Every now and then people will ask me about any early experiences I might have had as a child, and prior to 1978. Below are a few that I can remember.

I've always remembered being one with infinite light before I was born, then falling through layers of color to wind up on the physical plane. Always wanting to get back to the infinite sun. Always feeling emptiness, the emptiness of feeling separated from that light, and trying to fill that emptiness to make up for the feeling of separation from infinite sun. Filling the feeling with what people call “life”, with relationships, with projects, with work, with distractions. And in the end, everything always just got in the way, and I always knew whatever I was doing wasn't what I really wanted.

When I was seven or eight, just old enough to see over the kitchen counter top, I remember standing in the kitchen, looking at the tile behind the counter, feeling as though I was trapped in someone else's dream. And that dream was a kind of collaborative effort of my mother and father, their parents, plus people at large. And I kept trying to wake up from the dream, to get myself untangled from someone else's dream. My body, my personality, my “Roger” was this collaborative dream I was stuck in. I later realized that for me to be able to recognize I was in the dream meant that I was awake in the dream.

Many times as a child, and later into my adult life, I had a recurring dream in which I was wearing some sort of brown robe, and flying over a very desolate, mountainous region. In my dream I could see a town below me with one distinct feature that I always used as a landmark: there was a large, multi-storied stone building, fairly rectangular, on a small hill; and behind it was an enclosed open area that looked something like a parade ground or a sports field. Whenever I flew over the area I would drop blessings on the town: as a child I always thought of it as being like Tinkerbell flying around dropping pixie dust. Many years later I came across a copy of National Geographic from 1978 in a second-hand book store. The magazine had a full page picture of the very area I flew over in my dreams, including the stone building and the parade grounds behind it: the building was the old palace in Leh, Ladakh, and what I was calling a parade ground was a polo field behind the old palace.

Got kicked out of Sunday school twice, once before I was six, and once again when I was about eight: both times for asking too many questions. I never went back. On the other hand, I loved going to church, especially Catholic high mass— I liked the idea of it, what it represented in its purest form. (I went with my father and his wife to Europe when I was sixteen— and I annoyed the hell out of them because I always wanted to spend all my time in the cathedrals—Notre Dame in Paris, Westminster in England, Marienkirche in Munich.) Which I now find strange, since I have next to no interest in ceremony or ritual. But now, as then, I still appreciate the spirit of the ceremony or ritual.

In the summer when I was nine, we went to visit my mother's uncles and aunts in Missouri. I slept in a bedroom by myself, on a large feather mattress that threatened to swallow me whole if I didn't sleep near the edge of the bed (you have to know about feather mattresses to know what I mean: feather mattresses are, as the name says, stuffed with feathers. And if you're small, and you try to lie in the middle of the mattress, the thing will fold up around you like a huge pea pod. So you have to learn to sleep near the edge of the bed to keep from getting swallowed.) The bedroom had a Bible in it and I decided that I'd read the New Testament while I was there, at least the four Gospels. So that was my project each night when I went to bed: read the four Gospels. As I read I realized that things were terribly wrong, so I rounded up some thin “airmail” paper and a pen (in those days sending a letter by air mail was expensive, so paper makers made very thin, light weight paper specifically for email letters). As I read the Gospels I made notes, writing down what I knew Jesus had said. When I had finished my project I had perhaps six or seven handwritten pages of what I knew were Jesus' words, and I carried those pages in my wallet until they finally disintegrated when I was about seventeen or eighteen. What struck me most in reading the Gospels is the major disparity between what Jesus said and how it got interpreted by those around him, the Disciples, Paul, John, etc. The whole New Testament is about going to heaven, avoiding hell, not to mention Armageddon, and accepting Christ and confessing your sins as a way to do that. Heaven is some place “up there,” and hell is some place “down there”. And yet in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said to “seek first the kingdom of heaven...”, and someone in the crowd asked him where heaven is, and Jesus said that some people say heaven is here, or there, or whatever, but that in fact the kingdom of heaven is within you. And I could never get what Jesus said, about the kingdom of heaven being within, to jibe with heaven “up there”, or going to heaven, or hell, or whatever. Either I was missing the point, or people weren't listening to Jesus and were more interested in pushing their own agendas. But I was a nine year old kid, so what did I know.

When I was a kid I loved organ music, especially Bach, especially when I leaned that he frequently wrote “AMGD” (“Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”—”to the greater glory of God”), at the end of his compositions. When I was in prep school I somehow managed to get forcibly auditioned for the glee club and chapel choir, and got semi-forcibly drafted (the payoff, the bribe, was that we got to go to girls' schools at least once a month). I couldn't wait to sing in the choir every morning— it was my own private offering.

Even as a young kid I loved being out in the natural world, preferably alone. I'd go out into the desert around Phoenix, ride my bike way beyond any boundaries my mother had set up, and just sit out there, doing nothing but being. Being alone meant that I didn't have to be “human”, that I could just be myself. I'd frequently experience a glow, a brightness emanating from everything— a gold-white light that I always thought of as the “light of the world”— not sun light, and not auras, but the light that makes makes everything what it is. And sometimes I'd see a sort of blue web connecting everything— in some places it would be fairly solid, while in other place it would sort of jump from plant to plant, tree to tree, rock to rock. As I grew up I parlayed my love of being alone in the natural world into solo backpacking trips in the summer, and solo back-country ski trips in the winter.

Was a philosophy major in college. This was a huge compromise— if there had been a theology major I would have done that instead. Was miserable in both prep school and college— pretended to fit in, but didn't. I probably shouldn't have been there, but in those days there were no “eastern studies” majors, next to no ashrams in North America at all, and those that were here weren't known well at all.

One summer, when I was in college, I worked in Frankfurt, Germany. Before heading back to college, a friend and I took a motorcycle trip to the German border to do some climbing in mountains that are the border between Germany and Austria. It rained almost the entire time we traveled, and we spent most days being cold and wet for hours on end on the motorcycle. At one point we stopped in a small village, bought something to eat, and then looked for someplace dry to hang out for a few hours and dry out before finding a place to camp. We wound up going into a tiny German Baroque chapel, large enough to seat maybe fifty people, plus a choir loft and a pipe organ and, of course, an alter. My friend sat down in the back row and promptly fell asleep. I walked around the chapel, looking at all the baroque ornamentation, the statues of the saints, the Virgin Mary, when a teenage girl came in and climbed the stairs to the choir loft and began her organ practice. The organ was an old, wheezy, baroque organ, and she played Bach. I sat in the front row and enjoyed her playing. After she was finished, and had left, I walked around the chapel again, waiting for my friend to wake up (he'd slept straight through the organ practice. At one point I found myself standing in front of the staff that would have been used in the processional: it has perhaps seven feet tall, with a gold cross on top, and was resting an a holder attached to the alter railing. I was transfixed by the thing — I just kept looking at it. Suddenly the chapel started to fill up with a bright gold-white light. The surroundings faded away until all I could see was the cross at the top of the staff. Then that too faded away into the light, and I lost all sense of being in the chapel, standing in front of anything. There was just me in an infinite sea of gold-white light. I think at one point I faded away into the light myself— I say that only because I had a sense of being gone and coming back, after which the cross gradually came back into view, then the rest of the chapel slowly appeared as the light faded, and I was eventually back in the chapel, in front of the staff once again.

Experimented briefly with psychedelics as a spiritual avenue, but got bored. Realized I was bounded by the limits of the chemicals. Used to play with willing/intending my perception past the psychedelics— allowing the drug to disassemble my perceptual field, and then willing my perceptual field back to “normal”. (Once took some strong LSD, enough that my perceptual field was broken up into lots of little floating diamonds, each diamond containing a piece of my perceptual field, all floating in open clear space. I'd then will the diamonds back into a coherent whole and the world would appear “normal” to me, then I'd allow it to break up into the diamonds again, then will it back whole. After I learned I could do that, I lost interest in psychedelics. I was much better off just going to the mountains and letting go, watching everything glow with the bright light, seeing the blue web of creation. That, and music were much more meaningful to me.

In 1973 I was camping up on some cliffs overlooking the ocean on Pender Island (British Columbia, Canada). I'd set up my tent fairly close to the edge of a thirty to forty foot cliff, and gone to bed, setting my alarm clock to wake me up early the next morning. Some time during the night I was awakened by an enormous weight pressing down on me, as if something was on top of me. I struggled to throw off whatever it was, and when I finally did, the next thing I saw was a man's face floating in space in front of me. He had straight black shoulder length hair with a red headband of some sort. He felt very menacing, as if I'd invaded his territory (to me he looked Native Canadian). I could see his face, and I could see my alarm clock, and the tent walls, so I knew I wasn't dreaming. He quickly disappeared and I lay there scared, thinking “holy crap!” Then I realized I could hear sheep bleating, which would have been no surprise because there were tons of wild sheep on the island— only I realized I could not only hear sheep bleating around me, but also underneath me. The bleating sheep sounds around me finally disappeared, but one in particular remained underneath me, and I could hear it sort of moving away from me, the bleating getting more and more faint.

I lay there, looking at the clock, wondering what to do. My inclination was to get the hell out of there, but it was the middle of the night and I was camped eight or ten feet from the edge of a thirty foot cliff. If whoever owned that face decided to come back and jump me while I was outside the tent and standing up, I could easily have wound up going over the cliff; so I decided to wait until daybreak to leave. Plus, the first ferry off the island wasn't until early morning, so I couldn't get off the island in any case.

So I decided to just lay in my tent and stare at the clock until daybreak, but somehow I must have managed to fall asleep because the next thing I knew I had something/someone very heavy on top of me once again. I was on my stomach, with my head turned toward my alarm clock, which I could see quite clearly. Only this time, instead of reacting out of fear, I got really angry. Since I was on my stomach, I pushed myself up with my arms, onto my hands and knees, with whatever/whoever still on top of me, mashing me down. I hollered at the top of my lungs, “get the fuck off of me!” and reared back onto my knees. Whatever was on me went flying off. I looked at the space in front of me and realized that I was out of my body. Then I looked at “me” and saw that I had this very brilliant red/gold luminous body, and a feeling of immense power, as if I could have put my hands into the earth and torn it apart like you'd tear apart an orange or a peach. I then laid back down into my physical body and woke it up, and laid there until daybreak when I packed up and headed home. I never saw whatever/whoever had been on top of me ever again.

At the time this happened I was working building a house. For the most part I worked on the house alone, by myself, especially doing the finish carpentry and cabinets. When I went back to work a couple of days later I was once again working by myself, putting up door and window trim, only now I had the distinct feeling that I was working in a house full of people— I couldn't see them, but could sense and feel them, like doing carpentry work in the middle of a very busy train station, pounding nails in Grand Central Station at rush hour was how it felt, with the distinct sense that people were standing behind and beside me, looking over my shoulder as I worked. At the same time, I started going into spontaneous meditation: sometimes I could barely keep my eyes open at work, and always wanted to go sit in a back room and meditate— so much so that I started keeping track of my meditation down-time and would deduct it from my weekly time sheet.

Three years later, in 1976, I kept having experiences at night where I'd be out of my body, and have hands on either side of me, guiding me through all kinds of colored planes, then bringing me back again. I knew that my marriage was going to break up and that my life was going to change, but didn't know in what way. Two years after that, in 1978, I had the major awakening I wrote about in my 1995 correspondence with my friend Chris.

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