TITLE: “Yancey Gates: A Dialogue With Self”
RELEASE DATE: April 20, 2017
AUTHOR: Arthur Telling
CATEGORIES: Metaphysical/New Age
PAGE COUNT: 310
ISBN: 978-1543007053
IMPRINT: Gaia’s Essence
KEYWORDS: Buddhism, Occult, New Age, Metaphysical, American Indian,
World’s Fair, Spiritual, Religion
ONE LINER:
A
spiritual theme in a developing San Francisco World’s Fair gives Planning
Department employee Yancey Gates a pathway for awakening the mind.
SYNOPSIS:
Yancey
Gates seeks enlightenment, while enduring a mundane job plagued with office
politics at the San Francisco Planning Department. Opportunity arises when a
dynamic new California governor proposes a world’s fair in San Francisco having
a spiritual theme.
Yancey’s
job in Planning takes on new life as the governor’s plan drops into his lap,
and carries him to a Northern California Buddhist monastery where present
moment awareness is a way of life, and to a fiery American Indian chieftain
whose distrust of the White Man threatens the governor’s plan.
Remaining
steadfast as he navigates through challenges and pitfalls, Yancey’s focus stays
on the question of his
real
purpose, his reason for living, and he brings you, the reader, along a
tumultuous journey towards enlightenment.
CHARACTER INTERVIEW:
Yancey
Gates is here today. He is employed at the San Francisco Planning Department,
and is on the Governor’s World’s Fair planning committee.
INTERVIEWER:
Yancey, it is good to talk with you today.
YANCEY:
Thank you sir, it is good to be here.
INTERVIEWER:
Can you give a history of how you became a member of the Governor’s World’s
Fair committee?
YANCEY:
Yes. It began when I was given the assignment of planning a new MUNI transit
terminal out in the bay on Treasure Island.
INTERVIEWER:
You mean the San Francisco Municipal transit system.
YANCEY:
Yes, the MUNI. Ms. Brown, my boss, sent me to Sacramento to pick up some documents
for the project, and there I was introduced to the Governor. We hit it off well
together, because we were both on the spiritual path, and, you know, the new
Fair has a spiritual theme.
INTERVIEWER:
Tell me about this spiritual path, and the whys of how you got there?
YANCEY:
Sure, of course. It was quite some years ago, my life wasn’t going well, and I
began wondering about my whole purpose for living, you know, why do I exist,
where did I come from, where am I going; all that. I landed a job in Planning
but I wasn’t happy. Frankly I was quite miserable. See, I don’t fit into this
world, I really had no social life and the job was not going well.
INTERVIEWER:
And so you began your spiritual quest?
YANCEY:
Yes, exactly. There was only one book that gave even a hint that there must be
some future world better than what we have here. After all, we live and we die,
that’s it! Does that make any sense?
INTERVIEWER:
And this book, was it religion?
YANCEY:
Yes. I picked up a small copy of the Bible, the New Testament. It didn’t answer
my questions, but I became more curious. I moved to Berkeley. It’s where
revolutions start, where the standard fare is challenged. I found the kinds of
answers I wanted at metaphysical bookstores in Berkeley. It became clear that
the mind creates the world, not the other way around. The other way makes
absolutely no sense, there is no possibility that the self that we know and
experience emerges out of dead matter. In fact, what is dead matter? We only
know what we see in front of our faces. What is “the physical world”? It’s a term
describing what we see in front of our faces. But we cannot be objective
observers because we too are “the physical world”. We really don’t know
anything else.
INTERVIEWER:
You’re saying Science has it wrong?
YANCEY:
Newton and Darwin’s science, yes. But the newer science, Quantum Physics, is
coming around to the Buddhist way.
INTERVIEWER:
Buddhist way? You said you read the Bible.
YANCEY:
I started with it. Buddhism and the other Eastern religions make presumption
that mind is all that exists, and that mind creates the world in our
imaginations, like when we dream.
INTERVIEWER:
Let’s consider your original focus for a moment; the Bible. Is that okay?
YANCEY:
Sure. Of course.
INTERVIEWER:
The Bible is our answer, the West’s answer, to those questions that you said
were so important to you. More than two billion people throughout the world are
Christians. This is their path to
eternal life, is that not true?
YANCEY:
This is a subject I generally avoid. I believe that the Master, that would be
Jesus, taught the same essential things that Buddha taught, but the message was
twisted when Church authorities who were closest to Rome founded their church
in the Master’s name.
INTERVIEWER:
In my Sunday School classes, that was some time back, but I distinctly remember
the early Christians being at odds with Rome. They were thrown to the lions
just for amusement. And their Master was crucified.
YANCEY:
I believe the message later became twisted. The original message does not lend
itself to organized religion, to a structured body. What Jesus taught, and what
all the Masters generally teach, is something of a private matter. We don’t
need others to intercede and bring us salvation. Beliefs cannot save us, only
wisdom and spiritual knowledge really can.
INTERVIEWER:
You don’t believe you’re saved by the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ?
YANCEY:
Do you?
INTERVIEWER:
If you don’t accept the Cross then what do you believe?
YANCEY:
The Cross, salvation through the Cross, is a belief. It’s essentially a story.
We cannot be saved by a storyline no matter what that storyline is. But we can
be fooled into thinking so.
INTERVIEWER:
The Church is fooling its members?
YANCEY:
I wouldn’t say that. Rather, the Church itself is fooled by an historical story
of salvation.
INTERVIEWER:
I don’t want to dwell on this too long because I want to talk about the World’s
Fair committee that you’re on, but really, without Christ as our salvation, do
we have anything remaining but Darwin’s evolution?
YANCEY:
Darwin’s evolution is pure doom. With that scenario there is no purpose for living,
we’re just doing dumb things for a while and attempting to be not too
miserable, so that we can wait it out and then die and be gone. It makes no
sense.
INTERVIEWER:
So what then is the answer?
YANCEY:
Christians can find it in the Gnostic gospels, a few of them, that give a
clearer picture of the Jesus message. Like the Gospel of Thomas. It is probably
the best gospel we have.
INTERVIEWER:
I’ve never heard of that gospel. It is not in the Bible.
YANCEY:
Yes, exactly. It’s not because the early Church leaders didn’t understand it.
But this gospel tells how to find everlasting life by way of knowledge, not
beliefs.
INTERVIEWER:
Knowledge, not beliefs? What is the difference? What is knowledge?
YANCEY:
Truthfully, knowledge, real knowledge, is the understanding that beliefs are
not ultimately true. No belief is true, because beliefs are creations of the
imagination.
INTERVIEWER:
But the Crucifixion is not a belief, it is an historical fact.
YANCEY:
Whether it actually happened or didn’t happen is beside the point. It really
doesn’t matter. You see, people imagine things; they imagine events and they
imagine stories. Maybe they’ll put the story in a novel or maybe they will
pursue their imagination and it will come to pass in this world. Either way,
it’s an imagined event. So what if it happened? Would that make any difference?
Whether it happened or didn’t happen wouldn’t really matter in the greater
scheme of things. No story can save anyone.
INTERVIEWER:
So, what is real knowledge?
YANCEY:
Real knowledge is, well, it’s a recognition that beliefs are not true, and are
yet necessary to our existence. It’s both of these things; not true yet
necessary. Beliefs are the clothes we wear, the flowers in the meadow; they are
the lifeblood of the world. At the Last Supper, Jesus told his disciples that
the wine he was pouring at the feast was his blood. He meant that the body is
more than our flesh, it goes beyond the flesh, it is all of what surrounds us,
and what surrounds us is entirely our beliefs.
INTERVIEWER:
I’m not sure that I understand you. Let’s move on. You said that the Governor
is a spiritual man. I’ve never heard him speak of his religion. How would you
know this?
YANCEY:
As I said, I met him at his office for the MUNI Treasure Island project, which,
I didn’t know at the time, was connected to the World’s Fair that was in
planning then.
INTERVIEWER:
Did he tell you he was a spiritual man?
YANCEY:
No, not at all. I just knew that he was, and he could see that I too was on the
path. He saw it instantly, I could tell.
INTERVIEWER:
How?
YANCEY:
It’s a higher plane of thought. I don’t know. You can see light in a person,
you see energy, and you know right away they are at a higher level. You can say
that we connected. It is why he wanted me on the project and is why he
appointed me to the World’s Fair committee,
INTERVIEWER: Okay, uh, the World’s Fair; you’re on the
World’s Fair planning committee, and you have no visible position at the
Planning Department where you work. How did you accomplish this?
YANCEY:
Yes. At the time, when I was in Planning, the project wasn’t going that well,
we were having some problems with some of the peripheral players. The Governor
wanted to end legalized gambling on the Indian reservations that were to become
a part of the World’s Fair. This is a little difficult to explain. An
influential tribal chieftain was organizing demonstrations in Sacramento to
counter a federal bill that would end Indian gambling. This was a disruption.
And I, well, was helping to iron this out.
INTERVIEWER:
And how did you do this?
YANCEY:
I couldn’t do much at the Planning Department, because, as you said, I had no
authority to do much of anything.
INTERVIEWER:
There have been rumors of your run-ins with your supervisors in Planning. Is
this what you’re getting at?
YANCEY:
Uh, well, I would rather not get into that here, but, uh, yes, there were some
issues. The Governor appointed me to the State World’s Fair committee, and in that capacity I managed to work with the tribal chief.
I worked between him and the Governor. It was essentially a spiritual solution,
that was our common ground.
INTERVIEWER:
Spiritual solution? What do you mean?
YANCEY:
If your focus is a spiritual one then your interest is with the general
welfare, not so much your own material advancement. We were not seeking to
enhance our reputations or secure any kind of reward. We wanted the Fair to be
successful; all of us.
INTERVIEWER:
You mean you and the Governor and the tribal chief Ground Hog?
YANCEY:
Yes. An accumulating of material goods, or fame, or recognition is futile.
Nothing can touch the real issue which is old age, sickness, and our bodies
turning to dust at death. There is nothing in the world more important than
that. Well, Ground Hog was at odds with the Governor, and that was a problem,
but when I looked at it I saw that we all wanted the same thing. Ground Hog
didn’t want the gambling money, he wanted to return his people to their
spiritual heritage, but he thought the money from the Indian casinos would give
him the means to that. The Governor had other plans, but envisioned a same
result. Once that was clear there was no longer an issue. Just about anything
can be easily resolved when the intention of the players becomes clear. But
when there is a selfish motivation, that is, when someone wants more wealth, or
more fame and recognition than he wants others to have, then there is no
resolution. This is why wars are fought.
INTERVIEWER:
Wars are fought because some people are greedy, you’re saying.
YANCEY:
Yes. But also because of misunderstandings. I think those are the only two
reasons why we have wars. But if people were not greedy there would be no
misunderstandings. The misunderstanding happen because people believe their adversary
is being greedy, that’s all.
INTERVIEWER:
We’ve about run out of time, This experience has been enlightening. Thank you,
Yancey, and good luck with the World’s Fair project.
YANCEY:
Thank you.
AUTHOR BIO:
Arthur Telling, born in San Francisco, California, grew up on the San
Francisco peninsula, and presently resides across the bay in Oakland with his
wife. A lifelong search for meaning and purpose in life, brought him to nearby
Berkeley, with its rich metaphysical environment. He has authored several novels, and has
written numerous stories and articles. His articles have regularly appeared in
online conscious lifestyle magazine OM Times (www.omtimes.com) including
the January 2017-C issue “Jane Roberts, the Seth Books: An Overlooked Giant” and August 2016-B issue “Son of Man May
Not Have Been Jesus”. His article “A Different Jesus Message” was
published in the November 2011 AMORC online Rosicrucian Digest. His article
answering the question “How are the mind and brain related?” appeared in
January/February 2008 edition of British Journal Philosophy Now. His
website is www.arthurtelling.com
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