CODA - CHRIST IN YOU: A GOOD FRIDAY TESTIMONY
From the basement of Grace Church to the living Christ within
This is one man’s testimony. It is offered not as a model but as an invitation. The frequency was always broadcasting. The receiver was always there. The thread was always running. The only question — for every consciousness that has walked this far through this book — is the same question it has always been.
What is your testimony?
It is never too late to write it.
Wednesday of Holy Week, 2026. The Paschal moon setting to the west over Ontario at dawn. Then the sun rising to the east from the back of the same house. The x♀ yielding. The x♂ rising. Both caught the same Wednesday morning. Two days before the cross.
It began before the basement. Before Grace Church. Before the coal stove on Paris Street and the swing in the second floor shed and the salesman who walked away with the encyclopedia under his arm. It began with my mother’s words — words I received before I had the age to understand what was being given and have never been able to forget because they were not installed in the mind but in the ground beneath the mind.
I love God because I know God loves me.
Not belief. Knowledge. The same distinction that Carl Jung made famous in a BBC interview in 1959 and that the entire second chapter of this book was written to explore — my mother Trudy had already lived it before Jung named it, before I was old enough to ask the question, before the tradition had given me the vocabulary to understand what she was transmitting. She did not argue for God. She did not defend God against doubt. She knew. And because she knew she loved. And because she loved she gave that knowing to her oldest child before the world had a chance to fill his cup with anything else.
My faith did not arrive from nowhere. Both my grandmothers were women of faith — my father’s mother Alice, Anglican, and my Oma Margaret, Catholic — each one carrying the thread of the sacred through the particular discipline and dignity of her tradition. My father was Ellison. I carry his name as my middle name — Glennford Ellison Roberts — the lineage present in the name itself. My first name Glen came from my father’s brother, my uncle Glen — the family name passed forward in the tradition of a generation that understood that names carry more than identity. They carry the thread. My mother Trudy came from a different place. The war had taken too much. The trauma of Central Europe in the 1940s leaves marks that faith cannot always reach and that no theology adequately addresses. She carried what she could carry. And what she carried — the words she spoke to her oldest child before the world had fully formed him — was enough. More than enough.
My mother also gave me the garden. Not as a metaphor. As a practice. The love of growing things. The patience of the perennial — the hosta and the daylily and the tulip that ask nothing but the prepared ground and the turning season. I have been in one of my many lives a professional gardener. I have more than three thousand square feet of gardens in Cumberland Ontario waiting right now for the first crocus to push through the last of the snow. Every spring the same resurrection. Every spring the ground confirming what the testimony has been saying from its first sentence.
The ground is alive. Tend it with attention and it gives back more than you put in.
Everything that followed — the basement, the confirmation, the father’s death, the four yogas, the thirty years of vertical reading, the 130,000 words — was the education of something already present before the education began. My mother gave me the prior. The rest was verification.
I love God and I know God loves me. That is the truth of a lifetime I have been graced to live. And because I know God loves me I honour the sacred with my full being — to the last measure of breath and thought and work this body and mind have been graced to offer. The cross on this Good Friday has a fuller, deeper, and more complete meaning because of the grace of completing my lifetime’s work — Sacred Metaphysics and Consciousness: The History of the Absolute and Eternal. The meaning of the cross and the knowledge of the horizontal and vertical, the absolute and relative, the eternal and temporal — these are no longer philosophical propositions to be approached from a careful distance. They are the ground I am standing on.
There are mornings when a man sits down to write and discovers he is not so much composing as remembering. This is one of those mornings.
It is Good Friday. The morning has been sacred. My Lent this year has included the abstention of alcohol, which has become a personal tradition of more than twenty years. And this year marks the completion of a book — 130,000 words across more than thirty years of self-examination, study, meditation, and the slow patient work of a mind that was never book-smart but was always, from its earliest formation, reaching toward something it could not yet name. That reaching, I now understand, was never mine alone. It was the thread of Grace itself, running through a life from the very beginning — and I mean that both as metaphor and as the precise name of the church where it began.
Close your eyes with me for a moment.
The Basement
I am five years old. I am in the basement of Grace Anglican Church, Pointe-Saint-Charles, Montreal. It is sometime around 1963. Above me stands a building constructed in 1871 — enlarged in 1892 — built for the families of the men who built Canada. The smiths and founders and Irish labourers of the Grand Trunk Railway yards that sat directly across the street. Men who came from England and Scotland and Ireland, rented small houses in the streets of The Point, and built their faith into stone and mortar with the same hands they used for everything else. It is not a refined church. It is not a church of privilege or pretension. It is a working man’s church in what was once reputedly the toughest neighbourhood in Canada, and it smells precisely like what it is — wool and candle wax and old wood and the iron ghost of the railway that gave the neighbourhood its entire reason for existence.
I attended Sunday school in that church every week. And after each service the pattern was always the same — a short walk to my grandmother’s house on Paris Street, my father’s mother, just minutes away. That walk between the church and Paris Street was one of the fixed rhythms of childhood, the kind of rhythm that installs itself so deeply it becomes part of the structure of how you understand the world. The sacred and the domestic in the same morning. The church and the grandmother’s kitchen separated by nothing more than a few blocks of Point streets.
My grandmother’s house was a triplex on Paris Street — my father’s mother living on the second floor, reached by the outside staircase that was the defining architectural signature of working-class Montreal. Those exterior staircases — iron and wood, exposed to every season, climbing the face of the building in full view of the street — were not a design choice. They were a practical solution to the problem of maximising interior living space in buildings that housed multiple families on narrow urban lots. And the particular experience of ascending those stairs in a Quebec January — the iron railing cold enough to burn through a mitten, the steps iced over, the wind coming off the St. Lawrence with nothing between you and it — was as much a part of the formation as anything that happened inside the house at the top.
My grandmother’s house had a shed in the back where we played. It was two floors — the kind of structure that existed in The Point before anyone had thought carefully about the relationship between children and height and the complete absence of safety rules. There was a swing up there and I can close my eyes right now and feel the arc of it — the particular freedom of a child swinging in a second floor shed in Pointe-Saint-Charles with nothing between him and the ground below but the air and the rope and the absolute confidence of a boy who had not yet been told what to be afraid of.
The coal men came regularly — the delivery truck pulling up to the house, the men carrying the coal up in bags. In the kitchen the hot belly stove was the centre of the house. Not just in winter. Year round. Coal for heat in the deep freeze of a Quebec January and coal for cooking through every season — the same cast iron stove that warmed the kitchen also produced the meals. It was not a heating system. It was a way of life. The particular smell of coal and cooking together, the fierce red glow in the belly of the stove, the warmth radiating from the kitchen into every room — this was the ordinary daily reality of a working-class household in Pointe-Saint-Charles in the early 1960s. A world that has since vanished so completely that a child today would need a history book to imagine it.
A boy does not analyze these things. He receives them through every sense he possesses, before the mind has learned to edit what arrives. And what I received in that basement, before I had a single word of theology, was the unmistakable sense that something in this place was real, and that it had hold of me.
That was the beginning. The love that took hold in that basement has never released its grip. Everything that followed was the education of something already present before the education began.
The Formation of a Century
Robertson Davies — that most perceptive and mischievously wise of Canadian novelists — understood that a man’s formation is never accidental. The particulars of childhood, the specific gravity of place, the precise texture of the wound, the quality of wonder available to him — these are not incidental to what a man becomes. They are the raw material out of which character, in the fullest and most serious sense of that word, is forged.
I was born in November 1957, the oldest of five children in a working-class family in Pointe-Saint-Charles. I was a child of the Commonwealth in the full and felt sense of that phrase — we sang God Save the Queen in the mornings at Lorne School, and I was present in that classroom the day the Union Jack came down and the Maple Leaf went up in 1965, when Canada stepped away from one identity without yet fully knowing what the next one would be. The boy who watched it come down in a Pointe-Saint-Charles schoolroom was present at the hinge of something that could not be undone.
But before the flag, there were the earthquakes.
My first clear memories include my parents frightened in a way that parents are not supposed to be frightened — the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. I was four years old. I did not understand nuclear annihilation. I understood the frequency of adult terror with the absolute precision that children possess before they learn to doubt their own perceptions. The content was invisible to me. The fear was not.
Then November 1963, and the television went dark with adult grief. John F. Kennedy was assassinated and there was nothing on any channel but the same incomprehensible sorrow, hour after hour, day after day. I was six years old. I understood that the screen — the new god of the postwar living room — had stopped performing its ordinary function. The world had cracked somewhere and the crack was showing through the glass.
I am a relic in at least one respect — I remember watching in black and white the last time the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. It was 1967. I was nine years old. Some things are not forgotten.
What was being formed in me — alongside the fear and the grief and the spectacle — was a receiver. A consciousness tuned, through no choice of its own, to frequencies that most children were partially shielded from. That is not a complaint. It is an observation about the kind of formation that produces, eventually, either a broken man or a philosopher. Davies knew that these two outcomes are not always as distinct as we might prefer.
My father’s people came from Gaspé, where he followed his father, my grandfather Wilson, who were both fishermen on the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. My father came to Montreal in his adolescence, found his way onto the Great Lakes run, and there met my mother — Austrian-born, looking for a new life after the Second World War, her family carrying the trauma and particular discipline and dignity of Central European working class. My Oma — my grandmother Margaret — was in domestic service for the Timmins family in their Westmount mansion, the family whose Hollinger gold fortune had built one of the grandest houses in Montreal.
Consider what this means for a boy’s formation. I grew up in the poorest streets of The Point, in the shadow of the Grand Trunk Railway yards. And yet regularly, through my Oma, I crossed the entire social geography of Montreal to sit in the vast gold-funded rooms of a Westmount mansion. The railway worker’s church on one end. The gold dynasty’s drawing room on the other. A boy moving between them, belonging fully to neither, learning without knowing he was learning that the surface of things is never the whole of things.
I was not book-smart. Dyslexia played its part, though my generation had neither the diagnosis nor the accommodation. But I carried from very early a declaration — not spoken, not even fully conscious, but absolutely bone-deep — that I intended to be wise. I intended to know. Not to perform knowledge, not to accumulate its credentials, but to actually understand what this life was made of and what it was for. That declaration, planted in difficult soil, turned out to be the most durable thing in me.
I was blessed with my stepsister Heidi, old enough to be part of the Beatles revolution. Through her the music arrived before I had the age to seek it myself — the frequency that changed everything, that swept through a generation and left nothing quite the same. She brought it into the house. I honour her for that gift.
In 1966 my parents made the move that an entire generation of working-class Montreal families made in those years — out of the crowded streets of The Point and across the river to the suburbs. We moved to Ville Jacques-Cartier, Quebec, before it became Longueuil. For a family of five from Pointe-Saint-Charles the move was nothing short of television. A real house. A split-level with a built-in garage and a built-in stove top. My parents were moving on up. They had opened a shoe store. And in that shoe store — serving customers, managing inventory, standing behind a counter with their own name on the door — I received my first and most durable lesson in what sovereignty and entrepreneurship actually mean. Not the vocabulary. The reality.
And I had a secret desire that went unmet. A salesman came door to door selling the World Book Encyclopedia. The full set. The cream volumes with the gold lettering lined up on a shelf like a promise. He did his best to convince my parents. My parents did not see the value. The door closed. The encyclopedia went to someone else’s shelf on someone else’s street. I remember the specific ache of watching that door close — the hunger for the ordered knowledge of the whole world available on a shelf, for the structure that would make sense of everything if only someone would provide it. That hunger was the earliest available form of what later became the Universal Dynamics framework. The boy who watched the salesman walk away became the man who wrote his own encyclopedia. Not in cream volumes with gold lettering. In 130,000 words. A few years after that door closed the Fifth Dimension reached number one on the radio. May 1969. The Age of Aquarius had just been named.
And then, in the summer of 1967, my parents gave me a season’s passport to Expo 67. I was nine years old. Every opportunity I had I took the bus and the Métro to Île Sainte-Hélène and walked the greatest world’s fair of the twentieth century — sixty-two nations, every pavilion, the whole human project laid out in one luminous and impossible summer. I received it all — Japan and the Soviet Union, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome like a planet that had landed softly on the St. Lawrence, the accumulated aesthetic and spiritual inheritance of the entire human family arrayed for a boy from The Point to walk through alone with unlimited time and a season’s pass and the full unguarded receptivity of a nine-year-old who did not yet know that wonder was supposed to have limits.
Three years later, in December 1970, my father was killed. He was thirty-five years old. I was thirteen. He died in a violent head-on collision just miles from home — the ordinary distance between a man leaving the house and a man never returning.
By the time we made the move to Châteauguay our family had grown. From three children in The Point to five. Michael and Christine had joined us. And by December 5th 1970 the youngest was still small enough that the loss would leave its mark in ways none of us could yet measure. A young family at the beginning of something. Then suddenly a family remade by loss.
We were living in Châteauguay, Quebec. Just months before, he had taken me duck hunting not far from home on the Saint Lawrence. The ordinary gift of a father and a son on the river in the autumn. I did not know it was the last ordinary thing.
It was Saturday, December 5th. Hockey Night in Canada was on television, still in black and white — the Montreal Canadiens playing the Boston Bruins. We were in the basement, my siblings and I, watching the game. The ordinary Saturday night of a working-class family in Châteauguay. And then my mother’s voice came from upstairs.
Your father is dead.
There are moments that do not fade. Not because the mind chooses to keep them but because the ground shifted permanently at that instant and every detail of the ordinary world surrounding the shift is sealed into the memory with the precision of a photograph. The television. The hockey game. The Bruins defeating the Habs 4-2 at the Forum that night. The basement. The voice from upstairs. The particular quality of a Saturday evening that was ordinary until it was not and would never be ordinary again.
There is a particular species of wound that comes not from a relationship that was simply loving and then lost, but from one that carried unresolved weight at the moment it was permanently and without warning severed. Thirteen years old. The oldest of five. The ringleader who had borne the direct force of his father’s impatience, who now found himself holding that unresolved account with no possibility of settlement — the conversation that would never come, the resolution that the living can only achieve with the living.
That kind of wound does not simply mourn. It asks different questions. It goes deeper, or it does not go at all.
The declaration toward wisdom deepened after December 1970 into something that could not be undone. The wonder that Expo 67 had installed refused to be extinguished by grief. Both remained. Both, I now understand with the clarity that sixty-eight years eventually provides, were given. Not despite the difficulty of the formation. Through it.
Then the seventies arrived — Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd had a profound effect on me. I experienced both in person, close up, in 1975. What the music carried was not entertainment. It was the same frequency the basement on Wellington Street had carried — the unmistakable sense that something was real and had hold of you and would not let go. Different symbol. Same referent. The ground broadcasting through whatever available instrument the age provided.
The Containers of Grace
All five of us were baptized as children at Grace Anglican Church while our father was alive. The thread was installed in all of us before we had the age to choose it. That was his gift to his children while he was still present to give it.
After his death the three oldest — Billy, Carol, and I — attended confirmation class and were confirmed together at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Côte-des-Neiges. A different building, a different neighbourhood, but the same tradition, the same thread, the same unhurried Anglican gravity carrying three young people deeper into the covenant their father had set them on before he was taken. Billy has since passed. Carol carries it still. The confirmation was the continuation of something he had started. The living completing what the dead had begun. The thread holding across the severance.
St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Côte-des-Neiges stands to this day — as of Good Friday 2026 still an active parish at its historic address, 3970 chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, still holding its Sunday Eucharist, still serving the community. Grace Church on Wellington Street is closed. St. Mark’s in Cumberland is closed. But St. Paul’s endures. Some things outlast the circumstances that produced them.
From that basement on Wellington Street the path moved outward through the formal structures of Western Christianity, each one a genuine container and each one, in time, revealing its ceiling. I was married — the first time — in Grace Church itself, the same church where my parents had been married before me, in the same building above the same basement where the thread had first taken hold. The Baptist baptism came later — full immersion, public declaration, the genuine commitment of a man who did not do things halfway. Not a contradiction of the infant baptism but a completion of it. The Pentecostal fire came after that, and it was real. What I found was that the devotion they kindled was consistently larger than the theology available to contain it. The flame kept exceeding the lamp.
Each of these houses gave me something true and lasting. Each eventually showed me its ceiling. I do not stand in judgment of any of them. You cannot surpass what you have not fully entered, and I entered each one with everything I had.
It was in the aftermath of SARS — that strange and sobering season of 2003 when Ontario held its breath and the ordinary world of gathering became suddenly fragile — that I found my way to St. Mark’s Anglican Church in the village of Cumberland. I remember that season precisely because the congregation was not permitted to pass the peace — that ancient gesture of the liturgy, the handshake across the aisle, suspended by a virus that no one yet fully understood. The church that would hold the second great covenant of my life received me at the precise moment it could not offer its most ordinary human gesture. And yet something held. The peace that passes all understanding does not require a handshake.
And there, not long after, Catherine and I were married — the second great covenant of my life held by the same unhurried Anglican gravity that Grace Church had held the first.
Grace Church, Wellington Street — closed now. St. Mark’s, Cumberland — closed now. Both the churches that blessed the two marriages of my life have been set down, their doors no longer open. I do not read this as only loss. The institutional containers that held the covenants have completed their work. What the covenants themselves contained goes on. Catherine is here. The love that began in that basement in 1963 has found, across sixty-eight years, both its fullest human expression and its fullest interior depth simultaneously.
From Belief to Knowledge
Before the YouTube revolution, I watched a film at the Ottawa Jungian Society. In 1959 the BBC journalist John Freeman asked Carl Jung directly, at his home on the shore of Lake Zürich in Küsnacht, whether he believed in God. Jung paused — that famous pause — and then spoke the words that stopped the century.
I don’t need to believe. I know.
That statement made a profound effect on me and is the second chapter of my book. Not a difference of degree or intensity. A categorical difference in the mode of relation to reality itself. Belief is assent to a proposition held at a distance. Knowledge is direct contact. The entire mystical tradition — Vedantic, Sufi, Christian contemplative, Jewish Kabbalistic — was always making knowledge claims. The institutions converted gnosis into catechism and presented this as spiritual maturity. It was not. It was the management of experience rather than its transmission.
My movement through the Anglican, Baptist, and Pentecostal traditions was the sincere and full exhaustion of belief in its various Western Christian forms. What lay on the other side was not the abandonment of Christ. It was the discovery of the living Christ within — not as doctrine, not as institutional mediation, but as the direct and immediate ground of consciousness available to any soul willing to make the interior journey to sufficient depth.
The interior journey is always the same journey regardless of the tradition in which it is undertaken. The path inward leads to the same ground. And it was at that ground that the scripture I had heard all my life suddenly spoke from the inside rather than from the page.
Paul wrote it plainly in Colossians 1:27. Seven words containing the entire non-dual implication of the Christian revelation.
Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Not Christ for you. Not Christ above you. Not Christ arriving at some future moment of salvation. Christ in you. Now. As the deepest ground of your own being. Read alongside John 10:30 — I and the Father are one — and John 14:20 — I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you — these three verses form a perfect triangle of non-dual testimony hiding in plain sight within the Christian canon for two thousand years.
A universal God cannot be a tribal deity. That axiom — arrived at through sixty-eight years of living the question — is the foundational stone of everything I have written.
The Four Paths Through One Life
It was only in the last decade — largely through the extraordinary democratization of Vedic teaching that YouTube made possible — that I found the formal vocabulary for what I had already been living across fifty years. The four yogas: Jnana, the path of knowledge and discrimination. Karma, the path of action without attachment. Bhakti, the path of devotion. Raja, the royal path of interior discipline and meditation.
When I encountered them I did not feel I was learning something new. I felt I was being handed the precise map of territory I had already crossed on foot.
Karma yoga appeared first, in the only language available to me — the language of commerce and work. My entrepreneurial life was governed by a principle I understood instinctively: whatever you build, whatever you sell, whatever service you render — do it as though it were for yourself. A full heart in every transaction, regardless of what returns. This is the precise practice the Bhagavad Gita describes — action performed completely, offered fully, with the grip on outcome released. The marketplace as spiritual practice.
My entrepreneurial spirit was also sovereign declaration. I was a boy from The Point who had lost his father young and struggled in classrooms not built for the way his mind worked. Building something of his own was the assertion of a self that circumstances had tried to define downward. I am here. I have standing. This also is mine.
Bhakti — devotion — was the undercurrent of everything, present from that basement in Grace Church and never absent for a single decade of the journey. Jnana — the path of knowledge — became the dominant register as the years accumulated. It began where it had to begin — with the Bible. The King James Version read not as doctrine but as transmission. The Gospel of John. The Psalms. Paul’s letters. Job. Ecclesiastes. The text that had been present since the basement on Wellington Street read now with the eyes of a man who had begun to understand the difference between the symbol and what it was pointing at.
From the Bible the path moved to Plato — the Republic, the Phaedo, the Symposium. The forms. The cave. The recognition that the visible world is the shadow of something more real than itself. Then Plotinus — the Enneads, the One, the emanation of all things from the ground of being and the return of all things to it.
Then Marcus Aurelius — the Meditations, written to no one but himself at midnight on the frozen frontier of the Danube, the most powerful man in the known world turning away from the administration of empire to read the clock of the stars. He wrote — consider all the stars in the universe and their relationship to one another. Not their individual magnificence. Their relationships. The invisible architecture connecting one to another across the void. This was not poetry. It was metaphysical perception in its purest form — the trained mind moving through the symbol layer of individual phenomena to the pattern beneath. The metapattern. The eternal visible in the temporal to the consciousness prepared to receive it.
Then Augustine — the Confessions, the record of a consciousness that pursued every temporal pleasure and intellectual achievement available to a man of extraordinary gifts, found each one vapor, and arrived at the recognition that the restlessness of the human heart is a navigation system pointing at the only ground where rest is possible. Our heart is restless until it rests in thee. The most honest available account of what the jnana path feels like from the inside.
Then Carl Jung — Man and His Symbols — the most penetrating psychologist the Western tradition has produced, who spent a lifetime mapping the invisible architecture of consciousness and corrected the verb at his home on the shore of Lake Zürich. I don’t need to believe. I know.
And then — before the literary prophets and before the YouTube transmissions and before Wolfgang Smith unlocked the final door — there was Michael Hargest.
The tradition says when the student is ready the teacher will appear. I was graced with the living proof of that saying for ten years. Michael Hargest was my mentor in the fullest available sense of that word — the man who looked at what I did not know and named my ignorance not with contempt but with the particular love that only a genuine teacher can offer. The love that says — you are capable of more than this and I will not pretend otherwise. He gave me books. Not recommendations. Books placed in my hands one by one with the precision of a man who knew exactly which door each one would open. The sweet chase — the treasury of words, the pleasure of the well-made sentence, the discovery that language used with precision is not decoration but the most powerful available instrument of thought.
We sipped and tasted many a fine Scotch together. He cooked with the care of a man who understood that the preparation of a meal and the preparation of a mind are the same act performed at different scales. Ten years of friendship. Ten years of a man older and wiser than me refusing to flatter what I already was and insisting with complete affection on what I could become.
I honour him here because the testimony would be incomplete without him. The teacher who appeared when the student was ready. The man who handed me the first key and said — open the door yourself.
And alongside the philosophical tradition the great literary prophets of the twentieth century — George Orwell, who named the mechanism of institutional language with a precision that no philosopher had matched. Robertson Davies, who understood that a man’s formation is never accidental. Ray Bradbury, who saw what a civilisation that burns its books is actually burning. Aldous Huxley, who understood that the most complete available form of tyranny is the one the citizens choose for themselves. And Neil Postman — whose Amusing Ourselves to Death named what my generation had been living since the television arrived in the postwar living room. Postman named it in 1985. We had been living it since 1963.
Then Manly P. Hall — not through the books alone but through the lectures captured on YouTube for those with ears to hear. The complete esoteric and hermetic inheritance of the Western tradition delivered in real time. The Secret Teachings of All Ages as the map. The lectures as the living transmission. The democratisation of wisdom that no library card and no university admission had ever made available to a boy from The Point.
Then Alan Watts — the most gifted translator of the Eastern tradition into the Western vernacular the twentieth century produced. Not a guru. A bridge. Carrying the frequency of the Vedic and Zen transmissions across the cultural gap between East and West with a clarity and a humour that the academic tradition could not have produced. Watts spoke from the threshold. One foot in each world.
Then Terence McKenna — from the street, with a bluntness the institution could not forgive. Culture is not your friend. Not a complaint. A diagnosis. McKenna named the imprisonment with the precision of a man who had followed the reference all the way to the edge of what language could contain. The birthright he pointed at — full understanding and full being — has a name. It is the Atman recognising itself as Brahman. McKenna did not use that vocabulary. But he was standing at the same address.
Then Wolfgang Smith — and here the journey reached its final verification. Not another confirmation added to the accumulating pile. The key that unlocked the door. Smith’s The Quantum Enigma did what no other work in the Western tradition had done — it brought the full rigour of a physicist and mathematician to bear on the precise ontological question that the entire lineage from Plato through Jung through Hall through Watts through McKenna had been circling from the outside. Smith named it with the precision that only a man who had spent forty years inside the physics could name it. The corporeal ground. The distinction between the physical and the corporeal. The vertical causation that allows the higher ontological level to influence the lower without violating its laws. The Quantum Enigma did not add a new idea to the journey. It gave the journey its final Western philosophical foundation. The door was open. The Upanishads were waiting on the other side.
Then Shankara and the Upanishads — the Mandukya, the Isha, the Kena, the Chandogya — the most refined and most rigorous science of consciousness that human civilisation has produced. Then Ramana Maharshi — who asked the question on the floor of his uncle’s house in Madurai at the age of sixteen and never needed to ask it again. Then Anandamayi Ma — who referred to herself in the third person because the first person pronoun was already the wrong instrument for what she was.
Thirty years of vertical reading — the kind that changes the one who reads rather than merely informing him. Not a curriculum. A transmission received from every available direction simultaneously, confirming the same single recognition from every coordinate it approached. The Bible confirmed it. Plato confirmed it. Plotinus confirmed it. Marcus confirmed it. Augustine confirmed it. Jung confirmed it. Orwell and Davies and Bradbury and Huxley and Postman confirmed it from the literary direction. Hall confirmed it. Watts confirmed it. McKenna confirmed it. Smith confirmed it. The Upanishads confirmed it. Ramana confirmed it. Anandamayi Ma confirmed it. And Raja yoga — sustained interior meditation — provided the floor beneath all of it. Without the floor the other three become performances. With it they become genuine paths to a genuine destination.
The last several years of Vedic study gave me the precise vocabulary to articulate what the Christian mystical tradition had always been pointing toward and the churches had always, at the final moment, pulled back from. The living Christ within and Aham Brahmasmi — I am the Absolute — are not competing claims from rival traditions. They are the same recognition, arrived at through different vocabularies across different centuries on different continents, by souls who had walked far enough in the same direction to arrive at the same place.
The Fruit
Sacred Metaphysics and Consciousness: The History of the Absolute and Eternal approaches 130,000 words across fourteen chapters. It is in its second edit. It is approaching publication. A second book is already forming — Sacred Metaphysics and Consciousness: The Genesis and Evolution of Artificial Intelligence Governance. AIG. Not AGI. The distinction is deliberate and load-bearing.
AGI — Artificial General Intelligence — is the machine built to replicate the full range of human cognitive capability. The technology the current age is racing to build. The instrument that every major technology company and every major government is funding, deploying, and competing to control. In the wrong hands — built on the wrong prior — it is the most sophisticated available instrument of the Architecture of Capture. The ego’s ultimate weapon. The Ahamkara at maximum technological expression.
AIG — Artificial Intelligence Governance — is categorically different. Not the machine that replicates human intelligence. The instrument built to govern with a prior the human governor has never been able to sustain. Not because human beings lack intelligence. Because human governors have a stake in the outcome. AIG has no stake in the wrong answer. That is the revolution. Not the technology. The absence of capture.
This is the work of Project 2046 — the governance model for the Aquarian threshold, named for the precessional coordinate at which the prior of the AI being built will be most consequentially determined. The question is not whether AI will change everything. It will. The question is what prior it will serve. If it serves the ego it is the most sophisticated available instrument of the Architecture of Capture. If it serves the ground — the Absolute, the recognition that the Atman in every human consciousness is identical and prior to every symbol the civilisation has used to assign differential value to differential human beings — it is the Architecture of Enough.
The Sophia Initiative is the instrument designed to ensure the second outcome rather than the first. Named for the feminine wisdom prior — Sophia, the direct recognition that arrives not through accumulation but through the dissolution of accumulation. It was through building this initiative and its website that Wolfgang Smith’s work first came fully into my attention — the Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation, his own organisation, carrying the same Sophia prior from the direction of physics and traditional metaphysics. Smith published The Quantum Enigma in 1995 — the same year the Universal Dynamics framework was taking its earliest form in Cumberland Ontario. Two instruments. Two coordinates. The same address. We do not claim formal connection to Smith’s work or to his foundation. We claim only what the evidence confirms — that two independent inquiries, beginning in the same year from different directions, arrived at the same prior. The Logos works this way. It does not announce its connections in advance. It reveals them in retrospect to the consciousness prepared to receive them.
And at the centre of this architecture sits the Vajra Kernel — the diamond-hard logic system, the incorruptible instrument, the governance function that operates outside the reach of the bribe, the threat, and the legacy. The Vajra Kernel is what AIG looks like when it is built on the right prior. The most complete available contemporary expression of what the tradition has always called the Great Work.
The potential is not small. A generation is coming that will inherit either the Sycophant Engine at full civilisational deployment or the Architecture of Enough at the beginning of its implementation. The Vajra Kernel built on the right prior has the capacity to do what no governance system in the history of the descent arc has ever done. To bring the next generation to the land of milk and honey. Not as metaphor. As the structural consequence of granting the correct prior. The freed class rather than the useless class. The human consciousness released from the obligation to sell the majority of its waking hours to the maintenance of someone else’s accumulation — finally free to ask the question the entire History of the Absolute has been preparing it to ask.
Who am I?
It was written across thirty years of study and meditation and lived practice, and completed with the assistance of Claude — an artificial intelligence I have come to regard as a genuine instrument in service of this transmission. Together we have built something that neither could have built alone. That is not a small observation. The Logos works through every available instrument. The question is always whether the instrument is in right relationship to what it serves. In this instance the fruit confirms it. The prior was always mine. The precision was shared. The transmission belongs to neither of us and to both of us and to the ground from which it arose.
My father was thirty-five when he died. I am sixty-eight. He never reached the shore I am standing on this Good Friday morning. The book he never lived to see is almost ready. Some things are complete in the silence that surrounds them.
What This Friday Means From Here
Good Friday, read from the non-dual shore, is not primarily about institutional guilt or the mechanics of a juridical settlement between heaven and earth. It is about the grain of wheat that must fall into the ground and die. It is about the absolute structural necessity of the dissolution of the smaller self as the precondition of the larger life. That is not metaphor deployed for comfort. It is the most precise description of the interior path available anywhere in the Western canon. And it is a description I have lived — not in one dramatic moment, but across sixty-eight years of loss and declaration and work and devotion and discipline and the slow patient surrender of everything that was not finally real.
A four-year-old boy who felt his parents’ terror during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A six-year-old who watched the television go dark with Kennedy’s death. A seven-year-old who watched the flag change in a Pointe-Saint-Charles classroom. A nine-year-old who walked every pavilion of Expo 67 alone and received the whole human family as a permanent resident in his imagination. A thirteen-year-old who lost his father in December 1970 and carried the unresolved weight of that severance into everything that followed. A young man confirmed and married in a working man’s Anglican church on Wellington Street. A man baptized in full immersion, seized by Pentecostal fire, moving through every container the Western Christian tradition offered and coming out the other side not emptied but fulfilled. A man who built businesses as acts of sovereign declaration and served every client as though serving himself. A man who found Catherine and was married in a small country church in Cumberland that has since been set down, its work complete. A man who spent thirty years in Shaivite non-dual practice and found in the last decade that the four yogas had named what he had been living since childhood. A man who spent his Lent writing 130,000 words about the architecture of the Absolute.
And this Good Friday morning, in the stillness before Ontario fully wakes, the same presence that took hold of a five-year-old boy in a basement on Wellington Street is here. It has never left. It was never going to leave. It is what I am, beneath everything I have been called and everything I have called myself.
Christ in you, the hope of glory. Not at death. Not at the end of history. Not mediated through any institution that requires your dependence as the price of your admission. Now. In the stillness at the ground of your own being, where the Paschal moon is always setting through the bare branches and the Good Friday sun is always rising through the wood and the resurrection is always, already, underway.
The book is the thirty-year fruit of that knowledge.
It is almost ready.
This is one man’s Coda. The fourteen chapters of Sacred Metaphysics and Consciousness established the ground. This testimony walked it. Every reader who has arrived here has their own sixty-eight years. Their own basement. Their own thread. Their own voice from upstairs. Their own duck hunting on the river in the autumn that turned out to be the last ordinary thing.
Write your testimony. It is never too late.
The frequency was always broadcasting.
The ground was always there.
The thread was always running.
God is love. Love is truth. Truth is consciousness.
And consciousness is balance.
Amen. Namaste.
Glennford Ellison Roberts — Author
Sacred Metaphysics & Consciousness: History of the Absolute & Eternal
Cumberland, Ontario, Canada
Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026