The website account of his conversion begins with a chance hypnosis session with Dr. E. Arthur (Art) Winkler, in which it was suggested  “You will go back to that time and place of greatest spiritual significance to you now.”  What happened next is recounted as follows, reprinted in extracts with permission. The full account is on their website:

The next thing Al knew, he was awake, but where seemingly moments ago he’d been lying down, on the leather recliner, now he was standing. Adjusting his eyes to the dark, he realized he was outdoors, apparently under a twilight sky that was giving way to nightfall. He looked at his hands to see if he was really awake, but they were different somehow, as if not his own, and the shirt he’d had on when he’d closed his eyes as Dr. Winkler had begun talking to him in that strange measured pace, had been replaced by a heavy, simple garment of some sort that went almost down to his feet. And there, on his feet, instead of his shoes were sandals. Abruptly aware of people talking behind him, he spun around. Not far away was a small fire with a group gathered close around it, obviously warming themselves against the frigid air. A bit further away were the silhouettes of palm trees next to a small pool, and far off in the distance, he could make out sizeable dunes surrounding them in a sort of gigantic bowl of desert hills. The members of the group were talking amongst themselves with excitement, not seeming to pay any particular attention to his presence off on the outskirts of the oasis.

Something from behind seemed to call Al, shaking him loose from staring at the scene. Turning, the voices carrying on in the background, he stood, gazing out toward the skyline and into the night beyond, a feeling of joyful anticipation growing deep within, that someone he cared about very deeply was soon to arrive. As he searched the horizon for an indeterminable time, he wrestled with thoughts. ‘What is going on? Who am I and where am I? Who is this I’m waiting for that I seem to know but can’t quite remember?’ all the while the thrill inside all but bursting forth in expectation that one so dear to him would, in moments, come walking out of the darkness down the dune to him and their small, waiting group. And then he started to hear a voice, calling to him. Softly, barely audible at first, but slowly growing louder, the voice of this Dr. Winkler calling him to come back.”

This chance hypnosis session revealed an astonishing gift. Continuing from the website:

 Once fully back, Al wanted to tell his friends about his incredible experience, but instead, they began to tell him of their own experience and of information he’d been giving. Al refused to believe. “Well, that can’t be true. I was in this desert oasis and…” but they weren’t listening, too excited about what he…or someone…had spoken . . .  Laughing, they told him they’d actually been having a conversation with him and he had told them many things, even about another friend of theirs, who Al had never heard of, who lived in Maine and was in deep trouble.

Confused and not able to believe what was being said by the others, Al wanted no more part of this, when Dr. Winkler said, smiling, “I’d like you to hear this”, and reached down and began playing the tape that had recorded the entire session.

When the recording started, and Al heard the voice, he wanted to jump up and run out of the room. What he heard was obviously his voice, but not only was the accent not his, how could it be that he was speaking with them while he was having his own experience in the desert? The more upset Al got, the more everyone else laughed. Finally, Dr. Winkler brought a chair over and sat down next to Al.

“It’s okay,” Dr. Winkler said softly. This kind of occurrence is rare, but it does happen. You have an uncommon ability to move in the sonambolistic state of hypnosis very easily.”

What happened when he went back to a time several centuries in the past (while simultaneously diagnosing illnesses in the “present”) became the turning point, leading up to the decades as full-time channel that occurred since. However, the conversion was not without preparation or “tests,” as would be expected in an Eastern situation of the sort where past abilities were re-recognized. The website continues: 

It would probably be well to add in conclusion that the “chance” hypnosis session happened after several out-of-the-ordinary occurrences in Al’s earlier life, perhaps in some way preparing him, giving him more of a propensity to believe in phenomena or miracles.

There was a near drowning at the age of four in an icy Wisconsin lake, in which, as Al was floating peacefully down to the bottom, looking around at the beauty in the vividly clear lake, he saw a snake swimming towards him. The last thing he recalls, before remembering waking up in his bed with a pile of blankets stuffed around him, was the sight of the snake, which broke his trance and scared him enough to begin his frantic climb to the surface.

When he was nine, he was not expected to survive the rheumatic fever that had been ravaging his young body for more than six months. He was aware, as he lay staring at the ceiling, of the doctor speaking with his mother in a hushed voice in the next room and that she began to weep as he consoled her. And then, as she had so many times when the pain became excruciating and the fever too much to stand, My-Lady (as he called her) came to him as he gave way to deliria, holding her hand out, lifting him out of his body and into worlds beyond. But this time was different. Instead of returning him, as she always did when the pain subsided, they traveled far away, and when they returned, it was not to his body but to somewhere just above his home. Somehow he could look down, past the roof, the ceiling, and into the kitchen, where he saw his mother weeping, and in the next room, his body lying still on the sofa where they had temporarily moved him. As My-Lady showed him the scene, Al knew he was being given a choice—leave with her to remain in realms beyond, or return to his frail, sickly body and to the pain. It was his love for his mother that caused Al to return. There would still be quite some time of pain and recuperation remaining, but it was strangely different, and somehow bearable. That was the last time Al would see My-Lady, though unbeknownst to him, she would be born on Earth four years later, and in the autumn of their years, would return to him to become his wife, Susan.

Finally, there was the time he was coming home very early in the morning after finishing a night in a club with his band, when he got a flat tire. Not really needing to concern about anyone coming at this hour of night on the deserted back-country road, but pulling onto the shoulder anyway, Al had gone around to get the spare and jack, and was buried to his waist in the huge trunk of his 55 Olds. Suddenly a flash of light shined into the trunk from behind him, and the next thing he remembers, he was sitting on the bank of a ditch about ten feet deep, about fifty feet across from where his car had been, lights flashing and people running about, talking, shouting. A sheriff, pad and pen in hand, was calling across to him, “Son! How the hell’d you get over there?” Somewhere down the road, Al could make out the other car, its front-in totally smashed, his own car upside down in the ditch. A shaken Al was having difficulty relating the incident, “I was trying to get the stuff out to fix my flat, when I saw this glaring light and that’s the last thing I remember.” By now, Al was hearing the sheriff’s voice more and more muffled, as if miles away, “Well, son, how can that be? They were doing about 80 MPH when they came up over that hill. Could only’ve been a few seconds before they hit you. I climbed down the ditch to look at your car. Back bumper’s rammed under your back seat. If you hadn’t gotten outta the way, that car would’ve cut you in ha—…” With the sheriff continuing to ask him questions he could not answer, Al was quietly asking himself his own, ‘My life’s savings are gone—saxophone, clarinet, car. What’ll I do? And how did I get all the way over here? What’s happened here?’ as the ambulance sped away with the other car’s occupants.

In a recent reading, Lama Sing said that, among many other things certainly, Al’s choice to change course in two major points in his life—first from the entertainment business and then from corporate America—were like tests for him to move from temptations, the lure of money and stature and such, that would enable him to be such a pure and open channel through which these works could flow.

BOOKS AND PROJECTS. See www.lamasing.com for the many projects, a library of readings, and published and up-coming books, such as In Realms Beyond: Book One of the Peter Project. Publisher website: http://www.paraview.com/miner/