Following The Flow

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.”

This passage from Plato’s Republic perfectly described my feelings about life.  I knew there was a deeper reality which our culture was ignoring.  This feeling was so strong that nothing else mattered to me besides finding this more spiritual way of living.  Unfortunately, in 1971 there were not a lot of ways out of the cave.  Especially when all I had to go on was a deep feeling there was something more to life, but I had little idea what it was or how to find it.

Only in Plato’s writings could I find any glimmer of this higher reality, so I taught myself Greek to understand directly what he was saying.  Sadly though, Plato’s dialogues were of no help in actually getting me out of the cave.  In my freshmen year at Dartmouth College, I studied ancient followers of Plato who were able to become aware of a better spiritual world 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.

In the meantime, I was strongly attracted to the emerging field of humanistic and transpersonal psychology.  While Plato said it was our social conditioning and wrong metaphysical and intellectual views that kept us from seeing the higher reality, these psychologists thought our emotional problems were like chains that kept us imprisoned in the cave of our fears, anxieties and past emotional traumas.  They thought that if we could work through these problems, we could live a much more joyous and meaningful life that would make ordinary life seem like a cave.

Some psychologists, in particular Victor Frankl and Abraham Maslow, wanted to help people become more aware of their spiritual sides to bring more meaning and joy to their lives.  Maslow was especially interested in developing a science of the higher reaches of human nature.  He studied people who, in the course of their daily lives, had times of intense joy and aliveness, moments of great awe or feelings of cosmic oneness.  During these times, which Maslow called peak experiences, people were filled with love and the meaningfulness of life or experienced great bursts of creativity.  These peak experiences could happen at any time: washing the dishes, working or even playing.

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.  I never had moments of great awe, tremendous love, or cosmic consciousness.  Considering my life had always been so flat and dull, what were the chances I could have 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.

This description of a negative energy cycle described my life perfectly.  As I contemplated this, I realized that having these peak experiences did not have to be a random occurrence that only happened 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 leftover traumas and 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 achieve contact with the deeper aspect of her inner soul, and her life could feel like a continual peak experience.

In order to get to this wonderful state, I would have to clear away these blocks by working through my personal problems.  The book I was reading said that the best psychological system for this was a new one called Psychosynthesis.  As well as helping people work through their emotional problems, Psychosynthesis also helped people connect with their inner spirit.  This was just what I was looking for, so I decided to get the book Psychosynthesis, by Roberto Assagioli.

The next day, on the way to the bookstore, I saw a poster advertising an upcoming Psychosynthesis workshop.  I didn’t know it at the time, but there were only two Psychosynthesis teachers on the East coast, and one of them had just moved to the small town of Hanover, New Hampshire where I lived.  Seeing this new advertisement for an unknown 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 was too strong to be coincidental but was not causal.  Other people enlarged the term to describe times when both a person and the Universe were flowing together in a larger pattern, and the person was given what she needed by the Universe.  I was excited because these wonderful things were happening to me, not just to the people I was reading about in books.

After I started the class, I found Psychosynthesis emphasized that our real essence was our inner soul or Higher Self.  This Higher Self was the center of our being and an indwelling aspect of God.  Furthermore as we connected to this Higher Self, we could have deep peace and joy, as well as times of great creativity.  Because most people are not aware of this Higher Self, and instead identify with their body, emotions or mind, one of the aims of Psychosynthesis is to build a connection to it.  Then we could experience our soul’s serenity in our daily life and receive its help in dealing with our problems.

As I did various exercises such as drawing, journal keeping and guided visualizations, I developed a connection with my Higher Self.  I could access its wisdom and get its insight about my problems.  Furthermore the times when I contacted my inner spirit, I felt the world was different: it was full of serenity, joy and power.  It was not the boring world I usually knew, but one that held the promise of something much more wonderful.

Psychosynthesis also stressed that our Higher Self is simply an aspect of the Divine or God.  The more we gave up control of our lives to the  Divine Will, instead of following our personality desires, the more our lives would be full of energy and joy because we would have the deeper spiritual energy of God enlivening our lives.  Psychosynthesis brought together techniques from many spiritual traditions to strengthen the Higher Self’s control over the personality.  These techniques included meditation, prayer, chanting, invocation, singing, studying and a continuous review of the motives of one’s actions.

I had been raised Catholic, and Psychosynthesis’s entirely different approach to spirituality gave me a new perspective.  I had never thought before that the spiritual life was something joyful.  It had never occurred to me that people would have a better life if they got beyond their personal egos and gave their will over to God.

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 wonderfulness and so tried to find more ways of applying these spiritual ideas to my daily life.  I investigated many spiritual teachings and groups.  The best one I heard about was a community in Findhorn, Scotland where people were applying these spiritual principles to many aspects of their daily life.

The Findhorn community emphasized that God was not a transcendent being without connection to our practical world, but was instead intimately connected to our daily life.  They agreed with Psychosynthesis that as we surrendered our will to the Divine Will, we would have more energy, more aliveness and more joy than before.  The founders of Findhorn used to be very successful business people, but they felt led by God to give up that life and were instead living in a small trailer next to a garbage dump.  Because they were doing God’s work, their lives had a special energy and joy.  They emphasized that the spiritual life may not bring the material things our culture values; instead, the spiritual life brings a wonderful joy and energy that enlivens a person’s life so that she does not miss these material things.

When I read about these people who were living a practical spirituality, an energy leapt off the pages and sparked my soul.  For many years I had been possessed by a feeling that there was something more in the world, something outside our dead culture.  Now, for the first time, I felt I was finding it.  Nothing had excited my soul as much as this message of the possibility of a new way of living if we opened up to our spirit.

The Findhorn people thought that a New Age was coming because of a cosmic energy shift.  I was skeptical of this claim because so many movements throughout Western history have wrongly proclaimed that a new age was dawning.  So the odds were that this proclamation was also inaccurate.  The philosopher of Findhorn, David Spangler, taught that a person didn’t have to do any particular thing, join any particular group or believe in any particular creed in order to live in what he called the New Age.  Instead a person was living in the New Age to the extent that she was attuned to God and following her inner guidance.

While I did not know if there was a New Age, I knew I wanted to live my life in a spiritual way.  The key seemed to be inviting the divine into my life and dedicating my life to God.

At this time I was devoting my energy to two different groups of people, and I had to make a choice between them.  One group was a large, politically involved community with most my friends and many people I respected and found intriguing.  This group had introduced me to many new ideas and ways of doing things.  The other group was really only a couple of people helping my Psychosynthesis teacher introduce psychological and spiritual ideas to the area.  These people had little social cachet, but I felt more joy helping them.  It became clear I had to choose between which of these two groups I would primarily devote my time to.  I felt my choice would have profound implications for the course of my life.

Previously I would have tried to figure out which course of action would give me the most satisfaction.  But after all the spirituality I had been involved with, I knew that anything my personal desires could lead me to was of lesser quality than the deep and lasting fulfillment I could get from following the Divine Will.  Being in tune with the Divine Will was more fun, joyous and meaningful than following my desires.  My old method of intellectually, weighing out various options, could not possibly be the best guide for making decisions.  Not only was there no way for my intellect to know in advance the best choice, but as long as I was centered in my individuality, and hence tried to rationally figure out what was best for me, I could not possibly know what God wanted of me.  Thus only if I gave up my personal desires and 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.  To ensure I made the best decision for myself, as well as others, I needed to get beyond my wants and wishes.  Therefore I concluded it was time to totally commit my life to following God’s will: instead of being guided by the desires of my personal ego, I would give my life over to God.

So I walked into a nearby empty church and committed myself to following God’s will.  I vowed to surrender my personal will and to instead always follow God’s will.  As I gave up control of my life and dedicated it totally to the Universe, I did not feel I was giving up something, rather I felt I was going towards something.  Anything my personal ego could give me couldn’t compare to the joy and energy of being in tune with the Flow.

But after I had committed my life to following the Divine Will, there still remained the question of knowing what to do next.  Unless I got a Divine voice, how did I know what the Universe wanted me to do?  I needed help.  Then I turned around and saw a banner in the church that proclaimed, “Joy is a sign of the presence of the Lord.”   

It was clear to me that continuing to devote my time to the politically active group would make me feel I was doing something important and would make me part of a much larger community.  Nevertheless helping my Psychosynthesis teacher spread spiritual and psychological ideas had a deeper, truer joy to it.  Now that I knew that joy was a sign I was doing the Universe’s work, I would devote my time to the spreading of spiritual and psychological ideas.  As I walked out of the church, I strongly felt that the Spirit was guiding my life.

Over the next few days, I was filled with an incredible energy; it felt like I was plugged into a cosmic battery and its energy was flowing through me.  It no longer mattered that I was doing unimportant work according to my peer group, as I had tremendous amounts of joy, enthusiasm and meaning.  Previously my life was like living in a cave, and now for the first time I was experiencing the sunshine; it was wonderful.  I had been searching for the real world for years, and now I had finally found it.

 

Chapter Two

For the next seven months, I continued to feel the higher energy coursing through me as I followed the Flow.  But then the sense of being guided by God left me.  I no longer had that special energy, nor did I know what the Divine Will wanted me to do next.  So I thought I might as well finish my degree at Dartmouth College.  I wasn’t sure that was what the Universe wanted me to do, but it was the spring of my class’ senior year.  I didn’t think it would hurt me to take classes.

As I started classes, my life was anything but miraculous.  To begin with, I was on crutches because I had hurt my knee playing basketball.  Secondly, I was coming out of my classes feeling totally spaced.  Previously, intellectual activity had always been extremely easy and natural for me.  Now, right after my classes finished, I was so spaced out I needed to lie down for ten minutes to recover my ability to function in the world.  Worst of all, my sense of being guided by the Spirit, and the joy and excitement of being in the Flow, had totally left me.

I wanted to get that energy back and re-attune myself to the Divine Will.  But as I was having such troubles, the feeling grew on me that my intellectual preconceptions of how the Universe worked stopped the higher energy from coming back into my life.  Until these mistaken thoughts were removed, and I started to see the world in a way that let God’s energy pour through me, I knew I would not be able to connect with the Flow.

Nothing mattered to me other than the presence of the Flow in my life.  I was totally committed to clearing away all the mistaken views which blocked God from guiding my life.  So I prayed intensely for the Spirit to clear away the channels that were hindering me from being of use in the world.  For four days I totally centered on how I wanted the Spirit to be back in my life, and how I would give up anything to get it back.

The next day, my Psychosynthesis teacher asked me if the Higher Self was practical.  That is, could I follow my spiritual guidance and have things work out on the practical, daily level?  This juxtaposition of the words “Higher Self” and “practical” was a totally new one to me, and it threw me into a state of higher awareness.  I saw that I had been assuming that my Higher Self or my spiritual intuition could not possibly be practical, and so I felt I had to make concessions to the realities of daily life, even though that meant I had to give up being in tune with the Flow.

I realized that society’s conventional paradigm maintained that there is a large gulf or disconnection between the spiritual realm and the practical world.  Thus one couldn’t get by in the practical world by paying attention to one’s spiritual intuition.  But now in my illumined state, I realized that the conventional paradigm was wrong.  There was such a deep connection between the two realms that my highest spiritual intuition, my Higher Self, knew what was going on in the practical daily world and could lead me to my right place in it.  There I would not only be doing God’s work and have the energy and joy of being connected with the Spirit, but I would also be getting by in the practical world.

I realized the reason I had not been able to follow my inner guidance, and had thereby lost my energy, is because my Higher Self wanted me to do something that I considered totally impractical: quit Dartmouth College.  I had finished almost four years of college and what would I do if I quit?  I had no skills and almost no money.  I realized I would not even let such an impractical message enter my conscious awareness because I did not feel that my spiritual intuition was practical.

I saw that my idea of what was practical was based on my paradigm of how the world operated.  Because I had been taught all my life that there was no connection between my spiritual guidance and the daily material world, I did not think, and hence did not feel, that my inner spiritual guidance was able to help me live practically in the world.  Instead, I believed in society’s attitude that I had to be practical because spiritual intuition could not be trusted with life’s most important decisions.  If, however, I had been programmed with the correct paradigm that our spiritual guidance is practical, then I would have felt that following my intuition was practical.  And so I would have felt comfortable following my Higher Self even if it told me to quit college.

I then saw that spiritual intuition was more reliable than the intellect because spiritual intuition has a direct grasp of what is right for us to do.  The intellect, on the other hand, does not intuitively know the right way of doing things: it arrives at its recommendations for action by figuring things out from data, like a computer does.  The problem is that the data one inputs into the intellect is socially conditioned, and so the intellect’s conclusions are inherently susceptible to society’s programming.  For this reason, the intellect is not as reliable as true spiritual intuition in leading us to our right place.

As soon as I realized these things, I knew I could follow my spiritual intuition and quit Dartmouth College.  Because my Higher Self was practical and could lead me to what I needed in the daily world, as long as I followed the guidance of my Higher Self I would get by in the daily world.  Only my cultural conditioning had prevented me from following my spiritual intuition and quitting school earlier.

In some ways quitting college was not a strange activity for me.  I had never graduated from high school, instead going on to college without ever getting a high school degree.  Quitting college just felt like the same thing.  Plus my parents had not paid any of my college expenses as I had a full scholarship from Dartmouth.  Lastly I did not feel I was harming Dartmouth as I was not quitting for selfish reasons but to help others, and the college had a long tradition of celebrating its dropouts.

After this realization, I was scared because soon I would be leaving the safety net of social structures.  However, I was even more excited as I was starting out on a grand adventure into understanding how the Flow works in the world.  Because society was mistaken in thinking there was no connection between our spiritual intuition and the practical world, there was a much better, more connected way of living than our society believed.

Ten days after quitting college, a clear intuitive message came to me: “Go to California.”  I trusted this message as it had such a deep stillness and purity to it that it could only have come from my Higher Self which intuitively knew my right place.

I had discovered what I should do next, but how could I get to California from Vermont: I had no car, no money, and I was on crutches because my knee was injured.  While getting a job would have been the obvious, practical thing to do, I was so tired on a very deep level from the intense fasting and praying I had been doing in the past several months that I needed to recover.   I felt getting a job now would injure me on some deep level, so I didn’t feel it was the right thing to do.

I had quit college based on the insight that if I listened to my spiritual intuition, I could also get by in my practical daily life.  Therefore, I did not have to do things which destroyed my connection to the Flow to get by in the world.  I strongly felt getting a job at this time would be giving up on my insight that a person could follow her spiritual intuition and still make it in the practical world.

Yet a large part of me wanted to forget all this spiritual stuff and just get a job.  If I had a job, I would be assured of earning money and getting to California.  While I was sure my insight was correct and the spiritual realm was intimately connected to the practical world, I still had not seen this insight work out in my daily life.  So parts of me were understandably nervous about it.  How could I be positively sure it would all work out in my daily life if I hadn’t experienced it yet?  I couldn’t.  But as much as I wanted to go back to the old ways and comfortably sink into practical mindedness, I wasn’t going to let my worries get the better of me.

Instead I just rested and recovered.  Moreover, as I had received the message that I was supposed to go to California, and it was definitely not right for me to get a job now, I assumed that the Universe was going to arrange a way for me to get there.  That meant that I should be ready to travel when the time came.  I went to an acupuncturist for my injured knee, which helped it get better for awhile.  I mailed all my books to my parents’ house and disposed of everything else that I couldn’t easily take with me.  All I had left were a few personal belongings and my tent.

One morning I had an overwhelming feeling that it was time to take down my tent and pack everything up so that I would be ready to go that very day.  As I had no way of getting to California, I didn’t trust this very intense feeling.  I felt I would look foolish if I got all ready and nothing happened.  So even though I felt an extremely intense feeling to do all the final preparations for the trip to California, I didn’t do them.

An hour later, my Psychosynthesis teacher Donald drove up and told me that he had been offered a job teaching at a college in California.  He was flying there, and he needed his car driven to the college where he was going to teach.  Since I was the only person he trusted with his car, he asked me to drive it there for him.  Of course I agreed as this was my way to get to California.

Donald needed to leave right away.  As I hurried to take down my tent, I understood why I had felt so strongly that I should get all ready to leave.  My deep feelings were more sensitive to the Flow than I thought possible.

I was elated as I drove away with my former teacher.  I had followed the Flow, and it had really worked.  Now I had a much better way of getting to California than if I had gotten a job and made money.

My intuition really did know how to lead me better than my practical mind; I could listen to it and have things work out in the world.  It was as if there was a giant computer matching my needs to the possibilities in the world.  My intuition had access to this computer and was sensitive to the best way to satisfy my needs.

The idea I could listen to my spiritual intuition and succeed in the practical world was now more than an insight; it was something that had proven itself to be wonderfully true.

Chapter Three

The trip to California turned out much better than I could possibly have imagined.  Not only was I provided with a car, but Donald also gave me more expense money than I needed.  Furthermore, after I stopped to visit my family in Detroit, my favorite brother and sister decided to come to California with me.  Once I arrived at my destination and parked in the college parking lot, I started talking to the first person I met.  It turned out this person had always wanted to go to Dartmouth and was a dorm supervisor, so he offered to let me stay in a dorm room until my former teacher showed up.  Finally, as I walked into the dorm, I saw a beautiful, sexy woman.  I was immediately attracted to her, and more importantly, she was attracted to me.  In the next week we had a very fun time.  My whole trip had turned out much better than I could possibly have planned with my practical mind.

My trip to California had been a very nice vacation, but I was ready to get back to work and do something to help the world.  However, I didn’t know what the Universe wanted me to do.  Instead of worrying and using my practical mind, I knew I should be receptive to my spiritual intuition.  I prayed, asking the Universe to tell me what to do next.  I had earlier discovered that one of the most important rules of being receptive to one’s spiritual intuition is to put everything else aside when it is time to receive a spiritual message.  So a few nights later, when I was at a party and I felt it was my time to receive a message, I left the party right away.  I went to my room and became calm and quiet.

The message, which came wordlessly into my head, said my mission was to be a spiritual teacher.  It also said other spiritual teachers have flaws and emotional problems which cause them to distort true spirituality.  These distorted teachings make spiritual people in the modern world look silly and self-absorbed, which is one important reason why so many people in our culture treat spirituality as a joke.  An important part of my job of being a spiritual teacher was to clear away my personality flaws, so I could separate the true spiritual way of living from the strange, tainted ideas that are often attached to it.

While it was good to know what my life’s work was, this message said nothing about what I should do next in my life.  A few days later that came too: I woke up with a dream saying I should hurry back to Hanover, New Hampshire where I had gone to college.  This dream felt like it came from a deeper, more aware part of me, so I trusted it immediately.

I didn’t have any reason to go back East, but the message was very clear that I should go back as quickly as possible, which meant flying there.  I didn’t have enough money with me for a plane ticket, but I remembered that five years ago I had lent my father money from my paper routes, and while I had never felt right asking for it back, this time it seemed the right thing to do.  It turned out the last of this money was just enough to fly back to New York and take a bus to New Hampshire.

I was somewhat reluctant to fly back when I couldn’t figure out any reason to hurry, and I could easily hitchhike or get a drive-away car.  But the message was clear that I should go back as quickly as possible.  Furthermore, whenever I would stop and tell myself to be reasonable, the energy abandoned me and I felt adrift.  So I spent the last of my money and quickly arrived in New Hampshire, wondering what the hurry was, but also knowing from my California trip that the Flow arranged things better than I could with my practical mind.

I got to Hanover and one of the first people I met was a friend of mine named Alice.  She was a Dartmouth College student who had lived in the same house I had.  She invited me to her house and I cooked her dinner.  It turned out I had shown up a couple days before she was to leave on a week long canoe trip with a guy who was romantically interested in her.  But because she met me, she didn’t go on the canoe trip, and we began a life-long relationship.  If I had not spent all my money and flown across country, I would almost assuredly have missed making a connection with my future wife.

Ten days later, as I was walking down the street, a message flashed across my mind like the back of my forehead was a computer screen.  The message said: “Go to Detroit.”

This seemed like a strange message to me.  While I had grown up in Detroit, and my family still lived there, I had never enjoyed the place or the people.  More importantly, the other intuitive messages I had received — to quit college, to go to California and to hurry back to New Hampshire – had come after much prayer, meditation and focusing on my need for divine guidance.  These messages also immediately felt like they were from a deeper part of my consciousness.

This message was different: it just flashed into my head as I was walking down the street.  So I felt I had no guarantee that this message came from the spiritual part of me which knew my right place in the Flow. Instead this message could be from a lower part of my unconscious.  I couldn’t think of any reason why some unconscious part of me would want to go to Detroit as I didn’t want to leave Alice and go to a place that I had never liked or felt comfortable in.

There were other reasons not to go too.  First, I had recently re-injured my knee and could not walk well enough to hitchhike.  Secondly, I had absolutely no money left and couldn’t afford the train.  (This was in the day before everyone had credit cards, and I did not have a credit card.)  Lastly, because my parents were poor, if I got into trouble, there was no one to help me out.  So if this message was not from the part of me that knew my place in the Flow, I could easily end up in an unpleasant situation.

For all these reasons, it was imperative that I know if this was a real intuitive message or not.  For a few days, I thought about the problem of discerning true messages from false ones.  I wondered how I could tell if this was a message from the part of me that knew my right place in the Flow or was a false message from my emotionally clouded, lower unconscious.  As I thought about this question, I remembered I was able to quit college when I realized the spiritual and physical levels were not two separate realms as our culture had trained us to think, but were deeply connected.  Now I realized that as a corollary to this insight, if I was doing the right thing, the physical level should work out in a wonderful way as it did in my California trip.  Thus if this message was truly from my spiritual intuition or Higher Self, the Flow would help make things work out on the practical daily level.  I wouldn’t have to put up with being thirsty, hungry or cold while lying on the side of the road with a hurt leg.  Instead I would get to Detroit in a pleasant way.

If I could get some money, I could easily get to Detroit by taking the train.  However I was too hurt to work.  Earlier, I had learned that if I needed money, I shouldn’t ask people for it; instead, I should make my needs known clearly.  Asking people for money put them in an uncomfortable spot whether they gave me any or not.  Furthermore, if the Universe did not want me to do something, then people giving me money would only help me get out of the Flow.  It was of utmost importance to be totally pure because the level of consciousness a person uses along the way determines the final result.  If it was right for me to go to Detroit, someone would want to give me money.  If someone gave me what I needed, the fact that I was being helped in my endeavor was a sign that it was the right thing to do.

I told some friends about my message and they were surprised; like me, they saw no reason for me to go to Detroit.  When they asked me how I was getting there, I said that I didn’t know but I couldn’t hitchhike because I was hurt.  I then mentioned it would cost about forty dollars to take the train.  I assumed that the Flow would move someone to give me money if it was the right thing to do.  It turned out that it was a spiritually liberating thing for two of my friends to each give me about twenty dollars.  This money was enough to take the train to Detroit and make the trip a very pleasant one.

I had absolutely no idea why the Universe wanted me to go to Detroit.  But as I could do it in a Flowing way, it looked like it was the right thing to do.

When I got to Detroit, I went to visit an old friend.  In high school, this friend and I had started a radical, underground newspaper together.  Recently he had interpreted some rare eclipse or planetary alignment as meaning that it was time for him to make deep spiritual changes.  He was just waiting for someone to help him, and I started a process that helped change his life.

 

Chapter Four

 

When I was finished helping my friend, I went back to New Hampshire to see Alice.  Over the next few months, I fell deeply in love with her.  After she went to Berkeley to study for the winter term, I realized I wanted to marry her.  I was not going to let my soulmate get away, so I decided to hitchhike to California to be with her.  Even though I had little money, and it was in the middle of an extremely cold winter, I started hitchhiking to California.

I got to New Jersey where it started snowing heavily.  After a couple rides, I was let off in the Pennsylvania wilderness.  I was in the middle of nowhere, had less than two dollars and the snow was getting higher, so it might seem that I was in trouble.  But I felt God’s presence, and I was not the slightest bit worried.  Indeed, I was so filled with the joy of the Spirit, and how much more amazing and wonderful my life was now than it used to be, I stopped hitchhiking.  I trudged through the snow into the woods where I kept singing “Amazing Grace.”  I was so glad that I had given my life over to doing the Universe’s will.  As the Spirit’s energy and joy enlivened my life, it more than made up for any external things it might seem to others that I lacked.

After I sang for about an hour, I felt it was time to go back to the highway and start hitchhiking again.  When I got to the highway, I saw that it was snowing so heavily that the interstate would soon be impassable by car.  As only a tractor-trailer truck could make it through this big snowstorm, I needed a truck to pick me up.  Furthermore, I was getting tired and was still far from my first destination, my parents’ house in Detroit.  So I needed to be picked up by a truck that would take me all the way to Detroit.  As I thought about these things, I remembered there was a freeway near my parents’ house that kept going to Pontiac.  As I put these facts together, I thought I needed a truck going to Pontiac to pick me up.  A few minutes later I saw a tractor-trailer truck approaching with the words “Pontiac, Michigan” painted on the side of its door.  As the truck drove by, I so much felt this was my truck, that I pointed at it and said it should stop.  It did.  The driver picked me up and we drove away.  Later he told me I was lucky he picked me up as the snowstorm was so heavy that only his special kind of big rig could make it through the snowy Pennsylvania mountains.  As he drove me 500 miles to Detroit, the driver also fed me.

At my parents’ house, my father and mother told me they had not yet given me my Christmas present.  As it was also near my birthday, they combined the presents and gave me enough money to buy a cheap bus ticket to San Francisco.  A few days later, I arrived at Alice’s apartment.

Unfortunately, while I could joyfully navigate my way through a snowstorm, Alice’s emotional storms were much more difficult to deal with.  While part of her was very glad to see me, another part of her wished I wasn’t there and would push me away.  Sometimes she would get very mad at me and tell me to leave; one time she even kicked me out of her apartment.  These emotional tempests happened for no apparent reason, and so it was hard for me to tell whether I would encounter the Alice who loved me or the one who wanted me to leave.  I could easily deal with hitchhiking through a giant snowstorm, but dealing with this relationship was far more difficult.

Partially because Alice didn’t seem to want me around, I got the idea that I should go visit my former Psychosynthesis teacher in Southern California.  I also got the idea that I should take an airplane there.  This idea was not a message coming from my higher intuition; it just seemed like a nice thing to do.  As I had no money, taking a plane to Southern California seemed unlikely.  But with all the things I had been through, it seemed possible.  After all, someone might give me money or somehow my name might be in the computer ticket system, and I would be given a ticket.  Before, this whole plan would have seemed crazy.  But after doing things like hitchhiking through one of the worst snowstorms of the century, the boundaries between what was possible and what wasn’t possible were no longer clear.

The San Francisco airport was twenty miles away from Berkeley, and it was too difficult to hitchhike or walk there.  Because I didn’t have enough money to take the rapid transit system, I violated my principles and asked Alice for the money.  She gave me five dollars, but when I tried to buy a ticket for the subway to the airport, the machine did an ominous thing: it ate my money.  Alice then gave me a few more dollars, and this time I got a ticket.

Going to the airport, I didn’t feel inspired like I did when I was hitchhiking through the snowstorm.  I got to the airport and asked the ticket agents many times if they had a ticket in my name, but with no luck.  Nor did anyone walk up to me and give me money.  After five hours of sitting in the airport, I started to feel miserable.

This trip was not turning out well, and it was now becoming clear to me that I had made a mistake in coming to the airport.  I thought I would have to suffer until I got back in the Flow, especially as I didn’t have enough money to get back to Alice’s apartment.  It seemed I would have to make a very difficult and dangerous walk back there.

The bus to San Francisco cost eighty cents, and I was glad that I had that much and eight cents to spare.  I got on the bus and as it drove away, I thought about why I had embarked on this stupid trip.  After a few minutes, I realized I had ignored four important principles I had developed for telling if what I was doing was in tune with the Flow.  To begin with and most importantly, I never questioned the purity of my motives: I did not question whether the message to take a plane to my friend’s house came from my Higher Self or my lower unconscious.  Instead of examining myself, I just assumed it was the right thing because I wanted to do it.  Secondly, rather than just making my needs known clearly, I had asked Alice for money, thus possibly putting her on the spot.  Because I had assumed I had a good goal, I did not make sure I was using the right means along the way.  Thirdly, considering I had lost such a significant portion of my money in the ticket machine, I should have wondered if this was a sign that the trip was probably not in the Flow.  When you are doing the right thing, the Universe generally helps you along instead of making things more difficult.  Lastly, I was not infused with God’s presence as I traveled: I didn’t feel energized or joyous or any other manifestation of the Flow.

I realized I must have been blinded by some emotional problem to have made so many mistakes.  After thinking about it on the bus ride from the airport, I realized I wanted to show my former Psychosynthesis teacher and the other friends I was going to visit that following the Flow would succeed on their terms.  These friends only wanted to be spiritual if spirituality also gave them all the material things our society valued.  So I was trying to take a plane to show them the Flow could live up to their standards.  If the Flow did that, then I thought they would listen to my ideas.

My friends’ views were a mistaken way of looking at the Flow.  The Flow gives us what we need, not what will impress others.  If that meant some people wouldn’t listen to my spiritual message because the Flow did not give them enough money or social status by their standards, I would have to live with it.

Once I figured out my problem, I felt better about the whole stupid trip.  After a while, I struck up a conversation with a guy on the bus.  In the course of our conversation, I casually mentioned to him that I had only eight cents left.  Twenty minutes later, as this guy left the bus, he quickly slipped me a five dollar bill.

I was elated.  Not because this was enough money to return to Alice’s apartment, but because it meant that I was already back in the Flow.  I realized that in general I did not have to suffer for my mistakes: I could dissolve my bad karma as soon as I realized why I had made the mistake that generated it.  The Universe does not make us suffer for our mistakes; instead, we are right back in the Flow as soon as we figure out why we made them.

As I thought about it, I realized this happened because humans are primarily spiritual beings whose work in the world is to learn and grow in spiritual awareness.  We develop awareness by learning from our mistakes.  As we make these mistakes and spiritually learn from them, we are doing the work of the Universe, and so the Flow supports us.  For that reason, instead of suffering for our mistakes, we could get right back in the Flow as soon as we understood why we had made them.

I was elated as I realized that I would not have to suffer for my mistakes.  It was a much nicer Universe than I had thought.

Chapter Five

While I wanted to marry Alice because I felt she was my soulmate, she seemed very ambivalent about our relationship: sometimes she was very loving, but many other times she was very mean to me and pushed me away for no apparent reason.  Because I was unable to leave Alice and my life wasn’t that positive with her, I wanted to find a way to make our relationship better.  Before I did not know that the Universe was set up in such a way that I could make the relationship better.  But now I realized that the Flow was working through Alice in giving me some of the things I needed, and as things should work out for people as they do the Universe’s work, that meant I should be able to make my relationship with her work.

As I thought about how I should be able to improve my situation with Alice, I remembered a magazine article I had read several years ago about est, a popular psychological training seminar in the seventies.  Est’s main principle was that we are not helpless victims in any part of our lives.  Instead, they say “we create our own reality.”  This belief that a person creates her own reality seemed jejune to me, but I was interested in how they applied this concept to improving emotional relationships.  Est maintained that our negative relationships are unconsciously brought about by a part of us that benefits from the negative situation.  Est stressed that once we understood this unconscious part of ourselves, our relationships would improve tremendously.

Est’s principle, if it was true, meant that once I understood the part of me that benefited from my negative relationship with Alice, the situation would change.  I decided to test this idea.  So I asked myself: What part of me wanted my relationship with Alice to be so negative?  My previous work in building a connection to my intuition paid off, and the answer occurred to me immediately: my situation with Alice was exactly like my father’s situation with my mother.  When I was younger, my mother treated my father just like Alice was treating me: my mother often pushed my father away, while at other times she was very loving.  My brother thought my father shouldn’t put up with this behavior and once said that my dad should leave her.  But my father scoffed at my brother, saying many women were just like that and one had to put up with their erratic, emotional behavior.  I had always respected my father and had defended him by saying he was doing the right thing.

I realized that if I had the same situation with a woman as my father had, it was a statement that my father was right: many women just were emotional messes, and he was right in staying with my mother.  Because I respected my father so much, I wanted to validate his way of doing things.

Once this pattern was brought to my consciousness, I realized it was a stupid way to validate my father, since it did not help him and it ruined my life.  After this realization, I could no longer put up with Alice’s behavior.  Things had to improve.

A few hours later, Alice came home.  As soon as she saw me, before I even said a word, she knew that things were different.  She could tell that I had changed, and she would have to change too if she was going to keep me.  And she did.  Whereas before she was not even willing to talk about the reasons why she often pushed me away, now she opened up and told me about the emotional problems that made it hard for her to be intimate with anyone.  After two intensive days of psychological counseling, she got through some major problems about why she was afraid to open up to people and our relationship became much better.

Est was right; there was a part of me that benefited from being in a negative relationship with Alice.  Unfortunately, when est and other New Age groups philosophize about this idea, they overstate it.  They don’t say that our unconscious psychological states help to bring about our emotional relationships; they say “we create our own reality.”  I was not creating my own reality; I was following the Flow and going with a deeper energy.  This deeper energy was much more powerful and wonderful than anything I could even conceive of creating with my little mind.

For the next few weeks I meditated on why our psychological states influence our relationships so much.  Then I had a deep, intuitive insight that explained why if we change, other people change too.  I realized that around everyone’s body there is a subtle energy field.  Furthermore, whenever people interact, there is an exchange of this subtle energy; in every relationship, some subtle energy flows from one person’s energy field into the other person’s energy field.  Without this energy exchange, a relationship cannot occur.

Our cultural paradigm generally maintains that bad things happen to good people for no particular reason.  In our cultural paradigm, it is often inexplicable why a person was snubbed, mugged or raped.  In my view, because all relations are energy exchanges, whatever happens to a person is never inexplicable or purely random.  In order for any interaction or relationship to occur, there has to be an exchange of subtle energy between people’s subtle energy fields.  Thus only if a person had an opening in her subtle energy field to receive the other person’s negative energy could she receive it.

Most importantly, the openings in one’s energy field are not random.  They are connected to one’s psychological state of consciousness.  The openings in a person’s energy field are a manifestation of her psychological and spiritual awareness.  This means that nothing ultimately inexplicable or totally random ever happens in any of our relationships.  Bad things happen to good people because good people have less than pure subtle energy fields.

I also realized that the openings in a person’s energy field changed as the person’s consciousness changed.  Thus a person could change her subtle energy field by making changes in her consciousness or way of dealing with relationships.  This insight means that a person is never a helpless victim.  As all relationships are exchanges of subtle energy, if one closes the opening in the subtle energy field that allowed the energy exchange, then one could be free from the negative relationship.  Because a person had the power to change her subtle energy field through changing her consciousness, then she had power to change her negative relationships.

Est and some other New Age groups said that people were responsible for their relationships, but this is an infelicitous choice of words.  The word “responsible” implies one consciously wanted something to happen or was consciously in control of it happening.  But I never consciously wanted a messy relationship with Alice.

By changing her consciousness, a person has the power to change a negative situation, and so she can respond to any negative relationship and make it better.  Obviously, this wouldn’t change the negative things that have already happened to a person, but it empowered a person to change the future so that these negative situations wouldn’t reoccur.  Past negative feelings therefore lose much, if not all, of their sting because the fear of them happening again is gone.

This vision of relationships as subtle energy exchanges means that if a person can face her problems, she can change her relationships.  No matter how horrible a relationship is, one is never merely a helpless victim.

After learning about how our inner consciousness and emotional relationships were connected, I heard about a more connected approach to illness. This holistic approach believed that our body’s ailments can be seen as a metaphorical manifestation of our emotional or spiritual troubles.  For instance, if one has a stomach ache, there may be something that one can not stomach.

The metaphorical way of looking at physical ailments assumes that the physical level is intimately intertwined with the emotional and spiritual levels.  A person’s physical problems are not random but are often a metaphorical manifestation of her psychological and spiritual states.  Because a physical problem is often a reflection of what is troubling a person on an inner level, illness or ailments become messages or lessons a person can learn from.  In the metaphorical approach, instead of illness being a purely negative phenomenon, it can be a positive guide to better understanding how to attune to the Flow.  This approach is not a replacement for conventional Western medicine, but is used along with it or used with problems not amenable to treatment by conventional medicine.

Alice finished her term at Berkeley, and we were ready for whatever was next.  Then my ass started hurting a lot.  The pain felt like I had been sitting for much too long.  It was the kind of pain a person gets from an overly long car ride.  I was surprised by this pain as I had not been sitting any longer than usual, and my posterior had never hurt like this before.  Previously, I would have shrugged off this pain, but in the metaphorical approach, because physical pain can be an outer manifestation of something importantly askew on the inner level, it wasn’t wise to ignore it or stoically endure it.  Instead I should see if it was a metaphor to understanding my inner problems.

While this new approach made a lot of sense to me, it required a lot of mental and emotional energy to look at myself and see how I might be sitting too much on some inner level.  On the other hand, maintaining my present course was easy.  So instead of thinking about my pain as a clue to my inner state, I ignored it and hoped it would go away.

However it got much worse.  Now the pain felt like I had been sitting on my ass for an extraordinarily long time.  After a couple more days of intense pain, I decided I had nothing to lose if I tried this metaphorical method.  My bottom was hurting like I was sitting on it too much, so there must be some way on the inner level that I was sitting around too much and not getting up and doing what needed to be done.  But what could it be?  After a couple of days of thinking, I had no insight and again I wanted to give up.

But prodded by my intense pain, I tried to connect my problem to other things in my life.  If I was doing something wrong like sitting too much, it should be connected with other matters in my life.  And if I could relate these two seemingly unconnected things, I might get rid of my pain.

Since the only significant thing happening in my life at that time was my relationship with Alice, I wondered if my pain could be connected to her.  After thinking for awhile, it gradually occurred to me that I might be “sitting on my ass” too much in my relationship with her.  While I wanted to marry her, I was not telling her much about the spiritual things I was involved with.  I had told her very little about the Flow, how to connect with it, or how people had to continually face their problems.  For some reason, probably embarrassment, I was keeping that part of my life secret from her.  But if we were ever going to get married, she needed to know about these things.

After thinking of these things, I now realized that in my relationship with Alice, I was definitely “sitting on my ass” way too much.  I should be telling her everything about the spiritual part of my life and how I was discovering principles of following the Flow.  It was stupid to keep that aspect of my life separate from her as she obviously needed to know about it if we were going to be married.  I had to get off my ass and really start sharing with her the most important aspect of my life.

I changed my behavior and started sharing the details of my spiritual life with her.  I told her about following God, the wonderful things Flowing had brought me, and how it was done.  Immediately my ass stopped hurting.  Furthermore, Alice reciprocated by sharing her feelings more deeply than ever before.  It seemed once I wasn’t holding anything back in our relationship, neither was she.

Two days later, Alice and I were walking on a deserted beach of the Pacific Ocean.  She was more romantic than ever before, and for the first time, she was seriously thinking of marrying me.  Then she looked down and saw something glistening in the sand.  She bent down, picked it up, and found it was a man’s gold, wedding ring with five diamonds in it.  She handed it to me and it fit my ring finger perfectly.  She took finding this ring just as she was first thinking of marrying me as a sign from the Universe that we should get married.

Understanding one’s physical problems as a metaphorical manifestation of one’s inner problems can be an extremely effective way to attune to the Universe and benefit from synchronicity.  Great things happen if one can learn from one’s physical problems because the physical and spiritual levels are not as disconnected as our cultural paradigm maintains.  Once one is attuned on the inner level, that attunement manifests outwardly in wonderful synchronicities like finding a wedding ring in the sand.

Chapter Six

A week later, I asked Alice to marry me and she said yes.  So we traveled to New Hampshire where we wanted to get married.  About fifteen miles from her parent’s house in southern New Hampshire, we noticed a wedding dress hanging from a tree at a yard sale.  The dress fit Alice perfectly, and her parents bought it for her.  We reserved the Dartmouth College chapel for our wedding and Alice made her wedding ring at the college jewelry studio.  A friend of a friend volunteered her beautiful Vermont farmhouse for the wedding reception and our honeymoon.  Finally we arranged to be married the day before many of our college friends were graduating so that they could be there.

Before we got married, Alice and I simultaneously had deep intuitions that we should have a child now.  It never occurred to us to do anything but follow this message; we trusted that as we followed the Universe’s will, things would work out for us.  When Alice was three months pregnant, we both felt we should go to California.

In California, we moved into a small house with some friends.  Then my former Psychosynthesis teacher, Donald, moved into the house too.  While Donald was aware of many spiritual things, he always had a strong desire for money and social status.  He wanted a Mercedes, and so he set up a little altar with a picture of a Mercedes.  He would look worshipfully at this picture, visualizing himself owning a Mercedes while affirming that he was deserving of it.

I thought this was very strange behavior, but Donald continually maintained that his behavior was spiritual.  He was into prosperity consciousness, a way of thinking which maintained that as each person is an aspect of a loving God, they naturally deserved total abundance on the material level. According to this philosophy, our external states were a manifestation of our thoughts.  This philosophy maintained it was only our negative self-images and negative thoughts which caused us to be poor, sick or unable to find a parking place.  The goal of prosperity consciousness was to change our thoughts, and thus change our external state.

Flowing is based on connecting to God and others so that a deeper, more joyous soul energy flows through you.  The Flow gives a person what she needs as she follows it.  Part of following God, though, is realizing the distinction between what you really need and what you merely want.  This distinction is important because what a person wants might not even be good for her.  Furthermore, a person may only want something because she has been conditioned by her society’s warped values to desire it.  Those who stress prosperity consciousness, however, do not discriminate between their needs and their wants.  This leads to many problems like my former teacher worshipping a Mercedes and thinking it was spiritual behavior.

In following the Flow, one needs to analyze and think critically about what one is doing wrong.  Those into visualizations or prosperity consciousness, however, have the exact opposite attitude.  In their view our thoughts create our reality, so they believe it’s dangerous to focus on problems as that gives the problems more energy.  Instead a person should affirm the positive.  As they don’t want to even think about these “negative” things, they have an inherent bias against critical thinking.  This unfortunate tendency discourages understanding problems because it discourages even thinking about them.

Donald said when a person needs something, she has to get perfectly clear about the exact thing she needs and visualize receiving it.  The person also had to do whatever was necessary to become ready to receive the thing she needed.  Then it would show up.

I was not a follower of this visualization method as it was antithetical to how I understood the Flow to work.  I did not see myself as creating things.  I saw the Flow as being like a river, and I was in a canoe flowing downstream in that river.  My job was to keep clear of the rapids and other dangerous spots and not get pulled off course by my lower personality desires.  As long as I did that, the river would help me go downstream.

As he continued to live with us, my former teacher would often scream and yell at us even though we hadn’t done anything to provoke his anger.  He also made it very clear he did not want to discuss his behavior with us.  Since we couldn’t see why we deserved these angry outbursts, we just thought he had turned into a complete jerk.

Earlier in my life I would have just ignored or put up with these angry outbursts.  But as I thought about why this situation was happening to us, I had a realization.  For the first time, I understood the ramifications of an earlier insight that there is an exchange of subtle energy in all relationships: in order for a person to receive any kind of negative energy, there would have to be an opening in her subtle energy field on that level.  Now I saw that there could only be this opening in a person’s energy field if she was centered on the same level of consciousness as the negative energy.  This meant that for me to receive my former teacher’s mean outbursts, I would have to be centered on the same level of consciousness as he was.  The only way this could be true was if I thought and understood relationships the same basic way that Donald did.

After I understood this principle, I saw why I had an opening in my energy field to his angry outbursts.  I realized that I had a tendency to think about other people the same way he did when he was yelling at me.  Thus I was not receiving his anger because I was doing something wrong, but because I had the same attitudes that he spewed forth.  Even though I didn’t yell meanly like he did, I thought about people the same way he did.  I merely controlled myself infinitely better because my negative thought patterns were not as strong as his.

The only way I could be safe around this guy was to stop thinking in the same negative way that he did. Then I would no longer have an opening in my subtle energy field, and his negativity could not affect me.  As I understood this and changed my attitude, I could not receive his negative energy and my former teacher immediately stopped yelling at me.

Once I rose above the level of being screamed at, Donald started directing all his mean outbursts at Alice who was now five months pregnant.  Alice did not know how to handle these outbursts, and she would become very emotionally upset.  My former teacher then said my wife was so out of control emotionally, she should be put away in an insane asylum until she learned how to control her emotions.  One time, Donald got so upset he almost punched my pregnant wife in the stomach.

Obviously these fights were getting out of hand; we had to figure out some way to stop them.  Trying to discuss the problem with Donald got us nowhere because he kept insisting his behavior had nothing to do with my wife being upset, and she just needed to learn to control her emotions.  Needless to say, this upset my wife even more.  So I explained to her the principle I had just discovered that one can only receive negative energy if one is centered on the same level of consciousness as the negative person.  That meant she must think in the same or a very similar way as my former teacher did.  So he must be an external expression of a voice within her that thought emotions were awful, and the goal was to live above these emotional storms by controlling them.  As my wife thought about this, she said it made total sense to her.  What my former teacher was saying was exactly how she thought about herself: she thought she was an emotional volcano that spewed forth emotions for no reason at all, and she wished she could control her emotions as Donald advised.

I told Alice she needed to stop thinking of emotions as storms; she was not being beset by storms that came over her for no reason.  Her emotions were a valid, though inappropriately expressed, response to negative emotional energy that my former teacher was sending out and which she was not consciously aware of.

The way to deal with our problem was not to try to convince Donald of Alice’s saneness, but to deal with the part of Alice that saw her emotions as so troublesome.  If she changed her view of emotions, he would no longer be able to yell at her.  My wife did change her attitude, and my former teacher immediately stopped bothering her.

When Alice was seven months pregnant, to pay for the baby’s birth, we applied for California’s health care program for the poor.  As we were talking to the social services worker, she said we were eligible for welfare as they considered our unborn child a baby.

Southern California was at the height of the disco craze, with people worshipping Mercedes and pretending this was spiritual behavior.  It did not seem the ideal place to raise a child.  So we decided to go back East where it was a saner world.  Because of the welfare benefits, we had enough money to get cheap plane tickets to New York.  With Alice eight months pregnant, it seemed like the easiest and best thing to do.  A month later Alice had a baby boy in New Hampshire.

Chapter Seven

Everything went well for about six months.  Then we made a wrong turn and were no longer in our right place: we did not have money, we had a poor living arrangement, and we just felt tremendously lost.   Previously I would have looked at when I had lost connection with the Flow, and why I had stopped following my intuition about my right place.  This time felt different.  I felt very strongly I was missing some important concept about how to follow the Flow, and for this reason I had made a wrong turn somewhere.  I intensely concentrated on discovering this new concept.

While meditating, I kept getting distracted by the thought of my many missed romantic and sexual opportunities when I was a teenager.  At first, I tried to stop thinking about this because it seemed so completely irrelevant to my current troubles.  But as these thoughts reoccurred in my meditations, I eventually decided that there might be a principle underlying my current troubles which I could best understand by looking at that period of my life.

By looking at my troubled dating patterns, I did indeed discover the concept I needed.  I started to see there were some people who were more important than other people.  These people give us the love, money or food we need.  They introduce us to new things and take us on to the next stage of our lives.  Oftentimes it is as if these people are on our wavelength, or they bring out a different side of us than anyone else.  Sometimes they are our parents, siblings, wives, first loves or mentors, and are around for significant portions of our lives.  Other times we see them for just an hour or a summer.  With them, life is fun and meaningful, and we succeed in an area of our life.  On the other hand, if we do not meet these people or do not relate well enough with them, that part of our life is empty or unfulfilled.  As we are especially connected to these people and our success is bound up with them, I call these important people connections.  Not only people, but places, activities, animals and things can also be our connections.

Watching TV and American movies, it was obvious that many people intuitively understood this concept.  In the movies, the winners make their connections and succeed or get the girl because their connections give them what they need.  People get in trouble when they do not make their connections.

With this new concept, I had to enlarge my idea of what following the Flow was about.  There was more than just attuning to my inner divine connection and following it; I also had to make these connections and be blessed by them.  They were often like “hits” of the Spirit or appearances of grace helping me along and giving me what I needed to stay in the Flow.  So I had to make these connections and get the things I needed from them if I wanted to keep flowing.

I had studied many religious and spiritual traditions and most of them emphasized following God and your divine messages.  The important thing in these traditions was doing what you were told by your divine messages or being faithful to your spiritual sides.  These traditions emphasized not being swayed by social circumstances or external factors like popularity or practicality, and instead emphasized always being spiritual.  None of these spiritual traditions I knew of discussed this concept of connections and being led in your spiritual path by them. Now I understood that caring about God and doing my spiritual duty was not enough.  A person who was following the Flow also needed to be sensitive to their connections and make sure they made them.

We had our son because we had an extremely strong intuition to have a baby.  I never questioned following the intuition; after all I had been through, it no longer seemed strange to be told to do things.  I had also seen so many wonderful things work out for me when I followed my divine messages.  Now I had a very strong feeling to have another child because this child would be a very deep connection of mine.

Although we were not doing very well in the external world right now, that seemed only temporary.  It was such a strong feeling that it never occurred to me to weigh the pros and cons of having another baby.  My guiding principle was do the right thing, and the money will come.  Before I had always thought of doing the right thing as being about following divine messages; now I extended that idea to making connections.  I felt my connection was calling me, and that was pretty much the same as God calling me.

By thinking about the idea of connections and what her connections were, Alice realized she wanted to go back to Dartmouth College.  Her parents wanted her to finish college, so they paid for her tuition and some of her living expenses while I took care of our baby son. I was right to be worried about my inability to follow the Flow if we did not learn about connections and how to make them. We also made other connections we had missed, and gratefully we got back in the Flow.  Considering she would become a professor and this is how she would make money for the rest of our lives, Alice clearly needed to make this important connection in her life.

Alice re-enrolled in college, but we deeply felt we were six months behind as she should have been taking classes six months earlier.  So she took extra classes to make up for what she had missed.  My wife was not sure what classes to take, but by now she was pregnant with our second child and the most important thing for her was taking classes with comfortable chairs.  The only class with comfortable chairs at a convenient time period was a religious studies class.  It turned out she loved religious studies.  The professor became a mentor to her, and my wife decided she should become a religious studies professor.

While Alice was at Dartmouth College taking an extra heavy load of classes, I was at home taking care of our son.  Now that raising him was my total responsibility, I thought about how to do the job well.  The model I had for my life was trusting in the Flow and being careful to not let my own inappropriate lower personality desires get in the way of following the Flow.  I wondered how that could be applied to taking care of children.

Pondering my childhood, I remembered what I had disliked from that time: my mother making me do things that were not really necessary, but she wanted me to do as they satisfied her lower personality desires.  For example when I was in eleventh grade I had long hair, but she forced me to cut it because she did not like her son having long hair.  Or I hated dressing up for church in scratchy wool pants and tight dress shoes that hurt my feet.  All I could think about in church for an hour was how horrible the situation was.  Maybe going to church was important so I wouldn’t be damned to hell, but I would have been so much happier and liked her more if she would have let me dress more comfortably.  No matter how much I argued or whined, she would not allow it as she could not let her son go to church dressed inappropriately. Looking back it was obvious she cared more about avoiding social disapproval than about me and what I cared about.  She could not see or did not care that we would have a better relationship if she did not let her lower personality concerns get in the way.

I decided that if I could keep my lower personality concerns out of the way, my son would become whatever was right for him to be.  I felt I was being a Taoist: I could not create my son to be what I wanted him to be, but I could get out of the way and provide an environment where he could most easily become himself.

As I thought more about raising him, it did not seem part of following the Flow to take care of my son in a way that destroyed my connection to the Flow: everything did not have to be perfectly tailored for him as that would overtax me.  In practical terms that meant to take both our needs into account.  For example, with food, he needed healthy food but I did not want to spend much time dealing with it.  So I wanted to feed him something easy to fix.  The obvious solution was lots of tofu and ketchup.  I would just open the package of tofu and put it on a plate with some ketchup on it and give him a fork.  As he was too young to know everyone thought uncooked tofu was unappetizing, he was happy to eat it.  (And till his mid-twenties he would amuse people at parties by chugging raw tofu, putting a whole pound in his mouth at one time.)

Chapter Eight

I was starting to see that things go well when a person makes her connections.  But what if a person has no connections and nothing good happens to her?  My childhood was often like that: there were long times of boredom and dullness punctuated by misery and sadness.  I had many friends because I was outgoing and charismatic, but I often felt very deeply disconnected from everything around me.   It did not seem that I had missed my connections, many times there were just no connections available.  When I was young, I saw no recourse but to simply accept that life was often boring and sad.  Now I could not accept the idea that my life had to be that negative.  If there was a Flow, there should have been more connections or a reason why my childhood was so messed up.

Once I realized that every relationship involved an exchange of subtle energy, I knew the kinds of troubles people have are not random.  Because every relationship involved an energy exchange, there was something in me contributing to any negative situation.  So I started looking for a pattern behind my troubles when I was young.  I looked to see what type of connections I might have missed or why or how I had missed connections.  If I could find this pattern, then that would give me a clue as to what my problem had been to cause my childhood to feel so desolate.

As a kid, I had lots of physical energy and loved playing sports.  In second and third grade, I was by far the best football player in my school and good in other sports. I was looking forwards to playing organized football which started in the fourth grade.  But when I got to fourth grade, they changed the rules so that the organized league started in the sixth grade.  In the intervening two years, I hated school so much that I started getting many psychosomatic headaches to avoid it.  Tragically for me, even though I had never had a concussion before, my mother was convinced by a doctor that my headaches were an indication that I had a tendency to get concussions.  For this reason, she never allowed me to play football or any other contact sport again.  I lost many of the relationships that I had gained through sports, and I always felt I would have made much better friends if I could have continued to play.

Thinking more, I remembered that in sixth grade, all the Catholic schools in Michigan significantly raised their fees, so I had to go to public school.  All my friends stayed behind in the Catholic school to finish seventh and eighth grade while I went alone to a large public school that had grades seven through twelve in it.  I could not connect very well to the new kids in public school; it often felt like I had been dropped among a bunch of aliens.  I also lost my connections with my old friends and never got them back.  As the Catholic school only went to eighth grade, if I had been two years older, I would have started public high school with a large group of friends.

Wondering if there was a pattern of being two years too young, I soon saw something else.  After I finished tenth grade, I felt even more out of place in Detroit than ever before.  I had an overwhelming feeling there was absolutely nothing there for me anymore.  After the tenth grade, while bicycling in Canada by myself and never wanting to go back to Detroit, I promised myself that I would spend only one more year in Detroit then leave, no matter what.  As it turned out, I got into college during that year without ever graduating from high school.   Looking back now, it was like I was sensitive that my time in Detroit was done, but I hadn’t finished high school yet, so I couldn’t move on.

Thinking about these things, I realized that if I had been born two years earlier, many connections in my childhood would have been so much better.  My problem was that I was born two years late.  Obviously there was nothing I had done this lifetime to cause myself to be born late; it must have been something in a previous lifetime.

Until my marriage, I had a very ambivalent attitude towards reincarnation.  On one hand the Greek philosophers I had studied, like Plato and Pythagoras, were very enthusiastic about it.  On the other hand, the only modern people who talked about it just happened to have been Buddha’s charioteer or Cleopatra in their past lives.  It seems that only flakes were interested in reincarnation.  But a few weeks after Alice and I got married, she started having extremely intense feelings involving fire and death.  As we intensely focused on helping her, for a short time we became aware of a deeper part of our being and got some information about her past life: she had been burnt as a witch and while she was being burnt, she had cursed her tormentors.  The energy exchange model implied that a person would only suffer from past karma as long as she still had the same qualities or way of being or thinking.  So we helped Alice by looking at how she still acted and thought the same way as when she had been burnt.  With that way of linking things together, my wife had learned things so she could change and stop being bothered by events from her past lifetime.

A few days later my first daughter was born, and I felt closer to her than to anyone ever before.  I loved her so much and knew she was a person I had been hoping to know all my life.

For Alice to finish her college degree, she had to take part in a religious studies program in Scotland.  So we took out a student loan and flew there.  With my wife and two very young children, I arrived in Edinburgh.  We had a little extra time before the term started, so we decided to visit the Findhorn community in northern Scotland.  We bought train tickets and had just boarded the train, but immediately taking the train did not feel right; somehow it felt extremely flat to me.  So we returned our tickets and decided to get there the cheaper way: hitchhiking.  We had only been in Scotland for a couple of days, so we had no idea what roads went to Findhorn.  On a map we saw that Aberdeen was the nearest big city to Findhorn.  It was two hundred miles away from Edinburgh, and we decided to head towards it first.

Outside the Edinburgh train station, we asked some people about how to get to the road to Aberdeen.  It turned out the people we asked were members of an Aberdeen soccer team that was playing a match in Edinburgh.  They told us that after they finished their game, we could ride the team bus back with them.  That night, we got on the bus, and because they had won their soccer game, we all had a raucous good time.  When we were arriving in Aberdeen, one of the women said that the city was hosting a big oil conference (the city was the center for the North Sea oil business), and so there were no hotel rooms available in the whole city.  But she liked our two children, and even though she knew her roommate would be upset with her, she let us sleep in her apartment under the kitchen table that night.

The next day we arrived at Findhorn.  We met some of the community members, and they were impressed by me and my ideas.  I talked to one of the community group leaders, and he was amazed at my insights.  He had previously thought that only people who had been at Findhorn could understand the spirit of the place, but he said that I knew more about the spirit behind the place than he did.  Later I met with the editors of Findhorn Press, and they said they would consider publishing this book when I was done with it.  I also helped one of the guys at Findhorn with his problems.  He said my approaches to problems were better than anything he had found elsewhere.  Then he gave us enough money to take the train back to Edinburgh.

Even though Alice had often been worried about evil forces coming after her, and I had once been a channel for evil forces when I helped her with her past life problems, I never believed any evil force actually existed.  I just I never thought about it as I was totally unconcerned with the issue.  On the train ride back to Edinburgh though, I realized on a deep level that an evil force actually existed and was actively trying to stop the natural pattern of the Flow from unfolding.  Evil is not something merely in our minds, but an active force that tries to increase the amount of anger, envy and hatred in the world.  It reinforces peoples’ selfish and greedy desires, thus encouraging them to do negative things.  Furthermore, by corrupting humans and getting them to disrupt the positive flow of energy, evil increased its own power.  For the first time in my life, I realized evil was an actual force in the universe, and it was fighting those trying to do good things.

It should be emphasized that while I understood evil as an active force working in the world, I still had the same basic paradigm as before: evil can only affect a person if she has impurities in that area of her life.  Thus evil cannot make people do things, it can only work with a person’s problematic areas and reinforce or exaggerate them.

After this insight about evil, the train reached Edinburgh.  The next morning we visited a spiritual center, and I got an unusual reception.  While many people in the past few years and just a day before from the Findhorn community were impressed by my spiritual philosophy, now it was completely different.  At this spiritual center, they immediately assumed I was a spiritual neophyte and wanted to teach me very basic things.  I did not know how to react as this was such a change from the past.  It was like I was no longer connecting well to people or something was in the way of these connections.

My wife and I thought we could easily find a place to rent in Edinburgh for the fall term. Two weeks later however we were unable to find a place to rent, and we were spending too much money on hotels and restaurants.  We were not making a connection, and we were getting desperate.  I now knew enough about connections to know that if I was missing one, the key thing to do was to figure out what connection I had missed and why.  After doing that, I could get back in the Flow.

Thinking about how we could have missed a connection, we remembered that Dartmouth had a foreign studies director who found places for all the other students but did not do that for us because my wife was married.  At that time, we did not think anything of it as we thought we could easily find something on our own.  Plus our daughter was just being born and there was so much other stuff happening.  Now it was clear that we couldn’t find a place by ourselves in Edinburgh, and we probably should have pushed the foreign studies director to find a place for us.  Just knowing how we had messed up made the situation feel different; immediately we no longer felt we were in a dire situation.  We turned around and saw a triple rainbow over the beautiful, old part of Edinburgh.  Later that day or the next, the professor in charge of the program said the college probably should have done something to find us housing, and he found us an apartment with a local professor’s family.

While our situation had improved significantly, and we were going to survive, we had spent more money than we budgeted for hotels and meals.  Now my wife and I often had to go hungry to make sure our two children had enough food to eat.

Alice finished her courses in Edinburgh which meant that she had finished all the requirements to graduate from college.  We went to London to fly back to America.  While on a bus in London, I had an extremely strong feeling to get off the bus right away.  After we got off the bus, I turned around and saw an airline ticket office.  We bought our tickets and a day or two later went to Heathrow Airport.  There we saw many Americans sleeping in the airport as they could not get a flight out because it was snowing in London.  They had been in the airport for days and were not sure when they would be able fly out.  But that wasn’t our situation.  Because of my intuition, we had bought tickets on the one airline that was flying that day while all these other people were stuck.  They had the money but because of my sensitivity, we had the connection.  So we flew to America on a mostly empty plane while they languished in the airport for who knows how many more days.

After we arrived in the United States, we had a sense that we were still being affected from Alice going back to college six months late.  We felt if we had made the connection with Alice going back to school on time, she would have graduated earlier and would have gone to California at the end of summer.  Now we were six months behind and would have to go to California in the middle of the winter.  I also had the feeling that we would need money to rent a place when we got to California, so we needed to be very careful with our finances.  We got a drive away car to Utah and still had a few hundred dollars left.  It was extremely cold in northern Utah in the beginning of January, and we had enough money to take a bus to California, but we knew this meant we would arrive there broke with no money to rent a place.  So we started hitchhiking.

In a little while the police told us it was too cold to hitchhike and took us to the bus station, ordering us to take a bus.  While we had enough money, we did not want to spend this money as it would be needed in California.  An hour later, we slipped out of the bus station, walked out of town and started hitchhiking.  A nice family picked us up and let us stay in their house that night.  The next day we hitchhiked to California, arriving late at night in the town where we had lived when Alice was pregnant with our son.  We could have spent money on a hotel room, but we were saving the little we had left for rent.  We walked into a big park in the middle of town and slept in the bushes.  It did not seem like a problem: a little while before, in London, people with lots of money were sleeping on the floor of the airport as they couldn’t make a connection.  We were doing something very similar except it was quieter and more peaceful.

The park was near a university, and the next day we went to talk to people there.  One woman really liked our kids and told us how her friends had vacated a small, one bedroom house six months earlier but that the landlord still had not rented it.  The small house was perfect for us, and we had money left for the rent as we had saved it for this purpose.  As we moved in, we knew even though we had gotten behind with some of our connections, we felt that the Universe had kept this house open for us.

A few days later, we went to social services to get our two children up to date on their vaccinations.  Reagan had just become president, and the economy was in a major recession.  The social services people encouraged us to get on welfare and we did.  With a place to rent, food stamps and welfare we had made our connections.

Chapter Nine

In Scotland, I had seen that evil was an active force in the world.  This realization was as clear as my other insights about the nature of reality.  But when we left Scotland, I just stopped taking this realization seriously.  It was as if a fog came over my mind, and I could no longer keep hold of the idea of evil forces that worked against the Flow.

In California, Alice was considering going to graduate school in religious studies.  A few days later my wife and I were talking to our next door neighbor Larry about how some graduate schools wanted students to learn German.  Larry said many graduate schools required their students to learn German because many books and articles were written in it, and a good scholar needed to be able to read them.  But I laughed at the idea, with my tone implying that only people lost in their heads thought intellectuality was so important they would learn German to read scholarly books.

We talked for a few more minutes and then Alice left.  A few minutes later, I asked Larry to come see my garden, but Larry refused and rudely snubbed me.  As he walked away, it felt like all the energy of the Flow that had buoyed me up for years left me.  Before, I had been like a helium balloon that was floating high on the Universe’s energy.  But after Larry snubbed me, it was like I had been poked by a sharp pin, and all the air had gone out of me.  I felt like a shriveled-up, deflated balloon.  This had never happened to me before, and I had no idea what had occurred or why.  I connected it to the fact that Larry would not exchange energy with me, but all I could figure out was that he was some kind of snob.

A few weeks later, Alice got a part time job selling cable TV over the phone.  The great part about the job was that she not only got a decent hourly wage, but if she made twenty sales a night (and each individual cable channel counted as one sale), she would get a fifty dollar cash bonus that night.  The welfare people were glad she had this part time job, but she did not make enough to get our benefits cut.

The strange thing was that the cable TV company did not really verify if the sales were legitimate. So it was easy to cheat by getting a friend or someone to falsely say they would buy the channels and then get the fifty dollar bonus.  The company did not care at all if these claimed sales ever turned into real sales.

Alice was a true New Englander and did not like this cheating, especially as the company was paying her a decent hourly wage.  It also seemed morally wrong to me. We were used to living extremely frugally, and with our welfare benefits we did not need the money.  While everyone else was cheating and making lots of money, Alice did not do it.

Alice was proud she had the highest number of real sales, but when business slowed they had to fire someone.  They did not do what seemed the obvious, smart thing (keep the salespeople with the highest number of real sales), but instead kept those with the highest number of claimed sales (which included many fake ones).  So Alice was the only person fired, even though she was the most productive person for the company.

Losing her job caused our welfare worker to reconsider our case, and on some technicality, we were thrown off welfare.  As the Reagan recession was still going strong, Alice was not able to get another job, and we could see that in a short while we would run out of money for rent and food.

It seemed we were being punished for being moral.  I then thought about another incident that had happened two years before.  We had just run out of money and Alice was five months pregnant.  Alice went food shopping with a roommate, and it was not clear who would pay for food.  As she was putting the food on the checkout counter, there was a fifty dollar bill on the ledge where people put money to pay.  Someone had just accidentally left the bill there.  The checkout woman asked Alice if that was the money she was going to pay for the food with.  Alice could have just shaken her head yes, but she thought that was immoral as it was not her money.  Because of her honesty, our situation with food and money for a time was difficult.

Both times if Alice had done something she thought was immoral, we would have made our connection to food.  So in both incidents, we were screwed for being moral.  While I thought following moral rules was extremely important, the Universe did not seem to care about them as much.  In following the Flow, I had had to give up many things I used to care about.  A certain kind of honesty and moral concern for others now seemed to be another thing that had to be given up.  A few days later, the welfare people decided we should be put back on welfare.  We were glad as that meant we had enough money for our rent and food.

A month or so later, Alice heard about a master’s degree program in religious studies at Claremont University and enrolled.  As we were so poor, she got a full scholarship and a work-study job.  Because we learned our lesson about not being fully honest and moral, we managed to do it in a way that allowed us to make money while she was going to school.

In graduate school Alice did very well integrating her spiritual concerns with her academic concerns.  She wrote papers about historical figures like Joan of Arc who got voices to do difficult things.  Alice’s thinking about spiritual matters became more sophisticated as well.  Because she was taking extra classes, commuting seventy miles and working, she could not always make it home each night.  That was not a problem for us as the kids and I got along so well.  But sometimes she did not have enough time to study for her exams.  So she would put her books in front of her, calmly center herself and pray to open them up to the right pages.  When you are doing everything you can to follow God, the Universe will help you out, and so she opened the books to the very material she needed to study for her exams.

My wife wanted to be a professor, so she applied to a Ph. D. program at Syracuse University and was given a teaching assistantship.  She had gotten behind in her studies by going back to college six months late, but by taking extra classes and summer school, she had gotten through that karma and now she was no longer behind.

When we arrived in Syracuse, I had the intuition that we should camp out in a state park ten miles from town while we tried to find the right place to rent.  It was the end of summer, and it was a beautiful time to be in the woods.  But after two weeks, it seemed like the fun had ended and it became a drudge.  After a hard day, I wondered if we had missed a house to rent.  Alice, who was in charge of finding a house, said that two days earlier there was a house in our price range but she had rejected it as it was only a month to month lease.  I said that considering how things had become hard since then, maybe that house was our connection, and we should reconsider renting it.

She checked out the house and we decided to take it.  A month later, we found out the house we had just rented was being torn down so the state could expand a nearby freeway.  While the state of New York forced us to move, it also gave us a significant amount of money to move and a four year long rent subsidy.

Chapter Ten

Because my intuition was connected to the Flow, it was great at finding the perfect house to move into.  On the other hand, my relationships with people were not going well at all.  While I thought I should be viewed as a spiritual teacher with great insights, no one I talked to connected in the slightest to my ideas; indeed, they all looked down on me.

I knew the problem involved losing my energy with Larry, but I couldn’t get anywhere on my problem until I realized that there must have been a lesson that I didn’t learn from my time with Larry.  As the Universe was trying to get me to see something, whatever lesson I needed to learn with Larry would be showing up again and again in my relationships.  Another way of expressing this insight is to say that because I was still stuck at the level of consciousness I had when I met Larry, I would keep attracting to myself the same negative relationships.

At this time, Alice was in a Ph. D. program in religious studies while I took full-time care of our children, so most of the people I was meeting were Alice’s fellow doctoral students.  I wasn’t getting along very well with these people because they treated anyone who didn’t have a Ph. D. as a member of a lower species.  For the last three years I had just dismissed these graduate students as intellectual snobs, and it didn’t seem important that I had trouble relating to them.  Now I saw they must be the key to my bigger problem with Larry and regaining my energy.

As I thought about meeting so many intellectuals, it occurred to me that Larry was an intellectual too.  If my problem started with an intellectual and I was still surrounded by intellectuals, I realized there must be something about them I needed to understand before I could get back in the flow.  This immediately felt right.  Indeed I felt like I was finally making progress after years of suffering.

Now that I knew I had some problem with intellectuals, for the first time I remembered what I had said to Larry right before he had snubbed me.  We had been talking about Alice learning German for graduate school, and I sneered at the idea.  As Larry was an intellectual, and I had sneered at putting so much energy into intellectuality, he was offended by this.

It had never occurred to me that I had sneered at intellectuality because I didn’t think of my behavior as sneering.  I was so stuck in my pre-conceived ways of looking at the world, I thought every person who had her head on straight thought the same way I did.

As I was still surrounded by intellectuals and my problem started when I sneered at intellectual activity, I obviously had the wrong attitude toward it.  I soon decided that I had lost so much energy after Larry snubbed me because I had made a mistake in looking down on intellectual activity, which was my next connection.  When I met Larry, it was time to become more intellectual: but because I missed this connection, I fell out of the Flow and lost my energy.  We have to continue to move on to the next connection in our life, and if we don’t, we stop being in the Flow.

When my relationship with Alice had troubles, because of my sense of connection to her, I kept pursuing her and did psychological work to make our relationship succeed.  The real trouble with connections comes when a person does not feel connected to them or actively despises them.  Connections do not always seem positive and glowing when one encounters them.  Indeed, like intellectual activity seemed to me, one can have issues with one’s connections because of one’s past upbringing, acquaintances and other karmic matters.  Thus sometimes it is extremely tempting to dismiss one’s real connections and not want anything to do with them.

When a person does this, she loses energy because she does not make the next connection and has no idea what caused the trouble.  The way out of a problem is to examine the problems in one’s current relationships and link them to the origin of the problem.

After I figured out these things about intellectuality, some of my energy returned, and I started making better connections with intellectuals.  I also started studying tons of books on religious, cultural and historical subjects.  While taking care of my children, I read these scholarly books all day, as well as anything else I found interesting.  I had lots of trouble understanding why the Universe wanted me to spend my time reading these books, but as I did it, I felt energized and joyous.

One of Alice’s new professors related to me almost exactly as Larry had before I had sneered at him.  The relationship was so similar that I felt I was being given another chance by the universe to make this type of relationship work and fully regain my energy.  The relationship went very well for a couple of months, but like all my other relationships in the last four years, it ended badly.

Because my disdain for intellectual activity was not the reason this relationship had not worked, it seemed that before that problem there must have been something else about how the Flow worked that I had missed.  From my earlier work on missed connections, I knew that when one is having a long term, recurring problem, the key is to look at the origin of the problem.  At the problem’s origin, one had made a major mistake in following the Flow.  As I thought about the origin of my problem, I realized that while my energy had dropped dramatically after the Larry/intellectuality incident, my negative relationships with people had started a few months before.  In fact, as soon as I thought about it, I was able to pinpoint the exact moment when my relationships turned sour: it was a few hours after I realized that evil was an active force in the world.  Before that realization, many people could tell I was a spiritual teacher and were glad to meet me as I could help them understand how to flow.  But mere hours after I realized that evil existed, all my relationships changed dramatically for the worse.  All my relationships since that time were screwed up exactly as if there was an evil force trying to disrupt the connection.

I now remembered that after I returned to America, I had repressed my realization about evil because I didn’t want people to laugh at me.  In my circles, believing in evil as an active force much like the Christian devil would make me a social outcast.  Because I did not want people looking down on me and ridiculing me about evil, I had repressed my insight about it.  Thus it was cosmic justice that I spent the past five years being ridiculed as unsophisticated.  These past five years, which had been so bewildering, finally started to make sense.  I had refused to take the next step in my life and integrate evil into my philosophy, so I paid for it dearly by being ridiculed for being unsophisticated by so many people.

After remembering about my insights about evil, I understood my troubles in relating to people.  I was not seeing that there was an evil force helping to mess up the connection with them.  Because of this evil force, people would have more trouble rising above their own selfish concerns and psychological problems than I had previously thought.  This force helped people get stuck in their egos and not care about others or God.  By ignoring this force and assuming that people would rise above their egos to a higher spiritual level, I was blinding myself to reality.  In order to deal with evil’s influence on people, I had to stop being so trusting and open to them.  To protect myself, I had to put up more boundaries to people and be much more cautious in my relationships with them.

This was a different way of relating than most current spiritual teachers preached.  They thought that people were naturally good and if we opened up and trusted other people, they would respond with their best sides.  They said the enemy is our baseless fears and worries about other people; the solution is to learn to trust people and love them.  But the existence of evil meant that there was an evil force actively intent on breaking up relationships by encouraging people to sink to a state of lower consciousness.  Thus I had to set up stronger boundaries and be more guarded with people.

The idea that evil was an active force also helped me to see why I should get a better education: I needed protection from intellectuals, and high level intellectual activity was that protection.  It helped me to know how to respond to their points and also to beware of the pitfalls of a position.

Unfortunately for me, I also needed to be more guarded with my wife. When we married, my wife who was a little shy perceived me to be a charismatic, spiritual teacher who would bring people and spiritual community into our lives.  To make it worse, while my wife thought all my other intuitive insights were wonderful, she did not accept the idea of evil.  She thought I was using evil as an excuse for why people were ignoring me instead of facing my own problems.  I often tried to discuss evil with her, but she would get angry and say nasty and contradictory things so we could never have a civil discussion about the issue.  Whenever we tried to have a discussion, it felt like an impenetrable, dark cloud rolled in between us, making any meaningful discussion impossible.

Once I understood about evil and the need to protect myself from its workings, it was easy to realize that when I was relating to intellectuals I should maintain my distance and relate only on a superficial level; however, it was very hard to relate that way with my wife.  I resisted doing this for many years as I wanted to relate more openly to my soulmate.  I did not want to accept that my relationship with her was not going to be as deep as I wanted it to be.  But once I understood and accepted the reality of the situation, I stopped trying to force things to be the way I wanted them to be and our relationship became more peaceful.

I would have preferred my relationships with people to have been better as I am a people person and get energized around them.  But when following the Flow, it is important to distinguish between your needs and your wants.  The Flow gives you what you need, not necessarily what you want.  I wanted better relationships, but when I stopped trying to get them, I became happy and energized doing the intellectual work the Universe wanted me to do.  My Chinese was getting good enough to read classic novels, and I had marvelous times going on long walks in the countryside and stopping for an hour or so to read Chinese.  No one was interested in my ideas, but I did not care as I felt very joyous, zestful and peaceful while I read about all kinds of intellectual things.

Chapter Eleven

After five years, I felt there was nothing interesting left to read and no reason to keep studying.  A few days later, my wife suggested that as I was such a good intellectual, I should go back to college and get a Ph. D. so that I could earn money by being a professor.  That made sense to me as our three children were getting older and no longer needed me as much.  We had no idea where we would get the money for me to finish my undergraduate degree, but we plunged ahead as we thought it was the right thing to do.  As we were living in Syracuse, and I was still the primary caregiver of our three children, I applied to Syracuse University to finish my undergraduate degree.  I was given a full scholarship, and we also received money from government grants.  As I re-entered college, I felt very joyous and zestful.

Sometimes with connections practicality is not a concern.  When I was sensing there was a deep connection of mine — my first daughter wanting to be born into my family – I did not think at all about whether having another child would be practical.  Following connections was like following God’s will, so I was sure things would work out.  But going back to school to become a professor was all about making money, and so it was about sensing the best way to be practical.

To become a professor, a person concentrates on just one subject area in graduate school.  But I was interested in lots of things and had no idea what I would be a good professor in.  My Chinese and Greek were good enough to go to graduate school in either area, but East Asian studies and classics both seemed too small of a subject to spend my life thinking about.  There was a program in general humanities that had the marvelous advantage of letting me take classes in many areas; however, because they did not have any teaching assistantships, they did not have any money they could offer me.  Furthermore few colleges had departments in general humanities, which meant I would be unlikely to get a job in that field later on.  That left either religious studies or philosophy.  Religious studies was much more interesting and much more closely related to my spiritual pursuits, but it had the downside of putting me in the same field with my wife which I thought could easily be troublesome later on in getting jobs.  Also religious studies programs generally did not offer teaching assistantships unless you already had a master’s degree, and that meant I would have to pay for my masters degree program.  I had always benefited financially from going to college, so it did not seem my thing to start paying for my education now. Philosophy, as it was now taught, was extremely boring as it was centered on the analysis of language and logic.  But I also had majored in it at Dartmouth, and it was the one important area of the humanities that I had not assiduously studied in the last five years.  So I could see how it might be very good in the long run for me to know more about it.  Philosophy departments also had many teaching assistantships, which they gave to people without masters degrees, and almost all colleges had philosophy classes which meant that there were many jobs available in the field.  So in terms of practicality, philosophy, while mind-numbingly boring, was better than religious studies.  The final straw which made me decide to go to philosophy graduate school was that I noticed that the professors in religious studies were very careful about how they dressed.  Their meticulous dressing seemed to me to be a manifestation of how much they cared about social prestige and fitting in with society’s conventional values.  Philosophy professors, on the other hand, did not at all care about their clothes and conventionality.  I fit in much better with the philosophers.

I almost cried when I figured out going to philosophy graduate school meant that I now would have to take as many undergraduate philosophy classes as possible.  I had thought I could put them off until graduate school, but it was obvious I needed to take the classes now so that I could have a better undergraduate resume and get good recommendations.

I also prepared for the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) by studying intensely for months.  I always felt that an important part of getting into Dartmouth without ever graduating from high school was a perfect score on the math SATs.  So while the GRE problems were useless and boring, I intensely studied for them.  At first I did extremely poorly as they were very hard.  After about four months of hard work focusing on them, often all day, I eventually did extremely well on the tests.

After I graduated from college, it was time to apply to graduate school.  I felt that my connection was Syracuse University as we could not move from the area because of my wife’s job.  They also had a very good graduate program in philosophy and were letting me take two free graduate classes to get a start towards my degree.  While I felt very connected to Syracuse’s program, and they liked me, I also had a strong intuition that they would not give me a teaching assistantship unless I applied to other graduate schools.  Syracuse had a limited number of teaching assistantships, and it seemed they would only give them to people they felt they had to compete for.

There were only two other graduate schools within possible driving distance of our house.  One had more social prestige than Syracuse as it was an Ivy League university.  The other was a state university with less social prestige.  I did not want to apply to the less prestigious school because I had no intention of going there.  The only reason to apply there was to pressure Syracuse to give me a teaching assistantship.  I felt I should respect other people and not use them merely as a means to my own ends.  Not applying to the less prestigious state university also made me feel extremely joyous, serene and loving.  On the other hand, whenever I started applying, I would feel very drained and unhappy.  I thought these intense spiritual feelings were a result of being guided by God and the Flow, so I never applied to the less prestigious university.  As I still worried that Syracuse University had only a limited number of teaching assistantships, and they would not give me one unless they felt they had to compete for me, I applied to the more prestigious school.

A few months later, Syracuse accepted me, but did not offer me a teaching assistantship or any other financial aid.  Unfortunately, the more prestigious program rejected me as well.

I knew I had messed up because it felt like now was my time to study for a Ph. D., but the only way I could pay Syracuse’s high tuition was to borrow tens of thousands of dollars.  This seemed wrong because in the past I had always benefited financially from going to school, and the job market for philosophy professors was not good enough to think I could easily repay such large loans.

After Syracuse did not give me a teaching assistantship, I applied late to the less prestigious state university because it was much cheaper.  When they heard my exam scores and grades, they said I could have easily gotten a great fellowship or a good teaching assistantship as I was so well-qualified, but now it was too late.  To make matters worse, they had so many assistantships open this year, they would not have any available next year.

Fortunately, a couple days after I realized my mistake and told Syracuse that I was registering for the less prestigious school, Syracuse offered me a five-year teaching assistantship.  While I was relieved to have that offer, I could sense something was wrong with my understanding of how to follow the Flow, and that made me worried.

From the beginning of my path in spiritual discernment, I thought that deep spiritual feelings of peace, zestful energy and joy were a sure indication I was doing the right thing.  But following these deeply spiritual feelings had not worked this time.  Something was wrong with my idea of how the universe worked, and this really cut into my sense of being joyful and enlivened by God’s wonderful energy.

Sometimes after making a mistake, it took me very little time to figure out what I had done wrong and why.  When I had troubles with my wife at the beginning of our relationship, I immediately got the intuition the situation was like my father’s with my mother.   On the other hand, after I had troubles with losing energy because I needed to go on to intellectuality, it took me four years to figure out the solution.  I had a feeling this time it would take a long time too.  I knew from experience the more significant the missed connection, the greater number and the greater depth of wrong attitudes I had.  This meant it took longer to understand these misconceptions and change them.

With my problem about going on to intellectuality, I never received a great intuition.  Instead I kept reflecting on the situation and intellectually looked at possible solutions.  It was only when I realized I should link it with what was going on in my current life that I started to get somewhere.  Previously, I often felt that I had done enough changing, and I deserved to have the energy back.  Unfortunately I did not get to set the standard of what was enough, the Universe did.  And things did not get better until I met the Universe’s standard.  Once I had figured out my problem about moving on to intellectuality, not only did I pop through to the other side and get my wonderful energy back, but things fit together so well that the past made total sense.

There is no guarantee, however, that a person is going to make it to the other side of her trouble.  I was stuck for four years, someone else might be stuck much longer, and another person might never solve the problem this lifetime.  The temptation to give up dealing with the troubling issue is strong.  I often thought that the problem could not be important enough to continue for so long and wanted to give up thinking about it.  I probably would not have persevered except it was so obvious when the problem started, and I had such a strong sense of how great the energy used to be.

There is a very popular saying that people should not sweat the small stuff.  This is often followed up by saying that everything is small stuff.  But in terms of making connections, this saying was bad advice.  What seemed small, missing some seemingly insignificant connection or not doing well in some part of an ongoing connection, was caused by an underlying way of looking at the world.  This underlying attitude manifested itself in seemingly insignificant aspects of someone’s life but also in important parts of her life.  She may first see it in an area that seems small, but it would not stay confined to that area, it will eventually show up in other aspects of her life too.

I had no magic bullet that quickly solved all a person’s problems.  It often took lots of time and effort to learn from them.  But if you put in energy to deal with your problems wisely, then over time, you could get better and better at making connections.  This was especially true because making a realization about a damaging way of doing things in one area of your life would often help in other parts of your life as the underlying attitude often turned up in seemingly unrelated areas.

At least I was getting better over time, gradually avoiding mistakes and also getting better at dealing with my connections as I learned from my past mistakes.  On the other hand, Alice’s Tibetan Buddhist guru proudly stated that the past does not exist.  His point was based on abstract Buddhist philosophy and the supposed importance of living in the now, but practically it also meant that he made no effort to learn from the past.  So I would see him repeating the same mistakes over and over with worse karma each time.  He was not respecting the past and so he was not able to learn from it.  I used to do that too before I understood the importance of making all my connections and the need to learn from the times I messed up.

Over the summer I worked on the mistakes I made applying to graduate school.  After the summer was over, I entered graduate school.  Thinking about how to be a good professor, I realized that I should treat my students the same way that had worked so well with raising my children: keep my lower personality desires out of the way, and let the deeper flow of the situation happen as best it could.

I was continually told at orientation that to be a good professor one needed to be enthusiastic about the material and convey that to the students. But being enthusiastic was not possible for me as I considered the material to be worse than useless intellectual garbage.  However, I could go the opposite way: have an unspoken attitude of everyone says we are here to get an education, but we know that is mostly bullshit.  We know that the system is set up so that the students have to jump through certain hoops to get what they want later in life, and most people don’t care about the material.  We also know that it would be no use to try to fight the system as we are stuck in it.

Within that unspoken framework, I could do a real service to my students by making my class as interesting, fun and non-painful as possible.  While I did not understand why the system was set up the way it was, I could help my students through this situation we were both stuck in.  Seeing my work as service to my students meant I had to give up my desires to get things in class and focus on their needs instead.  I had to overcome all my lower personality desires for things like deference, control or wanting to be right.  Instead I had to try to give my students anything I could. Like with my kids, I could let them be the stars of the class by putting the spotlight on them and letting them shine.

When I started teaching, the students could sense I was real with them, and they were real back with me.  We had marvelously lively discussions about things I found boring, but they were happy to be in a space where their ideas were valued and the professor let them be the star.  Before each class, I never wanted to teach as it was frustrating teaching useless material when I thought I had such a great contribution to give to the world with my spiritual ideas.  But I always left the classroom with more energy than I came in with.   Furthermore, because I had a very good memory and the basic ideas of philosophy do not change, preparing for class did not take much time.  I had to work hard to learn the material, but once I had the material down, I never had to prepare for class again.   So I was getting paid a significant sum of money for an insignificant amount of work.

The normal load at my graduate school was taking two or three classes and maybe teaching two classes.  In my last term I took five classes and taught four of them.  I could manage such a heavier load than other people, not because I was so much smarter than the other students (two ended up teaching in the Ivy League, and at least two others had books published by Oxford University Press), but because this work was my spiritual path, so I did not need or want to do anything else.  I did not need to drink or smoke to blow off steam; I did not need to relax by watching TV or talking to friends.  I could work continuously without losing energy because doing this was my connection, and I got energy from it.  I could also do my work very quickly and efficiently because there were no lower personality desires or fears or muddle-headedness blocking my awareness of what really needed to be done.  Because I was pure of these lower things, I could sense the right thing to do to get the best possible result in the situation, which brought a joy no matter what useless stuff I was studying or teaching.

Once I finished my classes and exams, the last thing I had to do was a dissertation. Once again I was able to get my desires out of the way and see my best course of action.  I finished my three hundred page dissertation on ancient Greek philosophy in less than four months.  My wife had written her dissertation in a much more typical manner: she had started her dissertation nine years before me, but finished it a couple months after me.

Chapter Twelve

A few years after I finished my dissertation, I would often play video games with my children in a fun, competitive way.  Then my two oldest children went off together to Dartmouth College on great scholarships.  When I was in junior high, I had saved all my money from my paper routes and invested it in the stock market.  Now I felt I should invest in the stock market again.  I did not need the money as my wife had gotten a great teaching position in Wisconsin, I had very good part time teaching jobs and our kids had scholarships.  But quickly buying and selling stocks was fun.  It was often like playing video games, except I got money if I won.

 I soon discovered that I was very good at finding undervalued stocks that were fundamentally in good shape but for some reason were ignored by other people.  I would buy fundamentally sound penny stocks, IPOs or other unpopular stocks that often increased tremendously in value in days, minutes or even seconds.  In my style of trading, I had to make very quick decisions about stocks that could gain or lose ten percent of their value in minutes and would often gain or lose a quarter of their value that day or in a week.  If I made a good trade, the results were sometimes apparent in seconds and often painfully obvious in minutes.  Innumerable times I was so close to doing so much better if I had made slightly different decisions.  My preparatory work had positioned me so that I was in the right place at the right time, but my worries, fears, hopes and regrets so often got in the way of doing better.

While I was significantly outperforming the stock indexes, these mistakes gnawed at me because I was close to being so much more successful at this game.  In raising kids, teaching and graduate school, things always seemed easy and fun: I got my lower fears, desires and other confusions out of the way, and then I could easily sense the best way to do things.  But in stocks, I had so many emotions getting in the way that my sensitivity was clouded by my troubles, and I was nowhere near as successful as I could be.

I also knew that I had never gotten my deeply exuberant joyfulness back from about eight years ago when I had messed up applying to graduate school.  So I kept looking at my problems, linking my current troubles with the older problem of how I had messed up in my graduate school applications.  Using this method, I tried to see how these two problems could shed light on each other.

Meditating for a long time about my troubles, I discovered some things.  While I had an intuition to apply to another graduate school, my big mistake was applying to the Ivy League university instead of the less prestigious state university.  One important reason I did not apply to the less prestigious school was that I had absolutely no intention of going to that school, and I did not want to use them just to get what I wanted.  I strongly felt that being spiritual meant that I should treat every individual right and not use them as a means to accomplish my ends.  In my way of looking at it, if I applied to this school with no intention of ever going there, I would just be using these people, and how could that be a spiritual way of doing things?  At that time, relating to these people in this morally pure way filled me with deeply spiritual feelings of immense joy and love.  These two things strongly reinforced my decision not to apply to the less prestigious university.

As I thought about the situation more, I realized thinking of the admissions officers as individuals was not the best way to understand the situation.  Instead it was better to see them as being in a certain social relationship with me. Thinking of things in this social context, the admissions officers would not have thought of me as using them.  When I talked to them once they said I had by far the best exam scores of any applicant.  They would not have felt used if I treated them like a safety school as I would have done something they cared a lot about: improve their applicant pool.  It was fine that I cared about treating individuals morally right, but it was such a stupid thing to think of these admission officers merely as individuals rather than part of a larger social system.  I had some problem of focusing on individuals rather than seeing the larger social context they were part of and understanding the importance of this larger context.

I soon saw I did the same thing in buying stocks.  From experience I knew that by far the most important factor of whether an individual stock went up or down was whether the larger stock market was going up or down.  Despite this insight, I still would often fall into a pattern of focusing only on individual stocks and neglecting the larger social context of the whole stock market.  I would kick myself for doing it, but that did not change my behavior.   I knew I must still be suffering from a larger personality characteristic getting in my way and that involved focusing on individuals and not being fully cognizant of larger social forces.  But I did not know what this larger pattern was and it would be many years before I would find out.

The next year I thought about how one big reason I did not apply to the less prestigious state university was that it was much farther away, and I would have to move there for the weekdays.  This meant I would have to stop taking care of my four year old daughter.   I was my daughter’s primary caregiver as I had been for our two other children.  At the time my attitude was that only a misguided person would put intellectual philosophizing over a caring relationship.  Now I saw that seeing things as about either caring for relationships or intellectuality was a projection of my internal issues onto the situation.  As I had this internal framework that I was projecting onto the situation, I could not see the situation for what it was and how it affected my life, so I could not be sensitive to my right course of action in the situation.

As I thought about this realization, I saw that in general I was too focused on relationships.  I thought of my connections as almost sacred, as they were hits of the Spirit or they were meant to be.  But too often the other person in the relationship did not do her part ,and I was left hanging.  Ever since I had discovered evil, very few people reciprocated my sense of how the connection should go.  Maybe I was sensitive to the connection or maybe I was misreading the whole situation, but by being so focused on the connection, I was left high and dry.  My situation reminded me of what some feminists said about women in general: they were often so open to and focused on the relationship that the other person can use them or neglect them.

My connections often did not come through for me.  If I continued to be always so open to them, I would continue to get screwed.  So I realized I needed to get better at being sensitive to when the other person was not going to reciprocate in the relationship and have an alternative strategy of dealing with it.  At first this was extremely sad as was I very sensitive to connections, and I could feel a large void in my life when the connection did not go well.  Eventually I got more used to it and developed strategies for dealing with it.  The key, for me at least, was recognizing that the connection had not gone well, and then consciously doing the best I could to replace it.  Eventually I got better and better at developing these strategies and would get used to certain connections not reciprocating.  Then I would go on to my replacement strategy.  I realized that if I could see the unreciprocated connection coming, I could deal with it more easily.  On the other hand, if I was blindsided and had put myself in a situation where I needed the connection to act well, I could be in a sad spot.  Over long painful experience, I saw how important it was to be pure so I could be sensitive to my feelings or intuitions that someone was not going to reciprocate in a relationship.

These realizations were good insights, but they did not solve my problem, so I continued meditating trying to link current problem with earlier times.  One thing I noticed was that many times when I sold a stock too early, it was out of fear that it would go down in price.  The fear was often overwhelming, pushing every other thought out of my head.  The fear was the only feeling I experienced, and so I would sell a stock, oftentimes only to see it quickly soar in price.  I saw this pattern so often that I tried to fight it, but I hardly ever won.  Part of the situation was just the nature of the stock market, especially concerning the extremely volatile stocks I traded.  But I could also see this phenomenon happening in many other areas of my life.

Thinking about this and other things in my life, I slowly came to a further realization about evil.  I saw that evil had the power to deeply reach into my mind and magnify my feelings, urges and desires so that they seemed extremely attractive to me.  Evil was able to coat these thoughts and feelings with tremendous allure into my consciousness.  These evil-influenced thoughts or feelings then commanded my attention as they were much more attractive and powerful than they would have been if evil was not reinforcing them.

These evil-influenced thoughts and feelings were more than just my lower personality desires and urges. They were of an incredibly stronger power and urgency, and so had a much different qualitative feel to them.

Evil does not create out of nothing, but works on complexes, desires and feelings that someone already has.  Evil could make my lower desires, fears, misplaced hopes and other feelings immeasurably more powerful and alluring so that it was much harder to resist them.  With stocks, I had many of these lower fears and desires, and by magnifying them at the right moment, evil helped me miss my connections.  I was having such a hard time with stocks because I was not just working against myself, but a larger force that benefited from me screwing up.

Then something worse about evil’s powers became clear to me: evil can somehow bring about deep spiritual feelings of immense serenity, peace and joy.  This horrified me; I thought people who were deeply committed to following God’s will and carefully watching their motives could trust their deep spiritual feelings of intense peace, joy and love to guide them to their right place.  But, obviously, if evil can counterfeit these feelings, then I could not trust these deep spiritual feelings as a sure sign I was following God or the Flow.

This explained one reason I had messed up in applying to graduate school: I had not applied to the less prestigious state university because whenever I thought of not doing it I had such intense, deep spiritual feelings. Now I thought instead of trusting my feelings so much, I also needed to balance them with an awareness of whether or not I was making my connections.  While evil could mislead me through my feelings, I hoped I would not be misled as long as I was making my connections.

Minutes after these insights about evil, my body changed and my physical energy doubled.  This was a great blessing for me as I liked energy and exercising.  Also that night, for the first time ever, I was able to have a good conversation with my wife about how evil worked.  There no longer was an impenetrable black cloud between us that made any discussion of this topic impossible, and my wife understood my ideas about evil.

A couple days later I made a connection with a woman who wanted to learn about flowing, and thought the ideas were great and should be shared with other people.  She inspired me to think of how I could present these ideas to others and helped with developing some good ways of presenting them.  I felt people were for the first time in many years open to my ideas, and thus I could connect with them.  I was hoping that the cloud that was around me helping to prevent people from being interested in my ideas was gone.

Unfortunately the openness of people to my ideas did not last more than a few months.  That was sad, but it had happened to me before so I was not totally surprised.  Fortunately my physical energy stayed at a much higher level, and I had also gotten somewhat better in trading stocks.

I did not understand why no one was interested in my ideas, and I kept trying to find ways to get them publicly accepted.  Many years ago I tried to write a novel with my ideas in them, but I was not suited for that.  In the last seven years I had embarked on a much more intellectually oriented approach of putting the New Age movement in its cultural context of being a synthesis of the values of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.   I enjoyed this intellectual work and was very good at it and put tremendous amounts of effort into it.  It did take a lot of effort though and did not give me enough time to meditate and rest.

Meanwhile, since I knew there was a big break in my energy after my application to graduate school, I kept looking at that time in my meditations.  Back then, I had an intuition that I needed to apply to other graduate schools so that Syracuse would have to compete for me.  My big mistake, however, was applying to the more prestigious graduate school (which did not accept me and so was useless for my purposes) instead of the less prestigious state university.  Now I realized that my intuition had given me a smart course of action, but evil screwed up my connection by pushing me off course slightly.  I followed my intuition, but it was just suggesting a smart general course of action to take, not a detailed plan of exactly what to do.  So in this case, evil was not magnifying or reinforcing a feeling or emotion, but rather just redirecting an intuition to an ineffective action.  The reason evil could do this to me was because I cared too much for social prestige and status.  So evil could excite that part of my personality and help me miss my connection with the less prestigious school.

Shortly afterwards I saw that because I still had this desire for more social prestige and energy than was appropriate in the situation, I was now centered on how my ideas should be better known.  So I was currently spending most of my time researching and writing intellectual books.  While I was very good at this kind of writing and research and enjoyed it, it was also tiring me out, taking time from my meditation periods.  Plus, I was unsure it would ever get published or noticed.  After my realization about how evil redirected my course of action when I was applying to graduate school, I felt evil was once again exciting my desire for social prestige and directing my energies in an inappropriate way.  So I stopped trying to get my ideas noticed by writing intellectual books.

After this realization, I spent much more time meditating, resting and trying to make my connections.   One thing I thought might be a connection for me now was re-learning Chinese.

If a person has no problems in an area, she can see her connections clearly and obviously.  If, however, the person has issues that get in the way, then it can be really hard to be sensitive to her connections.  Over time I had developed possible indications that activities might be connections.  One indication was if you had been connected to this activity when younger.  Connections will often keep recurring over a long time period so this earlier interest was a manifestation of a long term connection.  Another sign something was a connection was if you enjoyed doing the activity and got energy from it.  Another indication was if this activity made sense to do as it was part of the larger pattern of your spiritual work or part of the larger pattern of positive things in your life.  Another sign was if you got intuitions concerning it, such as a feeling that you should do it or dreams about it.  Another one was if other people thought you were good at this activity; things we want to do for lower ego reasons we often have no real talent for.  On the other hand, it made sense that we have the talent to do things we were connected to.  Another sign was if it just made rational sense to do the activity as it improved the overall quality of your life.  Finally, if you did not do the activity, you noticed a lack of energy or felt something was missing in your life or it left time to do negative, destructive things.

There were also some indications that an activity was not a connection.  Something was unlikely to be a connection if it immediately led you into destructive behavior.  An activity was unlikely to be a connection if you felt totally depressed doing it and there are no positive indications it was your connection.  An activity you could see that was motivated totally by lower personality desires such as fame, security or more money than your neighbor, and which you had a feeling was not your thing to do was unlikely to be your connection.  Something that genuinely hurt those around you or left them needing something from you should be questioned if it was a connection.  Finally, another indication was if people who knew you well, had your best interests at heart, and were not in general over-critical of you, wondered about why you were doing this activity.

For me reading Chinese fit a lot of these positive indications.  I had spent three years learning it in college and so had a very good grasp of the grammar.  Fifteen years ago, I had relearned many characters and gotten good enough to have a marvelous time reading some classic novels.  Furthermore in the last couple years, the thought sometimes occurred to me that learning Chinese well was something I needed to do before I died.  I also liked reading foreign languages as it brought me into a different world and made me less dependent on other people and needing anything from them.  As people were very bad at exchanging with me since I had discovered evil, that was an important consideration.

All of these considerations made sense to me, so I started relearning Chinese characters. From my experience with connections, I had come to understand they are often much different than divine guidance.  Every time I followed my divine guidance, I was sure I was doing the right thing, and I was always blessed with wonderful enlivening energy as I did God’s work.  Connections were often different: they sometimes took time to blossom into wonderfulness.  Chinese was like this.  At first, it made sense to do and I liked getting better at it.  But I also suffered from many doubts. Chinese does not have an alphabet, so it was not unusual to spend fifteen minutes trying to find the meaning of one character and sometimes I never found it.  Worse yet, the last time I relearned the characters, I was not able to find a sufficient amount of good reading material to keep my interest.  I kept wondering, what was the use of learning this language if there was nothing good to read? Often I got discouraged and this cut into my energy, but I kept at it as there was nothing else to do and it felt like my thing to do.  One time I had gotten so discouraged that I stopped learning Chinese, but then I had too much excess energy and nothing to do with it; since I knew I was liable to doing something stupid, I decided to keep learning Chinese.

Then one day my connection to Chinese blossomed into something wonderful.  That day I did something I was never able to do before: make a connection with fun modern novels.  These novels had been published for awhile, but I had never known about them before; now I found out they existed because of the internet.  If I had gotten lucky when I was younger, some Chinese person I met or one of my Chinese teachers would have told me about these modern novels; instead, all I knew about then were classic novels, which soon, like classics in every language, became boring.

I loved reading these modern martial arts novels as they had great characters and heroic sweep.  As I was getting older and my eyesight was getting poor, I could not read the small characters very well.  So I would have to close one eye and hold the book about four inches from my face to see the characters, but I was reading marvelous stories and that made everything fun.  While it was still hard to look up the characters in the dictionary, at least now I knew there was a reason to become proficient at Chinese.

One day my connection to Chinese got even better when one of the foreign students enrolled in my philosophy classes told me a great number of these novels were on the web.  This meant I could now read them with both eyes open as the print was bigger.  Not much later I found out they had dictionaries on the web; Chinese had recently become so much easier for me to read.  Still I wanted to read these novels while I exercised on my elliptical and that meant reading them in book form.  I had to squint with sweat filling my one open eye while I tried to hold the book straight as I bobbed up and down.  Then one day I discovered that someone had invented a shelf for my kind of elliptical, and I could safely put my laptop on it and read Chinese novels on the web while exercising.  This significantly improved my Chinese reading experience and made exercising much more fun.

If I had known about all these things when I first started reading Chinese again, things would have been much easier.  I would have been more joyful doing it and never been discouraged.  But I did not know what the future held for this connection, and this made it easier for evil to reinforce my discouragement.  Over time I had discovered connections are often like that: we cannot see how they are going to develop, and so it is easy to focus on the negative aspect of the situation.  If we are not sufficiently sensitive that something is our connection, we stop doing that activity or connecting with that person and have a void in that area of our life.

Unfortunately I never discovered any secret formula that would make it so I could always do well with my connections.  Making connections was extremely dependent on having no obstructions in the way of sensing the connection or sensing the right thing to do in a situation.  So a person continually had work on cleansing herself of blockages like lower personality desires, frameworks projected onto a situation and misguided conceptions of how the universe worked.  While this was no guarantee of making all a person’s connections successfully, it at least gave a person the feeling that she was oriented in the right direction, and things would continue to get better.

The second thing I thought was my connection at this time was daytrading.  We don’t choose our connections, and I would not have chosen stocks.  I did not need the money and considering my wife and I had secure jobs with a great retirement plan and she had an inheritance from her father, I thought I would never really need it.  Furthermore, as I was so well-organized and competent at teaching, I was making lots of money for an incredibly little amount of work and could have made more money if I accepted more teaching jobs.   In stocks, though, it was the exact opposite: I made very little money for a vast amount of work.  But the feeling stocks were my connection kept coming back  and I would lose energy if I did not work on them.

After deciding trading stocks was a still connection of mine, I felt it was important to do it well as it was part of my spiritual path.  But I wasn’t that successful and so put more energy into discovering why.  Looking at this area of my life I started to see that at a particular point in time there was a sharp disjuncture in my stock trading results: seven years ago my earnings from trading stocks had peaked, but then they had declined.  This was the first time I saw that there was an obvious point in time when things went downhill.

Looking at what I might have done wrong then, I saw that before that particular time, I had developed a very good sense of the long term market direction  based on fundamental understanding of the economy, the price of stocks, and technical analysis of chart patterns.  I did well because I held onto my informed judgment instead of being influenced by the fear, greed or hope of less sensitive people in the media and on the internet.  But to maintain my informed judgment I had to be careful to maintain tight control over my emotions, thoughts and reactions and hold onto my informed judgment and not be influenced by other people less well-informed than me.

But this constant vigilance took lots of effort.  At the top of the internet bubble I knew stocks were very overvalued, and I should just stay out of the market.  But I gave up my well-informed judgment and instead I went along with the crowd buying stocks.  Since I had given up my best judgment and the necessary vigilance that was required to stay focused in my informed judgment,  I had not done anywhere near as well trading stocks.  For awhile I had even lost significant sums of money.  Over the years, through lots of turmoil and hard work, I had gotten my earnings back up to where they had once been, but then I had plateued at the same level for a couple years.

I now realized what a mistake it had been to give up that vigilance of holding on to my informed judgment and got carried away with the uninformed, emotional reactions of other people.  After realizing my thoughts and feelings were so easily affected by evil, it was pure folly to think I could ever give up vigilant patrolling of my thoughts and feelings.  Because of evil’s attacks, I would never be able to give up that vigilance in trading stocks or in other areas of my life where I had problems and could be influenced by evil.

The next day I opened a letter and to my shock it had a twenty thousand dollar check in it.  It turned out my brother, who had died a year ago, had left my father his money, and my aged father was distributing it to his kids now.  This totally unexpected money felt like it was compensating for my mistakes in trading stocks.  More importantly, the market which had been so overvalued for so long because of the housing bubble, finally turned my way and crashed.  By being patient, trusting my informed judgment, and through great sensitivity to technically based turns in the market, in the six months around the beginning of 2008, while the market was down twenty percent, I played the market turns perfectly and earned twenty percent of my money in a couple weeks.

But this victory did not bring me much joy.  My best day, when I made over ten thousand dollars after buying the stock the previous trading day, was over as soon as the market opened in the morning.  Even though I had done everything perfectly, my sense of joy for my accomplishment lasted about forty seconds.  Thankfully for me, later that day, for the first time I found my Chinese had gotten good enough to read the novel Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and that was the highlight of the day.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell if you are messing up with a connection.  A person might have conflicting values and from one way of looking at the situation she is doing fine, while from another angle she is messing up.  If she has problems in an area, she might not see the best way to look at the situation.  So she could be mystified whether she was messing up with her connections or not.  That happened to me with stocks in the crash of 2008.

Over ten years of stock trading, I had learned I should only buy individual stocks when the larger market was moving upwards or reached bottom and turning upwards.  If I bought a stock while the market was going down, no matter how undervalued the stock itself was, that stock would probably go down with the larger market.  While many financial advisors say that no one can time the market, I had gotten very good at doing that.

But it was difficult to patiently wait to only buy good stocks when the stock market was going up.  This was especially true in the crash of 2008 when there were many stocks that were tremendously undervalued.  I had been itching to buy these stocks for years while they were completely overvalued during the housing bubble.  So I would get extremely joyful about buying them now, even though the market had not yet bottomed.  In the next days these stocks would often lose ten to thirty percent of their value as the whole market went down.  But I was still so happy at being able to buy them.

Should I value my deep joy more and not worry about losing money I did not need?  Or should I value the longterm perspective more of trying to make money at this game?  I was not sure what perspective I should take.  Many people were losing their homes or jobs now, and if something like that was happening to me, it would have been easy to decide I was messing up a connection.  But I had timed the beginning of the crash of 2008 well, and while the market was down twenty percent then, I was up twenty percent.  Now I was losing money on some stocks, but I was still up for the year.  Plus in the eleven years I had traded stocks, the larger market had lost about ten percent of its value, while I had made about nine times my starting money.

In one way of looking at it, I had a problem as I kept losing so much money after I bought these individual stocks.  It was especially worrisome as I kept doing the same pattern of behavior.  But on the other hand, I was so joyful buying these stocks and the money was not something I needed, that I was not sure I had a problem.  Furthermore, once I decided I was messing up with a connection, it would become a heavy thing.  I had to think about what I had done wrong and focus on it, and that was hard work.  I also would have to decide that my deep feelings of happiness and joy were possibly influenced by evil and that was a downer.

It took me months to decide there really was a problem, but I felt that it hurt my sense of myself as a good player of the stock game to be making these mistakes.

Looking at my behavior, I eventually saw that the problem was that evil was helping me focus on just part of the situation (the stock being way down in price) and helping me not see the larger picture (the possible dangers of the whole market continuing downwards and thus my individual stock going down too).  I was joyful because I saw only a small part of the situation.  If I enlarged my focus and took in the whole situation (especially the totally dangerous downside of not making the connection right), then I would not have been so happy.  Evil was reinforcing my feelings of joy and happiness so that I would just be totally joyful, instead of making sure I was carefully doing things right in the larger, extremely dangerous, situation.

After seeing this pattern of behavior in stocks, I realized I had done the exact same thing when I was applying to graduate school.  At that time I had deep spiritual feelings of joy and peace when I did not apply to the less prestigious state school, but I was totally oblivious to the downside of what would happen if I did not get a teaching assistantship from Syracuse.  At that time, if I had seen the possible downside, considering how seriously I was treating other parts of the application process, I would not have been so joyous about my situation.  I would then have applied to the less prestigious graduate school right away, and things would have worked out so much better for me.

I soon saw the same tendency in my relationships with people.  When I was particularly happy because I had made a good connection, I often would get so carried away with my happiness that I would be oblivious to the downside of not speaking carefully to the other person or persons.  It took a lot of vigilance on my part to say the right thing that would resonate with someone else and avoid saying the wrong thing that would bother them.  This was especially true as there was an evil force that was trying to get other people to not understand my message.  When I was centered on how I was full of joy, I would not practice this kind of vigilance.  Then I would often not say the right thing, and my connection with this other person would be messed up.  I needed to see the larger picture of the possible downside in the relationship and not simply focus on my current happiness.

Some years earlier, I had figured out that I had a tendency to focus solely on the individual and miss how the individual was deeply affected by larger social forces.  In terms of my stock trading that meant I focused too much on individual stocks and not enough on the larger movement of the stock market.  In the beginning of 2009, when the market was continuing its great crash downwards, I still was doing the same thing.  I would buy individual stocks that were a great bargain before the larger stock market had bottomed and while it was still going down.  This would cause me to lose some money.  While I was still up for 2009 and way ahead of everyone else as I had actually made money during the great crash, I could have been doing better.

I knew I must still be suffering from a larger personality characteristic getting in my way and that involved focusing on individuals and not being fully cognizant of larger social forces.  But I did not know what this larger pattern was.  I had tried many ways of thinking about it, but I had never gotten to the bottom of it.

Now I wondered if I could get somewhere on this problem by trying a different approach: linking it to another pattern of behavior that caused me to mess up in applying to graduate school.  This other pattern was framing the graduate school application as caring for relationships versus being concerned about philosophizing.  I had realized things about both of these patterns of behavior years ago but they seemed to be totally separate issues.  Now I tried to link them together.  I wondered if there was any way I could still be focusing on individuals instead of the larger social system and also focusing on the importance of relationships while downgrading philosophizing.

I had never tried to link these two patterns of behavior before and phrasing the question this way was very helpful in getting an answer.  I quickly realized I had always assumed I was supposed to teach my ideas to individuals.  My model of how to share my ideas was to help some individuals understand these ideas by spending lots of time helping them through their problems.  I then thought these individuals would share with others and these ideas would become better known.  This approach was very relationship oriented, focusing on individuals while it downplayed the larger connection of these individuals to our society’s paradigm.

I thought my teaching these individuals a new way of being spiritual could counteract their previous social conditioning.  But what if these people were more influenced than I thought by the larger social forces of our society’s paradigm and that could not be so easily counteracted?  What if I was looking at things the wrong way because I had a problem being too centered on relationships with individuals and not enough concerned about  philosophizing about our society’s paradigm?  What if my spiritual work was meant to be more intellectually oriented, not centered on relationships with individuals, but on changing our society’s intellectual and philosophical worldview?

I now realized I had a problem of emphasizing relationships over philosophizing.  This problem caused me to try to teach individuals instead of focusing on changing our society’s philosophy.  This larger pattern of behavior had also manifested in making mistakes in applying to graduate school and in trading stocks.  If I had not been looking for a solution to these earlier problems, I never would have noticed this tendency in the much more vital area of my spiritual work.

After making this realization, something switched deep inside me and I instantly felt less centered on relationships with individuals and their problems, and much more concerned for philosophizing to change society’s paradigm.  I decided I had been approaching things in the wrong way by being so focused on individuals and neglecting intellectual forces.  I should be focusing on writing philosophical intellectual works and trying to change society’s paradigm.  I felt I was finally getting somewhere on my graduate school application problem, a problem that started eighteen years ago.

The next morning, the great market rebound of 2009 started.  I quickly sold my stocks for a very small profit.  If I had held onto longer them I could have made a lot more money, but I despised the shortsighted way the government was trying to fix our economic problems and I wanted to spend my time now on more philosophical matters.  I began a more philosophical version of this book, putting my intuitions about living spiritually in their philosophical framework.  While I knew many people would have troubles with my intuitions and the related ideas, I thought I could at least clear away their intellectual resistances to these ideas.

A few years before I had been doing intellectual work, but that was motivated by lower personality desires of wanting public approval for my ideas.  This time my motivation was purer and I was sure I would do it in a better, more productive way as I would be more sensitive to the right things to do.

As part of my spiritual path was helping people to intelligently reflect on how to be spiritual while living in the modern world, I felt that as a public service I could write critiques of currently popular spiritual teachers.  I could post these critiques on the web and use my stock money to buy search engine keyword advertisements so that the critiques had a chance to get read.   I wrote a critique of Eckhart Tolle and posted it on a website I built.  I also wrote a critique of The Secret and began one of Pema Chodron’s bodhisattva ethics.  I was haunted, however, by the feeling that I was not getting to the heart of Tolle’s ideas.

I then spent a lot of time reading Tolle’s books, but I viscerally hated having to be immersed in his mental universe as I considered his ideas misguided and his way of arguing weaselly.  Because I considered him such an overrated lightweight, I was continually plagued by worries that I was wasting my time.  One day I decided I would either have to give up these critiques or commit myself to doing them right.

The big question was whether or not writing these essays was a connection of mine.  There was evidence writing them was a connection.  First at least a couple people were reading my essays on the web because they sent me emails about them.  I also felt that I should really understand these popular spiritual teachers in case someone asked me about them.  Moreover writing these essays did very much help the larger project I was doing of comparing the philosophy behind my  spirituality to other spiritual teachings.

On the other hand, there were things which made me doubt doing these critiques were a connection of mine.  I hated having to spend so much time on them as I considered Tolle a lightweight whose spiritual philosophy was incredibly misguided.  I also had no idea how many people were reading the critiques.  Furthermore, to really criticize Tolle well, I would have to go deeply into his ideas and this meant I might have to spend much more time thinking about Tolle’s ideas and his weaselly arguments.  That idea almost made me want to throw up.

I went back and forth between giving up and committing more time to the endeavour.  After rationally judging the matter fully, I decided writing these critiques was effective in helping me think about my spiritual philosophy in comparison to other philosophies and so doing these critiques fit nicely into my larger spiritual work.  I also decided it was too early to say few people would ever read them.

Then I thought more about how I focused so much on the feeling I was wasting my time and how I hated to think about Tolle’s ideas.  I thought about how in areas where I was successful, particularly reading books, I always focused on the positive aspects of what I was doing and how the project fit into the larger framework of what I wanted to accomplish.  This meant the negative parts of the situation were taken in stride as the larger vision gave me energy to do the little things and ignore the detours.  But it was different in writing these critiques: I was so strongly focused on the troubles of the present moment that I never saw the larger picture.  The disgust I felt in the present moment was thrust so strongly into my awareness that it was all I experienced.  From my past encounters with evil, I remembered this was exactly how evil operated.  It helped focus all the person’s attention on only the troubling features of the situation so that the larger perspective was blotted out.  I decided that evil was trying to disrupt my connection to writing these critiques.

So I started reading Tolle’s book again, determined to get it right this time, no matter how long it took.  Twenty minutes later,  it was like a fog lifted and it was so obvious how I should criticize his ideas (by criticizing his overarching metaphysical paradigm).  I could have seen this earlier as I had read these points many times before, but it had just not registered earlier.  I also realized I could use this way of criticizing Tolle on all the other critiques I wanted to write.  So writing these critiques became easy and almost fun.  In my experience, some connections were like that: until one cleared away the issues obstructing things, the situation did not flow smoothly.  But once the obstructions were cleared out of the way, something clicked and the whole connection went well.

Ever since I messed up applying to graduate school, I had been continually worried that I could miss my connections by doing something wrong.  In the intervening eighteen years, I had made many realizations about why I had messed up then, and why I was still screwing up because of similar patterns of behavior.  Now I saw that this worry I might miss my connections was never going to go away, and that was a good thing.  Because evil was so crafty and smart, it would try to mislead me through my lower personality problems.  It was not just a matter of figuring out what wrong thing or things I had done in applying to graduate school.  Unless I was continually vigilant against it, evil would find some other way to mislead me, and I would miss my connections.  So my worry was a legitimate response to the situation.  But I did not have to be distressed by this worry.  If I did miss a connection, there would be clues to what connection I had missed and why.  By following those clues, I could get back in the Flow.

My exuberant energy of deep joy that I had before I messed up in my application to graduate school returned.  I knew that I would still miss some connections and lose that energy sometimes, maybe even for a long time.  But I also knew I could get that energy back by figuring out what connection I had missed.

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.

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