On Devotion, Awakening & A City from Another World

When I was a child, I used to play a Sufi music CD and dance around the living room. That CD is called Love and Devotion by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. To this day, I find it fantastic and enchanting.

Neither of my parents are Sufis. I’m not sure where that CD came from or what inspired me to start listening to it – but at four or five years old it became the one piece of music I obsessed over. Listening to those chants, I began to spin around in circles, and move in lines across the edges of our living room rug. I began to see images in my mind for each of the songs. I left my experience as a child and transported to a place where I became a king of some ancient country. I saw boats, caves full of spiritual beings, and other strange things that I won’t describe here.

I grew up in a (mostly) secular American household in the rural southwest. We didn’t talk about religion. At five years old, no one explained to me that there were people called Sufis who danced in circles and transported their consciousness to a different state. But when I listened to the sufi music, these things started happening for me. I suspect I may have past life expertise in that area.

We are each born with an ocean of potential inside of us. There are things that come easily to every person, and we have these natural inclinations from birth. In my view, this reflects the knowledge of our souls, and the particular expression our spirits want to take in this lifetime.

In my childhood, there were many signs of spiritual inclination for me. In kindergarten, I used to perform ceremonies and funerals for the little blue moths that would die in the mud of our playground. Throughout my early childhood, I had vivid dreams where I communicated with people and animals in other worlds. They were beautiful dreams and incredible experiences – but I didn’t understand what they were teaching me until later in life.

Had I grown up in an ancient society, the elders would have paid attention to these signs. They would have seen that I was on the shaman’s path. But the shaman is given no place in the modern world. These signs from my childhood were dismissed or ignored. What’s worse, the American education system only cares about molding kids into something useful for the industrial world. They don’t consider, let alone value, the natural inclinations of a child. They pay no attention to the dreams or games of children.

I awakened when the time was right. At fifteen years old I had an experience where the sky opened – a spiritual awakening that changed my life, even though I had zero context to understand what was happening at the time. By then I’d become enculturated into a mostly-secular American worldview. I liked video games and animated movies. My family only went to church on Easter and Christmas. I’d been involved in a Christian youth group for a while, but those things provided no answers for what I was experiencing. I had spiritual experiences that I kept to myself. For I was afraid (and rightly so) knowing these things would only be met with terror and rejection from the adults around me.

You’re probably wondering what happened during that experience. In many ways it cannot be spoken of: In one sense because there are no words in the English language that can capture what happened. In another sense, there are many stories that would have to be told, in order to explain the steps that lead to that awakening. I will share one of them here:

When I was about eleven years old, I wanted to design video games but I had no way of doing this. So I came up with a brilliant idea: I would design a video game that I could play in my mind. One night I designed a whole process for this. I laid in bed and said a secret password in my mind that was supposed to transport me into a game-world.

Next thing I knew, I was standing on top of a skyscraper looking over a city of orange lights.

Now I was always an imaginative kid, coming up with games and fantasies – but this was different. It was vivid and palpable. The first thing I did was look over the side of that skyscraper, and then I began to run down the side of the building, my body defying gravity. I felt the wind rush by my face. I quickly began having adventures in this vivid world with the intent of playing it like a game.

Soon I discovered that I could experience anything I wanted in my mind. If I wanted to experience something, I simply had to focus on creating it, and it would appear for me. I shaped the bodies of various video game and cartoon characters into existence. Pretty soon I found myself making friends with Street Fighter characters or the X-Men. Every night I would go to bed and travel to this world where I would experience these fantasies in a way that I could see, feel and hear.

Along with this, something strange began to happen: when I was not trying to visualize a particular thing, the world and its people would appear all on its own. I met characters who I had never seen before, and I wasn’t trying to create them. They appeared and became a part of the games I played in my own mind. I had various experiences in this world that seemed so natural, I began to question “is this a parallel dimension?”

I only knew about that concept from sci-fi and games. Nobody had ever talked with me about astral projection, shamanism or the potential reality of such things. For a while as a kid, I entertained this belief of parallel dimensions. But as I grew, I became more rational and I abandoned this notion. I still went on frequent journeys in my mind, because I enjoyed them, but I considered these a part of my imagination.

All of that changed one day. After my spiritual awakening at fifteen, let’s just say that I began talking with the spirits in a direct and powerful way. I began to study any esoteric knowledge that would help give me knowledge of this realm. I read the main books of different religions. I studied ritual magick and psychic cultivation among many other things.

Like many kids, I was encouraged to go to college right out of high school. I felt completely out of place in the university. I stopped paying attention to my university classes, and instead immersed myself in shamanism and healing arts. I joined shamanic journey circles that opened my eyes to how I’d been doing shamanic journey since age eleven – I simply had not known it at the time.

Through training, I began to have experiences with spirits and psychic abilities that dramatically increased in power. They began to heal me. I was severely depressed and anxious at that point in my life, and working with the spirits brought me out of that hell. They guided me onto a road of empowerment in a way that no human ever has. I’ve had so many experiences since then – including visions that were shared or validated by other practitioners.

Once I sat inside a cave and saw a spirit walk through the entrance that another person described in the same way as I’d recognized it. In times like that, the skeptical voice inside my head begins to wane. There’s no way to prove any of these things. But when a person sees and lives these experiences (and when those experiences are lived and shared by many) – the most rational choice is to find a bigger model of reality. Given everything I’ve seen and learned, a spiritual big-picture of reality is the only one that makes sense. It’s funny that in the end my childhood fantasy of “parallel dimensions” seems closer to the truth than I ever imagined as a kid.

I’ve kept these stories secret for much of my life. I’ve shared them with canny invidivuals and in certain societies – but this is the first I’ve publically written about them. I’m choosing to share certain information, because I find nothing more critical than expanding awareness in the world today. So I want to open a dialogue about consciousness, spirits and esoteric paths to knowledge. I want to live in a society where we give room for shamans and magicians again. We are here – and there are more of us than many would think.

I’m writing this during the COVID-19 epidemic, where the government tells us to stay inside. This is a time of tremendous anxiety. Life as we know it has changed, and we don’t know where it’s going. My career and life plans have been put on temporary hold along with my social life. In this time of reflection, I remember the name of that Sufi CD, Love and Devotion.

I find that devotion is a powerful idea. When we find a sense of devotion within us, we have found meaning in our lives. Most people have some kind of devotion. It keeps us going through hard times. We are certainly living through hard times now, and I imagine a lot of people are questioning or reconsidering what they devote themselves to.

It’s unfortunate that modern stories often fail to capture the richness and range of devotion. We’re inundated with movies about romance. Part of the American psyche obsesses over the romance of monogamous love. This is a particular kind of devotion – but certainly not the only kind (and it does not speak to everyone.) We see stories where a soldier devotes themselves to the ideal of freedom, which they will fight or die for. Indeed, America remembers the devotion of a soldier.

But we don’t give voice to the vast possibility of a person’s devotion. One can devote themselves to building a family or a circle of friends (which becomes a certain type of family.) Some will devote themselves to their craft – and spend countless hours honing their skills until they reach mastery. No one can stop them. When we are devoted to something, no one can take that away from us. It is a beautiful thing.

My devotion is to the spirits. The path I walk is a path between worlds. There are many other things I consider important in life – family and friends among them. My creative and healing work are important too. Yet at it’s core, my devotion is to the shaman’s way. I take this as seriously as I would take a marriage. This represents an expression of my spirit – it’s who I am and what I have chosen.

I will end this post with two quotes.

The first comes to us from the Kybalion,

” The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding.”

The second has its roots in Buddhist tradition,

” Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

I will leave you with that. May you prosper and be well.