Transcription
Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright
Chapter 28: The Impersonal Life
I was talking to a friend yesterday, and somehow, out of the blue, Elvis came up. It was a bit odd, as I was never really an Elvis fan. Years ago, when I was a teen in the 60s, but always honored that his music was around, I sensed that he was an anomaly, talented in a new way the world had not seen. And he was an entertainer known globally by a mere one song about a hound dog. It occurred to me, in deeper thinking, that a handful of enlightened musicians who had sought after some kind of god-knowing or enlightened thinking have become vastly world-renowned mega figures. In fact, like the Beatles and the Maharishi and Elvis, just to begin the list. Maybe he had gotten some incredible divine juice; maybe he was just lucky. I don't know, but he seemed to have had some powerful awakening, and I didn't, or so I thought. And I was always looking for that.
One thought led to another, and just the other day I find myself remembering a book that Elvis cited as one of his favorite spiritual books. Elvis sang many gospel songs, and his roots in music were actually gospel, as he declared his alliance with Christ openly much of the time. It always seemed odd to me to declare an alliance with Christ and be addicted to drugs simultaneously, but it was not for me to judge. I guess that's why they call it an addiction, because no matter what, it's hard to overcome it. I could only wonder about it, as I had never been addicted to anything in my life. As I said, Elvis had found a spiritual book he considered special to him, a book called *The Impersonal Life*. He revered this as revolutionary to his own life and kept it with him much of the time, or so I'm told.
It was from that conversation with my friend earlier that I started the flashback to something spiritual as it related to Elvis. Somewhere stuck into the sticky drama of my life around the late 1990s, I was sinking into a despair in my world. As I sat alone outside my woodland house, I was wondering why I was struggling so hard to financially survive, having health challenges, battling all the elements of Mother Nature without a partner, on a ridge top high in the backwoods of Tennessee. How did it come to this? How did I choose this? Why had I gotten divorced? How was I going to make it as a single mother all by myself? Why did I never feel well? And how could I take care of this house and property for my kids' future? I was clenching onto my land and clenching my jaw all the time. I had very dark moments in those days and wondered what the point was of even being here, of even existing. Life was excruciatingly disappointing to me. I could not shake the fact that my grandfather had solved his own problem of existence by ending his post-stroke life at the age of 92 in a small town in Iowa with a World War II rifle. No one knew he had ammo for it. Yes, there are many ways to get out of here; none of them really appealed to me, and I would sit and cry at times to just release the anxiety I felt about the dilemma of being human. I could not assess what it was all about. Most folks I knew seemed much happier than I, and I didn't know how to reach for it or what it actually was, no matter how spiritual my path had been.
One day, back in that long segment of a desperate time, I was alone in the living room, and my eyes were swollen from crying, and I was trying to discern if I could even get up to go get some clean eggs. I felt drained and hopeless. I had been wiping my nose on my sleeve for hours. I looked across the room, and there was a book on the shelf—by eight shelves of books—that seemed to be blinking at me, on and off, like a light. What the heck? I got up and walked over to it, pulled it off the shelf. It was funny because it was very small; it was just squished in there by the bigger kids on the book block, but it was fearless; it was blinking. It was entitled *The Impersonal Life*. I had no recollection ever of getting that book at all. I sniffed a big sniff back up into my head and sat down on the sofa, book in hand, curling to see what this book was. I forgot all about Kleenex, as I had suddenly stopped crying. Something felt like magic at that moment; something was speaking to me.
I had inherited boxes of books a couple of years earlier from a friend who had a partner who was closing her spiritual bookstore in Nashville. He had her books in his attics and was cleaning it out and thought of me to be the beneficiary of them all. At the time, I was delighted, as I was an avid—what we might call—seeker, but knew it could take a lifetime to read all of them. This one, as many others, I had not yet gotten around to. Here are the first couple of paragraphs I read: To you who, through long years and much running to and fro, have been eagerly seeking in books and teachings, in philosophy and religion, for you know not what—truth, happiness, freedom, God—to you whose soul is weary and discouraged and almost destitute of hope; to you who many times have obtained a glimpse of that truth only to find, when you followed and tried to reach it, that it disappeared in the beyond and was but a mirage of the desert; to you who thought you had found it in some greater teacher, who was perhaps the acknowledged head of some society, fraternity, or religion, and who appeared to you to be a master, so marvelous was the wisdom he taught and the works he performed, only to awaken later to the realization that the master was but a human personality with faults and weaknesses and secret sins, the same as you, even though that personality may have been a channel through which were voiced many beautiful teachings which seem to you to be the highest truth—and here you are, soul weary and hungered and not knowing where to turn—to you I am come. Likewise to you who have begun to feel the presence of that truth within your soul and seek the confirmation of that which of late has been vaguely struggling for living expression within; yes, to all of you who hunger for the true bread of life, I am come. Are you ready to partake? Listen: I am you, the part of you who is and knows. I am your divine self.
And so there it was—something captivating that blinked to me from the shelf. It torqued me into a different direction of myself and caught me unaware and told me that I simply needed to remember who I am. I am not small and helpless, looking for assistance from an unattainable higher being I would never meet until I was dead, but part of the system and always in touch, not alone. I was always with the divine, whatever that is. I am it; I am close to God. It was profound for me; it was very profound for me at that moment. And I read the whole book in one sitting and was amazed at how I felt inside myself at the end—renewed, recovered. It did not feel like it was stealing anything precious from the conventional teachings about Jesus from my childhood at one church or another, nor was it something more outrageously beyond or more profound than anything I’d participated in while learning meditation and sitting with masters and teachers and gurus in various places around the world, but it was speaking to me in some new way.
I wanted some other people I knew to know how this book and thought I would do a search to find copies to give to a few friends. A week later, I started an informal search on the internet to see what I could find out about the author and the little magic book. The trouble was, Joseph Benner wrote—or should I say channeled—out this book about messages from God in 1916 and 1917, as copies of his handwritten notes indicated in the book—1917. My book copy was quite old and was in the 42nd edition in 1941. There was no email address on this, and there was no such thing as the internet when this book was written or published, obviously, and I had no idea how to easily contact Devors Publishing Company. In my mind, they were probably long gone. Devors Publishing—never heard of it. I found quite a few dead-end searches, and in time I gave up the hunt and moved on with my own personal fascination with it and let the thoughts of sharing it with others leave me.
In those days, I was in a healing practice with an MD. I did therapeutic body work all the way in town from my woods, and he had an office in my establishment. He would come and do intake appointments with new patients in this new private practice in alternative complementary medicine. That was after a day of teaching conventional medicine at the medical university. We were good friends and office mates, and he was married to Katie and lived in a small town about 20 minutes from my home in the boondocks. On one particular day, Katie called me to let me know a very good friend of theirs was coming across America on his motorcycle to visit them and to enjoy the countryside all the way from Los Angeles to Nashville. She invited me to come and meet him and thought I might really like him, so I filed it into the “maybe” file of my brain, continued on with my work week. It was never really big on gathering with people or meeting new people, as it turns out, but I told her I would certainly try. She seemed adamant.
During that time, I had a habit occasionally of coming home to the woods through my historic small town that my mailing address belonged to. I would just quietly sit for a while in the Episcopal church that was open to the public 24 hours a day. Somehow that fascinated me, and when I found out this historic and Civil War-era church was open to sit in at any hour, it became a frequent favorite place for me to reclaim myself from the day. I had not been a churchy person for many, many years, and as stated, I was no longer that interested in sitting with a large group of other humans at any time—no movie theaters, no ball games, no congregations. I had become a true recluse in the woods with my animals, and I found immense comfort there, but this just felt so nourishing. One single candle was lit every night above the altar, and on any random night I could pop in for a quick prayer and meditation. There was never one actual human body besides my own sitting around in the pews, but I felt there were many souls. I loved that, and I loved the feeling, the past, and the history of the church, which was once used as a jail for the prisoners taken nearby in the Battle of Franklin. Somehow the church managed to survive the trauma of war and this town’s main battle, which occurred just down the street back then. There was a habit of burning churches to the ground. I was grateful this little one-room chapel’s vibrant handmade stained-glass window had survived.
One particular night, I was sitting in the quiet in a pew after being in the clinic and in the middle of some floating thought. I remembered: I’m supposed to be at Katie and Doc’s to meet their friend from LA. Oh no. I excused myself from the pew to the invisible others, knowing I would be forgiven, and ran out to my car and called Katie. It was past dark and probably too late to drive the 35 minutes across the countryside to their house in our part of the country, but I wanted to check anyways, or give my apologies. She moved from the phone to ask Kenneth and came back to me: “No, that’s fine, come on over; he had passed along to her he would be up a while longer.” I kept driving and was getting tired and wondered, “What in the freaking frack am I doing? I need to be going home and going to bed; I’m just tired, tired.” But that voice that beckons me on always to some new thing of interest, or even beckons me away from danger, popped in and told me to keep going, so I did. I always listened to that voice above all; I really do. My eyes were darting, looking for deer shooting onto the road; they are my beloved animal guides, and I particularly don’t ever want to collide with one on the night highway. I was hoping that Katie and Doc and Kenneth all would still be awake when I got there around 10 o’clock.
When I arrived, I’d been embarrassed to be so late and not confessing. I had forgotten. Katie was tired, yawning, and about to hit the sack, and Doc had already turned in. Kenneth came out; she introduced us, and we gave each other a hug, which is my normal way, really—stranger or not. I have learned that a hug diminishes a lot of space between getting to know someone; hugs can be priceless medicine. He sat down with me, and I didn’t know what his age would be, but he looked to be in his late 60s, early 70s, and I wondered about him driving a motorcycle all the way from Los Angeles to Nashville and how he could be feeling about that now. He had a softness of being, and I felt as if I already knew him. He asked me a few questions about myself; I could tell immediately he was not a man of common words, and he would dive deeply into soul thoughts at a moment’s notice. As I took the opportunity to ask him more about himself, the two of us talked fairly hushed so as not to disturb the sleeping hosts. I discovered something astounding. “Kenneth, what is it that you do? What is your line of work?” He did not hesitate, and he answered, “I work for…for Devors Publishing Company.” I blinked; I had to put my hand over my mouth not to squeal out loud and wake others. “No, no, you do not,” I said in hushed staccato words. “Yes, I actually do,” he answered gently and a bit confused. Then all I could do was stutter: “I…I was looking for this…I mean this book…this little book…might have saved my life one day a while ago…I mean this little book is old, and it said it was published in the 1940s by Devors Publishing Company…I couldn’t find it anywhere I looked; I really did, but I couldn’t find it so I could give it to some other people…but that could not…could not be you…It is called *The Impersonal Life*. Do you know of it?” He smiled and said with certainty, “How many copies do you want?” I almost fainted. “Yes, yes, I need to get that book for others…Oh my gosh, this can’t be happening…really…this is amazing.” I was about to fall off the ledge of myself when I came to terms with the fact it was indeed happening. He would get me some copies, and I could just relax and be amused and grateful now as well. I knew this was going to be a fun story and a long list of stories that would someday tell.
We talked a while longer, but he was clearly ready for bed, as were our absent hosts. I wrote down my contact information as did he, and I left, driving back into my night to the woods, which was not that far away, especially when you are floating. Yes, it was different than when I arrived. Again, I realized I had been heard by someone or something greater than myself. How could this be a simple coincidence? An old, old book from a generation or war ago flashing unexpectedly at me from my shelf in a time of despair—about listening to God, then finding God within for me, then in a search seemingly unattainable, and a stranger to me who I almost forgot to seek out until something popped into my head and thrusted me over in my car on the highway to find him late at night—him, a stranger to me, driving thousands of miles on two wheels to end up in a tiny town in Middle Tennessee for a very brief meeting with me—in fact, only 30 minutes—to disclose he had the book I was seeking was almost unbelievable, but this is how I have learned to live my life: to trust the music of the words that waft in, to just listen, to always have an inner radio station turned on, and to have my cosmic or higher frequency station tuned in. I call it my “God station.” There is no other way to explain it to me. Others are out there transmitting, and we receive; we transmit, and others will receive. How much more beautiful can that get?
He indeed did send me a small collection of these tiny books in a padded envelope in due time, and I was able to give some people a copy to enjoy. I always keep my copy around, and I do enjoy opening it and finding passages that bring warmth to me from time to time. This experience of this book, *The Impersonal Life*, was just as much, if not more, about the acquisition of the book in this impossible scenario as about reading the book itself. It was a gentle refresher for me, a reminder to stay tuned, to stay in God, to always receive, to always transmit, and keep teaching others to do the same. The lesson in synchronicity is always at hand. And so you can speculate by now, as you have probably been reading some of my other short stories; they all have a similar theme: Trust, listen, love, tune your higher frequency station into God, and to what seems to be miracles. If I can do it, and I do it all the time, then you can do it too, no matter who you are. Ask for what you want and need; that must come to you. And don’t forget to have gratitude, and then share your abundance with others—it’s the most fun life game around.