I want to be straight with you before I take you in there.

I was an atheist. A hard one. A man with a two-inch sheet of glass over his head where the bigger questions were meant to go. I'd raised three hundred and fifty million dollars for other humans' companies, I believed in what fit on a spreadsheet, and I was having an absolutely phenomenal time doing it.

Everything up to that point had been cracks in the glass. The mentors. The channelers. My old man and his pendulum. The experiments in Manila that downloaded more about the nature of reality than I'd ever thought a brain like mine could hold. All of them real. All of them cracks.

The ceiling held.

This is the night it shattered.

I'm not telling you this so you'll believe it. I know exactly how some of it reads, because I'd have thought the same thing myself. I'm telling you what happened to me.

The invitation

A beautiful soul named Hailey invited me. I'd met her and Keith at a yoga and sound bath a little while before, two awesome beings I'd taken an instant liking to, and when the invitation came I had no real idea what I was saying yes to.

That was the whole of it. A WhatsApp message, a friend I trusted, and a yes.

The instructions were basic. No drinking, no sex, no drugs, no meat for the twenty-four hours beforehand. Bring warm clothes, a yoga mat, candles, some fruit for afterwards, and a personal artefact you want blessed.

For the artefact I brought a photo of me and a lot of my mates from Sydney, the one I'd carried around the world with me for three years of travelling.

I didn't research what was coming. I didn't feel the need to. Weeks off my thirtieth birthday, and I was nowhere near ready for it.

The fire, and a voice off to the right

A head Marakame and two more shamans helping him. Twenty of us in a circle around a big fire in a clearing in the middle of the jungle, just on dark.

They opened with a drum and a flute, the kind of sound that goes underneath your thinking and tunes something you didn't know was out of tune. The first shaman blew frankincense across each of us. The Marakame sang an incantation over each of us. The third closed the field behind.

And then, after what I think was the third cup, the first thing that happened was a voice. Clear, and wise, and coming from just off to the right of where I was looking, the way a thing comes from your periphery before you turn your head.

Cameron, get out of your own way.

Cameron, get out of your own way.

Cameron, get out of your own way.

Three times. And then it showed me exactly what it meant.

It showed me that I'd built a Cameron and then spent years walking around performing him. The party boy. The ladies' man. The one who's untouchable. I'd decided, somewhere down the line, how my best mates saw me, and then I'd acted out the version of myself I'd imagined living inside their heads.

Here's the part that almost made me laugh. It made no difference whether I'd guessed right. None at all. It was my projection, my story, my own sick little imagining, and then me dutifully conforming to it in real time and calling it me.

A costume. I'd worn it so long I'd forgotten it was a costume, and the medicine reached over and lifted the edge of it, and underneath there was a soul that had been waiting a long time for somebody to look.

The moment I got it, Hailey turned and tapped me on the leg and said something she had no way of knowing to say.

Your Grandfather wanted me to let you know you're doing a great job.

So I took the photo. The one I'd carried for three years. And on the back of it I wrote:

Thank you for the memories. Thank you for the journey. But it is time for me to move on now.

And I walked over and gave it to the flames.

Through, not around

What came next I'll do my poor best with, because the words are going to lose it, and that's the honest truth of writing any of this down.

I experienced that we are infinite beings. I was given doors into other realities, the ones where my ancestors live. I was shown that this reality, the one I'd been so dead certain about, isn't what I thought it was, and that thousands of helping spirits had been walking beside me the whole way, the entire time, and I'd never once felt a single one of them.

And once I understood, really understood, that this is an illusion, I felt myself pulled towards the fire.

As I walked around it I could hear them. The invisible ones, talking among themselves the way a crowd murmurs just before something happens.

He has come so far.

I told you he could handle it.

I wonder if he will be able to do it.

And an instinct came up in me, total, with no argument left in it. To walk through the fire. Not around. Through.

I'd done the Tony Robbins firewalk years before, the bed of cooled coals, the whole choreographed thing. This was a roaring campfire in the middle of the Mexican jungle, red coals and burning sticks.

I took three or four steps directly through it.

The shamans jumped. The helpers jumped. The whole circle came to its feet. It caused a stir and I'm not going to pretend it didn't. However, when I got to the other side, what I heard was a chorus of angels. Thousands of them. Celebrating.

And then the switch flipped. Up was down, down was up, and the part of me that had spent thirty years refusing the Divine finally let go.

No burns. None. I stepped into a literal fire and the fire didn't touch me.

I went from atheist to knowing God in about ten hours.

"So we are gods"

At seven-thirty in the morning, when the ceremony closed, I was a different human being.

I turned to Hailey, still half in a daze, and said the only thing there was to say.

So we are gods.

She giggled. And then, simple as a kid telling you the sky is blue, she said:

Yep.

That's the holiest moment of my entire life, and it fit in one small word, in the early light, from a woman who already knew it and had simply been waiting for me to catch up.

The part that changed me more than the fire

Later that morning a few of us went down into one of the cenotes. An underground cavern of clear blue freshwater, bats overhead, blue light on the water, my skin caked in dirt and sweat from a whole night of eternal discovery. The only honest word for it was divine.

And it was climbing out that I made the discovery that may have changed me more than the fire did.

Hailey was ahead of me on the rocky staircase, and she's a gorgeous woman, and as she ducked under the low cave mouth and climbed, bent over, she was right at my eye level. The version of me who'd walked into that jungle the night before knows exactly what that version of me would have done with that.

The lens was gone. What came up instead was awe. Reverence. Not a flicker of the old fantasy. I was looking at a Goddess, a human being, a soul, and I was seeing her.

And in that one clean moment I saw that I had objectified women my entire life. Things to be used for my own satisfaction. Behind the new awareness came everything that had built the old one, society, family, brand marketing, the movies, the games, every channel of it teaching me the same lesson on repeat, that having women want you is what makes you a man.

When the lens clears, appetite turns into reverence.

And once it cleared on those stairs I could see it everywhere else it had been smudged. Business. Money. Politics. Family. All of it distorted, and me never knowing it was distorted, because a smudge on the lens you're looking through is the one thing you'll never see.

Two soaked towels

There's a piece of that weekend that turned the shatter into something I could actually live with.

A dear friend named Carla had gifted me a Reiki session on the Friday before the ceremony, and I'd completely forgotten I'd booked a second one for the Monday.

I walked in not knowing what to expect. Air-conditioned room, soft towel underneath me, another one over me to keep me warm. And I went somewhere.

I was shown every single individual who had ever wronged me, standing alongside every individual who had ever helped me. And I saw the Divine working through all of them. Through the ones who helped, of course. And also, and this is the part that undid me, through the ones who hurt me. The same God, working through every last one.

I was flooded with so much gratitude that I heard myself ask, what can I do for you?

What came back had me pull energy down through the crown of my head, through my body and out through my feet, and I let it go at those figures like a beam. The back of my head tilted and I was yelling, properly yelling, and my body heated up so much that when it finished both towels were soaked through and dripping.

In an air-conditioned room. I walked in dry. I left with two towels you could wring out.

Here's what that Monday gave me, and it's the thing I'd walk every coal in Mexico to keep.

It let me forgive. All of them. And myself.

Because how can I be angry at God when it's all God?

Sit in that one with me. Every individual who ever wronged me was God, working through them, moving my life exactly where it needed to go. The anger has nowhere left to stand.

A thousand doorways

I need to say this part clearly, because it's the piece surface spirituality keeps getting wrong.

When I first went through all of this we genuinely thought we were the first humans in history to do it. Then I went around the world and sat with the wise ones, and that's what actually humbled me.

The medicine was a door. Breathwork is a door. So is cold water, so is meditation, so is the near-death experience, so is an hour with a journal before the rest of the world wakes up, so is one honest conversation with a soul who won't let you hide. Not one of them ranks above another, and not one of them is a prescription.

Mine happened to be the loud one. Yours might be much quieter, and quieter is very often the wiser road.

So let me be clear about what this is. It's testimony. I walked into a fire in an unplanned moment, inside a held ceremony, with a lineage around me and shamans who knew exactly what they were doing, and I'd never hand that to anybody as a method.

What I'd hand you is the thing sitting underneath it. You were never separate from any of this. The jungle wasn't the door, it was a door, and there are a thousand more of them.

Yours won't look like mine, and it doesn't need to.