Image:  The title page for section IV, by Diana Souza.

                   A Chat With Padre Pio in my Living Room

I had a little chat with Saint Padre Pio in my living room this afternoon. I always have considered the saints our "friends in High Places". In the last few weeks my injuries and their painful symptoms had flared up, and I had become fairly discouraged. Feeling more and more injured, and not knowing where to turn for help here on earth, I called on Saint Pio and asked him for healing. Within a few moments he appeared before me, as a sort of energy field in the rough form of a human that radiated a great warmth. He put his hands over my injured head and began to speak. This was the first time I remember him speaking to me. I could not hear what he was saying with my physical ears, but my inner response to his words was "yes, yes" - as it often is.

He reminded me that I was the soul, a being of luminous Light, and not my injured body. He then showed me how to send the rays of the soul through the body, from the inside of my being radiating outwards into the world - and as he showed me this, I perceived that I was only the Light, the body now very transparent and permeated by the bright Light of the soul. There was an infinitude to this experience that cannot accurately be described, an infinitude to the soul and the dimensions of the soul - dimensions in terms of its reach and size but also dimensions in the sense of two-dimensional or five-dimensional etc. The soul, in this image presented to me, seemed to contain thousands of dimensions. I am trying to find words but I have no human vocabulary to describe it. The words do not exist.

As I watched my injuries and my pain dissolve into the Light of the soul, I realized in a new and vibrant way that the injuries do not truly exist and had never truly existed. They conventionally exist, but they do not truly exist, not in the ultimate sense.

If you have read what I have written prior to this story, then you know the idea that I am the soul and not the body - is not a new concept for me. Rather, it is how I have tried to live my life. However, this experience today - was new. I was not meditating, nor in prayer. It was not a clairvoyant vision in the usual sense. Rather it was a further glimpse into who we truly Are.

If we think that we are only, or even primarily, the body and the personality - and that the physical, material reality which seems to surround us is the real, the True, Ultimate Reality - then we will be bound by the physical laws of the universe. In this way we entrap ourselves. To limit ourselves in this manner is to deny that we are truly the soul.

At the start of our spiritual journey here on earth, we cannot possibly conceive of the grandeur and infinite beauty of the path we have taken. And the results, even the fruits of my incomplete and stumbling journey, are beyond our human imagination. I am continually amazed at the depths and heights that are hidden from us, yet exist eternally within us.