[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.
My name is Rick Archer.
Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.
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My guest today is John Audette.
He is the author of a book which I just finished listening to
called "Loved by the Light,
True Stories of Divine Intervention and Providence."
John earned a master's of science degree from Virginia Tech.
He's a native of Fort Lauderdale, Florida,
and he's been for decades a senior executive
in hospitals and hospice administration
and physician practice management,
as well as the performing arts and public broadcasting.
He contributed several scholarly chapters
to various books by other authors
about spiritually transformative experiences
and non-local consciousness,
including works by Dr. Irvin Laszlo.
He's also gratefully acknowledged
in many other books on these subjects
by various well-known authors
whom he assisted dating back to 1974.
In fact, John, that's one thing I noticed about you.
of like a Forrest Gump character in a way because you've run into all these amazing people you know
like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Edgar Mitchell and Kenneth Ring and all these people going back
decades. You just seem to have a knack for traveling in those circles. Moody, Dr. what was his first
name? Raymond. Raymond Moody, right. We'll get into some of those stories but that's been kind of an
interesting aspect of your story. You're writing a book of fiction, huh? A novel trilogy? Have you
Have you written all three or are you just the first one?
Yes, all three are written, they're finished.
I'm actually just doing some final editing and polishing and I hope to have them self-published
sometime next year.
That's great.
Is it sort of like spiritual fiction?
Yes, it's political thriller in the genre of Dan Brown.
Suspense thriller.
You know, I call it fiction but a lot of it is historically accurate.
I changed the names to protect the guilty, but I'm trying to basically do the same thing
I did in writing Love by the Light, which is to convey some spiritual message points and
some very important calls to action.
One of the main ones is to encourage people to practice critical thinking.
>> Oh, yes.
>> Do their own research and form their own opinions that are grounded in credible evidence.
Yes, and that can be taken different ways because people on both sides of various contentious
debates say those same words.
Like all of a sudden I've become a molecular biologist and here's my opinion about this.
If you want brain surgery, come to me, I'm an expert.
I like that quote, you're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts.
Yes, who was that?
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that.
Yes.
Okay, let me keep reading your bio and I might interject again because there's a lot of interesting
tidbits in here. So you were the primary founder of the International Association
for Near-Death Studies, INS.org, with co-founders Raymond Moody, Bruce Grayson,
who's been on BatGap, Michael Sabome, MD, and Kenneth Ring, and you now serve as
CEO of Eterna, Eterna.org, which you co-founded with Ibn Alexander, who's
been on BatGap, and Edgar Mitchell. One thing I was wondering about Edgar
Mitchell, in your book, you kept saying he's a skeptic, he's a skeptic, right up
until his death practically, but then I've always heard that he was the founder of, what
was it, Ions?
>>Kurt: Ions, the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
>>Rick: Yeah, that one.
So I was kind of surprised because I figured he had had some kind of mystical experience
when he went to the moon or something that inspired him to start the Institute of Noetic
Sciences.
>>Kurt: Edgar wrote a great book called The Way of the Explorer.
He talked about his oneness epiphany on the way back from the moon.
started him on the path to explore consciousness.
And we would often engage in dialogue
about whether consciousness survives bodily death.
In fact, John Fetzer of the Fetzer Foundation
offered to help fund the Institute of Noetic Sciences
if Edgar would agree to seriously pursue
the issue of life after death
from a scientific perspective.
And Edgar said, "John, I would love to do that.
I'd love to accept your money, but in all honesty,
how can I agree to do that when I don't even know
the definition of consciousness?
What can I tell you that survives bodily death
if I don't know what it is or how to measure it
or how to operationally define it
from the standpoint of a research protocol?"
So this sort of reminds me of an incident
that happened with Dr. Moody, Raymond Moody,
in Charlottesville, I think it was 1976,
James McDonald from McDonald Douglas Aircraft
was in town to attend a symposium on future relations
with at the time the Soviet Union.
And he came in looking very somber and concerned.
Life After Life had just come out.
- Raymond Moody's best book.
- Raymond Moody's best work
where he was pioneering groundbreaking work
where he defined near-death experiences for the first time
and laid out what's called a Moody model,
which the common elements that are often reported.
And it was catching fire.
I mean, the book was truly riveting for a lot of people
because I think it was really the first time
that a PhD MD seriously waded
into the waters of survivalism.
Now, Raymond would always say in the beginning
that he did not know what these experiences signified.
He could not, being a philosopher, doctor of philosophy, he could not legitimately claim
them to be proof of survival.
But they were interesting anecdotal stories that deserved everyone's attention.
So Mr. MacDonald came in and he said, "We had a meeting."
And Bruce was there, Bruce Grayson, and Bob Monroe, Monroe Institute Out-of-Body Experience,
by Noral Beat, Hemisync, and Ian had written a book called "20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation."
So he felt he was in good company and he said, "Look, I've got my checkbook right here." He was
kind of pulled it out of his jacket. "I'm willing to write you a check for any amount, you name the
amount, I'm a wealthy guy, but I need you to produce evidence that there's life after death.
Because if you can do that, we will create ideological havoc in the Soviet Union, because
the whole society is predicated on atheism.
They said, "I'm concerned that we're going to have a nuclear confrontation, that we will
not survive."
Nobody.
So, we have to diffuse this while we can.
Your book is the most important and exciting thing I've read ever that might serve as a
solution.
So, will you do that?
from a non-profit and I'll fund it. You can direct the research. And Raymond, you know,
he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He was well trained
in what constitutes proof. -Scientific method, yeah. -You know, what constitutes logic and
deductive reasoning and all that and critical thinking. And so, Raymond said,
this is Raymond. He's an all shucks kind of guy and very unassuming. And he just basically said,
"Mr. McDonough, I appreciate the offer. I'm honored, I'm humbled, but I can't accept it because proof
sets a very high standard and we cannot possibly meet it to the point where it would create
ideological havoc in the Soviet Union." So he declined the gift. It's a tribute to his integrity.
Yeah, you have to honor that, but at the same time, I think he could have stayed in integrity
and answered the question a little differently, which is what I was hoping. I wish I could have
telepathically communicate to Raymond how he should respond. We didn't know what Mr. McDonald wanted
to meet about and what his offer was going to be, so there was really no chance to more or less
script the conversation. But we were talking about at that time creating a 501(c)(3) to advance
research in the area. And what I wish Raymond had said, by the way he just turned 80 years old,
I think it was June 29th, and he's in good health and good spirits and still very much the laughing
Buddha. Raymond has the best sense of humor of anybody. He's quite the comedian and a great
storyteller. But anyway, I had hoped he would have said, you know, we're fortunate to be embarking
upon fertile ground, embryonic phenomenon called the near-death experience, which we know very
little about and we certainly could further the state of the art if we had adequate funding.
I can think of lots of protocols and hypotheses, controlled studies, give grants to major
universities, medical schools to undertake some of this work and I can assure you that at the end of
the day, while we might not have definitive proof, we will advance the state of the art that much
further and probably make it that much more compelling because, to be honest, I mean,
my personal opinion, and I think this is probably Raymond's point of view too, we could spend
billions on research and yes, we would further the state of the art. We would accumulate some
compelling information and very interesting data cross-culturally, maybe even some longitudinal
studies to determine after effects, and some prospective studies designed before experiences
happen.
But I think the takeaway at the end of the day would be to validate what we already know,
which I put in "Attorney in Seven Statements."
I summarized it as best I could into seven observations about the nature of reality, based
on a convergence model which brings together frontier science and its exploration of these
experiences, not just near-death experiences, but a whole array of exceptional, transcendent
human experiences, together with the cornerstone pillar teachings of the world's great religions,
aligned with what the great sages and avatars and spiritual teachers have said over millennia.
all converge into those seven observations about the nature of reality. No matter how much more
research we do, or how well-funded it is, I really don't think we're going to improve upon
those observations. At the very least, I think we might help to empirically validate them and make
them more acceptable and credible in the minds of a lot of folks who are still on the fence,
still sort of tied to materialism, but nevertheless I think they will stand the test of time.
So, I'm a fan of research. I'd like to see a lot more of it. Frankly, this whole area has not
been very well funded for decades, especially the burgeoning field of torsion physics,
quantum physics, and how it makes use of consciousness, which I believe is the
the missing link that Einstein sought for his unified field theory. So that's my
long-winded answer to your question about Edgar Mitchell and John Fetzer and
Raymond Moody and James McDonald. Well I'd say that proof is not the right word
because it's too strong a word and there are many areas of science which are very
mainstream and very widely respected but which are still accumulating data after
decades. When you talk about subjective experiences, have we ever proven that people dream? There
can always be a white crow that shows up, you know, that refutes the notion that all
crows are black, but science works by virtue of just continually amassing greater and greater
evidence. And so your hypothesis gets stronger and stronger. And I think there's a heck of
a lot of evidence now for the kinds of things you're discussing here. When you talk about
subjective experiences. Have we ever proven that people dream? How do you
videotape a dream? You don't. Everybody says they have them and we can associate
rapid eye movement and certain brain waves with them and so on, but I think
the same thing could be done of higher states of consciousness. A lot of people
have said they have them and there could be neurophysiological correlates which
enable us to establish a standard for these states. Yes, well said. Well said. It
reminds me of a cliche, "To the one who knows, no amount of evidence is necessary, and to
those who don't know, no amount of evidence is sufficient." That's so true. Materialist
science is dismissive of the phenomenology that falls under the rubric of spiritually
transformative experiences. They like to be dismissive of the things that materialist science
cannot explain, like the vertical perception, for example. So proof is an intellectual trap.
That's all it is. It doesn't serve us well at this point. That's not to say that we should
buy into falsehoods or half-truths. We should, each one of us, engage in very aggressive,
critical thinking. But when the anecdotal evidence is so compelling and goes back for
millennia back to Plato, if not before, in the case of these experiences, and when science
cannot adequately account for them, then the default position has to be, logically, to
take these folks at face value. What do they believe it signifies? I've been very fortunate.
I started this work at the age of 22 because of my meeting with Raymond, which was an amazing
synchronicity, I call it cosmic choreography in my book, because it was a journey that went back to
1960 when I was in third grade, the age of eight. The seeds were planted firmly back then,
but I was raised Catholic, I gave it up for Lent when I left home at age 18.
I was agnostic because I did not know what I did not know, and I wasn't going to buy into anything
unless I could be reasonably sure that it was true. So, when I met Raymond, I was a full-fledged
agnostic. The way in which I met him was extraordinary, and he had my full attention,
because I could tell that spirit was at work without knowing what spirit was. I really felt
guided, and I felt I'd heard the ring of destiny for the first time. And when he spoke, I organized
his first talk, his first major talk about his research. He was a medical student at the time
of Medical College of Georgia and I was an undergraduate at Augusta College. I'd just
been discharged from the army and I'd been elected president of the Sociology Club and
our job was to bring interesting speakers to campus and I asked my club members if they had
any ideas for good speakers and only one person raised her hand and it was Kathy Tabakian,
who's acknowledged in Life After Life, by the way, and Kathy said, "Yeah, I know somebody,
Dr. Raymond Moody." "Oh, he's a doctor?" "Yeah, he's the doctor of philosophy."
"Literally philosophy?" "Yes, literally philosophy." "Well, what did he talk about? You know, Plato?"
And she said, "Oh, no, no, no, he's a medical student, you know, and he's doing this fascinating
research. I'm helping him with it about people who have clinically died and been resuscitated.
They come back telling these fantastic experiences.
Well, I lit up like a Christmas tree when I heard that.
Because when I was eight years old, in third grade,
my best friend at the time, Mike Waters,
I used to go to Mike's house frequently after school
for the proverbial milk and cookies and to play,
do what eight-year-olds do,
and I knew that his mom had been taken by ambulance to the hospital
a few weeks before.
She'd had a heart attack.
Apparently she was clinically dead and resuscitated, and she came back home, I think, two or three
weeks later.
And on this particular day, we're walking home, Mike says to me, "I want my old mom
back.
I miss my old mom."
He was depressed because he didn't know who this new person was.
And I said, "What do you mean?
I thought she was fine out of the hospital."
"Well, yeah, she is, but she's not the same."
"Well, how is she different?"
She said, "Jesus freak.
Jesus freak.
this week. What do you mean? Well, she talks about God and angels and heaven and Jesus and how much
she loves us. So we get to his house that day and I'm seeing his mom for the first time and,
oh my gosh, I mean, I don't see auras, but she was aglow. She was definitely a changed woman.
You could see it in her face. Her countenance was remarkable. So she had my attention and I
I couldn't wait to do my first ever interview
with a near-death experiencer at the age of eight.
"Ms. Waters, Mike tells me that you went to the hospital
and you had a heart attack and you died."
"I sure did, honey. I sure did."
"Well, what was it like to die?"
"Oh, it was the most beautiful experience of my entire life."
And she went on to describe a near-death experience
in classic terms.
And she was reassuring me that nothing to fear
and God loves us and we're all greeted with incredible,
beautiful love and compassion.
And there is the death of the body,
but not the death of the soul.
So nothing to fear, all is good.
And I never forgot that story.
It stayed with me.
I didn't, not in the forefront of my thinking, of course,
but there in the inner recesses.
So when Kathy told me the story
that she was doing this research with women,
I was like, I gotta meet this guy.
I've got to meet him.
And then I did the next day, and it was love at first sight.
And when we brought Raymond to campus, it was standing room only and panel discussion.
His book didn't come out until I think the fall of 1975, and this was April of 1974.
But in that presentation, I don't channel that I'm aware of.
However, I received what I would call thought implants during that time.
They were not really my thoughts, but it was information coming through to me, I presume,
from spirit, and it was more or less like bullet points, like, "This is powerful stuff.
This can change human nature.
This can change the nature of social, political, and economic systems.
Pay attention.
Form an association.
Do more research."
That kind of stuff.
So from that point on, I just kept bugging Raymond about letting me move forward with
what turned out to be the International Association for Neurogast Studies.
Rick Good. A question just came in about Raymond from a fellow named Stuart Finney in the UK.
He wonders if you've ever read Making Sense of Nonsense by Raymond Moody, and he feels that this
particular book is very important with no other like it, and he has been profoundly affected by it.
Yes, well thank you for that question. Great question. I am familiar with Raymond's nonsense work. In fact, he's been working on this.
This is what he did when he was a student at the University of Virginia, a doctoral student.
And he created a taxonomy of nonsense. I forget how many different types, but oh my god.
Raymond has an intellect unlike anybody I've ever met. And his work in nonsense proves it.
a tip of my way of thinking. And it's the work he's proudest of, most excited about.
He has been giving workshops in how to employ nonsense techniques, nonsense exercises,
that are intended to suspend the rational mind.
>>Rick: Can you give us an example? Because I don't know what this would be about.
Well, nonsense is, by definition, a statement or a subject that one cannot logically or
rationally interpret.
So if I made a nonsense statement, "Giraffes, pickles, onions, and I don't know where this
goes."
I mean, a nonsense statement, that's probably a poor example, but if I made a nonsense statement...
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
not really so much nonsense.
Rick: Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense.
David: Yeah, Raymond could come up with like, you know, he's very good at nonsense.
Rick: Why is a mice when it spins?
David: There you go, something like that. In fact, we had a nonsense party one time,
and we were supposed to bring their favorite nonsense phrase, but when you hear nonsense,
it suspends the rational mind.
Rick: It's like a Zen Koan of a kind. And what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Yeah, yeah, that's much more contemplative. This nonsense, it's not something that logically
computes. The rational mind goes into what the computer called, in computer programming
this is concept of do loop, where the computer is trying to make sense of the command so
that it can do the next task. But it's really kind of going on a circuitous, in a wild goose
chase through the circuits, trying to figure out what the meaning is of this command. What
fact it might not have any real meaning. Raymond's theory is that this suspends ego and it parks
the intellect, the rational mind, and puts it in a state of suspended animation. He thinks that
nonsense exercises work really well for people who are very analytical and the type A's because he
feels that when you suspend the... I mean meditation does this. When you're in deep state meditation
you move outside of ego and you move outside of rational thought and you move into what I
affectionately call the twilight zone, but it's that place where you enter the realm of the unseen
and spirit begins to communicate. So yes, I personally believe that nonsense is Raymond's
most important work and he also says that nonsense gives people a language that they can use when they
they come back from their death experiences to more effectively convey what happened to
them.
He believes it provides a whole new vocabulary to epiphany, one's own astral travel, if you
will.
Interesting.
Well, they don't quite know how to put it into words.
So yes, I mean, for those of you listening, I highly encourage you to get Raymond's book,
Making Sense of Nonsense.
And I think he does offer CDs, there were downloads on how to engage in nonsense training.
And he believes that through doing this, one can engineer one's own epiphany, one's own
astral travel, if you will.
>>Rick: Interesting.
Well, let's do an abrupt segue here.
In your book, you tell the story of where, as an adult, you went to see an Apache shaman
who happened to be a chain smoker, although that's not really relevant, and he immediately
picked up on an incident that happened to you when you were, what, six or eight years
old, something like that, where some bullies made you fall off your bike.
Yeah, that's one of my interesting adventures in life.
The year was 2008, and a friend of mine said, "There's an Apache shaman in town who's giving
readings.
I think you're supposed to meet him.
my guidance and I'd like to suggest that you call for an appointment." And I'm like, "Well,
I don't really do these kinds of things." Having been involved with diuretics and with
ions and atteria, I meet a lot of psychics, channels, mediums, shaman, and generally
it's sort of a casual thing, but I don't really pay for greetings, if you will. I've only met
a handful of really good ones who I think had legitimate talents. This guy was pretty remarkable,
but I didn't know that going into it. So my knee jerk was, "I told him your name, I told
him I was going to call you, and he said he wants to meet you. So if you like what he
has to say, you can make a donation." And I said, "Okay, fine. I can agree to it on
that basis." So I went to a high-rise condominium in Pompano, where he was staying with a friend,
And he was out on the balcony overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and he was a chain smoker,
and on the table in front of where he was seating, coffee tables, a pack of Marlboro cigarettes,
flip-top bucks, red and white.
That has spiritual significance for me.
Yeah, we'll get into that story later.
And when I tell that story, this whole meeting with him will take on new dimension, but he
was smoking and the interesting thing was the box of cigarettes was open and there
was only one cigarette missing and it was the one he was smoking. I sat down
looked at him, he's definitely Native American, you could definitely see the
the attributes, qualities that would establish him as that. And he had me, he
was kind of sizing me up and he was doing so very quickly and he pointed to the
cigarettes on the table. He said, "I know those cigarettes have meaning for you. I
just want you to know that they're my calling card and I've been smoking these
cigarettes for years so it's not a plant. Many, many years this has been my brand."
So he said, "I just want you to know who you're dealing with." Then he kind of
steps up and he puts his left hand on my left shoulder and he's feeling the spot I
I have my left shoulder, which it sends me through the roof whenever anybody touches
it.
It's like a pinched nerve or something.
And he knew right where it was and he said, "Tell me about that.
What happened there?"
I said, "I have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't know what that is.
It could be a pinched nerve maybe."
He said, "No.
You're carrying a traumatic incident from your past."
"Oh really?
You think?"
He said, "Yeah.
When you were six years old, first grade, what happened?"
involves riding a bicycle. He saw all this.
Wow, that's impressive.
Oh my god. You know, I'm not a scientist, but I'm trained as a scientist.
And you didn't tell your friend that story that he was staying with.
I didn't. The friend who introduced me to him was not the one he was staying with.
It was somebody different, but I told her. I thanked her profusely later,
because it turned out to be a powerful meeting.
As a scientist, to me, it's like, how do you see this? How do you know this?
is I try to approach things with the discipline of a scientist.
So I immediately go into my wanting to ask 20 questions, but he won't let me go there.
He's like, "I want to hear about the experience.
Tell me from your perspective what happened."
I said, "Well, I just got off training wheels and I was very good at riding my bike without
training wheels and I was going down this asphalt street and it wasn't smooth asphalt,
It was rocky asphalt and I was maybe a couple blocks from my home and these boys, these
two young boys, I think they were older than me, I'm guessing eight and ten, eight and
eleven, something like that.
Their car was in the driveway, the father's car, and the hood was up, the father was working
on it.
There was a mechanic's dolly, which is a dolly you lay on with four wheels and slide
under the car.
And they were playing with the dolly.
driveway was sort of slanted and when they saw me riding by they just shoved
the dolly down the driveway and I couldn't brake fast enough and it ran
right in front of my bike, the front tire, and I hit it and the bike reared up and
I flew off the handlebars and over the handlebars and glided along the street
my face made contact with it. I still have a big scar here from that event. It
It just turned my face into a bloody pulp and shredded skin.
It was quite painful.
I was quite traumatized.
I left the bike there and I picked myself up and I went home.
My mom was outside with my older sister and she saw me bleeding profusely and she brought
me in the house and put cold face cloth on it.
She was patting it and treating it and she wanted to know what happened and I told her.
My sister went and retrieved my bike.
My mother had choice words for his parents.
They denied the whole thing.
When my father came home from work, my mother told him what happened.
And he went down and spoke with the parents, the two boys, and their story was, it was
an unfortunate accident.
The dolly rolled down the driveway by itself.
The boys did not push it, and it collided with my bike.
an unfortunate accident. So the shaman's name was Eagle Bear and he said to me, "How do
you interpret that?" I said, "I don't know what to make of it. I just know that it was
very traumatic and painful and my face wasn't the same for quite a while." He said, "Well,
those weren't little boys. Those were lizards." I said, "What do you mean by lizards?" He
said, "Low vibration, interdimensional beings." Well, of course, I don't have a context for
that. So I'm like, "Yeah, okay, whatever." And he got into other things, which I write
about in the book, where he goes on about me being one of 46 people on the planet, and
I'm supposed to help bring more love and light to help humanity avoid a very unpleasant future.
And I've heard this before from other psychics and mediums, so I don't accept it as true,
I don't deny it as false, I just have an open mind about it.
So he wanted me to do some more work, you know, some sweat lodge, fire ceremony stuff,
some peyote, maybe some ayahuasca, another vision quest and so on.
And he said my vision quest was my opening and my initiation, but I had a lot more inner
work to do before I could open up these abilities of mine that would surpass his abilities.
And he started getting into what I would be doing in the future once I unlocked all of
my hidden talents, which I still don't know about. I mean, if I have these talents, I'm
the last to know. I don't know where they are, and I don't know what they are, and I
don't know how to access them.
Yeah, but the key point of that story was that these so-called lizard beings, these lower
dimensional beings posing as boys or inhabiting the boys or something, their intention was
to thwart your spiritual aspirations, to dim your spiritual luminance so you wouldn't have
the confidence to be all you could be in that way.
That's true, Rick, yeah.
That's the gist of the story, really.
And the reason I wanted you to tell it is that I kind of think that in a way that's
true of everybody on earth. Everyone has been dampened down. We all need to kind of get
the monkey off our backs, so to speak, to clear away whatever it is that's repressing us.
So we all have that tremendous potential. In fact, there's a quote from Yogananda that
I read you earlier. This might be a good time to read it. Someone just sent this in today.
Yogananda stated, "Spiritualization of material life is the real need of the modern world.
We want Christ and Buddhas walking the busy streets of New York and esplanades of Calcutta.
Christ and Buddhas sweeping the streets and running the big banks, performing all duties
from the humblest to the most exalted.
All duties are important, great ones as well as small ones.
Both kinds are necessary for keeping the wheels of the world going.
Smaller great duties do not make their performers great or small.
Both should be performed only by great ones.
When all duties of this imperfect earth will be performed by angelic men and women, when
the stock market and church both will be run only by those who are nothing less than prophets,
then our earth will be heaven and darkness will be changed into light.
And I think Yogananda and you would both agree that essentially, inherently, intrinsically,
we all are prophets, but our full capabilities as spiritual beings in a human body have been
squelched, dampened or repressed by whatever it is, we can discuss what that might be,
and that our duty in life ultimately is to unleash those capabilities, let our light
shine.
Amen, and amen, and amen.
I love that quote by Yogananda.
It's the whole thrust of my book, Love by the Light, and the exercise God for a day.
Getting back to your point, we are all for walking wounded.
Life can be challenging, it can be difficult.
all have our scars. And the truth is, we can be victimized by them and kept down by them,
oppressed by them, or we can heal them, we can forgive, and we can blossom into the great
beings that we're meant to be. And Christ said it pretty well. He said, "These things
I do, you can do, and greater." I mean, I love the title of your podcast, Buddha at
the gas pump got me to thinking, you know, what would I say to Buddha if I met him at
the gas pump?
Nothing, because that was the whole point, you know.
I love that quote by Buddha, which is, "Unless you can improve upon the silence, say nothing."
And that lecture he gave, it's often written about, where he just sat on the stage in the
lotus position and said nothing, and finally, an hour or two later, a monk in the audience
gets it.
He held up a flower or something.
Yeah, he's staring at the lotus flower the whole time.
That's the whole thing, you know, spirit is elegant, the dance of spirit is magnificent.
And when we lower the RPMs through meditation, force bathing, whatever the mechanism might
be, that's when the unseen becomes visible to us with our inner eye, and that's where
we start to effectuate this communion with spirit.
So where all the great things happen, and I believe, you know, again, this quote was quite
powerful.
This is the challenge before us right now.
We have a crisis that's unprecedented on many, many levels, political, economic, climatic,
but our greatest challenge is what I would call the crisis of meaning.
We don't know who we are or why we're here.
has failed us miserably with dogma, with flawed theology, with sexual abuse, you know, with
things that just don't hold up under scrutiny. And it's no wonder that people have been turned
off to the whole idea of Source Creator, the whole idea of God, the whole idea of the golden
rule, if you will, in favor of the golden calf, because it's not real to them. And if
If religion has been their only introduction and orientation, well, obviously then they
are lacking for true divine inspiration and true connection.
So it's not real in any meaningful way.
So the whole point of my book is to say, "Hey, look, Ken Ring and I are good buddies from
way back, and it was Ken who encouraged me to write Love by the Light because of the
angel stories.
I remember me telling him one of the angel stories about the hitchhiker, and he said,
"Write it up for me."
And I did, and he said, "Fantastic, you've got to publish it."
I said, "Well, Ken, it wasn't just the one angel story, there were seven others."
He said, "Well, write them all up," and I did, and then he said, "This is great, you've
got to publish."
I said, "Well, it wasn't just the angel encounters, there was all this other stuff, too."
I said, "Write it up."
Yeah, so that's kind of part two.
And then he said, "You've got a book, you've got a..."
I said, "No, no, no."
There's a part three, which is, what does all this mean?
What does rubber meet the road?
This is where I give great emphasis to this,
because it's the most important thing that I can convey today,
which is we need to evolve into a greater
spiritual awakening.
We need a global spiritual revolution.
We need to understand, not intellectually, but emotionally,
psychologically, experientially, that God is real and so too is the afterlife. I think it all
stems from that fundamental issue. Is there a God, Source/Creator, and is there an afterlife?
If there is no God/Creator and if there is no afterlife, then there are no transcendent
consequences or meaning to earthly behavior. But if the opposite is true, if there is a
Source Creator, and there is an afterlife, then of course there's transcendent meaning
and purpose, significance to what we do.
In the book I talk about one's God quotient, and I talk about the life review of the near
death experience, where one is only met by love.
There's no judgment that's taking place externally.
It's all internal.
The soul or the spirit is looking at their life review and it's portrayed instantaneously
and panoramically, and it's a sort of a binary process. They look at what they did that was
loving contrasted with what was unloving. And it's pretty clear that what they did that
was unloving takes them out of resonance with this being of light, which is pure, perfect
love. And in order to stay with that being of light, which is the goal, because that's
all they want to do, they don't want to come back, they don't want to leave this place of
perfection. But in order to stay, they have to match the vibration or the signature frequency.
Now, speaking of frequency, going back to the Pachi Shaman, he made your point, he said
they did that deliberately to shut you down because they want to keep you from fulfilling
your destiny, which is to bring more love and light into the world. And I said, a logical
question, "Well, I don't know about this destiny. I have no great gifts or talents, and I certainly
don't feel I have this great destiny, one of 46, how do they know who I am when I don't
know who I am? He said, "Oh, in the realm of spirit, it's all frequencies, and they
know who you are even if you don't know who you are." And that's the point. You're a dead
man walking and you've got to wake up, which is why you've got to come to my place and
do the audience one. But this is the whole point about the life review. They want to
hang with God with pure love and pure compassion. Can't improve upon it. It's ecstasy, beyond
ecstasy. But they can't hang there unless they are the equivalent, which I believe, you know,
Christ demonstrated on the cross when he said, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."
In truth, they did not know what they were doing. Any enlightened being would never think of doing
such a thing. But they were coming from myopia, from blinders, and ego, which to me is evil.
I mean, ego to me is synonymous with ego.
>>Rick: With evil, you meant to say.
>>Martin: Yeah, with evil. Ego is synonymous with evil. And this is the whole point. They're
resolved to go back, I guess, through reincarnation, not necessarily in human form, not necessarily
on planet Earth, but wherever or whoever or whatever to work out this karma, to seek forgiveness,
and to heal, and to give love where love was denied in the past.
And this was Raymond's point in his lectures.
He said it many times.
He would say, "I can't imagine a worse hell than being an Adolf Hitler and having to live
through tens of millions of deaths that I personally caused and trying to figure
out a lifetime that would atone for all of that.
Yeah. Cooler Ross used to say... She was a mentor as well. I met her through Raymond.
She wrote the foreword to Life After Life. A beautiful lady, a force of nature, Mr.
Dearly. She would say, and I don't know if this is true scientifically
speaking, I don't have data to support this, but I love it poetically. She said,
one lifetime as a Jesus Christ can wipe out all the bad karma of Adolf Hitler. So I
don't know how you go from one extreme to another. I don't know if you do. But this is the whole point. We
have to become God-realized. My original title for this book was "Affirming God."
Two stories of... That's the name of your website. Yeah, that's the name of the website for the book. I
gave it up because many people said to me, "Don't use God in the title. It'll be
off-putting to a lot of people. If you want people to read the book, don't use
God in the title. So I kept the website name because I could only compromise so
much. But this is the point. Until God becomes real, you can talk about it and
intellectualize about it and listen to these near-death experience stories, read
my book, "Oh John, how did these great angel encounters and these terrific vision
and what have you, but maybe, yes, maybe, yeah, it's all abstract to me. So until a person actually goes through it for themselves,
it doesn't become real in any visceral sense. Hence, it doesn't become real from the standpoint of behavior and
values, perspectives. So that's why I recommend
exercises at the end of the book, part three, "Where the Rover Meets the Road,"
- if you don't want to take my word for it or the word of others
Who've come before me and it will come after me that God is real source creator is real and life after death is real
Not the God of religion
Not the survival of dogma the heaven hell eternal salvation eternal damnation
But the New Testament stuff where there's only love and only love
God can't be anything other than pure perfect love and compassion by definition
So, when it becomes real, that's when transformation takes place.
And we need to get to critical mass transformation, now more than ever,
because the hangar-nade is in the trench, and it's smoking and fizzing, and about to detonate.
So, I'm very concerned with the state of human affairs.
I don't want to see the gnashing of teeth, darkness on the face of the land,
the dark night of the soul, collective soul.
We can evolve, we must evolve,
or face ungodly challenges, unlike we've seen in the past.
Today we have wars, rumors of wars,
pandemic, economic pressures and woes,
lack of integrity in government,
unprecedented malfeasance in government,
no visionary leadership coming from true, reliable integrity.
We're in a sticky wicket and that's why I finally decided I had many opportunities to publish
but I didn't feel motivated to do it until Ken really left me no alternative and
Actually guided me through the book process
Which resulted in love by the light?
I only agreed to put it out there for all the good it can do to help wake people up and
Give them a road map to what can be
Enlightenment, expedient enlightenment.
Now I wanted to demystify enlightenment, and I wanted to demystify God in this book.
It's really no great mystery.
It's all about love.
It's all about getting away from the golden calf and becoming a purveyor of the golden
rule, practitioner of the golden rule.
Not about what can I do to further my own interests, but what can I do to further the collective
good.
all gone on that page, as Yogananda said in your beautiful quote there, we'd have heaven
on earth. I would say to you, we must get on that page, lickety-split, or face nightmarish
conditions beyond what we have now. So we have the power to do it, we have the tools
to do it, we have the inspiration to do it. If not my book, then there are dozens of others
that certainly give adequate foundation to compel this kind of transformation. But we
must act because the time is short.
All right, let me say a few things based on what you just said, and then I'll have some
questions and we'll kind of figure out what we want to cover in our next hour. Firstly,
have you heard Danny and Brinkley's near-death experiences? Just for the audience's sake,
I haven't interviewed him, but I've read a couple of his books, and he was this guy who
who had been a sharpshooter in Vietnam and had shot people.
And he ended up having four near-death experiences,
two by lightning and I think two by heart attacks.
And in each one, he had like a life review
in which he experienced not only the impact
that his having killed people had on the people he killed,
but the ripple effect,
all the people connected with those people,
their families and communities and whatever,
and the effect that their death had on those people.
And so he ended up becoming like a hospice person like yourself.
You've done a lot of work in that area, and in order to perhaps atone for what he had done
in Vietnam.
And you can imagine if that was his experience, what Hitler's experience might have been,
you know, when he had his life review, and what kind of atonement it might take to burn
off that karma.
I don't know.
Then the whole thing about God.
I have a really good friend who's used to be, believe all the stuff that you and I are
talking about, but kind of eventually turned around and is now considers himself an atheist.
And we have these long, friendly discussions in which neither of us make any headway, because
what was that quote you said, for those who don't believe, there's nothing you can say,
how did that go?
>> What I said was, for those who know, no amount of evidence is necessary,
and for those who don't know, no amount of evidence is sufficient.
And so that to me means that somehow or other you have to have an experience which turns
you around.
No amount of talk is going to do it.
And this reminds me of another friend who interviewed me recently who, he used to be
the Amazing Randy's protege, if you know who the Amazing Randy was?
He was this magician but professional skeptic who tried to shoot down and disprove pretty
much everything.
And this guy was of the same mindset, but he had some kind of spiritual epiphany which
completely turned him around. It totally flipped him in terms of understanding consciousness
to be fundamental and all this spiritual stuff and everything. But it was the experience.
It wasn't his brainwashing with Randy. It was an experience that then restructured his
whole philosophical outlook and his spiritual outlook. So I think that that kind of experience
is - there's something in the water these days - that kind of experience is becoming
more and more common, there is some kind of an enlivenment of collective
consciousness that's making it more likely and possible to have spiritual
awakenings, which has been the whole premise of this show, and more and more
"ordinary people" are having them. It is kind of nip and tuck
between the forces which would give us a dystopian nightmare for who knows how
along, or an enlightened world, an ideal or enlightened society. If I only had the
news media as my source of information, I would probably be pretty depressed and
cynical, but there's a whole other world going on here that we don't see on the
news that you and I are very much tuned into, and all the listeners of this show,
and that makes me optimistic. I don't think it's necessarily going to be a
totally smooth transition. There could be a lot of chaos and destruction as things
shift from the way they're done now to the way they ought to be done, but I do
feel we can make it. I'm therefore optimistic and that's my deepest
motivation for doing this show and for having dedicated my life to teaching
meditation and stuff since I was 21. Well I love what you just said. Yes, I mean
while there's opportunity there's hope. While there's time there's hope. And
Kupala Rosh used to always say, she didn't originate this quote, I don't know
who did, but she used to always say, "It's better to light the candle than curse the darkness."
She would also say, "We would not know the beauty of the Grand Canyon if it weren't for all the
windstorms." So here we are, we're kind of being wrestled to the mat collectively. People are in
fear, they're confused, they have high levels of anxiety. For the most part, they don't know
what the future is going to hold. I mean, there's just chaos everywhere. And what's worse is that
there doesn't appear to be visionary leadership anywhere that's going to lead us to the promised
land. I think there's some potential visionary leaders, but they don't tend to go into the
mainstream easily because the collective consciousness just doesn't support that so
much. What's exciting about what I write about in my book is we don't have to take the existence of
God, Source/Creator, or the existence of life after death on the basis of faith.
No one's asking anyone to accept these premises or hypotheses as a matter of blind faith.
There is ample evidence, if one chooses to embrace it or become familiar with it, that
every day is a miracle and every day Spirit surrounds us in different ways, in ways that
that are discernible, palpable,
and if people are not aware of this,
then there's inner work to do.
And I explain different things they can do
at part three of the book.
But one of the things I talk about
is the God for a Day exercise,
which to me was my highest high.
I've never ever been able to top the natural high
I got when I went into my persona as God,
which I could also have called it Love for a Day.
So, you know, it's being anonymous and going someplace where no one knows you or you don't
know anyone and you become a purveyor of unconditional love, love without strings, without attachment.
Basically, you're not looking for reward or appreciation or recognition.
You just give freely.
And to see how that impacts people, impacts the environment, because it's not just what
you do for other human beings, it's what you do for animals, what you do for the ocean,
for the rivers and streams and lakes, cleaning up pollution, planting trees. I mean, this
is all about being a purveyor of love. When you start to emulate God, emulate Christ, emulate
Buddha, the love that they had for all things, that's when you feel the connection and the
communion most strongly. So it's a way to shortcut one's spiritual awakening by doing
this exercise. And it's easy to do. Anyone can do it. So this is part of my appeal to
the people who are reading the book. Do God for a day. If you can't do it for a day, do
it for a half day. Do it for an hour. If you can do it every day, do it every day. Because
if you do it every day, and if we all do it every day, well then, hey, you know, we're
going to have a perfect world. And by the way, a perfect world is not such a bad
thing. I mean, I don't know what it is that keeps us in the dark. I don't know
why we're so attached to it to a point of not wanting to let go of it because
it's not serving us at all. Well, people don't let go of heroin even though it's
not serving them. We do get addicted to all kinds of things. Well, the question is
why did they go to heroin? It is a form of escapism. There's something lacking within
them. I call it, well, Blaise Pascal called it, the God Void, the God Hole.
>> Yeah, if they had sort of a divine inner experience, heroin would be extremely distasteful,
and if they did it once, they would think, "Oh my God, I'm never going to do that again."
Same with any drug or even alcohol, in my opinion.
Yeah, the highest high is to be God-centered, to live one's God quotient, to become in total
perfect, like I call it a resonant energy connection with God.
I've never known a more profound state of being.
To me it is Nirvana.
And yes, you can achieve it every minute of every day.
And not just in meditation, but going out there and getting outside of ego, putting
your identity, your social identity, to rest for a bit and becoming pure love, a vessel
of pure love. Getting outside of ego is a tough thing to do, it's a tall order, but
with practice one can do it.
That's why Seva is prescribed as a spiritual practice. You know the word Seva?
Yeah.
Selfless service.
Ram Dass's foundation.
He had a foundation and it's a kind of ancient word in India as a known means of spiritual
development.
Right. So, again, this is simple stuff. There's nothing complicated about enlightenment or
spiritual awakening, and we all need to do it. And by doing it collectively, we will open ourselves
to an optimal future for Earth and all its inhabitants. And our reality then could hardly
compare to the reality we have now. We're in the darkness right now. We're here suffering on a
trail of tears. But if we all wake up to this, we can dance on the clouds and know bliss.
You know, you and I are pretty fortunate. You're in Florida, I'm in Iowa. We're not in Gaza,
we're not in Ukraine, we're not in Somalia. I mean, there are places which are far worse,
and we should count our blessings. But I've heard it said that the resources exist for everyone to
live, to have enough food, to have proper shelter, for everything to be just hunky-dory. And then
sometimes in their next breath they'll blame the politicians, but I don't think that's where it
goes. I think it has to do with the collective consciousness of the world, of which the
politicians are a symptom or an expression, but which we all are responsible for and contribute to.
Well, you know, we do not live in a scarce universe. It's an abundant universe. There's
no such thing as scarcity. Hunger, poverty, illiteracy, these things are unacceptable,
inexcusable and intolerable. There's no reason for them. Why do they continue to exist? Well,
there are many who would like to blame the ruling elite, the power brokers, the ones with the
greatest wealth and the greatest political power, the ones who start wars or decide where wars will
be fought and when, the ones who determine the relative value of currencies on any given day.
They like to scapegoat it that way. And I often say to myself, what would it take in a top-down
and bottom-up approach to bring us into a new way of looking at things, a new paradigm? What
would it take to bring about paradigm shift? And, you know, there are many who are now talking about
post-materialism because materialism is a flawed model. It doesn't work. It's a lie. It's a product
of myopia and limited thinking, the evidence strongly disproves it. So, why are we still
practicing or subscribing to that point of view? And what would it take to get us away from that?
Because if you're coming from materialism, then nothing comes after this lifetime. Hence,
this is all there is. Hence, get while the getting is good.
>> Yeah, there used to be a beer commercial that said that you only go around once in this world,
and so grab all the gusto you can get.
- Exactly.
Well, the truth is we're infinite eternal beings.
Anything else is a lie.
And we're not condemned to hell forever and ever and ever.
This lifetime is not the only chance you get
to demonstrate your divinity.
You have infinity and eternity to demonstrate it.
But why suffer?
And this was the whole point of the message
that Christ was trying to convey.
if you pick up my yoke and walk in my footsteps, you too can know the Kingdom of Heaven. You too can,
figuratively speaking, sit at the right hand of the Father. I don't think God has a gender,
frankly, and I don't know if God has hands or arms or any of that stuff.
Pete Or right or left, because I'm the present.
R. Yeah, but I think that's just a figure of speech. But his point was,
if you had the faith of a mustard seed, you too could move mountains.
I think it was Timothy Leary who said, "I'd like to give LSD to everybody," because LSD is an
entheogen. It's one of the ways to have a breakthrough experience beyond nonsense exercises
and vision quests and meditation and fasting is to take peyote or ayahuasca or bufo or ibogaine or
Pick your drug, you know, ecstasy, LSD, whatever. This is another way to do it. I personally
don't like doing anything that causes a loss of control and I prefer other methods to open up to
the divine, including the God for a Day exercise, which is my recommended method. But the thing is,
until it becomes real for the decision makers, they're going to continue to worship the golden
they're going to continue to stay in egocentrism, nihilism, and dualism, until
they recognize that the same God who made you also made me, and that we're all one,
which can be demonstrated convincingly through quantum physics, especially
torsion physics, which shows the interconnectivity of thought, intention,
with quanta, with the actual behavior of quanta, until it becomes real at that
level, they're not going to change, they're not going to transform, they're not going
to say, "Hey, all for one and one for all." No, they're going to keep saying,
"Every man for himself." So, yes, we must get beyond materialism, we must do so
quickly, and that's why I formed Eternia, Eternia.org, to advance this strategy and
this model. It's all explained on the website, and it's my offering to humanity. It's the best
blueprint I could conceive from 50 years of work in this field about how we move from the darkness
into the light. What are some of the specifics that it offers aside from the God for a day exercise?
Eternia is a prayer. Eternia is a concept. It is operational, but only in a minimal way. We publish
a quarterly digital bulletin which 15,000 subscribers or so and we occasionally sponsor
webinars and that sort of thing. But we have never been appreciably funded. There are seven
program components and it's a holistic, comprehensive, multifaceted strategy to achieve
individual and global transformation. And it's been refined over the years, but basically what
I had in mind when I received that download from Spirit in 1974, when Raymond Moody first
spoke about his work in near-death experiences.
So if I had an audience with Warren Buffett who says he's going to give away his billions
again a second time, I would encourage him to consider Eternia because for me it's the
mother of all causes.
>>Rick So if you had a billion dollars, what would you do with it?
Well, I would operationalize the seven program components, look at each split, which are
research number one, and I said before that there hasn't been good funding for research
and there's only been precious little good work.
And I think that there are all kinds of different things we could do if the funding was there,
in the form of giving grants to major medical centers and academic institutions to undertake
our protocols.
So there's people like Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake and others doing research, but you're
just saying that's a trickle compared to what could be done.
We have a frontier science forum on paper.
It would be populated with the best thinkers, the MDs, the PhDs, the great academicians,
and we would put together the protocols and award generous funding to the major medical
centers and universities.
The ones that are most credible because when this comes out in the way of findings, we
want press conferences and we want people to realize that the best, brightest minds
on the planet, from the hallowed halls of academia and science, have put their imprimatur
to this.
And for what good it might do.
Education is the second component.
say to me, "What would you do to educate?" And I say, "Everything conceivable, limited
by our own creativity." There's a lot we already know. Near-death experience has become a household
word, but that's only one of many, many phenomena that validate the seven statements. So there's
a lot that needs to be done in the area of education.
The third is outreach.
Outreach has many different initiatives, but outreach is intended to put love in action.
You know, Leo Biscaglia, Dr. Biscaglia was a great, great teacher about the importance
and power of love.
And if I had my druthers, if we brought the major religions on board with this convergence,
which is the other program component of the Convergence Coalition, we would help them
reinvent themselves along the lines of what I think they were originally intended to do,
which is to teach people how to love one another.
If they wanted to reinvent themselves, I can't imagine going to the Vatican and convincing
the conservative cardinals that they needed to reinvent themselves. As it is, they can't
stand Pope Francis because he's so innovative.
In my early days, I used to think that this work could be the antithesis of religion. It
would make religion superfluous. And today I don't say that. Today my attitude is
all religions can serve a purpose, a very valid important purpose. Teaching people
how to love one another, being a support system to keep people in unconditional
love when the going gets tough, implementing some of these projects and
outreach, the love in action projects and the loving each other global campaign
and the One World Leadership Project. There are so many different projects. They're all
on the website. People who are interested can go there.
And of course, to a great extent, religions have made themselves superfluous. People are
leaving the churches in droves, and that term "spiritual but not religious" has become
very popular. People don't feel they need mainstream religions in order to pursue spiritual
development.
Yes, that's exactly true. But religions have established constituencies, albeit smaller
They have vast resources, they have a lot of real estate.
They have a structure.
They have an infrastructure.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel.
If they all took one of these, I call them induction techniques, or explained in my book,
if they all took one of those exercises and saw the error of their ways and became instantly
enlightened and concentric.
By the way, the shoes of the fisherman, have you seen it?
What is it?
Shoes of the fisherman.
I've heard of it.
What is it, a movie?
starred in this, I think it's 1960-something, great film, but there's a Pope who transformed
the Catholic Church. And that's what I'm talking about. That's the kind of transformation that
needs to happen within all the major religions, and that's what our other program component
is all about, the Convergence Coalition, which is to bring science, spirituality, and religion
into close collaboration with one another
along the goal of promoting the seven statements
and further establishing their validity.
And then the other is technology development
with AI and virtual reality and augmented reality,
nanocomputing and linking the brain to the cloud and so on.
There are all kinds of technological possibilities
to use devices that can help engineer an out-of-body experience in a safe manner that isn't overly
invasive or intrusive.
Jeff Martin, who established the FINDERS course and whom I've interviewed, has been doing
some things with Shinzen Young, who's a Zen teacher, using some kind of device that very
specifically uses magnets to target particular parts of the brain.
Shinsen said he's had the best experiences he's ever had using this thing.
So there could be physiological traps.
Now of course you mentioned Robert Monroe and biornal beats or whatever they're called.
I've heard from people who say that that has been extremely profound.
So there could be external modalities like that, technologies, that could elicit profound
spiritual awakenings or give you a taste anyway.
Well that's why technology development is up there as one of our most important priorities.
And then synergy with a GE at the end, it's kind of a made up word for synergy for the
earth.
And that's bringing kindred spirit organizations together and get them coordinated and galvanized
around specific priorities to affect institutional change and to achieve certain high priority
goals that could be more medification-ly and more expeditiously if we all work together
in a coordinated fashion, cooperatively, kind of a hybrid of the United Way, Chamber of Commerce
model, both from funding and implementation.
So yeah, all these components are explained in great detail at Eternia.org.
Well, all work together cooperatively is a key phrase because when you're talking about
the religions, I kept thinking in the back of my mind, yeah, but people are going to have
to get over the attitude that our way is the best and everything else is either completely
off are not as good as what we have. It takes a certain amount of spiritual maturity and
broad-mindedness I think to come to the realization that God is not a one-trick pony and there
are just so many different possibilities that suit different people. Appreciate your own
thing but appreciate other people's choices.
Well, that's exactly right. You can't be an ego and do this work. If you're in service
to yourself or to your own agenda, your own ulterior motives, then this can't work. That's
That's the whole point.
That's why someone, every individual needs to have their own epiphany.
That's the key thing.
They can either have a virtual epiphany by reading the book and say, "Oh wow, this guy
was an agnostic and look at what happened to him."
I hear this from people all the time.
The book speaks to them energetically and brings them into new corridors of thinking,
new ways of looking at things.
A woman, 28 year old, who's a law student in Madrid, finishing up law school, her fiancé
killed himself from despair over the world situation.
A friend of hers gave her my book and she read it and she said she was suicidal and
she said it brought her out of suicidal ideation.
You couldn't pay me a higher compliment, but she's going to go on now and do all kinds
of good things based on what she's learned from the book.
And so this is the point.
It's very simple.
We just need to become purveyors of love.
What's the incentive?
The best incentive you could possibly have.
What's the common denominator that likes us all together as human beings?
We're all mortal.
At least the body is.
We're all going to die.
Kularas used to say, "We're all in death denial, to thee, to thee, to thee, but never to me."
But the truth is, our days are numbered, and sooner or later it'll be the blinking of an
eyelid when it happens, this life and this body will come to an end.
And like John Lennon said, recorded George Harrison, John Lennon said, in one of his
songs, I think Ballad of John and Yoko, your song was While My Guitar Gently Weeps, he
said, "Last night the wife said, 'Oh boy, when you're dead, you don't take nothing with
you but your soul.
Think.
Think.'"
the title of Blaise Pascal's book from
1674. He had a near-death experience in
1654 and he invented that term the God-shaped hole, but only God can fill.
You know that yearning that we all have to connect with something greater than ourselves,
a cause greater, an entity greater.
Only God can fill the God-shaped hole and one can only find God if God is sought in the silence.
By emulating God, emulating God's love, we can strengthen the communion, improve the resonance,
until God becomes real.
So if I could convince a Warren Buffett or a Bill Gates to give their billions to Eternia,
I would quickly implement those seven program components.
You know, I often say Eternia needs the budget of a small nation and the army of a small
nation to succeed.
If our vision was, "Hey, let's clean up Lake Okeechobee from pollution," that's very nicely
defined and neatly contained.
But Eternia's vision is to co-create an optimal future for Earth and all its inhabitants.
And it can only do that by effecting a convergence between science, religion, and spirituality
to catalyze a global spiritual revolution.
that's a pretty tall order. It's very utopian, some would say naive, but frankly
there is no other way, there is no other answer. And I hope you realize that
Eternia would be one of many things which are contributing to this. Absolutely.
Yeah, you're not saying there's no other answer than Eternia, you're saying there's no
other answer than this kind of transformation. It has to be the one that
waves all flags. We have to get out of the Tower of Babel, proof, we're never
going to get it. The best we can get is this very powerful anecdotal stuff. It's enough
to build a phenomenal advanced civilization. So why are we not doing that? Somebody needs
to be the rising tide to raise all boats. I don't care who it is or what it is, so long
as it's God-centered, authentically, and coming from full integrity. It's unassailable, and
It's basically impeccable.
It's tough to find that kind of leadership.
It's tough to find people or organizations that rise to that standard.
But when you find them, they're golden, you know, and we've got to come together and try
to bring about mass social change while we still have the opportunity to do so.
What you're saying is you want to flip the paradigm.
There's a fellow named Mark Gober, whom I've interviewed, whose first book was The End
to Upside-Down Thinking, and the whole premise of the book was that our whole way of thinking
about the world is upside down.
We consider consciousness to be this little epiphenomenon of brain functioning, whereas
in fact consciousness is the rock-bottom foundation of the universe and everything else is an expression
of that.
And if all of modern science and our quest for knowledge and our technologies is based
on such a flawed paradigm, then necessarily it has huge ramifications for the quality
of the world, the impact that all of our technologies have, and which is why, you know, we've desecrated
the environment and so many people are starving and there's so many wars and all this stuff.
But the more pivotal level at which you can work, the easier you can affect major change
with less effort.
I think that's what you're getting at, that if we could establish...
I call it the mathematics of eternal existence.
Do the math.
...foundation.
The Rower Emerson said, "Go ahead and build your castles in the air, that's where they
belong, just establish foundations under them."
Yes, Abraham Lincoln said that.
He also said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
Good one.
Amen.
This is the whole point.
I call it the mathematics of eternal existence.
Do the math.
If you're a smart person and you care about,
if your eyes are on the prize,
whatever net worth you have, you can't take it with you.
All that you have will one day be given.
One day your voice will fall silent, never to speak again.
And your time to make a difference,
to make an impact is gonna be at an end.
So we're all gonna die.
And I've been at the bedside of many in my hospice work.
And the worst nightmare I've ever experienced
is when they don't have any spiritual moorings
and they go into this identity crisis of the first order.
Who am I?
What's gonna become of me?
They can't see beyond the body or the ego.
That's very sad.
There's so much beyond that.
And when people wake up to that one way or the other,
it's a whole new universe that unfolds.
Kelly Caleb LeBron said it in the prophet.
He said that when you die, and I'm paraphrasing,
he said the veil is going to be lifted
and you will see the light.
And once you see the light,
you will wonder why you ever spent any time in the darkness.
The darkness is not where it's at.
And this thing about lack of tolerance for diversity
and wanting to be the 500 pound gorilla
and the alpha male and the dominant species
with the most toys and the most money
and the most women or whatever.
I mean, that's all flawed thinking.
That's all illusory.
But at the end of the day, you take none of that with you.
So the golden calf, at the end of the day, leaves you broke.
It's what have you done to advance love and light?
How much love have you given?
It's not how much love have you received?
It's how much have you given?
This guy with a blog, he always ends up by,
he says, "In the end, the only tragedy
is not to have been a saint. I don't know that any of us can be a saint, but we can certainly
be more loving. We certainly can do God for a day. It's a simple thing to do. Love for
a day. Love it for a day every day. And that's really the whole point of why I wrote the book.
I hope people take it to heart, because me, for one, I'm tired of living in a world that
is so suboptimal and dystopian. I'm tired of seeing suffering, you know, it affects me.
I don't suffer, I'm fine, I'm living a good life, but I have great empathy for animals and for
trees and for rivers and for streams and for oceans and for people. Who's starting these
wars and why? What kind of bonehead decision is that? They're fighting over anthills that amounts
to nothing at the end of the day, and don't they realize that they're just shooting themselves
in the foot? Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. Yeah, right. All the wars that are being fought over
this little pale blue dot. What you were just saying reminds me of a couple of cartoons for
humor break. There was a guy, one cartoon was a guy standing in front of a bank and it says,
"First reincarnation bank. You can't take it with you, so leave it with us until you return."
And then the other cartoon was a tombstone and it said, "I'll be back. Don't touch my stuff."
Well, that's the whole point. You're rich when you are a purveyor of love. I was never more
rich than those days when I dedicated to God for a day. It's the highest time I ever had,
and I encourage people to learn about that and practice it often. Eventually, you know,
It's like the random acts of kindness that pay it forward. It's a variation on the same theme.
Pete I'm not, you know,
David It reminds me of that
Christian saying, "What would Jesus say?"
Pete This is ancient wisdom. It goes back to Plato,
if not before. And I just hope that humanity becomes inspired by this and engages in proactive
behavior to turn things in the opposite direction from where we're going, because
we definitely need a course correction.
David Yeah, you know, when I contemplate God for
a day, it reminds me of that Christian saying, "What would Jesus do?" which you also mention
in your book.
And whenever I've heard that phrase, I've thought, "Well, you kind of have to be Jesus
to know that," because you can only act from your level of consciousness.
And if you're actually at the level that Christ was at, then your action is going to be different
than the ordinary person, no matter how hard they try.
But I don't quite think that as much as I used to, because I think it really makes a
difference if you do try to emulate
saintly people or to embody saintliness.
I mean I know people who have just been
meditating for decades who will still
like rip people off in business deals
and be unkind and things like that and I
think it takes a certain amount of
discernment and a certain amount of
effort to be a good person. It's not, if it
doesn't come automatically then try a
little bit and it could make a big
difference. Don't you think?
Well what you do to others you do to
yourself. So that's another way of saying the mathematics of eternal existence. Ben Franklin
figured this out in his 13 Virtues. And one of the 13 Virtues was emulate Christ, Socrates,
and be learned, be loving, be compassionate. Thomas Jefferson had the same philosophy.
our Founding Father documents are expressive of this philosophy. "E pluribus unum," "of many one."
In God we trust, in love we trust. This stuff goes back to, as I say, it's ancient wisdom,
but you bring a good point about, you know, we're not Jesus Christ. I don't know, I'd probably have
to have a million more lifetimes before I can even think. But again, I'm trying to demystify the whole
thing of enlightenment and the whole subject of God, it's not too complicated. It's called
love, but another word for love is kindness. Another word is compassion. Another word is
empathy, sensitivity, generosity. Forget about love. If love is too abstract, too complicated
a term, or Christ consciousness confuses or intimidates people, then just think about
being more sensitive, being more kind, being more gentle, being more loving, being more empathetic.
These are the siblings of love and I actually think they're in some ways synonymous with love.
So again, it's not that difficult. This lifetime is the blanking of an eyelid. We're here today
and we're gone tomorrow and tomorrow is promised to no one. So every day, you know, my prayers,
my meditations I focus on gratitude, giving thanks for all my blessings and asking that
everybody and everything become equally blessed, not more so. And I ask how can I be of best service
with my opportunities today to promote more love and light in the world. We truly are right now in
a struggle for our future. We the United States, we the humanity, the entire world, there's chaos
everywhere right now. It's all throughout Europe and Asia, South America, Africa, I mean, you name a
continent, maybe Antarctica is having environmental stresses, but all seven continents right now are
in chaos. The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica could slip off and we'd raise sea levels by 20 feet or
something, which would cause a bit of a disruption. Yeah, we've been dominating this conversation. I
just want to make sure, are there questions? Well, there are a couple, yeah, let's see here. Two more
questions have come in. So the first one is from Patrick Wiggins in Gainesville, Florida.
"Looking forward to reading your book. You equated evil with the ego. I've come to believe that evil
is taking pleasure in the suffering of others. I'm puzzled about two or three things. Is there
some sense of personhood always tainted by ego? So even angels would have some quality of ego.
And isn't it possible that those who enjoy the suffering of others will continue to do so by
choice? Great question. Ego is self-differentiation. It's coming from
separatism, dualism, me and everybody else, me against everybody else. It's self-absorption,
self-possession, self-importance. It's I'm gonna get mine and to hell with the other guy. That's
what I mean by ego. Raymond Moody and I had a conversation not long ago where he talked about
about his only goal right now is to overcome self-esteem and ego, because he calls them
the great impostors, and they are, because you can never be the best looking or the wealthiest
or the strongest.
Now this other dimension of taking pleasure in the suffering of others, I would say that
evil exists along a continuum, and you have maybe the most diabolical, devilish form of
evil that likes to inflict pain on others and maybe enjoys in some perverse sort of way
watching people suffer.
I can't relate to any of that.
I can't watch any of that.
It is too offensive to me.
It's too low vibration.
Somebody who is that lost is so far removed from the light.
I don't know how one transforms an entity like that other than, as I say in the book,
The only example I have for how to deal with evil, whatever form it takes, is the same
example that we were taught by God and by Jesus and by all the great teachers, which
is to pour love and light all over it, to extend compassion.
Now you might still get beheaded or fed to the lions or nailed to the cross, but again,
it's not about the love you receive or the compassion you receive or the kindness you
receive. It's about what you give to others. That is godliness. And I think the
purpose of this existence is to evolve into more godliness. And one can do that
by giving love in an egoless way. Now it's very hard to do that because we're
taught that our ego is all-important and we're so conditioned to stay in ego that
we're all kind of operating from the principle of self-interest. And what's in
it for me. And that's the motivator. But when we know that the goal is to merge with Source
Creator and that we can only do that by matching the frequency and vibration, that's the prize.
That's the ultimate. That's Nirvana. How do we get there? Well, we have to raise our God
quotient. We have to purify by being a vessel or purveyor of selfless love. And evil is
going to do what evil is going to do. That's evil's karma, and evil has to atone for that,
one way or the other. In my opinion, God is not damning evil into the infernal regions,
but one cannot be with God on any sustained basis unless one comes from pure love on a
sustained basis. Being deprived of God, removed from God, to me is hell, and I personally
don't want to hang out in hell any longer than I have to. Being without God is hell.
So, you know, God could pull the plug on evil anytime God wanted to. I mean, did God
create evil? No. God created free will, and with free will came choice, and with
choice came, well, when you're in this time-space three-dimensional illusion,
it's a very powerful illusion, you get to thinking this is all there is, and so
eagle kind of takes over, and it's easy to see how people lose their way, how they literally
fall off the cliff. So, God is not a camp common nut. God doesn't want sycophant slaves or tomatons.
God gave us all free will. That means we can do whatever we want. But the nature or structure
of reality is such that unless we're coming from pure love, we can never find our way back home,
which is God's source. So, God doesn't pull the plug on evil, and if God were ever going to smite
evil, my opinion is God would have done so at the crucifixion. I mean, how intolerable and ugly and
horrific was that? But God did not. There were little things that happened, I talk about it in
my book, that's not often talked about, but it comes from the Bible, parts of it you can trust
and believe maybe, that showed that God could create earthquakes, could bring down the temple,
could make the birds fall from the sky, could raise the dead from the graves, but wasn't going
to smite Pontius Pilate or the Romans or the Sanhedrin or Caiaphas or all those who the soldiers
who drove in the spikes. "Forgive them for they know not what they do. Go in peace and sin no more."
So that's God's reaction to evil. So who am I to say we should banish evil, we should exterminate
evil, we should meet evil with evil by being its equivalent? To me, that's the antithesis
of perfect, pure, unconditional love and compassion. I don't like it. I would rather
round up all the people who are causing all the problems and send them to a penal colony or,
you know, another planet somewhere, but that's not how creators structure things.
Creators structure things for this reality to be a proving ground for the spirit and nothing else.
So we're here doing time on a penal colony and how we respond to need when we see it
is how we're going to evaluate ourselves when the life review takes place. And we're all going to
have one. So Warren Buffett, if you're listening, give me a call.
>>Rick: How about Elon? Go after Elon.
>>Buffett: Yeah, how about Elon Musk? Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, whatever.
>>Rick: Zuckerberg. Okay, so I'm going to make a quick comment on Patrick's question,
and then I'll move on to the next question. Patrick said, "Is some sense of personhood
always tainted by ego?" And I often run into spiritual teachers who claim to have lost all
sense of a personal self. And they claim that as being some kind of a goal, and they kind
of psych others into starting to think that way. And there have been a lot of casualties
of that approach in terms of people becoming nihilistic and spiritually bypassing and losing
interest in their families and stuff like that. I could get into quoting scriptural
references that at all levels of creation there's always going to be some sense of personal identity.
Otherwise, you could put your hand in a flame
and you wouldn't know it was happening.
And I've heard some spiritual teachers
actually using that as an alibi
for sleeping with their students and stuff.
Oh, I'm not doing it, God is doing it,
I'm not the doer, yada, yada.
So anyway, I just wanted to touch on that
'cause it bugs me when I hear people.
- It brings up an important point
and it gives a definition of consciousness.
Right now we're in individuated consciousness
and ego, social identity.
But when we leave the body, we're no longer the body,
we're no longer the social identity,
we're no longer the possessions,
we're no longer American citizens
or whatever citizenry we have, citizenship.
And when we go to our life review,
I imagine we see past lives too.
- We probably do.
And we're still a soul.
You know, there's still some, oh, I did this, I did that.
And of course there are scriptural verses which will say,
well, ultimately you are not the doer, God is the doer,
God is all there is, God is doing everything, and that's true, but reality is different
at different levels of consciousness.
Right.
Well, well, Valentinus, Saint Valentinus, talked about his abilities as a healer in
third century Rome, for which he was put to death.
And he used to say, you know, I'm not going to renounce my faith because how can I renounce
what's real?
And when I heal, I feel God's love coming through me.
I don't do the healing God does.
I just get out of the way and God's love comes through.
Well, what is God if we are all, and what is consciousness?
In my book I talk about it, I define it as an aspect of the divine, a tiny, tiny, microscopic
aspect of the divine.
Consciousness?
Yes.
Individual consciousness.
Yes.
Well, the individuation comes about through socialization and culturation.
You know, if the programming were different, our identity would be different.
If we were raised, let's just say by parenting, culture, social institutions, and this gets
back to the whole thing about ideological infrastructure, we have to come to some agreement as a species
about who we are and why we're here.
Because from that we will derive our ethics, our morals, and our values.
And from that we will derive our behavior.
This is what Confucius was saying, it was the basis for Buddhism.
We have to get right in our perceptions of reality.
We have to get right in our knowledge so we can be right in our action.
I'm missing a few steps, but you get the idea.
So until we agree on a few fundamentals, which I offer as a straw dog in the seven statements,
I call them seven statements and not seven truths.
I think they're truths, but that's for everybody else to weigh in on.
Until we can get there, we're never going to have a shared ideological infrastructure.
Hence, we're never going to get on the same page. Hence, we're going to have these problems with
diversity. Do we only want one kind of tree or one kind of flower, one kind of fish, one kind
of bird in the sky? I mean, what is wrong with diversity? Except when it puts us into dualism
and makes us contentious, and we use it as reason for conflict and competition. There should only be
cooperation and collaboration. We should all be pulling in the same direction for the same reason.
That's the only way we're going to get out of the madness that currently is suffocating the species
and the planet. I would say that unity harmonizes diversity and enriches it. So you have the fertile
ground of the rainforest, there's a proliferation of variety of plants and animals and all that
stuff because there's so much nutrient available to them all.
And like that, consciousness is the ultimate nutrient, or God, you could say, is the ultimate
nutrient, and I don't think an enlightened world would be one in which everyone was the
same in some way.
There would be probably even greater flourishing of diversity and cultures and so on and so
forth, but they'd all be harmonized in a common foundation.
>> Exactly. We all come from the same source. We all will return to the same source. We are
all one.
>> Yup. Okay, here's another question for you. This is from Abaya Kim in California. This
is more of a statement than a question. Bliss and joy are always available. Many are able
to feel it from others, especially when their hearts are open with joy. It sounds like you
may be in constant peace, joy, and bliss.
No, I'm not because I weep for the world.
When I meditate, when I go off in nature and commune with God,
I have that connection and that love.
I mean, I have that connection always. I'm sustained by it always.
And the most remarkable things happen. I don't have remarkable things
every day. I mean, every day is a miracle and remarkable in its own way.
But I do stay connected with it. But when I'm really connected
is when I have my greatest self-transcendence and bliss.
But I wait for the world.
I'm sad because I'm feeling the pain
and I'm recognizing that it's so unnecessary.
And I also recognize that it's so fixable.
You know, it's not irreparable.
We can fix this.
We can get beyond this.
We were meant to be more than this.
And I don't know what's holding us back.
I really don't.
understand why we're sitting in the dark when we could be enjoying the light.
This was the message of my vision quest. I got the medicine named First Light and
the message was you're not going to the conference room that's dark where all
these people are sitting around a table and just turn on the light switch and
and say let there be light. You have to put in a dimmer switch and you kind of
have to raise it a little bit at a time so people adjust to the light as it gets
greater. And I watched that in the cave up in the Mojave Desert.
And you're alluding to a cool story that we didn't get to in your book. We've hardly talked
about your book. We've been going off on all these things, but...
Well, in a way, this has been the book. I mean, this is...
Yeah, it has been, but there's some cool stories in there about your angel encounters and your
vision quest in Joshua Tree and other things. So people are going to have to read that book.
I didn't mean to cut you off, but keep going.
That's what I wanted to say.
Yeah.
Cut me off. Thank you.
Okay, another question came in, I want to get to them all. This one is from
Anthony Parshall in Burlington, Vermont. This is interesting, I don't know what he means by this,
but maybe you'll get something. What is the role of the idea of paradise for the seeker?
Well, to me, paradise cannot be improved upon, that's the perfect world. By definition,
perfection is that which cannot be improved upon. And to me, there's no fixed definition
of perfection because we're going to continue, if we truly move into cooperation and collaboration
out of a sense of oneness, out of a sense of love for each other, out of a duty to each other,
not just to one human being to another, but to the animals, to flora, fauna, the forest, the trees,
the rivers, the streams, the oceans, the atmosphere, space, we have to first work to
restore our environment, our planet, and our atmosphere and outer space.
We've got so much space junk, it's unbelievable.
But we've done a lot of damage.
So perfect love, perfect cooperation, perfect collaboration, first would cleanse, detox,
and restore.
And then, you know, it's the Star Trek mentality.
The universe is our playground.
If all the money and energy we put into fighting each other and competing with each other,
if we put that into, "Hey, you know, let's figure out how we can get to Mars or
to an exoplanet somewhere," it can be our sandbox. That's what we were meant to do.
We're not meant to be stuck in the tar pits, clutting each other with femur bones.
We're meant to have this wonderful, blissful dance throughout perfection.
And perfection is going to be an ongoing dance of realizing our unlimited potential.
We'll go on to create more and better and newer things, but in a conscious way,
not in a way that's going to hurt anything or deprive anyone or disenfranchise anyone.
it will be ethical evolution, if you will, God-centered evolution. So that's where I want
to be and I don't want to have to die to get there. I mean, I'd like to experience that in my lifetime.
So until we get there, I do feel sadness because I'm painfully aware of what is
versus what could be. And my job, and everybody's job, frankly, is to help build a bridge between
what is, where we are now, to where we could be. And where we could be is nirvana, while
still on the body.
Very good. And if enough of us were, then the world itself would display the qualities
of nirvana, the heavenly qualities that it could potentially have. I just think that
the world is a clear reflection of the ambient level of the subjective experience of 8 billion
people. And if that subjective experience were more nirvanic, if that's a adjective,
then the world, you know, think about just as an example the amount of money that we
spend on wars and the other countries spend on wars. If all that money were put
into education and health care and all kinds of positive stuff like
technological innovations and so on, it could make a huge difference. Even for
the reputation of the United States, you know, in these countries in which we have
fought wars. They might love us if we put all that money into schools and
health care and beautiful good things. But again it takes a changing of the heart
in order for the institutions to change and that's got to happen on more of a
mass scale. Yeah it takes everybody having their own personal epiphany. I
mean I would like to think that they would come to transformation just from
reading my book because it's fairly comprehensive and I think it speaks to a
a lot of the questions people have,
but I know that that will only be the case for a few.
So for the rest, I put in there the formula
for their own epiphany.
And I really hope the wealthy and powerful,
the ones who start the wars,
the ones who could eradicate poverty,
the ones who could eradicate abuse and illiteracy
and all the other social ills,
I would hope they would be among the first
to undergo that transformation
because I think they could be very instrumental in bringing about rapid progress and doing
no further harm to any species, not just our species, but to any species and to the planet.
It's karmic. What we do to others, we're going to do to ourselves.
Yep. Well, may it be so. Alrighty. Well, this has been an enjoyable conversation, and I encourage
people to read your book. You had a proclivity for DWS, which is driving while sleeping, and
there are a bunch of stories about that in the beginning of the book and how you were
quite miraculously saved from certain death. And then there are all kinds of other stories
from your life about divine intervention and providence, all of which make the case that
we're not alone, that there is some higher intelligence that helps to orchestrate things
and helps to help save us and support us, particularly if we make ourselves receptable to such help.
And then again, part three is reflections about God and divine emulation with some practical
tips and exercises on how you might actualize this in your own life. Is that a fair one-minute
synopsis of your book?
John: Yes, thank you.
Rick: Good. All right, so John, I'll put up a page on BatGap and it'll have a link to your
book and a link to your websites and you want to just say quickly what kinds of ways people
can engage with you. You know, might be are there webinars, are there courses, are there...
Well, my book really speaks for itself. Love by the Light, the trilogy will be out next year.
I don't know if we're going to publish it one volume at a time or all three depending upon
where things go between now and then, but... Tell Peter Jackson to make a movie of it.
Yeah, I would hope so. It would make a great mini-series to be honest.
On a Spielberg or somebody.
Yeah, it's too much for one movie, although you could do like a Star Trek thing or a Lord
of the Rings thing where you reinforce it.
Yeah, serialize it.
Attorney.org has a lot of information. Affirminggod.com has a lot of information.
The contact information is on both websites, the email address and the mailing address.
And I encourage people to go there and learn more about it.
Great. Well, thank you for all you've been doing. I'm glad you got the lizards off your back.
And you've been living a good life, making a wonderful contribution,
and it's always inspiring to see that.
Well, back at you, Rick. Thank you for all you do.
Well, thanks.
That's what we came to do.
To quote the Beatles again, "We're all doing what we can."
Oh, doing what we can to try to make a difference. And that's the whole point.
How much did the world change because of what Christ did? Not much. And if Christ came back,
I think the same thing would probably happen all over again for the same reasons. So this is what
Einstein was warning about. He was saying technology is outpaced consciousness. He said, "I
don't know what World War III will be fought with, but I know that World War IV will be fought with
with sticks and stones.
Until we have enlightenment,
spiritually awake and aware individuals,
this is your quote from Yogananda,
heading up all of the major social institutions
and governments, we're gonna find ourselves
right in the thick of it, all over again,
shooting ourselves in the foot,
doing brain dead things and making poor choices.
Until we are enlightened, we're gonna continue
to play out this suboptimal reality,
which is no fun for anyone.
- I think we may be heading for that.
And it may not be in our lifetimes,
at least this particular lifetimes of ours,
but I think there's a momentum.
And that's why I was saying earlier, I feel optimistic.
And it's not obvious to the majority of people in the world,
but I think there's something real going on and significant,
and it's gaining momentum.
- Right, amen.
We do what we can do.
all the ways we can do it without being attached to the results, because we cannot control
results.
Exactly.
Bhagavad Gita says, "You have control over action alone, never over its fruits."
That's right.
All right, well, thanks so much, John.
Hope to meet you in person someday.
I always say that.
I never get out of Iowa, but it would be wonderful to have some big conference someday where
everybody can give each other a hug.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity.
It was a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you.
to those who've been listening or watching. We will visit the BatGap website if you'd
like to sign up for an email to be notified of each new interview or if you'd like to
subscribe to the podcast or some of the other things that we have. There's the BatGap bot,
I haven't talked about that. We have an AI chat bot with over 100,000 documents in it,
and it's very interesting. Okay, we'll leave it at that. Thanks, John.
Thank you, Rick.
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Thank you.
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