When the author was four years old, he was sitting on a coloured carpet, playing with building blocks. Through an open window he could see a cloudless blue sky. His mother was sitting in a chair watching him at play. Suddenly the child looked up and gazing through the window at the blue heavens, spontaneously asked his mother: “Where is God? Is he in heaven? Does he float there? Or is he sitting there? Where?
His mother sat up straight and gave the following answer, which has held true for the child ever after: “God is present everywhere. We know that even though we cannot see the air, it penetrates everything – and it is only thanks to the air that we can live and breathe. In this same way we live and breathe in God. And since it is in God that we live and breathe, it is from God and thanks to God that we live.
This answer, so clear and convincing, was like a breath of fresh air that ever blew away any conundrums on this question, leaving behind always the certainty of God’s invisible presence everywhere. And it has been said that this seed-thought was to flourish into the heights and depths and breaths, proving to be the primal seed from which a many branched tree of insight and faith unfolded over the following decades of the author’s life.
The wind bloweth where it listeth,
and thou hearest the sound thereof,
but canst not tell whence it cometh,
and whither it goeth:
so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
(John iii. 8)
The miracle of the transformation of water into wine at Cana of Galilee
The healing of the nobleman’s son
The healing of the thirty eight year old paralyzed man
The feeding of the five thousand
The walking on water
The healing of the man born blind
The raising of Lazarus
Interesting accounts have been given by various people of their meetings – on a spiritual level – with the author of these works. One such account can be found in the preface to Healing into Immortality, by the New York psychiatrist Gerald Epstein, who describes there an experience in 1974 while he was with his teacher in Jerusalem drinking tea in her garden. A thin bespectacled gentleman walking by stopped for a moment and said in a booming voice:
“It reminds me of the days of the prophecies.”
His next encounter with this stranger was in January 1986 in the Paraclete Bookshop in New York. He was interested in mental imagery and had selected several volumes. He was about to pay for them when this same stranger, without saying a word, picked up each book in turn and laid it down again, as if to say “This is not it; this is not it.” Then the stranger pointed to a copy of Meditations on the Tarot. Dr. Epstein decided to buy this book and forego the others. He went to the door of the bookshop to thank the stranger, who had just left. When he got outside the stranger was gone.
When he began reading it, his life was changed. A stream of inspiration began to flow and his questions began to be answered inwardly.
from The Wandering Fool by Robert Powell
