Lisbon and Turning Inward
Peter's Call to Healing
It was May 4th of that year when I began consciously waking up.
I had already been stationed in Lisbon for several months. Despite the change in setting, the detachment was in disarray. I remember being told by senior Staff NCOs — and even some officers — that the most meaningful posts would be the hardest. That hardship forces connection, often with people you'd never otherwise choose. And they were right.
When I arrived in August of 1997, morale was low. The Marines there had been through a disruptive phase. A tangled romantic relationship with embassy staff had fractured the group, and most were no longer socializing outside their official duties. Some of the Marines simply didn't get along, and the tension was palpable. Individually, they were decent men — but together, the room would turn cold. Conversation would halt. The air would get heavy.
During those months, I found myself questioning more than just my surroundings. I began examining my spiritual awareness — and the role my early philosophical curiosities might play in shaping my future. I also started wrestling with a deeper ethical concern: the moral authority to take a life in the line of duty.
After years of training in the safe and effective use of military weapons — and carrying a sidearm to work daily for over a year — I began asking: Could I live with the outcome of a deadly force encounter? I wasn't a conscientious objector. I could justify lethal force in a life-threatening situation. But my downtime wasn't filled with bravado or escape — it was filled with questions. Big ones. Ancient ones. Ones I hadn't yet known how to ask before.
I wasn't raised religious, aside from the occasional Christmas or Easter service with my family and grandmother. But even before joining the Marine Corps, I had been drawn to Eastern philosophies. I remember watching The Golden Child in the late 1980s and wondering what that level of mysticism — of spiritual clarity — could mean for a person's life.
To be anointed from such a young age? To be guided by something unseen and luminous? That idea stirred something in me.
Organized religion, with its rigidity and judgments, had always turned me off — especially as I saw it start to influence extended members of my family. And yet, these tensions, these contradictions — between faith and doubt, tradition and curiosity -- became turning points in my inner life. They didn't close doors — they opened them.
Precognitive Perceptions
In the months leading up to my awakening — and the out-of-body experience that followed — I began noticing a series of precognitive dreams that heightened my psychic awareness. These scenarios came to me during sleep, each one vivid and emotionally charged, as if preparing me for something just beyond the veil. As winter unfolded, so too did the intensity of my dreams. This expanded awareness felt like both a test and a signal — an indicator of the deeper levels of consciousness I had been slowly cultivating over the years.
At one point, I confided in a fellow Marine about what I was experiencing — about the dreams, the intuitive hits, the sense that something larger was beginning to unfold. His response was dismissive, quick to downplay anything that couldn't be squared away with the material world. That was enough for me. Whatever was coming next, I would keep it to myself.
One morning, I was preparing for an off-duty work assignment, getting ready to shower and shave after our early PT run. Physical training while on embassy duty was still required, much like in the Fleet Marine Force, but with more flexibility. We didn't run in formation. In fact, we ran as a group — individually — a strategy meant to reduce the risk of surveillance, which was always present, even if unseen.
It was still early. The sun had just begun to rise as I returned to my room. I stood there, alone, and found myself inspecting my face in the full-length mirror mounted on the back of the door. The room was mostly dark, but just enough light filtered through the barely opened window to make out my reflection.
Then something shifted. The light in the room began to move — subtly at first — from dark, to light, and back to dark again, like the ebb and flow of a tide. I turned, caught off guard, and found myself staring into the mirror. At first, it was just me — the shape of my face, the weight of the moment. But then my reflection softened. The edges blurred. My face slowly faded into the mirror around it.
Something was changing. Something was about to happen.
The Shaman's Call to Power
At first, I began to see animals — their shapes, their spirits — as my face and body continued to shift in and out of the mirror's light. My features dissolved, replaced by flickers of fur and form. Though I was acutely aware that I was due for an appointment at the embassy — and had no idea what time it was — I allowed myself just a few more moments with the mirror before pulling myself away to shower.
As I stepped out of my room and headed down the hallway toward our common shower area, something happened. My consciousness slipped — not out entirely, but just enough. It moved over my shoulder, outside my body. I watched myself walking from behind, as if I were both actor and observer, drifting somewhere between presence and departure.
When I returned to my body, I remember the water — scalding hot, grounding me. The sudden jolt of awakening from that earlier moment was now fully alive in me. I shaved. I showered. I functioned. But something in me had shifted.
When I returned to my room, I found myself back at the mirror — picking up the gaze I had left behind. The young Marine in me didn't understand what was happening, not yet. But now I know: I was about to meet my guide.
He appeared in my mind's eye — suddenly and vividly — as my brow opened wider. His two eyes pierced through the veil between worlds. He stood atop a handmade wooden raft, bound together with worn-out ropes, steadying himself with a long wooden oar. The landscape around him looked like the isles of Scotland — misty, timeless, ancient.
He didn't speak. He just stood there, quietly, as if he had been expecting me. His stare was steady. His clothes, ragged. His presence, unmistakable.
His name is Peter.
That first vision would later unfold into a series of past-life regressions — one of them in Paris — that helped me remember who I was, and what I had come here to do.
And for years afterward, I would return to those two eyes — and a few others — as I answered the call to step into the work that was waiting for me.