This was drawn on a napkin by an artist studying Brock in a Cotati, California coffeehouse when he was bumming around the West Coast and brooding about what to do with his life.

A 21 st Century handbook for Huckleberry Finns and Molly Browns floating down a cosmopolitan river toward an unknown frontier via telecommunications, interstate highways and democratic freedom (e.g. Mark Twain’s America, Woody Guthrie’s 1930s, Bob Dylan’s 1960s and the Internet 1990s).

The removal of learning walls in our planetary Disneyworld accelerates holistic body, mind and spirit growth; creates “whole earth hoboes”, lifelong students in a “university without walls”. Our changing inner/outer reality includes the meeting of East and West in a global village and an emerging 21 st century multi-cultural persona with spiritual unity and planetary hand tools.

My autobiographical journeys shared over talk-back radio, e-mail forums and magazine articles include Brock’s shaking hands with Lyndon Baines Johnson at a Billy Graham Crusade, meeting Stevie Wonder and Paul Newman at a Harlem Civil Rights benefit; watching eagles, Ronald Reagan and Loretta Lynn from a dirt road rural Illinois church; smoking pot with Zen Buddhists in a hot tub, attending the funeral of an African-American sports hero and hitchhiking through California’s Big Sur.

Earth University is an educational journey “Home”.

BACK TO TOP

Chapter 2

Grace Rode the Elmira Express

The American Dream

In the summer of 1963, an African-American Civil Rights leader invited me to Harlem 's Apollo Theatre for a March to Washington benefit. While rapping backstage with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Little Stevie Wonder and Tony Bennett I wondered about the broken dream which led me to Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. A simple turn of events can change a person's life.

In Upstate New York, amid autumn leaves, bountiful cheerleaders and hometown fans, I once scored four touchdowns in a high school football game. It was breathtaking to be a young warrior lifted on the shoulders of the American Dream. Only a junior, I looked forward to continued glory and a college scholarship.

But a medical doctor's misdiagnosis of a heart condition before my senior year prevented me from achieving those goals. When his error was discovered, the Fall season was not only over but I had reversed field as a class clown and drunken rebel.

Hell, it was no use pretending things would ever be the same. In the 1950s, football heroes and prom queens were idols reflected in Hollywood Westerns, beauty pageants and President Eisenhower's Republican Party. Success was measured by athletic prowess, good looks, high IQs and family background. It helped if you were a WASP, a White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant.

Competition for the limelight was brutal. After promotion to Varsity basketball as a sophomore, a coach looked the other way when two teammates attempted to injure me. That hometown stomping ground of the ego was aggravated by a social class disparity among corporate executives and factory workers. The latter's assembly line malaise and periodic job layoffs produced an infamous stretch of gin mills and alcoholics along Market Street .

Corning and its Glass Works were only a few smokestacks and polluted rivers away from the Pennsylvania steel towns of such football legends as Mike Ditka, Joe Namath and Joe Montana. Because the rugged working-class sport was a way out of the mills and factories, the loss of a college athletic scholarship was devastating.

From somewhere inside me, I felt an irrational explosion toward an unjust universe. School assemblies for athletic and academic awards became a painful joke. I realized that contrary to the Declaration of Independence, not everyone is created equal. Some are born more equal than others. And some are struck down while climbing toward their goals.

Brooding about social determinism led to such constructive alternatives as becoming a student sports writer for the city newspaper and entering a Public Speaking contest. I spoke out about world peace and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, an unpopular subject in a Republican town where President Eisenhower had dedicated Corning 's War Memorial Stadium.

It was fortunate my rebellion occurred when a Baby Boom generation began bursting through classroom walls and demonstrating against the Vietnam War. The sixties were a hospitable decade for rebels hitchhiking to new frontiers. After college graduation, I went to Brooklyn , New York as a youth worker in three churches active in Civil Rights demonstrations.

When I asked an African-American pastor in our jail cell why his people didn't use more force, he said, "A violent revolution brings a violent peace." Many blacks were militant. But Martin Luther King, Jr. stimulated a troubling dialogue in our souls about the spiritual dimensions of social change. If not for him, there would have been a more extensive and bloody civil war.

A gift of grace in America's history, King said during the 1963 March on Washington, "meeting physical force with soul force...Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred...I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed - we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

In 1968, I observed the demonstrations at the Democratic Convention while wearing clerics as an Associate Pastor in Chicago's Cabrini-Greene Housing Projects and as a staff member at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center.

In 1957, when I played football for Northside High, I was satisfied with America's ideals, unaware of any newspaper writing ability, afraid to talk in a classroom and uninvolved in humanitarian causes. The diagnostic error which changed all that could have taken me to the front lines of the 1968 Convention. Instead, a modern day saint, named after an express train crossed the Pennsylvania border into the Corning-Elmira area and delivered another message to an athlete's broken heart.

Ernie Davis was a thorn in my conscience because he both embodied King's philosophy and achieved the All-American dream at Syracuse University. He was the first black to win the Heisman Trophy, emblematic of the best college football player in the country. But after signing to play with the Cleveland Browns, Ernie died of leukemia on May 18, 1963 at the age of 23.

On May 22, I attended his funeral in Elmira, New York before going to Brooklyn. Death may have worn a black skin that day but grace rode the Elmira Express. There was a sense of being in the presence of spiritual greatness, a quality you can discover by reading Ernie Davis: The Elmira Express by Robert C. Gallagher or William Mack's "A Life Cut Short" in the September 4, 1989 issue of Sports Illustrated magazine.

The Grace of Ernie Davis

It was as if some god or advanced soul chose to wear a football uniform in one of the [ego's] more competitive arenas. What I considered injustice and bad luck, Ernie transcended. He was black and orphaned by his father's death (before he was born). His mother, unable to take care of him, sent Ernie to live with grandparents and a dozen other kids in the coal mine regions of Pennsylvania.

At the age of twelve, he was reunited with his mother in a strange town (Elmira). In addition to a disruptive childhood, Ernie had a speech impediment and died before he could fulfill a professional football dream. And yet, he never complained or considered himself unlucky.

Most of his friends, including Syracuse University's Coach Ben Schwartzwalder, said they never met another like him: "Ernie was just like a puppy dog, friendly and warm and kind. He had that spontaneous goodness about him. He radiated enthusiasm...Oh, he'd knock you down, but then he'd run back and pick you up. We never had a kid so thoughtful and polite. Ernie would pat the guys on the back who had tackled him and help them up...[other backs] would knock you down and run over you because they didn't like you. You were enemy. Ernie didn't dislike anybody" (Mack, Ibid.).

He was always like that, even as a boy. "Yet, despite his physical advantages, Ernie was never aggressive. He was a peace maker with his playmates, avoided fights when he could, and was repulsed by cruelty...when the boys shot and killed a bird with a BB gun, Ernie was upset and buried the bird with sadness. He refused to play with the BB gun again, and the other boys also eventually stopped" (Ernie Davis: The Elmira Express by Robert C. Gallagher).

When provoked by a dirty player during a sandlot football game, he managed to avoid a fight until the boy hit him. After he retaliated, his friends "were happy but Ernie walked away, saying, `It's just a game. It isn't any fun anymore' " (Ernie Davis: The Elmira Express by Robert C. Gallagher).

A youth who never played football got tangled up in his pads before a game and put them on backwards. "He grew red-faced as some cruel taunting began. 'Next thing you know, Ernie is walking over there [according to his High School coach]. He says, `Here, let me help you with this. Don't be embarrassed.' A little thing? Maybe. But not to me, as a coach. It was a big thing, and I'll never, ever forget it" (Mack, ibid.).

I never experienced such compassion in athletics. During one football practice, I cried and was left alone until I fought back. There were few alternatives in those war hero days of John Wayne and President Eisenhower. Anyone subjected to competitive cruelty in High School or elsewhere knows what an Ernie Davis means. He had the courage to express what we all felt.

Gallagher noticed in researching his book that people rarely talked about his athletic achievements. It was his character and love for humanity they remembered. Floyd Little, another All-American at Syracuse said "So many people loved Ernie at Syracuse because he spread so much love. He didn't have to be loud or the center of attention. You just knew he was there" (Ernie Davis: The Elmira Express by Robert C. Gallagher).

I met him on several occasions; as an opponent in two of the record fifty-two straight games his high school team won, as a sports writer and at an Elmira banquet honoring him and his college team after they won the National Championship. Future Cleveland Browns teammate and National Football League Hall of Famer Jim Brown was the featured speaker.

One summer, Ernie played basketball in Corning where he commuted for classes. When the High School All-American passed me the ball, I nearly dropped it because I knew he could easily jump over everyone and score. But Ernie got everyone involved with an infectious enthusiasm and love of the game. It was a pleasant contrast to the playground wars I was accustomed to.

Jim Brown said, "The greatest thing about Ernie Davis is that white people liked him and black people liked him...And I liked him, too, because I never thought of him as an Uncle Tom. I thought of him as a certain kind of spiritual individual, a true kind of spirit who had the ability to rise above things and deal more with the universe, so that white people would forget their racism with him and black people would never think he was acquiescing to white people...usually you either line up on one side or the other. So Ernie Davis transcended racism. That was his essence. That was his greatness" (Mack, ibid)].

At the end of his life, while "shuffling off his mortal coil", Ernie's Light shone more and more. It was, his friends said, as if the inner essence of the man, a joyful, loving Spirit was emerging through a temporary home...as if his mission was over. Jim Brown said, "to have great consideration of others and to know you're going to die and then to bow out with such grace-I've never seen anyone else do that" (Mack, ibid.).

His stepfather, who worked the night shift at the Corning Glass Works, remembers Ernie singing when he went to bed at night and after he awoke in the morning. The joyful song in his heart continued ministering to people in the final months of his life. When a waitress in a restaurant started crying, Ernie smiled, patted her hand and reassured her, "Don't worry...I feel great. "I'm Not Unlucky" was the title of an article he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post.

I stood in line with thousands to see him lying in state in a high school since renamed Ernie Davis Junior High. Loudspeakers broadcasted the funeral service from the church to an overflowing crowd in the streets. The pastor quoted First Corinthians, Chapter 15, "But by the grace of God I am what I am and His grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain: but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me".

Ernie's grace was a seed that stimulated my search for spiritual unity in the world; a wisdom he naturally possessed. To paraphrase an old saying, "When the student is ready, a spiritual guide(s), mirroring our [Higher Self], illuminates a way toward the freedom in our soul". The only enemy is ourselves.

The Freedom Train

From Corning, I rode the Erie-Lackawanna train through Elmira's hills and valleys, past the Delaware Water Gap to Hoboken, New Jersey where a subway train took me underneath the Hudson River and Manhattan's Wall Street to housing projects in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvanest. There, I could express my anger toward an oppressive society.

"The American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare [for African Americans]"...(The Fire Next Time, 1963, by James Baldwin). In a Harlem church, I was in an audience cheering Baldwin's prophetic speech about a fiery revolution. When I questioned the pastor in our jail cell about the tactics of change, I was ready for a second Civil War.

The sixties generation went to Selma, Kent State and Vietnam with the youthful enthusiasm to build a better world. People sometimes ask whatever happened to the large-scale demonstrations of that era. Many discovered another reality that took us in the 1970s to Esalen, India and Findhorn.

Ida Rolf, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls pioneered holistic therapies that released fear and anger blocking the Inner power to create one's reality. Those using LSD and psilocybin, including Ram Dass, had mind-expanding experiences that took them to Hatha Yoga and Zen meditation. The spiritual awareness that everyone is on a healing journey through many lifetimes transcends polarized [egos] in social, economic and political war zones. Even one's so-called enemies are on a journey to discover the god or goddess within.

As Richard Lovelace said:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for a hermitage;

If I have freedom in my love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone that soar above

Enjoy such liberty. (To Althea: From Prison)

Whether Dorothy on a yellow brick road or Huckleberry Finn up an unknown river, the journey through our dreamscapes is fraught with landmines that blow apart the illusions of the ego. Martin Luther King, Jr. or an Ernie Davis exposes our angry self-righteousness and illuminates a Self transcending alternative.

In the Fall of 1963 while enrolled at a theological seminary in Illinois, I felt Ernie's presence while delivering newspapers in the Evanston Hospital. It is where he was diagnosed with leukemia while practicing with the College All-Stars. His terminal illness and the way he responded put my own disappointment into perspective.

As a student, I was nearly expelled for pressuring the administration to relate its curriculum to contemporary issues. Seminary classmates, in the late sixties, provided housing for the SDS who trashed part of Chicago's downtown in what the newspapers called "Days of Rage". By then, I was unable to accept their hostility toward such enemies as LBJ who was instrumental in passing landmark Civil Rights legislation through Congress. Instead, I explored internal barriers separating me from King and Gandhi's philosophy.

The deeper reason for my anger was an authoritarian father who pressured me into following his 1950s version of the American Dream. That included focusing upon a college education instead of a "dangerous" sport. Without letting me know, he vetoed the coach's plans to have heart specialists examine me – until after the football season was over. Other medical doctors then gave me a healthy diagnosis.

The quest for healing the bitterness in my soul led to Humanistic Psychology and world religions in Chicago, California and the Pacific Northwest where I learned to let go of blaming others and to take responsibility for creating my reality.

We are not free until we forgive our enemies and ourselves. A runaway slave, John W. Jones, once rode the Underground Railroad to Elmira where he was a sexton at Woodlawn cemetery. Jones, who had responsibility for burying Confederate soldiers from an Elmira prison camp, went beyond the call of duty in making sure nearly 3,000 prisoners who died there had identification placed in their casket and upon grave markers. His painstaking records, preserved in Washington, enabled Southerners to visit their relatives' graves after the war. It was a way of forgiving his enemies and himself.

There was also a young seminary student from Upstate New York under a lot of strain as a student intern in a New Jersey church. After attempting suicide, he was sent to an Elmira mental health Center. Harry Emerson Fosdick went on to build and pastor the world-famous ecumenical Riverside Church in New York City. His life experiences made him an exceptional counselor, and composer of the hymn God of Grace and God of Glory: "Armored with all Christ-like graces /In the fight to set men free...Cure thy children's warring madness..." In a sermon, Fosdick said he could understand the bad in a world of manipulative egos but, "Why the good?"

The healing grace in our lives is the good that gives rise to that question. Why the misdiagnosis, the twist of fate that caused me to brood about world peace and discover a writing talent, to explore holistic counseling and world religions. Why the coincidental juxtaposition of an Ernie Davis who by transcending his own hardships and broken dreams was an inspiring Light in my darkness?

In retrospect, I'm grateful to the medical doctor, my father and my Higher Self for the circumstances leading to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. There is an underground railroad somewhere inside us that our Higher Self rides beyond the ego to a non-competitive universe. You have but to take an "Elmira Express", your Soul's Freedom Train, to King's philosophy, Zen Meditation, Simone Weil, the Unity Church or Mahatma Gandhi.

BACK TO TOP

Chapter 4

Elk Totem: Big Sur to Sedona

A Vision in Big Sur.

The elk stood in the middle of Highway One and stared at me as I walked around a bend in the road south of Monterey , California . Cool morning mists shrouded us in mystery. The first light of dawn was rising from a distant horizon. My heart leaped into my mouth. The world stopped moving as I stood in awe of a majestic presence from the Big Sur wilderness. It seemed to have been waiting for me.

A vision quest, whether for Native American medicine animals or Moses' burning bush is often subconscious, the time measured in years and the results unexpected. It does not require expertise from any spiritual path other than our Higher Self. Most of us are already familiar with Hindu, Native American, and other resources from past lifetimes. We access those teachings whenever we're ready to change.

Visions clarify and give direction at the juncture of death and rebirth when we traverse the abyss between our old and new selves. A landscape, poem, person or song leaps into our consciousness at opportune times to symbolize and empower spiritual transformation.

In The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham told about a medical doctor who left on a worldwide cruise to re-examine his life. When the ship entered a port in the South Seas , he disembarked and walked through a native village. The deja vu sense of finally being home was so strong he returned for his luggage and remained there for the rest of his life.

Maugham's novel was based on the quest of Paul Gauguin who, during his thirties, decided to leave a marriage, family and successful business practice to follow an artistic vision that tortured his soul. He found himself and his symbols on an island in the South Pacific.

The medical doctor's and Gauguin's recognition of their Shangri-La was prompted by dreams, persons and books provided by some Inner Guide. That inner guidance led Georgia O'Keefe from New York City to a desert wilderness in Northern New Mexico .

My own visionary journey began in Chicago when I moved onto the Eastern religions and Humanistic Psychology frontier; when I scheduled such heretical activities in my church as Gurdjieff, Reichian therapy and parapsychology seminars.

It led to a month-long counseling workshop near San Francisco , far removed from my clergy career. Core Therapy nurtured the healing of wounded children who were learning to love and be loved; to trust their own feelings and intuition. The unleashing of the [Higher Self] through the body in Self directive fun and creativity was in contrast to the suffering servant ideal in my Christian past.

Core Therapy included the release of childhood fear, sadness and anger over not living up to parental expectations. There were also amusement park rides in Santa Cruz , a cliff climbing expedition, swimming naked in the ocean, drinking wine in a hot tub, body-painting, tie-dying and pottery-making.

Because hitchhiking was one of the activities forbidden in my youth, it became a ceremonial way, toward the end of the workshop, of formalizing breakthroughs I had been making. Native Americans call it a Vision Quest. My original destination was Esalen, the Human Potential Movement mecca of the l970s.

There I was, a Christian minister, thumbing a ride along the California coast. In the spirit of Ken Kesey's busload of Merry Pranksters, I caromed down the highway with a busload of hippies, a Mexican grapepicker and a truckdriver hauling garbage. In the evening, I enjoyed Irish Coffee and savored the view of Big Sur 's coastline at Nepenthe Restaurant. Afterwards, I hiked south through the darkness toward Esalen.

I rested by the side of the road, slept and was awakened by seals barking on a craggy shoreline far below. There was no traffic in the early morning. The Earth was still when I resumed my journey down Highway One. When I encountered the elk, we looked at one another for what seemed hours... a lifetime. And then, it walked toward a hillside of trees and slowly disappeared into the dawn.

I had come face to face with a Spirit of freedom and joy that broke my bondage to the fear and guilt in Hierarchical Christianity. I recognized that [Jesus], Buddha and others are guides for the unfolding of our [Higher Self]. And in so doing, I became an outsider to the Christian Church and my family.

The elk was symbolic of a year-long transformation. I never did make it to Esalen. Its purpose was served in the Core Therapy workshop I attended that summer. Instead, I turned around and walked toward home.

The Edge of the World

My restless sleep alongside Highway One could have plummeted me into a roaring cauldron. There was a precipitous cliff from the road down to where the Pacific Ocean was crashing against Big Sur 's rocky coastline. It was the edge of the world or at least the edge of a world I had lived in for too many years.

Further north, along Highway One, a young man meditated on wooden ramparts constructed by lumberjacks over oceanside cliffs in Mendocino County . They were built at the turn of the century for hauling timber from the High Sierras to offshore ships. But they became unsafe after the loggers left. And one night, the young man fell to his death through rotting timbers.

A few years after the vision in Big Sur , I stood on the edge of those same cliffs contemplating which abyss to jump over or into. I had left my clergy job in Illinois , and wandered around California for a year, trying to find myself. I was an exile from the promised land of my Christian past – a failure of sorts.

The name of the old lumbering town was Elk. I lived in a cabin overlooking the ocean with a woman who had moved there from North Carolina . She was a single mother with a Master's degree in Psychology; attempting to make ends meet by counseling, secretarial work and cleaning the homes of her more affluent neighbors. She also provided shelter for the young man who meditated atop precarious ramparts over the sea. We were all searching for ourselves on the edge of the world.

One does not have to live on a cliff to experience a precipice of fear. It happens whenever we make changes which separate us from our old selves. Francis Thompson's frontier began when he forsook careers in the military and medical profession in order to give voice to the lyrical poetry flowing through him. He once sold pencils on street corners in l9th century England and submitted his poetry to publishers on brown wrapping paper. Many critics have since considered his lyric poetry among the best in the English language.

In The Hound of Heaven, he wrote about the truth and love of the Supreme Being (or our [Higher Self]) hounding us, pressing our spiritual growth:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From Those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat-and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet-

'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.'

Intense growth, like "new wine in old wineskins" (Jesus) stretches career and relationships. The creative tension between the old and the new pushes us to the breaking point. Old wineskins burst. It sometimes becomes necessary to change a career, relationship and/or environment in order to hold the new wine flowing through us.

After returning from the vision in Big Sur , I was enthused about communicating an understanding of [Jesus] that is present in the Gnostic Gospels and among Christian mystics. But my attempts to express this point of view, and change the Christian Church were unsuccessful. The old wineskins wouldn't hold.

I returned to California for more workshops and finally emigrated there to be a lumberjack, group counselor and play the guitar. Let somebody else save the world! However, after working through our karma (our major life lesson), a healing story or idea (one's dharma or contribution to humanity) burns within. It is the creative fire behind an Alcoholics Anonymous or Francis Thompson or Moses. It is the "return of the hero" that Joseph Campbell described so well in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Moses' vision of the burning bush was a glimpse of his emerging [Higher Self]. The shepherd, in peaceful exile, had heard the cries of his people. But, what could he do against a Pharaoh? During his vision on the mountain, Moses said, "I am not eloquent...I am slow of speech and of tongue....Oh, my Lord, send, I pray, some other person" (Genesis 4:l0-l3).

I felt that inner turmoil in the town of Elk when I looked from the cliff to the churning Pacific waters beneath my feet. Whatever I had pursued in California was unrewarding because of the dharma that stirred my soul. To paraphrase Francis Thompson, all things betray us when we are not true to our Selves.

We cannot escape our destiny as an artist, a prophet or a businessperson. There is a deep calling to communicate what we have learned. Whether we succeed or not is irrelevant. Failure is an illusion because all experience is a healing journey. "Success" comes in risking our dreams.

I knew I would not be satisfied until I responded to the dreams, ideas and challenges that hounded my soul. To do that, I needed to return to my roots in the East and Midwest . I did not have the PhD resources to express the point of view I felt so deeply. And yet, expressing it was the only thing that mattered.

The coincidence of landing on the edge in a town named Elk did not escape me. After Big Sur , whenever anything important happened, I would see an elk or a deer: alive, in a photograph or in a name. The elk was a spiritual presence, an Inner Guide, that appeared whenever I needed support.

A vision mirrors the spiritual power of the person who leaps into the abyss beyond their old self. A crack in one's old world, one's defensive armor, breaks open and gives birth to new Spirit, new wine.

I decided to return to the Midwest with a new resolve. On a drive along a mountain road overlooking the Pacific, I said goodbye to the friend I had been living with. We saw a buck and a doe standing side by side, touching one another, but facing in opposite directions. It was time to move on.

The Inner Shaman

When I saw the elk walking toward the pinnacle of one of the twin hills called the Airport Mesa Energy Vortex in Sedona , Arizona , I bolted upright and split my pants. Only a few minutes before, I had done an astral projection exercise to that same location from the mesa where I was meditating.

"Shaman" is a Mongolian word used to describe a person who uses "magical flight" (astral projection) in our various "upper and lower" worlds. Everyone astral projects during sleep, and unconsciously when awake. We can learn to harness that steed for transportation to wherever we want to go.

Native Americans in the Southwest were spiritual warriors who carved their spirit into red mesas and cliffside homes. Legend has it they were advanced beings on our planet; perhaps, past-life graduates of Himalayan mountain communities who gathered at energy vortex centers in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Stonehenge and elsewhere to heal the Earth.

The Earth is a living organism that corresponds to the body's chakras (vortex or energy centers) and energy channels (leys). Many people now involved in the New Age, Humanistic Psychology and environmental healing are continuing the work they did in those lifetimes. California 's Ojai, Chicago 's Oasis, Sun Bear and others offer contemporary versions of this ancient path.

In Chicago , I became acquainted with a Native American tradition put together by Swift Deer, a Cherokee with a Ph.d. in Humanistic Psychology. He was an apprentice to Two Bears who is described in Carlos Casteneda's books. My connecting with the Swift Deer people was another totem coincidence. They use Sun Bear's astrology system which says the two major animals of my sign are an elk and a deer.

Anyone courageously going through a major change in a career, relationship, therapy group or creative endeavor is in Carlos Castenada's world. Our [Higher Selves] access shamanic resources from the astral plane and past lifetimes. As "shamans", we use those Inner abilities to traverse a treacherous world of fear and illusion in the place where we live.

When I returned from Elk, California , the only church job available was a parish l00 miles west of Chicago . One of its two churches was named Elkhorn Brick. It so happens I was looking for quiet retreat to meditate and write in. Naturally, my medicine animal made an appearance to reinforce the choice I made.

A spiritual quest does not require mountain ranges or oceans. I lived with my doubts in a land of Prairie farmers, Abraham Lincoln, Chief Blackhawk, Carl Sandburg, Mark Twain, golden sunsets, country-western music, county fairs, eagles, raccoons and herds of deer.

The Midwest Plains was a Shangri-La where I integrated my auto mechanic roots with farmers and a carpenter from Galilee in a down-to-earth writing style. I learned my new writing career was not as a scholar with Ph.d. expertise but as a neighbor communicating New Age spirituality and a Gnostic [Jesus] to the mass market.

When Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings entered the inner wilderness of her Cross Creek retreat, she continued writing Gothic novels that wouldn't sell. After awhile, she grew to recognize the spiritual beauty in the crude language and stories of her neighbors. Her best selling The Yearling, about a deer and a growing boy, inspired my own search in a Prairie wilderness.

The movement from karma to dharma is a universal journey that shapes our lives. Whether we accomplish all that we set out to do is not as important as risking our dreams. The fear of failure is an illusion because, in taking risks, we build muscles that advance us toward our goal. The Midwest Prairie, Chicago , California cliffs churning waters, dawn, distant horizon, mountains, elk and deer were as much a part of my spirit as the archetypes that drift across the landscape of our dreams.

In the years between Big Sur and Sedona, I developed strength to change careers, leave the Christian Church, live cheaply, move to the Pacific Northwest and back again. When I returned to Chicago after a three year hiatus in the Pacific Northwest, I walked into a [New Age] rock shop which is no longer in business. The owner put carved elk antlers into my hands and asked "What do you think of this?" I paused for a long moment, my breath taken away, and said "I guess it means I'm supposed to stay in Chicago for awhile".

Living on the spiritual edge became part of my lifestyle. And yet, I still searched for a shaman, anyone, with answers to some troubling questions. Because of precognitive images of the Southwest and a lifelong association with Native Americans, I went to Sedona's energy vortexes intending to use my psychic abilities in quest of a vision.

I never expected to see a live elk walking up a cliffside path toward the top of a barren mesa. It was twilight on the edge of Sedona when I astral projected to where my surprise visitor was climbing skyward. It was the same place I had "flown" to only a short time before. When I arrived, the elk changed into a shaman wearing a maroon robe.

In that altered state of consciousness, I recognized he was my Higher Self. I had traveled to a planetary power place to learn I was the shaman, the elk in Big Sur , the guide who gave me strength and direction. That revelation, alone, made the trip worthwhile.

In his poem, The Kingdom of Heaven, Francis Thompson asks:

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,

The eagle plunge to find the air--

That we ask of the stars in motion

If they have rumour of thee there?

He answers by saying our "holy land" is not in a Bethlehem or Sedona but where we live. In Thompson's case, that was London :

Not where the wheeling systems darken,

And our benumbed conceiving soars!--

The drift of pinions, would we hearken,

Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

...

And lo, Christ walking on the water

Not of Gennesareth, but Thames !

Whether we are a shaman apprentice to our [Higher Self] in a desert wilderness (e.g. O'Keefe and Moses), a large city (e.g. Thompson), an island (e.g.the medical doctor and Gauguin), the Plains (e.g. Lincoln and Sandburg), among country folks (e.g. Rawlings and Elkhorn Brick a.k.a. Brock Elk Horn), or the street where we live – we are all warriors fighting our way to the Self we keep having visions of.

BACK TO TOP

Chapter 5

The Mechanics of a Starship

The Holy Energy

Arrghhhhhh! Ooohhhh! *?!*!*? (expletive deleted). As blood-curdling screams and profanity from a Reichian Therapy workshop exploded through Sunday morning's worship, a startled church member arose from her pew and left the sanctuary.

Others, benumbed by memories of a friend's heart attack, were unable to move. Some joked about an earthquake in the lower reaches of Hell. Several looked through the workshop door, saw people in their underclothes and wondered what was going on in the House of God. Under the circumstances, I thought it appropriate to postpone the workshop until we had finished singing hymns and saying our prayers.

As pastor, I was the culprit who rented the church basement to Charles R. Kelley (Education in Feeling and Purpose), founder of the Radix Institute. Massage used to facilitate his therapy was responsible for the scanty attire. Kelley was a protégé of Wilhelm Reich (Character Armor) who pioneered such holistic body therapies as Hakomi and Rebirthing.

In contrast to Sigmund Freud, a former colleague, Reich's physics and biology background led to the discovery of a healing energy within the body he called orgone. According to the editors of The New Age Journal, "Reich found evidence of this [character] `armor' not only in the psyche, but also in the characteristic way people held their bodies and breathed. Reichian therapy, as it developed, thus included exercises, massage, and deep breathing. Reich's approach is now recognized as having paved the way for many of the body therapies made popular by the human potential movement – bio-energetics, Gestalt therapy, Rolfing, primal scream therapy, et al. owe much to Reich's pioneering work" (Chop Wood Carry Water).

I was interested in Kelley's work because of a neo-Reichian therapy which was challenging not only my Christian theology but psychotherapy and Human Potential Movement gurus. Appearing on my disbelieving horizon was the specter of an Inner Therapist, an Inner Savior that could bypass exorbitant fees paid to counselors, clergy and teachers.

It meant leaving a group therapy training program and attending many workshops in California . The West Coast seminars included people already involved in Aikido, Zen Buddhism and Humanistic Psychology. The philosophy that unified us was a belief in orgone, that Inner Energy which broke through our body armor and healed pre-natal, birth and childhood traumas.

Aikido students called Reich's orgone discovery "Ki" (or Chi), Humanistic psychologists "energy" and I, "Holy Spirit". While reading Reich's The Murder of Christ, I realized he had discovered and harnessed the Holy Spirit which empowered biblical prophets, [Jesus] and Christian mystics.

In his book, Reich paraphrased Jesus' sermon on the mount: "God-Father is the basic cosmic energy from which all being stems, and which streams through your body as through anything else in existence". He saw Jesus as a pioneer who had achieved "salvation" by becoming a free flowing (Holy) energy system.

Reich's orgone is prana, the spiritual energy whose body circuits and centers (chakras) were mapped out by meditating yogis in India thousands of years ago. Chinese acupuncturists also traced those energy channels with meridian points. Prana moves through the body's circuits and chakras to drive our human auto (self) mobile (movement) wherever we want to go.

Yoga, which means oneness with divine energy, is a way of facilitating its synergizing goal. According to Vedanta Philosophy ( India 's Veda scriptures), people choose various combinations of yogas depending upon what they want to learn. Raja, Kriya and Hatha Yogas use meditation, breathing techniques and physical asanas (postures) to clear the body's circuits and move prana through them. According to Vedanta, Tai Chi and Rolfing would be included in these yogas.

[Jesus'] first path was Bhakti Yoga; loving devotion to the Supreme Being and the God within. His second was Karma Yoga or "loving one's neighbor"; something Gandhi mastered. All yogas, including mind (Jnana), relate to the seven major chakras along the spinal column.

Ai-Ki-Do is the way of harmonizing with the Loving (Bhaki) energy of the universe (Ki). It was created by Morihei Uyeshiba who went on a spiritual retreat in Japan and developed a self-defense system that would not harm anyone. By centering in Ki, a person is non-attached to others' karma which throws them to the ground. Aikido thus has elements of Karma, Raja and Bhakti yogas.

In California , we each adapted orgone or prana's healing philosophy to our chosen path. Aikido and Tai Chi students exorcised pain to facilitate the flow of Ki [and Chi.] Bodyworkers realized massage broke through emotional armor, and integrated the release of feelings into their practice.

In a holistic path or yoga, there is simultaneous healing on other mind, body and spirit areas. For example, Jesus' focus on Bhakti Yoga opened psychic and spiritual healing doors. A person who gets a massage or Rolfed feels better. If someone feels better, they stand straighter and take better care of their body.

This spiritual cosmology implies that disease is related to cosmic energy blocked somewhere in the body's energy system. In order to heal ourselves, it is useful to understand the lesson(s) we have chosen to learn. Otherwise, a sore muscle or cancer can return after a first cure.

Theoretically, a person can live forever in their body through natural foods and fasting which increases longevity the same way tune-ups and no-lead fuel does for a car. St. Teresa of Avila (Interior Castles) lived on air, water and communion bread because she knew, as did her precursors in India , how to extract vital nutrients from prana in the air.

Everybody has this Inner Knowledge. We choose to exit our body when we've finished learning what we came for.

A Starship's Computer

For many years, I avoided psychic activities because of a prevailing wisdom that it distracts from one's spiritual journey. Edgar Cayce, Arthur Ford (Nothing So Strange) and the Ouija Board served as an introduction to Eastern religions. But I moved on to other interests as Cayce's Association of Religion and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) study groups do.

In California , I also became aware of the natural development of psychic abilities through holistic healing. For example, after neo-Reichian therapy sessions, we were more intuitive and energetic. Natural foods, meditation, massage and Aikido exercises had the same effect. During those workshop(s), we explored the various ways orgone could heal one another's aches and pains.

Like jump-starting an automobile battery, a person acts as a cable for the Cosmic Energy which flows from the Universe through the hands (e.g. Hands of Light by Barbara Ann Brennan) to another's chakras. A spiritual healer is anybody through whom prana flows - which includes everyone. It grows as we do.

In the Pacific Northwest , people were giving their power away to such channelers as J.Z. Knight (Ramtha) who has a home near where I worked as a hospital chaplain. At a branch of the Berkeley Psychic Institute, I studied how people could access their own Inner Resources.

The topography of our psychic machinery, like Wilhelm Reich's orgone, was also mapped out by India 's spiritual cartographers. The founder of the Berkeley Psychic Institute (BPI) gathered his information from Vedanta, Wicca, the Rosicruceans and others. Such groups have mail-order catalogues for books and tapes at reasonable fees. The Psychic Healing Book by Amy Wallace and Bill Hennkin of the Berkeley Center is available in many bookstores.

Wallace and Hennkin quote from A Course in Miracles, "Miracles are natural. When they do not occur, something has gone wrong". Everybody has a first-class Spiritual Computer with “Internet” clairvoyance, spiritual healing, astral travel, past lifetime, akashic records and spirit guide programs. Those tools in the root memory of our human and astral computers are operated by our Higher Selves.

Occasionally, it is useful to study that machinery to realize we are as capable as anyone we have given our power away to. The purpose in Kriya Yoga, Wicca and A.R.E. study groups is the same as the other yogas, i.e. to move prana through the body. BPI's meditation for "grounding and running energy" through the body's circuits and chakras is described in Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualization.

The development of psychic skills is not so much a matter of learning something new as clearing away illusions that block our Higher Self's ability to use them in performing the miracles we're capable of. Ports or chakras as tools in the body, comparable to computer terminals, connect us to any resources we need. All one needs to do is visualize a chakra port and turn on a Spiritual Computer program. As we grow, more prana flowing through more spiritual machinery upgrades its performance.

Like electrical circuits and batteries (chakras) in a car or computer, these resources have a precise location. For example, cosmic energy doesn't enter the body through our big toe. It comes through a port in the crown (head) chakra area. There is also a transmedium channel called a t-bar, located along the upper back and neck. The crossbar extends to the bony nodule at the top of the spinal column. This transmedium chakra is a port of entry for others' energy. When a person channels, they exit their body through that chakra and invites another being to come in and communicate through the throat chakra.

We all channel others' ideas and feelings to a certain extent. In Earth's Learning Center , we dialogue with illusions through others' energy connections to our transmedium channels and major chakras. Energy cords are the physical routes for what Transactional Analysts call "hooks" or "games".

Not all cords are dispiriting. We use them in relating to people we have a spiritual oneness with. However, when a person removes a suffering servant game, they also remove another's energy connections to their second (feelings) and fourth (love and self-worth) chakras. It isn't necessary to know how this works in order to heal oneself. When a person lets go of an illusion, their Higher Self simultaneously disconnects energy draining cords.

Our body, like the Starship Enterprise, is a sophisticated machine for moving through space. Other persons' presence at our seven major steering chakras can interfere with the Higher Self's "mission to explore strange, new worlds...to boldly go where [we] have not gone before". When we "[holy] energize" our ships with prana, we rid ourselves of sabotaging alien forces.

One myth in the television program Star Ship, The Next Generation is that Counselor Troi, a Betazoid, has psychic abilities we do not. With the exception of the Android Data, everyone has her capabilities. We are not half human, half Betazoid but a mixture of Holy Spirit, alien energy and bio-spiritual computer. Data, the Starship Enterprise, Counselor Troi, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Lieutenant LaForge and Gainan are symbolic parts of our identity.

Understanding one's Inner Computer is as powerful as a Buddha, Jesus, New Age guru or Betazoid is advantageous in removing the myth that some people have a better starship than we do. Often, it is sufficient to communicate how these abilities work, how we already use them and how continued growth on our own path enhances their development.

Knowledge about our spiritual computer system is available in many books and seminars. Most people prefer to let their computers do the work without studying the circuitry. They simply turn on a switch, let their Higher Selves do the work and channel their Selves to the planet. Probably, they've mastered its use during past lifetimes in India , hired "Lieutenant Laforge and Commander Data" spirit guides or take Spiritual Computer classes on the astral.

Zen Clearing

Thaddeus Golas' little classic The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment (1971) begins "We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other. The universe is made of one kind of entity: each one is alive, each determines the course of his own existence. That is really all you need to know..." I'd like to see a new edition with the title changed to The Lazy Person's Guide..."

Golas' "Even Lazier" aphorisms include "All states of consciousness are available right now.", and "Enlightenment doesn't care how you get there." In that spirit, I could abbreviate my own beliefs with "Each of us is energizing our body with Holy Spirit in ways we choose". Simplifying philosophy economizes energy.

Chop Wood, Carry Water by the editors of New Age magazine has that brevity, clarity and quality. They remind us that "This `new spirituality' is not really new, of course, but more of a form of something very old, of something that has always been present." Their title comes from a Zen poem on spiritualizing one's body, "Magical power, marvelous action! Chopping wood, carrying water..."

Zen meditation is quietly "sitting" to still the subtle and exotic dances of the ego across the mind. It is an "emptying" of whatever interferes with our Higher Self's view of the Universe's spiritual ecosystem. The practice of Zen, which removes distracting energy and creates more space for Holy Spirit, enables a person to spiritually see.

The "magical power" of clairvoyance is "clear seeing" (via the 6th chakra or 3rd eye) without illusion. It is used to tell a truth from a lie, look at spirit guides and read illusions which interfere with the flow of prana. A person looks at an image or symbol of someone or something on a psychic screen located in front of one's forehead. Clairvoyance locates places in the body where prana isn't moving. Holistic counseling can then jump-start the energy through those areas. One of the better resources on how this all comes together is Roberta Miller's Psychic Massage.

Developing psychic abilities is a matter of re-energizing the relevant chakra batteries. In Hatha Yoga, Aikido and Tai Chi, a person learns asanas (postures) which are descriptive of how prana moves the body. They stimulate an Inner "remembering" that enables person to let go of mental technique and flow with Universal Spirit. Clairvoyant technique and Zen mediation jump starts the natural functioning of the sixth chakra, i.e. clear seeing. This is the so called Zen or Tao of learning anything (e.g. Zen In the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel).

Tai Chi and Aikido moving meditations are non-attached ways of freeing oneself from others' illusions. "The training of [Aikido] is to take God's love, which correctly produces, protects, and cultivates all things in Nature, and assimilate and utilize it in our own mind and body" (from Aikido by K. Uyeshiba).

The most effective teachers and counselors recognize that the emerging god or goddess within their students knows as much about what they're teaching as they do and will uniquely express that information to the planet.

But many Transpersonal Psychology and New Age leaders project their illusions on students or clients in the same way Jesus' followers did. Tempted by external measures of self-worth, they put themselves on a saviors's pedestal to enlighten humanity. They become blind to the god or goddess within and pollute the process of finding our Selves.

As Sheldon B. Kopp (If You Meet The Buddha On the Road, Kill Him!) said, "No meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it...The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside of ourselves can be our master. No one is any bigger than anyone else".

Learning we are both teachers and students, even in therapeutic relationships, is part of the journey. It means clearing away those who interfere with seeing, feeling and creating on the planet with our own reality. Much learning therefore has to do with unlearning others' information. It is the wisdom behind the Zen aphorism quoted in Chop Wood, Carry Water "One should attain enlightenment before one attains enlightenment". That is, even our spiritual intent is polluted by the advice of others. Enlightenment already exists within.

My Self Healing exploration in neo-Reichian therapy and psychic development began because I believed Inner Healing is available to anyone regardless of their race, class or educational background. Jesus also believed a fisherman or heretic (a Samaritan) has the same Inner Equipment as a priest (Pharisee), professor (Scribe) or plain carpenter from Galilee . Self knowledge was repressed in Western Civilization because it threatens hierarchical religious and political power structures. However, black, charismatic and spiritualist churches created ways of exorcising psychosomatic illusions and developing spiritual gifts. Their worship services, similar to neo-Reichian seminars, are out of place in Hierarchical Christian power structures.

But, groups of people have gathered for centuries to facilitate Self growth. Christian revivals in Western Civilization occurred when everyone participated in prayer, preaching and healing; the Gnostics, pioneers on the American Frontier and country folks on the backroads of John Wesley's (Methodist) England .

Learning and sharing in small groups (e.g. A.R.E., Vedanta, and Unity) is one of the more effective methods of spiritual growth. Opportunities in California 's neo-Reichian seminars were set aside for owning our power in facilitating depth therapy. After the workshop, we continued Self Healing groups in one another's homes.

Social, economic and political changes over the past 200 years have provided an environment for developing our Inner Therapist and Inner Savior. At the beginning of the 1990's, there is the continued movement of Holy Spirit beyond the walls of not only hierarchical Christian churches but the limitations of New Age gurus. The Inner Spirit movement is growing in the non-professional living rooms of ordinary people.

Hierarchical religion is enabled by people afraid to take responsibility for expressing their ideas(mind), feelings (body) and religious path (spirit). Self determinism is the ego's deepest fear because it is the reason for reincarnating on this planet. That is why undue concern about imperfections in spiritual paths and their teachers is another trap. The answer lies within, and we are not free until we stand alone, non-attached to others' illusions.

Painful detours are learning journeys that teach us to once again look within. Zen clearing is a journey that includes seeing the god or goddess within our enemies. Or as Thaddeus Golas said, "When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven".

BACK TO TOP