In hindsight now, my route to “A Course in Miracles” probably all began in 1969 when I accepted Jesus the Lord and Savior, intoxicated by the Campus Crusade for Christ. However, after joining a Christian brotherhood of aspiring monks, where I used to be daily quizzed about how many Bible verses I needed memorized and can recite verbatim, I had been totally confused along with it all. Their form of reality just didn’t sit well with me at night. I felt being a parrot of The bible, which i didn’t even start to understand, or the town crier that nobody wanted to hear. Jesus would show me more, a lot more.
As divine synchronicity might say, I ingested a hallucinogen that triggered a near death experience the next day Christmas, 1970. When I was in the black void, with the consciousness that “I Am”, George Harrison’s song My Sweet Lord began playing. That was my voice singing to God, not George’s! Soon an excellent white light began coming from the darkness, as my soul sang “I actually want to view you Lord”. Then somebody did start to emerge out of your light. This Holy One oscillated between masculine and feminine. As I seemed to be praying to Jesus, I figured it may be him, but without a beard. I began crying through the depths of my soul, because Holy One communicated telepathically into my heart. I knew this Being being nothing but pure love. It was over. I used to be shot back in my body system, hearing the words to an alternative song saying “it’s been a very long time coming, it will be quite a while gone.” How correct that has become.
Annually later, I saw the coverage of Autobiography of the Yogi. It absolutely was Paramahansa Yogananda who’d arrived at me! Next came meeting Baba Ram Dass, who confirmed that we wasn’t crazy and mentioned that Yogananda had appeared to many young spiritual seekers on drugs. Actually is well liked autographed my copy of Be Here Now. My next decade was spent becoming an aspiring yogi and practicing Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship lessons and exercises, chanting, meditating and receiving initiation into Kriya yoga. Yogananda’s path and linage of gurus brought the much needed clarity will understand Jesus and Christianity better. Yogananda also showed me the fundamental truth behind the oneness of religions. And he brought me to Babaji, the Mahavatar who sent him to America during the 1920s. From the time I heard the name Babaji, I knew I knew Him. He and Jesus come together, behind the scenes, inside the cosmic general scheme of things. And Babaji would have been to function as the second step inside my ongoing spiritual evolution. However, I didn’t know at this stage that He had supposedly manifested a shape again and it was surviving in the small village of Haidakhan, in northern India. That might come later, along with the mystery and myth of this current manifestation.
After hearing Bhagavan Das sing, I bought a dotara and commenced chanting mantras to God daily. This easy, ancient two- stringed instrument is simple to experience and lets one continue with the drone sound into silence. At this time, I bought my very own place in the woods and met a male who’d lived with Babaji. He conducted a Vedic fire ceremony that Babaji had taught him to initiate my new abode. I questioned and grilled him repeatedly, asking if it new Babaji was precisely the same entity Yogananda has written about. Yes, the same but peoples egos still question His true identity. Babaji’s new Kriya yoga was the road of truth, simplicity and love while performing karma yoga- work – and keeping one’s mind on God, through repetition of the original mantra Om Namaha Shivaya. Babaji stated that this mantra alone was more robust when compared to a thousand atomic bombs with his fantastic 1-800 number. I started now seriously doing japa, or even the repeating the mantra on 108 rudraksha beads, to have this vibration into my sub consciousness. I also learned a number of ways to chant it on my small dotara. With all of this taking place, I purchased “A Course in Miracles” and commenced the daily lessons immediately. I attempted to make a feeling of the writing but got nowhere; each sentence bogged me down and had to get re-read over way too many times to assimilate. I was just too young, I told myself. I used to be thirty-three. I’d take care of this Text later, someday, maybe.
Then after having a year to be married, the house burns down- an actual karmic fire ceremony. Inside the ashes, untouched with the fire, was a picture of Babaji and the cymbals from Haidakhan. Speak about miracles! Next, was the unexpected news we have your baby coming, after losing everything? My marriage started to dissolve quickly while i fell twenty feet off a roof, breaking myself in twelve places. Surviving death, I became put into college for just two years to be retrained, while my ex-wife and son left for the Southwest. This is when our abandonment issues resulted in extreme drinking alone. After graduation, I left for India to determine Babaji’s ashram, while he had already left His physical body again, and also to pray for benefit my entire life in the most spiritual country in the world. I attended the 1995 Kumbha Mela festival with tens of millions of others and lo and behold, who should appear? It had been Babaji, asking me if I was having a good time. Yes, however i couldn’t talk to answer Him! Create disappeared back into the crowd, leaving me blown away. Returning state side, I ended up following my ex- wife and son for the Southwest, where my next step was peyote meetings using the Native Americans for many years to come. Everything I’d read and studied inside the Course was evident around the medicine inside that tipi. God Is. I learned more in a single night than I’d in a long time of studying metaphysical books. However didn’t practice all I’d learned and that i let my depressed ego, alcohol and abandonment issues take me closer to death’s very door. However, as fate, karma and prayers would have it, I finished up in prison for 2.Five years on an aggravated DUI, as opposed to dead, where I ran across the Courses’ Manual for Teachers in your library. Soon, I had your entire book submitted liberal to prisoners and was reintroduced to Jesus again, with the time I needed to analyze every word of the lengthy text. After twenty years, I need to be old enough to have it now! In time along with the the assistance of the Course, I had been finally in a position to forgive myself for your bizarre life my ego had constructed. Used to do the daily lessons again, looking to understand the face of Christ within each inmate. That’s no easy one. On the other hand left prison a changed, free sober man, greater for that experience along with an initial draft book regarding it all under my belt. Today, We’ve eight many years of sobriety under my belt and my book Still Singing, Somehow won the autumn Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. This is a very condensed type of my story- an odyssey of just one soul’s karma.
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