7 Tips To Reinvent Your A Course In Miracles And Win
Looking back now, my way to “A Course in Miracles” probably all were only available in 1969 when I accepted Jesus my personal Lord and Savior, under the influence of the Campus Crusade for Christ. However, after joining a Christian brotherhood of aspiring monks, where I was daily quizzed on what many Bible verses I had memorized and may recite verbatim, I was totally confused by it all. Their version of reality just didn’t sit well with me. I felt like a parrot of Bible verses, that I didn’t even begin to understand, or the city crier that nobody wished to hear. Jesus would show me more, a lot more.
As divine synchronicity would have it, I ingested a hallucinogen that led to a near death go through the day after Christmas, 1970. When I was in the black void, with only the consciousness that “I’M”, George Harrison’s song My Sweet Lord began playing. That has been my voice singing to God, not George’s! Soon a brilliant white light began taken from the darkness, as my soul sang “I must say i desire to see you Lord”. Then somebody started to emerge from the light. This Holy One oscillated between masculine and feminine.
As I’d been praying to Jesus, I thought it might be him, but without a beard. I began crying from the depths of my soul, as the Holy One communicated telepathically into my heart. I knew this Being to be nothing but pure love. Then it was over. I was shot back into my body, hearing the words to a fresh song telling me “it has been quite a long time coming, it will likely be a long time gone.” How true that has been.
Per year later, I saw the cover of Autobiography of a Yogi. It was Paramahansa Yogananda who had arrived at me! Next came meeting Baba Ram Dass, who confirmed that I wasn’t crazy and stated that Yogananda had seemed to many young spiritual seekers on drugs. He also autographed my copy of Be Here Now. My next decade was spent as an aspiring yogi and practicing Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship lessons and exercises, chanting, meditating and receiving initiation into Kriya yoga. Yogananda’s path and linage of gurus brought the much needed clarity for me to understand Jesus and Christianity better. Yogananda also showed me the fundamental truth behind the oneness of all religions.
And he brought me to Babaji, the Mahavatar who sent him to America back the 1920s. Since I heard the name Babaji, I knew I knew Him. He and Jesus work together, behind the scenes, in the cosmic scheme of things. And Babaji was to be the next step in my ongoing spiritual evolution. However, I did not know at this stage that He had supposedly manifested a body again and was residing in the tiny village of Haidakhan, in northern India. That would come later, together with the mystery and myth of this current manifestation.
a course in miracles After hearing Bhagavan Das sing, I purchased a dotara and began chanting mantras to God daily. This simple, ancient two- stringed instrument is easy to play and lets one follow the drone sound into silence. At this point, I purchased my very own place in the woods and met a man who’d lived with Babaji. He conducted a Vedic fire ceremony that Babaji had taught him to initiate my new abode. I questioned and grilled him repeatedly, asking if this new Babaji was exactly the same entity Yogananda wrote about. Yes, one and exactly the same but peoples egos still question His true identity. Babaji’s new Kriya yoga was the road of truth, simplicity and love while performing karma yoga- work – and keeping one’s mind on God, through repetition of the ancient mantra Om Namaha Shivaya.
Babaji stated that mantra alone was stronger than one thousand atomic bombs and His 1-800 number. I began at this stage seriously doing japa, or the repetition of the mantra on 108 rudraksha beads, to obtain this vibration into my sub consciousness. I also learned many ways to chant it on my dotara. With all of this going on, I bought “A TRAINING COURSE in Miracles” and began the daily lessons immediately. I tried to make sense of the Text but got nowhere; each sentence bogged me down and had to be re-read over way too many times to assimilate. I was just too young, I told myself. I was thirty-three. I’d cope with this Text later, someday, maybe.
Then after a year to be married, our house burns down- a real karmic fire ceremony. In the ashes, untouched by the fire, was an image of Babaji and His cymbals from Haidakhan. Discuss miracles! Next, was the unexpected news that we have a baby coming, after losing everything? My marriage started to dissolve quickly after I fell twenty feet off a roof, breaking my body in twelve places. Surviving death, I was put back to college for two years to be retrained, while my ex-wife and son left for the Southwest. This is when all of my abandonment issues resulted in extreme drinking alone. After graduation, I left for India to see Babaji’s ashram, as He had already left His physical body again, also to pray for help with my entire life in probably the most spiritual country on the planet.
I attended the 1995 Kumbha Mela festival with ten million others and lo and behold, who should appear? It was Babaji, asking me if I was having a great time. Yes, but I couldn’t speak to answer Him! HE THEN disappeared back to the crowd, leaving me impressed. Returning state side, I ended up following my ex- wife and son to the Southwest, where my next thing was peyote meetings with the Native Americans for quite some time ahead. Everything I’d read and studied in the Course was evident on the medicine inside that tipi. God Is.
I learned more in one night than I had in years of studying metaphysical books. But I didn’t practice all I’d learned and I let my depressed ego, alcohol and abandonment issues take me closer to death’s very door. However, as fate, karma and prayers could have it, I finished up in prison for just two 2.5 years on an aggravated DUI, instead of dead, where I discovered the Courses’ Manual for Teachers inside our library. Soon, I had the complete book sent in absolve to prisoners and was reintroduced to Jesus again, with all the time I needed to study every word of this lengthy text.
After twenty years, I have to be old enough to get it now! In time and with assistance from the Course, I was finally in a position to forgive myself for the bizarre life my ego had constructed. I did the daily lessons again, trying to see the face of Christ within each inmate. That was no easy one. But I left prison a changed, free sober man, far better for the experience sufficient reason for a first draft book about any of it all under my belt. Today, I have eight years of sobriety under my belt and my book Still Singing, Somehow won the fall Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. This is the very condensed version of my story- an odyssey of 1 soul’s karma.
