Places Beyond Belief

In Physical to Metaphysical in Four Steps and ONE GIANT LEAP, published in 2017, I laid out the three steps that can help the reader become aware of, and separate from, being overly identified with the physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects of being human. In the fourth step, I wrote about how we can then learn to promote and refine the energy that truly defines who we are in this life. I further explained that while having a proper perspective of our bodies, feelings and thoughts and harmonizing these aspects was a wonderful beginning, the journey towards a deeper awakening to our true nature starts with recognizing that, as I put it back then, “Everything is energy and so are you.” In my opinion, if this awakening to one’s life energy happens not just intellectually, but rather on the being level of the person, then it is what the Japanese word satori (悟り), and the Chinese word wu (悟) is referencing. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to the experience of kenshō, “seeing into one's true nature.” Satori and kenshō are commonly translated as enlightenment, a word that is also used to translate bodhi, prajna and Buddhahood. In some circles, “awakening” and “enlightenment” have been imagined as supremely elevated states of existence that most people will never experience. Some even imagine that such a state must mean that one will soon be exiting the body permanently. However, we should recall that when Gautama Siddhartha awoke beneath the bodhi tree and became the Buddha, he continued to live and teach for many more years. Others believe that such a state is reserved for divinely chosen individuals and is not possible for most of us. But in the Christian verse John 14:12, it is written that Christ said (in this contemporary English version), “I tell you for certain that if you have faith in me, you will do the same things I am doing. You will do even greater things, now that I am going back to the Father.” Let me clarify here that I do not conflate the state of consciousness I describe as “enlightenment” as being the same as that belonging to those who are deemed “Manifestations of God” in the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith, which identifies nine including the Buddha and Jesus Christ. While the distance between them may be great, the promise of all religions, it seems to me, is that human beings can through their diligence, effort, and sincerity, approach the heights illumined for us by the Manifestations of God. Indeed, the main purpose of my previous book was precisely to provide a non-religious step-by-step guide to how this might be achieved. The main focus of that book was to show how fear stops us from trying new things, from seeing the world in new ways, and God forbid, from questioning what we were taught as children. In this book, I will turn towards how the beliefs we pick up from the world around us can stop us from growing beyond them. The lessons we learn from parents and teachers shape our understanding of the natural world and our interactions with other people. These lessons can help or hinder our evolution and growth towards our full potential. It is vital we learn to test these lessons learned as children as we get older. While I have a personal background of growing up in Hong Kong under traditional Chinese culture, it was moving to Los Angeles and experiencing the rapidly changing social landscape of America in the post-Nixon era that informs much who I am today. Reflecting on lessons I have gleaned from the Bahá’í teachings, Jungian psychology, and quantum physics, I will offer one way of understanding the state of the world as it stands today, and how we can thrive here without losing sight of the bigger picture of WHY we are we. I will show how a runaway belief in materialism has devastated the natural world, forced individuals into lives of desperation regardless of their income level and blinded our political and scientific leaders into ignoring the intangible aspects of life leading to a grossly imbalanced society. In Physical to Metaphysical, I touched upon how shortly after I had the experience of “awakening” to the fact that everything is energy and so am I, I learned about books by Robert Monroe, a pioneer of modern consciousness research. In his famous trilogy on “Out of Body” experiences (OBEs), Bob described how while working on sleep learning through audio technology, he discovered binaural sounds (directing a different frequency to each ear via headphones) could stimulate the formation of any desired frequencies in the brain. An unexpected effect of these experiments that he conducted on himself was Bob began having spontaneous OBEs. Reluctantly at first, but soon enthusiastically, Bob delved into these experiences. One of the conclusions he came to after decades of experimentation is death is not the end, and growth that you make to your personality and character will persist and continue on in another life. While intrigued, I never attempted to have an OBE myself until after I had absorbed some of the teachings of Tom Campbell, a noted physicist and a much younger collaborator of Bob Monroe. Tom’s trilogy on the subject, “My Big T.O.E. (theory of everything),” is written for the left-brain, logic-dominant mindset holders to help them approach a very right-brain, intuitive subject. Tom’s work helped me understand that much of what we see and feel in an OBE cannot be literally real and can only ever be a metaphor that you must interpret. In fact, physical material reality is also not “literally” real, but rather a personalized sensory data stream that we must interpret. Or as Einstein explained, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one…“ Tom’s research has allowed me to grasp that what is important in having OBEs is the internal reaction one has to what is experienced. The key is not is it “real?” Rather, it is what did I learn. For me, the very nature of an OBE is that it is perceived as a very real experience that is not like a lucid dream, not like a hallucination, and sometimes as real as waking life. Later in the book, I will detail how I also began to have OBEs and write about some of them and how they related to events in my physical life. For now, let me just state this: my wife and I have been having such experiences for several years now. At one point, we did try to test if things we see while “out” could be verified later as real and we did so. But soon, I became mainly interested in having more archetypal experiences. In the beginning, it was our own intentions that drove the experiences, but as time went on, we began to have more “directed” situations that seemed geared to teaching certain lessons. In fact, for a period of several months, most of my OBEs were of attending some kind of class.