Discovering Bliss
Chapter Four (Continued)
I’m going to give you a series of assignments. You have surrendered your life to something higher. Now you will enter into a series of life lessons. I want you to follow through with the assignments I give you with close attention to detail, a sense of curiosity and discovery. You have signed up for a school that you chose to be in—this lifetime with this teacher. Now your lessons will begin.
Your first assignment is to read your family Bible from cover to cover—without skipping one word. My inner teacher emphasized, without skipping one word, like that was the most important part of the assignment. It seemed daunting. I found our large family Bible, filled with beautiful color Renaissance paintings. The book was huge, beautifully bound in red leather with gold leaf lettering on the cover. It must have weighed seven pounds. Each page was edged in gold. I opened it up on my lap and started reading the inside cover, determined not to skip one word.
I’d been guided to develop my reading endurance before this read-the-Bible-cover-to-cover-without-skipping-a-word assignment. In second grade I’d been labeled a slow reader. I was dyslexic. Words and lines of type would switch places as I stared at a page in front of me. My teacher, Ms. Hamilton, often taught a lesson by having us stand beside our desk to read a paragraph from our textbooks. I was nervous and embarrassed when it came time for me to read. I didn’t realize what was happening at the time—and neither did my teachers. No one understood dyslexia in the fifties.
My fear increased as each student took their turn reading, progressing one-by-one up each row. I watched as the student in front of me stood and read—then it became my turn. Nervously, I stood and did my best to read the words that were jumping around on the page. My mind raced as I tried to re-order the words to make sense of the sentence. I felt horribly embarrassed and painfully stupid in front of everyone.
Ms. Hamilton arranged a private meeting with my parents in my empty second grade classroom with me sitting in a small chair beside them in an intimate semicircle. Ms. Hamilton expressed her concern about my mental development to my parents. She explained that I was having a hard time reading aloud. I watched my parents faces seeing their concern, then stared at the floor as Ms. Hamilton continued. She recommended that I be placed in a remedial reading class. I sat there hurt. I felt humiliated. I didn’t want to leave my friends. I felt embarrassed and sorry that there was something wrong with me. Why am I so stupid?
One day, a reading competition was announced. The child who checked out and read the most books from an extensive reading library would receive an award at the end of the year. I jumped on this assignment. Our class reading library was three shelves of books, thirty feet long, the length of our classroom. Every day I’d checked out ten thin children’s books, read them at home, wrote a half page report on each book, then returned for ten more the following day.
As I spent my evening hours reading, I developed different techniques to stop the words from bouncing around. At first, I held a bookmark beneath each line. After two weeks, I switched to using my index finger to keep track of the words before they moved. After perhaps a hundred thin children books, I developed the best technique to manage my dyslexia and improve my reading speed. I discovered that if I blinked at the end of a line, the words reordered themselves so I could read the next line. After several months of reading ten books a night, I was so far ahead of everyone else that I evolved into reading books that were several hundred pages long, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I fell in love with reading. It piqued my intellectual curiosity, offering doorways to explore beyond the boundaries of my small world. I did win the reading prize at the end of the year. I was over one hundred books ahead of second place. My mother framed the certificate and hung it on my bedroom wall. But best of all, I’d learned to control my dyslexia. As a pre-teen, I became a voracious reader, curious about life and many subjects. I believe that experience was a preparation for the long reading assignments I was going to receive from the spiritual presence that began to direct my studies.
The Bible was my most challenging reading assignment. It seemed very foreign written by ancient people. My favorite parts were when Jesus spoke. I imagined myself as a child, sitting beside him on a rock and listening to him speak to other people. I imagined the warmth from his love surrounding me. I felt like I’d been born 2,000 years too late.
Reading long hours each night, it took me over a month to read the Bible. It focused on the belief that we were a physical body, and that we had something very nebulous, called Soul. If we believed in Jesus and practiced his good works, we’d be able to go to heaven to be with him and his father. If we didn’t believe in Jesus and did wicked works, we would go to hell and suffer horribly for eternity. We only had one life to make this work, whether you were a native in the Amazon jungle, were born deaf and blind in China, or had a privileged birth into a wealthy Christian family with a perfectly healthy body and mind.
No matter how dire or advantaged your circumstances, you only had one chance to accept Jesus as your savior. If you were Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or of any other faith, evidently you would go to hell. The Bible didn’t address what would happen to individuals born centuries before Christ. To me, it didn’t seem like a loving, fair God would create such a system. I felt like God’s system would be loving and kind, and provide a path for all people to be with Him. God’s system would be universal, like gravity. It would apply to all life throughout all worlds.
And what about the animals? How did they fit in? The nuns at Sunday school taught us animals didn’t have souls. Only people could go to heaven. None of this seemed right to me. I loved my dog and experienced the spark of life inside him, independent of his body. I felt empty after reading the Bible, my spiritual hunger and curiosity were unquenched. It didn’t explain the wonderful spiritual experience I’d had or how I could repeat it, maybe go beyond it.
One Saturday morning, I felt inspired to ride my ten-speed bicycle to Cinderella City, a huge, new shopping mall one mile from my home. As I wandered aimlessly through the mall, I looked to my left to see B. Dalton Bookstore. There were no doors or windows. It was completely open to the mall. I liked that feeling of openness. It was inviting me in. As I braved my way into the strange new store, I was surprised at the shelves and displays of books inside. Before this, the most books I’d seen were in our small elementary school library with shelves waist high. These shelves towered over my head. I was in the right place. I felt like I was being encouraged to explore new worlds I hadn’t dreamed of. I was excited. I wandered around the store to discover the Metaphysical section.
Browsing through the books, I saw a paperback book with a woman on the cover who was sitting in the lotus position like I’d been asked to sit when I’d had that strange, wonderful, out-of-body experience. The book was on yoga. I’d never heard of yoga. I wondered if this book could shed some light on my experience. I bought that book with my allowance and read it. It was more about Hatha yoga exercise positions and wasn’t very deep. I was disappointed.
I went back to B. Dalton Bookstore a few days later and purchased a book that seemed to be calling out to me, The Bhagavad Gita. It had a mysterious glowing light around it like my inner guide was drawing my attention to it. As I stood in the isle skimming its contents, I could tell that this was my next must-read book. Studying it at home in the privacy of my bedroom, I experienced a strange déjà vu like I already understood its contents. It seemed strangely familiar. This was both pleasing and confusing to me.
The Bhagavad Gita was written approximately 2,000 years before Christ. It tells the mythical parable of a Christ-like Lord Krishna who offers spiritual counsel to the good King Arjuna, who is paralyzed with indecision and depression at the beginning of a great battle. His nation and family are split. Arjuna is poised in his chariot, lined up with his armies, about to lead a charge into a war against many family and friends he still loves in the opposing army. He knows his cause is good, but he finds it impossible to move forward into battle against his loved ones. He is depressed, frozen with indecision, unable to move forward.
Krishna’s battlefield counsel to Arjuna is that our true nature is Soul, an eternal part of God. One’s true nature cannot be harmed. “This Self cannot be cut, burnt, wetted or dried up. It is eternal, all-pervading, stable, ancient and immovable.” He explains that Arjuna is frozen in fear because he is seeing life only from his physical perspective. He is failing to appreciate the process of life he is experiencing—the expansion of all Souls into a God-like state. Krishna counsels him to step back from his anxiety and comprehend the divine plan being enacted on this metaphorical battlefield of Earth. He can then conquer his fear and confusion, while embracing a higher wisdom. Learning these important life lessons is a stepping stone for Soul to move into Divine Consciousness.
These teachings felt more familiar to me than the King James Bible. I felt like I was remembering them rather than reading them for the first time. I began to ache with a gnawing spiritual hunger, an actual pain in my gut. I needed to learn more—everything possible!
At twelve years of age, I was developing an independent view of life beyond my faith and circumstance. Fear of going to Hell for eternity was a big thing in the Catholic Church during the 60’s and was often brought up in Religion class. Sister Josephine taught that it was a mortal sin to miss Sunday mass without a Priest’s permission. If we died with a mortal sin on our soul, without going to Confession to be forgiven, we would go straight to Hell! A scary thought for a pre-teen! Yet Sister also taught that God was loving and able to forgive. It seemed obvious to me that making anyone suffer for eternity was not fair or kind.
After a math class where I learned the meaning of finite and infinite, I realized that while we were in a body, we were finite beings, with limited ability to reason and comprehend. I reasoned, how could finite beings like us do anything to deserve an infinite punishment? If God was loving, intelligent, and just, then Hell didn’t exist. If Hell didn’t exist, I suspected that many other Christian concepts might have become twisted over the centuries by the clergy to consolidate their control over society. Making a break from Catholic dogma was a bold step for me.
I was careful not to challenge anyone’s beliefs outwardly but made the mistake one day of bringing a book on Tibetan Buddhism to my Catholic school eighth-grade class. It was The Third Eye by Lobsang Rampa. I loved that book and didn’t want to put it down. I so easily identified with being a Tibetan Buddhist monk. My heart stirred and ached with longing when I read about Tibet. I began to experience an unexplainable homesickness for Tibet that was both sweet and painful.
I was reading this book during my lunch period, sitting outside on the asphalt playgound, leaning back against the school building in the shade. I was in a joyful, blissful state. My euphoria was interrupted when Sister Jean, a frail elderly nun who taught us Religion, walked by and noticed the front cover. Sister Jean stopped and leaned over me to make sure she was seeing the book cover properly. I looked up from the book. Her face glared down at me in a wrinkled, angry contortion. Her eyes burned with righteous anger. “Stop reading these books, or you are going to end up in Hell!” she warned. “And never bring a book like this to school again!” She marched away, her full-length black habit swishing about her quickly moving legs.
I closed the book and stood up. I understood. She’d invested her life in her story and didn’t want to risk having it invalidated. I’d seen her fall asleep in Religion class as a girl began her assigned speech standing in front of the class. Sister’s head slowly bobbed, then drooped forward like a melting candle until it rested on her desk. Most everyone quietly laughed, but I felt sorry for the elderly nun. The girl stood in front of the class patiently waiting for signs of consciousness from the nun. When Sister’s head popped up ten minutes later, the clever student spoke the last sentence of her speech. Sister told her, “Very good,” and dismissed the class. A few months after Sister Jean warned me about going to Hell, she was retired and sent to a rest home for nuns.
I felt sorry fo Sister Jean but she wasn’t alone in her viewpoint. This was one of many instances that made me aware of how extremely intolerant Catholicism, and Christianity in general, were at that time. In the sixties, there was a smug egotism that encouraged us to look down on other faiths. I kept my books to myself after that but continued to amass my growing home library. My bedroom shelves were soon overflowing with books.
B. Dalton Bookstore became my home away from home, my secret church, my window into a larger world. I couldn’t wait to go there each Friday to spend my weekly allowance on more books. I enjoyed books on the life of the Buddha and witty wisdom of Japan’s Zen masters. I read several books on Lao Tse and the breathtaking poetical insights that sprang from his heart. I loved reading about Tibet’s great Yogi, Melarepa, his troubled beginnings, the insurmountable obstacles he faced, and his wonderful spiritual accomplishments later in life.
I read several books by Jean Dixon and Edgar Cayce, both Christain mystics who opened me to the possibilities of understanding the flow of life beyond the physical. I studied the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, noting how his path paralleled the Buddha’s, the rejection of a wealthy privileged life for a humble life in pursuit of experiencing and sharing Divine Love. Saint Francis explored the mysteries of the Divine found in nature, striving to be a humble servant to all life.
Of all the books I read, one book took my breath away. Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi shared the life story of a gentle man of miracles obsessed with knowing God, searching for the secrets of dwelling in the God State. Miracles flowed into his everyday life and outward to others.
He moved from India to the United States in the 1920s becoming an international spiritual figure with thousands attending each lecture as he toured the United States, Europe and the world. Popes and presidents all sought him out, inviting Yogananda to their capitols. Even President Calvin Coolidge invited him to the White House in 1927. He was friends with Mahatma Gandhi, and spent time with Christian and Hindu saints. He’d passed away in 1952, a year after I was born. Unfortunately, I stopped reading Autobiography of a Yogi halfway through, distracted by my life circumstance. I wasn’t aware until later in life of the great body of books and teachings he’d left behind on the science of consciousness, Kriya Yoga.
Spurred by my appetite to understand more, I started mowing lawns with a local landscaper to earn more money for books. Somehow, someway, I’d discover what happened to me when I left my body and rose into that world of pure love. I intended to find out how to re-enter that state at will, and possibly venture further to discover what wonders lay beyond. I ached from the seeming absence of God in the world. I prayed that eventually, I’d find what I was looking for—if that were even possible.
One lesson became clear: I wasn’t alone. Someone was watching over me.