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Paul Wood

Leon Paul Wood (1917-1965)

Enlightened Christian Mystic

Richard Rose on Paul Wood

from: Augie's ApartmentRaleigh, NC, 1991

... And then naturally in San Antonio there were a few other movements, and this Paul Wood was one of them. Bob Martin met him there, but I met him later when Bob was living in Akron and brought him up. I often wonder whether he's still alive. I couldn't tell his age. I can't remember how old I was either. I was married at the time.^*

* In the summer of 1963 Wood was 45 and Rose was 46. Mr Wood died just 2 years later, unknown to Rose.

He had had a spiritual experience. He had been an aviator when we bombed Japan. But he was a devout Christian and he believed everything he read in the Bible. And he said, "This doesn't add up. The Bible says that God observes the fall of the sparrow, so where is God when he let me drop these bombs?"

After he blew the place up he got to talking to himself, and consequently they considered him dangerous to the other crewmen. They gave him a rest and recreation stint to serve at home, shipped him back to the States. He said this thing troubled him tremendously and he got to praying. He was trying everything to get God's reaction to what he was doing. He said he was troubled and in mental agony; it just worried the life out of him. He tried a lot of things. He tried to pray. He said he read in the Bible that whenever you're in need of help you should pray thusly, and what followed was the Lord's Prayer. So he takes the Lord's Prayer and starts praying, nothing but the Lord's Prayer, over and over and over. Of course that drove him nuts.

He went to work in a dealership in San Antonio selling automobiles. He's got this on his mind, and he had some people who came in and gave him a bad time; they got to arguing with him or giving him heck because there was a defect in the car or something. He said he went over to his desk, sat down and prayed for God to kill him. He didn't want to live. And he passed out. They took him to the hospital and he was out for ten days: ten days as far as our consciousness is concerned. He said that in those ten days he was free, he was travelling. And when he finally woke up he realized that he was immortal; this was his proof of immortality, because he lived, but in another dimension.

So he spent the rest of his life going around talking to people if they wanted to listen. Of course he never pushed himself on anybody. Bob Martin got him to come up to Akron. He looked like Crazy Guggenheim, Jackie Gleason's sidekick who acted the part of a drunk. This guy was taller, maybe 5'10", along in there. His eyes were hooded, they had white pouches.^*

* According to his obituary, Wood had his first heart attack less than a year before the meetings in Akron.

He had a wife and some children but his wife got rid of him. She shoved him out the door because he wasn't talking intelligently to her. I don't know what he did for a living after that. I don't know if he still worked in the dealership. But he rented himself a little room someplace, and some of the people who knew him would bring him food. A lot of people learned about him. Then he moved from there to Oklahoma and lived out in the country. In the meantime he had picked up a different wife. He had a young woman with him; by young I'd say she was about 25, a very beautiful woman. And I'm telling you, he wasn't nice to look at. He looked like he'd been soaked up with too much booze. And I think he was, because when he was in the air force he was unhappy and he was drinking to put himself to sleep.

So Wood was in Akron and we were sitting there talking. Bob Martin had invited all the engineers, a whole lot of officials from Firestone who came over to this little meeting. Bob had ten kids so we couldn't meet in the house. We had to take some chairs and go out into the garage because the kids would just climb over you. Bob never trained them to sit still.

These guys were all questioning him about his experience. And he started telling them about the time he had no food in his house. He said, "When you're working for God you don't have to worry about food, you don't have to worry about anything. Whatever you need will come to you." And I believe this myself. I'm not saying I'm working for God, because I don't want to presume that I'm doing something for the maximum powers that run the universe. But ever since doing this work I've never had any trouble with enough to live on. That's all that's necessary, enough to live on. But when Wood came up to Ohio he had a big car. I said, "Geez, did you buy that?" He said, "No, somebody gave it to me." It was a headache to him, I guess because of the gasoline. And he told me, "I don't worry about it. I'll be supplied with what I need to get around."

But anyhow, he was telling about this time he went without food. He said that in his cupboard he had an onion, a soup bone of some sort and something else. He said people were coming over to talk to him, and he always liked to have soup or something for them to eat. So he gets a big pot of water to make a pot of broth at least. That was all he had. He said he cooks the bone and the onion and whatever other thing he had there, and they all ate it, I guess out of politeness. But the impression was that they were satisfied. I imagine they would be, you know. Who in the heck wants to eat two bowls of that?

But he said it wasn't but a day or two later that one of the ranchers came in with a quarter of beef. He said, "You got a freezer? Can you take this off my hands? I don't sell it and my freezer will only hold a couple quarters. If you've got room you're welcome to it." And he said that's the way his life went, that about the time he was ready to starve, something would show up.

Well, I could see these experts, these were engineers and mathematicians who believed in nothing except what could be explained in logical terms. They're kind of sneering at him, and Bob Martin said, "Paul, geez, I wish you hadn't have told that." You know, "I didn't want you to appear ridiculous." And I said, "Bob, shut up, will you? He's telling them what happened to him. It doesn't matter whether people believe it or not. I believe it. I don't believe he's lying."

A. They were surprised he had a good-looking wife.

R. Yes, well she came in. He got up and went to the house to go to the toilet or something, and his wife comes out with the coffee pot, passing out the coffee. So one of these smart aleck engineers said, "Hey, what's it like to be married to that guy?" She said, "It's alright." And he says, "Well, just how do you tolerate all of his ideas?" And she never missed a drop of the coffee. She went to the next cup she was pouring and said, "He is my lord and master." And that was it. She hadn't batted an eye. That's what she believed.

A. What made you sure that he was authentic?

R. Well, I know when I'm around a person. I could tell by the way he was talking. I knew that he had made the trip. One thing about it is, he wasn't selling anything. The other thing was that he gained knowledge that wasn't there before. He had the ability to go to almost any time in history and focus in on an incident; he'd flop into another phase of history. He'd do it walking down the street. He was walking with Bob Martin one time and was telling him about the battle of Gettysburg. He was watching it, he was saying where the troops were stationed and that sort of thing. These were things that he seemed to see. Swedenborg had this, incidentally. The Swedenborgian Society formed as a result of his works. You don't hear much of him around here, but out in L.A. they've got a big center, a great big building. They've got one on the east coast too, in New Jersey. But I knew that the man was genuine. And that's the reason when they started ridiculing him I said, "Hey, don't worry about what people think."

A. Do you think his experience and yours were identical?

R. No. They were identical in that there was no time after death. You can move to almost anyplace you want to focus on, which seemed to be the thing that concerned him most; that he wanted to visit certain places in history. All the history is now. There is no calendar. It's just a space-time printout you might say. ...

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