Michael Bookbinder

Around 1970 or so, I met Michael Bookbinder, whom I’m told was behind the book “Way of the Peaceful Warrior.” At the time, I was involved with macrobiotics and certain people in that circle were getting into spiritual things. These folks had met Michael and had “light attunements” with Michael, and I so I signed up for one. The reading — Michael called them “light attunements” changed my life. Michael had tapped into a cosmology that was based on numerology (or so I was later told). According to Michael, everyone had certain energy patterns that they were here to express and complete. It didn’t matter if you had one or many; it didn’t make you greater or lesser than anyone else. They kicked off in sequence, meaning that once you worked through the lessons of one, the next one would kick and so forth. Each had a negative and a positive quality. Michael told me that mine were “inner creativity,” “spiritual law” and “outer creativity.” The negative of the “inner creativity” was “doom and gloom.” “And you can be doomier and gloomier than most people,” he said with a kind of chuckle. The positive was the ability to heal. “You can just lay hands on someone, not knowing where the points or meridians are, and you could heal them,” he said. The next he said was “spiritual law.” I don’t really understand “spiritual law,” I told Michael. He sort of laughed and said, “you will.” Then he said, there are two kinds of laws, man’s law and spiritual law. Man’s law is like the speed limit, it changes a lot, whereas spiritual law is eternal. And the last was outer creativity. ” This is what you are here to do, and you can be very productive at it.” Michael also told me that I had a spiritual gift. “I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you it represents strength,” he said. “You’ll recognize it.” The last thing he told me was to learn to recognize the difference between sympathy and empathy. In one of them, there is the tendency to get down there in someone’s pain and share it with them. The other is compassionate, but more neutral, letting the person have his or her own experience. He told me the story of a guy who always came to him to borrow money. Michael lent him the money a couple of times, but the third time he said “no.” The guy didn’t take this well, and maybe even cursed him. But sometime later, he came back and thanked Michael. “You were the only one who had faith in me, and didn’t try to buy me off.” Anyhow, everything that Michael told me has come true. He planted a seed in me that has grown.