A month or two later, I was in the gardens where Abdu'l-Baha is buried, on Mount Carmel at his shrine. In through the gate walked Emily. I was delighted to see that she was the person from my dream. But you don't go up to a complete stranger and say, "Hello, I've had a dream with you and we're supposed to be married!" We met and talked for maybe an hour and a half; it was like we'd always known each other. But I still didn't mention my dream.
She was there for a convention, and the very last day she was there, I saw her again, briefly. They were about ready to close the gates to these beautiful gardens and to the shrines, and Emily was going to go there and say some prayers. I said, "You'd better hurry, because they're closing soon." So, she went and that was the last time I saw her on that trip.
Later, I went to the shrine and prayed and said to God, "If this is real- ly who You wish for me to marry, she's going to have to approach me, with me never telling her the dream or trying to contact her again."
Well, Emily was going to meet her mother in London for a vacation. When she got there, she had a strange compulsion to try to write me, but she didn't even know my last name! She only knew my name is Steve. Someone that she was traveling with happened to know my last name, and so she was able to get the letter to me, through the headquarters of the Baha'i religion there in Israel.
Emily wrote me a letter saying how much she enjoyed meeting me, etc. That was what I'd been waiting for. I wrote a first letter to her that was just normal and friendly. In the second letter, I recounted the whole story of how we had been introduced and what Abdu'l-Baha said in the dream. She wrote me back and said, "Well, if this is the divine will, this is what we'll do."
We corresponded for a whole year. In June of 1979, Emily packed up all her things. We met in the Seattle airport and went to Alaska for a ten- day courtship and then decided, yes, we would be married. And in August of 1979, we were married on Mt. Carmel in Israel! This year (2006) is our 27th anniversary. So some marriages really are made in heaven!"
I tell people this story because many people are given guidance that they don't take, because it doesn't appear to make sense. But if it is right, it doesn't have to make intellectual sense all the time. We've had splendid times, a wonderful marriage and four beautiful children. We've done all these things that you're going to read about, and I love her now more than ever!
Emily picked out a beautiful silk sari with gold thread to wear at our wedding. She didn't know that was exactly what I saw when I was introduced to her in the lucid dream state by Abdu'l-Baha. When I saw it, I said, "This is exactly it."
Our first daughter was born on Mount Carmel in Israel, and we brought
her home on our one-year anniversary, so we named her Carmel.
After our first child was born, we came back to the United States, and I went into medical school. I went into emergency medicine because I found it not only very challenging, but it's where I could apply the science and the technology of modern medicine in its highest form. During that time, I was involved in running programs dealing with meditation and holistic health. We formed the Shambhala Institute and offered pro- grams on holistic health and healing.
For many years, I raised our four children with Emily, was chairman of emergency medicine and worked in an emergency department, and was founder of CSETI and the Disclosure Project. Life was quite a three-ring circus!
CHAPTER 5
Q^D
Forgiveness and Faith
One of the great lessons I learned as a teenager was forgiveness. I think it's so important that if people contemplate the sort of situation the world is in on a macro- scale, that it really comes down to a very person- al matter: The microcosm of our own lives is recapitulated through society, and we're all operating as a universal resonator. I found the divine and sacred exists and it is real and it is made manifest through loving- ness and forgiveness.
So the very first thing that I did was to forgive my parents for actions during our childhood. You don't forget it, but you can forgive. And this frees up an enonnous amount of imier peace and energy because you have let go of the negative. The act of forgiveness and the act of love is really one of the highest expressions of spiritual realization.
And so what I found is forgiveness and love require a genuine selflessness - one where you go beyond yourself. As I looked around the world as a teenager, I saw that most of the problems in the world were because of selfishness. There's a wonderful saying attributed to Abdu'l- Baha that says, "Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time." I really believe that. This is part of what we're on planet Earth to learn.
I had to create my own spirituality from nothing. This is the blank slate phenomenon: With my near-death experience, I didn't go to the pearly gates where there was this angry old man with a beard, throwing down bolts of lightning at people and judging you and throwing you by your lying sinful forelock into hell.
As I mentioned, one of the first challenges I had was to forgive the people closest to me. People have to learn to forgive. This is why, even though I'll speak with great force about the need to change the path we're on, it's not that I'm wanting to do this by taking a pound of flesh in a vengeful way from those who have gotten us into this mess. It's that they should be educated and, if necessary restrained.
But even those actions are done out of love and out of a sense of what needs to happen. And it must be done with forgiveness. I continue to practice that now.
Being here on this planet, to me, is not about trying to pretend like you're perfect. There's a saying that's attributed to a German writer: "those who would pretend to be angels are destined to behave as beasts."
The scariest cultists ever are the ones who set themselves on a dais. It's better to be who you are and be real and be human even while you begin to bring into this world those attributes that are spiritual and divine. But you don't have to be perfect to do that.
There is no one perfect on Planet Earth, unless that being is an Avatar- that is one of the high prophets or a Manifestation of the Godhead. And there are none of them living on the Earth today and haven't been for over 100 years, and there won't be for another 1,000 years.
The major prophets or the Manifestations of God are very rare. And they're actually a different species. They have a station that is beyond that of the capacity of even a fully enlightened human. In other words, you could evolve to the highest level of capacity as a human and never reach that station. It is another lineage, another level. And that's how important those figures are and how powerful, but also how unique. And that's why I say it's one of the worst things ever for someone to claim to be that when they're not. The most we can do is to reflect the light from that Godhead.
We are all relatively imperfect, and we're here to manifest degrees of perfection. And beyond that, nothing else should be claimed. And those who claim beyond that are frauds. Period. I don't care who they are. Only by being who we are and knowing where we are, can we evolve.
The South is so crazy - love every minute of it and it suits me just fine! When I was growing up back in the late '50s and '60s, it was really the Old South, still. There were wonderful black women that I knew, and they would come up to me and say, "Oh, you're an old soul." They'd look at me and they'd say things about my future. These were very unpretentious, salt of the Earth, wonderful beings.
You meet people like that all over the world, and you won't meet many of them in temples or in cathedrals or in ashrams, but you will meet them in other places. As a child, I had things affirmed to me from some of these wise and sagacious people. This happened from the time I was four or five years of age on. I was not drawn towards the trappings and formality of spirituality that gets subsumed into the world of priests and the hierarchy or gurus or ashrams, but was more attracted to that genuine spirituality you find in honest, direct, clear, simple spirituality. Because that's where I stayed, it enabled me to open up my heart and do things such as acts of forgiveness and acts of love that really were outside of what my upbringing should have allowed.