I heard the call

By Bastiaan Berende

One night, when I was performing with my blues duo, I met a woman. She stood out from the drunken, self involved crowd that normally attended our concerts. She oozed a particular certainty and gave me the feeling she had something for me. After we talked for a little bit we exchanged numbers and I called her first thing after sobering up the next morning.

I told her about my troubles and that I was looking for help. And she told she was at home in various kinds of alternative therapy. I trusted her somehow and asked if she would help me. We talked about the friendly rates for her services and she accepted me as her new client. Then after a couple of hypnosis and chakra therapy sessions she sent me home with a customized hypnosis tape. I played it when I went to bed every night. It relaxed me and suggested positive and powerful ideas that replace my negative thoughts and emotions. I was exhilarated by the results these compassionate ideas had on me.
I changed, even physically. Being the tall guy I am, my stance used to be a little bent with my head facing down. I was afraid of standing out too much. But now I walked up straight, I felt proud and complete within myself.

I was compelled to bring this new awareness to everyone I knew.  Forgiveness was automatic because I related to each individual as they appeared in the moment. And as I didn’t bring the past there was no way of holding the relationship to what it had been before, the relationship was enforced to rearrange itself. Some people freaked out about the way I asserted my new found certainty but others were attracted by it.

In the meantime my therapy sessions continued. My therapist friend helped me to see a lot more than I had permitted myself to see in me. After 5 or 6 sessions I had a strong emotional release. My body started to flow with energy. I was healed and much in tune to myself and my surroundings. I felt a strong connection with everything. I saw things in their openness, and as I showed myself, everything showed itself to me.

When I came home, I laid on my bed.  In a short period of time I had discovered there to be so much more to life. I had been restricted by so many limiting beliefs that, now that these were released, the distinction between inside me and outside me was less clear than it used to be. My body had always been dense and solid but now it was loose and fluid.  I had become mindful to the relationship between my thoughts, my body and the now undefined universe.
Then I asked a daring question:
My body is healed and now what?

I lay still for a moment without thoughts. I was ready for whatever would come to me on my request; I anticipated something big and trusted that whatever would come meant well. An immense power then surged through me from my ears down into my toes and back up and out again. I was encompassed by this power and was plugged into its source far beyond my body. Conscious to the event I lost control and was taken out of my body shell. I was immersed in a vast force field which stretched out into infinity. I received a new reference for all of life. I was part of something big, and nothing would ever be the same. Directly after, I was tempted to do away with the experience by telling myself that I must have fallen into a deep sleep, and though it did feel like falling,I was fully awake, I hadn’t gone to sleep. Then I acknowledged what had happened by getting out of bed, sitting behind my desk and writing an inspired epistle titled “The Call”.

This is what I wrote:
“I’ve been plugged in the field. I will go with the flow. I am a real part of it now.
I laid down the shield of being lost. In space and time I wandered. I finally found myself connected.
I’ve abandoned the chase. It is behind me to run and hide my face. I will win and trace the places I was and will be. I struck home base in the field of life.
I’ve put my trust in all that relates. I won’t put them on different tracks or give them different names. We are family now. I had to go this way; I knew it all along, to put all experiences in order to stay.

There is no such thing as coincidence and shattered exclusion is not included. All matters refer to the level I’ve reached. The medium on my road are the words I speak and the music I make. To rise, shine, and enlighten the force that drives me.”
The following day, my friend told me that his brother’s fiancée was won over by a group or movement called A Course in Miracles. Through the little I heard about them it was a dynamic get together and not yet another smoothed over new age offering. Since my first encounter with Jesus such a significant series of serendipitous events had lined up that I didn’t doubt this to be the next step and that I had to go.

We were picked up by the car of my friend’s brother’s fiancée and one other lady. There was a devoted, quiet and pleasant atmosphere in the car. We drove to Amsterdam and there a guy read from the textbook of A Course in Miracles, ‘For They Have Come’. He read something about a call and answering to it, and about making the ground whereon you stand holy with their presence. I expected angels to descend or alien visitors to appear. I heard what was read on an abstract yet genuine level. I discerned a strong use of Christian terms and symbols but they were expressed in a highly original and fresh manner. After his reading and sharing everyone got up and stood together in a circle.

I could see this group facilitated the spiritual experience I had enjoyed only a moment ago. What had happened to me was no anomaly within this circle and I fell right into place. I joined with them in the current awareness of that experience and they called it light session. The mind’s focus was away from the usual day to day events towards the place where real communication is, an active meditation into the abstract and expansive nature of who we really are.
A woman then asked me how I found them and with all the youthfulness of a true initiate I replied: “I heard the call.”