One of Richmond’s most prolific authors is passionate about his work.
Stephen Hawley Martin, a former principal at the Martin Agency, the Richmond advertising firm that brought the Geico lizard to life and in an earlier iteration proclaimed that Virginia Is for Lovers, is still a creative force.
His focus these days, though, is less on earthly matters, and more with an eye on the paranormal. Look at his author page on Amazon, and you’ll find titles including “Your Guide to Achieve Fourth Density: The Law of One, RA, and the End of Suffering,” “Reincarnation: Good News for Open-Minded Christians & Other Truth-Seekers,” and “The Truth About Life and How to Make Yours the Best of All.”
The meaning of life according to Martin? There is an entity, “spirit,” at the center of everything, and we are each part of it, as is everything else. That entity wanted to know itself, and in seeking to achieve that goal it fragmented, and now it’s in pieces. That includes everything, even us, and we are striving to return to the entity.
“At some point, spirit created an almost infinite number of bubbles, or whirlpools of itself, i.e., consciousness, and turned them loose so they could interact,” Martin writes in “Facts About Life and Death.”
From that concept, he expounds on reincarnation, soul mates, politics and political leaders, extraterrestrial beings, the Buddha and Christ, and how an awareness of the nature of the entity will cure gun violence and school shootings while in general bringing about a new age of enlightenment.
His other key tenet? No worries — you’ll have infinite chances to get things right. That Judgment Day thing? Think of it as a learning assessment. “God is not going to come down and put his finger in your face,” Martin says.
Now Martin is an acolyte of sorts, spreading the word about his take on how things are and what makes the universe work. It’s a calling, a later-in-life drive to make people aware of what he perceives as the true state of things — the true state of everything. “I feel like I have a mission to wake people up,” Martin says.
A publicity photo of Steve and his brother David circa 1990 with a photo of their father, Hawley Phillips Martin, when Hawley was the foreman of a ranch in Arizona (Photo courtesy Stephen Hawley Martin)
Leap of Faith
By his own account, Martin had a typical post-World War II childhood in Richmond. The son of Hawley Phillips and Evelyn Martin, he was raised in a household that was not especially religious, one more oriented toward science and rationalism.
He earned a bachelor’s in economics in the late 1960s at Hampden-Sydney College. Advertising was the family business; his father had worked with Ferguson Advertising, and his brother, the late David Martin, had co-founded an ad agency in Richmond — Martin & Woltz. Stephen Martin began his professional career in Baltimore in 1967 with VanSant Dugdale, then moved to Martin & Woltz in 1973 and ran that agency’s office in Washington. He then worked with his brother at the founding of the Martin Agency in 1975. He served in several positions there at various times, including director of client services, senior vice president for plans, and senior vice president for direct marketing services. He was president and chief executive officer for Athey Martin Webb in 1987-88. That agency became Hawley Martin Partners in 1988, with Stephen serving as a founding partner with his brother and working as chief executive officer for the firm until 1993, when it was bought out by the Interpublic Group of Companies.
Richmond resident Jim Maxwell worked with the brothers and managed Hawley Martin Advertising Agency. He also co-wrote an Oaklea title with Stephen Martin, “The Martin Managing Method.” Maxwell noted that the agency and the brothers built success in developing campaigns for national names, but would deliver the same top-tier work for clients in Richmond, too. “It was probably one of the highlights of my work as a professional,” he says. “It’s not everyday that you get to work with giants.”
Maxwell describes Stephen Martin as having a strong sense of self-actualization and as spiritual. “That’s what drives him,” he says.
Maxwell says that David Martin also had a deep sense of spirituality about him. Stephen Martin says that he had “lots of deep discussions” on spirituality with his brother.
Advertising was a good life for Martin, and he focused on work, but then, he says, the mystical world intruded. Martin was 35, lying on a hammock in his backyard, when he experienced an all-is-one epiphany that the grass, the trees, the sky, his own being were all part of something greater. It was life-changing, he says, the start of his pursuit of alternative theories and knowledge, but it also was not something he was comfortable sharing with coworkers.
I feel like I have a mission to wake people up.
—Stephen Hawley Martin
He says that there were two other experiences early in life that he thought nothing of at the time, but that, looking back, he believes were encounters with the extraordinary.
One happened when he was a teen and was struck by a car while strolling along U.S. Highway 1. He says he walked away without a scratch. “It was like a miracle, it had to be,” he says. “Instead of under the car, I went over it. My shoes were 50 feet ahead of me ... how is that possible?”
It wasn’t until much later in life, he says, that it occurred to him that surviving that accident was miraculous — and maybe an early sign that he was here on earth for a purpose. “I didn’t share that with anybody until I started writing these books,” Martin says.
The second event occurred when he was in his mid-20s. He was feverish, he says, and he experienced the sensation of feeling that he was somewhere around the ceiling of his room and looking down on his physical body. He attributed it to partying, but he now thinks it was a near death encounter of sorts (read an excerpt below).
After his revelation in the hammock, Martin says, his outlook on life and world were altered. He had already been reading books about metaphysics and had studied Rosicrucianism, a mystic bouillabaisse of various religious beliefs and practices melded with other purported secret knowledge. He read copious quantities of books about reincarnation and the afterlife, as well as chronicles of sayings from a purported space being; studied various academic writing and research into the paranormal and metaphysical; and eventually came up with his own understanding of how the universe works and what he needed to share with others.
He presents his worldview via print, e-books, podcasts and guest appearances on various broadcasts. He is prolific in his efforts: There are dozens of books by Martin from his own Oaklea Press, including looks at life, the afterlife, reincarnation and the clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. Their titles suggest that they hold the secret to life, the truth to life, an explanation of how to master life and a blueprint to happiness.
Martin has also delved into research from the University of Virginia and its Division of Perceptual Studies in the School of Medicine. The late Dr. Ian Stevens initiated paranormal studies there in the late 1950s and founded the Division of Perceptual Studies. His research was known for taking a scientific look at people who claimed they had memories of prior incarnations, and he wrote books on the subject, including “Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation.”
Dr. Bruce Greyson continued that work from the 1970s on and has reviewed more than 1,000 incidents involving people who said they had near-death experiences. For Martin, the work of Greyson and other division researchers provides “convincing evidence” that consciousness can exist independent of the brain’s involvement; that the brain integrates consciousness in the body, that it doesn’t necessarily create consciousness.
Martin reaches that conclusion from the division’s reviews of cases, including those of people who claimed near-death experiences; some who apparently had sustained irreversible brain damage but recovered consciousness before death; and those of children who reportedly recalled details of someone else’s life who had died.
From a religious standpoint, Martin considers himself a Christian and often uses Biblical language, encouraging people to turn the other cheek and to love their neighbors. But he contends that traditional readings of the Gospels get some things wrong. As he puts it, if all is one, then everyone’s consciousness is part of the infinite consciousness that creates physical reality.
He also says that traditional Christianity misinterprets what Jesus said and anthropomorphizes God, but that Jesus was talking about his Father in a way that’s closer to the Hindu sense of God as both in the world and transcending it. Martin says he thinks a young Jesus may have spent time in India in an ashram before he started his ministry.
In “Facts About Life After Death,” Martin cites Matthew 25:40, and Jesus saying that “whatever you did for the least of these brothers, you did for me.” From that, he concludes that “we are all from God and of God,” and that each person’s awareness is “a tiny sliver of a larger screen [God].”
“I have obviously a different take on things,” he says.
Martin contends that the one we are striving to rejoin has a side, the “love thy neighbor” side, that encourages unity, harmony and helping one another, while another side is me-oriented, selfish and harmful. He breaks it into Service to Self and Service to Others, and he suggests that those two sides are in conflict, which can be seen in the current political scene.
He’s concerned that the U.S. political situation may deteriorate into anarchy and issues a clarion call to readers to be aware of political gaslighting and manipulation and to vote for candidates who are working to pull people together. “The Earth is going through a time of change,” he writes. “[We] are moving into a new time, political chaos in this country, and hopefully we will get through it.”
Photo by Monica Escamilla
Other Paths
True to his professional roots, Martin is still at work, serving as a marketing consultant, including recent work with a digital agency in Asheville, North Carolina, that specializes in recruitment for police and fire departments.
Advertising was Martin’s career, but books and writing were his passion. He says he started Oaklea in 1995, presenting work by other authors, his own titles and some ghostwriting for clients, too. As of this summer, he had six books in the queue to edit and publish. His clients find him; many of them have written works with a spiritual theme. Martin says that’s to be expected. “Google my name, and all these [spiritual] podcasts and books come up. That’s where I am now.”
James King, an English citizen who lives in France, says he found Martin in late 2020 through “Afterlife: The Whole Truth.” They began a correspondence and Oaklea last year published King’s “The Story of Us: Extraterrestrials Explain Who We Are and How Our Universe Came to Be.” “We found many things concerning spiritual evolvement of interest to us both,” King says in an email. “Stephen’s books provide answers of a broad, understandable nature.”
Oaklea Press features about 16 titles that Martin has written or co-written, as well as works by others. His titles cover the basics, ranging from “The Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurship” to “The CEO’s Guide From Good to Great.”
His other titles include some fiction and his own writings on the paranormal and other New Age topics. He writes with ease, just as he talks, and writes quickly. In June, days after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Martin released “A No-Brainer Way to Stop the Killings.” The book’s solution is to teach the kids most likely to engage in mass shootings that they are part of something greater and will never die. “And you know what? Once every 18- to 20-year-old male knows the truth, the killings will stop. That by itself is reason enough to get the word out,” he writes.
His titles on life after death are his bestsellers. In mid-September, his book “Afterlife, The Whole Truth: Life After Death Books I & II” was No. 16 in Amazon’s Kindle rankings in the category New Age Reincarnation, and No. 103,157 overall in the Kindle store.
Martin says he does one or two podcast interviews each week, and that’s where most people become acquainted with him and his books. Most of the podcasts he works with focus on spirituality or metaphysics. “There’s a lot of them out there,” he says. “I think there is a whole movement of people who are waking up to this reality.”
He had an online radio show from 2007 to 2009 that dealt with a range of topics, focusing on the truth about life as he sees it, talking with people who said they had experienced reincarnation or had been clinically dead, academics who study the paranormal and reincarnation, ESP, near-death experiences — the gamut of the paranormal.
Martin has been married twice and has been with his second wife, Hilary, since 1987. He has three children: Hawley, Hans and Hannah Grace. Martin’s passion for metaphysics draws mixed reactions from his immediate family.
His wife, he says, thinks it’s just “woo-woo.” “We don’t talk a lot about it,” he says. Hilary Martin describes herself as a traditional Christian, and they attend church together. She says that her husband’s out-of-the-mainstream, metaphysical pursuits are simply a part of his personality. “He’s just very interested about anything, really, all kinds of topics,” she says. “He loves to tell a story. He’s passionate about books and reading and literature, and getting [them] into the hands of readers.”
A Near Death Experience
Image courtesy Stephen Hawley Martin
An excerpt from Stephen Hawley Martin’s “Facts About Life After Death: Three Books In One Volume”
“Let me tell you about my NDE {near death experience}, and why I do not think it would have been pleasant if I had not returned to life. I’m not proud of why it happened. I was in my mid-twenties, and like many young men at that age, I thought I was immortal. I was a bachelor living in an apartment in an old townhouse with two other young men in the Bolton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore. I had a bad case of the flu, it was Saturday night, and I was upstairs in my bedroom, nursing the flu and reading a book, when I heard people downstairs coming into the apartment.
Before long, there was a party going on. Well, nursing the flu in my bedroom was not where I wanted to be on a Saturday night. At age 25, one is not about to miss out on a party no matter how sick one might be. So, even though I felt woozy, I climbed out of bed, put on some clothes and went downstairs to join in. I smoked and I drank, and before long I realized I could hardly stand up. I practically knee-walked back upstairs and flopped on the bed, which seemed to spin like a helicopter propeller at liftoff. I felt nauseous, the spinning continued, and I was about to throw up. But I didn’t think I could possibly stand up and get to the john.
Lying there, feeling awful, I felt my body rise up and come back down with every breath — like maybe I was actually going to lift off like a helicopter, when a sort of pressure started building up inside me. It kept building, and after a few moments, I had the sensation that I — my body — popped. Everything seemed to shift, and for a moment I panicked — had I exploded? The next thing I knew, I realized I was up near the ceiling looking down at my body on the bed.
I thought, “What am I doing up here?” I kept looking down at myself all sprawled out like road kill, and I thought, “Oh my God, am I dead?”
With that, my awareness shifted. I could think, but it was a different type of thought — a much clearer thought process. I realized I was up near the ceiling, which puzzled me. I thought, “Wait a minute, I’m up here — not down there. How can I be up here?” And suddenly it dawned on me that I identified with whatever part of me seemed to be bumping against the ceiling, which meant it wasn’t actually me down there on the bed — even though I was sure that was my body down there.
I had an epiphany. “Wow! I’m not my body — we aren’t our bodies — people aren’t bodies.” With that, I flipped upside down and was inches from the ceiling. I recall that I saw all the texture of the ceiling as though it were under a microscope — all the little dents and grooves and texture of it because it was so close to me. Then I swiveled and looked down at my body again. It looked very pale, and everything went black. The next thing I knew it was Sunday morning and I was awake, back in my body, feeling much better than when I’d crashed on the bed the night before.
Okay, so why do I think that if I had remained dead, it would not have been pleasant? Because I was an atheist. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think someone would be punished for being an atheist. It’s just that, as a Scientific Materialist atheist, I didn’t think there was such a thing as life after death. I thought that when you die, that’s it, lights out like when you pull the plug on a TV set or vacuum cleaner. Since I believed that was the case, I didn’t know I needed to head for the light. Not only did I not see a light, it would not have occurred to me in a million years to look for one.”
