I love opening the blank page on my Mac and starting to type. I consider it the only thing that I do well. And some of you may be thinking, “You mean that’s it?” And I would have to say yes, it is. My writing life is as sure as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. It is built on what I have learned from a lifetime on the path of awakening. I have had some wonderful experiences. One of the craziest was when I dreamt to going to Hawaii to meet a teacher. My husband, Bob, couldn’t resist the idea of Maui and it WAS our 25th anniversary. So off we went.

By intuition I found the teacher, whose name was John Ramsey. He was smart and funny and deliciously weird. He had built himself a hut on some land right on the ocean and he surfed daily. He was a good looking blonde man, skinny as a rail. During our meeting, he reclined on his round bed and I sat in a chair up close to him. Bob chose to sit behind me, as if he was announcing that he would have no part of this craziness.

He taught something he called The Receiving Course but I didn’t take it. It cost a ridiculous amount of money and we were leaving soon anyway. But he gave me the whole load, as they say. The gist of what I came to meet him for was this: He told me that I was the Self. He was Ramana with a lei, you might say. He was droll and dry and we hit it off immediately.

After Vernon Howard died, Bob and I returned to Maui, only this time I got very sick. Bob had to take me to a clinic and the doctor said my heart was going so fast he couldn’t even count the beats. He said, “If it doesn’t slow down, I am putting you in the hospital.” I said, “It will slow down.” And it did. But the trip back home was torture. I coughed the whole way.

When I told John I had gotten sick, he said something like this, “You created yourself getting sick so you wouldn’t have to hear me say that you don’t need a teacher.”

The last time I called John he was quite ill with emphysema and had had to tear down his little hut because it didn’t conform to safety regulations. I treasure the memory of the only time I met him in the flesh, though. He was a renegade. At some point after I visited him, he left the island and toured around Australia for a while. He apparently had some quite dangerous encounters, pushing the envelope as he loved to do.

He told me some really funny things. One was this. “Don’t try to wake people up. Let them nap. They will wake up when they are ready.”

And I am still trying to rouse myself from the sleep of being human. It was fun meeting John in the dream. I have written about the dream that sent me to Maui to meet him. In it, a woman guide told me that I had a teacher, but that I would meet a teacher from Hawaii. She said I had the Christ Consciousness. I was to hear this later from a Zen master, too. He was as weird as John Ramsey and at some point I abruptly severed our connection.

I tell you these things because when you are on the Way, amazing things happen when you are on the edge of waking up.

I called my last book, “The Edge of Enlightenment.” I have found the edge to be unendurable except for brief periods of time.

There will come a day, though, when the edge will not be enough. And then I will not have to write anymore. The silence will have taken over the land.

Vicki Woodyard