After my first successful OBE I continued with psychedelic experimentation. I tried everything I could get my hands on during my senior year in high school, even though at this point I’d stopped selling drugs. I was blown away by the cosmic bliss, overwhelming perfect unconditional love that was accessible on mushrooms, ecstasy and LSD. Right after my high school graduation I came across a lucid dreaming instructional video by a youtuber. He was living in Arcata, Northern California at the time and for some reason I had this wild pressing calling and intuition to bike all the way to him. It was so random. That one video was the only video of his I watched. At the time I was in great shape and still athletic from kickboxing and running. I sat with it for a couple days before disassembling my bike into a large cardboard box loading it onto a greyhound bus and taking off to the San Francisco. I was still 17 that August. I left a note to my parents and told them under no circumstances to call the police and that I’d be fine. With a 50lb backpack of clothes and mostly canned foods and nuts, I arrived the following morning in San Francisco, assembled the bike and made my way to Arcata which was 280 miles or 450km away.
I biked across the Golden Gate Bridge and didn’t consider in advance how difficult the ride would be from San Francisco to my first stop which was Petaluma. It was only a few hours away cycling, but the mountain roads were super steep. The sun was setting and I still hadn’t made it even half way. With a backpack that heavy, in combination with steep incline, my legs were completely shot by dusk. I couldn’t bike anymore so just began walking. It was getting pretty dark and up ahead was one home with a barn off to the side. I was about to knock on the door of these strangers and ask if I could sleep for the night in or behind the barn. It was cold, but I only needed a few hours of rest and sleep for my legs to recover. A red truck pulls up to the stop sign at the intersection so I run up to the guys and tell them my legs aren't working and that there’d be absolutely no way I’d get past these hills and winding roads. At first the guys said “sorry we can’t help you” so I said “alright I’m going to knock on that door and ask those homeowners if I can sleep in their barn.” They looked at each other and said “ok throw your bike in the trunk and get in.”
It would’ve taken me an entire half day of walking and biking to get to the next city. Within an hour we were in Petaluma. They said “well where the hell do we leave you?” I said “my dad told me churches usually let you spend the night in their yards and you’d be unbothered by police there.” They dropped me off at a Korean church we passed randomly. It was about 7pm. I knocked on the door of the church and a young pastor opened the door. He said “hello how can we help you?” I answered “could I sleep in your church yard? I’m biking to Arcata and have a sleeping bag and just need some ground to rest on.” The pastor invited me inside and I sat in on a group sharing of kids talking about Jesus and school. After it was over the pastor loaded my bike into his van and unexpectedly bought me a room at a hotel nearby. After unloading my bike and backpack he said “goodluck and may you find your way to Christ.” Recently, I’ve driven by the same church 14 years later. I knocked on the door in the evening just as I did last time, hoping he was still there so I could tell him thank you. A different pastor opened the door and I asked if that young man who helped me all those years ago was still there. Unfortunately, the new pastor didn’t know who I was talking about as he’d only been there for a couple years.
The following morning I started on my bike again going down the side of a 2 lane highway to my next stop half a day away in a small town. I was using one of those old keypad phones at the time and had used google maps to write out every road and turn had to go down or make. 300 miles of roads and turns. Some nights I slept in parks. Other nights I slept on the side of the road. Other nights I’d sleep in the forest or along the side of freeways in brush areas between the road and residential property. To save money I ate my canned foods and nuts, which gradually helped lessen the weight of the backpack. When I was tired from biking I’d take public transport and when I needed wifi or internet I’d spend a couple hours a public library. I can’t remember exactly how long this went on for, but after a week or so I finally made it to Arcata. I showed up at that YouTubers door, having told him I was coming to meet him in advance of course (in those days you could message YouTubers). When I got there he said “hey nice to meet you how was the drive up?” I said “I didn’t drive I biked.” He yelled ‘you what?!” We both started laughing and I told him it took me over a week of biking and sleeping in parks to get here. It was one of the craziest things he’d ever heard so he said “you’ve got to make a video for a channel and tell people what the hell you just did, this will be great.”
He created a YouTube channel for me and overnight I had 3 thousand subscribers. I starting making videos on lucid dreaming, astral projection and meditation. We even started a mass astral projection group together and had Robert Bruce come in as a guest and do a Q&A for everyone tuning in. It was a strange and exciting time and with all the popularity and people flying in from different parts of the world to meet me, it all went straight to my head. Delusions of grandeur and a massive spiritual ego set in and not before long that original purity I had approach this subject with became corrupted by thoughts and feelings of specialness and being “chosen.” At the time the new age and starseed movement was in full blast leading up the precession of the equinox at the end of 2012. There were all kinds of ideas about Nibiru, ancient aliens, the world ending, humanities ascension, which we all so easily believed in those days. A couple years later December 21, 2012 came. The so-called ascension didn’t happen and so many of us woke up from the dream of new age spirituality that day. A new wave has come that’s really only a rehash of the old. More messianic messages from channeled entities about a golden age to come and even if it is true, new age teachings are really no different from Christianity. In the place of Christ are the ascended masters or alien guides. In the place of the ‘world to come’ of the abrahamic religions is the 5th dimension of the ascended earth.
Back to 2010, a couple months after my trip to Arcata I turned 18 and did my first Vipassana retreat in the Goenka tradition. The retreat was in Kelseyville, California sometime in November. It was by far the hardest thing I’d done up to that point. The leg pain from sitting cross legged was brutal. My thoughts were totally incessant and music wouldn’t stop playing in my head. 4 days went by with a break from every song I’d ever listened to until finally I asked the meditation instructor what to do about it. He said “oh there’s nothing you can do about it just let it be and do the practice.” I did exactly that and it worked, my mind gradually calmed and began to scan through the body seamlessly and for a couple days was completely free of pain. During the last day of the retreat the 10 day silent vow was lifted and I’d never seen so many people so happy in my life. People talked and laughed the whole afternoon. I went for a walk in the pathways between the trees out past the meditation center parking lot. It was snowing then. Everything was covered in several feet of white. I was walking alone through the woods and spontaneously my mind became so quiet. Completely quiet and dead silent. Time stopped, the world stopped. The snow kept falling, yet somehow nothing was moving. Peace and bliss welled up in my chest and began radiating in every direction. So much boundless peace I thought to myself “wow if I died right now, my whole life would have worth it just to experience this.”
The peace faded of course within a few minutes and reality returned to ordinariness, but it was now seared in my consciousness what was possible through Buddhist meditation. I wanted to learn and practice everything. The jhanas, insight knowledges and cessation. I didn’t have the discipline to stick with Goeka style Vipassana body scanning, but I did continue with mindfulness of breathing. I began reading everything on Theravadin Buddhist meditation and opened the at the time incomprehensible Visuddhimagga (the Path of Purification), the definitive 5th century commentary on the early Buddhist scriptures by Acharya Buddhaghosa. I skipped the entire section on sila (morality) and went right to the sections about the jhanas and superpowers. Intense spiritual craving and clinging was born.