TS: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is John Milton. John is a pioneering spiritual teacher, meditation master, vision quest leader, and shaman. His vision quest and shamanic work began in the 1940s, and since the 1950s, thousands of people have sought his powerful yet gentle qigong and meditation instruction, Sacred Passage programs, and vision quest guidance. John continues to this day to live, explore, and lead wilderness trainings in many of the earth’s wild and sacred places, and he and his guides offer Sacred Passage awareness trainings and wilderness solo experiences year-round for individuals and groups. In addition, for over 25 years John has taught t’ai chi at his Golden Flower school.
John is also the author of the Sounds True audio learning series Sky Above, Earth Below, and has created several instructional DVDs with Sounds True, including T’ai Chi for Liberation, Cultivate Longevity, Cleanse and Build Inner Qi, and Develop Qi Strength and Power.
In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” John and I spoke about connecting with nature through his Sacred Passages program, harnessing the shamanic power of intent, and embracing what John calls the “internal demon of fear.” John also shared some of the insight and wisdom he has received from deep immersions in nature. Here’s my intriguing conversation with John Milton.
John, I think of you, when you come to mind for me, as the person who drops people off in nature, and then lets some kind of natural process unfold, a process of natural healing, natural liberation. And I’m curious, first of all, what do you think about that, being the man who drops people off in nature? And then secondly, how it is that you view nature as this great power to heal and liberate?
John Milton: I think that’s a pretty good description of the process in that the same way that we trust the birthing process, the natural process of organic growth in the womb and then birth itself, there’s a natural process to liberation that is possible if we just give it half a chance. And nature is a tremendous support in that. In fact, I think the word “nature” is a pretty incredible word, because it describes both the truth of inner nature and outer nature, and the connectedness between the two. So in that sense, in our Way of Nature group we focus especially strongly on the connection between inner nature and outer nature, and then depending on the deepening of that connection, to open up the full liberation process.
TS: We’ll have to get a little bit more specific, first of all, what you mean by “liberation.” And then I’d like to understand more what you mean by “inner” and “outer” nature, and the connection there.
JM: Sure. The word “liberation” is a word I think is especially important for these times, when we’re very bound by many things that constrain our experience of true freedom. And in a way, the process of liberation is liberation from the shackles of suffering and attachment, which have been well described by the Buddha, and revealing the natural condition that lies at the heart of us and the essence of all of us. So in that sense, liberation puts the emphasis on the process of freeing ourselves from the shackles that have bound us for so long, in most cases.
The process of connecting to nature—and “nature” is a wonderful word, because it describes the truth of Source, and the truth of our connections to the natural worlds, or potentially the realization of our connections to the natural world. So it’s a word that seems to be able to bridge the inner world and the experience of the outer world. And the main emphasis in our Way of Nature organization is to help people discover the means to realize the unity of inner nature and outer nature. And then you can go deeper than that into the fundamental Source that underlies both outer and inner.
TS: Now, John, of course I could hang out outside, and I can imagine that not much might transform. So what kind of posture or attitude is needed for nature to have this kind of impact on someone who is looking for transformation? Isn’t this a specific posture or attitude required?
JM: It’s very important to go with the correct view. And the correct view is to in a sense dedicate yourself to the discovery of the deepest truths of who you are, why you’re here, what this life is for, and the truth of your being. If you go in with that kind of a motivation, and a motivation to discover that, then the very simple tools that we provide during the awareness training part of our process is to take on a form that has real power. Without that commitment or motivation to true enlightenment or true liberation, it’s difficult for the solo time to have much effect.
TS: So what you’re saying is that this intention, moving into solitary time in nature, in and of itself begins a kind of process. How does that work? How does simply having this intention—“I want to discover what’s true, I’m committed to this interior process”—how do you see that magnetizing a transformation?
JM: It’s interesting that in this world of shamanism, the most important power is the power of intent. Intent is the sparkplug that helps the psyche move in whatever direction it has chosen. And without activating the power of intent, it’s very difficult for any shamanic realization to occur.
In the case of liberation, if you harness the shamanic power of intent to the intent to accomplish full liberation for the benefit of all beings, then of course you’ve harnessed the shamanic power to its highest potential, which is enlightenment itself. And you might say that the power of intent when linked to the commitment to liberation is the real beginning of the deeper path to enlightenment itself.
TS: Now, why are you calling this the “shamanic power of intent”? What’s particularly shamanic about it?
JM: Well, if you take a look at many of the different shamanic paths around the world, one of the most common principles in shamanism is harnessing the capacity of awareness to generate intent, and then to place it in the field of pure awareness, and then trust that the power of that intent will naturally unfold. It’s like planting a seed, and then trusting the seed will sprout with proper cultivation. So in that sense, this foundation or principle of shamanism is very relevant to the process of enlightenment and liberation.
TS: OK, John, so I have this intent, and I’m out on my solo in nature. You’ve dropped me off, you’re given me some training in the right view to have, but one of the things I imagine is that I might become quite afraid at some point of being alone in the wilderness, and the various animals that are going to eat me or attack me, or the weather patterns that are going to come and make me shivering and freezing and pelted with water. Help me! What do I do with all of this potential fear?
JM: Yes, I think it’s probably natural to have some fear of nature because we are so separated from it these days. And then of course there are real dangers taking the form not so much of—I don’t worry about wild animals so much for people in nature, but I do get concerned about their falling off a ledge, or twisting an ankle, or cutting themselves while carving a staff. Those are all things that have actually happened. The only emergencies we’ve ever had in the 40 or 50 years of my guiding these processes has been where people have either twisted an ankle, slipped on a ledge, or in one case, cut themselves while they were carving a staff.
So I think how we address the natural fears of nature is a really good question then. The key to it I think is to embrace the fear itself, not to try to make it go away, but to embrace the truth of the fear, and actually develop the ability to look on it as kind of an internal demon. Embrace it, and then follow the fear into the source of where fear is arising from. Then the fear has potential to actually dissolve into a kind of bliss. There’s no real source to it; there’s no—if you’re being attacked by a grizzly bear, of course that’s a very good reason for fear, but if you’re sitting there in nature and there’s no actual cause of the fear except an internal demon, it really comes out of having seen too many movies. And that embrace of the internal demon is very powerful and very effective potentially if you’ve mastered the ability to do that.
TS: Now, John, why do you call fear an “internal demon”?
JM: Well, I sometimes look back on my life and look at it as a process of personally grappling with my own demons, and helping others encounter theirs. The main demons that we face in life, they have names: fear, anger, greed, attachment, envy, jealousy, and so on. These are the true demons. And to the degree that we can learn how to liberate the demon, then we’ve liberated the heart of our own blockages and those powerful demonic forces that prevent us from realizing our true nature.
TS: So you can give me an example, John, of encountering one of your own inner demons, perhaps in nature, and the process that unfolded?
JM: One of my favorite examples was back when I around 18 years old. I was getting ready to go up to Alaska to work as a salmon fisherman, but I had a month free before I had to take that job, so I had decided to do my first month-long vision quest or wilderness solo, and I chose the Olympic Mountains in the state of Washington to do the month-long retreat. And there’s a beautiful trail that walks to the north end of the Olympic National Park to the south end, it goes over a pass called the Low Divide. So I hiked up that long trail to the center of the Olympic Mountains, and then set up a camp in the middle of the mountain range, kind of by these incredibly beautiful glacier-covered peaks.
I’d been there maybe two or three days, and I woke up one night in the wee hours of the morning hearing the sound of a gigantic animal moving in the brush around me. And of course meat-eating fears of grizzly bears and such arose in my mind, and I went into a state of very deep and profound fear, contraction. As the sounds got louder and louder, I even heard a few sounds of the tent being brushed, and I went into absolute total contraction.
Finally I stirred up enough courage to be able to pull back the flap of the tent and look outside, and I saw in the moonlight a herd of elk moving through this pass in the center of the mountains. And immediately the fear dissolved into an extraordinary experience of bliss.
In a sense, because the fear had been so deep and the contraction had been so absolute, when the fear was cut through or dissolved, that energy naturally exploded into an extremely powerful kind of bliss and joy. That remained for three weeks, for the remainder of my solo time in the wilderness, and basically permeated my entire experience of the solo. It’s a good example of what can happen when the demon is completely embraced and dissolves into free energy, or liberates your naturally liberative condition.
TS: But John, that’s an example where there really wasn’t anything to be afraid of, meaning you looked out and it wasn’t a marauding bear, it was a beautiful image. What about in your experiences in nature when it actually was an encounter with some animal that somebody might find terrifying, that you might have found terrifying?
JM: Well, I guess probably I can remember one example where I had formed an expedition to take several of my students through a part of what at that time was the largest still unexplored part of the Rocky Mountains in northern Canada. It’s an area called the Upper Nahanni River Basin, the Logan Mountains.
And in the process of doing this expedition we had dropped off the glacier. As we dropped off the glacier, walked off the glacier, we looked up and saw two really cute little grizzly bear cubs come rollicking up to our feet, as if to play with us. And then looked up to see the mama about 200 yards away, and she was not very happy. And she immediately dropped down onto her four legs and charged us; it was a full-on, very aggressive charge.
We had no weapons, except for a small 22 410 over and under rifle we were using to get some small game with which to supplement our diet, and it would be only like a bee sting to a grizzly bear. And the mama bear charged us, got to within 10 feet, and then stopped, and gave a swat to the behind of one of the cubs that went heading in the opposite direction. And then she turned and ran after them, stopped once, made another charge back toward us, maybe stopping about 40 or 50 feet away, and turned again and made sure the cubs continued to exit.
We were very, very close to potential death at that time, of course. But the experience of tremendous joy and bliss from still being alive, just the pure appreciation of the gift of life and the gift of being on this planet and surviving something like that, exploded very much in the same way as it had when I was in the Olympic Mountains.
TS: Now, you mentioned, John, that you don’t feel particularly worried about people you drop into the wilderness dying from an animal encounter, that that’s not where you see people having problems in your 40-plus years of leading sacred passages. Why don’t you feel worried that—I mean, we hear stories, we read about them in the newspaper, of people who actually do die in animal encounters. Why isn’t that a concern for you?
JM: I think a lot of the reason I don’t worry too much about it is that, again in the process of leading these, I’ve probably put between 5,000 to 10,000 people out on solo over the past 40 or 50 years, and the most serious things that I’ve had, as I mentioned, were just small injuries due to carelessness on the part of the individuals during the solos. We’ve never had a problem from encounters with the animals.
And one of the reasons for that is because I’m very careful to select times and places and situations where that kind of danger is minimized. And then we are very careful during the training to give people some very simple tools to minimize danger if there should be any kind of encounter with a threatening animal, like a rattlesnake, for example. So I think the precautionary work in the training, and also just finding locations where that kind of difficulty is minimal, makes a big difference. You want to also chose a time of the year when the weather is good, and conditions are ideal for people having a pleasant and comfortable experience.
The whole point is not to go through some kind of a warrior-like difficult experience, but to really embrace the capacity to relax into nature, to let the walls that separate us from nature begin to dissolve. And we can have the actual fears that people have about the separation from nature, which is the real cause of the fears: the separation itself creates the alienation from the natural world.
And of course this is one of the reasons we’re in so much difficulty these days: we not only fear nature, we still look on it as something we can’t control, and therefore must fear. We lack the ability to trust the flow of life, just like we trust the process of birth. So I think the passage is really an immersion in learning how to trust the flow of life as it moves moment by moment and day by day, in living deeply in it and in solitude.
And of course when you’re living in solitude in nature, after some of the initial fear of being alone in nature begins to dissolve, then you start having the experience of what we call “aloneness becoming all-oneness.” And you start having the experience of deep communing with the rest of life, and with trees and plants and flowers and animals and all the elements. And then the whole experience becomes a threshold to going even deeper into the discovery of Source itself, which is the source of both outer and inner nature.
TS: Now, John, just a little bit more about meeting animals in nature, something I’m very interested in. Which is I know that you believe, at least I’ve heard you talk about some of these meetings as potential initiations, that actually through our encounters with animals we can be undergoing some type of spiritual initiation. And I’m wondering how you see that. Maybe you could give some examples from your own experience of something that you felt initiated into by the animal encounter.
JM: Yes. That’s a very good question. You probably know in the Native American traditions, there’s the experience of the totemic aspect of a bird or an animal. In my experience, starting from a very young age, I began to have experiences with different living beings that went way beyond the way we normally can see the plants and animals as a biologist or an ecologist or as a human being. And I’ll give you a good experience of how different animals can arrive in nature as a totemic experience.
Some years ago I just moved to Crestone, Colorado, as my main home base, probably back in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and I decided to do a vision quest at the headwaters of a little stream that goes through the land I live on down there. I found a very beautiful site on the top of a ridge with a beautiful stone dome. I climbed up to the top of this large stone dome that had an incredible view from the top; it was probably around 11,000 feet high. It had an expansive 360-degree view in all directions, to the north, south, east, and west.
And in the process of doing the vision quest there—in a classical vision quest you don’t eat food, you don’t sleep, you stay within a very small circle. During that time, I’d say maybe the second day or so, I was looking down across this beautiful valley that lay below me, and saw suddenly a large bald eagle, which is unusual for the Sangre de Christo mountains in Colorado peaks. We normally have goldens out there; the bald eagles live closer to where there are large waterways or lakes. Here was a bald eagle directly below, and I was looking right down onto its back and the beautiful lights that were shining through the feathers of the back and the tail and the wings. And it had set wings and was gliding below me directly to the east, toward the interior of the mountain range I was in.
I was absolutely amazed by this vision. And I remember I just blinked briefly once, and in the time it took to blink, it disappeared. And then I felt a strong energy out to the west, and I looked to the west and I saw what I assume was the same eagle doing a spiral, a very tight spiral, up into the setting sun. And it rose and rose and rose, and so it entered into the disk of the sun, and was in front of the sun disk. And then it set its wings and headed toward me, and came in a beautiful glide directly over my head, and then disappeared into the mountains in the east.
I was absolutely blown away. So I lay down on top of the rock of the stone dome, looking up into the sky after that had happened, and noticed a large cloud moving over in the sky above me. And as I looked at the cloud, I realized that the cloud itself was in the shape of an eagle with its wing spread out, but the wings in this case were spread out over a mile wide. And the head and the beak and the talons were all perfectly formed by the cloud eagle.
As I looked up, this large cloud eagle came directly overhead at pretty much the same trajectory as the bald eagle had before. And two holes in the cloud formed the eyes of the eagle, and as I looked up into the sky, I found myself drawn to looking into the eyes of the eagle. And then through the eyes I was of course looking directly out into the sky, into the vastness and the spaciousness and the clarity of the open sky. At that moment I had one of my most powerful experiences of Source itself. A very liberating experience.
So that entire process was initiated by eagle. And of course the rest of the vision quest was powerfully transformed by that totemic experience or totemic encounter. It was a direct introduction to liberated view.
As human beings, we don’t normally think of other animals, plants, elements, as having the capacity to bring liberation or enlightenment. But to most traditional peoples who live very close to nature, this is a common—this is a knowledge that most all peoples who live very close to the earth know, that life has far greater wisdom than we human beings normally give it credit for. And my experience has been that many of my greatest teachers have been animals, birds, plants, and even elements.
TS: Now, John, that’s a beautiful story, and in a moment I want to hear more about how an element could be one of your greatest teachers. But the question that emerges for me listening to it was, this was part of a vision quest. You’re not sleeping, you’re not eating. Was it really the power of the eagle, or just if you don’t sleep and you don’t eat, you can start hallucinating all kinds of things?
JM: Well, I think there’s been a long debate about what is real, which you and I here probably can’t settle today.
TS: I’m comfortable with that!
JM: But what we can speak to is the truth of our direct experience. And so when I speak in terms of vision—and sure, a story like that, what I’m sharing is the truth of a direct experience, without trying to dissect it into whether it could have been caused by a bit of undigested beef jerky, or something like that. Who knows?
But I think the main thing is, when you have one experience like that, and then you go back out into nature and you do, as I have done, literally dozens of vision quests over my life, you begin to have similar profound connections with other living beings that serve to be teachers for you, bringing you great inspiration and insight into how things are.
Then of course your view of the rest of life begins to transform. You begin to see that you’re part of a vast network of living beings that carry great insight, great wisdom, great knowledge, and which actually provide us with some of the keys to learning how to live more sustainably and in greater harmony with the rest of life, which is of course the greatest challenge that human beings face today.
TS: OK, now, tell me a little bit about what it might be like to be initiated by an element.
JM: Ah. Well, a good example of that would be when I first went down to Baja, California. I’d had some very strong experiences of being told that Baja would be a very important place for me to offer the Sacred Passages and the vision quests and the nature quests. These are different forms of wilderness solo that we offer.
So I had gone down there to have my first contact with the Pacific Ocean, and I remember I arrived in the area where I felt that this was a place where I could do the wilderness solo work, and provide people with a really unique and powerful experience with one of the two greatest metaphors in nature for liberation, which is the vastness and the expansiveness of the ocean, very similar to the vastness and spaciousness of the sky, which is another great aspect of nature that has an inherently liberating potential.
So I arrived at this beautiful location on the southern tip of Baja, California, and there’s a little town called Todos Santos. I was particularly interested in the fact that the whales come there every winter in January and February. And so people would often go down there to make a connection with the whales, not by going out into boats, but the whales can actually come right into those little bays and on the coastlines very close, so you can be sitting on the coast and have a pod of whales come right up to you, if you’re in the right state of mind.
So I walked down to this beautiful coastline. And I remember I was wearing a blue jean suit, which was popular back in that time, and carrying a little shoulder bag with my wallet and passport and money in it. And I felt it was important for me to make a direct connection with the sea, even though I didn’t have a bathing suit or anything with me to swim with. It was pretty perilous swimming in quite a bit of that, because it drops so very steeply, and you have huge, very large waves come in to that part of the Baja coast. So I watched the waves very carefully to judge when it would be OK to go down and make direct contact with my hands with the outwash of the waves.
I waited until it was clear that it was a safe time to go down and make direct contact with the sea. I walked to the edge of the water as it was beginning to recede and go back into the ocean itself. I touched the receding water just very briefly with my right hand, and in the next instant a towering wave, it must have been at least twice the height of all the waves I’d been watching beforehand, suddenly rose up over my head and grabbed me and pulled me in. And I remember being tumbled and spiraled under the water, and then spit out onto the shore like a wet dog.
And I’d been wearing a watch at the time, a Southwestern-style watch that had turquoise in the silver watchband. And I looked down to see if my watch was still there. The watch was still there, but one blue turquoise had been plucked out of the watchband and taken by Mother Ocean. And I realized that I had made a profound mistake when I’d gone down to touch the ocean; I’d gone down and only wanted to receive something from the sea, and I made the fundamental error of forgetting to bring something to offer, even if it’s only the opening of the heart, and unconditional love and appreciation of the water element. So Mother Ocean took the one turquoise as the offering.
And that began the cycle of all of our work in the Baja, which has gone on now for over 20 years, and literally hundreds and hundreds of people have been through incredibly powerful transformative experiences down there since then. But the initiation of that whole process was that one connection with the water elements.
TS: Now, when you use a phrase like “Mother Ocean,” can you tell me what that means to you, and why you refer to the ocean as Mother Ocean?
JM: Well, I think of it as Mother Ocean in the sense that this is predominantly a water planet, and of course we normally refer to Mother Earth, and Mother Earth is a water planet, and is predominantly on the surface made up of water. The water element itself has many of the qualities of the sacred feminine in its power of receptivity and adaptability, and capacity to hold and be, you might say, the womb of form. All of life seems to have arisen in contact or in connection with the ocean. So for me, in many ways it represents the very essence of life itself, and the womb of life. Whenever I see the ocean, I immediately think of a great being that’s the essence of the divine feminine.
TS: So John, when you talk about Mother Ocean taking this piece of turquoise, or the eagle helping give you a gift of a liberating insight, there’s a way that you seem to be describing these aspects of nature as if they have their own consciousness, their own intent, their own purposefulness. And I’m curious if you see and experience nature that way.
JM: Absolutely. An old friend of mine, Jim Lovelock, some years ago wrote a paper called “The Gaia Hypothesis,” in which he laid out the idea that the earth is behaving like a living organism. And then he went on to prove, using his background in atmospheric science, that the behavior of the earth is the behavior of something that’s able to regulate. For example, [it is able to regulate] the oxygen content of the atmosphere to the precise level that allows for oxidative processes to nurture life to mature. So if there were more oxygen on the planet, then it would be very difficult to put out a fire. If there were less oxygen, it would be very difficult for aspiration to occur. But somehow, the entirety of the atmospheric process has been able to maintain its oxygen level at a relatively coherent level that’s optimal for the maintenance of life as a whole.
And from that series of studies he had done, he came to the conclusion that the earth itself was behaving as a self-regulating actual system, just like a cell or an organism. And then from there, he went on, and other scientists went on, to take that same hypothesis and test it. And they found additional evidence from other— I mean, it’s like evolutionary theories that supported the hypothesis. And then out of that came the full-formed theory of Gaia as a living organism.
At this point, many scientists accept the idea that the earth is a living entity, just as our body is. And if it’s behaving as a living entity, it’s not a huge step to look at that entity as having some kind of sentience.
In my experience, the earth itself does have a kind of sentience. And if you spend some time taking the time to make that direct connection with the livingness and the sentience of the earth, then you begin to receive insights as to the nature of what that sentience is like, and some of the messages that it has for us as a species.
TS: You know, John, I think most people would accept the sort of basic idea, “Yes, the earth is a living organism.” But when it comes to then making the connection that “The rocks in my backyard have consciousness,” that’s where I think people are like, “They’re just rocks! How can they have consciousness? They’re rocks.”
JM: Well, without trying to provide scientific justification for the idea that a rock can have life, from a Native American perspective, the belief is that stones have sentience, have a certain kind of living-ness to them. And in fact in many of the Native American traditions, stones are called the “stone people” in order to honor the livingness of stones as living beings, or sentient beings.
Now, to most of us in the Western world, this is a pretty ridiculous idea. But again for those who live very close to nature, this is not a ridiculous idea: this is how things are. And it’s very, very common for indigenous traditional peoples to look on stones as incredible holders of wisdom. I just came back from Australia, where I spent a month guiding wilderness retreats in Tasmania, and I spent a little bit of time with some of my friends in the aboriginal community there. Their view of stones is very, very close to many of the views of the traditional peoples of North America. There’s a very strong feeling that stones hold great wisdom and great knowledge of the past.
One of the reasons that stones, the stone people, are called the wisdom keepers in North America is because they have held their form for so long, and they are composed not of cells like we are, but of many, many tiny crystals, which I suppose from a certain standpoint operate or function similar to how the stone does as far as supporting their sentience.
But the main point here is that the form of the stone changes very, very slowly over a very long period of time relative to how our bodies change. From a stone’s point of view, our bodies are like the flash of a firefly in the night; they come and go very, very fast, very quickly. If you accept that a stone can be sentient, from a stone’s point of view, their perspective of events and what happens over time has a vastly different scale than for a human being. And so from the Native American perspective, they spend a lot of time with stone people in order to receive the gifts of some of the wisdom and the insight that what to us are just dead things can bring.
So we come up again against a very different worldview of modern culture versus the deeply earth-connected, nature-connected indigenous peoples. And I think it would be difficult to provide the scientific support for pros and cons of the Western view versus the indigenous peoples’ views, but we do have to at least honor the difference, and begin to look a little bit into the depth of some of the truths they may have discovered that we’ve ignored in our more contemporary cultures.
TS: You know, I’m not so much interested in a scientific perspective on this, but I’m curious, when you say something like, “The stone’s point of view,” that a stone has a point of view, what your experience of that is. What have you discovered about a stone having a point of view?
JM: Well, some 30 years ago in southern Colorado I made the discovery of something that was pretty radical from the standpoint of what we knew about nature in the West. I found a series of ancient archaeological sites there that were in the form of seats, some of them carved, some of them formed by different stones being placed together in certain patterns. So I was absolutely amazed to discover these things, and they had not been in Western culture up until that time. So I began to spend quite a bit of time experimenting with these discoveries that I made in Crestone, and actually became very committed to preserving the various special lands where I found some of these made-meditation seats.
So over the period of these years, the last several decades, I’ve been spending time sitting with these seats and just tuning in to what they might have to offer, or how are they used. They obviously were used to sit in, but why? So I went and spent literally decades sitting in these seats, bringing other people to sit there too, and then getting some sense of what my friends and students had experienced, as well as myself, and then beginning to pull together some of the core comments, threads, themes, of people’s experiences when they sat in these great meditation seats of Crestone.
And over the years, I began to see that there were common themes or common threads from one seat to another seat. I saw that there were different gifts, different insights, different realizations that often would occur for people when they came to these special places to sit and meditate. But it’s all based on, you might say, the capacities of stone and stones to impart certain kinds of insights.
TS: So you know, John, in addition to thinking about you as the person who drops people off in nature and allows their spiritual process to unfold naturally, I think of you as someone who has had some very interesting death and rebirth experiences. I know that you’ve been bit by a rattlesnake twice, as well as having something that one might call a near-death experience, or certainly a type of dramatic rebirth experience. And that recently you also had a stroke, a quite challenging stroke that you’ve been recovering from in this past year. And I wonder just on a personal level, if you could talk to us some about those experiences.
JM: Sure, I’d be glad to. I had an experience back in 1984 where I had just gone up to help dedicate some very sacred land that a friend of mine owned up in the Shawangunk Mountains of New York. So I went up and did that ceremony, then came back to get some rest. As I was preparing to go to bed and get some sleep, suddenly just as I had been about to lie down to go to sleep, the next thing I knew a thunderbolt hit me, and I was ripped out of the body, with a sound of thunder shattering everything, every form aspect that I knew.
The only thing left was consciousness itself, which went shooting through a gigantic tunnel, kind of like Dorothy going out through the core of the tornado. And I found myself shooting through this great, vast tunnel—it was immense, it was like the diameter of the earth—and then winding up as a wormhole through space. And at the end of the tunnel was a brilliant light into which I shot headfirst. And then of course myself and all form completely dissolved into the clarity of spaciousness and intense luminosity of that light.
I remained there just as pure consciousness, no form aspects, in a state of complete bliss until it was time to return. And then I was brought back feet first out through the tunnel, and back into my body, which now amazingly was in the lotus posture on top of the bed where I’d just laid down earlier to get some rest.
And as my normal physical perceptions began to operate again, I found myself looking still at the light as the walls of the tunnel dissolved, and I found myself back in that room. I was looking out through an open window, I assume through which the thunderbolt had come, and the light however was still visible. And as I looked more closely at the light now that I was back in the body and the walls of the room had reformed, I realized that what I was looking at was the morning star of Venus, and it was now close to dawn in the eastern sky.
So that was a profoundly transformative, enlightening experience that completely transformed my view of myself, what this world is, and what enlightenment itself is. It was a very good preparatory experience for the experience of stroke that happened quite a few years later, that actually happened only a little less than a year ago.
TS: Can you tell us what that experience was like, both the experience of the stroke and then your recovery afterward?
JM: Well, it was a very different experience than the one I had of the thunderbolt. In that case, it was profoundly enlightening. In the case of the stroke, one moment consciousness was behaving normally inside the body, and then the next moment, basically I was paralyzed. The first stroke comes in a flash, and very often—in my case it was an ischemic stroke, so it meant that a small blood clot had moved, somehow for some reason released itself in the body, and it moved to block a major source of blood supply to part of the brain.
So I remember I tried to get up, but my whole left was paralyzed, so I ended up collapsing on the floor. And I had lost all use of my left arm, all use of my left leg, because it was basically paralyzed as well, and lost all use of functional speech. So I lay there for about six or seven hours until somebody found me. In that case, my wonderful secretary, Sheila, discovered me on the floor. She had been trying to reach me and called on the phone, and I was able to get the phone off the hook enough to be able to speak into it. Of course my speech was just garbled nonsense from what she could hear, and so she knew enough to realize there was something seriously wrong. She came over to where I was and immediately called 911, and I was rushed off to the hospital.
But I can’t say the process of the stroke was especially liberating, but the process of recovery from stroke has been extraordinarily informing. I know that many people who have stroke of the type that I had remain permanently disabled for life. And I’ve been very fortunate to be able to use some of the gifts that I have received through meditation practice, and also especially through t’ai chi and qigong, which I have been teaching for many years, to help recover the use of the limbs, the leg and the arm and the hand, and the speech. Of course I also had some wonderful conventional therapy as well.
During the process of recovery, I actually started inventing new therapeutic approaches of how to integrate the practices from t’ai chi and qigong to accelerate the process of healing, and I began sharing some of the things that I came up with with the therapist at the recovery hospital where I was staying. They’ve actually now begun to incorporate some of those things, I understand. I’m due to go back and have a visit with them fairly soon, so I’m curious to see how it’s going.
But I’d say that the main insights that came from recovering from this stroke have been the power of meditation, the power of t’ai chi and qigong to help deepen the process of how do you regrow a brain, how do you regrow a nervous system. And that of course is quite an adventure, a very different kind of adventure than some of the other ones I’ve been on that are more external.
TS: Now just one final question. At Sounds True, we offer people so many different approaches to spiritual transformation. You can learn how to say a mantra, do yoga, meditate, writing practice, running practice, etc., etc. I’m curious, what do you think is unique about being in nature as the path and the practice form for spiritual transformation? What does it give that perhaps other paths don’t?
JM: Well, I think it’s the missing link to what we need to do to recover the true paths to living sustainably with the rest of life. Most of our spiritual systems, they’re wonderful, they’re beautiful, they’re powerful, but they don’t bring the gift of the direct experience of being deeply connected to and having the experience of communion with other living beings at a profound level.
The Way of Nature and the Sacred Passage process, or the wilderness solo process, however it’s said and through whatever means, provide the means for helping dissolve the boundaries between oneself and the rest of life and the rest of nature. And when you go through that kind of experience, you begin to see that all of life is your family, and you no longer can treat it the same way you did before. It’s no longer just a natural resource, it’s no longer something you can abuse and manipulate. It’s something you’re deeply motivated to learn how to live in harmony with, and live in balance with.
And of course when you go out into nature on a spiritual path to accomplish a deep realization of the truth of inner nature and the deep connections to outer nature, the great gift of that is the gift of both the powerful amplification of the journey to Source, but also a powerful opening to becoming a member of the family of all life. And as a member of the family of all life, we begin to get insights on how to create a more sustainable society and sustainable culture at a very deep and profound level. We’re motivated to do that; that becomes important to us. If it was not important to us before, after you’ve had the experience of being profoundly connected to all of life, you can’t see or treat the rest of life the same way anymore. So I see it as the missing piece, the missing link, in the sustainability work that has been growing so rapidly around the planet right now.
And I think because that’s at the very heart of the Way of Nature process, that makes our work truly unique, because it provides this profound experience of natural communion with all of life. And at the same time, it provides a profound path to liberation as well. So to me, that’s the heart essences of why this type of path is so important at this time.
TS: Thank you, John. That’s beautiful and wonderful, and the work you’re doing I think is so important for people.
John Milton has created a series of audio teachings with Sounds True, filled with stories about nature encounters and exercises that you can do to open up and transform in nature, called Sky Above, Earth Below. And he’s also created a series of three qigong long-life DVDs: Cultivate Longevity, Cleanse and Build Inner Qi, and Develop Qi Strength and Power. I think, John, you’re a testimony here to the power of qigong for long life! These are practices that can be done in nature, as well as a DVD called T’ai Chi for Liberation, a special form of t’ai chi that John Milton shares with his students.
SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
