The Night I Screamed at God and God Answered

In late 1991, I was thirty-four years old and had made a considerable amount of money in my land development career. Gorgeous house in Fairbanks Ranch, two boys under six, a wife who loved me. I was on top of the world.

My wife was not. She was asking the questions that arrive uninvited in your late thirties — who am I, what am I doing, what is this all for. She found a ten-day seminar that promised to help. When she came home, she was a different person. Different in a way I couldn’t explain and couldn’t ignore. I enrolled immediately.

The seminar was held in a large conference room — a large room, group work, meditations, the kind of setup that has existed in a thousand forms. There is nothing novel about the ingredients. The magic comes from the readiness of the customer. I was ready.

During a meditation on the first Sunday, I came to a dark tunnel. Familiar. I had seen it before. Every time, I turned away. This time, the leader encouraged me to go in. Go past my fear. So I did. Something shifted. I had given myself permission to enter a place I had always refused.

What happened next, I did not see coming.

During a deeper meditation a few days later, I became aware of a rage I did not know I carried. It was directed at God. Not abstract. Not theological. Personal. I felt it rise through my body and I let it come. When it came, it was overwhelming. I shouted directly at God — out loud, in a room full of people, with a fury I had never accessed in my life.

All these thousands of years that we needed you, nothing. You were not there. We prayed to you. We honored you. We loved you. And you never answered. We survived famines and torment beyond comprehension, begging you for help, and you did nothing. Now we have finally stepped out of the darkness on our own, and you want to show up for the celebration?

I had no idea that lived inside me.

That evening, during the next meditation, I found myself in a very deep state. I started repeating the same words with my eyes closed. Tears running down my face. Take me, God. Please take me. Take me, Father. Please take me. Over and over. I do not know where those words came from. I had not been taught any of this.

And then something happened that I have never shared publicly in the thirty-five years since.

I met God. Felt God. Knew I was looking into the eyes of something I had never believed was possible. It remains the most important thing that has happened to me in my life, to this current moment.

I know how that sounds.

I know because I have spent decades asking every hard question about it. My mind — which I trust, which I have trained, which I have spent forty years studying — has generated dozens of explanations. Perhaps some deeper part of my brain conjured the experience because I needed it. A boy with a painful father relationship creating the ultimate father. Perhaps collective consciousness showed God in the way it can be accepted. Perhaps other forms of intelligence use familiar shapes to reach us. Perhaps something darker was at play. I have sat with every one of these possibilities. I have not dismissed a single one.

It is the foundation of my life.

Our minds are not capable of understanding everything. We struggle with this. Culture will lull you into the illusion that humans can eventually know it all. But we cannot. And once we accept that — really accept it, not as defeat but as honesty and humility — it humbles us in a way that makes room for experiences our logic cannot contain.

I do not know what God is. I do not know what the Universe is. I do not know what existence is. What I know is that the experience was real in the way that matters — it changed how I moved through the world. It broke a framework I had been living inside and forced me to build a new one. And then that framework broke too. And I built again. It broke again. That has been the pattern for forty years.

People sometimes ask what decades of studying consciousness have taught me. The honest answer is not a set of conclusions. It is a comfort with - not knowing.