If You Only Ever Read One Book in Your Life

Consciousness

Jan 17

As I said in the previous blog, if you only ever read one book, I would share with you what that book is.

It’s not because I want to string you along or try to get you to listen to my thoughts but I want to provide some background that I think is important before I do that.

Before I begin, I want you to know that I know my opinion doesn’t matter. Get 10 people together and everyone has a different book to recommend. My efforts over the course of my life have been to come into contact with the greatest source of knowledge about human existence that I could find. There was a time around 1984 when I thought I had found it. I was wrong but it would take me another 25 years to come upon, at last, what I have been looking for.

When it happened, I was aware that my intention and my desire to grow, to evolve, to become awakened, had drawn me to the book but it was my teacher at the time who would introduce me to it. It took me two years to read it the first time. While traveling, I lost my first copy that had extensive notes and I was devastated.

I got another copy and went through the arduous process of reading and notetaking again. The book is my bible of living and I always have it close by. My wife and I were speaking the other night and I said, “When my time comes and I’m on my death bed, make sure I have my iPod and my book.”

As I have shared, your outer life is a mirror image of your inner life and it is the inner life that draws to itself that which it is. Does that make sense? Do you understand that? Life is not static and neither is spirituality. It evolves right long through the ages with material evolution. The needs and values of the individual change over a lifetime, as they should, for the willingness to change is the sign of a maturing individual. The spirituality and the discipline you practice should be the same.

You see, even if you don’t have a daily practice or don’t even believe that consciousness or anything else is taking place, even if you are an atheist or believe that God does exist, the evolution of your life is still unfolding because there is only one evolution, one process, one unfolding because that’s all there is…the unfolding, the oneness, the absolute.

All individuals exercise enormous resistance in the unfolding process. Governed by the mind, the individual becomes a by-product of their experiences and lives their life accordingly.

Without question, there is a deep sense of meaninglessness that lies at the root of your unique problems, meaninglessness that most individuals will do just about anything to avoid dealing with. But there is no experience that can change that…what changes your life is not experience or time but knowledge or consciousness. But why would you do anything different when the very issue of existence has never been addressed in the first place? If you live in the US, you live in a country that worships the material not the spiritual, money not fulfillment, acquisition not giving.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

- Albert Einstein

But things have changed. Things have evolved.

Needing a miracle means that what has happened has been a mistake, that something has gone wrong, and that the only way to fix it is through a miracle. It also suggests that the mistake is obviously more powerful than God, thus disempowering God and turning the event for which you need a miracle into another meaningless, shouldn’t have happened event and only God can get you out of it. A miracle implies that God had nothing to do with the thing for which you need a miracle. Now, we’re back to the separation, to the division, to the content and the context, to the life and death, to the horizontal and vertical, to the duality, to the relativity.

The pandemic is no different. If you view the virus as an accident or for that matter, anything in your life as an accident, then you’re circling the drain of meaninglessness again and in the process, you deny the existence of God. Once denied, you turn to the only thing you know to turn to, to God, to ask for a miracle for dissolving the very thing that you have made more powerful than God. It doesn’t make sense.

If on the other hand, you understood or simply chose to believe that everything is an act of God, of the Divine, you would seek not for miracles but for understanding the purpose of the event so that you could participate as best you could in the unfolding. I am simply suggesting that it is time for you to evolve. It is time for you to move away from needing miracles in your life, from the old spirituality to the new spirituality of consciousness, to learning to and being able to able to see beyond your sensory receptors. I am inviting you to go beyond your experiences and into your existence and to do that, you need a new perspective, a new foundation, a new knowledge.

I have shared a number of stories about my upbringing which included sexual abuse, violence, and the absence of being protected or feeling safe. I simply got used to it and considered it to be normal.

A lot of people normalize the abnormal.

I grew up in the Episcopal church and at the age of 15 went to an Episcopal boarding school which would be my exit from the nightmare I had known. At the school, I found safety and stability. It literally did save my life. It wasn’t until I went to school that I really started reading and before long, I loved reading. I was not a good student, but at the school, I was learning to be a good student.

My French teacher who took a special interest in me was walking with me from the school building one day to the cafeteria when he pulled a book out of his bag and said, “I have a gift for you.” It was Herman Hesse’s Siddartha. I stayed up all night reading it. I couldn’t put it down and after I finished the book, I knew and realized that there was another world, another life, another way of being to which I was deeply attracted. After leaving the school in 1969 and on my way to college, I began reading everything Hesse wrote with my favorite being Magister Ludi or the Glass Bead Game for which he received a Nobel prize for literature.

Over the next few years in college, I was lost in reading the plays of Moliere and the works of Camus and Sartre and I stuck with French literature for a while. As the years went by, I began reading Alan Watts and Carlos Casteneda and began to gravitate to Buddhism and Taoism, special ordering books like The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I- Ching, and others that you couldn’t find in the book stores at that time. When I read a lot of the Upanishads, I knew once again that there was another world but I was not capable or developed enough to understand much of what I was reading.

That only worsened when I managed to get a book that contained readings of the Vedic scriptures. I read parts of the Rig Veda and hardly understood a word but somehow instinctively knew that what I was reading contained the truth that I was seeking but as I said, I didn’t understand much of it and I had no one in my life who was able to teach me.

In 1977, when I met Dr. Tony Speed, a teacher with whom I would for 10 years, my focus changed. I moved away from the esoteric and into what I refer to as the horizontal…daily life, the skin and bones of life, the meat. Around that time, I started studying the work of Tony Gregorc who is the designer and author of the Adult Style Delineator, a profound understanding of human behavior which deeply influenced my life and my teaching career. My work with Dr. Tony Speed took me into meditation, the musical compositions of Daniel Kobialka to which I became addicted to learning meditation, and during that period of time, I was introduced to the work of Dr. Ron Smotherman. His book, Winning through Enlightenment, is the greatest book I have ever read in understanding mind, body, and emotions, what I refer to as the horizontal of daily life. Since 1980, I have probably owned a dozen copies and have given as many away. But I do have my original copy that has been taped, stapled, and kept together with rubber bands.

No one should ever be allowed to get married until you read Smotherman’s Winning through Enlightenment and take Gregorc’s Adult Style Delineator. Between Tony Gregorc’s work and Smotherman’s work, you will save yourself tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees and wasted years spent on drama and suffering and relationships that you had no business being in.

In 1983, I walked into a bookstore and, as a result of an extraordinary experience with the clerk, I came in contact with A Course in Miracles.

It took me seven years to read it the first time.

It took me 3 years to complete the workbook the first time.

The second time I read the book, it took me four years and the last time I read the book, it took me only two years.

I was absolutely convinced that this book resided at the very top level of anything I had been exposed to. I understood the weight and influence and consider myself lucky to have been introduced to it. I meet people all the time who describe that they have a copy but that they haven’t read it because it’s too hard, too demanding. The problem with A Course in Miracles is that now, you move away from playing around with your life and becoming serious about becoming a student of your life. CIM is an introduction to the vertical, to the world of the invisible, of the laws and principles that govern the outcome in your life and its central focus is the issue of perception. It is impossible to seriously undertake this book and not watch your life change before your very eyes.

As I said, the majority of people I have ever known who have a copy of the book, well, that’s about as far as they have gotten. They have a copy.

In 1987, I had my “out-of-body, thought I had died” experience that would turn my world upside down. For once that happened, I didn’t just think that there was another reality but I had experienced it.

To keep this brief, that as a result of that experience, I can tell you with absolute conviction that:

1. There’s nothing wrong with you.

2. You are perfect just the way you are.

3. Love is all there is.

4. Death does not exist.

5. You are held in safety and balance all of your life.

This experience I had in 1987 was, I would come to learn, preparing me for the descent into the darkness that began in 1989, reached a pinnacle point in 1992, and left me penniless, emotionally broken, and devastated by 1993. Had I not had this experience, I don’t know if I would have made it through what I did. “I go but by the grace of God” is not an expression but was the reality I lived.

In spite of the fact that I was going through a psychological death experience that would change my life forever, I knew I could use the help. I had stopped all meditation, had stooped all reading or any disciple, for I was on the brink of giving up. In spite of the fact that I was living day-by-day in a devastating condition and barely able to function, a man came to the apartment where I was living and spent several hours with me trying to help me. He mostly laughed alongside me, telling me that there was a life waiting for me that I could not even imagine and these circumstances that I was currently navigating were part of the preparation for that life. My time with Robert Wilkinson would be inspirational and left me with hope and determination to make it through this darkness that had overwhelmed me. At the time, I realized that Robert was the most evolved individual I had ever met but I also needed to focus 100% on my horizontal life and trying to figure out how I was going to survive.

There’s nothing wrong with you.

You are perfect just the way you are.
Love is all there is.
Death does not exist.
You are held in safety and balance all of your life.

In 1993 when Terry and I moved to Asheville, I started teaching French again at the local community college and was taking my life one day at a time.

I had become a teacher of the CIM and I was asked to begin teaching CIM on Thursday nights at a local bookstore in Asheville. I was back to reading again. During one class, a young man joined the class a little late. He was a little disheveled looking but polite and he jumped right in and made a wonderful contribution to the class. When the class was over, I walked to the parking lot and saw the young man heading toward the sidewalk where I assumed he was walking home. I thought he was homeless. I asked him if he needed a lift and explained that I would be happy to take him where he needed to go. He declined but we talked for a while about CIM and both of us left that evening refreshed. It was an enlightened conversation and I never knew his name.

Three or four days later, the bookstore owner called me and said that there was a small package for me but he didn’t know where it had come from. It had no postage on it but that he would leave it for me in the room where I taught the class. When I arrived to teach the next class, I opened the package and it was a small book entitled, “The Illimitable One.” The author is Elise Nevins Morgan.

I opened this small book that was 5.5 inches tall and 4 inches wide about halfway and could not stop reading it. It is an extraordinary book that was in my experience at the same level as the CIM but in a slightly different tone and language. It is a confirmation of this reality that I was seeking but had figured out how to live. As I was getting ready to put the book away and get ready for class, the front cover flipped over to the left and I saw thin, penciled handwriting on the inside cover.

It said:

“Thank you Brother
For Laying down
The cross
And teaching
That forgiveness forgives
What cannot be
And therefore never was
Heaven is here
Heaven is now
And nothing else at all
Shine on.”

There was no signature but I knew who it was. It was the young man who had attended the class the week before entering like the soundless breath and who had left like a whisper.

I was speechless and emotional. This young man was, to me, an angel, who took the time to say hello and to remind me of the true reality of life on this planet.

Heaven is here. Heaven is now.

I kept trying to remind myself of the 1987 experience, and each hour not knowing if I was going to make it, that there was nothing to fear for I was being held in safety and balance. But I did not succeed. I was doing well to get out of bed.

I started MindSpring in 1993, incorporated in 1995, and decided that if I go down, I’m going down doing what I love, what I’m good at, what matters to me most. I had gone back to Smotherman’s second book, Transforming #1, and was framing my entire life around the crucial element of integrity. I had gotten my life back together in 1993 and began to live my life out of absolute integrity. I thought I had integrity until in 1993 I read Smotherman’s brief thoughts on integrity and realized I had none…and I wanted what Smotherman spoke about.

The blink of the eye that took place next would last nearly 15 years. We had our own business property, had expanded our work, Terry and I were living an extraordinary life and still, I wasn’t satisfied. This isn’t it, I said to myself. I have money, success and this isn’t it.

There is something else and I don’t know what it is or where to find it.

I read Durckheim’s The Way of Transformation which is a must on any seeker’s bookshelf. I began to move completely away from what I call the spiritually elite and stooped reading those books because I saw the ancient thread of Buddhism and realized that nothing had changed in that line of thinking. This isn’t it, I would say to myself.

So, around 2010, I tracked him down and called Robert Wilkinson. I went a spent a day with Robert. I got home early that evening and not long after I was home, I called him back on the phone and I said, “Tell me…what happened to me today?”

He laughed as he always does, and said, “Welcome to the real world.”

Since that day, since 2010, my life has been devoted to what Robert revealed to me. I became not immersed but at times nearly isolated as I began reading, studying, piecing together the portrait of what he had shown me. What I was seeing, was, I knew, what I had been looking for my entire life and that everything I had gone through was part of my preparation to be at this moment, this time in my life, to be able to understand what I was being shown. Every question was being answered, every problem was being solved, every ounce of any regret, shame, guilt that I had held onto was evaporating but this time I knew it was happening. Now, here I am again, I said to myself, being born again but now, I am being born again not through bearing the cross, through pain and suffering but through joy, through release, through letting go. I became addicted.

It was Robert who introduced me to the works of Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, and Patrizia Noreili Bachelet. Robert was a student of Patrizia but also served as her chief and principal astrologer and cosmologist. Aurobindo represents the transcendent, the Mother represents the cosmic, and Patrizia, known as Thea, represents the individual. By this time in his life, Robert had emerged as a true seer, a true guru. And here I was lucky enough to have access to him.

A week passed and I went back to spend another day with Robert. He asked me if I had heard of Aurobindo’s epic poem, Savitri. I explained that I had not. I don’t know if I have the words to explain what happened next and I don’t know if I even need or want to try.

To understand Savitri, Aurobindo’s masterpiece, you first must understand Aurobindo. I’m not going to try to educate you. You can read on your own but it’s important.

If you only ever read one book in your life, Savitri is it.

It took me two years to read it the first time and about a year the second time. Read it even if you don’t understand it. Read it if you only read ten lines a night of the 724-page masterpiece.

The Mother who was Aurobindo’s principal spiritual collaborator said this of Savitri:

"Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living: it is all replete, packed with consciousness. It is supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is
Yoga...everything, in its single body."

She went on to say,

“Read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is by the heart. I tell you if you try to concentrate really with this aspiration you can light a flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri.”

Aurobindo, his work, his yoga, his description of what he called the supramental manifestation, picks up where everything, and I mean everything else leaves off, there is nothing to compare to it for it is the preparation of the future of mankind and for the purposes of my work in TruthSpring, is it the future of the individual. The seeker needs to seek no more.

I would try to read passages to Terry at night but could not because I would start crying. I still have trouble reciting Savitri without becoming emotional. All my life, all my life, this is what I have been looking for. At last, this is it.

The spiritual path is not an intellectual path. I assure you, I promise and I hope you will not be offended but relieved that neither you nor I know anything. And that’s a good thing, for now, we can make room for a new reality, a new world, a new life, and in that process, the absolute will make itself known in the physical world and you will, at last, know who you are for you are God in a physical body.

I could recite passage after passage to you but that will not change anything. The entire 724 pages are quotable. Until you choose the path yourself, it’s just another book that sits on your shelves.

Your life hangs in the balance between what your mind is capable of creating and what your heart is capable of enduring. Develop the courage and certainty to take both to the limit. You are not here to go undetected for your birth itself establishes your identity and your worth and use Savitri as a process of awakening to the real you and the real world.

We can make room for a new reality, a new world, a new life, and in that process, the absolute will make itself known in the physical world and you will, at last, know who you are for you are God in a physical body.

Contradicting myself, I will read two passages to you from Savitri:

“Thou hast come down into a struggling world
To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twist earth and heaven;
If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,
The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;
The day-bringer must walk in the darkest night.
He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure?
If far he walks above mortality’s head,
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?”

You, too, have walked in the darkest night. You, too, have known deep pain, loss, and grief. For they have enabled you, now, to know the truth and to the past that never existed.

The epic poem ends in these words:

“Then one spoke there who seemed a priest and sage,
‘O woman soul, what light, what power revealed,
Working the rapid marvels of this day,
Opens for us by thee a happier age?’
Her lashes fluttering upwards gathered in
To a vision which had scanned immortal things,
Rejoicing, human forms for their delight.
They claimed for their deep childlike motherhood
The life of all these souls to be her life,
Then falling veiled the light. Low she replied,
‘Awakened to the meaning of my heart
That to feel love and oneness is to live
And this the magic of our golden change
Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage.’
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,
And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.”

If you only ever read one book in your life, read Savitri. Use Savitri in your efforts to nurse greater dawn in your life and I wish you the very best on the path of becoming.