“During the last 10 years I have had the privilege of following Ric’s awakening path and it has produced a huge transformation in me. I have worked on my inner constraints, freeing the issues that caused me great fear and suffering. Through Ric’s guidance I have been able to walk step by step on a road that leads to awakening to our true nature, creating a life with more freedom and openness. It has been a journey from the shadows to the light. I am completely sure that as you read this book and put your consciousness into it, you will have the same wonderful experience.”

-- Santiago Ardissone, President of the Columbia Foundation on Consciousness and Energy

“Of all the teachers, guides and masters whom I have met in my 40 years of seeking spiritual fulfillment, Ric Weinman has the ability to map not only consciousness but that most elusive of qualities - awakening. VortexHealing® provides a path that anyone can tread to that end. What more can you ask? I thoroughly recommend both Ric & the VortexHealing® path, and this great book he has written.”

-- Richard Farmer, Founder, Tai Chi Movement for Wellbeing; Dir. Rising Dragon Tai Chi Living Ltd.; Hon. Pres. Tai Chi Union of Great Britain

* To order Awakening Through the Veils, go to bookstore.balboapress.com or to Amazon. *

Ric Weinman has been described as having the mind of scientist and the heart of a wizard. He is the founder of VortexHealing® Divine Energy Healing, a healing art that he re-discovered in a profound ‘vision’, November 26, 1994.

Ric grew up in Queens, NY. He went to Columbia University as an engineering student, and in his sophomore year he transferred into its liberal arts college, majoring in English and getting his BA in 1971. From there, he hitchhiked around Europe, going wherever the wind took him, mostly sleeping in farmers’ fields. He was trying to escape from a deep emotional trauma, and so he barely ate and got very far ‘out of body’. But in his ‘out there’ and starved state, although he lost a lot of his body mass, his nervous system went into a different state, and he rediscovered his spiritual connection. This began the slow journey back in, taking this new inner connection with him.

Ric lived ‘at the edge’ for many years, working odd jobs and day jobs, moving about but living mostly, in Tucson, AZ. During that time he did a lot of meditation and writing. Some of his short stories were published, as well as two books (Your Hands Can Heal, printed in 7 languages, and Breaking the Illusion). It was in Tucson that his ‘psychic’ abilities started to activate, and he began to practice healing. He studied Jin Shin Jyutsu®, cranial-sacral therapy, and practiced his own methods of working with energy, consciousness, and fascia. At that time, he also started to connect inside to various Divine beings, both alive and no longer in the body. His connection to the Divine became his main lifeline.

Ric took a short detour into a Masters program in Computer Science at the University of Arizona, attempting to move into a more secure, mainstream existence, but his heart wasn’t in it, so he left it and returned to his healing work. At one point he began to teach his own healing workshops, which became the basis of his first book, Your Hands Can Heal.

Then, in 1994, his path took a radical turn when, in a profound ‘vision’, he found himself standing in a huge inter-dimensional vortex, and the divine presence within that vortex re-activated his past-life connections to VortexHealing® and the Merlin Lineage. People quickly noticed how powerful this healing art was, and they asked him to teach it to them. In September 1995, he taught the first VortexHealing® Basic Training, in Tucson.

Almost 7 years later, meditating in a hotel room in Colorado, on vacation with his wife and son, his core sense of ‘I’ suddenly disappeared. He had been moved into spiritual awakening by the Divine source of his lineage. This began a new phase for both his personal life and for VortexHealing®. As his own awakening deepened, he realized he was being shown an awakening map that could be used to take VortexHealing® students, step by step, through the same stages that he was being guided through. When the map seemed complete, he wrote Awakening Through the Veils, to share the map with the general spiritual world, along with guidelines for making its journey.

At the time Awakening Through the Veils was published, Ric was living with his wife and son in Massachusetts.

"You take all your mental and emotional stuff with you into awakening and it is still there on the other side. What changes is your relationship to all that stuff."

"True Self is not a deeper or bigger or higher version of I. It has no sense of your familiar ego self in it."

"People have all kinds of experiences that they like to think are awakenings, but most aren't. Most of those experiences are just expanded ego states, and most of the rest are simply a momentary taste of something deeper, and then the moment passes. The Map provides a clear definition of how to tell a true awakening from one of these other kinds of experiences. Here is a quick rule of thumb: if the description of the experience has the word 'expanded' in it, then most likely it was an expanded ego state. The overriding quality of a true awakening experience is most aligned with the word 'empty', for one's familiar sense of self has 'emptied', leaving a space in its place. And if it is a true awakening and not just a taste, then what has become empty stays empty. The sense of expansion, on the other hand, usually refers to an expanded sense of self. In awakening that sense of self does not expand, it disappears."

"In true awakening, there is nowhere to get to and no one to go anywhere. If you think of samadhi or mystical experiences of oneness with creation—or any other place the ego can get to—as a particular sound, then awakening is like silence, and you can't get to silence through particular sounds, no matter how wonderful the sound is. You get to silence by ceasing to make sounds."

“For freedom to be achieved, for true freedom to enter into your existence, you need to do more than expand consciousness. You need to go in a very different direction, which is the path of awakening. Awakening isn’t about expanding the ego; it isn’t about expanding the self. It’s actually waking up out of ego, waking up out of self, into something that is more fundamental, that’s more original truth, that’s more original essence of Divinity or being of what one is. That is true spirituality. It is about becoming what you are. You don’t need to expand to become what you are, you just need to go deep enough that what you are emerges. That is what brings true freedom into your life.”