On the morning of April 13, I read a post on NHNE Near-Death Experience Network. It was from an NDEr Rudi Rudenski and he said:

When I was a soldier, we plotted and schemed about killing others…The wars we planned are ongoing even to this day… After my NDE, I could see there were human beings in all the collateral damage… We were not heroes at all…. Killing someone would be like cutting off my own arm as we all a part of a whole. Killing the opponent is only half the story… but the human beings who are just at the wrong place at the wrong time…make war an impossible game…. They should make a place where those who want to play war can go to play general and soldier….Where children will not get in the way of their fantasies…. I know when I was young, I dreamed of bombing the Kremlin. Perhaps some boys like me are just hard-wired to be killers…. Maybe it is okay to be that way? But they should make rules that never let those that don’t include letting those who don’t want to play war getting in the way of their fun. Let them all, those who want to play war, go and fight somewhere away from those who don’t until there are none left who do. This might take a few generations to do but I hope one day there will be no more war… In the the last ages of the world… I saw a world full of light… There were no wars… Perhaps we are the souls who wanted the soap opera experience of living in a war-torn World?

About one minute later, I was looking at my daily email from the New York Times and saw this featured quote:

“If they can go fight in a war, they should be able to fight in a cage if they’d like.”

KEITH MINER, a mixed martial arts fighter from Texas, on amputees, some of whom are from the military, who are pursuing careers in mixed martial arts.

This sounded eerily similar, so I read the article. It was about amputees who are fighting in the mixed martial arts circuit. The main character in the article was born with a left arm that ends three inches below the elbow. Another man in the article lost an arm in a wood chipper. But many of the amputees entering mixed martial arts are veterans. Here is how the article ended:

Miner noted how a steady stream of martial arts fighters is emerging from military hospitals in Texas, damaged by war but newly versed in state-of-the-art limb substitutions and carrying a desire to remain physical.

“There are a lot of soldiers coming back and a lot of amputees starting to train,” Miner said. “They’ll run into a lot of the same issues we have.”

He added, “If they can go fight in a war, they should be able to fight in a cage if they’d like.”

The article’s main focus was on the difficulties these men face in the sport. These include other fighters refusing to fight them (to avoid the humiliation of being beaten by an amputee), and the sport itself trying to figure out how the rules apply to these guys. For instance, should these fighters be granted a license, or does their medical condition put them at risk of serious injury?

Obviously, the article had nothing to do with Rudi’s big point about the future of warfare. Still, there were impressive similarities on the level of the details. Here are the parallels I came up with:

1. Men fighting in war.

2. Men losing a limb in war. The focus is specifically on men who are missing an arm.

3. These men have a need to fight, whether inside or outside an actual war.

4. These men should be given a special place to fight, outside of conventional wars.

5. This would be in a game situation where no one but the combatants can be hurt.

6. There is a focus on the rules of this place.

The parallels, while they miss the meat of Rudi’s idea, are like dots scattered all over it, like a connect-the-dots drawing. I can’t help but think that the CMPE is there to confirm the rightness of his overall idea.

The message of the CMPE, then, is that war is deeply misguided. Killing another is not heroic, but really is like cutting off your own arm. Despite this fact, though, there are men who are, so to speak, hard-wired for warfare, no matter what its cost. What we’ve traditionally done is let them instigate and fight in actual wars, where the cost to humanity is immense, including untold collateral damage. But what we can do instead is acknowledge the need in these men to fight, and set up special arenas, circumscribed theaters, in which the war is not real, in which the fighting is just a game. They still get to express the urge to wage war, but without any cost to humanity. This is a way in which humanity can both realistically acknowledge the “need” for war and transition out of war. This is a way in which we can reach a point, generations from now, in which there are no more wars, and humanity is on its way to living in a world full of light.

There is a certain brilliance to the idea, I think. Perhaps that is why I had a CMPE about it. It is quite interesting to me to see the signs lift above their usual focus on personal issues. It’s extremely helpful to get a message that tells me, for instance, which house to move into. But it’s kind of beautiful to get a message about how the world can move beyond warfare, on its way to becoming a “world full of light.”

Even though I have been working with CMPEs for over thirty years now, I am still trying to understand them, and still have questions about how much they can be trusted. In the last several months, I went through a process which seemed to call for major reevaluation of them, or at least of my reading of them.

Since we moved to England in 2010, my wife Nicola has been trying to return to the teaching profession, trying to settle into the job that is just right for her, one that pays enough, that gives her a chance to use her talents to do something fulfilling, and that doesn’t tax her to exhaustion (which teaching posts are very good at doing).

Last summer, Nicola applied for a job at a private school. We had strong inner guidance around this, saying that she would get the job and that it would leave her time to pursue her other interests. She did got the job. And then as she started it, two CMPEs came, saying that this would be her last conventional job, that once she had moved on from it, she would be able to come home and focus on her deeper interests. Everything seemed to be in the perfect place.

The actual job, though, didn’t leave her any time. And then she was told it was set to last only for one year, which means that she would need to look for another once it was over.

So the guidance (inner guidance and CMPEs) seemed to be bombing. But right at this point, she and the director of music there hatched an idea for her to transition to another job within the same school, as a music teacher, which is what she has really wanted to do all along. We had a CMPE about that idea the day it was hatched, affirming that this was the position Nicola needed in order to settle into the right place job-wise. This was the end of her two-year search.

I then immediately went back into my sign logs, realizing there were a number of CMPEs going back years that seemed to point to this very idea. CMPEs about her return to teaching in England all seemed to point in this direction. Earlier CMPEs about her teaching music to children seemed to dovetail as well. It now seemed clear why we had had all that guidance when she first applied for her job at this school. The guidance wasn’t about the initial job, but was looking beyond that to the eventual music teaching job at the same school, which was the real position the signs had been envisioning for her for some time. So now, guidance we had received for years all seemed to fall together, all of it pointing to this single spot.

For several weeks, the job situation was up in the air. It was not at all clear that Nicola was going to get this job, which, after all, she and the director of music had cooked up out of the blue. During these weeks, Nicola grew increasingly pessimistic. To cheer her up, I kept assuring her, saying with complete confidence, “The job is yours.” The CMPEs seemed so clear. Nothing else could fit what all of them were saying.

But then it really fell through. It was clear that the head of the school just didn’t feel the money was there. When I finally admitted to myself that it wasn’t going to happen, I realized I had no good explanation. The situation itself wasn’t cosmically significant. But it was an effective test of the CMPEs. And the test had been failed.

I found myself very confused, which I said repeatedly. I had seen the signs come through in similar situations so many times. How could they fail this time? I was also embarrassed. While I, strong in my trust, was assuring the faithless, untrusting Nicola that “the job is yours,” she had actually been the realistic one. All I could do was apologize and say she had been right.

A possible solution occurred to me. The key CMPE, the one specifically confirming the rightness of that particular music job, had been a weak one. The parallels had been quite general. Genuine CMPEs tend to have more specific—and thus more impressive—parallels. So maybe I needed to revise my rules for evaluating CMPEs. Maybe the specificity of the parallels was a crucial and necessary component.

At this point, I made what I felt was a good decision. I decided that I wouldn’t conclude anything. I would just watch this situation over the long-term and see what it would end up teaching me.

Then, months after the job had been taken off the table, it came back! A music teacher at the school resigned, because she got a post at another school, one that Nicola had been a top candidate for. This left room for something like what Nicola and the head of music had proposed back in the fall.

Even though the job was back on the table, the situation still didn’t want to resolve. The process dragged on again. During this time, we had another CMPE which was totally unambiguous. It likened the arrival of this job to the arrival of an office chair I had ordered, both of which were key to us being in the “right workplace,” and both of which were late. The message of the CMPE was that, just as my office chair was on the way and certain to arrive, so was Nicola’s job.

There was no other way to interpret this CMPE but as specific assurance for Nicola that the job would indeed arrive, an assurance intended to see her through the uncertainty. So at this point I threw caution to the wind and went back to my earlier slogan: “The job is yours!” I even let my inner teenager out, and announced that, when she actually did get the job, I would have to humbly admit that I was wrong when I said earlier that I had been wrong.

Time still dragged on, and Nicola completely gave up hope. But this time, it turns out that I was the realistic one. The job finally came through. So now it looks like, come the fall, Nicola will finally be settling into the right job for her, in which she can do what she loves, and which will leave her time to pursue her other interests.

As I said, this is not a cosmically important situation. But it has been extremely educational for me, and for Nicola, too. This is twice in the last two years where I’ve had to face the very real possibility the signs could have gotten it consistently and unambiguously wrong. (I wrote about the other one here.) In both cases, though, I learned the exact same thing: that they should not be written off so easily. Both situations have taught me that in the long run, they really do seem to know what they are talking about.

At the end of the phone meeting, an image came into my mind to summarize what we had seen. The next day I sketched the image out on a Post-it, in preparation to do a more polished version for those who had been on the call. Here is the thumbnail version:

And here is the finished version:

The horizontal disk represents the surface of Helen or Bill’s life. At the center of this disk is a particular situation, and within that situation is their reactions in it. The eye in the upper left represents their vision, which has great difficulty seeing beneath the surface. For them, the disk is virtually impenetrable.

In contrast, the author of the Course as the power to see through the disk, to see what is beneath it, and then to illuminate that for Helen or Bill. What does his illumination reveal to them? Two things: First, he illuminates the unconconscious foundation for their current reactions. (For instance, he tells Helen that her tendency to get people’s names wrong is actually an unconscious—and childish—attempt to protect them, by injecting distance between them so that her hurtful thoughts can’ t reach them.) Second, he illuminates the new thought system that can be the basis for a new set of reactions in the situation. The goal of this illumination, of course, was to allow Helen and Bill to shift from the first foundation to the second, and thus find healing.

As soon as this image popped into my head, it really grabbed me. I had to draw it for everyone, something I had not done in two and a half years of these phone meetings.

Within seconds of finishing my thumbnail sketch, I happened, for unrelated reasons, to visit a website on synchronicity. There, in the lower right corner I saw a drawing which immediately reminded me of my diagram:

This drawing came from a dream of physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli came to Carl Jung as a badly out-of-balance person. Over months he then recorded over a thousand dreams and impressions. These culminated in his dream of the “world clock,” an image that Jung interpreted as representing wholeness. This clock and its interpretation led to what Jung called a “conversion,” a profound transformation of Pauli’s psyche toward wholeness.

In Jung’s interpretation, according to synchronicity author David Peat, the whole image represented a “mandala of the Self.” Further, ”The two disks belong to the two universes of the conscious and the unconscious.” I assume this means that the vertical disc (the one resting on the bird’s back) belongs to the unconscious while the horizontal disc belongs to the conscious.

My diagram and Pauli’s world clock were thus parallel on both the visual level and the level of meaning:

1. There is an image that represents the mind or self.
2. Its main feature is a horizontal disk or disks, a flat area containing a series of concentric circles.
3. The center of these circles represents the meeting point of the conscious and unconscious.
4. This horizontal area rests on an unconscious foundation beneath it.
5. The whole image represents a person (Helen, Bill, Pauli) who is seeking healing or wholeness.
6. In this pursuit, the person is working with a master teacher (author of the Course) or therapist (Jung).
7. This teacher or therapist has the role of interpreting this person’s surface material, revealing its hidden meaning or dynamics. (This is what Jesus’ illumination did for Helen and Bill, and what Jung did with Pauli’s dream).
8. This interpretation is meant to lead to healing.

I had no doubt this was a CMPE. The two events were virtually simultaneous and the list of parallels was quite good. I gave it a straightforward interpretation:

My image of how Jesus dealt with issues in Helen and Bill’s lives captures something important about how a Course in Miracles teacher should deal with a pupil’s life issues. The teacher’s role in interpreting surface material to reveal its hidden meaning or dynamics can lead to dramatic healing.

Interestingly, in the month since this CMPE, the diagram has taken on something of a life of its own. As we have talked about our attempts to apply it, several of us have shared that, while we meet with pupils (over the phone), we have found it helpful to have the diagram in hand and look at it. While doing that, a few of us have reported startling insights into the real unconscious basis of our pupil’s reactions, insights that proved pivotal in the session and extremely helpful for the pupil. One of our teachers said half-jokingly that we will need to have a card-sized version produced so that we can carry it around with us.

The other day I received an email from a man who does not take part in our calls but, being on the email list, received the diagram. He said:

Confession time. Your chart descriptive of our foundations for reactions to our life situations is quite a classic! I have had it reproduced and it is referenced at every [Course in Miracles] class discussion. Without question, as an aid , it is relevant no matter whether we are discussing a current workbook lesson or related textual section [referring to the Course's Workbook and Text]. I have even dreamt of finding an architect-oriented Course student to design a three-dimensional model.

When I drew the diagram, I had no idea, of course, that it would prove this useful. I just knew that it grabbed me and I had to get it down on paper. What I find so interesting in hindsight is that the CMPE flagged the importance of this diagram right at the beginning. As is so often the case with CMPEs, it seemed to know from the start what only became visible later on.

It feels, of course, really good to have the paper finally out there. I just hope that it makes possible the next step in researching this phenomenon. My goal is to see this phenomemon on the map, alongside other paranormal phenomena. To my knowledge, there really is nothing like it. Here we have physical, observable events brought together in apparently highly orchestrated ways, resulting in what seems to be the communication of helpful messages.

Whereas paranormal phenomena are usually suggestive of non-ordinary powers that we possess, CMPEs, however, seem to point to a higher intelligence, perhaps even to God. In this respect, CMPEs are more reminiscent of spiritual experiences, yet they have the advantage of being physical events, not just subjective experiences. In a sense, then, they combine the objective, verifiable quality of psychic phenomena with the more directly spiritual quality of mystical experiences. I’ve never really put this together until now, but I think that, in this sense, they represent a kind of best of both worlds.

And significantly, it’s clear to me that they want to be on the map. As I detailed in my book Signs, I have had a series of CMPEs that demonstrated that they themselves have an intent to get out there, to become part of the culture.

So we will see what comes out of the publication of this paper. The signs themselves have seemed to see great things coming from it. I’m frankly a bit skeptical of that. They often exaggerate the small steps along the way, seeing them in light of the final goal and imbuing them with its significance. Whatever happens, I’ll keep you posted.

For all those years, my pattern has been that I spend a few years checking in on the Shroud only occasionally, and then I feel drawn back into greater contact. It’s as if a magnetic force pulls me back to it. The nature of that force is no mystery. I want contact with the historical Jesus, the real Jesus that actually lived on earth. I want to reach back, past the myths and legends, the creeds and icons, and touch the real figure, the actual man.

That, of course, is why I study New Testament scholars. And yet those scholars are using delicate and subjective intellectual tools to reach from the gospel records back to the time of Jesus some 40 to 70 years earlier, a time shrouded in mist, to make their best educated guesses about what actually took place there. It’s as if they are trying to shine a flashlight into that mist, trying to penetrate a fog that will never fully lift.

If we are talking about contact with the actual man, the Shroud is on a completely different level. If it is authentic, then we are talking about a cloth that actually wrapped Jesus’ body, that contains his blood (which turns out to be Type-AB), that has dirt from his feet and dust from the stone slab on which he was laid, and that has a one-of-a-kind image of his body and his timeless, regal face. If the Shroud is authentic, it contains a record of everything that physically happened to Jesus from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, imprinted on the cloth by his own body. If we are talking about contact with Jesus, there is nothing that comes close to the Shroud. That is why I have found myself drawn back to it again and again, since I was 18.

As you may know, the Shroud is a fourteen-foot linen cloth, that contains the eery front and back images of a naked man, a man who seems to have been crucified. It has been housed in Turin, Italy since 1578 and can be traced at least to France in 1355, but its history becomes questionable before that. A carbon-dating test in 1988 measured the cloth as originating between 1260 and 1390. And that seemed to put an end to it. The Shroud was proclaimed a fake and one of the scientists who measured its age labeled belief in it on par with being a flat-earther.

But that didn’t end it. People slowly realized that the date didn’t explain how the image got there—an image that is not composed of paint, but of some kind of chemical change to the cloth itself—and why everything else about the Shroud seemed so flawlessly realistic. The carbon-dating stood on one side while a mountain of other equally scientific evidence stood on the other. It wasn’t a case of science vs. faith, but of science vs. science.

Eventually, a plausible explanation for the carbon-dating was discovered. The carbon-14 tests had dated material from only one corner of the Shroud and that specific area has now been demonstrated to be chemically unlike the rest of the Shroud. A number of lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that that area was the site of a 16th-century reweave that was invisible to the naked eye (though not to the trained eye of a number of textile experts).

So the one test that stood against the mountain of positive evidence has effectively been invalidated, which means the only thing still standing is that mountain. Which brings us right back to the strong probability that the Shroud actually wrapped the dead body of Jesus, and provides us with something like a photograph of him, 1800 years before photography was invented, and a 3D map of his body, nearly 2000 years before the technology to recognize that existed.

While many details of the Shroud are fascinating in their medical or historical accuracy, the image itself is what is most entrancing on a human level and mysterious on a scientific level. It has been shown that the image is a change in coloration of some of the top-most fibrils that make up the linen threads. How that change in coloration occurred is still unknown. But how it functions visually is pretty clear. It seems that the closer the body was to the cloth at any particular point, the greater the density of the image at that point. Thus, where the body touched the cloth, there is a more dense image. Where the body was slightly distant from the cloth, there is a less dense image. So, for instance, the nose is darker, as it presumably was touching the cloth, while the sides of the face are lighter, since they were presumably slightly distant from the cloth.

This makes for an image that looks odd, not particularly life-like at all. But when you take a photographic negative, everything changes. Now the nose is lightest, while the sides of the face are slightly darker—much like a real face would appear. This explains why a negative of the Shroud looks like a photograph, and it also explains the 3D information contained in the image, since lightness or darkness are functions of cloth-body distance.

What really puzzles me, though, is this: What I’ve just described really only works if whatever traveled from the body to the cloth (whether that be heat, chemicals, or some form of radiation) traveled only either straight up (from the front of the body to the cloth above) or straight down (from the back of the body to the cloth below). If, instead, what caused the image radiated out in all directions, you’d get a blurry image, rather than the crisp one we see on the Shroud.

Further, the cloth must have been close to absolutely flat—flat underneath the body and flat on top of the body. If the cloth had wrapped the body, followed the contours of the body, then the cloth-body distance would have been much the same all over. There would have been gaps between cloth and body at certain points—for instance, where the cloth left the nose to join the top of the cheekbone—but except at those points, the cloth would have followed the body’s contours. This means that the sides of the face, or the sides of the torso, or the sides of the legs, would have just as much image as the tops of those features. And that would mean the image would actually lose its photographic quality (and the 3D information as well). To understand why, think of a photo of a person’s body in which every part of the body is just as light as every other part. There would be no shadows, and as a result, no sense of contour. All you’d get is a white shape.

If the cloth hadn’t been flat, you’d also get other problems with the image. The image would be too wide, for one thing. Imagine putting paint on your face, wrapping a tea towel around your face, and then opening the tea towel up. The image of your face would be too wide. Also, a cloth that was wrapped around the body would be wrinkled, creating cloth-body distance that had nothing to do with the body’s shape but was simply a result of the folds that occur when a two-dimensional cloth is draped over a three-dimensional body.

I realize that this is probably hard to follow. Ideally, it would be a much longer explanation, and complete with diagrams. Even then, it’s easy to misunderstand. For a more visual explanation, see the third video down on this page.

My main point is, I don’t understand how the image could have been formed. How do you get some kind of image-formation mechanism that only travels straight up or down—from a dead body, no less? And how do you get the cloth completely flat? By the way, the cloth at one point had wrapped around the body, as a blood stain from the tip of one of the elbows shows. So it seems to have gone from being wrapped around the body to being stretched flat above and below the body.

It’s very hard to talk about all this without thinking of the resurrection. I need to say that there are credible theories of how the image could have been formed by natural processes. For myself, though, I don’t see how normal chemical processes could have resulted in this image, with its crispness and its 3D information. I have difficulty not seeing this one-of-a-kind image being the result of a one-of-a-kind event. And that, quite naturally, makes me feel that in the Shroud I am touching more than the man himself, that I am in contact with the crowning event of his life, the event that literally changed the world.

If you want to learn more about the Shroud, I highly recommend www.shroud.com, which is really the main Shroud website. I also highly recommend www.shroudstory.com, which presents high-quality information on the Shroud from one man’s point of view. I’ve also just discovered his blog, which he typically posts to a few times a day. If you are interested in the Shroud, it’s an incredibly valuable service that will keep you up to date on the latest news.

In terms of documentaries, here is one of the all-time best Shroud documentaries, a terrific telling of the story that many believe thoroughly discredited the 1988 carbon-dating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YEivEc6KcI

Here’s a great one on an attempt to reproduce on computer the face on the Shroud (though, to be honest, I prefer the face as it appears on the Shroud—somehow the cheekbones, along with the whole regal feel of the face, got lost in translation):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvAJRp4CXdU&feature=player_embedded

Here is a relatively recent BBC one I had never seen before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr9_v5A4a2w

And here is perhaps my favorite one,which I almost know by heart. It has some problems (I wish it hadn’t included the flower images), but I just love the mood it creates:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6KVoO4aHbU

I said that many of my critical junctures of this type involved moving into a house. But the example I want to tell involves moving out of a house. Specifically, it involves Nicola and I moving out of our home in Sedona, which was also the home of the Circle of Atonement (the Course in Miracles organization I founded in the early 90’s), to come to England.

When Nicola first brought up the idea of moving to England in the fall of 2008, I couldn’t see how it could possibly be right. For years I had been receiving guidance about the Circle being in Sedona, Arizona, and growing there into a real center, with a retreat aspect and an educational aspect. There had been so many CMPEs about this that I had difficulty doubting it. Of course, all of that could still happen without us there, but that didn’t seem very realistic.

However, my mind was slowly opened to the idea of moving. One of Nicola’s main points was that our two children would be better off in England than in Sedona, and I conceded that point. Then, in January of 2009, we had a very clear CMPE saying that we needed to face the question of moving to England and seek guidance about it together. That, of course, got my attention. Along the way, Nicola was getting inner guidance about the rightness of moving. Her inner guidance has, in my view, an impressive track record, so this gave me pause. But I assumed that in this case it was probably wrong.

Then in May of 2009, we had an extremely clear CMPE. It pictured us moving to England and Amy Speach moving to Sedona to work for the Circle. Amy had been our most community-oriented person in the Circle’s online community, and this sign showed her coming to Sedona to grow community for the Circle.

The beauty of this sign is that it made sense of both sides. It did picture us moving, but it also pictured the Circle staying in Sedona and growing there. That met a huge concern of mine and, indeed, the sign seemed to specifically speak to my side of the equation. In addition to reassuring me about the Circle’s continuance in Sedona, it also specifically said that I needed to get past my reluctance and say yes to this move.

So that was it for me. I did say yes, in the trust that everything would work out for my family and also for the Circle.

Yet, in the ensuing months, while we prepared to move our lives across the ocean, everything changed. The sign had pictured Amy moving to Sedona with her partner, but the relationship broke up, and Amy decided it wasn’t right for her to move. We explored at length the possibility of another friend filling that role in the Circle. But that eventually didn’t work out either.

The move was only three months away, and it looked like my worst fears were about to come to pass. There was no one to keep the Circle going there in Sedona. It looked like the Circle would have to close up shop and basically go virtual—exist online without a physical home.

None of that fit the guidance I had received for the previous twenty years. It didn’t make any sense to me. How could new guidance lead us straight into the destruction of old guidance? I didn’t understand it. But then there are a lot of things I don’t understand. So I remember that one day, as time was drawing short, I just let it all go. I let go of this vision of the Circle being anchored and growing, over decades and perhaps longer, in its home in Sedona. I had been living mentally inside that vision for such a long time, but now it was as if I opened the door and walked out, into unfamiliar territory.

But that didn’t last long. Within about a day, our old friend and long-time student of the Circle, Veronica, agreed to move into the house. Then Amy re-raised the issue of moving to Sedona, saying she had received guidance to do just that. Within days of me deciding I had to let it all go, the new configuration was in place.

It didn’t happen without my action. I called Veronica to raise with her the idea of moving in. And I mentioned the situation to Amy, to find that she’s already been receiving the inner nudge to move. But it felt like I was just poking a small hole in a ceiling, above which had pooled a large volume of water, so that a tiny amount of effort caused the water to just come pouring down. It felt as if there was a whole plan already in place, ready to spring into action, just waiting for me to poke that little hole.

The fact that, in the end, everything worked out for the Circle confirmed for me that all that previous guidance about the Circle and Sedona hadn’t been wrong. There really was a plan for the Circle’s growth there, such that, when that plan was put on the line, forces were poised to guarantee its continuance. Within a short time, a CMPE came along that said I had been right to cling to that vision from the previous guidance. In hindsight, therefore, I don’t think the virtue had been in letting go of that vision that day. In hindsight, rather than wise, that looked naïve. It was analogous to hearing a baby cry whose parent was in the next room, and assuming that, because the parent hadn’t shown up in ten seconds, I just had to let go of my attachment to the baby going on living.

This taught both Nicola and I a lot about how the plan works. There are times to let go and times to hold on, but we often get those times wrong! This was also an example of one of those critical junctures, times when everything is on the line, and the plan, after long periods of hiding quietly in the shadows, strides forth to show that it really is there.

Most of the time, of course, this plan doesn’t seem to be operating. It seems to not exist at all. Life stumbles forward, random things happen, and much of it makes no sense. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind the erratic firing of life’s events.

However, occasionally the plan steps forward in ways that are hard to deny. Things happen that feel less like accidents and more like visitations. They leave behind them an aroma of the divine and leave in place a legacy of lasting change. And then the plan steps back again behind the curtain of randomness.

Lately, I have been reflecting on these special times. I have been calling them “critical junctures.” Life, of course, is punctuated by critical junctures, times when a great deal pivots in a short space of time. When that time is over, things have changed. There is an old order, so to speak, that has passed away, and a new order has come in. In a matter of days, these critical junctures set in place changes that may last years or decades.

Within this class of critical junctures are certain ones that the plan is especially interested in. In my experience, these are junctures that tend to be overtly about a higher purpose. They are also ones that the signs have shown a good deal of interest in. They are, therefore, not just any junctures. They are ones that are “of the plan.” They are critical junctures not just in our eyes, but also from a higher perspective.

In my experience, these critical junctures typically have a few stages. First, as a critical juncture approaches, an opportunity opens up that has a strong appearance of being “of God.” Oftentimes, this opportunity is stumbled on out of the blue. Despite that, however, it ticks all the boxes (as mywife would say). It fits past guidance. It fits your needs and talents. It seems to fit everyone’s needs. It moves you, and everyone, forward, in a big way. It seems to take everything into account, to make sense on every front. It seems too good to be true.

Second, this opportunity usually seems to hang by a thread. It is unclear that it will come off, and there may be a major obstacle standing in its way. I don’t like this part. I tend to trust things will all work out, but I’m also worried about being shown to be a fool for trusting in the face of these kind of odds. I often think, “Why can’t this just be a shoe-in? Why does it have to balance on a knife’s edge?”

Third, it works out. Sometimes it turns out that that one big obstacle was only a small part of the story, that planted all over the landscape were hidden factors poised to cooperate with this new opportunity. Other times, it all hinges on one tiny event that could have gone either way, but for some reason it goes the plan’s way. One time, for instance, a house I wanted to move into hung on a coin toss that happened while I was on a pay phone. For some reason, I was allowed to call the toss. I called tails, which I’d gotten in guidance, and we got the house. But what if it hadn’t turned up tails, or if I hadn’t been given the call?

Many of my examples of this phenomenon, in fact, have to do with moving into houses. I’ve moved into nine houses in the last 28 years. Six of those were meant not just to house my family but to also house a spiritual work. And all six of those roughly fit the pattern I’ve just described. They all were cases where the plan seemed visibly and dramatically at work. Three of those nine houses, however, were just meant as homes for my family, and, interestingly, those three conspicuously did not fit that pattern. They felt like completely normal processes. There was no higher hand in sight.

I intend to tell a more extended example of this critical juncture pattern in my next post. But for the moment, the main reflection I have about this pattern is that I think it tells us something about how the plan works. I think the plan is always at work, but mostly in subtle, behind-the-scenes ways. However, it can step forward quite dramatically. There are certain intersections in our lives where turning right versus turning left will mean significantly different futures for us, with one of those futures being the one the plan has slated for us. If the plan really does care about our lives, and if it wants to use its influence with maximum effect, then it makes sense that it is at these intersections that the plan chooses to step out of the shadows and start visibly directing traffic.

At the end of this school year, the school of our six-year-old, Miranda, reaches its end and all children have to apply to a “junior” school, which is the next level up. Most will transition to the one right next door, but you can actually apply to any one of several schools in the area. Nicola, being a teacher and knowing how important the choice of schools is, sent us on a tour of all the available options. We visited five schools in all and Nicola read the official reports about each school online.

After all of that, it seemed clear that there was one particular school that outshone the others, both overall and as a fit for Miranda’s very particular needs. It’s a small village school about ten minutes away, stuffed onto a small plot of land. But the school had an amazing feel. The head is clearly on top of things, the staff felt completely behind her, the kids were unbelievably focused on their learning, the school had the highest rating available from the government inspection agency, and that rating report emphasized that the kids there tend to jump far ahead of national averages.

The drawback was that there is only one space available, and to get that space, Miranda would have to move right after Christmas. She took weeks to settle into her current class, and here we’d be moving her again, at a time that was different from when all her classmates would move. We were really concerned about that dislocation.

We prayed about it and it felt right to move her there anyway. But the guidance didn’t seem particularly impressive. We went with it, for want of any better ideas. But we weren’t convinced it was real guidance. So now we were pulling her out of her current school and sending her to this small village school, where she wouldn’t know anyone in her class. Overall, it did feel right, but how could we be sure we were doing the right thing?

Then, a week ago, Nicola went to visit the head of the new school and talk about the transition. When she came home, the report she gave me felt really significant. She said a few things that helped sweep my doubts aside, one of them being that there were a number of girls in what would be Miranda’s class that, in key respects, were like Miranda. One of our concerns about  Miranda is that she easily gets overlooked. Rather than being cool and “with it,” she is a deep thinker and sensitive soul. And rather than being either advanced or behind, she is both at once—strong in certain areas and weak in others. If there are other girls there like her, her chances of really connecting and finding her place seemed greatly increased.

I was so enthused by Nicola’s report that I said, “This feels like it could be part of a sign.” And sure enough, it was. Nicola had just happened that day to have a very parallel conversation with a head of department at her school, about her place there. She hadn’t noticed the similarities. But when I heard the stories side by side, I was immediately struck by them. We counted seven parallels and, after running it through the CMPE scale, declared it a sign.

The sign was clearly there to reinforce our decision. Its main message was that this school was the end of a long search, that it was the right placement for Miranda because it suited her particular needs so well.

The immediate effect was a massive sense of relief. All those doubts about us doing the right thing fell away. The gnawing uncertainty was replaced by a real sense of peace, and of accomplishment, too, as if we had steered Miranda’s ship through difficult waters and had finally arrived in safe harbor.

We then remarked that that’s one thing we love about signs—that ability to make you feel that the voice from on high has given a particular decision its indelible stamp of approval. And in a life where it’s hard to really be sure about anything, that is a priceless gift.

Shroder writes with such vividness that he makes us feel like we are actually there with them, in people’s homes, talking to these children and their families. Throughout the book he himself is clearly wrestling with the evidence he sees. As he encounters the children himself, the skeptical explanations—that their families have coached them, or that they are trying to better their own lives by forming a bond with a higher-class family—fall apart. And he is left with children who are in possession of names, locations, specific events, attitudes, emotions, skills, phobias, and a sense of identity that fit a particular deceased person whom, in most cases, they should be completely ignorant of.

As what amounts to the philosophical climax of the book, Shroder tells a story that becomes his own key for unlocking this vexing mystery. After his trips with Stevenson, he relates what he’s seen to a skeptical friend, who provides the standard skeptical answer: “In the absence of compelling reasons to believe in souls and soul transfers in and of themselves, a rational person had to choose the unlikely over the unexplained”—choose conventional explanations, however unlikely, over paranormal ones that are simply unbelievable. 

Then Shroder remembers his story, which he says “had been haunting the back of my mind ever since India, maybe even before.” 

Right after he graduated from college, he and a friend went on a road trip across the country, a road trip which “turned into a marathon conversation.” 

There were a couple of women in my life, and I realized that I was associating each of the women with a different vision of my future. One was safe, expected, almost a retreat. The other was dangerous, risky, a leap of faith.

As they talked endlessly over the weeks, each woman became symbolized by a song. The safe one became Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” and the dangerous, risky one became Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One.” 

“Which woman?” quickly became “which life?” and the more we talked, the more crucial it seemed to figure out which was the “right” decision. Was taking the bold course, doing the unexpected, courageous, or just foolish? Would it lead to glory or doom? Was doing the safe thing solid and reasonable, or cowardly, the first step into a life of tedium and regret?

The ongoing conversation reached a head at a lonely campground near the Grand Canyon, where they were the only campers. He says: 

This was it, the clear turning point. The indecision, the complete inability to see what was the truth and what was the delusion, was agony to me.

He felt like his head was going to explode. And when his friend suggested they get back in the car right now, throw caution to the wind, and head, totally unplanned, to Mexico, 

I screamed, “Wait a minute! That’s the same decision as all the rest.” Suddenly I could see how I’d been chasing my tail for hours, if not weeks. ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to wait for a sign.” 

Instantly, the ache in my head vanished. I felt a bottomless silence wash over me…. 

Then, “Absolutely no more than sixty second later,” they hear a van enter the campground, which then drives all the way to the section where they are and stops at the campsite right next to theirs. The side door of the van opens and, sure enough, out blasts Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One.” Near the end of the song, “The lights went out, the door slammed shut, and it was just us again. Perfect silence.” 

He said he senses immediately that the “sign” wasn’t what it seemed—wasn’t telling him to go with the dangerous girl and risky life. It was there to deliver a larger message, and he then tells us the larger message that he eventually settled on: 

For some reason, I was given this gift, this weird, irrefutable demonstration that there is more to the world than its surface. That whatever we’re all about, whatever the universe is, it is far more than just some empty, mechanical, material machine. There is some…force out there, something beyond knowing, that we can nonetheless—on some level—feel, and see and interact with. My petty life, and all my personal concerns, in some way connected up with something so big, so far beyond myself, that it could choreograph a little performance like that tailored perfectly to what was going on in the mind of one confused kid. 

Back in the present, Shroder’s skeptical friend acknowledges that it’s a great story, but questions what conclusions we can really draw from it. Shroder responds, “You say, ‘Maybe it’s a coincidence.’ Fine, but I’m willing to say flat out, no way. No way that was completely unconnected to what was happening in my life. Just as now I’m willing to say flat out that there is no way all those kids and all those families and all the other witnesses are simply lying or deluded or wrong. Those kids knew stuff they shouldn’t have known.” 

As I read this, I couldn’t help but be struck by the similarity to my own experience of signs or what I call CMPEs. 

Basically, I believe in a lot of way-out things, many of which I am deeply committed to. My inner and outer life are organized around these things. To an outsider, therefore, I probably appear like the most gullible and credulous of believers. But I am at heart an intellectual, and I frequently review my case for believing in those way-out things. I turn it over in my mind to see just how well it holds up. And most of them, I must admit, I can quite easily doubt. The weight of the evidence holds up my belief quite sturdily, but that doesn’t mean I cannot readily conjure up doubt. 

And when I mull over those uncertainties, I find myself, in Descartes-like fashion, retreating to the secure place where I cannot doubt. I try to find that place where personal experience has left no room for doubt. And that place, oddly enough, turns out to be the same as Tom Shroder’s. I know from countless experiences that there is some force out there that at times will weave the events of my life into such perfectly choreographed performances that I know it cannot be chance. Flat out, no way. I can easily entertain different ideas of what that force is, but I have become unable to doubt that that force is there, and is acting in my life. Of all the places on which I stand, that is the one rock that does not—cannot—wobble beneath my feet. That is my personal proof that “whatever the universe is, it is far more than just some empty, mechanical, material machine.”

And, as seems to be the case with Shroder, that one rock of irrefutable personal experience then becomes a key that opens the door to other phenomena. It becomes a foundation that provides at least some measure of support to my other beliefs. It doesn’t of itself establish those beliefs, but it does prove to me that the universe is the kind of place in which those other things, rather than being impossible, are perfectly natural.

You will also know that last year we did a pilot study that attempted to document CMPEs in the  lives of seventeen participants. The paper reporting on that study has recently been accepted for publication in the December issue of Psychiatric Annals. 

Actually, hearing that news was part of a sign about the pilot study, which means that I have now had seven signs about the study at this point, starting all the way back in November of 2009 (most of which I have written up on this blog): 

1. Pilot Study (November 27, 2009)
2. Psychiatric Annals (January 26, 2010)
3. Huh, That’s Weird (May 19, 2010)
4. Failed CMPEs (February 1, 2011)
5. Pilot Study Scoring (March 14, 2011)
6. Neurotheology (August 11, 2011)
7. Intermediaries (October 5-6, 2011)

What has interested me lately is that I can tell the signs think something is going to come from the publication of the study. They have been rumbling about that from the start, but the last two signs were particularly strong on that theme. Both spoke of the impact of the study and both happened at key junctures in the process leading to publication. The sixth sign happened right as I finished the draft of the paper and the seventh happened right as I received the news that it had been accepted for publication. Clearly, in their mind, something is afoot. 

Obviously, I’m interested in this topic—I’d like to see the study have an impact. And I’m honestly surprised by what the signs are claiming here. For instance, I’ve written two chapters for academic collections in recent years, and their publication, as far as I can tell, has not been noticed by a living soul. Left to my own devices, I would assume a similar result here. For these reasons, I’ve wanted to get to the bottom of what those seven signs are claiming, and so I spent some time today trying to do just that. 

As I look over them all, a number of things jump out at me, not all of them predictions. First, the signs have been very concerned about how to present our data. They have repeatedly emphasized quantification of the data. Their main focus in this respect has been on using the CMPE scale I devised, which separates the genuine CMPEs from the failed ones by assigning a score to each one (1, 4, 5). They also emphasized the importance of Nicola doing the scoring, so that it wasn’t just me scoring them (5). (We also added Greg Mackie as a scorer.) The counsel on how to present the data got quite specific. The signs urged us to count how often certain features appear, such as what kinds of events show up and what life concerns are addressed (1). They also urged us to showcase the difference between the number of parallels on genuine CMPEs and failed ones (4). I find it very interesting that they were so concerned with how to present the data, and that their advice consistently was in the direction of strengthening the quantification. 

Another theme that is even more pervasive is the importance and success of the study. They said that the study should be done (1), that it would succeed in collecting CMPEs (3), that it would be published and written about in periodicals (2), and that this would spread awareness of the model (2). They characterized the pilot study as a case of someone at last studying this ancient spiritual phenomenon (synchronicity) in an objective, scientific way (1, 6) and showing there is indeed something measurable going on there (6). As such, they saw the study as an important first (6). 

Two signs spoke of the pilot study being published in Psychiatric Annals (2, 7). One was a prediction (though at the time I didn’t think it meant Psychiatric Annals in a literal sense) and one happened (as I said earlier) when the study paper was accepted for publication. (The connection between these two signs was remarkable. Both emphasized the publication being made possible through a connection with guest editor Bernie Beitman, and both mentioned a coincidence study done by George Costin—a man I’ve never had contact with—which, as it turns out, will also appear in the December issue). 

The signs clearly see the publication of the study as having some sort of impact. Four of them (1, 2, 6, 7) deal with this. As best as I can make out, the impact has to do with a recognition of the study’s significance. The study will be seen, the signs imply, as a first-time unlocking of this seemingly subjective spiritual phenomenon by use of scientific methods. As such, the study will get some kind of media attention (1, 2). It will allow me to enter broader pastures beyond the Course in Miracles community (2, 7). The Course will always be my primary work, but I think I have a contribution to make in other areas, and the signs see this as an opportunity for me to begin doing that. And, they suggest, the publication of the study will spark further research. The symbol they use is that of Andrew Newberg’s initial study of the brain correlates of meditative experience, which sparked the field of neurotheology (6). However, since I can’t imagine a new field sparked by this study, I’m guessing that symbol simply says more research will occur. 

All of this brings up a huge question. Even before we get to the question of how accurate these predictions will be, we also have to ask, “On what scale do the signs mean these predictions?” How much media attention? How much research will be sparked? I’ve been down this road many times with the signs. They make these bold predictions, and something does happen that is visibly like those predictions, but the scale of what happens is often about 20% of what was predicted. As a result, I’ve come to believe that they just like to exaggerate. You see this all over the place, not just in their predictions. They like to paint their message with broad, colorful strokes. The big point seems more important than the little details. 

Yet this observation has sometimes led me to underestimate their predictions. For instance, when the “Psychiatric Annals” sign focused on the study being published in periodicals, and offered Psychiatric Annals as the main symbol, I didn’t think it was actually talking about the study being published there, in that journal. And when “Huh, That’s Weird” said we would succeed in recording CMPEs for the study, I was a little leery about that prediction. I could still picture us coming up empty-handed. 

So what will result from the publication of the CMPE pilot study? Obviously, I don’t know. But I think it’s good to write predictions down ahead of time. It will be interesting to see what happens and how much it looks like what I’ve written above. 

In the meantime, this can give you a good idea of the larger pictures that can come out of having a number of CMPEs on the same topic. Each one tends to contribute several puzzle pieces, so that when you get half a dozen or so, you can assemble quite a decent overall picture. I find it extremely interesting that a form of guidance can do something like that, can convey a larger vision about a situation, and I also find it extremely useful.