Questions Answered and Answers Questioned: Conversations with a Spiritual Guide Drew Leder (pre-publication: do not share without the author’s permission) CONTENTS I. Introduction: Who am I? Who is the Guide? What is this Book? PART ONE: LIVING WELL Creating Joy: Attention, Appreciation, Abundance 1. Attention: Investment Strategies for the Mind 2. Thought: Metabolizing the Real 3. Mind-Sailing 4. Happiness: Retuning the Radio, Appreciating the Song 5. The Ego is Immature, Irrational, but Overcomeable 6. Good Dog, Bad Dog: Mastering the Mind 7. The Mind is a Display Window that Attracts Customers 8. Faith is Fulfilled: The Mother/Child Team 9. Beyond Trust and Faith…Assurance 10. Self-Love is the Window Through Which God’s Love Shines Dealing with Difficult Emotions 11. Anxiety: Calming the Barking Dog 12. Anxiety: Comforting the Child 13. Anxiety: The Unheard Messenger 14. Fear: To Whom Do You Grant Power? 15. Anger and Anxiety: Accepting, Witnessing, Channeling, Enjoying i 16. Frustration: What to (Un)do About It? 17. Anger: Choosing to Make Yourself Soft 18. Weathering Your Emotional Weather 19. The Meat and the Stewpot (Emotional Versus Spiritual Growth) 20. Dream Problems Only Dissolve When You Wake Up Living With Others in a Challenging World 21. Disappointments and God-Appointments 22. Are Children a Burden or Blessing? 23. Don’t Try Harder, Try Easier 24. Self-Esteem: Avoiding Others’ Projections 25. Listening Beyond Positions and Op-positions 26. The World is a Dark Stage 27. The Troubles of the World: How Not to be Overcome 28. War: The Horror of the Unreal Pain, Illness, Aging: The Body and Beyond 29. Pain Doesn’t Have to be that Painful 30. Medications: Sin or Self-care? 31. Physical Pain and the Intact Covenant 32. Physical Healing: Our Stories and Dialogues 33. The Aging Body and the Timeless Self 34. Seeing Through Illusions 35. Who Am I? The Self Beyond All Mirrors ii Living From the Heart 36. Head and Heart: A Landlubber and a Ship’s Captain 37. A Net Catches Fish, Not the Ocean 38. Designing a Proper Universe 39. The Heart is a Flip Phone 40. Death and the Timeless 41. Heartbreak and Beyond PART TWO: REALMS OF REALITY Other Dimensions: Death and the “Subtle Plane” 42. Death (and Enlightenment): Getting Off the Hook 43. Others Died? Other-Sided 44. Our Living Conversation with the Dead 45. Reincarnation IS 46. Astral World: What You Want is What You Get 47. Realms of Reality: Amusement Parks and Planetariums 48. ESP: To Intuit by Getting Into-It 49. Out-of-Body (and In-the-Body) Experiences 50. Eighty-Eight Keys and the Music of Karma The Way the World Works: Twelve Lessons 51. Lesson #1: The Room in Which All is Related 52. Lessons #2-3: Bursting the Bubble-World iii 53. Lessons #4-6: The Game Unfolds 54. Lessons #7-8: Remembering What You Already Know 55. Lessons #9-10: The Benevolent Universe 56. Lessons #11-12: You Cannot Be Alone We Are Part of the Mind of God 57. The Creation Beyond Destruction 58. The Mother Ship and its Probes (God and Us) 59. God Doesn’t Care (The Impartial Referee) 60. The Bottomless Mind of God 61. Avatar World: Befriending and Expressing the Divine 62. Physics and the Garden of Eden 63. Matter and Spirit: Pushing Off and Penetrating Time and Eternity: The Evolving Universe 64. The Big Birth 65. Ocean Waves: Time and Eternity 66. Perceiving Perfection: The Is-ness Behind the Business 67. Buddhas and Bicycles: The Universe Awakens 68. Evolution: The Scientific “How” and the Religious “Why” Coda: How Do I Know this Spiritual Stuff is Real? 69. The Quarrel Between the Mind and the Soul iv Appendix One: Hari’s Worldview Appendix Two: Who Are You? — The Guide Responds Appendix Three: A Philosophical Postscript — The Universe Re-Members Appendix Four: A Note on the Preparation of this Book Bibliography v Introduction: Who am I? Who is the Guide? What is this Book? A funny thing happened a few years ago. I started communicating with an inner spiritual voice, or as some would call it, a spirit-guide. Not that funny you might say — there are many authors, teachers, and just plain ordinary people who claim to have experienced that kind of communication. But it was funny to me: funny-peculiar, not funny-ha-ha, as I used to explain the difference to my children. Here I was, scientifically trained with an M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine with a Ph.D. in Philosophy, a professor for twenty-two years at Loyola University Maryland. Not the kind of person who is supposed to be talking with a spirit-guide, a seemingly disincarnate being from another realm. My mind is trained, and is now used to train others, in careful thought and logical analysis. I am a big believer in the power of the scientific world-view. Yet I also couldn’t deny my experiences. Experiences of a spiritual sort had been happening to me for over twenty years. They particularly began back when I joined a Twelve Step program (the program used in Alcoholics Anonymous, and other such fellowships) for multiple compulsive problems. When I was age eighteen to twenty my mother died of breast cancer, and my brother and my father both committed suicide. Such harrowing events, as well as preceding traumas and, perhaps, constitutional predispositions, left me something of a nervous wreck. While successful on the outside I was disturbed within by intense anxiety, guilt, low self-esteem, and a tendency to bleak, depressive moods where I dwelled as much in the land of death as with the living. The Twelve Steps, along with therapy, and other forms of inner work and spiritual practice, helped me to overcome, or at least better cope with such problems. The Steps also vi triggered a series of sometimes quiet, sometimes dramatic, spiritual experiences which led me to belief in a Higher Power. (Some of this is recounted in other books I’ve authored.) In accord with mystics of religions the world over, I have come to view this Power as inside myself, as well as saturating the outer world. I look within for Higher Consciousness but have also prayed to and talked with God as if he/she were another. I’m happy to mine the riches of many spiritual traditions and methods without worrying too much about defining my religious “brand.” (For the record, I’m currently a Jewish Quaker who teaches Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism at a Catholic college.) Still this spirit-guide thing was a new and deeply weird development. It started when I first contacted a “medium.” Again, not a typical thing for me to do, skeptic that I am. Perhaps because of the premature deaths of my closest family members I have long had a passion to know more of what death is, and whether one survives, individually, or as part of an eternal Mind. Can one know what life is, and whether it has any meaning, without also exploring death? I was intrigued to discover that a Psychology professor who I had known when at Yale University as an undergraduate, had become intensely interested in such matters and attempted a rigorous scientific study of the claims of certain mediums to contact the dead.1 Gary Schwartz, Ph.D. from Harvard, professor at Harvard and Yale (now at University of Arizona), with many prestigious appointments, positions, and grants, and he’s taking this stuff seriously? I was intrigued. I contacted one of the mediums, untrained, unprofessional, but who performed quite impressively in Gary’s book. On a phone appointment she told me at length, while I transcribed her words, about different family members from whom she received images and 1 The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Evidence of Life After Death, by Gary Schwartz with William L. Simon. Note: Full citations to all books mentioned by myself and the guide are provided in a bibliography at the end. vii communications. At her suggestion I kept almost entirely silent during the call so as not to cue her responses. Though there were occasional mysteries, or perhaps mistakes, I was rather “blown away” by the power, specificity and accuracy of what she shared — how could she know all that? At the end of the two-hour conversation she said, “By the way, you don’t really need me. You can do this on your own.” (For me that added to her credibility because she was not trying to hook a future customer — quite the opposite.) She recommended a book about contacting one’s own spirit-guide.2 Rather half-heartedly I bought it and tried out its method. The short form: it worked. Though I had only a vague visual impression of someone wearing a white robe, I started distinctly hearing a voice within my mind identifying itself as “Harry.” “Harry?” I thought. What kind of a name is that for a spirit-guide? Hari was the slightly corrected version I heard.3 I quickly found that I could ask Hari whatever I wished, and I would immediately hear forming in my mind an answer, one which utilized precise language, metaphors, parables, clarifications, and explanations concerning issues I had been struggling with for years. Hari provided wise counsel on matters both personal and metaphysical. For the most part I talked with him in front of the computer so I could take down immediately and preserve his answers. My fingers raced to keep up. As a writer, it made sense that for me such spiritual communion might best flow forth in written form.