Several years ago I had a vision of the future that transformed my life and helped me to determine what new career path to pursue. Leading into that moment was the fact that, at the age of 40, after years of working in computers, I was back at school. I was an adult returnee in my “senior” year at college and my three most favorite professors had each approached me about entering into their field of expertise: Asian Studies, the School of Journalism, and Psychology. What a wonderful compliment! — each thought that I would excel in their profession and offered me mentoring, contacts and references for further graduate work. I was both flattered and immobilized with indecision

If you’re one of the thousands of people who have experienced the unexplainable – a near death experience, an out of body moment, a vision, or other extraordinary phenomena that has changed your life – then you know that it can be difficult to share that experience with others, or even fully understand it your self. Fortunately, there are resources now that can help. One of the best is ACISTE, the American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences.

Those who seek a greater spiritual dimension may be searching for glasses that are perched upon our head. Now, after all the experiences I describe in my new book, I see and feel spirit everywhere. We swim in spirit, we breath it, and it breathes us, interpenetrating every cell. We need only open our eyes and hearts in moments of free attention.

What happens when a scientist has a spiritual experience? When the skeptic has his or her eyes opened? When the rational comes up against the seemingly irrational? Lately we’ve been reading serious accounts of just these events. Our favorite new website is www.issc-taste.org . Originally created by Charles Tart, the website has become a real resource and a treasure house of true stories of scientist’s mystical experiences. The stories are fascinating and many readers who have had similar experiences will recognise the details of the events recounted.

Chronicle One begins… Being My Search for the Round Table These are strange, restless times when, in the words of the late Joseph Campbell: “We have no modern myths to sustain us.” Many of us live greedy, fragmented lives, devoid of any direct contact with nature, the numinous or the divine. We are often dissatisfied, or disaffected, forever in pursuit of elusive Eldorados. Why? Whatever made us this way? Sociologists and psychologists blame it all on the Industrial Revolution – the age of the machine. Certainly, science has been doing its best, since the Age of Reason, to make mythology irrelevant, and the Christian church, in turn, has made God appear to be against Nature. As a direct result anything natural or mythological has been viewed with the gravest suspicion and frequently derided in public, certainly during the course of the twentieth century.

Last month the United States joined a growing list of nations such as Britain, France, Russia, Sweden, Brazil (video), Canada and others, in releasing government data about UFOs. As reported in The New York Times, CNBC, and The Chicago Tribune, the Pentagon spent over $22 billion dollars from 2007-2012 investigating reports of unidentified flying objects, mostly reported by service members, pilots and astronauts.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a New York Times interview with Barbara Ehrenreich, author of several books including “Nickel and Dimed.” The interview focused on her most recent book, “Living With a Wild God,” a memoir detailing the author’s transformative experiences when she was in her teens. Having had numerous experiences myself, I found that her account caught my interest. In the last few years I have noted an increase in the number of people stepping forward to tell their sometimes other-worldly stories of wonder, enlightenment, and awe…

The fear of action is the sort of fear that paralyses a rabbit in the headlights. That’s an image we are familiar with. There is also the physiological effect of fear in humans that swamps the brain to such an extent that the person simply cannot react in an emergency and we are literally stunned into inaction. People freeze in terror. It’s common for those unfortunates caught in disastrous accidents like stricken ships to simply be unable to move, even when shouted at and slapped to “bring them round.” Lesser fear can paralyze us into inaction in daily life too….

Imagine for a moment you are hurtling through space at 30,000 miles an hour. You look out a window and see a sliver of the moon, planets, stars, and in the distance earth. You are completely surrounded by a dark emptiness punctuated by these celestial bodies…. You gaze out the window again and you realize the tiniest speck of matter, let alone the earth, the sun, the celestial bodies, everything you see, is being sustained by something more than chance. You intuit that the cosmos is in harmony. Some unknown intelligence is orchestrating the universe.