Episode 084 - On Every Baby's Face

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

As I mentioned in the previous episode, I am about to begin a series of episodes that will have more of a free-flow format than the ones that have gone before. This is because I have a large amount of information that I have collected over the years which I consider to be extremely valuable when it comes to personal growth, and rather than try to build a context for each one that would be the theme of an entire episode, I am just going to put them out one at a time, without trying to format them into a general context.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one is that I have found that every one of these ideas has been extremely helpful to me at some point in time, just the way they are. And they may be very helpful to you, as well. Also, if I don’t put them out now, rather than serving to possibly help someone in their path of personal growth, they’ll probably end up just being food for worms somewhere. And although the worms might appreciate the nutritional value of the paper, the ideas themselves will do the crawlers no good at all. That kind of stuff only works for human beings.

So, before I begin, I’d like return to my own personal story and move it forward a little bit from where we left off in the last episode. I had mentioned that my interest in inner growth began when I heard the news that the Beatles were continuing their magical mystery tour by travelling to India to study meditation. Before I knew it, I decided to look into meditation and went to the Philadelphia Transcendental Meditation center and received a mantra to meditate with.

The practice didn’t really do much for me and my interest in inner evolution left me about as quickly as it came. But at this point, I want to underscore something important about what was happening within my overall intelligence. You may or may not be aware of the fact that I had a few extraordinarily metaphysical experiences surrounding the sudden death of my father. These experiences are detailed fairly extensively in my memoir, “Wilt, Ike and Me” and they were the subject of a few podcast episodes about a year and a half ago.

To make a very long story very short this is the gist of what happened. With absolutely no background in this kind of thing at all, one night when I was in 11th grade, I had a clear and vivid dream that my father had died. I dreamt the events as they happened to me. It was quite a long dream, with several sequences, it was crystal clear and I could remember every bit of it.

And then incredibly, it all happened the next night exactly as I had dreamt it, down to the finest details of who said what to me and when. Then, about six months later, I had another deeply vivid dream in which my father appeared to me and told me that he never really died. He said that there is no death and that it’s just a public relations stunt that God came up with to get people to think about him.

At the end of the dream, he noticed that I was wearing his ring He told me to give it back to him. I did and the whole room exploded into brilliant white light. Then back in real life, a few hours later, following my gym class, when I opened my locker and went into my wallet where I kept my two rings, his ring had disappeared. My other ring, my watch, my wallet with a ten-dollar bill in it were all still there. But inexplicably his ring was gone. It had vanished without a trace.

Now, even though the details about these events were truly extraordinary in and of themselves, the thing that was important to my growth was the fact that they had happened at all. Underlying the shock and grief that came along with the sudden death of my father was a deep understanding that started to come over me, that was that there’s more to this life than meets the eye. There’s more to it than we’ve been told.

I mean, how is it possible that in a dream, I clearly foresaw events that hadn’t happened yet? What does that say about time and space and the so-called reality of life as we know it?

Of course, this was a lot for a standard American 16-year-old schoolboy to begin to grasp, but it lit a deep desire within me to find out what the hell is going on around here. What am I doing here? What is the purpose for my life? Why was I born? What did I come here to do? You know, all those basic kinds of existential questions that we are generally warned to dismiss from our minds at all costs. There’s no answer to them and they will just lead you down a never-ending rabbit hole of confusion.

Well that may be true, but the fact was, I had no choice about asking these kinds of questions and I still don’t. I still have to ask them. By the way, I’ve learned a lot since then and although there is still effort to be made, there is an enormous amount of difference between the effort of searching to find a gold mine and the effort of mining the gold once you’ve found it.

Anyway, in the fall of 1971, suddenly some powerful events began to take place almost simultaneously. The first thing was that I heard about a unique Indian teacher who supposedly had a very evolved way of teaching. He was all the rave at the time, but I was really put off by the fact that the guy was only 13 years old. He was basically just a kid.

I’ll never forget it. I was in my first semester of law school walking down the quad at Temple University with my old friend and fellow student, Ted Simon. Ted was already very serious about the law. He studied hard and quickly became a major criminal lawyer, as well as the President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. I won’t go into details about it here, but let’s just say I went down a road less traveled.

Anyway, I had a hot dog in my hand and was about to bite into it and suddenly saw a poster taped to a pole which said something like, “13 year old spiritual teacher has come to relieve you of your suffering.” I stopped dead in my tracks and just stared at it. “Whoever is promoting this guy is going to go bankrupt fast. Who the hell is going to believe that a 13-year-old kid is a spiritual teacher? What the hell can somebody that young know?” I asked Ted. I was so flabbergasted by the complete absurdity of the idea that it took me a few minutes to finally bite into the dog.

Well, things went the surprising way they often do and within a few months, to my extreme surprise, I started taking this young teacher a bit more seriously. He was teaching a form of meditation that was supposedly quite powerful and in certain circles that I had become familiar with, he was gaining a serious reputation for having significant wisdom.

That’s a really quick overview, but how it actually happened is quite a story in and of its own right and I will probably tell it in a podcast episode one of these days.

Anyway, this teacher’s name was Prem Rawat and besides hearing a lot about him, I also got exposed to a few other sources of information that began to exert a strong influence on me in those days. And this kind of happened all at once.

The first one was that a lot of people I knew had begun reading a book called, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” by someone named Parmahansa Yogananda. At some point, I got that book and couldn’t put it down. I’ll go more deeply into who he was and what his influence was on me at a later time, but his writings became a major source of inspiration to me. And they still are.

At the same time, a lot of people were recommending reading a book called, “There is a River, the Edgar Cayce Story.” I had never heard of Edgar Cayce before and the story of America’s most documented psychic was another element that played a major role in my inner awakenings back then. The idea that someone could tap into a higher realm of consciousness and gain access to a wealth of knowledge that was otherwise unavailable was basically a mind blower.

Another book that hit me pretty hard at the time was called “The Essene Gospel of Peace,” which was one of a four-part series that presented a deeply esoteric view point about God and religion.

Along the same lines, it was recommended to me that I begin reading a book called “The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ,” which was supposedly channeled by someone named Levi. This book was truly incredible and I plan to present a few chapters of it down the road sometime.

I began reading all of these books within a few months of each other and it was quite a powerful experience because essentially they all said the same thing. Prem Rawat hadn’t written any books back then, but he was giving a lot of talks which also said the same exact thing. And the basic message which was common to them all was that – yes there is such a thing as God and it is omniscient, which means it knows everything, is omnipotent, which means that it is all powerful, and it is omnipresent, which means that it is present everywhere, throughout every molecule of creation and beyond.

And the most important thing is that it is within every single individual and we are all born with the inherent ability to connect with it, expand and grow, and eventually merge into it. And the successful performance of this merger of consciousness, which could also be termed, the ultimate surrender, was the purpose of our life, the very reason we were born here in the first place. And if we were able to accomplish this evolution of consciousness, we will be complete and able to have the highest experience of life possible or find heaven on earth while we are still alive, if you want to put it that way. This is the brass ring on this otherwise crazy looking merry-go-round we found ourselves on.

And the most amazing bottom line element to me was that God is not some ultra powerful guy who lives ten zillion light years away and can only be approached after you die. No, all these sources taught that you can find the god presence within yourself and ultimately merge with it. The general term for it was “the indwelling god presence” and I had never been exposed to this kind of a concept before in my life.

Like I said, all of this hit me at the same time within just a few months. I started practicing the meditation taught by the young teacher and I’m still doing it to this day.

So, this has been quite a lot of information for one episode and I’m going to close it by relating to you one of the first notes I took from back then that was deeply meaningful to me.

I was reading the transcript of a press conference that was held for Prem Rawat. Again, he was thirteen years old at the time. And by the way, as bizarre as the idea of such a young teacher seemed to me back then, in the east, great teachers who were child prodigies and began teaching at a young age does happen from time to time. The greatly venerated Yogi, Sri Ramakrishna was recognized as a master soul by the age of seven. The current Dali Lama was recognized as a master soul by the age of five and assumed full leadership duties at the age of fifteen. And there is currently a very young teacher who will apparently take his place at the appropriate time.

I didn’t know any of this back then and the reality is that it didn’t really matter. I liked what the young teacher had to say and his approach seemed not only revolutionary but it was deeply meaningful.

Anyway, at this press conference someone asked him, “Do you believe in God?” And he simply replied, “I believe in the God who put a smile on every baby’s face.” That eleven-word sentence was one of the most beautifully profound statements I had ever heard, and I’m going to get into it more deeply in the the next episode, along with several other things. But in the meantime, you may want to give that statement a little thought and see what it does to you. “I believe in the God who put a smile on every baby’s face.”

So, for now, keep your eyes, mind, and heart open and let’s get together in the next one.