Hello, I’m Doug and I’ll be your host and companion on this visit.  

In 2001, out of the blue, I experienced a dramatic and life-altering spiritual opening. The saga of the event itself you can find laid out here. For several years in the aftermath, I had luminous and symbolic dreams imbued with deep significance. In one of these dreams, as a resident of a small and comfortable town, I explored the surroundings outside the town limits and eventually stumbled into an area of wondrous and awe-inspiring scale and grandeur, not too far from the town. This paradise, buried in a deep forest, had peaks and canyon walls of stupendous size and fairly radiated a palpable sense of magical presence and a promise murmured in stillness. It wasn’t so much that the scale was grander – the peaks higher, canyons deeper, and trees more vibrant and magnificent – but more that I was so insignificant by comparison, and that this magnificent setting was in fact the way things really were, waiting to be discovered by anyone who ventured beyond the known town limits. It became my dream mission to return to town, report the astounding findings, and attempt to convince others to return to the magical land with me, to see for themselves. In a sense, this site represents my attempt to report on my explorations and testify to the nature and character of the New World, as well as providing some means of navigation. Call me a noetic explorer and mapmaker if you will.

For those who might be curious about my background, my upbringing in religion was conventional, and not particularly devout. I was brought up in the Episcopal church, which really means very little in the larger context of my young life. I might just have as easily said I went to school as well. I didn’t have any particular talent or aptitude for the orthodox religious life, and I didn’t feel or display any noteworthy ardor towards God or the Christian iconography. It was just something I was expected to do, a form of rote role-playing in meeting my basic family obligations in homage to the church. I served as an acolyte as a teenager, and attended services on a regular basis until I was 19 years old. At that point, due to various trials and circumstances in my life (and, to be honest, some disillusioning church political machinations in my parish), regular attendance dropped off. This time coincided with a personally stressful and traumatic time in the aftermath of an aborted enrollment at a military academy. Two close friends my age died tragically within six months of this, one from an auto accident, the other struck down suddenly by meningitis, and the combination of all these events threw me into a deep depression. It is fair and largely accurate to say I began seeking some answers and solace after these events, motivated largely by my personal suffering. Though no longer an active member of a religious community, I continued along a conventional religious path for a while, reading the Bible from cover to cover twice in my first two years of college. I didn’t find answers that resonated sufficiently for me within the confines of my church or Christianity at large for that matter, and that marked the departure point for my gradual turn to a non-traditional spiritual orientation. For almost two decades, I didn’t attend church at all, nor did I think much of it. I had left that behind, stepping out as Campbell would say, on the left-hand path, beyond the conventional “safe” confines of an institutional structure. Today, I periodically attend services for the ceremonial rites and a sense of community, but I don’t have a permanent home in any religious institution.

I would say there were only two distinguishing characteristics in my young adult years where some earmarks for an unusual calling might have begun to show themselves once I crossed the Rubicon in leaving the confines of the church. One was that I had developed an active and curious mindset, and a spontaneous initiative came forth in exploring other religions, spiritual traditions, and philosophies and seeking similarities between them. These topics, for unaccountable reasons, deeply interested me. True, this pursuit was largely an academic curiosity in its expression and the exploration, but it was firmly and irrevocably rooted when I discovered the Gospel of Thomas in the early 1980s. This discovery elicited a deep interior recognition and an excitement that’s hard to explain – perhaps an unconscious recognition of encountering the living truth for the first time. I also gradually developed a deep and intense aspiration, or hunger for some naked form of transcendental encounter or experience, heightened by the discovery of Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s books. I was fortunate that the circumstances of my life aligned in such a way that I could spend months outdoors, always a spiritual homeland and solace for me, working with a friend in the western deserts in 1986, and it was there that, in retrospect, the seeds were planted that led to the event of 2001.

Though I had studied widely and pursued knowledge, understanding, and intensity of experience through the 1980s, I was taken by surprise by my event more than a decade after I left off active searching. It took me close to three months to adapt to the new higher energies and wider consciousness pressing itself into me to a degree that I could function again in everyday life. It took an additional five years or so to fully integrate and ground the new consciousness.  Nowhere in my readings had I encountered and taken seriously the notion, much less heeded any warning, that spiritual aspiration could be dangerous to the personal self and invoke extreme states of fear and maladaptation for those not prepared. If there were hints, I missed them.    

Later, I discovered later that some folks had done work in this area, and a “spiritual emergency” was a real thing. I can testify from first-hand experience that it can take every last bit of resource one could muster to weather it. I’ve included some excerpts and information on spiritual emergencies, material that would have been helpful for me to have known ahead of time.  In the aftermath, I found that in addition to adapting to the new states, a great deal of personal work in backfilling areas of weakness or underdevelopment in my personal psychological structures was called for. Removing, reducing, or discharging them, many by the methods laid out here on this site, functioned like removing boulders in a turbulently-flowing river, allowing for a smoother and more harmonious experience.  Much of my time since 2001 has been spent in this grounding, integrative, and rehabilitative work. It was my severe trial by fire that provided an impetus to share with others the knowledge, not only of the blessings and gains of spiritual growth and what I found helpful along the way, but of the possible pitfalls as well.

One of the surprising personal discoveries (though it shouldn’t have been, had I been paying closer attention) was that the spiritual journey is not a linear one, advancing ever upward until one disappears into oceans of light. Life and Spirit eschew the straight-line mental abstractions we’re so fond of in the West and prefer more cyclic movements.  The precipitating event for me has subsided in the years since the opening; its effects ebb and flow, sometimes close to the surface, sometimes receding. If the event itself was a “king tide” event, the new sustained level can be likened to a general rise of sea level, below the king-tide datum. There are still the normal tidal cycles at work, but they are operative now from a wider and higher threshold of consciousness. I feel the lasting effects of the opening in the background of my being every day, but I have the same daily concerns as most folks, and I “live in the town limits” most of the time. I’m certainly not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, as those close to me would surely attest; I have my faults and virtues, like anyone. And, important for you to know, I don’t consider myself a realized individual.  I have seen and set foot briefly in these lands, but I have not been a colonizer or a permanent resident. At best, I occupy an intermediate station – not living permanently stationed in remote transpersonal realms, but no longer bound by the hard limits of the rational, subject-object consciousness most adults in Western societies occupy either (Yes, there are realms to transit between “here” and “there” – spiritual growth is not usually a one-off event that elevates one once and for all from discrete frame A to discrete frame B). In other words, I’m your host, companion and a scout reporting on the terrain beyond, but I’m not a guru!

And with that, let’s dive in together. I look forward to sharing with you what I’ve found, and I hope it’s helpful for you. If you care to offer thoughts or share stories or information, please leave a comment or drop me an email at viaperennis@gmail.com.

Peace and blessings,

Doug