By Raphael O’Suna

I met a holy man once in a redwood forest. He was the son of a great Sufi Master.

He was unable to answer or understand my questions. We stood beneath the virgin timbers, silently, and then I walked away.

I met a Nazi doctor on that very spot years before; and the woman I should have married, was met there, many years after the holy man.

The bank was wide there and the river curved to the left. The gulch widened there, and gigantic trees grew side by side.

Spirituality, mystery and magic, and romance, three lifelong interests of my adult years: All of them intensified, vivified, and seemingly offered to me over a fifteen year period at the same spot.
I go there always in my fancy and often in my nighttime dreams.

Were I to write a book, it would have to begin there: “I met a holy man once in a redwood forest.”
There’s a bit of magic in that sentence, I felt the same way, when I wrote: “I am old enough to have known someone who met Abraham Lincoln.” And also, when I wrote: “I stepped in quicksand once,…” And lastly, I knew I had captured the reader’s attention, when I wrote: “Almost forty years have passed since I was put into the Witness Protection Program.”

My questions to the holy man were inspired. They arose from years of study, thought and practice. They were also practical. They dealt with the hazards of the spiritual path.

The holy man in robes, son of the great Khan, did not want to go against nature. He did not want to take heaven by storm. He wanted to flow along with evolution, karma and good works.

There can be no inheritance, father to son, of advanced spirituality. Every Christian bears witness to this. Their “Son of God,” had to suffer His own trials and tribulations. Names, lineage, tutoring or a father’s desire, will not make the son a holy man.

The great Khan’s son stood face to face with the son of nobody, beneath the towering crowns of titans, which pre-dated the wanderings of the Archetypal Son. On that spot, at that moment, squeezed between the Nazi doctor and lovely Marla, he told me not to worry. The risks I had repeated to him: “Illness, madness or death,” were very far removed from the slow flow of his grace.