It is a late hour. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I sit listening to Rachmaninoff's Vocalise sung by Anna Moffo, which I would listen to on nights when I felt that the visitors were coming. They would cast such a spell over me on those nights, with their strangeness and their longing. They seemed far from home, but not physically; rather, from a home that is deep in the heart. They were seekers, looking for something they had lost, which was why, after my initial disquiet, I felt such a closeness to them.

After my family had gone to sleep, I would put on my coat and hat and take my flashlight and go out into the woods, deeper and deeper, in the moonlight or the starlight, into great silence. There were some old Indian graves out there, and sometimes I would sit among them and feel the concentration of being that was there.

I've been writing about my life then, when I was possessed by that secret love. It was a dangerous love, ready at any moment to consume me like a fire. But, looking back, it was also a deep emotional satisfaction. Throughout my adult life, I have been seeking toward higher consciousness, to taste moments of sweet being, in the action that unfolds beyond meditation, and the people I met in those woods lived in the state to which I aspired. It was long ago, though, and I was a young man. Now I am at rest in myself as they were then and, having done with me what they set out to do, they have moved on. And yet, I have not lost contact with them. To the contrary, I have gained access to new being and knowledge that I cannot yet quite communicate, but will before too long.

It's Christmas, the season of birth and renewal, the time that they first came to me with their slap of awakening. Now I am grown old in this new state, and yet I remember as if they were still falling, the snowflakes that fell on my gloves in the hours before they first came. On the evening of December 26, 1985, we took a walk along the road beside our cabin, just as night was gathering. It seemed a perfect moment, the snow falling in large, crystalline flakes, the silence profound but for its whisper in the pines.

In recent years, I have come to a new depth of inner silence. Before they came, I engaged in inner work, rowing slowly toward some end that I could not quite discern. Then they came, an explosion of education and wisdom that has left me understanding that we are actually embedded in a much greater reality, physical beings drifting in an ocean of conscious energy. I have lost interest in the question of whether or not there is a soul. I live in two worlds now. One is this physical reality. The other is far more vast and more vividly alive, which is the conscious energy that streams through space and time, endless, poignant, surrendered and compassionate.

We have come out of it and entered these bodies of ours so that we will not have access to the understanding that fills the very air around us. We have done this so that we will act without restraint from our own essences, and thus find out the truth about ourselves. This is a school of self-discovery, carefully designed so that we will not have access to the insight that pervades conscious energy, but rather will have only our deepest selves to turn to.

When we die and are released from this restraint, there follows immediately an explosion of conscience as we look across our lives and discover what our essence truly is.

I am so lonely, and yet so deeply at home in myself, at ease with my presence in consciousness, no longer isolated by my body from the living energetic world. My heart is deep in silence. The profundity of the season is upon me, as the time after the solstice brings, minute by minute, the return of the sun and the promise of the new year.

2012 approaches, and with it my hope to find deeper compassion for my fellow man and for all creatures, and no matter if they are here on this planet or somewhere else along the paths of life that spread throughout the universe.

Peace has come to my heart, and this season always reminds me of my journey, and the kindness of those who came out of the night to draw me along the path that has become my life. Have joy.

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