How This Writing Began

In early February, 1995 I decided to amuse myself by exploring a newsgroup called alt.meditation. I’d poked around there before but never found much to interest me, but on this particular day I came across a very interesting post. It was from a young fellow in England who had had a very authentic kundalini experience and who was looking for help. There were over thirty replies to his post, none of which—from my point of view—were at all accurate or helpful. So I decided to reply to him.

I’d never written about any of my own experiences before, in fact I’d never even thought about how I might tell someone else about them, much less how I’d do it so that it would be helpful to another person. But I jumped in and wrote to the young English fellow. And a day or so later I got a answer from him, thanking me for my reply, and telling me that of all the replies he’d received, mine was the only one that made sense to him. His name was Chris, and Chris and I exchanged emails from then, the beginning of February, until he graduated from university in July, 1995. We wrote at least once a day, sometimes more. I’d check my email when I first woke up and, because of the time difference between England and the west coast of Canada, there’d be an email from Chris that he’d written just before going to bed. When I’d get home from work in the evening and check my email again, there’d be an email from Chris that he’d written in the morning before he went off to classes.

(The article on this site called 1978 Awakening was the second email I wrote to Chris. He’d asked about my experiences, so I wrote that piece and called it My Resume. It was the first time that I’d ever even attempted to write about that part of my life.)

By the time Chris graduated in July, we’d generated a fair volume of correspondence. Chris suggested at one point that other people might find the exchange valuable, and that we’d discussed some important stuff. He suggested there might be some place on the internet that would host our exchange, but this was 1995 and the online resources were few and far between. One website that I’d come across was called Spiritweb. It was a large repository for all kinds of spiritual, psychic, and related writing, and I figured I could approach the site owner, Rene, to at least get some feedback. So I sent our correspondence to Rene and he wrote back immediately, saying that he wanted to host the writing. But there was a condition, which was that I edit out all of Chris’ questions and replies and reduce the writing to just what I had to say. I wasn’t too sure that that was a good idea: I didn’t like the idea of cutting Chris out of the picture, and I thought it would be more interesting for readers to see the entire exchange. Chris and I talked about it and finally agreed that having the material available on line was most important thing, so I did the editing and the writing went live on Spiritweb. Rene chose the title for it: A Diary of Awareness, Kundalini, and Life.

What happened next astounded me: I was deluged by emails from people from all over the world who had read my writing on Spiritweb. I quite literally could have stayed home and replied to emails for six to eight hours a day. In the beginning I tried to be very diligent in answering emails, but at the time I was also working full time as a self-employed carpenter/contractor so by the time I got home in the evenings I was usually pretty worn out from the day. Dealing with a load of emails at the end of every day got to be too much for me after a while, so I eventually gave up and just let my intuition and spirit guide me to which emails to answer (and it usually happened that answering an email was the start of a longer period of correspondence with the person). After a while the emails tapered off and my life demanded a lot of my attention, so I tended not to write very much. In fact I still lack motivation to write just for myself: I pretty much need someone asking me questions.

But in 2005 I started thinking about how much first person accounts of spiritual experiences had meant to me: as I say on the front page of this site, reading Muktananda’s, or Milarepa’s, or Ramana Maharshi’s, or Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s accounts of their own experiences was far more meaningful and fruitful to me than grand theories and expositions of abstract systems, or dry impersonal accounts that usually seemed to be almost rote repetitions of what someone is supposed to say in their particular culture . And I remembered people’s responses to my writing—not everyone’s, of course, but those who needed it. Rene had shut down Spiritweb in 2003, so none of my writing was available on line anymore, and so I decided to put together a web site of my old Spiritweb writing: thus diaryofawareness.com was born.

I maintained Diary of Awareness for a couple of years, but was always dissatisfied with it because I’d grouped the writings together chronologically, as they had been on Spiritweb: all the 1995 correspondence together, all the 1998 correspondence together, all the 2000 correspondence together. What I really wanted to do was to sort things out by subject as much as possible, so in 2008 I started this present site, Light Seeking Light.

On Light Seeking Light I’ve kept the 1995 correspondence together, for the most part. Where there were substantial pieces (like the 1978 awakening article), I broke those out separately. There’s a collection of small bit and pieces that I’ve tossed into a group called, appropriately enough, bits and pieces: miscellaneous writing, but in fact a lot of the bits and pieces are very interconnected among themselves and also in relation to the larger articles. I’ll leave it to the reader to make those connections. At least for now.

Over the years I’ve added more writing as people have requested it, or when I feel inclined to say something. Chris and I still stay very much in touch, but these days we’re more inclined to write less and Skype more: we usually wind up having two to three hour marathon Skype conversations, which plays well with my being a lazy writer.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.lightseekinglight.com/how-this-writing-began/