The message here is: you can transcend your own limitations, if you let yourself
go there. You must exercise your free will to create your own reality. As I look back on it, that was the big lesson of the first 20 years of my life. The specific experiences that I had were in a sense wonder- ful, and I was blessed to have them even though they happened in the crucible of much difficulty and suffering. It's easy to talk about it, but going through it was not easy. Life on earth is not necessarily easy. There are perfections and imperfections here, and our task is to manifest as many of these good qualities and attributes and perfections as we can.
I had to re-create my life- physically. I had been so sick growing up. I had to reform my body, re-form my mind, re-form my spirit, re-form my heart. It was like a Shamanic process. And the way that happened was not only through the exercise of will but also through an ability to transcend my own limitations.
You can call this faith- not the faith that most religious people think such as certain beliefs and dogmas. To me true faith is a knowingness and a certainty of things not yet seen and not yet fully known. And yet in your heart and spirit a certainty exists that it can be. I found the ability to actualize and manifest through faith and through vision and saw things happen that were miraculous.
I remember, for example, being in college after I had learned medi- tation techniques, and I started experimenting with the power of prayer. I lived in a dorm and there were these guys who were getting drunk all the time and really on a dangerous path. Every year there were a few of these college kids who ended up drinking and getting killed, driving between Boone and Blowing Rock on a treacherous two- lane road.
One afternoon I was sitting in the dorm room meditating. I heard these guys come in, completely drunk and rowdy. So I went into a state of divine awareness, and without any irritation or negativity on my part at all -- I wasn't judging -- I just went in that state and I saw them. In my mind, I could see them coming down the hall. And I put this divine light around them, and I asked for their forgiveness. Then I asked that they wake up to what they were doing and that they stop harming them- selves in this way. About five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. And there they were, looking completely sober, asking for forgive- ness- through me to something greater. It was a transformative event for them, and I never saw them drunk again!
That same year, I found that the same thing happens with animals that there was this ability to connect with what people in the East would call the devas and the nature energies. I would sit out under the trees in a huge ancient forest behind my dorm and meditate.
One day, while sitting against a huge old Hemlock tree and meditating, I felt I was being watched. I slowly opened my eyes and to my delight, there was a semi-circle of animals around me. There were a couple of birds, a squirrel, a chipmunk and a raccoon, just in a semi-circle. I know this sounds like something out of Siddhartha, but it really happened. These animals were peacefully staring at me and appeared to be in a state of great calm and bliss.
We have within us a wonderful divine spirit -but we have to know it, practice it, and affirm it in our lives so that these things are possible. This is what, to me, faith is: You act as if it is so, and it is so. And when you act as if it is so, it will be. Ultimately, it is an exercise of surrender, of giv- ing up self to the great Spirit.
CHAPTER 6
q^D
Ineffable Oneness
In the Sufi tradition there is the story of the master who is trying to teach a student how to levitate across the water. The student is at the edge of the body of water, intellectualizing and thinking, "Well, I'm heavier than water; I'm going to sink and I'm going to drown." The master turns to the student and says, "Leave thyself behind, and then walk upon the water."
This is the grace - I call it operative grace- that you have to find to achieve these things spiritually. You have to practice it and let it unfold.
You have to know in your heart that it is possible — not just believe in something in the ordinary sense of belief. You have to say, "It will be," and you then do it. But it is being done not because of your ego; it's being done from the greater Mind that stands within you.
Realizing this is a paradox: On the one hand, our individualities are the vehicles through which the unboundedness can manifest and express. Once you understand that, you understand the concept of being a clear vehicle for spirit. So, 011 the one hand, there has to be individuality to be able to have it happen. On the other hand, you have to be freed up enough from self to let the larger divine Being shine through and let these things happen. And then it will happen.
I survived my own adolescence by finding this pretty much on my own, with some help from the unseen realms. But if I hadn't found it, I am quite sure I would have been dead by age 20. Most people who would have come out of the kind of situation I was in as an adolescent boy would have ended up a drug addict or a criminal. I attribute this transformation to the guidance, protection and inspiration from the Great Spirit, the Divine Being ~ and somehow I was willing to be open to that. When I opened to It, It all rushed in. It was all there for me. And It is always there for each of us.
I tell people, "As soon as you're ready to open to That, it's there." And it's there for any purpose. I don't care if you're in the emergency department, trying to save a life, or you're an airline pilot, or a carpenter. The unbounded Divine Mind is always folded within us. It's a matter of knowing this, being open to it and letting it operate. So, you have to get out of your own way and let It happen.
When I was living in Israel, my father, who was a chain smoker and an alcoholic, became deathly ill. I now realize that he also had very serious Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from World War II, from doing hand- to-hand combat with the Japanese in the Pacific islands. One day, I heard from family that he had an inoperable golf ball sized tumor in his right lung. Back then -- this would have been around 1978; it was not thought that the available chemotherapy would work, but they would try it any- way. And so I was called back to the States to make burial arrangements: the doctors said he had about six weeks to live. When I saw Dad I asked him, "Do you want to die from this?" He said, "No, I'm not ready." So, I taught him meditation and I taught him prayer. Now, you have to understand what a hard-boiled atheist, and bitter man he was, and of that generation, born in 1916. But still he said, " I'll do this." So, I gave him some books to read and then I personally taught him meditation, visualization and how to heal with mind from within.
You have to first center and go into a deep, quiet state of conscious- ness that goes beyond self, where the real power is, which is divinity It's that which transcends ego. And then from that state, do the visualization. So, you bring in what I call the God factor or the divine spirit factor.
So I taught my father to do this. I said, "Just do it. This is a matter of saving your life. Whether you believe it or not, act as if you do." So, he did.
I then went back to Israel, and I would go to the beautiful Baha'i shrine on Mount Carmel. Every day at lunch, I'd go there and I would do the same visualization as I taught my Dad. Then I would pray for his healing.
Well, a few weeks later, he went back to his doctor. (We did pick out the cemetery plot, but I knew he'd be okay.) The doctor took some x- rays and found, suddenly, that the huge tumor was gone. And the doc- tor went, "My God!"- it was one of these "miraculous," spontaneous healing's. But we knew exactly what happened.