CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Tips for the Spiritual Hitchhiker

Sometimes I feel like a spiritual hitchhiker, thumbing a ride on an incredible highway. Through accidents that revealed a glimpse of glory, through struggles as a pastor, through meditating at ETC, and through the path of training at The Monroe Institute, I've been traveling toward the hidden dimensions of life—opening ever more to the radiance that lives within every aspect of creation. Though I often fail to take notice, still the spirit beckons me into an ever-deepening mystery. A world that once seemed impossibly diffìcult, even depressing, has taken on the resonance of joy.

An indescribable richness awaits each of us. Yet it is not something we can attain by a frantic search for security. It doesn't lie in distant and exotic lands. It's as close as your next thought. That thought requires a conscious decision to turn away from fear—away from viewing the world as a dangerous place that we must hammer into submission.

It means letting go of our preconceptions about what should be, so we can embrace the wonder of our next breath and realize, in that breath, the magnificence of our own creation—which extends beyond the physical world and touches dimensions beyond imagination.

Imagine for a moment what it would be like to know that you were more than your physical body. Daily interactions with nonphysical dimensions would open up unimagined possibilities. It would mean being in touch with an inexhaustible creativity as you begin to move in concert with your deepest passion and ultimate purpose.

The limits of this world would cease to be unyielding barriers of frustration and would instead become new opportunities for unexpected growth and insight. Life would lose its oppressive heaviness and begin to sparkle with the lightness of spirit.

TRUSTING OUR UNIQUENESS

The paths of spirit are boundless and varied. There are as many paths as there are seekers. The important thing is to find the way best suited to your own particular makeup and to honor it.

The journey begins by trusting and valuing our own uniqueness—especially when it comes to perceiving spirit.

We all have dominant modes of perception. Some are primarily visual. Others are primarily auditory. A few are highly sensitive to smell and taste.

Those who are sensitive to touch are the kinesthetics. They gather and process information through their bodies. My wife, Jacquie, is one of these. At first, I could not understand this way of experiencing, because visualization came so easily to me.

Because Jacquie found it hard to see internal mental pictures, I considered it my mission to help her realize that she was much better at it than she thought. I would ask her to do things like picture the living room in which she grew up. Because she was able to do these things over time, I was sure her “problem” was just that she undervalued her visual capacities.

It didn't occur to me until much later to honor her primary mode of perception—touch. Like a misguided evangelist, I was bent on trying to make her like me.

When Jacquie took her first program at The Monroe Institute, she at first was baffled. All around her the visual types were exploding like fireworks with reports of their thrilling journeys.

The only thing Jacquie saw was black. True, the black had subtle differences from time to time. Sometimes it was really black and other times it was just sort of black. But black wasn't what she had signed up for at all.

So, in utter frustration, she went into one of the meditation sessions shaking her fist at whoever was listening on the other side.

“Why can't I see?”; she screamed.

The answer she received was, “Because, first, you must learn how to feel.” Jacquie first had to honor who she was and how she was made. By doing that, she would know herself to be perfectly suited for receiving information in her own way.

When Jacquie came home and told me about the message, I suddenly understood Jesus’ saying that “the first shall be last and the last first.”¹¹⁸ We've been conditioned to dismiss touch and to value sight. In the process, we may have overlooked one of the most essential perceptual modes for the kingdom of heaven.

It's no accident that Jacquie embarked on a career as a massage therapist, with incredible abilities to sense the human body through her hands.

INGREDIENTS FOR THE JOURNEY

While no one can know your path but you, there are, however, a few ingredients I can offer as aids to sustain your inner journey.

First, give yourself the gift of time. So often we try to do everything on the run. A little voice inside our heads is convinced that if we can squeeze one more activity in, finish one more project, make one more phone call, it will put us ahead of the game, and then we'll be able to find some peace and quiet.

When I was a builder, I was always tempted to stretch the day in this manner. In the morning, I would plan out the things that needed to be accomplished in order for it to be classified as a productive day. If I failed to get them done—virtually all the time—I would try to make up for it by lengthening the day. The more I did this, the worse things seemed to go.

The old Amish saying, “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get,” is spiritually astute. The idea that I will ever get ahead by working harder or faster is just an illusion. When things go wrong, the universe is telling me that I'm missing a very important point. Seldom do I get the lesson, and seldom do I say thanks for it.

The truth is that moving into the states of awareness that Jesus called the kingdom of heaven takes time. The mind is resistant to slowing down, and so it will put up a strong fight if there's not enough to entertain it. It will continue looking for new dramas to nurture long after the exterior environment has calmed down.

The trick is to not give in to this desire for activity and to simply watch the number of maneuvers the mind will use to liven things up. Eventually, however, it will give up and allow the kingdom of heaven to peek through.

A CUMULATIVE EFFECT

In this regard, I've found that enrolling in a workshop that is four to seven days long will usually provide enough time and space for the world to open up. This length is necessary for what I call the cumulative efect. That is when small efforts become mutually reinforcing.

Years ago, Nikola Tesla, a genius who was fascinated with physics and electricity, among other things, began to experiment with this idea of the cumulative effect. He theorized that a small impact could be magnified exponentially if it were timed with the natural reverberations of a larger body. To test his idea, he invented a small contraption that delivered a hammer blow at specified intervals.

One day, while no one was watching, he affixed this unit to the side of a steel column of a building under construction. He adjusted the interval of the hammer blow to coincide with the echo of the reverberation within the steel skeleton.

The first blows had little impact. But as each successive blow was added to the previous reverberations, the entire structure began to sway and jerk to the point where it would have collapsed if Tesla hadn't turned off his little box.”¹¹⁹

The same effect can be achieved with a sustained period of spiritual practice. Normally when we engage in meditative practices, our efforts are sporadic at best. Even if we can manage to stay awake during the exercise, we're immediately called back by the demands of ordinary awareness.

The baseline of our consciousness is not altered significantly. If we're able to shift awareness at all, it's like the seed sown on the path of jesus’ parable. The birds come along and snatch it up right away. Each meditation, then, must stand on its own with no chance to be reinforced by other sessions.

Devoting extended time to moving progressively further into the mystical realm allows each exercise to build on the previous work. It's like laying a foundation upon which a whole new structure of awareness can be built. The reason many people are not able to enter altered states is because they don't allow enough time for this cumulative effect to take place.

GROUP SUPPORT

Second, find a group of people who can share your interest. Because our society is oriented in such a different direction, it's very challenging to maintain your focus on this work. One of the best ways to combat this problem is to create cells of like-minded people, so you can nurture one another in your spiritual quests. If enough of these cells are formed, eventually the dominant thrust of our collective psyche will shift. In fact, this is already happening at a rapid rate.

Having others along can also be much more fun. Years ago, we had a group of people who went on an annual skiing trip. It was something Jacquie and I looked forward to with great enthusiasm, because it was a time when we laughed almost continuously.

These were in my younger days, when I still had something to prove athletically. One time, I was a little dissatisfied with the slow pace and tame demeanor of our skiing group, so I decided to go off by myself to more challenging slopes. I planned on catching up with my friends later.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find them the rest of the day. It was the most miserable time skiing I've ever had.

What I found was that skiing, as much as I loved it, was nothing compared to the joy we experienced as a group. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.

A group will make you laugh. They will help you not to take yourself or your journey with such deadly earnestness. As many have said before, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” Close friends will not only encourage your spiritual journey, but they will also serve up a healthy portion of humility.

In a retreat setting, the combined efforts of the people gathered flow together to create a sacred space. Unified concentration produces a mutually reinforcing support for the work.

It's much like gathering helium-filled balloons. One by itself isn't enough to provide sufficient lift to take a person airborne. But if balloons are added one at a time, eventually there will be enough to pull even the heaviest individual aloft. In this way, a group can hold space for individual exploration.

CHANGE SELF, CHANGE WORLD

Many times we turn away from giving ourselves the gift of time to explore the inner world because we consider it to be self-indulgent. We have learned from an early age that truly good people are unselfìsh.

But viewing spiritual work in this manner overlooks the fact that we all contribute to the ethos in which we live. We're deeply connected at a soul level, far more than we know. When each of us embarks on the spiritual quest, the degree to which we alter our awareness not only affects us but also has an impact on the world in which we live. The only real hope for any kind of peace in our world is through changing our collective awareness.

We can talk about sharing and justice all we want. We can nod our heads during sermons about giving joyfully to those around us, reaching beyond racial barriers, and turning away from war. But until we come to know—by direct perception—our essential unity with one another and the world, these noble ideas will inspire us for a moment and then fade away.

Only when the unity of the kingdom of heaven becomes part of our lived experience will we change. Only as each of us changes from within will the collective awareness shift toward peace.

So it's no small thing to alter one's consciousness. We do it as a legacy to our children and their children. In the end, it can be the most significant work we can do.

WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU

I can't help thinking about my first visit to that magical, otherworldly city of light in Focus 21. When I came into that huge hall filled with luminous people, I was surprised when one of them greeted me with the words, “We've been waiting for you.”

“You've been waiting for me? Why?”

“Because what you are doing is very important to us.”

At the time, I had no idea what could be so important about my haphazard forays into the spiritual realm. I was undisciplined, disorganized, distracted, and depressed most of the time, always yearning for something that was out of my reach. Their comment struck me as almost comical.

But now I understand those words in a whole new way. Maybe it's true after all. Maybe what I'm doing is important, not only to me but also to an unseen world more beautiful than anything I could have ever dreamed.

Maybe it's true for all of us when we follow our unique path. Our actions suddenly become precious, even essential.

Whether you stumble into it by accident or inch toward it deliberately, I hope you find that sacred calling that is your unique gift. When you discover it, you may be surprised to find that there is a multitude waiting to celebrate with you.

Here's to your passion.

Here's to your purpose.

Here's to the genius that is yours alone.