Originally published in The Life Connection, April 4, 2016

Late in the evening of January 4, 1998, a great anguish erupted in my soul and I collapsed onto my drafting board. I awoke as if I had broken through some barrier and was connected to everything. Ecstatic energy coursed through every cell of my body. Looking out over the high desert where I lived the whole universe revealed itself and I was just standing there in the middle of it as if it were home.

I didn’t know what was happening. My spiritual awakening was spontaneous. But it was clear that I wasn’t doing it, that something was happening to me. I somehow knew it was a natural process. And it’s one we are all going through, at some level, whether we are aware of it or not.

So began my nine-year process of revelations and many stages along the path of awakening to God and Truth. I wanted to understand the process, to map the entire journey of consciousness, and to develop a language for communicating this process to others.

I realized that the Universe is purposeful. We we are the products of a four-and-a-half- billion year evolutionary process that has reached its pinnacle, in each of us, as a self-aware human being. The spiritual journey begins when a sufficiently self-aware person spontaneously turns their attention inward to their divine source.

It’s extraordinary time in human history. A new possibility for being is now here on the planet and each of us has a role in establishing it. Mine is to assist in this transition by establishing a New Dharma, a new way of understanding and collaborating with the awakening process.

Q. What is your unique offering to seekers?

A. My role is like a midwife, assisting students who are already engaged in the spiritual journey, bringing to fruition that natural occurring process of spiritual development.

Mankind is moving in greater proximity to fundamental truths of existence: we’re all interconnected; when we cooperate, things work, and when we don’t, they don’t. In every field, there is growing awareness of the interface between consciousness and matter. It’s happening so fast that you can’t even publish a book fast enough to keep up.

Q. How do you define Awakening?

A. Awakening is a fundamental shift in one’s experience of themselves and their world. For some that means breaking out of the box of individual ego. For others, it’s a felt connection to a divine presence or force and a new capacity for experiencing and being. It’s a definitive shift, not an abstraction. These early indicators can happen before one knows an awakening is coming. They can produce a longing or an aspiration—or they may create dissatisfaction and loss of attraction to the people and things of one’s life.

Q. What about you is able to “quicken” this shift for other people?

A. When a person is ready to awaken and connects with someone who is already awakened, they tend to awaken more quickly and with greater capacity to collaborate with the process. But connecting to a fully realized, enlightened person can accelerate the process even more. What might take many years or a lifetime can happen in months or a few years. The newly awakening person can make shifts, integrate and stabilize new way of beings, and rapidly go on to the next stage.

Q. Many teachers claim they’ve had awakenings. For me, though, the impact of the transmission you bring is profound, of a different order.

A. The same thing that allowed you to benefit from other teachers prepared you to recognize a teacher that can take you to a next level. It also allows us to recognize a teacher we have the best affinity with.

Q. So many teachers… how would one know which is best for them?

A. At the beginning, the base is wide, with lots of teachers and seekers. People tend to sample different teachers and then focus on the type of teacher and type of path that suits them best: the path of action, of devotion, or of knowledge. Each person is predisposed to one of these approaches and accordingly, to the type of teacher they respond to. As the student progresses, there are fewer and fewer teachers with the ability to take him or her farther than they’ve been. Ultimately there are very few teachers to take the student through the final threshold, from identification as the human being having a divine experience to a divine being having a human experience. This is enlightenment or realization of one’s Divine nature.

And the process doesn’t stop after enlightenment. There’s a process of integrating the divine with the human being we woke up from – the physical body, the nervous system, the emotional nature, the psychology, the mind, the intellect, the mental capacities and structures and so on.

Q. How many teachers are able to take people to enlightenment versus awakening. Can you do this?

A. Awakening is just the beginning of the journey to enlightenment. There are many stages and states on this journey, and depending on what one is aspiring for there are many or few teachers to guide us. I point to the Bhagavad Gita as a reference that describes three stages of the journey: the Self, God and the Supreme. They’re like the stages for climbing of Mt. Everest: base camp, upper camp, and the summit.

The journey begins only after some level of awakening has occurred. Only then can one begin to see and feel the spiritual energy and experience the aspiration or longing to go further. Once awakened, one can travel beyond ordinary human consciousness until reaching the first stage of the Self, base camp. Only at base camp can one see how much further there is to go. But getting to base camp prepares one for the next ascent.

Just as one who has made it to base camp experiences the power, majesty, and the challenge of what is next, so does one who has come to the Self get a glimpse of the majesty and glory of what is next. Upper camp is the universal state of being I call the stage of God. Only those who are ready will aspire to travel there. The rest will feel overwhelmed and return to more comfortable regions.

Beyond the upper camp one must pass through what I call the death zone. Very few are willing and fewer still are able to succeed. This is also the case for those who are pulled to travel the last stage of the journey, the summit, the journey to the Supreme.

Many make it to base camp alone, but only a few can go further without experience, preparation and guidance. The best guide is one who has already traveled the distance..

Q. If someone reading this senses an affinity with you, how would they proceed?

A. They should watch one of my videos or listen to talks posted on our web site, www.satshree.org. The bottom line is, if you have an affinity, you will have some indication you are capable of receiving my transmission. You may feel inspired, feel connected to something, have greater aspiration, or have enhanced meditations, or greater clarity, or an overall sense of being stronger. Whatever the attribute, it’s such a fundamental experience that you can’t deny it.

If you’re feeling the resonance, if you’re feeling something in you responding, if a longing or an aspiration for Truth or God comes to you, then you would get benefit from participating with me at some level by going to the website, or maybe coming to one of my programs. Maybe you will dedicate yourself to becoming a spiritual channel yourself.

Q. So the opportunity you present is to sit with someone who has completed the journey, someone with the capacity to guide others through that final passage, that final divide.

A. The nature of the role I play, the force or the qualities I bring, are present in every single awakened person to varying degrees. You can’t know the difference between one teacher and the other until it’s in your own experience. If someone comes to me and there is a strong resonance, a strong reaction, I’ll work with him or her. If what they are really pulled to is something other than what I can bring, then I take them to that point, and that’s all I have to do.

It’s not anything I do. The sun doesn’t do anything, it just shines. So I just do this. The only difference is that I have a mission in the relative world of the mind and the ego. So in every person who comes to me, I plant something of the possibility of this new dharma in them, no matter where they’re coming from or what they’re capable of.

What’s happening now is that people linked with me are planting the seed of this new dharma with people they are connected to. It’s happening automatically and spontaneously. I didn’t do this. I didn’t make this mission. I just learned about it. It simply revealed itself as the organizing principle of not just my life, but of all life.

We’re doing this outreach because I’m establishing a new dharma, a new way to live aligned with the eternal laws and principles of life that have always been here but have been veiled or forgotten. To recover this eternal dharma on this planet and reach a critical mass, you need many different types of people in different locations. People will resonate to whatever extent they’re capable. I’ll play my role but I am not in charge of the outcome, the success or failure of this effort. I can’t tell at this point how it’s going. For every hundred people I work with there are a thousand who have moved on. So it’s not up to me. But I do know that people who come to me feel have found their mission, found their purpose.

It’s not easy. It’s not for fun and profit. It’s not like those who are pulled to this work have a choice. The Universe takes over and it pushes us to the highest state we are capable of. If that happens it gives us the work. We don’t choose. For me it’s not anything I could say no to. I can’t say no to this. There is no no here anymore. I just have to do this. And if people can sense what that is, if they can sense what I’ve become, then they can find the same in themselves. If they can see me living this work they’re going to be pulled to come and participate. If enough come, then purpose for my existence will be fulfilled. I have complete faith in this.