It was either 1974 or 1975. It was a warm Michigan summer evening. The windows in my pickup were down because in Michigan there is little need for air conditioning in vehicles. I was driving on highway U.S. 127 coming from Mid-Michigan Community College where I had finished teaching a painting and drawing class. It was close to sunset. There is a fairly long hill by Michigan standards coming south from the campus. It begins in a pine forest and ends at fields of new mown hay. As I got close to the bottom of the grade, the trees gave way to two fairly large fields on either side, both left and right. There it was. The moon was rising about fifteen degrees above the horizon to my left, and the sun was setting about fifteen degrees above the horizon to my right.
Instantaneously I could feel a tremendous amount of energy
passing through my head, and I began to chant. It was as if I had the awareness
of everything all at once as I chanted on. I was truly one with universal
consciousness. It was as though I knew everything known, and it was there all
at once. This went on for about twenty minutes of a thirty-minute drive to my
home in Rosebush Michigan. During the twenty minutes I did not recall driving
and my avatar was on automatic pilot. My I-AM was engaged in a knowledge
download. The chant was melodious. I was singing rather than simply speaking. I
know that I was fully engulfed in an amazing peace that really defies
explanation. The only thing I remember from the experience was the last line of
the chant and I said, “and to the lion, killing isn’t wrong.” That’s where it
ended. The thing that I remember most during this experience; I was filled with
an amazing peace, but I can absolutely not remember any of the chant except the
last line.
I do believe however, that in that dump of spiritual info, I
received all of the words of knowledge and all of the spiritual insight that I
have given over the years. I have a strong intuition and there are times when I
know things about people that I really have no way of knowing, and when I have
the courage to share it… it always proves to be right on and just what the
individual needed to hear at the time. Since that time I have been driven to
understand the nature of reality and the purpose to which this material world
exists.
I believe as Nikola Tesla did that, we are receivers from
the mind at large. I think I prefer that term “mind at large: though little
known and only by those who have read Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception.”
It is interesting to me how synchronicity works because a couple of years before
that experience, while taking a graduate painting course at Central Michigan
University, my instructor assigned us to read that book as part of painting
class. At roughly the same time I was introduced to Fritjof Capra’s “The Tao of
Physics” and another friend suggested I read Carlos Castaneda’s novels. I began
with “A Separate Reality,” moved on with “Journey to Ixtlan” and kept on from there.
I also began to have people with clairvoyant abilities come into my life. I
understood that the world that I was in was definitely shaped by consciousness
or what one could call spirit. It
was easy for me to accept the reality that somehow spirit, or consciousness was
underlying reality.
While I had
never heard the word panpsychism nor was familiar with any of the philosophers
that held that view of reality, it was definitely my view even if I did not
know the term. It would be many years before I would come to study Hermetics or
read the Tao, but the foundation was laid in this experience. It was also in
this time period, later that winter, that I would experience other phenomena on
that drive. I began to see bright lights in the sky above my home as I was
driving. This would be during this thirty-minute drive. It was like they were
parked right over my house. I would see them in the direction of where I lived
and as I got closer and closer to home it was obvious that they were there, in
the sky. I remember one evening in particular. I saw the light there, and when
I got home, my wife’s aunt was babysitting our children. I ran in the house to
have her come out and look at it. When she came out, I swear it turned into a plane
with a blinking light and moved on. She must have thought I was crazy. I swear,
before I went in the house it was just a bright light, white in color and
hovering up in the sky and it actually blew my mind that it turned into an
ordinary plane.
I remember
another evening in the cold Michigan winter. It was a crisp evening with a full
moon shining down on the shivering cold. I looked up at it and I had a sense
come over me that I was not from here. I was in reality from somewhere out
there. It was an overpowering awareness and then it passed. So yes, most
definitely I am a believer in paranormal anomalies. For good reason. I am an
experiencer of many paranormal circumstances over the years. So numerous that
it would take a book to retell them all. Do I realize that we need to stay
grounded and accomplish things in the material world for our benefit? Yes, of
course. But, I likewise realize that there is much more to reality than simply
meets the eye, and I believe that consciousness is on an upward spiral trajectory
with a purpose of enlightenment as one goal.