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Paul Wood

Leon Paul Wood (1917-1965)

Enlightened Christian Mystic

Richard Rose on Paul Wood

from: Zen Is ActionOhio State University, 1989

... I met a man one time by the name of Paul Wood from Texas. At this time I was going up to meetings in Akron. We had some people there who had graduated from Alcoholics Anonymous and now were on something of an esoteric or spiritual path. Incidentally, Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was an enlightened man, although he was originally an alcoholic. Anyhow, this group of people had met through Alcoholics Anonymous, and they would get together and were interested in spiritual work.

This man from Texas came up to visit Bob Martin, the fellow I knew real well. And he had been enlightened. He looked like Crazy Guggenheim, the guy who used to be the sidekick for Jackie Gleason. This was a stocky fellow with eyes that sagged down, he was fat, a big heavy fellow; that's the description of him but that doesn't matter. To look at him you wouldn't have thought he was anything. You'd think he had spent a lot of time drinking, which he did, before he had this experience.^*

* Wood had a heart attack about 8-9 months earlier.

They had brought a bunch over from Firestone or Goodyear or those places. Some of the engineers heard about him being in town, so they came over to look at him through the glass and see if he was crazy or not. And he was telling us about what happened. When the war broke out he was an engineering student, so they made him a pilot or something on a bomber, and his ship bombed Nagasaki or one of those places. Now he was a Bible student before that, and he said it bugged him after he dropped the bombs. So his commanding officer said, "You'd better take a leave, a sabbatical, go home and get some rest." He couldn't see sending him out on another mission.

He said that what troubled him was that he had believed the Bible, and that this wasn't coinciding with his beliefs. In the Bible it says that God observes the fall of the sparrow, and here's a big bomber dropping tremendous eggs and killing people by the eighty thousand. "Where is this God I believed in?" So he came back to Texas, San Antonio I think it was. He was married and had some little children. And he couldn't have any peace; he just became obsessed with finding that answer. He realized that he was troubled and he said, "The reason for my trouble is evidentially spiritual, and if I'm a fundamentalist I ought to go into the Bible and find the answer."

So he got to searching through the Bible and he found where Christ supposedly said (I'm quoting him, because I don't read that much), "If you would have something granted to you, pray thusly," and what followed was the Lord's Prayer. So he meditated, concentrated, analyzed the Lord's Prayer twenty-four hours day. He and his wife were quarreling because he wasn't making any money. He got a job as a car salesman in a dealership but he wasn't doing them much good; he was acting a little buggy. He said that he was just overwhelmed one day and he prayed for God to kill him. And he said he passed out.

When he woke up he was in a hospital. For ten days he traveled in space-time. All the time he was in the hospital he was conscious, while his body seemingly was unconscious. One amazing thing was that his trip doesn't coincide with some of the other incidences of enlightenment. He was more like Swedenborg; he could drop into almost any time category he wanted to. He'd be walking down the street with this friend of mine – Bob Martin used to relay a lot of this stuff to me – and he'd watch the battle of Gettysburg, or he'd watch something going on in Europe. He would describe it accurately, and then brush it aside as though it didn't mean anything. But he somehow had gotten past time as being independent of space – that they are both one so to speak.

Well, the engineers from Firestone and Goodyear were kind of sneering at him. I didn't say anything; I just watched him. And I came to the conclusion that he had been there. I knew it, just from what he was saying. And they started throwing questions at him: "Well, if you know so much, why aren't you rich?" and all this sort of thing. They didn't seem to get the importance of what he had become or discovered. We do not, incidentally, ever learn in this life anything of importance on a philosophic basis. We only become. And you never find God until you are God. That's the simple answer.

But anyhow, they were ridiculing him. And he started telling a story. He had been going around trying to tell people to read the Lord's Prayer, to get this enlightenment. Of course, it didn't work, because not everybody was like him; they hadn't bombed Japan. But he believed that he would be taken care of. He didn't look for food. His wife had left him, the kids left him. So he got a little place by himself out in the country. And he said that every time he'd get to the point of starvation one of the ranchers who lived around there would bring in a quarter of beef or something for him to eat. They seemed to know he didn't care whether he lived or died.

He said that one time he was really down and out and had nothing to eat except an onion and a soup bone of some sort. And there were people there who had come to visit him. So he said, "All I've got is some broth." And they said, "Okay." So he cooks up this big pot of broth, and he said everybody ate it and seemingly they were satisfied. Of course the thought went through everybody's head, "Oh, this fellow's borrowing from the loaves and fishes parable and he's going to capitalize on it." And Bob says to him, "Paul, geez, I wish you hadn't told that story. I've been telling these people how sincere you are." And I looked over at Bob and said, "Bob, shut up. He doesn't give a damn whether they believe it or not." He told it because it was true, that's all; he didn't care if people believed it. ...

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