An Experiment in a New Age Bookstore
“What are you looking for?” the white-haired man asked me. The owner of the New Age bookstore, where I was currently browsing, was busy hammering one of the tall, dark brown shelves in the corner.
I hesitated, not quite sure how to answer. My friend, Kathy, and I had agreed to meet at the bookstore—the first stop on one of our semi-regular outings to our favorite small town on the Hudson River. The location was the perfect midway point between her house in Warwick, New York and my apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, where I was living at the time.
Kathy was out of earshot browsing at another end of the store.
“I…I don’t really know.” I said, finally.
The owner came out from behind the shelf he was working on. His white hair was tousled, and he was wearing overalls and a red and brown flannel shirt. He said his name was Karl. He told me that he was a former Jesuit priest, but that he’d left the priesthood because he’d become frustrated with the dogma.
“What about you? When are you going to become a finder, rather than a seeker?” There was a twinkle in his eyes as he posed these questions.
Not used to such directness, I flushed with embarrassment and looked away, not at all comfortable having my obsession with spiritual seeking seen so easily by a stranger.
Karl walked over to one of the shelves near where I was standing, grabbed a book and handed it to me. “This should help.”
The book was called, From Onions to Pearls: A Journal of Awakening and Deliverance by Satyam Nadeen. I’d never heard of it before.
Karl launched right into a synopsis for me.
“It’s about a guy who made millions selling large quantities of MDMA (aka Ecstasy), living the life, traveling all the time, houses all over the world, the whole deal. Then the government decided to make it illegal, so before long the guy gets busted and spends time in a pretty rough prison.”
Nodding, I wondered where this story was going.
“In one scenario,” Karl continued, “he’s in a cell with thirty other guys, boom box blasting twenty-four seven, men being raped, no real bathroom to speak of. In other words, he was in hell. Well, it turns out, it was these very circumstances that caused him to spontaneously wake up. Right there in the middle of that cell, he shifted out of his human story into God Consciousness.”
“Wow, that’s amazing,” I said, unconvincingly, not quite sure how this related to me.
The twinkle was still there, but Karl seemed to read my resistance. He saw that he wasn’t getting through.
I looked around to see if Kathy was nearby. It would have been nice to have her step in and bail me out. I guessed she must have gotten pulled into a book somewhere in the store.
“Okay, let’s try a little experiment,” he offered.
“That’s not necessary,” I said, looking over his shoulder to the place he’d been hammering. “Don’t you want to get back to your project over there?”
“This won’t take long,” Karl said, grinning. “Here goes: I want you to talk with me for the next five minutes without using the words ‘I’, ‘you’ or ‘me’”
At first, I stumbled awkwardly with my words, but after less than a minute, something shifted. By not referring to myself or to him using those three words, we were somehow able to break through the mind and get past the ego. There was a rapid shifting back and forth between duality and non-duality—I could see both simultaneously. Many times, when Karl spoke, he wouldn't have to finish his sentence because I got what he was saying without words. Fits of laughter came over me the entire time.
When Karl asked me to switch back to speaking from the ego identity, initially, I had trouble accessing it. The whole experience had happened so fast, it left me feeling ungrounded and a little shaky. I took a few deep breaths while trying to process all of the thoughts and feelings rushing through me. Karl stayed silent, waiting for me to catch up.
Kathy finally joined us, and the energy shifted entirely. She and Karl began a friendly chat about renting his adjoining space for workshops. The bubble I’d been in with Karl had disappeared, and I felt connected with my surroundings again.
A little while later, Kathy and I were in a crystal store down the hall from Karl’s bookstore. I mentioned the unusual experience to the owner. He stared at me surprised and said, “I’ve known Karl for twenty years and have never had an experience like that with him.”
It made what happened seem even more mysterious.
That evening, Kathy and I had dinner and Jasmine tea at a local Thai restaurant. Hanging from the ceiling were beautiful hand-carved, hand-painted, wooden flying women. They were all over the restaurant. Some were half fish; others were half birds. There were also fish tanks filled with multi-colored fish in one half of the room. Kathy, a certified aromatherapist and Feng Shui consultant said that these things were all powerful symbols for freedom and prosperity. I also saw them as symbols for flow and fluidity.
While we were in the restaurant, my heart center spontaneously burst open bringing with it a flood of clarity. I realized that if I was open, receptive and willing to put myself out there, the universe would bring people into my life with whom I could connect with on all different levels, and that I didn't have to feel as though there was a scarcity of spiritually aware people out there. Tears followed along with a huge feeling of relief. I saw that my limiting beliefs had caused a deep-seated feeling of scarcity and blinded me to the incredible abundance all around me.
At one point, it felt as though someone was grabbing me and saying, "You're missing it! Everything you need is right here, right now; all you have to do is really open your heart. It's not dependent on a specific person or place or thing—it's everywhere—all around you, but you're missing it."
That day was a major paradigm shift for me in which I saw myself interconnected with all of life, rather than just within my small world, and that whatever I needed for my soul’s journey would be provided, often in unexpected and magical ways.
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