I went through a period where I moved around a lot. I mean, I guess less of a period and more of a lifetime. Anyway, when I was in my early 20s going through this intense spiritual work, nothing else was important to me. So I moved wherever I thought I could focus the most on it. This was also a period of time when the mundane world and my spiritual world were at odds. I felt like the mundane world was a huge distraction from my spiritual practice and was looking for a way for the two to coexist. The problem of course was my age. Not many people wanted to seek spiritual advice from someone that wasn’t old enough to buy beer. So this time was real struggle for me.
I ended up going to Evanston, Illinois right outside of Chicago to live with my astral traveling buddy Terri and her family. I camped out in a closet in their Chicago style apartment. I tried to resolve these conflicts between my spiritual world and mundane world very unsuccessfully. I ended up clashing very hard with her husband. There were many factors at work here. I wasn’t contributing financially to the house, he was very jealous of the spiritual connection that I had with Terri. So it reached the point that I had to leave.
I had just returned back from a visit at Camp Chesterfield in which I was told there was a man in Arizona that I may want to study with. So when everything came to a head in Illinois, I decided to go out west and see what I could learn.
The trip to Arizona was eventful, I had a guy snatch my money in Pittsburgh. So I arrived in Flagstaff completely broke, with only a name of a man I had never met. I guess I should have been afraid or even concerned, but I wasn’t, in those days I was every bit the archetypal fool. Trusting in the journey and the universe absolutely.
In the bus station in Flagstaff I met German kid named Alex. We decided to travel for a bit together. If it wasn’t for Alex, I would have starved for sure. He was the son of a German politician who was running for office. His dad paid for him to come to America during the election. Alex with his messy long black hair and leather punk clothes was not the image his dad wanted around him, so Alex got to travel on his dad’s tab.
Me and Alex arrived in Sedona at night. A hippy told us we could sleep in his front yard so the cops wouldn’t harass us. So that is what we did. We kicked back under the Arizona stars, two lost souls in a land of strangers. The next day we walked around the town, Alex took pictures of everything. We talked about everything, he tried to convince me to go on to Santa Fe with him, but I told him I had to stay and find this guy to study with. So he agreed to stay a couple of days with me and check out Sedona.
That day we met a guy named Jeff at a health food restaurant called “Food Among the Flowers”. He said he had a camp we could stay in and if we wanted to wait around till his shift ended, he knew a place we could shower. So we did just that, stowed our stuff behind some bushes and walked around until Jeff got off work. We then all took showers at this girls apartment and went to Jeff’s camp.
On top of a mesa in the red rock mountains sleeping on a piece of plastic and an Indian blanket was my life for a week or so. Alex only stayed a couple of days and moved on. Jeff was making plans to move on, so I set out to find what I was looking for. I found a metaphysical healing chapel that was just getting itself together and befriended the people running it. They hadn’t heard of the guy I was looking for but did tell me that I should come to the open house they were having and maybe I could make some connections there. The woman that owned the center looked at me the same way the Chesterfield folks did and felt like I was there for a purpose. Because of this she really went out of her way to help me. I was very grateful.
The day came for the open house so I wanted to clean the dust off of me and be presentable. I took my olive oil soap down to the river and took a cold bath in the mountain waters. Put on my least wrinkled, cleanest clothes and popped in. That is when I met Ken who took an interest in me and offered me a place to stay. He said that he and his partner David had just moved there and needed someone to help them with yard work and such. So a deal was struck for a place to stay in exchange for me working around the house.
Ken and David were both into metaphysics and I had a couple of Channeling sessions with them both. Ken was a heavy drinker however, so the house was a bit crazy at times. Collectively they knew a lot of amazing people in the spiritual community, so I was able to learn a great deal while I was there. In most cases their friends looked at me as a kid, which at times was frustrating, however in retrospect, I think it allowed me to just observe and absorb all the information.
The dynamic of the household may need some explaining. For the first week it was just me and Ken there. He told me that him and David were not a couple and had made certain advances toward me. Now when David returned, it was obvious that he was the money of the house and felt for sure that he and Ken were a couple. This put me in a very odd position, especially because as time progressed I really liked David much more than Ken. Not in a romantic way, but in general. I really didn't like the fact that Ken was obviously using him. It made my place in the house very strange, sometimes when David was in town Ken would be downright mean to me, then make advances toward me and others when David was out of town. I felt very conflicted but dared not say a word because to be honest, I had a pretty sweet place to stay and if that was all I had to put up with, it was worth it.
My connection to the Healing Center remained, in fact, I began to help them paint in exchange for taking classes there, always seeking ways to expand my education. As time went on I ended up teaching some of the techniques I had learned both at Chesterfield and through channeling. It was pretty exciting to be teaching a class at such a young age. Teaching became part of my life from that moment on, if I have any gift at all, I think the ability to transmit information would be it.
I also met a friend of David's named Cindy, who was quite a famous Channel at the time, we seemed to hit it off easily. We would sit up for hours talking and spent many days on top of the mountains, meditating and Channeling. It was the only time I ever channeled with someone else. The two beings communicating to each other through us. It was a very strange experience, one that although cool, not very helpful since we were both in trance, so no one was conscious to relay the conversation. It seemed more healing than anything else. It was nice to be taken serious by someone so well known. I learned a great deal from her about existing in this world while communicating with others. It didn't quite sink in for some time, but it was good information nonetheless.
Other notable people that I had the good fortune of meeting and learning from while there was a herbalist that had developed a form of alchemy that reduced herbs down to their most powerful yet simplest state. He would then put these in cubes that only needed to be placed near the body. It was a strange form of vibration healing. His theory was that by reducing the herbs down to a simple vibration he could intensify that vibration. By doing this he felt that it would be a stronger vibration than the one created by an illness. This was the first time I had heard the theory of harmonics and waves being put to use in healing. Those notions would go on to influence me greatly in my understanding of many metaphysical processes.
I also met a female doctor that worked with various forms of chiropractic and energy healing. She owned a big piece of land that had a stream running through it. I have fond memories of laying in this creek while the cold rushing water from the mountains washed over my skin. While playing in the water we would discuss the way electromagnetic energy traveled through the spine and how by looking for blocks there, you could fix a lot of chronic conditions. This also would go on to influence my healing practice a great deal.
Most of these conversations were happening around me, only a few were with me. I was viewed like I said as a kid, and little did I know at the time that Ken had a reputation as well, so I could only imagine what they thought I was doing there. I am glad for being able to absorb such amazing information and techniques. It was perfect timing for me, I was like a sponge in those days absorbing all that was around me.
Personally I was going through some pretty intense stuff. I was playing around with Cabalistic workings with their roots in the Western Occult traditions. In other words I was doing crazy rituals in my room trying to access higher energies. For those familiar with this kind of study I was performing the Middle Pillar exercise, the Flaming Sword exercise, and I think I was doing a form of the LVX exercise as well. This along with my ongoing Tree of Life Path Working meditations. I won't get into what all that is, if you're interested there are plenty of good books on these subjects. Needless to say I was opening up a lot of energy at the time so all these conversations around me were being put into this context.
All this energy flying around also made for some strange experiences. First my psychic senses were very heightened, the energy of the mountains themselves felt like too much at times. The people there were all about “Vortex” spots and such. To me the whole place felt like a vortex. I questioned my sanity on several occasions. I began to also have strange spontaneous dreams. What I mean by that is, I would be laying down or reading and would pass out, have a crazy vision of some kind only to wake a few hours later. The strangest one happened one day when I went onto the roof to lay in the Sun. I would do this from time to time, mainly because were we lived I could get naked up there and it felt great to be naked in the Sun. Anyone that knows me knows I love to be naked! So I was up there, I laid down and boom. I was standing on a cliff with caves along its ridge. These strange luminescent beings are handing me large glowing orbs of different colors. I am taking them and putting them in an ornate trunk. As I am doing so I am receiving information from each one of the orbs. Like a psychic download or transmission. Nothing was strange about this as far as dreams go. I mean I was playing with the Tree of Life that is composed of different color orbs, each orb does have certain qualities and the whole thing involves calling upon different celestial beings, like angels and such. So the dream or vision or experience wasn't all that strange. The strange part was when I woke up it was several hours later, and I wasn't sunburned, in fact I looked the same. Even stranger, when I came down Ken asked where I was because he had gone up to get me for dinner and I wasn't up there. To this day I chalk that experience up as close encounter of the dang weird kind.
I was having these kinds of experiences more and more frequently. I wasn't sure half the time if what I was seeing was what everyone else was seeing our not. Although I felt more in touch than ever, I also felt more crazy than ever. My everyday life was like a strange supernatural movie. Let me give you another example of how my life seemed to be overlapping this other world. I was taking a bath back in David and Ken's room. They had a huge Jacuzzi style tub that they let me use whenever I wanted to. I was soaking in it, had my eyes closed and again felt things shift. So I opened my eyes wondering what was gonna happen this time. When I opened them my Great Grandmother was standing in front of me. She said she just wanted to say goodbye. I told her I loved her and she smiled and faded away. I believe it was that very night I got the news that she had passed. This was important to me, because this meant I wasn't crazy, but that I was walking in two if not more worlds at the same time. So it just felt crazy.
My time in Arizona ended badly, but perfectly. I really think if I would have stayed any longer I would have truly lost my mind. I was opening up too quickly, those mountains acted like huge amplifiers for me. I think that is why I needed to go and that is also why I needed to leave. Not to get into any crazy details, David found out about Ken's affairs, Ken threw me under the bus and David asked me to leave. For the record I wasn't involved with Ken, and at that point could hardly stand to be around him. He did continue his advances when David wasn't around, so I tried not to be around either. I'm not sure how I got dragged into what was going on between them, but it got me to move on and that much I needed.
I ended up walking to Scottsdale to find the original person I went there to study with. After looking at two campgrounds I found them. No one was home so I crawled inside their car like a vagrant and fell asleep.
I was awoke by a couple of people talking outside the car and looked up to find them looking at me. Wondering no doubt who I was and why I was asleep in their car. I pulled myself together and then explained that I had traveled from Indiana to meet them. The woman responded that I wanted her husband who wasn't in town. She invited me in however and fed me some soup. She then asked the man with her if he would put me up for the night. He agreed and I went home with him back into Sedona. He ended up being a not very nice guy, yet an obvious manifestation of my repressed sexuality and so I called my Mom in tears asking for money to get the hell out of there. I was soon on a bus back East.
It didn't take long for me to begin to feel sane again and although I believe I truly came close to losing my mind out there. I also believe it was what I needed to be able to endure the more and more subtle energies that I would later tap into. It was like my circuits needed to be blown open in order to let more currents through. This was also the beginning of my magickal explorations.
This is a good time to talk a bit about what I mean when I talk about magick and mysticism since this was the time of my life when these were very important factors in my life.
Magick in my opinion is the process of creating change both internally and externally through focusing the mind, usually through the use of ritualized actions and symbolic gestures. Furthermore coupling these actions and gestures with items that represent states of consciousness, desired results or other outcomes we symbolically create and link the actions to the intentions. This works because the mind is very powerful, but usually scattered. When we can manage to focus the mind on a single idea for even an instance great things are possible. So the ritual and symbols are a means to focus the mind on a single idea or intention. In my case I used magick to awaken understanding or awareness along a spiritual lines, a form of internal alchemy or transmutation.
Now, mysticism is a more passive form of the same thing. The mind is focused through meditation, trance, shamanic journeying or other means on a single object. Depending on the form of mysticism this can be used to observe states of consciousness, gain insight, focus the mind or access specific mental abilities.
So this is what I am talking about in a nutshell, when I begin talking about vibration, frequency, harmonics and energy, I am referring to both wave theory and brain chemistry. Meaning, in wave theory the strongest wave will harmonize weaker wave forms to it in most cases. Like playing a drum in a room with a piano, the strings of the piano will begin to vibrate to the rhythm. In magick a lot of times we are trying to create a vibration that would cause us to harmonize to other frequencies. This affects brain chemistry in ways that we are only beginning to understand. What we do know from research done on meditation practitioners is that we can actually cause physical changes in the way the brain is wired through such practices. This does in fact change the way we perceive and experience reality and as such how we process information and react to it.
So for me magick is a very scientific thing that needs to be explored, experienced and when possible documented. I wanted to make a note about that here so I don’t lose any of you who aren’t down with us mystic types. So now on with the show.
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