“The root of all misery is duality. There is no other remedy for this disease except the realization that objects of experience are unreal and that all there is is the one, pure consciousness and bliss.” 

                                                               ~ Ashtavkara, Ancient East Indian Sage

It’s 4 a.m. in San Francisco.  I am at a dingy diner next to the dingy motel near the Presidio where I’ve stayed the last four nights. 

After enduring  a long “Dark Night of the Soul”,  I’m drinking dishwater coffee, sitting in a booth with worn vinyl benches. The waitress, face haggard, cleans the booth across from mine with a dull bar rag. The whole place is the color of the rag.

I am wide awake, sleep having become impossible, my mind busy transfiguring into something known only in the realm of Light.  

In place of sleep, I was guided to read the entirety of “Self Realization-The Knowledge of the Absolute”- a slim volume that Al Drucker had given to me the day before. It’s verses are gleaned from the teachings of Astavakra, an ancient Vedic sage. 

 After all that had transpired in my most recent history, this profoundly esoteric, metaphysical series of illuminations made perfect sense to me. As I read through the night, the words did not reach me so much as unfold me.

I am aware that I am crossing into a finer world, a higher plane. This reading of this book at this moment, elucidates the hidden order within the weave of experiences and spiritual forces acting upon me. A transfiguration is occurring and the overnight reading has catalyzed, stirred something, something Ancient, once known but forgotten.

With my now empty cup in my hand, swirling the grounds as if they too will reveal something, I patiently wait for the shuttle from my motel to the airport, feeling a certain gloom—a heaviness about me. I sit with it, though, unworried, as I can feel the presence of holiness surrounding me.

Something in me knows this isn’t despair but its chrysalis.

As we ride toward SFX, stopping for each new passenger, something begins to lift. With each person who boards, I feel myself merging a little more — recognizing them not as strangers, but as fellow light beings. By the time we reach the terminal, the last trace of heaviness is gone. I grab my bag, step into the airport, and find myself smiling — connected to everything and everyone.

It’s now about six in the morning. As I stand in line to check in for my flight home, a wave of happy anticipation rises: Whatever’s coming, it’s going to be very, very good.

I listen to the quiet hum of a regional airport. I gaze around at the sleepy, waiting people, all while feeling this lightness of being.

At that exact moment, a rooster crows.

Wait — a rooster? Inside the San Francisco Airport? Impossible, and yet there it is. I know instantly that this boisterous crowing is meant for me. And just so I wouldn’t miss the point, a gospel chorus bursts alive in my inner ear:
“In that great gettin’ up mornin’, fare thee well, fare thee well…”

It’s all a message — the sound, the song, the timing — a cinematic reflection of my inner state. The missive is clear: You’re waking up.

I’ve become accustomed to this kind of wild, perfectly sensible synchronicity that marks every illuminated happening. It’s an intimate, ongoing communication between Spirit and mind that is at once fun, holy, hilarious, blissful, serious, and deeply personal. Everything speaks of God, all at once — through music, “other” people, street signs, random events, and especially through the still, certain Voice I hear clearly within.

This Voice is not ordinary thought, not the chatter of the mind. It has a different texture — clear, pure, immediate. It speaks only of Spirit, only in the present, and only to guide or instruct. In this state of corrected perception, it has become ever-present.

I find my seat on the plane and am soon joined by an older couple. The man seems to long for the window seat where I’m sitting, but before he can speak, his wife taps his arm and says sharply,
“No, George. This is your seat.” She points to the middle one.

He, somewhat grumpily, sits. I can clearly sense that he wants the window seat, and in fact, his arm is touching my leg. I make no move to break the contact, and he seems to want his arm next to my leg…I sense, on both our parts, to allow this contact, as it seems necessary to the maneuver the “Light of me” is about to perform.

Then something curious begins. A faculty of light—one I hadn’t known existed—starts to act upon us. I begin literally seeing light energy with my inner eye. I feel it gather in the solar plexus, whirl upward like wind through a shell.

At first, I notice the familiar stream of judgments rising: older couple, nagging wife, cowed husband, maybe from the Midwest… But those stories are lifted from me by a power that feels as though it moves through my center — spiraling outward and back again, weaving through me and them until the judgments simply evaporate.

This light is self-intelligent. It doesn’t arise from any thought or effort on my part. I’m only listening to the Voice, following its gentle instructions, witnessing.

As those descriptions fade, I perceive what remains — a deep, holy light emanating from their eyes, revealing who they truly are.

When the plane lifts into the air, a new sensation dawns. The ascent feels heavenly — a literal rising of spirit. A soft, floating joy fills me as the world below recedes and the sunrise paints the clouds in shades of rose and silver.
It’s not just, “Look, the pretty clouds.”
I am the clouds, the ascent, the heaven itself.

The Voice within tells me that my encounter with the couple is complete, and that I should go to the back of the plane. I turn to them kindly and say,
“Thank you. I won’t be disturbing you again.”

The old man wastes no time sliding into the window seat as I make my way down the aisle.

At the very last row, a woman is dozing in the aisle seat. The middle seat beside her is empty. I slip quietly into it. She continues to sleep, serene and untouched by the subtle currents now moving all around us.

Again, the whorls of light spiral into and out of my field, weaving through the sleeping woman beside me. As I reclaim my judgments about her—blond, a little too pretty, privileged, business type, etc.—they dissolve in the same way the earlier ones had.

When the process feels complete and all stories about her have lifted, she suddenly stirs awake. Turning toward me, she blinks as though pulled from a dream.

“Hi,” I say gently. “Remember me?”

She looks around, confused.

“Not from here,” I continue. “From before that—you know… Heaven?”

She hesitates, caught between refuting and receiving what I’ve said. I choose to speak to the openness I sense in her. As each thought arises, I share it quietly, and she nods. I see into her. A light comes on in her eyes, and something in us joins—merging as one awareness.

I offer her a copy of The Hidden Words and tell her that when she’s ready, she’ll find it essential.

Once again, the Voice speaks within, directing me to move to the front of the aircraft where an empty seat has opened beside my friend, Yaani. In my present state of certainty, I don’t question how unusual it is to change seats three times on a flight.

My friend and I speak fondly of matters of Light and Spirit. Then she begins to sing an ancient Vedic chant in Sanskrit. At that exact moment, the flight attendant’s metallic voice blares through the overhead speaker, announcing our arrival in Albuquerque.

My friend’s song pours sweetness into my right ear, while the attendant’s voice grates in my left. The contrast causes a sudden sensation—my mind feels as though it’s splitting open. In that opening, a rich golden substance flows over my forehead, warm and luminous, like liquid sunlight pouring through the crown of my being.”The Voice quietly tells me, This is necessary to the next phase.

When we begin to deplane, I glance back and see the blond woman from earlier. Her eyes are bright; she smiles at me with recognition and gratitude, clearly aware she’s entering an experience unlike anything she’s known before. I smile, nod, and give her a thumbs-up.

As I walk through the Albuquerque airport with my two traveling companions, the Voice says, You are going to speed up now. You’ll be passing those you are with.

I somehow understand that this means I’ll be transitioning to a higher, faster frequency. I feel calm, certain, and deeply centered as we approach baggage claim.

Passing through the first of two large glass doorways, I suddenly sense a change—a parting of the familiar, as though an energetic curtain is drawing aside. The air, the objects, even space itself seems to vibrate faster.  My eyes suddenly fill with brightness and the solidity of things are in question.

As I pass through the second doorway—bloop!—another veil lifts.

And now “I” have disappeared. My body—and all sensation of having a body or a separate identity—has blown away with the last parting of the veil. There are no objects, no familiar forms, only the witnessing of an exquisite, oceanic field of waving lines that emanate from the horizon of awareness in all directions.

The light flows toward me, passes through me in union, and then rolls up behind me like waves upon a shore—bubbling, dissolving, vanishing into nothingness. I can still feel, but only as light, not as anything physical. 

I know this ocean to be myself, or rather, my union with God. The waves rolling up behind me are nothing but the non-existent past—demonstrating that time has no real continuity, only a seeming succession. Each moment arrives as a complete thought of God, whole unto itself, radiant and eternal.

I experience this on multiple levels of awareness, all ecstatic, all filled with love and light. Time has no meaning here. I know I’ve entered the furthest valley, where only absolute poverty and utter nothingness are admitted, —

I am in direct communion with God, and I recognize Bahá’u’lláh as the radiant presence guiding the experience. The Voice for God—His mouthpiece—speaks with such vast content that words can’t capture it.

 “For when the true lover and devoted friend reacheth the presence of the Beloved, the radiant beauty of the Loved One and the fire of the lover’s heart will kindle a blaze and burn away all veils and wrappings. Yea, all that he hath, from marrow to skin, will be set aflame, so that nothing will remain save the Friend.”

~ Baha’u’llah

Then something happens that reveals everything.

I have a thought apart from God.

I say to myself, One would have to maintain great sobriety to sustain such an experience.

In that instant, I become “one” apart from the One—planning, imagining a future, desiring continuity for myself—and the vision collapses. The ocean disappears.

Objects return.

I raise my arm and think, arm. Then floor, carpet, escalator. The world instantly arises again. And this I understand: this process of naming is how I made—and continue to sustain—the illusion of the world.

Reality, as I once knew it, does not exist. Only the Ocean of Love is real.

I noticed wisps of remnant thought swirling through my mind, phrased in what I can only call high-speak—a language more akin to the cadence of the King James Bible than to ordinary English. I recognized it as the voice of my ascended master self, though now I found myself once more under the auspices of limitation.

It was clear I had only glimpsed the green garden land of which He writes in The Seven Valleys. Yet even that brief glimpse was enough to alter my understanding of reality forever.

In that instant, I existed before time was, and after it was over. Time itself—the human construct of linear order—had stopped. What replaced it was a flow of infinity: a vast ocean of living light that approached me like a moving horizon, passed through me in ecstatic union with itself, and then faded behind me like waves retreating from a shore. I, a spaceless point of consciousness, stood as both Alpha and Omega of that witnessing.

Slowly, awareness of form begins to return. The great ocean recedes, though its shimmer still fills my vision. My body feels insubstantial—more suggestion than weight, more echo than form.

I rise and move toward baggage claim, where my two companions suddenly reappear beside me.

Like compassionate guides sensing my unsteady steps, they each take one of my arms to steady me. My eyes are still filled with vibrating light, making ordinary sight difficult. I don’t question how they knew to appear at that precise moment; I understand now that all things are moved by the same entanglement of consciousness — a quantum sympathy of being that responds before thought itself.

Yaani guides me toward a large statue of a Native American and begins to read the plaque at its base aloud. it’s a passion play of joy, light, and sound amid the shimmer still dancing in my vision.

As we ride the escalator down, a huge sign at the bottom greets me in bold letters: “KNOWLEDGE OF GOD.”

The airport, the statue, the whole scene itself had become scripture, as if written upon by the Divine. 

“All things are echoes of the Voice for God.” ~ACIM

Of course, the humor doesn’t escape me. A wink from the Supreme Orchestrator reassuring me not to doubt what has just been given. Below the sign, a table of books—religious titles for sale in the airport—seems to underline the point with cosmic humor.

I saw with clarity that the fully realized self—the master consciousness God created whole and perfect—has always existed alongside this lesser, dream-self that thought itself bound to matter.

I retrieve my bag, say goodbye to my Al and Yaani, and head for my car. As I drive away, I feel a sudden pop—as though I’ve slipped outside a bubble that once contained my life. My heart swells and throbs cartoonishly with love and gratitude. 

I feel like my True Self. There is a certainty within me that fills me with a feeling of fearlessness, yet my emotions become instantly available— like a child.

My wish has been fulfilled.
I have met God and spoken with Him—face to face.
Only…the face was mine.