Good times are coming. I can feel them coming, just around the bend, coming our way.

Good times have been slow coming. Aspen and I have had to be patient for a long while. We have been together for 25 years now, and, for most of that time, we have lived on the edge. We have lived for most of that time with very little money, often with just enough to survive.

For the last 10 years, it has become more difficult, as our family has grown. When it was just Aspen and me, it wasn’t too bad, but, with the three boys, it has become much more difficult. We have always managed to pay our rent, have food on the table and clothes to wear, but we haven’t had any money for the normal city enjoyments such as going out to eat or going to a movie. And Aspen and I haven’t been out by ourselves on a date in years. We haven’t been able to afford the childcare.

Aspen and I know how to be patient. We’re good at it. Aspen once said that we are really good at doing poor. She added that she was really tired of it too. It has been hard living on the edge. I remember once when we were stuck in Eugene, Oregon with no money and no gas, living in our van. Fortunately gardening work came just as we spent our last dollar, and we moved on down the road.
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However, during this past year, I have noticed that we seem to be bringing in more money, not much more but enough to take the family out to dinner every once in a while. Some of our other needs seem to be more easily met too – almost as if our luck has changed. Aspen and I have several new and worthy friends. And several old friends, two of them from over thirty years ago, have called and said they want to reconnect with me.

I think a lot about what we need to make our lives together happier and more fulfilling. I want more money for us obviously. I want more of my medicines, my smoke and my acid. These medicines are essential for my work of exploring consciousness and reality. I want more friends, friends who are high brothers and sisters and who are open to exploring with me. I want more peace in my heart and in my life too. Our three boys are anything but peaceful, but I am finding that when there is peace in my heart, the household tends to be more peaceful too.

I want more recognition and respect for my writing. I would feel a lot better knowing that what I have to say is being heard. I also want to have more healthy years ahead of me. I want to be around for Aspen and my boys. I want to see all three of them as young men before I leave this reality behind. I want to be here especially for Jake with his muscular dystrophy. I also want healing for my family. Each of the boys has a physical problem, not just Jake. Zane is allergic to peanuts and Callahan has ADHD. Aspen sometimes has severe migraines that last for a week or more. I want us all to be healthy.
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If good times are coming, and they are, this implies that I have been doing something right. I have always thought that if I put my head and my heart together, if I become a kind and loving person doing God’s work, then all that I needed would come to me. It looks as if I was right, although sometimes it has been difficult to trust and be patient.

Perhaps this would be true for the larger world too. Perhaps if we all focused upon being kind and loving beings, doing God’s work, what we see as our major problems might just solve themselves and everything that we needed would begin to come our way too.

The Celestine Prophecy is a story of a mystery and a spiritual quest, a story of the seeking and the finding of the meaning of it all – the question of why asked and answered.

Early on in his story, James Redfield has one of his characters explain how the dominant Christian world view, that had persisted throughout the first fifteen centuries after Christ, fell gradually into disrepute and came to be viewed with disbelief by more and more of us. Since the fifteenth century especially, this has led to a collective search for new spiritual meaning, for meaning more relevant for the new times we have been entering.

With the fall of our belief in Christianity, what could we believe in? What was true? How did reality work, and how did it all fit together? What could we expect? What was our place in all this? Why was it as it was? Faced with these eternal and as yet unanswered questions, we sent out scouts. Some explored the inner world of imagination and consciousness. Some explored the world of the very big, some the very small – the world of galaxies, stars and molecular gas clouds, together with the world of quarks, quantum energy and uncertainty. Some explored the physical life that we all share and our own unique nature – explored our bodies, our origins, our own place, and ourselves in this reality.
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Some five hundred years later, we are just now beginning to hear back from the first of these scouts.

One of the first, Carl Jung, returned to tell us that beneath the seeming individuality of our consciousness there is a deeper, more collective level in which we are all essentially one. He showed us that there’s much more to consciousness than our little egos with their extremely limited and always one-sided viewpoints.

Another scout, Steven Hawking, in his book, A Brief History of Time, returned to show us the common frontier that we all share, as we continue to explore together the very big and the very small of our universe. He showed us that ultimately both realms contribute equally to reality. Hawking also suggested that the universe is as it is in order to create the conditions necessary for our existence – so that we can uniquely view reality as it truly is. He hinted that if there is a God, he is not a creator God, not a spiritual force in that sense, but rather the union of our unique consciousness with the rest of the dance of energy. God is the meaning given to the dance, and we are ourselves God when we are conscious of this meaning, yet still dancing with the rest. We are the consciousness of the universe, that part of the universe asking and seeking the answer to the question why.

Other scouts, the leading biologists of our time, returned to share with us their exciting adventures tracking down the secrets of DNA. They found that we share DNA, the exact same DNA, with all of life, that we contain the same DNA as the lowliest worm, as the wildest weed, as all of life. All life shares the same DNA, differing only in amounts, combinations, and varying degrees of complexity. We humans differ only in what has been added on to make us what we are. The percentage that separates us from the rest of life is very small. Ninety nine percent of our DNA is the same as that of the chimpanzee, a mere one percent accounting for our differences. We humans are not better than the rest of life, just a bit more complex. We are all made of the same clay – “all my relatives,” as the Native Americans say.

With our scouts returning and reporting upon true reality and our relations with it all, we are finding a new and more spiritually profound way to look at reality and our place within it. We are realizing our true spiritual purpose, that of understanding the meaning of the dance of life and energy. We are the mind of God. We are also realizing our true oneness with all life, finally realizing that we aren’t set above and distinct from the rest of creation, as the old religions would have had us believe. We are also the body of God.

In the late sixties, while studying the I Ching, I began a long and fruitful spiritual journey into Chinese thought and wisdom. I soon realized that the Chinese sages, those who, over the centuries, had been involved with this great book, were the most conscious beings that I had run across in my long search for wisdom.

One of these high beings was Lao Tzu, the mysterious author of the Tao Te Ching. I had run across his writings earlier while reading Tim Leary’s Psychedelic Prayers.

Later, I read Jung’s commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower and this inspired me to read the book that he was commenting upon, a book written sometime around the eighth century by a Taoist adept, Lu Yen, and translated from the Chinese in this century by Richard Wilhelm.

The Secret of the Golden Flower is one of many Taoist tests, all concerned with creating the immortal “diamond body.” The book itself is very short, less than 70 pages including Wilhelm’s commentary, but filled with great wisdom.

Taoism differs from Buddhism in one important way. The goal of Buddhism is Nirvana, together with complete and final death of the ego, the ego being seen as mere illusion. The Taoist, on the other hand, “seeks, with all his might, the fixed pole in the whirl of phenomena, where the adept can attain eternal life.” (The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 7.) For the Taoist, the goal “is to preserve in a transfigured form, the idea of the person, the ‘traces’ left by experience. (p. 18.)

This is similar to ideas expressed by Castaneda’s Don Juan. For him, the goal is to develop an awareness independent of body. To this end, he elucidates the notion of the “dreaming double,” an immortal body that can exist in all realities, hence can exist even after the death of the body. And clearly, for Don Juan, together with the Taoists, the goal is for this immortal body to retain traces of the individual’s life experience. I share this goal and am working unceasingly to identify, not with my physical body, but with the body of consciousness that is my true and immortal self.

In the past, Aspen used to just throw stuff into her big, walk-in closet until it was a jungle in there. It had to do with her mood, a lot to do with her moon cycle. Aspen would always say that she did it because she didn’t want to deal with her stuff at the time.

The notion of the personal unconscious that we have received from Freud and Jung and their many colleagues is similar in function to Aspen’s closet. It’s where we put all our stuff that we don’t want to deal with at the time. However, Jung says that if we explore and organize our personal inner closets, we will be able to find our way to ourselves and to the larger transpersonal realm of imagination and spirit.

I had a dream once in which I was on board a large, ocean-going sailing ship. We saw that a big storm was coming, so we gathered everything up and stored it away in the proper places. We didn’t want the coming storm to toss anything about. Afterwards, when I woke from my dream, I realized that it was telling me something important. In my life, when emotional or psychical storms can come at any time, it would be wise for me to keep everything in its place, all the many aspects of myself on my ship of life.

I have a closet. I also have a cedar chest and a chest of drawers. I have places to put things. When I last moved, I went through everything. I know where everything is now, and it’s all useful and worth keeping. I may not use all of it often, but I know where everything is if and when I do need it.

My inner closet is the same. I have places where I store memories and feelings and thoughts, whatever is worth keeping; stored where they’re not on my mind all the time but are easily available whenever I do want to connect to them. And I never just toss something into my inner closet. I don’t repress anything just because I don’t want to deal with it at the time. I’ve had that sort of inner closet. I don’t like what it did to my head, and I’ve worked very hard since to clean it out – to have no loose ends.