Who I am is not very important to most of the people who come to this website. What is important, though, is how I know that what I’m sharing here is true, since many of the things I am saying are completely conflict with what almost everyone believes. For some, most of its contents will strike them as intuitively obvious. These people have no need to read the rest of this rather long page, although they might find it interesting anyway. For others, this site’s contents may seem so outrageous that they will dismiss it as ridiculous. Most likely, they will not gotten even this far in reading what it contains.
This article is primarily for those people who may be intrigued by this site’s name, or who have been attracted to one of its articles, or who came here on someone else’s recommenndation, and who want to decide if I somehow have access to useful insights. This fairly long and somewhat detailed article is is written so you might know my state of mind and my motivations as events ocurred that radically changed my view of the world and our place in it.
Even from a very young age I found I was able to look beneath the surface of very complicated situations and find important concepts that helped to explain the complexity. I excelled in mathematics and the sciences, winning contests and awards without much effort. I had no idea why I had these abilities, but they led me to conclude that I must hve been given them to do something important and useful with them. I had no real idea what this something was that I so deeply felt I was supposed to accomplish. I just assumed that if I searched for it with enough effort, I would find out what it was in time. I have always been concerned about how many people are suffering from poverty and violence all around me, so I also came to assume that my abilities would help me understand the many causes of all this suffering, and help point the way toward easing it.
Early on I concluded, as most scientists of the time believed, that you could understand everything that happened in the universe if you completely understood the behaviour of subatomic particles. The reasoning was that the physics of these interactions would explain chemistry completely, chemistry would explain the biology of living organisms, and understanding biology would explain the psychology of human behaviour. My plan became to understand mathematics and physics as deeply as possible to form the foundation of a better understanding of the problems of the world.
Beyond motivating me to set this goal for my life, my abilities lured me into a kind of intellectual arrogance. In high school I applied to only one college, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, since I believed it was the pre-eminent college of science in America, and the MIT leadership would certainly accept me with all my honors and accomplishments. I had numerous scholarship offers from other schools, but I just threw them in the trash. Toward the end of the summer after my senior year, though, I got a letter of rejection from MIT. I managed to find one letter with a full schloarship offer, from Michigan Sate University, so I called them, accepted their offer and headed to MSU to enroll with mathematics and physics as my dual major. To make things even more difficult, I found out during the admission process that the MSU scholarhip offer was void, since I had failed to list MSU as my first choice in colleges on my National Merit Scholarship application (as stated in fine print on the bottom of my award letter).
I was so arrogant about my intellectual abilities that I didn’t think I needed to attend my college classes even though I enrolled in all the most advanced classes available to me. I played bridge with friends most of the night, slept most days, and read my textbooks in the two or three days prior to tests. I actually did well for a while, but toward the end of my freshman year, my grades were falling. I had missed far too much using this foolish strategy.
I started my sophomore year with a new resolve to attend all my classes and complete all my course work, and I knew I could repair the damage to my career plans from my behavior during my freshamn year. But then my life took a major turn. I was dating a woman who became severely depressed and suicidal. I had asked her why she was os terrified of her father, especially when he came to visit, usually unannounced. It turned out he had been raping her for years and that is why he would visit her at school. I talked my parents into taking her in back in Pittsburgh to get her away from her father. Over the ensuing months, that didn’t work out well and I dropped out of school to come back to Pittsburgh and work things out. Eventually, Emily joined the US Air Force to get away from her father and I joined to avoid being drafted into the army to fight in the Jungles of Vietnam. Dropping out of school cost me my draft deferment.
The Air Force trained me in civil engineering and gave me orders to go for on the job training at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio. There I met a civilian co-worker who told me a story in confidence that would eventually, about 20 years later, completely turn my view the world and my life upside down. She was an older woman with severe arthritis and she told me of her expereince when her heart stopped on the operating table while having her right hip replaced. We were alone when she told me, and she said she had never told anyone else, and she was not sure why she was feeling so complelled to tell me. She remembered floating up out of her body and looking down on it from the ceiling as her surgeon shocked her body with a couple paddles. She then floated through a dark tunnel to eventually meet with a loving man at the end of the tunnel that she was sure was Jesus. He asked her if she would return to earth since she had more things to accomplish, she agreed and she woke up after surgery.
This was about two decades before reports of what are now called “near death experiences” were written about or reported on. I knew that Mary, my co-worker who was telling me this, would never lie about anything, but it did not fit at all with what I believed about the way the world and the human mind worked. I just filed it in a back drawer of my mind and went on with my life. As my on the job training came to an end at WPAFB, I received orders for Tan San Nhut air base in Saigon Vietnam.
Toward the end of my year’s tour of duty in Vietnam, I collapsed on the street on base in Saigon, and was taken to the base dispensary by a Vietnamese taxi driver who found me. Later, I read in my medical records that my temperature was over 105 degrees and they ran 4 liters of IV fluid into me before I regained consciousness. After several days, my fever resolved, and they thought I was well enough to send me back to work. I wasn’t well at all. I was too confused to do any kind of work. I was walking around in some kind of delerium. One of the things I vaguely remember was wandering off the base into Saigon, having no idea where I was going, or even who I was. The next thing I fairly clearly remember, I was strapped to a litter in an Air Force medical evacuation jet landing for refuelling in the Phillipines. Apparently I lost consciousness again and the next thing I can recall was being in a hospital bed back at WPAFB (where I had done my on the job training in civil engineering).
About 6 months later, when I was discharged from the hospital with a disability retirement from the Air Force, I was a mess. I had what I now know to be a post-traumatic stress disorder, was severely depressed, and I was still recovering from what was, most likely, an unrecognized case of meningo-encephalitis. I recuperated back at home in Pittsburgh with my family, and eventually re-enrolled at MSU to re-take classes I had nearly failed and start a new major emphais for my studies.
I could have restarted my physics studies and carried on with that plan as a physicist, but a more compelling goal had taken its place. After my experiences in Vietnam, and all the heartache and traumas I witnessed, I wanted to try to determine why human beings go to war and kill each other en mass. I reasoned that an in-depth study of the social sciences was my best chance of answering this question. I began to study anthrpology, archeology and psychology. But, as was the case for my exstensive exploration of mathematics and physics, several years of study of the social sciences convinced me that this approach was also a dead end, I was no closer to answers about why we go to war with each other than we I started.
It was then, with the help of my wife, Jean, that I made another change in my exploration of how best to use my natural abilities for the good of others. Since my efforts in understanding the causes of mankind’s problems by studying the sciences was not making any realistic progress, I decided to give up the search and do something concrete with my life to help others. But what was this to be? I vividly remembered the satisfaction I felt while volunteering to help in orphanges in Vietnam. The orphans were always very sick and the funds to care for them was almost non-existent. I found they were very malnourished from the lack of protein in their diet and had chronic diarrhea from water stored in the hot sun without any disinfectents. I found that simple things like just adding right amount of Chlorox to the orphanage water storage tank made a huge difference in the orphans’ well-being and comfort.
As I considered my success working with the Vietnamese orhpans, I began to consider going back to school to study nutrition and then to go to medical school, but I realized that my checkered college career and my many changes in plans would make getting into medical school just a pipe dream. I mentioned the idea to Jean thinking she would probably just laugh at the fooloshness of it all. But she didn’t, in fact, she said it was a wonderful idea. Without her encouragement, I don’t know what I would be doing right now, but I enrolled in Drexel University’s nutrition science program, graduated with highest honors and somehow managed to get accepted at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine.
Over the next decade or so, I completed my medical degree at Penn, three years of residency in Pittsburgh, and moved my family to Albany, Georgia to practice medicine as an internal medicine specialist with a subspecialty in nutrition. My life as a physician was indeed very rewarding and I could see how I was helping my pateints.
Then, as I was driving down the Highway 19 to work one day, my world was turned inside out. I usually listened to music on my car radio when driving, but for some reason, on this day, my radio was tuned to a talk show. The host of the show was interviewing Betty Jean Eadie about her newly published book: Embraced by the Light. The story Betty Jean was telling, of how she floated up out of her body after her heart had stopped she lay in the hospital, how she watched her lifeless body from a vantage point above it, and how she travelled down a dark tunnel to meet with a loving man at the end of the tunnel.
This story hit me like a bolt out of the blue. It was almost exactly the same story my co-worker, Mary, had confided to me back in 1970, long before this kind of “near death experience” was publically reported on or discussed. There was no way this could have been some kind of highly unlikely coincidence, the stories were so incredibly similar! I also knew there was no way Mary could have heard this kind of story from someone else. I pulled my car off the road and listened intently to everything Betty Jean had to say, and that evening I purchased a copy at a local bookstore, reading the entire book in one sitting.
The messages these two reports carried changed almost everything I believed about the world, who we are and what our purpose is in our lives. For the first time, I had incontrovertable proof that a spiritual reality not only exists, but as these two stories demonstrated, proof can be found while we are still alive. They also demonstrated to me that who we are exists independently of our body, since our conscious essence can leave our body and gather information form other physical locations as well as from the spiritual reality itself. Ideas about the spiritual nature of my soul, which I had always taken on faith from religious teachings, became a much more tangible knowing. I also had learned that we always exist in two realities at once, both the physical and the spiritual, and I learned that what happens in our lives is important to the spiritual reality that is our true home, and everything we do has implications for this spiritual reality.
I now knew that my past beliefs were the product of a mental block that could be described as a belief in a false duality. What I mean by this is that all of existence was conceived by me to be in one of two completely separate realities. While I am alive, I am participating in the physical world. After I die, I imagined that I will move out of the physical and into the spiritual realm of my soul. As a result of these stories, though, I saw that we always exist in two realities at the same time. Not only are we spiritual beings that have temporarily attached to a physical body, our spiritual nature means that we have access to spiirtual sources of information and spiritual abilities that operate outside the physical limitations of material particles and forces. These abilities are very subtle and easily obscured and hidden by our physical sensations, but they are always potentials for us to access..
After having experienced this flash of insight and the new understanding that comes with it, I went back and began to revisit information I had acquired throughout my life. I looked again at research like those experiments that had disclosed anomalies in quantum mechanics research. They showed how human knowledge about an exerimental set-up investigating quanum mechanical principles actually changes the path of physical particles. When I was studying nuclear physics, I had never been able to fit this into my understanding, but suddenly I could. I also explored a vast amount of research into human paranormal abilites like remote viewing, mental influences on physical events and healing by the intent of a human healer without any physical contact. These research studies not only made a lot more sense now, they also were confirming the implications of the reports from those who told of their near death experiences. Once I was freed from the mental block of false dualism, all these things made much more sense, and fit nicely into an expnded view of reality.
Besides reviewing this massive amount of scientific research reports, I also took another careful look at the sacred literature of some of our most widely accepted and popular religions. I even re-read the Bible from cover to cover. What this search confirmed to me was that sacred wisdom literature is almost always speaking through metaphors to describe subtle concepts that are difficult for our 3-D minds to grasp, and most religious doctrine appeared to be different attempts to capture core spiritual truths. I now understood the metaphors used in this literature much better, and saw how the teachings were very compatible with what I had learned for these near death experience stories.
Another rich source of information that feels intuitively accurate and is completely consistent with the anomalous research findings I just presented, as well as the world’s wisdom traditions, is what is popularly known as “channelling.” In my view, some of the best of these channellers are able to tap into information based on spiritual knowledge otherwise not easily available to us. As I see it now, this is exactly how the sacred literature of the world arrived here in the first place. Back when they were disclosing their insights, though, they were called prophets.
This site is about sharing some of these personal discoveries, but more importantly, it is also about helping readers connect to others who are also asking important questions, and are not afraid to carefully consider ideas which are not popular. With this site, I see myself like a sort of fishing guide on some large, rustic, uncharted lake. Just like most fishing guides are passionate about helping others find fish, I am passionate about helping others find their own indisputable evidence of an unseen reality that lies beneath our physical world and explains a lot about what is happening within it. Little discoveries about this unseen reality are a little bit like finding fish. You find insights here and there, usually little bits at a time.
But none of what is really important here is about me; it is about who we all are in our deepest and most fundamental essence. We are discovering that our minds are much more powerful than we have ever considered possible. We are also finding that our universe is much more tightly organized and much more benevolently intended then we have ever dared to realize. To me, the evidence in support of these contentions is both compelling and incredibly important to all of us. There is a whole lot of truth being constantly uncovered that we can share with each other.
I hope this site fulfills even a little of the promise that I believe it may hold for its readers. My efforts will be richly rewarded if you find something here that even helps a little in transforming your life for the better.
Much love and my best wishes, and appreciation, for all who read this,
Chuck
Science and Spirit 