Editor’s Introduction

Richard L. Amoroso (real name), Ph.D., received his B.S. in psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1972, his MA in 1996 from John F. Kennedy University in consciousness studies, and his PhD the International Noetic University in 1994 in Philosophy of Mind/Cosmology, where he is now a professor. Dr. Amoroso may be reached at ramoroso@wenet.net. He has published more than two dozen papers and consciousness studies and his first book (Science and the Primacy of Consciousness: Intimation of a 21st Century Revolution) is in press, and he is the founding editor of the Noetic Journal, 1997 through present, URL http://www.mindspring.com/~noeticj .

1st contact
Richard L. Amoroso

My first transcendental experience occurred when I was 18 months old; the following is an account:

My parents married immediately after the war, my father from Medford, MA near Boston, and my mother from Manhattan Beach, California, after I was born. At 18 months old, they went to visit my maternal grandmother in California. My parents were young, my mother only 19 and they left me with my grandmother to run off to the movies etc.

I walked out the front door, and immediately after the couple of steps and starting down the walkway, something happened. I saw something like a field. It unwrapped from the top of my head like a whirling vortex and it was like I was no longer confined to some boundary: immediately I had adult intelligence. I remember opening the white picket fence gate, first I walked to the right and it was an increasing incline, until I began to hear a louder and louder roar. It was the ocean, this bothered me so I turned and went back the way I came, I continued and crossed the street which would have been about 3 or 4 cottages past my grandmother’s the other way. Very soon there were railroad tracks, and I crossed them, wobbling a bit, it is hot in the summer near Los Angeles and the oils from the tracks and wood were a very strong experience; the iron was very unique also.

After the tracks there was a steep sandy slope; I could not walk up, and after several attempts of falling in the sand, I turned back across the road. I must have been now only one or two doors from my grandmothers. People started to notice me: when they approached, as if to accost me, I waved them away or turned around and held onto the fence.

Finally a woman approached with a distraught expression, and my tricks did not work: I heard her say I was too little to be out here alone. As she put out her arm to reach for me, I took a deep breath and opened my mouth to shout at her, which caused an expression of surprise on her face.

At that moment, as I was about to speak, the heavens opened and three golden spheres with a golden thread connecting them appeared. One was inside my breast, the next in my head and the third suspended in space above. It took only an instant, but I heard a voice that said “Do not speak, the time will come for you to tell people what to do…”. The voice in my chest, I recognized it as my voice, the one above resounded as my fathers voice, and the third I can only interpret as the father of fathers, God or some higher consciousness.

I don’t know after 50 years what those words mean. I am not a world leader, and the time has gone by when I would have much chance of becoming so. Was it to tell my daughter to eat her vegetables? I don’t know, but this very general meaning is sufficient because it allowed the woman to take me to her home on the corner by the road, only three or four houses from my grandmother. I remember seeing her in the next room talking on the phone, must have been to the police. I remember she had a television on near where I was, as I sat on the floor playing with her blonde haired daughter who was about the same age as I was.

The reason I believe I remember all this is because it was a profound experience, and usually nothing memorable happens to an 18 month old. The significance of this experience I can only try to understand in terms of a myriad of other experiences I have had since. But the most important thing perhaps is that this made me grow in a direction I or a child would not typically grow. I have become a mystic, a seer, who has been given great gifts. I have not developed these talents very formally, like to become a great mystic like the Russian Gurdjieff or such. Whether this is a shortcoming or not on my part, I do not know, I think I have chosen another task: that of understanding consciousness or the mind, a task that would be far more difficult without these gifts and the insights they have given…

Contributor’s Comments on the Experience

This first contact was the first of a lifelong series of mystical experiences that I believe skewed my development; and led me to take a totally different life path than I would have otherwise done. We seem to be entering a time when there is a great deal of interest in integrating science and spirituality. The mystical character I have developed has caused me (1) to study the cosmology of consciousness as a key aspect of my scientific inquiry and (2) to utilize transcendence as a tool in scientific theory formation.