Spiritual experiences are not planned: they happen. Their content and their message happen as well. They are spontaneous nonordinary experiences, and they happen in nonordinary brain and consciousness states. When they happen, the brain operates in unusual domains of frequency: either at the very low end of the EEG scale or at the very high end—either in the alpha, and even below in theta domain, or at the gamma range. In the former case, nonordinary experiences come about in a meditative state of consciousness, and in the latter case in a state of exaltation. These states permit elements of experience that are ordinarily submersed in the sea of everyday concerns to surface to consciousness.
The elements that surface in nonordinary states of consciousness may carry important insights. Among other things, they may tell us something about our connection to The Source—about the “in-formation” that shapes our life, and our very being on this planet.
The bouquet of spiritual experiences recounted here are the lived experiences of credible individuals from a wide variety of interests and backgrounds. They are the experiences of a humanist business leader (Lawrence Bloom); a television producer (Darla Boone); a social activist and philosopher (James O’Dea); an investigative journalist (Guido Ferrari); a biocosmetics designer (Adrienne Feller); two teachers and mystics (Jean Houston and Nicolya Christi); a teacher and activist (Barbara Marx Hubbard); two experimental psychologists (Lynne McTaggart and Gary Schwartz); a Silicon Valley inventor (Federico Faggin); an educator and humanist (Pierre Pradervand); a natural healer (Maria Sági); a Japanese spiritual leader (Masami Saionji); and two pioneers of communication with other species (Jane Goodall and Frédérique Pichard). We first listen to what these notable individuals tell us of their spiritual experiences (pp. 48–174), and then take a deeper look at the message conveyed by their experiences (beginning on p. 183).
Business leader, humanist
I can’t remember the month, but it was in the early spring of 1974. I was sitting in my 6.3-liter Mercedes 500 SEL outside my seven-bedroom house in the Hampstead Gardens suburb, a beautifully designed residential estate in North West London where the houses in Central Square, where I lived, had been designed by Edward Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi. I was thirty-one years old, and I had “arrived.”
While I was growing up, and throughout my teenage years, it was made clear to me that “if you’re rich, you’re happy—it’s very simple.” Now here I am, reasonably rich, but not as happy as I had been led to believe I should be. “Is that it?” I asked myself. It seemed to me that I had simply exchanged one level of challenges for another level, of higher complexity. Whereas making ends meet had previously been the priority, I now discovered that I needed to consult with tax lawyers and others to ensure that I could maximize my earnings. This realization, that the promised “happiness” had not materialized, created a deep identity crisis in me. So I drove off, had a drink—and three years later, I was still in crisis and still drinking.
I eventually realized that through my drinking, not only was I putting a huge stress on my physical body, I was also putting a great emotional stress on my personal and business relationships—both were suffering. I went on a search to look for what was missing. I applied to that search the same diligence that I applied to my business life. Over time, it became obvious that there was a part of me that was not being nourished, and it was that part on which I decided to focus. In popular Western parlance, that part is called the “soul.” Other belief systems call it by a different name, and some deny that there is even such a thing. But I can say based on my personal experience that there is, and that we all have it.
Where did I get lost? At what point did I begin to feel separate and isolated from the whole? Ever since I was a young boy I remember feeling connected—to my mother, my father, my grandparents, my sister, and all my aunts and uncles. I felt connected to nature: I would look at the stars and feel they were part of me. I would look at the trees and plants and know that they were also part of me. So what had happened?
I remember that when I was about five, I brought home a school friend. My grandfather, who lived with us, came from Russia and only spoke Yiddish (in his case, a mixture of German and English). He asked me, “Is he unserer?” Which, roughly translated, means “Is he one of us?” “Of course!” I replied. “We go to the same school!” The thought that I could be separate from him because of our religious differences never occurred to me. Slowly I began to learn the concept of separation and separateness.
As time went on, I was accused by my schoolmates of killing Jesus, and other crimes. In 1948 I was five years old. The newsreels of German concentration camps began to appear on our new TV set. My grandfather lost his whole family in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His hatred of the Germans knew no bounds—and I was taught to hate Germans as well. This was another way of feeling separate. Our people are good, and those people are bad. And so I bought into the illusion of separation. But that was only half the problem. The other half was the illusion of scarcity. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were enough resources on the planet to feed, clothe, shelter, and give access to education, health care, justice, and basic income to every human being on Earth. Everyone could maximize his or her potential. However, instead of realizing that the system that created this potential wealth could not take us any farther, we didn’t shift the system and continued with the existing model.
Like the booster rocket on a space shot, the GDP growth model and debt-driven banking system had fulfilled its function. In a space shot, we know when we must detach the booster and allow it to fall back to Earth, and know that if we don’t detach it, the entire project will be jeopardized. In the same way, our financial system at the time functioned as a booster for our economy-spaceship, but now we have left the Earth’s gravitational field and we must find a different system. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
The old economic/financial model is based on scarcity in the midst of plenty. When you put the two illusions of separation and scarcity together, you have a toxic brew of unhealthy competition. I realized at last that in my competition with others, I had lost my connection with the Earth—with The Source that gives us life, with the cosmos that gave birth to us, and with each other. But without these connections, our lives have no meaning. I had also lost the connection with myself, with my true nature.
I returned to business recognizing that it was my soul that I needed to satisfy, and not my ego. Of course, once this insight was achieved, life then conspired to ensure that our commitments were kept! I found myself deputy chairman of a major property development/investment company. I knew that we were about to enter a major economic crash and convinced the owner to sell first our development projects, and then our investment holdings.
I came into the office one Monday morning to discover in the business press that my company, totally unbeknownst to me, had acquired a major development project in the City of London. It is not a great feeling to realize that one has total responsibility but no power! One of the insights of living by the dictates of one’s Soul is that thinking, doing, and saying are the same thing. This keeps us connected to ourselves. Even though I was concerned that if I left this affluent company it might be difficult to find another job, I could not live a lie. I walked to the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and came to a decision. I submitted my notice of leaving the company, effective immediately. By some grace, shortly thereafter I found myself appointed to the executive committee of the Intercontinental Hotel Group, in charge of asset management for the entire group.
The second test of my resolve to live by my Soul was not far behind. I resolved to create an environmental manual for our group. There was a great deal of resistance to this, both from the Chief Operating Officer and the Chief Financial Officer. The former pressed me about what advantage I was creating to the quarterly bottom line, and the latter pressed me about value for the shareholders.
These pressures tested my resolve to maintain my relationship with myself and the planet. But when we act from our Soul, we become a powerful force, and although I was fearful every morning, sometimes even to the extent of being sick into the bathroom sink, I never relented until my task was completed. Eventually the environmental manual I created was adopted by Prince Charles: he called it “the Prince’s Manual.” As a result, the manual was offered to all five-star hotels in the world, and is now placed in more than 5.5 million hotel rooms. The card that announces the option for guests to not have their towels changed every night is one small part of the manual. I hope to be able to announce shortly that the policy to make the supply chain completely green has been adopted by a new major hotel chain.
My story is not about feeling separate as a child and needing to discover the oneness of things, but about feeling connected as a child and needing to go through the illusion of separation and scarcity to regain that connectedness. It is about recognizing that unconditional love flows continuously from the heart when it is aligned with the mind and the Soul. The Vedas tell us, “From Joy is all this created, by Joy is all this sustained, through Joy does all this move and into Joy does all this merge!” For me, to feel the truth of this assertion is to embed myself in the oneness of all things in the universe.
After my epiphany, I realized that the tragedy of our times is not just that our aspirations are purely material, but that they lack vision. They lack the idea of service.
We live at a very dangerous time. We should be looking at what is breaking through instead of looking at what is breaking down. We should be nurturing, protecting, and connecting what is emerging and what wants to be born. But it is difficult to discard the old system based on security gained through separateness, and on protection from any challenge to its dominance.
In Judaic lore, there is a major commandment. All the others, including the Ten Commandments, are subordinate to it. That commandment is “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The instruction is clear. Its essence is that there is only one God. We need to fulfill the evolutionary impulse for diversity, never forgetting that it arises from the One, and that at the end of days it will return to the One. With this insight, we can create a world based on dignity, equity, and compassion.
Television documentary producer
I have undergone many spontaneous experiences in my life, reaching back to my earliest memories. I have been in touch with the unseen world since my birth. In fact, I have a full memory of my own birth, incredible as that may sound, but that is another story. Here, I have chosen to recount an event that had a particularly powerful impact on my life and became the guiding light I have carried with me ever since I experienced it … kind of a roadmap for my life.
As a small child, I could see Little People, the fairies who live in the Pacific Northwest forest where I was born and raised. They were the most darling and cheerful little friends I ever had … and I was also aware of a much bigger universe surrounding me, one that I could interact with.
When I was around four or five, when I fell asleep at night I would sometimes find myself astral projecting, and would leave my body and travel through the universe on what I called my Magic Carpet. It looked like thousands of molecules had woven themselves into a Magic Carpet just for me … it allowed me to travel throughout the universe. I was never afraid; I always knew I was safe.
This began to be a nightly ritual for me. I could hardly wait to fall asleep and leave my earthly body behind. I noticed how much more comfortable I felt outside my body than with my earthbound existence.
Through these adventures, I became aware of how wholeness felt outside and inside the human body, and I became completely connected to that feeling of wholeness. It was as essential as air to me. Little did I know that later on in my adult life, I would fall in love with holistic health; it became my main object of study. Later I discovered that I have an empathic and intuitive natural knowing regarding illness, and that the cure for disease and illness was finding the right frequency.
Today, the world is abundant with breakthroughs in new-paradigm and scientific thinking that substantiate what I knew intuitively as a child. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it. So what a joy it was when this kind of knowledge and information started to rise to my consciousness. It is nothing short of miraculous to know that we are on the tipping point and are looking right into the eyes of the potential to transform humankind’s understanding of what wholeness truly is. And thereby transforming our idea of what illness is, and how to overcome it.
It wasn’t until my young adulthood that I realized that I had the power to heal myself … even in the most difficult circumstances. I have learned to command my body to be well, although sometimes that took some digging to find the root causes of the problem, while at other times it was instant.
I believe this is an insight I had come across in my astral-projecting childhood adventures. I could integrate it into my physical and mental being. I have used this knowledge all my life. It is like “getting into the zone” for an athlete.
As time went by, it became more and more evident to me that people didn’t know what wholeness actually feels like. That is something I have aspired to feel in my entire life. I would love for everyone to be able to feel whole—it is such a deep part of our being, so powerful yet fragile at the same time.
Even as a child I was obsessed with trying to figure out why people get sick and how to make them well … this has been a driving force in my whole life. Even when I was tired of hearing the misunderstood word “wellness,” I was fascinated with exploring it … it is the love of my life. I have always felt unsettled by the illness that plagues humanity. This feeling is part of the very fiber of my being. The universe has been a constant teacher to me, unveiling the truth about wellness … and I am grateful for it.
I had no idea that my Magic Carpet would come back into my life in my early twenties—but it did. At first, I was a true-blue sixties hippie. I say this proudly. It was a wonderful time to be alive, with the great ideas for change sprouting like flowers from the earth … revolutionaries standing up for change and for a better world on every corner. A new movement was born. It was a beautiful time of celebration. The new paradigm of social change was bursting out of conventional thinking and bringing forth new possibilities for humanity. No longer would this human eruption lay dormant … it seemed as if everything was happening all at once, not through technology, but through human interaction. It was an extraordinary time.
Among all of the fascinating things that were happening at that time was that India was sending to the US one great Guru after another. They came to America bearing such names as Paramahansa Yogananda, Maharishi Yogi, Yogi Sacinandana, Swami Muktananda, and many others. Then there was a little sixteen-year-old teacher Hans Ji Maharaj, who created an organization with his family called Divine Light Mission. It turned out that this young guru had a potent message to give me; a message that would lead me back to my Magic Carpet and change my life forever.
The encounter with Hans Ji Maharaj began at Evergreen State College, the first fully accredited college in the US to not use a grading system to evaluate the students’ progress. (At most schools, it was believed students were equal to their grade-point average. Evergreen, however, used context and explanation to evaluate performance, not a simple letter grade. Detailed evaluations highlighted the students’ work and provided specific examples of their progress.) Evergreen was the perfect place for me, an entire campus filled with like-minded people from all over the US and the world. The freedom I experienced at Evergreen allowed me to follow my natural instincts. This meant focusing primarily on transpersonal psychology and on the arts. It turned out, to my amazement, that I was a brilliant psychology student. I was becoming a bit of a celebrity … the faculty had high hopes for me.
One weekend, Evergreen hosted a huge Spiritual Symposium and all kinds of amazing spiritual people showed up … it was a wonderful event. One of the speakers was Swami Sacinandana, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. I stood on the balcony of the auditorium looking at the Swami sitting in the lotus position with his crisp white clothing and beautiful long hair and huge beard. The auditorium was packed with three or four thousand students and light seekers. I noticed that energy waves were emanating from the Swami like heat waves on a road on a hot summer day. I asked Jim, now my ex-husband, “Do you see those waves coming off Swami Sacinandana?” but he said that he did not see them. I knew that I needed to investigate this strange phenomenon, so I decided to go down to the auditorium floor, and when the Swami came off the stage, I would be there to meet him.
As the Swami came off the stage, he saw me standing there. He smiled and bowed to me. Then he almost knocked me over with a big shaktipat transmitted to me. I was off the ground and flying. I was in a state of bliss, a state of cosmic consciousness, for the next eight months. This experience shifted me into a deep commitment to my spiritual path.
Shortly after this experience with Swami Sacinandana, I became aware of Hans Ji Maharaj beginning to visit me in my dreams and asking me to come to San Diego with my husband Jim to meet him and receive knowledge. Knowledge is said to be the gift of Light, Sound, Word, and Nectar.… All I know is that my life changed when finally I received this knowledge.
By this time I was a Transcendental Meditator, and I practiced yoga and tai chi, using sacred deep-breathing techniques. I could blow a house down with my OM. I had incorporated spiritual practices into my daily life; I was no longer an idealistic beginner.
I decided to take myself and Jim to San Diego to meet the Guru. When we arrived, we found ourselves in a lovely home near the beach with fourteen other people. We were to become initiated into the Divine Light Mission. The ceremony took about an hour and a half, or perhaps a little longer.
It was then that I reconnected with my childhood Magic Carpet. We went into the meditation sanctuary, where we were instructed to sit in a circle and were given information about the initiation we were about to receive. The Guru and his entourage of helpers wanted to be certain that we were as clear as possible in making our decision before receiving the knowledge. A few people decided not to be initiated and left the circle; they were blessed and left the room. There was never any pressure—it was an open invitation to participate or not, and I was highly motivated to go for it.
The Guru came over to me and asked me if I was very, very certain that I wanted to become enlightened, because once you became enlightened, you can never become unenlightened. I said YES, YES, I want to become enlightened. I was miserable not being enlightened … so he said okay. He reached over and put his finger on the place of my third eye. That’s when the fireworks began. My head lit up like the brightest star ever, and all of the information that I had recently acquired at Evergreen about psychology flew from my head at the same time. I remember thinking, I have just entered cosmic consciousness. It was a totally exhilarating, mind-bending experience. It changed my life forever.
The physical sensations were tantalizing. All of my chakras began spinning, and powerful waves of energy came from my feet to the top of my head and began to pulse intensely up and down my body. I don’t know how long this went on; I was totally engulfed in the experience. I started to notice that I was outside my body. I looked down and realized that I was back on my Magic Carpet flying through the universe … it was incredible to have the universe say to you, “You are not crazy, you really were on a Magic Carpet as a child.” I felt as if God had wrapped me up in love and there was nothing but smooth, smooth sailing ahead.
When the ceremony was completed, Jim and I were then instructed to go to meditate together and make the effort to come together as a couple. He and I were sitting across the room from each other as we began to meditate. I remember what a powerful meditation I was having and, again, I felt engulfed in the experience. I was very high and very peaceful, and I let myself go with it.
When we came out of the meditation, Jim said that while we were in it, he looked at me and saw that I was inside a royal blue triangle floating about four inches above the ground. I have no memory of levitating, but I am sure I did—Jim was the last person who would have believed me doing it. He said his first thought was, There is no way she is coming back to the farm now! He was right: That was the beginning of the end of our marriage, although we remain friends to this day.
How did this incredible experience impact my life? It gave me a crucial insight: We are all universal travelers with access to the whole of the universe and to the entire Akashic Field, no matter where we are and how old we are. The Akashic Field is ageless, and our childhood innocence is a state of bliss, insight, and joy. Embracing the consciousness of children is vital. It is written: “Become ye as little children, and ye shall enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
My nonordinary experiences took me beyond the range of my everyday consciousness, into what I have come to see as a form of superconsciousness. I am blasted forward on my life path. I experienced the transformation we know as spiritual evolution.
Mystic, Visionary, Futurist
Throughout my life, I have had extensive spiritual experiences. These have occurred during a concentrated five-year period of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) between June 1997 and March 2002. Further spiritual experiences continue to this day. They have given rise to deep, profound, and often unique metaphysical insights that have come to form the basis of my work as a visionary, futurist, and writer.
Was there one particular and especially profound spiritual experience that led to the insights that form the basis of my philosophy? The answer to this question is both “yes” and “no.” Each extradimensional manifestation brought with it a broader and deeper perspective, realization, and understanding of the supra-realities that underpin, “over-light,” and ultimately direct what we human beings call “life.”
Every independent experience served to facilitate a further understanding of the “greater reality” that is life beyond this earthly life; or, from a human perspective, life after death. A spiritual experience always presented a unique and profound insight that was, in itself, extraordinary, and so, each added to the “whole” in terms of deepening my comprehension.
The Roots of My Spiritual Reawakening—When, Where, and How? When exactly did my spiritual reawakening begin? Was it as a result of a single event … a chance meeting, perhaps … or a psychoactive substance I had ingested? It was none of these. My awakening began in my early childhood, when I found I was able to perceive lights, colors, orbs, and auras around people, animals, and plants. As a young natural empath, I could tune into others and feel their feelings as if they were my own. I could “see” past their cultural conditioning and social graces. I often came into contact with adults who would pass comment about my “unnerving,” “intense,” and/or “penetrating” gaze, and of their experience of feeling that I could “see straight through them.” This was perhaps a precursor to my later ability to tap into the greater mysteries that exist beyond this mortal world.
At an early age, I came also to realize that our thoughts influence our reality. This became clear after having several minor “visions,” which later came to pass. One such example was the day I was stung on the foot by a bee that had flown into my shoe, after I had imagined this very scenario only moments before. I vividly recall watching the bee at the window. The thought that played out in my mind was, Wouldn’t it be awful if that bee flew into your shoe and stung your big toe? A few moments later, this was exactly what happened! Were these my own thoughts, or those of a discarnate friend or foe? Was it a teaching from a luminous guide or, perhaps, a malevolent ghost that had unknowingly taken up residence in the family home? Either way, it served me well for a realization such as this to come to me at a young and impressionable age.
Around the age of six or seven, I began to communicate with a “higher power.” The spiritual influence in the house in which I grew up was nonexistent, as my father was an atheist and my mother only ever referred to “God” as “paying debts without money.” Are there any “special” circumstances that result in one child being more open to the metaphysical than another? For example, does being raised in a spiritual household or community make one more open to this? I do not believe so, for my own childhood home was entirely devoid of anything remotely spiritual or creative, yet my personal experience of the world at that time was saturated in matters of Spirit.
Beings from the Future—Interstellar Family. When I was seven, I won a competition at school for the best short story of a child my age. It revolved around interstellar beings from the future that would regularly visit our world with the purpose of gathering particular individuals and taking them back to their distant homeland in the starry heavens. They would gently teach and guide their “guests” before returning them to their everyday lives on Earth. The title of the story was, “The Strange Smell of the Strange Buttercups,” and it was centered on the events that took place within a soft, golden, and fragrant meadow that was carpeted in sunshine-yellow flowers. By walking through it, and breathing in the exquisite aroma, one entered a trancelike state, and it was at that point that our beneficent ET friends would arrive.
Years later, in the early hours of a summer morning, when living on the spectacular Atlantic Coast at Zennor, Cornwall, surrounded by nothing but wild, open moorland and ocean under a vast sky, I suddenly awoke to the vision of an “alien” spacecraft hovering outside my bedroom window. It hung there for a while, maybe minutes, or only perhaps seconds, and then disappeared in a flash. I was left with the distinct impression that the beings inside the craft knew me, and I knew them. Could I have just been returned to my bed after an interstellar trip “back home”? More often than not, such encounters are rarely remembered. I recall at the time feeling no fear, only a sense of the familiar, of family, and of feeling reassured that they were around, even though, generally, I was unable to either see or recall them.
School Daze. The world in which I lived as a child was entirely the dominion of adults and their experiences. The old Victorian adage “children should be seen and not heard” comes to mind. Yet, in many respects, my world somehow transcended my mundane three-dimensional surroundings. School days were spent mostly gazing out of the windows during lesson time, immersed in a world of feeling and imagination. To my mind, the archaic school system could not coax me away from my reveries, and was unable to meet the spiritual and creative needs of myself and other children. Everything in the world felt to me to be antiquated, dense, heavy and slow, with all its many systems—the hospital, education, commerce, industry, animal welfare, travel (planes, trains, and automobiles…), employment, banking, global authority, political and governmental setups, etc. Yet I lived in a world of mercurial thought and Neptunian feeling. I was continually curious about the nature of things, humans, the plant and animal kingdoms, and the workings of the material, natural, and spiritual worlds and how these interrelated, whether harmoniously or remaining juxtaposed.
Love, God & Everything. A favorite pastime of mine was shared by many other children: lying on the soft green grass and gazing up at the heavens. I did this often, wondering … always wondering … what lay beyond that vast skyscape above.
This question continued to preoccupy me as a child and as a teenager. Eventually, two and a half decades later, I found my answer following five years of out-of-body experiences that involved direct, otherworldly encounters and communication. The answer became increasingly clear to me in the wake of a mysterious and unfathomable life-changing physical collapse that began in 2002 and concluded in 2009.
I recall feeling as a child full of LOVE, yet the environment into which I had incarnated (central London) was not at all receptive to it. It was a contracted, fear-driven habitat marked by a tangible lack (visibly or vocally) of expressed love. The human expression of love was all but absent in both the local and the wider community. Still, I would regularly pray to an all-loving and all-beneficent higher power, for a higher-dimension reality was as real to me as were my hands clasped together in prayer.
Seventeen. An incident occurred at age seventeen, when I was changing the water of some spring daffodils in a vase. While tugging on a dying leaf to try to remove it, a powerful electrical voltage shot through my fingers and hand and up my arm. This stopped me in my tracks, and I knew immediately that the leaf was reproaching me for treating it insensitively and attempting to defend itself. I quickly apologized and have never again have approached any plant (or any being) since that time without the greatest respect.
The daffodil leaf taught me that it was a living, feeling, and conscious being, just like me. It demonstrated that we are all interconnected; that we all value life and living; and that we all need gentle, conscious, loving, and heart-centered contact, and mindful and caring communication. It conveyed the wisdom that humans are not superior or greater than any other living beings, as we are all over-lighted by an ultimate higher power that I refer to as SOURCE/LOVE, but others may define with one of the many names of “God.”
One evening I fainted twice within the space of half an hour. Both times I found myself hurtling through a long, dark tunnel heading toward the proverbial light at its end. As I got closer, I came around. Later that evening, I was taken to hospital to try to establish why this had happened, but no explanation was forthcoming. The impact of that event radically changed my life overnight, as I went from being a confident, carefree, and outgoing teenager into one who was introverted and filled with anxiety and fear. I became agoraphobic, claustrophobic, and social-phobic. Yet, two decades later, when I had finally overcome and transcended that phase of my life, I blessed that debilitating and harrowing condition and all its limitations, as I recognized how it had served to catalyze in me an existential crisis. I was propelled into a no-holds-barred journey of Self-discovery and Self-liberation. It threw me onto the path of Self-realization and Self-actualization, and the all-consuming pursuit of understanding who I really am.
A Psychic Stepping-Up. As I matured from child to teen to adult, I continued to see energy fields, auras, colors, and orbs around people, animals, and plants. My brow and crown chakras became increasingly active, resulting in nights that brought a kaleidoscope of expanding and contracting swirls, colors, shapes, and patterns. These would often morph into random “scenes” from the lives of people who were unknown to me, and would play out on the inner-screen of my third eye. It was as if I were tapping into an Akashic library of movies, accessing snippets of historical lives and events.
Three Spiritual Giants and Luminous Ones. To return to the question of when my spiritual and conscious awakening began, I would say it started in my early childhood, but the real turning point occurred when I was seventeen, with the discovery of Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, Carl G. Jung, and Mohandas K. Gandhi—all around the same time. These psycho-spiritual giants activated the dormant seeds within my psyche in regard to my future vocation as a visionary and writer, and as a teacher of psychological integration (Jung), conscious evolution (Gandhi), and spiritual awakening (Omraam). These are the three foundation stones that underpin my work. The other instrumental force was/is my connection with the “beings from the future” who had first presented themselves in my early years but became established as regular features in my life during my early twenties, at which time these Beings of Light were revealed as “The Luminous Ones.”
Psychological Integration, Conscious Evolution, and Spiritual Awakening. My childhood, adolescence, and early twenties were a time of accelerated spiritual and psychic awakening, while my twenties and thirties were focused on psychological healing and integration. Spirituality without psychological integration results in what I call “the balloon syndrome”—in other words, in a spirituality that is largely ungrounded. And psychological awareness, when not unified with the spiritually awakened Self, can lead to the mind and the intellect becoming overly developed and dominant, and thus unable to fulfill their true potential as facilitative, positive, and effective gifts for the conscious evolution of the individual in the world. My late thirties brought me an awareness of the bridge that is to be found between psychological integration and spiritual awakening: conscious evolution. This is the phenomenon that Barbara Marx Hubbard often refers to as our capacity to evolve by choice and not by chance.
A Brief Chronology. Chronologically, my journey that led to spiritual insight unfolded as follows:
Life Returning—Purpose Manifesting. Once my life began to move forward in March 2009, my higher purpose manifested immediately. Only later did I come to realize that by bringing the OBEs almost to a standstill, my higher-dimensional friends (“The Luminous Ones”) had found another way to work with and through me. And so it was that I entered the path of a visionary, futurist writer. All my work is sourced in what I personally tap into or directly experience.
In Summary. As I continue to contemplate worldly, earthly, metaphysical, and spiritual realities and the great existential questions, I always return to the same fundamental understanding, the same comprehension, the same grounded realization: We are LOVE, We are from LOVE, and when we leave this earthly realm, to LOVE we return.
When I consider all that has occurred since my childhood, I arrive, over and over again, at the same conclusion:
LOVE is GOD/CONSCIOUSNESS/EXISTENCE ITSELF— an unquantifiable, immeasurable, indeterminable, incalculable, indefinable, and infinite SOURCE.
Entrepreneur, software pioneer
I was born in Italy during World War II, and I was educated in the Catholic religion, receiving a generous dose of indoctrination.
Since an early age I was interested in inventing and building things. I studied physics because I wanted to understand the fundamental ideas describing how the world works for the purpose of better solving practical problems. Science seemed to offer a certainty that religion lacked, and I gradually accepted the materialistic view of reality without much questioning because I was more a doer than a philosopher.
In the late 1960s, I married and moved to Silicon Valley in California, where I had a successful career as an inventor and entrepreneur, starting a few companies in high technology.
Growing up into adulthood, I could no longer accept the dogmatism of religions and I abandoned those beliefs that felt unfounded and arbitrary. By thirty, the only trace of religion left in me was the idea that there must be a “God” somehow. I imagined God like a creative principle for the simple reason that the universe could not have created itself, unless “universe” was another name for God.
By my forties, I had fully accepted the materialist worldview and concluded that when we die, it’s game over for us, because consciousness has to be a property of matter, given that only matter exists. Therefore, when the body dies, consciousness must do the same. Reality is just like that, I felt. Simple. No big deal. No point fussing over it.
Without knowing it, I was still hypnotized by having accepted without question the materialist ideas about reality.
I felt that, even if God existed, He had to be too distant and too disinterested in human affairs to have any impact on our individual lives. And given my ephemeral life and God’s disinterest in me, I had no reason to be interested in Him.
A Deep Crisis. By the late 1980s, I had a beautiful and healthy family of three children, I had been successful in technology and in business, and I was wealthy enough that I didn’t need to work one more day of my life. Could I wish for more? I had indeed been fortunate and achieved everything that common wisdom says should make me happy.
But just when I was at the height of my success, I got in touch with a deep dissatisfaction brooding inside me. I realized that I was very unhappy, but I pretended not to be, because I was preventing myself from experiencing my despair. I lived hiding in an artificial cocoon that I had constructed to protect myself from feeling my deepest and most genuine feelings. I only imitated being happy.
And yet I couldn’t understand how I could be so unhappy when I had achieved everything the world said was necessary to be happy. “What’s wrong with this picture?” I wondered.
And together with this one, two more questions that I was avoiding preoccupied me and were insistently resurfacing: “What is the meaning of life?” and “What do I want from my life?”
Growing up, religion had given me answers full of hope before I had the maturity to properly ask the very questions to which those answers were given. To have blind faith, however, required giving up my rationality and the right to think with my own mind. That was too much to ask. On the other hand, science had taken away even the hope that hope existed, because it described a dystopian, soulless, and mechanical world.
Once the vision of science was accepted, I could no longer content myself with those fragments of wisdom gathered here and there, which praised virtues: beauty, commitment, altruism, and knowledge. All high-sounding but empty virtues, since they were pure human constructs, illusions that would vanish with our certain death. I was wondering, “What do I live for?” And at the same time I felt compelled to maintain a facade, given my responsibilities as husband, father, and CEO of a promising company that involved other people’s well-being. But I felt almost dead inside.
In those days, I was also studying biology and neuroscience and developing artificial neural networks in an attempt to design a cognitive computer. During that investigation, as I struggled to understand how consciousness could possibly emerge from a complex organization of matter—the incomprehensible “explanation” given by science—I realized for the first time that consciousness is a mystery.
I could not comprehend how sensations and feelings could arise from electrical or biochemical signals, and I soon became fascinated by this subject. I genuinely wanted to know how feelings could possibly emerge from nonfeeling matter. Science was offering me a pseudo-explanation and asking me to believe, just like religion had done before.
I didn’t realize it then, but I had reached the bottom of my “spiritual suffering” and I asked for help. I prayed, not verbally, and not even consciously, asking the universe for answers to my fundamental questions: “Is death really the end of everything?” “What is the meaning of life?”
And every time I reached that desperate place where my life seemed utterly meaningless, I perceived at the very depth of my consciousness a weak but persistent point of light against a dark background. There was enough hope in that faint light despite my despair.
A Sudden Illumination. In December 1990, while I was with my family at Lake Tahoe during the Christmas holidays, I woke up around midnight to drink a glass of water. When I went back to bed, while I waited in silence to fall asleep again, I felt a powerful rush of energy-love emerge from my chest, the likes of which I never felt before and couldn’t even imagine possible.
This feeling was clearly love, but a love so intense and so incredibly fulfilling that it surpassed any possible idea I had about what love is. Even more unbelievable was the fact that I was the source of this love. I perceived it as a broad beam of shimmering white light, alive and beatific, gushing from my heart with incredible strength.
Then suddenly that light exploded, and filled the room and then expanded to embrace the entire universe with the same white brilliance.
I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the “substance” of which all that exists is made. This was what created the universe out of itself.
Then, with immense surprise, I knew that I was that light!
The entire experience lasted less than one minute, and it changed me forever.
What made this experience astonishing was its “impossible” perspective, because I was both the experiencer and the experience. For the first time in my life, I was simultaneously the world and the observer of the world. I was the world observing itself! And I was concurrently knowing that the world is made of a substance that feels like love!
In other words, the essence of reality is a substance that knows itself in its self-reflection, and its self-knowing feels like an irrepressible and dynamic love.
This experience contained an unprecedented force of truth because it felt true at all the levels of my being: At the physical level my body was alive and vibrant like it never felt before; at the emotional level I felt myself as an impossibly powerful source of love; and at the mental level I knew with certainty, and for the first time, that all is “made of” love. That experience also revealed the existence of another level of reality: the spiritual level, where I felt one with the world.
This was direct knowing, stronger than the certainty that human logic provides—a knowing from the inside rather than from the outside. A knowing that involved for the first time the concurrence of all my conscious aspects: the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. I like to think that I have experienced my own nature both as a “particle” and as a “wave,” to use an analogy with quantum mechanics impossible to comprehend with our ordinary logical mind.
The particle aspect is the ability to maintain my unique identity despite being also the world, which is the wave aspect. My identity is that unique point of view with which One—all that is, the totality of what exists—observes and knows itself.
This experience maintained in time its original intensity and clarity. It changed my life from the inside out, and it continues to have a powerful impact to this day.
The Difficulty in Telling It. I realize how difficult it is to describe what happened to those who never have experienced something similar. Before my awakening, if someone had described to me a like occurrence, I would have dismissed it as the result of a vivid imagination—a daydream without any reality.
Therefore, I am sympathetic to the skeptic. Yet, that vivid experience occurred while I was fully awake and alert, revealing a “reality” even more real than the physical world I previously thought was the only reality.
Imagine a sea creature that lives in the deep and has never seen either the seabed, the sea surface, or the sunlight, convinced that everything that exists is only the infinite sea in which it lives. Imagine its surprise if it were taken out of the water and could experience the blinding light and the warmth of the Sun! And realize that the sea “ends” with a “wavy surface” of which it had no notion! Even more amazing would be the sight of the “sky” with “clouds” moving about and “birds flying,” not to mention an “island” in the distance with “solid ground” and “trees.”
Back in its environment, this creature would find it impossible to convince its companions that the sea is not the only reality because it ends, and beyond it there is another world made of … and at that point it would realize that the words to describe what it had experienced so vividly and clearly did not exist.
Being misunderstood and ridiculed, it renounced speaking again of its experience, though it would keep it forever in its heart, sure of its reality, even though it couldn’t properly describe it.
Likewise, I never doubted the truth of my experience.
The Impact of the Awakening Experience. My awakening opened the door to a period of intense psychological and spiritual exploration that continues to this day. Throughout the following years I was gifted with many other extraordinary experiences that included vivid dreams, deep intuitions, and other states of consciousness that greatly expanded my previously limited concepts of reality, constrained by preconceived ideas.
About ten years ago, I came to the conclusion that consciousness cannot be a product of matter, but it must instead be a property of the living light that I experienced. Consciousness, I surmised, must be the capacity of that light to perceive and know itself. That “light” must also be the “stuff” out of which everything that exists is “made,” the indivisible source out of which the Matter, Energy, Space, and Time (MEST) of our physical universe are made. All that exists is therefore conscious and the universe has a purpose and a meaning that materialism denies.
In 2011, I started with my wife the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness under the hypothesis that it is an irreducible property of nature. I have been pursuing this study full-time since 2008.
My current thinking—still a work in progress—is that the conscious living light I experienced, which I now call nousym (a contraction of nous—“mind” in Greek—and symbol), has two irreducible aspects: an inner semantic and an outer informational, where the outer aspect is a reflection of the inner one. Nousym manifests in the form of elementary conscious fields called Consciousness Units (CUs), endowed with a unique identity, free will, and the capacity for action. Action is the ability of a CU to communicate symbolically with other CUs.
Through communications with each other, each CU gets to know itself and the other CUs. And they also combine to create ever more complex organizations of conscious entities through which One forever deepens their own self-knowing.
Current physics studies only the outer informational aspect of reality that can be described by quantum information. This information is, however, purely abstract, i.e., independent from any meaning. In the model I am developing, the material world reflects the informational aspect of nousym, which is inseparable from the inner meaning. Therefore, this outer information is more general than quantum information. I call it live information.
Myriads of CUs and their organizations interacting with each other form all realities in order to know themselves. “Know Thyself” becomes then the organizing principle of all existence.
Biocosmetics teacher, entrepreneur
The home in which I was raised was not particularly religious. We only attended church on the high holidays. We lived near my grandmother’s and we could meet several times a week. The moment she saw me, she would bless me with the Aaronic blessing. At that time, I was unaware of the meaning such moments would have for me later in life.
Prayer would not become a part of my daily life until I was about twenty. Then I got married and fate took me to live abroad. In my foreign abode, I needed to draw on my inner strength through prayer. I can still remember the way I would almost always have my hands locked in prayer. It was around that time that I first underwent a spiritual experience—an experience so profound that I could not bring myself to speak about it for months. Even after all these years, I cannot seem to find the right words to express what I experienced that day.
At the time, I remember saying that God had embraced me and whispered life into me. Everything that I thought about life had changed. From that moment, there was absolutely no question in my mind as to whether or not there was a higher spiritual intelligence in the world. Faith had suddenly been planted into my heart from one moment to the next. Since I was unable to express what I had gone through, I was convinced that no one understood it. So I kept my experiences to myself.
Slowly but surely, my spiritual experiences became a part of my everyday life. The Almighty intended the second part of my life to be filled with creative work. I am happy that my artistic compositions are spiritually driven. I always knew when I was going to get a creative intuition, to form the basis for my next project. I would receive the whisper in great silence. I can only compare this feeling to currents and tides. Prior to getting such intuitions, I would have absolutely no idea what I should make or do, and I felt that I did not possess the ability to come up with anything worthwhile at all. My spiritual experiences enabled me to feel the coming of a low tide. I would feel encouraged at the time, rather than disappointed, knowing from experience that I would soon be inspired, having been granted a gift from the higher intelligence, who was using me as an instrument to create something new and meaningful.
As the years went by, through meditation I could hear that inner voice ever more clearly. At first, I resisted. It all seemed beyond complicated and strange. There were disappointing tries that almost made me give up. Notwithstanding, I would wake up in the middle of night to the sound of that inner voice saying, “Immerse Yourself! We are waiting for you!”
Ten years ago, I was again forced to face an incident similar to that of my early twenties. This episode occurred in the summer at a time when I had been unhappy for several days. I had gone to bed earlier than usual because I was miserable. I thought that I would rather rest than try to think. As I lay there, I felt a mighty pull at my heart. At first, I was not startled by that, but by the fear that followed. All of a sudden, I felt as if there was a wall encircling me, getting more and more constricting. I had no previous conception of this wall. The more I tried to understand it, the more I felt that it was choking me. Then I realized that if the wall got any narrower, I would die. An unbelievable panic overwhelmed me, yet I could not move. I was paralyzed. The wall was indeed getting tighter, while my fears were taking over my entire being. It shook me to my very core. Then suddenly the wall and all the terrifying feelings were gone. Not only were those feelings gone, but I was engulfed by a kind of serenity that I had never felt before.
When I finally came to my senses I discovered that I had never, ever experienced such calmness before. Then I realized that my body was missing. I am dead, I thought, horrified. My bodily perceptions were as if they had not undergone any changes, yet there I was, without a body. I thought despairingly, I am not ready to leave my life behind. I still have many things to do. I have to raise my son and my daughter; my husband is not prepared to have me leave them on their own. I cannot die now.
It was from that moment onward that my thoughts flowed effortlessly to exactly where they had to be for me to receive the answers I needed. I did not know that such an incident could occur here on Earth. It was all new to me, yet at the same time, it was completely natural.
The universe became ever so vast. The planets were there in front of me, and I was floating about. My body was overwhelmed with a feeling of serenity. I was drifting as a fish in ocean currents. Then, all of a sudden, my focus shifted and I recognized the point to which I had arrived and perceived the purpose of my life. How come I did not think of this till now? I asked myself. I felt such love like I had never felt before. My entire being was made of love. The most surprising aspect of this was that I felt love for everyone without exception. There was no difference between the love I felt toward my son and daughter, and toward my uncle, although ever since I was a small girl I was not on the best of terms with him. I loved everyone with equal devotion, with an embracing unconditional love. Oh, that is what this is like, I thought. That is what all the books are about. How intuitive it is. I felt as if I was love itself. Everything I had perceived as a problem beforehand ceased to exist when I took another look at it. Love healed it, replaced it. Nothing else was needed; it was all there.
Then a vast book opened in front of my eyes. The size of the book itself was indefinite; it was both minuscule and monumental. Or rather, I was both diminutive and vast. Everything about my life was written in this book. Every thought, joyous moment, every arduous happening, utterance, and string of words were there. The book opened, and then it closed. The moment it closed I felt an unbelievable pain in my heart. What is this? I asked myself, and asked the universe, my helpers, elders, and family despairingly. What is this infernal pain? I cannot bear it! Then some kind of basket appeared in front of me. It was not a basket at all but a sort of heap, a mound of all my debts, everything I owed. I started to search for the cause of the pain. I continued digging deeper and deeper but I could not find it. Then, all of a sudden, the seed from which the pain originated was before me. As I beheld it, the pain subsided. I could identify it: I NEVER TOLD MY MOTHER HOW MUCH I LOVED HER!
That was the reason I had been unhappy for so long. “Should I have been the one to tell her, make her feel my love?” I asked, but I knew the answer. The answer was yes, since I had been granted the power to love her, and all things and all beings as well. “Oh, how could I have not noticed? How could I have gone on for so long without knowing? Now that I am here unembodied, not able to embrace her, how can I rectify this and make it up to her?” The pain became even sharper. I would have done anything to be free of it, not only to escape it, but because every cell of my body longed for harmony. Bodiless, I went to my mother and shouted: “Mother, I love you! I am here, I love you! Can you hear me?!” But she could neither see me nor hear me.
What have I ever used my hands for, until now? I asked myself despondently. We have to hug, embrace, love with them. What have I used my voice for? We must use our words to caress, calm, and give warmth. These thoughts came to me one by one and entered my consciousness. What an immense event it is to be born! I realized, without any doubt at all. “Please, please, give me one more chance to go back, to relive, to caress, cradle, and love. I would like to have just one more chance to spread the word of love so as to live the life I was born to. Please…” I begged in despair. At that moment, I felt a powerful thrust at my heart; I felt as if I had been thrown forward. I came to my senses: I was in my body again.
I spent the next few days in bed, in silence. From then on, I was not the same person I had been. My previous encounters had also been significant, but this one had been terrifying as well as significant. The purpose of my life had changed.
I had the opportunity to realize what a great gift life is, and how soon it can be over. I could now understand why my grandmother has always prayed for me to live a long life. I looked at my mother, my husband, my children, and my students through entirely different eyes. The first time I saw my mother again, I kissed her hands. I can hardly describe the need I had to kiss her hands. And to kiss the hands of my husband and my children. I had come to understand the humility and the power of human relationships in life.
Journalist, documentary filmmaker
At the beginning of the eighties, I directed a television documentary on near-death experiences, a newly discovered topic at that time. Since in The Tibetan Book of the Dead there are relevant passages on near-death experience (NDE), I decided to interview a Tibetan lama and ask what he thought of this now-popular phenomenon.
Before the interview, the lama suggested that I listen, together with a few other people, to a short lesson on Buddhism, a subject in which I lacked expertise. His simple words touched my heart and aroused memories within me. I felt like I already knew what he was speaking about but had just forgotten it. Waves of warmth were radiating from the lama, filling me with love and joy. I was completely present in the moment and had an experience that changed my life.
After focusing my consciousness on love for those around me, I had the sensation of flying high up in the sky, passing through the center of a mandala. I found myself in an unknown room, in which there were young monks, who I knew were my old schoolmates. I greeted them warmly. Behind them I saw a monk with a strong body and a black hat, immersed in meditation. It was their master, and I was intimidated by his presence. Then I had the sensation of falling back from the sky, and through the descent I relived moments of my life that were dominated by anger. The anger then melted away. I again found myself in the meditation room, moved to tears following this experience. For weeks, I lived in a state of greater consciousness and fuller awareness. I felt well and joyful.
The experience I had just lived through was completely real to me: the young monks and the lama with the black hat must have existed somewhere, at some time. I have inquired, and discovered that the room was indeed a Tibetan temple and that the lama was a Tibetan figure: the Karmapa. This episode was at the root of a deep paradigm shift for me, and raised many questions.
What is the relationship between everyday life and that experience?
Are there many forms of reality?
What is dreaming?
What is lucid dreaming?
What is indeed reality?
Was my experience a memory from another life, and if so, is life continuing with reincarnation?
Do we only live in the eternal present? And what, then, are our extraordinary memories?
What is time, really?
Do we live our experiences through our consciousness? And what is our consciousness?
My vision of the world was materialistic and did not offer grounds for answering these questions, or understanding the experience I had had. I began a long period of research to make sense of what I had lived through, trying to explain it through science and spirituality, and avoiding dogmas. I was aware that to internalize and process this experience, I would have to enter on my own path.
I remember telling this experience to Ervin Laszlo on our way to the airport in Venice, struggling to find words to express what I had lived through. He assured me that he knew about such experiences and was working on some of these “impossible” themes to which traditional science does not offer an answer. He shared some of his thoughts about combining quantum physics with ancient spiritual traditions to gain a better understanding. Since then, I have been following his thinking assiduously.
After my experience, I asked the lama what had happened to me. He smiled and answered with kindness that what mattered was to feel love and live with awareness and full presence in each moment of our lives. He told me that becoming emotionally attached to one’s experiences would be an obstacle to understanding them.
My Western analytical mind was hungry for logical explanations, and I felt somewhat disappointed. I still had a lot to understand at that time on how the mind works—on how our emotions, thoughts, memories originate from within, and how, if we don’t let go of them, we block our spontaneous intuitions. The lama helped me with “mind to mind” teachings: meditating in his presence, I had had experiences that had completely changed me.
One morning I saw him transform into an ancient lama in profound meditation. I recognized the figure from an old painting I knew. On another occasion I saw my young parents united in an embrace, as illustrated in Tibetan tantric paintings. I felt within me pure love, without selfish attachment. That was a part of me, and I understood that I could evoke it and experience it again. I discovered that within me there was an abundance of resources that needed to be liberated. Wisdom was not to be achieved by my brain, but by opening my heart. This realization made me feel calm and serene. Ever since then, I try to live in harmony with my deep internal resources. Evidently, it is not always easy …
I studied Buddhist ethics, familiarizing myself with the divine entities that express aspects of the basic wisdom. I embraced the Buddhist teachings on natural consciousness, on present awareness: Rigpa. This nourished my heart and empowered me to better comprehend the experience I had had with the lama. And it helped me to confront the anger I felt toward my father due to my youthful longing for his help, and to find affection for him.
Even though my nonordinary experiences were useful, I felt they were incomplete because they aimed at reshaping my relationship with others rather than connecting me with my own deeper nature. Despite this, there were moments of clarity and archetypal dreams that helped me glimpse the existence of a hidden design underlying my experiences. I felt that my research needed to continue—I needed to find a new path to lead me to The Source.
Right after my experience with the lama, I attended an international congress on contact with other dimensions of existence. Harald Wessbecher, one of the speakers, told us about his experiences at the Monroe Institute in Virginia. In complete darkness in a soundproof cabin, he listened to the Hemi-Sync sound while floating on a bed of water. This special sound, developed by Robert Monroe, is conducive to the synchronization of the cerebral hemispheres and helps us to enter altered states of consciousness. Wessbecher’s altered-state experiences enabled him to see things that took place far away, to travel through other dimensions, to contact the dead and beings of light without a body, and more. I was astonished by his stories and after the conference, attended a seminar organized by Wessbecher. I felt being enveloped by an infinite dark sky, accompanied by two golden spheres that emitted light and melodious music. I understood that there are many ways to align with or induce nonordinary experiences.
A few years later I attended further seminars at the Monroe Institute and I was able then to directly experience some of the altered-state events Wessbecher had talked about. I learned that by staying fully aware and entering altered states of consciousness, we can travel through space and time and live through meaningful events. I remember one such “trip” that was particularly significant for me, because in it I relived the near-death experience I had when I was just three years old. I felt my body grow colder and colder, while my mother was powerless in trying to help me. A feeling of abandonment pervaded my consciousness and I found myself in the park of the hospital, out of my body. Then I met some elderly people who told me to go back to my room and go to bed.
In the seminar that followed, I asked what I could have done to bring warmth back to my body. The answer I received was: “Forgive.”
Accessing our multidimensional reality prompted me to inquire further about phenomena such as UFOs, mediumship, and transcommunication. Here I will only cite an experience where the Italian medium Marcello Bacci transcommunicated via an old radio from which the valves could be removed without stopping the transmission. He asked to speak to deceased people and received answers through the radio. In my case, a voice could be heard during the session, the voice of someone who greeted me with sympathy and gave me advice in old-fashioned German. I speak German, but Bacci does not. Ervin Laszlo told me that in his own session with Bacci, the voice through the radio spoke in Hungarian—another language of which the elderly Italian medium did not have the slightest inkling.
As the years went by, I felt it was time for me to communicate directly with beings in other dimensions so as to get closer to The Source. I wanted to wander by myself in the unknown, leaving behind the support of the familiar spiritual traditions. Then another turning point came about for me.
In a seminar on holotropic breathing by Stanislav Grof’s disciples, an old man appeared to me and told me that one day I would want to become a shaman. I was amazed and also a little apprehensive. Shamanism is the path of direct experience, the ancient path. It originated before the great religious traditions did. It has no sacred texts; it is only a way to access other dimensions and find the beings who guide us with the objective of furthering personal development, the development of others, and the development of the planet itself. In shamanism, one experiences that all living things are connected: nature, the animals, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the past, ancestors, evolved spirits, and the diverse planes of reality. Everything is alive, has consciousness, and is filled with the divine spirit.
In our shamanic experiences we receive the energy we need to go back to The Source, to the primary unity. We receive this energy from animals—from so-called power entities and from masters appearing in many different shapes and colors, images, and words. These entities are commonly called spirits. At the beginning of each journey, one formulates his intentions through a question that he will ask the guiding spirit. During the journey a dialogue can be established and further questions can be asked.
Here I will report on only a few experiences. Once a bear answered my questions and shared his strength and presence with me. A snake taught me to be benevolent and astute. A dove taught me the necessity of purity. As the Bible says: “Be pure as a dove and astute as a snake.” This presence and awareness appeared to me to be fundamental.
In another experience an old yogi laughed and showed me how his hand could pass through my body. In yet another experience, he destroyed my body and rebuilt it: it was a process of purification and regeneration, death and resurrection. On another occasion still, he showed me how he could help suffering people by transforming their sorrow in his heart and returning it to them as pure energy. In practicing shamanism one can learn to fuse with one’s spirit guide and receive direct support. But these experiences are too profound; they cannot be described in words.
I learned that all such experiences aim at rediscovering the natural state of our consciousness: a bright and clear consciousness, with spontaneous manifestations of love, empathy, and compassion. We become present and conscious, and see life for what it is, and live it with joy.
What is touching and reassuring for me is the discovery that there is a hidden design underlying our hardships, even confusing experiences that seem void of sense. Deep below the surface lies a hidden natural harmony, a shelter where we would love to be. That is our true home, a home beyond space and time.
In an interview I conducted with Ervin Laszlo for Swiss television, he told me: “The world is like a symphony, it is harmonious. In spirituality, we talk about cosmic harmony, and in the new sciences about coherence. Being coherent is being connected to everything, being one with everything. The feeling connecting us is love, our vibrating at the same frequency. Loving the next person as we love ourselves is the secret of coherence. Coherence is a state of our consciousness, a divine consciousness.”
I had spent some days at Monte Lema, a mountain rising over the lands that reach toward the Alps from the lake of Lugano. The view is breathtaking; it never ceases to amaze me. At one time I spent several hours just looking at the landscape in front of me. Nothing seemed to happen or change. But then I gradually realized that my perception and my presence had changed. A deep calm arose in me, a huge interior space, with a feeling of harmony. I was home. I felt content. I began to be filled with a sense of great peace, of wonder and joy. I looked at my life with a feeling like I had when I was a child. I had a sensation of freedom. My heart was connected with everything, I was in the eternal present.
This, my experiences taught me, is the way. It is a way of joy.
Scientist, chimpanzee intelligence researcher
From the earliest age, I loved animals and nature, and spent hours wandering outside, watching the insects and birds in our garden and on the tree-covered cliffs above the sandy beaches of Bournemouth in the UK. I was brought up in a Christian family, although we were not regular churchgoers. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was a Congregational minister. Then, when I was fifteen years old, I fell passionately—but very platonically!—in love with the Welsh minister of our church. I went to every service, and this led to a period when Jesus was as real to me as the people whose voices I heard on the wireless (no TV when I was growing up!). Next I became fascinated by philosophy and then, when working at a boring job in London (because I had to earn some money!), I joined, for a couple of terms, an evening class that taught theosophy. I read a lot of poetry and was intrigued by some of the great “mystic” poets. I never, at any time, wanted to be a scientist—I wanted to live with wild animals in Africa and write books about them.
Ervin asked me to throw light on how I came by my “insights,” and I wrote the above preamble to my little essay wondering if it would help me answer his question. And it did, for I realized that my explorations into religion, philosophy, the mystics, and, above all, into the natural world, all combined to open my mind to the importance of insights. There was no heavy hand of reductionist scientific thinking to prevent my believing in their reality. And, most important, my early experiences enabled me to accept, as scientific tools, not only sudden flashes of insight or intuition but also the feeling of empathy I developed when I was with animals.
Probably the first time I experienced a moment of insight into the nature of the universe itself came to me quite unexpectedly, as I was walking along a deserted beach.
THE DUCK
A duck that flew across the sun
Flew on past me,
Winging his solitary way
Towards the sea.
I saw the brightness of his eye
So close he flew;
His feathers in the sunset gleamed
With lustrous hue.
I heard the music of his wings,
The song of flight,
Stirring the stillness of a world
Awaiting night.
I sensed the warm life in his breast
So close to me,
And in my heart the pain of Joy
That such could be.
The lovely dunes; the setting sun;
The duck—and I;
One Spirit, moving timelessly
Beneath the sky.
Early Days at Gombe. In 1960, my childhood dream came true when I began my study of the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park in Tanzania. I became totally absorbed into their forest world. It was an unparalleled time. A time when I climbed the forested hills above Lake Tanganyika from dawn to dusk, day after day, week after week, searching for the chimpanzees, learning the trails, alert for the presence of buffalo or leopard.
At first the chimpanzees vanished into the undergrowth as soon as they saw me, but gradually, because I always wore the same color clothes and never tried to get too close, they lost their fear and accepted me as just another rather peculiar animal. And even as I was learning about the chimpanzees, I was becoming a part of their forest world. I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees as I laid my hand on the rough Sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or on the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling. I developed a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up from water in the ground by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead.
Sometimes, as I sat by one of the fast-flowing little streams that tumble down through the rocks and trees to the lake, or lay on the forest floor looking up through the rustling leaves of a giant forest tree into the greens and browns of the canopy above in which little flecks of sky shone like stars through the leaves—or as I sat sheltered by the vegetation overhead when it was raining and listened to the pattering of the drops on the leaves and felt utterly enclosed in a dim twilight world of greens and browns and soft gray air then—it was at these times that I felt so strongly a spiritual power that was everywhere around me and everywhere within me.
It was during one of those moments that I suddenly had an insight into what seemed to me to be another way of thinking about the nature of life on Earth. We humans have developed the power of communicating or asking questions with words, and we want to explain, logically, the nature of the world around us. We talk of the interconnectedness of all life, each little species of plant or animal playing its part in the tapestry of life—or of biodiversity, as science calls it. But it seemed to me that day that there was a deeper way of thinking about this: that each living thing in the forest around me had within it a spark of that great Spiritual Power that was all around us. And I supposed that this might be what we call our soul, or our spirit. And so, surely, each living thing—the chimpanzees, birds, insects, trees—also have a soul. Are we all, I wondered, human and nonhuman alike, part of that Spiritual Power? I thought back to the insight I had had as a young woman in England: “One Spirit, moving timelessly beneath the sky.”
And then there was the never-to-be-forgotten insight that came upon me when I was with David Greybeard, the first chimpanzee to begin to lose his fear of me in the early days. He had been feeding in a tree overhead, and when he climbed down, I followed him. After a while he left the trail and moved through some dense undergrowth. I was sure I would lose him, for I became entangled in the vines, but when I finally pushed my way into the open, there was David, sitting, looking back. It was almost as though he was waiting for me—perhaps he was.
I sat near him, and noticed the ripe red fruit of an oil palm lying on the ground—a fruit much enjoyed by the chimpanzees. I picked it up and held it toward him on my palm. He looked away. I moved my hand closer. He turned and looked directly into my eyes. He took the fruit, dropped it, then, still holding my gaze, he very gently squeezed my fingers, a gesture chimpanzees use to reassure each other. His eyes seemed like windows through which I should be able to look into his mind. Alas, I lacked the skill, but one thing was clear—in those few moments we had communicated with gestures that, surely, predated human language, a form of communication that we still share with the chimpanzees today. I knew intuitively that David did not want the fruit, but understood that I meant well. We not only communicated through the touch of our hands, but through the meeting of our minds, and in that moment, we bridged the supposed gap between us and other animals. There was, after all, no difference in kind—as I was told by my professors in the early 1960s—we are indeed part of and not separated from the wonderful animal kingdom.
Gradually the arrogant, reductionist view of the early ethologists has changed, and today scientists are studying animal intelligence, emotion, and personality, aspects of behavior that were, back then, considered uniquely human characteristics. Thank you, David Greybeard, and all the other chimpanzees, and thank you, my childhood teacher, my dog Rusty, for helping me to have the courage to stand up to the arrogant assumptions that were prevalent among the early ethologists. And thank you to my mother, who taught me that if after listening carefully to the arguments of those who disagree with you, you still think your belief is more correct than theirs, you must have the courage of your convictions.
There was one incident at Gombe that might have been an out-of-body experience. I was following a small group of chimpanzees in the early afternoon, when, as we emerged from some dense undergrowth, I realized that the sky was very dark, almost black. The rain clouds had obliterated the higher hills of the valley. The darkness increased as the storm approached, and there came the stillness, the hush, that so often precedes a tropical storm. Only the rumbling of the thunder as it moved closer and closer broke this stillness, that and the rustling of the chimpanzees’ and my own footsteps as we moved through the tall grass. All at once came a blinding flash of lightning, followed, a split second later, by an incredibly loud clap of thunder that seemed almost to shake the solid rock before it rumbled away. Then the clouds let loose such torrential rain that sky and earth seemed joined by moving water. The chimpanzees and I sought shelter under some trees, but the trees did not keep out the rain for long. We all sat, hunched over, waiting. The rain poured endlessly down, I got wetter and wetter. I felt first chilly and then, as a cold wind sprang up, freezing. Soon, turned in on myself, I lost all track of time. I and the chimpanzees formed a unit of silent, patient endurance.
That rain lasted at least half an hour before the heart of the storm swept away to the south. Then the chimps moved on, walking through the soaked, dripping vegetation. Resigned, clammy in my wet clothes, I followed. The chimps climbed into some low trees overlooking the lake to feed on new shoots. A pale, watery sun caught the raindrops so that the world seemed hung with diamonds, sparkling on every leaf and every blade of grass. A delicate spider’s web was a jeweled work of art, something to be captured by the poet, not something to be analyzed and categorized by the scientific mind!
I was warmer now after my efforts to keep up with the chimps, and I stood and watched as they enjoyed their last meal of the day. Down below the lake was still dark and angry with white flecks where the waves broke. The rainclouds remained black over the lake in the south, but to the north the sky was clear, with only wisps of gray clouds still lingering. The scene was breathtaking in its beauty. The chimpanzees’ black coats were shot with coppery brown in the soft evening sunlight, the branches on which they sat were wet and dark as ebony, the young leaves a pale but vivid green. And behind them was the dramatic backdrop of the indigo sky where lightning flickered and distant thunder growled and rumbled.
Lost in awe at the beauty, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness. The air was filled with a feathered symphony, the evensong of birds. I heard new frequencies in their music, and also in the singing insect voices—some notes so loud, so harsh, but others high and sweet. Never had I been so intensely aware of the shape, the color of individual leaves, the varied patterns of the veins that made each leaf unique. Scents were clear as well, easily identifiable: the slightly pungent odor of the chimpanzees; waterlogged earth, cold wet bark; and the aromatic scent of young, crushed leaves. As I tried afterward to remember the experience, it seemed that for a while I was literally one with the chimpanzees, totally immersed in the glorious process of eating good food, enjoying the taste, the warmth of the evening Sun. Just being, in the present, content. Was I suddenly seeing the world through the senses of a chimpanzee? I don’t think so. I don’t pretend to understand.
Presently, their hunger assuaged, the chimpanzees climbed down and moved off into the valley. I stayed where I was, drained yet curiously alive. As I slowly returned to my everyday self, I scribbled some notes, trying to recall at least something of that which I had so briefly experienced. I had not been visited by angels or any other heavenly beings, but it had been a truly mystical experience, one that left me a little changed, a little closer to understanding the wonder of the natural world. It seemed to me that self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the Spiritual Power of the life of the universe.
There are many windows through which we humans, searching for understanding, can look out into the world around us. There are those carved by Western science, their panes polished by a succession of brilliant minds. Through them we can see ever further, ever more clearly, into areas which, until recently were beyond human knowledge. For more than twenty-five years I had sought, through careful recording and critical analysis, to piece together the complex social behavior and way of life of the chimpanzees. And this had not only helped us to better understand their place in nature, but also helped us to understand a little better some aspects of our own behavior, our own place in the natural world.
Yet there are other windows through which the holy men of the East, the founders of the great world religions, the shamans and other seekers of the truth have gazed as they searched for the meaning and purpose of our life on Earth, not only in the wondrous beauty of the world, but also in its darkness and ugliness. They sought to understand the reality of the great spiritual power that is beyond the realm of science. They understood that this reality is not constrained by what we are taught to consider as being rational.
That afternoon, it had been as though for the briefest moment I had seen through such a window. In a flash of insight—or perhaps I should call it outsight—I had known timelessness and quiet ecstasy, sensed a truth that until very recently has been ridiculed by mainstream science, and even today is only acknowledged by a few of the great minds of our time. I knew that the revelation would be with me for the rest of my life, imperfectly remembered and understood, yet always there. A source of strength from which I can draw in times of need.
One final insight. And here we must go back in time to the spring of 1974. I was going through a difficult time in my personal life, and my childhood faith was no longer part of my everyday life. I was depressed and, I think, searching for a way forward, a way of once again feeling in control of my life. I was in Paris for a conference, and ever since reading Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I had wanted to visit that cathedral. And so, rising early in order to visit before the busy day began, I walked through the waking streets and arrived at the cathedral—perhaps around seven thirty. There were only a few people around at that time, and when I went inside it was quiet and still. Suddenly the morning Sun appeared and illuminated the magnificent rose window. And then, as I was gazing in awe, the cathedral was filled with a glorious volume of sound—an organ playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. It was startling, shocking, heart-stopping. I have always loved that rousing opening, but that morning in the cathedral, filling its entire vastness, it seemed like a living entity that entered into my whole self. I was possessed by, lost within, the music.
It appeared that, however unlikely at that hour of the morning, there was a wedding in a far recess of the cathedral—or maybe it was just the organist, practicing for an event later in the day. But the circumstances were not important. What was important was the feeling that I was experiencing a captured moment of eternity. And within that precious moment I found a new meaning to my life. How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust, invisible particles of the big bang, that had led up to that moment in time—the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built, the advent of Bach himself, the brain—his brain—that translated truth into music; and the mind that could, as my mind did then, comprehend the whole inexorable progress of our time on Earth. Since I could not believe in chance, I had to acknowledge a guiding force in the universe—I had to acknowledge a Spiritual Power that, during my Christian upbringing, I had been taught to call God.
Not that I thought of this in a logical way at the time, for I was caught up in the wonder of the experience. It was afterward, when the mystic reality of the moment was invaded by my human brain, that I sought to take control once more.
Back in the early 1960s, when I suddenly found myself thrown into a PhD program at Cambridge University, most of the scientists I met professed to be agnostic or even hard-core atheists. But fortunately, by then, I had spent hours in the rain forest. And there, as I have remarked, I have felt the reality of a great Spiritual Power. Albert Einstein, who described standing wrapped in awe at “the marvelous structure of the universe,” wrote of “the intelligence manifested in Nature.” And since then scientists have gradually revealed more and more of the amazing complexity of the universe—a universe of which planet Earth is but a minute speck. Many have marveled at the existence of the mathematical rules that govern nature. In fact, many leading scientists (especially, as Ervin points out, those in the fields of quantum theory) have come to believe in a supreme intelligence.
Francis Collins, currently director of the National Institutes of Health in America, was director of the Human Genome Project. Initially an agnostic, he became increasingly amazed by the complexity of our DNA—which in essence, he explains, is a three-billion-letter program that informs each cell to act in a certain way, a full instruction manual composed of chemicals that instruct how our bodies are to develop. “Surely,” he wrote in his book, The Language of God, “only an awesome Intelligence could have caused this complex manual to wind up in each human cell…” And so, he came to believe in God.
How fortunate I have been to have experienced so many flashes of insight, helping me to understand a little better those mysteries whose secrets will never be revealed by cold intellect alone. Those moments that helped me to realize that, as Einstein put it, “what is impenetrable to us really exists.” And in ending this report on my experiences, it is enough to say that my moments of insight—or outsight—have made me, for better or worse, who I am today.
Mystic, teacher
We were both pups when my parents got her—I, about eighteen months old; she, somewhat younger, but older by far in wisdom and experience. She had already had a brief career in the movies, having played one of Daisy’s puppies in the Dagwood and Blondie series. But now, too old for the part, she had been given to my father in lieu of payment for a script he had turned in. He was a comedy writer for radio and occasionally movies, and excelled at writing jokes and scripts but not in collecting the fees owed him.
Her name was Chickie, and she was a wonderful mix of Welsh corgi and bearded collie. A white star blazed on her chest, and she had four white feet and a white-tipped tail to complement her long black fur. Even though she was scarcely over a year old, she was already motherly and sat by my crib for hours on end, making sure that no harm came to me. If I cried, she would be off to my mother, insisting that she come immediately. If I wanted to play, she would bring toys, hers as well as mine.
Chickie and I took to having long jaunts with each other. We would be gone for hours at a time, and either my parents were too busy to notice or they trusted Chickie’s care of me. With Chickie in charge, I was given a great deal of freedom to wander in a world as miraculous as it was marvelous.
Behind our house was a large wooded area where Chickie and I began what I have come to think of as our “travels in awakening.” Two hours with Chickie in the woods yielded an incredible range of learnings. Chickie was more nose than eyes, and I quite the other way around. But together we investigated the endless treasures of forest and meadow. I remember crawling on four legs in order to follow more closely her interests and discoveries. As she sniffed out deer scat, mouse holes, squirrel trails, and bug routes, she would occasionally turn around and check with me to see if I saw them too.
Chickie taught me to be alert to both the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard. A whisper of wings would turn her head and mine would follow, waiting for the flutter that would finally announce to my human-hindered head, “Bird on the wing!” Chickie would lift her nose, her tail would signal attention, and we would be off and running to follow the adventures of the air—entrancing molecules luring us to destinies both savory and dangerous. Once it was to a camper’s discarded remnants of fried chicken, but once, too, it was to meet up with the snarling fury of a bobcat. Chickie barked, and I, knowing that human words were useless, barked too. Our defiant duet seemed to work, for the bemused cat slunk off, never to be seen again.
Chickie gave me metaphors for my later life’s work, especially when it came to digging. Paws scratching away at apparently nothing soon revealed dark secrets hidden in the earth—old bones, ancient feathers, and things so mysterious as to be beyond human knowing. Years later I would probe and dig into the soil of the human subconscious with something like Chickie’s fervor to find there the bones of old myths, the feathers of essence, and the great mysterious matrix that still sustains and lures the human quest.
Those early years with Chickie were a whole education in looking, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching—the feast and lore of the senses. For many years now I have been helping schools in the United States and many other countries to improve education by making it sensory-rich, hands-on, art-centered. When asked who my mentors have been—John Dewey? Maria Montessori? The Carnegie Institute?—I can only reply in truth, “Chickie.”
Entering into another realm, that of the spiritual epiphany, Chickie accompanied me on the most important experience of my entire lifetime. It turned out to be my key experience in awakening. I have described it in other books, but not from the perspective of Chickie’s critical role in it. It happened in my sixth year. I had been sent to Catholic school in Brooklyn, New York. My father had been tossed off The Bob Hope Show for an excess of high spirits, and we were broke and living with my mother’s Sicilian parents in the Italian section of that noble if bad-mouthed borough.
Theologically precocious, and buttressed with questions designed by my agnostic comedy-writing father, I would assail the little nun who taught our first grade with queries that seemed logical to me but blasphemous to her. “Sister Theresa, when Ezekiel saw the wheel, was he drunk?” Or, “Sister Theresa, I counted my ribs and I counted Joey Mangiabella’s ribs, and we have the same number of ribs, and so do all the other boys and girls. See?” (At that moment, on cue, all the children in the class lifted up their undershirts to prove the point.) “So if God took a rib out of Adam to make Eve like you said, how come…?”
Then there were the Jesus questions. “Sister Theresa, how do you know that Jesus wasn’t walking on rocks below the surface when he seemed to be walking on the water?” And, “Sister Theresa, when Jesus rose, was that because God filled him full of helium?”
Then there was the day of the question that tipped her dogma as well as her dignity. It had to do with Jesus’s natural functions and whether he ever had to go to the toilet. Her response had her looking like a black-and-white penguin in a state of hopping rage. She jumped on a stool, tacked up a large sheet of heavy cardboard, and in large India-ink letters wrote: JEAN HOUSTON’S YEARS IN PURGATORY.
All further theological questions of an original bent met with the little nun X-ing in more years for me to endure in purgatory, and each X stood for a hundred thousand to millions of years! By the last day of the first grade I had accumulated something like 300 million years in purgatory to my credit. Spiritually bereft, I told my father about the debacle and he, finding it very funny, took me off immediately to see the motion picture The Song of Bernadette. This famous movie is renowned for its scenes of Saint Bernadette’s vision of the holy Madonna in the grotto at Lourdes, which thereafter became a famous place for healing. Unfortunately, during the holiest of scenes, with the Virgin Mary appearing in luminous white in the grotto before the praying Bernadette, my father burst into long, whinnying, uncontrolled laughter. It turned out that he had known the starlet playing the role of Mary and found the incongruity between her Hollywood life and the role she was playing hilarious. Leaving the theater finally in a state of mortal embarrassment, I pulled away from my still-laughing father in order to get home quickly and emulate Bernadette’s remarkable vision.
My destination was a guest room with a very deep closet that looked a lot like a grotto. There were no clothes in the closet, for Chickie had commandeered it as a nest for her eight new puppies. I explained my need to Chickie, feeling that she would not mind my moving her pups, being as she would want me to open a space for the greatest Mama of them all to show up. When she protested mildly, I further explained that I didn’t want the Holy Mother to step on her pups. After that Chickie watched my actions with interest.
Kneeling in the now-cleared Brooklyn “grotto,” I prayed to the Madonna to show up in the closet as she had for Bernadette at Lourdes. I began by closing my eyes and counting slowly to ten, while promising to give up candy for two weeks if she would only show up. I opened my eyes to encounter the Madonna Chickie lovingly carrying one of the pups back into the “grotto.” I kept on counting to ever higher numbers, promising all manner of food sacrifices—mostly my favorite Sicilian delicacies like chicken with lemon and garlic sauce—but my revelation was only to be more and more puppies back in the closet. Finally I counted to a very high number, 167, and having given up all calories, I told the Holy Mother that I could not think of anything else to give up, so would she please, please, please show up, as I really wanted to see her. This time I was sure that she would make it. I opened my eyes, and there was Chickie contentedly licking all eight of her puppies.
“Oh, Chickie.” I sighed and reached out to pat her, whereupon she bestowed on me a kindly lick and a compassionate look as if I were her ninth puppy. At that moment came a vague spiritual forewarning, as if I had prayed for the Madonna and seen her in one of her many forms in Chickie, the all-wise, all-loving mother, and her care for her pups. But still I yearned for the movie version and did not yet recognize the truth of what I had been given. And so Herself offered me another chance. In a dreamy, unspecified state I went over to the window seat and looked over at the fig tree blooming in our yard. And suddenly it all happened—the most important awakening state of my entire life.
As I have written, “I must in my innocence have unwittingly tapped into the appropriate spiritual doorway, for suddenly the key turned and the door to the universe opened. Nothing changed in my outward perceptions. There were no visions, no sprays of golden light, certainly no appearance by the standard-brand Madonna. The world remained as it had been. Yet everything around me, including myself, moved into meaning.”
Only in reflection have I come to realize how much of what I then felt and knew had been prepared for me by Chickie and her guidance in the ways of awakening. All those rambles that we took together were now one ramble, all the smells and sights of nature to which she had introduced me were present along with the fig tree blooming in the yard, Chickie herself and her pups in the closet, the plane in the sky, the sky itself, and even my idea of the Madonna. All had become part of a single unity, a glorious symphonic resonance in which every part of the universe was a part of and illuminated every other part, and I knew that in some way it all worked together and it was very good.
My mind awakened to a consciousness that spanned centuries and was on intimate terms with the universe—everything now mattered. Just as Chickie had taught me, everything was interesting and important: deer scat, old leaves, spilled milk, my Mary Jane shoes, the fig tree, the smell of glue on the back of the gold paper stars I had just pasted on the wallpaper, the stars themselves, my grandfather Prospero Todaro’s huge stomach, the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, Uncle Henry (the black porter who took care of me on the train across the country), the little boy fishing in the lake who waved to me on the train when I was crossing Kansas, the chipped paint on the ceiling, my Nana’s special stuffed artichokes, my father’s typewriter, the silky ears of corn in a Texas cornfield, my Dick and Jane reader, and all the music that ever was—all were in a state of resonance and of the most immense and ecstatic kinship.
I was in a universe of friendship and fellow feeling, a companionable universe filled with interwoven Presence and the dance of life. This went on forever, but it was actually only about two seconds, for the plane had moved only slightly across the sky. I had entered into timelessness, the domain in which eternity was the only reality and a few seconds could seem like forever.
Somewhere downstairs I heard the door slam, and my father entered the house, laughing. Instantly, the whole universe joined in. Great roars of hilarity sounded from Sun to Sun. Field mice tittered, and so did angels and rainbows. Even Chickie seemed to be chuckling. Laughter leavened every atom and every star until I saw a universe inspirited and spiraled by joy, not unlike the one I read of years later in The Divine Comedy when Dante described his great vision in paradise: del riso del universo (the joy that spins the universe). This was a knowledge of the way everything worked. It worked through love and joy and the utter interpenetration and union of everything with the All That Is. And the Madonna—Chickie—was at the center of it all.
In this direct knowledge lay what I later learned was the mystical experience. This experience is not something to be kept sacrosanct in esoteric cupboards. It is coded into our bodies, brimming in our minds, and knocking on the doors of our souls. It is our natural birthright, and naturally it is most available when we are still children. As a child it charged me and changed me and probably gave me the impetus to do the things I later did. It showed me the many faces of God, and for weeks afterward I went around seeing this face in every creature, plant, and person—even in Sister Theresa, who was somewhat bothered by my beaming approval of her inner self.
“Madonna, Madonna, show up, show up!” I had shouted. And of course the Madonna had showed up, present in Chickie with her unconditional love and care for her pups and for me. Kneeling in front of her and her altar of puppies, I asked for everything and everything is just what I got. And even today, whenever I see a statue of Mary I cannot help but be reminded of Chickie’s boundless love, the ultimate Madonna bringing the puppies back into the closet, bringing them back into the manger.
Teacher, social activist (1929–2019)
Spontaneous insights have guided my whole life. I have developed a process of accessing such insights in my journals, begun when I was eighteen in 1948 and now, in 2018, entering journal volume number 203.
One day, after talking with Nassim Haramein about his experience of direct contact with extraterrestrials, which I had not had, I felt irritated, went into my morning mediation and asked clearly: Give me contact. The words came which I recorded in my journal:
You must stop and let us lift your vibrations. Prepare for your rendezvous with destiny. Refocus your integrated ego-essence upward toward your Universal Self on the other side of the transition. Keep your attention on Me. I am coded with your own evolution. The script of your conscious evolution is coded within you. To read it, simply place your attention on it. Experience fulfilling your mission on Earth: the shared planetary birth experience as a Universal Human at your own next stage of development, with the rapturous experience of what used to be called “gods.” Feel beloved by the Beloved. Experience the Presence as who you are. By placing your attention on Me, I will lift you over the quantum jump into the quantum landing field, where there is instantaneous connectedness and manifestation through intention.
For years, I have been receiving insights and downloads like this. I have published some of them in a book, 52 Codes for Conscious Self Evolution, which I was teaching in a yearlong intensive through Humanity’s Team called “Awaken the New Species in You.” One of the codes we are using is especially relevant:
Develop an Incorruptible Communication System for Your Inner Scripture … for the emerging word of evolution as it appears through experiential listening, asking, scribing, and mapping in such a way as to activate the Word becoming conscious in others as well as in you. The Word of evolution is your inner scripture. It is sacred; it needs to be cherished, cultivated and remembered. (Code 39: 52 Codes for Conscious Evolution)
I have developed a lifelong method of gathering such insights. First, I present myself with a question or deep issue, described by my “mental mind,” my rational figuring-it-out intelligence. Then I turn off my mental mind and start a new paragraph with quotation marks: “Without further thinking, with poised attention, I ask: “Dearly Beloved [my name for Spirit, Source, God], what does this mean?”
I write without thinking, discovering and recording a wellspring of insights that would not otherwise become conscious. It is not channeling. It is deeper knowing. I can stop at any time, go back into my mental mind, interact with and question my deeper mind, which feels like direct knowing from The Source. It feels like tapping into the universal intelligence of creation that runs through the spiral of evolution; experiencing it as the inner impulse of evolution, the creative intention of universal evolution, directed to my specific and unique questions or life situation.
I have been inspired by Teilhard de Chardin’s understanding of the recurring pattern of evolutionary process understood as divine, tending toward greater consciousness, freedom, and complex/loving order, for 13.8 billion years. It has evolved from single cell, to multicell, to animal, to human, and now to us, going around the next turn on the spiral of evolution. We are becoming self-evolving humans learning to be at least partially response-able for guiding the processes of our own self- and social evolution. We are evolving in the recurring evolutionary direction as individuals, toward greater consciousness, freedom, and loving order.
We discover that evolution is going somewhere … that we want to go! It has purpose, direction and telos, and so do we. The inner motivation of most evolving humans is toward expanded consciousness, greater freedom, and deeper access to complex order, connecting in love. It feels as though the actual process of evolution is activating us as us.
The inner impulse responds creatively to whatever I ask it. It offers me guidance in writing, or as inner experiential knowing, as vibrational experience, filling me with awe, gratitude, and love. I sense that inner impulse as what Sri Aurobindo calls Divine Consciousness that has two aspects: one is immutable and changeless; the other is dynamic. This dynamic consciousness has intention. Its purpose here on Earth is to create beings ever more conscious of this creative process until there emerge beings who are one with that consciousness and embody it. This Divine Consciousness has pressed up through the formation of matter, life, animal life, human life, and now our own life, as we become evolving humans. This consciousness force, emanating from universal consciousness itself, is the architectural genius actually creating new life-forms from quarks to us, and now to planet Earth itself, which is becoming an interconnected whole system.
My experience is that the genius of creation is creating each of us every instant of time. When I say YES to it, it says YES to me. That is, it responds to intention and to passionate vocation and motivation for inspired action.
Here is an example. I had been reading Reinhold Niebuhr on the subject of community. He quoted Saint Paul’s famous statement: “All men are members of one body…” I was thinking about that idea and feeling deep, nameless frustration in my own body. The Gospel writers had a simple story to tell: A child was born, and from that all the rest followed.
I lifted my voice to the white sky, and asked, “What is our story? What in our age is comparable to the birth of Christ?” I lapsed into a daydreamlike state, walking without thinking around the top of the hill. Suddenly a Technicolor movie turned on. I felt earth as a living organism heaving for breath, struggling to coordinate itself as one body. It was alive! I became a cell in that body. The pain of the whole body was flashing through the mass media, the nervous system of the world. The agony of the earth was my own.
Then the movie sped up, and I saw something new. A flash of extraordinary light, more radiant than the Sun, gleamed in outer space. Instantly all of us collectively were attracted to the light. We forgot our pain for the moment. Together we saw the light. Empathy began to course through our bodies. Wave upon wave of love flowed through all people. A magnetic field of love aligned us. WE were caressed, uplifted in this field of light. Joy began to pulse through our bodies.
Miracles of healing occurred. The blind could see, the lame could walk, the deaf could hear. People flooded out of their houses, meeting each other in ever-growing gatherings, embracing, singing, loving one another … We sang together in spontaneous harmonies, a planetary choir of voices. Ancient human feelings of separation dissolved. I saw our rockets rising majestically into space, reaching beyond our terrestrial home to the place where my mind’s eye resided, in the universal dark, carrying the seed of humanity in peace to our cosmic destiny: children of the stars.… Finally, I heard the words clearly: “Our story is a birth. It is the birth of humanity as one body. What Christ and all avatars came to tell us is true. We are one body, born into the universe. Barbara, go tell the story of our birth.”
It became the purpose of my life, my books, my work. I wrote two volumes on the New Testament, reading the Bible with evolutionary eyes, just asking: How did you do this? I received life-affirming answers basically saying to all of us, “You will do the work that I did and more in the fullness of time, which is now.” I saw that our high-tech genius, when infused with love, is making us a new species, right now, a universal species.
At the core of spiritual evolution is intelligent attraction, allurement as Marc Gafni calls it in The Universe: A Love Story, a science-based understanding of reality, evoking “evolutionary love,” or eros, as attraction at the fundamental operational basis of reality. The trillions of cells making up our own bodies are organically attracted to one another with awesome precision, making eyes, hearts, lungs, everything! Not only by attraction, but by integration internally as well as externally. This is more than insight. This feels like a higher power, the evolutionary genius of creation. It felt like “I Am”; we are THAT THATTING. We are divine creativity creating. We are evolution in person incarnating in each of us uniquely.
What’s more, in these experiences of insight I literally tuned into Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize winner for his development of the dissipative structure model. He responds to the question: “How has nature evolved from entropy or disorder to syntropy or higher order for billions of years?” As systems become more dysfunctional, innovations occur in every field, like our own right now. At first, they are relatively ineffective. But there is a tendency toward convergence in evolution. Everything that rises converges. At some point there is a nonlinear exponential interaction of what is emerging, and the system cooperates in its own self-transcendence.
This is happening right now in our planetary system. As the old system is ever more dysfunctional, innovations are arising in every field and function. One more degree of connectivity of what is already emerging, and we would see the new world already arising in our midst and discover ourselves to be members of a new planetary body at the threshold of devolution and extinction, or evolution and transformation.
A new structure of democracy is now being born out of this organic process of evolution. It is a synergistic democracy, an evolutionary democracy. It evolves from the win/lose system, what are you for and what are you against, to the new questions: What do you want to create? What do you need to create it? What do you want to share freely with everyone? This synergistic democracy, still nameless, is using our rapidly growing internet communication systems, matching projects, people, ideas, needs with resources. A new social structure is arising in our midst through the tendency in the self-organizing universe to co-create greater consciousness, freedom, and complex love order, à la Teilhard de Chardin’s vision.
I began to experience vividly I AM EVOLUTION. WE ARE EVOLUTION. We are evolving every day. Every cell in our bodies is being coordinated by attraction by an awesome higher intelligence. The larger planetary system is itself struggling to coordinate as our communication systems, our defense systems, our production systems are rapidly interlinking, transcending all past forms of self-governance. Win/lose forms of democracy are failing us, naturally, almost everywhere; that is no longer an appropriate structure.
Intuitively, experientially, and by the foresight of insight, I experienced the coming together of enough of us, each to give our unique creative gift into a living whole system. The internet has become our new “noosphere,” our planetary nervous system, offering to the world insights as well as factual realities so that we actually have the resources, technologies, and know-how to make this world 100 percent, without taking it away from anyone, as Buckminster Fuller told us so many years ago.
We are already, right now, cells in the planetary body experiencing the emergence of ourselves as members of a new whole system, with genius and innovations in all fields connecting in a new syntropic dissipative structure.
I began to intuit a universe filled with “other” life. As we integrate into a whole system on Earth many of us feel CONTACT actually happening. As we become synergistic with one another, like a newborn baby just after birth, we are opening our collective eyes, ready, perhaps, to smile our first planetary smile. I have encountered a group called the Intergalactic University and Interstellar Communication Center, proposed by Jeanne White Eagle through her book, Eyes Open, with a supportive introduction by Edgar Mitchell.
In my own life at eighty-eight years old, I feel I am crossing a threshold toward a new human and a new humanity. This experience is flooding my body/mind with insights as to how we can take the quantum jump needed right now. I have been offering my “Awaken the New Species in You” intensive with Humanity’s Team, on which Ervin kindly spoke, along with many of our most important evolutionary leaders. I am vocationally aroused. Becoming “telerotic,” filled with telos and eros combined as love in being and in action.
I do not call the interior genius of evolution from quarks to us spiritual, as contrasted to material. It seems to me that insights are coming direct from universal telos becoming telerotic, or a motivating force within us. We are being animated by the telos or purpose of evolution itself, felt as our deepest heart’s desires, as our yearning to join genius to become more than we possibly can be alone. My own unique purpose was to be a personal expression of a universal process of conscious evolution motivating us.
This experience leads to saying yes to our vocation of destiny, yes to deeper life purpose, yes to The Source incarnating in us as the impulse of creation co-creating with us, as us.
We are all expressions of the universal impulse of creation, Aurobindo’s “Divine Consciousness,” and Laszlo’s holotropic attractor, whether we know it or not. The Source is SOURCING in each of us. The key to conscious evolution is to experience our own deepest callings, animating each of us uniquely to realize our vocations as co-creators of the new world.
Business management guru, marathon runner
The marathon distance is precisely 42.195 kilometers. Like most human beings, I found it too long to run sensibly in a single race. Something unexpected inevitably happens along the way: a muscle spasm, dehydration, or calorie depletion. The biggest obstacle is usually psychological. In the dozens of races I’ve run since age eighteen, I’ve almost always experienced one or more moments when I felt that I could not possibly go on. It’s in those moments that runners have to dig deep to find unknown reserves that allow them to finish. The marathon can be such a maddening challenge, one that mirrors life itself, which is also why it can be so fascinating.
In October 2018 at a marathon near Manchester, New Hampshire, I had an extraordinary experience near the halfway point. The early kilometers had not been easy. I hadn’t been able to find a comfortable cadence where things flow effortlessly, at least for a few kilometers. I was becoming increasingly fearful of a meltdown in the second half of the race. Instead, something unexplained happened: a physical wave of energy washed over me, scrubbing away any fears and negative emotion, and leaving me feeling healed and whole. The only way I can describe it is as a thickening of the air that flowed over me: a loving source of energy and compassion that cleaned my soul and left me with a sense of forgiveness and understanding. In that moment, everything in my life seemed exactly as it should be.
I remember being on a forested section of the course, running on a narrow dirt path surrounded by lakes on either side. I’m sure that all the trees had a lot to do with it. Although the physical wave lasted only around thirty seconds, it changed not only the marathon, but my life.
One Year Earlier. I spent most of 2017 training for a marathon near the city of Baltimore, Maryland. My training had started in January for a November race, making it an unusually long running season. By the time the starting gun went off, I was in the best shape of my life. I felt confident that I could run fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon, which requires runners to meet age-specific times. Yet to my surprise and disappointment, the race went terribly. I missed my Boston qualifying time by a large margin and ended up walking most of the way between kilometers 35 and 42.
What happened? In the months before the 2017 marathon, I put in all the training miles I knew were needed. After all, this wasn’t my first attempt at the distance. I was in good physical health. The night before I had my usual spaghetti dinner and slept well enough, given pre-race nerves. The early winter cold, dry weather made for ideal conditions.
The first half of the race went as expected. Then things began to deteriorate. It was as if I became enveloped in a fog of negativity and confusion, my body slowing down despite every fiber of my being wanting to stay on pace. By kilometer 35, I began to walk. A short while later, I lay down on the side of the road, as other runners went by, shouting encouragement. Finally, I got up and continued a miserable run-walk until, what seemed like an eternity later, the finish line came into view.
In retrospect, it was easy to see that the problem was mental rather than physical. I had been under a lot of work-related stress. Like so many people, I was spending too much time multitasking between big projects, each of which deserved full-time attention. I would roll out of bed to turn on my computer and begin each day answering emails and carrying out administrative duties that came on top of my research and teaching load. Since the summer, my work environment had become tense. I was ensnared in organizational politics. My professional relationships felt frayed and were causing me constant anxiety. I shouldn’t have been surprised at my poor marathon result that year.
It’s now well-known that long-distance racing is limited by the mind rather than the body. Even the best athletes slow down because the mind tires, unable to stay focused on the high level of required effort. But how does one strengthen mentally for a marathon? Part of the solution is to work less and avoid unnecessary stress. Meditation or yoga and other mindfulness practices also offer well-documented benefits. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to reduce work-related pressures or to find the additional time for daily mindfulness practice. At this point in my life, my professional responsibilities were, for the most part, increasing in a positive way. I just wasn’t sure whether I’d ever run another marathon fast enough to qualify for Boston.
For my next race, which I had scheduled to run almost a year later in October 2018, I decided to take a novel approach. Rather than trying to reduce my workload or insert a new mindfulness practice, I would change how I ran and also where I ran.
On Forest Trails. I live in northern Virginia, where there are many forested trails that wind along the Potomac River. The trailheads were a five-minute drive from my home. Whenever possible, I would head there for my daily training runs. After decades of distance running, I felt I had accumulated solid data on the advantages of forest trails over urban road surfaces. There were subtle physical benefits to placing each footstep at a slightly different angle to accommodate tree roots along a twisting dirt path, which builds a broader range of muscles and avoids the repetitive injuries of road running or treadmills. There were psychological benefits to being among towering oaks and birch trees, feeling the earth beneath one’s feet, hearing birds calling, and sensing a river flowing nearby. On such forest trails I found myself engaging in fewer negative emotions and less self-referential thinking. The reduced anxiety and other physiological gains such as lower blood pressure carried over into the rest of the day. No wonder the Japanese consider shinrin-yoku, “forest bathing,” to be a recognized preventive healthcare practice covered by medical insurance.
Still, until 2018, my trails runs were often done mindlessly. On some days I would be so preoccupied with work that I was hardly aware of where I was, as thoughts about the past and future tumbled through my mind one after the other. I’m sure I still benefited from being out there in nature, but I knew there could be a lot more to gain from it. What I began to do differently in 2018 was to make every run more deliberately mindful, which in practice meant being fully present in each moment. At first it took real effort to slow the analytic part of my mind. Gradually I was able to notice what I was seeing, hearing, and feeling in real time. I began to experience a new connection to the forest, which I could increase by running with my arms stretched out with my palms open to the trees.
Another thing I did differently that year was to stretch out on the forest floor after each run. I would lie on my back looking up at the many layers of branches of the trees around me, allowing my heart to go back to its resting rate while focusing my awareness on each breath. Just five to ten minutes of this cooling down were enough to increase my sense of calm and well-being during the rest of the day.
The Marathon in October 2018. I started the race in Manchester feeling a little unwell. I had a lingering cough, which was exacerbated by the cold, wet temperatures of New England in the fall. Up until my wave experience, my running felt labored, both physically and mentally. Yet I was better prepared for such difficulties than in the previous year’s marathon by virtue of my fresh approach to training. I’m persuaded that the time spent running more mindfully on forest trails and cooling down on the forest floor had allowed me to accumulate new reservoirs of strength. Now, during the early kilometers, I found that I could calm my mind and focus quietly on running in ways that I hadn’t been able to before.
Of course, the holotropic wave experience changed everything. The distance remained dauntingly difficult and my leg muscles began to seize up all the same after 35 kilometers. I still experienced being mentally tired and had to slow my pace more than I would have liked in the final stages. But I experienced a kind of joy, gratitude, and serenity unlike I had felt in any other marathon I had run. I felt a proverbial sense of oneness with the world around me. The result was an unexpectedly fast time—at age fifty-nine, I had crossed the finish line once again, fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon—and a feeling of freedom and well-being that is still with me to this day.
Experimental psychologist
As a writer, I am drawn to life’s great mysteries and biggest questions—the meaning of consciousness, the extrasensory experience, life after death—particularly those anomalies that upset conventional wisdom. I like to ferret out, as the psychologist William James put it, the single white crow necessary to prove that not all crows are black.
But for all my forays into the unconventional, I remain, at heart, a hard-nosed reporter, the result of my early background as an investigative journalist, and I constantly look to build an edifice of solid evidence. I am not given to arcane references to mysticism, auras, or any sloppy or inchoate use of the terms quantum or energy. In fact, there’s nothing I hate more than unsubstantiated woo-woo, because it gives what I do such a bad name.
In 2005 I had grown especially curious about the implication that thoughts are an actual something with the capacity to change physical matter. Is this a true power, and exactly how all-purpose is it? I wondered. Are we talking here about curing cancer or shifting a quantum particle? And what happens when lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time? Does it magnify the effect? Quantum physics and the new science seemed to change everything we thought we knew about our innate human capacities, and I decided to test it to the limit.
In 2007 I gathered together a consortium of scientists from prestigious universities. Periodically I would invite my internet audience or an actual audience if I were speaking somewhere, to send one designated, specific thought to affect some target in a laboratory, set up by one of these scientists, who would then calculate the results to see if our thoughts had changed anything.
Eventually the Intention Experiment evolved into the world’s largest global laboratory, involving several hundred thousand of my international readers from more than one hundred countries in some of the first controlled experiments on the power of mass intention. Even the simplest experiment was carried out under rigorous scientific conditions.
When I launched the Intention Experiment, I was highly dubious that any of it would actually work. But as it turned out, the experiments did work. In fact, they really worked. In the thirty-three experiments I’ve run to date, twenty-nine have evidenced measurable, mostly significant change—a consistent track record not matched by any prescription drug on the market.
After early successes in making seeds grow faster and changing certain properties of water like pH, we tested whether group mind had the power to lower violence and restore peace in a war zone. Of the seven peace experiments we have run and studied to date—lowering violence in Sri Lanka; southern Afghanistan, Washington, DC; St. Louis, Missouri; Jerusalem; and Yemen—the results were compelling. In each instance, violence fell long-term after we sent the intention.
The idea of placing people into small groups of eight started out as a crazy whim of mine, just to see what would happen if group members tried to heal one of their group through their collective thoughts.
I was sitting with my husband, Bryan, one afternoon in late April 2008, both of us trying to figure out how we might scale down the large Intention Experiments for the workshops we planned to hold in the United States and London the following summer. The problem was, I hadn’t run many workshops before, and all I knew at the time was what I didn’t want, which was to pretend that I could help people manifest miracles.
“Let’s try putting them into little groups of eight or so and have them send a collective healing intention for someone else in the group with a health condition,” I said to Bryan. Perhaps we could find out whether a tiny group had the intention horsepower of the larger groups. We can’t remember which one of us—probably Bryan, a fellow journalist and a natural headline writer—came up with it, but we christened the groups “The Power of Eight,” and by the time we got to Chicago on May 17 of that year, we had come up with a plan.
On Saturday, we divided our audience of a hundred into small groups of about eight. We asked someone in each group with some sort of physical or emotional condition to nominate themselves to be the object of their group’s intention. They would explain their condition to the group, after which the group would form a circle, hold hands, and send healing thoughts in unison to that group member, holding the intention for ten minutes, the length of time that we had used in our large-scale experiments, mainly because it seemed to be the maximum time that untrained people could hold a focused thought.
“This is just another experiment of sorts,” I told everyone just before we started, although what I didn’t tell them was that they were on a maiden voyage and I was basically making up the route as I went along. “Any outcome you experience is acceptable.”
On Sunday morning, I asked those who had received the intention to come forward and report on how they felt. A group of about ten people lined up at the front of the room, and we handed each of them the microphone in turn. I thought that at best they experienced minor physical improvement caused by a placebo effect, a feel-good exercise—something akin to a massage or a facial.
That is emphatically not what happened. One of the target women, who had suffered from insomnia with night sweats, had enjoyed her first good night’s sleep in years. Another woman with severe leg pain reported that her pain had increased during the session the day before, but had diminished so much after her group intention that she now had the least pain she could remember having in nine years.
A chronic migraine sufferer said that when she woke up, her headache was gone. Another attendee’s terrible stomachache and irritable bowel syndrome had vanished. A woman who suffered from depression felt it had lifted.
The stories continued in this vein for an hour. I did not dare look over at Bryan, I was so completely shocked.
The Lame May as Well Have Been Walking. For all that I disparage woo-woo, the biggest woo-woo was occurring right in front of me. The group’s intentions seemed to become more effective as the day wore on.
After we returned home, I did not know what to make of the entire experience. I dismissed the possibility of an instant, miraculous healing. Perhaps there was some expectation effect at work, I thought, some permission granted for the person to mobilize his own healing resources.
But throughout the next year, no matter where we were in the world, in every workshop we ran, no matter how large or small, whenever we set up our clusters of eight or so people in each group, gave them a little instruction, and asked them to send intention to a group member, we were stunned witnesses to the same experience: story after story of extraordinary instant healing and physical and psychic transformation.
Marekje’s multiple sclerosis had made it difficult for her to walk without crutches. The morning after her intention, she arrived at the workshop without them. Marcia suffered from a cataract-like opacity blocking her vision in one eye. The following day, after her group’s healing intention, she claimed that her sight in that eye had been almost fully restored.
There was sixty-three-year-old Sande Cournoyer, a lifelong athlete, but one of her knees was now shot. “When I walk I can feel when my knee is going to pop out, which it does, and then I fall. I’m in a lot of pain.” She had a knee replacement surgery scheduled for the following month.
During the intention circle, tears rolled down her cheeks as she felt pressure around her knee on both sides, “as if somebody with big mitts was holding my leg. It was warm, not hot. I’ve never felt that before. It went down my whole leg, going down to my ankle. When we opened our eyes, we looked at our hands, and everyone’s hands were vibrating, with lots of tears.”
When the intention was finished and I asked the audience to share any experiences, Sande was the first to put up her hand. “Look,” she said, “I can bend my knees.” She leaned over and squatted down. “I could not do that before.” Since the Power of Eight group experience, Sande has no longer needed her brace, and when the improvement persisted, she was able to cancel her surgery.
There was Laura’s mother in Denver who had scoliosis. After her turn as the intention target, she reported that her pain had vanished. Several months later, Laura wrote me to say that her mother’s spine had altered so much that she had had to move the rearview mirror in her mother’s car to accommodate her new, straightened posture.
There was Diane, who had such pain in her hip from scoliosis that she had had to stop working out and had lost an inch in height over the past year. During the intention she felt intense heat and a rapid-fire twitching response in her back. The next day, she declared, “It’s like I have a new hip.” And Joan, who had two mini strokes and could no longer focus her eyes, was able to see normally immediately after the ten-minute intention of her Power of Eight group.
There were hundreds, even thousands more, and each time I was standing there, watching these changes unfold right in front of me. I should have felt good about these amazing transformations, but at the time I mainly viewed them as a liability. I believed they were going to undermine my credibility in what I saw as my “real” work: the large-scale global experiments.
In my investigative reporter days, I had been fastidious about the standard journalistic practice of gathering at least two independent sources of evidence as the minimum requirement before I would regard something as fact. It was such a hard-and-fast rule with me that one evening in 1979, during the writing of my first book, The Baby Brokers, an exposé of the private adoption market, I had stayed up that entire night, poring over what I had known about a fellow who had set up a string of adoption agencies in different states and countries. His practices seemed highly dubious, and he even made a veiled threat during one phone interview, but I was weighed down by the knowledge that one slipup could unfairly ruin this person’s life, even if, to all appearances, that person was somebody trafficking in human beings.
I don’t have it, I finally decided at six a.m. about one accusation I had been preparing to make: I can’t confirm this as a fact. Although my gut forcefully argued otherwise, I softened the story. And now, here I was, all these years later leading my audience in miraculous healings. Everything about this was violating my own two-sources rule. In fact, it was violating every last bit of the pertinacious, fact-gathering side of me.
Which is why, for many years, I ignored what was happening. As any journalist would tell you, I buried the story. I didn’t fully appreciate what people like Rosa had been trying to tell me, about the moment when her group sent her intention for her underactive thyroid: “I felt an opening in a tunnel and connecting with the universe. And if I received this I would be able to heal. It felt like I was giving and receiving healing, like I was healing myself.”
What on earth have I done to them? I kept asking myself. At first, I didn’t believe it. For years I attributed what appeared to be rebound effects to my imagination working overtime. As I kept telling my husband, I needed to gather more stories, carry out more experiments, amass more hard proof. Then I became frightened by them and sought some historical or scientific precedent.
Eventually it dawned on me that these groups and experiments were providing me, in the most visceral way, with an immediate experience of what I previously had understood only intellectually: that the stories we tell ourselves about how our minds work are manifestly wrong. Although I’d written in my book The Field about the latest discoveries in quantum physics and their implications about the nature of consciousness, what I was witnessing surpassed even the most extravagant of these ideas.
Every Intention Experiment I ran, every Power of Eight group that assembled, demonstrated that thoughts are not locked inside our skulls, but find their way into other people, even into things thousands of miles away, and have the ability to change them. Thoughts were not just things or even things that affect other things; thoughts might even have the capacity to fix whatever was broken in a human life.
And these miracles weren’t just happening with the Power of Eight groups, but some strange rebound effects were also occurring with the participants in my large-scale Intention Experiments, which I discovered in late 2008 after the first Peace Intention Experiment, when I began sending the attendees surveys to describe their experiences after each event. “It’s as if my brain is wired to a bigger network,” wrote one of the experiment’s participants on his survey. Thousands more had described a similar phenomenon:
“My whole body was tingling and I was having goose bumps.”
“Sort of like what I imagine it would be like to be locked in a tractor beam like is described on Star Trek.”
“The first day I started sobbing,” wrote Diana from New Orleans, “not from sadness but how overwhelming it felt to be connected to so many people. It was POWERFUL.”
The participants seem to have been plunged into an altered state of consciousness simply by holding on to the power of a collective thought. Many of them described changing major things in their lives. Nearly half reported that they felt more peaceful than usual, and this feeling of peace affected their dealings with other people.
More than two-thirds noted some change in their relationships: more than a quarter felt more love for their loved ones, and another quarter said they were getting along better with people they normally dislike or argue with. Almost half claimed to feel more love for everyone with whom they came into contact, and this connection just seemed to carry on after the experiment was over.
These rebound effects seemed to mirror the experiment itself. When we focused on peace, people began being peaceful. In later experiments attempting to heal a Gulf War veteran with posttraumatic stress disorder, thousands had reported some sort of pronounced physical improvement.
“My carpal tunnel injury improved.”
“Last ten days I have regular digestion (I had constipation for almost twenty years).”
“The pain in the knee is completely gone.”
“I used to have colon problems, not anymore.”
“No longer experiencing sciatic pain.”
“I sleep better, and anxiety and panic attacks have disappeared.”
For a decade, I studied the large and small intention groups from every angle, even following a group of 250 organized into Power of Eight groups month after month for a year. After many years of painstaking study, I concluded that some of their immense healing power could be attributed to the power of group intention, some was a group effect, and a big portion had to do with the effect of altruism, which appeared to heal both senders as well as receivers. I even discovered that group intention caused some amazing changes in the brain.
In 2016 the neuroscience department of Life University, the world’s largest chiropractic university, carried out a study of my Power of Eight groups among student volunteers. They discovered that members of the group undergo major brainwave changes as soon as they begin intending in a group: there is a sharp decrease in activity in their brain’s frontal lobes (behind the forehead) and in the parietal lobes, at the back of the top of the head.
The purpose of the parietal lobe is to figure out where you end and the rest of the universe begins, and the right frontal lobe is the area of the brain associated with negative thinking and worry. According to the late Eugene d’Aquili of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleague Andrew Newberg, our Power of Eight groups created brainwave signatures identical to those of Sufi masters during rituals or Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns at ecstatic prayer.
This shutting down of frontal and parietal lobe activity would create a sense of oneness, says Newberg, which might explain why those experiencing a state of enlightenment often describe feelings of bliss. This suggests that the participants in our global experiments and Power of Eight groups were experiencing something akin to a moment of ecstasy, which then may have proved transformational in their lives. But unlike nuns or monks or Sufis, our group members didn’t require years of devoted practice. In every case our participants had been transported into that state in an instant. Sending altruistic thoughts of healing in a group appeared to be the fast track to the miraculous.
What are the odds against the chance of all these healings being mere coincidence, the inevitable changes in circumstances that occur over time? I no longer ask this question. I am content simply to be a kind of messenger, a reluctant apostle of the mysterious alchemy of groups.
I still like evidence in my work, but over the course of studying this phenomenon, I have lost my skepticism, my need to tease out some scientific basis for everything that just cannot be rationally explained. Altruism, group effects, the power of intention, brainwave changes—all these together could not explain everything about the miracles that I was witness to.
Some things in our lives are just beyond our explanation or understanding, and when people come together, miracles just happen, miracles that cannot be reduced to the sum of certain facts and observable data, the workings of the vagus nerve or parietal lobes.
I have come to believe that miracles are not individual but the result of collective forces, especially when we move past the puniness of the self. I have given up trying to explain magic. It’s enough to show, even in small glimpses, that it’s there. But I have realized one thing: we find our true power in numbers.
Humanist, activist
Let me begin with a nonordinary experience, one that appears to breach what we think of as the normal boundaries of reality. Fortunately, there were witnesses. As it turns out, it is also an experience that lends itself to both spiritual and scientific interpretation. At the time I was executive director of the Seva Foundation, and prior to that I had been director of the Washington Office of Amnesty International. Later I was to become president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Seva is a Sanskrit word for “service.” The context for the experience began when I headed to Kalamazoo to the Fetzer Institute for a meeting exploring the spiritual heart of service. I only got as far as Chicago when I had to turn around: The meeting was called off due to a snowstorm. I turned around and came back to my point of origin—San Francisco. The next morning, rather than go to the office, I decided to go out to Commonweal on the mesa above Bolinas and spend time in my favorite meditation hut near the ocean.
Notice in the setup for this experience the complete interruption of the planned trajectory of my time and intention. I was literally turned around. I found myself headed to the Pacific Coast rather than into the snows of Michigan; alone rather than in a scheduled meeting with colleagues.
On an impulse, I decided to drive into the little town of Bolinas before heading up to the mesa to meditate. I parked my car near the post office. As soon as I got out of the car I noticed a house on the other side of the street. The house was behind a fenced-in wall and gate with a garden and pathway up to the front door. What was it about this house that was so compelling to me?
Then an inner voice said, “You should go inside and introduce yourself.” At this point I took fright and concluded I was losing it and that I was somehow disoriented. But then some deeper will took over and I summoned up the courage to cross the street, open the gate, walk up the path, and trust that in breaking every norm of social etiquette I was conditioned to follow I would not get arrested. After all, we generally don’t respond well to people who tell you they are responding to an inexplicable impulse or voice in their head. How was I going to explain my purpose in calling on complete strangers quite out of the blue?
The front door was a clear glass panel and I knocked. Then it happened: the inconceivable happened. A middle-aged woman walked toward the door, and when she got close enough she screamed out, “It’s James O’Dea!” My whole body went into shock. She opened the door. Then came a stream of questions: “What are you doing here?” etcetera. My jaw was locked. I couldn’t answer. Then even more extraordinary details: “You missed the meeting. Almost everyone has left. We didn’t contact you about it since you are no longer with A.I.” It turned out there had been a meeting in the house with human rights leaders—many of whom I knew—discussing how to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Needless to say, I was floored. But I was not happy. I felt the universe was trying to pull me back into work I had given my all to: ten years of grueling work on every kind of human rights abuse and dreadful levels of human cruelty and oppression. Once the three women in the house understood that I had actually been pulled in on an impulse and that I wasn’t very comfortable with the situation, they were ready to let me go. But before I left, one of them had a question: “What do you think is the relationship between spirituality and human rights?” Then it happened again: I felt a huge wave of relief, almost euphoria. Oh yes, this was the question I really wanted to be asked. This was the question that had to be answered if humanity was to evolve.
In that question lies a host of critical questions:
If there is a God, how can massive levels of suffering be permitted?
Are we really evolving from barbarism or just creating more high-tech methods of slaughtering people?
Can religious/spiritual communities really actively and effectively engage to address human rights violations?
Is there a way humanity can collectively evolve to a higher and more compassionate consciousness?
Can we end the intergenerational transmission of wounds?
Can we heal the wounds that live and hide inside the perpetrator?
Can spiritual consciousness foster the reconciliation and forgiveness work needed to resolve the wounds of victims and provide templates for social harmonization and healing?
I came away from my extraordinary Bolinas experience with a profound sense of renewed purpose and insight, which has guided me to this day. It helped formulate a new kind of peace curriculum focused on consciousness development and became the basis for training more than a thousand peace ambassadors from thirty countries. It inspired me to head up an organization whose mission is to explore the powers and capacities of consciousness. It motivated me to help host and lead social healing dialogues in different conflict zones around the world. Finally, it spurred me to try to understand the relationship of these kinds of spiritual epiphanies to emerging maps and templates of reality in what we refer to as positive and sacred psychology, neuroscience, and new science.
A higher purpose was adroitly constellated by having me cross over the threshold boundaries that are regulated by our scheduled lives and socially conditioned responses. We can lead much of our lives in a fairly tightly managed reality and remain largely unconscious of the warp and weft of a much greater Reality that is all around us.
There are maps of developmental psychology that outline the progression from survival dependence to self-realization, and the expansion of our field of perception that comes with moving out of egoic self-preoccupation to empathic connection with “others.” There are pathways beyond problem- and pathology-focused analytical psychology to a range of approaches that engage creative solutions, embrace new paradigms, and even mythic perspectives. There is also a range of spiritual practices that not only help us shed many of the conditioned responses that lock us into a tight and narrow version of things, but which actually entrain us to experience subtle energy, intuition, deep compassionate connection, and forms of consciousness that transcend the solidity of matter and the boundaries of time and space.
But what of hard science?
There is a Chinese proverb: In a single cup of tea, you drink the forest. Science is getting more proficient at moving out from analyzing the tea leaf to mapping the myriad relationships that make up the forest. At the root of understanding the relationship of everything to everything else is the exploration of the nature of fields and their relationship to each other. This interconnection or interpenetration of the vibratory frequency of fields can be looked at as their collective resonance—just as the vibration of every single musical note contributes to symphonic resonance.
When I got out of the car in Bolinas I experienced a flow of resonance. What was going on? Here is my hypothesis.
Fields carry information, but they have a nonlocal aspect; they are not bound by the limitations of time and space. They have a latency that is activated by being observed; we remain unconscious of them until something brings them to conscious awareness. The universe seems to be able to capture the raw data of everything that happens, but the subjective interpretation of what happens is either individual or cultural. There has, for example, been a lot of interest in the retrieval of memory for some people with Alzheimer’s when they are exposed to popular music from a certain era. They seem to relive those days or, you might say, they experience the presence of a resonance with that time.
The quantum field may hold an imprint of an event as a set of quantum state relationships between such elements as photons and electrons, which only come out of a dormant latent state when an experiencer with a particular interest, intention, or emotional charge convenes them as memory.
In my case, a field had been activated at the house in Bolinas, i.e., summoned out of its latent state by a group of people I knew well, who were meeting on a topic I not only also knew well but which I had a passionate connection to. Did my subconscious receive this raw field information and then translate it as a signal to my conscious mind as a voice that guided me to act as I did? Well, that’s clearly only the beginning. Because the context of my responding to the field resonance at the house was to lead me to much higher guidance in response to a spontaneous question—namely, “What is the relationship between spirituality and human rights?”
Following this trail leads us to contemplate a conscious universe communicating orders of consciousness that range from densely confined in matter and belief structures highly restrictive to consciousness, to states highly receptive of and attuned to subtle vibrations. Could it be that the universe is always trying to communicate with us and coach us to develop higher reason, but we are constantly shut down to its resonant guidance because we are too busy with life’s diversions or caught in neurotic preoccupations?
One thing is certain: authentic spiritual Masters gain access to a unifying field of consciousness where all life, whatever its degree of attunement, is held with love and compassion, and embraced as sacred in the knowledge that its journey to complete and total self-knowledge is inexorable. In fact the universe seems to have all the time in the world to guide each one of us home to The Source of all guidance. But that doesn’t mean we are free to drag our feet or willfully close our ears. And anyway, it is much more fun to tune into higher resonance. You just never know where it might lead!
Dolphin intelligence researcher
When the dolphin’s gaze reached mine, I was uplifted in a storm of emotions. It was like a journey through time at the speed of light, an awakening, a reminiscence and a shock of love. I was brought back to The Source.
In the 1980s, being an international tour guide allowed me to sail all the seas of the planet. In each of my encounters with dolphins, I would discover the astounding intelligence of these marine creatures. Every one of them had its unique behavior with humans, but all of them were like transmitters-receivers of energies. I was simply enthralled.
A few years later, a friend told me that a dolphin was swimming in the harbor of Royan, near my home in France. My daughter Adélie could celebrate her sixth birthday in the company of a dolphin ambassador, a free creature in the wild. Life sometimes offers us marvelous surprises!
Dolphins were first noted by the Greeks in ancient times, and about sixty kinds of these creatures have since been studied. The ambassadors are friendly dolphins who remain close to the coast and look for interaction with humans. The first dolphin I met is one of a kind, because unlike his friends, who end up settling in one area, he is a great traveler, a ceaseless wanderer. That is why he goes by several names: the French call him Randy, the British know him as George, and my Irish friends named him Dony. I like this name particularly, for it perfectly conveys what he is: to some extent, Dony incarnates the idea of donation—Dony is a gift.
On the first day, we hoped to see him in the harbor. Our expectation was in vain until Adélie brought me to him, knowing instinctively where to find him. Recognizable by his notched fin, he was waiting for us, motionless, next to a boat. We immediately went into the water to join him. This felt like a reunion, because it seemed that I had always known him. It did not take long for us to become familiar with each other. After five minutes of this magical encounter, I realized that I was with a 750-pound dolphin who showed no sign of mistrust in my arms. He had instantly felt that I was no stranger to the world of vibrations.
Since that day, my life has completely changed. My idea of reality has completely changed. I discovered all the “significant coincidences” as well as the famous “synchronicities” that Carl Jung wrote about. I canceled a trip abroad that would have kept me away for the next three years, and made it my custom to meet with Dony at nightfall. Since I have been a dancer since childhood, expressing myself through my body was not a mystery for me. But beyond the marvelous choreography that Dony was teaching me, I discovered a new way to communicate—no longer through artistic expression but through something more subtle, deeper, from cell to cell, a language of bodily vibrations. Dolphins live constantly in what is called an alpha state, an altered state of consciousness, half awake, half asleep. In this condition of consciousness, we are one with the universe.
To enter the world of the cetaceans, we must understand that we, too, are “vibrating” beings. In an alpha-state osmosis with Dony, beneath the moon and the stars, my cells absorbed the energy he passed to me. When I came out of the water, I would write down in words the messages I had received from him, conveyed to my body as a new energy.
There is no question: Dony was like a guide for me from that point forward. He invited me to enter another kind of communication: communication by telepathy. I had already been witnessing this kind of communication in my twin sons, who could understand each other without words. Now I received this gift from the master of this art: a dolphin. Modern human reason and logic have steered us away from this form of communication. Yet we can all use telepathy; the internet and mobile phones are nothing but modern tools at the service of our own internal transceiver in our connection with the world, a subtle, invisible but effective receiver and transmitter.
For two years after meeting Dony, I practiced my spontaneous communication skills with him by telling him places and times we were to meet and then going to that place at that time myself. Of course, there were some misses, but most of the time, he would show up and our meetings would take place. Visualizing the image of the intended place and feeling the emotion and joy of the reunion produced vibrations. The emotion created a wave of a specific shape, and this wave traveled from me to Dony.
I would sometimes drive many kilometers to meet Dony. We inevitably found each other, being pulled together like magnets. It felt like I was being sucked in by this momentum. I just followed the direction I would feel, thoroughly confident that it would lead me to where I wanted to go. I knew no fear; it was as if I was moving with a partner in a dance.
Dony’s physical presence in our encounters bolstered my confidence. I could not say anymore whether it was he or I who had set the time and place of our meetings.
I will always remember the day preceding one of my meetings with him and one of his dolphin friends, Jean-Floch. I made a wish and told it to the shooting stars. And the following day, my two dolphin friends were waiting for me in the spot I had had in mind! Later, when they swam out to the open sea, I was filled with a tremendous feeling of sadness. I told them telepathically that I was feeling a little blue and would like to say good-bye to them again. They were both back in the next five minutes!
I also remember a long trip swimming in the sea: I was feeling more and more tired, when Jean-Floch suddenly stopped me by biting at my flippers. He then swam right under me and carried me so I could take a rest.
I remember another time as well, when, after realizing that I had not seen Dony and Jean-Floch for some time, I happened to meet them, as if by chance. Dolphins can read our minds even before we know our own thoughts. Earlier, in December 2004, just before the tragic Japanese tsunami, Dony had sent me an image of humans holding hands, as in a dance; this was a message that said that the time that was to come would be hard, and only solidarity and fraternity could save us.
Once, in the autumn of 2010, when I was with Dony, he stood up in the water like a human being and snuggled in my arms as a child would, staying completely still. My left hand was attracted as if by a magnet to his heart, and I was surprised to feel his intense heartbeat so sharply—I will remember this moment for the rest of my life. I accepted the heartbeat as a sacred gift, a message of invitation to feel this vibration, a pure crystal sealed in the depths of our bodies; feeling the love from this entity vibrating in tune with me and with the whole living world.
When I met Ervin Laszlo at a convention on new paradigm physics in the French city of Reims, it was important for me to share my many experiences of cetaceans with him. I think that cetaceans show us to what a small degree we use the power of our brain: we are told we use only 5 percent or so, and that is ridiculous. The intelligence of these mammals proves that they could develop the potential of their very advanced brain to a greater extent. They seem to incite us to develop our own brain capacities, different as these may be from theirs.
One day, in September 2008, in the harbor where I had spent so many hours with Dony and Jean-Floch, I was watching the sea, feeling rather low and nostalgic, having had my request for a grant to support the projects of my “Institut Dony” turned down again. I was feeling as weary as Sisyphus hauling up his rock over and over again. Moreover, I knew that, following some snags Jean-Floch had had with fishermen, he had swum away two months ago, and no one knew where he had been since then. We heard later that he had been spotted by the Spanish coast guard—the pictures we were sent by them confirmed that it was indeed Jean-Floch’s fin that had been seen. He had swum all the way to Galicia. At that time I felt that he was alive, and I decided to meditate with him from afar.
As I meditated, I immediately got the feeling of being sucked in by the ocean: I felt that the connection had been made. Then I received an image looking like a grid, accompanied by this message: “For us in the ocean, time is endless, infinite; the idea of time itself is limited to human perceptions, and the ideas of beginning and of ending scare you. If people’s minds are not ready to understand [our idea of time], accept it and be at peace.”
For the next fifteen minutes, it felt like I was being taken down to cellular levels. At that very moment, a dog walked up the steps from the base of the cliff and sat down in front of me, staring at me with eyes full of kindness. Suddenly, I perceived Jean-Floch telling me: “Frédérique, I send you the splendor of peace.” A second later, the dog’s master came up the steps and called to him. I could hardly believe my ears when he repeated the dog’s name several times: “Galice! Galice!”
I got the impression that the dog’s eyes were the eyes of Jean-Floch. Notwithstanding the distance between us—about a thousand kilometers—Jean-Floch managed to communicate a message to me through the eyes of a dog who carried the name of the place where he had taken refuge.
Is this communication not precisely what the splendor of peace truly is—an awareness that everything is connected, despite our limited perceptions and our constant inclination to analyze things by taking them apart? Yes. This was Jean-Floch’s message: “It is when you open your consciousness and link your heart to all that surrounds you that you find peace and can enjoy beauty. We are the universe, all of us together, even when we think that we are alone.”
At another time, I went looking for dolphins with my sister: we wanted to create an elixir of water tinted with their vibrations. This is what had I noted: The elixir was created on France’s Atlantic Coast on a sunny day in August 29, 2008. It was created through the joint effort of my sister, my niece, a group of bottlenose dolphins, and myself. That day, we had gone out to sea intending to meet dolphins. And sure enough, all of sudden, they burst out of the surf: one, two, three, four dolphins! And more! They came from different directions, but all of them were converging toward the center. We were surrounded by them, amazed at their energy, their lightness, and their simple and natural bond with the sea. They filled us with joy. The waters were so clear that we could see them through it. The dolphins were playing, jumping in the air, following the boat with extreme precision. Then, there was a sudden shift of energy: we were now witnessing a hunting scene. The dolphins were going in seemingly random directions, but were in fact following a strategy. Their instinct told them where to go, and though they were acting as individuals, a collective energy emerged from the group. My sister lowered herself into the water to meet them and then felt called to come toward the prow. Two dolphins swam to her, in perfect unison, fully harmonized with the ship’s movements, slightly ahead of us. One of them turned his head toward her and stared directly into her eyes—or, better said, through her eyes—and instantly sent her this message: “We came to you so you can take part in the creation of this essence. We are fully participating.” The dolphin was perfectly aware of what we were seeking, and wished consciously to participate in the process. My sister swam with the dolphins at first, but then they suddenly left her and swam ahead of the ship. This was at the very moment when the elixir was created. This was an extraordinary experience. I will never forget this contact, this total communication and commitment, and the precision that communicated the sense of purpose. Together we moved forward, knowing where to go without need for any guidance.
“Dolphin Together” is an essence now in development. This is what its message is today: “The time has come for us to gather. Together, we are strong; we are going in the same direction and know full well the part we have to play. We are acting with full consciousness, embracing life with lightness, determination, and inner knowledge. We belong to a collective consciousness.”
Ervin once wrote that in the sea, everything is consciousness, and during the trips I organized to meet cetaceans in their habitat, I had countless opportunities to realize how true that is.
All kinds of creatures, each more magnificent than the other, have come to interact with us during these years, from incredibly small unicellular organisms to staggeringly large whales. I marvel at how connected they are in the sea, particularly in the Azores, the home of about thirty cetacean species.
I will always remember one dive when I saw a hundred dolphins letting out bubbles of light that resembled the codes of a language. They were geometrical figures. That image remained imprinted on my brain, and later I drew it on paper. I awoke to the idea that these figures were meant to be meditated on. I started working as a relaxologist, receiving images from the dolphins and using them to help humans reconnect. Dolphins know what we need to evolve further. This image, for instance, of light bubbles being emitted into the water, was the image of a diamond that we can visualize while being seated: the upper edge is at the top of our head, and the lower edge is below our feet. We see ourselves as a crystal, with our body being filled with hundreds of light bubbles. I understood then that the dolphins were trying to give me information to help me connect to my Source. The quantum universe that Ervin and other scholars are discovering is like the universe in which cetaceans live.
I treasure a sentence that imprinted itself on my mind during an encounter with Dony: “Only one thing behooves us, and that is our responsibility for ourselves.” I understood that instead of imposing ourselves on the world by our intention to unify everything, it is more coherent to live with wholesomeness inside ourselves. Our human suffering is often due to the illusion of separation, which generates cravings and feelings of abandonment.
Experiences with dolphins often cure the pain of separateness and separation: dolphins have the gift of making our reconnection easier, but the path we take is ours to choose. Love and free will are the same. Most times dolphins cannot carry us, but they feel so much love and compassion for us that some of them can even let themselves die for us. One of Dony’s first telepathic messages was: “I am coming with you, but I am not carrying you.” Death, for dolphins, is a transition to another level of consciousness.
When Dony misses one of our appointments, I use the silence to experience my unity with nature and allow the seeds of our encounters ripen and blossom. This realization is deeply rooted. Experiencing unconditional love for others and for ourselves is the most beautiful and most demanding journey. Uniting with the inner peace that follows with the expectation of experiencing peace in the world can follow.
Nonetheless, I would say there is a slight limitation to the multiple potentials of dolphins when it comes to healing. The healing link they trigger is a bridge, a mirror of our soul. The dolphin’s love strengthens the process of healing within us. Similarly to the music of Mozart, the vibrations emitted by dolphins are extremely high, and they help us transform ourselves.
Today, Dony is returning to life in the open sea, and other dolphins have replaced him. Originally Dony came to shoot some scenes for movies that will air on TV. One film was for the Franco-German channel Arte. It was awarded the biodiversity prize. Dusty, another Irish dolphin, appears in the same film. She is a character: she collects waste in the sea. I call her “the green ambassador.” She is friendly and open to contact with humans, but she remains uncompromising, indomitable, and free.
According to the indigenous myth of the Fifth Dream, humans were dreamt into being by a whale. Since I can hear the whisper of the whale through Dony, to this day I remain true to what he taught me: feel the universe within yourself, with pure love. Love and oneness is where we come from, where we are, and where we are headed. It is the center that bonds us all. Our sacred oneness is omnipresent: it is there whenever we take a breath, whether or not dolphins are physically present.
A year ago, I met Aladin, another dolphin ambassador who was cruising along the coast of Brittany. He used telepathy to tell me this: “When you see me coming to a port of my own, it is only your human perception that tells you that I am alone. I am on my own, yes, but I am connected to a group.”
Aladin is much younger than Dony, and he loves to play. I have never felt so much softness and tenderness connected with energy that’s like a big bang. Among the various activities of Institut Dony, I like to have children discover their inner ecology. During these activities, I like Aladin to be present. He reminds me of our inner child, who remains connected with his essence and stays in touch with us with joy. Imagine a dolphin who is motionless, fully present, fully conscious, and listening to you.
To conclude this report, let me communicate to you the most recent message I received from Aladin: “Cultivate your inner peace.” And the message from Dony: “You, the human and I, the dolphin, come from the same Source, The Source of beauty and love.”
Educator, activist
I have been fortunate enough to have received solid scientific training and been graced with some powerful mystical experiences—and to have been able to put both together. And to do this in a manner that they not only do not clash, but open up enchanted vistas that fill me daily with the most incredible awe and gratitude just to be alive in this rather out-of-the-ordinary place called planet Earth, part of this stupendous happening called the universe. And my most fundamental belief—that which enables me to function in what to material sense seems an often cruel and totally unintelligible universe—is that everything is governed by law.
We live in an incredibly friendly universe, not a place run by chance. I do not believe chance can exist in a space completely run by law, and as I believe this law to be infinitely loving, it could not tolerate “chance,” i.e., something outside its jurisdiction. It has also been my privilege to live a long life with well over fifty years of professional activity, traveling to, or living and studying, in well over forty countries of the five continents, experiencing many cultures and ways of life, befriending so-called saints and sinners along with presidents and peoples of all cultures, races, creeds, and walks of life, the most unenlightened intellectuals and the very wise, along with illiterate peasant farmers with an amazing knowledge of life and nature and healers of all hues. And every day I have a deeper conviction that we live in an infinitely friendly universe that wants our real good more than we could ever wish for ourselves, and will not let us go until we have reached perfect wholeness and bliss with our Source.
This vision was born of the most powerful mystical experience I had in my life. Many years ago I was attending the board meeting of the 6-S Association, the largest grassroots peasant-farmer movement in Africa, of which I was a founding member, in Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.
The last day of the meeting, I contracted dysentery. As at the time I was following a path of purely spiritual healing (no conventional medicine), I worked on it spiritually. On the plane the next day I was still working on the issue with my spiritual texts, affirmations, prayers, and the like. Next to me was an unaccompanied young boy, and the stewardess caring for him was incredibly loving, just as if she were his mother. At one moment she spoke to him with such kindness, I was suddenly overwhelmed by what I can only describe as a sort of cosmic gratitude, which enveloped her and everything. And suddenly, I was projected into a space that was timeless and beyond material space and where I was aware of nothing else but infinite love. I felt in my very essence that unconditional love was the only cause, effect, substance, power, being, reality, identity, presence in the universe, that it was literally all-in-all.
The most wonderful thing of the whole experience was that my ego had completely disappeared. I had no sense anymore that anyone called Pierre Pradervand even existed. For an indeterminate period (as I was no longer in time), the divine consciousness was my consciousness, which is why this was the most glorious experience of my existence: infinite love manifesting as total freedom. The human mind (intellect, mental reign) had just vanished; all was on the level of this extraordinary feeling of the divine.
And suddenly, I was back in my seat on the plane. I felt something moving in my bowels, and, in a matter of seconds, the dysentery had disappeared. But even that healing, however welcome, was nothing compared to the vision which brought with it a quality of knowing that human words just cannot describe—because it was far beyond normal human experience. I now feel with such a depth of certainty, of spiritual groundedness, that love is the ultimate reply to all and any problem, be it a personal, social, or world issue.
And you and I are one with that love. We are literally welded to love and nothing will ever be able to change that, even our own doubts and fears. Love is our home, our haven, our springboard, and our resting place—for always.
Because in this very instant, we are literally divine love expressing itself.
One of the most amazing aspects of this happening was the quality of knowing I experienced. It was a knowing I had never felt before nor experienced since. This knowing was a deep feeling that had absolutely nothing to do with the intellect, which, as I said, was not involved as it had disappeared.
It was a knowing beyond any categories of right or wrong, of “what if,” “maybe,” “somehow,” an inner certitude that was not born in me but with which I was graced. I could have had (or have even today) a thousand scientists in front of me saying, “But Dr. Pradervand, unbeknownst to yourself, you must have swallowed some hallucinogenic mushroom in your food at the African restaurant the evening before,” or some similar uninformed intellectual argument that we are not yet able to accept or understand phenomena that are beyond the understanding of the usual and “scientific” paradigms—and I would have just smiled.
At another time in my life, I was living on Mont Pélerin, one of the most beautiful spots in my home country, Switzerland, in the lovely apartment of an artist situated under the roof of an old house, with a balcony opening onto one of the most spectacular sceneries I have known in my life, a grocery next door which opened at six thirty a.m. and wonderful, sweet-scenting pine forests where I did my jogging accompanied by the neighbor’s friendly dog trotting beside me. A true paradise.
Later I moved to the center of Geneva, to one of the busiest, noisiest, most polluted streets of the city. Not exactly my mountain paradise. Jogging there in winter on sloshy sidewalks with melting snow was not my dream, so I purchased one of these exercise machines that imitate cross-country skiing, one of the most complete sports around. I threw myself into my daily exercise with my usual gusto and enthusiasm. But I must have overdone it, because I was soon seized with the most disturbing symptoms of angina pectoris, a hereditary challenge in the family, waking up at night with throbbing pains in the chest, difficulty breathing, and a deep anguish.
For three days, I literally dragged myself through the apartment, completely drained of all my energy. The phantom of myself. On the third day, I was sitting in an armchair opposite the bay window with a fabulous view of the French Alps when suddenly, “something” in me propelled me up and with outstretched legs and arms I stated “YES” out loud for one or two minutes. I was instantaneously healed. The experience was so incredibly powerful that for a couple of years after that, I used to walk in the street saying a powerful inner YES on every third step. I even wrote a book (in French) with the title The Grand YES to Life (Le grand OUI à la vie).
Dr. David R. Hawkins, MD, that great American seer of the last century who, after the most brilliant career in the field of psychiatry, became, at the end of his career, a major figure of the American spiritual scene and an acknowledged leader on the nature of consciousness, states that YES is the most powerful word in our language. Try it out as a kind of mantra. Use it whenever you are faced with a major challenge. Instead of cursing the situation, or feeling angry or depressed, say a powerful “YES” out loud, many times. It will help you immensely to change your frame of mind. Personally, the first thing I do when I get out of bed in the morning is to stand next to my bed with uplifted arms, saying a very vigorous “Yes, thank you” to and for everything that will happen during the day.
I believe the reason this word is so powerful is that maybe, unbeknownst to ourselves, we are saying “yes” to the existence of a benevolent, infinitely loving universe we can really count upon, because it is governed by law down to the tiniest detail, plant, insect, or micromolecule.
Simply think of your body. By the latest counts, this unbelievable friend is made up of around 35,000,000,000,000 cells (to be honest I haven’t counted them). Can you imagine such an incredible assembly of cells which communicates the most sensitive and refined messages twenty-four seven, an assembly that is an awesome example of the most exquisite collaboration and mutual support—can you even imagine such a body being run by chance? Anyone who would dare make that claim would be laughed out of the room by a classroom of first-grade statistics students! And our body is only a tiny element of this incredible “thing” called the planet, itself a tiny, weeny little body in our universe, which seems to be only one among many such universes.
Mind-boggling.
On still another occasion, I was healed of seven years of very aggressive attacks of depression. At the time, I was still using a purely spiritual approach to healing myself that had worked amazingly well for around twenty-five years. But this time it did not function, albeit I called upon the help of leading healers in the movement I belonged to. One night, at well past midnight in Geneva, in a state of total desperation, I phoned a friend in the US. With one single statement—a verse she quoted from the twenty-third psalm—seven years of depression just dissolved in five minutes. This psalm is for me the most universal, interspiritual text I have ever come across, because it is entirely made up of metaphors—no theology! I use it daily.
When confronted with the above three healings I experienced, the traditional response of modern medicine is “Nice examples of spontaneous remission.” This expression has always amused me because what it is really confessing is: “We have not the foggiest ideas of what is happening here, but as we dare not confess our ignorance of the mechanism of such healings, call them ‘spontaneous remissions.’” Spiritual healing is not yet a favorite with the scientifically inclined version of modern medicine. Fortunately, both medicine and traditional science are changing fast, as this book shows for science at least. However, we are all aware of the growing number of medical practitioners who are earnestly seeking for other approaches to their art.
One of the pioneers in this area is Dr. Joe Dispenza, one of the most sought-after speakers and trainers in the world. When he was twenty-three, Dispenza healed himself of six severe fractures of the spine solely by a meditation technique he developed himself. Three of the best neurosurgeons of Southern California had predicted that he would spend his whole life in a wheelchair unless they fixed him up with Harrington rods (to which one attaches the broken spine to enable it to function). Yet in less than ten weeks, he was up and walking! Since then, in his worldwide workshops, he has had the most amazing healings even of terminal cancers, Alzheimer’s, or multiple sclerosis. In one such instance a person who had been suffering for ten years from MS got up from her wheelchair in the middle of a meditation and started walking. The power of Dispenza’s teaching—which has literally made scientific history—is that he has scientific proof of the impact of meditation on the functioning of the brain, having made over two thousands brain scans of people meditating during his workshops. (I myself was measured in this manner during one of his workshops I attended in 2017 at Lake Garda in northern Italy.) The data are published in his latest book, Becoming Supernatural.
Many scientists would scoff at such stories. However, that is not exactly a very scientific response. Others fortunately are opening up to the most exciting vision of the “new” science of tomorrow, as Ervin Laszlo so clearly shows in his books.
We are living in what is certainly one of the most exciting and challenging periods of human history. Traditional models of the world and reality are crumbling in all areas. From societies where stability was the rule and change the exception, we have moved to societies where change is the norm and stability the exception. What this will do to us and to human knowledge (including science) in all areas, nobody knows. The passage might not be smooth and could even be very rough, with immense upheavals in many areas. But because I believe we live in an infinitely friendly universe, I also believe we will sooner or later make it. So put on your seat belts, be ready for takeoff—we’re away!
Parapsychologist, experimental consciousness researcher
Early in the year 2000, I was searching for office space to house a research institute that a colleague, Dr. Richard Shoup, and I were establishing. We called it the Boundary Institute because its mission was to scientifically explore the boundaries between mind and matter using the disciplines of physics, mathematics, and computer science. Our organization would continue a program of psychic research that I had been in charge of at a Silicon Valley technology company called Interval Research Corporation, which was funded by Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft.
The dot-com craze was at its peak at the time, with new internet start-ups popping up all around Silicon Valley. As a result, office rental rates, already at astronomical levels, were continuing to rise. We looked at four potential locations and rejected the first three because they were too expensive. That left only one clear choice, in the town of Los Altos, a suburb of Silicon Valley. It was a nice space with four offices, a common area, and a conference room, and it was located in an office complex that housed accountants, therapists, real estate agents, dentists, and other businesses of that kind.
After spending a few days moving furniture into our new office, I became curious about our neighbors. I found a directory sign listing the various office suites. Most were ordinary businesses, but one was named PsiQuest, Inc. I took this as a delightful coincidence, because our new institute was also a sort of “psi quest” (the term psi is parapsychological jargon for psychic phenomena). There are only a handful of psi research facilities in the world, and we are all well aware of each other. So I was certain that the “psi” in PsiQuest must have meant “Personnel Service Investigations” or something like that. The “psi” similarity was surely just an amusing coincidence.
About a month later, I took a new route to walk to our office and noticed that a small sign on the suite next door to ours, which I hadn’t seen before, read “PsiQuest Research Labs.” This was suddenly more than just an interesting coincidence, because what in the world was Personnel Service Investigations, as I imagined PsiQuest to be, doing with a research lab? The miniblinds on the PsiQuest Research Labs window were closed, and what little I could see through the blinds only revealed a well-appointed reception space. No one was visible.
I peeked through the blinds every day for the next two weeks. Finally, I noticed that someone was in the office. I knocked and tried the door. It was unlocked, so I entered and prepared to say hello to a man behind a desk. He looked up, his eyes widened, and his jaw dropped as though he was seeing a ghost. I thought maybe he was having a stroke, because he looked absolutely stunned. I slowly extended my hand and said, “Hello, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m your neighbor next door. My name is—” But before I could finish, he managed to croak: “Dean Radin?”
I hesitated. “Yes,” I cautiously replied, wondering how he knew who I was, and if he was feeling okay. He said nothing. He just continued to stare at me. After an uncomfortable pause, I repeated, “I’m your neighbor from next door. I just wanted to introduce myself and see what kind of work you’re doing here.”
After a moment the man replied, “I’m doing what you’re doing.”
Confused, I asked, “What do you think I’m doing?”
He replied, “Psi research … parapsychology.”
Now it was my turn to stare, dumbfounded. Unbeknownst to me or to any of my colleagues around the world, here was another group engaged in the unusual type of research that we were doing, and they were located next door to our office.
It turned out that the president of PsiQuest, Jon K., not only was thoroughly familiar with psi research, but was specifically engaging in a magical practice to manifest me! Jon was using a Tibetan dream yoga technique, which involves alternating three-hour periods of sleeping and waking over the course of twenty-four hours. During the waking periods, he was intensely wishing for a sign that his business was on the right track, and one of those signs would be for me to show up, somehow, so I could join his board of directors. But he had no idea where I was or how to contact me. Hardly anyone at the time knew that I was living in Silicon Valley, and even fewer knew where our new institute was located.
That’s why when I opened the door to Jon’s lab that day, he was speechless. He had just finished one of his three-hour sleep manifestation exercises, and he couldn’t tell if he was awake or dreaming. From his perspective, my appearance on his doorstep was literally an act of magic based on his clear, repeated affirmations. When he was finally able to tell me what was going on, I, too, felt seriously disoriented. We both had to sit down.
So far, this was already a very strange series of events. But what happened next made things even stranger. The month before I met Jon, I was focused on visualizing what our new offices and laboratory space would look like. I was drawing sketches of my ideal lab configuration on the whiteboard in my office and imagining a certain kind of reclining leather chair, a shielded room, and other types of equipment that would be useful to have in the lab. I knew all this would be expensive, and our budget was limited, so I figured we wouldn’t be able to afford it in the short term. But that didn’t stop me from spending a few hours a day visualizing what I wanted.
Returning to our story, after recovering from the shock of our meeting, Jon invited me to tour the rest of his facility. As we moved from one room to the next, I could hardly believe my eyes. Jon had the reclining leather chair, the shielded chamber, and all the other pieces of laboratory equipment I had been actively imagining. And all of it was located on the other side of the wall from my desk, no more than six feet from where I had been sketching what our lab would look like. I had literally drawn what I wanted into being.
After discussing this series of synchronicities with the other members of our institute, we agreed that this couldn’t just be a case of dumb luck. It’s as though sustained intention on the part of Jon and myself had acted as a sort of force that drew PsiQuest and the Boundary Institute together, analogous to gravity drawing a moon and a planet together. In Einstein’s general relativistic concept of gravity, the planet doesn’t reach out with “gravity beams” to pull on the moon. Rather, the fabric of space-time itself is distorted by the mass of Earth and the moon, and the warped geometry naturally guides the two masses to drift toward each other. With this analogy in mind, we speculated that perhaps intense mental intention also warps or distorts aspects of reality. Events that might otherwise be completely independent and never interact would naturally be drawn together by the resulting warp in space-time.
This hypothesis has wide relevance and applicability. If mind and matter are two sides of the same coin, which is one way of interpreting the blurring of objective and subjective realities that we see with psi phenomena, then given that space-time appears to be distorted via physical mass à la Einstein, then it should also be possible to distort space-time via “mental mass.” What is the mental mass analog of physical mass? Perhaps words like love, meaning, and focused intention capture its essence.
I reported in my book Real Magic that when we checked the output of our quantum noise generators during the 2016 US presidential election, we observed both spacelike and timelike distortions in the data just when Trump was announced as the winner. In that case, “mental mass” emerged out of the hundreds of millions of minds coalescing into either a collective cheer or a collective groan. This is speculative, of course, but it is something like this that the data are telling us.
Whatever the ultimate explanation for the series of synchronicities recounted here and for the apparently mentally caused distortions of the data may be, these experiences are a stark reminder that our understanding of the role of consciousness in the physical world is still in its infancy.
Natural healer, psychologist
I grew up in the land of Bartók and Liszt, in the city of Budapest, where musical life is of exceptionally high quality. I grew up in a family of music lovers. Even from the age of six, my parents took me to the opera and to concerts of classical music. At home we were constantly listening to classical music, and I started taking piano lessons when I was seven. I heard great music even while cleaning the dishes or polishing the floor. My father wanted to be a professional musician from early childhood, but after graduating from secondary school, instead of the music academy, he decided to enroll in the technical university. He had two passions: music and photography. This was the intense, passionate environment in which I spent my early years.
Spontaneous Experiences of Music and Art. In my teens it was a great joy for me to make music with my father. He played the violin and I accompanied him on the piano. When we were playing together I melted into a larger whole. I was no longer a separate individual; my own self had vanished.
At of the age of fourteen I was enrolled in the Béla Bartók Secondary School of Music as a piano student. I never had any other intention but to become a pianist. But an accident at age sixteen while doing gymnastic exercises decided otherwise. The injury I suffered affected both my arms. After a year and a half of treatment, I resumed playing the piano, but it became clear that I no longer had the physical capacity to be a concert pianist. Therefore, on finishing secondary school, instead of continuing at the music academy, I enrolled in Eötvös Loránd University and studied psychology.
As a college student in music, and during my years at the university, I regularly attended concerts at the music academy and performances at the opera. Listening to music, performed at a high level of excellence has been, and still is, a spiritual experience for me. It creates a sense of immersion, of unity, of floating in harmony and love for everything around me.
A remarkable experience occurred when I was sixteen. After a great performance of Verdi’s opera Aida, I went home and fell asleep. I reexperienced the entire opera in a kind of dream. I could recall the whole work, the music and the images and other sounds, and the sensations they triggered in me.
On another occasion I witnessed—or rather, in some sense “took part in”—a performance of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. The experience took my breath away. I was so moved that I nearly fainted. Years later—I was twenty-seven at the time—I had a similar episode while experiencing Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle. When the fifth door of the castle opens and Prince Bluebeard shows and offers his dominion to Judith, his new love, the epic story of the opera reaches its climax. When I think back on this episode and the music that fills it, I still feel the bliss I felt at that moment. An intense stream of energy was flowing down my spine, to penetrate every cell of my body.
Reading great literary works has a similar impact on me as listening to great music. All throughout my teen years, classical Hungarian and world literature provided me with intense enjoyment. The catharsis triggered by literary works filled me with life affirmation and love.
Great paintings affected me in a similar way. When I was sixteen, I did not leave the Zwinger museum in Dresden for a week. I came back day after day, sitting on the floor and gazing at the paintings. A few years ago, I went to Milan for a conference, and saw Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. It took my breath away. Sitting and meditating in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and in the Duomo in Milan filled me with a sense of intense gratitude, peace, and unconditional love. No matter what the form, great masterpieces speak to me as tangible manifestations of the perfection that is surely present at the heart of the universe.
During my university years I continued my studies of the piano, having had Erzsébet Tusa, a noted pianist, for my teacher. I had deeply admired and loved her. During the first few years my attention was taken up by the medical subjects that were part of my training. But my eyes were filled with tears when I attended musical performances in the evening.… It was not easy for me to accept the new direction taken by my life. In my fourth year at the university I had to choose the topic of my thesis. My heart guided my choice: I decided to study the transformative impact of music, using projective tests of personality analysis as developed in psychology. (The title of my thesis was “Experimental Study of the Emotions Induced by Music.”)
After finishing my studies, I worked as a research assistant at the Cultural Research Institute. I conducted surveys in the psychology of music, testing the musical creativity of people in diverse walks of life. I devoted my doctoral studies to a related topic: the study of the manifestation of musical experience in the work of young painters. Later I extended my research to other areas of interest, to the psychology and sociology of art, including dance, literature, the visual arts, and motion pictures. After seven years of research, I received my Candidate of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (C.Sc.) degree.
Meeting Pater Louis. Working at the Cultural Research Institute, I had the good fortune to know the head of the international department, Dr. Gedeon Dienes, the son of Dr. Valéria Dienes, the first recognized female scientist in Hungary. Gedeon (known familiarly as “Gee”) was a father figure, a wonderfully warm and caring personality. He was over sixty years old at the time, spoke eleven languages, and was a renowned classical dance critic.
One day, Gee, who regarded me almost as a member of his family, asked me to go with his wife to see Pater Louis, a renowned natural healer living in the country. People called Pater Louis “the herbal priest,” because he prescribed herbal teas for his patients. He was a highly successful healer. Being a Catholic priest, he held mass at six o’clock in the morning, and from eight o’clock on he saw patients hour after hour. He did not expect anything in return.
Pater Louis radiated strength, health, and goodness. Although he was sixty-six years old at the time, he looked youthful. Maya, Gee’s wife, placed pictures of the patients’ family in front of his eyes, then handed him a letter handwritten by a friend. Pater Louis examined Maya, then the photos, one by one, and then the letter. He practiced remote healing, using a sidereal pendulum. Then he took out a small box that contained glass vials of herbal and vegetable essences prepared by him. After retrieving a few vials, he used the pendulum to select the best essence for Maya, and then for each of the persons he examined with the help of the photos and the letter.
I was watching him work in silence. I have never seen a natural healer work with a pendulum, but it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world. A surprise came to me only when he turned to me and said, “My child, you are completely healthy, but you have a poor diet. You should avoid meat, sugar, bread, and milk.” Then he moved behind my back and, as it turned out, he used his pendulum to examine me. After a brief silence, he said slowly, “Garlic is poison for you.”
At that moment, I felt like the heavens would open up: I was finally able to get rid of the obsession to consume garlic because it was thought to be healthy. I had been sensitive to milk and garlic since early childhood, but the women in my family, my mother, my aunt, and my cousin, used garlic abundantly, notwithstanding my reaction to it. Now here was someone who, using a simple pendulum, discovered a nutritional problem I had struggled with since I was a child. That very moment I knew that I would follow the advice of Pater Louis through thick and thin. I did, and became a vegetarian—later I adopted a macrobiotic diet. More important, I learned from him how to use the pendulum for the diagnosis and therapy of various health problems. I was amazed by his ease, precision, simplicity, and efficiency. Being his disciple gave me a sense of well-being and fulfillment. It seemed to me that he was transmitting the sacred tenets of the great religions. I joyfully spent every minute that I could with him. He charged me with energy—I felt like I could do anything.
My encounter with Pater Louis catalyzed in me a serious interest in alternative medicine. In the eight years that followed, beside my scientific research, I studied various orientations and techniques of health and healing, including macrobiotics and Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy.
The next milestone on my way came eight years later: I met the Austrian scientist Erich Körbler. Since I was subject to extreme sensitivity to the presence of water veins, a Viennese healer friend of mine recommended that I get a protective bed sheet. During my next visit to Vienna I acquired such a sheet and put it on the bed before I went to sleep. That night I felt like I was floating above the bed, warmed by infrared lights from below. The next day I contacted the inventor of the protective bed sheet, Erich Körbler.
I stood in front of his door and knocked. Through the glass door I saw Körbler rise from his desk, cross his long laboratory, and come toward the door. This was another significant moment in my life: I had no idea what Körbler was doing, but I was intuitively certain that it is what I should be doing myself. In the years that followed, I learned to use his dowsing-based healing method called New Homeopathy. Three and a half years later, after his sudden death, I inherited the practice of New Homeopathy as his legacy. I have taken it even further, developing his proximal application to include healing across time and space: remote healing.
Spiritual Experiences in Healing. To my initial surprise and constant delight, I receive a kind of spiritual guidance in my work as a natural healer—it is coming my way regularly. The harmony, sense of safety, and wholeness I experience in music and in art is coming to the fore in my healing practice.
I do my healing through the use of classical homeopathy, the New Homeopathy of Körbler, my own elaboration of Körbler’s New Homeopathy, as well as the combined homeopathy developed by Guna laboratories in Italy. When I apply these methods, I have a particular kind of spiritual experience. I feel the dowsing rod “pull” at my hand—it moves seemingly of its own accord: my hands do not consciously initiate its movement. And when my healing is taking place, there is a feeling of wholeness and harmony spreading throughout my body.
I receive spontaneous information on the health condition of my patients. The information I receive can refer to any period in their life, starting from the period of gestation in the womb. I concentrate on various periods and observe the movement of the dowsing rod. Proceeding in this way I can determine the period pertinent to the patient’s health issue. Using the dowsing rod, I identify the nature of the problem, and often even the event or situation that had created it.
By this method, I can treat the cause of my patient’s health problem, and not its symptoms. Treating the symptoms calls for local information only—information on the patient’s actual state of health. On the other hand, treating the cause of the problem often calls for using nonlocal information, extending beyond the present moment in time. (That information, I have come to believe, originates in the Akashic deep dimension of the universe.) To receive it, I distance myself from any emotional involvement with my patients and their health problems. My mind must be clear, and I must focus uniquely on the task of healing. Then there is a good chance that the information needed for healing the problem appears in my consciousness.
Practicing healing is a joy for me. Day after day and year after year, I am amazed at the results and grateful for being able to attain them. To my mind this is evidence that there is a subtle but real connection between me and the patient, the same as between all the people who share life on our precious planet.
Two Cases of Spiritual-Experience-Based Healing. 1. A thirty-year-old woman came to me for help: her seven-year-old son had been born with a brain deficiency. At times, his behavior was extremely taxing: he would shout at the top of his voice for hours on end and bite his hands until they bled. One day, after years of my treating him, the mother came to me to help her live with this problem. I was just then moving house and did not have time to attend to her. Instead, I directed her to a homeopathic doctor who used a bioresonance machine to diagnose problems such as this.
I was in the shower the night before she went to consult the doctor, and all of a sudden, the name of a homeopathic remedy came into my mind: staphysagria. I knew intuitively that this was the remedy she needed, and that it should be taken in the “M” (one thousand) potency. I thought of telling her that I had the remedy and she did not need to consult the doctor, but then I thought it was best not to interfere with her scheduled consultation.
She called the day after she saw the doctor: the bioresonance machine came up with the name of the remedy she needed. It was staphysagria in the M potency.
2. Sándor was fifty-nine years old when he came to consult me. He lived with his family in the same town in the Mátra Mountains where my family had a cottage. He had an orchard where he grew various kinds of fruit. He heard of my healing work with people as well as with other living things, and asked me to test the trees in his orchard to find out which minerals he should use for better nourishing them. While we were speaking, he told me of his health problem. It appears that for the past eighteen years he has suffered from a chronic inflammation of his joints.
Sándor’s problem first manifested itself when he was about forty years old. He developed polyarthritis; it impacted every joint in his body—he had pain in his fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders, toes, ankles, and knees. His leg joints became so weak that he could barely walk, and the pain in his hip joints became nearly unbearable. He received medical treatment for this complaint for more than a year, and this produced temporary relief. But the arthritis would flare up again and again, and it would always attack one joint at a time. Occasionally he developed a hard, red lump in his wrist joints, the size of a ping-pong ball, accompanied by sharp pain. The response to treating this was unpredictable—at times, the pain would disappear, and at other times it would persist. I asked him to let me know when the lump became visible again.
One afternoon I accompanied Sándor to his orchard. Even though he had pain in his left arm earlier that morning and his left wrist became so stiff that just driving the short way to the orchard was difficult for him, the pain was not accompanied by swelling and so he did not say anything about it.
We were inspecting his trees when Sándor suddenly gave a shout and pointed to his left wrist. A red lump began to form, and in less than ten minutes had grown as large as a walnut. As I was watching this curious happening, the term Phosphorus M popped into my mind. I felt that this homeopathic remedy would be the right treatment for him. Since I did not have this substance with me, I sent the corresponding energy mentally into the red lump on his wrist. As the energy passed from me to him, I felt completely drained.
The next day I had to leave town. When I saw Sándor a few months later, he told me that he was happy and relieved: he was completely cured of the problem.
The phosphorus M remedy came to me spontaneously. Because it did, and I introduced the needed information into his body, Sándor’s eighteen years of suffering came to an end. The swelling did not recur—and that was over twenty years ago.
My decades-old practice convinced me that such spontaneous healing experiences are not accidental. They appear in regard to health problems in both young and old. The information we need for our health is present in our body. It can be tapped when it is needed. Spontaneous experiences such as those that accompany my healing work convey the relevant information. This information, I believe, is available to everybody. We just need to know how to access it—and how to apply it to the problems that come our way.
Mystic, activist, spiritual leader
I was born in Tokyo in June 1941, the same year as the start of World War II. I remember that when I was about three years old, I experienced some of the air raids in Tokyo.
When the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nothing remained of what had been there before. All the people of Japan were in shock, and for a few years we were unable to recover from it. The damage and destruction were beyond anything people could have imagined. Everywhere, bodies and objects were burnt black, and people could not even bear to look at them.
But in the Japanese spirit there is the ability to accept whatever might happen, and adjust to it without holding a grudge. So, people got to work trying to rebuild the country as quickly as they could. The people came together with one heart and one mind, and worked hard, and finally they found the power to rise above what had happened.
I went to a private school called Gakushûin. Originally, it was a school for members of the imperial family and Japan’s nobility, but that is no longer the case, and anyone who wants to can take the school’s entrance examination. My husband, my husband’s father, and my sister also went to Gakushûin. That was the kind of world I grew up in.
When I turned eighteen, my father wanted to take me to my family’s homeland, Okinawa. So, we went to Okinawa together. My spiritual mentor, the philosopher Masahisa Goi, didn’t want me to go, but I decided to go in order to please my father. While we were there we visited the Himeyuri monument, built in memory of the girls and women who became army nurses during the Battle of Okinawa.
The Battle of Okinawa was Japan’s first land battle on Okinawan soil in World War II, and it was expected that many people would lose their lives. Seventeen-year-old boys went out to fight, and a group of high school girls and teachers formed a nursing unit. Most of them died during the fighting, and when the war had ended, a rumor was going around that Okinawan girls would be raped by the conquering forces. Because of this rumor, many of the girls who had survived the war committed suicide to avoid being raped, jumping off the cliff that was near the present-day monument.
When I visited this monument with my father, all of a sudden my feet, my hands, and my whole body became stiff, and I couldn’t move a muscle. Then I lost consciousness and fell to the ground. My father took me to a Western medical facility for an examination, and there my symptoms were diagnosed as a brain tumor. However, as I later learned, the source of my ailment was not a physical one.
When I suddenly fell ill at the Himeyuri monument, I didn’t know what had happened, but in the months that followed I came to understand it. I learned that in that region there was a dense field of thought-energy created by the anguished emotions of many people who had died in Okinawa. When I arrived, that mass of energy suddenly rushed toward me and congregated around me. I was constricted by the enormous force of this energy field, and my body became rigid. Even after I returned to Tokyo, my illness continued. I could not hold down any food, and I had seizures every day. I gradually lost my eyesight, and then my hearing. I didn’t know how to alleviate this condition on my own.
On the recommendation of doctors, my father wanted me to have surgery to remove the brain tumor. However, the chances for success with this kind of surgery were extremely poor, and I was unwilling to do it.
Fortunately, at the age of sixteen, I had met Masahisa Goi through my mother and a friend of the family, and I respected and trusted him very much. In Japan, people who give guidance to others are called sensei, which means “teacher,” and all of us called him Goi Sensei. After coming back to Tokyo from Okinawa, as soon as I was able to, I went to see Goi Sensei, and he explained that my ailment was not rooted in a physical cause. He told me not to worry, and said that he would help me to get better by praying for world peace with me. Thanks to Goi Sensei’s healing love and world-peace prayers, the field of anguished thought-energy that constricted me was gradually purified and harmonized, and in time it completely transformed into a field of gratitude and bright light.
During the height of my illness, as my eyesight and my hearing were receding, my spiritual awareness was growing more and more clear. Although I could not see with my physical eyes, I could sense the presence of things in my room, and my consciousness traveled back and forth between the spiritual and the physical realms.
One day, as I was lying in my bed, I had the pleasant sensation of feeling the life energy gently ebbing out of my body through my toes and fingertips. With joyful anticipation I thought to myself, Oh, so this is what death is!
Feeling happy and comfortable, I looked up through my window at the Sun. Although I could not see with my physical eyes, I could spiritually perceive where the window was, and how the sunlight was flooding through it into the room. Enchanted by the Sun’s radiance, my soul cried out, Hello, Sun! How beautiful you are! The Sun came closer and closer until it merged with my body, and I was wholly at one with the Sun. My heart grew lighter as I naturally ascended to a higher, more spiritual dimension.
I then experienced a warm reunion with the enlightened beings who were (and still are) constantly guiding and protecting me from moment to moment. I was able to confirm that each and every human being is similarly guided and protected by such beings, who love us even more than our earthly parents do. I learned from these divine beings that I had been given new tasks to carry out on Earth, and would be returning here to live a while longer.
And so, I received new energy from the cosmic source and returned to the material plane. After that I gradually regained my hearing, my eyesight, and all my other physical functions. However, I still retained the spiritual perceptions that developed during the time when I had lost my eyesight and my hearing.
Overcoming the Fear of Death. Based on my own experience, I would like everyone to know that death is not something to be afraid of. I have observed many people make the transition known as death, and I have felt their happiness as they ascended to a higher dimension. This includes my mother, who passed away at the age of ninety-seven.
At the instant of death, even if the physical circumstances are violent, the soul doesn’t experience any pain because it has left the physical body. The people who remain on the physical plane may feel tremendous pity for them, but those who have departed are not in pain at all, because their soul is not present in the body.
The physical body could be compared to an outer garment that we wear while we live in the material dimension. While we live in this world we take care of this garment, but when our work here is finished we leave it behind. Even if the garment is in shreds, we ourselves do not feel any pain.
Everyone, no matter who it is—even a terrorist or a convict on death row—is taken to a light-filled world after death. However, if they feel uncomfortable amidst this brilliant light, they will descend of their own accord to a lower dimensional plane where they can gain further experiences.
When people die with a strong sense of guilt or unfulfillment, they almost always choose to return again to a physical environment where they can gain the experiences they wish for. On the other hand, when people die with a feeling of gratitude and contentment they do not find it necessary to experience another lifetime in the physical realm.
In order to have a truly happy life after death, it will be most helpful for us to deeply love, respect, and forgive ourselves now, while we still live in the physical world. The life that we are living now is extremely precious and valuable. While we live on the physical plane, we each have a unique opportunity and mission to burnish our existence and spread love and gratitude to all people, animals, plants, minerals, our planet, and the universe as a whole. And to carry out this mission, it will be important for us to free ourselves from our fear of death.
Why did we begin to fear death in the first place? It is because we forgot our essential identity and consciousness, and started to think that we are material beings that are separate from one another. We then tried to gain security by snatching things away from each other.
Because we still have this fear of death, we human beings became obsessed with illness and became dependent on doctors, and go to extreme lengths trying to prolong our physical lifetime. But when we overcome our fear of death, we carry out our work on Earth with a joyful, happy feeling.
Two States of Consciousness. How can each of us be deeply and truly happy? I believe this can happen only when we have discovered our essential identity and true nature as a human being.
As all the great spiritual founders have known, the mind (consciousness) of the great divine universe spans out endlessly within each human being. This deep, pure, immutable cosmic consciousness is not simply a scientific theory or a spiritual teaching. It is reality. It is something that each individual can know, feel, and experience for herself.
In addition to our vast, unwavering cosmic consciousness, within each individual there is another conscious state—one that is constantly shifting and changing. This shifting consciousness is filled with the various hopes, desires, fears, anxieties, habits, and beliefs that we hold in our mind from day to day. And as we live our daily lives, it goes on changing and evolving according to the thoughts we think and the decisions we make from one moment to the next.
Although both these conscious states exist simultaneously within us, most of us give priority to the one that keeps shifting and changing—the one that is concerned with daily happenings, things, and events. Each individual’s deep, cosmic consciousness has been ignored and overlooked, and most of us have convinced ourselves that it does not even exist.
How did it happen that we each lost touch with the deep dimension of our cosmic consciousness? How could we have forgotten the profound, ultimate reality that is the essence of our being?
I have intuitively learned that in the far distant past—long before human societies appeared on Earth—our individual lives emerged as part of a great cosmic impetus for creating and developing the universe. In those times, our bodies were composed of subtle, spiritual vibrations that were unfettered by time and space. We could freely move back and forth between the material and the spiritual planes, and could easily leap from one place to another simply by thinking of it. We didn’t need food to survive, and could instantly create whatever we wished for. However, as we continued to make innovations in the material dimension, we gradually assimilated with it and turned all our attention to enjoying material things.
As our thoughts became more and more materialistic, our bodies took on a more material character, and we began to experience hunger and other physical needs. Our original spirit of joyful cooperation gradually degenerated into competitiveness and struggle. Emotions like anger and resentment took shape. And rather than letting those emotions naturally dissipate and vanish, we instead clung to them, fueled them with our energy, and caused them to multiply.
From that time forward, the creative process started to develop in a negative direction. As more and more negative power built up, we began harming, and even killing, one another. Some voices called for harmony, but one by one those voices were silenced, and in the end almost everyone forgot their original, cosmic consciousness. People identified themselves as physical beings and nothing more.
This trend still continues today. Just about everyone takes a materialistic view of life. Individuals and groups struggle fiercely to defeat others and gain more and more wealth, more and more land, more and more possessions for themselves. In reality, within our cosmic consciousness we each hold a source of wealth and power far greater than anything in the material dimension. Yet we continue to ignore these unlimited resources and seek instead to exploit other people, animals, plants, minerals, and all the precious blessings of nature.
When We Look Outside Ourselves for Solutions. As a result, today’s world is plagued with divisiveness and conflict, famines and epidemics, environmental destruction, and the plight of refugees. Not knowing how to cope, people feel uneasy and confused. We do not even notice that from moment to moment, we are forging our conditions with the co-creative power of our thoughts and consciousness.
And so, when something goes wrong in the world, we each look outside ourselves to discover who is at fault. This is the mind-set of each individual’s shifting consciousness. There always has to be a culprit. There always has to be an enemy. There always has to be someone to blame.
Once and for all, I would like to clearly state that none of the ills that afflict ourselves and the earth is created by others, nor does it originate outside us. Rather, it stems from the feelings of complaint, intolerance, vanity, cruelty, and greed that hide in each human heart. It is our insatiable desire for wealth, power, and supremacy—the bottomless craving to obtain more and more—that numbs our awareness and blinds us to the sacred reality within us.
Not knowing this, we continue to look around for the source of the world’s problems. We say things like, “The problem lies with this or that religion, this or that culture, this or that country, this or that leader, this or that organization, or this or that movement.” We say, “The problem is discrimination; the problem is prejudice; the problem is oppression,” as if those conditions had an independent power of their own. And at the same time, we look around us for someone or something that will come to the rescue and deliver the world from its evils.
We always want to believe that some outside power—a leader, a saint, a science, a religion, or a system—can remedy our problems. We are ready to believe in almost any kind of power except one—the power of our own profound, harmonious, sacred cosmic consciousness.
Yet until each individual human being steps forward and takes responsibility for his or her own consciousness, this world will never get better. If we go on and on entrusting the human future to a small number of experts and government leaders, a bright future will never take shape.
Asking Ourselves Questions. Whatever we may be seeking, the answer absolutely lies within our cosmic consciousness. To bring forth the answers we are looking for, all we need to do is to keep earnestly knocking at the door of our deep inner mind.
First and foremost, I think we need to ask ourselves some fundamental questions about ourselves, questions like:
What is a human being?
Why am I here?
What is my purpose in this world?
What can I do to help?
What should I be doing now, at this moment?
As more and more individuals keep asking themselves questions like these, a mass of positive energy will gain momentum, and positive changes will take place within us and around us.
Let me stress how important it is for each individual to live with vitality and courage. One big stumbling block is the belief that conscientious people have to dwell on the mistakes they made in the past. Why do you think selfish, greedy people are so often successful in getting their way? It is because they focus all their energy on their egocentric desires, and rush full speed ahead toward realizing those aims without wasting energy on regretting their mistakes. Meanwhile, conscientious people consume tremendous energy regretting their past errors and trying to forgive themselves for them.
There is no doubt that self-reflection is valuable and necessary. However, if we keep blaming and judging ourselves again and again for the same errors, we will severely inhibit our power of accomplishment. Therefore, after recognizing their errors one time, I urge all peace-loving people to stop dwelling on the past and pour themselves heart and soul into making the most of the present moment.
At this very moment, with the creative power of our consciousness, each individual human being is exerting an influence on the universe and on the Earth’s future. Each one of us is amassing the inheritance that will be passed along to our children and our children’s children.
By now it should be clear to everyone that the Earth is in a moment of crisis. We can no longer afford to create further tragedies, further wars, further disasters, and further environmental destruction. Instead, one by one, let us each make up our mind to live with pride and courage as we reconnect with the deep dimension of our sacred, cosmic consciousness.
Experimental parapsychologist, educator
About a decade ago I learned a lesson that radically transformed my consciousness. The lesson can be summarized simply:
If it walks and talks like The Source, it probably is The Source.
How did I learn this lesson? Through a multi-witnessed, statistically improbable, real-life experience involving ducks, apparently orchestrated by The Source itself. Reconnecting to The Source gives me the opportunity to honor this life-altering duck-wisdom lesson and share it with you.
My upbringing did not encourage an openness to spiritual experiences. I was raised in a Reform Jewish, essentially atheist home where science, mathematics, music, and truth-seeking were encouraged. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to receive a strong science education from Cornell University (undergraduate) and Harvard University (graduate). I began college as an electrical engineering student, graduating pre-med with a major in psychology and minor in chemistry. My MA was in clinical psychology, my PhD focused on psychophysiology and personality.
My take to materialist philosophy was like a duck to water, seemingly effortless and natural. I treated concepts like Source and Spirit like I treated Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: lovely childish, superstitious, and fallacious ideas not befitting a twentieth-century educated person.
When I was offered a tenured faculty position in the Department of Psychology at Yale University at the age of thirty-two, I accepted the materialist science conclusion that the brain created mind and consciousness and that the existence of a greater spiritual reality was a myth, case closed.
However, midway through my time as a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale and director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center, my mind was challenged by emerging scientific theory and evidence that deeply questioned my materialist assumptions and shook me to my core.
As I discuss in my 2006 book The G.O.D. Experiments: How Science Is Discovering God in Everything, Including Us, contemporary findings in quantum physics and astrophysics, when integrated with general systems theory, challenge seriously—and some would say definitively—the idea that the universe emerged by chance alone. G.O.D. stands for “Guiding Organizing Designing” process; the acronym implies the existence of a universal, holographic intelligence/mind/consciousness.
It is a curiosity—and possibly a synchronicity—that:
1. It was the general systems writings of Erwin Laszlo in particular, and some of his distinguished peers (e.g., Ludwig von Bertalanffy and James G. Miller) that inspired my awakening to The Source,
2. Laszlo happened to precede me at Yale, and
3. Laszlo and I would, seemingly independently (we did not know each other at the time), end up with the same book agent.
I mention Jung’s concept of synchronicity here because it was my personal discovery of the statistical improbability of the presence of too many “11s” in my life at Yale (literally more than eleven of them) in the early 1980s, coupled with my attempt to make sense of their presence and organization in light of general systems principles, that my mind was opened to the possibility that it was theoretically possible for people to consciously connect to The Source. We will return to synchronicity and its relationship to The Source later in this chapter.
I should explain that as a scientist, replicated evidence is essential for me to hold a belief and draw a conclusion. It has been my experience that basic methods of science can be practically applied to the laboratories of our personal lives. In my 2011 book The Sacred Promise: How Science Is Discovering Spirit’s Collaboration with Us in Our Daily Lives, I termed this evidence-based process “self-science.”
I should also explain that although my given middle name is Edward, my adopted middle name is “If.”
I reasoned that:
1. If general systems exist at all levels in the universe, from subatomic, micro levels to supra macro clusters of galaxies levels, and
2. If everything is connected (and hence information is shared) within and between levels as general systems theory predicts, and
3. If a universal intelligent Source exists, then
4. A universal intelligent Source would have access to information about everything within it, and that includes us. As micro systems can communicate with macro systems, this reasoning predicts that we can communicate with The Source.
However, being trained in clinical psychology and psychiatry in the 1960s, I was taught that people who believed they were communicating with a greater spiritual realm were, by definition, delusional, and that this was a symptom of psychosis. Only recently have some psychiatrists recognized that connecting with a greater mind is not necessarily a sign of pathology; it can sometimes be a sign of health.
An exemplar is Bernard Beitman and his 2016 book Connecting the Coincidence: The New Science for Using Synchronicity and Serendipity in Your Life. As I explain in The G.O.D. Experiments, a set of highly improbable events inspired me to take the plunge and perform a secret “self-science” experiment.
Very briefly, one night I decided to test the “Connect with The Source” hypothesis by “asking the universe a question.” Universe was the nonreligious word I used for a higher power, Great Spirit, or God. I decided to “speak to the universe” in my head and introduce myself (although no introduction was probably necessary).
I explained how the integration of quantum field physics and general systems theory led me to the conclusion that it should be possible to interact with The Source. However, I explained that I despised the word God because it triggered my childhood images of a vengeful white man with a beard and cane who spread plagues on people (e.g., the Passover story), and this historical archaic image was impairing my ability to explore and potentially accept the general systems Source hypothesis.
I then asked a seemingly foolish question: “Could you give me another name for God?”
Immediately, without a moment’s hesitation or reflection, I heard in my head the unexpected name Sam.
I said to myself, “Either this is my creative unconsciousness, or this is a Woody Allen movie.”
Then, for some reason, I got out of bed, went into my study, opened my old Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and looked up the name Sam. Sam is short for Samuel. When I read the root of the word Samuel, my jaw dropped to the floor.
The dictionary explained that the name Samuel comes from the Hebrew Shemu’el. Since I did not know Hebrew, this was a surprise to me.
However, the mind-boggling surprise was the name’s root meaning. According to this dictionary, Shemu’el literally means “the name of God” (shem means “name,” el means “God”).
How could the highly improbable and extremely meaningful name “Sam” have popped into my mind at that precise moment?
Being a skeptical scientist, I considered more than eleven alternative explanations. For example, I considered whether the root meaning of Samuel was common knowledge. I conducted an informal survey of approximately fifty students and staff at Yale. (I discovered only one person knew the root meaning of Samuel. This person happened to be a graduate student in the Department of Psychology; he was well trained in the Talmud, and his father was a distinguished rabbi in Toronto.)
I considered the question of how frequently the name Sam would come up if I asked people spontaneously to give me another name for God. (I performed this experiment with approximately fifty people. No one said Sam.)
I considered whether the reason I heard the name Sam was because I had a fondness for the name Sam. (I had no friends or family named Sam, nor had any favorite characters named Sam.)
I considered whether I had any favorite songs that featured the name Sam. (I only knew one song that had one sentence that mentioned the name Sam.)
And I carefully considered the possibility that maybe the highly improbable association between:
1. The question, “Could you give me another name for God?”
2. The name that popped into my head (“Sam”), and
3. The root meaning of the name Samuel in Hebrew (“the name of God”) had simply occurred by chance.
However, there was one other possibility that frankly terrified me. That hypothesis was “Be careful what you ask for.”
What I had done was intentionally ask a question of the universe: (1) in a relaxed, meditative-like state, and (2) from the bottom of my heart—and now I would say “soul,” and (3) I had received an answer that could be verified. I underscore “an answer that could be verified.”
As you can probably imagine, I seriously questioned if I was losing my mind, or if instead I was “finding my soul.” Fearing that the latter might be true (for the former, I had the expertise and professional colleagues to deal with), I did not dare repeat this self-science experiment—i.e., ask another question of the universe—for more than decade, and I kept the evidential experience secret.
However, after moving to the University of Arizona, various events led me to resume my self-science experiments of asking the universe questions and determining if verifiable information would be received. It was only after completing numerous “asking questions/verification” self-science experiments that I was forced by the accumulating evidence to accept the general systems–Source connection theory. The interested reader can find two more early evidential instances in The G.O.D. Experiments.
The specific “If it walks and talks like The Source, it probably is The Source” lesson occurred after The G.O.D. Experiments was published. I confessed this duck-wisdom lesson in my book Super Synchronicity: Where Science and Spirit Meet, published in 2017. Super Synchronicity was originally titled Synchronicity and the One Mind, but we (the editor, publisher, and me) felt that featuring The Source conclusion in the title might be too controversial for some readers. The term One Mind was inspired by Larry Dossey’s seminal 2013 book One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters.
I define a “supersynchronicity”—also termed a type III synchronicity—as a set of six or more connected serial coincidences that occur in a relatively concentrated time period. Scientists often connect the prefix “super” with concepts such as supercomputers, superconductivity, and superclusters of galaxies. However, the words were kept separate in the book’s title for ease of understanding.
Supersynchroncities can be quite mind boggling and unsettling. My original eleven-plus set of synchronicities involving the number 11 were so hard to believe that my editor and coauthor recommended I not include that chapter in The G.O.D. Experiments. We reached a compromise, and I included it as appendix C (in the hardcover, published in 2006). I vowed that someday the elevens would be honored appropriately, and eleven years later, they were featured as chapter 2 in Super Synchronicity (coincidentally published in 2017).
Having a proclivity for mathematics, this talent probably prepared me to make this kind of personal discovery. To give you a better understanding for the process, as well honor the experience, I list the first six examples here.
1. My office number was 1A (A is the first letter of the alphabet, hence 1A can be restated as 11).
2. The Yale Department of Psychology was located on a street with a sign that read “Kirkland Ave” (only 11 letters were printed on the sign).
3. I regularly took exit 56 (5 + 6 = 11) off the Connecticut Turnpike to go home.
4. Connecticut has 11 letters.
5. Exit 56 took me to Route 1A (like my office number), a beautiful stretch of country road.
6. Route 1A took me to my home, whose street number was 326 (3 + 2 + 6 = 11).
Rereading this list, the supersynchronicity pattern still strikes me as silly, at least superficially (no pun intended). Even though a conservative estimate of the conditional probability of the complete suite of number 11 coincidences occurring by chance was less than 1E+9 (i.e., 1 in a billion), it is easy to interpret a list of numbers related to the number 11 as unimportant and meaningless, especially to those of us who are not well versed in the history of numbers.
As explained in my book Super Synchronicity, I would later learn that the number 11 has a deep historical connection to the concept of a universal mind. For example, in the mystical writings of the Kabbalah, the number 11 is considered to be a “master” number related to Kabbalists’ ideas about God.
Meanwhile, it turned out that the complete suite of more than eleven curious connections to the number 11 in my life included certain personally meaningful coincidences, including the fact that I happened to be born on June 14, 1944. Though it may not be obvious, there is a relatively simple and standardized (i.e., fixed) procedure for reducing numbers to determine whether they add up to eleven (or any other number, for that matter).
June happens to be the sixth month of the year: 6 + 1 + 4 = 11. The year 1944 is 1 + 9 + 4 + 4 = 18, and 1 + 8 = 9. Therefore, the sum of June 14, 1944, becomes 11 + 9, and 1 + 1 + 9 = 11. Though on first reading, this process may seem arbitrary to you, it does follow a fixed set of simple mathematical rules.
Most of the chapters in Super Synchronicity provide a concise statement of a universal lesson taught by the specific super synchronicity. In the case of chapter 2, this universal lesson is “follow the data that is way beyond chance.” Chapter 9 is titled “Humorous Synchronicities with Ducks,” and its lesson is “If it walks and talks like the One Mind, it probably is.” The chapter presents nineteen duck synchronicities that occurred during a six-day period. Yes, you read that correctly.
Here is how I began chapter 9:
Does the Universe have a sense of humor?
And if the One Mind does, how would we know?
Yes, the unfolding synchronicities were sometimes exciting and even fun, but they were more often challenging and downright stressful at times.
When I would feel stressed by the emerging synchronicities, I would take solace in remembering the history of quantum physics, as well as other areas of mathematics and science that revealed ideas that seemed beyond understanding. Comforting examples in mathematics and science included the incomprehensible quantity of infinity times infinity (there is a field of mathematics that focuses on infinity), and the unknowable existence of physical matter that can only be inferred indirectly (called dark matter).
I suddenly realized that there was a complex cosmic comedy unfolding that was beyond anything I could have guessed or imagined.
The following is a summary listing of the nineteen events. I encourage you to try to imagine how you would feel if you had been in my shoes experiencing these nineteen events unfolding over a six-day period. To help you appreciate the combined astronomical improbability of this sequence of events, I invite to consider how often they appear in your life.
DATE |
DUCK EVENT |
#1. Sunday morning, February 17 |
I received an email about a four-legged duck from the evolutionary psychology program at the University of Arizona. Have you ever seen a four-legged duck? |
#2. Sunday evening, February 17 |
I learned that Mr. J. (a man I just met) had a family crest with a “duck with an arrow in a heart.” Do you know anyone who has a family crest with a duck? |
#3. Monday morning, February 18 |
I read in my novel the sentence “First, you want to get all your ducks in a row.” How often do you come upon these words in a book you are reading? |
#4. Monday evening, February 18 |
Mr. J. showed me two family crests, the second with three ducks in a row. Have you ever seen a family crest with three ducks in a row? |
#5. Tuesday afternoon, February 19 |
I reached the scheduled point in my lecture where I describe the HBO special Life Afterlife and Lucky Duck Productions, who produced the show. How often do you give a lecture and mention ducks? (In those days, I did so once a year, coincidentally on that date.) |
#6. Tuesday afternoon, February 19 |
A student handed me a yellow plastic duck she had in her pocket. How often do you meet someone who has a yellow plastic duck in her pocket? |
#7. Tuesday afternoon, February 19 |
A student told me his four-year-old daughter had arranged three ducks in a row that morning. Have you ever been told a story where someone’s child arranged three ducks in a row? (FYI, his daughter had never done this before.) |
#8. Tuesday afternoon, February 19 |
A student told me about her son’s nickname being “Duck” and about rediscovering her duck teapot. Do you have any acquaintances whose nickname is “Duck,” and how often do you hear about someone rediscovering a duck teapot that has been missing for years? |
#9. Tuesday evening, February 19 |
In a channeling, an intuitive brought up the phrase “If it walks like a duck…” How often have you heard (or heard of) a medium or channel saying the phrase, “If it walks like a duck…”? |
#10. Tuesday evening, February 19 |
Martha shared her dream about Groucho Marx, and Betty told us she was reading Duck Soup. How often do you hear about someone dreaming about Groucho Marx, and then another person sharing that she is reading the book Duck Soup (or any book with “duck” in the title)? |
#11. Tuesday evening, February 19 |
The intuitive told us about her pet duck, Daisy, and that night I read about a character named Daisy in my novel. How often do you hear of a pet duck Daisy and read about Daisy in a book or article? |
#12. Tuesday evening, February 19 |
Rhonda shared her transformative story of her and her mother healing a baby duck. Do you know anyone, or have you ever heard a story, of someone healing a baby duck? |
#13. Wednesday lunch, February 20 |
Dr. K. told me that Dr. D. lives on “Three Ducks Lane” (named in Spanish). Have you ever been told that someone lives on Three Ducks Lane, or any “Duck” street? |
#14. Wednesday night, February 20 |
Just before my lecture, I bumped into Dr. D. and he confirmed his street was named “Three Ducks Lane.” Have you ever bumped into anyone who lives on a street with the word duck? |
#15. Wednesday night, February 20 |
Charles and Laurie F. called and told Rhonda about Honk! (a musical based on the story of the Ugly Duckling). How often do you hear about someone performing a song about a duck? |
#16. Thursday evening, February 21 |
Dr. K. saw Tucson “Adopt a Duck” month on TV. How often do you see a TV commercial for “Adopt a Duck” month? |
#17. Friday morning, February 22 |
I was on Mary Occhino’s SiriusXM radio show, where she mentioned a “water off a duck’s back” story. How often do you spontaneously hear a story based on “water off a duck’s back”? |
#18. Friday morning, February 22 |
The caller on the phone, PG, mentioned her grandfather’s pet duck. How many people do you know who have a pet duck? (This may be the most probable duck instance in this list of improbable duck-related events in this series.) |
#19. Friday morning, February 22 |
Mr. J. came over, received an “Adopt a Duck” printout, and shared his town’s name, “Susy Duck.” How many towns do you know of that have “duck” in the name? |
By the time I had experienced event #8, I was thoroughly confused. After event #9 occurred and I realized the possible significance of the channeler’s suggestion, I asked the universe if it would be willing to provide additional evidence or “signs” that the One Mind or “Higher Intelligence” was participating in a nonrandom process involving many different people. To my amazement, this request was followed by events #10 through 19. Again, an instance of “Be careful about what you ask for.”
After considering this superset of serial events and their potential significance, I ended the chapter with these words:
Let’s assume for the moment that if it walks and talks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
Let’s assume that this degree of type III duck synchronicity—nineteen in a six-day period—is so far beyond chance that we can infer that some sort of a higher intelligence is required to orchestrate such a sequence of synchronicities.
Let’s further assume that the hypothesized One Mind orchestrating these events might be trying to get a message across, one that is both serious and playful.
Could the message be that it was time for us to symbolically “walk like a duck” concerning synchronicities and the reality of the One Mind?
If we can apply the “walks like a duck” metaphor to evidence concerning survival of consciousness, why can’t we apply the “walks like a duck” metaphor to evidence concerning the existence of the One Mind itself?
Since my Yale days, I have experienced hundreds of type III supersynchronicities involving many hundreds of people. At some point one “gives in” to the evidence and concludes that a conscious, dynamic, interactive Source exists in everything, including us. And that this Source has a playful side.
Such personal experiences, combined with advances in science-spanning quantum physics, astrophysics, and metaphysics, has led to the birthing of what some of us term “postmaterial” sciences. (The interested reader is encouraged to visit www.AAPSglobal.com to learn about the new Academy for the Advancement for Postmaterialist Sciences and the implications of this emerging scientific revolution for the reconnection of science and spirituality and humanity’s reconnection to The Source.) Carl Sagan, the distinguished astrophysicist and skeptic, termed this kind of transformation “the heart of science”:
When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science.
Reconnecting to The Source, both experimentally and experientially, may reflect the highest example of the heart of science and its integration with spirituality.
One wonders, does The Source appreciate the heart of science? Is The Source possibly the first scientist? The evidence from supersynchronicity suggests the answer is yes.
Systems scientist, former concert pianist
As I was putting the finishing touches to this book, a thought occurred to me that I could not resist putting into practice. Modesty aside, I, too, had had spontaneous “spiritual” experiences and those should be recounted as well. These experiences were of a special kind, having to do with the experience of performing music. They began in my mid-twenties and continued to unfold over nearly a decade.
It was in 1958 that with my young wife, Carita Marjorie, I moved from the countryside into the city of Munich in anticipation of the birth of our first child, Christopher. We lived in Munich for a few years, and had a remarkable experience when Christopher was in his second year. We went on a New Year’s holiday to the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. At midnight, when we were looking at the shimmering beauty of the moonlit Alps, a resolve came into my mind: Take seriously the ever more insistently appearing questions I have been asking lately about myself, my life, and the world. These questions may have been planted in my mind by my philosopher uncle during our regular walks in the Budapest city park from the time I was nine or ten.
As we watched the moonlit snowscape in front of us and heard the bells ringing midnight and heralding the beginning of a new year, these questions cropped up. I decided to do something about them: as of this new year, I was to read systematically, visit lectures at the university, and commit my thoughts to paper—not for any purpose other than for my own reference.
When I embarked on the career of an international concert pianist, such questions were overshadowed by the practical concerns of an active musician. But they did not disappear from my mind. Later on, between travels in Europe and America, I adopted a daily routine. After breakfast, I would sit down at the beautiful old Bechstein concert grand I discovered a few years beforehand, and begin to play. On my right was a small desk where I would sit when writing letters to my parents and friends. On the desk was a small Remington, an old-fashioned portable typewriter. My routine consisted of playing the piano and then moving to the desk and typing what came to mind.
This continued for about five years. Then, in 1966, responding to the invitation of the head of the philosophy department at Yale University, I moved to New Haven and took up residence at Yale’s Silliman College. I had no piano in my room, nor did I have time to play. The established routine had to be discontinued. Until then, I now realize, every basic idea I ever had in my life was born in the music context. It was not born purposively—I did not set about researching any particular subject or idea. I had no purpose or aspiration for thinking and writing. I just played the piano, then moved over and began to type.
While I was playing the piano I was free-associating, daydreaming. Not about people, things, and events, but about ideas. About the ideas that would respond to the questions that had surfaced in my mind. I filled page after page and took the notebooks along on my travels so I could continue writing in them. I seldom read what I wrote. It was enough that I committed my ideas to paper.
I only began to read my notes when a gentleman came to see me after a concert in the Diligentia concert hall in The Hague. He talked to me about the same questions that occupied my own mind. Afterward he asked if I took any notes. He borrowed my notebooks and showed up the following morning, announcing that he would publish them. It turned out that he was the philosophy editor of the renowned Dutch publishing house Martinus Nijhoff.
After about a year of polishing and organizing my material, the editor did publish them, and my first book was born: Essential Society: An Ontological Reconstruction (1963). When friends and colleagues asked on what that book was based, I named the works of Alfred North Whitehead and other process philosophers. True, their works helped me organize my ideas, but my book was not based on theirs. It was not “based” on any book or theory. Its contents had come to me while I was playing the piano. I was ashamed to admit such lack of true scholarship.
Today, some ninety published books and four hundred or more papers, articles, and lecture notes later, I recognize that everything I had ever seriously contemplated was born during the time I was free-associating while playing the piano. My subsequent ideas and theories are elaborations, expansions—footnotes, if you like—to these initial insights.
The nature of my insights can be described. They do not state separate facts—data resulting from my or other people’s research. They state the outcome of a search for wholeness, completeness, and encompassing harmony in science and in the world. From where did the motivation for this search come? It did not come from my uncle, who apart from his love for music, was a nonintuitive, deeply skeptical person (his favorite philosopher was Schopenhauer, a misogynist and skeptic). My uncle’s worldview was pessimistic enough to prevent him from having children—no child merits, he said, being brought into this miserable world.
The questions that my responses addressed came from him, but not the answers. The answers, I believe, came from Mozart and Schubert, Bartók and Brahms, and the Indian Ragas and Tibetan chants that I explored with growing fascination. The wholeness, completeness, and harmony in music left a deep impression on my consciousness. It motivated my search for wholeness and harmony in the world. I could not and would not have left the life of a concert pianist if I would not have found elements of wholeness and harmony in nature and love in relations among people.
I am still searching for wholeness and harmony in everything I encounter. Everything I think of, speak about, and write reflects this search. Finding wholeness and harmony, and the love and the sense of belonging that lead to them makes me fulfilled.
I usually end my writings with the same questions with which I begin them, coming full circle, completed and enriched by the ideas that I have come across. This is true of this book as well: the last sentence of the conclusions takes us back to the first sentence of the introduction. This was not consciously intended. It just came about.
In the “new paradigm in science,” the quantum view of the world, I find order, wholeness, and harmony. This, I believe, is more than just imagination: it is rudimentary but significant reflection of the order, coherence, and harmony displayed by the universe.
Lawrence Bloom was voted by SALT magazine as being among the top twenty-five most Conscious Global Leaders, and in 2016 received an award at the UN from the Humanitarian Innovation Forum for Conscious Leadership. Bloom is Secretary General of the Be Earth Foundation, a UN Inter Governmental Organisation, Chair of Be Energy a green energy company specializing in the conversion of waste and plantation timber to sustainable energy projects, and Co Founder and Director of Dakia Global Enterprise LLC, a Holding Company creating significant hotel subsidiary and other initiatives.
Darla Boone is Founder, Executive Producer & Director of Boone Media International. For the past nine years she has been producing PBS Television shows on healing and society, and the new paradigm in science. She has entered on the paths of media in all their forms along with marketing, promotion, and sales. She is committed to explore and present through television deeper levels of knowledge and new findings in science for the benefit of humanity.
Nicolya Christi is a born mystic, visionary, and futurist. Her first book, 2012: A Clarion Call: Your Soul’s Purpose in Conscious Evolution was placed in the top ten of Spring 2011 book reviews by Publishers Weekly. Her latest book is Contemporary Spirituality for an Evolving World: A Handbook for Conscious Evolution—From Personal to Global Transformation. Nicolya is the Founder of WorldShift Movement, relaunching in May 2020 as Worldshift Earth.
James O’Dea is contributor to multiple global humanitarian works in several fields. He is a former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Washington office director of Amnesty International, and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He has taught conscious peacebuilding to over a thousand students in thirty countries and conducted social healing dialogues in conflict zones around the world. He resides in Crestone, Colorado, renowned sanctuary for the world’s religions and spiritual traditions and home for numerous visionaries and ecologists.
Federico Faggin graduated in physics from the University of Padua, Italy, in 1965. He came to the US in 1968 working for Fairchild Semiconductor where he led the development of the MOS Silicon Gate Technology, a key process technology that was adopted worldwide and laid the foundation for nearly all contemporary integrated circuits. Working for Intel Corporation from 1970 to 1974, he designed many products, including the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004; and the Intel 8008, 8080, and 4040 microprocessors. Faggin is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the 1997 Kyoto Prize, the Lifetime Achievement Award by the European Patent Organization in Brussels, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama in 2010.
Adrienne Feller is a naturopath, aroma therapist, and beauty treatment instructor. Twenty years ago she founded Panarom, an aroma therapy Institute in Budapest that teaches how to heal with human touch and with essential oils, and teaches soft-birthing to midwives with the help of aroma therapy. She is the founder and head of the Adrienne Feller cosmetics brand and the co-author of Aromarenaissance and other books.
Guido Ferrari holds a degree in economics and social sciences at the University of Bern (Switzerland). He is a journalist and director, author of portraits, historical documentaries, and documentaries on spirituality. His fields of interest are spiritual research, in particular Buddhism and shamanism, the relationship between spirituality and science, studies on consciousness. His latest book is A long journey, a spiritual autobiography.
Jane Goodall is dedicated to the conservation of nature and working to inspire and empower young people to make this a better world for people, animals, and all living things. She began her landmark study of chimpanzee behavior in what is now Tanzania in July 1960. Her work at Gombe Stream became the foundation of primatological research and redefined the relationship between humans and animals. In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute, which continues the Gombe research and is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. In 1991, she founded Roots & Shoots with a group of Tanzanian students, an organization that is active today in more than fifty countries. Her honors include the French Legion of Honor, the Medal of Tanzania, and Japan’s Kyoto Prize. In 2002, she was appointed to serve as a United Nations Messenger of Peace and in 2003 she was named a Dame of the British Empire.
Jean Houston is a mystic, activist, and humanist. She grew up in show business: her father was a comedy writer for Bob Hope and other famous comedians, and her mother was a Shakespearean actor. Jean herself did some off-Broadway theater in her late teens and won a New York critics award. She went on to become a university professor, and cofounded several universities, serving as Chancellor of Meridian University. Currently she is exploring the outer reaches of inner space together with studies in quantum physics. She serves as Chair Person of the Palace, creating innovative concerts, lectures, and theater pieces to “lift the spirit of the human race.”
Barbara Marx Hubbard has been one of the originators of the world view of conscious evolution. Born in 1929, she has been a teacher of thousands of students and the author of nine books, including two works inspired by the New Testament. A co-initiator of the SYNCON conferencing, she has developed a process for synergistic democracy in the United States and in the former Soviet Union. In 1984 her name was placed in nomination for the vice presidency of the United States, on the democratic ticket. An Honorary member of The Club of Budapest., she has served as co-chair of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and of the Center for Integral Wisdom and has co-founded Evolutionary Leaders, The World Future Society, and the Association for New Thought. She passed from this life in the summer of 2019.
Chris Laszlo is a nature enthusiast, distance runner, and professor of Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University (USA), where he researches and teaches flourishing enterprise management. He is author of Quantum Leadership (2019), Flourishing Enterprise (2014), Embedded Sustainability (2011), and Sustainable Value (2008), all from Stanford University Press. In 2012, he was elected a “Top 100 Thought Leader in Trustworthy Business Behavior” by Trust Across America. He was later elected a Fellow of the International Academy of Management and, in 2018, incoming Chairperson of the Academy of Management MSR Interest Group.
Lynne McTaggart, living on London, is an experimental psychologist and consciousness researcher, dedicated to the exploration of the effect of conscious intention on the living body as well as on consciousness. She is the award-winning author of seven books, including The Field, The Intention Experiment, and The Bond. Her latest book is The Power of Eight and she is the cofounder and editorial director of “What Doctors Don’t Tell You” and originator and architect of the Intention Experiments, a web-based “global laboratory.”
Frédérique Pichard is the founder of the Institute Dony in France, an organization working to help with the protection of the seas and oceans, and the cetaceans and Ambassador dolphins in particular, through research and communication between them, the scientific world, and likeminded teachers, therapists, artists, and children. Her background includes being a dancer, relaxologue working with guided creative visualizations, and a naturopathy trainer. In 2010, she published Dauphins Ambassadeurs, messagers de la Mer which has been adapted to the screen and was broadcast in July 2011 on the Arte television channel. She was filmed with the dolphin Dony interacting together for the French documentary called Le plus beau pays du monde, Opus 2. This documentary, first broadcast on Christmas Eve in 2016, has since been shown on TV in France and elsewhere.
Pierre Pradervand is a dedicated world citizen striving for a win-win world that works for all, including nature. A Swiss national raised in England and Switzerland, his studies in sociology took him to the universities of Geneva, Berne, and Ann Arbor and to a doctorate in sociology from the Sorbonne in Paris. He has returned to his home country where he has been writing and running workshops on personal development and spirituality. The prize he created for grass-roots rural women has been awarded to over 420 women in 140 countries.
Dean Radin is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Before joining the research staff at IONS in 2001, Radin worked at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, and SRI International. Throughout his career, his principal research interests have focused on the role of consciousness in the physical world and on perceptions unconstrained by the everyday notions of space and time. He is author or coauthor of hundreds of scientific and popular articles, four dozen book chapters, two technical books, and four popular and award-winning books translated into fifteen foreign languages.
Maria Sági is a social psychologist and natural healer who has developed the Information-Medicine method pioneered by Viennese scientist Erich Körbler into an encompassing means for diagnosing and treating human health problems, synthetizing the effect of information according to the meridian system. She has an active healing practice in Budapest. She is the author or coauthor of eleven books and about eighty articles and research papers on social and personality psychology, the psychology of music and art, as well as healing and information medicine.
Masami Saionji is a spiritual leader and peace visionary from Japan. Her life’s passion is to assist even just one more person in making the most of his or her life by encountering the limitless realm of their own consciousness. She heads several peace organizations, including the Goi Peace Foundation. The May Peace Prevail on Earth International and the worldwide Peace Pole initiative. In 2005 she introduced the internationally known Symphony of Peace Prayers. She is an honorary member of the Club of Budapest, a recipient of the Philosopher Saint Shree Dnyaneshwara World Peace Prize, the WON Award honoring distinguished women leaders, the Barbara Fields Humanitarian Peace Award, and the Luxembourg Peace Prize. Along with Ervin Laszlo and her husband Hiroo Saionji, she co-initiated the Fuji Declaration, followed by the Soul of WoMen movement.
Gary Schwartz received his PhD from Harvard University and served as professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University as well as Director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center and codirector of the Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic. He is the director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona. His interest initially focused on biofeedback research and health psychology, while his recent research is in the field of parapsychology and consciousness-based healthcare.