of my tale. The process, the path of getting to that moment at the waterfall, is a significant aspect. The path is the journey; to understand the journey, one must understand the path...
ONCE UPON A TIME...
(Because this portion of my tale begins with "Once upon a time," this doesn't mean it's not a true story;it is. Although most books that begin in this fashion are fictional, they are written for the express purpose of illustrating lessons and revealing hidden meanings contained therein, and this book most definitely meets those criteria)
Once upon a time I was born... and my experience of my universe began.
My earliest remembered formal training in this new earth-environment occurred during my formative preschool years. During this time I acquired many of life's useful skills, such as stacking blocks-early construction techniques that were to serve me well in my chosen profession in later years, and hide-and-seek-dealing with peer group, win-at-all-cost competitiveness.
As my reality-preparedness education advanced, I moved on to grammar school, where I ear ned some highly notable achievements. These included being appointed blackboard monitor for two weeks in a row, being the first in my class to memorize my seven-times multiplication tables and, on a dare, kissing a real cutie named Ann without getting punched!
In seventh grade, I even achieved the near impossiblegoing steady for 32 days straight without my parents finding out!
Anyway... having mastered all the mandatory requirements and skills necessary at this level, I entered high school. There I did all the very insecure things one does during that time of one's life; then I ventured off to college, got married and began my grown-up life!
By the time I reached age 35, I was cruising through life with the statistically average family:a wife, a son, a daughter, a dog, two cats, a mortgage and the appropriate number of credit card payments. I had become a very successful general contractor in a third-generation family business, and I resided comfortably in a quiet suburban community in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I suppose my principal goal in life was to acquire the same middle class values and accomplishments that my parents had effectively obtained. I was living a very predictable and structured life, following all the familiar, conservative patterns taught to me since childhood. Although I was struggling in a soon-to-end marriage that neither of us seemed to fully understand, it was my belief that I was happy. Why shouldn't I be? I had it all: a successful business, a wonderful family, the good life!
And then one day my life took an abrupt change of course, leading me to unexpectedly discover my inherent psychic nature.
(Ever notice that most stories beginning with "Once upon a time... "subsequently begin a paragraph with "And then one day... "?This generally serves to alert us that we are about to encounter a major change in the story line- here comes the portion of the story which leads to the lessons we can learn-and who am I to break tradition?)
It was at this time, in my seemingly secure existence, that I met my next door neighbor's sister while attending a social gathering at his house. During casual cocktail party conversation, she shared an experience of a recent weekend seminar, enthusiastically claiming that it had radically changed her life. By the end of the evening she had persuaded me to attend a repeat presentation of this workshop. She convinced me that it would be as positive an experience as the seminar's name ''YES" suggests.
I was definitely not a seminar junkie, yet I was drawn to her enthusiasm for what she had undergone. She told me that her life experience, like mine, had been quite happy and contented, but that she had sensed something "missing" and had found "it" at this weekend retreat.
She was right. The seminar was dynamite! From the very moment it began, I was absolutely absorbed in an encounter with brand new ideas-new to me at least.
The program began with an activity that required us to introduce and describe ourselves to a stranger sitting nearby. Then, unexpectedly, we were required to report on what we heard to the rest of the class. In this very first experience we realized that we were so involved in ourselves that few of us had paid attention to what our partner had said. This exercise was designed to illustrate the limitations of our individual awareness in our day-to-day lives. Jan and Hardy, our seminar leaders, guaranteed to change all that by the time the seminar was over!
As the weekend progressed, many experiences we collectively encountered encouraged us to touch and express long-repressed emotions, such as fear, joy, anger and sadness. I came to realize that expressing sadness was very difficult for me, yet I found that others could do this quite easily. Although anger seems somewhat easier for men to verbalize, I was truly amazed that many of my classmates had almost totally blocked the verbalization of this emotion for most of their lives.
It became readily apparent to all of us by the end of the first day that while this retreat was about many things, it was primarily designed to encourage us to experience our feelings and our emotions... on the way to the discovery of our inner selves. We soon realized that the deeper we got in touch with these sensations, the more we became truly aware of ourselves and who we really were. But it wasn't until this weekend was ending that I discovered just how wide the door to this awareness had opened!
The weekend continued. At the beginning of the third and final day we were informed that it was time for us to demonstrate some of the self-awareness we had learned during the previous two days. In a morning exercise we each placed our driver's license into a separate envelope and sealed it. After the envelopes were shuffled, we randomly selected one of the envelopes from the pile and were asked to sense or intuit whose envelope we had drawn, without opening it! At the conclusion of the exercise, I reviewed the physical features shown on the license. I was shocked to find that, from the group of 30, I had accurately identified the individual whose photo peered out when I opened my sealed envelope!
Equally astonishing, a statistically high percentage of my classmates had similarly successful experiences. Furthermore, many of those who did not correctly identify the specific individual discovered that they had accurately predicted many physical characteristics of the person whose license was in the envelope they held.
During this final day we were to experience additional intuitive hits by tuning in to our newly discovered awareness. But the last event of the seminar was the clincher!
We were ushered in to a room where several dozen strangers were seated, each having an empty chair in front of him or her. Hardy introduced them as clairvoyants, accomplished in the art of thought transference. After each of us was paired with a psychic, we were provided with just the name, age and location of a known acquaintance of our partner. We were then instructed to describe this acquaintance in specific detail. The psychics seated in front of us held a "thought picture" of the subject while we composed our stories. When the exercise was finished, our partners handed us written descriptions and photographs of our "targets" from sealed containers resting beneath their chairs.
I was dead right... again!
My target was a retired Montana cowboy, whom I described in great detail. I had correctly identified him by appearance, profession, personal hobbies, the number and sex of his children and several of his personal traits. As evident from the image that stared back at me from a color photograph, I had been accurate even to the color of his red and white suspenders, favorites he wore when he went fishing.
We were then informed that we were not working with professional psychics at all, but with previous graduates from this seminar. They were normal, regular people, just like ourselves, who had recently completed the same workshop a few months before.
Wasn't it interesting, we were asked, how perceptive we became once we were convinced that
