Home of the "Blind Buddha"
The gifted memory of the American mystic and author Norman Paulsen exists as a visual memory recall with vivid images, sounds, and colors.
I descended toward a bright blue pearl of a Mother Earth. Her waters and land appeared like a celestial garden floating in the cosmos and drew me like iron to a magnet.
My life energy and love merged with images of clashing waves, torrents of spray clouds of mist, slowly settling upon glistening monoliths of stone.
Still searching, I flew East beyond the rolling hills and bright green meadows to a fertile valley. There a village greeted me and a silent street ran north and south. I watched for a house facing the rising Sun. Then, a picket fence, an open gate, and a green lawn sprang out beneath two tall palm trees to welcome me. Indeed, I found the home of the blind Buddha – my father-to-be.
Charles Paulsen was the newly elected judge of the city and county courts, as well as an American Buddhist minister. Deprived of earthly vision, Charles walked with a white cane sensing the ground beneath him. The blind man was stalwart and precise. Using his acute hearing, he heard the message of the whispering wind and the babbling brook as he extended his life outward into all beings and images around him. Silently my spirit approached the blind man by being as quiet as the wind. But like an ocean wave meeting another wave, our souls could not resist.
He found me standing there on the street in the midst of his life. My spirit-image flashed before his inner vision; I had startled him. He stopped walking to stand alert in a silent greeting. Time stood still for him. “You have finally come to help me, to be my eyes in the world.”
I explained: “Long have we been friends and again we meet. My spirit is fixed upon rebirth here. Our lives must be joined together for a time.”
Charles invited me into his home like any other guest. Although cheerful, Charles harbored reservations that blindness might accompany me if I was born in his family. Once Charles overcame his fear, he prayed: “Man from the North, eyes for two, abide in my house with my wife and me; be my friend once more. Your name shall be Norman after the blood of our fathers: Nor (the) man.”
I answered the blind Buddha’s call on February 3, 1929, and lost no consciousness in entering the planetary body of the earth elements.
I maintained clear consciousness as an infant. Certain sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch assaulted my awareness. Sounds of a fire and the odor of burning oak, for instance, often woke me early in the morning. When my father was in the kitchen making breakfast, the morning coffee assailed my nostrils, I thought, “Give me a cup of coffee!” My father replied, “No, not yet, Norman. Coffee is not good for little boys.”
As an infant, I found that my newly extended limbs were cumbersome. I struggled, resenting the restrictions of my body ball and chain. At night, I overcame my confinement: I floated out of body to join spirit companions.
Norman Paulsen is a living direct disciple and ordained minister of Paramahansa Yogananda, and founder of the Sunburst Church of Self-Realization in California.
Sunburst Church is composed of people who desire to practice a conscious way of life based upon the teachings of an eightfold path of right living and twelve divine virtues. These teachings promote virtuous thought, positive action, and the attainment of constant communion with God.
Yogananda stated that God wanted people to form colonies of men, women, and children, living, working and meditating together for the greater good of the whole world. Sunburst Church of Self-Realization exemplifies this, and encourages the formation of such colonies.
Home of the Blind Buddha is found on page 576 in Cosmic Cradle: Souls Waiting in the Wings for Birth.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
Our soul, our life’s star, hath elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar.
But not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness,
but in trailing clouds of Glory do we come from God who is our Home.
— William Wordsworth
I think continuously of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb,
remember the soul’s history through corridors of light
where the hours are suns,
Endless and Singing.
–Stephen Spender
