Encounters with Power: Adventures and Misadventures on the Shamanic Path of Healing - José Luis Stevens 2017

The Power of Prophecy: India and the Life-Changing Reading
Expression—Storyteller-Artist

The stories in part I best fit under the category of expression — the storyteller and artist. While each story in this book has elements of all the aspects of the shamanic map, the ones you will read in this section truly are tales of encounters with power and are the best examples of pure expression. They teach by going to many places, by shining light on all aspects of an experience.

The shaman storyteller teaches by telling riveting stories, funny stories, stories that carry lessons. The storyteller has to make the tales come alive, to get listeners on the edge of their seats, to fascinate and entertain them. Shaman storytellers must believe in their own stories, know them from the inside out, and sell them to a crowd that always wants more. They must also leave their stories with a bit of mystery, an aspect of the unknown that allows room for listeners to come up with their own understandings, lessons, and realizations.

For the artist shaman, living is an art, learning is an art, and all art can be expressed in myriad ways: through song, dance, and symbolic forms. This expresses to the people what cannot always be said in words.

The Power of Prophecy: India and the Life-Changing Reading

In July 1976 I quit my job as a psychiatric social worker at Napa State Hospital in Northern California, a foreboding collection of institutional-green concrete buildings with few windows. I had put in my two years of postgraduate work to gain enough hours to be licensed in the state of California as an independent practitioner. Functioning as the assistant ward administrator on an adolescent locked unit, I carried heavy skeleton keys that I used to lock myself into the ward as if I were going to prison every day. This unit included both psychotic teenagers and seriously sociopathic young people who were in the hospital for arson, prostitution, violence, drug dealing, murdering their parents and barbecuing them in the backyard, killing their siblings, and hijacking a jet.

Ronald Reagan had mandated a state hiring freeze during his tenure as governor, cutting the budget for mental health care and turning out thousands of mentally unstable people onto the streets — an unconscionable cost-cutting act that was conveniently forgotten during his presidency. The result on my ward was that as staff left through attrition, they were not replaced.

The policy of the hospital was that a male staff member had to be present on the ward at all times to restrain violent patients. Eventually I became that one man, although I had never been trained to restrain anyone. I was not a psychiatric technician but rather a liaison between kids, parents, schools, probation officers, and the court system. Already, one male staff member had been permanently disabled by a violent six-foot-two eighteen-year-old who put him in the hospital. I figured it was only a matter of time until it was my turn.

At one point the hospital director shuffled staff and sent me to work on a ward with profoundly developmentally disabled children. I had no heart for this work, so when my two years were up I followed my supervisor’s advice and quit. “Get in, get your training, and get out,” she had told me, “or you’ll become a lifer.” “Lifers” were staff who were hard to distinguish from the patients, except that they had a set of keys and a salary.

On the day I quit I felt such relief — like the weight of ages had lifted from my shoulders. I was a free man, and I was determined to make the most of it. My relationship with Lena had been developing from housemates to boy- and girlfriend, but in a bold and risky move I stored my belongings and booked myself a flight to Hong Kong. I would embark on this adventure solo and with no plans to return at any particular point. I was twenty-eight, in my Saturn return, and for years I had wanted to see Asia, India, and Nepal. After a short visit to Hong Kong and a mind-blowing week in Thailand, I headed for my primary destination, India, where the spiritual comingled with the ordinary every day. I could hardly wait.

INDIA

I had just left northern Thailand and my world had already been rocked by events beyond my comprehension, including witnessing a unique Buddhist ceremony where dancers stabbed themselves repeatedly with steel swords and suffered no injury. After flying for hours over green jungle with watercourses snaking into the distance below me, the plane left land for the ocean. Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of landing at the Delhi airport in northern India that fall after my twenty-eighth birthday.

The Vietnam War had recently ended and my thoughts were heavy with what had transpired there, just to the east of where I was now flying. I thought about friends who had died there and Jerry, the one who returned without a face. I had gone to see him at the VA hospital in San Diego and was forever sickened by what I saw. A man I had known and liked lay in a hospital bed with a small tube running out of a hole in the side of what used to be a mouth. His eyes and nose were gone. There were no identifiable features left on his face. His body was covered with lurid red scars where surgeons had removed shrapnel. Jerry had lived just down the hall of my college dorm, a friendly, handsome guy full of energy and vitality. We all knew he had a military dad who pressured him to “be a man,” join the Marines as he had, and go fight the enemies of the United States in Vietnam. That was in 1966 when the war was heating up. We students already knew it was about oil, competition, and ideologies, a serious waste of lives and money.

We all talked about how wrong the war was, so we were shocked the day Jerry went off to join the Marines. His dad’s pressure had finally overpowered him and he wanted so much to prove himself to his father. We were horrified and very concerned for him. Three months later he had been torn to pieces by a mortar that blew up in his face and I was visiting him in the hospital. Perhaps his father was proud, I thought, now that Jerry had come home a grossly disabled veteran.

As I flew toward India, I thought about Richard Nixon announcing the end of college exemptions from the draft and about watching the lottery on television with my college buddies. My birth date came up number 25, so low that I was certain to be drafted within a couple of months. We all got drunk that night. Two months later I was in the Oakland Induction Center standing naked in a long line of young guys who had received draft notices. Meanwhile, Vietnam had become carnage. Thousands of young men were dying over there and the war was only escalating. It was crystal clear to us that the war was a serious miscalculation and a mistake of horrific proportions, and only the administration wasn’t getting it yet.

I had made plans to go to Canada if I passed the medical portion of the exam. I could not in good conscience kill people in a war I did not believe in. In fact, having been a soldier many times in past lives, I had had enough of war. I knew I had sent many men to their deaths in other times and places when I was a younger soul. War had never solved anything, and killing was not in my nature anymore. Fortunately, with heavy help from Spirit, I failed the medical exam and was given a permanent 1-Y status, meaning that I would only be drafted in a national emergency. As it turned out, they did not want someone with a history of childhood eczema scrambling around in the jungles of Vietnam. I did not have to go to Canada after all, and I could go on to more productive endeavors. As I walked out of that induction center onto the noisy Oakland street, I felt a huge and tearful relief. I was twenty years old and very happy to be alive.

Now, a decade later as I flew toward the exotic destination of India, I realized why I had not gone to Vietnam. There were other more important things to do with my life. I had a destiny and it was unfolding before my eyes.

A landscape covered with a thick curtain of brown air appeared on the horizon, and I felt a rush of exhilaration. As I deplaned in the dusk, that hot brown air hit me like a wall, an oven thick with smoke and grit. The smells of burning charcoal and dung hung heavy in the air, tugging at a distant memory. It was all so familiar. I took a wild taxi ride from the airport, with incessant honking, oxcarts, bicycles, scooters, brown women dressed in saris with brass pots on their heads, and rumbling trucks. A painted elephant lent an unreal quality to the ancient chaos that is India. Fresh from the mysteries of Thailand, I was about to begin an adventure that would propel my growth to the breaking point.

If I had known then what I was in for, perhaps I would not have had the courage to go to India, but innocence is the fuel of adventure. Shortly after arriving, I became so ill I nearly died. I was lodged in a government guesthouse beside a railway station in an unknown village. Alone and gripped by fever in a hot, dark, windowless room with a rotating fan, all I could do was lie there and hallucinate. For four days, weakened by high fever, dysentery, and vomiting, I couldn’t get out of bed. No one knew where I was, I had no way of contacting anyone, and I couldn’t even get to a doctor because I was too sick to leave my room. Eventually the fever broke and I spewed thick green scum for several days before I was able to resume my travels.

I gradually made my way to Varanasi, also known as Banares, which is located on the banks of the Ganges River. Varanasi is the holiest of Indian cities and the sacred place where Hindus bring their dead and dying. At the river’s edge were ghats — stone steps leading down to the river — upon which pyres towered with flames burning corpses to ash. As I made my way through the twisted streets, I glimpsed an unforgettable sight: a three-wheeled pedicab with a corpse propped up in the passenger’s seat, the body wrapped in cotton strips like a mummy. The unconcerned driver was calmly pedaling the cab down to the burning ghats.

Following the cab, I made my way down to the river’s edge to view the throngs bathing beside the temples that lined the shore. I watched the rituals of the Hindu priests and the fires consuming the corpses. Day after day I visited this fascinating place, transfixed by the colorful but morbid display. I watched men from the untouchable class dive for gold teeth fillings, coins, and bits of valuables they could glean from the ashes dumped into the brackish waters of the Ganges. Skulls, hands, feet, and ribcages glowed in the coals of pyres as priests chanted, bells rang, and clouds of incense billowed skyward. Many years later I would learn that watching the burning of the dead was a Hindu practice of the highest order.

Before I left the United States, a psychiatrist friend gave me the name of a professor of Ayurvedic medicine at the world-renowned Banares Hindu University in Varanasi. I was to look up the psychiatrist’s colleague, Harish Shukla, and say hello. I tracked down the professor and the serious-looking older gentleman immediately invited me to his home, an impressive two-story structure on a major street. We spoke for many hours about philosophy, the nature of reality, and Hindu beliefs, and he invited me to return the next day for more discussions. I did, and again we engaged in animated talks for most of the day.

He took pains to point out that our thoughts and intentions manipulate reality on a minute-by-minute basis. He explained at length how we each create our own reality in this fashion and that it is our individual responsibility to control our thoughts and fantasies, lest we inadvertently create our worst fears instead of what we truly want. I found that his explanations were in alignment with the supernatural events I had witnessed on my recent visit to Thailand — but they were dramatically different from the nature of reality I had been taught in my Catholic upbringing.

These talks were magical, and I marveled at how fortunate I was to be having them. I considered the fact that I had created this whole trip from my intent and that it was not simply a random set of events I was reacting to. I played with the idea that I was meant to meet this professor and that perhaps we had a deeper relationship than I had considered at first. He certainly had an impact on my whole outlook on life.

CONVERSATIONS WITH DR. SHUKLA

Dr. Shukla, a yogi himself, regaled me with philosophical observations and stories about his guru, who he said could raise people from the dead and appear anywhere at will, and who had announced his own death beforehand. One time Dr. Shukla asked his guru to show him the great light of the source. His guru told him he was not ready but showed him anyway by producing a powerful sound vibration. Dr. Shukla told me he was so terrified by it that he ran screaming into the night, tripped, and hurt himself. He went on to explain that the body-mind must be prepared for this vibration or the energy from the blast can be deadly. He said,

How can a two-horsepower motor handle ten thousand volts? The average man is merely a beast, but we are capable of being divine. Only a few make it during their lifetime. We must accept our violence, competitiveness, irritation, and suffering and then go beyond it to the next higher mind-set that ultimately includes none of them. We are everything and nothing. As men we must slave to increase our power and divinity.

He then explained that there is an upsurge in mental suffering when one searches deeply within and that this is natural. “The more I read Gandhi’s book on peace,” he noted, “the more I realized violence was within me. The obstacles within me began to rear their heads.”

Dr. Shukla told me life was like ordering food for a meal but we only remember the very last thing we ordered:

A man may order bread but then forgets and orders fruit, meat, cheese, and coffee and then whisky. Then he notices all of them on the table in front of him and doesn’t know what to do because he doesn’t remember that he ordered all these things and some of them are contradictory, like coffee and whisky. He then becomes upset and blames the waiter. However, he can laugh, select what he wants, and give the rest away.

After some tea, the lessons resumed:

The physical world is experiential because it arises from a state of resistance. It has to pretend to be “not Spirit” or separate. Our bodies arise out of this resistance and therefore we suffer in them. But this is not bad and we need not suffer. All we need to do is remember that we are Spirit and that all separateness is merely an illusion. In this way we come out of resistance to the divine. People in a great state of resistance are more subject to gravity because, in a way, they have more material mass. They are depressed and bent over from the increased gravitational pull. We must grow light so that gravity exerts less force upon us. Then we will step lively and our posture will be straight.

Man is limited by his belief systems. Thus, a man who believes only in a heaven or hell is limited to expand only within this framework. It is necessary to create a belief system that is expansive enough to include every possibility, known and unknown. In this way we short-circuit the limitation of the belief system that ego seems to need in order to operate. This is the quantum leap out of ego back to godhead, or Spirit. This is the biggest math set of all.

At this point I was deeply emotional and had my fill of fascinating things to consider. Then at the perfect moment Dr. Shukla’s son, Anil, a handsome young man in his early twenties, arrived. After we made introductions, Dr. Shukla excused himself for a few minutes and the conversation began anew with Anil. He spoke very good English, like his father. I learned that he was an astrologer with degrees in math, physics, and chemistry, and that he was also a whiz at chess.

Anil said, with a hint of warning in his voice, “Varanasi is a place of power. It was founded on coordinates that are perfectly adjusted, making it the perfect place to create matter out of thought. One must be careful what one desires because consequences and conditions can occur that were not anticipated.”

To illustrate, he told me that his father once took pity on an old woman with tuberculosis of the joints. He laid his hands on her and healed her overnight, but soon the daughter of his guru came down with tuberculosis of the jaw because someone had to take up the slack. Then Anil told me more about his father. At his guru’s touch he went into a blissful state that lasted for a full year. This became too much for him to handle because he couldn’t get anything done, so he asked his guru to remove the state — which he did with a single touch.

After several days of very interesting discussions, the professor proposed that I meet Ananda, the son of the family’s former guru who had become the family’s spiritual guide after the guru passed. First Dr. Shukla showed me a photograph of their late guru. I saw a man in a loincloth sitting in lotus position with a shock of white hair and blazing eyes that seemed to penetrate right into my soul. It was unnerving and it frightened me not a little. I felt relieved that I was going to meet his son instead, though I was still nervous about it. Then the professor began to tell me some stories about Ananda.

He explained that when Ananda was a child he once warned him about a tragedy that ultimately came to pass. In that part of India are many poisonous snakes and people die from their bites every year. As the professor was leaving for work one morning, Ananda stopped him and said only this: “The snakes are angry today.” Not understanding the meaning of this, the professor continued on to work without a second thought. When he returned home at the end of the day, he found the household weeping and his two-year-old daughter laid out in bed, dead, fatally bitten by a cobra that had slithered from under the house. Only then did Dr. Shukla remember the young guru’s words.

After several more stories of this nature, I was both more intrigued and even more nervous about the meeting, yet I was especially excited by the fact that Ananda was going to give me a life reading. He asked me for my birth date and time of birth, which, fortunately, I knew by memory.

The next day at the appointed time, I walked to the professor’s house in the baking heat of Varanasi’s desert sun. I expected to find a man in a loincloth, so I was stunned to meet a man who appeared to be in his thirties dressed in a three-piece black suit and wearing black leather shoes. He sat in the professor’s living room and spoke in crisp Hindi while Anil acted as translator. Without further ado, he asked to see my palms, which I readily showed him. He studied them for a few minutes and consulted some notes he had with him. Then he began to speak swiftly and assuredly.

“This is your life,” he said, and began to tell me about my life from birth onward. He said that three people were present at my birth and proceeded to describe my family and what life had been like while I was growing up. He said I had been through many difficulties and was not understood as a child. I could readily verify what he was telling me. He went on to tell me I had been involved in social service work (remember, I was a psychiatric social worker) and that I was not married but soon would be. He described the woman I would marry, who bore a great resemblance to Lena, and then announced that I would have two children: a daughter who would be born in 1980, four years hence, and then a son who would be born in 1982. He went on and on describing my future, and as he did so I became more and more uneasy. He described great difficulties and many amazingly positive things as well. He said I would become a writer and make a specific contribution through my writing work.

He told me how long I would live, and then Anil said, “He didn’t want me to tell you this but I’ll tell you anyway. He said you will die from falling from a very high place and that a woman will push you.”

This was just too much information. I did not want to hear it and yet once it was said it was too late — I was stuck with this terribly frightful image. Then he told me that in three days I would meet a powerful spiritual man who would greatly affect my life. With this statement he wrapped up the meeting, which had lasted about two hours. By this time I was no longer the same person I had been at the beginning of the reading. I felt as if I had grown older by twenty years. My stomach was churning, and I couldn’t seem to get enough air to breathe. I was on the verge of a full-on panic attack.

It was way more than I had been prepared to hear. My thoughts were like a freeway filled with cars speeding out of control. After some farewells, I staggered out into the blazing sun and headed for the government guesthouse, where I lay down on the bed and sobbed my heart out, so traumatized I did not know what to think. The fact that he could describe my life thus far with such accuracy gave him enormous credibility. Was fate a fact? Were these things all destined to happen as he said, or did I have free will? Could I change the outcome? He had told me a couple of times that maybe I could, and that seemed to indicate that I had wiggle room. I desperately clung to this thread. And after all, Dr. Shukla had said that we create our own reality with our hopes and fears. But how could I now banish these thoughts from my mind? Around and around I obsessed until, in the wee hours of the morning, I fell asleep, exhausted.

The next day I had to plot a course of action. A part of me felt I had bitten off more than I could chew, and like a scared little kid I wanted to board a plane for home. I had no itinerary, yet there were many things I wanted to see and do. I was also determined to prove the guru wrong in order to ensure that I had free will. I created a plan to board a train for Madras (renamed Chennai in 1996) and then Pondicherry on the southeastern coast, a “tranquil French resort,” as my tattered guidebook described it. I would hole up there for several days and avoid all meetings with people.

Standing on the platform waiting for the train, I was an emotional mess. I had no one to talk to and was extremely traumatized. I tried to think of everything I had learned in my professional training to help me cope with my mental and emotional crisis. It helped some. And as the train trundled slowly down to Madras, the scenery was so varied and interesting that I was able to distract myself from my fears.

Eventually I arrived in Pondicherry and booked a nice room in a comfortable French colonial hotel. Aah! I would hide out here. Yet I had nothing to read, and if I was going to stay here I needed reading material. In my guidebook I read about a local ashram near town that had a bookstore where I could pick up some books in English to while away the hours. The ashram had been built by a man named Sri Aurobindo, someone I knew nothing about at that time. I bought several books he had written, took them back to my hotel room, and began to read. They had titles like The Life Divine, The Future Evolution of Man, The Human Cycle, The Destiny of the Body, and The Adventure of Consciousness. I bought these books figuring that after reading them I would leave them behind in order to lighten my load. Little did I know I would carry them all in my backpack for months before returning to the States with them.

I read for many hours each day, hardly leaving my hotel room. I had discovered a fascinating philosophy in these pages. Then it slowly dawned on me that I had indeed met a great spiritual leader who was influencing my entire way of thinking through his writing. Although this realization horrified me because it proved the guru right, I also gained much solace through the writings. I learned that there was a much greater spiritual essence within me that did not need to worry about what would happen to my body in this life. So the guru had been right again, but in his accuracy there was also redemption for me.

As the years passed, many of the events Ananda predicted came to pass. I did indeed marry Lena, the woman he described, and my children were born exactly in the order and in the years he predicted, despite the fact that we were using various forms of birth control both times. I did become a writer and have indeed led an amazing life as he predicted. In the form of Guadalupe, my shaman teacher, I did find an older man who was like a father to me and who taught me much about life. I did meet an older woman named Beth Miller who helped me by introducing me to many influential and famous people and promoted me to my great benefit.

Yet some things did not come to pass. I did not become an importer and exporter of goods, but instead of books and shamans. I never owned a farm, but instead bought wilderness land for retreats and seminars. So I learned that although some events were indeed set in stone, I have free will to alter the course of my life. And yet I chose these destined events at a much deeper level, so there is nothing to worry about. My life is in excellent hands — and who am I to try to resist that?

As I write this, I am some years past the age when Ananda said I would die. I do not know how many years I have left, but I am very grateful for each hour, day, week, and year I am blessed with. He did say that I would have a long life, “but not too long,” he added wryly. Becoming decrepit is not always a good thing and that is okay with me. I get what he meant; I just don’t want to be stupid about my life. After I am dead and with my guides, I will have to go over it all with chagrin, looking at all the things I should have realized, done, and not done. I would prefer to realize them now when I am in my body. Then I can die with a smile on my face and enjoy the passage home.

Although this next part of the story occurs many years later, I am skipping ahead to the mid-1990s after I moved from Berkeley, California, to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In this part of the story Lena and I were married and had two wonderful children, Anna, a teenager, and Carlos, a preteen. I had begun developing a course for people in the business world based on my book Transforming Your Dragons: How to Turn Fear Patterns into Personal Power. The idea was to expose businesspeople to techniques and exercises that would help them confront their fears and overcome them. I had been speaking to my friend and colleague Laurie Skreslet, a strong and powerful warrior with an inquiring mind and deep spiritual insight, and the first Canadian to summit Mount Everest. At the time, Laurie worked as a mountain guide and was on the professional speaking circuit, as he is to this day. Later I would climb Mount Aconcagua with him, but that is an altogether different story I will tell elsewhere in this book.

Laurie was interested in teaching the rock climbing aspect of the course. I had introduced him to another friend, Jan McNeal, an attractive blonde woman in her thirties and a veteran skydiving instructor who held a number of world records for women skydivers. She was a real pro, with more than fifteen hundred jumps to her credit. She was interested in doing the skydiving aspect of the course. I had met Jan in a psychology course I was teaching at JFK University in the San Francisco Bay Area. A slight complication was that Jan and I had an attraction for each other, both of us being scholars and sharing a lot of past-life history. Being married, I realized this was not tenable, so I introduced her to Laurie. I figured she would find him attractive, and to my relief they started an affair. Problem solved from my end.

The plan was that Lena and I would present the information from Transforming Your Dragons for the academic part of the course. Our feeling was that this would be a dynamic course integrating the best of our knowledge about confronting fear and becoming more powerful. We were very excited about the project and had drawn up some brochures and marketing materials to generate interest in the class. Then Jan pointed out that it would not be proper to offer the course unless all of us had gone through it ourselves. She was absolutely right. This meant that I had to do a tandem jump with her to get the experience of skydiving, and also do some rock climbing with Laurie. This sounded reasonable to me but nevertheless brought up my fears of jumping out of an airplane, an experience I had always wanted to have — but always managed to put off for later.

To complicate matters, I remembered what Ananda had warned me about many years before: that I would die falling from a high place and a woman would push me. Even though he had also predicted other events that had never come about, these words haunted me. Still, I was determined to go ahead. I did not want to give power to his words, and I was intent on choosing my own course with maximum freedom.

I booked a date with Jan to do a tandem jump at Belen, a site in the desert terrain south of Albuquerque and not a long drive from my home in Santa Fe. As the date neared, I actually got more and more excited about the jump. It so happened that a shaman from Peru was visiting us and had offered to do an ayahuasca ceremony for Lena and me and a few of our friends. Having done this a number of times before, I readily agreed, believing that it would be an excellent way to prepare for the jump.

In the wee hours of the morning, I was deep in a meditative state when a strange set of visions came to me with absolute clarity. First I saw a medieval knight in armor laid out on a stone slab. His arms were crossed over his chest, his hands grasping the handle of his long sword, which was pointing downward in the position of burial. He was clearly dead and a woman nearby was wailing at her loss. It became clear to me — I can’t tell you how — that I was the knight and the woman was my son, Carlos, who was mourning my loss. I heard the words “He lost you once already. Don’t make him lose you again.” I clearly saw that I had witnessed a past-life scenario in which I was married to a woman who was Carlos in this life.

Following this realization I was immediately greeted with the heart-stopping 3-D vision of Jan and myself hurtling out of the plane and downward toward the ground. We fell at a great speed, and when she pulled the cord for the chute to open, it did not. She then pulled the reserve chute and it streamed out but did not open either. We plummeted directly down to the ground, where we crashed into the earth with a terrifying impact. I saw that without a doubt we were both killed. Covered with sweat, my heart pounding, and my mouth dry as cotton, I opened my eyes and gulped air. I felt that I had just received a clear warning not to make the jump. I saw that Carlos needed me and that I should not take risks with my life when I had an obligation to be a father to him.

I realized in that moment that I would have to cancel the jump. I agonized over what I would say to Jan and how I would justify offering a course about overcoming fear if I cancelled. The next day I called Jan but, unable to reach her, I left a message saying I would not be going with her this time. I did not hear back from her.

Two days later on the day of the jump, I was outdoors working in the yard when my daughter, Anna, came out of the house with a look on her face I will never forget. White as a sheet, she said, “Dad, it’s Jan. She’s dead.”

In a state of shock I could hardly believe what I had heard. “What!” I babbled.

Anna struggled on. “Her chute didn’t open. She died with a student.”

I staggered into the house to find Lena on the phone getting further details. Jan had been tandem jumping with a series of students. In a tandem jump, the instructor pushes the student out the door of the plane as the student jumps. All the jumps had gone well until her chute failed to open and the rare event happened: the reserve chute failed to open and they both fell to their deaths. The crater they made was fifteen feet around and two feet deep. Nothing was left of their bodies.

My shock and tears lasted a long time. In fact, the event took me many months to get over, and to this day it marks a turning point in my life. Even now the thought of it brings tears to my eyes.

I had many considerations about the accident. If I had not cancelled, would the other student have lived? If I had not cancelled, would there have been a chance that Jan and I would have survived the jump? Was I meant to die this way? Had I just put off the inevitable? In an event of this magnitude it is difficult to maneuver alone through the emotion and confusion; I definitely needed support. I consulted my wisest friends and colleagues. They were considerate and extremely helpful to me, and I will always be grateful to them.

What I gleaned from this event was the following: I had an exit point that I might have taken. I chose not to. Instead, a person who had chosen to leave stepped in and took my place. In retrospect it was clear that there were various reasons for Jan to leave at this time. When I chose not to go with her, she simply went with another. Those who spoke to her just prior to her accident revealed that she seemed to know that she was going to die. She seemed happier than she had been in a long time. She even said to one friend the morning of the jump, “If I don’t come back, just know I was doing what I love the most.” She knew.

Later I thought of the warning Ananda had given me — “A woman will push you” — and I shivered. Obviously there are choices and I had made mine: to not jump, to father my son, to remain faithful in my relationship with Lena, and to live longer to make a larger contribution. A possibility, a probability was bypassed in favor of other options and I am glad of that choice.

A couple of weeks following the accident, I went to the Santa Fe ski basin after a big snowfall. Jan and I had skied there together shortly before her death. She had taken a bad fall on that day, which had rattled my nerves, and we had become separated once, leaving me feeling panicky until she at last reappeared, laughing, “Where were you, slowpoke?”

Now the experience of skiing there was bittersweet — I couldn’t get Jan off my mind. The day was magnificent, and the conditions couldn’t have been better. The slopes were covered with new cottony white billows of dry powder snow. In the afternoon I was skiing rapidly down an open slope high on the mountain near where Jan had fallen weeks before. Suddenly, such a powerful wind blasted up the mountain that I was almost stopped in my tracks. I had to throw my arms out like wings to keep my balance. From that location a grand vista of the Rio Grande Valley spread out below me. Then I distinctly heard Jan’s laughing voice say to me, “This is what it’s like to fly, José.” She seemed so happy and carefree that I laughed out loud. After that, I relaxed and no longer felt mournful for the rest of the day. I knew Jan was okay and had chosen correctly for herself.

POSTSCRIPT

You will find that death plays a major role in many of the stories in this book. This is because death is such an amazing teacher and is always an encounter with major power. Rather than be afraid of death, it is beneficial to experience it as our friend. Without it there can be no birth, no renewal, no evolution in our approach to life. Death is also an illusion, like everything that is impermanent. Death is a tool that teaches. Nothing more. One day we will look and see that death never really existed.

So where is the power in this story? It brings up the question of free will versus fate, freedom of choice versus being entrapped in a preordained program. If everything is predestined, where is the power? If life is an already written movie, why bother? So does choice have to do with selecting a different path, or does choice only have to do with choosing what was already destined as opposed to resisting it? What I have learned is that it is not an either-or question, nor is the choice between resignation and acceptance. Both are deeply intertwined. The power is in choosing. If we fight what is handed to us, it goes badly for us. If we choose to accept our lessons, we build power and sometimes we open a portal to a new choice.

What is the difference between resignation and acceptance? Acceptance gives us wiggle room and resignation does not. There is a plan to life and there is ample wiggle room to shift probabilities if we learn certain lessons. In the end it looks to our minds as if each set of probabilities was destined no matter which set we chose. Some things just aren’t completely understandable. What is clear is that I was in a powerful place at a powerful time in my life, meeting with powerful people discussing powerful topics — and powerful things happened.

EXERCISES

Reflect back over some of the major events of your life. What if the outcome had been different? Where would that outcome have led you? If that had been your reality, would you have experienced it as inevitable? Would you have accepted it the way it turned out?

Imagine that you could project yourself a thousand years ahead of today and look back on your experiences. Are you glad for what happened? Are you accepting of the experiences, seeing them as necessary steps in a long series of adventures? Would you change anything?

Reflect upon what you believe about the inevitability of your future. What have you resigned yourself to — that you will always be bad at languages, not remember names, find math difficult? Are those your only alternatives? Are there other outcomes awaiting you that lead to a different future?

QUESTIONS

What should you accept as “just the way it is” and what should you question and choose to change? Consider your options. Are you actually free to choose or are you predestined?