Litigation as Spiritual Practice

George J. Felos

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ISBN: 1-57733-104-4, 344 pp., 6x9, hardcover, $24.95
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A letter from the publisher to everyone who is sending email to "George Felos" or "Michael Schiavo"

Such a deep, dark, silent blue. I stared as far into her eyes as I could, hoping to sense some glimmer of understanding, some hint of awareness. The deeper I dove, the darker became the blue, until the blue became the black of some bottomless lake. "Mrs. Browning, do you want to die ... do you want to die?" I nearly shouted as I continued to peer into her pools of strikingly beautiful but incognizant blue. It felt so eerie. Her eyes were wide open and crystal clear, but instead of the warmth of lucidity, they burned with the ice of expressionlessness.

With this meeting, Attorney George Felos became the legal advocate of Estelle Browning's right-to-die and in the process plumbed the depths of death and dying and spearheaded a social revolution to enable death with dignity in the state of Florida. Felos uses this case and Fellouzis vs. United States of America - a decade-long tax battle sending him to Hong Kong's back alleys in search of antique jades and ivories - as framework to interweave the story of his law practice and spiritual unfoldment.

Litigation as Spiritual Practice describes the excitement and drama of the courtroom, and the ecstasy and anguish of spiritual evolution in a combative environment.

If the seemingly barren and war-strewn field of litigation can be the playground where spirit dances, it can revel anywhere.

LEGAL
  • Fee Negotiations
  • Case Research & Preparation
  • Shaping Public Opinion
  • Trial Strategies
  • Supreme Court Practice
SPIRITUAL
  • Experiencing Grace
  • The Nature of Energy
  • Psychic Communication
  • Practicing Non-attachment
  • Examining Universal Mind

Endorsements

"Here is a masterful blend of spiritual awareness and legal expertise. I am deeply impressed by George J. Felos' dedication to serving and bringing healing and well-being through the legal profession. I wish every lawyer would read this inspiring book, as well as those seeking to empower themselves in their personal lives. This is a breakthrough!" Alan Cohen, author of Wisdom of the Heart

"This book could be called 'God in the Courtroom.' It is a wonderful and amazing step on the path that our legal system must take if it is to truly heal and resolve the differences that arise between us. This book is a miracle. I am going to call George Felos God's Lawyer from now on." Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God

"Yoga philosophy draws heavily on the analogy of life as a battlefield between the ego and who we are beyond the ego. Telling the story of his real-life battles in the courtroom and reflecting on his inner journey into the practice of the perennial philosophies of yoga and meditation, George Felos offers a fascinating doorway into the inner and outer struggle of the Self." Sudhir Jonathan Foust, President, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health

"At the heart of every conflict, no matter how severe, is a place of peace and stillness which, when accessed, provides true power and genuine healing. In this clearly written and heartfelt book, George J. Felos shows that when this stillness is intentionally accessed in the harsh practice of litigation, miracles happen. Books about spirituality are countless, but this one - fusing the spiritual with the rationality of a skilled attorney's mind - is extraordinary." Colin C. Tipping, author of Radical Forgiveness

"Simply a unique, brilliant accomplishment. Felos has woven into a most gripping, fascinating personal account, that had me as spellbound as the best novel, a splendid summary of the best of contemporary spiritual understanding and practice, while giving a fascinating insight into contemporary legal practice. I can't recommend it highly enough." Joseph Chilton Pearce, Author of Crack in the Cosmic Egg and Magical Child

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

1. The Big Case Arrives
2. The Weekend from Hell
3. Choosing the Right Road - Taking the Case
4. Bargaining for the Contingency Fee
5. My Death and Resurrection
6. Re-Entering the World Through the "Right-to-Die"
7. A Client Fights for Death
8. "Soul-Speak"
9. Starting Discovery - The Big Case Progresses
10. Awakening in Hong Kong
11. The First Major Assault - Being Falsely Accused
12. City of Colors
13. Back in the Trenches
14. The Joy of Creative Discovery
15. The Bowels of Litigation
16. Taking the High Road
17. The Crushing Difference of a Day - Is All Lost?
18. Rescued on Dream Wings
19. Reversing the Government's Torpedo
20. Bringing to Court a Show-Worthy Production
21. Crusading for the Right-to-Die
22. Collective Consciousness and the Fear of Death
23. Battling on All Fronts
24. My Supreme Court Appearance
25. Successful Cryonics - The Big Case Resuscitates
26. Becoming an Empty Vessel
27. My Kingdom for a Nap
28. Barbecuing the Government's Expert
29. The Denouement
30. Off into the Sunset

Appendix A
Appendix B
Index

Excerpt

Cases arrive in different ways. This one entered on a forklift. Six cardboard file cartons, each over three feet long, now occupied my ten-by-twelve foot screened-in porch. On the Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend 1992, I turned out of bed and in my underwear stumbled towards the lanai. I opened the sliding glass door and stared at the twenty-or-so linear feet of paper that would probably consume just about every minute of the three-day holiday weekend. My stupor was eventually interrupted by a self-pity that cried that every other inhabitant of Tampa Bay would be spending the next three days boating, beaching, barbecuing, or just goofing off. With all this simply too much to bear in a fully vertical position, I plopped into a chair luckily placed nearby.

I sat immobile for a few moments until a sailboat caught my eye as it glided through the channel behind my house and into the open bay. One or two small white sails already glistened in the distance. The blue sky and unimpeded sunshine made this a perfect day for everyone else to stretch into. I noticed a neighbor bringing some gear down to his dock in anticipation of a day on the boat. A pair of gray pelicans flew in formation over the channel, and a snow-white egret strutted the back lawn, perhaps stalking breakfast. As it hunted, its head remained rock-steady while its long neck undulated as it moved. An egret's concentration is good enough to snag a lizard now and then, always exciting to see - apart from the lizard's point of view.

Even though it wasn't mine, I loved that house - 1960s concrete block, small, two bedroom, with original appliances of medium sky-blue. Thank God it was built before Florida slipped into the dark ages of avocado and gold. The house obviously wasn't much, apart from its prime location on a small peninsula in St. Joseph Sound. Looking west I enjoyed a gorgeous view of the open Sound and the thin green line on the horizon that was Caladesi Island. This natural barrier island and state park lies north of its concretized counterpart, Clearwater Beach. My backyard ended with a sea wall at Curlew Creek, a natural waterway that flowed into the Sound. The Creek's two hundred-foot breadth cushioned me from the backyards of the homes to the south. From my living room window looking northwest past the cul-de-sac and vacant lot beyond, the water eventually passed under the Dunedin Causeway drawbridge out into the Gulf of Mexico.

I felt soothed and protected by the surrounding water. That's what drew me to the house. I had moved in eighteen months before, in March 1991, leaving my marital home, my wife, and my son about two miles to the north. A month and a half before separating, I was shown the house by a realtor who told me the owners insisted on a yearly lease. Only wanting a month-to-month tenancy, I asked the realtor to convey my transient-sounding offer. She stressed there was no way this would be accepted.

While standing in the house with the realtor, I knew I would live there, as improbable as the circumstances made it seem. Believing that something will happen is not foresight. Rather, it is the actual experience in the present of something that will occur in the future. The paradox with this form of intuition is that the future is no longer the future because it becomes for that moment the present. When I entered that house for the first time, I knew I would live there because, through foresight, I realized I was already living there.

Most times this "knowing" for me is sensed as a feeling. Sometimes I hear it, and sometimes I see it. This is not to say that I go around every day intuiting tomorrow's events. I'm stuck in my head a good portion of the time, like most of us in our mentally over-developed culture. This means that most of our energy is tied up intellectually, engaged in thought and reacting to thought. And much of the time our reactive thought process drives our emotions. How we feel depends upon whether we happen to be attracted to, averse to or indifferent to what we are thinking.

Intuition does not lie in the rational mind. Sometimes it is "seen" through other centers of the body, such as the heart or solar plexus. Everybody has had that "gut feeling." For me, the experience of intuition through sight is like seeing two different realities at the same time. To use a Star Trek analogy, it's dimensionally multi-phasic. (I wondered whether I could write this book without referring to Star Trek, and didn't get past page three!)

The crew of the Enterprise, beset in one episode by all types of strange maladies, discovered that they were infected by invisible parasitic creatures attached to their bodies. The creatures were unseeable because they existed in another phasic dimension. They occupied the same space and time, but at a different vibrational level. With the benefit of a hand-held "multi-phasic viewing device" constructed by our heroes, they could press a button and observe the creatures on their skin. Release the button and they were gone. Intuitive seeing is somewhat like that for me. A transparent image exists and is there, and then it's not. While extremely subtle, it is also undeniably real.

Blue Dolphin Publishing, 2002


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