Leaving the Dance with the One I Came With

 

I’ve come to believe that our life path isn’t some random accident—it’s something we chose. Not just individually, but as part of a soul committee before we ever arrived on this planet. Each life has a purpose, and that too was chosen in advance. We picked our birth time, where we’d be born, the name we’d carry, the family we’d grow up in, and even the belief system we’d be steeped in. All of it carried a built-in lesson and a goal we were meant to reach. So yes, I’m someone who believes there are no accidents.

For me, that meant choosing to be born in rural Michigan in the late 1940s, into a family with a devoutly fundamentalist Baptist mother and a father who quietly supported her faith but rarely went to church. I, on the other hand, was there constantly. If the doors were open, I was inside them. From early on, I had a deep belief that Jesus was real, and I was thoroughly immersed in the doctrines of evangelical fundamentalism. My pastor leaned toward “once saved, always saved,” and that belief was etched into my spiritual framework.

But as I entered adolescence and early adulthood, the world grew bigger. Education expanded my horizons, and the teachings I had absorbed began to unravel in light of science and a broader understanding of humanity. I struggled to believe that people were doomed to hell just for believing differently. It broke my heart to think that kind, loving people—especially Catholics, whom I was told were “lost”—were supposedly beyond salvation. At the time, I didn’t even know other world religions existed. That’s how narrow my upbringing was.

Eventually, I walked away from it all. I threw out Christianity, the whole thing—baby and bathwater. College opened my mind. Quantum theory fascinated me, especially books like The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. I devoured Carlos Castaneda’s works and met people exploring metaphysics, clairvoyance, automatic writing. I experienced enough to become convinced that a spiritual realm transcended the material world. Mysticism became my compass, even though I didn’t yet have that word for it. And in the process, I discarded Jesus as part of a system I thought I had outgrown. I was “spiritual but not religious” before that was even a cultural thing.

During those years, I embraced numerology, conducted readings in Phoenix, and attended meditation groups. We’d do visual walks and sink deep into inner consciousness. I’d always been intuitive, empathic—I could read people and feel what they carried. That sensitivity only sharpened. I didn’t know it then, but I was moving toward what the Gospel of Truth calls a “waking from forgetfulness.” I was beginning to remember.

Then came the 1990s. Everything fell apart. Life unraveled, stress piled up, and I found myself praying again—really praying—on the back porch in Hayward, California. That night became my “Back Porch Prayer,” and it marked the beginning of my return to Jesus.

But the Jesus I was coming back to wasn’t the one from my childhood church. It took decades to untangle the voices of guilt, fear, and judgment. But gradually, new glasses were placed over my spiritual eyes. I started to realize that what we’ve called “orthodoxy” is often a distortion. Evangelicalism had taught me to view the Bible as a set of rules to avoid punishment. But what I began to see was something else: Jesus came not to found a religion, but to awaken us from our forgetfulness of who we truly are.

That’s the message of The Gospel of Truth—that forgetfulness is the root of all error, and Jesus came to bring remembrance. The Valentinian vision of the Christ story is not about appeasing a wrathful deity but about awakening to our divine origin. In that light, I began to understand Paul differently too. The emphasis on justification by faith wasn’t meant to create a legalistic system—it was an answer to a specific cultural and spiritual crisis of the first-century world, where sin-consciousness and guilt dominated. Paul’s deeper mystical message—Christ in you, the hope of glory—resonated far more powerfully.

Eventually, I began receiving impressions from Jesus. Not voices, but streams of inner knowing, especially when I typed in a meditative state. Sometimes it felt like automatic writing. Always peaceful, always loving. His voice reminded me not to fret—just like Psalm 37 says—and he revealed how divine love subtly influences outcomes, especially within systems, without ever violating anyone’s freedom.

So what’s the point of this story? It’s this: we’re here to remember. To work through our life circumstances, not as punishment, but as part of awakening. Our spiritual and mystical growth is as vital as our intellectual or physical development. And for me, Jesus became central again—not the dogmatic Jesus of fear and wrath, but the Logos, the divine consciousness, who reveals the truth that has always been true: we are eternal.

Jesus didn’t come to start a religion. He came to show us that death is a lie, that fear is a veil, and that our origin is divine. He entered a world trapped in false ideas about a violent God and turned it upside down, revealing the loving Father—the true source who sees no separation, no condemnation.

The New Covenant isn’t about earning love. It’s about living from it. Paul, in his best moments, knew this. John the Beloved did too. They saw Jesus not as an exception to humanity, but as the revelation of what is true of all of us. We are not broken wretches to be justified—we are divine children to be awakened.

The old orthodoxy is fading. A more inclusive consciousness is dawning. You don’t have to be Christian to see it, but understanding the Jesus story certainly helps. I’ve found as much light in the Tao Te Ching as in the Gospel of John, and both have pointed me toward the same mystery: the divine within.

So where does that leave me?

Still dancing—with the One I came with.