Brad’s First Visionary Experience
I was a nineteen-year-old college student who had previously won first place at the 1969 International Science Fair and been offered a full scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I mostly studied, played the piano, and enjoyed listening to jazz. On this January afternoon in 1971, I took a walk and was unexpectedly filled with extreme exhilaration. I felt guided to a small chapel built of stone where I entered and sat on the front pew. I immediately knew this was the beginning of the most important experience of my life.
The curtain that separates intimate closeness with infinite divinity opened to reveal an indescribable glory. As this took place, a concentrated, pulsing fireball of energy gathered at the base of my spine and began its holy climb with a steady advance, like molten lava flowing upwards. The liquid fire rose and radiated a blazing emotion that broke my heart wide open. With flowing tears, I entered the waves of a vast ocean of love. At the same time, I noticed that my mind was being connected to a reservoir of timeless knowledge. I felt an unusual readiness for any request or question that might come my way. I was filled with a blessed assurance and certainty that exceeded my previous belief and faith. Above all else, however, was the burning, expansive love that continued to intensify. This was the beginning of my life as a hunter of sacred ecstasy.
My body trembled, quaked, and shook with a force I had never known possible. There was nothing subtle, calm, or quiet about this inner force. I learned firsthand that there is an incredible mystical power, a sacred vibration, and an electric-like current that, once directly experienced, changes everything. I knew that no matter what I would do in my life, what was most important is that it be administered through this remarkable life force hookup. When I enact this practical truth, all is well. When I forget this, I suffer and am lost.
During the night when I first met the mystery light, I was fully aware that I was being prepared to heal and teach what had been instilled inside me. I also received a foretelling that I would spend decades as a spiritual traveler, both to actual geographical places and visionary realms, in order to meet and rejoice with others who had been spiritually cooked in this luminous fire. That would come later.
Steadily and assuredly the inner ball of fire advanced until it finally reached the crown of my head and came out in front of me as an external white light. It took the shape of a luminous egg that was about my height, close to the front pew on which I sat. I stared into this numinous luminosity and, transfixed by sacred emotion, I saw a figure standing with open arms. An outpouring of streaming rays of illumination brought further exhilaration and jubilation. I recognized that this was the divine son, the mystical sun of the holiest light.
As Jesus stared into my eyes, he spoke: “Come home, my son. I am the way and shall be with you and in your heart always.” I was flooded with the kind of religious sentiment described in the lyrics of hymns I had heard sung by my father and grandfather who were country preachers: “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine . . . What a friend we have in Jesus . . . Oh, how I love Jesus.” The luminous mystical Jesus proceeded to teach through numinous means. “By this you shall heal and teach. In this you shall rejoice in the Lord. With this you shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” I surrendered all—and by this I mean all my mind, heart, body, and soul—to the precious Lamb of God. Jesus became my true guide, teacher, friend, and home base. Throughout the subsequent years he would visit, bringing whatever spiritual gift, inspiration, and direction were needed.
Jesus opened his robe that evening and said: “All of this I hold inside my robe. They belong to the Kingdom of God.” I then saw a multisensory, multidimensional presentation of saints, mystics, and spiritual teachers, one after another. In this parade of holy ones, their shining eyes sent more electrical current into my heart. There appeared the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the disciples, and what seemed like an introduction to the major icons of religion and sacred tradition: Black Elk, Buddha, Muhammad, Krishna . . . it seemed to never end. While I recognized many of the divine teachers that appeared, others I would not meet until later in my life.
I witnessed and deeply felt the mystery teachings of the illumined ones. More than anything, this experience involved heightened sacred emotion. Never had I felt such extremely intense vitality, powerfully uplifting excitement, and sweetly radiating love! Only later was I to learn that the Kalahari Bushmen call this experience “receiving God’s ostrich egg,” the egg in which spiritual gifts are held and bestowed. Suffice it to say that I knew that night—and even now as I write this report over forty years later—that I was cooked by the fire and dissolved in the sea of everlasting love.
In the midst of this experience, the voice that I would forever serve spoke again: “I will guide you. Follow me and the light will shine brightly. If you follow your reason rather than my direction, you will get lost. Fear not, for I am with you always. You shall be prepared to express these truths and share these gifts.” I was then warned that the journey would be difficult and that I would be no stranger to failure and pain. There was much to learn about how to bring this teaching to the everyday world. I would have to fall down over and over again, each time lifted back up by higher hands.
This illumination remained ablaze in that chapel throughout the night and into the late morning, around twelve hours in duration. The oval light continued to be visible to me for several more months afterward—I am not sure exactly how long because I lost track of time. What I do remember was that whenever I looked up, the light was there. During this time I often kept my head bowed, not to be reverent, but for fear that if I kept staring at the mysterious light I would be swept away and never return. In truth, I was taken away and I have not returned.
And so my spiritual journey began as an ambassador of ecstatic transformation, a teacher of mystical fire, a shamanic pianist, an improvisational healer, a scholar of the ineffable, a luminous attendant of the numinous, and a captain of the sacred sea who is free to call upon any and all holy names and songs. I have spent a lifetime celebrating this utmost mystery and experiencing its miraculous transformative power inside many kinds of sacred mansions—from the Amazon to Japan, Africa, Bali, Mexico, Brazil, the Caribbean, Australia, and numerous stops in between. No matter where I went, after my first encounter with the mystery of divinity I could repeat the words of the mystic Ibn al-’Arabi and say that every word I have since uttered and written was simply “the differentiation of the universal reality comprised by that [first] look” (1911, 153–54). My life is testimony to the fact that the highest experience of any religion reveals the same truth held in all of them.