Chapter Six

Six  Quantum  Leaps

Nothing is as it appears
to be, even when one is certain.

In my Transformational Process there have been six "quantum leaps" - experiential insights that have radically and suddenly altered my perception of reality.  As I use the expression here, a 6 1 quantum leap" is a jump. from one level of realization to another without passing through an intervening development to arrive at the new awareness.  Up to a certain point in time, you hold one set of beliefs; and in the next instant, you experience a whole new perspective.  In any such case, you cannot comprehend the validity of the new experience unless you relinquish an idea, or many ideas, that you have held till then.
     In my case it took over thirty years to establish the foundation on which these leaps in awareness could take place.  All of them were slow in brewing, were accelerated by the process of meditation and were infused with a sense of expansion and deeper truth about the manifest plane and its relationship to the psyche and to the spirit.

For me the six major insights were:
1. The relativity of all reality and the importance of state­bound consciousness
2. The differentiation of sequential experiences from simultaneous experiences and the real meaning of the now moment
3. The breakdown of the skin-bound consciousness
4. The realization of the difference between thought forms and essences
5. The resolution of the death space
6. The experience of Unconditional Love

RELATIVE REALITY

Albert Einstein had the genius to take the obvious and validate it with mathematics.  Without him, people might have gone on forever denying in their intellects what they had known for eons in their lives: two individuals observing the same event from two different points in space do not experience the same reality.  Going even further than Einstein, I would state that two people who observed the same event from the same point in space at the same point in time (if it were physically possible) would not experience the same reality.  Why?  Because each person's focus of awareness is different, so that no two people can possibly draw the same conclusions.  Each individual's consciousness is unique, not only in its historical background, but also in the kind and degree of its filtration.  Experiences of the manifest plane are always, and can only be, relative to the perspective of the viewer.  There are, therefore, as many different realities occurring simultaneously as there are foci of awareness.  In regard to any event, there are as many realities as there are observers, and each reality is equally valid.
     I usually illustrate this point by inscribing in space the largest circle it is possible to draw with my finger.  That circle could conceivably include the entire universe, but for the moment let's limit it to a circle with a radius as long as my arm.  Now, put a dot - the tiniest of dots - anywhere in that circle.  We let the space within the circle symbolically represent your total possible awareness, while the little dot represents your awareness in any given moment.  Now, using the same radius, transform that circle into a sphere and the dot into a tiny sphere.  We now have a model in three-dimensional reality.
    Now imagine, inside this larger sphere, many small spheres, the size of marbles, representing each and every possible state of awareness.  The tiny dot-sphere representing your momentary outer awareness can go into any one of these marble-sized spheres.  The first such sphere you enter might be labeled "conditioned ideas about reality.  " While you are in this space, everything fits in with that label, and nothing contradicts it. You next enter a sphere labeled "neurotic state," with the subtitle "fear of rejection." All reality you perceive from this focus of awareness confirms this perspective-you are an object to be rejected - and nothing denies it.  Then, let's say your tiny sphere of awareness enters a marble-sized sphere called "depression.  " No matter what you perceive there, everything feels and looks bleak and dark, and despair and pain get worse and worse.  And so on, through as many labels as you can imagine.  The ordinary human awareness goes through just such a process -but in a more complex way, because memory is a dimension always superimposed on the moment's experience so that the experience of the present moment is altered even further.
     The process of enlightenment is the process of acquiring the ability to expand that tiny sphere of awareness to include more and more of the marble-sized spheres and thereby to include a larger and larger portion of the large sphere.  When you reach the point where your awareness at any given moment includes the entire larger sphere, you have achieved illlumination.
     Many individuals have entered a space labeled "expanded awareness" -and called the experience "enlightenment." But, because their individual focus was not expanded, they have not been truly enlightened.  They have, it is true, had a peak experience in spaces not easily penetrated by the aware focus; but their real task, still before them, is to expand their awareness to encompass that peak-experience space, and all the others, all in the same moment.  A peak experience is far from enlightenment.
     The more inclusive an individual's aware consciousness, the greater his or her soul development.
     I also illustrate relative reality with the idea of a series of slides.  First is the perspective of the earth as viewed from the ground.  One could get lost just trying to grasp the myriad details of Los Angeles - even spend a lifetime or two studying its aspects.  To make the project more difficult, it is constantly changing - with new roads and buildings added and old ones removed, and so on.  One's entire focus of awareness could be spent in this activity and not even get into neighboring Southern California areas, or to San Francisco, New Delhi, or Paris.  This situation is analogous to being stuck in a psychological set or a fixation of awareness: while you are in it, nothing is going to make you believe that there is any other possibility of experience.  Your focus on a problem or situation is so close that you cannot see anything outside it.  In fact, our laws of relativity would state that the closer you are to any object, whether material or psychological, the larger or more vast it will be ­ not seem, but be!  In fact, if your focus of awareness were to penetrate a single atom, that atom would take on the appearance and the dimensions of an entire solar system. (Your problems get bigger when you focus on them.)
     The next few slides would show the earth from an orbiting satellite.  Not only can you now see a far vaster portion of the whole, but the appearance of the ground is radically altered.  Roadways in and out of cities can be seen.  The relationship of one city to another can easily be grasped.  Mountains, rivers, oceans, lakes, cities, roads and other topographical features now appear in relationship to one another.  Egypt from the air and Egypt from the ground are two different experiences.  The former is a ribbon of green meandering through a vast desert, while the latter is a mass of teeming towns and village - farms extending out on either side of a large muddy river.
     The next slides would show the earth as seen from 100,000 miles away, progressively farther and farther, and eventually show the earth from the moon.  From there it is staggering to conceive of the entire history of humankind, up to and including this very moment's developments, as taking place on that small multicolored globe.  Billions of people are swarming over the planet, and not one can be seen from this perspective. (And where are your problems now?)
     We next view slides of the moon as seen from its surface, then go on to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto; and finally we move out into the galaxy and beyond.  From this perspective, all that remains of the earth and the totality of human endeavor isn't even perceptible to the eye, but infinite other perceptions and experiences in awareness are - including the possibility of focusing on another sun, with its planets and their life forms, perhaps more advanced than ours.
     There are billions of suns just in our own galaxy.  More than one hundred million of them are thought to have planetary solar systems similar to ours.  Since there are billions of galaxies, the probability of life in the known universe is high.
While light from our own star, the sun, reaches us in about 8.3 minutes, light from the nearest star outside our solar system takes 4.3 years.  The farther we are away from these distant objects in the known universe, the farther back in time are the events that we perceive - up to perhaps ten billion years for stars at the farthest observable reaches of space.
     As long as we can perceive and conceive only in linear models, it will be more than four years before we can know that anything major has happened at the nearest star in our own galaxy.  Fortunately, there are alternatives to linear models, as I will demonstrate in the sections on simultaneity.  Most important, however, is that a change of perspective in thought changes actual time and actual physical relationships.  This suggestion may be a clue as to how a change in attitude about a disease process can influence the course of that disease process.  From all that has been said, we may even infer that the disease process may be affected not only by changes of attitude in the patient, but also by changes in the attitude of the physician, healer, therapist or anyone else who is a part of the patient's consciousness.
     We are beings of an undetermined number of dimensions exploring the third and fourth dimensions.  These three or four dimensions are a school for gods in which we learn in slow motion the consequences of thought.  This conception of us and our world is diametrically opposed to the more common idea that we are third- and fourth-dimensional beings who are trying in vain to comprehend the n dimensions of reality.
     Another example of relative reality, which we have already considered, is the interpretation of the Tarot cards.  Here again, the perspective determines or creates what one sees.  In a group of twenty or so people, I usually demonstrate this phenomenon by having one individual name the card he or she most dislikes.  The other participants then find the same card in their own decks and study it for a few minutes.  After the person who selected the card gives his or her interpretation of it, I ask the group, "How many of you saw the card change as the interpretation was given?" Up go the hands.  Most of the people always see their own initial perspective of the card -and therefore their experience of it -cchange into something similar to what the first person reported seeing.  To emphasize this relativity, I ask each person to relate what he or she first saw in the card, and with each sharing, the card seems to change magically for all of them.  This experience is only the beginning of understanding how perspective determines what one experiences.  And twenty people encounter only the bare possibilities contained in just one card.
     In teaching psychotherapeutic work, I extend this relativity concept to show the importance of seeing another's perspective - that is, the way the individual is configurating the problem or problems.  This perspective is then put into relationship to the therapist's various perspectives, which hold the potential resolution.  When the problems are projected onto the Tarot cards, the client has the opportunity to observe how differently the card appears when the therapist presents alternative views.  In my psychotherapeutic work I do not just give options to the clients.  My fundamental purpose is to enable the clients to learn to see options for themselves.
     Two personal examples demonstrate how my own attitudinal shifts changed my perception of events.
     In the first seventeen-day Conference at Sky Hi Ranch, which I presented in September 1975, 1 played for the group an English translation of the record of the Bhagavad-Gita, a twenty-five-hundred-year-old Hindu epic poem from India.  On hearing it, I was enraptured, truly ecstatic, and so I played the identical record again in the Conference of January 1976.  This time II was enraged by what I heard.  I was angry over almost every statement in it.  Then, during one of those moments of anger, I suddenly realized what was going on.  I brought the September experience back to my mind.  How could 1, in a past moment, have experienced this record as one of the most beautiful and, in this moment, barely tolerate it?  Then it dawned on me: since the poem was innocent and the record the same, something must have happened inside me to produce the second, diametrically opposite response.  When I shifted my focus of awareness to a heightened state, I again experienced the harmony of the poem.
     When the record was over, most of the members of the group said that they detested it and were angered by it.  In them its religious associations had stirred up deep-seated resentment.  I experienced a sudden insight into the power of group consciousness: even though all the participants had been lying quietly on the floor, listening to the record, I had been somehow swept up in their unspoken emotional responses.  As some participants with powerful energy fields reacted in anger, the rest of the group was inducted into the same emotional perspective, and I was. caught by it, too - until I realized what was happening and, enabled by my training, blocked the induction.

     The group's mood was depressed, resentful and angry.  I then asked the participants to form a circle and shift their awareness to Unconditional Love.  Two minutes after they did so, the energy of the group - and all the energy in the room ­ was transmuted into harmony.  It was a profound experience, especially for me, because I knew from experience that people usually take hours or days to work through feelings of anger and resentment.  Now, having listened to the Bhagavad-Gita at least six times, I have responded in so many different ways that I wonder whether I shall ever hear what it is actually saying and whether what it is saying is even the point.
     The second example to demonstrate the consequences of an attitudinal shift concerns my feelings about my facial asymmetry.  One of my ears is noticeably lower than the other, and so is one of my eyes.  I became aware of this imbalance at about the age of ten; and to make it less obvious, I had learned to tilt my head a certain way and to comb my hair to minimize the apparent disproportion.  Still it was almost intolerable to my ego that this disharmony existed.  Then several years ago I came across an article that pointed out that mystics often have distortions of the face, and when I then looked into the mirror I said, "It's not distorted enough!  " My ego needs had completely shifted my perspective to a new behavior and feeling.
     The phenomenon of state-bound consciousness is closely connected to relative reality.  As you already know, ordinary consciousness is only one of many possibilities.  It is primarily a trained state of mind, a conditioned state.  We have been told how and what to think and, for the most part, how to act.  Ordinary consciousness is the one that perceives Los Angeles as a city, whereas, when you see it from another state of consciousness, you can't see where it begins or ends or, therefore, whether it exists.  As a matter of fact, it doesn't exist - really.  It exists only at a certain level of consciousness.  No forms of life but the human have any idea that Los Angeles exists.  Your ordinary awareness has vast experience and vast information available to it about this conditioned level, albeit this information may be compartmentalized within the normal or conventional states of consciousness.
    The term "state-bound consciousness" means that the information known to one perspective or state of awareness is bound to that particular perspective or state of awareness and is generally unavailable to other perspectives or states.
     When we dream at night, our consciousness is obviously in a different state from its ordinary waking state.  Sometimes we can bring some of the dream experience back into the outer state of awareness but, for the most part, dream experiences are bound to the dream state and are unavailable to the outer mind.  As a byproduct of meditation, however, one can develop the ability to shift from one state to another, and thus recapture dream experiences in all their detail.  This phenomenon is one of the several reasons why I consider meditation to be empowering.  It enables the mind to go into any state of consciousness and retrieve information that ordinarily can be experienced only at that level.  Charles Tart of the University of California at Davis has devoted much of his energies to teaching and writing about the binding of information to the level in which it is first experienced.
     In one experiment (not by Tart), medical students drank alcohol until they were drunk, and then they were trained.  When they sobered up, they were tested on what they had learned while they were drunk.  They did poorly but when the experimenters got them drunk again - and tested them while they were drunk - the students performed much better on the same material.  Much of the information was entirely unavailable to them when they were sober.
     Something similar occurs when individuals enter high states of consciousness through meditation or when the gift of channeling is achieved and the wisdom of the information received transcends ordinary awareness.  When individuals return to ordinary awareness, most of the information is lost to the outer mind.  Such is the case with many inspired teachers.  When they are "in stream" - a term that denotes a shift to a more expanded awareness - they verbalize or channel information from that state of experience.  If the stream of consciousness is broken - as by questions from students or by some other action - the connection is disrupted, the teacher's focus of consciousness shifts and the experiences of another level are lost, at least momentarily.  The teacher may not even be able to tell the student what he or she was discussing.  A tape recording, however, can sometimes recapture what was experienced in the higher state, and a master teacher can return at will to the state where the information is bound and rechannel it.
     Inspired writers demonstrate the same phenomenon.  When they reread their creative writing several days later, they often find that what they wrote seems to be not of themselves, as if it would be impossible for them to reproduce a similar level of writing from the ordinary "normal" state.  And, of course, what they are experiencing is the truth: the original material is not available to their "normal" focus of awareness.
     Something similar happens almost universally to participants in Conferences at Sky Hi Ranch.  When they return home, they find it almost impossible to tell other people what has happened to them.  In the home "reality," the ranch experience takes on a dreamlike quality.  "It was so clear and profound while I was at the ranch," they tell me when they see me later, "but words would dry up in my mouth when I attempted to share what I had experienced." Again we are dealing with state-bound consciousness.  While they are at the ranch, Conference participants are not in ordinary states of awareness.  Most of these experiences are bound to their levels of consciousness at the ranch and are not fully available to them when they return to the ordinary outer states where most of their friends and family exist.  Some participants have actually rejected later what they validly experienced at the ranch.  State-bound consciousness also explains the mechanism of the crash or depression that often follows prolonged higher states of experience.  The important thing to do in such cases is not to bring the people back to ordinary "reality" but to teach them how to reenter the expanded levels, to recapture and create further on these levels.  Again it is all relative because, as you already know, I consider the expanded states of Beingness the natural ones and the "normal" ones profoundly abnormal.  'ne choice of which state to experience life in is always up to the individual.

     Invariably one of the participants will say, "I get it, but I want some hope that I can bring it to my everyday life." My response is always the same.  It is possible to blend the higher dimensions with the outer levels of awareness, but not if one is unwilling to let go of the rigid structure of that outer everyday life.  If one is going to bring experiences through from other levels, one's outer reality must accommodate both.  To break free of conditioned states, the belief structure must change.  If that possibility seems threatening, then one should avoid the pathways into expanded awareness.  My clear intention is to break down the partitions that compartmentalize our experience of reality.  Your choice is your own.
     At the ranch I warn each participant, both in a letter a month before the Conference and in person during the first five days of the Conference, that the exploration of higher states of consciousness can be painful and difficult, like riding a gigantic roller coaster.  None of them will return to their homes and professional lives unchanged.  Each participant has the choice of remaining or leaving.  When the group has committed itself, I begin to intensify the group interaction, and for each individual a window of consciousness begins to open.  The participants actually open the window themselves, and near the end of the two weeks, they gradually close the window as they begin to focus their attention on the future event of returning home.
In summary, no creative idea or experience is ever lost: a shift in perspective and state of consciousness only makes it seem to disappear.  The practice of meditation teaches us how to change levels of consciousness, so that eventually we can enter any state of consciousness at will, and the creative idea or experience can be fully recovered.

SEQUENTIAL VERSUS
SIMULTANEOUS EXPERIENCE

The change of attention toward the return home exemplifies one of the problems of sequential awareness, that of allowing the future - actions that have not yet transpired bbut are imagined to be going to occur - to influence the present moment.  It is the superimposition not of the future but of ideas about the future that makes sequential consciousness such a limiting experience.  There are many other factors to consider, but this distortion of the experience of the moment is most fundamental.
     I believe that the present necessity of communicating by means of words underlies the major entraining of consciousness into sequential linear patterns.  Language is indispensable to most human beings - not because it is innate but simply because it is usually the only developed means of communication available to the individual human being.  One cannot verbalize two different words simultaneously, and that simple fact is what traps the awareness into sequential patterns.  Sequential awareness conditions us in early childhood as we learn to speak, so that the thoughts behind language are trained to appear sequentially in our minds.  Soon we begin to experience sequential perception in sight, feeling states and other activities that are not necessarily or inherently sequential at all.
     Although most people cannot conceive that it is possible to focus awareness on more than one object or idea simultaneously, some simple training techniques can demonstrate that simultaneous awareness is possible.  When simultaneous states of awareness begin to appear, there is an even better alternative to sequentiality - through symbols or through telepathy.&  Telepathy is capable of impressing in a single moment the totality of what is to be communicated.
     But communication is just a small part of the insights into the sequential versus the simultaneous.  Even though the bio­chemical reactions at any locus within the brain take place sequentially, thought is not produced by a single biochemical reaction or at a single locus but through the associative reactions taking place simultaneously in many areas of the brain.  It is therefore a synthesis of many reactions.  I do not wish to imply that thought originates in the brain but only that the brain's physical responses to thought undergo this process. (The late Wilder Penfield of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, a highly respected pioneer in brain surgery, concluded from many years of clinical experience that the human mind cannot be found in the structure of the brain.) Perhaps the brain is a transducer of the basic energy of essential thought, converting this energy or original impress into stepped-down equivalent patterns of energy that the outer mind recognizes as outer or apparent thought.  By the time thought appears in the outer awareness, it has been drastically filtered, sequestered and distorted and is of an energy form quite unlike the original.
     As I have said before, telepathy is our natural form of communication.  Essential thought is not sequential but is an energy configuration that is transformed into a sequential pattern to appear as words or images in the outer awareness.  Two people whose outer areas of communication are conditioned to different languages may still be quite capable of communicating with each other - through telepathy.  The seeker of another's attention (the "sender") does not have to think in images or symbols, because in telepathy the language is automatically translated into essential thought and retranslated into the outer language of the person having the telepathic impress.  Mastery of telepathy would make it possible to abandon language and move to communication by essential thought alone.
     So far, I have been using a linear model to discuss aspects of simultaneity.  In fact, however, simultaneity has nothing whatsoever to do with linearity or with time.  That is, it is neither an affirmation nor a denial of linearity and time; it is simply beyond linearity and time.  Time is a useful construct of outer awareness.  Essential thought does not know what time is, nor does it care.  Essential thought resides in the now moment, that all-inclusive dimensionless space of awareness where all of the past, present and future exist simultaneously.  I am laughing right now, because it is ridiculously paradoxical to try to use words to discuss nonlinear states, including essential thought.
     And I can also laugh at my own experiences as I spent four months of deep contemplation each morning searching for the now moment.  The tack that I took was that it was somewhere between time and close to the present moment.  First I tried to accelerate my awareness into the future slightly to wait for the now moment to enter my awareness.  When that attempt failed - miserably - I tried to slow time down and escape iinto the now moment between time.  All I experienced, however, was a slowed down mind.  By then I was exasperated, because I was sure (erroneously, as I later learned), that everybody who taught higher dimensions of consciousness experienced the now moments.  Almost every book on spiritual awareness mentions it.  I felt as if I were some sort of inferior outcast, fenced off in exile while the superior, acceptable insiders were enjoying the fruits of the Divine.  Then the solution and the experience struck and I laughed for days.  The now moment has absolutely nothing to do with time.  As long as I persisted in trying to reach it through some alteration of time, I was doomed to failure.  The moment I stopped trying to reach the timeless awareness space and simply ,instructed my consciousness to become the awareness, it happened.  It was an excruciating but important lesson.
     In other words, when we talk about the now moment, we are actually talking about two different things, the present tense, in which awareness experiences linear, sequential time, and simultaneity, in which the awareness does not experience linear, sequential time.  Both are significant for development.
     In Conferences, I use an exercise to demonstrate how little we are ever aware, in linear time, of the now moment.  It is very simple: for six to eight hours, the Conference participants must use only the present tense in their conversations with one another.

Initially I tried the exercise for twenty-four hours, but the stress on the participants was too great.  Six to eight hours is enough time to demonstrate the experience.  Most people try to get around the frustration by such tricky techniques as using the present tense to phrase events that really took place in past moments.  Participants discover that it is very hard to talk about only what is happening in the present moment, especially if something wonderful happened not long ago (a few minutes to a few hours) and there was nobody around with whom to share it as it was happening.
     Distorted memories of the past and ideas of the future are constantly superimposed on the linear now moment.  Like pesky flies crawling over one's face, into the nostrils or the mouth, the past and future constantly demand the attention of the focus of our awareness.  One can learn finally to ignore all but the present moment.  When one does, the opportunity to enter the now moment is available.  This is such a supreme state of consciousness to experience that I won't attempt to describe it in words.
     Every experience that appears in the outer awareness belongs to the past.  Not one iota of that awareness is current.  By the time sensory stimuli have been converted from physical energy waves into bioelectrical currents - passed through the brain receivers and translated into coherent images, sounds or feelings, the actual event is over.  We are only aware of secondary impressions, not the primary event itself.  But in the state of simultaneity, awareness and the events are one and the same.  Direct experience is possible, but not through the linear mind patterns.  Someday it will be shown that consciousness does not need a physical vehicle to exist.  Those people who are capable of moving out of linear patterns already know this to be true, but all the rest - billions of people - do not.
     Anything carried over from the past distorts the now moment.  There is a story of a man who approached a sage to ask for help with some problems he was having.  He had to wait several weeks before he was admitted to the sage's council room, and then the sage only looked at him, asked simply, "Why are you carrying that huge sack of stones on your back?" and dismissed him.  It took the man several more weeks to understand that the sage's question contained all the insight he needed to solve his problems.  That question and that insight are valid for almost everyone.
     Past traumas, past hurts, past guilts, past perceptions of reality - especially those of childhood - past beliefs are all stored in the memmory mechanism of our consciousness, and we are constantly superimposing them upon our awareness of the moment.  If one persists in carrying around the stones of the past, one cannot begin to appreciate the opportunity of a new moment.  'Me heavy, worthless stones of the past must be let go.
One begins by divesting them of any importance.  Eventually, because the mind is no longer energizing them, they atrophy: they lose their weight, and there is nothing to carry around anymore.
     It is, of course, always appropriate to draw the lesson from the past - what I call "drawing the jewel of insight" - but then, to use a Buddhist expression, the right thing is to WALK ON!  If you need to punish yourself, carry your stones, but don't then expect to experience any of the other possibilities of life.  In ordinary states of consciousness, there simply isn't enough room for both the present and the past.
     How is it that the present moment of linear time can be distorted by an event that one expects to occur in the future?  What diabolical apparatus of awareness can make us anxious, upset or worried, feel traumatized or sometimes induce illness, with only thoughts about a future event?  If you have ever had to prepare for important exams, concert recitals or some other display of talent or knowledge, you know exactly what I mean.  Anything, imagined or real, that threatens the ego produces such feelings - until, that is, the ego either dissolves or is deemphasized as the center of one's awareness of self.  The actual future event is rarely anything like what you imagine, and the sad part is the squandering of so much energy and the loss of appreciation of the present moments.  Only present moments have the potential of being real events and then only if the outer mind doesn't eclipse them.
     A wonderful illustration of several of these points is the Old Testament story of Lot and his wife leaving the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  In metaphysical interpretation, Lot and his wife represent the essential or pure aspects of one's Beingness.  Sodom and Gomorah represent, of course, the distortion and confusion created out of the ignorance of ordinary awareness.  The angels that appeared to Lot and his wife symbolize the connection to the higher natural state of Beingness.  What did God say to Lot and his wife as they were leaving (the problems, guilts and traumas symbolized by) the city?  Don't look back!

Don't look back.  Extract yourself from these morasses.  They have nothing to do with the present moment and certainly not with the future, so long as you, yourself, do not seed the future with the past.  Now, what happened to Lot's wife when she did look back?  She turned into a pillar of salt; she was rigidified into the form of past actions and past patterns; she was trapped in the past.  The injunction is clear: don't look back, not even to peek for old time's sake.
     Another valid analogy comes from the technique of taking tests effectively in higher education.  It usually takes only a few examinations for one to learn not to stop and get bogged down at the first question to which one does not know the answer.  What one does instead is to put a check mark by that question and move on through the examination.  Often, answers to questions one could not answer are given by later questions, or, as the stress of the examination is discharged and one gets the feeling that most of the questions are answerable, the mind is unblocked and the answer to the difficult question has a chance to come through.
     I don't know how many times I have seen individuals, including me, squander an unbelievable amount of time and energy in attempting to cope with a problem.  It is a ridiculous situation to sit forever pondering an early question that can't be answered and then to find that the test period is up and you never let yourself go on to other questions that you could have answered easily.  The test of Life is analogous.  Let go of the problems and get on with living Life.  It's a relatively short span of time and not to be wasted on problems - particularly imagined ones!  If you come into fulfilling patterns -if you finish the exam before the time period is up - then there is ample opportunity to go back to an old unresolved problem, but, even given that leisure, you do it only if it still appears to be worth the effort.
     To get people to let go of their problems is so very difficult.  One almost gets the impression that they would be lost without them.  If a problem is important to experience, what will appear in the future will not be a specific answer but rather a significant pattern, a template for many similar actions, an overview, which may yield deep insight and wisdom.
     Experience the present moments with their potential for an experience of the now moment.  Don't look back.  Walk on.

BREAKING DOWN THE
SKIN-BOUND CONSCIOUSNESS

Many phenomena clearly demonstrate that individuals are not awarenesses residing in the head areas of their physical bodies but are interrelated fields of energy to which the skin presents no barrier at all.  Although more and more people are aware of these phenomena and are teaching about them to others, I am often amazed how these people fail to realize the extent to which this knowledge differs from the general consensus of belief of Western humanity as a whole.
     If you perform an extemal-reality check - a check with people who have no idea of reality beyond what is reported to them by their five outer senses and by science in general -you will find that most people consider as sheer nonsense the idea of their Beingness as interpenetrating and coexisting with their physical forms.  Healing at a distance, chakra systems, energy fields extending many feet from the surface of the body, telepathy, telekinesis, holographic theory and so on - billions of people do not hold these ideas valid.  For such people it is a quantum leap in consciousness to find any of these phenomena to be valid by means of an experiential process.  There is a vast difference between the mental or intellectual belief that a phenomenon is valid and the direct experience that the phenomenon is valid.  The quantum leap occurs only with the experiential route.
     As I mentioned earlier, I became extremely interested in the ability to influence other people's energy fields and physical bodies, along with their psychological states, when working at a distance from their bodies.  The distance might vary from touching them lightly to working with energy focused through my hands at distances several feet from the body surfaces.  Working with someone many miles away is a similar phenomenon, but it requires imaging that person to be in your presence, wherever you and the person may actually be geographically.
     We must begin to appreciate the importance of this kind of interaction in relationship to disease - both to its engendering and to its resolution, whether the disease is physical or psychological.  A diseased member of a family is not isolated and ineffective in influencing other members of the family, and the other members of the family are involved in influencing the diseased person and his or her disease - no matter what the disease is.
     The state of consciousness of the people who surround someone who is ill has an influence on the course of the disease in that person.  Let me emphasize: I am not talking about physical interaction between the people, and I am not talking about the psychological effects of words and actions.  I am talking about energyfields.  I am stating that the energy fields of people who surround an ill person-energy fields created primarily out of the unconscious areas of their psyches - can either vitalize the ill person or devitalize the ill person.
     People who have strong, healthy bodies and strong senses of well-being radiate this energy without necessarily being aware of what they are doing.  In ancient Rome, children were the constant companions, waking and sleeping, of people who were ill; the Romans knew that there was some sort of transfer of vitality from the growing person to the ill one.
     Far from being able to modulate their energy fields, most people do not even know they exist.  They cannot realize, therefore, the importance of their external attitude and behavior in their relationship to someone who is ill.  The energy-field interaction, however, always represents the deeper truth of people's feelings.  More than once I have experienced the situation in which a wife professes deep concern for her dying husband while she is also carrying on an extramarital affair; her concern and caring are on the outer levels, but the energy in and attitudes about the affair are deeply involved in her husband's dying - even if he does not know that the affair is going on.  In such cases, the field interaction is draining to the patient.  The outer mind may be deceived, but the underlying awarenesses of both the patient and the other person react and interact to the truth of what is happening.
     Among the people who must be considered in this connection are health practitioners, because they reflect their own state of consciousness and well-beingness as they care for their patients.  Tired or upset nurses, physicians, aides, orderlies ­ anyone, in fact, including the patient in the next bed six feet away - can all influence the sick person in aan adverse way.  On the other hand, certain physicians, nurses, aides and so on ­ again including other patients may have naturally uplifting and positive body energies that are conducive to recovery for the patients with whom they come in contact.  I remember in particular a nurse's aide from Jamaica: if she simply went in and mopped a sick person's floor, the patient would always report feeling better after she had been in the room.  Some nurses ­ and some doctors - have just the opposite effect.  Again, I am not talking about personality differences; I am talking about reflections of deeper consciousness and body energy.
     Some day orthodox medicine will recognize that the course of disease is altered by the state of harmony of those who surround and take care of the sick.  Health personnel will be taught how to balance their energies and how to share their energies for the benefit of patients.  While we now tend to concentrate ill patients in one place, the hospital - which inevitably has a negative field in which it is difficult for the body to recover- we will consider the wisdom of placing a sick person in an environment that is cheerful, without death or serious disease in a bed less than six feet away and surrounded by people who represent health and vitality.  Health professionals who are not conducive to a patient's recovery should be removed from the field - or be assigned to people who want to die.

     Yes, we must remember that there are situations where vitality and the sense of well-beingness do not serve the patient's purposes.  Some patients are preparing for death, and, on the deepest levels, some simply want to die.
     When I began my practice of medicine in Los Angeles, I felt an obligation to heal every patient regardless of the cost or the circumstances: it was what my training had taught me.  Death was the ogre, the demon to be defeated, and I was the knight dedicated to slaying the dragon.  Few patients died while I was on duty.  They could die when I was off duty or when a partner was covering my practice, but if a patient-except an aged one -died while I was in charge, I sensed it as a rejection of my sk ' ills as a physician.  It was a truly difficult experience for me to accept.
     This facet of my immaturity was finally shattered by a woman who had been my patient for several years.  In her mid-sixties, she suffered from a severe form of heart disease in which the blood vessels to the heart were so constricted that the least exertion or emotional upset was an overload; she sweated profusely, fluid built up in her lungs and she felt excruciating pain in her chest.  Once or twice a week for almost a year and a half, most often in the middle of the night, her convalescent home would call me with word that she was in heart failure, with intense pain and marked difficulty in breathing.  I would dress and rush to the nursing home, order all the necessary medication and treatments and then go in and give her a pep talk.  Within half an hour she would be resting comfortably, and I would leave the nursing home feeling uplifted: I had once more saved the woman's life.  What I did not recognize was that, in giving her the pep talk, I was transferring energy to her.
     The last time I saw her alive, I had again ordered all the appropriate treatments and she was just coming out of an episode.  I was in the middle of giving her my usual encouragement when she suddenly said, "Why are you doing all this to me?" I instantly understood; and I was shocked, then moved to tears.  While part of my psyche felt rejection in her words, it was overridden by my deeper sense of compassion and understanding.  I stepped out into the hall, where I could openly allow my tears.  The woman had confronted me with my fear of facing my own death.  In that moment my underlying motivation in "curing" patients and extending myself to keep them from dying was all too clear.  I was saving them because I saw them as symbols of me; because I was afraid to die, I was forcing this woman to live- against her will.  With this realization I felt a snap inside me, as if some hitherto unknown force field between the woman and me had suddenly been broken.  She died within twenty minutes.
     Even to this day it is hard for me to keep from transferring vital energy to someone who is dying.  Similarly, I often see a family member, or more than one, unknowingly transferring energy and sustaining a dying person, delaying the moment of death.  As less myth and greater understanding surround the process of dying, perhaps the dying person will have the strength to die consciously and the members of the family consciously to allow him or her to die.  It is only when we comprehend the spiritual or natural states of Beingness that we can begin to understand death.

     In this section I also wish to invite my medical peers to reconsider any rigid opinions they may have about unorthodox views on health and disease.  Although the principles of orthodox medicine have been, and shall continue to be, basic in our scientific approach to the physical body and in the treatment of emergent or acute disease, much less is understood about the body than is not.  Even today many disease processes are simply incomprehensible.  Medicine is an art mixed with a great number of hypotheses -about reality, about the human body and about the human mind -and at their deepest levels, most physicians know it.
     Altogether, the treatment of disease rests upon empirical experience - essentially trial and error.  Hundreds of years of practice have accumulated a body of knowledge that has proved beneficial in alleviating human pain and suffering.  The profession is venerated not only because most of its members are dedicated, but also because a person must study and master unbelievable complexities to become qualified as a physician.  The medical profession is proud and protective of the standards of practice it has evolved.

     As I tell most groups attending Conferences at the ranch, many of them would not be alive to come exploring with me if they had not had the benefits of modem scientific medicine.  Some would not have survived the ordinary childhood diseases or other diseases such as pneumonia, which was 50 percent to 80 percent fatal before antibiotics; others would have died of polio, diphtheria or other diseases conquered by orthodox medicine in recent years.  For that matter, I wouldn't be there either, because at the age of eighteen months I almost died of double pneumonia.  And if you, the reader, advocate natural foods, I must remind you that about two hundred years ago, all our ancestors ate only natural foods, and their average life span was about half what it is today.  Natural foods alone will not offer a healthy body.  I believe that if you put fine food into a body with a crummy mind, you get a crummy body; but if you put crummy food into a body with expanded awareness, you get a fine body.  To a greater extent than we usually realize, our state of consciousness determines the way we transmute the levels of energy represented by foods, but the opposite statement would be definitely untrue: foods do not determine the level of consciousness.

     When I practiced orthodox medicine, I was often at the very forefront of knowledge in my attempts to treat the incurable.  But my earlier psi abilities, my mother's philosophy and Eunice's demonstrations of healing by mind alone kept coming back to me.  I began to feel the need to explore these alternatives in relation to my patients when everything else in the medical armamentarium was failing.  Finally my interest broke down my reluctance and my fear.
     Through empirical exploration I began to investigate the relationship of the mind to the body.  In orthodox medical literature, I studied published accounts of this area of research.  I was certain that the mind and body were a unit, and I knew that the idea went back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle.  I was also very impressed by cases of "spontaneous remission" ­ cures partial or complete, temporary or permanent, for no known cause - in patients who had been proved beyond all question to be incurable or terminal . At least in my experience there was, in these cases, usually a spiritual-conversion aspect.  Inevitably I became interested in all three areas - spiritual, psychological and physical - and in their interrelationships.  I came to lament the peculiar, present-day approach that divided the human being into three separate aspects so that three professions - medicine, psychology-psychiatry and religion - were often needed for a single patient.
     In orthodox medical practice, each professional space is jealously guarded, and woe to the person who crosses the line of any of the specialties.  To me their boundaries are entirely imaginary; I can't see or feel them.  My only concern is to bring to a patient anything and everything to help him or her regain health and a sense of well-beingness.  I find that all three areas are involved in every case - and it is as simple as that.  Can we also begin to see the analogy of skin-bound consciousness and the compartmentalization of professions?
     My intention is to help to break down the irrationally rigid awareness that orthodox medicine displays.  I encourage my colleagues to open their minds to new areas of research into the potential of human consciousness and its effects on disease and health.  However disturbing these developments may be to medicine's comfortable status quo, it is only a matter of time until medicine recognizes and acknowledges the importance of these fringe areas.
Medicine rests strongly on its foundation, a foundation upon which new advances will arise, beyond the imagination of the most sophisticated practitioners today.
     I must emphasize that I am not predicting that the unorthodox approaches will displace medicine.  On the contrary, medicine will incorporate some of the so-called unorthodox approaches.  Science will demonstrate their validity and give far more insight into bioenergies than any metaphysician has understood to date.
     To heal and to alleviate human suffering is the common goal of both the orthodox and the unorthodox practices.  The difference between them is simply the difference between their perspectives of reality.  Healing does not rest in the hands of a selected few but in the hands of every human being, and I don't mean healing just in the sense of professional therapeutics.  I mean that healing can come, will come and does come from the individual integrated human consciousness that is capable of healing itself.  No matter what physicians do, they can only augment the healing process of the body itself.  The extension of human awareness into the psi areas is only a further diagnostic and therapeutic tool to augment this same basic process.
     In August 1974, 1 discussed these concepts with my medical staff at the hospital with which I was associated.  Some of the physicians were shocked, and some were outraged.  But, with more and more research material coming out of respected universities, I wonder what their attitudes would be now, just four years later.
     I dare to say that the human mind can and does generate force fields that can transmute matter.  I further dare to say that an awareness without spiritual foundation is like a stool with only two legs.

THOUGHT FORMS AND ESSENCES

By this time in this book it shouldn't be too difficult to conceive that the human psyche is capable of creating thought forms (forms in thought) that can influence matter, including the physical body.  Now I want to talk about the similar process of creating entities - fields of energy that can appear to take on the form of a human, or animal or, for that matter, an angelic being, a demon or even an Inner Teacher.
     Whether we are aware of it or not, we are a most wondrous interaction of energy in this dimension and others.  Our force fields organize matter into our physical forms.  Perhaps an even more essential force field also organizes subtle matter into form -that is, the etheric body.  If you do not know about the aura or the energies that form what is called the etheric body, you may want to read The Energies of Consciousness, edited by Stanley Krippner and Daniel Rubin; W. J.. Kilner's The Aura;
Thelma Moss's The Probability of the impossible: Scientific Discoveries and Explorations in the Psychic World; or William Tiller's section on energy fields and the human body in Frontiers of Consciousness, edited by J.W. White.
     Occasionally a few people bump into so-called entities fields of force - that make their presence known through the movement of objects (such as the poltergeist phenomenon), through possession, through spontaneous combustion of materials or through the channeling, during trance or meditation, of what seem to be conscious entities.
     If your belief system discounts all such phenomena, you are simply using a convenient way to deal with what is incomprehensible to you.  I am impelled to share my own experiences and concepts because this area of exploration is profoundly interesting, and, as expanded awareness begins to be experienced, these phenomena are encountered and must be dealt with.  Wait until you experience them!  It is in anticipation of that time that I share this information.  What I want to do is offset some of the crazy ideas people often have about these manifestations.
     I was in my late twenties when such an experience first happened to me.  A poltergeist manifestation appeared one evening while I was working on a scientific paper that I was to present to the staff of the Mayo Clinic.  I was in the living room of my small, second-story apartment in Rochester, Minnesota, minding my own business, when the hair on the back of my neck suddenly stood straight up.  I sensed at once that there was something in the room, but I couldn't see it.  Then objects on the kitchen table flew to the floor, and a set of keys on top of the refrigerator catapulted across the room.  At this point I could see the vague shape of a vortex of energy moving on the other side of the room.  I was so scared that I actually lost control of bowel and bladder.  My heart was pounding so hard I thought I was going to have a coronary.  If the vortex came any closer to me, I felt, I might die.
     Fortunately, there was a phone on the desk.  Keeping my eye on the vortex, I carefully picked up the receiver and dialed my mother in Garden Grove, California.  I misdialed several times, because I refused to let whatever it was out of my sight.  When Mother finally answered the phone, much to my relief, I whispered that there was something in my apartment that wasn't human and felt malevolent.  After I told her the events as they had been transpiring, I was shocked by her response.
     "Nonsense," she said.  "It's only a poltergeist, dear.  It won't hurt you if you don't fear it.  " She sounded almost lighthearted as she said it.  "Tell it to go away.  Say that it has no business there.  Tell it to go back to where it came from."
     I felt a calm come over me - then anger.  I put the receiver ddown on the desk top, got up and went over to old whatever-it­was and yelled, "Get out!" Much to my amazement, it did.
     Mother laughed when I returned to the phone.  "Something in you attracted it," she said.  "It's time to see what thoughts inside you attracted it.  " I didn't fully understand what she meant, but by then it didn't make any difference to me.  The thing was gone, and that was all that mattered.
     The broken dishes and the keys flying across the room were not in my imagination, nor had I been placing my mind in a suggestible state by reading a ghost story.  I was hard at work on a thesis covering a disease related to the pancreas.  Even if this event should prove to have been caused by an energy from my own Beingness, it would be awesome; but my feeling is that it was some form of external energy that responded to my telling it to leave.
     Several years later, Eunice, during my time of study with her, emphasized the differentiation between thought forms and essences. 1, however, paid little attention to this aspect of her work, because to me entities, whether their form was human or demonic, were nothing more than projections of people's minds.  Except for my poltergeist experience (which I had by then rationalized as being some natural form of energy vortex not well understood by science) nothing in my experience made me concern myself with the distinctions between thought forms and other supernatural beings or to pay much attention to Eunice's teaching on protection and shielding.
     I can remember her saying that the great deceivers were to be encountered when one entered the subtle levels of awareness.  She talked about their presence in the room where she was teaching and about the differences in the kinds of light that emanated from them.  "The true spiritual beings of high development have a full aura," she said.  "They are filled with a particular quality of white clear light.... Discarnate souls [ordinary people who have died] appear as they did in life, their auric development easy to discern.  Thought forms, creatures and forms similar to the human, as well as the demonic, are in the darker shades ' Salute the Divinity in them.  If they are spiritual beings, they will respond.  If they don't, send them on their way." Since I couldn't see any of these entities, or even feel their presence, I would just sit and wait until she discussed areas of more interest to me, such as healing.
     In September 1975, 1 woke one night feeling a powerful presence in my bedroom at the ranch.  Its form was human, its colors dark, its feeling demonic.  Remembering what my mother and Eunice had said about such things, I simply told it to leave, and it did.
     The next morning, in meditation, I asked the Inner Teacher about the presence that had entered my room the night before, and the Inner Teacher delivered a long discourse, of which I remember the essentials:
     Just as man is conceived and created out of a higher order of intelligence, so too can man create out of his own order of intelligence.  Every time an individual images a person in his or her mind, a subtleform of the imaged person is created.  Its level of manifestation is ordinarily different from the levels with which we are commonly familiar, but people who are highly developed in the art of thought-form creation can empower their thought forms with enough subtle energy to materialize them.  The old-time Tibetans, who were masters of this technique, created many thought forms in the configuration of demons and used them to frighten off unaware humans who might covet things the Tibetans wanted guarded.  These thought-form demons were like household pets, often sent to carry out certain missions or, like watchdogs, to ward off enemies.  The more demonic-looking the thought form, the more effective it was.
     But thought forms aren't restricted to the demonic.  Thought forms of saints, Buddha, Christ, wise teachers, angels, gods, animals and so on are all manifested in what is called the astral plane by this mechanism.  Once they are created, they remain manifest until a human consciousness dissolves them.  If the human who created them dies, the thought forms he or she created remain.  From prehistoric times up to the present moment, the human mind has created thought forms for thousands and thousands of years, so that the astral plane is a vast cesspool of these creations, most generated by human consciousness.
     The moment human consciousness images, a thought form is created.  Most of them, the products of average human minds, have so little substance or intensity as to be of no real consequence.  Some, however, are so strong that they can be seen and heard by clairvoyants and other sensitives, and if a thought form is created by many people it is apt to be very powerful.  An outstanding and familiar example is the thought form of Christ.  Millions of people, imaging the Christ figure, have created millions of thought forms of Christ and have empowered them with all the attributes that human consciousness believes necessary to such a figure.  Because of these millions of repetitions, the Christ thought form is a powerful one, and it appears to many sensitives.
     Just as we are not consciously aware that we are the creations of a higher order of intelligence, so thought forms do not know that they are thought forms - nor usually, do the psychics who channel them.  It is critical to distinguish between the thought form of Jesus Christ, the actual Jesus Christ and the essence of Christ.  While the actual Christ exists as a single essence, the Christ thought form exists in unbelievable numbers.  The actual Christ essence is not created by the human level of consciousness, but all the others are.  In all but rare exceptions, psychics do not bring in the Christ essence; they bring in thought forms of Christ.  All thought forms created by the human mind may be dissolved by the human mind, but what the human mind did not create cannot be dissolved by it.  This difference can be the key to telling them apart.
     The Inner Teacher told me that the entity that had come to me the night before was a thought form that I had created in a previous lifetime.  I then asked the Inner Teacher, "How do I know that you are not a thought form of mine or someone else's?"
     It replied simply, "Try to dissolve me.  " I couldn't, and, to tell the truth, I didn't especially want to.
The next evening the same negative entity appeared in my room again.  It wouldn't leave immediately, and it kept me awake.  I felt fear because it was very demonic.  Over the next few weeks, it returned every few nights.  Finally, in great anger, and with a force I had never before felt pass through my body, I arose from the bed and bellowed an invocation: "I created you, and I now dissolve you!" The demon disappeared and never returned.
     People who find themselves doing automatic writing are sometimes channeling thought forms.  I know of five different people who believe that they channel the Christ.  Of the five, only two are at the level of metaphysical training to be able to distinguish thought form from essence.  In such a case, a reading of the material brought through often gives a good idea of whether it is from thought-form area or from the essence.
     Several months ago, a gestalt therapist shared with me an interesting phenomenon he had observed when he was working in Brazil.  The poorer classes of people there are involved with cults dealing either with black magic - the majority of them ­ or with white magic.  They talk about supernatural entities, demons, good entities and so on.  The middle and upper classes who hire the poor as servants, consider such talk sheer superstition and pay it little attention.
     Working with a group of middle - and upper-class people in techniques tto raise their awareness into transformational states, my therapist friend found, to his amazement, that they were becoming sensitive to thought forms - and they began to report encounters with the thought forms created by their employees!

(The therapist himself had an encounter with some form of energy that pushed him to the ground and forced his head back by pulling his hair.) The lesson here is that disbelief in thought forms seems to have a protective or shielding effect but only so long as people stay away from explorations of subtle reality.  If they begin to lose their disbelief, they are unprotected unless they go on through the experience to the start of understanding.
     It is a difficult subject, to say the least.  What I have said may not be much, but I hope it will be enough to help a beginner, should the need arise.

THE RESOLUTION OF THE DEATH SPACE

Of all the quantum leaps, the resolution of the death space is the most difficult to experience.  As we saw in Chapter One, the concept of death is not only encrusted with an overwhelming load of fears, myths, fantasy, ignorance and neurotic ideation, but, also in the West, it is as much as possible shrouded and concealed from experience.
     Either physical or psychological death is a transfonna­tional experience. (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross puts the idea well in the title of her book, Death, the Final Stage of Growth.) No soul that has ever manifested in this plane has escaped it.  Nor is it desirable that we should.  From the perspective of the un­awakened mind, death is such an awesome spectre as to be quickly suppressed or to be discussed in tones that are deadly serious.  We may joke about death, but the psychoemotional reaction to the actual event, whether the death of loved ones or the knowledge of the approach of one's own death, is probably the most profound experience ordinary consciousness must meet.  The end of the physical self, or the threatened end of the psychological self, is one of the central fears of the human being.  It demonstrates our usual identification of the aware state of consciousness with the outer manifest plane, with the body and the ego or personality level.  When one is able to break free of this identification, when one knows experientially that body and ego are not the sole totality of one's Beingness, the transformational states of consciousness can become available while one is still embodied.
     It took me a long time to catch a glimpse of a higher self beyond the ego level.  I had plenty of ideas about such a self but had no real experience of it until I committed myself to the deidentification with the ego, to embrace what I call the Higher Orchestrator.  I spent nine months working on the death process in terms of the ego or ideas about myself.  During that time I became aware that I would also have to deidentify with my body.  In other words, the fear of physical death and psychological death would have to be released, and the only way I knew to do it was to trust that my Beingness was more than either my body or my ego.  That trust was based on rare and brief experiences through meditation.
     Please note carefully that I am not speaking about destroying the physical form or the ego.  I am speaking about the expansion into a state of awareness where the loss of either is of no importance.  This state is immortality, and it has absolutely no concept of death.  Literally, it does not know that death exists, because, deathless itself, it experiences bodies and per­sonalities only as vehicles to express itself.  It is the outer mind that creates the pain surrounding death, because death itself is only a marker, or gate, that signals to the deeper awareness that a lifetime is now complete.  Because of the continuity of Being­ness, the deep awareness does not even experience the actual moment of death.
     I have enjoyed Edgar Cayce's comments on this subject.  He said in one of his readings that if only the outer awareness knew the fear and apprehension of the soul just before incarnating into the plane, there would be far less fear about passing out of it.
       The greatest psychological pain of the death process is caused by the attachment to the form nature, whether it be to other people, one's own body, places, whatever.  To conquer this pain and the fear associated with it, detachment must be achieved.
     To psychologists and psychiatrists, detachment is a symptom of an abnormal state of consciousness.  If the detachment is complete, it is called a psychotic break, a loss of connection with reality.  I want to emphasize clearly that I am not discussing a state of consciousness that is disconnected from reality; I am discussing a state of consciousness that is aware of ordinary reality but is also aware of an even higher portion of Beingness.  In this state, one does not overvalue either the ego or the body, because neither is essential to the existence of the higher consciousness.
     A psychotic break is, however, a genuine risk in the practice of detachment.  Unless one has at least a thin thread to guide the awareness to the higher levels, the mind can lose itself in universes that have no connection at all to outer reality.  There is a slight risk on the return to the usual perspective of outer reality, but it is nothing in comparison to the risk involved in releasing ego boundaries to embrace the higher self.  This risk is especially great if one has a tendency to reject either the self or the outer reality.  Detachment and rejection lead to quite different consequences.  While detachment has the potential of enlightenment, rejection has the potential of neurosis, of psychosis, of death of the physical body or all three.  Detachment produces the serenity of releasing to embrace, while rejection produces anguish, pain and let-me-out-of-here feelings.
     As a preparation for this detachment without rejection, contemplation on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead can be extremely helpful.  They can also be terribly confusing, if one doesn't catch the essentials.  In the process of detachment come fifty-six demons, and each one of them represents individual or collective fears that can deflect the soul from the straight path and completely block its progress if the awareness gives them even the slightest acknowledgment.  The fifty-six demons must simply be ignored.
      I reached the culmination. of my work on the process of psychological death with my experience in the Great Pyramid of Cheops.  Before I relate that experience, I will explain how I managed to arrange to spend the night alone in the Great Pyramid.
     I went to Egypt from Findhorn with two wonderful friends, David Elliott and Pat MacLean.  I had three objectives in mind.  One was to scan the mummies in the Cairo Museum. (I'll discuss scanning in the next chapter.) Another was to visit the Karnak ruins.  The last was to spend a night alone in the Great Pyramid.
     On arriving in Cairo, we headed straight for the pyramid and took the usual guided tour through it.  It was amazing to me, because while the pyramid is huge, the passageways up to the grand gallery and into the queen's and king's chambers are so small that one can only crawl or waddle to get through them.  On entering the grand gallery, one has to climb a series of steel rungs to reach a walkway that, in turn, ascends to the entrance of the king's chamber.  Some major drop-offs have no railing for protection.  On the guided tour, I made a mental map of the pyramid in preparation for my solitary adventure.
     Outside the pyramid, one of the tour guides asked whether I wanted to spend some time alone inside.  From stories I had heard, I guessed it was going to cost some money to make arrangements, so I went to work on my best business and bartering states of consciousness.  I might be interested, I said, but it would have to be for the entire night of the full moon, two days away, and I needed to be entirely alone.  "Hmmmmm, this is very difficult," the guide responded, and I began to see the dollar signs go up in brilliant neon, rising higher and higher into the sky.  I agreed to meet him the next day for a report on his progress in getting me in.
     Since it was still early afternoon, Pat, David and I decided to climb to the top of the pyramid to meditate on the setting sun.  Our plan was to assault the top by going straight up the north face.  About a third of the way up I realized that it was a crazy thing to do.  The face of the pyramid had been eroded by centuries of wind-driven sand, so that handholds and footholds could crumble or break off at a touch.  It didn't seem to bother David; he had nearly reached the top.
     I experienced several minutes of panic.  I was about two hundred feet up and wasn't really sure I could get down.  When I looked down, there were all these people screaming up at me in Arabic.  When I did get down, an Arab who spoke English told me that the way I had been going was the most difficult way to climb the pyramid and that, in fact, at least nine people a year are killed trying it.  "I'll show you the way," he said.  It didn't cost as much as I thought it would.
     The pyramid is more than 450 feet high, with an angle of incline of 510, 5 1'.  The comer edges are huge blocks, like giant steps, and so I climbed up them until I was about two-thirds of the way up.  At that point, I was startled by a tremendously powerful urge to cast myself off.  Never in my life had I experienced such an impulse.  Instead of lessening, it intensified as I continued upward, and I had to use every last degree of control not to jump.  The moment I reached the apex, however, the feeling dissipated.  The experience was eerie, almost as if there were some sort of barrier or force field one had to pass through.  Later I climbed the pyramid several times without sensing the barrier field, but that first blast was almost too much for me.
     The next day the guide informed me that it would not be possible to stay in the pyramid overnight.  More money, I thought.  Finally, I politely asked him who was in charge of the pyramid.  "A professor of Egyptian antiquities over there," he said, pointing to some sand dunes.
     "I'll talk to him," I replied.  Sol went over the sand dunes, found the small, adobelike structure with its office, and encountered the official, a young man who spoke excellent English and was shrewd.  When I told him I would like to spend some time alone in prayer in the pyramid, he seemed perfectly agreeable and offered to arrange for a three-hour period late that afternoon, after the pyramid was closed to the public.  When I told him I wanted to spend the entire night alone inside the pyramid, his attitude changed.  Before I realized what was happening, I found myself undergoing another psychiatric interview- one of several I endured in 1975.
     1 convinced him I was sane, and that my motives were coherent. (I was deliberately a little misleading.  How could I tell him I was working on the death process and detachment?)
     He informed me that only the president of Egypt could give permission for me to stay in the pyramid for the entire night.  What the young official could arrange was for me to be inside from five to eight that evening after the pyramid had closed to the public, and again from five to eight in the morning, before it opened.  I immediately saw how I was going to spend the whole night in the pyramid, and asked him if I could accept his offer of time alone in the pyramid for the next evening.
     He agreed, but also delivered a warning about a long stay in the pyramids.  "Too many people become psychotic if they spend more than just a few hours at a time in there" was the last thing he said to me.
     Promptly at 5:00 P.M. on the night of the full moon in February 1975, 1 met the gatekeeper who was to let me in and take me out at the appropriate time.  A payment of fifteen Egyptian pounds to the gatekeeper enabled him to forget to let me out that evening.
    The gate was locked behind me as I began my penetration to the first inclined tunnel.  It was dark and cool. 5:10 P.M. Full moon.
    When I entered the pyramid to spend the night, I was free to release the world, my form and my ego.  I had already detached myself from everything and everyone else.  The most difficult detachment for me to achieve had been from my two brothers, especially my twin.  One would have thought it would be my mother or my father, but it wasn't.  The release of my twin brother had been almost unbearable.  It had taken place an hour earlier in a meditation between the paws of the Sphynx.
     I felt fear of psychosis, but only momentarily.  I was aware of something else inside me guiding this initiation, as if I had experienced it all before in other lifetimes - an Egyptian lifetime, a Tibetan lifetiime, a Zen-Buddhist lifetime and a Christian monk lifetime.  Even the demonic thought forms that greeted me on my entrance turned out to be old, familiar, almost friendly experiences.
     I was not, however, in such a state of consciousness as to be entirely free from childhood memories of such horror movies as The Mummy's Curse and its sequel, The Return of the Mummy.  As I said earlier, the usual work with thought forms is merely to ignore demons, but there was also another effective maneuver - to laugh at them.  Laughter turneed out to be the most effective way to dispel them.
     When the demons disappeared, I felt a tremendous sense of freedom.  Now I had access not only to the deepest aspects of the pyramid, but to the deepest aspects of my own Beingness as well.  My eyelids seemed like cellophane, because I could not tell whether my eyes were open or closed.  When I paused before the entrance to the first small passage, I began to notice a light that seemed to touch my body and to extend for several feet.  At first I suspected that I might be hallucinating, but as I inched my way along the walls, what I felt with my hands correlated with what I was seeing.  My ego boundaries were dissolving, and the pyramid and I were fusing into a unit.  I spent almost three hours in the queen's chamber, then ascended to the king's chamber for nine hours of experiences beyond my ability to articulate even today.
     After twelve hours, the process of detachment and expansion ended.  I had died in those twelve hours.  Whatever configurated my consciousness as William Brugh Joy, M.D., was gone.  I was an incarnation of another aspect of my Beingness in the same physical vehicle.  It would take several years for it to mature, but my consciousness had been fully impregnated with information and I had completed the experience of entering states of awareness I had not even dreamed of.  I was ready to begin the journey back down.
     I reached the opening of the pyramid at 6: 1 0 - the ap­proach of sunrise.  As if by magic the gatekeeper appeared and unlocked the gate.  I felt something even greater than exhilara­tion.  It was ananda!  I climbed the pyramid to experience the sunrise and the full moonset.
     It was rebirth.

     My encounter with inner death was completed, but my outer death work was not.  In Auroville, India, a month after my night in the Great Pyramid, I suddenly decided to return to the United States.  My outer reason was my desire to complete the ceremony of becoming a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.  I could have chosen to do it the following year, and I was experiencing an almost incredible state of integration and well-beingness in India, but the pull back to the United States was the force that determined my action then.
     After I was confirmed as a Fellow-in San Franciso on April 7, 1975 -1 traveled down the coast of California, took a side trip to the desert to spend a few days at the ranch and reached Los Angeles on the morning of the 17th of April.  I was visiting a friend when Father telephoned.  My mother, who had previously enjoyed perfect health, had collapsed.  The rescue squad was attempting cardiac resuscitation.
     I went into a deep meditation, and my mother spoke to me.  She said that she was going to die but would not leave her body until I was with her at the hospital, forty-five minutes away.  In the emergency room, I talked briefly with the physician in charge.  "She is stable but comatose," he said.
     I pulled back the white curtain that surrounded her.  She was on a respirator, and two IVs were running.  Electrocardiographic electrodes were on her arms, on her left leg and over her heart.  The monitor showed the heart to be regular in rhythm but acutely injured.  I scanned her energy field quickly, then went to the heart area and began to transfer energy to her.  It was like a steel wall.  Not one speck of energy would move into her body.  I went to the head area and tried again.  Again there was no transfer of energy.  Her eyes were dilated.  She was serene and strikingly beautiful, like a Nefertiti.  Five minutes after I had arrived, her heart stopped.  No medication, no countershock, nothing could stimulate it into activity.  She was gone.  I removed her wedding ring and turned to cry.  A nurse who was working beside me held me for those moments of pain and tears as the physical bonding between mother and son was broken.

     In a two-week Conference at the ranch, two days are set aside to explore the spaces of the now moment, death and transformation or reincamating with new vision.  This period ­ actually nearly sixty hours - combines fasting with total silence.  One has the opportunity to enter the desert in solitude.  The.participants examine what each one would change in his or her life if this experience were to be an actual death.  What attachments would pull one back for another lifetime?  How does hanging on to problem areas make it necessary, in the future of this lifetime and in future lifetimes, to continue the manifestation of such problems?  What overview or vision of totality of Beingness can be glimpsed and experienced?  Can we release our identification with the body and personality level and embrace a higher authority of our Beingness?  What is Unconditional Love and how is it expressed?
The two days are agony and ecstasy, a battle for mastery over self.

THE EXPERIENCE OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

The importance of Unconditional Love was so obvious to my awareness, I had felt no need to include it, separately and specifically, in any of my public or private discussions focused upon quantum leaps in consciousness.  Then, earlier this year, a Conference participant asked me to choose which of the transformational shifts I considered most important in my experiences up to that moment.  It was only then that I realized the gross omission.  Unconditional Love is the most fundamental and transforming of all the leaps.  It is mentioned with emphasis in numerous places in this book, but, most important, it is the field force that penetrates all of the book, of my work and of my life.
     To use the terminology of ancient Greece, Unconditional Love is most closely equated with Philos, or brotherly love, and is beautifully poised between Eros, which is sexual­emotional love, and Agape, which is purely spiritual love.  While Agape tends to exclude the form nature, Eros tends to exclude the spiritual aspects.  Unconditional Love synthesizes Agape and Eros.

     Without the opening into Unconditional Love, as manifested by the opening of the heart chakra, the states of awareness achieved through the opening of the higher chakras cannot be integrated with those of the lower chakras.  Unconditional Love connects the body to the soul.