Tadd - The infinite view: a guidebook for life on Earth

We shall ascend the mountain together. We shall climb to the highest peaks and there the magnificent view of all of life shall be our reward.

I always say that my mother gave me birth and my mother gave me rebirth. On the first occasion she gave me physical life. On the second, when I was nineteen, she opened my mind to the world beyond the physicalan experience that led to a transformative understanding of why Id often felt anxious and uncertain growing up, unable to plunge into life without a deeper comprehension of its meaning. That encounter set me on the path to meeting the spiritual guides and teachers who have since become the most powerful influences in my life, offering me tools and insights through which to navigate both the ordinary and extraordinary challenges of daily living.

Let me explain.

As a child, I had experiences that no one else around me seemed to share. At night, I saw faces in the dark, and although my father tried to reassure me that they were merely the work of a vivid imagination, I begged him to let me sleep with my light on. Sometimes I had out-of-body experiences: Id be lying on my bed, when suddenly the room would start to spin, and I was on the ceiling looking down at my body still on the bed. How can this be? I wondered. Am I the body on the bed, or am I on the ceiling? Who am I?

Sometimes I saw light around people. I told my father, a physicist, Daddy, I can see molecules!a word Id learned from him. He replied that no one can see molecules with the naked eye, and to prove his point he brought me to an electron microscope laboratory at Yale University, where he was on sabbatical, to show me what molecules really looked like. As I watched the microscope screen I understood that he was right, of course. But if I wasnt seeing molecules, what was I seeing? Not knowing scared me.

Other times, I was overwhelmed by so many feelings and impressions that I couldnt even begin to sort them out, much less interpret them. In fifth grade, I remember missing an entire math lesson because I was so absorbed by the images and insights I was picking up about my teachers personal life. I was also distracted by the fascinating nature of this ability.

I questioned my friends and other family members to see if they had similar experiences. They thought I was making up stories, so I learned to keep quiet about my unusual episodes. Although I spent a great deal of time feeling misunderstood and confused (spending time alone in nature was one of my few solaces), I always felt loved by my family. But as time passed I grew increasingly anxious.

This anxiety was rooted in some ways in a terrible shock that hit my family when I was very young. At the age of thirty-two, my mother woke one morning to discover that she was blind, the first sign of what would eventually be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. The disease progressed rapidly, affecting both her mind and her body. If my mother was sick, I thought, perhaps I was, too.

Over the years, as I watched her deteriorate mentally and physically, I wanted to understand why my mother, who was a good person and loved us all so much, suffered so. I asked many such why questions, but no one provided me with satisfactory answers. Though I was raised without religion and felt agnostic, I took a tour of churches in our area when I was around ten or eleven, to see if religion could offer any resolution. I didnt find a source of information that felt personal or persuasive, nor did there seem to be much tolerance for my most pressing questions.

When I was seventeen, my mother died, paralyzed and unable to talk. The following year, I went to college, where I hoped to find a better understanding of lifes meaning in books and classes on psychology and philosophy. I wanted to believe what I heard in lectures and seminars and embrace the concepts in books I was assigned, but I didnt feel certainty or confidence in the material presented. My life would have been easier if I had, but I didnt know if the ideas were actually true.

I frequently wrote in journals, continuing to ask myself questions and searching for peace of mind. After my first year in college, I decided to take a leave of absence and travel. Privately, I resolved that during that year of exploration I would find my lifes purpose. A friend told me about having had mystical experiences in Cuernavaca, Mexico, so I decided to go there. I was ready to be open to whatever came my way.

Before arranging for my leave of absence, I visited one of my brothers, who lived and worked in New York City. At that time, he was dating a woman named Catherine, who called herself a trance mediumwhich I thought was very odd. Although I did have something of a mystical streak, and had wrestled with questions about the meaning and purpose of life, mediums and clairvoyants didnt really fit into my scheme of things. Id certainly never met one in person.