An Electrician’s Guide To Our Galaxy: Living On Universal Bandwidth
My first spark of fascination with electricity traces back to childhood. I was nine years old, and it was the summer of 1965. The previous December, near Christmas of 1964 the Willamette River overflowed its banks. The flood-swollen river swallowed many homes along its path while at its apex, nearly reaching our home’s living room floor level. The aftermath destroyed our furnace and water heater, forcing my father to relocate us to higher ground
During one visit to our under construction home, I remember walking down the stairs and seeing an electrician pull romex cable through the wooden studs to the junction boxes he had already roughed in. I was fascinated by the work. It almost seemed like magic that a house could be wired in such a way that we could control lights and power from just toggle switches and outlets. I asked the electrician several questions, and he was very pleasant, and answered me in a friendly manner.
I was very impressed with the electrician, and I had an immediate respect for him and his work. The thoughts of bringing power and light to families had an appeal to me. I began to wonder if becoming an electrician might be a good thing to do when I became an adult, but there were a lot of other things I was interested in, too, like becoming a jet pilot and an astronaut. Yet, the electrician and his work became a permanent resident in my mind.
Christmas 1964 flood
My interest didn’t stop with the electrician in the basement. My new neighbor, Craig Salter, introduced me to the hands-on, often unorthodox world of adolescent experimentation. Together, we wired lights into secret underground bunkers, digging trenches for cables and marveling at our creations. That is, until I became the load in a live circuit, learning firsthand the duality of electricity—its power to give life and take it away.
Years later, my career trajectory as an electrician gained focus under the mentorship of Albert Critzer, an instructor at my high school’s Owen Sabin Occupational Skills Center. Albert wasn’t just teaching skilled labor—he was, perhaps unknowingly, passing on passion, energy, and reverence for the craft. His infectious enthusiasm lit something within me, showing how rewarding a commitment to this trade could be. But, I still wanted to escape the surly bonds of Earth, through a career in the Air Force, and then NASA. At this point I had the grades and the skills to get me there.
I took a long and circuitous route through college and university levels of electrical, electronic, and computer engineering. I also briefly was in the Air Force ROTC, where I could not quite find what I was looking for. The Air Force no longer needed pilots, as they had an excess trained from the Vietnam War, thus they wanted me to be a ground-based electrical engineer for them. I said
NO THANK YOU,
eschewing a full-ride scholarship with them to find my own unique path to reach heavenly realms. Umm, after a few years of bouncing around doing less than happy, fulfilling things, I applied to and was accepted into a local electrical union’s apprenticeship program. I have never regretted the decision.
I became an electrician by trade but a writer and spiritual seeker by vocation. At first glance, these might seem like diverging paths, yet they were strands woven into the same cord, guiding me toward a profound and illuminating truth:
We find what we seek. Whether that is a constrained sense of self or an infinitely expanding awareness, the external lives we build mirror our internal choices for perception and vision.
This realization did not dawn overnight. It arose through unique life experiences—cultivated in equal parts by curiosity, inner reflection, revelation, and a myriad of challenges both in my career and everyday life. At first glance this truth may appear dated and mundane, but after its timeless truth and galactic implications.are revealed within this book, the reader will think otherwise.
My early years as an electrician anchored me in a world of tangible realities. I worked amid the inherent dangers of handling electrical systems—a place where energy flows invisibly yet powerfully through wires, waiting to be guided or misdirected. I learned about the foundations of energy management: system planning, design, construction, and upgrades for improved efficiency. These responsibilities called for precision and foresight. However, as a spiritual seeker, my perspective shifted—instead of just focusing on electrical energy coursing through inanimate systems, I began to turn inward, observing the energy coursing through our human spirit.
This dual focus brought a critical insight into view. Just as untrained electricians risk mishandling powerful electrical grids, unconscious or spiritually unevolved individuals carry vast personal energy through the grid of their lives, also mishandling it. Without inward awareness, they stumble through their unexamined lives, ignoring opportunities to heal wounds and faulty perceptions while limiting their lives to lower levels of insight, connection, and fulfillment.
For all the thousands of years humanity has spent exploring philosophy and religion, this spiritual energy remains elusive—poorly understood and most often unconsciously harnessed. Yet the need for greater awareness is undeniable. Through my dual lenses as a professional electrician and spiritual explorer, I came to recognize the collective longing for a deeper relationship with the fundamental energies that animate life.
These two interwoven paths—profession and spirit—became more than careers or explorations. Together, they revealed underlying truths about human connection, the rhythms of nature, and the structures of existence itself. They taught me, above all, how to live a life charged with maximum spiritual energy, flowing harmoniously, not just within myself but as part of a greater universal current.
Electromagnetism, the source for electricity, is one of the four strongest forces in the universe. Electricity and magnetism are essentially two aspects of the same thing, because a changing electric field creates a magnetic field, and a changing magnetic field creates an electric field. Yet, electricity is more than a force of physics; it’s a metaphor for life itself. Consider the circuit—a closed loop, requiring energy, flow and balance to function, just as our lives require energy, connection and reciprocity. Its foundation lies in potential energy—an imbalance, a difference that sparks movement, energy, and, ultimately, transformation. You do not need to believe in electricity to feel its power; you must only respect its laws. Similarly, belief isn’t required to experience life’s interconnectedness; it is only awareness.
Like a completed circuit, human potential is fulfilled when energy is directed with purpose and flows back to its source with necessary feedback. This interplay between input and output echoes through human relationships, empathy, compassion, creativity, and spirituality. It’s no coincidence that physical and energetic balance is a recurring theme across cultures and spiritual practices.
We are wired to seek and find. As we become adults we seek for sex, a sense of security, and a place within society. Some seek for recognition and fame, others for lots of money, a few to just blend in, and some to find the real truth about their lives. My lifelong search has been for understanding wherever my attention may land, be it my education, career, family, world, myself, or the very nature of reality.
There’s a distinct difference between seeking confirmation of what we expect to find and seeking the truth. The former is constrained by our limited perceptions, rooted in collectively and individually acquired knowledge, biases, and assumptions. The truth, however, is untethered—vast, infinite, and unknowable in its totality. What fascinated me most was the importance of examining the process of seeking and, most importantly, the seeker itself.
By turning attention not just to what we seek but also to the one who seeks, we open an entirely new dimension of possibility. An electrician looks at the current flowing in a circuit but should also wonder—what powers the current? What enables the very laws governing its flow? Who is the person asking these questions? The answers enable higher degrees of insight and intelligence, and create profound clarity in understanding systems and the miracle of our life.
Electrical connections taught me the physical principles of flow, potential, resonance, and grounding. Spiritual seeking revealed their metaphysical parallels. Together, they outlined a foundational truth—that life, much like a circuit, depends on intelligent design, good connections, equilibrium, feedback, and energy directed with purpose.
This is about beginnings—the roots of curiosity, the influences that guide us, and the power of asking questions. But the story doesn’t stop here. As we explore further, we’ll shift from understanding the principles of electricity as they mirror life to applying these lessons to our most important connection—to ourselves and the universe.
For the seeker, both literal and metaphorical, there’s always more to learn, more to illuminate, and more to connect.
Are you ready to dig deeper into your miraculous self while flying to the farthest reaches of our spiritual galaxy?
Then keep reading!
