SACRED JOURNEY OF THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR Read online

  SACRED JOURNEY

  OF THE

  PEACEFUL

  WARRIOR

  Books by Dan Millman

  THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR SAGA

  Way of the Peaceful Warrior

  Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior

  GUIDEBOOKS

  Body Mind Mastery

  Living on Purpose

  The Laws of Spirit

  No Ordinary Moments

  The Life You Were Born to Live

  ESPECIALLY FOR CHILDREN

  Secret of the Peaceful Warrior

  Quest for the Crystal Castle

  For information about Dan Millman’s seminars,

  please see the back pages of this book.

  SACRED JOURNEY OF THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR

  DAN MILLMAN

  An H J Kramer Book

  Published in a joint venture with

  New World Library

  Editorial office:

  Administrative office:

  H J Kramer Inc.

  New World Library

  P. O. Box 1082

  14 Pamaron Way

  Tiburon, California 94920

  Novato, California 94949

  Copyright © 1991, 2004 by Dan Millman

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or

  in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by

  any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission

  from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief

  passages in a review.

  Editor: Nancy Grimley Carleton

  Cover Design: Mary Ann Casler

  Text Design and Typography: Cathey Flickinger

  Cover Illustration: Terry Lamb

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Millman, Dan.

  Sacred journey of the peaceful warrior / Dan Millman.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Way of the peaceful warrior.

  ISBN 1-932073-10-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Spiritual life. 2. Millman, Dan. I. Title.

  BL624.M5 1991

  291.4’4—dc20 91-11234

  CIP

  Revised edition—First printing, May 2004

  ISBN I-932073-10-8

  Printed in Canada on acid-free, partially recycled paper

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my wife, Joy,

  for her constant guidance and support,

  and to my daughters, Holly, Sierra, and China,

  who remind me about the important things.

  To our readers:

  The books we publish

  are our contribution to an emerging world based on

  cooperation rather than on competition,

  on affirmation of the human spirit rather

  than on self-doubt, and on the certainty

  that all humanity is connected.

  Our goal is to touch as many

  lives as possible with a

  message of hope for

  a better world.

  Hal and Linda Kramer, Publishers

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue: A Suggestion from Socrates

  Book One: Where Spirit Leads

  1 Out of the Frying Pan

  2 The Journey

  3 Fool’s Gold

  4 A Fire at Sea

  5 New Beginnings

  6 Barefoot on a Forest Path

  Book Two: Illuminations

  7 The Three Selves

  8 Eyes of the Shaman

  9 A Well-Rounded Woman

  10 The Razor’s Edge

  11 Tower of Life

  12 The Jaws of Fear

  13 Realm of the Senses

  14 Flying on Wings of Stone

  15 In the Service of Spirit

  16 Dark Clouds on a Sunny Day

  17 Courage of the Outcast

  18 Illuminations in the Dead of Night

  19 Revelation and the Warrior’s Way

  Book Three: The Great Leap

  20 Odyssey

  21 Sunlight Under the Sea

  22 Living Until We Die

  23 Lessons of Solitude

  Epilogue: There Are No Good-byes

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  What if you slept, and what if in your sleep

  you dreamed, and what if in your dream

  you went to heaven and there you plucked a strange

  and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke

  you had the flower in your hand? Oh, what then?

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  MY FIRST BOOK, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, relates my adventures, training, and tests with an old service-station mechanic whom I named “Socrates.” Readers of Peaceful Warrior will remember how, after expanding my view of life, he sent me away to assimilate his teachings and prepare myself for a final confrontation described at the end of that book.

  This period of exile, preparation, and initiation that I am about to relate begins with personal struggles that send me on a quest to reawaken the faith I had found with Socrates, then somehow lost.

  Sacred Journey stands alone, and it can be read independent of Way of the Peaceful Warrior. However, you should understand that this story takes place not after, but within Peaceful Warrior. In other words, you could read Way of the Peaceful Warrior to page 184, then read Sacred Journey in its entirety, and then read the rest of Way of the Peaceful Warrior. That’s how the saga actually unfolds in chronological order. It is not necessary to read them this way, but at least now you understand where this story fits within the larger picture.

  In the future I expect to write other books in this series. But now we turn to Sacred Journey.

  I have, in fact, traveled around the world, had unusual experiences, and met remarkable people, but this book blends fact and fiction, weaving threads from the fabric of my life into a quilt that stretches across different levels of reality. By presenting spiritual teachings in story form, I hope to breathe new life into ancient wisdom, and to remind you that all our journeys are sacred, and all our lives an adventure.

  PROLOGUE

  A Suggestion from Socrates

  Free will does not mean that you establish the curriculum;

  only that you can elect what you want

  to take at a given time.

  —A Course in Miracles

  LATE AT NIGHT in an old Texaco service station, during training sessions that ranged from meditation to cleaning toilets, from deep massage to changing spark plugs, Socrates would sometimes mention people or places I might someday visit for my “continuing education.”

  Once he spoke of a woman shaman in Hawaii. On other occasions, he referred to a school for warriors, hidden somewhere in Japan or China, and of a book or journal he had lost somewhere in the desert.

  Naturally, these things intrigued me, but when I asked for details he would change the subject, so I was never certain whether the woman, the school, or the book actually existed.

  In 1968, just before he sent me away, Socrates again spoke of the woman shaman. “I wrote to her about a year ago, and I mentioned you,” he said. “She wrote back—said she might be willing to instruct you. Quite an honor,” he added, and suggested that I look her up when the time felt right.

  “Well, where do I find her?” I asked.

  “She wrote the letter on bank stationery.”

  “What bank?” I asked.

  “I don’t recall. Somewhere in Honolulu, I think.”

  “Can I s
ee the letter?”

  “Don’t have it anymore.”

  “Does she have a name?” I asked, exasperated.

  “She’s had several names. Don’t know what she’s using right now.”

  “Well, what does she look like?”

  “Hard to say; I haven’t seen her in years.”

  “Socrates, help me out here!”

  With a wave of his hand, he said, “I’ve told you, Dan—I’m here to support you, not make it easy on you. If you can’t find her, you’re not ready anyway.”

  I took a deep breath and counted to ten. “Well what about those other people and places you mentioned?”

  Socrates glared at me. “Do I look like a travel agent? Just follow your nose; trust your instincts. Find her first; then one thing will lead to the next.”

  Walking back toward my apartment in the silence of the early morning hours, I thought about what Socrates had told me—and what he hadn’t: If I was “ever in the neighborhood,” he had said, I might want to contact a nameless woman, with no address, who might still work at a bank somewhere in Honolulu; then again, she might not. If I found her, she might have something to teach me, and might direct me to the other people and places Socrates had spoken of.

  As I lay in bed that night, a part of me wanted to head straight for the airport and catch a plane to Honolulu, but more immediate issues demanded my attention: I was about to compete for the last time in the NCAA Gymnastics Championships, then graduate from college and get married—hardly the best time to run off to Hawaii on a wild-goose chase. With that decision, I fell asleep—in a sense, for five years. And before I awakened, I was to discover that in spite of all my training and spiritual sophistication, I remained unprepared for what was to follow, as I leaped out of Soc’s frying pan and into the fires of daily life.

  BOOK ONE

  Where Spirit Leads

  The important thing is this:

  To be ready at any moment

  to sacrifice what you are

  for what you could become.

  —Charles Dubois

  CHAPTER 1

  Out of the Frying Pan

  Enlightenment consists not merely

  in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions,

  but in making the darkness visible.

  The latter procedure is more difficult,

  and therefore, unpopular.

  —Carl Jung

  I WAS MARRIED on a Sunday in the spring of 1967, during my senior year at U.C. Berkeley. After a special dinner, Linda and I spent our brief honeymoon in a Berkeley hotel. I remember waking before dawn, unaccountably depressed. With the world still cloaked in darkness, I slipped out from under the rumpled covers and stepped softly out onto the balcony so as not to disturb Linda. As soon as I closed the sliding glass door, my chest began to heave and the tears came. I could not understand why I felt so sad, except for a troubling intuition that I had forgotten something important, and that my life had somehow gone awry. This sense would cast a shadow over the years to follow.

  After graduation, I left the familiar college routine and my athletic career behind me. Linda was pregnant, so it was time for me to grow up and find work. We moved to Los Angeles, where I sold life insurance. I felt as if I were inhabiting someone else’s life. Then I learned that a coaching position had opened up at Stanford University. I applied for and got the job. We moved back to northern California; our daughter Holly was born. To all appearances I led a charmed life—so I continued to deny the feeling that something felt fundamentally wrong.

  Four years passed. The Vietnam War. The moon landing. Watergate. Meanwhile, I immersed myself in the insular world of university politics, professional aspirations, and family responsibilities. My experiences with Socrates—and his words about the woman in Hawaii, the school in Japan, and some kind of book in the desert—faded into the dark recesses of my memory and then were lost in the shadows.

  In 1972 I left Stanford to accept a faculty position at Oberlin College in Ohio, hoping that I might outrun my depression and strengthen our marriage. But these new surroundings only served to clarify our diverging values: Linda was at home in a conventional world that repelled me for reasons I couldn’t explain. I envied her comfort. I looked at myself in the mirror of our relationship, and I didn’t like what I saw. I had once viewed myself as a knight in shining armor. Now the armor had rusted. Even as I played the role of a wise college professor, I felt like a charlatan.

  Despite Socrates’ lessons about living in the present moment, my mind buzzed with regret and anxiety. I was no longer good company, not even for myself. Overstressed and out of shape, I lost my physical edge and self-respect. Even worse, I was going through the motions, having lost any sense of the deeper purpose or reason for my existence. I started to wonder: Could I continue to pretend that everything was well when my heart and guts told me something else? Would I have to pretend for the rest of my life?

  Linda sensed my discontent, and we drifted further apart—she found other, more satisfying relationships, until the weakening thread that held us together finally snapped, and we decided to separate. I moved out on a cold day in March. The snow had turned to slush as I carried my few possessions to a friend’s van and found a room in town. Lost and miserable, I didn’t know where to turn.

  A few weeks later, while glancing at a faculty newsletter, an item caught my eye: It was an invitation for interested faculty to apply for a travel grant to pursue “cross-cultural research.” A sense of destiny coursed through me—I was certain that I was meant to do this. Two hours later I had completed the application. Three weeks later, I was awarded the grant. A window had opened; I had a direction once more, if only for the summer.

  But where would I travel? The answer came during a yoga class I had joined to get back into some kind of shape. The breathing and meditative exercises reminded me of techniques I had learned from Joseph, one of Soc’s students who had owned a small café in Berkeley before he died. Joseph had lived in Mysore, India, for a time, and had spoken positively of his experiences there. I had also read books on Indian saints, sages, and gurus, as well as on Vedantic philosophy. Surely, in India, I might rediscover that transcendent sense of freedom I had experienced with Socrates.

  I would travel light, taking only a small backpack and an open airline ticket for maximum flexibility. I studied maps, did some research, and got a passport and immunizations. My plans made, I told Linda the news and explained that I would send our daughter postcards and would call when possible, but that I might be out of touch.

  “That’s nothing new,” she said.

  ON A WARM SPRING MORNING just before the school year ended, I sat on the lawn with my four-year-old daughter. “Sweetheart, I have to go away for a while.”

  “Where are you going, Daddy?”

  “To India.”

  “Where they have elephants?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can Mommy and me go with you?”

  “Not this time, but someday we’ll go on a trip together—just you and me. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She paused. “Which way is India?”

  “That way,” I pointed.

  “Will you be gone a long time?”

  “Not so very long. Just the summer—maybe a little longer. You’ll have summer camp.”

  “But I won’t have you. Who will read to me before I go to sleep?”

  “Your mommy will.”

  “You’re funnier. And why can’t you move back home with us?”

  I had no answer to that. I could only say, “Wherever I am, I’ll be loving you and remembering you.”

  “Do you have to go, Daddy?”

  It was a question I had asked myself many times. And answered. “Yes, I do.”

  She sat with this for a few moments. “Okay. Will summer camp be fun?”

  “I expect it will.”

  “Will you send me postcards?”

  “Whenever I can,” I said, putting my arm around her. We sat this way fo
r a while, and I think it made us both happy and sad at the same time.

  A week later, the school year ended. After a bittersweet goodbye to Linda, I hugged my little daughter and slid into the taxi. “Hopkins Airport,” I said to the driver. As we pulled away, I looked back through the rear window to see my familiar world growing smaller, until only my own reflection remained, staring back at me in the rear window. I had the summer to search, and to see what would unfold.