Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look at the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by appreciative listeners and viewers, so you know if you feel like it has benefited you or might be benefiting the world and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of batgap.com. We appreciate your support. My guest today is William Meader. William is an influential and respected teacher of esoteric philosophy. He has established an international reputation for his gift as a communicator of this spiritual philosophy. His extensive teaching program includes a diverse array of workshops and lectures devoted to nurturing a deeper understanding of the spiritual path, both from an individual and global perspective. William lives in Oregon and presents regularly workshops in the US, Europe, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. So welcome William. Thank you.
William: Good to be here Rick.
Rick: Yeah, good to have you. So you and I are probably roughly the same age. Before we started the recording you mentioned that you’ve done quite a few different things on your spiritual path. I mean how did you get started on it to begin with?
William: Well I guess really my beginning point was when I was about 16 years old I went to a funeral, actually a funeral, my grandfather’s funeral, and at that funeral had an interesting conversation with another family member who mentioned that I started asking about afterlife and that sort of thing and they recommended that I read a particular book and I did and in that book there was mention of meditation but at 16 I didn’t know what that was, but I was real curious and so I decided to explore that right away and I found Transcendental Meditation, TM, and so I began to meditate at the age of 16 and for many years I was quite diligent with the 20 minutes per day meditations and so that kind of was the beginning point Rick, and then it took off from there.
Rick: Yeah, it was the beginning for a lot of people and so just just to give us a quick sketch perhaps of you know some of the highlights of the various things that you’ve been through over all these decades.
William: Sure, sure. Well in my early 20s I also got involved in something called The Church of Religious Science, also called the Science of Mind, which is part of the New Thought Movement and I was involved in that way of looking at things for quite some time, a few years. The philosophy behind that is you are the product of your thinking and in the middle of that I discovered the Course of Miracles, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, and so I decided to dive into that as well and study and meditate along that approach. In the interim I did some yoga, did a variety of Eastern, a lot of reading from an Eastern perspective and I ended up finding Theosophy quite by accident. I actually discovered the work of Alice Bailey and so much of my background today is really rooted in that discovery and that’s actually the foundation, Theosophy and the Bailey work that I come from.
Rick: As you went from thing to thing did you kind of feel like, well this thing isn’t really doing it for me or it sort of did it for a while and now it doesn’t seem to be and I think I need to find something different? Or you know were you moving from a sense of dissatisfaction as you went from thing to thing or was it more a sense of, all right I’ve pretty much learned whatever this thing has to teach me and now I want to move on to the next chapter as one might do in going from grade to grade in school?
William: Yeah, well I suppose there’s a little of that but it was really much more about, I still look at things like the Course in Miracles for instance and think it’s an incredibly valuable system and I have no doubt that there’s more that it could teach me. So it’s not like, oh I got it all from that and now I’m moving on. It’s just when I make a move like that, which again hasn’t happened for many many years, but when I have made a move like that it was more supplemental initially until I, it wasn’t like end one thing and begin another, it was more of a overlap period and found myself more and more engaged in the new and less and less engaged in the old.
Rick: Sure, yeah I can relate. And who was Alice Bailey?
William: Alice Bailey was a woman, a British woman, who lived earlier part of the 20th century and she was a woman that wrote for nearly 30 years and she took dictation from a great Eastern master who is called the Master Jwal Kul, also the nickname is The Tibetan, and so really that’s the foundation of much of the work. She’s actually part of a stream that has to do with Theosophy, which was originally came to light, you might say, in the late 1800s with Helena Blavatsky, the great Russian mystic, and Alice Bailey became a kind of next step or next generation of understanding that profound body of work.
Rick: Okay, was she channeling this Tibetan master or actually communicating with him in the flesh or what? Well it’s kind of a yes-yes to that. It’s channeling but not in the same way that you see it in popular culture today. She was called an amanuensis, she took dictation from The Tibetan and although it was telepathic, it wasn’t one of those situations where the belief that an out-of-incarnate being is speaking to me, it is actually The Tibetan was in incarnation and they developed that capacity while he was in form.
Rick: He was like living in the Himalayas or something? Yeah, in Tibet. Did they ever meet in person?
William: There’s conflicting stories about that but I would say probably not, but I can’t say for sure.
Rick: Okay, just curious. So you’ve written a rather extensive book, what was the title of it again? Shine Forth. Shine Forth, The Soul’s Magical Destiny. And there’s a lot of knowledge in it and I want to ask to start with, how do you know what you present in that book? Is it because Alice Bailey said it? Is it because you yourself personally have experientially verified it, some mixture of the two points or what?
William: I would say it’s a mixture. I mean obviously I have a lot of academic background in this work and that’s been a rich experience but also a lot of meditative experience over the years and so as with any philosophy you have to figure out, can I live it? Does it really work in the real life? And yet the esoteric philosophy is so vast, so intricate, so amazingly whole that every step of the way you validate more of it through your own experience. So in a way everything is theoretical unless there’s some validation experientially. But it supports both my mind as well as my intuitive sense and to me the greatest truths come when both the mind and the intuition are in agreement on something and in Hinduism that’s called buddhi-manasic consciousness. Buddhi is intuition, manas is mind. And so anything that I claim I know experientially is because it’s buddhi-manasically realized within me.
Rick: Yeah, I think probably a lot of people can relate to that if you think about it. I mean for instance if we take the point of reincarnation, some people that listen to this show don’t think that that’s really a thing that happens. Personally it makes a lot of sense to my mind and intuitively it feels right, it makes a lot of sense. So I think maybe I have a buddhi-manasic orientation to that phenomenon, you know, and just to use that as a case in point or an example.
William: It’s a great example, great example.
Rick: Yeah. And then there’s also some evidence of it. I mean if you look at all the little kids who remember being a World War II fighter pilot or something and can name the airplane and exactly what ship they were flying off of and all kinds of details, you know, and then it gets corroborated.
William: Well, and there’s esoteric philosophy clearly recognizes the truth of reincarnation and has a wide understanding of it. It’s rich, it’s wonderful and it does both intuitively and intellectually make sense. Yeah, yeah.
Rick: So you know, you just alluded to The Tibetan master and in your book you also mention Christ a lot and I guess my question is, is esoteric philosophy largely of Eastern origin, you know, Vedic or pre-Vedic or whatever, Tibetan, or is there really no sort of East-West when it comes to this and that, you know, Christ and any of the great masters wouldn’t really ascribe their knowledge to a particular geographic location.
William: Sometimes I think you’re right. I think sometimes the East-West divide is actually more human contrivance than anything, but esotericism is often viewed as kind of a Western idea, but certain streams of esotericism are much more Western in their language and their way than Eastern. One of the reasons I like the Alice Bailey work so much is because although it is Western in many ways it’s almost equally true that it’s Eastern. So yeah, I would call it Western philosophy or esotericism strongly colored by Eastern thought.
Rick: Yeah, and actually I always like to expand it out. I particularly do this if I’m ever accosted by a religious fundamentalist, I start talking astronomy, you know, and about how many earth-like planets there are in our galaxy and how many galaxies there are in the universe and all. When you start contemplating that, the whole East-West thing on this little speck of dust seems rather irrelevant.
William: It really does, it’s so true.
Rick: So if you were stuck with me in an airport waiting to get on a plane and you had about five minutes and I were curious and we weren’t assigned to adjacent seats and this was your only chance to talk to me, what would you want to convey to me?
William: Well, I’m glad it’s you because it would also be very contingent upon who it is.
Rick: Yeah.
William: So assuming it’s somebody that I’m sensing is on the path as opposed to somebody not yet on the path.
Rick: Which most of the people listening to this I would say are.
William: So I guess in five minutes I would say that look, I think that one of the things that all of us have to realize is that internally there’s two of us in there, so to speak. There’s your day-to-day consciousness which is your personality consciousness and then there’s a higher, wiser part of yourself, that we start to sense when we wake up and it’s a higher prompting and it’s both got an intuitive quality to it as well as a wisdom quality to it and that’s coming into rapport with the more eternal part of you, the soul itself. And so that recognize that you as a human being are essentially internally dual, you have a higher consciousness and a lower consciousness and that higher consciousness is the thing you are more and more evolving toward and that requires that the lower consciousness become increasingly cooperative as an agent on support of the higher. So the personality, the destiny of the personality, the destiny of your day-to-day consciousness is to be the outer garment used by the soul to make an uplifting contribution to the betterment of something beyond yourself because the soul in each of us is governed by several laws but one of the laws is the so-called law of service. Every soul when it’s awakening through the personality, every soul wants to express through that personality, it wants to do it without the personality getting in the way and by the way that’s the challenge and in so doing it wants to make an uplifting contribution to the betterment of something beyond its individuality and that service and I would say as part of that five-minute discussion I would say that we are living in an incredibly transitional time as a humanity and that humanity itself is going through a crisis of transformation and that an individual’s capacity, this person I’m speaking to, that person’s capacity to bring the best of them forward in service to the larger whole, there is no time in my life anyway where the need for the best of each of us to come forward is now, it is now, given the magnitude of what’s trying to happen in the collective of humanity. So I would say something like that.
Rick: Nice. Your mention of the collective automatically triggers a whole grab bag of questions in my mind that I want to get into with you, but before we, and we’ll get to that somewhere in the course of our conversation, hopefully at length and in depth, but I just want to ask you, so what you just said about the soul and the sort of the two-part nature of our makeup, would it be fair to say that it’s due to the sort of the density of the Earth plane that we have this problem that perhaps before coming here everything is free and clear and we’re a lot wiser and have a broader perspective, but then when we get into this density, which reminds me of a line from that movie, never mind, Back to the Future, remember you are my density. He meant to say destiny, but when we get into this sort of dense field of the Earthly life that we forget a lot and the name of the game is to somehow remember it or reawaken to our full potential while yet living in such a sort of a dense world.
William: Yeah, I mean in principle I would agree with all of that. I would say that it is said that the soul in each of us is archetypally designed, in fact there are seven types of souls, but each soul has a fixed archetypal pattern within it.
Rick: Throughout its history?
William: Throughout its history, but the goal of evolution is for the soul to increasingly express that archetype through the personality and so incarnation is actually viewed as a necessary process to step by step transform the lower self so that it becomes effectively the expressing agency for that archetype. We could look at it this way, what is spiritual evolution? It’s the recognition of the potentiality of the soul gradually and incrementally actualizing itself through form. When I say form I mean mental, emotional and physical and when the fullness of the soul can be expressed through that outer triple garment, mental, emotional, physical, without distortion at all times under any conditions, that’s enlightenment.
Rick: Do you feel like that there’s an endgame to this, that there’s sort of an enlightenment with a big E that one eventually arrives at and that there’s no further development possible or no regression from that development?
William: Oh heavens no, not at all, there’s no end, not realistically from our perspective. I mean you know when I do presentations around the world I might talk about the Buddha and the Christ and I might look at and you know they’re considered to be seventh degree initiates and that’s the whole story in itself.
Rick: Which we may get into.
William: And from our perspective that is enlightenment, that’s full enlightenment, that’s perfection and from our perspective that’s true.
Rick: How about from their perspective? From their perspective they’re just beginning a whole new regime, they’re aspirants, they’re beginners in a larger evolutionary regime which was what we call the regime of the solar logos. We are evolving within a regime which is called the planetary logos, the entity that ensouls our whole planet. Our planet is a god in a way and when we talk about the great masters like the Christ and the Buddha we’re talking about beings that have reached the high point of evolution within our planetary system but our planet as you rightly point out is just a speck of dust within a larger system and this gets into the whole subject of Hylozoism which we touched on before you and I got online.
Rick: Great. There’s so many gems along the way that we could go off on a tangent into any one of them and I would lose track of the sequential unfoldment of this but I want to, that’s definitely something I also want to come back to and those listening if you want to ask a question at some point go to the upcoming interviews page at batgap.com and look at the bottom and you’ll see a form through which you can submit your question and if you hear something interesting that we’ve been talking about and we don’t seem to be coming back to it feel free to remind us. Yeah, this thing about the Buddha and the Christ being beginners at their level, there’s something in the Vedic cosmology about Kalas which there’s supposed to be 16 Kalas or levels of evolution and supposedly human beings occupy the fourth through the eighth, so even the brightest of the bright were only at the eighth and then above that there are eight more levels to which they could rise.
William: Well, there is it, you know, different systems have different numbers of rungs of the ladder and divide the pie in a different way, but fundamentally it is hierarchical and it is a ladder that when you get to the end of the ladder you realize it’s the bottom of another ladder.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to play devil’s advocate on behalf of some people whom I actually don’t agree with but who bring up points such as the ones I’m about to bring up, I want to ask you a few questions. You know, one is that some people who are quite highly respected in the spiritual realm in one way or another don’t even acknowledge the notion that there’s some kind of a soul because they say that ultimately there’s no one home, there is no person, there is no entity in there and therefore to them the notion of reincarnation is absurd, the notion that, you know, somebody like Sam Harris who’s in a way devoted his life to spirituality but for him, but he was also an avowed atheist, would say that, and I just listened to a recording of him the other day, would say that when you die that’s it, lights out, and that all the talk of religions of there being something that happens after you die is just wishful thinking to avoid the sort of the horror of the termination of our existence. So I don’t know if you’d spend a lot of time talking to people who think that way but if you had to, if you’re stuck in the airport with one of those people, what would you say?
William: Well, I would say that you know that question, that comment you’re making is rooted in the most fundamental question, which is this, is consciousness the product of biology or does consciousness inform biology or is consciousness primary and biology arises from it?
Rick: Right. And the atheist will say biology is the source of consciousness. Many mystical traditions will say no, consciousness is transcendent to biology and that biology is an outer instrument. Esotericism would say actually there’s truth on both sides. The truth on both sides is this, when we talk about personality consciousness, your day-to-day concrete thinking, your emotional experiences, the experiences that arise from the physical dimension of life through sensation and outer activity, that’s what conditions personality consciousness, as well as even genetic attributes. When we look at that,
Rick: as well as what you had for lunch, you know.
William: Yeah, and then the atheist is absolutely correct because largely lower consciousness is indeed conditioned by the biology and the social conditioning. Esotericism would say that there’s a part of you that is transcendent to that and we call that soul and beyond the soul there’s even another structure called the monad, which is another subject, okay. But that soul is the sum total of acquired wisdom that you have garnered over countless incarnations and that instrument or that what we call the causal body, the holder of that wisdom from life to life to life to life, that piece is not conditioned by the physical incarnation, it’s transcendent to it. So one of the beauties of the esoteric philosophy, it’s often not an either/or but a both answer to many, many things.
Rick: Yeah, and I think one of the, you’ve probably heard of Nisargadatta Maharaj, that great sage from Mumbai, but one of his statements was that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity, that you can it doesn’t have to be either or both and, it can be both and, there’s a larger basket into which both things can fit. And of course there’s a simple analogy for what you just said, which is the radio. I mean if you smash the radio with a hammer, it can’t play music anymore, but doesn’t mean that the electromagnetic field is not still there and that other radios can’t detect the fluctuations in it and transmit music.
William: Right, right, and if you’re tuning that radio and if it’s tuned well, perfect, it’s a perfect expression of the transmission, but if it’s tuned a little off, it’s a little off and so it’s like the whole system is designed to transform the lower self so that it can become more well-tuned, that radio becomes tuned to the soul’s electromagnetic field, you might say.
Rick: Yeah, and one limitation to that metaphor is that a radio station doesn’t send out individual packets of information destined to reach a particular radio, it just transmits and then any radio within its range can pick up that transmission, whereas here we’re saying that in addition to consciousness being a ubiquitous field, there are sort of individual expressions which you’re referring to as the soul which go from life to life and evolve as they do so.
William: Yeah, except that here again it’s a both not an either/or because you’re quite right in the case that we’re talking about the causal body, the soul is a unique agency, however there’s also the greater life that your soul is just a cell within, that greater life has a much vaster signal you might say and much more encompassing the soul of humanity for instance, is a much vaster signal that would be more akin to a radio station you might say, broadcasting to everybody, every radio.
Rick: So you’ve probably heard the absurd argument that you know anatomists have cut open bodies and have never found any soul in there and so some people actually use that to deny that there is any such thing, and we say that you’ve never found the Beatles by opening up a radio, but that leads to the question, well what is the soul actually made of? If it’s going from life to life, it implies that there’s some little cluster of something that goes somewhere or stays somewhere once this body dies, hangs out and then comes back into another one, so you know what is the substance of it?
William: Oh what a great question Rick, great question. Okay, so it’s been long understood in ancient esotericism you have something called a causal body, it’s just as you have a physical body, you have an emotional body, you have a mental body, beyond that deeper than that there’s this thing called the causal body and it is called the causal body because it’s your body of causes and it’s the container that is holding two things that we in the end call soul consciousness, it’s holding the sum total of acquired wisdom over countless incarnations and it’s holding a profound sense of lofty almost Christ-like love and when I use the word Christ and you brought the word up earlier I don’t mean it in a Christian sense, I mean the principle of love and wisdom and that that your soul is the Christ in you and that that causal body is holding that vibration. Now that causal body is what is moving from one incarnation to the next to the next to the next, each incarnation that causal body is being enriched by the experiences of the previous incarnation and more stored wisdom is being stocked into that causal body every incarnation, so every incarnation you have more stored wisdom contained in that instrument. Now there’s a it is considered substantial, it’s interesting that you bring that term up substantial in as much as it’s found on the higher mental plane, the causal body is found on the higher mental plane, the abstract mental plane we are told. However, it’s filled with Christ-like love, so one of the things to understand about the causal body and your soul consciousness is that it’s both an agency of lofty love and higher mind. A lot of times people think that the soul is about love, esotericism would say that’s only half the part, half of it. The soul is both an agency of lofty love and wise mind. In fact there’s a whole mythology of how does that causal body form and it’s, there’s a mythology about it called the coming of the solar angels, but it’s said to be substantial and in the sense that it’s made up of higher mental living substance and in that sense it’s substantial, but it too in the long run is only temporary. You will utilize your causal body as a function of your evolution for thousands of incarnations, but the day will come, the day will come when all of the content of that causal body is now successfully able to express itself through the lower self unimpeded without distortion and that’s what I meant by enlightenment. We call that the fourth initiation when everything that the causal body can express through that lower garment has been achieved, the purification has been achieved and also simultaneously that’s when karma comes to an end and therefore reincarnation is no longer a necessity. We could call that enlightenment and then at that point there’s a letting go of the causal body and there’s a whole kind of science in terms of how that happens depending upon the the ray your soul is on, the type of soul you are. That too is another subject, but yeah anyway so it’s a kind of a long answer to your question that it is substantial and it is made up of higher mental substance filled with Christ-like love.
Rick: Yeah, so higher mental substance, I’m familiar with the concept of subtle matter, if you want to call it matter, and that of celestial or astral beings whose bodies are not comprised of physical matter in the Earthly sense but who nonetheless have bodies and which are comprised of more subtle substance of some kind and so perhaps what the soul is comprised of something along those lines. Also the thing you said about karma all being finished and burned up or resolved and not needing to reincarnate, would it be possible to still reincarnate in order to serve some particular role or function?
William: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, so that’s a two-part question.
William: Yeah, in this philosophy there’s a whole section called the higher way of evolution and there’s some intricacies to it that aren’t important, just understand that the day comes in some future incarnation for all of us when we finally reach that fourth initiation which means I no longer have personal karma etched into the vibrational quality of my causal body any longer, I’ve worked it through and it’s adjusted at all, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have relationship to collective karma. In fact, this higher way of evolution that I’m mentioning, there are said to be seven paths in ancient literature about this and one of them is called the path of Earth service or in Hinduism, the East they might call it the way of the Bodhisattva, okay, but it’s the same idea to stay until the last weary pilgrim comes home and that so a choice can be made to deliberately incarnate to continue a piece of work on behalf of your deeper call, but most don’t actually, most move on to another regime.
Rick: Yeah, and I would assume that the decision to do that is not governed by any kind of narrow individual consideration, but is really one is so in tune with the divine consciousness or cosmic awareness or whatever you want to call it, that at that point it’s just like wherever the need is, it’s determined by some vast intelligence that’s governing the universe and one just serves accordingly.
William: Well, kind of, yeah, at least as it’s conveyed in this philosophy is that at that point it is said that the decision of which way to go is 100% free choice and then it’s also said that it’s predestined.
Rick: Yeah.
William: So it’s free choice and predestined and so there’s another paradox that is part of the journey.
Rick: Yeah, which brings up another question, you know, these people who say that there is no actual individual soul or any such thing or any person in there, also often say there’s no free will and that, you know, we’re governed by our genetics and our, I don’t know what, karma or something, and that it may appear that we have choice but we in fact don’t, and they even cite, some of them even cite, you know, neurophysiological studies in which the impulse to do a thing is detected through instruments before one is even aware that one is about to do the thing. Do you have any comment on that?
William: Well, okay, so free will versus what philosophy would call determinism. Again, esotericism has what I think is a rich answer and the answer is both. Again, let’s put it this way, I’m going to use my hands, I hope you can see me okay here. I can. Let’s say up represents widening fields of consciousness as you evolve, okay, so wherever you are on the path it’s the mean point of where your resting consciousness is deep within. Okay, now you have relatively complete free will from whatever that place is downward through your system and life, but you have no free will when it comes to your relationship to the greater life and you’re a cell within a larger entity, back to Hylozoism, which I know you’re going to want to ask about, but you and I are cells within a larger living system and that entity is evolving too and whatever it’s doing we have no choice. We are just constituent parts of its evolution. In that case it’s predetermined, it’s determinism, you have no free choice. So again it’s both.
Rick: Yeah, so to take a perhaps absurd example, maybe more of an illustration than an actual factual thing, let’s say you know a liver cell has a choice of what to do within its domain as a liver cell, but it doesn’t have any choice about whether you’re going to go and play tennis or not, that’s just not within its realm of influence.
William: That’s a beautiful example, exactly, exactly, and that’s exactly what Hylozoism is about and indeed this would just be a good time, you wanted to talk about that. I do, I want to ask you one follow-up question about something you said and then let’s get into that, and that is that you were talking about how one accumulates wisdom and knowledge and experience as one goes from life to life. What if you screw up, what if you’re a mass murderer or rapist or you know some you’ve really done some bad things in this life, can you regress or actually are you just still progressing and learning lessons the hard way?
William: Great question. Well, there might appear to be regression but not nearly to the extent that some sects of Hinduism would suggest. You know, the idea that you regress back to the animal kingdom so the cow is grandma. Esotericism doesn’t believe in any kind of trans… that’s called… oh there is a term for that, I’ve forgotten it, I’m sorry. Forgotten it, no worries. Oh, the transmigration of the soul.
Rick: Yeah.
William: Anyway, the key is to understand that it would be nice if evolution were like this, kind of a slope upward over many lives, but it isn’t, it’s like this.
Rick: Right, it’s a sine wave that’s fluctuating but going, for the sake of audio listeners, a sine wave that’s fluctuating but trending upward over time.
William: Yeah, so when we look at an individual or we look at the collective of humanity, and now in human history is a good time to consider that too, that there are times when there’s a downward motion through wrong choice, through difficulty, through crisis, through a variety of things, that leads to what we would look at as saying, wow, that looks regressive.
Rick: Yeah.
William: But it’s only when you look at that within a short view, so much of the path has to do with pulling yourself back to see a larger picture, and when you see a larger picture with an individual or society, and you pull, let’s say you pull your, with the individual you pull yourself back to think of many lives, or for society you think of centuries rather than the last five years, okay, what you see is that there are times when there is a downward turn, and with the short vision, the narrow vision, it looks like it’s all falling apart, and but with the pullback vision you realize that yes, it is a downward turn, it is a downward turn but still within a larger upward trend, and that’s the key to understand this, and that’s a that applies to an individual, to a group, to a nation, to humanity as a whole.
Rick: Yeah, so yeah, I think everybody gets that, feel free to send in questions if you don’t, but it’s like if there is, if we look at the universe as a whole and kind of conclude that there’s an evolutionary trajectory to it, that word is always hard to say, then you know, asteroids might destroy inhabited planets, and all kinds of nasty things might happen, stars will explode, but there’s actually in the big, big picture, the universe’s eye view of it, there’s all these things are necessary for the continued evolution into more and more complex life forms, which are more and more capable of expressing that divine intelligence that gave rise to the whole thing in the first place.
William: Yeah, what’s flashing in my mind right now Rick is Kahlirl Gibran and the Prophet, maybe you’ve read that, I’m sure many people have, years ago, and I paraphrase where he says something like, to judge one by their failures is to reckon the power of the ocean by the frailty of its foam.
Rick: That’s good. Yeah, sort of gets at the same idea, I think. Yeah, so there’s a couple things we want to discuss here, and I think they’re probably related, I don’t think, I think there are two different things, but correct me if I’m wrong, one is Hylozoism, which as I understand it is sort of the systems within systems within systems, you know, greater and greater, like Russian dolls, larger and larger systems containing smaller systems, and the other thing is the nature of society and what’s happening in it and to it, and the significance, as you were saying earlier, of people who are on a spiritual path and the role they may be playing in today’s world, which you want to tackle first.
William: Let’s go with Hylozoism first. Okay, good. So it’s an interesting term, and maybe for the sake of your audience let me just spell it out, because people, it’s a new word for a lot of people, it’s spelled H-Y-L-O-Z or Z- -ism, a zoeism, sorry, Z-O-ism. It’s also called the Hylozoistic principle, and actually I believe it was Pythagoras that first presented it as a kind of philosophic doctrine, but it’s this idea that every unit of life is a cell within a vaster unit of life. Every unit of life is nested within a larger living entity that in itself is evolving. So when I speak of Hylozoism, I often like to speak of it by giving kind of a metaphoric example, and you kind of brought one up when you talked about the liver cell, but if I look at a cell in my body, let’s say it’s a cell in my hand, from an esoteric point of view that cell is an entity, it’s alive, it’s a unit of consciousness, infinitesimal without a doubt, but it’s a unit of consciousness.
Rick: From a biological point of view it is not only esoteric, I mean a biologist would probably agree with everything you just said. I don’t know about the consciousness part, but definitely it’s alive and it’s extremely complex. I mean I’ve heard the complexity of a cell compared to that of a Tokyo or a modern city, it’s so complex. But anyway, continue.
William: Yeah, no, you’re quite right. I mean if you’ve ever studied cellular biology, it is an amazing thing, and it’s considered a life unit. Again, its consciousness is so remotely minuscule that it’s not surprising that people would find that it is that consciousness at all, but we would say yes on a minuscule level, and yet it’s just a cell within a larger entity called me and you. But you and I are just cells within a vaster entity as well, and that entity is humanity as a whole.
Rick: And we don’t have to jump all the way to humanity, do we? I mean we could say we’re cells within a community consciousness which actually has some kind of autonomous nature to it, and then within a national consciousness which has some kind of autonomous nature to it and so on. And this is not just sort of metaphorical, we’re saying that there’s an actual being of some sort that is comprised of these smaller units.
William: That’s right, that’s exactly right. I just jumped up to humanity. Yeah, you’re right, there are family units, there are groups, a nation, a nation is an entity. The United States, Germany, all the countries in the world are entities, and they have a soul, and they have a personality, and they are struggling to transform their lower in support of their higher, just like you and me. And the same is true with all of humanity, and today humanity, the soul of humanity, is trying to express itself through the personality of humanity, and a lot of tension is arising because of that. That gets into your next question. But taking it further, just to give you perspective, all of humanity collectively as an entity is a unit of consciousness within a vaster entity, and that’s the planetary logos. Now that’s the being that ensouls the whole planet, which is a god to us in a way. And each kingdom of nature is just a layer of its consciousness evolving through form. Now and uniquely what’s so interesting about the human kingdom is we were told in ancient literature that the entire human kingdom is the throat chakra to that entity. I’d like to invite you, everybody listening, to think about that for a minute. The sum total of all human consciousness on this planet is this vibration to that entity. Now of course that would beg the question, what’s the function of a throat center? Because to really get at that question is to really understand what it means to be living as a human being. What does it mean to evolve within the human kingdom? And the implication is that a throat chakra in each of us, and collectively, the throat chakra is the center of creative ideation. It’s through your throat chakra that the soul finds the capacity to bring forth its expressed wisdom on behalf of human betterment. And that’s the function of all of humanity as a part of the throat chakra of the planetary logos. This is why my book is called Shine Forth the Soul’s Magical Destiny. Every human soul is destined to be a creative agent in support of spiritual upliftment. Why? Because every human soul is a constituent part of the throat chakra of the planetary logos. And that entity, by the way, is evolving. And that entity is said to be a chakra within a larger entity that’s called the solar logos. The solar logos is the entity that ensouls the whole solar system. And our solar system is said to be one of seven in what is called the local group that is a massive life, cosmic life, called The One About Whom Naught May Be Said. I always laugh about that because I figure, okay, what’s the point of going further? But the truth is that it does go further. I’ll take it one step further, and this is jumping many levels. If you look at the whole Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way is now believed to have, I believe, it’s a hundred and fifty billion stars. Think about that, 150 billion stars in a spiral galaxy. That entity is called a galactic logos. And then now we know that there are millions of galaxies. Trillions. Trillions of galaxies. So the magnitude of this is staggering. And so I kind of jokingly say that when somebody has a meditation experience and they say to you, I reached ultimate cosmic consciousness, I only say, hey, turn and run. Turn and run. Not even the solar logos, the entity that ensouls the whole solar system of which we are just atoms of consciousness within it, not even the solar logos can make that claim. Yeah. So sometimes when you talk about hylozoism and people feel, it kind of makes you feel like a piece of dust in a hurricane. But the truth is that you are also the hurricane. Because in the ultimate, the other aspect of this that has to be stated, and I should have stated this at the beginning, is that hylozoism and also implies that in the ultimate, ultimate, ultimate sense, there’s only one thing. One living principle. One beingness. Some people call it God. Some people call it Brahma, universal intelligence, call it what you like. And that that beingness is all there really is. And so even though we, in looking at hylozoism and in the way I’m sharing it with you, it can make you feel like a piece of dust in a hurricane, but never forget, in another sense, you are the hurricane.
Rick: Yeah, I don’t find it discouraging or belittling or anything of that sort. I find it inspiring. And I don’t resonate with these people who seem to be in a big fat hurry to kind of end their existence in some kind of an enlightenment, extermination event, in which they’re not going to exist anymore and they’re not going to reincarnate anymore. And it’s like, you know, I feel like whether we know it or not or like it or not, we’re all in it for the long haul and it’s a marvelous adventure and it’s participatory. It’s like we’re participating in this divine play and all the world’s a stage and we all have our entrances and our exits and each man in his time plays many parts, to butcher a little bit of Shakespeare.
William: But I got it.
Rick: It’s like, wow, what an adventure, what fun, how interesting, you know, endless fascination.
William: Yeah, it is, it’s marvelous and it’s so embracing, it’s so embracing of so many things, but I will say that I’ve met many people who, the people you’re talking about, I’ve met many of those people too. Many people believe that this is their last incarnation, that somehow they’re lasting if they only knew what they were saying. I mean, we think that, for instance, as I mentioned, in this philosophy it’s understood that the fourth initiation is where that could be made to be true. But we anticipate that we think that in studying modern society, we think the Dalai Lama is right around the fourth degree. We think that Mother Teresa was right around the fourth degree. So, if you think that this is your last incarnation, you’re putting yourself right up there with the Buddha.
Rick: And even so,
William: I mean not, the Dalai Lama,
Rick: right, Mother Teresa. And even if it were your last on this planet, it doesn’t mean the game’s over, you know.
William: No, of course it’s not. A lot of times what people feel, and I understand this, because my personality can feel this too sometimes, is that, oh, life is so difficult, I’ve learned so many lessons, surely I’ve paid my dues, I’m not coming back.
Rick: Yeah, I think if you’re not really enjoying life that much, you might feel that, you know, there’s that saying “life sucks, then you die.”
William: Yeah, well, but it’s just the personality in its tension around the struggles of life that can lead us to think that surely I’m wrapping it up now because I’ve had to do so many adjustments.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a question that came in from a guy named Ivan, and I want to ask you that and then tag on to a question that pertains to what we’ve been talking about, and Ivan’s question does also. He asks, don’t know where he’s from, but he says, “Material planets carry spiritual energy. Eight planets in the solar system create a unique energetic pattern for each incarnation and personality. When the soul graduates the earthly plane, it moves to other solar systems.” Can you comment on this? And before you do, I just want to tag on, you know, is part of the evolution of the soul to move from the human incarnations to actually incarnations of into these larger entities you referred to, like you might become a, you know, a being that occupies or governs the solar system or the galaxy or something? But then one more bit to that question is that it seems like there’s a sort of diminishment of souls as you go up, because, you know, there are a lot more insects than there are animals, and there are a lot more animals than there are people, and there are a lot more people than there are solar systems, and so on. So there’s sort of a weeding out process, or maybe we all glom together into one super soul in order to become a, you know, a galactic being.
William: Well, in the ultimate sense that is true, because in the ultimate sense there’s only one entity. Remember I said it earlier. So in the ultimate sense it’s oneness, but I’m just trying to recapture your thinking of that. I guess, you know, when you work on yourself and develop yourself, as you depart, let’s say you do achieve perfection, relatively speaking. You do go into a higher regime of evolution. There’s no question about it. And I mentioned those seven paths. Well, there’s a whole understanding of those paths, and one of the paths is called the path of the planetary logos, where eventually that being will move toward evolving itself to become, in the distant billions of years perspective, an actual planetary life. So you’re moving into wider fields, and sometimes people have a lot of fear about the idea of absorption into larger, because they think that it’s like a drop that’s lost in the ocean and that you lose who you are. But you never lose your identity, ever. You lose your ego, but you don’t lose identity.
Rick: What’s the difference?
William: Well, identity is a principle. It’s just like the principle of love. Identity is the sense of is-ness, whereas ego is the sense of it’s a lot of associations to is-ness. I am this, I am that, and it often is in contrast to others. But understand that you’re monad, which is beyond the soul. The monad is the true you. You’re monad, which is pure spirit. The monad is a spark of life from the one flame. That monad is the carrier of a variety of spiritual principles inherent in the fabric of creation, and one of those principles is the principle of identity. You will never lose your sense of I-ness, but you will have absolutely no interest in it. Another way of looking at it more on a… Let me give you a contrast or an analogy that has to do with this sense of individuality and I-ness. How to word this? Here’s the analogy, and I’m going to use a master to give you a sense of how individuality is experienced by a master. By analogy, individuality to a master is, again, by analogy, equivalent to animal instinct in a human being. Let me say that again. By analogy, individuality to a master is equivalent to animal instinct in a human being. So what do I mean by that? I mean that you and I, as human beings, one of the great functions of human evolution is to develop your individuality and your ego. Actually, it’s a good thing to develop it before you let it go, okay? This is what Abram Maslow was talking about in his humanistic approach. It’s true, but animal instinct is still with us. We evolved through the animal kingdom millions of years ago, but it’s still there. I’m sure that you and I and your viewers, you don’t have to go too far in to find it, I’m sure, okay? Well, imagine that same principle with a master. They have their individuality. They’ve got a history of it having evolved through the human kingdom, and it’s etched into the fabric of their deepest consciousness, but it’s not something they are preoccupied with or focused on at all, and they can reach to it, grab it, use it as a function of service when needed, but it is quite secondary.
Rick: Yeah, so perhaps one way of explaining it, see if you agree, is that you know, whereas most people might consider their individuality to be the entirety of what they are, a master or someone who is more spiritually developed might consider it to be a kind of a faculty or a feature or something contained within something much larger that they know themselves to be.
William: That’s exactly right, and that’s why so much of the path, it’s so interesting when you read some of the literature on this, like, let’s use the Alice Bailey writings for just a minute. The Tibetan in the Alice Bailey writings might say, “Know where you stand on the path.” Okay, well that’s saying something about know who you are and where you are in your evolution, and then in the next paragraph it’ll say “Take your eyes off yourself.” Well, so it’s the paradox of being attentive to evolving and recognizing your authentic identity, while simultaneously always knowing that you’re just a cell within a larger living system. So it’s to be centralized and decentralized at the same time. A friend of mine, Timothy Conway, sent me a quote this week which pertains to this, I think. I’ll just read it. He said, “What the Buddha meant by ‘anatta’ was not ‘no self’ but ‘not self.’ He clearly, repeatedly taught that the five aggregates of personhood – body, sensations, perceptions, samskara reactions, and the personal consciousness, vijnana, are not who I am, not myself. He did not say that there are no persons, and this is quite contrary to what so many misunderstanding Buddhists, including many teachers and academics and neo-Advaitins teach today. They interpret as ‘no persons whatsoever,’ which is a recipe for depersonalization syndrome.”
William: That’s true, yeah. No, I agree with that. I agree with that. Yeah, you have a sense of an ‘isness’ that will always be with you. It’s just what you have a presence about. In fact, that’s what the monad is called. The monad is the thing beyond your soul. That’s your true highest self, you might say, and that’s not conscious to us. There’s a certain place on the path where you become conscious to us. A master has gone way beyond their soul and is fully integrated as monad. Monad is a word that means ‘the one.’ It comes from the mono, ‘the one.’ Let’s put it this way, and I’m going to use some Christian terminology here, but the soul in you is the Christ in you. The monad in you is the God in you. That monad is what actually is on the long journey. It’s called the eternal pilgrim in some of the ancient literature. It’s the monad that carried you through not just the human kingdom, but before that, the animal kingdom, and before that, the plant kingdom, and before that, the mineral kingdom. So, it’s really the main agency, and the soul is just a category of consciousness used by the monad in its evolution as it works its way through the human kingdom.
Rick: Through the human kingdom. So, it’s not like your soul, it’s not like you had the same soul when you were a rock or a bug or a cabbage or whatever you were through all those things. The monad was still there, but then once you entered into the human range of evolution, then a soul somehow came into the picture. Is that what you said?
William: Yes, and here’s where we get into kind of nuances with language. What happens in the human kingdom, every kingdom of nature is said to be a place that the monad develops further capacities of itself. And the human kingdom has much to do with first discovering your identity, to rise above animal instinct, to understand your individuality beyond mere instinctual response. And for much of the human kingdom, in the evolution of your many lives, the goal is to develop that ego, to develop that personality that becomes eventually what we call an integrated personality. An integrated personality is when all three parts of the personality, mental, emotional and physical, are integrated. They work as a whole. And many of the most powerful people in the world that are making decisions, sadly at this time of life, may have strong personality but no awakening to soul yet. And then what happens is, late in the human journey, there’s something called the awakening. For the first time, that personality awakens to a higher prompting within. And that’s in this philosophy what we call the beginning of the path, the beginning of the recognition of your own duality. But prior to that journey, that leads you eventually to discover your duality, and then eventually transform that lower so that you enter into the human, the next kingdom of nature. Prior to that, the earlier kingdoms of nature, when you were a monad working through those kingdoms, you were developing other attributes. Like for instance, in the animal kingdom, you were developing instinctual tendencies of behavior. I could go through a whole litany of things that are said to be developed by life as it evolves through those earlier kingdoms. But it’s in the human kingdom where individuality is emphasized. Only toward the end do you decentralize and start letting go with your preoccupation of your individuality and start merging yourself back into the larger whole.
Rick: So could it be said that the monad that is at the core of your existence in some sense at one time didn’t exist whatsoever, and that your individual monad kind of sprouted or came into existence at a certain point and then began to go through this whole sequence of incarnations?
William: It’s so interesting you say that. It is said that the origins of the monad are lost in the mist of time. But in my book I have a simple analogy for it. If you look at imagine that the one life is a cloud. Think of the monad as being a droplet of water that is so faint within that cloud that it doesn’t have the gravity to to drop. And yet when it does have the gravity to drop that’s when it enters into the lower kingdoms of nature and works its way back through the kingdoms all the way back up to the cloud, which is the real meaning behind the whole story in Christianity of the prodigal son. The outbreath into form, into density, the struggle to evolve, to awaken, and the lessons learned through the kingdoms only to eventually return to the father’s home having benefited from that long journey over millions of years.
Rick: It’s said in the Vedic tradition that when the entire universe collapses down again, that the universe is cyclical, that all the souls then in existence actually kind of go into some kind of unmanifest state but continue to exist and re-emerge with the next Big Bang or the next expression of the universe at whatever level of evolution they had achieved in the previous one.
William: That’s true, that’s right. By the way, you just reminded me there was something earlier that you mentioned that I wanted to say about this idea that when the earth is done, what happens to it? You alluded to it. Esotericism would say this, that all the planets in our solar system are entities, they’re gods to us, but in that larger system of the solar logos, really the solar logos is the big boy on the block, and its incarnation is primary in that the the planets in its context are actually chakras. So it is said in ancient lore that when our solar logos ends its incarnation and goes into a state, in Hinduism they call it pralaya, that it goes into abstraction, that’s what death is, death is movement into pralaya, that there’s an absorption that takes place and all the planets in our solar system will be absorbed back into that profound singularity, but it’s not a direct thing. In other words, there are said to be three planets in our solar system, incredibly evolved beings, who are called the synthesis planets or the synthesizing planets. They are Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, and certain the other planets are believed to be their life force and all the kingdoms of nature that are part of that life force will be drawn into one of the synthesizing planets. The earth it is believed will synthesize into Saturn, whereas Venus will synthesize into Neptune, and there’s a whole discussion of understanding why that is, and then the three become the one. So it goes into a trinity before absorbing back into the ultimate singularity of the solar logos.
Rick: Yeah, we could have a long conversation about that. I mean, my understanding of cosmology or astronomy is that when the sun becomes a red giant it’ll expand out far enough to pretty much subsume the earth. I don’t know about Mars, and of course Mercury and Venus will just be toast, but you know the planets beyond Mars and possibly even Mars won’t be within the reach of that red giant star. I’m a little rusty on whether our sun will become a black hole or not. I think maybe not, but I don’t know.
William: Anyway, just to highlight that one point though is that I’m not talking about the end of the solar system in its physical nature. Remember the solar logos is a being as well. It has a soul, it has a personality. The physical sun that you’re talking about is the outer representative of the personality nature of the solar logos, whereas there’s a soul nature to it that’s called the heart of the sun, and there’s a monadic nature which is called the central spiritual sun. So when I talk about this absorption I’m talking about the consciousness, the livingness of it as it absorbs back into singularity.
Rick: Okay, there are about four questions that have come in that are actually asking for elaboration on things we’ve talked about, and here’s one that is related to what we’re just saying. KP from Mumbai asks, “Gurdjieff used to speak of how the moon was a living organism. Would you be able to comment on this and the influence our moon has?” And of course you’ve been saying that all the planets and the sun itself are living organisms, which might seem like a strange idea to people because biologically they couldn’t be, but what you’re saying is that those physical entities, whether the sun or the moon or whatever, are the sort of material representations or expressions of it. They have a spirit or an indwelling consciousness which is very alien in terms of thinking, in terms of biological life, but which is nonetheless real. So again his question was, would you be able to comment on this and on the influence our moon has?
William: Okay, without trying to contrast it with Gurdjieff’s work, because I actually don’t know exactly how Gurdjieff would have viewed this, but in Theosophy there’s this long understanding that our Earth is a living entity, as I mentioned. What we call the moon, and this is going to surprise a lot of people, what we call the moon is actually the carcass of our earth’s, our planetary logos’ last incarnation. It’s the carcass of the past and the life that it had is actually the life that is now imbuing the whole earth, and that there’s a whole amazing mythology in ancient history about what’s called the Moon Chain Disaster, and I won’t go into that, but I will say this is that therefore in Esoteric Astrology, which is an important part of this philosophy as well, the moon in your chart is viewed as the symbol of the instinctual past, which is why literally it is the past. And it’s very interesting because you know NASA has brought some rocks back from the moon, so we have moon rocks. There are some rocks on the moon that are said to be older than anything found on the earth.
Rick: Well, the moon was said to have formed when something huge crashed into the earth and just broke off a great big chunk of it, which was completely cataclysmic for the Earth. But anyway, I mean the moon is actually vital in terms of the earth and what influence it has on stabilizing the earth’s rotation and the tides and as a magnet for asteroids which would otherwise crash into the earth and Jupiter serves that role also. But anyway, we’re getting, I don’t know where we’re going with this.
William: Well, I will say this, that idea of the moon being created by a cataclysmic collision, Esotericism would say no, that’s not true. One of the big mysteries is why is our moon a full third of the size of the earth? No other planet in the solar system has a proportional ratio even close to that. And there’s a whole mythology about the heaviness of the moon in terms of what it symbolizes as the weight of the past as it’s, we have to struggle to transform it. This is why in Esoteric Astrology sometimes the moon is said to be the symbol of the prison of the soul. When you get into this kind of stuff, I go back to my hypothesis mode, which is that everything to me is an interesting hypothesis, some of which has more evidence than others. I sort of give everything the benefit of the doubt, but I also take everything with a grain of salt and the proportions vary. So, to really wrap my head around what you’re saying would take a long conversation and I’d probably want to sit you and some other esoteric people down with three or four astronomers and hash it out, it’d be an interesting conversation.
William: Well, and when I present it, sometimes the groups ask me to do a whole presentation. I have quite a few visual aids that can help me to explain it because it is actually quite a complex notion. Anyway, yeah.
Rick: Okay, so here’s another sort of wrap-up from things we’ve already discussed. Mark Peters from Santa Clara, California asks, “Who is it that progresses or evolves on the spiritual path? Is it the biological body-mind, the causal body, or some other form of localized consciousness, or all of these concurrently? Is consciousness itself evolving while awareness remains static?” It’s a little bit of semantics here, how we’re going to define these terms, but see what you can do with that question.
William: Well, okay, so in the big picture, in the ultimate picture for a human being, it’s the monad that’s evolving over the vastness of time. In a more realistic way, it’s the causal body that’s evolving. You know, it’s interesting that sometimes people think that the soul is perfect, but it’s not perfect. It’s only perfect in one way. It’s perfect in its potentiality. It’s imperfect in its capacity to express that potentiality through the personality without encumbrance, and that’s the function of evolution. So, in a sort of realistic, practical way, understand that the soul itself, the causal body, is what is evolving over many lifetimes, but the personality is evolving as a reflection of it over every lifetime as well.
Rick: Okay, there was a section in your book in which you were talking about the necessity of preparing and strengthening and purifying the body to be a fit, sort of receptacle or vehicle for the infusion of the divine energy or whatever you call it in your book, and that without that preparation it could be catastrophic for you. You’d burn out if that energy were to come flooding in prematurely. And there’s a question from Jean from Germany that’s along these lines. He or she asks, “How does the Kundalini fit into the overall picture of the evolution of a human being? Is it mainly a clearing energy to prepare the body to house more of the soul’s energy?”
William: Great question. Wow, what a great question. Okay, so Kundalini, in the ultimate sense, a true Kundalini experience in the full sense is another mark of evolutionary perfection, because if you look at life, it’s got two forces. There’s the life of form and then it’s the life coming through you. And Kundalini is when all parts within your form nature, mental, emotional, and physical have been so purified that those two expressions of spirit can meet and join each other.
Rick: Which two again?
William: Okay.
Rick: Which two expressions of spirit?
William: There’s one expression of life that comes through form itself, through mental, emotional, and physical form. The life that animates your cell in your hand, for instance, is a type of life. It’s sacred, but that’s not the same life that is trying to work through your monad and soul. That’s another stream of life, you might say, coming from top down and the other is coming from bottom up. And if when the system, which is you, your incarnation, when it’s purified to the extent it needs to be, those two electrically fully relate from high to low. And that’s equivalent to what we call the fourth or the fifth initiation. So now having said that, a lot of people, and I’ve met many, who have said they’ve had a Kundalini experience. Let’s be clear on that. Yes, you might have, but you didn’t have the full Kundalini because you’d have to be a master for that. It is said that between your chakras, there are said to be etheric webs between the major chakras. Now through purification, meditation, and the spiritual work you do, slowly those webs are starting to become permeable. And when a web happens to become permeable enough, it can arc a kind of Kundalini from a lower portion to a higher portion. It’s a small arc. It’s important. It’s really important. But it feels like the whole thing from high to low triggered. But it’s actually a small arc that feels like it must have been the whole arc. So I don’t want to discredit Kundalini because it’s very important. But just know the difference between a true full Kundalini and a partial one that for us might seem like it’s full.
Rick: Okay, good. So let’s see here. Here’s another question. Maybe I’ll ask this first, but then I want to get into the whole idea of what’s happening in the world and so on. This is from Tristan from Manchester, UK. He asks, “A major theme in Alice Bailey’s work is the idea of seven rays, which you’ve referred to earlier, which condition every aspect of creation, including individual humans. Are you aware of which rays condition your soul and personality?” I guess he’s asking you personally. “And what is the best way to determine which rays our various vehicles are on?”
William: Wow, great question. I could spend days on that one, but let me just give you my best on that in a short time frame. Yes, all things are said to be expressions of seven rays. We can talk about the rays from a national perspective. We know the soul ray of this country. We know the soul ray of many countries, but you as a human being, you are on a soul line ray. Your soul is on one of the seven rays, and to know your soul ray is to know the very meaning of purpose of your life itself in a spiritual sense, not just in this life, but over many, many incarnations, because your soul ray stays with you for many, many incarnations, but your personality ray, for the lower self, the personality, it changes from each incarnation. So let us say that a person had a third ray soul. In this incarnation, they may choose a seventh ray personality to try to express through. In the next incarnation, it could be a fourth ray personality, and that alternating of different personality rays over the various incarnations is what contributes to the evolution of that causal body and its development. Like I say, it’s imperfect. It’s evolving as well. In terms of my own soul ray, it won’t mean a lot unless you know it, but I’m a second ray soul with a seventh ray personality, and I can get more technical. I have a fifth ray mental body and a second ray emotional body too, but this is a big subject, but I just will say this, is that the way you find your soul ray, which is really the root of much of the question, I think, is kind of twofold. One is to just learn as much as you can about the rays, read about it, study it, and also study the distortions. They’re called the glamours of the ray. Sometimes we get a handle on what our rays are from their distortions even more quickly than we can when we sense their pure nature. And so there’s a wonderful body of information out there about the rays, so study it, learn it, and then look at yourself through that lens. That’s step one. Step two is to start to identify, once you’ve got a sense of how to recognize rays, which are the two or three that are strongest in you, because you’re going to recognize yourself in all of them, really, because they all play out on some level in some ways, but some of them are much more relevant in the life. So what are the two or three that are most important? Then ask yourself, okay, these seem to be the strongest. So, okay, now where do I feel it? Is it how I present myself? Maybe that’s my personality. Is it how my mind tends to want to frame thought? Maybe it’s my mental body. Or is it something deeper, more essential, more true to my core that not everybody’s going to recognize unless they become close to me and get to know me really well. That’s one way of really working on it. Another way is that there’s, you know, for instance, I think this is somebody from the UK. When I go to the UK, I’ve teach there all the time every year. I’ve done a number of seven-ray workshops there, where we spend the whole day trying to do an assessment, to try to get a realistic hypothesis of what your soul ray is, what your personality ray is, and what are the implications of that. I even have three questionnaires to try to help measure the rays in you. So there’s sort of internal ways of trying to understand it by just understanding the rays and looking at yourself. Then there’s some other methods that we try to use that can help in another way, in an assessment kind of way.
Rick: So I have no idea what my ray is. I’d never even really heard of the concept until the past week when I started reading your book. I don’t know what my enneagram type is. I can tell you very little about my astrology or jyotish chart and whenever I hear about any of these things it kind of goes in one ear and out the other. So am I a hopeless loser? I mean is there any…
William: You’re a good comedian. As an interviewer you should be a comedian. You’re not a hopeless loser.
Rick: It’s like for some reason I’m just don’t gravitate to thinking about these things or worrying about them or figuring them out. I just kind of blithely go along and life is working out pretty well, but I mean am I missing something essential?
William: Well I don’t know. Here again I’d have to say a yes and a no, but in the big picture, Rick, it’s just be the best you can be. If your heart is ablaze with lofty love for human betterment, if your mind is acute and is committed to shaping ideas that make a difference in the world, in the big picture that’s the simplest understanding of how to live your life spiritually. But having said that, remember your causal body is also an agency of higher mind and it’s something that’s trying to evolve. So the Esoteric Philosophy is very much trying to help you develop that abstract mind because the more you can develop it, the more you’re in the neighborhood of the soul.
Rick: But I would say it’s developing without my… Well it would be interesting. I’m not opposed to knowing what my ray is. I’d be happy to sit in on one of your workshops and learn all about it, but I just haven’t felt strongly drawn to any such thing and I guess I’m feeling like should people listening to this be worried about it if they also aren’t really drawn to it.
William: Look, there’s also a rayological attraction. So for instance, people with a lot of third ray are often attracted to the work of Esoteric Astrology. People with a lot of seventh ray are often very attracted to the magical creative work. So there’s actually different facets of this philosophy that are catered to different ray types.
Rick: Right, I see. So maybe what I’ve told you so far gives you a clue as to what my ray type is.
William: I have a theory.
Rick: All right, let’s hear it just for kicks.
William: I think you’re living proof that there is an eighth ray. The explanation.
Rick: What the heck does that mean?
William: I’m just joking.
Rick: Oh, okay.
William: No, I’d have to spend more time with you, Rick. Today you and I met, this is it, we’ve never met before.
Rick: Sure.
William: I’d have to. I would say this, that I’m quite confident that you would have a lot of a fair amount of second ray in you. Okay, and what would that mean again? That’s called the ray of love and wisdom and people who are on the second ray line are more inclined to serve humanity through educational initiatives, through bringing forth understanding and wisdom. The second ray rules all education, whether it’s in a primitive society or a advanced society. And it also is the ray most associated with the healing profession. Probably the largest percentage of people I meet on my journey with my students around the world, probably about 70% of them are second ray souls because you tend to be attracted according to like ray type.
Rick: Right, they’re attracted to this sort of thing.
William: Sure.
Rick: Yeah, okay, good. Let’s talk about the picture of what’s going on in the world today. I’ll get you started with something that has been on my radar for the last week or two. I have a couple of two or three friends here in town who have kind of tuned into the work of Guy McPherson. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a climatologist of some sort who feels that we have already passed about 60-something critical tipping points, irreversible, and that well within our truncated lifetimes all complex life on earth will be wiped out by catastrophic global warming, and that we might as well just make hay while the sun shines and enjoy what time we have left on this planet. These friends of mine are buying into this and some of them even gave a presentation in town the other night, and if you actually look at the logic of what they’re saying, what Guy McPherson is saying, it can get kind of scary and it’s a little hard to argue with it, although he has his detractors and people who argue with him. But there are even not only even climate but a number of other factors such as loose nukes and genetic engineering and many other things which could theoretically do us in or make life on earth extremely unpleasant. And my attitude is that there’s this sort of sea change happening in consciousness and that there’s going to be kind of a Hail Mary pass, which because of this rising consciousness that’s evidenced by my show for instance, where I’m finding all these amazing people to interview, that will bring about solutions in ways that may as yet be unforeseen, even technological ones, that somehow the the upwelling of creativity that this rising consciousness will result in will bring about solutions that will kind of save us in the nick of time. But that’s just a hope perhaps and it’s not necessarily a done deal. So anyway, that’ll get you started. What do you think?
William: Well, I’m pessimistic in the short run, optimistic in the long run.
Rick: Okay. And I’m much more focused on the question of human consciousness as it struggles at this time because everything we see in terms of climate, in terms of starvation in Africa, all of the horrible things and difficult things we see in the world are just the out picturing of certain patterns of consciousness within our collective. So my focus is on trying to understand that. Now, one of the things that’s so important to understand about human consciousness is that all major transitions or big jumps in evolution, all of them will have major crisis at the front door. Crisis is always a prelude to the next step in evolution. And that holds true for both an individual and for a nation and all of humanity. And there are a couple major trigger points that are underlying why this time is so much related to that because we as a collective humanity are in two different transitions at the same time. Neither of them are going to be subjects that you’re terribly focused on because one is astrological and one is rayological. But the astrological one is we’re moving from a Piscean era to an Aquarian era. The rayological is that we’re moving from a sixth ray urge to a seventh ray urge. So talk about it from an astrological point of view. Understand that entrance into the Aquarian age is not like one age ends and the next one begins. There’s a huge overlap and astrologers have different views of how big that overlap is. Most of the people that I associated with we put it around 200 years. It is said that we will not enter the age of Aquarius fully until the year 2117. Up until that point there’s this overlap and we’re at the midway point in that which is why the crisis is at its highest. Now what does that mean? It means that in the collective consciousness there are two astrological forces that are pervasively conditioning the field of human consciousness rather than just one. And they are so different, Aquarius versus Pisces, that is causing a lot of the increased polarizations that you have attitudinally in politics, in religion, in the arts, etc. So that’s one of the transitions that’s a crisis point.
Rick: So people are aligning themselves with one or the other of these major influences and thus becoming so polarized. That’s what you’re saying.
William: And why there’s such a pull toward… The past always has a stronger foothold initially than the future because the past has the historical advantage and that’s why you’re seeing so much rising up of darkness. Now that’s one aspect of this. The other is rayological. We’re moving from a sixth ray age to a seventh ray age. Now the sixth ray is called the ray of idealism and devotion and it’s been an underlying conditioned energy all along. In fact, the sixth ray rules all religions throughout the world. Every religion, the soul of that religion is sixth ray. Its personality will be a different ray. And if you look at, if you study world religions, you find that at the core of all of them is a sense of a set of ideals and a devotion to, devotion to a teacher, a guru, a text, whatever it is. And that that’s the sixth ray is also called the ray of mysticism. The seventh ray is called the ray of practical mysticism. We’re moving from a mystical era that lasts a couple thousand years and entrance into the world of practical mysticism. It’s the capacity to seventh ray, the capacity to inwardly reach for the stars but keep your feet on the ground, think, get real and organize outer structures in life in a way that the best of the human spirit can find more effective expression through them. Now these two energies are also overlapping at the same time and and that’s also contributing to the crisis. That crisis period in ancient occultism has a name. It’s called the Period of the Burning Ground, the Period of the Burning Ground, and humanity is in total is right now walking across the the burning ground. And one of the things to keep in mind is
Rick: Quite literally by the way, there’s 60 wildfires out west that are burning entire towns but continue.
William: I know, I’m in Oregon and I’m one of the states that’s getting that and believe me it’s sweltering hot right now in this room. So it is believed that right now the soul of humanity is trying to infuse itself or you might say push more of itself into the personality of humanity and what happens when that occurs is that shadow issues within the collective personality of humanity rise up in defiance which is why for the last several years we’ve seen the worst of business, we’ve seen the worst of government, we’ve seen the worst of theology and if we’re really honest with ourselves I think we could say we’ve seen the worst of ourselves too because if the soul of humanity can be recognized in our higher value system and as that higher value system tries to subtly impress upon human minds that it can sense it, it will also create a a negative reaction from the consciousness that emphasizes the past and it will rise up in opposition. Now that’s why the crisis in the world today in a way it’s a really really good thing you know as painful as it is because it’s jarring loose shadow issues that have been there all along but have been more hidden but now they’re forced to rise to the surface and we can’t change anything unless we can see it and now we see it. Now this big transition is it’s understood that the major theme is that humanity itself is approaching a great initiatory opportunity possibly in this century it’s called the first initiation and that’s what’s really trying to happen what’s really trying to happen is humanity is trying to figure out how to be one really and if we don’t figure that out we’re then your friends this fellow you’re talking about is absolutely right we have no hope if we don’t figure that out but there’s a spiritual principle that is underpinning this need to find right relationship and that principle is called the Principle of Right Relationship the Principle of Right Relationship today is the time when we have to be asking ourselves what is the right relationship between nation and nation, between men and women, between a religion and another religion between a government and those it governs between humanity and its relationship to mother nature between humanity and how it understands resources and we’re waking up subtly very subtly humanity is waking up to this sense of what constitutes right relationship and in that awakening comes an awareness of wrong relationship wrong relationship and having to do with mother nature, money and and that wrong relationship is what stage is the burning ground so for instance right now I don’t know if my stats are exactly current these are a couple years old but did you know that 30,000 people die per day per day from starvation or disease due to malnutrition I calculated that as one every six seconds so somebody just died there’s another there’s another while we have a surplus of food of I think it’s three or four percent surplus of food that’s wrong relationship and so the whole focus is to establish like for instance 50 years ago we didn’t even think about the fact that there was an environmental crisis but the last few decades couple decades it’s really picked up speed because more of the sense of right relationship is starting to crest on the shores of of progressive thinking people and that wakes us up to wrong relationship that’s the burning ground but out of that burning ground comes the antidote and that is the rise of the environmental movement and that’s true I’m just using environmentalism as just one example of of this so this is an incredibly important transitional time that is steeped with crisis and darkness and oppositional energy and that’s why I said at the beginning of our conversation that in that five minute conversation with the guy that you said I should talk with well this is the time to bring our very best forward because friends all of those you who are listening you and the best of you is needed more at this time in human history than at any other time in your life these next few years are going to be pivotal in terms of humanity’s capacity to rise above its its tendencies to separate itself and become a more unified thinking group It is said in ancient esotericism that the greatest obstacle to humanity moving into its first initiation of real living oneness more is the so-called heresy of separateness the heresy of separateness and that is just permeating the airwaves these days whether it’s separateness in terms of men and women whether it’s separateness in terms of building a wall whether it’s separateness in terms of preventing an immigration crisis from entering into Europe whatever it is there’s just it’s all over the place so this is your time friends this is this is your time and I think that probably for the next three four maybe actually I think until the year 2025 for sure I think there’s going to be this is just going to continue to get heated up
Rick: okay just again to take the environmental thing as an example as you just did because it’s an easy one but you could take it you know any number of other things as examples but there’s a good argument to be made that the crisis in Syria the civil war and the consequent refugee crisis is due to global warming because there was a serious drought and all the farmers moved into the cities they weren’t properly supported there couldn’t do anything and created all this unrest. So there’s evidence that you know certain ice shelves in Antarctica might slide into the ocean which could raise sea levels 10 feet or more quickly in a short amount of time which is going to create a a migration crisis that’s going to make Syria look like you know just a picnic and it’s going to be and at the same time while that’s happening huge droughts you know and fires and other environmental disasters which are you know going to make it very difficult for everyone on on Earth and yet with all that going on you know we have an administration which puts somebody like Scott Pruitt in the Environmental Protection Agency you know he’s since left but the guy who took over for him is cut from the same mold you know who deny that global warming is even a problem and are doing what they can to you know serve the oil industry. So you know people who sort of think along the lines more progressively look at something like that can easily become furious or discouraged and you know feel like we’re all doomed there’s no hope. So in what sense would you say that the current state of affairs is an opportunity is it that it polarizes or magnetizes everybody to sort of like focus and do something rather than be complacent or is and is there some kind of esoteric explanation for the way things are unfolding and the current dominance of a regressive mindset in politics?
William: Lots of questions within one question.
Rick: Yeah.
William: Just let me say that the rise of this darkness which is emphasizing separateness is perfectly predictable. It’s perfectly predictable because as I say often darkness is the prelude to greater light. Now having said that I think that if you look at human history you find that humanity is as a species we are remarkably resilient and that I think that we as a species have the capacity to adapt to a wide variety of differing circumstances. It’s one of the great gifts of human beings is our capacity to be adaptable to a changing environment. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that if you look at the great cycles of human evolution and the rise and fall of civilizations there’s always been these periods of profound gloom and naysayers who believe that this is the end but humanity the spirit of humanity rises to the occasion and finds the solution to the next step. I believe in the soul of humanity. I believe that we will come out of this correctly because history and precedents prove it to be so.
Rick: That’s a good answer. And also would you say, and this is something I’ve often thought and said, that there are a lot of things which are well entrenched economic and political and institutions that really wouldn’t fit in a more enlightened world and somehow or other they have got to be dismantled and chances are they’re not going to do so willingly. So perhaps we’re building up to a kind of a crisis situation in which they collapse unwillingly or who knows maybe those running them all of a sudden have a change of heart and the oil companies decide to just forget about oil and totally embrace alternative energy or something to take an example.
William: Oh I see, I see. Yeah, you threw me off a little bit when you mentioned social institutions because I’d have to know the institutions. Many of the major institutions, it’s not about the collapse, it’s about the transformation. Every institution whether it’s politics, government, education, the arts, science, religion, all of these are just categories of human consciousness that are actually ray defined, I might add, that evolve through the vastness of time and those ray qualities are going to be continually with us and structure patterns of societal organizations and structures for us but they have to adapt as humanity is moving forward in its next step. So to me the major institutions, now if you’re talking about if you look at the oil industry as an institution then I’d say to you, yeah that’s got to collapse and something has to come into its place, but if you’re looking at the institution of let’s say government or the arts or science, those are not going away, they’re just continually evolving and they have a higher nature and a lower nature just like you and I.
Rick: Yeah, and even the oil industry could put its resources into alternative energy and more sustainable. For instance, the country of Dubai is establishing huge solar arrays and they’re sitting on a lot of oil and natural gas which they could use to produce electricity but it’s actually gotten cheaper for them to use solar power to do so and for some reason they have the freedom to do so, maybe because it’s more of a totalitarian situation and people aren’t clinging to their old ways of doing things but they’re just surging ahead in terms of changing their whole way of producing energy. So there’s no reason that that couldn’t be done in other countries but very often people hold on to the old ways of doing things even though they’re not working because they have personal vested interest in doing so.
William: I agree, I agree. So countries like that become shining stars of examples for us to really look at and say what can we do to to mimic some of that and move in the right direction. Of course these big countries, these big countries like the United States are it’s like a huge ocean liner and to try to get it to move into a new direction. It’s tough. A little country, you know, I teach in New Zealand for instance, it’s one of my major places I work and I’m always amazed at how progressive New Zealand is and in so many ways and yet they have the advantage of being a small country that can make changes that is much more difficult for we in the United States to make and yet we should because they’re right.
Rick: We’re talking about countries embodying a soul, having a soul or collective consciousness that’s a being in its own right and obviously over the eons of time or over at least recorded history civilizations have risen and fallen and some which seemed great and invincible no longer exist. I mean do you have any insights as to the fate of let’s say the United States or western civilization in general? Is it in decline and or will it resurge and continue to to shine?
William: In the short picture it’s in decline, in the big picture its day is coming and I say that because in the big picture the United Nations is the hope of the future in many ways. It’s a fourth ray institution that’s in its infancy. It’s believed in ancient esotericism that the United Nations as it continues to grow will become far more influential as a governing body that supports the oneness of humanity but does it by honoring the diversity of culture and civilization and yet because the United Nations is still in its infancy it’s making a lot of mistakes as any infant would but the day will come when that institution will play a much stronger role in the shaping of our collective lives and it all hinges upon to what extent can we generally see ourselves in the other? To what extent can we see ourselves in the person that attitudinally we might think is holding a whole different view and it’s also to the extent that we can own our own shadow our own issues. So I’m actually optimistic in the long run because it’s all moving toward a one world if we don’t get that as I said if we don’t solve that we’re we are probably doomed in a way but it’s the one humanity but it’s oneness realized through diversity it’s not oneness through sameness it’s oneness through differentness and that’s the core to the future and so this work that I do in trying to share this philosophy with people around the world is to provide a philosophic container that supports that because that’s what’s most important.
Rick: So I have about eight pages of notes here consisting largely of you know the main points from your book and all which obviously we’re not going to get to but in our remaining time what would you like to touch upon that we may have skipped over in this interview? For instance, the whole idea of the seven initiations, I think there were seven, is that something important that you’d like people to hear about or is there anything else that I haven’t thought to ask you that you’d like to throw in here?
William: Yeah well okay let’s talk a little bit about initiation and initiation is just a it there are well there are seven full but we talk about five and three major for human beings and initiations represent milestones of evolution within our individual consciousness. So the first initiation has a lot to do with two things the first initiation has to do with the soul of a human being having enough influence in the life that the heart wide opens wide and that you begin to feel the oneness of humanity it’s not just theorizing the oneness of humanity it is with your heart feel the underlying unitive field of all people. This is the first initiation? Yes but it’s also the the initiation where the soul has proven that it can take dominion over the appetites of the physical body and no longer does the physical body have undue sway in the shaping of actions. It doesn’t mean that a first degree initiate is somebody that doesn’t eat or doesn’t have a sexual life but what it does mean is that there that there’s a part of them that can retain the sense of being the observer and being the master of the instrument rather than the instrument mastering them.
Rick: So you’re saying that’s a prerequisite or a qualification for the first initiation?
William: Prerequisition, you have to demonstrate that consciousness before that initiation is actually taken.
Rick: Before you go on to the second one, who or what initiates you? Great question. Remember I said that you are on a soul line, you have seven types of souls. Well see your soul is part of an ashram but when we use the word ashram we often think about India but that’s not where the ashram is. It’s a good place for spiritual experience but that’s not where the ashram is. The ashram is deep inside you, it’s the place from which your causal body, your soul issues forth and there are said to be seven great inner ashrams according to the seven types of souls and each has a piece of work to do on behalf of humanity’s upliftment and your purpose, your soul’s purpose is to be an agent on behalf of the intention of that ashram. Now why I say that is because there are said to be a master of the ashram as well as the Christ and they are said to be, these masters are said to be the officiants that actually take you as a soul, not you as a personality, you as a soul through a process of initiation. They happen rarely like for instance it takes thousands of lives to finally get to the first initiation and many people that are seriously on the path are first degree initiates we believe but to get to the second initiation might take another four or five lives and the second initiation has to do with now the soul is demonstrating mastery over the emotional dimension of life, the emotional part of the personality. It’s called the Baptismal Initiation, it’s depicted for us symbolically in the life of Jesus in the story of the walking on water. Did Jesus really walk on water? I don’t know for sure, I suspect he probably did but that’s not important because it’s really speaking of you and I. It’s about learning how to hold ourselves above our watery nature, our emotional body and use your emotion and not be used by emotion. That particular initiation, it’s a very difficult initiation and there’s a lot I could say about it but at least that gives you a taste of it.
Rick: So before you go on to the third, another clarification question, are you saying that there are some kind of higher beings like ascended masters or something who kind of watch over humanity and initiate people when they’re ready to be initiated?
William: Yes. These are the sort of heads of these ashrams kind of thing?
William: That’s right and so the ashram you’re from, you might say you’re being initiated more into that ashram. The first and second initiation, they’re said to be the ashrams on the threshold. Sorry, the initiations on the threshold. The third initiation is where you make your first more inwardly direct entrance into the ashram deep inside. The third initiation is called the Transfiguration and it’s where now the mental body of the personality is becoming more mastered. The personality has three parts to it, Rick. There’s a mental, emotional and physical and these first initiations represent mastery over those three instruments. You see, the transfiguration is a symbol for us. Also you find that in the Christian teaching in the story of the transfiguration of Jesus on the Mount. There’s a whole story about how Jesus takes three disciples to the top of a mountain. I think it was Peter, James and John as I recall. I’ll give you an edited version of it. Essentially while they’re at the top of the mountain, these three, Jesus becomes this kind of glowing ball of light and these three disciples are so taken by this that they fall on their face in reverence to this, prostrate themselves in that way. Then a booming voice from the heavens speaks and says to those disciples, “This is my son of whom I’m well pleased, follow him.” Then they look up and Jesus is back to normal. That’s sort of the edited version of it but you get the feel of it. Well, that’s actually a metaphor for the third initiation because you see those three disciples are said to symbolize the three parts of the personality. Peter for instance was called the rock of the church. That’s the physical body. James in some literature has been called the deceiver. That’s the emotional body. John correlates to the mental body. When you as a soul come to the third initiation, remember I said earlier that in a way the soul is the Christ in you. It’s your threefold personality now yielding to the radiance of your own higher nature. That’s the transfiguration. Many of the stories in the Bible as well as the Bhagavad Gita are metaphors that speak of an inner process for each of us and that’s what the third initiation is really about. I could spend hours on this. I have a whole weekend workshop on this. It gives you a taste anyway.
Rick: Are you going to go through all seven or what?
William: Well, not all seven. I’ll tell you what, I’ll go through five. The fourth initiation is called The Crucifixion. This is where I told you I think that the Dalai Lama there’s good evidence that the Dalai Lama is about there. Also Mother Teresa. Whereas examples of third degree initiatives with people like Abraham Lincoln. We think people that study biographies we’ve done a lot of work on this. Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi. These would be third degree initiatives probably. But the fourth initiation is called The Crucifixion because it’s when all karma has been removed. You’ve adjusted all karma. The causal body is now able to express itself fully through the personality. For the first time you’re really waking up to the monad. Actually you have a glimpse of it at the third initiation. As you approach the fourth initiation inwardly you’re sensing the monad in a very conscious way. It’s said to be so terrifying. It’s so powerful. It’s like an atomic bomb an inch from your nose. You inwardly sense it and it’s there. What happens is just as you approach the fourth initiation that light of the monad clicks off. You have this deep sense that you must now destroy the causal body. The very thing that you had thought was going to be your home of eternity because you now realize that now your own causal body is going to get in the way of the next step. That’s what’s crucified. It’s your causal body which is again your Christ body is crucified and the light going off is to make sure that there’s no crutch that you lean on as you go through that fourth initiation. This is the story of Jesus on the cross. When he said, “Father, Father, why have thou forsaken me?” Let’s translate that. “Monad, monad, why have thou forsaken me?” The fourth initiation is very, very intense, difficult, but liberating at the same time. By the way, there’s also a huge joy on each step. The fifth initiation is called, in India, they call it The Revelation in the east. They call it The Resurrection in the west. But essentially you’re a full master and you begin to have, you begin to develop your own ashram. You’re actually developing your own ashram even now in a way. You’ve got people, you for instance, I’m sure have many people around you that are very spiritual who see you as a kind of person that is a leading, guiding voice for them. Those people, in a way, in many incarnations down the road, they could indeed become part of the ashram that you eventually will lead when you become a fifth initiate. Well, let’s just hope I don’t screw up like so many of the gurus have. It goes to their heads and goes to their groins and they end up falling on their faces.
William: It’s all over the place. That’s very common and so you have to self-monitor all the way.
Rick: The fifth and sixth, or rather the sixth and seventh initiation is sort of post-human. You don’t even do them when you’re in human bodies. Oh, well, you do the first four, you have to take them while in physical incarnation. After that, you don’t have to be in physical incarnation. I hesitate to go into the sixth and seventh because it’s a whole different regime and it would take us quite a bit of time to really shape what that’s really about. It’s exciting and fascinating, but I’m afraid you’d have to give me another 10 or 15 minutes to really do that justice. I can do 10 or 15 if you feel like it. PT Barnum said always leave them wanting more, but if you want to get into it, we can do that a little bit.
William: Let me just do the sixth initiation, not the seventh. The seventh is just a whole different thing that I would have to show you graphics and so forth. The sixth is called The Decision, Rick. The decision. Many of the greatest masters that oversee these seven ashrams are said to be sixth degree initiates. They’re also called the Chohans. Maybe you recognize that term in Hinduism, the Chohans. Now, a sixth degree initiate is somebody what it says, this decision, what’s the decision? The decision is the decision of which of the higher ways of evolution that you will follow. Remember I mentioned that earlier. That’s the decision and that there are a percentage of them that will stay and choose the path of earth service, but a larger percentage of them choose other paths.
Rick: Do they serve in other places, on other planes? Not at that point, but eventually they will when they actually start leaving the Earth system. But at the sixth initiation, the decision is made. It is said to be registered within the ashram and it’s not clear, in my mind anyway, it’s not clear when that actual movement starts to take place moving into that new path. So, for instance, we’re told that the Buddha is on what is called the path to Sirius, the star system Sirius, which is around the world has been such a revered system. Esotericism would say, yeah, it’s a very, it’s amazing that Sirius system is incredibly amazing as a superior system, we are told. You know, even ancient Egyptians understood something powerful about Sirius. It’s Isis in Egyptian mythology. And the Buddha is on the path to Sirius and interestingly, the Buddha is said to give us, he returns to visit us once a year for eight minutes at the time of the WESAK full moon in Taurus. There’s a whole, I don’t know if, have you ever heard of the WESAK festival?
Rick: No.
William: Do you know about that? Do a word search on it, WESAK, WESAK. Thousands of people around the world, I’ve led many of these. We do a whole ritual during the eight-minute period that we are given to understand the Buddha comes to the Himalayas and unites with the Christ and a whole ceremony takes place in a valley and high in the Himalayas called the WESAK valley. That eight-minute visitation is a great blessing to humanity and it’s four minutes before the exact moment of the Taurus full moon and four minutes after. And how that works, I don’t know, but we’re given to understand that the Buddha is on that path and yet for some reason he’s able to kind of bless us for eight minutes a year. It’s a lovely, lovely experience and a beautiful water ritual that is brought into the whole ceremony, gorgeous.
Rick: Well, to my way of thinking and feeling, and I’ve said this in practically every interview, the path of evolution is vast and it’s much more vast than people generally realize and it’s nice to have you flesh it out a lot as you’ve been doing, partly as a sort of counterpoint to those who say, “All you have to do is realize that you’re already enlightened and you’re done.” There are people who actually talk that way. I’ve locked horns with a few of them, but in any case, I think this has been a nice vision of possibilities. I think it expands my horizons and reinforces but also just enhances the perspective that what is in to mangle a little bit more Shakespeare, there’s more in heaven and earth Horatio than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
William: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: It’s easy, there’s a kind of human tendency to sort of wrap it all, to want to wrap it all up and tie it with a neat little bow, and to be cocksure of one’s understanding and opinion of things, but to me it’s nice to maintain, I think Einstein said this, that maintain an attitude of the mysterious and of wonder and realizing that there probably is vastly much more going on in this world than we realize and we’re kind of always going to be on the path of fathoming it more and more deeply.
William: That’s exactly it, that’s exactly it, and so the more you know, the more you realize how little you know.
Rick: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that’s actually encouraging and inspiring rather than the opposite, it makes you humble.
William: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, great.
Rick: All righty, well thank you William, I’ve really enjoyed this. Yeah, never did get to my eight pages of notes but it doesn’t matter.
William: Maybe another time. Yeah, so let me make a few quick little wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with William Meader, he’ll have a page on batgap.com with a link to his book, to his website and so on, so you can pursue this if you like and find out more about what he’s up to. There’s also a page on Batgap over in the resources section or something where it’s like this geographical index where if you type in the location where you live or where you’re going to be, it’ll show you activities and talks that teachers in that area are going to be giving and it radiates out geographically. So if you type in San Francisco it’ll radiate out farther and farther, you’ll get down to San Jose and Santa Cruz and you know Los Angeles, it just shows you things listed in that way and so we’ll give William information about that and he can enter in his events. In any case, thank you for listening or watching. Next week I’ll be speaking with a fellow named Paul Levy who for some reason has a glowing recommendation from the musician Sting, but it’s all about quantum physics and consciousness. Apparently I’m about to crack open his book and start reading it. Each week is like Christmas for me, I get to open a new present and you’ve been a delightful present William, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you and having this conversation with you.
William: Thank you, it’s been good, I’ve really enjoyed it as well, thank you very much Rick and I continue to do this work. You’re doing fabulous work on behalf of humanity’s betterment so thank you.
Rick: As are you and thank you for that. All right and thanks again to those who have been listening or watching and hope to see you next time.