bio (2)

I was born and raised in the Seattle area and lived here until I headed off for a brief stint in college when i was 18. I spent my late teens and twenties wandering around searching, learning, figuring out what was worth doing in this world. My college career had ended soon after it began when I left Oberlin, Ohio and my studies with a backpack and hitchhiked to a zen buddhist monestary. I was going for truth in life, and college wasn't teaching the sort of truth that i was looking for.

Over the next decade I lived here and there, all over the country, never staying one place more than a year or two. I became increasingly idealistic, and over time made stronger and stronger commitments to myself and to the divine being, which i sensed but did not yet know, that i would work to fulfill the ideals that i believed in, and would not cave to the agenda of the corporate-fascist rulers of the world. During my twenties, i developed a strong background in the natural and organic food business and in 1988 when I hit 30, I moved back to Seattle and started my first business, Essential Foods. I was broke, and the business was started with no capital, i only had enough to buy a few supplies to get going. But I was in the right place at the right time with the right attitude and the right product, and the business prospered. Six years later I had accumulated enough capital to launch the Essential Baking Company, and I formed a team and built a successful bakery business.

I am now working on taking the financial resources that I have built with the bakery and using them to start up the chocolate company that I believe may be very closely tied to the role that I am playing as "the son." Who I have become is something that each person can, and indeed may, decide for his or her self. I believe that I have had the most profound awakening that a human being can, by definition, possibly have. This is the awakening into awareness that there is someone other than "me" having the experience that i once thought of as "my" experience, the comprehension that this being has a Name, (not to mention a personality!), the realization of what His Name is, and how he expresses himself in the world, an understanding about what he wants, how his plans are going to be fulfilled, and why everything is the way it is. And I have experienced the complete surrender of my "self" to this being, in his Name. In other words, I have given up clinging to a false self and have shifted my sense of identity to the Creator, through his true Name, which is the true identity of everything that exists. I call this experience "god-realization" though I use the quotes as a way of making the disclaimer that "God" is not his name. He may be a "god" to use a term from the English language, but his Name, which is the same in any language, is not "God." I call him "the Creator." In private I whisper his true Name and experience the ecstasy known as Heaven. I spend my time enjoying this experience and doing the work that I sincerely and profoundly believe has been given to me to do, that of helping others step off a freight train barrelling headlong into Hell, and assisting them in stepping through the door that I have stepped through, into Heaven. The Name, the Word of "God" that was in the beginning, is required to make this transition, and this is what I have to give.

I now own a chocolate company that was named Essential Chocolates, also known as The Essential Chocolate Company, The Chocolate Company, 3400 Phinney and Theo.