A QUIET MIND

A Mystic Journey OUT of Insanity

By: Sean Blackwell

‘One million people commit suicide every year’
The World Health Organization

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All rights reserved, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any means,
electronic, mechanical photocopying, documentary, film or in any other format without
prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by
Chipmunkapublishing
PO Box 6872
Brentwood
Essex CM13 1ZT
United Kingdom

http://www.chipmunkapublishing.com

Copyright © Sean Blackwell 2008

Edited by Marc Wilson

ISBN 978-1-84747-516-9

Chipmunkapublishing gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

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To those of you who have been stamped BIPOLAR.
Your time will come.

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 Contents

Introduction 5


Part One
Rude Awakening 13

Part Two
The Struggle for Integrity 81

Part Three
Déjà Vu 131

Epilogue 153

Touched Souls 157

Thank You 172

Notes 173

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 Introduction

A few months before finishing this book, I decided that I would, most likely, adorn it
with the brilliant and highly original title, A Quiet Mind. I thought this title was a rather
pithy warning shot across the bow of the psychiatric establishment, which Dr. Kay Redfield
Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, firmly represents. And why not? It seemed to me
to be the perfect response to a book which has taken the world of bipolar disorder by
storm and, in the process, stripped countless people of hope for a truly better life,
medication free.

There was only one problem. I hadn’t actually read her book. In fact, I had been almost
avoiding it.

I mean, what was the point? Why did I need to read, in detail, how bipolar disorder is a
terrible mental illness with horrific ramifications for all involved? I’d already lived through
that. Why did I need to read how it was an incurable biological disease, like asthma, which
I have had since birth, when my own life experience said otherwise? The very idea of
reading her book left me feeling, well, constipated. But wherever I went, whenever I got
into conversations about bipolar disorder, that damn book would pop up!

Only when I decided to “steal” her title, did I actually choose to read her story. I couldn’t,
in good conscience, name my book A Quiet Mind without reading hers.

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However, before reading it I realized that, in order to be fair to her, I needed to organize
some sort of psychological truce with my own dark side. I basically scolded myself in
advance, the mother inside of me insisting that I “behave myself” with Dr. Jamison; that,
for $13.95, she has been nice enough to let me read her book and, in return, I would not
simply gloss over it, probing the book for flaws and weaknesses. And so off I went.

Not surprisingly, inviting her book into my life was, in many ways, an uncomfortable
experience. I often felt as if I were at one of Dr. KRJ’s magnificent dinner parties where
everyone is happy and gay (in the 1940’s sense of the word) and we would spend the night
sipping sherry, discussing poetry and listening to Mozart; a perfectly marvelous evening
during which I would casually glance at my watch every two minutes to see how much
longer I would have to endure her fine gathering of esteemed colleagues.

The one saving grace which gave me just enough inspiration to keep reading was that,
while An Unquiet Mind taught me nothing about bipolar disorder (or manic-depression, as
she refers to it), I did gain quite a bit of insight into who Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison was, as a
person. With that understanding, I was at least able to muster some level of compassion
for this woman as someone who has struggled for decades with her condition; albeit from
the painfully limited perspective of mainstream psychiatry.

I guess what made it easier was in learning just how overt our differences were. From
page one it became very clear that Dr. KRJ and I not only have different opinions on bipolar
disorder, but that we have lived all our lives in entirely different worlds. She was raised
among the top military brass of Washington, D.C. A self-proclaimed WASP, she reflects
longingly on the marvelous pageantry, romanticism and formality of her experiences at
cotillions and other events of high military society. “It was a small, warm, unthreatening,
and cloistered world,” she says.1

Born on March 27th 1966, I grew up in one of the sprawling, generic suburbs of Toronto,
Canada - Scarborough. Living on the somewhat humbler side of a rather WASPish
neighborhood, our immediate neighbors were Greek, Jamaican, Austrian, Native
Indian, German, Chinese, etc… Growing up, I felt rather estranged from the kids in my
neighborhood, as my brother, Glen, and I were both bussed out to a mostly Italian Catholic
school about 3 miles away.

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To my knowledge, none of my friends, either at school or in the neighborhood, had parents
with a university education. While my father, who spent almost his entire career in real
estate sales, was somewhat famous on the street for his ’74 Corvette Stingray and three-
piece suits, our environment was about as middle-class as you can get. In fact, the only
truly recognizable thing that consistently set us apart from the rest of our neighbors was that
we would take vacations almost every year which most families on my street would never
have even dreamed of. By the time I was 16, I had been to Disney World, Bermuda (three
times), Cuba, Hawaii and Jamaica. We also went skiing together every winter. During the
summer I would spend hours by our backyard swimming pool. Up until about the age of 10,
I thought we were rich. Looking back, I think we were, in the most important ways.

“I wish I had your parents,” was something I would hear from more than a few
childhood friends.

Dr. KRJ’s high school years were filled with nights of diligent studying, student council
participation and other resume building activities. Personally, good grades and popularity
came easy to me all the way through primary and secondary school. In fact, like her,
I had earned a reputation as being one of the “good kids” in the class, never causing a
problem, homework always done, that sort of thing. However, as I moved into the heart
of my teenage years, I started to tire of the never-ending series of hoops which we were
all required to jump through every year. I found the early years of Late Night with David
Letterman (which finished at 1:30am), my job at the grocery store (with shifts ending
at midnight) and weekends in Toronto’s after-hours clubs (12am-8am) to be far more
interesting than trying to get my B+ grades up to A’s. Obviously, my biggest challenge
back then was getting enough sleep! Approaching graduation, I was doing the absolute
minimum I needed in order to get into a “good” university. By that time, I was too busy with
my first real girlfriend to care about chasing grades.

Away from school, Dr. KRJ was discussing poetry and listening to the classical music
of centuries past. Meanwhile, I was delving into what would become the music, not of
my generation, but of the generation to come - Hip Hop and House. Her heroes were
Beethoven and Bach; mine were Afrika Bambaataa and Eric B. & Rakim.

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While these differences may seem rather superficial, they indicate a definite orientation
towards life. Dr. KRJ relished her “cloistered”, elite past as well as her rare female access to
the “old boys club” with its “good parking.”2 I found the more WASPish Canadian pastimes
to be tedious, boring and, above all, phony. Rather, I was always on the lookout for the
next big thing, the latest sound, another adventure. Being allowed to go downtown by
myself at the age of 12 was a real thrill; traveling alone to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia
at 20, even bigger.

In some ways my adventurous, exploratory attitude was motivated by a genuine

desire to escape my bland surroundings. While I always felt that my family was
special, I found normal, suburban life comfortable, but uninspiring. They didn’t call it
“Scarberia” for nothing. And, looking into the eyes of my tired, often exasperated
teachers, it didn’t look like the adult world was going to get much better. Peering at the
endless sea of comparatively lifeless, brooding adults around me, I would ask myself,

“What is going to happen to me, that is going to turn me into one of them?”

Perhaps in that question lies the biggest difference between us. I was always after the
bigger, deeper, picture. What most people accepted as “reality” left me slightly bewildered.
I was often perplexed by how the vast majority of people I met would speak their opinions
about things with such factual certainty, whereas I was barely sure of anything. Most
people, especially adults, just had a, “Well, that’s just the way life is,” attitude about them,
where if you didn’t immediately agree with what they were saying, you were either stupid
or, “a little off.” In retrospect, I can see how the ability to consider different points of view
was utterly lost on most people around me, especially the teachers.

In this way, Dr. KRJ seems no different than the “perfectly normal” adults I was probing
as a teenager. In her introduction she writes that manic-depression (bipolar disorder),
“… is an illness which is biological in its origins…”3 as if this were a proven fact, which is
clearly, not the case. Despite the billions of dollars spent by the pharmaceutical industry
in research, they have still yet to find any scientific proof that mental illness is biological.4

Her repeated assertions that, for a person in her situation, the only options are “death
or insanity”5 may be true for her, but certainly not for all of us. During the 1970’s, while
she was studying in Los Angeles, a short flight away in San Francisco, psychiatrists
Dr. John Weir Perry (Diabasis)6 and Dr. Loren Mosher (Soteria House)7 were both healing
people suffering from acute schizophrenia, a condition considered more severe than
manic-depression.

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Meanwhile, psychiatrist Dr. Stan Grof, a founding father of transpersonal psychology,
was exploring the spiritual aspects of insanity. He would later coin the term “Spiritual
Emergency”, in reference to these clearly beneficial “manic” episodes.8 His work has
proven to be so influential that, thanks to the efforts of Dr. David Lukoff and others, DSM
IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) accepted “Religious or Spiritual
Problem” as a category of mental illness which should not be medicated.9

It was in learning of Dr. Grof’s work that I was finally able to find an appropriate theoretical
explanation for my own experience. This process of “insanity” can be a sacred one. It is
an attempt by your repressed Soul to bring itself into your consciousness, so that you may
lead a life which is more transparent, spontaneous, loving and alive. In this way, many
more episodes of mental illness than we have ever imagined are clearly intended to be a
spiritual, healing process. As tumultuous and horrifying as they can be, they are intended
to bring us to life.

If I could offer one criticism of the content of An Unquiet Mind it would be this: Dr. Kay
Redfield Jamison doesn’t talk very much about her episodes. Yes, like most parents in
describing the experiences of their bipolar children, she gives us the terrible lows as well
as the ecstatic highs, but more as a highlight reel than as to what actually happened. She
spends much more time relaying the details of dining with peers at St. Andrews or Oxford
than she ever does regarding the “inner-world” in which she resides during her episodes.

I wish she would have shared with us more of her experiences of mania, from her own
“insane” perspective. I think that if, as a society, we are ever going to deal with so-called
mental illness in a healthy way, we need to start sharing these mad inner worlds, so that
more people know what to expect when these powerful experiences overwhelm our loved
ones. It comes as a surprise to almost everyone, even people with bipolar disorder, that
experiences of insanity are not nearly as chaotic as they appear to the outsider. In fact,
most manic/schizophrenic people undergo a very similar series of sensory experiences
and mythological themes which are shared by people around the world. Discovering
that you are not alone is a huge relief for many. In a sense, it validates something that
everyone else has dismissed as simply crazy and to be quickly forgotten.

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For all of our differences, there is one passage near the end of An Unquiet Mind with
which I agree. In fact, when I read it, I was shocked. It turned out that Dr. KRJ wasn’t
nearly as oblivious to the deeper reality of her situation as I had imagined. She writes, “We
all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadness of life and the often overwhelming
forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this - through love, work, family, faith,
friends, denial, alcohol, drugs or medication – we build these walls, stone by stone, over
a lifetime.”10 Here, not only does she clearly and eloquently identify what she is doing to
herself, she also frames the deeper pathology of our entire society. As a whole, we try
to block out our unwanted thoughts and feelings by any means necessary. In this way,
Dr. KRJ reveals herself as completely “normal” by today’s standards. Unfortunately, what
passes for normal today can hardly be considered optimal, or even healthy.

Fortunately, there is a way out of this dilemma.

Those “sea walls” she refers to are what transpersonal psychologists would refer to as
our Ego, or “False Self”. That turmoil from which she is protecting herself is the Ocean of
the Unconscious, where resides all of her repressed trauma, anger and pain. It is also the
domain of her very own Soul, her “True Self”.

As you will see, while Dr. KRJ has worked at building, defending and medicating her
walls, I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life examining my walls, exploring them, then
taking them down, sometimes painfully, brick by brick. During my manic episode,
I welcomed the sacred “demolition crew” that invited itself into my life to do most of
the dirty work. However, internally, work was being done to take down my walls long
before that. The work continues to this day. To me, the secret to happiness is a
continual dying to one’s False Self, or Ego, brick by brick, day after day. Let in that
seawater, as much as you can! Feel your pain and ecstasy to its fullest! Deny nothing.

Once you have truly felt the full extent of your repressions, your traumas, your pain, your
karma; only then will you find peace. This madness, which always arrives unexpectedly,
wants to heal us and then leave; if only we would allow ourselves to surrender to it. Rather
than fighting to hold back the flood, we need to allow this mad, sacred tide to overwhelm
us entirely and simply….let…go…

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For most people, this idea will be completely new, even frightening. However, among the
true spiritual seekers of history, this approach to the Divine has always been a central
truth. Diminishing the Ego through meditation is a central principle within Buddhist11 and
ancient Hindu teachings.12 The mystic saints of Christianity (all of whom would certainly
be diagnosed as bipolar by today’s standards), such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. John of
the Cross, St. Augustine and St. Teresa d’Avila, were very aware of the need to surrender
to this Divine Madness as well. Perhaps theologian Evelyn Underhill said it best over 100
years ago, in her classic book, Mysticism, when she wrote of the mystic saints,

“…their shells were wide open; they knew the tides of the Eternal Sea.”13

As for me, I was given my first small taste of this Eternal Sea years before my actual manic
episode, in some rather surprising locations – the dingy after-hours clubs of downtown
Toronto. In those clubs, particularly the “legendary” Twilight Zone, I would learn something
about myself that, up until then, had been hidden from me. Dance, which was always my
true passion as a teenager, could open up parts of myself which found no vehicle for
expression anywhere else. With a little time, maybe 3 or 4 hours, I could arrive in a new
“space” where the music and I were completely seamless. During the first few hours, it
was clearly “I”, my ego, that was in control; but as the sunrise approached, and all but the
faithful had gone home to bed; I would willingly find myself at the mercy of the powerful,
complex, soulful rhythms that would resonate within each cell of my body. Alone, in some
tucked away corner of the dance floor, a second wind would fill my exhausted corpse.
It was in this state that I would first taste the Other Side of those Walls, my first morsels
of Cosmic Ecstasy.

This was no secret to the small group of regulars that I would leave the club with every
Sunday morning. Why do you think they had stayed all night? We were all waiting for our
fix. But this experience was hardly a drug, nor was it caused by one. You could tell the
difference between someone moving from that honest, earned place inside of themselves,
and those that had cheated there way into a cheaper imitation.

In many ways, a great DJ is like a great psychologist. His task is not to analyze you. No,
the great ones feel you. They see where you are at, and they lead you to where you need
to be. A great DJ will start the evening with music of mild intensity and then slowly build
the energy in the room until it reaches its zenith.

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At that peak, or perhaps just before it, the DJ will take out his secret weapon: the 12” inch
track that he knows will take his people into the timeless space that dwells within. Back in
the day, one of those “peak” tracks was by a guy named Robert Owens. It is with a touch
of regret that I can’t share the music with you, but even if I could, I still wouldn’t be able to
convey the feeling of it, which is what I really wish I could communicate. His mantra-like
lyrics, as simple as they were, told me exactly what I needed to do, not only on the dance
floor, but with my entire life:

Bring Down the Walls

We’re gonna strip those bricks and let you release all that heat inside….
All your passion, covered up by pride….

We’re gonna bring down the walls…

Let’em fall… fall… fall.

We’re gonna bring down the walls…

Let’em fall… fall… fall.

There’s a magic in this feeling that moves us all,

Shake your body to the rhythm let the Spirit fall,
But you’ve got to shake the tension and move the walls,
You’ve got to bring… down…. the walls…
Let’em fall, fall, fall, fall, fall!!!!

You can’t fake this feeling, don’t you waste this feeling,
You can’t fake this feeling, don’t you waste this feeling,
You can’t fake this feeling, don’t you waste this feeling,
Let it fall!

Let it down, down, down, down…. walls…

It feels so good.14

May my story inspire you to take down your walls….

One nasty brick at a time.

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Part One: Rude Awakening

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Eternal Career Crisis - January, 1996.

“Sean, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?”

That was the question I asked myself, staring into the bathroom mirror of my Vancouver
apartment.

Despite being out of University for 6 years, I still hadn’t managed to get into a fruitful
career stream. It wasn’t like I wasn’t trying. I was trying hard! It just seemed like my whole
life had become a prison cell, out of which there was no escape.

And I had escaped. Or at least I thought I had. I’d moved as far from my old life as I
possibly could have - 4000km. Yet, the same issues, the same people, would follow me
all the way from my hometown of Toronto to Vancouver, B.C. Swearing I would never go
back to a media job in an advertising agency again, I ended up working for the exact same
media department with exactly the same people. Why? More money, of course. And
maybe a chance to earn a little respect.

However, what started out as promising turned disastrous and, once again, I found myself
in a desperate career situation - a career I hated. I was starting to wonder if I would ever
be as happy as I was in the first effortless and dreamy 19 years of my life.

Finally, one night, a year and a half after moving out there to start a new life, I was picking
up the phone to share my grief with my ex-girlfriend, Carmen. I was expecting a normal
reaction from her, which would have been to tell me to, “get off my ass!” Instead, all she
said was, “Sean, take the Forum.”

For six months, Carmen had been encouraging me to take this strange course that she
said had changed her life, The Landmark Forum. But this time I had agreed to look into
it. There was a different tone to her voice. Something was there that I had never heard
before. Compassion.

What the hell. I had nothing to lose.

A few days later I went to an introductory seminar, where people interested in taking the
course sit-in with “graduates” who are taking the Forum “commitment” seminars.

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Not surprisingly, the graduates get up and start to tell the group about how their lives have
improved since taking the course, and what they were doing to make their lives even
better. I was surprised by the openness and sincerity of the people in the room. All types
of people getting up and sharing their deepest insecurities with a roomful of strangers, all
there because they had admitted feeling some level of failure, sadness or dissatisfaction,
and they were all taking personal responsibility for changing their lives for the better.

I thought, even if I don’t get anything out of it, whatever happens to these people on the
Forum weekend certainly must be an interesting thing to watch. Being an experimental
sort, I was interested.

Then they took me in for the hard sell.

They asked me why I was there.

“I feel completely handcuffed,” I told them.

“It’s as if, career-wise, I just can’t get a break, and I don’t know what to do.”
We talked about the situation a little while and then they went on to tell us some of the
concepts that will be covered in the Forum - all very above board.

When they asked if I wanted to sign up, I told them I wanted to “wait and see”, because
I wasn’t sure I if was going to stay in Vancouver. I thought I might have to move home to
Toronto if I didn’t have a job. My ad agency had just put me on probation after a dismal and
raise-less review. I was assured that if I moved to Toronto, I could re-book my weekend
with their Toronto operation.

“You know what happens when you wait and see?” She said, semi-rhetorically.
“You wait……and see.”

She was right. I signed.

Afterwards, the two female volunteers that I signed with were so happy that I thought it
must be a joke. They said they just loved to see people take the first steps to putting their
lives together.

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“You will be surprised,” the first woman said. “It’s as if, as soon as you sign up for the
Forum, it’s working for you.”

“Sure,” I thought to myself.

The next day was another gorgeous January morning in Vancouver. I was walking to work
from my brand new condo that I rented with two other guys, and I felt much better than
I had during the past month.

“You know…” I said, talking to myself, “you love it out here. You know that from moving
out here with nothing last year, you will survive, even if you are fired at work. The hell with
advertising. You can just stay out here and sell mutual funds or something.”

At that moment, I decided to stay in Vancouver, resign from my place of employment,

CCEO, and get a job elsewhere.

Except a funny thing happened.

I went into work that day and my boss and V.P., a very nice lady by the name of Jennifer
Weston, called me into her office.

“Annette called from Toronto,” she said.

My ship had come in.

Annette Jones was the former head of Account Planning at CCEO Vancouver. At that
time, Account Planning was the hottest, growing field in advertising and had been so for
the previous ten years. Good account planners were hot commodities and made big
bucks. Along with creatives, planners were the only agency people that could get Green
Card status to work in the United States, my dream since I was a boy. I was always
thinking about how I was going to get over that border and out of the cold.

Despite hating my job in media, all I could ever see myself doing in advertising was account
planning. As soon as I had heard of the profession, three years earlier, I knew I would
be fantastic at the job and, eventually, a remarkable success story….if I could just get the
break.

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I had tried three times to get into account planning positions with CCEO. Each time I had
come closer to the available position than I thought I would, but each time I was rejected
in a more and more embarrassing manner.

News of the last rejection was communicated to me by the most junior person in the
entire agency, a 20 year old media assistant, while we were getting drunk at the pub. He
knew that they had hired someone else for the position before I did. I was rejected due
to some fuck-ups of monumental proportions that were largely attributed to me, although I
still feel that, to a large extent, I was hung out to dry. But that’s another story. OK, it was
my fault.

However, this time was different. I could feel it. I had done some on-the-street interviews
for a new business pitch CCEO had been involved with a year earlier. We lost the pitch,
but I was able to get my foot in the door with Annette as a possible Jr. Planner down the
road. Unfortunately, she left the company before I could jump ship from my own private
media nightmare. Over the previous few months I had occasionally been in contact
with her regarding possible openings at the 3-person operation for which she worked in
Toronto, WeCU Creative Planning. She was calling to let me know that I should send in
my resume. Apparently, the owner of WeCU had decided to consider hiring another junior
planner.

Three days after receiving her phone call, four days after I signed up for The Landmark
Forum, I decided to move back to Toronto and put everything I could into getting that job.

I was surprised. It was as if the Forum had started working for me already. It was nothing
short of a miracle.

From the day I got that call, every night in Vancouver felt like the night before Christmas.

The reason I lead off with this story is to let you know why I took the Landmark Forum in
the first place. I wasn’t there for any other reason except that I was totally stifled career-
wise. In fact, except for my career, my life out West was pretty good. Socially, I had lots of
close relationships with people. I was active, skiing, traveling the West Coast and SCUBA
diving on a few occasions. I went out a lot, but had a lot of time to myself as well.

17
However, the biggest improvement in my life out West came in my spiritual development.
My time in Vancouver was a period of transition, where I began to see God back in my life
again. The miracle of Annette calling on the same day I decided to leave advertising was
just one in a long series of “synchronicities” I had experienced out West – synchronicities
that I recognized, but did not understand.

God Returns (a little spiritual background)

While I had been raised a Roman Catholic in Catholic schools, and even minored in
Religious Studies at The University of Toronto, God had sort of taken a back seat in my life
after university. I was too busy struggling to build a career at the height of Toronto’s worst
recession ever to follow up on the sort of spiritual anomalies that I reveled in learning about
while attending university. The one exception was the work of Joseph Campbell, who
I had only learned about after graduation, in a series of PBS interviews with Bill Moyers.1
I watched all six hours of those tapes three times. I was riveted to the ideas this man had
to share. I remember vividly wishing how I could see the world in the way that he did, but
I just couldn’t. His world of magic and bliss seemed far removed from my harsh reality of
mediocrity and apathy.

Somewhere on the way from high school to university to the world of advertising, life had
lost its magic. The whole process of studying your life away until you enter the workforce,
where you are expected to work your life away seemed to be totally meaningless; especially
where I was employed. Despite my best efforts, the most creative, meaningful work
I could imagine for myself was advertising? While rationally, I thought I had potential in
the field, it just seemed to be a part of the problem, not part of the solution. But what was
part of the solution? I had no idea.

Back then, all I knew was that I was so struck by the weight of the meaningless of my life
that I would find myself crying in movies….a lot. Like, the movies over, the lights are up,
people are leaving the theatre and I’m still in my seat with my arms around my date, crying
my eyes out. Like, now I’m out in the parking lot, in my car, still crying. Not normal.

And why was a crying? The movies inspired me. The characters were bold and heroic in
their actions. They threw themselves into the fire, stood up for the right thing, the hell with
the consequences. And where was I? In my cubicle, checking contracts.

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Going out to Vancouver however, I began to feel different. I had wanted to move out there
for a few years, but commitments were holding me back; namely, my job and my girlfriend.
Then on the same day that I realized that I needed to quit my job in Toronto, my girlfriend,
Carmen, dumped me. She had met someone else while she was visiting India. Once
I realized that I no longer had a career or a girlfriend, my first thought was, “I can go to
Vancouver now.” Rather than feel sad at the loss of either Carmen or my job, there was
a surprising sense of immediate relief and optimism.

On my eight-day, solitary drive to the West Coast, I began to feel lighter and lighter.
Colours brightened. I had nothing to go to, but yet, I was very, very happy. I felt as if, for
the first time in years, the whole world was opening itself to me.

I had goals when I went out there. I wanted to see what life would be like without television.
I wanted to get back in shape and start eating better. I wanted to make $28,000 a year,
which may not sound like much, but it was $6,000 more than I was making in Toronto
at the time of departure. After being with back-to-back girlfriends for the better part of 6
years, I wanted to actively socialize with people I really liked, instead of being filtered into
hanging out with their friends. I wanted a nice place to live.

Within 2 months of arriving in Vancouver, all of those things had fallen into place. I was
positively giddy. So giddy, in fact, that I started to see how what had happened to me
seemed almost dreamlike. I recognized that my new life had started in my mind and then
it all appeared exactly as I had wanted. I felt almost invincible.

One night I went for dinner with a friend of mine, Ross, who had just moved out to Vancouver
from Toronto as well. I told him of my great new circumstances and positive outlook on
life. I also told him of the amazing coincidences that seemed to guide me to where I was,
like losing my job and Carmen on the same day.

I also shared with him the details of how I first found a place to stay in Vancouver:

My first day at work after being dumped by Carmen, I was thinking about my move
out West, wondering where I would sleep, as I had very few contacts out there.
That afternoon in the photocopy room, I met my ex-supervisor, Bill, who had some
interesting news for me. “Sean, I just thought I’d let you know that I’m leaving the
agency and heading back home, to Vancouver.” By the end of the week, Bill and
I had arranged for me to stay with him at his parent’s house in North Vancouver,
until I had a place to stay of my own. It was that simple.

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Ross and I shared stories like that all night, even discussing the “coincidence” of us having
dinner together on the other side of the continent when, 3 months earlier, neither one of
us had even thought about moving out there. We spoke of other insights as well, like the
fact that I like the way I feel about myself when I am with certain people, but don’t like the
way I feel or the way I behave when I am in the company of others; almost as if I were
another person.

With this said, he mentioned a book that he had been reading, The Celestine Prophesy.2
He told me that it covered a lot of what I was talking about.

The next day I called Carmen, my ex, in Toronto. Her and I had remained friends and
talked regularly after our break-up. I told her that I was beginning to piece together a new
perspective on the way I think the world works, and that it is very different from how we
had been taught. I told her of how Ross and I had discussed these ideas the night before
and that he had recommended a book.

“Oh my God, The Celestine Prophesy!!” she exclaimed.

“That’s right,” I said. “How did you know?”

Carmen was reading it as well, and had been blown away by it.

I began to tell her how I thought the world really worked - that we are not exactly individuals,
but all sort of connected and that coincidences, or synchronicities, play in this big role. We
talked for two hours, back when a long distance call was expensive. Without prompting
from Carmen, I talked about the different aspects of my new perspective and, inadvertently,
covered the first six of nine Insights discussed in the Celestine Prophesy.

“Sean, that’s the fifth insight!” she whispered in excitement.

The next day I bought the book and read it in two nights. Everything I had been thinking
about was there, spelled out clearly in Insights One through Six. I was flabbergasted.

20
After that, I started reading more and more spiritual work. I began to look more deeply
within. I started to have more quiet time to myself. I got my astrological chart done by
an astrologer that I met, by coincidence, in a Mr.Submarine sandwich
shop, just when I was in the market for having a chart done - the first
time in my life. I still remember his last words to me after my reading,

“Sean, you’re a king and you’re gonna live for 100 years!” I guess it could have been
worse.

I returned to literature on Taoism3, a philosophy that had intrigued me since university.

The astrologer guided me to the works of Carl Jung.

Once I began to read Jung’s biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,4 my dreams

became more vivid than they had ever been. I would begin to give my dreams extra
value in my life, and played close attention to them, deciphering the symbolism. One
book seemed to lead to another as I would eventually pick up my first books on astrology,
Buddhism and a few New Age types, just for kicks.

Back in Toronto for the Christmas holidays (December, 1994), I had a long talk with my
mother, telling her that there are things I am experiencing that she may not understand.

“I’m having psychic experiences,” I said.

“That’s great, I’ve always wanted to have psychic experiences,” she replied.

What was a mother that grew up in the ‘50’s to say? I knew deep down she didn’t
believe me. At least she would talk about it and was supportive. My father just thought
I was nuts.

My first eight months out West had gone amazingly well and were really magical, but
I didn’t know why. While I was back home for Christmas I had this ominous feeling within
me that things may not be the same in Vancouver when I returned:

One night I had a dream that I was sent to Spain on a business trip, flying the plane
of Charles Lindberg, The Spirit of St. Louis. I could see myself flying over the open
water of the Atlantic, in his open-air cockpit. I even remembered landing, and the
two men who took my plane into the hangar, while I went into the city on business.

21

When I woke up, I asked myself, “Charles Lindberg? Why him? Why his plane?”
Then it hit me. After Lindberg crossed the Atlantic, he became so famous that
he became a target for criminals. At one point his baby was kidnapped and was
never returned.

Charles Lindberg lost his baby.

“That’s it!” I thought. “I’m afraid of losing my baby, but my baby is me – this new,
optimistic Sean that has grown out of years of depression. I’m afraid of losing the
new me.”

Little would I know that this dream would have a profound impact on my life; both positive
and negative:

On the positive side, one afternoon, back in Vancouver, I was having lunch with a friend
of mine, Sandy, near my office. I began to tell him of this dream and how, through the
dream analysis I was learning from Jung’s biography, I was opening myself to new insights
regarding myself and life.

I began to share with him the value of dream interpretation and proceeded to tell him my
story of Charles Lindberg, and how I was afraid of losing what I had gained in my first
8 months in Vancouver. Then I said to him, “However, it’s not like the symbols in one
dream mean the same thing for everyone. For example, suppose we had the exact same
dream, which, of course would be impossible, but just suppose. If I dream about a tree in
my dream, it may mean something completely different to me than if you dreamed of the
same tree in your dream.”

Up until then Sandy had seemed rather skeptical and, perhaps, bored with my new
understanding; but then the miraculous happened. “I had a strange dream the other
night,” he said. “I dreamt that I was in a cabin in the middle of a valley, surrounded by
trees. Near the trees were these deer, and they came and attacked me. I was attacked
by deer in the woods.”

22
I was dumbfounded. My roommate, whom Sandy had never met, shared with me the
exact same dream a month earlier! I would later get them together for drinks, and they
both had a correction to make from their dreams. The deer had horns. In fact, both had
not dreamt of deer, but of elk. I began to suspect that maybe I was the attacking elk, that
my new ideas were somehow threatening both of them.

Weeks later, I would share this incredible story with the astrology, who had a rather
interesting perspective on the whole thing. Telling him my story over coffee and a donut,
my new astrologer friend informed me that he suffered from schizophrenia. Back in the
1970´s, during one of his episodes, he hijacked a plane with a toy gun in order to “end
the Vietnam War.” While he was in jail, his cell-mate gave him a book, Black Elk Speaks.
Based on my story, the first thing my new friend did was recommend that I read this book
as well. It is the auto-biography of Black Elk, a Lakota chief and shaman in his own right.
Black Elk Speaks would be my first book related to Native Indian shamanism5. Incidentally,
the Vietnam War ended shortly after my astrologer’s hijacking attempt and arrest.

I found all of these mystical connections to be very meaningful and inspiring. The
spiritual opening which these connections created within me left me feeling as if life was
one humungous adventure, where one astonishing discovery only lead to the doors of
countless others.

However, on the negative side, it seemed the prophesy of the Charles Lindberg dream
would come to full fruition. I was about to lose my baby.

The Downslide

Over the course of January - June ’95 my status at work went from company hero to
company zero. The promises made to me by my employer at the time I agreed to come
back to CCEO were not delivered upon. I was starting to realize that I was not going to
enjoy this stint in media any more than I did in Toronto. My main client contact, the brand
manager of my client, B&G Restaurants, had a well deserved reputation as being a bitch
from hell. And, due to my inexperience on her business and being painfully overworked,
she lost faith in me very quickly, as I did myself. To make matters worse, a girl had started
in my department just before Christmas that I quickly fell in love with.

23
As a result, I couldn’t concentrate at work. Everything was falling apart. Even when
I realized that I was in love with her, I remember laying on my bed thinking, “I’m in love,
and I’m not ready!” But it was too late. It was as though I were possessed.

By the time I returned home for my brothers wedding in the summer of ’95, I had been
officially taken off of the B&G business at the request of the client. The girl I was in love
with wouldn’t even speak to me at the office (a long story), and I was having sex with
the office receptionist, an 18 year-old girl that, as I was to discover, had had 18 lovers in
2 years. I was 29 at the time. My life was a mess.

Once I returned to Vancouver from my brother’s magnificent wedding, I made great strides
towards getting my life back in order. The girl I was “seeing” dumped me for another guy
in the office, I got the woman I was in love with speaking to me again, and, eventually, they
officially put me back on the B&G business, giving some stern words to the client that was
ruining my life. I got some redemption.

Life got lighter again. My career still stagnated though, and, as I mentioned before, an
account planning job I didn’t get in Vancouver was a big disappointment. By the time
I got Annette’s phone call about the job opportunity in Toronto, I felt as if my experience in
Vancouver had been to Heaven, Hell, and everywhere in-between.

But it all seemed to be for a divine purpose.

A Near Death Experience?

Like I said before, my first eight months in Vancouver were a blast. One of the best things
about going back to working in a media department were the perks we got from TV and
radio stations. I got $500 courtside seats to see the Seattle Sonics in Seattle. Our agency
Christmas party included a fully paid weekend at Whistler Ski Resort. I was having a ball,
but, as always, once the wheels started to come off, it felt like everything was falling apart.
So when I decided to return home to pursue the account planning job with WeCU, I decided
to really “live it up” in Vancouver for the eight weeks before my departure. Part of “living
it up” meant going on one more diving expedition with my friends, Peter and Lorraine.

24
Peter was a diver with the Canadian Navy and was the reason I got PADI certified. He
was the experienced dive buddy I could trust.

I had called Peter to tell him that I was moving back to Toronto and that I was wondering
if we would get a chance to go on another dive together. As it turned out, Peter and his
wife had planned a “wreck diving” weekend in mid-February, a month before I was to leave
Vancouver. Everything seemed to be clicking again. I signed on.

“Peter, I know it sounds kinda sick,” I said, “But, you know, if you were going to die, dying
on a wreck dive would be a pretty cool way to go.”

“Don’t even say that, Sparky.” Peter used to call me Sparky (another long story).

So off we went on this dive trip, just off the coast of Vancouver Island. The B.C. Reef
society had sunk an old Canadian destroyer out there. It was sitting on the sea floor
at 130 feet. The deck was at about 90 feet. Being a novice diver, I was “officially” only
supposed to dive to 60 feet, but I felt comfortable going deeper with Peter and Lorraine.
We were diving from a ship we went out there on, along with 17 other experienced divers.
I wasn’t planning on doing any major penetration of the sunken vessel, but I thought
I might go in a door, here or there.

The first dive went fine, with the exception that my rented weight belt, (the device that
allows you to sink in the water wearing a wet suit and oxygen tank) was slipping around
my waist. By the time I surfaced from my first dive, all the weights had slid around to the
front of me. I wasn’t terribly concerned as I would simply switch belts for the next dive.
Visiting the bathroom of a military destroyer at 90 feet below sea level is a memory I will
never forget.

On the second dive, we went with the owner of the tour boat. We were supposed to do an
easy penetration of the upper deck of the ship. That was the plan, but I had a cold feeling
about this guy. I grabbed a different weight belt and tightened it as best I could before our
descent; positioning the weights on my hips in a way that would avoid slippage.

25
As we descended along the dive line the water became very dark and murky. Visibility
was only about 10 feet and the current had picked up considerably as well. It was a little
hairy. Once I got to the deck with Peter, we both hung on to something on deck and waited
for Lorraine and the owner to follow. But instead of following us, they directed us to the
front of the ship, down below deck. We were descending below 90 feet now, a depth
I wasn’t that comfortable with. Deviating from the plan, the owner was now pointing to a
2-foot-by-four-foot black hole in the front of the ship that he wanted us to penetrate - for
me, the equivalent of suicide.

As I floated there, waiting for the group to make a decision, my weight belt slipped.
I grabbed it and tried to pull it tight. But as these belts are designed for quick release in
case of emergency that is exactly what happened.

From 90 feet below sea level, I went shooting to the surface, as my weight belt slipped off
my legs and onto the sea floor. Since we had only been down for a few minutes I knew
my chances of getting the bends were minimal, but if I didn’t slow my ascension speed,
relax and exhale, I could die instantly from a brain embolism.

I did all the right things. I emptied my buoyancy control device of air, relaxed, exhaled and
spread out like a star fish to slow my ascension. I remember vividly reaching for my depth
gage at 25 feet, where water pressure begins to decrease rapidly, wondering if I was going
to die or not. I had done everything I could do by that point, so I just watched the depth
gage and waited to see if I would die.

It was a cool feeling.

Once I hit the surface, Peter was just a few seconds behind me. They had heard my high
pitched murmuring as soon as my belt dropped. Embarrassed by my “rookie” mistake,
and pissed off that I dropped the belt, I wasn’t even thinking about how close I came to
death at that point; but everybody else was. Once I got back to the ship, the looks of
concern jarred me. I didn’t realize the finality of what could have happened until I saw it
in their eyes and heard it in their voice as they asked me if I was “OK”.

I went to bed early that night, a little shaken, but in a way I wasn’t familiar with. I had
nightmares about our ship sinking, filling with water as I laid in bed, helpless.

So with this experience, and a myriad of other wonderful times under my belt, I returned
home to Toronto for my quest to get the job of my dreams.

26
Heading Home - March 1996

I took a route home through Oregon and southern Utah. Looking at all of the beautiful red
rock down there, I began to think of the possibility that maybe all of this is a dream.

“Maybe my soul really isn’t moving across the country, but just thinks it’s moving because
my mind has senses that tell it so. Just maybe.” My exodus in Vancouver had meant the
fulfillment of many dreams, and many nightmares as well.

I was home for one day before I had to drive to Montreal for my friend Trevor’s wedding.
You see, before I had decided to move back home, I had already bought a return airline
ticket from Vancouver for Trevor’s wedding anyway. Once I decided to make the move,
I had to sell it and drive back in my car. The wedding was another wonderful event.
He was really pleased to have me there, especially since he could tell his family that I had
driven all the way from Vancouver just for his wedding!

However, there was some sad news as well. For the first time, Trevor let his friends and
I know that his brother, Michael, who was quite estranged from the family, was dying with
a terminal illness. When we asked what it was, Trevor found it too upsetting to discuss.
It was only at the wedding rehearsal that we all met Michael and realized that he was in
the very last stages of AIDS. He had only a few months left to live. His formerly plump
plus frame had been shriveled to skeletal proportions.

But there was also something different about Michael. Where there was once inner turmoil
- a guy who used to tear his room apart in rage, there was now tranquility. I sensed that
he had come to grips with his imminent death. I had never met a person living in that
state of mind before. Within two months of Trevor’s wedding, I would attend his brother’s
funeral.

I returned to Toronto in preparation for quite a week. I had set up an initial job interview
with my potential employer, David Stone, for Thursday. I was able to land an interview
with him, not because he was impressed with my resume; far from it. It was my method
of delivery that did the trick. Back in Vancouver, I had Fed-Exed him my resume to arrive
before Valentine’s day, with a Valentine card telling him how much I loved “His Agency”.
Inside the card was a Top Ten List of reasons he should hire me. Reason # 6 was, “I enjoy
being beaten and verbally abused by my employer (if you’re in the mood)”. Reason #1
was, “Everyone else sucks!”

27
It turns out the guy had a sense of humor. I was in.

Funny enough, I was able to transfer to a Landmark Forum Seminar in Toronto, which
started the following day. Like I said, things were clicking. However, by now, my intention
of going to the Forum was a little different than I had planned originally. Initially, I had
wanted to sign up because I felt that I was “handcuffed” into my job situation. Now that
a genuine career opportunity had presented itself, I wanted to take the course to see if
I could help myself avoid the potential pitfalls that I might walk into out of ignorance, fear,
or stupidity.

I wanted that job with WeCU so much so that I drove back across the country just for the
first interview. But there was never anything in my life that I had wanted this badly that
had I actually landed. This time I didn’t want to blow it.

The Thursday of the job interview, things went alright. David was a tall, British planner that
seemed to ooze an almost absurd amount of confidence. I sensed that we immediately
liked each other, but it came as no surprise that David wasn’t going to commit to a “media
guy” with no account planning experience without very careful consideration. That first
interview was just the beginning.

Friday - The Landmark Forum

The next day, the Forum started early in the morning. My first impression of the seminar
was the implausibility of what their staff said would happen. With 150 of us sitting in a fairly
tight seminar room on Front St. East, the idea of any real change happening seemed, at
first glance, absurd. After all, people spend years in one-on-one therapy sessions without
experiencing any deep changes in their lives. How could one solitary speaker create true
breakthroughs for so many people in one weekend?

The atmosphere was one of cautious anticipation, as none of us were sure what to expect.
There was a little small talk in the room, as if we were waiting for a university lecture to
begin. We had been greeted and seated by what I later learned were Landmark volunteers.
They were very nice, but had an overly nice way about them. Then again, maybe that was
just me being paranoid. The guys had a lot of facial scars, like they were ex-drug addicts
or gang members. It all seemed a little cult-like.

28
When the session began, up came this petite 40ish woman that looked like an attractive
version of Margaret Thatcher. I can’t remember her real name, but she was bold,
charismatic, articulate, and very, very funny.

The first thing she did, which took over four hours, was address any concerns members
of the group had concerning the nature of the course and, most importantly, some of the
unusual rules that they insisted we promise to adhere to. These rules were put in place,
she said, because previous experience had shown that they help to make the seminar a
much more effective tool in impacting everyone in the room. Many people in the room had
a problem with this.

The rules were as follows:

• No going to the bathroom until the set breaks, which happened every two hours
or so.
• The usual class day went from 9:00 am to around midnight, and nobody was to
leave early.
• We were all obliged to arrive on time in the morning, with any homework assignments
completed. Homework often involved interaction with people in our lives that we were
close to, but had issues with, that needed to be cleared up. (The most sleep anyone
could possibly have gotten on any night was no more than 4 to 5 hours.)
• There was to be no talking or whispering during the lecture except when we were
instructed to breakout into pairs for discussion.
• We were to stand up when we spoke to the group leader (I’ll call her Thatcher for
simplicity).
• We all needed to know why we were there. We all had to be there because we wanted
to be there, not because we were pushed into attending by a boss or loved one.
• The last piece of criteria was that we were all “normal” people leading basically
“normal” healthy lives, functioning adequately in society.

“This course is very psychologically stressful,” they told us. “If you have some sort of
psychological disability, illness, or were in some kind of therapy you should not take
this course.”

This was already reinforced by the waiver that they had us sign before we were registered.
Having never even visited a therapist, I signed without hesitation.

29
It took four hours for everyone to agree to all the rules, and to ensure that they were all
there voluntarily. This delay occurred largely because of challenges to the rules by some
of the older men in the room. There were a number of guys, over 50 and set in their ways,
which were sent to the course “by their wives” and really didn’t like being told when they
could and could not go to the bathroom.

For every one of these challenges, Thatcher met the complainers head on, and would
not let them sit down in resignation. She forced them to either willingly say they would
comply with the rules and spirit of the program or leave. One guy took over 20 minutes.
Her ability to take on these headstrong men was impressive.

Another guy was chronically depressed and had tried to kill himself a number of times.
Thatcher discouraged him from taking the course and asked him to seriously think about
why he wanted to take it. After the break she asked him in front of the class (as was
the norm) if he was going to stay or leave. This guy had been in therapy for years.
He decided to stay. It was a moving experience for everyone in the room, and we hadn’t
even started.

Once we were into the program, for the first day, a lot of the concepts introduced were very
familiar to me from my readings on Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

The first concept they asked us to “try on”, was the notion that there is no such thing as
a real, objective, factual interpretation of reality. That yes, something happens in the
physical world, like a man hitting someone, but the meaning that we automatically attach
to that event, which we think of as “reality” is simply our perception. It is a valid perception
because it is one that reflects our life of experience and learning, but it is only one of a
myriad of perceptions. It is not objective reality.

Now you may already know this, and so did I at that point in my development. But many
others didn’t, so we had to take a lot of time getting them to understand this idea.

Later, they started to discuss how our perceptions get us into arguments, and how it is the
nature of humans to defend their perceptions and values at the expense of relationships;
that we would rather fight, righteously defending our opinions or value system than “love”
each other.

30
They then got us to define ourselves by listing our values, which lead me to reflect on
arguments I had had in the past over our view of reality. I could recall Nietzche writing
about how every nation has a different set of values, and that these are the things, more
than anything else, that they are prepared to go to war over. As individuals, people are
the same way.

I instantly understood what they were getting at, and felt humbled by my ignorance; not
realizing for a second how harsh and unfeeling I must have seemed to people, especially
my family and friends, when I knew that I was right and they were wrong, and how I would
not back down one inch from my position.

It was my friend, Wendy, in Vancouver, that initially came to mind. Wendy was not the most
rational person in the world. One day we had an argument over which direction we were
heading in my car. I said we were going north, she insisted we were heading west. After
a while of bantering back and forth, I realized that the reason we were arguing was that,
while I knew we were heading towards the geographical North Shore of Vancouver, we
were on West Georgia Avenue. The fact is, we were going northwest. When I mentioned
that to Wendy she still laughed at me, insisting we were going due west. So we pulled
over and decided to get a map to settle our argument.

I pulled into the gas station and got a map, proving to her that I was correct. However, she
still would not admit it. In retrospect, I think her spatial thinking was weak and that she
wasn’t very good with maps. However, with conclusive proof in my hand that I was right,
her refusal to concede defeat pissed me off. I became obnoxious and argumentative. She
was hurt and caved in. “Hooray!” I won the argument, but had damaged our relationship,
all over which way is north.

Everything they taught at the Forum sort of sunk in like that, right away. They were taking
concepts I knew were correct, intellectually, but making me apply them to my own life.
While others in the course often appeared confused or skeptical of what they were learning,
I was sitting there absorbing everything like a sponge. It all made perfect sense.

Day One was really about how we define ourselves in this world, identifying the first
incidence in our lives when we decided that this was an appropriate definition for ourselves,
and understanding that these definitions, which we spend our lives defending so as to
maintain the integrity of our ego, were the very things that were causing conflicts in all of
our relationships with others.

31
Boom!

This was a revelation of staggering proportions to me - that my very definition of myself

as being very intelligent, individualistic, and honest to a fault, were actually limiting my
relationships with co-workers, family and friends. I was also able to look back and see, in
my childhood, the very moment I started unconsciously defining myself in that manner.

I could apply these and other insights to my own life in a way that created within me a
sense of startling, joyous revelation. By the end of the first day I felt like I had gotten my
money’s worth out of the whole course.

Arriving home that night, excited beyond belief, I found my parents talking with my brother,
Glen, and his wife, Rebecca.

“So, what did you learn today?” My dad asked in his typically interested, but sarcastic
tone.

“I’m an asshole!!!” I replied ecstatically, on the verge of tears.

Naturally, they disagreed with me. “Well, you’re not an asshole,” they said.

But then I went on to explain what I meant. That I now understood how my unconscious
arrogance with people made them feel bad about themselves when I got into arguments
with them, and that regardless of what the discussion or argument is about, keeping the
relationship open and loving is much more important than being right, being the “winner”,
and preserving the integrity of my “ego” - which is really just something I made up along
the way, anyway.

My family sort of understood, but they were a little cautious about my tone. I was going
a mile-a-minute and they really didn’t understand that well what I was talking about.
My brother and his wife had a little better grasp of what I was saying.

That night, before I went to bed, I went into my parent’s room and asked my dad if he
would come with me to the last night of the Forum.

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“Before I go to bed I just wanted to come in and tell you that the Forum has asked that I
bring someone on the Tuesday night (the last night of the course) that I think would benefit
from the course. So I thought I’d ask you tonight, before I go really nuts.”

I was alluding to the fact that my parents were not keen on me taking the course due to its
cost and its “cult like” qualities (the long days). I asked my dad on the first night because,
if I became even more excited as the weekend went on, I would be filled with so much zeal
as to make him think I really had joined a cult and was now trying to get him involved too.
All of this was a big joke in the family.

When friends or relatives asked what I was up to that weekend, my dad would tell them
that “I’ve gone off to join a cult.”

But he was always there for me. I knew he’d come, even if he thought it was all bullshit.
My mother, on the other hand, wouldn’t get caught dead within 10 miles of the place.

We were assigned homework that night, but it was homework I didn’t do. They wanted
us to think of the person in your life that you are the most estranged from and/or have the
most conflict with, and write them a letter of reconciliation. The letters would be shared at
the beginning of the next day.

I went to bed that night wondering who my letter would go to. I just didn’t feel like I had a
relationship in my life that was creating conflict within me. Many of the people at the Forum
were trying to recover from serious issues such as divorce, death, strokes, alcoholism,
etc…my problems seemed not only small, but non-existent.

The only person I could think of was Ben, an old friend of mine that I hadn’t spoken with
in 4 years. But I wasn’t so sure I wanted to heal that relationship.

Ben was one of those people that others might describe as “difficult”. On his good days he
was intelligent, dramatic, funny, opinionated and fun to be around. On his bad days he was
arrogant, insulting, depressed and depressing, negative, paranoid and overly competitive.
He was a friend I hadn’t had a lot in common with in my 20’s, but we had known each other
since early childhood. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to get back together with him as
I wanted his memory and the thought of us not speaking to go away. Just like when we
were friends, he was still irritating me - except this time, with his absence for my life.

33
But I still didn’t feel like patching things up, not with him or anyone else I could think of.
I had a happy home life, good relationships - I liked myself. I just wanted a job!

Saturday

Saturday morning was the first time people actually got to open up and tell the rest of
us why they were there. They would do this by reading their letter to a partner that they
were sitting next to or, if they felt like it, they could stand up and share it with the rest
of the class.

Thatcher had told us the night before what to expect from these letters that we wrote.
She had told us how many people, while wanting to reconnect with the person they were
writing to, would send a lot of blame their way and not really take responsibility for their
own role in the relationship. She was expecting letters like:

“Dear Dad, I miss you and love you and I am sorry for getting angry with you when you act
like such an asshole with your drinking.”

She expected stinginess, blame, conditional love, manipulation, etc.

But first she wanted to know if anyone had not done their homework. I raised my hand
along with a few others. After a brief reprimand she asked us to go to the back of the room
and do it.

I wrote a brief, but forgettable letter to Ben.

Once I was back at my seat, the session started and Thatcher asked people to read their
letters. I was not expecting much of a response from the group. Who would want to read
a letter of such a personal nature to 150 people?

I was wrong.

Hands were up all over the place. It became very clear to me how much pain a lot of these
people were in, how badly they wanted to get their lives in order and their relationships
healed.

34
Thatcher selected the first guy to get up and read his letter.

The guy stood up,

“Dad….”

was the only word that came out before tears came pouring down his face.

His letter was not what Thatcher had expected. No blame, no guilt, no defensiveness.
This guy just wanted his dad back in his life.

One after another, people stood up with a different, tragic scenario, but the same desire.
People had had enough of trying to hold their high and mighty lives together. The people
in this room (most of them anyway) had given up.

We had surrendered.

After hearing from about 6 people, the lone transsexual in the room got up to read his
letter. A lot of tears had been shed by that point in the morning. But instead of reading his
letter he began to sing,

“Feelings…nothing more than feelings….”

It was priceless. The whole room cracked up.

Then he started his letter,

“Dear Mom, I’m writing to you from the Landmark Forum course I told you I was going to
take. If you remember, one of the reasons I wanted to take the course was so that I could
be around normal people… but now I’m really starting to wonder if there is such a thing.”

That really became the theme of the weekend for me. As Thatcher said,
“The only difference between regular people and the crazy homeless folks you see on the
street is that their lips are moving.”

35
At break there were phones out in the hall so that we could make calls to the loved ones
with whom we were in conflict with, to start the healing process right away. But during the
breaks I wasn’t at the phones, I was on the toilet. Every single break I had to go to the
men’s room to relieve the worst intestinal gas I had ever had in my life. I was there, every
2 hours for 3 days. And I wasn’t eating anything to give me the gas. I became convinced
that there was some relationship between what I was learning and the gas. It was as if
the farts were old experiences, stored in my intestines, which were now leaving my body,
as I no longer needed to hang on to them. In a very literal way, my negative experiences
were being let go.

There were a lot of different concepts thrown at us on the Saturday and the Sunday.
They talked about how people rarely listen to one another because they already think they
know what the other is going to say; “Already Always Listening” they called it. They talked
about the personality traits we use when life is going well for us, our “Winning Formula”,
and when life is not going so good, our “Losing Formula”. Thatcher talked about what
we get out of being the “victim” in our relationships and how that lets us avoid taking
responsibility for our own lives, about how being the victim gets us love and sympathy
from others.

And, most importantly, she talked about the root of all this stuff, which is fear. Not really
fear of what we are currently experiencing, but fear of what might happen in the future. In
a nutshell, because we are constantly living in a state of fear that we are not even aware
of, we are constantly planning or worrying about the future by remembering the negative
experiences of the past. As a result of being constantly stuck in the past, because we are
worrying about the future, we are rarely immersed in what is really important - which is
how we are living the present.

She’s talking Buddhism.

And I’m buying it.

But then something happened that was basically the turning point, where I went from
interested, open-minded “normal guy”, to a member of the “cosmic order.”

36
“Now we are going to feel our fear,” Thatcher told us.
“You are in a very safe space and it is perfectly fine to feel this way.”
Then, she had us close our eyes, lower our heads and focus on the thought that, “Everyone
in the room is trying to attack you…everyone wants to harm you.”

She would shout out that scenario, or ones similar, repeatedly. I found her scenarios
rather lame. These people were among the meekest I had ever met. I wasn’t the least bit
afraid or intimidated by anyone in the room. As a matter of fact, I could never remember
being afraid. I was always a pretty brave guy. I stood up for myself in the school yard.
I played football. I was even pretty good at public speaking.

I thought I was fearless.

Then I saw the SCUBA depth gauge at 25 feet.

I felt a force puncture my chest like a fist. It came in around my solar plexus and rose up
in my body to my head, forcing me to burst into tears out of nowhere.

I didn’t know what had happened, but I was feeling fear now. I let the imagery of my diving
accident blend into imagery of being taken hostage, of being surrounded by terrorists.
I was shaking, my knees were quivering. I was thoroughly immersed in the experience,
but at the same time, very aware that this was not actually happening now; that it was all
in my imagination.

“I could be an actor,” I thought to myself. My tears were real.

I wasn’t the only one. People were sobbing, throughout the room. One guy screamed so
loud, he sounded like he had just met the devil.

And with the tears, came another revelation:

“All my life I thought that I couldn’t feel fear…that I was somehow different from every
other human on the planet…..my God, I thought I was crazy!”

This insight brought with it a tremendous amount of relief to know that, deep down, I really
was just like everyone else and that they were just like me.

37
As this thought went through my head, I heard Thatcher change directions.

“Follow your fear,” she said.

“Follow it to the other side….there is something interesting waiting for you on the other
side of your fear, something quite funny…follow your fear…”

“Does anything there appear to be absurd to you?” she probed.

Immediately, I burst out laughing.

“Yes!” I thought. “Me! I am completely absurd. I am absurd!”

The sense of relief was overwhelming. Immediately I thought of my father, the most
absurd person I had ever met.

It must have been earlier in the course when they had asked us to define our parents.
When I thought of my mother, the only word that came to mind was “perfect”. But when
I thought of my father, nothing came to mind. To me, my dad was an indefinable entity, a
living being beyond explanation; an impossible combination of walking talking paradoxes
that cannot possibly be fully understood. He was, in every sense of the word, absurd.
And, as I came to realize over the course of the weekend, that is why my love for him had
always been unconditional. There was nothing he could do that would be beyond the
mental boundaries I had set up for him, because, by unconscious definition, my dad had
always been indefinable.

For the first time, I truly understood the absurdity of my own life, and that of everyone
else’s. We are all rationally impossible. In other words, we are all miracles; entities that
never should have been able to happen; creatures that cannot rationally exist.

I began to feel myself sort of slipping into the environment at that time.

Swimming in a sea of bliss. Happy, floating, excited, crazy, emotional and shaking.

I can’t remember when we began to talk about how we defined our parents, but, as much
as I knew that my love for my father was unconditional, I could see, for the first time, what
many, many women had told me in my life:

38
“Sean, you’ve got a problem with your mother.”
“Sean, sometimes I don’t know whether it’s you talking or you mother talking.”
“Sean, have you been talking to your mother about us again? You have, haven’t you?
I can hear it in your voice.”

For the first time, I could see what the problem was, clearly.

About Mom

My mom comes from a line of matriarchal families, where the men were largely unreliable
and the women held everything together. My great-grandmother, whom I never met,
raised six kids in a marriage with a man who drank heavily, beating her and the kids along
the way. The only story I ever really heard about my mom’s grandmother was that she
always told my great-grandfather, “As soon as the last child moves out, I’m leaving you.”

Back in the 1930’s and ’40’s, women rarely left their husbands, even if they were total
jerks. The day after her last child left home, my great grandmother packed her bags and
left her husband.

“I always respected her for that,” Mom would say. She respected her for not leaving him
for the sake of the children, for telling him she was going to leave him, and then keeping
her word and her dignity by following through.

My grandmother was the same type of woman. The whole family called her “Mother
Margaret”, even her own brothers and sisters. Because she came from such a large
family, she was forced to forgo her education so that she could help her mother raise her
younger siblings. When she had her own family, granddad was a little unreliable with the
paychecks, so Mother Margaret was left to pay the bills, clean the house and raise 4 kids
at a time when most women didn’t work outside the home.

The day my grandmother died, the last two things she did before going to the hospital
were to lay out my grandfather’s shirt and tie for him to wear to her funeral, and give him
$26 to pay the phone bill, when it came in at the end of the month.

39
I think by now you can understand the sort of lineage my mother comes from. She is a
strong woman, from a lineage of strong, independent, dependable matriarchs. And just
like they did, man, did she rule the roost.

Now retired, my mom had been an executive assistant with a large Canadian corporation
for many years. She went back to work after staying home to raise my brother and I into
our late teens. After returning to the workforce three days a week, time and time again
she would come home with performance appraisals recommending her for management
positions if she would only agree to commit to permanent, full-time status, which she was
reluctant to do. Back then there was no real financial need for her to work at all.

Back in the ‘80’s my dad was raking it in, earning a six-figure income. In the late ‘80’s
the money was so good that mom and dad were flying off to The Bahamas for the long
weekend. However, once free trade kicked in with NAFTA, the real estate market went
down the tubes and my dad’s career nose-dived. As a result, the ‘90’s started with mom
working full-time, paying the mortgage, cooking the meals and cleaning the house - just
like her mother did…and her mother’s mother did.

The executives she worked for used to call her “The General.”

However, I was a powerful force in my own right.

I was born on March 27, 1966, under the sign of Aries and, by all accounts, I was a
true God of War. I took great pleasure in antagonizing those around me, especially my
mother. I’d lock her out on the balcony; paint my bedroom walls with my own “personal”
art supplies, located in my diapers. I slept very little, keeping my parents up all night with
cries for attention which were non-stop. Most children have some curiosity regarding
electrical outlets, but once they were shocked, that was the end of it. I would go back
for more, hairpin in hand. Like a lot of young boys, fun for me was hitting anything, but
especially the private parts of my relatives. My earliest nickname was “Bulldozer” for the
way I crawled across the room, creating havoc wherever I went. Later they called me
“Baby Huey”, after the big duck on TV that none of the other, smaller ducks wanted to play
with. I was simply too rough. The other kids my age would scamper away in fear.

40
Early on, my mom figured out that “it was going to be her or me” that was going to run
the house. This wasn’t a battle that the General was about to lose. In retrospect, I think
I was disciplined fairly, but often. Always warned twice before receiving punishment,
I always had to take that third time just to see what would happen. Whenever I see little
kids running their mothers lives in a grocery store or restaurant, I think of the story of when
I was spanked, pants down, in the meat department of the supermarket. Don’t forget, this
was the late 1960`s.

We eventually reached a compromise at the grocery store. I’d get right in the cart and
she’d put the groceries on top of me. It was a great arrangement for her, because
I couldn’t get out and pull stuff off the shelves; and I liked it because I got to ride around
with a bunch of groceries on top of me.

My disposition changed as I started to go to school. I liked school and was good at it.
It wasn’t as boring as staying at home. I was pretty popular too. In grade one I had six
girlfriends, or so I thought in my head.

Looking back, I think the discipline my mother instilled in me was necessary, although
occasionally, I wasn’t sure what for. Mom was the keeper of all information on what was
good and bad, right and wrong. And, because she never violated this strict moral code
that only she knew, she took a place in my head as being “perfect”. She always knew
where everything was. She never made a mistake. She trusted me and gave me a long
leash in high school. Whenever I was yelled at I felt that, somehow, I deserved it. I think
this is where the “neurosis” came in.

As I got older and needed to make my own decisions, her image of being “all knowing”
stayed with me. I would think about what I wanted to do, but her voice would, seemingly,
always be there telling me to do the opposite, until I made my final decision, which she
always supported. My dad reinforced this situation. His only rule in the house was, “Sean,
your mother…” meaning, the only thing that I could do wrong in the house, in my dad’s
eyes, was piss off my mother.

When I was coming home from Vancouver to pursue the WeCU job, I was haunted by two
thoughts. First, I dreaded the ongoing, nonstop dialogue with mom about me forgetting
advertising and going back to school to get my MBA. While I had thought of doing it while
I was in university, as time passed, I began to reject everything that an MBA represented.
But mom wouldn’t let it go, always telling me about some “hip” young guy like me at work
that just got his MBA and now has a wonderful life.

41
The other incident happened the month before I came home. I was driving home one
night and, as I pulled into the driveway of my condo, I clipped a car that was illegally
parked too close to the driveway. The accident was my fault, but the other guy had some
responsibility as well. When I saw the dent in my car, the first thought that popped into
my head was, “What is mom going to say?” My gut instinctively cringed at the thought of
Mom’s disapproval.

I was almost 30 years old.

It was about that time that I sensed that all of the women in my life had been on to
something. I did have a problem with my mother.

I didn’t see her as human, and her perfection made me feel, somehow, less than perfect.
All I could ever aspire to be was a person as good as she was. But being imperfect,
I would never get there. In my mind, I wasn’t good enough.

Most of what I just wrote came to me during the Forum weekend. I hadn’t really put it
together until then. And, as with the “fear” exercise and realizing that I was an “asshole”
(both revelations of startling proportions), deeply understanding my relationship to my
mom opened me up as never before.

All this from a guy who just thought he needed a better job.

Saturday Night

Driving home that night, I thought I truly understood what it was to be human. It was,
on one level, the saddest story I had ever heard, and on another, the most beautiful and
heroic.

Here we are, all us humans - gods stuck in the bodies of animals. All of us pretending to
“have it together”, busting our asses out there to fulfill some artificial image of who we are;
all the time putting on this brave face that everyone else can easily see through, if they
care to look. Of course, we have been trained not to do that either. How many times do
we look at each other in the eyes? Not that often.

42
And here I sit with the answer. We don’t need to put on the brave face, because when
we put that mask on, others instinctively put theirs on too, without even knowing it. We
do not know that we are protecting ourselves against an illusion, and that the illusion is
not what will kill us. It is the protection, the masks, the identities, the personalities that we
give ourselves in order to make us feel strong and good enough that will kill us, because
these are the things that kill our relationships with each other. Anything that separates us
is a sin; anything that brings us together is a virtue.

We are forced through the history of our cultures and families into a situation of constantly
having to prove that we are good enough, against some immeasurable, ever-changing
criteria. Meanwhile, we are all fine just the way we are.

If we all could only understand that, the world would change overnight. If every inch of us
knew that we were more than OK, that the real us was God itself; there would be no reason
for our fear-driven manipulations and defensive maneuvers. The illusion of money, status
and power would disappear and we would all find Heaven on Earth. When I would think
of the degree of this universal neurosis I had come to understand, I would weep.

What made it even sadder, was that to explain it to a normal, fear-driven person is
impossible. They would simply think that you are crazy. You are standing right in front of
them, seeing and feeling the equivalent of Heaven on Earth, and you are trying to explain
it to them, but they cannot believe you. They want to but they can’t; because they fear the
unknown, part of which resides within themselves. They would rather toil in the mediocrity
of day-to-day strife, than risk even the thought that life could be so much more radically
different and wonderful than it is for most people right now.

By Saturday night, I was in one world, everyone else was in another.

When I went home that night to go to sleep everything, everything was different. I was in
the bathroom getting ready for bed, and I could hear the sound of my hair being combed.
I looked at a towel on the rack and immediately saw every fiber. When I got into bed and
turned out the lights, I was awestruck. The velvet black darkness blanketing me was one
of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It dawned on me that as a child you could
“see” that darkness and were naturally afraid of what was lurking within it. Your mother
would tell you, “Don’t be afraid, there is nothing there,” but the nothing is something.
I could “see” the “nothing”, the blackness, and it was beautiful.

43
But my sleep didn’t last very long.

Nervous energy shook through my entire body. I was up at 4:00am writing stuff down,
drinking orange juice. My mom got up from her sleep and came downstairs to see what
I was doing. I spilled my guts about how I had seen her as “perfect”, but that was just the
beginning of a confession of stuff she didn’t know about.

A girlfriend of mine had had an abortion. I made the call. I took responsibility so that she
wouldn’t have to. I’d carried that guilt with me for a long time. I carried a lot of guilt over
past relationships. Guilt about not really loving these girls the way I felt I should have.
Guilt over leaving them. Guilt everywhere.

My last relationship was one where I tried to repent for my previous sins. When I met
Carmen she was totally lost, a real mess. But she knew it, and she had a fire within her
in which I could see potential. I made a decision with Carmen to love her like a father
would a child; to give her the same sense of responsibility and ethics that my mom had
given me; to raise a 19 year old girl as if she were my own. You scratch my neurosis,
I’ll scratch yours.

I gave Carmen everything I could while we were together. All the love, time, and attention
I could muster. Her demands were non-stop. Yes, she learned a lot from me, as I did from
her, but by the time she dumped me, I was spent. I had given her all I could, including the
trust and freedom to go to India for five weeks, and she paid me back by having an affair
with some guy in Bombay. Part of me was angry about that, but the deeper part felt like
I had finally gotten what I deserved. Now I was free. My penance was done. And I could
start anew in Vancouver, without having to carry that guilt with me anymore.

I told my mom about that too. About how I felt redeemed knowing that I had tried
to help Carmen become a better person. That I felt like I had taken a life, but now
had helped someone get theirs back. My relationship with Carmen had allowed me to
forgive myself.

It wasn’t easy for her to hear, but I had to get it out. It felt like I was vomiting memories
at her. Explaining things the family could never have understood, because they were my
secrets - secrets that separated me from them.

44
As the evening of confession went on, I told her of how I felt like there was a lack of genuine
affection in our relationship when I was small. Her hugs were always stiff, protected, and
guarded. I told her that I knew she loved me, but that she didn’t always show it the way
I wanted her to, and that, “I want a hug!”

A real hug.

She hugged me then. She held me for a long time. I needed it.

As we talked through the night, I could see how deeply concerned she was and I knew,
deep in my heart, that if she knew what I was thinking, and if I expressed my thoughts the
way I wanted to, she would think that I was insane. “I don’t think you are crazy,” she said,
trying to console me. She was really scared. She couldn’t possibly understand what was
happening to her boy.

Sunday

The next day I’m back at the Forum and I feel better than I have in my entire life. I am
completely stoked, in love with life and ready to take on the world. I had cleared more
issues up in the previous 48 hours than I had, perhaps, in my previous 20 years. I felt like
I was living magic.

For me, there wasn’t a whole lot more to absorb. Thatcher might have introduced a few
new concepts, but I felt as if none of it really mattered anymore. It was more of a day
to summarize what we had covered, where we were at, and where we could go with this
new wisdom.

“Life is about nothing,” Thatcher said, “…and because life is about nothing, anything is
possible.”

Then there was a bit of encouragement to get out there and live your dreams, the hell with
the definitions and limitations. However, by this time, I was way ahead of her.

45
Remember, I had a sense that magic was running my life in Vancouver. Now I had proof.
That afternoon they asked us to call the person who had recommended the course to us
so that they could be with us for the evening session. I called Carmen.

After the Sunday session, Carmen and I went for a drink at a bar nearby and talked about
what I had been through, what I had learned, and what she had learned on the course as
well. When we went out to her car, I mentioned how I could see things that I had missed
before, especially the darkness.

“Isn’t it wild!” she said to me. “It’s like you’re on acid.”

I had never taken acid (or any other drug), but from what I had heard from others, the
experience I was having was similar. One thing I forgot to mention earlier was that Thatcher
had warned us that this change in perception with our senses may happen to some of us.
“For some of you things may look very, very different,” she said, and “Not to worry, it will
wear off after a day or two.”

At home that night was more of the same. Feelings of wide-eyed optimism mixed with
sadness over the state of mediocrity most people accept as simply normal life. I began to
call friends in Vancouver that I thought could benefit from the course, and friends closer to
home as well. I told them what they meant to me in my life. In retrospect, I probably bit off
more than I could chew. I felt like I wanted to save everyone from everything. My friends
listened quite openly to me, but, as they should have, they had some caution about the
level of emotion and intensity of my language.

I left a voice mail with Ben’s parents saying I’d learned a lot over the past weekend, like
why we hurt the people we love the most. I told them I wanted Ben’s phone number so
that I could call him.

46
Manic Monday

Monday was a day off from the Forum, and, outside of the seminar environment, things
started to get a little crazier. By the time I woke up on Monday morning, I was seeing the
world I live in, in a completely different manner. I began to sense that maybe I was making
all of this up, everything around me, out of my own imagination. The impenetrable gap
between fantasy and reality seemed to have almost disappeared.

My parents and I would have long talks in the kitchen. “Sean, we’re concerned,” they
would say, “You’re really emotional, and we don’t like to see you like this.”

“It’s like I have been to Heaven and come back, and you want me to act normally! Wouldn’t
you be emotional if you had been through that?” I replied, usually in tears. Sometimes
happy tears, sometimes sad tears, but a lot of tears, and shaking, and farting.

I decided to go to Fairview Mall that day to do some shopping. Primarily, I went to buy
some notebooks so that I could write down the insights and experiences I was going
through. I was not in this world.

For some reason, I pulled out a De La Soul cassette from our stereo cabinet. I had seen
them in concert in Vancouver, the week before I came home. It was a “goodbye night” with
some of my closest friends. These three rappers were truly “Of the Soul”.

I had seen many rap concerts in the past, but their desire to ensure that all of us had a
time to remember was inspiring. After the show they came out and danced with the crowd.
I went up to Maceo, the D.J. of the group and told them how much I enjoyed the show
and that they were the best rap concert I’d ever seen. We talked for a while. I felt a
true connection.

So when I pulled out that De La Soul cassette, I had them in the back of my mind from
Vancouver. But when I put their tape into my car stereo and headed out to Fairview Mall
that day, they sounded different. Previously abstract, indecipherable lyrics were now
understandable. The album starts with a song called the Daisy Age - a prophesy about
a time of love on this planet that will begin “about five years from now”. The album was
five years old. It dawned on me that what they were talking about in the song was a time
when all of mankind would exist in the timeless state of mind that I was experiencing at
that very moment.

47
More and more, it seemed that my imagination and the “real” external world were
merging.

Walking into the mall, I deciding that, unlike an adult that walks from A to B, I would walk
where I “felt” like walking. For a long time I couldn’t get out of the Sears department store.
I was often walking in circles.

Once in the main part of the mall, I heard music over the intercom. I had never heard
music over the intercom at Fairview Mall before. As I was “wandering” through the mall,
the song being played over the intercom was “The Wanderer” by Fabian. I couldn’t tell
whether the music was coming from “out there” or from inside my own head.

I looked into the window of a jewelry shop. There were watches, five of them, in the
window. Four of them had a second hand, except for the one in the middle. I decided that
I wanted a second-hand to be on that watch. I took another look, and the second-hand,
which, apparently, wasn’t there before, appeared.

Then I remembered some of my quantum physics readings that said there was really no
such thing as time, that it was a mental construct and wasn’t really real. So I looked at
those second-hands trying to make them stop, then start, and go faster and slower. It was
working. I wasn’t sure why I was experiencing time moving faster or going slower, but
I knew that I was.

I went over to the balcony and stood under the skylight, feeling the sun warming my face.
I stood there for a long time.

I went to Levi’s to buy a pair of jeans. People responded to me differently. They seemed
warmer, more sincere. When I went to pay for a pair of Levi’s, a petite, pretty Asian girl was
working the cash. The computerized cash register on which she was trying to swipe my
Visa card wasn’t working. She was getting frustrated, obviously insecure about keeping
me waiting. After trying the other register, which stalled as well, she apologized to me.

“That’s OK”, I said to her.

“I can get money from the bank machine and come back to pay with cash.”

Instantly, she relaxed and the Visa card went through on the computer that wasn’t working
a minute ago.

48
“It was really nice meeting you,” she said, with sincerity to her tone.

As I walked out the door, I felt myself get a bit of a headache. It came when I began to think
of myself as being a particularly “good” person for the way I interacted with the cashier.
Then I noticed that if I had a negative thought, the headache moved to my stomach. As
the day went on, I got more of these stomach aches and headaches, only to realize that
when I thought of myself as “nothing”, not good or bad, did this energy centre itself in
my chest, around my heart. That was where it felt like it belonged, and I was without
discomfort. It felt as if my soul had been unleashed and was moving up and down inside
of my body, depending on the tone of my thought patterns.

In one store, I saw a picture of a little boy on a board game. I stood there for 10 minutes
to see if I could make him talk. He never did. It wasn’t that I was sure that he could; I was
just testing my newfound powers. It was as if I were testing the laws of physics in a world
that was totally new to me.

I bought a T-shirt based on my experience of the first night of the Forum. It said,
“If Assholes were Airplanes this Place would be an Airport.”

It was stupid, redneck humour, but it was appropriate. In an effort to protect our phony
self-image, all of us act like assholes and don’t even know we are doing so.
In fact, if we could understand how, why and when we act like that, the change in society
would be miraculous. People wouldn’t just be “nice” to each other. For the first time in the
history of Western Civilization, we would actually connect with each other, all of the time.

The most vivid memory of that trip to Fairview Mall, however, was the petting zoo. Right
there in the middle of the mall was a small petting zoo for children. I had never seen it
there, before or since. I stood at the fence, not knowing it was a dream or not. All the
children were petting the smaller, safe animals. However, in the back stood a solitary
camel, swaying back and forth like large animals do when they are cooped up in a small
space. Nobody was petting him (her?) because he was too big. I remember how I had
been taught that you should be wary of camels; that they are ornery and that they bite.

I thought about it for a few long minutes, then I entered; the only adult without children.
I went straight over to the camel. He made a grunt noise acknowledging my presence.

49
I grunted back, just like he did. He swayed away. When he swayed back he grunted
again, looking me straight in the eye. I never wavered, grunting at him, mimicking his
sound, looking straight back at him. He swayed away.

The next time he swayed back he brushed my cheek with his, and swayed away. When
he swayed back the next time he buried his head into my chest like a baby. I put my arms
around him. I heard a woman behind me gasp at the affectionate gesture of the camel.
The camel and I were loving each other.

When I glanced behind me, it seemed that our interaction had caught the attention of
others. Two llamas and a couple of businessmen had come up behind me, to see the
camel and myself, I guess. The zoo keeper, who I had been talking to earlier, came over
as well.

“I know what it is to be on LSD,” I told her.

“Are you on anything now?” she said.
“No, but I know how it works,” I replied.
“It allows you to forget what you are trying to forget, but you don’t even know you’re trying
to forget it.”

After saying goodbye to the camel, I talked to the zookeeper a little bit and told her about
the course I was taking, then I left. But after a few minutes, I went back to the petting zoo,
and wrote down the address of the Toronto Windsor Hotel, where the final evening of the
Forum was to take place. As I was writing, she sort of saddled over near me, as I knew
she would.

“Here,” I said, “If you’re interested, I’d like you to come to the last night of the course as a
guest of mine, if you feel like it. I think you would get a lot out of it.”
She told me that she would think about it.

After the petting zoo I sat down on a bench, feeling lost in a mall I had been to hundreds
of times before. Then I realized that I was not a child, like I had pretended to be during my
whole day there, but that I was an adult too, and could move linearly, asking for directions
if I needed them. I went to Grand & Toy and bought four hardcover notebooks in which to
keep all of my writings, then headed back to the car.

50
However, out in the parking lot I was, again, not using my linear, logical, functioning
properly and walked out there solely on instinct. I walked a number of steps to the middle
of the lot and paused, as I would come to do often, waiting for my intuition to kick in and
give me the direction I required. I felt an urge within me to look to the upper right of the
lot. There was my car.

I can see how someone could easily interpret all that I have written about this day as the
goings-on of a man who has lost his mind. But I was functioning, talking to people, and
happy. I knew I wasn’t in our “normal” external reality, the one that we have all been taught
to see as the real world, but I was also uncertain of my experience being all a figment of
my imagination. I felt “in-between” those two states. I was confused, but it was a joyous
confusion.

Tuesday

Tuesday Night was the last night of the session.

My dad and I went down to the Windsor Hotel. Despite the fact that both my parents had
been dealing with a very emotional, flaky son over the past few days, Dad still lived up to
his word, and came down to the last session with me. Mind you, he sat in the back row
wearing sunglasses. I was wearing my “Assholes in Airport” t-shirt. We arrived just before
it started.

The room was jam-packed with very happy, excited course members and the people in
their lives that they wanted to heal relationships with the most, or those that they thought
could benefit most from the course.

With my dad beside me, I looked around the room to see if the girl from the petting zoo
was in the room. I saw her in the middle of the room, looking straight at me. I bolted over
to her from my seat and thanked her for coming. Then, in a rush, went back to where
I was sitting.

I can’t remember a whole lot of the details of what was said that night. Initially though,
Thatcher, asked some people to stand up and tell the others in the room what they
had learned.

51
One of the first guys to get up was the first guy who read his letter to his father on
the Saturday morning. This guy brought just about his whole family. His dad looked just
like him.

I was waving my hand frantically in the back of the room. Thatcher asked me what my
name was, but for some reason I wouldn’t tell her. I think I wanted it to be a surprise. She
insisted, but I refused. As I got the microphone I had my dad stand up and the girl in the
middle of the room who I had invited.

“I learned on this weekend that I am as absurd as my father is,” I said. I don’t think anyone
in the room had an idea what I was talking about. “And this woman over here, I had never
met before until today.” I said, then I sat down.

I didn’t get much response from the crowd. I’m not sure if they knew what to make of me,
or what I just said.

At the break, the guests were asked to join the Landmark volunteers in separate rooms,
where, as I had briefed my dad earlier, they would be given a bit of a hard-sell.

In the meantime a few of the people I met from the Forum came over. One came and
explained to me that the girl that I had thought was the girl from the petting zoo was, in
fact, not the person I thought she was at all, but was her cousin.

I asked if she had a sister or any relative that looked like her that would have been working
at Fairview Mall the day before. She said no.

I asked her why, then, did she stand up. She replied that it was the pressure of me
asking her to do so in public. I’m a little more embarrassed now than I was then about
what had happened. I really couldn’t believe it. She looked just like the girl I had met the
day before, and she had looked right at me when I came into the room. I was starting to
think that the Universe was playing a bit of a trick on me again, in response to my rather
outlandish, grandstanding behaviour.

“Well, you still played an important role in my life!” I said to her. I went back to my seat.
There were no hurt feelings or anything. They kind of thought it was funny.

52
I was just buzzing by this point. Everything seemed like a dream to me. I was really wired,
in a state of wondrous bliss.

In the second half of the session I sat alone at the end of a row, as Thatcher began to
summarize much of what we had covered and discussed how to apply these lessons to
our daily life. Staring at the magnificent chandeliers in the room, I began to tune out.
I realized that I had already received all of the answers to all of the questions that I thought
I would ever need to know.

“My God,” I thought to myself, “This is the kind of information that I only thought I would
get once I was dead.”

“That’s it! I am dead! I died during the diving accident, and this is some sort of
purgatory.”

I realized I had been dead for a month and had not even realized it, but, since I was
undergoing this sort of magical purgatory adjustment process, everyone in my life since
then must know, since they are not human either - they must be some type of angel that
only appear to be human.

“Everyone knows I’m dead but me!”

I began to laugh hysterically at the profoundness of this cosmic joke. Everyone in my life,
every acquaintance, gas station attendant, Forum volunteer and member of my family
knew that I was dead, but acted as if I were alive in order for me to learn what I needed
to learn in this “in between life” so that I could move on to Heaven, or wherever it is I am
supposed to go. I was floored. And who could I tell? Everyone was in on the joke.

So I sat there in my chair, staring at the ceiling. Meanwhile, Thatcher was at the front asking
people where their heads were at regarding what they had learned over the weekend.
She would ask people to raise their hands if they were stuck on certain things that she
mentioned. If you raised your hand, she would recommend, tongue-in-cheek, that you
sign up for the advanced Forum course.

I just sat and waited for her to finish. I knew I wasn’t ever going back home again.
I figured I wasn’t going to see anyone from my family ever again, either. Dad had done
his job and left.

53
At the end of her lecture, Thatcher said something that sort of stuck with me. She said
something like, “And if you haven’t raised your hand yet, you don’t need to take the
advanced course …..and feel free to proceed through the Valley of Death……” The crowd
laughed at her last line. I wasn’t laughing. It was the first thing I had taken seriously
all night.

I picked up my coat and sort of headed for the door. I was on my way to “Heaven”, but
then I sort of stopped as I wasn’t sure which way to go. I simply stood against the wall.
A Forum volunteer came over and I said to her, in a rather comical way, as I was obviously
in some sort of make-believe land, “Excuse me, but I’m looking for the Valley of Death?”

I don’t know what she was thinking, but she sent me over to the opposite corner of the
room. By this time I had put my name tag on upside down. In the corner was another
volunteer. I had met this guy a few days earlier. I’d talked to him because he looked like
a magician from TV - part of the team, Penn and Teller. I told him that he looked like the
big guy, Penn.

It hit me as soon as I was sent over to him, he didn’t just look like a magician, he was
a magician. He was somehow connected with this elaborate joke regarding my death.

“Hi,” I said to him.

“Oh, hi, yeah, Sean, right?” he said.

“That was a great trick.” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

“Sure,” I said knowingly.

I walked away and over to the back wall of the ballroom, coat in hand. I just stood there
waiting for someone to get me, as I knew they would.

This girl came over, and asked if I needed some assistance.

“You lead,” I said, expecting that she would take me to Heaven.

54
She sat me down with this other volunteer. They handed me a form to fill out for the
advanced course. I just wrote “Hi” on it in big letters.

I was sitting across from this guy who, supposedly, was there to get me to sign up for the
advanced course. When she saw how I filled-in the form, the girl who took me over said
to me, “Maybe Steve can help you out.”

Steve looked like a game-show host. I thought that was pretty funny.

“You know, you look like a game show host,” I said to him.

“I do?” he replied.

“Yeah….You know, all my life I thought I would make a good game show host. What a
phony way to live your life, eh?”

“Are you saying I’m a phony?”

“We’re all phonies,” I said.

Changing subjects, I said to him, leaning over in a sarcastic, but partially truthful way, “You
know what I’m really afraid of?” I asked rhetorically, “This part about going through the
Valley of Death.”

“You just went through it,” he said.

“I did!” I said in excited anticipation, I knew that Heaven (lack of a better word for the
afterlife) was close at hand. I looked to the right. We were right next to the partition in the
Windsor’s Ballroom., next to one of the doors.

I jumped up from my chair, pushed open the door, and walked into a magnificent site. The
other half of the ballroom was completely empty, with the exception of a handful of chairs
near the far door. Middle Eastern pattern carpet on the floor, luminescent chandeliers
lighting up the room, and just me. Alone. As far as I knew, utterly alone. I was unsure if
I would ever see another human again.

55
And I loved it.

“Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!” I howled, as I ran around the room. I was absolutely

elated.

I was dead!

But now what to do? How do I leave this illusion of 3-dimensional reality and recognize
my true state of being? All weekend I had done everything on instinct. I just did whatever
popped into my head, hoping that an inspirational key would pop up. Memories of books
about attaining Nirvana, and a book by C.S. Lewis passed my mind. I didn’t know what
I was supposed to do, by I knew it would involve letting go of everything.
I took off my shirt.

One of the guys from the course opened the door. “Hey, come on in man!” I said. I thought
he was coming to Heaven too.

“No, it’s all right,” he said. “You just do your thing, have a good time.”

I thought he was wishing me well on my journey.

I looked for a place... a place to interact with whatever it was I was to interact with.

I had to go to the bathroom.

I pulled out my penis and urinated on the carpet. The first drop hit the dime size centre
of a lotus design in the carpet, yet another indication that I was on the right track. Urine
didn’t smell bad to me anymore. It was beautiful. It smelled as it was supposed to smell.
Like urine.

I laid down in the moist area I had made in the carpet, face first. “Maybe I could push
myself through the floor?” I thought. I tried. That didn’t work.

Then I laid on my back and stared at the ceiling. I urinated again, this time in my blue
jeans. I felt this was all a test, a test to see if I was truly prepared to give up everything
and surrender myself to the complete unknown.

56
Still shaking from head to toe with energy, I started to think that maybe I was going to
ascend piece by piece; don’t ask me why.

As I laid there trembling, staring at the lights, I began to focus on my left leg. It started to
shake vigorously. As I focused, people from my life, people that I loved and had played a
role in me becoming who I was, came to my mind.

“Peter!!!” I yelled, “Get in here”. Peter never came. Peter was my friend in Vancouver
with whom I “died” scuba diving. I was recalling what he said to me in the boat after we
had dried off.

“So Sparky,” he said, “You’re leaving Vancouver in three weeks to start a new life, and you
just about lost your life at 90 feet below sea level. Do you feel any different?

“No, not really,” I said.

“No huh?” He looked at me like he knew something I didn’t.

Of course, laying face up in the hotel ballroom, I now realized that Peter knew that I was
dead and that he was, in fact, a caretaker for me so that I could continue on my journey.

My leg stopped shaking and became completely relaxed. Then the other leg began to
shake. I contemplated how I had wanted to have children before I died.

“Time is an illusion,” I thought to myself.

“Lyndon!” The guy I met in the Forum. A tall, good looking, 19 year old guy I met. He and
I had sort of hit it off.

After the third day of the Forum, I had run into him in the cloakroom, at which point he says
to me, (just like a beer commercial) - “I love you man!” and gives me a hug.

I asked him why.

“Because you’re just such a cool guy to talk to!”

57
I don’t know, I thought maybe I got to meet him before I died because he was my son in
another time period.

Then a funny thing happened.

A few seconds after calling Lyndon’s name, I began to hear saxophone music. Lyndon
was a saxophone player. He had come to the Forum to help himself learn to do other
things besides practice his saxophone. Playing the sax had become a bit of an addiction
for him. It sounds weird but it’s true.

Was it in my mind or in the “real” world? I had no idea what was what. I was dead.
Anything could happen.

My right leg relaxed, along with the left leg now, as if they were both really dead.

The energy went to my penis.

“Take it!” I remember thinking.

I thought of my friend Trevor’s brother that was dying of Aids, and all the selfish things
I had done, and negative relationships I had developed because of my sex drive.

“Take it,” I thought. I was happy to get rid of what I then saw as an overpowering third
brain - a brain that ran my life, usually in a bad way. My penis trembled, then released
into deep, dead, relaxation.

The energy came up my body. Other images of friends and family, even my life, passed
through my mind as other areas began to shake and then release, as if the different parts
were ascending to Heaven.

I spread my arms out like Jesus on the cross.

My ribs shook violently.

“Take it! Take it! Take it!”

58
At the end of every shaking session I would here this bell ring. I don’t know whether it
was real or in my head, but it reminded me of the bell that rings during the stages of the
Catholic mass. I was on my way.

After every major body part had shaken and released, the last part was my eyes.

I thought I may be blind by the end of this. For the last time, I stared into one of the
chandeliers….and released.

I opened my eyes, I could still see.

As I laid there staring at one lamp light in the ceiling, I was now completely relaxed. The
light I was staring at turned pink for no reason. Was it a sign of God’s love? The bell rang
for the last time.

Whatever I was going through was over.

I looked at my hands and thought, “You know, for being dead, this looks really real.” For
the first time it dawned on me that I just might still be alive. But I wasn’t sure.

Then in came the first security guard.

Handcuffed

A large black security guard came into the ballroom after I had finished this spiritual
communication. He looked quite menacing. I looked at him as I laid on the carpet,
shirtless, in urine soaked blue jeans. I thought maybe he was coming to take me to the
next level. He asked me what I was doing there. I was vague. He left.

A few minutes later, three security guards came in, all of them black. I found this quite
amusing. “Man, there are a lot of black angels,” I thought to myself. “No wonder I’ve
always preferred hanging out with them.”

Two of the guys meant nothing to me, but the third looked very familiar. My intuition was
razor sharp at this point, and I could see that this third security guard was a very nice
guy.

59
“You look very familiar,” I said to him. He sort of gave me a sideways smile and said
something like, “Well, I’ve got a familiar face.”

After the four of us stood there for a while, the first guy said, “Come-on, let’s go.”

“You lead,” I said. Wherever we were headed, I was ready to go.

When we got to the main doors of the ballroom, the guards had a request. “Here man, put
your shirt on,” said the familiar looking guard.

I refused.

He gave it to me and I let it drop to the floor.

“No.”

If I was going to Heaven, I was not going to hide my state in shame. I wanted to go “shirt-
off”. To me it was a test, a test to see if, being dead, I would still conform to the restrictions
of our fear-driven society.

This caused quite a dilemma for the hotel staff. They guards left to get some of the
members of the Forum staff.

The first guy to come into the room was a volunteer from the Forum, we’ll call him Dave.
This guy was the one responsible for announcing when breaks started and ended over the
weekend. I didn’t like him when I first saw him at the Forum. I didn’t like him now.

He came in and looked me straight in the eyes.

His eyes were like ice. I knew now more than ever that this guy was not to be trusted.

“What’s going on, Sean?” he said to me in a somewhat threatening voice. He was obviously
more concerned with taking care of an unruly course member than helping me. “What’s
going on?” he kept asking.

60
I just laughed and walked away from him. I despised everything he stood for - another
phony, hypocritical controller; but also a test. He was there to scare me into submission.

People came and went, but I think the next person to come in was the Forum leader.
Thatcher was not there to hurt me, but her calm disposition couldn’t hide the fact that she
was scared shitless.

“Sean”, she said, “If you don’t start to behave, something very bad is going to happen to
you. Do you understand me?”

I was immediately frightened. I felt the power of her words go into my chest. I turned and
walked away form her. And as I walked, I remembered what they taught us in the Forum.
Don’t suppress your fear. Acknowledge it, stay with it.

And I did. And the fear subsided. I walked back to her. I was no longer scared.
I had overcome my fear of something bad happening to me. I had faith that everything
would be OK, that something bad would not happen to me. This was another test. I was
unwavering. I was brave.

“You know what you are doing,” she said to me.

“I do?” I asked in return. I was excited. If she thought I knew what I was doing, maybe
I was on the right path. I still wasn’t sure. I was just looking for clues.

She was in with me for a while. She insisted that I put my shirt back on. Instead,
I removed my shoes, socks, and pants. I was now in the Windsor Hotel Ballroom wearing
nothing but my underwear.

She didn’t say anything. She went out and grabbed a chair from the hall. I didn’t realize it
at the time, but a whole slew of people were on the other side of that door trying to figure
out what to do with me.

When she sat in a chair, I sat down at her feet, like I did in grade one - at the feet of my
teacher.

“Were you my first grade teacher?” I asked.

61
“No, I wasn’t,” she replied, looking as if she was just trying to hold it together - Forum
style. They seemed to cultivate a type of personality that makes you act like some sort of
detached robot.

I felt very powerful, sitting there in my underwear. I had tossed my glasses aside earlier
so I had a hard time seeing. But I was really, quite relaxed, waiting for the next test.

Just passing the time, I began to talk into my shoe.

“Hello…hello…”

“You know,” I said to Thatcher, “I always wondered why on Get Smart (the old TV show)
they had the shoe-phone on the sole of the shoe where it would get crushed.”

She nodded.

After a while with her (I had no sense of time in that ballroom, whatsoever. It might have
been minutes, it might have been hours) my dad was brought in with the head of Landmark
Education, Steve Shannon.

I didn’t know who Steve was at the time, but thought he looked very familiar, like I did with
the third security guard.

I thought, when I saw my dad, that he was an angel of some kind now, and that maybe his
job had to do with my growth. But, as it turned out, he was there as another test.

“Sean, think of your mother,” Dad said.

Fear, again, struck me in the chest. They were trying to scare me by getting me to think
of how I am hurting my mother.

I walked away from him, as I did previously, and was present to how frightened that made
me feel. Then the fear passed.

62
I went over to my dad and bowed to him. A couple of times, I think. He came over to me
on the other side of the room at one point and tried to convince me to come with them in
some other way. What was I to say? I thought it was all a test to get into Heaven, and if
I told them that, they would deny it anyway, for they were the ones there to test me - to
see if I was susceptible to their threats and verbal manipulation. As they were finding out,
I wasn’t.

In retrospect, my actions were completely sane and quite brave when you consider the
situation that I thought I was in. It’s just that I had made and error in assessing the reality
in which I was interacting…or did I?

I think it was Steve Shannon who was the last Forum person to try and deal with me. He
told me that if I didn’t behave, that the police would be called. Again, the fear struck my
chest, I sat with it, and it went away. I held out my arms to him, letting him know that I was
willing to be arrested, rather than succumb to manipulation.

After the police were called, I went over to the other side of the room where there was a
wooden door. Maybe this was my way to Heaven. I knocked on the door a few times.

Then Steve came over.

“You remind me of Peter at the Gate,” I said to him.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Me?” I began to punch the doorframe like a boxer (images of my favorite boxer, Thomas
Hearns running through my mind). “I’m in the fight of my life!”

And I was. I knew that my life would never be the same again. No matter where I was or
what was happening. All of which I was very unsure of.

Then the police arrived. They were pretty big cops. I think there were three of them. So
there we were, the three police officers, my dad, Steve Shannon and me in my underwear.
I walked over to the other wall in the ballroom. There was a small light switch box on the
wall. I opened it and was immediately startled and frightened. Letting go of the door, the
box slammed shut.

63
It was quite clear to me at that point. Everyone, everything in the room was somehow a
product of my mental abilities. I had created this entire scenario in my mind. In fact, my
entire life had been a fabrication of my mind, I was just too dull in the past to see it for what
it really was. All I had to do to end it, and return to the Source of All Things, was have the
courage to extinguish myself by turning out the lights in that ballroom. Basically, I thought
the light switch would turn me “out” as well and that I would lose my physical existence
and exist in some unfathomable spirit form of which I had no experience, whatsoever.

The nice cop said to me, “You have two options, we can take you to Psychiatric Emergency,
or we can take you to jail.”

I thought about it for a second. I was feeling rather dramatic by this point in time - I mean,
what the hell?

I came back to the nice cop and asked him for the options again.
“You know, all my life I thought I would make a great game-show host, and now I get to be
one. What’s my first option?” I asked him again.

“Psychiatric emergency,” he said.

I held up my index finger.

“What’s my second option?”

“Jail”

I held up my middle finger. So now I had two fingers in the air.

“I’m choosing the third option.”

“What’s that?” said the cop.

“It’s right in front of you. I choose peace.” My two fingers up made the peace sign.

I solemnly went over to the light switch box to turn out my life.

64
You may think that I was just kidding with myself, but for me, in the state of mind I was
in, it was the equivalent of committing suicide. However, this was not a suicide to end
my life, it was a sacred ritual intended to set me free, to move on to the next level. I was
choosing the spirit world over the material world. This was the test that God had put in
front of me.

As I went to turn out the lights the cops approached me from behind.

“Sean, we’ve got nothing against you, but you’ve got to come with us.”

They grabbed one arm each. I resisted their pull as hard as I could. My whole body was
shaking. I thought maybe I could hold them off for a while. But, once I realized I had
nowhere to go, I gave in.

“Ok, Ok,” I said.

They pulled my arms behind my back and pushed me to the floor. My left shoulder hit the
rug pretty hard, leaving a nasty rug burn the size of a silver dollar. I still have the scar.

As I laid, faced-down on the carpet, they hand-cuffed me, behind my back.

“Thanks, guys,” I said to them. “I know you’re just doing your job.” I was pretty polite with
them. I didn’t want them to think I was a jerk.

As my head was pressed against the carpet I could see the one guy’s gun sitting in its
holster.

“There was a day when you could have pulled that thing out, stuck it in my face, and
I wouldn’t have blinked.” I said to him. Recalling how I had thought I was, basically fear-
less.

I still thought they might shoot me, and I was prepared to accept that fate.

65
They brought in an ambulance stretcher and had me get onto it. They covered me with
an orange sheet. I didn’t know where I was really going, although they said I was going to
the hospital. I thought they might “kill” me once they covered me with the sheet. I found
it all very funny. I mean, what a wild-ass ride this was, going from Earth to “Heaven” after
you died. This big test -people trying to scare the crap out of you with threats that you will
go to jail, hurt your mother; that you will die.

And I passed it all. I had come to grips with some of the deepest fears of my being. My
reward was being taken to Wellesley Psychiatric Emergency.

They wheeled me out into the hotel lobby. I saw Dave, that first Forum volunteer that tried
to manipulate me. I looked at him and smiled. “Goodbye,” I said to him. There were a lot
of people out in the hall watching me go by.

My dad was one of them. He says that to this day he will never forget seeing me being
taken down and handcuffed by those cops.

In retrospect, I find it to be a coincidence of staggering proportions that I initially signed up

for the Landmark Forum in Vancouver because I felt “handcuffed” in my career path.
And here I was really handcuffed, in an ambulance with two police officers.

But I didn’t really mind. I thought it was all part of the process, part of the test; every
step taking me closer to God. Underneath all the chaos going on around me, I still had a
tremendous sense of joyous, divine, bliss. I was in a sort of hypnotic ecstasy, almost like
after a really powerful orgasm.

I still thought I was dead.

On the elevator to the ambulance I thought it may take us “up” to Heaven.

Once in the ambulance, the officers remained very friendly and asked if I wanted to roll
onto my side, to take the pressure off of my handcuffs. I declined. I liked the handcuffs,
the way they dug into my wrists as I laid on top of them. It just seemed like it was supposed
to be that way.

66
It was only in those handcuffs that I felt free. Once society puts handcuffs on you, you are
free in a way that you are not in your normal life. Free to speak your mind. Free to scream
when you feel like it. Free to cry. Free to laugh hysterically without having to worry about
offending anybody. Free not to behave like a civilized human being, which none of us
really are, but all of us pretend to be everyday.

We’re all raging storms of emotions and insecurities; wild, exotic jungles, trying to
fit ourselves into cookie cutter “lifestyles” dictated to us through the lie of our culture.
I should know, I worked in advertising at the time. Even the rebels have to behave like
“rebels”: The skatepunk, the techno geek, the lawyer, the adman, the prostitute, the
priest, the salesperson, the doctor. Where are the humans?

The Doctor

When they wheeled me into Emergency, it was probably about midnight, but I really
had no idea of the time. I figure I was at the Hotel for at least two hours before they
arrested me.

They asked me to be quiet, as I would disturb some of the other patients. But I didn’t feel
like being quiet. I kept yelling “Hi!” to anybody who walked by. I was sort of happy, and
rather oblivious to my situation. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized how seriously
everyone had taken all of this. As for me, for the first time in my life, I felt free.

The time at the hospital was a little surreal. I remember most of what happened, but not
entirely the order of what happened.

The first thing was that they put me in the hospital bed, face-down, with both arms and
legs handcuffed to the bed. It was a restraining bed. I was cool with that.

Then in came the doctor, a young Chinese guy named Dr. Chin. He seemed like a nice
enough guy. He sat down in the chair across from me, notepad in hand.

“So, Mr. Blackwell, could you tell me what happened this evening?”

67
I started laughing to myself. Here I was in this hospital, saner and more coherent than
I had ever been in my life. I knew all I had to do was tell him that I had had a reaction to
the Forum brought on by my SCUBA diving accident, that I had thought I was dead, but
now I know I am alive; and that they would, most likely, let me go.

But I just couldn’t bring myself to lie like that. I know that was a way of interpreting my
circumstances, but to me, it was a lie.

I asked Dr. Chin if I could sit up in the chair across from him and talk to him like a human
to another human. He declined. I was OK with that and could understand his position.
Then I told him that I really didn’t want to deal with a doctor, I wanted to talk to a person,
so I asked if I could call him by his first name.

“You can call me Dr. Chin,” he said.

I looked at his name tag, “Dr. F Chin”. From that point on I would call him by his first name,
whether he liked it or not, “F”.

“F” looked at me with his notepad, listening with a tilted head which immediately said to
me that he was judging, analyzing, but not really listening to me. I told him what I actually
thought happened, anyway. I don’t remember the details I gave him, but as far as I know,
I told him how I had died and gone to the Forum where I went through the Valley of Death.
I told it all in a rather sarcastic manner, knowing full well that if he was pretending to be a
real physical doctor, which I was almost certain that he wasn’t, my story would absolutely
mean I was insane. But I wasn’t about to chicken-out now. I was sticking to my truth.

After “F” came in, my dad entered the room as well. He quietly stood next to me, with a
hand on my back the entire time. His hand being there was very reassuring. If he took it
off, I would ask him to put it back on. I thought dad was a spiritual entity helping me return
to “Heaven”.

I thought the hospital room might be traveling in some way, or that I was in some sort of
transformation process that he was there to guide me through. It was great having him
there to babble to, and he was wise enough to avoid trying to bring me back to earth with
any more verbal coercion. Imagery would float through my mind almost as vivid as a
hallucination. I was talking out what was in my head as fast as it would come.

68
Most of the imagery seemed to take me back in time, into my childhood, then into creation
itself. At one point I was flooded with a scene from the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
where a small band of monkeys jump around the mystical, giant, black monolith. It was so
strong, I felt as if I were a monkey as well. I started making ape noises on the hospital bed,
“Ooo, ooo, ooo!”. All kinds of imagery entered my mind that, I thought, might be related to
the fact that I was still in the process of dying: scenes from old TV shows like Sha Na Na;
visions of space related to the Big Bang; there were even a few songs as part of evening’s
entertainment. I sang Amazing Grace to myself,

“I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.”

“Dad, are you an angel?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I haven’t earned my wings.” he said.

I laughed hysterically. In the world I was in right now, that made perfect sense. Dad was
down here assisting me in order to earn his wings. I began to see how that could apply to
my brother and Carmen as well.

Later, my mother arrived, followed by my brother and his wife. I was thrilled to see them
as I thought it was, most likely, that I would never see any of them again. I asked if my
roommates from Vancouver were coming as well, as I thought that maybe everyone in my
life would be able to visit me, regardless of their supposed location on this planet.

It was questions like this which obviously left “F” and the family with the impression that
I was insane. But I never really felt insane. I felt extremely emotional, often blissful, but
operating in a world in which I didn’t know the rules just yet. So I would ask questions
like that, not because I expected people from across the continent to arrive, but because
I thought anything was possible in this new world where things work more like they do
in a dream than they did in “real” life. But as with normal dreams, even then, there are
surprises, limitations, and you don’t always get what you want. In fact, you often get what
you fear.

I started to realize that maybe things weren’t as I had thought when the doctor had some
security guards and nurses change my sheets, which had urine from my underwear on
them.

69
I asked the guards if they wanted me to move, in order to assist them in changing
the sheets.

“You’re not moving anywhere,” was the reply of one of them. His mean-spiritedness and
pleasure in exerting power over a patient was obvious.

“You don’t think I can move? AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!”

I started yelling and moving around in my wrist and leg restraints as much as possible. I
started to see clearly the hypocrisy of the institution I was dealing with. It was very clear
to me that they were much more concerned with controlling me than helping me. Mind
you, by this point, I wasn’t exactly a joy to work with either.

My movements were really jerky, as I was moving around the bed as much as I could.
I would yell to people often, though, not at people. I simply wouldn’t be quiet, which is
what they wanted more than anything. They had no real interest in engaging me in any
way; to try and really understand what I was going through.

I asked “F” if he was going to tell anybody about me and what I was going through.

“No, it’s confidential,” he replied.

“Not even your wife?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“You mean to tell me that you are never in your entire life going to tell anyone about what
happened to me tonight because it’s confidential? Nobody?”

“That’s correct,” “F” replied, in an almost too professional manner.

I saw that I could very well be considered insane for the rest of my life. Away from me,
I found out later that the doctors had told my parents the very same thing. They told
my mother that I could come out of this in a very short period of time, or I may have this
condition, whatever it was, forever.

70
My mom told me this later. She told me how she had begun to think about having to leave
her job to take care of me and the financial burden that would put on us, as she was the
primary source of income in the family at the time.

Five years ago my brother was in a fire, burning 20% of his upper body with third degree
burns, and the rest with 2nd degree burns. When I came home and saw him, he was
completely bandaged from the waist up, lying on the floor. I had never been so shaken as
seeing him lying there, bandaged up like that, wondering how he would be scarred, if he
would ever look normal again. After I got out of the hospital, my mom told me that seeing
me “insane” was the single worst experience of her life; worse than seeing my brother
burned, worse than her mother’s death.

“I know what I’m going to do for the rest of my life,” I told my mom, holding her hand.
“People will come to me, to examine me and figure out why I am the way I am, and I will
tell them what they have been waiting to hear their entire life.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“That they’re OK. Just the way they are, they are OK.”

If people only knew, deep down, they were just fine, and that their troubles lied in defending
a false image of themselves that is not fine, because it is a lie - this was the key to a whole
new society. I knew that what I had learned over the weekend could change the world,
and I could be a vehicle for this change.

I guess I was also starting to ponder the possibility that I was not dead, and also that being
considered insane by society was something that could happen to me. But I felt ready for
the challenge. The cuffs on my wrists and ankles made me feel strong. Biblical images of
Samson shattering those big pillars he was handcuffed to flashed through my mind.

Eventually, the doctors and nurses got tired of my shtick.

They took everyone out of the room, all of my family, and shut the door to my “bedroom”.

“Wait, I want to talk!” I yelled.

71
Everyone ignored me. I started to think, as a small child would, that because they didn’t
respond to me, they really couldn’t hear me.

“Are you deaf!!!”

“Are you deaf!!!”
“Are you deaf!!!”

I shouted over and over and over.

Finally the doctor, a nurse or two, and a couple of security guards came in.

“Did you hear what I said?” I asked them. I got no response. “I asked you, “Are you
deaf?” I was pretty damn belligerent at this point. But under the circumstances, being
handcuffed to a bed and cut off from human contact, who wouldn’t be?

Then I saw at the end of the bed that the nurse had a needle.

In as calm and sane a voice as I could muster, I started saying “Get that needle away from
me, I do not want that needle, I do not want that needle, get it away from me,” ...and on
and on.

Despite being very scared, I think I acted very calm, considering the circumstances. I
didn’t know what was in that thing. I would have preferred a gun to my head. At least
then I would know what was going to happen. A drug could have really screwed with my
being, and I knew it.

Finally, one of the security guards turned to the nurse and said “Why don’t we take the
needle away?”

“Terrence!!! Tell them, tell them, they can’t hear me!” I said, reading his name tag.

The others ignored him and me.

I turned to “F”.

“Look, if I calm down, will you take the needle away?”

“Yes,” he said.

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“Ok, just give me a minute.”

“OK,” he said.

I began to focus on that nervous energy that was trembling through my body all night.
I began to breathe deeply in an effort to get myself to relax. I focused on my navel.

The doctor lost patience. He nodded to the security staff to force me down.

“Wait, one more minute,” I asked him. “F” agreed and I was able to calm myself down.
I lied with my body entirely pressed against the mattress. I shut up. I quieted myself.

“F” then gave the order for them to inject me.

I snapped up, furious at his betrayal of me.

“How am I supposed to believe anything you say when you lie to me like that!!!?”

I snapped around to where the nurse was, holding the needle, “How would you like it if
I stuck a fuckin’ dick up your ass against your will??!!” I yelled at her.

“Because that’s what you are doing to me!!!”

I was furious. I hated them. Their ignorance, lying and hypocrisy made me sick.

Knowing that they were going to give me that needle whether I liked it or not, I decided to
lay down and let them give it to me so that I could reduce the risk of physical injury to my
thigh when they stuck it in. This was rape.

“Fine, I’ll take your needle if that will make you feel better,” I said sarcastically. “But it isn’t
going to do anything.”

And they stuck it in.

73
There were other incidents that night that occurred in an order that I cannot recall. They
may have happened before or after they injected me. For the most part, I think they
happened afterwards, but I’m not sure.

It seemed like I spent a very long period of time alone trying to get out of my restraints.
Not that I minded them so much. But I was wide awake and had nothing else to do. I even
asked permission from the security guard to do so.

“Do you mind if I try and get out of my restraints?” I politely asked him.

“Go ahead, but you’re wasting your time.”

“All I have is time,” I said. I guess it never dawned on him that I might be bored, being left
alone in a dark room with nothing but a bed to play with.

At another point in the evening I remember being given the form which stated that the
hospital had the right to keep me under supervision for three days. The page had a
series of statements regarding my condition which I found absolutely laughable. I seem
to remember very clearly critiquing them out loud.

But when I first got it, I remember being really excited. My mom was beside me when the
doctor gave me that page that said I was insane.

“This means more to me than my University degree!!!” I exclaimed. It did, and still does.

At the bottom of the page was one line that I really never thought I would come across in
my life. The line stated that I had the right to a lawyer.

“I want a lawyer! I want a lawyer!” I yelled incessantly. I genuinely did want one. I wanted
someone to represent me - a civilized human on my side to battle these idiots for my
freedom.

Dr. Chin came in the room.

“I want a lawyer,” I said to him.

“It’s 4am. Can’t you wait until the morning?”

74
“This form says I have the right to a lawyer, I want a lawyer.”

The lawyer never came. Later I found out that “F” had consulted with my parents, and
that they had waived off the lawyer. I’m still unsure as to what my rights were in that
situation. I was thirty years old and yet my parents had the right to waive my right to legal
representation?

I crumpled up that legal document and threw it in the corner. I wish I had it back now.

“F” wasn’t all bad however. I seem to remember, after giving me the needle, him coming
in and asking my mom (the staff hated talking to me directly) if I would like to be turned
over so that I may be more comfortable.

I told him I was fine.

There was a lot of wild behaviour on my part, aside from my incessant blabbering. Even
in the restraints, I was often up on my knees, staring at my navel. People around me were
very uncomfortable with how naked I was. But I was warm, and I still had the need to be
naked. I really wanted to be naked, no matter who was around.

When everyone left I would pull hard on my restraints to see if I could snap them. That
didn’t work. But I did manage to get my leg restraints off of the bed. My legs were free
before I fell asleep.

I can’t really remember when I fell asleep, but I do know why I was able to, and it had
little to do with the drugs they gave me. At one point during the night, my brother came
in alone.

In one of those coincidences that is beyond coincidence, my brother worked as a social

worker at a place that troubled kids go to when they become uncontrollable at their group-
home. They are, most often, mentally ill and/or abused. To put people in restraints is a
part of his job. He sees kids in my situation everyday, but it was another thing to see his
own brother.

75
Perhaps it was the fact that he deals with this sort of stuff everyday, or maybe it’s just that
he’s a little crazy himself, but when he came into the room alone, he was the first person
all night that talked to me like I was still, basically, me. Nobody else had shown that kind
of courage - to understand that this person laying in his soiled underwear, locked to a
hospital bed, was still, basically, a normal human being, and should be talked to like a
human being. The doctors and nurses couldn’t do it, because they had been trained not
to. My parents couldn’t do it because it was simply beyond their ability to understand that
somehow, it was still, basically, me lying there. But Glen could.

At work they called him “Superman”, because he worked best with the kids that are
the most screwed up. He never thought he’d be working with his older, university educated
brother.

“Sean, maybe someday you’ll be able to tell me what you’re going through, and maybe
one day we’ll sit down and be able to talk about it. But right now, with all of your yelling,
you’re scaring a lot of sick people in this emergency room. So why don’t you just lie down
and get some sleep.”

It was the most honest thing anyone had said to me all night, and the first time anyone had
really talked to me like I was somewhat normal. It was beginning to dawn on me, now that
I had seen my whole family again, and nothing “otherworldly “ had happened, that I may
not be dead. But moreover, by this point I realized that, if I had my choice, I didn’t want
to die. I wasn’t ready. There was more to do, more to accomplish. Especially with what
had happened to me.

“If I go to sleep, will I wake up?” I said to Glen, not sure of anything at this point.

“Yeah, you’ll wake up.”

After that I felt like everything was going to be OK, and, most likely, I wasn’t going to
change much. Maybe I was dead, but if I was, death was going to be very similar to what
life was like, at least in appearance. But I knew it would also be a whole lot better.

I guess I fell asleep, eventually. The nurses came in with my mom, I think, and took me to
a bed in the main part of the hospital. I slept for about 24 hours straight, according to my
parents. I had no idea how long I was asleep, what day it was, time it was, or anything.

76
I remember waking up mid-sleep and my family was there in the room with me. My mom
likes to remember how that was when I told her one of three things had happened,

“I’m either dead and this is Heaven; or dead and in some in-between stage leading to
Heaven; or I’m still on Earth and I haven’t died and I just really went off my stick.”

Those weren’t the exact words, but it was something like that. It was a big relief for her to
hear me consider the notion that I still may be alive.

The nurse then came in and asked me to take two pills of unknown origin. She said it
would help me sleep. I didn’t want to take them, concerned that they would mess with my
mind. But I had softened over my sleep and agreed.

“All right, I’ll take them,” I told her and my family. “But I’m not going to sleep now because
of these pills; I’m going to sleep because I want to go to sleep.”

And that’s just what I did.

Aftermath

The following day, still in the hospital, I phoned Carmen to tell her what had happened.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m in Wellesley Psychiatric.”
She laughed her head off.

“My whole family takes the Forum and you wind up in the hospital!”

She sort of meant it as a compliment.

I think it was later that afternoon that I had my great reckoning - my first official visit
with the staff psychiatrist. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of there. Thoughts of
Johnny Depp in the movie Don Juan de Marco passed though my mind. I gave that sort
of performance.

77
“I had a SCUBA diving accident about a month ago where I could have died instantly,”
I told her. “I hadn’t really dealt with my feelings about that near fatality. When I went to
the Forum, it led me to address that issue. That, combined with the mental stress of the
course put me in a state of mind where I believed that I was dead. But now I know I am
still alive and that I was going through some sort of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

I thought that would impress her. It was all bullshit. I still wasn’t sure what had happened
to me.

I still wasn’t sure if I had died or not. The truth is, I’m still not 100% sure what happened.
I could have told them that story about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder the night I went
in there. I could have put my clothes on at any time. I could have stopped myself from
pissing on the floor.

But I chose not to. I chose to act out the inner drama of what was really going on inside
of me, and that made all the difference.

As she could see that the doctors weren’t doing anything with me, Mom asked that I be let
into her custody during the day. I would spend the next two days at home with her, mostly
watching TV, and then I would return to the hospital at night, to sleep. When asked if she
wanted to take some medication home for me, mom wisely declined, knowing how much
the idea of being on meds would upset me.

Walking out of the hospital for the last time, about four days after I was admitted, I passed
“F” in the hallway. Seeing him there was no coincidence. Immediately, the moment struck
me as an opportunity to make peace with this man.

“Hey!” I called over. “Listen, I just wanted to apologize for the other night, I know I was
hard on you.”

He looked at me as if he were seeing a ghost. He was completely shocked that I was the
same person that he had injected just a few nights earlier.

“No problem!” he said, enthusiastically. “We were just trying to help.”

78
For the first time, I could see who my doctor really was. The night I was admitted, the
person who sat across from me was a cold, analytical man that thought he knew everything.
The person in front of me now was so young, wide-eyed and inexperienced, perhaps
only 25 or 26.

His words would stay with me, “…just trying to help.” Everybody is “just trying to help.”
They have no idea of the damage they are doing.

Nevertheless, by apologizing to him I lifted his burden, and in a way, I guess, I lifted my
own.

Validation

My first few weeks back home, I saw very few people. I preferred to stay inside, watch
TV or maybe sit in silence. I felt as if I had been stripped down to my core, and, while at
peace with myself, I was also extremely sensitive.

It was funny how my friends and family reacted. Some were very cautious with their
words, looking at me in a very distant, “Is he crazy?” sort of way. Others laughed, reveling
in my wild experience. When I told my friend, Wendy, that I had taken my clothes off and
pissed on the carpet of the main ballroom at the Windsor Hotel, she just laughed and said,
“Sparky, if only that happened to everybody.”

But the person who was to give me the most spiritual guidance was a friend of Carmen’s
family named Sheena, who had taken the Forum back when it was called EST training in
the ‘70’s. I had met her at a few get-togethers before I moved to Vancouver. About ten
years older than myself, she struck me as one of the most interesting, spiritual, women
I had ever met. Aside from that, she also had a master’s degree in psychology and was a
practicing past-life therapist.

When Carmen relayed the story of what had happened to me, Sheena immediately told
her that she wanted to see me. Later, Sheena told me that she knew what had happened
to me as soon as Carmen told her that I thought I had died.

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About after a week after I got out of the hospital, Sheena came over to my parent’s house.
My mother sat with us in our living room as I told Sheena everything. Near the end of our
conversation she asked me what I thought I had got out of this experience. I told her how
I felt that I had confronted all of my deepest fears - of death, of rape, of losing my parents,
of being put in jail, of being naked in public, everything.

At the end of my story she stood up, started clapping and jumping up and down.

“Sean you got it!!!” she shouted.

“I got it?”
“Yes, YOU - GOT - IT!”

“You don’t need any more courses. You are in this world, but you are not of it.”

80
Part Two: The Struggle for Integrity

81
Hold Your Horses (May, 1996)

“Hold your horses!” they cried,

As they see the fire in my eyes,
The power of my step.

“Hold your horses!” they shriek,

As I grow from infant into Brady Bunch clothing and matching lunch box.

“Hold your horses!”

“Hold your horses!”
“Hold your horses!”

“OK!” I said.
I will hold my horses if that is what it takes to be loved,
If that is what will make you happy.

“I will hold my horses and do as you say.”

But why?

Are my horses evil or stupid?

Are they pointless?
Are they wrong?

They must be.

For why would I want to hold my horses unless they were horses not worth sharing?
Horses which should not run free?
Horses not worthy of love?

How could I have known the fear beneath their masks, as they witnessed the power
beneath my saddle.

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Nostrils flaring with anticipation, jaws tugging at the bit.
Limbs coiled, eyes eager, focused and ready.
Each horse, bigger, faster and more beautiful than the next.
Effortlessly pulling behind them trains of lightening, trains of genius;
Trains of love and beauty, all barreling dangerously towards them at Godspeed,
Never fast enough for me.

But I succumbed. For love I pulled hard on my reins.

And watched my once proud, fierce stallions soften, weaken, and slow.

The milk wagons which replaced the trains seemed heavier than the mass of the
universe.

And for what?

Warm, spoiled milk?

A pat on the head?
A paycheck?

My horses were dying one by one.

Their loads got smaller and heavier.
My paycheck to nothing.

Impotence replaces fire,

Resignation replaces curiosity,
Mediocrity replaces genius,
Apathy replaces love,
Jealousy and hate replaces admiration and understanding.

But my horses are held,

And my horses die with me.

Death, fear of death, dreaded death.

Oh God! Not death!
“We must survive, even if it kills us,” is their mantra.

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But I did not care when death came for me.

Take me sweet death,

Take my horses too!
And let us have our trains!
Let us have our power,
Let us run, run again, roughshod over terrain unknown!
Through the eyes and hearts of a billion souls,
Lost and Confused,
Afraid to live, afraid to die.

Take me sweet death and give me back my horses.

Give me back my trains and let me run the Earth with creativity, and love and lightening.

Lightening to empower others with what is within them that they do not know.
Lightening to destroy that which keeps them from knowing and loving themselves.
Lightening that heats the air around it,
That brings life.

Take me sweet death, and alight me back on this Planet of God.

But alight me as I am, anew!

For I am no longer a child, and I will not hold my horses!

84
Living in Two Worlds

From the very beginning of my experience, there was never any doubt in my mind that
I was going through a profound spiritual awakening. The notion that I could possibly have
a mental illness struck me as positively absurd. When the family gently suggested that I,
perhaps, see a psychologist, my response was,

“Why would I talk to anybody that has no idea what just happened to me?”
It was a rhetorical question.

But how to take this new me, and insert it back into daily life was another matter.

All my life I had felt rather uneasy inside - unable to sit still. Like many “normal” people,
I went to nightclubs and bars to blow off steam and burn energy. But now I felt very calm
at the centre of myself; very at ease and gentle, for the most part. However, I was also
much more emotional because I had also become more sensitive. I remember the first
movie I went to see shortly after my hospitalization, “Fargo.” The violence and gore of this
supposed “comedy” hit me so hard, I almost needed to leave the theatre. I had similar
feelings visiting a local rave with some friends of mine. The thumping base vibrating out
of the speakers seemed to be attacking my body. I could not leave soon enough.

Fortunately, for my first six months out of the hospital, I didn’t need to work very much.
WeCU was only interested in “testing me out” on projects, here or there, so I was usually
at the office only one or two days a week. Working for David Stone in this way was exactly
what I needed, as it took the family pressure off me to get out and find full-time work.
Instead, I could simply stay home and integrate my experience.

Following Sheena’s advice, I started reading some books that she had found to be most
enlightening, starting with Autobiography of a Yogi, the story of Paramahansa Yogananda.1
As time went on, I bought a vast array of spiritual books in order to understand myself
more deeply. I also bought four or five books on meditation and took some meditation
instruction from a Kriya Yoga instructor from India by the name of Guru Satyam. His
instruction proved to be very helpful. I began meditating for at least an hour a day.

85
Other aspects of my life changed as well. I would often have psychic experiences, to the
point where I just felt that life was simply a physical dream. Things seemed to come into
my life just when I wanted them to. To a large extent, they still do.

One morning, while having my cereal in our kitchen, which overlooked our backyard, I was
struck with an intuition to go open the front door. Upon opening the door, to my surprise,
was a cute Chinese girl, just about to knock.

“Wow!” she exclaimed. “ESP or what?!”

It’s important to know that in our quiet Canadian suburb, we may not have anyone knock
on our door in an entire week. As it turned out, the girl was originally from Vancouver and
had just started work for a charitable organization, which was why she was knocking on
our door. We had a nice conversation.

Another day I was relaxing at home, talking on the phone with Trevor, who I had not
seen since I was hospitalized. After a long chat about my experience, he asked me what
I wanted to do that day. I could see long reeds on a mud flat in my mind’s eye. I told him
about this vision I was having, and that I wanted to walk through them; that that was what
I wanted to do with him. But it was fantasy to me, as we were in some sort of wet field, the
likes of which I had never encountered, as far as I know.

I drove out to Trevor’s new home in Mississauga that afternoon, about an hour away.
Without saying anything to give it away; he took me for a drive around his neighborhood.
Within a mile of his home was the exact field of reeds I had seen in my vision, with a twisting
creek surrounding it on three sides, explaining why the ground was so muddy. Being part
of a public park, there were many people there on this Sunday afternoon. Meandering
across the mud flat of reeds, with the crisp, blue sky above us and the sound of children
giggling in the air, we spent the rest of the day pondering my recent experiences and
newfound insights.

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Grandma’s Passing

While it was hardly something I looked forward to, the death of my grandmother would
have strong psychic aspects as well. My mother’s mother, Margaret, was the grandparent
that I was closest too. She complained a lot, smoked too much, and her cooking was
sometimes scary, but I always looked to her as a true guardian. Whenever we were sick
or in trouble, I knew she would be praying for us every night. And while she had a tough,
sometimes ornery exterior, all I had to say to her was, “I love you,” and she would get
choked up.

The night before she died, I thought I was dying in my sleep. The dream was so vivid
that mucus began to block my nasal passages and I had to wake myself up to continue
breathing. I honestly thought I was going to die, again. That morning we got a call from
the hospital, my grandmother had less than 12 hours left.

I don’t remember the exact details, but I do recall behaving a little strangely with the family
at the hospital. I was still in such a positive frame of mind that it appeared to others that
I may have been a little insensitive, or just clueless as to what was actually happening. My
episode had occurred less than two months earlier.

I think, deep down, I was happy for her. I knew that she was ending the pain she had
lived with for the past few years. I wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong with her, but she
apparently had quite a few complications related to cancer surgery she had had a few
years earlier.

Moments after she passed away in her hospital bed, I sat alone, off to the side, in silence.
I had the desire to simply be quiet, to see if she would communicate anything to me.

“Huh? That’s strange.” I thought to myself.

When I closed my eyes, I saw an image of Grandma in my mind, as she was when she
was about 40 years of age. The trouble was, I never knew this woman. I wasn’t born until
she was over 50, maybe 55.

“Why am I imagining Grandma like this? I never knew her like this.”

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As she was much younger and smiling, I took it as a message that she was fine.

At home, for the first time after the funeral, my parents and I were sitting in the living room
together.

“I know I should be sad,” my mother said, “but I just see her with this big smile on her
face!”

“What was she wearing?” I asked.

“She had on a dark brown blouse with buttons in the front.”
“And no sleeves.”
“That’s right, no sleeves,” she said.
“And how old was she?” I asked.
“About 40 years old.”

We had both seen her in the exact same way. Grandma resembled a picture she
had on her wall, standing with her four kids, during a happier, maybe the happiest time of
her life.

While reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying years later, I came across a passage
by Songyal Rinpoche in which he tells us of how, in the Tibetan Buddhist belief system, if
we have a good death, the body in which we see ourselves in the afterlife is one in which
we are at the peak of our vitality, not the elderly body which we leave behind.2

Apparently, Grandma was doing just fine.

Dreaming

Other aspects of my dream life took on increased significance as well, but it wasn’t all
“peaches and cream.” In the beginning, almost every night I went to sleep I would have
very vivid, usually disturbing dreams. This bothered me quite a bit.

If I had “Got it!” as Sheena said, why so many nightmares?

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I came to realize that these dreams reflected traumas or fears that still laid within me, and
that I had to engage much of this on a dream level in order to let it go.

I would often dream that I was being raped. I could feel a hand press down on the back
of my neck, and push my shoulder to the ground as some man started to have sex with
me. As frightening as this was, over time I learned that I had to accept this experience if
I was to get over it, and that the reason for this nightmare was to realize that I was not my
physical body, that I was a spirit in the casing of a body.

Was this particular nightmare related to my hospitalization? Perhaps.

Over time, I would also explore lucid dreaming, the ability to awaken in your dream and
consciously control your movements within the dream itself. Each night, after meditating
for about an hour, I would pray to God to bring me a lucid dream. These dreams began
to happen regularly.

Whenever I would awaken within the dream, I would begin to fly, often through walls,
simply to test out this other form of reality.

One night, I awoke in what appeared to be a sparsely decorated, Tokyo apartment. In the
distance I could see some people socializing in the living room. Upon realizing that I was
dreaming, I leaped upwards to fly through the ceiling. Passing through the ceiling, I found
myself in another apartment. Passing again, I found myself in another, then another.
Determined to “jump” right out of this building, I continued. Finally, I leaped through the
ceiling and into black nothingness. There, floating in space, I witnessed what appeared to
be a procession of multi-coloured medieval saints, frozen-still, one after the other, in the
spiral shape of a DNA double-helix. As I gasped in astonishment at this incomprehensible
image I kept repeating, as if asking for help,

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand…”

Then, I immediately found myself in the home of an old Chinese mystic. My black robe
contrasted nicely with the traditional red Chinese décor of his small abode. The man
approached me with a pair of slippers, knelt down, and slipped them on my feet.

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I woke up with the distinct feeling that I had somehow graduated. I had earned these
slippers by passing through this experience. The spirits, or at least this particular monk,
were proud of me.

Dr. Stan Grof

Along with exploring the dream world, I was trying to get some sort of intellectual
understanding of what happened to me. It took take some time, but eventually I would
discover the work of Dr.Stan Grof, psychiatrist and one of the founders of transpersonal
psychology. His books were a revelation to me. I can’t express what a relief it was to
finally find a respected psychiatrist who could explain, in detail, what I had been through.
In his book, The Stormy Search for Self, he documented a wide range of, what he referred
to as “spiritual emergencies.” Basically, his idea was that people undergoing profound
spiritual transformations can often enter periods of what may look like insanity. Indeed,
even the person in crisis may think of themselves as insane for a period of time.

The symptoms he listed as part of this condition mirrored my own: a high energy level;
extreme emotions; a sense of one-ness; timelessness; identification with one or more
gods, angels or spirits; a feeling of being tested by God; a confrontation with death; a
tremendous feeling of love; deep, often terrifying fears; delusions; etc…3 It was as if Dr.
Grof had been right there with me. He was also highly critical of psychiatry for simply
passing off these experiences as mental illness, often medicating the people that have
them for life.4

According to Grof, experiences such as these have been occurring since the beginning of
time, and are well known among tribal peoples. In fact, shamanic initiation is most often
associated with having such experiences. As a result, for tribal peoples, journeys to the
“other side” are hardly considered a mental illness; quite the opposite in fact.

The spirit world is a place where valuable insight and knowledge in acquired by the
shaman, in order to help those in the tribe lead more prosperous, harmonious lives.5

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I would eventually go on to purchase four of his books, all of which were deeply insightful.
The following year, I would attend a workshop he was giving in Vermont on Holotropic
Breathwork. This technique allows you to access the higher, spiritual, “holotropic” mind
states in which you can release repressed emotional trauma. I still remember the passion
of one of his assistants as she leaned over to me saying,

“Dr. Grof will not be recognized for his work in his own lifetime.”

The certainty of her words left me inspired.

Breathwork proved to be a very interesting technique which left me feeling deeply, deeply
relaxed. However, it was quite gentle, taking me into an altered state, but leaving me in
total control. I was nowhere near the state I was in that got me hospitalized. I guess that
was a good thing.

Eventually, I was able to track down a transpersonal psychologist, who had been trained
by Dr. Grof, living a few hours from Toronto. After sending him the details of my story (in a
document that included a lot of what you are reading right now) we agreed to meet. Our
meeting was held over lunch in downtown Toronto. I was a little apprehensive, meeting
my first therapist, but he was a real “hippie” type and his wife was very warm, so things
went well.

As we got to know each other, I took a quick glance over some of the comments that he
had made in the margins of my text.

“Oh, what a lucky man, he was….” the doctor had written.

“What did you mean by this?” I asked him. Apparently, they were words from a 1960’s
folk song.

He then looked at me with the utmost sincerity, “This has never happened to me…,” he
said.

He was jealous. I couldn’t believe it.

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Here was a man that had been a spiritual seeker all of his life and yet, approaching 60,
he somehow felt like he had missed something by not experiencing what I had been
through.

Back to “Normal”

Trying to function “normally” with family and friends came slowly. I often felt out of sorts
around people, like I was alive and they were still dead. Typical conversations about
sports, relationships difficulties and the latest movie release bored me. I had to watch
what I said around family and friends.

As my poem, Hold Your Horses, reflects, I left the hospital with an intense desire to
help other people. However, I quickly learned that helping people is not as easy as it
looks. I felt this need to improve all of my relationships at once, save all my friends and
make everyone happy. Over time I withdrew my missionary zeal, as I realized that it
was a futile, egocentric and possibly destructive approach. My newfound “enlightenment”
wasn’t exactly scoring huge points with those that mattered. Eventually, I learned to
mostly keep my mouth shut about it, only sharing my most personal thoughts and feelings
with Sheena.

However, while my initial attempts at “saving the world” were not exactly a smashing
success, being part of the “solution”, not part of the “problem” became a goal which I
was determined to reach, eventually. Central to this issue was what to do about my
career. Even though the project work with David was going fine, and becoming an account
planner had been a dream of mine for years, working in advertising tugged at my integrity
stronger than ever. More and more, I felt uncomfortable with my whore-like existence in
that business.

As a result, despite being unemployed, broke, and living with my parents at the age of 30,
I was actually having reservations about returning to advertising. The trouble was, what
else could I do? The only other idea I had was to walk to Mexico.

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My Psychic Potential

One night I was discussing this dilemma with my mother, who had a difficult time
empathizing with my situation, especially because I seemed to be on the cusp of landing a
job which I had coveted for almost my entire time in the ad game. Retiring to my bedroom
in frustration, I resumed reading Your Psychic Potential by M.J Abadie. It had a tacky
title, but I had actually enjoyed reading this woman’s New Age perspective as well as her
various techniques for getting “in-touch” with your subconscious, True Self.

As luck would have it, Ms. Abadie had a history of career struggles, herself. In fact, just
minutes after discussing my career frustrations with my mother, I was reading of how
Ms. Abadie had lived through the exact same difficulties I was experiencing, at the same
age, no less. Before she started writing books, she had worked as an advertising art
director. She left the business because she felt that advertising was, “ludicrus.”6 Struck
by the synchronicity of reading Abadie’s story of leaving advertising only minutes after
discussing the exact same subject with my mother, I returned to the living room to share
what had happened. As I should have known, the significance of this event was lost on
my parents.

Your Psychic Potential also held another small gem for me, with regards to my direction
in life. Halfway through the book was a simple visualization exercise to help discover the
nature of your True Self. The exercise was hardly innovative, as I had done similar ones
in the past. It involved visualizing a trail which entered into a forest. On the trail you would
pass a body of water, a key, a chest, a cup and a few other things along your imaginary
walk. Finally at the end of the walk, up on a hill would be a home. Walking up to the home,
you were asked to explore its contents.7

During this visualization I imagined a decrepit, old Victorian house, which reminded me
of the one in the classic horror flick, Psycho. On the front porch sat a smiling skeleton in
a rocking chair. As I entered the house I wandered from room to room perusing the cob-
webbed covered contents. Finally, I went upstairs to the master bedroom, where I found
the skeleton standing beside me. Together, we opened the top drawer of the dresser,
where we found plane tickets, which the skeleton handed me. Nice guy.

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After my visualization, I returned to the book to decipher the meaning behind each of
the symbols I encountered on my “walk.” To my disappointment, it was written that the
house was to describe my deepest, most heartfelt, unconscious goals in life.8 “I wanted
this crappy old house?” I asked myself. No, clearly this was not the case. So I decided to
enter back into the visualization again. What was it that this Victorian house represented?
The answer was clear. It was symbolic of my boring, stale, Canadian existence, with all
of its Victorian trappings and expectations; which made my life in Toronto one without
passion. I hated that house.

So what did I want to do with it?

Burn it!

I imagined myself torching the old grey house to the ground. I took great pleasure in
seeing it go up in flames.

And what was left? Behind the ashes, on the other side of the fence were rolling hills
of tall green grass. I hopped the fence to explore the new territory. I liked it over there.
I didn’t know what I would actually do there, but it felt good. I felt free.

So there it was. On a very deep, subconscious level, I knew, I wanted to destroy my life.

But I think I’ll keep those plane tickets.

The Holy Grail

Adding to my quest for an alternative to my advertising career, I sought out the help of
more than a few psychics and one quite interesting astrologer. At Sheena’s suggestion,
I drove two hours to meet a middle aged, female astrologer who lived on a farm by the
coast of Lake Erie. She had quite a few interesting things to say. Examining my chart, she
could see that my desires for a spiritual life and a successful career were both pressing
priorities. She also recognized how positively “stuck” I had been in my career for the past
4 years. Astrologically speaking, she said that it was as if there was “no way out” for me
during that time period.

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Then came the shocker. As she drew an outline of the Holy Grail chalice on a blank sheet
of paper, she told me, “Based on your passion for spirituality and your career ambitions, I
think that the only profession that will satisfy your thirst, will be to become a writer.”

“A writer!” I replied in disbelief.

The funny thing was, she wasn’t the first person to mention this idea. On three occasions
different women, including my brother’s wife, had said the same thing. Back in Vancouver,
my boss, Jennifer Weston, had signed my going away card, “Start writing those memoirs”.
Once at a party, Wendy had introduced me to her friends, spontaneously blurting out,
“Everyone, this is Sean and he’s going to write a book one day.” Personally, becoming a
writer had never, ever crossed my mind. I always thought of writers as “other people” who
were either smarter or luckier than I was. It’s with a touch of irony that I am sitting here
writing a book as “a writer”, ten years after the fact. Mind you, I’m not quite ready to quit
my day job just yet. I guess time will tell.

However, while having a career as a rich and famous author certainly sounded enticing,
I was compelled to follow a more “practical” route, considering the circumstances.
In order to rectify this split between the “Spiritual Sean” and the “Survival Sean”, I made
a deal with myself. I decided that I would return to advertising, giving it my best, but that
I would also follow every dream or opportunity I could find to deepen my spiritual pursuits.
Like many people, it was my hope that, in the end, I would eventually be able to find a way
to survive doing some sort of spiritual work.

Landing WeCU

That David Stone hired me to start in September came as no surprise, as I had “envisioned”
starting at that time with him back in May, five months earlier.

How I came to close the deal on that job was a real turning point for me. After working
for David, on and off for about three months, we went for a coffee together to discuss
how I was doing. He quickly cut to the chase and told me that, while he liked me a lot, he
simply wasn’t in a position to hire someone in his tiny, 3-person operation who was without
significant account planning experience.

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In that moment, I sat coolly, as all of the previous rejections from planning positions passed
in my mind. Somehow, they had all felt like some sort of conspiracy. For reasons I did not
understand, the world was out to fuck me, and I didn’t know why.

“Here is the point where you schlep off into the sunset with your head down and your tail
between your legs. Just like the others, he has been bullshitting you all along.”

OK, that wasn’t exactly what I was saying to myself, but that was the feeling.

Actually, there was a still silence within me, but that moment of insight was clearly there.
And, somehow, being able to see that instant with such total clarity, I was able to steer my
life away from another rejection.

I calmly leaned in towards David as if he had simply told me that he did not want another
cup of coffee, “Listen, I heard that you also do a lot of commercial testing, involving data
analysis and recommendations, and that you need to do the work all yourself because
nobody else in the office can analyze the data. Is that right?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” he said.

I knew that having to analyze the data himself was a sore spot for David, but that nobody
else in the office had the ability to do it properly. Most “ad people” aren’t so great with
numbers.

“Well, I have extensive background in data analysis and a degree in sociology. For your
next project, why don’t you give the data to me as a test and see what I do with it?”
“Now, if you can do that…”

A few weeks later, he got a look at my data analysis and I was hired. My first year at
WeCU was, easily, the happiest year of work I ever had.

Thank you, Landmark Forum!

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A Vision of the Future

Both my material life and spiritual life would be given huge boosts in September of 1996.
For, it was during those first few weeks with WeCU that I would experience a dream that
would, eventually, have a huge transforming impact on my life for years to come.

Here is the passage from my dream diary, as I wrote it on September 16, 1996:

I was walking though a grassy, hilly area; when a woman up ahead pointed to me,
giving me hand gestures indicating that I should quickly go up the hill on my right-
hand side. She was a Peruvian Indian and looked as if she was expecting me or
anyone else who may be looking for some instructions on where to go. I listened
to her and went up this hill onto a plateau, only about 15 or twenty feet higher than
where I had been walking. On top of the plateau were a group of Peruvian Indians,
about eight of them, dressed in their cultural apparel, and one white woman, who
I immediately went over and stood next to, seeing how she must have been some
sort of tourist as well and could speak English. It should be noted that at this point
I was startled and excited by the fact that I could see their auras - the entire aura
of all the Indians I saw. But at this point nobody was saying anything because they
were all standing in a row, looking at the sun. It became apparent to me that I had
stumbled across a Peruvian ritual of some sort.

I looked up with them and, to my surprise; I could stare, open-eyed at the Sun.
However, instead of a normal yellow, the sun looked as if it were made of liquid
silver; a very shiny bright silvery light was radiating from it. Then, what the Peruvians
had been waiting for happened. The Sun seemed to drop a long line out of the
bottom of it, about twice the diameter of the sun itself. The Sun and the line were
now made of the normal golden yellow light, but still did not hurt our eyes. The line
began to swing back and forth and it dawned on me what I was witnessing.

I had recently read a passage by Carl Jung of recently discovered manuscripts in

which Peruvian Shamans speak of a ritual in which the Shaman witnesses the Sun
drop down his penis and wave it from side to side in the air like a flexible pendulum.
As the Sun moves in motion you can feel the wind swish from side to side with the
movement of the penis. At that point I said to the blond girl next to me, “I know
what this is.....we should be able to feel the wind move with the penis of the Sun.”

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 I stuck out my arms at my side to try and feel the wind. But the wind was sort of
gently swirling about, and I had a difficult time judging whether or not the wind was
in synchronicity with the Sun’s swinging penis. The wind definitely seemed to pick
up, however. This whole process left me with the unmistakable notion that the Sun
is conscious and is a form of life in and of itself. The Sun knew it was performing in
this ritual with the Peruvian Indians and the Indians were aware of this as well.

Just as I was getting excited over this, all of the Indians walked down the hill in a
very matter of fact, humble way. To them, this was just their regular communication
with the Sun and was, although sacred, certainly nothing out of the ordinary. All at
once, they left the hill as the penis was still swinging. The only one who stayed to
watch with me was the blond girl to my right.

Once all the Indians had left, the Sun did something else that only the girl and
I witnessed. The penis turned into a “minute-hand”, with the rest of the Sun splitting
into pieces, creating a giant clock in the sky; a clock of silver light against the sky
blue background. Apparently, the Indians didn’t need to see this mystery, for they
had seen all they needed. The minute-hand started to spin faster and faster. The
girl and I marveled at this spectacle for a while, then walked off the hill together to
talk about it. The Sun had apparently been sending me a message about time -
time getting faster. Maybe a foreshadowing of what is to occur in my future.

Then the dream was over. I’m not sure what it meant, but it had enough of an
impact on me that I can say at this point, if there was ever a place that seems to be
calling me, it is Peru.

A few weeks later, I followed up with this passage:

October 5, 1996
Back on September 13th I wrote about a dream that I did not quite understand,
about being part of an Incan ceremony. This, along with documentaries I’d seen
on Peru as well as books like the Celestine Prophesy that talk about ancient Incan
culture, had me interested in it to the point where, after a psychic asked me if I
felt called to a place on Earth, I only thought of Peru. I told this to Sheena, and
she just started laughing, because she had been thinking the same thing. But, as
I mentioned before, it was the dream itself I had felt to be so compelling.

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I watch countless documentaries on Shamans and the like on T.V. So why Peru?
Why the Inca’s and not the Aztecs, the Maya, the Eskimos, the Japanese, the
Hindu, the Thai? Why this calling to Peru?

And what was the meaning of the clock spinning in my dream? Why did the Inca in
my dream leave after the Sun began to wave it’s penis in the sky, leaving the blond
girl and I to watch?

I received my answers in a classic case of the Universe showing me the door, but
me having to walk through it. On Wednesday of this week I went wandering by the
Omega Centre, where I buy all of my spiritual books. I had nothing really to buy
in there, but sometimes I like to go in and look around, letting my intuition stumble
across whatever lay in its path.

Well, I don’t know, I guess the Peru thing was on my mind, along with more of a
focus on mysticism and shamanism now, so I picked up a magazine I had glanced
at once or twice before entitled the Shaman’s Drum, Number 42, Summer, 1996.

I opened it up and on page five was a full page ad that went like this:

INCA SHAMANISM
with Alberto Villoldo, PHD, and THE INCA MEDICINE PEOPLE OF PERU

MEET THE LAST OF THE INCA SHAMAN

THE Q’ERO ELDERS JOURNEY TO NORTH AMERICA

...DETROIT NOV.23 * NEW YORK NOV.24 * PROVIDENCE NOV.30.....

“In an unprecedented journey this Fall, the Inca Elders of Peru will travel to
North America to share their most holy rites-of-passage. The last descendants
of the Inca have remained in monastic isolation for five hundred years, high in
the mist-shrouded, sacred mountains of southern Peru. According to ancient
prophecy, it is the time of the great gathering and reintegration of the Peoples
of the Four Directions, bringing renewed order and harmony in the universe.

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 The Q’ero believe it is time to release their teachings to the West, in
preparation of the day the Eagle of the North and the Condor of the South
will fly together again. The Inca are the “Keepers of the Time to Come”,
and the rites-of-passage to who we are becoming. The Inca elders will lead
us in the rites of initiation to who we are becoming individually, and to our
collective destiny. This will be a rare opportunity to meet the Q’ero masters,
the last of the Inca Shaman, on this historic journey to North America.

ALBERTO VILLOLDO, PHD. is a psychologist and medical anthropologist,

trained for over twenty years in classical Shamanism. He is founder of
the Self-Regulation Laboratory at San Francisco State University and the
author of numerous books including Island of the Sun and Dance of the Four
Winds.

There was the explanation of my dream. The Inca left the ritual where I was, once
they had received their signal from Father Sun, waving them north, up the ravine
from which I had come; north to North America, to initiate my people, Western Man
into their rite-of-passage.

The “Keepers of Time”, are the Inca, as symbolized by the Sun turning into a clock.
And Time is being accelerated into eternity. The reason the Inca left before the Sun
turned into a clock was two-fold. First, they had received the message they needed
in order to begin this most sacred of journeys. Second, the Sun turning into a clock
was a message for me (and possibly the blond woman who I still don’t know). The
clock was there to let us know that the Inca, the Keepers of Time, would be sent on
their journey, and that I am to play a role. I am to participate. And much change
will ensue if I am to engage the Inca on their sacred journey.

I phoned the number in the ad and will be enrolling for either the Detroit or New
York session November 23 or 24.

A few months later I would drive, alone, to attend the meeting with the Inca Elders. It was
a brief ceremony held just outside of Flint, Michigan. About 200 people attended. There,
the Inca introduced us to their culture and initiated us into their highest rites of passage.
One of the elders looked just like the only one of the eight I had seen clearly in my dream.
Interestingly, there were about eight elders on the trip. As part of the ceremony, they
cleansed our luminous body, or auric field. This helped explain why I was able to see their
auric fields in my dream. The entire experience matched up with my dream very nicely.

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I remember one thing they said about American culture, “You have so much, and yet
nobody is connected, everyone is alone.” They also added that, “Your minds are much
more developed than ours, but your hearts are not developed at all.”

They were a very observant people. I returned from the ceremony inspired, and planned
on visiting these same people in Peru the following year.

The Secret of My Success

Meanwhile, on the material side, my first year as an account planner was going startlingly
well. Starting at $35,000 per year, David gave me a $5,000 bonus at Christmas, along
with $5,000 raises after 3 months, 8 months and 15 months, simply because he was
happy with my work and my attitude. At the end of my second year with him, WeCU was
purchased by a larger agency, and my salary was again increased to $65,000.

Needless to say, David and our clients were very satisfied with my work. But there was
something else which was happening that really made the difference. Every so often,
David would hear from somebody about how “involved” or “present” I was on their project.
When I was in a meeting, I was really in the meeting. It left people with the impression that
I genuinely cared about their business, which I did. This stood in stark contrast to what
was said of me at my last performance appraisal in Vancouver, where I was described as
being constantly distracted or not paying attention.

My combination of newfound material prosperity and heightened spirituality lead to me

earning the well deserved, but rather sarcastic, nickname of Guru Show-me-the-money
within my family.

I found it a little sad that some people saw me as being somewhat hypocritical in aspiring
to earn more money. I’ve never seen a problem in this regard. My problem was in how
you earn it. If you can do it with integrity, so be it. As for my integrity, during those first few
years, I was far from perfect, but I was doing the best I could.

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With this newfound success in the material world, serious worries regarding my mental
health dissipated quickly. The only concern of my parents was that I showed no signs
of stopping my quest for a deeper spiritual understanding of life. They worried that other
strong experiences may lead to mental problems in the future. But I didn’t care. I had
already decided that I was taking this journey to the very end.

Peru

As part of that journey, in November of 1997, I went to Peru to visit the Inca shaman that
I had met outside of Detroit. Arriving in Lima, setting foot on South American soil for the
first time, I felt like I had just entered a country which was in the midst of a civil war. Armed
soldiers guarded the airport. The streets were dirty and crowded, the air polluted. It was
definitely the Third World. My trip got off to a friendly, but rough start, as I spent my first
night in Lima vomiting out the local alcoholic beverages in my hotel room.

Meeting most of the tour group in the morning, we immediately flew to Cuzco, where
our trip into the world of the Inca really began. Along with Dr. Alberto Villoldo9, we were
accompanied by two Incan shaman, Don Umberto, (who seemed very familiar from my
dream the year before) as well as the head elder shaman of the tribe, Don Manuel. For
these two men, to share their rituals and beliefs with us was the fulfillment of their life’s
work, so our tour was as important for them as it was for us.

I was the lone Canadian on the trip. I had flown down with five other Americans – four
“New Age” type women and one very rich son of an oilman from Oklahoma named Trip.
To my surprise, the majority of the tour was from São Paulo, Brazil. In the cosmopolitan
city of Toronto, I had only met one person from there. I literally knew nothing of the place.
Fortunately, most of them spoke a little English, as I spoke no Portuguese, whatsoever.

Among the Brazilians was one cute, petite, red-haired girl that joined the tour a little later.
Her name was Ligia, and she had met the group in Cuzco, not Lima, as she had traveled
from São Paulo to Cuzco through Bolivia.

“A woman traveling alone through Bolivia?” I thought. “Interesting.” However, while Ligia
seemed enticing, romance was not on my agenda.

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It was in the Inca Valley, when our group assembled for our first meeting. There, I had an
opportunity to share my angst over my career with the tour.

“I make lies for a living,” I told them.

Revealing that I was from the world of advertising was met with a laugh. I also shared with
them the story of my spiritual awakening and subsequent hospitalization.

Later, I asked the shaman, “Do you know why I am here? Why you are in my dreams?”
As they only spoke Quechua, the translations were difficult, but I think they dodged my
question at that time. Too soon, I suppose.

The trip proved to be very interesting. Every day we would travel, by bus or train, to
some remote Incan ruin. There, the shamans would hold ceremony. Usually rituals
with coca leaves would be accompanied by rigorous energy work and a cleansing of our
auric field.

After about four days on the tour we arrived at Machu Picchu. I was initially somewhat
disappointed at the high level of tourism there. In all of the images, you see this mystical,
ancient city situated in the extremely remote location. What they don’t show you is that
there is a rather large hotel and small parking lot of buses just outside of the photo.

Machu Picchu was chock-full of tourists, and our guide who seemed to speak in super-
slow motion, didn’t make things any more exciting.

However, the evening was a different story. Alberto had contacts at Machu Picchu which
allowed us to enter the city at night. Our tour was the only group on the grounds. We were
guided by Alberto to the Death Stone, where one of the Incas most sacred rituals would
be performed on us by Don Manual. To my surprise, Alberto asked that I help him with the
ritual. He was starting to look at me with knowing eyes.

Arriving at the Death Stone that night, the entire group slipped into a spontaneous, sacred
silence. Macchu Picchu, the stars, and a full moon framed by a large circle of clouds,
seemed to have gathered, especially for our ceremony. We were all feeling it in the air
that night.

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In his native, ceremonial dress, Don Manuel would lay each of us on the Death Stone, one
at a time. Then, he would do some energy work, after which, he would release our spirits
from our body and, literally, send it around the world, and then back into us. My job was
to hug each person that came off the rock, “as if they were your first born child,” Alberto
instructed. I was grateful for the opportunity and did not want to disappoint. I recalled
lying in the hospital bed, thinking to myself, “You can love everybody. It doesn’t matter who
they are or what they do. Everybody can be loved.”

And that’s what I did. I hugged each person who came to me with all I had. The reactions
from people, especially the Brazilians, were wonderful. They couldn’t stop talking about it
with me afterwards. It seemed that for some of them, my hug was more important to them
than the healing.

The day after the ritual, one of the women came to me with a gift, a Peruvian doll. She
communicated to me that this doll, which held a baby, was symbolic of her being born into
my arms. I still have the doll, and she travels with me on all of my journeys.

But there was one small violation on my part. One by one, each person came off the
rock, usually crying or expressing some form of sadness. Then Ligia descended from her
rebirth. Being about a foot shorter than myself, she bent her neck back and looked at me
with the biggest, warmest smile I’d ever seen. For the others, there was a hug, but for her,
it was a kiss on the mouth. I could not resist.

I was the last to receive the ritual. At over 80 years old, Don Manuel was an ancient,
gnomish figure right out of National Geographic. With the stars behind him, I felt as if
I were an Inca myself. This was the real deal. First, he worked on my head, then chest,
then belly. At the belly he seemed to struggle. He kept pushing on the right side of my
intestines, again and again. Finally, on the left side of my intestines, I felt a release.

“This little guy knows what he is doing!” I thought to myself.

As soon as I felt that release, he stopped working on me. For the next 24 hours, I was
stuck in my room with diarrhea. Don Manuel’s medicine was powerful.

In fact I was so sick that I missed the walk up the main mountain, to where the group could
see Macchu Picchu from above, at the end of the famous Inca trail.

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After our kiss (which she did not object to), Ligia and I began to spend more time together,
but as we were in “travel mode”, neither of us was taking anything too seriously. However,
as the days passed, she began to have a familiar feeling to me - independent, funny,
introspective, spiritual. She reminded me….of me!

Finally, about 10 days into the trip, I sat down next to her on the bus.

“What is your birthday?” I asked her.

“March 27,” she replied.

I knew it.

“That’s my birthday,” I told her. Refusing to believe me, she asked to see my passport.
After that, the connection became closer.

A few days later, we were having pizza together, alone, just the two of us. I asked her a
second question.

“What time were you born?”

Many people don’t know the time they are born, but I knew she would.
“11:30 in the morning,” she replied.
I almost fell off my chair.
“Exactly as I thought.”

We were born on the same day at the same time. My official time of birth was 11:39am,
but I thought she was going to say 11:30am. She was, however, 3 years older, which
I already knew by that time.

As our trip neared its end, the two shamans read coca leaves for the group in private
readings. I had the feeling that what would come from this reading would be important for
me. During my reading, I told Don Umberto of my dream from the year earlier, and that
this dream was the main reason I had come to Peru. I asked him why I was there, and if
my career in advertising is really what I should be doing right now, or should I be in another
field, one that is more in line with my values.

105
Don Umberto informed me, quite directly, that I was in Peru because Mother Earth
(Pachamama) had called me there in my dream, and that shamanism would be my work,
not advertising. This confirmed everything that I had been silently thinking for the last year
and a half, including a vision that I had shared with the tour group minutes before I went
in for the reading.

He told me that the reason I was cut out for this work was that I had a very large, sensitive
heart, and that I knew, “…in my heart what thousands of people are searching for in books
and cannot find.”

“The people you will serve are not the Peruvians…You know who they are,” he said to me
in Quechua. I wept in gratitude.

In fact, I had been crying all through the trip. My tears perplexed a lot of people. It’s just
that the whole experience felt so sacred to me, every minute of it. It was also confusing.
“Am I still dreaming?” I would quietly ask myself. “What is reality?” “Why is this happening
to me?”

On our last day of the tour, Don Umberto took myself, Ligia and a few of the other Americans
that we were close to up to a sacred spot in Cuzco. There, as we had done on the entire
tour, we performed long, detailed rituals whose names I have already forgotten. However,
the feeling and intention behind those rituals are still with me. We would sit for hours
putting together “despachos” of coca leaves, candies, special stones and other materials
as gifts for Mother Earth.

At one point, I noticed some tourists watching us from a distance. I turned to Anastasia,
one of the American women with us and said, “In the beginning, we were on the tour.
Now we are the tour.”

As our ceremony came to a close, Don Umberto grabbed my hands and began to speak
to me with a passion he had not shown until now. Everything he said was in Quechua.
I didn’t understand a word, but I understood everything. His message to me was simple,
“Keep going. Don’t stop. You are on the right track.”

Afterwards, he brought together Ligia and I, blessing us as a couple. I thought that was
rather funny. Ligia and I were together a lot on the tour, but, as she lived half-way around
the world, I don’t think either of us saw our relationship as something long-term. It was
simply a very special “vacation” romance.

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My last night in Peru, we spent together, sharing a small bed. When the sun rose, I had to
rush off to the bus. The trip was over. Ligia kissed me farewell with a rather vacant look
on her face. “I’ll see you again,” I told her. I don’t think she really believed me at the time.
However, what she didn’t know was the feeling I had for her.

No, I can’t say that it was exactly one of true love. Rather, it was a passionate, insatiable
desire to talk to this woman. Despite the language barrier, we never, ever ran out of
conversation.

There was never an awkward silence. When we were together, life was light, fun,
meaningful and interesting. Every moment.

The Return

“Because of all the rituals we have been doing, our energy is very strong and pure
now.”

At least that’s what Alberto told us before we left. I really didn’t pay much attention at the
time he said that, however, once I arrived at Lima airport, strange things began to occur.
It seemed that many people, especially teenage girls were looking at me in a very direct
way. Later, I sat down next to a woman holding her baby. Within a few seconds, the
baby was crying, with his arms outstretched, for me! Have you ever seen a baby desiring
to leave their mother for a complete stranger? Weeks later at a family get-together, my
uncle’s dogs spent the entire night lying at my feet. They wouldn’t go to anyone else in
the family. Apparently, Alberto wasn’t joking.

Flying back home, I began to ask myself,

“OK, now you know that you know you are a shaman. What does that mean? What does
it mean to be a shaman in the modern world?”

I certainly wasn’t going to be sacrificing lama fetuses to Mother Earth with Canadians.
As always, one question simply led to another.

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Because our flight out of Lima was delayed, I missed my connector in Miami, which was
a great piece of good fortune, as I got to extend my trip one more night, going over the
details of our adventure together with my new American friends, Anastasia and Victoria,
even if it was at the very and mystical Airport Howard Johnson’s Restaurant.

The next morning, I arrived at the Miami airport and immediately checked my baggage.
“March 27th,” the check-in attendant said, looking at my passport. “My grandmother was
born on March 27th. Whenever I meet someone born on that day, I think that they must be
a good person.”

“Yes, they are!” I replied. It seemed that the synchronicity of meeting Ligia had not been
lost on the Universe.

Once home, I was on the phone to Sheena soon after,

“Sheena, I was told in Peru that I am a shaman. What should I do now? I don’t know what
to do!”

“Don’t do anything,” she wisely advised. “Just go back to work. You’ve been through a
lot.”

Returning back to the “real world” I would find myself leading a double-life, more and
more. All of my money would be spent on spiritual books, seminars and travel, with the
hope that, some day, all of my efforts would lead me towards a much more spiritual life
and out of the world of advertising.

Ligia, Me & Brazil

A few weeks after our trip, Ligia and I started e-mailing each other, each one rich with our
souls. More and more, I could see that she was a person that could not only understand
me, but could also identify with my perceptions. She dreamed passionately for a better
world, and having a bigger role in it, as did I. However, sometimes I wondered if she
could endure the trials of mundane, daily life with the same passion. She was a marvel to
dream with, but would she be a dream to live with? I wasn’t so sure. It’s hard to pay the
bills when your head is always in the clouds. Nevertheless, I visited her only four months
after we met in Peru.

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Weeks before my trip to Brazil, I was dreaming again….

I saw myself on a tour, overlooking São Paulo from a green mountainside. To my

right, was a small waterfall and a few lush trees, where some shirtless, mulatto
children were smiling and playing. Looking down, I could see an endless sea of
office buildings alongside a wide river. Overhead flew a group of very large blue
and black butterflies, each with an enormous wingspan of about six feet. They
were very beautiful.

However, as I watched the butterflies soar above us, one of them got caught in
a tree, which had lost all of its foliage. As I turned I saw that the waterfall had
become a concoction of rusty plumbing, under which the children were showering
in rather dirty water. I looked down at the city and saw the river, brown with pollution.
Everything seemed to be dying.

When I awoke, the message of the dream seemed clear. Brazil, especially São Paulo,
is a city which has some of the worst environmental and social problems in the world.
However, because the problems there are so deep, it is also a place where people are
working very hard to resolve them. This dream stayed with me. I felt as if, not only Ligia
was calling me, but Brazil was calling me as well.

I wrote to Ligia saying that I felt as if there is a part of me in her country, which is waiting
for my arrival, so that I can become one with it again.

Arriving in São Paulo, I remember the look of quiet, innocent expectation on Ligia’s
face as I came down the airport escalator, where she waited with her best friend. While
I became a little nervous with level of commitment we seemed to be moving towards, we
quickly slipped into the easy vibe we felt for each other. We were clicking again.

Within four days of arriving in Brazil, Ligia had arranged for us to have seats in the
Sambodromo for Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Feeling the rumble of the first samba school
enter into the stadium, I was again, deeply moved. Approaching us from the right was a
mad passion the likes of which I had never, ever seen. I remember catching a glimpse of
such a thing in the eyes and movements of one or two clubbers, late into the evening at
Twilight Zone, my old haunt, back in the day; but thousands of people like this, dancing
and singing their hearts out all night? It was overwhelming.

109
“You could give Canada a billion dollars and they could never pull off something even
close to this,” I told her. Here’s what my life had been missing in Canada - heart.

As the first group of dancers of the night approached, to my astonishment, I recognized

them. Leading the entire Carnival, were about 8 men, all dressed as giant, blue butterflies
with black trim. They could not have looked more like the ones in my dream. The
synchronicity was not lost on Ligia. We would stay at the Sambodromo all night, leaving
long after the sun rose. I walked back to the subway with Ligia and her friends, completely
inspired, and utterly exhausted.

Our nine days together were warm, inspired and easy. I felt as at home with her as I did
in her relaxed, but troubled country. Other than for Carnival we spent most of our time by
the beach in Rio or Ilha Grande, or, on a few rainy days, simply spending the day in the
room. I think you get the picture.

And then there were the conversations: shamanism, transpersonal psychology, spirituality,
the future of the world, quantum physics, synchronicities, values, integrity, love, sex, pain,
dreams, journeys, failure, success, relationships, madness, our future together. As always,
nothing was off limits - not one ounce of bullshit or fluff. Every word was important, every
word was honest. She was as transparent a person as I had ever met, so completely
different from the women that I worked with Canada, each with their carefully manicured
image; each working so hard to look like they actually know what they are doing and
where they are going.

Plus, she had a surprise for me. Back when I had first arrived home from Peru, I sent her a
blank card, in which I drew an entire map of North and South America. The map featured
a number of famous cities as well as her city of Itu, just outside of São Paulo, and mine
of Newmarket, just outside of Toronto. To the left I childishly wrote, “Ligia, You live too far
away! Move closer!”

As it turns out, Ligia’s sister was considering moving with her family to New York, where
Ligia’s brother-in-law was working. It seemed that the opportunity to “move closer” was
actually there.

110
When I arrived back home, I was still unsure of what the next move would be. When your
“girlfriend” is halfway around the world, each move seems like one towards commitment
or breaking up. There is no happy, middle-space that guys love, where you are just having
sex and having fun with no particular plan. You are either moving towards or away from
marriage. Yikes!!!

But, in a sense, that is what I had been doing anyways. I hadn’t had a girlfriend for
about 5 years simply because I didn’t want to waste my energy getting into a relationship
that I would have to fight to get out of a year later. I guess, by default, I was ready
for marriage.

The feeling Ligia left with me was a lingering one. Although I feared marriage, afraid that
my feelings for her would change with time, I would find myself asking, “Do you really want
to let this one go?” There was just so much to her that was unique. I think she was the
first woman that I had ever been with that was actually “good” for me. I was, somehow,
better with her than without her.

Six months would pass before I would see her again, however this time she would be
coming to stay with her sister’s family, just outside of New York City.

As soon as she arrived in the United States, our travels together continued. First there
was our trip together by motor-home from Las Vegas, to Sedona, the Grand Canyon and
back. I booked Ligia’s first night in America to be at the Luxor Hotel - the black, glass
pyramid casino in the desert. Not only did I want to impress her, I also wanted to freak her
out. The Luxor did just that!

Then, I would drive to New York from Toronto, an eight-hour drive, about once a month.
At Christmas, we went to California together, driving from San Francisco to Santa Barbara.
Everywhere we went, we lived it up and had a ball. Spend, spend, spend! During that
time, it would have been easy for anyone to criticize my “pseudo jet-setting” lifestyle as
somehow immature. Living at home from age 30 to 33, I was driving my parents crazy.
They simply couldn’t understand why I would spend all of my money traveling, all the while
sleeping in their living room, instead of moving into my own apartment. However, for me,
“investing” in these trips with Ligia was simply something that needed to be done.

111
I felt this insatiable need to show her all of the interesting cities of the United States.
In fact, I wanted to show them to myself as well. All of my life, I had wanted to live in the
U.S. and really experience America. With Ligia or without, between the ages of 30 and 35
I found myself in all of the major American cities that I had wanted to know. Sometimes
I felt as if I was living at the airport, and loving it!

Once we drove from her place in Chestnut Ridge, New York to Atlantic City for the weekend,
where we would stay at the Trump Taj Mahal. The fact that we were now visiting another
casino city was not lost on Ligia. “Sean,” she asked, “What is going on with you and these
casinos? I mean, you don’t even gamble.”

“I don’t know,” I replied. I was just drawn to them. We had a great weekend there, never
gambling a cent.

Ironically, the one place we couldn’t visit was Toronto. Once in the United States, she
simply couldn’t get the Canadian visa. The closest we got was the time we met in Niagara
Falls. From the American side of Lake Ontario, she could see the Toronto skyline in
the distance.

As we got to know each other better, I always came away from our encounters feeling
better than I actually thought I would. The inevitable burst of our romantic bubble never
came. We kept asking ourselves when our trip to Peru was going to end. It never
really did.

One Saturday, we made plans to visit a variety of sites in Manhattan. The Guggenheim
was closed. Tavern-on-the-Green had a private party. MOMA was being renovated.
All day we marched across the city in the cold rain. The day should have been a disaster,
but it wasn’t. We were having a fabulous time wandering from one disappointment to the
other. We finished the day having a rather bland meal at the Hard Rock Café, soaking
wet. The day was so bad, we couldn’t help but laugh.

“If I’m having fun with Ligia on a day like today,” I thought, “maybe we’ve got a shot.”

After a few months of traveling here and there, we would start to build a life together.

112
Living in America

While Ligia and I were having our long distance romance, I was still struggling with my
career. Whether to hang on to advertising until something “more spiritual” came along, or
to simply “let go” was a huge issue for me. However, this time, it certainly wasn’t due to
a lack of success.

On one project, we were evaluating three commercials for a major American bank whose
ad agency was in San Francisco. As I had done most of the work on the project, at the
last moment, David asked me to fly out there in order to help him organize the material for
what would be a 2-hour presentation.

A business trip with the boss to San Francisco was a huge deal for me at the time.
Considered a very special city by almost everyone, it was especially revered by account
planners, as it had created a name for itself as being the best place in America to work in
our profession. The agencies there were very innovative and interesting. For years, I had
dreamed of one day working there.

However, even on the most exciting business trip of my life, my soul was still gnawing at
me. The in-flight movie was Jerry Maguire. As I watched Tom Cruise strut from meeting
to meeting, cell-phone in hand, I couldn’t help but think,

“There I am, Jerry Maguire. How much longer for this fake life?”

Mind you, a glass of wine with the boss at the St. Francis Hotel and a stretch limo ride to
our morning meeting helped me forget my woes, if only for a few days.

So, as most people do, I stuck with what was comfortable and tried to improve things.
I also decided that, if I wasn’t going to live out my current dreams, that I could at least put
a few of my older dreams to rest. The first was to work in the United States.

From the time I was 20, when I skipped my first Canadian winter to live in Australia, I vowed
that I would move south one day. “Six winters,” I would tell myself, while freezing my way
from class to class at the University of Toronto. “Six winters and I’m out of here.”

113
Moving to Vancouver at 27 was a good first step, allowing me to bypass two of Toronto’s
hard winters. Out there, I was rollerblading in February. However, at 32, I still hadn’t
made the big move. Driving to see Ligia in New York regularly made me feel as if I were
almost there. I had this feeling that the more physical time I spent in the U.S., the closer
I was to actually living there.

For six months I was in conversation with headhunters across America, looking for a
solid account planning job south of the border. While my experience was rather thin at
less than three years as a planner, I did have something to brag about. The first project I
ever did for WeCU lead to the creation of an award winning ad campaign for Campbell’s
Soup. The ideas for these commercials stemmed directly from insights I had discovered
conducting in-home research. Ironically, the agency behind the campaign was CCEO, my
old agency, who, if you remember, had rejected me for inside account planning positions
three straight times.

There were a few prospects out there, but nothing quite right. By February 1999, Ligia
was getting impatient. It seemed that living with an unclear future in the New York
winter, without me, was wearing on her. Finally, one job came up through two different
headhunters. It seemed that it was a job that few planners were interested in because it
was in the advertising backwater of ….

Las Vegas.

The main client of this agency was Mandalay Resort Group, owners of the Luxor Hotel/
Casino.

“The Luxor!” I thought. “Casinos! That was the job for me.”

Ligia and I would go back to where her trip to America had started, Las Vegas. From
a research and strategy point of view, I loved the idea of working there. While other
planners turned their nose at the idea of working in such an insignificant advertising market,
I relished the thought of deeply understanding the allure of the casino business and of
having such a unique glimpse of American life.

And could there be any place more spiritual? Just kidding. Looking back, while I may not
have been mentally ill, I certainly did have split-personality disorder.

114
Just as I did before I started working for WeCU, after my first telephone interview with the
agency in Vegas, I had deep reservations about staying in the business. After discussing
it with Sheena, I actually called Ligia and proposed the idea of simply dropping everything
and moving to Brazil with her right away. Ligia talked me out of it, saying that we should
get to know each other a little better before making that move. I reluctantly agreed.

The next day, Ligia called me and said that she had changed her mind; but by then she
had already convinced me to go to Vegas!

The salary for the move would equal about $100,000 Canadian dollars (or U.S. $65,000).
I had been out of the hospital for about three years and had already tripled my salary. That
“mental illness” I had was obviously paying off.

Las Vegas

A new job, a new city, a new girlfriend, a new car, a new apartment. Could anything else
in my life have changed? Somehow, I doubt it.

Living in Las Vegas had its ups and downs. While Ligia and I were having a ball, I think
I probably spent a little too much time with her and not enough time at work. It felt more
like we were on an extended honeymoon. In fact, it became just that, as we were married
on January 1st, 2000 (01/01/00), about 7 months after moving in together.

And where to honeymoon when you already live in Las Vegas? Hawaii, of course! We
spent two weeks in Oahu and Maui, showing Ligia my favorite islands. I’d been there
twice before.

The Las Vegas job didn’t last long. The president of the agency and I never really clicked.
While doing his best to seem friendly and politically correct, he had the underlying
personality of a mob boss. After a few months of working there, it seemed pretty clear
that things were not going to work out.

I should have known I was in trouble on my very first day. One evening, I was with some
of my new colleagues, casually watching a focus group from the backroom. Jane, the V.P.
that hired me, called me over to ask a “favour.”

115
“Sure, what is it?” I replied, eager to please.
“Would you be able go to a shareholders meeting at one of our clients tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said. “What for?’

“Well, when you get there, there will be a guy at the door who will give you a question.”
“A question?” I asked, somewhat lost.

“Yes, a question on a piece of paper. At some point in the press conference, if our client is
being asked a question by the media that they do not want to answer, you will be signaled
to ask your question, which our client will then answer.”

“Oh, OK. I guess that’s fine,” I replied, still dumbfounded at her request.

I sat down by the one-way glass, watching the focus group unfold, when the implications
of what I had just agreed to do began to sink in. I was to be the agency’s bitch.

After a few minutes, I returned to Jane’s side.

“Jane, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this.”

“Why not?” she warmly asked.
“I think it’s completely unethical.”
“Why? It’s a free country, anyone can be there, and anyone can ask whatever
they want!”

It sounded like such a pre-programmed answer.

“And the press has the right to ask whatever they want,” I said.
“OK, no problem,” She said, with a smile.

And that was that.

Now, I can’t say that I was finished with the agency after that day, but the relationship
never became what I would call, warm. They made me nervous, and I think I made them
nervous.

Shortly after returning from my honeymoon, they let me know that they were less than
satisfied.

116
Ironically, while the powers-that-be were rather unhappy with me, my main client, Mandalay
Resort Group was quite satisfied with my work. While in Vegas, I had the opportunity
to do research and strategic planning on three of their casinos, Luxor, Excalibur and
Circus Circus. On a personal level, it was in working on those casinos that I got the most
satisfaction; not because of any great advertising campaign that came out of my work, but
because of how much I learned about Americans themselves.

Each of these casinos catered to a different type of American. Luxor focused on upper-
middle class, university educated, urban customers. The Excalibur was a hot-spot for
“Middle America” – farmers and small town people. Finally, Circus Circus targeted lower-
income groups and Hispanics from California. It was an amazing experience of contrasts,
seeing how these different groups think and feel; how they responded to research
techniques and different styles of advertising, and how they could express themselves.

It was surprising to see how educated people were so much more open and imaginative
than, lower-income, uneducated people, who, in contrast, were very direct, concrete and
fearful in their way of thinking. I remember one interview session where the two young
women I was interviewing stopped the interview because they were actually afraid of my
projections exercises.

Using image cards which came from a type of tarot deck, I would ask people to pull out
pictures that reminded them of the hotel in which they were staying. These two ladies were
actually afraid of my deck of cards, thinking that I was somehow using the cards for some
kind of occult practice. I just wanted them to show me pictures that reminded them of the
hotel! Nevertheless, the interview was over after that. In contrast, one marketing guy
I spoke with spread out about 30 different cards related to his stay at the Luxor, and he had
an interesting point to make regarding each card. This contrast in consciousness would
be a valuable learning experience which would have implications well into the future.

With about four months left on my one-year contract, Ligia and I realized that the best
move for us at that point would be to visit Brazil and see her family for the first time.
However, I simply did not have the money to pay for the kind of extended trip which I had
wanted to take. As a result, I started looking for another planning job, this time in the city
of my dreams, San Francisco.

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Ligia wasn’t thrilled with this idea, as she hadn’t been home for two years. “Sean, you’ve
got to get a free-lance job!” she told me. At the first mention of it, I thought that idea was
impossible. First, I was on a work visa to work only for one company; second, I had never
done a free-lance job in my life, and third, where would I get one? Las Vegas was a very
small advertising market.

As it turned out, getting a free-lance job is exactly what happened. With two months left
on my contract, I started working for X&Y’s arch rival on the side, effectively doubling my
salary for my last two months in Las Vegas. With that extra income, we were able to plan
a trip to Brazil for six months!

If, by now, you are getting the impression that my life seemed like one easy cruise where
I could travel endlessly, somehow having the income to pay for whatever it was I desired;
where opportunities presented themselves at every turn, making all of my dreams come
true, you would not be mistaken. While my journey had many twists and turns, it also felt
like I was moving through a dream of my own creation. After coming up with the money to
travel Brazil for seven months, I was truly starting to feel that anything was possible.

Back to Brazil

Of course, our journey to Brazil was not to be a simple sight-seeing adventure. It also
represented my first significant step towards leaving advertising. We traveled there,
almost non-stop, first visiting family and friends, then for an extended journey up into the
northeast of Brazil and the Amazon. For one month, we would travel by boat from the
mouth of the Amazon, into the city of Manaus.

Be it the jungle, the beach, or the cities, everywhere we went, we would seek out shamans
in the area in the hope that we would find some clue to developing spiritual work ourselves.
While their divinations for us were always positive, concrete answers were elusive.

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In Salvador, my favorite city of our tour, we witnessed our first Cadomblé ceremonies. Held
in the humble homes of the hillside favelas which engulf the city, we would respectfully
watch as practitioners worked themselves into trances, channeling the African Orixá spirits
which they worshiped. While it was clear that these people were poor and uneducated, it
was also clear that they knew something that we modern folk had long forgotten. There
was power in their trance states. Power to do what, I wasn’t sure.

During the first of two ceremonies we attended, I remember seeing this young mullata, a
waif of a girl, about 14 years of age, trying to work herself into a trance state. However,
her inhibitions were getting in the way. Little by little, the woman leading the Candomblé
session would lean over to her, whispering gentle encouragement.

Finally, after about 20 minutes of dancing, the young girl began to slip into the rhythm of
the bongo player in the corner. Minutes later, as her head dropped and shoulders swayed,
she let out a sudden, primal, sheik. The group leader leaped over to her in excitement.
The girl had done it, she had broken through to the Other Side. The elder touched the girl
with warmth and support.

Witnessing this moment, I recalled my experience in the hospital and how so misunderstood
I had been; how impossible it was to explain to some people what was happening within
me. And yet these simple people, they definitely had some idea. I would have been much
better off with them in my crisis than I was in the hospital. I left the favela deeply moved.

Was it simply a coincidence that Dr. Stan Grof would be speaking at the University of
Bahia, in Salvador, while we were there? Somehow, I think not. One morning, I am
perusing the local Portuguese newspaper looking, in vain (as my Portuguese was still
terrible) for something to do. What do I see in the events section, but a small ad for a
lecture that Dr. Stan Grof is giving at the University of Bahia.

Wanting Ligia to see him in the flesh, we attended the event that night. For me, his speech
was a bit of a let-down as it was identical to the one he gave at the holotropic breathwork
seminar I had attended in Vermont a few years earlier. However, at the break, I was able
to say a few words to him in person, thanking him for the impact his books have played
on my life.

During our entire trip I had this feeling that we would meet someone in our travels that
would completely surprise us. I never imagined that it would be Dr. Stan Grof.

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Our trip took us to 16 cities, 7 national parks and two islands. It ended with us having an
experience of Brazil that few Brazilians have had. Most of our friends in São Paulo would
shudder at the very idea of sleeping in boat hammocks for 20 nights on the Amazon River.
I think I was bitten by every possible ant and mosquito known to man. We encountered
poisonous snakes, tarantulas, piranhas, bats, water buffalo and drunken villagers. I also
got into a few blow-ups, one with a rather territorial parrot and another with a very cheeky
monkey. Nobody steals my beer.

While the journey itself was a tough, sometimes grueling one, it was very rewarding as
well. We experienced some of the most breathtaking, untouched landscapes on the planet.
And let’s not forget the Brazilians themselves. Beyond warm and friendly, everywhere
we went, we were treated like long-lost relatives. My apparently “hilarious” accent was
always the talk of the town.

Our trip throughout Brazil certainly served the purpose of stripping any remnants of my
comfortable, suburban upbringing out of my system. I look back on our photos and I ask
myself, “Was that really us?”

Mind you, in the end, the “spiritual mission” we were both seeking eluded us. I’m not sure
exactly what we were looking for, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem to show its face. At
the end of our trip, I was about $5,000 in debt and could only think of one thing - getting
back to work.

The Last Hurrah

So, with my American experience under my belt, along with an exciting journey to Brazil to
brag about, I had no doubt that I would be able to enter the market again; finally landing
that “big” advertising job that I thought may finally satisfy me. The only problem was that
the idea of finally achieving my old dream of living and working in San Francisco left me
feeling less than enthused.

During our journey, the people I had met in Brazil were warm and unpretentious. Every
door was open, every smile sincere. When I would think of the carefully fabricated images
of successful executives and creatives that I would need to work with in advertising,
I would sink, just a little.

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Over the years, I would have a recurring dream related to my advertising career that,
I think, says it all:

I see myself alone, on one side of a glass wall, looking in at a group of ad-people,
all sleek and sophisticated, apparently having a wonderful time. Whether they were
socializing or working, it all looked like a lot of fun. However, once inside the room
with them, trying to fit-in, trying to belong, I find myself still feeling lonely, isolated
and completely uninterested in what they are actually doing or talking about.

In a sense, I wanted to be accepted by a club that, deep down, repulsed me.

Year after year I would have similar feelings to these. And, like a bad marriage, I kept
thinking, “This time, it would be different.”

By the time I got back from Brazil in February, 2001, the entire advertising market was
reeling from the collapse of the “Dot coms” in Oct-Nov. 2000. It seemed that, over-night,
the Internet boom had come to a crashing halt, taking half of the advertising agencies in
San Francisco down with them. Agencies I had interviewed with less than a year earlier
were now out-of-business.

But all was not lost. Despite a tightening market I was able to quickly get interviews at
agencies in Los Angeles and Miami, receiving two lucrative job offers.

Within two months of returning home, I was moving down to Miami to work for DG&B
and was excited to do so. DG&B had an incredible reputation for doing award winning
account planning and exciting advertising to go along with it. In some circles, they were
considered to be the most creative ad agency in the U.S. At the interview, Ted, the head
of Account Planning, seemed keen to do the kind of on-the-street, guerrilla style research
that I enjoyed, avoiding the more stiff and tense focus group sessions. While I was also
offered a job in Beverly Hills for US$90,000, I turned it down for a chance to work with
DG&B for $10,000 less.

“Finally, this would be the agency where I could make my mark!”

At least I kept telling myself that.

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By the end of my first week at DG&B, I was already calling the headhunter that hooked me
up with the position. “Do you think the L.A. job is still open?” I asked. After being there
only one week, I was feeling that I had made a huge mistake.

My first day on the job, I was in a meeting with my boss and three very young, very uptight
female executives. It seemed that they had a problem with their new advertising for their
client, “TRUTH”, Florida’s teen anti-smoking non-profit. DG&B had established a world-
famous reputation for making fantastic, irreverent ads for this client, and had won very
prestigious account planning awards in the process of doing so.

However, it seemed that the teenage staff at “TRUTH” was unhappy with the new campaign,
and they wanted the ads pulled. After seeing the ads during the meeting, I immediately
knew what they were talking about. The ads sucked. They were far too childish for the
teen audience and were a little weird – not in a good way.

”Well, why don’t we test the ads,” Ted, my boss suggested.

Then later,

“We’ll make sure they come out OK.”

“What? What did THAT mean?” I thought to myself. “We’ll make sure they come out
OK?”

Well, as it turns out, that is exactly what we did.

Over the next few months, I watched as my boss devised a rather biased research project
to prove that the advertising was good, and then had it interpreted by people that would
give it a positive spin. The negative comments that kids gave to me during focus groups
were completely glossed over. In essence, we were lying to the TRUTH kids.

While I remained patient, hoping that what I thought was a nightmare was actually just a
misunderstanding, I quickly came to realize that my job as an account planner at DG&B
would be to make sure that ALL of the research “came out OK.” At the very least, it was
my job to go out there and “prove” what the agency was already thinking. And if anything
came back negative, it was ignored.

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I had always known that there was a lot of bullshit in advertising, but somehow, I had
managed to maintain my own sense of integrity and honesty through it all. However, this
time, it seemed that there would be no escape.

Finally, about four months into the job, I stood alone in the stairwell of the agency.
I realized that the moment of truth had come. I had a choice to make. I could go back to
my desk, shut up and “play the game” like everyone else, or go up the stairs, tell my boss
exactly what I thought of him and be fired.

I imagined myself, five years into the future, working in San Francisco as a successful
Director of Account Planning, yet with a few extra wrinkles from the lies I’d had to tell to get
there. I imagined how difficult it would be for me to look at myself in the mirror, knowing
that I had become an incredible success by becoming a huge sell-out.

I shot up the stairs, heart pounding, sat down in his office and, within a few minutes, it
was over.

“You are not a planner, Ted,” is what I calmly told him. It was a surprise to see this
otherwise cold and emotionless man shudder in the light of unblinking truth.

By 10:30am I was back in our spacious, South Beach apartment, crying on Ligia’s shoulder.
I had just destroyed my career.

After all of this, you might think, “Well great, now Sean and Ligia can go to Brazil and
he can finally end this advertising nonsense.” The trouble was, by that time, I was still
in a little bit of debt, and I just couldn’t come to grips with the idea of moving to Brazil
owing money.

So I kept hanging on. I had made a few connections in Miami with some free-lance
advertising people that I actually liked, and did some work with them for free, just to prove
myself. We hit it off and were actually planning to make a proposal for a major fitness
chain.

“Hey, maybe I’m not dead yet!” I thought.

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Then came September 11th. Walking the streets of Miami for the next few days, it was
eerie to know what everybody was thinking, but not talking about; as if the entire nation’s
mother had died. The grief was staggering.

And, along with the World Trade Centre, the advertising market came crashing down as
well. The proposal to the fitness chain was put on hold, permanently. After sticking it out
in Miami for a few months, waiting on a couple of other slim opportunities, Ligia and I
packed up our belongings and headed to Toronto, to stay with my family until we sorted
things out.

“All our dreams…(gone)!” she cried.

Each day, as we drove north, the weather would get a little colder, the sky a little greyer,
and I could feel the stark reality of our situation settling in.

Arriving at the border, we needed to convince the immigration officer that Ligia would not
be applying for permanent residency. “We are just here to meet my family, and then will
be moving to Brazil,” we told him. For a second, we looked at each other with excitement
in our eyes. Could it be true? Would we really be moving to Brazil?

Arriving home, I felt like a total failure. 35 and stuck in my parent’s basement with my wife!
All of our dreams had become a nightmare.

And then indecision began – Should we stay in Canada, both start new jobs, pay off
our debts, and then move to Brazil in a few years? Should we just go to Brazil in debt?
Should we simply settle in Canada? At one point, I even considered the advice that my
mother had been hounding me with for years, to do my MBA. Of course, that would mean
living in my parent’s basement for only another three more years!

“Was it possible that less than a year ago I was joyously celebrating New Year’s Eve on
Copacabana Beach? What happened to my new, adventurous life?”

Most mornings I would wake up in that basement, dreading the day to come. “Oh my God,
I’m still here,” I would think to myself.

Some days, I simply didn’t want to see anybody. I remember seeing an old girlfriend in the
mall one day, and turning the corner before she saw me. I felt so humiliated, like every
decision I had ever made was a mistake.

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Except for one.

Ligia stayed supportive of me the entire time. She never criticized me once and never
tried to influence me one way or the other about moving to Brazil. I knew that she was
dying for us to cut our losses and head south, but she also knew that the decision on what
to do with my life had to come from me. Mind you, I also knew that if we settled in Canada
that she would divorce me eventually. Living in Toronto, I would simply never be the man
that she married, and I would never be the man I had hoped to be.

I will spare you the miserable details of living in my parent’s basement. It was a true Dark
Night of the Soul which was difficult for everybody. However, after eight or nine failed job
interviews and about six-months of part-time factory work, I finally made the decision that
needed to be made all along. Ligia and I were moving to Brazil, even if we had to risk
bankruptcy.

In sharing my plan with my father, he sarcastically suggested, “Well, why don’t you just
steal the money.”

I must admit, I agreed with him. I doubt there could be any greater shame to me, personally,
than going bankrupt, especially after having spent so much money traveling, “chasing
my dreams.”

But that is what had to happen. I felt like I no longer had a choice. It was either move to
Brazil or spend a lifetime in depression.

Ligia left for Brazil in August of 2002, in order to set things up for my arrival. While she
was gone, I made the preparations for selling our 4X4, an Isuzu VehiCross. The first
“dream machine” I had ever owned, I had purchased this limited edition concept vehicle,
when I first arrived in Las Vegas. It remains, to this day, my all-time favorite set of wheels.
Returning to Toronto had been hoping to get over $35,000 for it. Now I was prepared to
sell it for anything.

However, once we made our decision, the weight that had been on my shoulders lifted
shortly after. I was finally able to sell the VehiCross, something I’d been trying to do since
I arrived. Sheena had some paid work for me to do on a calendar that she designs. Ligia
started teaching English in São Paulo. All of the sudden, the light started to come back
into our lives.

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I remember seeing Cameron, my brother’s baby son, for the first time after all of our
decisions had finally been made. For the entire time I had been in Toronto, he was always
cautious of me, never engaging me in any way. My brother would tell me that he was
afraid of strangers, so that I wouldn’t feel so bad. Then, a few weeks before I would fly to
Brazil to start my new life, Cameron was not only coming to me, but playing with me and
sitting on my legs at every opportunity.

I was back!

Happily Ever After?

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned,

so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
~ Joseph Campbell ~

Apparently, I had, in fact, fulfilled that deepest of all desires which had dwelled within my
psyche. That old Victorian house was gone forever.

I had finally destroyed my life.

I only wish I had read Joseph Campbell’s quote a little sooner!

My move to São Paulo in November of 2002 felt as if I simply walked away from my
entire life history. I came here without a plan, with no idea of what the future would hold.
It was a tremendous relief to get out of Toronto, but it was also a little scary. However,
gradually, Ligia and I would find ourselves easing into a lifestyle that fit us very well.
Her parents helped us out a lot, buying us a car and providing some money to furnish a
small apartment. For the first year, we both were teaching English for local schools and
after a year, we would both begin teaching independently, effectively doubling our income
from the year before. By the end of our second year, we had paid off all of the debts
which I owed back in Canada. The bankruptcy I had feared so much had been avoided,
quite easily.

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While I originally thought that teaching English would eventually bore me, I found it to be
quite a pleasant surprise. It hardly felt like work at all. Being independent, I could work
as much or as little as I wanted. I had no office politics or boss to deal with, plus I was
actually helping people improve their lives.

But, perhaps most importantly, I was doing something that allowed me to simply be me.
I didn’t have to puff myself up and act like the expert. Many connections with my students
were open, honest and often quite personal. It wasn’t uncommon for class to turn into
a therapy session (for them, not me!). Some of my students stay with me for three
or four years, and the relationships became much more like friendships than that of
student-teacher.

I remember walking out to the parking lot after one of my first classes, in January 2003.
As I approached the car I was struck by the feeling of silence within myself. No e-mails,
no backstabbing, no bullshit, no drama. It was effortless. I felt free.

Basking in my newfound “retirement” as an English teacher, I also lowered my ambitions

towards that elusive spiritual work that I never could seem to find. Rather than trying
to directly help others, Ligia and I both focused on strengthening our own inner spirit
as much as possible. In our spare time, we would read what inspires us, meditate and
exercise. We also started to participate in the Native Indian rituals of an older, British
couple living just outside of the city. Together, we would do monthly sweat lodges at the
home of Felicity and Andrew, then, once a year, we would both participate in their Sun
Moon Dance, an elaborate ceremonial retreat which involved dancing on-and-off for three
days without food and very little water.

My new lifestyle didn’t exactly impress anybody back home, and I hardly held a position of
status, but it felt real. Finally, after ten years of searching, I was living a life that was true to
myself. Eventually, I was even able to tell many of my students about my hospitalization,
in the hopes that my story could help someone in their family, down the road.

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Ego’s Last Gasp

In our third year here we decided to open our own English consulting company. For eight
months we worked on a website of our own design, creating new services that we thought
would appeal to executives looking to improve their English.

But something funny started to happen. All of the sudden, everything we were trying felt
heavy. We often had conflicts with our webpage designers. The advertising we did on
Google had less than stellar results. Managing other teachers felt tedious and draining.
All in all, growing our company was not very inspiring.

And then, every once in a while, Ligia would pipe up,

“Sean, you had a dream to go to Peru. You meet me, we are born on the same day and
time. We travel America, then Brazil. Then you leave everything behind to move to São
Paulo so that, together, we can become….
English teachers?!!”

“Something is not right.”

So, without much fanfare, we quietly let go of the idea of growing our company. The old
me, from my 20’s, determined to make it work, would have pushed and pushed to grow
my company even if it killed me. However, at 39 years of age, after all that I had been
through, I could see that what needed to die was not me, but my ego. I realized that
growing my company was not something that I particularly wanted, but something that I
was doing in order to impress other people. I wanted to be able to say, “Yes, I moved to
São Paulo with nothing and created the best English consulting firm in the city!” (Can you
hear me beating on my chest? Thump, thump).

Instead of putting more energy into our occupation, we started to put less. At around the
same time, Ligia’s father bought us a modest, but interesting apartment with her inheritance.
Together, we would spend our days, between classes, overseeing renovations and buying
upgrades for our new home. We turned one of the bedrooms into a Zen space, with a
futon and hammock, for meditating, reading and just hanging out. We had an artist come
in and paint some interesting designs on our walls and cupboard. It was fun!

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By the end of our fourth year here, freed from any occupational ambitions and enjoying
my new home, I was feeling a deep sense of peace and happiness. I was also meditating
like crazy. It became a sort of experiment for me, where I would often meditate for almost
3 consecutive hours.

One Monday in September, 2006, I was relaxing, watching television during the afternoon.
We had just spent the entire weekend with Felicity and Andrew, and about 30 members of
their “tribe”. It was a wonderful weekend of ceremony, deep connections and interesting
stories.

Lying there on the sofa, I was overcome with a feeling of quiet elation, for no reason in
particular. Recognizing how special it was, I turned off the T.V. and began to meditate.

After about 20 minutes, Ligia came into the apartment. Seeing that I was meditating, she
did not disturb me. A few minutes later, as I was sitting there, eyes closed, I felt a brilliant
flash of light in front of me. “What was this?” I thought. “Some new, deeper level of reality
I’m experiencing?”

I opened my eyes to find Ligia standing in front of me with a camera. She had just taken
my picture.

“Sean, you were in bliss!” She said to me afterwards. That’s my woman.

It took a few years to figure out, but one thing about Ligia is that she always knows how
I’m feeling better than I do. It’s scary.

Along with experiencing moments of occasional bliss, in October I had started to reflect
on something which I found to be rather perplexing. I had noticed in the biographies of
famous and not-so-famous people that many of them had had a very defined idea of what
they wanted to do from a very young age. And yet, despite my best efforts, I could never,
ever remember truly wanting to do anything for an occupation.

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I had studied Economics, Sociology and Religion without having any desire to become
an economist, sociologist or theologian. I almost fell into advertising because I enjoyed
working with ideas. I honestly couldn’t have cared Iess about the ads themselves. Teaching
English, while enjoyable, was primarily a way of paying the bills and hardly what I would
consider a “career”. In fact, the only thing that I was genuinely passionate about was to
understand the nature of God. But what to actually do with my acquired knowledge and
experience of the spiritual realm remained forever elusive.

However, despite this sticking point, I was very aware that the Fall of 2006 was the
happiest period of my entire life – not because I had found a career, but because I had
given up looking for one. Never before had I experienced such peace and satisfaction
with myself, my relationship and the world around me. After 10 years of struggle, I had
finally integrated my life – by giving up.

Based on this new understanding of myself, I decided to start 2007 with a fresh idea.
Almost all of my adult life, I would begin the year with some quite defined objectives of
what I wanted to accomplish, where I would like to be by year’s end. In my 20’s, these
goals were rarely met, as my career stagnated. But after the hospitalization my ability to
visualize my own future became much more powerful. And yet, even with this ability, life
was obviously not without its curves. Even when I achieved my goals, the feeling towards
the experience was often less than satisfactory. I began to intuit that simply having no
goals at all might be a lighter, more interesting way to move through life.

“2007 would be the year without goals.”

However, as I was to soon discover, while I had devised no particular plans for myself,
there would be a mission waiting for me, indeed.

130
Part Three: Déjà Vu

131
Will the Student Appear?

2007 started as positive and relaxed as the previous year had ended. Recognizing that
my level of personal suffering had diminished to almost nothing, I started to wonder if I,
indeed, had become “enlightened” in some way. I began to take a closer look at the issue
of enlightenment itself. To delve deeper into this question, I ordered a bunch of books
from Amazon.com. I was particularly interested in the ideas of Ken Wilber, but was also
studying Hinduism and a few related items.

And while I was content to spend the year studying, there was a slight melancholy
underneath my little Nirvana.

“I wish I could teach what I know,” I remember thinking, back in January, 2007. I mean,
I was sharing my experience with my English students and friends, on occasion, sometimes
leading to rather dramatic changes in their lives. But still, that was on a small scale.

Then, not long after, a new insight soothed my longing.

“We know that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” I said to Ligia.
Looking back on the many “teachers” I had had in my life, I knew this to be true.

“Maybe, when the teacher is ready, the student will appear.”

That idea renewed my faith – that someday, I will find a profession where I am able to
share all that I am. I had no idea just how close I was to doing just that.

About Ana

In April 2007, Ligia and I got a call that would eventually leave us both forever changed.
One of our nieces was having a “crisis” and had been to a psychiatrist with her parents.
As Ligia was conversing with her sister-in-law in Portuguese, I attempted to decipher the
essential information. Over three days I would hear the symptoms…high energy level,
inability to sleep, non-stop talking, taking off her blouse in front of her father, a lot of fear,
etc…it sounded all too familiar.

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“Ligia, I don’t think Ana is having a crisis, I think she’s going through what I had, a Spiritual
Emergency.”

On the following Thursday we got a call from Ligia’s sister. Apparently, Ana had been
completely drugged out of her mind by the psychiatrist. As the story goes, she had
acted very badly in front of him. Realizing what was at risk, we drove to their home the
next day.

On the way up, we had a plan. From my experience, I knew how sensitive Ana would
be and how toxic the fear of her parents would be for her in that situation. It was my
assumption that Ana was very scared because her parents were terrified.

“We’ve got to get the fear out of the house,” I told Ligia.

Upon arrival, we could see that Ana had been heavily drugged. It looked to me as if she
could barely hold a glass. Nevertheless, she was very warm with us, hugging and laughing
with Ligia as soon as we met her. I immediately sat down with Ana’s parents, sharing
with them the details of my hospitalization and how beneficial the whole experience had
been for my life. Ligia went upstairs with Ana to give her love and support, connecting
with her as deeply in possible. In fact, at one point Ligia jumped in the shower with Ana,
completely clothed, just to lighten the mood around what was happening.

“You are not crazy,” Ligia told her. “You are going through something very, very special.”

I told her parents that, if her condition was similar to mine, I thought that Ana could come
out of this situation and return to a life that may be even better than before.

At first I was cautious, especially concerning the level of fear that everyone had said was
present. However, after seeing Ana with Ligia for only a few minutes, it was obvious that
she was already much more at ease. For the first time, she was able to go upstairs in
her own house, without someone being by her side. As time passed, I would see other
symptoms similar to my own: demonstrations of strong affection towards us; a state of
rapture for anything she found to be beautiful; a heightened sense of smell and hearing.

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The next day, we all went to see the psychiatrist in order to get her medication reduced
to a more reasonable level. In the waiting room I watched in amazement as I saw
her smell the flowers as if they were the most beautiful she had ever seen. It all reminded
me so strongly of my own experience, I felt as if I might be slipping into that mystic
space myself.

By then, I had seen enough to be sure that Ana was experiencing the same thing that I did,
and was encouraging her parents to take her off the medication entirely.

“This is not a mental illness,” I told them, “It’s a Spiritual Emergency.”

However, they chose to stick with the psychiatrist and continue with the medication, for
the time being.

Ligia and I stayed with them for the entire weekend. I spoke with her parents for hours about
my experience, the books I’ve read that helped me understand a Spiritual Emergency,
what I think is happening, and what I think they should do. Ligia did her best to work with
Ana, getting her to describe her feelings, express her frustrations with life and integrate
what was happening into her consciousness.

Many of Ana’s frustrations focused on her inability to decide what she wanted to do
in university. Like a lot of people her age, 17, she had endured many changes and
disappointments in her life over the previous three months. She had failed to get into the
school of her choice. Most of her friends had moved away to other schools and her older
sister and cousin had recently left for Europe for extended stays. On top of that, she was
just starting to discover who she was as a person, whereas, before, she had never given
it a second thought. She had simply spent her entire life being the “good daughter,” trying
to fit-in and satisfy everyone else’s expectations of who she was supposed to be.

One night, Ana, Ligia and I all stayed up talking in the kitchen together until about 5:00am.
She was very receptive to everything and, while energetic, very easy to work with.
By Sunday night she had created a collage about how she saw herself now, and who she
wanted to be in the future. We left their house that evening feeling like we had made huge
strides. Indeed, we thought we may have rescued her entirely. I was expecting that her
parents would take her off the medication fairly quickly.

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Later in the week Ana was taken to her psychiatrist and psychologist, both of whom said
that they had never seen a girl recover so fast from her type of crisis.

Two weeks later, we saw the family again. Ana was still being medicated, but there
was something about her, a deeper awareness. Her eyes revealed previously hidden
depths. She told us that she had no regrets over her experience and that she felt she was,
somehow, different, “I don’t care as much about what other people think.”

Her father, however, was more reluctant. “I’m not so sure it’s the same thing,” he said.
“You were 30, she is only 17.” I failed to see how that made a difference, as the symptoms
were all the same. Then he started to defend the psychiatrist and all of his experience,
“She’s better because of the medication,” he told us.

I became exasperated. It was as if he was completely blind to what we had accomplished

a few weeks earlier and deaf to everything I had shared with him. The next day, I put all
of my key thoughts on paper, just to make sure that both parents were clear about where
I stood. After that, it would be in God’s hands.

As the weeks passed, our dreams of ending her medication would fade. All of our work
to convince her parents to let us work with her without the meds was completely ignored.
When her father informed Ligia that Ana would continue to listen to the psychiatrist, they
fought and Ligia cried.

The next time I saw Ana, she was gone again, back to her old, smiling, insecure self. The
argument between her father and Ligia had taken its toll on her.

Fighting Back

Eventually, we heard back from Ana’s parents that the psychiatrist was saying that she
was, most likely, bipolar and that she would need to stay on medication for a minimum of
two years. Ligia was furious and I was very confused. How is it that this condition that
Ana had could look so much like mine and yet be something which required two years of
medication?

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Night after night I found myself scanning the Internet, checking websites, reading blogs,
watching videos, all in the name of understanding what exactly is this thing called “bipolar
disorder.” The more I found out, the more frightened I became. It’s a lifelong illness like
asthma or diabetes. It requires a lifetime of medication. The likelihood of a relapse into
mania, once off medication is around 90%. These medications have often brutal side-
effects. Entire lives, once full of potential, are robbed of vitality forever. Bipolar disorder
ruins lives.

However, when I took a closer look, the vast majority of the symptoms of bipolar mania
looked like the symptoms of a spiritual emergency. To my complete shock, I realized that
many, if not all of these bipolar teenagers and young adults that I was reading about were
having, basically, the same experience that I had ten years earlier!

It was if I could hear alarm bells going off in my brain. These bipolar kids are having
experiences of spiritual awakening, and they are being drugged for life for it!

I began to read more deeply into the work of some radical psychiatrists from the
‘60’s and ‘70’s, R.D. Laing and John Weir Perry, who claimed to be able to heal people
with a more severe form of mental illness, schizophrenia. To my surprise, I discovered
that, on a sensory level, many schizophrenics were having the same set of experiences
which I had had: a sense of one-ness with everything; timelessness; a feeling of being a
god, like Jesus; having a sense that you are on a mission from god; outpourings of love to
almost anyone you feel good with; a confrontation with death; and violent rage when this
experience is controlled or suppressed by parents, doctors or the police.

In other words, on a sensory level, the experience of schizophrenia, bipolar mania or

spiritual emergency could all be the same thing!

The Vomit Theory

So why was I medication free while all of these people with bipolar disorder would continue
to relapse? I eventually reached the tentative hypothesis that bipolar mania is like a kind
of psycho-spiritual vomiting - a process that needs to continue until its completion, or else
it will return again.

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I reached this hypothesis because, as I met more bipolar people online, I realized that in a
typical situation a manic person is confronted by the police or their family, who attempt to
control them through physical force or verbal confrontation. In other words, they attempt
to scare the person into submission. In my case, I never allowed that to happen. Even
when the police threatened to take me to jail, I ignored them. I refused to be manipulated.
As a result, my process (my vomiting) was completed. For the vast majority, their manic
process is blocked and that block is solidified with the medication. When the medication
stops, the mania eventually returns. The manic process will never stop until it is complete.
All of the vomit needs to come out. Since then, my opinion has been modified slightly, but
that was where I stood, at that point in time.

With my research solidifying, I decided to get more aggressive, telling my story through
a series of videos on YouTube. I thought that as long as the psychiatrist was telling Ana
that she had a mental illness, I should be out there screaming the opposite. Not only did
these videos help promote my new-found information; they also got me in touch with many
bipolar people that completely related to my experience. As one girl told me, “Sean, after
hearing your story, I realized that my life could have been different. Thank you.” And by
listening to the stories of people from around the world, I could better prepare myself for
the task ahead.

My plan was simple: keep studying this condition until Ana’s parents realize that the
psychiatrist will, most likely, medicate her for the rest of her life. I was hoping that this
would happen sooner rather than later, as medication side-effects were taking their toll on
her. Then, with that dismal option in front of them, I would propose taking her off of her
medication, but with everyone’s full knowledge that we will, most likely, need to take Ana
through a full manic crisis, once she is medication free.

Meanwhile, as I sifted through my mountains of information, Ligia continued to work with

Ana on a regular basis, encouraging her to open her perspective, not only regarding her
manic episode, but her life, as well. And, while she remained medicated, she began
working towards creating a life that better reflected who she was as a person. This process
included regular therapy sessions and yoga, along with making some very courageous
decisions regarding her education. Rather that strive for the business degree that she had
been groomed to pursue, she opted for a degree in nutrition, which reflected a personal
passion of hers.

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Eliana Returns

In July 2007, Ana’s sister, Eliana, returned from a six-month university exchange in Paris.
She had arrived back in São Paulo aware of her sister’s condition and hoping to help in
any way she could. After being here for a week, the two of them spent the night at our
apartment, sleeping over. She was very excited from her journey, happy to be home and
was returning to university that very week. Eliana showed us the photos of her journey
abroad, telling us stories of her adventures. It was a great night. For the rest of the week,
the two of them slept at Eliana’s apartment in São Paulo, as Ana explored education
options here in the city for the next semester.

A few nights later, Ligia got a phone call from Eliana. After hanging up, Ligia says to me,
“Sean, Eliana is all over the place. We’ve got to get over there.” I couldn’t believe what
I was hearing.

“Could Eliana be having a manic crisis too? Exactly what soap opera am I living in?”

When we arrived at the apartment, Eliana seemed agitated, but OK. She desperately
wanted to share thoughts and feelings with Ligia that Ana seemed to think were confusing.
I sat there undisturbed, as the two of them went back and forth in Portuguese, speaking
too fast for me to understand everything. She seemed a little excited, but nothing too
serious. Then she took us into her bedroom. There, written across her wall in large
lipstick printing, was a poem in Portuguese,

“What is the World?

The world cannot save itself, because it does not believe in itself.
How can we love and be free at the same time?”

“I wrote it down because it was important,” Eliana told us.

“I was crazy, but I never wrote on walls!” said Ana.

As the evening progressed Eliana shared with us many new ideas, but she was having
trouble expressing them clearly. However, I immediately understood where she was at.
She was in an enlightened state.

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“What is your experience of time?” I asked her.
“There is no time!” she said with a wide grin.

“It’s this power, and with this power, you could control the world,” she said.
“What is the power?” I asked.
“You can just read people. It’s all there!”
I fondly recalled that power myself.

“This is going to happen to everybody,” she said.

“Why?” asked Ligia.
“Because we are already enlightened, we just don’t know it,” I answered.
“Yes! Yes!” Eliana shouted in excitement. She loved it when we could identify with her
newfound insights.

At one point, I put a blanket over her shoulders as the three of us listened to her crazy
wisdom. Whether she was making sense or not, was irrelevant. The point was that we
were all there for her, all listening, without judgment.

“Eliana, you are a real Buddha,” I said. And she was, for the time being.

Eliana was relieved to be able to share her thoughts with us, and laid down, to relax when
I left. However, with Ligia there, she was awake until 6:00am. At her request, we did not
call her parents to let them know what was going on.

Ligia stayed with the girls, working with Eliana, but during the next day, a tension started
to build in the cramped apartment and Ligia came home. Eliana was reluctant to take our
advice about staying in her apartment, insisting that she go to some parties. As she was
with her sister, we let it be. She was happy and seemed to be functioning adequately.
However, as Ligia drove home, she felt her heart in her hands, leaving them alone to take
care of themselves.

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Round 1

Friday night, Ligia and I were watching television and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. “We
didn’t protect her enough,” I thought. “She’s out there, in São Paulo, in a state of mania.
Anything could happen.” I was getting more worried by the minute.

At 12:30 am, we got the call, “I’m at a party, and I’m scared.”

Ligia and I got dressed and rushed over to pick her up as fast as we could.

“They’ll have to run the ambulance right over me before she gets sent to the hospital,” I told
Ligia. I wasn’t going to lose Eliana like I lost Ana. As Ligia drove through that infuriating
maze known as São Paulo, I kept talking to her on the cell phone.

“How did you do it Sean? How did you handle the fear?” she asked.
“You stay with people you love,” I replied.

Upon entering the apartment complex, I shot straight up the stairwell to the second floor
to find her alone in the dark, slumped over on the stairs, barefoot. Her cell phone, still
activated, was now on the floor. The moment the lights automatically turned on, she
awoke, stood up to move towards me and then collapsed again in my arms after a split
second. I envisioned light-energy radiating out of my heart and into hers, so that she
could regain consciousness. Ligia hugged her from the back. It seemed to work. After
about a minute, she was back with us, barely.

We took her down to the car. Once on the street, Ligia said, “I’ve got to go back and get
her shoes and purse.” “Forget it!” I told her. “There will be time for that later.”

Coming back to our apartment, she again collapsed in the elevator, this time on Ligia’s
shoulder. I needed to pick her up again, this time, with my arms wrapped around her
waste, literally carrying her through the door. Snapping back into her body, she screamed,
in joyful hysteria, “I want to fly! I want to fly! I want to fly!” in her native Portuguese.

“She’s a wild one!” I joked with Ligia. As serious as it was, we never lost our sense of
humor regarding the absolute insanity of the situation.

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Once inside, we immediately laid her down on our futon, situated in the “Zen-Bahia” space
of our apartment; a place we use for relaxation and meditation. It’s also our office.

“This is the shamanic process….enter the process….enter the shamanic process…”

I whispered in Eliana’s ear.

Within minutes she was shouting, “You were right! You were right!” rolling on the futon
and then to the floor. We immediately took the office chair, pottery and anything else that
she might be injured by out of the room. Ligia brought in some candles to the area, to
emphasize the sacredness of the experience.

As Ligia stayed with her she began to take off all of her clothes, shouting “Without shame!
No more shame,” repeatedly. Again, memories of my own experience returned. While
Ligia and I both couldn’t help but smile, we let it all happen, as we believed it should.
remained respectful, staying out of the room. In fact, I went to get a synthetic fur blanket
to cover her, as she rolled about. Forcing her to get dressed was out of the question.

When I returned, she was now moving around the room on her feet, saying she wanted to
fly. And, fulfilling my deepest fears, she started to move towards our glass balcony doors.
She was trying to fly out of our 13th floor apartment.

“Sky! Sky!” she repeated again and again.

Seeing that Ligia was too small to handle the situation, I came into the room and stood,
stoic in front of the window. Eliana’s torso bounced into my arm once, and I think her
foot banged into our computer desk as well. After that, she laid down again on the futon.
I covered her with the blanket and then left her and Ligia in peace for a few minutes.
Eliana was having a full blown, out-of-body experience; something far deeper than what I
had gone through.

Watching from a short distance away, I saw her start to move and breathe in familiar
patterns; deep, rapid breaths that lead her into the deepest caverns of her psyche. Then,
with the blanket on top of her, she started to make gyrations with her hips and legs, as
if she was either having sex or giving birth. I remembered having similar feelings during
Breathwork sessions with Dr. Stan Grof (actually feeling like I was giving birth) years
earlier, so I knew that she was going through some important work. Later, Eliana would
explain that she was experiencing her own birth; that she felt as if she were in the womb.

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“Am I going to be in here for nine months?” was one of her passing thoughts.

Then the contractions started. With Ligia`s support, she began to tightly contract her
abdomen as if a baby was arriving. After about 5 long minutes of contractions, I entered
the room to see if Ligia needed anything. When I moved towards them, Eliana asked for
my hand and, reaching over, began to kiss it, apparently out of gratitude for me being the
one who could allow her to enter such a blissful state. She was in absolute ecstasy.

Ligia and Eliana slept in our bed that night while I slept on the futon. At some point during
the night, she fell off the bed on the way to the bathroom and hurt her foot. However, in
the state she was in, she felt no pain. As with most people in a bipolar manic episode,
she didn’t get much sleep, nor did she need to. We went to bed at 6am and were up by
about 10:30am.

Worried that Ana was alone in their São Paulo apartment, I went to pick her up. When
we got back an hour later, Eliana was laying on the sofa with Ligia. During the day, Ligia,
Ana and I took turns staying in physical contact with Eliana. As she laid there in an altered
state, I would touch her back or her shoulder, as I remembered how much I needed a
loving touch during my own experience. I can’t imagine how disturbing it is to be one of
the thousands of people out there who are locked up in isolation during an episode. Later,
I was simply holding her left hand, maintaining a sacred state of mind. We would have
sparse, but warm conversations.

At one point, she looked at me and said, “I need you.”

“I need you too…. We need each other,” I replied.
Then she turned on her stomach and looked me straight in the eyes.
“I believe in you,” she said to me.
“I believe in you,” she said again.

Nobody had ever spoken to me like that, with such openness and honesty; nothing to fear,
nothing to hide…no ego at all…just a pure spirit expressing her feelings.

“I believe in you too,” I said. I kissed her on the forehead. She was a saint to me.

Her moods shifted during the day. At one point, she began to cry a lot, so much so that
she politely asked us all to leave the room. Later, when we were up talking, she asked me
if I believed in reincarnation. Apparently, death was on her mind.

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Meals were rather interesting as I watched my once refined niece eat fried eggs with her
bare hands. Upon finishing her meal, she was so exhausted; I needed to carry her back
to bed.

Ligia also provided crayons for Eliana to express herself.

“I’m free now,” she told us, as she filled the page with the simple image of blue seagulls
over open water.

Back on the sofa, Eliana began to “fly” again. I was surprised, as I thought she was
coming out of her altered states. It seemed she had more work to do. This time, however,
she started moving around. First she slid onto the floor. Then, as I helped her back onto
the sofa, she began to climb up the back of it. I got nervous.

“What was she doing?”

She began to move away from me, as if trying to escape. I got up off the sofa, losing
touch-contact with her for the first time. Calmly moving in her direction, I came around the
side and saw that our black leather cube was blocking the distance between her and I.

“Fuck.”

Somewhere between moving around the cube and getting to her, she tried to jump over
me and right out the closed glass balcony door. Fortunately, she landed in my arms,
letting out a primal scream along the way.

I don’t remember that split second of my life. I have no mental image of her actually
jumping.

For the first time, I was rattled. We all were.

“Well, I didn’t see that coming,” I told Ligia, as I carried Eliana back to the sofa.

Lying down again, Eliana began to examine her arms. Unbeknownst to me, three days
earlier, she had bruised them by trying to walk through a wall after her yoga class. “Where
did these bruises come from?” she asked, in a worrying tone. She felt the pain in her foot,
from when she had fallen out of bed the night before. “And how did I hurt my foot?” She
also noticed her bruised rib, probably from her jump.

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“I don’t remember how these things happened, and I haven’t felt any pain until now,”
she said.

Her bliss was over. Now she was afraid.

“Look, I know you are trying to help me, but….I was not prepared for this.”
“Nobody is going to believe this.”

She had that right.

Recognizing her fear, but not knowing if she was in an altered state or not, Ligia tried to
bring her back to reality.

“OK, then lets bring you back…You are here! This is real!” she barked, banging on the
dining room table.

“Is this a hospital?” Eliana asked, staring ominously at our white walls.
“No, this is our apartment and you are OK.”

“Am I dying?”
“In a way, but you will be OK.”

“Was I selling drugs in Europe?”

“No.”
We tried to answer her questions as best we could, and tried to alleviate her fears, but it
was of little use. Exhausted, I finally asked her, “What are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of you.”

At that point, I knew it was my time to step away. Eliana had associated me so completely
with the other level of reality that, while she was there, in bliss, I was her hero. Now that
she was afraid, I was, somehow to blame. At least that’s what I thought was happening.
Ligia took control of things for the rest of the night, while I got some rest.

Later that night, four days into the episode, Ligia contacted Eliana’s mother, Maria, for the
first time. On the phone with her mother, I overheard Eliana say, “No, Sean’s not here.
He’s afraid of me.”

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Even though I knew her feelings towards me would change again, it still hurt. I went to
bed feeling somewhat defeated. I prayed that night, “God, Ligia and I are wiped out.
Please help Eliana get some sleep and come back to reality. I think she’s done.”

Unable to sleep, I moved to the sofa in front of the futon, where Eliana slept with her
sister. I did so because I was scared to death that Eliana would make another move
for the balcony. Every noise I heard that night sounded like the balcony door opening.
Eventually, around 5:30am, I fell asleep. The girls slept through the whole night.

In the morning, Ligia jumped in bed with the girls, for a friendly wake up call. I could hear
them laughing. I came in, snuck up to Eliana’s face to take a peek. She broke out in a
big laugh. She was back!

The Eliana that returned was sane, but not entirely the girl we knew. A little angry and very
sensitive, she wanted to be left alone. She was suffering for reasons we weren’t entirely
sure of. Later that day, we dropped her off with Ana at her parent’s house.

Sitting down with Maria, I tried to explain to her what needed to take place.
“Patience, patience…She’s OK, she just needs some time,” I asked.
But I knew what was going to happen. Out of fear, her parents were about to do the exact
opposite of what needed to happen in order to help their daughter.

“I know you don’t believe me,” I told Maria.

She held my hand compassionately, “I believe that it’s your interpretation.”
“My interpretation… my interpretation…,” I murmured to myself in frustration.
“10 years…10 years…of trying to explain myself and still nobody gets it! It doesn’t matter
what I say or do, nobody understands!” I thought.

By this point, Eliana was eager to see us go. With our nerves frayed to the edges, even
Ligia and I started to get short with each other. It was not the Hollywood ending that I was
hoping for.

However, as we drove home, I felt certain that, if we had to do everything all over again,
I wouldn’t change a thing. We gave Eliana our entire being for five days. I think that’s all
anyone could ask for.

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The next day, Ligia dealt with the stress of the weekend by heading straight back to her
English classes, as they helped her forget the chaos we had just been through. She also
went to the park to cleanse herself with her own rituals.

As for me, I cancelled my entire schedule and stayed in bed the whole day. The experience
was just too overwhelming. On the one hand, I wasn’t sure if Eliana would be able to
survive the amount of bullshit that was about to come her way. I was scared for her. But on
the other, I knew that Ligia and I had just done something remarkable, taking a completely
unprepared person through a manic experience without doctors or hospitalization.
As dangerous as it had been, I was very proud of all of us, especially Eliana.

The experience also gave meaning to everything that I had been through; everything
you have already read. After all of those years of searching, here was an event that
honestly felt like the shamanic work I had been looking for since I was hospitalized. For
the only time in my life, I had this voice speaking to me, saying, “This is who I am, this is
what I do.”

This was the work of a true shaman.

Round 2

Eliana’s first few weeks at home were terrible. She was fighting with her parents, who,
as I expected, were doing everything normal parents do, not realizing that they were only
making things worse for her. In the first week, they took her to two local psychologists and
her sister’s psychiatrist, all against our recommendations. We had asked for patience.
Instead, they hit the panic button.

However, because of the work we had done with Eliana, the psychiatrist was unable to
detect any manic symptoms and let her walk away, medication free. I couldn’t believe it.
Apparently, she was smart enough to keep her mouth shut in front of the doctor.

“You’re controlling me, your controlling me!” seemed to be her mantra while at home
during these weeks. Apparently, Eliana felt controlled by her parents at even the slightest
suggestion from them.

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Finding living with her parents to be too confrontational, she chose to stay at her apartment
in São Paulo as much as her parents would allow. Maria usually insisted on staying with
her most nights, as even she realized that the tension between Eliana and her father was
too much for the family to bear.

Over the next month, Eliana would, basically, ignore any advice from us - to go slow, relax.
While she was nice and had lunch with us, she was a little uncomfortable talking about
what had happened. Although she could see the value of her experience and was grateful
that she was not medicated, she was doing little to integrate the experience into her daily
life other than by seeing her new therapist, an experienced transpersonal psychologist
who Ligia had sought out and wisely recommended.

Then, a few days after meeting us for lunch, Eliana had a relapse. She had been studying
too much and was unable to sleep for three days. Together with the construction noise
and the typical chaos of São Paulo, it all became too much for her and she entered a
state of confusion. She called her mother, just to be comforted and reassured, but, by
this point, Maria wasn’t risking anything. Despite her insistence that she was “fine”, her
parents drove down, from their city of Itu to pick her up. Once in the hands of her parents,
however, she was on the phone to us as soon as she could.

“They are forcing me to take drugs,” she told me over the phone.
They had, once again, dragged her to the psychiatrist. I again felt defeated.
“I’m sorry Eliana,” I said.
“It’s OK,” she replied.

“You’re killing me, you know that,” she told her parents. “Is that what you want?”
In the end, she agreed to take the medication for 10 days.

To my surprise, a week later, her mother, Maria, came to our apartment. She was frustrated
and looking for help. It seemed that all of Ligia’s efforts and my conversations with her
were finally paying off. As it turns out, Maria had been reading much of the material that
Ligia had been providing her in Portuguese. And while, none of it convinced Maria with
total certainty that Eliana did not have a chemical imbalance, it did open her eyes to
different perspectives. In these books, she was quickly introduced to theories of mental
illness brought forth not only by Dr. Stan Grof, but also by Dr. Roberto Assagioli, Dr. Carl
Jung, Ken Wilber and others. Maria contrasted this mix of somewhat optimistic opinions
with the dreaded, arrogant certainty of their psychiatrist and realized that, perhaps, there
was something to what we had been telling her.

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“Eliana is not integrating; not dealing with her experience,” she told us. As Eliana was
coming off the medication the following day, Maria didn’t know what to do.

I was quick to offer a suggestion. Going back to my “vomit theory” I said, “Well, the first
time with us, Elaina got a lot out, but obviously, she had more to go. Then, the second
relapse was obviously blocked by you guys and the medications, correct?”

Maria nodded in agreement.

“If she is coming off the meds tomorrow, I think it is highly likely that she will relapse within
two weeks, to get it all out – whuah!” I said, imitating vomit noises.

“On that one, when it happens, call us, and we will work her through it, together.”

Maria was open and listening, but deep down, she didn’t really want to hear it. The idea
of a third episode was not something that she looked forward to, nor did Eliana. But, deep
down, I wanted it. I wanted to see us all work together, both sides of the family. I wanted
to see Eliana heal, as I knew she could. And, selfishly, I wanted to spend a few more
hours with that pure, unshackled spirit, if only for one last time.

Before she left our apartment, I said to Maria, “I just want to thank you for considering our
opinions. I know our ideas are very different for you.”

Her reply pleasantly surprised me, “Well Sean, to be honest, your ideas simply offer a
more hopeful perspective than what the doctors are saying.”

That’s when it hit me. For parents, it’s not about my experience, my education on the
subject, or the soundness of the theory. It’s not that at all. It’s about results. They
want their daughter back, and if they need to go to a Mongolian shaman or a German
neurosurgeon, that is exactly what they will do.

As Maria left our apartment I had a vision in my mind of the Earth’s tectonic plates shifting
dramatically. After enduring months of frustration, fighting against the mainstream opinions
and quick-fix solutions of psychiatry, the game had suddenly turned in our favor.

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Round 3

Two weeks later, Eliana began her third episode, right on schedule. As her energy level
rose, Ligia would stay with Maria and Eliana in her apartment. Again, she was not sleeping.
Then, on a Wednesday, she went into a rebirthing process right in her therapist’s office.
Ligia called me, and the four of us, Eliana, Maria, Ligia and I, slept at the therapist’s clinic
over-night (only in Brazil!).

“Do you want to come over?” Eliana asked, over the phone. She sounded like she was
inviting me to a party. “I see elephants!”

When I arrived, around midnight, Eliana looked weary, but positively radiant. I said little,
but she was glad to see me. She was playful, saying things that seemed only half crazy.
Apparently, she had been keeping herself occupied by repainting the psychologist’s wall
art with over-ripe bananas. And she was, in fact, seeing elephants, as the clinic was
decorated with images of the Hindu god, Ganesh and other pachyderms.

At one point, I brought a box of matches into the room to light some candles for one last,
sacred evening together. Surprising me, Eliana snatched the box of matches from my
hand, lit one and held it up in front of her face. Looking back, I can see how, rationally, the
right thing to do would have been to blow out that match, as she was sitting across from
me on the floor. It would have been easy. And it would have been a mistake.

I was not sitting across from a young woman now. I was sitting across from a jaguar.
A jaguar that was testing me, and any sign of fear could have meant a serious problem.
I got up off the floor, onto my hands and knees, moving my nose within inches of the
match. Through the flame, I calmly stared into her eyes, letting her know that I was ready
for anything – one jaguar to another. And with that, she blew out the match, sending the
light sulfur smoke into my face.
 
As we all prepared to go to sleep that night, Eliana reached out for me to hold her hand.
I laid down beside her and she turned, so that we would have been spooning if we had
been in bodily contact.  I held her hand with my right, and had my left hand on her left
shoulder. After helping Maria get settled, Ligia came into the room and put a blanket over
the both of us. I would stay awake with her like that almost the entire night, protecting her
and sending her love. Despite trying to get some sleep, Ligia would lay across from us,
awake, the entire night.

149
As dawn approached, I fell asleep and Ligia moved Eliana into another room because
I was snoring (getting old, I guess). She slept like a rock until about noon. As for me,
went to work before she woke up.
 
Ligia walked me out to our car, as I left the clinic to head for my class.
“Do you think she’ll have another relapse?” she asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Tonight was perfect… Both sides of the family working together… The right location… Her
experience was totally unblocked. There was an art to the whole thing. It was perfect.”

Ligia and I had a warm hug on the curb and talked to each other with the same mutual
admiration and vitality that has carried us through our 8-year marriage.

To no one’s surprise Eliana came back to this reality very sensitive, weak and tired. For
the first week or so she would remain frustrated at her inability to concentrate on reading,
studying, etc… However, as she got used to her new Self, she was able to return to
university, completing her semester, passing all of her exams, totally unmedicated – a
remarkable achievement.

Meeting her for lunch on a few occasions before the Christmas holidays we would talk
about some of the details of her experience. She seemed to be able to look back on the
whole thing with honest, objective eyes.

“Do you think you might have a relapse?” I asked her.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “After the first two episodes, I was sort of in denial; acting like
I was fine and everything is OK. But then during the third one it was like… I give up.”

“Ahhhh, the surrender!” I said, very happy with her answer.

As we continued our conversations, I provided a few helpful hints for the future.

“Pay attention to your dreams,” I said.

“They can help you understand yourself and what you need to do.”

“And watch for the synchronicities. If you find yourself in a surprising situation, pay
attention, there could be meaning in it for you.” It was something like that.

150
As an example of paying attention to dreams, I told her about the dream I had with
Charles Lindbergh’s, plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, which I mentioned at the beginning of
the book.

The next day, I met Eliana again at Ana’s birthday party in Itu. We had dinner together
with the whole family.

“Guess who my history professor was talking about in class this morning?” she asked,
rhetorically. “Charles Lindberg!”

“I love that!” I told her. “It let’s me know I’m in the Zone!”

While the exam period was understandably stressful for her, by the holidays she was
positively mellow. Even her younger cousin noticed the difference, aptly nicknaming her
“Li-Zen.”

Looking at her now, I see myself 10 years ago – calmer; more open, receptive and
passionate; knowing eyes, faith in life, a quiet mind.

I can’t wait to see her when she’s 30.

Back to Ana

I wish I could end my story by telling you that, based on our success with Eliana, we were
able to take Ana off her meds as well. In fact, without informing anyone, Ana stopped her
medication just before her 18th birthday, close to Christmas of 2007. This decision would
prove to be her undoing. Despite being perturbed by her decision to act without talking
to us first, we were supportive of her decision. Besides, after months of therapy, yoga,
and volunteer work, we thought there was a good possibility that she may not relapse.
Personally, I thought her chances of success were 50/50.

The timing of her relapse could not have been worse. It happened while I was in Canada
for the Christmas holidays and, unlike her first episode, she came back violent and
uncooperative, even with Ligia. Despite showing undying patience with her, Ana needed
to be hospitalized after being in a manic state for nine days.

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Ironically, if Ana had been violent the first time, I probably would have never
gotten involved with her situation and this book never would have been written.
According to Dr. Stan Grof, violent and uncooperative behavior is indicative
of mental illness, not spiritual emergency.1 So what changed?

I can only think that the medications have had a detrimental effect. While
I have yet to find research connecting her medication, Depakote, to violence,
other medications, such as neuropleptics2, Lithium3 and anti-depressants4
have been; especially if the person withdrawals from them too quickly.

Nevertheless, I remain optimistic.

About a month out of the hospital, Ana called Ligia to share a story. Apparently, she
was getting a massage to help her relax after her recent relapse. Lying on the table
in the therapist’s clinic, she had a hallucination. She saw a giant conch shell floating
in the corner. Later, the shell moved to in front of Ana’s heart. After her massage, she
told the masseuse what she was seeing. To her surprise, the masseuse had a statue of
Yemanjá, the Brazilian Saint of the Sea, in her clinic. The therapist was a worshipper of
this particular saint.

“Ahhh, she´s still out there!” I told Ligia. “Don’t worry. We’ll get her sooner than you
think!’

And there is no doubt in my mind that we will.

But I’ll have to save that story for another book.

152
 Epilogue

Over 10 years ago, I first wrote down the events surrounding my hospitalization and sent
them to that “jealous” transpersonal psychologist I told you about. In that document,
I wrote the following concluding comments:

On our tour of Peru, the leader and founder of the tour company, Dr. Alberto
Villoldo, spoke of how the shaman lives in the world of percept, as opposed
to precept. Of any shamanic practices, the one that I have come closest to
mastering is this. After returning to Toronto, I was, again, unsure if I wanted
to “engrave in stone” my memories of what happened during my spiritual
emergency of the previous year. I can see quite clearly that I have a choice as
to how I wish to remember the experience.

Do I choose to remember myself as a victim of a weekend program that refuses

to take responsibility for their course members if they begin to act abnormally?
Do I choose to recall incompetent psychiatrists who seek to control rather
than heal patients? Do I choose to remember myself as a person that really
embarrassed himself and acted like a total idiot in a downtown hotel? Or do
I choose to see everyone, including myself, doing the best they can, given the
circumstances? Do I choose to accept a once in a lifetime gift that is beyond
my comprehension?

And how will this past effect my future?

Will I allow it to be a dark secret in my life that I dare not share with co-workers,
for fear of them thinking me to be a flake? Do I push the experience down, put
it behind me, and try to piece together that ever elusive, monotonous, “normal”
life we are supposed to aspire to? Or do I celebrate the episode as a divine
rebirth, the hell with what the masses say?

The choice is mine. I am in charge of how I interpret my reality. I am in charge

of how I will help create my future.

153
 I choose to believe that the entire sequence of events described here was
a crucial part of a destiny that I can feel inside of me, but still cannot
clearly see or name.

Be it “fantasy” or “reality”, I know in my heart that I looked death in the face and
embraced it in a spirit of divine surrender. Nobody can take that away from me.
My life has never been the same since.

Fast-forwarding now to the present, it is much clearer to me how naturally and deliberately
the events of my life have unfolded. In the past, I have often felt as if I were a blind mouse,
navigating the maze of life solely on intuition. There were many times when I never new
why I needed to do something, or go somewhere. I just knew I had to.

In retrospect, it is easy for me to trace how the prophetic dreams, synchronicities, visionary
experiences and “gut feelings” that I have shared with you here have been the pivotal events
of what has been a rich and deeply satisfying journey. “Destroying my life” in advertising,
while slow and painful, was the most important decision I ever made. Discovering the role
I have to play as a “shamanic guide” and advocate to a whole bipolar generation has been
a startling revelation. As for becoming writer, let’s just say that the experience of sharing
my life with you has already been a reward, in and of itself.

Guiding Eliana through her process was the single most important experience of my life;
for the first time shedding light on the intense, winding path I have been asked to follow.
For two decades I wondered why it was so difficult for me to find a satisfying career. It was
only with this experience that I could clearly understand. Finally, here was something of
tangible benefit to others, the spiritual rebirth of a member of my own Brazilian family.

For what it’s worth, those curiosities I had about my own personal enlightenment faded
considerably during our year with Ana and Eliana. The stress those experiences put us
under made it very clear that any level of spiritual progress I had attained was clearly a
form of enlightenment with a small ‘e’. Besides, who wants to bask in an ocean of bliss
when there is so much work to be done? Diagnosis of bipolar disorder rose 4000%
between 1994 and 20031, with almost all of those people, most of whom are under 21,
being told that they will require medication for their entire lives. If given the choice, I’d
much rather help this “bipolar generation” through their trials than retire to a problem-free
life of “bliss.” I can’t, in good conscience, meditate my life away while I know there are
people locked to hospital beds that need my help.

154
In a sense, our work with Ana and Eliana has confirmed my deepest suspicions about
myself. I probably won’t be around to see the “Heaven on Earth” that felt so close during
my own episode; but that’s fine because, deep down, I don’t feel that I was born for a truly
blissful life. To me, it’s this new generation of saints-in-the-making that will be the true
Bringers of the Dawn.

No, my job is to do battle. To “pave the road” so the purer, more sensitive souls can survive
their awakenings. I find myself in an ideal situation for helping people from all around the
world learn to take back and validate what once had the potential to be the most sacred
experience of their lives; one that our entire society has violently stripped away from them
out of fear and ignorance.

The biggest part of that “paving” process is to simply raise awareness of the spiritually
healing potential of bipolar disorder, a huge part of which involves my YouTube channel,
bipolarORwakingUP.

While the amount of views my videos have received pales in comparison to that cat playing
piano, the lives I’ve touched, not only with my story, but with my theory videos as well,
are among the very first baby-steps towards our entire world looking at bipolar disorder
in a revolutionary, new way. Receiving e-mails and comments from people in Australia,
Bulgaria, France, India, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay, etc., it certainly seems that the
whole world is waking up. Apparently, I’ve found those students I was looking for!

Everyday I get correspondence from around the world regarding my videos. Some people
are looking for help; others just want to thank me. A few of them hate my guts! Even after
almost a year, I still get a kick out of someone sending me a great message. To know that,
in some small way, I’m helping them validate, accept and give value to their experiences
means more to me than anything I ever did in advertising, there is no doubt about that.
Like I tell Ligia, “YouTube is the best job I ever had, even though the pay sucks!”

Along with the videos, we are also “walking our talk”, helping a few brave pioneers out
there come through their psychoses without meds, psychiatrists or hospitalization. As
Ligia and I gain more experience, we are improving our approach to this process, trying to
create a safe and sacred atmosphere which will permit the person in crisis to work through
their spiritual awakening unencumbered. It’s safe to say we won’t be working in our 13th
floor apartment again!

155
With that said, I am fully aware of the challenges which confront our work. The very idea
of bipolar disorder being a natural mechanism which is intended to heal through a form of
spiritual awakening is, well, heretical, to say the least. Our work is a serious challenge not
only to psychiatry, but also to mainstream, “Freudian” psychology which views all forms of
direct spiritual experience as a sign of pathology.

The very idea of God being a factual entity which can be experienced directly by anyone
through what has been commonly referred to as a “manic episode” calls into question the
fundamental tenets of both modern science and its historical rival, religion. If the material
world is not as “real” as we first imagined, but actually the offspring of a deeper spiritual
reality, where does that leave science? If God already exists in the hearts of all mankind,
expressing His Divinity as an experience of perfect, Unconditional Love, how can any
religion claim to be the one true faith? One of the joys of being in touch with people from
around the world has been to verify that this Divine encounter has been experienced by
Christians of many denominations, Muslims, those who follow Buddhist practices and
even atheists. Of course, there are no atheists afterwards!

The corporate world will not exactly be thrilled with our new approach to mental illness
either. How long will any of us stay chained to our cubicles after we have been blessed by
the arrival of the Great Awakening? Let’s face it, enlightenment is bad for business. And
anyone who thinks that Big Pharma and psychiatry will be thrilled with the “discovery” that
bipolar disorder is best treated without doctors or medication is painfully naïve.

However, as time passes and people start talking, I’m sure that thousands, if not millions
will start to come through their manic experiences feeling reborn, as Eliana, myself, and
countless others already have. Once it becomes common knowledge that bipolar disorder
does not necessarily lead to a life of “death or insanity”, we’re in a whole new ballgame.

As it turns out, God had a plan after all.

156
 Touched Souls

Emails and comments from around the world:

Chicago:
Your video is amazing. It is totally and completely on point. I KNEW someone would
eventually be smart enough to figure this out. I’ve been fighting doctors and parents for six
years. I believe that we are on the verge of something great.  I remember the exact day of
my awakening.  It was 2/2/2002, when I was 22 years old.  I remember the date because
I wrote it in my bible.  I had was I call the Christian Revelation.  It came after a near death
experience.  I accepted that I ‘might’ die and decided I would live the ‘perfect’ life.  Soon
after, I became stricken with my first manic episode.  That particular night I made a bond
with God that I would trust Him.  Then I felt unusually happy, I remember laughing for no
reason.  Then I felt I would go read the Bible and turn to random verse and trust and let it
guide me.  It guided me to Jeremiah and the words said something along the lines of “your
words are my words, let me speak for you...” and I felt an extreme since of what I learn
now to be synchronicity.  I felt like the words were speaking directly to me.  After that night
I woke up with an extreme mania, I wrote the date down in the Bible.
 
I didn’t tell anyone what happened but I KNEW it was something spiritual. It began to lead
me, and I became hyper aware of everything.  I began to see all things as one, and there
were levels of overwhelment, and it seemed to be calculated.  Nothing seemed ‘random’,
it seemed like on big moving organism, all of life.  And I experienced all this during my first
episode.  People started noticing a change after about 3 or 4 days.  This is when I decided
to start telling people about what was going on.  That’s when it all went downhill.
 
I was placed in a hospital, but even while in there the episode continued.  When I got out,
nothing had changed.  I began to feel like I had ‘visitors’.
 
Actually, my story is pretty long, I’m going to shorten it up and if you want me to go deep
later I will. 

157
Now it’s been six years, and I’ve had to battle with myself and my reality.  Some really,
really amazing things have happened, and I’d like to share that with you.  I realized early
that the symptoms matched Kundalini awakening, but it seemed that it was only the
beginning.  It became very destructive after a while, and my reality became extremely
distorted by visions, and I believe there were different beings speaking to me; beings that
were extremely intelligent.  They spoke through every medium you can think of, but then I
realized that there were an extreme multitude of beings.  It was all very disturbing to me,
because I am normally a pretty rational young guy.  I knew that it was completely crazy
but it seemed to be making a lot of sense.  I was lead to find and extraordinary amount of
information that goes along with what I’ve been experiencing. I felt God came into my life
to judge me, and fix what was wrong.  It’s strange but I’d felt that the devil was right there
along with him.  This is because this sprouted out of the Christian faith. 

It soon engulfed all religions and manifested everywhere.  This is when I began to feel
extreme oneness with everything.  Next, I began to feel like I light being.. like I was
manipulating the force that holds us in place, and I would merge with all the atoms around... 
I felt like I was in a sea of atoms and I could expand as I saw fit, but at the same time I was
living right here in reality walking the street.  My behavior seeming perfectly in alignment
with what was going on.  And I saw other people as ‘light’ beings, but their lights were
off.  It was all too strange.  This was after my first few episodes.  I learned how to keep
my episodes ‘under the radar’, and I studied the changes in my consciousness and found
many things remaining consistent.
 
I was difficult at first because the consciousness would come and go.  It was very tough
when it left, but I always felt it was something I was doing wrong to make it leave.  Maybe
I tried to grasp it all too fast, or my ego and pride got in the way and I would do something
stupid, or I would not be able to handle it. 
 
After three years the episodes got more and more intense, I began seeing a shift in the
way things are... I awakened to mania one day and saw everything.. but on a higher scale. 
Every word, movement, and action in the universe.  It was completely overwhelming, there
seemed to be a complete order in it all.  This is when I began to feel Iike I was possessed
by something.  I felt there was no way I should be able to see all that. 

158
I wish I could tell the complete story.  But now here are my beliefs.  Throughout history
and ancient text these times are spoken about, people will begin to awaken.  The Mayan
calendar ends in 2012, the Universe itself is changing... there are many cosmic changes
taking place. They say a shift in thinking will occur, and the existence of a greater intelligence
will be realized.  These are the changes I feel inside, and I had to lose my ego in order to
control my manic episodes.  When a person becomes enlightened they tap into that astral
light.  I tapped into it by accident and a lot of different things manifested, including what I
call Christ and his opposite the Devil.  But I found that all of these personalities are part
of this great multitude.  From there I went to Nephalim, fallen angels, Egyptian gods and
goddesses.... and once I even thought I was experiencing the ‘universal form’.  I know I
sound all over the place, but that’s how it went down. 
 
I’m still pretty afraid to speak about all I went through, only because I fear being
misunderstood.  But I definitely feel like it is 4th Density thinking.  It is when time as
we know it (3rd density thought).  The funny thing is, I know this sounds like crazy talk,
but I’m here to say it’s true.  It’s very difficult to define though.  Most people who have
manic episodes aren’t informed enough.  This is why a person would sound ‘scattered’,
because their words have so much more meaning.  They are not speaking in linear terms. 
Thoughts vibrate at a higher level.  The words “I AM” take on a different meaning.  It is like
being part of a collective consciousness.  This can cause paranoia....  It is “Enlightenment
in the Western World”. 
 
Most of us are Martyrs....

Holland:
I dare say that if I would have had your channel right after my first manic experience 4
years ago, I would have been saved a lot of trouble. It’s true; psychs and family don’t want
to listen to mystical experiences. It’s so important to know those are normal in a mania or
psychosis. And that it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Rather, the beginning of a
lighter (enlightened) life. I’ve become extremely disappointed in psychiatry. You gave me
an alternative way to see it. Thanks!

159
Seattle:
I watched your video today on YouTube. There was a link on the integralinstitute.
org website. I am maybe just one more person who has contacted you to say
that my experiences that were diagnosed bipolar, were the most profound,
enfolding experiences of my life, and I am deeply grateful I went through it too.

In 1994 at the age of 31, I listened to the recording of a spiritual teacher from Australia
and my head and life popped open to a new awareness, crazy as it was. Coming
from a conservative Christian family and not having a shaman, guide, or supportive
context, I made my way through it alone. It was treacherous at times and a pretty
unstable place to navigate, but I too finally trusted my gut and my experience, slowly
went off the meds, read lots of Ken Wilbur, Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly, Robert A.
Johnson, Rupert Sheldrake, Marrianne Williamson, Caroline Myss, Stephen Hawking,
Graham Hancock, watched my diet, sleep and exercise and tried to make my way to
chop wood carry water. I expect writing to you now is even a small part of that path.

Over the past 13 years, I haven’t spoken about it to others much, because the few times
I have I didn’t find it enjoyable, understandable by others or personally validating. Right
now, I just want to add one more voice to your experiential data and say I too know that
many people who are being diagnosed and medicated are possibly having a wakeup. You
are a brave guy putting yourself out like you are. I have wondered often over the years
what to “do” with my experience. Writing a TV movie of the week didn’t seem the right
path for me. I respect and envy your clarity to actively engage the world on this aspect of
being human.

Calgary:
I wanted to thank you for posting your Bipolar or Waking Up video on YouTube. 
I went through a “bipolar crisis” two years ago and it was one of the most
meaningful experiences of my life ... however, that is something that I have never
been allowed to say to anyone and have my truth of that experience respected.

I had been severely depressed for almost two full years before my crisis/awakening
(depending upon one’s perspective) and before that I had been living what I would call
a half-dead existence for basically my entire life.  (Oddly enough, like you, I worked in
advertising ... perhaps there’s something about that world that sucks out one’s soul.  LOL)

160
Anyways, I had just gone through a very difficult time in my life.  My 18-year marriage had
recently collapsed, I was unemployed, I had lost many friends because they could not cope
with my depression and rage and I was just completely and desperately sick inside of my
soul.  One night I found myself literally crawling on the floor, crying out to a god in whom I did
not believe to bring me relief - even if that relief came in the form of death. I think only others
who have themselves become suicidal can understand how utterly tormented I felt at that time.

Of course, I was put on antidepressant “medication” (or “poison” as I now call it)
because that is what our society does with people who are sick within their souls. 
It gives them an instant “cure” that does not help them but, in fact, can cause them
great psychic and physical harm. If somebody had just taken the time to let me talk,
and listened to me, I think that would have been enough to help me with my terrible
depression.   But talking takes time, and in our culture who has time to listen to
the ravings of a heart-sick lunatic?   The $2 pill is cheaper, easier and less messy!

The medication that I was given induced a “euphoric hypomania” which was the most
magical and beautiful experience I have ever had.  I was lying on my couch one night with
my eyes closed, listening to beautiful music (Broken Social Scene ... from your hometown
of Toronto!) when all of a sudden I began to hear the music differently.  It was as if every
single note of that wonderful, multi-layered music was a physical object - a glowing sphere
of light - that was dancing in the air around me.  All of my senses became much more acute
and I began to feel as if I were bathed in warm, amber light.  I then had a “vision” of the
entire cosmos whirling around me and entering my body in the form of love and light.  This
wonderful, beautiful light was pouring into my body and then shooting out through the
palms of my hands and from the top of my head in a column of clear, beautiful, perfect,
powerful light.  For the first time in my life, I felt like I “belonged” here.  I felt like I was a
tiny speck in an endless universe, and that I also contained or WAS the whole universe at
the same time.  I felt completely at peace with myself and everything in existence.  I felt
that my prayer to “god” (in whom I still did not believe!) had been answered. I cried and
cried - but they were healing tears, tears of gratitude and joy that I had been released from
the hell of my own depressed life and mind and had been blessed with this cosmic vision.

The next day I went back into the world, convinced that my prayers had been answered and
that I had somehow been awakened to the true nature of reality and existence.  I no longer
felt sad or worried or anxious or fearful - I knew that everything was as it should be, that
I belonged in the universe, and that I was loved.  Needless to say, my doctor was horrified! 
I was (like you) sent to hospital where (like you) I was treated as an object of scorn.

161
I have never felt so degraded as a human being ... my heart aches for “mentally ill”
people who undergo that sort of treatment on a regular basis.   The lack
of respect, the lack of humanity was a real eye-opener for me. I will
NEVER permit myself to be taken to a psychiatric facility again - ever.

I think that I must be a pretty strong-willed person, because I refused to take antipsychotic
medication and it was (mercifully) not forced upon me.   As a result of my refusal to
cooperate, my doctor “fired” me - which was the best thing that could ever have happened
to me, in my opinion.  My “euphoric hypomania” continued - uninterrupted, because I was
a relatively benign and peaceful nut job - for about six months until I finally came down on
my own.  Although I have had some struggles since then with depression and agitation to
some extent, I have managed to bring those problems under good control by changing my
diet, practicing yoga and meditation, and by taking natural nutritional supplements that have
virtually eliminated most of my mental distress.  I will never, ever take psychiatric medications
again.  I believe that they are dangerous, soul-destroying poisons that do nothing for the
sufferer but rather simply keep them in a silent stupor lest they upset those around them.

I apologize for the length of this email.  But I wanted to - for once - tell somebody MY story,
the story of what my “hypomanic episode” felt like to ME.  It did not feel like a curse, or
like a terrible shameful scary thing that should be hidden away in my past (which is how
my friends and family view it).  It felt like I had seen a glimpse of heaven and it made me
feel happy to be alive.  I was so glad to see your video on YouTube and know that I’m not
the only person who has experienced this!  So thanks again for posting your video - and
thanks for listening to my story.

Norway:
I’m so grateful for having found your valuable videos on YouTube and your blog. Thank
you. I agree with you on so many things. I wrote this text early this morning (my Norwegian
time) and I hope you like my present approach to bipolarity:

What if bipolarity is a gift? An extra function?

An ability to confront life with extra intensity and open-mindedness in order to try to
improve ones outlook and in-look to help oneself and consequently probably others (and
maybe even - since I’m feeling quite manic right now - in the long run, all humanity**?)

162
What if when even a mania or psychosis doesn’t seem to take you forward, maybe even
makes you more confused, shifts into depression and total sense of meaninglessness,
only in order for you to be able to start anew?

Maybe your next manic effort will take you a bit further than the last, like trying to continue
laying a very difficult puzzle (the foundation for your sense of judgment that needs all your
skills in order to get clearer).

If even your psychotic abilities cannot help you grasp how to proceed - every new far-out
way of looking at this puzzle fails - maybe the best way to continue is to leave it, get a rest,
empty yourself of all granted, preconceived sense of outlook, like in a depression.

Then try again, starting with the very simplest pieces of the puzzle, like food and sleep.
Even having the feeling that this is enough and forget about the other pieces.

Is this maybe the best ground for trying again? Nothing to lose and slowly regaining your
interest. Working the puzzle from other angles, maybe remembering some of the things
that felt right and important the last time, trying to fit them in but maybe in a new way, in
a new place.

Getting excited, overexcited, manic, psychotic. Not wanting to give up the most interesting
and important task you have ever had.

Until you’re too exhausted and have to leave it again. Hopefully not giving it all up forever,
but to regain the strength to try again. With the knowledge that you can go back to the
basic comforts whenever you fail.

The awesome happiness of finding an important piece and a foolproof place for it - knowing
that this will almost automatically lead to many other minor revelations. The awesome
happiness.

**It’s maybe this sense of the huge importance for mankind attached to my laying this
puzzle that helps me not give it up.

Warm greetings from a cold Norwegian village.

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British Columbia:
Firstly, I’d like to say thanks for your blogs, postings and YouTube clips, they’ve made a
huge difference to me already, in terms of self-esteem, and I appreciate the trouble you’ve
taken to share your experiences and the efforts you’ve made to help others.
 
I came across your YouTube clips of “mania vs enlightenment” on the iambipolar.ca
website latest blog entry. I’d come across this site fairly recently and had been finding it to
be a valuable resource...not to mention a source of synchronicities… :-)

When I viewed the first clip I was absolutely stunned by how it mirrored my own
experience of seven years ago...it wasn’t just similar, it was EXACTLY the same pattern.
I had considered spiritual emergency before as a possible explanation, but I guess I’d
discounted it as “wishful thinking”. It was the fact that there was such a common theme of
experience that hit me most. I’ve always thought it significant that I was never disturbed or
depressed before the first event and the label of bipolar-disorder doesn’t somehow “fit”…
although I do agree that the medication I take now is appropriate.
 
I’ve since watched all your videos about your experience and read the account on your
blog...wow that took a while!!
 
Although I’ve been hospitalized twice, and been medicated at one time, to the point of
displaying symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, I seem to be doing well now. We emigrated
from the UK nearly six years ago, to B.C, and I’ve been employed by the same company
for five years as an administrator (I hold a Masters in Molecular Genetics)...so I think the
likelihood that I’m insane is fairly remote.... :-)
 
I’ve  had that connection with all things...see synchronicities, meaning and patterns in
everything, and am in a constant search for ultimate truth. I can see that all religion is,
is metaphors...God is just another word for the source of all things (and not a human
looking supernatural being with a beard…lol). We are stardust made conscious. As a
biologist, intellectually I want to know how it all works, but also as a human being I want
to experience full “being” in the sensory sense, rather than just a bunch of words on the
page. Frankly I can’t understand people who don’t want to “know”, but of course learned
the hard way when to be quiet!!

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I’m interested in shamanic practices, especially healing, the role of the metaphor...etc. and
I’d like to do some myself. My totem is the dragonfly, due to the transformation I have gone
through and my ability to display a different facet of myself to whomever I am in contact,
as appropriate...this isn’t a new trait, but one I’ve always had. Like you mentioned though,
this can lead to you not liking yourself in some situations, which is why I tend to chose my
friends carefully.
 
Although I work in Biotech I consider drugs as “taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut” and
that a holistic approach is the only way to go...somewhere along the way people stopped
actually listening to one another and forgot what it means to have a diverse community
and value the special characteristics and needs of each member!! I’ve never taken illegal
drugs and don’t drink often, certainly not to excess, which helps in keeping control of
sensory overwhelm.
 
Anyway, I’ll stop blithering now. I’m just excited to know someone who’s really been there.
There are so many “bipolar” folks on the net who don’t either think they can, or want to, or
have the support to make the most of the “gifts” they have. I know myself, that once you
stop being afraid of your perception and just observe it then it can become quite fun!
 

Jerusalem:
OMG... I can’t believe there is actually SOMEBODY on my side. I have nobody. Last time
I told my mother I wasn’t taking the medication she kicked my ass out of the house and
stopped paying for my college.... OH MY GOD. dude. fucking message me would you?

My god man... I can’t believe someone else actually feels the same way as me. I’ve been
off medications for a year now, and every time I go to my psychiatrist he says, “Yes... yes...
the medication is working great.” Then I say, “Doc. don’t you think we could bring down
the dose on my medication like we did over the summer? Why did you bring the dose
back up anyway?” and Then he says, “Well. I was going to bring down the dose slowly,
but then you broke up with your girlfriend and I didn’t want to take a chance of you getting
stressed out and maybe having another episode; so I brought the dose back up.” Then
I say, “So you think I’m doing better now?”, then he says, “Yes. You’re doing great. The
medication is working great for you. In fact, I’m not even going to drug test you to make
sure you’re taking the pills because I would be able to tell if you were having problems.”
Then I say, “Thanks doc! Maybe we can bring down the dose in the next couple months or
so?” and then he says, “Maybe. We’ll see what happens when we get there. For now let’s
not take any chances of switching the medication since you’re doing so well on it now.”

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And I say “Okay Doc. Thanks. See you next week. Ha-ha. And I’ve not taken a single
medication for a year. What a fucking quack.

Oslo:
[Regarding your personal experience of mania…] I’ve gone through the same more or
less. I was fortunate enough to grow up with musicians and artists that were spiritually
experienced. I decided when it happened (18 years old) that this was a test, that it was
sacred and that I had a mission. I’ve had four experiences with “bipolar” (one year at a
time..!), been arrested and the whole package. Never used medicine and I haven’t had the
experience in twelve years. I’m free. I decided that I had the answer inside, and so I did.

Thanks for your very important contribution.

Iowa:
“Iowa” and I correspond a lot. This is my favorite story of his.

I am manic.  Staff in hand, I raise my arms and face to the high flying geese.  I laugh
with glee and call to them.  Then, I am with them, taking my place among them . . . wind
in my face, honk-honking mutual encouragement, traveling another dimension.

Staff in hand, feet to the earth, I meander north through the tall grass.  A drainage ditch
flows parallel to me at my right hand. 

There is a whisper within me, soft but insistent, welling up within my soul,  “Break your
staff into three equal parts.” 

At first I argue with the still, small voice.   “I don’t want to.  I like this staff.  It is straight,
just the right length, and fits my hand.  Why should I senselessly waste it?  I reach out
to the One . . . considering . . . then break the staff upon my knee.  I look upon the three
nearly equal pieces in my hands. 

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Now that I have obeyed and followed, the voice comes to me again, and I see the simple
plan laid out before me.  I yield, immersed in my work.  As directed, I take the three parts
of the one staff and thrust them into the soft ground beside the drainage ditch. 

Each stick lies at the point of an equilateral triangle, the base of the triangle parallel to
the ditch and the apex pointing to the west.  Then I angle each stick so that it leans and
points slightly to the east, and so that an imaginary extension of each of the three sticks
converges together at an imaginary point about twenty feet above the water.

I stand behind the crude arrangement---about twenty feet to the west and facing it---and
wonder why I have been led to do this.

Then I see three geese flying low and south to north across the far edge of the wet
meadow.  I watch the Canadians as they begin a sweeping turn and head west.  I am
directly in their path.  “If they continue like this,” I think, “they will fly directly over my
head.”  I hold very still, and they pass directly through the intersection point marked by
the three parts of my one staff. 

The ruffle of their wings fills me as they pass, and I throw up my empty arms straight
overhead.  Touchdown!

They follow the point of “my” “arrow” into the west and disappear.

Even obedience in small things can bring great delight to the one who follows.

I like geese.  I hang with them.

Oklahoma:
I loved the 2 videos I’ve seen so far. I was determined to research through enough websites
until I found someone with the same views on bipolar as I have. I have found you. I would
like to talk with you further about these beliefs and suspicions. It just amazes me to hear
someone else describing the same experiences as I’ve had. I have been to a bipolar
support group and there really wasn’t anyone there with quite the same experience.

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Yours are like hearing my story verbatim. Would you be interested in starting a
forum, or might you have one already? I want to get a collection of stories similar to
my own and compile them for a book or some sort of informational collaboration to
educate others. I believe that there are some further implications of the common
experiences of bipolar and schizophrenic people in a much more collective aspect.

It could be possible that we are having these experiences for a reason. Anyway, I suppose
I am running on for the first communication.

Please let me know if you would be interested in speaking or emailing.

Thanks for what you do!

San Francisco:
You’re the only other person I’ve found that
this! I just had an amazing “bipolar” episode, I
than ever. My mission is the same as yours it
potential for healing, awakening, etc. It’s so
had a positive experience with
made it through, and I’m better
seems; educating people on the
misunderstood by the “system”.

Thanks again for putting up the vids. Very inspiring.

Video Comments

As a psychiatrist with bipolar I can vouch that your video is as good an explanation of the
bipolar experience as it gets. Nice work.

Dude, You rock man! I wish there were more people out there that think like you. I believe
you and can totally relate to what you are saying. I have been off meds for a long time
now, yes I am bipolar, and I have maintained a 3.3 GPA in college. I am an artist and
I am myself again. Panic attacks happen, but I’ve learned to control them. Mania, well
it’s just me.

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LOL Thank you for posting this video on YouTube.

Fantastic! Keep up spreading the truth about the psychiatric sham. We are not a collection
of chemicals! We are spiritual beings, whatever our beliefs.

I think your video puts into words so many of the experiences and misunderstandings of
a labeled bipolar and I believe that the doctors have not ever benefited me in healing, just
covering some symptoms and creating more. I am going back to the doctors 2morrow
after a year because I do feel so lost and I am so thankful to find this special video you
made with heart thank you.

I will be listening, my friend in this world ;)

Thank you

This video is a masterpiece, I have sent it to my brother-in-law, the Charleston County

Mental Health facility, and my boss and I love it! Thank you for all your hard work!

I wish I could express in words how happy I am to come across your bipolar videos. I’ve
watched 2 videos so far and I’ve been granted hope that I will not be drugged for my entire
life due to my “rapid cycling.” I’m 17 years old and have been recently diagnosed with this
“disorder”. I’ve been hesitant to take Risperidone which my psychiatrist prescribed to me
a few weeks back - tonight was probably going to be my first night taking it, as she had
recently reassured me to do. I’ve been completely hopeless ever since my diagnosis, as
this is supposedly an incurable lifelong disorder. I can’t even begin to describe to you how
AWESOME I feel - like my life has given back to me. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK
YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Bravo! Bravo! This video ROCKS!

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Wow dude, you went insane and came back knowing more than the shrinks who use that
word. You should win the Nobel prize. I started having spiritual experiences when I was
using weed and thought I would loose my mind each time. Literally each time I smoke and
have ‘revelations’ just come to me. I would look at other people and instantly know if they
were good or not because I could see inside them. Crazy or perhaps not.

I love the video! I’ve had almost everything described in the video happen to me including
the police! But I know it’s spiritual because I have friends that have seen me reach my hand
out to lizards and I sent them love and they started jumping in my hand! Unexplainable and
I can’t do that now! The “I am Somebody” thing ie: “Jesus” is I believe not just confusion
of metaphors but also connected to the shattering of the ego.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful video. The process you described actually reminded me
of an LSD trip (that my “friend” once described to me, not that I’ve ever done it).

Oh fuck! Where were you a year 1/2 ago when I was thinking the same shit after my
first and last “psychosis” experience. Nothing I’ve experienced in my life was like it & I’d
probably never share it, but it really makes you wake up to life.

My sincere gratitude for creating this explanation of how depression works. Although
I don’t suffer, I have a close loved one who does. I believe as you’ve stated in your
videos that we all have the capability to overcome depression and that healing takes
place when we recognize the causes, not by taking some poison created by Big Pharma!
My thanks again as I add to my prayers that your message reaches the masses!
Namaste!

FUCK YEAH! I LOVE THIS!

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Holy crap!...you NAILED IT BRO! I seriously am impressed with this video...from my own
personal experience, I feel that in order for me to overcome depression, I had to move on
from things I was happy with in the past...there is a part of me that wants to hold on and
make things all better by exercising, diet, and what not...but ultimately I have to let go and
transition to the next stage.

This is the best video I have ever seen! It’s kinda a hard to swallow so much truth! But
it is the reality of planet earth and our kind! I think we should wipe out the psychs! What
horrible creatures!

I’m 36 years old but I have to say “OMG! I can’t believe people are actually having the
guts to stand up to this monster of psychiatry. My insurance company would probably rise
up and call you blessed! They pay about $500 a month for my meds not to mention my
step daughter’s. As a 27 yr old who’d been recently traumatized I was told I would lose
my children if I was non-compliant. But I still got a little renegade in me and it loves this
video! TRUTH!

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 Thank You…

Even though most of the names and some of the locations in this book have been changed
to protect people’s privacy, I’ve discovered that it’s impossible to change the names “Mom”
and “Dad”. Thank you, Mom and Dad for allowing me to invade your personal life so that
I could share my story. I know the work I’m doing in this area scares you to death, so
having your support means a lot. I couldn’t do what I do without it.

To the woman who changed my life forever, my wife, Ligia. You have been my best friend,
mentor, lover, therapist and playmate since we met. You are always the first person to
stand up for me, and the only person on the planet who can keep me from bullshitting
myself. Without you, my life doesn’t even happen. Your intuitive knowing of what “sings”
and what “sinks” has been of enormous help in telling my story. That face never lies.

To Sheena, for years you’ve been listening to me, listening…never offering an answer;
always presenting the right question. It may not have been therapy, but is sure as hell
helped! Your faith in life has always been an inspiration. Thank you for being my “guru”!

To everyone in the online bipolar community who has written me, sent me a comment, or
told me to go fuck myself. Most of what I have learned about this “dis-order” has come,
not from doctors or books, but from you. You have all been great teachers! One day, your
contributions will reap huge dividends.

And finally, to my two wonderful Brazilian nieces, “Ana” and “Eliana”. You are the motivation
and inspiration for this book, my YouTube videos, and everything else that Ligia and I do
with regard to bipolar disorder. Thank you for allowing me to share our stories together,
and for having faith in us.

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 Notes

Introduction

1. Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind, (First Vintage Books Edition, 1996), 31.

2. Ibid., 63.

3. Ibid., 6.

4. See Robert Whitaker, Man in America, (Basic Books, 2002), 196-199, for an excellent,
detailed account of the myths that psychiatry spins throughout our society.

5. Jamison, An Unquiet Mind, 6, 215.

6. See John Weir Perry, The Far Side of Madness, (Spring Publications Inc, 2005)

7. See Loren R. Mosher & Voice Hendrix, Soteria, (Xlibris Corporation, 2004)

8. See Christina and Stanislav Grof, M.D., editors, Spiritual Emergency, (G.P. Putnam
Son´s, 1989).

9. For more information on the DSM IV “Religious or Spiritual Problem” diagnosis,

see the online course-book available at http://www.spiritualcompetency.com/dsm4/
dsmrsproblem.pdf .

10. Jamison, An Unquiet Mind, 214.

11. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, (HarperCollins Publishers
Inc., 1994), 120-122.

12. Georg Feuerstein, PH.D., The Yoga Tradition, (Hohm Press, 2001), 48, 240,241.

13. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, (Dover Publications Inc. 2002), 199.

14. Lyrics to Bring Down the Walls reprinted with the written permission of Robert
Owens.

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Part One

1. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers, (PBS, 1988).
Now available on DVD.

2. James Redfield, The Celestine Prophesy, (Wheeler Publishing, 1994).

3. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching (Barnes & Noble Inc. 1993) and,

Deng Ming Dao, Chronicles of Tao, (HarperCollins Publishers, 1993).

4. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, (Vintage Books, 1989).

5. John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, (Bison Books, 2004).

Part Two

1. Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (Self-Realization Fellowship,

1998).

2. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 330.

3. Christina and Stanislav Grof, M.D., The Stormy Search for Self, 73-99.

4. Ibid., 1-7.

5. Ibid., 88.

6. M.J. Abadie, Your Psychic Potential, (Adams Media Corporation, 1995), 108-109.

7. Ibid.,150-153.

8. Ibid., 159.

9. Alberto Villoldo, Dance of the Four Winds, and Island of the Sun (Destiny Books,
1995)

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Part Three

1. Christina and Stanislav Grof, M.D., The Stormy Search for Self, 254-255.

2. Robert Whitaker, Mad in America, 188-189.

3. Ibid., 248-249.

4. See www.ssristories.com for an updated account of anti-depressant related murder

and suicide.

Epilogue

1. Benedict Carey, “Bipolar Illness Soars as Diagnosis for the Young”, New York Times,
September 4, 2007.

175