William Samuel – A Gentle Teaching of Tranquility and Awareness William Samuel grew up in Mountain Brook, Alabama – a small village to which he returned as an adult after fighting in WWII and living in the Orient. "The Universe is my home, but I choose to walk the fields and quiet hills of Alabama." Born in 1924, he was commissioned a Lieutenant at age 18 and fought in WWII:
During that fighting, Bill came under the tutelage of his Chinese interpreter, a Mr. Shieh, who was a Taoist master:
After the war, I think he lived in the the Orient for several years, possibly studying under Shieh, although although my information is sketchy. A few years later, he found himself back in a war zone again:
It was during one of the battles in Korea when Bill Samuel had such a revelation:
And that Arjuna-like soldier (whose demeanor may have been similar to that described by the opening lines of Richard Rose's autobiographical blank verse "Three Books of the Absolute": Out of the valley of the river came a wanderer. Peace was in his eye and his soul was wrapped in Nirvana) became a gentle teacher of tranquillity and awareness. In the second half of the 1950s Bill became a well-known healer in Christian Science circles. But by the early 1960s he was removed from their practitioner listing since his views no longer dovetailed with Christian Science teaching. And in 1964 he published Two Plus Two Equals Reality, where he challenges the reader with fundamental questions: "Who am I; who are you? Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Who or what is God? What is absolute reality?" He began that booklet with the following advice:
One of his students wrote that Bill's awakening occurred in the 1960s and was triggered by seeing his
reflection in the water of a pond near his home and realizing that "who and what he is was the witness of that reflection and of the image called Bill." I assume that this realization provided the conviction that spurred his writing of the above booklet. (As an aside, the details of his awakening sound greatly similar to the fictional depiction of the protagonist's awakening in Douglas Harding's Spectre in the Lake published in 1996, the year of Bill's death. His student told me that Bill was familiar with Harding's teaching, but I don't know if there was any contact between them.) Another student wrote that Bill's realization occurred "around 1956 or maybe at the latest 1958" and that he wrote The Melody of the Woodcutter and the King (see link below) almost immediately afterward and circulated it among his students although it wasn't formally published until 1976. Published work includes: Two Plus Two Equals Reality (1964) A Guide to Awareness and Tranquillity (1967) The Awareness of Self-Discovery (1970) The Melody of the Woodcutter and the King (1976) The Child Within Us Lives! (1986) You can buy the books directly from the publisher at William Samuel and Friends or from Amazon. A new (2010) edition of The Child Within Us Lives! is now available. For further interest: William Samuel & Friends for background info, many excerpts from his writing, and books and audio recordings published by his literary executor, Sandy Jones. There is also a wonderful 5hour DVD filmed by PBS of a workshop that Bill did in 1993 ... see the videos page for clips. Urban Guru Cafe has an audio file of a 20-minute talk by Bill, One Heart . November 2006 TAT Forum, for Bill's moving account of awakening, "The Melody of the Woodcutter and the King." (For those who are afraid of anything that looks like poetry, fear not! The blank verse won't hurt you :-) Update: "The Melody of the Woodcutter and the King" was included in the TAT Foundation publication Beyond Mind, Beyond Death. Induction Talk in the Articles section of this site, for a talk given by Bill to a group of visitors – the purpose of which was to bring them into conscious contact with the Child-heart within. Journal Tending, also in the Articles section, for an excerpt from The Child Within Us Lives! for consciously becoming "the very point where the Ineffable becomes tangible in the world...." Stumble It!
