Chapter 5: Polarities Revisited

I sat in a windowless room facing a large mirror. A psychologist sat across a table from me, with a telephone in front of her. I knew that there was a panel of several more psychologists and a video camera in a semi-darkened room on the other side of the mirror. They were my jury. They had convened at my behest to see if I should be committed. I held my head in my hands as I told the psychologist that I thought I was going to die. A light flashed on the phone. She picked it up and listened to it for a moment. Someone on the other side had requested a clarification. "Are you telling me that you're planning on killing yourself?" she asked pointedly.

"No," I sobbed brokenly, "but if I keep on doing what I'm doing I'm going to die. It'll kill me, I know it will." I told her that my wife had sued me, that a judge had ordered me to keep my job but that part of my life was becoming a poison to me, and that if I kept taking the poison I would die. "I can't do it any more," I cried. "I just can't." The doctor was careful not to betray any emotion. The big mirror revealed nothing except for my reflection, a weeping middle-aged man lost in a big white room.

The doctor picked up the phone again and listened. "What do you want from us?" she said.

"I just need to know that it's okay," I said into my hands. "I need to know that it's okay for me to go and be a healer even if the courts, society, my wife, and everyone else says that it's not. I need to know that I'm not the one who's crazy. I need to know that I can do what I love."

The psychologist pursed her lips professionally. "We can't tell you what to do," she said. "Your life is your responsibility."

I shook my head helplessly. "Then I don't know what's going to happen to me. If I keep working at my job I'm going to die. I just need to know that it's okay to do what I love to do."

A speaker crackled into life. Somebody somewhere behind the mirror had thrown a switch. "Mr. Page," it said. I looked up at the stainless steel speaker grill above me. The voice was devoid of all expression.

"Go for it," the disembodied male voice said.

To anyone else that voice would have sounded like the speaker inside a plastic clown's head at a drive-in restaurant but I heard the voice of God, speaking directly to me. I sniffled and wiped at my face with my hands.

"You mean it?" I asked hopefully. The doctor sitting across from me nodded. They meant it. I was okay. Everything was going to be okay. I felt the corners of my mouth lifting into a smile. My eyes still stung but now they stung happily, like the kind of sting you get at the end of a good movie or when you see your child for the first time.

The doctor was speaking into the phone. She covered up the mouthpiece when I looked at her. "Was there anything else?" she asked politely.

"That's it!" I said, practically shouting as I grabbed my jacket. I nodded deferentially toward the big observation mirror. "Thank you," I told it reverently. I bowed slightly as I left, as one would when crossing a temple threshold. My reflection bowed back. Behind it, the unseen doctors sipped stale coffee and spun in their armchairs. One of them filled out a form on a clipboard. Another mental health crisis solved.

The breakdown that brought me to the hospital was occasioned by the end of my marriage, the loss of my children, and a court order requiring me to continue working at a job that I had grown to loathe. I had met Melody, the psychologist who had been the catalyst for my divorce, in 1989, two years prior to my experience in the hospital. Feeling that I had much more in common with Melody than with Rhonda, and that I had become a danger to my family as well as myself, I asked for a divorce. As was my pattern with my first wife, Linda, I had worked as hard as I knew how to give Rhonda what she wanted, even to the point of giving her my house, my furniture, and more than half my income. At that time, I felt that working hard and being the best provider possible were ways of showing love. Understandably, it was never enough. Although I tried to explain it to her many times, Rhonda couldn't fathom how I could put my relationship to God ahead of my relationship to my family. She couldn't even understand my concept of God, which wasn't dependent on anyone else's. Nevertheless, I still loved her, and I didn't want to lose my children. At the same time, my thirst to understand the hidden dimensions of the human soul was more powerful than any other force in my life. My search for knowledge had replaced my addiction to work. I was out of control.

Almost as soon as I left Rhonda, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. I attempted to reconcile. To this end I moored my motorhome in the driveway of our house in Livermore. A garden hose and an extension cord snaked into the house for water and power. It was a tenuous connection but it was all that my wife would permit me and I was grateful for it. I could spend hours on the weekends playing with my children until she sent all of us off to bed. I don't know what the neighbors thought, but I earnestly believed that I was succeeding in regaining my wife's confidence-until the day when she knocked on the door of my motorhome to bring me the final divorce papers. I told her that I didn't want to sign, that I still loved her.

Rhonda sighed wearily. She'd heard me promise her the earth, sky, and the moon and all she had was this house and by God she was going to keep it. She pushed the thick sheaf of papers across the table. The motorhome's lights flickered as the house air conditioning compressor kicked in. Rhonda folded her arms. I signed the papers. The next weekend she asked me to leave. The reconciliation had been nothing but a fantasy on my part. My signature had been all that she had ever really wanted. The house and the furniture was hers. She deserved it.

I trundled my motorhome and my car back to the house that I'd leased with Melody to find half of the furniture missing. A scrawled note said that she'd taken it in payment for the year of free therapy that she'd given me. I hurriedly dragged the rest of the furniture out to the garage before she could come back for it. I could tell that my neighbors were watching but no one stepped out from behind their drawn curtains to offer to help. I felt like a leper.

When I came back from my job at the printing company the next weekend, the refrigerator was gone. I stood blinking in front of the square patch of bright linoleum where it used to be, holding one hand absently in midair. Melody breezed past in the hallway. She paused to look at me like one of my clients who was channeling Lucifer. A moment later the door slammed. I didn't know where she was going, only that it was well-furnished.

Although I was too deep into the role of victim then to fully understand it, what was happening was that the world of polarities that I'd immersed myself in was becoming physical. The energies that I was drawing to myself as an imagined beacon of righteousness were not only affecting me but everything else around me. The result was that I was finding myself lost in a world of opposites. People either loved me or hated me, admired me or despised me, praised me or vilified me. Mostly it was the latter. The amount of negativity that I'd created around me was staggering.

I tried to go on living with Melody but it was like the siege of Leningrad. We had no refrigerator, no furniture beyond what I'd locked away in the garage, and only space between us where there had been closeness. We ate our meals out, barely talked to each other, and came home only to sleep. I knew what she was angling for: She wanted me to go so she could keep the house. I had some experience with these things. Finally I got tired of eating Chinese food up in my room. I gave up the siege, taking my bedroom furniture with me.

My aunt Mary, who was a partner with me in one of my waterlogged resorts and knew something of my predicament, offered me a position up at the stables that she ran in Oakland. She'd sold the stables to the city but still managed them and owned the tack store. The store did good business. I could eventually take it over, and in the meantime I could work there and look after the horses for her. The money was a tiny fraction of what I was used to being paid but at least I'd have a place to park my motorhome, away from all of the people that had become as angry and disappointed with me as I was with myself.

I had time to look after horses because the heat of the scorn that was being directed toward me had all but evaporated my healing practice. Apart from the people that I occasionally was asked to help die, I had no clients. Rhonda, my ex-wife to be, had made a lot of phone calls that began with the words, "I think there's something that you need to know about Ken." What they needed to know was that I was a monster for leaving her for another woman when she was pregnant with our fourth child. It wasn't that I didn't feel as though I deserved her scorn-I just wasn't so sure about deserving everyone else's.

Rhonda sowed the seeds of her vengeance far and wide, and their bitter fruit ripened to be pecked over and consumed and spread even further afield. Wherever I went the sound of the bell that she and I had hung around my neck preceded me, and it wasn't long before the weight of all of the projections that were being directed my way started to affect the way that I saw myself. Even Melody, the licensed psychologist and freelance furniture repossessor, had caught the revenge bug and had warned our joint clients in her most convincing professional jargon that I was unstable and therefore untrustworthy.

Only the horses would have me.

We fell in love, the horses and I. In the depths of their dark liquid eyes I found the perfect compassion and unconditional love that I had been looking for all of my life. They offered me the best reflection of the parts of myself that no one else seemed to be able to see anymore. Driven to heal, and with no human clients, I nourished that spark within me by becoming a healer of the four-leggeds. They offered me their teachings in return. I learned to look carefully within myself before I walked into a horse's stall, for a single negative thought was enough to manifest a ton of horseflesh pushing against me like an avalanche. When I centered myself and pulled my fields close in to my body, I found that I could even walk right through the horses' blind spots without them so much as lifting a hoof. Much later, after my clients returned, I would teach my students what the horses had taught me about how to hold a space for healing. It was one of my most valuable lessons.

Whatever epiphanies the animals brought me by day did nothing to make my nights easier. As I had done when I was a child, I did the best that I could to crowd my troubles and my pain out of my life with work. Every day I was up by 7:00 a.m. to feed the animals. From there, I changed into my three-piece suit and went straight to my $7,000 a month executive job in Fremont. By 3:00 p.m. I was back at the stable where I changed clothes, stuck a straw in my mouth, toted feed, and played Calaban to the old dowagers and society women whose horses I was happy to look after. The society women taught me about prejudice, something I had never felt in my life before. They treated me like nuclear waste, afraid to meet my eyes or touch me, projecting the worst aspects of themselves onto me because of the job I held. I knew this because I could read all of their thoughts. Knowing what they were thinking didn't make the experience any less painful.

Nights at the stables were when my troubles came home to roost. I would linger outside longer and longer before I went to bed, studying the stars from the steps of my motorhome, saying goodnight to the horses, doing all of these things like a child asking over and over for water because it is afraid of the monsters that only it knows await under the bed. My monsters waited inside my motorhome. They knew that I had to sleep sometime. And they knew that to sleep I had to let go and then they had me.

At those moments I felt utterly lost.

The monsters were my own creations, my failures and my fears. They gathered around my bed to tell me that I'd never be loved again, that I was a failure as a businessman, father, and husband, and that I was a failure as a healer. It was the last of these that bothered me the most. I had unwittingly bargained away everything that I ever cared about so I could become a healer, and now I had no clients. I couldn't understand it. I had learned so much and would gladly offer it all to anyone who asked yet no one came. I was so certain that this was what I was meant to do, what I had incarnated for, what I had died in other lifetimes to bring forward into the present time. The fear that I might have been wrong gnawed at me like rats worrying the ropes and stays that were all that held me together. If I was wrong then all of my dreams and visions, all of the pain that I had caused myself and others, all of it was pointless. This thought haunted me like no other.

I started to have bouts of uncontrollable crying. Like seabirds flying before a squall they were the harbingers of my approaching emotional breakdown. Finally I came completely unraveled, falling to pieces in a motel during a business trip to Seattle.

I had taken a ruby amethyst crystal down to the motel's hot tub with me. When I finished my meditation and lowered the crystal from my forehead, all the makeshift dams within me suddenly gave way at once. A huge wave of sorrow washed over me, followed by another and then another until I was shaking and crying like a baby. There was nothing that I could do to stop it. My tears were endless. I cried for all of the things that I had lost. I cried for my children. I cried for my parents. I cried for the love that I had squandered. I cried for the mere fact that I existed. The steaming water of the hot tub became my tears, the tears became me, and I became all of the sorrow that ever was until I was lost in an endless dark ocean of my own creation.

In the morning I awoke in a cold knot of clammy sheets in my room, unsure of where I was and with no idea of how I got there. I dressed shakily, went down to breakfast and read the menu over and over until the waitress asked me if there was something wrong. I blinked and shook my head, unable to speak. I felt so fragile that a single touch from her would have destroyed me.

My emotional meltdown in the hot tub created a space within me where I could look at my problems with perspective and clarity for the first time. After I got home, or more precisely to my motorhome, I spent some time thinking about what had gone wrong with my life and for the first time I could really see the role that polarities had played. I decided that I needed to somehow confront these forces that were making life so difficult for me. I would go out into the desert and I would take someone, the most evil person I knew, with me. We would call upon all of the polarities, positive and negative, and bring them to us so that each of us would be like the cathode and the anode of an immense cosmic battery, charged with the potential of all of the polarized energy in the universe. We would then shift all of the energies at once, sending them back to Source and bringing the universe back into balance, perhaps for the first time since its creation. I didn't know it at the time but my plan was seriously flawed; I didn't know it because I was still in polarity consciousness and could see no other alternative.

I had been to the desert once before, a year earlier. Angry and upset over what my life had become, I had marched out into the middle of Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Monument, drawn a circle in the sand around me, and issued a challenge to the devil. I screamed every insult and provocation that I could think of but he never came. Instead, I heard a voice directing me to walk down a valley between two towering dunes. I felt sure that I was being asked to walk into the valley of the shadow of death, and I eagerly obliged, stalking along with my fists balled, ready to knock some sense into anything that got in my way. A huge dark snake, one of my biggest fears, lay motionless in the sand ahead of me. I stopped for a moment, and then stomped directly towards it. As I drew closer I saw that it wasn't a snake after all, but a gnarled piece of black wood that had somehow found its way into the heart of the treeless dunes. It was such a perfect facsimile of a snake that I had to kick it before I picked it up. I stuffed it into my backpack and took it home, where it remains as a reminder that the worst that the devil can do to me is activate my own fears.

I chose the desert again for my second trip for the same reason that they tested nuclear weapons there: There was no telling what might happen when we tried to deal with that much energy. For all I knew it could be a suicide mission. I'd seen the dark swirling colors of negative energy over Oakland before the fire, and over San Fran-cisco before the quake and I knew what had happened when those energies changed form and became physically manifest. Whatever my misgivings, it didn't take me long to decide who I wanted to take with me. I knew of only one person who had more investments in the world of polarities than I did and that was the yogi I had known in California who purposefully invited negative energy into his Malibu ashram to accelerate his student's lessons. Although we hadn't parted on the best of terms-I had left his ashram at warp speed once I realized what he was up to, he appreciated my candor and the seriousness of what I was proposing, and readily agreed to come with me.

After I had thought about my multidimensional Manhattan Project for a little while, I started to have more and more second thoughts, just like the physicists connected with the original Manhattan project had done. When I conceived of the idea, I had assumed that as a beacon of righteousness I would be the positive side of the battery. The fact was that I had no guarantee that I might not be the opposite and this was extremely frightening to me. I started to feel as though I had volunteered to stand out in the middle of a golf course during a lightning storm while holding a five iron over my head. I was looking forward to creating a new era of balance in the world, not having my shoes blown off by negativity.

Somewhere in the midst of considering this problem, and not getting any answers in the way that I had come to expect them, I agreed to do a session with my old friend Lynn McFarlane. I'd known Lynn since I taught my first class at Drunvalo's mystery school in Questa, New Mexico. She came to me at my aunt's house, near the stables where I worked in Oakland. Although it was wonderful to see her again, I wouldn't know just how wonderful until the time came when she would present me with a gift that would completely change my life.

Almost as soon as Lynn and I had done the hypnotic induction together, and she had slipped into an altered state, I found myself head to head with some very powerful energy. I could feel it pressing down on me, like I was a thousand feet below the surface of the ocean. Using Lynn as a trance medium I made contact with the energy. "You better be ready," it sang out ominously.

The energy then went on to taunt me, as energies often did, probing me for fears and weaknesses that it could use to its advantage. It was immense and I was puny; it was powerful and I was weak; it was going to kill me and I was powerless to stop it. For some reason, rather than invoking my army of angels and wading into battle brandishing my sword of light as I had always done previously, I decided to try something new. I could always teach it a lesson. Before I did I wanted to really see it. I'd never really looked at these kinds of energies before.

With Lynn's permission, I closed my eyes and moved into the silence. Instantly I was in the center of a massive dark cloud that seemed to stretch for thousands of miles in all directions. Energy crackled through it like lightning. It wasn't kidding when it had said I was puny-I wasn't any bigger than a grain of sand in the Sahara compared to it. I had always thought that energies lied about such things. If it wasn't lying about its size, then perhaps it was serious when it said that I better be ready. I began to sincerely hope that I was.

I held my focus. It could kill me if it wanted to. I didn't care. I embraced my puniness-my life didn't matter anyway. What mattered was my essence. This was my proving ground. I had done battle with energies like this a thousand times, calling upon all of my legions of angels, the dolphins and the whales, and whoever or whatever else I needed to send them on their way. Now I realized for the first time why I felt that I had to work that way: it had to do with my fear about my own core energies, the belief that I couldn't be with these energies because I might not be balanced enough inside to resist them. For a long time now I had been preaching to my students about the importance of being love, and now I was on the witness stand and the question was being put to me. Either I was love or I wasn't: if I was love then there was nothing that this energy or any energy like it could ever do to me. I cross-examined myself. Mr. Page, I asked myself, are you love? Yes, I answered.

Instantaneously everything changed. The energy made a kind of a pfft sound, shrank to a tiny dot and disappeared like the image on an unplugged television. I looked all around me. I was alone in the great void. There was nothing positive or negative for as far as I could see. All that there was was in balance. I had let go of the polarities within myself.

From that day on, my life began to change. I canceled my plans to go out to the desert with the yogi. The trip was no longer necessary. I had learned that the entire universe is holographic. If we have pain inside then we see pain all around us, if we are polluted we see only pollution. I was no different. The polarities that I saw in the world around me were reflections, one and all, of the polarities within me. I had created a war outside of myself to mirror the war inside of myself, and now finally the war was over. I released St. George, St. Michael, Moses, and all of the guides and angels that I had recruited to help me with my work. They too were reflections, part of a stage play that I had written, directed, and cast myself. As above, so below. As inside, so outside.

I still had to deal with the mess that I had made of my life, but now that I was no longer a magnet for negativity it became much easier. There was light at the end of the tunnel. Mary, my wife, was one aspect of that light. We met when I helped to heal her horse at the stables. Soon after I met Mary, I met Shirley Holly at a workshop I gave in Texas. Shirley was the best student any teacher could hope for, and the three of us would found The Institute for Multidimensional Cellular Healing™. Within a year we were offered our own center in Houston, a mailing list of thousands of names, and I was in the flow of the universe again. It felt a lot better than trying to swim up Niagara Falls.

As balanced as I thought I had become, there still remained a piece of polarity lodged inside of me. Like shrapnel from a forgotten war, it would remain there for four more years, until I finally found the means to remove it.

Three years after I had released my polarities, I went back to Seattle to give a workshop. I had clients again, more than I had ever had before, and the people whose healing I facilitated came back to me again as students. I was also back at the site of one of my Waterloo. Shirley had, unbeknownst to me, checked me into the same room in the same hotel where I'd had my emotional breakdown, the nadir of my personal hell. I didn't know it but I had come here to learn about another kind of hell, the Hell that the fire and brimstone preachers talked about.

The problem with trying to frighten people into going to church, the way that the fire and brimstone preachers do, was that the fear had to be constant to keep them coming back each Sunday. The mechanism for this was to convince them that on some level they could never be entirely free of sin, no matter how hard they prayed, or how many times that they confessed. When these people died, their fear of being punished for their secret sins stayed with them. It made them turn away from the light, just as surely as if they had been in a satanic cult. Instead of going home to be with God and be whole again, many of them became hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts desperately wanted to eat, smoke, be held, drink, make love or do anything that they could do in life instead of wandering around in the cold, loveless, darkness. When they found someone whose energetic fields were weakened, they moved in. If they had liked to drink, they would do everything they could to compel their hosts to drink, usually around ten times the normal amount because that's how much it took to make them feel the way that they had when they were alive. Other consequences for my living clients (the spirits were also my clients) ranged from chronic fatigue to the re-creation of the illness or accident that killed the possessing spirit. Most of the people I saw had suffered with these consequences for years before they finally found their way to me. I think that if any of those fire and brimstone preachers had to experience the consequences of the judgments that they handed out so readily, from either the point of view of the possessor or of the possessed, they might never talk about Hell in the same way again.

Thus Hell was something that I didn't think about much, although I dealt with it all of the time. I didn't think about it because I didn't want to give energy to the distress that brought my clients, both living and dead, to me in the first place. However, during this particular workshop in Seattle, I would have occasion to think about Hell a great deal, and my thinking would lead me to do something which I have since become at least a little bit notorious for. I was a little bit notorious because I had only spoken of it once before. Perhaps writing about it will make me really notorious.

The opportunity to think about Hell came because one of my clients in Seattle had been there. I didn't know that we were going to Hell together until midway through her session when we began to look at releasing her patterns. After we looked at her death in a past life together, I asked where she went after she died. I always did this to make sure that I retrieved all of the pieces of my client wherever they were, and so that the client could understand the way that those lost fragments of themselves were affecting their lives today. I had seen spirits go to many different places after they died, from journeying to other planets to becoming a barnacle on the belly of a whale, but I had never seen one go straight to Hell, which is what she had done after she left her body. From what my client told me, it seemed that perhaps the fire and brimstone preachers knew what they were talking about after all. Everything was there: all of the despair, the torture, the hopelessness of the lost souls who believed in a God who would wish such a thing upon them. As I questioned her, eliciting more and more details, I soon saw Hell almost as vividly as if I had gone there myself. Visually, it was just as the medieval paintings depicted it to be-searing sulfurous smoke, forced labor, leathery-skinned demonic overseers, torture and misery wherever you looked.

I was already very familiar with the process of releasing trapped souls from prisons in other dimensions because of my work with witchcraft. It was relatively easy; the only real difficulty was finding them. I needed my clients to show me where the prisons were because these places didn't exist in space and time as we understood it. With my client in Hell, I could send the light to her, and we could hold a space for the souls to go home. It was very much like the way that the transporter beams worked on Star Trek.

I felt a familiar rush of energy as I held the gateway open. The cleansing light of Source flooded all of Hell, like a great ocean wave scours the shore, and then all was still. For a moment Hell was empty. There was great beauty in its emptiness. Like the shell of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, it had become, briefly, a monument to the freedom of those who once inhabited it.

My client's dark eyelashes fluttered like bathing birds in two overflowing saltwater pools: She had seen the beauty of it too. I leaned closer to her. "And how many years have you struggled trying to fulfill this mission?" I asked her.

"Centuries," she whispered. The trickle of tears cascading down her cheeks became a waterfall, ferrying away her fear and her pain, allowing her to be whole again. "Centuries," she whispered again. I held her forehead with my hand as we wept together. Hell was already filling up again but it was of no moment. I had the keys. She had given them to me.

Three nights later I padded down the hallway of the Rodeway Inn to the very same hot tub where I'd had my emotional breakdown. I twisted the hot tub's wall timer to the hash mark at sixty minutes. The warm water lapped at my chin like a chorus of puppy dog's tongues. I thought of all the tears that I had cried on that one lonely night so long ago. I had returned to the same room in the same hotel for a reason and now I knew what that reason was. Having triumphed over my personal hell, I had come here on a mission to change the collective version.

I'd had three days to ruminate about what I was going to do. Like some medieval cleric, I'd wondered first of all why God would permit such a place to endure for thousands of years. The answer had come to me right away, although it took substantially longer for me to fully accept it. God hadn't created Hell: Man had. Hell was just a thought form and had no reality beyond the energy of our beliefs, energy that had remained constant throughout history as long as stories were told about it.

The fact that Hell was only a thought form didn't detract from the massive constellation of suffering that revolved around it. It wasn't just the suffering of the souls who were sent there. There was immense suffering in the physical world as well that revolved around our belief in Hell. This suffering ranged from all of the people who lived their lives in subjugation because of their fear of it, to all of the physical facsimiles we had built of Hell-the dungeons, prisons, and concentration camps whose very existence was as much a function of our fear as the other Hell was.

It was the energy of our beliefs that made Hell real, nothing else. No other kind of hell could exist because if it did it would violate the sacred principle of free will. In essence, Hell was nothing more than a spell that we had cast on ourselves, and I was an expert at breaking spells. I had come to earth in the first place to release trapped souls and so that's what I did. I set all of the souls free that had cast themselves into Hell since the first release that I had done. Then I dismantled Hell, treating it just as I would a spell, creating a mirror image of it and then bringing the two thought forms together so that they canceled each other out in an instant. When I was done with Hell I moved on to Heaven. It was every bit as limiting a concept as Hell was, binding the souls of the dead to the imaginable whereas the true breadth of the universe was beyond imagination. Then I finished my soak, went to bed, and in the morning I woke up refreshed and had a nice breakfast.

A year later, I made the mistake of including this story in a lecture to a New Age group that had invited me to speak. I spent the rest of the evening responding to their attacks. People were upset and angry at what I had done. Evolved as they were, they still had investments in polarities and believed that some souls other than themselves deserved to go to Hell for their sins. I explained to them that their thoughts, and the thoughts of people like them, would have instantly recreated a new Heaven and Hell, and that Heaven and Hell would endure for as long as any one person on earth believed that they did. The only difference would be that the new Hell wouldn't be near as bleak, because we had evolved. Instead of throwing people into dungeons to be tortured to death, we probably housed them in huge motels with color TV's. "There'd probably even be a McDonalds down there now," I joked. Nobody laughed. I might as well have been joking about evicting Santa Claus and paving the North Pole. Maybe they never planned on going there but at least they had always been able to navigate by it.

The fact of the matter was that I could no more destroy Hell than Satan could destroy me. All that I could do was change the collective consciousness of what Hell was, and probably only for an instant. This is how I believe human beings evolve. As a race we are the total of all of those tiny changes in our collective consciousness over the course of five billion years. Our shared reality is completely democratic, for this is the nature of oneness and this is what we have been struggling to bring into the physical world for centuries. Our votes are our thoughts, and in this sense we can choose to be conscious co-creators of our reality-creator-gods, or unconscious creators. Either way, we still create.

I had seen the world as a system of oppositions for more than forty years and I clung to those beliefs until they nearly destroyed me. Few of us, a man dying of AIDS had once whispered to me, learn anything by choice. I was no different. I had clung so stubbornly to polarity consciousness, first of all because my fear of death kept me there, and after that because of all of the energy that I was devoting to maintaining the polarities within myself. For as long as I saw myself as a self-sacrificing exorcist, as God's broom sweeping the world of evil, I had doomed myself to inhabiting a world where good and evil were in constant struggle, and my life became a conflict-riddled microcosm of this. The moment that I saw the truth of oneness, those conflicts in my life that I had created to validate my beliefs in polarities all but disappeared. Just as I was able to honorably discharge St. George and the rest of my angelic army, I was able to close a long chapter on my life and begin anew. The ensuing chapters would not be without struggle, conflict, and self-delusion, but it would be of a different type. I was one step closer to home.