Life is School

The following excerpted from forthcoming Morning Star’s Seven Steps to Spiritual Awakening, The Small Book of Love: A Mindful Guide to Love, Life, and Unity During and After the Pandemic.

Life is School

This pandemic is an excellent time to ponder your life’s journey and journal about it. Focus on the times when you made a major life decision. And what came from that and what would have been the alternative path in your life. For instance, did you take a job or entered a profession because of money or pressure from others, such as parents? Did you marry someone not for love, but for family reasons, money, prestige, and/or security? Be honest with yourself.

The most pivotal point in our life and the decision came on a sacred mountaintop in Japan in 1987:

While I jetted off to Japan on a spiritual and warrior pilgrimage known as a musha shugyo, my wife was back in Maine preparing our home to be sold. Three years prior, my father had passed over at a very young age. He was only fifty-eight and had built over many years a successful small business. Being the only child, my mother was lonely and kept reminding me that I was the only child. Continuously, since my father had passed over, she had been pressuring my wife and I to “come back home” and take over the business.

Ah, she was using society’s rules: be responsible, make lots of money, work for works sake, and the lure of retirement – the Great American Dream. And all wrapped up in a pretty package of guilt. Ironically, guilt^[i] is usually not a button pusher for me. But still, my wife and I decided to move back to our hometown in Maryland and take over the business. The United States Senate was one of my wellness clients and I rationalized that I would be closer and wouldn’t have to travel all the way from Maine to Washington D.C.

But then again, guilt is not one of my rules of life, nor is money for retirement. The magic of Kōyasan—the joy of its peacefulness and its power of nature, this sacred mountain and my own innate spiritual, philosophical and esoteric self—led me to another realization and a life changing decision. Did this realization come in a vision or a dream? Far from it; it came in my everyday present moment of wakefulness as – I know things. And the decision: we were not moving.^[ii]

This decision not to move led to a few of the following adventures Far Traveling:

Far traveling, wandering to distant lands into the unknown, is necessary for awakening and spiritual power. A far traveler begins and then knows spirit of place. In other words, a far traveler is a spiritual pilgrim ever seeking the mysterium tremendum, the awe-inspiring mystery of the unknown. The blood-pulsing passion of life is found at the edge of the unknown. Far traveling is not vacation. It is not traveling to a place just because it is the “in thing,” as it is to go to Iceland, and years ago, sadly, Machu Picchu. A far traveler goes on holiday, or holy day, and is not a tourist but an adventurer, a pilgrim of spirit on a journey of self-knowledge. Pilgrimage means going out and finding something. And that something equates to many things: our true self, compassion, love of self and nature, and accepting and understanding our self and others not like us. In other words, you will learn about yourself and others not like you. And this will grow your compassion and empathy.

In forty years of far traveling, Sher and I have experienced things that seen mythic and the story line from an Indian Jones adventure movie: my vision of the star and hearing the voice from heaven; the blazing red eyes of a long-dead monk; gigantic pillars of light—angels—and glowing gigantic green rocks that grew from small ones; spirit encounters on the battlements of an old Welsh castle, and with an awakened dragon-spirit in a Cornish cave; spirit dancing in the smokehouses of British Columbia; downing bottles of posh (cane alcohol or what I call shamanic white lightning) in a night-long ceremony in the highlands of Mexico with a Zinacantec (Bat) shaman; receiving a message from a spirit-man at midnight outside the sacred city of Teotihuacán; being clawed by a jaguar shape-shifter under a pyramid in the Yucatan jungles; knowing Oneness after a descending spirit exorcism at midnight in front of a mausoleum on the sacred mountain of Kōyasan, Japan; chased by killer bees after almost dying—my death initiation—on a mountain peak in Peru; a hungry Hawaiian spirit, the flying meatloaf; a long-dead Northwest Coast sea serpent; a Japanese succubus; the gate-keeping dwarf of Machu Picchu; the “hidden ones” of Iceland; the Yakuza and the wounded vet, and so many other experiences. These tales are told within our memoirs.

[i] I am not motivated or burdened by guilt in this lifetime, but I would discover much later in life that I was carrying great guilt within my heart and soul from a previous lifetime.

[ii] Husfelt, Tequila and Chocolate, The Adventures of the Morning Star and Soulmate, 60.