Looking back now, my way to “A TRAINING COURSE in Miracles” probably all started in 1969 when I accepted Jesus my own Lord and Savior, consuming the Campus Crusade for Christ. However, after joining a Christian brotherhood of aspiring monks, where I was daily quizzed on what many Bible verses I had memorized and could recite verbatim, I was totally confused by it all. Their version of reality just didn’t sit well with me. I felt such as a parrot of Bible verses, that I didn’t even begin to understand, or the town crier that nobody wanted to hear. Jesus would show me more, a lot more.
As divine synchronicity could have it, I ingested a hallucinogen that resulted in a near death experience the day after Christmas, 1970. When I was in the black void, with only the consciousness that “I’M”, George Harrison’s song My Sweet Lord began playing. That was my voice singing to God, not George’s! Soon a brilliant white light began appearing out of the darkness, as my soul sang “I really want to see you Lord”. Then somebody began to emerge out from the light. This Holy One oscillated between masculine and feminine.
As I’d been praying to Jesus, I thought it might be him, but without a beard. I began crying from the depths of my soul, because the Holy One communicated telepathically into my heart. I knew this Being to be nothing but pure love. Then it was over. I was shot back to my body, hearing what to a fresh song telling me “it’s been a long time coming, it will likely be a long time gone.” How true that is.
A year later, I saw the cover of Autobiography of a Yogi. It had been Paramahansa Yogananda who had come to me! Next came meeting Baba Ram Dass, who confirmed that I wasn’t crazy and stated that Yogananda had appeared to many young spiritual seekers on drugs. He also autographed my copy of Be Here Now. My next decade was spent as 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 for me to understand Jesus and Christianity better. Yogananda also showed me the essential truth behind the oneness of most religions.
And he brought me to Babaji, the Mahavatar who sent him to America back the 1920s. Ever since I heard the name Babaji, I knew I knew Him. He and Jesus interact, behind the scenes, in the cosmic scheme of things. And Babaji was to function as next step in my own ongoing spiritual evolution. However, I did not know at this stage he had supposedly manifested a body again and was surviving in the tiny village of Haidakhan, in northern India. That could come later, together with the mystery and myth of this current manifestation.
After hearing Bhagavan Das sing, I purchased a dotara and began chanting mantras to God daily. This simple, ancient two- stringed instrument is easy to play and lets one follow the drone sound into silence. At this time, I purchased my own place in the woods and met a man 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 this new Babaji was the same entity Yogananda wrote about. Yes, one and exactly the same but peoples egos still question His true identity. Babaji’s new Kriya yoga was the path of truth, simplicity and love while performing karma yoga- work – and keeping one’s mind on God, through repetition of the ancient mantra Om Namaha Shivaya.
Babaji stated that this mantra alone was more powerful than a thousand atomic bombs and His 1-800 number. I began at this time seriously doing japa, or the repetition of the mantra on 108 rudraksha beads, to obtain this vibration into my sub consciousness. I also learned many ways to chant it on my dotara. With all of this going on, I purchased “A Course in Miracles” and began the daily lessons immediately. I tried to make sense of the written text but got nowhere; each sentence bogged me down and had to be re-read over too many times to assimilate. I was just too young, I told myself. I was thirty-three. I’d deal with this Text later, someday, maybe.
Then after a year to be married, our house burns down- a real karmic fire ceremony. In the ashes, untouched by the fire, was an image of Babaji and His cymbals from Haidakhan. Discuss miracles! Next, was the unexpected news that people have a baby coming, after losing everything? My marriage began to dissolve quickly after I fell twenty feet off a roof, breaking my own body in twelve places. Surviving death, I was put back into college for just two years to be retrained, while my ex-wife and son left for the Southwest. This is when all of my abandonment issues resulted in extreme drinking alone. After graduation, I left for India to see Babaji’s ashram, as He previously already left His physical body again, also to pray for help with my entire life in probably the most spiritual country on earth.
I attended the 1995 Kumbha Mela festival with ten million others and lo and behold, who should appear? It had been Babaji, asking me easily was having fun. Yes, but I couldn’t talk with answer Him! HE THEN disappeared back to the crowd, leaving me impressed. Returning state side, I finished up following my ex- wife and son to the Southwest, where my next thing was peyote meetings with the Native Americans for quite some time to come. Everything I’d read and studied in the Course was evident on the medicine inside that tipi. God Is.
I learned more in a single night than I had in years of studying metaphysical books. But I didn’t practice all I’d learned and 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 ended up in prison for 2 2.5 years on an aggravated DUI, instead of dead, where I stumbled upon the Courses’ Manual for Teachers in our library. Soon, I had the complete book sent in free to prisoners and was reintroduced to Jesus again, with all the current time I had a need to study every word of this lengthy text.
After twenty years, I have to be old enough to get it now! With time and with the help of the Course, I was finally in a position to forgive myself for the bizarre life my ego had constructed. I did so the daily lessons again, trying to start to see the face of Christ within each inmate. That has been no easy one. But I left prison a changed, free sober man, much better for the experience sufficient reason for a first draft book about it all under my belt. Today, I have eight years of sobriety under my belt and my book Still Singing, Somehow won the fall Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. This can be a very condensed version of my story- an odyssey of one soul’s karma.