It would make sense to explain why I had a spontaneous awakening, or at least how I believe that the awakening occurred. In my understanding of consciousness today, I realize that I am not my past nor my future, but it does help give a point of reference, especially to those that have not yet awoken or who are just now waking up.
I graduated from Ohio State with a degree in Aviation-Computer science. I was enlisted in the Air Force for six years and then flew as a pilot for another six years. I helped start up Frontier Airlines, as my father, a pilot and serial entrepreneur and his wife were instrumental in getting Frontier started. My time in the Air Force and with Frontier enabled me to get hired by United in January of 1995.
In some ways I am like many of the other United pilots. Getting there is pretty competitive so the resulting work force is highly educated, highly focused, and reasonably responsible. Fifteen years ago, the job paid well and if you scheduled yourself right, you could bunch your time off so that you could work hard and then play hard. Real hard.
This left most of us with a lot of time and a decent amount of money, so many of us became garage entrepreneurs. Clearly, my observation of my dad preconditioned me to be an entrepreneur, and I took to it whole heartedly. I started and ran a few interesting businesses through the years.
And then came 2003. The post 9/11 aviation industry was in upheaval (and is now nearly decimated.) United had entered bankruptcy and management had literally stolen our retirement (easily verifiable). While many pilots had built their entire identity on being an airline pilot, there were a lot of us who decided to look outside aviation for both personal growth as well as revenue generating. United was laying off hundreds of pilots and I was in Las Vegas looking at the cheap houses. So I got my real estate license and started selling investment property.
My timing could not have been better. I quickly became the top selling agent at my large national brokerage. I also quickly built a business around this and had a sizable staff. For a few years, this worked fine because we were continually growing. Unfortunately, this masked my weakness in financial skill because I would use my talent to bring in more business to pay the rapidly growing overhead. Within three months I had taken a voluntary three year leave of absence flying 747's for United and started selling real estate full time.
During all this, I came up with a brilliant plan to build a large national network of investment savvy agents. No one had to pay any money to join or use the service, as the commissions were big enough that the selling agents were happy to pay us referral fees. Infinitely scalable, I realized that it could be worth a couple hundred million dollars in less than three years. So I set upon the task of raising a million dollars to finance the project.
That was quite a fateful decision, although through my eyes today, I wouldn't want it any other way. (I know that from someone's Level 1 perspective they couldn't believe that I really mean it. Until you awaken and realize what it is to wake up, I can understand why you don't understand.)
My Level 1 has some pretty cool strengths. I have been tested by the Results Foundation and I am an extreme Creator and Star. This means that I am most productive in dreaming up incredible systems and then using my charisma to promote the product. And I have really learned how to maximize both of these. What this means, however, is that my ability to handle the financial aspect of a somewhat large and rapidly growing company and my ability to go out and generate cash by myself is very low, relatively speaking. I do realize this now, but what this meant in 2006 and 2007 is what is important to this story.
Right when I started seeking capital, the market started so show signs of weakening. Clearly, we have never seen a real estate market crash in the United States ever before, not even during the great depression (mortgages weren't really around back then so it was a very different thing.) Had I known then how bad the market was going to crash I would have closed up shop, gone back to flying, and rode it out like the rest of the nation. Lacking a crystal ball, however, being an eternal optimist, and relying on creativity and charisma like I had for the first few years, I pressed forward.
I had been married since 1990 and while I felt (and still feel) the marriage was good for quite a few years, things changed somewhere after our son, Tristan, was born in 1998. It was not the event of him being born, as he is one of the coolest (and awakened) kids you'll ever meet, and we are both very loving and actively involved parents. But that was the timing of when thing started going south. We moved to Vegas in 2000 and were touch and go, several times discussing divorce. Each time we decided not to "for Tristan's sake." In early 2005 I had a discussion with a friend of mine who was a psychologist and I had resolved that the next time if we got to the divorce discussion, if I was not going to stay in the marriage for love, then I was not going to stay at all. That summer, I ran into my high school girlfriend and her husband at our 20th high school reunion. The next month my wife and I got into another argument I told her I wanted to leave. As I wanted to try to clean up some financial issues before the divorce and she need to have a minor surgery done, I delayed in leaving. A few months later I told her I wanted a divorce and I moved out. There are other details that at this point I don't need to share. This isn't a mea culpa and out of respect for my ex-wife there are things that are not pertinent to understand my mindset as I was approaching my awakening.
Around this time, a big problem that my company faced during the initial down turn was integrity. Frankly, had we been a scummy outfit, we would have and easily could have sold hundreds more units in 2005 and 2006. But the company I created hinged upon and built it's foundation on integrity, and we stuck to it until I grounded the company in late 2007.
My leave of absence was up in July of 2006. Fortunately, the market downturn came six months earlier so I could see the writing on the wall. I chose to go back to fly for United rather than give up the job. This is a decision that my father fully encouraged, and I'm glad that I did make the decision as that is what I'm doing today. But you should realize that it was a great acknowledgement of defeat to me. I had really never failed at anything before in my life, and while the acceptance of failure was okay, the combination of the magnitude of failure and an undeveloped sense of how to deal with failure is another piece of the puzzle.
Bills mounted and revenue dried up to nothing. I methodically let employees go, although I tried to find jobs for each one of them as they left. Two of my most faithful employees, Sue and Jerry Rudden, worked without pay. Jer worked for over a year without being paid, and his attitude was bright and still is today. This is the kind of company we had built. Unfortunately, I did not have the proper financial savvy to keep us afloat.
In the middle of 2007, facing looming bills, missing several mortgage payments, I realized that bankruptcy and foreclosure were next. As I had personally guaranteed everything and the company was not small, my company debt was over a quarter million dollars. I had sold all of my investment properties to pay the bills and the house, which was supposed to go to my ex-wife in the divorce, had depreciated below the first and second mortgages. This led to about two weeks of what I would probably have to consider as depression, as I cannot think of another way to describe it. After this brief encounter, with help of Sue, Jerry, my great friend Tamara, and the incredible emotional support of my girlfriend Amber, I tried to go at it again. But there was very little fuel left in me or anything around, and things came to a crash in November. This is when I finally resolved myself to Bankruptcy.
Oddly, while I very much recall the two weeks of depression in July, I don't remember it being so darned depressing in November. I just remember the sensation of pressure, intense pressure, but not depression. Finally, about the last week of November, I cracked.
I have read about other's awakenings and have listened to how they describe the exact moments of awakening. Like something from a Kafka film or Van Gough painting, they vividly relate how things looked and felt. Not for me. For me it was really just a bizarre, radical shift of perspective. It was like I went from being the character in a video game to the perspective of the person controlling the player in the video game. I was literally not seeing "through my eyes" but from a perspective above and to the right of my head by about 2 feet each direction. This extreme sensation lasted for a week or two as I recall. Somewhere in there, I found that I was going back and forth between the perspectives with little control over it and little desire to control it.
Mind you, I was still on the hook to fly. I was on reserve (on call) and I fortunately wasn't called much in the early days of my awakening. I can't recall if I called in sick or not, but I do know that I was very safe about knowing my capabilities. Additionally, I am almost always a relief pilot so I would not have been at the controls during take off or landing. Regardless, if I had felt unsafe, I wouldn't have flown.
Remember, I wasn't having hallucinations at all. The only real oddity was that my perspective was changing from first person to third person. I was fully functional. If I were in third person perspective at the time, I could will my body to do things just like we are all used to willing our arms to move up, our hands to grasp things, our feet to step on things.
Things started to stabilize. I was getting more and more back into first person perspective and the jump in and out of third person became more deliberate. It is this time that I recall most fondly, because once you learn to be able to control this, it is mind blowing what you can do. Sadly, the control over this slowly waned over the next few months as my first person perspective once again became dominant.
Tamara was going through some pretty huge issues herself and in the greatest moment of synchronicity and grace, she woke up almost simultaneously! One of the things I feel most blessed about is the fact that I had someone to wake up to consciousness with. Perhaps it would be better to awaken by yourself because the loneliness would intensify the awakening and might propel your consciousness farther than what occurred with me. But I believe that it is an incredibly rare opportunity to waking up with someone else, especially if that someone is a great friend. I imagine that would be something that occurred in concentration camps or prison camps, or maybe during warfare. But to civilians in a civilized country, I imagine that most people who spontaneously awaken are alone. (Remember, many of the experts say that once you are through your awakening, you look at the circumstances with thankfulness, not anger or sadness. So if you are or do wake up by yourself, you will eventually come to realize that the intensification of doing so will be something that has helped you advance your consciousness and therefore a good thing.)
If you haven't picked up on it, the first person perspective is my Ego or what I refer to as Level 1. This is a term that Tamara and I coined when we were trying to figure out what the heck was going on with us. We had no clue that it was about consciousness. Other than a conversation that I had at a party of mine on March 5th where someone mentioned Eckhart Tolle's name, I had never heard of him nor did I know anything about awakening or consciousness. We had no clue what the Ego was (I wouldn't really start to get it for another three or four months) and really had no idea what to call the bizarre third person perspective. So we called the first person perspective, the one lower to the ground, Level 1. The third person perspective was higher, another level up, so we called it Level 2. Conveniently enough, Richard Moss describes the Ego as "lower self-consciousness" and being present "higher self-consciousness," and that jibes with Level 1-Level 2.
I am sure it is due to Grace that my Level 1 allowed the search for truth in the matter to be so aggressive. My creative and system development skills enable me to become a madman when I dive into something. I am an exceptionally quick learner and given the right leeway, I could master the issue in short order. But it was necessary for my Level 1 to not interfere too much. In retrospect, it is amazing that my Ego (Level 1) allowed me to be on a mission that would ultimately nullify it, and yet it did and still does.
I must comment here that I have always had a very good relationship with myself, even before I awoke. I had a good upbringing. Yeah, I come from a divorced family, and my mom and step dad had to bust their ass just to keep us going in a very low-end house. But both of my parents and my step-dad were very good people and they taught us good values. (Alas, they were all far from being awake, but very good natured people none the less.) Somewhere in young adulthood I unconsciously chose the path of integrity and have stuck by it as much as a human ego could. "He without sin cast the first stone," and I fully admit that I have not been perfect. Everyone has done things that they feel go against their character, and I am no exception. But the general operating standards that I held myself to were very high, and they got higher as I matured. So the person that I was just before my awakening was someone that I liked and still do. I think it's one of the reasons that adapting to the integrity demanded by Level 2 has been so easy for me.
In February of 2008, I was packing to move from a rental house back into my old house that had yet to be foreclosed on. (It's October of 2008 and I'm still living there, waiting for them to come kick me out. Bizarre. I will miss this house and remember it for a long time. But I'm cool with moving on, too, to the next cool experience.) As I packed my extensive library, I came across a book that was given to me by some clients, Jim and Cathy LeValley. It was "The Celestine Prophecy." I was needing a book to read for my next trip, so I tossed it onto my suit case. Perfect timing. While it was not the bulls-eye that "A New Earth" would soon be for me, it was on the board. I read it in one four day trip. When I got home I called Tamara and made her go buy a copy. (I think that I've given out more than a dozen copies and have had almost that many people buy them for themselves.) I read the entire Celestine series that month, and while it's a bit more ethereal for my taste, now and even then, it was describing synchronicity and group think, two concepts that were bombarding me very hard since my awakening.
I graduated from Ohio State with a degree in Aviation-Computer science. I was enlisted in the Air Force for six years and then flew as a pilot for another six years. I helped start up Frontier Airlines, as my father, a pilot and serial entrepreneur and his wife were instrumental in getting Frontier started. My time in the Air Force and with Frontier enabled me to get hired by United in January of 1995.
In some ways I am like many of the other United pilots. Getting there is pretty competitive so the resulting work force is highly educated, highly focused, and reasonably responsible. Fifteen years ago, the job paid well and if you scheduled yourself right, you could bunch your time off so that you could work hard and then play hard. Real hard.
This left most of us with a lot of time and a decent amount of money, so many of us became garage entrepreneurs. Clearly, my observation of my dad preconditioned me to be an entrepreneur, and I took to it whole heartedly. I started and ran a few interesting businesses through the years.
And then came 2003. The post 9/11 aviation industry was in upheaval (and is now nearly decimated.) United had entered bankruptcy and management had literally stolen our retirement (easily verifiable). While many pilots had built their entire identity on being an airline pilot, there were a lot of us who decided to look outside aviation for both personal growth as well as revenue generating. United was laying off hundreds of pilots and I was in Las Vegas looking at the cheap houses. So I got my real estate license and started selling investment property.
My timing could not have been better. I quickly became the top selling agent at my large national brokerage. I also quickly built a business around this and had a sizable staff. For a few years, this worked fine because we were continually growing. Unfortunately, this masked my weakness in financial skill because I would use my talent to bring in more business to pay the rapidly growing overhead. Within three months I had taken a voluntary three year leave of absence flying 747's for United and started selling real estate full time.
During all this, I came up with a brilliant plan to build a large national network of investment savvy agents. No one had to pay any money to join or use the service, as the commissions were big enough that the selling agents were happy to pay us referral fees. Infinitely scalable, I realized that it could be worth a couple hundred million dollars in less than three years. So I set upon the task of raising a million dollars to finance the project.
That was quite a fateful decision, although through my eyes today, I wouldn't want it any other way. (I know that from someone's Level 1 perspective they couldn't believe that I really mean it. Until you awaken and realize what it is to wake up, I can understand why you don't understand.)
My Level 1 has some pretty cool strengths. I have been tested by the Results Foundation and I am an extreme Creator and Star. This means that I am most productive in dreaming up incredible systems and then using my charisma to promote the product. And I have really learned how to maximize both of these. What this means, however, is that my ability to handle the financial aspect of a somewhat large and rapidly growing company and my ability to go out and generate cash by myself is very low, relatively speaking. I do realize this now, but what this meant in 2006 and 2007 is what is important to this story.
Right when I started seeking capital, the market started so show signs of weakening. Clearly, we have never seen a real estate market crash in the United States ever before, not even during the great depression (mortgages weren't really around back then so it was a very different thing.) Had I known then how bad the market was going to crash I would have closed up shop, gone back to flying, and rode it out like the rest of the nation. Lacking a crystal ball, however, being an eternal optimist, and relying on creativity and charisma like I had for the first few years, I pressed forward.
I had been married since 1990 and while I felt (and still feel) the marriage was good for quite a few years, things changed somewhere after our son, Tristan, was born in 1998. It was not the event of him being born, as he is one of the coolest (and awakened) kids you'll ever meet, and we are both very loving and actively involved parents. But that was the timing of when thing started going south. We moved to Vegas in 2000 and were touch and go, several times discussing divorce. Each time we decided not to "for Tristan's sake." In early 2005 I had a discussion with a friend of mine who was a psychologist and I had resolved that the next time if we got to the divorce discussion, if I was not going to stay in the marriage for love, then I was not going to stay at all. That summer, I ran into my high school girlfriend and her husband at our 20th high school reunion. The next month my wife and I got into another argument I told her I wanted to leave. As I wanted to try to clean up some financial issues before the divorce and she need to have a minor surgery done, I delayed in leaving. A few months later I told her I wanted a divorce and I moved out. There are other details that at this point I don't need to share. This isn't a mea culpa and out of respect for my ex-wife there are things that are not pertinent to understand my mindset as I was approaching my awakening.
Around this time, a big problem that my company faced during the initial down turn was integrity. Frankly, had we been a scummy outfit, we would have and easily could have sold hundreds more units in 2005 and 2006. But the company I created hinged upon and built it's foundation on integrity, and we stuck to it until I grounded the company in late 2007.
My leave of absence was up in July of 2006. Fortunately, the market downturn came six months earlier so I could see the writing on the wall. I chose to go back to fly for United rather than give up the job. This is a decision that my father fully encouraged, and I'm glad that I did make the decision as that is what I'm doing today. But you should realize that it was a great acknowledgement of defeat to me. I had really never failed at anything before in my life, and while the acceptance of failure was okay, the combination of the magnitude of failure and an undeveloped sense of how to deal with failure is another piece of the puzzle.
Bills mounted and revenue dried up to nothing. I methodically let employees go, although I tried to find jobs for each one of them as they left. Two of my most faithful employees, Sue and Jerry Rudden, worked without pay. Jer worked for over a year without being paid, and his attitude was bright and still is today. This is the kind of company we had built. Unfortunately, I did not have the proper financial savvy to keep us afloat.
In the middle of 2007, facing looming bills, missing several mortgage payments, I realized that bankruptcy and foreclosure were next. As I had personally guaranteed everything and the company was not small, my company debt was over a quarter million dollars. I had sold all of my investment properties to pay the bills and the house, which was supposed to go to my ex-wife in the divorce, had depreciated below the first and second mortgages. This led to about two weeks of what I would probably have to consider as depression, as I cannot think of another way to describe it. After this brief encounter, with help of Sue, Jerry, my great friend Tamara, and the incredible emotional support of my girlfriend Amber, I tried to go at it again. But there was very little fuel left in me or anything around, and things came to a crash in November. This is when I finally resolved myself to Bankruptcy.
Oddly, while I very much recall the two weeks of depression in July, I don't remember it being so darned depressing in November. I just remember the sensation of pressure, intense pressure, but not depression. Finally, about the last week of November, I cracked.
I have read about other's awakenings and have listened to how they describe the exact moments of awakening. Like something from a Kafka film or Van Gough painting, they vividly relate how things looked and felt. Not for me. For me it was really just a bizarre, radical shift of perspective. It was like I went from being the character in a video game to the perspective of the person controlling the player in the video game. I was literally not seeing "through my eyes" but from a perspective above and to the right of my head by about 2 feet each direction. This extreme sensation lasted for a week or two as I recall. Somewhere in there, I found that I was going back and forth between the perspectives with little control over it and little desire to control it.
Mind you, I was still on the hook to fly. I was on reserve (on call) and I fortunately wasn't called much in the early days of my awakening. I can't recall if I called in sick or not, but I do know that I was very safe about knowing my capabilities. Additionally, I am almost always a relief pilot so I would not have been at the controls during take off or landing. Regardless, if I had felt unsafe, I wouldn't have flown.
Remember, I wasn't having hallucinations at all. The only real oddity was that my perspective was changing from first person to third person. I was fully functional. If I were in third person perspective at the time, I could will my body to do things just like we are all used to willing our arms to move up, our hands to grasp things, our feet to step on things.
Things started to stabilize. I was getting more and more back into first person perspective and the jump in and out of third person became more deliberate. It is this time that I recall most fondly, because once you learn to be able to control this, it is mind blowing what you can do. Sadly, the control over this slowly waned over the next few months as my first person perspective once again became dominant.
Tamara was going through some pretty huge issues herself and in the greatest moment of synchronicity and grace, she woke up almost simultaneously! One of the things I feel most blessed about is the fact that I had someone to wake up to consciousness with. Perhaps it would be better to awaken by yourself because the loneliness would intensify the awakening and might propel your consciousness farther than what occurred with me. But I believe that it is an incredibly rare opportunity to waking up with someone else, especially if that someone is a great friend. I imagine that would be something that occurred in concentration camps or prison camps, or maybe during warfare. But to civilians in a civilized country, I imagine that most people who spontaneously awaken are alone. (Remember, many of the experts say that once you are through your awakening, you look at the circumstances with thankfulness, not anger or sadness. So if you are or do wake up by yourself, you will eventually come to realize that the intensification of doing so will be something that has helped you advance your consciousness and therefore a good thing.)
If you haven't picked up on it, the first person perspective is my Ego or what I refer to as Level 1. This is a term that Tamara and I coined when we were trying to figure out what the heck was going on with us. We had no clue that it was about consciousness. Other than a conversation that I had at a party of mine on March 5th where someone mentioned Eckhart Tolle's name, I had never heard of him nor did I know anything about awakening or consciousness. We had no clue what the Ego was (I wouldn't really start to get it for another three or four months) and really had no idea what to call the bizarre third person perspective. So we called the first person perspective, the one lower to the ground, Level 1. The third person perspective was higher, another level up, so we called it Level 2. Conveniently enough, Richard Moss describes the Ego as "lower self-consciousness" and being present "higher self-consciousness," and that jibes with Level 1-Level 2.
I am sure it is due to Grace that my Level 1 allowed the search for truth in the matter to be so aggressive. My creative and system development skills enable me to become a madman when I dive into something. I am an exceptionally quick learner and given the right leeway, I could master the issue in short order. But it was necessary for my Level 1 to not interfere too much. In retrospect, it is amazing that my Ego (Level 1) allowed me to be on a mission that would ultimately nullify it, and yet it did and still does.
I must comment here that I have always had a very good relationship with myself, even before I awoke. I had a good upbringing. Yeah, I come from a divorced family, and my mom and step dad had to bust their ass just to keep us going in a very low-end house. But both of my parents and my step-dad were very good people and they taught us good values. (Alas, they were all far from being awake, but very good natured people none the less.) Somewhere in young adulthood I unconsciously chose the path of integrity and have stuck by it as much as a human ego could. "He without sin cast the first stone," and I fully admit that I have not been perfect. Everyone has done things that they feel go against their character, and I am no exception. But the general operating standards that I held myself to were very high, and they got higher as I matured. So the person that I was just before my awakening was someone that I liked and still do. I think it's one of the reasons that adapting to the integrity demanded by Level 2 has been so easy for me.
In February of 2008, I was packing to move from a rental house back into my old house that had yet to be foreclosed on. (It's October of 2008 and I'm still living there, waiting for them to come kick me out. Bizarre. I will miss this house and remember it for a long time. But I'm cool with moving on, too, to the next cool experience.) As I packed my extensive library, I came across a book that was given to me by some clients, Jim and Cathy LeValley. It was "The Celestine Prophecy." I was needing a book to read for my next trip, so I tossed it onto my suit case. Perfect timing. While it was not the bulls-eye that "A New Earth" would soon be for me, it was on the board. I read it in one four day trip. When I got home I called Tamara and made her go buy a copy. (I think that I've given out more than a dozen copies and have had almost that many people buy them for themselves.) I read the entire Celestine series that month, and while it's a bit more ethereal for my taste, now and even then, it was describing synchronicity and group think, two concepts that were bombarding me very hard since my awakening.
An avid reader and book collector, I started hitting Half.com and Amazon.com buying as many used books as I could. I was in the process of bankruptcy by now, but when you can buy a hardback book for seventy-five cents plus three bucks shipping, you can find ways to get what you need. (And there's always the library for the major works.)
And then I found Tolle. Bliss! Eckhart was the first person that I came across that was describing EXACTLY what I was going through. You can't burn through a Tolle book as it is packed dense with deep, thought provoking ideas paragraph after paragraph. But I chewed "A New Earth" up as fast as I could, but insisting that I must understand every concept as I go before I could move onto the next. (This is a reading habit that I still maintain and cannot imagine anyone doing otherwise.) Immediately I went to "the Power of Now," another grinder that filled my head with explanations leading to more and more questions.
All of a sudden I became aware that I wasn't just dealing with consciousness. While it is still absolutely my main focus these days, I now realize that if you crack open the door with consciousness, you cannot stop spirituality from flooding in. It is as if I were in a pitch black room, with the door shut tightly. But once grace opened the door even a smidge, the intense bright light outside the doorway crashes into the room. When everything is totally dark, even a sliver of light can cause a startling amount of illumination. Once the door is fully flung open no darkness can remain. And that is why consciousness and spirituality are required for enlightenment, because consciousness opens the door, and spirituality is the light. The room is the essence of YOU.
And that is the how and why of my awakening. Since then, I have discovered many great authors, especially Richard Moss. I have also started reading "A Course in Miracles" and attend a few weekly discussion groups about ACIM and consciousness. (I love my groups!) In coming posts you'll get to hear about the thoughts that zing through my head and the authors, books, audio files, and videos that I read. But I hope this gives you some kind of foundation for when you read those other posts.
Remember, I only awoke at the end of 2007, less than a year ago. Progress has been incredible. If you have yet to awaken (then I don't know how you could have read this post to this point), know that it can happen at any time. Any and all preparation is worth your time. I can only imagine what it would have been like to wake up and already know what the heck it was that was happening to me. But we all have our different paths and I truly mean this that all paths are equal. If you have just awakened and are just now trying to figure things out, know that you are just a few months behind me. If you stick with it, you'll be here in no time.
I hope that future posts in this blog will enable you to make your leaps and bounds even more quickly than I. It is my path and the path of my teachers and companions to bring this material to help you along your path. Perhaps you can contribute to my path an the path of others by contributing to the insights and conversations herel. How fortunate we are to have crossed paths.
Namaste.
