- TRANSCRIPTION OF AN AUDIO TAPE -

E. MICHAEL HOLDEN, M.D.
TO
H. LAWRENCE KING

In Which Dr. Holden Recounts His Spiritual and Primal Experiences

(Edited by Dr. Holden - 3/87)





For many years Dr. Holden was the medical director of the Primal Institute of Los Angeles. In 1983, H. Lawrence King wrote to Dr. Holden, informing him that he had heard that he was no longer associated with the Primal Institute and that he had had deep spiritual experiences. Larry invited him to attend the Summer convention of the International Primal Association.

Dr. Holden did not attend the IPA's convention in 1983, but he sent Larry an extraordinary tape recording which recounts his primal experiences as well as his born-again religious conversion. The recording was played a number of times at the IPA convention that summer where it was received with mixed reactions.

Since I had always been interested in all aspects of the religious conversion experience, I asked Larry for a copy of the tape recording which I transcribed. The transcription is almost ten thousand words long! It was printed in the Primal Feelings Newsletter after it was revised by Dr. Holden at a later date.

Apart from its spiritual/religious significance, Dr. Holden's message is an important document in the history of primal therapy since it concerns personal aspects of the lives of both Arthur Janov, Ph.D., psychologist, discoverer of primal therapy and E. Michael Holden, M.D., neurologist, who subsequently defined the physiological and neurological correlates of the therapy.

Dr. Holden told me that he finished his primal therapy in only three and one-half years. He said that when he went into primal therapy his core body temperature was 100 degrees and after therapy it is 95 degrees. His pulse rate went from between 90 and 100 to between 50 and 60. His blood pressure also lessened but with a smaller percentage decrease. He said that he presently has the EEG readings of a child.

When I last spoke with him ten years ago, he said he remains an enthusiastic born-again Christian and he continues to believe that primal therapy is a real and effective form of psychotherapy.

I revised these notes in December of 1998. At that time Dr. Holden's whereabouts were unknown.
-- John A. Speyrer - Webmeister - The Primal Psychotherapy Page


* * *

Hello Larry. This is Dr. Michael Holden, dictating you a tape, a tape for anyone who might be interested in these things on Aug 28, 1983. I have a unique opportunity to discuss for you the interface between therapy and related issues on the one hand and the issues of religion on the other, because between 1974 and 1980 I was deeply emersed in defining the physiological correlates of primal therapy in considerable detail. And I myself went through primal therapy between 1974 and 1977. As the story which I'm going to tell you unfolds, you will realize that primal therapy is a resource available to us, not different in kind from surgery or some medications, but that it in no way speaks to the ultimate reality. And fortunately starting in 1979, I've had numerous opportunities to know a great deal about the ultimate realities and I will speak to you on this tape about that.

It's 1983, I'm 42 years old, I was born in 1941. My birth was an unpleasant affair including a 20 to 25 second cardiac arrest. During this time I had a small stroke in my left brain stem and right sub-cortical brain, but as you might imagine, my birth record reads as one might expect--''normal birth.'' Somewhat earlier than that, in approximately the sixth month of gestation my mother and I nearly bled to death, an event I learned about in 1975, on Christmas Day when I had an extraordinary opportunity to have a detailed and completed intrauterine primal in which I experienced complete weightlessness, saw a sea of red in front of me, tasted bloody amniotic fluid, knew that I was dying and knew that my mother was dying, but that was only the feeling, I did not die, I was only starting the process (Transcriber's Note: Refer to Arthur Janov's Imprints pages 275-276 which appears to be this pre-birth primal, which Dr. Holden is describing). So I've had unusual primal experiences, but they are all in one set, in one context which is a sub-section of a larger reality, the nature of which I will unfold for you in the following story.

* * *

Let's start the story when I was four. I started to have a nightmare, every single morning at 5:00 to 5:02 A.M. which was the time I was born. This nightmare occurred almost every night. And in it, I am a five year old boy who is walking along a path in the woods, and a bony skeletal hand reaches out through the bushes and grabs my collar, hauls me roughly into the center of a clearing and I am placed up on a marble altar of sorts, and held down by seven women skeletons dressed in black.

My first assailant, who I can now see, is also a woman skeleton(The "woman skeletons'' - had long brown hair on their skulls). dressed in black and the content of the nightmare which is primary: she raises a sixteen inch black handled cooking knife above me, and plunges it into my chest, and I feel my ribs break and I feel my heart start to bleed. I go out like a candle and as far as I can tell, I am dying.

In the dream, there is part of the dream which includes an out of body experience, because I am simultaneously the little five or six year old boy on the one hand, but I am also twenty to twenty five feet away on the outside of this clearing, watching this little boy being stabbed to death, (which is also an very interesting phenomena). It indicates that sometime in my experience, I had that out-of-body experience which was registered as such in the dream.

At age 12, I had a particularly compelling version of this dream and instead of waking up from this nightmare as I usually did with a pulse rate of 40, some chest pains and near-paralysis, on this one occasion, when I was 12 years old, I woke up unable to breathe, unable to move, my head looped over to the right like a corpse, but I was unusually wide awake.

My pulse rate was exceedingly slow, not faster than 20 beats per minute. At that time, I went more than three minutes without breathing, and I was so full of death awareness that I was certain that I would die, but the Lord of Hosts was not ready to take me home yet, because after about three minutes without air I saw a light in front of my closet about fifteen feet away which looked like a flashlight.

The light got brighter and brighter, and brighter until the other side of my room was so brilliantly lit with blue-white light that I could not see the other side of the room.

And out of the light stepped a man, about six feet tall, with honey brown hair to his shoulders, with a mustache and a full beard. He was dressed in white from his shoulders to the floor. He had on sandals, he had a sash round his waist. He was the source of the light. And a wavefront of heat and light left his face and neck area, and started across the room toward me. At that point I had no idea who he was or what sort of phenomena.

It took about 7 or 8 seconds for this wavefront of light to come across the room and when it got to me, it seemed that I ``dissolved.'' My whole body disintegrated. It became like a mist or a vapor and terrifically strong power entered me.

It was like the life force itself and the thing which characterized it more than anything else is that I felt absolutely adored and loved and in an instant I knew that I would be perfectly alright. I gasped for air; the death awareness vanished; my pulse rate increased to about 50 or 60.

Suddenly I was able to move again and as I was struggling to get my air again, this man said to me: "I have something very important for you to do,'' and then vanished in an instant.

My childhood was so extraordinarily unpleasant, can you imagine that I forgot that event?. I totally forgot it, and so painful day to day that can you imagine I forgot the event? I totally forgot it. Jesus Christ, the King of the universe appeared to me, saved my life, told me he had something important for me to do, disappeared, and I forgot it! And time passed, and time passed and time passed.

During my internship, which was exceedingly difficult for me, since as you probably gathered, from my writings in the primal journal, I am a parasympath. I am organized into low pulse rate, low blood pressure, small pupils, central weakness, a bias towards sleepiness, and so on. I virtually never experience anxiety. I virtually never get angry. These are responses which were burned out of me early on, not psychologically, but physically, since part of the area of my stroke included the posterior hypothalamus, where the sympathetic mass reaction is organized.

And that was largely unavailable to me, and so during my internship, I used rather large amount of caffeine, and ritalin and dexedrine to function because we had an extremely difficult obligation in front of us, several interns had dropped out; but I had a magnificent obsession to become a doctor, so I was practical about it. I used whatever were necessary for me to accomplish my goal of becoming a physician.

During that time, when I was using uppers, being pharmacologically a parasympath, getting my pulse rate up to 80 or 90 most of the day, the recurrent nightmare of being stabbed to death by a woman skeleton dressed in black just about disappeared.

I almost never had it because I was too ``up'' to have it apparently, but then came two years of neurology residency and then two years on the Island of Guam with the U. S. Public Health service, during which time I was underworked and overpaid, and I started to get plenty of food, and plenty of rest, and not surprisingly after about 12 to 15 months of this, and after having read The Primal Scream, at this point my early feelings surfaced again with a vengeance, and the recurrent nightmare returned.

It seemed that just reading the book, The Primal Scream, opened me up terrifically, because I started to spontaneously primal on my own, and in February of 1974, I had a completed birth primal in my bed, coming out of a nightmare about a baby drowning and it was then that I went through a sequence, wide awake, my body was writhing in S turns in a fashion you only see in lizards, chameleons, snakes and fish.

I went through a sequence of from 20 to 25 seconds without a heartbeat. During that time my lungs filled up with blood plasma, because I was in acute heart failure and it was then, in that moment that I had a total vivid scene of the room in which I was born, and I knew that this was my birth sequence.

I also knew that was where my migraine came from and I had such catastrophic head pain as part of that experience that I knew that brain tissue was dying during it, and I was full of death awareness, and I was sure that I would die, but at the end of that 20 to 25 seconds an extraordinary thing happened.

There was a violent and powerful contraction of my entire chest and I brought up about a quart of fluid from my lungs and my heart ``snapped'' right back into normal sinus rhythm, and I was fine. I had no more migraine and I was back in the present. It was in February 1974. So unlike sympaths who have difficulty getting into their primal feelings, I just fell in hook, line and sinker. I just fell into first line feelings months and months before I was even at the Institute.

Well, at the end of my third year residency in 1974 I came out to L A and started as Medical Director and Director of Research at the Primal Institute and rather quickly integrated what I knew about neurology and neurophysiology with the physiology of the primal response and I must admit at the time, it was exceedingly interesting to me and I was really involved in it.

It was very, very easy for me to primal. I never had a primal that was incomplete; unlike the struggle and fail sympath. When I started into a feeling there was nothing to stop it. I would just go on, and on until the feeling was through. There were some primals that lasted 40 minutes long, some that were 2 hours long and some that were outrageously long, that required food breaks in the middle, in order to actually have the fuel to complete them, and those were five, six, six and a half hours long.

Nothing stopped me, because I did not have that blast of anxiety and tension which were recruited, when the pain got worse, to stop the feeling, so for this reason, primal therapy worked for me with a tremendous speed, including terrific suffering, deeper than most sympaths ever experience, because sympaths are, by definition, defended. And I got it over with in a rather short time.

Arthur Janov started primalling in 1967 and he's still not well. That was 16 years ago. And because the nature of his trauma; the cord wrapped around his neck, with an extremely high anxiety state as he fought to get born, coupled with the fact that the harder he struggled to get born the closer he came to dying, well he's a very defended guy at his deepest levels and its hard for him to feel first line feelings, and so his therapy isn't over yet, but mine was over in 36 months.

My formal therapy started in April of 1975. My informal therapy had started in February of 1974 and by September 1977 I reached a point where I did not need to primal at all. It was marvelous. I would go 8, 10, 12 weeks before I e ever needed to cry. And then it would be a quickie, you know, five minutes second line primal with a connection, in and out and over and then I'd go back to another several months. I was feeling fine.

Time passed, time passed, time passed. Until the middle of 1979, more than 18 months after I stopped needing to primal, one Saturday morning I woke up about 9 with a severe left hemi-cranial migraine. pulse rate of about 40, and had deep suffering and thought that it was my birth feeling and that I had to have a primal.

Well, I had spent 500 hours of agonized baby crying in my birth primals and they had gone on in an inexorable sequence, 18 months, virtually non-stop ending in March of 1976 after which I never again needed to have a birth primal, so this was rather curious that now three and one-half years later, up comes this apparent feeling and ``needing to have a birth primal again'' and so it sort of generated a ``here we go again'' attitude on me, on my part, but I knew that for me to feel a feeling I would have to get my pulse rate up to about 60.

I had six cups of coffee and several no-doz tablets and my pulse rate was still 40. Very unusual, I still couldn't get my pulse rate up and my headache wasn't getting any better, and I was sort of ``locked into'' this parasympathetic state of suffering with migraine. And I wanted to get it over with, so I took two and a half milligrams of ritalin to work up to the primal zone. Unlike the sympaths I never needed to ``go down'' to feel; I always needed to ``go up'' to feel. And I started in to what seemed like my birth primal sequence. But the Lord of hosts had another plan as to how this was to end.

I started crying like a baby and a few seconds later had a complete and total respiratory arrest. I was wide awake and alert; I was lying down on the floor of my closet. I could not breathe at all. And this went on and on and on and on and I had a thought, ``Hey maybe I'm going to be the first person in primal therapy to die in this therapy.'' And it went on and on and it went way beyond the time I can voluntarily hold my breath. I went to three to three and one-half minutes without air and all of a sudden I had a vision.

The vision was in color. It was a rectangle made of two smaller rectangles, like split-screen television, and it was present with my eyes open, or my eyes closed and I could see my closet around the edges of the vision, neurologically then, unique. Whatever it was, was inscribed on my brain. And the vision content was as follows: On the left, coming out of the interior of a filthy, dirty, Victorian house, was a male skeleton dressed in black from head to foot, with his finger pointed out coming to touch me. I recognized him right away. A guy from one of my nightmares, ``Mr. Death.'' In the original nightmare which had occurred two years earlier, three years earlier, something like that, Mr. Death had come to touch me on my nose, and had gotten within six or eight inches of me and I had looked at him right in the face which was a skull, and I had said ``It's not my time yet'' and he had given a sick evil grin as if to say ``I'll get you later,'' and so during the vision on the left, here he comes again.

On the right, against a iridescent royal blue background of extravagant beauty, was a blazing, shimmering self-luminescent, platinum colored Christian cross. And Michael Holden who never went to church, who never read the Bible,reached this conclusion in an instant,''Hey, you know what? I'm being offered a choice. I can choose between ugly death or life with Jesus Christ.''

The vision stayed and it stayed and it stayed and it stayed. And all this time I'm in respiratory arrest and I'm running out of air. When the vision started to swim like water, I knew what this meant, that was the beginning of brain death. And I said to myself,''This is it.'' And when I said the word "it,'' the vision was torn apart from the center as if by a blowtorch coming through a kleenex, with a mighty rushing noise like wind or thunder.

And I was face to face with a light, brighter than the sun, with fire along its edges and it didn't hurt my eyes at all and it was in the event that followed that I had sudden and total recall of the event which had occurred at age 12 to me because heat and light and life and strength and joy and love and P-O-W-E-R came into my body once again, just like it had 26 years earlier, and I ``dissolved.'' I became as a mist, I lost my weight, I lost my form, I lost my shape, I didn't know where my fingers and toes were and I had this compelling, total sense of being adored and the death awareness vanished in an instant and I knew.

I knew that God, Almighty had interceded to save my life. That's quite an extraordinary event. Those two events, the one at age 12 and the one at age 38, I think would suffice to make anyone a born-again Christian.

But the Lord didn't stop there. Three and a half weeks, later at 3:30 in the morning I was awaken from a sound sleep, by the compelling sense that there was someone in the room with me, and I sat right up in bed and looked .I didn't see anyone . I was dark adapted. I could see my whole bedroom.

My wife slept soundly at my right side. I was phenomenally alert. I was not scared at all, but I was very alert and I didn't see anyone in that room. But from the roof tree of my house, which is 18 feet above the floor, I heard a loud, kind, authoritative man's voice speak to me and say this: "I am the truth and the truth will set you free." "I am the truth and the truth will set you free." And do you know what? I knew who was talking to me. The Bible says he rose from the dead. Jesus Christ was talking to me, Praise God, what a marvelous thing. I didn't earn it and I didn't deserve it. I didn't go looking for it, but the King of the universe reached down to save me. Really, quite extraordinary.

Well thereafter, one thing led to another, I started praying a great deal started reading the Bible. I had such a hunger to read the Bible. I was like a man, who was dying of thirst for an entire lifetime. I couldn't get enough of the Bible I was reading 80, 90, 100 pages of the Bible a day. I was devouring scripture, like a person whose life depended upon it.

Shortly thereafter, I asked Jesus Christ to come into my heart to be my Savior. I confessed that I was a sinner, that there was nothing I could do to save myself. I thanked God for sending his Son to die for me. Realizing that I of all people, was on death row. The Bible says, ``All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and the wages of sin is death,'' which means eternal separation from god, ``but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ,'' so you and I are like people who are on death row. We were just waiting for execution, and in the last minute in the fullness of time, Jesus Christ steps into the cell and says, to Michael Holden and to Larry King and to any one else who will receive him, ``Hey,-- you go free; I am going to take the rap for you.''

This is what the word atonement means. Jesus Christ, the son of God, a spiritual individual, he who knew no sin, became sin for us so that we might obtain the righteousness of God. So in your letter to me of 8-13-83 you talk of spirit, you talk about transcendental, you talk about mystical, but I tell you it ain't none of those, it's Jesus Christ. Supernatural power, yes, you bet, plenty of it.

God almighty, there really is a God almighty, sent his son in the fullness of time that you and I and anyone else who might receive him might go free and do you know I have this fantasy that people who sought primal therapy, especially need Jesus Christ, because they are the wounded, they're the beaten, they're the downtrodden, they're the battered, they're the bruised, they're the broken people, but what was it Jesus Christ said: ``This is my body which is broken for you.''

The gospel of John records this tragic and powerful fact. ``He came to His own people'', he was a Jew remember, ``and His own people did not receive him, but to those who did receive Him, to those he gave the right to become the children of God, even to those who believe in His Name.''And God commended his love to us, it is written, that while we were still sinners, Jesus Christ died for us. This is an extraordinary thing I'm telling you.

You've got to know, from all the articles I wrote, from the book I co-authored with Arthur Janov (Transcriber's Note: Primal Man: The New Consciousness), how deeply involved I was with primal therapy, how interested I was in primal therapy, but I'll tell you the truth, primal therapy can make your body feel a little better, but it cannot save your soul!

There were several remarkable interfaces between primal therapy and the Lord in the months that followed my conversion. As I mentioned in my letter to you: On October 29, 1979, on a beautiful fall day in Virginia Beach, at a Christian Broadcasting Network seminar, aided and assisted by a charismatic preacher named Harold Bradesen, a marvelous man, I asked Jesus Christ to baptize me in the fullness of the Holy Spirit like the disciples were baptized at Pentecost. It was a beautiful Fall day, crisp, clear and cloudless.

The sun at noon was brilliantly bright above my left shoulder. At the end of the prayer when I said ``Thank you Jesus, I accept'', there appeared a light in Heaven to my right, above my right shoulder which was so bright it made the sun look like the moon. And it seemed a laser about a foot and a half across, came out of heaven and it came into my body, and I was filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God.

I was wide awake and alert. This was no dream. And at the moment it happened (this is not the only time this has happened to me), I spoke in tongues, I spoke a language I never learned, and it was beautiful and I recognized it because I have heard other people speak in tongues, Aramaic.

It was a language which Jesus himself spoke. I spoke in tongues fluently then. And at the moment of infilling of this tremendous rush of heat and life and joy and strength and love and power, I saw a filthy disgusting black, ugly thing come out of my feet. And I felt it come out of my body like someone was pulling off a pair of socks from me.

And Harold Bradesen who was right next to me, was given at that moment a gift of the holy spirit which is called discernment of spirits and he saw it too, and said, ``Michael what happened to you is described in the Book of Romans 8:2. Go read it.'' I said, ``OK, I will.'' It says this: ``For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.'' And suddenly, in a flash with a lifetime of insights I knew that for 38 years I had the spirit of death in me.

Suddenly it made sense, why I told psychotherapists and psychoanalysts without number in my childhood, ``You don't understand, I already know death. Death is a companion to me. I know death.'' It didn't compute. There is nothing in Freud, that makes sense out of that. And they would say things like, ``Yea, sure kid, yea sure, yea, go play with your toys, and don't bother me any more.''

But suddenly I knew. That's why for 38 years I had been pre-occupied with death. Suddenly that nightmare made perfect sense. Satan had been trying to get me, but good, but Jesus Christ had other plans. And since he has all the power, He won. He got me. He paid for me with his own blood.

So here I am, Michael Holden, former director of the Primal Institute, who almost single handedly, defined the physiology of the primal response, who probably knows more about the biology and the physiology of primal therapy than any man living, understanding and realizing that it all counts for nothing and is as the apostle Paul says, to be counted as dung because of the glory of knowing Jesus Christ!

Now, wonder upon wonder, glory upon glory, I've had some extravagant and marvelous things happen to me over the past year. One of the things I learned about a year and a half ago is that Father God considers it extremely important that when we pray, we pray to the Father in the name of Jesus, just like Jesus told us to do in the Gospel of John.

The prayers make no sense at all and don't reach the throne room unless you've asked Jesus Christ to be your savior and confess to Him that you are a sinner, and that you need Him to save you. At that point you become born again. I learned, about 18 months ago, that Father God, considers it very important that when we pray, after we pray, we wait. Well how long can we wait, 30 minutes? 60 minutes? 90 minutes? Jesus said to Peter, outside the Garden of Gethsemene, when Peter, his trusted friend, fell asleep. (The King of the universe was sweating blood, contemplating the upcoming crucifixion and his trusted friend, Peter, fell asleep.) He said to him, ``What!, could you not wait for me one hour?''

Well, in June of 1982, on a Friday night, I decided to apply the principle. I was going to wait upon the Lord. Jeremiah, had prophesied in the first person, in the words of God, ``If you will seek Me with your whole heart, you will find Me.'' That's a promise from God. God does not lie. So I was applying the principle, believing His word, I was seeking God with my whole heart.

I stopped praying at about midnight, and I waited and I waited, and I waited and I waited and I waited. I was sitting cross-legged, in front of my Bible in my den, in the middle of the night in Malibu, a beautiful night, quiet, just waiting, wide awake, not asleep. At about 1:30 in the morning the following sequence occurred.

I saw a blast of blue-white light behind my eyes, suddenly it went from my eyes to my whole body and my whole body filled up with blue-white light, brighter than a flashbulb and once again just as I had described to you before on this tape, I ``dissolved,'' I became a mist, I became a vapor, I lost my shape, my form, my weight, my gravity. I didn't know where my hands and feet were. I had a slight migraine on the left side of my head. It was gone. I had a little back-ache, because I had been sitting cross-legged for an hour and a half. It was gone.

And suddenly, I had this strong feeling that I was being moved suddenly, somewhere. Sure enough, in front of my closed eyes two or three seconds later, I beheld a huge, snow-white rectangle, three dimensional, ten feet wide, ten feet deep and maybe twenty feet high. And as it clarified for me, I realized that I was looking at a throne. And I could see through it. The throne was made of light, and my eyes drifted up and praise God! I saw He who sat upon the throne, and for over a minute I looked right into the face of Jesus Christ, the King, the Savior. I've been there. I saw it with my own eyes, It's true. He lives.

Hear people, hear the words of Michael Holden, a witness of the Lord. I was there. He's alive, and he's coming back in ``about ten years.''(My present understanding is that Christ will return sometime around 1996. (Note made March, 1987)) So the time is short. The time to ask Him in your life is immediately. Praise God, what an experience!

When I first saw him, I recognized him, because his facial features are identical to the facial features on the Shroud of Turin. Of course I then believe that the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ and no one could convince me otherwise, because I've seen him. I know what he looks like. I was there. He by the way, appears to be made of light, which by the way, is what the Bible says.''A God of Light, in whom there is no darkness at all.'' Praise God, that is not the only time I've been to the throne room. I didn't earn it. I don't deserve it.

About three years ago when I was still at the Primal Institute, one afternoon I had a sudden onset of sleepiness and I took a short nap in the staff room, and I had a dream and Jesus Christ appeared to me in the dream and he stood about four feet away and said to me, ``You're a witness.'' And that is exactly what I'm doing right now, to Larry King, Larry King's friends, and anyone who ever hears this tape know for certainty that the Son of God came to earth, put on flesh like you and I wear, and in flesh, He who knew no sin, became sin for us so that we might go free, that we might obtain the righteousness of God. He paid the price.

It ain't Buddha folks, it ain't Khrisna, it ain't Mormon, it ain't Jim Smith, it ain't Ragjnessh Bhaghwan, up in Oregon. It ain't Rev. Moon, it ain't Mohammed. Jesus Christ is the way. He said, ``I am the way, the truth and the light and no one comes to the Father but through me.'' Amen. It's true. No man on earth ever said these words, except Jesus Christ. ``I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whosoever believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

And if a man lives, and believes in me, he will never die.'' Incredible, incredible words and do you know what? They're true. While I was there. While I was in the throne room, gazing at the face of my Redeemer, the face of perfection, the face of perfect honesty, a face without guile, a face full of love. I felt absolutely adored and loved and taken care of. I felt completely forgiven. And I was very aware of the ways in which I fall short of the mark. And suddenly I saw with my eyes, and suddenly I understood how dirty and contaminated and polluted we are. The Psalmist King David, had mused philosophically and questioningly in one of his psalms: ``Oh Lord, what is man, that thou are mindful of him?.'' And do you know what, I wonder about the same thing. God, why did you care? I mean you're so perfect and we're so wretched. Why did you care?

Well, the answer is to be found in John 3:16. A scripture many people have heard, but it's absolutely true. ``God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, and that whosoever believes in Him, should not perish, but should have eternal life.'' And I've told you before, and I'll tell you again. He commended his love towards us and while we were still sinners, Jesus Christ died for us. It's an extraordinary event in human history. God in human form, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, came to earth, and paid the price, so that we could go free.

Well, therefore, it is my earnest hope that you will not dabble in spiritism, that you will not dabble in cults, that you will not expect more from primal therapy than what it can actually give you, that you will not take reincarnation seriously, but that you will turn your whole focus and attention to He who is the truth, because Jesus Christ is the truth.

One point I want to make is that there is absolutely nothing which is vague or nonspecific about what I'm telling you. God is not a force. The Holy Spirit is not simply power. In heavenly math, there is a mystery that we cannot comprehend, but I can speak about for you and that is the mystery of the Trinity. Each one of the members of the triune Godhead have personality. They all share the same spirit. And one day when I was earnestly considering the nature of the Trinity, God spoke to me plain as day and he said: ``We have one purpose''

That seemed to answer all of my questions for the time being. But suffice it to say, there is God the Father, there is God the Son, Jesus Christ, and there is God the Holy Spirit. And God has not only entered human history as a man and paid the price that we might go free, but He left us His book to tell us quite a lot about Himself. His book, the Holy Bible, I earnestly recommend that you dig, that you seek, that you find the truth. The place to start as far as I'm concerned is with the Gospel of John. It's a synopsis of the three year ministry of Jesus Christ. That's where you find out who Jesus Christ is, what he did for you.

What does the phrase ``born again'' mean? Born again means that the spirit of the living God comes into you and that you are born of the spirit. In John:3 is recorded a conversation between Jesus and a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemous. Nicodemous came to him by night and said: ``Master you must be from God for no one could do the things you do unless he comes from God.'' Jesus used the opportunity to change the subject and He said: ``I tell you truly, unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemous, a reasonable man, well educated said: ``How can a man, fully grown, enter again into his mother's womb a second time, and be born a second time?'' Jesus said, ``Unless a man is born of woman and of the spirit he cannot see the kingdom of God, for that which is born of flesh, is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. I tell you truly, you must be born again. Do not marvel at what I have said, you must be born again.''

So a person who might read that might say Ok, Doc, that's fine, how do I get born again? Well, Romans 10:9 says ``if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead you will be saved.'' And I've enclosed in this letter a tract which has in it the Sinner's Prayer.

And if you or any of your friends are certain that you would like to become born again people and know of a certainty that if you died tomorrow you'd go to paradise to be with Christ, you can say that prayer out loud with your mouth and if it comes from your heart, it'll happen and you'll become born again, and you'll become an adopted son or an adopted daughter of God and you'll enter the family of God and you'll become a regenerate person, a human being made whole.

You see, the truth is we're not just monkeys just wandering around in bodies doing the best we can. We're created beings, we have a spirit inside of us and by some mystery in ages past that we dimly understand the entire human race became separated from God through sin. But we do know, however, that the soul will live forever. In the book of Genesis, you can read the words that God breathed on Adam and he became a living soul. That means that he will live, forever and ever and ever.

Now the question is, after your sojourn in the flesh, in your earth suit for your three score and ten, where is that eternal soul going to spend eternity? Well, my understanding of the possible options are as follows: If you're not born again, you spend eternity in the lake of fire. That is called the second death. The first death is the separation of your spirit from your body. The second is the separation of your spirit from God. That's a bad, bad option. Another option is that you can get born again, and become an overcomer. You want to know what an overcomer is? Read the first three chapters of the book of Revelation and everywhere Jesus says ``To he who overcomes'' you highlight it. An overcomer is one who receives the very best of what God has to offer, who lives forever in the holy city, new Jerusalem, on the new earth surrounded by the new Heaven.

Now if you happen to be a born again person but you're not an overcomer then you'll live in the nations outside of the holy city. Many Christians don't know that but if you read Revelations:20 and 21 and 22 and highlight the word `nations' wherever you find it, you'll see. There are some Christians in the holy city but most are outside the holy city in the nations. I for one, want to spend eternity in the holy city with Jesus Christ and Father God.

How do you become an overcomer, Doc? Well, in 1:John you can read, you can overcome the lust of the eyes, that's the love of things, the lust of the flesh, that's all the things which make the body feel good, the pride of life which is wanting to live in the flesh more than to die sacrificially for Jesus Christ, if it's required of you. And fourth, in the name of Jesus Christ, you overcome the evil one.

On an occasion, a few month's ago, during prayer, I saw him. He's not a fellow with horns. He's not red. He doesn't have a tail. He looks like a man. He's got a very dark, dark face. There's no light in him at all. He's got a close cut beard, he kind out looks like a Greek. Just a well trimmed, short mustache. In this vision of the king of evil which I had one night during prayer, he spat at me, and I had such a compelling sense of his spitting at me that I turned my head, thinking that I was going to get hit with his spit, but the moment that the spit left his lips, the Holy Spirit spoke to me in the spirit, in my mind, like a well formed thought, and he said ``We are not ignorant of his devices,'' which is scripture, that Paul said in one of his letters.

And the spit bounced off of a barrier which was about four feet outside of my body like an invisible shield. Well, it is an invisible shield. It's the blood of Christ which surrounds me wherever I go. And in the name of Jesus Christ I am more than a conqueror through him who loves me. Now I've seen Satan, he's real. There is a devil and he's out to destroy the world, and you don't have to read the newspapers too closely to see how well he's succeeding.

Getting back to being an overcomer. You overcome the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life and in name of Jesus you overcome the evil one. In the book of Revelation it speaks of the overcomer and says: ``They overcame by the blood of the lamb, and the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even unto death.''

Now, one thing I need to briefly run by you, because God has not only anointed me to speak of the fact that this is still the acceptable year of the Lord, but he has anointed me to tell you of the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn. Your reference to that is Isaias:61 and the beginning of the Gospel of Mark.

It is implied throughout scripture in the New Testament, that Jesus Christ is coming back again. And a reading of the Book of Revelation indicates that prior to his coming there is going to be a time of trouble such as never was, since there was a nation. That's the way Daniel put it. And Jesus himself said in Matthew:24, ``There will be a time of trouble such as never was since the foundation of the earth, and unless those days had been shortened, all flesh would perish, but for the sake of the elect, the special people of God, those days will be shortened. So where are we on God's timetable? Where are we on God's clock?

Dear people, know for certainty that you and I are living in the last generation of man. The Lord has given me dreams, and prophesies and words of knowledge, and visions and has shown me what's coming.

Nuclear war is coming to America. There will be troops in our land. There will be tidal waves. There will be famine. There will be earthquakes.

And my question for anyone is this. Who's ready for that? Well, I think the only answer to that is, those people who know that they know that they know that they know, that they belong to God. Now God has promised throughout the Old and New Testament to take care of His people in the time of trouble.

The God who delivered Shadrach, Mishach and Abdenago from the fire is fully prepared, fully able and utterly committed to deliver his people from the fire this time. Now know for a certainty that the message of the Gospel is not a message of fear.

God does not want people to come to Him through fear,(but I suspect a lot of people will come to Him through fear), but that was not intention. God loves you, He adores you. He loves you with an everlasting love that never fails. He loves you so much that he sent His own son to die for you. But, God is holy, God is righteous.

What I saw of Jesus Christ on his throne, a God of light, with no darkness at all, I reflected on the words of Job. Job had said when he saw God in the whirlwind: ``I had heard about you by the hearing of my ears, but now my eyes see you in the seeing of my eyes and, therefore (interesting word!), therefore I abhor myself, and I repent in dust and ashes.'' You see most human beings have no concept of what the word ``holy'' means.

But, dear people, I was there with my own eyes, and I gazed upon the Holy One of Israel. I saw the king Jesus Christ, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and my testimony to you as God is my witness is that He is perfect. And because God is perfect all sin, all wrong, all injustice, all robbery, all false witness, all cruelty, all corruption, must of necessity be paid back. And it is God's intention to pay it back, altogether, in a very short time.

Have you heard the parable of the wheat and weeds? A man came to his master and said, ``Master, didn't you plant good seed?'' There's weeds and wheat coming up in the fields. And the master said. ``An enemy has done this. He's planted weeds in with my wheat.'' And the servant said, ``Master do you want me to go pull out the weeds?'' And the master said, ``Let them both grow together. At the time of the harvest, I'll gather the weeds and burn them, and I'll gather the wheat into my barn.'' And in Romans:12 we read ``Vengeance is mine said the Lord of Hosts.'' And that is said that we might heed his instruction to us, ``Do not repay evil for evil, but overcome evil with good,'' (because there is a day of wrath of the Lord.) And dear people, it is not very far away. Long before you and I will die a natural death in the flesh as old men and as old women, Jesus Christ is coming back again, and before he does, we're going to see the day of the Lord.

Now if you would like to have a broad brush of God's timetable, I'll share it with you, that you might grow in the fear of the Lord. Proverbs 9:10 says that, ``The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.'' Ecclesiastes ends his chapter by saying, ``Let us state the conclusion of the whole matter, fear God and keep his commandants, for this is the whole duty of man, for God will bring in judgment every secret thing, whether it be for good or for evil.''

The Lord told a woman named Pat Brooks, a Christian author, who wrote a book called Christian, Wake Up that in 1980 with the eruption of Mt. St Helens, the time of sorrows, the time of birth pangs began, so it gives us a good indication of where we are in God's timetable. What is coming next is nation warring against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And if this was not extraordinary enough, there's a very godly lady from Montgomery, Alabama, who was told by the Lord one night to make a vertical bar chart and label it 1983 to 1990, and call it countdown to the Great Tribulation.

The Great Tribulation is described in Matthew:24, Luke:21, Mark:13, as a time of troubles such as never was since there was a nation. It's going to start about in 1992. That's when the age of Anti-Christ begins. Now I was given to know in a dream and a word of knowledge which followed it on 5-2-82 that the Anti-Christ, the coming world dictator is already alive.(He was born in February, 1960.) That he is a man and that he has made his commitment already to Satan. He is just waiting to be revealed. Folks it's going to be in about nine years. Are you ready? He is given power to wage war with the saints and to overcome them, for forty-two months.

A very important thing I need to tell you, is that the universal product code which you see inscribed on everything you buy in the stores, the computer bar code, those stripes that are on everything. Look very carefully at them. On the left, on the dead center, and on the right are two lines. And if you look at the right kind of code which happens to have the number 6 to the right of center, you'll see that those two lines are identical to the form of a (right sided) number 6. In other words, built into the universal product code, used in every country of the world is the number 6 6 6.

Most people don't know the details of what that means. They know it is Satan's number. But let's make is more specific. Turn to Revelation:13 where you can read these words, speaking of the coming world dictator, the anti-Christ, John wrote ``He causes all, small and great, rich and poor, free and bond to receive a mark on their right hand or in their forehead, that no man could buy or sell unless he had the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is the mind which has wisdom, let he who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man and his number is 666.'' So, what is now being used for a thing-control soon, about nine years from now, will be used for people-control.

But dear people, I urge you by the mercies of God, to never, ever, ever, ever take that mark. Because, Revelations:14 makes it abundantly clear with the message of the third angel, that if any man or woman takes that mark into the skin of their right hand or forehead that they will spend eternity in the lake of fire, ``guaranteed damnation,'' and conversely if any man will die; refusing to take that mark, they save their soul. Boy, that's a tough way to get into the kingdom but that's one way to do it.

If in principle you will choose God's way instead of Satan's way, God will bring you into the kingdom, His kingdom, but it doesn't have to be so rough. It could be much better than that. Psalm:91 records this. Starting out with these beautiful poetic words, ``He who dwells in the secret place of the most high, shall abide in the shadow of the almighty.'' And then further down, it records, ``A thousand shall fall at your left hand, ten thousand at your right side, but it will not come nigh unto you.

Only with your eyes will you look and behold the reward of the wicked, for he shall give his angels charge over you to keep you in all your ways. They will bear you up in their arms, less you dash your foot against a stone.'' I think there is a way for Christians to get through the great tribulation, the protection of the most high. If you trust in God, he will deliver you. But you can't give glory to God, you can't work for him, you can't witness for him, unless you're born again. Jesus Christ is the way.

What an extraordinary thing! An utter heathen, who knew not God, was spoken to by Jesus Christ at age 12, forgot about it, and came to the Lord, utterly at age 38. And now at age 42, Michael Holden is a servant of the Lord. I'm telling you the truth, people, hear my words, get it together while there's still time. Seek the Lord your God, while yet he still may be found, for it is still the acceptable year of the Lord. It is still possible for you to get into the kingdom, but sometimes around 1996 when Jesus Christ comes back for the Church, and the Rapture occurs, and the dead in Christ and the alive in Christ rise to meet him in the air.

After that moment, the door is shut, and there is no more salvation, and there is no more getting in the kingdom, and everyone else roasts. Grim, grim prospect. You don't have to be lost. God has provided a way for you. For nearly two thousand years, with loving kindness and patience he has held out his arms to you. And he says, won't you accept the free gift I send you? Won't you accept the truth? Do you remember what Moses said to the Israelites on behalf of God? He said, ``This day, in your hearing, I hold before you life and death, now therefore, choose life.'' Now that's my same message to you guys. Choose life. Jesus Christ is the way. It's not too late. There's still time.

Primal therapy is interesting. Primal therapy is a resource for man. Primal therapy is a way to lower your vital signs. Primal therapy is a way to get Pain out of your body, but primal therapy cannot save your soul.

Now you might be interested to know that I had levels of pain, and let's call it primal Pain cause that's what it was, so deep that primal therapy couldn't touch it. When I got to a certain depth of pain, my body knew that if I went after those Pains, I'd die and because I'm a parasympath, it almost happened one night, but, as you've gathered it wasn't my time yet. I forget the exact time, I think it was in 1980.

I had had surgery on my forehead, to take off some basal cell carcinomas because of exposure to the sun, and six weeks later I started to cry real hard, because of something I'd seen on television. And in my crying I cried out to God, for Him to forgive me and then an extraordinary thing happened.

Á la the primal mode, to experience the way it was, instead of the way it came through all that defense and repression, I started to re-experience the incision on my forehead, over again, without anesthetic. Well folks you know that scalpel went down from the surface of my skin down to the bone and that was an unbearable stimulus.

For a guy who had nearly died with migraine and stroke, and near heart attack at birth, that was just too much. And as I felt the scalpel coming across my forehead from left to right, in my mind's eye I entered a black trumpet, and I started to sink down, down, down, down, and I knew that if I got to the bottom the trumpet I would certainly have died because I had accelerating death awareness as I was going. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, a scream that would break glass, and about seven-eights of the way down, I heard a man's voice, right between my ears, it was not a thought, it was a voice. The voice said, ``God is with you,'' and in an instant I was cold sober and I was sitting on the edge of my sofa and I didn't need to cry anymore, because God knew that if I'd finished that feeling, I'd have died and it was not my time yet. So interesting. Interesting.

I've been at the interface of primal therapy healing where it ends, where the body can't go any further, because it will die if it does and where God's healing begins. It's amazing. God is able to do in the twinkling of an eye what years of primalling cannot accomplish.

So do you know what? Primal therapy is not the cure for neurosis. It helps. But it is not the cure for neurosis. God is the cure for neurosis, because God can take all pain out of you. God has graciously done that for me. I consider myself absolutely pain free. I've asked the Lord to come into the cellar of my life and clean me out. And folks, I'm clean. No more primal Pain, no more reservoir, no more nightmares, no more death awareness, no more primal Pain nightmares, no sick behaviors. Praise God. It's a lot better than primal therapy to be a Christian.

It would be a great service to the Lord of Hosts, a marvelous bit of evangelism if you have the guts to play this tape over a PA system at the IPA, that they might hear the words of Michael Holden, one of the original thinkers and profound workers in the research of primal therapy telling you that primal therapy doesn't hold a candle to the truth, that Jesus Christ is the truth.

I don't know if you have the inclination to do that, but I surely hope so. Great would be your reward in Heaven if you could get this message out to hundreds or even thousands of people who are really interested in primal therapy, because they'll hear it straight like it really is. Primal therapy is not the cure for neurosis. What I'm proposing is holy primal therapy. It's a whole lot better.

Well, God bless you all. I really hope that each of you comes to know the truth, comes to know the goodness, the love, the marvelous peace of knowing the King. The Lord of Hosts is His name, Jesus is His name. In the name of Jesus Christ, I hold before you life and death. Choose life. May God richly bless you all.

End of tape.



Neurologist E. Michael Holden died in early April, 2002. He was 61.


For other articles on this subject, see on this website, The Psychology of Mysticism