Read an Excerpt
Introduction:
My Friend Emmanuel
Again and again in spiritual texts one is enjoined to seek out the company of the holy, that is those whose lives are committed to God. I, for one, readily admit that I am addicted to such beings, for reflected in them I can see the spiritual aspects of myself and of the world around me, aspects which in the marketplace are so often veiled by ‘this’ and ‘that’.
From my Guru, Neem Karoli Baba, I received encouragement to take teachings wherever I could find them and then to trust my intuitive heart to cull the teachings which would be useful from those which were irrelevant or potentially harmful. His support enabled me to open wide and receive rich returns from a great variety of different traditions and sources. Whether through the written words of such beings as Lao Tzu, the Buddha, the Third Chinese Patriarch, the Christ, Kabir, Ramana Maharshi, The Baal Shem Tov, Ramakrishna, etc., or the darshans of such noble souls as Grandpa Joe of the Taos Pueblo, Ananda Mayee Ma, Kalu Rinpoche of the Kargyu Tibetan Sect, Father Demasius of the Benedictines, Lama Govinda, Sayadaw U Pandita of the Therevadans, etc., I have profited greatly. These voices of compassionate wisdom are what the Therevadan Buddhists refer to as ‘Kalayan Mita’ or Spiritual Friends: beings whom met along the way provide guidance and support for one’s spiritual journey. Emmanuel, for me, is another of these voices. It is a priviledge to be able to introduce him to you and to share his teachings with you.
I first heard Emmanuel on WBAI in New York City. Actually, I heard Pat Rodegast reporting what Emmanuel was saying. She had been in contact for some time with this being whom she referred to as Emmanuel. She could contact him at will through meditative tuning and could hear him clearly though others around her could not. To each question asked by Lex Hixon, the host of the radio program, Pat relayed Emmanuel’s response.
Listening to that radio show, what I was most struck by was Emmanuel’s charm and old-world courtliness, his humor, eloquence, directness, ‘hip’ness, and the fact that his responses evoked intuitive trust in me. By the end of the show a number of questions of both a personal and general nature had arisen in my mind and I asked Judith Stanton, who had introduced me to Emmanuel through that program, to try to arrange an interview for me with Pat and Emmanuel.
The interview was held in a quiet meditative room looking out on a garden. As we settled in, Pat started a tape recorder so that I could have a record of our conversation. Pat started to describe colors which she saw as associated with me. In the middle of this description she said, “Emmanuel wants to say something. He is saying.……” and then she reported Emmanuel’s comments about the colors, and we were off and running.
I had no sense of Pat being ‘possessed’ by Emmanuel. Rather, Pat remained very much herself, but willingly conveyed Emmanuel’s words in a way that indicated that it was a relaxed, light, and quite delightful friendship that she shared with Emmanuel. The differences between them were very noticeable. Most obviously, there were marked differences in sentence structure, linguistic patterns, and choice of words. But more subtly, there was a vibratory difference as well. At first I barely noticed this subtle quality. However, in later interviews this vibratory space came to have as profound and significant a value for me as Emmanuel’s words.
In that initial interview Pat also described other images she was seeing. Among them: “I see you very involved in playing a game. There is a feeling of tremendous excitement. You are sitting hunched over the game board in intense concentration.” Then she said, “Emmanuel, help me because I feel there is something more there and I can’t.…”
Emmanuel: “You take great joy in life, in the game of life. That is not degrading it. There is a charismatic excitement.”
I laughed as I recalled the numerous times in lectures when I had quoted Leo from Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East when he says, “Don’t you see that’s just what life is … a beautiful game?”
Pat then added, “There is no opponent that I can see.”
Emmanuel: “You have already long since identified the opponent and removed it by accepting it into your own being as the manifestation of yourself.” He was right in that observation. But he didn’t let me rest on my laurels. He was quick to point out that I still hadn’t reconciled these forces within myself, and was still plagued by the dualistic separation between divinity and humanity which underlay my fears of my human condition. “There is divinity in all things,” he pointed out,” “and in order to find the divinity one must work with the material at hand.… In the clay of the pot is the truth of God.”
He returned again and again to my suspicions of my passions and my fear of surrendering to my humanity. He kept reassuring me that my human desires were very much part of my spiritual journey and that through them rather than in spite of them I would find God.
As I reread the transcript of that first interview I see a confusion in our conversation that was only resolved as I came to recognize that Emmanuel was not speaking to me as I was used to being addressed. Most people, even those of us who acknowledge that we are souls incarnated in bodies and personalities, speak to one another as ego … as a psychological entity. The reason it took me time to acclimate to Emmanuel’s conversation was because Emmanuel was addressing me as a fellow soul, not as an ego. After all, he did not identify himself with a particular timespace configuration and thus did not identify me in that way, either.
This form of address at first seemed quaint, and I kept trying to translate it into ego address, assuming that he was speaking to me as a psychological being trying to awaken. Slowly, however, as I surrendered into the identity of a soul who was passing through an incarnation, the conversation not only became clear, but I realized that this unfamiliar form of address was, in itself, a liberating factor.
Over time I have come to be quite comfortable being with Emmanuel as a fellow soul, and have all but forgotten the unusual (for me) fact that I am speaking with someone who is not embodied on the plane of reality that is so familiar to my senses. From time to time those of us around Emmanuel speculate as to ‘where’ he is or ‘who’ he is. Emmanuel does not seem eager to satisfy our idle curiosity, however, and offers only the sketchiest of clues:
“I am spirit and you are spirit. I have a body and so do you. Mine is slightly altered by the altering of my consciousness.”
“It is not such a big step between your reality and mine. There is a belief that you who are in physical form are the only solid existence in the universe. This is clearly not true. We all have our physical reality. Mine may not be as photogenic as yours, but it certainly exists.”
“You are where I am. I am where you are. And the physical dimensions of height, and depth and width have no reality at all. If you were to remove the spectacles of human limitation, you and I would face each other in perfect equality.”
“You and I are walking the same path. We are seeking truth and our souls are yearning back towards the One God. All of us are growing within our own realm. There it is.”
He notes at one point, “I am no longer subject to the tyranny of the calendar and the clock.” And in speaking of death, he says, “I, myself, am a product of the afterdeath experience.” Regarding his function, he says, “Those of us who no longer need to be human exist in a realm of consciousness in which we are available to guide and to teach.”
Ramakrishna, the great Indian Saint said of spiritual transmission, “When the flower blooms the bees come uninvited.” Certainly with Emmanuel this seemed to be the case. Over the past few years the number of people seeking workshops and interviews with Emmanuel has increased dramatically. Pat and Judith, who was transcribing many of the interviews, noted how often the same questions were repeated and how Emmanuel had to repeat the same material again and again. So an effort was made to collate the answers to the most oft asked questions and photocopy them. This was the way in which this book was born. Subsequently we saw the desirability of broadening the scope of material covered beyond that which emerged in individual interviews. So we asked Emmanuel if he would be willing to entertain sets of prepared questions for a book. He was delighted to participate, pointing out that that was, after all, what he was there for.
