I’m not kidding; you don’t trifle with past incarnations if they are revealed to you with great clarity. As what happened one evening during the early days, many years ago, when George’s Temple was only just beginning to exude happiness and prosperity. George went into a trance (if you can call it that, since he had his eyes fixed on you as if he was trying to figure out why you parted your hair at the middle when it would look better on the left) and casually described my past life and, to his surprise, his own as impinging on mine.
We took these "revelations" with some levity of course, but they explained a lot of things about ourselves: Why I seriously took up Chinese painting with Prof. Chen Bing Sun of the Chinese Artists Guild for five years; why George went to a military school in the US (where, he recounted, his cavalry horse bit him and he bit him back); and why we have remained the fastest of friends, although we don’t see each other for years, or a lifetime or two.
Last year, when George sent me the manuscripts of his book, asking if I could do some editing on them, I said, after reading the typewritten pages, that the writing and the style are inspired. You don’t tamper with the distinctive and inimitable George Sison idiom and inflection (he writes the way he speaks, which is the trademark of many great writers). Once when I asked Mr. Nick Joaquin if he would edit my book, he warned me, in the august tones of a National Artist: "I don’t edit, I rewrite." You don’t rewrite George Sison. Because nobody talks like George Sison.
There’s something about George that people who know him well will say makes him the quintessential George Sison. He has an indomitable sense of humor; he’s always cracking jokes and telling funny anecdotes, and drawing out the lighter side of even the most solemn and lugubrious situation. There’s never a dull moment with him. And this is true with his book: Never a dull line, never a word of advice that he hits you over the head with. He’s down-to-earth and practical (listen to this: "Pay yourself a compliment when others do not."), a genius not only at slipping in a light-hearted comment edgewise but also the unsurpassed master of the deadpan. A lady desperately asks him what she’s going to do with her life. And he inquires if she knows where she wants to go. And when she says no, he says dryly, "If you don’t know where you want to go, it doesn’t matter where you are."
His book, which has a foreword by Catherine Ponder, Sison’s own guru who is a world-renowned advocate of prosperity and healing, is a compendium of the insights he has gathered from his readings and his interpretations of religious, even biblical, texts and symbols, his own spiritual experiences and his concepts of believing and self-reinvention that be at the core of his teachings.
So how do you read Sison’s A Miracle Awaits You without getting zonked out with an overload of precepts and without missing the miracle when it happens?
Read a page or half a page a day. It will be easier to absorb and digest his precept or advice.For instance, his teaching on how to "adjust your frequency so that you can match the kind of prosperity you are asking for" will be clearer to you if you stop to ponder on the truth elucidated on one page which says that "one basic way is through prayer which, as Jesus said, can move mountains" and "calm the seas." The next page will tell how to vibrate at the frequency of P20 million or selling 600 houses and lots. And the next tells you that "you must learn how to say no to things that do not synchronize with what you desire."
Treat it like your Grandmother does her bedside Bible. You close your eyes, open the book at random and point your forefinger onto the page, and the line or passage it falls on will be your guide for the day.
And the line or passage will always convey messages of hope and comfort. Unlike in the Bible, Sison’s book has no passages of abomination and punishment by fire and brimstone, much less the condemnation of one’s sexual orientation. In fact, in his book, Sison avers that God is male, female, gay, lesbian, all of the above, even tri-sexual, and ultimately non-sexual, because God is all. But you have to read his book to put this statement in its proper context.
Keep your sense of humor while reading it. Sison always has his humor and sensibility about him, even while he’s expounding on the miracles that can happen in your life. A prime example of this is when he debunks the notion that "you must earn a living through the sweat of your brow." How then do you earn a living and not break a sweat? Read his book.
Don’t accept anything he says as Gospel truth, however. Argue against it, rage against it. Surely, you don’t feel like accepting everything he says about praising and forgiving and forgetting and "reconfiguring your hurts." Or even about loving. To say nothing about his concept of reinventing God. Who is this so-called Sage of the New Age, anyway? Like, how, or rather what, does he know about my past life as the handmaiden of a concubine, if that’s true at all?
Sison’s book provides an arena for argumentative, hair-splitting philosophers, cranky evangelists (the bilious pastor on TV’s Ang Dating Daan will find in it a wealth of heretical thinking), and closed-minded catolicos cerrados. It will be a good start when reading the book to assume the stance of anyone of them.
But also keep an open mind. When you have posited your objections and cynicisms, prepare for George Sison’s clear expositions that will demolish all your doubts and misgivings, with the clarity, grace and swiftness of a samurai sword cutting off the head of the enemy. (Now, why am I using that imagery? What past reincarnation prompted me to say that?) Seriously now I mean, I’m serious, it’s just that talk of reincarnation sometimes gives me goose pimples! The Gospel according to George Sison is spiritual but also pragmatic, lofty and yet also light-hearted, and its illuminations often elicit eurekas of "Why, yes of course, nothing could be truer!" "Why didn’t I think of it that way?"
You’ll find yourself exclaiming thus when he says, "Money is not evil per se; it is the wrong use of money that is the root of all evil." Or, "If there is someone close to you whom you want to change, the thing to do is to change yourself." Or, in his message to today’s high-tech geeks: "Always remember that you are like a computer. Your every thought is encoded as data and will have a printout."
A printout, that’s what Sison’s A Miracle Awaits You is. A printout of Sison’s deep meditations and luminous insights. A printout of the collective thinking of the age, and the ages.
Now George of course has his own recommendations on how to read his book. If you’re too lazy to read the book, he says, look at the illustrations. If that’s too laborious for you, read the table of contents. The miracle awaits you at any shortcut, that is, if you believe that it will happen. Believing brings us back to the story of the handmaiden of the favorite concubine of the emperor.