I know where I am Going

“Life changed forever the day I set out in my sky-blue VW Bug heaving with everything I owned. An old carpenter’s chest, a gift from my mother and stepfather, had been carefully packed with watercolors, paintbrushes, and other art paraphernalia and small, cherished belongings. A single suitcase that easily held all of my clothes cordially rubbed sides with it. Add a futon and a sleeping bag—purple, of course—neatly tucked into the back, and I was ready to go. My mother, June, did not bid me goodbye that morning. Instead, she wished me well. Love encompassed us. Tears welled. She was sad to see me go but was excited for me too. I was embarking on the adventure of a lifetime and she knew it, maybe even more than I did at the time.
She waved big as I drove off, and I caught a glimpse of her in my rearview mirror. She leaned long and to her left, stretching to capture the last hint of me. The view shrank until all I could see was a shock of white hair glowing in the distance like a star. I turned my sights to the road before me. As I rounded the first corner, a strand of memory connected the fading star of white to the vivid mental picture of making my announcement that I was leaving: “Mom, Sandra is going to Colorado with a friend to work there. She’s asked me if I want to come along. I’ve decided to go with her…”
Quietly but in her usual forthright manner she simply asked, “Why are you going?” She held her gaze steady, slightly squinting. The question hung in the space between us… “I don’t know. It just really feels right for me, Mom,” I answered her. Her eyes moistened just enough to increase the wattage of her eyes. She smiled with sweet acknowledgment. No judgment. I felt she knew exactly what I meant. I relaxed into her loving embrace. “Follow your heart, honey,” she said with a breathy whisper in my ear. And three weeks later, that is exactly what I did.
I was an average kid in most respects. A relatively happy child at home, I was quick to laugh and vigorously engaged with my siblings as we played games and teased one another. But my first years in elementary school were awkward; I became ever more shy and quiet, finding it sometimes difficult to connect with other kids. This may have been due to something that no one else I knew seemed to experience or understand:
I saw energy around things. People, plants, and animals, mostly. One day, I asked my mother about it. I must have been about six or seven because as I write this I can see myself looking a long way up to catch her attention. “Mommy, why do people have lights around them?” She kneeled down next to me, and her eyes softened as they narrowed to probe and console at the same time. “I don’t know.” When I saw her expression of wonder and mild concern, I realized that although she didn’t know what was going on with me, she did not think I was strange or bad for it. She just didn’t want me to feel even more out of place at school.
I was a chubby girl, and this, combined with my unusual vision, made me a target for ridicule. The title “class cootie” had been bestowed on me and was flung at me on more than one occasion. I remember coming home numerous times at the end of the school day, hurt, confused, and even frightened by what I had seen. It was not uncommon for me to arrive at our front door red-eyed, my cheeks flushed and wet with tears. I often felt like I was from another planet. Still, one advantage of this alien capacity was that I could tell whether someone was telling the truth or not. This was handy. I had no way to communicate about any of this. Mommy wanted to help and didn’t know how. This was painful for me at times, but her love for me was never in question.
As I became more and more distressed, she found a psychologist who helped children to cope with these sorts of experiences. She specialized in sensitives, as they were called at the time, but that term also implied being psychic.1 I have vivid memories of much of my childhood, but I can barely remember these meetings with the therapist. My mother claims that after the third and last session, I felt protected from having to see and feel so much. I vaguely recall the psychologist guiding me to visualize a protective shield around me. By the fifth grade, I no longer saw the colors and forms around people; I got to know my peers by interacting with them. I had multiple friends for the first time and was eager to go to school each morning to see them and learn new things. I felt normal. I liked myself. I wasn’t looking for any more than that. But something happened one day that reminded me of the realms I had glimpsed before.
It happened on a very normal day as I was reading the very normal Palo Alto Times. I was not yet in puberty but was no longer a little girl, so I must have been around eleven years old. Sprawled out on my soft belly, soaking up the heat from the cork floor in our Eichler house in Palo Alto, I was leafing through a section of the newspaper to find an article for current events class. I was dimly aware of my father and mother discussing an article about a girl who had just died in a car accident. My attention zoomed in when I heard my mother reading aloud to my father—as best as I can remember it:
“As she lay on the ground, dying, with her father holding her hand, she looked up at him and said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy. I know where I am going.’” An intense need to understand the meaning of birth, death, and the events in between these two inescapable markers burst out of me. “Where was she going?” I asked with all the passion of my little heart, not addressing anyone in particular. My eyes searched the air but found nowhere to land. I was entranced with the question itself; at the same time, I wondered about Mom and Dad—what were they thinking and feeling? Half-audible comments sputtered out of them, then dissipated like puffs of smoke.
No satisfying answer came from above either. The question of death and the hereafter dropped into my chest like a rock and wedged itself next to my heart as an unopened secret. It haunted me for months. I guess you could say that this was my first existential crisis, although that would be too fancy a word for a kid that age. The death of that young girl, coupled with my early experiences of the energetic universe, propelled me into a search for meaning beyond this physical world. I knew there was more to it than meets the eye. The urgency to meet that “more,” to know it, only became stronger. A significant shift had occurred:
I was no longer afraid of the unknown or unexplained. I was curious. It is natural for children of that age to become aware that life ends, people die. Questions come, questions fade away, as explanations are given to a child to fill the void. Often those explanations so fill the space of wonder that the queries disappear entirely. In some children, the curiosity is channeled in all manner of creative and interesting ways. My dissatisfaction with the usual explanations persisted. I kept my antennae up for anything that might offer clues. Religion began to play a role in my search for answers. The religious influences in my early years were varied.
My mother and father, both of Scandinavian descent, had a fairly traditional Lutheran upbringing but didn’t bring up their children with the same rigor. There were several reasons for this lax attitude. Some dark stories regarding the church had left them ambivalent about whether and how much to involve us in a strict religious training. In spite of its shortcomings, however, they felt that religion could be a positive influence—in small doses. On a more positive note, my great-grandmother on my mother’s side—from County Cork, Ireland—married a Chippewa Indian chief and lived on a reservation in northern Wisconsin for about ten years.
She had left her first husband by whom she had three sons, one of whom was my grandfather. Chippewa legends and beliefs are passed down from generation to generation through pictures and stories, and although as a child, my mother went to church regularly like her mother did, she eagerly drank these stories in. She learned very young that everything is alive and filled with spirit—the stream she sat by with her grandfather to receive the sacred teachings, the trees that listened in as they spoke, even the big rock she was sitting on. So it was probably not the big surprise it might have been to the average mother in the fifties when I reported seeing spirit all around me. Even so, my parents would get on kicks about providing a consistent churchgoing experience for us kids; every few years, they would resolve to find a place to land that would give us a solid ethical focus. We finally settled on a progressive Unitarian church in Palo Alto, where the Sunday school teachers encouraged independent thinking in the kids and taught us about many different religions.
At one of the book sales that were held after every Sunday service, I was drawn to The Diary of Anne Frank. I became fascinated for two reasons. First, in addition to having seen the camps right after the end of World War II, my father had also been at the Nuremberg Trials of the major war criminals. Mother said he came back a changed man after both experiences. He told us stories about the atrocities he had seen and frequently used them to point out what human beings can do to one another. Second, Anne Frank’s diary presented me with a perspective of someone near my age—I saw a whole other face of that war.
Anne’s bravery and faith in the face of adversity inspired me. She had suffered far beyond what I had experienced and somehow managed to find something she could be certain of beyond the physical world of appearances. This added more fuel to the flame lit by the newspaper story about the death of the young stranger. These two girls had met with such a tragic end, but they seemed to have had some kind of magic key. Two vibrant lives cut short. I had mine to live. What gave them such courage and strength, so much love and kindness? Even though Anne faced fear every day, she never lost faith in the good in people or in her God. She sought answers and searched herself for them. Did Anne also know where she was going? Did she know about the realm beyond this world that the girl dying in the accident was so sure would welcome her? What did they know? What did it mean? More important, how could I know?
Our family always said grace before dinner, and Mother always said prayers with us before bed. I began to pray on my own, and it became a way to feel my heart’s yearning for God, for love, for companionship. I looked forward to praying every day. The form my prayer took depended on whether I was feeling joyous gratitude and celebration, yearning for something or someone, or sad about an event in my own life or someone else’s that made me want to ask for help.
Sometimes, while praying, I sensed love mingling with my salty tears, melting the rock that had wedged itself in my chest when I read about the little girl. In hindsight, I could say I felt a sense of devotion, though over time, God had changed from the familiar Sistine Chapel image to a presence with no specific form or face. I didn’t know how Anne and the girl in the newspaper understood God, but I began to sense what they might have known:
I felt that I, too, would be okay, no matter what. Deep in me were goodness and strength. Not in an I-am-a-good-girl kind of way—just plain goodness. I felt lucky, too. I had found a doorway to my heart. I opened it. This explicit sense of underlying goodness arrived just in time. Circumstances in my life forced me to grow up rapidly. My mother left the family when I was twelve to join the man who would become my stepfather. This was a painful, empty time for me. I was often overcome by loss and inner chaos. Although the years immediately following her departure held deep hurts, the void eventually opened to blessings…”


~ Karen Johnson, The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization
“Karen Johnson is the co-developer of the Diamond Approach as it is taught in the Ridhwan School today, having worked alongside Hameed Ali (A. H. Almaas) for the last 40 years. Karen was trained in art and dance and began the journey into the spiritual universe at 14 years old with the guidance of her parents. First, she was introduced to yoga and meditation, and then learned about other forms of spiritual practice, which allowed her to develop her innate paranormal capacities. After attending California College of Arts and Crafts, she befriended Hameed Ali, and with him began a new trajectory into the secrets of the universe of Being, which became the Diamond Approach. Karen also received an MA in psychology JFK University in 1990. She continues to venture into new explorations of the endless realms of our miraculous Nature.”
“Neither the depths of spirit nor the surface of the mundane world can adequately express what reality is and what is possible for each of us. How can our human lives be both the arena for spiritual practice and enlightenment, and the occasion for our true being to express its infinite possibilities?
When we realize that we are each the miracle of matter and spirit and at the same time we are neither, our everyday ordinary experiences can become doorways to further possibilities of reality, of awakening to our spiritual potential in its endless possibilities. True Being lives through the particulars of our lives, utilizing them to reveal its potentialities. The Diamond Approach explores how to use our personal situations as occasions for practice and learning, and as opportunities for expression of our finer spiritual qualities. It enables people to work with their everyday experiences of work, relationships, play, creativity, love, sex and so on to learn to be the transcendent living a human life. Its students learn to employ each particular situation within this world to go beyond it in a way that includes it. Inclusive transcendence enables our human consciousness to view reality beyond the concepts of duality and nonduality. Each particular situation affords us the opportunity to use its energies and forces to liberate and optimize our experience. Following such path, it becomes natural to be of help to others and to life in general.”


Photo with VW is merely illustrative.