Fifteen years earlier, in 1985, I was a nuclear submarine officer serving on the USS Tecumseh, a ballistic missile submarine. The ship was being overhauled in Newport News Shipyard in Virginia. One evening I was the nuclear engineering officer on watch and we were refueling the nuclear reactor. The ship was in dry-dock, about 90 feet above ground. So much of the hull was cut out that it looked liked Swiss cheese. We have to cut the hull apart in order to repair or replace the equipment inside. It’s not as if a huge turbine generator can fit out the tiny round hatch. It was about three in the morning and I had been on watch for over twenty hours. My bones were aching as I shuffled my heavy steel toed shoes between the murky shadows created from an army of towering lights whose heads were glowing in the early morning mist. I was standing on the deck overseeing the nuclear fuel rods being lowered into the reactor by a crane. Out of the corner of my right eye I saw a crane operator swinging another load over the ship and it was coming my way. I looked for a place to jump, but I wasn’t a rat, so the deep holes in the Swiss cheese were not very inviting. As I turned to look up I was struck in the forehead. Fortunately I was wearing my hard hat, but the blow crushed two of the discs in my spine. I was in traction for months with my head resting in a sling and weights gently lifting me up off the ground. It wasn’t exactly like the torture rack I once saw in the Tower of London, but the principle is the same. When I left the Navy hospital they gave me a portable traction unit that I hooked onto the top of an open door to hang myself, adjusting the tension by varying the length of the bungee cord as I sat on the floor.

            When I wasn’t in traction I was wearing a neurostimulation device that was clipped to my belt and provided electrotherapy. This cute little battery powered device sent an electrical impulse through two pads that were sticking on the nerve clusters on both shoulder blades. The theory is that the electrical impulses reduce the pain by confusing the brain. It did not work so well. Some days I had my personal electric shock treatment turned up so high that I would walk around with my shoulders twitching more than a dead chicken with his head cut off. This made signing my signature to work logs a bit challenging. I once considered moving the pads to my temple and ending it all, but that was a fleeting thought and after six months the pain was mostly gone. All was well for many years but in 1999 that began to change.

            From June till December in 1999 I was like the story of the proverbial frog who is sitting in a pot of room temperature water and slowly gets boiled alive as the temperature is raised one degree an hour. There was a slow change boiling inside my spine and it happened in such tiny increments that I failed to fully notice that my pot was reaching the point of no return. My vertebrae were listening to the Andrews sisters and doing the Boogie Woogie in my spinal column, grinding away what remained of my damaged discs bit by microscopic bit.

            By January 2000 I am completely unaware of the fact that I have lost all strength in my left arm to the point where I can barely lift one pound. Months ago I started to take a Motrin every once in awhile but by now I am popping 800 milligrams of Motrin every hour like it’s candy. It only takes me four days to suck down a bottle of 100 of those deceptive cherries. But God, the universe, or whoever is in charge is about to intervene.

            On the morning of January 18, 2000, I wake up and get out of bed. It seems just like any other morning but the events that are about to unfold will forever change my life. I proceed into the bathroom and turn on the shower to let the water get hot. I take off my pajamas and stick my hands in the air for a nice morning stretch.

            The pain I am about to experience is worse than the pain when I broke my foot in two places playing football. It is even more excruciating than when the entire twenty-one man pyramid collapsed on me in high school and tore my chest muscles apart, dislocating my shoulders and the ‘AC’ joint in my collar. It does come slightly close to the time I broke two ribs when I fell off the mountain in New Zealand.

            As I am stretching my arms into the air preparing to enter the water, a metamorphosis is about to take place just like the one described for our amphibian friend when the vapor pressure of the liquid equals the environmental pressure surrounding the liquid and the water starts to boil. The Andrews sisters stopped singing and my vertebrae both ran for the nearest seat. The Axe Murderer has arrived and he is trying to split me in half with a six-inch blade. As he slices between my shoulders the pain is so excruciating it is beyond words. I let out a blood-curdling scream, he swings again, and again and the screams are piercing my ears. I stagger out of the bathroom screaming and reaching my arms over my head trying to pull the axe out. I am unaware of my wife who has come running to my rescue. By now the screaming is existential, I am out of my body, someone else is writhing and screaming, not me.

            I am floating above, watching my wife trying to catch my body as I – perhaps I should say “it”– is collapsing. Its’ head hits the corner of the bedroom dresser then It (my body) flops down to the floor like a rag doll. This out of body feature is either a marvelous defense mechanism and I should thank the architect who designed this interesting but little-known feature or … I am dead. I look for the tunnel and the light but I don’t see it, there is just raggedy Andy and Marianne and the essence of me, so I figure I am not dead. Once again I have evaded the Grim Reaper and now I am on autopilot and like the space shuttle conducting a reentry, I return to my body. As I am writhing around on the floor, again twitching like the headless chicken, I beg my wife to give me some pain pills. She kindly obliges and shoves a few into my mouth and calls the ambulance, which takes me to Mount Elizabeth Hospital.

            A few days later after my body stabilized I am laying on the surgery table in Singapore and I distinctly remember being surrounded by comfortable blue lights, “Blue lights, why do these blue lights feel so soothing?” I remember thinking. As two teams of doctors prepare to put Humpty Dumpty together again, one team to take bone out of my hip and another team to insert it in my spine, and the doctor leans over and asks, “ Do you have any last requests?” He was joking of course and so I joke back, “How much bone are you going to take out of my hip?” and he tells me “About one inch.” Given that Marianne and I have a long-running twenty year debate over who’s taller, and since she always claims to be by a mere quarter inch, I say to the doc, “Yeah, take another half inch out if you can and make me taller.” When I wake up, he tells me he did and now I am taller. Consider it the booby prize. My wife still disputes this fact and refuses to step up and be measured.

            Ten days after the doctors put my body back together they decide it is time to unplug the magic elixir they call morphine from the veins in my pale left hand. I never really noticed it was there until they took it out. They also remove two other tubes previously in my body, one in the center of my throat and another in my right hip. The one in my throat leaves a quarter inch sunken scar that resembles a small bullet hole. Anyone who has ever had the dubious honor of a tracheotomy, and survived to recall the damn thing, instantly recognizes the sunken trademark of this exclusive club.

            Getting unplugged is not pleasant and I cannot recommend this. I feel like Neo in the Matrix, and I just took the red pill and I am traveling down the rabbit hole and experiencing reality for the first time. I am falling from a delusional existence of peaceful bliss and ignorance from my morphine induced state and entering a dark and twisted tunnel of a new life that is filled with pain and depression. Before I was blind, but now I am beginning to see for the first time in years and it is about to get ugly and confusing.

            I’m out of the hospital and now I am spending my days in agony, recovering in an upstairs bedroom that is converted into a makeshift hospital room. My neck and shoulders are immobile and I am now consciously aware of the fact that I have no strength in my left arm. A few of my nerves are crushed, which also means that I have no feeling in part of my left arm and fingers. I have no feeling in my neck because the surgery cut the nerves, but they say that it will return. This makes shaving a bit tricky. I have this strange feeling in my throat and chest like something isn’t right, so my wife calls the doctor and he tells her not to worry, my esophagus is out of place from the surgery but it will eventually wiggle its’ way to where it’s supposed to be. The good news is my neck does not hurt anymore. The bad news is that the inch and a half the doctors have taken out of my hip hurts like hell. It hurts so much I cannot walk.

            As I lay in bed for weeks I am getting extremely depressed. I cannot walk, shave, or even shower. My neck and shoulders are immobilized and I cry a lot. When I am not crying, I am staring in a daze at the ceiling and looking at dozens of flower arrangements sent by caring friends and smelling the fragrance that fills the room. My son Grant, and two daughters, Taylor and Madison, who are respectively three, six and nine at the time, occasionally comes in and we talk a lot. Or at least we try to talk. This makes me even more depressed because I realize that for the last three years I have done nothing but work. I am completely detached from my kids. I do not know their favorite cookies or colors and I have not had time to even eat meals with them. No, I was too busy living to work and not working to live. Twenty years and hundreds of projects of left-brain work in the Navy, with Exxon, or as a partner with Ernst & Young--reactor kinetics, metallurgy, chemistry, electrical engineering, petroleum systems integration, outsourcing, procurement, balanced scorecard, call centers in America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia–has slowly consumed every neuron in my conscious mind. The neuron path for right brain emotions or personal pleasure is a collapsed bridge. Years of mental programming on a nuclear submarine trained me to launch a missile, destroy the world, then go watch a movie. Exxon was not much different where I became one of the machines in the Matrix, generating power to keep the city basking in light. But that world is over, a new life is about to begin and the gestation process is complicated. First I have to go through the deprogramming process, and that will take two years. Oh the joy of uninstalling the equivalent of outdated Microsoft products. After I remove all the outdated programs my hard drive will need to be defragmented to prepare myself for the new Mac Book Leopard operating system, which has music and photos. But I am oblivious to all this at the moment. My family is busy telling me about the vacation in Australia that I missed when I was busy helping to negotiate and lead Cap Gemini through their acquisition of Ernst & Young, my partnership. They show me the pictures of the time they went to the Great Wall of China with Nana and Papa when I was helping the Prime Minister of Singapore on the national innovation program. While they were enjoying the world and each other, I was busy doing mergers, acquisitions or putting in information systems for global companies, ministers and royalty. Now I am really depressed.

            Two things happen that starts to lift my spirit. One day in a moment of deep depression, I ask God in silence, “Why did you do this to me?” In less than a minute my little Grant comes toddling in and blurts out, “You’re working too hard, Daddy,” and then shoots away as fast as he came. This might not have gotten my attention had it not happened repeatedly. It startles me and I ask myself, “Is God answering my prayers through my son?” It may sound strange but as a statistics major in college, I want to know the probability of this happening. What is the chance of Grant coming into my room during any two-minute period? I assume 3 percent. What is the chance of Grant answering my prayer with a direct relevant reply knowing he never hears my question? I conservatively assume the kid has thirty random responses, which is low, hence 3 percent. Finally, what is the chance of both happening at the same time? The answer is once in a thousand. Finally, what is the chance that this happens three times in a row? The probability is a staggering one in a billion. This cheers me up and I start to play a game with Grant, sending prayers out into the ether, and waiting to see what happens. A couple of days later I ask God, “What do you want me to do?” and sure enough, in less than a minute, Grant comes bee-bopping in and says, “You need to play more daddy.” With amazing consistency, Grant bats a billion and answers all my prayers. I think about this for a long time and finally conclude, “Either Grant and I have a strong connection or God in all his wonder is communicating to me through my son, or both.”

            The second event happens when my father-in-law calls from halfway around the world. Dad is a crusty ole’ son of a gun in his late eighties. He has survived getting shot in the Pacific in World War Two, several heart attacks, a couple of strokes and living with my mother-in-law for thirty years. He is one tough SOB. Dad asks how I am doing and I tell him the truth “Not so good Dad. I’m really depressed, I cannot walk or wash my own body and I think I’m going to go crazy.” Dad says, in no uncertain terms, “Get out of bed!” I remind Dad I cannot walk and then he shouts, “Get your GD ass out of bed and just walk one minute.” So I do. I walk one minute in excruciating pain. Then the next day I walk two minutes. Then three minutes and after thirty days I am walking around the block. After six months the braces are off, my esophagus wiggles back onto home base, and the nerves in my hand, arm, and neck are again talking to the neurons in my brain. One might think that by now, everything is fine, but it is far from fine. Both left and right brain neurons are now talking and it’s about to get downright ugly. I am awakening from a long deep slumber I was taking in the hold of the USS Globalization and the world has changed since I last saw it.

 

            I had learned a lesson and I could not get it out of my head. The coconut between my ears had been split and the husks pulled away and now I could see and I did not like what I saw. I had become nothing more than my job. It was my complete existence. Get more promotions, make more money, buy more things and maximize the 401k-retirement treasure chest, and I did it masterfully, I was successful. Isn’t that wonderful? In the process I had lost touch with my family, my faith, the community and every other realm of existence save the one, work. Somewhere along the path of life I had become lost. I was reminded of something that I learned a long time ago but had forgotten: money and success does not bring happiness or satisfaction, only gratification. Watches can be replaced, loved ones can’t. I began a search to find happiness and fulfillment. I did not know at the time that the search would last almost eight years.

From the middle of 2000 till the middle of 2001, the left-brain nuclear engineer and the newly found right-brain human began to devour dozens of books. To understand about love, passion and to get in touch with feelings, I read books like the Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. To learn about souls and soul theories I read Destiny of Souls and Journey of Souls by Dr. Michael Newton and Soul Power by Nikki De Carteret. To understand my brain and learn about the outdated programs I read Self Matters by Dr. Phil McGraw and Psycho-cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. Because I was in Singapore and traveling in Asia I picked up many ancient books on philosophy and eastern religions such as The Essential Tao translated by Thomas Cleary, The Eight Immortals translated by Koh Kok Kiang, The Teachings of Buddha compiled by Paul Carus. I read several ancient books such as the Art of War by Sun Tzu and translated by Thomas Cleary, Balance and Harmony the ancient Chinese wisdom, I-Ching Chinese book of change, The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. The more I read the more interested I became in spirituality, metaphysics and healing and so I read books like The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence, both by Dr. Deepak Chopra, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Hands of Light by Barbara Ann Brennan, Numerology by Hans Decoz, Signposts by Denise Linn and many more. Often I was reading three or four at a time. I read over fifty books during that time and although they were all wonderful, they all seemed to present a slice of physical, mental or non-physical reality, not a complete three-dimensional mosaic that I hungered for.

            By the end of 2002, after three years of grueling self-exploration and healing, a new day was dawning. I am reminded of what Kahlil Gibran wrote in the Prophet, “We must first pass through the dark of night before we reach the dawn of day.” I realized that previously I was confused. I realized that who I am is not what I do and I believe that millions of other people are equally confused. I began to create a long list of Great Misconceptions and Illusions, what I refer to as the M&I Gumbo about life, science and faith, and of course about reality and evolution. As I analyzed the words and definitions we use that form our belief systems I began to believe that they were antiquated and inaccurate. Take death for example, if we evaluate these words and our existence from a point in deep space, there is no such thing as destruction or death, merely transformation or regeneration. Death is a human term. Nothing ever dies from the point of view of energy or God. Then there is the notion that animals and trees are alive but water, air and earth are not. This makes absolutely no sense. If our bodies are nothing but air, minerals and water, where exactly is the dividing line between where the materials in us are dead, but we’re alive? After pouring through enough theories and books evaluating life, living, God and the universe from a scientific, philosophical and theological perspective I could no longer endure what I was doing and took the executive board approval provided by my ego and spirit and I quit my high paying six figure job.

            This is when strange phenomena began to invade my life. I called them “Unsolved Mysteries” and I started keeping a journal with the lessons I had learned about the Great Misconceptions. I had no idea that I was about to spend another six years investigating each phenomena and researching and interviewing the work of hundreds of Nobel Laureates and the worlds’ greatest philosophers, theologians and spiritual healers. Before this I thought my life had been difficult enough. I thought I was through the worst, what with my broken neck and all the personal work I had just finished. I didn’t know a person could experience any greater pain than I had already endured. I was wrong, very wrong.

 

 

 

 

            This was the beginning of what I now refer to as my “Quest”, a personal search to understand the answers to the “Quintessential Questions” in life – who am I, where did I come from, why am I here and where am I going.

            The first challenge I encountered on my quest is that the more deeply I submerged myself into the Quintessential Questions, the more uncertainties I found. What is reality? Who and what is God? What controls my existence, my mind, and my body? As I tackled one question, two others emerged. Before I knew it, an intricate and vast spider web formed. As a seeker of knowledge, I became like Hercules, attempting to decapitate the Hydra: For each head that Hercules cut off, two more appeared. Soon, a tangle of swirling heads called capitalism and socialism, east and west, energy and warming, intelligent design and Darwin, Islam and Christianity were thrashing about in my thought process, and I became lost in them.

Humanity, it seems, like Hercules, whacks restlessly away and continues to distance itself from the core of the problem, the illusion of separation. The massacre continues for so long we forget where we started and continue to create and perpetuate a cacophony of laws, theories, dogma, and models to justify the existence of a false separation to protect our egos, rice bowls and stock options despite all evidence and wisdom to the contrary.

This, then, revealed the second challenge. To answer the Quintessential Questions I must detach from all known axioms and beliefs, step beyond our earthly domain, beyond our endless territorial battles, beyond our human addictions. I must become the observer from a point in space in order to properly evaluate the Great Change taking place in my life. My mantra became a quote from the late Albert Einstein who once said, “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.”