Living the Dream Book

Living the Dream-It's Time

A Exciting Chronicle of the Gathering of Equal

by Mark Conrad and Keith Varnum

$12.95

Align with Your True Purpose
Dance with Your Soul’s Destiny
Awaken the Power to Soar
Share the Magic of Waking Up
Ignite Your Creative Passion
Celebrate Your Unique Gifts
Claim the Love You Deserve

Each Chapter Offers Practical Exercises to Master

Miracles, Magic and Grace
Equality, Play and Freedom
Alchemy, Adventure and Aliveness
Universal Supply, Sovereignty and Synchronicity

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Experience Your Gathering through "The Book!"

This is a journey to the deepest level of knowing, a journey into a world that will shake the paradigms of mainstream thought. This is where magic happens and you can be a part of it. You can live there!

Align with your true purpose and unique destiny here on earth. Rediscover who you are and play in the realm of pure vibration, energy, and essence.

Rediscover the fire in your belly, the primal excitement that is life itself. Nurture it as you would a pilot light, as if it meant the very survival of your soul.

The sleeping spirit within each of us is waking up. It is now safe; it is okay to know great things and share what we know with others.

It's time to awaken to The Dream.

This book chronicles a year in the life of the Gathering, a fun playful three-day event of conscious equals coming together to share, celebrate and explore each other’s unique, natural "vibration," essence and gifts…a joyful emergence of knowing and innocence.

The first chapter describes how Keith Varnum consciously awakened after decades of searching for an answer. Most of the book is a word-by-word account of people sharing the voice of their intuition. In a twelve-month adventure the book takes the reader on a spiritual journey from city to city and from heart to heart, as people rediscover the God within themselves.

Take me to CDs

Excerpt from Living the Dream:

Chapter 1

JUMP AND THE NET WILL COME

Keith’s Story with an Introduction by Mark

GEORGINA MURATA WAS NINE YEARS OLD WHEN she came to the Gathering. Shortly before, in a flurry of inspiration, she had composed several poems about coming into her own personal power. She felt The Dream - A Gathering of EqualsÒ was the appropriate place to share the music from her soul. At the Friday night introductory session, Georgina sat there timidly and listened while her dance teacher read her poetry to the group.

The roomful of adults was stunned, inspired, and humbled at the profundity and innocence of her poetry. It speaks of the wisdom, power and light within us all. Living the Dream is about awakening to recapture those gifts. The quickening is upon us. It’s time!

Georgina had no conscious way of knowing that her poetry would be highlighted in a spiritual book for adults. How did she come to write such profound wisdom from the heart at only nine years of age? Was it a coincidence that she presented it at the Gathering and, consequently, to thousands of readers? There is a reality which many of us have only had glimpses of throughout our lives. It’s an existence in which nothing happens by chance, "coincidences" abound, magic is commonplace, and abundance prevails. It comes into being simply by becoming fully conscious, fully alive. Georgina was there. Lots of our children are there. Now it’s time for us to return to that part of our being that makes magic happen.

Many of us are awakening to discover we need to re-establish a relationship with our inner knowing, that all-knowing God voice within. It’s pure love and pure light, the state we have all touched but then forgotten. Why do we forget? It’s part of the game, this fast-paced game of effort we call living. In the space of true essence, your true essence, there is no time, there is no space, and there is no struggle. Living the Dream is about a different kind of existence, one I only began to fully discover a short time ago.

My name is Mark. I am the scribe, the one who was called upon to write what you're about to read and who will serve as your guide to tie the shared thoughts together as we go. Writing this book has been a profound and transformational experience for me. I’ve had the good fortune to first attend the Gatherings then listen and transcribe the notes and audio recordings of the Gatherings. These activities have integrated into my life and changed me in wondrous ways.

Two years ago, I would have thought you were crazy if you told me where I would be and what I would be doing today. I was on the treadmill called a "normal" life with more "success" than many because of my tenacity and ambitious drive. Way deep down inside, I knew there was more, but it was way down there.

As a child, I connected with some of the true spirit of God and Jesus in church services. I loved singing the old hymns and looked forward to Sunday when I could sing them with others. Very early on, I could tell that people were going through the motions and not really living what they talked about in the churches. I noticed when many of them sang, though, they brightened up, were touched by spirit, and began living pure joy in the moment. Suddenly they were real, and I wanted to be with them. By the time I was seventeen, I had become greatly disappointed by the hypocrisy. I knew that if the people in the churches would only take the spirit of the music into their hearts and keep it there, things would be better.

I became disillusioned with the experience and convinced myself I was an atheist or maybe an agnostic who enjoyed singing hymns. I had always loved science and turned to it as the ultimate answer to everything. Science became my religion.

My analytical self convinced me that coincidences were simply chance happenings, mere bleeps in the steady flow of reality as we know it. Science and logic prevailed. I could see the God of science in nature, but Jesus, Buddha, and all of the rest of them were fairy tales. To me, they were pacifiers for the masses like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Anytime I personally experienced psychic phenomena or knew events before they actually occurred, I dismissed that as a quirk or something that must have a scientific explanation.

I went to college and worked steadily up the corporate ladder. For eight years preceding my recent jump into the new reality, I worked my way into a very good management position with a major food company. I commuted an hour and a half or more a day from the suburbs of Seattle to work about fifty hours a week. I saw my two wonderful children for about an hour and a half a day during the week and a little longer on weekends. My wife and I juggled our time with them along with the mowing, painting, entertaining, going to business functions, and doing all of the other things done by "successful" people at our age and in our position. I was married to a person who had similar interests and goals, a very good business person and supermom who kept an immaculate home. We shared a lot of good times, especially with the children, but basically had become two hardened corporate beings who did not have enough time to kiss, hug, or have intimate conversation. We were just too busy with other important things. We told ourselves and each other we were doing it for the kids. We believed it.

I was going through all of the appropriate motions and doing it quite well. I was saving money for retirement to build up enough "security" so that, in twenty years, I could follow my heart’s passion and write. I had sold my soul to the routine and in return held a figurative document stating I could do anything I wanted to "as soon as:" I retire, huge lawn is mowed, the wood is chopped, I get the next promotion. As soon as… I was dying in tiny pieces, a day at a time.

There was no time for spirituality in my life, no way to schedule it. My calendar was booked until the year two thousand with lots of things that other people expected of me and that I expected of myself. I began to realize there is more to living than working, saving and working some more, and sleeping. My awareness of another way came with the birth of my two children. There was something about the purity and innocence of my children that jarred me back into my present reality, living, not in the old way, but with a renewed sense of love and vigor. I credit my children with saving my life, rescuing me from the treadmill of drudgery to which my surrender to mainstream thought had sentenced me. It was truly their influence that ultimately resulted in the living of my dream.

Only a few years ago, some of my suppressed inner yearnings started to become stronger and stronger. I was becoming more conscious of the food I ate and the company I kept. Somehow, even in the business tapes I would listen to while commuting to and from my stressful job, I began to notice spiritual messages. My demeanor slowly began to shift, and I became more sensitive about the environment and about life. Instead of smashing spiders inside the house, I would capture them carefully to release them outside. My children had a great influence on me during these early stages of my transformation.

At work, I began to consider the needs of my employees first and those of the company second. I became more concerned about their personal well-being than the profitability of the company. All of these changes were slow and gentle until several key events occurred in my life in very quick succession. It’s difficult to say if any of them had more impact than the others, but they all set me up to take several large leaps of faith. Somehow, during that time, I began to listen to a soft voice deep within my being. This was a huge step because I did not believe in intuition. Finally, I read the words in a book somewhere and they resonated within me as none had ever done before. "Jump and the net will come." It gives me the chills, or what I call a huge "rush" to write it even now. I have since learned to run toward rather than from the rush. Jump and the net will come.

About that time, I went on a body cleanse diet, deciding before I started it that I would eliminate red meat and greatly reduce the amount of poultry in my diet. After the cleanse, an increasingly stronger voice from inside told me to give up meat entirely. This caused some domestic turmoil and was a catalyst for dealing with several other more major issues. I was becoming desperate to do what was really right for myself and what I knew would also be best for those around me. A "normal" life was not right for me anymore. Deepak Chopra calls a lot of the "normal" things society expects of us "the psychopathology of the average."

I was having stronger and stronger intuitive messages that I needed to do something spiritual. I needed to deliver a message of peace to the world. It would not happen living and working where I was. This was scary and I thought I might be going off the deep end. I was very tentative when approaching my spouse about this because it was so clear she wanted us to remain exactly who and where we were. She had worked her entire lifetime to build the lyfestyle in which we existed. So had I, but I was realizing that the whole thing, our whole reality, was not really what we thought it was. I was beginning to suspect that security is an illusion. The more you struggle to build it around yourself, the less you really have. The pesky voice of intuition was one I could no longer ignore.

Through a string of bizarre "coincidences," I found out about a workshop called The Dream - A Gathering of Equals that was, "coincidentally" coming to Seattle within a week. Just hearing the name, I knew I would go, and I could feel it would be a major step for me. I managed to get the time off work to go. Through the Gatherings experience that voice from within was handed a megaphone, and I have never been the same since. I am now living consciously. I have jumped off the treadmill and am consequently able to manifest marvelous things in my life.

For most of my life, I had fantasized about writing a book, one that spoke the message of my heart. Then, just over a year ago, while in my new green station wagon, commuting on the way home during rush hour, it hit me. It was an epiphany, a huge enlightenment, right in the middle of stop-and-go traffic on an interstate highway north of Seattle! My voice from within was shouting again. I had recently discovered that small miracles began occurring in my life as I learned to become truly "present" more of the time. My epiphany in the car was like seeing a spectacular sunset and being so caught up in the beauty that I felt as if I were floating. The feeling of joy was so encompassing I cried. I was filled with such an overwhelming rush of peace that I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was okay. That is being fully present. I did it in rush hour traffic, at that time, one of the most stressful parts of my life. I realize now that all stress is completely self-imposed. The universe spoke, as it always does, but that time I listened. I knew, absolutely knew, everything is okay. I knew I was to write this book.

As I write this and continue to explore my inner God voice, and see God in everything, miracles are becoming a part of my daily life. In marvelous ways, I have manifested a new life. It includes my soul-mate and our new beautiful baby, a publishing business, travels, and a house nestled in the woods. The drawing at the front of this chapter is of our back yard, a lush oasis of fir trees, ivy, and ferns. Through a series of miracles, my wife Michele and I manifested our ideal house and yard. We now receive virtually everything we want and need. This past year and a half has been a wonderful adventure in living, and I know it’s just beginning!

The majority of this chapter is about Keith Varnum's life.

As the founder of the workshops highlighted in this book, his story is relevant to an understanding of how The Dream - A Gathering of Equals came into being. His story is a journey into another reality. He came from a considerably different background than I did, as you will soon see. I presented my recent past as an illustration that anyone can break free and truly live the dream. Truth is in the same place it has always been. It hasn’t moved; we have. We can get there from anywhere. Since Keith and I come from such opposite ends of the spectrum, it makes a convincing case for the possibility that anyone could be here. Where is "here?" "Here" is living consciously, in the moment, with heart and intuition in control, in the driver's seat. The brain is in the back seat where it belongs, performing its vital functions, and assisting when called upon.

Two years ago, I would have thought the following stories were the fantasies of a spiritual nut, a raving counter culture guru who could not hold down a real job. Now I believe them as the truth as Keith knows it, and am discovering that I am open to experiencing all kinds of new wisdom, joy, and surprises of my own. For the first time in over twenty years, Jesus is real to me again, but in a fresh, new, alive way. I have heard messages from Jesus and other ascended beings as well. As crazy as it might sound to people who are as close-minded as I was, I even listen to trees.

As I go "inside" and find out who I really am, the line between magic and "the real world" becomes more and more vague. I am beginning to remember events like Keith’s that have occurred in my own life and am looking forward to more. It’s amazing what we forget! Now sit back and enjoy some new reality. Set your judgments aside and read with your heart.

The remainder of this chapter is an abbreviated version of key events in Keith Varnum's life, in his own words, that led up to the Gatherings. We hope you will have as much fun reading this as we have had in bringing it to you.

KEITH’S STORY IN HIS OWN WORDS:

One day recently, Spirit sat me down on my living room couch and presented my entire life to me in a three second vision. This comprehensive review was clear, precise and emotionally deva-state-ing. I saw that every experience that I'd had in my life so far has been brilliantly and deliberately designed to train me to successfully facilitate The Dream-a Gathering of Equals. This four-day play/workshop is the current expression of my life purpose and my soul's joy.

Even at five years old, I was being exposed to a full spectrum of spiritual options.

My mother wanted to raise me Unitarian. So when I was five years old, my parents drove forty miles every Sunday to a Unitarian Sunday School. That school taught as much about Buddha and Lao Tzu as it did Jesus. After a couple of years, I couldn't go anymore because it got to be too difficult for my parents to travel through winter snowstorms in the Pennsylvania mountains. After that, I was put into the hands of the Methodist Church. I went to Sunday School during the year and Bible School every summer. I loved Bible School mainly because of the stories they told about Jesus. I noticed, though, that every Sunday and Bible School teacher and church minister interpreted the stories very differently. Basically, I could tell they didn’t know what Jesus was really saying.

I heard many stories from the Old Testament about disastrous things happening to people who could not understand why God acted that way toward them. In one case, God told Abraham to kill his son. I remember hearing about the trials of Job. There’s the tale of the prodigal son about two sons; one is good and works really hard, and the other goes off and spends all the money his father gave him on riotous living. He returns, though, and the father takes him back. I loved those stories, but even as a kid I could tell that the religious leaders barely had a clue what the real import of these stories is. When I asked questions, they would mumble and fuss and give all kinds of varied vague answers. I decided then I needed to discover their true meaning on my own.

I really didn’t have a personal relationship with God or Jesus at that time because of the way the teachers talked about him in Sunday and Bible School. The picture they painted for me about God and his Son was that they were wrathful, that you would be condemned, go to Hell, or be famine stricken if you screwed up. It didn't feel accurate or real to me. I felt deep conflicts between what the church was saying and what I understood from the Bible and felt in my heart.

I was an acolyte, an altar boy, in the Methodist Church for many years. We would light the candles before the service and extinguish them at the end. I liked the job because I got to leave the sanctuary during the sermon and relax backstage until I was needed again to put the candles out. I didn't want to listen to the insincerity and the inconsistencies of the sermons. And it was so much more inspiring to hang out in the spacious loft space behind the sanctuary altar. I would see angels in the rafters when the organ music was really loud.

The inspirational music was powerful to me at that time. "In the Garden" is still my favorite song. It talks of going to the garden alone and meeting Jesus while the dew is still on the roses... "And the voice I hear calling on my ear, the son of God discloses. And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own and the joy we share as we tarry there no one other has ever known." That music would fill me completely. I have planted beds of flowers and vegetables everywhere I’ve lived since childhood. In gardens I feel the peace of Jesus and God. I also loved singing Christmas carols. I would go out with the church on Christmas season nights singing carols at people's homes. I have always made contact with spirit through through music and song.

The first time I realized that there was something more grand going on in life than what I was being taught was when I was fourteen taking drawing lessons at a summer resort. My art class convened at an old community called Lilydale in New York State. It’s a summer headquarters of spiritualist mediums. About a hundred resident clairvoyants there presented talks and seances for thousands of visitors. People would come to have the mediums contact their dead relatives and friends. We artists came to draw and paint the old Victorian houses, hotels, gazebos and the virgin trees in the deep, dark forest surrounding it all. The original buildings and grounds with lakes and ponds were preserved with great care and love. Nothing had changed there for over a century. Lilydale had an enchanting, timeless quality to it. When we were done sketching for the day, we would go to a trance session or a seance just for fun, to check it out in the spirit, so to speak, of a fourteen year old.

In my art class, I met a kid my age from Wisconsin. One day, he got up the nerve to raise his hand and talk to one of the mediums. Suddenly his uncle started speaking through this woman, and said, in the uncle’s voice, "You really have to quit breaking parking meters. You’re going to get caught next time." As the deep voice talked on about these parking meters, my friend turned ashen white and started shaking. After the seance, he said that he and a buddy had gone out and smashed parking meters in his hometown. His father was the chief of police in the little village he was from in Wisconsin. The meters cost thousands of dollars. No one had ever discovered who it was that had wrecked them. Neither of us could imagine any possible way that the medium could have known. The rest of that summer I kept contemplating that mystery. I realized that there was something going on in Lilydale that I wanted and needed to know more about. This is my first memory of me beginning to suspect that there are more realities happening here on the planet than I was being told at school and at home.

I remember starting to read spiritual books at around fifteen years of age. I would visit bookstores in Erie, Pennsylvania, the only real "city" near the tiny town where I grew up. I’d find these out-of-the-way bookstores run by crotchety old men with dust and cobwebs layered on everything in the store. I used to come home with Zen stories and strange, little spiritual books. These volumes were a treasure to me. I couldn’t explain them because I really didn't understand them myself; but I loved them. I 'd read from the books to friends who would give me blank stares in return. They never could feel the magic I felt in those words.

About that same time, I experienced a lot of near disasters with cars. I noticed that when I should have rationally gotten in a car wreck, or even been killed, an "inevitable" accident didn’t occur. One time, for example, I was driving with friends and decided to pass a car. Once in the other lane we encountered a truck coming straight at us going in the opposite direction. We were so close to his windshield we could see the truck driver’s face in our headlights. By all known laws of physics, we should have smashed right into him. We were going at least fifty miles an hour and so was he. All of a sudden, without realizing what had happened, we were safe and unscathed on a grassy knoll on the side of the road. There is no way, physically, we could have gotten there. Similar enigmas happened to me throughout my teenage years.

It was also about then that St. Germain started appearing in my bedroom. St. Germain is an energy being and expression of my higher self that is very wise. He is commonly spoken of as one of the Ascended Masters of the White Brother/Sisterhood. They're called ascended beings because they have mastered and ascended the influence of their emotional programming. St. Germain ascended and agreed to stay in contact to help us do the same thing that he has done...to master human limitations and remember who we are. Ascended beings play consciously in form in order for us to be able to see them. Actually, for them to be able to appear and to be experienced as separate from us, they have to be in form. Jesus is one; Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mother Mary, and Sai Baba are others. There are some who choose to remain nameless.

St. Germain and I spent a lot of time together, sometimes four hours at a stretch. He’d talk and show me life lessons on the wall. I would joke and say to him that this method of instruction felt like when my football coach would project training films of last week's game on the white wall of the locker room. Although, St. Germain's visual presentation was of the future, not of the past! He’d show me how my life was going to unfold, the options I would have along the way, and how I could prepare for it. Much of what he had me focus on was my interaction with individuals and groups. He said I would need all the love, understanding and skills I could muster to facilitate large gatherings someday. At the time my memory of these nighttime sessions was very vague. Usually in the morning, I’d just shake it off as a dream. Deep down within myself, though, I knew it wasn’t a dream at all. I was fully awake, walking around in my bedroom, and talking with St. Germain as I would a close buddy. I would get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of it. These meetings went on through high school and college and into my twenties. As the visits became more frequent, I would run into the St. Germain Hair Salon, St. Germain Dress Shop, and receive mailers from the St. Germain Book Co. I knew then that these reminders were appearing in my life to help me keep my sanity and to know that these fantastic rendezvous were real.

Also during these same years, I would have numerous out-of-body experiences. Typically, I would be standing with a group of friends, but at the same time I’d be about twenty feet above them! I would actually look down on the group. I would see other people coming way before they could see us, because I could see so much further from that high perspective. I was completely conscious of leaving my body, just floating; and I knew it was okay for me to do that. I’d tell my friends, but they thought I was crazy; so I learned to keep it to myself.

One time I was climbing a six-hundred-foot cliff with a girlfriend and at one point, we both slipped. As we began sliding down the cliff, my whole life flashed in front of me, all my happiest birthday parties and other special times. As we were falling with five hundred feet to go, we suddenly stopped sliding. The next second we found ourselves at the bottom of the cliff sitting in a small pool in the creek bleeding and staring at each other. We had certainly been scratched, but we were not dead or injured. On many occasions during my early years, I experienced numerous jumps or gaps in time and space like this day at the cliff. Every time these time lapses happened to me, I got more and more curious about what was really going on.

I was in college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during the height of the sixties awakening. I did all of the stereotypical sixties’ hippie things. I found the spirit was very real in the "Make Love, Not War" movement. I experienced genuine brotherhood and sisterhood with many diverse people. My friends were very caring and authentic. We lived together in groups and freely shared our money, food, bodies, emotions, and ideals. Many strong, positive seeds were planted for my future unfoldment.

At the same time that my spiritual perspective was being pried open by these adventures, I was shutting down on other levels. I was very angry at society in general and my institutional schooling in particular. I was initially excited about college, but soon discovered it was no different than high school and not the expansive place I had hoped it would be. Everything seemed like such a lie. I was discovering that very little of what I was told about the world was turning out to be accurate.

All of my kindred spirit friends were in the same boat. There was a huge contrast between what we saw in the world and what we were told was going on. We knew the truth but weren’t able yet to live it. The paradox was just too much for most people. Some of my friends went crazy. Some of them died due to hepatitis and other diseases, but most "checked out" with drug overdoses or motorcycle crashes. They found a way to die because they couldn’t find a way to live in the conventional world. A lot of the others eventually "sold out," just decided to forget what they felt in their heart and work at an insurance company. Some friends went back-to-nature to homestead in northern New England, Alaska or Canada. A few died or disappeared up there. Most came back, got burned out, and slowly died at jobs. The track record wasn’t very good; not many of us were able to keep our spirit alive.

Before my senior year at college, I went to Europe, to the roots of Western civilization, where I felt I might find some answers. There maybe I could make sense of it all and find a way to fit into the world. While in France, I went to a 2,000-year-old Roman coliseum that was still being used for bullfights. It was originally the site for gladiator exhibitions and other forms of public entertainment, pageantry, and expression of imperial Rome. I was engrossed in this monumental piece of architecture and the throngs of French and Spanish people who were the descendants of ancient civilizations. I then watched as all of this collective energy was focused on killing the aliveness of these vibrant, majestic bulls. Very slowly, spear by spear, the life force was drained from these beautiful creatures.

As I watched in horror at the slaugther, I fully realized I wasn’t going to fit into this culture. It is not a natural part of me. My heart wouldn't allow me to remain any longer in this society. It wasn't a judgment, simply a recognition that my spirit didn't fit. At that moment, I experienced a sense of my true destiny, my true nature. I wasn't yet at the point of being able to fully express or describe it, but I did know that I needed to go in an entirely different direction. My being was here to express and evolve totally outside of the human culture I'd grown up in. To protect my spirit, I needed to find a place this culture doesn't even know about; because I knew that this civilization is, fundamentally, a killer of souls. I realized sitting there in the Roman coliseum that everything I had been taught about Western civilization was false; nothing was really as it appeared. If Western culture really had heart and wisdom, it could not continuously use a structure for 2,000 years toward the destruction of the spirit, toward the killing of the life force in beings. (This discovery is explored in more detail in Chapter 5 - The Spirit of the Volcano).

Soon after leaving the coliseum with these realizations, I went to Amsterdam where I met a new friend at a youth hostel. One night he took me out into this big forest on the outskirts of the city. We peeked through the bushes and saw naked men, women, and babies dancing and chanting. There were blood sacrifices of lambs and goats and bizarre sexual things going on. It was some sort of satanic rite or ritual. As soon as I got a glimpse of it, I accidentally stepped on a stick. My friend said, "Run! Who knows what they will do to us if they catch us here." So we ran and got away safely. The very next morning, though, I woke up and my eyes were inflamed and wouldn't open.

I flew to my parent's home in Pennsylvania to try to heal my eyes. However, the condition got progressively worse and I effectively lost my eyesight for over two months. I realize now that I had to hide deep in the darkness, out of the sight of my society. I needed to find a way to put my spirit, trust, power, and gifts into something other than the culture I'd been brought up in. The divine purpose in this was for me to withdraw until I found my sovereignty, until I found God. And that's what happened. I started talking to God to see if s/he really existed. S/he talked to me and we made a deal. I swore that instead of complaining, I would go deeper. I would look behind the appearances until I found the truth, until I found a reality that was more fundamental than what was showing up on the surface of human experience. I would go deeper and deeper until I found the fire inside, my true essence. Within hours of making this agreement with my Self, events started to unfold which led to the restoration of my eyesight.

Upon healing, I decided I wouldn't waste my energy participating in the demise of Western civilization. It was missing heart, and without heart it could not survive. Most people have been successfully indoctrinated to believe that our society values compassion, equality, mutuality, wisdom, and human rights, but it doesn't. Western, and most human, culture is really out to destroy those qualities...to kill human spirit, primal life force, and aliveness. This creature called human civilization, without a heart, will eventually die on its own. The agreement I made was that I would not accept the polluted waters on the surface. I would look deeper and deeper and discover the pure spring, energy, love, grace, and God that flowed deep within every person on the planet. I would not accept anything except that purity: the beingness and oneness behind everything and the knowing behind all beliefs and ideas.

With my recovered sight, I began to make films my senior year in college. Over Christmas vacation my filmmaking friends and I decided to drive up to Montreal and shoot a documentary about an international spiritual group that teaches Yoga and other spiritual techniques. I'd heard of the group from my friend, Rhone, who was the nephew of the group's leader, Gaston Bourdage.

With no forewarning from Rhone, I called my friend's uncle to see if we could film their group's activities and he said, "Oh, We have expecting your call. Yes, you can come and stay at our house." About half way driving to Montreal, I got really sick. I was physically ill the whole time there and for a year afterwards. I had nausea, intestinal flu, and diarrhea. My body was trying to tell me something, but at the time I wasn't able to listen. When we got to Montreal, we arrived at a large home that looked like a very typical suburban residence. It was the meeting place of their secret society consisting of about two hundred members. They all held regular jobs but would meet at nights and on weekends in this big house. As we went inside the center, it started to snow heavily outside. Before long we were snowed in under six feet of snow. The drifts were so deep there was snow up to the top of the door, so we couldn’t go outside at all for five days.

Consequently we were stuck inside for days with this man, Gaston, and his partner, Edith. They told us that they were not human and they just took human form for our comfort and so they could communicate with us. With me were were three guys and two women. We were all filmmakers and not spiritually-minded at all. (I was at that time still in complete denial regarding St. Germain and my agreement with God.) As far as we consciously knew, we simply came there to do a documentary as journalists. Yet, to our shock and surprise, here we were sitting down hearing stories from people who said that they were not human. Gaston and Edith proceeded to take us through five days of spiritual initiation. First they told us the true history of the planet and about who we really are. I have since heard the same story in different words from every other spiritual teacher that I have ever had. Earlier, in another dimension, St. Germain had prepared me for these revelations.

They told us who we were as human beings. They said that we are souls that have come here to experience that the whole creation is made up of polarities, dualities...right and wrong, good and bad, up and down. We all buy into these beliefs, and that’s what makes matter and earth possible, as well as the whole pretend game we’re playing. All of this information went right over our heads; but, I know now, it went right into my soul. Then they took us for five days of soul travel, also called past life regression, astral projection or awareness technique. We lay on a bed and allowed our intuition, or soul, to open us to other lifetimes, either our own or others. In present time several of us went in spirit to the Himalayan mountains between Tibet and India. We delivered verbal messages from the people in Montreal to friends of theirs in Tibet. When we did this, it was as real as a conversation in everyday life, not foggy or vague in any way. Then they took us on a fantastic ride through various lifetimes of our choice.

In each other lifetime we visited, we would vividly experience being physically born in that lifetime. Then we'd observe and feel significant moments of the life in a very tangible way. Then we'd fully experience dying in that lifetime. While doing this, we were 99% identified with the other lifetime with only about 1% of our being aware of our body on a bed in Montreal. That’s how real it was. Every time we opened to another lifetime, we were very aware that the purpose was to learn about the effects of greed, selfishness, revenge, jealousy, and other human emotions and feelings. We were experientially realizing how being stuck in a certain narrow point of view can dominate and debilitate a person's whole life. It was quite an extreme exploration of all the various human conditions and frailties. In addition to going through death over and over again, we also experienced what it is like between lifetimes. In the in-between-lives state, we'd meet with our spiritual advisors, talk about how we fared the last lifetime, and choose what qualities and experiences we wanted to explore in the next lifetime. It was very powerful and transforming. I learned so much that I was able to use it professionally to benefit other people years later in Boston.

Then Gaston gave each of us a personal reading. For three hours, he told each of us who we were personally, as a soul, why we were here, and what we came to do. He said that originally there was only Oneness. When the Oneness decided to reveal itself in form, we each chose to express different aspects of the Totality, each embodying and radiating more of one aspect than the others. Some of us carry more of the vibration, or space, of love; for others it's innocence; for some it's courage. We have different jobs to do. Gaston shared that my essence is predominantly the frequency of peace and harmony. He told me that my soul was from a space called Xeros, a place of place. I was here on a mission of peace to observe humans and society and see how people interact. When I had learned enough, I was going to assist people to heal, re-connect and wake up. At first, I would learn ways to counsel and help people make peace with themselves and each other. Eventually, I would embody the vibration of serenity so much that if people were arguing and I walked down the other side of the street, they would just quit arguing from the effect of the calming quality of my radiance. It’s interesting because my first teacher after that was Michio Kushi, a Japanese teacher of macrobiotics and natural healing methods. The whole reason he lives was to bring peace to the world. And, as it's turned out, I've spent my life assisting people to become whole, tranquil, and happy...through meditation, yoga, Zen, counseling, therapy, rebirthing, natural foods, acupuncture, and other methods of self-empowerment and integration. Gaston also showed us a way to open the chakras, the energy centers of the body. Before we left, we met some of the other members of the society. They were professors, lawyers, doctors, and police officers, a cross section of society...very open, friendly people.

When we got back home to the University of Michigan, three of our group became so overwhelmed and scared that they went to a "white witch" in Detroit. She taught them different spells and rituals to protect themselves. The three of them had decided that the people in Montreal were evil and in some sort of Satanic cult. They went home and put salt on all of their doorways. Then they went to a Catholic Church and got holy water to sprinkle on everything. All three were eventually committed to mental institutions. They went to psychiatrists and couldn’t be helped. They went completely off the deep end. I wanted to go see the people in Montreal again, but I didn’t because I was still so physically sick. It was too soon for me. I had expanded too fast. I needed to integrate what I had uncovered within myself. Gaston wanted us to share what we had learned with other people, which I didn’t do for about ten years. I know now that the sickness was a way for my soul to slow me down so I would to heal and rearrange my universe before I transformed any further. I needed to develop more strength, compassion and wisdom before I opened to more spiritual exploration. The fifth member of our group did not freak out or get sick, but he did seek assistance from Findhorn, the spiritual community in Scotland, to understand and incorporate what happened to him in Montreal.

The purpose of the secret spiritual society in Montreal was to bring people together to awaken. It was a gathering of equals. They considered everyone in the group of equal ability and worth. The technique they used, which is not that different from the "dream outs" we do in the Gatherings, was to have people become aware of their spiritual nature in order to realize that they are eternal and all-knowing beings. The experience of the soul travels we did with them pierced a permanent bubble in our belief that we are just a personality in a body living just this lifetime.

The year after Montreal I was so sick for a year I couldn't work. I slept a lot, was freezing all of the time, and very weak. I had graduated from college and was about twenty-two. I had no money left so I moved in with my brother who was going to law school in Boston. One night for dinner my brother was cooking live lobsters in a big pot on the kitchen stove. I watched the lobsters trying to crawl out and sat there with the same feeling I had in the Roman coliseum with the bulls. I realized I needed to leave. I could not stay. I didn’t feel judgmental toward my brother, but my spirit knew that at that time it was not helpful for me to have to sit by and witness the killing of innocent animals again. I had nowhere to go, no money or friends, and I was sick. I didn't tell my brother I was leaving. I just grabbed my suitcase and left. Something was propelling me out of there toward my next encounter with destiny..

An hour later I found a natural food store where I could buy some ready-made food to eat. At the cash register, there was a young man who had a bright glow around his whole body, buying a fifty pound bag of whole wheat flour. I wondered who would buy fifty pounds of whole wheat flour unless they lived in a commune or with a group of people. My inner voice told me to go talk to him, but I was very shy about talking to strangers. He left the store and I suddenly experienced a jolt of inner panic. I heard an insistent command from deep inside, "You have to talk to this person!" I left the store and saw him way down the street. Chasing after him, I ran past people in the mud and slush. I finally caught up to him and said, "I couldn’t help noticing that you have all this flour and I figured you cooked for a bunch of people. Maybe I could come and eat with you." He said, "Sure, come on over."

He didn’t live with a group of people. He and his girlfriend lived in a two bedroom apartment. They loved making homemade whole wheat bread, chapatis, tortillas, cinnamon rolls, and muffins from scratch; they just used lots of flour between the two of them. There was an empty bedroom because a roommate had just left. I moved in that night and stayed for a year. We became really good friends and they introduced me to Michio Kushi.

Michio and I recognized our soul connection right away. I was soon helping to run his natural food stores. He helped me to understand and integrate the Montreal experience. By being with him, eating simple things like brown rice and getting a whole new world view, I regained my health very quickly. We would meet after his macrobiotic lectures and he'd talk to me for hours about being a free being. He taught that everyone is equal in all ways, and that we are all inherently able to do anything we chose in life. He spoke to me about sovereignty and the importance of working for one's joy, not just for money. He used to levitate and he taught me how. Michio’s whole purpose was to bring people together to become whole again and wake up. He told me someday I would be leading large groups of people to freedom. He said, "You will, you must, go far beyond me. You must leave me behind. You’re going to teach something much bigger and yet much simpler."

I moved to Los Angeles to run Michio's East-West Center, a villa and gardens in the Hollywood hills. It was a thirty room mansion with magnificent porches and balconies looking out over the city. We had a staff of eight people to keep it clean, cook for the residents, and maintain the grounds. There were avocado, lemon, lime, grapefruit, and orange groves on the property, as well as an evergreen forest, a rose garden, and a grape arbor. It had a gate house that was bigger than most people's homes. There were four huge fields in which I grew organic vegetables for our own food consumption. There were two meals a week for the public as well. Movie stars used to come to eat natural foods. The Center offered classes in Tai Chi, acupuncture, massage, macrobiotics, paper folding, flower arranging, and many other spiritual and Japanese disciplines.

It was in the East-West Center gardens where I first tuned into the vibration of plants. I learned to hear plants speak and I've been able to do it ever since. By my listening to the plant spirits and doing what they suggested, the gardens thrived and gave us an abundance of food. The plant devas told me I did not need to water them; I could save money on the water bill. They said plants don’t need water, soil, or nutrients to grow; they grow from consciousness and love, just as humans do. And they proved it to me. Following their instructions, I never watered the vegetables, flowers, or shrubs, yet they all grew healthy and strong. I would go up to the fields every day and lie in a hammock, and then tell everyone in the Center that I had been watering the gardens for hours. The plant devas implored me to tell people that I was watering the fields. They told me that if people found out that the gardens were not being watered, the plants would have to conform to the human belief in the necessity of watering and thus, they would have to wilt and die to be in harmony with the collective consciousness. Also, following the advice of the devas, I planted a smaller garden, about twenty by twenty feet, exclusively for the deer, rabbits, snails, fungus, and bugs. This garden had all of the vegetable varieties of the larger fields. It was devastated all the time, eaten to pieces by insects and animals. But they left the main fields alone. I was enraptured by the experience and did everything the plants told me to do. There was some part of me that would completely relax and trust them. And at that time if you would tell me to do anything that was 180 degrees opposite of what society says, I would do it! "Don’t water? Great! No problem!"

My life shifted abruptly once again after running the East-West Center for about a year. One night I went and saw a movie called "Sunday Bloody Sunday." It’s about people following the urgings of their heart. I came home from the movie and immediately got on a bus to the L.A. airport. I flew to San Francisco leaving my car and all my belongings behind because I knew intuitively I needed to move on. I made myself get on a plane that night because I knew if I "slept on it," I would have second thoughts and not leave at all.

The next day in San Francisco, I began to feel regret that possibly I had left Michio's Center in the lurch. After all, I was the director and it was a busy place with hundreds of people coming in and out. It was not a small thing to walk away from. I called the Center to tell my staff I was in San Francisco and never coming back. Before I could say anything, the head cook told me that Carolyn had called. She was the person who ran the Center before I did and we had not heard from her for a year. I called her and she said, "Look, I am kind of up in the air, could I come back and be your assistant or help in some way?" I said, "Well, you can have the whole place back if you want it." She said, "Wonderful!" So I was able to tell Michio, "Hey, I’ve left and Carolyn’s back running things." I was able to leave in a totally responsible way, even though, on the surface, it looked as if I was being irresponsible. I've found that when I make a move intuitively, following my heart, Spirit takes care of the responsibility part...and all of the other synchronicities necessary to maintain harmony.

In San Francisco I developed my interpersonal skills further by helping to run a communal natural foods restaurant called the "Good Karma Cafe." My experience at the cafe lived up to its name. It was a very healing and nurturing place for me. My daily routine was to arise at dawn and buy fresh produce directly from farmers at an outdoor market at the edge of town. I would spend the rest of the day cutting vegetables and fruits in a very meditative way and preparing them in soups, sauces and specials for two hundred people to eat each evening. Surprisingly, making all decisions concerning the restaurant as a group was a very smooth, enjoyable and easy process! The cafe was well-known in hippie circles and was a crossroads for people traveling form Hawaii to Machu Picchu and from Alaska to some ashram in India. After a blissfully contemplative, very California year, I was ready for more challenging exploits; I traveled to Boston to assist Michio with his booming natural food business there.

In Boston I helped take Michio's macrobiotic food company from one little retail store to the largest natural food manufacturing company in the world at the time. I learned to blend the financial with the spiritual. My social and managerial expertice blossomed. I discovered that I was good at assisting people to open to new possibilities and tap into previously unknown capabilities. And I loved transforming with people. During this period, I entered into the wild, adventurous world of rebirthing. Rebirthing is a way of releasing emotional and physical blocks in order to open to spirit. Wearing a snorkle to breathe, people would float face down in a hot tub. This environment simulated the womb experience and would invariably trigger people to re-experience their birth and the truama of the soul coming into a body and into this physical world. It was very powerful and often very dramatic. Often people would stop breathing and their body would turn white and then blue from lack of oxygen. It was in these crises that I learned to call on and trust grace. Asking for divine intervention, we'd intuitively massage and hug the body of the person, lie next to them, and talk to the person's heart. Eventually, the person would start to breathe again, come back to life, and feel ecstatic. We never lost anyone. We were watched over by their guardian spirits and our own. I know it was our innocence and pure intention to serve that carried guided us through each rebirthing safely.

When I was rebirthed for the first time I opened so much that I entered into the realm of angels for a period of two weeks. Every morning I'd wake up and whisper quietly to myself, "They're still here." I felt very honored and blessed. I just sat in my living room for two weeks straight and soaked up the energy of this heavenly host. I was receiving daily vibrational healing and cleansing and briefings on my next mission. I'd call in work everyday and tell them I couldn't move. Everyday my partners and co-workers understood and would leave food off at my home. Finally, I was able to go outside. I went to a large park across the street and the sky was filled with hundreds of angels going all the way up into the heavens as far as I could see. It was a momentous event. I carry with me still the feeling of awe and infinity that I embraced that afternoon.

Eventually, everyone in our company got rebirthed. We had naked truck drivers rebirthing each other. That sounds crazy but they did it. Their heart told them to. The next day, they would not even talk about it. It was funny. Somebody would refer to the rebirthing the night before and they'd say, "Don’t you ever mention that again." Yet the next evening, they’d be back to get rebirthed again, holding each other like babies for hours, naked in a hot tub. It was completely spiritual and not sexual in any way; there was too much grace to feel anything else. It was very healing and magical.

As everyone at the company rebirthed and freed their body and spirit, our sales took off and we tripled our market in just a year. Customers loved dealing with our salespeople, ordertakers and especially our open, personable truck drivers, who delivered the wholesale food orders to retail stores across the Northeast. One day, though, the three of us who ran the company, the president, the general manager and me, the vice-president, had a fateful meeting. We had a little extra money and my two partners wanted to buy a whole new fleet of trucks. We had a lot of manufacturing equipment to grind nut butters and to fill bags. Some of the machinery was getting old and breaking down and injuring the operators, sometimes even cutting off fingers. The three of us always voted on major issues. The two of them voted on spending the money to buy new trucks; I voted to spend it on fixing the machinery and safeguarding our workers. They saw no profit in fixing the machinery, but a large one in buying new, more efficient trucks. When they out voted me, I got up and just left. These were my friends who were being maimed by the faulty equipment. I couldn't remain at a company that had lost its heart.

Soon after leaving the health food company, I bought and ran two gourmet natural food Mexican restaurants in Boston. Owning my own restaurant had been a dream of mine for my whole life. I always wanted to prepare chef specials and then mingle with the clientele, inquiring how they enjoyed the specials that night. For a while, it was a lot of fun; but once satisfied with the thrill of ownership for a year, I wanted out of the business. Within a week of deciding to get out, a businessman who owned big steak and seafood houses up and down the East Coast offered to buy the restaurants for a hundred thousand dollars. That would wipe out my debt and give me enough money to go to acupuncture school. But the restaurants weren’t worth that much. We were fifty thousand in the hole. I felt I needed in good conscience to tell the potential buyer the truth of how I felt. I said to him," Look, you don’t want these restaurants. They can’t make money; there aren’t enough tables." He thanked me, but went ahead with the deal. I told the truth and still got the money. It was a very clear and powerful demonstration to me that speaking one's truth allows whatever is mutual and harmonious to unfold.

My next adventure was as an acupuncturist. I combined acupuncture with Reiki hands-on healing very effectively with my clients. As I allowed more transformative energy to flow through me, I met my next teacher, Medicine Cloud, a Hopi medicine man. From him I learned to work with the spirit animals of my clients. The spirit animals of a person would tell me what was really going on with their energy field and guide me to harmonize it with acupuncture and Reiki. This collaboration allowed me to become a lot more conscious, comfortable, and accurate dealing with the beings in "so-called" other dimensions. When the time came to begin the Gatherings, I was energetically more versatile and relaxed, because I had worked all those years with Medicine Cloud, spirit animals, and healing.

After many years of healing through Chinese medicine, the course of my life shifted direction once more in a matter of a few hours. My brother had developed what his doctor called "terminal" cancer. I assisted him to feel his feelings and change his beliefs and heal himself. After I witnessed my brother free himself of cancer with intention alone, I couldn't continue to present myself as "the healer." The morning my brother called to say he was cancer-free, I told my office secretary to cancel all of my appointments. I just left my practice that morning after years of being an acupuncturist. I knew it wasn’t acupuncture that was healing people; it was the power of their intention. I drove home without any conscious idea of what I would do next in my life. As I walked in the door to my house, the phone was ringing. A spiritual teacher I had visited in Arizona was on the line. He asked impishly, "Do you want to come out to Arizona and assist me in helping people change their consciousness?" He already knew! He had never called me before, but at that moment, he knew I was ready to leave my old universe. I said, "Sure! I’ll be out in four days." For three exciting years, I assisted Lester to help people to release stress and emotions and to free their consciousness of limiting beliefs.

After being with Lester, I facilitated a group course called "Avatar" for five years. It also was a way to assist people to improve their lives by transforming the beliefs that shaped their world. I delivered that training in major cities across the country quite successfully. Here I learned how to set up a network and co-create with people on a national scale. This has proven to be valuable experience for coordinating the Gatherings.

I’ve heard about the Gatherings from every spiritual teacher that I’ve had. Each one talked to me about a time when people would come together intuitively to share what they know...in their heart, in their beingness, in their essence, from their deep inner wisdom. The first time I encountered this was with St. Germain, the Ascended Master. Sometimes he would come in the subtle form and sometimes in the physical. He would speak to me about the Gatherings, about myself, and my purpose on the planet. And usually by morning, I would forget most of it. Most of my life, I've experienced miracles, spontaneous healings, and a very fluid, magical personal universe. Even with all of that, I still had a lot of doubt, reluctance and fear. I know now it just wasn’t time for me to wake up and to start utilizing these awarenesses. Then, finally, something happened that really was undeniable, that made it impossible for me to go back to sleep.

One evening I was in a hotel restaurant in Florida with a new friend I had recently met. On this occasion, we were talking about very safe subjects like sports and business,. Ater dinner we walked outside and my friend asked me if I wanted to go to a 7-11 convenience store over a mile down the street and get some bottled water. Noting the time and feeling it wasn't too late, we decided to walk to the store. Just as we were taking our first steps, my friend asked me, "What do you know about St. Germain?" Considering the tone of our dinner conversation, this question felt to me totally out of the blue. I had rarely mentioned my lifelong encounters with St. Germain to anyone and had not breathed a word of him or anything "spiritual" to my friend at all. To our shock and surprise, when our first step hit the ground, we were in front of the convenience store! We had gone that mile in one step. We quickly looked at our watches in front of the store; no time had gone by. We checked the wall clock in the store; no time had elapsed. In a daze, we bought the water and we walked back to our hotel in silence...the hard way. It took about 25 minutes.

After a long uncomfortable silence, we began to talk about other times that we had encountered time stretching or contracting. As people now do as a main element of each Gathering, my friend and I were intuitively making space in our belief system for something new by sharing personal, direct experience of similar extraordinary events. As we acknowledged to ourselves the reality of what we had just done, two lights began to fill the room...a purple radiance and a golden glow. Soon we were sitting there with St. Germain and Jesus in the hotel room. They began to speak to us in a very informal, familiar way. We conversed back and forth as old soulmates. They told us about our lives: what we were each doing here this lifetime and what our relationship was to each other, to them, to God, and to the overall plan. They met with us every evening for a week. Because I had a witness in my friend and because the connection was so vivid, powerful and conscious over so many days, the whole experience was impossible for me to deny, discount or invalidate. For once, my knowing of who I really am would not sink quietly back into my unconscious.

After this encounter, I continued to open to my true nature at a greatly accelerated rate. One particular night, I was lying in bed feeling very frustrated and lonely. I started to feel something in my heart, in my chest, that I had never felt before. It felt very different, very strange. It was a slight burning sensation. At first I thought maybe it was indigestion or heartburn. But it felt good. Then a momentous realization from deep inside began to dawn in my awareness. This feeling was me; it was a part of me that was coming alive again. As I lay there, opening gingerly to this warmth, this fire coming to life in my belly, a strangely familiar voice...the voice of my heart, my knowing, my higher self...began to speak: "This is not heartburn, you idiot. This is you. This is the real you. Not what you think is you, but the you that really exists behind your identity, your body, and the appearances of life. This is the essence of you. Right now, it’s only a small flame, a pilot light. Your only job is to nurture this radiance. Protect it. Keep it safe. Allow it to grow." This mandate to nurture the primal fire within soon lead me to the volcanic islands of Hawaii.

For the next several years, I spent as much time on the Hawaiian Islands as I could. The inviting ocean, the balmy breezes, and the protective palm trees allowed me to relax in a much deeper way than I generally would anywhere else. I felt safer and more connected with the Earth than I did in most other places. The Big Island with its active volcano attracted me in particular. On that island by the shore one evening, I was unwinding and allowed myself to really open. I surrendered to the rhythmic waves lapping on the rocks. I merged into a connection with Spirit, Oneness, Self, to a greater degree and for a longer time than I ever had before. I’d had glimpses of this experience before...brief moments when I knew the whole score, the blueprint of what I was here on the planet to do. But until this moment I'd only stayed in that state for about forty-eight seconds, not the forty-eight hours to come.

I discovered that the more I allowed myself to enjoy and surrender to these waves of love and acceptance, the deeper and more powerful the joy got. I allowed wave after wave of total, non-judgmental, unconditional energy to pour over me. Gently, tenderly, I was gathered into the arms of the Earth. I was held childlike by life itself. Each breath of wind spoke to me of the love that was my essence. The only word I know that comes close to describing this state is grace. I never used that word before; but at this moment, I finally knew what that word meant. As this ecstatic embrace continued throughout the night, I realized that it wasn’t going away this time. I wasn’t going to deny it or run from it. It felt like home. I started to really trust it. I began to let up the unresolved problems and painful traumas of my life...the issues that still hadn’t cleared up with my parents, friends, body, and finances. As I felt my way through my life, old confusions lifted, ancient terror melted, and the horror of separation dissolved. Clarity came. I knew true peace for the first time in my life.

After two full days of this divine energy, I was sharing my excitememnt with friends at a seaside cafe. Suddenly piercing the afterglow of this inner calm, a very familiar memory, vision, nightmare swept over me. I had been hounded by this remembrance my whole life. It recurred every time I was in a safe and expanded state. I knew the story all too well:

I was a member of a group of twelve beings whose job, and greatest joy, was to bring light and consciousness to the places in the creation where there was still darkness and unconsciousness...where awareness had not yet arrived. We loved this adventure. But there was one place we were not ever supposed to go. This was very frustrating because our very essence was to be light-bearers. One day I convinced the others to go to this forbidden space. As we approached, I, being in front as the ringleader, saw the nature of this prohibited place and was able to stop myself from going any further. Despite my warning, my cohorts, however, could not put on their brakes fast enough and went into the outer zone of this space and were repelled into a kind of spiritual limbo for eons.

Even though I had worked on this trauma with every technique and teacher in my life, I had not been able to resolve the heavy guilt, regret and sorrow about having gone against the will of God, broken a divine trust and sent my closest soul friends to a state of perpetual purgatory. I also had never been able to remember or discover what this place was that was so off-limits to everyone. That evening, however, as I retold the hopeless tale one more time, I saw with total clarity the reason we were not supposed to enter into this place. It hadn't been the right time! Chilled by an ominous breath of wind, as I sat there in an open cafe watching the golden sun retire into the depths of the ocean, I realized with equal clarity that now it is time to know this final piece of the puzzle: this previously prohibited place is the space of knowing...knowing how to undo the whole creation...and knowing that it is now time to do it. As the primal force of this awareness moved up through my body and being, the phrase was triggered and expressed: We are the fail-safe seeds to ensure that the creation does not go on forever.

With the dawning of this awareness, I knew it was time for "gatherings" to commence. I had been told of the "gatherings" my whole life...by my human and celestial teachers, by Pan and by my own heart...a time when people would intuitively begin to gather around the earth to share, from the core of their beings, the wisdom of their own unique knowing...once again each person freely expressing her/his own individul, particular gift, vibration, aspect of the Oneness, and in doing so, returning us all to wholeness. The "gatherings" would be a fertile space for the seeds of knowing, planted by us so long ago, to germinate and to blossom. Just as the 6,000 year old wheat kernels found in Egyptian pyramids sprouted when given the right environment for growth, so our absolute knowingness will come forth organically when provided with the warmth of the heart and the safety of innocence. In the timeliness of grace and in a space free from duality and judgment, our ancient wisdom will naturally begin to flow forth again. This will be the magic, the alchemy of the "gatherings."

I knew right at that moment exactly what we gatherers would do when we came together. We would ask for and enter the state of grace; we would go to our knowing; and we would allow ourselves to know what our purpose is here and how to go about it. Our knowing would direct the rest of the "gathering," and the rest of our lives!

When I got back from Hawaii to my home in Arizona, I discovered that my friend, who had shared with me the encounters with St. Germain and Jesus, also knew it was time to do "gatherings." We intuitively phoned friends around the world to tell them what we intended to do. Twenty-five souls came from New Zealand, Hawaii and from across the country to the first Gathering in Sedona, Arizona, in the summer of 1994. As with current participants, these first people showed up because their intuition guided them to come.

Right before the first Gathering, my friend and I felt that we needed to open to more inner direction for this initial reunion of soulmates in Sedona. We hiked deep into a remote canyon in northern Arizona. Our intention was to wake up to who we were individually, what our relationship was to each other, and to St. Germain, Jesus, and God. On the fourth day, Spirit spoke to us: "What you are seeking, you can find by going to what you know...go to what you know from personal, direct experience." We started playing with this by the river in the canyon. I’d say something and then my friend would say, "Well, do you know that for sure?" And I’d say, "Well, no, that’s what the Bible says, or Jesus, Sai Baba, or Buddha." He'd respond, "Okay. That’s fine. Their words and their experience are helpful. But what do you know about it for sure from your own personal, direct experience?"

Up until this time, I had tried meditating a lot. And I 'd tried going to my intuition in the past. Sometimes I got an answer, and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I got an answer and I didn’t trust it; I couldn't tell if it was my intuition or not. But as we sat there in the silence of the canyon, with our intention very strong to just allow this to work and to allow ourselves to wake up naturally and gently, answers did come. Our inner voice came through loud and clear with answers from our own direct, personal experience. And the more questions we asked about life, death, money, sex, and spirit, the more quickly and easily answers came from our knowing. The channel to our intuition clearer, stronger, and more fun! We began to feel ourselves coming alive again...on fire, burning with joy and passion for life like we hadn't felt since childhood. Our sense of who we really are, our essential being, got deeper, richer, and more tangible. And as we filled with the power, wisdom and compassion of our own soul's direct life experiences, we noticed that our fears, doubts, confusion, and spiritual forgetfulness were lifting naturally. We knew then that this is what we would do at the Gatherings. We also knew then that just as we discovered scores of buried personal direct experiences, so too would people at the Gatherings uncover their own direct experiential answers to their deepest questions.

ORDER LIVING THE DREAM