Featuring a Talk by Tom Coates
“Peeling Away Layers of the Onion – Soul Stories Lost and Found.”
Our December 12 program will feature a talk by Tom Coates, our group’s only still-active original member. His talk will mark the 240th monthly program of our Richmond area IONS Community Group and pave the way for our 20th anniversary celebration in January 2016. Music will be provided by Dan O’Neal.
Tom’s theme will be “multidimensional explorations into who we are, what we are doing here, and how we create and manifest the world we want.”
As his program title suggests, Tom will use what he refers to as “soul stories,” drawn from his own experience and from his lifelong fascination with and study of the human soul, to inform the subject. And, in keeping with the season, those stories also will include a unique rendering of the life of Jesus and the soul which gave rise to his remarkable life, gleaned from many years of channeling inquiries and guidance.
This is a version of the Jesus story no one is likely to have heard before and underscores that his life was even more extraordinary than commonly believed.
We live in a period of intense transition, one in which many of our most long-held and cherished assumptions about ourselves and our world are being swept away, and one in which it often seems the only constant is rapid, unrelenting, unexpected, unforeseeable, dramatic change.
To help ground us and get us through this topsy-turvy cycle, the program will conclude with a group exercise designed to assist all present to rediscover, reawaken and reconnect with their Authentic Self, the true identity hidden within each of us, and to integrate and sustain that Self through and beyond this sea of change in which we are now immersed. As always, Tom promises some secrets known only to a few will be revealed.
About Our Presenter:
Tom Coates is a Richmond-based lawyer who has represented numerous spiritually oriented and public interest groups throughout his career. He was a co-founder of Richmond’s Ekoji Buddhist Sangha in 1985, and has been a member and contributor of the Richmond IONS chapter since its formation in early 1996.
In his spare time he enjoys reading, creative writing, painting, woodworking, alpine skiing, biking, backpacking, sailing, time travel, metaphysics, and relaxing with his family at their ancient Outer Banks beach cottage or their Appalachian Mountains retreat.
He still reports his most significant unfulfilled ambition of this lifetime is to make love to an extraterrestrial female, preferably of Pleiadean or Sirian origin.