Having never been

unhappy a day in my life, Depression came as a shock to me.

All the things I'd once lived to do were dead in me.

Not a whisper of emotion as I fell into a crevasse so deep I had to look up to see a worm.

I couldn't figure out how I got there, and as the years went by, I came to feel that I'd never escaped from this prison.

With time, though, the haze in the air evaporated and the world came into focus.

But I was seeing through new eyes that gradually opened as I read about how the mysterious world of quantum physics aligned with spiritual views, especially those of Eastern religions.

So

Yeah

... that too, that this is the last.

But so we had set up these, these fences.

Went down there on July, July the 4th in, uh, 1976 to start building these fences.

While people were celebrating the 200th anniversary, we were on [laughs] our way to hell, basically.

So we, we set up these six pastures, and we had goats in each of the pastures.

And, uh, the amazing thing is that in one of the pastures, the goats started to eat these woodrat houses.

Yep.

[laughs]

... illustrates a point.

So in my mind, for a master's degree, what I would've loved to do is to follow mountain goats around up at 13,000, 14,000 feet elevation, watching what they were eating, right? Becoming a member of their group, which you can do too, they'll habituate to you, and just see what they ate.

That was my interest.

That, that was my huge interest.

Nothing beyond that, [laughs] just what do they do? What...

So I end up with these goats in southern Utah and a monoculture of a plant called black brush, and it i- it's just a shrub that's about as hostile looking as can be.

[laughs]

That's all of Christianity.

That's right.

So I remember asking my mother when I was tiny one day, how come only we Catholics are going to heaven? What about my Methodist friends, my Presbyterian friends? I wasn't really so much aware of Buddhists or others.

The rest of the world.

The rest of the world.

And she did her best to try to tell me why only the Catholics were going to heaven.

And I never believed that there is only one way because I always thought, well, what about the person that's brought up a Methodist? Or what about the person that's brought up a Buddhist? Or so on and so forth.

Apparently, he's got some health challenges right now, so he's not doing podcasts, so I was sorry to hear that.