Stephen G Post – Revelation On Route 80
For over twenty years, Stephen G Post, Ph.D., has spread the science of giving and commitment to the greater good across the globe. Supporting dozens of scientific studies at top universities and conducting his own research, Dr. Post lives and teaches the uplifting perennial message that by giving to others, we become our fullest selves. The bestselling lead author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People: How to Live a Longer, Happier Life by the Simple Act of Giving, Post is the founder and president (2000) of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (www.unlimitedloveinstitute.org), and the director (2008) of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University in New York. OMTimes is pleased to share this interview we had with him about his new book, God and Love on Route 80: The Hidden Mystery of Human Connectedness.
Many years ago, at the age of 15, Stephen G Post had a recurring dream while a student at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. The dream recurred six times over a year and was always the same:
It was early morning, misty and silver-gray, at the end of a long road to the unknown west. High above the sea, a long-haired blond youth leaned outward over a ledge about to let go, when out of the mist appeared the light blue image of an angel’s face. Speaking softly and with great love, the angel said, “If you save him, you too shall live.” Then she faded back into the silver-gray mist.
Often we do not take the spirituality of children and teens seriously, but eventually this vivid dream lured “the boy” across the country on Route 80 in search of a destiny that found him through an uncanny encounter that was life-saving both for himself and the youth he finally met on an early silver-gray morning along the ledge of the Golden Gate Bridge. Since that astonishing episode of synchronicity, the boy’s life unfolded with threads of the dream woven into many more episodes across the years.
People have dreams, intuitions, amazing premonitions, and unexpected encounters that feel “set up” by an infinite Mind and in fact, these things simply cannot be explained in any other way. Post wrote God and Love on Route 80: The Hidden Mystery of Human Connectedness to help people to notice the whispers of infinite Mind, to talk about them more freely and realize how cherished each of us is, and because they can unlock our deeper spiritual capacities for creative love.
An Interview with Stephen G Post
OMTimes: What was your “blue angel” dream about?
Stephen G Post: I was fifteen when I first had the dream, and it only recurred about a half dozen times for a year or slightly more. It was uplifting, and I loved talking about it with my school mates and Rev. Welles, as well as his wife, Julie. The dream recurred in the early mornings, and each time it was exactly the same: A blue angel would appear out of the fog somewhere out west at the end of the road, and there was a youth leaning off a ledge. Then, speaking very softly and with great love, the angel would say, “If you save him, you too shall live.” Then she faded back. After each dream, I would quietly meditate on it in the old Chapel at St. Paul’s. Rev. Welles, my teacher, and I drove down to Yale University Divinity School (he was a closely connected graduate) to talk about the dream in a class on adolescent spirituality when I was 16.
OMTimes: After your experience on the bridge, how did your life change?
Stephen G Post: I never again struggled for meaning in life. There were some ordeals here and there, peaks and valleys, but I never again felt even a little on the ledge myself. I realized that we think we are more separate from each other than we are, and that in fact, we are profoundly connected in the mystery of a Mind, that Mind ultimately holds us close. I was no big believer in angels, but I understood the dream as the infinite Mind trying to break through my everyday consciousness to get me thinking that Mind comes before Matter and that it is not just derived from cells, tissues, and brain. My episodes early in life on the bridge and in then in Oregon left me certain of this Mind in which we are all one beyond place and time.
OMTimes: What is the significance of the color blue? What does it mean to you?
Stephen G Post: Blue is one of the seven “angel colors,” based on seven different light rays. The theologians of old said that blue angels protect and defend people. Blue is a significant color, according to angelology, scriptures of many types and with Chagall’s paintings. I love Chagall because many after my adolescent dream when I was teaching philosophy at Fordham (1985-88) in Tarrytown, my office-mate Gabe Gomes asked me how I wound up studying world spirituality at the University of Chicago. I told Gabe about the dream. He was a leading expert in spirituality, and he told me to walk over to the next village, Pocantico Hills, to the Union Church, and look at Chagall’s stained glass window of the Good Samaritan. I did, and later I studied Chagall because I wondered where he came up with all his blue angels. It turns out that he left home when he was 17 because he did not want to work in his father’s factory pickling herring! I headed west on Route 80 at 17 after my father insisted that I work in a lampshade factory. Chagall went to St. Petersburg, and while homeless, he had a dream vision in the small room where he was allowed to sleep. The room filled with blue light, and he saw wings of an angel that then ascended leaving behind blue. Chagall considered blue to be the color of love, and when he died many years later, he was painting a blue angel in his studio outside of Paris. So finally I felt that someone else had had a youthful experience a bit like my own.
OMTimes: You wrote about a wild experience on a motorcycle in Oregon when you feared for your life. Oddly your mother—who was at home in New York — woke up thinking that you were dead. What was going on? How do you explain her late-night call and how you actually were the one to answer the phone in the college dorm?
Stephen G Post: About six months after encountering the blond youth on the Golden Gate Bridge, I was attending Reed College in Portland. My mother called my dorm at 2am ET after she awoke from sleep 3000 miles away with a dreadful premonition that I was dead. Actually, I had just stumbled into the dorm as the phone rang after the most perilous 180 MPH motorcycle ride of my life. I ended up clinging to the back a crazed biker for two unrelenting hours on the Pacific Coast Highway sliding in the cold slush. I had assumed that I was not going to survive. How does a mom know exactly when to call and from so far away?
OMTimes: What does having a premonition mean?
Stephen G Post: Premonitions, meaning literally “forewarnings” from the Latin, are typically experienced between parents and children, between spouses, siblings, and close friends. This is because there is something about deep, anxious, and selfless love that moves us so far beyond ego and selfishness that we can most powerfully enter the field of the infinite Mind, which is also a field of infinite Love. When premonitions occur, it is a sign that the walls between “I” and “You” have been replaced by oneness, and at that frequency of love, the miracles of premonition and synchronicity are most likely to happen.
OMTimes: How do you explain what synchronicity is?
Stephen G Post: They are the loving encounters that happen so perfectly and out of nowhere that they feel “set up” by a cherishing personal, loving infinite Mind. But you have to want to notice them and slow down a little to acknowledge them. They are always so perfect and often in answer to a prayer of some special need, but not always. When we notice them, we realize how loved we are no matter what, and we can reflect this in our concern for others.
OMTimes: You have lived an astonishing life of synchronicities, and very auspicious meetings with people who eventually would turn out to be great allies on the next step of your remarkable journey. One meeting, in particular, is with Sir John Templeton, with whom you founded the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Stephen G Post
