The Curious [Spiritual] Phenomenon of Trump and His Supporters – A Call to Vote!

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Albert Einstein

Different from other pop-pundits, I feel that as a “spiritual” writer commenting on material subjects like politics or contemporary culture, I should probably preface my commentary with a few qualifications; otherwise it may be hard[er] to accept that my observations come from an authentically “spiritual” perspective. Before I share my “spiritual” thoughts about Mr. Trump and those devoted to him, let me first give you some “material” backstory. 

Believe it or not, I survived three “Near-Death Experiences” over about fifteen years – you know, those other-worldly experiences where a person claims to briefly visit a crazy, beautiful “heavenly” existence beyond this crazy, beautiful human one.

 

In my first, I was knocked out of my body in a serious car accident and witnessed life on earth from about thirty feet above it. I “returned” with a literal spiritual Perspective on our lives as human beings – where we all channel a kind of divine life force through this “material” body-form we occupy. I returned to the crash scene later and confirmed parts of those surroundings that I could only have seen from the top of a light pole.

In my second, while living a downtown Manhattan life of self-destructive excess, I collapsed in a physical shut-down and was enfolded in a brilliant cloud where I was presented with some of the places I’d badly screwed-up in my life – like in an interactive movie that was hard to watch. I returned from that realizing the power of Presence – the power of each moment’s profound truth and singular potential, the awareness that awakens it, and the unconsciousness that can destroy it as in passes by in a flash.

In third and last (knock on wood), I was ambushed – knocked-out and severely beaten, stomped, and kicked by skinheads who mistakenly thought I was gay. I found myself in a safe, womblike place, surrounded by loving spirits who gently forced me back into this life, to naturally fulfill a kind of karmic “mission” that I still had to complete. I came back with a new Purpose, and after nearly ten years of volunteering in a New York City hospital, and thousands of hours of meditation and study, I became the author of two books, and an adviser and speaker dedicated to helping folks understand that there’s a lot more to this whole thing than meets the eye. At age 58, I’d found a greater reality…the hard way.

Like many experiences, spirituality is anecdotal – there’s no real way to prove to anyone else what needs no more proof to the experiencer. These are my true experiences, and they’ve understandably changed the way I live as a result of learning those three very difficult lessons. In the intervening years, I’ve worked with lots of people in various parts of Life – usually difficult parts – with questioning people, with crashing people, with dying people. I believe these experiences have (gratefully) given me a peculiarly valid kind of insight.

Basically, I view us as being expressions of the same Divine Consciousness – of all really being more or less the same thing here, expressing itself through each of our unique forms, filtered through our ancestry, our genetic make-up, our life experiences, our cultural biases. In this way, everyone, from the chillest swami to the biggest hothead, is expressing something we all know about – parts of a collective “self” we can all identify with. Everyone finds themselves at a certain level of awareness about ourselves and the world and behaves in a way that our personal level of consciousness dictates. With that in mind, I find acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness become the most important ways to work with each other; and kindness, honesty, and humility the most important principles we can bring to our own lives. 

That’s my “spiritual” backstory…and here’s my personal experience and observations about Trump and his devotees.

My own personal “transformation” occurred at the same time as I personally witnessed the events of 9/11, in New York City. I had lived there for more than twenty years leading up to that day – mostly years of material success, physical excess, and spiritual emptiness. I had many occasions to intersect life-paths with Donald Trump and his kind (while not nearly so well-financed, our interests did coincide in a number of ways, at that time). For years a close friend was a big TV Soap Opera star, and when I was with him, lots of strange and exclusive doors were opened. 

During those years I knew Trump as many New Yorkers knew him – objectively speaking – as a spoiled rich kid (his dad owned thousands of apartments in NYC) who was viewed as a selfish, lascivious, hedonistic con artist of sorts, and a guy who kept the company of pretty much the worst kind of people imaginable. I had no direct, personal experience of him other than the consistently negative things I heard through the local media (which I was a part of), although I did have three close friends who’d all had direct dealings with him, so I only had one “degree of separation.” 

It was always telling that everyone who worked for Trump in any way had to sign a Nondisclosure Agreement, guaranteeing they would not speak of any personal experience with him under threat of litigation.

 

In the 80s a relative of ours was severely injured by part of a Trump building that illegal (former Soviet-bloc, non-union) workers collapsed on them while they were walking down the street; followed by years of attested persecution and personal vilification by Trump and his lawyers, and costly legal complications that Trump eventually lost. 

Another close friend was hired to provide a professional service for a Trump project but quit when they refused to commit crimes (in furtherance of a massive Ponzi scheme) on behalf of Trump and his company. That company was subsequently shut down and ruled to be a criminal fraud. Trump settled that case by paying $26 million to his victims.

My third example is of a friend who was a Gulf War veteran who came home to start a business doing extremely dangerous maintenance jobs, which they had fairly contracted with Trump to do. After the work was done they invoiced the company as usual, only to receive a response that Trump had decided the job wasn’t worth the agreed-upon fee, and that they would either accept half the amount as payment-in-full or have the option to pursue the matter in court – and have their reputation as a service provider ruined throughout Trump’s extensive network of property owner contacts. 

These are direct, second-hand testimonials of friends that I absolutely believe – in fact two of them were definitively documented by the media. Those weren’t anecdotal experiences to me – they are objective truths that formed my impression of Mr. Trump, along with the knowledge around town that he had been documented as a racist, a dirty landlord, and a serial molester. NYers knew that his mentor had been the notorious Roy Cohn (mob lawyer and Joseph McCarthy’s righthand man), and that he hung around with drug abusers, gangsters, and deviants (like his longtime “party pals,” convicted pedophiles Jeffrey Epstein and John Casablancas). The Trump family had earned a thoroughly disreputable, even criminal reputation in financial matters, and Donald was demonstrably a pathological liar and failed businessman, and anecdotally considered a drug addict (known in those circles to abuse cocaine and other substances), a likely sexual deviant, and a low-grade gangster himself – turned into a TV reality star by a savvy British TV producer named Mark Burnett. 

As a media professional myself, the stories that circulated in production circles out of Trump’s NBC TV show told a sordid story that supported many of the worst impressions possible. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump lost his home town of New York City by a resounding 84 to 16%. Clearly, the great majority of New Yorkers who knew him best had formed a justifiable distrust and distaste for the man. 

Given the evidence of his administration (including the unnecessary loss of over ONE MILLION American lives) and his irrationally traitorous behavior since he definitively lost the election, I believe this represents a pretty accurate representation of a sociopath who has created so much chaos, division, and anxious, fearful preoccupation – something that none of us need in our already challenging lives. It is the profile of a desperately damaged individual, who despite deserving the full measure of our compassion, is nonetheless a very poor (even dangerous) candidate for any position of leadership and responsibility, having stated his desire to end American democracy and align himself with criminal dictators Putin (with whom he has a long history), Xi, Orban, and others. Still, we must avoid reactionary judgements.

 "Once you label me, you negate me.”

Attributed to Kierkegaard 

While these facts and impressions have formed my “material” profile of the man; and knowing that they’re available to everyone (including his daily statements and behaviors), it has always been difficult to understand how so many fellow Americans – particularly smart, otherwise good-hearted friends within my own “spiritual” circles, can harbor a kind of elevated respect and even absolute devotion that they seem to feel for a man who is objectively a criminal deviant – a victim of extremely dark karma, including likely childhood abuse in the same forms as he is known to have inflicted on his own children. It’s abuse that I suffered in childhood too, so I don’t speak from judgement, but from painful identification.

This phenomenon is fairly simply and directly described by the idea that we’re in a kind of ‘school of spiritual evolution,’ that sixth-graders through first-graders are attending simultaneously (I think I was expelled from an early grade…). Trump supporters are ‘first-graders,’ observably disturbed – objectively angry, aggressive, cognitively dissonant people; people who are likely to have suffered difficult, even abusive childhoods (like Trump); marked by alcoholism and drug-abuse, racist beliefs, feelings of unjust victimization, and beliefs of religious superiority and entitlement. Their spiritual surrender is incomplete, so they experience only a fearful God, not a God of absolute tolerance and pure Love. The degree to which they wish to control life is proportional to their level of suffering, and proportional to the level of violence that seems justified to permit their efforts to control the uncontrollable. Trump excites, focuses, and expresses this dark energy for them on a larger stage.

The elite corporatists and their professional media-shapers know this, and easily manipulate this ‘base’ of devotees, unconsciously driven by their own delusional, incomplete mythology. They know that people of constrained consciousness can be directed by their fears, and have made a science out of convincing them the corporate cause is to their own benefit, when in fact the opposite is true. For them, it’s all about money, power, and the selfish exploitation of our planet’s resources – they are the ‘second-graders’ who are the true creators of the Earth’s current theater of suffering. 

What you can do is to organize, take action, vote, identify and forgive, provide evidence of the unseen consciousness alive in everything, and remove the obstacles from Love flowing in, around, and through all of our gorgeous life on this amazing planet. 

VOTE to prevent the spread of ignorance and evil unconsciousness. VOTE to advance our spiritual evolution and to give our species a chance to help restore balance to the world. Step into the light, look at the real condition of the Earth, and VOTE like all the current life of the planet depends on it…because at this point in human history, it does.

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

Simple, Solid Bridges to a Working Spiritual Life (Learned the Hard Way)

 

      
            I'm known for having had the [mis]fortune of surviving multiple "near-death experiences," and as a result I (unintentionally) find myself absolutely certain that there's a spiritual reality that underlies, informs, and precipitates all of this success-seeking, bill-paying, precaution-taking material existence. It's a function of what the Hindus call Maya, the illusion of Life. While being hit on the head three times very hard may exclude me from what's normally considered as "sanity," I think it was what I personally really needed. I needed experiences that painfully proved the existence of a reality that's magically extra-dimensional in every sense – physically, spiritually, and conceptually. Realizations that I suppose are more commonly known as faith.

            Thankfully a lot of us acquire this understanding in easier ways, from our parents, or from religion, or just in the course of coping with the slings and arrows that life throws our way. Apparently being challenged by hardship does help to make us realize that there's a reliable order alive in the universe we can turn to, especially when things get tough. Naturally, I certainly can't recommend near-death as a means to bridging that elusive gap between the harsh realities of "material" life and a more grace-filled "spiritual" life, but I can offer you a few very practical bridges into that living magic that makes everything so much more enjoyable – grounded in this fundamental concept:

            We are spiritual beings learning through physical experience; we are designed to overcome the mental and physical barriers presented by human sensory experiences and realize our spiritual nature. There are bridges – invisible spiritual mechanisms (choices) – built into this physical experience that afford us passages to our spiritual evolution.

 
Here are a few solid bridges that help us cross that dimensional divide:

Unconditional Kindness is the most available (and enjoyable) mechanism that engages us with our spiritual life by giving us an immediate heartfelt identification with others – the [proactive] warmth and support that we respond to ourselves, when it's unconditionally shown to us. Being unconditionally kind to others is being kind to ourselves, because we find we can easily forgive others for just being human, and realize that applies to us too. We give everyone a break, because life is tough for everyone. As part of that, Unconditional Kindness obliges there be no exploitation, manipulation, or participation in doing harm of any kind in our actions, so we end up being forthright, friendly vegetarians who work at something that contributes to Life in a meaningful, productive way. (We even get to forgive those who can't understand our approach to Life)
            Hindus call this Karma Yoga, and it instantly connects us to an unseen dimension of profound compassion and generosity that we may have never known was alive everywhere in the world. We make, and find others who are making, good karma.

Honesty in all our relationships and dealings, and in what you might think of as a variation of confession—owning up to our mistakes, not always needing to be right—is really a visible invisible bridge. We all know how it simplifies our life, since being honest gives us fewer of life's complications to fear, because you're simply never adding to them. Your motives remain those of a seeker of fairness, truth, and wisdom. You become seen and known as a person who is resolutely trustworthy, whose intentions are of the highest order...that sounds pretty spiritual, doesn't it? It's a kind of intellectual vigilance that Hindus call Gnana Yoga.

Giving, simply put, may be the single most important bridge, particularly to an agnostic that isn't interested in "extra-dimensions" but does want to live with a more graceful connection to Life. What we might call Compassionate Consciousness (altruistic effort like charity and volunteerism) – often referred to simply as service (like responsible parenthood, being a good friend, etc.) – is the most reliable bridge to a working spirituality. It's simply the singular most effective means to overcoming the sense of separateness we develop while sitting and thinking about ourselves and our own life situations – that selfishness that paints us into our own little corner, only using the color fear.
            In selfless service—with no regard for reward or recognition—we're immediately attached to a greater universal intelligence by the lightest of all yokes: the engagement created by contributing to the cycle of well-being. We almost immediately escape the harsh realities dictated by our ego, and instantly begin to lighten and align our karma. (Karma Yoga, again)

Humility – not as a form of self-deprecatory ineffectiveness, but instead as a subtle, powerful sense of reality and connection; as an extraordinary underlying energy that filters all of your Life experiences, and provides an intuitive ideal to live by with purpose and grace. We've all experienced this powerful kind of humility as a truth-bearing, holistic force in Life, often demonstrated by the people we really respect the most. Nobody is really that important—even if they are; and often people who don't act important but just show up with open-hearted willingness are the most important of all.

"Conscious Contact with Source Energy" is what all these bridges lead us to, actually. A personal attachment and conscious surrender into the energy and intelligence alive in the Universe, regardless of whether we personify that power in popular traditional ways, or form our own concept of it as "The Field of Love," or other force. In this way we surrender—as a strategy—into the power that energizes and directs our being, recognizing the true control that our choices give us over our lives. You become aware of all kinds of beauty, the inherent divinity in nature; and realize that your actions in Life can be devoted to this undeniable Source of Creation – to "God," to Life, to one another, to Love. The Hindus call this devotional, or Bhakti Yoga.

            I don't pretend to know the designs of the Universe, only to have experienced the effectiveness of these visible (invisible) mechanisms in my own life and in the lives of those I'm close to; but I do know this:
            You do deserve the life that you have – with most of your biggest difficulties defined by whether you willingly cross these bridges towards "the spiritual," or stay stuck (and frustrated) on this side of the river, avoiding the magical extra-dimension of Life.

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

Six [Dangerous] Modern Fairy Tales on Being Human

 “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

                        Marianne Williamson

 

            Let’s begin by casting our imaginations into a popular fantasy that resembles spectacular science fiction a little – namely that we’re not simply human beings fashioned from muscle, bone and blood, but that in a larger reality we’re really beings of pure effervescent energy wired into these clunky human robots, yet simultaneously connected to the limitless intelligence of the Cosmos...(science fiction and fairy tales can have a lot in common).

            Escaping those misperceptions of the human form we could then detach and observe Time itself as an assemblage of discreet moments in “eternity,” and witness the greater forces at work in this world that we fail to perceive from down here on the ground.

 

            Immediately, we might realize that we humans are unconsciously confined to a set of powerful beliefs suggested by the ‘evidence’ of our world around us as we see it, as our limited powers of perception present to us – so as humans, we simply have a misperception problem.

            Then, people who knew more about manipulating these powerful beliefs could be called wizards, witches, or “movers and shakers.” They would have the power to mold human illusions to suit their own purposes. In the metaphoric terms of Fairy Tales we may say “a darkness had fallen over the land,” the result of a spell cast from the wizard’s castle – the source of all confusion…the source of all evil.

 

            In the ancient Vedas of Hindu philosophy, this world of illusions/delusions created by our limited human senses is called Maya – an elaborate veil before our eyes. This veil is universal in human experience, so its effects can be explored and uncovered personally, or manipulated through the energies of larger groups into collective systems of delusional thought and action, in short, into different “realities” (like what we see today with the QAnon phenomenon).  

            In Fairy Tales (or The Bible) when this happens, there can be plagues and pestilence, famine, fires, crazy storms; waves of fearful insanity seizing the leaders and sweeping through the masses, leading to accelerating division, the destruction of Nature and a pandemic of fearful selfishness…sound familiar?

            

“We cannot solve our problems by using the same consciousness that created them.”

                        Albert Einstein

 

            Now that we’ve got our cosmic fantasy caps on, and we’re objectively looking down on humanity, let’s look at six of the delusional beliefs being propagated by our culture, and its wizards – political movers and shakers, and magnates of the media elite:

 

1. We are separate from one another, and from Nature

 

 Because of the insular experience of our human form, our independence is probably the easiest, most persistent delusion to maintain. Our sense of our disconnected self is so powerful that we can’t seem to see ourselves like a school of fish, or flock of birds…but we are.

Ask any astronaut you know and they’ll tell you that the arms-length view they had of the Earth completely destroyed that delusion of separateness. We truly are all one life here on this planet. Why even the nature of our material composition insists that the very atoms that make up our physical selves were part of something before they were part of you – rocks, plants, animals…dust (to dust).

Even though you feel separate and special, you’re not at all. You are one with everything you see, and a lot of what you can’t see. The truth is that we are all absolutely, inexorably bound and connected by our collective thoughts, energies, elements, and actions.

 

 

2. What is “real” is observabl­e – you can only believe what you can see

 

            The old expression, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” got turned inside out years ago when Quantum Physics essentially redefined it in reverse. The fact is, we really can’t see the elemental forces that create our observable world. What we do witness is the evidence of all of those mysterious processes, like gravity, or electricity, or Love…or human ignorance. It’s a scientific fact that the apparent material reality around us – the places and things in our lives – are less tangible, less real, than they appear to be.

            Quantum Physics informs us that the subatomic particles that coalesce into what we see around us look less like Newton’s little billiard balls, and much more like tiny, fuzzy clouds that don’t actually become solid until they’re observed – and so their transformation into ‘reality’ occurs only by engaging with our limited observational perceptions. It seems to be our single global mind – it’s focus and engagement in a great, intangible reservoir of consciousness – actually constructs the “reality” of our reality.

            So as a result, it’s closer to the truth to say: “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

 

 

3. All of life has forward momentum, and all arising problems are reversible

 

            Recent discoveries about Mars tell us something amazing – that there is and has always been water there, and that at one time Mars probably looked quite a bit like Earth. Before it got too hot and started drying up, and the sun’s radiation soaked up its atmosphere and it got too cold, the folks up there probably thought they were on a carousel of never-ending abundance too. The idea that we can harvest the bounty of a planet’s resources indefinitely, ignoring the imbalances we cause, holds about as little water as logging the Sahara Forest once did. We are quantifiably in the midst of one of the great mass extinctions known to humankind, and extinctions aren’t reversible. Time isn't going anywhere, it's results are always present.

            We’re not going to terraform Mars anytime soon – not while we’re so busy transforming the Earth to look like Mars. We can see the paradise we could have, or the Hell we can create.

 

 

4. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution demands “Survival of the Fittest”

 

            While natural selection efficiently promotes characteristics that ensure survival, our cultural misunderstanding of Darwin’s theories (encouraged by the “haves” of industry and media) has to do with what characteristics actually constitute “the fittest,” and what evolutionary direction those traits take us in. In biology, and in the natural world, it’s not greedy leaders that drive evolutionary ascendence, it’s the characteristics that enhance the endurance and viability of the entire species, and that sustain those conditions that support the success of the whole community – “haves” and “have-nots” alike.

            It’s quite democratic, really – there isn’t one strong leader or small group that determines the most beneficial direction for a community to move in, in fact it’s usually a sudden shift (about 51%) of the colony that ‘breaks’ in the direction of collective progress (As our elections should demonstrate…)

            The real lesson of Darwin isn’t dog eat dog – it’s that animals move in groups. It isn't really “survival of the fittest,” but actually “survival of the most cooperatively adaptable.”

 

5. New advances are always superior to old, and technology provides all the answers

 

            From the unimaginable aberration of an island of plastic refuse the size of Texas floating out in the Pacific Ocean, to the warped lunacy of “fracking” toxins into bedrock beneath the water table to release more hydrocarbons, to the nefarious insanity of using GPS and the internet to track every person on the planet, the benefits of technological advances clearly depend on to what purposes they are employed. Those technologies dedicated to exploitation, destruction, and personal power are harmful to the human species, and to our non-human fellow Earthlings.

            Indigenous cultures have created advanced technologies too – often to a higher level than ‘establishment’ anthropologists are willing to acknowledge – but here’s the difference: theirs have often been organic technologies of respectful sustenance, in accord with the energies of the Earth – what I like to call Spiritual Technology.

The answers actually lay in a spiritual approach to all of life, what are real “technologies of the heart” – like free energy, transpersonal communication, and inter-species collaboration – most of which are labeled “woo-woo” by the selfish guardians of our status quo who have the most to lose materially.

 

6. What's “miraculous” or “paranormal” is automatically considered foolish and impossible

 

            In an earlier article called Paranormality is the New Reality, I discuss the simple fact that most of what we take for granted as modern science was at one time considered “paranormal." ­Unfortunately this is still the case, but as those cultural blinders are being swept away by rapidly spreading Consciousness – the great field of intelligence at work beneath and beyond our human forms ­– it becomes ever clearer that our cultural delusions are kept alive and manipulated by a fairly small group of people who are ignorantly dedicated to self-enhancement and gratification, using the power of irrational fear. That is what destructively deepens their delusions and prevents them from experiencing “the miraculous” spiritual solutions to all the overwhelming problems they create.

 

     So let’s go back to our beginning sci-fi scenario and imaginatively re-enter our human bodies with this expanded knowledge, perspective, and purpose. Now we ought to be able to consciously recognize, and lovingly acknowledge, the limitations of our present human form. By compassionately freeing ourselves of those veils of human delusion, we can see that our answers lie in the “unimaginable” spiritual potential that we are all heir to – beyond simply being a human being. Life is already quite miraculous, let’s make it moreso.

 

 

            "Our present world is conditioned by our present mode of consciousness; only when that consciousness passes from its present dualistic mode...will the new creation appear, which is the external reality of which our world is a mirror."

                                    Bede Griffiths

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

Synchronicity is Not a Coincidence (It's Evidence of the Unseen)

 A lot of people have an idea of what the term "Synchronicity" means in popular use, but in a lot of cases they confuse it with the simple fact that sometimes all of us experience extraordinary, timely coincidences. Accidents, that seem as though they were by design. But synchronicity really removes the accident from the accidental nature of those ‘random’ phenomena, and while it can manifest itself as coincidence, that’s only the visible tip of a vast, hidden synchronicitous iceberg.

To better illustrate the nature of this distinction, let me call upon two other simple metaphors: electricity, and eating.

We all have faith in the practical applications of electricity, right? You know the light will turn on when you flip the switch (unless one of those "never needs replacing" light bulbs needs replacing), but sometimes, the light goes on or off at a very particular moment without you flipping the switch. Or in its grander form, a bolt of lightening strikes a tree on your family property. Those are what you may call 'electrical coincidences.' Synchronicity, in this case, has more to do with a very practical yet deeply mysterious lifelong relationship to natural phenomena of all kinds. 

For example, if a bolt of lightening strikes your grandfather's favorite tree on the day of his death – that's synchronicity. One aspect appears to be connected to the other, but there’s no provable material cause for it, aside from an obvious spiritual cause.

Or say you're getting hungry around lunchtime, and for some unusual reason you've been craving oysters. Just then, a co-worker starts talking about the great oysters he had last night. That's coincidental. But if your girlfriend gives you a surprise call to meet her at the oyster bar for lunch, and then tells you how much she loves you – well, that's synchronicity. Reaching beyond just the particular coincidence, synchronicity may have everything to do with how you met your wife.

Dr. Carl Jung, the creator of synchronicity, may have taken that example a little further by suggesting that love revealed itself to you like a pearl, and that the opening up of your life revealed this timeless treasure to you. His original version of synchronicity brought in, and out, the presence of recurrent images and ideas, archetypes, tying us to another dimension where dreams come true, timely meetings change your life, omens accurately predict the future, and phenomenal ‘signs’ are deeply significant to our personal experience.

Dr. Jung didn't define the new principle because he was a mystic, but because after years of working with patients and bearing witness to the events of his own life, it became clear that there appeared to be a mysterious, underlying kind of 'field' effecting a whole different level of experience. Even though he first coined the idea of synchronicity in the late 1920s, it wasn't until 1952 that he committed his concept and data to print with "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle," as the first half of his book, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche.

Around the same time, the world was learning about quantum theory, and the concept of a quantum field, or source plenum, from which all matter arises. With it came evidence that we’re all participants in an observer-based reality, of sorts; that our focused attitudes, intentions, and actions may interact with an unseen mechanism to create our personal and collective reality. It confirmed Jung’s observations, and he referred to this field as unus mundus – a unified world. In this unified world, coincidence is only an indicator of an underlying reality.

Jung’s observations were based on the rejection of a coincidental, one-dimensional life, and instead, the recognition that we engage in the world in a very complex way through our psyches, our energies, our emotions, and our actions and experiences. Seeing life this way, it becomes less a series of coincidences mixed with our projections and manipulations, and instead a far more interactive (albeit far more mysterious) experience. Life becomes a unified co-creation that is answering your questions. Life is reflecting to you what it is you need to know.

“Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.”

Carl Jung

Jung based the synchronistic model on three characteristics of spiritual potential: meaningful coincidence – that random events happen sometimes with very specific, personal meaning; causal connection – that despite there being no apparent material cause and effect, there is an undeniably profound personal significance, and so an apparently intentional connection at play; and luminosity – the indication that all of this happens within a kind of shared field of divinity, in communion with a greater whole.

Across most life experiences, these three aspects actually do work to describe something that happens in everyone’s life, even though no one knows exactly how.

Scientific materialists see consciousness as an individually brain-generated phenomenon, generated independently by every consciously living thing, rather than as a shared field that’s accessed by every living thing through their sensory capabilities. Because of this, they tend to dismiss synchronicity, yet their limited model of consciousness supports synchronicity too, because if each life form has a bubble of consciousness around it, they become like 'quanta' of quantum physics when they simultaneously, "acausally" share information through the principle of entanglement.       

Synchronicity merely recognizes the existence, and potential, of this ­in-formation ­field of shared consciousness.

Skeptics say it’s all coincidence, chalking it up to what's called "confirmation bias," which is our very real tendency to remember our 'hits' and forget our 'misses.' It means that you're more likely to remember the bird at the window the day of your father's death than all the birds at the window on other occasions. Of course, it all depends on what the bird is doing, and when it's doing it, doesn’t it?

My wife and her family witnessed just such a bird hovering nearly motionless outside the window of her father's hospital room, that flew away at the moment of his death. It was the first and only time any of them had ever seen a bird hover outside a window like that before. That’s synchronicity: meaningful coincidence, causal connection, luminosity.

Materialism considers all such verifiable testimony as 'anecdotal' (as is all of personal spiritual experience, when you think about it). But spiritual experiences are realized through ones heart, not through ones intellect – a mechanism that's been proven rather unreliable after centuries of scientific reassessments and  dangerously ‘adjustable’ dogmas. The miraculous has always ironically been rejected by learned men, who have yet to provide an explanation for their existence on a planet in outer space, other than that it is likely the product of "coincidence."

The acceptance of synchronicity as an unpredictable, yet wondrously reliable mechanism in our [observer-based] life, leads to a very practical realization that you could relate to any natural force, like electricity, or gravity – it works much better for you when you believe it’s there, and learn how to work with it. When you have faith in it.

A personal story to end with: About fifteen years ago I'd come to accept my self-reliant bachelorhood. A series of remarkable, synchronicitous coincidences suddenly put me in the position to buy a small house, overlooking a wonderfully scenic river in northeastern Pennsylvania. In what I (anecdotally) consider miraculous fashion, the sale went through, and I spent a day signing papers that granted me the deed to my new house in Pike County, Pennsylvania.

Back in Manhattan, on the way home from the bus station, I bumped into a charming woman I'd briefly met before. She seemed to be lit from within, and after a very nice conversation, she wrote her name and number down for me. Her last name was Pike, and without knowing where I had just come from, she told me that she was hoping to get away to the country soon. I made sure she did.

I can’t forget that 'hit.' We've been married now for thirteen years (the best of my life). And like electricity, she invisibly powers my life; and like eating oysters, well, let's just say it was no coincidence that I bit into a synchronicitous pearl.

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!  

Where Ego, I Go – Avoiding My Bad Ego Trips

"Ego specialness prevents you from authentic feelings of sacredness by creating an inner experience of fear."

                                                                    Dr. Wayne Dyer

            Egomaniac. Egocentric. Egotistical…not nice things to call someone, right? But just what the heck is your ego? The simple translation of the word ego from its Latin origin is “I.” That’s all, just “I.” What can be so nasty about that?

Despite the simple ordinariness of it, I have learned this one particular lesson the hard way: Whenever I start a statement with “I,” there’s a much greater chance that I’ll regret it than if I start it some other way. So I ask myself, why do I have to be so careful about my ego? How does ego get such a bad rap? Why do “I” have to ask “myself?”

It’s because generally speaking, there are two different kinds of “me” in here – two aspects or types of my ego that are always competing to define the world for me, and make me behave the way I do:

The first (and ideally more prominent) type is that healthy ego that allows my true, grounded self to interact with material life in an easy, less-demanding way (hello, angel on my shoulder). Things can come and go in life without seeming so terribly important. I find that “me” rarely gets offended, because tolerance and acceptance just come naturally. 

This is my healthy, beneficial ego because it provides a reasonable, balanced foundation to my life, and plays a relatively small active role in my experience of things. It demands less judgement and comparison, and much less control of everything I clearly can’t really control. So listening to the inner voice of my healthy ego makes it easier to "stay out of my own way," and allows me to experience a more balanced exchange of Life energy that lets me share, express, and grow. I become more tolerant and teachable. It’s not all about “me,” and so I can live much more easily with “my self.” Simply put, this ego is grounded in Love.

            My other ego is more or less the opposite – unhealthily self-absorbed; over-important and over-complicated (hello, devil). It’s the voice of what I think of as my “False Self,” because it’s rarely (if ever) who I want to be. Unfortunately, this self-important ego often acts as my instant default interface with Life, pressing unfair and unnecessary demands and comparisons on all the people and situations I encounter. It's easily offended, lacking in tolerance and acceptance, and foolishly wants to control the uncontrollable. It’s a kind of shadow “me” that stifles the expression of my natural, easy-going self with unnecessary defensiveness and negativity. It obstructs that beautiful, balanced exchange of Life energy – which is Love. In this way, I can unconsciously become my own worst enemy. Simply put, this is the ego that’s grounded in Fear – it’s what gives ego a bad rap.

             This double nature is expressed in the beautiful mythic metaphor of The Garden of Eden. The unhealthy ego knows everything and always needs to be right. It wrongly makes a constant diet of "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" – judgment and comparison, and so insists on “playing God.” Then, when it serves as the sole interface to Life, our grounded natural self is “banished from the garden.” Simply being what we really are is never enough, so we must become something other than our authentic, natural self, based on what the unhealthy ego demands us to be – on how it compares us to “what others expect from us.” We get locked out, separated, from the beauty of the natural world.

            On a larger scale, this unhealthy ego process is the mass default for commercial culture. The rapid expansion of this dangerously delusional unhealthy mass ego – driven by unconscious, top-heavy corporate media – is the reason for our gravely unbalanced world. It’s why we find the very survival of all species – the very ability of our planet to sustain life as we know it, suddenly in such precarious circumstances. This mass ego lives to control and exploit the Earth in order to meet endless voracious needs that can never be met. It lives by creating its own "map" of reality, and only functioning by focusing on that delusional map, instead of paying attention to the actual geography and conditions of the world around us. 

            As soon as we escape this useless, destructive mass ego and live in the simple underlying truth, becoming honest with ourselves and the rest of humanity, the sooner we'll see that no matter how big the problem there’s always a solution. With this simple realization, we will become spiritual beings, and the inevitable spiritual evolution of our species will become a real and workable thing. 

Evidence of this spiritual evolution of humankind is all around us. Our extreme circumstances serve to inspire more people all the time to say:

"Wait a minute! This is insane – we can't do this anymore!"

That's your window of opportunity. Climb through it, and from that moment on, your healthy ego (your intuition) will be activated and will direct you to behave in a whole, newly responsible way that will lead to your connectedness with all life (Love & happiness); to the healing of our mass psyche, and – most importantly – to the healing our planet.

"When Man ate of the fruit of the Tree, he discovered himself in the field of duality instead of the field of unity.  As a result, he finds himself out, in exile."

                                                                                 Joseph Campbell

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

Could it be "The End of the World" as We Know It?...Yes!

 "The Promised Land has nothing to do with real estate."  

Joseph Campbell

Remember all those poor old evangelists who promised the end of the world? They all had a lot riding on that prediction, so you can't help but feel a little sorry for them when it didn't happen when and how they said it was going to. But then perhaps it did happen – it is happening, just not the way they thought it would.

May I be the first to bring you the real good news right here and right now? Despite whatever evidence to the contrary, The World – as we have known it – has ended.

It's been the "end of time," and "the end of the world" so many times now, it seems like it never will really end, and it won't. Of course, it's never actually the end of the world we're talking about. As George Carlin (the patron saint of cynical enlightenment) said: "It's not the end of the world, it's the end of people, man. The world is still gonna be here – we aren't." 

The end of the world hasn't come the way we usually think of it, because the classical "End of the World" doesn't describe a literal ending; like all scriptural spiritual scenarios it's really a metaphor. "The End of the World" is really a spiritual and psychological end – the reframing of a new reality brought about by a big change: a transformational coalescence of consciousness, a "singularity" after which old ways of thinking and doing are in an instant rendered obsolete. Sound familiar? It is a lot like what's been happening around here lately. 

It even fits quite nicely into that Mayan theory that around 2012 the Earth began to resonate with a level of consciousness that simultaneously threw things into a kind of chaos, and seriously began to inform it's occupants that a major change was taking place. The "occupiers" showed up in town squares, the "Arab Spring" took place. Hong Kong began to percolate. Fraudulent elections became unacceptably obvious, and their results provoked the most massive global protests ever known. War became obsolete (but it's chief proponents will never admit it). Now pandemic is defining the falsehoods of financial structures, the equivalent needs of all people – and the grotesque inequalities forced onto humanity by unconscious folly, greed, and self-worship. A revolution has erupted against the "Era of Power" that supports itself on lies and hatred. Climate change attests to the truth that what we do has consequences – that we can cause irreversible destruction to this beautiful world.

And all the while, arising awareness and Love demonstrates the solutions presented to us by spiritual sanity. We are all one.

Wherever you're at home now, everyone is learning that the Earth's endless potential is being mismanaged by a criminally unconscious minority (God bless 'em). It's global knowledge that misguided, destructive segments of humanity are intensely wasteful, while the majority of our brother and sister humans are subject to unnecessary want and deprivation. It's clear that our extreme economic disparities are selfishly foolish and completely unsustainable. The occupants in every small town know about the elite class of super-wealthy, extraordinarily fearful (suffering) people, who feel they need to control the world's resources and media (the true "Fake Media"); corporate agents who are happy to kill off every Mom & Pop business in the world, and control all consumption from soulless global distribution centers. We can see their duplicity and their political mess on TV everyday, and increasingly we are living in it, too.

Yet the true, vast majority of real earthly occupants are aware of what the miraculous potential of the Earth actually is.

Naturally it's all happened before, when these literally medieval disparities bring us to a spiritual renaissance. We suddenly realize that being programmed to identify ourselves with the insane demands of corporate materialism, like "trickle-down," "know your class," "what you deserve and must have," and "how our way is right," is a form of destructive insanity that's forcing us to live totally inauthentic lives. The death of that inauthentic self becomes inevitable, and that's the shift – "The End of the World." Nothing can ever be the same after that.

Here's what it means: Everyone deserves to be who they are. Everyone deserves to be reborn into a fulfilling, authentic life. Everyone deserves life, health, and sufficient wealth – the shared resources of this incredibly abundant planet. We will have that, but there almost always seems to be a kind of "Dark Age" first, where faith is not always a well-lit place. It's like that period inside the caterpillar's chrysalis that is pure chaos, before the formation and flight of a new Era of Ethics.

I can't say exactly where we are in the process – at the start of that dark age, in the middle, or towards the end of it – whether we've stopped crawling and are growing our wings...but I do know one thing for certain regarding "The End of the World:"

Humanity is currently experiencing a mass metaphysical impulse to transcend the delusion of separateness. It's the collective death of an illusion, and it's spreading faster and more completely than any virus ever could. The resurrection is arising; the "Ethical Era" is settling upon the followers of the one true prophecy: That all Life on Earth is beginning to realize that it is one in the same thing. The Earth already knows, the animals do too – it's just people that are a little late to the real party.

As that global entity, we can all recognize the unfathomable mystery that everything comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, to a kind of ultimate ground of being that we're becoming aware of through quantum physics, cyber-consciousness, and verifiable sixth-sensory perception. We know that a mysterious ground of being – a 'matrix' of loving intelligence – transcends this form we're in; that this "radiance of the eternal" penetrates everything and everybody, and is intuitively informing a graceful and responsible way to live that's possible for everyone, and that everyone in this world deserves as their birthright. The darkness just requires deconstructing first.

Then the "radiance" (that understanding we all share) can illuminate the dark place where we'll find trust in ourselves and each other – call it Faith. That is the light we can shine now to penetrate our media, our destructive mass-ego, our "One Percent," and expose it – penetrate through it back to the fundamental mystery where we all live free and equal lives. 

Now we can stand our ethical ground with an unassailable authority; the boundaries protecting humanity simply can no longer be contested; and if you stop for a moment, and just listen and feel, it is yours to occupy.

The best and easiest way to make all this happen is to simply show up for life with this knowledge in our hearts, and try our best to live our authentic lives – where the inspiration for our actions comes from the inside, not the outside. We're being taught the difference between what is really important, and what is completely unnecessary and destructive – just pay attention and follow that direction! 

And here is the good news, here is the real gospel – the world has ended. Welcome to the new world.

"It will not come by watching for it. No one will be saying, Look, here it is!

Or, Look, there it is! The Kingdom [of the Father] is spread out over the whole earth, and people do not see it."

Logion 113, The Gospel of Thomas

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!