Summary
William Meader explains an esoteric framework rooted in Theosophy and Alice Bailey’s teachings. The discussion explores intuitive knowledge, the relationship between personality and soul, reincarnation, consciousness, spiritual evolution, and humanity’s need for service.
Questions This Interview Explores
- What is the soul, and how does it relate to the personality?
- Is consciousness produced by the brain, or does it exist beyond biology?
- How can reincarnation and spiritual development be understood?
- What does enlightenment mean in an evolutionary spiritual framework?
- How can a person express higher wisdom through everyday life?
Key takeaways
- Spiritual understanding grows when reason and intuition confirm each other.
- The personality is meant to become an instrument for the soul’s wisdom and love.
- Reincarnation gradually transforms mental, emotional, and physical patterns.
- Enlightenment is the unobstructed expression of the soul through human form.
- Spiritual progress has no final endpoint; each level opens into a larger one.
- Personal growth finds its purpose through service to the wider human community.
- Consciousness may shape biology while ordinary awareness remains conditioned by it.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done 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.
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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 workshops regularly in the United States, Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. So, welcome, William.
William: Thank you. 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. 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, my grandfather’s funeral—and at that funeral I had an interesting conversation with another family member. I started asking about the afterlife and that sort of thing, and they recommended that I read a particular book. I did, and in that book there was mention of meditation.
At 16, I didn’t know what that was, but I was really curious, and so I decided to explore it right away. I found Transcendental Meditation, TM, and began to meditate at the age of 16. For many years, I was quite diligent with the 20-minute-per-day meditations. 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. Just to give us a quick sketch, perhaps, of 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 Science of Mind, which is part of the New Thought movement. I was involved in that way of looking at things for quite some time, a few years.
The philosophy behind that is that you are the product of your thinking. In the middle of that, I discovered A Course in 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 and a variety of Eastern practices, and did a lot of reading from an Eastern perspective. 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. That’s actually the foundation—Theosophy and the Bailey work—from which I come.
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 that it sort of did it for a while and now it didn’t seem to be, and you thought you needed to find something different? 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 A Course in Miracles, for instance, and think it’s an incredibly valuable system, and I have no doubt that there’s more it could teach me. So it’s not like, “Oh, I got it all from that, and now I’m moving on.”
When I made a move like that—which, again, hasn’t happened for many, many years—it was more supplemental initially. It wasn’t like ending one thing and beginning another. It was more of an overlap period, and I 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 British woman who lived in the earlier part of the 20th century. She wrote for nearly 30 years and took dictation from a great Eastern master called the Master Djwal Khul. His nickname is “The Tibetan,” and so that’s really the foundation of much of the work.
She’s actually part of a stream connected with Theosophy, which originally came to light, you might say, in the late 1800s with Helena Blavatsky, the great Russian mystic. 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?
William: Well, it’s kind of a yes-and-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. Although it was telepathic, it wasn’t one of those situations involving the belief that an incorporeal being is speaking to me. The Tibetan was actually incarnate, and they developed that capacity while he was in form.
Rick: He was living in the Himalayas or something?
William: Yeah, in Tibet.
Rick: Did they ever meet in person?
William: There’s conflicting stories about that, but I would say probably not. I can’t say for sure.
How esoteric knowledge is verified
Rick: Okay, just curious. So you’ve written a rather extensive book. What was the title of it again?
William:Shine Forth.
Rick:Shine Forth: The Soul’s Magical Destiny. 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 have experientially verified it? Is it some mixture of the two, or what?
William: I would say it’s a mixture. 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. As with any philosophy, you have to figure out, “Can I live it? Does it really work in real life?”
Yet the esoteric philosophy is so vast, so intricate, and so amazingly whole that every step of the way you validate more of it through your own experience. In a way, everything is theoretical unless there’s some experiential validation. But it supports both my mind and my intuitive sense.
To me, the greatest truths come when both the mind and the intuition are in agreement on something. In Hinduism, that’s called buddhi-manasic consciousness. Buddhi is intuition, and manas is mind. Anything that I claim I know experientially is because it’s been buddhi-manasicly realized within me.
To me, the greatest truths come when both the mind and the intuition are in agreement on something. In Hinduism, that’s called buddhi-manasic consciousness. Buddhi is intuition, and manas is mind. Anything that I claim I know experientially is because it’s been buddhi-manasicly realized within me.
Rick: Yeah, I think probably a lot of people can relate to that if you think about it. For instance, if we take the point of reincarnation, some people who listen to this show don’t think that it’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, just to use that as a case in point or an example.
William: It’s a great example, a great example.
Rick: Yeah. And then there’s also some evidence of it. 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, and then it gets corroborated.
William: Well, 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.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. You just alluded to The Tibetan master, and in your book you also mention Christ a lot. I guess my question is: Is esoteric philosophy largely of Eastern origin—Vedic or pre-Vedic, Tibetan, or whatever—or is there really no sort of East-West divide when it comes to this? Would Christ and any of the great masters not 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 a human contrivance than anything. 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, about how many Earth-like planets there are in our galaxy and how many galaxies there are in the universe.
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: 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 one of the things all of us have to realize is that internally, there are 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. It’s a higher prompting, and it’s got both an intuitive quality and a wisdom quality to it. That’s coming into rapport with the more eternal part of you, the soul itself.
Integrating Higher and Lower Consciousness
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. That requires that the lower consciousness become increasingly cooperative as an agent in 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. 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, wants to express through that personality. It wants to do it without the personality getting in the way, and that’s the challenge. In so doing, it wants to make an uplifting contribution to the betterment of something beyond its individuality.
Every soul, when it’s awakening through the personality, wants to express through that personality.
As part of that five-minute discussion, I would say that we are living in an incredibly transitional time as a humanity. Humanity itself is going through a crisis of transformation. An individual’s capacity—the person I’m speaking to, that person’s capacity—to bring the best of themselves forward in service to the larger whole is more needed now than at any other time in my life. Given the magnitude of what’s trying to happen in the collective of humanity, the need for the best of each of us to come forward is now. It is now.
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. 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: What you just said about the soul and the two-part nature of our makeup, would it be fair to say that it’s due to the density of the Earth plane that we have this problem?
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 earthly life, 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 dense world.
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 earthly life, 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 dense world.
William: Yes, 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. 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. When the fullness of the soul can be expressed through that outer triple garment—mental, emotional, and physical—without distortion at all times and under any conditions, that’s enlightenment.
Rick: Do you feel like 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, realistically, from our perspective. When I do presentations around the world, I might talk about the Buddha and the Christ. They’re considered to be seventh-degree initiates, and that’s a whole story in itself.
Rick: Which we may get into.
William: 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, beginners in a larger evolutionary regime, which is what we call the regime of the solar logos.
We are evolving within a regime called the planetary logos, the entity that ensouls our whole planet. Our planet is a god, in a way. 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.
This gets into the whole subject of hylozoism, which we touched on before you and I got online.
Rick: Great. There are 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 definitely want to come back to that.
For 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. You’ll see a form through which you can submit your question. 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.
This thing about the Buddha and the Christ being beginners at their level—there’s something in Vedic cosmology about kalas. There are supposed to be sixteen kalas, or levels of evolution, and supposedly human beings occupy the fourth through the eighth. So even the brightest of the bright are only at the eighth, and then above that there are eight more levels to which they could rise.
William: Well, different systems have different numbers of rungs on the ladder and divide the pie in a different way, but fundamentally, it is hierarchical. It is a ladder that, when you get to the end of the ladder, you realize is the bottom of another ladder.
It is a ladder that, when you get to the end of the ladder, you realize is the bottom of another ladder.
Rick: Yes, yes, yes. So, to play devil’s advocate on behalf of some people whom I don’t actually 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.
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. They say that ultimately there’s no one home, there is no person, and there is no entity in there. Therefore, to them, the notion of reincarnation is absurd.
Someone like Sam Harris, who has in a way devoted his life to spirituality but is also an avowed atheist, would say that when you die, that’s it: lights out. I just listened to a recording of him the other day. He would say that all the talk in religions about there being something that happens after you die is just wishful thinking to avoid the horror of the termination of our existence.
I don’t know if you spend a lot of time talking to people who think that way, but if you had to—if you were stuck in the airport with one of those people—what would you say?
William: I would say that the question you’re raising 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. The atheist will say biology is the source of consciousness. Many mystical traditions will say, no, consciousness is transcendent to biology and biology is an outer instrument.
Esotericism would say that 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 genetic attributes.
Rick: As well as what you had for lunch, you know.
William: Yes, and then the atheist is absolutely correct, because largely, lower consciousness is indeed conditioned by biology and social conditioning.
Esotericism would say that there’s a part of you that is transcendent to that, and we call that the soul. Beyond the soul, there’s even another structure called the monad, which is another subject.
But that soul is the sum total of acquired wisdom that you have garnered over countless incarnations. That instrument, or what we call the causal body—the holder of that wisdom from life to life to life to life—is not conditioned by the physical incarnation. It’s transcendent to it.
One of the beauties of the esoteric philosophy is that it’s often not an either-or, but a both answer to many, many things.
Rick: Yes, and I think you’ve probably heard of Nisargadatta Maharaj, that great sage from Mumbai. One of his statements was that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity. It doesn’t have to be either-or; it can be both-and. There’s a larger basket into which both things can fit.
Of course, there’s a simple analogy for what you just said, which is the radio. If you smash the radio with a hammer, it can’t play music anymore. But that doesn’t mean that the electromagnetic field is not still there, or that other radios can’t detect the fluctuations in it and transmit music.
William: Right, right. If you’re tuning that radio and it’s tuned well, it’s a perfect expression of the transmission. But if it’s tuned a little off, it’s a little off.
So 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: Yes, 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 any radio within its range can pick up that transmission.
Here, though, we’re saying that in addition to consciousness being a ubiquitous field, there are individual expressions—which you’re referring to as the soul—that go from life to life and evolve as they do so.
William: Yes, except that here again, it’s a both, not an either-or. You’re quite right that in the case 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 is much more encompassing. The soul of humanity, for instance, is a much vaster signal. It would be more akin to a radio station broadcasting to everybody, every radio.
The causal body, karma, and reincarnation
Rick: So you’ve probably heard the absurd argument that anatomists have cut open bodies and have never found any soul in there. Some people actually use that to deny that there is any such thing. We say that you’ve never found the Beatles by opening up a radio. But that leads to the question: 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 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 that you have something called a causal body. Just as you have a physical body, an emotional body, and a mental body, beyond that, deeper than that, there’s this thing called the causal body.
It is called the causal body because it’s your body of causes, and it’s the container 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.
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 your soul is the Christ in you, and that the 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, you have more stored wisdom contained in that instrument.
Now, it is considered substantial. It’s interesting that you bring that term up—substantial—insofar 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.
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 of it. The soul is both an agency of lofty love and wise mind.
In fact, there’s a whole mythology about how that causal body forms. It’s a mythology called the coming of the solar angels. It’s said to be substantial 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 when all of the content of that causal body is successfully able to express itself through the lower self, unimpeded and without distortion. 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, simultaneously, that’s when karma comes to an end. Therefore, reincarnation is no longer a necessity.
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, simultaneously, that’s when karma comes to an end. Therefore, reincarnation is no longer a necessity.
We could call that enlightenment. 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 ray your soul is on and the type of soul you are. That, too, is another subject. But, anyway, it’s a kind of a long answer to your question: 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 comprised of more subtle substance of some kind. Perhaps what the soul is comprised of is 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. There are 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. That means I no longer have personal karma etched into the vibrational quality of my causal body. I’ve worked it through and adjusted it all.
It doesn’t mean that you don’t have a relationship to collective karma. In fact, in this higher way of evolution that I’m mentioning, there are said to be seven paths in ancient literature. One of them is called the path of Earth service. In Hinduism, in the East, they might call it the way of the Bodhisattva. It’s the same idea: to stay until the last weary pilgrim comes home.
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 in which a person is so in tune with the divine consciousness, 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 serves accordingly.
William: Well, kind of, yeah. At least as it’s conveyed in this philosophy, at that point it is said that the decision of which way to go is 100 percent free choice, and then it’s also said that it’s predestined.
Rick: Yeah.
William: So it’s free choice and predestined. There’s another paradox that is part of the journey.
Rick: Yeah, which brings up another question. 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 we’re governed by our genetics and our—I don’t know what—karma or something. It may appear that we have choice, but we in fact don’t.
Some of them even cite 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.
Let’s put it this way. I’m going to use my hands. I hope you can see me okay here.
Rick: I can.
William: Let’s say up represents widening fields of consciousness as you evolve. Wherever you are on the path is the mean point of where your resting consciousness is deep within.
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. You’re a cell within a larger entity. Back to hylozoism, which I know you’re going to want to ask about: You and I are cells within a larger living system, and that entity is evolving, too. 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 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. That’s exactly what hylozoism is about. Indeed, this would just be a good time—you wanted to talk about that.
Hylozoism and nested living systems
Rick: I do. I want to ask you one follow-up question about something you said, and then let’s get into that. You were talking about how one accumulates wisdom, 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’ve really done some bad things? Can you regress, or 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 transmigration of the soul.
Rick: Yeah.
William: Anyway, the key is to understand that it would be nice if evolution were like this—a kind of slope upward over many lives—but it isn’t. It’s like this.
Rick: Right, it’s a sine wave that’s fluctuating but trending upward over time. 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 the collective of humanity—and now in human history is a good time to consider that, too—there are times when there’s a downward motion through wrong choice, difficulty, crisis, and a variety of things that leads to what we would look at and say, “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.
When you see a larger picture with an individual or society, and you pull back—for an individual, you think of many lives; for society, you think of centuries rather than the last five years—what you see is that there are times when there is a downward turn. With the short vision, the narrow vision, it looks like it’s all falling apart. But with the pulled-back vision, you realize that, yes, it is a downward turn, but it’s still within a larger upward trend.
That’s the key to understand. It applies to an individual, a group, a nation, or humanity as a whole.
Rick: Yeah. I think everybody gets that. Feel free to send in questions if you don’t. It’s like, if we look at the universe as a whole and conclude that there’s an evolutionary trajectory to it—that word is always hard to say—then asteroids might destroy inhabited planets, all kinds of nasty things might happen, and stars will explode. But in the big, big picture, the universe’s-eye view of it, all these things are necessary for 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 Kahlil Gibran and The Prophet. Maybe you’ve read that. I’m sure many people have. Years ago, and I paraphrase, 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, it sort of gets at the same idea, I think. So there are a couple of things we want to discuss here, and I think they’re probably related. I don’t think they’re two different things, but correct me if I’m wrong. One is hylozoism, which, as I understand it, is sort of systems within systems within systems—you know, greater and greater, like Russian dolls: larger and larger systems containing smaller systems. 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 do 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 it’s a new word for a lot of people. It’s spelled H-Y-L-O-Z-O-ism. It’s also called the hylozoistic principle, and actually, I believe it was Pythagoras who first presented it as a kind of philosophic doctrine. 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.
When I speak of hylozoism, I often like to speak of it by giving a metaphoric example. 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’ve heard the complexity of a cell compared to that of 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 it difficult to see that it is 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. This is not just 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, and there are nations. A nation is an entity. The United States, Germany, and all the countries in the world are entities, and they have a soul and they have a personality. They are struggling to transform their lower in support of their higher, just like you and me.
The same is true with all of humanity. 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. That’s the being that ensouls the whole planet, which is a god to us in a way. Each kingdom of nature is just a layer of its consciousness evolving through form.
What’s so uniquely interesting about the human kingdom is that we were told in ancient literature that the entire human kingdom is the throat chakra to that entity. I’d like to invite 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 begs the question: What’s the function of a throat center? 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?
The implication is that the throat chakra, in each of us and collectively, 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. 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.
Every human soul is destined to be a creative agent in support of spiritual upliftment.
And that entity, by the way, is evolving. That entity is said to be a chakra within a larger entity called the solar logos. The solar logos is the entity that ensouls the whole solar system. Our solar system is said to be one of seven in what is called the local group, which is a massive life, a 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, a hundred and fifty billion stars. Think about that: 150 billion stars in a spiral galaxy. That entity is called a galactic logos.
And now we know that there are millions of galaxies.
Rick: Trillions.
William: Trillions of galaxies. So the magnitude of this is staggering. I jokingly say that when somebody has a meditation experience and says 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.
Sometimes when you talk about hylozoism, it can make you feel like a piece of dust in a hurricane. But the truth is that you are also the hurricane. The other aspect of this that has to be stated—and I should have stated this at the beginning—is that hylozoism 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 or universal intelligence. Call it what you like. 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, can feel like a piece of dust in a hurricane, never forget that, in another sense, you are the hurricane.
Sometimes when you talk about hylozoism, it can make you feel like a piece of dust in a hurricane. But the truth is that you are also 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 end their existence in some kind of enlightenment-extermination event, in which they’re not going to exist anymore and they’re not going to reincarnate anymore.
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. 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—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, and somehow they’re lasting. If they only knew what they were saying.
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, in studying modern society, 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, “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. 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 make 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. Ivan’s question does also. He asks—I 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: Is part of the evolution of the soul to move from human incarnations to actual incarnations into these larger entities you referred to? You might become 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. 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 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 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 entities 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 your 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 isness, whereas ego is the sense of a lot of associations to isness: I am this, I am that. It often is in contrast to others.
But understand that your monad, which is beyond the soul, is the true you. Your monad 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 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 Abraham 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, 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. They can reach to it, grab it, and 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, 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 faculty or 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. 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 knowing who you are and where you are in your evolution, and then in the next paragraph it’ll say, “Take your eyes off yourself.”
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 it 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 of it. 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 Greek mono, “the one.” Let’s put it this way, and I’m going to use some Christian terminology here: 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, a soul somehow came into the picture. Is that what you said?
William: Yes, and here’s where we get into nuances with language. What happens in the human kingdom? Every kingdom of nature is said to be a place where the monad develops further capacities of itself.
The human kingdom has much to do with first discovering your identity, rising above animal instinct, and understanding your individuality beyond mere instinctual response. 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 eventually becomes 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. Many of the most powerful people in the world who are making decisions, sadly at this time of life, may have a 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. In this philosophy, that’s what we call the beginning of the path, the beginning of the recognition of your own duality.
But prior to that journey, which leads you eventually to discover your duality and then eventually transform that lower self so that you enter into the next kingdom of nature, the earlier kingdoms of nature—when you were a monad working through those kingdoms—you were developing other attributes.
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 of your preoccupation with 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 mists of time. But in my book, I have a simple analogy for it.
If you 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 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.
That is the real meaning behind the whole story in Christianity of the prodigal son: the out-breath 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—the universe is cyclical—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 of what happens to the earth when it’s done. You alluded to it.
Esotericism would say this: 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 context, the planets 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. 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—that are called the synthesis planets, or the synthesizing planets. They are Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. 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. 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 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.
The moon and esoteric cosmology
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?”
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—is actually the carcass of our Earth’s, our planetary Logos’s, 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. 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: 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.
It’s very interesting because 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, 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. 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, which we have to struggle to transform. 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, 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.
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.
Kundalini and purification
Rick: Okay, there was a section in your book in which you were talking about the necessity of preparing, 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 there’s the life coming through you.
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’s 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 when the system—which is you, your incarnation—is 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—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 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. 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.
The seven rays
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, 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 and purpose of your life itself in a spiritual sense—not just in this life, but over many, many incarnations.
Your soul ray stays with you for many, many incarnations, but your personality ray, for the lower self, the personality, 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. 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. I just will say this: 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 them, study them, 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. 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. 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 your life.
So what are the two or three that are most important? Then ask yourself, okay, these seem to be the strongest. 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—for instance, I think this is somebody from the UK. When I go to the UK, I 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 the implications of that are.
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 are 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 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. 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: I’m quite confident that you would have a fair amount of second ray in you.
Rick: Okay, and what would that mean again?
William: 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 an advanced society. 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 percent 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, irreversible tipping points, 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. 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 not only climate issues, 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, will bring about solutions in ways that may as yet be unforeseen, even technological ones.
Somehow, 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 crises 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 of 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 that we’re moving from a Piscean era to an Aquarian era. The rayological one 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 it is causing a lot of the increased polarization that you have attitudinally in politics, in religion, in the arts, et cetera. 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 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 a teacher, a guru, a text, whatever it is. That is the sixth ray, which 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 into the world of practical mysticism. It’s the capacity to, with the seventh ray, 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 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 in total is right now walking across the burning ground. And one of the things to keep in mind is—
Rick: Quite literally, by the way. There are 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. Believe me, it’s sweltering hot right now in this room.
Humanity’s Shadow During Spiritual Transition
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. 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, and we’ve seen the worst of theology.
If we’re really honest with ourselves, I think we could say we’ve seen the worst of ourselves, too. 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 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, is a really, really good thing. As painful as it is, it’s jarring loose shadow issues that have been there all along but have been more hidden. Now they’re forced to rise to the surface, and we can’t change anything unless we can see it. Now we see it.
Now, this big transition is understood to have as its major theme 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 that humanity is trying to figure out how to be one, really.
If we don’t figure that out, then, your friend, this fellow you were talking about, is absolutely right: We have no hope if we don’t figure that out. But there’s a spiritual principle 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 one religion and another religion, between a government and those it governs, between humanity and its relationship to Mother Nature, and between humanity and how it understands resources?
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 one religion and another religion, between a government and those it governs, between humanity and its relationship to Mother Nature, and between humanity and how it understands resources?
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 has to do with Mother Nature, money, and other things. That wrong relationship is what stages the burning ground.
For instance, right now, I don’t know if my stats are exactly current; these are a couple of 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. Somebody just died. There’s another. There’s another.
Meanwhile, we have a surplus of food—I think it’s a three or four percent surplus of food. That’s wrong relationship. So the whole focus is to establish right relationship. For instance, 50 years ago, we didn’t even think about the fact that there was an environmental crisis. But in the last few decades, or couple of decades, it’s really picked up speed because more of the sense of right relationship is starting to crest on the shores of progressive thinking people.
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. That’s true. I’m just using environmentalism as one example of this.
So this is an incredibly important transitional time that is steeped in crisis and darkness and oppositional energy. That’s why I said at the beginning of our conversation that, in that five-minute conversation with the guy you said I should talk with, this is the time to bring our very best forward.
Your best of you are needed more at this time in human history than at any other time in your life.
Friends, all of you who are listening, you and the best of you are 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 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 is the so-called heresy of separateness. The heresy of separateness is just permeating the airwaves these days, whether it’s separateness in terms of men and women, separateness in terms of building a wall, or separateness in terms of preventing an immigration crisis from entering into Europe. Whatever it is, it’s all over the place.
So this is your time, friends. This is your time. I think that, probably for the next three or four years—actually, I think until the year 2025, for sure—this is just going to continue to get heated up.
Rick: Okay. Just to take the environmental thing as an example, as you just did, because it’s an easy one—but you could take any number of other things as examples—there’s a good argument to be made that the crisis in Syria, the civil war, and the consequent refugee crisis are due to global warming.
There was a serious drought, and all the farmers moved into the cities. They weren’t properly supported and couldn’t do anything, and that created all this unrest. There’s evidence that 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. That’s going to create a migration crisis that will make Syria look like a picnic.
At the same time, there will be huge droughts, fires, and other environmental disasters, which are going to make it very difficult for everyone on Earth. Yet, with all that going on, we have an administration that puts somebody like Scott Pruitt in the Environmental Protection Agency. He’s since left, but the guy who took over for him is cut from the same mold. They deny that global warming is even a problem and are doing what they can to serve the oil industry.
So people who think along more progressive lines can easily look at something like that and become furious or discouraged and feel like we’re all doomed, that there’s no hope. In what sense would you say that the current state of affairs is an opportunity? Is it that it polarizes or magnetizes everybody to focus and do something rather than be complacent? Or 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: Let me just 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.
Having said that, I think that if you look at human history, you find that humanity, as a species, is remarkably resilient. We, as a species, have the capacity to adapt to a wide variety of differing circumstances. One of the great gifts of human beings is our capacity to adapt 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 have always been these periods of profound gloom and naysayers who believe that this is the end. But 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. Also, would you say—and this is something I’ve often thought and said—that there are a lot of well-entrenched economic and political institutions that really wouldn’t fit in a more enlightened world, and somehow or other they have got to be dismantled? Chances are, they’re not going to do so willingly.
Perhaps we’re building up to a kind of crisis situation in which they collapse unwillingly. Or who knows? Maybe those running them will all of a sudden have a change of heart, and the oil companies will decide to just forget about oil and totally embrace alternative energy, to take one example.
William: Oh, I see, I see. You threw me off a little bit when you mentioned social institutions, because I’d have to know which institutions you mean. Many of the major institutions—it’s not about collapse; it’s about transformation.
Every institution, whether it’s politics, government, education, the arts, science, or religion, is just a category of human consciousness that is actually ray-defined, I might add. These institutions evolve through the vastness of time, and those ray qualities are going to be continually with us, structuring patterns of societal organization and structures for us. But they have to adapt as humanity moves forward into its next step.
To me, the major institutions—now, if you’re talking about the oil industry as an institution, then I’d say to you, yes, 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, 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 energy. For instance, the country of Dubai is establishing huge solar arrays. 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.
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. They’re just surging ahead in terms of changing their whole way of producing energy.
There’s no reason 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 a personal vested interest in doing so.
William: I agree, I agree. So countries like that become shining examples for us to look at and say, “What can we do to mimic some of that and move in the right direction?”
Of course, these big countries—these big countries like the United States—are like a huge ocean liner. Trying to get it to move in a new direction is tough.
A little country—I teach in New Zealand, for instance. It’s one of the major places where I work, and I’m always amazed at how progressive New Zealand is in so many ways. Yet they have the advantage of being a small country that can make changes that are much more difficult for us 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 a collective consciousness that’s a being in its own right. Obviously, over the eons of time, or over at least recorded history, civilizations have risen and fallen, and some that seemed great and invincible no longer exist.
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, or will it resurge and continue 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. Yet, because the United Nations is still in its infancy, it’s making a lot of mistakes, as any infant would. The day will come when that institution will play a much stronger role in the shaping of our collective lives.
It all hinges upon this: To what extent can we genuinely see ourselves in the other? To what extent can we see ourselves in the person who, attitudinally, we might think is holding a wholly different view? 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 one world. If we don’t get that—as I said, if we don’t solve that—we are probably doomed in a way. But it’s one humanity, and it’s oneness realized through diversity. It’s not oneness through sameness; it’s oneness through differentness. That’s the core of 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.
The stages of initiation
Rick: So I have about eight pages of notes here consisting largely of the main points from your book, all of which obviously we’re not going to get to. 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. There are seven in full, but we talk about five, and three major ones for human beings. Initiations represent milestones of evolution within our individual consciousness.
The first initiation has to do with two things. It has to do with the soul of a human being having enough influence in the life that the heart opens wide and you begin to feel the oneness of humanity. It’s not just theorizing about the oneness of humanity; it is feeling, with your heart, the underlying unitive field of all people. This is the first initiation.
But it’s also 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 who doesn’t eat or doesn’t have a sexual life. What it does mean is 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: A prerequisite. 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 and you have seven types of souls.
William: Well, your soul is part of an ashram. When we use the word ashram, we often think about India, but that’s not where the ashram is. India is 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.
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. 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 these masters are said to be the officiants who actually take you as a soul—not you as a personality, but you as a soul—through a process of initiation.
They happen rarely. For instance, it takes thousands of lives to finally get to the first initiation. Many people who are seriously on the path are, we believe, first-degree initiates. But to get to the second initiation might take another four or five lives.
The second initiation has to do with the soul 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 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 me. It’s about learning how to hold ourselves above our watery nature, our emotional body, and use our emotion—not be used by emotion.
That particular initiation is 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 watch over humanity and initiate people when they’re ready to be initiated?
William: Yes. These are the heads of these ashrams, so to speak.
That’s right. The ashram you’re from, you might say, is where you’re being initiated more deeply into that ashram. The first and second initiations are said to be 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 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 part, and these first initiations represent mastery over those three instruments.
You see, the Transfiguration is a symbol for us. You also find it in 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, Jesus becomes this kind of glowing ball of light, and these three disciples are so taken by this that they fall on their faces in reverence to it, prostrating themselves in that way.
Then a booming voice from the heavens speaks and says to those disciples:
This is my son, of whom I am 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 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—your threefold personality is 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 it. 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, is about there. Also Mother Teresa. Abraham Lincoln would be an example of a third-degree initiate. We think people such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi would probably be third-degree initiates. We’ve done a lot of work on this by studying biographies.
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 and so powerful—like an atomic bomb an inch from your nose. You inwardly sense it, and it’s there.
What happens is that, just as you approach the fourth initiation, the 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 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, that is crucified. The light going off is to make sure that there’s no crutch for you to 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 you forsaken me?
Let’s translate that: “Monad, monad, why have you forsaken me?” The fourth initiation is very, very intense and difficult, but liberating at the same time. By the way, there’s also a huge joy on each step.
The fifth initiation is called the Revelation in India, and in the West it’s called the Resurrection. Essentially, you’re a full master, and you begin to develop your own ashram.
You’re actually developing your own ashram even now, in a way. You have people around you who are very spiritual and who see you as a kind of leading, guiding voice for them. Those people, in many incarnations down the road, could indeed become part of the ashram that you eventually will lead when you become a fifth initiate.
Rick: 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 initiations—are sort of post-human. You don’t even do them when you’re in human bodies.
William: 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 about. It’s exciting and fascinating, but I’m afraid you’d have to give me another ten or fifteen minutes to really do that justice.
I can do ten or fifteen if you feel like it. P. T. 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 who 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 who embodies what it says: this decision. What’s the decision? The decision is which of the higher ways of evolution you will follow. Remember I mentioned that earlier. That’s the decision. There is a percentage of them who 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?
William: 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, when that actual movement starts to take place, moving into that new path.
For instance, we’re told that the Buddha is on what is called the Path to Sirius, the star system Sirius, which around the world has been such a revered system. Esotericism would say, “Yeah, it’s amazing.” The Sirius system is said to be an incredibly superior system.
You know, even the ancient Egyptians understood something powerful about Sirius. It’s Isis in Egyptian mythology. 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, 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 in which we are given to understand that the Buddha comes to the Himalayas and unites with the Christ, and a whole ceremony takes place in a valley high in the Himalayas called the Wesak Valley.
That eight-minute visitation is a great blessing to humanity. It’s four minutes before the exact moment of the Taurus full moon and four minutes after. 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 bless us for eight minutes a year. It’s a lovely, lovely experience, and there’s 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. 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.
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—to mangle Shakespeare a little bit more—
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 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—an attitude of the mysterious and of wonder, 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. 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. I 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.
Rick: 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 there’s this geographical index. 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 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. Hope to see you next time.
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