INTRODUCTION

There is an enigma at the heart of biology. Scientists are baffled by the mystery of what it is that makes organisms alive. Even simple single-celled creatures seek food and run away from threats in self-directed ways that amaze scientists. This book takes us on a spiritual quest for a clear understanding of how life works.

Solving this puzzle offers deep insights for both physical and spiritual growth. Seeing the way life works, the way it flows, changes what it means to be alive.

Isn’t it strange that science has been stumped by something so common? We meet human beings, wildlife, insects, dogs and cats, and other living creatures every day. They aren’t rare encounters.

I believe this blindness—our inability to see what is happening right before our eyes—comes from using the wrong “lens of percep­tion”—the wrong way of seeing. We keep try­ing to solve the mystery of life the way we study chemical and physical reactions.

Organisms are not machines. They are clearly different. The problem is that we can’t see this difference if we only study them as outside observers.

It is time to recognize how important our lenses of perception are, and how uncon­sciously they shape everything we see.

Lenses, when used properly, allow us to comprehend. Beneath every clear idea and thought is a lens that puts it into context. But grasping the meaning of art needs a different way of seeing than trying to interpret a math­ematical equation.

Therefore, using the wrong lens can blind us. Imagine using a microscope to study stars, or a telescope to understand atoms. Until we find the right “schemas” or “perceptual sets,” as psychologists call lenses, we’ll keep miss­ing the secret of life.

In our spiritual lives, we face similar di­lemmas. How can we achieve our full poten­tial? We often hold ourselves back with old ways of seeing. They get in our way and blind us as to what is possible.

We all struggle with problems, only to find out later how simple they are to solve as soon as we understand them. This book tries to clear up a confusion that casts dark shad­ows across our world. There really is no gulf between spirituality and science.

Brown Landone, whom I will introduce shortly, tells a story that relates to this. He heard it from a man who was invited to Thomas Edison’s birthday every year, for eleven years:

At one of these dinners, some guests were glorifying the great development of man due to the invention of the electric light and other Edison creations.

Edison replied: “They are but a part of all the changes…created…since I was a boy.

“When I think of them, I realize that if the Infinite Intelligence had given all of them to man at one time, man would have had such mental and economic indigestion that it would have hindered his progress for a century.

“On the other hand,” Edison said, “If In­finite Intelligence should one day take all of these great changes away from man, he would be left in such chaos…that he would suffer paralysis for half a century.

“It is evident that there is an Infinite In­telligence that gives to man a few new things this decade, a few more the next decade—as rapidly as man can learn to use them for his own good.”[1]

Edison saw that the flow of inventions is related to many things. He knew that he wasn’t inventing new gadgets out of whole cloth all by himself. He was moved by the needs of people. He was inspired by new dis­coveries of science. He was assisted by the teams of engineers that he led.

We could say that new inventions and in­sights are always present, all around us. We just can’t see and recognize them until we have the right lens of perception.

If we can’t see how they work or how to use them, they pass us by like ships in the night. This is why secrets of nature are hidden until we grasp the responsibility that comes with them. In other words, we must change within before we see them.

This means learning how to perceive things we’ve never seen before. For this to happen, we need to cross through a zone where we feel confusion. It is extremely un­comfortable. We must keep searching if we want to understand. Then, one day, the un­conscious puts it all together. It clicks for us and we finally get it. We just found a new lens that makes sense of it.

Our headlong plunge into a world of ma­chines, paved roads, and electronics, has in­creasingly alienated us from nature, mak­ing it harder for us to feel the fluid flow of life. As a result, we keep trying to force nature to give us what we want. This is now endanger­ing the ecologies of Earth.

We are starting to realize that we have a responsibility for how we live. The lives of countless species depend on it. Perhaps this shift in perception is the inner change we have needed to solve life’s puzzle.

This book offers a lens that allows us to see how life works. It shows us how to use this way of seeing to increase the flow of life in our businesses, our families, the growth of our countries, and, most importantly, for our spir­itual growth.

There is plenty of science to back up eve­rything written in this book, but I will touch on the science only lightly, so that we can fo­cus on how to use these insights.[2]

To tell this story, I am drawing from Brown Landone’s book, Soul Catalysts—And How to Use Them.[3] (All italic quotes in this book are from Landone. Those not footnoted come from Soul Catalysts.)

Landone led an amazing life, teaching him the possibilities of living fully. It all began with serious health problems that afflicted him as a child. He writes

As for myself, I think that when I came to earth this time—and I am as certain of this as of the stars—I came to work out the per­fection of overcoming hindrances of the body…, for I was born an invalid: my heart was defective organically and functionally.

In my third year, my leg was crushed almost to my knee, with a resulting club foot and ankle for nearly thirty years. At five years of age, I was run over by run­away horses, leaving my left ribs crushed, left leg broken, and left arm broken twice.

I had terrible arthritis, even when I was eight years old—something physicians said I could not have, yet did have. Every time physi­cians and specialists examined me, in my first seventeen years, they declared I could not live three months.

Yet, in spite of such limitations, spirit within me loved and so strongly urged me to live, that before I reached middle life, I knew I had to solve the problem of how to live—joyously, actively, youthfully.[4]

He was ninety-six years old when he wrote the above words and would live two more years. But the biggest turning point that changed his way of seeing came when he was just a teenager. Until then, he needed nurses around the clock to dress and feed him. Here is how he tells it:

I was an invalid until my 17^th year—in bed or a wheel chair. One summer after father and I returned from Europe, he brought back two very large trunks, metal-bound, filled with rare manuscripts. These were the im­mense trunks of years ago. You can imag­ine how very heavy each one was.

My bedroom was on the second floor—two flights of stairs to the street level. Late one afternoon—when servants were out, I was left alone, and the house caught fire—for some never explained reason. Smoke came into my bedroom, and through the open door I saw the flames.

What did my mind do? It was so shocked, it stopped thinking of limitations —it forgot all about my illness of years. It forgot that that very day I had been carried up and down stairs because I was too weak to walk. It forgot all the limitations it had put on me for all of my life.

Why? Because my soul asserted itself by an unselfish desire to save those trunks of manuscripts which my father treasured so much. In other words, love and desire be­came dominant. I urgently desired to save those trunks because I loved my father and did not wish him to feel the loss of them.

Without a thought of conscious mind, I jumped out of bed, slipped on a robe, rushed from my room, down the hall to the room where the trunks were stored.

I grabbed the handle of one of those trunks, snaked it down the stairs, down the outside stair and then across to the street.

Then I ran back up the two staircases and dragged the other trunk down.

Then, as soon as my conscious mind be­gan reasserting its false ideas of limitation —why then, I almost collapsed.

Yes, such power is usually temporary, but it is proof that the power does exist, and it is temporary only because we soon allow conscious mind to clamp down again on the soul. But the soul always has such power and can always use such power whenever it frees itself from the limitation of conscious thought.[5]

The fire was soon extinguished. But when the nurse then tried to put him back in bed, he refused. He said, “I want to sit in this chair and think.”[6]

After this, he tried to learn how to awaken this experience again. With great persistence, over many years, he reversed all of the prob­lems with his body.

For example, when he was seventeen, his father died from heart failure. Brown knew that he had the same heart problem as his father, but the doctors didn’t know why. This was before the days of X-rays, so they deter­mined that the best way of learning what was happening was to do an autopsy of his father’s body.

They discovered severe lime deposits, up to 1/8^th of an inch, in the muscles of his heart. This could also explain Brown’s arthritis. So, for years, he followed a severe diet where he drank lots of distilled water, ate non-acid fruits, and avoided red meat and cereals.

When he was twenty-four, he was re­ex­amined by the same specialists who had said his heart condition was incurable. When they checked him again, they found no trace of his previous heart troubles.

Decades later, he was examined again, with the latest tools. Doctors still found no sign of trouble with his heart.[7]

But the way he overcame the problem with his foot is even more fascinating:

Then came the greater revelation that trans­formed my life, changing fatigue into energy and age into youthfulness….

Step by step during the years, the power of the spiritual (spiraling) energy of spirit was revealed to me….

You probably have heard that when I was three years old not only was my left an­kle smashed, but the leg also was crushed almost to the knee. When molded to shape, as best the plantation doctor could do at that time, it became a sort of club foot.

For years the ankle had been one jammed bone, grown together solidly. I did everything I knew to change it—massage, exercise, mind treatment—still the ankle mass was one solid bone.

But with the new awakening—that spirit is the spiral essence—I began to free myself of mere mind efforts. I tried to feel spirit manifest­ing in my body.

Physically, I began to twist my body, as supple animals do, and little by little, that solid ankle began to change.

Mentally, I gave up trying to use mind to change that ankle, for mind moves in straight lines that tend to make things solid. I wanted new flexibility, not more solidity.

I used love, to love every cell of my foot, for love breaks down straight-line activity. Watch a child joyously loving its play, and you will see what I mean.

Then…I tried to feel spirit thrilling, as the spirit of life spirally moves upward in the tendrils of vines, ever reaching upward for greater life.

Later my body became responsive enough that I could truly feel that spiraling power of spirit. Lastly came the complete change, so that today no one recognizes any difference in my ankles.[8]

In other words, Landone learned how spirit works arm-in-arm with living bodies. The two are intimately involved with each other in all lifeforms. Thus, spirituality is not just about upliftment, it is also very practical. In fact, it is involved in the way all things manifest. This is the enigma that this book aims to explain.

Brown Landone went on to become a doctor, one of the first neurologists in the U.S. He was also one of the first to show that there are a number of brain centers in our bodies, not just the one in our skull. For example, there is a brain center near our heart and one near our gut.

The principles he learned don’t just apply to health and bodies, they are also directly re­lated to the best way of working with others. Once again, Landone showed this by his achievements.

Here are just a few examples: In 1895, he organized the first boys’ activities in the YMCA. In 1905, he was executive chair­man for a group of one hundred educators from seventeen different countries for the “New Educational Movement.” Then, in 1914, he be­came director of the Institute of Science and the Arts in Paris. A year later, the President of France appointed him to be special ambassa­dor for France to the U.S. In 1917, he published the seven-volume, The History of Civilization, as Editor-in-Chief. He would go on to publish over a hundred books and booklets.[9]

These accomplishments show that he ex­celled at working with others. Strong rela­tionships make extraordinary actions possi­ble. This is how spirit manifests.

And that is why I use Landone’s words throughout this book: I find a flow of inspira­tion when collaborating with him. This di­rectly relates to how we can in­crease the flow of life in everything we do.

Speaking of flow, just as I am finishing this book, an article was published in Inc. Magazine. It starts with this:

When he ran the four-minute mile in 1954, Sir Roger Bannister said, “No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.”

Bannister was describing “flow,” a unique state of mind when we’re so absorbed in an activity that we lose all track of time and effort and feel intensely fulfilled….

Not only is flow associated with optimal performance, but people who regularly experience flow are happier and seem less stressed than those who don’t.

Flow holds intrigue because it flouts some rules. People can keep going for a long time without experiencing cognitive fatigue, despite being cognitively engaged. They also report feeling calm and detached from negative emotions, a state that is usually associated with deep relaxation, not with cognitive engagement in an activity.[10]

If you are interested in understanding this mystery and how to use it in your life, read on.

 

[1] Brown Landone, Prophecies of Melchi-Zedek in the Seven Temples (Orlando, Florida: The Landone Foundation, 1943), pages x-xi.

[2] To learn more about the scientific side of this story, see Lenses of Perception: A Surprising New Look at the Origin of Life, the Laws of Nature, and Our Universe, by Doug Marman (Ridgefield, Washington: Lenses of Perception Press, 2016). I also recommend The Origin of Life Patterns—In the Natural Inclusion of Space in Flux, by Alan Rayner (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017).

[3] Brown Landone, Soul Catalysts—And How to Use Them (Holyoke, Massachusetts: The Elizabeth Towne Co., Inc., 1939).

[4] Brown Landone, He Lives (Orlando, Florida: The Landone Foundation, 1943), page 83.

[5] Landone, He Lives, pages 64-65.

[6] From http://brownlandone.wwwhubs.com/

[7] Brown Landone, Body Purification, (Mokelumne Hill, California: Reprint by Health Research Books, 1994), pages 23-24.

[8] Brown Landone, I Reveal—The Landone Epistles (Mokelumne Hill, California: Reprint by Health Research Books, 1974), pages 53-54.

[9]Sunna Dagor Message, January, 1946, page 1.

[10] Mithu Storoni, “Why Do You Feel Happy When You’re ‘In the Zone’? Science Finally Has an Answer,” Inc. Magazine, Oct. 23, 2017. https://www.inc.com/mithu-storoni/why-do-you-feel-happy-when-youre-in-zone-science-finally-has-an-answer.html