My first big wake up call came with no forewarning one late Friday afternoon in the early eighties.   The day had started out with blue skies and a crisp bite to the air before the skies turned grey, pushing down on those below with the threat of snow like a father growling threats of 'house arrest' to a wayward child.  That was the day my world turned upside down.  Literally.  Figuratively.  Metaphorically.  Philosophically.  Emotionally.  Really.

I was driving in a little red Fiat convertible up I-77 North from Charlotte, North Carolina heading towards Black Mountain for a spiritual weekend retreat up in the mountains.  I was looking forward to it as the last (and only) retreat I had gone to at the Light Center had attracted an interesting mix of people of all ages and from all walks of life.  They had told me it was so non-denominational, that, in the same afternoon, it was common to sit down and talk to a Catholic priest with his starched white collar... a Hari Krishna with his or her exotic robes... an orthodox Jewish Rabbi with his long curls... a teenager looking forward in their life... a grandfather looking back on his life... women and men trying to look for Love in better places than a bar... an aging hippy from the sixties now wearing more wrinkles on his/her face than his/her clothes... a businessman or woman loathe to let go of their power suit and tie or scarf, but who were too curious not to come...   Protestant ministers with different visions of their faith...  a housewife looking for more than clean dishes and ironed clothes as a list of her life accomplishments... a chanting monk from Tibet...  people who talked to angels... other people who talked back to them... a man who swore he was improving his golf game by coming to the Light Center... a pianist who was creating new music by channeling her Divine Soul Energy, and people like myself who fell somewhere in between all of those social descriptions, but who had a curiosity to know beyond the appearances of everyday living where we had been taught to “get a good job, put a roof over your head, food on the table and to collect as many bells, toys, whistles and the highest end labels on your clothing that you could afford in your pursuit of happiness”.  

In other words, some of us were looking to put more color into our tapestry of life while others were looking to put more threads.  Still others, were wondering if the tapestry even existed and, if it did, where did it go when it was finished?

The eclectic group of people they had promised me had, indeed, been there.  Which was one of the reasons I was going back; I loved the stimulus of talking to other active minds even if I didn't understand, yet, too much what the founder, Jim Goure, had to say.  I just knew I was curious and wanted to know more.

He had said in his last talk of the weekend that if your consciousness was aligned with the awareness that everything was made of Light, you wouldn't even need gas for your car.  Those were pretty big words for me at the time.  Put it on top of the fact that, during the break, I had met two fellows and a woman who said they actually talked to angels of all things... well, that was a lot of 'out there' information for me in one afternoon and evening.  Shortly thereafter, though, I came to have respect for all of that information.

Going home from that seminar, I had a lot to think about.  I had left late for the three hour drive home because everyone was so interesting, I didn’t want to leave.  I knew I shouldn’t have left so late, but I was thinking the drive home would give me time to digest the information, I could get home by 1:30 am and, besides, I only had $5.42 in my pocket so I couldn't really afford to spend the night and was too proud to ask someone I didn't know to let me sleep on their couch.

You can imagine my chagrin when I was an hour down the road and saw that my gas tank was on empty.  “Shit!” I banged the steering wheel in frustration.  “I forgot to get gas on the way up.”   In order to properly chastise myself, I threw in for good measure, “I knew I forgot something!”  Like that last little bit was really going to change the level of gas in my gas tank. 

I drove on for a few miles in the hopes of finding a late night gas station tucked between the miles and miles of forest of the North Carolina mountain country, but to no avail.  Remember, this was the early eighties before all night pump-it-yourself gas stations could be found every two miles, fast food chains closed at 11:00 pm, hotels turned their lights off at midnight unless they knew your arrival time in advance and mobile phones were still a rich man's toy.

In short, I was busted.  And I knew it.  And I knew it was nobody's fault, but my own.  But, I was still busted.  Big time.

My second thought was to find a hotel and just bang on the door until someone opened up.  I did have a credit card with me, after all, even if I couldn’t really afford the expense.  But, there were no hotels along that stretch of the highway and my gas gauge was registering deep in the red zone, on the wrong side of the letter E for empty.

It was too cold to stop on the side of the road for the night and, yet, I couldn't keep going because I was going to run out of gas sooner rather than later.  I started to panic and then I remembered something Jim Goure had said about not needing gas if my consciousness was aligned with knowing the Light.

So I started praying in a most fervent manner, “Light is all around me.  I am driving through Light.  My car is made of Light.  My car runs on Light.  I am Light living in a Light world.  My car is made of Light.  The engine is made of Light.  The engine runs on Light.  I am driving...” 

I kept repeating this non-stop while refusing to look at the gas gauge in worry.  At first, I had figured I would keep going until I ran out of gas.  Then, my thoughts turned into thinking I didn't want to affirm 'empty' for my gas tank so I wouldn't look.  Somewhere along the line, I let it go altogether and the words became a kind of mantra and I lost sight of time.  I just kept driving and saying the words over and over. 

I didn't stop until I drove into my parking lot all the way back in Charlotte.  When I went to shut the car off, I looked down at the gas gauge and got goose bumps all up and down my spine.  It registered more than a ¼ tank full. 

“How could that be??”  I was stunned and couldn't move.  Then, I felt this wave of exhaustion hit me as the adrenaline I had been holding during the drive just drained from my body.  “I don't know,” I answered myself, wearily dragging myself out of the car and up the walk to my apartment door.  “I'll think about it tomorrow.”

Friends tried to tell me later that the gas gauge was broken.  I had it checked, though, and the mechanic said it was in perfect working order.  Other friends tried to tell me I was tired and had misread the gas gauge.  I knew that wasn't right so, rather than argue, I just shut my mouth.  Although I couldn't articulate what had happened in a way they could understand, I knew something important had just happened.

Which is why I was back on the road making the trip, once again, up to Black Mountain that fateful Friday afternoon; I was curious to know more and to understand how that could have happened the way it did.

Some really good oldies music was playing on the radio and I was driving along in the middle lane of a multiple lane interstate, happily singing at the top of my lungs in whatever key that struck me at the moment, when it started to snow.  I slowed down to about 70 mph and tested the brakes a bit to make sure the road wasn't icing up.  It wasn't. 

I was driving straight into a snow storm so, three Beetles' songs later, it was coming down with increasing insistence in those fat fluffy snowflakes of sentimental Christmas card variety.  It was during the chorus of, “All you need is love, love, love is all you need” in which I was somehow managing to sing all parts of the chorus at the same time, that I thought to slow down still again.  Okay, I was wise enough to think to slow down, but still young enough to think driving at 60 mph in snow was prudent.

Right about then, a car came speeding up on my right hand side.  He hit an icy patch and went into a skid, plowing into the front right hand side of my little sports car. 

I heard the sickening crunch of metal hitting metal a split second before it registered that I was going to go into a really big skid myself.  All senses went on alert as I prepared myself to keep my hands on the wheel and turn into the skid to try to get control of my car, just as I had learned years earlier while learning to drive in the New Jersey snow.

As my car started to go into a 360 degree turn, my first thought was, “Whoa!  This is a whole lot bigger than me.” 

Then, I felt the second crunch of metal as my car hit the one to my left and it, too, went into a skid.

“Oh my God.  This is it.  I’m going to die.” I said out loud as I prepared myself for whatever came next.  Then, it hit me.  “No! It’s too soon.  I’m not done yet.”

What came next was the last thing I expected.

I heard a commanding voice which said, “Let go.”  This voice was so calm, so loving, so all-knowing, I went against everything my driver's training had taught me to do and I did just that:  I let go.  I took my hands off the wheel and placed them on my lap, took my feet off the pedals and rested them onto the floorboard of the car and felt an incredible calm wash over me.

Time slowed down and I watched as my car went into two 360 degree turns on the icy highway.  I saw passing by in slow motion the snow covered banks on the side of the interstate with some stubborn spikes of green grass that hadn’t been mowed in quite some time, still poking through, refusing to be covered; prickly bushes looking like ungainly bales of untended cotton with snow clumped around their thorny leaves; the trees in the distance had begun to fade into the white of the field they bordered;  the fence along that same field already had snow building up on its fence posts, making little igloo coned shapes and, then, something else happened. 

Just as I thought, “This the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” I suddenly realized that something had shifted and I was seeing everything in its Light form.  For the entire second 360 degree turn of my car, I looked at every thing in its Light form as if I were watching a cinema-graphic movie.  Everything pulsated Light.  Emanated Light.  The fields, the trees, the cars, the road, my car, all the instruments in the car, me.

And I knew it wasn't my time; I wasn't going anywhere.  I also knew in a flash of an instant, that there was no separation between anything because we were all connected by this Light.  There was nothing that wasn't this Light.  Even the air was made of Light.  For the first time in my adult life, I understood what all the great sages throughout known history have been trying to teach us: we, all of humanity and everything under the sun, were all One in this Light. 

All of this was going on in very slow motion, giving me plenty of time during both 360 degree turns to digest what I was seeing and what was happening before my car ended up in the grass median separating the north and south bound interstate lanes.  When my car stopped, I sat for just a moment to get my bearings before getting out of the car to see if the driver of the other car I had hit was okay.  She got out of her car about the same time I did and, as we walked towards each other in the snow, our hair taking on lacy snow veils one fat flake at a time, we both wore expressions of incredulity and wonder.  I didn’t see her as a human being; she was literally a pulsating Light Being.

When we were still maybe thirty feet from each other, we just stopped and looked at one other.  Finally, she spoke, the wonder in her voice cutting through the silently falling snow.  “Did something just happen to you?”

“Yes.  Did it to you?”

“Yes.  It was a miracle.”  Then, she just turned around, got in her car and drove away.

“Yes...” I trailed off, not quite sure what to do next.  “It was a miracle.”  I looked across the interstate at the man who had started the domino effect.  He waved to say he was okay, got into his car and drove off, leaving me standing there with the snow silently falling onto my face as if to give me a caress of its blessing and reassure me that everything was, indeed, okay.

I turned to go back to my car to inspect the damage, hoping that I would be able to drive it away.  I wasn't worried, though.  I just knew everything was going to be fine. 

What came next would have been a shock at any other time and place, but, somehow, it just seemed so natural.  There wasn't a single scratch on my car.  Not one. 

I got back into the car, said a heartfelt prayer of thanks, started the car and somehow made it back up the snowy incline after two or three tries of sliding back down to where I had started.  It was on the third try that I said to myself, “Glenn, this is silly.  Look at what just happened.  You WILL make it up this hill,” and I did.

By the time I was back on the road, visibility was very limited and the snowflakes were falling into the beam of my headlights so fast and furiously, it was hard to see the spaces between them.  For another 'first' in my adult life, I knew what they meant when they said to pray 'without ceasing'.  I spontaneously sang the Lord's Prayer non-stop as I crawled down the now deserted interstate.  

At one point, I realized that I was shaking and it was crazy to think I was going to make it all the way to the Light Center for the weekend seminar and, yet, after what had just happened, I knew that anything was possible.  What was the right thing to do?  I didn't know, so I asked.  “Father/Mother/God, if you want me to go to the Light Center, I will.  If not, I will stop.  Just give me a clear sign and I will follow it.”  (That was back when I still needed 'signs' and hadn't yet learned to listen within directly). 

My car went into a spontaneous 360 degree turn.  Once again, time slowed down.  Once again, I saw things in their Light form.  It was like I was being given the confirmation my rational mind needed to know that what had happened earlier, had really happened, and it was time to really wake up and start paying attention.  My car finished its gentle spin with its nose facing the exit to the interstate.

“Okay,” I smiled.  “That's a pretty clear sign.”  There were four truck stop hotels at that exit and I got the last room at the last hotel.

That was twenty five years ago and there has been a lot of learning since then.  I’m sure there is still a long way for me to go in my growth and this thought brings me pleasure.  It is now common for me to see people and the world around me in their Divine Light form.  It is also common that the people I work with, sooner or later, see people and the world around them in their Divine Light form.  It depends upon the degree of one’s willingness to let go of their world view.  I also know that miracles are just normal events in this vast Universe of ours that we have yet grown to understand how they came to be.

I didn't release the adrenaline from that event for another twenty years in a somatic experience that was very enlightening.  But, that is another story for another day.

What's important right now is to acknowledge that, when I say the vibration of Divine Light is equally everywhere present in all things, at all times, I can say that with a certainty beyond the shadow of a doubt. 

What's more important, however, is that you know it for yourself.  You don't necessarily have to wake up to it in such a dramatic manner; my bag of experiences is mine and will never be yours.  The Principle remains constant for all of us, however.  Whether we realize it or not.

EXERCISE:

1. 1. Continue to practice the Principle of the Presence of Divine Light in all things that you learned in the last lesson.
   

2. 2.Make a list of thoughts or ideas you resisted in what you just read.  This will give you an idea of where you are holding on to your old point of view and will also give you the chance to feel where and how you hold resistance.  This self understanding will serve you in the upcoming lessons. 
   

3. 3.Write down at least one reason why you feel it might be possible that all things are made of this Divine Light.
   

4. 4.Write down one reason why you think it wouldn’t be true.
   

5. 5.Now, to the best of your ability, (if you feel like it) state:  “Illumine me.  I want to know the Truth.”   Then, just be patient, continue to practice the Presence in your everyday activity and allow the Truth to reveal itself to you in the right way and in the right time frame for you.  Your Divine Soul knows how to do that; He/She just needs your permission and an open mind.  The only thing you need to do to allow it is be open, curious, interested and detached to the outcome.  This is your chance to be like a little child is, with all their curiosity still intact. This is more effective if you have first done the Basic Activation of the Divine Light Vibration.  I’ve linked it directly to the written explanation for you.  It’s in the Activating the Alchemy section of the website so I’ve also given you a link back to this lesson.  If you prefer a podcast or video format, those are also available, too.