Adam's Story: A Search for Something More
Last spring when I was staying in Austin, Texas, for a few months, I met a guy at church named Adam. As I got to know him, I learned that he had just become a Christian a few months earlier. His story of coming to faith turned out to be quite crazy, so I asked him if I could write it down and share it with you all. Here is Adam’s story.
Once a month, sixteen-year-old Adam would make the 30-minute drive out to the sand dunes of northern Michigan with his closest friend. The two friends would leave for the sand dunes after dark, since they weren’t going there to hike or camp or sand-board down the slopes, but rather in search of a transcendent experience.
Once there, Adam and his friend would hike to the top of the dunes, completely alone as they looked out over Lake Michigan. They’d then split that month’s bag of magic mushrooms and spend the night tripping on the drugs. They’d stare up at the stars as they tried create a divine connection.
Some nights, Adam and his friend would have ecstatic experiences, where they felt connected to the unifying element of the universe. Other nights, though, they’d take too many mushrooms, and their drug trip would devolve into a nightmare, as the world felt like it was melting down around them.
While it’s not unusual for young people to try out drugs to get high or rebel, Adam was different; he was trying to satisfy his search for something more. Was there anything out there that could satiate his deepest longings and put him in touch with the divine?
Part I: Losing His Religion
Despite Adam’s interest in psychedelics, he didn’t grow up in a free-spirited family. Both of his parents had been raised in traditional Roman Catholic families, before meeting as undergrads at Xavier University, a Jesuit college in Cincinnati.
Adam’s dad’s family had been particularly devoted to Catholicism, with their home in a Kentucky coal mining town decorated throughout with crucifixes and statues of Mother Mary. Adam’s dad, however, started to question his Catholic beliefs during college and decided he was an atheist.
Adam’s mom was unfazed by her boyfriend’s loss of faith and they stayed together, getting married soon after graduation. Adam’s parents then bounced around the Midwest as his dad pursued graduate school, ultimately receiving his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Adam’s dad was looking for a place to practice medicine, so his parents moved to Traverse City, Michigan, where his dad was hired as an emergency room doctor.
This was 1972, and emergency rooms were a new innovation in medical care. As Adam’s dad worked hard to get the Traverse City emergency room up and running, he spotted a lucrative opportunity: what if he helped hospitals across the country staff their emergency rooms? So Adam’s dad quit his job at the hospital after just a year, and together with another ER doctor, started an emergency room staffing company.
The business took off, and Adam’s dad was soon flying all over the country to secure ER staffing contracts. Within a few years, his company was running the ER services for 50 of the largest hospital systems in the country. Back home in Traverse City, Adam’s parents were also building a family, and soon they welcomed two daughters, before Adam was born nine years later.
But there was a hidden cost to the business's success. Adam’s dad was constantly traveling, and he soon started a series of extramarital affairs all over the country. He’d strike up a new romantic relationship in each new city, promising to each woman that he’d soon leave his wife and marry her.
When he’d eventually get tired of each affair and move on, the jilted women would often get revenge on Adam’s dad by calling his mom in Traverse City and letting her know about her husband’s unfaithfulness. These constant affairs destroyed their marriage, and Adam’s parents got divorced when he was just two years old.
This meant that as Adam grew up, he was exposed to two different views towards religion. Adam’s dad remained a staunch atheist and believed that religion was just a way to control people and help them be less scared of death. To him, church was nothing more than a crutch for people who couldn’t handle life. There wasn’t much time for religion anyways, since Adam’s dad’s company continued to grow, eventually reaching over 1,000 employees.
Adam’s mom, however, had a more favorable view of religion. While she didn’t express any personal belief in Christianity, she’d take Adam to the local Presbyterian church on Christmas and Easter, hoping to give her son some familiarity with religion. These occasional drop-ins gave Adam a shallow understanding of Christianity’s basic ideas, but he had no clue what any of it meant.
By the time Adam turned 18 and left for college at the University of Michigan, his dad’s views towards religion had won out. Adam saw Christians as close-minded people stuck in a bunch of backward traditions that were no longer relevant. While he still believed in a spiritual world, he saw psychedelics as a more interesting way to pursue contact with the divine.
Part II: Are You Saved?
Adam majored in psychology at Michigan, but his real interest was in Eastern religions. He became fascinated with Buddhism and Hinduism, drawn in by their promises of wholeness and total fulfillment. He read every book he could find on the two religions and continued to use psychedelics to chase after transcendence.
Outside of his interest in Eastern religions, Adam’s other main activity was singing. He loved to sing and was a part of both the university’s main choir and its men’s glee club. So when a friend asked him to go with her to a gospel choir’s rehearsal so she wouldn’t have to go alone, he said sure.
At the rehearsal, Adam found that he really enjoyed singing the old African-American spirituals. His friend decided not to join the group, but Adam kept going back, making him the only white person in the entire choir. He attended every rehearsal and joined the choir as they performed at local churches on Sunday mornings, singing about the enduring themes of Christianity.
After three months in the choir, though, the director approached Adam with a question: “Adam, are you saved?” While Adam wasn’t sure what it meant to be saved, he knew that he wasn’t. So after paging through a Bible that the director gave him, he emailed the man to let him know that he was more of a Buddhist. Adam wasn’t offended by the director’s question, but he knew his beliefs were at odds with the group, so he stopped participating in the choir.
As the end of college approached, Adam still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. He had briefly entertained the idea of joining his father’s business, but despite his dad’s excitement at the possibility, Adam realized that given their different personalities, trying to follow in his dad’s footsteps would be a disaster.
So after graduation, Adam decided to move to Boulder, Colorado, to spend a few years snowboarding and figuring out what was next. Since Adam wasn’t interested in his dad’s business, his dad soon sold his business to a larger staffing company for a significant payday, making him quite wealthy.
While Adam just wanted to snowboard, his dad said that if he took classes at UC Boulder to make him a more well-rounded person, then he'd pay for Adam's living expenses and give him an allowance. This sounded like a great deal to Adam, and soon he was off to Boulder with his dad’s credit card in hand, excited to experience life as an adult.
Part III: Joining Access
Once in Boulder, Adam settled into a life of snowboarding and classes. He was still interested in singing, so he decided to take a vocal performance class from a local voice teacher. Adam enjoyed her class, so when she invited him to attend a special vocal performance seminar with another teacher, he signed up.
This vocal performance seminar was sponsored by an organization called Access Consciousness and promised to give the attendees the mental tools they needed to handle the stress of performing. Adam had never heard of Access Consciousness before, but he appreciated the seminar and found it helpful.
Intrigued by this organization, he looked online for more Access Consciousness classes and found a more general one that promised to help you clear your limitations and step into your full capacity. Adam was lonely after his move and this seemed like a good way to meet people, so he decided to go.
Adam enjoyed this class as well and appreciated the opportunity to talk about life with other interesting young people. While Adam wasn’t exactly sure what this new group entailed, he soon started to sign up for more classes, using his dad’s credit card to pay the fees.
Adam didn’t know, though, that Access Consciousness wasn’t just self-help seminars, but rather an offshoot of Scientology. In 1995, a man named Gary Douglas repackaged Scientology into a similar belief system with a self-help veneer. Douglas claimed that his new movement, Access Consciousness, would give people the practical tools to shift their mindset and change their lives.
As Adam got more involved in Access Consciousness, the classes started to go beyond self-help and became more like a science fiction novel. The class leaders taught that the earth was trillions of years old and that human beings had once been gods called humanoids. Humanity had experienced a fall from grace, though, so now everyone was limited by unhealthy mindsets.
What was the answer to this problem? Access Consciousness, which gave people the tools to access higher levels of consciousness and return to their god-like status. The key was to use clearing statements to break down broken thinking and set yourself free to achieve your ultimate destiny, a life of wealth and success.
While these ideas sounded strange, Adam enjoyed the community and all of the friends he was making. Plus, the teachings weren’t that different from some of the ideas he’d encountered in Eastern mysticism, so kept going to the classes.
A turning point came when Adam decided to fly down to Florida and take an advanced Access Consciousness class from the founder himself. Adam joined several hundred other young people at a resort, where they spent a week learning how to unlock the mindsets they needed to reach their potential. After each day’s lessons finished, the attendees would then stay up all night partying, processing what they were learning together as they drank until three or four in the morning.
The founder taught them that through Access, as insiders called it, they’d be able to realize the true nature of reality. He encouraged the young people to break free of their ordinary thinking and to regain the mental models they’d lost when they fell from their humanoid status. If they could do that, they’d experience a life of unlimited success and achievement.
Through the founder’s persuasiveness and the subtle pressure of the group, Adam found himself buying into Access’ belief system. He wanted to believe, after all, since this new group was giving him things he’d never really had in life, like community, purpose, and attractive people to party with.
Part IV: Going Deeper
So when Adam returned to Boulder, he took even more Access classes. These classes cost $2,000 to $5,000 a pop, but Adam told his dad that they were for personal development, so his dad paid for them all.
Eventually, though, Adam’s dad became curious about all of these expensive classes. What were they all for? After Adam told his dad about the basic concepts of Access, his dad told him to stop taking these crazy classes and move on with his life.
Access leaders had anticipated this type of pushback from parents and had pre-programmed their students with a negative point of view toward the family. They taught that if your family finds out about your new levels of higher consciousness, their limited mindset will try to keep you from reaching your greatest potential. In one of the intro classes, Adam learned that family was an acronym that stood for Fucked (up) And Mainly Interested in Limiting You.
So while Adam outwardly complied with his dad’s request to quit Access, he secretly kept taking classes. This continued for several years until Adam signed up for an Access class series on CD. The CDs were mistakenly shipped to the billing address on Adam’s credit card, which was his dad’s house.
When Adam’s dad opened the CDs and listened to them, he realized that Adam was still involved in Access. His dad was furious, so he canceled Adam’s credit card and completely cut him off financially. This caused Adam and his dad to stop speaking to each other and become estranged.
Despite losing his relationship with his dad, Adam continued to get more involved in Access. He started dating another woman from the group and they eventually got married. Adam and his wife then moved to Austin, Texas, to work at a friend’s Medicare billing company.
Their real goal, though, was to become influential Access teachers. They dreamed of a future where they were teaching Access classes to thousands of people and raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in course fees. And so they mapped out a five-year plan: they were going to make it to the top of Access Consciousness.
Part V: A Change in Fortunes
As Adam and his wife settled into life in Texas, they received terrible news. Adam’s dad had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 65. Adam and his two older sisters were shocked by his death and struggled with the complicated feelings they had towards their dad.
While outwardly the siblings said all the right things at his memorial service, praising their dad’s work accomplishments in front of the executives from his former company, inwardly, they knew he hadn’t been a great dad. As the service closed with Elvis’ rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way,” they were all too aware of how this attitude in their dad had led to the constant affairs that had destroyed their family.
This attitude, though, had also created tremendous financial success, and so after their dad’s estate was settled, Adam and his sisters each received a generous inheritance. Adam’s oldest sister retired immediately at the age of 49, even though she’d been a full-time student her entire life, never working an actual job.
For Adam and his wife, the inheritance money breathed life into their dreams of becoming celebrities in the Access world, since significant wealth was the ultimate sign that the mental tools were working. They began using the money to attend elite Access classes and develop a lifestyle of decadence.
Soon, Adam and his wife were flying first class to every Access event, where they would show up in custom-tailored Italian clothes and only stay in five-star hotels. Adam was always buying extravagant jewelry, spending tens of thousands of dollars on diamond rings and ornate necklaces. They constantly posted about their lifestyle on Instagram, showing their Access community how the teachings had worked for them.
Over the next five years, Adam and his wife spent over a million dollars living like this. Their progress towards Access celebrity-status was mixed, but by 2019, Adam and his wife were more deeply embedded in Access than ever. They were using it for their friendships, career aspirations, and belief system. Little did Adam know, but it was all about to fall apart.
Part V: Maybe Something’s Wrong?
In 2019, Adam's wife left for six weeks to help care for her cancer-stricken mom in Maryland. At home by himself in Texas, Adam was scrolling through Netflix one night when he came across a documentary called Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Adam thought it sounded interesting, so he started to watch.
The documentary featured different ex-Scientologists sharing about how they had left Scientology. As Adam watched, he surprisingly found himself relating to what they were saying. Their experiences in Scientology had been similar to his experience in Access, both for the reasons they had decided to join the organization and for the strange ideas they swallowed to stay in. “Hmm,” Adam wondered to himself, “Maybe there’s something wrong with Access?”
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Adam’s seed of doubt grew. He was struck by the strange reactions in the Access community to Covid, which caused him to look around for other viewpoints towards Access on YouTube.
He eventually found another video where former Scientologists shared why they had left Scientology. Adam had even more common experiences with these ex-Scientologists and realized how both organizations used similar ideas and emotional devices to brainwash their adherents and control their minds. He began to doubt his Access beliefs even more.
Adam’s house of cards came crashing down, though, when he came across an article in the Houston Chronicle about Access called, “What’s Behind Gary Douglas’s Scientology Knockoff?” As the article exposed the beliefs of Access Consciousness and the man behind it, Adam finally admitted to himself that something was deeply wrong with the group that he’d been a part of for ten years.
Adam then spent the next week reading everything he could find on Access and Scientology. He got in touch with an ex-Scientologist, who suggested he read a book called Combating Cult Mind Control. Adam tore through the book, realizing that he had experienced every one of the cult mind control tactics in Access that the author mentioned. He couldn’t deny it any longer; Access Consciousness was a cult.
Now, Adam just needed to talk to his wife.
When Adam’s wife came back from caring for her mom, he sat down with her and told her his new views: Access was a cult and he was done with the group. His wife didn’t take the news well, though, and refused to even consider Adam’s perspective. Access leadership primes their members for these de-conversion conversations, teaching that anyone who leaves Access is unenlightened and just can’t handle the power available to them in the new levels of consciousness.
So Adam and his wife separated, at odds over Access, and began living in different wings of their home. In just a few months, Adam had lost his belief system, his community, his life aspirations, and now, even his marriage.
Adam and his wife divorced the next year, and he moved out into his own apartment in Austin and began preparing for a Doctor of Physical Therapy program. Adam’s life had been thrown upside-down, but the life-shaking changes weren’t done yet.
Part VI: A Different Kind of Dad
While Adam waited for his physical therapy program to start, he received an unexpected email from his oldest sister. Their dad’s long-time accountant, Tom, had just passed away, and Tom’s son wanted to send his father’s eulogy to Adam and his siblings.
Tom had been more than just their dad’s accountant, he and his family had also been their next-door neighbors growing up. Even after Adam’s parents divorced, the two dads and two moms separately remained close friends.
As Adam read Tom’s son’s eulogy for his dad, he was amazed at how different Tom’s life was from his dad’s. While both men were successful in their work, Tom’s kids actually loved their dad, as shown in the first line of the son’s eulogy: “My Dad was as good, as kind, and as generous as any of us can hope to be.”
The eulogy went on to describe what made Tom so special as a husband, father, and member of the Traverse City community. Rather than living a self-absorbed life filled with affairs like Adam’s dad, Tom had been committed to his wife and children for his entire life. He never missed any of his kids’ activities and was always finding ways to take them on special trips, whether that was a fishing excursion to Canada or a two-week road trip around Europe.
What struck Adam most, though, wasn’t how Tom lived, but rather how he died. Tom had been diagnosed with a rare lung disease in his late 60s, and he slowly wasted away until he went to the hospital for his final days.
Unlike Adam’s dad, who always became quiet, nervous, and fidgety whenever the subject of death came up, Tom strangely wasn’t afraid of dying. In the eulogy, his son described Tom’s final moments like this:
He fought his illness with every bit of strength he could muster, but when the time came, when the fight was over, he faced his passing from this world without fear. Perfectly coherent to the end, he was able to say his goodbyes. As my Mom and brothers and sister gathered around his bed, each of us hugging him in turn, he told us that he loved us. He told us that he was proud of us. Then he said, “I’m not going to need this anymore,” took off his oxygen mask, fell asleep, and twenty minutes later, went to join his parents, brothers and sisters and my wife, who I’m certain were all waiting joyously to hug him.
Adam was perplexed by this scene. How could Tom be so unafraid of death, knowing he was just minutes from the end of his life? As Adam read through Tom’s eulogy, he knew he wanted his life and death to look like Tom’s and not his dad’s.
But what made Tom so different?
As Adam looked for clues in Tom’s life, he honed in on his strong Catholic faith. Like Adam’s dad, Tom had grown up in a Roman Catholic family. But unlike Adam’s dad, Tom had continued to believe and attend church throughout his entire adult life.
This realization struck Adam. Maybe there was something to Christianity after all?
So the next week, Adam did what was previously unthinkable. He looked up a nearby Roman Catholic church and signed up for their Rites of Christian Initiation program. Every week, Adam attended these Christianity 101 classes, which introduced him to the basics of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
Spurred on by these classes, Adam started to explore Christianity on his own. He soon came across Lee Strobel’s A Case for Christ, which helped him work through his questions and doubts surrounding Jesus’ resurrection.
Despite Adam’s growing interest in Christianity, his physical therapy program began and soon overwhelmed his life. He was struggling in his classes, so he turned his full attention towards his studies, leaving him no time to think about Christianity. Over the next year, Adam was solely focused on his physical therapy program and lost all momentum in his search for Christianity.
Part VII: Finally Finding Hope
This stalemate with Christianity continued until December of 2022. Adam had just finished his classes for the semester and was sitting around his apartment on the first day of winter break. Bored, he turned on Netflix to find something to watch. He figured that since Christmas was just a few weeks away he should watch something Christian. As he scrolled through the options, he came across The Chosen, a TV series that explores Jesus’ earthly ministry, and pressed play.
During the first episode, something strange happened in Adam. There was a scene where Mary Magdalene was sitting in a bar, drinking away her sorrows as she struggled with demon possession. Adam watched as Jesus walked in as Mary ordered another drink and said, “This is not for you.” Jesus then called Mary to follow him and put his hands on Mary, cleansing her demon possession and changing her from the inside out.
This scene rocked Adam, and he burst into tears as he watched. At that moment, when Jesus called Mary to follow him, Adam knew in his heart that Jesus was real and Christianity was true. Adam went on to binge all three seasons of The Chosen, watching every episode over the next three days.
After Adam finished watching the show, he started looking for resources from different Christian apologists. Now that he believed in Jesus, he didn’t want intellectual arguments to choke off his new-found faith. He soon came across Frank Turek’s book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, reading both books from cover to cover.
At the end of his monthlong winter break, Adam found a church near his apartment and went to a service. For the first time in his entire life, Adam considered himself a Christian. Even he couldn’t believe it!
Adam had been using the dating app Bumble for a bit, so on a whim, he changed his bio to say that his relationship with God was important to his life. Thirty minutes later, he matched with a woman named Claire.
Claire was also a Christian, but unlike Adam, she had grown up in a Christian home. As they went on dates and shared their stories with each other, Claire was able to help Adam make sense of his new Christian faith. They’d spend hours each week talking about the Bible, Jesus, and theology, wrestling through topics like sin, suffering, and justification by faith alone.
Claire soon introduced Adam to Tim Keller’s books and sermons, which helped Adam understand the intellectual arguments for both the gospel and a Christian worldview. He began to realize that his dad’s assumptions towards Christianity had been wrong; the Christian faith wasn’t opposed to thinking and reason, but rather satisfied the deepest questions and longings of the human heart.
Through these discussions with Claire and the work of the Holy Spirit, Adam began to change in unexpected ways. Christian beliefs that used to sound crazy to him, like waiting until marriage to have sex or being against abortion, now started to make sense.
Before becoming a Christian, Adam believed that humans were a plague on the planet and thought that the best way to serve the greater good was to never have children. After becoming a Christian, though, Adam began to see human life as not only valuable but uniquely precious. He sees how his previous lifestyle oriented towards non-stop entertainment, adventure, and personal gratification wasn’t actually satisfying, and has now sees marriage and family as a way to serve God.
But the most radical change from Adam’s conversion to Christianity has been in his perspective towards death and the future. He used to feel hopeless about the future, both for himself and for the world as a whole. But after putting his faith in Jesus, he now realizes that death has been defeated and that someday Jesus will return again to set everything right. This has given him the ability to look ahead at the future without fear.
Through these many years, God has gently guided Adam’s searching heart to find true rest in the overwhelming love and finished work of Jesus Christ. Twenty-five years after Adam began his search for the transcendent out on the Michigan sand dunes, the Transcendent came to him.
