Effects of Long-Term Participation in TMI Programs, Phase 2

May 30, 2010 Print Preview

A summary of Phase 1 of this study was published in The Journal of The Monroe Institute and may be seen HERE.

See Phase 1 of this study online.

Download a PDF file of this Phase 2 study.

by Cam Danielson
MESA Research Group
February 21, 2010

Cam is a partner at MESA Research Group. His work focuses on assisting leaders and management teams to revision future direction and opportunity amid the turbulence of personal, organizational, and societal change. His research has appeared in the Academy of Management Executive, Human Resource Development Quarterly, Business Horizons, and the American Benedictine Review. He has designed or conducted executive development programs for companies such as 3M, AT&T, BP, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Crédit Agricole, Dow Chemical, EDS, ExxonMobil, Ingersoll-Rand, Lucent Technologies, Mahindra & Mahindra, Manitowoc, NASA, The Nature Conservancy, Philips Electronics, Prudential (London), Rolls-Royce, Saudi Aramco, Shell International (London), Sara Lee, SUEZ, Whirlpool, and Xerox.

Cam’s background includes twenty years of leading the office of executive education at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. He also was a speechwriter for the president of Indiana University and a member of the faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Cam received a BA in classical studies from the University of Kansas and a medieval studies certificate and an MA in English literature from Indiana University. He is an alumnus of The Monroe Institute’s GATEWAY VOYAGE®, GUIDELINES®, LIFELINE™, and EXPLORATION 27® programs (1994 through 2006). Cam attended both the VOYAGE and GUIDELINES twice. He also participated in the American Center for International Leadership U.S.-USSR Exchange Program (1985).

Report of Findings:

Phase II of a Study on the Effects of Long-Term Participation in
The Monroe Institute Programs

Introduction

This study was undertaken as a follow-up to my initial investigation into the effects of long-term participation in TMI programs. There I found individuals who attended 3 or more programs had some distinctive characteristics compared with those who had only attended the Gateway Voyage. Specifically, multiple program participants have a higher degree of life satisfaction and self-efficacy, and in terms of their motives for attending TMI, were more curious and interested in self-development. In addition, I found the language used by multiple program participants to describe their most memorable experiences at TMI was more personal in relating not only the experience but what it meant to them, whereas those who only attended the Gateway Voyage were more focused on a description of the experience and less on their own response.

As I pondered the data looking for insights into the differences between the group and conclusions I could draw about those differences, I knew two things. First, I could not attribute the differences I was seeing to the role of TMI. The study was limited in its ability to draw causal relationships between their state of development as individuals and the influence of TMI. What I could say was that TMI was a “strange attractor” in the collection of individuals whom comprised the multiple program set. Second, I found myself curious to know about the individual lives behind the data. Who were these people? What made them tick? And if some (or more) of them are in fact operating from a state of development that allows them to be more effective with greater levels of complexity, then what does that look like? How do they “show up” in their interactions with others? How would they show up with me?

In this study, I have profiled the lives of a representative set of the multiple program participants.  The objectives are:

• Defining a set of characteristics which distinguish this group as a whole in terms of their stage of development
• Understanding the variables influential to their personal development, and more specifically, the role of TMI in that development
• Understanding how others who interacted with them at home, in the workplace, or in their communities perceived them and how that compares with my own assessment through the interviews

Some of the variables I wanted to understand included the nature and quality of their family experience, the function of school and the role of mentors or teachers, the function and quality of friends and intimate relationships, life-changing events (whatever that meant to them), the degree of social acceptance at different stages of their life, and other personal development activities in addition to participation in TMI programs.

Methodology & Process

The initial goal was to identify a representative group from those who had participated in the first phase of the study.  While I was limited to those who had indicated they were willing to participate in a follow-up interview, fortunately more than 200 were open to such an idea by sharing their email address on the survey used in the phase one study.  From this subset I sorted based on the following demographic dimensions:

• Gender
• Age
• Civil Status
• Household Income
• Education

A group of 35 was identified and a letter of invitation prepared and distributed under the signature of the president of the Monroe Institute, Skip Atwater, explaining the purpose of the study and introducing me as the principal investigator.  I then sent a more detailed outline of the specific steps in the interview process including the following list of questions I referenced as the interview guide:

1)    Where did you grow up?  List the various locations and dates, as appropriate.

2)    Who were the most important members of your family to you (including your extended family)?  Describe them and frequency of contact.

3)    What were some of your favorite memories of family life?  Least favorite memories?

4)    What did school mean for you – how did it affect your life?  What did you enjoy the most about school (both through high school and after high school)?  What did you not enjoy about school (both through high school and after high school)?

5)    What would you describe as the most important experiences in your life before you left home and began to live on your own?

6)    Who have been the most influential people in your life after you left home?  Why?

7)    When someone would ask you “what do you do?” how would you have answered that in the early part of your adult life, in the mid-part, etc.?

8)    What jobs have you held?  What was the most rewarding aspect of your work?

9)    What amount of time have you spent living alone and/or with someone else in an intimate relationship?   How important is it to you to have a life partner?   If appropriate, what is the most significant thing you have learned about yourself and others as a result of having a life partner?

10) How many people do you count among your friends?  How would you describe them (qualities, characteristics, why you count them among your friends, etc.)?

11) What events or ongoing activities have been or continue to be instrumental to your growth and development?

12) How would you describe your perfect day?

Those who were interested emailed me with a phone number and I made contact to schedule an interview.  This accounted for the initial 8 interviews conducted over the first 3 months of the study.  While I did get 5 individuals declining to participate, far more simply did not respond either due to changes in their email address or uncertainty about the time commitment.  Consequently, I spent several months in follow-up mode securing another 9 interviews.  The result was a nine-month process for completing the 17 interviews.  To the degree possible, I sought to do each interview in person and was successful in 8 out of the 17.  On average, each interview lasted 3 hours even though I had asked for only 90 minutes.  Attachment A provides a demographic profile of the group.

At the conclusion of each interview, I asked for a commitment to participate in a multi-rater assessment using an online psychometric instrument (the description of the instrument was included in my initial letter to everyone).  The objective was to understand how others familiar with the participants in the study had observed them on a set of dimensions indicative of their interpersonal effectiveness.  Two individuals declined due to personal reasons.  Of the 15 who agreed, 14 completed the process which added another two months on average for each participant since they were now responsible not only for completing the survey themselves but for identifying others who knew them well enough to also complete the online survey.  In the end, data collection, comprised of 17 interviews (52 hours of tape recorded conversations and 300 hundred pages of notes) and 14 multi-rater assessments (210 pages of summary results), took one year to complete.

While my intention was to demonstrate the efficacy of TMI program participation in their growth as individuals, I discovered my reasons for conducting this study were more involved than I knew.  I was privileged to have been granted unfiltered access to the personal stories, dreams, and reflections of these individuals.  The consequence for me is I have felt more like an interlocutor due to the unexpected level of disclosure rather than an investigator who has to work around the fringes of the conversation to tease out information.  The relevance of this to the report that follows is that I have been both an observer and participant who has not been unaffected by these engagements.  As a result, I cannot remove myself from the observations of my encounters.  Rather than a mere report of findings, what follows is a picture of what I heard and experienced combined with my own dreams, reflections, and insights.  Any conclusions I have reached are mine alone but I invite you to make up your own mind about the lives I have depicted.

How it Began

A week before my first interview I had the following dream:

As I walk along a road through a forest which is densely enclosed with thick foliage, I am surprised by the sudden appearance of a mythic figure that emerges out of the jungle of vines, trees, and shrubs.  I have known of its existence, but had never seen one or ever believed I would.  Much like the snow leopard, it is more legend than real because of the rarity of sightings.

It was a small, human-shaped being mounted on an odd animal that seemed to jump like a kangaroo through the undergrowth.  The figure was enclosed in a garment that made me think of a Kachina doll.  Its face set was inside a highly decorated hood that appeared carved out of wood.  My astonishment was matched by hers whereby she immediately returned to the cover of the forest.

As I proceeded down the road in an amazed state of mind, I lost track of time until I came upon men along the road who were using long, tentacle-like whips to search the forest.  The impression I got was an alien invasion in a deliberate effort to find these mythic creatures.

At the time of this dream I was uncertain of its portent. I had been traveling for a few weeks and had many things on my mind. So I wrote down the details in my journal without further reflection. It wasn’t until after my first interview that I came back to it.

I had included on my travel schedule several interviews for this study. The morning of my first interview I found myself noticeably quiet, as if conserving energy. I arrived at my destination on a beautiful day full of promise. The woman I met (Participant A as she will be referred to in the future) was light as air, yet in the story she related, she was suffering a deep pain over a recent loss. Once seated in her living room, I began with an overview of the project and a review of the questions sent out in advance.

With little pomp, we were launched:

Tell me about your parents?

My mother was of Italian origins from New York.  My father was a mutt with Midwestern roots.  He was recruited by the FBI out of high school.  He wanted to become a writer.  My parents met at work, fell in love, got married.  There were three kids, all girls.  I was the oldest one.  Mom suffered from postpartum depression for several years.  She would put us to bed by 5:00 each evening and Dad would come home and come up to see us and we would tell stories.  By my 3^rd Christmas, I was acting odd in front of the camera.

And just like that, I was quickly pulled into a life story that would take me ever deeper and wider. I could see the little girl playing on her magic carpet with a neighbor boy and hear her describe how much she liked to read, how she knew all the planets, and loved to play with her chemistry set. Then came the big day of change at the age of 11 when she had to grow up much too fast with the birth of her 4th sister Linda, who had a serious congenital heart defect, and with the emotional withdrawal of her parents due to her mother’s nervous compulsions and her father’s alcoholism. She now became the caretaker of her little sister whom she played with through an imaginative world they created together. The strain of those years shows in her face as she recounts how she dreamed of running away from home. By high school she was out of touch with her parents to such a degree she was basically living on her own with all the likely consequences that followed – sex, drugs, and depression. How she managed to keep her grades up is anyone’s guess, but she gave testimony to the importance of her friends filling a vacuum in her life.

The maturing process of college laid the foundation for a successful career in business or so it seemed on the surface. Not far below a darkness continued to haunt her resulting in failed relationships, an abortion, the death of close friends, depression and unemployment. But once again, remarkably, she lands on her feet in a new organization with a new career beckoning. It is a cycle that repeats itself over the first half of her life. When she arrives at TMI for the first time she feels she has been through several incarnations in the same body. TMI is another demarcation in her life, a period during which she recounts a series of “road trips.” A modern day version of the ritual undertaking of pilgrimages, she spent time at various centers of healing and self-exploration – Esalen, TMI, the Barbara Brennen School of Healing. She was developing and honing her extrasensory capacity even as she struggled against those aspects of her self. The journey includes helping her youngest sister make her transition – “it was a beautiful death, we sang to her as she died.” She is coming to acceptance of herself in a much larger view of what that means – “we are creating all the time with our thought patterns, by forgiving, by remembering.”

When I left I felt an incredible gift had been granted me. Her energetic presence was much larger than the life story I heard. The raw honesty about herself and her life, spoken with laughter and tears, surprised me. It was as if I had glimpsed a rare sighting in my own encounters with others, one who is living in the presence of their Higher Self. And then I remembered my dream of a week prior and felt the sacredness of what I was embarking upon. I had been given something I knew I had to protect even as I wanted to share it. The project, unbeknown to me until that moment, was to tell the story of a group of people whose lives are richly varied, filled with joy and sorrow, and yet are consciously present to a spectrum of being that continues infinitely beyond the limitations of this time, space, and individual personality.

The Work of Telling Their Story

Each interview after that continued to reveal something new, something unexpected.  I was searching for a pattern, an organizing structure to make sense of these encounters, and was growing increasingly frustrated.  Then in one of my final interviews, to the question of the value of TMI, he noted:

TMI got me outside of my box; got me outside of various traps, constructs, and concepts that had bogged me down.  I simply got to a bigger stage, a larger perspective.  Some people need to have the Out-of-Body Experience (OBE), but for me that isn't my expectation nor has it been my experience at TMI.  In fact, TMI for me is really about the unexpected.  That is why I go back, for the unexpected.

Participant L

This struck a cord with me so I probed a little deeper and asked what he meant:

I am more conscious now.  I get these little epiphanies such as ‘having a higher consciousness isn't about possessing yogic powers, but about being conscious on multiple levels, multiple dimensions and making conscious choices [. . .] It is being more aware, being more awake.’

Participant L

And like that I had my own little epiphany.  I realized I was experiencing my interviewees the way they experienced TMI.  I was learning to be in the presence of individuals who are striving to be conscious on multiple levels and in order to do that, they were not merely open to the unexpected they expected the unexpected.  Alive within an infinite universe that is also alive, they are yet distinctive in their abilities to give voice to what they experience.  The interchange of the two – the life around them and the life within them – is an ongoing process of creation, change, and growth.  “Formation, Transformation/Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation,” is how Goethe captured it (79).  It closely parallels what I understand Kegan and Lahey to mean when they use the term “self-transforming mind” (19).

Kegan and Lahey’s model of human development is built upon the Aristotelian precept that by nature we desire knowledge.  Call it the other half of Goethe’s vision of the eternal mind where our ego-based mind desires to know, to understand, and make meaning of our experience.  It is the human function we are given to develop upon our birth.  Within this context, knowledge is a dynamic relationship between the knower and the known; the more awareness we have of the spectrum of our consciousness, the less unconscious we are of self-limiting concepts and beliefs (fears) and their reflexive conditioning of our responses to situations we encounter.  It is an interactive process of widening perspective that views people “as active organizers of their experience [. . .] and psychological growth as the unself-conscious development of successively more complex principles for organizing experience” (Kegan 29).

Major shifts in perspective leading to more nuanced understanding of self and the world around us can be delineated in stages.  Each stage is a shift in the level of consciousness in which a wider interest appears on one’s life horizon.  This emergent interest gives rise to new personal objectives, an urgency to the acquisition of relevant competencies, and an appropriate sense of satisfaction in goal completion.  But for what purpose or end is this quest for meaning, which I am framing as a desire to live less unconsciously?  Karen Horney, an early pioneer in developmental psychology, defined the relationship between the knower and the known as a striving for self-realization.  Arising out of what she refers to as a morality of evolution, the creative act that constitutes the dance of life is a process of growth and change:

This belief does not mean that man is essentially good - which would presuppose a given knowledge of what is good or bad.  It means that man, by his very nature and of his own accord, strives toward self-realization, and that his set of values evolves from such striving.  Apparently he cannot, for example, develop his full human potential unless he is truthful to himself; unless he is active and productive; unless he relates himself to others in the spirit of mutuality.  Apparently he cannot grow if he indulges in a ‘dark idolatry of self’ (Shelley) and consistently attributes all his own shortcomings to the deficiencies of others [. . .] We arrive thus at a morality of evolution, in which the criterion for what we cultivate or reject in ourselves lies in the question: is a particular attitude or drive inducive [sic] or obstructive to my human growth. (Horney 15)

But no journey is a straight line and no stage of development is permanent. We can sustain our place on the rung of our evolutionary ladder to some degree by accommodating the changing landscape of our life with coping skills, but if we are curious enough or put ourselves in new situations, places, or jobs we increase the likelihood that we will eventually face the time when our world becomes too complex for our current frame of reference. In other words, incorporation of what is conducive or elimination of what is obstructive to our growth entails periods of transition, or more figuratively, periods of exile in some unfamiliar land. During these times we are restless, disoriented, anxious and rudderless. We become unformed (without identity) when the boundaries of an older way of life dissolve to give way to another orientation that is not yet clear. It is a trying time, but also one of opportunity as the limits that have defined us can now be leapt over in a transformation of self.

Transformational growth entails a degree of uncertainty associated with our own completion or destiny. The eternal questions become more pressing at this time: Who am I? Why am I here? How do I live a successful life? When we don’t feel compelled to raise these questions we are under the spell of a current orientation, until the time arises when we are not. Then, once again, the questions we felt we had put to rest come back to haunt us. For example, our teenage years are memorable because of the great angst that underlies the change underway in our lives. In childhood, we were known for our narcissistic tendencies which gave us our endearing capacity to act unself-consciously (spontaneously break out in song or dance in public) and our requirement for supervision to insure our impulsiveness did not harm others or us. Yet at some moment we know we are no longer children, but are we yet adults? We certainly know more about how to behave in public than we did as a child, but is that all there is to being an adult?

This middle ground is fraught with ambiguity because no one quite knows how to treat us even as we express a desire to make our own decisions. If we are honest, we want to explore more widely the world and ourselves within it. But no matter how we try to explain what is changing in us, we find ourselves harangued, curtailed, overruled by our parents. As we try to sneak around the rules we only bring upon ourselves condemnation and more rules that make life unpleasant. If only our parents trusted us! But then, that is the point. As a teenager, we struggle with a crisis of identity that erupts out of our quest for autonomy. We want to take charge of our lives, but in order to have more independence we have to demonstrate responsibility to the needs of others. To come home from a party when we said we would, even if we were having a good time, means we can follow through on our commitments and acknowledge the support and help others have provided us. Without clear understanding of when the shift occurs (call it the day our parents seemed to have gotten smarter), we all managed to achieve greater degrees of autonomy.

The trajectory of our life after we enter adulthood continues to be marked by shifts in how we experience the life around us and within us. It is a process of mental development that only recently has grown in acceptance among neurologists who had traditionally assumed that the brain did not undergo any significant change in capacity after late adolescence. “On the basis of thirty years of longitudinal research,” according to Kegan and Lahey, [Figure #1 – Age and Mental Complexity] the data would show that “mental complexity tends to increase with age, throughout adulthood [. . . and] there is considerable variation within any age” (13-14).

Figure #1 – Age and Mental Complexity: The Revised View Today

The upward sloping cluster indicates mental complexity increasing with age.  The solid black dots illustrate different levels of mental complexity for 6 different individuals all close to 30 years of age.  “While there is an upward trend in the general development of mental capacity with age there is still great variety among individuals.  Some people may be operating at higher levels of mental complexity well before others reach those same levels, if they ever do” (Kegan and Lahey 14).

Illustrated below in Figure # 2 is the result of quantitative analysis of hundreds of transcripts of individuals interviewed and re-interviewed at several-year intervals by Kegan and Lahey and their colleagues.  The graph demonstrates:

• Qualitatively different, discernibly distinct levels which are not arbitrary, but represent different ways of knowing the world,
• Development does not unfold continuously, but swing between periods of stability and periods of change,
• The intervals between transformations to new levels gets longer and longer
• There are fewer and fewer people at the higher plateaus (15)

Figure #2 – The Trajectory of Mental Development in Adulthood

The three plateaus or stages that emerge out of the data are indicative of different relationships between the knower and the known (call them worldviews), each with a logic that provides a framework for extracting meaning from our experiences.  At the earlier end of the spectrum, we are more concerned with how others see us - to be perceived as competent, capable, and dependable - what Kegan and Lahey calls “socialized mind” (17).  Here societal norms form the boundaries of self and determine what is important to pay attention to.  At the later end of the spectrum, it is more about perspective building beyond the limits of an ego-based personality, in other words, self-transforming mind.  Here the transpersonal gives rise to a multi-dimensional view of life which shapes the experience of self.

For the participants in this study, they clearly are influenced by their transpersonal experiences.  How they attempt to gather perspective is the focus of their meaning making efforts, as a brief flavor of the language used by different individuals indicates:

Obviously the beliefs I hold do matter, but at what layer of consciousness do I hold these beliefs?  How did I come to be here in this reality?  Obviously my little self didn't choose this for my little self.  That belief must have been held at the Higher Self level for this reality to be in the first place and for me to be here.  It becomes difficult to sort through at what level I am holding the beliefs I use to create the reality I am experiencing - some would seem quite conscious like taking the first steps toward the sink.

Participant C

I do not hold other people responsible for my happiness or fulfillment.  I find that focusing on anger usually gets me stuck, so I experience it and move on.  My guidance continues to remind me not to take everything so seriously.

Participant D

I am feeling restless again.  It is a periodic thing, and it tells me that there is something else I need at the stage I am in.  This is the clearest sense of restlessness I have experienced, much less noise around it than in the past.  In the past, I worked through my stages of restlessness by just sitting with it.  The question now is not what's next, but what I want to make next.

Participant F

I see my life as full of possibility.  The question for me is can I open up to the possibilities?  Can I see things in a different way?  I am now walking my journey in a way I once only intellectually understood - staying in the moment.  I can recognize when I have stepped out of the moment, but I know I have a choice of moving back into the moment.

Participant H

I am much more aware of what is current around me, but it is like being in an open time book: touching past, present, future all at once.  I can be present to others in this time and present to all time simultaneously.  It is as if I am both a witness and a participant in the events around me.  I can be in a doing mode and a meditative mode simultaneously.

Participant K

When I get into a state where fear enters, I can now let go. I am conscious of a quiet or a peace that is almost always present behind my ego.

Participant M

I now vibrate at a higher level, and I can feel it, when I am in service to others.

Participant N

I am beyond the curiosity or interest in exploring the role of our minds in our experience of ourselves and others, to now having a firm conviction that we create the world around us with our thoughts.  My work is like a prayer for me, whenever I face a new project and I don't know how to approach it I reach inside and wait for a visual to come to me.  I am much more at peace with myself.

Participant O

We operate across a spectrum of consciousness where every level has its work and we each have our purpose.  You move to the work of the next level when the questions become nagging.

Participant P

The me-ness that is inside is looking out of the eyes of my body.  I have gotten most of my lessons through my body.  Pain is no stranger to me.  The way I can receive those messages now are very different.  I once was very ambivalent about being here, in this body, but now I feel very complete

Participant Q

In musing upon these different perspectives, three questions emerge for me that become the lenses or frames of reference for telling their stories:

1)    What is their orientation for which the label “self-transforming” is but a threshold to a more expansive state of being?

2)    How are their life journeys emblematic of their orientation, particularly as it relates to the role of TMI?

3)    How do others see them compared with my analysis

The first question is an exploration into a way of functioning that distinguishes who they are now.  The outcome is a group profile based on the core tenets of their worldview or internal operating logic (their stage of development).  The second question looks more closely at a comparison of life experiences to explore similarities and differences and possible linkages to their current state of being.  One constant in all their lives is the role of TMI, and therefore, becomes a critical part of this evaluation.  Finally, with the introduction of a psychometric assessment instrument, the third question is a comparison between how the participants see themselves in terms of their effectiveness in interaction with others and how others who know them see them on the same dimensions.  It is an opportunity to compare them, individually and collectively, to a database of thousands of other people assessed with this instrument and to make some specific comparisons with norm groups at different stages of development.   

Question #1 or
What is on the Other Side of the Rainbow?

There is an ancient tale of a young man who meets a famous relative in a dream where he is given a view of life on earth from the far reaches of the heavens.  The comprehension of the interconnections or relationships to the order underlying the world upward through the heavens left the dreamer amazed (which continued upon awakening even without recall of the insights he had received).  He had never envisioned the universe by looking back on the planet earth.  It shifted everything for him in terms of how he thought of himself and where he came from.  No longer was his horizon limited to the boundaries of his world and the small community of friends and family he lived with.  There was more to explore and discover than he ever felt possible, and his sense of self now included not only all that he had witnessed but the source of guidance as well.

This centuries old story was a constant backdrop in my interviews.  Each participant struck me as a modern day astronaut who metaphorically was sharing experiences of looking back on the world.  On more than one occasion I was reminded of a sonnet Shakespeare wrote on the nature of love, which he describes as “the star to every wandering bark,/Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken” (116.7-8).  Like ships upon the sea, the participants in this study navigate their lives on the basis of a reality that lies beyond the physical limits of this world.  Rather than orienting themselves in terms of identity and purpose on the expectations of others, generally or specifically, they find their location - their sense of place and direction - in relationship to the unfathomable depth and infinite dimensions of love.

There are a number of implications to be drawn from a self-orientation based on a transpersonal perspective.  From my interviews I can capture the following elements:

1)    Engagement of Multiple Intelligences - development of multiple forms of expression including music, art, and physical movement (dance, athletics, body work) to supplement abstract reasoning as a way of knowing

2)    Anticipation of Liminal States – being in transition on a more frequent basis and the increased interest in the white space or the unformed dimension of possibility that exists between two or more existential planes

3)    Relationship with Inner Guidance – being present to an interior silence or transpersonal awareness while simultaneously interacting in the world

4)    Playfulness towards Life – being open to the dynamic forces of change without succumbing to socially accepted beliefs, biases, or assumptions regarding their meaning

5)    Compassion for Oneself and Others – the essence behind the instinctual needs of human existence which shows up in a qualitative shift in regard to self and others

Let’s take each one of these and examine them more carefully.

Engagement of Multiple Intelligences

What constitutes intelligence is often debated, however, the importance placed upon intelligence as an indicator of human distinction vis-à-vis other life forms is not.  Of course, there is always the possibility of life forms beyond the range of normal human sensory experience which could challenge this assumption, but clearly the value of intelligence to the human experience goes without saying.  The usual testimony to the distinctive quality of the human species is the development of language, technology, art, and architecture evident in the rise of civilization around the world.  Yet the question remains, what is the essence of intelligence that makes these changes possible; that “imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower” (Plato 201)?  What Socrates goes on to note in making the link between the knower and the known is the role of insight – quite literally an inner light which makes knowledge possible.  While definitions of intelligence vary, the root meaning of the word is “to understand.”  But understanding begins with acceptance of what is not yet known.  To revel in the question rather than possess an answer is to proceed from the known into the unknown with the realization, according to Werner Heisenberg, a Noble Prize physicist, that "we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word understanding" (201).  What Heisenberg came to realize in the course of developing a scientific principle based on relationships of uncertainty is that the wider one’s embrace of the objects of knowledge the more the results challenge underlying assumptions.  Such a paradox is particularly relevant to the experience of our participants in attempting to understand their transpersonal identities.

Heisenberg was a classically trained physicist who, along with several other scientists in the early half of the 20th-century, encountered very disturbing evidence that seemed to indicate an irrationality operating at the smallest levels of nature.  What he discovered was that subatomic particles, e.g. electrons, exhibit contradictory behaviors depending on the type of experiment conducted.  Heisenberg describes his personal challenge:

Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments? [. . .] The assumption that this was actually true led to limitations in the use of those concepts that had been the basis of classical physics since Newton [. . .] One had learned that the old concepts fit nature only inaccurately. (42-43)

He had come to an epistemological shift with regard to the nature of knowledge.  Rather than the operating assumption that objectivity is possible in the observation of natural phenomena, the implication is that objectivity can be attained only for that part of nature that allows for it.  There is apparently a limit to what can be discovered by use of the principles of classical science, and the limiting factor is the unique role each observer plays in interaction with what is observed.  “In this way quantum theory reminds us, as [Niels] Bohr has put it, of the old wisdom that when searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both players and spectators” (Heisenberg 58).

The search for meaning may be the driving force of human existence, but as Heisenberg notes, our role in that journey is more instrumental than the answers we receive.  Often the questions we have are a matter of survival; an attempt to deal with pain and suffering through an inquiry into why things happen the way they do.  In these situations there is real urgency to the effort.  But the passion or energy associated with this search for answers is not enough to comprehend what is meant by intelligence.  Passion is necessary, but it is not sufficient.  There is a further quality that when coupled with passion creates the conditions for insight.  It is a quality that shows up among the participants in this study as the most prominent reason for attending TMI – curiosity.  For those gifted with the irreverent quality of exploration for its own sake, questions are merely the means for taking the next step into the unknown.  For the participants in this study, curiosity was nurtured early.  One of the first things I noticed was the number of individuals who spoke to their early memories of reading, which was a subset of their more general comments regarding the importance of reading in their lives.  Reading, as they described it, was like stepping into a transporter room that beamed them into other worlds.  So it would come as no surprise that behind the value of reading was a rich imaginative life which took root in many different activities:

My best memories [. . .] lots of make believe.  I played on a magic carpet that took my friends and me into new worlds where we had many adventures.  I remember telling one my friends that he was so lucky because he could grow up to be an astronaut [. . .] But I was just curious about a number of things.  I loved stories of dinosaurs.  I remember getting a chemistry set as a child and “mixing potions.”

Participant A

I was really good at daydreaming.  I liked to role play [. . .] Because of my father’s work [a historian who recreated live representations of American pioneer life], I lived in a fantasy world.  Life was all about going out to have adventures.

Participant B

I have been spiritually oriented since a child.  When I was 4 years old I jumped on a pile of sawdust only to find I was out-of-body.  Some years later, I remember running around the edge of the lake in the trees.  It was easy to get into a meditative state while running.

Participant C

As a child I could fly and communicate well with trees and other living things. I had lots of imaginary friends.

Participant D

I was always active, always exploring.  I played cowboys and Indians with the neighbors.  I had a very active imagination [. . .] created places in our yard for building forts and pathways.  I imagined the world of King Arthur and the intrigues that took place at court.

Participant E

As a child I could see things out of the corner of my eye and believed I was seeing into other dimensions.

Participant F

I liked climbing trees – it was quiet and it was in nature. I stuffed a lot of things inside of me and then I would read books and go climb trees to deal with it [. . .] If I ever got bored, I could always daydream.

Participant H

As a child I was fascinated with the idea of God and salvation. Going to Sunday school was an important early experience.

Participant K

I spent a lot of time alone.  I liked to read and draw.  My earliest memory was drawing rockets to Pluto.  I was reading mostly non-fiction as a child.  I liked books on airplanes and astronomy.  I also played cops and robbers/cowboys and Indians with the kids in the neighborhood.  We didn’t have many toys so we had to be pretty imaginative.  I would just play anything that was make-believe.

Participant L

I usually played games with adults.  I began playing chess at 3 or 4.  I spent a lot of time alone.  I liked to read, to spend time in nature sitting still and watching wildlife.  Animals are very open and people put up screens.

Participant M

Comic book reading was my favorite pastime, but I also read books – reading was an important part of my life. I also played board games or imaginary games with my friends. I particularly remember playing cowboys and Indians. I also loved riding bikes into the country to explore. I always had an affinity with nature.

Participant N

I played a lot of games with my sister.  I remember playing Operator.  I also remember a boy in Russia who I climbed trees with.  I didn’t have many friends so I would spend time alone – mentally, not physically.  I lived in a city and would spend time observing others.  While I didn’t have imaginary friends or fantasies, I do remember thinking “Here I am 4 years old and it is the right age.”  I had more philosophical thoughts about things.

Participant O

I grew up playing cowboys and Indians with my friends, climbing trees, and exploring the foothills nearby.  I was often accused of having an overactive imagination.  I had an imaginary friend for 3 years who was a very vivid presence in my life.

Participant P

I lived in a fantasy world.  I was a fairy-like child.  I had my spirit friends.  People would tell me their stories when I was young rather than the other way around.  I tended to be rather quiet.  I was a listener.

Participant Q

It could be argued that imagination is another sensory organ, a means for exploring beyond the limits of the known or current reality.  Clearly for the participants in this study it was an active element early in their lives.  What is also clear is how the function of imagination, as the agent of curiosity, continued to evolve in the course of their lives.  The development of multiple aptitudes or, to use Howard Gardner’s term, multiple intelligences, beyond the early interest in playing “make believe” is indicative of this evolution as Attachment B illustrates (6-18).  While some of these interests proved to have an economic by-product at various times in their lives, the more instrumental goal they served was to widen the range and deepen the nature of their explorations.  To refer to their interests and abilities as evidence of multiple intelligences makes this point more clearly.

To be clear, however, I am not proclaiming a theoretical link between Gardner’s research and the aptitudes of the participants in this study.  I am noting that the idea of understanding as a definition of intelligence is more than an ability to solve problems.  There is a capacity for learning that has as its goal new vistas, new worlds, and wider perspective.  In his clinical studies, Carl Jung observed how his patients overcame dysfunctional patterns of behavior and self-defeating routines when they “brought something new into being,” i.e., a new perspective:

All the greatest and most important problems in life are fundamentally Insoluble [. . .] They can never be solved, but only outgrown [. . .] This “outgrowing,” as I formerly called it, proved on further investigation to be a new level of consciousness.  Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening on his or her outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency.  It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. (CW 13: 17)

To define learning as leading to a new level of consciousness is to see it as a process of discovering “a new and stronger life urge.”  What is it that moves people from one state of existence to another?  Is it an awakening much like a door opening onto a New World?  Is it a remembering of something we always knew and are now amazed we had forgotten?  Is it a glimpse of the fullness of life operating outside our frame of reference?  Regardless of how we describe the experience, a change in orientation is the result of an altered picture of reality.  For the participants in this study a principle objective of their learning agenda has been an exploration into the void behind the apparent reality of the universe and the change in perspective that ensues.  Their development of multiple intelligences is merely an expression of different ways of conducting that exploration.  For self-transforming individuals, a journey of possibilities is more relevant than having a fixed destination.  Requisite to this journey is imagination and curiosity, tools for probing beyond the safety of known boundaries.

Anticipation of Liminal States

Liminality is a description of the transitional phase between different existential planes.  The definition can extend to a number of categories from ritual practices, to time (twilight or changes of season), to physical location (the edge of a forest or other points of spatial change), to identity (mixed ethnicity or transgender sexuality).  Within ritualistic practices of modern culture a classic example is the state of being engaged.  This is a liminal state for those who are neither single nor yet married.  It is also a state whose boundaries have a powerful effect on others.  In my own case, I remember the confusion and embarrassment I felt in college when attempting to ask a girl for a date only to learn she was recently engaged (sans ring because her fiancé was in another city and had yet given it to her).  My clumsy reaction, due to feeling I had committed a terrible taboo, was really quite amusing to her now that her search for the “right person” was seemingly resolved.  The liminal state of engagement can result in a unique perspective on courtship (the past), which may have accounted for her reaction.  At the same time, with their objective close at hand but not yet attained, the engaged have time to reflect on the marriage that is yet to occur (the future).  Engagement is a period of new awareness resulting from an in-between state and it is this temporal boundedness which gives it a magical quality.

When describing the participants in this study as being well acquainted with liminal states, it applies not merely to the typical categories listed above but also to states of consciousness.  In the use of the audio-guidance technology at TMI, exposure to the threshold between waking consciousness and the different focus levels associated with changes in brain wave activity is a liminal state whose frequency of experience is a differentiating aspect of their lives.  As mentioned above, the idea of expecting the unexpected when attending a TMI program is learned through exposure to multiple programs.  It is a state of mind they become familiar with; the unbounded state between the past and the future, where something is going to change even though it isn’t entirely clear what.

How that translates into the more mundane dimensions of their lives can be seen in the way they explore their hopes and fears.  Wherever a boundary shows up, whether in terms of vocation, relationships, or personal interests, it merely becomes an invitation for further inquiry, which sometimes means testing the nature of the boundary.  As Participant F noted about his array of personal pursuits, “I am trying to address my fears.”  In his case, he has learned to skydive, to sail, and to ride motorcycles.  But it isn’t limited to physical activities.  He also has what he calls “a conservative Christian friend” with whom he has “an ongoing conversation about death and the afterlife.”  Whatever he might have experienced for himself regarding the nature of death, he is ready to evaluate it in the light of another perspective, especially one that may be opposed to his own.

Anxiety is a natural response to whatever disturbs the boundaries of our comfort zone, i.e., our current way of being.  Liminality is an appropriate description of those times when we are aware of a moment of choice between what has been and what can yet be, between who we think we are and a blinding insight into what we are.  It is a point of demarcation that can be mere seconds in length or a no-man’s land where we can wander for years.  It is a transitional state when the boundaries of our world no longer seem solid and our past is no longer a predictor of what is going to happen next.  It is a troubling time, but not an unusual state of being, as Nietzsche’s insight attests:

Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound: whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself also know how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence. (175)

Participants in this study have learned to consciously spend time in the white space, the unformed potential or prima material of our lives.  They actually seem to enjoy it as if it is part of a practice in the artistry of their own lives.  They use phrases, in talking about their lives, such as:

Stepping more fully into life (into possibility) rather than walking around the edges

Participant G

Wanting to trust a journey I do not understand

Participant H

Seeking those moments when you can witness the manifestation of spiritual forces

Participant I

Becoming unsettled is important to learning

Participant K

Watching my inner resistance

Participant B

Making a conscious decision to live in this world

Participant Q

Learning what being more awake means

Participant L

From certainty, to uncertainty, to certainty is what defines me [a reference to a continual loop between polarities]

Participant P

An experience shared by Participant C characterizes the liminal state taken to its transcendent conclusion. He was explaining what happened to him one day while he was driving. Suddenly,

everything just vanished and I am in an eternal moment as a point of consciousness that can see in all directions.  There are lines of light going away from me; my possible and probable futures [. . .] And between every moment Here, I am in a moment There, and I am holding different memories of the future and the past, every moment.  It kind of reminded me of the white frames in between the movie pictures.

When I asked him what was different for him now, he replied, “in a way nothing and in a way everything.”

To navigate one’s life unconsciously based on assumptions derived from past experience is like having a hammer and seeing every problem as a nail.  It is a logical orientation only to the degree past experience is applicable to the present or current context.  And current context is to a large degree a result of what we are capable of seeing or envisioning as Richard Tarnas notes:

Although there exists many defining structures in the world and in the mind that resist or compel human thought and activity in various ways, on a fundamental level the world tends to ratify, and open up according to, the character of the vision directed towards it. (406)

Such is the function of self-transforming individuals.  They are more likely to question their existing assumptions in the light of what more there is to learn (or unlearn).  They are more likely to suspend judgment, which as Jung wrote, “is always based on experience, i.e., on what is already known [and] as a rule it is never based on what is new, what is still unknown, and what under certain conditions might considerably enrich [consciousness]” (The Portable Jung 275).  In other words, one of the principles I have learned from the participants in this study is the value of liminal states as a means for building greater capacity for openness to “what is still unknown.”

Relationship with Inner Guidance

When referencing transpersonal experiences, which TMI alumni do in a variety of ways (often without using the term transpersonal), it begs the question of what is similar or different among their experiences.  The idea of the transpersonal emerged in the last century among psychologists who view the ego-based personality and its centralizing function of consciousness within individuals as but one part of a totality defined as the Self.  Within this totality is a spectrum of consciousness that is not limited to classic notions of physics (time-space continuum) or autonomy (I in relation to my thoughts).  Boundary violation on either dimension (physical or mental) is often grounds to speak of a mystical experience.  The variety of experiences cast as mystical has been well documented by Michael Murphy in his book The Future of the Body (the title alluding to the fact, in Murphy’s thesis, that what we call mystical is a form of meta-normal human functioning or human potential yet unrealized within a normal range of functioning).

Robert Forman, in his book Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, makes a further distinction regarding mystical experience by distinguishing between “intentional consciousness” and “awareness per se” (112, 131).  The former is what we use in crafting our worldviews.  It is indicative of our stage of development and, some would say, our reason for becoming human – to learn how to expand our consciousness.  The latter has always existed autonomously.  From where it stems is no place and it is every place.  It has many names and they are all symbols of the ineffable principle of existence - Yahweh, Tao, Godhead, “a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being” (Meister Eckhart, 178).

To explain the distinction Forman is making, I want to share a dream I had some years back.

It is late at night and I am standing outside a large, limestone building of classic Victorian construction.  Around me are a number of dwarfish, shadowy individuals who are breaking into the building (they are ill defined because I cannot make out their features or the details of their actions, but I know what they are doing).  In my arms I am carrying a small child who radiates with a serenity that beguiles its infant state.  I exhibit a level of excitement about what is happening that seems to go unnoticed by the child.  Somehow I know that the child has had a vision, as the child often does, and I am actively pursuing clues to uncover the nature of this vision.  I am seeking artifacts, text, and pictures I can hold before the child to see if a glimmer of recognition appears in its eyes.  My diminutive friends are breaking into the building because I believe within are a number of promising clues.

Once inside the building I move rapidly down long corridors extracting one artifact after another from the shelves along the walls to hold before the child.  For a period of time the child shows no interest in what I am doing, remaining quietly content and unperturbed.  Finally, I notice the child's eyes focus on one particular fragment.  As I turn to look at it I begin to awake from my dream and in that instant I recognize it as a tablet from the ancient Mesopotamian text The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Putting aside the personal significance of the imagery, the dream illustrates several dimensions of a larger Self.  My dream "I" was an accurate depiction of the interests, motivations, and behaviors of my waking "I" - my sense-making role or intentional consciousness.  What "I" am seeking are answers to extraordinary events, visions, and dreams - epiphanies - channeled through a dimension of the Self represented by the child (who is present to my dream “I” but slightly out-of-phase with my waking consciousness).  The dream acknowledges this dimension of the Self by providing it with physical representation, though interestingly, I cannot tell if the child is male or female.

In my dream, the child is without desire, that is to say, it has no need to make meaning from its existence or experiences.  As such, it is a representative of “awareness per se”, what Forman also refers to as a pure consciousness event (6).  As the child exists non-physically, one could say it knows "spiritually" (all things all at once across existence – it is non-distinct from the object of its knowledge).  On the other hand, "I" know by means of contrast and comparison with something already known (sequentially over time within the plane of my physical existence – I am distinct from the object of my knowledge).

Forman calls the two orientations and their epistemological structures “the dualistic mystical state” (150-151).  In his definition, the pure consciousness event represented by the child is no longer a temporary state (a peak experience), but co-exists simultaneously with engagement in the world.  It is the phenomenon of intentionally knowing (knowledge by direct sensory contact or through conceptualization) combined with non-intentional knowing (the pure consciousness event or awareness per se).  In other words, the dualistic mystical state knows the self reflectively simultaneous with seeing, acting, thinking, etc.  The result is a permanent presence of awareness which can be characterized as an unchanging silence within.  The way that shows up for most of the participants in this study is through an ever-present sense of guidance.

For more than a decade, I have been consciously following the guidance of my “wider self” (I prefer this term to higher self).  I use discernment, but there is a clear sense of what is true.

Participant B

The feeling of the higher self being present never leaves.

Participant C

I always had a strong presence of guidance [which has been experienced as] a sense of grace most of my life. Rather than struggling with my choices, I have felt guided to go through the open doors the universe has provided me.

Participant D

I have experienced a place filled with love that is always there; a place I go back to whenever I want. It is a reassuring feeling I carry.

Participant F

I felt the emergence of guidance in my life when I began meditating over 40 years ago. I became the ocean that I am.

Participant I

I am now in a state of silence even in the midst of others. As emotions come up I can witness them.

Participant K

I have a sense that things lead where they are meant to – the sense that I had to learn certain thing before other opportunities emerged.

Participant L

I am conscious of a quiet or a peace that is always present behind my ego.

Participant M

There is a deep peace to me. I don’t worry about life being fair. In the great realm of things, it all gets sorted out.

Participant P

The co-existence of an awareness that is clearly transpersonal in nature with the discerning qualities of our unique mental and emotional apparatus becomes a permanent fixture in their lives.  What may have begun as a goal, “glimpses into the transpersonal waves of awareness,” is often transitory (Wilbur 269).  The peak experience associated with pure consciousness events is a tool for learning and development, not an end in itself.  For those whose forays into the transpersonal are temporary in duration it is but the beginning of a deeper transformation.  To stop short of that work is the result of what Jorge Ferrer calls “spiritual narcissism” which he describes as a failure to adequately integrate spiritual openings:

The structuring of spiritual phenomena as objects experienced by a subject [leads] to a conception of spiritual phenomena as transient experiential episodes that have a clear-cut beginning and end – in contrast, for example, to realizations or insights that, once learned, change the way one sees life and guides one’s future actions in the world. (38)

One of the distinguishing differences identified in the first phase of this study between those who had only attended the Gateway Voyage program and those who had attended multiple TMI programs was not merely the nature of the shift in their personal worldviews but the degree of self-awareness evident in their level of self-disclosure.  One reason I have discovered for this difference is a lasting presence of an inner awareness or presence referred to as guidance.

The confidence with which the participants gave to this inner guidance was quite evident even while they told stories of decisions and actions they took that ran counter to familial, cultural, or societal norms.  When I probed to understand the abiding value of what at times could appear to be a flippant reference to this invisible force in their lives, I was always surprised with what I heard.  To give but one example:

What have I learned from my guidance?  How to awaken to the truth of who I am by recognizing the shame and guild I still carry and to love myself as I am.  I have carried an unknown wound throughout my life [she was sexually molested as a child].  I saw the effects of it but didn’t understand it.

My first insight into healing was taking responsibility for my own feelings.  My second insight was to discover that there is nothing in the terrorist that isn’t also in me.  My third insight, the universe is a mystery.  Let go of the idea of ever figuring it out, of putting the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together.

Participant B

There is a paradox of control within their lives that is instrumental to their state of being.  On the one hand, they are actively engaged in the world across multiple roles as they clearly detailed in each interview.  They are parents, siblings, sons and daughters, spouses, lovers, bosses, workers, community volunteers, friends, and citizens.  They are players in the game of life.  On the other hand, there is an undercurrent to them which I became more attuned to in the course of each interview.  What emerged was a deeper dimension of self; their own version of a divine child they carried whose choiceless awareness instilled a distinctive energy.  Call it the witness state, but their surrender to it is the guiding force of their lives.

Playfulness Towards Life

The more time spent consciously operating across the spectrum of consciousness the less one tends to identify with perspectives formed by a more limited range of consciousness.  The relativity of this statement is obvious, but the intent is to suggest that transpersonal experience begins a journey that alters fundamental premises about one’s self.  Jill Bolte Taylor gives an excellent description of her initial struggle to assimilate the experience of being more than her physical body.  When a blood clot in the left side of her brain shut down neural pathways affecting her ability to see herself as a distinct personality bounded by a physical body, she had her “stroke of insight:”

When I awoke later that afternoon I was shocked to discover that I was still alive.  When I felt my spirit surrender I had said goodbye to my life, and now my mind was suspended between two very opposite planes of reality.  Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain.  Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape.  Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle.  And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria.  I remember thinking there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. (Taylor)

The shock she speaks of isn’t merely the amazement of a pure consciousness event - her spirit “gliding through a sea of silent euphoria” - but also, the attempt to reconcile the expansiveness of that transpersonal awareness in terms of physical limitations, i.e., putting the genie back in the bottle.  The challenge is not unlike what I had to deal with upon returning from my initial Gateway program at TMI.  While not as dramatic as Taylor’s realization she was still alive, I nonetheless felt a disorientation that had long-lasting personal implications.

The way I experience the hemi-sync process is the dilation of the left hemisphere of the brain, which results in the flood of right brain consciousness followed by guided excursions beyond my ordinary knowledge.  In the course of the week in the Gateway program the aperture was so open it took several days upon returning home for it to return to anything resembling what it once was.  However, when I had become reasonably grounded, I was surprised by the maze of stimuli I was not able to process very effectively (at least in terms of my expectations).  I became increasingly unsettled by how I now experienced myself and, in succeeding weeks, grew more disconnected from the person others referenced when speaking of me.  It led me to seriously wonder about the truth of my own identity.  Is my self-awareness a private reality?  If so, on what basis is it true?  Questions such as these did not ease my transition.  The more I attempted to find something to hold onto the more it merely accentuated the rumblings from deep inside of me.

In time I slowed my thought process – too much effort to process too much information only short-circuited what I was not in control of anyway.  I took to sitting and observing without purpose, particularly when I was away from the more familiar contexts such as home and office.  A few weeks later, I was sitting idly in the gate area of a major airport awaiting my flight and watching people come and go when suddenly I wondered to myself, “How would I describe myself in a sentence or less?”  Almost immediately an answer emerged in my mind, “a stranger in a strange land.”  Though startled I remained in a meditative mood and began to have a vision of myself wandering among an alien race of people unaware that I was a foreigner among them.  This “stranger” was troubled by a sense of fear and resentment, but had no reasonable explanation for the cause of his disturbance.  And then the vision faded.

Unknown to me at the time, I was in transition.  One life had ended and another was beginning and there were things I was still shedding, mourning, and trying to honor even as I was moving towards a new identity.  It wasn’t just a change in self-image, it was a change in a way of perceiving – a shift in mental functioning.  The notion of being “a stranger in a strange land” was not coincidental or merely a literary allusion.  What I didn’t want to acknowledge is what participants in this study have accepted, we are all aliens.  It is an observation they shared not in derision but in a state of musing aloud as if coming out of a reverie.  In the course of each interview, there were unprompted stories or insights that I surmise was the deeper dimension of their Self speaking to me.  At the same time, there was almost a tongue-in-cheek quality about some of these revelations - a playfulness even as there was a seriousness in the message.  To listen to the following quotes with an ear for this subtle dimension reveals an attitude about life that can embrace wholeness in whatever form that takes, even if it initially overwhelm one’s ability to make sense of it.  And when that boundary of understanding is breached and “I get into a state where fear enters,” as Participant M noted, “I can let go of the fear:”

It is all about embracing what IS without having to change things.  I don’t give a rat’s ass for metaphysics or theology.  I have never been a searcher.  I have never been a wanderer.  I was just where I was.

More divine Mother energy is coming through me now – I am more of a girly girl

Participant B

In any reality, it is impossible not to hold our Higher Self consciously, and yet we are attempting to do it.  We are all completely mad, mad as hatters, living a delusion that we are separate from our Higher Self.

The inner search for the absolute has been the firmest direction of my intention, my interest.  And in this reality there are so few absolutes.  The only one that I have found is that belief proceeds reality.

While I agree that we are that which existed before creation, once creation started, once we separated ourselves from that which is, we became I or god, and with the “I” thought came the “I am,” the equal peace with the oneness, and with that original separation from that which we are came creation.  Creation is eternal, we can’t turn it off.  There is only endless experiencing, we can’t turn it off.  This is my belief.

Participant C

I enjoy my life though at times I miss having someone to share intimate things.  I am not sure I am willing to do the give and take that is necessary for living a full life with another person.

I have a cottage on 30 acres in Wisconsin which I use as a retreat.  This summer I was floating on a raft on the lake and I had an encounter with a male loon who came within 6 feet of me.  I had a strong sense of merging or union with this wild bird.  It is now one of my highlights

Participant H

I built up a lucrative practice [as a writer], went on tour and was featured regularly in the media. The part of me that was flying wasn’t the part that was meant to fly. A near death experience in an automobile accident brought me back in the groove again.

Participant Q

A favorite memory as a child was when my parents would go to Mr. Fan on a regular basis to get “an adjustment.”  Mr. Fan was a professional wrestler who became a masseuse.  He was a huge man, reminded me of a Sumo wrestler.  One day he was working with my Dad at our home and after observing my brother for a few minutes, asked my Dad how long my brother had been deaf in his right ear.  My Dad had never told him that, but my brother had been born using forceps since my mother had lots of problems in childbirth.  The result had been a shifting of the bones behind his right ear that had gone undetected since birth though he could not hear.  Mr. Fan asked my Dad, “Would you like me to fix that for you?”  After getting permission from my father, he took my brother’s head and hugged it to his chest.  He twisted the bones in his skull and his ear popped open.  It has been fine ever since.

Mr. Fan had special skills, I would suspect.

Participant P

My first horse was really, really kind.  I needed that at the time.  My second horse was a tough customer.  It was a question of rhythm and lightness with that horse.  My third horse came off the Mexican Olympic team, but had been ruined as a result of some terrible vices.  It was a question of retraining, becoming light and soft.  I learned how to be in perfect balance – to find my balance in balance with the horse . . . .

Breaking my back [when thrown from a horse early in her career] taught me to be more balanced, because I couldn’t carry weights.

Participant M

Obviously, there is a further subtext to each of these individuals, but the lovely way they were fearless in their disclosures, conveying a sense of wonder, displayed an other worldliness.  Integration means acknowledging their change in perspective, even reveling in it.  “There is a stamp you acquire.  You don’t think in conventional terms,” is how Participant I describes it.

Herman Hesse, a Nobel Prize winning author, wrote a story of a young man whose sense of his own difference alienated him from others.  He was repelled by the brutality of the world and lonely at the same time.  Yet, his fear ran deeper.  He could not accept the “stamp he had acquired,” which is the mark of his essential nature.  As Hesse notes, every one has but one task, “to discover his own destiny – not an arbitrary one – and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself.  Everything else [is] only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness” (111).  The implication, for the participants in this study, is openness to the unfolding of their lives and the associated vulnerability that follows.  It is a scary proposition to be out on a limb not knowing where your path leads with only your guidance to trust in.  For many, they remain fairly solitary figures with relatively few close, intimate friends.  A stranger in a strange land they may be, but beyond the courage to accept their “path” and live it wholly and resolutely, there is a lightness to them that plays on life’s subtle energy like a butterfly on a summer breeze.  They have seen themselves in their essence and know, as Participant O shared, what they are “without all the baggage accumulated in this life.”

Compassion for Oneself and Others

In spiritual traditions, it is not unusual to speak of compassion as a sign of enlightenment.  William James, one of the early social scientists to investigate and categorize spiritual experience in terms of psychological functioning, reviewed the case files on hundreds of individuals to explore the relationship between mental health and spiritual vitality.  In his seminal work delivered as a series of lectures that was later published as a book entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience, James determined that there are four “qualities of sanctification [that arise with] the attainment of a new level of spiritual vitality.”  To briefly summarize they are:

1.     A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's selfish little interests

2.     A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power [Higher Self, Atman, Tao, God, etc.] with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control

3.     An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood [ego] melt down

4.     A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards 'yes, yes,' and away from 'no,' where the claims of the non-ego are concerned (193-94)

While I wouldn’t expect the participants in this study to describe themselves as enlightened, many of the qualities James identified are evident in their lives as previously noted.  Further, there is a distinctive element to their lives in the notion of a “shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections,” what I am terming compassion, which first had as its objective the trauma of their own lives.

In each interview I explored family background, childhood, friendships, and educational experiences.  I continued this line of inquiry into the adult years adding the dimensions of work, intimate relationships, and personal development to the conversation.  I asked about pleasant and unpleasant experiences or memories and important events or occurrences.  Personal trauma was readily evident in their stories from the time they were born up to the current day - emotional and physical abuse, serious injuries and illnesses (near fatal in many cases and debilitating in others), marital divorce and broken engagements, and the death of loved ones.  These are not people who have lived sheltered lives.  Their struggles have been heart wrenching, but they tell their stories with an honesty that displayed no self-pity or remorse.  Without being too graphic I will share four representative examples of the depth of suffering experienced by the participants in this study:

I spent the first 18 months of my life in the hospital.  I guess I didn’t really want to be here very badly because I have had a long-term relationship with the thin veil that separates the Here from the There.  Over the course of my life I have spent many years in various hospitals having suffered from Crone’s disease and survived 4 near death experiences.

Participant Q

When my first husband reached his mid-twenties he became seriously disturbed and eventually committed suicide after we had been married for 15 years. I would have left him because he was abusive to me and one evening almost killed me. I learned that love can’t fix everything.

Participant M

I was adopted as an infant and raised by a mother who couldn’t have children. I believe she felt shame given the importance of lineage in her family. She could hardly touch me and would seldom acknowledge me when I was in the room. I had a real aversion to being touched as a result of my upbringing.

Participant E

I fantasized about running away from home – I was quite depressed as a child [note the additional summary of her life provided above on pages 5 & 6].

Participant A

Behind their disclosures was an awareness of the consequences of their trauma in terms of a loss of self-confidence, heightened anxiety, depression, alienation, and splintered egos.  The straightforward way in which participants spoke of their shortcomings and the inner work they have done and/or have yet to do demonstrated a degree of personal objectivity that is consistent with self-transforming individuals.  But beyond that I discovered a level of extraordinary care they felt they had received in their lives.  They pointed to it in many ways from how they addressed their fears, to how they perceived their lives and their choices, to how they now interact with others:

Fear of being molested, of not being able to say no [something that happened at the age of 3]. Over the course of my life, I have intellectually experienced being molested from every angle. I have done a lot of healing to recognize the shame and guilt I still carry, but I am learning to love myself as I am. There is nothing in the terrorist that is not also in me.

Participant B

I was in a car crash as a teenager. I was terrified when suddenly I felt these hands on my shoulders and I knew I was safe.

Participant C

I now feel I don’t need to fit in before using my gifts [as a healer] to help others take their next step. I know I don’t heal people. It is their own inner state that leads to their healing.

Participant D

I came to realize I needed to find my own path towards wholeness. I could become an incredible thief or I could become a great person.

Participant E

All my life I have felt there was always something other than me that took care of me.

Participant F

The irresistible forces in my life seemed to condemn me to bouts of depression that left me struggling for understanding. When I had a heart attack, a light filled my existence with an experience of love that overwhelmed me for days. Since then I have felt a sense of acceptance.

Participant I

I began to forgive myself for some of the things I was still judging myself harshly. Essentially, I have learned to take responsibility for my life rather than getting stuck in the victim role of trying to please others.

Participant J

I am still the same person, but more in process of maturing in the way I react to life or others. I am not frightened or unnerved by most situations I face.

Participant K

I have learned to accept the healings wherever and whenever they are offered me.

Participant L

The healing that has occurred in their lives, resulting in a qualitatively different self regard, is not a short-term experience. It has been underway for years, as most of them realize. The difference in their understanding is an acknowledgment that, as Participant M described, “I was always protected.”

What is the source of this compassion which has allowed them to overcome so many hardships? What has contributed to its conscious presence in the face of their woundedness? The quality of inner guidance has a depth that goes beyond merely a voice speaking to them. Behind that voice or vision or extrasensory awareness is an essence that is more real or true than any conditioned response acquired as a function of the instinctual needs of human existence. It is a lesson made clear to me in the following dream:

I am in the middle of a city and appearances would indicate that this is a seedy neighborhood. Buildings are not well kept and few people are out and about. When I become aware of myself, I am a late middle-aged woman who has been a prostitute. Memories come flooding back to me. I remember the brutality of a life living on the streets turning tricks and the mental, emotional, and physical scars which eventually left me homeless and destitute. I remember how I was eventually hospitalized, but like a bad dream that I awake from now and again I don’t recall the details of the institution, just the impersonalized nature of the experience that left me lifeless but functioning.

Now I am living on some kind of state support near the poverty level. I have acquired enough capacity to take care of myself though I still have serious struggles with relapses. But I am aware of what is going on around me. I continue to live close to my old haunts and see some of the old “friends” – people like me who were once young and beautiful. While I am at the hospital for a check-up I pass by a room where I see two women I recognize. They were always inseparable, a twin-billed prostitute act, who went everywhere together. Now they are a couple of schizophrenic bag ladies like I had become. They know something is up because they act like caged animals. Either they have been mugged or merely rounded up by the police and brought in for evaluation. In any case, they are moving around the room mumbling the same things over and over. One is saying that they were only trying to get back to where they belong. The other is trying to get all her belongings back together and ready for inspection.

I can see their world the way they see it. The books they have been carrying look shiny and new and just need a wet cloth to wipe off the dirt on them. But no one will help them. The nurse is complaining that she doesn’t know what to do because they are in such an agitated state. I step into the room and look at the books, resisting for just a moment because the empathy I feel for these two women is almost too painful to bear. And then I commit myself and begin to help. I find myself putting the torn cover jackets back on the old, worn books that have been discarded by someone years ago. To my friends, these are precious possessions and none of the hospital staff can see them the way I do, the way my friends do.

As I am doing this work, I hear the buzz around me of the medical staff and I begin to cry. I say out loud to no one in particular, “Why can’t people get a little bit of help.” As my tears fall upon the book that I am cleaning, I lay my head down. I don’t know if I sleep, but it seems that almost instantly the sun breaks through the window in the room and I hear one of the two old women say to me, “Good morning, pumpkin.” She doesn’t remember any of the events that had moved me to such feelings of anguish. And I sit up and look at her somewhat dazed myself. Then I realize that she isn’t in any pain because she isn’t present to the world of “today” and I nod and walk out of the room.

When I awoke it was daylight and I was muttering to myself over and over like one of the women in my dream. I felt like crying but I was overwhelmed with the reality of the moment and too amazed to cry. I had experienced my inner state as I had treated it for so many years. And even after the near destruction of this empathic and compassionate force within me, I had yet the strength and courage to reach out to my alienated, fragmented, suffering self in the knowledge that this sacrifice could be in vain. In attempting to give comfort and succor by helping restore the old books, I risked the possibility that my help would be of little or no value. Nonetheless some aspect of me was moved to act unselfishly in spite of my own damaged state. This is what touched me so dearly upon awaking; the recognition that in my efforts to meet the demands of my life I had isolated and abused the very source of my humanity which nonetheless compassionately attended to my waywardness.

As the participants in this study have learned to acknowledge the extraordinary care operating behind their individual circumstances they have acquired a similar regard for the suffering of others. It is an orientation based on an understanding they are not the cause of any comfort that others experience, but rather, agents in “helping others take their next step.” When I heard this expressed by Participant D the image that came to mind was of beings who show-up at the time of our physical death. Metaphorically, it applies to the major transitions in our lives when others can appear to help us across the threshold of change and transformation. This work is vocational in the sense of “being called” to be present with others under the aspect of our transpersonal or higher self; what I understand William James to mean in his reference to “spiritual vitality” as the, “shifting of the emotional centre towards [. . .] 'yes, yes,' and away from 'no,' where the claims of the non-ego are concerned” (194). The following quotes illustrate the point:

As a result of the energy that flows through me now, the one thing I care about more than anything else is the awakening of whoever I am with. It isn’t that I don’t have my own desires, but they are subordinate to this guidance.

Participant B

My purpose is to help show people a space of love that is already there for them.

Participant D

I know I am dying (shedding my skin), but I am hopeful I will have more time here; more opportunity to love. My work is to be a full-time student of life; my exchange is giving and getting love.

Participant F

I have a sensitivity, a gentleness, and a concern for others that won’t be squashed.

Participant G

My life has been about making changes, and since I have reaped the benefit of these changes, my purpose is to share what I have learned with others.

Participant L

Where I am in my journey is to be here now – to be present and of service in helping others realize unfulfilled potential.

Participant N

My purpose, which is the covenant I made with myself before I was born, is sharing healing energy to help others through the trauma of the human experience.

Participant O

My mantra is pretty simple: take care of yourself, your family, and whoever is in your charge. I am continually listening for the inspiration about what needs to be said.

Participant P

I want to end this section with a longer story shared in writing with me by Participant E. She had taken up writing in her youth as a way to emotionally explore what she dared not share in her interactions with others. It was a means of healing to have this inner dialogue with herself. Over the years she wrote many short stories and poems expressing a wide range of human experiences. This excerpted version of her story was prompted by a request she received a couple of years ago to describe her most memorable experience at The Monroe Institute.

Growing up my sister beat me. She was unhappy and ensured that my life was unhappy as well. We had never resolved that. Yet, when she had part of her brain removed I took her on as my responsibility, and had continued to do so for ten years.

She was a child, half of her body was paralyzed, and a chunk of her face had been eaten out by cancer. I recalled an earlier conversation with my partner about what my expectations were for the world, for the Universe and had responded, “I expect a world, a Universe that is generous and compassionate.” One day while I sat in my bed at the Monroe Institute, I realized that indeed I had been generous with my sister, but I had not been compassionate. I could barely manage to visit every couple of weeks, did not want to touch her, and could not stand the smell of her. I had had conversations to help her grow when we were younger, but now I wanted to keep my distance.

I called my partner, and the next day after arriving home from TMI we drove the four hours to the nursing home, and I spent time with her. I took Hemi-Sync, the "Going Home" series, and began that trek with her, using Reiki energy to help protect her when she called out: "A man, a man, an evil man!" and going with her as she smiled in greeting to our mom and dad, whom she could see and I could not. The next few months I tried to visit as often as possible and continued to work through the series. The weekend before she passed we finished, and she wanted to hear Bob's words over and over and over again. "Yes" she would whisper from a barely recognizable face above 60 pounds of broken bones stretching distorted skin when Bob said, "You hear and you understand." And when it was time to leave, I pulled her hair back on her forehead, I kissed her, and I told her I loved her. And when she was gone, I grieved. I call it a joyous grieving, for I grieved for someone who I had considered the bane of my life. And I thanked her for helping to make me who I am. Tears come down my cheeks now as I recall and write these events. Every aspect of my life has been surfaced and considered, even my very birth relived, and now much before this life, even to the form and shape that has waited dormant in my "basement."

There is so much unfolding still to occur, so much to learn, so much to experience. Every day I live my life there is some new learning, some new feeling to share with my larger self, some new insight to pass along, some new challenge to grab hold of, and so much love!

The instinctual dimension of human nature is the driving force in the creation of filters or layers of self as a means of suppressing fears associated with pain and suffering. Aspects of self that create a sense of risk (heightened anxiety) are split off and remain unrealized, fragmented, disintegrated. This is the wounded psychic state that the participants in this study have experienced. And yet it wasn’t courage that led them out of their psychological wilderness. It was compassion. The essence of the human experience isn’t the conditioning acquired to protect or shield our woundedness. It is the experience of what Joseph Campbell called “invisible hands” that are guiding us “to discover our own depth.” The result is “[we] put ourselves on a track that was always there for us [. . .] and doors open where we didn’t know they were going to be” (The Power of Myth, 120). Some years ago, while attending a TMI program, I raised with myself the question of how to walk in a sacred manner (how to follow my bliss). The response I received from the depths of my being in the form of the woman, whose compassion I had abused, was both simple and profound, “First receive my embrace, then embrace others as you have been embraced.” If ever I needed an example of what this guidance meant, I have but to reference the lives in this study.

Question #2 or
How does the Spirit move across the Face of the Earth?

Among the many experiences that entail a single lifetime which are the ones that provide a sense of someone’s identity? It would be easy to say that every experience is a microcosm of the whole, but that only begs the question of what is the whole. And yet there are certain times and places where we know ourselves “without all of the baggage we have accumulated in this life.” For the participants in this study there were a number of points along their life journeys critical to self-knowledge, even if at the time it wasn’t always clear. The interview process was autobiographical in nature giving the participants an opportunity to review and reconnect with life events that surfaced from their memories. What came out of this process was telling both for what it revealed of each individual and the themes common to the development of who they are today.

Circumstances forced upon them a degree of introspection that catalyzed around the question, what do we do with our lives? This is not a vocational question or even a philosophical one for these individuals. The question is based on what Colin Wilson has termed the outsider’s problem: “The outsider is not sure who he [or she] is. ‘He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His [or her] main business is to find a way back to himself [or herself]” (147). In the lives of the participants in this study, an existential crisis occurs early resulting in a division of self. By that I mean a shock to their psychological make-up forcing a splitting or separation in the developing personality or ego identity. The result is a protective persona that emerges as the “I” in interface with others. Alice Miller describes this as the trauma of children who “develop in such a way that [they] reveal only what is expected of [them] and fuse so completely with what [they] reveal that one could scarcely have guessed how much more there is to [them]” (12). To describe the trauma in more poetic terms, William Blake wrote:

They told me that the night & day were all that I could see;
They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up,
And they inclos’d my brain into a narrow circle,
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning,
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.
(Visions of the Daughters of Albion. 53-57)

While adaptation to the needs of others is a necessary step in the human journey towards wholeness, all children require a foundation “where a healthy self-feeling can gradually develop” (Miller 32). In the absence of such self-feeling, a child “cannot develop and differentiate ‘his true self’ because he is unable to live it” (Miller 12). What replaces “healthy self-feeling” is fear, distrustfulness of others, and withdrawal as the following examples illustrate.

The Story of Participant E

She was adopted as an infant by a couple who were as different as night and day. The father was a strong, out-going man from a poor, immigrant family who took on the world with gusto and gumption. His was going to be a rags to riches story (that would never materialize). And along the way he met a woman with strong southern roots and high society means. It was the story of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara all over again. But once they were married, they could not conceive children. It was a shameful thing for her mother to admit she was unable to bear children and the pain was almost too much for her to bear. Even when her minister advised adoption, it became the lesser of two evils given the importance of her family tree and its blood line. And yet her father encouraged this with unbounded enthusiasm typical of his approach to life’s challenges. It was a context that as a child left her deeply divided. Her father loved to tell her stories and “was always hugging me.” She noted that he “had a golden energy and was wise beyond his education.”

But it was a different experience with her mother. She was very distant, critical, and harsh in her treatment of her daughter. “My mother would never acknowledge my presence when we were in a room together and she could hardly stand to touch me.” Her mother’s treatment left deep wounds. Even though she found her father a source of strength and caring concern, she found she was forever trying to please her mother to no avail. It was primarily this experience that led her to say “I had an unhappy childhood. I would look happy on the outside so as not to let anyone know.”

The Story of Participant G

Her father was an illegitimate child who became a successful “and well paid” scientist. She describes him as “self-indulgent” and her mother as “frightened by the responsibility of having children.” The result was an experience that she would only find out about years later. As an infant, while lying in her crib one winter day, her mother came in and opened the window before throwing water on her. It was a death penalty that was commuted when she returned to dry her off. Later as a school age child, her father would beat her for wetting her bed.

An older couple up the road from where she grew up in the country became surrogate grandparents. It was a much needed example of a loving connection, but her devoted attention made their grandchildren jealous. While returning home one day from a visit, the grandson accosted her. He stripped her and urinated on her.

Between her parents and the neighbor kids (who basically comprised the older couples’ grandchildren), she “was living in an emotionally barren place” and “retreated into my own mind.”

The Story of Participant I

He remembers the blitzkrieg and going to the bomb shelters as a small child. It frightened him badly. He was told to “put my fingers in my ears, and I won’t hear the bombs.” As he looks back on it, “I can see the seeds of my depression.” He describes his family as “quite dysfunctional.” His father was a drunk and beat his mother.

The family across the street was an important contrast for him. “They were so decent and well educated. They were a kind of oasis for me several hours a week for a number of years.” But it wasn’t enough to make home life more tolerable or maybe the contrast was just too painful because he regularly plotted his escape. “I always wanted to get away on my own. I would slip away to go down to the river. I was a rather solitary fellow.”

The Story of Participant K

He doesn’t remember seeing his father much because he worked three jobs most of the time. When pressed, he notes that he has very few pleasant memories. In fact he has lost blocks of time. “It was hell living around my parents. They were abusive. I literally spent chunks of time alone.”

Growing up he was bullied quite a bit in his neighborhood and at school. He credits some of this to social class prejudice, but the result was the same – he got “beat up.”

He became fascinated with the idea of being saved as a child. Going to Sunday school was an important early experience. In many ways, his search for a relationship with “something higher than myself” was to find what was missing in his life.

While these may appear extreme examples, they are not atypical. Their sense of separateness is a common experience. It is the mark of their outsider status. They could have succumbed to their alienation and looked for outlets to deaden the emptiness they felt. They could have become caught up in activities that proved their intelligence and their worth. And all did for varying lengths of time in their lives, but something continued to beckon that could not be easily dismissed.

The burden of living with expectations that do not reflect their “true self” leads to a degree of self-imposed isolation. Solitude becomes a restorative, but more than that, it becomes a way for unconstrained imaginative endeavors. Through the doorway of their imagination comes relief in a freedom that is not dependent on others, neither family nor community. Yet, it is important to note the difference between grandiose fantasies and “the ‘glimpse of power’, of contact with some reality, awareness of a new area of [their] own consciousness, that came in a time of emotional stress” (Wilson 42). The former is merely an effort to compensate for living in “a state of noncommunication” with the true self and the latter is that moment when the cares and concerns of the personality fall away leaving the doors of perception cleansed (Miller 20). It is a time, as Wordsworth writes, recalling his own such experience,

. . . when meadow, grove,
and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and freshness of a dream.

(Ode: Intimations of Immortality, 1-6)

The natural world provides access to the limitlessness of being. In many ways, it becomes their alma mater (nurturing mother) whereby they experience the life around them as wondrous and infinite. Here is where communication with their true self takes shape, outside the constraints of human society. Here is where they begin to have a sense of the transcendent quality of life beyond the concerns of daily existence. In Native American traditions, this is referred to as stepping through the skin of the world (Martin 40-42).

The Story of Participant C

Growing up on a farm can be a lonely existence. However, he never felt overly burdened by the fact that his sister was his only company through the first 10 years of his life. Being outdoors was more than enough of an adventure to keep his young mind fully engaged. “I liked being in the forest. I liked the peacefulness and the energy. I tended to always find space to myself.”

When he was 4 he remembers jumping on a pile of sawdust from a logging camp only to find he was out-of-body. When he was 8 he recalls looking at a grove of trees and just sinking into them when he shifted into the land of faeries. He would often find himself running through the forest. “It was easy to get into a meditative state while running.”

In a statement that underlies his orientation, he recalls that “the world seemed like a harsh place.” To paraphrase Wordsworth, the world of getting and spending laid waste his powers. Maybe that explains why he never enjoyed going to the mall at the nearby town. “I got tired being around the people there.”

The Story of Participant D