This book is an account of how these spiritual ideas were discovered.  It gives a good summary of the main ideas behind our kind of active mysticism.

Chapter One

“Imagine prisoners who have been chained in a cave all their lives,” Socrates said.  “Furthermore, they have been chained so that they cannot turn their heads and thus they can only look forwards.  Behind them is a fire that casts shadows on the cave wall.  Because all their lives the prisoners have seen only these shadows, they assume the shadows are real things.  Indeed, they even give prizes to those who can best identify the shadows on the cave wall.  But if these prisoners were released from their chains and climbed out of the cave, they would experience a much better world.  For unknown to the prisoners, outside their cave is the world of real things.”

When I read this passage from Plato’s Republic, I experienced a profound spiritual awakening.  I instantly knew the things conventional American society cared about were mere shadows on the cave wall, and there was a more spiritual, better way of living.  Socrates had found a way out of the cave; he was in touch with a deeper spiritual energy that made his daily life in this world much better than other peoples’ lives.  I wanted to find that deeper spiritual energy and live in tune with it.  I did not know how to get out of the cave, but I knew finding a way out was the only thing that mattered to me.

But I was in tenth grade, it was 1971, and this was way before any kind of alternative spirituality was popular.  Nor did I live in some hip place like California or Boulder, Colorado; I lived along Eight Mile Road in a working class suburb of Detroit with my eight brothers and sisters.  Even though nothing else mattered to me besides finding a way out of the cave, there was no one I could discuss it with or ask for help.

I investigated Indian philosophy, and learnt to meditate, but traditional Indian spirituality was interested in transcending this world, not living in it in a spiritual way.  I read the most important book of Chinese Taoist spirituality, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.  This book emphasized that there was a Tao, or a spiritual Flow, that we could attune ourselves to.  It said our lives would be better if we attuned to the Tao, but the book offered no help in how to do it.

I sensed my best connection to find glimmerings of this higher reality was in Plato’s writings about Socrates, so I taught myself Greek to understand directly what he was saying and not be misled by any translations.  I had a job in the public library and wrote out vocabulary words and grammar rules to memorize while shelving books.  It was hard understanding all the grammatical terms, verb tenses, and noun endings.  I only learnt later that the textbook I was using assumed no one learnt ancient Greek as her first foreign language, and so the textbook did not bother to explain these basic grammatical terms.

I had only a vague idea of how to get connected with this deeper energy, but I knew I first had to get out of Detroit.  The city was just mile after mile of cars and houses.  I lived a block away from half-mile long factories, and when I was bored, I would watch giant vats of molten iron or steel being poured.  There was no privacy or nature, and I knew this was not the right place for me.  Normally people get a chance to move away from home when they graduate from high school, but I was just starting eleventh grade and was far from having enough credits to graduate.  Luckily, I had heard that some colleges would admit students without a high school degree.  I was not an obvious candidate for early admission to college: I was not a super-genius in any field; I was not at the top of my class; I did not even have an A average in a working class high school.  But I knew Detroit was not the place for me, so I took a chance and started the application process.  When I told my guidance counselor of my plan, he snorted, saying I would be very lucky if some small, local college would accept me.  But after I got a perfect score on the math SATs and an excellent score on the verbal part, my chances of getting into a good college increased.  Eventually Dartmouth College accepted me and gave me a full tuition scholarship because my family was poor.

A month before college started, I decided to ride my bicycle to Dartmouth, going through Ontario and then the scenic route through New Brunswick, Canada.  Ten days later, I was riding out of Montreal when I met another bicycler who soon started bragging about the extremely healthy diet he was on.  The diet was called Macrobiotics and stressed eating only food our body was meant to eat.  He said Macrobiotics was more than just a diet, as people became more spiritual when they ate properly.  He emphasized that dairy products and processed grains were particularly bad for us.

After bragging to me for thirty miles about his great diet, he stopped for a pizza.  (In those days all pizzas were made with white flour and regular cheese.)  I was taken aback as he had just been bragging about how he ate such healthy foods and never ate dairy products or processed flour.  But now he seemed oblivious to whether what he said earlier fit with what he was doing now.  This bicycler was the first person I had ever met who was interested in spirituality and health, a type that would later be called a New Ager.

Macrobiotics saw itself as modern Taoist spirituality. The Tao Te Ching talks of a spiritual Flow or Tao that we could attune ourselves to.  When I heard about this Tao, I knew I wanted to live my life attuned to it.  Nevertheless, the Tao Te Ching, and many New Agers like this pizza guy, take another step I do not understand when they talk about transcending the intellect and critical thinking.  The Tao Te Ching says that if we get past the intellect, we can see that good and evil are categories we create with our minds.  But sexually molesting a child is evil and wrong in itself; it is not wrong because our minds create moral categories.

In recent history, some people who claim science, logic, and critical thinking are on their side have done negative things to spiritual people, including putting them into mental asylums.  Rosalyn Bruyere is a well-known spiritual healer who claims to heal people through seeing their auras.  She said that in the 1930s her grandmother often talked of seeing auras around people and other creatures.  When her grandmother refused to stop talking about auras, she was put in a mental institution and made to endure many rounds of electro-shock therapy.  In the 1950s, Richard Price, one of the founders of Esalen, the first growth center, was institutionalized by his family for a year because he wanted to meditate all day instead of settling down into a conventional upper middle-class lifestyle.  In the 1960s, a devotee of the Hindu God Krishna was put into an insane asylum in New York because he mentioned being devoted to the blue god Krishna.  He was only released from involuntary commitment because the famous poet Allen Ginsberg vouched for his sanity.  Some people who claim science, logic, and critical thinking are on their side do force other people to try to live within the conventional paradigm.  Therefore many people believe that in order to be spiritual, they have to turn off their critical thinking skills.

Just because some people use critical thinking to stamp out spirituality does not mean we spiritual people have to go to the other extreme of throwing out critical thinking, logic, and rationality.  On a most basic level, these skills help keep us grounded.  This pizza guy was lost in his feelings when he was giving himself self-image points for being so concerned about his diet when a little later he ate bad foods.  Critical thinking and a concern for consistency could have helped him stay grounded in daily life by making sure his feelings and self-image matched his actions.  This is a trivial example, but he was the first New Ager I ever met.  Since then I have met so many spiritual people who think it is a virtue to ignore critical thinking and logic, not realizing these skills help make sure their spirituality is grounded in their daily life.

After bicycling 1700 miles through Canada and then New England, I was only twenty-five miles from Dartmouth when my bike slid on some sand and I fell, breaking my collarbone.  But I was lucky: the nurse from the hostel I had stayed at the night before drove down the road in a minute or two.  She then took me to the hospital and arranged for my medical care and for a ride to Hanover, New Hampshire.

At Dartmouth, I had sufficient knowledge of Greek to get into an upper level Greek class that spent the whole term reading Plato’s Republic.  In order to read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, I also started studying Chinese. Throughout my freshman year at Dartmouth I kept learning Greek and Chinese and took philosophy classes, trying to find some way to make a connection to the deeper energy I knew was beyond the cave.  In one of my philosophy classes we studied ancient followers of Plato, the Neoplatonists they were called, who were able to become aware of a deeper spiritual reality beyond the cave.  While my professor thought this awareness had died out in antiquity, I was sure that something so important would not have disappeared.  Somewhere in the world people had this knowledge, and they could help me get out of the cave too.  I knew I would find these people eventually, but I sensed that the moment had not yet come.

At this time my roommate was becoming involved with recently developed therapies that helped people deal with their personal problems.  I knew I had personal problems to work out, so I started looking into these things too.  I had been planning to go to Taiwan to become fluent in Chinese, but instead I went to my parents’ house to work on my personal problems.

I spent eight months dealing with my problems at my parents’ house and then went back to Dartmouth a more together person.  Dartmouth was the most conservative of the Ivy League colleges, and all my fellow students seemed to just want to find their slot in conventional society.  I had been an outsider at the college, never finding a place I belonged.  But this time things were different: I quickly found a group of people who were also pursuing alternatives to traditional bourgeois values.  These people had always been there, but I had never made a connection with them.  Now that I had changed, I met them and this made my life so much better.

After a year focusing on my personal problems, I was drawn to psychologists who integrated spirituality with psychology.  I was particularly interested in Abraham Maslow, who studied people who had times of intense joy and aliveness in the course of their daily lives.  These times, which Maslow called peak experiences, could happen when a person was washing the dishes, working at a job, or playing; the important thing was that during these times, a person could be filled with great awe, tremendous love, or cosmic consciousness.

I never had had anything like this in my life; it had always been totally flat and dull.  These descriptions of peak experiences excited me; I wanted to live like that.  But compared to what these people were experiencing, my whole life was like living in a drab cave. What were the chances I could experience these great moments?

Then I read that Maslow discovered these experiences happen to some types of people more often than others.  The people who had these joyful times had learned to build a positive energy cycle in their lives.  They thought that life was worthwhile, worked to make it so, and occasionally had peak experiences when they came into contact with their inner spirit.  On the other hand, people who did not think life had much to offer did not put out as much energy to make their lives good and so never had these peak experiences.

As I contemplated this, I realized that having these peak experiences did not have to happen only occasionally to people.  Instead we could have this intense joy and happiness often because peak experiences happen when we contact our real self, our inner spirit.  I also realized major impediments to connecting with our inner spirit, and therefore having these peak experiences, were our emotional or psychological problems.  These negative patterns of behavior acted like dams that blocked the spiritual energy from flowing into our personal selves.  But if a person could remove these blocks from her psyche, she could connect with the deeper aspect of her inner soul, and her life could feel like a continual peak experience.

The book I was reading said that the best spiritually oriented system for dealing with psychological problems was a new method called Psychosynthesis.  This system had many techniques which helped people work through their psychological problems by helping them connect with their inner spirit.  This was just what I was looking for, so I decided to go to the bookstore to get the book.

On the way to the bookstore, I saw a poster advertising an upcoming ten week class in Psychosynthesis.  I didn’t know it at the time, but there were only two Psychosynthesis teachers on the whole East coast of the United States, and one of them had just moved to the small town of Hanover, New Hampshire where I lived.  Seeing this advertisement for an obscure psychological system just as I wanted to learn it was my first incident of synchronicity.  Carl Jung coined this term to describe times when there was a significant connection between one’s inner consciousness and the outer physical world.  Synchronicity described a meaningful connection that seemed too strong to be coincidental, but one event was not causing the other in any ordinary way.  Other people have broadened the term to describe times when a person was given what she needed by the Universe through a meaningful coincidence.  I was excited because these wonderful things were happening to me, not just to the people I was reading about in books.

One of the most important philosophical questions is whether the universe is in some way friendly or helpful to us, or if it is it totally indifferent to our endeavors.  Many spiritually oriented people believe there is a God, Flow, Force, or Spirit that in some way helps us.  One school of popular spirituality even says we live in such a great, wonderful universe that the universe wants to give to us whatever we desire and we just have to accept its abundance.  (This is the philosophy behind the idea that our thoughts attract external things to us through what is called the law of attraction.)  Most contemporary scientists take the position the universe is indifferent to our concerns because there is no larger Flow or God that helps us.

My view is in between these two positions.  I am in the spiritual tradition of Socrates and some of his followers: God helps us, but each individual also has to do his duty.  Socrates talked of being assigned by God to a post or station, and he said his post was questioning the Athenians about their lives.  The most significant group of Socrates’ followers in antiquity was the Stoics.  The Stoics thought all creatures were deeply connected in a spiritual whole, but God was like a general assigning each person to his post.  Socratic-Stoic spirituality resurfaced in the deism of the Enlightenment period.  (The deists are often wrongly characterized as believing in a distant, watchmaker type God.  I discuss them more in the last chapter.)  At that time, deists said that God providentially cared for us, but God required that we beneficently care for other people.  People in the Socratic-Stoic-Deist spiritual tradition do not believe the universe is so wonderful that it wants to fulfill our every desire, but they do believe in a much more caring universe than most contemporary scientists.

My claim that I just experienced the universe helping me could be dismissed by many people as wishful thinking.  Some scientists would say my belief resulted from inherent biases built into the human brain.  Recent discoveries have shown that humans have evolved to see causes and agents behind events even when there were none.  So a caveman who heard the grass rustling and assumed a tiger must be causing the rustling, immediately ran, and he survived.  On the other hand, the caveman who did not make this immediate connection was less likely to survive.  So my belief the universe was helping me could easily be dismissed as merely a result of how our brains have evolved.

Nor would it make a difference if I said I later experienced many more of these synchronicities.  (I describe some of them later.)  The skeptics could understandably say that I am only noticing the times when things worked out well and ignoring the times it didn’t.  Furthermore, recent studies of how our memories work support this doubt.  These studies show that our memory is not a recording of the actual events, but instead our memories have many holes in them.  Our brain fills in the holes and fabricates parts of our memories while making us think we are remembering what actually happened.  Our memories are even affected by our current beliefs and expectations.  So scientists could say that anything I said about how the universe supposedly helped me is based on distorted memories.

Many spiritually oriented people say that our feelings and intuitions are so trustworthy that if we feel something is true, then it is true.  So if we feel the universe is on our side, these people say that it’s true the universe is on our side.  On the other hand, modern science is built on an inherent suspicion of human feelings and intuitions.  If you look at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, you can see this suspicion in the writings of one of the most influential articulators of the scientific method, Francis Bacon.  Bacon said our mind suffered from many distorting factors (which he called “idols”), including our feelings and intuitions, which cause us to have a distorted perception of reality.  Bacon’s solution was to not trust a person’s individual feelings about the nature of reality and instead to perform experiments which had to be verified by the larger community of reliable witnesses.  This distrust of our feelings and intuitions has continued throughout the history of science.  So recently one of the most popular science bloggers described the nature of science by quoting the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.  This blogger, Jerry Coyne, said that the best explanation of science is “‘the first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.’ In contrast, the first principle of religion is that you must fool yourself, finding in the universe only those things that support your beliefs, and harmonizing all possible observations with what you want to be true.”  Scientists believe our feelings and intuitions are often wrong, and its methods are fundamentally based on this point.

While science is fundamentally based on dealing with our tendency to fool ourselves, it is not fundamentally built on saying the universe is indifferent to our concerns.  Indeed, almost all scientists prior to 1800 thought there was a God who actively and providentially cared for humans and the world.  So Isaac Newton said the force of gravity was not inherent in matter, but was continually done by God.  He also thought God intervened so that comets did not hit the Earth.  The other scientists of the 1600 and 1700s universally said that God’s existence was proven by the wonderful order of the cosmos.  They also thought God had providential and active care for us.  A few scientists in the 1700s, and gradually more and more of them in the 1800s, came to believe there was no God who cared for us.  Scientists nowadays will generally say they do not believe in a caring universe because there is no evidence of it.  Nevertheless, the scientific method is not based on the fundamental proposition that the universe is indifferent to our concerns.

After seeing the poster advertising Psychosynthesis classes, I was not worried about these intellectual concerns; I was just happy to have  such a nice synchronicity happening to me for once.  I got the book on Psychosynthesis and a few weeks later, I started the course.  The course emphasized that a person’s real essence was her inner spirit or soul, which it called the Higher Self.  This Higher Self was more than just a person’s soul, it was connected to the divine in a deep way.  Furthermore, if we could build a connection to the Higher Self and listen to it, we could receive its help in dealing with our psychological problems.  Psychosynthesis had many techniques and exercises such as meditation, chanting, drawing, journal keeping, and guided visualizations to develop a connection with the Higher Self.

As I did these techniques and my life became more spiritually oriented, I felt more centered and joyful; my life felt like it had more meaning to it.  I wanted more of this spiritual energy in my life, so I asked my Psychosynthesis teacher about what spiritual practices would help me. He recommended meditations developed by an English woman named Alice Bailey.

Bailey’s meditations were based on the idea that each individual had many socially conditioned wants and lower personality desires that pulled her away from being spiritual.  To counter these selfish tendencies, we had to examine the motives behind our actions, looking at actions that were motivated by lesser personality desires.  People also needed to build a connection with the spiritual energy through invocations, which were ways of visualizing this energy coming into their life.  She emphasized that people could become connected to the spiritual energy of the Universe, but they had to work hard at it.

This approach made sense to me.  People do not get things for free; they had to work for them.  I was much more hesitant about her claim that her ideas came from a spiritual being of higher consciousness who dictated the books through her, a process called channeling.  At the time I started doing Bailey’s meditations, I was a teaching assistant in a critical thinking and logic course at Dartmouth.  I graded the students’ papers and helped them understand material which included complicated quantificational logic.  I saw no dichotomy between teaching logic and also being involved with meditations which supposedly came from a disembodied spiritual being.  Pure logic, as taught in philosophy classes, was only concerned about the way someone makes deductions from basic premises.  Pure logic had nothing to do with the truth of the premises themselves.  So, from a philosophers’ point of view, I was not being illogical in being involved with a group that believed in higher spiritual beings who helped us.  Of course, whether I was stupid or naïve was a different question.

Every day I did my spiritual meditations and thought about how I could be of service to others in the world.  I also kept trying to find other spiritual teachings and groups that would help bring this spiritual energy into my daily life.  The best group I found was a community in Findhorn, Scotland. The founders of Findhorn had dedicated their lives to following God’s will.  They had been very successful people, but they felt led by God to give up that life and were now living in a small trailer next to a garbage dump.  They emphasized that the spiritual life may not bring the material things our culture values but it brings a wonderful joy and energy that enlivens a person’s life so that she does not miss these material things.

The Findhorn people believed a New Age of higher spiritual energy was just beginning.   The Alice Bailey meditation groups and other people I was reading also believed in a New Age.  There seemed to be two main conceptions of the New Age: some said it was a sudden tremendous change like aliens showing up, while others said it was a paradigm change.

Western history has been full of people who believed humans were about to experience a sudden, epic transformation.  For example, in the middle ages, a monk named Joachim of Fiore predicted that a new age of the Holy Spirit was about to happen.  Many Franciscan monks believed in his prediction and thought the world was about to undergo a wonderful transformation.  These monks were wrong and so were many other people throughout history who just knew somehow a great change was about to happen.  Just judging by history, the chance of a modern prophet being right with her prediction of a sudden transformation in world history seemed exceedingly remote.

The other problem with this interpretation of the New Age was that it meant that individuals did not have to do much on their own to be part of this change.  They just had to wait for this epic transformation, whether it be a quantum leap in evolution, aliens arriving, or 2012.

The other explanation of the New Age, that it was a paradigm change, piqued my intellectual curiosity.  I knew enough of the history of Western culture to know that before the modern scientific paradigm emerged, many Westerners had believed in a spiritually oriented paradigm that had many similarities to New Age spirituality.  This spiritual paradigm, which in its broadest form is called Neoplatonism, was an extremely popular way of thinking in the Renaissance, and it was the last time so many in our culture believed in a spiritual paradigm.  Neoplatonism had elements of Plato’s thought in it, but combined this with elements from other spiritual traditions including the number mysticism of Pythagoras and the magical practices of Hermeticism.  Like New Age thought, Neoplatonism believed in crystals and astrology as there was a deep connection between all things because the cosmos was a living organism.    It also believed in the power of the human imagination and thoughts to affect things in the physical world.  Planets and other purely material things had souls in them.  They also thought there were helpful spiritual beings like angels or guardian spirits and these beings could be channeled.  

The spiritual teachers I was reading and a couple of my friends were exuberant about how our culture was moving to a new, more spiritually oriented paradigm.  But it seemed shortsighted to cheer about our culture moving to a new spiritual paradigm without knowing why a similar spiritual paradigm had been abandoned over three hundred years ago.  It seemed to me that if this spiritual paradigm had been totally adequate, then our culture would never have abandoned it.  I did not agree with those that claimed Western culture abandoned the older, more spiritual friendly paradigm because the new paradigm allowed the male dominated energy of capitalists and scientists to dominate nature. (This view was expressed a few years later in popular book by Carolyn Merchant called The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution.) This answer made spiritual culture blameless as there was nothing lacking in its paradigm.  Instead, the transition was all the fault of the greedy men with their grasping male energy.  It is comforting to only see the good points of your viewpoint and ignore its lacks.  But while doing this can make you feel good, it does not help you learn from the past and progress.

It was not until many years later that I had the time to research the transition from the spiritual paradigm of Renaissance Neoplatonism to modern science.  In the earlier part of the twentieth century, scholars thought the giants of what is called the Scientific Revolution, thinkers like Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and Tycho Brahe, developed modern science by distancing themselves from the superstitious spiritual paradigm of Neoplatonism that infected their contemporaries.  But in the last fifty years, historians of science have realized that the vast majority of the scientists who developed what is called the Scientific Revolution actually believed in Neoplatonic spiritual ideas and these ideas often inspired their scientific endeavors.  Isaac Newton spent as much or more time on alchemy than physics, and in his physics, he thought he was rediscovering the hidden knowledge of the ancient sages.  Robert Boyle, the discoverer of Boyle’s law about gases, believed in astrology and practiced alchemy so that he could manufacture a philosophers’ stone to talk to angels.  William Gilbert, who discovered many things about magnetism, believed the earth and other planets were living creatures with souls.  Even more importantly, the scientists’ emphasis on quantifying nature did not arise from an urge to dominate nature, but came from the number mysticism of the Pythagoreans.  The Pythagoreans were originally a mystical cult which believed in reincarnation, spiritual purity, and the strange idea that numbers were the only real things.  So early modern science was not developed by grasping males or modern secular geeks, but by people who had many beliefs similar to New Agers.

A good example of how early scientists were motivated by their spiritual beliefs but were forced to discard some of them is Johannes Kepler.  Kepler was an astronomer who discovered important laws about planetary motion.  He also believed in astrology, had a kind of sun-worship, and his astronomical work was based on a mystical Platonic vision concerning the distance of the orbits of the planets from the sun and geometric figures.  He never discarded these beliefs about the planets and geometrical figures, but one spiritual belief he did discard was the belief that each planet was a divine being with a planetary soul guiding its movement.  Over many years of investigation, Kepler gradually realized that the movements of the planet could be explained in the same way the actions of inanimate levers on earth were explained.  So he realized the planets did not have to have a planetary soul guiding them, their movement could be explained purely in terms of inanimate mechanical forces.  Kepler had to either give up an idea he cherished about planets being alive with souls, or ignore what his investigations were telling him about nature.  He, like many other scientists in this period, gave up one of his spiritual beliefs.

It was not male energy with its urge to dominate that caused Western culture to discard the spiritual paradigm; instead, very spiritually oriented scientists had to gradually drop their cherished spiritual beliefs because these beliefs did not fit the facts they were discovering through their investigation of nature.

Through reading the Tao Te Ching, I learnt there was a Tao or Flow I could live in harmony with.  Wise people aligned themselves with it, even though that meant they had to give up other things they wanted.  After I read about early scientific history, I came to realize the early scientists were doing something similar: they were trying to align with nature and its laws, and if their spiritual beliefs did not actually fit with nature, they had to discard these beliefs.  These scientists cherished their feelings and intuitions about nature, and it was as hard for them to throw out their ideas as it was for people to give up things they desired in order to become attuned to the Tao.

When I first became interested in spirituality in 1971, science did not contribute much to my life.  In fact, to many people of my generation, science’s main contribution seemed to be plastic and atom bombs.  Forty years later, I have much different feelings towards science as it has since discovered wonderful things like the internet.  Unfortunately, spiritually aware people have not progressed since I first encountered spirituality forty years ago.  They still discuss basically the same things as before.  This leads me to think scientific culture has something importantly right with it, while spiritual culture is missing something extremely significant.  Science has found a way to progress by judging people’s feelings and intuitions and discarding the mistaken ones.  Spiritual culture, on the other hand, has stagnated because its culture emphasizes never judging or criticizing anyone else’s ideas or feelings.

While a few of my friends were talking about a New Age, I did daily meditations and invocations to help me be of service to other people. One of the ways I had long been interested in serving people was improving our political policies.  In the summer of 1976 I traveled around the East Coast visiting groups that were combining spirituality and politics.  I ended the summer working with a spiritually oriented political group in New Hampshire.

At the same time I was helping my former Psychosynthesis teacher publicize his classes and a conference he was organizing on transpersonal psychology.  Psychosynthesis and transpersonal psychology had been a good starting place for me, and I could see it helping other people, but I was not deeply interested in teaching people about it.  It was just a fun thing to be involved with at that moment.  On the other hand, political change was something I had long considered important because so many peoples’ lives were improved if we made our society better.

One weekend there was a critical weekend-long meeting for those involved with this political action group.  My former teacher also wanted help with his projects that weekend.  I could not be at both places, and both of them were important if I was going to be involved in later projects with either group.  It became clear I had to choose between which of these two groups I would devote my time to.

I sensed this choice would somehow have profound implications for the course of my life.  I had been spending the last year hearing about the deeper energy and joy of following God’s will.  In the last year, my life had changed significantly for the better as I developed a connection to my soul and listened to its wisdom. Now I thought only if I dedicated my life to the Divine Will would I be sure that I was in tune with God or the Flow and have its love and energy fill my life.

So I walked into a nearby empty church and stood before the altar.  I then dedicated my life to doing God’s will, vowing to always do what God wanted of me.  Instead of focusing on trying to get things for myself, I vowed to focus on serving others through doing what God wanted of me.  As I gave up control of my life and dedicated it to doing God’s will, I did not feel I was giving up something; rather I felt I was going towards something better.

But after I had committed my life to following the Divine Will, there still remained the question of what to do next.  How did I know what the Universe wanted me to do?  Wondering about this question, I turned around and saw a banner in the church that proclaimed, “Joy is a sign of the presence of the Lord.”  This banner seemed an answer to my question of how to tell God’s will for me at this moment in my life.

I could sense that going to the weekend retreat with the politically active group would keep me doing political activity that I cared about.  I would also be part of a much larger community of interesting people.  But helping my former Psychosynthesis teacher, while it was doing work I was not as much interested in, felt like it had a deeper joy to it.  I assumed the banner was right and joy was one sign I was doing the Universe’s work, so I decided to help my former teacher.  As I walked out of the church, I strongly felt that the Spirit was guiding my life.

Over the next four or five days, I was filled with the most incredible energy of my life; it felt like I was plugged into a cosmic battery of joy and its wonderful energy was flowing through me, filling me with tremendous amounts of joy, enthusiasm, and meaning.  This energy was so wonderful that compared to it my previous life was like being confined to a deep cave seeing only shadows on the cave wall.  I had been searching for the way out of the cave for years, and now I had finally found it.  It was beyond wonderful.  And it was only the beginning.

For the next chapter go to  the Chapter Two page.

Copyrighted 2009

This essay was written by Joseph Waligore. He dedicated his life to following the will of the Universe when he was 20. Seven months later he received a message from his Higher Self or inner connection to the divine to quit Dartmouth College. Through following a deep intuition in a dream and after many synchronistic experiences, he met his soulmate and married her. He and his wife followed their spiritual intuitions in their daily lives, including receiving messages to have children. For twelve years he stayed at home and raised his three children while his wife worked. Then, his wife told him he needed to make some money, so he got a Ph. D. in philosophy from Syracuse University. He currently has a part-time job teaching philosophy and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. More information about him can be found at his MySpace profile. He also has a website with information about his own spiritual journey and his spiritual philosophy.

There is a Facebook group called Flowing.  People interested in meeting other people who are interested in these ideas and/or participating in discussions about these ideas are invited to join the group.

Many people reach this site through keyword advertisements. It might be of interest that Joseph got the money for these ads through his daytrading profits.