Originally written as Part 2 of my introduction to my new Substack blog, but easily reads as a standalone post so am publishing here as well. For additional background and context, feel free to check out Part 1, where I cover my birth and rise as a dissident writer. Otherwise, please enjoy the read!
A Truth Seeker is Born
From as young an age as I can remember, I was that kid who questioned practically everything with an open mind, and refused to accept the hollow-sounding answers I was given that neither resonated with my heart, nor served to quench my soul's ceaseless thirst for deeper truth and knowledge. Growing up in a devout fundamentalist Christian environment, this tenacity of mine didn't always bode well with the religious authorities, but neither did it prevent me – at least in my younger years – from sensing the deep compassion of and truth in the life and teachings of the central character of the religion – the great spiritual Master and faith healer known best in the West as Jesus, or Yeshua in his native tongue, and Issa in Islam and throughout the East. It was during these earliest years of childhood memory in which I can clearly recall the day I made the decision to 'accept Jesus into my heart', and officially 'became a Christian'.
At that age, I was still seeing some picture of the man Jesus who walked this earth 2,000 years ago, his selfless ministry of healing, and his simple yet radical message of unconditional love expressed through compassion and forgiveness; more or less free from the religious doctrines and dogmas built upon – but not necessarily reflective of – those great teachings of timeless truth that only a true Master can impart as simply and as eloquently as did that one called The Nazarene. That slowly changed, however, as I continued to grow older and in the process underwent the sort of fear-based societal and religious mental programming that most of us born into this world are subject to in some form or other throughout our childhood years - being indoctrinated into a less-than-empowering worldview, just as most of us here on earth are.
Surely more on the unusual side of my childhood, I actually spent the majority of my years of childhood memory - from age 12 and up - growing up in East Africa, where I also attended several years at an American Christian boarding school and graduated high school, before moving back to the States to strike off on my own.
By the time I turned 18, I had already made up my mind that I had no interest in following the societal path set out for me by spending the next four years of my life attending college, racking up a pile of student loan debt in order to receive a so-called higher education in preparation for a career path of which I had no idea what it was or should or would be. My unorthodox decision seemed to come as quite the shock to most of the adults around me at the time, and despite the loving support of my parents in that firm decision of mine, I was nevertheless certainly beginning to feel just a bit like a societal dissident and outcast. Indeed, that is just what I was becoming, I just didn't quite realize it yet. My lifelong refusal to consciously go into debt, particularly bank/system debt – as I see usury (charging interest on debt/loans) as both highly immoral and oppressive – only added to that feeling of being (or at least being deemed) a societal outcast and a dissident. I would quickly learn that in a debt-based society, refusing to put oneself into debt is both a revolutionary act and one that would raise the eyebrows of just about everyone I shared this aspect of my life path with during my early adulthood.
For my first two years out on my own in 'the real world' as an adult, I worked as a construction laborer on a small framing crew in Bozeman, Montana, where I decided to settle down for what would end up being over a decade. Given my entrepreneurial spirit – by this time I had already successfully ran two small business ventures in my childhood and teenage years – I suppose it was practically inevitable that I would eventually start my own business soon after striking off on my own. Sure enough, after only one more year of working a 'real' job at a local pizza place following my framing job, I inadvertently found myself so busy and successful 'working for myself' as a handyman/construction laborer/yard cleanup guy that summer into the fall, that by the time the work began to slow down, it was already winter and I had no job lined up and no idea how I was going to make it through the winter! I had no interest in applying for a 'real' job at this point, so instead I started accumulating my very first snow removal clients, began shoveling sidewalks and driveways for folks when it snowed; and from that day on I stayed plenty busy building and growing the lawncare/landscaping/snow removal business I would then be successfully operating for the next decade, until the next major phase of my life journey would begin. And ever since I walked out of those doors of that pizza place, I have still to this day never worked a 'real job' in my life since, and I doubt I ever will.
Being a truth-seeker from before I was even familiar with the term, it didn't take long for me to become accustomed to having many questions about the deeper meaning of life but finding few answers my soul could accept. As I got older and continued to question everything I didn't understand, I fast learned that being a dedicated seeker of truth over tradition in this world quickly makes a religious heretic, a political dissident, and societal outcast out of an honest man. Strangely, nothing was able to suppress that inner drive for deeper truth, not even the threat of being thrown into a fiery hell to be consciously tormented for eternity – a concept I did still believe in at that time, despite discovering that I was incapable of tolerating several other distasteful religious doctrines that had been instilled to me from my childhood, and which I was informed were 'essential' Christian doctrines, or those beliefs which one must believe in order to be 'saved' according to the institutionalized Church. Given my disposition, I suppose it was inevitable that this line of questioning ultimately leading me to a state of constant wrestling with certain uncomfortable religious doctrines of the Church would eventually lead me to abandon those same religious beliefs I had once held so dear.
The Day I Left the Institutionalized Church
Unlike some who leave the Church for similar reasons, I 'threw the baby out with the bathwater' as it were, leaving not just the religious doctrines that were troubling me behind, but the whole religion including God and even Jesus. In the years that followed I came about as close to identifying as an atheist as possible without ever quite being able to honestly say I didn't believe in some sort of Creator, some Higher Power, some divine Source of all life.
I can still remember the day I sent that lengthy email off to my parents attempting to explain why I was, at the time, making the decision to officially leave both the church and Christianity as I knew it behind. The reasons for this decision were numerous, but at the core, that which 'pushed me over the edge' was the largely unquestioned support of and seemingly blind allegiance to both Israel along with its systematic oppression of the Palestinian People and the US-engineered foreign war(s) being waged for global domination in the name of God, Jesus and true religion throughout the ranks of the Evangelical Church. At this particular time in history, this pro-war ideology played out specifically as support for and allegiance to the war in Iraq, first through invasion and then the subsequent, still ongoing to this day a whopping two decades later, occupation of the war-torn nation.
While I was still attending a local church there in Bozeman, Montana, I can recall the mental agony of enduring the sermon I listened to that Sunday morning, which would immediately trigger my subsequent departure from Christianity altogether. It was one of the countless 'war sermons' preached throughout the American Evangelical Church back in those years, and my spirit was no longer willing to endure the hypocrisy of a religion that was purportedly worshiping the 'Prince of Peace' every Sunday while simultaneously supporting politically-motivated, imperialist foreign wars of aggression - wars-for-oil-and-israel-and-global-domination. One time too many had I heard the religious call to blindly support what was to my mind clearly an unjust, wrongly motivated, and highly destructive foreign war being waged; based entirely upon an intricate web of blatant deception.
I could no longer abide this open crucifixion of the Prince of Peace in the name of all that is holy, in order to perpetuate all that which is most unholy upon this earth – all of the gruesome sacrifice and horrific atrocities carried out on the battlefield in the name of some elusive 'higher good'. So I left my religion behind, and with it my love and devotion for the Peacemaker Yeshua as well – for a number of years there anyhow, until I was finally ready to begin looking at divine Truth in a whole new light, free of the religious dogma I was at this time running as far away from as I could get.
A Spiritually Transformative Experience and an agnostic no longer – The day I first heard 'the voice of God'
After officially and permanently leaving the Church in my earliest adult years during/following my initial awakening (described in detail in Part 1 of this introduction), I then spent years seeking truth in this world while 'running from God', only to have my first – and quite sudden at that – powerful spiritually transformative experience that led me right back to the very same teachings of Jesus I had by now long abandoned when I left the church; only now to be seen in an entirely new and different light, as beautiful teachings of truth that had simply been shrouded by flawed religious traditions for so many years.
This experience occurred in February of 2015, so I would have been in my mid-20s at the time, but that is a complete story in and of itself for another time, deserving of its own post. Suffice it to say that I heard a voice that I knew wasn't mine; what it said immediately got my attention; and what it either did or foreknew, so as to bring about in short order the very thing it had spoken of (a near-impossibility by my reckoning), convinced me what I already intuitively knew – that I had just heard the 'voice of God', which was now very clearly calling me out of the world of darkness and confusion I had been living in and back to the path which was to be my destiny to walk.
This 'voice', as far as I was concerned, was clearly emanating from a divine Power that knew my inner workings even better than I did, and had either orchestrated a near-impossibility in order to prove itself to me or had intimate foreknowledge of my imminent future, as well as the ability to subtly influence me in a way so as to manifest this soon-to-come 'sign' as I saw it – for I had to make one unlikely decision in order for this future event to unfold within my life. Unaware of it at the time, I was being intuitively guided to 'do my part' in the beautiful orchestration of this monumental signpost along my journey that would forever change how I viewed the world, myself, and especially God. Upon receiving my sign from the universe confirming the veracity of the mysterious 'voice' I had heard, I could no longer continue running from what I had previously become convinced was a far-off and distant Creator which had entirely withdrawn itself from its Creation.
I had finally heard the voice of truth within myself, and this time I could go on ignoring it no longer. So it immediately began to gently guide me straight back to the teachings of Jesus I had once had such an affinity for; and there again in the 'red letters' of the Bible I heard that voice of truth and felt it resonate deep within my soul, and this time there would be no more running away from it in the name of truth. This time I would also have to undertake the long and arduous task of sifting the chaff from the wheat, the real from the counterfeit, and the truths from the lies. This process would continue for years, the process of untangling all of the fear-based religious dogmas, traditions and church doctrines from those otherwise precious teachings of pure spiritual truth; eventually freeing the Christ from the cross of ignorance he had been nailed to within my consciousness ever since my teenage years when the steady stream of fear-based religious programming I underwent had begun to overshadow and displace the pure and unconditional love of that great Teacher/Healer I had once touched in the innocence of my young and pure child's mind.
An intense period of deconstruction and the conscious beginnings of a spiritual journey
So began my long deconstruction process of Christian fundamentalism, and this was also the beginning of the spiritual path I would be traveling to discover my own unique personal and experiential understanding of the meaning of life, God, and ultimate Truth. From that day on, I have consciously been on my own unique spiritual journey – predominantly guided by the teachings of Jesus that have survived to our time, my intuition, my ceaseless quest for truth and the knowledge I've picked up along that quest; and that still, small voice of truth within. As anyone who has gone through such a deconstruction process knows, it was a difficult path to walk; with my beliefs and understandings about myself, God, the world, and spiritual matters changing and morphing and evolving so rapidly in the months and years immediately following this experience that at times even I really had no idea what I actually believed! But I was finally beginning to find real answers to all of those deep philosophical questions I had been asking all my life, one small step at a time.
The first major step along this new journey involved a complete and total acceptance of Jesus' teachings of resistance through nonviolence as the only path to true and lasting peace and equality on earth; and while I quickly embraced this new and revolutionary understanding of the nature of peace and violence which radically transformed my worldview very quickly all on its own, many of the other necessary lessons along my path would take me many months and even years to truly learn and begin positively integrating into my life.
But the spiritual awakening process had begun, and my quest for truth began to shift more and more away from the outer world of politics and external events, as it began to transform into a dedicated search for more spiritual knowledge as I became increasingly ever more interested in my own personal inner journey and my new quest for the ultimate truth of reality – which I was now consciously aware was very much, in some way at least, a divine, sacred and spiritual truth that transcended the known 'facts' of this material world.
A large part of this stage in my journey would include the discovering of my gift of writing, which occurred throughout 2016, quickly followed by the discovery that I also had a gift for expressing my voice through speaking. This particular discovery came as I began to explore my talent for video creation in a series of fast-moving events that would quickly usher in my short-lived rise to and subsequent fall from YouTube stardom, thanks to an intense social media censorship campaign in 2017 responsible for the deletion of my original YouTube channel and the end of my fast rise among the ranks of successful YouTube content creators about three short weeks into the saga. But nothing could silence my voice at this point, for I now knew that it was both greatly appreciated and in high demand – in certain alternative circles at least – and so began my blogging 'career' as I know it up to this point, as I began to write as full-time as I could on a wide range of subjects of interest to me, from then on all the way through 2022, when my writing would come to a standstill for about the next 15 months - until now...
Transition to a Vegetarian Diet
Apart from uniformly rejecting all forms of human violence as necessary 'solutions' to the 'human problem' within my own consciousness, as well as realizing and stepping into my gift as a writer, one of the biggest key lifestyle changes this initial spiritual experience eventually led to was my choice to embrace a vegetarian diet. The reasons behind this major lifestyle change of mine are probably best laid out in a short post I wrote on the subject many months later - As Long as There are Slaughterhouses, There Will be Battlefields | Tolstoy, Pythagoras, and the Philosophy of Vegetarianism – in which I made the moral and philosophical case that ceasing from the needless mass slaughter of animals for human consumption is likely just as important an ingredient in the recipe for true and lasting peace on earth as is the recognition that human violence cannot and will never solve the problem of human violence; for only peace and love can do that.
In my case, the decision to transition to a vegetarian diet ultimately came about due to my inherent love for animals that had been with me since the youngest of my childhood years, in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance that was building up within me over this issue, as I had also been an avid meat-eater my entire life. This inner shift also came about in response to my newly inherited but increasingly strong conviction that Jesus had in fact been an outspoken critic of the priestly cult of bloody animal sacrifice that was at the heart of the Jewish Temple worship of his day; and that the true God, who is Love, never desired nor demanded the sacrifice of innocent animals in order to forgive humanity for her many errors – as much of institutionalized western religion actually teaches.
Perhaps that is why this phase of my spiritual journey – literally just days before setting off on the trip that would ultimately serve to usher in the next major phase of my journey – came to a close with the interesting piece I wrote at the time; both in response and staunch opposition to the Zionist Israeli religious far right faction relentlessly pushing for a reconstruction of the ancient Jewish Temple, and with it a re-establishment of the perpetual bloody animal sacrifice ritual in the name of God that had once stained the 'holy' city of Jerusalem red with the blood of the innocent for centuries. Only this time it would stand for all eternity. All of this apparent obsession with bloodshed coming from the misguided desire to rebuild “the city of peace” upon the very same foundation of bloodshed that had ultimately led to its original final destruction in 70AD at the hands of the Roman army.
This single choice of mine to withdraw my direct support from something my soul so abhorred – the needless suffering and senseless slaughter of innocent beings raised only to die in the most horrific of conditions – had become one simple way in which I, as a single compassionate soul who was seemingly powerless in its ability to change the violent trajectory of humanity, could actually do something that would directly serve to alleviate some of the most horrific and needless suffering of some of the most innocent beings on the planet within the dark and cruel factory farm and slaughterhouse industries of modern society. If the highest spiritual ideals included universal compassion and love even of enemies, my reasoning went, how hypocritical it must be of me to be actively supporting the slaughter of animals that weren't my enemies at all, but rather my friends! Regardless of how 'small' an impact such a withdrawal of my direct support for this senseless slaughter may have had on the industry as a whole, I had now finally taken the most empowering action that I could in defiance of this dark and cruel oppression of my 'lower-level' friends, through the withdrawal of my financial support of (and thus also my consent for) a system I simultaneously found so abhorrent, so inhumane, and so far from the ideals of love and compassion captured in the simple teachings of Jesus, that in the end the choice I made hardly felt like a choice at all but rather a human duty of mine as a lover of animals and follower of the teachings of Christ.
With this resolution to the acute cognitive dissonance I had become painfully aware of within my mind also came a sense of inner peace I'm not sure I had ever felt before. The storms of life carried on around me and within my own life circumstances, but I had finally taken the next big step along the path I was destined to walk in this lifetime, and far bigger changes I could never have imagined at the time now lay just around the corner.
A Powerful Spiritual Awakening
It was during this often confusing time of my life and several years after that initial spiritual experience when I would eventually go through a powerful spiritual awakening following what was at the time the most intense period of darkness and suffering I had ever experienced in this lifetime; and this experience of awakening would again forever change the trajectory of my life path and my spiritual journey - in just about every way possible. I had just lost my border collie dog of ten years to an incredibly fast moving cancer in the late summer of 2018, and it must have been the most traumatizing experience of my life, as this loss of what felt like my whole world at the time plunged the whole of my being into the darkest, most depressing period of intense inner suffering I had at that point ever endured, and this period of deep inner darkness lasted for several months until the moment that sudden life-changing awakening occurred.
It was the Christmas season, I had traveled east to spend the holidays with my family, and I was now a solid four months into my wretched state of suffering with no end in sight, though I had intuitively felt in the days leading up to my travels that somehow something was going to change for the better during this trip. I didn't think much of it at the time, but looking back, my intuition had been spot on as always.
So it was that during that lovely extended Christmas/New Year visit with my family, and from out of that deep darkness and depression I had been stuck in for months now, something was awakened within myself that I had never quite experienced before; and such were the circumstances in which my spiritual awakening occurred; and my life has never been the same since.
The initial awakening experience itself was sudden and abrupt but also lasting, intensely powerful, incredibly transformative; and it brought about instantaneous, lasting healing to the deep mental/emotional wound that the loss of my dog had left within me. I will never forget the moment when that shift occurred and when that Power, that Awareness first awakened within me; as I was watching a video recording of an older Gregg Braden lecture, and that unforgettable moment occurred towards the end of the lecture during a real-life story that he was telling to illustrate the lesson he was teaching about compassion, forgiveness and mentally/emotionally letting go of that which in reality is long gone but which we are still clinging to in our own minds. The story itself was about a couple letting go of their old and dying dog, which dog refused to let go of its life (and the pain that was inherent to it) until its owners consciously made the decision to let the dog go, at which point the dog found peace in finally being freed to let go of its dissipating life while the owners found peace in the freeing of their beloved canine from its pain along with a deep release of the resistance to this inevitable outcome they had been clinging to for so long.
The story itself was eerily similar to the story of my own dog's passing, though I didn't find my own peace until this particular moment so many months later; but now that it had arrived, it was overwhelming, and it was most definitely here to stay. In a single moment, all of the pain and suffering, the depression and hopelessness, the grief, the guilt, the overwhelming darkness, it was all gone – and I mean completely gone, without a trace, leaving me with a deep sense of peace, acceptance, and aliveness that I certainly can't recall having ever felt before. It was as if, in ways the human mind struggles to understand, that somehow in that moment there was instantaneously brought about within myself a strong sense of closure and meaning to my otherwise meaningless and painful experience; and with that closure and sense of meaning to it all, I was instantly healed and the internal suffering that had been tormenting me for months, that incredibly heavy burden I had been carrying for so long, it had simply vanished. And it never came back.
I had been touched by the hand of divine love in a way I had never experienced before, thanks in large part to the amazing work of Gregg Braden along with the part my own intuition played in leading me to this particular video at the exact moment my soul was ready to receive its divine message; and I believe it was that divine energy of unconditional love coming through Gregg Braden in the form of a deep and transcendental level of compassion that was somehow directly responsible for this sudden, highly transformative awakening I had just experienced.
Not only was I experiencing, and seemingly out of nowhere, a deep inner peace that I had never known before, but also a deep inner knowing that I had never experienced like this before either, along with a state of presence that was also strangely new to me. This deeper sense of inner knowing must have in turn helped to start quiet my otherwise often racing mind; and with it the many negative fear-, doubt- and guilt-based thoughts and emotions that torment the human mind by keeping one chained to the past or worrying about the future, leaving me far more present and aware in the ever-unfolding present moment of the timeless 'eternal now'. I almost immediately also began to feel far more compassionate than ever before, because, as I have now concluded, I was for the first time beginning to feel truly connected to all of humanity, and one with All That Is. In the hours and days that immediately followed, a new level of awareness accompanied by a host of spiritual and metaphysical knowledge and understanding flooded into my consciousness, forever re-shaping how I would see and understand both myself and the world around me.
These massive 'downloads' of esoteric knowledge were clearly both brand new to me and my consciousness and yet at the very same time felt much more like a period of intense 'remembering' as opposed to a period of intense 'learning'. It was as if I already knew exactly what keywords to search for to find the websites that had the knowledge which I already knew at some level, but also knew at the very same level that I needed to remember at the conscious mind level of being in order to practically integrate it into my life. I began seeing synchronicity everywhere, as my life suddenly became increasingly magical, enchanting, and to some degree far more effortless than it had ever previously seemed to be. Where once resistance had made its home, allowance had now begun to move in. My entire worldview and belief system was radically shifted with no conscious effort of my own in a single moment that couldn't have lasted for more than a minute or few; and yet in a matter of weeks my entire way of being had radically shifted in both noticeable and positive ways. I immediately began eating healthier, finding new spiritual YouTube channels to follow, reading spiritually-oriented books I'd never heard of before then, and subtly shifting the focus of my writing more and more into alignment with this new level of awakening consciousness I was now operating from.
I can still remember surfing the web that same night, finding myself browsing through what had to have been 'new age' websites I had never heard of before, reading up on the seven major energy centers ('chakras') of the human body; blown away by how strongly I was feeling that I already knew all of this 'brand new' knowledge I was apparently only just rediscovering in this lifetime. I can even recall beginning to subtly feel the energy of some of those energy centers for the very first time, which I again intuitively sensed I was already somehow deeply familiar with at some level.
I began embedding all of these new realizations into my writing in the days that followed as best as I knew how. For starters, I donated all of the crypto rewards I was getting from my recent blog posts on the Israel-Palestine conflict to a young Palestinian gal who was writing on the same blog, so she could buy some Christmas gifts for nearby Palestinian children in need, who are so adversely affected by the debilitating years-long Zionist military blockade, siege, and relentless carpet bombing of the besieged and officially 'unlivable' Gaza Strip.
I was also immediately inspired to write a New-Years post outlining the incredibly simple to understand yet difficult to implement path to peace on earth, which I now knew with all of my being was indeed being birthed out of the perpetual cycle of endless human violence that had been oppressing humanity for so many millennium. A New Age of peace and freedom was indeed upon humanity, this I suddenly had no doubt about whatsoever, though it took months for me to gather the 'evidence' for this to make my case in an objective manner.
Next up I was inspired to make a post capturing a part of Gregg Braden's all-important message of empowerment shared through his works I was now fascinated with; which probably also best captured my state of mind and point of view immediately following the awakening I had just experienced – Angels of Light in a World of Darkness & Peace on Earth – this timely message of hope originating in the ancient Essene tradition of peace. The message was simple, as summed up in the words of Braden: "You are the angels, you have the tools, and this is the time," this summary following the Essene teaching on the Tree of Life, which ended with the following profoundly powerful words:
“To lift your eyes to heaven, when the eyes of others are on the ground is not always easy; and to worship at the feet of angels, when others worship fame and riches is not always easy; and perhaps the most difficult of all, is to think the thoughts of angels and to do as angels do."
Difficult indeed it may be, but I now knew at a very deep and primal level of my being that this was also very much possible; and not only possible, but the very purpose and meaning of life for all those among humanity who were awakening as I now was. THIS is why I was here, I now felt it so strongly! If we wish for the aid of divine, angelic forces to help rescue us from our 'fallen' human state of insanity, then perhaps the solution was as simple as becoming the angels we wished to see in our world. I, for one, was absolutely convinced, and my own personal connection to the Essenes and ancient Essene knowledge only continued to grow stronger from there.
New Beginnings
In that January alone, I published no less than half a dozen posts dedicated to nonviolent resistance as the only valid path to true peace and freedom in a world dominated by human violence and oppression; including one post advocating for wide-scale nonviolent resistance as the only real solution to the perpetual illegal Israeli occupation and violent oppression of Palestine - Breaking the 12 Year Israeli Siege of Gaza; one highlighting the 'Greatest Christmas Story Never Told' – the unbelievably true story of the Christmas Truce of 2014 that almost brought about an abrupt and early end to the 'Great War' (WWI) and illustrates how peace is always only ever one simple choice away; a post detailing seven simple steps to world peace entitled, War is Over, If We Want It; two posts in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and his successful civil rights movement that was based upon the principle of nonviolent resistance and unconditional love; as well as the New Year's post already highlighted above. Clearly something radical had changed within me, and this inner shift was greatly influencing nearly every aspect of my life, from my writing to the content I was consuming and absolutely everything in between.
I felt both alive and truly happy for the first time in months! I couldn't comprehend or understand exactly what had happened at first, but neither did I need to understand at first. Something had awakened within me that I wasn't familiar with, a part of myself it would seem, and this was now the one calling all of the shots in my life. And given the circumstances, surrender to this awakening power was a relatively effortless, thoughtless and intuitive process that more or less simply played out on it own without much inner resistance at all.
I was also immediately drawn to a number of subjects that had previously been outside of my awareness; such as the importance of the pineal gland to spirituality and its widespread calcification among so many in the West, so-called 'New Age' spiritual material, Near Death Experiences, and so much more. Health and healing began to quickly replace the world of news and politics in the front seat of my consciousness. The very week of my return back home, I instantly transformed from a 'junk food vegetarian' into a health conscious vegetarian, and I replaced my entire array of personal hygiene products with natural, non-toxic and sustainable alternatives. The many changes that occurred quite naturally and without much forethought or planning in the month or two following that awakening are far too numerous to detail here, but the changes didn't stop there. As time went by, so did this inner transformation continue in full force – for months, never really truly ever coming to an end...
I can remember, upon arriving back home in Montana after the long and refreshing time away, that one of my first stops was the local library, where I would for the first time in my many years in the area finally go about getting a library card so I could utilize this invaluable free resource. The first three books I came home with that day left a permanent mark upon my consciousness and forever changed my life. I will never forget those three transformative books, apparently containing important material and knowledge that my soul needed to hear immediately following this awakening experience: Gregg Braden's The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles and Belief; Dr. Brian Weiss's Messages From the Masters: Tapping into the Power of Love; and Thom Hartmann's spiritual autobiography, The Prophet's Way: A Guide to Living in the Now. These three powerful spiritual works touched my soul at a deep level and so resonated with me that I have since purchased all three for my own personal library, as each of them had a profound impact upon myself, my inner journey, and my worldview; though in time others would eventually rise above them in that regard. One of those works was the renowned spiritual autobiography of the now famous Indian Yogi, Swami and spiritual Master, Paramahansa Yogananda.
It was in the wake of this experience that I was deeply moved by Yogananda's 'Autobiography of a Yogi', which I heard about from a YouTuber I had just begun listening to in recent weeks, and that book single-handedly did more to shift my consciousness, expand my awareness, and propel my awakening experience forward than did any other single thing following that initial awakening. It appeared, as so much of the information I was finding myself intuitively drawn to, as if the knowledge being shared within those enchanting pages was also somehow and somewhere already stored deep within my own consciousness. For the first time since my childhood I very quickly began to truly believe in miracles and the world of the miraculous once again, the pages of this thrilling spiritual adventure submersing me in a world so absolutely and ridiculously unbelievable to the average western mind that I was somehow quite easily convinced - almost as if I was experiencing the entire story for myself in a way that felt so incredibly and undeniably real and tangible at a heart and soul level that the intellectual mind was utterly powerless against it.
I also began integrating meditation into my life as a major spiritual practice during these months, and became increasingly interested in both alternative healing of all types and the spiritual traditions of the East; including the concepts of Yoga, reincarnation, Oneness, and Self-Realization. I also found myself deeply fascinated with the world of quantum physics where modern science and ancient spiritual traditions seemed to finally be meeting and vindicating one another, along with the placebo effect and role of belief in spontaneous healing, the 'science of miracles', and all things supernatural.
Suddenly, with my ego pushed just far enough out of the way, I was beginning to intellectually understand the 'science' behind the spirituality that I could feel and sense and inwardly knew to be truth; and this 'marriage' between my mind/intellect and heart/intuition was extremely empowering, liberating, and exactly what had been missing from the religion of my childhood that my soul had been so yearning to discover – an intellectual understanding of the spiritual and miraculous, coupled with a healthy balance between this intellectual understanding and the heart-based experiential knowledge gained through direct personal experience.
Beginning of the end of an era...
Just four short months later in May of 2019, which felt like an eternity in terms of the staggering inner growth and change I was going through, I was prompted to make an incredibly sudden and radical change in my life, and lifestyle; that would again forever change the trajectory of my life path in ways I could never have imagined. Ultimately, my choice to make this big change was driven primarily by a deep dissatisfaction with my life circumstances and a desperation to make some meaningful change in my life, along with a yearning to help bring about a more loving and peaceful world in order to help alleviate human suffering, a conviction that sustainable/community living was somehow integral to this end, and a strong intuitive hit that instantaneously illuminated my 'way out' of the dysfunctional cyclic situation I now found myself seemingly trapped within.
I had spent the previous night writing into the whee hours of the morning, trying to make sense of my situation and what to do about it; and that day as I was doing one of the many lawn care jobs which had all become so mundane and meaningless to me at this point, the answer to all of my questions and frustration expressed through my hours of writing the night before suddenly came to me – as if through an instantaneous 'download' that took a few hours for my mind to fully integrate and make sense of intellectually. But by the end of the day, I knew exactly what to do, what I was going to do, and there would be no going back. So my 'plan of escape' was born. By the fall of 2019 I had sold my business, let go of all my personal possessions that couldn't fit into my Subaru, and took a giant leap of faith into the unknown; leaving my home in Montana to embark upon a journey with no planned itinerary or final destination, traveling the country and living the camping lifestyle of an off-grid nomad with only my intuition, that inner voice of truth, and the flow of life as my guide.
The last five months of my former life in Montana flew by; and despite the mad scramble to make the October 1st move-out deadline I had set for myself, these last days of an old era ended up being some of the very best of my many years in this beautiful western Montana valley. I began volunteering at the local food bank, and was eventually inspired to begin handing out food to the homeless on the street at no financial cost to myself, utilizing free bread from the food bank and eggs from my own flock of free range chickens. Meanwhile, chapter by chapter, as time allowed over the late spring and early summer weeks, I made my way through the enchanting tale of Yoganada's life as told through his autobiography; and this, along with my newly adopted practice of meditation, were doing much to prepare me for the journey that lay ahead, and helped to keep me centered in an otherwise crazy hectic time that rushed by in a whirlwind of activity.
Leap of Faith
https://www.bitchute.com/video/kQi5qG0LkGaR/
Before I knew it, that all-important day had arrived, and I moved into my new 'home', spending the first two weeks of my camping adventure in familiar territory as I wrapped up loose ends before embarking on the adventurous journey of a lifetime, making my way south for the winter. The transition into my radically new lifestyle was finally complete, and I was stoked, living it up with my newfound sense of peace and freedom.
I had taken that terrifying initial leap of faith into the unknown, and would now find out just where the flow of life would carry this wandering soul. Determined to discover where Life might guide me and what surprises God might have up his sleeve, with my new border collie pup Dakota as my sole travel companion and the beauty and peace of nature becoming my new home, what an epic journey and enlightening adventure I was in for. As days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, I settled into my new lifestyle as the path that lay ahead began to unfold before me, one day at a time.
An incredible period of self discovery, for months I spent the majority of my time writing, reading, meditating, and hiking/biking with my dog, enjoying the peace and quiet, or at least beauty, of nature. The documentary film I had watched on Netflix in recent months before my big move, Heal: The Most Powerful Healer is Within, had a profound and lasting impact on me; and one of the first pieces of writing I would publish along this new journey of mine was an in-depth post inspired by that film and documenting the incredible healing power of belief that is but a reflection of the innate power to heal oneself that lies within all of humanity.
An entire book could be written detailing and documenting the magical months-long journey of faith and surrender to the flow of life that ensued, the many lessons learned, unique experiences had, and tremendous inner growth and development I experienced throughout this time of unprecedented change - both within myself and my own circumstances as well as the world at large. Just months after taking that major leap of faith, the world as we all knew it was quickly turned upside down by all of the COVID craziness and pandemic pandemonium that largely defined the atmosphere in which I was to be experiencing this journey throughout its duration.
That epic journey, which eventually landed me in New Mexico, continues on some level to this day, though it no longer involves the constant travel of the camping lifestyle at this time. The traveling aspect of the journey largely ended roughly 28 months into my travels, when I was led to a small community in the high desert of the East Mountains of Albuquerque, central NM, where I would spend the next year of my life, and where my inner transformation would continue, and speed up faster than ever, as I sensed myself - and the journey I had been on - drawing closer and closer to some sort of climax. By this point, I had already traveled much of the country I'd never seen before, I had become accustomed to being happy in the most simple and rustic of living conditions, spent a life-changing month at a hippie commune in the Sierra Nevada foothills of central California, had several deeply profound meditation experiences and one unforgettable, incredibly powerful, paradigm-shifting transcendental spiritual experience; and quite possibly most importantly of all, I was forced to face my long-held, deeply rooted fear of becoming homeless, which temporary experience ultimately shifted the trajectory of my journey and led to everything that followed. Meanwhile, overcoming and freeing myself from that particular fear was a major necessity in order to continue down the spiritual path I was on, and of the greatest importance to my spiritual development and life path.
On the 3-year anniversary of that big leap of faith, I was nine months into my stay as a member at the small community in NM I had settled down at for the time being, fighting the deep darkness of COVID-turned-long-Covid - ultimately morphing into an emotionally intense and drama-riddled 3-month healing saga which ended with my departure from an imploding community. My post commemorating this 3-year anniversary was one of the last I published before my writing would go on hold for a solid 15 month hiatus, and it gives a wonderful and relatively detailed overview of my journey up to that point.
After spending a full year living as a member in that now-defunct small community I once called home, I was then, over the course of the next several months, led to my dream property - the gorgeous rural northern NM homestead where I now currently reside. Just over one month into my stay here, my trusty Subaru that had been there for me throughout this entire years-long journey broke down on the side of the highway and was subsequently stolen. I took this as a sign from the Universe that I had finally arrived at this particular journey's 'destination' and that this is where I was meant to be for some time. One epic journey of faith finally appeared to be coming to a close 3.5 years after its humble beginnings on the day I first took that life-changing leap of faith; but a year chalk-full of challenges and a winter of deep darkness spent battling the return of the debilitating chronic dis-ease of long-Covid still stood between myself and the new beginnings that surely lay ahead.
Now, 4.5 years later, and the next phase of my journey seems to be finally kicking off. I have at this point now been through the grueling but liberating process of healing myself from debilitating chronic illness without medication in recent months, and have truly begun to discover and tap into my intuitive gifts like never before, as I stand ready to embark upon the next major chapter in my life journey, which is but a continuation of the same one life and spiritual journey underlying all of the various phases and chapters enfolded within that greater single story of one human soul's tireless search for truth. And this is where that quest for truth, and the spiritual journey initially sparked by that same quest for truth, has brought me.
Now a writer for over 8 years, and currently just working my way back into the world of writing and publishing after many months away; I seek to use my voice to share from my own unique experience what I have learned throughout my life journey, during my deconstruction of fundamentalism, through my spiritual awakening, along my spiritual path, through my ongoing discovery and integration of my intuitive gifts, through my recent physical faith/energy-healing experience, and especially during my latest 4-year adventure that is ongoing to this day even as a new era dawns within my life - with the aim of empowering others who are going through similar struggles, realizations and awakenings; by shining the healing light of love and knowledge into these often dark times of confusion, division, polarization and also great awakening that are currently playing out upon the world stage in so many obvious (and some not-so-obvious) ways.
So very much has changed over these past few years, often drastically, and yet the all-important choice now facing humanity nevertheless remains very much the same. Will we choose love or fear, freedom or slavery, reliance upon external technology to 'save us' or connection with our own internal technology as our means of empowerment?
Thanks for reading, and welcome to this collective human journey out of the darkness that has long ruled the earth and into the light of the New Age that is now dawning within the consciousness of mankind.