them up either; if you must know, I am especially fond of Sequoias. And by the way, Ponderosas, though scratchy, are quite nice, and you needn’t worry, their bark is worse than their bite.
But I am inviting you to consider that in this day and age, technological advances and psychological research are leading us to more than just a better Xbox, brain scan, smartphone, or anti-depressant.
What if there were new approaches that could greatly enhance your spiritual awareness? What if there were breakthrough techniques that could save you years of meditative practice? What if I suggested that the traumas of your childhood that block you from your full potential might be resolved in months, not years of therapy? What if I told you that you could consciously recognize your karmic issues from other lifetimes? What if you could resolve issues directly with loved ones that have passed on, without the aid of a medium? What if you could meet Jesus or the Buddha directly? What if you could experience the oneness of the Universe? What if I told you that you could touch the Face of God? What if I told you that the kinds of experiences that saints, poets, and geniuses have had are yours for the asking? What if I told you that you could leap ahead on your spiritual journey into an entirely new way of being in the world?
It boggles the mind.
But I have seen it. I have lived it, and I have watched countless clients and workshop participants have these kinds of experiences. They are the result of specific techniques, deliberately applied in specific settings resulting in real, demonstrable life changes. These quickenings are not wishful thinking. They are reality.
By far, the three biggest impediments to utilizing these techniques are as follows:
1.People are ignorant of these techniques.
2.People believe they are too good to be true.
3.People believe that profound spiritual experiences can only be catalyzed through years of hard work.
Let’s address these one at a time. First, the answer to ignorance is education. The book you hold in your hands can be the doorway to opening your mind to these accelerated techniques. And, I urge you to go beyond the cursory explanations I will offer and go directly to the source materials, which I list in the back of this book, to get a deeper understanding of these breakthrough modalities. Or get on Google (or get your grandkids to get you on Google), and let your cursor go wild. You will be amazed at what you find.
Second, these techniques offer such radically profound results in relatively short periods of time that they certainly appear, at first glance . . . okay, even at second glance, to be “too good to be true.” I understand. Can you imagine what a breakthrough the typewriter was after pen and ink? Are you old enough to remember your first word processor? Maybe you recall the first time you heard about a voice-recognition system that could convert speech into words on a page.
I remember being a very young boy and sitting in a restaurant with my mother and one of her friends and hearing about a microwave oven for the first time. My eyes went wide! Hamburgers cooked in three minutes? Plates don’t get hot in them, but the food inside does? Impossible. It sounded like a magic trick; too good to be true! But, of course, it wasn’t. It was simply new technology. These modalities are, too.
Arguably, Edgar Cayce offered in one reading, “there are no shortcuts, [spiritual progress is made] line upon line, precept upon precept.” But surely, we can agree that some paths are faster than others. You can get to Los Angeles from New York faster if you don’t go by way of Tampa, Fla. One way to account for how a quickening can be accomplished is to look toward a concept called gauge symmetry.
Imagine for a moment, that you are at the foot of a very steep incline. There are two paths before you: one is a very steep ladder that goes straight up the side of the mountain; the other is a series of gently sloping switchbacks that zig-zag back and forth, first left and then right, with mild inclines, all the way to the top of the mountain. Which path should you take?
You say to yourself, on the one hand, the switchbacks look a little easier; they won’t take as much energy and effort. On the other hand, don’t they say that a straight line is the closest connection between two points? Doesn’t that mean that the ladder is the faster path?
It is, but there is more to the story than that. As any physicist will tell you, setting aside minor calculations like extraneous friction, either path takes the same amount of energy. Fill in the variables in the equation, and you will see that you can exert yourself more on the ladder for a shorter period of time or take the switchbacks and exert yourself less . . . but over a longer period of time! So, it may be that engaging in a conscious quickening takes every bit as much energy—expressed as faith, commitment, and emotional vulnerability—as more traditional approaches, but like the ladder, it gets you there faster!
So, for those of you who are looking for a “magic bullet,” a pill you can take to make you a Tibetan monk overnight, may I remind you that these are accelerated techniques, not presto-chango David Copperfield tricks. But they can save you time. A lot of time.
Finally, people believe that hard work is required to “earn” revelatory experiences. This is very much a Western mindset—the Puritan work ethic applied to spiritual growth. As children, our good behavior got us rewards from our parents and teachers. Our dedication and loyalty at work (theoretically, at least) earn us a raise. At first blush, it doesn’t seem fair that God, Our Father, would grant us a free pass to the front of the line, since Dad, Our Parent, told us if we didn’t behave he would yell at us or ground us until we reached adulthood.
There is no free vegan lunch and the like.
I understand. Let me be clear, without question, spiritual discipline has its rewards. But millions of people have had spontaneous spiritual experiences that have changed their lives apropos of nothing. How do we account for these breakthroughs? Most of us have had the bootstrap ideology hammered into us, even when it comes to revelation. But one doesn’t have to look any farther than the New Testament and the story of Saul “seeing the light” and becoming Paul on the road to Damascus to discover that transformative experiences can happen unbidden to the so-called “undeserving.”
I think some people associate this with God’s grace—a special gift. Who is to say? Once I saw a painting of a beautiful woman, gazing toward heaven, flanked by angels—cherubs, actually, floating by each of her ears. They seemed to me to be ready to whisper the secrets of the Universe, to sing the song of all of heaven. There was only one problem.
This chick had her fingers in her ears.
Perhaps we are no different. Perhaps angels are whispering to us constantly, but we are too distracted by the temporal world and our noisy egos. I want to believe that if we go seeking God that She will only be too happy to respond! A Course in Miracles, a powerful spiritual pathway lauded by teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, and Dr. Wayne Dyer, reminds us that “there are many answers you have already received but have not yet heard.”1 “Knock and the door shall be opened,” Jesus tells us. Maybe we just have to take our fingers out of our ears and find the right way to knock.
This book is a result of researching, training in, and practicing these new breakthrough methods—what might be called spiritual technologies—all over the country for the last fifteen years. I have seen them work for thousands of people both in individual sessions and in workshops. While some techniques have been around for decades and are rooted in years of research, others are relatively new. Many are well established and have extensive track records. All have been developed by leaders in the fields of psychology and spirituality. Each has tens of thousands of hours of clinical observations by trained professionals who would testify to their potential. And, yes, some
