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Paul Wood

Leon Paul Wood (1917-1965)

Enlightened Christian Mystic

Richard Rose on Paul Wood

from: Zen and Esoteric ChristianityLos Angeles, 1976

... I find that different cases are different. I'll give you an outstanding case I ran into by accident in Akron, Ohio. Incidentally, I was supposed to talk about esoteric Christianity and Zen. This man never heard of Zen. He never heard of anything, except the Lord's Prayer and the Bible. Yet he had one of the most profound experiences that I've ever encountered. I've never read anything like it in a book even. The account is like Ramana Maharshi.

He had been a pilot, a bombardier or a pilot. Regardless, he bombed Japan. He dropped some of those big bombs on Japan.^* He was a Christian, a devout Christian. When he brought his plane back to the base he said, "The Bible says that God observes the fall of the sparrow. If he observes the fall of the sparrow, where was he when 80,000 people got wiped out?" So he started questioning the religion of his parents. And he kept this up until they heard him talking to himself. So they sent him home. "Take a vacation. Go back home, so we don't have a casualty from this."

* Probably conventional bombs, see note 1a on paul-wood-story.htm#note-1a

So he went back to Texas – he was from San Antonio or Dallas, Texas. He was still mumbling to himself, he was still brooding over this: "Where's God? Where was God when the bombs fell?" So his wife says, "You're going to have to get back to work." He couldn't work. He had to have the answer before he could go back to work. So she dumped him. She went and got herself another husband. He had children by her, and the children kind of looked down their nose at him, and took off, "Dad's blown his lid."

He kept it up, though. He says he went back and he realized that he couldn't lose the faith of his childhood; that somewhere there must be an answer in that. And he picked up the Bible and started reading it. In the Bible he found a statement that, "If you would know, you've got to pray." – "If you pray, pray thusly." And what followed was the Lord's Prayer. And this fellow took the Lord's Prayer and prayed it and prayed it, until he practically got obsessed – using it as a crutch or whatever.

He was losing one job after another, but he took a job in a car dealership, he had a job selling automobiles. And it seemed as though the more he prayed the more hell he got, the more trouble he got into. But he kept it up. He decided that that was the only thing left for him. The only hope for his sanity was to keep on praying.

He said he had some people come in to look at an automobile one day, and he just couldn't take it anymore. He said he had tried to kill himself two or three times but didn't have the courage. He said he just laid his head down on the desk and prayed for God to kill him. And he said he never took his head up off the desk. They hauled him to the hospital – he passed out, or maybe he was ranting and raving.

He was in the hospital for a week or ten days, and in that time the man saw the beginning and end of history. He saw everything that had ever happened. He knew the totality of experience. When he came out he was at peace. There was no more struggle. He never had to worry about a job. If he worked, he had money, and if he didn't work, he had money. He would talk to little groups and the like. He never charged anybody. It seemed there were always opportunities, and some of them seemed utterly fantastic, incidentally; I heard him talk about them.

But the thing that I noticed about him, is that this man's experience was more complete, and more sensational, if you want to put it that way, than anything I've ever read about in the research of the spiritual experiences. And he had done it absolutely without any knowledge of Zen, or any knowledge of esoteric philosophy, just by going inside himself. ...

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