I had always been spiritually precocious.
I grew up wanting to be a monk or a priest. I was not raised Catholic — I raised myself Catholic. At sixteen I began taking RCIA classes — the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults — so I could finally receive baptism.
Near the end of it, I ran into logical inconsistencies I couldn’t abide and the priest couldn’t resolve:
God is all. We are God. There is hell. Hell is the absence of God.
An all-loving God created hell — and sends his own creation there? No. This cannot be. So I left.
I went to my aunt’s bookshelves. She is the family member I am closest to — an aunt by marriage, half Inca and half Aztec, beautiful and shamanic and deeply spiritual. Her shelves held books from many religions, many cultures, many centuries. For a kid from Bliss, Idaho — population three hundred, all white, all Mormon — this was the first time I had encountered the idea that other traditions might contain truth.
I found To Live the Life by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá of the Bahá’í faith. My reaction was roughly: Oh my god. Another religion has truth. Holy. Shit.
My mind cracked open. I began reading voraciously — texts, philosophies, traditions. I became Bahá’í.
Also on my aunt’s shelf: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra. I am slightly embarrassed to admit this, but Chopra gave me my first satori. I read that book again and again until I could nearly recite it. What it taught me silenced the storm inside and opened something I had no name for yet — a profound, spacious quiet.
I began walking daily along the Snake River. Meditatively. Slowly. Letting the stillness of the valley, the river, the light fill me until I felt such total connection that it was clear — not as a thought but as a direct experience — that it was all me. That I was that.
I became vegetarian. I began daily meditation and yoga. I was promptly declared hellbound by the local Mormons — and I hadn’t even come out as gay yet. I took meditation classes from a remarkable man trained in clairvoyance at the Berkeley Psychic Institute. He told me I was his youngest and most advanced student.
And then one day I sat on my meditation rock above the river and felt that river in my blood. Felt the sky in my mind. Felt the valley as my body.
That was seventeen. It was not something I was looking for, or trying for, or searching for. It was something that was allowed. And then bloomed.