I Changed My Mind to Be Happy - Part 1

October 26, 1996

For you to understand it, you need to fall in love.

We have the cakes tonight. Back when we first got started, we didn't have the cakes on the altar, we were getting ready to make the nectar publications. Life is a really interesting thing. You know we all are sort of doing different things in life, and everybody comes from a different perspective here. Each one of you has an individuality that is unique, like you see in those pictures, the snowflakes that fall out of the sky; we're told that there are no two snowflakes alike. Did you know that? And they are crystals. Has anybody ever seen a photograph of a snowflake? They have beautiful patterns to them. Have you seen them? And out of every snowflake that has ever fallen since this planet has been here, on the whole planet, no two snowflakes were alike. That seems impossible, doesn't it? I mean there must be billions of snowflakes that fall every year! Billions of them! More than the national debt, billions of them! Trillions of them. That no two snowflakes have ever been alike, ever! Ever! They have not been alike for the last trillion eons. No two snowflakes, on all the planets that ever existed. There is an infinite number of varieties. It's infinite; it goes on forever, it never ends. It is so vast that it is hard to maybe comprehend with a finite mind.

But it seems like you could run around your neighborhood or your back porch with a frozen glass and catch snowflakes and bring them in and look under the microscope or the magnifying glass and find a similar snowflake. But there are no two snowflakes that are identical. And there never have been. They are all different. It is just an awesome and amazing event. We could spend our whole lifetime being concerned with snowflakes and why, the big question, "Why aren't two snowflakes alike, why are they all different?" Or we could go back to those moments in our life where we just barely touched upon the question about existence, that deep, awesome question: "What is life?"

What is life? You know there are all those religions out there, and all those philosophies, and they've all got a story for it, or an answer for it in a book. "If you read this book it says on page 32 and 35, it tells what life is about." "Chapter 375, verse 16, this is where life is found. Amen." And that's been going on for all the snowflakes' time. The snowflakes don't really seem to get upset about how many books men write. They don't seem to be concerned about how many wars humankind have. They don't seem to care who is going to win the election. They don't seem to care whether it's going to be warm or cold. The snowflakes fall, and they present themselves as they are. Each individual snowflake. None like another. Each with its own similarities between other snowflakes, but individual personalities.

Every cell in your body is different but identical to the others. It is shaped just a little bit different. They can't find another exactly like it, and there are trillions of them! And so there is all this different-ness, but all this same-ness at the same time. And we come back to that question: life. What is life? What are we? Where did the big bang come from? Where did this big bang come from, and the planets were created and stuff? What's the why of it? Or it just was, and we are an effect of it? But what's on the other side of it? On the other side of "before the big bang," what's the solid core of mass that was supposed to have contained all the elements of the universe that exploded into existence and caused Creation to be?

And those are questions that sometimes touch into the consciousness of humankind. Which make you just a little bit different. Just a little bit different than fish. Just a little bit different than asparagus. Just a little bit different from other creatures of evolution. To the extent that that question once in awhile touches the consciousness of all humankind. And the more affluent you become, the greater the pressure of the question. And the reason being is, you're not trying to survive, you are trying to answer the question. And you are trying to answer it in your affluence. You are trying to look outward and gather something to bring it to you, to bring a satisfaction of what life is about. Trying to acquire or come to some kind of attainment, some kind of pleasure, some kind of feeling, some kind of emotion, some kind of fulfillment, to answer the question of what life is about and where it came from.

I want to introduce Mike Hopkinson here. He came to one of the first lectures I ever gave on Summum back in the yard on 2300 East and 3900 South where we built the little yellow pyramid, and we set up the little flip chart, and I used to write the stories about everyone on there. What I want to do is, I want to go back, and maybe a lot of you have never heard me tell the story about how I got involved in all of this and what happened to me. And originally I didn't know why it happened. I know now, but I didn't know then.

You know a lot of times something happens for you and it takes a lot of years for it to sink in, why it happened, and you look back on all the causes and effects, and you put all the different things together and you sort of are able to figure it out, but initially it's like a car accident. How did I get in that car accident? And then you realize that it was raining and your windshield wipers weren't working, you were down looking on the floor for something and all the sudden you ran into a telephone pole or something like that. Happened real quick. Well, this wasn't like a car accident, this was sort of different.

I had done all the things that a normal person in Salt Lake City or within the world had done, it doesn't make any difference where you happen to be. It just so happened it was my time because of the things I'm going to tell you about tonight after I tell this story, that it could be your time, what happened to me. That in my previous lifetimes, I'd been involved in this same consciousness. Summum is not 707 Genesee Avenue. Summum is not a person. Summum is not a religion. It is not a church. It is a state of consciousness when you discover what it is. It's a way of seeing existence. It's an understanding. It's being able to look into the crystal ball from the inside out. And see all the surface of it, rather than looking from the outside in. It's when you've gone inside of it, and you are there inside of it. That's what Summum means.

And I know everybody else has their snowflake interpretation of it, and that's perfect. Because on the outside of the crystal ball there is an infinite number of dots, and each one of them has a perspective looking in, and they see the crystal ball from where they are at on the surface of it. It is like a faceted gem; all the cuts, and all the planes, and all those levels of consciousness, and you are on one of those. This crystal ball is a gold plated pressed platinum ball. But you look from the inside out. Rather than being on the outside, you merge with it, or you immerse yourself inside of this.

So I had gone on an LDS mission, and I got married in the temple, I was doing all the things that you're supposed to do. I was living up in Mount Olympus Cove. My dad had built me a beautiful home up there and gave it to me. I had 300 thousand dollars in my savings account, that's a lot of money in 1974 isn't it? And I built this den with a sound room in it, it had walls that were two feet thick and it was totally insulated. You could go in there and it was a different world. It was a pretty good sound room. Ron was probably the only one here that ever went in there. Anyway, I'd go down there and I wouldn't turn the music on, but what I would do is I'd go down there after work. I'd come home, I was working over here on Redwood Road as an administrative manager for a wellness supply distributor. They'd sell gases and stuff to the hospitals. Anyway, I'd go home after a hectic day at work, being on the phone all day long, you know how your neck gets tight? You guys know what that's about don't you? Your back would get all stiff. I had 200 employees working for me, and you still have to do the work, it doesn't go away, it's still waiting for you the next day, it's on demand the pressure. So you come home after work, you sit down, and everybody's got it in their job. Everybody's got it. Whether you are flipping hamburgers or whether you are placing vending machines, or whatever you happen to be doing, selling clothes, talking to people. Everybody has the pressure out there. Trying to keep the customers happy right? They're all pissed off about that detail or this little detail. Gotta keep 'em happy right?

And so, I would come home and I would sit down on the floor of my den and I would close my eyes and I would go into a silence. I would just stop my mind. And I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know, I had never heard, I had heard maybe in passing the word meditation, but I didn't know what it meant. It's not in the bible, is it? Where? In Psalms? Well, I didn't believe in the Old Testament, I was a New Testament man! The Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants. And so I was down there meditating and didn't even know it. And all of the sudden it was really interesting, I was in my early 30's, and all of the sudden I heard this really high frequency inside of my mind. First of all, I thought it was in my ears and I had this really good friend who is not here tonight, Dale Bernstein, who is my doctor. Have you guys met Dale? He was my doctor. He was a young doctor then. Anyway, I went down to Dale's office to get an ear exam to make sure my ears were okay and everything. And I had perfect hearing. It was just unbelievable. But whenever I would sit down, I would hear this really high frequency in my mind.

And everything was going along just fine, and it seemed as if I were drawn to do this, to sit down and go into this silence; just stop thinking. Not think about anything at all, but go into the silence every day after work. Then I'd start doing it on weekends, and as much time as I could do it I would go down there and do it. And I would just listen to that sound of silence. It was so perfect. It was so relaxing, so wonderful. It was like everything outside just sort of went to sleep, and everything inside came alive when I went into that silence. All of the sudden my attitude started changing when I did this. [With irony] I got a real bad attitude. I got a real bad attitude about going to church. I had a real bad attitude about the hypocrisy of the people who lived on the east bench, [their attitude] about the people who lived in the valley. And so I went to elders quorum, and they would ask questions of me, and there was this doctor there named Dale Hebertson, he was the head of the female organ department at LDS hospital, he's probably dead now. He was in the elders quorum, and we used to get in arguments all the time because he would stand up in elders quorum and say, "The reason we're up here and we have these $100,000 dollar homes (that's what they cost in those days; one hundred thousand dollars back in 1974 up there) is because we are so much more intelligent, and we're blessed by God, and we're so much more righteous, and we work so much harder, and we're so much more educated, we deserve it. And those guys down there in the bottom of the valley, those guys are bums, and they don't work hard, and they're all lazy, and they're not the chosen ones." And I said, "Wait a minute! I don't buy that!" So I would get in arguments with these guys in elders quorum. I'd say, "You know, those guys down there are just as good as us. They just haven't had the opportunities that we've had. I had a dad that had lots of money, and sent me to college, and gave me a house, and I worked hard and everything, but a lot of those guys didn't have opportunities like I had. They got stuff within their insides and everything, and within their hearts; they feel just like we do." And these guys would really get pissed off at me. So I'd get in these arguments, and they started calling me in, saying, "You're straying from the fold Elder Nowell. We hear you're not doing well."

Then I started drinking. And the reason I started drinking, is my dad was in the private club business. And they had these private clubs where you go, in those days there was a private club down on 39th south and 11th east, and it was called the Bell Khan. It was a long time ago. You had to go stick your bottle in the wooden locker, and you got a key when you came in, and you took it out and you poured your drink at the table. That's what they used to do. You had to go to the liquor store, and you had to have a liquor license to buy liquor, with your picture on it. Unbelievable! That's how it used to be here.

Anyway, so things changed and I started seeing everything differently from this new perspective. I was meditating and I didn't know it was called meditation, I didn't know what I was doing, I was just going home and getting some rest after work. So I ended up getting a divorce because my wife was really into the LDS church, and I was in this big battle with them, and we were just going different ways and she was a lot younger than me and it just didn't work out. So we got divorced and I moved out, and I moved down to Sorenson's house on 29th East and 39th South. And lived there for a little while, and then went over and lived in Woodlake Village down where Bob lived on 3rd East and 45th South somewhere. And then I met a girl at a club called The Winery. Anyway, I moved into and lived with Chris Miller up in the Avenues. And I was still coming home every day after work where I was selling printing for Vanguard Graphics. I would come home every day after work, and I would sit on this couch and I would face the west, and I would sit down and I would meditate. And one afternoon on October 28, 1975, I came home and I sat down just like this, and I had this blanket, this same blanket, and I sat there facing west with this blanket on me, meditating. And all of the sudden I heard this really intense sound inside of my mind that I had heard before. And then I felt it all over my body. And then I felt it all in the room. I was consumed by it totally. And then the next thing I knew I was standing in front of this huge pyramid. It was huge. And it looked like it was at least a half a mile long on one side. I used to run track and you can sort of judge distance when you run; how far you've got left to go. And it looked like it was made out of black graphite, but it was perfectly smooth all over. It looked like it had Astroturf all around it, it was live grass but it was cut so perfect it was unbelievable. And I knew I was there physically because I could feel myself. Can you guys feel yourself right now? Grab your hands and feel yourself. Are you really here? Are you sure you are here? Is everybody sure they're here?

Okay back to the class. I was there, as much as you are here. I was there. I was not on the couch. I walked along, it seemed to me as I perceived it, I started from the south and walked northward, and on the north side of it there was this huge round building, and it looked like it was made of black graphite also. It was very, very smooth. I walked up to it and I passed right through the wall of it. I was drawn inside of it. And as I was drawn inside of it, it seemed as if it just melted around me. And when I got inside of it, I just couldn't believe I had passed through it, and I started feeling myself again to make sure that I was still alive, like you guys know you are still alive right here, you know? You really do believe you are alive. You really do believe that you have bodies and everything. And when I entered inside of it, it was all light. Just pure light. And the light was not coming out of the walls; it looked like the light came out of the air. And it didn't have a light source, but it was very, very bright. It was the brightest light I have ever seen in my whole life. And as my eyes adjusted to it, I looked across this large room and on the far side there was this whole group of people, and they were all naked, every one of them. But their nakedness wasn't relevant. And they were the most beautiful people I had ever seen. They didn't have any hair or anything on their body, they were bald, every one of them. But they were male and female, you could tell, but not pronounced, they were unpronounced male and female. They weren't some, you know, you could tell these guys were all the jocks and these guys were all the chicks, no... they weren't like that. They looked very similar to each other. And instantaneously they started communicating with me. I didn't have to say a word, and neither did they. They knew everything that was in my mind. And they projected to my mind a comfort or a wellbeing that allowed me to feel okay there. I had no fear whatsoever. And this is what I would say would be like a very dramatic drug trip, hallucination, or cause for hospitalization. Because I didn't believe in these things! I was a good Mormon boy. I thought when those things happened to people, when you heard stories like that, what you do is you take them to the psych ward, those guys, when that happens. Because they don't believe in society. That is definitely some kind of glitch in the thinking process. Those things don't happen. That's not reality.

But I was really there. And I knew I was there because I kept feeling myself, and I was there just as you feel you are here right now, that's how I felt. Just as you can hear my voice, just as you can see the surroundings you are in, that's as vivid as it was for me because I was really there. And I was compelled to go towards them, and I went to the far side of the room. And I looked at the floor, and out of the floor came a large pillar, it looked like a piece of glass because I had never heard of crystals. All these "crystal rubbers" and stuff like that, you know, I don't know if any were around in those days, they all came afterwards, sort of. They're more popular now than they were then. Anyway, this shaft came out of the floor, I looked into it, and I didn't know it, but the first time I was there this happened, but a shaft came from above also, another crystal. And they programmed me. To really be honest with you. They just brainwashed me. They put all of these concepts in my head instantaneously and then it went back into the floor. And I got to know them all after a period of time. And the next thing I knew I was sitting back on the couch with the little blankey on me just perfectly fine, right there, saying, "Whoa! Those guys at Vanguard Graphic gave me some LSD. I've heard about that stuff."

Because they were talking about it and they were trying to talk me into taking it. They would say "Hey you ought to try this one night with us! This stuff is really far out, you see this stuff crawl all over the walls, you see these paisley things." And stuff like this, you know. And so I said, "I know exactly what happened, those guys slipped me some LSD when I was at work." I had just come home from work, and those guys were always doing drugs, always smoking dope and everything on the job, you know, and I knew those guys had slipped me some LSD or something. I knew they had to have done it. Because I got home and this weird thing happened to me.

So I went down to work the next day and I started saying, "Nothing happened to me. I know you guys did it. Nothing was wrong. Nothing happened you know, there was no effect from that stuff you guys gave me, it didn't even work. Don't give it to me anymore. I don't want any more LSD." And we used to have these donuts, and I was chowing down on these donuts after work just before I went home, and I thought, "Oh they stuck it in the donuts! They put the LSD in the donuts, or some kind of drug in there to make me have this hallucination." And so I said, "I'm not eating any more of those donuts." So I was really cautious, and I'd say, "No I'm not hungry, I've got to lose a little bit of weight, we've got to go over to work out a little bit at the gym" (we used to go work out). I'd make sure I didn't drink any water out of the bottles so I didn't get any of this LSD in me, and go home and have another one of those hallucinations! Because I was afraid that they were going to lock me up. And I didn't dare tell anybody about it. You know, what would you guys do if you had something like that happen?

Anyway, so we got a little further down the road, and I was being very cautious, and it started to happen to me on a regular basis. Every time I would go home, I would sit down and I would meditate, but I couldn't stop from meditating when I got home, because I started to fall in love with these people. And I don't know if any of you have ever been in love. Love is a very interesting thing. Do you remember when you were a little kid, and your mother says, "that's just puppy love," when you came home and told her you were in love? When you first fell in love, and you lost all consciousness because of it? And they said, "that was really puppy love, that's not really love." And then society puts all these things on what love is supposed to be, it's got to have license plates, and it has to cost thirty thousand dollars and it's got to have this to it, and it's got to have that, and it's got to have stability and it's got to have these long term things; there's a whole list of things that love has got to have. But when you were really in love, when you were really first in love, you lost all of your obstacles between you and that person, you became blindly in love. All their faults, anything that could have ever been wrong with them, went away, because you were really in love. You know why you were in love? Because you were in love with their being. You were in love because you were innocent. You didn't have a criteria of desires and wants and wishes that you put upon this person that they had to supply to you for you to be able to be in love with them. You were in love with their being. And it allowed you to drop all of your obstacles. And you couldn't eat you were so in love. It made you love sick you were so in love. You reached the point of centeredness between bliss and sickness. You were so in love that when you stopped thinking about the love, you were sick. And then you thought about the love and you became unsick, and you went back to love sick, and then you went back to love. The purity of the innocence of love. But it's all passed from you, you have lost it.

Because you've built a barrier, you've built obstacles. You've built something between you and everything out there, and everything in here, that you can't love anymore. You can't even love yourself. When you look back on that moment, that was the purest and the happiest moment of life that you've had. It had no contamination. It had nothing on it. It had no requirements to it. Everybody experiences it. You may have been in love with someone who didn't even know you were in love with them. Right?

So, they kept on bringing me back. They kept on indoctrinating me, brainwashing me, whatever term your point on the outside of the crystal ball would like to call it. I could care less. But it was my time, because I had been in the Summum consciousness like you are, for many lifetimes before. I had been going to touch it. I had been going near it. I had been trying to become it. And it was my time in evolution and my progression for it to happen. There is a time and a season for everything, for all things, for all snowflakes to fall. But I didn't dare tell anybody. If I started telling somebody about this, it would cause a problem. They would think that something was wrong with me. Because I didn't believe in this stuff! I was a Mormon! This is totally contradictory to my belief system! This couldn't be possible. And so I started telling some of the guys at work, because I knew they hadn't slipped me LSD, because it kept on happening and I wasn't eating anything. Because I was in love. And so I took two weeks off from work and I hid under my covers. I stayed in bed for two weeks. All I did was get up and eat a little tiny bit, and then get back in bed and sort of hide under the covers because I was afraid of going out into the world to tell anybody about it. And they finally convinced me that it would be okay to tell someone. And they said, "You tell someone about it, and we will perform a miracle on them and prove it to them that it's true."

And so what happened was, Bill Rounds, who worked at Paragon Press, was a very understanding person. And he was the most understanding person of the whole group. So I went to work one day and I said, "Bill, come out in the parking lot, I've got to tell you something." It was in the fall, this time of the year, about a year after it had happened. I guess it was '76 when we started building that pyramid. We went out into the parking lot, and I had a 1963 Chevrolet I paid $25 for because in those days when you got divorced, your wife got everything and you got your clothes. And so my house and $300,000 dollars went to St. Louis. With all the art and everything we had on the walls, and it got distributed among the in laws. Anyway, you are lucky you got divorced in the good days Gale! In those days it was intense. They used to give everything to the wife. But they changed those rules.

Anyway, so what happened is Bill and I were out there, and I said, "Hey Bill I'm going to tell you something, because you're the only person I can tell this to, you're the only person I can trust, you're the only person that I know that this can happen with." And I told him the story about what had happened to me. And they said, if you tell him the story, we'll perform a miracle on him, and we'll make him know this is true. But you tell him, and you don't have to worry about it. I said okay, let's give this a shot. And all that could happen is Bill could tell Steve, and Steve could fire me, and they'll turn me in and the police will pick me up and they'll take me to the Psych ward. It's all that could happen. That's the worst part. But I KNOW these guys are real, I mean, they looked just as real as you guys do. I could touch them, and I could feel them, they did all kinds of stuff with me, they were really sort of giving me all these clues. And so I told Bill this story, and I went back inside and left him in the parking lot. He was sort of in a daze, he was holding on to the car. And Bill was a born again Christian. And he said, "It's the devil! It's the devil that's got you! The devil got you!" That's what he said. That's exactly what he said in the parking lot.

And I went back into the print shop, and about ten minutes later Bill came sort of crawling in there. And I said, "Well, are we still friends and everything, you know?" And he just stood there kind of frozen, and said, "I can't say anything." And he couldn't talk. He just couldn't talk. And he grabbed his lunch pale, and left, and went home. He left work, and went home.

And Bill wrote a story about what happened. What happened, it was a really bizarre thing that happened to him in the parking lot right after I went inside. This tornado came. A real tornado came to Utah. And there were these pyracantha bushes with those little berries - oh, I forgot to tell you, when he came inside he was covered from head to toe with pyracantha berries - the tornado came down this huge hedge, it was about 100 feet long, and it took all the pyracantha berries off and stuck them to Bill's body. And they hit him so hard that they were all broken. He was covered from head to toe with pyracantha berries. And at the same time they told him that the story I told him was true. But they had to get him with the pyracantha berries to prove it, that this was real. And he grabbed his lunch pale and went home. And he's never been able to deny it since, has he? But he was a born again Christian. This guy is a born again Christian, saying that this is the story of the devil, but he said it was from god when he left the parking lot! We've got a little signed affidavit, and you guys can go talk to Bill Rounds if you want to. He's still alive, still kicking. He was the first person I told, but he's never dared come around here. It was too intense for him.

Anyway, that was how this all got started. And we started giving lectures. We had a little back yard, and I would set up this flip chart, I've got it back here with the same stuff. I would draw things on it back in 1976, and tell everybody about all the things that they had told me. Is this a different story, or is this the same story you heard me tell 20 years ago? How long has it been since I've seen you Mike? I haven't seen this guy for twenty years, and the story hasn't changed? Same story?

Then we started teaching the class at the University of Utah, where Mike showed up, and Mike was a carpenter. He helped us build that little first pyramid back in the back, and we moved it down here when we got the property, and we started doing all of this, and all of the things that they told me I was supposed to do. Anyway, that's how it all got started.

So, Summum is a state of consciousness. It's not something that you attend. It's not something you go to church on Sunday, do a bunch of ritual and say talks about and stuff like that. It is not something that you do. But there is a criteria. For you to understand it, you need to fall in love. And it's very rarely that you ever fall in love in your life, you have two chances to fall in love. And every snowflake has this. Every snowflake gets the opportunity to fall in love twice. Once, when you fall as a pure snowflake from heaven. And the second time is when you are contaminated. You get a chance to evaporate and go back into the air and fall in love with it, where you came from. But most snowflakes melt; absorb into the earth in one way or another, and take on an incarnation as a flower, or sucked up into the rose, or into the orange, or into the tree, or drank by a human, and they become part of it. And there they live their incarnation. Very rarely does a snowflake evaporate back in. But every so often, if you keep on being a snowflake, you'll have the opportunity to fall in love the second time. Now why don't we take a quick break, and come back and begin the second part of the class.