• Your true essence survives the physical death of your body • Your soul is the true essence of who you are; not your body • In all likelihood, you have lived before in a much different body • All souls originated from the same God-sourced energy • As humans living on Earth, we are 'ONE' big, soul family This book combines science and spirituality in a unique way. It contains carefully documented descriptions by a trained research scientist of visions, which I received as a result of prayers and requests for information. Science of Prayer validates the usefulness of walking a path of spiritual wholeness. The author describes his search for answers to help explain his experiences. This journey takes us through the study of consciousness, psychic development classes, training in an energy healing modality, and much more. It describes what the author did, and suggests exercises to help put you in the best possible position to receive the guidance that you are given. Richard Rominger "This remarkable story gives us all a glimpse into what is possible when you allow your six sensory abilities to open up to Spirit". -Sonia Choquette, New York Times bestselling author

Science of Prayer

- Your Prayers Are Answered -By Richard S. Rominger

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2012 Richard S. Rominger
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-4261-4

Contents

Overview................................................vIntroduction............................................ixChapter 1: Why Me? Why Not You?.........................1Chapter 2: My Traditional Education.....................12Chapter 3: Spreading My Wings...........................22Chapter 4: The "Red Hue" Appears........................29Chapter 5: A Paradigm Shift Occurs......................36Chapter 6: My Search for Answers........................48Chapter 7: Back for More Visions........................75Chapter 8: Psychic Readings.............................92Epilogue................................................119Recommended Reading.....................................123Acknowledgments.........................................127About the Author........................................129

Chapter One

Why Me? Why Not You?

"Let the Journey Begin"

Why me? Why was I allowed to have this incredible mystical experience? Although I have a strong belief in God, or what some may call a "higher power," I am not overly religious. I was raised in a conservative family on a farm in Montana and baptized as a Methodist. I am still amazed that I was blessed with this fantastic, life-changing experience, but why me? After giving this serious thought, the only conclusion that makes sense is that, as a trained research scientist, I am trained to look for and document details. Therefore, the facilitator(s) of my experience knew how I would react to the situation and is (are) using me as a messenger. I have always thought of myself as normal in every way. Since this all began, my recurring thought is that other people must also be having these same experiences, and yet I haven't heard about them. As a scientist, with a Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my skeptical, analytical mind never imagined that anything like what I discuss in this book was possible. In fact, I believe that the rational mind will try to rationalize away any significance of my experience, as often occurs with events not fully understood. I ask you, the reader, to keep an open mind as to what may be possible for your life in a human body. As you begin to read about my life, you will come to realize that I am no different from you and that you could just as easily have been the one to have this experience.

Life for me has always been interesting, exciting, and a search for something more. Finding my life's purpose has always been a driving force for me, which continues to this day. Change, transition, and challenge were concepts that I was introduced to as soon as I was born in Helena, Montana. I started out life in the body of a mother who could not keep me. After my birth, I was placed in an adoption home where I stayed until I was three months old. It was at that point that the blessings of God started shining down on me, as I was adopted by a loving family in rural Montana. I am told that my immediate relationship with my new mother got off to a somewhat rocky start. Since I wasn't used to being held much at that point, I vomited all over my new mother when she picked me up for the first time—definitely not a good way to make a favorable first impression. I evidently had other redeeming qualities because shortly after that episode, she and my father made the decision to take me home. They loved me as their own, always supported my desires and goals, and most importantly, allowed me to be myself. While playful and curious in nature, I have always had a serious side that challenges and questions existing ideas. I am sure this made me a challenge to raise. Although frustrated at times I am sure, my parents never showed any lack of commitment or love toward me. I always felt very loved and wanted.

My parents never adopted any other kids; I grew up in their home as an only child. Although wonderful in some respects, this can be a very lonely life growing up. It was great to be able to get all of my parents' attention when I wanted it, but as I grew older, that sometimes became problematic for me—especially as a teenager when I began to stretch and search for my own identity.

My loneliness as an only child was greatly tempered by the fact that I was able to grow up in a small rural community where I had many cousins to play and have fun with. My Aunt Kay and Uncle Jerome and their five kids provided me with a second home of sorts, filled with love, laughter, fun, and kindness. Their five kids—four boys and a girl—were my siblings. We only lived about a mile apart, so it was easy to see them all the time. I was able to stay at Aunt Kay's house when my parents needed to go to town. Kay was really like a second mother to me. As I look back on this, I know I was truly blessed to have her in my life.

My cousins and I shared many joyful and trying times together. As I recall some of these memories, emotions flood back to me, ranging from excitement, fear, joy, love, trepidation, resignation, commitment, and trust, to name a few. My cousins' ages ran from three years older than me to seven years younger than me. Of course, this allowed me to cycle in to the level of fun and trouble that I felt I could handle at any given time. Many opportunities on both ends of the activities spectrum presented themselves on any given day. This made staying with Aunt Kay and her family simultaneously exhilarating and challenging. As with any family, competition for resources was a constant challenge: food on the table, positive attention from a senior authority (Aunt Kay in most cases), etc. There were times when it became a personal asset to be a nephew instead of a son in Aunt Kay's household. If something happened that required immediate discipline, I could hide in the shadows until things calmed down, knowing that in all the confusion I would not be the first to be targeted for corrective action with five other warm bodies nearby. I also learned the technique of blaming my cousins before they could blame me for things that I did that met with disapproval.

Many of my most memorable, exciting times were spent out in nature. My cousins had horses, cows, dogs, and cats that we could play with outside. I remember one animal in particular that gave us many hours of happiness and that loved us all unconditionally: Goldie, a twenty-something-year-old, sway-backed mare, well beyond her prime. She hauled us around every acre of the nearby countryside for hours on end, sometimes with four of us on her back. She never balked or hesitated when we wanted to go somewhere or stop for a rest and play en route to nowhere. She loved being with us kids as much as we enjoyed having her as a playmate. As I think more about our respective roles in this long-lasting friendship, she was really our babysitter, and we were her ticket to a more exciting existence. Since there were six of us and there was only room on Goldie's back for four of us, we had to find some ingenious way for the lowest ones on the pecking order to come along. We put our collective minds together to devise a solution. We knew that whatever we used would need to be big enough to hold at least two of us, as well as all the snacks and water we thought we might need on our outing, yet leave enough room so we could pick up and bring home any prize collectibles we might find along the way, like a pretty rock or an old interesting bottle. Since every kid from about age two got a wagon to play with, we scrounged around until we found the one with four good wheels and an axle that would support the weight we thought would be in the wagon. Goldie was more than happy to comply with our request to pull the wagon along behind her. This was a perfect solution to our problem ... until Goldie decided to gallop instead of walk, or until we wandered into a soft field instead of a hard trail. We quickly learned our limits with this mode of transportation, and Goldie quickly learned to dump us out of the wagon so she could rest while we took the time to stop and regroup. During the winter, we switched from a wagon to a toboggan, and that also worked great.

Other fun times included learning how to milk Aunt Kay's brown swiss milk cow. I did not like drinking the milk we got, but I sure enjoyed spraying my cousins when I was trying to milk the cow. We also spent many hours fishing for goldeyes, pike, and carp in the Missouri River that meandered past our area. It is located about two miles east of where I grew up, so it did not take long to get there and to throw a hook in the water. The main concern, however, was getting to our favorite fishing hole without encountering any rattlesnakes. We were always on the lookout for those unwanted reptiles. Often we would depend on man's best friend to find and chase away any such critters.

Like many kids our age, we also spent a lot of time watching TV. We learned many useful things like seeing Superman fly around and save the world. He was a great role model, because he never got hurt and was always on the side of goodness and justice. Since our mothers knew we idolized our superhero, they made Superman capes for us to play in. What they did not expect was that we would try out their effectiveness. Aunt Kay had a garage with an easily accessible roof and that was just high enough to give us time to catch the air we knew we needed to soar. We thought that would be the perfect building to jump off of as we trained to become superheroes. We would then be available to help Superman in the event he became entangled in a situation that he couldn't handle himself. Luckily for us, we never got hurt trying to fly. Unfortunately for our superhero aspirations, we found out that some things only worked on TV.

Although we never stopped having fun, there were dangerous moments for some of us, though at the time we never saw them as threats to our very existence. One such occasion occurred when Pat (my cousin who is eighteen months older than I am) and I decided to play "camping out on the range" in Grandpa's old barn. In the weeks leading up to this spectacular event, we had been watching Western movies on TV and noticed how cowboys would always stamp out a fire just before breaking camp. Well, we decided that if we could find some matches, it would be fun to learn that technique in case we ever became cowboys. After talking it over, we picked Grandpa's old barn to give us the privacy and shelter we thought we needed while mastering this critical skill. It took some time to find the right spot in the barn; we needed to be up high near an opening so we could see if anyone was coming to break up our training program, and we also needed something flammable that was easy to ignite and move around. The storage loft in the barn was selected because it met all of our parameters: full of straw with just enough room to do our work, and up high with a big door to see if anyone was coming. As it turned out, we were quite good at starting our campfires. We were having great fun and mastering a skill that would be useful for the rest of our lives. After stamping out the fire, we kicked the remains down the access hole in the floor that was directly above the wall-mounted ladder. All was well until a fire burst out at the base of the ladder. Of course, we did not anticipate this development, because we had been so meticulous about stamping out all existing fire. With flames shooting up the ladder from below, we immediately sensed our perilous position. We decided to abandon ship, so we pushed open the big barn door only to discover that we were twenty feet off of the ground. Although we knew Superman could fly because we had seen it on TV, we didn't have our capes with us. We were cowboys at the time, after all, so we quickly went to plan B, which we knew was going to be a little tricky. We would have to go out the same way we came in, which entailed climbing down the ladder through the flames, up over a big pile of sacked feed, and out through a little hole in the wall. Once we cleared the flames at the bottom of the ladder, we knew we were survivors, but we also sensed that time was of the essence. We went looking for help but none was close. Unfortunately, the barn burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt. We did get our well-deserved punishment, but it did not last long because our families were so happy that we survived.

A series of life-changing events occurred for Pat and me when we stepped up to claim the temporary title of traveling bat boys for a local pro baseball team, the Great Falls Electrics. At the time, this team was a part of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball organization. It was one of the many farm teams in their player development system. Fortunately for Pat and me, our Grandpa Walker was president of the Great Falls Electrics. Therefore, we were afforded privileges that others were not, which we greatly appreciated. One such privilege was our appointment as the team's temporary traveling bat boys. We both loved baseball and never missed a chance to go to an Electrics game with our families, so we could not pass up the chance to watch a game played by our favorite baseball team in faraway places and at the same time help our team. We saw this as an opportunity to get out of our little town and experience the world in an environment with less supervision than we were used to getting. Bat boys were charged with the important duty of retrieving a bat at the batter's box after it had been used to hit a ball. We would occasionally get to spice up that routine by chasing down foul-tips and returning the ball to the umpires. We got to wear a somewhat official-looking baseball uniform that made us fit in while performing our very serious duties. This was all great fun, but our most important learning experiences did not occur on the field of play. Rather, they occurred in the back of the players' traveling Greyhound bus, where we learned how real baseball players prepared themselves for the upcoming games. We learned how to play poker without losing too much of our hard-earned funds, we learned what a stogie tasted like, we learned how hard it was to get the taste of Beech Nut chewing tobacco out of your mouth, and we received some vital knowledge about the opposite sex from the perspective of young, flourishing, professional baseball players. As very young teenagers, we marveled at how much we were learning and we dreamed about how useful it would be as we aged through adolescence.

Since we lived out in the country, we were blessed to always be surrounded by nature, which included many animals and birds that unconditionally loved us. My mother raised and took care of chickens, geese, guinea hens, dogs (mostly German shepherds), cats of all colors and sizes, peacocks, turkeys, pheasants, parrots, crows, sparrow hawks, owls, lambs, a goat, a burro, and a raccoon. Some of these animals she took in were injured. She nursed them back to good health, and then released them into their natural wild conditions. Many of these living creatures were unique in their own way, which my mother respected by giving them their own name and treating them as living, breathing, loving beings. Take Ralph for example, the Polish rooster that would jump up and try to rake you with his leg spurs if you pestered him enough. He was never trying to hurt any of us, but he was sending a clear message to us when he had enough and wanted to be left alone. Then there was Barney, the sparrow hawk that was rescued as a baby and given to Mom. She cared for and nurtured this sparrow hawk for many years. He became a part of the family while he was alive, and he lived in a large cage placed in the backroom of our house. I can remember many times when Barney escaped from his cage and flew around the house, only to be caught with my mom's loving and tender hands so that he could be returned to his home in the backroom. Poe, the crow, was an interesting story too. He lived outside and was always perched somewhere near the house so that he could keep an eye on what was going on. As soon as my mother left the house, he was right there with her, either prancing along on the ground next to her or flying overhead as she drove around the farm and our little town. Some of his interesting habits included finding shiny objects, which he would bring back to her house and hide under the shingles. Yes, this crow was also a prankster. He was a talking bird that could only say one word: "Ralph." We think he learned that word by listening to a neighbor lady, who lived one-half mile away, calling to her husband, Ralph. Since he knew the word Ralph, on occasion he would flyover to our neighbor's house and wait for the husband to come outside, at which point he would shriek "Ralph" very loudly. Ralph said the first time this happened he looked around and couldn't see anybody, and he thought that maybe God was talking to him. We all got a good laugh out of that, including Ralph himself.

As my life progressed, my interest in other activities grew. By the time I was in high school, I spent most of my time after school playing sports and hanging out with my friends. I was fortunate in that I attended a small high school. This allowed me to participate in many activities just because the coaches and teachers needed all the warm bodies they could find to field a team or fill up all the chairs in the music room. As a consequence, I had my before and after-school hours filled with band, chorus, football, basketball, and track practices. I would occasionally participate in a play or musical, so those practices had to be pushed into my schedule as well. Off and on throughout high school I played the drums in several rock and roll bands. I was very busy, but I enjoyed all of these activities. On the positive side, it allowed me to stay focused on healthy, fun, and wholesome activities that I could do with many of my friends. At this point in my life my thirst for knowledge had not taken hold. I only studied enough to learn what I needed to get average grades. It worked for me in that I was able to get on the school honor roll just often enough that the teachers left me alone and I got a good student discount on my driving insurance. Little did I know at the time, but these musical activities were allowing me to balance out my left and right brain activities. I would say that this was my start to becoming a "whole" person. Some of my most memorable activities as a youth include learning to drive a Chevy pickup by age eight, learning to drive a WD9 tractor with a hand clutch, learning to drive an international grain truck during harvest by age ten, driving a John Deere combine during harvest at age twelve, and taking my first flying lesson at age fourteen.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Science of Prayerby Richard S. Rominger Copyright © 2012 by Richard S. Rominger. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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