A Conversation with David James

The Monthly Aspectarian: David, you and Bill Getz do a workshop called Personal Myth and Practical Reality into which you weave numerology and astrology. First of all, what do you mean by "personal myth"?

David James: Every person develops myths from the time they begin forming an ego or personality. Each of us, certainly by the time we become adolescents, have a very strong survival need to get along with the power people or the authority figures in our life . . . parents, teachers, clergy, neighbors, peer group. To do that, we make adjustments. We make what might be called a mask, some people call it a cloak, that we take on to shelter us. But as youngsters, we tend to absorb our myths about life, its purpose, our personal purpose in life . . . we tend to absorb this from the authorities, the power figures in our life. The problem with this is that it becomes a life of trying to please others. It's not that there's socially anything wrong with pleasing others, but you can lose your genuine self.

TMA: How much of this is conscious, and how much of it subconscious?

DJ: I think the average person is not aware. I think as we form an ego, which is absolutely necessary if we're going to live a healthy life, then it tends to operate more on the unconscious level. If we were to take someone in their thirties, they would not really be aware of how they came to be who they are. Perhaps if you could get them to think about the process, they would recognize that, well, Dad was in the medical field and from my earliest days I was surrounded with medical talk and medical ideas, and was urged -- that much might be conscious -- I was urged into medicine as a career. Or that Mom's great desire was to marry well and so I became a woman who thought most importantly about marriage and marrying well -- things like this. But I think it operates almost entirely unconsciously until people get up to middle age or until they get into some kind of crisis. I've seen this happen with teenagers in high school, I've seen it happen with people in their twenties who get into some kind of a health crisis or an accident of some sort. All of a sudden they have to start rethinking the myths they've been living.

TMA: This can also happen in the case of a person who becomes a seeker.

DJ: Yes, but I think it's a long process unless you have suffering. Pardon me for saying that, but unless you have suffering to kind of slap you in the face and say, Come on, get real, even in the early stages of seeking, we're still run mainly by our ego.

TMA: Yes, and often it is trauma or pain of some sort that leads people to become seekers.

DJ: But in any case, by the time people get into their late forties, they begin to develop at least the recognition that maybe they've missed something. Carl Jung said that he never saw anyone with a neurosis in middle life in which the origin of that neurosis was not spiritual. In other words, there is a part of us on the spiritual level that knows there's more -- that more was purposed or intended as we took on this incarnation. Then people begin to do the typical midlife crisis, doing a lot of wacky things in order to find fulfillment. Some people make even more unhappiness in their life by the desperation of that search, but many others are inclined to go inward, especially people who have been into therapy, into counseling of some type. They certainly have to investigate the myths they've been living and see how some of those myths, by their results, have become toxic in their life, and realize that they've been really poisoning themselves by trying to be what in fact they probably never stood a chance of being.

So then the question is, Well then, why am I here? If I've been going down the wrong path or a path that's wrong for me, then what am I supposed to do? So many of the people who attend our conference are middle-aged people. But two years ago, Bill and I had a chance to do our workshop for a youth group, what might be called "street kids" in Saratoga Springs, New York. We never really knew whether fourteen-, fifteen-year old adolescents would find this system, number one, interesting, number two, profitable for them. We were just amazed, because essentially what these kids are doing is, they're firming up their personality just as a person in midlife crisis is doing, only the adolescents are doing it, really, for the first time. These kids were marvelous. They attended seven two hour sessions after school in the middle of winter. They had to walk probably a mile and a half, some days through blizzards, to get to a coffee house where we were doing this. There was almost no dropout. I talked with the director recently, and he said, "Here we are almost two years later, and many of them are still talking about this process." In other words, it gave them a new myth or a new way of seeing themselves. But these are not your typical conformist kids. These are kids that are gifted in some way and they just don't fit with society. They're very creative . . . and so they were adaptable to our program.

TMA: How did their myths differ from those of people in a midlife crisis?

DJ: You find them seriously questioning the commercialism, the materialism, especially, of their society. That your main purpose in life is to be a consumer. That's what we get on radio and TV: your main purpose in life is to feel good; the main purpose of life is self gratification. This is what's being thrown at adolescents left and right, whether it's in song lyrics or print articles, or certainly in the plots of television. Where do you see on any of the sitcoms on TV that struggle is valuable? Where do you see that self denial is, in fact, a strong, spiritual quality? It's pretty rare that kids run into this unless they're involved in a church or synagogue or mosque. If so, then they might be more resistant to this commercialism, materialism.

TMA: I don't know, as they hit adolescence and reject their upbringing, they're likely to go more the other way.

DJ: Yes, that's true.

TMA: In what ways do you help people recognize their myths, and what do they do then with them?

DJ: Well, my personal strength lies in numerology, which I've done for twenty-five years. We use the process of numerology to lay out the mythical lessons that the soul has chosen to work on in this life, with one specific lesson I call "the destiny lesson" -- which is, mythically, the soul's greatest single urge or desire to accomplish in this life. And then look at things that can be done. We also determine lessons that have either been avoided or "failed" in past lifetimes, and that kind of brings them up to where they are right now, to see how well what they've been doing or how they've been living matches up with this new idea about themselves.

We also use a technique which comes out of the Edgar Cayce readings for understanding your life in terms of learning cycles that the soul would have chosen before coming into this body. We can actually go back over previous learning cycles and get some perspective on why certain things happened, what the soul might have been trying to learn in certain experiences. When we get into this, we get a lot of Aha's from the people that attend. When you work with adolescents, they've only had maybe three or, at the most, four cycles of learning, so they can't see some of the patterns. But when we're working with middle-aged people, they have about half their life gone and they can look back and in terms of the myth we've already given them, they get some deeper understanding of just maybe why they had to go through certain experiences when they were younger.

TMA: Let's remember to come back to the learning cycles. I want to ask you to comment on this: are you saying a person will have various traumas and incidents in their early life which will cause them to form certain myths which are likely to lead them off the path that they really came here to do?

DJ: Well, yes and no. In this respect, I'm very much of a Zen Buddhist in my outlook, and that is, just because it's painful doesn't necessarily mean you're not on the path. The Zen Buddhist outlook is that you can never leave the path, you can never leave the way, because wherever you go, it's part of your way. Even if you're doing something that runs counter to your soul's purpose, it still is instructive in showing you what you're not or what you shouldn't be doing.

TMA: What I'm asking, though, is, the person will be having pain because they're on the path, but they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing.

DJ: Sure, they're trying to use themselves in the wrong way.

TMA: And you come up with a number for them which will present a theme?

DJ: It's an alternative way of looking at what this life may be about.

TMA: Okay, so a person "should" be working on a 3 or a 5 or a 7, and they haven't been. You come to them with this number, and then it is, Okay, you're working on a 7 life path, these are the types of things 7s do. So is this what you're doing, presenting them with choices?

DJ: Well yes, it's a new reflection on them. But I'll tell you Guy, to the best of my knowledge, in all the workshops and readings and so on that I've been involved with, I've never found someone who has been totally avoiding what they're here to do. Almost certainly they've been struggling with the issues, but because their myth was made more to support or sustain their ego structure, they've tended to see these issues as bothersome rather than something they should actively engage. I've never found anyone that's not aware of the issues, but they don't understand how these problems, which seem like they should be avoided, figure into what mythically the soul wants to do in this life.

In other words, they've been engaging these things but also trying to avoid them and make the ego the center of their life. Of course, by the time you're middle aged, ego structure is generally pretty far from what you should be doing. And you know, Carl Jung talks so much about the need for people to individuate, which is basically to become all they can be. So, if you're going down a wrong road or a road that's just not profitable to you, then you probably have to turn around somewhere along the way.

I find this idea of individuation very much present in the teachings of Lao Tze, who did his teaching in China about 500 B.C. And that was the idea that if you conform too much to society or family or philosophy or whatever, then you become like it. Lao Tze's idea was that society is sick, too much conformist, and it's very hard to find out who you are and why you're here if you're trying to be like everybody else. His idea was to get away from society, to get off into wilderness where everything is real.

Once you get out into wilderness, you don't run into trees out there that wish they were a squirrel, and you don't run into lions or tigers that are envious of the birds. In nature, everything is what it is. It lives by a realism that people don't live in, because people tend to live in jealousy or envy or a lot of illusion. But when you're off where everything is natural and real, it's easier to make some discoveries about yourself. At least that was his philosophy -- and then, of course, you brought that realized self or that individuated self back into society and contributed what your strength was.

TMA: Why don't you give us a couple examples of people you've worked with and what happened with them?

DJ: As a private counselor or in the workshops?

TMA: One of each.

DJ: Okay . . . I just finished working with a marvelous woman. She has worked in network television for maybe twenty, twenty-five years on the production level; a very, very intelligent woman. She's a member of Mensa and has a couple of college degrees in history and is very wise. Astrologically, she is a Sagittarian, and now at middle age is very much drawn to a deep understanding of what her life is about.

She had to give up her career to come home and take care of her brother. And here is, I think, an example of where crisis enters into a life. She had to give up . . . who knows where she might have gone professionally -- she came home and spent two and a half years taking care of her brother while he slowly died. This may have been a karmic obligation on her part just in the suffering of watching a loved one die as well as coming back into a family environment that was very dysfunctional.

Her need to know what this life was all about was really under pressure, and so she came to me with a desire for a reading. I do get insights into what may be past lives . . . and my almost immediate reaction when I turned on my intuition is that this woman has come into this life -- of course, this is mirrored in astrology -- to work on love, to work on her relationships with people. She had a disastrous marriage twenty years ago, and in this life, if we had to revolve this lifetime around a single issue, it's love and relationships.

In this intuition I had, I picked up on a couple of what may have been past lives. The most recent was as an artist in France in the last life where she had been a male -- and she admits that she has had many struggles to adopt a female consciousness in this life -- in that male life, she -- or he -- had fallen in love with a woman who spurned him, chose someone else. This man, who could have gone on and done some very noteworthy things in impressionist art, committed suicide. So again, the number one issue in the present life is love and relationships -- and she'll admit, these are real struggles for her. The overriding spiritual issues are what is love -- and how do you make it happen. One might see that with her parents and see it with her brother, whom she deeply misses now that he's passed on, and the issue of what to do about marriage and love relationships and all that.

I was rather surprised to find out that this man really did exist. His name was Louis Robert or Rober, and he lived in the early 1800s in France. Once in a while I'll get confirmation. This means that such a person existed, it doesn't necessarily mean that this woman was that person. But this is part of the myth that I supply. So yesterday we spent about three hours talking, and she said what we had turned up in her numerology was ninety percent accurate. She comes from a family whose family name becomes a Seven when we do it numerologically, and that's the lessons of humility and service; certainly she talks about the humility that happened when she had to give up her network job and come home to a little rural town where the family's highest aspiration was to make a profit in the family business, a bar. It's also interesting that she has no Sevens in her birth name, which means that in her past lifetimes, apparently, she had not learned humility or the desire to serve people.

TMA: How does she go forward now? How is she helped?

DJ: Well, she's still struggling, and so we don't know, but she's reached the time in her life where she has a lot to give to younger people. My advice to her was to certainly work at educating. She also is about to offer her production services at really no salary at all to a gentleman in New England who is hoping to do a new video biography of one of the major mystical figures in American history. I can't say too much about that, but she would certainly be humbling herself to do this because her abilities would have commanded a real good salary in the big cities.

She felt I had sized up very well what she had struggled with, and so now I think the big struggle is her need for having a meaningful life. That's an example of someone I've worked with on a personal counseling basis. It's interesting that I've never met most of my clients because they approach me through the mail by way of word-of-mouth networking. I do charts and send them back, so it's always gratifying to get some positive feedback.

TMA: How do the workshops differ that you do with Bill Getz?

DJ: Well, the personal myth thing is really the opening gambit of the workshop. We do a number of exercises in the conference to encourage people to investigate the way they normally go about dealing with problems and obstacles in their life, and also to think of some of the myths that they have thought were important in their life.

Then, of course, we do the numerology -- we work out and study the learning cycles they have thus far been through, keeping it all on a mythical level. In other words, our attitude is that as interesting as all this is, if you don't find it true, then it's not -- and you really ought to get up and walk out. In fact, Bill and I have a money back guarantee on our workshop. If you come in and you don't learn a single thing that's of value to you, we'll refund your money. But in four years, we've never yet had to do that. People are intrigued; but because you're intrigued doesn't necessarily mean you're dealing in what's true for you.

Bill was Director of Communication Training for the New York State Education Department for over twenty years and used a technique called "Ideals Formation." This is the concept that comes out of the Edgar Cayce readings. Cayce said the reason people suffer so badly is that they're trying to do too many things at once. A good psychologist would say their lives are fragmented; you have one set of ideals maybe in dealing with your parents, another with your customers or clients, another with your next door neighbors and another set of priorities with your children. Cayce's idea was that if you are to be happy, if you're to be successful, you have to set a single, spiritual ideal -- the word "ideal" being different from "idea." This would be an ideal, perhaps, such as love, or perhaps as in the case I spoke of a moment ago, it was love and relationships. Or it might be something like service or it might be harmony or it could be peacemaking or friendliness or whatever altruistic goal appeals to you.

It's not like you're going to be into one particular goal for the rest of your life. We encourage people to fill in this goal in pencil, because very often you realize you bit off more than you can chew and you modify your ideal. But to take the spiritual ideal and actually chart out how you're going to apply this ideal, first off on a mental level, let's say with my parents . . . if I set love as my goal, my spiritual goal, my spiritual ideal, what am I going to do mentally toward my parents? Bill has a very powerful section in the workshop where he indicates, from his own life, how he did it with his dad when he was alive, and with his mother now that she faces death.

And then what do you do on a physical level? What do you do practically? It's one thing to have intentions and perhaps to change thought patterns, but what do you do on a practical level every day? So this addresses the three sides, the spiritual, the mental, and the physical, and it integrates this spiritual ideal.

Another segment on the chart might represent his boss. Well, what is he going to do mentally -- ideas, attitudes that he's going to change or modify as far as his boss goes . . . and then practically, on a real, physical, day-to-day level, what is he going to do? So this process is quite lengthy, helping people isolate what to them are the most meaningful ideals. Bill had worked with this in the Edgar Cayce organization for quite a few years and found that if you left out some of the code words of religion or spirituality, you can actually do this in the workplace.

The interesting thing that Bill did in a business atmosphere applies just as well to people in their ordinary lives. His real strength was taking spiritual principles and integrating these into the workplace not only to make demonstrable changes in one's own personal life but also to help one's co-workers -- and in fact an entire department -- to do the same things. So doing retreats or workshops for employees is an especially interesting thing that we've tried to bring to working with companies.

Essentially, we set up a new potential myth for a person. We help them examine where they've been thus far, and how much success or happiness the old myths have brought them. We offer them a chance to replan their life if they like the myth that they've worked out with us -- because we don't really impose anything on people. Our attitude is not that we know more than you do. Our attitude is that within you is the answer to almost all the questions that you have. In the process of our workshop, we just help people work those out, actually plan this out on paper so that you have an agenda, a program you can take home with you.

After a lot of workshops and seminars that you go to, you're very excited until you come to your third red light in a row after leaving the conference center, then you hear your tire going flat, then you realize you've got to get gas, and you get home and the dog is loose and the power is off -- and somewhere in there you lose it. But we give people something on paper. We've followed up on a number of conferees a month or so after the conference, and found people are not only using these ideas, but they feel their life is enriched; they've got a new sense of purpose.

TMA: Let's go back to the subject of cycles that we began to discuss earlier. Can you give me a nutshell of the learning cycles?

DJ: I think it would be easy to misunderstand this, but as far as I know, Edgar Cayce is the only one who spoke about this in terms of numerology. That is, you assign to each person a mythical length of life of seventy-five years, and you count up the number of letters in the birth name. When we talk about family names it would depend on which one you might use, but let's say a person has a total of fifteen letters in the full birth name. You divide that number, fifteen, into the arbitrary length of life of seventy-five years, and you'd get a dividend number of five. This would indicate, then, that each of the learning cycles in the person's name was five years long. In this way, you're able to go back and look . . . for example, someone who came into life with G as the first letter of his first name, there's a whole thing about that first letter that we haven't talked about. But essentially his first learning cycle, if in fact he has fifteen letters in his birth name, the first cycle (if, for instance, his name is Guy) would be the G cycle or the lesson of Seven for the first five years. And it would give you a picture of what the first five years might have been about. So you go back and you look at the humbling experiences, maybe the humbling beginnings into which you were born, things that may have caused you to feel humble or humiliated but that first learning cycle is very important as far as pointing out purpose for the life.

Then at age five, you moved out to the U or the Three cycle, and the issue there is balance. Then one could figure that the best way to learn balance is by facing imbalance. So one would look between ages five and ten for issues of imbalance. Many times in early life these are health problems, but they could be -- again, depending on your Sun sign -- emotional difficulties or health difficulties, or sometimes a combination because they all work together.

And so one goes through their name, and it can bring you right up to the present. The conferees would see which cycle they're in right now. I think that's what brings anybody to a conference: where am I right now? What's going on in my life right now, and what should I do about it? So there would be a mythical statement of where you are right now. There are many other things we do in the conference, such as on two-day conferences, we do what's called "the dream incubation," usually the first night, and ask people to intuit from their dreamwork what their destiny number is about. We don't really talk about the meaning of numbers until the second day. So they've made a chart, and they might understand that this life is about a Seven or it's about a Six, but they're puzzled . . . and so they go home and have a dream, and certain issues or certain symbols will arise and give them something very strange to bring in the next morning -- and that's where we begin talking about numbers.

The information that's available through this combination of astrology and numerology provides a worthwhile roadmap for people to follow on the way to becoming all they can be.

David James holds Masters Degrees in Social Studies Education and in Counseling Psychology, studied dream analysis with Dr. Montague Ullman and has conducted weekly dream study groups since 1990. He has also worked with the Association for Research and Enlightenment (the A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach, Virginia as an intuitive who mentors and assists aspiring intuitives. He has regularly given workshops, appeared on radio and TV in the United States and Canada, and is currently employed by Atlantic University in assisting individuals to affirm their life purpose using his reading techniques.

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