I am a practically minded psychiatrist who is always interested in finding better ways to solve everyday problems. I was raised in traditional Protestant home and was so attracted to spirituality that I became a religion major at college. By my senior year at Oberlin College, however, I had met many people with no spiritual beliefs who were far more ethical than the religious people I grew up with and found that my childhood beliefs no longer connected me to a spiritual reality. People's beliefs seemed so varied and highly personal that I concluded they must be made up by men and women to satisfy their psychological needs. And since psychology seemed to have far better answers to my questions about life, I set aside religion and went to Cornell Medical College. I became a psychatrist.
For twenty years, I had no belief in a higher power or spiritual forces. Then, one day, I received my first spiritual message while on vacation in Rio de Janeiro--a rather serendipitous experience with a leaf that struck me as a clear sign that another dimension to life did exist and was reaching out to me. I didn't know at the time if it were spiritual sor not, but I wanted to find out more about the forces causing this experience. Since as a psychiatrist I had learned to take a rational approach to all kinds of human experience, I naturally approached my spiritual experiences in this same rational way. Over the past twenty-five years, I have followed a trail of messages that have taught me how spiritual forces work and what makes a thought, feeling or action spiritual. I have learned that spiritual forces are still active in everyday life where they help and guide us--if we pay attention to them and learn to use our better educated minds to decode what they are telling us.
As I began to decode how they were guiding me, I began to write what I had learned. It wasn't long before I saw how limited and fragile they were and how--just as my more purely psychological experiences-- they only made sense when properly placed in the context of others' experiences. Having been a religion major in college and studied the world's religions, I was aware of the wealth of expert opinion that we had about the spiritual dimension. Having been unable to stay connected with it for twenty years myself, I was also aware of how easy it was to overlook the feedback of spiritual forces that is constantly coming my way. By learning to decode my own messages, however, I learned how to use our more rational kind of thinking that we all use today to follow the guidance that my messages were giving. I saw that the solution to the difficulty that many of us have in decoding the spiritual feedback that comes our way is by learning how to learn from each other--as peers. This led to my creating this website where we can all all learn from each other and contribute what we have learned.
We each have something to offer. One of my strong points is organization and discipline. To make it easier for you to more systematically examine your own experiences and draw upon what others' have learned to decode your messages, I wrote my book and set up this website. I hope that it will encourage you to think more systematically about the experiences on which your own beliefs are based.
