The Beginning of My Spirit Walk

I have to be honest with you, I’ve always talked to the Source of All That Is. That’s my first real memory. When I was nine years old, I reached out into the nothingness with my soul. I didn’t have words, but my soul spoke for me. It cried out, and the nothingness became All That Is.

I didn’t have a name for it. I just knew that I was now a part of it. That was the day I awoke to a new reality where I was an active participant. I’m not going to delve into now—you can hear the story in my 3rd series podcast, The Second Wave of Volunteers—but that’s when the hunger for knowledge about this entity took over my life. Because of my upbringing, the only entity I knew about was the God of Bible, so that’s who I talked to for the next 31 years.

The versions of Christianity I experienced—Methodist, Baptist, Brethren, and Messianic—didn’t believe God talks to us. If you wanted to hear God, you had to read the bible because that’s where God said everything he wanted to say, and then ghosted us. That was the official message of these denominations, but that wasn’t my personal experience. I experienced “divine encounters” on several occasions throughout those years, and many other experiences that were more subtle.

It was the subtle experiences that taught me how to connect with All That Is. Because I was taught, and I believed, that everything about God was written in the Bible, the Bible became for all intents and purposes, God. It was God in written form, so I studied it with incredible intensity. Every word had multiple levels of meaning. I also studied ancient history with a similar intensity so I could interpret the words based on language usage and idioms of the times in which the words were written. I have bookshelves full of lexicons, dictionaries, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Talmud, Kabbalah, writings of church fathers, gnostic scriptures, as well as archaeology, and other historical, sociological, and cultural texts from the time of Moses through the dark ages. God was speaking through the bible, so I wanted to be sure I heard him accurately.

It wasn’t enough to read these texts, I would agonize over them, making sure my own biases weren’t influencing how I interpreted everything I was reading. I applied logic, deductive and inductive reasoning, and forced myself to objectively read the bible. It wasn’t easy. I had to be very honest with myself, and constantly on guard against letting pre-existing dogma and doctrines determine how I interpreted things. It can be very subtle: a simple assumption or conclusion that seems so obvious, but was totally unknown by the authors. To help keep me honest, I read research by people coming from opposing beliefs, and gave their research the same respect and attention that I gave to researchers who agreed with my preexisting beliefs. And you know what? Amazing insights happen when you take yourself out of your own worldviews and perspectives. It’s like removing smog from your brain. It simply works better.

To help make sense of all this conflicting information, I started doing three things: I started writing down everything as I learned it, I began taking long walks in the back field where I talked to God about what he supposedly said, and I had long talks with my sister who lived across the country. Those long walks with God were amazing.

Since no one could hear me, I talked out loud and in the silence between thoughts, new ideas and new perspectives emerged. Although I didn’t know the word or the concept at that time, I was experiencing claircognizance, or clear knowing. It’s one of the ways to gain higher knowledge.

After my walks, I’d talk about these insights my sister. For hours at a time, we’d weigh the ramifications and consequences of each new idea against what we were taught. These conversations helped to clarify concepts that still felt murky or conflicting. Next came the writing. I’d spend a hours each day laboring over ideas until they were coherent and easily understood. I ended up writing 5 theological textbooks this way. The last I check, the Perpetual Flame, and Romans: from the mind of Paul are still being used by Messianic Yeshiva. The other three books—the Restoration Covenant series and Eve: temptress or victim are still available on Amazon. I decided to keep these books available in case anyone else is going through a similar Spirit Walk to my own.

As you may have already guessed, this kind of self-honesty comes at a price. I lost my faith in the God of the bible. My soul was still hungry for the Source of All That Is, but where was I supposed to turn? For the past 31 years, I had wrapped my entire identity around the bible and my faith. I felt betrayed and deceived. My trust was destroyed. I couldn’t even trust myself anymore. There was nowhere to turn so I fell into a deep withdrawal. I abandoned my friends—all of whom were as fervent as I had been—left my congregation, and stopped talking, even to my family. I didn’t know who I was anymore and I didn’t know who God was either. Despite it all, I still believed in this Unknown presence, but it took the terminal illness of my mother four years later, to force me into finding the answers.