Awakened at Needle Point: Close Encounter with The Cosmic Christ

“With his visions, his ability to transform energies, and his mastery of healing, Christ could be seen as a prototypical shaman.” Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head

Introduction

It was late Friday afternoon February 26th, 2010; a cold, snowy, mid-winter day in the Pacific Northwest when an unresolved, incapacitating childhood conflict surfaced again. Indeed it was the prime source of symptoms, mental and physical, that had controlled my entire life story for over half-a-century now. These addictions and afflictions—anxieties, fears, phobias—dogged me like a proverbial hound from hell and I had no choice but to pay close attention to them. Intuitively I knew that my sanity depended upon comprehending these “signs of the times” boiling up from my unconscious mind creating overwhelming suffering for my “conscious” body.

However with hindsight 20/20, the original issue—and some days all I had were “issues”—was created by the abandonment of my father, A. J. “Jay” Harper, in Seattle at age 5. He deserted my mother, Catherine, and my two brothers, Ron and Steve, left us high and dry, homeless and penniless, so he could hire on with a fishing fleet and escape to sea. Trolling for the “deadliest catch” in waters up and down the western coastlines of Alaska, Canada, Washington, Oregon, and California, I never saw him again until I was 32-years old.

So my mother filed for divorce due to desertion when we lived at Yesler Terrace. This low-income apartment complex overlooking the waterfront in downtown Seattle was the original “skid row” site known as Profanity Hill. This was where loggers slid trees down to Puget Sound for their trip to sawmills owned by Henry Yesler (1810-1892), a founding father of the Emerald City. My childhood neighborhood had housed such notables as architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986), a second-generation Japanese-American designer of the former World Trade Center Towers 1 and 2 in New York City that were destroyed along with 2,751 of its living souls by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001. It is likewise the location of a premier trauma hospital: Harborview Medical Center. Thus, I muse today that crises both big and small have a link to this unstable muddy pioneer hillside real estate but there are indeed success stories besides Bill Gates.

My maternal great-grandfather, Thomas Decker, (1846-1917), owned a blacksmith shop in the early 1900s on the western edge of what is now Interstate-90 crossing the Lake Washington Floating Bridge. And my grandfather, Jay Decker, (1876-1958), was a Seattle Police Officer during the flu pandemic of 1918 picking-up the corpses in wagons and transporting them to the morgue as they dropped on the streets. The Seattle-Times reported the scene was a worldwide nightmare in this 2007 study: “An estimated 600,000 people in the United States and as many as 50 million worldwide died in the pandemic. The fierce wave of illnesses struck at the close of World War I just when people thought they could breathe a sigh of relief. More U.S. troops died of influenza—sometimes called the Spanish flu—than in the war.”

Seattle was a wild, wooly western frontier town when my mother’s family came here from Wisconsin, no doubt about it. But it was where the courageous and foolish came for fortune and folly, ever since the 1896 Klondike Gold Rush to Alaska and my maternal parents were not adverse to high-risk ventures. They were previously given land options in the Wisconsin Territory in the 1850s because the men were veterans of wars and decided to “Go West Young Man” and relocate from New York. Of special historical note, my great-great-great grandfather’s son, Michael Decker was living in Concord, Massachusetts in April 1775 “… while the British were destroying the stores at that place which had been collected by the Colonists, he received a gunshot wound which caused his death. His family afterward returned to New York and during the War of 1812 his son, Michael Decker, Jr., aided in the defense of Sackett’s Harbor. At the time of the French Revolution in Canada, his brother, Peter Decker, joined a company of filibusters crossing the St. Lawrence River at Ogdensburg to Presscott, Canada where they joined a force of French rebels. They were there besieged by the British forces, taking refuge in an old stone mill, where they were captured. Their leader was taken to Kingston and hanged, and the privates and non-commissioned officers were exiled to a penal colony on Van Dieman’s Land. There Peter Decker received a pardon, but never returned to this country.”

Then I recalled my paternal family history and the East-to-West migration route travelled from Scotland-to-Virginia-to-Illinois-to-Utah-to-California-to-Washington. My great-great grandparents sailed to Virginia from Scotland circa late 18th century and later moved to Illinois by wagon train. My great-grandfather, Robert Harper, was born in Decatur, Illinois but migrated to Utah where my grandfather, Arley Harper, was born in Salt Lake City in 1890. The story goes that Robert helped lay stones on The Mormon Temple in the 1850s. Arley then moved to California just prior to the Great Depression, where my father, A. Jay Harper was born in Eureka, Humboldt County, on April 6, 1928. Though not a parent worthy of the name my father was an adventurer, inventor, pilot, and businessman. He lived a fast lifestyle, smoking and drinking himself to an early grave and died from lung cancer at the Las Vegas Medical Center on February 25th, 1991.

Nonetheless, in my opinion, my father and mother’s s lineage had an evolutionary purpose-in-mind, an intention, combinations and permutations commingling to create mystics.  For the record, my late paternal great-grandmother, Karen Kirstene Johanensen (1865-1929) born in Copenhagen, Denmark, died in Salt Lake City, Utah; maternal grandmother, Mary Evelyn Scott (1888-1977) born in Racine, Wisconsin, died in Seattle, Washington; and mother, Catherine Marie Decker (1921-2003) born in Seattle, and died in Bremerton, Washington. And no doubt they did suffer from bipolar disorder and at the hands of medics. All three spent time in mental hospitals and the last two received numerous electroshock treatments for “paranoid ideation” and clinical depression in the late 1940s. My mother, in particular, was medicated into oblivion in her later years but this much I know: these were brave, gentle, wise souls all.

I, too, have the “spiritual DNA” traits of the mystic, prophet, and shaman but why does such a visionary capacity even exist within us now if not to be nurtured by society and used to create a new civilization? Maybe we are on the verge of co-creating “a new heaven and a new earth” through our collective gene pool of wisdom traditions watering the gene seeds contained within The World Tree of humanity itself. Ironically, I stated in the Second Edition of my book, Tranceformers: Shamans of the 21st Century, that my perceived reality was nothing but the symbolic cutting down of my family tree reenacted through me. That is, my mind was infected with survival scenarios, constantly seeking ways to be safe from the slings and arrows of life’s challenges. I felt alone and continually invested my life force energy in self-sacrificial efforts to stop suffering from happening to me and those I loved, again and again and again. No matter the cost to my wellbeing, it was as if I had no sense of self. Clinically speaking, I developed a borderline personality disorder in my formative years known to seasoned psychotherapists today as the cause of “third degree emotional burns” that predispose us to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addictions of every flavor.  

On this particular evening that led to my current crisis, I felt a swarm of negative emotions sting me and reacted as a helpless child alone in the dark—not an adult. I truly did not have a life yet; there was no authentic “me” that was symptom-free under stress able to engage the world on its terms. I constructed a “false self” with its hard protective crab shell of symptoms to shelter me from storms: I did not trust man, nature, or God. Not surprisingly, my birth sign is Cancer, the Crab! I was in fact born on June 24th, the celebrated birthday of St. John the Baptist. Perhaps, I should create a new diagnostic label I chanted: The “mini-me” syndrome?

Yet my newly acquired allergy headaches and sinus symptoms were Claritin clear enough. My beloved 20-year old granddaughter, Kathryne, who had lived with us for the past 3 years, was departing on her first solo cross-country road trip from Spokane, Washington to Jacksonville, North Carolina. And I was panic-stricken and deathly afraid for her safety. Katie was soon to be en route to Andrea, a girlfriend she had known in Spokane since 14, to share a recently purchased home close to the Atlantic Ocean. Andrea was now a proud U.S. Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune, awaiting the return of her husband and high school sweetheart, Joshua, a combat soldier presently fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan until summer 2010.

In an ill-made decision, literally, I decided to drive our gas-miser Honda Civic for the first one thousand miles of her four thousand mile journey to the East Coast. I wanted to blaze the trail, so to speak, make certain she, and co-driver Jody, got safely through the snowy mountain passes in Idaho, Utah and to the first city they planned to stop on Saturday afternoon: Las Vegas, Nevada. I even paid for a deluxe room-in-advance at the Luxor Hotel for my wife, Connie, and myself before we departed Spokane confident this was a slam dunk “mission possible.”

However, my cock-eyed military veteran optimism overstretched my capacity to drive around-the-clock anymore, as I did easily in my pre-retirement years. We never made it for I truly collapsed from physical exhaustion early Saturday morning while driving on Interstate 84 through Boise, Idaho. Sadly, I was forced to exit the freeway, pulling into the Hampton Inn parking lot at approximately 3:30AM PST. Connie called Katie’s cell phone and explained what had happened and wished them a fun weekend in Las Vegas, but without us. She said we would rest a few hours, as well as chart a new route back home through western Idaho, eastern Oregon, and central Washington, avoiding those mountain passes we four had crossed in the middle of what would begin for me an extremely long, dark night of the soul.

From the beginning, I sensed it was a strangely symbolic, synchronistic, trip I was on with my illness this time around too. It was as if everyone involved in this orchestrated, well-written, preplanned script was finally in place to act out their role in it to perfection. Perhaps, akin to what India’s beloved mystic Tagore meant when he proclaimed: “Some being who comprehended me and my world was seeking his best expression in all my experiences, uniting them into an ever-widening individuality, which is a spiritual work of art!” 

The Cosmic Christ

Fortunately, there is a new breed of psychiatrist emerging among the ranks of the old Darwinian-Freudian guard, like Andrew Newberg, M.D., correlating mysticism with medicine in what he calls neurotheology. Employing an array of high-tech instruments like PET, SPECT, and fMRI to “see” like a shaman using this “third eye open” nanotechnology, he found God looking back at him. In his captivating book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief Newberg faithfully reported, “The only place he [God] can manifest his existence would be in the tangled neural pathways and physiological structures of the brain.”

Clearly, we have not adopted this scientific vision of the Cosmic Christ globally yet so we see “through a glass darkly” religiously. However, theologian Matthew Fox reiterates in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: “A critical dimension of this imbalance in the West is the stunted growth of our mystical awareness and the underdevelopment of our mystical brain.” Twenty years ago I shared some of this wisdom with the President of my Christian denomination in Kansas City, Missouri who was in fact a retired medical doctor, an ophthalmologist—a man of vision—and the reply I received was disheartening: although polite it was cynical, sarcastic, and insulting to the spirit of mysticism—unity. Needless to say, I resigned my position as a lay priest and member in that organization shortly thereafter.

French scholar of religions Mircea Eliade, saw the trunk within The World Tree in the Garden of Eden as the gateway to the gods, and devils, declaring in his classic book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy: “The underworld, the center of the earth, and the ‘gate’ of the sky are situated on the same axis, and in past times it was by this axis that passage from one cosmic region to another was effected.” Historically, the shaman was the skilled person that could use the mystical mind of Christ, altered states of consciousness created by ritual prayer, trance meditation, to soul travel up and down the north-south polar axis center conduit of the cosmos. This “tunnel of love” also known metaphysically as constructed of flowing and glowing “rivers of light.”

The mythological Cosmic Serpent, usually seen as an Anaconda to Amazonian shamans, was said to swim in these life-giving waters that fed The World Tree and the Garden of Eden, but this is nothing more, or less, than the purpose of our DNA macromolecule. Our DNA template grows the human body into the Temple of God. That is, snakes shed their skins and go on: and we are designed to live forever physically and spiritually too: “And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (italics mine, Romans 8:23).

Wikipedia records this much on Swedenborg: “In 1741 at the age of fifty-three he entered into a spiritual phase in which he eventually began to experience dreams and visions beginning on Easter weekend April 6, 1744. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, where he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons, and other spirits. For the remaining 28 years of his life, he wrote and published 18 theological works, of which the best known was Heaven and Hell (1758), and several unpublished theological works.”

Interestingly enough, overall Swedenborg’s mystical model of creation matches the shamanic worldview and the near-death experience almost exactly where creation is seen as a three-layered cake: upper and lower realms with the earth sandwiched in the middle of it. The reality of heavens and hells has become obvious to those of us that have taken the time to carefully examine the heartfelt testimonies of people that have died and been reborn into a multidimensional universe by whatever name we care to employ. One of the leading NDE researchers, Dr. P.M.H. Atwater says: “Hell refers to levels of negative thought-forms that reside in close proximity to the Earth realm. It is where we go to work out, or remain within, our hang-ups, addictions, fears, guilt, angers, rage, regrets, self-pity, arrogance, or whatever else blocks us from the power of our own light.”

For instance, psychiatrist George Ritchie, M.D. saw during his NDE how three different realms of our planet co-exist within the same space as we are living within today. Ritchie died for nine minutes while a soldier with the U.S. Army at Camp Barkeley, Texas, during WW II. He had become morbidly ill with lobar pneumonia, and shortly after hospitalization collapsed during an X-ray examination, then pronounced clinically dead by the physician on duty. Yet he was very much alive, rising up through the ceiling of the medical ward, and into the cold night air in his spiritual body. In a state of panic, he decided to make a beeline eastward for his mother’s home in Richmond, Virginia.

Flying over the landscape like a bird, seeing lights below, Ritchie decided to land in a city somewhere in the state of Mississippi and ask for directions. Now standing on an unknown city street, he approached people slowly strolling on the sidewalk, but to his horror saw that he was walking “through” them. Not being able to communicate with anyone, in fact, Ritchie understandably became even more frightened than before realizing suddenly that he must be “dead.” So rather than continue on towards Virginia where help would not be possible, he decided to return to the Army base hospital in Texas to search for his “other” body. Of course, no one had mentally prepared him to exit his physical body and fly through the night sky like a bird in his spiritual body. No, he had evidently missed that premed class on “shamanism” and soul travel technology at the University of Virginia.

Still confused, but back on the ward, Ritchie began wandering the halls of the infirmary looking for the morgue with his dead physical body in it: musing that, perhaps, he could slip his “self” back into it? But before he could carry out that plan, a Being of Light he later identified as Christ appeared from out of a swirling vortex of light energy and scooped him up in His arms. Stating, in his classic book that all of us who read it simply adore, Return from Tomorrow, “I want the reader to realize that as The Christ and I observed these beings of Earth and the other three realms of this planet, these beings could not see us. They not only could not see us but the beings from one realm could not perceive the beings from another realm. I was made aware of but one realm at a time. It is beyond my capacity to explain how the Lord closed one realm and opened another. It was not a case of our changing location as much as it was a case of the location changing right in front of our vision.” He adds:  

It is this realm which removes forever the concept that we stop learning or progressing in knowledge when we die. I could call this realm the realm of research, or the mental realm or the realm of intellectual, scientific, and religious knowledge. All would be correct. Not only we in the fields of education, psychology, psychiatry and neurology, but in all walks of life, have asked ourselves the question, “Where do new ideas come from?” I know not the answer to this from my medical background but it is my belief that I found the answer to this question after The Christ showed me a few things in this realm.

From this realm, I learned how stupid our prejudices are in regard to races, creeds or color. I realize He showed me just a few things in this realm as he did in all the others. As soon as I became aware of this new realm, I found we were located in an area that could best be described as a musical conservatory. The beings here were playing on all the instruments I had seen and quite a few I had never seen. They were making the most beautiful music I have ever heard. Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Stokowski, Toscanini, all of the great musicians must have been able, in deep meditation, to have listened into this area and brought some of the music back to our own realm. (Italics mine)

Indian yogi-scientist-philosopher Gopi Krishna (1903-1984) described the coming biblical apocalypse, unveiling or rapture into these realms in Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man as beginning with subtle “spells of absorption … into space.” More so, in Pole Shift by John White, this enlightened guru attested in a letter to him the following chilling warning: “If those who are now in power were just to have a fleeting glimpse of the events to come, they would with ashen faces change their habit of thought and behavior at once, thanking heaven for the chance of atonement granted to them.” Our third eye is opening into the heavens and hells and I sense that our ego, our “mini-me” sense of self will be crushed to death by these mystical visions of Our Higher Self.

Hence, we see the purpose of prayers and rituals in every culture. The Dogon elders of the Sudan teach shaman initiates that this is the way of the world, to be “cast out” of higher and lower realms but drawn back into them at the end of time changed by the renewing of our minds. Science writer Michael Talbot says as much in The Holographic Universe: “Thus, consciousness is not only a subtler form of matter, but it is more fundamental than matter; and in Hindu cosmogony it is matter that has emerged from consciousness, and not the other way around.”

Artist, and author of Time and the Technosphere: The Law of Time in Human Affairs, Jose Aguelles, Ph.D., has said for decades that the Mayans were “masters of time” and obsessed with calendars for a reason. But it was not a primitive attempt to control the vicissitudes of life, rather a superior way to know how to see and learn from our life, death, and rebirth cycle on Earth. They knew in other words that time and space converge into a single experience at specific conjunctions of the celestial clock, the constellations of the Zodiac, and a major shift of the ages occurs. They kept a close eye on stars and planets, Orion and Venus, specifically, for end-of-time meltdowns of society due to solar magnetic-reversals. In our era, this is happening between the eclipse of our Sun by Venus in June 2004 and June 2012.

That is, the north-south flip of the electromagnetic mind-field poles of our planet triggered by comets from Orion crashing into our Sun with subsequent flares and coronal mass ejections is what clears our chakras of energetic pollution gathered over lifetimes. The full-spectrum of attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that we emit over a range lower to higher, from animal to angelic natures, respectively, is about to change in the blink of an eye. It is all a matter of observation, what we focus on that determines our experience of reality, our health, and, ideally, we align, attune, with God: seek at-one-ment with The Cosmic Christ!

Accordingly, my mystical vision of our future is that we are in the early stages as a species learning how to “walk between worlds,” meaning we will bring the imagery down from the solar magnetosphere of heaven and up from the fiery molten core hell of Earth. We will make these two realms one again. This is only possible if we learn to balance our two brain hemispheres in meditative trance, activating the third eye open skills of shamans, mystics, and prophets. The truth is we are embedded within a living being of light seeking consciousness too and that is our own planet. Indeed I see us integrating the wisdom in the living beings of outer and inner space into a unified field of creative intelligence, a compassionate, loving “science of soul” shamanic model of creation in the 21st century.

Shamans of the 21st Century

The days, weeks, and months of spring 2010 turned into summer as my symptoms increased from sinus to serious and I lost the ability to control my neck muscles and it collapsed. A pinched nerve at the base of my skull became so painful that it demanded medical intervention. This bracing against pain 24/7 began a decline in my health with sleepless nights and miserable days of suffering spiraling downwards towards a date with death I sarcastically sighed to myself as depression began to take its toll. I no longer had a life rather I was a septic tank of symptoms constantly seeking a savior with a “magic silver bullet.” I brushed-up on Latin because my bedfellow companions spoke only in the language of the Physicians’ Desk Reference (PDR) dictionary and the pharmacist. My medicine cabinet’s inventory went from a box of Alka-Seltzer to neatly ordered rows of pill bottles from the pharmacy.

However, to my primary care doctors’ credit at Group Health Cooperative clinic in Spokane, Tim J. Meyer, M.D., and Jan H. Mueller, M.D., I was prescribed a course of drugs that did address the pain control center of the brain, the PAG (periaqueductal gray). So we started down the right track pharmacologically even if I did derail later.

Moreover, I reviewed the medical literature constantly: I read articles, books for clues to my condition and reviewed a classic titled Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel. The words of biochemist Candace Pert, Ph.D. that got my undivided attention stated “Pain researchers all agree that the area called the periaqueductal gray, located around the aqueduct between the third and fourth ventricles of the midbrain, is filled with opiate receptors, making it a control area for pain. It is also loaded with receptors for virtually all the neuropeptides that have been studied.”

There was the key word: neuropeptides.

So began the major turning point in my search for salvation from suffering: what the late Francis Schmidt of M.I.T. called “information substances” or “messenger molecules.” Dr. Pert proclaimed “This complexity has led to their being classified under a variety of categories, including hormones, neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, growth factors, gut peptides, interleukins, cytokines, chemokines, and growth-inhibiting factors.”

In plain terms, my brain-body quit making its natural pain killers, endorphins, and thus my physicians prescribed the opiate-derivative equivalent drugs to them, hydrocodone and oxycodone, as I underwent a comprehensive diagnostic work-up to isolate the problem over a 3-month period from June to August 2010. Tests that included the cutting-edge in X-Ray for the spine, laboratory analysis of blood and urine samples for chemical health index baselines, as well as cardiac enzyme function examinations at Sacred Heart and MRI at Holy Family Hospital. The ER physician’s words were themselves a blunt force trauma: “If you saw what I did, no anesthesiologist in this town would touch you for surgery!”

That did it: I had to find an alternative organic treatment to allopathic doom and gloom forecasts! For now I had more diagnoses, prognoses, and fear factors than my beloved late grandmother, Mary Evelyn Scott (1888-1977), would say “Carter had liver pills!”

No sooner had I made that decision, than a medical intuitive, vibration healer, Reiki master, and shaman in Bend, Oregon, Mona Klinger, came into my life. Just when I thought I could go on no longer because my suffering reached cosmic-levels heretofore unimaginable and I could not cope with it. Often collapsing into a fetal position on the back porch deck of my home, I’d curl up on my side to relieve the unrelenting ache in my neck and pain in the bones of my skull. The cold concrete floor served as a whole body ice pack in those early morning hours before the sun heated it anyway. Without a doubt, however, there is One Great Spirit that listens to our pleas for intervention, and speaks to others to go help us recover, and Mona was that “earth angel” God sent to my rescue, initially.

Through a synchronistic chat on Facebook, Mona sensed my situation was critical and said she was going to fly, and later drove, to Spokane to reorient my focus from fear to faith, illness to wellness once again. She conducted not one but two 3-day treatments a month apart for me and my wife, Connie, and she made all the difference in our world. From her first session employing shamanic wisdom, it was clear that I was being spared to “walk the talk” of a Christ-centered, earth-honoring medicine man as I had written a couple books on this topic—and it was time to “put up or shut up!”

Along this same line, I went to several complementary health care specialists in my community that included acupuncture with Rebekah Giangreco, L.Ac., Dipl.Ac., at New Moon Family Acupuncture; sports medicine chiropractic with Ryan Johnson, D.C., at Pearson and Weary Pain Relief Clinics; and massage therapy with Marlene Sullivan, L.M.T.

Thank God, I also had a strong spiritual support team that appeared as if by magic, usually a bad choice of words with the Christian evangelic. Albeit, I hope I will be instrumental in helping them see and step-up to the plate as healers of the soul more than ever before. Trust me they are right-on-target when it comes to Hades—“the hidden place”—and the “evil spirits!” That is, I am not focused on fear at all but facts that will convince you beyond a reasonable doubt that what we’ve called “hell” is right here on earth. Specifically, we’re experiencing a literal warfare going on within the cells of our human body-mind-spirit! “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (Romans 12:1). For the “doubting Thomas,” I only ask you to review one “non-religious” textbook, The Body of Myth: Mythology, Shamanic Trance, and The Sacred Geography of the Body by mathematician, and physicist Professor J. Nigro Sansonese, and the objective documentary DVD film titled “Gates of Hell” produced by The History Channel.  

Pastor Robert Lindseth of the Life Church located at the corner of 25th and South Grand Boulevard in Spokane came into my life miraculously after his teenage daughter, Alexa, just happened to come by our house one evening to ask my wife if there was anyone that needed prayer? Oh did I ever! Bob invested countless hours ministering to me this past summer as we prayed together for answers to my condition. I even asked him to renew my covenant in baptism. By the way, the word covenant in Hebrew means a “cut-where-blood-flows.” For I identified with this proclamation of Paul of Tarsus as never before: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Here is the point: Is there really a clear-cut dividing line between physical and spiritual bodies, heavens and hells, if matter is mind in the final analysis? One of the NDErs that I came to know well in the 1990s is Mellen-Thomas Benedict and his infamous quote: "This body, that you are in, has been alive forever. It comes from an unending stream of life, going back to the Big Bang and beyond." There is no separation between realms if DNA co-exists within outer and inner space and that is what I came to accept is true through a theory of Panspermia: Greek for “seeds everywhere.” Ultimately, I came to understand that the needs of the flesh and spirit included amino acids as the precursors to the development of our light body too. Though pharmacologically, we’ve only scratched the surface of “sacred substances” for cancer cures, pain potions, and immortal fountains of youth, if my musings on this topic are validated, amino acid therapy will combine with indigenous pharmacopeia plants to treat addiction disorders of all stripes second to none soon.

I mean every single one of us create these alchemical brew admixtures within our brain, blood, and lungs at each and every moment now but, obviously not in sufficient quantity to maintain wellness under certain circumstances. Physician Gabor Matѐ, M.D. in Vancouver, British Columbia, writes In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction: “The most important finding of research into a genetic role for alcoholism is that there is no such thing as a gene for alcoholism,” quoting addictions specialist Lance Dodes. So what do our genes contribute to order and disorder? The experts conclude when all is said and done merely sensitivity to stress and all that means in a high-tech, low-touch “shop until we drop” consumer society. Dr. Matѐ adds, “People are susceptible to the addiction process if they have a constant need to fill their minds or bodies with external sources of comfort, whether physical or emotional.” It is well-known that the 12-Step programs ask us to turn our lives over to God, so what if we do that more and more with every passing generation, completely organically, pharmacologically and prohetically?

In other words, does an optimal plant-based cocktail recipe for immortality exist? Before you dismiss that musing, please scan the shelves of your local health food store. Sacred plant researchers such as Steve Sewell of the Mind & Body Works clinic in Durango, Colorado as well as authors Martin W. Ball, Ph.D., an expert in “entheogens,” and British journalist-world explorer Graham Hancock report the same realization that sacred plants do in truth “create God within us.” Writing, respectively, in Mushroom Wisdom: How Shamans Cultivate Spiritual Consciousness, and Supernatural: Meetings of the Ancient Teachers of Mankind they document their revelations and they confirm my thesis that we are in the process of uniting science-religion to create an immortal heaven on earth. Again, I turned to Wikipedia for clarification: “An entheogen, in the strict sense, is a psychoactive substance used in a psychotherapeutic, religious, shamanic, or spiritual context. Historically, entheogens were mostly derived from plant sources and have been used in a variety of traditional religious contexts. Most entheogens do not produce drug dependency. Entheogens can supplement many diverse practices for healing, transcendence, and revelation.”

Psychiatrist Rick Strassman, M.D. has also released his clinical experiments on 60 volunteer subjects at the University of New Mexico with approximately 400 doses of the spirit-seeing substance N,N-dimethlytrptamine in DMT: The Spirit Molecule. The hypothesis is that DMT is endogenous, made in the pineal gland, what French philosopher, physicist, and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650) called the “seat of the soul.” In metaphysical terms, this is the endocrine gland location of “the third eye” that opens us to the multidimensional mystical realms of hyperspace.

Since 1996, Dr. Strassman has been exploring models for the DMT effect, and has focused primarily on the Old Testament concept of prophecy. This is a spiritual experience which takes into account the apparently external, free-standing nature of the DMT "worlds," in which one's sense of self is highly preserved and interactive. This is in contrast to previous models that borrow more heavily from Eastern religious systems, ones that emphasize unitive, ego-dissolving experiences. In addition, the prophetic model deals directly with ethical and moral concerns, adding a crucial element to our ability to understand and integrate the content of the psychedelic experience. He is developing these ideas in his next book, The Soul of Prophecy, due to appear in 2011. 

Again, in addition to healing, the shaman is the one that can read the star maps, the signs of the times in the precession of the equinoxes, as did the Old Testament prophets with regards to the coming of Jesus Christ. In fact, the Zodiac, or "circle of animals" has been used as the solar lens by which to forecast the future of the past for millenniums. I mean it is true, what goes around comes around only in new costumes for there really is nothing new happening under the living Suns of God!

Columbia University scholar Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880-1963) studied comparative religions, mythology, and linguistics then wrote his doctoral thesis based upon his mastery of Egyptian sun sign symbolisms linking them completely to the origins of Christianity titled Theosophy: A Modern Revival of the Ancient Wisdom. This is not surprising given the Genesis of the Holy Bible stories are themselves attributed to the writings of Moses and the retreat by Mary and Joseph to Egypt with the "baby" Jesus for theology schooling by the priests-shamans overseeing the temples and pyramids.

This culture worshipped the Sun God for a reason. Indeed, the rest of my story is apocalyptic, or "unveiled," truth about the revelation of the Second Coming of Christ Consciousness through us that Dr. Kuhn only hinted at in his final book prior to his death, A Rebirth of Christianity. Clearly, we are about to die and be reborn to a new way of beong one with nature! No modern-day mythologist speaking to this self-realizartion is akin to the integrity and intelligence of Joseph John Campbell (1904-1987), than is the Director of 2012 Studies, John Major Jenkins, in Ft. Collins, Colorado. He is the author of several authoritative books on the Maya and Mesoamerica but, in particular, I am referring to his latest attempt to dispell the spells of the New Age nonsense about the End-Time scenario in The 2012 Story: The Myths, Fallacies, and Truth Behind the Most Intriguing Date in History [December 21, 2012].

No doubt we need to cut-to-the-chase, since we are according to the Mayan calendar "running out-of-time" and into eternity! Specifically, Jenkins shares a vision he experienced in an "isolation tank" under the influence of LSD at age 19 in Chicago, not unlike the approach employed by the late John Lily, M.D. in Hawaii to symbolically, "telepathically" communicate with dolphins.  Briefly, after Jenkins sensed he was under-the-influence of this psychedelic neurotransmitter-receiver messenger molecule, lysergic acid diethylamide, he "awoke within the dream" we call physical reality. He travelled to the farthest reaches of inner space by catapulting through outer space in blunt terms and that was his ultimate conclusion and one that I wish to emphasize as extremely important to my own thesis now: "I also felt I had never left my body: I had, rather, explored the cosmic contents of it," Jenkins revealed. Is this not the supreme revelation of Jesus Christ with respect to his Second Coming: "The Kingdom of Heaven [and hell] is within you?"

Furthermore, Andrew Collins has, in my opinion, decoded the "secrets" in shamanic healing and divining and what is the key idea to 2012 in his monumental book The Cygnus Mystery: Unlocking the Ancient Secret of Life's Origins in the Cosmos: The purpose of "junk DNA." The shorthand translation of his research is that the star constellation in the sky known to ancients as representing a "swan" (astronomically Cygnus X-3), is the source of creation for us. This was discerned through the use of trance states by shamans in these early cultures as depicted in prehistoric-that is to say, before language-cave drawings and myths.  Yet what we need to know is that gamma-ray bursts (GRB) from this, and perhaps, other light-storing "black holes" in the Milky Way, are mutating amino acids-DNA-RNA protein synthesis into new configurations. And this is reworking the expression of genes throughout the animal kingdom itself signifying a time of rapid change in the ecology, and biosphere, referred to biblically as "a new heaven and a new earth."  

The Cosmic Serpent is the Human Body

Now while all of these skilled practitioners of the healing arts, and scholars of the sciences and religions helped me cope to a certain extent with excruciatingly painful weeks that stretched into agonizingly slow months I realized I was missing a critical key to opening the locked gates of hell to my wellbeing: Life force energy collocated at the base of my spine. Specifically, I came to see from my studies that I needed to increase the flow of my ch'i with amino acid therapy administered not only orally, as I had done for months, but also intravenously (I.V.). I had to repair the cell damage of aging, diet, alcohol abuse and toxic emotions in order to restore the functioning of my communication circuitry, the message molecule carriers of the central nervous system. Metaphorically, I had to glue Humpty-Dumpty back together again, increase the "ligands" that are the "binding" agents of DNA-RNA coded protein synthesis cycles of consciousness. These electronic ions cement branches of amino acid molecules into chains, the building blocks of life. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby, Ph.D., Stanford University, unpacked the secret to this, too, from his shamanic field work with the plant teachers in the Amazonian rainforests, ecstatically reporting in The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge: "When I started reading the literature of molecular biology, I was stunned by certain descriptions. Admittedly, I was on the lookout for anything unusual, as my investigation had led me to consider that DNA and its cellular machinery truly were an extremely sophisticated technology of cosmic origin. But as I pored over thousands of pages of biological texts, I discovered a world of science fiction that seemed to confirm my hypothesis. Proteins and enzymes were described as 'miniature robots,' ribosomes were 'molecular computers,' cells were 'factories,' DNA itself was a 'text,' a 'program,' a 'language,' or 'data.' One only had to do a literal reading of contemporary biology to reach shattering conclusions; yet most authors display a total lack of astonishment and seem to consider that life is merely 'a normal physiochemical phenomenon.'"

Again, Dr. Candace Pert, formerly a Research Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., wrote in her aforementioned textbook on this topic: "Ligands are generally much smaller molecules than the receptors they bind to, and they are divided into three chemical types. The first type of ligand comprises the classical neurotransmitters, which are small molecules with such unwieldy names as acetylcholine, norepinephrine, dopamine, histamine, glycine, GABA, and serotonin." Soon thereafter, at my wits end with drugs of every flavor that did not yield viable cures only intolerable side-effects, I remembered another informative dialogue I had on Facebook a year earlier, with Steve Sewell. He had succinctly replied to a comment I made that I was using amino acids orally to improve my health but he knowingly stated that in many cases, they had to be administered via I.V. to enter the bloodstream to bypass the deleterious impact of digestive tract juices. Then in a subsequent telephone conversation, I shared my medical history and Steve offered that, perhaps, my brain-body could no longer create its endogenous, morphine-like pain killers, the endorphins, to give me that "runner's high" I associated with wellness? That was a reasonable conclusion given my "free-floating" symptoms of anxiety-panic, hypomania that seemed even to me to be a case of hypochondria; that is, more psycho than somatic!

In the final analysis, I needed high-tech soul food: the "finger-licking-good to the last drop" ligands! If I wanted what they offered, Steve said, I could report to the clinic on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 for a physical examination by Paul Glanville, M.D., an anti-aging specialist schooled in complementary and traditional medicine. Of course, I was impressed with the intravenous protocol's potential for healing my spine and took his advice to heart, and head: they seemingly had exactly what I was looking for no doubt about it.

From my own decades of study in the shamanic sciences and practice in Community Health Administration and Wellness Promotion with the U.S. Navy Hospital Clinic, Keyport, Washington, I knew that healing disease happened through integration of the East and West: what Larry Dossey, M.D. in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and his wife, Barbara Dossey, R.N., Ph.D., call ERA-III Medicine. They do not mince words or split-hairs-and neither do I-for this is the emerging health care paradigm of the future: We are literally "thought forms" co-existing within the Mind of God-Body of Christ-and we need to apply this eternal truth to our lives here and hereafter. We co-exist with myriad life forms and we need to get over it and get on with it: There is a lot of work to do if we are to bring hell up from and heaven down to earth. Our mission is to merge three worlds-upper, lower, and middle-into one new world order right here and now! Dr. Dossey counsels:

Taking nonlocal mind seriously can, as I describe in Reinventing Medicine, widen the dimensions of consciousness. We can tap into sources of wisdom beyond ourselves and beyond the present: Creative breakthroughs and prophetic knowing become ordinary in the context of nonlocal mind. Empathy and compassion flower as a result of our felt linkage with one another. And the awareness of immortality, as I've described, takes the pressure off living and dying. This will not happen automatically, however. We have to do our share and set our biases and prejudices aside. These are urgent matters. As Andre Malraux said, "The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be at all." (See www.dosseydossey.com)

Rocky Mountain High

For the record, it is an absolutely divine drive into Durango. Colorado from all directions but we had come by way of the northern Interstates: I-90E, I-15S, I-70E: Spokane-Billings-Salt Lake City-Grand Junction, and then south onto Colorado Highway 550. This is a breathtaking scenic route with big timber, wildlife views at somewhat oxygen-starved elevations: over two miles high at its jagged-rocky top peaks. But what a beautiful clear-blue unpolluted sky!

Then as we descended into the City of Durango itself, we saw clean streets, a well-planned city center and marketplace that highlighted its southwestern cowboy theme. The focal point was the restored train station for the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. Of course, the antique brick hotels with crystal-chandeliers and gun-fighting saloons of the 1800s helped set the stage, literally. Actually, Connie remarked that we had come to a 5-star vacation getaway-not a sterile-looking typical medical district as we had envisioned. There was even a gorgeous fast-moving river running through the city park: Animas. This in fact was a sacred space nestled within the Four Corners of the USA.

Upon arrival at the clinic the next morning, I already knew that I came to the right place to kick-start my immune system. If I needed a booster shot of confidence, I was greeted with a warm smile by Julie Frank, the office administrator, and Steve Adams, my co-counselor for the next 10-days. Then I reported for my physical exam at 10AM to Paul Glanville, M.D., and read these inspirational words on his business card from Psalm 103 that made my day:

"Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's."

You know what an eagle can do, right? It can grow brand new feathers no matter its age! Indeed I needed new feathers, and bones to support them, if I was ever to fly again without a neck brace and a beak load of medicines. In a nutshell, be careful what you pray for and write about, and who, for they may very well return to validate, or not, your claims about them be they among the living or dead. You'll see what I mean when you read the First Edition of my book Tranceformers: Shamans of the 21st Century. But, in brief, you will learn what I did from an after-death communication incident with a "deceased" optics physicist colleague, George, and why analytical psychologist Carl Jung, M.D., stated "Modern behaviorist psychology reduces psychic happenings to a kind of activity of the glands; thoughts are regarded as secretions of the brain, and thus we achieve a psychology without the psyche."

In other words, we removed the powers of the psyche-soul-from our physical sense of self but the greater truth is we are entangled within messenger molecules of "spirit" all the time. Close encounters of ETs/UFOs, for example, are synchronistic clues-profoundly meaningful coincidences-that speak to a multi-dimensional, layered "hyperspace" cosmos filled-to-the-brim with psychophysical beings. Mind and matter is a single substance made of information. There is simply no wiggle room anymore around this fact says National Public Radio award-winning correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty, and acclaimed author of Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality.

The lesson we are learning from amino acid therapy is straightforward: the mind of the mystic, prophet, and shaman is lying dormant, sleeping untapped within DNA yet cosmic consciousness is forever flowing-freely through us all now. That is, the knowledge to heal ourselves is available for the asking if we ask the right questions symbolically and playing possum is not the answer to a spiritually alive, "genetically" mutating universe. The author of creation, God, writes the Book of Life and illustrates it via DNA codes with our life experiences providing the "data" each and every second for the messenger molecules forming and informing an infinite number of space-time "real" worlds. With this insight, I wept tears of joy for I knew that my prayers had been answered: my deliverance from pain was at hand and my walk into wellbeing had begun. Although I was optimistic, and looking forward to the treatment sessions, I was about to take an unexpected swan dive, and it was not the 6,500 foot elevation in Durango that made me swoon either.

I Died in Durango

"Are you okay, John?" my nurse, Jessica Dehen, R.N., asked. She had skillfully inserted the first of the ten-day intravenous (I.V.) needles into my right arm, but suddenly my mind relaxed its tenacious grip on the pain in my neck. I unwittingly started to slump into what I imagined was the darkness of unconsciousness, so replying softly, I said what I felt was obviously true: "I'm dying."

She calmly helped me into a black lounge chair and discretely summoned Dr. Glanville to check my vital signs, if that was needed. But it wasn't, and of course I was not dying but being reborn in fact into a new way of living. Yet I didn't know that until a few days later after I shared what had happened to me with Jessica and she corrected my distorted perceptions of this incident. She informed me that I did not faint nor have any type of adverse reaction to the amino acid nutrients whatsoever, rather I simply slipped into a deep state-of-sleep-and snored to high heaven!

As I reflected upon her words, that made perfect sense since I had not slept without a sleeping pill in months. I knew I had stopped dreaming once I began taking AmbienTM and my educated guess was that rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep is much more critical than we have imagined. Perhaps, the brain-body cannot repair itself properly if we induce sleep with drugs of all types: alcohol, prescription, and street? Maybe the organic messenger molecules created by nature such as serotonin, dopamine and melatonin, for examples, are paralyzed, and cannot exchange DNA-RNA protein synthesis maintenance information between brain hemispheres, I pondered?

Author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, Daniel Pinchbeck, shared the conclusions of Dr. Carl Anderson of McLean Hospital, Virginia: "... disparities between the left and right brain disrupt REM sleep, which as Anderson notes is ‘essential for emotional regulation, learning, and memory consolidation.'" In particular, I agree with Dr. Anderson, although I acknowledge that Pinchbeck, a wise urban shaman in his own right, is not totally convinced yet with respect to this physician's hypothesis: "Interhemispheric struggles, primarily a result of child abuse, may be a fundamental psychological root of drug addiction." 

Accordingly, drug addiction is indeed getting worse every single year in PTSD breeding grounds: military combat zones, inner cities, and First Nations reservations. This is the siren song warning that our children and grandchildren are at high-risk for self-destruction in untold numbers if we do not intervene now, if not for any other reason that we are a nutritionally-bankrupt nation! The obesity we see is symptomatic of stress stored in belly fat and the high corn sugar-low exercise diets will have only one long-term outcome for the Western world: degenerative diseases such as arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, premature pain, suffering, and death with its correlated runaway health care medical costs for taxpayers.

So I asked myself: Can amino acid therapy rewire our genes towards not only optimal wellness and personal happiness but world peace too? Is it that simple: Let food be our medicine in the way that the father of medicine, Hippocrates, meant it? It's a visionary idea for certain and will require considerable scrutiny if and when taken seriously enough to have federal government funds assigned to it. In the meantime, I'd reflect upon the meaning of the epigenetic medicine model findings of Dawson Church, Ph.D. relayed recently in his book The Genie in Your Genes: "The healing power of consciousness and intention appears to be independent of time as well as space. Prayer seems to work retroactively as well as across great distances. Perhaps the whimsical injunction is true: ‘It's never too late to have a happy childhood!'" (See www.soulmedicineinstitute.org)

Can we pray our self and world well too? This much I know from my observation: our brain is a terrible thing to see waste away on junk food, drugs, and booze! Slowly I stitched the pieces of my addiction, pain, and stress disorder together with the help of the staff assigned to me for that purpose: co-counselors extraordinaire Steve Sewell, Steve Adams, and shamanic practitioner Marie Redfeather. Though my life story is not unique, it is totally relevant to you my friends regarding how to heal from childhood traumas, symptoms, employing specific steps I took along the way that I methodically, painstakingly but also joyously, outlined in the Second Edition of my book, Tranceformers: Shamans of the 21st Century. Again, Daniel Pinchbeck speaks wisely beyond his tears: "With his visions, his ability to transform energies, and his mastery of healing, Christ could be seen as a prototypical shaman."

Not surprisingly, every one of the lessons-learned on my own from decades of research, I saw incorporated into the wellness model employed at Mind & Body Works. Therefore, amino acid therapy is the key to survival in our efforts to offset the impact of climate changes and what near-death researcher at the University of Connecticut, Professor of Psychology Emeritus Ken Ring, Ph.D., knowingly called us to embrace two decades ago: the "shamanizing of humanity!" By the way, my two books are also directly related to what is happening to people and planet today in era-2012: We are threatened with extinction. As cell biologist Bruce Lipton, Ph.D. has said, "It's the environment stupid!" Our toxic technology has turned our agricultural soils and drinking water sources into septic tanks and our dysfunctional attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyles are eating away at our immune systems worldwide. (See www.brucelipton.com and www.iands.org)

Thus I cannot emphasize enough the importance of shamanic tools and techniques for our day and age for it is indeed the "myths" by which we live that determine our life story individually and collectively as a civilization. What is it we want to experience, in other words? It could not be said more clearly and forcefully than this prophet: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." (Proverbs 23:7)

The Key is Under Your Mother's Pillow

Over the 10-day course of I.V. treatments with amino acid nutrients, what I came to call "Love Potion Number 9," I also had sessions with other outstanding health care providers including Healing TouchTM with Linda Marie Ambrose, as well as in the downtown Durango community. Namely massage therapy at Amaya Natural Therapeutics, and acupuncture at Animas Oriental Medicine clinic.

Macushla F. Hobin, L.Ac., MSTOM is a graduate of the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, San Diego, California and her expertise in clinical diagnosis and needle placement really opened the door-chakras and meridians-to my healing. For the first time in six months, I finally heard an assessment of my situation that made sense of the symptoms that was a true mystery to me. Yet I agreed with her immediately, intellectually and intuitively, as to the underlying cause-effect relationships: Sleep Deprivation. More so, I was told that my neck symptoms presented itself in a way that was well-known to the classical oriental medicine model and therefore had specific treatment protocols that could be followed to heal me now.

Beyond a doubt, I benefited once these blocked pathways were opened to the flow of life force energy-ch'i-again through my spinal column vertebras and into the skull's sinus cavities. I felt the instant relief from pain when she inserted needles into C7 vertebra that second session: these circuits began to function as intended. That is, I was no longer grid-locked neurologically between my head and heart in particular and the neurotransmitters could transmit messages full-circle in these circuits of consciousness. My nerves quieted down and restored themselves to peaceful co-existence with the natural rhythms of my lifestyle in the days and weeks ahead.

Marie Redfeather played a pivotal role in recovering and releasing early childhood trauma that I had completely buried within my body. She is a First Nations, French-Canadian descent initiate of Peruvian shamanism. Through her expertise, and sensitivity, to what was seeking to surface during our counseling sessions and ceremonies together, we rediscovered a series of medical crises that had crippled me throughout my life. Specifically, I broke my leg in the 3rd grade and had to be transported for treatment to Auburn General Hospital, Washington. This was in the days when a parent could not visit or stay at will with a scared child, but to make matters even more terrifying in my case the ward nurses used hypodermic needle injections to sedate me-keep me quiet-throughout the night.

Moreover, during my days hooked-up to I.V. at Mind & Body Works, I flashbacked to several incidents that involved doctors, nurses, syringes and I.V.s in Seattle. For examples, I had blocked memories of Children's Orthopedic and Virginia Mason Hospital clinic visits that had traumatized me severely in my early teen years. Thus, we uncovered and brought to light how these disturbing incidents ultimately steered my studies to psychology and theology in my totally subconscious efforts to continually work through these fears as an adult much as psychiatrist Stan Grof, M.D. outlines happens in Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. (See www.holotropic.com)

Needless to say, I was indeed "awakened at needle point" in Durango, Colorado! However, it was the insights of the founder of Mind & Body Works that triggered a major catharsis during his first counseling session with me. Steve Sewell patiently listened to my medical history: recitations of childhood and alcohol abuse, military injuries and related psychophysical symptoms, allopathic and integrative treatments, as he observed my body gestures, too. He then gently, nonchalantly offered this "pearl of great price" for me to mediate upon later that evening at the Iron Horse Inn motel as my counseling homework assignment: "The Key is Under Your Mother's Pillow."

So I mused into the night, as my wife slept alongside me, about my life's story and how I spoke it into existence with every word uttered. Specifically, I came to see the wisdom in the words of St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1). That is to say, I needed to wash my mouth out with soap for I spewed out toxic temper tantrums, childish concepts and emotions in nearly every sentence. I colored my world with words that had coagulated, nearly choked the life out of me with fear over many years by failing to follow my bliss as a public-speaker because I was reenacting my mother's sense of "learned helplessness," also known as clinical depression, at being abandoned by my father-not me. In reality, I never knew my father given my age at the time of his departure so how could I blame him for being a bad parent or role model? But I did incorporate-make physical-every negative emotion my mother felt and expressed by her body postures and inadvertently "poisoned" my environment. My father had little to do with my life issues was the bottom-line: It was "mommy dearest" after all.

Summary

Apostle Paul summed-up my conclusions nicely: "Now you together are Christ's body; but each of you is a different part of it." (I Cor. 12:27) No one knows that truth better than Andrew Newberg, M.D., Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College. He is a pioneer in the study of a field frequently referred to today as "neurotheology." In his career, he has also actively pursued neuro-imaging research projects on aging and dementia, Parkinson's disease, depression, and other neurological and psychiatric disorders. He has also researched the neurophysiological correlates of acupuncture, meditation, and alternative therapies, and how brain function is associated with mystical and religious experiences. Dr. Newberg has received an award from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences for his program entitled "The Biology of Spirituality." (See www.andrewnewberg.com)

In the Gospel of Thomas, Christ spoke these words of wisdom: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." Daniel Pinchbeck has the right molecular spin on many of these matters: "The tryptamine molecule is the building block of many neurotransmitters. ... You may spend the rest of your life suppressing the memory, but it is still inside of you." Later in a mystical burst of clarity, I saw that I did not get sick or healed in a vacuum these past months either, rather my life story was the well-orchestrated script that God designed to bring me to Him and my future work with people suffering from addictions, pain, and stress disorders needing amino acid therapy.

No doubt about it today, my history is not my destiny. Yet to say I'm objective anymore is a lie: I am subjective in that I know what works and I plan on shouting it from the rooftops. If you are an adventurous, courageous soul willing to follow the road less travelled to achieve optimal wellness here and hereafter, then I wholeheartedly suggest that you go to this website right now without delay: www.mindandbodyworks.org. Note that they are a non-profit organization and need your love offering donations to stay afloat. Indeed, be bold and call the Mind & Body Works clinic Toll Free at 1-888-788-7348 and see how you can help spread the word in your community, and perhaps you or a loved one will likewise become awakened at needle point!

Further Recommended Reading References:

1.      For those interested in the symbolic treatment of illness, I refer you to an eclectic new book on this topic, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky in Paris, France. As well as the insights of Jungian-oriented psychotherapist Paul Levy in Portland, Oregon, himself a former mental hospital patient and now "crazy life a fox." (See www.awakeninthedream.com)

2.      Braverman, E.R., M.D., and Pfeiffer, C.C., M.D., Ph.D. The Healing Nutrients Within: Facts, Findings and New Research on Amino Acids. CT: Keats Publishing, Inc., 1987.

3.      Twiss, Richard. One Church Many Tribes. CA: Regal Press, 2000. (www.wiconi.org)  

Image by Ben Brown, courtesy of Creative Commons license.