Paul DeBell

I was born and raised in New Jersey with a Protestant upbringing.  Growing up, I was always fascinated by religion and was a religion major in college, but by my senior year at Oberlin College, my faith in spiritual reality had been shattered. So, I went to Cornell Medical College and studied an approach better suited to my practical way of thinking, psychology.  I became a psychiatrist and have worked and taught as a faculty member at some of the finest medical institutions in New York City: Weill Cornell, Columbia Presbyterian, Albert Einstein and New York Medical Colleges.  My main calling, however, was practicing in poor inner city neighborhoods - specifically the community mental health clinics in the South Bronx - because people there needed assistance and caring far more than others who were more fortunate. I worked there for over 30 years, studied family therapy, utilized hypnotherapy and traveled internationally.

For 20 years I had ceased believing in the existence of a spiritual dimension and a "higher power" until one fateful afternoon while on vacation in Brazil. I was in beautiful Rio de Janiero, sitting on a bench and reading Carl Jung's book on Synchronicity when I had a strange thought: ‘Go to the Botanical Garden where a tree will open the door for you to an invisible dimension of life.’ So I went and as I sat among the lovely plants and flowers, a falling red leaf floated down and landed in my hand - the stem softly planting itself in my loosely closed right hand so that the leaf stuck straight up - something that has a one in a billion chance of occurring.

This experience illustrates one of the most interesting things I have learned: It isn’t the material event itself (like the falling of the leaf) that makes a thought, feeling or action spiritual but its inner effect. Looking back, the spiritual effect in that event is clear for it completely changed the course of my life. Without any religious beliefs at the time, I began to analyze other experiences that I now recognized as spiritual because they were connected to this one in as scientific a way as possible. To follow the proverbial breadcrumb trail that spiritual forces often leave for us, I ended up taking an evidence-based to spiritual beliefs. The success of this approach led me to write my book, Decoding the Spiritual Messages of Everyday Life.  

My vision of spirituality is more universal, the equivalent of what psychology is in our material life. My book provides a blueprint that you can use to decode your own messages and better navigate your own spiritual path in the tradition of your own choice. We are in the midst of a major revolution in our spiritual thinking and each one of us possesses a small piece of the puzzle. The age of 'experts' has past! To facilitate the transition to a more universal understanding of how spiritual forces work in everyday life, I have set up a resource center at decodeyourmessages.com on which we can all share what we have learned in the peer-to-peer way that the creative commons spirit makes possible.

For more information on my book visit decodeyourmessages.com