Excerpts

The Search For David

by George Schwimmer

contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

1 The Search in Baja . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 David Remembered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33

3 Struggle in the Storm . . . . . . . . . . . . .52

4 Another Dimension Opens . . . . . . . . . 69

5 A Different Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

6 On the Inner Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

7 Spiritual Frontiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

8 Dreams and Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . .133

9 Spiritual Credentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

10 Noreen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .159

11 More Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

12 Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184

13 David's Life Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .200

14 The Father Is the Mission . . . . . . . . . . 220

15 Moving On . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

16 A New Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

17 Channeling David's Solo . . . . . . . . . . 259

18 A Ritual Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .273

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .283

Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

preface

Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts. 1 Corinthians 4:5

And ye shall also bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning. John 15:27

Eighteen years have passed since the phone call that shattered my life so com- pletely that I've had to change not only my views of existence, my life-style, my behavior and my work, but even who I am. The man who I was then has died as surely as did my younger son David.

The cascade of events that has washed over me since David's death was put into motion on January 8, 1978, when David began an Outward Bound kayaking course in Mexico's Sea of Cortez, paddling with his crew along the eastern shore of the Baja peninsula. On January 27, David's nineteenth birthday, I was called and told that David had been swept out to sea by a violent wind storm. Although a substantial search was eventually mounted, the sea stubbornly refused to yield up my son. David did not appear. His body was never found.

After the search for David ended in Baja, I was confronted by the first of several seemingly unanswerable questions, questions which pushed me back into the darkest corner of my being and then challenged me, like the sphinx in Oedipus, to come into the light and answer them. The answers were already there, I discovered, because the questions were there; the universe poses no question until it has first created the answer.

So, in only a few days, David's friend Alice answered my most agonized thought:

Why David? Why take the one who was already aware of Your love on Earth? Why take the one who gave us joy as no one else did, by his emanations of this light and love? Why the scholar, the giver, the one most ready to live life? Because, the answer came back from the faith we both shared, to take away David will force you all to look, some of you very hard, into your own souls to find the light and love that God gives to each. When we find this which we have been made to hunt for, we will each have a part of David for ourselves, the part he would have liked most to give.

I laid aside Alice's letter--I wasn't ready to search my soul then. Yet the inner quest had already begun, although I didn't know it.

Two other questions also surged forward, demanding immediate answers: What happened to David in the storm? and What can I do to keep David's spirit alive?

The sea had taken David's body, but I refused to let it extinguish his flame. There had to be something I could do for David. Within days the answer to the third question came to me: publish David's writing. During his last seven years David had kept personal journals; I had no idea what the journals contained or whether they had any literary value. But when I read them I discovered that David had conducted an unusual inner--as well as outer--search for himself and for the meaning of his life during his teenage years. I was fascinated and impressed by the journals and decided they--along with some of his poems, papers, and fragments of two books--had to be published. Over the next few years I edited David's work. I didn't yet consider writing about my own experiences.

I found the question of what had happened to David in the storm much harder to answer. After the search had ended in Baja, I began another search, this one to find out what had taken place during the last day of David's life. I had to discover what had occurred--I couldn't resume a sane life without knowing. When Outward Bound refused to release any details of the tragedy, I threw myself into this new search with enormous energy, but more than three years had to pass before I could unearth everything that had taken place in Baja during Southwest Outward Bound Kayaking Course S-54.

Some of my questions could not be answered through ordinary research, so I turned to reputable mediums. They told me facts about David's life and death which they had no way of knowing; at times their accuracy was stunning. They also recounted unexpected, extraordinary things about David, some of which were confirmed by David's journals. I learned about David's prior lives, his personal symbology, his dreams, his astrological chart, and his life plan. David himself--through many of the psychics--communicated with me, while David's friends and family began to report having sensed, felt, heard, or seen David since his death. As I was given more and more such information, I decided this had to be published as well, so I began to record it all, and much of that material is included in this book.

But as the number and significance of unusual incidents grew, I found I couldn't merely note these--I had to examine them as well, and as I did so I saw a logical pattern emerge. I realized that what was before me was a demonstration of the mechanics of spiritual life on Earth. David's life and death were a striking allegory of what existence is all about--David had lived a textbook of cosmic truths. And I was being led, item by item, person by person, place by place, along a path which had been laid out long ago with great care by some unseen consciousness.

My search for these hidden facets of spiritual life, however, was hampered by the fact that I was directing my efforts through my intellect only. I saw myself as a researcher of cosmic life, often excited and illuminated by the discovery of how something worked or what something meant, but I was missing the essential point. Although it was continually presented to me, I couldn't understand, couldn't sense, the basic spiritual truth which I was being shown, because I would look only at the outer reality.

I failed to perceive what lay behind the kindness and patience of the members of the spiritual study group which I had joined around the time of David's death. I wasn't aware of what motivated David's friends to speak with me and write to me when I sought them out. I wasn't sensitive to what radiated through the readings of the psychics whom I visited for help. I didn't hear the inner whispers of all who helped me with my outer search. I didn't realize the importance of David's message to me, and I misunderstood what many others brought into my life.

What I was unknowingly searching for and had searched for all of my life, I finally realized, had been given to me at the birth of the universe, but I had always walked blindly past this primal gift. A number of years had to pass before I understood what my search was for.

That search is the search on which we are all embarked, and its destination is one we have always known, since our destina- tion is our starting point--a point which we actually never left. That search is the search for ourselves and who we really are.

Come join the search!

1 the search in baja

Raleigh, North Carolina                                  Friday, January 27, 1978

     The telephone rang shrilly in the next room, and my head turned toward the sound. I had come to the kitchen after my evening bath and was getting a snack before going to bed. I glanced at the stove clock: it was three minutes after midnight. Wrong number, I thought, although both I and my wife Veronica tended to stay up late, and friends and family knew that. The phone rang again. I went into the small sunroom and picked up the receiver.

     "Mr. Schwimmer?" a male voice inquired.

     "Yes," I replied.

     The man identified himself as the director of Southwest Outward Bound. For some reason this didn't alarm me—I don't know why. My calm was shattered a second later.

     "Mr. Schwimmer, your son David and two other students have been lost at sea in an accident."

     The impact of his words was more violent than if he had struck me. What he'd said created a complete void in my mind: I could find nothing to say, I couldn't even think.

     After a moment of silence, I asked him what had happened. He couldn't tell me. He said that only a one-sentence message had been left with Southwest Outward Bound’s answering service in Santa Fe shortly before this call and that he himself was in Florida. He continued to talk, but I heard his words only as meaningless sounds. I finally said goodbye and hung up the receiver dazedly.

   Thoughts and images flashed from my mind, as if flung by a cyclotron: a dark sea, waves, David struggling. Questions: What kind of accident could have occurred in the Sea of Cortez? How could David be lost at sea? Where could he be? Was he alive? I struggled to control the storm that raged inside me.

     I went into the living room where Veronica was watching television, turned off the sound as I walked by the set, and sat down beside her on the sofa. Then I told her. She burst into tears, and I could only sit there feeling totally unable to help.

     A few minutes later I called John Rhoades, associate director of Southwest Outward Bound in Santa Fe. He couldn't give any further information since the only telephone was in Loreto, inside a tire store which had closed for the night and wouldn't open again until 9:00 A.M. Baja time (PST). That telephone was thereafter the only link between Baja, Santa Fe, and us. I asked Rhoades if anyone had called the U.S. Coast Guard, since San Diego was just up the coast and a helicopter could be sent to help with the search. Rhoades answered that he did not believe the Coast Guard had been notified. I asked him to contact them immediately and said I would call him at 9:15 A.M. Baja time. That ended our conversation.

     I told Veronica what Rhoades had said, after which we lost ourselves in our own thoughts and prayers. Around 2:00 A.M. Veronica told me to go to bed. I said that was impossible. I couldn't and wouldn't lie in a bed while David was adrift in a dark sea, I thought to myself. All through the night I sat on a small sofa in the dimly lit living room, while Veronica walked tensely around the house.

     I mentally listed the reasons David should survive. Each thought was a prayer bead that I clutched with my mind. I thought: David is so resourceful and intelligent, studied outdoor survival so carefully at Duke University, took two endurance swimming courses the past year, trained for cross-country running the previous summer and fall, completed a Red Cross first-aid course recently. I thought: the Outward Bound course is designed to teach him to survive, might have been preparing him for what had occurred; he had to be all right. I had always felt that nothing would ever happen to him—he had always seemed very special. I tried to convince myself that he was safe, but underneath it all I was desperate. My mind held my prayer beads more tightly, but the thread on which they were strung snapped. My thoughts scattered.

     I stared into the darkness of the most terrible night I had ever lived, terrified that I might never see David again, that another kind of darkness, a darkness without end, may have slipped into my life and that a critical part of my future had been torn from me.

                              ♦ ♦ ♦

from The Wilderness