Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Aug 11/99) - Michael McGinnis was 21 years old when he started on the path of spiritual awakening.

Now 47, the Mayo, Yukon, science teacher was in Yellowknife last week to discuss soul travel, dreams and finding answers to life's deep questions with anyone interested in taking part.

"Eckankar teaches people to be happier in life, to gain a different way of looking at life and to learn some ways of dealing with life's problems," he said of his religion, Eckankar.

"In Eckankar, it's not so much somebody standing up and telling you how things are. It's more a question of helping people to find out what's inside them already."

Dreams, souls and unique inner lives are examples of what people have inside them already.

In Eckankar, there is a belief in reincarnation -- that souls take on bodies in order to have experiences in the physical world -- and those experiences allow people to learn responsibility and how to love, he said.

McGinnis first discovered spirituality in 1973 when he was doing a science degree at the University of British Columbia.

He studied physical chemistry, an area where there is no place for out-of-body travel, but rather one that understands human consciousness as the result of chemical reactions in the brain. He went to a lecture held by a psychologist who wired people up to a monitor to study their brain waves while they were sleeping.

Some claimed when they were dreaming they could look at their bodies as though their eyes were in a corner of the room.

The scientist tested these claims by placing a number on a shelf above them so they could not see it. Then, when they were dreaming, he asked what the number was.

"As a science student that was absolutely incredible," McGinnis said of the dream experiments.

McGinnis was so awestruck that within a year he discovered Eckankar, a religion that describes itself as the "religion of the light and sound of God."

Essentially, it teaches that all individuals have eternal souls that exist because they are loved by God.

These souls are on a journey of both self- and God-realization.

And spiritual unfolding can be accelerated by conscious contact with Eckankar, or the divine spirit.