Chapter 4
Jozef’s Story: Dying Into God
It is the year 2001. I have been struggling with this manuscript for several months, wanting to tell a story that may prove helpful to others, and wanting at the same time not to tell it, never to go back to the kind of pain that has brought me to this point. Andy’s death, my own illness, an abandoned career, the dissolution of a marriage – what sort of ingredients are these to make into a tale that speaks in any way of hope for the future?
During this time, I speak often with Jozef, who redirects me from the pain to an energy that I feel beginning to enter my life. At first I am unable to name it properly. He points me to texts I have never read before, the Nag Hammadi, the Kabbalah; to words I have never heard, the Shekinah, Sophia. “Have you realized yet what the book is really about?” he asks.
Sometimes there are souls who return to us in a very high state of evolution to fulfill a specific purpose. Jozef is such a person. He is a completed spirit who has been fully connected in the spiritual sense from the time of his earliest consciousness, and fully cognizant of the work that would be his to complete. It was Jozef who first clearly confirmed the direction I was to take along my spiritual path; Jozef who had the vision and the words to express what I could comprehend in only the most elementary of terms.
At the heart of Jozef’s message are the enduring Universal Truths, the truths that are unchanging and unyielding, though always simple and direct. He is unique in his clarity of vision about his task in this lifetime and the information that we so urgently need to hear. We have entered an era when it is possible for us to gain a fuller understanding of the Trinity than we have ever had before, to dispel old myths and distortions of the truth and to put in their place a more accurate set of guidelines for our evolution. This is the time that Jozef refers to as The Age of Awareness:
The Age of Awareness
The human psyche develops in two thousand-year increments, each era having its own particular energy and focus. The patterns and habits of each time period suit that two-thousand year interval only. Souls are calibrated for the age they are born into, and one person is born every two thousand years to hold the energetic charge for that age. The Piscean Age, the era just passed, held a martyr complex, an enlarged ego or an ego in reverse, in which the individual served an untouchable God from a place of suffering. Today there is a collective charge that is being activated.
The collective is a body of energy of which we are all a reflection. Creative Source created the collective body and emanated individual sparks. Before we go back to Source, we must pick up the collective parts, activate and reconnect the collective charge and go back as a group. The collective body needs to merge back with God. Some people are afraid of the idea of giving up their individuality, but this is not the case. By residing in the collective, we expand our uniqueness and reside in our Divinity.
The tenets of this age are soul growth and the alleviation of human suffering. Suffering cannot be eliminated altogether while we reside on this plane; it is part of the school curriculum while we are here. Suffering is part of what creates a balance here—It is how some have chosen to learn and to grow. We decide before we come down here what will help us to grow in our next step. In this lifetime, we are integrating the qualities that are missing so that we can evolve. This may show up as suffering. It is not a part of our soul growth, but some choose it as a means to express their growth. As we move into the 21st century, which is all about acceptance, awareness, and evolution, we are now being given the energetics to support us and to create an easier transition for us to evolve.
Humans are a Divine creation and originate from a Divine Source. What humans have been trying to do is to humanize spirit since it cannot be conceptualized. When we try to conceptualize it, we turn it into suffering because that is something we can understand. Suffering is tangible—we can see it, feel it, thus understand it. It is something we can work through and work with and it makes us feel as though we are serving the Divine; the Divine is tangible even though it is often not seen in all of our surroundings.
In order to progress to our next step, we need to develop our discernment. We must assume personal and social responsibility and accountability so that we again are united with our brothers and sisters everywhere throughout the world. We are all connected. No matter how many miles, oceans, or languages separate us, we are not separate. We must learn to be supporting, nurturing, and accepting of each other; to continue to open our hearts and unite with one another, to restore balance and neutrality on this planet.
In the present age, we have been given the blessing of transparency. We can’t hide behind illusory beliefs; we live in a glass house. We must choose to empower the positive in our lives and live from that place—to empower what feeds and nourishes ourselves and others on all levels.
The nature of service work is something that confuses people sometimes. I don’t serve in order to be connected to God. It’s the other way around. As you evolve, your service work comes by proxy of your evolution. It is secondary to your connection and commitment to God. You don’t go into your service work and evolve as a result. When the Buddha gave up his life as a crown prince of India and went in search of enlightenment, he tried to find it first in doing good deeds or performing certain tasks or in giving up his earthly possessions. But he found that it could not be done in that way. First he had to find himself in connection to God, his own soul-ful self, and then the rest fell into perspective. This is true for all of us. As you go along in your growth and in your connection to God, these things happen. If you do good deeds, that is something just for you. It’s the reward in itself. But when you do the work out of connection to the Creative Source, then growth occurs as you go along in your progression. Most people do it the other way around, but it doesn’t work that way. You find yourself first, your spiritual nature in relation to Source, build that relationship with God, that communication, and then these things happen by proxy as you go along.
Jozef’s message, then, is one of personal accountability and responsibility as we move toward a collective awakening. Along the way, the act of acknowledging and integrating the masculine and feminine energies within ourselves represents a first step toward this awakening. Rather than viewing life from the perspective of pairs of opposites that cannot be reconciled—black and white, night and day, male and female-- we begin to live our lives from a perspective of inclusiveness that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all.
From this vantage point of a larger understanding of our own natures, we will arrive also at a more inclusive understanding of Creative Source, one which acknowledges the feminine parts as well as the masculine. The human condition mirrors the Divine. Just as we all have within us a masculine active side and a feminine receptive side, so too does Source. The male God, he tells us, is Love and the Letter of the Law, and is connected with the dispensation of Universal Law. The female God, the Creatrix, is Light and the Spirit of the Law. She is the force or energy that allows the mathematical act of creation to unfold. The Holy Spirit, which is also feminine in nature and in many older scriptures is referred to as the Shekinah, is the energy that moves through all things, connecting them and causing communication to occur. Together, they comprise the electrical-magnetic forces of the universe, the currency and voltage that are the Source and the All. This is a subject that Jozef will speak more about in The Golden Thread: Awakening to the Feminine Divine.
Jozef has experienced both physical death as well as the deeper soul-surrender of self to a higher purpose. While he is the first to emphasize that one does not need to go through a death experience to advance spiritually, he did turn a painful time into an opportunity for the advancement of his soul.
When he was asked about his near-death experiences, Jozef responded, “First of all, there really is no such thing as a near-death experience. You either die or you are living. I have had several death experiences, in which I actually died, but was then later revived. The reason I kept having these experiences was that my physical body could not hold the currency of the energetics that I carried. I was born completely activated, which means that I had access to all gifts, abilities and talents that allowed me to be able to see into other realms and dimensions and be able to pull information from them. Since my physical body could not hold this high voltage, it kept shutting off, completely rebooting its systems—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—to amp up so that I could hold higher voltages. My last death experience occurred in 1997, at which time I was able to fully integrate and hold this voltage.”
He tells us that an experience like this is usually part of an initiation that builds upon what one already has. “It is no longer appropriate, necessary, or effective to have death experiences to advance us in any way. Soul advancement is happening here and now on this dimension. With this in mind, each one of us is born with extreme healing gifts, talents and abilities. Some of us choose to access them, and some do not. Some of us choose to utilize them in the healing modalities, some as teachers, or in corporate business, or by parenting, or writing or as a janitor, physician, homeless person or scientist. Everyone has these gifts—they are human traits. They can be awakened, developed, and increased with commitment and practice.”
Jozef’s own work is directly related to our path of soul growth, by helping the soul anchor into the body. “At my programs,” he says, “the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies, both atomically and subatomically are repaired, realigned, and restructured so that the soul can anchor more firmly into the body. For a lot of people, this is a new theory, a new idea. In order for the soul to come down onto this dimension and anchor into the physical body, it needs to go in subatomically into the auric field and anchor there. If the first fifteen layers are not there or have been damaged, it cannot anchor into this dimension. The evolution of humankind has been suspended because of this. The benefits of this kind of repair work are that you can then connect to your own Divine definition, move forward from the physical to the spiritual, and advance in your evolution.”
His early life was a continual honing process, a fine tuning that brought him ultimately to a place of full physical presence and participation in his life’s work at the age of twenty-seven. In the passage below, Jozef describes the experiences leading up to the beginning of his soul assignment:
I was very sick as a child. I got more so around the age of nine. I was born very sensitive to everything, so if the wind changed direction, I would fall ill and almost die every time. There was always something; I was always sickly. Then at nine, I started getting physically ill, all of the time, and I was in a lot of pain. Up until that time, the pain would come and go. Then around the time of puberty, it came and stayed with me until I was twenty-seven. It was a constant, twenty-four-hour-a-day-hour physical pain that I was in. I had very few days when I wasn’t ill. I remember those days. Out of all of the past, I can tell you the exact days that I wasn’t ill, because there weren’t that many times. There were two occasions—once there was a three-day period that I wasn’t in pain and once it was two days that I was not in physical pain. Some energy work that I received on both of those occasions gave me a little breathing space for a short while.
Over time, I became sicker and sicker, and after having all the different medical tests that Western Medicine has to offer, the doctors just decided that it was an emotional, psychological illness-- that I wasn’t sick, that I was making it up for attention. Like most parents, my parents didn’t know what to do. So we looked at some alternative methods, some indigenous healers and energy workers, who really could not do anything either. This was simply something that I had to endure. We hoped that it had purpose and meaning.
As I got progressively more ill, I realized that I was running away from the things I had come here to do—the task that seemed impossible of delivering the messages of an abstract, unknowable, unfathomable God. What I was running from became the same thing I eventually found solace and peace in—the mystery and enigma of God. At that point, I decided that my training, my discipline would be to still be able to function in extreme pain and suffering. The experience really served to strengthen my connection and commitment to God. Most people who become sick for a long time turn away from God because they are not being healed or helped. Well, I was born with an innate sense of God and knowing God and with a connection to God, so I used those times of pain and suffering to go inside, to connect more strongly, more fully. Instead of defining myself externally, I spent a lot of time in contemplation and prayer. Even though it brought me no physical peace, I did have peace in my soul and in my spirit.
In those moments, I felt a sense of peace, regardless of what was happening in the physical storm around me. So I spent a lot of time with that. Since I was an extremely different child and because I could see non-physical energetic beings, I could connect, and that added a whole other dimension to the way I experienced the illness. Being raised Catholic and going through all the Sacraments and the different processes of Catholicism… those things just made me sicker and sicker, and the progression of that did not help my physical health.
I did not realize it as a child, but it didn’t help my family psychologically or spiritually to see me suffer so much. It was a hard thing for them to watch and try to understand why this was happening to me for apparently no cause and at the same time seeing my dedication to spirit, to God. As a result, they have faith issues surrounding this period in my life. People could not comprehend how I could go through so much and still have that faith, have that connection.
And so it just developed from there. When I was 27, I was extremely ill and I had just had it … that was a very difficult year, 1997, for the entire planet. That was my completion cycle. I just needed to get to 27, and I knew I would be fine. A part of a significant process occurred that summer. I became dangerously ill, with symptoms that I had never had before in all of that time. I began having convulsions and seizures. Through that whole process, the masculine and feminine polarities, the magnetic and electrical properties, were brought into alignment, into a state of balance to prepare me for what was coming. I didn’t realize it at that time, however. I was just very ill, and so everything was set in order, because it was a preparation, an ongoing preparation.
My whole life has been an ongoing process that was preparing me for the work that I am doing now and for what I am here to do. It was ongoing and unending, and it was 24 hours every day for 27 years. I learned detachment and active faith and discernment. I spent 27 years developing those qualities. In those 27 years I felt that I had integrated 27 different lifetimes-- everything that I needed to have the currency and the voltage to complete what I came to do. All of those things missing that I didn’t have that I would need to complete this lifetime were all packed into the 27 years of a very frail physical body (there wasn’t much left of that poor vessel).
During that earlier death experience, I remember waking up in what you would consider to be heaven. And I was standing on what you would consider to be puffy clouds – just like people think. In the death experience that occurred during the summer of ‘97, I went through the tunnel. I went to the light at the end of the tunnel, and then I was there. Later that same year, in December, I just woke up without having to go through the tunnel, and do all the processes, because when you are dying, you are dying back and you are going through your third eye, out of your psychic door, into a time space continuum, into whatever your mental version is of heaven or God. So in that final experience, I was on these puffy clouds and stepped out onto a stone pathway. There was a huge door about 30 feet from me. And I knew instantly that if I got through that door, I would be finished, and I would not have to come back-- everything would be done. All I had to do was walk 30 feet to that door, walk through it, and I would not have to come back here-- it would be done. And I thought – oh, good! And so I started walking towards the door, and several different energetic beings appeared as I was walking along this path-- just different historical personalities or incarnations that you would recognize from world history, telling me that I had to go back and I wasn’t finished. Well, of course, I pushed them out of my way and kept on walking faster. As I got closer to the door, several angelic beings, the archangels that you would recognize from recorded history, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and some others, were standing there in their supremeness and ordered me to return. And I said to Michael, directly to him – Obviously, you don’t have the power to send me back or you would. Wouldn’t you? And I pushed them out of the way. And I kept moving faster toward the door. Because I realized at that moment – they don’t have the authority to stop me, or they would have already sent me back! Why would they be asking me, ordering me, demanding me, telling me, do it! I thought – ha! They can’t - and I kept going. As I got to the door, an unbelievable golden door that I knew was going to take me beyond the void, take me beyond this whole place, I looked up – and I was just a couple of inches from the door, I was just about to open the door and carry on walking because I didn’t care – I was automatically standing and then suddenly found myself floating in front of this huge energetic Being, filled with light, on this humungous golden throne. And it was so bright that I couldn’t even see with my spiritual eye. I couldn’t see with my chakras, I couldn’t see with my energetic being. I could not even look at this brilliant light that was directly in front of me. So, of course, I didn’t say anything. No need to push that envelope, right? I was just floating in front of this Being, and the only thing that I saw was a hand go up and a finger point out, and I was back into my psychic door, out through my third eye and I woke up in my physical body. My family was standing next to me. And I started crying. I was very upset! And you know – then I was just restored instantly after that. And I went home.
There were no medical explanations, no reasons; nobody could tell you why or how I got better. When I did come back, I had such a super sense of hearing that you could turn the dial on the radio and I could hear you turning that dial – it just echoed. It just was the loudest thing I had ever heard. I had just been through a life-threatening surgery that the doctors felt sure I would not survive—but there was no choice but to do it. The doctors had told my parents that I was not going to make it through surgery and that I was not coming back. After my return, they still said, he won’t survive – and they said – even if he makes it through, it will take a year-and-a-half of physical therapy because all of his organs have to be put back in working order. They said it would take months and months, years and years in order to regain strength. A short time later, I went from the ICU down to regular floor. It didn’t take long to recuperate. Very soon after that, I walked out of the hospital and that was it. My sister and I just got up and walked out. We didn’t talk to anyone. We got in the elevator, walked out of the hospital and never went back. That was it. That was the story. Basically overnight my physical body was restored. I gained thirty pounds – I only weighed eighty-eight pounds at that time – and then over the next two months, I gained twenty more pounds, and I was sent immediately the summer after that to go and start teaching instead of working. During that period, I was working and teaching and doing everything at the same time.
From my teenage years on, I had been working with groups and individuals. At first my focus was just on an accurate interpretation of the scriptures. But by the time that I was twenty-seven, the focus came to be more on the Divine Feminine. Even in re-interpreting the scriptures, or interpreting the scriptures correctly, it was very evident that Woman has a place of Honor, and that there is something much more to the Creative Source than just the male God. Most people even today aren’t ready for the idea of the Divine Feminine-- for the Creatrix or the Holy Spirit to be female. Twenty years ago, it was even harder to deal with. So we did incremental steps as we learned to introduce the concepts so that they were psychologically comfortable for people. By the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, we were moving more into the empowerment of the female.
Recently, probably only in the last two or three years, we have been actually naming the Creatrix, naming the Shekinah and saying, this is what this is, this is where we are. We are just coming to an understanding of Sophia as the Creatrix, the female Goddess. We are just beginning to recognize the Shekinah, the Holy Spirit, the Great Teacher, also feminine in nature, the spirit that moves through all things. Older cultures called Sophia the Creatrix. They were aware of the male and female Gods as equal. They were able to comprehend that both the male and female deities are a part of the Whole yet very distinct in their attributes and qualities. This is a truth that we are just remembering today.
A lot of the information we have brought in has been soul-growth directed, talking to people about their soul as opposed to the New Age channeling and all this other stuff, you know-- getting rid of gurus and having them get a day job. That is the sort of thing that we have been working on- to bring an understanding of Sophia and the Shekinah back, to awaken an innate understanding of Sophia and the Shekinah.
People awaken to these truths in a gradual way. Sometimes it takes a very, very traumatic, life-altering experience, like an illness or a death. For most people, it is usually full of martyrdom; it’s painful and very horrible. And out of that, if the person can stay in their center, comes the lesson that they need. They find they want to do something, to contribute. And everybody on the planet is geared to evolve – period. No matter how highly they die in another life, they are here to evolve or they wouldn’t be physically incarnate – no matter if they are here to teach or whatever – they are here to evolve in their personal way, to God, whatever they understand God to be.
For Jozef, detachment is a key concept, one that we need to develop a clearer understanding of as we grow. Detachment is often used synonymously with not caring about a particular subject, or lacking interest in it, but this is not the case. Real detachment involves surrender to a higher will. It is the act of allowing an outcome rather than investing our human will to try to manipulate a particular outcome in any given case. When we pray with detachment, we acknowledge the wisdom of a higher Power and do not superimpose our own expectations and wishes upon this sacred act. Detachment in this sense means putting the ego aside as much as possible, dying into God to allow the highest good, whatever that might be, to occur.
Detachment allows us entry into a world where we may see beyond the surfaces of things. In this regard, it is much like the act of painting. The artist Robert Henri once said that a painting is the barometer of the artist's soul, a reflection of the artist's essence at the exact moment in time when the painting was completed. He observes in The Art Spirit that "a work of art which inspires us comes from no quibbling or uncertain man. It is the manifest of a very positive nature in great enjoyment, and at the very moment when the work was done. The brush stroke at the moment of contact carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at that exact moment into the work, and there it is, to be seen and read by those who can read such signs, and to be read later by the artist himself, with perhaps some surprise, as a revelation of himself….He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surface of his subject."
Thus, the artist approaching the canvas necessarily cultivates a sense of detachment to the outcome and relinquishes the illusion of control in favor of the great gift of an occasional glimpse of something larger than one's own limited viewpoint. It is very similar to an act of meditation, in which one centers and grounds as a preliminary to entering a prayerful state. The painter must open to greater receptivity, set aside at least temporarily the mental grocery list of other things to do-- the worries, obligations, and concerns that fill our days-- and enter as completely as possible into the present moment, focusing totally on the task at hand. This allows a person to step into the middle of the circle, to a place of greater connection with our core.
In a sense, we all are painters, facing what Winston Churchill has called the tyranny of the white canvas; wanting to know at the end of the day that we have lived our lives fully and well, to make of the finished design something beautiful and whole. For what all of us truly desire is to be able to give and to live from the center of our beings. In this way, all of our life becomes a prayer in motion. It is this practice that can restore to us a fuller comprehension of our own totality and of our own parentage.
In The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, one of the Gnostic Gospels, Mary asks Christ, "What is matter?" and "Will it last forever?" To this question, Christ responds, "All that is born, all that is created, all the elements of nature are interwoven and united with each other. All that is composed shall be discomposed; everything returns to its roots." The French theologian Jean-Yves Leloup calls this a highly metaphysical discussion, an inquiry into the fundamental nature of the world and of being human. He observes that Christ in these passages serves as savior in a special sense of the word: "What people really need to be saved from," he says, "is their ignorance and forgetfulness of the Being that is their destination and their source. Human beings are to be saved from their ignorance and obliviousness of the presence that Yeshua embodies. First and foremost, salvation is knowledge of the truth that shall make us free-- free of attachments and identifications with that which we mistake for real Being."
Real Being, then, is an understanding of reality that lies beyond the world of appearances, beyond the boundaries of delusion and separatism. All matter is impermanent, and ultimately interconnected. As Leloup says, "Nothing exists in itself or by itself, for the world is a vast tapestry woven of relationships. Not even the smallest strand of this web can be tugged without affecting all the myriad strands and interdependencies to which it is connected and of which it is composed. This is true of matter, and it is also true of the nature of the human body and the psyche that animates it….Ignorance of impermanence generates illusions, attachments, and therefore suffering-- all the ancient wisdom traditions tell us this."
The information that Jozef offers us is in this vast tradition of the inviolate, eternal truths that have been passed down to us as each new era unfolds. "We live at a pivotal point in history," he reminds us. "Light is being shed" on the things that we already know at a deeper soul level, but which we are just bringing up into consciousness. Through Jozef’s work, we can begin to see clearly through our spiritual eyes.
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