My last entry was a recollection of my “spiritual” experiences during childhood, and covered that aspect of my life up until I began attending a Spiritualist church in my early 40’s (more on that in a bit). The reason for describing my spiritual journey is, as I said last time, to allow you, dear reader, to get an idea of who I am and what my spiritual path has been so that you can decide, as is your right and responsibility, whether or not to accept anything that I have to offer. Right now, I want to make it clear that I am not an expert on spiritual or religious matters. I have great respect and admiration – and love – for the example Jesus set for us as a healer, messenger, and teacher, and for what other spiritual-minded people like Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, and Confucius have left for us to consider. At my best, I am an occasional healer, messenger, and teacher, and I try my best to serve others as I believe Spirit wants me to serve. Some days are better than others! In the Buddhist tradition, we hear of the bodhisattva, a sort of “spiritual hero” – so to speak – who works to gain enlightenment in order to bring others to that same state. I think that’s above my pay grade. With props to Warren Zevon, I’m trying to paddle the old Bad Karma kayak as fast as I can to keep it from taking on any more water! Really, I’m just trying to enlighten myself so I can live a more peaceful and fulfilled life. If in the process others learn something, then that works for me – maybe I’ll build more good karma, right? I try to remain open to learning new things and will probably always be more a student of spirituality than anything else.
Proverbs 2:6 says “For the LORD gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” I have come to believe that “Knowledge is Wisdom understood” and that we can never truly “know” anything unless we understand the “Wisdom” that is the truth of Creation – of Life – and of THAT which created it. Most of us don’t recognize that “wisdom” when we hear it. Since we don’t – and as the ancient Hindu rishis suggested, we probably can’t – understand much of the truth of Life, our “knowledge” is necessarily limited, maybe even non-existent, and based solely on our individual, and subjective, life experiences – which may all be the product of delusion. I sometimes wonder if evil isn’t simply the ignorance of “wisdom” combined with humankind’s “free will.” I believe that nothing is real or permanent except Love – the Force that, for me, must have authored Creation. Everything else is temporary, and therefore not to be worried about because eventually it simply will not be of any importance. That includes what the Spiritualists call “the change called death.” And if death is not a worry nor to be feared, then why should we worry about or fear life? I’ve been told on occasion that I seem to hold nothing sacred in this life, since I can joke about pretty much anything, including death. On the contrary, I hold everything sacred, as everything is an expression of the Creative Force of Life. I simply try not to take things too seriously, and that includes my self. The fact is that humor has been an important part of my spiritual development. The people I have worked with who are the best spiritual teachers all have great senses of humor, and while they take their spirituality seriously, they don’t tend to take themselves too seriously. I have seen inflated ego, grandiosity, and self-importance in my spiritual travels, and so a healthy skepticism has been important in my spiritual development. The ability to discern what is true from what is untrue – at least as far as we might be able to tell the difference – is essential to spiritual unfoldment. Otherwise, we end up with a closet full of snake oil…
I started going to a Spiritualist church in Augusta, Maine in May, 2002. I had no real interest in “spirituality” or religion at that point, but I did have an interest in someone who had an interest in those things. At her suggestion, I went to check the place out, more or less to give me something more in common with her that we could talk about. At the time, I was about a year removed from my first mental-emotional bottoming-out, and a few months away from a second. I was exhausted, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I was trying to be a good father to my daughters while they went through a difficult divorce with my former spouse and me, and I was not doing very well with that. I had left a teaching career that I had worked very hard to establish, and had taken a social services job that I couldn’t stand, and for which I had very little enthusiasm. I was also struggling – though I didn’t realize it then – with an addiction problem that I had nurtured for nearly 30 years. When I walked into that church in Augusta, as so many others have while facing life challenges, even crises, I had no idea what was about to happen for me, and maybe if I had known I might have gone in a different direction. Then again, probably not.
Spiritualism is a “science, philosophy, and religion” often associated with the New Age movement. Modern Spiritualism traces its modern philosophical and phenomenal roots to 1848 (near the end of America’s religious Second Great Awakening), and its limited religious doctrine to the progressiveness of the changes in spiritual awareness of the 1890’s. Spiritualism’s hey-day was in the first quarter of the 20th century, although many people currently share the beliefs associated with Spiritualism without recognizing that they do. The “science” of Spiritualism, as I have come to understand it, is the proving of the “continuity of life” – the idea that “life” does not end at death, and that the “personal identity of the individual” continues to exist after physical death. This is proved through mediumship, or communication with those who have made the “transition” to the next plane of existence, which is a major component of the Spiritualist worship service. As a philosophy, Spiritualism explores the same questions as other philosophies, namely those concerning the origins of life, and our purpose and place in the whole of Creation. As a religion, Spiritualism has only nine statements or “principles” that guide its adherents, with the primary principle being that Spiritualists believe in “Infinite Intelligence” – what the rishis called “THAT” which the human mind could not conceive nor comprehend – or the limitless capacity of the Creative Life Force.
I have had many significant experiences through my practice as a s/Spiritualist, as a worshiper, healer, and medium. Over the course of the past nine years, I have studied the “science, philosophy, and religion” of Spiritualism (among other spiritual belief systems). As I have been taught, I take what resonates with me – what I think makes sense – and leave what doesn’t. In the process, I learned about spiritual “hands-on” healing and eventually became a Reiki Master-Teacher. I studied mediumship and became, according to others, a competent medium, though I rarely serve in that capacity these days. I taught awareness classes about healing and mediumship, and presented a workshop on developing a “personal spiritual mission statement.” All of this amazes me now – when I began attending worship services, I was very skeptical about the whole thing.
What usually hooks the person newly-interested in Spiritualism is receiving a “greeting from Spirit” – or what most people refer to as a “message” through a medium. I didn’t get a message the first time I attended a service, but for some reason I went back. I guess seeing the process in action interested me more than I thought it would. Maybe I was just pulled back by a magnetic Force greater than my self. The second time I went, I did get a message through the pastor of the church, a medium (and now dear friend) with 30 years experience in Spiritualism, which said I would be meeting someone named “Gloria” and to listen to what she had to say. Well, unknown to me, a medium named Gloria served the church the next weekend. And though nobody (including the medium) ever knows who is going to receive a message, Gloria did give me a message that day – and it took away a great deal – but not all – of my skepticism.
She brought across the spirit of a young boy who she described in detail – blond, always smiling and laughing, full of life, younger than me, and someone who I knew as a child. She said that he was alright now, and “growing in Spirit.” She then said he was telling her that he was “responsible for (his) own death.” Then she described him being hit by a car, the exact nature and extent of his injuries, and his rolling under the car for a long distance before the car finally stopped. What she described still gives me chills, and 40 years later, saddens me. In the summer of 1970, when I was nine years old, I witnessed this exact scene when a four year-old friend and neighbor, who I loved like a little brother, and who fit the medium’s description exactly, was struck and killed when he ran across the street from my grandmother’s house, where he was playing with me, my younger sister and brother, and his older brother and sister. He jumped up from the picnic table where we were all sitting and ran across the street, without looking, to see his father who was returning home from working the day shift at a local paper mill. An elderly driver apparently didn’t see this little boy as his view was obstructed by another vehicle, and struck him squarely, hitting him so hard the impact knocked off his sneakers, and dragging him underneath the car for over 100 yards before stopping. The whole scene was surreal – we were all in shock. But I remember every detail like it happened yesterday.
This young boy’s death was incredibly tragic for every one of us there. I don’t know exactly how it affected everyone else, and I don’t want to pretend I could ever imagine how this beautiful child’s parents and siblings were affected. For me, I carried guilt and shame, that as the oldest child of the six of us that I didn’t prevent the accident. From that, and other influences, came problems with self-worth, early alcohol and drug use (and eventually addiction), and a need to control situations involving those people I cared about so that nothing bad would happen to them. The trauma of witnessing this accident stayed with me for the next 35 years until I finally had to process it and recognize how it changed me and influenced my life experience, and how I needed to change in order to move forward. Now, I knew there was no way this medium could know about this experience. We had never met, and I hadn’t talked with anyone at the church about this tragedy. I don’t think I had probably thought about it in years. But as validation that the message I received was real, about two weeks later I happened to be walking with my younger daughter in a cemetery near our home. She had a math assignment to plot headstones from the cemetery. She had been there earlier with her class on a field trip but had lost her list of headstones to plot. She said she remembered where they were, and that they were all for people who had died in the 1930’s or so. As we walked through the rows of graves and markers, I came across my little friend’s headstone! I had never seen it before and had no idea where he had been buried all those years before. I couldn’t believe it. I was moved, and really wasn’t sure what to make of the experience. But here he was, right in front of me, as if to prove beyond doubt that he had come to talk to me from Spirit.
Through my practice of Spiritualism, I have been “contacted” by many family members and friends who have passed to Spirit. Most significantly, I received a communication from my father’s father, who my father never knew, who passed before I was born, and who had moved to California after the Second World War and remarried and had two sons (and four stepchildren) there. My grandfather came in through a young medium and said he “wanted to see how the boy turned out.” Me, I guess. The medium said he could “smell fish” strongly and described a scene of a car hitting a tree. I had understood, from my father, that my grandfather had a heart attack at 45 and died from it, so I wasn’t so sure about this message. Well, long story short, through a series of strange events, my brother and I eventually found my grandfather’s widow out in California, and we went out to visit her before she eventually passed to Spirit a couple years ago. I think she was really taken aback by my appearance, as I look like my father, and he looked like his father. I also strongly resemble one of my half-uncles, who actually laughed when he first met me, and we had an immediate affinity for one another. My grandmother was able to fill my brother and I in on the truth about our grandfather, which was different from what we had all been told by others in our extended family. Apparently, my grandfather had a heart attack and died on November 17, 1956, on his way to go fishing in Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay area, and had driven his car off the road and hit either a tree or telephone pole (I forget which right now). He was only 43 years old, but suffered from the effects of rheumatic fever, namely atherosclerosis, which he had contracted during basic training for the Marines during WWII. After nearly 50 years, my grandmother was obviously still not over the loss, even though she remarried after my grandfather's death. I met some of my grandfather's children and step-children and it became clear that he had been much loved and greatly missed by them. My brother and I were able to visit his grave in the Golden Gate Veterans Cemetery outside San Francisco – a truly amazing experience. My father passed to Spirit a few years ago with the knowledge, and the related peace of mind, that his father had not abandoned him and had actually tried to get custody of him when he was young, but wasn’t able to do so. And my step-grandmother found some peace in the fact that we cared enough to try to find her and her sons. When she passed away I was actually at a “table-tipping” physical phenomenon workshop with two mediums. When I was at the table, it leaned over into my lap and stayed there for half-a-minute or so. The medium said “someone is sending you a kiss from Spirit.” When I got home later that afternoon, I learned that my step-grandmother had passed to Spirit in California about two hours before the table tipped into me.
A second spiritual experience I would like to share concerns a friend and co-worker who passed to Spirit several years ago. I had worked with this woman for about five years, back before I ever knew what Spiritualism was. We talked a great deal at work and got along well. After I left that employment we only saw each other once more before she passed (about ten years later), when I had occasion to be working in a school where she had become a teacher’s aide. At the time of her passing, I was substitute teaching in a long-term assignment in another town in central Maine. I happened to be reading the newspaper one morning and for some reason, turned to the obituaries, which was not something I normally did. I saw her picture and obituary in the middle of the page. I was dumbstruck. My friend had developed cancer and died from it. I went to a memorial service being held that night for her and spoke with her husband and family, who I had never met before, and figured never to meet again. About a year or so later, I attended a “gallery reading” event at a New Age-type store in Portland, Maine. A friend of mine was serving as a psychic/medium for the event and I thought I would attend to show my support for her work. She started the show by telling the other five people in attendance that she knew me so she’d read me last in case time got short. So she began readings with the person to my right. Directly across from me in the circle was a woman about my age, with red hair and glasses. I knew I didn’t know her but something was familiar about her. I shrugged it off and listened to my friend read for the two people to my right. Then she began to read for the woman across from me. My psychic/medium friend talked about this woman’s sister coming through for her, and about how she had passed from cancer, that the cancer was related to medical procedures she had to try to conceive a child, that she missed her nieces and nephews, and that she wasn’t happy with her husband’s new girlfriend and his letting her use the car (an Audi which she loved) she had heft behind! Well, I guess my jaw kept dropping because everything my friend brought for information could have applied to my friend who had passed a year or so earlier. Then I realized how much the woman across from me looked like my departed friend and I started to wonder…but since my friend had lived in a town about 100 miles from Portland, there was no way…But my medium friend continued on with readings for the other two people to my left and then read for me. I don’t remember a word of what she said to me. I was still thinking about my old friend and if it was she who had come through for the woman across from me. When the event was over, I walked over to the woman, introduced myself and asked if she was possibly related to my old friend, who I named. The woman looked at me kind of funny, but gave me her name, and then said she and my old friend were indeed sisters! I was amazed by this experience, especially since I was from a town 75 miles north of Portland, my friend had lived in a town 100 northwest of Portland, and her sister lived in a town along the Maine coast about 50 miles northeast of Portland! Now, the probability of this occurring has to astronomically small, right? Right.
I have also had communications from my father, maternal grandparents, maternal grandmother, both maternal and paternal great-grandparents, a ninth-generation great-grandfather who was killed in the American Revolution, friends and acquaintances who have passed to Spirit, and numerous “spirit guides.” I have had glimpses into “past lives” as well, and received personal communications, healing, and guidance through meditation. I have brought across messages from those who have “transitioned to Spirit” for many people over the years. I’ve studied and learned a little about astrology and have prepared many natal and “progressed” birthchart analyses for friends and family members, which are usually well-received. I am sure none of this would have happened if I had not set foot in that church in Augusta.
One of the stranger messages I have received came through the medium and friend I wrote about earlier who told me pay attention for “Gloria.” He once told me that I should study Hinduism and Buddhism, which I thought was odd for a Spiritualist minister to tell someone. A short time later, I began to read some books on Yogi philosophy and the religions of India by Yogi Ramacharaka (his “Fourteen Lessons” is a must-read), and books on Eastern spiritual phenomena by William Walker Atkinson (who may actually have penned the Yogi Ramacharaka works), and then went on to read some books on Buddhism, including some of the modern work of the Dalai Lama, and some of the Gnostic writings, such as the Gospel of Thomas. I have read some of the more popular New Age work of people like Don Miguel Ruiz (“The Four Agreements”) and yogi Yogananda Paramahansa, whose “The Yoga of Jesus” is a personal favorite. My belief system is an amalgam of all of these writers’ ideas and some of those I have received in my own meditations. I’m still learning and, as I said, will likely always be a student of spiritual things. I also believe that, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes 1:9-1:11, “there is nothing new under the sun.” We aren’t hearing, reading, nor saying anything that hasn’t been heard, read, or said before. For me, the New Age is simply the Old Age “recovered.”
One of the things that I’ve done in my study is practice is production of a workshop for helping people develop their own “spiritual mission statements” – a sort of spiritual purpose awareness exercise. When I produced this workshop over five years ago, I worked through the process to see if it had any value and could benefit anyone. As a result, I developed a three-part spiritual mission statement for myself, which I now realize was the first part in the on-going process of a thoughtful plan of action – an intention – for living my life. By making this spiritual mission statement, I told God – Spirit, Infinite Intelligence, the Universe – that I intend to live this way and be this person. I laid out my general goals for my life from a spiritual perspective. As soon as I did, my life started to move along the path that could make those goals reality. I didn’t have a specific plan – and I still don’t have one. I’ve learned to be flexible and adapt. I try to take life as it comes, with an eye to the future but with my mind, heart, body, and soul firmly grounded in the present. When I start to think that my life has gotten off track and I’ve lost my way along my path, I think of my spiritual mission and I can usually see how the experiences I am having relate back to what I said I intended my life to be.
It’s not coincidence that the goals I crafted are all related to areas of my life in which I have had difficulties in the past. I have personality traits and personal characteristics that have made achieving these goals and this growth hard for me. I’ve also found that in order to achieve my mission, I’ve had to sometimes experience the opposite of what I want. Maybe that’s so I can learn the process for changing. Maybe it’s a test to see how committed I am to making change and whether I will continue to work at it. And maybe it’s so that when I do accomplish my goals I’ll appreciate it more and I won’t be likely to backslide! Or all of these things…
The first part of my mission is to lead a life of personal freedom and independence and to allow others to live as they want without my interference. The second part of my spiritual mission centers on personal relationships, and that I want to create and maintain relationships that are healthy, loving, and mutually supportive with people who want to have them with me. The third and final part of my spiritual mission is to learn and teach practical spirituality. I believe my personal spiritual mission statement has helped put me on a path toward personal growth and fulfillment of my potential as a spiritual person. It is a work-in-progress, but such is life! By understanding why I have gone through different experiences, sometimes very painful experiences, I can go through them now and in the future with acceptance and confidence, knowing I will find healing of some personally painful issues and make changes that improve my life. By going within, and developing a spiritual mission, I have helped heal myself in many ways. As I walk along my spiritual path, I am finding the “kingdom of God.” And it’s right there where Jesus, the greatest of the teachers of practical spirituality, said it is… within.
In keeping with this “spiritual mission”, my life and career paths have changed. I never expected to become a substance abuse/addiction counselor, which is what I am now doing. In my early adult life I worked as a common laborer in many different industries. In my late 30’s earned a bachelor’s degree in secondary education, taught for a while, and then went into the social services field. Without any prior notice and with minimal planning, I ended up returning to college and earning a post-baccalaureate certificate in substance abuse rehabilitation. The path by which I came to addiction counseling is one common to many people who work in the field – a personal history of addiction, life problems related to substance dependence, relationship problems, and mental health issues. It is in this work that I have come to understand the concept of “recovery” as simply getting back something that has been lost. Recovery is the process of coming back from that experience of loss and grief stronger, smarter, more spiritually-minded, and, simply, healthier than before.
My own “recovery” continues to come through my daily education and experience, and through the fulfillment of my spiritual mission.
Thanks for reading, and coming along this far…
Next entry:
Genesis of Nine Principles of Spiritual Recovery
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