I guess for me it was probably about 15 years ago - can't remember the date or the year.

I was staying by myself in a large mansion house in the middle of a large deserted private forest...it's a long story how I got there and I won't bore you with the details :)

I was very isolated and cut-off from humanity in general and had been so for years. I was desperate to understand why my miserable life was the way it was. My self-imposed isolation felt like part of my Inward Quest.

Then one day, out of nowhere, a packet arrived in the mail and there were two copied cassette tapes inside. They were sent by someone I had met briefly at a New Age convention a few months earlier. We had exchanged addresses at the time but I never followed up.

I took a look at the titles scribbled in handwriting on the covers of the cassette tapes and kind of shrugged to myself because I had no idea what they were about.

It was a nice sunny day so I decided to take a drive to a nearby town and walk around the shopping center just to be in the company of human beings for a while. I picked up one of the tapes and started playing it in my car...and almost immediately, I was virtually in a trance from the information I was hearing. I could feel my hair almost standing on end from the thrill of finally understanding things about life that had never made any sense before.

I never reached that shopping center because I just drove and drove and drove so I could carry on listening.

You could say my life changed dramatically from that day onwards as I immersed myself in that information.

A few years(!) later, I remembered there was another cassette tape in that packet - I rediscovered it as I was packing to move house - and I finally decided to play it to find out what it was. Again, I was captivated as yet another amazing perspective on life flooded into my reality.

A few years ago, I contacted that friend who sent the tapes. In all that time since the tapes arrived (a decade earlier), I had never contacted her or told her of the effect of that information on my life.

But I just felt curious about what had made her start me on my journey. I asked her why she sent those tapes and how the information had helped her. She told me she had completely forgotten she had sent them and did not even know what was on them...they were given to her by someone else, she had never played them, but she thought I might be interested instead even though she knew virtually nothing about me.

So what was on those cassette tapes that I received in the post on the same day 15 years ago from a virtual stranger that had such a profound life-changing effect on me?

The first tape featured "someone" called Abraham. The second tape was by "someone" called Bashar.

:)