Return to the Source: The Way to the Experience of God

In the past some great religious figures have had some notable events surrounding their birth. Wilson Van Dusen has minor qualifications. He was conceived on Christmas Day and his birth was attended by a rare full eclipse of the sun in San Francisco, California in 1923. His grandmother was a spiritualist minister, and with a slight grandmotherly bias, found the signs auspicious. But he was born into a totally unreligious family. At the age of one he had an ecstatic experience of God while lying in a crib, an experience he remembers some seventy years later. He had many mystical experiences in his youth. By adolescence he set about to understand how this happens, so that he could return to it at will. At this time he first connected this experience to the only formal religion he encountered, in radio sermons. Formal religions seemed lost in comparison. He had just completed high school when World War II started. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine, ending the war as a Second Mate. Nearly every ship he sailed on had explosive cargoes, and in this delicate state they met three enemy subs and thirty-nine bombing raids. After the war he raced through university getting a B.A. and M.A. in three and one half years and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in two more years. His middle years were taken up with raising a family and dealing with every form of madness as a clinical psychologist. In his later years he became a real scholar of the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. He discovered that his grandmother had willed him her Swedenborg collection when he was seven, and his parents "protected him" by throwing it out. Grandmother won in the end. It is as though his direct experience of God became a hidden occupation. Most of his friends don't know of his knowledge and expertise in this area. He has studied the mystics of various traditions, and considers himself a living representative of this universal tradition. He finds that the more widely one explores in this area the more apparent is a universal consensus on the nature of things, transcending individual religious traditions. One mystical friend remarked that he seems to have a knowledge tree that grows new understandings. He says that whatever he has really wanted to know in this area the Lord has graciously shown him. We have here an unusual representative of the experience of God. He regards this experience as essentially simple and quite available to everyone, in or out of any religious tradition. It is the ultimate answer to everything. He helps make this wisdom available to others in this book. He is also the author of The Natural Depth in Man, The Presence of Other Worlds, and The Country of Spirit.