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Parallel Paths to Personal Growth

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

List of Figures............................................viiAcknowledgments............................................xiii1. Introductory Comments...................................12. The Search for Something Beyond.........................63. A Better Way of Being...................................104. The Experience of Intuitive Moments.....................195. What Is Personal Growth?................................486. The Parallel Paths......................................577. Integrating the Two Paths...............................658. More about the Parallel Paths...........................749. The Natural and the Spiritual...........................8410. Why Does Anything Exist?...............................9311. The Significance of Uses...............................10212. Sacred Service.........................................11013. Considering What You Know..............................11914. The Challenge of Personal Growth.......................133Notes......................................................141References.................................................151Index......................................................155

Chapter One

This book has, in many ways, been a more challenging attempt than any other writing task that I have taken on over the years. There are two reasons why this is so. The first is that what I have to say is likely to be considered by some, especially my colleagues, to include a bit of inappropriate science bashing. I will assure you right now that this has not been my aim. It is indeed so, however, that I will be sharing my personal views of what seem to be significant drawbacks to an exclusively empirical approach to knowledge. This is not to deny the incredible advances that have been achieved in what we know about the natural world and the cosmos at large through utilization of the scientific method. The attainments of science, particularly in recent years, have been remarkable, and those achievements and their applications in every branch of human endeavor are there for everyone to see and to profit from. Nevertheless, it has become clear to me that science's tools are not the best fit for every focus of inquiry, particularly those areas that are considered spiritual or metaphysical in nature.

The second reason that I have felt challenged by offering this little book is that it was my decision to include several episodes from my personal life in order to illustrate how subjective experience, especially intuition and unanticipated shifts in consciousness, may influence one's views about the world and the meaning one gives it. By making use of several true-life anecdotes or vignettes, I hope to show how a very ordinary person may arrive at new perceptions of the things that are felt to be very important and relevant. And while anyone is free to argue with the personal opinions that are suggested or how valid they might be, it will be difficult for anyone to challenge the facts of the experiences themselves and how those experiences influenced the way one thinks about the world and deal with it.

Furthermore, I am quite sure that the things I personally have gone through in my inner travels of thought and feeling are at least comparable, and probably very similar, to what many others have experienced and struggled to understand. I make this latter statement because, in my career as a psychologist and teacher, I have worked intimately with my fellow human beings—males and females, young and old—for many decades. During this time, many individuals' personal histories were shared with me—enough to confirm that their uncertainties and need to know more about life's meaning have closely mirrored mine.

Since early childhood, I have been a prolific reader who delighted in learning about the natural sciences, modern and early history, the arts, and more. Knowledge of all sorts was fascinating to me, and I acquired a lot of it from books and occasionally from my schoolteachers. But gradually, it became clear that I also could be my own source of knowledge, the knowledge being that which occasionally comes unbidden from within. And although it initially was difficult to accept as valid the subjective insights that I experienced, I quickly discovered that they were extremely important and should be trusted.

As a result of such intuitive episodes, my view of the world and my notions about what life is all about have changed markedly over time. In particular, many troublesome ideas about what we are and what is real came into my awareness, and these caused both wonder and wide-eyed astonishment the more I considered them. It was as if I was being prompted to wake up, to realize that everything I thought I knew was nothing more than a distorted and incomplete picture of the things that existed. I also recognized how odd it was that existence, an observable fact, is so routinely taken for granted and that, while each of us expresses it in our own fashion, we seldom, if ever, acknowledge or even seem to recognize the magnitude of the miracle that existence represents. But through intuitive glimpses, I began to sense a grand significance in the phenomenon of being—my own as well as that of everything around me—and I felt compelled to understand that circumstance more deeply. I wanted answers.

Obviously our reactions to things that exist result from our attraction to them, the repugnance we feel toward them, or our indifference concerning them. My questions, however, were not primarily about why we might hold such attitudes but about how to explain existence itself. For instance, does existence, which we commonly refer to as presence (in the case of inanimate objects) and life (when alluding to animate or living forms), simply boil down to a bunch of capricious actions and reactions of random vibrating particles, some of which eventually have become organized into complex arrangements of matter that interact with one another? Were the very first things to occur in nature the result of a chance event or incident, or has the occurrence of each natural object, form, or living entity ultimately been caused by some intentional action? If the latter is the case, is the purpose a benevolent one? Could existence follow from some mysterious pull, perhaps emanating from a teleological influence that is yet to be identified? And finally, do such questions matter at all? There is little likelihood that queries such as I have listed can ever be answered correctly in a mortal lifetime. And even if one or more of them actually were to be answered correctly and completely, could we know that we actually were dealing with an ultimate "truth"? I doubt it. But the search for the elusive answers nevertheless continues.

Certainly, many great scientists and philosophers have made their careers and their marks in history by pursuing such issues. This book I am offering you, however, is not for them. It is for the ordinary woman or man who, like myself, leads a more or less conventional life—goes to school, earns a living, toils, plays, thinks, wonders, and asks questions—this latter sometimes in an unsophisticated, although sincere, manner.

I am firm in my conviction that the questions posed above are highly relevant to every individual's personal growth, a term yet to be...