I’m beginning this ethnographic retrospective of major spiritual experiences with the vision that occurred on February 13, 1987. It inspired my work from then till perhaps 2015.
This is the best attempt I’ve made to describe it. It led me to know for a certainty that enlightenment is the purpose of life.
In a reading with Archangel Michael, through Linda Dillon, on April 26, 2011, Archangel Michael – the Spirit whom I serve – said something that surprised me:
“We do not ask you to veer away from being a writer but we want you to write what you feel moved to and it is also more dabbling into what you have thought of as the sacred truths.
“And people, humans, hybrids [Starseeds], and beyond, are prepared to receive those [writings] as well. In a fuller and perhaps may we say more profound way than previously. …
“… In the human element their hearts are yearning for more. So you are going to do more writing in that vein.”
I expressed surprise because I’m not an enlightened being but the Boss said that nonetheless that’s what I’d feel drawn to do.
And I confess that the desire to turn to spiritual topics is arising in me. There’s a desire to write about enlightenment, the design elements of the human being and life, the natural laws, the Trinity of God the Father, God the Mother, and God the Child.
I could have said God the All, since there’s nothing that isn’t God. But nonetheless to create this lila or drama called life, God did, as far as I’m aware, step down His/Her/Its powers in a mysterious way that’s difficult for us to understand to assume other roles in the play.
I feel a strong desire to begin by sharing something that tells us why life was created and a little bit about how it was designed.
Back in 1987, I attended a rebirthing workshop in Seattle and had what rebirthers call a “full-breath release.” I can’t describe what that feels like. The breath, instead of being a country road, becomes an eight-lane highway. I felt altogether cleansed and purified. I had broken through the “character armoring” or “pain body.” So I was in a remarkable space.
The next Friday, while driving my car to work, I had the experience which changed my life.
A word of context first. I was in my doctoral years at the University of B.C., studying to be a counsellor. I had been practicing listening therapy, the incredible impact that deep, therapeutic listening could have in the processing of major upsets. I had noticed that when a person was listened to for a very long time, they reached a point where the puzzle they faced became a picture.
A thought arose in my mind as I was driving to work: “If our early life is a puzzle, which, when solved, becomes a picture, could it be that life itself is a puzzle and, if so, what is the picture that life is?”
Now I see this event as simply one act in the unfolding drama that our lives are. It was my time to have this information downloaded and I now see it as being brought to me for a purpose. But back then, the question itself and what happened after was entirely marvellous to me.
What occurred after was that everything turned black and I forgot that I was behind the wheel of a car.
For the next eight seconds, I was shown a living tableau, a 3D movie, that revealed the entire journey of an individual soul, through lifetime after lifetime – from God, as Jesus said, out into the world (that is, the Holy Spirit or Mother, mater, matter), and back to God again. It was all symbolic, representational, and diagrammatic. And bliss, which brings all things to remembrance, was helping me easily understand what I was being shown.
I won’t describe what I saw because I’ve already done so in the conclusion to the book that resulted, called The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment. (2) But I emerged knowing for certain, and I want to emphasize that certainty, like I could bank on it and risk my life on it, that enlightenment was the purpose for which each one of us is born, lives our lives, and “dies.”
That experience lasted eight seconds and, when it finished and the black disappeared, my car had not moved an inch. (I grew up in that area of Vancouver so I knew exactly where I was.) I was removed from time.
At the next stoplight, I looked at the driver of the car on my left. His face was riven with fear. I presume I had a five-mile smile. I wanted to roll down my window and shout: “It all works out in the final reel!”
I emerged knowing what the Trinity was. I saw the stages of enlightenment. I knew what our task was. I saw where it all came from and was going, the Alpha and Omega, the origin and destination.
But none of this was explained in words. I saw only pictures. It took twenty years of blissful research to find the words that would explain what I saw that day. My hat is off to D’Arcy for allowing me to pursue this research for so long.
That explanation became the dictionary, From Darkness Unto Light, (3) whose provisional title was Matrix (i.e., the Mother’s womb). I took a section of that dictionary and converted it into The Purpose of Life. That book, if I recall correctly, was written in a matter of a few days.
I found that what I saw was known to countless sages through enlightenment. I discovered that life was designed, that that design was benevolent, that design elements operate on us to keep us moving towards our final rendezvous with destiny, and that God does not create our sorrow and pain – we do.
I learned that enlightenment itself goes on so far down the road that for us to call one local stage of it “complete” or “final” is humorous. None of our enlightenments can possibly be seen as any more “final” than a drive from Vancouver to Seattle can be called a drive through North America.
I obtained a glimpse of how wonderful God is that so many ineffable, majestic views of Her/Him cannot slake our thirst or exhaust what there is to be known. Even Seraphim, who stand in the face of God, don’t know God completely. No one knows God but God. I’m not sure if I’m capable of communicating the eyes-wide-open amazement I felt upon realizing the vastness of God’s Being.
Nonetheless I don’t consider this enlightenment. It was a vision.
Any knowledge of God, whether a peak experience, an enlightenment, or anything else, repays years and years of spiritual effort and struggle. I used to say to myself that one spiritual experience – a transformational moment, a vision – repaid a decade of labor for it. And I know that a moment comes when we must not struggle or exert ourselves.
There came a time when I was having one spiritual experience after another and none of it slaked my thirst.
Here I am twenty-four years after that experience, feeling as fresh with the topic as I did then, feeling no diminution of enthusiasm for an eight-second tableau. That’s because, when I get in touch with it, when I breathe into it, I’m breathing into a truth. And so I feel joy and bliss.
After the vision, I insisted that my doctoral dissertation be about enlightenment and my thesis adviser refused. No other department of the university, including Religious Studies, would take it on. I was stunned to discover that studying the purpose of life could not be studied in the Religious Studies Department. It was “outside the university’s charter.” Excuse me?
So I left an institution that, in my view, was wedded to empirical materialism (the philosophy that only what we can see, hear, touch, etc., is real).
I’m sure the university has changed by now. But I have no more use for degrees. I only want to know who I am, who God is. I’ve been smitten by love’s arrow and I cannot see, hear or want anything else but God. And so it has been for everyone who was ever contacted or been awakened by the Divine in any way. So powerful is the touch of God that it rearranges lives, smashes plans, and totally converts the soul. It divides father from son and mother from daughter.
After that experience I used to say that I know one thing for sure, and only one: that enlightenment is the purpose of life.
But let me not fly off into outer space, lost to everything. There’s work to do to serve Her, the Divine Mother. Later comes the pension.
Footnotes
(1) Available here ( https://goldenageofgaia.com/16244-2/the-purpose-of-life-is-enlightenment/ch-12-epilogue/ ). The first page of The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment can be found here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/16244-2/the-purpose-of-life-is-enlightenment/ch-1-introduction/.
(2) At https://goldengaiadb.com/E