PROLOGUE

YOU HAVE CAPACITIES WITHIN YOU THAT ARE PHENOMENAL,
IF YOU ONLY KNEW HOW TO RELEASE THEM.
– David Bohm

It was Monday, May 11, 1953. I was eighteen years old and a freshman at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, which then had a population of 85,000 people. I was in my dormitory room, alone, completing an essay due later that week. By around 4:30 that afternoon, the sky had turned dark. It had been raining hard for a couple of hours, but now the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind was picking up. All of a sudden it was as if a hundred freight trains were roaring through my room. It lasted only seconds, but I was stunned. “My God – what was that?” Within minutes the rain subsided to a light drizzle.

Without really thinking, I put on a windbreaker and baseball cap and ventured out. I was not making a deliberate decision to go. I just found myself heading in the direction of downtown, not stopping to assess the risk of walking among all the live electrical lines that were strewn across the streets. There was no one on the streets – no cars – no one in sight.

I passed near Katy Park where the local Texas League baseball team played. The park had essentially disappeared, collapsed in on itself. I could see only one wall standing. I noticed a building nearby that was cut in half, as if by a great meat cleaver. I walked directly up to the center of town, the corner of Fifth and Austin, where the six-story R. T. Dennis Building was located. That was a furniture store that covered most of a city block and was across the corner from Chris’s Café, where I often had dinner.

As it turned out, that corner – Fifth and Austin – was the epicenter of a deadly tornado. As I approached the corner, I was astonished to see that the Dennis Building had vanished. In its place was a towering heap of rubble. The vacuum created from the tornado had blown the walls outward, causing all six stories to collapse onto one another, falling into the basement. The walls of bricks had flattened the cars in the street beside the building, and the cars themselves were buried under five-tosix feet of bricks. The café and the Palace Club, the pool hall next door where I had often hung out, had also disappeared. They were just an enormous pile of rubble, fifteen-to-twenty feet high.

I learned later that the destruction I saw was the result of the deadliest tornado in Texas history and one of the ten worst ever recorded in US history. The 300-mile-per-hour winds had left a twenty-three-mile path of destruction, including 114 dead and over 1,200 injured.

I was one of the first few people on the scene. There was an eerie silence pervading that corner. The few people who were standing around were stunned, in shock. Within just minutes, about a half dozen of us self-organized into a team and began the first stages of a search-and-rescue effort. A doctor was nearby, helping to guide us. We worked as a team in that particular area through the night and into the midday Tuesday, doing our best to locate and dig out survivors. Within minutes of arriving, I found one person in the rubble. We dug her out, and as I held her in my arms, taking her to the place the doctor was designating as a field hospital, he examined her and quickly said, “She’s gone. Let’s make this the morgue. Over here will be the field hospital.”

It was a delicate operation. We patiently dismantled the debris piece by piece. We worked as a team in that particular area through the night, using flashlights and gloves that had been brought to the scene. The police, using bullhorns, directed everyone not involved in the search and rescue away from the area.

Within an hour or so of my arrival, help from the nearby Connally Air Force Base came. And by 2:30 that morning, heavy equipment had arrived – but where we were working, it was useless, even dangerous. As we found survivors, we had to be exceedingly careful not to allow the debris to shift and crush them. Eventually, we dug out a number of survivors and recovered twenty-nine bodies from the café and pool hall area.

Our little team stayed intact the entire time. While we worked together, I experienced a palpable energy field surrounding us. My sense of awareness was acute. I possessed an uncanny clarity, a sort of panoramic knowing. Time slowed down. We were able to perform very difficult tasks with apparent ease. We would accomplish something so extraordinary, I would “look over my shoulder,” so as to speak, and wonder “How in the world did we accomplish that?” Yet in the moment, it seemed so natural. It was almost effortless, yet we were exerting a supreme effort. We operated as a “single intelligence” – as one organism – with exceedingly high coherence.

We self-organized from the very beginning. Leadership on the team shifted seamlessly in the moment, as required. I was acting without conscious awareness or control, doing tasks without the sense that I was personally performing them. It was as if we were being used as instruments to accomplish what we must. But most of all, I was struck by the deeper level of knowing that I embodied. My premonitions were consistently correct. During those hours, we had the strength, courage, endurance, and internal resources we needed.

Only when our task was done did exhaustion begin to set in. It was early Tuesday afternoon, and we all paused to say goodbye. Nothing was said about what we had all experienced – it was not necessary. It was clear that we all felt it. The true trust and connection remained palpable.

In the days after the tragedy, I took time to reflect on all that I had experienced. At that stage of my development, I barely knew how to think about it at all. At one level, the whole experience seemed dreamlike. But at another level, I was aware that it would deeply inform the rest of my life.

As I grew and developed over the years, my understanding grew as well. That understanding was heightened by similar experiences, enabling me to glimpse the essence of what had occurred in Waco over those few hours. One experience occurred a few years later when my best friend saved my life by picking the front of a jeep up off my chest after an accident. The energy field I had felt after the tornado and the sense of deep connection was present at that time. Other instances occurred among our law firm’s teams when we were in the midst of trying a difficult lawsuit, particularly one where our client was the underdog, and we were trying to redress a great injustice.

Over time, the feeling grew within me that I needed to search for the source of these kinds of collective experiences and to determine how to have access to them without a crisis – how to harness this phenomenon in organizational settings for the benefit of all society. By the time I had practiced as a litigator for twenty years, the need to learn more grew so present within me and the crisis of leadership in the country seemed so acute that I decided to leave the practice of law.

Two days after leaving my law firm, I met the great physicist, David Bohm, who taught me that there is a creative Source of infinite potential – the “implicate order” – enfolded in the explicate order, or manifest universe. What I learned that day altered my worldview forever, creating the opening for all that occurred afterward. Just a week after meeting Dr. Bohm, I flew to Houston to form the American Leadership Forum.

During the Leadership Forum years, I began to realize there is a deep hunger for the experience of oneness and for being used for something greater than ourselves. I began to understand that being used in this way is what it means to be human. This is why the experience of being part of a team that is acting as one consciousness in relation to something larger than the individual members stands out as a singular moment in people’s lives. Some – like me – spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture the spirit of that experience. And others – also like me – spend years attempting to understand the nature of that experience. What is the Source of our capacity to access the knowledge for action we need at the moment?

This book is the story of my quest to answer that question.