Paul DeBell

Have you ever had an experience, a dream or an epiphany, that you could have sworn was spiritual yet had no way of proving for certain? Have you ever looked at the daily news or peered deeply into your own soul, and all too quickly felt that something essential, something spiritual was missing? Have you ever wondered if there was a way to be better connected to your fellow man while retaining all that is important to you as a unique individual?

Psychiatrist Paul DeBell, MD has been on a fascinating journey toward a better understanding of spirituality and its manifestations in people across racial, cultural and religious lines. Through that journey, he has pinpointed rational techniques for detecting and deciphering "feedback from the deeper dimensions of life." His findings have been integrated into the text of Decoding the Spiritual Messages of Everyday Life - a profoundly enlightening book that took 25years of systematic studies and 14 years to write. Subtitled "How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know," the book is a methodical overture to DeBell's ultimate goal of persuading people to participate in a groundbreaking open source social networking Website where we can share our experiences, compare them with those of others, and ultimately find our own life-defining purpose.

"Over the past 25 years, I've been trying to make sense of these moments in our lives when the spiritual world becomes real," DeBell states. "After studying my own experiences, I began collecting those of other people. What interested me most was how perfectly each person's experiences fit their own life. I wondered, 'How can you glean something from other people’s spiritual experiences that will help you know what’s best for you to do in your life?' Applying the practical approach to problem solving, I sent a questionnaire to friends asking about the experiences on which their beliefs were based and asked them to forward it to their friends. It was an informal pilot study that netted me the experiences of a couple hundred people. I then interviewed 40 or 50 of them in greater depth. These samples laid the foundation for the book."

In Chapter 1 of Decoding the Spiritual Messages of Everyday Life, DeBell stresses that spirituality today is in much the same state that psychology was at the end of the nineteenth century. Before then, no one had succeeded in studying the mind scientifically, despite the remarkable success of scientific study in other fields. DeBell's book has ushered us into an exciting era where we can dare to make systematic sense of otherworldly forces and use our knowledge to better direct our lives in line with their beneficial effects.

"Some say the spiritual world makes no sense," DeBell says, "but look at the world we're living in. It doesn't make sense either but it doesn't stop us from trying. Everything from time honored human values to the very ecology in which we live and breathe is coming apart at the seams. Everyone is going through more and more changes everyday—some positive and some negative. While gaining greater comfort, excitement and security, we have lost something more important—our sense of purpose. People want their lives to be meaningful if not inspirational, but they don't know how to do it — to enjoy the benefits of modern life and be deeply connected to their soul. I liken our current stage of spiritual uncertainty to early adolescence, where one tends to dream a lot about how things should be without knowing how to turn those dreams into reality. Both psychological and spiritual maturity come as one develops his/her own vision and capacity in the world. By decoding our unique spiritual messages - then comparing and contrasting them with those of others, we can ultimately express our own uniqueness and become full fledged members of a larger spiritual community."

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Paul DeBell was born and raised in New Jersey with a Protestant upbringing. Growing up, he was always fascinated by religion and wanted to be a missionary, but by his senior year at Oberlin College, his faith in spiritual reality had been shattered. "I experienced a conflict between believing in justice and seeing so much unfairness in the world that proved so impossible for me to resolve that it finally drove me away from religion," he admits. "'Religion' as exemplified by the church people I’d known seemed dead to me. It had no vitality. When I went to college, I was shocked because many of the people that I met had no religious belief but were more intent on helping others than the people I had grown up with. So when 'religion' ceased to answer my more philosophical questions about the meaning of life, I had no practical reason to remain religious…so I bailed."

DeBell ‘dropped out’ and traveled to Germany. He tried to become a hippie but failed. He returned after only a few months to the U.S., finished college and attended Cornell Medical College in a field better suited to his way of thinking, psychology. He became a psychiatrist and has worked and taught as a faculty member at some of the finest medical institutions in New York City: Weill Cornell, Columbia Presbyterian, Albert Einstein and New York Medical Colleges. His calling was to practice in poor inner city neighborhoods - specifically the community mental health clinics in the South Bronx - because he sensed how much people there needed assistance and caring. He worked there for over 30 years, studied family therapy, utilized hypnotherapy and traveled internationally.

For 20 years he had ceased believing in the existence of a spiritual dimension and a "higher power" until one fateful afternoon while on vacation in Brazil. "I was in beautiful Rio de Janiero, sitting on a bench and reading Carl Jung's book on Synchronicity when I had a strange thought: ‘Go to the Botanical Garden where a tree will open the door for you to an invisible dimension of life.’ So I went and as I sat among the lovely plants and flowers, a falling red leaf floated down and landed in my hand - the stem softly planting itself in my loosely closed right hand so that the leaf stuck straight up - something that has a one in a million chance of occurring.”

“Interested in hypnosis, I established a more informative connection with this invisible dimension by using a technique called 'automatic writing.’ Right there in Rio, I took a pen and paper, cleared my head and waited for my hand to begin jotting down answers from my subconscious mind to a series of questions. Over the years many of the things I wrote went directly against what I believed. For example, I was told that I should not withdraw from society or pay much attention to the 'spirit world' but be more active in society. It inspired me to discover how spiritual messages could help us use an active, normal everyday life for our spiritual development. It all started with that leaf, which is why you see one red leaf on the cover of my book."

Much to his surprise, DeBell's “automatic writing experience” also encouraged him to stop using trance to think and write about spirituality, and to write out his thoughts in the same way he would any other subject. “By writing down the experiences they deem to be spiritual and comparing them to the ones written down by others, people can begin to understand their journey more clearly,” he explains. "When you write down your experiences you can see them more objectively, just as you would when you read the experiences of a perfect stranger. Seeing your experience next to someone else's creates a welcome synergy that helps you understand both better.”

Dr. Debell continues, “I found any attempt to remove the uniqueness from a person's experience pointless because it would require us to do the same to our own and thus destroy that very singular spark that inspires new understanding. At the same time, we want to generalize from our experience by abstracting multiple principles from everyone's experiences and using them in ways that fit our own situation. By trying to understand spiritual experiences scientifically instead of philosophically, our brains start to make new kinds of connections—ones that help us understand how spiritual forces work. As a psychiatrist who learned to take a rational approach to all kinds of human experience, I have followed a trail of messages over the past twenty-five years that have taught me what makes a thought, feeling or action spiritual."

What DeBell imagined would take two years to complete wound up taking a whopping 14 to finish. To bring it to completion he retired from working in the inner city four years ago - a time when the bureaucracy was becoming too much to bear. He took this as a spiritual push- encouraging him to do what was necessary to get the book done. "I was often discouraged," he admits, "but then I would get another spiritual message that kept me going. The most frustrating thing was that I understood all of the information I had amassed, but I didn't understand it well enough that others could understand it. I often had to remind myself that finishing the book wasn't about satisfying my own curiosities, but encouraging others to be more rational in their search."

A key point in the comparison process is that it's not as important to learn what someone else's experience meant to them as what YOU can learn from it. "Say you read about someone whose disconnect from spirituality had something to do with their attachment to money. You would ask yourself, 'What am I attached to in the same way that this person is attached to money? What in my life is blocking me from progress?' Once you can reason like that, you are on the right path."

The goal is to understand that in spite of everything that makes us unique as individuals, there are ways that we are very much like everyone else on the planet. "A lawyer and a musician may lead very different lives," DeBell observes, "yet they need to take into account the same realities if they are to have happy and fulfilling lives. To give another example, even though millions of people are 'New Yorkers', what that means will be expressed in very different ways by each. The same is true in our spiritual paths. We may identify with being spiritual but it will manifest in each of us in an equally wide variety of ways that take into account our own nature, preferences and life-circumstances."

What may be most important of all concerning DeBell and his method for Decoding the Spiritual Messages of Everyday Life is that it shows how messages help us hold onto our deeper values during this very materialistic period in our history. "We’re living in a time of incredible freedom in a world run largely by mass communication, money and power," he explains. "Yet the more we fall under their sway, the more they pull us away from time honored values. Now all of our more self-centered tendencies are being drawn out into the open - out of the box - by the all the opportunities available to us! By understanding how to connect to our higher spiritual selves, we learn to sidestep the obstacles and develop more discriminating controls that enable us to develop more virtuous states of being such as compassion, generosity and humility. By doing so, we help maintain their influence in our society instead of letting the other forces turn everyday life into even more of the disaster area for spirituality than it is at present."

Paul DeBell is pleased with the progress of all the hard work that he and others interested in a more rational approach are making to painstakingly break down the steps that people can take to open the path to a better future. It is his innate compassion, humility and sense of service that have seen him through. And the book is only the beginning. In his own development, Paul has evolved a long way from the young man who discarded spirituality in favor of science. He has broken through to see how the scientific method is exactly what we need to attain our spiritual maturity, and wants as many others to climb aboard this soul train as possible.

"Today I feel closer to my childhood roots and vision of spirituality than ever before because my vision is more universal. I can put my earlier beliefs into a sound developmental perspective while giving proper due to both nature and nurture," DeBell concludes. "My mind is now able to take into account the spiritual differences between people just as I learned to do as a psychiatrist. My book Decoding the Spiritual Messages of Everyday Life provides a blueprint for individuals to navigate their own spiritual path, while drawing on the collective spiritual wisdom that can be found on an internet resource center of spirituality that he set up to help everyday people learn from others' experiences.

”We are in the midst of a major revolution in our spiritual thinking and each one of us possesses a small piece of the puzzle. The age of 'experts' has past!"