffering. The only way we can change that is by … That suffering just opens me up to suffering. Then compassion comes. Then you just want to go help others. You want to. When I was in India … Have you been to India?

Rick: Yeah, a couple of times.

Tom: You can’t even describe the poverty there. Getting off the plane at the airport is like entering a twilight zone. You are just shocked.

Rick: People sleeping on the sidewalk.

Tom: Luckily, as you know from the book, when I went to India in the early nineties, I met Mother Teresa more than once. She was very … gosh, if she was in the U.S., you couldn’t even get near her. I could go to mass every morning. I’m not a church guy, but I went to mass every morning in Calcutta because she was there, sitting in the back, not doing the service, of course. What I loved is what she said before I went to India. I learned this about Mother Teresa in her writings, that all these poor people on the street, they are begging for money. Tourists will give them money. People give them money. But she says, more than that, they want love. I made it a point. I would go out. When I was walking the streets, I would have easy access to money in my pocket. I would sit down and just go, “Namaste,” to somebody. Just sit on the sidewalk with them. Touch them, touch their shoulder, give them a hug, just try to communicate. Then, before I left, I would hand them some money. I felt that it was very moving for me. Whenever I was in a town for more than a week or so, it seemed like I would adopt. Obviously, it was because they knew I was going to give them some money, but I think they liked the love, too. I remember a mother with her baby. When she first came up to me, I just treated her like that and was very loving to her, and then gave her some money. Every time she saw me coming, she would not come up with her hand out anymore. She would come up and hook her arm in mine, or hold my hand and walk through the streets of Calcutta. It was so beautiful. That came from just opening up and touching another human being. They want that. The whole planet is just so starved for love. It’s unbelievable. We know that.

Rick: That is very sweet. As you speak, it gives me the impression and reminds me that we are really all conduits for love, for God, to whatever extent we can be. You have made a conscious choice to improve your ability to flow in that way, to improve your ability as a conduit, to make yourself a bigger pipe, so to speak, through which more love can flow. You have fine-tuned your attachment to the reservoir from which it flows.

Tom: I don’t know any of that. That sounds beautiful.

Rick:  That is metaphorical.

Tom: I know, but I just know one thing has happened to me. Over the years of this practice, I realized that it is a gift to lose yourself in others. My natural tendency may be to want to stay home some night and maybe get laid or watch a good movie with my wife, but I know I’ve got to go out. I don’t pray. My meditations are like mindfulness, just sitting and watching. When I get up, I like to take my meditation with me all day. The one thing I do pray for, I do say one prayer at the end of every meditation. It’s just, “Send someone to interfere in my life.” There were many years I could not say that.

Rick: By interfere you mean someone who you can help?

Tom: Right. Just interfere in my life. Make my life inconvenient.

Rick: Why that particular emphasis?

Tom: Because when I’m working with you, when I’m listening to you, reaching out to help you, I’m not dwelling on myself. That is the key to service, right? Service is that whole self-forgetting. We wake up and one of the biggest gifts as we wake up, the big shock is, “This isn’t even my life anymore.”

Rick: That’s an interesting thing.

Tom: That’s how I look at it.

Rick: That’s very interesting. An addict, it seems to me, is into blotting out the self. They want to just blot it out. In a way, what you are describing is another way of blotting out the self, but it’s a completely different way of doing it, which is benign, which is wholesome.

Tom: I think it’s way groovier than that.

Rick: You gain your life by losing it, as Christ put it.

Tom: Right. They all talk about it, every mystic. They also talk about the dark nights of the souls. I think this is very important to bring up on the spiritual path. If you read the journals of Mother Teresa that were revealed afterwards, it turned out, in her last forty years of life, when she became so famous with the Sisters of Charity and just dedicating her life to the poor, she had no connection with God.

Rick: So she thought.

Tom: She felt abandoned. I tell people, the guys I sponsor, “I don’t care what you feel like. I don’t care what you feel like when you wake up in the morning. What can you do for somebody else?” It’s really easy when we’re feeling love and joy inside and we’re feeling at one with our day and with life. It’s easy to go out and give to others. But what if you’re feeling crappy? What if you’re in the midst of a huge challenge yourself? All the more important to go out and give away love.

Rick: Because otherwise you are just going to wallow in it, just going to dwell on it.

Tom: So, I think that is important stuff on this path.

Rick: I was just going to say, on the other hand, there is something to be said for learning how to swim before you go diving into the ocean trying to save people. There is a value in retreating and going into a preparatory phase where you are not necessarily out there. You see some people getting into various kinds of political activism, but they haven’t really done the work on themselves to be able to do that without losing their center and without just becoming another angry voice.

Tom: I’m talking about people on the spiritual path. The people I sponsor are meditating every day. I’m talking about having that quiet time first and then looking for a way. At least it is the way I was taught in the early days, that unconditional love, that love without a price tag is the magic way to live life. You know the book, The Secret? The secret is: get out of self if you want a happy life. I really believe that. As long as I think I deserve something, God, it gets me in trouble. I suffer.

Rick: A lot of these non-dual people are harping on the theme that ultimately, there is no self, there is no individuality and so on.

Tom: That’s beautiful, I get it.

Rick: It is one level of it.

Tom: Maybe interview me in another 40 years. I’ve only been doing this 40 years, so maybe in another 40 I’ll come on and say that too. I don’t know. Right now I’m very aware that the planet needs help.

Rick: What I was going to say is that that is only half the story. It’s only a certain level of it, but very often it’s used to negate these other levels which you are talking about which need compassion and care and service. For instance, I was at a conference in California and this guy got up on the mic and he was asking this non-dual teacher about the environmental crisis. The guy was pretty much brushing him off, “That doesn’t concern me. The world is like a speck of dust. It’s nothing. It’s a loser,” and that kind of thing. Even though I respect that teacher who said that and I like the guy, I feel as if it’s not the full picture. You can’t take refuge in the absolute to the exclusion of the relative. A really integrated, balanced approach is to incorporate both, to have the foundation of stillness or silence or whatever, and yet, in a way, to take the world seriously enough that you love it and care for it as the great examples of spirituality have done, such as Jesus and so on.

Tom: His Holiness right now, here today on the planet.

Rick: Dalai Lama?

Tom: Yeah, His Holiness. What does he say his religion is? Compassion and kindness to others.

Rick: Yeah, you don’t see these guys just going around saying, “The world is an illusion, the world is an illusion.” It’s more like, “What can I do to…” Yet if you pin them down and say, “Yeah, yeah, fine, ultimately it’s an illusion, but okay, now what? Let’s go out and feed this person or help that person.” Illusory though they may ultimately be, there is a need for a real meaningful life to be of service to them.

Tom: The spiritual journey is a journey that we can’t travel by ourselves. We cannot make the commute to awakening by ourselves. Everyone is invited. The bodhisattva finds enlightenment and then makes a vow to be reborn, reborn, reborn until everyone wakes up. That is why I said earlier on, look, I’ve had profound things. Early on I found out it’s cool, but there is more. I have had my third eye open. I went to a monk one time to talk about it and he said, “Don’t get hung up on astral television.” As I described in that ten-day retreat, out of nowhere my chakras just went, “God, boom!” They just exploded right out of my third eye. I was just paralyzed and crying. It was a great experience, but at the end I finally went up to the teacher because I couldn’t even get up for a long time. I was in a ten-day retreat with 40 people and I thought he was going to turn me around and say, “Now see, if you practice diligently, this is what will happen.” No, he just whispered to me, “Don’t hang on to it. There’s more.” I love it when I sit and I get to that place of no thought and stillness. You’re in what they call the gap. I love the gap. It’s a groovy place, but I can’t make myself go. All I can do is sit and watch my breath and then go, “Uh-oh, I’m thinking.” Come back to thinking again, again, and again. If I go to the gap, it’s a great experience, but don’t hang on to your story lines. Don’t try to hang on to the bliss either. It’s all just an experience. It’s what we do with it out here. That’s what I’m obsessed with.

Rick: So, if a person listening to this has a problem with drugs or alcohol or something like that, you said in your book you don’t mention specific programs. Do they feel pretty confident to go ahead and just look up AA or how do they find a 12-step program? Should they get in touch with you and you would recommend something?

Tom: Yeah. I don’t have a website, so when you post my thing, you can post my Facebook page. You can send me instant messages. But in major cities, look, there’s AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, NA, Narcotics Anonymous, GA, Gamblers Anonymous, SLA, Sex, Love Anonymous. They go on and on. OA, Overeaters Anonymous.

Rick: They are all over the world, right?

Tom: They are all over the world.

Rick: And they all use the same basic 12 steps?

Tom: Same 12 steps. Maybe the first step is the only thing different because they’re talking about a …

Rick: Food versus alcohol versus eating.

Tom: Right. So yes, it is all over the world and they are usually in the phone book or in the newspaper, even under the religious page maybe. Hey, in the ’60s it was really anonymous. Whoever heard of it, there was not even such a thing as a treatment center in the ’60s. Now they are on every street corner. This stuff is not hard to find if you want help. I think it is a beautiful program. It is the base of my practice. I still go to meetings. I am still in a lot of service. Today what I say, I carry the same message of the 12 steps and the dharma. I love them both.

Rick: How do you support yourself financially?

Tom: Well, I was a painting contractor. Let me just say how I became that. As you probably read in the book, I think it was on one of our many guided trips. We used to go to Virginia Beach a lot. We were guided there. The Edgar Cayce Center was there. I used to come in and out of Hawaii a million times a year. On this trip, there was a group of us who got to L.A. We drove across country, got back to Virginia Beach. No money – not a cent between any of us. We had enough money for one night in a motel. We were driving down the street we looked up in Virginia Beach. There’s a motel called the Aloha Motel. We said, “Oh, my God. That is where we are supposed to be. Obviously, it’s right there. Aloha.” We spent the night there. The next day, the lady said, “Hey.” She kind of knew what it was. “We heard there was a group of hippie-looking people with Flo Bird,” she was a trippy-looking lady. She said, “Hey, if you want to stay another night, paint a room for me.” I was there for a week. That is how I became a painter. I ended up becoming a painter. Through all those days, it did not matter where I would go, I had a brush and a roller with me. I would work my way around the world. Then I started slowing down. In 2006, when I closed my companies, I had 50 employees. I was working on three different islands. Now I’m retired, but still, my son is a painting contractor. Hey, I am going to be 70 years old in February. I am still out climbing ladders. I work part-time. I just go out. It helps. My wife is a psychologist. It just helps me. I get Social Security. It is not like, “Oh, my God, God, why am I still painting at 70 years old?” It is rather, “Oh, wow, I can still do it. I can still climb the ladders.” That’s what I do.

Rick: Do you have the time to take on more people in terms of sponsorship? How do you select the people you are going to sponsor?

Tom: I have people ask me or get in touch with me. I speak at conventions and stuff. I have around 2,500 friends on Facebook. They are all probably in the program, almost every one of them. People ask me. I cannot really do real new people anymore, especially if they don’t live right here, because they need a lot of attention. I sponsor a lot of guys with even 20 years, 30 years because it is a spiritual thing. What we do is we work the steps.

Rick: So, you are kind of maxed out in terms of taking on new people.

Tom: I actually sponsor way too many guys. I listen to my heart with who asks me. It doesn’t ever say no.

Rick: Probably if you cannot take on a new one, you have somebody you can refer them to.

Tom: I am very active in all that, in service with that, and have been all over the world.

Rick: Is there anything else you would like to cover that we have not talked about?

Tom: We have not gone that long. How long have we gone?

Rick: About an hour and ten minutes.

Tom: That is probably beautiful if you think it is. Rick, I can do this all day long, and I am sure you can too.

Rick: In fact, I often say that at the end of interviews. I say, “I could talk to you all day.”

Tom: Nothing else is important anymore. Look, I have my soul mate. I have been married for 28, 29 years to my wife. We are in the middle of a beautiful rainforest. Sometime, maybe I will take my iPhone around on Skype with you and show you. It is like a retreat center. I have Buddhas in the yard that took forklifts to bring in. It is just a lovely place, yet I know that it is all impermanent. There is nothing else I want than this. I was talking to a teacher yesterday. I am using a Dharma teacher right now who is local here. We are going to be doing the third day-long course here at the house in September. He comes in and does it. A beautiful guy named Gavin Harrison. He turned me on to Adyashanti, in fact. He gave me his book, The Way of Liberation. I was sitting with him yesterday, and I used that analogy. I said, there is just nothing else I want anymore. I have done it all. I have made tons of money. I have lost it all. I am living simply now. What else is there but the spiritual practice?

I just want to add one thing about meditation. I think I heard you say that you meditate three hours a day. Even I went, “Whoa, whoa.” No, it’s beautiful. When I am on retreat, that one ten-day retreat I did was a Goenka retreat. I call that the boot camp of retreats, because that is 12 hours a day on the cushion, no mindful walking. I do other three and four-day retreats. I always try to do a couple a year, one a year. Then I do day-longs all the time, where I do the whole day, nine to 4.30, with mindful walking and meditation. Normally, I meditate 30 to 45 minutes in the morning, whatever appears. Sometimes I still go to work and paint. I have to leave the house by 6, so I am up between 3 and 4 to do practice.

Then, here is what is important, and I think you’ll agree with this. That sitting period is beautiful, and it starts my day off. I cannot even tell you the last time I missed a day. What is important is to take it with me. When I get up off the cushion, to take that awareness of being present with me the whole day. There are many times I’m climbing up a 28-foot ladder, and I’m going, “Climbing the ladder, climbing the ladder, climbing the ladder,” being present. I think that is the important thing, to take that presence with you all day long. I spend the whole day coming back to my breath.

Rick: That becomes second nature after a while, doesn’t it? It’s like when you take a shower in the morning, you don’t have to go around all day thinking, “I’m clean. I’m still clean. That shower really got me clean.” The effects of the shower just last. It’s a poor analogy because you do get dirty after a while.

Tom: Being present does take work, but it becomes second nature now. I’m in the present moment. I’ve told this to people just from years of meditation now. If I wake up during the night, sometimes even if you are switching positions, you come awake a minute, or you have to get up and pee or something like that. The minute I even turn over, the first thing that happens is I go to my breath. I’m in my breath, right there, even just for that tenth of a second before I go back to sleep. But that is like you. You have been meditating over 40 years. I share this with newer people.

My second book, in fact, that I am in the middle of writing is called “May I Sit With You? A Simple Approach to Meditation.” It’s going to have, well, I’m already on Chapter 32 and I’m only a third of the way through it. It’s going to have a lot of chapters, just short, a page here, two pages long, just addressing everything about meditation that comes up. It is a very wonderful thing. It is all I talk about, all I write about.

Rick: Cool. Another thought that occurred to me is that one can turn one’s weakness into a strength. It is as we were saying earlier, where addicts want to just blot out the self. The flip side of that is through service, the self gets blotted out, but in a wholesome way. You lose yourself in a good way by dedicating yourself to others. I was also thinking that I have a bit of an obsessive tendency. Friends will tell you, my wife will tell you. Yet in a way, that has turned out to be an asset, because it is like when I learned to floss, I don’t know, 40 years ago. I don’t think I’ve missed a day of flossing ever since.

Tom: My dentist wishes I had done that. I can’t seem to get into it.

Rick: I heard the lecture and I thought, “Okay, that totally makes sense. I’m going to just do this every day.”

Tom: I love it.

Rick: The same with meditation. When I learned it, I thought, “Oh my God, this is so valuable. It’s having such a good effect on me. Look where my life was going beforehand. I’m just going to do this no matter what.” I’ve never missed one, at least twice a day all those years. The reason I’m bringing this up is that maybe people are listening to this who have an addictive personality which might contain obsessive elements. You can actually turn that to your advantage by just being obsessive about something that is positive.

Tom: Right. I agree. In recovery you have to be obsessive now, not to ever use again. My clean time is really important. I stopped eating meat in 1966. I have never eaten meat or fish since. That is, I would not take a bite of meat no more than I would drink a sip of beer. Meditation, I don’t want to ever miss it. It’s not as if it is a struggle. It’s just so natural to come downstairs and do it. Our whole house is a meditation house now. There are statues everywhere. My meditation room is a meditation room. That is where I go and light my candle. I am very airy-fairy about it. You don’t have to be that way. I have candles and crystals and I light incense. I have my cushion that I sit on. I actually still even have Yogananda on the altar. He was one of my first guides that I really did that. These are positive obsessions. Even with that, even my teacher right now says, “Once in a while, don’t go to the meditation room.”

Rick: So, you don’t become dependent on it.

Tom: Yeah, because meditation is flexible.

Rick: Yeah, you should be able to meditate in an airport, which I’m sure you have done a hundred times.

Tom: Oh my God. Long flights, I call it airplane sitting meditation. It’s like being at a retreat. You’re stuck for six to eight hours in one chair. It’s a beautiful thing.

I really want to thank you for even giving me this opportunity. When I saw the people you have on your show, I thought, “Oh my God, what am I doing? I’m just this little recovery guy, but all these non-dual people, they are really advanced.”

Rick: The slogan of my show, the subtitle is “Conversations with Spiritually Awakening People.” You don’t have to be famous to be spiritually awakening or anything like that. I read your book and I just thought your heart shines through it. Your sincerity, your earnestness, they all come through loud and clear. It’s a very well-written book. In fact, I’m wondering how a high school dropout became such a good writer.

Tom: You are reading about the fifth rewrite of that. Look at the first one. I showed this good friend of mine who is a Dharma teacher and who also has his major and master’s in English. He has a couple of books out. I showed him my first, because he knows my story. He has heard me speak. He took my first draft of a few chapters and he just said, “Look, Tom, you can’t just tell. You’ve got to show, too.” Then I started reading some books on writing and I got the whole thing. You have to describe, you have to use metaphors, you have to do that stuff. It’s embarrassing on Facebook, because I don’t know how to spell correctly. I don’t know where commas go or where you start a new paragraph, or where periods go, so I just kind of make it up as I go. Right now, as I finish a chapter, I just send it to my ex-wife, my first wife. She lives over here and she is just a really brilliant person. My own wife can do that, too, but she can’t come home and edit my book. I send it to her, she red-marks it up, puts the periods and commas in the right places. I just do all the words and get the message across.

I learned how to write by just writing. I really got it that you walk into a room. You just can’t say, “I walk into a room.” The room had curtains. What color were the curtains? They had purple curtains. You have to bring the reader in. That is what I really tried to do in the book. If you have looked at the Amazon page, there are about 45 star reviews and a lot of them say, “I don’t read, and I picked up your book and couldn’t put it down.” I hear that over and over. I just had somebody contact me just a week or two ago who wants to do a screenplay. He said it should be a movie.

Rick: Yeah, well I read, but I don’t have a lot of time to do it. I thought this was a really interesting book and that is why I invited you on. It was a lot of fun.

Tom: Thank you so much.

Rick: Yeah, I recommend people read it. From the page I’ll create on Batgap for this interview, I’ll link to your Facebook page and anything else you want me to link to.

Tom: I don’t know, can you put the Amazon page?

Rick: Yeah, I’ll put a link to the Amazon page.

Tom: Since I don’t have a web page.

Rick: No, that’s all right. I’ll link right to the book if people want to get it. I guess it is in both Kindle and physical versions.

Tom: It is. Oh, yeah.

Rick: And link to your Facebook page, be a good friend, you’ll get in touch. I really hope that each of these conversations that we have on Buddha at the Gas Pump kind of appeals to a slightly different niche. But as we were discussing much earlier, there is definitely a niche out there that is addicted to one thing or another. I hope we have touched some lives through this conversation, perhaps even saved a few. It will give people some hope and encouragement and a direction to take that will get them out of that mess.

Tom: Beautiful.

Rick: Let me just make a couple of concluding remarks that I always make. First of all, let me thank you again, Tom. I really appreciate having the conversation with you. You are a wonderful guy, with a good heart. It’s enjoyable to meet you. But I just want to say for those listening, that this has been one in an ongoing series. As Tom mentioned, he has watched some of the other ones. There are about 180-something of them now, and I intend to keep doing it. If you would like to check out the ones that have already been done or be notified of new ones as they come along, go to www.BATGAP.com. You’ll find alphabetical and chronological indices of all the interviews done so far. You will also find a place where you can sign up to be notified each time a new one is posted. There is a chat group that develops along with each interview, in case you want to get in there and talk about some of the stuff we have been discussing. There is a “Donate” button, which I kind of brush over quickly when I conclude these interviews, but I do rely upon people clicking on it if they have the ability to do so. There is an audio podcast. I know a lot of people can’t sit in front of their computers for hours and watch videos, but you can subscribe to the podcast and listen while you are painting houses or whatever.

Thanks for listening or watching. We’ll see you next week. The next interview is going to be with an old friend of mine named Eric Isen, who is one of these Oneness teachers. There is this couple in India, Bhagavan and Amma, and there is this whole oneness movement. They give Diksha, which is a sort of a Shaktipat or something. I don’t know a heck of a lot about it, but I’ll have an in-depth interview with Eric here, personal. He’s going to come to my house. He’s visiting town. I am looking forward to that. See you then.