As a child I'd tell my stuffed puppy where we'd go in our nightly travels, then find myself consciously leaving my body and meet friends in ships. I drew spaceships in art class until told not to. The stars called me home. My loving parents adopted me at birth and are probably themselves Wanderers, though they have only gradually come to accept my ideas.

In leaving my body for sleep, I remembered my past deaths, feeling the cold and immobility of the body.

I told my parents as a child that I received communications from "aliens", and "My Favorite Martian" was my favorite TV show. Having been educated in Child Development and Sociology, they accepted this as a variation of the usual 'imaginary friend'.

At age 16, I was held under water through repeated waves after a wipeout in big surf. At first I struggled to reach the surface, though eventually became oxygen-starved, and stopped struggling. I found myself become a ball of golden light, at peace, able to see in all directions of time and space. This experience furthered my understanding of death as a gateway into the larger world.

Testing highly and interested in everything, I received a scholarship and enjoyed many activities, but dropped out of academics and society, disillusioned by available sources of knowledge, experimented with LSD, had great insights and depression. It seemed clear that Earth was headed for disaster of all sorts (some of which I have seen intuitively, and from space, in ships and out of body, some of which have come to pass, others not yet). With seemingly no sane livelihood available, everywhere I could see terminally callous, trivial and detrimental occupations and preoccupations. Suicidal at 18-20, I was hospitalized three times for overdoses, wanting to return to a more sensible place and enter the state I found in meditation.

I found a timelessness in psychiatric facilities and a reorientation to inner values, that in times past monasteries fulfilled, and in more recent times, retreat centers have begun to provide. I did much reading there, and began my meditation practice, according to a technique my father had begun. I began to integrate my spontaneous and LSD meditation experiences into a conscious and disciplined ability and metaphysic. Upon discharge, I joined an eclectic spiritual community that also treated psychiatric patients and became a staff member. This community gave me a vision of individual and community spirituality, and service to the world. It also began my realization that at the 3D stage of development, Earth society is struggling to learn to move beyond the personal and organizational politics that pervades.

Most of my instruction came during meditation, though it was more like waking up, remembering. I ascended through levels of consciousness, from contentment to infinite light, objectless awareness, and absorption. I at one time ascended to a brilliant blue realm to gaze into the eyes of a blue light being I knew was my own self. I remembered my relation with a web of beings, through which flowed intelligence and energy.

My path has led from trying to counsel and teach to just being here. The limitations of a fourth density (unwise compassion) or fifth-density (non-unified wisdom) type service effort led me to feel I can best serve others and progress by a self-contained approach of simple life and radiating love and light, sharing freely when feeling called to. Paradoxically, the poignant near hopelessness of attempting to teach, even by simply being in this environment, both calls on the utmost spiritual effort, as well as self-containment and self-sufficiency. I continue to swerve between trying too hard and withdrawing. As I joke, we learn to drive by trying to stay off the sidewalks!

Sometimes I feel moved to talk freely with someone, but to turn that into a livelihood in the sense of lectures, workshops or books has so far not felt appropriate. Groups so easily turn to orthodoxy and politics, and everyone's path is unique, while universal. I have experienced many wonderful teachings with organizations too full of conflict. I also feel it is my practice to follow my own path. I think that is actually the crux of the Wanderer's own lesson in wandering. The balancing into unity of the individual and the universal.

The sixth-density social memory complex ironically/paradoxically enters the gateway to unity together at the same time as each individual would attain an inner-connected enlightenment/unity. The society craved is found at the point one no longer needs it! Yes, we have experiences bridging the paradox along the way - inner communion and outer, but you know the Wanderers' dilemma all too well, I'm sure.

Having tried to exit "this insanity" myself, I know the effort is not one to be judged or pathologized. To remain effective for self or others requires a balancing act and a death of sorts - the sixth density lesson, to enter seventh, I suspect, is the death of any limited sense of self - the surrender, finally, taught in the Indian tradition. I don't think my attempts were 'psychic attacks' but individual aversion, mismatch or 'allergy' to my environment, coupled with the knowing that things don't have to be this way.

Traditional initiation rituals of so many cultures are lacking in modern, materialist society. What true initiation do young adults have in modern Earth society? For that matter, does any Earth person have the chance to 'grow up'? Beyond the infantile preoccupations with self? The mall has replaced the sweat lodge and the vision quest. And so, those who seek more have less example to follow. On the other hand, in such times we sign up for service and call for individual fortitude as well as communitarian spirit.

See the wonderful book The Circle of Life. The book opening tour for 'The Circle of Life' came around the time of puberty for my son in 1991. The book is at once a work of humanity, anthropology, psychology, wisdom, and photojournalism. I painstakingly quality photographed the book's images in our university photo lab, to be used only for teaching purposes, with no distribution, according to copyright.

When the traveling gallery showed in San Francisco's museum, in a four-sided tent, representing human life's four most salient transition rituals, my son and I attended. I used the slides I took to evoke ritual and archetypal life-stage awareness with my students. While I had rewarding experiences in university teaching, the academic venue is unsuited to the shamanic. Those interested in spirit are 'liminal', ie 'threshold' figures. Frankly, only one of my professors was a shaman, while the rest believed only in academic bean-counting, and that one shaman was shunned by the department, to later found a teaching school in China, a selfless effort unfortunately entirely unique in the department. Many mean well, few step up to the plate.

We all die to this life through both living and dying, so we can find their non-difference. This learning is presenting itself as Earth 3D society dies and its 4D life begins.