Early Experiences

Every now and then people will ask me about any early experiences I might have had as a child, and prior to 1978. Below are a few that I can remember.

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Bach and Organ Music

When I was a kid I loved organ music, especially Bach, especially when I leaned that he frequently wrote “AMDG” (“Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”—”to the greater glory of God”), at the end of his compositions. When I was in prep school I somehow managed to get forcibly auditioned for the glee club and chapel choir, …

Before I was Born: Infinite Light

I‘ve always remembered being one with infinite light before I was born, then falling through layers of color to wind up on the physical plane. And always wanting to get back to the infinite sun. Always feeling emptiness, the emptiness of feeling separated from that light, and trying to fill that emptiness to make up …

Flying Over Ladakh

Many times as a child, and later into my adult life, I had a recurring dream in which I was wearing some sort of brown robe, and flying over a very desolate, mountainous region. In my dream I could see a town below me with one distinct feature that I always used as a landmark: …

Guiding Hands

In 1976, three years after the experience I described in the article above, I kept having experiences at night where I’d be out of my body, and have hands on either side of me, guiding me through all kinds of colored planes, then bringing me back again. I knew that my marriage was going to …

Kitchen Counter/Collective Dream

When I was seven or eight, just old enough to see over the kitchen counter top, I remember standing in the kitchen, looking at the tile behind the counter, feeling as though I was trapped in someone else’s dream. And that dream was a kind of collaborative effort of my mother and father, their parents, …

Sunday School and Churches

I got kicked out of Sunday school twice, once before I was six, and once again when I was about eight: both times for asking too many questions. I never went back. On the other hand, I loved going to church, especially Catholic high mass—I liked the idea of it, what it represented in its …

The German Chapel

One summer, when I was in college, I worked in Frankfurt, Germany. Before heading back to college, a friend and I took a motorcycle trip to the German border to do some climbing in mountains that are the border between Germany and Austria. It rained almost the entire time we traveled, and we spent most …

The Limits of Psychedelics

I experimented briefly with psychedelics as a spiritual avenue but I got bored, realizing that I was bounded by the limits of the chemicals. I used to play with willing/intending my perception past the psychedelics—allowing the drug to disassemble my perceptual field, and then willing my perceptual field back to “normal”. I once took some …

The Natural World

Even as a young kid I loved being out in the natural world, preferably alone. I’d go out into the desert around Phoenix, ride my bike way beyond any boundaries my mother had set up, and just sit out there, doing nothing but being. Being alone meant that I didn’t have to be “human”, that …

The Spirit on Pender Island

In 1973 I was camping up on some cliffs overlooking the ocean on Pender Island (British Columbia, Canada). I’d set up my tent fairly close to the edge of a thirty to forty foot cliff, and gone to bed, setting my alarm clock to wake me up early the next morning. Some time during the …

What Jesus Really Said

In the summer when I was nine, we went to visit my mother’s uncles and aunts in Missouri. I slept in a bedroom by myself, on a large feather mattress that threatened to swallow me whole if I didn’t sleep near the edge of the bed (you have to know about feather mattresses to know …