The Color of Your Soul

By David CH Park

The Color of Your Soul is a 91,000 word non-fiction book about what it means for a regular guy to become enlightened. “Enlightened” is a term that I do not use in the book (or elsewhere), however, it applies. I remember being faced with enlightenment when an old girlfriend said that her intention was to become “fully enlightened” in this lifetime. I realized that I had no idea at the time what this meant.

When I asked Fr. Alan Clute, someone whom I trusted and thought would have something to say about this question, he said that the state of enlightenment is one in which everything flows effortlessly. I have since learned that this view is accurate, but it only conveys a part of the truth, which is all that any single word or short phrase can be expected to do.

My awareness of flow brings me to realize that my senses of beauty and effortlessness come out of and are intimately connected to my sense of flow and to each other. Beauty and choice are also linked. Beyond flow, the state of enlightenment also has the sense of being a part of the universe in a way that is not confining or constraining in any way. It doesn’t control me or dictate my actions. So that you may always choose and that choice may have no effect on the ultimate outcome, nevertheless, each choice can be critically important.

This is freeing in that I am fully free to create whatever I want in life - I truly can and do create everything that I experience without fearing that my choice might impact other people's choices. The universe (other people) gets what it (they) want and need. My choice won't change what they get. It will only impact whether and in what way I can be a part of what they get. Whether I connect with them in their creation or not, it is my choice - if I'm not there, someone else will be. So I can be free to create and become what I need and want.

Furthermore, I find that truth leads to more truth and that everything is connected. Ironically, I find that everything is connected by being open to the possibility that nothing is connected or that things are only loosely connected. I conclude that things are connected because it opens me to further truth. Being connected is a discovered truth. I don’t assume that things are connected to begin with. I discover that they are connected.

Thus, I conclude certain things about myself and my experience based on my experience, not the other way around. For example, the experience that everything that can be created has been created - that all things exist in God already - is not only a felt experience, it is seen and felt to be equivalent to the idea that we are the pinnacle of creation and that we expand God through our enjoyment. Not only is it true that we can expand God, we must expand God and this expansion is linked with the realization that all things that can exist already do exist in God. Apparently diametrically opposed ideas are found to actually be the same, larger idea. Not only that, they contain and reflect each other and they also contain notions of flow, beauty, and truth.

I provide tools, including meditation, shamanism, and Huna, with which anyone may do the same thing. None of these tools is hidden, special, or secret. However, using them does require you to be honest, most importantly, with yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David CH Park
• Release date: Aug 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476342221

David CH Park

David holds two BS degrees from MIT, an MPS from NYU, and an MS from Carnegie Mellon University. The joke is that he graduated from CMU with an ABD (All But Dissertation). Nevertheless, he learned how to create new knowledge – arguably what PhD degrees are all about. He has over 30 years of study and practice of leadership in academia and various organizations from small startups to large, well established firms, as well as in the US Army. David also has a lifelong interest in meditation and spirituality. He brings considerable insight and scientific training to his explorations of existence and as a result, has developed a unique and straightforward take on many esoteric topics. He was consciously aware throughout near-death experiences that resulted from strokes in 2008 and again in 2012. As detailed elsewhere, the two experiences were different but valuable. Lessons from these near death experiences continue to unfold for him and deepen his appreciation and understanding of life on a daily basis. His work comes from an abiding interest in human potential. David offers personal support and coaching services for individuals, couples, and groups. As a coach, he focuses on supporting clients in recognizing and trusting their own deepest wisdom as a means to transcend difficulties and heal the wounds from which they arise. He has successfully coached clients through professional and job related crises, relationship issues, and personal success difficulties, as well as personal growth challenges. He also leads classes and workshops on various topics including shamanism and Huna. As we grow as human beings, we realize that all of the different facets of our lives are intimately connected, so that healing one area often benefits others as well.

Book preview

The Color of Your Soul

by

David CH Park

Copyright David CH Park 2012

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Cover image: Morning Glory Interior by audreyjm529, Audrey, http://www.flickr.com/photos/audreyjm529/202888934/sizes/o/

Table of Contents

Introduction

Section I: Tools I Have Used

Chapter I: What came from my near-death experiences

Chapter II: Meditation — Clarity in the moment

Chapter III: Shamanism — Going beyond the moment

Chapter IV: Huna — Making sense of what is there

The intelligence that manages or creates the effect

The force that is used to create the effect

The means to deliver the effect

Chapter V: Putting it all together

Section II: What Came From Using the Tools & Things I Am Working On

Chapter VI: Learning as a serious obligation

Chapter VII: Seek joy

Chapter VIII: Getting there from here

Chapter IX: Feeling vs. emotion

Chapter X: Being and doing

Chapter XI: A parallel structure

Chapter XII: Using the parallel structure

Chapter XIII: Stroke and witnessing myself in process

Chapter XIV: Warrior romance

Chapter XV: You have everything you need

Chapter XVI: What comes next

EndNotes

Send Feedback So I Can Improve This Book

About the Author

Appendix A: Words we use when our needs are met

Appendix B: Words we use when our needs are not met

Appendix C: Words we use when we interpret others

Glossary

Sources

Introduction

I have been honing my sense of what is out there for most of my life, almost in spite of myself. Along the way, I have learned that what we have available to us is available to all. I am not special. What I can do, everyone can do. We are not special because we each have a different being living within us, waiting to be heard and expressed. We are special in that we each have the same being inside of us waiting to be expressed in a new, different way. We are unique in how we say what we have to say, not what we have to say.

The truth is the truth, is the truth, regardless of who says it. However, my expression of the truth is different from yours. It must be as long as it is original. This is the strength and the beauty of the truth. It’s as if we each come to the same truth from different angles and we have accordingly different views of the same truth. Our expressions differ because our experiences differ, but they all go to the same center.

I find that I am strengthened by the truth in many ways. One of these is that the more honest I am with myself and those around me — the more I hold with the truth, no matter what it might be — the more that truth resonates with other people. The more people show up to hear the truth and the more they support each other in telling their own truth to the people they are close with.

In keeping with this idea, I remember that I had my first out-of-body experience when I was fifteen years old. At the time, I didn’t have anyone to talk with about it. I had no idea what to think, what is true, or how to relate with what I experienced. I naturally sought out religious leaders, but the ones I found were ignorant of what such experiences meant or of what they held.

I started my religious life following in my mother’s footsteps. She had my brother and me taken to Presbyterian church each Sunday for several years. This was the same religion she learned as a child. I was baptized in the Presbyterian church, and remember creating little rituals to prove my devotion, like kissing a bible whenever it touched the ground or a floor. It was deeply disturbing to realize that those around me seemed to have no idea at all of what I had experienced nor of how it affected me.

My first encounter with another way of thinking didn’t happen until I was twelve or thirteen years old, when I came across a copy of The Chariots of the Gods? It was wholly revelatory for me. I had never considered before that a perfectly reasonable person could look at the same evidence that I had and come to radically different conclusions from ones I had been trained to find.

My father was no more help in this than my mother had been. He had been raised Buddhist, but didn’t really have much to share with me about truth or the nature or condition of enlightenment. However, he was very forthcoming about his Christian friends in Korea, back in college. They were amazing! Their religion gave them strength! Buddhism never did that for me.

For him, being Christian meant being closer to the mystery central to life. Many years later (after he’d died) I learned that not only was he a closet mystic, many of the principles upon which he’d based the creation of his fortune were grounded in ideas from Seth, Napoleon Hill, James Allen, and others. Nevertheless, he was thoroughly Christian and felt strongly — and demonstrated — that Christian principles and New Age ideas are not incompatible.

Left to fend for myself, I studied the great masters of the sciences and the arts — those individuals who had made truly creative contributions to their fields and all of humankind. I found that they had a common calling. They all spoke about the primacy of honoring their personal senses of the truth over anything that anyone else had to say. They didn’t uniformly pooh-pooh what others had to say, but they all paid heed to themselves, first. I embraced that wholeheartedly and based my entire life on it.

I pursued this calling, defining truth in my own terms, throughout my teen years and early twenties. In college, it came as no surprise when a professor whom I had, who taught a course in creativity and ran a modern dance company, spoke of the same idea. She used a book called, The Creative Mind, which drew from creative geniuses throughout history from all fields. It came to the same conclusions. I was similarly unsurprised when a Nobel prize-winning physics professor said in front of an entire class, that we should never "accept anything anyone says unless it makes sense to you, even me."

After college, though, without really understanding or even noticing it, I came to embrace the idea of becoming rich before I really explored or expressed my interest in truth or enlightenment. This way (or so the argument went and I acceded), I would be proof against anything that the world had to throw at me since I would be able to support myself regardless of how the world felt about me.

What I didn’t see at the time was that for me to embrace the idea of planning for the worst, some part of who I was had to believe that the worst would happen. I had to accept that these things had reality and importance and that their reality determined my own. We spend no time or energy worrying about an end to the universe as we know it because doing so would be a waste. It would say more about who we were, giving credence to the worry, than it would about the world. In a similar fashion, I was carrying with me the very thing that I was most afraid of.

My sense is that holding with anything that is not true gives that thing reality and that the only reason that we receive them in our lives is that we are prepared to receive them. I have observed that we create the reality that we live in through our reactions, interactions, and expectations. This question then gives rise to, What is true? But I am getting ahead of myself.

I now see my time following college as a period of about fifteen years in which I embraced a lie. I tried to lie to myself so that I would accept the lie more easily. It was my hope to make the story I was handing myself (and others) seem more true. To the extent that it was true, I now see that it was real, if only because it was real to me.

The lie I told myself was that it was more important to conform with the crowd than with what I felt was true. I told myself that if I was the only one I knew who seemed to think a certain way, then I had to be wrong. Truth was determined by whatever I found others around me saying. This is not what I told myself nor how I saw myself or truth, but it is how I behaved. It was incumbent upon me to not only find out what the group was saying and hold with it, it was furthermore important for me to police myself and others to ensure that they also held with what the crowd said.

Notice that your attitudes say a lot about who you are and whether you are open to what shows up in life. They say a lot about who you expect yourself to be and thus, who you can become. I would implore you to be open to possibilities and to be ready to reconsider your own (as well as my) beliefs and reality. Only in the face of such shared, open honesty can we hope to make progress together toward truth.

Two ways in which this period stands out are the lie and a degree of financial success. In nodding toward financial success, I imagined myself to be bloodied and bruised, having battled through to moderate success. I imagined a brass ring that I could variously grab or run through that was nevertheless bloodied by my efforts. It didn’t matter to me how bad I got nor the ring, as long as I was able to get through it.

In actuality, I added more than forty pounds to my weight, I was losing sleep, and my physical health crashed. I remember walking out of my office once during this time at the end of the day and saying to myself that it had only been 12 hours — a short day! During this time, not only did my aerobic fitness fall off, but my hypertension grew so much it prevented me from giving blood and raised flags with my physician. I had always had borderline hypertension, but now it increased to dangerous levels, setting me up for the illnesses to follow, including strokes.

I remember sitting in the car, in the dark, with a friend on more than one occasion at this time. I was afraid to go home, dreading what I would find there — absolute nothingness. My wife didn't understand me. This was my first wife, of course. You may ask how well anyone can know anyone else and you would be in very august company. Nevertheless, I find that my second wife, Mia, understands me infinitely better than my first wife ever did. At the time, I refused to even understand myself. I recall feeling and talking about being trapped in my marriage and life. I felt that the only way forward called for me to completely eliminate my life as I understood it. I was right, of course. This is the same choice that we always have before us, but I was too afraid to even look very closely at what was before me, much less than to do something about it.

Though I didn’t understand it at the time, my sense of fear and failure was the only thing that kept me on the straight and narrow and that moved me along that path. I was afraid to be myself, even with my wife, and to be clear about what success was to me. I found myself at a loss to explain myself and forced to accede to her wants, as I understood them.

Of course, any question or mismatch between her wants and how I understood them never came up. Neither did any question about what I wanted nor about what she wanted in life. The further question of what we could create in life together never even came up. It was never even a possibility. I never asked her those questions. I never asked myself those questions. Neither of us would have known the questions were possible, much less what our answers would be at that time.

I was afraid of myself and the choices I had made. They had led me to the left coast and greater financial success than I’d known before, but they had also led me to cripple myself. They had even led me to question my ability to convey my sense of the truth — to even speak of what I felt the truth was. I felt unable to express myself and be understood, which was, of course, my fear — that I would be eternally misunderstood.

Eventually I met a venerated, older programmer in a consulting firm who seemed to be one of the only people who knew what to do with his company stocks. It was easy. — The writing was on the walls, he said, smiling, and shrugged. Nevertheless, no one else seemed to know what he did nor why. He was a deacon in the Liberal Catholic church (destined to become a priest there). He was certified in Reiki and was married to a woman who had introduced him to the church and who also had extensive shamanic training. The shamanic work really opened my eyes to what was possible. He was instrumental in showing me again that the universe is a wonderful place.

In what follows, I assume that the admonition I have heard from some teachers that you should not try to give someone more than he (or she) is ready for, is either wrong or leaves out vital information. I choose to adhere instead to what others (including Abrahamic and other traditions) have done — make everything available and let the reader (or listener) take home what he (or she) can.

I assume that each person will hear (or in this case, read) what he (or she) needs to hear and ignore the rest. Of course, this may mean that as you climb the spiral, you find lessons similar to ones you encountered before. When this happens, you simply have an opportunity to take from them newer or deeper things when they come around again. For instance, my friend, Diane, swears that her experience of a set of books is different now than it was when she first encountered them. She learned from them each time, but in her experience, they not only taught her different things at different times, they were different books.

I don’t claim to present anyone with something that will change as you grow subtler. However, I will claim not to pull any punches. I will present the things that I have learned and the things I have learned from as plainly as I can. I also promise to present things I am currently learning from. We each have a chance to learn from each other and to create together. That's often how we create together — by learning together, which calls us to be open to learning from each other. This, in turn, I find, calls for honesty — at minimum, with myself and with anyone who asks directly. In fact, I can and do invite others to create in honesty with me. I may nor be always successful, but I promise to always try. In this, I differ from some (though not all).

I promise to also focus on what is present. In this respect also, I will not pull punches. My wife, Mia, says that many take me to be too harsh. I have considered this and continue to take it to heart every time I hear it (and many times that I don’t). What I see is that what some see as harshness, I see as directness and honesty. I have asked myself how I can be direct and honest and less harsh at the same time. I'm not sure that it's possible. It has occurred to me that although they call it harshness, they may even think of it as harshness. However, maybe they (or their Egos or their training) really mean to suppress honesty. If anyone has suggestions, I would be glad to hear them. For what it may be worth, I have found in my own experience that I don’t benefit from a lesson unless I am fully honest with myself about what it is and what it has in it.

In many ways, my directness and honesty are acknowledgements that the other person is mature. He (she) is mature enough in himself (herself) to see the truth. Neither he nor I gain anything from concealing that truth and in fact, we are diminished by concealing it. Considering that I would rather walk away from a person and relationship that is consciously or deliberately dishonest (and have done so and would do so again), such honesty and forthrightness really is (at least in part) a blessing and an honor. I am not the final arbiter of honesty, nor would I try to be, but to the extent that I am honest with you, we have a chance to find what is true, together.

By the same token, I have learned that when I try to protect my ego (Ego) and respond to my fears, frustrations, concerns, etc., instead of listening to what I have to tell myself or what you have to say, I don’t serve my highest self. I find that I become engrossed very easily in what I think about things outside of myself and forget what the things around me have to tell me about who I am and how I experience myself.

When I notice that someone around me is acting this way and I sense that I have permission from that person to be real, I voice my concerns. But in that case, I try to be aware that not only might I be wrong and have to revise my sense of the situation, but that we both might be wrong and (again) revise accordingly. So I might be wrong, the other person may be wrong, or we both might be wrong. I try to be open to all of these possibilities and to understand how we (I) have come to this pass.

I am never more critical of anyone else than I am of myself. I may say things to others that they are not accustomed to hearing, but I never say anything I wouldn’t receive from them or myself. In that sense I am harsh. However, I tend to say things when they are asked for and walk away otherwise. Furthermore, I tend to say what comes through to me. It is part of my practice to be open and honest with what I sense as the truth. I have found that the more honest I am with the truth, the more that truth comes through. Of course, distinguishing truth from non-truth can be a task and is dealt with in Section 1.

I am constantly learning, which is saying more for me than was true at one time. When I held with lies, my conscious goal was to get rich. My unconscious goal was to lie to myself about the nature of the universe, so that my lies about getting rich seemed to hold water. I failed to consider that I was only prepared to accept so much (of the lie) in this life, and that the lies were killing me. I failed to consider that I would be faced with a choice between being dead with a lie (which would fall away as soon as I died) or alive with the truth.

In what follows is a story (or stories) about what I have learned and what I have come across to learn it. I also talk about tools that I use to distinguish truth from non-truth. Throughout, though, I maintain that I am learning. Therefore I invite you (as the reader) to comment whenever you find something that does not ring true for you. I will endeavor to honestly look at whether I am wrong, you are wrong, or we both are wrong and how. I promise to be honest with myself about what is before me. I ask only that you be honest, too.

[Back to top]

Section I: Tools I Have Used

This section presents five chapters that are intended to be the heart of the book. Note, however, that in some ways, these chapters contain materials that have only been recognized lately. I didn’t realize until recently the extent to which I was using some things. Others, and how they naturally fit into my scheme, only became apparent to me as I was creating classes. Still others came through in meditations or visions.

In each case, I was aware of being ready to share what I have lived through and what I was realizing. For me, what I say is never necessarily the final word. It is something that I am trying out. I want to hear myself say what is there as much as I want to hear how it resonates (or doesn’t) with everyone else.

In this resonation, I have found that is possible for me to hear and experience things I might not otherwise. Each person brings a piece of the puzzle and we all benefit by fitting pieces together. My piece is in who I am. I suspect that you (and anyone) can find it in who you are. I encourage all I meet to be who they are, even if that takes them away from me or the circle I am a part of. That seems to be the only way that each person can be what he or she was meant to be.

By the same token, I find that I sometimes hear myself saying things that I have never heard myself saying before. Often, these are things I have never heard anyone saying. Sometimes they are. Either way, they are things that strike me as true. They are things that seem to resonate with who I am.

They seem to not only flow from what I know to be true, they open me to further truth. When I put them in the limelight (so to speak) and open myself to what they have to say, they bring me to further truth. In other words, when I ask the question, "If this is true, what else must be true?" an answer is forthcoming. In addition, that answer is open and leads me to another answer beyond it and another answer beyond that.

In every case, the things I used resonated with what I knew or felt inside me. I was able to sift through what spoke to me and what didn’t by being aware of what I felt. I noticed that in most cases, if I felt that something was going to provide results, it did. I can’t think of a single case in which it didn’t (though that does not rule out that it could have). In every case, when something didn't work out, I knew beforehand that it wouldn't.

Similarly, I have deliberately tried the opposite of what I felt. I tried to work with things that did not speak to me or that I felt drawn to leave behind. Usually, I did this because I understood others to say otherwise. People whom I respected because they held respectable positions in society seemed to promote or advocate one or another position. In those cases, I followed what respected others said and defied the truth as I understood it. In every case, the path I chose under such conditions led to more of the same — difficult decisions and stonewalling.

This was relatively early for me — many years ago. However, I learned — and continue to learn every day — that I am not well served by following what I understand of what other people expect of me. When I follow what I sense to be true, that truth takes me to a cleaner and simpler place, a more beautiful place, so I have somewhere to go. I have thus ceased to follow the crowd and have instead devoted myself to follow my truth, wherever it may go.

A side-effect of following my truth is that I don’t follow everyone else’s truth. This means that I am occasionally presented with opportunities to do what I feel is right as opposed to what others expect of me. I have seen over and over that doing what others expect does not serve me, so I refuse to do it. This can make me into a bad boy. What, after all, is a bad boy except someone who refuses to march along with everyone else and chooses instead to march to a different drummer?

A key question might be, What drummer am I marching to? There are many potential drummers, including one defined by whatever the group is not choosing and therefore whatever will annoy the most people in any given instant. Although there is some appeal to annoying group members because they are group members, I prefer to follow the truth as I see it and to follow it wherever it may take me, whether it annoys people or not.

In other words, I choose to define my highest and first goal to be to discover the truth and to follow that truth, wherever it may take me. I figure that way, what I find to be true, will be and I can rely on that. If it changes or I find that a truth leads me to a conclusion that is false or unreliable, I find that I don’t understand the truth as well as I think I do, I don’t understand the problem as well as I think I do, or both. In any case, I have myself to start with.

It doesn’t pay, I find, to pay attention to whether what I follow is accepted. I pay attention to whether it captures (part of) the truth. By following the truth, by asking myself, what is true? and listening to the answer, I have opportunities to re-ask the question and extend or reform how I understand the whole universe (or any part of it), or both. I have the freedom to pose questions. Any question. If that makes me a bad boy, I am a bad boy. However, in addition to simply being a bad boy, I have the option of following the same