Neal Allen - Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside You

SHAPES of TRUTH

SHAPES

of TRUTH

Discover God Inside You

Neal Allen

Pearl Publications

Fairfax, California

2021 by Neal Allen

www.shapesoftruth.com

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021900522

ISBN: 978-0-578-83908-0

For Renata, Andrew, Marina and David

Foreword: Pearl

A Buddhist, a Christian , a Jew, a misanthrope and a secular humanist walk into a bar. This isnt a joke, but a description of the audience for the book in your hands. Anyone interested in life, love, truth, transformation and simply being humans together will find it exhilarating, will be changed and challenged and nourished by its insights. The book bridges two camps often considered at odds with each other rationalists and the spiritually inclined with its elucidation of a recent discovery that can widen our understanding of truth. You can explore whats in the book on your own, in the momentousness of dealing with everyday life, or in more reflective times to assist in finding meaning, or peace or God in the world. In Shapes of Truth , the accountant and his Burning Man, yoga-obsessed daughter will find something they both can talk about.

Full disclosure. The author is my husband.

The first thing I noticed when I laid eyes on Neal Allen in 2016 was what a good nose he has, and large, beautiful hands. Within a few minutes, I could see that he had a high intelligence, possible over-education, and a broad range of interests; before our coffee cups were half empty we had covered Kierkegaard, Les Enfants du Paradis and JonBent Ramsey. He was gentle and kind, a little shambly, very observant, and an excellent listener. He was droll but subtle about it.

I was a tiny bit discombobulated, and not just because it was, after all, a first date. My problem was less romantic; that very morning I had decided to fire a longtime assistant. As I settled into my seat at the restaurant, I felt down and guilty. Being me, I might have mentioned this in passing with Neal. He didnt recoil at the over-share, or express knee-jerk sympathy at my distress, so much as he seemed deeply curious. So curious that I had a hard time changing the subject.

After our second cup of coffee, we got to down to the books we were each writing. His was called Shapes of Truth .

Oh, I asked prettily, What is it about?

Let me show you, he offered, and began to walk me through the process that he describes in the book. He told me to think about my difficulty that morning with my assistant. I closed my eyes to begin the interior visualization. He asked if I felt anything distinctive in my torso, and if so, where was it? I described a cramped feeling in my lower belly, anxiety I had over the firing. Neal asked me to describe the exact size of the area of tension, the shape of the area, its density, and its color. It was an ugly stain, a spilled liquid, grayish brown, the density of mercury. He asked me to stay with it for a minute. I desperately wanted to run, but I sat quietly, partly because of the cute nose, but also because my stomach felt terrible and maybe this would help. Then I noticed the strangest thing, that the gray-brown liquid was floating in an empty space, as if some of my internal organs had been pushed aside and had left behind a pristine staging area.

After a while he asked if the thing in my belly was changing in any way. Well, not fast enough, I can tell you that. But in fact, it had changed slightly, and continued to, becoming wider and less dense, less like mercury. Then after some time, it rose higher, eventually reaching my chest, much airier now, and then slowly rose up my throat, and into the air beside me, where it disappeared.

In its place I noticed a white balloon.

An icky, thick, grayish-brown blob had transformed through attention into a white balloon, hovering beside me and then magically inside me, too.

Ah, Neal said, smiling. You went straight to the Pearl.

The Pearl?

Yeah, he said. The Pearl that white balloon is kind of like looking straight at your own soul, or at least a part of it, as if you can see both your own divinity and your ability to function in the world from your divinity.

Neals little parlor trick took me from my familiar self as an anxious, cranky adult full of self-doubt and blame to my own patch of the sacred. In about ten minutes. So yeah, I wanted to go out with him again, which we did the next day, and every day since.

Neal told me the Sufi story of the pearl without price. Soon after the princes birth, his mother and father, the king and queen, move to a new dominion far away. When the prince comes of age, the king and queen command him to leave the castle and retrieve a treasure box from the town where he was born. With scant instructions and an unreliable map, the boy makes his way back, encountering dangers and obstacles all along the way. When he finds the treasure box and opens it, a perfect white pearl is revealed, which he carries with him as he returns home to the castle, and holds forever after. Its the story of the journey to recover our birthright to our own perfection and holiness.

My experience on our first date, it turns out, was pretty standard in a mind-blowing way standard in the sense that as you will find in Shapes of Truth , this is a simple, mechanical, and previously unknown way to bring the divine into your life at your own pace and as you need it. Besides being a breezy introduction to my husbands curious universe, the book is a practical, step-by-step guide and exploration of a mostly unknown method of dialogue and meditation, which sneakily leads to breakthrough.

So what was it like for me, Al Franken, a follower of Jesus, to encounter this material the first time? One might think I would have wanted to run screaming for my cute little Christian life, to my identity as a child of God, part of the Body of Christ. But instead, I felt exhilarated, freed from bondage to my emotional rejection of both my self and my employee. I got incredibly happy.

Now we are married and spend our lives together, and Ill tell you all about that another time. But this is about Neals book. Of course I was predisposed to love Shapes of Truth . But by the same token, I was extremely anxious about reading it, in case it was too woo-woo, overwrought, esoteric, pedantic, intellectual, or poorly written. To my great relief and pleasure, it is the opposite of all these things, a brilliantly written and welcoming work. Neals writing is fresh and exhilaratingly erudite, capable at times of namedropping Plato and Chomsky but with the conversational charms of Bill Bryson. Plus, he has stolen several of my best lines, although I am too nice and too in love to call him on this.

Get ready for a roller coaster ride as Neal describes the timeless body-forms, their everyday appearance in his coaching practice, and his own personal search for truth and healing. What makes the book thrilling is the bandwidth of his spiritual understanding, his great sense of humor, and his ability to explain the esoteric while singing the plainsong of universal truth.