_In his own words, Dr. Ron Scolastico described how he

_discovered his ability to access the source of wisdom from which, for 37 years he gave readings, workshops and Retreats and wrote 10 books:

"I first learned to make a deep connection to spiritual realities in the 1970s, just after I completed my Ph.D. degree in Humanistic Psychology and Human Communications at a large Midwestern university. At that time, even though I was pleased about my academic pursuits, I was very troubled about life. I worried a lot about the state of the world. I saw so much negativity around me (social conflict, poverty, crime, individuals being cruel and unkind to one another) that I was discouraged about the possibility of people ever healing their differences and coming together in understanding.

Yet, my most troubling problem was that I had no ongoing source of inspiration to give me hope about life. Although I had studied psychology, philosophy, and spiritual studies for many years, and even though I had been practicing meditation for ten years at that point, I had never directly experienced the deep, ongoing beauty of the spiritual realm. I had only read about it in books. I had never broken through the barriers of ordinary human experience to verify the existence of spiritual realities for myself. I had never gone beyond the limits of the physical world, except, in one instance, and that was very frightening.

I was eight years old. It was a warm summer afternoon, and I was lying on my bed, reading a book. All of a sudden, I began to feel like I was expanding. I seemed to be growing larger than my body. I started to swell and fill up my room. I felt like I was a huge ball of awareness, and I seemed to be floating near the ceiling. In terror, I jumped up out of bed, which snapped me back into my body, and I ran out of my room.

That experience was so frightening that I immediately forced it out of my mind. So, from that time, to the period of my inner struggles in the 70's, I had blocked out the memory of that disturbing childhood experience. As far as I was consciously aware, I had always been limited to my ordinary perceptions of life.

During my difficult period at the university, I was also struggling with a feeling of disconnectedness in my personal life. None of the wisdom that I had gained from all of my studies seemed to help with the feeling of emptiness that I had inside. I was not creating deep relationships with the people around me. Also, even though I was planning to teach in a university, I had no real enthusiasm about the prospect. Actually, I felt like I really had no purpose in my life.

At that point, I met a fascinating woman, named Lina, who gave "psychic readings." Even though I considered an intellectual study of spiritual realities to be a valid pursuit for intelligent people, at that time, because of a certain academic snobbishness that I had developed, I felt that most psychics were, at best, ignorant, and, at worst, downright charlatans who took money from the gullible. Yet, somehow, one cold winter evening, I found myself trudging off through the snow to have a reading with this intriguing woman.

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Yet, even though I felt that the source of these speakings was simply me, talking in a relaxed state, each time I did a period of this speaking, I felt a deep sense of peace. It was very pleasant. More so than my meditation experience that preceded the speaking. So, I continued to do this "thinking out loud" every day.

After a few months of this practice, I began to have some unusual experiences. My voice suddenly took on a different sound, along with a strange accent. Then, I began to speak information about friends that seemed to help them. Still, I felt that what was being said during these speaking sessions was coming from my own mind, conscious or unconscious. Even though I was beginning to experience some deep feelings of inner opening stirring within me as I learned to make adjustments that allowed me to release more and more into the speaking process, I continued to be skeptical about my ability to tap into a spiritual source of wisdom.

For several months, I made tapes of my speaking for various friends, always alone in the privacy of my room. Then, one day, Lina convinced me that I needed to do a "live" session for her. Although I was reluctant, and somehow embarrassed by the idea of sitting in front of another person talking in a strange voice, I finally agreed to give it a try. This turned out to be the opening that would launch me into a new career.

As I sat down at Lina¹s house to do my first formal "reading," I was very nervous. I procrastinated and made excuses for a while. Lina encouraged me by entering her deep state of consciousness to give me some suggestions on how to begin. With that prompting, I was finally able to start the speaking for her.

At first, there was a general statement made about Lina¹s life. This was followed by a period where Lina asked questions and I responded with answers. During all of this, I felt the same as I did in my daily private speakings.

After my initial nervousness, I became deeply relaxed and began to feel the sense of peacefulness that always came during the speakings. Yet, as far as I could tell, the words being spoken to Lina appeared to be coming from my own mind.

Then, something quite unusual began to happen. A very strange sensation of lightness started to infuse my entire body. I began to feel as if I could just float away from my body. I seemed to be as light as air.

This was followed by a very strong feeling of being expanded. I seemed to be growing larger, going beyond what I had always felt to be me. Instead of my normal feeling of being inside my body, I was becoming an expanding, free floating awareness that began
to fill the entire room. What was so amazing to me was that I had no part in creating this experience. It was happening to me spontaneously, as if the experience was being given to me by something beyond myself.

As this feeling of expansion continued, I began to experience a most profound feeling of love. I was astonished by the depth of this love. I had never before felt anything like it. It seemed as if everything in life was being permeated by this unbelievable love.
_ On that walk, I had a strange experience that set into motion a most profound transformation in my life. As I was making my way through a lightly falling snow, comfortably snuggled under the hood of my down jacket, I started wondering why I was wasting my time on a psychic reading. I stopped for a minute and considered forgetting the whole thing and going back home.

Instead, I looked around at the beauty of the still, cold night. I began to feel touched by the tranquility of the gently falling snow as it sparkled in the street light. Then I glanced up and saw a full moon, brilliant and majestic against the black sky.

At that moment, I was simply staring at the moon, without any particular thoughts in my mind, when I suddenly began to feel a slight tingling in my body. Then I noticed that my awareness seemed to be expanding, becoming larger. My vision was growing strangely acute, giving everything I saw a mysterious new brilliance. I began to feel extremely alert, and particularly sensitive to everything around me.

What followed was a most profound feeling of exhilaration that seemed to fill my entire being. I felt very warm and intensely alive, as though everything around me was infused with this stimulating "energy" that seemed to be flowing through me.

As I stood motionless in the snow, I seemed to be caught in a most amazing moment. I felt deeply touched by the pure, unending beauty of life. I was suspended in a timeless experience, enveloped in a deeply moving energy of love, waiting with intense anticipation to see what the next moment would bring. I had an overwhelming feeling that something very important was about to happen to me.

Then, a most powerful thought instantly appeared in my mind. It was so dramatically different from my own way of thinking that it seemed as if came from somewhere beyond myself. The thought was: "This is a night that will change your life."

Feeling confused and a bit disoriented by this unusual experience, I quickly made my way to Lina's house. By the time I arrived, because of my habitual skepticism and my mistrust of anything that I could not grasp with my intellect, I had convinced myself that the unusual experience in the moonlight was nothing more than my imagination.

Yet, in spite of my skepticism and misgivings, the reading with Lina was a deeply moving experience for me. She helped my identify the source of the nagging emptiness that I had been feeling. With her help, I saw that I had closed myself emotionally because of past pain and suffering that I had experienced. I had learned to hide behind my intellect in order not to feel my emotional pain.

Her reading also helped me recognize the first stirrings of a spiritual experience. It was very subtle, and I was not clear about what it was at the time, but I had an inner feeling of something warm and loving beginning to open within me.

As I had more readings with Lina, we became good friends. Then, she introduced me to another woman, Cora, who did similar readings. In a matter of months, working with the wise counsel
that I received from readings with these two women, I made some very deep emotional openings. Touched by the wisdom of their work, and moved by the personal sensitivity and kindness of Lina and Cora, I began to experience more love in my day to day life. I was even feeling more hopeful about the general state of the world.

Then, in one reading with Cora, I was shocked when I was told that I had the ability to enter a deep state of consciousness, draw upon a spiritual source of wisdom, and give guidance to others by speaking from that deep state. Indeed, her reading informed me that I had "promised" to do such work in this lifetime.

At that time, I was in my late thirties, and I was convinced that I had no such ability. So, I was skeptical about what I was told. Yet, since I had come to trust Cora¹s readings, I decided to conduct an experiment to test myself. I set up a tape recorder beside the chair where I meditated each morning. Then, every day, after my meditation, with my eyes closed, and trying to stay in the meditative state, I would reach over, turn on the tape recorder, and begin to speak my thoughts out loud.

I would usually talk for ten minutes or so. Then, I would come out of the meditative state and listen to the tape to see if anything was said that went beyond what I consciously knew. I was not surprised to find that these meditation speakings seemed to be nothing more than my own thoughts and ideas spoken by me in an ordinary way.
_ Even the skeptical part of me was overwhelmed by the astounding experience of being expanded by this love. It was absolutely clear that this was not my imagination. Something startlingly real was happening to me. The feeling of love was so intense that I was filled with tears of joy. I was amazed when I realized that I had entered a realm of existence beyond ordinary reality.

For a while, I was completely caught up in this most astonishing experience. My voice had stopped speaking to Lina when the experience began, so I was drifting silently in a remarkable world of vast beauty and love. My physical body was gone. I was floating about as a vibrant, enlightened totality of awareness.

I have no idea how long this amazing state of expansion lasted. I had lost all awareness of my physical body. Then, suddenly I felt a strong force of energy pushing out from within me, and my voice began to speak to Lina again.

But, as my voice spoke, it was very different from all of the "talking out loud" that I had done in the past. Now, the words that were coming forth were not mine. They were being chosen by something beyond my own conscious awareness. They were somehow being placed into me by a source that was profoundly wise and loving. The words seemed to be spoken through me in a way that felt wonderful and sublime.

Since I was not deciding what was being said, I heard only one word at a time as my voice spoke. Thus, I had no idea of what was going to be said until a sentence was completed.

I listened in total fascination at what the words were telling Lina. They began by explaining to her that the long silence that had just occurred was due to the fact that I had left my physical body. Then, the voice told Lina that it had been necessary for my consciousness to leave my body so that I could draw upon a vast realm of truth that I was now tapping into. She was told that I was being infused with a tremendous energy of universal wisdom and love that would help me in my personal growth, and in my ability to tap into this source of wisdom in the future.

Then, the voice told her something that shook me to my depths.. It said: "The experience of expansion that Ron is now having was first implanted in him when he was eight years old so that it could be returned to him at this time so that he would believe."

The voice continued to speak to Lina, but I was so stunned by what had been said that I heard nothing else that was spoken. I was suddenly remembering that long-ago forgotten experience of my eight-year-old self, and I realized that it was the same experience that was happening to me now. All at once, any sense of past and present collapsed. There was only the brilliance of the moment in which that past experience of the eight-year-old child was now merged with my incredible experience of love and expansion in the present moment. In that moment, I realized that the two experiences that were now fusing into one were the only times in my life that I had ever consciously broken through the boundaries of physical reality. I had gone beyond the physical world into an amazing non-physical reality of majesty, wisdom, and love, and I longed to go deeper.

After that experience with Lina, I discovered that in my meditation period each day, I was loosening my consciousness in a way that was bringing me closer and closer to the doorway to the spiritual realms. I began to do face to face speaking sessions for other people similar to the one I had done for Lina. As I did these sessions day after day, my inner experience deepened, and I learned to make the delicate adjustments of consciousness that allowed me to enter the spiritual dimensions of reality to draw upon the vast source of knowledge and wisdom.

Not only was my personal experience growing richer and fuller from this work, but the people for whom I did these speaking sessions seemed to be genuinely touched and benefited by what they were given. The sessions were providing them with valuable information about their personality and their life that went far beyond my own conscious knowledge.

Since these beginning experiences many years ago, I have entered the spiritual realms thousands of times to provide information and guidance for thousands of individuals throughout the world. I have created numerous books and audio tapes of wisdom that have been helpful for many people. It has been a great joy for me to see so many people use these books and tapes and their individual readings to bring about beneficial and meaningful changes in their lives."

From Dr. Scolastico's book, Doorway to the Soul, How to Have A Profound Spiritual Experience