The Incident

It is Autumnal Equinox in Los Angeles. The year is 1990. My metaphysical counseling practice is filled with celebrity clients seeking answers to questions like “When should I go on my audition?” “Should I change agents?” “When will I be famous?” Searching their astrological chart, I hope to transmit a message to ease their mind, or better yet, point out a direction that might turn out to be more meaningful in the long haul. But lately I feel unable to carry on – “Dead as a doornail,” as my Grandmother Edith liked to say.

This is definitely a problem since I am known in Hollywood circles as a voice of healing, a bringer of light to my clients– an astrologer of transformation, astrologer to the stars.

I drag myself out of bed to telephone my personal 9-1-1, Ed Kauffman, the healer I’ve been seeing on a bi-weekly basis for over a year.

Ed answers the phone, “Healing Light Center, Ed speaking.”

“Ed, I really need to see you right away if you can get me in… I’m critical here…you have to help me. I feel like I’ve become a dot of dust in the Universe, a black hole disappearing into the void.

“Ok,” he replies, “come on out… I’ll see you when you get here.”

Somehow I manage to get dressed and leave my house to take the hour plus drive from Brentwood to Monrovia on the Pasadena Freeway.

Ed has been telling me for months that he receives regular visits from extraterrestrials. Once he even gifted me with a bottle of pills, saying they had been magnetized with Love by the Light Being ETs.

I know this all sounds crazy, but I’ve seen them, the Light Beings. Several times, at my invitation, they stepped into my body and used my hands to conduct magnetic healing sessions for various people needing assistance – one or two times this included Ed.

Now you can say that I am highly suggestible, which is true, or you can acknowledge that there are indeed Light Beings and that I am one of the lucky ones to have shared their light, or you can say that I’ve lost it completely. Whatever the case, here I am driving 70 mph on the Pasadena freeway to Monrovia when all of a sudden a ball of white light comes down from the sky, literally, up and to the right of my head. This light comes in through the passenger side window of my car and softly spreads itself out along the right side of my body. It feels like feathers, the wings of angels caressing against me, pushing ever so gently. The translucent light grows brighter as a voice begins inside my head, telling me what I must do to receive this light as my own.

“Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior,” the voice calls over and over – just like the endless stream of altar calls I heard on Sunday nights and at evangelical prayer meetings when I was a child attending University Avenue Church of the Nazarene on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday night– always by my grandmother Edith’s side.

But there is another voice, equally strong, struggling to gain control.

“Hold on here, you’re in the middle of a psychotic break! You can’t do this, you can’t! This is crazy!”

The struggle continues for what seems an eternity. I recognize the duality of it all, the light and the dark. I am wrestling with an angel, as Jacob did in the Bible story. But Jacob demanded a name, and I’m still in the dark as the light continues pushing up against me, now more insistent.

Finally I recall my personal axiom, “The only way out is in,” used whenever I can see no way out…which is more times than I can count…but never like this.

“What have I got to lose? I can’t hold it together here. Even though I may be in danger of losing any remaining thread to reality, I have no choice but to go into this experience all the way.”

Finally, “Ok, let’s go.”

“I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior,” I say aloud just as I had dozens of times as a child, answering Sunday night altar calls just to make sure I was not left behind when Jesus returned to gather his flock from the field and ascend into heaven.

As soon as I speak the words, the light moves in fully, filling my body with blissful peace, shooting up the length and the breadth, out the top of my head. A cross of light spreads through my insides and my head bursts open at the crown. The outside world lights up in unison – all settles ’round as soft and golden drops of light fill the air.

Still driving 70 mph on the Pasadena freeway, I feels as though my body has disappeared.
”I Am light.” I hear and see and understands transparent layers of Biblical New Testament scripture. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” I see through the words the meaning underlying it all, connected and complete.

No longer dark, dull and exhausted, I eventually arrive at Ed’s office. 
Ed’s office is housed in the back of a lingerie shop run by his wife, Jean, a red head who sells see-through baby doll pajamas, nightgowns, lace panties, bras in various styles, all while delivering a speech on the importance of having your bra fitted by a professional – A mini Frederick’s of Hollywood on a street corner in Monrovia.

How I manage to make my way inside I can’t remember, but I do, and then I sit down and begin to recount the full story to Ed.

“The Holy Spirit came down,” I say, giving him the details.
”Well if that’s what it was,” he replies, “But I can see the Light around you.”

Proceeding to scan my energy, he finally proclaims, “Your energy is in perfect alignment, there’s nothing I can do for you today. You are open and on center…you’ve been healed from the inside out.”

I could have told him that, but just what I had been healed of wasn’t all that clear. All I was certain of was that I had been blown into a thousand million pieces.

Over the following days I began to see the correlation between my experience and that of Saul of Tarsus. Struck blind by the light on the road to Damascus, Saul became Paul, the visionary of the New Testament, the one who wrote letters to the churches in Rome, who spread the gospel of Jesus and was imprisoned for the sake of his beliefs. Now I inhabited the same inner world, with the One who ‘goes before us to make the crooked places straight’.

It turned out that the language of the Spirit for me was Biblical. This is more than ironic since only a few years earlier I had wrapped my Grandmother’s Bible in tissue, anointed it with rosemary oil, stamped it with red sealing wax and thrown it ceremoniously into a Beltane fire. The day after the fire ceremony I burned with fever, unable to speak for three days. All this to send a message to my subconscious that never again would I accept the image of a punishing God.

Now, I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior while driving 70 mph on the Pasadena Freeway.

I once read somewhere that it’s easier to return from a visit to Hell than from Heaven. I had always imagined a final destination where all would fall into place, perfectly. But this was the beginning of the end of life as I knew it, and in the days following almost nothing of my past would remain.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God” – Hebrews 10:31

Reminiscent of the Biblical locust invasion, within a day’s time ticks literally not only begin to fall from the ceiling of my home, they rose up from underneath the carpet, all over the living room. I had no recourse but to call exterminators to clear the house of the invasion. Once the exterminators came, the toxic fumes left behind made it impossible for me breathe inside the house. Now I am homeless.

I had become totally dysfunctional in the “real” world.

Every day for months I would ask myself, “Have I surrendered to a past I’ve spent thirty years trying to escape by leaving San Diego and moving to Los Angeles, embarking on a path of spiritual studies, seeking to get as far away as possible from my Southern Fundamentalist Christian childhood?”

Astrology, mental alchemy, tarot, metaphysics, Jungian psychology, kundalini yoga, hatha yoga, transformational healing, light healing, sound healing, chakra meditation, walking on fire – ingesting LSD, MDA, magic mushrooms, eating only macrobiotics, burning dried cow dung at dawn while chanting Sanskrit mantras at the exact moment of sunrise and sunset to purify the atmosphere and balance my circadian rhythms. Need I go on?

I had been determined to keep going until I found what I was looking for. Now it had found me.