Throughout this time, Shams-Tabriz continued his spiritual journey. Also in these years he ventured into real estate. He spent many years growing a small, regional bakery into a national presence.
With the seeds of his divine garden planted, Shams-Tabriz turned to entrepreneurship. And many of these great teachers had shown the way. All were capable of emerging consciously into their divine humanness. They had come to teach that everyone was divine. He soon came to see that, despite prevailing understanding and teachings, the essential message of the true, great ancients had been no different.
His journey into the full embrace of this reality continues, but it was at this pivotal time in his life that he first began to integrate the profound possibility of his destiny to fully know himself in this life as divine - a destiny intended for all of humanity, man and woman, great and small, those with coats-of-arms, crests and colors and those without. This was the beginning of Shams-Tabriz’s awakening to the greater wisdom for which he’d yearned. Simply stated, he saw that his purpose was to experience himself consciously as a divine being having a blessed life in the physical.
He soon realized it was his purpose to make sense of the madness, to integrate the wisdom contained within the stories of his own life in order that he may embrace the grand destiny that awaits all of humanity. He also began to comprehend the greater meaning of life with all of its hardships and trials. With this guidance, Shams-Tabriz began to realize certain fundamental truths, foremost being that he was a child of God, an extension of God-essence, experiencing himself in the realm of the manifest-separateness of life-as-we-know-it. It was in these lush hills of North Carolina and later Georgia that Shams-Tabriz formed a deep friendship with a gifted psychic-channel named Elmarilla who lent herself as a conduit for the flow of wisdom and healing from the heavenly realms of pure divine love and compassion. There, he underwent an initiation of sorts into a world of esoteric knowledge rooted in personal experience - which was intrinsically different from that of the textbook beliefs of the ancients to which he’d once subscribed. During this time, he found himself nestled in the soft, crystal-filled hills off the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. In the years that followed, his understanding of spirituality broadened through his exploration of modern-day spiritual thought in addition to a newly-discovered objectivity toward the ancient beliefs he’d once thought he understood so well. This was not a question of whodunnit but an overwhelming philosophical, metaphysical need-to-know why the life of a beautiful, caring and joy-filled young woman would be brought to such a sudden and tragic end.ĭriven by compulsion, Shams-Tabriz interrupted his studies to pursue an inextinguishable longing for the truth about death and the commensurate meaning of life and the nature of God and Man.
While this was not the first time he had encountered death, suddenly, he was overcome with an indescribable longing to understand the reason for Yasmin’s death. The pivotal moment in Shams-Tabriz’s life occurred when a young friend, Yasmin, died tragically in an automobile accident. His family emigrated to Canada and the United States, where ultimately his personal interest in Sufi mysticism led him to explore Near-Eastern Religious Studies and Philosophy. Shams-Tabriz was born in Kampala, Uganda to parents with an East African lineage spanning from the early-mid 1800s - he has both an earlier Indian ancestry and an underlying Persian heritage.