Paul Richards was 16 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Paul had by that time already seen a few of his own new and strange worlds, but unlike Armstrong, the child Paul had been doing so without the aid of the science of his day. Neither Paul’s aerospace executive/engineer father nor his Roman Catholic mother had been able to help him understand his ongoing extraordinary experience of a realm of Energy underlying all physical things. The harsh and inexplicable accuracy of Paul’s alternative vision unsettled him. The everyday world, through his eyes, did not seem as safe, civilized, charitable, or sensibly controlled as it was presented to be. And it did not seem to be going in the right direction.

Years later, he discovered that there was another way. While on the path to becoming an aerospace executive himself, Paul was quietly offered training and a place in an oral tradition that referred to itself simply as Energetic Seeing. In exchange, Paul’s only obligation was to someday train one other person. The existence of the tradition Paul joined was known only to its own members, who called themselves Seers. They fit successfully into the modern world, working in medicine, higher education, and the sciences. But in his eyes they were also Merlinesque; in command of perceptual faculties that allowed astonishing feats of non ordinary perception. And they could demonstrate amazing mastery of attention and Intent.

His mentors presented Paul with no social agenda and no religious or political dogma, though they insisted that the training be accompanied by in-depth psychological therapy, rigorous mind body practices, and a deep spiritual inquiry of Paul’s choosing. The goal of the training was succinct: to produce high functioning intelligent professional members of society, of good personal character, able to see far more of the total environment in which humans live than is ever experienced by the average person. For ten years he trained with several mentors, tasting both the luxuries and the serious challenges of the path. Afterward, changed, he shocked his associates by giving up his lucrative career in aerospace and moving to New Zealand in search of even greater transformation. It was at this time that he saw the birth of his own individual vision as a Seer and his unique articulation of that experience.

Paul anticipated for himself the same anonymity as a Seer that had been the rule for generations preceding him. But when the time came to pass his training along, he found that the world had changed. Paul returned to America to find that western society had become, on the one hand, more open to Seeing as a topic of discussion. But it also had grown even more barbaric in Energetic terms, as the media and materialism advanced and fundamentalism merged with secular power.

By 1991 when Paul finally met his future protégé, he thought that perhaps it was time to become slightly more public as a Seer. His chosen recipient, Patricia Steele, studied with him for many years, became a Seer herself, and then, as is not unknown in the Seeing tradition, became his wife.

It was Patricia who suggested to Paul that he expand his training model and allow a small group to participate with her during her Seer’s education. Reflecting the needs and spirit of the times, word of this training group spread, more groups followed, and the Senté Center was formed. Over the next twelve years hundreds of students embraced this other way offered by Paul, the Seer’s way.

As demand for access to his path rose, Paul realized that he could not create thousands of Seers, but felt that he could offer intelligent, compassionate people on the verge of change a glimpse of the universe through his eyes. In so doing, he could help cultivate an Energetically educated and aware subculture, one whose members would be better prepared to deal with the enormously important issues and challenges of our time. He envisioned its members as people from all walks of life for whom a basic understanding of Energy and Intent would give them more to offer to their communities at a time when the reawakening of personal power is especially relevant. Paul and Patricia call these energetically literate individuals Energy Progressives. Their numbers are expanding.