A Path To Freedom: The Awakening

By Michael Ginsberg

"A Path To Freedom: The Awakening" is a non-fiction narrative that follows the author Michael Ginsberg for 25 years. Examining what it takes to go beyond human suffering, he strives to fundamentally understand himself. The book shares real-life anecdotal stories and confessions of what transcending the ego looked like in his case or what it might look like in anyone's case that wants to realize God. This tapestry of spiritual realizations shows the way to go beyond all suffering, as Michael speaks profound truths about what stops people from realizing God. He expresses an enlightened view of human relationships and how to transcend or go beyond difficult circumstances.

Michael Ginsberg grew up under the umbrella of difficult circumstances. His father was never around; he was the youngest of three, he lived with all women, his two sisters, and his mother. He thought of himself as the man of the family.

Being sick quite often, he sought ways to heal himself through diet, exercise, and yoga. To this end began his great search to set his life right from suffering. This book shares every detail of his journey, from yoga practices to spiritual teachings. This book shares every detail of his profound and dire search to end suffering and discover life's answers. He shares with you how people bound up in the illusion of the world are suffering. His ambitious narrative speaks profound truths. These are truths that he sought after for decades, and oftentimes experienced unimaginable pain along the way. He believes that there is divinity in all of us, and with great love, his words will jump off the page and flow directly into your heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098383886

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All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN 978-1-09838-387-9 | eBook ISBN 978-1-09838-388-6

The Prologue

A Path to Freedom (The Awakening)

The book you are reading came to be because; I was at a crossroads in my life.

Five years before this juncture, I had vanished in the mountains for five days.

When I made it out alive to safety, my experience changed my outlook on life vastly.

At this time, I was living in a small mountain town in northern Arizona called Payson.

Incidentally, Payson has been home to the oldest rodeo in the United States.

I was trying to make some sense of what to do next in the mountains there.

I had learned at the precipice of death that I was a healer.

This discovery is what saved my life. I used breathing, visualization, perseverance, and all that I had learned in my life up to that point to calm my consciousness by relaxing my physical and emotional states. All of my yoga training Saved my life. I had a vision quest at seven thousand feet. That tested my ability to remain alive in the direst circumstances. I had thoughts racing through my head that I might die out there. These yogic procedures and techniques gave me access to my higher self, which allowed me to stabilize my heart rate and breathe from panicked short choppy breaths and the gnawing numbness of fear and anxiety about what lay ahead in a life and death struggle. That tested my ability to remain alive.

From the time I survived and made my way off that mountain, I became motivated to write my first book Michael and The Mountain. After committing that book to paper five, years passed before my life would make some real sense. During this time, I had many challenges.

I was seeking and suffering and had one problem after another Which, caused me to encounter such limiting karmas in myself that it was overwhelming at times. These karmas were holding me hostage in a prison of my own making. Therefore I always looked for a way out of one problem after another which, created more difficulty for me. Like the great sage Ramana Maharshi imparted, karma is coming to you do: what you can to prevent it. Just know and get ready for what happens in your life. These tendencies have followed you around since the beginning of all of your lifetimes. This time frame brings together and encapsulates every single karmic propensity that ever preceded this birth.

So much so that I turned to seek God-realization, desperately through various yoga forms and looking for God within me. I had been doing this for several years, and now I looked to and indeed did intensify this search. I did the most extreme yoga practices. I taught myself how to master my breathing. I performed this by staring at my third eye; this helped to equalize my incoming breath with my outgoing breath and relax my central nervous system. .Now, I pulled out all the stops and engaged this process with full throttle and tremendous determination and intensity. There was one thing that I knew unequivocally—that I must realize God.

All of the seeking and disciplined yoga efforts became albatrosses. This set in motion the understanding that I had to meet a living master. One day it became clear that essentially psychologically and sensitively, I was not balanced enough. I was too thin, and I was aware of many things in my diet that did not resonate in harmony with my body. My emotional disposition was one of being frustrated, angry, fearful, and anxious. I was suffering from spiritual disease, and I was bordering on insanity. I had read if you mess around with the higher dormant energies in the human body, it is essential to be under the guidance of a guru. It became apparent that I would have to come under the tutelage of a human spiritual master.

As you shall see in my spiritual journey, I had many disembodied spiritual masters that served my heart. They were guides to get me to my true guru. Thank God that these beings were accessible to me because I truly needed them. I felt I should move to India to find a guru. I went missing in life. I suffered depression at times and anxiety at others.

At the end of these five years, I saw the picture of a man on a wall.

Thus, it begins my story of actual God-realization. That was graced to me by a living master, a Siddha, a perfected one(one who has realized God); this one can transmit it to disciples, and through that transmission, they can recognize that state of the Master. All masters share their realization of the great and omnipotent divine reality. This story represents an account with my Ishta, which I chose, to take me from the darkness to the light.

Preface

I created this book because of my 25-year-long odyssey to realize a life free of ordinary suffering. That mundane life consisted of never feeling good enough to accomplish very much of anything. Therefore, I was intensely looking for a way to change that. This feeling drove me to locate or know or connect with God, truth, or the reality that we are all living.

My three spiritual master teachers helped me so much to understand things about myself.

I wrote this book to show human beings that there is indeed a path to freedom.

Perfection, love, bliss, and happiness always already can be realized as your actual state even right now.

There would be nothing to write about if I had not met these profound beings in physical form.

Introduction

I wrote this spiritual journey to show the most straightforward way of realizing everything in the universe is one thing. When I discovered this truth, it became simple to understand, and it is an irrefutable truth, and the only necessary competence, in everybody’s existence. My years of yoga meditation prepared me, physically and spiritually, to meet my true guru. This preparation of my body-mind was given directly to me from the generous spirit of God. This consistent applied yogic effort resulted from my many lifetimes as a yogi on the path to find God. I met my true guru and spiritual Master because I was thirsty for some water after a hard day of physical work. I did get a drink of water to quench my thirst, and what I got was a genuine drink of pure water that showed me what divinity is. That water was the living Divine in the form of the spiritual Master. All of this transpired just from looking at the spiritual Master’s picture. While I was at my employer’s house, this unfolded as grace will have it, the end of my intense yogic effort to find God, and brought this yogic insanity to a close in my life. Because of this happening, I guided all my seeking to a halt. With this development came real peace for me. He steered me Godward and continuously into the divine reality. With all his words as my constant teacher and guide by his grace.

He said to all his devotees, give me your attention and I will bless and awaken you to God knows where. To the state of truth, peace, and happiness, because when you locate me and allow me to be your guide and great help, you will become divinely free in love, wisdom, joy; you’re going to find it an extremely rare simplicity. He said to have an opportunity to practice this way is a mighty and great opportunity. I will be your constant teacher and guide through the whole process.

Tribute to my spiritual masters

I would like to thank three spiritual masters who awakened me to various illumination levels and understanding of the Great Spirit we call God.

I cannot convey enough gratitude to them as they served as guideposts along rocky and treacherous terrain to the other shore and the conversion of the heart. I could cross over from a life of self-possession, suffering, and seeking love and self-acceptance, to a life lived in love, and the way I achieved this is to realize that you are love itself. So, therefore, there is no need to find love. This revelation cures the heart of unenlightenment to enlightenment. First, Paramahansa Yogananda, for ten whole years, I called him into my life, by following his instruction, to daily call him into my spine to guide me so that he could reveal God to me; he did just that. I owe a debt of gratitude to and for him. Coming to the West and making it possible for millions to learn discipline, they could become stilled enough to precisely commune with the universal cosmic unity that everything and everyone is of, including the stars, planets, etc. He said never let anything interfere in your scientific process of God-realization. In and by this great yoga, he taught me the concentration of a single point or the Bindu. He was my spiritual Master for ten years; if I had not met him, I could not have met my true spiritual guru master. I had to prepare on so many levels. I cannot describe them all here. Succinctly, I can say under his guidance, from the spiritual plane, because he already passed out of this world, I learned discipline, balance, calmness, breath control, healthy living habits, prayer, and so many forms of healing too numerous to mention here. All of this was essential to get me ready to relate rightly to my chosen guru with true devotion. It was going to be a serving I had to have to realize the great one. One day I was browsing in a metaphysical bookstore in New Jersey, where I went for a psychic reading. Then I came across the great Master’s books; as I looked through them, one book spoke to my heart, so I bought it. I had established a connection, and in due course, as grace will have it, I became his devotee for ten whole years.

Picking up his book in a bookstore and then becoming his devotee and then finding out I had been a yogi countless times.

Next, I have two inseparable beings to thank at various times over twenty years. This spiritual growth could happen in a way that only the Great Spirit or grace could have orchestrated. I have a debt of gratitude for beloved Adi Da, capturing my heart away from the great path of return. Trying to find and then know God from seeking truth and reality. I was sick, frightened, and going insane, from manipulating energies, from sexual to spiritual back and forth, to solve all my life problems.

The day Beloved came into my existence, and I became aware of his teaching, was the holy dropping off point, whereby my search for God ended at his blessed feet. It is said in spiritual traditions, a guru or many gurus can teach you many things. Yet, there is only one guru that is your ultimate teacher, and he/she is the one that is the airplane route to God. As a result of this awareness, I recognized who he was for me. Then I was able to let go of my insane ascetical search for God. Grace itself led me to him and his human-born bodily godly form. This revelation of his human physical divine form allowed me to be able to relate to him and let go so he would be able to do the sacred yoga in my body., By giving up my whole self at his holy feet, I permitted him to purify my life, body-mind, and the ultimate karmic destiny I was heading in. He called this divine intervention, moving you from your unconscious fate of seeking, suffering and death, to a divine one of love bliss bright conscious light by the principle of attraction, love, recognition, and response to the great one.

Then there was a man that was a student of Adi Da’s, who was brought to the pinnacle of enlightenment by Adi Da.

His name is Nick Rivero. When he came into my life, I knew nothing about spiritual life and was ignorant concerning spiritual community and genuine love. Anger, fear, sorrow, of every kind people just wanted nothing to do with me, the vibe I sent out was unconscious, twisted, and maliciously muted. What I mean by this is I was a powerless being. I was furious, and it showed it would not come out all at once. It would seep out the sides moment by moment and was a colossal offense .to everyone. Before Nick, people did not even want to get to know me; it was awful. It was different from the beginning with Nick; he embraced me and loved me when no one else would. I would say or do things that moved people to abuse me and work me over, which was very painful. He saw me beyond all my limitations and bullshit. For me, he was great good spiritual divine help in the physical, and his compassion healed me of a lifetime of attracting so much garbage; my heart was able to open, and this was a forever healing. He was the one who loved me despite all my flaws; only the Divine can do this. He simply accepted me as I was in 2001in Tucson, Arizona, at a time in my life when nobody supported me.

Then he moved away in 2008 to Washington State. He awakened to a state of god realization, and he was free to live what he had realized by the grace of his spiritual Master Adi Da.

Five years later, in 2013, he invited me to live in his community of devotees.

To live with him and become free and enlightened.

I received Diksha from him every day for sixteen months.

The way that he helped me is both heartbreaking and heroic simultaneously. My spiritual life could not have unfolded as it has without my time with my spiritual Master Nick.

Then I left his blessing company, where I was able to feel divinity moment by moment. To go out in the world and, as Nick says, playing out it with all the ordinary social conventions, rules, regulations, presumptions that led to vicious and unfounded abuse at the hands of the ego. That is what I had to live once I left Nicks Ashram and his community of devotees.

Adi Da became more known to me as a result of having been with Nick. He taught me how to practice moment to moment with everything that I could encounter in my life experience. This way of practice did not happen in my first eight years in the community of Adi Da’s devotees, nor the subsequent four years on my own away from Nick and the community of Adi Da’s devotees. Nick is the one that tied together for me what real spiritual life was. I willed myself to engage a more mature approach to Adi Da than I had for the previous 14 years because of this recognition. As a result of all these years of preparation, for the next seven years, I practiced moment to moment on the living form of Adi Da. No matter what I was doing, whether I was working, doing massage, walking or eating or talking, or studying, I turned my body, breath, mind, and feeling over to my Master. I made myself available to his blessing presence and influence in my life. During this time, so many miraculous events have occurred, as you will read about in this book. The one that stands out and really, I could write an entire book about is this. I put so much attention on him that he began showing up tangibly as a guide. That now, I can feel him overshadow me all the time he is living me. It has proved that his instructions are the way, the truth, the light, and life. His direct revelation of this phenomenon has proved to this devotee that there is God. There are many things I could say about this, yet I can not explain the beauty and luminescence that has occurred in me once this happened. I might add here once I left Nick, I had to have this, or I would have perished a miserable seeker, gone to my grave, guaranteeing myself future lifetimes in this horrible place. It is unparalleled in anything I have ever known; you need great good divine help to become ultimately free. It is a new revelation given by Adi Da, not a two-, five- or six-thousand-year-old teaching, but teaching for our time and place. The freedom I am referring to is the holy bright outshining of all conditions in real God. I took all the things that Nick opened and showed me. One of the biggest things he ever said was never to shut down feeling. He always posed this question to his devotees, what concept will transfigure the body-mind and the world. The answer to that is feeling. When you are ready to feel anything and everything to infinity, you are inclined to realize God. Nick said, you are responsible for the sun rising. In this, he meant there are no victims. One of Nick’s earliest admonitions was narcissus’s way would have to be addressed by me and then overcome. There is no realization without the victim’s recognition of their actions and subsequent responsibility for the ego I of darkness, anger, and separation.

Then I took all that God’s grace had given me from Nick and turned to Adi Da. I now understood what true feeling was, coupled with true devotion and recognition of who Adi Da is. To make my spiritual life fruitful, beginning a connection with the living Divine would lead to my freedom, albeit a tough seven years but one that I had to take on.

Adi Da said you must trust your life processes, whether to succeed, fail to become ill, or die. As the arrow flies, it would have been better to awaken under Nick at his ashram, yet that was not to be. I had to go out on my own and trust the process of my own life in grace.

During this time, I endured so many difficulties, yet I could always locate Adi Da. Only then did I begin growing, passing through the different purification and divine spiritual practice stages. These included many revelations, about myself the world, and life—my constant attention on Adi Da moment by moment gave me a direct revelation of where I was heading.

Thank you to my Beloved Heart Master, Sri Ishta guru; you permeate my very cells. You live me now, and I am your servant to awaken human beings to real God.

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to the people that have influenced my life during the writing and production of this work.

These people encouraged and supported me emotionally, economically, and spiritually. When they said, people in the world need the message in your book.

Table of contents

Chapter 1: Five years to meet the Master

Chapter 2: The blessing of the Master

Chapter 3: The initiation

Chapter 4: Dancing down the light

Chapter 5: The women Of Payson

Chapter 6: The bookstore in Scottsdale

Chapter 7: Nick and the devotees of Tucson

Chapter 8: The summer with Lauren

Chapter 9: The journey to massage School

Chapter 10: A deeper relationship with the Master

Chapter 11: Sherri’s house and the theft

Chapter 12: Meeting Julia

Chapter 13: David goes to Chile

Chapter 14: Seeing the Master at his ashram

Chapter 15: The trip home handling karma

Chapter 16: Susan and Massage Envy

Chapter 17: Breaking my foot

Chapter 18: The call from Washington

Chapter 19: The guru and the ashram

Chapter 20: The ordeal of my life

Chapter 21: Connection with an old friend

Chapter 22: Finding shelter at Karla’s, the awakening beyond self-contraction

Chapter 23: Awakening to brightness

Chapter 1:

Five years to meet the Master

So, we pick up my story at a point where I could process all the early events of my life. I always tried to answer a problem or multiple problems, yet remaining on the periphery of understanding anything concrete about myself. The only thing that I had any clarity on was that I had learned to meditate, breathe, do healing, and visualize.

I also spent an entire year channeling the Ascended Masters and subsequently healing people, whereby I would invoke them. Then they would show and instruct me internally about what somebody needed. I also taught classes about some of their precepts and laws.

After I had my experience about which I wrote in Michael and the Mountain, I could always feel their guidance.

They always had valuable insight and intuition on what would be best for a patient. Their affection for me being their chela added something to my existence, and I was extremely grateful to St Germain and El Morya and the masters.

Yet life sucked for me; it overflowed with pain, anguish, and the need to find a way out of such pain. So I used my meditation practice to escape my demons, just as much as it was a way to become closer to the real God.

I used meditation as my only resort to deal with life. I was addicted to meditating and removing myself from the physical world. I believed (this is a keyword’ believe’—I did not know and had no certainty) at that time, I was going to realize real God and reach Nirvana, just like my guru said was possible, through the rigors of life in yoga. I used to be up early at 5 am, exercise for 20 minutes then meditate for an hour. Because of my suffering, I chose to increase my meditation time of turning inwards inside myself to two hours, and then I raised my meditation time to three hours a day while still making a living. That was no easy thing to do, to balance this way of life while I remained in the world in a day-to-day career in sales.

I began to ask myself where were the bliss and the joy that is supposed to occur from these practices. There was none. Instead, there was so much suffering. When I meditated, my body’s left side would lock up at times, and I would keep pushing on and doing this ritual every day. That I hoped, and looking back on it, I had no certainty that God-realization would happen in my case. I was fraught with fear because I knew that I would get locked up physically and emotionally daily sitting for formal meditation. I would go to a park where I could just hang on the rungs of those horizontal ladders or monkey bars to stretch myself out.

I could control my breath, and I learned not to suppress my emotions. I learned how to expertly disassociate myself from the physical world by shutting off the senses as yogis do and then going into deep silence.

I had accomplished an extraordinary feat, one worthy of tremendous discipline, focus, and determination.

These meditations were both simple and challenging simultaneously and required my full attention. A very learned man once taught me that some life tasks could be simple concerning exercise mechanics yet still be tough to perform.

Yet, something was missing. Where was the joy? Where was the ability to be in a relationship with a woman? Where was the capacity to enjoy with other beings, plants, and animals?

To get some temporary relief from the suffering I was causing myself from these meditations, I did everything to keep stretched out. All this stretching never gave me much relief from the constant aggravation to my neck and back. I never found much relief from whatever I had been doing to myself for ten years. Psychologically and physically, I was a mess. I could barely function. My emotional state was raw, and I was out of touch with the world. Yet my obsession with these meditations was so ingrained in me at this point that I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop seeking salvation through these yogic rites and procedures to bring an end to my profound unhappiness. Also, simultaneously, I couldn’t continue with this way of living anymore either.

Never disobey the advice of your spiritual Master, or you will pay the price for that disobedience. Whenever I was suffering that locked-up feeling, when I felt like I could not function in the world and was afraid of what would happen to me, I would have to stop eating for five or six days and drop into a fast. I would then routinely just extend the fast for seven to ten days to boost my immunity, which greatly benefited me. Afterward, I would be able to function very well, and then I would repeat this pattern of becoming dysfunctional again, which had its roots and tentacles in the deep unconscious of Michael. I learned about fasting with Dr. Bragg’s book, The Miracle of Fasting, and I also read many other books that educated me on how to fast and increase my overall well-being. I started with a 24-hour fast and then a three-day fast, and then a seven-day fast. It took a good year to work up to this. The way I did this was to take on the discipline of several one-day fasts, then several three-day fasts, and so on. My body became prepared to acclimate, adapt, purify, and heal, as this way of living supports a healthy mind and body. Dr. Bragg said it would. I moved into the 16-day fasts and, from there, into the 20-day fasts. Dr. Bragg showed me precisely what was necessary to conduct such fasts, which entailed starting them and ending them with returning to normal eating.

Dr. Bragg is famous—he lived into his eighties and was a huge inspiration to a sickly Jack LaLanne when he was just 15 years old. He inspired Jack to become a world-renowned bodybuilder and was the forerunner for all the modern gyms’ perfect fitness models. The modern gyms took all of Jack’s concepts of healthy living, which entails the proper diet and exercises such as running, swimming, and lifting weights to keep the mind and body healthy and functioning at a high level. So, due to Dr. Bragg’s work with Jack, we now have the 24-hour Fitness, the Gold’s Gyms, Pure Fitness’s of the world.

I am extremely grateful for the education that I received from Dr. Bragg for helping me to stabilize my sickly body, Dr. Bragg communicated, that there were nine doctors. I won’t name them all here, but I will mention a few, fresh air, a good diet, exercise, adequate rest—you get the idea. Dr. Bragg was a fitness guru of international note, and he functioned as my dietary counselor. I applied all that he recommended. It served me immeasurably. I watched Jack LaLanne on television as a boy—the TV I watched him on was black and white, an authentic slice of Americana. My father used to say; only in America could he own a home, drive two cars, and raise a family in the suburbs, adding that life is good.

So this was my answer to everything in life—be disciplined and hold the line to whatever I was doing. Without it, I would be in trouble before lunch, and everything would turn to hell in a handbasket.

At this time in my life, without fasting, I was always sickly. So, at the first sign of sickness, which I was still fighting and had since I was a boy—I had allergies to many foods and milk especially—I was fed a steady diet of antibiotics, which wore at my internal ecosystem. There is more to say about this internal imbalance in my body’s immune system and what I had to understand about food intake, food combining, and so forth. I will comment more on this imbalance in my body later on in my story.

I have always been able to pick up a book about spiritual techniques and exercises and perform them relatively smoothly. I had to keep going in my insane search to realize God. The Master said I could follow his yogic disciplines, and I was all in; even when difficulties arose, and they did, I let nothing interfere. As I followed the Master, his instructions made no sense to anyone who knew me and my justification for leading such a life—and that justification was to end my suffering, mind, body, and spirit.

Everything was challenging anyway, and I found this to be the simplest way to balance myself out. Yes, I thought that I was balancing myself out. I wanted to master shutting the heart off and go into a breathless state so that I could have actual God contact. Just as the Master had instructed would occur. Once you have achieved this technique called resting the heart, you could attain states of God-communion.

This desire came from being in a bookstore in 1989. I picked up this book called Scientific Healing Affirmations by Paramahansa Yogananda, the great Indian saint that came to America in 1920 to teach Kriya yoga to the West. Kriya yoga is a yogic rite, a breath technique that offers the inhaling breath into the exhaling breath, creating calmness and cessation of breathing altogether to rest the heart, the most active working organ in the body. It is called kriya kundalini pranayama. It means (to do, to raise the primordial energies of life, located in the base of the human being’s spine by using breath control). This practice gives you access to higher states of mental consciousness and God-contact. I went to see a healer who did psychic healing and the human body’s opening, a tangible gift that few people on earth have. I have been fortunate and blessed to have met five such healers in my life—four Filipinos and one white American man who had this gift—and had them work on me. On this particular day, I saw the white healer in Long Island, New York. I went to see him for help that I needed for my neck and back, as I had been in an accident a few days earlier.

I kept that little book of the Master’s close to me all the time. I usually kept it in my shirt pocket to read it often, many times a day, as it was of great help. So, after my session, I was sitting in the clinic’s front room, waiting for Richard, the healer, to let me know what he found and then subsequently treat me during my session with him. I was reading the book. When he sat down next to me, he told me that he had gotten rid of a lot of swelling in my body from the accident. He then asked me what I was reading. When I showed him, he said if I kept carrying that book around with me, I would get involved with those people. I asked him what he meant, and he said, You will find out. He said this very matter-of-factly as if it had already happened.

When I was reading, I began reciting this one series of affirmations about how God is perfect and everything in him is in me. Reading this made a profound impact on me. I repeated this over and over again until I felt that it was true of me. Then, I decided to look in the back of the book, and it said send away for the undreamed of possibilities, so I did. I received four lessons a month for three-and-a-half years. They taught me how to become a yogi. The studies were a real challenge to me—they demanded my cognitive mind and my resolve to apply mind and body disciplines. They insisted I have faith in the Master that he would guide me, come into my spine, and live in me. Then from the other side, as he died in 1952, as he taught me, he could help me understand things I knew nothing about if I only saw him. He also communicated that he and the other masters of his spiritual lineage would appear before my spiritual sight. They would instruct me without words on how to become a yogi. After a year, I grew to embrace his teachings; he said to call him forth in prayer into my spine then I could find God in myself. His demand was never to allow anything to interfere with what I was doing. To faithfully invoke the help of the lineage of his spiritual masters and that he was the last Master of the line. He said that he and the rest of the masters would come into my spine and be with me forever; that was good enough for me. I had no training in such matters, and if I hadn’t picked up that book, I wonder what direction my life would have taken.

Now I had been practicing for a year, and I was ready for the higher initiation into the deathless science of Kriya yoga. I had prepared my body through the proper diet, exercise, right emotional self-control, and right meditation. The first time I located the Master, I felt him so strongly and was technically called into the higher practice and calling of the guru; I was instructed in his lessons to follow many simple admonitions. I followed all of them to the letter—I was committed and ready. I began by praying and invoking the Master and my lineage of spiritual masters. I prepared my throat by sipping warm water and then gently coated my throat with some warm butter, just a smidgen. I sat down and had the Master’s instructions inside my head, as I had memorized all of them many times after reading them again and again for days. With the first breath I took, something extraordinarily memorable and miraculous occurred. I felt this powerful, electric current pervade and circle my spine very strongly. It lasted quite a while. I was so stunned by this that I was motivated to call the mother center, and I asked what that sensation or electric current was. They told me I had been a yogi in other lifetimes, and the guru was welcoming me home, and that I should try to have this experience in every meditation. I was elated by this news. So, I set out to have the same experience during every meditation for the next ten years. I had many meditation experiences—I saw lights, had visions and saw masters from past times. During meditation, I saw faces and people that I had never seen embracing me, and I very distinctly felt them enter my body and impart wisdom and love. Yet, I was looking for one thing: to have that same experience and feel that electric current, but it never happened again.

I was a desperate seeker, and I thought if I could just solve the problem and do things just right, I could have that experience again, but it was not to be. That initiation given by the Master was my guidepost, and that is how I should have received that wonderful blessing. I kept reasoning that if I could have that experience again, divine love and divine perception of Nirvana would be mine. Unfortunately, my need to end my bodily suffering drove me to search for God-Realization and fulfillment to end my sorrow, which deluded me. I was addicted to getting out of pain and moving towards pleasure, and this horrible fault of mine deceived me. I felt that I must get out of the pain and separation from the omnipresent Lord. The Master was clear and taught that without God, you would suffer. He has everything that you want in limitless capacity. That was good enough for me.

So, I was motivated to it no matter what. I just didn’t give a damn about anything other than what I was after. As a result of this way of living, my body had gotten very thin. I was six feet tall and weighed 150 pounds, whereas I had weighed 190 pounds earlier in my life. I was a vegetarian, and I had not considered what becoming a vegetarian entailed. I was raised as a prolific meat-eater, basically having meat two or three times a day for the first 33 years of my life. My father was a meat salesman. One kind or another beef was on the daily meal planner that my mom cooked, and she was a great cook. I ate many soy products in my idealistic vegetarian phase, and I had become fragile and effeminate. To the point that one day I was in a store, and an older woman told me to get my skinny ass out of the way. I was living the ascetic path. I didn’t even want to see myself in the mirror. It was my way of existing after I almost died, on my vision quest, in which I survived five days in 10 degrees below zero weather. I got lost in the wilderness, in the mountains of Arizona. My first book is about that and how I learned to be a healer under life and death circumstances. After that older woman yelled at me, I think you get the picture of what I looked like and what energy I was communicating to the world. You could have blown me away with a feather.

I made a living as a phone psychic. I was a very good one, and looking back at it, that was the only work I could do. I bordered on being mentally unstable from whatever yogic disease I continually applied to myself as the result of my search for God.

A year after my experience of being lost in the wilderness, my story unfolds, culminating in a profound understanding and realization that I was a healer. With this concept of myself firmly in place, I had to incorporate this realization into my life. It took four-and-a-half years to integrate these changes that had occurred on my vision quest and for another significant phase of my life to begin. Every 5 to 7 years, a person goes through dynamic changes, all the cells will renew, and a human being grows and adapts.

My narrative begins after my near-death experience in the woods, and everything that brought into my existence a higher way of living eclipsed the early part of my life as a salesman in New York.

I have left behind me all the relationships I had with the people I was associated with in my first book. They all had something to teach me, and they did it in many different and varied ways. Now I was living alone in Payson, Arizona. I was a hermit. And I had fundamentally changed from my near-death experience in my vision quest. I knew I was an accomplished psychic, healer, and speaker. I knew this was the only path that I could follow. This revelation made it crystal clear that some significant transformation took place when I had almost died.

Everybody I knew, and the reason I went to that small town in the first place, gave way for what was to take place next.

I had no friends, no acquaintances, and I internally searched for God to answer all my life problems. Beyond that, I was critically dissociated, understood nothing, and chose to live separately away from any and everyone.

Four years had passed, and some transformations in the wings were coming about that I believed I chose before I was born. About nine months after being lost in the wilderness, a significant paradigm shift occurred that carried me right through and up to the meeting of my true guru.

How I met Shannon is very interesting and profoundly tragic simultaneously. The bridge to a complete transformation was about to shape up, and it was big.

As Shannon, who was a psychic, said, our spiritual lives were going to change forever. And she even predicted that it would happen in three weeks. I met Shannon at the Payson Spiritual Center, where I spoke about my wilderness’s survival.

A member of the spiritual center congregation heard me speak and came up to me to ask some things. So, after my talk, she said, Michael, I hear you are a wonderful psychic. Some of the congregation members have had a reading with you. So, I wanted to ask you how you work on the psychic line. I have a friend named Shannon, who is trying to work the psychic phone line and has had very little success. She said to me, do you think you could speak with her about the best way to be successful on the line? So I communicated to her that I would. Now this woman introduced herself to me more formally. She said her name was Ruth. Everybody knew and very much liked and respected her as an upstanding member of the church.

Ruth gave me Shannon’s number, and that ended our conversation. I wondered who Shannon was and how she could most benefit from my help. When I called Shannon, It was a real trip. First of all, she had a mid-western dialect, something you might hear on Second City TV from Chicago.

Being from New York, I could relate. Ever since coming to this little town 80 miles north of Phoenix, I was just too fast for some of these people accustomed to living a slower way of life. I had difficulty communicating with the locals and made it difficult for me to make concrete sense of what they needed or wanted some of the time. My saving grace was this: some displaced people from all over the country, like Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, and Detroit, lived there, so sometimes speaking with them was excellent. Usually, this would happen when I went food shopping.

Therefore I felt right at home with Shannon in that respect, and that put my mind at ease when I wondered how I could connect with her.

We spoke for a while, and then I asked her out for coffee to discuss how best she could work the psychic line. I was lonely, and I figured this would be an excellent way of getting out of the house. So we agreed to meet the following day after work. We sat down and started talking. You could see she was a woman of culture, yet she didn’t look very well. I have always been a man that must rescue women, and I came by this honestly. I had two sisters growing up. My mom worked, and my dad was never around—he was a traveling salesman. So, it was just my mom and sisters in the house, spending a great deal of time together. Living this way with them helped me because it showed me how to be loving and kind on a deeper level. I lived this love and kindness and naivete with them, and as a result, I was privy to all the problems that women suffer. My mom did not miss my dad, and couldn’t wait for him to leave, which he had to permanently after some time.

My sisters would always talk about their boyfriends all the time and how they wanted to impress them. One of my sisters was prettier than the other, and most boys wanted to get together with her more. It created problems for them, which would eventually create a problem for me. Sandwiched between them, I struggled to see how I fit into the family, mostly because I was missing a solid male figure. I was the youngest, Lynn was the middle child, and Cheri, the oldest, was five years senior. So I was the man of the house, and as such, I felt a need to keep everything going while my dad was gone. Even if all that responsibility was in my mind, it felt genuine to me.

So this pattern of rescuing women has followed me throughout my life, yet it was relatively uninspected and very unconscious.

Shannon told me she was living in somebody’s basement, working the psychic line there and that it wasn’t going very well. So I shared some of the things that I did on the line that made me very successful.

I shared some fundamental things that I did—how I started the readings, the types of things I would say. For instance, to pause at the appropriate time, before moving on in the psychic reading, clarifying what and how the clients were feeling, and how she should relax her breathing, she would feel and read the clients more efficiently. Strangely enough, she was not very receptive to any of my ideas, so I didn’t fight it. I did my best to be helpful and supportive, and I must admit I probably did not do very well at it. I was very much a suffering person, and keeping it real and being confessed, I transmitted that vibe to everybody.

I tried to understand what might have happened in our meeting, so I decided to follow up with her and see how she was doing. That is the professional salesman in me. I had close to 20 years in sales, from my time in Kentucky as a door-to-door salesman to my time in New York as an industrial packaging and sanitary and maintenance and dunnage salesman. I covered the five boroughs, northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut, and Long Island. In the latter role, I sold everything that a manufacturing plant might use to make its products. I offered Double-sided tape, chipboard for hat makers, corrugated cartons, anything needed to protect the products shipped like foam, bubble wrap, and macerated newspaper. Then anything that is required to close the carton, such as pressure-sensitive tape and gummed tape to seal the cartons. I was also involved with stretch film to wrap pallets handheld and machine type, plastic, and steel strapping to secure things together. I sold mailing bags to companies that deal in getting clothing to people by mail in the least expensive way; a company like Haband would be a good example. I would go after the sizeable users of bags, operations where they were using a padded bag when they did not have to. My company manufactured a non-padded mailer, making close to a 40% profit when I earned business with that product, depending on shipping arrangements. My company was a giant in distributing fluorescent lights, toilet paper, paper towels, and floor cleaners, including wax, strippers, and buffing products. The large automated floor cleaning machines, which do the job of stripping, cleaning, and polishing, can buff large areas, and finally, we sold a large number of degreasers. When I called her, she said that she was doing a much better job on the line.

I must let my readers know that I met many people from this point on. My life changed dramatically immediately after Shannon accurately predicted that our spiritual life would change forever. My relationship with Shannon changed after we met our guru. Who was to be my spiritual Master for the next 20 years and beyond.

We dated for about a month, and this was why I became intimate with her living circumstances. I was living in a 1,300 square foot apartment. I had room for my office, a large and serviceable desk, and a second room, serving as a second office with a built-in wall desk. There was a big kitchen, a living room, a small bedroom, and the master bedroom. All in all, it was one of the best and most prominent places I had lived in, in recent memory.

Shannon and I went out to dinner several times during this month, and when I saw Ruth at the spiritual center, she gave me a thumbs-up, as Shannon told her how good it was going for us. I was very attracted to Shannon. I must confess that because of the severe abuse I suffered in my early life with my parents in various ways, I could not initiate or make it known that I was attracted to a woman. I didn’t want to be hurt anymore. Shannon was easy to be with and easy on the eyes—she had vibrant red hair, a fantastic figure, and was very alluring. I loved the smell of her; she exuded sexual energy and a sense of wanting to explore life and feelings.

It has been challenging to make the first move on a woman due to the fear of being rejected. So that male aspect of finding courage, making the first move, making a pass, and making it be known I am a man, I am attracted to you as a woman, you have turned me on. Embodying that confidence, I could be sure of myself so that a woman could feel my vibe of masculinity. This way, I would feel she acknowledged my intentions and reciprocated her feelings that she wanted to be intimate and share her body with me. When I communicated my fear of rejection by transmitting doubt, I told a woman I was not good enough and was afraid of my own shadow, which is not normal. When a woman feels this, you are projecting you are not much of a man; consequently, she will deposit you in the friend zone. What is not common is to shrink and cower and emotionally collapse when you are with her in this way. I showed a great deal of neediness and immaturity. I experienced plenty of friend zones due to this limitation. I made a real deliberate effort to change this, and it had to be developed by me after I met my guru, and then I understood what made me afraid of rejection and what makes other people tick. All this is just bound energy from being beaten and rejected. I crawled up inside myself and hid from life. That is why all those worlds excluding and relationships excluding meditations were attractive to me. They demanded something of me, yet it was my own private Idaho, where I could retreat and hide.

So Shannon made the first sexual move by massaging my head, and I reciprocated by sensuously rubbing massaging her head, and there was a vulnerability, chemistry that naturally developed. We enjoyed an intimacy, where we were very loving and kind to each other, and we became an item, a couple.

I hadn’t dated anyone since November 1994, and it was now September of 1995, so I was glad for the company of a woman. Sometimes I felt like I would like to be nurtured and regarded warmly, like any other human being, yet it was difficult to initiate love and receive love. It just came to me that I was out of touch, I tried to correct it, and I found I could not. All I could do is cope and hope I would receive love. This predicament caused a great deal of anxiety. This life I constructed didn’t give me any freedom in a relationship—love was very complicated.

I felt terrible for Shannon, who was living in that older man’s basement—she would tell me stories of how he was weird and how he was spying on her.

I have always been a nice man, yet I would never have allowed Shannon to move in if I had understood anything about my unconscious pervasive debilitating patterns. That is why this book is so essential to those who read it. Our unconscious patterning repeatedly repeats, which creates multiple tendencies on top of the ones you already have. And the plain truth is none of these tendencies are necessary.

It is the failure to love that creates these tendencies. My spiritual Master was evident that this failure to love withdraws and withholds life energy; this loss of life cripples a person. He was clear; you must show up with energy and vitality, and make this demand on yourself, then live this life in the world of relationships, be free in this loving. When you bring energy to those you have relationships with, including yourself, this affords you freedom that not everybody is living.

Demand life energy from those you relate to in your daily life—don’t try to fix anybody or anything. It is the way of self-transcendence, human aliveness, and the direct well-being of everyone. Everyone is connected and dependent on everyone else for their well-being. Even your thoughts and ideas have nothing to do with genuine love and how you communicate it to others. It is essential to clarify that the mind cannot love and cannot incarnate Divine life’s force. He said that if you suffer and feel that this life is awful, you have lost the thread of love, making you dark and separate. Everyone can love because everyone is only the incarnation of love.

I was just Michael throughout my life, so my karma kept repeating itself in place. The mind form I continuously created drew me further into my already anxious mind. As a result of this unconscious practice, I continued to develop new karmic tendencies on top of the old ones I already had. Thus, it created a sense of who the hell I am, which always culminated in my existence, layered in doubt, frustration, anger, confusion, sorrow, and fear. So you never understand your actual situation—that you are a pattern of bound energy that you can never be free of, just like a rat in a maze. Thus this is the path of non-realization of the Divine condition, leading to your unconscious destiny, suffering, and death. It is what the Hindus call the wheel of 98 birth, life, and death. It isn’t until you meet a living spiritual master that you can begin in earnest a self-transcending life, and for that to take place, you must love the Master with your whole being, connect to him, bind yourself to him instead of conditions and become free. He incarnates for the sake of your liberation and freedom. He is the Divine in human form.

Sometimes, you never even know what you are doing, especially those doing advanced forms of yoga, thinking this is the way to enlightenment.

By doing these advanced forms of spiritual seeking, you feel sure that you are growing. Yet you cannot even balance your checkbook and have a civilized conversation with someone you profess to love so much. In living this way, you have not loved yourself and others. You build up layers or karma tendencies that you bury deep inside yourself that attract some horrific things. In this way, you create an exponential amount of unconscious mind.

This unconscious mind plays itself out in your life through a darkening of who you are.

This activity layers your existence through this subjective thickness of doubt, frustration, anger, confusion, sorrow, and fear. You live this cycle of birth, life, and death that you repeat until you break it.

So I offered Shannon a place to live, work the psychic line, be safe, and make a good living. Here she could master doing readings for clients who were in trouble and develop a way of establishing herself in the world. I was 38 years old, and I was functioning more like a 25-year-old. Doing all those escaping meditations stunted me from growing personally outwardly. There was a gap as wide as the Mississippi River between my inner spiritual growth and my outer-worldly growth. I was a recluse, a hermit, very set in my ways, and disconnected and fearful at the drop of a hat. I was in hiding from the force of love.

I never even saw what would happen, and I am a psychic and counseling others on what they should do for a living? That’s the pot calling the kettle black.

As soon as Shannon moved in, we started having sex, which was great at first. Then I started seeing how it took me away from my meditation practice, and that wasn’t cool at all. I had a foyer set up as my meditation room, where I had my meditation chair that Yogananda suggested western men use. He said it would be challenging to sit on the floor, and I agreed with that. So I set up my chair with a beautiful pink blanket—to me, the color of love. I had the pictures of the lineage of all my spiritual masters on my altar. I would go in there and sit for six or seven hours, meditating and repeating over and over that I am one with my father. I used to think I was accomplishing something this way, but I was not.

I used to think if I could only do without sleep, then I would have arrived; this must be the way to real God. To meditate rather than sleep was what all the yogis posed in all the books I read—that lack of sleep would not matter if you meditate deeply. In doing this, I would be exhausted, almost sleep-deprived, at some points. My outer life was failing, so I turned further inward and was glad to do so. Then I mastered meditating instead of sleeping by withdrawing all my life energy into the spine and brain for refreshment and rejuvenation. It was indeed as good, and many times, better than sleep.

It took dedicated practice to withdraw all the bodily currents from going out to the senses and manipulate them inward. Yogananda taught, and I followed it to the letter, always trying to perfect the technique, looking to improve it, resting the heart from its constant work. The heart is the most vital working organ in the body, and to spiritually rest, its violent action is the best thing one can do for long and healthy life. The yogis say you only have so many breaths in your life, and then you will die. So by resting your heart, you can add years to your life. I finally noticed that my side would cause me many problems, whether I meditated or just slept. I always thought, ‘Man, if I could just solve this problem of my body locking up… That would lead to absolute freedom for me and true God-realization, nirvikalpa (absorption in God), which it never did.

Now Shannon was working the psychic line; I naturally thought she would pay for half of everything, which would suit both of us. The first thing that happened is that she didn’t want to work. I set her up with her own office space; she had her phone line and plenty of room on that side of the house to feel that this was hers.

After a week, I saw that she got about three calls a day while I worked my line consistently—I was averaging 30 calls a day. After the end of a long day on the line, I would want to recharge by meditating, and that’s what I would do every morning and every night. She thought it was cool to live with a yogi at first. I was no easy person to live with, so I thought it would serve us both by keeping quiet and doing