As you explore the thoughts and approaches shared on this site, there are some assumptions and hypotheses inherent in what you’ll find here. It’s my hope that this beginning page will allow you insight into the world view I bring to what you’ll find throughout the site.
I was raised in a home defined by the presence of my maternal grandmother – a Victorian woman who ran our multi-family home as the unquestioned authority on just about everything. She was a clairvoyant who perceived other dimensions of reality, as well as a healer who worked with people who came to our large Hollywood, California home to see her. She was a Theosophist and, I later discovered, a Spiritualist. When I was about 10 years old and decided I didn’t want to go to the local Presbyterian church anymore, she gave me a choice: go back to church or study with her. I chose to study with her, which I did from ages 10 to 16, when she died. The time spent with her shaped my perceptions of, and expectations about, reality.
Even though I have grown beyond the teachings of my childhood, some of the assumptions about reality that I learned as her student are still with me, which comprise the working model of reality reflected by Devadana Sanctuary:
* We live in a world made up of many dimensions of reality
* There are visible and invisible sources of help and inspiration around us all the time
* Help is readily available if we ask for and then allow ourselves to receive it.
In 1978, during meditation, I fell into what I can only call the Void. In the flash of a moment, it became clear to me that everything I had ever believed and experienced, no matter how moving, no matter how vivid, no matter how much love I felt in it or about it, was unreal and impermanent. The beliefs on which I had based my life now appeared as one way to translate an infinite reality that, ultimately, emerged from the Void space and returned to it. It was a thoroughly shattering experience and I felt as though my solid foundation of reality, the world as I had known it, had been yanked out from under me. Even though I have recreated a fluid kind of belief about reality in the years since, there is a part of me that never forgets that what is ultimately real, in my experience, is the Nothing that is the ever-present, all encompassing Void – the paradox that this Nothing holds the infinite potential for all that is and all that will ever be.
For that reason, while Devadana Sanctuary offers a working model to engage in a creative, dynamic relationship with multidimensional reality, we want to avoid offering any kind of belief system. We seek to inspire your own perceptions of reality rather than to suggest what belief system you should hold.
– Nancy Napier
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