God not only heard the prayer of a "sinner" like me, but He answered in no uncertain terms. In response to my prayer, and my request to help God (instead of the other way around) the Light of God enfolded me with such Love and a loving caress that the words come to mind: " and I will pour out a blessing upon them that they will not be able to contain" . Was I somehow unique, a freak of nature? It seemed so natural and yet so unnatural as this sort of thing had never happened to me before. Was this what it was like for St. Paul when Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and blinded his eyes with the Light of his magnificence? There were certainly similarities but there were differences also. God is no respecter of persons and He has no favorite sons. It is written in scripture that God has written his laws in our inward parts. I felt a quickening within me that there are no words to describe. Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." What were God's plans for me now? I had certainly "asked for it".
There are parts of us that lay dormant, like a woman when she conceives a child, that become quickened when the occasion arises. Parts of the woman that were dormant become quickened at conception and progress throughout pregnancy. A muscle that she barely knew she had forms a womb to nourish and protect the child developing within her. When it is time for the child to come into the world, that muscle takes over to expel the child from the womb. Previously she had no knowledge of that muscle or how to use it but it was there and it, and her body, "knew" what to do. It is a miracle and a process of nature that we sometimes take for granted, and that some have come to despise. Looking back, with years of experience behind me, the only way that I can describe what happened to me with the Light of God is to say that Christ was quickened in me. Christ in me would know what to do. I had to trust the process. It was not all revealed at once, it would be revealed over time. I had to follow the mandate in Luke 11:9 "And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."
I had asked God to show me how to help Him solve the problems of the world. This was no time to become a hermit or to seek a cloistered life. It was necessary for me to remain engaged with the world through outer work while at the same time performing the inner spiritual work to liberate a planet and a people. I tried to follow the principles set forth by Christ and Buddha in seeking Right Livelihood, and multiplying my skills and talents. I needed to stay in school and get my degree.
In all of my years in school when asked the question: "what do you want to do in life, what profession, what career?'; I had no answer. I was in college as a Business major because I wanted to learn how to run a business; I did not know which one or what it would involve. I had been a Drill Instructor, now I was a Computer Operator on IBM 360 Series computers (you find these in Computer Museums now). Now I had new decisions to make and I needed to understand what had happened to me and what I was supposed to do. Using the analogy of the pregnant woman, I needed to understand what the process was all about.
I had a knowing within me that I would not find the answer in orthodoxy alone. Nevertheless, I started taking Religious Studies courses as electives. One of the courses was squeezed into an unusual two month winter break. It was taught by a man from India and the subject was Houston Smith's book "The Religions of Man" published by Mentor Books. We were required to visit a Church, Synagogue or Temple that was different from what we normally attended. When I was in High School I babysat for a young boy. "Out of the blue", his mother contacted me and invited me to attend his Bar Mitzvah which I was most happy to do. In the hills above Hollywood, I visited the Vedanta Society and experienced a Hindu ceremony.
Our University also had an "Experimental College". Anyone could obtain classroom space for free and present a lecture or a course on any topic. I attended as many different lectures and courses as I could. One lecture was given by Shafica Karagulla, a medical doctor and psychiatrist, on her book on"Higher Sense Perception, HSP" entitled Breakthrough to Creativity.
After the lecture we had a question and answer session. People were pressing all around her asking questions rapid fire. I wanted to know if it were possible for people to develop higher faculties. I could not get the question asked but held it strongly in my mind. Suddenly she turned to me and answered the question in the negative. Then she paused, stunned, because she realized what had just happened. She knew that she had received my question telepathically.
The Light had sensitized or activated certain spiritual faculties within me and I was experimenting. I was able to "read" or sense things in people. I was able to contact souls who had passed from the "physical" screen of life and who were now on the other side of the veil. A mother and daughter, both of their names were Mary, wanted me to contact their husband/father to tell him how sorry they were for how they had treated him. They had me go into the school library to a section I had never been to before, and take a certain book off of a certain shelf, and turn to a certain page, and read a certain entry. It was kind of a Who's Who book. I called the phone number listed in the book and got a nurse. I explained why I was calling and who I wanted to talk to. She declined to let me speak to the man who was now very old and frail. I contacted other "departed souls" and found that for the most part they were very confused, disoriented, and not very spiritually developed. I later learned why they are confused and why it is not a good idea to "channel" spirits or to participate with others in such activities. I will explain more about this in later entries.
The Ascended Masters sponsored the Spritualist Movement of the 1800's to let people know that there is life after death. I proved that there is life after death for myself by contacting those whose bodies had "died" but their souls were very much alive. Because of this I could understand people who had "near death" experiences and could validate their stories for myself. Some of the more interesting and well known cases are those of Danion Brinkley, Mellen Thomas Benedict and Betty Edie.
Another Experimental College course that I took was on Self Hypnosis. Again, I had to learn the hard way that any form of hypnosis is dangerous to the soul as it violates certain protections set in place. Dr. Helen Wambach wrote a book entitled "Life Before Life" and the book "Mass Dreams of the Future" was based on her work. She originally set out to debunk the idea of reincarnation but instead scientifically proved that it was real. There is life after death and there is life before birth; the life of the soul is a continuum. To Dr. Wambach's credit, she had the "sense" to ask permission of the person's Higher Self before revealing details of past lives under hypnosis.
I had a voracious appetite and "need to know" for all things spiritual. I read many books and talked to many people. The least helpful people turned out to be ministers in Christian Churches. They were like blind leaders of the blind. They could quote chapter and verse but they had no understanding of the words they were quoting. In my last semester in college I had a Religious Studies course on the Bible. When I did an exegesis of a biblical passage, the Holy Spirit revealed things that astounded my professor and fellow classmates. There was a two week seminar at a local Junior College on religious leaders and spiritual communities from around the world. I ditched my regular college classes and attended the seminar. Remember, this was my last semester in college and I going to graduate in June. It was hard to maintain an interest in the subject of "business", it seemed so mundane and unimportant.
For a long time now I kind of felt like "The Lone Ranger". I did not meet anyone else like me or who knew what I knew about God or Spirituality. This also took a toll on my wife. She had filed for divorce a year earlier. I left her lawyers office in Pasadena, CA sad and depressed about losing my family. My son was four years old and my daughter was two and a half. I headed for the freeway. I saw a hitchhiker and decided to take him wherever he wanted to go. He wanted to go to San Francisco. This was 1974, during the Carter Administration, and we were on a kind of gas rationing system based on odd or even numbers on our license plates. On the road I talked about my spiritual experiences and books I had read. It turns out that the young man was on his way to Canada to be with people who were experimenting with sleep deprivation as a kind of spiritual experience and he wanted to stop off at his home first. He invited me to come with him. We slept on the side of the road that night and I took him home the next day. While he was visiting his family, I visited the graveyard across the street. I got the sense that if I went with him I would be running away from my destiny. I returned to Los Angeles, somehow able to get gas even though I had the wrong license plate number for that day.
Now it was a year later and my wife and I had to appear before a magistrate for the Final Dissolution of Marriage. The appointment was on a Tuesday during Easter Vacation. I had seen a poster on the bulletin board in the hall by my classroom. It announced another seminar or Conference at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that was to take place on Wednesday, the day after the Final Dissolution of Marriage meeting on Tuesday . Actually there were two posters. The first one had a picture by Dore of Angels encircling a cross and it said that the conference would be on angels, auras and other topics of interest to me. Because of the pending divorce I procrastinated registering for the Conference. The second poster convinced me that I just had to attend. It was a picture of a woman standing on top of Pikes Peak and flashing the Victory fingers. At the meeting on Tuesday I felt as if my life had ended. On Wednesday I felt as if my life was just beginning; I had found what I had been searching for over the past two years.
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