Dreams and Mountaintop Visions

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18 KJV)

“He has allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!” The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluding his final speech, April 3, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee

Visions of a goal ahead guide us when we are lost. They encourage us with the hope we need when we are ready to give up.

Our dreams and visions are not for ourselves alone. King received multiple death threats every day for years. He had been stabbed and his house had been bombed. Yet he kept going because he knew that the Spirit that gave him dreams and visions needed them to be shared.

King explained why when he said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly”

Jesus shared the same vision of oneness. He saw that his real enemy was not Caesar or the Pharisees. His enemy was the selfish fear and greed of the individualistic ego that is incapable of seeing our true oneness. It was the life of the ego that Jesus meant when he said we have to lose our life to save our life.

Jesus said that the source of all evil is in our heart, but so is the source of all good. He saw that humanity could grow beyond the ego’s immature level of consciousness to have a heart and mind led by the Spirit within us.

This is the evolution we need to undergo now if we are to survive the crises humanity faces. The Spirit within us sees what the ego cannot—the oneness of all people and all life on earth. The Spirit leads us to have compassion and serve the common good.

Martin Luther King Jr. had an ego, but we revere him because he was willing to lose that life, he was willing to lay it down out of a greater love. Dozens of leaders made the same sacrifice, and hundreds of thousands followed them. The Spirit rose to ascendency over the ego in the 1960s nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. Individual lives were transformed and they transformed the world.

But the ego struck back in the 1970s. Continue reading →

How Can New Consciousness Evolve Now?

The Tree Sprouts New Branches, Human Consciousness Evolves, the World Is Transformed

One year there was solid bark, the next year a new branch had burst through where no one could have expected it.

I was clearing a field once and liked where a maple tree was growing, but it had been shaped by the old thicket and was bent over toward the light. A neighbor knew trees better than I did and insisted I was foolish to think it would straighten up and flourish, but I was happy in my foolish hope and left it.

He was right, the old trunk did not change direction entirely, but it sprouted a new branch like the one above, and that branch grew straight up and soon became the new lead trunk. The old, bent trunk diminished to be a side branch.

We face a crisis in human evolution that threatens to destroy the world that has carried us to where we are today. We are in danger of turning our planet into a habitat in which humans cannot survive and, along the way there, turning our civilization into a crucible of survivalist fear and violence in which the human spirit cannot thrive.

We do not have at this time the collective will to change our ways and act for the long term well being of our habitat. We do not take the necessary actions as a society even when we hear the urgent cry of scientists, see the first stages begin of the suffering to come and acknowledge the wisdom of the religious traditions calling us to care and act.

Our hope is that the human spirit can rapidly evolve to have that collective will.

We know it is possible because humanity has evolved through crisis points in the past. Whole new branches of insight and understanding and new ways of living have sprung from the solid bark of old ways.

We have hope, and that hope resides in our hearing the calling within our hearts as we look at what is happening in the world, and then exploring where that calling leads. The hope is for our individual transformation that will give us the wisdom and power to transform the world. Continue reading →

Introduction to the Returning/Aloha Category

This is one of a series of introductions that bring together two ways of describing a path that leads to the transformation of ourselves and the transformation of the world around us.

The first word in each dyad is from stages and chapters in The Golden Room writings. The second is from my brother George Kinder‘s methodology of Life Planning. (The first five are from Life Planning’s EVOKE steps, the last two, Understanding and Aloha, are from the Seven Stages of Money Maturity. George’s began working primarily with the financial industry, but Seven Stages and EVOKE both are heart-centered, spiritually grounded and used by clergy and coaches.)

If you have not read about The Golden Room Writings, these introductions will make more sense when you have. You can read about them at Introduction: The Vision Behind This Site, and More Introduction to this Site: We Need Metaphors. Here are the seven introductions in this series, listed in order, with links to them.

Calling/Exploration
Siting/Vision
Clearing/Obstacles
Digging/Knowledge
Building/Execution
Dwelling/Understanding
Returning/Aloha

The Golden Room Writings and Life Planning Writings are both categories on this website, and they share these seven dyads as subcategories.

Returning/Aloha is the most important stage of the journey. It cannot happen without all the other stages, but this is the reason why we have sought and built the Golden Room into our lives. The purpose is not for us to feel the bliss of being there. The purpose, as the vision showed, is to take what we find within and deliver it to the world.

An essential part of dwelling in the Golden Room is returning to the world, living not just in our heart’s core but from it, in order to serve with whatever gifts we find there. Usually a Life Plan contributes gifts to others, whether to family, our workplace, our local community or the wider world, even if the plan is to sail solo around the world or enter a monastery. There is almost always sooner or later a gain for others in our fulfilling our Golden Room life. The calling in our deepest, truest core comes from the universe that created us and is not for ourselves alone.

We return to the world, and then return to the Golden Room and then return to the world again, until that cycle of returning is resolved in the highest nondual or integral developmental stage of consciousness, when we see that the universe and the Golden Room are one and we do not need to return because we are always at home wherever we go and whatever we do.

We will not have reached the truest, deepest core of the Golden Room until we have attained this universalizing stage of oneness with all creation. The heart’s core gives rise to a self-giving, unconditional, all-forgiving, universal love that does not differentiate between worthy or unworthy or friend or foe or this recipient or that, but loves for the sake of loving.

No matter how partial the love we find within, our task is to return with even the smallest sliver of its golden light and deliver our gifts to the part of our world where we find they are needed.

“Aloha” is where George Kinder’s Seven Stages ultimately lead. The meaning of Aloha is far more than hello or goodbye. It is a personal quality of generous-hearted lovingkindness. It takes simple joy in bestowing gifts to the world, whether random spontaneous acts or larger life works.

Aloha is a returning of blessings to others out of the knowledge and gratitude that we have been blessed by the universe to have this time on earth. It has nothing to do with a sense of obligation or self-esteem, and it may not be true Aloha if we have not mastered some degree of the Understanding Stage. True Aloha rises naturally from the heart. It blossoms when we attain freedom from inner obstacles that block us from the integrity of living in, from and for our Golden Room, the way a hyacinth blossoms after struggling up from its buried bulb through the dark earth, at last releasing its inner truth of sweet scent and beautiful hue.

Introduction to the Dwelling/Understanding Category

This is one of a series of introductions that bring together two ways of describing a path that leads to the transformation of ourselves and the transformation of the world around us.

Calling/Exploration
Siting/Vision
Clearing/Obstacles
Digging/Knowledge
Building/Execution
Dwelling/Understanding
Returning/Aloha

The Golden Room Writings and Life Planning Writings are both categories on this website, and they share these seven dyads as subcategories.

When do you begin to dwell in the Golden Room that you are building, whether it be the spiritual center you are nurturing or the heart’s core vision (the “Torch”) of the Life Plan you are implementing?

Once it is completed and you move in and you never return to your former dwelling?

No, at some point you awaken to the fact that you began dwelling in your Golden Room the moment you inclined your heart toward the faintest calling. To seek the site, to clear it, to dig, to build are all to dwell in that place.

Even more so, of course, is to move in and change your mailing address, to rest after all the striving and be still and fully present to the moment of arrival, to look with wonder at the beauty of the Golden Room and feel the peace and joy of being in your true home.

You may find forgetfulness taking you back onto your old street, falling into old habits, straying from your heart’s core and dream life, but as soon as you waken to that fact and long to return to the Golden Room, you are dwelling there again.

Whenever you are aware of it, whether you feel you are there or not, you are dwelling in it. Doing spiritual practices designed to lead us to the Golden Room keeps us dwelling there, however far it may feel from finished and furnished. Working on the logistical steps to put the new life in place is a real form of dwelling in it. To live in relation to the Golden Room is to live in it.

“Understanding” is the pivotal phase of George Kinder’s Seven Stages. It is the moment when we gain the capacity to dwell within our inner truth with acceptance and peace, and to live as we choose to live, with freedom and integrity, no matter what inner or outer turmoil is swirling around us.

We have heard a calling to a new way or level of living, we have cleared and dug deep and gained the knowledge we need, everything is in place, but in order to dwell in that newness and be our true, authentic self we need to have a psychological and spiritual breakthrough, we need to emerge fully from the hold of our old self-limiting ways of thinking and acting.

The Understanding stage requires mindfulness, inner listening, the ability to let thoughts go and let feelings be, the capacity to dwell fully and freely in each present moment whatever experience it may bring, and choose our path through it. The result is a tremendous release of creative and entrepreneurial energy, a vigor that is in the service of our deepest, truest self, which has altruistic love at is core. The more we dwell in it, the more we contribute to the well being of the world around us.

The posts in this category will be about what we need to do to dwell in the Golden Room wherever we may be on the journey there or in the process of building it. They will be about mindfulness and the contemplative life and the Understanding Stage ability to find freedom and integrity within the present moment.

William Blake wrote,

I GIVE you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.…

This Dwelling/Understanding category is about how to keep our fingers on the golden string that leads to and through the Golden Room.

Introduction to the Building/Execution Category

This is one of a series of introductions that bring together two ways of describing a path that leads to the transformation of ourselves and the transformation of the world around us.

Calling/Exploration
Siting/Vision
Clearing/Obstacles
Digging/Knowledge
Building/Execution
Dwelling/Understanding
Returning/Aloha

The Golden Room Writings and Life Planning Writings are both categories on this website, and they share these seven dyads as subcategories.

Building puts new habits and practices in place where obstacles were blocking us before. We begin to see the beauty of our dream coming to life. We see the building’s emerging outline define a space, and we step into it with wonder and excitement as it evolves. We create borders and boundaries, a sheltering structure. Our perspective changes as each new development reframes the view.

We find ourselves no longer descending in the vision of the Golden Room through utter darkness, claustrophobic and scraping our skin with no end in sight. We can see now the glow of the Golden Room ahead, and every step on the ladder brings it closer. We shift from moving away from our old reality through a painful exodus to moving toward our destination with joy.

In the journey of Dante’s Divine Comedy we have gone from being lost in the woods to descending into hell to working through purgatory, and now at last we begin to ascend in paradise, the realm of light.

The Life Planning “Execution” stage is where we implement the architectural designs of the plan, we build the logistical structure. We carry out the action steps for every solution to every obstacle. We start to see immediate results as the building rises. We begin to live into the new life.

Posts in this category will be about putting in place all the needed elements to live the Golden Room, heart’s core life.

Introduction to the Digging/Knowledge Category

This is one of a series of introductions that bring together two ways of describing a path that leads to the transformation of ourselves and the transformation of the world around us.

Calling/Exploration
Siting/Vision
Clearing/Obstacles
Digging/Knowledge
Building/Execution
Dwelling/Understanding
Returning/Aloha

The Golden Room Writings and Life Planning Writings are both categories on this website, and they share these seven dyads as subcategories.

Digging continues the process that clearing began, the preparation of the site to fulfill the calling. We dig in to the project, and lay the foundation that the building needs.

It corresponds in the vision of The Golden Room to the long, painful descent down the ladder. This is where the challenges begin, and where many people give up. It is no longer theoretical. We have to get our hands dirty.

Kenosis, the process of self-emptying, becomes more intense. Thomas Keating, the teacher of Centering Prayer, talks about “the unloading of the unconscious” that contemplatives go through as their meditation practice deepens. We need to bring up the junk, the old rocks and roots that will get in the way of solid footings. The great song for spiritual renewal, Psalm 51, prays, “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” Digging works toward the wide open heart that we need in order for a new and right spirit to rise in us.

The EVOKE Life Planning “Knowledge” phase applies expertise to the Obstacles we find as we dig. It researches what we need to create a strong foundation for our new life. How can we move buried boulders, how can we work with immovable ledge or a high water table—what logistical groundwork or architectural design work do we need to do, whether financial or psychological or relational or some other form, in order to implement our Life Plan?

Introduction to the Clearing/Obstacles Category

This is one of a series of introductions that bring together two ways of describing a path that leads to the transformation of ourselves and the transformation of the world around us.

Calling/Exploration
Siting/Vision
Clearing/Obstacles
Digging/Knowledge
Building/Execution
Dwelling/Understanding
Returning/Aloha

The Golden Room Writings and Life Planning Writings are both categories on this website, and they share these seven dyads as subcategories.

This is one of a series of introductions that bring together two ways of describing a path that leads to the transformation of ourselves and the transformation of the world around us.

Calling/Exploration
Siting/Vision
Clearing/Obstacles
Digging/Knowledge
Building/Execution
Dwelling/Understanding
Returning/Aloha

The Golden Room Writings and Life Planning Writings are both categories on this website, and they share these seven dyads as subcategories.

We need to prepare the ground once we know what we are called to do and where we are called to do it. This is the clearing stage.

We may need to remove some trees or rocks for a building. Logistics may challenge us like building permits or bank loans. We will need to remove whatever inner and outer obstacles are in the way.

The Greek word kenosis means self-emptying, clearing out the old attachments and addictions of the false self so that we can begin to develop the true. We need to confront our fears, we need to get past those inner voices that threaten to withhold the building permit, we need to assess our inner and outer resources and obtain whatever we are lacking to make our vision come true.

The lid of the chest needed to be lifted in the vision of the Golden Room, and encumbrances needed to be let go or stripped away in order to climb down the tight tunnel.

The EVOKE Life Planning “Obstacles” phase is designed to help us brainstorm solutions and actions that can clear the way for us to live our heart’s core dream life.

Clearing/Obstacles can be the most dynamic and creative of times as the landscape reveals its hidden needs and demands, and we respond. The calling is sharpened and siting refined as we make the heroic journey to overcome everything that could block us from reaching our goal.

Introduction to the Siting/Vision Category

This is one of a series of introductions that bring together two ways of describing a path that leads to the transformation of ourselves and the transformation of the world around us.

Calling/Exploration
Siting/Vision
Clearing/Obstacles
Digging/Knowledge
Building/Execution
Dwelling/Understanding
Returning/Aloha

The Golden Room Writings and Life Planning Writings are both categories on this website, and they share these seven dyads as subcategories.

Calling forms a sense deep within us of what we need or long to do. Siting happens when we begin to develop a clearer sense of where that impulse is leading us. We start to walk the literal or metaphorical ground to decide exactly where our structure will stand. We may try several different sites before we find its place on earth or in our life, and make many tweaks after that to get it just right. We will need to use all our knowledge and wisdom and powers of intuition before we can be sure.

Siting corresponds to the moment when the vision of The Golden Room began with the instructions to go to the chest, open it and climb down.

The “Vision” stage in the EVOKE Life Planning process hones the sense of calling into a crystal clear, inspiring picture of what our heart’s core life would look like in the near term. Once we have that image, called a Torch, we can start living into it by envisioning it coming true and letting it move us and instruct us how to take the first steps.

Posts in this category will look at the process of forming a vision of where our heart’s core is located and how to approach it, a vision of what it would mean to live in, from and for that Golden Room.

Introduction to the Calling/Exploration Category

This is one of a series of introductions that bring together two ways of describing a path that leads to the transformation of ourselves and the transformation of the world around us.

Calling/Exploration
Siting/Vision
Clearing/Obstacles
Digging/Knowledge
Building/Execution
Dwelling/Understanding
Returning/Aloha

The Golden Room Writings and Life Planning Writings are both categories on this website, and they share these seven dyads as subcategories.

Calling is the earliest stage in the building process when the feeling stirs that creating a structure could be desirable and possible. It corresponds in the vision of The Golden Room to the sense that something is about to happen, a heightened awareness, an attentive listening for guidance.

It could also be the sense that something must happen, as many of us feel in the world today. We are waiting and watching as that something begins to emerge and grow clear.

The EVOKE Life Planning process “Exploration” stage is extremely powerful in the hands of a skilled Registered Life Planner. It helps us discern callings that may have been hidden from us or that we may have discounted as impossible dreams.

The posts in this section will explore the topics of callings and discernment as well as Exploration, both for Life Planners and for anyone seeking their own calling for this stage of their life.

The Golden Room, A Golden Civilization: Four Steps Toward Saving the World, Step Two

It does not take many golden-hearted hawkweed blossoms in a patch of grass to sweep our hearts up into an enlightened state of attentiveness and joy. The golden light changes us. It shines through us and brightens the people around us. It does not take many blossoms to transform a whole field. It does not take many enlightened people to transform the whole world.

The Golden Room, A Golden Civilization: Four Steps toward Saving the World

This is the second in a series of posts about the relationship between the Golden Room we each have within us and the Golden Civilization that would arise if we each lived in, from and for our Golden Room or heart’s core or truest, deepest self. In Step One we heard many voices saying this in different ways. Here we will show that a surprisingly small percentage could make the difference to save the world. Step Three will show a map of how we can get from here to there. Step Four will talk about some of the tools and practices we can put to work right now to speed the transformation.

Here is the outline of this series of related posts:

Step One Recognize we need a new consciousness
Step Two Strive toward the tipping point of 10%
Step Three, Part A Follow the Map: Image, Metaphor and Introduction
Step Three, Part B Follow the Map: Review and Overview
Step Three, Part C-1 Follow the Map: Story and Sketch
Step Three, Part C-2 Follow the Map: Structural Details
Step Four Tools to help us get there

Step Two:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation.” That statement was true when he said it. It is much truer today. Of all the possible solutions King could have proposed to bring us back from that brink, he said, “This hour of history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists.”

That sounds like a weak answer to planetary annihilation, but the anthropologist Margaret Mead reassures us, saying: “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Science has recently confirmed this. In 2011 a group of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute scientists did a study funded by the United States Army and Navy research offices. Their study documented the existence of a tipping point of public opinion. They found that the culture will make a dramatic and rapid reversal when a committed and passionately dedicated minority becomes 10% of a society.

Step Two toward saving the world and establishing a Golden Civilization is for 10% of our society to fulfill Step One. That step was summed up by Gus Speth who wrote, “Many of our deepest thinkers and many of those most familiar with the scale of the challenges we face have concluded that the transitions required can be achieved only in the context of what I will call the rise of a new consciousness.”

Ken Wilber has written an extremely important book not just for religion but for making “the transitions required” in every field to save the world. The book is The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions. Wilber refers to social research showing that already 5% of our society has attained the “new consciousness” Speth says must arise. Wilber echoes the RPI study saying that if we can achieve 10% we will see a rapid transformation that will bring the changes in consciousness needed to solve the problems that threaten civilization and the planet today—things like climate change, weakening democracy, racial hatred and injustice, increasing economic inequality and war.

People have much work to do who are in the 5% today, striving in every field where civilization and the planet are threatened, but they also have this most important task: helping another 5% rise to a higher developmental stage and deeper spiritual state of transformed consciousness. We need more people with a more enlightened perspective on the world, and we need them fast.

The next post in this series, Step Three, will talk about how we can get there, and Step Four will offer tools and practices that can cultivate the Golden Civilization where the new consciousness must arise, within the Golden Room.

Ken Wilber says that simply being aware that there is a higher stage and deeper state of consciousness that we can attain is “psycho-active.” Just knowing about it moves us closer to it. The RPI study says the 10% needs to be “committed and passionately dedicated.” So I urge you to spread the word about this in every way you can, including clicking on some of the buttons below all four of these posts.

Thank you for doing all you are to bring about the transformation we so desperately need.

You can continue reading this series in order by clicking here.

The Golden Room, A Golden Civilization: Four Steps Toward Saving the World, Step One

This oak was cut down years ago. Its structure remains, but is decaying and breaking. Its heartwood core is gradually softening and rotting within a circle of cracking bark. Meanwhile, what is left of the oak collects fallen leaves and galls. It holds acorn shells and droppings that squirrels or birds have left. Each humble contribution will feed the roots and heart of a future tree that will rise from the same ground. All that has ever fallen on the oak will live on in what comes after, including light and rain and the remaining essences of other lives. The new tree could not exist without all the lives and ways that have gone before. They are its hope, as it is theirs.

The Golden Room, A Golden Civilization: Four Steps toward Saving the World

This is the first of several posts about the relationship between the Golden Room we each have within us and the Golden Civilization that would arise if we each lived in, from and for our Golden Room (meaning our truest, deepest self, our heart’s core). The second step will show that all of humanity does not have to take these steps to transformation, a surprisingly small percentage of us could make the difference to save the world. The third step will show a map of how we can get from here to there. The fourth step will talk about some of the tools and practices we can get busy putting to work right now to speed the transformation.

Here is the outline of this series of related posts:

Step One Recognize we need a new consciousness
Step Two Strive toward the tipping point of 10%
Step Three, Part A Follow the Map: Image, Metaphor and Introduction
Step Three, Part B Follow the Map: Review and Overview
Step Three, Part C-1 Follow the Map: Story and Sketch
Step Three, Part C-2 Follow the Map: Structural Details
Step Four Tools to help us get there

In this post we will hear about the first step from many voices.

Step One:

The first step toward saving the world is recognizing that it is from the cultivation of the Golden Room that a Golden Civilization will arise. As Gus Speth summarizes the collective wisdom below, we need the rise of a new consciousness, a transformation of the human heart, a new way of seeing in order to bring about a major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values.

We KNOW this! We have heard it over and over. Yet we have not taken it seriously enough to ask how, and to set out as a people to accomplish it.

Now we must. We have no other choice and no time to lose if we want to protect what we love and save what we depend on to survive and thrive.

We know this step because we have heard our wisest elders saying it increasingly stridently.

Heeding them and asking ourselves what we can do in our lives to follow their direction is the first step toward saving our world.

We can do this. The following three posts will talk about why this can work and how we can do it. Thank you for doing your crucial part.

First, some recent voices:

Gus Speth sums this crucial wisdom up beautifully in his book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute. He Chaired President Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality and served as a senior advisor to President Clinton’s transition team. He was Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Here is what he says:

“Many of our deepest thinkers and many of those most familiar with the scale of the challenges we face have concluded that the transitions required can be achieved only in the context of what I will call the rise of a new consciousness. For some it is a spiritual awakening —a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself. But for all it involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.”

George Kinder, the founder of Life Planning and author of The Seven Stages of Money Maturity and Transforming Suffering into Wisdom: Mindfulness and the Art of Inner Listening and an upcoming book on the Golden Civilization: “If you want a golden civilization, you must start with what is golden inside of you. If you want a civilization that will thrive for a thousand years, you must start with what is timeless inside of you.” Continue reading →

Introduction: The Vision Behind This Site

One afternoon in the late 1980s I was lying in bed with a fever, trying to meditate or pray a listening, contemplative prayer. I was turned on my side looking across at a carved wooden trunk that belonged to my grandmother when she was a girl. I felt called to get up and open it. I did not move, but I experienced everything that followed as absolutely real. I got up and opened the chest, and instead of seeing blankets, I saw a ladder dropping down into darkness. The same voiceless voice that called me to the trunk told me to climb down. As I went down, the light overhead grew smaller and finally disappeared. I was climbing through total darkness down a tight and hot tunnel. I was sweating. I was scraping my skin on the sides. I felt claustrophobic. I was afraid and had no idea that it was leading to any good, but I felt I had to keep going down.

After a long while, a golden glow appeared below me. I grew calm and curious. The ladder ended and I dropped down into a small room like a cave. Its walls were as smooth as yellow clay, but it was dry and warm. There was no visible source of the beautiful golden light. It just was. I was looking at the wall in front of me with wonder when I got the sense that someone else was there. I turned around and saw a man dressed in a white robe squatting on the floor, looking up at me and smiling. He said, “My name is Michael, and I am going to help you take what you find here and share it out there.” As he gestured with his arm the wall behind him turned into glass, like the wall of a bus station waiting room, and I saw the world outside and people passing by. Then the vision ended, and I was back in bed.

Over the next twenty years that vision kept coming to mind, and I pondered it. It was not clear to me what to do with it other than to keep up my contemplative practice and keep writing and working as much as I could from the place within me where I found my connection to God and my truest self. Over the years I learned much about how to live in and from the Golden Room, but I thought that what I was learning was meant to guide my own life.

Only recently did I come to understand that the vision is not for me alone. It is for us all. It is for the world. And it is urgent.

That is why I have created this site and why I welcome you here: to give you as much encouragement and assistance as I can for you to find your way to your own Golden Room and live in it and from it. This site provides insights, inspiration and tools to help you do that, as well as company for the journey and celebration along the way.