I repost this one to honor an experience that happened 39 years ago today. The experience continues to inform my spiritual awareness.
Friends often say I’ve carved out a life entirely my own—a path less traveled, winding through the underbrush instead of sticking to the paved road. It’s not a life marked by bright headlines or neat, cinematic endings, but a patchwork of change and quiet growth, stitched together in its own messy yet deeply meaningful way. This chapter traces its beginnings to an extraordinary year—1987—when I first encountered humanity’s, and my own, immense capacity for healing. From the soil of memory, I feel driven to uncover a tapestry of rough-edged experiences, hard-earned lessons, and a few dazzling revelations, all centered on that single, seismic year.
To capture the weight of that year, I’ll dig into my past and unearth a few telling artifacts from the time before the awakening. I’m not after a neatly polished chapter dressed up in the false clarity of hindsight, but a rough, scattered reflection—a mirror that embraces the sharp turns and deep valleys of a life genuinely lived.
The Era Before Awakening
My childhood resembled a bookshelf, bookended by fleeting daytime moments of quiet joy and innumerable terrors of the night, with vast stretches of profound loneliness filling the space between. Before 1965, I felt perpetually out of sync with the world beyond my family’s front door. I was the small boy—precocious in some ways, backward in others, traumatized and emotionally adrift—a wounded creature thrust into social settings that felt less like communities and more like battlegrounds. The playgrounds I navigated seemed designed not for connection but for Darwinian survival.
When my social circle finally expanded, it filled with those the world had largely disregarded: the outcasts, the dreamers, the rebels, the misunderstood souls living on the periphery. Few in number, they became my first teachers in the curriculum of loyalty and radical acceptance. They taught me that worth is not always visible to the naked eye.
Books became my refuge, especially the limitless realms of science fiction. Within the pages of distant worlds, I found a comfort this one could not give. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was especially transformative. Its protagonist, Michael Valentine Smith—an infant survivor of a failed Mars mission, raised by Martians—arrives at a profound realization: “Thou art God.”
This planted a quiet, subversive seed in my chest. It suggested that perhaps life—and even I, in my brokenness—could hold a spark of the divine. It became a psychic anchor as I navigated the treacherous waters of early life.
Adolescence marked a turning point, but it turned toward the dark. By fifteen, I had fallen into the suffocating grip of drugs and alcohol. These substances offered a deceptive salve, a chemical numbing against intense anxiety, loneliness, and the hollow ache of self-doubt. They promised relief but delivered only distance. As a child, I had often wanted to
“Just get off of this fucking rock!”
I dreamed of escape—as an astronaut, an alien abductee, through some alchemical breach of reality. I wanted to shatter the glass of this flawed world and step into something purer.
Despite the chaos within, I maintained a façade of academic excellence, hoping success might deliver me from discontent. I crushed standardized tests, earned scholarships from the University of Portland, the Oregon Scholarship Commission, and the U.S. Air Force, and secured a coveted spot in the Air Force ROTC program. But my life was built on sand. A broken love affair—mirroring the turbulence inside me—derailed everything. The collapse was total. I abandoned my dreams of reaching the stars and plummeted back to a hard, unforgiving reality. The pharmaceutical industry held my mentally ill wife together long enough to marry me on September 17, 1979. Eight months later, the medicinal bandages failed, and she was institutionalized.
The Grammar of Separation
In the years before 1987, I inhabited a deeply dysfunctional reality. I had been addicted from 1971 onward and was possessed by a grim fatalism. I knew with chilling certainty that I would die an active addict or take my own life by thirty, if the disease had not already claimed me. What I could not conceive was what might happen if I survived. I had no map for recovery, no reference point for a life without chemical crutches. I had made no preparations for living—only for dying.
My internal landscape during this descent carried a peculiar linguistic fracture, and it matters more than it might first appear. We tend to assume our inner monologue is mere commentary, a passive ticker tape of thought. But the language we use within the quiet chambers of our skulls does not merely describe reality—it constructs it. And I had built a reality of fragmentation through the grammar of my own existence.
I rarely spoke to myself as “I.” Instead, a relentless, critical narrator described my life in the third person.
He needs to stop.
He is a failure.
He is dying.
This was not eccentricity; it was alienation. By referring to myself as an object—a “he” rather than an “I”—I created a safe, critical distance from the raw vulnerability of being alive. I had severed the spiritual tendon binding soul to body, watching my own life from the shore as the ship drifted away.
Even as I spiraled, a part of me—perhaps that seed Heinlein planted—searched for meaning. My relationship with American Christianity was rocky terrain of jagged peaks and deep valleys. I had attended Sunday school but found its teachings irrelevant and incomplete. Its core premise of humanity’s inherent sinfulness never resonated with my soul’s ancient longing for unity. Each time I cobbled together a few weeks of sobriety—which happened perhaps four times across sixteen years of addiction—I returned to Christianity, hoping to find the missing piece. Each encounter left me spiritually malnourished, chewing dry dogma when I craved living water.
I found my living water in 1987.
The Climb to Larch Mountain
The year stands as the monolith in my timeline. After years of addiction and turmoil, I reached a fracture point that forced a reckoning with my own existence. Through fragile new sobriety and rigorous self-examination, I began peeling back the layers of pain and conditioning. On May 24th, I had a brief spiritual experience that brought amazing—but temporary—relief from my suffering. It did not heal the tremors or silence the voices, but for about a week its love-energy permeated my being.
I wanted more.
On June 22, 1987, driven by an instinct I could not name, I made a pilgrimage to Larch Mountain. This sacred peak, steeped in indigenous reverence and the ghosts of my ancestors, stands sentinel over the Columbia River valley, offering cathedral-like views of the Pacific Northwest’s volcanic giants: Rainier, Adams, St. Helens, Hood, and Jefferson. I had been sober three months, but the deep wounds of addiction—neurological damage, mental distress, a trembling body—lingered like smoke after a fire.
I climbed over the observation deck’s guardrail, searching for a hidden spot away from the world where I could connect with the spirit of the landscape. I let the beauty wash over me, the light breeze carrying the scent of countless pines like a cleansing ritual. Then I turned inward, attempting the nearly impossible task of silencing the constant chatter. The critical voices that had narrated my life in the detached third person for years responded at first with their usual noise, but in that peaceful place, they slowly and mysteriously faded away.
Then something extraordinary unfolded.
For the first time in my life, the boundaries dissolved. I felt myself physically melting into the natural world. The agonizing separation I had always known—from life, from others, from God—began to vanish like mist in morning sun. Suddenly everything—myself, the granite beneath me, the rushing river below, the endless sky—was one continuous, unbroken field of existence. An ineffable warmth flowed through my veins, richer and more intimate than anything I had ever known. It quelled the mental noise and filled the silence with unmistakable clarity.
Then came the voice. Not the detached, accusing commentary of my inner turmoil, the one that used “he” to belittle. This was a calm declaration rising from the bedrock of consciousness, using the third person one final time to tell me I had touched something far beyond my history and my narrow understanding of human possibility:
“He is having an experience with God.”
These words were not spoken aloud, yet they resonated in the marrow of my bones as undeniable truth. And with that utterance, the stubborn third-person perspective that had plagued my descent into chemical madness vanished. The “he” of my ego, the “he” of my dissociation, was replaced—one final time—by the “He” of the Spirit.
The veil lifted. The tremors ceased. The voices fell silent. Hands that had shaken so violently I could not hold a spoon became steady. The mountains were no longer distant scenery; they were extensions of my own body. The river did not wind away from me; it flowed through me.
Peace enveloped me completely.
This was not visual or intellectual. It was experiential, rooted in the ontological essence of being itself. The artificial boundaries of “self” and “other” dissolved, and I saw with startling clarity that all of humanity was my family—each person a thread in the great tapestry into which I, too, was woven. Love, which had always felt conditional and transactional, now radiated freely. It extended even to those who had wronged me, those I believed I could never forgive. It was as if God had handed me a lens of boundless compassion and asked me to look through it.
In those timeless moments, I touched eternity. It was apocalyptic in the purest sense—an unveiling—and for a brief instant I thought Jesus himself had stepped into my consciousness, pushing out the old Bruce and replacing him with something far beyond human experience. (Of course, that pesky theology training of mine tried to slap a so-called sacred name onto an indescribable experience, boxing the infinite, mystical now into old knowledge.)
The Return to the Valley
Descending was a re-entry into what I once called the mundane. I carried the transformation back into the structured chaos of human life like a fragile ember, determined to embody what the mountain had shown me. True healing, I now understood, is not perfection or permanent escape from pain. It is presence. It is the reclaiming of our true identity. It is the discipline of remaining open to the truth that we are deeply interconnected—to one another, to the Earth, and to the Source.
As days became weeks, then months, then years, one realization grew unmistakable: I had been remade. All my theology and religious training finally began to make sense. In the Old Testament, God’s name is “I Am.” Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” The same is true for us once we shed the illusions of self. Jesus was not the distant deity religion had painted, but an enlightened sibling—a prototype for what every human being could become. The “I am that I am” he had embodied now manifested in my consciousness as well.
I no longer needed to travel to the underworld to find truth. I no longer needed to beg someone to listen. A single question would guide me for years to come:
Where are my people?
I drove toward Portland and, pulled by an invisible thread, went straight to the NE Glisan office of the U.S. Postal Service’s Employee Assistance Program. I had worked at the Postal Service from 1975 through 1985, and their EAP was well aware of my chemically distracted nature and the poor work attendance that resulted from it. Mike and Larry had both accompanied me to AA meetings in 1981 and again in 1984—requirements if I wanted to keep my job. After yet another relapse, I called in sick the day after the Fourth of July in 1985 and never returned to work, never even called to tell them my intentions. I had left in shame, a ghost of an employee. Now I walked through the door and greeted Larry and Mike by name. Neither recognized me—the husk of the man they knew was gone. When I told them my name, they were stunned. Mike said I was simply radiant. I told them, matter-of-factly, that I was having a spiritual experience. They embraced me, acknowledging the miracle standing in their office.
I then visited the Personnel Department of the Main Post Office in downtown Portland, where Eleanor Workman acknowledged that I had been fired inappropriately and offered to help me reapply for my old position.
“No thank you, Eleanor,” I said gently. “I just wanted to apologize for working here so unhappily for so many years.”
I met with John Zimpleman, the head of Plant Maintenance, to atone for my poor performance from 1980 to 1985, when I worked as an electrician and electronic technician trainee. He listened, deeply moved, and confessed he wished his own son could find what I had found.
Two days later, searching for a book at the world-famous Powell’s Books, I encountered my former psychiatrist, Dr. Dan Beavers, in the metaphysical section. He did not recognize me until I spoke my name.
“Bruce, this can’t be you,” he stammered. “Last time I saw you, I was wondering how much longer you could survive if the medication didn’t turn your life around.”
“Dan, the medication worked fine,” I replied. “I just never used it the way you intended. I found a new way to live—without medication, drugs, or alcohol. I accept full responsibility now for my thoughts, my feelings, my behavior. The schism in my mind appears to have healed.”
“Bruce,” he said, “that is the outcome I want for every patient. Congratulations.”
I drove up to my ex-wife’s home near Camas, Washington, and made further amends—an amazing exchange I will cover in depth later in the book.
That August, still searching for where I belonged, I went to the International New Thought Alliance Conference in Portland. I was mainly drawn to hear Jack Boland, the renowned recovering alcoholic and new thought leader behind the tape series *12 Steps to a Spiritual Experience*, which I had listened to before my healing vision on May 24th.
But I found so much more—hearing several globally recognized thought leaders, including the captivating Barbara Marx Hubbard, who completely held my attention. I saw over a thousand people embrace the musical group Alliancegay men, many living with HIV/AIDS, led by Jerry Florence. Having just left a church where gay people were openly condemned, this radical acceptance felt like oxygen to someone drowning. The tenderness I experienced that day still lives in me. Even now, I weep for everyone deemed unworthy or ignored—those reduced to “they” and “them” by a society forever afraid of “we.”
Navigating the New Self
I would be lying if I claimed full awareness of where I was headed. Only in the rearview mirror does a rational narrative emerge. In the spring and summer of 1987, I was a novice on the path of transformation, completely open and almost entirely without a map. Beginning that April, I built a rigorous meditation practice and set committed relationships aside to deepen my focus. When I began working the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in May—prayer and meditation foremost among them—I created the conditions for a more peaceful mind.
After the contact of June 22nd, my old life began to evaporate. I could still describe the world I had left, but I had no language for the world I was entering. Somehow, that spiritual insight had released the controls of my wounded ego. A new order revealed itself moment to moment. At times I felt like a guided missile—never knowing the destination, but trusting that whatever had launched this new life would carry me to the right place at the right time.
Before 1987, my mind had been a crowded room filled with other people’s ideas about me and my own miscreations. I was addicted to the duality of perception that breeds endless background noise—the cacophony of “yous,” “theys,” and “hims.” By June, that committee had permanently adjourned. There was only one peaceful presence, one new ordering principle: the I Am.
But the small story I began to tell did not always meet a friendly reception. When I shared my experience, I was met with silent stares, abrupt subject changes, suggestions to attend dogma classes, or simple disinterest. My family still viewed me through the lens of the past; my history had scarred their psyches. Yet they could see that the new me no longer required their worry. I was independent, upright, conscious. I made healthy choices and chose a fulfilling life to replace the wreckage. I was a boy again—learning the ropes, meeting friends, sipping from inner healing springs.
This “Bruce 2.0” experienced blessed states almost continuously. From June 1987 until I met my wife Sharon in August 1989, I spent more than six hours a day in prayer and meditation, taught on inner planes about aspects of consciousness I had no other way to know. This was not a Christian God or a Jewish God or the Buddha Mind—but those names all pointed toward the reality I had accessed.
Eventually I returned to the world more fully. I hiked and backpacked again, cycled with Cycle Oregon, learned tennis, and excelled as a masters-level runner—even winning thirty-one-mile ultramarathons and competing on championship teams in Hood to Coast and Rainier to Pacific. I was granted a “redo,” gleaning wisdom from life rather than hating myself for its lessons.
The Grammar of Existence: A Complete Teaching
What the mountain ultimately gave me was language—not for the light itself, but for the architecture of separation that keeps us from it. I have no inclination to describe the light as mystics and poets do; that path of via positiva was futile for me. My path was via negativa and via transformativa—the way that opens only after the debris field of human consciousness is perceived, healed, and cleared.
Here, then, is the teaching at the heart of June 22, 1987.
The words we use are not neutral tools. They are the architects of our isolation or our union. Perception builds reality, and the pronouns we choose—the I’s, the you’s, the they’s—are the bricks with which we construct either bridges to one another or walls that guarantee our exile.
Consider the third person—they, them, he, she. This is the language of the observer. It places its subject at a distance. Applied to others, it reduces living people to stick figures fleshed out by our ignorance: They need to fix this. He is difficult. It is a linguistic push, a subtle dissociation that keeps the speaker safely on the sidelines while everyone else plays out the great mystery of life. Applied to the self—she needs to do better, he always messes this up—it becomes something darker: an alienation from one’s own soul, a viewing of oneself as an object to be critiqued rather than a subject to be inhabited. I know this intimately. I lived inside that “he” for sixteen years.
The second person—you—is more intimate but still divided. You can do this. Why did you say that? It splits the self in two: actor and critic, coach and player. While occasionally useful for motivation, a steady diet of “you” presupposes a fracture in the psyche. To refuse the “I” is to refuse full ownership of our experience.
If perception creates reality, then the third person creates a reality of fragmentation. When we regard our families, neighbors, and colleagues as a collection of “theys,” we sever the spiritual tendon that binds the collective body. The evidence bears this out in plain, measurable terms. Teams that receive communications phrased in the second person—you are part of this—demonstrate markedly greater engagement than those handed third-person directives—they should do this. The shift collapses the distance, transforming abstract obligation into personal calling. Organizations that adopt inclusive language report far higher employee satisfaction—not because politeness is pleasant, but because the soul hungers for belonging. And individuals who use first-person pronouns in self-talk report greater self-awareness and emotional regulation. The “I” grounds us in the self; the “we” grounds us in the collective. The unexamined “he,” “she,” and “you” leave us floating in a void.
Some insist the third person is necessary for objectivity—that to assess fairly, one must detach. There is a stubborn belief across business, politics, and even therapy that emotional distance equals competence. But this confuses clarity with detachment. One can see clearly without severing the heartstring of empathy. The most damaged institutions are often led by those who treat workers as “they” rather than “we,” elevating ego and self-interest above the shared body. True resilience is found not in detachment but in the radical embrace of the collective.
So the discipline is this: move your internal references from the alienating third person toward the integrated first person. Catch yourself when you call yourself “you” or “him,” and ask why you are afraid to say “I.” Catch yourself when you say “they” of the human family and ask whether you can honestly say “we.” In doing so, you do not merely change your sentences—you change your soul, and by extension the reality you inhabit.
I will not pretend this is easy. After thirty-nine years I am still learning to live by it. Our present era has tested me with the strong urge to distance my identity from those whose values appall me. I am, and we are—even when what we have become unsettles my peace. I suspect you feel the same about the times we share.
Living Within the Unlimited Bandwidth
What remains after the wounds are healed, the emotional debris cleared, and the linguistic fractures mended?
What remains is the metamorphosis itself—the quiet miracle that carries the butterfly out of the caterpillar. If the butterfly could speak, it would tell of flight and open sky, not of the slow crawl through dirt. Yet it arose from a world of ground-dwellers, and that is where all its old stories were written.
Imagine that butterfly returning to its caterpillar friends, eager to tell them of the new life waiting just beyond their reach.
Get lost. You were never one of us.
Nice for you to fly, but that’s not for me.
Have you heard about the tasty leaves on that parsley plant?
These are the replies of those who find change threatening, unnecessary, or impossible. But spiritual freedom is precisely this: the release of limitation, and the patient relearning of how to communicate—with one another, and within ourselves. The new life is not reserved for the chosen few. It is available to all.
Each of us carries the inner wisdom of a master teacher, yet that master sits mostly ignored in the unvisited recesses of the heart. On Larch Mountain, I was handed a blank slate and invited to write a new self upon it. The world I had once longed to flee became paradise. Heaven was no longer a distant promise but a living present—a breath, a heartbeat, a now. But I could not drag the old me into that world. I had to leave my baggage at the trailhead, both the words I spoke and the silences I hid behind, in order to stay in tune with the new music.
Those who touch the Infinite struggle to relay it. The universe of Spirit defies the rational mind, though it will eventually speak through a healed one—but only if that mind has first been prepared and made willing, no matter the cost. When a mind is overburdened with rigid dogma, the Infinite is forced through distorted channels, breeding the illusion and delusion we recognize in fundamentalism of every stripe. This is why those who undergo dramatic spiritual experiences so often become poor communicators in the years that follow. I was mute in this way for a long time. I learned, eventually, not to wave the recovery flag at every stranger—to let people know me for who I was, not who I had been. And as I moved through new relationships, the new me slowly came into focus: someone who loved without condition, who recognized all of humanity as kin, whose lifelong ache of separation had finally, mercifully lifted.
If you wish to live within this unlimited bandwidth, watch for the signs that the Infinite has already touched you:
The invisible shield in the crucible. In the midst of chaos, you may sense an unseen architecture deflecting the heaviest blows—not mere luck, but the universe quietly redirecting harm, guiding you toward sanctuary when logic promised only ruin.
The symphony of synchronicity. What the uninitiated dismiss as coincidence, you recognize as the dialogue of the cosmos: the exact wisdom arriving the moment you need it, the chance encounter that bends the whole arc of your life.
The quiet oracle within. Beneath the clamor of the ego lies a tranquil, unwavering knowing. It does not shout with anxiety. It waits, and patiently invites you to surrender to a deeper intuition.
The alchemy of empathy. You are drawn to ease the suffering of others—not from obligation, but from the bone-deep recognition of shared existence. It is the Infinite expressing itself through your hands.
The crucible of transformation. You no longer merely endure hardship; you transmute it into wisdom, understanding at last that life is not punishing you. It is sculpting you.
The anchor in the void. Where uncertainty breeds terror in the ego, you carry a paradoxical calm—trusting that you need not control the currents of the cosmos in order to be carried safely by them.
The reverence for the ordinary. You feel an unprompted gratitude that requires no grand catalyst, finding beauty in the quiet poetry of an ordinary hour—evidence of a loving force that holds you regardless of circumstance.
When I tell my story now, I have learned to turn the volume up—especially in the places where I most need to hear myself. Listening to my own voice does not guarantee that others, long conditioned to ignore me, will listen too. But sometimes a bird sings in the forest even when no other birds are listening. The real miracle was never that others would finally hear me. The miracle is that I am finally singing—and finally hearing myself.
Can you hear me now?
Can I hear me now?
It has been a great adventure, this life. And it is a quiet fulfillment to have lived long enough to grow articulate enough to set the whole of it into words.
I am what I am, but I am not only what I seem.
You are what you are, but you are not only what you seem.
We all need a bigger story.
We all need more heart, and more healing.
And we all need each other to make our stories complete.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” —William Blake
