One day, fighting mad, I vowed (or more accurately I initiated the awakening of a deep inner vow) to discover who I am and why I am here.   That was in my middle thirties.  Even as a child, I had studied others, and questioned them - thinking that if I could understand at least my mother, father, brothers, cousins— I could figure out who I am and why I am here.   Three decades of effort had led to nowhere other than disillusionment.  I couldn’t find myself in my life as I knew it.  Through my vow a quest had been born: to understand who I am and why I am here.  The deeper urge was to live my life as a gift.   

But where to start?  First, I said goodbye to my therapist.  In my deepest knowing I had been as valuable—maybe more— to him as he had been to me.  His final words were, “You know you are embarking on a lonely path?”  I had responded that it would be no lonelier than my life to date.   Then I walked out the door, shaken to the core.

My first desperate impulse was to obtain the latest self-help books or take some spiritual classes.  Slowly, it began to sink in: what I needed would be provided—I didn’t get to call the shots. 

I knew for certain I was on “the path”, when suddenly there was nothing predictable about me.  I scared people—more than ever.  I scared myself even more.   I thought I was going here and ended up somewhere else.  People came into my life and just as fast they were gone.  That wee voice inside of me that I had attempted to squelch for so long could no longer be controlled.  And I didn’t want to control it.  This was crazy scary, a form of spiritual madness.   I was on the freedom path.  

One evening, called with great haste to my sylvan sanctuary, a message, straight and direct, jammed my energy field with a force never felt to date.  “That now-familiar God voice declared with iron severity:  “You are not free until everyone is free!”    

The message carried me far and away to a place of true law.  That I could not be free until every last being understands who they are and why they are here transcended linear thought.  Yet, the truth was alive within me.  I could feel it. No one is free until all are living their lives as a gift.  EVERYONE!! Humbled to the core, I continued on.

 Years passed, my search was my life.  Along the way I watched my personal self die—one by one, ideas, desires, wants, needs, all illusions had to be surrendered…or else ripped from me.   My personal death was a small price to pay for this journey of greater understanding.

One day a woman proclaimed that she had read a quote by an Aboriginal woman on her girlfriend’s bathroom wall and she thought I would like it.  It went, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.  But if you have come because you know your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”   Another road sign: we are all in this together!  

Thousands of miles turned into tens of thousands.  I struggled with the engrained compulsion to pick up others along the way, talk them into joining me, carry them if necessary.  That drive, which was in my DNA, came from many past lives where I had had responsibility for the well-being of the collective.  Now was different.  I had to stay on “the path” all by myself even while I understood that I would not be free until everyone was free.  It seemed heartless and self-centered, but it wasn’t.  I was leaving the masses, climbing Mt Clear Vision, leaving earth, traveling way out there where a greater “I” was waiting for me, as well as information that could never be found in textbooks.   I was traveling home.  Leaving the human world while still embodied proved to be an excruciatingly lonely situation…for the ego.

One day, shortly after my mother passed on, she came flying in panicked, clamoring to explain that I had to help her.  She understood that she had wasted her life and was presently stuck in what she called the collective disconnection.   She showed me all the others there with her—the grand scope of the collective disconnection.  She beseeched, “you have to help get me out!                You have to help all of us get out of here!”  She proclaimed that I had the power to help her and all the others—and that I had agreed to do so.  

It became ever clearer, that as I pulled myself out of my own disconnection, the more I was creating space for my mother as well as others to follow.  The more who free themselves from the collective disconnection—as my mother had labeled it—and move into the greater connection the stronger the greater connection becomes and by contrast the weaker the collective disconnection becomes.  Step by step, as each of us embraces “the path” to knowing ourselves and why we are here, we become a gift to each other.

Today, as I watch this earth world being turned around and around, and inside out—fighting here, fighting there, fighting for this or that, fighting for freedom, it is clear that this false sense of freedom is crumbling.  It’s not about saving our things, or saving our lives, or having life on our terms.  This is about moving from our old way of being to a god self waiting for us.   As we each step onto “the path” leading to true freedom—living who we are and why we are here— that vibration pulses ever more strongly within each of us.  

It is time to open to the awareness of what lies beyond the human realm.  It is time to walk through the veil that separates us from the truth of who we are.  Make the commitment.  Take a first step.  Embrace your fears.  Unearth your pain.  Face your shame, regrets, sadness.  Heal old wounds.  Be brutally honest with yourself.  Let your heart speak.   The path to freedom has its perils.  Staying put is deadly.

Know there are many ahead and behind and beside you on the journey.   Those ahead of you are reaching out to you.  Those behind you need you to reach out to them.   And too the support of the unseen ones awaits us, but “they” are held immobilized until we take our first step.  That first step is the invitation.

As we each embrace the knowing of who we are and why we are here, we become part of a force that magnetizes us.  We are all in this together.  Coming together in the realm of greater awareness, the world of “we,” means we are all free.  This is the new paradigm.  The time is NOW!