I'd lost nearly everything I'd built. No salary, no board, no company, no title, almost no money, and I was sitting on a private beach on the island of Marinduque being treated like a king by a man who owed me nothing.

His name was Yong Nieva. Seventy-two, Filipino, a restaurateur with several restaurants and hundreds and hundreds of staff, and one of the wisest souls I have ever sat with. Born and raised in a heavily Catholic country, and still he went to the Divine direct, the God within rather than the dogma. He was up at three every single morning to meditate and to journal, because he reckoned the ether is at its least noisy before the rest of the world wakes up. I'd come out the front and my yoga mat would already be laid out exactly how I liked it, weights beside it, and by the time I'd finished and walked back to my room the bed was made and there was a smoothie waiting on the table.

We could spend weeks in each other's company, talking six or seven hours a day, sometimes nine or ten, covering every topic there is and coming to a mutual point on all of it. Neither of us bored. Neither of us reaching for a phone. I have never, before or since, been connected to another human at that depth.

He is the reason this organisation exists, and he never once heard the word.

"I need to introduce you to someone"

I was four or five days off a flight back to Australia when he said it.

He did that a lot, Yong. He'd hand you a human the way another man hands you a tool he knows you're about to need. This time it was a holistic entrepreneur and astrologer named Jeannie Javelosa, and she and I got along like a house on fire inside the first minute.

We got talking about the work. The real granular version of it, what I'd been through and what I could see coming. And somewhere in there she said it plainly.

"We need shamans."

I laughed. Of all the things I was short of at that point in my life, shamans wasn't on the list.

"Oh," I said. "I know some shamans."

Now, sit with how mad that sentence would have sounded to me three years earlier. A bloke who'd raised three hundred and fifty million dollars for other humans' companies, who didn't believe in a single thing he couldn't put on a spreadsheet, telling an astrologer that yes, as it happens, he has shamans on hand.

However, by then I did. The ones who woke me up in the jungle out the back of Playa del Carmen. The ones who took a hard atheist and cracked him open on a dirt floor and showed him there was a whole game running that he'd never been told the rules of.

So we flew them. Yong backed it the way he backed everything I ever brought him, and those shamans came across from Mexico to Thailand and the Philippines, and the three of us put together the first ceremonies and built the first container.

For years I'd gone hunting for the thing I was supposed to be doing with my life. It turned up in a conversation I wasn't even steering, between two humans I hadn't gone looking for.

Then it needed a name

That first programme needed something behind it. "Personal development" wasn't it. "Wellness" was an insult to what I'd seen.

So I went researching, and I came across an ancient Greek word, and it landed so deep in me that I knew before I'd finished reading the definition.

Henosis.

Union. Oneness. The word the old mystics used for the soul's communion with the source. Plotinus used it for the soul's return to the One, the infinite that everything emerges from and returns to. The gap between you and everything else, closing.

That's the whole thing. That's what every one of those experiences had been pointing at the entire time. A homecoming. The remembering that you were never separate in the first place.

It's a metaphysical position, and it's the only filter this network has ever applied.

What he was actually doing

Here's what I didn't understand at the time. He was preparing me.

Yong had old shares from his decade-plus working in the United States, an investment fund tied to one of the companies he'd been employed with. Around a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, locked up and tangled and seemingly out of reach. So I spent hundreds of hours on it, calling back and forth, chasing it through systems built to make a man give up, until I freed it for him. He passed away before he ever really got to enjoy it, and he wasn't attached to it for a second. He'd say to me, "Cameron, please know that if I was to die, I am ready. And I know you won't be here forever. You belong to the world." I would always respond the same way. "Stop saying that. You have another forty years ahead of you."

He gave me a stack of beautiful Japanese notebooks and beautiful Japanese pens, handed over one at a time with "Cameron, write," because he believed that before I did. He gave me hours and hours of the life he had left. He fed me, he corrected me, he told me once that I was conversing to respond rather than conversing to listen, and that single reframe changed the way I sit with every human I've met since.

He never asked for a thing back.

I went to Australia for a few weeks. I gave him a kiss on the cheek to say goodbye. That afternoon I was on a plane. The next day his daughter called me. Yong had passed away. He passed peacefully, during what turned out to be his last nap, in his small hut in his private paradise in Marinduque.

He'd been preparing me for that one too, the whole time, right out in the open. I only saw it afterwards.

Why this is the first entry in this journal

Because it would be very easy to tell you Henosis was founded on a strategy.

It was midwifed. By a man who believed in me and then behaved as though it were already true. Yong introduced me to Jeannie. Jeannie named what we needed. I happened to have the shamans. A whole life's work handed forward through love, one human saying to another, you have to meet this human.

So that's what this network is. That same act, formalised, so a soul looking for the real thing doesn't have to spend years and a small fortune finding out who's genuine and who's performing. Someone vouches. Someone assesses. Someone says, you have to meet this human.

It won't be rushed, and I've stopped trying to rush it.

And every time this thing puts out another branch, I know exactly whose beach it started on.

I honour him with this continued work, and with the diligence to carry on a mission we were both extraordinarily passionate about.

Thank you, Yong.