One day, as Paul was reviewing some video he had recorded the day before, he noticed something that astounded and shocked him. He called me into the living room and pointed to the computer screen.
“Honey, look at this.”
I walked over to his chair and leaned over his shoulder. “Look at what?”
“You see this elephant?”
There was an elephant on a billboard Paul had passed on the way home from work.
“Yes, I see that elephant,” I answered.
“Now look at this.” He pulled up a list of times over the past three days that elephants had appeared in his video data. “I’ve seen six elephants since Tuesday.”
I looked at the list he was pointing to. The program had identified six instances in which an elephant had appeared in the video data he had collected. I’ll mention here that Paul had begun wearing a pair of glasses equipped with a miniature video camera, pretty much all the time. I thought he was nuts, but he was pursuing his passion so I refrained from expressing my opinion.
On Tuesday, there was an elephant on the television. In fact, I now remembered seeing that one. On Wednesday, three elephants had appeared within Paul’s video data, and now two more on Thursday.
“How about that?” I said curiously. “That’s a lot of elephants.” I turned and began walking back into the kitchen.
“Wait,” Paul said as I walked away. “Don’t you think that’s strange?"
We continued the conversation while I peeled potatoes in the kitchen. “What, that you see a lot of elephants?” I asked.
“No, that I’ve seen so many this week.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe you have a thing for elephants. Are you sure you don’t always see them? Maybe elephants are your spirit beast or something,” I said half-joking.
“Yeah, maybe,” Paul said. “But I queried the database, and I’ve only seen one other elephant in the past two months. And now I’ve seen six in three days.”
I agreed that it was kind of strange. But I saw no need to think much further about it. “Keep your eyes peeled,” I said, smiling at the reference to the potato in my hand. “See if you notice any more.”
In fact, Paul didn’t see any more elephants. It seemed that once he noticed them, they stopped showing up. And I wouldn’t be telling you this, except that the following week it happened again. Not with elephants, but with Neil Diamond.
Neil Diamond?
That’s right. Paul realized one day that he had seen Neil Diamond twice in the same day, and when he looked back at his data he saw that Neil Diamond had shown up, either his name or a song, five times over the previous two days.
Now, I really wasn’t very affected by all of this. To me it was odd coincidences, and nothing more. How could it be more than coincidence? What, was Paul being communicated with by spirits or something? Elephants and Neil Diamond? It was a bit of a stretch.
But Paul was extremely affected by it. He went back and started analyzing all the objects and sounds and processes that his program had identified, and what he discovered startled him. According to his search results, there were frequent episodes of a particular object or name or animal or event showing up and recurring a number of times. There were all sorts of interesting trends, and Paul pointed some of them out to me.
I’ll admit I was intrigued by what he was finding, but I didn’t really see the significance of it. But Paul did. And what’s more, what he was finding was very much in line with one of the topics in Harry’s book. (which was no coincidence, I’m sure)
Harry discussed coincidences in his book. He also talked about how each of us has a language that we use to communicate with ourselves, a language we have developed over lifetimes and that we use in both the dreaming and awake state to communicate with ourselves.
Apparently, Paul had stumbled upon or begun to notice bits and pieces of this language, and he was beyond excited. He was ecstatic. It was the first time he truly understood that he was creating his reality, and that there was meaning behind the everyday events and objects in our lives.
I, on the other hand, was not so sure. It was all too strange for me. I wasn’t yet ready to consider the possibility that everything I was experiencing and had ever experienced was being created by me. I had heard of the idea that we create our reality many times, and I came across the concept over and over again as I visited some of the spiritual retreats around California. But up until then it had been what I would call a New Age idea that didn’t really have any concrete meaning to me.
I readily acknowledged that people influenced their lives, and that positive people tended to create opportunities and success for themselves while negative people did not. But I could also see that many things which happen to us are out of our control, and that no one would ever choose to be a victim or to starve to death or any of the millions of other unpleasant and unfortunate predicaments that are part of the human experience.
But Paul was quite ready by that time to fully accept the fact that he was creating his reality, every minute aspect of it. All that was left was for him to learn exactly how he was creating it. And that’s what Harry’s book was about. Paul finished reading it long before I did. In fact, he read it twice before I had made it all the way through. And he couldn’t wait to share it with some of this friends.
I won’t go into great detail regarding the contents of the book– you can certainly read it for yourself – but I will say that it is not for everybody. For those of us who are comfortable with the way we currently see the world, there is no need for material like this.
The book presents an entirely different way of viewing yourself, your life, what it means and how it is occurring. This was something that was much more appealing to Paul than to me at the time, though admittedly I have since come around and now appreciate the information that Harry is providing.
Paul was quite anxious to get the book published and make it available, and he took charge of contacting potential publishers. Within six weeks we had chosen a small publisher and scheduled production. The editing process was quite easy, as Harry had obviously gone to great lengths to make the material grammatically correct and easy to read. And within three months of receiving the manuscript from Harry, there was a release date scheduled and a book cover chosen.
The Relative Truth was released late in the fall, to absolutely no fanfare. We had unfortunately chosen a small publisher that did very little beyond make the book available to distributors and online. Our excitement at the release gradually faded as we realized that there was not yet much of a market for such a book, and nobody seemed interested in reading it. Either that or we weren’t doing the things necessary to get the book into people’s hands. But we weren’t marketers, and our job was simply to publish it and make it available. Which we did.
Paul was discouraged, but I was not. I wasn’t as excited about the book as Paul was at that point, and I hadn’t really expected much to happen with it. So I wasn’t disappointed when only a few dozen copies had been sold after it’s first month.
That would later change, and eventually people all over the world would read and be deeply affected and inspired by it.
But, for the time being at least, the world was not yet ready for Harry Phillips.
