In the beginning, I died…

In the beginning…I died

Early January 1987, In my 45th year, my life as I knew it ended. I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my second wife and I had moved twelve months before after I closed my law practice in Birmingham, Alabama. I had become very interested in the New Age and Santa Fe had a great deal of New Age energy. I attended and graduated from Dr. Jay Victor Scherer’s School of Natural Healing and Massage. I was taking cranial sacral therapy training offered by The Upledger Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida. I had broken up with my second wife, who had endured my struggles most of the time I had practiced law in Birmingham, Alabama, my home town. I was struggling to make a go as a massage therapist- healer. 

I had found a new girlfriend, who worked in one of the labs at Los Alamos about 50 miles across the desert from Santa Fe. She was somewhat of a mystic, in that she was having some not of this world experiences, perhaps because she was born in Australia, and then her parents moved to America. Her spirit bird was the nighthawk, aka whippoorwill. Her lab used vegetation to try to soak up and neutralize all the toxic chemical wastes the other labs at Los Alamos discharged into the ground and the water table. She obtained grants for her lab to continue doing that work. Although I was very happy to have her in my life, I was acutely aware that the move to Santa Fe had not fixed me. I was acutely aware of feeling like I had failed in every way a man could fail.

In that state I prayed one morning in my apartment in Santa Fe, “Dear God, I do not wish to die like this, failed. Please help me.” I paused, then said, “I offer my life to human service.” Tears came to my eyes. I went on about my day. About ten days passed. I spent the weekend in Los Alamos. Sleeping beside my new girlfriend, I woke in the wee hours, perhaps 2 a.m. and saw two whiteish shift-shaped beings hovering above me in the darkness. I figured they were angels. I heard very clearly, but not in my ears exactly, “This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it, and we are going to give it to you.” I remembered the desperate prayer I had made, and saw a bright white flash and was physically and otherwise jolted by something electrical, which happened two more times quickly.” I was physically shaking. I asked my girlfriend if she was awake? She said, “Yes, what’s going on?” I asked her what she had seen or heard? She said she saw my body lurching. I asked her if she saw or heard the angels? She said, no. I told her what had happened. She laughed, said, “Let’s go back to sleep, you strange man.” And that’s what we did.

The changes began slowly. I was relocated to Boulder, Colorado that fall, to take the Hakomi body psychotherapy training. I was learning a lot about deep emotional healing, as a patient of my Hakomi and craniosacral instructors, from having practice patients, and from observing my fellow students be “worked on” by our instructors. I also was learning that my instructors did not seem to be very interested in what I was raised to call God. My parents and their parents were Southern Baptists. My mother had left for the Episcopal church. I eventually drifted away from going to church, but I always believed God existed and Jesus was something very different, and I didn’t measure up well to his way of living. I was 100 percent convinced I had been by angels known in the Bible, but I did not yet know for what. A big piece of it became a very long course in mirrors, which actually had begun in Santa Fe, via people I met there who were doing A Course in Miracles, and by people who were talking about looking inside, instead of looking outside. One of the look-inside people was my girlfriend in Los Alamos.

Those two angels are still with me, and I know one of them as Michael, and the other as Melchizedek. They turned me every which way but loose, upside down and inside out, and it never let up, and I came to think they had lied to me that night in Los Alamos, because I was pushed beyond any limits I could imagine I had, even as I knew something was with me, pushing, shoving, carrying, dragging, rebuking, steering, redirecting and encouraging me, and that’s still going on. They completely changed my perspective of myself, other people, humanity, and the spirit realms, including the Dark Side of the Force, or Evil, which is very real. The Devil exists. I learned every person has an internal demonic twin, and coming to terms with that, and many other parts of oneself, is part of the human experience on this world human beings call Earth.

Those two angels are not attached to any religion. They do not care if someone belongs to a religion. They are in service to what I was raised to call God, and they are attempting to help people who are willing to change and move closer to God, by thinking and behaving differently. I have known several men and women who met those two angels, and I watched how they responded to those two angels and they moved past believing God exists, to knowing God exists. Some of them also met other angels, such as Gabriel, Raphael and Khamael. They came to wonder when they were ever not in church? They came to know what Jesus meant in the Gospels when he said to be in but not of this world. Only one of them was a Christian. It was not easy for any of them, and some of them gave up.

Sloan Bashinsky

March 26, 2025