For my TORI-Astron-Omicron friends and collaborators.

Preface: LOOKING AHEAD 
1. A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY 
2. SOME THINGS ARE MORE WHOLE THAN OTHERS, REALLY 
3. LIKE THE RIVER, FLOWING 
4. THE UNIVERSE IS DISCOVERING ITSELF 
5. THE CENTER OF THE CELL 
6. FULFILLING THE PROPHECY 
7. MOVING BEYOND MYSELF 
8. THE UNIVERSE LOVES ME 
9. BEYOND WELLNESS 
10. TRUSTING IS THE KEY TO IT ALL . 
11. A BIT OF META-THEORY 
12. MAGIC MESSAGES 
13. THE COLLABORATIVE DISCOVERING OF COMMUNITY 
14. A NEW LOOK AT NARCISSUS 
15. WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET 
16. ALL PROCESSES AND PRODUCTS ARE SACRED 
References 

This book, The Passionate Path, is the first of three volumes in which I am presenting my view of the Omicron orientation, a general, unitary theory that has emerged out of our interactions in the TORI communities, the TORI professional intern program (TORI Astron), and the more recent Omicron studies groups, which emerged out of the other experiences. Thirty of us are creating the current theory as a collaborative venture, a loving trip, and an exciting multilogue in theory construction.

The second book in my trilogy is The Magic of Self-Regulation, in which I write about creating more self-regulating organizations in the North American culture. I deal with what the manager or administrator does to enhance the self-regulatory properties of any system.

The third book is titled Touching the Universe. The reason for my title will be clear to anyone who reads the book you hold in your hands. I assume that all forms, including cultures, have an intrinsic, magical property of transforming themselves. The universe is ready for Omicron. It is in the process of a radical and dramatic shift into a powerful new era, the characteristic of which, in the main, is the focus upon transcendence.

Omicron theory is an extension of the Trust Level theory described in the TRUST book. In talking about Omicron, we look at a radical and conservative approach to wholism. To be whole requires high trust. We define trust level as a movement toward perceptual wholeness. An enrichment of the Trust Level theory.

I dedicate this book to my TORI-Astron-Omicron friends and collaborators. The TAO, as always, is in the flow of the universe.

This was an excellent choice. From the start I have known that people loved me. This is a good feeling. It nourishes me during the occasional times when depressions visit me and befuddle this dominant memory.

Ada Laura Gibb, my mother, was a pioneer woman and a pioneering one. Born in Lehi, Utah, in a polygamous Latter Day Saint family, she drove with her father, his two wives, and her 20 brothers and sisters to Magrath, Alberta, where I was born in 1914. Uncompromisingly devout, prayerful, deeply trusting of the universe, my mother endowed me with a faith-trust that has undergirded my life and gentled it.

My earliest memory is of my grandfather, a patriarch in the church, and a cobbler, taking me to buy an ice cream cone. I worshipped him and, as I remember it, spent most of my days tagging along with him and playing with him and his friends in his shoe store. I have a vivid memory of our walking back from the ice cream store with me on his shoulder -- ice cream dripping down on him from my cone, and love dripping up on me from my playful grandfather who, people told me later, was "crazy" about me.

Born of a "single parent," as the current phrase goes, in a closely knit Mormon community, I might have been neglected had the nurturing love of members of my very large family not greatly overshadowed whatever censure there might have been for my mother and me.

Thinking about writing this chapter, I reread, for the third time in my life, some letters that members of my mother's family had written to her when I was about 5 years old. In her note accompanying the letters, my mother said, "Jack, you will see how much they all loved you when you read these letters. Treasure them." I do.

Reading the letters in the context of this book about my life was a tearful, joyful experience. Memories flooded me and mingled with the tears of appreciation for those nourishing and spiritual people who loved me through those early years.

My grandfather is quoted in one of the letters as saying, "Ada, care for this special child who has blessed our home. His life mission is to bring a great spiritual message to the world." It is this special spiritual journey, prophesied by my grandfather, my spiritual parent, that I wish to use as the theme of this book you are reading. Aware through multifaceted messages of my grandfather's patriarchal blessing and prophecy, I have been deeply dedicated to this mission for as long as I can remember.

I have experienced my spiritual journey and my central mission as a light-hearted one and as a centered and passionate one. From the beginning I have been seen as a child and a man as dedicated, as on a path, as "knowing where he was going." I like being seen this way. It has been life pervasive. I had a beautiful experience, when I was 15 and 16 years of age, as a Superintendent of an LDS Sunday School, working with my two "counselors" each of whom were men in their 40's, dedicated, like me, to spiritual values.

My life journey has been, and is, a passionate path.

By far the most significant aspect of me is my deep feeling, from the beginning, that I am on an eternal spiritual journey. My earth trip is a significant blip on the curve of my eternal journey. I have always had a mission, a purpose, a destiny, a transcending passion, a deep-lying want to make a difference.

I describe my pathway in many different ways, all descriptions blending into one integrated theme and message: I want to join the universe, tune in to it, be a significant part of it, join others in changing it, join others in creating a new universe in each moment, and be with each form in the universe in some significant way.

All of my life experiences have enriched this vision of my life adventure and have strengthened my motivation to dedicate my life to this course.

Beginning in my early years, I felt that my lifetime was a magnificent adventure, an opportunity to learn as much as I could learn about the "significant" aspects of being.

During the three years that I have been actively writing this book, I have retrospectively examined my life with the intent of understanding the process of life journeying and passionate-pathing. And, being me, I want to develop a general theory of journeying.

One vivid image comes to me of a woman customer in our little store on Stark Street in Portland, Oregon, where my stepfather and I sold groceries. I was writing a paper during the mid-afternoon lull. Asking to see the paper, and reading it, the lady asked, "How old are you?" Replying, "I'm nine," I carried on a vigorous discussion with her about the content of the paper. Recently, I discovered this particular paper among my collections of stuff from my childhood. The title is "Christ or Capitalism." It is an article I wrote about the dilemma that faced our "universe." I saw the most important dilemma as a conflict between cooperation and competition. As I saw it, the two powerful world cultures, America and Russia, were both "economic" systems and forced to look at the human experience as necessarily focused upon materialistic gain. Christ's message, as I saw it, was one of loving cooperation in caring for the spiritual needs of people. This message was clearly "incompatible with the basic tenets of capitalism or communism," as I worded it then, and these "economic systems, of necessity, forced people to value material goods rather than spiritual values." Our world needed to make a choice between Christ or Capitalism, two incompatible belief systems. Such issues were of deep concern to me.

As I scan my life experiences and reread scraps of notes and papers from my boxes of hard-for-me-to-throw-away stuff, I find seven themes that recur.

Basic values. What are the deepest and most basic values in the human experience? What has most meaning? What gives me perspective on what matters in life? I was greatly moved by the works of Koffka (35), Kohler (37), and Wertheimer (60) when I was in graduate school in the 1930's, and felt that wholeness was an enduring value.

Energy. What gives me energy and sustained motivation in my life? How do I create the energy that will enable me to do what I want with my life? Where does the internal energy come from? Later in my life, when I developed occasional depressions and related apathy, I became concerned with the downers that distracted me from what I felt to be my true path. People often commented on my high energy and by ability to work "around the clock" when other kids might be playing, goofing off or not doing their lessons.

Discovery. How do I discover all of the multitude of things that life seems to offer? How do I find the answers to awesome and pressing questions that consume my attention? How do I discover a middle ground between my dedication and heaviness, on the one hand, and the playfulness and perspective that others seem to have, on the other.

I remember one time when I was about 12 years of age hearing my mother on the phone talking with one of the girls in my high school class who had invited me to go skating. My mother said, "I surely hope that you can get him to go with you, because he has never learned to play." I was quite proud of the fact that my stepfather trusted me with the bookkeeping in our store because I was accurate, dependable and appropriately serious minded. We both prized this "adultness" of mine. I remember being impressed with my mother's wanting me to play but understanding my stepfather's need to have me work "all the time." Even then I was vaguely aware that I was missing something and that I somehow had things in an incorrect perspective.

Evil and pain. How do I handle the evil and the pain of life that I saw all around me and that I experienced in my own life? I had read about the gentle Jesus (8) and the compassionate Buddha (17, 29) and was impressed with the tenderness and gentleness of these men, their forgiveness of sinners, and their concern for the poor and the downtrodden in the universe. I remember my brother, Bill, saying about me one time, "The trouble with Jack is that he is so afraid of hurting someone that he has a difficult time taking action or making decisions." I remember that when I heard that Bill had said this, I wondered what was wrong with my feeling that way. Wasn't it "right" to be so concerned about people who hurt?

Taking charge. How can I, and others, take charge of our lives, do what we deeply want to do, follow our missions? Especially without hurting people, without depriving others from having what they wanted? How do I "do my thing" without dominating others or pushing them around? "Assertiveness training," devised to be a solution to this dilemma, impressed me as a very limited and inadequate solution for this life concern. This issue is a continuing concern of mine.

Soul and the life beyond. I was brought up as a Latter Day Saint and became involved at a very early age in discussions of after life, eternal existence, preexistence, and matters of the enduring nature of the inner being. Later on, as a psychologist teaching in several universities (Brigham Young University, Columbia University, University of Colorado, etc.), I enjoyed teaching Psychology of Religion and read extensively in mystical and psychological literature about the religious experience (30).

Cosmic reality. What is my relation to the universe (57)? What is the larger reality of which I am a part? How do I get in touch with the allness? My early statements contained some statement about communion with the "universe,'' a focal concern of my reflections from the very beginning. I felt a kinship with the universe in some sense beyond that of my friends and colleagues.

As I look at my journey toward communion with the universe, I am very much aware of the power that polarities have had in my life experience. My life has formed around a number of polar conflicts in each of the seven areas of concern just mentioned.

Community and cooperation. In my struggle to see what value is deepest and most significant in the experience of the race, I keep being drawn to my experience that each of us spends a lot of energy avoiding each other when, at some level, what we all want is to be deeply in universal community with each other.

I feel, at times, my unutterable, omnipresent loneliness and my deep need to be in community with every one. At times I want everyone to love me and am in pain if I'm aware of someone who doesn't seem to love me, or who even seems to hate me. My friend, Richard, said one time that "the reason Jack works so hard to create the TORI communities is that he is a lonely man" (44). I had an immediate sense that he was right and this was the primary conflict in my life. I am both distant and friendly. I am sometimes so desperately dedicated to creating community in the universe, as my passionate path, that I have no time to be in community with those around me. This is sometimes confusing to me and to others.

I know that collaboration and cooperation is the primary process in the universe and I find it very difficult to collaborate with others, to be with them, to co-author and to co-create.

Divine energy and passion. Where do we get our energy and passion? Most of the time I have an incredibly strong inner force that keeps me working with high energy all through the night on activities that are related to what I see as my spiritual journey. At other times I can get distressingly bored, passionately resentful of this inner drive that consumes me, desperately wanting to get away from it all, even at a few times in my life seriously considering suicide as a way out of this boredom and meaninglessness (51).

I experience this polarity in others. In consulting with organizations I sometimes see so much angry boredom that I am frightened and confused by it, until I search inside and see my own polarity in these people. Sometimes I see the most bored and listless people working the hardest. I remember my youngest brother, Bob, asking my mother, "Why does Jack always work so hard?" My mother reported this conversation to me one day when I was about 18. She expressed wonder at the same process, but my impression was that she understood me very well and that she had a lot of the same stuff going on in her, with some of the same deep conflicts and inner polarity. I believe that when I am seeing things most clearly I know there is a universal store of infinite energy available to each of us at each and every moment. At times, though, I wonder where the storehouse is.

Cosmic humor and light-heartedness. Sometimes I think I have consciously developed a humorous side as an effect to balance my inner heaviness. I see this polarity between the tragic and the comedic in many people, certainly in myself. Even in my heaviest grief I often see the comedy being played out. Whether it seems to come to us from the outside or from inner sources, humor can be healing, restorative, and inductive of wellness.

My speech professor in college used to say, often, that "whenever someone laughs there is someone hurting and in pain." He was aware of the hostile side of humor. I am too. But there is a gentle, warm, and caring aspect to comedy that is divine and healing. In the past, it has sometimes been difficult for me to see the lightheartedness in pain and tragedy, particularly in relation to myself. Ability to see the restorative qualities of humor is increased by the ability to make a perceptual shift, to create a new perspective.

Sacredness and purity. I sometimes find myself caught up in a deep anger towards people who seem to be evil in intent and action, and, at the same time, feel a deep compassion for people who are hurting so bad inside that they feel they must punish the world in some way. I have a vivid memory of a scene on the beach at Laguna Hills in California. On one windy afternoon, on my "coffee break" from a workshop I was conducting nearby, I saw a small boy of about four years of age, walking along and sobbing at the cold wind, and complaining to his father. His father turned around, saying something about "men don't cry," and slapped his son's face very hard several times, finally knocking the boy to the ground. Understanding the father's righteous anger at his unmanly child, and his inner need to punish when seeing the world as he did, I still found it very difficult to keep from going up and protecting the child, perhaps hitting the parent, who seemed to me, from the way I saw the world, to be doing an outrageous thing. I felt incapacitated by my awareness of the dilemma in me, my strong polar feelings, and my caughtness in the midst of my own unresolved beliefs. Empathy and non-action. Rooted in polarity.

I remember receiving a letter from my stepfather when I was spending the summer working on the farm of a relative near Magrath, in Alberta. He asked me to find my real father, whom he thought lived near Magrath, and never to return to his home in Portland, Oregon. I remember, at the age of 15, understanding the feelings of my stepfather, who deeply resented taking care of his wife's bastard son. I must have been a continuing reminder of the "sin" that his wife had committed. I could easily understand his feelings. At the same time, I was deeply frightened, had no way of knowing how to find my own father, whom I had never met and whose name I did not know. I missed my mother, felt that I had nowhere to turn, felt friendless and abandoned, and resentful of his action. I felt caught between my strong compassion for him and his pain, and my strong feelings of fear, impotence and abandonment. Again, empathy and non-action.

I get caught up in this dilemma and polarity when I read about child abuse, preparation for war, active discrimination against women and blacks, the helplessness of the unemployed, and a variety of other "evils" that exist in our world. About equally, I have an "understanding" of the reactive defensiveness and pain in people that are led to murder or punish. I feel a strong compassion for these people that is at least as strong as my compassion for the people who are abused.

Proactivity. I often get caught in my self created polarity between my wish to have things different, to see the world changed, on the one hand, and my strong belief in letting people work out their own problems, create their own reality, on the other. I want to see people change but I want, at the same time, to allow them the freedom to be whatever they wish to be. I almost never intentionally push people around, or even intentionally try to influence them. But I often have a desire to see them change. I have a strong desire to see the world transformed, to create a better environment, a better government, more effective schools, or a better universe.

It is relatively easy for me to make words that solve this dilemma for myself. For instance, I believe that I can collaborate with others in creating a common solution for problems that we perceive. This works well in very small systems, and is very difficult in larger systems, where most social problems are most visible. I talk about collaborative environmental design, a process which is designed to resolve this polarity and to make things possible for us, those of us who would like to change the world.

I believe that each of us can create a spiritual journey that is satisfying and life-enhancing. And I believe that we can do this without imposing on the spiritual journeys of other people, or even getting into their parades.

For me, it is difficult to be fully proactive and to be fully allowing at the same time. When I am active and getting something to happen I am likely to be, in subtle ways, trying to influence people to take positions similar to mine.

Inner guidance. I have lived so long in the world of "scientific psychology" that it is very difficult for me to open myself up to a spiritual universe. I was taught and have taught others to look at empirical evidence, to doubt until something was "proved," to be cautious in interpretations, to rely on the canons of logic, to look askance at even the "hardest" research evidence, and to be linear, logical, and rational.

My intuitive, right-brained, impulsive, soul searching belief systems are often very different from what have learned in classical psychology.

In many practical situations in life, I find myself caught between what I think to be "true" and rational and what I feel, in my "soul," to be true and right. This polarity is present for me in all "significant" life situations. My inner guidance system is at odds with my scientific training. This is particularly true when we are talking about experiences that are mystical, esoteric, non-sensory, cosmic, transcendental, or spiritual. I see this dilemma in many of my fellow travelers on this planet.

Cosmic consciousness. The powerful impact of so many current books on the new physics (63), the new age consciousness (62), the esoteric philosophies, the Eastern mystics, and the world "beyond classical science" indicates to me that many people share the dilemmas I feel about cosmic consciousness. My path is to connect with the universe, to get in touch with it, to collaborate with all forms in the universe to change it. At times I feel that I am in touch, and at other times I feel that I am in an alien and unfriendly, untouchable cosmos.

I suspect that the underlying dilemma for me, the polarity for me in my life, is my wavering between my view of the universe as unfriendly, uncaring, or perhaps neutral, on the one hand, and friendly, warm, loving, caring, on the other. I project my current feeling of being loved or unloved upon the universe. I see the universe as I am, as a projection of me. Seeing the universe this way, I act toward the universe as towards a loved one or as towards an enemy. And I get back corroborative evidence of my belief.

I don't know about you, but I can range from the very extremes on this polar view of the universe, and be on all points that reside therein. And at either extreme or at points in between I experience the universe as very real, as friend or enemy, depending upon my own inner thermometer.

I am aware of many rhythms and flows in my life (26) I seem to have chosen a life pattern on this earth journey that calls for a major change every twenty years. During first period of about twenty years, from 1914 through 1935, I was a devout religious person and a dedicated and avid student, studying religiously everything that came my way. I experienced in my family, at school, and in my reflections, each of the classic seven dilemmas that I have described above. Sometimes painfully, sometimes joyfully, with all the shades and variations.

For the second twenty years, from 1936 through 1955, I was a college professor, a research psychologist, and a professional educator. I taught in the departments of psychology at Brigham Young University, Michigan State University, and the University of Colorado. I had a ten-year research grant from the Office of Naval Research and developed a theory and some research data about trust (9), defensive behavior, and creativity that led to my Trust Level theory (25). I was a dedicated and passionate scientist and professor, feeling that I had found my calling and that I would be a professor all my life.

For the third twenty-year period, from 1955 to 1974, I became a consulting psychologist, developing a theory of organizational behavior while consulting with business, government, churches, universities, and every variety of organization throughout North America (4, 9). Again, I was sure that I had finally found my calling and my life work. I believed that societal advancement and the transformation of our culture would occur in our organizational settings, and that the way to contact the universe was through direct transformation of the organizations we created and lived in.

It was at this time, between 1974 and 1978, that I had a series of seven life-changing transcendental experiences, which I see as mystical messages from the universe, an attunement with God, and a powerful communion between my non-conscious inner guidance system and my conscious self. These were by far the most significant events in my life up to that time. In 1974, I commenced my fourth twenty-year period, lasting, I sense, through about 1994, when, as I see it now, I will move into my fifth twenty-year period of more direct and immediate communion with the universe. At this moment I feel that after my century of living, my five twenty-year cycles, I will move on to an after life that will be even more accelerated, beautiful, in tune with the infinite allness, and nirvanic than I expect my life to be in my fifth twenty-year period.

This rhythm feels right to me, selected by me, and suited to my special spiritual journey. I am very much aware of other rhythms in my life: diurnal, seasonal, lunar, physiological, temporal. It is basic to the universe to have rhythms emerge. Being in touch with these rhythms and seasons is a life-enhancing process.

Seven distinct and life-forming experiences in the four years between 1974 and 1978 changed my life radically. They "came to me," happened, unexpectedly, without warning.

In retrospect, it seems to me that I was able to hear these dramatic messages, this lifting of the curtain, this communion with God, this in-touch-ness with the universe within me. As described above, my whole life has been a searching for some kind of wholeness, some working out or, better, playing out of the seven concerns that have energized my life. It is as if, focused on these concerns, my body, mind, and soul tuned in together and gave me the words to the music I had been writing, "answers" to the dilemmas that captured and enraptured me, messages that both quieted and empassioned me. Whatever else, the experiences have strengthened my mission and my sureness that I am on the special path that my grandfather had prophecied for me.

A lot has happened since these experiences. I translated the seven messages into a unitary theory of the universe that feels good to me and that forms the substantive content of the trilogy I am now writing. I radically changed my lifestyle in ways that I am pleased with and that others notice readily. I am more sure of my directions, more loving of myself, and less ambivalent about the primary concerns that have troubled me. I am moving to a transcendence of the seven polarities that I have discussed above, and am, in large part, resolved about these paradoxes and am moving beyond them into new spaces, new confidence in my mystical orientations, and into a newer and more satisfying belief system. The Omicron Orientation is a message from me to me, and I am listening to me.

Believing that collaboration and cooperation is a, or perhaps the primary characteristic of the universe, I have sought out a magnificent group of collaborators who are inventing and discovering the theory with me. We are writing companion books, falling in love with each other, moving into new and adventuresome lives, and welcoming others who are joining us. I find new joy in co-being, co-authoring, and co-playing. I almost said co-working again and caught myself. I am undergoing a significant perceptual shift into seeing my work as play and seeing the universal metaphor as spiritual play. Feels good. Playful. Workable.

In the next seven chapters, I am discussing all of this in the framework of my/our evolving theory. I believe that my passionate path is a prototype of all human experience, all spiritual journeys of plants and people, and an entry into discovering the universe anew. The process of discovering is the key here -- not the discovery. Both process and product are significant. I am assuming that you, I, the universe, and the discovering process are each infinite, eternal, sacred, and mirrors of each other. This neverendingness is self-sufficient, generates its own meaning, is fortunately unpredictable, and is perhaps definitive of universality (6, 62).

Trusting and wholizing are synonymous terms. Seen in full context, everyone and everything is trustworthy. Fear disappears when we see everything. It is only the truncated visions that are frightening. I am frightened when I can't see what led you to do what you are doing. The murder seems somehow inevitable to the omniscient observer who sees precisely all of the events in the situations and in the heads of the participants: the contextual and historical events that led inexorably to this catastrophe. A loving mother may see the murderer understandingly, without fear, because she sees with whole eyes, wholizing the experience, de-fanging it. I trust everything that I see whole.

It became very clear to me in my seven mystical experiences that an orientation towards wholeness and trust was a single-factor, transforming, perceptual orientation that universalized all experience, matter and life. Seeing holistically led to the magic in wellness, physics, ecology, archeology, the theater, business, religion -- everything (6, 20, 41, 45, 48).

Wholeness is the basic value, more central than any other. It is the lead factor in the seven Omicron processes. It is the theme of my message from the universe. It is a truly perceptual factor: it is the seeing of the wholeness that defines the process, not the presence "out there" of the property of wholeness (28).

As I indicated above, I have struggled all my life with my existential aloneness and my consuming need to be in community with everyone. I want to be unique and to be in everyone. I am becoming aware that there is an inseparable quality to aloneness and to community. To be uniquely and totally alone is to be fully in the universe, to be in community with every form and atom in the universe. And to be fully in community is to have the universe within. To be wholly alone and to be wholly in community is the same process. One that resolves my lifelong paradox by a perceptual transcendence. This transformation, for me, came in my first communion experience.

In the spring of 1974 I went, in desperation, to my physician for a check-up because I was feeling all kinds of disorienting confusion. For the first time in a life of notable good health I was diagnosed as having severe hypertension. Advised to take four diazides a day, I was assured that I would be relatively safe from the dangers of a heart attack. Determined to get back into full and abundant energy for my spiritual path, I tried everything that my many friends suggested. I started jogging, for instance, religiously and with great determination, with compulsive passion.

My daily four-mile trip soon became joyful, and I soon began to experience profound highs, especially in the last ten minutes of my runs (cf. 19). This experience of intensive highs was startling to me at the time, though later I read that this was a common experience for runners.

One day during the last ten minutes of my run, on a particularly energyful day, I experienced a deep trance that, judged from the distance I saw that I had traveled during the experience, lasted about eight minutes. Everything that I had struggled to understand in the past now suddenly, with immense illumination, came abundantly clear. It felt that I now completely understood everything in the universe. Everything was directly and inextricably related to everything. The expression "all in all" came to me in words and seemed profoundly applicable to all my dilemmas. After coming out of the trance, I realized that I had run down a rocky hill that I traversed each day, and that this hill running seemed, during the trance, to be a metaphor of all journeys and paths in every life and in every time span, of any length. G. Stanley Hall's famous phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" appeared in my trance and seemed, now, ridiculously inadequate but representative of all other recapitulations, reiterations and journeys in the history of experience. The content of the trance was far too rapidly experienced to be limited to the ponderous medium of words or even of imagery. It all "came" to me, wordless, mostly, and imageless. The content seemed voluminous. I remember writing about it for two months afterwards -- about the "environmental quality states," a description that appears, in part, in a chapter with that title in my TRUST book. The experience seemed too long and too esoteric for my editor and so I condensed it and saved the major part for another book that I am now in the process of writing.

My experience was so vivid, so startling, so completely new for me, so filled with awe, that I have never completely recovered from it. It seems even more vivid now, in memory. I still go back to it as to a favorite book to "re-read" it and to enjoy anew, enrich my interpretations, savor the wisdom, marvel at the luminous clarity of it all.

Lately I have been drawn toward reading about Buddha's experience under the Bodi tree. I relate my experience to his in the impact each experience had in changing the life of the experiencer (17, 27). Hearing me describe my all in all experience in a public lecture, a friend recommended Cosmic Consciousness (10) as a book that described what seemed like similar experiences received by others.

Since this experience I see myself as a very different person, and others report seeing me as very different. I see the message as a personal communication to me, as well as a description of a universal process of allness. I was telling myself, in my trance, that community and collaboration are the core processes of the universe. I no longer feel the ambivalence toward joining others in depth. Joining you in whatever relationship and form that happens is a way of maintaining and enriching my uniqueness. I now have little need to protect my privacy and my aloneness. Being alone is the same as being with you in community. The universe is in each of us. We are each fully in the wholeness. Being in and with you, to whatever degree of intimacy and fullness of community, is safe, trustable, and whole. Each of us gains. Neither loses, ever.

I know that I am whole, and a unique form. How I see, feel, and think about life comes from my wholeness and is an expression of the whole me. I am all of me in each moment. Each of my processes is a sacred expression of all of me. They are expressions of my own inner harmony and of the full universe in me.

Each moment is whole. The universe is completely represented in each moment, in each person and in each form that I connect with. Each moment, person, and process is sacred, to be honored as eternal, and worthy of my passion and love. I am accomplishing my spiritual journey toward connecting with the universe when I am connecting with you. I am on my path. A sacred and special path. The journey is available to any person who wishes to be on it.

Each person loves me and I love every person. Loving you is the same as loving me, as loving the universe. Each of us mirrors the allness. Each of us is a member of the universal family, in all meanings of this term. A metaphorical sense.

Being in the moment takes on a different meaning for me when I see it this way. Being wholly in the moment is the same as being holy in the moment. Is the same as being whole in the moment. Because each moment is a hologram of the universe, then I am on my spiritual journey, my special quest to join the universe, and to join you in changing the universe.

I believe that the theory my friends and I are creating together is both fully idiosyncratic and fully universal. Each of the 30 co-authors creates his or her own unique statement and viewpoint. Each of us, in some manner, is also creating a universal viewpoint that moves beyond what we see as individual persons. It becomes, thus, a unified and general theory that is very useful in the practical world of business, government, church and family.

At the moment of writing this I am very thankful for my special, honored birth -- for being a love child, a fatherless child, a special child in a warm Mormon community family. This specialness seems to make it easier for me, now, to suddenly see the universe as a warm, friendly father, a special being that loves me, cares for me, and singles me out for special, personal messages. These enable me to grow, and to honor the universe in me and the me in the universe. I feel a kindred, person-to-person love toward the universe. The universe is my father, my sister, my brother, my lover, and my inner guide.

I became so immersed in this vision, reported in the previous paragraph, that I allowed myself to move into a trance, to savor this new feelingseeing. During my seven transcendent experiences that produced the Omicron orientation, I felt that my visions happened to me, out of my control, like visitations from the impersonal universe. During the last two years when I have been intensely engaged in the writing of this trilogy, I have discovered that I am able to enter a trance at will. My own proactivity has extended to most of my experiences in life. I am able to create my own dream life by feeling into the dreams on the day preceding my dream. I am able to feel into my trance communion experiences and have them whenever I feel harmonic with myself and the world around me. I create my own environment. I create my own consciousness and experience. And am able to do this intentionally, voluntarily, at moments when I choose to do so (cf. 6, 10, 29, 30, 45, 56).

I also believe that I create my own theory. I create the beliefs that will enrich my life experiences, and that will move me along my spiritual pathway toward joining the cosmos.

Often in the past, not too long ago, my movement on my passionate path seemed to be ponderous, like being in a slow motion picture. It seems recently that I am making things happen rapidly, with appropriate speed, and with a feeling of zest and anticipation. The way I visualize and describe my spiritual journey is changing significantly, as I feel that I am gaining new enlightenment.

My friend, Jack Hilgard, says that the universe is more like a drop of water than a telephone switchboard. Life and matter are like a river, flowing, emergent, dynamic, ever-changing, motionful, and in process. To the human eye, which takes still-life pictures, things look permanent and solid at times, like ancient rocks appear to be. Sometimes, in our fear, defending against the instability of a flowing world, we treat each other like static things, even, at times, like telephone switchboards, machines that move but that don't flow and happen.

To me, energy, passion and drive feel like rivers, or waves. They flow through me, surge into movements that I like to make, flow into thoughts that I like to enjoy, translate into full being. Even when I am being quiet, tranquil, at full peace, I often feel that the serenity is gently flowing through me, lapping up against my inner self in full nourishment, replenishing my soul.

In the past, very recent past, I have felt waves of apathy, boredom and meaninglessness (51). This lack of passion has been confusing to me, especially as contrasted with my "normal" state of zeal.

A significant part of my emerging theory of the person has to do with the development of a passionate path. I am assuming that persons create the energy they need, limitless amounts of it, when they get fully into the process of discovering an internal, spiritual journey that comes from the deeper wants of the inner self, from the enduring urges, the archetypal bases of spiritual quests, the primitive and unique wishes that well up in moments of vision or courage.

Sometime during the year 1979, I became fully turned on to the concept of a spiritual journey as central to the life development and personal growth of every person. Partly, this conviction came as a projection of my own intense interest in my own special childhood-bred mission. Partly, the growing interest in the theory came as a result of intensive observation of my friends in TORI communities and the special TORI Intern program, and seeing what happened when they began to clarify and intensify their own journeys, to put them into words, and to clarify their life quests. In the last two years, I began to do intensive interviews of anyone who would volunteer to participate with me in a study-in-depth of the fascinating phenomenon of pathing.

I have interviewed about 400 people in various ways, getting more and more close to the inner and often-hidden dynamics of such behavior (cf. 1, 7, 23, 59).

I will present relevant findings in each of the seven areas encompassed by these seven chapters. In general, the findings can be stated simply. With some reluctance, every person interviewed described himself or herself as having what I was calling a passionate path. Each disclosed, after some probing in depth, that the movement along their passionate pathway had these effects:

Life had more meaning and moved toward more collaboration, with others.

They created more and more energy that was directed even more fully toward the chosen path.

They achieved more perspective on life, and were more in touch with their playful and joyful nature, which naturally they somehow integrated into their paths.

They became more compassionate, caring, and aware of the specialness of other people and other living things.

They became more proactive and took a more active part in creating their own pathways and their own lives.

They reported some kind of transcendent experience, usually that they had never or seldom shared with others.

They reported some kind of noble, spiritual, or significant aim that moved them beyond themselves and toward universal, community, or larger realities.

I am quite aware of the tendency that researchers, even those with the most rigorous research training such as my own, are likely to discover data that corroborate their initial beliefs, often because they set up procedures that influence the processes of data collection. The above data in most ways corroborate my Omicron theory, fit my own experience with my own passionate path, and, in most ways, fit the way I would prefer the world to be. We are interpreting the data with caution, and continuing to investigate with alternate methodologies.

There are some surprises. I discovered a very clear tendency for closet passionate pathers to reveal themselves with great reluctance. Especially, I saw what I interpreted to be a repression of nobility, a tendency for people to be embarrassed to reveal noble or heroic purposes. People seem to have internalized a number of norms in our culture. They often feel that any "noble" motives are simply sublimations of more primitive, "real," or basic motives. Noble motivations are thought to be defense mechanisms. Freud has had a strong influence on our beliefs! Often, too, people felt that to admit to any higher or spiritual motives was immodest, called for an apology, and was an evidence of lack of appropriate sophistication in the dynamics of behavior.

In our Omicron study groups, where we have been co-creating the theory for the last three years, we discovered that we became highly creative and highly motivated when we deliberately sat down for a period of 20 to 40 minutes and wrote, often on a group-chosen topic that was hot and relevant to our current issues. Each person, under this favorable climate and in these high vibrations, seemed to probe more deeply into inner dynamics, quasi-hidden attitudes and creativity, and hitherto unexpressed feelings.

Adapting this form of communion to a number of workshops that I have given on THE PASSIONATE PATH, I discovered that people would be intrigued at the first writing but somewhat superficial. On second, third, and fourth writings, with two or three days or more in between, during which time people reported that they felt and thought a great deal, people would become more and more open, probe more and more deeply, and usually come up with more and more "noble" statements of their pathways.

As we discussed this phenomenon of repressed nobility in more and more workshops, people began to report feelings like these: they had not "admitted" to these immodest feelings before, except to a valued friend; they wanted to wait until they had accomplished these services or humanitarian aims before stating them in public; they felt that people might laugh at their pretentiousness in thinking they had the ability to accomplish such high aims; they were reluctant to admit even to themselves that they had such noble aims and had really "never talked about such things before" and so lacked even a language to describe their deep-lying life aims; or, they had been discouraged by parents, teachers, therapists, or school counselors, all of whom had, apparently with "helpful" intentions, encouraged them to be more realistic, practical, or finance-oriented (How could they make a living?) in their future planning.

Some quotations from interviews or writings that failed to appear in the first interview or written pathway statement, but which came out in subsequent probings were:

These are selected samples from people who seemed to be inhibiting "noble" motives, keeping in the closet their "true" natures and motives. Most of these people were doing other things, being de-motivated, and feeling frustrated and resentful at their relatively impotent and meaningless lives, especially as compared with what they deeply wanted to be doing.

It is very easy to see the difficulties that people face in getting on a truly autogenic spiritual journey. Some things that get in the way are:

Being out of touch with the inner life, the deeper motives, even what they want out of life.

Being forced to "make a living" at something practical and to make an early decision about this. Making a living often seems, especially to the fearful person, to be incompatible with doing what you really want. The economic life and the spiritual life seem unrelated. One happens on Sundays and the other happens on weekdays.

Being counseled by well-intentioned authorities, like school counselors, ministers, therapists, parents, and school advisors, to be practical, realistic, and properly cautious about taking up careers or pathways that are not suited to the norms of a competitive and non-spiritual culture unfamiliar with noble pathways. Such paths are open only to sons of wealthy parents, flower children, or radical counter-culture people.

The societal norm of "noble" pathways being a protest, being "reactive" rather than "proactive," or being a minority rebellion out of the mainstream of the culture.

Lack of models in our culture of people who speak out for the spiritual life. People like Martin Luther King, Jane Hull, Eugene Debs, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez, or Margaret Sanger are so rare as to be almost mythical and somehow an unattainable by the average kid looking for a way of life.

All forms of matter, energy and life emerge in a continuous, evolutionary, unprogrammed, nonlinear, and unplanned flow of process. This emerging comes directly from inner well springs of energy, feeds our chosen paths, and puts our passion where our path is. Matches our passions to our pathways.

One day in Denver, in the midst of a large TORI community experience, I was visited by another powerful and life-transforming experience, a transcendence experience.

Five of my seven trance experiences were associated with emotional highs in a TORI community, an experience of low-structure communion that produces a high incidence of transcendental and mystical experiences. I was intensely involved in this community at a very emotional and personal level, even more than is usual for me. During a lunch break I lay on my back on the carpeted floor, wanting to relax a bit, meditate, and explore my inner world for a few moments. I immediately found myself enveloped by a beautiful, peaceful overflowing that seemed to cover me, protect me, take me back to a womb-like encasement, free of all fear. I felt that I would never fear again, that I was bathed in a permanent protective fluid. The covering had a magical, transparent quality. I was able to see through into the insides of everything that I wanted to look at. Inside, everything was liquid, flowing, gently waving, a safe turbulence that was dynamic and rapid but non-violent and not at all dangerous. I was a protected observer of all this motion. I felt privy to the secrets of the universe. For the first time, I felt, I could see what was really going on inside of the universe. It would be fun to report to my friends in physics and chemistry and give them a first-hand, authoritative account of the events that they had been speculating about for all these years.

What impressed me most was that everything was in constant flow and motion. Nothing stood still. From time to time I looked at my own body, saw through it into the active world inside, saw that in me was the same continuous flow. Mostly I looked, seemingly without interpretation or comment to myself. At one point I felt the word "energy" coming to me, and the clear, worded observation that "goodness, everything is energy." Energy was there for the taking, the using, the looking. It was attainable, abundant, free and ready. There was nothing I had to do to capture it. Somehow, too, the energy seemed serene and gentle, not frenetic or needing to be used up, stored, or held on to. Nothing to do.

The experience lasted for 20 minutes or so, though I was not really sure how long it was. It had a decided impact on me. I felt that I had gained some significant knowledge. I talked about the experience to several people. It seemed a message to me and one answer to my dilemma and polarity around boredom and energy. I didn't have to search for energy. It was no big thing. It was always available. (cf 10, 14, 29, 30).

I believe that I am, at all moments, in process. I am in the process of transcending and moving beyond my current abilities, feelings, states, and attitudes. Any statement about an attitude or feeling is a retrospective one, already changing the process with the telling. I create my feelings and my perceptions. I re-create them constantly. I choose them, and I choose to move beyond them.

My self is changing, moving beyond what it is, was. I used to think that I could discover the "real" me, the authentic being inside. Once discovered, it would remain with me always, a source of stability and security. This former belief seems to me, now, as humorous and playful. The basic me is in constant motion and transcendence, flowing, growing, moving beyond any former or current perception that I have of the me. In the past this concept of continual emergence might have been frightening and insecure-making. I now feel the excitement, fun and adventure in this knowledge that the universe and I are the same in this regard -- each in continuous movement into new and unfamiliar states. Feels refreshing.

I am always creating and releasing energy, from an infinite supply that is always available in each moment, free for me to use for what I choose. Energy is like love. The more I use, the more I give away, the more I have left. Neither love nor energy is in limited supply. I do not need to barter for either, or pay any price. Each is free, costs nothing.

I am moving into new energy states. I feel more energy, aliveness, love, sexual energy. Certainly more spiritual energy, more reverence for the sacredness of all matter and life, more withness with God. When I feel ambivalence, boredom, or resentment I get in touch with what I am doing to create this state, and with what I can do immediately to change it. In the last year, as I become my theory, this transforming process works very well for me. Occasionally the process doesn't work for me, and I regress to my former ambivalence. These regressions seem temporary and to be disappearing.

One more thing. My energy seems to be free floating. I can choose to put it wherever I wish. Where I put it is where my path is.

All of life is an adventure, a journey into the attractive unknown, an exciting newness, an unpredictable, unprogrammed, spontaneous happening. The discovering is more basic and significant than the thing discovered. The making is more significant than the product made. The journey than the destination. The excitement is in the movement along the passionate path, not in the speed of travel. It is more important that I dance than that I dance fast. Life is never finished, always open-ended, new in every moment, a continuation of pre-existent life and a delightful movement into an after life -- an eternal discovering, full of wonder.

The universe itself is always unfinished, unfinishable, continually discovering its own pathway, one, fittingly, without a destination. Every form in the universe, every child, butterfly, flower, chair, and concept is in the process of discovering its own nature, process and uniqueness.

Discovering is at the heart of spirituality, and of the passionate path. Wonder is the magic ingredient, and collaborative discovering is the heart beat of every celebrative and energy-filled classroom, workplace, board room, congregation, therapy session, recreation field, bedroom, management team, office, clinic, squadroom, or discussion group.

The spirit of discovery makes each of these places a joyful and playful arena. Passion and energy come from quest, a sense of adventure, unknowingness, unfinishedness, novelty, surprise, challenge -- the many faces of discovering.

If the classroom is a zestful quest, there is no need for someone to "motivate" the learner. If the workplace is a celebrative discovering, no one has to motivate the worker. One does not need to discipline or goad oneself to stay on his or her passionate path. Nor does one need a teacher, guru, healer, therapist, external goal, behavioral modification program, or model to be on a dedicated and joyful spiritual journey. The passionate path is self-motivating, self-rewarding, intrinsically novel and adventuresome.

One Saturday evening in a TORI community experience, I came into the room to discover that a group of people had gathered fifteen colored candle bottles, lit them, and placed them in a circle in the middle of the large carpeted room. We started our session as if around a campfire, some sitting, some lying on their stomachs watching the "campfire" in the middle. A warm, cozy feeling had already been generated in this community of about 110 people and the circle of dim lights added to the intimacy and closeness that was building. Filled with peace and a quiet spirituality, I gradually became aware of a young woman who was next to me, someone whom I had not previously noticed. She radiated a quietly intense spirituality, a centeredness that was deeply appealing to me, a vulnerability that welcomed tenderness and gentle treatment. After what seemed like a long time, I mentioned to her that her quiet spirituality appealed to me. Her answer was, "I know." We then, quietly, at long intervals, shared some intense feelings about each other, each immediately knowing "exactly" what the other was going to say before we used any words. I had never before in my life had such an experience of deep, tuned-in communion with another person.

We seemed to be quietly focused upon discovering each other's core and inner reality. Without touching, with very few words, with no need for reassurance, with no need to check on the accuracy of our perceptions, with full attention on each other, we began to feel very close. I felt more in tune with her inner reality than I have ever felt with another person before or since. The joy of discovering each other's spirit and soul was the feeling of our experience. That we were falling in love with each other seemed certain but peripheral to the primal spirituality of our experience of each other.

After a very long and a very short period of time, we, together, moved out of our physical bodies, journeyed out of the room, viewed many scenes that were new to us, discovered much about each other, talked not at all but communicated more and more deeply at a level I had never experienced previously. The first words that were spoken was my quiet suggestion that we go back into our bodies and rejoin the other people in the community. We did this and were surprised to discover that about three hours had passed and that we were the only people left in the room.

Neither of us had read about what had been called "out-of-the-body experience." Neither of us had ever experienced anything remotely similar to this experience. We talked about things we had viewed on our trip and quickly found that we had viewed the same scenes, and experienced the same events. Each of us was awed and overwhelmed with the experience and found it difficult to talk about. When asked by the group, I spoke a few words about the experience the next morning in the group. When she was asked about it, she said that it was "far too deep and sacred to talk about." We each had what we thought of as sacred feelings about each other and about the experience.

For me, there are many complex and spiritual themes in this experience. Each of us, so profoundly able to communicate with words, find it impossible to describe in words the sanctity of our religious experience. We simply have no words for it.

I see the experience, among many other things, as a profound "answer" to my basic concern about the polarity of heaviness and playfulness in my nature. I discovered much during the communion. I discovered something about the process of discovering, about the transcending power of communication without words or even concepts, about out-of-the body experiences, about collaboration in depth and the necessity of collaboration in any genuine discovering process, about the core of spirituality, about my own in-touch-ness with the universe, and about the nature of "spiritual play." And many, many other things.

Play has many facets. Many faces. Many levels. Play may be to frolic lightly over the surface of experience and joyfully skip through our feelings. Play, for us, in the above experience, meant to sense deeply the cosmic juxtaposition of experiences that had not been placed together before by us, to entertain and gently laugh together at sacred depths previously unexplored by either of us, to sense the cosmic humor in our joining the universe in our newly-created companion venture, "without visible means of support" and without the epistemological girdings that such excursions "out of reality" might otherwise warrant. We did play together. We joyed together. The experience showed me how to balance my "heaviness" with a kind of playfulness that I could fully accept and participate in, thus forever lightening the intensity of my spiritual journey and passionate pathway into the "universe." I went deeper with a lighter mien than had ever been my wont before.

I find myself flooded with feelings in writing about this experience. My dear friend has some mixed feelings about my sharing the experience with other people. We agreed that I could write something about the experience but that I would not identify her. Each of us feels that this is the most intimate experience of our lives, that it was a special private experience meant for us, and that the universe opened up to us in a special and sacred way.

In re-reading what I have written, I find that I'm feeling that our special experience is somehow diminished in the telling. The significance of the experience is not, certainly, in our verbalizable and cognitive learnings, or even in the powerful effect it has had on each of our lives, but in some indescribable and as-yet-not-understood relationship to God and the universe.

Each of my seven distinct experiences is unique. Each seems to have a special life learning. Each forms a re-statement of the basic Omicron orientation. Each experience and each generalization that I have made contains, appropriately, the wholeness and the fullness of the holistic Omicron orientation.

I am amazed at the powerful effect this writing has upon me. I find myself exhilarated, with high energy awareness. It is as if I am going back into the trances that brought on my new consciousness in the first place. The experiences, in the re-living, seem, if anything, more intense and vivid than they were in the original. In spending some long days searching in me for the deeper meaning and wholeness of my life, I am sensing more and more the central significance of these transcendent experiences in all aspects of my life. I seem more whole to myself and to others. I awake each day with the excitement of pending discoveries, with a knowing that something new and sacred will happen again today. The writing itself, once so difficult that I would invent ways of delaying it, is often exhilarating. My typewriter and my favorite pen have become companions in this quest, with feelings of their own, with an assertively independent, playful, supportive, and inventive style of their own. Each becomes jealous when I spend too much time with one or the other. Much as my two favorite cats, Middy and Minerva, become jealous of my attentions. But more about cats and typewriters and pens in the next section on being. All of us writing companions are eager to get to the being chapter, which tells about each of us.

As I have been re-experiencing our spiritual communion I am amused at how satisfying it was to me to be able to re-define spirituality and religiousness to include the concept of playfulness and humor. Somehow, defining the words differently enabled me to make a for-me powerful perceptual shift that enabled me to make a radical change in my behavior. In playing with a holistic orientation we, in our collaborative Omicron seminars, have been struck by our many blockages around the use of words. Barriers in hearing ourselves and in being heard by others outside our group.

There is something incompatible between rigorous definition of terms (perhaps any definition at all) and taking a holistic viewpoint. Any definition of a concept is constricting and segmenting. Every adjective, for instance, -is holistic. That is, each refers to a whole experience. To be religious is to be playful is to be holistic is to be spiritual is to be rigorous is to be . . . ad infinitum.

In the midst of my own cognitive structure I found it difficult to see the inextricable (whole) connectedness between playfulness and religiousness. I began to see God as a playful God. If God is a jealous God, she (or he) must be amused at the profound discordance between jealousness and love, for instance. Just as there is a profound concordance, of course. God, from the position of a discovered androgyny, must be amused at the interminable discussions in the Earth province of the truly provincial question as to whether God is feminine or masculine or both or neither.

I invite you to look with cosmic laughter (whatever that may mean!) at my difficulty in discovering tools, words, concepts, and beliefs that express my dimly-perceived awareness of the majesty, pretension, pain and exhilaration in taking a "whole" approach to "everything" in the wholeness. And, perhaps, to look at the divinely comedic in each of us, as humans, caught in our form-o-centric predicament and our necessarily tunneled perspective of one form of energy and matter talking about all the other forms in a "holistic" manner. Who brings the elephant?

For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in the grandeur, excitement, futility, and misculation that seems to come from playing and working with words. And their relationship to wholeness. While teaching a course on test construction, I suggested to my avid co-learners that we discover something about the delights of such things as item analysis and test reliability by constructing a test measuring some aspects of a holistic attitude. We reasoned that we might use an interest-test format on the assumption that a "holistically-oriented person would be interested in everything, seeing as how, for the wholist, everything was related to everything. We found some highly suggestive results, had some difficulties in measuring validity seeing as how (this was about 20 years ago) we had difficulty devising or finding a satisfactory independent measure of wholeness. We discovered that we were about equally interested in the methodology and the substantive content.

To view something "holistically is to see the sacred nature of all forms and processes. Each chair and child, each winding road and wild flower, each saint and sinner, each sirocco and silken fabric -- each is sacral, and, of course, carnal. Even as you and I, each form in the universe contains every other form, is a mirror of each other, contains the other, loves the other. Each grain of sand contains the grandeur of the universe and also becomes a stimulant to the oyster and a pain to the eye.

Each process contains other processes, and defies analysis, classification or comparison. It loses something in being analytically stripped of its wholeness.

Each adjective contains all other adjectives.

Each organization and group mirrors every other organization and group.

Certainly we are moving towards a unitary language, a unitary organizational form, a unitary relationship among persons. This unitariness will be completely idiosyncratic, honoring the uniqueness of each form, and completely and fully universal, honoring the universal oneness and harmony.

Differentiation, analysis and linear logic are, of course, as honorable as wholizing and harmonizing. The right and the left brain are each to be celebrated. Any hierarchizing of mental, bodily and spiritual states is dewholizing. Until one realizes that hierarchizing is also a holy process.

It is as fashionable now to deify the right brain and the feeling world as it was for earlier generations to worship sweet reason, linear logic and facts.

It is fashionable to be "human" and "humanistic," especially among humans. To be human and personal is somehow better and more moral than to be efficient and cost effective. Unless you believe the opposite.

The heaviness of this apparent polarity between wholeness and pertness is somehow lightened by an awareness of the generic quality of the process of discovering. Each process is discovering itself.

I believe that I am in a discovering process. New experiences open up new avenues to wholeness, spirituality, wellness, creativity, harmony and transcendence, to list some of the characteristics of living that I see as important at the moment. I get passionate about the dilemmas mentioned above, and feel playful and light-hearted when I see myself getting so passionate and full of energy.

All living and being is full of adventure, wonder, and divine ambiguity. Each moment of being and living is ever new, illuminating, worth the quest, and moves me along the journey of joining and creating the universe -- along with each of you (33, 34).

Each form is unique, has a consciousness of its own, has a sacred spiritual journey, is a being. It is, understandably, much easier for a human to see this in a child than in a chair, in a person than in a machine.

I was born into life being aware, at some level, of this essence-o-genic process, knowing that each cell was indeed a brother of mine. Perhaps, in lacking a father, I could experience the fatherness in every being. Perhaps, lacking a full brother, I could see the brotherhood in each blade of grass. In any event, when first hearing about St. Francis of Assisi, I remember feeling that I was like him. The gentle Jesus and the compassionate Buddha (27) are easy for me to love and admire. They seem to be at the very essence of things.

As mentioned in the first chapter, one of my primal dilemmas focused on my perplexity about the evil and pain in the universe. If each cell and being is divine, then how could people violate them? How could we punish children, put people in prison, participate in a war, abuse a horse, shoot a rabbit, or speak unkindly of a friend? One of the most painful experiences of my childhood was being asked (I can't remember why) to watch my cousin take a pet dog out behind the barn and shoot it because it had done something bad. In my childish innocence I felt it was being punished for being a dog. Which may have been true. Certainly it was an act of anthropomorphic warfare.

My dilemma was that, even then, I could feel compassion for my cousin in his pain and for the little dog in his pain. I still create problems for myself in my intense compassion for any being that is hurting.

One of my seven communion experiences occurred at Innisfree, a conference center maintained by the University of Toronto. Our 30-member Astron intern group often met there. It was a beautiful country place.

An early riser, I would jog in the mornings before the rest of the group would get up. One morning, after a particularly intensive session the night before, I got up about five in the morning to jog. Finding that we were having one of our rigorous Canadian storms, with a high wind, a driving rain, and a cold wave, I decided not to jog, but to put on a rain coat and take a two-hour walk. Heavily involved in my writing, I took a small pocket tape recorder with me, holding it under my coat to protect it from the rain. I talked into it during the hour walk out and the hour walk back.

I was in a peace-filled trance, a deep transcendental state, during all of the two hours. Every sound and scene took on startling clarity. Each experience had, at once, an illuminating clarity as if etched, and a surreal quality as in deep dream.

I have written about 30 pages of material describing the life-forming events of that memorable walk. I will describe some that are most relevant to the concept of being, and to my own passionate path.

All through the experience I was powerfully aware of the reassuring and protective presence of three key people: my grandfather; my mother, Ada; and my son, Larry, a deeply spiritual child who died at the age of 7 (cf. 1). Love was the theme of the walk. The tape is full of my vivid awareness of being loved: "I am aware that every tree, every leaf, every cell is my brother and sister and loves me very much." Ever since a prolonged experience with sleeping in a cold tent in the Army in France, I have had a deep dread of being cold. When Larry died, I remember that all during our plane ride from Delaware, where he died, to Utah, where he was buried near my mother in Zion, I kept feeling that I hoped it was sunny and warm in Utah so that we could put Larry in warm ground. Something happened to me at Innisfree. I kept saying, to the tape: "this gentle and loving storm"; "I am aware of the kindly cold and how it envelops me." On the tape, even as I was talking about the gentle, loving storm, you can hear claps of thunder, the heavy beat of rain, and the winter violence of the Canadian prairie. I was aware of my mother being with me, for the first time since she died about 10 years before. She was caring for me, protecting me, guiding me, pointing out things to me on my walk. I remember talking with her, during my walk, about my love for her and asking her forgiveness for being so hard on "roles" and "mothers" in my Trust book. She warmly and lovingly forgave me. Just as this conversation was going on I saw a mother hen and a tiny newborn chick strolling pleasantly across the road in front of me, with the rain beating down and the storm buffeting them. I recall looking lovingly and quietly at this pastoral scene, not seeing the discordance in the strolling family and the violent storm.

I continued to converse quietly with my companion forms of the morning, speaking to them as persons, friends, companions, loved ones. Talking with the cells, the trees, a stray dog that ran across the street to a farm, the storm, a beautiful barn, a telephone post, a speeding car, a fence-particularly the many trees. Kindly trees. Protective trees (cf. 58).

Each being seemed actively alive. Existing separately as unique spirits that talked with me, loved me. Even the speeding cars which splashed water and mud on me were friendly, kindly, to be appreciated. Everything was friendly and loving. Every cell and board and building and tree had a spirit, a life, a core center, a being, a soul. I was among peers, each of us magnificent and sacred. Each providing this safe environment for me. And for Ada and Larry and my loving grandfather, whom I was seeing for the first time since seeing him at his funeral so many years before in Alberta, in plains country like this.

It seemed that each being and each feeling was symbolic, meaningful, provided by a kindly universe to make my walk spiritual and transforming. The sign on the road pointed to Delhi, ahead. At exactly one hour by my watch, at the time I had planned to turn around, I came upon a corner grocery store that was a replica of the store in Mt. Tabor that my stepfather had owned and that I had worked in for the years of my childhood. It seemed like the same store, same old-fashioned signs, advertisements from this earlier period, seemingly like a movie set reconstructed to celebrate my middle childhood. Along part of the road were some tobacco drying sheds. In spite of my strong aversion to tobacco from my Mormon upbringing, I felt that even these sheds were sacred, friendly, and protective of me.

One message had to do with pain and evil. The painful cold seemed warm. The grocery store which had caused me so much violent pain and discomfort was now quaint, welcomed, attractive. The "role behavior" of mothers was now beautiful. The violence of the storm was quiet and friendly, safe. The recklessness of the morning drivers was understandable, even friendly and kind. A barking dog was welcoming me. The storm-tossed trees that seemed about to blow over on me seemed to be dancing a friendly jig. And so it went. Evil and pain are created by me. They disappear when seen differently, through loving eyes. Animism, remembered as a primitive error from my scientific past was now very real, reasonable, ordinary. Anthropomorphism was a sacred process, creating the universe of reality. Projection and wish fulfillment, previously a sin of a defensive spirit, seemed now to be natural and organic ways of creating the universe. Processes organic to my spiritual journey. Friendly processes, loving me.

Also present was a quiet understanding of the oppressor, the one giving the pain or creating the evil. Not forgiving because there is nothing to forgive. All processes are organic. There is no evil and pain. Evil and pain were, in the past, created by me to meet my purposes and needs.

I feel compassion for both the oppressor and the oppressed, understanding the organic nature of both.

My studies and interviews indicate that compassion seems to inevitably accompany true and integral passion (27). When passion and energy are directed into an emergent, auto-genic pathway that is fulfilling to the pather, the feelings of compassion build up and are directed toward those that suffer and are in pain. The compassionate Buddha is indeed a symbol and metaphor for the universe, and for the modern person building a spiritual journey in this life.

The interviewees talked of devoting much of their energy to make the world better for the handicapped, the unemployed, the retarded, the victims of our competitive system, the ones without adequate resources, the poor or financially disadvantaged, the older persons, the sick, the abused, the criminals, the insane, the hurting.

It is dramatic to note that when people were asked to talk about devoting their lives to missions and pathways, they did not mention power, money, winning, efficiency, control, fame, success, and other ego goals. Despite many assumptions made by psychologists and social scientists about the prepotency of self and ego drives, the pleasure principle, rewards, and win-win drives, there seems little support for these viewpoints in our data.

People mention as missions such things as service to fellows, bettering the world, working for international brotherhood, making a better environment for our planet, improving the schools, creating a new-age business that would be devoted to improved health or enriched living, reforming the political or economic system, creating a new concept of improved health care, and other expressions of "noble" or other non-ego goals. Of course, it is easy to interpret each of these as a way of enhancing the ego. My impression from spending hours talking with these people was that most people who see themselves as on a passionate path are in the process of transcending, moving beyond ego drives.

We have experimented with several ways of examining these issues in some depth. One promising method is at the beginning of a three-day workshop to say something like this: "Do this with me, please. Imagine that all of us in the room here now had gathered together on a similar occasion about 100 years ago and had agreed to come as individuals to be born on earth. Happily, we all meet in this room today. I see you, am delighted, and simply ask: What are you doing here? I'd like you to think about this, as individuals for a few moments, spend 10 or 15 minutes writing it down. I'll then suggest that you form some small groups of 5 or 6 and tell each other why you are here on earth." Granted, the language and tone predispose people to take a long-range look at their earth trip and their passionate path. The high energy way people consistently go at the task seems to indicate they come up with something that is very significant to them. I have had people do this at the beginning of each day of a several-day workshop, and find that they go increasingly deep each time, consistently come up with things that they are reluctant to come up with in earlier responses. The "repression of nobility" mentioned earlier seems to have occurred.

I have worked with intensive groups for many years, beginning with the Bethel NTE groups in l950. I have found consistently that in in-depth groups meeting over long periods of time, from 150 to 1500 hours of contact time, people fall in love with each other, become dramatically more compassionate and caring with each other, and show, in general, the caring and loving sides that they repress or cover up in our competitive and hierarchical society. I am finding that these same processes go on, in a shorter time, in my "passionate path" workshops.

I am thinking of calling the "passionate path" the "compassionate path." The term is more accurately descriptive.

I believe that I am a unique and perfect expression of the infinite wholeness. Loving myself is the same as loving every form that exists, as loving the universe. My loving extends to all forms, all of which are also a perfect expression of the infinite allness. My universal family is of infinite, all-inclusive size.

I am unique, just as you are unique. No person has existed or will ever exist that is exactly like me. I am, thus, of irreplaceable worth. I want to be tender with me, treasure me, give me all of the experience that I can discover. I love Jack. Narcissus was right. Self-love is a divine and sacred form of religious expression. It is an organic, universal process. What I am describing is, perhaps, the opposite of a defense mechanism. To love self is to love the universe, which is an expression of me, that mirrors me. People, cats and flowers that love themselves are tender, compassionate, loving, and giving of self. They are not "selfish," not inconsiderate, not hostile. They do not populate our prisons or other institutions where people are placed to "protect society." They are not dangerous.

I am often described as tender, gentle, compassionate, protective of those who seek my protection, unassertive. I like these descriptions. At times in the past a few people have analyzed me, depreciatingly, as not competitive enough, not assertive enough, too feminine and gentle, not strong enough as a leader, "too much in the woodwork," not demanding enough, "easily walked over and ignored."

There are some bases for these observations. I recall a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. There were seven of us on the Board, most of whom had come from great distances to attend the three-day meeting. We were put up in individual rooms at a luxury hotel in La Jolla. The staff had agreed to pick each of us up sometime after 9:00 a.m. in the morning. They had agreed to have the desk call our rooms and we were to be available to hear a call after 9. Each of the people on the Board, except for me, were called and picked up about 9. At about 10:30 a.m., after an hour and a half of the meeting, someone noticed that they had forgotten to pick me up. I was certainly the least prestigious member of the distinguished Board, certainly the least assertive, certainly the person most likely to be overlooked and not missed at the meeting, and certainly the least likely to make a fuss or to make waves if forgotten. I had then many feelings of embarrassment, humor, resentment, self-doubt, self-pity, self-examination. Mostly humor. I see this as a natural consequence of being the me that I have created.

During the writing of this book in the last three years I have grown and changed a great deal. My Innisfree experience has been particularly significant for me in making even more clear for me my chosen spiritual pathway. I feel that I am tuning into the universe, joining others in making significant changes in the universe. I am certainly not alone on the journey. I like my priorities.

I have a new sense of being. I am still likely at times to be ignored, forgotten, underestimated. I like the genuineness of a person who introduced me, the other day, as the featured speaker to a large conference audience. He said, "Jack is always more than he seems." I liked what I assume that he meant by that.

At another time, after conducting a recent large workshop for an eight-hour day, I was told that one of the members of the audience had said about me: "I was amazed at how non-defensive he was. I have never seen anyone so free of defenses." I liked this view and it fitted my own perception of the changes in me. I believe that I am undergoing many significant changes that are visible to me and to others.

I like what I do, what I am coming to believe, how I feel, and the relationships I have with people. I feel that the universe loves me and that there is nothing to defend against.

I have learned a great deal about being and loving from our three sons. One day after about a month in the first grade in the public school in Delaware, Blair came home from school all excited and was telling us that they had just had a visit from a policeman who had talked with them for a couple of hours warning them about the dangerous people that they might meet on the way to and from school. The policeman had warned them in strong language about there being people who might rob them, molest them, sexually attack them, or kidnap them.

He suggested that if any adult approached them on the street to scream for a policeman or to scream and then run home to their parents. Then, seemingly incredulous, he asked me, "Do you believe that?" I replied, quietly, "No, I don't believe that." He said, "Neither do I," and then, as far as I could tell, he forgot about it. At least I never heard about it again. Blair, with high "being," just did not create experiences for himself that were fearful or distrusting. He discovered very early that the universe loved him and cared for him. Now, at 25 years of age, he is even more trusting and into his own "being."

Another experience comes to mind in this connection. It was a very powerful one for me. As I am now developing so many insights that are new for me, I suddenly see this experience in a new light. I was consulting with a large international company, doing a five-day team development session for the CEO and the nine key executives in the company. We had worked hard, working in a suite in this luxury hotel, having our meals served in our suite of rooms. On Saturday afternoon, the CEO suggested that we go to the main dining room and celebrate for dinner. The VP of Industrial Relations called the restaurant, telling them what company he represented and asking for a dinner table for eleven of us at 8:00 p.m. He reported back to us that they said that every table in the dining room had been reserved and that there was no table available at any time during the evening. Everyone was disappointed. The VP of Marketing asked how serious we were about getting a table. Everyone agreed that they wanted one very much. The Marketing man was one of the most impressive executives I had ever met in about twenty years of consulting with top management in the best corporations in America. He had been telling us that, as part of his amazingly effective program in sales training, he had offered to each region that he would come out to demonstrate his methods of selling. He asked each regional person to pick his toughest customer, one that he simply could not sell. He then invited the sales person to go with him to the customer and observe how he "sold" the customer. We gathered from many stories that had gone around the company for years that he "never" failed to sell the tough customer. The Marketing man was a quiet, trusting man with what I am calling here a "high sense of being." He had been very much impressed with my Trust Level theory of management and agreed with it completely. He and I both agreed that persuasion and "high sell," even attempts to "influence," were self-defeating. Selling does not sell.

He then said that if we wanted a table in the dining room to simply meet him there at 8:00 p.m. (the height of the evening rush) and he would have a table for us. We left the meeting room at about 7:00 p.m. to go to our rooms and clean up for dinner. The VP asked me if I would like to walk to the dining room with him to ask for the table. We leisurely walked to the dining room and found a large crowd of people waiting for tables. The VP walked up to the impressive and dignified Maitre de and, looking him very quietly in the face, simply said, "I would like a table for eleven at 8:00 p.m. for dinner." The immediate, unhurried reply was "Certainly, Sir." When we came back down at 8:00 p.m., they had placed a large table in a choice part of the room and we were taken to the table immediately. Each of us was quietly impressed, again, with the sense of being, presence, and simple dignity of this "spiritual" man. I have never forgotten this experience and was certain, as were all of the others in the group from their long experience at seeing him in similar situations, that this was a demonstration of the effect of spiritual presence. I choose to call this quality a sense of deep trust, spirituality, and being. I believe that the universe is moving in this direction. This dramatic and pervasive change in our universe is the topic of my third book in the trilogy, THE AGE OF TRANSCENDENCE.

I experience myself as moving in this transcendent direction. I feel little or no need for "defense" or for the behaviors and feelings that are associated, for me, with a defensive attitude: persuasion, putting people in roles, masking my feelings, attempting to influence others, controlling myself or the people around me, and the other feelings and attitudes associated with fear, distrust and counter-Omicron processes.

I am more and more loving of me.

The life of the person, in both an earthly and an eternal sense, is more fulfilling for the person if she or he creates and discovers a spiritual journey that truly comes from the deepest core of the person, that fulfills a sense of mission, that creates harmony with one's environment, and is in tune with the universe and its wholeness.

The primary function of the passionate path is to wholize the person. My life, in this world and in the next, is a conscious fulfillment of my grandfather's prophecy. My pathing has thus been, for me, a special and idiosyncratic fulfillment, completely unique, as I see it. I am finding, as I investigate the lives of others, that this passionate pathing is characteristic of the lives of most persons. My path has been the most significant force in my life. I believe that this concept is a vital bridging link among all persons.

Returning to Alberta is, for me, a journey filled with excitement. My consciousness is always flooded with memories, all of them positive. This day I had been consulting with the management of a Canadian oil company. We had all flown to Banff for a few days, partly for vacation and partly to work in a conference room away from intruding phones. Driving in a rented car down the mountain from Banff to Calgary in the late evening, alone with my memories, entranced by the moonlight, enticed by the snow on the mountains and on the prairie, I finally arrived at Calgary Inn, was shown to my room, and found the scene from my room window even more peaceful and transporting than from my car. I turned off the lights, gazed at the northern sky, and suddenly went into a peaceful, deep trance.

I was powerfully aware that my mother's letter to me had said that I was conceived in a hotel room in Calgary where my mother and her friend had spent the night. I was filled with immense gratitude for this gift that they had given me, my birthright of grace and spirituality. I have no idea how long the trance lasted. I was flooded with an intense light, was gifted with a panorama of scenes from my life, each of which seemed connected to this hotel room where I was given the gift of life. It seemed that I was being told that all of the events of my life had up to this point been connected, that I was asked to be aware of this connectedness, and that I was to dedicate myself even more deeply to the fulfillment of my mission that was foreordained by my grandfather.

The room became symbolic of all this, but more than that. It was a medium for giving me a sense of fulfillment, of infinite meaning, of assurance that all of my life events, sometimes seen as fortuitous, were each a meaningful signpost on my sacred journey. My journey seemed immensely clear, lighted, star-crossed, blessed by the cosmos. I felt that this messaged night was part of a larger purpose, filled with portent. I slept a peaceful slumber that night, protected by the spirits and the memories of my earth parents who had started my path.

A few weeks later, my communion with my parents was continued in another experience in Ord, Nebraska. A dear friend in our TORI community, Jo Stowell, had invited me to visit her TORI group in Ord. We chose to have this special event on my birthday, December 10, and the magnificent wholeness of the evening escalated to the point where, after the meeting, I suddenly was visited again by my parents. The prairie seemed a replica of Magrath, where I was born. The stars had a special luminosity, as if to honor the anniversary of my birth, and again to remind me of my mission, the sacral nature of my journey, the significance of this warm and loving TORI group in Ord for my connecting of me, through them, with our loving universe. I had been prompted to talk with a special spiritual message that evening and I was filled with the glow of that message that seemed to come direct from the universe, through me, to these special people.

The next day, my plane to the West coast was re-routed for weather reasons so as to fly over Provo, Utah, a glimpse of which, started me on the third episode of this tripled experience with my mother and her grace and spirituality. I had buried Ada and my son, Larry, near each other in Provo, and I fell into a deep trance for the rest of the plane ride, re-living, in intense illumination, the key events of my relationship with my mother. The intense cleansing light was a medium giving me the message that my passionate path was also her journey, and that I was fulfilling her spiritual mission while fulfilling my own. She was my companion in my trance and was again, as she had been all of my life, my spiritual guide and spiritual friend.

This triple trance experience, in which I was so deeply in communion with my parents, nourished and sustained me in my passionate path. The experiences enriched my vision, gave immense clarity to my journey, removed the occasional lingering doubts that this, indeed, was my life work and play.

One of my concerns from the beginning of my life has been how I might create the life I want without imposing upon others. The experiences above have clarified my journey to me. The focus of my journey is to be with, commune with, tune in to, and journey with all beings in the universe. It is this collaboration, this process itself, that is the transformational change in the universe. No one needs to change. No one needs ever to impose, even to teach. Each form in the universe is a sacred and perfect expression of the allness. It is this co-being that I wish to join.

Our experience in the Passionate Path workshops is that when we communicate in depth with each other, and when each person in the workshop takes a deep-searching inward focused look at the pathway she or he is on, that it seems we are all more alike than we seemed to be at first look. Each of us, it appears, is on a similar pathway. Even, in a sense, the same pathway. We are each headed toward higher spiritual energy, a deep search for meanings and spirituality, greater compassion, dedicated to a "noble" and universe-joining mission, is taking a cosmically playful look at self and others, and wishes to move beyond current perceptual boundaries.

Each person is, indeed, unique in the expression and manner of pathing, and each of us is taking her or his own sacred road to this spiritual joining of the universe, but each is, in a very significant sense, on the same cosmic journey. We, as humans, seem unaware of this universal brotherhood and sisterhood of mission and path.

I believe that I create me, my environment, and my journey. The journey is a sacred expression of my unique harmony. Each of my moments contributes to my joining and collaboration with the universe. I am continually moving into greater harmony, communion and allness.

A concept that takes on more and more significance to our collaborative Omicron seminar group is that of a proactive orientation in contrast with a reactive orientation.

Fred Cheyunski, one of our members, has just completed the first draft of his book on proactivity. We all believe that this concept is central to the Omicron orientation (15).

My intense contact with this group of co-authors and with my Passionate Path workshops has given me the increasingly strong impression that creating a passionate path for oneself is the critical factor in building a more proactive and collaborative life. The fully proactive person makes a statement about life that is similar to the following:

I move into life, rather than react to the life within and around me. Rather than react to my own inner feelings, my dreams, my perceptions, I create my inner life, my own daydreams and my nightdreams, my fantasies. I do not use my dreams as a basis for diagnosing what I am "really" like, as in the Freudian and Jungian fashion. I proactively create the kind of dreams I wish, so that my sleeping life is congruent with my waking life, my unconscious is congruent with my conscious, and my life is one that I am choosing. I choose the way I feel; I choose the way I think; I choose the assumptions I make; and I choose the unconscious dreamlife that I wish. I am proactive; I move into life. I move into relationships. I celebrate my own life and the life of others.

I move into collaborative relationships, with nature, with persons, with "reality," with the universe. I invite collaboration, and choose attitudes that enhance collaboration, being with. Thus, I reach out to join the universe.

I contrast proactivity with reactivity (15). When I am reactive I live in a world that impinges upon me. I am controlled by the processes and forces that I see. When I proact I create the processes around me. When I am reactive I am likely to be defensive, defending myself against the very forces, persons, processes and things that I have created through my fears. I am caught in a never-ending, circular process of reactions to reactions to reactions. When I am proactive, the process starts here. I start it. I break the circle. I get out of the decelebrative escalation of down-bringing feelings and states.

When I am reactive I create an unfriendly universe that corroborates my fear fantasies. When I am proactive I create a friendly universe that corroborates my celebrative and trusting fantasies.

The above is a fairly strong statement that represents where I am now as I am moving fully into the theme and mission of my fourth twenty-year period of life. I am impressed with the fact that this proactive manner of moving into collaboration is characteristic of the way that everyone I am contacting in depth is moving. We are providing the environment for each other that makes this not only possible but likely.

In the table on the following page is a set of relationships. Each of the seven Omicron processes is described in terms of a focus of energy that is specific to the process a focus of the trusting that occurs in the process, and a brief description of the boundary-breaking experience that aids in releasing the forces that transcend. This release is the transformation, the transcendence.

Trust is a key. A highly trusting person creates transcending experiences that trigger the release of new energy that transforms all process, all events, all forms. Every form is a dynamic energy state that continually sets up growth processes that outgrow the form in a process of dynamic evolution. This is particularly true of environmental quality states, through which all human forms evolve.

As I have indicated throughout this book, my own communion experiences have been central to my own transformation.

The passions and foci in my journey have led to these release experiences. It is as if the heavens have opened to me and revealed something fundamental about the inner nature of reality. This perceptual transformation has led, in each case, to new growth, new visioning, and new intensity in my spiritual journey.

One afternoon, taking a few moments to savor the intensity of a powerful experience in one of our professional intern groups, I went to my room, lay on the bed, and gave myself up to my free fantasy. I seemed to put myself in readiness for a deep communion with the universe. Immediately I felt a dream descend upon me. Afterwards, it reminded me of my all-in-all experience reported in Chapter 2. I felt that I was getting a message that was of tremendous significance to me, that would answer some of my many dilemmas. I gave myself up to the experience. I kept sensing the words, "Beyond imagery." I had been impressed for some time with the power of visual imagery in healing cancer, solving problems, manifesting inner states, and the like. The non-sensory experience I was getting was that imagery was very ponderous. Much more rapid and powerful avenues were to open up to me. Just as earlier in the all-in-all vision, I received a rush of clarity. The heavens were opened up to my knowing. At this moment in my account, I am completely at a loss for any descriptive words. The key message I received was that this clarity was beyond images, beyond reflective thought, beyond consciousness, beyond sensory experience, beyond ESP, beyond any process through which I had ever taken in something. Or beyond any process that I had heard about. I felt beyond my body or beyond life. Afterwards, in a few moments of recovery time, I was aware that this was a view of what life after death would be: incredibly nirvanic, peaceful, an experience beyond whatever I had ever felt heaven to be in my images and reflections.

I feel very inadequate in my words to communicate how powerful, freeing, transcending, and beyond all this experience was. I balk at even calling it an "experience," a word which seems to imply body-dependent and sense-dependent states.

Somehow I knew that this transcendence, this beyondness going was much more rapid and all powerful than anything I had conceived of prior to this.

This experience has led me to look anew at everything I have ever experienced and thought. In some ways this was the most powerful of my seven experiences. More jolting, disquieting, challenging. I am still processing the experience.

I can identify several changes I have made following this communion. I have lost, seemingly, all of my earlier fears of death. Death seems to be a welcome release, a moving beyond the limitations of body, senses, assumptions, and processes that are dependent upon life-in-this-form. I remember about 15 years ago when I began to feel the awesome historical significance of the TORI communities, I developed an irrational fear that I might die before I was able to complete this vital experiment with the world. I wanted to rush to see it all finished, written up, and "given to the world" before I died. In the perspective of my recent experiences this hurried creativity and fear of early death seems pleasantly humorous and enjoyable. I look back upon it now as I do upon some of my childhood fears -- to be enjoyed and left there.

I have developed what is for me a new view of the classic polarities of life-death, love-hate, doing-being, masculine-feminine, mind-body, intuitive-rational, left brain right brain, and the infinite array of other formulations (22). I believe these to arise as a creation of our limited and projective perceptual scanning processes. What we see is what we get. These polarities and their accompanying paradoxes are creations of our fear fantasies, our needs to stabilize our perceptual worlds, to see "meaning" in the characteristics of our perceptually created "physical" world, illusions created to support other illusions. Built upon our defensive need to create secure stability in our world "out there." I am sketching out a "beyond paradox" book that will be playful.

Radical new options open up to me. I am looking for unlikely options that I had in the past closed off. I am amazed at what a difference it makes to make the decision that no option is ever closed. There are no boundaries that I do not create in my perceptions.

Perhaps most significant is the lessening of my fears about using the language that I am using in this book. I have in the past been fearful that my new language would put off people who are looking for more practical, scientific, empirical, research-oriented, easily-defined, popular, familiar, or conventional language. I devote much energy to describing my ideas so that I will encourage dialogue with you, as the readers, and perhaps stimulate collaboration with you. Language need not be a barrier.

I perceive this communion experience as a message from the universe relating to this concern: How do I discover my soul and how do I nourish it?

During the first 20 years of my life, I had a firm and vivid "testimony" to all of the teachings of the LDS church. During the next two twenty-year periods, I became a psychologist and went through a period of doubt, hunting for evidence and experimental proof of everything, a critical questioning of many of the beliefs of the church. I maintained a membership in the LDS church, consulted often with the national headquarters of "the major Protestant denominations of the U.S., respected the religious leaders of our time, and created my own eclectic belief system, that was mildly satisfying to me. I missed the firm and unquestioning beliefs of my childhood. During the recent beginning of my fourth twenty-year period, I have come full circle and believe very firmly most of the beliefs of my childhood.

It strikes me now that my choice to come to earth as the love child of a spiritual Mormon mother was wise indeed, exactly what was best for my special spiritual journey. It is no accident that the LDS beliefs are with the human potential movement. My transcendent experiences have led me to look again at the heritage of beliefs about the -universe that nourished my early formative days. I will mention a few:

The deep belief in community. The "United order" of the church was a cooperative, self-regulating system that is very similar to the communities being revived in the human potential movement. We are moving toward international and universal communion through the medium of intentional community. These community experiments, which include our pioneering experiences, are, for me, the most promising of our current attempts to create a more humane and transcendent society. They are amazingly similar to what the Mormons tried in the early days.

The trusting belief in high-trust healing, with the "laying on of hands." Recent research on healing and touching confirms for me how significant my childhood experiences were.

A firm belief in personal existence before and after the earth experience.

Belief in taking care of the bodily tabernacle of the soul. The "Word of Wisdom" admonitions to avoid caffeine, tobacco, meat, alcohol, and additives, and to live temperate, moderate lives sound very modern and humanistic.

The firm belief in the validity and reliability of the inner guidance of the holy spirit, the inner voice, and the world of intuitive is very new-age in tone.

The belief in the overriding power of faith and trust in guiding life decisions. I am very sure that my growing awareness of the centrality of trust as a theory of human behavior was directly due to my mother's high faith in faith, a message she communicated to me in ways beyond words. My mother talked with my sister an hour before she died, alone, in her room, very conscious of what was happening to her. The experienced coroner had never seen a person die with such apparent quiet serenity, as evidenced by the peacefulness of her face. None of us who knew her had even a faint trace of doubt in her unwavering faith in the beauty of her after life (38).

My experiences as a member of the LDS church have been a primary influence on my life. I have for a long time been very much aware of the parallels between the Mormon value system and belief structure, on the one hand, and the value system and belief structure of my friends in transpersonal and humanistic psychology. I have long been a dedicated member of both worlds. Members of each tradition often look at each other as very different perhaps opposite in view. Fritjof Capra has performed a magnificent service in pointing out the parallels between eastern mysticism and quantum physics, two fields that, at first blush, might seem in opposite camps. I am preparing a manuscript that compares the belief systems of LDS people and humanistic psychologists. One of my motivations is to explore unexplored harmony and communion in the universe. I would like to introduce each of these seemingly opposite groups to each other. It might have symbolic significance. And it would, of course, be a movement in the direction of wholizing my own inner world.

These beliefs, and several others, formed the basis of the nourishment I received from my mother. They are fresh and new for me now in my "new" life, as they were during my childhood.

In all of my interviewees I have found some awareness of this "beyondness," a restlessness about what I am calling "spirit" and "soul." With many there is a discomfort with this language. Each seems to be struggling in some way with beliefs about enduring values, a search for some meaning to their lives beyond the ego, the here and now, the current views in "growth psychology," the current religious values, and the writings and teachings of the Eastern mystics. This seems to be a troubled age, an exploratory and transitional era.

There is a disquiet and even a new spiritual ethos, as if out of this inner search for deeper values something new and powerful will come, perhaps something "beyond" and transcendent.

In all of the interviewees, I found an increasing discomfort with many of the current values, perceptions, and life styles: depersonalization, materialism, distrust with institutions, lack of respect and trust for current business and governmental leaders, the superficialities of our current life, the public relations flavor of the contemporary world, the competitiveness and stress of current life styles. Most of those I talked with are searching for some kind of "noble" venturing in life, something to base life activities around. It can at least be said that most of them wanted something "beyond" what they were doing.

An Omicron orientation is that each form of energy, matter and life is, at once, idiosyncratic and universal. The inner search for essence and soul and the outer journey toward universality and in-touch-ness with the allness arrive at the same "reality." When each journey is in its fullness, all journeys are congruent and harmonic. Each form in the universe has an internal and external environment, and some manner of getting in touch with its essence and with its universality. Each of these processes is largely unworded. When the person is conscious of her or his universality, the process is both awesome and in awe, both humble and celebrative of self, fully unique and totally in universality and the allness.

My seventh communion experience came to me while I was jogging, toward the end of a beautiful run that was increasingly exhilarating as my body became more enlivened by the exercise. And by the organic changes that seem to escalate as I run I do my jogging during the late afternoon, at the end of a day of much mental and spiritual activity. Everything that has happened during the day reaches a climax of energy and illumination during my run. On this particular day, I went into a deep trance state during the last 10 minutes of the run, experienced a clarity of illumination and perspective that was a significant message for my life. The first words that came to me as I exited from the trance were clear: "The universe is within me." I was aware during my trance that this experience was coming as an answer to my persisting dilemma: "How can I get in touch with the universe?" This has been the theme of my passionate path for as long as I can remember.

During the trance, I experienced a peaceful glow, a euphoria, a satisfying sureness, a feeling that I somehow now knew where I was going with my life. I had no mixed feelings at all, no residual of doubt. I felt that I knew that the universe was in me. It was also in each and every other person, in every being. The way to see the universe, feel it, hold it, be in it, was to open myself up to myself.

Equally important to me was the feeling that the universe, rather than being an unfriendly force, loves me and cares for me -- is, in fact, inside me. It is always a resource. I need but get in harmony with myself, tune me up, and the universe opens up to me, is available to give me energy, support, sustenance, love, and a deep sense of collaboration.

Each of the seven transcendent experiences is a significant event in my life. The cluster of related experiences became the transition between my third 20-year period and my fourth 20-year period of life. They provided an entry into a very different cycle. I felt very new and different. With these experiences came new energy, a new strength of mission, a broader perspective, a feeling of being a new person. In this double decade I am in a new period of enlightenment for which the three earlier double-decades were a preparatory state.

The seven related messages have provided a unity and integrity to my life, wholizing my spiritual journey. Each experience gave me a central message, a new vision of the total Omicron reality. It is as if I, and the universe within, were giving me a wholeness view of all being, but giving it to me in seven different languages, perspectives of viewpoints so that I could have a more wholized view. The messages corroborate my intensive reading; validate my own experiences in living, teaching, and consulting; are confirmed by my field and laboratory research; and are a direct extension of our Trust Level theory.

I experienced each communion as a furthering of my passionate path, as movement on my journey, as congruent in both substance and process with my journey, and as an instance of organic growth on my part. I see my life much as Buckminster Fuller sees his (23), as an experiment with the universe, as a provisional try at a new life pattern. I am highly dedicated to this experiment.

Each experience grew out of my own ferment at the time, was preceded by hours or days of path-relevant stirring, intense spiritual and emotional excitement, and emersion in a perceptual shifting. The experiences came out of my own intense organic activity, and were embedded in spurts of intense growth.

I am coming to believe more and more that collaboration is a definitive condition of the universe, a natural garden for the emergence of creativity, invention, evolution, and productivity. Learning how to collaborate in depth is the turning point of our era, the medium out of which immense societal and cosmic growth will happen. The millennium will emerge from quantum leaps in our cooperation and collaboration. Newly evolved collaborative attitudes, skills, values, and knowledges. Each of my communion experiences grew immediately out of collaboration experiences with some kind of collaborative community.

For me, each of the experiences was positive -- joyful, peaceful, even euphoric. In several instances I thought of myself as getting a true glimpse of heaven or nirvana.

I experienced the communions as manifestations of the process of self-fulfillment. I look upon the self-fulfilling prophecy as a felicitous blessing, an organic working out, a playing out of the universal story, an instance of the friendliness of the universe. Providing an instance of collaborative depth process, the universe treats me as I treat it. We are in a reciprocal relationship. My communion experiences are illustratory of my self at its best, of the best of my relationships with the universe. Communions are demonstrations -- a foretaste of what life can be for me at all times. They are a preview of what I expect life to hold for me, perhaps in the last double-decade of my earthly existence. I know that the life of each of us can be a continual nirvana, a constant heaven, a non-cyclic joy and ecstasy. Such is the direction of our evolution as persons, forms, and as a universe.

My seven communions clearly completed a message to me, and seemed whole. The message was for me and for our era. It seemed applicable to our world at its present state of evolution.

Each of the messages came to me as a happening, a visitation, unplanned and out of my control. When the seven communions were complete, I had a feeling of being filled up, my continuing concerns answered and the tensions reduced. I felt ready to move on to other experiences and my new life. I felt, as a new person, that I was ready to create a new life.

I felt that I was "born again," starting a new, high energy life, ready to move in full force into my spiritual journey. It seemed to me that my sixty years of dedication to my passionate path was a preparatory trial, a practice run by an amateur on an unfamiliar track, an intense, highly motivated fumbling. I was now ready to make my move. It has been fun for me to look at my life since these experiences. I have, in addition, asked a number of people who have known me well during the last fifteen years to describe any changes that they may have seen in me over this period. I am surprised at the degree of agreement in our observations. My new life is described like this:

These perceptions, of course, are taken from descriptions made by people who know me well and who are very positive in their feelings toward me. I made no effort to get a representative sample of perceptions. There is a consensus around the view that I have changed a great deal, significantly, since my transcendental experiences.

I was surprised to hear from all of those interviewed that when they, at my suggestion, thought about themselves as having a "spiritual journey" that they were able to see this in themselves and that they were positive about being asked to view themselves this way. The more often they attempted to put their spiritual journey into words, the more in touch they became with long-range, meta-personal, and "universal" aspirations. They were certainly stimulated by my questions, and directed by me to some degree. The surprisingly positive responses, and the facility with which people were able to view themselves and their lives this way were notable. Some interviewees were able to easily touch the edge of what they saw as "universal," to speak in terms of cosmic metaphors of reality, to explore the edges of their awareness, to refer to archetypes that felt very significant to them, and to respond articulately to my probing.

I'm not sure what to call my experiences. I am reluctant to classify or code them, to diminish them in any way. They are deeply personal, created by me, deeply valued, powerful in their impact on me, life transforming.

Since having the experiences, I have read a great deal about such experiences. There is a surprising agreement in the literature about the nature of these cosmic and highly private events. It is clear that something similar can be induced by drugs, prayer, fasting, hypnotism, chanting, trauma, and a multitude of other induction techniques continually being invented by technique-oriented practitioners. I find myself very little interested in techniques and interventive strategies.

I am much more interested in organic experiences that come naturally from inner conditions of trust and wholeness, and from inner peace and richness of soul. Such experiences are becoming more common in our transcending society. The spiritual level of our society, perhaps of our universe, is recently accelerating. This massive change is the topic of my third book in this trilogy, Touching the Universe.

What is happening with me and with a number of people who are living TORI theory, the Omicron orientation, and related holistic views of the universe is an autogenic, organic, inner-toward-outer, flowing, transforming synergy. It is from this change in persons and in the vibratory rhythms of our world that come these modern mystical states. I see this emergence as a part of the Omicron shift: a proactive view of life, a higher trust, a new spiritual energy, a universalizing nobility of mind, and a synergy of bodymindspirit.

Since my seven highly integrated and wholized experiences, I have had many similar experiences. Whereas the first seven came as visitations to me, very much out of my control, the newer ones are very much created by me. I am now able at any time to go into myself, create an inner receptiveness, an enhancing environment, and have a trance experience whenever I truly want it. I am moving towards an integration of my waking states with my trance states. There is more unity, less and less difference between my normal organic state and my mystical experiences.

It is clear to me that I have unlimited and undeveloped organic capacities that are only beginning to be tapped. These are available to me for use in all of my life activities. I am developing clairvoyant, pre-cognitive, and other paranormal sensitivities that heighten my already-well-developed perceptivity and sensitivity to vibrations from human and nonhuman forms. I feel a general atunement with the universe, with people, particularly with children, cats, flowers and trees.

I have moved on to other activities from my former professional teaching and consulting activities, but, on occasion, I accept an arrangement with an organization or group therapy. I am amazed, awed, and sometimes a bit frightened by my new skills and transcendent abilities. My effectiveness has moved into new, hitherto-unexperienced levels. It is clear to me that this transcendence is available to all humans and nonhumans. As many have pointed out, we are moving rapidly into a new era of unpredictable paranormal sensitivities, communal peace and harmony, new consciousness, transcending love and communion, shared and perhaps universal satori, joyful wellness, and other readinesses for a new age. It is exciting to be alive and receptive.

The avenues to something beyond wellness are relatively unexplored, not likely to be prescriptive, not likely to be programmed or linear, likely not to need a guide or a professional, not likely to have clear road signs, may not be leading to a place or a goal, and are certainly not easy to describe or to write about. It is much easier to list the things they are not than to describe what they are.

Along with my Omicron collaborators, I believe that the road to states beyond wellness is a spiritual journey; is filled with high energy or passion; starts from someplace in the center of the self, is autogenic; is wholizing or trusting; is flowing, emergent, full of life; is a zestful, unfinishable discovering; is truly noble and worthy of the full focus of all of one's unlimited energy; transcends any images and states previously experienced by the person; and is in harmony and oneness with the in-process universe. That is, it is something like an Omicron journey. At least, we Omicron co-adventurers are in the preliminary processes of fantasizing what this road beyond wellness might be.

The process of creating and discovering one's own unique passionate pathway is the launching process toward the beyond-wellness road, the start of an enticing adventure into the nirvanic unknown. In Chapters 9 through 16, I am describing my own idiosyncratic view of this avenue towards transcendence and harmony with the universe. I will consider some of the guidelines we are using in applying the Omicron orientation in our personal and professional lives. Incidentally, our intention is that there be no significant differences between our personal lives and our professional lives.

The continually evolving passionate path becomes an internal guidance system. That is, it becomes a theory that the person uses in making choices, in getting into the flow, in creating new energy, in becoming proactive, in caring for self, in growing toward new habits of perceiving, in creating more nurturing messages given to self and others, in becoming more conscious of the sacral nature of self and others, and in the continual transcending of the inner guidance system itself.

Each person has an internal guidance system, a theory. It is likely to be only partly conscious. Friends are usually able to predict what we will do, and may be unconscious of the cues they use to predict what we do or to describe the inner theory they assume we have. Each person makes many assumptions about living, some of which are conscious. There is usually some congruence between what one says one's assumptions are and what one's theory is. We may describe ourselves more positively or more negatively than our behavior warrants. We all make choiceless choices, live in habitual patterns that are no longer matters of conscious choice, and about which we may be relatively unconscious.

A passionate path becomes an excellent internal guidance system under some conditions. As we have indicated in the first nine chapters of the book, our passionate path is more likely to lead us to a continual nirvana and spiritual joyfulness when certain characteristics are present. In the following section I will talk about this issue.

I have no interest in writing a "how to" book. Each person creates and discovers her or his own path and life-patterns. I will share some of the processes that have helped me to discover, refine, or improve my own passionate path, and what I have seen others doing.

We have found-the checklist on Table II a useful guide for suggestions as where to look in describing and refining one's spiritual journey. The items are largely self-explanatory. They come from our interviews of people who describe their paths and the feelings they have about what they are doing and what they would like to do.

People report the following activities as useful in creating a satisfying journey and inner guidance system:

Looking inside. A true path emerges out of the soul, the core, the deep-lying inner directions of one's self, the depth urges of one's inner voice. My outer life, professional choices, life style, career planning, time management, and way of being all arise in my inner life.

Listening to friends. It helps to talk around. Counselors, teachers, friends, parents, siblings, lovers -- the feelings and perceptions of others will give cues toward new options, towards self-diagnosis, to undiscovered talents, to tensions that are apparent to others but hidden to me.

Trying out new things. Often I am unaware of activities or jobs that might be ideal or well-suited to my life. I may not know how bored and dissatisfied I am until I discover something else that is really fulfilling to me. Some persons find one path and stay on it, with deep satisfaction, all of a long life. Others find it more satisfying to make major changes several times during a lifetime.

Look at what bores, fatigues, annoys, or drains me. It is possible to have high energy most or all of the time.

If I am devoting my energy to unfulfilling and draining activities, it is time to make new choices, seek a new career, or change the environment I am in. It is important to fully realize that each of us creates our own environment. It does not create us. The checklist is helpful in calling attention to hidden signs that I am on or off my path.

Look for activities on the job or off the job that are really satisfying. It is possible to fill my life with joyful and fulfilling feelings, attitudes, and activities.

Read widely about the passionate paths of others, or about the theory itself. This chapter is a start.

Try articulating my basic life activities, the passionate path I am on or would like to be on. Many people have found this a very informative activity. Reading the descriptions to others may encourage useful dialogue.

I am assuming that the creation of a fulfilling spiritual journey is the primary avenue toward the growth of the person. The Passionate Path leads to many positive outcomes: job satisfaction improved relationships with others, reduced stress or the absence of dysfunctional stress, living in a collaborative community of relevant others, feelings of self-worth, the satisfactions of feeling that one's contributions to the world are positive, and freedom from irrelevant anger. These outcomes are significant to overall wellness and would be normal outcomes of being on one's path.

Of far greater significance to most of us who are exploring the concept of the spiritual journey are: the probability of the autogenic path leading to transcendent outcomes beyond the normal, reaching new levels of joy, creativity, spirituality, nirvana, psychic capacities, and continuing states of super-health and paranormal wellness. It is this concept of a new world for any person and for society that makes the concept of the truly passionate and noble path an exciting one.

TABLE II

We have been talking of the passionate path concept as applied to the life of the person. It is equally applicable to the group, organization, or community. Each individual creates her or his own environment. Because the fullness of development of the person occurs in collaboration with the environment and with the larger universe, it is of great significance to the journeying person to create, with others, a communal passionate path for the organizations and groups of which one is a part.

Celebration and transcendence are likely to take place in the organization when the members of the organization are fully into an organizational spiritual path, when we members are fully aware of the journey and its significance for the organization, and when the spiritual pathways of the members are fully integrated into, wholized with, the Passionate Path of the organization into an organic being.

The organization achieves a celebrative and energyful pathway when it sees its mission as enhancing the environment of the planet, rather than that it is using up the oil reserve for a company profit, or that it is spending millions to convince the public that it is not squandering the reserves. The organization is likely to see its mission as spiritual when it is indeed dedicated to the improvement of communication in the world, rather than, for instance, seeing itself as putting out energy to do whatever it takes to make money from an efficient assembly system for telephones. The organization has a celebrative path when members can be justifiably and openly proud of the company record, its process, and its product. It is celebrative when members feel that they are "building cathedrals to honor God" rather than that they are piling bricks on each other to make a profit. It is celebrative when I feel that my effort contributes usefully to the true path of the organization, that my path and organizational path are both enhanced by what I did today.

In the early history of our world as we know it, life was very dangerous. In order to survive all of the natural dangers of floods, storms, fire, germs, war-like tribes, and all of the other fear-bred and fantasized specters added unto these omnipresent dangers, it was necessary for the human to learn defensive, survival-oriented attitudes, habits and assumptions. These defensive, fearful, distrusting postures seemed necessary for survival.

In the process of history, we got rid of the dangers much faster than we got rid of the danger-bred attitudes and assumptions. Defensive postures are no longer necessary. We now find that defense does not defend. Defensive behavior should have gone the way of the dinosaurs and the buggy whip. We now know that defensive attitudes produce the dangers, certainly augment and escalate them. Distrust produces more distrust. War and hostility feed from and live off of defensive attitudes.

When the world is seen as dangerous, unfriendly, and harmful, we see ourselves as needing to be cautious, guarded, reserved, cynical, distrusting and defensive. These attitudes and feelings become seen as realistic, necessary, appropriate and congruent with the nature of the universe we live in. We will see in Chapter 12 how messages, bred in this assumptive soil, contaminate and create the fear vibrations in the universe, and, of course, tend to create the dangers that we fear and prepare to defend against. We do the same irrational things that our large nation does: we prepare for war in order to achieve peace. The ludicrous nature of this assumption was highlighted in a graffiti in a college dorm that I visited the other day: "preparing for war to make peace is like fucking our way to virginity." Distrusting process is not likely to create trust-filled outcomes.

If the world is this dangerous and unfriendly, it might be irrational, perhaps psychotic, to celebrate it, honor it, love it, or see it as sacred, as we have done in this book. To trust such a world would be crazy-making. I prefer to trust the messages that come to me from my communion experiences.

People who live in such a dangerous and unfriendly universe are seen as being in danger, and thus needing therapists, physicians, teachers, spiritual guides, ministers, helpers, powerful leaders, and an elite group who are best able to defend themselves in such a dangerous world, and thus able to teach the rest of us how to be more appropriately defensive.

Omicron theorists assume that the above scenario is false and, indeed, more harmful to the universe than the so called dangerous world of fantasy. We assume that when we take another set of assumptions, described herein, we create a different, safer world, a perceived world that is more like the world as it actually is "out there," the "reality." The world is now and will become even more friendly, safe, and celebrative. We live in this world, which we help create, in joy, serenity, wellness and celebration. Even in transcendence, ecstasy, nirvana, and beyond wellness.

Seeing the world as dangerous and as sick, one set of theorists create worldviews that tell us how to heal the sick, doctor disease, remedy the dispirited, defend against dangers, remove the psychoses, and teach the ignorant. Seeing the world as friendly and celebrative and loving, the Omicron theorists look for the attitudes and assumptions that fit a world that is already intrinsically celebrative, holy, and ecstasy-oriented.

There is only one principle that one really needs to know: "The more trusting one is, the better life goes." All positive aspects of life are highly related to trusting attitudes. Each of the Omicron orientations are oriented toward high trust. The Omicron theory is an extension of the Trust Level theory spelled out in the 1978 Trust book (25):

Wholizing. Our original concept of trusting is more appropriately termed "wholizing." To trust is to be into the whole, the gestalt, the allness. To trust is to see things from a larger perspective. It is impossible to be fearful (the counter-trust stance) when one sees the situation in its wholeness, all of it. Wholizing produces trust, and trust creates wholeness. The two processes are eventually the same, as we define them.

Emerging. The nature of natural process is that it flows and emerges. To trust the universe is to trust the process of the universe, and that the natural, organic process will have positive, "friendly" outcomes.

Discovering. There is a false security in living in a fixed and established universe where there is no instability, no margin for error, no unknowns. It would be relatively easy to trust if all of the universe were visibly trustworthy and predictable. It is apparent that the universe is not like this. The universe and its processes are discovering themselves, in a dynamic state of unpredictability, working themselves out in an enticing and challenging state of emergence, unprogrammed and unprogrammable. To trust in this kind of process is the existential dilemma. This kind of trust is highly rewarding, an attitude (organic stance) that is highly appropriate for an unprogrammed human form that is living in a dynamic and changing relationship with an unprogrammed universe. Exciting.

Being. One's being is another dynamic and changing form, evolving, emerging, changing with the degree of enhancingness of the environment in which it is nourished or diminished. Trusting is the magic that enhances being. It is the trusting environment that is nourishing and developmental for being. This is true of any form in the universe.

Pathing. The more trusting, the more spiritual, noble, nourishing, and life-transforming is the pathway. The passionate path, as indicated here, is a trusting concept. Full belief in the efficacy of the passionate journey is to have full trust.

Transcending. Here we are talking about higher degrees of trust. The "moving beyond" quality of the transcending process is moving into the areas where trust is necessary to bridge between the perceivable realities of normal life and the parasensory, unpredictable, moving beyond that is the promise of a high-trust life. We are moving into areas of fire-walking, clairvoyance, precognition, and other beyond processes.

Universalizing. To move into universal metaphors -- into the areas of archetypes, myths, fantasies, dreams, and the unconscious -- is to move into areas requiring trust. To relate to the universal is to move beyond the hard touchable realities. It was "Doubting" Thomas who asked to touch the wounds of Jesus, trusting one sense modality over another.

I equate trust and faith. Fear is, often, the opposite of trust. The relationship of fear to trust is often complex, made difficult by the blocks that occur when we try to measure either.

When we are trusting we are more personal, more open to self and others, more allowing of the world, and more interdependent, less controlling. When we are fearful and distrusting we become more in role than personal, more closed than open, more managerial with the motivations of self and others than allowing of motivations, and more controlling than independent or interdependent.

The Nixon-Reagan era has broadened the base of distrust and fear. Erosion of trust is the disease of the era. We have a growing paranoia about Russia, business leaders, government leaders, labor organizations, criminals, almost anyone who is visible in public life.

I believe that trust is more basic than fear. In the long run, high trust drives out high fear. The universe is ready for a high-trust orientation like Omicron. These orientations speak to the deepest insights in the race. I believe that the deepest level in the human being is a trusting region. When the crunch is on, when danger and paranoia seem the order of the day, then the deepest nature in the human condition comes to the rescue of the race. Distrust and fear are more surface, more superficial, less enduring, less definitive. When we finally come down to where our deepest reserves are where our truest inner nature is, where we really want to be if given the ultimate existential choice, then we come to the deepest, unconscious, enduring nature of the person. This deepest core is trusting and loving. I do not believe that the inner unconscious world is the beast that it has been represented to be. Our fears as scientists and professionals have led us to project fear assumptions into the id.

I am impressed with the responses that I am getting to my public presentations of the Omicron orientations. The responses have been highly positive. This leads me to think that we are looking at a level of reality that speaks to the universal archetypes in people, to the trust-based unconscious, to the same forces in people that created for me my communion experiences, my glimpses of what I believe to be the inner reality of the universe.

The theory is more an orientation, a viewpoint, a way of looking at reality, experience, process -- everything. We think of it as a unitary theory. We intend to apply the orientation to all reality, to all forms of energy, matter and consciousness. It applies to all process: to winds, children, workers, chairs, rocks, cells, management, home building, and public administration. The purpose of this book on pathing is to focus persons on their self-organizing processes.

The theory focuses upon the perceptual processes, it being our belief that perception is the basic process in nature, the key process that precipitates change and growth, the unblocking process, the nodal process of all organisms, and certainly the process through which forms relate to one another. The heart of all behavioral science applications is the perceptual shift, which is the entry avenue to understanding and changing all social and physical systems. This is true of the new physics (26, 63); of societal reconstruction (16, 25); of cosmic awareness (2, 13, 54); of the revolution in management and administration (18); of the new view of health (19, 3, 52, 49, 25); of the role of the unconscious (24); of organization change (4, 9, 3); of the revolution in education (16, 46, 25); of the new view of reality (56, 62); of economics; of personal growth (25, 38); and of other phases of exciting change in all aspects of North American life.

Omicron is "holistic, oriented toward wholeness and trust. It is an extension and modernization of the gestalted positions of Kohler (37), Wertheimer (60), Koffka (36), and Wheeler (61). It is a systems approach (5). It is whole brain rather than left brain or right brain in focus (28). It is a field theory (40). It makes a start at transcending all polarities, duality’s, and paradoxes through a transcendental perceptual shift. It is both existential and beyond existentialism. It is always both and. It is both longitudinal and cross-sectional in methodology. It moves forward from the recurring question: What would life and nature be like if they were more whole? More trusting?

Omicron is both personal and universal. Each person creates her or his own omicronness, theory, viewpoint. The theory or orientation is completely unique for each person. It is a perceptual orientation that comes from the core of the person creating it. It is also a general, unitary theory, a growing consensual process. Through collaboration in depth a core group of 150 professionals are creating the viewpoint. It is being refined and presented in an Omicron series of books.

As indicated in the previous chapter, Omicron is an outgrowth and extension of Trust Level theory, a significant evolution of the earlier theory.

Omicron is, like Trust Level theory, a single variable theory. The single variable is movement toward perceptual wholeness (trust). Seeing trust as an expression of perceived wholeness is a useful and powerful advance in the theoretical model. Especially since the publication of our trust articles and the TRUST book, trust level has been discovered to be an increasingly useful concept and a powerful tool, especially in business, where it has been shown to be significantly correlated with productivity and other significant outcome variables.

Omicron theory is constructed as an adventure in fantasy. It is a whole-brain adventure in play, imagination, intuition, creative image formation, beyond-logic ideation, and speculation -- all integrated into concepts that come from hard research, mathematico-deductive logic, and other more linear and measurable processes. The test of the theory is in its applicability to life situations for individuals and organizations. The primary tests do not occur in measurement in the laboratory or in linear assessment of the constructs. The test of the Passionate Path concept is in the people who build life stories around the concept and find it to be useful or not useful in transcending to a new and richer level of living.

Omicron theory is emergent, in process, unfinished, and an invitation to continual discovering. It is a process of collaborative discovering. The excitement, the growth and the productivity itself come in the process of finding out, of zestful searching, of continual wonder and tentativeness, of not knowing and of not having road maps on the journey to spiritual enrichment. The ever-fresh searching is characteristic and perhaps definitive of fulfilling and meaningful, passionate life.

Omicron theory is born in collaboration, moves forward in synergy and cooperation, and indigenously invites new forms of collaboration. Each person seeking to create a passionate life benefits from collaboration with other pathers. Interviewed people who found themselves to be on a passionate path saw themselves as seeking collaborative lives.

Omicron theory is both a basic-science theory and an applied, engineering theory. It is designed for application. The Passionate Path is both a scientific hypothesis about the evolution of the person, and a highly practical concept that can change anyone's life. The theory relates to the process of getting in touch with the universe, and to the process of finding energy to get one through the next hour at work.

Omicron theory is designed to keep in touch with the flow, which is the fundamental nature of the reality. Putting our energy into the-flow of our life-urges and into the flow of our community life is the key to pathing.

Omicron theory defines collaborative environmental design as the primary mode of transformation and of effective action. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 13. The effective pather is one who creates, with others, a nurturing environment for the fulfillment of the path.

Omicron theory is not locked into any technique, culture, discipline, or language. It is independent of language forms, of the boundaries of particular disciplines, of the limitations of any technique, and of the norms of the culture. The aim of the Omicron orientation is to transcend limitations of norms, language, technique, and methodology.

Omicron theory is a diagnostic aid, a guideline to seeing what is happening, a window opener. It is a useful guideline in examining one's spiritual journey, gives a frame of reference for looking at my use of energy, my choices, my focus, and my inner guidance system.

Omicron theory is a guidance system for practitioners and for theorists and scientists. There is nothing more practical than a good theory. There is nothing more useful in theory construction than a beautifully-described practical pilot study. Theory and practice are interdependent. Omicron theory is created to take advantage of this synergy. The theory suggests issues and concerns that are of high priority. It is not a prescription for action but a guideline for suggesting issues, directions for looking.

Omicron theory is futuristic and longitudinal (cf. 21). The theory integrates [earnings from the past and hypotheses about the future into a meaningful whole that guides the person's efforts to create collaborative environments for a sustained integration of the life journey. The person thus creates a perspective that moves the person out of the limitations of a radical focus upon the present moment. The person then gets the intensity of being into the eternal moment and the perspective of being into the glories of the future. The larger the perceptual perspective, the more whole and effective will be the action system. Seeing things whole is an overall guideline for personal transformation.

Omicron theory sees all forms and processes as sacred and worthy of celebration. I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 16. It is easier to celebrate and honor persons than institutions. Once after I had given a speech before a national meeting of YMCA executives, Tilden Harrison, the director of training for the organization, said to me, "Jack, if you were able to love and celebrate organizations the way you can love and celebrate persons, you would be even more effective as a consultant." This remark started a whole series of self-examining processes in me. It was a beginning of a significant change in my perspective. I began to see the sacred nature of all relationships, forms, processes, and institutions, and to examine anew the nature of trust. For many people, the term "organization" is a dirty 12-letter word, three times as bad as a dirty four-letter word. A new view is that the organization is a transcendent reality, an organism that can be created in love and respect, created in our own image, and worthy of the creative efforts of our best moments.

Omicron theory posits seven basic processes or orientations that describe the sustaining environment of all effective systems. The fully passionate, energyful path creates and is created by a flowering of each of these seven processes in the life of the person.

The communications come as internal messages to self and as external messages to others. They come in various forms: words, gestures, vibrations, subliminal sounds, auras, universal symbols, cosmic and universal archetypes, and spiritual visions. Words may be the least significant form of these messages. For instance, the Findhorn experiences with plants, the Derby's work with animals, and Simonton's work with cancer cells all indicate the awesome power of sublingual processes as messages. Messages have magic.

One way to describe the celebrative universe and the celebrative organization is to think of positive, energyful, nirvanic, self-fulfilling, and love-brimmed messages continually being sent into the vibratory cosmos and the collaborative harmonies that surround us. These salutary valentines and rhythmic projections of inner states go out as conscious and unconscious epistles, worded and nonverbal messages to myself, to others, and to the universe. We create the universe.

These messages create health and wellness in ourselves, in our living space, in our organizations and in the universe itself. I believe that everything is changing and in continuous creation. Everything is emerging, always and in all ways. We continually create our organizations and our universe, in ways that are unpredictable and marvelously cloudlike and nonlinear. When we are in tune with ourselves, our inner states, and the universe, our messages are appropriately celebrative and positive, honoring and sacred, loving and harmonic.

As I evolve and proactively create myself, I have a wider range of choice in creating the messages that I consciously wish to send. I control my involuntary movements, my inner pulses and rhythms (26), my dreams (25), my auric emanations, my thoughts, the varied gifts that I bequeath to the universe. I continue to give out these messages. And I continue to receive these messages. My consciousness of the messages I receive is dependent upon my trust. When I am fully in tune, I know the universe is friendly and sacred. I get continual affirmation of this.

Of the myriad of illustrations that crowd and honor my mind, I think of the Champion Paper Company as the most celebrative organization that I have worked intimately with. I have a vivid memory of the president, Reuben Robertson, and his frequent celebratory messages to the organization. He talked little and gave off many messages. He did much. He walked a celebrative pathway, an honored and Passionate Path.

One day when I was in his office working with him as a consultant, he received a phone call telling him that Robert Wylie, a forest worker who had been cutting timber and working near the top of a giant tree in Champion's forest, had been killed a moment before the call. Rube responded immediately. He got in his car and drove 80 miles to the home of Mildred, Bob's wife, and called on her, informing her of the death of her husband. He drove alone, though he could, of course, have taken someone with him, and appropriately, he could have asked any one of a number of responsible managers to make the visit to Mildred's home to give the painful news. He told her that he and Champion would take care of her and her children for the rest of their lives, and that she was not to worry about anything. Rube knew Bob and Mildred, as he knew almost all of the ten thousand persons who worked with him at Champion. Long afterward, I learned more about the episode. The visit by Rube had transformed Mildred's life. She was celebrated by Rube and his visit and his powerful, spiritual message--his deep caring and humanness. Rube was killed about three years later by a drunken driver who hit Rube at about 1:30 a.m. while Rube was fixing a tire on the car of a stranded motorist. The tire fixing was as characteristic of Rube's life as was his visit to Mildred. It was easy to see why Champion people felt proud of their company, were proud of their president, and were proud to say that they belonged the Champion company. I mourned deeply when I heard that morning that Rube had been killed. Along with many others I celebrated the company. I felt valued for my theory and for to my membership, and I was aware that my celebrative trust theory did in fact authenticate and verbalize the similar Champion theory that members of the company created and lived so well. I learned much from my Champion friends.

The Omicron processes may be viewed as message centers, as receiving and giving off multi-faceted messages to each person and plant in the vicinity. The processes are magical forms that give off magical messages. Persons who internalize the Omicron orientation are likely to give off messages something like the following:

Wholizing: I am whole and see myself as whole. I continue at all times in all my actions to create my wholeness. I am connected with you and with the cosmos. I am you. You are me. I am the universe and the universe is me. I am in the universe and the universe is in me, always there as a resource for my life. The universe within is my guide, my internal guidance system. Each of us has a common destiny, is guided by our vision of the allness, and is a brother or sister in the universal family of all forms. The cosmos is indeed my family, in all senses of the term; I contain all love, energy, power, information, wisdom, and force. I reflect and mirror the universe, the allness. My life adventure is to form new connections with all matter, energy, and life, in all of their many forms of manifestation (28).

Emerging: I am ever unfolding. I am in process. I am a process. I am in flow, in the continuing stream of existence and being, ever emerging into something different from what I was in the previous moment. I connect all moments, all processes. I am an ever-forming event in an ever-forming universe. I am more like a drop of water in the river of living than like a complicated computer, however flexible. My metaphor is a cloud, wave, raindrop, tree, stream. I am changing, forming, moving, learning, growing, flowing. I flow into the universe and feel no need to defend myself against it, to keep myself separate from it, or to insist on my uniqueness and individuality. I am fully into the flowing cosmos.

Discovering: All of life is an adventure, a journey into the attractive unknown, an exciting newness, an unpredictable, unprogrammed, spontaneous happening. Being in the process of discovering is the magic. The making is more important than the product, but the making and the product are both sacred and magnificent and to be celebrated. Both the journey and the destination, and the byways and tributaries are sacred. Life is never finished, always open-ended, new in every moment, a continuation of pre-life and a delightful movement into an after-life. I am a novel event in an unplanned and unfinished, unfinishable universe that is continually discovering its journey, one, fittingly, without a destination, and without a mapped road.

Being: I am my essence and core. And I am in my essence. I grow in an inner-outer direction that starts in my essential self and moves outward to enrichment of my being. I create my own theory, joy, pain, environment, experience, perceptions, feelings, dreams, unconscious and my universe. I am all of me in each moment, bringing fullness to each one. I create and choose my theory, my attitudes, my wellness. I create me. All things are possible for me, are contained in my being. I speak from my core, my center, my essence. My being pervades the allness, preserves me into the infinite allness (57).

Pathing: I create my own journey, my pathway, my voyage, my bypaths, my choicepoints, my profession, my vocation, my calling, my own life quest. I seek within for inspiration, passion, energy, and the directions for my journey. I am on a sacred, unique pathway that has universal significance. My path is like no other path, and is like all other paths. My mission and journey transform my life, give it meaning. My life work is playful, joyful, celebrative. It deserve all of my passion. It deserves to be celebrated by me and by others, and it is so celebrated. My journey is changing the universe in a significant way. I am a significant force in the cosmos. This journey unites me with every other being and spirit in the universe.

Transcending: I vision and image all things, all processes. Along with every other form in the universe, I am continuously transcending my own being, becoming significantly new in each moment. I am both in all process and stand above and beyond all process to get a perceptual vantage point, to see all. I am open to all cosmic messages, hunches, intuitions, inner voices, mystical forces, and minimal cues. I am always moving beyond my fixations, hungers, addictions, loves, wishes, abilities, preferences, choices. I celebrate all of these and move beyond all of them. I am unlimited, infinite, timeless, spaceless, unbound, whole. I am transcending. In all ways.

Universalizing: I deeply feel my kinship with all other forms in the universe: rocks, flowers, cells, chairs, animals, persons. I am God. I create God and God creates me. We, you and I and the rock, are all Gods, creatures of infinite goodness of all creatures and forms. I am aware of my cosmic nature. I identify with the timeless metaphors, the symbols of the universe, the creatures of my fantasies and my visions, the images of your fantasies and your visions. I am, at once, a unique and a universal form. I am able to transcend my need for identity, ego, power and credit. I am idiosyncratic and universal. I celebrate my own existence and being, and the existence and being of every other form in the universe. Each is sacred.

These messages are magic, and magical. They join in harmony with all other messages from other forms in the universe. The harmony is an ever-changing, evolving, wholistic symphony. A fluid allness. A tune that is in tune with itself. A messageful pulse. A universal concordance.

Especially since my Innisfree experience, I talk with the plants. I talk with Middy, my psychic, cuddlesome, all-wise cat, who knows my feelings better than I do. He can spot the cat lovers, especially the Middy lovers, those that live on his vibratory level. He is tolerant of other persons, but tunes in pretty much exclusively to those who resonate with him. He spots the mystics. He looks over at me and says, "He's one of us, isn't he?" Or, perhaps, more likely: "He knows he's one of us, doesn't he?" Just as he looks at other persons and says, "He doesn't know he's one of us yet, does he?"

Middy and I are companions on our passionate path. He even seems to know where we are going.

Collaboration seems to be a basic condition of the universe. When we interviewed the people who were creating Passionate Paths, it was evident that the ones who were most into a Passionate Path were ones who prized collaboration most highly. When I am doing something that I deeply want to do, as a lifetime focus, then I want to do it with others. There are many forms of collaboration.

How do I give off signals that I really want to be with you? That I want to collaborate in any way that we can discover together? That I don't want to dominate you, win over you, manipulate you, subjugate myself to you, be dependent upon you, or be unaware of you? How do I communicate that I want to work with you, play with you, dream with you, learn with you, be in harmony with you, co-create with you, co-vision with you, create something that is great for you and for me, even create a common passionate path with you.

Words help, but they don't do it. It helps to learn from each near-collaborative experience how to do it more cooperatively next time. It helps to listen, especially to listen. Believing in cooperation helps. In the past I have never been quite convinced that doing it together would be more effective than my doing it alone. I suspect that we have all been bruised by the competitive economic system, the "rugged" individualism of our society, the forces in our culture which militate against a cooperative life.

Our culture has rewarded competitive behavior and punished cooperative behavior. Kids who cooperate in school are likely to be punished for cheating. Collaboration may be seen as weakness, as a sign that the person cannot go it alone. The style of our economic system has pervaded all of the institutions of our culture, even the churches.

It is my firm belief that cooperation and collaboration are the ways of the future. Learning to collaborate is a way of tuning into the nature of the universals.

We are the environment for our collaborators. Interviewees report that they feel like collaborating under such conditions as these:

When they feel loved, warmed, gentled, tendered, cared for.

When they feel pampered, indulged, spoiled, babied, molly-coddled.

When they are treated in such a way that makes them feel important, noble, significant to the lives of others, as having dignity and respect.

When they feel listened to, understood, empathized with, heard, seen as worth listening to.

When they feel unique, special, one of a kind, unusual.

When they feel trusted.

When they feel free, having inner processes that warrant being given freedom to roam, make mistakes, explore, try out new paths.

When they are seen as not needing help, praise, strokes, rewards, pushing.

When they are seen as self-directed and innermotivated, able to make their own choices.

When they feel safe, feeling that it is not necessary to defend themselves, that they are in a risk-free environment.

When they are seen as interesting to others, worthy of notice, worth paying attention to.

When they are seen as sacred, worth honoring, moral.

When they are specifically invited to join in collaboration.

Conversely, people do not feel like collaborating when they are under these conditions:

When they are depersonalized, seen as in role, minisculed, diminished.

When they are ignored, given false or distorted data, kept in the dark about what is really going on, left out of the communication loops, passed by.

When they are taught, looked down on, influenced, sold a bill of goods, persuaded, given a sales pitch, motivated, told what they ought to do, helped in a parental way, made to feel ignorant, unschooled, or uninformed.

When they are controlled, programmed, talked down to, talked up to, classified, compared, boxed in some boundary, restricted, scheduled.

When they are manipulated by rewards, punishments, stroked, acknowledgments, praise, when they are pushed, influenced, cajoled, flattered, subjected to techniques.

When they are placed in some kind of hierarchy of grades, classifications, ranks, levels, titles, positions.

When they are placed in a situation where they are forced to compete, to be pitted against one another.

When they are structured in some way that forces them to strive for the external goals of fame, money, profit, titles, power, rank, expectation.

Put in the Omicron framework, people feel that they want to collaborate when the internal and external environment of the person is oriented toward wholeness, invites one to join in the flow of life process, invites one into the wonder of discovering, comes fully from the essence of the person or of the environmental community, is centered in the spiritual journey of the person or of the community, is an invitation to move beyond the current state, and is closely in tune with the universe as perceived by the person.

It is probable that as each person grows into a more Passionate Path, she or he widens the concept of community with which the collaboration occurs. In my own case, I started my career in psychology with the intention of working a dyadic therapy. It became clear to me fairly early that I found this relationship confining.

I experimented with small groups in a number of ways, then participated with the pioneering experiments at Bethel, Maine, with the NTL group. Learning to see small groups as a transcending environment in an organic situation very different from a dyadic relationship, we tried small groups in team building, therapy, education, social planning, organizational development, political action -- almost any relationship could be improved by creating intense, organic, intimate, transcending small groups. This concept greatly broadened my horizons.

It was years later, seeing the limitations of the small group, that I began to experiment with communities of 100 to 180 people, applying the community format to business, the church congregation, the classroom, the therapy situation, neighborhood building, community development, personal growth, conference design, political action -- again, almost any relationship could be improved by building an intimate community.

A community of any kind and size is enhanced by viewing it as a collaborative design of an enhancing environment.

Looking together at the psychological, social, task, physical, spiritual and other aspects of the environment, we attempted to build communities that enhanced natural collaboration. Our experimentation with the TORI international communities has been successful and satisfying.

Environmental design is seen as a more effective way of building organizations, communities or any other social system than intervention, the work of an outside group or person in teaching, consulting, or resource-building with the social group. Intervention is an outside-inside process. Environmental design is an inside-outside process. The community creates itself. The partnership creates itself. Through collaborative building of community.

I distinguish between a caring, honoring, trusting, supportive, tender, gentle celebration of my self from a defensive, neurotic, protective, dependent, hurt-avoiding, isolating, and parental attitude toward one's self. I do not think it is possible to give too much of the first kind of love to my self.

It is probably not possible to give too much affection, too much warmth, too much honoring, too much tender care to the self inside. Narcissistic love was a term applied to self-idolatry, a kind of defensive worship of the self inside. This concept has led to an avoidance of positive self-regard.

An environment of unconditional positive regard is likely to be celebrative, nurturing, and enhancing of the high-energy journey. Tender, loving care from anyone is positive. Coming genuinely from my self, when authentic, without goading and manipulative intent, the caring is especially welcome and nourishing.

Self-love is a collaborative relationship between me and the self inside. As I look at the list in the previous chapter of the conditions that led to collaboration, it is likely that these all apply to self-loving. Genuine self-love means that I provide an environment for myself that encourages internal collaboration.

The person who is loved by self and by others is likely to have a full sense of "being." I will describe this state of being from several different vantage points and languages. The person with a full sense of being may be described in different ways. The following are self-descriptions made by people seen by others as having a high "being":

The passionate path of a person comes from one's being, enhances one's center, moves out from the essence, frees one's energy. The pather full of being creates, on the path, greater nobility, collaboration, energy focus, proactivity, spirituality, and serenity -- creates the inevitable conditions described throughout this book.

In the Innisfree experience, described earlier, I got in touch with the uniqueness of being, and the presence of being in every universal form. I became aware that I loved and was loved by every leaf, every cell, every form in the universe. The experience left me in awe. Tuned me in to the world around me. I felt the specialness of every form. I have never since touched a leaf, looked at an animal, sat on a rock, or touched any creature without being somehow aware of this specialness, this being, this essence. I have anthropomorphized every thing, made a friend and a person out of them. I am now an unreconstructed animist, a proud deist, a vivid imager, an attentive watcher, a companion of the flowers, a celebrant of the insect and the worm, an unabashed mystic, a deeply religious man. A celebrant.

My passionate path is more full and celebrative, more rich and enhancing, more actualizing and spiritual when I show myself to the universe, when I am open to the messages that come in to me and to the messages that I give out. When my being is in tune with your being. Value. It is impossible to be too open, to be too transparent, to be too available to others, to be too much in tune with myself and with others, or to show too much of me.

Openness is an absolute open, to be too transparent, to be too available to others, to be too much in tune with myself and with others, or to show too much of me.

When I am open I am not vulnerable (31). There is no risk. Risk is created by fear and defense. When I am in a full sense of being, I am safe and serene. The word "vulnerable" is a fear word, like "taking the hot seat." I feel that I am taking the "love seat" and loveable -- not woundable. I am only able to be wounded if I expect it and create the defensive environment around me that makes me "vulnerable."

To show me is to trust me and others. To show me is to honor me as the shower and you as the viewer. To show me is to acknowledge my celebrativeness and my celebrating. To show me is to invite you in, to invite collaboration, to invite spirituality.

In one sense, of course, each of us is out there in front of "God and everybody." We only imagine that we cover ourselves from view. Our defense and cover-up is an illusion. In a fundamental sense it is impossible to hide. There is no place to hide. To attempt to hide is to make ourselves more visible.

Full being is always open. To open up our beingness is to volunteer to show our inner selves, to verbalize our fears, to display our loves, to come out of our many closets, to open up. To open is to bring the allness to awareness to raise our consciousness to invite dialogue and multilogue, and to make the universe available to us and to others.

What you see is what you get. To truly see, as Don Juan says (13, 14), is to enter the new world. To truly perceive how a person sees things is to know how she or he will feel, act think and be.

The truly transformational process in a person or in an organization is a perceptual shift, a new opening of the window to the hitherto closed vision, a dramatic re-vision of reality, a new perspective on the problem or issue a new seeing, a fresh-eyed look (29).

I was surprised when I saw a statement as the first sentence in a physics book: "the basic nature of reality is - perceptual." I create my reality through creating my perceptions. I see things the way I am. I project myself into the universe. My projection is a sacred and mysterious process that transforms the world. My newest learning is that when I see the wholeness, or the largest whole that-I am able to be aware of at the moment, each process and person becomes trustworthy, lovable, sacred. The world becomes beautiful when I see it whole. When I see and am aware of the way the child or the adult sees the total situation, then the child or the adult always seems to be reasonable, sensitive, responsive, sacred, and worthy. Not dangerous. Not ugly. Not psychotic. Not irrational. Wholeness is a sacral screen. Realness making.

The universe feels about me the way I feel about it. The way I see it determines how I feel about it, how I reflect on it, how I act toward it. I create the universe the way we create our gods, in our own image. We get what we see. Our perceptions are self-fulfilling.

The world senses how I see myself. If I see myself as love-worthy, others tend to see me as lovable. The universe sees me the way I see myself. In a very deep sense, the universe and the people in it treat me the way I want to and need to be treated. How I truly see myself tells me how I want to be seen and treated. I am as respect-worthy as I see myself to be. I am as significant to the world as I see myself to be. My spiritual path is the process of integrating my perceptions into a lasting journey, a journey toward clarity, fullness of self-love, congruence of self and other perceptions of reality.

The key to personal and societal transformation is perceptual shifting. How we see things affects everything else in the system.

My visionary trance experiences changed the way that I saw myself, other people, my mission, and the universe around me. This perceptual shifting changed everything else that I did and felt.

Transformation and change may take centuries and seem very slow. This perception, that change is a slow process, is an illusion that comes from false "theories" of change, theories that have persisted for centuries. We need to change our theories of change. Change can occur instantaneously. One of the strongest factors in the persistence of the belief that change takes time is the self-fulfilling property of belief systems. The change will take about as long as we expect it to take. "Change takes time" is a familiar bromide that serves as a rationalization for persons and institutions that slumber along providing proof of the statement.

Diane Beakey (3), whose book, "The Dream Clock," presents brilliant analysis of Omicron theory as it applies to organizations, tells a relevant story of her father's sudden change. After years of unusually heavy chronic drinking, he suddenly, one evening, had what he called a "vision," in which he "saw" his life presented in total fashion to him, with particularly vivid views of his drinking and what it was doing to his health, his work, his family, and himself. He told Diane that he "saw" what his drinking was doing and that he would never drink again. He never drank again as long as he lived, felt good about it, and it changed many aspects of his life. He was sure-that his perceptual shifting experience "changed him." It is my view, built from much observation of client systems, that this experience is a typical one. This rapid-change view of personal and institutional transformation proposes a radical shift in our theories and our ways of consulting, managing, and doing therapy.

One powerful way of working with change in self and in the organizational climate is to understand that one of the most powerful forces in determining any change or any resistance to change is the expectations that you and others have. The further realization that I create my expectations removes the mystery and forbiddingness of expectations as a force hanging over us. Expectations are friendly forces that are completely under our voluntary control. Proactivity is a magical process.

Expectations, of course, are important in passionate pathing. Creating a clear spiritual pathway for myself starts a process where expectations form readily around the pathway. I expect to stay on my path. Others expect me to. I expect to be successful in doing my thing.

In my own case, I literally have no doubt that my trances put me in touch with the universe that is friendly and that my messages are true, point my way, and will be fulfilling. I fully expect to join the universe, to change the universe, to tune into universal forms in a new and enriching way, and to live my full five double-decades.

Knowing that I create my expectations and that I can create new ones when I wish puts me in a very positive position and gives me a powerful ally on my side. I know that my expectations are in my corner, and not an unpredictable neutral force that has to be reckoned with, tolerated, and adapted to.

The seven processes are viewed as orienting sets, as ways of looking at reality. Wholizing is looking at the whole of reality, rather than focusing upon segments or limited aspects of whatever "wholeness" is relevant to my purpose in looking. Emerging is looking at the flow of events and forms, seeing that the universe is flowing, constantly changing, always in motion, and is never static, permanent or un-get-at-able. Discovering is to perceive all forms as in the process of discovering themselves, to see this process as key to all matter and energy, to see the wonder and the mystery when it may not be immediately evident to the untheoried or un-omicroned viewer. Being is to look at the essential, the essence or core of all forms, and to see the relationship of all experience with the form to the essence-o-genic nature of everything that happens to the form.

Pathing is to perceive the longitudinal characteristic of all events and forms, the life-history-ness of everything, the directional nature of the universe, and the relevance of this to everything we do in relationship to the form. Transcending is to see the never-ceasing transformation in all forms, to see the "beyond-going" aspect of all concepts, persons, cells, theories, feelings, and attitudes, to see the promise and the eternal up-ness of this aspect of the universe. Universalizing is to see the metaphoric and actual process that all forms are going through in connecting with and transforming the universe itself.

It is our experience that this viewing process, this orienting, this attitudinal set, this perceptual process is the key to transformation in all life and experience of life. This Omicron orientation is a universal that has relevance to all process: gardening, automotive repair, therapy, colonizing of space, societal reconstruction, theory building, art-every thing and every process.

Perceiving, itself, is not a static process. I create my own perceiving and improve it. There are many avenues to improvement of our ways of seeing. This improvement is of immense importance, considering the centrality of the perceiving process in all life.

The physical process of sensing. We tend to be unaware of how much is known about retrieving sensory skills and abilities. Vision training, for instance, is being improved. Through improved methods of training, people have repaired "defects," been able to throw away eyeglasses, and improved vision remarkably.

Imaging. Jo Marie Nardi, one of our Omicron group, is writing a beautiful book on an Omicron view of imaging. She is a skilled psychologist and a professional hypnotist, and has been doing some experiments on improving the process of imaging. Imaging is significant in the proactivity process. Whatever we can image we can make happen. We "see" with the mind's eye, as it were, and are not limited in any way to whatever limitations the sense organs have.

Visions, trances, and transcendence. My trance experiences have been the most transforming experiences of my life. Clearly I have been improving the effectiveness of these processes, so that now I create a transcendence happening whenever I wish. From my personal experiences with many other persons who have been in TORI and Omicron communities, I am sure that this avenue to life enrichment is open to anyone who wishes to use it. I firmly believe that this is a way of communicating directly with the universe and that this avenue, open to everyone, has unlimited potential for transcending whatever limits we have imposed upon our perceiving habits.

Passionate Pathing. The selective attention that accompanies the focus of our energies upon our life journey sharpens our seeing of whatever it is that we wish to put our passions on. Again and again, the interviewees I am studying report a sharpened perceiving, a vivid imagery, and "illumination." "Once I clearly saw my pathway, then everything became clear to me; I could see what I had not been seeing before" is a representative comment. I believe that anything I can see I can make happen. "Seeing" is a many-faceted process: physical, sensory, transcendent, metaphorical, magical, visionary, prophetic, freshening and wholizing.

When I feel deeply that every process is sacred, I change my universe. Every country is England and every month is April. Every day is Sunday. Every sun is bright and healing. And every son. Every polarity is transcended. The softness and the hardness are equally holy and equally inviting. Aloneness and withness, each has a magic. Each is made the same by comparison. When I see the universe as sacred I am loved and honored. By everyone and everything. I am sacred. The universe is a dynamic, streaming, flowing, interactive allness. Everything influences everything. Everything is everything.

Being whole is to be in love. To love my hates, to love my dark places, to love my unwholeness, to love the carnal and the unholy. To love the unlovable. And the lovable.

To see, fully, is to be aware of the sanctity in every leaf and in each person.

When I see the allness with clear and fresh eyes, when I see clearly, I see the sacredness in everything. When I really see the sacral in all process and products, a number of things happen.

Allowing. I am able to allow the universe to be what it is. I accept the isness without needing to meddle, clean it up, or fix another person. I choose to spend my energies enjoying what is rather than changing things to fit my fixed habits of enjoying. When I listen to my words, for instance, I am aware of how often I see imperfections in the people and things around me. I also am noting that I do this less and less as I become more tuned to the sacredness of the universe. I like what is happening to me.

More love of my own sacred self. The person who is aware of the awesomeness of each cell and form is more apt to appreciate, honor, and love self. I begin to see my self as an honored whole in this honorable, sacred allness.

A new fearlessness. A sacred universe is not frightening. My old fear becomes irrelevant to the new universe that I have created. I look with "soft eyes" at each child, flower and blade of grass, seeing the perfection, the divinity, the inner beauty, the friendliness, and the colleagueness. I am in league with the cells and my universal neighbors. My family is the allness.

Attunement with the universal rhythm and pulse. Jeff Gibbs (26) is one of our Omicron collaborators who is writing a powerful book discussing this point: "The Wave Nature: Seeing Harmony in All Things." A sacred universe has a harmonic wave that is easy to tune in with.

Larger perspective. I can see the grandeur in the dandelion, the baby chick, the many familiar things that I had taken for granted before I became aware of the sacredness.

Renewal of passion. Joining the universe somehow seems to be of more significance, everything I do seems of more import, when I see the grandeur and a magnificence of every process that I observe.

Trust. My trust in myself, in you, and in the universe is increased when I really see the purity of motive underlying the surface characteristics I have seen with my defense-burdened vision. A sacred universe is trustworthy.

Compassion. Buddha was called the "Compassionate Buddha" when he saw, with clarity, in his cosmic vision, the sacral nature of the universe. As Buck (10) says, all those with "cosmic consciousness" see, with illumination, the true nature of the universe and become newly moral and compassionate.

A clear view of reality. Seeing the sacredness does not mean to filter out the carnal parts of reality, see the good and ignore the bad, but it means to see things clearly, as they really are, without the filtering screen of defense. Defensiveness forces us to overperceive the carnal and to underperceive the sacral. Defensiveness provides such a screen. Fear-bred defensiveness seems to lay a fear-producing cover over everything we see. Trust removes this screen and allows us to touch the realness.

Intimacy. I allow myself to come close to a reality which, like me, is sacred, pure, safe, and person-like. Those who see this sacredness speak in personal terms to the wind, the rocks, the theories and other sacred processes they experience. They are able to come spiritually and emotionally close to things.

A sense of celebration. When I am truly aware of the sacred wonder in the allness, then I feel, often, a welling up of the grandeur appropriate to this kind of world. It seems to me, then, that these feelings are natural and organic, and come from clarity of vision: illumination, wonder, ecstasy, awe, enlightenment, spirituality, nobility, Joy, passion, energy, dignity, rapture, fulfillment, serenity, awesome clarity, love, and similar feelings. It is easy, then, for me to feel like celebrating myself and the universe, on occasion, and then more frequently, such that it becomes my norm.

Nobility. Nobility is in the viewer. And in the process viewed. It is both in me and in you. In the wholeness. Both the observer and the observed are, in a wholistic view, in the system, in the wholeness, in the universe. Available. Nobility is in the nature of this process, a wholeness process. Nobility is minisculed, denigrated when called "sublimation" as though it were a second-order, derived, and not-intrinsic property of behavior or form. Nobility, omni-present, is worthy of awesome and joyful celebration. All Omicron-like (wholly-viewed) processes are noble and celebrative.

I create my own passionate path. When I put my full energy, coming from the deepest part of me, into a pathway to which I can dedicate my earthly and eternal life, I inevitably create my own spirituality. Life on my Passionate Path is meaningful and significant. It is full of high energy. It is playful and joyful, full of celebration. It engenders in me a compassionate feeling for my traveling companions. It is proactive, moving into life in its fullness. It is always moving beyond itself into new and more exalting beyondness. It is moving, with a deep feeling of nobility, into an at-one-ness with the universe.

A truly passionate path enables me to live, whole.

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