The Sacred
Warrior Teachings

There is only Now.

We speak of past and future because that is how a human life moves — one day into the next. But the past can only be remembered now. The future can only be imagined now. Every experience you have ever had, you had in the present moment.

I experienced this directly while sitting with the sacrament. There was no yesterday. There was no tomorrow. There was not even the sensation of time passing. There was only Now, and that Now was eternal. I experienced infinity, and it changed how I understand God, life, death, and what Jesus meant when He said the Kingdom of God is within us.

I do not believe heaven is a distant place on a cloud or on the far side of the universe. I believe the Kingdom is here, and that what separates us from it is the narrowness of human consciousness.

God is not waiting somewhere in the future. God is here.

This also changed how I understand death. For decades I wondered about my sister Monica, who died at nineteen. Was she somewhere, waiting? Could a person grow bored inside an eternity that never ends?

Then I experienced timelessness, and the question dissolved. Boredom requires time. Waiting requires time. Eternity is not an endless stack of days — eternity is the absence of time. Monica is not waiting. She is held in an eternal state of Grace, in the eternal Now.

I cannot prove that to another person, and I would not try. I can only tell you what I experienced and what it taught me.

The best way I can describe our relationship with God is an ocean.

Walk into the ocean with a glass and scoop up some water. The glass creates the appearance of separation. But the water came from the ocean, and it is still the same water.

The glass is the ego. Edge God Out.

We arrive here and we collect. Names. Titles. Accomplishments. Failures. Trauma. Shame. Fear. Regret. Stories about who we think we are. Eventually those stories get loud enough to drown out what is underneath them.

And it does not get more ego than a Navy fighter pilot. Or a SEAL. We are built out of it. Trained into it. Rewarded for it. The ego is the thing that keeps you alive at three hundred knots and it is the same thing standing between you and God.

So letting go was a fight. Trusting was a fight. Everything in me wanted to stay in command of the aircraft.

The sacrament arrested that. For a few hours the glass came apart, and what was on the other side of it was God. When the ego finally dissolved, what came was the deepest peace I have ever known.

There is an old line carved on a wall at St. Paul’s Monastery on Mount Athos:

It means that if you let go of ego and pride and selfish wanting while you are still breathing, what you actually are does not end when the body does. I experienced ego death.

I have no fear of death.

And hear this, because it is the part people get wrong: you do not have to climb up to God, and you do not have to abase yourself to reach Him.

God meets you exactly where you are.

Drunk. Ashamed. Furious. Numb. Halfway out the door. Wherever you are standing right now is close enough. He is already there.

During the most profound experience of my life, on my knees, God washed away my sins and said six words that rearranged everything:

That does not mean people don’t make mistakes. We do. It does not mean we don’t wound one another and ourselves. We do. It does not mean trauma and evil aren’t real. They are.

It means none of that defines the soul underneath it.

You are not your trauma. You are not your shame. You are not your addiction. You are not your worst day, your greatest mistake, or the worst thing another person did to you.

Underneath all of it there is something that came from God, and it was never damaged.

This is why we do not believe people are broken. A person can be badly wounded. A person can get lost. A person can forget who they are. But wounds close, the lost find their way home, and what was forgotten can be remembered.

That is how I understand healing now. Remember who you are.

The sacrament is sacred to us. The sacrament is not the destination.

It opens a door. It quiets the noise, softens the ego, and lets us see what trauma, fear, shame, and the chaos of ordinary life have hidden.

But God does the healing.

God gave us free will. Some of us use it to love. Some of us, sadly, use it to hurt. He could have made robots that bow to Him around the clock, but a robot cannot love you back, and that was never the point.

Which means the asking matters. The second a person says they are sorry, or says out loud that they want to be well, God hears it and goes to work.

I learned this in the most important lesson I have ever received. During a ceremony I told God I was sorry. I felt like I was failing Him, because I was trying so hard to help all these people heal and I could not do it.

The answer came gently:

A hundred pounds came off my shoulders.

I know what asking looks like, because I did it once and I have the page.

On 20 October 2021, the day before ceremony, I wrote a prayer in my journal. I do not think I had written a prayer down once in my entire life before that day.

Two days later I went back to that page and wrote: ANSWERED.

That lesson is the foundation of how we work at Sacred Warrior Fellowship. We do not heal anyone. We do not save anyone. We walk beside people. Sometimes we carry them. Sometimes we push them toward a door they are afraid to open.

The journey belongs to them and to God.

I call myself a recovering Catholic.

I was taught there was a spiritual chain of command. God, then Jesus, then the Holy Spirit, then angels, then saints, then the Pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, monsignors, priests — and then, at the very bottom of that ladder, me. The altar boy.

There is no chain of command. God is the chain.

There is no separation, and nobody stands between you and direct experience with God. It took me forty years and one night on my knees to find that out.

The more of this work I do, the less I know.

Ram Dass said it better than I can.

That is exactly right.

I do not have all the answers. I do not believe any human being does. Be very careful around anyone who tells you otherwise.

Sacred Warrior Fellowship has no gurus. Nobody needs flowing robes, a mountaintop, or a spiritual title to speak with God. Nobody here stands between you and God.

I can tell you what happened to me. I can tell you what saved my life. I can walk beside you and help you avoid some of the mistakes I made.

Your relationship with God belongs to you.

Humility is not weakness in a faith, and it does not make a faith less sincere. In 2025 a federal court in Utah, considering a religious-freedom claim brought by a small entheogenic church, declined to hold that church’s existential humility against it. Jensen v. Utah County, No. 2:24-cv-00887 (D. Utah, Feb. 20, 2025), order granting preliminary injunction.

A church is not made legitimate by a man at the front of the room claiming to have the answers. If anything, that is the warning sign.

That is why I think of myself as an apostle and not a guru. An apostle is a witness. My job is to say: This is what I experienced. This is what changed me. This is what I learned. Now go find God yourself.

In April of 2026 I stood on the grounds of Harvard Divinity School at a gathering of entheogenic churches.

Understand what that ground is.

I debriefed that day on the first episode of our podcast, Sacred Ground. The first ten minutes are me standing in that chapel, working out what it meant. Watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts.

I was there for a gathering of entheogenic churches, and later that year I sat on a panel at Harvard Law School and wrote for its Petrie-Flom Center on why this is a First Amendment question. Both are published and you can read them: the Harvard Law School panel, and the essay I wrote for Petrie-Flom.

But the reason that ground matters is older than any of that.

On the evening of July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson stood in Divinity Hall and addressed the graduating class. He was a former Unitarian minister. He was a graduate of that school. The students themselves had invited him.

He told them the church had gone cold — not because God had gone anywhere, but because the church had traded the living experience of God for a secondhand report of somebody else’s. He said men had come to speak of revelation as something given long ago and finished, as if God were dead.

Then he said the thing that got him exiled:

And to those young men about to take pulpits, he said:

And inside that address he issued the challenge that named everything I have written on this page: Acquaint thyself at first hand with Deity. You can read every word of the Divinity School Address for yourself.

The response was immediate and hostile. A Harvard professor called it the latest form of infidelity. His own former mentor preached against him from the university chapel. Harvard did not invite him back for roughly thirty years.

Now read what he said, and read what we believe.

The Kingdom is within. No one stands between you and God. Revelation did not close. God is not a historical figure. God is here, now, and available to you directly — not through us, not through a priest, not through a book about somebody else’s encounter.

We did not invent this.

We are standing in a very old American line, and the man who said it most clearly was condemned for it by the most respected divinity school in the country.

That is worth remembering when someone tells you a church like ours is new and suspect. It is not new. The only thing new is the door we walk through.

And notice what happened to Emerson. The institution punished him for saying God can be met directly. Institutions have always done that.

He was right anyway.

When I speak about Christ consciousness, I mean trying to see and live the way Christ taught: through love, forgiveness, service, compassion, surrender, and communion with the Father.

Jesus pointed past ego and toward God, every time. Love your enemies. Forgive the ones who hurt you. Care for the suffering. Set down your pride. The Kingdom of God is already within you and among you.

Christ consciousness means trying to live closer to that awareness.

And let me be plain about something, because it matters. This is a church of God.

What met me that night was not a man with a beard. It was the biggest, whitest, most beautiful light I have ever seen, and what came off it was love, forgiveness, and infinite compassion without end. That is what we worship. Christ is the Teacher of the Way — and the Way leads to God.

Not look at me.

How may I serve?

A Sacred Warrior is not someone who conquers other people.

A Sacred Warrior has the courage to walk into the places inside themselves they spent years avoiding.

For one person that ground is combat. For another it is childhood abuse, grief, addiction, shame, rage, regret, or the quiet conviction that he is unworthy of love.

We do not go in there to wage another war on ourselves. We go in to bring light into what has stayed hidden.

Sometimes the bravest thing a warrior does is surrender. Sometimes it is forgiveness. Sometimes it is asking for help. And sometimes it is finally extending compassion to the wounded person he has spent his whole life judging.

Twenty-two veterans a day are dying because nobody got to them in time.

We are going after them.

I believe consciousness is fundamental, and that this human life is a brief experience inside something infinitely larger than we can comprehend.

Its brevity may be the point.

We get to love. We get to lose. We get to laugh until we cry and cry until there is nothing left. We get to raise children, bury people we love, make mistakes, forgive, learn, and grow old.

If this body lasted forever, would a single day of it matter?

So do not wait for heaven to start living.

Hold your children. Tell people you love them. Forgive while you still have the chance. Serve someone who can do nothing for you in return.

You are inside something extraordinary. Do not sleep through it.

This entire journey is remembrance.

We spend our lives searching outside ourselves for the thing that will finally make us whole. Achievement. Money. Rank. Alcohol. Recognition. Whatever it happens to be.

None of it fits the space reserved for God.

The Kingdom did not disappear. God did not leave. We forgot.

That is canon. It is in every Bible on every shelf in America. And an ancient text found at Nag Hammadi says it again, with an image I have never been able to shake.

Two thousand years ago someone wrote that down, and it is the same thing we are saying now. Stop looking up. Stop looking out there. It was never far away.

And sometimes — through Grace, prayer, suffering, forgiveness, service, sacrament, or simply getting quiet enough to listen — we remember.

That is what Return Home means.

We are not traveling to a distant destination. We are remembering where we came from, who we are, and who has been with us the entire time.

Years before I ever sat in ceremony, I was reading A Course in Miracles. My copy is dog-eared and full of highlights. It describes the whole journey to God as a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed. I did not understand that sentence when I first read it. I do now.

The Kingdom is within. The Kingdom is here. The Kingdom is Now.