Autobiography, however sincere, is a kind of fiction.  The following is a streamlined *life* reconstructed with the help of several gifted therapists and psychic readers.  My gratitude to them is never-ending.

My name is Ray.  For those who value context: I was born in southern England in 1945.

Where did it begin, this journey into mystery? My earliest memories point to a sense of not-belonging that is, as I found out later, very common.  I know the obvious reasons.  When I was a few months old my natural parents put me into an orphanage.  After a while I was adopted by people who were good to me, but always seemed like strangers.

The instinct to counter pain is strong.  My mother taught me to read before I went to school.  Reading became my refuge.  I discovered stories and the realm of imagination.

At school my teachers discovered that I had an inquisitive mind, and encouraged me to use it.

I was a sad and solitary child, but imagination and curiosity became my companions.  So my course was set for many years.

I was precocious, as they used to say, which sharpened my sense of difference.  I learned to think, and not to feel.

So far I was an ordinary neurotic schoolboy.  Until pubescence.  As hormones surged, so did longings for something I could not name.  I continued to explore the worlds of story - especially science fiction and mythology.  I had discovered anthropology, language...and religion.

The world seemed like a cardboard cutout.  - my vision was always strange.  By age 15 I was fascinated by the tales and visions of Christian, Buddhist and Hindu seers - all those who said that the world is an appearance.  This focus remained so constant that when it was time to enter university - as was expected of me - I chose to study Sanskrit.  Translations of Buddhist and Hindu text did not satisfy my need to understand.  I wanted to read them in the language in which they were written.

I went to London.  What happened there was so powerful that London is still a dream motif when I am undergoing complex changes.  London, after my years in a small provincial town, was intoxicating.

I discovered music, sex and wine, ethnic cuisines, friends from other races, art, museums, academic discipline...and a wealth of spiritual offerings.

How to summarize? I loved my studies (I specialized in Buddhist religion), but they were not enough.  to satisfy the inner longing.  I fell in and out of love and drowned my senses.  I was still unhappy.  I developed migraines, attended meditation classes, dropped acid (once), and still could not find the answer to my most persistent question: Where is the Truth?

Some time in 1967, my graduation year, I asked the universe for my own connection to the Real.  The Real was silent.  Now I see that my asking triggered a series of experiences which did not mature until the ’80s.

Meanwhile I discovered Subud, a Javanese brotherhood that promised transformation without a guru.  That experience, which held me for seven years, is a saga in itself.  Subud became my life.

During those seven years I moved to Toronto to work at the U of T Robarts Library.  I quit, and moved to Vancouver, went into crisis, quit Subud...and had a breakdown.  Or a slowburn breakthrough.

I hid away for years wanting nothing to do with spirituality of any kind. Until...

One January morning in the early 80s I woke up with a message in my mind: the planet is passing through a vast Event.  No warning or context.

Two things happened quickly after that.  I began to see *energies*.  A string of coincidences brought me into contact with people who could help me and who had the same sense of enormous happenings.

My encounter with one of these, a psychic reader, was pivotal.  Call her A.

I had been sick for weeks with some virus.  It would not clear.  I got the notion that energy was somehow involved, but I did not know quite what meant.  I had been told of A, who lived near to where I worked.  With trepidation _ I was still badly scared - I went to see her.

Everything changed.  Within a few minutes I was at ease with her.  She became a kind of mentor and took me though years of deep processing.  I owe my sanity to her, and to one of her students, P., who was equally gifted.

At a certain point in A.’s work with me, some latent abilities began turning on.  I focus here on the *channel* phenomenon.

All I knew of channels was Jane Roberts, who denied she was one.  Her Seth material helped me immensely in recovering the sense of meaning which I had lost during the so-called breakdown.  I had no interest in channels in general, equating them with mediums.  I certainly had no interest in becoming one myself.

Through A.  I had connected with other people who were in the early stages of real self-discovery.  A few of us met weekly to listen to New Age music and practice creative visualization and so on.

After a few months of this I started to have an odd experience as the evening’s experiments came to an end.  I would see to my upper right a large golden disk.  If my mind was quiet, it would stay gold; if not, the color would shift to purple.

Then came the critical evening.  I entered the apartment where we met, to be greeted by very strange looks.  A., it turned out, had phoned them to say - among other things, that a new energy had eentered the planet, and that I, in our little group, would access it.  Gulp.  I did not know what to think.

The evening followed its usual course, but no disk appeared.  At last I sighed to myself in relief.  thinking: nothing’s going to happen.  Instantly I seemed to be looking at the room through the wrong end of a telescope, and I heard myself saying: Welcome to the nursery of the gods!

Wonderful? No way! I was spooked.  The others were spooked.  One of the first things I did was to get a reading from A.  who said that a being had shown up and he (it?) and I were pooling information.

So began the steep learning curve of how to channel, or, as I would say now, how to translate non-verbal information.

Stories

That pivotal evening happened more than twenty years ago.  It is, I feel, more helpful to say how I see this work now than to trace the learning curve that brought me to the present.

We all live inside stories.  Part of the exhilaration of intentional living is to bring the stories into awareness and, if necessary, change them.  The big stories can be anything from scientific materialism to one of the mainstream religions, or something new.

My intuitions, the voices that I hear inside me, for years have been supplying narrative frameworks which make sense of things for me.  They are spacious stories which enhance my life.  I do not assert that they are absolutely True.  For example...

I am a relay, one of many.  I step down energies.  I translate non-verbal data-composites.

I am not a channel, if to channel means to vacate my body and let an exotic entity take it over.  I translate information.  I take responsibility for the integrity and accuracy of the information.

The source of this information is usually my Integral, the being system of which I am an aspect.  Some would call this my Oversoul, or group-soul.

We each belong to an Integral.  It is our home and family in the All-and-Everything.  The big story in which I find myself says that our Integrals are gathering us in, restoring us to a forgotten unity.

We shall not be swallowed or dissolved.  What we have become through the human experience is uniquely precious in ways that I am only beginning to understand.  None of that is lost.  When we *return* to our Integral we enrich It with the distillates of our experience.

When an Integral has gathered in all its lost aspects, it will move on to Its next port-of-call.

This is abstract.  To get the feel of it, try entering this story with me.