Stephen G Post – Revelation On Route 80
Stephen G Post: I met Sir John at a conference on spirituality and health in 1991, and we immediately connected on the core ideas of infinite Mind and unlimited spiritual love. Sir John was so interested in the idea of “One Mind,” and although this was years before Larry Dossey wrote his great book on the subject, Larry actually was at the meeting and had dinner with Sir John, who subsequently supported one of Larry’s conferences. This was all synchronicity to me. In 2000 Sir John invited me to found the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (www.unlimitedloveinstitute.org), but not to focus on the study only mere human love, which he did not have much faith in. Instead, as he wrote me, we should study the powerfully transforming experiences that seem to invade our consciousness with a love that is truly spiritual in nature, a part of our Inner Being that is, in fact, our drop of the divine nature within. Human love tends to be narrowly focused, exclusionary, reversible, unenduring, and impure—human nature and emotions being the mixed bad that they are. But we saw “Pure Unlimited Love” as mystical, spiritual energy underlying the universe that we can connect with and be elevated by. A few weeks before Sir John died in Nassau, his son Dr. Jack Templeton called me and said, “Dad is dying, and he won’t be able to write his last book. So he wants you to do it for him as best you can.” “Okay, Jack, but what shall we call it?” “Dad says, “Ultimate Reality is Unlimited Love.” I agreed to do it and did, mixing world religions and physics and the writings of Sir John, who was I believe a genius way ahead of his time. But I asked Jack if his dad could let me have a title in the form of a question, to which Sir John agreed: “Is Ultimate Reality Unlimited Love? So I went ahead with it.
OMTimes: What kind of work do you do at the Institute now?
Stephen G Post: We have supported many scientific studies, published hundreds of scholarly articles, over 120 scholarly books, and worked closely with the media over the years. We have held numerous conferences all over the world. We are really interested in how people feel elevated when deeply in the “flow” of unselfish love, how compassionate love heals, how we can reliably raise kind children with a sense for a shared humanity, how we can spiritualize the workplace in creative love, how the transformative dynamic of infinite Mind and Pure Unlimited Love is experienced as the core of spiritually and how it can even be understood as Ultimate Reality or Ground of Being, and how all religions can converge on this within their many distinctive frameworks.
OMTimes: You co-wrote a bestselling book, Why Good Things Happen to Good People: How to Live a Longer, Happier, Healthier Life by the Simple Act of Giving. You are recognized for encouraging the prescribing of volunteerism for health, happiness, resilience, and longevity. Is there a science to back your theories up?
Stephen G Post: There is strong evidence that helping others in meaningful ways generally results in a happier, healthier, and more resilient life for the giver; and based on the strength of this evidence overall and in subpopulations including patient groups, it then asserts that the time has come for healthcare professionals to prescribe (or recommend) such behavior at sustainable levels generally in the range of two hours per week. Prescribing or recommending helping attitudes and actions in patients or communities is a universally valid contribution to preventive medicine and to the treatment of a wide variety of illness conditions. As a Professor in a Department of Family, Population, and Preventive Medicine, I can think of no other behavioral interventions that are as beneficial. Plus, it is well documented that volunteering in adolescence prevents teen pregnancy and academic failure, enhances social competence and self-esteem, and protects against anti-social behaviors, alcohol abuse, and substance abuse. I have done several dozen scientific studies on spirituality, purpose, and service as preventive of teen addiction with colleagues from Harvard and Case Western.
OMTimes: In your book, God and Love on Route 80, you wrote how anger is sometimes necessary and positive. Please explain a bit more as we see a lot of anger being expressed in our culture now.
Stephen G Post: Sometimes a controlled expression of well-founded anger is necessary to draw some boundaries, especially when someone has hurt you badly and no reconciliation can happen without a real meeting of the minds based on the acknowledgment of the wrong and an apology on their part. But out-of-control anger is always bad for your own emotional, mental, and physical health, and destructive of others. With my old friend Dr. M. Scott Peck, MD, we coined the word “Carefrontation” as an alternative to “confrontation.” The best way to deal with it is to meditate on the Light within as the source of the sublime and higher emotions, like forgiveness, humility, and love. But even with this, we still need to draw boundaries when people are harmful. Hurt people are the ones who generally hurt people.
OMTimes: Your book makes many references the Golden Rule and Norman Rockwell’s famous painting that had a profound influence in your life. How can we simply live and honor the Golden Rule in our lives now?
Stephen G Post: I had the honor of hearing Rockwell speak about his iconic image, “The Golden Rule” as a teen. I love the image because people from every race and religion, age, and gender, are peacefully focused on the concept “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them do Unto You.” They look so serene. And now we know that when human beings are in this frame of mind, the neurological circuits associated with hostility and rumination all turn off. Love casts out these destructive emotions. This is not the minimal or negative Gold Rule, “Do Not Do Unto Others as You Would Not Have Them Do Unto You,” because that just means that we can feel good about ourselves and our karma at the end of the day is we have not wantonly elbowed some innocent neighbor in the back. No, the positive version requires that we use our spiritual being, positive emotions, and moral imaginations to envision how we can contribute meaningfully to the lives of others.
OMTimes: The website for the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love was hacked by ISIS in 2014. What happened, and how did they find out about your work? It’s a remarkable story with an incredible ending with you at the UN! You again turned a negative into a positive!
Stephen G Post: The ISIS web takedown was most likely a response to an August 10, 2014 newsletter that the institute emailed out that went viral in the Middle East. It was titled “An Open Letter to Young Members of ISIS” and highlighted Sayed Hossein Nasr and other fabulous contemporary Islamic writers on divine love who can interpret Islam beautifully. Three months later, on Monday, November 10, 2014, the website of the institute was totally wiped out. It was probably the third website in the world to be taken down by ISIS.
When the website was taken down by TEAM DZ ISIS, our response was to establish an international essay contest for young people to describe how they pushed back against peer pressure to hate others simply because they did not share their beliefs. This went well. In fact, in August 2016, we filled the United Nations Headquarters with young people from all over the world performing their essays and poems and celebrating spiritual oneness and Unlimited Love.
OMTimes: How do you turn a negative into a positive?
Stephen G Post: Life is always an expanding canvas. Like a Jackson Pollock painting that might start with some gob of paint thrown down on the middle of a canvas, by the time we cover it over with lines spreading outwards it looks beautiful. It just takes one line to turn a negative (-) into a positive (+). On Route 80, life is always an expanding canvas, and what looks bleak can be transformed into something luminous with prayer and help from the infinite Mind. “Love never fails,” but this is the love that resides in our higher spiritual being and needs to be cultivated spiritually.
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with Stephen G Post
