It all began with a mysterious fire in my belly, a burning desire to go everywhere, meet everyone, see and do everything. It began with a life-or-death decision to remove the Needle of False Security from my arm, turn away from the Medusa of Routine, part the Veil of Bogus Guarantees and pass on into that vital place where, regardless of the question, all you have to say is yes.

It began with the Wisdom of Foolishness, a commitment to remain fluid, receptive, in process, part of the Membrane of Things as I struck out on that spiritual Route 66, the Experience Trail, determined to follow it to the end. It began with yours truly spontaneously ceasing to be myself and becoming someone else, assuming in the blink of an “I” the role of a drifter, a rolling stone, a wayward mariner lone and visionary on the High Seas of Chance and Possibility.

Actually, it began with a grueling Trailways bus trip since that was all I could afford with the money I'd probably stolen–three forgettable, sweaty, malnourished, backbreaking days and nights west from wherever across the tedious interstates of America. Feeling greasier than a TV dinner, I ended up in California in a town called New Age City, which seemed an appropriate starting point, a promising beginning for what I considered the dawning of my own “new age.”

New Age City was a kaleidoscopic pastiche of architectural designs that simultaneously delighted and bewildered. Gothic spires and modernist high-rises towered over straw-bale houses, adobes, log cabins, tepees, earthships and yurts, next to which Buddhist temples, dojos, mosques and shiny Bauhaus edifices competed for space, while the storefronts featured everything from rococo façades and stained-glass art nouveau awnings to medieval placards and flashing neon signs.

My impression, shouldering my trusty old buffalo leather duffel bag (containing the essentials: toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, spare underwear and Swiss army knife)–I say, my impression stepping down from the bus and squinting into the bright sunlight that first May morning was that the driver had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque and dropped me off on Mars. And I wasn't far off the mark, as I soon found myself whistling along Mercury Street into the heart of downtown.

***

The only way to convey my initial reaction to New Age City is to compare it to that pinch-me disbelief a kid feels visiting Disneyland the first time. There was no dirt in New Age City. No crime. No drugs. No graffiti. No youth gangs since there were no youths. No class issues since there were no classes. No racist slurs, sexist jokes, rightwing slogans or homophobic propaganda.

Wherever you looked everything was in pristine condition, and the parks were safe and clean, and all the cars were late-model imports, and all the people were white and over forty and expensively dressed even when dressed down, and the restaurants (though exorbitant) featured multicultural menus on recycled paper, and you could always get a decaf mocha latte even in a convenience store at midnight, and those who drank drank in moderation, and those who smoked smoked only American Spirits, and the police themselves were paragons of environmental consciousness as they rode smiling on shiny mountain bikes up and down exquisitely maintained streets.

And the extraordinary services! New Age City was a cornucopia of Transsexual Breathwork, Colonic Hypnotherapy, Psychotic Readings, Women's Foot Massage Circles, Men's Menstrual Networks, Nymphomatic Drainage, Applied Tautology, Body Piercing for the Inner Child, Alternative Unbirthing, Soul Upheaval, Past Life Digressions … To say nothing of the extraordinary products available through independent distributors of network marketing companies: Self-esteem Creams, Psychic Gels, Clairvoyant Eyedrops, Aboriginal Aphrodisiacs, Ostrich Feather Energy Bars, Irradiated Healing Clays, Chai Enemas …

I didn't know where to start. I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I'd just been born? On the other hand I thought it might be interesting to try a flavored enema or have my nasal septum pierced.

Confusing as my options were, it soon became crystal clear the little cash I had on me wouldn't last long in a place where a bag of peanuts cost ten bucks. So what if they were organic.

My first instinct was to get a job–an idea immediately followed by a crippling wave of nausea. I literally vomited in a trashcan on the sidewalk where I'd been pleasantly window-shopping. I found the idea of a job repulsive. Life was too short to waste being a productive member of society. My job was my imaginary life, and I felt deeply I should be paid to live it.

Such a conviction did nothing to put food in my belly or a roof over my head. The hotels and B&Bs were so expensive one weekend would have bankrupted me. It didn't take long for my homelessness to sink in. It just took shivering night after night on a park bench only to be mercilessly prodded awake at five by a smiling policeman urging me to move on; pissing in the woods, shitting in the bushes and wiping with leaves I prayed weren't poison ivy; then finally spending my last penny and feeling genuine hunger set in as a layer of sweat and scum encased me like a second skin.

And so, as is conventional in such cases, I resorted to begging. Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it's a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.

Granted, I was no master–but I seriously doubt Helen Keller could have pried any change out of the citizens of New Age City. I tried every trick in the book. I stood and begged, sat and begged, lay down and begged, begged on my knees. I drew little signs indicating I was unemployed, I was retarded, I was a starving artist, I was an orphan, I was deaf or blind or mute, I suffered from dengue fever, I had a broken heart. I changed locations and times. I faked whiplash, a fractured femur, an abscessed tooth. I moaned and groaned, gnashed my teeth and wailed as I sat impossibly twisted on the sidewalk. I even squirted ketchup swiped from a deli all over my jeans and complained of intestinal bleeding. But nothing, I mean nothing worked! Nobody gave me a dime. People practically walked on top of me without even looking in my direction.

Morning after morning the smiling policeman politely prodded me awake, and day after day my hunger hollowed me out from the inside. I no longer gave a damn about my inner child. How long would it be, I wondered, before I completely withered, turned to a crisp, lost my marbles and took to conversing with myself in different octaves in my own little one-man play scripted by misery's lunacy?

***

One especially traumatic afternoon I found myself seated on the sidewalk in the middle of Mercury Street being ignored by streams of polite people who managed to be cold as distant stars, so engrossed in their own “process” (a word I often overheard them use) that–this is what occurred to me–if the Good Lord Himself had suddenly materialized in a blinding flash, the situation would have been no different from that story where Christ returns to Waco, Texas, but nobody lifts a pinky to receive Him. I remember slumping sideways following this realization and crying a salty tear or two, no longer hungry (that had thankfully passed) but bitterly disillusioned.

Later that night, stretched on my park bench in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion, yet miserably unable to sleep, I realized I had to escape. I had to get out of that plastic place–even if it meant perishing in the attempt.

The problem was how. How could a beggar get out of New Age City? Not by hitching, that was for sure. Nobody would give you the time of day, much less a ride. Speaking of, where were all the beggars? Surely I wasn't the first drifter to show up expecting to live off the generosity of such an enlightened place.

Sleep being out of the question, I decided to go for a stroll to brainstorm. It must have been around three and besides yours truly not a creature was stirring. At that hour New Age City resembled a stage set more than a real city, a nearly convincing theater backdrop, the buildings two-dimensional like crushed cardboard boxes. As if they weren't solid, as if you could pass your hand through them with no effort.

This impression, strange as it was, persisted and actually grew stronger the longer I walked through the deserted streets where a surreal, pastel twilight prevailed. By the time I arrived at the outskirts of town, dawn was shooting yellow jags up through the inky sky. But instead of feeling gladdened by the new day, a wave of panic washed over me. I was certain another day in New Age City would be the end of me.

Panting with terror, feeling daybreak fry me like a vampire, squeeze me like a trap room in a B movie, I did something that in any other town would have resulted in a broken nose: I turned and plunged headlong into the nearest wall. Instead of stone I passed through something that felt like water but wasn't wet. When I reemerged, I was no longer in New Age City.

I didn't know where the heck I was–just that I was alone in a dark alley that smelled like piss and rotten beer. I leaned back against the alley wall (a solid one this time) and took a few deep breaths, disoriented but happy to be alive.

But just to make sure, I pinched myself (it hurt) and tried out my vocal chords. “Echo?” I yelled into the shadows.

“Echo? Echo? Echo?” the shadows replied.

O you I could have loved!
O you who knew it!
O we who blew it!

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

Sol Luckman

With the notable exception of Intermediate French, which I recall chiefly because the instructor was a to-die-for Parisian grad student named Emmanuelle whose haute couture hips maintained a constant motion like an Olympic slalom skier’s as she copied dizzying conjugations across the blackboard—I say, not counting French the only class I remember taking my first (and technically, only) semester in Pulpit Hill was Creative Writing 101.
 
Actually, that’s pure fiction. I just told a complete lie in a shameless attempt to streamline the opening of this transitional chapter that has, in all honesty, given me stress ulcers …

That’s another lie. I really just wanted to grab your attention, lure you in with a gratuitous image of exotic sexuality, seduce you into a comfortable narrative rhythm so as to take advantage of your aroused credulity. When the simple fact is I distinctly remember a third class that fall: Sociology of the Imaginary.

Taught by a twitchy little bird-faced Canadian professor named Jean-Michel Possy, Sociology of the Imaginary had fifteen students including yours truly, required no formal coursework other than a final and used a single textbook, Extraterrestrials in Our Lives, written by the professor. Many of the students were, in fact, extraterrestrials.

We spent most of our time watching ET, Close Encounters, Alien, Cocoon and Roswell documentaries, then discussing them in detail—the idea being, according to the syllabus, “to explore humanity by examining our imaginative conception of the Other.” I kept wanting to stand up and tell everybody I was the imagined Other, big as life right there in front of them, and they should be studying me instead of ET. But I was a freshman and still rather shy.

To return, though, to Creative Writing 101. This was an introductory fiction workshop taught by the venerable Department Chair, who wasn’t actually a chair but a slightly senile, possibly alcoholic novelist by the name of Bertha McGough from whom I gained a sobering perspective on the art (for lack of a better word) of writing pedestrian but eminently marketable prose with a distinctly Southern flavor concerned with the ordinary lives of ordinary characters and the ordinary human spirit’s triumph over ordinary adversity and all that Harper Lee crap.

That first afternoon we found ourselves seated around a huge round table, a literary Camelot, twenty or so of us aspiring eighteen-year-old geniuses with helium in our brains, in one of the seminar rooms in Lovelace Hall, home to the English Department. Mrs. McGough arrived fashionably late and, taking her place at the table, launched into a carefully rehearsed, impromptu lecture about how this was a serious course, and we were all expected to turn in our manuscripts on time, and we were to give and receive constructive criticism, and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.

The class is designed for no more than twelve students and, since there are twenty of us, the non-registered students are kindly asked to look elsewhere. I’ve already pre-registered, so I’m only giving Mrs. McGough half an ear. It turns out there’s one spot left for a non-registered student that has just been snagged by one William Morocco, a.k.a. Billy, presently engaged across the table in extracting an especially recalcitrant bugger from his aquiline nose.

Billy was, in a word … ugly. I mean that literally. The boy was as ugly as your grandmother bent over reaching for the soap in the shower. I’m quite confident Billy, wherever (and for that matter, whoever) he is, would agree with me good-naturedly. We used to joke about how ugly he was, after we became friends.

You’d think I’d have been accustomed to the sight of an ugly person, having hung out for so long with Egbert and Dante and having, moreover, grown up in Lipton Hill. But Billy was in a class by himself.

Maybe it was the way he always seemed to stoop (he could stoop lying down); or the way his hands, feet and ears looked half a dozen sizes overgrown; or the albino skin mottled with raspberry freckles and the occasional juicy zit; or the shoulder-length, neon red hair that looked like a cheap theatrical wig but that really was his hair … Whatever the case, there was one thing (technically, two things) about him that wasn’t ugly: his eyes.

Don’t panic. I have no intention of blithering on about one of my character’s eyes like some indulgent romance novelist. The eyes are the most overrated of the visible aspects of human anatomy. I myself prefer the earlobes and ankles. But I will say Billy had the most mesmerizing set of peepers I’ve ever stared into.

I can’t even remember what color they were. They could have been hot pink or lemon yellow, that’s how much I was drawn into them, mesmerized, blinded like a deer in headlights, bowled over and taken for a ride. Only much later did I finally break the spell of his eyes and realize how crazy the son-of-a-bitch was.

Long before that I came to love him as you can only love a best friend: totally, utterly, soul-to-marrow. I’d have followed him to the bottom of the ocean, the dark side of the moon, on a Himalayan expedition. And I practically did.

•

So all the non-registered students are obliged to leave, Billy casually flips the bugger over his shoulder, and the first lesson gets underway. As an ice-breaker Mrs. McGough asked us to go around the table and introduce ourselves. I recall counting only eleven students, including myself, four of whom, in addition to Billy, played at least a minor role in my brief tenure as an undergrad in Pulpit Hill:

Penny Genet. Related through an obscure genealogy to the French playwright, Penny Genet (for some reason nobody ever called her just “Penny”) could talk a mean Shakespeare and was the most naturally talented writer among us. She had a plump, pretty exterior, especially on the rare occasions when she permitted herself to smile, but underneath was a heart harder than marble and liquid nitrogen sluicing through her veins.

“I like eating better than sex because no one is sharing it with me,” she once told the class proudly. Gifted with a razor-sharp wit and microscopic critical eye, Penny Genet was more outwardly pleasant than inwardly kind. While remaining cordial toward one another, she and I both realized, privately, we disagreed about everything.

Tamara Love. A wan, hypersensitive girl who wore ankle-length, earth-tone, hemp dresses with no shoes or stockings (even in winter) and wrote tear-jerking stories about endangered wildlife. Plainly sweet and sweetly plain, Tamara didn’t look like other coeds with her bushy Slavic eyebrows and knotty body. There was something rather beautiful in her ugliness, and something else altogether unattractive in her beauty. She had a strange habit of giving her fellow classmates deep-tissue massages with the pointed end of a yam.

Once, at a party, finding herself alone with me on someone’s porch, she confided that in high school she’d had three abortions and two STDs. That was shortly before she fell to waxing eloquent about how nice my ass was (she’d enticed me to the floor and started in with the yam) and how I was so good-looking (she was stoned) and how we should definitely get together and have sex or something.

I think I hurt her feelings when I politely declined to accompany her back to her room. I never could figure out whether Tamara was stupid or just confused. She went on to become editor of Queue (which Billy and I referred to as Cul, from the French), the student literary magazine.

Reginald Washington. A skinny, animated guy from the Fourth Dimension (so we surmised) who was the spitting image of Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing. Reginald liked to discourse at great length and in tremendous detail on the Bible as science fiction. His stories never had characters—at least none any of us could identify—though he did produce one interesting piece of work: “The Undiscovered Country,” a sketch for a story (presumably with characters) about the discovery, in 1986, of a seventh continent the size of Australia located just a few miles east of the Florida Keys. The somewhat obvious theme being the hubris of science exposed by the mystery of the unknown universe.

It was impossible to tell whether Reginald was on drugs or Foucault. He’d get wound up and suddenly take off like a UFO into some extraordinarily abstruse topic completely off the subject, something like: “What I fail to understand is the contradictory textual situation because of the fact that the narrator is but isn’t, you dig, and also that whole antihero thing, and I was reminded again of the sociolibinal nature of narrative, which translates into a kind of triviality belying a tremendous though hidden and oft-denied importance, like the Crazy Glue cementing this world together whose center just can’t seem to hold otherwise, to paraphrase Shelley and Yeats and, yes, Achebe, a brother, dig, and I felt a vast existential loneliness inherent in the seemingly glib dialogue and compelling descriptions of the wasteland that society has become which came across as pure poetry, lyrical even, dig, and that reminded me of something Nietzsche once said—”

Then there was Tristan. Tristan Dykes. The funny thing was—she really was a dike. “Queer as a tennis helmet,” Billy used to say. Tristan had the droopy hound-dog face of certain Irish women, sported cropped flaming red hair to match her molten Gaelic temperament and was a damned good writer—if you liked stories about arson, gang rape and child molestation.

She wrote like a serial killer. She’d grown up as an army brat in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which she referred to with smoldering odium as “Fayettenam.” I’ll never forget the first sentence of the first story she submitted: “The only serious fire I ever set, aside from a few minor dumpster and trashcan fires, was when I doused my parents’ doublewide with gasoline, threw a lit match on it and walked away without looking back.” Fact or fiction? The shared suspicion was it was unembellished fact, but we never found out for sure.

Tristan carried a chip on her shoulder the size of the Rosetta Stone. She hated men in general, me in particular. She took especial umbrage at my satirical sketch of the feminist writer (cleverly named Kristen Sykes) who, after losing her memory in a near-fatal lesbian sexual accident, hears her own story (which she has absolutely no memory of writing) being read at a workshop by a male colleague and proceeds to attack his “typically myopic, bigoted, phallogocentric point of view.”

Last but not least, there was Billy. Besides being eye-popping ugly, Billy was the official Resident Enigma of the University of North Carolina at Pulpit Hill. A kind of collegiate Gatsby for the 80s, the guy was nobody and everybody, either full of shit or full of gold depending on the source.

Some said he was the estranged (possibly bastard) son of wealthy East Coast aristocrats, the Browns or the Rockefellers or even the Kennedys. And he did vaguely resemble—with that mop of red hair, blueblood nose and equine teeth—Bobby Kennedy as a young man. Others said he was related to Lily Tomlin, that he was descended from George Orwell, that he was Lyle Lovett’s half brother, that he was the son of Ed Sullivan or Jack Palance or even, according to a vocal minority, Buddy Holly.

Whether with plotting purpose or out of unconcerned innocence, Billy added to the intrigue by maintaining a serene, detached silence that had the effect of stirring up more rumors. That he was a heroin smuggler. That he was a KGB spy. That there were secret caves on the coast of Brittany where he’d hosted month-long orgies. All that was known with certainty about him was he was loaded—enough to drive a mint condition orange Ferrari Spider and own (not rent) the sumptuous three-story antebellum manor he resided in on a cul-de-sac off Mephisto Street.

Billy’s silence extended into the classroom, where unless I missed it during one of my daydreams, he never uttered a syllable beyond that first meeting when we all introduced ourselves … That’s not true either. I’m full of lies today! He did speak one afternoon in class when, ordered by Mrs. McGough (who was at her wit’s end) to produce at least the idea for a story, he looked directly at me as if staring into my heart of hearts and outlined the following scenario:

A writer in his early thirties kept sending off his stories to various magazines, contests, agents and editors—without success. The writer became more and more depressed, and at times even a little suicidal, facing all that rejection. But one day he had a brilliant idea: he decided to transform himself and go back to college. But not just any college. He applied to the University of Iowa and enrolled as a freshman in its famous writing program. Of course, he told everybody he was just eighteen, which made his professors (among them John Irving) think he was some kind of prodigy because he wrote so well for his age. So they used their influence to get him a lucrative publishing contract and, presto, despite his actually mediocre talent, he was hailed as the next Tom Robbins.

But other than this singular outburst, Billy’s lips remained tightly sealed. To the best of my knowledge he never even turned in a writing assignment. Yet he never skipped class, was always the first to arrive and last to leave. He even took notes occasionally, scribbling with a Waterman pen in a leather-bound, gold-leafed notebook he carried in the inside pocket of his Harris tweed jacket.

Mrs. McGough eventually stopped making his blatant lack of participation an issue—though she later flunked him. Little by little Billy passed from being one of us aspiring geniuses, to a curious if not altogether engaged onlooker, and finally to nothing more than a specter that haunted our classroom, a friendly apparition more figmentary than real, a regular Boo Radley gone away to college and enrolled in Creative Writing 101.

•

After introductions Mrs. McGough handed out copies of the syllabus and discussed its particulars, then went on to pose general questions about the nature and purpose of fiction.

“What is a story?” she began, surveying the room over the top of her horn-rimmed bifocals, which she always wore on the tip of her nose when not chewing an earpiece in a polished writerly gesture. “Tell me, what is a story?” An embarrassed silence ensued. No one had an answer.

To this day I’m not sure I’m any closer to answering Mrs. McGough’s question. I’m tempted to say either everything is a story, or nothing is. Maybe it’s simply a matter of semantics. Maybe there’s really no difference between story and non-story. After all, the Word was made Flesh. And certainly Flesh is made Word every day. Take my imaginary life. I used to be a real person, but now I’m just words.

Or am I?

Rule #1: Always believe everything you read, however absurd or implausible it may strike you, because you just never know.

Believe this:

That first class possessed an undeniable fatality. Aside from providing the context for my initial encounter with Billy (an event that was to have immense personal and, to a certain degree, metaphysical and even historical implications), that first class was where I fell madly, desperately, head-over-heels in lust with Vanessa Hope.

Sweet Vanessa! Nymphomaniacal muse! In Life, as in Art, one typically falls for at least one femme fatale. I still get a hard-on when I think about her.

I’d met her briefly a few days earlier at the reception for the incoming Skidmore scholars at the Skidmore Terrarium. A posh event, I’d never felt more like the wide-eyed, slack-jawed, clueless hick I’d chosen to be, surrounded by such stunning Old Money opulence—the shiny brass doorknobs, gleaming crystal chandeliers, period furniture, Turkish rugs, oriental vases and gilt-framed oil paintings; the waiters in black tie serving artisanal hors-d’oeuvres and expensive champagne; the stuffy trustees making the rounds getting to know the new scholars; the scholars themselves, sixty or so, an up-and-coming jet set of Americans, Canadians, Brits and Aussies from Andover, Hotchkiss and Wycombe Abbey destined for executive positions with such philanthropic and spiritually uplifting corporations as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, trying their prep school best to appear suave, witty, urbane and wise beyond their years; and presiding over it all the vast oil portrait of Richard Smedley Skidmore VI, rubber baron, patron of the arts but mostly the sciences whose seven-figure endowment was royally financing not only our educations but the artisanal hors-d’oeuvres and expensive champagne to boot. (The fact every scholar present was underage was casually and, I say with certainty, safely ignored.) Yes, there he was: good old Uncle Skidmark himself.

And there she was—Vanessa, sweet Vanessa, conversing in fluent French with one of the trustees, delicately sipping her champagne with impeccable grace. To look at her, to listen to her, you’d have thought she was untouchable, inviolable, a creature not of this world, a fair-skinned Norse goddess who, unlike her swarthy and promiscuous Greek counterparts, would never deign to be caressed by mortal hands.

Not that she was haughty; to the contrary, her conversation flowed with animation and sincerity. I noticed she had big gums, and the effect was anything but negative, and I returned to my dorm room later that evening still thinking about her, drunkenly aroused and mildly troubled in a sexual way. Imagine my surprise when she waltzed in the door twenty-five minutes late for Mrs. McGough’s Creative Writing 101.

“I’m Vanessa Hope. Sorry I’m late. I had trouble finding the building.”

“Have a seat,” said Mrs. McGough. “Tell us, Vanessa, where are you from? You don’t sound like a Southerner.”

“Boston,” she replied, squeezing into the vacant seat beside Billy, the bastard.

I’d never been to Boston, but the way Vanessa said it, the way the word dripped out of her mouth like fresh maple syrup oozing from a tap, filled me with an intense desire to go there. Immediately.

From that instant, for the duration of the class, I completely forgot about Billy. I forgot he even existed. I forgot I existed. I became an impassioned spirit drifting limpidly, languidly through the streets of an imaginary Boston, lost in Vanessa’s petulant breasts and slender neck, the chiseled line of her jaw, her sparkling emerald eyes that kept boring hot little holes in me.

•

The sounds of notebooks closing, chairs scooting back and people standing up rudely interrupted my reverie. Class was over. I’d managed to fantasize away the second half of my first lesson.

As we filed out of the room, I tapped Billy on the shoulder. “What’s the assignment?” I whispered.

He looked at me knowingly with his lucid mad eyes and said simply, matter-of-factly, “I haven’t the vaguest idea.” Then, turning to watch Vanessa sashay down the hall: “She’ll go far on that ass.”

I reread the syllabus later for the assignment: a one-thousand-word free association sentence without punctuation or capitalization to be written spontaneously in one sitting. We were also supposed to begin a writer’s notebook like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s to be filled with story ideas, character sketches, dialogue, descriptions, jokes, poems, recyclable tidbits, et cetera.

Meanwhile, I followed my classmates out of Lovelace Hall into a sizzling August afternoon. There wasn’t a hint of fall yet in the flatlands; the bright sunlight was still as hot as a crematorium. I watched furtively, longingly, as Vanessa disappeared around the corner in the opposite direction I was headed.

Parting is especially sweet sorrow when it’s unilateral. I felt empty walking back across campus to my dorm. As I made my way past the Hole, the university’s social epicenter and forum for a variety of lunatics, I overheard a street preacher reading from his King James Bible, voice raised, as if to a circus tent full of revival-goers.

“And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, Hear ye the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts. Ye have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of Israel to stand in the battle in the day of the LORD. They have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The LORD saith it; albeit I have not spoken? Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye have spoken vanity, and seen lies, therefore, behold, I am against you, saith the Lord GOD.”

When I looked back I saw Billy, heinously ugly Billy in his Harris tweed jacket, sitting alone on the steps munching a bag of Ruffles, attentively accompanying the preacher’s sermon.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

Part III: Becoming Light

It also must be stressed that the personal and collective evolution of consciousness and physiology we are embarking on presently as a species involves a positive genetic (trans)mutation that empowers humans to expand our multidimensional awareness while, effectively, becoming light.

Everything is energy. Einstein expressed an understanding of this truth in his famous theorem E=MC2, which established the interchangeability of matter and energy. Concerning matter, Einstein once remarked, "we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter."

Arguably, this truth that now has been validated even further by the quantum sciences was known to the ancient Hindus when they employed the term maya, meaning the illusion often mistaken for reality. Without a doubt, vanguard Russian scientists such as Kozyrev, Gariaev and Poponin who have studied torsion waves understand that energy (including so-called matter) is consciousness, and vice versa.

The notion that everything is energy or consciousness directly applies to human biology. The materialistic view of the body as a machine that may run on energy but is somehow distinguishable from it, is fast giving way to undeniable evidence that we, too, at our most fundamental level, are manifestations of conscious energy.

The holographic model views the ostensibly physical universe in terms of intersecting electromagnetic frequencies that, in effect, project the staggering illusions we think of as the world … and ourselves. "When two waves come together they interact with each other producing [a hologram]," writes Horowitz. "Information is processed and cell structures are organized by these forces including the structure and standing waves created by DNA."

By now it should not strike the listener as "coming from left field" to learn that in Vibrational Medicine, Dr. Richard Gerber concludes that matter, including human cells, is actually "frozen light." Horowitz reaches precisely the same conclusion, bluntly stating that humans are "crystallized or precipitated light." This assertion is consistent not only with torsion-wave research and the holographic model, but also with the findings of more mainstream quantum physics, which has demonstrated that light (much like DNA) is capable of both carrying and remembering data.

An insightful perspective on how the human body operates via--and even is composed of--light is provided by Dr. David Jernigan in an article entitled "lluminated Physiology and the Medical Uses of Light," where the author explains,

Top researchers believe that our thoughts cause the mind to set up a morphogenetic field, which in turn fuels bio-holographic ... projections in the heart. These projections in the heart use biophotonic (laser-like) coherent emissions to transmit information and control inputs to the DNA and from the DNA to the entire crystalline matrix to support the thought command. In theory, heart-generated light traveling through the liquid crystalline matrix 'optical fibers' of the body can produce 'supercontinuum light,' thereby maintaining its coherence and resulting in the multi-system wide effects seen when one biophotonic emission frequency from the heart is sent through the body’s crystalline matrix ... [DNA contains] photo-receivers and photo-transmitters, and it may be that DNA is where the coherent signal is split into supercontinuum light to produce the 'super-biohologram' that is the human body. It would seem that our thoughts are commands to the heart. The heart photonically imprints the DNA with the information to make the thought command come true.

The concept of light as information, or "light in formation," is an old one that for centuries has found expression in various types of sacred geometry. Others have suggested that angels, often depicted as divine messengers, are really angles or rays of light that convey information (typically experienced as "inspiration" and often centered in the heart) from a celestial source.

This expanded conception of light as a form of consciousness underpins, for example, the Toltec worldview of Don Miguel Ruiz, medical doctor, shaman and bestselling author of The Four Agreements, whose cosmology includes the Photon Band as a connector between Galactic Center and our sun. With the latter being Earth's primary source of light or information, the reverence for the sun in virtually all pre-industrialized cultures appears not naïve, but an informed and deliberate focus on humanity's local source of universal creative consciousness.

"DNA ... is a specific vibration of light that comes from the sun and becomes matter," observes Dr. Ruiz in Beyond Fear: A Toltec Guide to Freedom and Joy. "Every kind of life on Planet Earth, from … stones to humans, has a specific vibration from light that comes from the sun. Each plant, animal, virus and bacterium has a specific ray of light … condensed by Mother Earth and the information carried in the light becomes matter."

Neurological research indicates that humans' tremendous brainpower, even operating below ten percent of our capacity, results not just from biochemistry, but from the brain’s impressive ability to function as a holographic data storage and retrieval system (a "hard-drive") that employs different light angles to read information ("software").

This implies that the brain is a sophisticated holographic biocomputer that operates through electromagnetic frequencies. Not surprisingly, DNA has been shown to function very similarly. Human biology thus may be considered electromagnetic at the level of its manifestation from the torsion life-wave that sustains it. As Deepak Chopra has observed, human cells, far from being merely functional vessels, are in actuality electromagnetic fields of possibility and potential.

Human bioenergetic frequencies can be identified clearly in the aura. Researchers now generally agree that humans possess a detectable aura. Kirlian photography has captured this iridescent halo around the body for decades. In 1972 biophysicist Richard Alan Miller developed a field theory to explain the aura. More recently, Dr. Valerie Hunt, UCLA professor and author of Infinite Mind, actually measured the human aura with an EEG machine. Early in the 20th Century, it was theorized that the aura comprises various frequency bands known as auric fields, and that these govern distinct aspects of human biology, psychology, and spirituality.

Each of these so-called auric fields also corresponds to, and interfaces with, a specific dimension. The third field, for instance, is keyed to the third dimension. The auric fields can be thought of as a geometric matrix, a "Jacob’s ladder" that allows access to increasingly subtle frequency domains.

This unfolding of perception to the full range represented by the bioenergy fields and corresponding chakras is what it means to become "multidimensional." It is believed by Wilcock, myself and others that eight dimensions (not counting the "transdimension" of Source) are available to human perception at our present evolutionary stage, which means that operating in the first three dimensions, as most people do, humans currently only access just over a third of "reality." This does not even take into account the probable existence of multiple parallel realities.

According to Braden in The God Code, the ancient Hebrew four-letter name for God is secretly code for DNA based on the genetic code's chemical composition. "Applying this discovery to the language of life," writes Braden, "the familiar elements of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon that form our DNA may now be replaced with key letters … In so doing, the code of life is transformed into the words of a timeless message [that] reads: 'God/Eternal within the body.'"

If God is indeed in the body--and consciousness and physiology, from an evolutionary perspective, are linked inextricably--we must acknowledge that divine consciousness is available in and through physicality.


One highly intriguing aspect of DNA is that most people utilize only about ten--some say as little as two or three--percent of it. The other ninety percent or more has been dismissed by mainstream genetic science as "junk."

Interestingly, the fact that we use at best ten percent of our DNA correlates to the fact that we use at most ten percent of our brain. Still more provocative is that, according to one scientific model, String theory, less than ten percent of the matter in the universe is visible. The other ninety percent or so is sometimes called "dark matter" and, given the nonlocal quality of the torsion energy at its base, very well may reside in other dimensions.

Could "junk" DNA actually have biologically transformative potential awaiting activation? Could it somehow activate the unused portion of the human brain? Could this brain activation succeed in opening our godlike perceptual faculties, allowing us to climb the "multidimensional ladder" of our auric fields and experience the invisible ninety percent of the universe? Following the time-honored wisdom of "As above, so below," could reports that these perceptual faculties indeed are emerging in many people, especially today's extraordinarily gifted children, have anything to do with an increase in torsion energy in the form of superluminal light emanating from Galactic Center?

Many believe the answer to all these questions is an emphatic yes. According to William Henry, physicists "have established that a vast cosmic ocean of quintessence … invisible to our telescopes … surrounds the visible galaxies. If they are right, this 'dark matter' … that composes [what] we … see 'out there' is also 'in here' … This implies that 9/10 of ourselves is also unknown."

"It seems clear that our hidden human potential is now unfolding,” observes Judith Polich. "The higher order of consciousness that represents our next leap in human evolution is now being activated, and we are evolving into a higher frequency of light [...] Moreover, it is possible that the hidden potential lies within the very fabric of our DNA."

Polich quotes evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, who observes that "the history of evolution has repeatedly demonstrated that DNA is capable of rearranging itself intelligently in response to changing environmental conditions. Therefore, some types of mutation may not be random at all." In fact, according to Sahtouris, our "DNA may be capable of utilizing information and making conscious changes in its structure. That is, it may consciously direct the process of mutation, thus transforming a species."

In a wonderful article entitled "Living Systems in Evolution," Sahtouris elaborates on the current "changing of the guard" in our way of thinking about the nature of DNA:

In molecular genetic biology this shift is supported by fifty years of research evidence that DNA reorganizes itself intelligently when organisms are environmentally stressed, and that the required information transfer often seems to obey some form of nonlocality rather than slower chemical or electromagnetic transmission. Rather than being the sources of variation and evolution, errors known to occur in DNA during reproduction and by cosmic radiation or other accidents are recognized at the molecular level and fixed by repair genes. Thus we see intelligence at work not only in higher brains, but in the lowliest of bacteria and cellular components. Clearly, we are moving toward a post-Darwinian era in evolution biology.

Braden, who began his career as a geological scientist, was one of the first from the scientific community to theorize, based largely on observable Earth changes, that our planet is experiencing some type of frequency increase that ultimately will activate the dormant potential of our DNA. As detailed in Awakening to Zero Point, this evolutionary activation, or "Collective Initiation," possibly relates to Earth's harmonic frequency, known as the Schumann resonance.

Although this is a scientifically controversial subject, and has yet to be substantiated adequately, a number of researchers, myself included, still believe that some, possibly higher-dimensional (torsion) aspect of Earth's resonance indeed is increasing in keeping with the evolutionary timeline encoded in the Mayan calendar and explained in such compelling intuitive sources as The Law of One. Perhaps new data will facilitate our collective understanding.

Braden argues that Earth's hypothetical frequency increase, possibly linked to denser or brighter "light information" stemming from increased celestial activity, will result in new combinations of amino acids--in essence, new DNA. From a genetics perspective, this is tantamount to saying that a new life-form is emerging out of the human species.

This is not nearly as odd as it at first may sound, given DNA's spectacular capacity for adaptive (trans)mutation. Recently, the phrase "quantum biology" has appeared in response (in some cases) to allegedly suppressed evidence suggesting that a third strand of DNA currently is activating in humans, forming what may be a "triple helix." I believe the creation of a third strand of DNA is a potential reality; however, even as a metaphor for evolving the latent intelligence of our existing DNA, the notion of a third helix has a certain conceptual value.

The generally accepted notion that DNA in its double-stranded form is a universal molecule actually finds little support when we examine the activity of DNA itself. As previously emphasized, DNA continuously is changing, mutating. To claim it is impossible for DNA to morph into another molecule represents an empiricist bias based on so-called immutable facts (that the DNA molecule has been around a long time in more or less the same configuration, for instance) which are called into question by, among other scientific discoveries, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the logic-defying realization that we create our reality by observing it.

Inevitably, the scientific community is coming around to an awareness of the mutable nature of what heretofore were considered nature's immutable laws. In the words of biologist Rupert Sheldrake in The Presence of the Past, the "assumption that the laws of nature are eternal" actually stems from early Christian influence on the scientific method that was developed in the 17th Century. "Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving?" wonders Sheldrake. "Or perhaps they are not laws at all" but are "more like habits?"

In the theoretical case of radical genetic (trans)mutation from two to three rungs of DNA, we still are looking at a single molecule of life. There is simply (or not so simply) the addition of a third rung requiring a reconfiguring of the manner in which base pairs of nucleotides (protein bases) attach to the rungs. This might occur through a large-scale genetic rearrangement as described by Colm Kelleher in his article "Retrotransposons as Engines of Human Bodily Transformation."

On the subject of the emergence of a new genotype of human, Polich writes that "the codes to awakening our ancestral endowment--namely, our inner light--may lie hidden within the structure of our DNA." As we individually "begin to remember who we are, a new consciousness will emerge. [As] soon as this revisioning reaches a critical mass, it will trigger an evolutionary leap to a new human species--the long-awaited, quantumly endowed spiritual human known to ancient cultures as the child of light."

All living beings emit light. Anticipating the latest Russian research in wave-genetics, in the 1920s another Russian scientist, Alexander Gurvich, pioneered the concept of light frequency signaling via "mitogenic rays" in human cells. Later in Germany, Marco Bischof published an influential text entitled Biophotons: The Light in Our Cells. By 1974 German biophysicist Fritz Albert Popp's biophoton theory had confirmed the basic mitogenic hypothesis, demonstrating that DNA is the source of bioluminescence.

In biology circles, more and more attention is being paid to a system known as "biophoton light communication" that appears essential to many regulatory processes in living organisms. The cellular hologram equivalent of the nervous system, this intricate communication network that employs light for data transfer operates far more quickly than the nervous system and may be considered a real-time (parallel-processing) quantum biocomputer allowing for an unmediated electromagnetic interface with the individual's environment.

Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance theory strongly suggests that cellular bioluminescence (which in humans ranges from ultraviolet to infrared) is both personal and transpersonal. In other words, not only is the individual human "networked" with DNA light emitters and receptors; it also appears our entire species is networked morphogenetically much like individual cells that form a larger biological entity: humanity.

This assertion has been substantiated by the Gariaev group, whose findings liken DNA not just to a holographic biocomputer, but to a "biological Internet" that links all human beings. Many native wisdom traditions are based on an equivalent understanding of the universe (human inhabitants included) as a single living being intelligently networked like a biological organism. A similar understanding of the ultimate systemic unity of reality is the absolute foundational concept behind The Law of One.

"Eastern teachings tell us that the living light is encoded in our form," writes Polich. "The ancient concept of the macrocosm as microcosm … tells us that the greater divine [light] is reflected in the human body. Expressed in another manner, this means that … the spiritual human … has encoded within it a divine blueprint." This divine blueprint, which Polich refers to following the kabalistic tradition as the Adam Kadmon, also has been referred to as the lightbody.

Throughout the centuries, the lightbody has been called by many names. Other historical names for the lightbody include the "Diamond Body" and "Jade Body" (Taoism), the "Merkabah" (Kabala), the "Adamantine Body" (Tantra), the "Glorified Body" (Christianity), "Holy Flesh" (Catholicism), the "Superconductive Body" (Vedanta), the "Supercelestial Body" (Sufism), the "Radiant Body" (Neo-Platonism), the "Immortal Body" (Hermeticism), the "Body of Bliss" (Kriya Yoga), the "Perfect Body" (Mithraism), and the "Golden Body" (Emerald Tablets).

According to author and researcher Sai Grafio, who contributed to the foregoing list, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition is the only ancient tradition that actually refers to our ascensional vehicle as the lightbody. It goes almost without saying that the building of any kind of body, "natural" or "supernatural," is accomplished by way of life's building block, DNA, in one form or another.

With great prescience in the middle of the 20th Century, Indian philosopher and holy man Sri Aurobindo referred to the lightbody as the "Divine Body," explaining that it "is indeed as a result of our evolution that we arrive at the possibility of this transformation … Here a slow and tardy change need no longer be the law or manner of our evolution; it will be only so to a greater or lesser extent so long as a mental ignorance clings and hampers our ascent."

In the Bible, the lightbody is referred to as the "Spiritual Body" and the "Wedding Garment." The resurrection and glorification of the body is a central dogma of the Catholic Church, which maintains detailed records of lightbody activations in its strict records used in the canonization process for saints. Perhaps the most famous biblical passage that appears to describe the transformation of the human body into a lightbody occurs in Saint Paul's epistle I Corinthians 15:39-44:

All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.
There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.
There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differs from another star in glory.
So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption.
It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.
It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

James Redfield, Michael Murphy and Sylvia Timbers cite this passage in God and the Evolving Universe: The Next Step in Personal Evolution, a thoughtful and scholarly study of planetary evolution and human potential whose focus--surprising for a National Bestseller--turns out to be "luminous embodiment." In light of our current discussion, one passage from this illuminating book is worth quoting:

[W]e can begin to picture bodily changes that might accompany the further development of our greater attributes, supposing: first, that esoteric accounts of bodily transformation, though frequently fanciful, reflect actual developments of physical structures as yet unrecognized by science; second, that supernormal capacities, like their normal counterparts, require distinctive types of supporting structure and process; and third, that we can extrapolate from physiological changes already revealed by modern research in imagining bodily developments required for high-level change.

Clearly, the lightbody is no starry-eyed, esoteric fantasy, but at the very least a biological possibility--one that, by various indications, gives rise to a radically new "spiritual" biochemistry and genetics that allow for the incarnation of the light of unity consciousness in every cell of the body.

In the profoundly transformational process of lightbody activation, which for many of us is likely to be experienced as a global event sometime around December 21, 2012, it would appear from the esoteric literature that the liquid crystals of cells evolve from primitive hexagonal structures observed in normal human tissues to what have been called "stellar" tetrahedrons. Needless to say, this structural change is extremely consequential for biological expression.

In such a scenario, the hydrogen bond angles of our water molecules literally may broaden and become interlocking tetrahedrons in order to hold more light or photonic energy that partially results from the expanded hydrogen bonds themselves. These structures that form the liquid matrix for the new blood and tissues are thought to resemble three-dimensional Stars of David or molecular merkabahs. Merkabah is an ancient kabalistic word meaning "vehicle of light."

This helps explain the confusion that often has surrounded the merkabah, which sometimes has been taken to denote a type of spaceship. The irony is that the merkabah is a sort of spaceship--and that this spaceship is the individual's genetically activated lightbody.

According to Marciniak, the merkabah "represents the figure of the human being in its most unlimited state--the totally free human … The lightbody is the body that holds the complete mutation of the species. It [can] juggle realities through the shifting of consciousness by intent" like changing channels on a television. In a similar vein, Tashíra Tachí-ren describes the merkabah as a "crystalline Light structure that allows you to pass through space, time, and dimensions, completely in your totality."

Whatever its formal geometry may be, and there are various competing theories on this subject, the lightbody results from and operates through embodied higher light or consciousness. It represents the natural result of a perceptual evolution into enlightenment, based in unity consciousness and unconditional love, that is, by many indications, occurring on a planetary level with gathering speed and power.

From a certain perspective, there is perhaps no such thing as ascension, only "descension" of the light of unity consciousness into physical form. The lightbody also may be, literally, the spaceship that allows us to travel the multi- and transdimensional Black Road through the stars, ultimately all the way back to our Source.

In her own version of cosmological natural selection, Tachí-ren sees "going to Lightbody [as] only a part of a much larger process [in which] all planes and dimensions [merge] back into the Source for this universe, which then merges with other Source-systems, and so on, back to the One." However we define returning home, the lightbody--which itself appears to evolve into even higher expressions over time--is the vehicle that takes us there.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

[In addition to the bestselling and internationally acclaimed Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method (which since its original publication in English in 2005 has been translated into multiple languages), Sol Luckman is author of the groundbreaking Beginner’s Luke Series of six seriocomic novels devoted to exploring--irreverently and often hilariously--the primary role of consciousness and imagination in creating our reality. Sol is also a provocative essayist on literary theory, a visual artist, editor of the popular free ezine DNA Monthly, and cofounder of the Phoenix Center for Regenetics. For more information, visit http://www.phoenixregenetics.org and http://www.beginnersluke.com.]

Part II: Unconditional Love & Human Evolution

Another point related to human evolution that needs emphasizing is that the Shift now occurring is related directly to an increase in cosmic consciousness based in unconditional love. The Shift may be visualized as simultaneously evolution, revolution and, to borrow a term from the Weinholds, "LOVEvolution."

For some, the current global blossoming of consciousness is viewed as a natural process of human evolution. To others, this phenomenon appears more radical, a spontaneous genetic leap forward. Still others believe that this step is merely the bringing forth of what has existed always as a human potential: a revolution back in the direction of wholeness and integration. I trust by now the listener understands that these ways of envisioning our species’ present evolutionary phase are by no means mutually exclusive.

As the term LOVEvolution suggests, many believe that the dawning Age of Light or Age of Consciousness defines itself in relation to our capacity for unconditional love, our ability to transcend enemy patterning and victim consciousness while adopting unity consciousness that sees divinity in all things. From this standpoint, it might be said humans are evolving into a "biologically conscious" species capable of holding and sharing the light of unconditional love. As we will see momentarily, modern scientific research indeed supports the notion that the emotion of love is the key to true healing as well as conscious evolution.

It has been said that long ago, the ancient Maya conceptualized this next evolutionary stage occurring in the years leading up to 2013 as Mastery of Intention. Mastery of Intention appears to be another way of envisioning what I call conscious personal mastery, defined as unconditional love of oneself as simultaneously the Creator and the created extended outward to all perceived others.

Conscious personal mastery is achieved through activation of an embodied unity consciousness capable of infusing biology itself with new structures and possibilities quite outside the box of even much of today's "advanced" thinking about human bio-spiritual potential.

According to Joseph Chilton Pearce in The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit, "Transcendence is our biological imperative, a state we have been moving toward for millennia." The title of another intriguing study by Pearce neatly summarizes the name of the endgame we now are playing: Evolution's End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence.

How does one master intention in order to claim this potential? How does one consciously evolve bodily into "transcendence through immanence"? In other words, how can we best foster conscious personal mastery to facilitate our own metamorphosis, our own transmutation into a higher way of being?

The previously cited research by Bruce Lipton proves that consciousness can reprogram DNA. Our earlier discussion of this topic centered on galactic consciousness, torsion waves spurring human evolution as Earth moves into a denser, brighter and "more conscious" area of the Photon Band. But what role does an individual's consciousness play in this cosmic drama of becoming?


Clairvoyance is unnecessary to see that human consciousness is expanding at a tremendous rate. A trip to the local bookstore demonstrates that consciousness, along with associated terms such as "intention" and "manifestation," has become a cultural buzz word.

It must be emphasized that the exponentially increasing focus on consciousness we are witnessing is not merely a "new age" phenomenon, as some in the old guard have tried to paint it. Popular bestsellers such as Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe and Dr. Larry Dossey's Reinventing Medicine make a clear and compelling case that science is beginning to admit the ancient hermetic principle that Mind is reality's primary building block.

On this subject, renowned psychiatrist Stanislov Grof has written that "modern consciousness research reveals that our psyches have no real or absolute boundaries; on the contrary, we are part of an infinite field of consciousness that encompasses all there is--beyond space-time and into realities we have yet to explore."

Such an expansive view of consciousness also informs Dr. Leonard Horowitz's review of the science of quantum holography in DNA: Pirates of the Sacred Spiral, where he reminds us not only that a unified field of consciousness exists, but also that it "may be explained as emerging from a previously overlooked physical vacuum or energy matrix." From a human perspective, based on mounting evidence I barely have touched on, this nonlocal energy field functions through quantum connections between DNA and universal creative consciousness or torsion energy.

On much the same wavelength, in The Divine Matrix Braden examines the vast implications of three genetic experiments conducted between 1992 and 2000 that "shatter" the old materialistic paradigm on which traditional Newtonian science, and the resulting mechanical view of the body as a machine isolated from mind and spirit, are based.

The first of these experiments was Gariaev and Poponin's discovery of the "DNA Phantom Effect," which proves, to quote Braden, that: 1) "A type of energy exists that has previously gone unrecognized"; and 2) "Cells/DNA influence matter through this form of energy." (I engage in a more thorough discussion of this mind-blowing Effect in Chapter Twelve of Conscious Healing.)

The second experiment, reported in the journal Advances, was performed by the United States Army in the tradition of similar experiments conducted by Cleve Backster. The Army's experiment clearly demonstrated that the connection between DNA and emotion continues intact following physical separation between a person's DNA (sampled from inside the person's mouth) and the actual person experiencing the emotion.

In Braden's words, this experiment suggests that 1) "A previously unrecognized form of energy exists between living tissues"; 2) "Cells and DNA communicate through this field of energy"; 3) "Human emotion has a direct influence on living DNA"; and 4) "Distance appears to be of no consequence with regard to the effect."

The third and final experiment cited by Braden is the extraordinary research of cell biologist Glen Rein on the impact of coherent human emotion on DNA. Here, DNA inside human cells was isolated in a glass beaker and then analyzed (chemically and visually) in order to determine the impact of clearly sustained emotions, negative and positive, on genetic material as well as expression. According to Dr. Rein, "These experiments revealed that different intentions produced different effects on the DNA molecule causing it to either wind or unwind."

Rein and his colleagues discovered that anger, fear and similar emotions have the power to "unwind" the DNA molecule, literally decompressing and killing it. On the other hand, emotions such as joy, gratitude and love "wind" or compress DNA exposed to them, making DNA stronger and healthier.

According to Rein's data, it even may be possible for positive emotions rooted in love to revive or resurrect DNA apparently destroyed by negative emotions--an astounding phenomenon with truly enormous implications. Lest the skeptical listener dismiss this possibility, let us ponder the related implications of Gariaev's assertion that "research in wave-genetics … reveals potential applications with significant prospects for solving issues regarding the aging process and thus increasing life expectancy. This view is solidly grounded in [experimental] evidence."

Rein's findings on the impact of coherent emotion on DNA can help us answer the critical question of how to participate consciously in our own evolution in a very specific manner. His research makes a direct connection between life-giving torsion energy and uplifting emotions, particularly unconditional love, the most "coherent" of all emotions, indicating that love promotes healing and also literally may propel evolution.

Only the love-based emotions stimulate DNA to wind and become healthier and thus more capable of interacting productively with environmental stimuli. Hatred, depression, boredom and the like cause DNA to unwind, destroying the viability of genetic information necessary for healing as well as evolution.

In keeping with Rein's research, Barbara Marciniak in Path of Empowerment writes that "genuine feelings of love and appreciation for your body convey a positive message containing essential life-sustaining signals that result in excellent health." In direct contrast, maintaining "feelings of doom and despair, loneliness, helplessness, denial, anger, resentment, jealousy, greed, and fear conveys a negative message that promotes discord within the physical functions of the body." Marciniak concludes that the "ability to both give and receive love … holds the true key to healing because it is the most life-sustaining and affirming form of emotional expression."

Rein’s brilliant research, supported by Marciniak's inspired keys for surviving and thriving in a chaotic world in the process of transformation, indicates that the single most important factor in our personal evolution is our commitment to open ourselves to our own healing by giving and receiving the primary torsion wave known as unconditional love.


Appropriately, Wilcock's evolutionary model, founded in The Law of One, is crystal clear on the point that Earth and humans are evolving from a logos anchored in the third dimension to an existence rooted in fourth-dimensional, heart-based consciousness.

In The Biology of Transcendence, Pearce advances a hypothesis supporting this radical assertion based on the little-known fact that humans actually possess four neural centers in addition to the brain. One of these, currently in a state of development, is the "brain" located in and around the heart. Not surprisingly, the fourth or "heart" chakra, linked to the fourth "density" in The Law of One, typically is associated with Christ consciousness or unconditional love.

It is crucial that we understand the evolutionary engine behind this momentous developmental stage for our species, unconditional love, not as a weak abstraction, but as an omnipotent creational force of torsion energy that birthed--as it is still birthing--everything in the multiverse, including ourselves.

Unconditional love is named aptly because the creative principle of love places no conditions on its creations, allowing for the exercise of free will in the upward karmic spiral of evolving human consciousness. The Bible sums up this foundational concept in three words: God is love. For the ancient Egyptians and Maya, to cite but two examples, such infinite love associated with the life-giving feminine principle emanates from Galactic Center, also called the Central or Healing Sun.

Today this Core of our galaxy is thought by most scientists to be a black hole of massive proportions: the equivalent of as many as 4 million of our suns, or more. For decades it was believed black holes destroy everything that falls into them. Not too long ago, however, physicist Stephen Hawking performed an abrupt about-face when he was quoted as saying, "It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape."

If we understand "information" to include hyperdimensional torsion-wave codes that create and modify life such as those that find expression meta-genetically via transposons in DNA, life indeed may originate, as whole civilizations of ancients claimed, from black holes.

Alternatively, it is possible that Galactic Center contains not only a black hole, but also a "white hole." In the words of investigative mythologist William Henry, "Of all the high-energy photons beamed at us by the Core, probably none are more puzzling than those emitted in gamma ray bursts. Astrophysicists speculate these bursts are coming from a white hole, a 'cosmic gusher' of matter and energy … [W]hatever a black hole can devour, a white hole can spit out. These white holes precisely conform to the image the ancients held of the center of our galaxy."

In Chinese the character for "crisis," "wei-chi," also means "opportunity." Writing on this subject in Terra Christa years ago, Ken Carey wisely observed, as if referencing the exact period of history we now are experiencing, "IF THERE IS A MEGACRISIS, THERE IS ALSO A MEGAOPPORTUNITY."

"Within a larger framework of reality," writes Marciniak, "a crisis can be thought of as a meeting of minds at the crossroads of opportunity--a juncture where you recognize exactly where you are and consciously choose the best possible outcome for where you are going."

The crisis, as well as the opportunity, of our time is to surrender the controlling aspects of our ego and its conditioned fear mechanisms to the primary torsion energy of unconditional love that is seeking to evolve us and is calling us as a species home.

This "home" may be simply a state of awareness that transcends duality and consciously exists in a multidimensional continuum. Wilcock sees "returning home" as a dimensional Shift referred to in the Bible as Ascension and in The Law of One as the "Harvest," in both cases envisioned as a spontaneous metamorphosis or transmutation involving consciousness as well as biology similar to what happened to Jesus in the Resurrection.

"There is a parallel in the Shroud of Turin," Wilcock notes, "where certain researchers have found that Jesus' body burned a complete three-dimensional image of itself into the cloth." Through experimentation it was determined that "such a burn could only be caused by an instantaneous blast at a very high temperature, 'zapping' the cloth like an X-ray."

Others also visualize returning home in terms of a radical Shift. Barbara Hand Clow has remarked that, in the final analysis, all dilemmas are perceptual--which implies that all solutions are perceptual as well. This sentiment is echoed by Judith Bluestone Polich in Return of the Children of Light, where humanity is described as standing on the brink of a collective perceptual "awakening. As the cosmic cycles of time are telling us, it is the time for a major turn upon the spiral path of evolving human consciousness, when the light that has descended into matter begins the ascent back to its origin."

The preceding quote also suggests that the home to which we have been referring may indicate some other place entirely. The 2012 alignment of the December solstice sun with Galactic Center creates what some ancients called the Black Road. It is conceivable we are meant to follow the Black Road home to our "transdimensional" Source, where we experience a state of being that altogether transcends this holographic reality composed of various "frequency domains," dimensions, or densities.

After all, a white hole is basically a black hole reversed. The two are thought to meet at their small ends like a pair of funnels. Mathematically, it should be possible to enter a black hole and emerge from a white hole in a completely new universe.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

[In addition to the bestselling and internationally acclaimed Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method (which since its original publication in English in 2005 has been translated into multiple languages), Sol Luckman is author of the groundbreaking Beginner’s Luke Series of six seriocomic novels devoted to exploring--irreverently and often hilariously--the primary role of consciousness and imagination in creating our reality. Sol is also a provocative essayist on literary theory, a visual artist, editor of the popular free ezine DNA Monthly, and cofounder of the Phoenix Center for Regenetics. For more information, visit http://www.phoenixregenetics.org and http://www.beginnersluke.com.]